“Not too bad of a setup, to be honest,” Zorian said after thinking about it for a minute. “The divination ward stops casual espionage and makes it impossible to just scry-and-teleport inside, while the alarms on entrances make it impossible to simply sneak inside without magic.”
Covering only the entrances with the wards was a common mana-conserving measure. True, it made the wards useless if the attackers could phase through walls or were willing to make their own entrance by blowing a hole in the building, but thieves capable of phasing through solid matter had bigger fish to fry than robbing small-time shop owners and blasting holes in the walls would kind of defeat the point of trying to acquire the information undetected.
“You can teleport, though, right?” asked Gurey. “I mean, I’m sure you can — the speed of movement over large distances that you’ve demonstrated pretty much requires it — but how good are you at it?”
“I can teleport,” Zorian said hesitantly. He didn’t think he was making it that obvious, though he supposed he couldn’t keep leaving in the morning and coming back before the sun set with things only found deep in the forest without someone questioning just how he was doing it. “I’m getting pretty good at it, in my opinion. It takes me a while to shape the spell, but I can consistently pull it off.”
“Excellent. The intruder alarms shouldn’t be much of a problem, then,” Gurey said with a grin. “Aldwin had this neat trick where he could turn an item into a teleport beacon of sorts, and then simply teleport himself to its location without having to have been there in the past. I’m sure I can get some innocuous-seeming thing through the door, you just have to cast the spell on it. I don’t know how to cast the spell myself, but Aldwin did write it down in one of his journals…”
“Spell, you say? No spell formula involved?” asked Zorian curiously.
“No. ‘Spell of recall’, I think it’s called. It’s a two-part spell — you first cast a personal teleport beacon on an item, and it immediately forges a connection between you and it. You can then cast the second spell at any time, causing yourself to be ‘recalled’ at the location of the item. According to Aldwin, it was meant to be used for rapid escape — you cast the first spell on a retreat point and then use the second spell to teleport there if you end up in a bind.”
“Why not use a regular teleport for that?” frowned Zorian. “Sounds like a lot of trouble when a normal teleport will suffice. After all, you’ve already been to the location you’re teleporting to if you’re setting it up as a retreat point.”
“I really don’t know. You will have to find that out yourself if you’re interested,” Gurey said.
“Hm. So assuming this spell works as advertised and you can smuggle something in like you said you would, I ‘just’ have to defeat the protection on the safe to get to the documents.”
“Yes. That part will be all you, since I have no idea where it is or what protections it has,” confirmed Gurey.
Zorian stared at the man for a while before taking a deep breath.
“Lovely. Unfortunately for you, I am not the professional ward breaker you seem to think I am,” he told Gurey. “When you said you wanted my help with this, I had thought I would just play support or something. Something like this is, to put it bluntly, out of my league. I’m sorry, but unless there is something you’re not telling me, there is no way I’d be able to pull this off.”
Gurey leaned forward and gave him a conspiratorial grin. “Even if I gave you Aldwin’s spellbook and his notes on how the spells are meant to be used?”
Zorian blinked. “What?”
Two hours later, Zorian left Gurey’s shop with three new books under his arm. They had agreed to make the attempt at the documents three days before the summer festival, ostensibly to give Zorian the time he needed to practice the spells in Aldwin’s spellbook but also because that way, should the whole thing go pear-shaped, Zorian would only lose three days of the restart.
Zorian hummed to himself in satisfaction as he walked back to the inn. It was nice to catch a windfall from time to time. After the whole annoyance with Silverlake and the mysterious disappearance of soul magic practitioners, he had begun to think that this whole restart had been a giant waste of time. Now… well, at least he’d gotten some shiny new spells out of it, ones of the sort that he could never have acquired through any legal avenue.
Things were looking up.
After his talk with Gurey, time passed quickly. It was difficult to practice the spells found in Aldwin’s spellbook, as most of them only interacted with wards and required an actual warding scheme as a target. Thankfully, Zorian had managed to find a warded house whose owner had left on a trip, allowing Zorian to practice on it to his heart’s content, provided he kept out of sight of the main road. He also occasionally warded objects himself for practice purposes, usually when practicing the more destructive spells, but that just wasn’t the same as interacting with an unknown ward.
Surprisingly, Gurey was also willing to have Zorian practice the spells on his shop’s warding scheme, so long as he didn’t do anything permanent. Zorian wondered about that. All things considered, Gurey was being far too accommodating to him. He suspected that the portly man thought of him as an investment and hoped to turn him into a more long-term asset, and as such was rather more generous to Zorian than he otherwise would have been, but he had no way to be sure. There did not seem to be anything malicious about it, so he mostly ignored it and tried to be simply grateful for his good fortune.
There were essentially three ways of dealing with wards. The first one was to starve the ward out, depriving it of mana until it simply fell apart. The second was to identify a way to disrupt its structure, causing it to fail on the spot. And finally, the third one was to trick it into not activating in the first place. ‘Siphoning’, ‘breaking’ and ‘bypassing’ were the terms used in literature for the three methods. Each one had its advantages and disadvantages, but for the task Gurey entrusted him, he would have to rely on bypassing the wards on the safe.
Siphoning had the advantage that it always worked — every ward could be siphoned to death with enough time and effort, it was just a question if the attacker was willing to devote the necessary resources for the task. Some wards could last for months after being isolated from their power sources, even when actively drained of mana during the isolation. Unfortunately, it required that the attacker have complete control of the area around the ward, as siphoning operations were difficult to set up and maintain — anything less than total control made it too easy for the defender to wreck the setup. It was mostly used for sieges and bringing down legacy wards that had outlived their usefulness.
Breaking was the fastest method of neutralizing wards — just disrupt the structure of the ward and let it collapse on itself. Unfortunately, many wards collapsed explosively or had other unpleasant side effects if simply broken, often resulting in the destruction of the warded thing and sometimes the one doing the breaking as well. A lot of wards were also simply too powerful to be broken by a single mage, or even a group of mages, unless the attacker had identified a particularly glaring weakness. So all in all, breaking a ward was often not possible, and, even more often, not desirable even if the possibility existed. Still, if one wanted to get rid of a ward quickly and had power to spare, breaking the ward was the way to go.
Finally, there was bypassing the wards — the preferred way of dealing with them, if at all possible. If the attacker knew how the ward functioned, either because he had been given access to the schematics of the warding scheme or because he had analyzed its structure via divination spells, they could take care not to activate any of the triggers that made the ward recognize there was a problem to be countered. Depending on how the ward functioned, it might even be possible to put additional layers on top of it to neutralize it completely. If an attacker wanted to keep their intrusion secret, bypassing the wards was a must, as it was the only method that left the wards intact after they were done.