Chapter 249: Urgency

Chapter 249: Chapter 249: Urgency

The signal reached him on the thirty-seventh floor, in the middle of a fight.

Rowan did not notice at first. A stone-hided brute with a club the size of a wagon axle was bearing down on Caelen, and Mirei was dancing across the rubble in her silent boots, peppering its eyes with arrows, and Barney was bellowing something about the quality of the creature’s hide. The device in Rowan’s breast pocket gave a single, faint buzz, then another, then a long, insistent pulse that rattled against his ribs.

He ignored it until the brute fell.

It went down with a thunderous crash, as Barney’s hammer split its skull and Caelen’s blade took the legs from under it, and the cavern shook. Dust rolled across the floor. The squad stood panting in the settling gloom, bruised and grinning, and then, as they began to strip the carcass, Rowan finally pulled out the device.

The screen glowed with a pale blue pulse. A single line of text hung in the center.

[PRIORITY: Imperial Palace - Emperor Aurelius]

His smirk faded.

They found a quiet alcove in the cavern wall, a shallow niche of dry stone out of the dust, and Rowan sat down on a boulder with the device in his hands and the squad gathering around him. No one asked what was wrong. They had all seen his face.

He opened the message.

It was short, as the Emperor’s dispatches always were. But there was something in the shape of the sentences that made Rowan read it slowly, one line at a time.

Rowan,

I write this knowing you are inside the Tower, and that the signal may not hold. I will be brief.

Three days ago, the Supreme Leader of Vostrava was killed in his own Hall of Sessions. The Order of Humanity has claimed responsibility. The weapon was not a blade or a poison, but something engineered, designed to feed on the mana channels of its victim. The Confederation has confirmed it. The Supreme Leader was a Level 90 powerhouse, and his defensive talent did not save him.

I have reason to believe it is related to what struck Lyra.

I will not ask you to leave the Tower. I know what you are climbing toward, and I know it matters. But I wanted you to know, from me, before you heard it from anyone else. If you are able to return, I would welcome your counsel. If you are not, then be careful. They are watching.

Aurelius

He read it twice. When he lowered the device, the alcove was very quiet.

"Rowan?" said Seraphina, gently.

He passed it to her without a word. She read it, and her mouth tightened. She handed it to Caelen, who read it more quickly and passed it to Mirei, who read it with her lips pressed into a thin white line. Barney was the last. He read slowly, tracing each line with a thick finger, and when he got to the end, he let out a long, low breath.

"A Level 90," he said. "Killed in his own palace."

"It says the talent didn’t save him," said Mirei, in a small voice.

"Defense doesn’t help against something that goes around it," said Seraphina. Her fingers had gone to the monocle at her collar, and she was turning it over and over, as though she could not decide whether to put it on. "If the agent is what the Emperor describes, then it targets the channels directly. The body’s armor is irrelevant. What matters is the mana structure underneath." She paused. "And it is possible that it was refined from what was used on the Princess."

"That’s what the Emperor thinks."

"It is what I would think."

Silence settled over the alcove, thick and heavy. Somewhere in the cavern, water dripped steadily from a stalactite, and the sound seemed very loud.

"So," said Barney at last. He scratched his beard. "Are we going home?"

Rowan did not answer immediately.

He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hat tipped low over his eyes, and he looked at the empty air in front of him. The device lay on the boulder beside him, still glowing faintly. He could feel the squad watching him. He could feel the earth beneath his boots, steady and patient. And he could feel, much farther away, the faint, cold tug of a question he had been trying not to ask for days.

What can I do?

He ran the numbers, because that was what he did. A Level 90 had died. The dukes of Vostrava, men and women at Levels 70 to 80, were tearing their country apart, and none of them could stop the thing that had killed their ruler. The cult had struck across half a world with a weapon that bypassed every defense known to medicine. And he was Level 40. A good Level 40, Tier 4, with a domain, a Breath of Eden at its tenth level, and four of the finest companions in the realm. But still Level 40.

