Chapter 17 – Hammer

Callum’s body was in Alpha Chester’s yard, but his mind was on Ravaeb. He tuned out the chill in the winter air, the glare of the sun in the clear blue sky, and the shifter guards looming nearby. Instead he focused on the drone hovering above the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park. He couldn’t sense any trace of fae influence, but that was for the best. There was no point in allowing even a hint of his presence.

He withdrew the wooden ball from its hiding place in a pocket of earth and teleported it down to the forest floor, where it rested among snow and frozen loam. The drone itself he pulled back to the table, where Lucy cut the lift. From there on out she couldn’t do much more than watch.

“Thanks, Lucy,” he said, and started shifting the ball into the park.

“Play ball,” she replied, apparently thinking of the same turn of phrase he was, and he snorted as he stretched out his perceptions. He had to go quite a few more miles toward the center of the park than he’d expected before he started to notice the same mana pond phenomenon that Jissarrell’s enclave had demonstrated. Once he found it though, it seemed to get denser far more sharply than it had in the Creede area.

Denser and twistier. Space wasn’t exactly being tied in knots, but there was more distortion in more places than the last fae realm he’d looked at. He considered what he was looking at for a moment, then realized it was stupid to just ponder it himself when he had people around who might actually understand the implications of what he was seeing.

“I’ve never been, you understand,” Chester said when he asked about it. “But from what I understand a lot of Ravaeb’s fae prefer to be hidden. They tend toward ambush and duplicity, and his court itself is knives-out.”

“How do they get anything done then?” Callum wondered aloud, skirting around some of the brain-twisting contortions that had the distinct vis signature of a fae inside. The concept of a court wracked by infighting was not new, even infighting that was literal and not just social, but such things hadn’t lasted long historically. “Wouldn’t they just all kill each other off and collapse?”

“Depends on how hard it is to kill a fae,” Chester replied, and Callum shook his head. It still sounded like a recipe for chaos, but Callum wasn’t there to critique Ravaeb’s management style. He was there to kill the king.

Now that Callum was in the actual fae realm he didn’t dare use teleportation, since that would expose his magic, but he could weave a gravitykinesis framework inside the ball and sent it rolling or even flying around. That made the process of getting deeper a lot slower than it could have been. Not that it was slow, as such, but he was spoiled by moving a thousand feet every few seconds.

For once he had to actually worry about being caught. His instincts were all wrong for physically maneuvering something through the world, since he’d spent so long barely caring about the path between two points. He kept catching himself wanting to thread right through trees and brush, and he had to keep reminding himself to keep out of any potential line of sight. Even in a fae enclave, he was sure a wooden ball rolling about on its own was cause for suspicion.

Unless the wood was actually invisible to fae. That wasn’t impossible, but Callum didn’t think Jissarrell would do him that favor. The fae magic shrouding seemed to work, at least, since he could sense an odd muting of the pond as it pressed against the surface of the wood. The interior, where the anchor was, had none of the excess mana at all. He half expected the ball to start bobbing backward from mana pressure alone.

Soon enough he started to run across the same sort of ridiculous unnatural formations that he’d seen in the heart of Jissarrell’s enclave. Only instead of picturesque waterfalls coming from oversized trees, they were things like ice caves shaped around boiling geysers and wind-scoured canyons cutting deep into the earth. There were scenic parts, but they were scenic in a harsh and uncompromising way.

Some of it was not beautiful. There were swaths of dead and rotting vegetation, bubbling swamps that even through his remote perceptions felt diseased, and pits of burbling and steaming mud that had nothing at all to recommend them. Despite how awful those features were, every one of them had someone or something inhabiting it. He kept the orb far away but he could still get the outlines of huge, long-limbed things crouching or creeping or swimming in the muck and detritus.

“You were right,” Chester remarked to Lucy. “It really doesn’t look like anything. I can’t really even smell any magic.”

“He’s going to kill Ravaeb with the power of his mind,” Lucy said. “Plus a huge gun we picked up. But yeah, it’s actually a little freaky that he does everything all spooky silent. He hates the name Ghost but it works.”

