Chương 97: B2 Chapter 39: Plans and Tracks

King Elston Kalor was still staring at the hole where a secondary vault had formerly resided when a column of two dozen royal guards raced into the vault, running two abreast with spears held ready. The entire column stopped in perfect unison with the lead guards a respectful ten feet away from him. The officer in command took a half-step forward and bowed.

"Your Majesty, apologies for our tardiness." King Elston glanced at the commander briefly, then resumed staring at the hole.

"Save your apologies. I know the protections on this vault. I am as surprised as anyone to see it breached without warning." He turned to face his force of guards, and his frown twisted momentarily into a snarl.

"This… protest of Recindril's has gone a step too far. I don't know what he and his lackeys hope to accomplish with what they took, but I don't really care. He struck at what is mine, and that cannot be tolerated." He tightened both of his hands into fists, then slowly relaxed them and steadied his position, floating in the air.

"This is no longer solely Lornera's project; no longer limited to the personnel allocated to her." He let loose a calculated hint of his soul's power.

"By order of the Crown: Recindril Tostral is to be found and detained to face the Crown's judgement, and the vault he stole and its contents are to be recovered if possible. All discretionary forces and resources are authorized for this task as needed. Coordinate with Princess Lornera as appropriate, but this task shall be under my direct authority. See to it that it is done, Commander."

The guard commander straightened and knocked his gauntleted right fist, still holding his spear, against his armored breast in a salute.

"Yes, your Majesty!" King Elston looked back at where the missing sub-vault had been.

"And for a place to start the search, I sense traces of a recent teleport right there, along with a potent ward-breacher that opened the way for it. Get the mages on that at once. I will be in my quarters, practicing." The guard commander bowed over his spear, but King Elston was already gone. The next morning, High Lord Recindril Tostral found a brief moment of idleness and rested his head in his hands.

All too soon, the moment passed, and he re-assumed his practiced diplomatic poise; striking red hair and an angular chin framed his grimly serious smile, and his muscular arms crossed in front of him on his desk, relaxed but ready to exercise his steely strength. Time for another duel of words. Not my preferred kind of duel, but one I have learned to fight nonetheless.

He signaled to his aide, and the two-way scrying mirror on the wall flickered, replacing its reflection of himself with the image of another person, sitting at another desk in a far distant place. The other lord was scowling at him and brightened only marginally when the call began.

"Hello, Tostral. What do you want?" Recindril raised an eyebrow.

"Straight to business, Lord Hopset Felmor? I didn't think you were the type for that." Lord Hopset's scowl darkened.

"I'm in no mood for pleasantries after your raid on my house yesterday. That was you, wasn't it?" Recindril nodded.

"Indeed. Since you appeared not to see the critical importance of asserting our rights against the Crown's unfair decree, I took it upon myself to… illustrate the matter for you."

"How generous of you." Hopset's voice was level and toneless.

"Are you threatening me?" Recindril shrugged.

"In part, it could be seen that way. I prefer to view it as demonstrating an inevitable fact: If you do not join our cause, then we will sooner or later be forced to fight against you – and you cannot depend on the Crown's protection against us." He leaned forward and let his smile widen.

"More importantly, we demonstrated to you that the Crown can be fought!" Hopset narrowed his eyes.

"Oh really. How so?"

"How many nobles were in the force that attacked you?" Hopset glared in silence for a few seconds before grudgingly admitting, "None." Recindril maintained his forward loom.

"And yet it still sufficed to kill a squad of the much-vaunted Crown Guard; soldiers who are renowned for both their unyielding loyalty to the Crown and their strength that rivals nobility." Hopset stayed silent a while longer, then shrugged.

"So you can beat royal guards if you outnumber them enough. So what? The real threat from the Crown has always been the royals themselves, and I heard that your oh-so-impressive raiders immediately fled everywhere that a Kalor scion showed up." Recindril sat back and clasped his hands together on his desk.

