Dancing had never been Leon’s favorite pastime. He’d learned, though reluctantly, and danced with his ladies whenever they demanded such, but the moment Cassandra had her fill, he was steering them back to the edge of the room. Thankfully, Valeria wasn’t keen on having a dance of her own, too captivated as she was by the sight of her father getting closer to her mother.
“Things are going well, then?” Leon asked as he and Cassandra joined his other wife.
“Had to wait,” Valeria said. She glared back at the crowd that Justin had to get through to finally speak with her mother. “Still waiting.” She nodded in Justin’s direction, where he was currently doing much as Leon had done: steering his partner off the floor.
Leon nodded quietly as Cassandra loosened her iron grip on his arm. As the others started slowly assembling around them, he reached out and took one of Valeria’s hands, squeezing gently and supportively, though Valeria herself hardly seemed to notice.
After reapplying a subtle privacy rune, Leon asked his Paladins, “How are the exits looking?”
“I hope we won’t need them,” Alcander said, “because mine is watched. Too many patrols; there’s always at least one eye on the entrance at all times.”
Leon filed that information away. He wasn’t too surprised since Alcander had gone to scout out the tunnel entrance hidden in the gardens. Kamran’s guests might have been given the run of the gardens outside this hall, and of the adjacent halls, but that didn’t mean that Kamran’s guards just disappeared.
“Mine was unguarded,” Zhang reported. “I tried to open it, but couldn’t. It might not be guarded because it’s no longer accessible.”
“No way to get through?” Leon asked.
“I won’t say that,” Zhang replied. “I’m no engineer, architect, enchanter, or other such sort… But physically finding the door in the wall didn’t work well, and neither did attempting to open it.”
“It’ll open for us, one way or another,” Cassandra said with a determined grin.
“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” Leon replied, “even right as you may be…” He turned his disguised eyes upon Daryun and waited.
“We can use the one I saw,” Daryun stated. “It’s clear. Open. Usable.”
A grin spread across Leon’s face before he managed to suppress it. Daryun’s checked entrance was the farthest from this hall, but if he said it was open, then they’d use it.
“Kamran is gone,” Nestor said, sending a chill running through Leon’s body and killing the echoes of that grin. Sure enough, when Leon quickly scanned the room, the titanic presence of Kamran was gone. So, too, were those of the other two Anakes.
“Meeting,” Leon said. “Probably seeing to whatever business brought them all here tonight. Sure as hells wasn’t to celebrate the holiday, as much as any of them might want to…”
“Something to worry about later,” Cassandra asserted. “Kamran is likely too busy with his own war to bother us, even with some added allies.”
“Right…” Leon murmured. He agreed with her, but he imagined an alliance like this, if it manifested, would be enough to strengthen Kamran considerably—possibly enough to make him the Storm King properly. If he finished his war with Halbast and Auset, then the remaining four Anakes in the Storm Lands unaffiliated with him would likely fall in line. At that point, then there wouldn’t be anything stopping him from moving against Leon aside from whatever alliances Leon had been able to make.
‘And whatever other powers I’m able to muster…’ Leon curled his fingers, death lightning surging through his fingers, but not exiting his skin. At thirteenth-tier, and likely stuck for some time, he wasn’t keen on fighting Kamran. Fighting against a mage one tier higher was… doable, as he’d shown multiple times, but two tiers, and the fifteenth-tier in particular… He wasn’t confident in that hypothetical fight. He would need far more power to pull off that kind of upset than he currently had.
He made a mental note to fully throw himself into planar conquests once he got back to Artorion. His Kingdom was going to need all of the resources they could get their hands on while Kamran was busy. He heard the way Kamran spoke of his storm crystal. The Anax was going to turn his gaze upon Leon at the first chance he got; Leon could feel it.
“My father is done,” Valeria said, pulling Leon from his thoughts.
Sure enough, when he looked in Justin’s direction, he saw the disguised man slowly walk back towards them, his face flush, a silly look on his face even as Leon noted the tremor in his fingers and the weak-kneed gait he was using.
“Everything go well?” Leon asked, noting, too, that Ariana appeared to be making her way through the crowd of suitors now pushing to get a dance with her, her eyes fixing on the doors behind the high table.
“Better than I could have hoped for,” Justin said as he joined them, all but gasping as he took hold of the nearest table and practically held himself up. “Is there a way into the tunnels?”
“That’s not an encouraging start,” Leon hissed.
“We’re not running, are we?” Valeria asked suspiciously.
“No, dear girl, no,” Justin answered, his tenth-tier strength reasserting itself as he pulled back from the table, standing straight and steady without a sign of the nervousness that Leon had seen in him mere moments ago. “I… spoke to her. She knows me. She remembers me. I asked her to meet in a place that we’d met before. She… she agreed.”
