by Andrew Rowe
“I should hope so. Well, if you’re satisfied with the protection these two can provide, what will your next move be?”
Lydia reached down, moving her knight forward in a daring charge into enemy lines. “Confronting the assassin, of course.”
***
“What, precisely, do you mean that Ulandir Ta’thyriel is unavailable?”
Lydia stood outside the grounds of Ulandir’s manor, only one of several on House Ta’thyriel’s grounds within the city. The three guards – Rethri homes generally had three guards, she had never learned why – were all offering her apologetic looks with varying degrees of sincerity.
The guards were dressed extravagantly, with their blue tunics embroidered with the symbol of a bird - also blue, but with green highlights – on a purple shield. They wore green trousers with golden trim, all pristine in quality. Each wore a short sword on their hip, and the two in back carried iron-tipped spears.
Lydia knew House Ta’thyriel wasn’t the wealthiest house in the city, but she had a hard time believing it looking at their servants – and their perfect gardens, or the marble statues that dotted the grounds of the complex. The sorceress had never had the occasion to visit the few families that reportedly commanded even greater resources – she imagined they would have to line their paths with solid gold to look any more opulent.
Aladir wasn’t with her, which was probably for the best. His relationship with his father had been strained for years, and even if the two had been on good terms, he couldn’t have been expected to be objective in an investigation.
That didn’t stop her from using Aladir’s name to improve her odds of getting quick access to Ulandir, of course, but she had been stopped by something far more mundane.
“Forgive me, Dame Hastings. He is not currently in the city.” The guard bowed slightly at the waist, putting his hand over his heart and closing his eyes in a demonstration of sincerity.
The title caught her slightly off-guard – “Sir” and “Dame” were generally considered antiquated titles. Either the man was trained to be extremely formal, or he was simply trying to let her down as lightly as possible.
The reason was irrelevant, of course – she needed results, not platitudes.
“Where is he, then?” She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them quickly, reminding herself not to look as impatient as she was feeling. She didn’t realize that she had unconsciously been tapping her foot as well.
“I’m afraid that’s not something we’re aware of,” the same guard said. She watched the other guards to see if they had any reactions to his statement, but their expressions were completely taciturn.
Gods, I wish I had about ten guards this disciplined to keep an eye on Nakane. Her request for additional help had been met with the usual reluctance, followed by an assurance that she would be given additional manpower just “as soon as possible”. Which meant never, in all likelihood.
For the last three days, Lydia and Aladir had taken shifts protecting both Nakane and her mother, Nedelya. House Theas had their own guards, but they had proven insufficient once already, and Lydia was convinced that there was still the threat of another attack.
I just don’t have enough information. I need to try to discern the motive, at least.
It had occurred to Lydia that Nakane was a suspect – she was a sorceress, and as the younger child, she had just potentially won an inheritance with the death of her brother. Her behavior was strangely detached, at least by comparison to the obvious grief of her mother.
The main reason she doubted Nakane was responsible was that she was almost certain that Edrick would be able to determine Nakane’s innocence or guilt when he returned to the city – the man’s resourcefulness was legendary, and he was almost certain to expend all his efforts in attempting to find his son’s killer.
Which could be why Nakane is so desperate to find someone else to pin this on, Lydia reminded herself. It’s plausible she could feel the brunt of the investigation – or just the blame – if no one else is available to be Edrick’s target.
“Very well,” she said, mirroring the formal tone of the guard. “In that case, I will need access to his home.”
The lead guard quirked an eyebrow. “I am certain we could arrange a tour. May I inquire as to the nature of your business?”
“Aladir and I are in the midst of a criminal investigation, and we had hoped to utilize Ulandir as a resource.” Partially true. The elder Ta’thyriel’s sorcerous expertise would be quite useful if he is not the culprit. “In the absence of Aladir’s father, I might be able to find something useful in his library. He’s known for having an impressive collection, and some of the books may be relevant to our needs.”
“I see.”
The lead guard hesitated for a few moments, took a breath, and then turned and waved a hand at one of the other uniformed men. “Aloras, please escort the paladin to the library. She is to be given access to any of the books, provided of course that she reads them within the library.” He turned back to Lydia. “My apologies, but as much as I would like to, I cannot allow you to remove any of the books without the lord’s permission. Unless, of course, you have a writ—”
She waved a hand dismissively. “I’m not putting Ulandir under arrest. This should be quite satisfactory. If I need to withdraw anything, I’m sure I can send Aladir to retrieve it.”
“Ah, yes, of course.” The elder guard gave a strained smile. “If you require nothing else of me...”
Hrm, guess I wore him out. “You’ve been very helpful. I’ll be off to the library now.”
***
Ulandir’s library was as extensive as Lydia had suspected, and searching through it in detail would have taken a considerable amount of time. She contented herself to looking for anything overtly suspicious. The sorceress did not expect to find anything as conspicuous as a book on murder – although she did find a rather fanciful novel supposedly written by the Blackstone Assassin. Instead, she hoped to find anything related to the Dominion of Poison.
