Mother of Learning 1 - Caught in the Web, page 44
Maybe it was a Noveda House bloodline? One that gave their family huge reserves without the crippling loss of control, perhaps. Of course, the Noveda publically claimed they had no bloodline, but it wouldn't be the first time a House had lied.
"I hesitate to even bring this up," Taiven said, breaking him out of his thoughts, "but if you're really desperate for a short term mana boost, you can always absorb ambient mana faster than you can assimilate it. I'm sure you're aware of the drawbacks, though…"
Zorian nodded. There were two main forms of mana available to the mage: his personal mana and the ambient one that emanated from the underworld. Personal mana was something that all things with a soul possessed in varying amounts, and it was attuned to the person producing it – it bent easily to its creator's will, and was innately more malleable and controllable than anything else they might use to power their magic, since it never resisted the caster's efforts to shape it. Ambient mana, on the other hand, was both harder to control and toxic to living beings. Not enough to kill a mage just for using it once, but any substantial, prolonged use resulted in sickness and insanity. The mages of old believed that ambient mana was tainted by the World Dragon's hate for humanity and shunned its use, but modern mages had discovered a few tricks to making use of it. One was by using it to power items, which had no minds to corrupt or bodies to sicken. The other was to assimilate the ambient mana into their personal reserves, negating its toxic properties. While the process of assimilation was too slow to power actual spells, being able to regenerate personal reserves faster was useful enough that the skill spread far and wide. These days, every student of magic was taught how to do it along with the other basics of spellcasting.
"I'll get sick," Zorian said. "And possibly mad, if I keep using it constantly."
"Right," Taiven said. "Using raw mana on a regular basis is pretty stupid, but if you're in a real bind… well, it's better to spend a few days bedridden with a fever than end up dead."
"You've used it before," guessed Zorian.
Taiven gave him a surprised look, like it was unexpected he figured it out. "Uh, maybe once? Or twice?" She shifted her stance, looking uncomfortable. "But keep quiet about that, will you? Most combat mages have done it a couple of times in their life, but Guild inspectors don't accept 'everybody's doing it' as an excuse."
Zorian made a gesture over his mouth, indicating that his lips are sealed. It's not like she didn't know plenty of things to get him in trouble with, anyway.
"Let's just get back to the lesson, oh great teacher," Zorian said. "Since you're so intent on teaching me mana-intensive fire spells, how about that fire vortex I heard you can cast…"
✦ ✧ ✦
When the time came, Taiven and her two friends let Zorian take point as he led them towards aranea territory. They had already tried and failed to divine the location of the watch, which wasn't terribly unusual if it really was taken by the aranea – the aranea had been engaged in a shadow war with the invaders for a while now, even before the time loop started, and their anti-divination wards were top-notch.
[We meet again, Zorian Kazinski,] the matriarch spoke telepathically to him. She was surrounded by 6 honor guards, though only 2 were actually visible while the other four hung from the ceiling while under some kind of invisibility spell. Zorian only knew they were there because he could sense their minds. [And once again you bring additional guests with you. Three of them this time. If this pattern continues, we'll have to find a more spacious area to house them all after a few more restarts.]
[Funny,] Zorian sent back. [But actually, this is the group I was a part of when I first met the aranea. We were looking for a watch supposedly in your possession then, same as we are now. Sounds familiar?]
"What's going on?" asked Taiven. She and her two friends were hanging in the back, looking apprehensively at the three spiders in front of them. "Why are you just staring at them?"
Before Zorian could say anything, the matriarch started waving her front four legs in the air for a while and then spoke.
"What's this about a watch I hear?" she asked, turning her two biggest, forward-facing eyes at Taiven.
It took a few minutes of explaining and clarifications, but in the end the matriarch finally seemed to remember the event in question.
"Oh, now I remember," she said. "Though the man in question certainly wasn't any kind of innocent passerby, and the 'watch' is no simple time-keeping device – he had assaulted our web with couple of other thugs and ended up dropping his bauble when we chased them off."
[He's one of the invaders,] the matriarch told him telepathically, so only he could hear. [Or at least he works for them. You say you saw him? Excellent, we finally have an entry point into the organization. A face, a name and face-to-face contact should be enough to divine where he lives… you know his name, don't you? Excellent. Hopefully he gave away his real one. Did you shake hands with him when you accepted the job? No? Try to shake hands with him when you give him the device. Maybe put a tracking spell on it if you know how…]
Somehow, the matriarch was able to participate in two separate conversations at once, speaking out loud to Taiven and her two friends as she spoke telepathically to Zorian. Zorian himself was not similarly blessed, and mostly tuned out her explanation to Taiven in order to absorb what she was telling him mentally. Finally she seemed to realize this and cut her telepathic communication with him short, allowing him to pay attention to what she had been saying to Taiven.
"…so I'm not sure what the device is for, but it's clearly a magical item of some sort," the matriarch said out loud. "It's useless for us aranea, but we are well familiar with the concept of trade. We were hoping to trade it to some of our human contacts for something we can actually use, but since it's our dear friend Zorian that's asking for it, I guess we'll give it to you as a favor. I'm sure Zorian will make it up to us… eventually."
