Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Fortunately, Zach was more adept at retaining his presence of mind in these kinds of unexpected situations. The benefit of greater experience granted to him by the literal decades he had spent in the time loop, Zorian supposed.

"You look better than I would have expected you to look," Zach commented.

"How so?" Quatach-Ichl asked curiously. He made a couple of gestures at the passing waiter, ordering a something for himself. Zorian wasn’t sure what, but the waiter seemed to have understood him and responded with a casual nod in return.

Why was a lich like Quatach-Ichl ordering drinks, even though he doesn’t need to drink? Probably for the sake of appearances, but still. Could he even drink? Was his disguise good enough to allow that?

"You look surprisingly… fleshy," Zach clarified, taking a sip from the massive keg of beer in front of him.

"Ah, that," Quatach-Ichl said. "Truthfully, this is how I usually look. The skeleton form is something I reserve for battles and intimidation purposes."

Having spied on the lich a few times in the previous restarts, Zorian knew this wasn’t quite true. Quatach-Ichl also habitually appeared as a skeleton when interacting with the Ibasan forces and other people involved in the invasion… though perhaps he counted that under intimidation .

"It’s pretty bold to just approach your enemies like this," Zach commented.

"Are you going to attack me in the middle of this tavern?" Quatach-Ichl countered.

"I’m seriously considering it," Zach said, his face twisted into a small frown.

"No, you’re not," Quatach-Ichl said, giving them a knowing smile. "Putting aside the morality of involving all these defenseless bystanders in our dispute, starting a fight here would be just as bad for you as it would be for me. The ruling powers of this country would be just as interested in your activities as they would be in my own – probably even more so, since you two would be easier to blackmail and take control of than me."

He was right, of course. The two of them had come here without disguises, in their real identities. If they were to fight the Ibasan lich here, the authorities would track them down within a matter of hours, and the level of skill they would be forced to show during the fight would intrigue and alarm just about everyone involved. Once they started to look into Zach and Zorian, all sort of interesting things would come out. Even if the two of them won the fight with Quatach-Ichl and somehow managed to avoid any dead bystanders or property damage along the way, the restart would be effectively over. At that point they could just as well end the restart and start over.

Well, the truth was that the smartest thing to do would probably be to just end the restart immediately. Having this conversation with Quatach-Ichl was equivalent to playing with fire. Not even the ability to end the restart on a whim could perfectly guarantee their safety. Sudomir could detect when Zorian started messing with his soul marker, so Quatach-Ichl could doubtlessly do it too. With him so close to them, and having come here prepared for anything, it was entirely possible they might not be able to activate the marker in time before he made his move. Plus, an unscrupulous, ancient mage like him would no doubt have a whole host of subtle tricks in his arsenal, and they would possibly not even realize they were being attacked until it was too late.

Despite that, Zorian had to admit he was curious. He wanted to take the risk and hear what Quatach-Ichl had to say. This was a potential disaster, but also a potential opportunity. It was the first time they’d had the chance to engage in any kind of meaningful conversation with Quatach-Ichl, and Zorian had a feeling this kind of thing was not an easy thing to replicate between restarts.

"What you say is true, but it seems to me that you’d still be the bigger loser if we fight," Zorian said. "If your actions become known to–"

"You could have easily made that happen by now," Quatach-Ichl said calmly, cutting him off. "I don’t know how much knowledge you have about what I’m trying to do, but I’m guessing quite a bit. You could have easily made your findings public by now, but you didn’t. Instead you limited yourselves to raiding our supply caches and striking at the more careless members of our little conspiracy."

Zorian frowned. He supposed this was what Quatach-Ichl had been referring to when he said they had been interfering with his activities . However, the fact of the matter was that Zach and Zorian habitually did that kind of thing in every single restart, more in order to acquire additional funding than anything else, and it had never caused them to run afoul of Quatach-Ichl as a result. Minor complications like that didn’t usually arouse his attention. So the true reason Quatach-Ichl had managed to find them must be located elsewhere, and Zorian could think of two main possibilities. For one thing, this was the first time they’d gone after Quatach-Ichl directly, and maybe the ancient lich could detect that somehow. The second possibility was that Silverlake had overestimated her ability again and tried to gather information on Quatach-Ichl herself, with predictable results.

He was leaning towards the second possibility.

"So you saw we moved against your group and noticed we could have probably done even more damage if we really tried and thought to yourself: man, I really need to have a friendly chat with those guys ?" Zach asked.

"Why not?" Quatach-Ichl challenged. "We may be enemies, but so what? Enemies talk to each other all the time. Half of the world’s diplomats would be out of jobs otherwise. Well, all of them, if you’re a cynical old bastard like myself and see all international interactions as fundamentally hostile, but you know what I’m saying. The point is that you could have reported your findings to the authorities, but decided not to. And I could have easily gone after some of the people close to you in retaliation for the raids you’ve done on my allies, but chose to have this discussion with you instead."

Both Zach and Zorian glared at him lightly in response to that thinly-veiled threat at the end. Quatach-Ichl pretended not to notice the look.

"Anyway, what I’m saying is… we may be enemies, but we aren’t irreconcilable enemies," Quatach-Ichl concluded. "Surely we can reach some kind of agreement here?"

"I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you there," Zach said. "You want to destroy Cyoria, gather the souls of everyone who dies and feed them all to wraiths, release a primordial to rampage around the region and trigger another round of Splinter Wars. Unless you’re willing to drop this whole invasion thing and go back to your island, we pretty much are irreconcilable enemies. Don’t mistake our current passivity for willingness to quietly watch by the sidelines while you execute your mad schemes."

"Aha. So I was right, you do know quite a lot…" Quatach-Ichl said slowly, neither alarmed nor angry at Zach’s statement. "However, if you’ll forgive me for being a little blunt… why do you care?"

Zach raised an eyebrow at him.

"I’ve looked into you a bit before coming here," the ancient lich continued. "Neither of you are all that closely connected to the city itself. You are a scion of a dead house that has been taken advantage of, and Zorian here is just a talented outsider attending school here. I’m really not sure why people of your caliber would waste time on basic magic classes like that, but there are all kinds of people in this world, I suppose. Personally, I’d have gone crazy in a matter of weeks if I had to impersonate a complete beginner at magic for several years but… eh, I’m getting a little off-track. The point is, each of you has only a handful of people here that you really care about. We could easily arrange for them to be outside on the day of the invasion. Do you really care that much, in your heart of hearts, about all the random people that are going to die?"