By the time Captain Ishki came with Sergeant Tamharu and a few other soldiers, Gandash’s second pair of Abhorrents had long since vanished to whence they came. Ligish was still unconscious. The soldiers wasted no time binding him in a quasi-ritualistic fashion that was designed specifically to counter the strength of a martial adept.

Martial adepts were rare, but the armed forces of all three kingdoms on Mannemid were trained to deal with them. After all, there were all sorts of martial arts traditions floating around the planet, especially in the islands to the south. While it was virtually impossible that the armed forces of any nation would encounter a mage without prior warning, it was entirely possible that a martial adept could show up and cause problems out of nowhere.

Despite it being the middle of the night, there was a massive flurry of activity.

Soldiers ran through the castle arresting all of Ligish’s people, with the exception of a few who successfully fled into the Yellow Forest, including the servant who had met them at the gate when they arrived.

The three young mages took Captain Ishki into the workshop they’d discovered.

The captain let loose a string of profanity under her breath, then hooked her fingers into her belt and said, “Well done, you three. Very well done. Except for the part where you almost got yourselves killed. Again.”

“We survived, sir,” Xeres said. “All three of us.”

“That you did. Okay, walk me through everything.”

The aftermath lasted for about three hours. Upon closer examination, they found that the boulder had been attached to a special contraption hidden in the mouth of the cave, which was designed to make it easy to move the rock by inserting a rod into a hidden spot where the stone met the earth.

“Wait, does that mean him being a martial adept had nothing to do with how he moved the boulder?” Bel asked.

Gandash shrugged.

Late into the night, the captain let the three mages get some sleep. By that point, all of the terrible excitement had worn down, and they were exhausted to the bone.

The next morning, they woke early when Sergeant Tamharu knocked at their door.

“Captain seeks mage counsel,” he said. “Food’s waiting out here in the corridor. Find her in the courtyard when you’re done.”

Fifteen minutes later they were outside in the main courtyard, lined up in front of Captain Ishki.

“Hope the three of you can make do with only a few hours sleep.”

“Of course we can, Captain,” Bel said.

“Good. Here’s the thing. I don’t want to spend another day in this accursed castle. Illegal machinery is nothing to take lightly. If we don’t handle this properly, we could get the attention of the Nergal. And nobody on Mannemid wants that. So we’re going to be packed up and out of this place by lunch time. Now, let me ask you a question: do any of you have a clue what that damn thing is? Or even a guess?”

Xerxes shook his head in the negative, and he saw Bel and Gandash doing the same.

“I figured as much. Ligish and his people are all staying tight-lipped, and we don’t have time for hard interrogation. In other words… you have about four hours.”

“To do what, sir?” Gandash asked.

“To try and find something that tells us what the thing does. I’m having the men search this place as thoroughly as possible, but I’m getting the feeling there’s only this one machine on the premises. I don’t think Ligish was tinkering with all sorts of technology. He was focused on this one thing. In any case, I had the men move his personal diaries down into the library. I suggest the three of you start going through everything. Of course, we’ll be bringing as much as we can with us. But once we start traveling in earnest, there won’t be time to sit around doing scholarly work.”

“Understood, Captain,” Bel said.

“Good. Off to it, then. Report back if you find anything. If not, be ready to leave around the lunch hour.”

She turned and strode off briskly.

“Well, Gandy,” Xerxes said, “looks like we got put on library duty. Your kind of thing, eh?”

Gandash smiled. “You know it. Shall we go to the library?”

“There’s also that bookshelf in the workshop,” Xerxes said. “How about you two go to the library, I’ll hit the bookshelf?”

“Sounds good.”

Xerxes trotted to the secret tunnel. Inside the workshop, four soldiers were at work dismantling the illegal machine, while Goran was off to the side keeping a record of all the parts.

“How’s it going fellas?” Xerxes asked them.

“Ey, Xerk,” said Goran while scratching the final details of a sketch into his notepad. “Complicated and nasty, this thing is. Ain’t no ‘ogdown machinery, I tell you that.”

Hogdown, Xerxes thought. It meant “ordinary,” and was a slang word from his home neighborhood that brought a smile to his face.

“Yeah,” said another soldier named Shiram. “Taking this thing apart’s like doing a damn puzzle backward.”

Goran looked up from his notes. “‘Eard that Ligish fellow was a martial adept, but you three took ‘im down anyways.”

“We did, though I got my arm snapped clean in half in the process.”

“Can’t even imagine,” Shiram said. “I seen stab wounds, cuts, scrapes. Even saw a fellow’s finger cut off once. But arm snapped in ‘alf?” He gave a dramatic shudder. “Don’t sound fun.”

Xerxes asked a few questions before turning to the bookshelf and starting to go through all the contents. After an hour, he’d gone through about half the items but hadn’t made much progress. The titles seemed random, and included everything from martial arts manuals to a history of the pork industry in Fal. None of it seemed interesting. In fact, he didn’t even see anything he thought Gandash would like. There weren’t any treatises on magic, nor any journals or diaries. After taking a break to get some water, he set at it again.

Halfway into his second hour of investigation, he found a brown, oilcloth package that looked like a large envelope, wrapped in twine. Opening it, he pulled out a thick stack of paper, each sheet of which had been treated to make it partially translucent.

Spreading them out on the table, Xerxes breathed, “Is this it…?”

The top sheet had a huge gear on it that resembled the one that had occupied the central position in the machine, but was now leaning against the wall, having been disconnected by the soldiers. Beneath that sheet was a layer depicting a network of pulleys. Each successive layer contained different bits of machinery. After glancing through them, Xerxes put one on top of another, then lifted them up so that the light from the tunnel shone through them.

“Oh yeah,” he murmured. Put together and illuminated with the outside light, it was just barely possible to confirm that the various drawings combined to form a complex technical drawing of the gearwork machine. Many of the sheets had lines of precisely written lines of text, notes or explanations of some sort.

“Find something, Seer Xerxes?” one of the soldiers asked.

“I think so. You fellas keep working, I’m taking this to the captain.”

“Sure thing, sir.”

Grabbing the oil paper folder, he began placing the sheets inside, taking time to closely examine each one before doing so. Upon reaching the bottom sheet, he noticed a large line of text at the top.

Life Force Extractor and Distillator.

Beneath it were a few other lines of text.

Prototype Three. Iteration Four.

“Hunh,” he murmured. He put the papers in the folder, tied the twine, then hurried out of the corridor.

Needless to say, Captain Ishki was beyond delighted. Gandash was slightly disappointed that he wasn’t the one to find the paperwork. However his disappointment only lasted for a moment.

“Excellent work, Xerk,” he said. Looking at Ishki, he said, “Captain… any chance I can take a look at the papers?”

The captain only hesitated for a brief moment. “I’m afraid not, Seer. If the Nergal investigates this matter, then the fewer people who’ve seen the papers, the better. And if I were you, Seer Xerxes, I’d try to forget anything you saw when you found them.”

Xerxes’ heart flip-flopped at the thought of the Nergal. “Yes, Captain Ishki, sir. Once I knew what I’d found, I packed them away and brought them to you.”

That’s mostly what happened, he thought.

With the machine schematics having been found, the captain saw little need to continue poking around the castle. The soldiers finished dismantling the machine, and Ligish and three of his servants—one of whom was the one who had spied the three mages investigating the boulder—were bound and thrown onto the cart next to the machine parts and other bundles of evidence.

Shortly after the lunch hour, they left the crumbling stone edifice and made their way down the mountain and back into the thick of the Yellow Forest.