Book 4 Chapter 54: Advances

++Only a great fool tempts the wrath of forces beyond them. And yet only by being willing to move against those beyond oneself can a creature hope to rise in power and become one of the great forces of their world. The problem, then, is self-evident; there is a selection bias in favour of great fools among the world’s strongest creatures.++

- Sethira, also known as Sakhent the Doom Lord.

Two weeks passed following my wedding and idiotic brother-in-law’s mission to Elqarth’s mansion. I must confess some level of nerves about the whole affair. I had been careful to arrange several sightings for myself in several other parts of Poloira as of our alleged meeting, to ensure that his already-questionable account of my putting him up to it would be disbelieved should he go back on his word and confess, but I knew that there were only so many ways to minimize risk in an operation like this.

I passed my time by training both magic and body. Working mana through arms and fingertips, concentrating on that illusive effort for teleportation. I was making short jumps consistently now, not needing to worry about the risk of wasting my spell or, more inconveniently, accidentally eviscerating myself. Short jumps really did mean short however, perhaps a dozen paces at most. There were combat scenarios where this would be useful, but I would not be shearing off the hours of my travel time any time soon.

Sethira helped me pass more of the duration. Not in the way she would have liked, naturally.

The two of us worked on installing Sethira’s cult more thoroughly than before. She could have managed this alone of course, my continued involvement was motivated by two major requirements; firstly, we needed to ensure this job was done as well as possible so that I could leave no hitches when the time came to finally make use of them.

The second, more important reason was that I still did not trust Sethira. I liked her, I enjoyed her…company. We were closer than I had ever been to another lich. But I knew that betrayal was always a possibility, and that one day this little fling of ours would give way to something altogether more hostile.

I suspected that was part of what left her so excited about the whole thing.

When placing spies in a sprawling trade-empire, there was a single, critical question one had to consider; what sort of sexual perverts were in the region you intended to infiltrate?

It was quite the ridiculous thing to find myself considering, but it actually proved rather shockingly important. Blackmail was the currency of subterfuge as much as coinage was of…other subterfuge, but done by rich people, I supposed.

In any case, the best way to make the most use of spies was to ensure they had a ready supply of blackmail, and the best way to supply one’s spies with blackmail, without immediately escalating a conflict to military terms through kidnapping or assassination, was to ensure that they were positioned next to conveniently placed sexual perverts whose nighttime proclivities might later be weaponized against them.

This was rather less glamorous than what most would imagine when they thought of information warfare, but it was something both myself and Sethira were already well aware of.

I had not been born into the world of courtroom subterfuge that she had. No, humanity had not invented the very concept of a royal court—or, indeed, of royalty—until I had already been dead for a good four thousand years. I had, however, actually spent more time acquiring the craft than Sethira herself, or rather than Sakhent had. She had an aptitude for it that I did not, perhaps simple talent or perhaps simply instilled in her from having the techniques taught during her human childhood.

Whatever the cause, our various advantages equalised and left the two of us largely balanced.

“The Duke of Wolsingham,” Sethira noted after a moment. “What are your thoughts on him?”

“I say we avoid him,” I said hastily. She eyed me, grinning.

“You have a soft spot for your old flame, is that it?”

It was perhaps the stupidest thing I had ever heard. “Sometimes I wonder if you are even joking when you say things like that.”

Sethira just grinned.

“We will be avoiding the Duke for several good reasons, " I told her. Firstly, he has ties to the military. Secondly, he is actually intelligent. Thirdly, he is already an associate of mine. This all needs to remain buried and beyond scrutiny until the day we make use of it.”

And so it did.

We passed the time fruitfully, Sethira and I. But I did not linger with just her. Whenever I was not conducting the assembly of my growing spy network, I was with Farah, continuing my studies into the nature of the divine. It was clear that I would make no more breakthroughs on using divine magic without more test subjects, but I was still gradually improving my knowledge of the substance.

Readers may find this chapter on as the author's publication; it was copied here without permission, and reading there supports them.

Enough to know how infuriating it was. I could not see it, could barely feel it, and it seemed inclined to do the opposite of whatever I tried to make it. The worst part was not actually related to divine mana, though. No. The worst part was Farah watching me, and the diabolical amusement he seemed to take in my every failure.

“Now you know how the rest of us feel,” he told me with a chuckle. His body had not yet decayed enough that it was beyond chuckling. Soon enough he would have a newly-grown organic form, as much a warrior as mine was, and would be able to laugh without his throat so much as grating.

I made a mental note to delay that by some time, to punish him for laughing at me.

“It just does not make sense,” I frowned. “It does not behave like arcane mana, fine, I can understand that. But it does not behave in any consistent way either. It is like it decides its properties on a moment by moment basis.”

