Scrying nets were useless fucking things at the best of times.
Now that she was forced to rely on one, Ro had to physically restrain herself from hunting down whoever had invented the damned things and throttling them.
They detected magic at a distance. A handy thing, if not for the limitations.
It looked like the table of a war room — a magic-wrought relief of Deadacre and its surrounding lands for a hundred leagues in every direction, with the rendition growing fuzzier the further out it went. That had nothing to do with the clarity of the enchantment itself, but was instead a convenient piece of visual representation: the scrying net’s accuracy degraded the further away a source of mana was.
Atop the impressions of valleys, forests, city walls and districts, lay a flickering overlay of blue light. It pulsed and shimmered. Every now and then a bright pinprick would spark higher off the table, a sign of beasts clashing — or perhaps a hunting team striking.
Higher concentrations of mana stood out more brightly than usual. Specialists had been brought in to tune the device, but it had never been designed for the phase change, never intended to cope with background mana levels this high.
As works of artifice, they were clever inventions. As tools of utility, they were terrible. Too vague. Too slow. Too imprecise. Normally, they acted as little more than early warning beacons, giving her some indication of unusual mana emanations in any given location so she could dispatch scouts to investigate.
It was that lacking speed that was her current problem. Ro was no runewright, so she didn’t know the technical reason, but it could take hours for a sudden spike to register.
Even at their best, there were only two things that reliably triggered scrying nets: a fight of high Silver grade or higher, and the sudden discharge of a depth’s portal.
She just had to hope Kaius, Porkchop, and Ianmus reached the surface within a few days’ travel of the city walls.
Grinding her teeth, Ro’s hands bit into the table’s edge — though she was careful not to disrupt the runes carved there.
What burned most was that she knew there were better examples of the technology. She’d seen them, not just in Wight’s End, but in the Stoneholds, in the Dukedom cities of Roanwheat and Baanswell, and in the keeps guarding the edge of the Northern Waste.
There, where the greatest battles were fought, scry nets stretched for a thousand leagues in every direction, covering weeks of travel. The emanations they picked up were detected within minutes, and rendered in high detail.
With one of those, she wouldn’t have had to worry.
But she didn’t have one — not in a shithole like Deadacre.
“Ease off, Ro, you’re going to shatter the thing if you grab it any harder,” Rieker said, sprawled across a couch in their command center.
Ro spun, catching her partner’s steady expression. Across from him, Bronwyn kept wisely quiet.
“How can I relax?” she demanded. “There’s too much going on — far too much. Not only do we have a criminal on the loose with a direct enmity against us, but our most promising team is lost in a deep delve, we’ve discovered Imperial ruins beneath the city, and all of the beasts have vanished in a stampede — seemingly into thin air.”
“Aye,” Rieker said, “so best not to break our scrying net.”
Seeing her tense expression, he pushed himself to his feet and crossed the room, pulling her into a tight hug.
A moment later he set her back, hands firm on her shoulders, looking her in the eye.
“They’ll be fine, we’ll find them.”
“How can you be sure?” Ro asked.
Rieker looked at her incredulously. “Because the last time I sparred with them, they hadn’t even reached their hundredth level, and they hit like bloody Silvers. That group, on a deep delve? They’ll double their levels, if not cross through the tiers. I know it. And gods know what other benefits they’ll find down there.”
Ro brushed his hand off, returning to stare deeply at the scrying net.
“This is an Onyx Temple operative we’re talking about. He’s likely to still have resources — for all we know he might be preparing to engage once they resurface. Hells, he might have twenty Silvers waiting when they surface. Even for them, that’s a lot. I’ve seen them fight; I know they’re good, but—”
“But you haven’t fought them yourself,” Rieker cut in, grinning. “I have. They’re strong”
Before Ro could voice her protest, Rieker cut her off.
“I know the net is too slow; I know the chances of them surfacing in the city delve are slim to none — and that the outlying ones would take you hours to reach, leaving you half-dead with exhaustion if they were ambushed. But I'm still not worried. Ten Silvers, twenty — I’m certain they’ll crush them. Of course, we’ll render assistance, but don’t fear for their survival.”
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Ro exhaled sharply and gave him a nod, but she lacked his full-hearted confidence. Strong and capable the children might be, she had seen enough prodigies die. Fucking hells, Ianmus might already be dead.
He didn’t have the same hardiness as Kaius and Porkchop. Depending on how deep they’d gone, things could have gone very bad.
Very bad indeed.
And besides…that was only one of their problems.
“And the beasts?” she asked.
Bronwyn cleared his throat, interjecting from his seat in the corner of the room. “I have an update on that front — though it isn’t a good one.”
“You do? Why didn’t you say anything?” Ro demanded.
Bronwyn raised his hands placatingly. “Because I’ve been here for fifteen minutes — and I know you well enough to know not to interrupt when you’re already furious.”
He reached into the small dimensional pouch at his belt and pulled out a sheaf of letters, tossing them across the table. The scry net’s surface fuzzed as they passed through the illusion.
