BECMI Chapter 346 – The Wizards of Politics
I continued with my comments to Prince von Jaggenfel on the Frier. “House Tillian fears the Delphans and all associated with them, for they were the enemies who destroyed their mutual homeworld, winning the war between them handily. That the Followers of Air have made a vast empire, and those of Fire are merely a minor holding in a small country in the middle of nowhere, has created a massive inferiority complex they inflict on all those about them, even as they try to remain below the attention of the Delphans… who naturally are quite aware that they are here, and just don’t care about such a minor threat anymore, their fall being punishment enough.”
The Prince started slightly. “The Delphans… are aware ov Zanzyr?” he asked, even knowing it was a stupid question. “How aware are they?” he asked carefully, testing the waters with a touch of dread.
I just looked at him. “Prince Jaggenfel,” I said coldly. “There is a noble House of Zanzyr composed of direct Delphan descendants with relatives in the Delphan Empire. They came here both because of the Frier and the magical aspects of this land.
“They are still here. How much do you think Delpha knows about this land? Even accounting for the fact Argencal is a House in disgrace, not trusted much by Delpha, and the Imperial throne certainly has its own agents in place here, and likely has for centuries?”
Including among his own House, as his mother’s family was Delphan, and they’d be ripe for recruitment!
His alarm showed. Paranoia over Delpha was a byword at the highest levels of the government, as Brittabelle had made plain to me repeatedly, even if it was never mentioned publicly. The fear that Delpha would swoop in and take control of the lands of the Radiance was very real at the Archmage-plus levels among the nobility!
“I… there is fery little diplomatic contact between our nations…” he hedged, clearly caught off-balance. I just stared at him, and he swallowed slightly. “Var more than we want to think?” he finally guessed uneasily.
“How many Overmagi with some Divination magic puttering around and a hobby of keeping track of the cute native barbarians with their unrefined nascent magocracy do you think it would take for them to keep up on everything relevant in this country?”
His face changed again as he was forced to confront that fact head on. Wizards more powerful than him, amusing themselves by tracking events in Zanzyr, and the who and the why…
“Not fery many,” he admitted softly. “Do you think they know… ov the Radiance?” he asked daringly, testing my reaction.
My absolute lack of surprise or interest unsettled him more than anything else, although I knew he wasn’t a member of the Brotherhood and didn’t wield the Radiance himself. “Mmm. Would they know of the reason the Frier settled here, the elves came here, the Siricilans came to investigate, and the reason cutely powerful new magicks are being studied and discovered here that can’t be found anywhere else on the whole planet? It’s almost like they didn’t send a whole detachment of Delphan nobles here to investigate and take over the area on a casual lark!
“No, no, I am absolutely certain they are completely ignorant of all the reasons why this geographical area is important.”
There was no flinch this time. He knew it was a lie and agreed with it being a lie. He WANTED it to be true, of course, but any amount of common sense had to understand the impossibility of a nation run by Overmages not being aware of the special nature of Zanzyr.
“Then why haf they not come here in vorce?” he had to ask, both paranoid and trying to find a hole in the argument.
“Did you or did you not understand the implications of this being the Chosen Land of Thaum, Prince Jaggenfel?” I asked him scornfully, audibly rolling my eyes even as they stayed locked on his own.
His expression was thunderstruck. Zanzyr, the land that denied Immortals their priests and influence, was being protected by an Immortal?
The pure heresy of it, and the total and utter reality of it in contrast, just left him stunned, gasping in mental rejection of the obviousness of it.
If the Overmagi of Delpha came here, they would be directly provoking the Immortal working here, an Immortal who had made it very, very plain He wasn’t tolerating the interference of other Immortals… OR their servants!
It certainly had nothing to do with the puissance or attitudes of the land’s current inhabitants. What did they mean to a bunch of Overmagi and an Empire that spanned a whole continent?
Just to drive the point home, I spun up a map of the world.
The WHOLE world of Nown.
He stared as the sphere of the Holo rotated before him. I slowed it to face him, and lit up a small area, barely the size of a fingernail.
He recognized it, how could he not? Zanzyr was landlocked on the continent of Olos, such a tiny thing.
Then I spun it away, across the ocean to the east, and illuminated the entire damn continent there.
Blood slowly drained from his face when he realized he was looking at the Empire of Delpha!
“That is an extraordinary map...” he managed to say stiffly, a warlord’s eyes fixing on it hungrily.
I could almost feel his desires. A whole world to conquer...
“Go straight up ten thousand miles, orbit the entire planet while looking through the clouds, and you can see it for yourself, Your Highness!” I replied calmly, letting it all ripple away carelessly.
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The fact I knew about the whole planet now put me in a very different category from him. He was an Archmage, an important Prince of Zanzyr, a nation built on magic… and it was so very, very small.
Naturally, so was he. Of a very small country. If he had ambition, he would have to go elsewhere.
If he was a patriot, then he would have to defend it!
Ah, such a fun conundrum for a militant wizard fascist warlord of an elitist bastard who had backed a circle of totally unscrupulous wizard experimenters raiding neighboring countries for citizens for lab experiments.
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Which correspondence we still had.