That was the real hitch. Fluctuations like that were simply impossible to account for. Create a system to make use of divine magic, and it would fail because what that divine magic actually did would change between any two seconds. Muscle fibres could become ten times weaker, then a thousandfold stronger. The tissues might have their mechanical resilience improve at a different rate than their output. I could take one step in the body of a Demigod and find that I had immediately ripped my own leg off with the simple force of moving.

Farah was less frustrated and demoralised than I was.

“Your problem is you’re too used to everything being easy and natural for you,” he told me. “Here you are now, facing off with the first problem in years that you can’t just crush beneath the weight of natural genius, and it takes you all of a few days to start blurting out remarks about it ‘not making sense’ or ‘not being consistent’. Everything makes sense, sometimes things just make a type of sense we’re not familiar with yet.”

His words were like a slap in my face. Not just because of the cheek in delivering them, but because I knew he was right too.

Which, obviously, did not mean I was about to go and let him know that.

I continued my possibly-futile efforts with divine magic more habitually than anything, waiting out the few weeks until I heard word back from Backry’s little expedition into Earl Elqarth’s mansion. This new, magically-grown body of mine was more like the original female one I had been born into than my ancient lich’s form, and so the stress grew as days moved on.

But I need not have felt it at all, because to my surprise when the news finally reached me, through some ridiculously-shrouded courier who clearly made his money more through the theatre of appearing mysterious and secretive than any actual professionalism, Backry’s message assured me that all was well.

“The mission went as planned,” the shrouded man told me after he was invited into my mansion, handing over a package. “Backry gives his regards.”

“Backry?” I asked. “My brother-in-law? I have not spoken to that imbecile in weeks, if you see him again, do tell him I hope he dies in horrible agony.”

I did not think this was some attempt to entrap and incriminate me by someone else, but I saw no reason to run the slight risk of it working should that prove to be the case. The courier left and I spent a few minutes examining the package for any hostile magic, then permitted Blakely to spend the better part of an hour examining it for any hostile non-magic. Somewhere after his third consecutive sweep for a hidden explosive tripwire, I insisted he give it back over, which he agreed to do only once I bolstered my shield enough to survive a fall from orbit.

To absolutely no-one’s surprise except Blakely, when I opened the package I found that there was not actually an explosion the size of a house engulfing me, nor some lethal virus from across the sea, nor any of the other things my bodyguard had warned me of. Instead, there was a mask fragment. It was old, ceramic and flickering with divine power, and the break along its side looked utterly perfect to align with that of the one I currently had possession of after bargaining for it with Shuo Meg’s sisters.

“I still think it’s evil,” Blakely told me.

How a mask could be evil, I neither knew nor cared. “If it attempts to kill me, you are more than welcome to react accordingly,” I told him. Then I thought a moment more. “Actually, no, you are not.” Knowing Blakely he would be hallucinating approximately one attempted assassination per hour, and the artifact was in bad enough condition already without a deranged gunman shooting chunks off of it.

Blakely grumbled to himself, and I ignored him while focusing upon the mask. This fragment was fractionally smaller than the other piece, but I could sense a somewhat more powerful flicker of divine magic.

It was odd. My eyes could pick up the presence of divine magic, and something of its intensity, but they were helpless to actually see the substance of it in any way that was useful for manipulating the stuff. It was like attempting to see underwater. The light was there, and I could make out what vague colour I was perceiving, but any more than that was impossible.

“Is it gonna explode?” Blakely asked. I decided to ignore him, having no interest in his ridiculous paranoia, and instead sent a servant to fetch Sethira. She was not living in my mansion, but had started to construct her own tower just half a mile away. It had taken the two of us only half an afternoon to work out how modern telegrams worked and set a system up to pass them between us. Sometimes technology is just more convenient than magic.

The news sent her to me just as fast as I had thought it would. Indeed, had she been moving any quicker the kinetic energy of her entrance would probably have taken down a wall. She did not even look at Blakely or myself, simply rushed for the mask fragment, practically drooling on it.

“We have them both, then?” she asked eagerly. “This is it…This is it!”

I could tell she had more on her mind than simply squaring our debt with Zameka, were that not the case she would be less excited and more apprehensive. Sethira’s new body had not had as long to strengthen as mine, and even if it had…the two of us were still in no position to deal with an angry God should she decide to hold a grudge after Orapathaqi.

“What is on your mind?” I decided to ask openly.

Sethira smiled, then glanced at Blakely, who was already leaving. He had a way of sensing when information that might get him killed was about to be exchanged, then ensuring that he was not made privy to it. When he was gone, Sethira answered.

“We have two pieces of an artifact that, according to a God, can be used to breach the Depths and draw forth divine essence from beyond the veil,” Sethira told me openly. “I say we take our time in studying it for our own research before turning it over.”