The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 108 - The Rot Spilling From the Walls

With a steady supply of myrvites from her new Syndicate contact established, Mirian spent her next day trying to replicate the runes she'd seen in the sanctum. When she'd learned about 'glyph probing' from Professor Eld, she'd thought it was a stupid thing to learn. After all, she didn't plan on learning a glyph unless it had been well established. However, now, she could use the same principle that researchers used to discover new glyphs, and discover new runes. The technique involved scribing a single line of a rune and seeing which direction it was most stable in. Then, she scribed the most stable line four times, then added a second line in four different places, again, analyzing which was most stable. If it burst into flames, that indicated a problem. If it sparked and smoldered violently, that was progress.

The earlier Arcane Mathematics classes she'd taken had discussed efficient ways to narrow down the possible geometric patterns. It was time-consuming, but the smugglers here also had access to several myrvites she'd never used the souls of before. Once she could establish a basic construction of a rune on the page, she could analyze the resonance and look for similarities.

After that, she planned to begin researching combining two different resonances and seeing if she could find an intermediate resonance. In that way, she might be able to combine the souls of two different myrvites to get a soul-energy that would let her craft a third unique rune. She was relying heavily on the waveform mathematics she'd learned in Torrviol and hoping that her 'light' analogy was as applicable to different forms of magic as she thought it was.

Mournfully, she thought of Xipuatl. It would be nice to talk it over with him.

At night, she levitated around with her night camouflage spell on, getting a sense of movement around the city, and as an excuse to let loose after a hard day of studying. It also was good practice, and it felt wasteful to go to bed before expending most of her auric mana. After all, she was still well below Archmage Luspire in power, which meant she had work to do.

The next morning, Mirian went to the Great Library again to check out books about waveforms, and ended up borrowing a book on magical telegraphs. While the technology had never taken off, the principles behind the design of sending and receiving signals looked quite applicable to what she was trying to do with soul resonance. Access to the Great Library was a huge boon; whatever subject she needed information on, they had something. Except runes, of course.

But that led her to wonder: she might not be able to sneak into the celestial classes instructing priests in the Grand Sanctum, but she might be able to steal books from them. Most of the knowledge the priests had was passed down orally, because secrets were harder to steal if you didn't write them down, but at least some of their knowledge of celestial runes was recorded somewhere. Neither Lecne nor Arenthia had known where those sacred texts were kept. She also still had no idea where and how they were manufacturing orichalcum for the Arcane Praetorians.

That meant there were secret passages in the Sanctum that were not on the maps she'd studied.

Mirian started scouting around the northern canals that would be beneath Kingmont Hill, and therefore beneath the Grand Sanctum. The Sanctum was isolated from direct contact with the canals, but the cave networks were close enough to each other that she could use divination magic to start looking for where unmapped caves were. Once again, her work in exploring the Torrviol Underground was coming in handy.

Then on the 18th, an obituary in one of the newspapers mentioned a familiar name: Hamel.

Mirian had been reading between ten and twelve different broadsheets each day, usually during the evenings after dinner, just before her nightly flying sessions. There was plenty to read, and lots of small presses that churned out a daily sheet, though plenty of it was inane. Other articles, she couldn't tell; maybe some detail would end up being important later, but for now, it all seemed relatively normal. Nobles and rich merchants acting out little dramas. Neighborhood crimes.

Then, predictably, news from the war in Persama had overtaken the papers and created quite a stir in the city. Plenty of it was rumor and conjecture, and more of it was useless. She read up on it, but learned little she didn't already know. Besides, the details were likely to change as the southern time traveler iterated.

Hamel's death, though, caught her eye. She read it twice to make sure it wasn't a different man by the same name, but no, he was listed as an acolyte. Tragically, the coroner reported he'd died of an apparent heart attack at age 37.

That struck her as suspicious.

On the 19th, her eyes happened to pass over another obituary. Likely, Mirian wouldn't have noticed anything, except it was another heart attack, and another person who was far too young to have had one. It seemed a journalist named Celine who helped write for the Magrio Broadsheet had died, again tragically, at the age of 32.

Then she went through the newspapers she'd collected for the day and noticed she didn't have a copy of the day's Magrio Broadsheet.

