Chương 149: Book 3 - Chapter 10: The Return

++The good thing about Garamon's idiotically structured society is that it always left a great many people for whom change was inherently promising. It was easy to find recruits. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. My next few months were less hands-on than many periods of growth I had experienced since my rebirth. I was accumulating power, yes, but not in any form that I recognised or had done before.

Where in the past I had spent long stretches focusing on magical strength and the accumulation of knowledge, here I was simply twisting the world around me. Calling in men to survey the lands I had purchased and produce detailed notes for use in construction. Raw materials and machinery needed to both clear the way for the refinery and set it up. I was demarcating my new territory and making plans for a vast wall sectioning it off from the outside world.

All this, and I was remaining perpetually vigilant for a new attack from my mysterious, unidentified enemies. I was unfortunately unable to uncover more about them. Their suicides would not have prevented me in the past, but with Blakely present I could not afford to perform the magic that would let me commune with their spirits shortly after their deaths.

I attempted it later on, after distracting him with another errand, but by then their minds had already degraded into the bestial wailing more common to disembodied spirits. I was left to focus on acquiring strength instead. Compared to strengthening my mana, this was agonizingly ephemeral. What was money to magic? A powerful magician need only wave her hand to see whole buildings blown apart. I knew this, because I had already replicated such feats a dozenfold as Lord Dread.

But currency was a less direct power than that. Less inherent. A tycoon may well cause changes that no magician could easily replicate, having whole streets demolished with the stroke of a pen rather than the flick of a wrist, but take that tycoon out of the city and separate them from their checkbook and their influence vanishes alongside it. To most, authority was a power as inherent as any other.

To me, someone who had only ever known authority wielded through my own magic and will, it was pathetically impermanent. What did coinage matter to someone who had lived to see a hundred thousand coins fall out of circulation? Unfortunately, coinage mattered a lot. For now, at least. It was interesting, actually, how long my reincarnated life had felt so far. Seventeen years, four months, two weeks, ten days, seven hours. Just over half a billion seconds. It was nothing. A momentary pause.

It was as great a fraction of my total existence, even without counting my setback in the Depths, as a week and a half would be of Agrian's life. And yet it felt longer. Or perhaps more vibrant. The things I was doing in this life struck me much more significantly than anything I had committed to in millennia. Even now. I was not certain why, but the notion of accumulating wealth was sharing in the same significance that I felt for all my goals in this existence.

Of course, this was partly due to simple practicality. As much as I hated to admit it, brute strength and direct, tyrannical influence would not get me very far in this world. Not with the Gods still ruling over it. On the other hand, finances provided a means of influencing Garamon that was more or less perfect for my goals.

Money could be moved around in great sums and motivate any number of things, and the people of this empire had some almost pathological belief in the right of anybody with money to use it as they would and go unscrutinised. I had seen that much with my own father's abuse of personal connections to enrich himself at the cost of others. Lord Dread, the Lich King, reduced to pinching pennies. It would have been funny, if it were someone else who had been laid so low.

Nonetheless, I worked and prepared for the flood of capital. After several months I had finished all of my groundwork and was looking at a site made ready to be transformed by industry. The only factor that still remained, outside of a few finishing touches on the planning process that would likely take no more than a few weeks, was to acquire the necessary labour force. An ordinary businessman would have had to look into the expensive transportation of tools and workers.

Accommodation for the many hundreds of labourers needed to work for many hours each day, grinding away at the problem for long prolonged weeks or months. Engineers and mechanics as well as the unskilled men needed to haul and move material. It would have been a nightmare. In this, I had a significant advantage, because my early life spent at the Winzorth Institute had built up the very connections I needed to avoid this problem. Businessmen did not tend to get along with magicians, but I was the exception.

I was now both. I had sent correspondence out to the Winzorth Institute requesting a cloudscraper be dispatched to me so that I may visit the Institute more easily, being quite clear about a business proposal I intended to bring to them. For any other former student, even Agrian, I doubted this would be accepted, but I was, in the end, Isabel Vornholt. Putting aside the Grandmaster's personal alliance with me, I knew that my teachers would remain eager to stay in the good graces of their human-Demigod.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The scraper arrived just when I needed it to, and so instead of a multi-week journey across the sea I was able to reach Laugrey in only a day. The journey was uneventful. Blakely wanted to accompany me on it, though was eventually prevented when I simply raced him to the docked vehicle and won using my sled. Nobody crewing the vessel spoke to me as it flew, which I found entirely acceptable.

