Ascendant

Nym came to in a dark room with his arms tied behind his back and the bag still over his head. Every part of him tingled painfully, especially his hands. He could hear the sound of people talking nearby, but it was muffled, as though in another room.

For all Nym knew, Valgo could be standing right next to him, and he needed every advantage he could get. So he didn’t move. He didn’t groan. He didn’t do anything to give away the fact that he was awake. Instead, he forged a conduit and filled his soul well, then cast his scrying spell. He was thankful that he’d never developed the habits some mages had where they required words or moved their hands around when they used magic.

He saw the room in his mind, saw that it was empty but for him. He was in a building somewhere, a large one that stretched out in every direction. The first thing he checked was the location by sending his scry straight off in a random direction until he passed the exterior walls. He didn’t recognize the street, but he definitely knew an outer ring alleyway when he saw it. It was some sort of gang hideout, and Nym felt he could allow himself a few assumptions about where in the city that was based on his knowledge of where the bad neighborhoods of the outer ring were.

His scrying spell was only good for about a hundred feet, maybe hundred twenty on a good day. The building was bigger than that, but he was at least able to map out the rooms directly around him. There were thirty-two people that he could detect in that radius, but he knew Valgo was now employing anti-scrying rune sequences too. There must have been spies in the Feldstal house staff who’d alerted him that Nym’s scrying couldn’t see through the runes.

For all he knew, Valgo could be standing right behind him, waiting like a spider, ready to bite as soon as he moved. Worse, he didn’t know where Analia was. Her own rune-threaded outfit was working against him now. He needed to get free and find her before it was too late.

That cutting spell was already coming in handy. It had extremely fine control, and he was able to slice through the ropes tying his hands together without so much as scratching his own skin. Then, using the scrying spell to see, he flew straight up to the ceiling where he would be out of reach of anyone trying to grab him and jerked the hood off.

The room was empty.

Nym felt a bit silly, but justified it to himself as sensible precautions. He knew there were people invisible to his scrying; it was only smart to keep that in mind when he made his plans. Every move he made, he needed to keep in mind that he was acting on incomplete information.

He had a couple ways to proceed. First, he could try to escape and get reinforcements somehow, whether that was the city guard or people directly from House Feldstal. He doubted he could convince the city guard of anything, so that meant making contact with people like Malk. Nym was not a fan of that for obvious reasons, plus if he looked at it long term, he would be putting himself in a position of vulnerability. There was absolutely no way Analia was going to get away from them like she wanted if he went running back to her family for help.

Another option was to find and rescue her himself. That had a much lower chance of success with a much higher chance of personal injury, but if he pulled it off, they would be in a better position if her family wasn’t involved. If he knew where she was, he could plan to save her. It would be nice if she’d come save him instead, but he suspected that Analia was the real prize of the night. Valgo no doubt planned on demanding a huge ransom to return her to her family.

Nym spent a few minutes going over the building again. From what he could tell, it was a huge, sprawling three-story inn at one point. He found rooms that were being used as offices, rooms for storage, rooms for sleeping, the kitchen and common room were still in use on the ground floor. A pair of hallways ran parallel to each other about thirty feet apart on the second floor, with stairs on either end that led up and down.

Below all that was a cellar. There were barrels and kegs stacked on one wall, and, in one corner, a wooden framework filled with bars. The bars had a door built into them, which was closed. Three people stood outside of it, none of them really moving too much. There was no one inside the cell, as far as Nym could tell from his room on the third floor.

If Analia was a captive and they were in the same building, that was most likely where she was. Nym started plotting his route there. There weren’t a lot of options, if he stayed in the building. But there were some shuttered windows in a nearby office that he thought he could reach without being spotted by anyone.

His way back in was through the window in the kitchen, and then down the stairs. There were two people at work in the kitchen that he was hoping he could avoid if he timed it correctly since one of them was constantly going back and forth to the common room hauling plates of food. The other seemed to be thoroughly distracted with preparing the food.

Getting through the kitchen without being noticed was the most important part of his plan, because if he got caught there, it was likely that he’d end up being chased by the dozen or so people in the common room currently eating. His hope was to just sneak through, with his mind scrambler spell on standby just in case the cook looked up at exactly the wrong time.

