The Tower Master's Face
The fourth mage took the measure of Chris's speed—and it felt anything but natural. Ordinary flight, he decided, would not save him. Once a decent gap had opened, he dropped to the ground and drew a magic circle. A teleportation circle.
He had studied movement magic for a long time, but he had never grown skilled enough to cross a true distance. A circle sketched in haste, as this one was, could not carry him more than twenty paces.
Add the teleport scroll he had bought at a painful price for the day his life hung on it, though, and the distance became something he could accept.
He tore the scroll. Brilliant light poured out and wrapped his body. In the instant he meant to leap far away, a tree root burst from the earth, wrecked the circle, and coiled around both his legs. His body tore. Only half of him went.
Chris arrived a moment after the man was ripped apart. They were deep in the mountains, and trees crowded every side. Setting roots in motion with magic was no difficult thing. Fed fat on the abundant power of Seed Cultivation—wood-attribute mana at its heart—the roots tore the hasty circle apart with ease.
"One left."
Chris flung himself onward without pausing for breath.
On a deep night, with clouds leaving the stars only here and there, Chris returned to the magic circle that was meant to carry him to the ruins.
Draped over his arms were two mages' robes, two staves, and two spatial pouches, taken from the ones who had run. There ought to have been three. The mage who had used the movement circle had escaped with his property: pouch and staff had gone with the half of him that vanished, and half the robe had gone as well, leaving the rest worthless.
Chris settled in one of the towers and looked over the spoils. Both spatial pouches were cursed and trapped, though at a cruder level than Cyril's. Even so, Chris had never properly learned security magic, and breaking them was beyond him. As he had before, he took the curses on his body. The traps he killed the crude way, driving his hand in again and again until the mana lingering in the pouches was spent.
He searched them with high hopes, and was disappointed. Not a single magic tool. A few low-grade mana stones rattling at the bottom. He could not understand how mages who had come out of a tower—not wandering freelancers—could be this poor. He did not know they had surrendered their fortunes as the price of taking the mission, and so he could not contain the disappointment.
He consoled himself with the staves and the spatial pouches. Mages carried those, robes included, as a matter of course, so Chris had never thought them special. They were magic tools all the same, and expensive ones. A spatial pouch was made to hold a great many things. Even with part of its security broken, its worth did not vanish. Lay a fresh security spell over it and it was perfectly usable; if that was too much trouble, one could simply use it as it was. The only cost was a greater risk of theft.
I can sell them at a magic shop.
Through a tower window he looked down at Scott, thrown into the circle. What does Scott have on him?
He came down and was about to set his foot on the circle when, at the last moment, he turned aside. The circle had stopped completely. Stepping inside did not look likely to start it again, so it should not drink his mana as it had before. But one never knew what vicious thing might still be waiting.
The great boulder that six men had strained together to clear away when he first arrived, Chris lifted alone and hurled at the center of the circle. It fell with a thud and smashed the array. The satisfaction went clean through him.
Reassured, he stepped inside, tucked Scott under one arm and the second mage he had finished under the other, and came back out. Dried to mummies, they were astonishingly light.
A mage's robe often carries magic: spells of temperature and cleanliness for the comfort of wearing it, defenses against physical force or flame, wards against curses, and more. An expensive robe bears all of them. These two had surely carried one such spell, or several. All of it was ruined. Scott's robe had broken first when Chris drove a fist through his solar plexus, and whatever magic remained was destroyed when the circle stripped mana and life. The staves were ruined as well. A staff often holds a mana stone; these had crumbled to dust, and the circuits engraved within were twisted past recognition. Repair would cost more than buying new.
Robes and staves were scrap. Chris set his hopes on the spatial pouches. He loosened the mouth of Scott's and put his hand in. It slid through without resistance. The circle seemed to have erased the security magic entirely. He had worried the valuables inside might be ruined. Fortunately they were intact. Between the two of them there were a fair number of mana stones, enough to satisfy him. There was no other treasure.
He gathered what he had gained and stood, then looked over the five hundred people collapsed across the circle.
Colleagues, in a sense. I ought to bury them. Or would burning be better?
Turning the question over, he began to search the corpses one by one—and realized this was an enormous haul. The mages went without saying, but every one of the others had sensed mana as well. They were people who earned their keep anywhere, and their price was naturally high. Money, once it comes in, gets spent on expensive things. The armor and weapons they carried were valuable.
A few had owned magic tools. Those, regrettably, the circle had ruined. Robes and staves had lost their worth, but the spatial pouches were sound, and inside them lay mana stones—they had clung to the stones even as they died—and gold coins.
Chris took the property of five hundred people and was rich in a moment. He did not know it, but that was precisely what the men who ran the camp had been after.
3. Companions
Chris crossed the Grant Kingdom at speed and passed into the Albar Kingdom. The hunt there was several times weaker than in Grant, which lay under the shadow of the three great magic towers. He caught his breath and made the rounds of forges, merchant houses, and magic emporiums, selling off the weapons and magical goods he carried. Too much sold in one place might draw suspicion, so he broke the sales across several regions, and all the while he moved steadily toward the border of a third kingdom.
