Chapter 79 Cool Geometric Shapes?

  Isaac and Alexander sat shoulder to shoulder with their backs leaning against the back of Lenna’s pauldrons. Her aura was gently flickering off of her in fickle wisps of orange flames and it radiated warmth outward in all directions. They had long since closed the greenhouse door to keep as much warmth in as possible. Luckily, the greenhouse was made with the tropical plants in mind so the temperature would never fall below freezing, in normal conditions, but it was getting close. Isaac had changed into a fresh set of clothes and had Alexander clean the old set with magic before he put it back into his Inventory. Alexander obviously couldn’t dry the clothes while Isaac was wearing them because Isaac’s presence was too much for the simple spell to power through. Most lower scale utility spells were like that as powering through a person’s presence was just far too power consuming for a spell that was just designed to put things back to how they were before.

  “How is it coming along?” Alexander asked both Isaac and Shamesh. As soon as the snow had started falling, Isaac and Shamesh had gotten back to work trying to break the attunement of the crystal that controlled the wizard tower that was beneath their feet.

  “Slowly.” Isaac replied. “We’ve been steadily increasing the amount of dark mana that he’s been bathing it with but it’s still taking forever.”

  “The crown will not be happy about this.” Alexander told them. “For two main reasons.”

  “Oh?” Isaac said to keep him talking. The wait until Shamesh was done was incredibly boring.

  “The first is the obvious, this is a bad precedent to set.” Alexander began. “This proves to, quite frankly, far too many people to keep it a secret, that a tower can be broken into. The second is something that Lady L’Vore cares little for but the rest of us must take into account: money.”

  “What do you mean?” Isaac questioned. “I get the precedent but why money?”

  “Forcefully breaking an attunement is something that every wizard has been briefed on, though, only those of at least eleventh level actually have the potential to do it.” Alexander explained. “The issue is the damage that the enchantment receives from doing so. It is even worse when you are doing it with imbalanced mana, but only marginally so.”

  “So the tower’s Attunement Crystal will need to be replaced sooner than it normally would have to be.” Isaac surmised. “I can see why the crown wouldn’t like what we’re doing.”

  “It is not so much the crown, if I am being honest.” Alexander went on. “As far as I can tell, our rulers care little for money itself but only what it can do. If an aqueduct is needed and money can build it then that is how much money is worth. They are so detached from the common people that I doubt that they have ever even seen a silver coin.”

  “I doubt anyone of a higher station than you would appreciate your words, Alexander.” Isaac warned him with a hint of concern in his voice and absolutely no bite whatsoever.

  “Yes, you are right.” Alexander agreed. “Anyone but you.”

  Isaac chuckled. “Fair enough.” He conceded.

  “I must thank you, Lady Hellfire, for keeping me from freezing to death. I was not dressed for a highland winter.” Alexander told Lenna after he and Isaac’s conversation had been done for some time.

  “Of course, Alexander.” Lenna replied with a nod. “I couldn’t let you freeze after you came all this way to help us.”

  “I am not sure how much help I have given, but thank you.” Alexander said with a slight bow. “I am decently certain that your husband and Master Shamesh could have gotten in by themselves even without Lady L’Vore’s assistance. Perhaps the Attunement Crystal would have even been withdrawn by now even if I had not arrived. Honestly, I feel like the only reason for my presence was to move up the time table a few handfuls of minutes.”

  “Not at all.” Lenna countered him.

  “It is always a good idea to have someone on hand that knows what we are dealing with.” Isaac added. “Without you, I don’t even want to begin to think about the nightmare of trial and error we would’ve gone through to find the attunement crystal, or to just remove the entirety of the tower’s defenses. This is a much better plan. As annoying as waiting around is, it is better than purposefully triggering potentially lethal traps until they finally stopped activating.”

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  “Thank you both for the kind words, I know that neither of you would compliment with a lie like this.” Alexander said with a genuine smile. It seemed that even geniuses felt like they fell short from time to time.

  “Jala took two hundred years, maybe close to three hundred actually, to reach level nineteen. You’ll be that high by the time you are thirty.” Isaac told him to help put the Court Mage back into perspective. “You cannot compare yourself to an old corpse addict.”

  Lenna’s chuckle kept Isaac from continuing. “That reminds me of something my mother once said.” Lenna began. She felt Isaac shift slightly to bring his ear more inline with where her voice was coming from. Because of Isaac’s shift, and the silence that had followed her words, she didn’t feel the need to wait for someone to prod her so she continued: “Apparently, Jala’s first friend was a corpse. She had found a discarded skeleton of a slave and animated it. It used to follow her around and carry her books.”

  “Whatever happened to it?” Isaac wondered.

  “Jallen smited it.” Lenna told him. “Apparently, as payback for her trying to take some of his blood, in his sleep, for one of her experiments.”

  “How old was Jala at this point?” Isaac asked with genuine confusion. She sounded so much like a child in the story but she must’ve already been level five or so before she could’ve reanimated a skeleton. There was a way to do it at a lower level but it required a rather large ritual made with quite a bit of the caster’s own blood.

