by nobody103
Gurey once told a story about a costumer who tried to buy the decorative potted plants he strategically placed around the shop to liven up the place, and while Zorian understood Gurey's mirth at the incident, he also understood how someone might have decided they were for sale. With all the other things Gurey was selling, it really wouldn't have surprised Zorian to find out that he dealt in potted plants as well.
"Ah, Zorian, my friend…" said Gurey, walking out from the back and approaching him. "Did you read it? An interesting book, isn't it?" he prodded.
"It was… somewhat useful," said Zorian noncommittally. "Not much on its own, but if there really are a couple more where that came from, it might actually be worthwhile for me to work with you on your… problem."
Gurey frowned, apparently expecting him to be more impressed with his partner's work. He opened his mouth to speak, but Zorian interrupted him.
"Before we discuss this any further, I'd prefer if we move to somewhere more private. Do you have a room I could set up some basic privacy wards in?"
"I have better," Gurey said smugly, quickly shaking off his previous disappointment. "I have a room with privacy wards already present… and not just the basic ones, either. Follow me."
He led Zorian to a small, inconspicuous room with a single desk and two chairs… a room whose walls, floor and ceiling were full of magical glyphs and geometric shapes made out of crystalized mana. Gurey placed his hand on one of the circles and the whole complicated spell formula pulsed twice in bright blue light before becoming seemingly inert. Zorian wasn't fooled though – those pulses signified the more mana-intensive portions of the ward scheme becoming active. Much like many powerful warding schemes, the one he was looking at had two modes – the normal, mana-conserving one that could be powered indefinitely from its mana source and the advanced, super-charged one that burned through mana faster than the ambient mana levels could provide it with but was far more effective for the time it was active.
The sound of Gurey clearing his throat jolted him out of his thoughts and he realized he had been studying the wards for quite a while now. Oops.
"Is this one also 'somewhat useful'?" asked Gurey with a smirk when he realized he had Zorian's attention again.
"No, this is quite impressive," Zorian admitted. "Is this also made by your former partner?"
"Yes," Gurey nodded. "He was quite good at this. Setting up wards, I mean. Also breaking and bypassing them, but I understand those two are related. Learn how to make a ward and you're 90% there to figuring out how to defeat it."
"That's the conventional wisdom, yes," agreed Zorian. He decided not to dance around the issue any longer. "So… I'm guessing your former partner was your go-to person for these kinds of deals in the past, and now that he's dead, you need to find someone else to do your dirty work."
"My, you're direct," Gurey laughed nervously. "But you've hit the nail on the head, more or less. You see… magic was never my thing, as strange as that may sound from an owner of a magic shop. That was always Aldwin's thing – he was the one that worried about the spellcasting part of the business while I was always more comfortable on the more mundane, civilian side of things. Making contacts, closing deals, finding new business partners, that kind of thing. I'm a really terrible mage when it comes down to it. I can barely cast anything at all."
Zorian gave him a curious look. "I'm pretty sure I saw you manipulate mana plenty of times, and activating the greater privacy mode of this room couldn't have possibly been a matter of just channeling mana into that circle."
"Oh, I was always very good at using magic items," Gurey said. "You don't need to be a proper mage to do that. Lots of practice and some specialized shaping exercises and you're set. If you're fairly wealthy like me and live on a mana well, you can even commission items that draw power from the ambient mana instead of from my own miniscule reserves… but we both know there are severe drawbacks to such items, and this sort of job really needs a proper spellcaster."
Zorian nodded. He had been considering the possibility of using 'self-casting' magic items to make up for his below-average mana reserves for a while now, but there were a lot of problems with it. The core, inescapable issue was that souls of spellcasters were pretty damn good at spellcasting, while even the best-made magic items… weren't. Making an item that allowed the caster to skip some of the steps during spellcasting was simple enough, but creating something that was capable of casting a spell entirely on its own upon command? Hard. Possibly very hard, or even impossible, depending on what spell you were trying to imprint into the item. Warding schemes and one-use magic items like his suicide explosive cubes got around the issue by having the maker cast the spell during creation, after which the spell formula simply stabilized it and kept it from degrading, but that workaround wasn't very useful for the majority of spells.
And then there was the issue of powering said items. Not every place had much in the way of ambient mana, and even places that did often couldn't provide the amount necessary for the spell at once. That meant that most self-casting items needed an internal mana battery, which brought a whole host of problems on its own. No battery was totally efficient and reliable – they all leaked mana in varying amounts, and could easily blow up if overcharged or poorly constructed. And that was without even getting into the number of actual combat spells that were specifically designed to make mana batteries blow up from internal pressure.
All in all, the creation of self-casting items was something that Zorian put squarely into the 'probably not worth it' category. He wasn't nearly good enough with spell formula currently to pull it off, and even if he were, it was still a very difficult sub-field of magic item creation that gave very dubious gains. Though he did eventually intend to track down a blueprint for a blasting rod – probably the simplest of self-casting items that blasted whatever it was pointed at with a torrent of barely-constrained energy, usually fire. A fittingly named item, and one of the few self-casting items that was known to be reliable and effective in actual combat, at least at close range. It was not a priority, however – such an item would be more of a last resort, side-arm sort of weapon than something to build his skills around.