“Scouting reports. Now that I’m back in person, I’ve taken on my duties again. There’s enough going on that even you pulling double shifts isn’t enough, Ro. Four outlying villages have gone dark — all southeast, in the direction we last saw the beasts. Every single one had remained in contact with past that initial wave. They’d gotten battered, but they’d survived — until now.”
Rieker frowned. “Gone dark? What’s in the reports?”
Bronwyn nodded.
“They’ve been levelled — some sort of rampage. It wasn’t men or boggarts. There’s been no signs of either. Beast’s for sure, though I’m not sure what kind. Our rangers, hunters, and scouts? They all agree the tracks were clear. It was a mixed lot that never travels together naturally.”
“Shattered fucking axles,” Ro swore, running a hand through her hair. “How the fuck did we miss this?”
“Small settlements in the middle of nowhere, too far from the scry net. No way we could have known.”
Rieker growled, eying their larger map of the surrounding lands on the wall next to them.
“Aye, no chance then — but we know now. We best get scouts on them and those that still remain.”
“Already done. It’s hard on the coffers, but we’ll manage. Only the most agile, for now — and they’ll keep their distance. We don’t need to lose anyone.”
Ro couldn’t stop herself from flicking back to the sigils on the scry map — the ones representing known delve entrances.
“Can you shift some of them to watch the delves around Deadacre? This thing is useless — it’ll only tell me six hours too late. A scout with a message artifact could have me at any of the entrances in two hours.”
Rieker frowned. “And you’d be half-dead when you got there.”
“So?”
“I told you, Ro. They’re strong — they can handle a few hours delay. Trust them at least that much. We’ll hurry, but we can’t spare those scouts — not with entire settlements dying to something we don’t even understand. The lives of thousands rely on us.”
Bronwyn’s expression hardened. “And to add to that, I need to check out the ruins.”
Ro’s eyes flicked to him. He looked serious.
“I need to get out there,” Bronwyn said. “With our new discovery beneath the city, we need to know more. As much as I want to find out what is happening with those beasts, the risk to life of those in the city walls is immense. We all know what might be waiting down there.”
“The Imperial ruins?” she asked.
“The ruins,” he agreed. “We can’t leave them unexplored. Gods forbid the recent activity down there triggers something. For all we know, it could be a noble family bunker with armed centurions, or worse — a hidden military installation. Think of what would happen if a Gold construct — nay, a Platinum one — popped up in the middle of the city.”
Ro clenched her teeth and nodded. For all she wanted to flip the scrying table, Bronwyn was right — she knew better than anyone what devastation an Imperial installation could cause.
There was just too damn much going on. Too much to track. It was never-ending.
Booms wracked their office, a hammering coming from the door. Ro snapped her eyes toward it, resisting the urge to flick one of the needles sewn into her jacket.
Another interruption; another problem. Just what she needed.
“Enter,” Rieker said, composed.
Ro knew him well enough to hear the barely concealed tension in his voice.
The door opened to reveal one of her new assistants — a whip of a girl, nervous and wide-eyed in front of three of the Guild’s highest ranked. She’d been eager to chip in with the growing work — more for access to Guild trainers than coin. One of more than a few youths who’d had a sudden change of heart about working towards a combat class in these uncertain times.
Ro’s frustration softened, there was no point in taking her anger out on Mally.
“What is it, Mally?” she asked. “You wouldn’t interrupt if it wasn’t important.”
The assistant gulped, nodding quickly, and managed an awkward smile. “Miss Ro… I don’t quite know how to say this, but I think the Defender of Grandbrook is in the common room? He’s asking to speak with the two of you.”
Ro froze, blinking slowly, “Sorry, Mally. Did you just say the Defender of Grandbrook is in my common room?”
“Yes, ma’am. He didn’t give his name, and he was in a heavy cowl — but I don’t know of any other Hirgost in the region. He said he had something important to share.”
Rieker’s face scrunched. He shot Ro a questioning look.
“Did you forget to tell me about some bit of politics you arranged? Why would the Defender be here?”
“It’s news to me,” she replied, shaking her head.
Rieker turned to Bronwyn, who also shook his head.
“He didn’t explicitly say he was here to speak to the two of you,” Mally added. “But given his station, and the fact that he spoke of a group of youths chased into the Depths… it seemed warranted to bring it to you immediately.”
Tension built in Ro’s chest. She shared a long look with Rieker — how in the gods’ rotten fuck had the much-lauded Defender gotten involved in their shit show?
Rieker recovered first, smiling at the assistant.
She froze as the Guildmaster looked at her.
“You made the right choice bringing this to us, lass. I can see this is a bit much for you, as new as you are. Why don’t you send him up, then take a second lunch — and make it a long one. After that, you can spend the rest of the day sorting the backlog in the records room. Leave the ruckus in the common room to the others.”
The girl nodded and hurried off, leaving the three of them staring at each other in confusion.
“This just keeps getting fucking weirder,” Bronwyn muttered.