“Pathetic.”
A burst of magic illuminated the crystalline hallway, originating from a glowing rune drawn in the air. Metal clanged across the floor as the magical forces animating it ceased.
Nestor audibly scoffed at the motionless golems around him. A dozen in total, though most were small, about the size of his head. They’d looked like golden spiders to Leon’s eyes, their carapaces smooth and beautiful, and decorated with a thousand runes, only some of which were functional. Some of these golems’ many limbs had manipulators, but none had weapons; they were down in these tunnels to maintain the wards, not to fight against intruders.
At least, most of them were; the two latest golems that fell at Nestor’s feet were human-shaped, standing half again as tall as Leon did, and had been armed with vicious halberds. Those weapons, and the thick armor encasing the wisps within, availed them not, and Nestor dispatched them as easily as he had all the others so far.
“They are,” Alcander agreed with Nestor as he stepped over a golem that he’d taken out—the only one not eliminated by Nestor so far. “I would’ve thought a place like this would’ve been more heavily guarded…”
“The magic in the walls prohibits much guarding,” Nestor remarked, gesturing to the narrow hallway they found themselves in. “Too many war golems down here might disrupt more than defend. I’d say we’ve probably already taken out most of the active golems in this area. If any more golems come after us before we’ve left these tunnels, they’re most likely currently inactive and will have to wake themselves before doing anything.”
Leon breathed a sigh of relief, though he hadn’t been stressing overmuch, in truth. As he’d done with the other golems Nestor had taken out, he pulled these remains into his soul realm and set the golems he was already carrying in there to the work of dismantling them. He could study them later.
After entering the tunnels below the manor, it had been fairly easy for Nestor to find the second hidden door that led from the sally tunnels into the maintenance tunnels. The sally tunnels had been utilitarian to the point of being rather spartan. They were not regal halls, and were only designed to facilitate travel from one side of the wall to the other with as much secrecy as possible.
Of course, they’d been laden with wards that would’ve sealed the tunnel, sounded a thousand alarms, and resisted them at every step, but Nestor had undone all of that with such derision that Leon found himself impressed. Nestor so rarely had a chance to show off what he could do outside of his lab, and it hammered home with him just how far he had to go just to match the dead man’s level.
Further down the sally tunnels, Leon could sense doors and checkpoints, but thankfully, the maintenance tunnels began earlier, with Nestor halting at a seemingly identical, nondescript bit of wall. Leon hadn’t sensed anything until Nestor had him examine the flow of magic through the wall, focusing on the strings of magic that denoted the presence of ancient runes. In that wall, Leon sensed the slightest of wavers with those strings, but rather than being the natural flow of magic through the stone, all of the strings that flowed through the stone wavered in the same place.
Nestor had him draw a rune in the air, reasoning that since he didn’t have much power in his bodiless state, then Leon could at least help with some of the more intensive parts. Leon, happy to oblige, carved the rune in the air, and the wall slid open, revealing what seemed to be a completely different world from the dark, bare tunnel that they had entered, and which had closed behind them.
The maintenance tunnels, instead of being as Leon had expected and even starker and utilitarian than even the sally tunnel, were instead a passage seeming cut through a world of dark purple crystal. The walls, floors, and ceilings all gleamed, and the passage seemed almost natural in the way it shot forward arrow-straight, as if following a fault line in the crystal.
The crystal itself was lit from within, shining with inner lights that Leon almost took for stars at first. It almost looked like the crystal was only glass, separating them from Voidspace beyond the boundaries of the Nexus. But after his initial awe, Leon realized that the ‘stars’ beneath the crystalline surface were, in fact, the runes that made up Torn Sky’s wards. They billowed ‘beneath’ the surface, constantly moving to different places and joining with other runes to form complex enchantments, and remaining in those enchantments for only seconds at a time before separating again into individual runes and whirling around to create new enchantments.
It reminded Leon in no small way of the control room for Xaphan’s prison on Aeterna—a platform with the prison’s power crystal and control consoles suspended in the center of an enormous sphere, with countless runes moving around the inner surface.
For all the skill Leon knew he’d acquired in creating runes, all that he’d created were either static or attached to magical machinery. He had yet to reach the level of creating something like this, though his mind was already racing with potential experiments to try when he returned to Artorion.
‘If this is what Kamran can do, then I at least have to match it…’ he thought with a deep, if momentary, grimace.
In the end, their time in the maintenance tunnels was short. Thanks to Justin’s information, they knew exactly where to go, and they only had to get to the other side of the wall. With Nestor there disabling the wards and keeping the alarms from going off, it was almost anticlimactic when they reached the exit. Less than twenty golems had tried to stop them, and Nestor had eliminated all but the one that Alcander handled.
As they made their way back to the surface, however, Justin asked a salient question. “How long until anyone notices that the golems in this section of the maintenance tunnels were all disabled?”
