Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  After reminding Zorian not to skip the lesson tomorrow as well, Alanic decided to leave in the same manner he arrived in – by teleporting out. Zorian shook his head to clear it of fanciful tales of ancient artifacts and continued working on his golem prototype. He would go ask Vani about the Sovereign Gate and the Bakora gate network tomorrow, though he didn't expect that to go anywhere. While the story about the first emperor of Ikosia could be sort of interpreted as an account of the time loop, it made no sense that an artifact that was supposedly stored in the capital would cause an effect centered around Zach and Cyoria. Oh well, it hurt him nothing to ask.

  It was only half an hour later that Zorian realized that Alanic had teleported inside his room despite the fact he had warded it against teleportation.

  Frowning, Zorian wrote down a reminder for himself to tear down his current ward scheme in the coming days and put up something stronger. And a second reminder to ask Alanic how the hell he had done that.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Zorian had been worried that Vani might not welcome him into his home the way he had the last time they'd spoken in the previous restart. After all, he hadn't spent the month visibly culling the winter wolf population like he had last time, and that seemed to have had great influence on him.

  As it turned out, he need not have worried. The man was as friendly and helpful as ever, though also just as talkative and prone to digressions.

  "Ah, Ulquaan Ibasa, the isle of the exiles," said Vani. "A fascinating place and a fascinating topic. I wrote a book on the Necromancer's War, you know? Not an easy topic to write about in an objective manner, since so many are ready to dismiss them as monsters and criminals out of hand…"

  Zorian made a sound that could be possibly interpreted as agreement, though really, his opinion of Ibasans couldn't possibly be lower. Perhaps if he hadn't repeatedly witnessed all the killings and destruction in Cyoria he might have felt some pity for them, but as it was? They really were dangerous scum in his eyes.

  Unaware of Zorian's inner musings, Vani launched into a protracted explanation of the causes behind the Necromancer's War. He spoke of succession disputes in several prominent Houses and royal families that developed when their leaders turned themselves into liches and vampires and their heirs realized they would never inherit their birthright because their parents would never die of age alone. He spoke of the common people, who hated necromancers with a passion, and resented being ruled by the undead. And finally, he spoke of Eldemar's desire for supremacy, and how they were all too happy to prove their authority over all of Altazia by getting involved into every dispute they could find in order to place people more sympathetic to them in leadership positions.

  Finally, it all came to a head when the kingdom of Sulamnon, back then in a personal union with Eldemar, rose in rebellion against their king, supported by Reya and Namassar. When they lost said rebellion, they were forced to issue a blanket ban on necromancy by the king of Eldemar, or else forfeit their lands to the crown. The ban, if enacted, would gut the entire military of Sulamnon, which made great use of undead in their army at the time, as well as force a number of prominent aristocrats to hand over their titles to their children and go into exile.

  The necromancers in Sulamnon refused to accept the treaty and raised an army of their own, bolstered by the part of Sulamnonian military that still felt they had a chance to win if they continued fighting. Soon, they were joined by other forces that resented Eldemar's growing power – the remaining Khusky tribes that still retained some military might, the remains of witch covens, the undead aristocracy of other countries that saw the way wind was blowing and wanted to overrule the precedent that would see them similarly disposed of, as well as a number of opportunistic actors that felt they had more to gain by siding with the necromancers than with the king of Eldemar. The Necromancer's War had begun.

  The necromancers soon showed themselves to be cruel and merciless opponents, and the atrocities they committed against captured villages and defeated soldiers shocked the continent. Any sympathies or support they had from neutral parties that wanted to see Eldemar humbled quickly evaporated. Instead of serving as a rallying force against Eldemar domination, they handed the growing kingdom exactly the sort of war they needed to cement their authority and legitimacy. When Eldemar's general Fert Oroklo defeated the necromancer's army led by Quatach-Ichl, thereby destroying them as a coherent force, the continent sighed in relief. The kingdom of Eldemar rewrote the map in their favor, and were seen as heroes for it instead of tyrannical aggressors, and the surviving parts of the necromancer's army fled to the frozen island in the north that would be henceforth known as the isle of the exiles - Ulquaan Ibasa.