Mirian went on a search of the corner stands for a copy, but no one seemed to have one. Finally, near River Station, the woman at the stand lowered her voice and told her, "Their building was broken into last night. The whole place was ransacked, and the printing press smashed. Means they stuck their nose somewhere it shouldn't have gone. Young man like you has too much sense to miss the point, hmm?"

Mirian made some noises of agreement. Well, someone had certainly wanted to send a message, she thought.

She went back to her research on runes and continued to scout out the tunnels beneath the Grand Sanctum. She'd added quite a bit of detail to her maps; there were dozens of passages and rooms that appeared nowhere on the blueprints she'd acquired. However, her divination spells weren't precise enough to locate how to get into them.

That night, Mirian staked out the Akanan Embassy.

She'd picked out the roof of a clocktower a few buildings away from Tenedor Plaza, using a warmth spell to chase away the night's chill. It was a long and boring vigil, and she was just about to give up when she noticed some unusual activity. The Akanan guards on patrol vanished—but no one replaced them.

Nothing else happened.

She noted the time. It was clear something at the embassy wasn't normal, but it was hard to say what yet.

Exhausted from going the entire night without sleep, Mirian ate breakfast back at the inn then took a long nap. Then she went back to her vigil, though this time she just sat on a bench just outside Ducastil, blending in with the rest of the people milling about.

Just before noon, she caught sight of some twenty members of the Palendurio Guard, suddenly marching in column past the spires of the palace. She hadn't seen where they'd come from, but they certainly hadn't come from the Governor's Mansion. Checking her map of the city, she thought they might have come up from the canals; there was a stair and an elevator for moving goods and people around, just around the bend.

Mirian followed the guards from a block back. The group made no effort to deviate. They were heading straight for the plaza.

Got them.

There was no way to identify them yet. The Palendurio Guard wore thin metal masks that disguised their faces. This seemed to Mirian like a stupid idea, because it let the guard stay anonymous. How could misbehaving guardsmen be held to account? Here, it made them the perfect attackers. Even if the rest of the crisis didn't develop, how could one distinguish between the conspirators and the innocent?

She did wonder where the Arcane Praetorians and the Crown Bureau were in all of this. They wouldn't be around to stop the attack, but what did they do after it?

She was going to have to find out.

As soon as the guards neared the embassy, two of them in the lead smashed down the gate with force spells. Gasps of surprise and panic filled the plaza as crowds turned towards the commotion.

The rest of the guard started jogging past the gates to surround the embassy building, while four of them stood by at the gate, two facing the building, and two facing the crowd.

"What's going on?" a man asked, stepping forward.

"Guard's business. Step away," growled one of the men outside the gate.

"No it's not," said a woman in the crowd. "That's the embassy! What's the meaning of this?"

The two guards looked at each other, then pulled out wands. They started sending out a spell she recognized as sparkfire clamor, a spell that let out dozens of points of bouncing balls of light that seared what they touched and let out sparks and loud bangs that sounded like gunfire. Screams erupted among the crowd as most people fled the square.

Some stayed though. "Oh Gods! Look!" another woman screamed, pointing at the embassy. Sure enough, a column of flame had engulfed one side of the building.

Mirian wanted a better look. She glanced around, then ducked into an alley. With everyone distracted by the attack, she launched herself into the air with levitate, stopping when she was several hundred feet above, then cast eagle eye to enhance her vision. Several people had no doubt seen her, but it would stop mattering soon. It was too late for anyone as far away as Torrviol to act against her. Palendurio was about to be engulfed in chaos and war, and the train lines were about to be cut.

Down below, she could see the guards. Several had wands out and were continuing to pour flames into the embassy building while the others simply watched. All through the building, the fires were growing, and smoke soon began to obscure her view from above.

Through the haze, she saw a sudden flurry of movement and heard distant shouts echoing up. Several Akanans were attempting to break out of the embassy through the windows on the second floor. She heard the crack of a rifle and the flashes of spells being exchanged. The four guards by the gate took cover, moving back around the wall. For several minutes, the little battle continued as the flames spread and intensified. Squinting, Mirian could make out a woman falling from the window, then two men. All three of them made a mad dash for the gate, shouting first in Eskanar, then in accented Friian. Though most of the words were lost in the noise, Mirian made out one:

"—conspiracy!" the woman shouted.

