The Power of Ten

Sama inhaled deeply, smelling the air.

Normal humans didn’t have a range of senses anything like hers, she knew well. They couldn’t see in the dark like day, avoid tricks of the light, read the vibrations in the ground like a book, echolocate, and most importantly, they had lousy senses of smell.

She went for long walks through the city, and wasn’t an unfamiliar sight doing so. Most people probably thought she was homeless or a vagrant, even if she was dressed comfortably, but it didn’t matter.

As she walked the streets of St. Paul, she was painting everything into her Visual File, casually building up an accurate map of the city, its sewers, buildings, power lines, gas mains, what roads and streets and alleys led what and where... and perhaps more importantly, who and what lived in them.

Not all of them were human, of course... although a lot of them wanted to be regarded as human.

Leveling was hard work. There was only so much Karma to go around, and this wasn’t a battlezone. Getting her precious, precious Rantha Levels up was soooooo damn hard.

Sure, the benefits were great, but having to pay for each and every one of them sucked. Sucked hard. She needed to find an unlimited Karmic Buffet she could drink deep from.

In the meantime, playing vigilante wasn’t so bad.

There it was. That sickening stench of meth being cooked...

She had to follow the light breeze, of course, but it was late at night, and nobody was going to see how fast she was moving as she bounced from one building to the next, the Tats on her feet making sure she landed as lightly as a feather instead of plunging right through to the attics below, and her lightfoot was such that she didn’t actually touch the roof at all as she skated across them and leapt between them.

Her hair was currently ink-black, distorting her figure as she moved, fast enough that people thought she was just a shadow or trick of the light this late.

She slid along the occasional power line or phone cable as she crossed wider streets, making sure to actually touch neither of them as she did so, crossing back and forth to catch that errant breeze, and homing in quickly on the old house on the double-size lot with faint smoke coming from its chimney.

She didn’t particularly care about the motivations of the makers in terms of what was going to happen to them, but getting rid of this cockroach just meant their suppliers would set up another cook for the money to be made doing all this.

That, of course, was why she had a Gal in a Chair. Or more precisely, a Werewolf in a Chair.

“That looks like the place, Shool,” the radio about her ear murmured. It had tech and encryption about it, but with magic around, that was no guarantee. The broadcast point was relayed a full mile from where Klitza was actually waiting on her computer. “The old McGonnel place. Place has been up for sale for two years. Guy was doing bad shit in the back yard, messing with the dead. Word gets out, nobody wants to buy it. It should be burned and purified, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

“So, I’ll take care of the first part tonight,” Sama rasped back, skating along the power cable up to the eaves of the roof, and hopping off onto the slope, feet stopping an inch above the asphalt shingles. She glided up to the chimney, took a whiff, and scowled. “Definitely the place. They are cooking it now.”

Klitza Pyarshykov had long ago broken into city records and downloaded their database of building plans. Sama drew out the cheap phone vibrating at her side, pressed on the plate, and studied the prints there before putting the phone away.

They’d be doing it in the basement. She’d noticed all the windows there were tightly covered. Anywhere else the activity might be noticed.

Getting in through a window wasn’t hard, especially on the second story. Swinging over the edge of the roof as if she was weightless, she held herself in place off a rafter easily, ran her fingers over the screen, slid it aside, and then extended her nails and an inch of Vajra not-quite-a-Claw over the catches, flipping them open. They slid open with resistance she didn’t really notice.

Tremblesense painted the location of everything in contact with the floor, and she went in feet first, landing on the frame of the bed with one foot and then down on the floor with the other. She put the screen back in place and closed the window... when she left, she could simply go through the back door. Nobody was going to be alive to sound an alarm at that point.

The dust barely stirred as she skated over to the door, made sure there were no surprises with strings, touch-alarms, or Wards, and opened it silently.

The upper floor leading to the stairs had several closed doors, but patterns on the floor made it plain two of the rooms were being used sporadically. By their locations, she assumed they were a bathroom and one of the bedrooms, probably used for taking breaks.

Skating past them, she heard voices from downstairs, and paused at each door to make sure each upper room was currently unoccupied.

A man had been killed in the bathroom fairly recently, or at least disposed of there, by the smell of it.

She went down the stairs headfirst, as they opened into a living area, and there was light coming from it.

The curtains had been drawn on her approach, and supplemented by a big black covering behind them, while the small window on the door had also been covered up. No light was getting out from the TV playing quietly in there.

She recognized the show as The Quiet Plains, an eerie supernatural thriller set in the haunted plains near the nation’s capital, heavy on fey nastiness and ferreting out secrets hidden behind smiles and hidden desires. Given that the show actually used real events as inspirations for what was going on at all levels of power, it had quite the following for its gritty realism. The lead character was a minor Powered, a mere Three trying to do his job in a world where things were so much stronger than he was, getting by on cunning and luck, while his partner was a Primos woman basically smarter than he was, but not having any magic of her own.