"A fair point. However, our real power as nobles has also always been us nobles ourselves." He nodded to Hopset.

"There are many more nobles now than the last time the Crown's power was truly tested, more than a century ago. If we band together, I believe we will be able to force the Crown to accept our demands." Hopset raised an eyebrow.

"And if you are wrong?" Recindril shrugged.

"Better to try than to give up without a fight. What level would you be now if you had not ventured into the Wilds in your youth? If we submit to the Crown's demands now, that will be the fate of all future generations of every noble house. The power of nobility in general will be broken forever. We must strike now, or we will lose the chance to ever even try." He sighed deeply.

"But we will need every noble we can possibly get on our side. That is why we are forcing the issue. Neutrality on this is impossible. You must fight for the sake of your own house, as well as ours. And if you refuse, then we will have to remove you from the board to ensure that the Crown will stand alone when the time comes. Now, are you with me?" Hopset hesitated.

"You are taking quite a risk, speaking so plainly of open rebellion." Recindril shook his head.

"I am already in hiding, and the Crown already destroyed my home. I am committed and have little left to lose. My opposition to the Crown is no longer secret. And with that openness comes freedom; you need not fear that I might report your rebellious speech to the Crown. Now, I ask once more: are you with me?" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Hopset frowned in silence for several seconds, then slowly nodded.

"Very well. I fear the Crown's power, but I fear the generational collapse of noble power more. Call off any further raids you might have planned for me, and let us speak of how we will work together." Recindril smiled.

"Thank you, but coordinating our plans will have to wait for the moment. I still have dozens more calls to make today. Expect a messenger tonight with details of the conference, where we will all coordinate our next moves as a group." Lord Hopset nodded again.

"Alright. I will await your messenger. Farewell, Lord Recindril Tostral." Crown Mage Leffer carefully picked through the delicate scraps of mana and fragments of dissolving essence inside the Crown's vault, trying to avoid disrupting the remnant traces of the thief's teleport as she refined her understanding of the spell's details.

She and her comrades had already determined through painstaking hours of piecing together the spell's fragmented structure that it was an unusual variant that homed in on a destination beacon, rather than directly specifying where it would go. And that makes it so much more difficult to trace, because we can't rely on the beacon still being there. She dismissed the thought with practiced discipline and narrowed her focus. This circuit here… Yes, this is the part that found its beacon.

Now, can I find where it stored the result? The world around her faded from her awareness. She was vaguely aware that the other mages with her were maintaining a tight cage around the area, arresting the normal flow of aether to prevent its motion from disturbing the evidence or distracting her examination, but even that awareness was more a consequence of how calm the aether was than anything direct.

Leffer catalogued each incomplete scrap of spell structure in the target section, building a mental list of possible incantation elements that could have produced each one. Bit by bit, she narrowed down which of the possibilities would fit with each other and the overall context, until at last she identified a part that could only be the operators to store a location. She shifted her stance slightly to get the closest possible non-disruptive viewing perspective and paused to think.

There's barely even a glimpse of a connection to the stored information still there. It's too faded for regular mana sense to get what we need. Only a perfect specialist or a spell can still read it well enough at this point. We don't have the right specialist on hand, and a spell will only get one chance at it – the spell's active operation will disrupt the remaining traces enough to thoroughly ruin any followup attempts. She took a deep breath. It will have to be a spell, and I will have to be the caster.

The time it would take for another mage to pinpoint the target precisely enough, even with my help, would be an unacceptable delay. Leffer nodded decisively. Very well. Let's hope this works. She called forth the appropriate spell from the depths of her spell archive, focused carefully on the precise bits of essence she needed to extract information from, and willed the spell to form and take effect.

It was an obscure spell for an obscure circumstance; mana had some rudimentary memory, especially in its solid essence form, but any need to access that memory in fine detail outside of the mana of your own spells was rare. It did occasionally come in useful, however, and her spell archive had room to spare for it. The spell created strong pincers of essence that grasped the tiny scraps she'd targeted.