Every coin the sales brought he turned into mana stones, and every stone he gained he spent at once to raise his realm. Chris, who had stood around the middle grade of Seed Cultivation, climbed quickly until he had a fingertip hooked over the upper grade.
Before dawn he was feeding mana to his Klpandi by the secret art of Iron Body. A high-grade mana stone rested in each palm. He had meant to buy top-grade stones, but the house refused to sell, so he settled for high-grade—the next best thing. Top-grade stones were rare. Few houses kept them in stock, and even a house that did would not sell to a man without connections. Someone who had to hide his name was hardly going to have any.
When the stones had spent their mana, they turned into ordinary rock. Chris cleared them away and frowned. Iron Body was the finest secret art for tempering a body, and a poor match for growing a Klpandi. To raise it properly, he would need a new method of training.
"The higher I climb, the harder it gets."
As his magic deepened, the things he needed kept multiplying, and a drifter had no way to lay hands on them.
Is there no way into the ruins?
He turned the question over while he packed, then shook his head.
Don't cling to it.
He had been driven to the brink before he ever set foot inside. How much worse would it be once he had? The chance of dying would outweigh the chance of coming out alive.
He left two coins on the bed for the servant who cleaned the room and slipped quietly out of the inn. One more day of travel and he could cross into the Britan Kingdom.
Trouble broke just before noon. He was crossing an ordinary wooded hill when the mana around him suddenly churned, the earth heaved, and the ground came down on him. In the urgency of the moment Chris erupted with magical power, threw a barrier across his front, and ran.
Boom.
He punched through the wall of earth with the barrier, and beyond it lay a sea of fire. He drove his body straight through the flames. Then roots and grass burst up through the ground and wound around his ankles and calves.
Only then did he answer like a mage. He took hold of roots and grass himself and tore away what gripped him. In that instant a massive fireball bloomed in the air above his head, and from every side came a sound that crawled over the skin. Wind blades.
Chris did not move. The fireball did not fall, and the blades did not fly. Both spells, besides, stood a clear cut above Cyril, who had only been Seed Cultivation.
Ring Binding.
He weighed it.
Can I beat a Ring Binder?
A grandmaster is stronger than the lower grade of Ring Binding and stands even with the middle. That was the settled conclusion of those well versed in the world of mages and the world of knights alike. By that measure Chris ought to defeat a lower-grade Ring Binder. Reality disagreed. His was a body trained and nothing more—a grandmaster by halves, unable to use aura.
And if magic were added to that?
Yes. Chris was a mage as well, and so he had advantages an ordinary grandmaster lacked. The trouble was that this half of him was only half, too. A half mage and a half grandmaster, strangely fused and living in the same skin. That was what Chris was.
He thought it through and reached a conclusion.
Stake my life on the fight, and I can beat the lower grade of Ring Binding.
It was only his estimate, so it might be wrong. And so he prayed.
Let the one who ambushed me be lower Ring Binding.
When he did not so much as twitch, the mages who had been striking from hiding showed themselves. Two old men in front, and two men in their prime following behind.
Chris groaned inwardly.
Damn it. Two Ring Binders.
He had hoped a single mage had prepared both the fireball and the wind blades. Against one he might scrape by, somehow. Two were more than he could carry. He bit his lip.
If I fight, I die.
Having judged as much, he stepped forward with careful courtesy.
"We've never met... Who might you be?"
The old man on the left spoke.
"We came from Hermann."
Chris cursed inwardly.
Damn it. Hermann Magic Tower.
His face stayed calm. From rubbing shoulders with mages, and from living under a hidden name, he had grown considerably better at keeping what he felt to himself.
What do I say to that?
His mind spun hard.
"How did you know I was here?"
"You sold off that many spatial pouches and weapons, and you believed no one would notice?"
"I thought I was being careful, in my way."
"There was too much of it."
"That's why I sold it in pieces."
"Which only made you easier to find."
"Easier?"
"The sales ran in a line along the road. Draw that line, and it pointed at the border."
"Ah. That was a mistake."
"You should have dumped the lot at once through the back alleys, or through a merchant house where you had a connection. Gone to ground after that, and we'd have had a hard time catching you."
"Thank you for the advice. I'll be more careful from now on."
The old man smiled a peculiar smile.
"From now on? Do you have a from-now-on?"
Chris smiled too.
"Come now, don't be like that. We're on the same side."
"Are we?"
"Of course we are."
He added it in a wounded tone.
"If we're on the same side, why did you attack me?"
"Are we really on the same side?"
"I belong to Hermann."
"And yet you don't even recognize the Tower Master's face?"
The smile drifting on Chris's face set hard as stone.
The Tower Master?
He drew a deep breath.
Don't freeze. If they aren't attacking, they don't mean to kill me right this moment.