88 - Web of Lies

Vittoria had created a three-dimensional map of the sect compound, the golden particles flickering in place like a shining art form.
Arielle nearly got distracted by the pretty lights illuminating the orbs beside them, but Vittoria seemed to notice almost immediately and snapped a finger in front of her eyes.
“Pay attention,” she said. “Even with everything I’m about to tell you, this mission is going to be very risky. But if there’s no risk, there’s no reward.”
Arielle cleared her throat and nodded.
“As far as I know,” Vittoria continued and pointed at the tallest building in the far-left corner. “This is Yseult’s home at the sect compound. He also has an estate in the nearby city of Ghul, where he sometimes likes to stay, but as the Anchor of the region, he must spend most of his time at the anchorage, which is here. Security-wise, it would make more sense for him to keep the antidote here.” She dragged her finger across the map to another building complex in the distant rear, floating towers connected by sky bridges. “These are where the Elders stay. I suspect one of them has been possessed or replaced by a demon lord, and their home was its primary access point into this world. My best guess is that it is the one in the middle, only because it would make sense to have a ritual circle there, given the leyline convergence. There is only a very minuscule chance that Yseult gave the antidote to this demon lord. If he suspects I’m coming, that will be the person most capable of stopping me. It would be a smart engagement. However, Yseult is arrogant about his own abilities and untrusting of demons. I highly doubt he would hand over one of their last pieces of leverage to one of them. And if he did, then we might have to call off the mission entirely.”
Arielle flinched and was already shaking her head, but Vittoria held her hand up, her gaze commanding and strict.
“Yes, Arielle. We will call off the reconnaissance, regroup, and restrategize. Demons are no joke, and demonic spells are something we don’t fully understand. Their entrapment will be a lot more sophisticated than Yseult’s. A demon lord can also break our connection, preventing a simple withdrawal. We can’t let that happen no matter what. You meet a high-ranking demon, I get you out of there.” She brushed her hand through her hair. “Besides, as I said, the antidote is probably not even there. Handing over something as precious as that just to catch me would be very unwise. The demon might be the only one who can fight against me, but it will be a high cost to pay.” She cleared her throat. “In any case, stay far away from that place.”
Arielle still struggled with the idea of giving up in the face of adversity.
Vittoria braced her hands on her knees, leaned down, and said, “Arielle, a soldier who shirks instructions, gets arrogant, and doesn’t know their own limits quickly becomes a dead soldier. If you give me any indication of insubordination, I will halt this entire exercise right now. Understood?”
“I won’t be like that,” Arielle said, spooked by the thought of stopping. “I’ll follow orders. I promise.”
Vittoria stared at her for a long time, then released a noisy breath. “We’ll see. The third place it could be is the treasure room, in the main building.” She dragged her hand to the center of the compound, where a gilded building was modeled.“This is where Lord and Lady Draco stay, and because of that, there are extra protections, particularly around the treasure chamber. You would need the blood of a Draco to access it. It is one of the most fortified locations on the compound; however, I know for a fact the demons already have a way in, which they haven’t informed the sect of yet.”
“How do you know?”
She smiled darkly. “Let’s just say I had a very long night playing with our little friend in my basement.”
“Oh.” The Overlord. She had interrogated him.
“He’s asleep now,” she said. “It’s dangerous to keep him awake for long because he keeps trying to contact his brothers to lead him here. But I was able to glean some information from his mind and his soul, enough to know that there’s a portion of it that acts as a key to the treasure room. I’m guessing the demons plan on stealing things at some point.”
“So maybe they’ve already stolen the potion?” Ari asked. “If it’s there?”
“I don’t think they have. They probably plan to steal gold and other valuables in case the sect double-crosses them; however, they also don’t want to jeopardize whatever deal they have with the sect by stealing from them outright. Again, if Yseult really kept the antidote there, he would ensure that he knew the second it was missing. He would have his eyes on it at all times. Which is why, the second you have it, I must get you out of there that instantly.”
“Okay,” she said.
Vittoria materialized a tiny black pill in her hand and gestured, dropping it in Arielle’s palm.
“Hold onto that for now. Elric told me some weeks ago that he wanted me to make something that would help disguise your soul and protect it from Lady Draco’s soul sight. This does precisely that, mirroring the Overlord’s soul onto yours, at least for the purposes of getting into the treasure room. The effects of the pill don’t last long. I haven’t had time to perfect the formula, so ensure that you only use it when you’re about to enter the main building. It won’t help you anywhere else. And if the antidote isn’t in the treasure room, then I’ll bring you back, and we’ll check somewhere else.”
