Book 3, Chapter 42

Even getting close to the Telpike estate without being seen was harder than Sorin had expected. The explosion might have distracted the Galdyrin retainers, but they’d still cause problems if they spotted him. And they were everywhere right now, mixed with powerful climbers and retainers from all the other high families and probably hundreds more lower-ranked mid family climbers.

That made for packed streets, which allowed Sorin to sort of blend in, but also made it harder to keep track of the Galdyrins. Worse, he couldn’t really hide that he was rank 23, and that was unusual enough to attract notice. With his pursuers knowing to look for high rankers, having a bunch of random pedestrians watching him was as good as hanging an arrow in the sky to point in his direction.

But Sorin was backed by a B-rank soulprint enhancing his strength, speed, and agility. He had a lifetime of experience to go with it and an encyclopedia of spells in his brain that he could free cast. His anima reservoir was significantly bigger than it was supposed to be, too, maybe enough to match someone ranked in the mid-thirties.

There was nobody in the red tower who had more versatility and raw power than him, at least not on the bottom side of the Void Wall. If he wanted to go somewhere, a bunch of scrub climbers who’d spent years just trying to get to rank 10 weren’t going to be enough to stop him.

A combination of Stealth Phase, circuitous routes, free casting Wind Strider to traverse the rooftops, and an unmatched sensory ability showing him when people were looking the other way eventually got him to where he wanted to go. He wasn’t confident that no one had seen him, but he was reasonably certain that if anyone had, they weren’t important.

His journey took fifteen minutes—two minutes of travel and thirteen cumulative minutes of waiting for openings to move unseen at various street junctions where traffic was thickest. It ended with him dropping over the back wall of the Telpike estate when one of the sentries looked away for five seconds to watch the fire brigade’s attempt to quell the flames threatening to spread to secondary buildings.

He'd seen a trio of healers going in through the front gate while he was casing the place, though he’d only recognized them thanks to his lap around the city looking for someone to help Odric. If it was just three, though, he took that to mean there were too many wounded for the healer they had on retainer to work on them all, but not so many that they were dealing with mass casualties.

Either nobody died, or a lot of people did. If it was the latter, there’d be more of a reaction. Yoru’s family is probably all safe. That should make him happy, but he’s also going to want to know what exactly happened.

That it was a fight and not an accident was obvious. Through Observer, Sorin could identify five different types of magic in the residual anima still clinging to the area. That didn’t necessarily mean five climbers, since it was entirely possible for a single climber to leave behind fire and water-patterned anima. Nor could he differentiate if two separate climbers were both using fire, and reading the anima field also wouldn’t show him any climber whose build centered around internal augments.

The sheer amount of lingering anima was more than he could put out by himself, though, even if he drained his reservoir from completely full to empty in the attempt. If none of the combatants could be a higher rank than him, and assuming they hadn’t drained themselves bone dry in the fight, he was guessing five to seven climbers above rank 20.

Too many variables, he thought. All he had was educated guesses and speculation. It was easy to poke holes in the theory, if it was developed enough to even call it that, and so he needed more hard facts. At minimum, knowing what the fight had been about was a place to start.

It wasn’t hard to get a better vantage point. The fire brigade was all low-rank, none over 5 or 6, from the feel of it. Even if they hadn’t been focused on smothering the flames, they were unlikely to notice him. The wall sentries were more of a challenge, but Morlin Telpike kept an obscene amount of real estate inside his walls. The distance worked in Sorin’s favor, plus most of them were focused on looking outward for threats instead of inward at the conflagration.

He made his way up to the roof and settled down with his back to a chimney stack. From there, he could see right into the hole that had been made by the explosion, taking out almost an entire wall and half of the roof in the process. Observer was all well and good, but all of its components were centered around things like movement and aura, so he mapped out buildings and read fine detail more by sensing around where things were than by seeing them directly.

It was an inarguably better navigation tool than his eyes, and Sorin already had a pretty good idea what he was going to find, but it wasn’t until he actually got a good look at it in full color that he realized what the room was.

The place we stored the Enchanter’s Cabinet, where all the work was done. Could be a coincidence, but it’s a big estate, and that’s a very specific room.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The cabinet was no longer there, of course. After their falling out, Yoru had arranged for a different enchanter to do the work in a hidden location. It had all been very secretive. They’d even taken steps to keep their hired enchanter from realizing where he was when they brought him there. So far, everything had worked out fine, and the man had produced close to a dozen upgrades for his team’s gear.

It couldn’t be a robbery, then, not unless the band of thieves was working on some very outdated information. He supposed it was possible someone could have broken in, only to find an empty room. That would have been the height of stupidity to act without confirming their intel was still accurate.

