BT - Book 1 - Chapter 79

“Hold up,” Jo whispered, sending a thrill through Micah as she touched his bicep.  A second later, a pair of guards walked past on the compound’s walls, swords clanking at their sides.

Micah crouched next to her in the dark, Mursa’s moon lay hidden beneath a wall of clouds as they waited for the guards to walk out of sight.  He shifted slightly, the branches of the bush that the two of them were hiding in clinging at his clothes.

“What if there are magical alarms?” he hissed.  “I didn’t see you checking for wards and I’m certain that Baron Hurden can afford them.”

“Just do your time thing and see if they’re about to go off,” Jo rolled her eyes at him, barely visible in darkness.

“That isn’t how it works!” Micah responded, whispering heatedly.  “Foresight only lasts for a couple of seconds and unless the alarm is audible, there’s no way I’ll even know that something went wrong.”

“Then you get to try out that fancy silver whistle you made yesterday,” She winked at him before sprinting toward the wall surrounding the Baron’s compound.

Micah swore quietly to himself, following her, muttering the words to flight even as Jo activated the spell using her necklace to soar over the wall and into the courtyard beyond.  He jumped into the air, frantically looking back and forth, hoping that his actions weren’t triggering any number of rituals or blessings that could be defending the estate

He did have the whistle.  An item he’d enchanted with air magic so that his Luoca would be able to hear it at any distance.  He’d learned his lessons from the fight in the Crypt of Rot.  It hardly mattered that Micah had access to an overpowered daemon if he wasn’t able to call it.

“Took you long enough slowpoke,” Jo’s teeth flashed in the dim light.  The Baron’s compound had occasional mage lights dotting its interior buildings, breaking up some of the gloom of the overcast night.

“I thought you had a plan for all of this,” Micah walked up next to her, hand gripping his spear tightly.

“Sure do,” she giggled.  “A couple days ago, while you were enchanting the necklace I talked to the Baron’s majordomo about his hiring campaign to find his son’s killers.  My level got me a tour of the compound but eventually they figured out that I only had a common blessing.  Alas, I am not nearly elite enough for the exclusive club of mercenaries and thugs that Hurden is putting together.”

“So now I know where things are courtesy of the Baron,” she motioned toward the twenty or so smaller buildings surrounding the central palace.  “More importantly, I’ve seen the numbers he’s bringing in.  There are enough new faces around here that if we just walk around pretending we belong, no one is likely to call us out on it.”

“And if they do,” she shrugged impishly.  “You blow into that little whistle of yours and we see how big and bad these mysterious reinforcements you keep talking about are.”

“If there are really that many people,” Micah frowned, “We’re going to run into someone.”

“Just think of it as a great chance to earn an acting skill on the spot,” She patted Micah on the shoulder before walking away from the compound’s wall.  “Either that or we get to run away.  Nothing gets your adrenaline running like a good old fashioned chase.”

Micah swallowed his complaints.  Jo was reckless.  He knew that.  It didn’t change the fact that she was the only person he knew that even had an inkling on breaking into a noble’s estate.

Jo moved with purpose through the outbuilding around the central palace.  With each step, she gave off a sort of bored confidence that Micah did his best to emulate.  It took everything in him to not jump at every noise or start whenever a stray cat ran by.

Maybe Jo was right, it was about time that he picked up an acting or bluffing skill.  It had just never seemed important when his goal was to stop the Durgh invasion, but ultimately he lived in a world filled with humans.  At some point he’d need to interact with them, and that meant the ability to deceive.

They walked quickly, Jo leading him through back alleys past stables, workshops and art studios, many of which had been converted into makeshift barracks.  Snores and occasional muffled conversations filled the night, each sound driving Micah’s anxiety to new heights.

Jo darted toward him.

Micah barely stopped himself from skewering her, only registering the reflexive movement of his spear just in time to redirect it as she pulled herself close.

“Follow my lead,” she whispered into his ear, breath hot on his cheek as she pushed him against a nearby building.

Shock blanked Micah’s mind.  His physical stats tripled hers.  It would only be a shake of his shoulders to dislodge Jo, but instead all he could think about was the warmth of her body against his as she leaned into him.

“Hey!”  A female voice called out.  “It’s after hours!  You know you should…. Oh.”  The woman trailed off before finishing flatly.

“Sorry,” Jo leaned away from Micah, positioning her cloak so that it prevented the guard from seeing his confusion.  “I was just going for a walk with my boyfriend to take in the night air.  It was a little cramped in the housing.  No privacy if you know what I mean.”

“You were…” The other woman responded uncertainly.

“Well we were about to,” Micah could almost hear Jo wink.   “Don’t worry about it.  We’ll get back to our quarters soon if you let us be.  Say in maybe five minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes at least,” he forced the words out of his throat, vaguely succeeding in his attempt at sounding confident.