He could fly home tonight. He could stand at the Emperor’s side. He could warn, advise, suggest, and offer the water from the World Tree’s spring. And none of it would matter, not against a force that could unmake a man like Kharitonov.

"No," he said, finally.

The squad turned toward him.

"We’re not going home." He lifted his head, and the old, wry smirk had returned, though it was thinner than before. "Not yet."

"Boss..." began Caelen.

"Hear me out." Rowan raised a hand. "I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. I’m saying that right now, I can’t do anything about it. A Level 90 can’t stop it. Seventy dukes can’t stop it." He gave a short, humorless laugh. "What am I going to do, march into Vostrava with a hoe?"

"You could send the spring water," said Seraphina, slowly. "The Emperor’s physicians saw what it did."

"I can, and I will. I’ll send it tonight, with a note." He nodded. "But that’s all I can do from here. Anything more would be pretending." He looked at the faces around him, one by one. "The problem is too big for me. It’s too big for all of us. The only way that changes is if we get stronger."

"And the way to get stronger," said Mirei, understanding dawning, "is to keep climbing."

"The fortieth floor is four floors away." Rowan tapped the boulder with a finger. "Clear it, and we’ll have the guardian’s reward. We’ll have the experience. We’ll have another level, maybe two. And then we’ll see." He paused. "If I leave now, I leave with nothing. If I stay, I leave with something."

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then Barney let out a short bark of laughter and clapped Rowan on the shoulder hard enough to make him wince. "That’s the boss I know," he said. "Always figuring out how to turn a disaster into a plan."

"I wouldn’t call it a plan."

"I’d call it a direction," said Caelen, quietly. He had pushed back his hood, and his face was calm and clear and resolved. "We’ll keep climbing. And when we come down, we’ll be ready."

"Ready," Mirei agreed, and her bow gleamed in the lamplight.

Seraphina said nothing. She only slipped the monocle onto her eye, adjusted it with one finger, and gave Rowan a single, steady nod.

He wrote the reply himself, in the quiet of the alcove, with the device balanced on his knee.

Your Majesty,

Thank you for telling me. I understand the weight of what you’ve described, and I share your fears. I cannot leave the Tower yet. The floors above hold power I will need if I’m to be of any real use, and I will not return empty-handed.

In the meantime, I will send you more spring water, as much as I can safely carry. Keep it close. Give a small portion to Lyra each day, and take some yourself. I don’t know whether it can protect against what killed the Supreme Leader, but it saved your daughter from something similar, and it costs nothing to try.

Guard your household. Trust only those you have tested. And please, watch over my family. Lily is very small.

I’ll come back as soon as I can.

Rowan

He read it through, changed one word, and sent it. The device chimed softly. A moment later, a thin amber light bloomed from his palm, and a padded crate of crystal bottles shimmered into being on the alcove floor, filled to the brim with gently glowing water. He stared at it, then sealed it with a strip of wax and pressed his thumb to the lid.

It vanished with a soft, silvery chime, carried across the Tower’s walls on the thread of the domain.

"That’s the quickest delivery I’ve ever seen," murmured Barney.

"It’s what Eden is for."

They climbed again at first light, or what passed for it, a dim, silver glow in the cavern’s roof.

The stairs wound steeply upward, cut into the rock, and the squad took them in single file. No one spoke. The air was cold, and it carried the faint, mineral smell of deep stone. Rowan took the rear, as always, with his hoe across his shoulders and the Enchanted Straw Hat pulled low.

He was thinking about Vostrava. He was thinking about a dead man with gray, cracking skin, and a white feather on a marble floor. He was thinking about a Princess in a hospital bed, and a small, warm, glowing girl in a cradle, and an Emperor sitting alone in a lamplit study.

Too high, he thought. Too far. Too strong.

But the stairs went on, and the earth under his boots was steady and old, and somewhere above, four floors away, a door was waiting.

He quickened his pace.