All of that still left him with the problem of three people guarding a hopefully-not-empty cell, and any scry-blocked surprises that might come up along the way. For that, he needed magic and the element of surprise. The kinetic barrier spell worked best against arrows or thrown objects, anything with low weight and high speed was deflected quite easily, according to the book he’s gotten it from. He could use the cutting spell offensively, though it had done only superficial damage to Malk. He had concerns about its effectiveness.

“This is a bad idea,” he said out loud. He nodded to himself. “Can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Then he got up, grabbed the rope and mask so that anyone who looked in would hopefully think he’d just been moved instead of escaped, walked out into the hall, and headed over to the office with the window. He ran into his first snag there; it was locked. That was fine, he could try a different room. There were a few windows on the third floor and nobody up there seemed to be awake. The second room was locked too. So was the third. Finally, he found a storage room which wasn’t locked, but which was packed full.

Nym managed to scoot over the top by way of flight and use telekinesis to undo the latch. That left him with a gap of maybe eight or nine inches to squeeze through between the top of the window frame and the rack sitting in front of it. There was no way he was moving that rack, so he carefully inched his way out. It was just lucky that the windows were shuttered with no glass, or he wouldn’t have been able to get through at all. The hood and rope was left behind, buried in the back of the room.

The sun was up, but it was still early morning and there wasn’t a lot of activity outside. At least, no one started pointing at him and yelling. Nym thought lost an hour or two of time from whatever the thing they’d stabbed him with did. If he could find Analia quickly, they might still be able to buy a teleport out of Abilanth.

Nym flew down to the ground, hugging the side of the building as he went, and skimmed over to the kitchen window, which was thankfully still open. If the cook had decided to close it, he would have had no choice but to use a mind scramble on him and hope for the best.

The server came back in and picked up some more plates, then left again. The cook stood at the stove, probably facing at a far enough away angle for Nym to slip in, but he didn’t want to risk it. The man was alternating back and forth between the stove and a cauldron over an open flame in the hearth on a different wall, and as soon as he went back to check on that, Nym would have his opening.

He crouched outside the wall, waiting, and hoping that no one saw him or came to check on him and found the room he’d been tied up in empty. The server came back in and out another three times, and Nym was starting to think he’d have to risk it when the cook finally moved.

Nym floated up and through the window, his body held stiff with his arms over his head like he was diving into water. He slid soundlessly into the kitchen and in a single smooth, continuous motion, flowed down the stairs into the cellar. Only when he was half way down did he change his direction to hug the ceiling and move into a corner.

Luck was with him. Analia was sitting in the cell, awake and looking extremely miserable. That was as far as his luck went though, because in addition to the three thugs guarding her, there were another three. Nym recognized them from the roof as the ones who’d also been using anti-scrying rune sequences.

Three was already a long shot. Now he had six of Valgo’s minions to deal with, and he didn’t have a clue how he was going to do it. The only thing going right for him now was that the cellar was big and they hadn’t bothered to keep most of it lit. There were two lanterns hanging from hooks on the walls near where the cage was, and the rest was dark. There was plenty of room for Nym to hide.

As he saw it, he had two problems. The first was subduing Valgo’s crew in some way, or finding a way to make them leave. The second was getting the key to the cell Analia was locked in. He didn’t see it anywhere, either with his eyes or by scrying. That meant it was either in the pocket of one of the three he couldn’t scry, or it wasn’t in the cellar at all. He took a few minutes to comb through the rest of the hideout, but didn’t see it anywhere.

His best guess was that Valgo had it. It made sense, in a way. Analia was valuable, he wouldn’t want just anybody having access to her. So he took the key with him. It was smart, a lot smarter than what they’d done with Nym, just dumping him into an unlocked room with nothing more than a foot of rope wrapped around his wrists and a sack on his head.

Nym didn’t fancy his odds of fighting through six people, especially not when he needed to hit them quickly and quietly enough that they couldn’t raise the alarm. He thought he could probably get through the locked door without a key by using some extremely fine-tuned telekinesis. Keys weren’t that complicated, after all. He’d just force the internal mechanism to turn in the lock.

He sure hoped that worked, because if his idea to get rid of the guards worked, they would not have a lot of time. Nym reached out to the air in the kitchen above him, and using his scrying to direct his efforts, scattered the burning logs across the kitchen floor.