“Master Janie, what’s an [Ashmor’s Blessing] and why do I have it?”

Janie froze, for just a second. “What does [Status] say about it?” she asked him carefully.

Maslin looked at nothing for a moment. “That it gives a bonus to [Fire Magic] and [Tactics],” he read out. “Also that I automatically qualify for the [Firebrand Priest] profession.

“Well, that’s better than the curse,” she said. “As to why, well when you keep company with a champion, the gods have their eye on you. You must have—” she caught herself, figuring it out. “He must have taken a liking to you.”

“Is that good or bad?” Maslin asked. “People don’t like Ashmor, do they?”

“It’s a sight better than him not liking you,” Janie said fervently. “Mortals don’t really get a say in what the gods do, so just accept it, and don’t mention it to anyone else.

“Do I want to be a [Firebrand Priest]?” Maslin asked her. “Is that better than a [Fire Mage]?”

Janie made a face. “They’re scary f— people to cross, I’ll tell you that. But if you take that path you’ll be committing to serving Ashmor.”

“Is that bad? He made [Fire Magic] didn’t he?”

“Fire is pretty great,” Janie admitted. “But you need to keep it under control.”

I wanted to scoff at that. Control wasn’t the first thing I thought of when remembering how we’d fought together. But the truth was, she was good at keeping the stuff off of her allies. Just a little less careful with everything else. It was a good thing that Dungeons were mostly stone.

Since I didn’t interrupt, Janie was free to continue. “Worshipping Ashmor is like letting the flames control you. There’s some that think the power is worth being a tool, but I’m not one of them.”

Maslin nodded thoughtfully and then got shooed off to breakfast by Janie.

“So,” she said to me. “Why?”

“He was here last night,” I said. “I couldn’t tell you why he did that, but he said it was because he was impressed by him.”

Janie shivered. “Here… in this room?” she asked. “That’s disturbing. Is he your Patron then?”

“No, not if I can trust anything that they’ve told me,” I said. “It’s like you said, my… status gets me a lot more attention from gods than you’d expect.”

“Better you than me,” Janie said. “No, wait, better someone far, far away from me.”

“You’re actually taking this better than I thought,” I said. “Isn’t Ashmor the worst god?”

Janie shrugged. “Any god can ruin your day, or your country, if they feel they want to,” she said. “Yeah, Ashmor wants to destroy the world, but he hasn’t, so far. He’s outnumbered eight to one on that front, so he’s not that much worse when it comes to actual outcomes. So… what did he want?”

I snorted. “For me to destroy the world by summoning a demon, that’s what.”

“You gonna?”

“No. Of course not. He did seem pretty confident I would though… I can’t tell if he knows me better than I do, or if he just had a good game face.”

“I reckon the second one,” Janie told me. “Gods are pretty smart and all, but if they thought you’d summon a demon, they wouldn’t have brought you here.”

“Yeah…” I said, thinking about it. “You’re right. Let’s get breakfast.”

After breakfast, I had the pleasure of trying to escape from Luxury Jail.

“I am deeply sorry, my dear lady, but I cannot grant you a pass at this time.” The Chamberlain’s face was the very picture of contrition, but [Bargain] told me that there was steel behind it.

[Bargain] was a little odd as social skills went. You didn’t always get a sense of whether the other person was better than you. Sometimes you did. I was still learning the details through trial and error, but you could project certain impressions through the skill. What [Bargain] was telling me right now was that I couldn’t afford to bribe the Chamberlain. Maybe that was true, or maybe he was just projecting that idea. Without actually making an offer, there was no way to tell, but either way said I wasn’t getting my way.

“May I ask why?”

“Of course,” he said and looked down at my file. An honest-to-goodness stack of paper kept in a heavy paper folder. It wasn’t quite a manilla folder, but it was close enough.

“It seems that our Spymaster has flagged you as being at risk of an attack from…” He lifted up the top sheet to read the sheet below, and then carefully placed it down again. “… persons unknown.”

He gave me a sympathetic smile. “Of course, since you have been summoned to go before the King, we cannot have you getting yourself killed before your audience. Once the audience has occurred, we can revisit the matter.”

“Won’t I be kicked out once the King has seen me?” I asked.

“That is up to the King, and I wouldn’t dare to presume,” he replied. “The normal course of events would be for you to leave fairly quickly — I’m sure you wish to get back to your town as soon as possible. But as long as we don’t need the rooms for anything, you can extend your stay as our guest.”

“I see. Thank you for your time,” I said.

