“The challenge with all communication-based magic is finding the recipient,” Archmage Veran said. “This is by far the biggest arcana investment in even the most basic message spell, and that has a range limited to mere miles and relies heavily on the caster’s knowledge of the recipient to direct the search.”
He gestured to the fox ring and said, “This circumvents part of that problem by establishing a link not to a person, but to an unchanging item. The spell looks for the ring, and then pushes the communication to whoever is wearing it. Simple, but only effective one-way. It cannot, for example, be used to find the fox who gave it to you. I suspect that was purposeful.”
“So what is the secret to effective long-range communication then?” Nym asked.
“Simply put? Effective long-range scrying. There’s no way of getting around it. Any spell that needs to cover hundreds or thousands of miles to find its intended target is going to be expensive and difficult. For us lowly humans, that means being as efficient as possible in the spell construct, which often means tailoring spells to individual targets.
“For example, I currently have nineteen long range communication spells stored in my head, each one keyed to a different person. I have been meaning to create a new one specific to you, but as you know, something else is always coming up.”
Nym didn’t like that solution. It sounded like an inelegant hack job that only technically accomplished its goal when the parameters were narrowed down to exactly one use case. “What about a pinnacle spell?”
“Better for the scrying portion, complete overkill for the communication part, only really useful if I desperately need to talk to someone who is not one of the aforementioned nineteen people. If you still need my help once your current avatar reaches the fifth layer, I’ll show it to you.”
“There has got to be a work around to this,” Nym said.
“Oh, there is, but it’s so expensive that the king refuses to implement it.”
“I… what? What would he have to do with…” Nym trailed off as he looked at the fox ring. “Some sort of beacon network, right? Set something up every few miles so you can target anyone within a radius of it.”
“It has its drawbacks, of course, but if you don’t know exactly where someone is, you can toss out a communication spell targeted at a static location, the beacon, and hope they’re near it. You might include the reference number for your own beacon so they can communicate back, assuming they have the ability to.”
“But then you need infrastructure,” Nym realized. “It’s not enough to hire a bunch of master mages to build the beacons. They need to be placed; they need staff to maintain the facilities, to guard the beacons against hostile forces, to be recharged as needed.”
“And they need safety measures to prevent their abuse. We wouldn’t want an invading army taking over our communications network to help them conquer us more efficiently. It all adds up to a massive expenditure of time and money, something I can assure you King Maleotrak is not eager to endorse.”
The conversation turned from hypotheticals to creating a concrete communication spell that would link him to the archmage. The parameters for what the scrying portion would look for were locked down tightly: someone of Archmage Veran’s height, weight, age, eye color, hair color, and even magical aptitude. There were over two dozen descriptors all tailored to fit exactly one man. If something were to change about him, even if he put on or lost some weight, it would need to be updated, and beyond that every few years or so, it would have to be updated anyway.
Archmage Veran created a new copy of the spell using Nym as a profile to demonstrate how it worked. “Normally, I would never bother to go through the effort with someone so young. The spell rarely lasts more than a few months before the target outgrows it, but in this case, I suppose I shall make an exception. Unless something about you changes drastically, it should last for the duration of this job of yours.”
Then it was Nym’s turn. Archmage Veran couldn’t exactly guide him while he constructed his version of the spell, but the theory was simple enough that once he’d watched his mentor do it, it wasn’t too terribly difficult to repeat. The tricky part was tweaking the targeting portion, but a few hours of tinkering was enough to brute force it.
So now Nym had a ‘Contact Archmage Veran’ spell that would work from a thousand miles away. It wasn’t good for anyone else, and he wasn’t confident he could fill the blanks in for Analia or Bildar without further assistance. For his current purposes though, it worked just fine.
“I’m afraid we’re running short on time, and we haven’t even really started on the scrying spells you’ll need to effectively search the entire northland,” Archmage Veran told him.
“I am less worried about that. I think I can just follow the arcana. If I track it far enough, eventually I should discover the source.”
“You may be underestimating how far an infestation like this can spread, and how quickly. You could trace the one spot you know about to another, only to find that it goes in six different directions with nothing to tell you which way will take you closer to the origin.”
“That’s a good point. On the other hand, if I’m going to clean up the entire infestation, I’ll need to map it all out anyway, so eventually I’ll find the source regardless.”
“True, but the sooner you find the talisman that’s creating the scarabs, the less of them there will be to clean up.”
“Also true, but the longer I delay preparing, the more time they have to spread.”
“But if you don’t prepare well enough, you may not live to exterminate them all.”
“Alright, alright. I give!” Nym held up his hands in surrender.
“Excellent. I will clear my schedule tomorrow evening and we’ll continue our preparations. In the meantime, I hate to ask, but I don’t suppose you could make a new batch of freezing brain twisters for me? I’m afraid we’ve rather lost track of time and I don’t have enough hours in my day left to start over now.”
