Chapter 19 – Blitz

“It doesn’t change anything.”

Archmage Janry wasn’t too impressed by the official creation of the Earth Alliance. That’s what he’d been calling it for a while, and just signing a paper didn’t really do much. The only consequence was the Earth Alliance being closer to actually engaging with the mundanes, and that meant Janry had to hurry.

The people most worried about it weren’t even his fellow mages. The news – and subsequent doubts – came from some of their fae allies. Not everyone on Earth was pleased with Princess Felicity’s high-handed approach and her absolutely ruthless takeover of Earth’s enclaves. She’d gone after them all in the same day, so they couldn’t even band together in defense.

A triumvirate of objectors had emerged among Earth’s fae, important and powerful individuals who leaned more toward Janry’s direction than the Alliance’s, represented by people from enclaves in the United States, India, and Europe. Some of them had the backing of their superiors and more were there simply for their own interests, but none of them had official approval. They wouldn’t, with the fae.

“It changes how much time we have,” Archmage Moravin said, addressing the fae more than the mages. “We may have to reduce the number of targets.”

“Yes, unfortunate.” Janry wasn’t overly concerned by that. The more expansive the damage they could blame on the Earth Alliance, the better, but beyond a certain point it was just theatre. Important theatre, but he was certain that even just one or two points of contention would be enough to sink the Alliance’s overtures to the mundanes.

“Do we have enough gremlins, at least?” He asked, directing his question at the fae representatives.

“Yes,” one of them ground out, without further explanation. The stony fae in question wasn’t one for superfluous words.

“Then it will be easy enough to deal with the highest-value targets. Beyond that, we only need a few others for it to really stick.” Janry glanced over at Archmage Harper. He flicked up a glamour to demonstrate the current plan.

“We only have one supernatural target — Alpha Chester. His exact whereabouts are not well known, but considering he’s taken control of the Deep Wilds portal on Earth, he can be lured out that way. Archmage Tasser is in charge of that.” Janry would have preferred to take care of that himself, but the entire Alliance knew to be wary of him at this point. One of his cadets would have to do, and since Tasser was an archmage it was more likely to be successful.

“For the mundane targets, since we want it to look like the Alliance is making a bid to take over, we’ve targeted a number of top leaders.” Harper changed the glamour to show several portraits of individuals, rendered in ghostly mage-light. “Most of them will purposely fail, though, as we want them capable of effectively ‘discovering’ the Alliance and taking action against them. Getting away from mundanes is easy enough, after all. We don’t need actual chaos or destruction, we just need to show how dangerous the Earth Alliance is.”

“We’ll be doing this at about the same time,” Moravin added. “Distracting the Alliance by a noisy commotion at Chester’s place is the best way to ensure that our teams succeed. The mundane security is irrelevant, of course.”

“Of course,” Harper agreed. “The other attack vector is the mundane weapons. Since Wells clearly has access to their nuclear arsenal, it is the most plausible and attention-getting target. That’s what we’ll be asking your gremlins to do,” he said, pointing at the trio of fae representatives. “There’s a lot of mundane technology that we have to bypass, since it’s apparently very tricky.”

“Having some of their own weapons used against them, combined with the knowledge that Wells has already compromised them, ought to make it easy to convince the mundanes they’re a bad idea,” Janry pointed out. “Just give them an easy solution and someone to blame and they’ll do pretty much anything you want.”

Moravin changed the glamour again, this time showing a map with highlighted points. Most were in the United States, but there were a sizeable amount in India, as well as Europe and China. Most of that was actually gleaned from old GAR files, and if nothing else Janry found it surprising how widely the weapons had proliferated. It was absolute madness.

“I, personally, am too high-profile to go along on any of the errands,” Janry said, though he wasn’t too discomfited by the fact. It might not be the best way to show his support to his allies, but he knew that if he showed up anywhere he would be followed and surveyed. “My cadet Houses will be going in my stead, while I am publicly elsewhere so it is not suspicious.”

The other Archmages didn’t seem completely happy about that, but they would have to cope. Anywhere he went would bring down too much attention and might tip their hand early. The fact that the fae were the ones taking the greatest risks offset that, though. It was the fae’s territory, so it was only fair, and at the same time it wasn’t like anyone would really miss them if something happened.