  The king of Eldemar graciously agreed not to pursue them to their new home. No doubt that was because of his great mercy, rather than unwillingness to send soldiers to some worthless ice-swept land in order to pursue a broken enemy.

  Then again, considering it took more than a hundred years before the exiles started making trouble again, Zorian supposed he couldn't blame him for his reasoning. Hell, he still wasn't certain what the Ibasans hoped to gain with their destruction of Cyoria. He supposed if their leadership was composed out of immortal undead they might have personally participated in the Necromancer's War and were still bitter about it.

  "Well, I hate to interrupt such a fascinating story, but I was really hoping to ask you about some historical artifacts," Zorian said when he finally spotted a lull in Vani's 'discussion'.

  "Oh?" Vani said, perking up.

  "Yes, I'd like to know if you have some sources about the Bakora gates and the Sovereign Gate."

  "The Sovereign Gate is nothing," Vani said dismissively. "The royals won't even let anyone see it, much less examine it. I have doubts whether it exists at all. The Bakora gates, though…"

  Vani promptly started digging through his stacks of books, and continued to do so for another fifteen minutes or so. Finally, he found what he was looking for in some forgotten corner. He leafed through the book until he found the correct page and then shoved it into Zorian's hands while pointing at the illustration stamped on it.

  The Bakora gates did not look anything like Zorian had imagined. When Alanic had described them to Zorian, he figured they were something like stone arches or rings or something like that. Instead, they looked like hollow icosahedrons assembled out of some kind of black bars. Not very gate-like in Zorian's opinion.

  "It's hard to study the gates, since no one has witnessed one in actual operation for quite some time, but from the writings found inscribed into their pedestals and preserved written records, we know they function similarly to a teleport platform," Vani said, waving his finger over the illustration for… some reason. "Only they open a dimensional hole that connects one gate to another instead of teleporting people standing inside. It is probably not a good idea to stand inside the gate while it activates."

  Zorian gave the man an incredulous look.

  "Well, I mean, it could have some kind of safety feature to abort the activation procedure if someone is standing inside," Vani defended himself. "Anyway, the bars are likely stabilizers, making sure the rift stays open long enough for people to step through."

  "Hmm. They sound really powerful and exotic. I'm surprised there's so little interest in them," said Zorian.

  "Most people think they were not nearly as efficient as modern teleport platforms are, and they are bound to be exorbitantly expensive and difficult to make. The gate spell is almost certainly reverse-engineered from Bakora gates, back when people still knew how to activate them, and it is pretty much the pinnacle of dimensional magic that very few mages can cast safely. Teleportation magic, on the other hand, is relatively accessible and cheap. In the end, it all comes down to the fact they are currently inert and nobody how to use them. If, indeed, they can be used at all in modern times. They are the oldest magical artifacts that we are aware of – it is possible they broke down a long time ago."

  "How
many of them are there?" Zorian asked.

  "Hundreds are known," Vani said. "Only gods know how many more remain undiscovered in some distant jungle or mountain peak. The Bakora really loved placing those gates all over the place, it seems. Hmm… I actually think I have a map of all the recorded gates in Altazia."

  It took more than half an hour for Vani to find the map in the mess that was his house, but he did produce it in the end. Zorian studied it curiously, immediately noting one particular location.

  "Cyoria has a Bacora gate?" he asked incredulously. "How? Where? I've never heard anything about that."

  "Oh, that." Vani snorted. "I almost forgot about that. That gate is deep within the lower levels of the Dungeon beneath Cyoria, very far into the dangerous levels. It would be suicide to go there for most mages, so nobody studies that one to my knowledge. Researchers interested in the gates have safer locations to set up camp at."