What if it’s with the demon lord? Ari wondered but didn’t say out loud. Instead, she asked, “How are you so sure it’s at the sect compound? If Yseult knows you’re coming for it, couldn’t he have moved it somewhere else at the last minute? Somewhere that you would not even think of?”
Vittoria shook her head. “Unlikely. First, he’s aware that I’m tracking him now. He doesn’t know exactly how I’m doing it or how extensive my tracking is, but it’s safe to say that if he moves the antidote somewhere else, I will probably know. At least that’s what he believes. Secondly, there would be nowhere safer to keep it, outside of with the other Legendaries or the High Ascendant himself, and in that case, he would need to explain why he’s keeping it there. Thirdly, as I said, he has set a trap for me, and though they’re not a hundred percent sure I’ll be coming, because they’re not even sure if Elric is injured or why I’m involved in this, if I do show up, where better to capture me than at the sect compound? Then they could get me sanctioned immediately and might even have more grounds to kill me, before the authorities get there.”
Arielle pursed her lips. She didn’t get how the demonic sect could just kill people and get away with it. It was probably for some stupidly convoluted reason, but she didn’t ask because she didn’t care about the backstory or the political ramifications of invading them right now. She just wanted to save Elric.
“Just a recap,” Vittoria said. “First, you go to Yseult’s building, specifically his bedroom. We’ll check the surrounding rooms as well. Secondly, the treasure chamber. Then, if you find nothing in either place, I’ll bring you back. Understood?
“Yes,” she said impatiently. “I understand.”
“There will probably be hidden compartments in each of the rooms, and I can teach you a spell to uncover them. Not that you will need it. Right?”
“Yes,” Ari started nodding, then froze. She glanced at Vittoria quickly but averted her gaze when the other woman gave her a knowing look.
“I know you can see spell forms, Arielle,” she said. “Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe you can see the essences that make up the spell form. Maybe that’s what you talk to in that cave.”
“N-no,” Arielle’s voice cracked, and her heart raced at being thoroughly caught. “No, I don’t.”
“Hmm.” Vittoria didn’t sound convinced. “Well, if you did have that skill, it would help you here. There will be numerous, and I do mean numerous, security protocols surrounding each of the rooms you enter. It will be just like with the scroll, but most likely worse. That’s the only reason I’m letting you do this, because, in that regard, you’re better than me.”
“I don’t see essences,” Arielle clarified again, but Vittoria simply patted her head gently.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to lie to me. I don’t plan on telling anyone your secret.”
Arielle pushed her lips together, frantically thinking of a convincing lie, but nothing came to mind.
Only that Elric was going to be very upset with her for this. Though Vittoria knew a lot about her, Ari was supposed to keep that part a secret, and she had failed.
Then again, she probably had a lot more than just that to apologize for when he woke up.
“This is the spell form to uncover a hidden compartment, and this is a spell form to create one.” Vittoria waved her hand, forming both spells in the air. “If you don’t want to waste essences using an uncovering spell, you can just use those special skills of yours to look for anything that appears to be a hidden compartment spell. And it might be better to do it that way, because Yseult might have foreign-magic-detecting runes in his room. That, or anti-magic components.”
Arielle clutched her robe, initially struggling with a denial, then finally sighed her resignation. She nodded.
“You’re going to be invisible for much of the mission, but I will give you several disguises to don depending on the situation. Don’t talk to anyone. Absolutely avoid it. Even with a voice-modulating spell, your natural inflections will likely give you away. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I will teleport you as close as I can get you and guide you while you’re there. I cannot stress this enough: follow my orders, always. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Let’s go. Oh, wait, one more thing. The invisibility spell.” Vittoria performed a multi-layered spell, her body fading to nothing even as she continued talking. “This is a higher-adept-tier spell, but this particular technique is a bloodline trait because of the method by which it works. Not only does it render you invisible, but it also means that things can pass through you and you won’t be detected by a lot of lower-tier spells. Soul sight would still work on you, though, as well as spells of higher magnitude. Now it’s a little complicated to learn, but I’m sure we can manage it in–”

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Arielle copied the spell perfectly as she, too, faded, and her system alerted her to the new spell that it had just detected.
Vittoria rematerialized with an annoyed and impressed look on her face.
