Book 4 Chapter 19.5: Levers

++The warriors of Garamon have always found an easier time integrating into mundane fields than the magicians, simply because their abilities are far more in-line with what the common man is familiar with. The use of a person who can conjure flame or water is not always immediately apparent, not without a few follow-up questions about volume or distance, but a man who simply has added strength? Any fool can make use of that.++

- From ‘Magic and Mundanity’, a commentary on the role of the arcane in an advancing society.

I was in no mood to speak with my mother again. Or, to be more specific, to have my mother speak at me.

This new epiphany of mine regarding family had actually made me more antagonistic to her, not less. There had always been something more impersonal about my contempt for her weakness than there was now for her…self.

Something about the way I felt confronting her now had me bizarrely, pathetically urged to give the whole mansion a wide berth and find some other way to pursue my goals. I was not spineless enough to let myself cave in such a way, however.

Certainly not when I could be in and out without the Baroness ever even knowing I was there.

I made only one stop before I headed to the estate, then rushed there as much to test my new body as for pure expediency. Dialling down the drag-cancelling effect, I found that there was not an especially large difference to my speed, but it was at least more than nothing. A percentage point or two. On the scale of a two-hour flight that would save me perhaps a minute at most, but minutes could make all the difference.

Today I approached with stealth rather than speed, arcing high over the mansion and letting myself drift down slowly to bypass the spying eyes of those guards I had long since hired to defend it. I was actually rather disappointed to see how easily confused the expensive custodians were, and made a mental note to confront the mercenaries about this fact later.

Climbing in through my old bedroom window was oddly sad. Nostalgia, I think that was what they called it. I did not care for the feeling, but at the same time I basked in it. An unpleasant conflict that left me wholly unsure what to think.

Making my way through the interior of the building without being seen proved harder than it would have been a year ago. My newfound wealth had seen the Vornholt estate’s staff more numerous than it once was, and that was without counting the new guards.

Fortunately, this was where my new body came into play. While it was no inherently stealthier than the old one, there was something about my new reflexes and speed that made silent movement far easier.

I could keep up a pace that would by no means be considered slow for a normal mortal, but most certainly was by the standards of my own lightning-quick reactions. Placing my foot down was something that seemed to take an age, and let me exactly measure out my weight and distribution like I was performing surgery.

I would most certainly not be dodging bullets, not as I was now, and I rather doubted that I would be keeping pace with a horse without the use of mana to aid me, but for the purposes of controlling my own limbs I had a great deal more leeway than I did before. An adjustment that would take someone else a quarter of a second could be done in less than a fifth of one by me. Tens of milliseconds. Small, but they added up to make me very sneaky indeed.

Finding Blakely was easy, I simply had to search for the most ‘defensible’ position. In this case it was near the centre of the mansion, one of the storerooms on the ground floor with several, highly thick stone walls. I pre-empted our meeting with a shield around myself, and had the decision immediately vindicated as I entered into his hideaway and was promptly shot in the face. I eyed the flattened piece of metal clinging to the shield just above my eye while Blakely twitched and growled with his gun smoking.

“What are you doing here so soon?” he asked me.

“There has been a change of plans,” I told him. “I want you to meet me at the city’s outskirts in twelve hours, you need to depart with me for another task.” Blakely made one of his growling noises, the ones that demonstrated dissatisfaction.

“It’s gonna be dangerous?” he guessed.

“Ideally not,” I told him. “But then, this is rather untrodden ground for me. We can discuss it in more detail later, I would rather leave this place soon before I run into my mother again.”

I would have liked to see Qaigor and Victoria again, but…no, best not for now. There would be more time later to reunite with them.

Slipping out was as easy as slipping in, and I was at the outskirts in thirty seconds flat.

Blakely did not need twelve hours to reach me there, but he took that long. I was glad of this fact; the telegram I had sent had been to bring forth additional reinforcements for the mansion, and they would not be arriving until roughly the time I had set for him to meet me. One trait he had acquired in the army was a very particular sense for time, and he appeared just as I had wished.

When he did, he saw me performing a set of push-ups. With a block of aether bound to my back roughly twice as heavy as I was. The man watched in silence while I finished, then quietly moved over to test the object as I let it fall, grunting with the mild exertion before staring at me.

“I have granted myself the physical strength of a warrior, on top of my natural magician’s abilities,” I explained, though I imagined he knew already.

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“That’s not possible,” he told me.

“I could go into the details, but it, evidently, is. I am keeping it a secret, however.”