“I know next to nothing about alchemy,” Nym confessed, “But I do know an accomplished alchemist who owes me a favor or two.”
“Perfect. I’ll leave the ingredients in the lab for you to take with you. Please place them in the ice chest once they’re finished and I’ll collect them before the party.”
“Uh, how many did you want?”
“As many as can be produced with what I have left,” Archmage Veran said.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Perfect. Now then, I must be off. I do have other obligations to attend to.”
They said their goodbyes, and Nym walked over to the lab to load up his cargo.
* * *
The teleport directly into Cern’s workshop was tricky, and even though Nym was confident he could target it precisely enough to stick the landing, he did have some concerns about things like other people being there, or surprising an alchemist at work, which could lead to things exploding. So, with some regret, he teleported into the sky over Shu-Ain instead, then flew down to the workshop to walk in through the front door. It was locked, but Nym didn’t let that stop him.
Cern came storming out of the back room as the door opened, yelling in a rapid stream of the local dialect that he choked off mid-rant when he saw who it was. “God’s blood, kid! Don’t just walk in like you own the place. How’d you even get in anyway?”
Nym shrugged. “Magic. Here, got an order for you.”
Cern regarded the packaged ingredients suspiciously. “What’s this for?”
“Order for Archmage Veran, Headmaster of the Abilanth Academy. He wants as many freezing brain twisters as can be made with this.”
“Oh really?” Cern’s expression switched from suspicion to greed so fast Nym almost thought he’d imagined the earlier look. “Not terribly difficult to produce, but the ingredients themselves are expensive. That drives the price up. Normally I’d charge four crests for a batch of twenty.”
“Well, since the archmage is supplying the ingredients, I think you can forgo the mark up. And since he’d asked me to procure them as a favor, and since you owe me fifty or sixty crests worth of favors, I thought you might just make them for me.”
“I… yes. I can do that. Come on then, you can assist me at least.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know much at all about alchemy.”
“Yes, I’ll do the complicated stuff, and you’ll pour cold-aspected arcana when and where I tell you. Give me twenty minutes to finish up what I’ve got cooking now. You wait out here.”
Then Cern took the package out of Nym’s arms, closed the door to the backroom in his face and started rattling around vials and beakers and muttering to himself. Nym just stood there for a minute listening, then shook his head and sent a message to Analia letting her know he was at the workshop.
A few minutes later, he sent another message. It was possible she was out of the city and they just weren’t reaching her, or that she was sleeping, or just otherwise too busy to respond. All things considered though, Nym would feel more comfortable if he knew she was safe. When she didn’t respond to the second message, he started scrying.
A regular scry wasn’t going to pick her up, but he had some advanced techniques and third layer arcana available to him now. He started at her apartments and, when those were empty, spread the scry out in a large blanket. Eventually, he came across a distortion in the spell, a person-shaped hole that wasn’t giving him the feedback he normally received.
It might not have been Analia. She was hardly the only person in the world who valued their privacy so highly that they repeatedly stitched anti-scrying rune sequences onto their clothes. Idly, Nym wondered how much of her money had gone towards the special metal threads needed to keep the runes from burning out every few days.
While he was considering whether or not the person he’d spotted with concealment runes shrouding them was Analia, his scry kept working its way through the city in an ever-expanding radius. It would only go maybe a mile around him before it faded too far to be useful, but that was still a lot of area to go over in just a few minutes. It was a thousand times faster than looking by just flying around.
A second person popped up with a distorted presence, but this one wasn’t as well concealed. He recognized Analia immediately. She was standing in a shop of some sort, talking to someone while three other people looked on. Nym couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from her posture she looked like she was getting aggressive over something, and they didn’t seem to be taking it well.
“I’ll be right back,” he yelled through the door.
Nym teleported to the roof of the building Analia was in and switched to his anchor style scrying spell, now enhanced to show arcana too. It slipped down through the ceiling into the room, where he saw she had a spell already prepared to form chunks of hail and fire them off at high speed.
Before he could do anything else, one of the men she was talking to started shouting, and Analia finished the spell in a snap. A chunk of ice tagged the man in the face, which triggered the rest of the men to attack her. A wave of paralysis magic washed out across the room, catching two of them. The last one got a hand on her for a second before her third spell finished.
Pure force, probably the most expensive of the three spells she’d cast, lanced out and caught the man in the gut. His hand was ripped off her shoulder and he was flung across the room to crash into a pyramid of kegs that had been stacked up against the back wall.
Nym teleported down next to her and said, “Hi. What’s going on?”
Analia spun in place, prepared to fire off another spell directly at Nym. When she saw who it was, she scowled and snapped, “Don’t do that!”
