Caladin’s Climb—Part 19 (Patreon)

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          Oneiromancy magic was odd, but it had a few advantages over other harmonics. The ability to attack someone from the dream world was one of them. Sure, there were limits to what a nefarious wizard could do from dreams, but there were very few ways those that hadn’t mastered the harmonic could protect themselves from such attacks. Traditional wards were useless. It was one of those useful tidbits of information Caladin had taken note of when he was studying magic in Brorn’s library. Now he was in the perfect situation to take advantage of it. Brorn was asleep, something he almost never did, and behind a nearly impenetrable ward.

          Most oneiromancy spells used traditional targeting methods, such as line of sight or touch, which a ward would block just fine. But the spell Dream Walk would allow the casting wizard to explore the dream world and move between different people’s dreams. It was a nightmare—sometimes literally—to traverse the dream world to try to find a specific target, but it was possible. The fact that there were leagues of distance between Caladin, Brorn and the next closest sleeping person would only make the process easier. Caladin could use a rather simple oneiromancy spell to fling himself out his own dream and into a random one. He’d be practically guaranteed to land in Brorn’s dreams. Being so far from civilization was going to work in Caladin’s favor for once.

          Before Caladin started his oneiromancy spell, he looked around for some supplies. Just stealing the crown was a bad idea, so he wanted to make a replica he could replace it with just in case Brorn woke up before he could return. He spotted a small stack of silver ingots sitting on one of the lab desks. He grabbed the whole stack and stuck the extra ingots into his pocket. Silver was immensely useful when it came to making enchantments and he had a few ideas for how to use it before the night was through.

          A simple ferromancy spell shaped one of the silver ingots into a replica of Belorian’s Crown. Caladin eyed the original as a reference and made a few adjustments until it didn’t look obviously different. As long as Brorn didn’t actually try to use the crown, or examine it too closely, it had a good shot of passing as the real thing.

          Replacement crown ready, Caladin just had to cast the oneiromancy spell to get through the ward. The first step to using oneiromancy was almost always for the caster to fall asleep themselves. Caladin was already doing that thanks to his Sleep Walk spell. He settled down onto the ground just outside of Brorn’s ward and inscribed the spell Dream Walk, which would allow his dreaming self to travel into other people’s dreams. He had to make some adjustments to prevent it from interfering with the two enchantments already active on his body, but the more he did that sort of thing the easier it came to him. Preparations out of the way, Caladin triggered Dream Walk. His consciousness descended into the world of dreams.

          “Dinner’s almost ready,” Allison announced. She threw something into the large pot bubbling over the fire and went back to chopping.

          Caladin always loved Allison’s cooking. She could make simplest ingredients into something special. She didn’t even use recipes, just found a use for whatever the others brought back from their hunts or foraging. The smell coming from her cooking pot was meaty and delicious. A rare treat. Lenny must have caught another deer.

          “What are we having?” Caladin asked, coming up behind her.

          Allison’s cleaver came down on a severed hand, chopping the fingers off. She tossed the fingers into the pot. “Dead man stew!” Allison announced with a cheerful smile.

          Caladin took a step back. “No,” he said. “This is wrong.”

          “What’s the matter, Cally?” Allison turned around to face Caladin, exposing two missing eyes leaking blood from the holes they used to occupy. “I thought that’s what you asked me to make.” Caladin looked in the pot. Human body parts bubbled to the surface, Lenny’s face among them.

          “Y-you killed them!” Caladin shouted. “Why? This isn’t like you!”

          “I didn’t kill them,” Allison said. “You did. You killed them all. That’s what you do, Caladin. You kill people.” She took a step forward, then her body exploded into a shower of red gore.

          “This is wrong,” Caladin said to himself. “This is just a bad dream. I used a Dream Walking spell.” He’d been ready to ignore any nonsense he ran into in his dreamscape, but he hadn’t been prepared to find something that struck so close to home. This wasn’t what he’d come here for. He remembered the conditions to leave his dream with Dream Walk. A door. He had to find a door.

