Chương 147: Book 3 - Chapter 8: A Second Source

++People often think that the benefits of a powerful and well-honed mind are complex plans. Which is not untrue, but also far from the full truth. Being able to consider multiple variables and account for many possible problems is useful and helpful, and it has saved me many times in my existence, but if it were my only ability I would not have lasted long. The true power of an intellect is the ability to formulate plans rapidly, solidly and consecutively.

To have not one scheme in the works, but a dozen, a hundred; a thousand. To weave so many separate threads that it becomes harder to keep them from tangling each other than it is to make more. To give yourself so many redundancies that only with the most total defeat possible can your goals truly fail. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Dave Blakely didn't like Isabel Vornholt. That was actually nothing special, he didn't like most people.

There was something especially off about Vornholt though. Was it the way she talked? The way she looked at him? The fact that she was a strong and assertive young woman in a male-dominated society that had conditioned Dave, despite his best efforts, to despise those traits in the fairer sex and expect them to be weak and insubstantial? The answer to all of these was probably yes, but there was something else too. Some ephemeral quality he couldn't quite articulate. This was nothing new.

Dave found that plenty of people had some ephemeral quality he couldn't quite articulate, and most of the time this quality led to him perceiving them as a threat for one reason or another. He wasn't stupid. He understood how his own brain worked, understood it better than most people understood their supposedly normal ones. He could be aware about what it was doing and when. But that didn't mean it was wrong now, because as often as he'd found his suspicions disproven in the past, he'd also found them vindicated.

So what now? What now? What now?! What now was Dave would keep his head down, do his job, and hope that whatever mischief Vornholt may or may not have been up to wouldn't get him killed. He'd keep an ear to the ground and both eyes on his periphery as usual. Beyond that, there was nothing he could do. He'd met people who insisted on fucking with nobles on suspicion. Hoping to gain advancement, to profit from exposing some big conspiracy. It was one of the stupidest things you could do.

Exposing a conspiracy just got you killed by all the co-conspirators, who were usually infesting whatever governmental body you tried to expose it to. No, that sort of thing was dangerous work. Dave had experienced enough dangerous work getting shot at in the army.

He was quite content to live out a boring life working for his marginally-above-average salary and eventually retiring with enough money to splurge on occasion before he died of old age at the ripe old age of 'whenever the police ended up beating him to death because they blamed the man who heard voices for a totally unrelated crime coincidentally occurring nearby'.

And at the moment, Dave's job consisted of scouting out the new land Isabel Vornholt had bought to report back with any weird bullshit it happened to demonstrate. The land itself was not especially exciting. Largely flat, largely stinking of boiled shit, largely expansive. It had a few boulders and plenty of gravel, and looked like everything that had even thought about growing nearby had been rounded up and gunned down in a bloody massacre.

Would've probably been easier to find a nugget of gold than a decently sized plant in the whole stretch of it. But all of this was already known. What Dave was looking for were the unknown things. It was a long-standing fact of life that what you didn't know not only could kill you, but almost definitely would eventually. So far, he was liking this land. It was defensible. Plenty of outcroppings, but all bunched up in such a way as to be easily subsumed into a single settlement.

He'd have to advise Vornholt to make her base of operations between the largest rocks. If she did that, a few men with rifles and steady hands could hold the place against ten times their number of attackers. Add in a few cannons, or make those snipers warriors with especially massive and long-range rifles, and they'd probably manage hundreds. Was that intentional on Vornholt's part? The thought gave Dave pause. Only for a second though.

Noses that got stuffed into aristocratic business had a tendency to get chopped off. Bad enough that he spoke up as often as he did, a serious investigation was a guaranteed way to die. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The leyline was a withered and diminished thing, nothing like as powerful as the one near Lachfel. It felt like I had gone from standing in the presence of fifty Nu'chistas to only a dozen. Which was still, of course, far more power than even Lord Dread at his peak, and with human settlements being so far from my current location, that made it still enough to mask my magic effectively completely. Lord Dread emerged with a feeling greater than any my mortal body could ever have produced.