“Do we have a time frame on when the Alliance is intending to approach the mundanes?” Moravin asked the audience at large, the assembled mages and fae, many of whom had some sort of information source on the Earth side of things.

“So far as I know it’s still a few weeks away. Chester, especially, has something he’s working on.” Magus Leshiel volunteered. “That’s what I heard from my friend in House Xu, anyway.” Janry grunted and nodded to her. House Xu had been badly devastated in the altercation over the dragon’s portal – which would have been worth it if the portal had stayed closed – but they’d taken that as a sign to not work against the Alliance. At least overtly.

“Then we should take no longer than a week to get all our assets into place,” Janry judged. “I’ll provide the scry-comms from House Janry’s vault. The Guild of Enchanting might be shy about providing new ones right now but we have a number of corite-linked ones that are still functional.”

“Yes, sir,” Leshiel said, making a note. “Do we have a statement prepared yet?”

“A good point. I will write one after this meeting,” Janry noted. “Several, I imagine. The contents will depend on exactly how our preparations go.”

The topic moved on to specific ways and means. For the most part it wasn’t difficult to bypass mundane security, as a simple glamour would keep people or cameras from noticing, but there were more than simple cameras protecting some places. Any mage worth his salt could still use brute force, but bypassing long hallways of doors controlled from the inside without breaking everything took spells that hadn’t been invented yet. Or fae magic.

Some of their targets were protected more by obfuscation than by armor. People without a public itinerary, who didn’t necessarily spend the night at their own houses, were hard to track down for anyone. Janry passed along the names of several air-aspect mages who would be good for that kind of work, and didn’t have much else to do anyway.

Despite his apparent calm, Janry knew that if he missed this chance it would be awfully difficult to dislodge the Earth Alliance. The loss of secrecy wasn’t something that could be undone and the exact circumstances would set the tone of relations for a long time to come. If they let the Earth Alliance do as planned, mages in Faerie could end up marginalized, their power eroding and their access to the wealth of Earth drying up.

That was something that Janry wasn’t going to let happen.

A week was not much time to coordinate a simultaneous strike on twenty-four separate targets, but they’d already been practicing and organizing for some time. For most mages among Janry’s allies, it had been a long time since their tour in the portal worlds and they had to shake the rust off, or dig out and try to repair old foci. Then there was distributing scry-comms to the various fae and the occasional mage handler.

Janry had to empty out more of his treasury than he liked to pay for it all, but wealth could be rebuilt. In fact, when he had some time it wouldn’t be too hard to delve down into the Earth’s crust and mantle and dredge out more gold. While he didn’t have a metal aspect, he could at least sift it out of rock and let someone with the right magic extract pure elements from the undifferentiated mass.

Trying to do the same thing in Faerie was not a good idea. One of the problems with the portal worlds was that delving too deep or going too far ended up running into the frayed edges of reality, going in circles, or finding that the world itself stopped acting as expected. He couldn’t just pull riches out of the ground in Faerie as he could on Earth.

Idly, he considered Wells’ ability to open up portals while he sorted through the logistical paperwork. It had to be something that someone could duplicate. If there were other portal worlds, then perhaps there were other planets as well, and the riches and power that went with them. Hopefully places easier to tame than Earth.

Part of him considered that perhaps a good war would make it easier. With so many mundanes they would undoubtedly be fractious, but if they spent all that energy on removing themselves, then the ones that remained would be far more biddable. Especially if they had a handy target to blame.

Janry reached for a different set of papers and began altering the orders. He had initially considered only setting off one or two of the weapons, letting the rest be false victories that could be used to implicate the Earth Alliance. Upon reflection, it was probably better to set them all off and take advantage of the chaos. They’d still need to make sure that the blame was adequately cast on the Earth Alliance – and Wells in particular – but the more damage the better.

Fortunately, most of the gremlin-type fae, those who could interface with technology the best, would absolutely jump at the chance to meddle with something so powerful. It might be better to let each team believe that they were still one of the few who would have the chance, rather than letting them know all the sites would have detonations, but his plans would ensure there wouldn’t be any problems in the end. The mages were a little bit less reliable, or rather, more self-interested.

