Book 3 Chapter 19: Another Setback
Book 3 Chapter 19: Another Setback
++One unforeseen drawback to Garamon’s society was that, just as it is easy to make money with money, so too is it easy to lose money with a lack of it.++
- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.
The dead man did not seem to quite know he was dead yet. His body continued thrashing around, as if it were labouring under the assumption that moving sufficiently would prove to the universe there had been some terrible mistake. As if the injury that continued bleeding away more of its life with each passing moment would disappear.
It did not.
The motions grew slower and clumsier, the gurgling became quieter, and in another few seconds the corpse was as still as any other. Qaigor did not even glance down at it, just looked at his own gore-crusted fist with a wide grin.
“My first kill!” he declared. “Ha!”
I heard a retching sound and turned to see Alira, having defeated her own enemy, was currently dry-heaving. Apparently she did that a lot in combat.
Sethira, meanwhile, was looking at Qaigor approvingly. “Your brother is something,” she noted. “Come to think of it, the other one was special, too.” I could see the gears turning in her head as she wondered about the genetic talent for magic that must have run in my own family, and, by extension, whether there was a similar trend in her own.
But we did not have time to indulge that curiosity.
“Qaigor!” I snapped. “You should not have put yourself at risk like that.”
My brother’s face fell instantly, twisting into a glare.
“I just saved you!” he snapped.
“No you did not,” I pointed out. “I was still covered with my shield, that bullet could have been perfectly lined up with my head and still failed to wound me.”
The boy’s jaw tightened, and he was trembling now. Were he a few years younger I would have braced myself for a tantrum. Instead he just scowled at me more.
“Why can’t you just admit I helped? I killed an enemy, most of your magicians couldn’t do that, could they?”
“I am not saying that you did not help,” I told him. “But you put yourself in danger. You are a Vornholt, blood of my blood. You are not to risk your life over something as trivial as killing a random gunner.”
Qaigor’s expression was growing darker and angrier by the moment, and he looked to be on the brink of tantruming. I decided to prevent that, in no mood to deal with it.
“...But you did do well,” I finished at last. “You are quite strong now.”
Our father was still significantly above him, physically, but the difference was not nearly what it had once been. Even if Baron Vornholt were not weakening with age, I would expect Qaigor to surpass him within two years. From what I had read, warriors tended to only peak in power at twenty or twenty-one. If Qaigor followed that old trend, he would most certainly be reaching the Fifth Order.
There was no Sixth Order, but if there were, and if it followed the same trend of escalating power as the ones below it, its upper range would have some overlap with the physical abilities of a Demigod’s lower range.
Qaigor cheered up after that, fortunately. That left me to turn my attention to what really mattered: finding out why my business had just been attacked. I had roughly two hundred guesses, but no proof of any of them.
Fortunately, what I did have was prisoners.
Among the men we had captured, most were, amusingly enough, the common, mundane attackers who had wielded only firearms rather than magic. This is a standard pattern in battle, magicians are dangerous enough that many people are not inclined to take them prisoner.
Fortunately, we had enough of them that I had a variety of individuals to ask my questions of.
Some of the people who had helped stave off the attack, most of them amateurs whose blood was up from what must have been their first near-death experience, had already encircled the captured enemies and begun talking about how they might be executed. I cut in before anything as wasteful as that could be done.
“Split them up,” I told the group. “Do not harm them, but isolate all of them. I want each one out of earshot from all the others.”
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My orders were obeyed. Met with confusion and bitterness rather than eagerness, but I had shown off enough magic in the fighting that none of my subordinates were in a hurry to cross me just yet. Within minutes the attackers were all separated and ready to be interviewed.
One by one, I saw to them. Asking the same set of questions beyond the hearing range from their comrades, memorising the answer, and moving on. It took a while, but it was the only truly effective way to interview my prisoners. Had I asked them all a question together, one of them could have lied and the rest would have heard that lie to mimic it. As things were, the only way they could all give the same deception was if they had all rehearsed it beforehand.
I could not have prevented that of course, but I was confident it was not happening either. A significant fraction of the men deviated from the normal story in one way or another, usually telling lies that were incompatible with the ones told by even their fellow liars.