          Caladin looked around for a door of some kind. There were none. He was in the camp in the woods his family used to live at. All they had were tents. The faces of Caladin’s extended family watched Allison prepare their dinner, eyes slack and unblinking. A warrior’s cry erupted behind him. Caladin turned to see a line of eldrin soldiers in gleaming armor charging into the camp, swords flashing as they rained down death. He panicked. He had to get out of there. Could he die in his dream? Probably better not to find out, he decided. The tents! Surely the door to a tent would work for his spell. He rushed for the nearest one, just as the members of his family pulled out knives and began to saw at their own throats. Not again. Not again. He couldn’t see it all again.

          Caladin threw open the flap of the nearest tent and dived through. Beyond, it was black. If his spell was working, he should have ended up in a random nearby dream. He strained his eyes for something besides darkness to see. There. Above him. A single sliver of light filtering down from what looked like a grate in the ceiling. He was in… a jail cell? A dungeon? His eyes adjusted to the light, revealing a small naked boy curled up on the stone floor. The boy was skin and bones, with weeping sores covering the back that was facing Caladin.

          “Please. No more,” the small boy sobbed to himself, almost too quietly to be heard. Whether he was quiet out of fear or physical inability Caladin couldn’t tell.

          “I told you what would happen,” a deep voice replied from the shadows. A hooded figure loomed large, only just stepping into the edge of the light that fell on the boy. It was impossibly tall. A giant. It held out an arm obscured by a lengthy sleeve. A knife clattered to the stones before the boy, causing him to flinch. “Take it,” the rumbling voice commanded. The boy cried and sniffled, but he pushed himself into a sitting position and took the knife.

          Slowly, haltingly, he jammed it into his thigh and worked it around, crying as he did. After some clumsy sawing he pulled out a small circle of flesh and dropped it on the ground in front of him. Caladin saw then that the other puckering wounds covering his body had been made in a similar fashion. When he was done the boy dropped the knife, then hung his head.

          “You are not done yet,” the voice of the towering giant commanded. “Twenty-eight more to go.”

          “P-please!” the boy pleaded.

          “CONTINUE!” the voice roared. “If I have to do it myself because you’re too weak, I will make sure you regret it, boy!”

          The boy sniffled and picked up his knife. He was already covered in so many weeping wounds Caladin had to wonder where he’d put another twenty-eight. He wanted to step forward, to put an end to the needless cruelty. Then he remembered it was just a dream. None of it was real. Caladin couldn’t even tell whose dream he was in. In theory, he should have landed in Brorn’s dream, but that wasn’t guaranteed.

          Caladin decided to just assume he was in Brorn’s dream, even if he didn’t recognize either character. So if he was in the right place, that meant he still had to find a way to cast Sleep Walk. That required paper. He reached into his pocket. A paper scroll was waiting for him to Caladin’s pleasant surprise. He waved a hand over the paper, forming the runes for Sleep Walk. “Excit,” Caladin intoned, triggering the scroll and hoping for the best.

          Caladin opened his eyes. He was staring at a purple ward so thick he almost couldn’t see through it. He looked around and saw… himself, sleeping just on the other side of the ward. The spell had worked! He was in possession of Brorn’s body! Patting himself down, Caladin found the silver circlet of Belorian’s Crown hooked to his belt. He unhooked it and pressed it against the wards. The crown, as well as his hand, phased harmlessly through the barrier. Brorn had used a standard precaution on his ward to keep himself from becoming trapped, just like Caladin had hoped, and now he was able to exploit that vulnerability. Caladin dropped the real crown on the ground outside and swapped it for the decoy crown. When that was done he hooked the decoy crown around his belt, then lay down in precisely the same position. With any luck, Brorn would never even realize he’d been there.

