Chapter 8: The Advantages of Weakness

  ++My induction into the cut-throat politics of Garamon magicians was one of the best ones I could have received, because it taught me essentially everything I would ever need to know about it more or less instantly. There are benefits to being magically talented enough to warrant kidnapping—people are so rarely willing to kill their golden goose.++

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

  The plan was to move me and Agrian fast, and essentially just disappear us. I was able to predict that much easily enough, and soon confirmed it by using my old listening trick—now far more stable, longer-ranged and, fortunately, harder to detect using magic.

  This was no surprise, it had been the way of such magical kidnappings for generations. What it meant for me, though, was a decision. Did I want to accept this state of affairs?

  My first instinct was yes, being thrust into ever more gruelling magical training was quite literally all I could have asked for at the moment. The harder I was worked, the sooner I would boast the necessary power to tear those petty Gods down and stamp them underfoot.

  But I had to do more than just accumulate raw magical strength, this time around. I had already attempted that in my previous life, and it had resulted in the minor impediment I experienced after the Gods destroyed my armies and body. This time around I would have to fight them on terms they were less capable of engaging me in. Even that would be an uphill battle, given how dominant they seemed in the world’s politics.

  Which meant intellectual combat rather than purely magical or physical. I considered myself lucky, at least, that my long-term enemies were all nothing more than clumps of sentient mana, unable to match the glorious human intellect at anything close to full capacity.

  My immediate obstacles were humans themselves however, which demanded a bit less…bluntness.

  I took my time to get the lay of the land at first, not wanting to do anything rash or irreversible before I had the chance to gather information. Currently my chief advantage was that my enemies saw me as no more than a child, a being so tiny and fragile that any one of them could walk faster than I could run.

  My chief disadvantage, on the other hand, was that I was currently a child, so tiny and fragile that any one of them could walk faster than I could run.

  This made movement complicated, if I was forced to do it fast, but while my captors’ suspicions remained low, it was easy for me to just wander around giving all pretenses of a simple child who understood so little about her situation as to be reacting to kidnapping with pure curiosity.

  It helped that I was apparently rather a cute one. Lord Dread, cute. Another humiliation to punish the Gods for, when I had finished regaining my power, but for now just another advantage.

  The mansion was expensive and had clearly been occupied for some time, which meant this was planned well in advance. From that I inferred that my captors would also have prepared an escape route, possibly two. Fortunately, despite what I had initially thought, the place was big enough that it remained mostly empty. That made it easy for me to explore. Moving around and taking my chance to look through its windows, as well as perform a head count of both non-magical aids and magicians, I was able to narrow down the possibilities.

  We were on the edge of Lachfel, which gave easy access to several roads heading out of the city. The mansion was also not, I knew from tracking our journey, as close to the Vornholt estate as it could have been. I took that to mean that the roads were what motivated its selection.

  Aside from them, there was also a train that led out of the city. I knew little about those, with them having been invented long after I was removed from the world. I knew magic, though. Less of the new discoveries made in this world, but still enough for educated guesses. I knew that the power of flight was still as uncommon as it had ever been, and could assume that it required just as much power as the techniques used in my time as a result.

  Meaning that no magician here could perform it.

  Other abilities; translocation, dimensional displacement and the conjuration of beings powerful enough to bear human weights while flying over such distances were also out of the question.

  A train, and beast-drawn carriages. Those were the two most likely means through which Agrian and myself would be taken away. I headed back to my brother’s side, and was quite surprised when he firmly grabbed my wrist.

  “Don’t wander off again,” he told me. “Okay Isabel? I’m going to take care of this for both of us, but you need to stay by my side.”

  He looked so utterly serious. Clearly terrified, and yet the boy was doing his best to hide that from me.

  Misguided, but I was certainly not going to let such loyalty and courage go unrewarded. All those who served Lord Dread would be given what they deserved.

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  I had been forcibly re-introduced to human interaction over the past few years, and so I knew to squeeze Agrian’s arm with all of my childish strength to reciprocate his feeling. Then I spoke.

  “I have a plan to get us out of here,” I whispered. “But I need you to do it with me. Can you do that Agrian? Your magic is more powerful and you are bigger.”

  I believe it was the flattery that won him over, though it may just have been a previously unseen rational streak rearing its head thanks to our circumstances.

  “I can do it,” the boy told me earnestly. I got the impression he was trying to convince himself as much as me, which did not actually impede his ability to do as he was told and, thus, did not matter. We got to work.

  Obstacle number one was that, although we were children and seen as ultimately non-threatening, our captors were not stupid enough to leave us entirely unobserved. Even as I was allowed to wander freely, I had eyes on me. Agrian, the older child who had already made it clear he did not wish to remain, was watched more carefully still.