"I'm not as useless at this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff as you might think, though," Gurey said. "As I said, Aldwin was the spellcaster, but I was the one who identified the targets. You can't spy on a threat unless you know they are a threat, after all. And I was always very good at spotting who our competition was and keeping an eye on their activities. People underestimate how much information you can get simply by being well connected and giving a few expensive gifts to people."
"You mean bribes," said Zorian.
"Zorian, my friend, you have much to learn," Gurey said, shaking his head. "Bribes are illegal. There is no law against generosity. Giving that bottle of expensive wine to your drinking buddy or inviting someone to that fancy annual dance that they've always wanted to attend is just being nice and no one can prove otherwise."
"Right," Zorian sighed. "I guess I shouldn't talk, since I'm willing to go along with your plans. And speaking of which, why don't we get back to the reason we're here in the first place. What exactly do you want from me and what are you offering?"
"Very well. I presume you know about Vazen's General Store?"
"The biggest magic-related shop in town?" asked Zorian.
"That one, yes. Cwili and Rofoltin Equipment was once bigger and able to compete with them on a more equal footing, but since the death of my partner two years ago those days have passed. Recently they have closed a deal with another company from Cyoria, but they have been silent about the contents of the deal. Everyone knows they have bought a bunch of spell formula schematics, alchemical recipes and production licenses, so it's obvious they intend to seriously branch out into the production side of the business, but the exact details have been successfully kept secret. That is a problem. Depending on what Vazen intends to produce, some things are going to decline sharply in va
lue, while the price of the raw materials used to make them goes up to a similar degree."
"I see. You need to see what your rival will release so that you can prepare for the impact it will have on the market," mused Zorian.
"Well, that and so that I can see if it is possible to counter his move in some fashion," Gurey said.
"I suppose you know where I can find that information?" Zorian asked. "Not in the shop itself, I hope. That place is bound to be heavily warded."
"It's not nearly as warded as you might think – some basic counters to stop teleportation and divination, and that's about it. But the place is always manned, even during the night, so you're right they're not something you'd want to tangle with. Fortunately, you don't have to. In the end, Vazen's own paranoia is his undoing – I have found out that instead of keeping the documents in his heavily guarded shop, he has brought them into his much less protected home. Apparently he doesn't even trust his own employees."
"How protected is his home?" asked Zorian.
"Well, my information might be a little outdated since I got it two and a half years ago, from my then-living partner who scouted the entire building, but I doubt much has changed. It has an anti-divination ward and all the doors and windows have intruder alarms and that's it. The documents themselves are kept in a safe, though, and that is bound to have much more serious defenses."
"Not too bad of a setup, to be honest," Zorian said after thinking about it for a minute. "The divination ward stops casual espionage and makes it impossible to just scry-and-teleport inside, while the alarms on entrances make it impossible to simply sneak in inside without magic."
Covering only the entrances with the wards was a common mana-conserving measure. True, it made the wards useless if the attackers could phase through walls or were willing to make their own entrance by blowing a hole in the building, but thieves capable of phasing through solid matter had bigger targets to fry than robbing small-time shop owners and blasting holes in the walls would kind of defeat the point of trying to acquire the information undetected.
"You can teleport, though, right?" asked Gurey. "I mean, I'm sure you can – the speed of movement over large distances that you've demonstrated pretty much requires it – but how good at you at it?"
"I can teleport," Zorian said hesitantly. He didn't think he was making it that obvious, though he supposed he couldn't keep leaving in the morning and coming back before the sun set with things only found deep in the forest before someone questioned just how he was doing it. "I'm getting pretty good at it, in my opinion. It takes me a while to shape the spell, but I can consistently pull it off."
"Excellent. The intruder alarms shouldn't be much of a problem, then," Gurey said with a grin. "Aldwin had this neat trick where he could turn an item into a teleport beacon of sorts, and then simply teleport himself to its location without having to have been there in the past. I'm sure I can get some innocuous-seeming thing through the door, you just have to cast the spell on it. I don't know how to cast the spell myself, but Aldwin did write it down in one of his journals…"
"Spell you say? No spell formula involved?" asked Zorian curiously.
"No. 'Spell of recall', I think it's called. It's a two-part spell – you first cast a personal teleport beacon on an item, and it immediately forges a connection between you and it. You can then cast the second spell at any time, causing youself to be 'recalled' at the location of the item. According to Aldwin, it was meant to be used for rapid escape – you cast the first spell on a retreat point and then use the second spell to teleport there if you end up in a bind."
"Why not use a regular teleport for that?" frowned Zorian. "Sounds like a lot of trouble when a normal teleport will suffice. After all, you've already been to the location you're teleporting to if you're setting it up as a retreat point."
"I really don't know. You will have to find that out yourself if you're interested," Gurey said.
"Hm. So assuming this spell works as advertised and you can smuggle something in like you said you would, I 'just' have to defeat the protection on the safe to get to the documents."