Valeria’s breath hitched. “She’ll come with us?”
“She will,” Justin said proudly. “We just have to get there first.”
“Why?” Leon asked, unable to stop himself. “Why first?”
“To secure the area,” Justin answered without missing a beat. “I don’t mean anything by that; it’s just going to be harder for us to get there, so we should go.”
Leon wasn’t sure about that, seeing Ariana reach the doors. They swung open for her, and she cast her black eyes over her shoulder, first landing on Justin, and then turning to him. They made eye contact for less than a second, but the way she turned away, the fear that Leon read in her eyes…
He supposed that could be fear of Kamran and running away, but he wasn’t so sure. Still, there was at least one thing that he agreed with Justin about.
“Yes,” he said. “We should leave.” He removed their privacy rune and, with Cassandra holding one arm and his other hand in one of Valeria’s, he started steering them out of the nearest doors into the gardens. “Let’s go and see the other wonders of Kamran’s palace. I’m sure it will make living in Antiochus look spectacularly quaint.”
Picking up on his tone, Cassandra responded, “Quaint or not, our home is magnificent.”
“Indeed, but this is the home of an Anax,” Leon replied as they stepped out into the open air again—or at least, as open as Kamran’s palace could be with its thick shell of magical enchantments soaking into every stone. “If Lord Kamran is allowing us to explore, then it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it?”
Their little performance ended as they started walking through the gardens. For all their words, it wasn’t the perfectly manicured lawns or gorgeous, night-flowering plants that glowed with arcane light that captured Leon’s attention, but rather the number of guards patrolling through the gardens. The entrance to the tunnels out here was hidden in a fountain, and apparently couldn’t be accessed without alerting these patrols. Seeing the patrols for himself removed any doubts about Alcander’s report from Leon’s mind, though few had existed in the first place.
He set a leisurely pace, not wanting to draw too much attention, but Justin was impatient, and Leon almost had to drag him back to the rest of the group as he started outpacing them.
“No rush, Nathaniel,” Leon said, reminding him of their cover. Justin smiled bitterly at him, but fell back all the same. Leon could hardly blame him, though, as he knew he’d be just as impatient if he’d been separated from any of his wives for even half as long as Justin had been. In that light, he thought that Justin was being remarkably restrained.
They meandered through the gardens, not making a beeline for their destination, but making more of a show of exploring the gardens. It seemed like they were the first of Kamran’s guests to start exploring, and as such, Leon felt almost all of the patrolling guards keeping close watch over them as they played at marveling over the gardens.
By the time they reached the edge of these gardens, Leon had had quite enough of them. The pristine, controlled nature of it all wasn’t to his tastes, even if Elise often insisted on much the same around Westmount Palace. He much preferred nature left to itself, as it was throughout the rest of the nine-peaked mountain and the western half of the Artor Valley.
Thanks to the palace plans given to them by Hasahlain, their circuitous route took them right to where they needed to go: a quiet peristyle courtyard just off the gardens. A statue of Kamran dominated one end of the courtyard, the man posing triumphantly over a fallen eagle of immense size, and it took some amount of control for Leon not to smite the profane thing there and then. But he still made a show of going over to examine it until the nearest patrol rounded a far corner, and then he and his people ducked into the hall behind the statue.
What awaited them within was another hall, though much smaller and humbler than the one that Kamran’s feast and dance had taken place in. The floors were black marble and the ceiling was enchanted to look like the night sky—though Leon couldn’t recognize any of the stars. Magical fires illuminated the room hall from a dozen sconces and a lit hearth at one end of the hall, while a crystalline chandelier cast gleaming reflections of the ceiling’s starlight across the glittering black floor.
“I haven’t seen that sky in millennia,” Nestor whispered, his faceplate turned up to inspect the ceiling. “Kypros.”
Leon silently ordered Alcander to watch the door into the hall and for Zhang and Daryun to help Justin open the tunnels. Then, he turned back to Nestor. “The treasure plane of the ancient Clan?”
Nestor grunted in semi-agreement. “One of the wealthiest planes in the entire universe; the Titanstone alone that was mined on that plane was more than you’ve ever mined anywhere…”
Leon had heard the tales of the wealth of Kypros, but he’d long wondered if that wasn’t an exaggeration. He’d conquered large amounts of territory in the Great Strand of Rhea, and over the past century, their taxes and tributes had started coming in. His fleet build-out following the war with Triton would’ve been impossible without those resources, and that was even taking the wealth of his Nexus territories into account.
But Kypros, apparently, was richer than all of that combined.
“It will be ours again,” Leon whispered as Justin began pressing against the almost quaint stone wall beside the hearth.
A thunk behind the wall drew his attention, and the stone melted away, revealing a staircase spiraling downward. It was dark, lit only by dim red lights at the lip of every other stair, but at the level of his party, that was no obstacle to sight.
