Her father had no idea that Lizelle was actually Keritanima. Nobody did, for that matter. Her father had no inkling how much money Keritanima really had, though as smart as he was, he should certainly suspect that she had some kind of legitimate business to fund her spy operation. Provided, of course, that he didn't know that she had a copy of his seal and a key to the treasury which allowed her to simply proocure the money she needed. The expenses she incurred were usually just a bit more than the combined total of her allowance plus what she could manage to steal from the treasury without raising suspicion. But sometimes she needed a bit of extra cash, and Lizelle's deep pockets were there to provide her with a loan. Because she didn't often touch the money of her trading business, she had amassed a staggering amount in the six years she had been dabbling in commerce. She forgot about it from time to time, because her agent, a badger Wikuni by the name of Rallix, was an exceptionally gifted merchant and organizer. It was his brilliance that made Lizelle's business so successful. All she had to do was wander in from time to time in a disguise and look over the books, to make sure Rallix didn't think Lizelle dropped off the face of Sennadar.
Rallix had been something of a godsend. She started Lizelle and her business with small ideals, to create a cash fund for emergencies, but not a huge amount. She was too busy to be a merchant, so she didn't really expect the business to be more than a small-time affair. She had hired Rallix to act as her agent, and the badger had taken the initial investment and quadrupled it in the first six months. He was a brilliant merchant, with a nose for what was valuable in what part of the world, and a penchant for getting the better of anyone in a trade. He turned her small trading company into a huge enterprise, with six clippers and two rakers, warehouses and property, and employing nearly five hundred Wikuni and humans on three continents.
Rallix and the Twenty Seas Trading Company were going to be very important to her now.
Even without her dresses and jewels, Keritanima felt that she could impress the nobility of Wikuna. They didn't see the dresses and the jewels anymore anyway. The looks on their faces in the throne room told her that now they saw Keritanima, not the Brat, and it was her that had captured their attention. Not what she was wearing, but what she was saying. Not how she looked, but how she carried herself. Overcoming the hostility of the assorted nobles of Wikuna was a critical requirement for her plan, and it seemed that the first step on that venture had been a successful one.
Eyes closed, Keritanima shuffled along the carpet in her room. Her attention was focused inward, on her Sorcery, as her probes of mind-seeking energy fingered out from her and saturated the area around her apartments. It didn't take her long to locate and catalog every contact that returned a response to her mental seeking, and then separate the spies from the servants and nobles. She only needed one. Finding the most suitable candidate was what was taking her so long, looking for a strong mind that was drifting a bit, distracted and more prone to her intended plan. Someone with information, yet not so high up in the hierarchy that he would be well trained.
She finally chose her victim, then wove together her spell. She had never tried this before, but she had a good idea of how it was supposed to work. She wove it loosely, a respectably complicated knot of flows of Mind, Earth, Water, and Divine power, then she snapped it taut and released it against her victim. It struck like a viper, inundating him with enough power to send him into a trance-like state. His mind opened up to her like a book, and she found that she could walk through the passages of his mind and look through his memories, hear his thoughts. There was a bit of fuzziness and difficulty digging deeper than surface thoughts and short-term memories, things she knew were off because of her weave, things she could correct with practice. Lula had shown her something similar to this, a simple Mind weave that would allow a Sorcerer to hear the surface thoughts of a target. Katzh-dashi didn't often use such Mind weaves, because they fostered intense distrust in others if they realized that their very thoughts were being overheard, and the public image of the order was an extremely important issue with them. Keritanima had modified the weave, nearly by the seat of her dress, improvising literally as she wove together the spell. Mind weaves were dangerous, because a botched weave could destroy the mind of the target, and it could also backfire on the Sorcerer that was using it. A Mind weave like the one she was using exposed her mind to the weave as well, and a badly woven spell could damage both of them.
It was times like that that she was incredibly thankful she was Wikuni. If she had been human, the Tower could have simply used Mind weaves to persuade her to do anything they wanted.
Concentrating on maintaining the weave, she picked out where she had made her mistakes in weaving it together, even as she reviewed the memories of her target of the last hour or so. He'd been at his post the entire hour, trying in vain to listen through the stone of the floor-her ceiling-with a horn-like listening aid. There was a stray thought about the cowardly priests, afraid to use spells to try to eavesdrop for fear that she would sense their magic and follow it back to them. She could do something like that, she realized, after thinking about it a minute. She couldn't see them, but she could simply trace them back through the Weave. Sorcery required a Sorcerer to know exactly where the target of his spell was located. Mostly that required visual sighting, because a Sorcerer had to be able to see both his weave and his target in order to make it correctly, but some, like Dolanna, Keritanima, and Tarrin, had learned that knowing the exact distance and direction of the victim was also enough to target the victim with magic, and they could weave spells without having to literally see it with their eyes. Tarrin and Keritanima had learned that little trick from Dolanna. Dolanna could weave together complicated weaves blindly. For her, it was an amazing talent, something that no other Sorcerer Keritanima had ever seen, even herself, could do as effectively as she could. It has astounded her to see Dolanna weave spells blind, or with her eyes closed, something that Lula had said was absolutely impossible. That, of course, made her demand that Dolanna teach her that trick. Keritanima could manage moderately complicated weaves blind, but if it got complex, she had to be able to see it to do it right. It was about all she could do to weave together the spell she had just created blind. Weaving blind was exceptionally difficult, and it drastically increased the chances of an error in the weave, cause the spell to fizzle, or knot up and generate a wildstrike.
Keritanima had suffered one wildstrike during her training. She intended never to have to go through that again. If not for Lula, it would have taken weeks for her fur to grow back.
The spy knew nothing of importance, but the test had been the reason for it, not what she could learn. She had proved to herself that she could weave blindly a spell that complicated, using nothing more than her Mind-weave sounding to determine her victim's exact location. She had also puzzled out the modifications she'd need to make to allow her to access more than a victim's surface thoughts, though just getting surface thoughts would make the weave much easier to create.
His usefulness to her at an end, she attempted another Mind weave, a much simpler one that caused him to immediately fall into a deep sleep. She'd killed four sets of spies so far, blind-weaving the spell of Suggestion against them, but this set she wanted to keep for a while. To be her experimental subjects if anything else.