“The challenge with all communication-based magic is finding the recipient,” Archmage Veran said. “This is by far the biggest arcana investment in even the most basic message spell, and that has a range limited to mere miles and relies heavily on the caster’s knowledge of the recipient to direct the search.”
He gestured to the fox ring and said, “This circumvents part of that problem by establishing a link not to a person, but to an unchanging item. The spell looks for the ring, and then pushes the communication to whoever is wearing it. Simple, but only effective one-way. It cannot, for example, be used to find the fox who gave it to you. I suspect that was purposeful.”
“So what is the secret to effective long-range communication then?” Nym asked.
“Simply put? Effective long-range scrying. There’s no way of getting around it. Any spell that needs to cover hundreds or thousands of miles to find its intended target is going to be expensive and difficult. For us lowly humans, that means being as efficient as possible in the spell construct, which often means tailoring spells to individual targets.
“For example, I currently have nineteen long range communication spells stored in my head, each one keyed to a different person. I have been meaning to create a new one specific to you, but as you know, something else is always coming up.”
Nym didn’t like that solution. It sounded like an inelegant hack job that only technically accomplished its goal when the parameters were narrowed down to exactly one use case. “What about a pinnacle spell?”
“Better for the scrying portion, complete overkill for the communication part, only really useful if I desperately need to talk to someone who is not one of the aforementioned nineteen people. If you still need my help once your current avatar reaches the fifth layer, I’ll show it to you.”
“There has got to be a work around to this,” Nym said.
“Oh, there is, but it’s so expensive that the king refuses to implement it.”
“I… what? What would he have to do with…” Nym trailed off as he looked at the fox ring. “Some sort of beacon network, right? Set something up every few miles so you can target anyone within a radius of it.”
“It has its drawbacks, of course, but if you don’t know exactly where someone is, you can toss out a communication spell targeted at a static location, the beacon, and hope they’re near it. You might include the reference number for your own beacon so they can communicate back, assuming they have the ability to.”
“But then you need infrastructure,” Nym realized. “It’s not enough to hire a bunch of master mages to build the beacons. They need to be placed; they need staff to maintain the facilities, to guard the beacons against hostile forces, to be recharged as needed.”
“And they need safety measures to prevent their abuse. We wouldn’t want an invading army taking over our communications network to help them conquer us more efficiently. It all adds up to a massive expenditure of time and money, something I can assure you King Maleotrak is not eager to endorse.”
The conversation turned from hypotheticals to creating a concrete communication spell that would link him to the archmage. The parameters for what the scrying portion would look for were locked down tightly: someone of Archmage Veran’s height, weight, age, eye color, hair color, and even magical aptitude. There were over two dozen descriptors all tailored to fit exactly one man. If something were to change about him, even if he put on or lost some weight, it would need to be updated, and beyond that every few years or so, it would have to be updated anyway.
Archmage Veran created a new copy of the spell using Nym as a profile to demonstrate how it worked. “Normally, I would never bother to go through the effort with someone so young. The spell rarely lasts more than a few months before the target outgrows it, but in this case, I suppose I shall make an exception. Unless something about you changes drastically, it should last for the duration of this job of yours.”
Then it was Nym’s turn. Archmage Veran couldn’t exactly guide him while he constructed his version of the spell, but the theory was simple enough that once he’d watched his mentor do it, it wasn’t too terribly difficult to repeat. The tricky part was tweaking the targeting portion, but a few hours of tinkering was enough to brute force it.
So now Nym had a ‘Contact Archmage Veran’ spell that would work from a thousand miles away. It wasn’t good for anyone else, and he wasn’t confident he could fill the blanks in for Analia or Bildar without further assistance. For his current purposes though, it worked just fine.
“I’m afraid we’re running short on time, and we haven’t even really started on the scrying spells you’ll need to effectively search the entire northland,” Archmage Veran told him.
“I am less worried about that. I think I can just follow the arcana. If I track it far enough, eventually I should discover the source.”
“You may be underestimating how far an infestation like this can spread, and how quickly. You could trace the one spot you know about to another, only to find that it goes in six different directions with nothing to tell you which way will take you closer to the origin.”
“That’s a good point. On the other hand, if I’m going to clean up the entire infestation, I’ll need to map it all out anyway, so eventually I’ll find the source regardless.”
“True, but the sooner you find the talisman that’s creating the scarabs, the less of them there will be to clean up.”
“Also true, but the longer I delay preparing, the more time they have to spread.”
“But if you don’t prepare well enough, you may not live to exterminate them all.”
“Alright, alright. I give!” Nym held up his hands in surrender.
“Excellent. I will clear my schedule tomorrow evening and we’ll continue our preparations. In the meantime, I hate to ask, but I don’t suppose you could make a new batch of freezing brain twisters for me? I’m afraid we’ve rather lost track of time and I don’t have enough hours in my day left to start over now.”