“We should move quickly,” Justin said as he started heading down the stairs, the others quick to follow. “The meeting place is far, and if Ariana moves quickly, then she might reach it before we do…”
“We will move,” Leon said as he darted forward, Nestor bringing up the rear, “with all due haste…” He halted just long enough to see Nestor shutting the hidden door behind them before then moving to lead their group. He had to squeeze past the others to get ahead of Justin as the staircase was quite dark and narrow, but there was just enough room to do so.
“The hard part is done,” Justin insisted, though he yielded the spot in the lead to Leon.
Leon just glared at him as he passed, the dim red light casting dark, threatening shadows across his face. He didn’t deign to give Justin a response; he simply took the leading spot, followed by Justin, then Valeria, Cassandra, the Paladins, and Nestor.
The stairs wound downward, around and around and around. Leon almost started to feel dizzy as he thumped his way downward, his every sense on alert for any sign of an alarm or trap. He couldn’t feel anything of that sort, but he could still sense more magic flowing through the stone the deeper they went. But that paled in comparison to the sheer sense of weight imposed on them as they went deeper, deeper, deeper. In fact, he was certain that the spiraling stairs were getting narrower as they went deeper, though he couldn’t tell if that was his imagination or not.
Eventually, he halted, his senses pinging against something one revolution below them.
“What is it?” Justin grumbled behind him.
“An enchantment,” Leon said. “Hard to say what it does. I can… I can sense lightning, and light? And… maybe some darkness? A spatial enchantment? Was there supposed to be a portal at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Not on Hasahlain’s map,” Valeria said behind her father, her voice tinged with concern.
“Palaces like these,” Nestor said from the back, “will often integrate spatial enchantments to disorient attackers, or to facilitate travel.”
Leon nodded, remembering exactly such enchantments in Xaphan’s prison back on Aeterna. However, he wasn’t sure what this one was, since Hasahlain had apparently declined to comment on it before Justin was finished with him.
“A new enchantment?” he wondered aloud. “Or something he took to the grave with him, hoping that we’d stumble into it?”
“We should see for ourselves,” Justin insisted, and disinclined as he was to agree with it, Leon pushed down the next few steps.
The spatial magic hardly looked like much, being subtle enough that Leon was only able to see the unnatural ripples around the edges of the enchantment because he was looking for them, so it didn’t clear anything up on that front. What lay beyond the enchantment also just looked like more stairs in an identical staircase, but they’d already gone so far down…
“I can undo it,” he said after several moments. “If we’re certain that it’s not needed to take us anywhere, I can get rid of it…”
“Then do so,” Justin insisted. “If it wasn’t on Hasahlain’s map, then it isn’t to our benefit—and believe me when I say that when I was finished, he told me everything…”
He clearly hadn’t, but Leon didn’t argue, and instead carved an ancient rune into the air, one designed to reroute magic away from an enchantment as subtly as possible. Once the enchantment was starved, he could break it more thoroughly without tripping any alarms or alerting anyone who might be monitoring such things.
It only took a few seconds, and as the enchantment melted away, instead of the vision of more stairs that the enchantment had shown, Leon found himself staring at the bottom of the spiral stairs, which opened into a nearly identical hall as the one above, though this one without any lit sconces. Only the night sky enchanted on the ceiling lit the room.
Cautiously, Leon stepped into the hall, his shoes making no sound at all as they glided across the smooth black marble floor. Iron Pride sparked in his soul realm, but he refrained from immediately arming himself. Instead, he inspected every inch of the room, noting that there were neither windows nor doors, his heart sinking as it seemed clear that they’d come out into a seemingly dead end.
The rest of his party spilled into the room behind him, fanning out to inspect this dark hall in greater detail. Thankfully, it didn’t seem that there were any alarms, but Leon started to wonder if that spatial enchantment wasn’t supposed to take them to where they needed to go, after all…
As they inspected the room more closely, Leon found himself drawn to an enormous mirror opposite the hearth, where the door was in the twin hall at the top of the stairs. As he approached, he felt it shudder with magic, and he jumped back, ready for something to jump out, but instead, his reflection in the mirror changed, his disguise falling away. It remained in the real world, but the mirror reflected his true appearance.
And then a figure appeared in the reflection, thin and shadowy, their features indistinct. They stood next to Leon, an arm and a leg draped over him, their shadowy face close to Leon’s ear. He almost jumped, but when he turned, there was nothing there. This thing was only in the reflection, which he confirmed as he ran his hand and projected his magic through the space where the shadow was in the mirror.
A thunk drew his attention back to the stairs, and before any of them could move, the stairs sealed themselves off, leaving them apparently trapped in this buried hall…
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