          Caladin released his Sleep Walk and Dream Walk spells. They faded along with Caladin’s consciousness. A moment later, he woke back up—in his own body this time. He was still in Brorn’s lab. Brorn was still lying on the ground like a corpse. The protective ward around him was still in place. But… Belorian’s Crown had been tossed carelessly on the ground just outside Brorn’s enchanted circle. He tried to stand up and almost fell back on his face, needing to catch himself on one knee. His body was sore, eyes burning with exhaustion. What he needed was real sleep… but that would require time he didn’t have. Instead he cast another Sleep Walk on himself.

          Caladin grabbed the crown and hurried out of Brorn’s lab. He stopped by the courtyard just long enough to warn Maggie not to tell Brorn he’d been in the lab and top up his mana bars before continuing on to the study where the teleportation circle was. From there he jumped back to Brorn-Mart and was met by stacks of armor piled in his office. A zombie drone came in hauling a suit and dumped it on the pile. Half his office was filled with armor—and it was a big office! He had to step around the stuff to get to the main showroom. There, he found rows and rows of the same armor the royal guard had worn during their attack. “Hey! What’s going on here?” he called out. “There’s armor everywhere.”

          “119 suits of armor,” Lenny said. He walked up to Caladin carrying an armload of swords and wearing his own suit of armor, minus the helmet. “The shop is big, but it’s hard to store all this stuff with everything else we’ve got. They don’t stack very well. We really need to open soon so we can start selling these off.”

          “Soon,” Caladin assured Lenny. He glanced over the shelves, seeing chairs stacked to the ceiling on one end of the store, weapons displayed near the front, and the aisle nearest his office full to bursting with suits of armor. “I’m kind of in the middle of something right now. We can do the grand opening when I get back. Though… hold on, maybe there’s a way I won’t have to deal with this.” Caladin looked over the faces of the dessicated undead until he found the eldrin man he remembered interviewing weeks ago. He grabbed him from the chair-making assembly line and pressed a Repair scroll to his forehead. Golden fire burned away the rot until a clean face emerged.

          The newly restored undead looked around with his glowing green eyes, spotted one of the other undead hauling a load of helmets, and pointed at it. “W-what’s going on? Why is there a zombie over there?”

          “Don’t worry about it,” Caladin told the man. “Are you that manager, Brev something?”

          The man looked at Caladin. He blinked. “Brevisius,” he said. “Do I know you?”

          “Brevy, that was it,” Caladin said, remembering a bit from their conversation before. He managed a tailor shop in the city of Hephatius and, as Caladin recalled, was at least passively racist against humans. It was a conversation Brevy himself wouldn’t have remembered. Caladin inscribed the custom chilling spell he’d used to preserve Maggie. He still wasn’t sure what the long-term effects might be, but Maggie still seemed to be functioning just fine. He didn’t want to have to Repair this racist eldrin more than he absolutely had to. “You managed a tailor shop in Hephatius, right?” Caladin asked as he cast the spell to preserve the man’s flesh.

          “Correct,” Brevy replied. “How do you know this? Have we met before? Why are there undead servants walking around this place?”

          “Think back,” Caladin said. “What is the last thing you remember?”

          “I was sick and…” Brevy trailed off. “I hired a smuggler to take me to Necro-King Brorn…”

          “And you found him,” Caladin finished for him. “I’m not really sure what you thought Brorn was going to do for you, but I assure you he doesn’t heal the sick. He raised you as one of his servants. I’m Brorn’s apprentice and I brought you back to life. Er… kind of.”

          “You’re still dead,” Lenny supplied. He dumped his bundle of swords onto an empty spot on the shelf near Caladin. “He just fixed yer noggin’.”

          “I’m dead… but I’m also alive?” Brevy asked. Caladin nodded. “It worked then! I am immortal!”

          “Not quite,” Caladin stopped him. “You’re still dead, remember? Your body will rot away without regular maintenance. Maintenance which I can do for you… provided you do something for me.”

          “Anything! Name your price!”