"Uhh…" fumbled Taiven, looking at him uncertainly. "Is… that okay, Roach? Are you…?"
"Yeah, I'm fine with that," Zorian shrugged. Although as far as he was concerned he didn't really owe any favors to the matriarch for this.
[I only said that for appearances sake,] the matriarch told him telepathically. [It would be weird if we just gave it up for no reason. Besides, as far as I'm concerned, you will repay my generosity by helping me track down your employer so we can wring him for information.]
"Fang of Victory will go and retrieve the bauble," the matriarch said out loud, causing one of the two visible honor guards to suddenly skitter off into the darkness. "I'd ask you to warn your employer against further aggression against us, but it's probably best if you keep quiet about talking to us."
"Why did he attack you anyway?" asked Taiven. "You seem nice enough to me."
"Most places will kill sentient monsters as a matter of course, if they find them within their borders," Grunt said. He and Mumble were both pretty quiet thus far, so it was a bit startling to hear him speak up all of the sudden. Taiven gave him a dirty look for his remark. "What? I'm just saying he didn't need a reason. Their presence would be offense enough for some people."
"It's a little more complex than that," the matriarch said. "Humans clash with other sentient races, that is true, but that's because most of them are highly territorial, murderous, view humans as food or all three. On occasions where that wasn't the case, humans have shown themselves willing to make exceptions and take a more… nuanced approach. There are several dragons that deal with humans in a peaceful manner, the lizardmen of Blantyrre have long been a trading partner for human nations, and many of the splinter states bordering the wilderness have made secret or not so secret pacts with various spirits and monster clans living within their nominal borders."
"You've thought about this a lot," Zorian remarked.
"Though not well known, we have been peacefully interacting with humanity for quite a long time now", the matriarch said. "The aranea have been living in the deeper levels of the dungeon for as long as this city has existed. When the foundations were being laid, several campaigns were launched into the local sections of the dungeon to clear out the threats lurking inside it. However, this power vacuum also allowed weaker races like aranea to move into the place. The dungeon around the Hole is prime real estate for magical creatures of all breeds, as you probably know, and the competition was fierce. Fortunately, while we aranea lacked the brute strength or destructive magical abilities of some of our competitors, we were far more willing to cooperate with humans to our mutual benefit. We contacted some of the humans that were willing to cooperate with us and gave them information about our mutual enemies – their strengths and weaknesses, where they lived, the timing of their attacks and movements… everything they needed to wipe them out, or at least weaken them to the point where we could finish the job. Information gathering has always been our specialty."
Zorian found himself fascinated by the story, and more than a little surprised that the matriarch was willing to say all this in front of Taiven and her friends. Then again, Zorian never told them that aranea were mind readers, so their minds were completely unshielded - the matriarch probably had a pretty good picture of how likely they were to cause trouble for her. And they weren't going to remember anything about this when this time loops ended, either.
"Although giving information to humans helped us as well as them, we rarely did it for free – in return for our secrets, we demanded some of your own. Our human allies used the information we provided to make a name for themselves and further their careers, and in return they taught us some of your magic and helped us adopt it for our own use. Armed with our very own system of structured magic, the aranea grew in strength and versatility, solidifying their hold over this region and making the web that lived beneath Cyoria the most prestigious of aranean webs. The resulting prosperity caused their numbers to swell, and they sent a never-ending stream of colonists and breakaway webs to the surrounding region, where they proceeded to evict or subjugate every lesser aranean web they encountered. But although these aranea left Cyoria in search of their own destiny, no place had the prestige or opportunities that Cyoria offered, and thus viewed their mother web with envy and resentment. Soon, a number of these breakaways banded together and, armed with the experience of fighting the lesser webs for territory, drove the original web out of their homeland. It would not be the last time Cyoria had changed hands. The conquerors were soon evicted by another group of invaders, and this group was evicted by another, and then they were evicted by us. We are the fifth web to hold this place and while our position is secure at the moment, any sort of weakness could cause the neighboring webs to get… restless."
"Huh," Zorian said. "So if you were, hypothetically speaking, absolutely decimated by someone and had your numbers severely reduced?"
"Our neighbors would launch a few probing raids at the very least," the matriarch said. "But anyway, my point is that humans and aranea are not, nor have they ever been enemies. Well, barring some… isolated incidents. On both sides. In fact, it has been my explicit policy to encourage closer links between this web and humans living in Cyoria. I hope the day will come when aranea will be able to walk the street above in open daylight, just like any other citizen."
"And I suppose you hope the humans will defend you from outside threats, like any other citizens," Grunt said. "Like, say, from those rival 'webs' that want to take your territory?"
"I confess that possibility does factor rather heavily into my thinking," the matriarch admitted. "The city authorities would be a lot less inclined to stand by and watch if we had an established, formal relationship with them."
"So is this your recruiting pitch?" asked Taiven. "Are you trying to turn us into your agents?"
