Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  "Well yes, but that would require you to be right beside me and serve as a willing focus of the spell. A tracking spell that requires you to be right next to the target is functionally useless, wouldn't you think?" He suddenly gave Zorian a shrewd look. "But what you're really wondering about is not you tracking down the person whose soul fragment gave you the marker, but them tracking you, aren't you mister Kazinski?"

  "Call me Zorian," he said. If the man wanted Zorian to be casual with him, he should show the same courtesy. "And yes, that is basically what I'm worried about. How easy would it be for another holder of the marker to track me down?"

  Alanic quickly walked over to a nearby bookshelf, plucked a plain brown book from its shelf and handed it to Zorian.

  "The spell you want is on page 43," Alanic told him.

  Zorian quickly leafed through the book until he reached the indicated page. The spell in question was not an invocation, but rather a 10-minute ritual. It allowed the caster to locate a specified marker based on the copy of the marker in the caster's possession, and it had a downright jaw-dropping range. If Zorian was reading this correctly, it could locate any and all copies of the marker over a circular area that extended well beyond Eldemar's borders!

  Yeah, it was not cheap in terms of mana use – it required enough mana that Zorian wouldn't have been able to cast it at all before the time loop, and even now, after 3 years of restarts, it would take a sizeable chunk of his reserves. But still, for a nation-wide search spell it was shockingly accessible. He supposed its very narrow search focus allowed it to be hyper-efficient about mana use. Really, the only possible deal breaker was that the spell assumed the caster had a keystone imprinted with the copy of the marker, and would have to be slightly modified to switch the reference target of the spell from a stone held in the caster's hand to a marker stamped on their soul.

  Zorian sincerely doubted Red Robe was incapable of making such minor alterations to spells, though.

  "I could be tracked from one end of the country to another," Zorian mumbled disbelievingly to himself.

  "Yes," Alanic agreed. "Possibly even further. I don't claim to have comprehensive knowledge of tracking spells so there may be a version with even greater range. Your insistence that the marker must stay on was quite surprising. I hope you have a good reason for leaving a giant target painted on your soul."

  "Ugh. I'm not happy about the situation, but I do. I really, really do. I'd also like to cast this tracking spell myself to see how many other people turn up in results, but we can deal with that tomorrow. I've already kept you from your interrogation long enough."

  "Unfortunately, I seem to have ran out of truth potions," the priest said unhappily, throwing a glare at his potion cabinet. "Annoying. You can't buy those on the open market and it takes days for Lukav to make a batch. It seems I won't be interrogating anyone today…"

  Oh. He agreed with Alanic, that really was annoying – he wanted to know who the guy was working for just as much as the priest did. He thought about offering his services as a mind reader to the priest but quickly shelved that idea. Aside from the very likely possibility he would make Alanic too suspicious of Zorian to help him with his soul magic problems, there was the fact that he wasn't sure how much help he would be anyway. His mind reading skills were still very unreliable at this point. He'd feel pretty stupid if he outed himself as a mind mage and then failed to achieve anything of note – better try that in some later restart, after he gave his telepathic abilities some polish.

  "No matter. I will figure something out. I'm afraid I'll have to postpone our meeting for a day or two because of this, though. I'll send a message through Lukav once I have sorted my business in order. Agreeable?"

  "Sure," Zorian shrugged. "Just don't die before we meet again. Whoever wants you and Lukav dead can clearly throw a lot of resources at the problem so they're unlikely to stop now."

  "The same goes for you, young man," Alanic scoffed. "You seem to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. Suspicious, that. If I were in the attacker's place, I would definitely make sure to get rid of you before trying again. And no offense, but you look like a much softer target than me."