House Ta’thyriel was famous for their study of healing – both mundane and sorcerous – and just finding a book on poison would not have been suspicious in itself. She found several scrolls and a few books detailing mundane poisons, their symptoms, and their treatments. They certainly could have justified having a book on the Dominion of Poison, but she didn’t find any. With some hesitation, she eventually asked the librarian if they had any, and received a negative in response.
Lydia did find multiple books on the Dominion of Travel – one of the necessary prerequisites for the summoning ritual she had discovered. That was, unfortunately, also nothing that could be used as evidence by itself. Travel sorcery was notoriously difficult, but relatively well-studied due to the utility that it provided. She had even spent a bit of time studying it herself, but only the theory behind it. She had never actually cast any spells of the kind.
During her time in Orlyn, her former friend Veruden had been a practitioner of travel sorcery. He had explained that it was relatively easy to use travel sorcery to enhance your own movement, and much more challenging to use it for its most famous applications – teleportation and summoning.
Teleportation could be used to move from one place to another in an instant. From what Lydia understood about the theory, the spell was actually moving the target into the Plane of Travel, then to another point on the Plane of Travel that corresponded to your destination, and then back out into the Core Plane. Distances on the Plane of Travel differed from distances on the Core Plane, but she was not aware of any published equation with a conversion ratio. Instead, it was more popularly accepted that locations were linked between the planes through concentrations of energy, rather than distance.
There were two main limiting factors on teleportation – conceptualization and strain. The first meant that the caster needed to have a clear concept of the destination for their spell to function – typically, this involved having visited the location before. Th
e easiest form of teleportation was to go somewhere else that was currently in sight, since conceptualizing the movement between those locations was simple.
Travel sorcerers often used objects or locations infused with travel sorcery as beacons for teleporting long distances. Lydia knew that Veruden had concealed jars of dominion essence in several locations in the low palace to have convenient locations to teleport to, but she found the idea terrifying. Anyone who knew about the jars could have moved them, changing the destination of Veruden’s teleportation spells.
The second limitation, strain, was comparatively simple. The further you traveled with a single spell, the more strain the teleportation put on the body. The amount was not directly equivalent to the amount of stress on the body from physically walking the entire distance, but it was considered conventional wisdom that teleporting more than a day’s walk was unwise. Physical conditioning helped to tolerate teleportation strain – an experienced long-distance runner could teleport long-distances much more easily than someone without similar conditioning. Similarly, children and the elderly suffered more from teleportation strain.
Interestingly, travel sorcery could be used to cross planar boundaries without exponentially greater strain. Most sorcerers believed that this meant that the planes were not physically distant from one another, but somehow overlapped. The analogy that Lydia had heard was that two planes were like two pieces of parchment in a stack. When standing atop the top piece of paper, the bottom piece is invisible, even though it is a minute distance away. If she wanted to reach the other piece of paper, she did not have to traverse the entire length of the paper to get to the next, she merely needed to find a path through the top paper to the bottom page.
That analogy made traveling to other planes sound simple, but while studying the sorcery books, Lydia realized there were several problems with it. First, the conceptualization limitation – someone who had never been to another plane had no destination to focus on. Without a familiar location, moving to another plane meant going to either a place at random or whatever spot on the other plane was “closest” to where the caster was currently located. In either case, the destination was very probable to be unsafe.
Any given plane was primarily constructed from its namesake dominion, although every plane would have some energy and materials from other adjacent planes. Traveling to the plane of water in a random location meant that you were probably going to appear underwater. Even a sorcerer prepared with spells for breathing underwater might not be safe, however, since the water could be in any possible state, depending on where the sorcerer ended up. The travel sorcerer could appear inside a block of ice larger than a planet, or in a similar sized cloud of water vapor. And water was one of the safest planes – many of the others offered instant death for an unprepared visitor.
Thus, sorcerers typically used other forms of sorcery, such as knowledge and sight sorcery, to scout out possible destinations on other planes well in advance. Existing research could be helpful, but most sorcerers would take the time to verify it to the best of their own ability. From there, the sorcerer would have to research any of the necessary forms of protection to survive on the other plane. Since having access to more than two or three types of sorcery was rare, that typically meant a single sorcerer could not do all of the research, preparations for survival, and teleportation all on their own.
The books that Lydia found were similar to the ones that she had read in the past - mostly containing theory and the application of basic spells. Summoning was advanced enough that she only found a single paragraph on the subject.
In 2884, a group of Thornguard experimented with the concept of using a “reverse teleportation” spell, referred to as a “summoning” spell in modern nomenclature, for the purpose of bringing a native creature from another plane to the Core Plane. The project garnered the attention and subsequent sponsorship of one of the Vae’kes, whom provided the resources necessary for dozens of attempts. After over a hundred trials, only a single entity was successfully summoned – a creature that resembled one of the Esharen, but with green and brown skin and deer-like horns. The creature reportedly survived the teleportation process, but details are scarce. The project was abandoned shortly thereafter, and all participants sworn to secrecy.
