Book 5 Chapter 2: Bickering and Bonding

++Slavery may have been abolished within Garamon, but that has not stopped a ripe and bountiful trade from blooming across the rest of the world. If one is ever curious about the paranoia of magician families, one must only look at the price their children fetch in a foreign market.++

- Aravon Voret.

I kept an eye on Agrian while I did my work against the boatload of mercenaries. He had surprised me by insisting on taking the magician for himself, though I knew he did not still labour under the assumption that I needed protecting. Perhaps he was trying to prove the opposite; that I did not need to protect him.

Perhaps, more pessimistically, he was hoping to warn me by making a show of his power.

If that was the case, it probably backfired on him. I saw no evidence that Agrian had relented in his daily magical training, and indeed his talent had bloomed like few others. He was a Highmage of the second class, in raw power at least, and could have wandered the globe personally meeting one fellow magician each day and still gone years without encountering an equal.

But the gap between us was wider than it had been when we last saw one another. That, at the end of the day, was what talent meant, and talent was something Lord Dread had more of than anyone else.

Still, my brother was impressive, and his assistance had turned what might have been a semi-inconvenient assault into less than a minute of idle effort. I had tried to kill as few of the mercenaries as possible, in order to maximize the amount of information we could extract. This left us with about two dozen prisoners all told, including the leader of their little band and its hired magician.

“I see you’re as fond of big explosions as ever,” my brother noted from beside me while we stood by the river waiting for our current pair to feel like talking.

“There is nothing wrong with big explosions,” I frowned. “Big explosions are a very useful and versatile tool.”

“I think that says more about the sort of problems you cause for yourself than it does about the explosions themselves,” Agrian sighed wryly. “Most people actually kill less than fifty people a year, I’m pretty sure.”

“No wonder they’re all so stupid then, that lack of conflict would eat away at anybody’s brain.”

I felt a squirming shift under my foot and looked down at where the mercenary’s leader was now thrashing around with his head under the water. Agrian was holding their Highmage in much the same way while I mentally counted off the seconds.

Hm. Fifty three. We could give them another thirty at least.

“Most people avoid conflict, too,” Agrian noted. “I do at least. You know almost nobody’s shot at me since we parted ways. I’m proud of that fact.”

“I have enjoyed the same result as not having been shot at,” I retorted. “Nobody has hit me with a bullet.”

I was not actually sure what would have happened if someone had, at this point. My skin was a good deal stronger than most steels, thanks to the growing warrior abilities of this new body of mine, but human skin is also not terribly thick. I made a mental note to try and add some more to my next body’s, the added protection would come in handy. Penetration energy scales up exponentially with the thickness of a target.

Bubbles had stopped trickling up from under my own prisoner’s head. “I think they are about to pass out and die,” I told Agrian.

“Right,” he nodded, stepping back and making a magical gesture which hauled his own victim up to gasp in the humid air outside the river. I just grabbed mine by his head and yanked him free, registering his weight as no more than a few horseshoes.

“W…What do you want?” he gasped, coughing out water and wheezing through bleary red eyes.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “My brother and I would like to ask you a few questions.” Agrian was already taking his own victim away, separating him from mine. We would question each man separately and without giving them the ability to confide in one another, and in so doing ensure that none of them could communicate a lie. If their stories all added up, it would come from either extreme coincidence, unlikely with dozens of different tellers, or because they were telling the truth.

We got the testament from the first two, then reconvened with another pair after re-imprisoning the band’s leader elsewhere and humanely putting their magician down to keep him from causing trouble.

“The same result as not having people shoot at you would be getting along with most of the people you meet,” Agrian told me as we got to work on our next batch. “Something tells me that’s not what you’re talking about.”

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“A difference of opinion then,” I said, diplomatically. “You know I have never…gotten along with people.”

“I know you’ve never tried to,” he replied. “I don’t believe it’s because of some ineffable shortcoming on your part. I know you too well. You understand how people think, you can work out how they feel, you have all the equipment needed to be a social animal. You just choose not to.”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Right, and that’s what I’m criticizing.” His leg shot up for a moment as his own drowner threatened to force their head above the surface, Argian cursed and redoubled his efforts at holding them with a minor spell.