          “It’s something you’re uniquely equipped to handle,” Caladin said. He gestured a hand around the hopelessly cluttered store. “I need a manager for this Brorn-Mart. Keep it running and I’ll keep you alive. You can do whatever you want with your spare time.”

          “Brorn-Mart?” Brevy repeated. “Wha… I don’t understand. I’ve never heard of such a place.”

          Caladin slapped Brevy on the shoulder. “That’s because this is the first one. Look. It’s not that complicated. Brorn is planning to open a chain of stores that will sell undead-manufactured goods at bargain prices. If this first one is profitable, more will follow. You work; we keep you alive. Who knows? Maybe if this place makes enough money Brorn might even be willing to pay you some day.”

          “I have to… work? A regular job? Are you sure you wouldn’t I rather go kill someone for you?”

          “We’re good on killing,” Caladin said. “It’s up to you. If you don’t like the deal, I’ll just leave you to slowly rot until you’re a shuffling zombie like those ones over there. You might last a few weeks.”

          “You’re going to turn me into a zombie?” Brevy asked, concern creasing the lines of his face.

          “You’re already a zombie. All I’m offering is to keep you an intelligent one. Unlife isn’t free. If you want me to use my skills to keep you functional, you’ll have to give something back. This is the best offer you’re going to get, but if you don’t like it you can walk right out that door. I won’t stop you,” Caladin lied. If the former tailor actually tried to walk away Caladin was prepared to reset his mind and try again. He didn’t have time to try to track down a better candidate for manager.

          Brevy sighed. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

          “Great!” Caladin exclaimed. “You can start by coming up with prices for everything. Right now, all we have to sell is suits of armor, a bunch of weapons and some wooden furniture. But Maggie is supposed to start delivering mana potions soon.”

          “I don’t know about furniture,” Brevy said. “But I used to sell the under garments for armor at my tailor shop, so I’m familiar with the market. Do you know if the armaments are enchanted or not?”

          “They’re queen’s guard,” Caladin said. “Or… that’s who used to own the armor, anyway. A cohort attacked the shop a couple hours ago. We had to put them down.”

          Brevy pulled his head back in shock, blinking more times than Caladin felt was necessary. “All of this… did you say queen’s guard? As in the Royal Eldesian Queen’s Guard? All of it? You—you can’t buy that! Nobody sells it. Nobody!”

          Caladin shrugged. “Well if they didn’t want their equipment entering circulation, they shouldn’t have attacked us.”

          “You killed… queen’s guard? I… I… are you criminals? How are you running a shop?”

          “Relax,” Caladin said. “We’ve got it all worked out. We’re not technically in Eldesia right now. This is a river boat. They tried to shut us down by force anyway, but after that blew up in their face, we don’t think they’re going to try it again. We’re not worth the effort when all we’re trying to do is run a business that doesn’t pay them any taxes.” He slapped a hand on a nearby chest piece. “So. What do you think we can get for the stuff? Lenny tells me we have… how many again?”

          “119 full suits,” Lenny supplied. “Some of them got bloody, but none of them were even damaged.”

          “See?” Caladin said. “119 suits of enchanted armor. What can we get for them? Brorn’s going to want to move fast on this, so it’s fine to knock the price down. We are a discount store, after all.”

          “No,” Brevy insisted. “We can’t sell it. Not at any price. It’s totally illegal! Who would even buy it from us? They’d be arrested as soon as they got outside.”

          Caladin waved off Brevy’s concerns. “Don’t worry about the law, just worry about the economics. Just slap a price on it. If it sits too long, drop it down. We have a lot of inventory we need to move. You should get this place organized so we can do our grand opening as soon as possible.”

          “How can you not be concerned about breaking Eldesian law?” Brevy demanded. “Just who do you think you are?”

          “I told you,” Caladin answered. “I am Brorn’s apprentice. Archmage Caladin.”

          “Arch… archmage?”