  Not having much to say to that, Zorian simply bid the man goodbye, had a brief conversation with Lukav outside the room to inform him of everything and then went back to his room at the inn. He would sleep on things before making any decisions.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  With the next several days freed up for his own activities, Zorian decided to go visit Silverlake and see if the capricious old witch was in better mood to help this time. The trouble was, he could no longer find her cottage. His memory was extremely good, and he remembered exactly where it was in relation to surrounding natural landmarks, but when he physically got to the location there was nothing there. No cottage, no witch, no nothing. As far as Zorian could tell, it wasn't an illusion and there was no ward in place messing with his mind to stop him from noticing it – he detected no mental tampering, his area-wide dispels revealed no optical flickering, and he physically passed through the area that the cottage stood on in the previous restart and met no resistance whatsoever.

  How the hell did she do that? Dimensional shenanigans, maybe? Like a pocket dimension that can intersect with reality under some circumstance or something?

  Whatever the exact mechanics, he clearly wasn't going to reach Silverlake's place without her inviting him first. Considering the last time it took him several days of wandering around and almost dying to get her attention, he decided to not bother with that and find something else to do.

  Namely, investigating the rest of the disappeared soul mages. While it was true that Alanic seemed to be his best clue at the moment, it wouldn't hurt to check the other locations as well. Thus, while waiting for Alanic to contact him again, Zorian proceeded to break into the homes of each of his targets before combing through them with every divination spell in his arsenal. The knowledge he picked up from Gurey's little escapade was quite useful here, as a number of those homes were warded against entry and divinations, and that would have given him quite a bit of trouble in the past.

  What he found out wasn't much, but it did put at least one question to rest – the attackers had indeed been active long before the time loop started. Two of the houses showed signs of a struggle, and forensic spells dated those signs about a month to a month and a half before the start of the time loop. In addition, the house of the old curse-breaking herbalist lady looked pristine on first glance, but Zorian easily detected evidence of repair magic used on furniture and sloppily erased blood splatter on the walls – both dated 3 days before the start of the loop.

  Zorian silently thanked Haslush for his divination instructions – without them, he would have never been able to tell such things with any degree of certainty.

  He also made sure to search the houses for anything personally interesting while he was at it, and here he had greater success. The herbalist lady had intact notes about her curse-breaking side-business – Zorian pocketed those, even if he wasn't able to make use of them at the moment. She also had a pretty extensive journal that listed where to find rare plants in the nearby forest as well as detailed some of her rare recipes. Zorian left that alone for now, but made a mental note to show it to Kael at some point and see if it was worth something. The ransacked tower turned out to have been imperfectly ransacked, and Zorian managed to find two different secret compartments that the attackers missed. One held a trio of high-quality combat staffs and a stack of blasting rods. The other held a bunch of spellbooks containing combat spells – specifically, the sort of combat spells you couldn't buy legally anywhere because they were far too effective and lethal for the Mage Guild's tastes. Naturally, Zorian swiped all of it for his personal use. He found more interesting stuff in other houses, but nothing he felt like taking at the moment. The familiar-obsessed guy, for instance, had mountains and mountains of books and journals dedicated to soul bonds, magical
creatures, and familiar-related magics. It was interesting, but not something he needed at the moment.

  In the end it was five days before Alanic finally contacted Zorian again. If Lukav didn't insist that his friend was alive and well, just unusually occupied with something, Zorian would have feared the attackers got him.

  Regardless, Zorian soon found himself seated in front of Alanic, ready to finally discuss things.

  "I apologize for the wait," Alanic said. "I'm afraid that the confessions I managed to force out of the prisoner had far more far-reaching consequences that I had initially suspected."

  "Oh? I don't suppose you could tell me what those are?" asked Zorian.

  "I'm afraid not. It's not something you should concern yourself with," Alanic said, leveling him a mild glare.

  "Fine, fine, I get it," Zorian said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. Truthfully, it did not matter much because he already knew what Alanic had found out. While the priest seemed to have some sort of natural mental defense, his friend Lukav didn't. Zorian had simply pestered the transformation expert about the prisoner and read the man's thoughts wherever he refused to answer.

