Chương 172: Book 3 Chapter 30: Always Another

++Skin ##cracking# breaking# pain ### soul seized### body no longer mine # pain### pain### never ends### power## pain## power## live### need to live## the end## no end### dread## dread## dread ##Dread Dread. ++ - Fragment of Lord Dread's archives, date indeterminate. Returning to my refinery was easy enough. Though we had both exhausted much of our liches' power, we still had full reserves of mana to burn in human form.

Sethira remained unable to fly under her own power of course, which meant I was forced to carry her back. This was not as tedious as it may have sounded. If nothing else, it gave me a good chance to demonstrate the vast superiority of my own magical prowess all the while.

"When do you think you will be able to do this yourself without taking on Sakhent's form?" I asked her as we flew.

"A few weeks, yes?"

"It won't be a few weeks," she snapped.

"You know it won't be a few weeks."

"Ah. Months then?"

"Years," Sethira growled.

"I'm working on it, just give me a few years. But you knew that, you just wanted to hear me say it."

"I have no idea what you are talking about," I smiled.

"I was just assessing the progress of my ally. Years you say? That is…wow, you must be very talented."

"Shut up," Sethira growled.

"Just shut up and carry me back." It was a nice turn-about from all her time spent tormenting me, and as I continued drilling her on it I could feel her starting to wriggle around with irritation and anger. Were I not the sole thing keeping her from plummeting to the ground, she may very well have struck me. My good humour dissolved as we approached my refinery once more. I saw the damage instantly, craters near the new wall erected around its perimeter, scorching on the stone. Bodies littering the land around it.

I had barely touched down when Blakely made his way over to me, face spasming like usual.

"There was another attack," he said redundantly.

"How severe?" I asked at once.

"As bad as the other one. Except they obviously didn't get as far." I studied the refinery itself even as he said that, and was pleased to see that the great machinery was intact. Magic is not as long-ranged as a truly purpose-built rifle, let alone artillery. While a powerful magician can easily blast down stone walls or even deface steel, there are few who can do that from many hundreds of yards. This was the purpose of my wall of course, to keep enemy magicians from getting within those hundreds of yards.

And the new guards manning those walls served to keep magicians from getting past them. Evidently, it had succeeded. I did not see more than a few enemy corpses past the outer perimeter. Several holes marked the ground, burned black and rimmed with what looked to be flash-fried blood. The occasional loose limb dotted the place.

"What was the damage?" I asked.

"One dead magician on our side, one of hers," Blakely nodded at Sethira, who did not seem to especially care.

"A dozen dead mundane defenders, as many more wounded." Remarkably light casualties, all things considered.

"Were there any more prisoners?" Sethira asked. A good question, if we could extract extra information then this whole thing was a net gain. Sadly, it was not meant to be.

"None," Blakely replied.

"When the winds changed they all started pulling out. Then the magicians among them finished off their own dead as they ran. I reckon it was two mercenary forces, with one having been given orders to silence the other as they retreated. The silencers were probably more cautious in the actual attack, which is why they left none of their own wounded. Or they were just meaner bastards than even I'm reckoning and didn't mind killing their own too." I was starting to rather reluctantly admire this new enemy.

Then again, by all metrics they had quite a lot of wealth to throw into this. Two attacks of such magnitude, both staged back to back and far from the orchestrator's power base, implied a great deal of funds. Almost certainly in excess of my own, for now at least. Given time, they would manage a far greater attack still. There was no question in my mind of that. What remained to be seen was whether I would be prepared to meet it when it came.

"You did well," I told Blakely. He spat at his feet.

"I know I did," he told me.

"I want a raise. Fifty crowns a week. And a new gun, one of those magic ones that melt people in half."

"I can give you the raise instantly," I told him.

"The gun will take time." What he was referring to was affectionately called a 'heat-ray'. One of the more modern devices of magic in Garamon, it originally appeared in some pulp science-fiction novel about a race of alien creatures that invaded Arwyna from, of all places, a local planet also orbiting our sun. The aliens were terrifyingly advanced; operating vast triple-legged mechanical vehicles and utilizing strange, convectionless heat weapons to burn human forces to ash.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. Eventually one of the Winzorth Institute's finer minds read it, and took the whole thing as a challenge. He had spent two years engineering a functioning heat-ray from the novel before putting them up for commercial use. They required magic at every step of their creation, and were thus prohibitively expensive and virtually impossible to mass-produce, so the weapons remained rare.

Even still, the whole thing had been such a brilliant stroke of advertising that the creator retired rich a mere year later. As I heard it, he now mostly day-drank and showed up to the occasional public event hosted at Winzorth so that he could be touted around as yet another example of the Institute's brilliance and ingenuity. I had met him once in fact. He stared at my cleavage and asked me to sit on his lap.