"More contacts is always good," the matriarch said. "But no, I'm not trying to recruit you. I just sensed you were worried about Zorian's association with us and wanted to assuage your fears somewhat. Anyway, Fang of Victory is coming back with the bauble so we'll have to cut this short here. Talk to Zorian if you ever want to chat with us again."
Sure enough, the matriarch honor guard soon returned with the watch. Zorian half-expected her to return with the watch gripped in its fangs, but it actually came back carrying some kind of leather harness full of pouches across its body, one of which held the watch. For a moment Zorian wondered how they made that, what with them lacking hands and all, but then realized he was being a bit foolish. The matriarch had already said they traded with humans for a lot of things – this must be one of them.
They quickly said good bye to the aranea and were on their way back to their employer, prize in hand.
"I don't know what to think," Taiven said when they put some distance between themselves and the aranea. "They seemed nice enough, but it's a bit disquieting to find out we have an entire colony of these things living beneath the city, pulling their strings over gods know how many people."
"Yeah," agreed Mumble quietly. Zorian could definitely see why Taiven called him the way she did – he tended to talk really softly, making his speech very hard to understand sometimes. "Did you know Cyoria is kind of famous for its spider silk? The merchants who sell it are really cagy about where they get it in such quantities and have declared their source a trade secret. Most people think they have managed to create a spider species that can be farmed effectively and have a giant farm hidden somewhere, but I think it's pretty obvious now where they get it…"
Zorian mostly kept out of the conversation, alternating between listening to their conversation (when they were saying something interesting) and studying the device they retrieved from the aranea (when they weren't). It was, as the matriarch said, a magical item of some sort – shaped like a pocket watch, but not one. The hands didn't move, and the screw that should have allowed a person to wind it was fused with the casing and seemed to be simply an ornamental bump put there to make the illusion superficially convincing. He tried to channel mana into it, but that didn't result in anything substantial – the device probably required the user to channel mana in a very specific manner. Many complex magical items did.
The lessons in divining the secrets of magical items that Haslush gave him really paid off here. Considering its purpose, the device yielded its purpose surprisingly easily – to put it bluntly, it was equipment for burglary. More specifically, it was a ward scanner, designed to guide and enhance divination spells meant to seek out weaknesses in complicated warding schemes so they could be broken or bypassed more easily. Their employer had probably been trying to identify a hole in aranean defenses.
Still, while the purpose of the device was readily apparent to his divination spells, its method of operation stubbornly remained a mystery. After several unsuccessful attempts to pry the casing open without damaging the device, he finally decided to try something… experimental. He extruded a mana cloud from his hands, the way he did when picking locks, and directed it to trickle into the device's insides through the gaps and misaligned seams. The resulting information was fuzzy, but told him that the insides were filled with brass gears and crystals. They were probably not meant to be pried open. How then…
Ah, so that was the trick! The hands of the clock weren't just static – they were nothing more than an image painted over a glass cover. Zorian pressed his finger against the glass cover and pushed it into the casing. There was a soft click from the inside, and when Zorian released the pressure the cover immediately flew open, revealing a complicated interface full of dials and sigils. Very complicated interface… he wasn't going to figure this out in the hour or so they had until they reached the client.
He was so taking this thing apart to see how it worked in one of the future restarts.
✦ ✧ ✦
Finishing the job was done without complications. Zorian opted not to put a tracking spell on the device, since he didn't know how sensitive the device was and didn't want to ruin it. That turned out to be a good choice, as the man immediately cast several diagnostic spells on the device once Zorian handed it over, one of which Zorian knew to be a spell designed to detect simple tracking spells. Once the transaction was done, Zorian insisted they shake hands, claiming it was traditional in his village to do so after a successful business deal. The man rolled his eyes and mumbled something about yokels, but humored him anyway. Mission accomplished.
After they all shared a drink in a nearby tavern (Taiven insisted and wouldn't hear no from anyone), the group separated. Zorian immediately descended to the sewers again and went back to the aranea.
[A ward reader, you say?] the matriarch asked. [It makes sense. He and his friends had been hanging out at the edge of our territory for a while, trying to stay hidden. I'm surprised he hired a bunch of students to get it, though.]
"Yeah, I'm not sure what he was thinking," Zorian said. "Seems like a stupid idea to me."
[We'll find out in a few days, if all goes well,] the matriarch said. [That said, there are other things we must discuss. I believe I told you in the previous restart that I happened upon some pretty important information.]
"You did," Zorian agreed. "I was wondering what that was about."
[It's about the invaders. First of all, your guess was right – they are indeed from Ulquaan Ibasa.]
"I knew it," Zorian scowled. "What was it? Are they out for revenge or is this just sheer opportunism?"
[A bit of both,] the matriarch said. [They resent you for their exile and they think you're weak, now that the Splinter Wars and The Weeping wiped out most of your battlemages. But that's not the important part. The important part concerns a question so basic I'm honestly not sure why neither of us thought of it. Namely, why exactly did the invasion think they could conquer Cyoria in the first place?]