  This was not easily overcome. I took my time to find the most unobtrusive methods that might have been available; waiting for lapses in our watches, scrutinising the surroundings for some place I might slip away to unseen, anything. As might have been expected, however, these men gave no such opportunity.

  They were not risking their lives and livelihoods on this kidnapping just to have their prizes run off, after all.

  What was worse, testing boundaries would only arouse suspicions, make the men guarding us so loosely now stiffen up and take their duty even more seriously. We would stop being a suspicion, and become a problem in need of active scrutiny. We—

  …Sometimes, living as long as I have, I am humbled by the knowledge that I am, in fact, an idiot. I was overcomplicating my situation far too much.

  “Agrian,” I asked my brother after a moment. “Can you set that man over there on fir—” the man was already screaming before I had finished speaking, and Agrian was, apparently forgetting our situation, grinning from ear to ear. I mused that he had the makings of a rather respectable Lord of Evil himself, one day, but focused upon actually getting him his freedom this day first.

  Men panicked and yelped. Magicians, all of them, and perhaps not as slow to react as most would be when confronted with unexpected flame, but the very notion of an eleven year-old boy doing something so physically significant was clearly not one they had considered. The shock drew in all their eyes so well that I was entirely unobserved as I slipped from the room, and my long practice eavesdropping gave me the dexterity to do so before any of the other men in other rooms could rush in and provide more eyes.

  I knew enough of the building’s layout to make my way through it and into what appeared to be an indoor stable. Closed and locked, unfortunately, so I would not be fleeing through it, and even if I did I had no doubt that a dozen magicians would find me fast. But I was not here to escape. With the amount of men here, magicians among them, I knew that there were far fewer physically enhanced humans than magicians compared to the ratio of men responsible for my kidnapping. Too many to switch them between men and be carried as the last few had. And too many men in all to move nearly as quickly or subtly as before.

  Which meant that even if we left Lachfel by train, we would be leaving this mansion by carriage.

  Had I been luckier, the vehicles would be here already. They were not. That was no problem however, luck is for imbeciles who will take a look at the fact that they were not born with divine power and settle to live life without reaching for the world’s heights. I am, to say the least, not of that particular disposition.

  And the path my captor’s carriages would take was still there.

  It is difficult to damage something as durable as cobbled stone using a mere thousand vis of magical power, but entirely possible. Particularly if you are me.

  Heat was my first approach, and not in the form of magic missiles. I had been taught, some time ago, a spell matrix for projecting out mana as a concentrated jet that would dissipate once it moved past me, but the technique I used now was not that. Instead I copied the matrix Doctor Brown had used to produce his wall of force, substituting kinetic energy for thermal and heating a wider section at once.

  Not enough to melt the rock, not nearly, but enough to put some of my lessons in mundane science to good use. This one was actually something I had already worked out for myself a long time ago in any case; most materials heated enough will lose much of their strength, and once heated they take some time to cool.

  Enough time for me to switch between heat and force, dividing half my focus to replicating the muting effect my captors had surrounded me with, and half to blasting a slightly modified magic missile into the slightly-glowing stones.

  My mana reserves had never been strained like they were then, not in this life. I was close to emptied out by the time I’d finished my work and made a long sheet of mangled stone stretching almost the width of the stable. And another, and another. Layers of them, stacked beside one another to ensure that the damage would be as difficult to repair as possible, deep enough to demand much of anyone who tried to fill them in.

  And then aether layered over the pits, covered in fragments of stone stacked carefully and quickly to obscure them. The disguise would not have held by day and under scrutiny, but at night and in a hurry? I had a chance at least.

  Returning to the rest of the house, I seemed to be just in time. Men were already on their way to the stables as I met them in the hall, some eyes wide with worry, others lax with relief, others still narrowed with suspicion. Paranoid or not, it was this last group who clearly had the right of things.

  “There she is,” one of them sighed. Not a magician, that one, and perhaps that was why he was so terribly relieved. If something happened to the prize, I suspected it would be the social inferiors involved in this mission who took the blame.

  Hm. Blame would be assigned fast. That was worth keeping in mind for later, another weapon to use.

  “Where have you been, girl?” One of the magicians snarled, storming over and looming over me. I thought for a moment I might be struck, but no blow came. I was just treated to more pathetic fury as the man glowered at me.

  “Stables!” I grinned, doing my best impression of the air-headed youths I knew most children of my age to be. “Horsies!”

  As usual, my still-unpracticed skills in deception were helped to no small degree by the simple fact that people do not generally expect to be deceived by a child. Though the magicians were far from pleased, no more came from the interaction, and I was taken back into the main room.

  One move into my escape, and it had so far gone off without a hitch. Now how many more problems could I cause?