“It’s so stupid,” Callum muttered. “Like I’m some kind of comic book villain.”

He didn’t have to be quiet. It was hardly like anyone would hear anything through a portal anchor being chained through his nexus. But he couldn’t help it; he was trying to be sneaky so he was going to be quiet. He hadn’t disassociated his magic from himself that far.

Callum floated the ball from tree to tree and from bush to bush in short hops, mostly to make sure he hadn’t missed anything in his perception sphere. He had the range to ensure there was nobody around, something quite useful since there were small fae or magical beasts flitting about here and there, or burrowing underground.

Compared to what a wilderness should have, it was practically a desert. There were only insects, clustered around unidentifiable carrion. Yet there were no animals those carcasses could have come from. No elk or deer or bears, not even mice or foxes or birds flying around. Even through his spatial senses it felt off and oppressive.

He followed the feeling of increasing pressure as his best guide for the center of Ravaeb’s domain, since he had no idea where exactly he was going and the only path he could take was necessarily circuitous as he avoided any inhabitants. Even if Callum had been provided a map, he was pretty sure that it’d be useless given the general weirdness and spatial twisting the fae enclave demonstrated.

The minutes stretched on, nearing an hour, and shifters got up and moved around, cycling through forms. Lisa leaned on the table and chatted with Lucy, though in low tones to avoid distracting him. Callum didn’t even realize he was scowling until Lucy said something.

“Something wrong on the other side, big man?”

“Hmm?” He blinked and shook his head, stretching since he’d somehow become stiff and cold already. “Not wrong as such, but it’s pretty unpleasant over there. Just the environment is hostile and disgusting. Like, a land of blight and winter.”

“The longer a fae sticks to their story, the more powerful they become,” Chester remarked. “Big stories mean more power, too. Plenty of old stories about the king of cold and death.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s definitely both of those.” Callum shivered.

“Want something hot? Coffee? Chocolate?” Chester offered. He didn’t seem too worried about the cold.

“Sure,” Callum said. “Chocolate please? Thanks.” He flexed his fingers inside his gloves. “I guess I just didn’t realize I’d be spending so much time out here.”

“The sight lines are worse inside,” Chester said blandly, but smiled when Callum looked at him skeptically.

The carafe of hot chocolate helped, both the warmth and the sugar, as he kept floating his stealth basketball into Ravaeb’s demesne. The scattered dwellings, if they could be called such, got closer together until Callum broke out into a clearing where there seemed to be actual paths and fences. Footpaths became bridges over small streams, winding away from the edge of the wilderness.

Except that all the construction seemed to be bone.

It was so overwrought and macabre that Callum almost laughed. It was terrible, and he was sure there was human bone in there given the motif and theme of Ravaeb’s story, but it was also incredibly silly. Though the kind of insane required to build an entire pier and tethered boat out of nothing but fused bones was horrifying in its own right. It was exactly the sort of thing you’d see out of a deranged serial killer — which of course Ravaeb was.

The problem with actually stumbling on Ravaeb’s court was that there were fewer places to hide a self-propelled sphere of wood, and sight-lines longer than Callum’s sensory range. Not a problem if he could have teleported but moving manually felt dangerous and exposed. Especially since there were plenty of fae within Callum’s sphere, with relatively little underbrush to hide the movement of his anchor.

None of them seemed like the maybe-elves of Jissarrel’s nobles. They were all oversized or undersized, too long of limb or too short of it. For the most part Callum had no idea what sort of creatures they were supposed to be other than creepy. He did spot some that might well be aping certain urban legends, but that was only a guess.

He didn’t actually care what the court was doing, except for how hard it made it for him to move the ball around. Nevertheless it seemed there were a lot of fae talking and bickering with each other, and once there was even a fight that ended up with a much larger fae disemboweled by a small, razor-toothed mouse-thing. Callum would have sworn the wounds were lethal, but it was back on its feet and complaining to someone within thirty seconds while its intestines knitted back together.

