Chapter 9: The Hunt

  ++Introduction to politics as a powerless child, and later a young woman, did much to impede my early rise to power after being reborn, but I must admit that there was one great advantage to it. Nothing else could have prepared me for the delicate arts of manipulation and subterfuge quite so well.++

  - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E

  Henry could detect faint whiffs of power in the air, but no more than that. It let him track their enemy within, perhaps, a few yards of where they had been. This was actually quite an impressive feat, most magicians would have struggled for even one half that, on a trail this old, and even specialised sensory-types rarely exceeded double or triple it.

  Baron Vornholt did not see things that way, nor did his incredibly mean-looking aids from the local constabulary. Henry shivered as the carriage rattled along, moving slow enough that he had ample time to order turns when the trail started to grow weaker or stronger in any given direction. This took them about a mile from the mansion, then they came to a low wall and could ride no farther.

  “Then we walk,” Vornholt snapped. Say one thing for the man, he was decisive in a crisis. He simply leapt from the vehicle and landed on the other side of the wall, easily ten feet high, without even another word. Even his own men were stumbling to keep up, and Henry definitely was.

  What certainly didn’t help was that Henry was not entirely sure he wanted to find the children.

  Baron Vornholt might well kill him if he didn’t, of course. The lord might suffer consequences for it, for in the modern age of enlightenment an aristocrat could no longer enjoy legal immunity from how he treated his lessers, but the results of a trail would do Henry no good after already being murdered even if justice was served. What kept him moving was not courage, or any noble concern for the children, but simply that he thought Baron Vornholt was no less likely to end his life than whatever fight may have been awaiting him beyond.

  I have a chance, surely. That magician who arrived to take Isabel wasn’t so powerful. Stronger than Henry, for certain, but not by so very much. There were several strong men with him now, all warriors of the First Order, and Baron Vornholt at their head. They would surely enjoy the advantage of power.

  After all, what were the odds they would be set upon by a dozen magicians upon finding the children?

  ***

  Agrian the Younger had been hit, I saw, as I entered. The boy’s face was marked where a fist had caught it, skin currently red and turning itself purple. Within the day I imagined much of his eye would be swollen shut by inflammation.

  I observed the sight, paying attention to how the boy himself was taking it. To my total lack of surprise, it was by whimpering and curling up. Not meeting any of the men’s eyes, face turned low and limbs wrapped around one another. It would have been too much to hope that someone of his age would keep his nerve in the face of adult violence in any case, and I had fortunately not been banking on it.

  No, my actual plans were still playing out. My return to the common room led to me being positively swarmed by men, all with questions and mostly directed at one another. Demands, too.

  The world is not so kind to children as most people would imagine, and many of my captors were far more concerned with keeping me in sight than they were with my well-being.

  “We have two healers here,” one man growled. “We could take the kids’ legs off and stem the bleeding. No risk they’d die, and if we travel fast it’d be reversible.”

  The leader, still Doctor Avens despite the disaster of my escapade, rounded on the man with a dark glint in his eyes.

  “And you think that’s wise?” he snapped. “What if the bleeding isn’t stemmed, what if we can’t travel fast? Think it through, man, I am not going to let you endanger our prize just because you’re paranoid about losing track of a damned child!”

  “You’re the one who lost track of her!” another man spat.

  The expectation I’d entered this room with was simple; I would read how my disappearance had damaged the orderliness of my captors, and then slowly needle them into worsening this problem. I would drive them apart with paranoia and bitterness and, most useful of all, with greed.

  That plan was now almost redundant, because the absolute fools seemed to be on the brink of doing it themselves. It seemed that in my long absence, magicians had only become more unsociable, not less. Some things never truly change.

  “Enough!” Avens roared at last, actually setting the air aquiver with what I recognised was a thin thread of magic. That he produced such power was not remarkable, but infusing it into his voice was an interesting trick. One that was, actually, beyond my power to mimic.

  For now.

  And it did wonders to shock the room back into silence, letting Avans reassert his authority. Or what remained of it. I studied the group and saw that a sizable fraction of present men, magicians and warriors both, were far from happy with him even now. But they feared him, too.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  It was obvious why at a glance, Doctor Avans’ mana capacity was greater than the next two largest combined. But only the next two, not the next three or ten. If he pushed his allies too far, something would snap and he would not be able to defend himself from a mutiny.

  “We leave as soon as the carriages arrive,” he told the room. “And those children do not get out of sight again. I don’t care if one of them blows someone’s head up, while one of us is busy scraping brain matter off the wall the rest had better be fucking watching them, understood?” He turned and washed his gaze across the room, seeking a challenge. He did not get one, which only meant he had been denied the opportunity to reinforce his command with a physical display.

  It seemed that my opportunities were growing by the moment, perhaps this was a lucky day after all.

  ***

  The trail was growing weaker, and Henry was having an especially difficult time making Baron Vornholt understand why that was.

