The Restored: Chapter Twenty-One

“I know you’re going to want to come and rescue your sister the moment you even have an inkling of where she is,” the Arenamaster said calmly. “So let me be very clear when I speak: this is not a heroic rescue. This is a hostage situation. I am going to tell you what to do, and if you listen to me, then you will be able to be reunited with Zone – both of you safe and sound.” 

“I understand,” I said stiffly. 

“Good,” she said, and her voice dripped with a mixture of satisfaction and other, far darker emotions. There was silence that stretched, and I was certain that she had to be holding it out over me, forcing me to hold and wait at her beck and call, like a pet, rather than an equal. Just as I was prepared to ask her what exactly I needed to do, she spoke again. 

“What you must do is relatively simple. You will return to the hotel that I attacked via airship, and will break through the cordon that officers have placed using the skills that I taught you. From there, you will find a glowing red orb, which will be visible only to you. You will take that orb and draw it into your chest, and you will wait at the sight until midnight. If you complete these instructions, then Jessica and her husband will be left completely unharmed. If you do not, then their blood will be on your hands, not mine.” 

With that, there was a click and a buzzing sound as the line went dead. She’d hung up on me. 

I placed the phone down and started thinking. If I had no other option, then I’d absolutely be willing to do what was needed to save my sister. Hadiya had seemed certain that the structure of the power grid might be drained, but wouldn’t be brought to the point of collapsing buildings. Alyphize ascending to become the new Throne of Greed, or trying to un-sunder one of the two Sundered Thrones would be bad, but it would be a slow, long term problem. It wouldn’t result in mass death. Probably. 

But just because I was willing to make that choice in the worst case situation didn’t mean that I would be completely ready and willing to throw myself into it, not when there was a good chance that I would still be able to do something. I had until midnight, after all. 

So, where would my sister be? 

The Arenamaster was sending me to one of the points of the pentacle’s star, and presumably would be at the one that Rhys and Hadiya were cutting off from the demonic realm of the Fallen Void. 

Given that the old Zone was dead, and that my sister had been kidnapped, there were good odds that she was going to be brought to one of the other points. It probably meant that there were only three locations that my sister could be stashed away: at her old grocery store, Cipher Nightclub, or The White Rooms. 

I was willing to bet that she wouldn’t be at her own grocery store. First of all, even though it had been partially destroyed, it had also been her base of operations for years. With her familiar power, she’d be able to hide the activation of her wards and spellcraft while they held her, then bring the power of all of them crashing down. It wouldn’t be remotely secure. 

Not only that, but the grocery store had been burned down, and been the start of a lot of the rumors of terrorist attacks on the city, which probably made it a perfect match for Firefright, the only one of us who had truly remained loyal to the Arenamaster. 

Cipher Nightclub or the White Rooms, then. I wished that Hadiya were here, since there might be some clue hidden in the ritualistic nature of a city-wide array that would have been able to pick it out immediately. 

What did I know about ritual magic? A lot of it drew on the unconscious will of humanity, the associations that the ancient language used to cast in had with specific concepts. That was why my mass rune bond was so terrible – most cultures hadn’t possessed the intrinsic understanding of mass needed. Even now, most people tended to just equate mass with weight, though they weren’t precisely the same thing. 

So, conceptually, which of the two locations would make the most sense for someone being made to fill the role of the enforcer called Zone to fill? Or, which one made the most sense for the one called Deepwater to fill, given that if I could nail them – no, the current one was a him – down, I’d be left with only one.

Zone’s power was the ability to activate and command enchantments and wards without appearing to. It was why she had been called Zone, after all – she could create massive invisible zones of different ward-based effects, like upping the force behind all motions in an area. 

Deepwater, meanwhile, had the power of water. He was given boons from all sorts of water elementals, and could even do a passible imitation of a water sorcerer though them. But water wasn’t his only power, he also utilized pressure, in assorted ways. That probably came through a mix of different magics, but the concept of pressure did mesh well with the concept of being underground. Unfortunately, both the White Rooms and Cipher Nightclub had been in the undercity. 

What about the locations themselves, then? 

The White Rooms had been a bundle of contradictions. It catered to some of the wealthiest people in the entire city by using biomancy to reshape the poorest and most desperate people in the city into perfect pleasure companions. It was as cutting edge as Elucidate Labs when it came to body modification research, but in other ways, it was completely backwards and unable to even provide basic necessities to citizens. 

Cipher Nightclub, on the other hand, had been a place for people to let loose and live without worries, fears, or inhibitions in as many senses of the word as possible. It was a beast that was completely unable to be commanded or controlled by any faction, and even after the disaster, it would return. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but there’s always going to be a place for people to let loose, for better or worse. 

I growled and shook my head. Neither of these seemed like a good fit for Jessica in the role of Zone. If anything, the White Rooms felt like it was a better fit for me, given I’d had the most extensive body modifications, and was something of a constriction. After all, I was called Mist, but used metal magic. Metal wasn’t exactly renowned for being quiet and stealthy. 

Well, there was nothing for it then. I would simply have to check both places, or I’d have to give into the Arenamaster.

I contemplated it, I really did, for a very long time. It would be bad, awful even, to hand over that much power to Alyphize. 

Was there any option? Any at all? 

I closed my eyes and thought long and hard. I could try and break into the Central Aura Depository myself and confront Alyphize, but that would be a gamble at the best of times, and might wind up with Jessica getting executed. 

If I’d been a witch, maybe I could have attempted a scrying spell to divine her location, but I wasn’t. Hadiya wasn’t here, Rhys wasn’t here, and if Jessica were here I wouldn’t be in this situation. 