The pincers enclosed those scraps in spherical dimples at their tips, then crushed the scraps into themselves and absorbed them and their memory. The knowledge filtered into her mind: a confusing jumble of faint and smeared impressions of all the things those pieces of mana had ever been through in the background, all overlaid with a much stronger sense of an abstract distance and direction. 352 miles and 983. 3 feet, 19. 2465 degrees east of due north. She straightened and walked out of the aether isolation cage.

"I have it." She waved her hand and conjured 6 small paper notes with the numbers written on them, one for each of the other Crown mages there.

"Proceed as planned." Without a word, the 6 mages cast 6 scrying spells, their targets arranged in a ring around the teleport destination, each 1 mile distant.

"Hmm. Seems to be undeveloped land. Some hills and vegetation. No roads or buildings. A fair number of trees. Aether is at Level 2. No spells or enchantments within my detection range." The other 5 voiced their agreement with the most senior mage, who spoke first, and he nodded.

"Closing the distance." They concentrated in silence for a few minutes, then exchanged looks with each other, and the senior mage of the group saluted to Leffer.

"Scrying at 500 feet distance found nothing of note, but something could still be concealed there. If so, scrying closer is likely to be noticed and provoke a response. I recommend close scouting in force, deploying for surprise englobement." Crown Mage Leffer nodded.

"Agreed. Get with your squads and target 100 feet away. I will take the top." She turned to the commander of the more than two dozen royal guards present in the vault.

"Colonel, are you ready?" All of the guards straightened, having already been standing and watching, and gave an eerily-synchronized salute.

"Yes, sir!" Leffer waited for the other mages to each walk to their own group of 4 guards, readied her Teleport spell, and pulsed her mana. 6 answering pulses came back to her, and she finished her casting. A net of essence and mana outlined her, the colonel, and 3 more guards, she felt reality distort around her for a moment, and then the vault was replaced with the open sky. She hovered in the air, looking down from her vantage point 100 feet above the ground.

Her guard squad hovered protectively around her, and she sensed 6 other squads in a circle below her. She descended, and the circle shrank in unison. The other squads all stopped with the circle 20 feet across, and she landed in the center. Crown Mage Leffer mentally cursed to herself. There's nothing here. Nothing but more spell traces. And as for the traces, there are too many of them. Far too many. Hundreds at least, maybe thousands.

We can't possibly find the right one; it would be like finding a specific unmarked needle in a needle-stack! Whoever did this knew they would be followed and exactly how to cover their tracks. She took a deep breath, looked up to face the colonel still flying above her, and shook her head.

"No good. This is a dead end. Come down and I'll take you back to report to the general. The direct search for the Tostrals, through divinations and scouring their territory, will have to be the primary plan." Blissfully unaware of the hunt for her house, Jamar Tostral, fourth scion of her house, smiled in the early morning light of the deep Wilds 2 days later. Alright, finished with the first 5 unifications, all the way down to Tier 6, prepped for Tier 5, and I just hit Level 30.

With no reason for them to rush, Carlos and that girl should be temporarily stalled at Level 32, having to fill things out for Tier 4 before they can continue at any decent speed again. That's close enough for my superior soul plan to easily make the difference, and my escorts can handle the pair of royal guards for me. She stood up and exited her tent, taking a deep breath of satisfaction as she stepped out into the open air.

She looked around for the soldier in charge – she couldn't be bothered to remember his name or rank – and took a moment to realize that he was right in front of her, already in a deep bow.

"Tsk. You should have something to make you more obvious. Maybe a banner." She shrugged.

"Eh, I'm in a good mood right now. Let's get in a quick spar, and then… We will take down House Carlos today!" The soldier oddly paused for a moment, then deepened his bow slightly.

"As you command, Scion Jamar."