“He says fifteen minutes,” Jo’s laugh tinkled in the night air.  “A bold claim that I would like to test if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I.. uhh…” The other woman stuttered, obvious embarrassment in her voice.  “Just don’t take too long okay?  You know that the Baron doesn’t want us wandering around at night.  We’re all supposed to muster in the training square bright and early tomorrow morning.  Apparently his ritualist has made some sort of major breakthrough.”

“We’ll take just long enough,” Jo purred.  “I don’t suppose you’d want to dally as well?  I’m sure my boyfriend wouldn’t mind a third.”

Micah blushed.  Every ounce of his mind was focused on recreating an affinity attunement ritual.  He traced the complicated circles and diagrams of the advanced ritual, praying to Mursa that it would be dry and distracting enough to prevent Jo from noticing how he was reacting to her proximity and flirting.

“I think I need to get to the next checkpoint,” the guard responded hurriedly.  “If I don’t check in on time I’ll get in trouble.  Have a nice night you two.”

A pair of footsteps receded rapidly, almost running to escape them.  Jo chuckled.

“See Micah?”  She pulled herself away from him.  “Nothing like a judicious use of the acting skill to get the blood pumping.”

“What the hell was that?” he whispered back, shaking his head as he tried to clear it.  “What would you have done if she said yes?  We could have gotten caught!”

“Not if we stayed committed to the con,” Jo winked back, sending a shiver down Micah’s spine.  “It wouldn’t have happened.  She was confused and self-conscious.  She was trying to make up her mind as to whether she should do her duty and report us or just move on so she didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of confronting us.  It was just a matter of realizing that she was teetering on the edge of that decision and giving her a shove.”

“Gods Jo,” he exhaled, blinking in the dim light from the nearby orbs.  I think that was a little bit too much and a different kind of excitement than I was expecting.

“The night is still young,” Jo stepped away from the building and began walking toward the palace once again.  “We could still end up in a pitched battle for our lives yet.”

Micah opened his mouth to reply, catching himself with a shake of his head.  At this point she was toying with him like Ravi with a boar.  Any reaction on his part would just lead to her winding him up more.  While he wouldn’t mind if they were back in the Jolly Porker, flirting while sneaking into a heavily armed enemy compound seemed a bit much to him.

Of course, Jo lived for this sort of thing.  Any time things seemed stale or certain, she would find an excuse to throw a stick in the works.  While Micah could understand the adrenaline rush she got while thriving off of chaos, tomorrow would be a better time.

He shook his head, refocusing on their approach to the palace.  Jo led them to the building without further incident, stopping only twice to let bored guards walk past.  Finally, they were at the base of the building, crouched next to a pile of refuse that decorated the servants entrance.

Wordlessly, Jo fiddled with the lock.  A flash of silver in her hands as she twisted a thin rod in the door before pressing with her dagger.  The door clicked, and with a wave of her hand, Micah followed her in.

They were in a kitchen, a pair of great ovens dormant next to the Northern wall.  Jo closed the door behind him, dropping the two of them into complete darkness.

A moment later, her hand was on his wrist, leading him quietly through the maze of equipment and hanging pans.  Once they were in the hallway she pulled him to the side, entering a side passage.

Before long they were ascending stairs, evidently how servants brought food and drink to the nobles that dwelled in the palace’s upper floors.  With only an occasional creak of an old floorboard, the two of them reached the third level.

Micah vaguely recalled Keeper Ansom complaining about the number of stairs leading to the Baron’s private library, and luckily the Ageless Folio had recorded those gripes.  Without them, Jo and him might have been stuck wandering aimlessly throughout the building all night.

Finally, they entered the room, Jo peeling off silently to watch the sole door into the library.  The walls were paneled in rare wood, plush couches and chairs lining a pair of luxurious reading desks.  Micah suspected that the furniture in the room was worth as much if not more than the entirety of the attunement he’d managed to bank away, but that wealth disparity wasn’t his focus.

He ignored the rest of the books, quickly walking over to a glass case with five ancient grimoires in it.  Squinting in the low light, he made out the telltale glimmer of an alarm, cast with ritual magic, over the door.

Micah nodded, quickly pulling out a stick of chalk and drawing his own counter ritual circle on the ground in front of it.  Four reagents took their places on the circle and Micah began quietly reciting the spell.

Power built around him, seeping into the shell of energy that made up the books’ defenses.  One rune and then another, inscribed on the glass with a grease pen, faded from his sight as his writing energy wormed into the existing ritual, shorting them out.

Micah held his breath as the glimmer faded.  He strained his ears, waiting to hear shouts of alarm, but the night continued quietly with no sound other than the creaking of the house settling into its foundations reaching his ears.

He opened the glass, ignoring a grimoire of water magic, a ledger of family expenses, and an ‘unabridged’ history of the royal family.  Instead his vision honed in on two tomes.

One had the words The Magic of Growth written in brilliant gold stitching down its spine.  The other had an hourglass made of precious gems on the cover.  Below it, the words Chronomancy: Advanced Theory were stamped deep into the leather cover.

Micah’s fingers trailed gently across the book.  Finally, after years of using and reusing the same spells with only some minor modifications, he was going to learn something new.