The phrase 'better than sex' is thrown around a lot. I could not, at this point, comment on it, having never taken part in that particular pastime, but it was hard to imagine that simple rutting would compete with the freedom I experienced then. I still did not linger, as oddly tempted as I was to step out of the leyline's cavern and begin obliterating plateaus from afar with magic missiles. There were unfortunately more pressing things to focus on.

Besides, however distant this place was from colonial civilization, I did not want to bank on changes like that going unnoticed. Not for a little thing like fun at least. Nu'chista flinched as I emerged into my space, which was, as always, a pleasant sight. But I was sadly not here to torture him today. With me I had a large number of stones and other minerals, piled up and placed at my feet. Ready for use.

"What are those?" the Demigod asked. If he had one admirable trait, since his imprisonment, it was a persevering curiosity in the face of great pain and torment. It was almost tragic that such a classically useful magician's mindset had found itself locked into the stagnant brain of a divine worm.

"ROCKS," I informed him.

"How does someone without lips or a tongue have such a smart mouth?" he growled.

"I REALLY COULD NOT SAY, BUT I COULD BEGIN TO REMOVE YOURS AS A MEANS OF INVESTIGATING THIS PHENOMENON." He fell predictably silent at that, leaving me to my devices without interruption. Though I had silenced Nu'chista with my threat, I did not actually need to. What I was doing now was some of the lowest drudgery I could imagine, work so trivial and mindless that a suitably powerful undead may have succeeded in mastering it. Then again, I was a suitably powerful undead.

Albeit one of the higher kinds, whose mind was enhanced rather than diminished by the reanimation, and whose mana remained under the strict control of my own consciousness. Such a state of being has benefits. In my case it means essentially infinite concentration, provided my will remains strong. I think explaining how strong my will is would be the most redundant thing any creature in history has ever done. And so it goes without saying that my progress was steady, easy and unflinching as I worked on the stones.

Enchanting was only part of the process. Another part, by far the most tedious, was actual, physical creation. This was deceptively tricky, the part that demanded memory, precision and an attention to detail that would be excruciating for mortal wits. I had to create and blend aether into the substance of the stones in just such a way as to be identical to the magical materials most commonly found in such leylines.

The frustrating part was that there were so few scraps of the naturally-spawned samples from the leyline itself that I had little to go off of, and would not be given the chance to test this for quite some time. But I was confident. I was more than confident. This was a matter of magic in Lord Dread's hands. The chances of failure could not possibly be any lower. Even with my final complication. Once I had finished my work as Lord Dread, I stashed the stones to one side and looked at them irritably.

I could not sell these of course, not yet. For now I had to do more enchanting work, this time with far less efficiency. I took my leave of my custom space, not wanting to be anywhere near Nu'chista for what came next, and reverted to my new mortal body. Vulnerability was still a painful thing to contend with. Lord Dread though I was, if someone ambushed me as Isabel Vornholt I still could not be sure what would happen. Even if I regained control of the Lich King's body, would my mortal flesh survive destruction?

If I was forced to exist solely in my undead form, my chances of detection would be raised by orders of magnitude. Better to just avoid all of the unpredictable variables entirely and keep myself as safe as possible. Unfortunately, that meant not occupying the same dimension as Nu'chista when I was not wielding enough power to defeat him should he happen to escape. Then again, re-entering the actual leyline cavern was not nearly as distracting as having some imbecile Demigod looking as I worked.

And if the place was less eventful or exciting, there was still a literally infinitely greater amount of sensory stimulation than in my old cage in the Depths. Besides, the cavern was old and unmaintained, with its existing support beams now rotted and creaking ominously. An abrupt cave-in would certainly provide some entertainment, if nothing else. I whittled away another hour working like that before one of my perimeter runes was tripped.

A primitive and clumsy device, it would have been easily bypassed by even a middling Highmage. But it did its work in telling me Blakely's location, bearing and speed. I had a few more minutes before he arrived, just long enough. A swift transformation back to Lord Dread, something I was becoming increasingly fast with, and I was back in my own dimension a moment later, depositing the stones and re-opening the rift.

Nu'chista's barked question barely fell on my non-existent ears before I slipped through back into the cave as Isabel Vornholt. A few minutes later, Blakely was returning.