I swung the chair around, bringing myself into view. This was the first swivel chair I’d seen in this world, and I’d been just a little bit distracted by it. It was a bit lacking by my standards; this world still had a lot to learn about office furniture. There were no casters on the legs, it was heavy and unwieldy to move, and there wasn’t a way to adjust the height or lean. Still, it swivelled.

  “Lady Rankin,” I said in my best James Bond villain voice, “So glad you could make it.”

  She glared at me.

  “Another image,” she spat. “Where are you? You must be close, to have gotten that thing in here.”

  I was fairly certain that she didn’t expect me to answer that, so I ignored it. Maybe her game was off from not being able to read my mind.

  “Not going to pop this one?” I asked. Her gaze darted around the room, lingering on the door to her bedroom before she answered me.

  “There would be no point,” she said. “You must be in the tower, you would just send another to… distract me, is that what you’re doing?”

  “Now, now,” I said. “[Phantasmal Emissary] is good for more than that.”

  “All it can do is talk,” she dismissed. She strode over to the bedroom door and opened it. I’m not sure what she was looking for—searching her boudoir hadn’t been a priority for me. Maybe she was looking for me, but she knew I could go invisible. “It cannot even use social skills.”

  “Social skills aren’t everything,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. Social skills were great, but they weren’t everything. “Emissaries can walk around and scout, pick things up…”

  That got a reaction. That must be why she hadn’t gone to alert the guards; she was worried about what I might find in this room unsupervised. What I might already have found. That, and the guards were already on the alert. Invisible me was having quite a time dodging them.

  “Observe,” I said and tossed her an object. She caught it automatically, grimacing a moment later at being tricked into vulnerability. I laughed. “If that had been a knife, I wouldn’t have been able to throw it fast enough to do damage. The only reason I could reach you with that is because it, too, is an illusion. It can’t possibly harm you.”

  The Countess frowned and examined the object. It was a simple bottle, sealed, made of cheap dark brown glass that didn’t let you see inside.

  “What purpose does it serve, then?” she asked.

  “Well, you see, I recently came into possession of some serpentwine.”

  The Countess jerked her hand, trying to throw the bottle away, but I’d already cancelled the spell. All she succeeded at doing was scattering drops of the liquid that had already engulfed her hand around the room. She made a lunge for the door, but the alchemy was already taking effect.

  Just as Felicia had said, the liquid stuff was much faster than the gas or the diluted solution. I had to assume that she was also right about it wearing off faster.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I told her, as I carefully filled the bottle. “If it’s a higher dose, it should last longer.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” she’d said, wrinkling her nose from a safe distance. “It’s like… a fire? The hotter it burns, the faster it burns.”

  That didn’t sound like any chemistry I knew, but this wasn’t chemistry. It was magic. So I might as well trust the alchemist. I walked around the desk as Lady Rankin, twitching like a demented marionette, fell to the floor.

  “Another great thing about Emissaries is that they just aren’t affected by poisons,” I said. “You’ve made a real mess with that serpentwine, hopefully it will dry out before it paralyses any cleaning maids.”

  She didn’t say anything as I rolled her over to her front. I was pretty sure she could, the paralysis wasn’t supposed to be that severe.

  “And they can carry real manacles,” I added, showing her the pair I’d brought before securing her hands behind her back.

  “Weak,” she said, speaking with great effort.

  “The manacles? They’re of decent quality. Or do you mean me, for letting you live?”

  She declined to clarify. When she did speak, she enunciated every word separately, with great effort.

  “You. Lose. Contingency. In. Place.”

  “What contingency?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “What do you think you’ll be able to get up to, locked in here?”

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  “Already. In. Motion. Furry. Friends. Die.”

  Her body shook a little, and I realised she was trying to laugh. She didn’t manage it though, so she just smiled at me, a vicious-looking smile.

  She refused to speak any further, so I put a bag over her head. Which was a safety precaution, not any kind of torture. It was fairly clear to me that she had the same [Silent Casting] and [Subtle Casting] that I did. An inability to see her target should make casting spells much harder. [Improved Blind] would have been more comfortable and more effective, but it wouldn’t have lasted as long.

  I went through her pockets and retrieved the key to her room. Getting in here had required a shadow walk by my original self. Locking the door would help ensure we didn’t get disturbed before the mob got here. A flaw in the plan was that the door could be unlocked from the inside without a key, but it did require some fine manipulation. with the Countess manacled and blindfolded, I didn’t like her chances of managing it.

  That was just about all that this me had to do up here. Invisible me was still busy, though. Mysterious pronouncements of doom were all very well, but I had a very real and specific hostage to rescue.

  I don’t know how they captured Anas, but the reasons didn’t matter so much as the fact that they had. The Countess had grabbed the knowledge of how he was communicating with his master out of his brain and then ensured that she was in control of that channel. If I wanted to look Tinidan in the eye again, I’d have to make sure I rescued his apprentice.