After trying to figure out how he was going to fly a chunk of wood around without anyone taking issue for a good ten minutes, Callum almost slapped himself. There were streams, and they were going in approximately the right direction, so he simply rolled the wood into the water and let it float. Or rather, he helped it float, piloting it like a tiny boat rather than trusting the current.

His range was enough that the palace at the center of the clearing came into his perceptions not too long after the ball started inward, though calling it a palace was overselling it. The center of the bone court was more of a raised pavilion, framed but not walled, like some kind of oversized gazebo. It was hideously well made, every inch of the bone that made it up carved with exacting precision by a master. Obviously the work of years, and despite the material there was nothing out of place or haphazard about it.

Callum had a very dark urge to liberate some powerful munitions and just drop the biggest bomb he could find at the center of the whole thing. He quashed it though, since not only was it impractical, but he wasn’t there to kill everything, even if many of them were undoubtedly the kinds that deserved it. But he didn’t know that and he wasn’t about to cause massive death and destruction just because some people deserved it. The lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah came to mind.

“Found him,” Callum said, as the wooden ball drifted along the stream. Ravaeb was obvious not just from the fact that he was sitting on a throne in the center of the pavilion, but from the sheer scale and density of his vis. In fact, Callum was a little uncomfortable looking at him, because just from the impression of his power it felt like Ravaeb would notice. He nearly had a heart attack when Ravaeb shifted, though it seemed to be just to lean over and say something to what could only be described as a yeti standing to the side of his throne.

At least, Callum assumed the fae was speaking. Ravaeb didn’t have any lips.

“What’s he look like?” Lucy asked.

“Herne the Hunter by way of zombie apocalypse?” Callum hazarded. “Like, twelve feet tall, big deer skull for a head, thin but muscled and boy is that weird.” If anything, Callum was underselling the menace of Ravaeb’s actual form. His size, the corded sinew and muscle, and the casual power of even his slightest movement implied that he could fell buildings and overturn tanks if he wanted to. He hoped the gun they had was large enough.

“I’ve never seen past his blue-skinned-giant glamour,” Chester remarked. “But yes, that is Ravaeb.”

“It’s not really a treat.” Even with magic, he wouldn’t have thought it was possible for someone to be alive with an actual skull for a head, though Callum was sure he was missing details thanks to only being able to use his spatial sense. Ravaeb’s outlines were actually a little blurry, his vis melding with the heightened mana of the enclave. There were obviously subtleties beyond what he could discern, but he was pretty sure he was seeing some aspect of the whole fae king thing. One with the land and all.

“You’re close enough to engage?” Chester didn’t give any obvious signal, but the shifter gathering he’d almost forgotten about all stirred.

“Yes,” Callum confirmed. The ball wasn’t even in the pavilion; he’d wedged it under a handy bridge over a thousand feet away. Mostly because he didn’t want to have his perspective bobbling about while he was focused. “I’ll count us down,” he said, gripping the trigger for the antimateriel rife. “Ten, nine…”

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He poked a single vis thread out of the ball and snaked it over to the pavilion. That was actually the riskiest bit of the entire venture, whether his miniscule vis threads would trigger any kind of response. Callum had some hope that even if they were noticed, nobody would realize the actual threat until it was too late. Two hundred yards away, when Callum reached zero, he snapped open a portal and held down the trigger.

Ravaeb’s chest exploded.

The fae king was huge and Callum aimed for center mass, so with his spatial sense advantages the first bullet hit exactly where he was aiming. Not so the rest, because a small thing like an exploded chest didn’t really slow Ravaeb down. Despite being so huge, he was out of his throne before the second bullet hit, which gouged out a good chunk of the bone back with a spray of fragments but didn’t actually penetrate it, which was worrying coming from an anti-tank weapon.

He tracked Ravaeb with the portal, turning it slightly as Ravaeb seemed to simply blur to the side. The Fae was fast, but he wasn’t quite faster than bullets, and until he located the tiny portal Callum was using he wouldn’t even know where the attack was coming from. A second bullet dug into Ravaeb’s side, drawing another fountain of gore, but the fae king still didn’t go down. Instead, he did something.