Arriving in the evening, I wasted no time in heading through the building and seeking out the Grandmaster's office. The Winzorth Institute had not changed much at all, though it had been years since I last set foot in it. There were a few new faces who I passed on occasion in the night-emptied corridors, but otherwise it was as it had always been. The Grandmaster's office had changed even less, though the Grandmaster himself was different.

The lines on his face seemed to have doubled, and his hair had become a thinner, starker white than ever before. I was almost surprised to see he had the strength needed to turn his head up and face me.

"Vornholt," he smiled weakly.

"It's been quite a while." I closed the door after me and made my way over to stand before him in the centre of the room.

"You are dying," I noted. He snorted at that.

"Nothing gets past you, does it? Yes. I'm dying. I've been dying for a while now. Nothing diagnosable yet, but the doctors have stopped smiling when they tell me I'm not sick. I reckon they know there's no point in pretending that sick or not sick makes much of a difference to my lifespan anymore. Every time I go to sleep, I'm rolling the dice on ever waking up again." Self-pity normally had little effect on me, but I found myself sympathising now.

Had the Grandmaster discovered a suitable teacher in necromancy even ten years sooner than he did, it would have been all but guaranteed he would attain lichdom before his body could give in. But circumstances had been against him. Circumstances set up by the Gods. That, itself, was useful to me. In the future. However much of one he had left.

"I wish I could offer you more help than I have already," I told him.

"Oh, you've offered me plenty," he smiled.

"I'm retiring as Grandmaster to study full time under our mutual friend." Understanding struck me all at once, a hammer to the base of my mind.

"Sakhent," I said at once.

"You were already working with his cult." The old man smiled, and I saw that he had been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while.

"So that's who they were? I was wondering." Pieces fell together in my mind. He had grown in necromantic ability faster than I thought possible, now I understood why. He had gained instruction from another master even when I was not around to directly teach him.

"You were taking long absences, putting my life on the line. They offered me knowledge as long as I kept them up to date on you." And that was it, how Sakhent had known who—what—I was. I could not help but smile at the masterstroke of deception. Rumours of her cult had spread far and wide, investigating them was why my very first mission into Estia had even begun, but it somehow had not occurred to me that they could have infiltrated Winzorth itself.

"I underestimated you," I managed at last.

"I know you did," he smiled. It was, despite his great age, the most youthful expression I had ever seen. Like it was formed by a face two years shy of its birth, rather than two years from its death.

"I made sure you did. One does not bargain with the Lich King unless one is banking on him being cocky." He actually had me wondering for a moment whether his contact with Sakhent's cult pre-dated his contact with me, but I soon found myself deciding otherwise. He would have been far more skilled in necromancy if that were the case. There was no chance at all the Grandmaster would have failed to learn all he could about it.

"I am here on business, you know," I told him abruptly.

"I know," he replied.

"Though I'm not sure exactly what that business is. Care to illuminate me?"

"I am setting up some industry, and I require the use of magicians as a work force. I would like to know if you have any graduates, or near-graduates, who are likely to be available for construction."

"You have some in mind?" he asked. He was testing, trying to find out what resources I had at my disposal to keep tabs on the Winzorth Institute. Now that I knew the Grandmaster was affiliated with Sakhent's cult, the answer to that question was 'a lot'. And I saw no reason to let him know.

"I do not," I replied. He nodded, unsurprised.

"Then I'll give you a list of names," he told me.

"You still wish to cooperate with me?" He smiled.

"Of course I do. I'm not stupid enough to think that you're going anywhere, and if I do manage to scrounge up a longer life than the next few months, I want to make sure I'm on good terms with you." He was saying this to keep me from suspecting him of betrayal, I imagined. He was worried that, with his life running out, I would grow paranoid and assume he might think of turning against me, with his total lack of any life to lose removing all the fear that had kept me in check before.

He was right, the thought had crossed my mind. But I did not relax just because he seemed to be prolonging his existence now. If he truly planned a betrayal, he would want to make sure I did not see it coming anyway. I waited while he compiled the list, keeping my thoughts to myself and knowing that he was doing the same. Such was the inevitable nature of any conversation between aged magicians. In a few minutes I had the list and promptly read through it, finding a smile making its way onto my face as I did.

"See someone you recognise?" the Grandmaster asked, knowingly. My smile widened. Of course I had. It had been well over a year since I last spoke to Alira Bella Paula, but I remembered her like it was yesterday.