Perhaps they hadn't seen the guards who'd moved behind the pillars of the gate. Perhaps they didn't think their former ally would really slaughter the embassy staff in front of a huge crowd. Perhaps they were just desperate and scared; Mirian certainly knew the feeling. But force blades cut them to pieces until all three of them were a bloody smear on the cobblestones.

There were more citizens screaming, and then the Palendurio Guard retreated from around the building and reformed into columns. Mirian couldn't even make out the embassy anymore, it was too choked with black smoke, but the horrid light of the flames lit up all the nearby buildings.

Mirian went higher up, then moved back towards Ducastil, following the column of guards. The crowd in Tenedor Plaza didn't follow them, probably out of fear. As the guards moved back towards the palace, they didn't hesitate to use more sparkfire clamor spells or force push to make sure their path was clear. It only took a few spells to get the crowded streets to stampede away from them.

With her auric mana waning rapidly from the levitation spell, Mirian decided to land. She still wasn't sure how much mana she should keep in reserve, but she didn't want to go under half her capacity. She took a risk and went ahead of the group of guards, landing on top of one of the smaller towers of Ducastil, then hid behind one of the battlements. As she tested around with her divination spells, she discovered her guess had been right: none of the wards protecting the palace had been designed to detect infiltration by air.

She watched as the guard moved to one of the gates. They stopped in front of the gate guard, and there was a brief conversation. What happened next was lightning fast: the lead guard's hand snaked out and stuck a wand in the small gap between the palace guard's mask and breastplate so that it must have been touching his neck when the spell went off. The guard right behind the lead one dashed forward, catching the gate guard's body as it went limp, then that body began to float next to them, just a centimeter or two off the ground.

Probably using a lift person spell, Mirian thought, glad for her own eagle eye spell. Without enhanced vision, it would have been easy to miss. As it was, she could see the dead guard's toes dragging across the ground, but the corpse's movement matched the rest of the column. Even someone watching closely might have missed what had just happened and assumed the palace guard had joined the rest of his cohort.

The now twenty-one guards made their way up the stair that spiraled around the karst tower, moving the corpse-guard to the back of the line. The next two gate guards were missing already, so the bridge to the Governor's Mansion was completely undefended. They simply walked in.

Mirian dropped her eagle eye spell and switched to a detect magic spell, the cone targeting the mansion. That probably triggered one of the alarm wards, while another set of wards obscured the signal she was getting, but she could still tell that the guards were casting spells as they moved through the rooms.

Two of the guards emerged from the door, looking around—probably for her. She ducked behind one of the fancy battlements of the tower and dropped her spell. She switched over to her focus, using the generic soul energy in her primary repository to cast detect life. They'd prepared for countermeasures against arcane magic, but not celestial magic. With detect life, she could sense the two guards standing by the door through the stone. She could also sense the guards moving through the mansion, and several people who were caught inside. One by one, their life-forces were snuffed out as the guards moved from room to room, slaughtering everyone they encountered.

There was a group of people in the dining room on the top floor, who turned, then fled to another room as they heard the magical blasts and screams. One of them was probably the governor. Whatever locks or wards the mansion had, the unit of guards easily bypassed.

That explains what happened to him.

The front door closed, and Mirian watched as the twenty guards moved about the mansion. It seemed some were piling the bodies for incineration, while others were looking for something. With the amount of spellpower they had, it wouldn't be hard to keep the flames contained and the smoke compacted by remove smoke spells. Without any bodies left, perhaps it would look like the governor fled, rather than was butchered.

It took a little less than an hour for them to clear out the building of whatever they were looking for. Then, they proceeded down a passage that seemed to be built into the stone of the spire. Probably a secret passage that leads to the canals, Mirian guessed. Soon enough, they were outside her spell range.

By then, a crowd had gathered at the gates to Ducastil, and the shouting and rumors were both flying. The guards had locked the gate behind them, though. The guards at other gates were talking to the crowds, looking around. It didn't seem they knew what was going on.

Mirian used her night camouflage spell. Since it reprojected the sky's light, she realized she'd misnamed it; it could absolutely be used in the day, it just wouldn't be as effective. It would give her a little cover, though. Then she levitated herself north, towards the Magrio River, where she could head into the canals.

She wanted to see if she could figure out just who these guards actually were, and more importantly, who they were working for.