  “Magic is not permanent,” he tried to tell the man. “It fades, always. If mana is bound to do something then it will be exhausted before long, and if it’s unbound then it just dissipates naturally. This isn’t an enchantment deliberately set to feed off a source of power! The longer it goes on, the fainter the trail becomes.”

  Of course, a little something like logic and reason was no match at all for the aristocratic conviction Baron Vornholt maintained that he was right.

  “Then you’re not trying hard enough, damn it!” he spat.

  Fear was a great motivator, when it wasn’t so strong as to distract you. Unfortunately Henry’s problem now had nothing at all to do with fear, it was a simple matter of what he was capable of.

  And he was not capable of doing this.

  They hurried, moving faster once the Baron rather humiliatingly plucked Henry off the ground and over one shoulder to jog with him. They covered another mile before, at last, the trail went dead entirely. Henry revealed this fact, feeling suddenly certain that the admission may be the last words out of his mouth.

  Fortunately, it was not.

  “Then we have to resort to other means to find them. Which way was the trail going when you lost it?”

  Henry didn’t get what the Baron was saying for a moment, then it clicked instantly.

  “Ah! Uh, th-that way sir.”

  The Baron nodded, looked around, then promptly jumped up for the nearest building. It was a tall one, maybe seven stories. Almost a dozen times the man’s height, and yet he just about reached the top in a single bound without so much as a running start. From there, the dark kept Henry’s eyes from quite focusing on him, but the man appeared to be turning in place.

  He dropped down abruptly, landing beside them with both heels hitting the cobbled street so hard that he actually cracked the stones beneath them.

  “They’ve been moving in a straight line, the idiots,” he grinned. “A few zigzags here and there, but ultimately they just headed right in the same way, only turning where buildings and structures forced them to. Onwards!” Henry was scooped up again before he could either give or deny consent, and once more they were flitting down the streets with all the speed of a racing horse.

  As they went, a thought occurred to him however. Not a good one. These men they were chasing weren’t idiots—so if they’d been heading in a straight line, he feared it was because they knew it didn’t matter. They’d been sure to incapacitate him before leaving, buying time, and now the search party was still only a few miles from the Vornholt estate.

  He suspected the men they chased would be gone very, very soon.

  ***

  True to Avens’ word, Agrian and I received a far higher quality of scrutiny than we had before. It was just a shame for him, then, that the damage to his plans had already been done. I had not been in the mansion for even an hour and a half, and not been back from its stable for even one quarter of that time, when the carriages arrived and we were hastily shoved out of the room.

  Agrian put up some resistance, which I thought was admirable and, in this particular case, useful. The more trouble the men received as we went, the more distracted they would be from their surroundings. I was dealing with magicians here, even in the dark and with all their haste the chances of my trap being uncovered were far greater than zero.

  Best to make them as small as I could.

  While my brother had been observed as defiant and difficult already, I had so far managed to make myself the very gold standard of a perfect prisoner—minus my brief escapade to ruin the lives of those holding me of course. This meant that it came as quite the surprise when I joined in with Agrian’s troublemaking, too.

  “Leave him alone!” I yelled, as one of the warriors backhanded the boy rather too hard and sent him to the ground with blood-stained teeth.

  The man turned to me with a sneer, which lasted precisely as long as I took to fire a magic missile into his mouth just as he opened it to speak.

  Unfortunately, the more complex, weapons-grade form I had used earlier would have escalated the conflict more than was convenient, so I was forced to employ a less lethal variant that Agrian and I had been taught by Doctor Brown. It still took out several of the man's teeth and did something interesting to his tongue, left him stumbling away as bloody foam oozed up from his lips to dribble down his chin. I took a step forward and glared around the room.

  “Leave Agrian alone!” I repeated, though without drawing on more mana.

  Instantly, the response came. Magic flared and the air around me turned into walls of aether, sealing me off from doing more harm. Men roared and hissed and made demands, everything became chaos as fraying nerves finally snapped and all the mounting resentments I’d detected finally came to a crescendo.

  I was pleasantly surprised not to be injured during any of it. I suppose that can be attributed to my relatively harmless appearance, it simply did not incite the sort of fear that turned into impulsive violence. These men were panicked and cornered, but they had no reason to see me as a physical threat. Not yet.

  Agrian continued making a nuisance of himself, but neither he nor myself could do anything to keep from being carried away physically. We were just a few moments from the doors to the stables when I pulled out my final trick, turning to one of the larger supporters of Doctor Avens’ continued leadership and frowning.

  “Why are you taking me to the stable again? Are there horsies this time?”

  A pure fabrication. The man had most certainly not taken me there before, had been just as surprised when I returned as anyone else and, in fact, could rather trivially have been proven innocent of what I was implying.

  But the men around him were far too heightened to do anything as mentally strenuous as proving things. Not when they’d just had suspicions sewed by something as unimpeachable as a child’s honest, guileless question.

  For a second time, Agrian and I were briefly forgotten about. This time because the fragile cooperation I had seen binding my captors together had now, at last, shattered entirely.