“Of course, she picks it up in two seconds,” Vittoria murmured as though talking to herself. “I don’t know why I even bothered questioning it.”

---

Being invisible was strange.
It was like there was a transparent film of light between her and the rest of the world, and it made everything a little blurry around the edges.
That, combined with the overcast sky and the dark particles in the air, impacted Arielle’s vision, but not enough to slow her down.
She moved with ease, observing her environment. The compound was made up of multiple eastern-style layered towers, with concentric rings of defense, each corner punctuated with statues of dragons, serpents, and other glaring beasts.
Orion revealed to Ari that they held multiple spell forms, both for scanning and possibly animating the statues. Even with her invisibility spell, she avoided being in their view at all, taking special care to go around each of them.
Her heart thumped in her chest as she floated. Her tension was a mixture of barely-leashed anger and apprehension. She kept an eye out for the guards scattered across the grounds, wearing darkly colored armor, masks on their faces, and spears made of black steel that gleamed like a threat.
Ari moved swiftly, her feet hovering over the ground so as not to make any sound on it.
Then she came upon the building painted totally black, higher than the rest, with the eaves swooping into the sky.
This is Yseult’s, Vittoria said, but even without her announcement, Arielle would have known.
She had never seen such a tangled network of spells before.
The front door, as well as other entry points, was protected by all manner of curses and charms. There would also probably be cursed relics, blood covenant circles, and anti-magic runes within, according to Vittoria.
The problem was that the spells were all tangled together, all interlinked, and breaking one spell impacted about ten others.
“Do you know how to get past it?” Vittoria asked. “He might have strengthened the security after learning that we got past the ones on his scroll.”
Arielle said nothing.
The answer was that she didn’t know how to break it yet, but she would figure it out. She had to.
She started tracing one portion of the spell, directly over the doorway. It worked by the same mechanism the scroll did, but it was more complicated because the patterns twisted around each other. So, rather than just a few meeting points, there were added junctures that would work as an alarm or sensor for the rest of the protective mechanism to activate.
She counted all the junction points and individually tracked where they led to.
Each one opened up to another conglomerate of spells, which she also had to individually decipher.
So many alarms.
So many layers of protection.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, but it was long enough for her head to ache from her intense analysis and also long enough for Vittoria to start making humming noises in her head, which distracted her somewhat, but also calmed her at the same time.
“I’m guessing the paranoid bastard isn’t giving you much to work with, is he?” Vittoria muttered, and Arielle nodded.
This was a ridiculous amount of protection, and the more she looked at the interwovenness of it all, the more she noticed redundancies. More often than not, two or three spells were doing the same thing. Did they build on each other? Was he simply trying to confuse her? Or was there another reason for it?
Impatience beat at her, but she took a deep breath and calmed it. She couldn’t afford to be hasty. One wrong move and it would all fall apart. Vittoria would likely get her out before she got seriously injured, but they would lose the chance to grab the antidote.
She looked at the redundancies again, analyzing the duplicated mechanisms and triggers too. Some of them doubled back on each other, uselessly, and felt like they were simply put there to confuse people. They were probably decoys, meant to trick her into thinking that they were important components of the spell.
That felt excessive and a little useless.
This web of lies was something only someone haunted by very many secrets would bother creating.
“Arielle, be careful. Someone’s coming.”
Arielle stood perfectly still. Her ears had already picked up the footsteps a second before Vittoria’s warning, as the two guards turned the corner, talking to themselves in low voices.
One of them stopped and stared at Yseult’s building for some time. Then he brought up a middle finger directed at it and continued on his path.
“Well.” Vittoria sounded amused. “Seems our friend is not well-liked. Shocking.”
Yseult wasn’t their friend, but Arielle didn’t have time to evaluate what the statement or the gesture meant, so she simply turned her attention back to the task at hand.
After some more minutes, she realized something else.
The decoy spells did serve another purpose.
They engaged with a lot of Vacu orbs and emitted a low pulse of what she would call dark noise, a subtle shadow that revealed its presence.
A normal mage, or someone like Vittoria, might be tempted to use a Luxa-lattice or some other kind of complex Luxa spell to reveal more of what was there, or to gain insight into the spell.
That would trigger a trap.
He put that there for Vittoria.
Once Arielle figured that out, she bypassed it entirely.
She reached out with her hand and, simultaneously, touched about forty access points all at once.
After more careful inspection, ensuring she wasn’t falling for any traps, she broke them.
