Ascendant

Nym had waited a week on Valgo’s instructions. The House Patriarch of the Feldstal family had left on some business in the west, something important and complicated, and he was liable to be gone for weeks dealing with it. Nym didn’t get the details from Valgo, as they weren’t important to his job. What was important was that a powerful noble mage was not going to be home when his house got burgled.

Getting into the upper ring was as easy as it always was. Getting to the Feldstal family manor was a lot trickier. Nym kept to the roofs and made his way slowly to his destination. Valgo had given him tons of information, and even shown him a copy of the noble family’s crest. It was easy to know when he’d found the place, since the nobles apparently felt the need to carve it onto every flat surface in sight.

It was easy to scry the symbols too, and Nym confirmed that they were also present all over inside the manor as well. It struck him as extremely narcissistic, but then again, they were nobles. Regardless, he wasn’t there to gawk at their interior decorating. He checked the patrol routes and waited for an opening, then flew through the night to land on the manor roof. From there, it was easy enough to find a window, use basic telekinesis to open it from the inside, and slip in.

Things got more complicated once Nym was inside. There were no patrolling guards, but there were stationary ones and despite the late hour, there were still large sections of the interior lit with what appeared to be magically enchanted orbs that floated in the air near the ceilings. Nym took a few minutes to examine one that was lit in what looked like a dining room that nobody was using.

He judged it to be an acceptable risk as the servant’s hall that connected the dining room to the kitchen was dark and his scrying had found nobody in any of the nearby rooms. It was the first time he’d seen arcana infused into a physical object, and though he wasn’t familiar with the spell to create light, he was able to see the web of runes inscribed into the stone.

It was easy to pick out the flight runes. From what he understood, all runes were a physical representation of how arcana was woven into a pattern to create a spell. It wasn’t enough to just copy the rune; each section had to be inscribed in the correct order. Extrapolating from there, Nym quickly divided the orb into three sections. He mentally set aside the flight runes and looked over the rest.

Those he divided into two sections. First, the runes he thought generated the light effect. They were duplicated all over the orb so that it would shine light from every direction, and though he didn’t know how to write it, it was so simple that there were really only a few different ways it could possibly have been put together. Nym was sure he could replicate it.

The other section was stuff he wasn’t sure on. The best he could figure was that it was a support structure to absorb and store arcana, possibly accept some sort of command input to activate the flight and light runes, and maybe a few other functions he couldn’t think of. The runes themselves were foreign to him, completely removed from his own work with elemental magic.

Nym would have liked to take one with him for further study, but he wasn’t sure how to control it or if it was keyed to the house in some way. The last thing he needed was another incident like the bookstore alarm. Besides, he wasn’t here by choice. He’d be damned if he was going to take a single bronze wedge more than he had to.

He moved from room to room slowly, preferring those that were unlit when possible. He was wearing a mask Valgo had given him just in case someone spotted him, but the hope was that it wouldn’t be necessary. Plus, it was easy enough for him to navigate even without sight and stay hidden in the dark rooms. He just floated over all the furniture and hid near the ceiling while he scouted out nearby rooms. It was tedious work, but he knew where he was going. The family had several vaults underground, and while they did hold real wealth, Valgo wanted something else.

The thief had instead provided Nym the route to a library on the third floor. Unfortunately, it wasn’t near an outside edge, so Nym had to cross a few hundred feet of open yard, enter through a fourth-floor window, one of the few ones that opened far enough to let a person in, and sneak down to the third floor and cross a third of the manor house itself to finally reach it.

Supposedly, the library itself had a hidden room where Valgo’s target was stored. Nym would find out when he got there. He wasn’t even confident he’d make it that far. He was not a good thief, and despite the late hour, the interior of the manor was much better lit than he liked.

The stairs were proving to be especially problematic. There were a pair of guards stationed at the bottom and they were not moving. Nym sat in a dark room across from the top and scried them for half an hour, and the most he’d learned was that the one on the left seemed obsessed with picking his nose. At the rate he was digging, he’d be striking buried treasure soon enough.

Everything was well lit, and he couldn’t see himself managing to get past them without them moving or some kind of distraction. There was supposed to be a second set of stairs on the other end of the house, but that was a whole new set of problems just getting to them. Nym had almost resigned himself to plotting out the trek when one of the guards walked away from his post.

Nym held his breath and stared through the scry. He just needed the other guard to take a few steps to the left and he would be able to fly down and hug the ceiling. His shadow wouldn’t be thrown across the man and he could slip into another empty room just down the hall from the stairs. He waited, his eyes locked on the guard, mentally willing him to move.

And the man just stood there, digging up his nose like he had an itch on his brain. Nym was tempted to go anyway, just gamble that the guard wouldn’t notice him flying by. It was a bad idea though, and he knew it. He needed to be patient, but he also knew that if that other guard came back, he’d have no chance at all.