“Were these tunnels made by me,” Nestor said, “a day, maybe two. I would have golems patrolling the area constantly with the sole task to check on all the others.”
Leon almost chuckled. “I remember your stringent demands for the mining golems you designed…”
“Underground work is a nightmare,” Nestor said, his tone growing heavy. “And it took me more than a decade, when my father still ruled, to fully satisfy the mining guild. I’d present them new designs every year, and they’d return to me weeks later about how the golems I’d designed were ‘too limited’. Some of them would break down under the strain of such manual labor, or they’d be trapped if a mine collapsed, and no one would know because the golems weren’t able to call for help.”
The dead man paused long enough to scoff through his nonexistent nose. “I wasn’t keen to replicate that experience.”
“Our miners are very happy with what you built them,” Cassandra stated.
Justin, however, kept his focus entirely on the problem at hand. “A day, maybe two, then…”
“After that, it would only be the incompetence of our enemies that would see us remain undiscovered,” Nestor said.
“You should’ve said something earlier, Nestor,” Leon growled.
“I knew you were going to grab their remains,” Nestor shot back. “You can’t help yourself; you have to see how they work. And anyone or anything that comes down into these tunnels to check on the maintenance golems would raise the alarm anyway when they couldn’t find them.”
“That’s not my point,” Leon hissed. He considered emphatically making his point there and then, but he locked eyes with Valeria, standing by the wall separating them from another set of tunnels that supported public works rather than the city’s defenses. They’d be in the city in a matter of minutes once they were through, and the glint sparkling in Valeria’s currently plain brown eyes told him that she was impatient to get going.
So, he dropped the point.
“Just get this damn thing open…”
Nestor laughed once, loudly, and then had the wall slide open with a single glowing ‘open’ rune, cast with a familiarity and comfort that Leon couldn’t match—he would’ve taken twice as long to draw the thing, and then needed another few seconds to focus his mind enough to get the generic rune to do what he wanted it to do.
“Don’t be jealous, now,” Nestor quipped as he moved past Leon, third after Valeria and Justin in stepping out into what seemed to be a large flood overflow tunnel. Once the entire party was through, Nestor let his rune fade, and the wall slid shut.
Justin led them to a ladder in the wall, rusty and dirty, and instead of using it, he flew up to the drain cover in the ceiling. When he moved it out of the way, the light of the Origin Spark spilled into the overflow tunnel. After a quick scan of their surroundings, Justin shot up, and the rest of Leon’s party followed him.
They found themselves in an alley between two large stone buildings. The sounds of saws running through wood and the smell of sawdust on the wind greeted them, telling Leon that they were right where he expected them to be: in the midst of one of the city’s carpenters’ guild’s many small districts scattered throughout the city. To the west loomed the enormous city wall, and to the east, he could see Kamran’s palace floating above the unending storm at the center of Torn Sky.
Thankfully, no one heard their exit from the drain amidst the din of the busy trade district, and once the drain was closed again, there was no evidence of how Leon’s party had gotten into the city.
“We need to find Tion Bey,” Zhang said. “He was going to wait close to the gatehouse, as I recall.”
“Aye,” Justin replied, “but I’d rather not get too close to the gatehouse. That guard captain got a good look at us, and we should stay as far from him as we can.”
“Then we go straight to the safehouse?” Leon asked.
“Yes,” Justin said. “There shouldn’t be any problems from here. Torn Sky is not a fortress city, despite what those walls might imply…”
Leon’s lips twitched upward, and then he followed Justin out into the street. They attracted a few looks as they trooped out of the alley, but no one was curious enough to stop them, not even with Nestor bringing up the rear. Leon was amused to see the dead man affecting a stiffer, less natural and more golem-like gait once he was back in the public eye.
Justin led them through the well-ordered streets. Most of the buildings were made of stone and stucco, with a few adding timber accents where they would be nice. The streets themselves were busy, but not as much as Leon would have expected given the streamers and banners hanging from every eve and strung across every street crossing—it seemed that the guards were letting few people into the city at all, and that Rhen wasn’t unusual in that regard.
Still, the streets were decently crowded as the people readied themselves for the festival, and Justin set a pace that had them moving through the city as fast as their legs could carry them—there were prohibitions against flying, after all, and on top of that, Leon’s party was largely disguised as lower-tiered mages. It was better to attract as little attention as they could now that they could be seen.
The city was large, though, and after about half an hour, they still hadn’t reached their destination. Justin, however, had taken them into a much more crowded forum to try and cut between several streets—slowing them down severely in the end, given the sheer number of people packed into the forum trying to sell whatever they had or buy whatever they needed—and when they finally got to the other side, he halted, a look of disbelief on his disguised face.
Leon followed the man’s gaze and found that Justin was staring at three transport arks similar in shape, though different in color, to those that Regulus had taken them to the gatehouse in. They were trying to get through an adjacent street to the forum, going back the way that Leon’s party had come, and the leading driver was sticking his head out of his cabin, shouting at people to make way—something few were willing to do with any sense of urgency.