“I know next to nothing about alchemy,” Nym confessed, “But I do know an accomplished alchemist who owes me a favor or two.”
“Perfect. I’ll leave the ingredients in the lab for you to take with you. Please place them in the ice chest once they’re finished and I’ll collect them before the party.”
“Uh, how many did you want?”
“As many as can be produced with what I have left,” Archmage Veran said.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Perfect. Now then, I must be off. I do have other obligations to attend to.”
They said their goodbyes, and Nym walked over to the lab to load up his cargo.
* * *
The teleport directly into Cern’s workshop was tricky, and even though Nym was confident he could target it precisely enough to stick the landing, he did have some concerns about things like other people being there, or surprising an alchemist at work, which could lead to things exploding. So, with some regret, he teleported into the sky over Shu-Ain instead, then flew down to the workshop to walk in through the front door. It was locked, but Nym didn’t let that stop him.
Cern came storming out of the back room as the door opened, yelling in a rapid stream of the local dialect that he choked off mid-rant when he saw who it was. “God’s blood, kid! Don’t just walk in like you own the place. How’d you even get in anyway?”
Nym shrugged. “Magic. Here, got an order for you.”
Cern regarded the packaged ingredients suspiciously. “What’s this for?”
“Order for Archmage Veran, Headmaster of the Abilanth Academy. He wants as many freezing brain twisters as can be made with this.”
“Oh really?” Cern’s expression switched from suspicion to greed so fast Nym almost thought he’d imagined the earlier look. “Not terribly difficult to produce, but the ingredients themselves are expensive. That drives the price up. Normally I’d charge four crests for a batch of twenty.”
“Well, since the archmage is supplying the ingredients, I think you can forgo the mark up. And since he’d asked me to procure them as a favor, and since you owe me fifty or sixty crests worth of favors, I thought you might just make them for me.”
“I… yes. I can do that. Come on then, you can assist me at least.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know much at all about alchemy.”
“Yes, I’ll do the complicated stuff, and you’ll pour cold-aspected arcana when and where I tell you. Give me twenty minutes to finish up what I’ve got cooking now. You wait out here.”
Then Cern took the package out of Nym’s arms, closed the door to the backroom in his face and started rattling around vials and beakers and muttering to himself. Nym just stood there for a minute listening, then shook his head and sent a message to Analia letting her know he was at the workshop.
A few minutes later, he sent another message. It was possible she was out of the city and they just weren’t reaching her, or that she was sleeping, or just otherwise too busy to respond. All things considered though, Nym would feel more comfortable if he knew she was safe. When she didn’t respond to the second message, he started scrying.
A regular scry wasn’t going to pick her up, but he had some advanced techniques and third layer arcana available to him now. He started at her apartments and, when those were empty, spread the scry out in a large blanket. Eventually, he came across a distortion in the spell, a person-shaped hole that wasn’t giving him the feedback he normally received.
It might not have been Analia. She was hardly the only person in the world who valued their privacy so highly that they repeatedly stitched anti-scrying rune sequences onto their clothes. Idly, Nym wondered how much of her money had gone towards the special metal threads needed to keep the runes from burning out every few days.
While he was considering whether or not the person he’d spotted with concealment runes shrouding them was Analia, his scry kept working its way through the city in an ever-expanding radius. It would only go maybe a mile around him before it faded too far to be useful, but that was still a lot of area to go over in just a few minutes. It was a thousand times faster than looking by just flying around.
A second person popped up with a distorted presence, but this one wasn’t as well concealed. He recognized Analia immediately. She was standing in a shop of some sort, talking to someone while three other people looked on. Nym couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from her posture she looked like she was getting aggressive over something, and they didn’t seem to be taking it well.
“I’ll be right back,” he yelled through the door.
Nym teleported to the roof of the building Analia was in and switched to his anchor style scrying spell, now enhanced to show arcana too. It slipped down through the ceiling into the room, where he saw she had a spell already prepared to form chunks of hail and fire them off at high speed.
Before he could do anything else, one of the men she was talking to started shouting, and Analia finished the spell in a snap. A chunk of ice tagged the man in the face, which triggered the rest of the men to attack her. A wave of paralysis magic washed out across the room, catching two of them. The last one got a hand on her for a second before her third spell finished.
Pure force, probably the most expensive of the three spells she’d cast, lanced out and caught the man in the gut. His hand was ripped off her shoulder and he was flung across the room to crash into a pyramid of kegs that had been stacked up against the back wall.
Nym teleported down next to her and said, “Hi. What’s going on?”
Analia spun in place, prepared to fire off another spell directly at Nym. When she saw who it was, she scowled and snapped, “Don’t do that!”