          “I really don’t have time for this right now,” Caladin said. He waved his hand around the shop. “Just figure out the shop stuff. Lenny and I have an important errand to run. Those undead servants should listen to you, and you can tell our carpenter, Carlos, that I left you in charge. Oh, and one more thing.” Caladin reached inside his coat and pulled out a scroll with his special homing forcebolt spell inscribed on it. “Brorn wanted me to sell this spell. I didn’t have time to make a book like he wanted, but you can try to sell some of these spell scrolls. It’s a custom spell I made that combines kinomancy and calomancy to shoot bolts of force that home in on heat sources. I don’t have a clue what a spell scroll is worth or how to translate it into something other wizards can cast. Do you?”

          “My, umm, magical talents are far from impressive,” Brevy admitted. “I might be able to estimate a price, but a one-of-a-kind spell would be difficult. You say you made this yourself? That might be good or bad for the value. I suppose it will depend on if it works.”

          “It works,” Caladin insisted. “I don’t make spell scrolls that don’t work.”

          “It’s really not my area of expertise, but I have some old contacts I could make some inquires with,” Brevy said. “But that would require a sending stone.”

          “Well you’re in luck,” Caladin said. He pulled the enchanted stone Brorn had given him out of his pocket. “I happen to have one of those on hand. Here. Borrow it as long as you need. I’m sure Brorn won’t mind as long as it results in more money for him.”

          Brevy snatched the stone out of Caladin’s hand. “Perfect!” he said cheerfully. “I will start making calls for you right away.”

          “I will need that back though,” Caladin warned.

          “Yes, yes,” Brevy said, shooing Caladin off as he clutched the stone to his ear. “I need to make a call.” Caladin almost wanted to reprimand the man, but seeing him throw himself into the business of running the store was actually a load off his shoulders. “Roedrick?” Brevy said. “You’ll never guess who this is! Brevisius!” A pause. “I know! No, no, I’m fine. Yeah! Totally cured! Now tell me what you did with those Kreetish imports of mine you never paid for.”

          Caladin directed Brevy to the manager’s office and left him to it. “Sounds like he might be a while,” he said to Lenny when he’d shut the door to the office.

          Lenny laughed. “Yeah. You might regret giving that to him.”

          “I didn’t even know you could connect to other sending stones,” Caladin admitted. “What am I supposed to do now if I need to talk to Brorn?”

          “I’m sure you can figure something out if you need to.”

          Caladin sighed. “Yeah. I guess so. Probably better I not take it with me where we’re going. I wouldn’t want him to find out I’d stolen his crown and used it to attack a Loyalist military installment against his express orders.”

          “So you got the crown?” Lenny asked. “What happened to going home to sleep? You were barely gone two hours.”

          “Technically I’m sleeping right now,” Caladin said. When Lenny gave him a curious look he just said, “Do you even need to ask? Magic, Lenny. It’s magic.”

          Lenny absentmindedly scratched his cheek. “You seem pretty good at that magic thing. Even that eldrin guy was impressed.”

          “Brevy? I don’t think impressing him is worth much,” Caladin said. “Come on. We should go now. The sooner I get this over with, the sooner I can return the crown. If I’m quick, he might still be sleeping when I get back. Otherwise I’ll have to try to swap it with the decoy I gave him. You should have seen the paranoid lengths he went to to protect this thing! I think he forgot he told me the passcode to his lab a few months ago. And… after seeing one of his dreams, let’s just say I don’t want to end up on his bad side.”

          Lenny grabbed a helmet and sword. He popped the helmet on his head and lifted the visor. “Okay, I’m ready to go,” he said. “How do I look?”

          “Intimidating,” Caladin said. “Stand still. I set an anchor near that tower we can teleport to. Let me find it again.” Caladin inscribed the vocomancy spell Find Anchor. He felt several anchors nearby, but only one in the direction of the Setsyan border. He faced the correct direction and released the spell.