“Perhaps you should be less concerned with my social life, and more concerned with your magic,” I told him.

“Don’t change the subject. We both know you could work with people much easier, if you wanted to.”

He seemed adamant to sustain this verbal assault on my character. Fine then.

“And you? You do not exactly get along with your own family, do you?”

Agrian stiffened, and looked away. “That’s different,” he said quietly.

“Because it is you?”

“Because I love you all enough that it hurts to see what walking nightmares you all are. Or what nightmares you’re turning Victoria and Qaigor into.”

I thought about that, rather affronted that he would disparage my brilliant, beautiful, adorable genius younger siblings in such a way.

“You are just whiney, judgemental and annoying,” I told him.

Agrian sighed and didn’t say anything more, evidence of my overwhelming victory.

The next few prisoners all corroborated the story of the first two, more or less. Some details were missing or distorted, probably a consequence of us nearly killing them all before the interrogation, but there was enough similarity in the broad strokes that we were able to pin down their last major location and their route here.

They had made their stop in Irucci, in the city of Bornu, to deposit slaves trafficked from Garamon. This was a very useful lead for us, because it was that precise sort of cargo that we were searching for. Agrian had been sketchy on details, not wanting to confide in me for some reason, but I was now almost certain we were after a lover of his or some similar relationship.

It explained his uncharacteristic willingness to share in my brutality, if nothing else.

Once we were done with the mercenaries I decided to question him about it directly.

“You asked me for my help, and I have provided it,” I told my brother. “But I will be able to help more if you tell me what, precisely, I am helping with.”

I thought this was reasonable. Agrian, apparently, did not. He bristled.

“I’d rather not,” he said curtly.

“I know that,” I told him. “But would you prefer to keep this to yourself, or to maximize your odds of doing…whatever it is we are doing?”

I was being patient. More patient than I would be with anyone else. Agrian seemed to realise it after a moment, because he reluctantly nodded.

“Okay, fine.” He paused some more and I waited for him to give me the story.

It was not a long one. Agrian had met a woman while living by himself, Varna, and the two had, in his words, fallen in love. This had all been perhaps three years ago. More recently, Varna had been snatched off the street after crossing a local slum lord near their home in Cadnich. Agrian had not been around to defend her, but had been near enough that he had quickly uncovered what happened and responded. Too late to get her back, but fast enough to get a bearing and destination from the culprits.

Since then he had been darting after her, before, four months ago, growing desperate enough to seek me out for help. I knew the story from there; Agrian had shared the leads he had and I, with wit and wealth, had managed to identify a handful of key figures operating in the trafficking rings he was pursuing. We had hit them, found other names, identified Varna by several descriptions and begun following the lead wherever it went. The latest link in the chain was this mercenary band, fresh from Irucci.

“You did not come to me right away,” I frowned.

“I didn’t know if you’d want to help,” Agrian said after a moment.

“Then you are an idiot,” I told him. He gave me a strange look at that, and seemed on the brink of saying something when one of our final prisoners spoke.

“Are we done?” he asked. “Can we—” he fell silent as I bored a hole through his head with a magic missile, glaring at the corpse.

“Do not interrupt.”

I glanced at Agrian, waiting for him to whine about my brutality, but he seemed no more bothered by it than he ever was.

“What do we do with them?” he asked me matter-of-factly. “These fuckers were involved in the business, somehow. I don’t think they’re regular allies of the traffickers we’re heading after next, but they’ve certainly met and worked with them before.”

“Do you specifically want to spare them?” I asked him.

He thought about it for all of two seconds.

“No, they probably won’t get back to their old pals with a warning about us, but I value their lives less than I value being one hundred percent sure rather than ninety nine.”

I nodded.

Once we were finished feeding the survivors to the river’s extensive crocodile population, Agrian and myself were left to decide on our next move.

“We’re heading to Irucci, right?” Agrian asked me.

“I would say so, yes. There are allies I could gather up, but it is slower to travel as a larger group rather than a smaller one, and they would make us more easily noticed.”

Even I could be responsible for only a finite number of city-block-sized explosions across the globe before people decided that I needed to be reigned in.

“Then let’s stop wasting time and head off.”