“Looks like he was coming to meet us,” Justin said with a slight smile as he led the way over to the carriage arks.
“Get the fuck outta the way!” the driver shouted, his voice going hoarse in the final word as Justin stepped out into the street.
Justin, however, walked over as Leon’s party waited off to the side.
“You’re Commander Tion Bey’s man, aren’t you?” Justin asked. “You’re looking to meet with a party that came into the city today.”
The driver stared blankly at him for a long moment, then said, “Ah… um… yes, actually. Who the fuck are you?” His tone was aggressive, as if he’d taken personal offense at Justin walking out of the blue and stating his day’s objective.
“I’m the man you were sent to meet with,” Justin stated.
“No, you’re not,” the driver said. “You—”
A window in the back cabin opened, and, cutting off the driver, a deep voice echoed within. “Is that you, Jack?”
Justin smirked and walked over to the window. “I’m older than you; you should call me by my actual name.”
Despite his words, the man Leon glimpsed within the window looked significantly older than Justin did, older even than Regulus. He was completely bald, his pale skin gleaming in the light. Age had carved deep canyons into his face, but when he smiled back at Justin, he seemed to shrug those years off. Despite these overt signs of age, his body was strong, with plenty of muscle visible beneath his tight green tunic. Leon noted that he was eighth-tier and that he was certainly a lot haler and heartier than he appeared.
“When a man steps out in front of my ark, claiming to be an old friend despite wearing a different face, is he anything other than a Jack?” the old man asked. Though he smiled, his eyes narrowed significantly, a silent challenge rendered with the gleaming orbs alone.
“No man likes being called ‘jackanape’,” Justin retorted. “And tripping in front of Lady Nebenandra is not enough to be given such a name.”
The old man relaxed, his smile now reaching his eyes. “The way you slid across the floor and nearly wound up with your face under her dress is still talked about, in some circles…”
Justin visibly cringed. “I’d rather everyone forgot about that…”
“Not likely.” The old man leaned closer to the window and added, “Get in here, Justin. I’d rather not have this discussion out on the street.”
Justin grinned as the carriage doors slid open, with Leon, Cassandra, and Valeria joining Justin in Tion Bey’s carriage, while Zhang, Alcander, and Daryun were shown into the carriage ark in the back of the convoy. Nestor wasn’t given any instructions, but Leon watched him follow the others, his movements still stiff and mechanical.
Tion Bey studied Leon and his wives as they entered with Justin, not showing any signs of discomfort at their presence in his personal transport. He remained silent until the doors slid shut behind them and the window closed. Then, he instructed his driver to get moving again and studied the three of them for several more seconds.
Justin, meanwhile, disabled his disguise after a moment, once he was sure the ark’s interior was properly warded. Leon and his ladies, however, did not. They were here to support Justin, not to be a King and two of his Queens—Tion Bey didn’t know who they were, and the decision had been made weeks ago to not tell him any more than was necessary.
“Ah,” Tion Bey said as Justin’s familiar features revealed themselves. “There you are. Hmm. I’m almost surprised to see you; I’d heard that the gates were going to be ordered shut before midday, and that they were to be particularly strict with who gets into the city before then.”
Justin blinked rapidly in shock. “I’d thought the guards were behaving strangely, but I’d just thought it was because of Niam…” His tone quieted. “Is it true? About Niam?”
“Yes,” Tion Bey said, not sounding nearly as upset as Justin was about Niam losing his head. “He was caught taking a bribe to let slaves lacking the guild’s brand through his gate.”
“Hardly a capital offense,” Justin stated.
“No,” Tion replied. “But with the cracking down on the gates… I heard that the city’s arkpads were to be given honor guards, and that Lord Dionysias was going to personally make his way down there before the start of the festival…”
“The city’s regent?” Justin asked in shock, his eyes widening for a moment before a scowl narrowed them again. “Someone is coming to the city today. Someone important. That’s why the guards are hardly letting anyone into the city.”
“I don’t know if that’s true, nor do I have the inclination to speculate,” Tion Bey said. He laid a hand on Justin’s shoulder and whispered, “I don’t know why you’re here, Justin, but given what you asked of me, I know that it’s not the festival. You had better be damned sure that what you’re here for is worth the risk.” His eyes flickered in Leon’s direction, scanning him and then Cassandra and Valeria. He opened his mouth, perhaps to warn them about whatever Justin was planning, but seemed to rethink and shut his mouth again.
Justin, meanwhile, set his jaw and said, “I’m here for the best reasons, old friend. Believe that.”
Leon watched Tion Bey regard Justin almost coldly, with little friendship to be seen in his expression. He didn’t respond immediately to Justin, and the carriage was silent for much of the rest of the way to the safehouse.
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