In the more than two hundred years since the date cited in the book, the study of summoning had advanced significantly, but the paragraph did help to reinforce how difficult and expensive the process was. That only helped to reinforce Lydia’s belief that this murder could not have been committed without a strong motive – the cost and level of difficulty was simply too high.
More importantly, the story reminded Lydia that there were many distinct types of life on other planes. Comparatively simple creatures like Fragments, Gatherers, and Harvesters, were well-documented, but every plane had their own types of unique forms of life – and even communicating with the best-known types of extra-planar creatures was difficult. Convincing such an entity to go to the Core Plane to kill someone seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
Is that even what happened, then? I’ve been assuming that someone summoned something like a Harvester of Poison and sent it to kill Nakane’s brother, but what other options are there?
She bit her lower lip, considering what other possibilities she could think of.
Maybe the sorcerer has some kind of home on the Plane of Poison. Rather than summoning a creature from there, he or she simply teleported from the Plane of Poison to the Core Plane, committed the murder, and then returned to that home. Creating a safe location on another plane would be difficult, especially on a plane like that – but not impossible.
That ritual we found definitely did look like a summoning ritual, though. Someone could have set it up deliberately to look like a summoning ritual had been used as a form of deflection from their actual methodology, but that’s a little unlikely.
...but we assumed the exit portal was leading to the same place as the entity was initially summoned from. The sorcerer could have summoned the assassin from anywhere, and then placed the dominion essence of poison in the circle afterward, making the destination different from where it initially came from. Given how strong of a connection to the Dominion of Poison the creature had, however, a native to that plane – or something attuned to it – would still be the most likely case.
An Esharen, or another creature that is capable of adapting to dominion energy, could have survived being exposed to powerful poison and taken on an aura like that. Another option to consider, but even more complex than summoning something native to that plane.
Lydia flipped through another several books before coming to the frustrating realization that she was broadening the possibilities of how the crime had occurred, not narrowing down the culprit. While the information she had gathered would be useful for eliminating subjects that lacked the resources to succeed at the rituals she had witnessed, she needed more definitive evidence to know who to focus her investigation on.
For that, she was going to need a bit more help. She offered her sincere gratitude to the librarian and the guards, and then left to meet with one of the most dangerous men in the world.
***
The town of Edgelake was more commonly referred to simply as Hartigan, the surname of the local ruler. It took two days of riding for Lydia to reach the town, but it would have been remiss of her to dismiss Nakane’s first suspect simply because of the distance. As the Theas daughter had pointed out, Blake Hartigan was one of few who had the necessary wealth and power to arrange to be teleported back and forth from the city.
Although, Lydia considered, the city’s walls are supposed to prevent teleporting directly into the city from outside. Wouldn’t that apply to summoning an entity from another plane?
She frowned at the incongruity and decided that she’d have to investigate the wards to determine exactly how they functioned. Several possibilities occurred to her immediately, but the most concerning was that the summoner m
ight have been powerful to bypass the wards with brute power. It was an unlikely possibility, but disconcerting to say the least.
It was more likely that the protection simply did not apply to spells that originated from within the city, which the summoning spell would have – or that something had been built into the defenses to allow them to be bypassed through specific means.
While she didn’t find it likely that Hartigan was the culprit, she was well-prepared for a possible confrontation. She wore a saber on her left hip and a dagger on her right, the latter balanced for throwing rather than parrying. The sorceress was also wearing Edon’s ring, and though she hadn’t been able to activate it yet, she had some ideas on how to force it to function in an emergency situation.
Finally, she had surrounded herself with a Comprehensive Barrier spell – her own personal invention, and practically a second skin during any operation that she considered dangerous. The spell utilized the Dominion of Protection to block attacks, while simultaneously using a Key from the Dominion of Knowledge to identify any offensive spells that struck the barrier. The combination allowed her to make tactical decisions on how to counter the abilities of enemy sorcerers – although she had a pretty good idea of what she’d be facing if she antagonized Hartigan. His reputation for incinerating dozens of enemies at a time had earned him the moniker “The Ember Lord”.
The paladin wasn’t exactly sure how she’d approach Hartigan, even after two days to think about it. The man was a notorious recluse, even more so than most sorcerers. At least finding him would not be difficult – his residence was a colossal stone tower, standing vigilant over the comparatively minuscule homes of the town’s other residents.
The tower itself made sense to Lydia – after all, the vast majority of spells were easier to cast with the target within sight, and the top of a tower was a fantastic vantage point. Hartigan’s habits were strange even by the standards of sorcerers, however. Rumors indicated that he spent months isolated in his tower, only to emerge to purchase – or requisition – broad varieties of strange goods from the townsfolk. She had heard stories of the sorcerer levitating a dozen live goats onto the top of his tower before thanking the previous owners and returning to his work.