  The weird thing was how lightly he was guarded. I hadn’t gotten the full story yet, but it seemed that Lady Rankin had replaced Hector with her own commander, an intensely violent brute who didn’t interact much with the troops. Everyone seemed to agree that they preferred it that way.

  The town’s walls were defended by a force that was separate from the town guard. The terms tended to be used interchangeably, though, which got confusing. The Defence Force, to coin a phrase, was now composed of soldiers that were a mixture of home-grown troops, soldiers that had arrived with Hector and had not defected with him, and the new troops brought in by the Countess.

  The Defence force answered to the King. They were not supposed to be commanded by the Town Council, which the Countess was a member of, or foreign nobility, which the Countess was. I guess the chain of command got a little fuzzy when there was a mind mage in the house.

  All of which was to say, I think that the Countess had a problem finding enough… trustworthy troops. For her brand of trustworthiness anyway. People who wouldn’t ask questions about why they were keeping an honoured delegate of an allied power captive, to be specific.

  Add to that, the fact that most of the guards were tramping about the tower in search of me, and that might explain why Anas’s cell only had one guard on it.

  Oh, and those patrols. Desultory didn’t begin to cover it. They had gone about searching in what they probably thought was a professional and impenetrable search pattern. It would probably have worked if they were looking for a visible five-year-old.

  I was level six, goddammit! I could do the thing where you put one foot on each wall of a corridor and climb up to the ceiling. Granted that was more [Climbing] skill than my level, but the level helped! Wandering down corridors with your arms outstretched wasn’t going to do you any good, hapless minion.

  The point was, I had found Anas, and he was guarded by only one person. A level four person as it happened, and I was done with sneaking about. This was going to be simple. All I had to do was jump out of here with Anas, jump back in to get the Countess, and I was done.

  [Improved Blind]

  I won’t say it was the best thing about the spell, but time and time again, I found myself appreciating the fact that it silenced its target as well as blinding it. The guard was no doubt screaming blue murder, but I couldn’t hear him, and neither could any potential reinforcements.

  He tried to run for help, but this wasn’t… This wasn’t that kind of fight. I redirected him into the wall, and he fell down. I pulled the keys off his belt. He tried to stop me, but I had a dagger and you don’t want to fumble around blind when there’s a sharp edge nearby.

  I unlocked the cell door before the guard could get up, and then dragged him over to the cell. Opening the door, I took a quick look around. This was a much more spartan room than the one I had been kept in when I was a prisoner in this tower. There was a bench for a bed, an enchanted toilet and a lightstone. That was it. Anas was there, staring fearfully at the open door.

  I dragged the struggling guard in and closed the door. Now Anas was staring… not at me, I was still invisible. But he knew that someone had dragged the guard into the room, and he didn’t like it.

  “You have… you have to go!” he insisted, but I was done with this. There wasn’t any point in engaging with him, who knew what the contents of his head looked like. Better to get him to Aelira and let her sort him out.

  I reached out for him. He jumped when he felt my touch and tried to pull away, but he was only level four as well. My other hand plunged my dagger into the lightstone. The room was plunged into darkness and I dragged him into shadow.

  Underground tunnels are like highways for shadow walking, and I quickly made it back to our temporary hideout.

  “Back soon, see what you can do with him,” I told the others, before heading back to the tower. Stepping into shadow had broken my existing spells. The cell guard was now free to yell his head off, and Lady Rankin was now unsupervised. Still, it wasn’t like she could go anywhere, right? She was locked in, manacled, and had a sack tied over her head.

  Right?

  Well, damn.

  The room was empty.

  How had she even known? She had been sitting still right up to the point when the spell had broken. I tried the door. It was still locked. Did she have her own shadow-walking spell? Or…

  The door to the bedroom was open.

  Oh, well, if that’s the case…

  I knew there was no exit from the bedroom. Lady Rankin was just putting off the inevitable. Unless there was a secret exit… but that would be harder to open than the main door, right?

  Right?

  I moved a little more quickly to the bedroom. The room was filled with opulent decadence. Part of me disapproved of the expense, part of me wanted to make sure some of it found its way into my bedroom after this was over. The only change from when I’d glanced over it before was that the wardrobe was open.

  It didn’t hold any clothes. What it held was a very familiar-looking portal.

  Well, shit.

  Characters!

  Anas: See, he’s fine.

  Tindian: An owl-kin that’s helped Kandis out a bunch of times. Anas's boss.

  The Countess: I really feel she’s been in enough recent chapters to not need a note.

  Hector Rodakis: This one’s an old callback from the last novel. Untitled noble placed in charge of the town defences. Wanted to marry Kandis, got pushy about it. Was mind-controlled by the Countess and got executed by those happy little ewoks for burning the Mother Tree. Well, they're happy now.

  Sir Arnaud de Vautré: In case it wasn’t clear, this is the brutal commander that Kandis was hearing about.