by nobody103
As they say, third time's the charm.
Chapter 48
Well of Souls
Far away from any established path or settlement, in a small artificial cave that Zorian had made to serve as his workshop and base of operations, there was a large wooden table. A mass of papers was strewn over it, and Zorian was staring at it with a small frown. The collection of scribbled notes and crude diagrams in front of him would no doubt look like a haphazard mess to the casual observer, but there was a pattern to the chaos. Zorian had spent a fair amount of time assembling the entire thing, and each piece of paper was exactly where he wanted it to be.
Absentmindedly tapping his pencil on the table, Zorian considered the information laid out in front of him. Everything he knew about Sudomir and Iasku Mansion was there on the table, along with any other information he thought might be relevant for the upcoming gate assault. Truthfully, he already had a plan for the event… but it never hurt to double-check things, just in case he had forgotten something crucial. There were only three more days left until the summer festival, so if he wanted to make any significant changes to the plan, this was pretty much his last chance to do so.
After his conversation with Sudomir in the previous restart, Zorian was now fairly sure that the man had his own goals he wanted to accomplish, and was effectively a third faction of the invasion force. He was not just being a loyal member of the Cult of the Dragon Below or sympathetic to the Ibasans – he was hoping to gain something out of this endeavor, and it wasn't the same thing that the other two factions were fighting for.
Sadly, he had been unable to figure out what Sudomir had been alluding to when he said he supported the invasion because of 'politics'. That could mean anything, really – there was no shortage of reasons why someone might want Cyoria gone or taken down a peg. Sudomir might be trying to alter the internal balance of power within Eldemar to advance his pet cause or trying to destroy Cyoria's regional importance to boost the power of his own town and domain. He might be trying to weaken Eldemar as a whole on behalf of foreign interests or he may simply want to distract the central government by destroying a major loyalist stronghold and giving them an external enemy to focus on. The possibilities were endless and he had no way to narrow things down.
Well, no way besides repeatedly invading Iasku Mansion or attacking Sudomir directly. The former he was already doing, and the latter was hard to pull off. It was too easy for Sudomir to teleport away if Zorian decided to attack him on the job, and Zorian didn't know where the man went when not attending to his duties. Certainly not to his home in Knyazov Dveri, which was virtually abandoned most of the time. Knowing Zorian's luck, Sudomir was probably spending most of his time safely ensconced in Iasku Mansion, which was essentially unassailable before the day of the invasion.
No, his current way of going about things was definitely the correct one. Sudomir was never as vulnerable as he was on the day of the invasion, and not just because he foolishly sent virtually all of his forces to join the invasion and then left the obvious hole in his defenses completely unguarded. Iasku Mansion was obviously more than just a secret base for Sudomir, otherwise he would have been far more willing to cut his losses and run in the previous restart. There was something there – something he was unwilling to abandon, even after being metaphorically caught with his pants down and steadily backed into a corner. Zorian had a feeling that if he could find this mysterious something, he would solve the mystery of what Sudomir's real goals were easily enough.
He spent several more minutes poring over the papers in front of him, considering and discarding various possibilities, before his eyes fell on the small cluster of notes dealing with Iasku Mansion's warding scheme. His frown immediately deepened. Those wards worried him. His research told him there were several methods that Sudomir could have used to achieve the sort of reaction Zorian had experienced when he had tried to analyze the wards, but in all honesty? The most likely answer was that Sudomir had bound souls into the mansion's warding scheme. It seemed fairly obvious, considering Sudomir was clearly very necromancy-focused, and it would explain the weird ominous feelings he kept getting whenever the wards recognized him as an enemy. Most wards weren't so obvious about targeting someone.
Another point in favor of such a theory was that Iasku Mansion wasn't situated on a mana well, as far as Zorian could tell. He had spent several days wandering around the area where Iasku Mansion was located, mapping the local geomantic web and dodging winter wolf patrols, and he had found no evidence of a convenient underground ley line that could be tapped into. In other words, Iasku Mansion couldn't possibly support a warding scheme of any appreciable power. Not with conventional methods, anyway. Souls though… souls continued producing mana, even after death. It was what made them so valuable to spiritual entities like demons and was one of the reasons why undead were so much more convenient to use than golems. It would take a lot of souls to power the sort of wards that Iasku Mansion sported, but it could be done. And Sudomir clearly had no problems getting souls, considering how many undead guards he had at his disposal.
Unfortunately, the illegal nature of soul magic made it difficult to gather solid information on its limitations and peculiarities. Even if he really was dealing with a creepy soul-powered house, Zorian had no idea what that meant for Sudomir's capabilities or how to exploit it. Coupled with the fact that Sudomir no doubt had some kind of last resort defense set up at the heart of his domain, and Zorian was feeling just a little bit uneasy about blithely walking in there without knowing more about what he was dealing with.
Fortunately, he was a mage. He had a way of eating his cake and having it too.
The basic idea came from seeing Sudomir's projection. Zorian couldn't really project himself through the mansion like that, since the wards would stop him, but he could pilot his golem army remotely. That would be very impractical for most mages, but he was a telepath, and a pretty damn good one at this point. All he had to was do install a bunch of telepathic relays into each golem, along with some moderately complex spell formula work to make them understand his telepathic commands.
