Chương 175: Book 3 Chapter 33: A Public Display

++Twenty times now, have they come. Little geniuses of wizardry, some old and strong, some young and brilliant. The daring and the brave, and the reckless and the proud, all desperate for my knowledge. To study with a demon is one thing, to study with the Lich King? Perhaps I could make use of such conviction. ++ - Fragment of Lord Dread's archives, date indeterminate. Voret was growing angry, I could tell. He was trying to hide it, and clearly he was not very accustomed to doing so. I had seen that in Bagran too.

Vorets, apparently, had suffered from their own success, their children were far too accommodated by the world around them to ever learn how to keep their emotions to themselves. He might as well have been telling me each emotion passing through his mind as it came.

"So you're threatening me then?" Voret asked at once.

"That's it, you're trying to escalate this into an outright conflict."

"Escalate?" I asked him.

"You attacked me first, I am simply letting you know that you will not have an easy time doing it again." He was breathing hard, apparently struggling to control himself even as much as he was.

"You are the finest prize in the magical world," he said slowly.

"And whether you know it or not, you belong to me. Understand that."

"Leave now," I told him.

"We have nothing more to discuss." He sneered at me, taking a step pointedly forwards.

"Or what?" Backry Voret was older than Bagran, and older than me. He was probably a year or two over Agrian's age and most certainly just as well-trained in magic. He would have started at Winzorth earlier, in fact. His arcane education was probably more extensive still, outside of my own influence on Agrian's upbringing. But a man who was comparable to Agrian was no threat to me. And this one had made me angry.

He seemed surprised when I shoved him with a jet of wind, sending him stumbling back and falling onto his hind quarters with a stupid, blinking stare plastered across his face. His shock lasted all of a second before he was on his feet, magic crackling forth like heat from a blast furnace. But I was ready for this. His face, after all, was very easy to read. My shield came up to catch a vicious net of lightning, then I let a stronger wind current circle around me and slap away his conjured flames.

He hurled one spell after another, none with anything close to full strength but all powerful enough to hurt a person. As I turned them all away, he added more mana to the next, then more still, growing so enraged that he seemed to stop worrying about hurting me. That was fine too, he could not hurt me if he tried. Maybe in the heat of battle, where I had other things to worry about, but with just the two of us facing off, and me not needing to do anything with my magic but defend?

I flicked aside his petty attempts at attack spells with contemptuous ease, simply waiting for him to grow too exhausted to continue hurling out more. He was left panting and red faced when he finally did.

"That was a demonstration," I told him evenly.

"Were you paying attention?" Voret said nothing, just continued spearing his glare my way like he thought hate alone might breach my defences. I continued in his silence.

"You seem blessedly ignorant about just how far beyond your petty talent I truly am. In ten years' time I will be the most powerful magician alive, in five more I will be stronger than any other that has ever lived. By the time I am fifty I expect most Demigods would struggle to best me." That was, of course, without factoring in the power of Lord Dread still locked away within my core. If Backry Voret was intimidated by this, he did not show it. I just saw his lip curl.

"Do you know how big the Voret family is?" he asked me.

"We're all under the name, cousins and second-cousins as well as brothers. The dregs aren't half as talented as the main line, but they're still Vorets. My bloodline may be the largest collection of Highmages in the world." I had to admit, that did give me pause for a moment. It really was a formidable fight I was being dragged into. But his response was as much bluff as it was warning.

"You will not mobilise your full family against me, not without leaving an absence in Garamon that even your resources cannot make the general public ignore."

"And so what?" he countered.

"A tenth of us will be enough to lead a force that wipes your little endeavour here from the face of the earth. You should've taken my offer, whore." I sighed. Backry Voret seemed quite surprised when he was suddenly lifted from the ground, though why exactly he would have expected anything but this response I could not say. His limbs flailed helplessly for a moment and the last dregs of his mana feebly tugged at mine. It was pointless.

At the height of his power, he would have been a difficult but fully surmountible obstacle. With these tiny whispers of magic still left in him, he was not even an irritant. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I watched him fly higher, still thrashing like a fish on the hook. Higher still. Then higher. I lost physical sight of him before finally letting him fall, estimating the distance at some thousand yards.

It took him twenty seconds of falling before I halted his momentum with a cushioning mass of mana that saw him decelerating over a gentle ten yards, instead of a fatal zero. And no sooner had he touched the dirt than I hoisted him back up again, spinning this time. He was screaming now, wild, primal animal noises that came from somewhere lower than his lungs and deeper than his forebrain. I was laughing with a similar energy.

Up and down, side-to-side, around and around, I found myself doing tricks with the magician until he went limp. Only then did I drop him down at my feet to mewl in the dirt.

"The next time you think about bragging to someone and threatening them with the danger of Voret prodigies," I advised him.

