Chapter 10 – Cracks

“I really don’t care,” Archmage Hargrave told the House Fane flunky who was blocking his path into the House proper. He wasn’t well disposed toward House Fane on the best of days, and even less so now. Some of them had been sniffing around his House grounds and it had been a pleasure to send them whimpering home to their master.

Minus a few of their number. There were consequences for trespassing, and it would do to remind House Fane that not everyone was cowed by their wealth and near-monopoly on healers. Open conflict between their Houses was hardly likely from such a minor clash, especially due to the video he’d been shown.

“It doesn’t matter what the Archmage is doing. He has a lot to answer for,” Hargrave continued. It seemed every House had received an email from someone inside House Fane with a recording of the Archmage trying to recruit Callum Wells. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, but Fane obviously didn’t realize both that he was being filmed and that Wells was not amenable to pressure.

Hargrave hadn’t thought of such things himself, and had been forced to have the House swept for listening devices. They had even found a few, though after some very pointed inquiry he’d found it was all internal. Just younger mages trying to get one over on each other. He’d stopped that quickly enough, and handed down mandates to make sure his people kept an eye out for any new surveillance.

It wasn’t comfortable, but there was obvious value to what mundane craft could accomplish. Thanks to the video it hadn’t taken more than a few hours to put together a coalition to hold Fane to account. Hargrave wasn’t exactly the most interested in the inter-House politics but this was so blatant that even he couldn’t ignore it. Besides which, he’d never turn down an opportunity to turn the screws on Fane.

“I will inform Master Chen,” the House Fane man conceded, withdrawing from the vestibule. Hargrave didn’t much like being in House Fane, but their greatest power – their negative healing – wasn’t a threat to him, nor was it a threat to Archmages Janry and Elroe at his back. Hargrave glanced back at them and snorted, swaggering forward out of the vestibule into the main room.

House Fane was excessively luxurious, to the point of being garish. Not just silk and gold, but polished banic filigree carrying protective enchantments and wards. Hargrave didn’t exactly hate his luxuries, but there was a big difference between comfort and whatever Fane was doing.

“I say give him ten minutes and then we just start smashing,” Archmage Elroe muttered. Hargrave raised an eyebrow, irked by the implied instruction. It wasn’t like Elroe would do any smashing, since his aspect was fire and he’d just melt everything. It was Hargrave and, especially, Janry who would do the smashing with force and earth. Even the best shielding wards couldn’t stand up to Archmage strength.

Between the three of them, they represented more than enough power to deal with whatever nonsense Fane wanted to put forth. Not that Hargrave expected all that much trouble, at least not physically. Fane was more than slippery and underhanded politically, but Hargrave wasn’t going to give him a chance to weasel out of this.

“Apologies, Archmages,” said an obsequious-looking man, pencil thin and slightly greasy, hurrying up to them. “I am afraid there is a problem. We…” He trailed off and licked his lips. “We don’t know where Archmage Fane is.”

“What the devil do you mean?” Hargrave demanded. “Is he in hiding?”

“No, Archmage,” the man said. “He never returned from Beijing. He went through the teleporter there but didn’t return to the House.”

A faint alarm rang in Hargrave’s mind. He didn’t know Fane well, not personally, only as much as he needed to thoroughly detest his fellow Archmage. But he knew enough to realize that simply vanishing to who-knew-where was not something Fane would do. That it occurred directly after his discussion with Wells was beyond suspicious.

“If you’re covering for him, there will be consequences,” Hargrave said, flexing his force armor just a touch. The lackey went white-faced and started babbling.

“No! One would never give such an insult to such an illustrious person as yourself. We have no idea where our Patriarch is! The House has been in an uproar, he has been missing for almost a day⁠—” Hargrave stopped listening, turning right around.

“The hell is he playing at?” Janry muttered. Elroe was quicker on the uptake.

“That bastard. This changes things. No idea how he did it, but considering what happened to everyone else that’s dealt with Wells—” Elroe cut himself off. “We have to check with the China GAR branch. Maybe they know something.” Hargrave nodded agreement. Considering that China had only the Fanes and their cadet Houses, that would require some flexing of authority, but he wasn’t worried about that. He was worried about what they might find.

Or rather, he was looking forward to it.