It worked well. No, it worked better than well. Maybe it was because he had animated the golems himself, and they thus had affinity to his own thoughts, but ordering them around telepathically was very fast and smooth – almost like controlling additional bodies. He could never achieve that sort of precision and coordination with verbal commands, and Zorian was wondering if there was any point in even bothering with conventional control methods in the future. Unless he was designing golems for someone else's use, verbal commands were only useful as a backup method for times when his telepathy was being disrupted.
Unfortunately, there were some problems with his idea of simply throwing his golems at Sudomir and orchestrating things from relative safety. For one thing, the fact that he wasn't there personally meant he would be unable to use any magic to help them out. There was no way to cast spells remotely through his puppets – even his mind magic didn't extend beyond the golems themselves. He also wouldn't be able to activate his dispeller grenades and other spell items with mana pulses, which had necessitated a complete redesign of his arsenal into something cruder and less versatile. Finally, there was a fairly major issue of Sudomir seeing through his setup and disrupting his control over the golems. According to the books, that was the major reason why remote control schemes weren't more popular among mages – they were too easy to disrupt if the opponent knew what he was doing. Hopefully his solution to that problem would work. Come to think of it, he should probably check up on that now…
Dropping his pen on the table with a small sigh, Zorian left the planning room (as he had dubbed it) and went to the crafting chamber where he assembled his golems and other equipment. Most of the golems were already done at this point, silently standing at the far end of the room where they wouldn't be in the way, awaiting for orders. Six golems – two of them big and bulky to soak up damage, and four smaller and faster
ones to serve as a backbone of his little force. He extended his mind to them momentarily, testing their responsiveness to see if the control interface had degraded since their last test. It hadn't. Good. The first dozen or so versions had been very unstable, but it seemed he had ironed out all the flaws in the latest batch. He turned his attention to the reason he came here – his last, currently unfinished creation.
It didn't look like much, in all honesty. Thin, almost skeletal, and yet smaller than even his four agility-focused combat golems. The animation core that powered it was likewise underwhelming – the golem in question couldn't do anything without constant, detailed instruction. It would be useless for just about any purpose… except, hopefully, for the one that Zorian designed it for.
Namely, for being his body double. The golem was specifically designed to mimic his size and proportions, with an animation core meant to synchronize with his telepathic orders as smoothly as possible. Magical sensors allowed Zorian to see and hear through it as through his own senses, and while he couldn't achieve the same amount of hand-eye coordination while using it as he could with his own body, it should be enough to throw around grenades and walk around well enough to pass as a human being.
He glanced at the nearby alchemical container, where a syrupy pink liquid bubbled softly upon a carefully regulated fire. The artificial skin solution looked pretty much done to his eyes, but the recipe he had bought claimed the whole thing needed to simmer for at least another fifteen minutes so he left it alone for the moment, putting the golems through another round of tests to pass the time.
Finally, once the fifteen minutes had passed, he dumped the artificial skin solution over the golem and quickly started molding it into something resembling himself before it solidified and became unmodifiable.
Half an hour later, he stood back to inspect his handiwork. It… was kind of bad. The golem didn't really look like him much, or even entirely human, despite his best efforts. Either he sucked even more as a sculptor than he'd thought he did or he should have taken the solution off the fire sooner, recipe be damned. But it was adequate, really – some strategic goggles, heavy clothing and maybe a large hat should be enough to hide the imperfections. It should look human enough to fool Sudomir, at least until he could face off with the necromancer in person, at which point the man's soul sight would allow him to see through any amount of disguise anyway. Hard to hide that the golem has no soul, after all.
Oh well, even if the idea turned out to have been stupid and unnecessary in the end, he regretted nothing. He'd always wanted to make a body double of himself to offload some of his more annoying duties onto, and this seemed like a step in the right direction. Animation spells could get scarily intelligent at the highest levels of sophistication, so it should be possible to design a lookalike golem that could pass casual inspection and pose as him.
Looking at the misshapen thing in front of him, though, Zorian knew he was quite far from being able to create something like that.
He'd never be able to skip family gatherings with this!
✦ ✧ ✦
By now, the gate assault had become something of a routine for Zorian. He dealt with the Ibasan defenders virtually flawlessly, the only complication being that the pair of cave drakes he'd used as a distraction had fallen a little too quickly for Zorian's liking. They were big and tough, but apparently hordes of weaker opponents were a better choice for keeping the defenders busy until he could secure the gate. Still, all of his golems had survived the attack on the Ibasan base, and most of his spell item stockpile was still unspent, so Zorian considered the first phase of the attack a success. With the gate secure, the real operation could begin. He pushed the unconscious body of one of the Ibasans through the gate to fool the mansion's wards into thinking the incursion was authorized and then stepped through, his golem battlegroup trailing behind him.