The Gods had stamped out liches because we lived longer than humans and could accumulate far more power. This meant that, as magicians, we had raised ceilings for potential. One lich was no problem, but if we had been left unchecked the time may have come where our entire species was composed solely of liches. Billions, not dozens or hundreds. Against perhaps a few hundred Gods.

I did not know if ten million Sascithius’ could defeat one God, but I doubted the Gods knew either. They had wiped us out to be safe.

And I saw no reason to assume they would treat this new hybrid warrior state any differently. After all, warriors lived somewhat longer than magicians too. Not ageless as liches did, but enough that the average Highmage would enjoy a few more decades to hone their powers.

If that became commonplace, magical knowledge may well snowball.

So I was keeping this to myself simply because I did not want to go unnoticed as Lord Dread’s reincarnation only to be stamped out like an insect because the Gods grew paranoid about some other, wholly unrelated trait. Blakely did not know any of this of course, but I was banking on a single, crucial fact in telling him this.

He was so paranoid by nature that he would not need to understand. He would concur with my hiding it simply because he generally concurred with hiding anything. I saw him take all of a second to make his decision, then nod.

“I didn’t see anything,” he said flatly.

“Excellent,” I replied, pleased to see that I had guessed right.

“It’ll make you easier to guard at least,” Blakely added. “How strong are you now?”

The answer to that was ‘very’. But I sensed that he wanted more detail than that.

“I have not specifically measured myself,” I noted. “But I estimate that I am somewhere between double and triple the average strength for a man of reasonable fitness.”

“As strong as me?” he asked.

I suddenly found an incredibly undignified, but incredibly amusing idea occurring to me. “We can find out.”

And so it was that Lord Dread, history’s first lich, inventor of necromancy, enemy of the Gods and destined mistress of the cosmos, knelt down with a block of aether before her, planted her elbow upon it and prepared to arm wrestle her bodyguard.

Blakely was not terribly strong as far as warriors went. Perhaps he had the physical strength of a man twice his weight, with a considerably greater portion of that mass being bulky muscle compared to Blakely’s own, wiry build. I suspected that if he wanted to, he could juggle cannon balls, straighten horseshoes, lift an unresisting person overhead—any number of feats typically demonstrated by the strong-man performers of a circus.

But he was no Baron Vornholt, and he would most certainly not be bouncing bullets from his skin or punching through stone walls.

This made him rather a perfect measuring stick for me.

We began, and his arm stopped being an arm and became a screaming coal engine, the limb of a horse, a falling guillotine blade. The ground actually shook a moment as the aether platform shifted where it absorbed the brunt of our contest. Between the two of us, I fancied, we were probably doing the work of a draft horse.

My face was probably not very dignified. Gritted teeth, grunting lungs, sweat soon building on me. Blakely’s was just as ridiculous, his twitchy rictus momentarily buried by the effort.

And with us both trying as hard as we could, it was a near-perfect match.

Near-perfect.

My arm began to twitch back. Fractions of an inch, then full inches, and then, in moments, it was driven into the aether hard enough to shatter an ordinary hand. It merely bruised mine, though I still did not appreciate the sensation.

Blakely did, laughing as he straightened up.

“Not that strong, then,” he said at last. I stood myself, glaring at him now.

“Not that strong yet,” I growled. “I am…working on it.”

The sharpened learning curve of a warrior was very much something I enjoyed compared to the agonizing slowness of bolstering my magician abilities, though having nearly a two-decade headstart on the latter category still left my physical abilities rather…underdeveloped by comparison.

“Well keep working on it,” Blakely laughed.

“I did not recruit you to mock me,” I snapped. He sobered fast at that.

“Right, what do you want my help with?”

His amusement never took long to vanish when serious business came up. It was, in all likelihood, the reason he continued to live.

“I have been attempting to procure a certain…artefact,” I told Blakely. “Not a magical one, but perhaps one that is associated with magic. I was wondering if you know of any markets I might access that are not…publicly advertised.”

He bristled, eyes narrowing as he answered slow and cautiously.

“I…might do.”

“And do you know of a way that I might be connected to such a market?” I asked him.

Blakely chewed on that. “The people who run these things are dangerous,” he said at last. “I worked with them, briefly, after the war—the earlier one I mean. Where your father served. I needed money, and they were eager for Estalian relics.”

I made a mental note to keep Sethira from finding out about this, it would be inconvenient for me if she eviscerated Blakely.

“And you can reconnect with this market?” I pressed.

“...A thousand crowns,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s my price. A thousand crowns.”

It was ridiculous. But then, he was certainly in a position to ask the ridiculous and know that I had no choice but to grant it.

“Fine,” I growled. “A thousand crowns, after you have successfully granted me access to this market. I give you my word.”