  Basically, the mage Zorian incapacitated was hired by none other than Vazen – the man who Gurey wanted him to rob (well, spy on) in the previous restart. Worse, the man appeared to be just an underling himself, with the real ringleader being someone more highly placed in the local hierarchy. Someone capable of interfering with the police and guild investigations.

  It was certainly an interesting piece of information, and Zorian had some suspicions of his own about Vazen now. The man had concluded some kind of deal with a company in Cyoria, so it was entirely possible he was connected to the invaders somehow. He had intended to have another go at those documents anyway, but now they acquired a whole new importance.

  "Good," Alanic nodded. "What did you want to start with?"

  "Well, first of all I'd like to know if you could help me defend myself against soul magic in the future," said Zorian.

  "Why wouldn't I be able to help you with that?" asked Alanic curiously, cocking his head to the side slightly.

  "I was told that spellcasters without some measure of soul perception can only cast the most rudimentary of soul magic," said Zorian. And from his attempts to duplicate Kael's spells, he knew that to be largely true – the only spell he managed to learn from Kael was the one that cloaked him from the soul perception of other necromancers, and Kael claimed that was baby stuff.

  "Ah. You've been talking to a necromancer, I see," Alanic said.

  Zorian winced. "It… seemed like a logical course of action. I had a soul magic problem, and he was a soul mage."

  "Hmph. Necromancers," began Alanic, taking pains to stress the word, "have a habit of targeting others with their spells, so of course they consider soul perception to be absolutely essential for their craft. If you just want to cloak your soul in some protective effect, it is hardly necessary to go to such lengths."

  Oh, is that why he could cast Kael's soul sight invisibility spell but not the rest of his arsenal?

  "Even for other things, it is possible to use lengthy rituals to get around that requirement. I believe you've already experienced an example of such a ritual when Lukav tried to determine what is wrong with you. Don't be fooled by his lack of skill – Lukav is but a dabbler in this branch of magic, and if you dedicate yourself to the discipline you could end up much more impressive than he is."

  "But I'm never going to progress beyond unwieldy ritual setups without soul sight, am I?" guessed Zorian.

  Alanic sighed. "Yes. But soul sight is too much of a temptation. It makes soul magic too easy. For the sake of your immortal soul, I implore you to turn away from that path. It is not necessary to go that far just to protect yourself."

  "I see," said Zorian. "Out of curiosity, do you have soul perception?"

  For the first time since Zorian met him, Alanic looked uncomfortable. "Yes. But that's… different."

  'Of course it is,' Zorian thought. 'Do as I say, not as I do, just like it always was.'

  But he didn't say that. Instead he asked Alanic what exactly he was willing to teach him.

  "There are two ways I can see this going," said Alanic, quickly regaining his composure. "Option one is that I teach you how to perform a plethora of protective rituals to foil hostile soul magic. They are, as you say, cumbersome – casting times can be up to 2 hours long in some cases, and setting up a ritual isn't easy. They last a long time, though. Weeks if you perform them correctly. The advantage of this path is that you get a way to defend yourself right away – I'm fairly certain you could do the beginning rituals as you are now. Also, some of the rituals will allow you to affect souls other than yours, though none of the rituals I'm willing to teach you can be used on an unwilling target."

  "And the disadvantage is that if I'm ever caught unaware by the enemy, I'm screwed because there's no way to shield myself on a moment's notice," finished Zorian.

  "Exactly. That's where option number two comes in. With the help of some meditation exercises and special potions, I can teach you how to 'feel' your own soul. If you hone the skill to a required level, this skill will allow you to cast any soul magic that has you as its target. You'll be able to shield and analyze your soul with invocation spells, and it might even allow you to passively notice when someone is messing with your soul in some fashion."

  "I like that option," Zorian said.

  "I figured you might," Alanic scoffed. "The problem is that this option isn't some quick power up. It will take you months to reach useable levels in this skill, and that's assuming you have the patience and willpower required to perform the exercises every single day for months on end."

  "I do," said Zorian curtly.