He’d have to keep a close eye on them and make sure he had someone of unimpeachable loyalty along with each team. After all, they hadn’t had any real combat since their portal world days and some of them might be squeamish or just too weak to do what was necessary. The targets were just mundanes, but not everyone could keep things in perspective.

Janry was aware that the entire plan could go badly, if the Earth Alliance got involved. Between Wizzy, Wells, and Chester, there were plenty of people with no compunctions about killing their fellow mages. At worst, the actual bones of the operation might be exposed, which would naturally lead back to him.

Even if that happened, Janry wasn’t all that worried. He wasn’t taking any direct action himself, and House Janry had been around for a long time. Even if the cadet houses were implicated, many of them had been worryingly comfortable with the idea of accepting Wells’ terms. It was probably better to let them bear the brunt of whatever backlash, since it would solve that problem and so long as his personal power was intact, so was House Janry.

The other Archmages might not be happy with him, but it wasn’t like they had shown any inclination other than to vacillate and scold. The only threat to him personally was the Earth Alliance, but sufficient political pressure would keep them at bay. Clearly someone with sense held Wells’ leash, otherwise he would have been attacking people left and right.

He’d faced more challenges in the endeavor than he had anticipated, but he was undeterred. Janry considered himself a reasonable man, and it was reasonable to admit that the opposition had taken him by surprise more times than he’d liked, and undermined his slow growth with precipitous action. But new power made new mistakes. Someone like Wells or Taisen would overextend, push too far, and everyone would agree they needed to be stopped. Once people got over the shock of Wells’ demonstration, and the Earth Alliance’s power was curbed, he was sure everyone else would scramble to the proper viewpoint.

Janry just needed to ensure the plan succeeded. That meant setting watchers, and being ready to set everything in motion at a moment’s notice. If his plans leaked, he would need to ensure that everything happened regardless of the treason.

***

Callum was happy to leave the preparations for any actual unveiling to others. He knew that Chester was pulling together with Felicia, the earth-based Houses, and the dragons to put together a plan of action – speeches, demonstrations, and all kinds of political and public relations activities – but Callum was not part of the public face. He was The Ghost, he would remain The Ghost, and be both the bogeyman that nobody ever saw and the mysterious benefactor that provided portal worlds for all.

There was one serious reservation, and that was Janry’s faction. Callum was very strongly inclined to just bomb their little supposedly-secret compound out in the Deep Wilds, but so far they hadn’t actually done anything since the summit. He hated being so reactive, just waiting for someone to strike like in the early days, but there was nothing he could do without risking damage to his ultimate goal.

He still had a kinetic impactor waiting in the wings, looping through portals even if he’d stopped the acceleration. There was no way he wouldn’t need it sooner or later. That was just a sideshow to his real job, though, which was a never-ending task of surveying for portal worlds. It was only grueling mentally; he was actually seated outside with his laptop and a glass of iced tea while he watched Alex drive a toy car around the back yard. He had to admit that being able to do all his work outside, in a floating island paradise, was quite the benefit.

“Phone for you,” Lucy said, coming outside and easing herself into a chair. “Taisen sounded less than happy.”

“Right,” Callum said, flipping from the drone feed to the VoIP program. He waited a moment for the thing to load, and Taisen’s face popped up in the window. “What’s going on?”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Janry is making his move,” Taisen said shortly. “We need to move now. We caught one of his teams heading out and they actually wanted to talk. One of his subordinates warned us about his targets, because there are more of them than we thought.”

“Not just us, then,” Callum said, already reaching out through his drones for his cloak. Felicia had granted him a small estate in her weird faerie dimension, little more than an apartment, and while he was never going to live there it did give him a useful place to keep his cloak and his wooden anti-fae ball so they wouldn’t be destroyed. Also a safer place to open a feeder portal than Faerie proper.

“Not us at all.” Taisen looked even grimmer than normal, his mouth set in a hard line. “We’re collateral. He intends to assassinate a number of world leaders and then blame us. Worse, he intends to set off nuclear warheads and blame us.”

Callum blinked.

“Is he insane?” Callum asked, too bewildered to even be properly angry. “Even if he could do that, that’s just — I mean, setting off a nuclear war is an incredibly stupid idea.”