Nym watched the guard stand there, occasionally fidgeting in place. If the guard wasn’t going to leave on his own, perhaps Nym could distract him. He did a final sweep to make sure there was no one else nearby and that the second guard wasn’t on his way back from wherever he’d disappeared to. Then Nym floated through the air, just out of sight of the guard but ready to shoot past him as soon as he had his opening.

He forged a second conduit with an intent filter on it and pulled first layer arcana into his soul well. One feat of minor telekinesis later and he was holding the guard’s foot down. The next time he tried to shift in place, he nearly fell over. Surprised, the guard glanced down at his foot. Nym pushed back against the recoil in his arms when the man struggled to lift his leg, and mentally kicked out with a second wave of telekinesis to push against the back of the guard’s knee.

He went down with a clatter of metal, cursing as he fell. Nym made sure to create enough force around him to guide the fall so that he fell forward, and then he swooped down the stairs and ducked into the empty room.

Heart hammering in his chest, he immediately recast his scrying spell and checked on the guard. The man was back on his feet and peering down at the floor. Experimentally, he lifted his foot and put it back down. Then he did the same to the other one.

“What even the hell?” he muttered, loud enough for Nym to hear him in the nearby room. The guard bent down to examine the floor, but of course there was nothing there.

“What are you doing?” the other guard asked, coming back.

“My foot got caught on something,” the first guard explained. “But there’s nothing there.”

Rather than make fun of him like Nym had expected, the second guard took it seriously. “Go get whichever captain is in duty right now. Tell him we might have an intruder in the house with magical capabilities. Explain to him what happened to you.”

Nym’s face fell. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but he’d once again underestimated how accustomed the people of Abilanth were to magic. His whole mission was on a much tighter time-table now, and it was going to be that much harder to reach his objective, not to mention getting back out with the loot.

Nym considered his options. He could abandon the job while he still had the chance. He hadn’t been discovered yet, but he’d already screwed up on not letting anyone know he was there. One busted out window wasn’t going to change much at this point, especially if he was on his way out when he did it.

Valgo wasn’t likely to accept that as an excuse. Nym didn’t know exactly how the man would react, but whatever he chose to do, it wouldn’t be anything good for Nym personally.  The old thief was one problem Nym couldn’t just fly away from. As long as he was trapped in Abilanth, living in an old run-down warehouse that Valgo owned, and with those stolen books in a pawnshop attached to him, he was screwed.

At the same time, the thought of the guards catching ahold of him inside the manor was terrifying. He could feel the senseless panic setting in, and no amount of rationalizing the situation was going to change that. Nym tried to control his breathing, to force himself to think clearly. He needed to move now, before someone found him.

Five minutes later, he was still frozen in place. He’d completely lost control of his scry spell and was just sitting in a dark room, waiting for someone to find him while his mind spun out a hundred different ways everything was going to go wrong. It was only when no one opened the door and found him after half an hour that he finally managed to calm himself down.

Ashamed of himself, Nym took a moment to clean his face on his sleeve and recast his scrying spell. There were guards patrolling now in addition to the ones standing at intersections and doorways, but not a lot of them. If he could keep himself under control, he could still finish the job. He was unbelievably lucky that no one had heard him or even just opened the door to check in the room. He hadn’t even made any effort to hide out of sight.

Nym took the time to scry out the rest of the floor and figure out where the rest of the guards were and what they were doing. Then he mapped out a route from his current position to the library. The timing would be tricky, as it depended on slipping past three patrolling guards with overlapping paths. In order to make it work, he needed to move ahead three rooms in the next four minutes, wait two minutes for the hole in the patrols, and slip through.

If one of the patrolling guards showed up even half a minute early, he’d catch Nym and that would be that. Nym took a deep breath and started moving. Everything went according to plan, and he ghosted down the hallway, flying silently about a hundred feet behind a guard. If the man turned around, he’d see Nym, but it didn’t happen. He slipped into another empty room, this one looking like some sort of trophy hall.

There was no real cover, but he didn’t care. The room was dark and, most importantly, directly across the hall from the library. All he had to do was scry the hall to make sure it was clear, cross an empty ten feet of space, and get inside the library. He’d already confirmed that was empty.

Once the hallway was clear, Nym jerked the trophy room door open, closed it behind him, and walked over to the library. He opened it, slid in, and closed it behind him. Then he got his first physical look at the place.

There were so many books. Surely some of them would be about magic. It was beautiful. The room itself was huge and had two levels, though there were no doors on the second level. It would have made everything a lot easier if there were. Dozens of light orbs floated in the air, brightening the whole place up like it was midday in there.

Nym had already scouted out the secret room behind a book shelf. He even thought he knew how to get in. There weren’t any obvious mechanical mechanisms embedded in the wall which led to a trigger of some kind, which meant unless there was something magical, he just needed to lift the shelf out of the way.

It didn’t matter though, because Nym floated over a book shelf and found himself staring down at a person that his scrying spell had completely failed to detect.