It was a popular show, especially in a nation that didn’t take too well to light-hearted sit-coms. People did enjoy watching Powered doing all sorts of things in competition, however, so sports had a big following... it was just that normal people didn’t get much of a chance to compete anymore...

Unfortunately, the sots had set up the TV so that the stairs were basically right behind that corner, and there was no way to go down the stairs without both men there seeing her.

They were both white men, looking rather grubby and strong, but going to fat, and with some family resemblance in how they looked and moved. She didn’t see any sign they were dipping into the cookie jar of meth, but these two knew they were helping make poison, so she didn’t have any sympathy for them. Their job was to haul the raw materials around, not think. As long as they made the good money, they didn’t care what they were doing. It was the fault of the addicts that they were taking the meth, right?

Commercial breaks were wonderfully reliable. She didn’t have to wait fifteen minutes before it cut to an ad for Somnolent Mattresses, and the one got up to get a beer, the other one looked at him to tell him to grab an extra, and in that turning of the head, Sama was down far enough to swing over the railing and into the hallway out of line of sight.

Not being seen squarely was important in a world of scryers and diviners.

The one in the living room was just turning his attention to the living room when a black blur passed him by. He was confused, especially when he tried to turn his head and nothing happened. He tried to breathe, to say something, and nothing happened as his vision went suddenly and shockingly black, and his thoughts with them.

The bigger one was leaning into the refrigerator when she glided up behind him and inserted six inches of golden edge into the back of his neck. He basically died instantly, barely twitching, and Sama calmly helped a hundred and twenty kilos of beerbum fall smoothly to the ground.

She even closed the fridge thoughtfully.

The door to the basement had a Ward on it...

She ran her hands over it, an inch from the wood of the door, identifying the pattern of the spell, and then cut precisely there, there, and there. Nodes that powered the spell were severed, and it expired instead of getting dispelled, which would notify the Ward’s Caster that something had happened.

She touched the door, frowned, and reached up to the jamb, pushing the hidden switch there, then ran an arcing claw of force down the border of it, a tube in her hand. She severed the pull-string, caught it with her Vajra, and calmly glued it to the doorjamb with the fast-acting adhesive.

She waited patiently for three minutes as it set, then pulled open the door after turning off the lights up in the kitchen, and lowered herself to look down the edge of the steps.

It had no railing, and she could easily roll off the stairs to the floor, if she didn’t mind shattering a bunch of chemical equipment.

The fumes were extremely annoying, and she shunted them away with her Vajra.

The cook was standing at a table, mixing up more batches of stuff to boil down. Sama’s eyes focused on a side table laden with some other reagents that weren’t chemical, but alchemical.

As she had expected, they were treating the meth to be more addictive...

He had a wasted appearance, like he was being eaten from within, and Sama wondered if he’d been afflicted with a terminal Curse. With enough money, formerly lethal diseases like cancer were easy enough to remove, but once you started messing with powerful stuff, magical diseases and Curses could easily surpass the limits of most mortal Casters to get rid of them.

If they were well-earned, getting someone to remove them typically cost a lot more than money, if they’d do it at all. Silver Magic was the best at doing so, but they simply weren’t going to do so for an Evil person unless the compensation was absolutely crippling to the source.

She made sure he didn’t have a hidden Familiar or Homunculus, slithered down the stairs soundlessly, and pushed off to glide across the floor, passing smoothly under the mixing table in the way, and straightening right next to him.

He jerked when the golden blade buried itself in his neck, and there was a discharge that fried his brain instantly. Black light leaked out his eyes, and she relieved him of the cannisters in his hands as he slumped dead to the floor.

She’d felt the chains in their Auras upstairs, and his was even worse. They were all under Lesser Geases, sufficient to make certain that they wouldn’t say anything in life or death. It was tied to a Curse that would basically give them a massive seizure if they violated the Geas or it was removed, and their spirits would be similarly incoherent.

The Reading Paper floated down over the black goo coming out of his eyes. There was a hiss as it touched the goo, magic ignited, and scored the paper, sending it flipping back up into the air.

Sama calmly snatched it, and spread it between her hands.

Her eyes narrowed at the symbol etched on it. Normally this symbol would represent the power of the spellcaster, as individual as a footprint. A skilled Powered could use this to identify the culprit by their Aura alone by studying it, but she would have to do so at a range of touch.

However, if that Source was a Divine Caster, the overwhelming aura of the represented deity would instead register.

She was looking at a symbol of Imprus...

She wound the paper into a small, tight roll, and tucked it into her vest, then began to go through his belongings, and the house, much more thoroughly.