I stomped back to her lab, frustrated, and began going through the rest of her hidden compartments. 

Given the fact that there were completely usable defensive artifacts left over from when I’d raided, I was guessing that whoever had abducted her had used some sort of ritual to return things to the state they’d been before the battle, rather than going through every room and cleaning it all up themselves. 

The odds that there was some sort of mystic compass that pointed directly to Jessica or her husband weren’t high, but they also weren’t zero. She’d been a bit paranoid, so it was definitely a possibility that she’d leave something of that sort in case she ever did get abducted. 

I found a few other enchanted objects, including a small battery of wands, but I wasn’t well versed enough in magic to tell exactly what they did, and walking into a fight with a weapon you didn’t understand was beyond foolish.

I was pushing a wooden anatomical model off the desk to try and peel some of the backing off when I was struck by a thought.

The Arenamaster and Alyphize had been using projections. Why wouldn’t I be able to? 

Sure, there was the general conception that only an Archmage was able to create projected simulacra, but hadn’t I been trying to beat the idea that the number of archstars a person had wasn’t the same as the level of skill they possessed into Kelly’s head ever since I met him? And now, here I was, falling into the same trap. 

The more difficult part was that I’d never tried to create a simulacra before. I knew some of the theory, both from my own skill as a sorcerer, and my time in Bronzelight University, but I’d never had a reason to use them myself. 

It took enormous skill and power to project a construct at range, especially without any sort of relay. Even most Archmages who did it used ritual arrays to boost their abilities and to prevent the drain on their aura, at least if I understood correctly. 

A sorcerer wasn’t a witch, able to cast whatever kind of spell they wanted, so long as it was done through a ritual. Our rune bonds let us cast spells quickly, replacing most basic components like words with the bond’s mere existence. 

But just because a sorcerer didn’t often use rituals didn’t mean that they were incapable of using them, as long as they were also aligned with their rune bond or bonds. 

I was standing in the ritual room of the greatest witch I knew – no offense meant to Hadiya. 

I was in Elderglass, the city of metal. 

I was a metal sorcerer. 

If there was ever a time and place to construct a ritual that would allow me to project out a simulacra, it was here and now. I didn’t need the magic to last forever, I didn’t need the ritual circle to be able to be used multiple times, and I didn’t even need my simulacra to be perfect. 

All I needed was to be able to construct one that could fool a distant observer, fly out to the hotel, and stand in place, moving and itching itself occasionally, until midnight. 

I started with the body that I was going to animate. If I were a light sorcerer, this would be easy, but unfortunately, I was a metal mage, so I was forced to extract metal from the building I was currently in. I would be constructing its body out of a white metal, which was a mix of tin, copper, lead, and antimony. 

Ideally, I’d have used about four parts tin, one part antimony, and five parts lead, with only a pinch of copper in it, since that was the most general purpose and flexible blend, and would thus have the most human look when animated, but there wasn’t exactly much antimony or lead around in a public building. There was some in the pipings and the solder that had been done by enchantment rather than metal mage, so I stripped what I could, patching it over with copper from the surroundings, and fused the joints with metal magic.

The metal I was left with was closer to three parts copper, six parts tin, then an even mix of antimony and lead, which wasn’t ideal, but wasn’t terrible either. I stripped down, and then molded the metal over my skin, pressing it in to make an exact replica of my body, and fused the joints back together, then placed it to the side. 

I altered the properties of steel around for a bit until they were blueish, and put it in place of my eyes, then put my old Mist mask over it, along with my clothes and a dark hood. It wasn’t perfect, the metallic color of my hands not the perfect match to my own, even with dulling it through magic to stop it from shining as obvious metal. 

I stole some of Jessica’s husband’s clothes for myself, then set to work on the ritual. 

I used pinches of the metals that I’d used to create the copy of me, and set them out as the base components around a metal shaping spell, which I’d channel my power through it to actively control, and added some parts of the mental linking spell that Kelly didn’t know. 

With that done, I created a new spell elsewhere, working from scratch to make some basic instructions for the automaton’s slight movements to make it seem more humanoid. That part wasn’t too terribly bad, since a lot of the spells I used to move my coat around in combat were actually able to be used in this too, just for moving arms and legs instead of sleeves. 

Once that was done, I started working on the divinations. 

I drew out spells that should linked the metal of the eyes to my own sight, the metal of the ears to my hearing, and the metal of the mouth to my speech using the same basic sympathetic link I used when I gave a metal the spiritual properties of other metal. Normally, doing scrying magic like this would have been outside the purview of my metal magic, but with a doll molded to me, it might just be close enough to work, especially since I boosted it with components – the pickled eyes of a bull for sight, the fur of a bat for hearing, and a radio’s quartz crystal for speech.

It should be just enough to get it to work. Hopefully.

Feeling a bit nervous, I smeared some of my own blood onto the inside of the dummy, then reached for some of the more magical, planar components that Jessica had. I didn’t know much about these, so I stuck to only a few simple things. A bit of metal from the Elemental Fields that was denser even than lead for metal. A seed from the Lustrous Abundance and a swirling soulstuff stone, plucked from the Fallen Void, which I hoped would represent the link between my life and soul. 

I then encircled the three spells – the metallic instructions on loop, the freestanding metal manipulation, and the scrying stuff – in a single giant, sympathetic linking spell and swallowed, lighting my aura and preparing to make modifications to the spell on the fly, since I knew for a fact that I’d made mistakes in some parts. 

I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to either pull off a feat normally reserved for Archmages, or fail and be forced into obeying the Arenamaster’s instructions.