It wasn’t that the palace compound was a prison, exactly. Aside from some restricted areas, we guests had the run of the place. But the need for escorts every time we left was grating on me. Sure, any of us could evade the escorts, but we’d have to come back to the palace at some stage, and face whatever penalty they gave us for misbehaving.

The excuse they had given me was interesting. It might even have been true — there were a bunch of threats to my life. I hadn’t thought that the palace had known, or cared about them, but perhaps they cared this much. Or perhaps they used that excuse all the time, and it just happened to be true today.

What I needed to do was to find a way through the security enchantments. That didn’t sound easy, but I was an enchanter, and I did have [Theurgy], so it didn’t seem impossible on the face of it.

The first step was to observe them in action, so I lost myself in one of the more deserted areas of the palace. Turning invisible, I then carefully headed back to the gate.

I wasn’t so foolish as to pass through any of the security fields while invisible, of course, but it was easy to avoid them as long as I stayed in the public areas — it helped that I was able to see them with [Mana Sense].

Public areas had their own dangers, in the form of people wandering by who would bump into me if I wasn’t careful. By now, I was fairly well practised at avoiding them.

Parking myself in an un-trafficked corner near the gate let me see what was going on. It was pretty much the same idea as my first experiments with the Detect Person rune. There was a field covering the entirety of the inner gate, which was a choke point for all the traffic. If someone had a token, nothing happened. If someone came through that didn’t have a token, a light positioned where only the guards could see it, lit up, and the guards knew they had to check the person coming in. If someone invisible went through, the light would go on with no one to cause it. Presumably, the alarm would be raised at that point.

Could I just go through walking closely behind someone? Maybe. If they didn’t have a token, the guards would come up fairly quickly and make it difficult for me to slip around them. If they did have a token, then it would be clear that something had gone wrong, which would probably raise the alarm.

I had already checked out the walls, and they had their own security fields, extending out diagonally from just below the battlements. Given their placement, they seemed to be intended to catch people climbing over the walls. Flyers could get over, no problems, but it would be difficult to extend a field over the entire compound.

So flying, invisible people should be able to get in with no problems. That seemed like a rare combination, but I’d run into one person with that already, so who knew?

Lacking [Air Magic], I was forced to rely on [Theurgy]. The boost that Ashmor had given me was going to be handy. [Theurgy] was so goddamn hard to level, I should thank him. I wouldn’t, because he was a maniac that wanted to kill us all, but I should.

The reason [Theurgy] was so hard to level was that it was so hard to use. No one in this world had figured out exactly how skill improvement went, but they knew the basics. You got a tiny amount of improvement each time you used the skill, but you got a lot more if you succeeded. And you got even more if you were… the general feeling was in danger, but I suspected it might relate to stress or adrenaline levels when you used the skill.

[Theurgy] was damned hard to succeed at, and at my level, damned hard to get it to do anything useful. So playing around with it in stressful situations was right out. I needed to use other [Skills] at those times. [Skills] that would help me survive.

Now that I had level four in the [Skill], however, I might be able to do something with it. I focussed on the detection field. Doing this at range was more difficult but sticking my hand into the field would get me detected, so ranged it was.

As I concentrated, my will was focused through the [Theurgy] skill and began to have an effect on the field. It started to wobble and waver. I wasn’t worried about this action setting off the alarm. I knew from previous experiments that the field detected people, not being messed with.

You could layer fields to detect more than one thing, but that would have been visible to me. I had also checked around before starting to make sure that there were no mage-types wandering about. Even mages didn’t go around with [Mana Sense] on all the time (I thought). It was too distracting.

Last time, I’d managed to move the field, but not by enough to be useful. This time, I pushed a huge dent in it, big enough to accommodate me.

Would I be able to hold this for long enough? Could I move it through the whole field? I checked my mana. It was ticking down but fairly slowly. The gate was empty of travellers, the guards were bored and inattentive. Before I could stop myself, I darted quickly towards the gate. Moving carefully as the field enveloped me, I made sure to keep a bubble around me big enough to walk in.

Holding my breath, I walked quickly through, and back again. No one said anything and the guards were none the wiser. I’d broken free.

The first thing I did with my newfound freedom was to go back to my rooms. I know, I know, but it was more important to fill in the gang on what I’d managed.

As it happened, they had some news for me.

“A messenger arrived while you were out,” Felicia said, handing it to me. “From the Guild-master.”

I took the letter, a small piece of parchment elaborately folded and sealed with wax. Over the top, perhaps, but I liked it better than drugs and kidnapping.

Breaking the seal, I saw that the message was short and to the point.

The Guild master will see you this afternoon in the guild hall.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I know what I’m doing this afternoon.”