With Leonine dead as well, there was no time to lose. I motioned to Sarah to follow, and we took off at a sprint along the palace corridors. Aside from the odd maid and floor sweep they were completely deserted — was the place usually this empty or had they all just gone to see what the fuss was all about? It took a couple of turns for me to realize I had little idea where I was going. Coming to a dead stop, I touched a nearby maid’s shoulder to get her attention — she had been lost in thought dusting the mural of a former duke — completely startling the poor woman.

I felt a bit bad about scaring her, but she was here and I needed directions.

“Where can I find Court Mage Thaos?” I demanded, trying not to be too forceful — she was scared enough already. The maid blanched, opening her mouth to speak but only gaping ineffectively, much like a fish. “Well?” I tried again.

“H-he lives in his tower, in the n-north-eastern corner,” she finally stammered, uncertainly. “Just follow this hallway, take a right at the end, then the first left and it’s right at the end of the hallway.”

I murmured a thank you and set off again.

“Did you get that?” I heard Sarah ask from behind me. “’Cause I already forgot.”

I snorted. “Just follow me.”

Our run was quiet right until we reached the final corridor. As soon as we made the turn, doors on both sides burst open to release a company of guardsmen in our way.

I turned my head around to where we came, hoping to see it still clear, but another company emerged from a room in the corridor we’d just left, boxing us in.

It was a well-executed trap, I had to admit, but we were not going to go down so easily.

Sarah had already positioned herself in a defensive stance, her back almost touching mine. She was holding that sword of hers — where did she even keep the thing? I could have sworn she wasn’t carrying it with her.

At least, with the two of us, we had all directions covered. I readied myself, bringing threads of Force to my fingertips. I debated using Soul, but I wanted to minimize casualties, and Soul attacks were seldom non-fatal. Mind was right out, using it against well-aware opponents was unreliable at best.

“Try to disable, not kill, but don’t hold back if you feel in danger,” I murmured low enough that only Sarah could hear it.

“Why aren’t they attacking?”

That was a good question. Were they afraid? Or were they stalling for something?

The answer soon became irrelevant as the front row of guardsmen — four in all, as the hallway was not very wide — exploded into motion. They all charged in concert, denying me any space with which to dodge. Their fellows behind them advanced as well, ready to step in should they get the chance.

As I wove half the Force I held into a kinetic burst meant to knock them away, I realized that the cramped corridors were not doing the guardsmen any favors. They could only charge us four at a time on each side, and I could use this, couldn’t I? I unleashed the working, aiming for my attackers’ legs, making them stumble back into the advancing column. This gave me a precious few moments to think.

I spared a glance behind me to check on my companion. Sarah could not use magic, so her defense relied solely on her swordsmanship — and yet, she held her own surprisingly well. She had figured out how to leverage her infinite stamina into deceptively fast bursts of movement that, in spite of her heavy armor, allowed her to be seemingly everywhere at once. She wasn’t pushing them back, but they weren’t gaining ground either. Given her pitiful demonstration barely a week earlier, it was an almost unheard-of progress. Was this the power of Heroes, then?

I focused on the fight before me. I had a number of ideas to disable the guardsmen — maybe creating a stampede? Moments later, I had my solution, and I grinned inwardly at its simplicity.

I wove my remaining threads of Force — and continuously drawing new ones — into simple, normal heat, and dumped it around me with reckless abandon. It went unnoticed for the first few moments, and the guards facing me had recovered in the meantime and began their second attack. I was still using most of my mana throughput to dump heat around, so I had barely a couple of thin threads available to force three of the attackers to narrowly miss.

The fourth got me good in the abdomen, opening what would have been a nasty gash had my body not been a mana construct. As it was, it merely stung like hell, but I was able to use the guardsman’s surprise to land a Force-empowered fist into his chest. He crashed heavily into one of his friends, and I could already see the end of the battle in sight.

I heard a confused “What the fuck?” coming from behind me, as the guardsmen began to collapse on their own, seemingly out of nowhere. I waited a few more seconds and stopped dumping heat into the room, and switched my mana draw to Matter. Haphazardly throwing around threads imbued with the intent to bind, I had the guardsmen’s armors stuck to the floor. Hopefully. I wasn’t at all good with Matter, but I hoped the intent would make up for the lack of a proper spell framework.

“Heat, my dear knight,” I explained to my confused companion. “Heatstroke in armor is quite unpleasant, I’m told, but temperatures like this have little effect on us undead.” I finished with a smile and began trudging through the fallen company. The heat would disperse quickly through the hallways, and it was best to make ourselves scarce before they came to.

“Huh. That’s smart.”

A quick body count revealed there had been around forty of them involved in the ambush — a majority of the palace guard, I believed. I found it a bit baffling — why were they not spread out and searching for the Viscountess’s killer? How did they know to ambush me on the way to the Court Mage’s tower? Actually, was I even the actual target or were they expecting someone else? So many questions, so few answers. With a bit of luck, we’d get at least some of the mystery solved once we reached Thaos.