He marched over to the teleporter and ripped out all the framing to expose the enchantments, ignoring the protests of the House Fane man. It looked fine, but there was only one way to test it. Maybe it wasn’t necessary, but he had a sudden suspicion.

“You, teleport to the China GAR branch and back,” he ordered the House Fane man. The idiot gawped at him, but considering that it was Hargrave he hurried to obey after a few moments. Only after he returned did Hargrave go through the teleporter himself, floating up and into the switchboard balcony the moment he was on the other side. His companions were only a few seconds behind him, and knew enough to go start securing the higher-level personnel before they could rabbit. Hargrave could see Janry’s vis flickering out as he secured the exits.

“When did Archmage Fane come through here last?” Hargave demanded. The switchboard operators just looked at him with blank and terrified expressions, and he sighed. They probably didn’t speak English. This was going to take longer than he wanted.

After several hours, they did finally get the answers they wanted, though most of that time was spent dealing with language issues. Records were gone through and times compared, though in a way they need not have bothered. Everyone agreed that Fane had gone to Beijing, but hadn’t returned from it.

He’d disappeared between one teleport and the next.

That changed everything. Wells was more a threat to legitimacy than to actual people, or at least he had been. A danger that would pass the moment he was stopped. Killing Archmage Fane brought him into another realm entirely, and Hargrave had no idea how the powers of the supernatural world would react. Some would lend their own agents to help GAR scour the world for him, but others wouldn’t care at all. Houses with no holdings on Earth were completely distant from Wells’ activities, so to them he was very much someone else’s problem.

No matter what others thought though, Wells was now a real threat to real people. More, he was a threat by way of the very tools the entirety of supernatural society relied on. This had pulled back the veil on a very ugly door indeed.

“This is an issue for Duvall,” Hargrave said. “In fact, if Wells can suborn the teleportation system, Duvall certainly can. I don’t know about you gentlemen, but I am rather leery of stepping into one of these transporters now that we know what can be done.” There was very little that could threaten him, but that didn’t mean there was nothing.

It was well worth remembering that they had not fully plumbed the depths of the portal worlds, and the powers that the greatest of the fae held could rival what an archmage could do. So far Wells had attacked from unconventional vectors, and Hargrave didn’t want to get blindsided again. Elroe nodded grimly, and even the perpetually sleepy and bored Janry looked more alert.

“We’ll fly,” Elroe said, and Janry shrugged.

“I’ll just go by ground,” he said. Nobody but Janry liked the frankly claustrophobic confines of his earth vessel, despite the fact that it could shoot almost completely straight to any point on Earth. Assuming Janry’s aim was good, anyway.

“We’ll meet you by Portal World One,” Hargrave confirmed. “Then we’ll pry some answers out of Duvall.” It really didn’t matter how much Duvall threatened to restrict the teleportation network. Not when the network itself could no longer be trusted.

***

“This is really blowing up, big man,” Lucy said, wide-eyed as she looked at her laptop screen. “It’s like, practically war. I’m only seeing the low-level chatter and people are fighting and clawing about House Fane and the teleporters.”

“Definitely a good time to keep our heads down.” Callum was actually feeling a little weird about what they’d pulled off. Taking out the person pointing the gun at you was one thing; taking out the person giving the orders to the person pointing the gun at you was another. Better, and worse, simultaneously.

Lucy seemed to be taking it okay. She had been at least as incensed by Fane’s casual threats as he had, that same gut-level emotional boiling, and he knew how destructive that could be even after doing something about it. Drinking worked, sometimes, but that was a bad habit he didn’t want to start so he had given her some quiet advice about channeling it into something productive.

After all, there was still more to do: he wanted Lucy to investigate the Department of Acquisitions and the fae king that had laid that geas on her, Ravaeb. The former was obviously evil and the latter probably had more sins to his name if he was willing to do something as nasty as the geas, but he didn’t want to move without more information.

They needed a break, too. Everything had been work, work, work for weeks, so while he wasn’t going to rest on his laurels he wasn’t going make any immediate plans. There was plenty enough to do just with practicing his magic, reading through whatever Lucy pilfered from the magical internet, and trying to catch up on sleep.

There was also upkeep to do on the bunker. A little more gold to pay Miguel, and some yelling to do at people putting together substandard plumbing. He rather wished he’d had his perceptive sphere when he was doing architecture. Not that he was ever a supervisor or anything, but when doing walkarounds it would have been nice to spot some of the problems before they started. In a way it wasn’t like any of the buildings were his responsibility after the plans went through, but at the same time there was a certain amount of pride in workmanship.