  After studying the map for a while and failing to find anything really notable, Zorian thanked Vani for his time and left. The Bakora gates were kind interesting, but he didn't see how they could be connected with the time loop.

  Another dead end as far as he was concerned, but at least he didn't waste too much time on this one.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Zorian's eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

  "Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

  Zorian gave Kirielle an incredulous look. What? Why was he here? The summer festival was still days away, and the last thing he remembered was peacefully falling to sleep. Did Zach die again prematurely again or was he killed in his sleep without even realizing it?

  He was broken out of his thoughts when Kirielle kicked him, apparently unhappy that he was ignoring her. He expertly stabbed his finger into her flank, causing her to lose her grip on him with a squeal of indignation, and then took advantage of her moment of weakness to throw her off and rise to his feet.

  "I need to cast a spell," he said, looking at her. "Please give me some time alone."

  "Can I watch?" she asked.

  Zorian raised his eyebrow at her. "Do you think you can keep quiet for ten minutes?"

  She placed her palm over her mouth, mimicking the sign of silence.

  "Right. Go lock the door then so mother won't be disturbing us," he ordered. "I need utmost concentration for this."

  Also, mother would go berserk if she found him pouring salt and quartz dust on the floor, so it was best if she were kept out until he was done. Thankfully, he had both materials available in sufficient quantities, so he would be able to perform the marker tracking spell without delay.

  Ten minutes later, Zorian was once again given a sense of where all the marked individuals were in relation to himself. Two of them again – one representing him, and the other one in the direction of Cyoria. Less than a minute later, the other marker abruptly shifted positions to the southeast of where it had originally been, and then shifted south again not long afterwards. Teleportation. The owner of the marker seemed to be in quite a hurry to get away from Cyoria.

  There was no third marker.

  The other marker was almost certainly Zach, Zorian felt – his classmate definitely began restarts in Cyoria, and it made sense for him to have the marker since Zorian had to have got it from somewhere. That left Red Robe, then – either he did not start the time loop in the vicinity of Cirin, managed to teleport outside Zorian's detection radius in the 15 minutes or so it took him to set up the tracking ritual… or he flat out didn't have a marker.

  He would repeat the detection ritual every couple of days and see if the third marker ever popped up.

  "That spell is lame," Kirielle complained, poking him in the flank and disrupting his concentration. Apparently this was as far as her patience went. "There is nothing to see at all!"

  "Here, have a swarm of butterflies," sighed Zorian, conjuring a tiny swarm of glittery, colorful butterflies. It was actually a pretty hard spell to pull off, despite the totally useless effect – it took a lot of skill and practice to make that many animated, solid illusions and make them half-way convincing. Still, the spell's ability to distract and fascinate Kirielle was every bit as great as he had hoped it would be – it took her a full minute to realize he had slipped out of the room.

  Worth every minute he had spent on learning it.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  "All right," mumbled Zorian to himself, taking a deep breath to steady himself. "I have temporarily shut down the house's warding scheme, neutralized both the explosion trap and the sleep one, blocked the acid mechanism and destroyed the alarm beacon disguised as the document seal. This is it. Third time's the charm."

  And with that, Zorian commanded the small wooden golem in front of him to go fetch the papers for him. No way was he going near that safe personally.

  The wood golem, version two, slowly stepped forward. Its movements were awkward and jerky, but it did not stumble or sway drunkenly, which was a vast improvement over the wood golem version one. It would be useless in battle, but this task was something he felt his creation might actually pull off. If not, he had a collapsible 10-foot pole in reserve.

  Amazingly, the whole thing went off without a hitch – the golem reached into the safe and pulled out a stack of documents without some horrid trap mangling it in the process and then walked up to him and presented him with his prize.