  "We'll see. I should also mention that until you master the skill of sensing your own soul, this option will leave you just as helpless to soul magic as you are currently."

  "Yeah, that's a little dangerous," Zorian admitted. Still, the second option sounded way more useful and functional than the first one. Maybe if he wasn't stuck in the time loop he would blanch at the idea of spending months of his life like that, but right now it was looking like a bargain. "I suppose there is a reason why I can't learn both at the same time?"

  "They're both demanding skills in their own way, and I don't trust you to be capable of juggling them both effectively," Alanic said, his tone brooking no disagreement.

  "Fair enough," Zorian said. He was going to visit the man in future restart anyway, so he could potentially just pick different options on different restarts. "How about this: you teach me the very basics of the soul rituals, the things I can pick up well enough as I am now, and then we immediately switch to the personal soul awareness project."

  "I suppose I can live with that. You should note that the basics of soul rituals won't do much for you," Alanic noted.

  "That's fine. I'm mostly interested in option number two anyway. The reason I want the basics of soul rituals is because I still want to cast that marker tracking ritual you showed me, and modifying it to work with the thing attached to my soul is probably going to require some working knowledge of soul magic."

  "Probably," Alanic agreed.

  "Well. Now we come to the 'make it or break it' question," Zorian sighed, fixing a weary gaze at Alanic. "What exactly are you asking of me in exchange for all this?"

  Alanic rolled his eyes. "Don't be so dramatic, boy. Teaching people how to defend themselves against necromancers and hostile spirits is a part of my calling, as far as I'm concerned. I'd take a whole class to teach if people were actually interested. Unfortunately, such threats are considered something of a minor issue in the aftermath of the Necromancer's War. So while yes, I do intend to send you on an errand or two, it isn't going to be anything too onerous. Lukav tells me you can teleport?"

  "I can, yes."

  "Excellent. I was thinking of sending you out as a courier from time to time to some of my more dista
nt contacts. Nothing difficult or dangerous – just delivering some letters and packages for free."

  Half an hour later, Zorian had managed to hammer out some kind of agreement with Alanic.

  Overall, Zorian felt the priest had been quite generous in his terms – his principal demand was that Zorian had to show dedication, or else Alanic would unceremoniously terminate the lessons and kick him out. Specifically, he had to show up at the temple every evening like clockwork, and show 'diligence and enthusiasm' for the lessons. Right. Oh, and there was the whole business with him being a courier from the priest on occasion, which was of little concern to Zorian – he thought of it as teleportation practice more than anything.

  "Well then," Alanic said, leaning back in his chair. "Now that this is all done, we can being with our first lesson."

  "What, now?" Zorian asked in surprise.

  "Is there a reason to postpone things?"

  "No, no, I'm just surprised. Most of my previous teachers have been… well, no matter. What are we starting with?"

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Over the next two weeks Zorian continued studying the other disappearances while attending Alanic's lessons. He absorbed the basics of soul protection rituals in a few days and then moved onto the meditation exercises needed for personal soul sight, only to find out two things. First, the meditation exercises were incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. No wonder the man was worried about Zorian's dedication, he could easily imagine someone dropping that after only a few days. But no, Zorian was stronger than that… and besides, he really needed that skill.

  Secondly, those 'special potions' Alanic mentioned? What the priest hadn't clarified at the time – and indeed, hadn't explained before Zorian actually drank one – was that they were extremely powerful hallucinogens. Almost immediately after downing one, Zorian was assaulted with a cacophony of strange, incomprehensible sights and smells, sounds become distorted and unrecognizable, and his thoughts degenerated into a chaotic mess. It was a profoundly unpleasant experience, and once Zorian finally came to his senses and stopped drooling all over the floor of the temple (the jerk could have at least put a pillow under him!) he felt a powerful desire to punch Alanic in the face. The man had effectively drugged him helpless and was completely unrepentant about it too, claiming that without the help of those potions the entire process could take years. He would have to drink one of those once a week, apparently.