“If you’d had it before, you probably wouldn’t have gone into architecture,” Lucy pointed out. “You’d do, like, prospecting or treasure-hunting. Pull gold right out of the ground.”

“I’ve thought about that, but most ore is just, you know, rock. You have to treat it with stuff and I can’t really tell one rock from another.” Callum shook his head. “Treasure hunting, well, maybe. Even with my range though there’s an awful lot of land to try and inspect.”

“Better than a metal detector,” Lucy observed. “Besides, wouldn’t it be super cool to dig up some old gold coins from somewhere?”

“It actually would be,” Callum admitted. “I just don’t know where to look.”

“You know there’s plenty of shipwrecks and things nobody’s scavenged ‘cause they’re deep and it’s the middle of nowhere so it’s not worth it. But your little portal anchor thing means you could just snatch anything you wanted.”

“Huh,” Callum said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Aw, c’mon. You never dreamed of digging up pirate treasure when you were a kid?” Lucy pouted at him. “I grew up in a mage House and I still wanted to be a pirate!” Callum laughed.

“Okay, you’ve convinced me. We can go treasure-hunting. Considering we have no current income, that’d actually be fantastic, assuming we can move it.”

“Ask Chester,” Lucy suggested. “Like, collectors want to know where it came from, and I bet he can get together a diving team for cover.”

“And it’s all normal money, nothing supernatural about it,” Callum mused. “Nobody would be looking for it, and there’s plenty of ways that we could get access to the proceeds. I like it.”

“That’s why you keep me around,” Lucy said in a singsong voice.

“If you’ll find the places you want to go treasure-hunting, I’ll run it by Chester.”

“They’re mostly out in the middle of the ocean, but some are around the Caribbean,” Lucy hinted.

“Sure,” Callum agreed. “Let’s hit the beach.”

It was easier said than done, but Chester was more than amenable to assembling a front for them. Callum really disliked how dependent on Chester he was becoming, though he could have liquidated his finds on his own. It was just faster, easier, and honestly safer to do it through the shifter’s contacts.

“Now, I’m the Midwest Alpha, not the beach Alpha, so my personal expertise on this isn’t great. But I have a team based out of Oklahoma that’s willing to take the credit. They’ve got a sub drone so you can get pictures to verify the wreck you’re salvaging.”

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“That works for me,” Callum said. That meant they could really only salvage one location, since it’d be incredibly suspect for some diving team to salvage multiple ones in close succession. He didn’t even know what the best prospects were. Sure, there might be ships loaded with gold or silver that had sunk, but there were plenty of historical artifacts that were worth just as much to the right collectors.

He was glad Lucy had brought it up, because he’d gotten as far as realizing he couldn’t distinguish ore from other rock and how big the world was, and more or less written off the idea of cheating out hidden resources. In hindsight it was obvious, but he wouldn’t have thought of it himself. At least not anytime soon.

The drone portal setup meant he didn’t have to worry about hitching discreet rides on airplanes anymore, for which he was glad. It also practically invalidated the van, except he still liked having bulletproof surroundings if he was wandering around somewhere. While he could just teleport from place to place, or even make portals for himself and Lucy, that required a lot more finesse than just driving like a normal person. He had to teleport out of sight, but nobody thought twice about a van.

Unfortunately the van would have been out of place in Barbados, but neither he nor Lucy were. Tourists were all-season, and merely walking the beach was an ordinary activity. Well, Lucy did most of the beach walking. With his bum knee and his cane there was only so much sand he could take, but he kept himself active in other ways. With the injury and being holed up as he’d been, there were some excess pounds to work off.

He felt a little odd to be off enjoying himself with Lucy, hundreds of miles from where there was a lot of supernatural drama happening. Drama that he’d directly caused. But it was for the best. He couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening to begin with, and trying would only create more stress and he’d probably do something stupid.

Callum really needed a vacation.

***

“They were here for me?” Gayle reflexively reached for the focus band around her wrist. After her run-in with Mister Wells at Garrison Two she’d gotten with her mother and started practicing with her defenses more seriously. If she’d had proper reactive shields and more advanced offensive options she might have been able to do more, even if Wells hadn’t actually been a true threat to her.