The rest of the trip to the grand spiral staircase that served as the tower’s entrance was mercifully devoid of any surprises.

As we began carefully climbing the stairs, I drew as much mana as I could possibly handle, making sure to have a bit of every Aspect. There was no real reason why mages almost always made their home in towers other than tradition, but one thing they always had in common was that they were trapped and warded to high heavens.

I had made sure to counterward both myself and Sarah against the likeliest effects, but I knew the Adept had me beat in Fate, and given my barely apprentice-level grasp of Dimension, he almost certainly outmatched me there as well.

Fights between mages tended to be a lot like strategy games, but there was an element of gambling as well. You needed to predict what defenses your enemy would use, and attack through whatever avenue was the least defended. Knowing your enemy’s specialties helped enormously, but you could always bluff — leaving your biggest weakness undefended wasn’t an uncommon gamble, since the enemy would generally assume you would concentrate your defenses there.

The spiral staircase was connected to the outer wall of the tower — we could see some of the inner chambers as we climbed — libraries and laboratories, mostly. As we climbed, I grew warier and warier — we had yet to engage any trap, and we were a good halfway up already, by my count. It wasn’t that there were none — I could feel a number of wards anchored through the walls, and their potency was nothing to scoff at. But they had let us pass, and this puzzled me greatly.

I had assumed Thaos to be antagonistic, especially given his link to the gods. This did not fit in my scenario at all — we had come here armed and weapons at the ready, which in any reasonable world would have prompted a defensive response. Was he simply not worried about us? Maybe he’d reached a high enough level with Fate to discern the outcome of our meeting?

I wasn’t sure which option bothered me more.

Court Mage Thaos was sitting on a countertop, his feet dangling off the edge, when we finally reached the top floor. I had turned the top of my tower into a cozy observatory, but the Adept seemed to have made a bar and lounge out of his. He held a half-empty bottle of some spirit in one hand, and an empty shot glass in the other. He looked me straight in the eye as I entered and gave me a wolfish grin.

“Archmage Crane! So good to see you so soon. A bit early, though, are you not?” He tilted his head quizzically. “Not very polite, you should have sent a messenger if you wanted to come sooner.”

His demeanor caught me entirely off guard. “Early? You were expecting me?”

“Did you forget?” Thaos frowned. “We were supposed to meet here in the afternoon. And right now it is—” he blinked a few times and I could feel a thimble of Dimension mana flowing through him, “—just about nine in the morning. Quite a bit early,” he punctuated.

I remembered now — his invitation during the dinner. It somehow felt so long ago.

I wasn’t sure why he was suddenly so strict about propriety, given recent events, but I decided playing along would be for the best. “You have my apologies for that, Adept. The circumstances in the palace below have made a mess of my plans.”

“Yes, indeed — I’ve had to remake my plans over and over because everything just kept going wrong!”

Thaos let out a weary sigh, taking a gulp straight from the bottle.

“At least everything is on track now, finally. You know,” he began as he pointed his bottle at me, eyes forming into a glare, “you didn’t make this easy for me at all. Like, what the hells? What kind of Dark Lord are you even supposed to be?”

“...excuse me?”

Sarah circled around me, moving to stand further inside the room, ready to attack the mage if he tried something. I motioned to her to be cautious, wary of the strange mage.

“Like, seriously,” Thaos continued, ignoring the silent communication in front of him, “I gave you all the reasons to come kill the bastard — and you just, like, don’t?”

My eyes widened in surprise. “You sent Vinara with the letter?”

He snorted. “No, Illvere did. But I told him to do it. And he thought it was a good idea! Anyway,” he took another mouthful from the bottle, “I then went and did it for you — framed you perfectly too! — and you tried to make peace with the terrible three, of all things?”

Thaos rubbed his face with the back of his right hand, spilling the contents of the shot glass on his face. He winced, continuing. “Fuck, that stings. Anyway, at least the lion bitch is dead now so you can’t get out of it now.”

...Had he just confessed to both murders? Also, wait, what?

“Get out of what?” I stammered, incredulously.

He glared at me again. “Are you dense? Taking over the duchy, obviously.” He dropped the glass and the bottle, then, taking out a silvery coin from his pocket, he spun it around a few times, thinking. “What else was there? Oh, right.” He grinned, jumping off the counter and giving me a mocking bow. “My Master sends their regards. Compliments of the Fox.”

Then he crushed the coin in his left hand, which unleashed a stream of incredibly thick mana — Origin? — while drawing an activation sequence with his right hand — I felt the wards permeating the building shudder.

“You’ve some kick-ass wards around you, so if you don’t survive you’ve only got yourself to blame!” Thaos yelled, finally, as the Origin mana engulfed him completely. A moment later, he was gone.

I only had a moment before I realized what he’d done — he had supercharged all the wards in the tower, effectively setting them to detonate. Before I could cast anything to shield myself, the world went white.