But his guns were very effective, in fact being requested directly by Blakely was about as fine a mark of quality as I could imagine any firearm receiving.

"How much time?" Blakely demanded, eye looking like it was attempting to achieve powered flight.

"Give me a month," I told him. He made a deep growling sound at the back of his throat and nodded.

"Paula wanted to see you," he told me as he turned.

"She seemed to think it was important. Something about the workers." He was gone before I could ask further. A chuckle from beside me turned my gaze to Sethira.

"You just attract misfits don't you?" she grinned. I ignored the jibe and headed off to find Paula, which was not difficult. She was standing in front of the huge mob of angry workers. All eyes turned to me as I approached, most with fear but some with defiance. That was not good, I usually made sure to crush the defiance out of any potential minions I took on, but Garamon's pesky laws against mutilating one's employees meant that proper handling was simply not an option for me now.

"There she is," someone roared.

"Where have you been?!" The speaker barged to the front of the crowd, not a big man but one who moved with enough enthusiasm that he compensated for his mass with sheer momentum. He came to stop before me, glaring down.

"Do you know how many of us have died in the last few weeks?" he asked, pure venom dripping from his voice with every syllable. I decided to tread carefully for now.

"I have only just returned from an important outing," I replied evenly.

"So I am afraid to say that I do not." Apparently the crowd did not like this, and the man speaking to me liked it even less.

"And what was so important that you left us here undefended?!" he demanded.

"I did not leave you undefended," I told him.

"You may take note of the great wall erected around you, and the mercenaries protecting you. You may, also, take note of the fact that I did not leave until both of these things were in place." Entirely for self-serving purposes, of course. I had not wanted my refinery to be vulnerable. But an excellent habit in business is to get one's employees to be grateful for things you do purely out of self interest.

It worked on a bare few of the men I saw angrily glaring my way, but the rest seemed too agitated for my words to have effect.

"And why are we being attacked in the first place?" their de facto leader demanded.

"What have you done to bring this down on us?"

"Nothing," I told him.

"My best guess is that someone is threatened by the production of this oil refinery and—""If you're making so much money, why are we getting paid pennies?" someone else demanded from the back of the crowd. That brought on a wave of angry agreement. I could have used my illusion powers to help here. Send waves of mana through the men and women present, let their tempers wither and their conformity rise. I could have done that, but as was so often the case, there were dangers.

Illusion magic was easily detected in a person it had affected, and all it would take was one of Alira's magicians growing curious at how fast the workers calmed down for me to be exposed. I had no illusions about the loyalty of professional magicians to me in particular. All of our kind have snakepits for minds.

"What do you want from me?" I asked instead, tasting my own surrender like something oily and disgusting on the tongue. If there was any feeling of victory in the group's leader, he did not show it on his face.

"A raise for everyone," he told me.

"Half again what we're being paid now, and a guarantee of compensation for each man who dies on your behalf."

"That is ridiculous," I told him. He sneered.

"Oh don't try to bullshit me. We all know how much this place is making you, and we all know how much of a labour force isn't available in the nearby cities. If all of us refuse to work for you and spread the word of what's happened, how replaceable do you think you'll find us before your next payment?" This was a very big problem.

Workers who knew their worth were the natural enemy of any sociopathic, exploitative industrialist, which was easily the variety of human I had found thought in most similar ways to a lich. The group before me now was gaining momentum, and I realised the advantage in this debate was all theirs. I could probably find more workers eventually, but with the attacks on my property I would have a harder time hiring than normal. The usual labour surplus may not be enough to compensate.

It would be a risk, and with my previous lapse in production I could not afford a risk.

"Very well then," I hissed irritably.

"We'll expect the first installment within the day," the group's leader declared as he turned back to his now-cheering men. They began clearing out quickly, leaving me alone with Alira.

"I'm sorry," she told me.

"I…well, I guess I'm not actually." She shrugged.

"These people deserve what they're asking for, you know they do." I did not know that, actually. They deserved it now, having forced me to give in to their demands, but they had not deserved anything until the very moment they proved capable of that.

"It is fine," I growled.

"Oh, look at her fuming!" Sethira laughed from behind me. I turned to see her sauntering over with as wide a grin as I'd ever seen. She flicked her eyes to Alira.

"Go and make yourself scarce, I need to speak with Isabel alone." Alira glared at her.

"You don't give me orders."

"Really? Everyone else seems to," Sethira sighed.

"Are you going to do something important here, or just stand there petulantly because I told you not to?" Alira wavered a few moments more, then stormed off to leave us both alone.

"That was a disaster," Sethira noted.

"You have something important to say," I snapped.

"Say it." She seemed to savour my annoyance for a few more moments before obeying.

"We both know this little problem of yours is entirely self-inflicted," the necromancer told me.

"It has been this whole time. Why don't you use undead labour for your refinery?"