  “In her eighties, I think.” Lenna replied. “She has always been like that though, she never really grew up. That was why my uncle married her off to Fen. Fen’s personality always drove his family crazy too, but his power was also far too great for them to ever ignore him.”

  “So wait, are you saying that Jala is just a seven hundred year old incredibly high functioning autistic kid who taught herself how to reshape the world with pretty lights and cool geometric shapes?” Isaac wondered with a level of utter dumbfoundedness that none present could properly understand, not even Isaac himself.

  Lenna tilted her head in thought. “You did the thing again.” She told him. “I don’t know that word.”

  “I do not either.” Alexander agreed.

  “I…” Isaac tried to think about the word and started to get a headache. He could tell that the word itself was fine but the problem was that he was trying to think too hard about it. “It’s… it’s hard to explain. The best I can tell you right now, is that people who are autistic, have trouble connecting with other people and oftentimes feel to outsiders like they’ve never aged out of the curious child stage of their lives.”

  Lenna shrugged. “That sounds like Jala. I don’t know if you noticed, but at our reception, she was trying very hard not to notice everyone staring at her. That’s why she and Fen left early.”

  “Huh.” Isaac grunted to himself.

  The trio continued to talk until Shamesh finally finished and the Attunement Crystal in his hands went dim. It had never been exactly glowing but they could feel that it no longer had a connection to anyone else. The enchantments also looked tarnished inside of the diamond, which only served to reinforce what Alexander had said about the increase in wear on the enchantments.

  “Can you attune to it?” Isaac asked Shamesh.

  “I think so.” Shamesh told him. “But for now, I think it needs to cool off. It is… hot.”

  Isaac reached out and grabbed the diamond but it didn’t feel hot. It did feel a little warm to the touch, however, and that was not normal. “Once it has, Alexander, can you attune to it?” Isaac asked the Court Mage.

  “I cannot.” Alexander replied. “All of the Attunement Crystals work on the same frequency so if I were to attune to it, whenever I try to tell one tower to do something, the other will receive the same mental signal.”

  “So if you turned off all of the security measures here then it would do the same in your tower.” Isaac surmised.

  “Not quite. The defensive arrays are set up differently so it might just end up firing off every Reality Bind at the same time or something equally as expensive. Usually that would not be possible but my tower is special. My predecessor was a master of array magic, much like Lady L’Vore, and he had taken exception to the fact that the Attunement Crystal could not activate the wards in the defensive array. He theorized that an opponent capable of circumventing all known forms of detection could slip through even the most precise defensive arrays. In that kind of situation, it would be up to the wizard to manually direct the arrays.” Alexander went on. “I can see why you would not want Master Shamesh to attune to it though. If he did, then when someone new would be assigned to this tower, he would have to be present for the tradeoff.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like me.” Isaac replied and then turned to his retainer. “Shamesh, inform Jala that the attunement has been broken. Maybe she’ll have an idea when she gets here.” Shamesh bowed and did as he was told.

  “Fortunately or unfortunately, you have almost proved his theory to be correct.” Alexander offered, as if proving a dead wizard right would somehow make up for his tower being set up to allow Alexander to fight him even if he was entirely untraceable by magical means.

  In a blink, Jala appeared in front of them. “Good.” The ancient wizard spoke as soon as she arrived. “That took a bit longer than I expected. Did you fall asleep?” She questioned Isaac and then seemed to notice how cold it was. Before Isaac could answer, she was looking up at the glass roof with even more curiosity and awe in her eyes than Lenna had. “Is that natural snow?”

  “No?” Isaac crushed her hopes and dreams. “It was a storm made by a friend of ours in the city, to keep all of the hooligans in their homes until we are done.”

  “Oh.” Jala said with a dejected sigh. She then whirled on the crystal and leaned in to stare intently at it. After a moment she took it from Shamesh’s hands and sat down on the ground exactly where she stood. She reached her hand back towards where she remembered Alexander to be. “Golden Pen.” She instructed him.

  “I don’t have one of those on me.” Alexander replied. “I have no reason to carry artificers’ tools around.”

  “And here I thought I was making you into a proper wizard.” She grumbled. Without even taking her eyes off of the crystal she started drawing a small ritual circle next to her on the stone path with her finger. Everywhere her finger went, the ground glowed as she began setting up a spell that would fix her current problem. “Four gold coins.” She told Alexander and held her hand out again.

  Alexander did as he was told and set four gold coins in her hand. Jala stacked them neatly, inside of the new spell that she just finished drawing out, and then fed more mana into it. Isaac, Lenna, Shamesh, and Alexander watched as the gold warped and elongated into a rod much like Isaac and Lenna’s throwing spikes, though obviously made entirely out of gold. Jala then actually had to set the crystal down as she started drawing on the golden spike with her, now famous, glowing spell sigils. It took her another minute until it was ready. Jala then stabbed the golden spike cleanly through the diamond until it hit one of the preexisting enchantment lines. She pressed a bit harder and the golden spike parted the enchantment like a cold knife through colder butter. There was a flicker of power and then the sensory blocking magic that protected the tower from the outside all broke apart at once. It was finally time to see the inside of Yarra’s tower.