          Pop.

          Caladin and Lenny appeared in the buried remains of their old camp. There were still buried bodies nearby and Caladin once again made a promise to himself to come back for them when he had extra time and mana. His time with Belorian’s Crown was limited.

          “So, what’s the plan?” Lenny asked.

          “The plan is I walk up to that wizard tower of theirs and show them what this crown can do,” Caladin said. “But before I do, I had an idea for what to do about their ability to call in reinforcements.”

          “What’s that?”

          Caladin smiled. “Turn them inside out,” he said. He pulled two silver ingots out of his pocket and dropped them on the ground. “I accidentally disrupted the teleportation circle in Jakarta,” he explained. “That was easy enough. It was old and only made of copper. This will be a military grade teleportation circle. Probably hardened steel with a silver core. It won’t be easy, but I bet if I really put my mind to it, disrupting a teleportation circle on purpose will be easy.”

          “So no reinforcements?” Lenny asked.

          “That’s the idea,” Caladin confirmed. He got to worked with a ferromancy spell to reshape the silver. He formed a circle and the basic runes, then added in the security measure that would turn anyone who used the circle inside out. For coordinates, he didn’t even bother entering any. No restrictions. His circle would attempt to connect to any network it could reach and turn everything that passed through it inside out. Once the circle was complete, he lifted it off the ground and handed the hoop to Lenny. “Here,” he said.

          “You want me to take it? What even is this?”

          “It’s a teleportation circle,” Caladin said. “They’re made of metal and usually embedded in the ground. Just be careful not to bend any of the runes when you’re holding it. I need you to drop it somewhere on the far side of that wizard tower. Philipus Haedril’s forces are coming from somewhere to the West. If this circle is between the tower and the reinforcements, the effect will be that much stronger. Just make sure you aren’t spotted.”

          “What are you going to do?” Lenny asked.

          “I’m going to figure out how to use Belorian’s Crown,” Caladin said.

          Lenny frowned. “Good luck.”

          “Thanks,” Caladin replied. “You too. If this works, we should have the survivors from our family safely back at Brorn-Mart by the end of the night.” Caladin didn’t actually think that was anything more than an outside possibility, but it was nice to have hope. The truth was, with the eight bodies buried under their old campsite there was a good chance that there wasn’t more than a handful of survivors left… if they could even find them.

          Lenny lowered his visor and dashed away into the woods; the hoop of silver held carefully before him. Caladin pulled out Belorian’s Crown. He was apprehensive about putting it on. Brorn had said that the crown was infected with Belorian’s will. Sure, Brorn had been able to wear the crown just fine, but right before he put it on, he worried that might have only been because Brorn’s willpower was so much stronger than his own. It was a silly fear, he decided. Brorn spent most of his days sipping brandy and micro-managing his kitchen staff. How much willpower could he really have? Caladin settled the crown on his forehead.

          Kill them! Caladin thought. Kill them all, make them suffer! They killed your family. They deserve to die!

          Caladin was surprised by what he felt. He wasn’t being controlled by anyone else, it was his own thoughts. The tiny part of him that wanted bloody revenge against Haedril for what happened to him had just become the loudest voice in his head. He resisted the impulse to start marching towards that wizard tower right away, which was surprisingly difficult to do. Why did he even want to resist killing those responsible for killing his family? They deserved to feel what it was like to lose everyone they cared about. They deserved—

          Caladin had to take a moment to calm himself. He took a few deep breaths, doing his best to clear his mind of cluttered thoughts. He let his rational mind reassert itself. The last time he’d let himself use magic in anger, he reminded himself, he’d ended up killing people on both sides with a suicide compulsion. He couldn’t just run off. He had to wait until he understood how the crown’s power worked first.