However, she didn’t let the orbs float away, nor did she break the rest of the spell.
She had only disabled the detecting components, but she kept the rest of the spell in place so that the entire network would not disintegrate completely. Even with the detection aspects inactive, having the entire spell fall apart would send a warning to Yseult, too.
So she held the orbs vibrating in the air in their general positions but lacking some of the linkages that would prevent her from entering.
Then she moved through the door, into the building.
“Yes!” Vittoria crowed in her mind. “I knew you could do it, you infernal genius!”
Arielle cocked her head at the title, which sounded like both a compliment and an insult. However, she decided to address it later.
It was echoey and empty in the building, sounding more like a mausoleum than a home.
She walked the long, lonely path, taking the time to dismantle portions of the protective spells that she met along the way, while also holding them in place so they didn’t fall apart completely.
She passed the bare living area, the silent servant quarters, and located Yseult’s room at the very end of the corridor.
“Careful,” Vittoria said. “Yseult is a crazy person, and not the fun kind. There will almost certainly be another web of defenses in his room.“
Arielle knew that. She had already used Orion to scan the room. Thankfully, the web here was not as complicated. He must not have believed anyone could get past the trap at his entrance, and he was probably right, because the only way Ari could do it was by breaking the right pieces of his spell and holding it in place, at this point having about four hundred orbs held in place just by her own willpower.
She moved through his room door, and Vittoria’s breathing eased when nothing happened.
“Wow,” she commented. “I mean, I believed in you and everything, but…wow. I truly didn’t think it would be that easy. You really have a talent for this.”
Thank you, Arielle thought, but she didn’t say the words out loud.
“You know, I would give a lot to see Yseult’s face when he realizes just how easily you got past his guard.”
Vittoria’s voice dripped with satisfaction as Ari glanced around.
Yseult’s room was sparse and organized, windowless except for one balcony separated by a glass panel. She moved slowly, scanning each step of the way.
Several objects in the room were enchanted to give off alarms if anyone touched them. So was the floorboard. The eyes of a panther statue recorded movement, so she stayed out of view, while disconnecting their detecting components too.There was also a hidden ritual circle underneath the floorboard.
What was that for?
No time to think about it. She would just avoid it for now.
She scanned the room for hidden compartments and found quite a few. She used Orion to look into the first one, discovering a wand.
The second compartment revealed what looked to be scrolls and some gold bars.
The third was a book that gave her pause.
She felt something emanating from it. Something familiar.
Something that gave her the same sensation she had felt in the Helleron forest and standing near the Drift’s statue.
That faint flavor of otherworldliness that whispered at her.
The Drift. Was he there?
Was the book an access point? Another door?
Why would Yseult have that? Was he chosen by the Drift too? Or was it possibly stolen from Cornelius Draco?
“Is the antidote not there?” Vittoria asked. “It should be fairly obvious: a glowing bottle.”
Ari shook her head in disappointment. There were some potions in hidden compartments, but none of them were glowing.
Vittoria sighed. “Okay. Let’s check the second location.”
Ari bit her lip. It seemed like a waste of effort to leave without taking anything.
Perhaps there were things in the compartment that they could use, either to blackmail Yseult into giving them the antidote or to get him killed for what he did to Elric.
I can’t let him get away with it. Vittoria might disapprove, so I don’t want to risk asking her.
“Arielle? What are you thinking? If it’s not there, hurry up and leave.”
Arielle did not leave. Instead, she began dismantling all the alert spells attached to the items in the hidden compartment, taking the valuables and replacing them with random things from around the room.
“Ari…” Vittoria’s voice was warning, but she trailed off, apparently trusting Ari not to set off any alarms.
Arielle got books, gems, jewelry, potions, scrolls, even some random items of clothing. She stored the items she took in a magically reinforced sack that Vittoria had given her, which looked empty no matter how much she put in it, and would only reveal its goods with the right spell.
Once she was done, she gradually relinked the spells that protected the hidden compartments so that everything would seem back in place.
Vittoria was silent as she worked, but when she was done, she said, “That was very risky, Arielle.”
No risk, no reward, Arielle thought, recalling Vittoria’s earlier words.
Though disappointed, she was pleased to have collected a few items she could potentially use. The petty revenge of robbing Yseult blind also made her feel a little better.
As she retreated from his room, she checked other rooms in his home for hidden compartments–except for the servant’s quarters–taking what she could find.
Then she neatly put all his spells back together again and left the building as though she were never there.