The plan was simple: Zorian would remain in the gate room, guarded by one of the big golems, while the rest of his force would be sent deeper into the mansion to confront Sudomir. Zorian would be essentially projecting himself through the smallest, most human-looking golem, occasionally giving the rest of the golems superfluous verbal commands to complete the illusion. Hopefully this would fool Sudomir into thinking he was dealing with two human invaders, one of whom was just guarding the gate while the other one led a force of golems deeper into his domain, rather than just one human that was directing the golems remotely. Not only should it keep Sudomir from trying to disrupt Zorian's remote control, it should also keep Sudomir's attention firmly on the advancing golems and reduce the chance of him sending his forces around to strike at real Zorian.
The first surprise came when his golems had reached the spot where the wards had turned on him in the previous restart. This time they didn't activate. Strange. After thinking about it for a while, Zorian decided it was probably because none of the golems had souls. The detection wards were probably soul-based, just like everything else in this house.
Sadly, that only delayed the problem, as he soon encountered a locked door he had to go through to keep advancing. The golem Zorian was puppeteering didn't have anything to pick the lock with, and even if it had, it lacked the manual dexterity to perform something as finicky as lock-picking, so he just ordered the big golem to smash the door aside.
Unsurprisingly, that proved too much for the wards to ignore, and they immediately turned hostile. Zorian ordered the golem group forward, trying to get them as close to the mansion's center as possible before Sudomir scrambled his undead forces and tried to intercept them.
Curiously, the dimensional gate stayed open, despite the activation of the wards. Zorian could feel the wards' agitation as they realized he was a threat and intensified around him, but even though he triggered the wards in such a brazen manner, even though he was right there in the gate room, the dimensional opening refused to close shut. Obviously triggering the wards outside the actual gate room sidestepped the automatic shutdown contingency, but that sounded like such a silly oversight that Zorian couldn't help but think Sudomir wanted things to work like that. Surely a warding expert like Sudomir wouldn't make that sort of mistake? And even if he did, he almost certainly had a way to shut down the gate on his own initiative, independent of any automatic shutdown.
What was he missing here? Why would Sudomir want the gate to remain open, even if he had intruders inside his mansion?
Well, whatever. Only one way to find out. The golems pressed onwards, even as the first waves of undead began to crash into them. Zorian had plenty of spell items to burn this time, so he used them quite liberally on the attackers to great effect. His advance was steady and unstoppable, and the attacks on his golem group became increasingly frantic and disorganized as time went by. Sudomir hadn't even tried to contact him, in person or via projection.
There were far less traps than Zorian expected there would be, though in retrospect it made a lot of sense that Sudomir wouldn't seed his corridors with explosives and other destructive effects. Nobody wanted their possessions trashed by their own defenses, and the mansion was usually filled to the brim with guards anyway. When Zorian did finally encounter a real trap, it came in the form of a gas trap that rapidly filled an entire hallway with thick, yellow smoke. Considering that the gas had no effect on his golems and that the activation of the trap was soon followed by one last attack by the mansion's undead defenders, Zorian guessed that the gas was poisonous. It was a pretty good way to debilitate unprepared living foes while leaving the undead boars and warriors unaffected. The smoke also reduced visibility for anyone relying on regular sight, while the undead didn't seem affected by the resulting visibility issues.
Sudomir had clearly put in his all into this one last attack, even sending a pair of flesh golems to reinforce the more familiar boars and black-clad human corpses. The flesh golems managed to destroy two of his smaller golems before being torn apart, but the result was never really in doubt. The undead were destroyed and Zorian broke thro
ugh the last door standing between him and his destination. The golem he was puppeteering stepped into the heart of Iasku Mansion, and the sight honestly left Zorian speechless.
The room was large and cylindrical, with every inch of the walls covered with spell formula glyphs. Rather than being simply etched or painted on, however, the glyphs were made out of a shiny, silvery metal embedded into the walls. The really eye-catching thing, though, was the massive crystalline cylinder placed into the exact center of the room. It stretched from floor to ceiling, affixed to them via stone bases and thick metal bands, and emanated a soft blue glow that dimmed and brightened in a slow, regular pattern. Like a gigantic, glowing, cylindrical heart.
Zorian stared at the glowing pillar and the glyph-covered wall in silence, wondering what the hell he'd stepped into. He had expected to find something interesting here, yes, but the sheer scale of the thing in front of him was rather intimidating.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Sudomir said, stepping from behind the pillar. "It took me years to build all of this. It's a work of love, and I'd really hate to see it damaged. So be a little careful with those explosive you are toting around here, okay?"
Zorian frowned at the man in front of him. Sudomir was just standing there, smiling at him cockily. It was as if he was daring Zorian to attack him. For a moment, he debated simply ordering his golems to surge forwards and crush Sudomir into paste, but he decided to hold back for the moment. He wanted to see if he could get something out of the man first.
"The cylinder is a soul storage device, isn't it?" Zorian spoke through the golem. "That's how you're powering the wards in this place. There must be hundreds of souls trapped there…"
"A soul storage device!?" Sudomir repeated, sounding quite outraged. His left hand twitched uncontrollably for a second before Sudomir used his other hand to still its movements. "You think all of this is just…"