"Yes. That part will be all you, since I have no idea where it is or what protections it has," confirmed Gurey.
Zorian stared at the man for a while before taking a deep breath.
"Lovely. Unfortunately for you, I am not the professional ward breaker you seem to think I am," he told Gurey. "When you said you wanted my help with this, I had thought I would just play support or something. Something like this is, to put it bluntly, out of my league. I'm sorry, but unless there is something you're not telling me, there is no way I'd be able to pull this off."
Gurey leaned forward and gave him a conspiratorial grin. "Even if I gave you Aldwin's spellbook and his notes on how the spells are meant to be used?"
Zorian blinked. "What?"
Two hours later, Zorian left Gurey's shop with three new books under his arm. They had agreed to make the attempt at the documents three days before the summer festival, ostensibly to give Zorian the time he needed to practice the spells in Aldwin's spellbook but also because that way, should the whole thing go pear-shaped, Zorian would only lose three days of the restart.
Zorian hummed to himself in satisfaction as he walked back to the inn. It was nice to catch some windfall from time to time. After the whole annoyance with Silverlake and the mysterious disappearance of soul magic practitioners, he had begun to think that this whole restart had been a giant waste of time. Now… well, at least he'd gotten some shiny new spells out of it, ones of the sort that he could have never acquired through any legal avenue.
Things were looking up.
✦ ✧ ✦
After his talk with Gurey, time passed quickly. It was difficult to practice the spells found in Aldwin's spellbook, as most of them only interacted with wards and required an actual warding scheme as a target. Thankfully, Zorian had managed to find a warded house whose owner had left on a trip, allowing Zorian to practice on it to his heart's content, provided he kept out of sight of the main road. He also occasionally warded objects himself for practice purposes, usually when practicing the more destructive spells, but that just wasn't the same as interacting with an unknown ward.
Surprisingly, Gurey was also willing to have Zorian practice the spells on his shop's warding scheme, so long as he didn't do anything permanent. Zorian wondered about that. All things considered, Gurey was being far too accommodating to him. He suspected that the portly man thought of him as an investment and hoped to turn him into a more long-term asset, and as such was rather more generous to Zorian than he otherwise would have been, but he had no way to be sure. There did not seem to be anything malicious about it, so he mostly ignored it and tried to be simply grateful for his good fortune.
There were essentially three ways of dealing with wards. The first one was to starve the ward out, depriving it of mana until it simply fell apart. The second was to identify a way to disrupt its structure, causing it to fail on the spot. And finally, the third one was to trick it into not activating in the first place. 'Siphoning', 'breaking' and 'bypassing' were the terms used in literature for the three methods. Each one had its advantages and disadvantages, but for the task Gurey entrusted him, he would have to rely on bypassing the wards on the safe.
Siphoning had the advantage that it always worked – every ward could be siphoned to death with enough time and effort, it was just a question if the attacker was willing to devote the necessary resources for the task. Some wards could last for months after being isolated from their power sources, even when actively drained of mana during the isolation. Unfortunately, it required that the attacker have complete control of the area around the ward, as siphoning operations were difficult to setup and maintain – anything less than total control made it too easy for the defender to wreck the setup. It was mostly used for sieges and bringing down legacy wards that had outlived their usefulness.
Breaking was the fastest method of neutralizing ward
s – just disrupt the structure of the ward and let it collapse on itself. Unfortunately, many wards collapsed explosively or had other unpleasant side effects if simply broken, often resulting in the destruction of the warded thing and sometimes the one doing the breaking as well. A lot of wards were also simply too powerful to be broken by a single mage, or even a group of mages, unless the attacker has identified a particularly glaring weakness. So all in all, breaking a ward was often not possible, and, even more often, not desirable even if the possibility existed. Still, if one wanted to get rid of a ward quickly and had power to spare, breaking the ward was the way to go.
Finally, there was bypassing the wards –the preferred way of dealing with them, if at all possible. If the attacker knew how the ward functioned, either because he had been given access to the schematics of the warding scheme or because he had analyzed its structure via divination spells, they could take care not to activate any of the triggers that made the ward recognize there was a problem to be countered. Depending on how the ward functioned, it might even be possible to put additional layers on top of it to neutralize it completely. If an attacker wanted to keep their intrusion secret, bypassing the wards was a must, as it was the only method that left the wards intact after they were done.
Since the idea was to leave no trace of his home invasion, he obviously couldn't break or siphon the wards on the safe – he had to trick his way past them and leave them intact. There were lots of ways to do that in the books Gurey had given him, since Aldwin was primarily interested in that sort of solution to the wards himself, but until Zorian took an actual look at the safe he couldn't tell which ones he should use. So he settled on simply practicing all of them.
As the date of the summer festival approached, Zorian decided to visit Vani one more time to see if the man had any news on the missing soul mages. He didn't, though he admitted he hadn't tried to find out anything about that very hard. It was a matter for law enforcement, Vani had claimed, and getting involved would just paint them as suspects. He was probably right, and Zorian knew there was no point in snooping around now that the case was being investigated by the police, but he definitely intended to launch a personal investigation in future restarts to see what was going on there.