The sound of Gurey clearing his throat jolted him out of his thoughts and he realized he had been studying the wards for quite a while now. Oops.
“Is this one also ‘somewhat useful’?” asked Gurey with a smirk when he realized he had Zorian’s attention again.
“No, this is quite impressive,” Zorian admitted. “Is this also made by your former partner?”
“Yes,” Gurey nodded. “He was quite good at this. Setting up wards, I mean. Also breaking and bypassing them, but I understand those two are related. Learn how to make a ward and you’re 90 % there to figuring out how to defeat it.”
“That’s the conventional wisdom, yes,” agreed Zorian. He decided not to dance around the issue any longer. “So… I’m guessing your former partner was your go-to person for these kinds of deals in the past, and now that he’s dead, you need to find someone else to do your dirty work.”
“My, you’re direct,” Gurey laughed nervously. “But you’ve hit the nail on the head, more or less. You see… magic was never my thing, as strange as that may sound from an owner of a magic shop. That was always Aldwin’s thing — he was the one that worried about the spellcasting part of the business while I was always more comfortable on the more mundane, civilian side of things. Making contacts, closing deals, finding new business partners, that kind of thing. I’m a really terrible mage when it comes down to it. I can barely cast anything at all.”
Zorian gave him a curious look. “I’m pretty sure I saw you manipulate mana plenty of times, and activating the greater privacy mode of this room couldn’t have possibly been a matter of just channeling mana into that circle.”
“Oh, I was always very good at using magic items,” Gurey said. “You don’t need to be a proper mage to do that. Lots of practice and some specialized shaping exercises and you’re set. If you’re fairly wealthy like me and live on a mana well, you can even commission items that draw power from the ambient mana instead of from my own miniscule reserves… but we both know there are severe drawbacks to such items, and this sort of job really needs a proper spellcaster.”
Zorian nodded. He had been considering the possibility of using ‘self-casting’ magic items to make up for his below-average mana reserves for a while now, but there were a lot of problems with it. The core, inescapable issue was that souls of spellcasters were pretty damn good at spellcasting, while even the best-made magic items… weren’t. Making an item that allowed the caster to skip some of the steps during spellcasting was simple enough, but creating something that was capable of casting a spell entirely on its own upon command? Hard. Possibly very hard, or even impossible, depending on what spell you were trying to imprint into the item. Warding schemes and one-use magic items like his suicide explosive cubes got around the issue by having the maker cast the spell during creation, after which the spell formula simply stabilized it and kept it from degrading, but that workaround wasn’t very useful for the majority of spells.
And then there was the issue of powering said items. Not every place had much in the way of ambient mana, and even places that did often couldn’t provide the amount necessary for the spell at once. That meant that most self-casting items needed an internal mana battery, which brought a whole host of problems of its own. No battery was totally efficient and reliable — they all leaked mana in varying amounts, and could easily blow up if overcharged or poorly constructed. And that was without even getting into the number of actual combat spells that were specifically designed to make mana batteries blow up from internal pressure.
All in all, the creation of self-casting items was something that Zorian put squarely into the ‘probably not worth it’ category. He wasn’t nearly good enough with spell formula currently to pull it off, and even if he were, it was still a very difficult sub-field of magic item creation that gave very dubious gains. Though he did eventually intend to track down a blueprint for a blasting rod — probably the simplest of self-casting items that blasted whatever it was pointed at with a torrent of barely-constrained energy, usually fire. A fittingly named item, and one of the few self-casting items that was known to be reliable and effective in actual combat, at least at close range. It was not a priority, however — such an item would be more of a last resort, side-arm sort of weapon than something to build his skills around.
“I’m not as useless at this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff as you might think, though,” Gurey said. “As I said, Aldwin was the spellcaster, but I was the one who identified the targets. You can’t spy on a threat unless you know they are a threat, after all. And I was always very good at spotting who our competition was and keeping an eye on their activities. People underestimate how much information you can get simply by being well connected and giving a few expensive gifts to people.”
“You mean bribes,” said Zorian.
“Zorian, my friend, you have much to learn,” Gurey said, shaking his head. “Bribes are illegal. There is no law against generosity. Giving that bottle of expensive wine to your drinking buddy or inviting someone to that fancy annual dance that they’ve always wanted to attend is just being nice and no one can prove otherwise.”
“Right,” Zorian sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t talk, since I’m willing to go along with your plans. And speaking of which, why don’t we get back to the reason we’re here in the first place. What exactly do you want from me and what are you offering?”
“Very well. I presume you know about Vazen’s General Store?”
“The biggest magic-related shop in town?” asked Zorian.
“That one, yes. Cwili and Rofoltin Equipment was once bigger and able to compete with them on a more equal footing, but since the death of my partner two years ago those days have passed. Recently they have closed a deal with another company from Cyoria, but they have been silent about the contents of the deal. Everyone knows they have bought a bunch of spell formula schematics, alchemical recipes and production licenses, so it’s obvious they intend to seriously branch out into the production side of the business, but the exact details have been successfully kept secret. That is a problem. Depending on what Vazen intends to produce, some things are going to decline sharply in value, while the price of the raw materials used to make them goes up to a similar degree.”
“I see. You need to see what your rival will release so that you can prepare for the impact it will have on the market,” mused Zorian.
“Well, that and so that I can see if it is possible to counter his move in some fashion,” Gurey said.
“I suppose you know where I can find that information?” Zorian asked. “Not in the shop itself, I hope. That place is bound to be heavily warded.”
“It’s not nearly as warded as you might think — some basic counters to stop teleportation and divination, and that’s about it. But the place is always manned, even during the night, so you’re right that they’re not something you’d want to tangle with. Fortunately, you don’t have to. In the end, Vazen’s own paranoia is his undoing — I have found out that instead of keeping the documents in his heavily guarded shop, he has brought them into his much less protected home. Apparently he doesn’t even trust his own employees.”
“How protected is his home?” asked Zorian.
“Well, my information might be a little outdated since I got it two and a half years ago, from my then-living partner who scouted the entire building, but I doubt much has changed. It has an anti-divination ward and all the doors and windows have intruder alarms and that’s it. The documents themselves are kept in a safe, though, and that is bound to have much more serious defenses.”