  It was only when he tried to take the documents from the golem's hands that disaster struck – he foolishly assumed that the golem would automatically let go of the paper stack when Zorian tried to yank them out of his hands, but of course the wooden doll had no such instincts. It was too slow to release its grip, and ended unbalanced when Zorian unwittingly yanked it forward. Before Zorian knew it, the entire stack of papers was sent tumbling through the air and ended up strewn all across the floor of Vazen's living room.

  Zorian half-expected the papers to suddenly burst into flames out of sheer spite, but they thankfully remained intact. Just… completely scrambled out of order, probably requiring him to spend hours sorting them out.

  "Ah, screw it." Zorian said, quickly scooping up papers into an unruly pile and stuffing it into his bag. "I'll just take the whole thing with me and sort it later."

  His picked up his klutz of a golem and teleported out of the house. Minor annoyances aside, the mission was a success and he could finally find out what was so important about these documents.

  Chapter 34

  Unreasonable Things

  He didn't bring the papers to his room, of course. He was confident that there was no tracking spell on anything in the stack, but he was also confident that Vazen would try to divine the location of the papers the hard way once he noticed the theft. He might even succeed, in which case Zorian didn't want them to be near anything that would automatically implicate him in the theft. No sense in taking that risk when he could simply store the papers elsewhere.

  Elsewhere, in this case, meant outside Knyazov Dveri – that way the papers would be out of range of virtually every divination spell cast from inside the city. Thus, after teleporting around randomly a couple of times to confuse any theoretical trackers, Zorian's last jump took him deep into the forested wilderness to the north of the city, to a location that had a small, convenient cave nearby. He had found the place in an earlier restart, while he had been tracking down ingredients for Silverlake, and he had felt even then that it would be a nice place to set up camp at. It just needed some touch-ups here and there to make it suitable for his purposes.

  He conjured a glowing lantern to light his way in the gloom of the cave and got to work. After a quick casting of an area-wide 'spook animals' spell to drive away all the bats and vermin that had taken residence in the cave, he set about using alteration magic to clean the place up and make
some shelves and reading surfaces out of the rock. A while later, after he tested things for comfort and stability, he decided that stone chairs perhaps weren't the best idea and instead constructed some basic furniture out of the fallen branches he found in the surrounding forest. There – good enough for his purposes.

  "Now comes the hard part," he spoke to himself.

  It was time to start constructing the warding scheme for the place.

  Three hours later, Zorian had layered every single divination ward that he felt could be useful and a few that he didn't, and had rechecked the whole thing twice to make sure everything was stable and worked correctly. Truthfully… he wasn't satisfied. He had an insufficient collection of different anti-divination spells to set up a proper, iron-tight warding scheme, and too little experience to properly judge what was crucial and what was not. In addition, if it took him this long to set up even this mediocre thing, how long would something more complex take? He really needed to get better at warding…

  He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He needed to get better at a lot of things, but he had to prioritize. Defense against soul magic, then combat skills, then aranean mind arts. Those three things were urgent and couldn't be put off. Everything else was secondary for now, even the mystery surrounding Vazen and the documents. If stealing the documents resulted in his early death, despite the many precautions he took… well, he would just have to set the whole thing aside until he was done with his current main goal, wouldn't he?

  No, his current defenses would have to be enough for now. He placed the papers he stole from Vazen on the nearby stone table he'd made from the cavern floor, sat down on a chair he'd fabricated from wooden detritus he'd dragged into the cave and began to read…

  Hours later, when he was finally done reading and organizing the whole thing, he seriously contemplated burning the whole stack down and scattering the ashes in the wind. Safer that way, and probably more than a little cathartic. He had expected to find something heavily incriminating, but this was something else entirely. Why did the man keep all of his incriminating correspondence in one convenient place, anyway? If it had been Zorian in his shoes, he would have destroyed all the letters once he read them so they couldn't be used against him. Was Vazen keeping them as possible blackmail material or something? If so, that was kind of ballsy of him, considering what kind of person the man was dealing with.