Hence his interest in who had offed all the random ‘free wizards’. It was rather startlingly similar to how his own circle of mad wizards had been violently eliminated, although in those cases, we’d taken out the towers and buried EVERYTHING.
He wasn’t stupid enough to think nobody knew he was involved. He was simply waiting until they revealed themselves, and then he would try to destroy them with overwhelming force.
In the meantime, and this was important, he was keeping his nose very clean, indeed. And, also importantly, Herr Doktor the great Construct specialist of Zanzyr, a good friend and mentor-subordinate of the Grand Marshal, had stopped his research into better versions of flesh golems entirely. Which was good, too. Construct research was also dangerous, due to Axiomatics being able to reach out and grab them, but that was something the Jaggenfel family could find out for themselves.
There were other concerns. Family concerns.
The rest of our talk was relatively minor, shaken as he was and not wishing to have more of his extremely biased worldview broken in front of him. I could tell, however, that his plans of pursuing a way against the Tukhman had been put on the shelf.
It wasn’t the most dangerous enemy Zanzyr had to face, and they certainly knew nothing of importance.
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The rock protested, but it gave way before Primus, my Ring of Elemental Command rather prickly at anything like reinforced stone daring to deny its dominance. I stepped out of the tunnel into the depths of Castle Bludevich.
Way down in the depths. Here where unclean things were sent to sit and wait for the call of the Prince, or were caged and howled unceasingly for vengeance and blood and death… or slowly went mad from the insanity and pressures of the dead around them.
Sama was with me, because I wasn’t going into a place occupied by powerful undead and possessed objects and cursed souls and all this crap without backup. The fact I could probably handle it didn’t mean much when it turned out I couldn’t, and I didn’t have sufficient backup to extract myself.
The only way anything was going to stop Sama was to drop the whole palace on her, which would mightily inconvenience her if she had to dig her way out the slow, hard way. She’d definitely be in a foul mood when she got out.
“Place smells worse than most sewers,” she mentioned casually, making a face. “That nice combination of ghast stench, rotting entrails, corrupted souls, blood-fed mushrooms, and infectious chill plague from negative energy is just ripe here.”
“The place is festooned with Div Wards and magical barriers. I guess my grandfather doesn’t want people to know what he has sequestered down here. It’s line of sight or nothing,” I informed her, looking around. “Nothing has noticed us yet, but that won’t take long. Feel that shiver on your frontal lobe? At least two greater Shadows nearby, I’m pretty sure a Banshee is tickling the upper edge of my hearing, and that rustle of clanks is from at least two Ghosts.”
“Even he can’t retain master links for that many powerful undead,” Sama asked dubiously. “Can he?”
“At least seven Hit Dice per Caster Level as an undead Necromancer of the Secret School,” I answered as we made our way down the corridor. I couldn’t Detect anything through the stone, but if it came in front of us, I was definitely going to. “That’s on top of binding Charm Undead and similar spells, and their very real fear of him.”
Dread twinkled visibly in my hand, Sama seeing it too. “And that is?” she inquired.
“Something with Immortal Power is nearby…” Mortal Wards couldn’t deny the Artifact-level power of Dread to sense IP.
“An Artifact? Or something alive?” Her brow furrowed. “It is hardly above a necromancer to deal with demons…”
“Second priority. First, find my father. The Bloodline Tie I have for him is leading that way.”
Behind us, the tunnel and hallway closed and filled in, leaving nothing able to get behind us without having to go through the stone. It wasn’t cutting anything off, but it was filling the area in, and I intended to do the same for every room we passed… after we vivified the crap out of them.
Sama took point, the tap of Dread’s heel coming down enough to indicate right or left. Behind us, stone poured up out of the floor and filled in everything behind us, the storeroom for random tools, furniture, and ironmongery buried and gone under the stone.
We passed three doors, Sama pausing outside each one, looking inside, and electing to silently drift on. Neither of us needed illumination and could see just fine, but her tremblesense was unimpeded by the doors and could track what was within.
The double doors, however, halted her grimly. I made a face when I saw her expression, and Tremble silently flowed out to full, perfect length.
“Coffins,” she stated firmly.
I closed my eyes. “Go,” I said simply.
There was a complex locking mechanism on the door, and several magical spells meant to seal it, sound alarms, and get off some loud and flashy magic, including what looked to be a bound demon of some sort here.
Tremble’s gold-edged blue-black length swept through magic and locking mechanism alike with a protesting clank of stone and steel that was very loud and heard by absolutely no one outside its Sound Bubble, severing everything with impunity. Sama pushed the doors open fearlessly and strode within.
A very large crypt, with twenty different stone caskets of various sizes within, the tops carved into a possible likeness of those within.
Sama glided up, looked down, a very grim and ironic smile blossomed on her face, and she lifted up Tremble.
Maybe three, four inches of stone in the way. But she had no problem seeing through the container to the creature sleeping within. The Sword plunged through the stone of the coffin’s cover like it was moldy cheese, doubtless to the surprise of whatever was within, the edge of it gleaming a new Ruby and with the black Banefire against Undead setting off the white swirl of vivus into the swirl of hungry energies called Wrathfire.