          Nothing. He felt nothing. Lunamancy was the magic of nothing. Of the void. Some people thought lunamancy was darkness magic, but that was so far from the truth of things. Caladin could see that now. It was the gap between, the missing pieces of the puzzle, the lack. It was the power to destroy, to unmake. The power to command the empty spaces in things to take over. He could destroy anything. Unmake anything. Even magic itself. He picked a pinecone off the ground to test himself on. To guide his magic, Caladin focused his animosity, his hatred, his murderous intent. He focused on how much he hated that pinecone.

          Darkness reached up from Caladin’s hand and swallowed the pinecone. When it receded, nothing was left behind. That was his answer: focus on the things he hated and he could erase them from the world with a thought.

          Lenny and that trapped circle were probably in position, Caladin decided. There was no reason he needed to wait any longer. There was a tower full of Loyalist soldiers just waiting to die. Caladin started walking in the direction of the tower. As he went, he bathed himself in void magic. A single layer of its darkness would protect him from any attack. In fact, Caladin realized he could even be selective about which things his darkness destroyed.

          Instant death was not a mercy Caladin planned to give to anyone that stood before him. Why kill when he could erase a piece of their neck and leave them paralyzed? Why kill when he could drag their death out and ensure they suffered the whole time? They had killed his family, and Caladin demanded justice!

          The wizard tower came into Caladin’s view as he followed his old trail. He didn’t bother trying to be sneaky. Let them see him coming and know there was nothing they can do to stop him. He emerged from the tree and continued forward at a leisurely pace. A horn blast of warning sounded at his approach. Caladin didn’t adjust his pace at all. The first attack to be thrown at him was a bolt of lightning. It should have burned a hole in his chest, but instead it was absorbed by the veil of darkness surrounding Caladin. The lightning kept crackling in a continuous stream, so Caladin sent a tendril of darkness forward towards the source of the attack. The tendril burrowed a hole in the tower’s wards, then erased the attacker from existence.

          Yes! They were ants! They would fall before him! Caladin pulled a cloud of darkness from the ground around him and sent it to crash against the wizard tower like an ocean wave. The wards fizzled out. Caladin focused his darkness into a ball and punched it through the front gate. A burst of flames responded from a wizard inside, a last resistance before the darkness took him. Caladin’s magic found three more living bodies inside the tower. He erased tiny pieces of them, leaving them to suffer and choke on the ground. It was what they deserved. What they all deserved.

          Stepping through the perfect hole his magic had created, Caladin entered the wizard tower to see the result of his work. Three wizards in full combat armor were laid out on the ground around the mana well. All that mana, and it hadn’t saved them.

          He could still hear them choking. Puncture wounds in the neck of their armor showed where Caladin’s magic had snaked in to permanently disable them. “Suffer,” Caladin told them. “Suffer and die. It’s no less than you deserve for serving a murderer.”

          Just next to the mana well was the teleportation circle that had been Caladin’s target for this mission. A pop of displaced air sounded and a twisted, bloody corpse appeared, standing briefly before collapsing to the ground in a wet squelch. That meant his vocomancy trap was working. He was no longer sure why he had bothered with such a precaution. Reinforcement wouldn’t have been any threat to him. The trap was just depriving him of more deaths. That was no good. He would need to go after them himself now.

          Caladin studied the enemy’s teleportation circle. He had to assume there would be similar security measure on the circle connected to Philipus Haedril’s inner sanctum. When he saw where the trap had been laid—such a simple one—he reached out with his lunamancy and erased it. No lithomancy necessary. Lithomancy was a weak, useless magic anyways. Caladin had no use for it anymore. He stood in the center of the circle and triggered its release, using the passcode for his vocomancy trap so he wouldn’t be turned inside out himself.

          Pop.

          Caladin appeared in the center of a courtyard, surrounded by soldiers.

          “The enemy!” someone shouted.

          A horn blast sounded. “We’re under attack! Protect the king!”

          “For King Haedril!”

          Caladin couldn’t help himself. He threw back his head and cackled in delight. There were so many of them! Now he wouldn’t have to go hunting them all down.

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