So there was not some grand conspiracy to get their story straight before the attack, too many men were failing to do so for that to be the case.
From the ones who did not lie to me, and suffer a catastrophic anatomical rearrangement, I was able to extract that they knew…utterly nothing. Apparently we were dealing with some mercenary band. One that usually knew better than to attack Garamon nobility, but had been offered a ludicrous sum to make an exception for me. They did not know who had offered this sum, or why, and had dealt only with people whose faces were hidden and voices altered.
That told me that magic was used by their employers, which did not actually narrow anything down. A person wealthy enough to pay for this particular attack could easily hire a magician, or several, to perform the sensory distortions mentioned.
What we did find out was that the person responsible seemed to have been well-connected, they had found the mercenary company despite their best efforts to lay low at the time. Found them quickly.
That, itself, was a useful piece of information, but it did not narrow anything down to a conclusion. I reluctantly gave up on working out who was behind this attack, and was just on the verge of turning to assess the damage when one of my workers cleared his throat.
“Uh, my lady, what about the mercenaries?”
Ah, I had almost forgotten about them. I turned back to the trembling, cowering mix of magicians and soldiers and smiled.
“I have a plan.”
I separated them again and questioned them all about the name and identity of each one, this time succeeding in getting an answer for all of them. After re-assembling them, I told the group how things would be.
“I know who all of you are,” I said. “I will remember this forever. You all owe me a debt for what you did today, and you will pay it off by fighting to defend me. If you do not, and choose to flee, I will do two things. First, I will immediately spread the word of your deeds and names throughout Garamon and ensure that you are unable to ever safely dwell within imperial territory again. Half the planet’s surface will be denied to you.” I paused to let that sink in, and saw that they were already taking it gravely. Good. “And second, I will hunt you. And when I find you, you will discover how much worse things can get than execution by firing squad.”
That I was a seventeen-year-old girl saying this probably undercut the intimidation factor.
That I was saying it while drenched in the blood and brain tissue of the mercenaries’ own allies probably bolstered it.
Men paled and muttered and shied away from my gaze, and a few of the watching workers got angry and protested before falling silent as I glared back at them. A few moments passed before I got a round of unanimous acceptance from the mercenaries.
They had lost most of their numbers in the attack, and clearly not known how powerful a defence they would face even when they first launched it.
I knew that they would not try anything now, because I knew that they knew it would be their deaths if they did. The possibility of escape was somewhat greater, but I made a point of demonstrating my flight to them as I headed back to the machinery, just to let them all know how non-existent their odds of getting away from me along the vast plains surrounding the refinery would be.
Sethira joined me in the air, though she was merely hovering rather than properly flying and needed to wait until I was slowing before she could do so.
“You need to bring more of your cult here,” I murmured. “Fighters this time.”
“I’m already preparing to do so,” she assured me. “What’s the damage like here?”
We both found out together, dropping down to study the ruination.
“It’s fucked,” Sethira noted eloquently. I found that I could not disagree.
The larger structure itself was fine, clearly the mercenaries had not been expert demolitionists and their use of explosives to damage the machinery was clumsy to say the least. Clumsy explosives, however, were still explosives, and they had been used in both great volume and close proximity.
Metal plating had become warped and twisted. At parts it was stoved in like a breastplate struck by some great hammer, either compressing the internal machinery or coming dangerously close. Oil was oozing from a few ruptures in the tower and I saw patches of it had already ignited.
“Damage control first,” I concluded. “We can look more carefully once the disaster is halted.”
That did not take long, fortunately. Sethira and I had complimentary abilities. Where I was thoroughly educated by Garamon, and self-taught before that, Sethira was both the founder and inheritor of Orapathaqi’s rich casting history. She used curious spell matrixes to simply lift bundles of fire and fling them away like solid things, even as I banished the thermal energy they left behind to keep them from re-igniting. In minutes the fires had stopped and the structure ceased groaning.
“It’s fucked,” Sethira repeated, now that we could see it more clearly. I once again did not disagree.
“This damage will amount to thousands of crowns,” I noted darkly. “Weeks of effort to repair…maybe more than a month.”
And whether it was merely a plurality of weeks or over a month, it would still be too long to make up my next debt payment.
“What are you going to do next?” Sethira asked me.
I did not know.