No, that’s making assumptions again. There’s no reason to think anyone broke in looking for the Enchanter’s Cabinet. I have no idea what Morlin’s been doing with that room since we parted ways. There could have been any number of valuables in there.

It didn’t really fit, though. The room had been employed because it was out of the way as a measure for minimizing the danger of a voidling entering through Sorin’s Liminal Gateway. There was no reason to keep anything valuable there now.

There were two climbers standing in the middle of the room, both from the fire brigade. They’d finished extinguishing the interior flames by the time Sorin arrived and were working on reinforcing the structure itself with a combination of force and earth magic, but they were hindered by what appeared to be a dead body half-buried in the rubble. For whatever reason, they were going through a lot of effort to avoid disturbing it.

It was a surprise to see, mostly because it was so obscured by the rubble that he’d missed it with Observer. Now that he knew it was there, it was easier to trace the contours and separate the body from jumbled stone and chunks of wood. The corpse’s face was still obscured, unfortunately. One of the stone sheets that made up the walls had broken into a thousand pieces and collapsed on the man.

Either he’s weaker than I thought, or he was already dead when it buried him. Yoru’s going to want to know that it isn’t a family member; I’d better see if it’s a Telpike. That might explain why the other two are so hesitant working around it.

Excavating the body wasn’t necessary. Sorin hadn’t thought to use it before, but he could get a better look via his connection with the stone through Veins of the World. It was by no means a perfect image, not with it being a pile of stones instead of something fine like sand or even loose earth, but it was a start.

The face wasn’t familiar to him, either because Sorin couldn’t get a good enough read to recognize it or simply because he didn’t know the person to begin with. ‘Seeing’ him through soulprints like this was more akin to a blind person tracing someone’s facial features with their hand, and Sorin wasn’t nearly as practiced with sorting out fine details using Veins of the World instead of Observer.

There was a way to get a better look as long as he didn’t mind leaving a bit of evidence behind. He willed the stone on the body’s face to move, not shifting so much as reforming to slip through the empty space so that the pile wasn’t disturbed. Once the face was free of debris, Sorin got a look through Observer.

He didn’t know every Telpike in existence, of course, but he knew Yoru and Morlin and had met a few cousins and such in passing. Every one of them had a damn near identical nose, and the curve of their lips was also a distinctive family trait. Sorin was confident that this man didn’t have either of those features.

The worrying part was that Sorin thought he did recognize the man after all. It wasn’t someone he knew well, more of a feeling of seeing a face from the background of another interaction. But he’d met or been around so many people in the red tower by now that it was hard to narrow it down.

If he included only high rankers, though, that cut the pool of suspects down immensely. In fact, other than a handful of people from high families—and he’d already determined it wasn’t a Telpike buried down there—the only real candidates remaining were all from the upper echelon of the Black Hellions.

It wasn’t Urd, but Sorin thought it might have been one of the core group from his faction. And what a coincidence. We were just discussing where everyone who could conceivably be in charge ran off to. Doing a little daytime robbery, were we? What did Morlin even have that you needed?

Observer couldn’t sweep the whole city at once, and there were ways to fool it. If nothing else, Sorin not knowing where to look was a good way for someone to stay lost in the background noise. The farther away a target was, the more difficult it was to find them. That combined with even a modest disguise soulprint could explain how Sorin hadn’t sensed the man earlier, and why he couldn’t find him now.

Or I could just be wrong. And even if I’m not, I still don’t know what they were after.

It probably didn’t matter. He’d only investigated because he knew Yoru would want to know, and because Sorin could do it faster covertly than Yoru could by marching straight through the front gate. Nobody was dead, or at least nobody important. As far as he was concerned, that was all the involvement his team needed to have with this incident.

The location of the fight still bothered him, though. The coincidence of it all—the room he’d used, the thieves being Hellion members—was too much. Maybe that was just where the fight had erupted as they were trying to escape. Maybe it was nothing.

Sorin decided on the spot to ask Urd the next time he saw him. Solving this mystery couldn’t take priority over what he already had on his plate, and he’d learned enough to satisfy Yoru for the moment. The only other thing he could do here was eavesdrop and hope to get lucky, but he doubted random servants and low-rank guards would have much beyond speculation for an event that had just happened half an hour earlier.

Extracting himself was significantly easier than getting in. All he had to do was step through a newly-forged Liminal Gateway and walk a few steps to the one on the other side of the city to emerge into the rented house. Even better, he now had access to the Telpike estate again, even if it did spit him out on the roof next to a chimney.

The others weren’t back yet, so Sorin settled himself down to wait, brushed off Rue’s questions by promising to explain once the whole team was gathered, and occupied his time sweeping the city in an attempt to find Urd. In that respect, he failed to accomplish his goal.