Carrot and Stick - Chapter Thirty (Patreon)

Chapter Thirty

No, I'm not using Roman Numerals for this one. smh

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To Wizard-at-Arms Silas Switchbranch

Ordo Venator

Your submitted report has been formally acknowledged and entered into review. Verification will proceed in accordance with established protocol. Until such time as this process is concluded, you are to remain on standby and available for further instruction.

Your assigned directive, namely the identification and elimination of all daemonic presences within the city of Julberwood, remains active and unchanged. Failure to discharge this duty in full will be duly noted and may result in adverse consequences to your professional standing.

By authority,

Report Department

Ordo Logistica

Silas glared at the letter, then he pulled out the previous one he’d received and compared them. The text was damned near identical, but there were some slight differences in the way the ink was smudged. This wasn’t a direct, magical copy made using a copy spell.

The text however, was the same. Word for word. 

Setting the unfolded letter down, he rummaged through his bags for a second, then retrieved a small scope, like a jeweler's lens and set it over the page, then he pushed a tiny amount of magic into the device and compared the results against a small leaflet. 

It read as authentic. The paper was imbued with the correct magical signature that the Ordo Logistica used. 

The seal was the next thing he checked, pushing a bit of magic into it. It glowed, and as far as he could tell, it was entirely correct.

That was all he could do to verify the authenticity of the papers. Those were the only measures in place, and they were both things that a talented mage could check with relative ease. The ordos might have had better security at one time, but the requirements had lowered as... well, there just wasn’t a need for it anymore. 

The ordos had once, in a not so distant past, been at each other’s throats in a bad way. There had been what some might call wars. But that was a concern for previous generations. Nowadays... who would bother creating fake paperwork, or sending fake messages? It was all so convoluted. 

But the letter he was holding had to be fake, because otherwise something was very, very wrong.

It had been two days now since the battle in the factory with Carrot and that fisher daemon. He had sent a report that very evening, detailing every detail he could remember about the battle and the monsters they had fought. 

He had even sent in some samples, one of those bottles they had been working on.

Sending that package had cost him a lot! Shipping wasn’t cheap out here. He was going to have to trim down his food budget even more at this rate just to make it to the end of the week. 

He shook his head and refocused. It was early in the morning, and he’d only just gotten the mail. The news being this grim wasn’t good. Magical Society wasn’t the most... aware of things going on outside of its borders sometimes, but daemons were a constant and consistent risk, and one that they took seriously, especially the Ordo Logistica and the Ordo Venator. His ordo. 

An Avowed daemon wasn’t the biggest deal ever. They probably put down half a hundred of them every year. But three of them in one city? Working together? A rogue wizard working with daemons? 

No, this stank of something big, and being involved in something big was just about the last thing he wanted. It might push his career forwards, which was nice, but his ultimate goal was to be a nice, middle-of-the-road kind of guy. Reliable for simple jobs, not given complicated jobs, and paid as much as his rank deserved. 

As long as he had enough to cover Summer’s treatments, then he was happy to work a little harder. 

Being tossed into the deep end like this and not having anyone respond to the problem reasonably wasn’t what he wanted at all.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

He might have to fix this on his own. He wasn’t fond of that. 

And... he didn’t have a choice.

So, he girded his metaphorical loins and left the house an hour later, having scarfed down some toast and taken a quick shower. He had taken the day yesterday to refine the design of his detection devices. They were now hidden within some paper take-out bags, though he still used cheap coffee cups as the main body for them. 

The looked like cheap arts and crafts projects, but they worked. 

So, with that in an inexpensive bag he had bought, he moved around the city and started to plant them in a grid. 

Was it weird that he missed Carrot in all of this? Sure, she was a lot, but she asked the occasional intelligent question and he enjoyed the company.

He could, vaguely, remember a time when he was much younger where he was fascinated and amazed by magic and all that magic could do. He had, like many youths raised in the Magical Society, dreamt of being a mighty wizard, of having a grand tower of his own, of flicking out a wand and causing great destruction or casting amazing spells.

Obviously, age had tempered his expectations. 

With a fresh map on hand, he marked down every spot across the city that radiated more magical energy than was usual, and he kept his magical sensors out as well.

Interestingly, it seemed like the average ambient magic in Julberwood was lower now than it had been a few days ago.

Magic ebbed and flowed. When it grew too potent, that was how items gained magical significance, or how random people awakened magical abilities, or how a stray animal might awaken as a daemon.

In a city with this many daemons running around, he would expect the amount of magic in the air to be growing, if anything, not the opposite. 

He didn’t know the root cause, of course, but he could guess. Unfortunately, all of his guesses made him increasingly worried.

A wizard casting several powerful spells in a row might lower the ambient magical energy in a spot for a few minutes, but like scooping water out of a lake, the missing magic would be replenished by the magic around it pushing into that space.

Lowering the magical energy of an entire city required that... a lot of magic be used up. Even if it was only by a few percentage points.

And he wasn’t sure if his devices were precise enough to notice a few percentage points worth of change. It was far more likely that they were dealing with a spell consuming a lot of magic, or a lot of smaller spells being cast constantly.

He didn’t like that. 

Actually, that was a wild understatement.

He rode a bus across the city to the next area he wanted to investigate and made notes in a small notebook while he travelled. 

He was going to copy these over, along with all of his additional observations (with a few small details left out) and was going to ship these to both the Ordo Logistica and the Ordo Venator. Heck, he decided that he might send it to a few others as well.

Maybe he’d even send them from different areas? If this Master had some way of intercepting mail from Julberwood, then maybe he could ship something from outside of the bounds of the city? 

Yeah, that would make sense.

And then the inevitable inquiry happened, he would be able to point to all of the extra, usually unnecessary steps he took as evidence that he did everything he reasonably could to inform his superiors.

He was basically running entirely on a ‘cover your rear’ basis here, but it was all he could do.

Then his sensors went off, and Silas jumped in his seat. He checked against his map, then stood up and pulled the stop cord on the bus. He apologized to people as he ran out of the bus, then took a moment to reorient himself. 

The signal had been strong enough that he feared it might have fried his sensor outright, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had discovered something big.

He ran over to the end of the nearest street, then glanced at his magic sensing device while trying to be subtle about it.

There was no doubt, the ambient magic here had risen by several notches, but was now on a sharp decline.

Silas looked around himself. This was... one of the nicer parts of the city, actually. It was just a block over from one of the main streets and while it wasn’t the heart of Julberwood, it wasn’t far from it.

More interestingly, this wasn’t a street with public-facing businesses. 

This spot was almost entirely lined by offices. There were a few places where people were moving in and out, a dentists, a lawyer’s office, a notary, but there were no restaurants or anything of the sort here. 

He walked with a straight back, staring ahead of him even as he tightened his grip on his magic. It was instinct, more than anything, but a quick glance up to the rooftops revealed a suspicious number of very fat pigeons 

This was it. It had to be it. The Master was around here, or at least one of his lieutenants. He just had to narrow down the ‘where’ and then... then he’d have to go begging Carrot for help again, wouldn’t he?

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