"Remember this, and consider how insubstantial a Voret's talent really is compared to that of a Vornholt." It took him quite some time to respond. First he vomited, then he lay there heaving for a moment, then a long, shrill whimper escaped him. Finally he seemed to have recovered his wits and managed to look back up at me.

"Your family numbers six," he wheezed.

"With three magicians, one of which is a child."

"All the more reason for you to back off," I told him.

"Because one Vornholt would be more than enough." Backry Voret needed to be carried away by his own men after that, something that I knew only added further to his humiliation. This was, however, a great source of entertainment for my own men. The common labourers and mercenaries disliked magicians as much as most people did, and seeing any of them brought low was a treat they found strikingly amusing. Cheers erupted from the spectating men and women as Voret was hauled off.

The magicians among my staff, interestingly enough, seemed even more pleased. Apparently the Vorets, though irresistibly powerful, were not well liked among their own class. The Winzorth graduates had the most contempt of all, slinging a few choice words in Voret's direction which most certainly would not have been permitted on Institute grounds. He bore it all with a slowly intensifying glare, practically trembling with impotent rage.

I just watched and smiled, enjoying both his humiliation and the appreciating cheers I was getting from my own people for giving them such a display. Not everyone was enjoying the show however. No sooner had Backry's entourage been escorted out through the gate than Alira Bella Paula moved over to me. Our previous interaction seemed blessedly forgotten, concern with recent events eclipsed everything else on her face.

"That was stupid," she told me. I looked to the gate, now closed.

"It was…impulsive," I allowed.

"You just humiliated a Voret. One of their most powerful members." I snorted.

"That shaved rat would not even be the most powerful magician present at a witch burning."

"Not magically powerful," she snapped.

"Influential. He's his family's golden boy. Yeah, okay, he's young, and he's not been given much responsibility yet, but his father is Aravon the Gold. With Bagran gone he's their crown jewell." That name, I had to admit, did instill a measure of caution in me. The Grandmaster of Winzorth, Adan Farah, was Garamon's only Archmage at the moment, and Ludvar Bogern was the most likely candidate to reach that level of power next. But excepting those two, Aravon Voret was the closest.

I had never met the man, and could only go off reputation for his power, but I would be surprised if he could muster anything less than sixty thousand vis at his maximum output. More than double what I could currently muster without unmasking myself as Lord Dread. But that only made it more important that I seize every advantage I could. If the Vorets came cautiously, I would lose. If they came in a rage at having their most promising prodigy humiliated, they may well make the mistakes I needed for victory.

I explained this to Alira, who only shook her head.

"No, you just did it because he called you a whore," she pointed out. I did not deny it. For a few moments we stood there in silence as her face worked through a wide spectrum of emotions. Fear was the most commonly recurring one, deep and strong and hot as the sun.

"I don't want to lose this," she told me.

"I've been saving up, and your wage has gone a long way, but if I'm forced to go back out into the world now…" she did not need to finish the sentence, we both knew just how the world had treated her in the past, and how it would continue to treat her now.

"I do not want to lose my refinery either," I told her.

"And so I will not."

"You can't know that," Alira insisted.

"This is the Vorets we're dealing with."

"They are not Garamon's army," I pointed out.

"They are not even a lineage of battlemages. Most of their hundreds of prodigies will not be combatants, even if the whole family is mobilised against us. They do not have a standing guard of actual soldiers either, the men they reinforce their battlemages with will be mere mercenaries, just like mine."

"But they'll have more of them," she pointed out.

"And probably better paid."

"I did not say it would be easy," I shrugged. Alira was furious in an instant.

"Stop that," she snapped.

"Stop acting so calm. My livelihood is on the line here."

"What would you have me do?" I roared.

"Marry into that repulsive rat's nest, sacrifice my freedom so that you can keep yours?"

"... Yes," she said quietly.

"There's not just me to think about, is it so wrong to ask that one person makes a sacrifice for a hundred others?"

"Get out of my sight," I told her. Alira did so, leaving me to stew in my own thoughts. To love is to be betrayed. Less than twenty years, and I had let myself forget that simple, crucial fact. I pushed it aside for now, having more important things to worry about than the moronic emotions of this wretched new body. Bad enough that I even took Sethira's advice and indulged in— I pushed it aside. My meeting with Voret had been illuminating in several ways, at least.

Because I knew more about the first attack Blakely and I had turned away too. The Vorets were doing this to win my hand in marriage, as they had tried to do with Alira. To weaken my position and leave me no choice but to submit to them. But that first attack had been an assassination. The conclusion was clear, as unfortunate as it was. There were not one, but two different groups of enemies working against me, one with the motive of murder, the other with rape. Life really did get difficult sometimes.