Chapter 3 – Redoubt

There was plenty of strategizing to be done, but Callum left that to the others. He wasn’t indifferent to the coming conflict, or his place in it, but the absolute best use of his time was establishing portal world access. It would give him a position of strength from which to pursue the rest of his goals — namely, removing all those with designs on Earth.

He didn’t have the wherewithal to fight a crusade for centuries on end. The supernaturals needed to properly police themselves, not require some external agent to convince them of the simple morality of not preying on people. He had only the haziest ideas of how to accomplish that, but he knew that he’d need to involve other people. Alpha Chester and the two aligned Houses were a good start on that, and while Callum didn’t think that putting them in absolute charge would turn out much better than GAR, at least with those people running things he’d be left alone.

Neither could he just destroy all the opposing mage Houses. Even if he was capable of that kind of slaughter, if things spilled out into full war it’d engulf all of Earth. The supernatural secrets would crack wide open, governments would get involved, and nuclear war was not out of the question. He did not want to precipitate that kind of disaster.

“I really want to just go back to our own house,” Callum muttered, rubbing his eyes as he looked at the laptop screen from one of the exploratory drones. “Feels so wrong doing this in a guest room.”

“Just think of it as added incentive,” Lucy suggested. “Not like you need it, but it’s always better to look on the bright side. Like how we don’t actually have to worry about fae going after Alex.”

Callum grunted agreement. He hadn’t gotten or been interested in the full debriefing, but Felicia’s partner had at least confirmed that the video he’d been sent was solely to get his attention. Not that the fae in question weren’t that nasty, but reaching Alex was beyond them for the moment. At least, so long as he stayed inside wards.

Since he didn’t want to dwell on that, he returned his focus to the drone. Once again they seemed to be running low, since he wanted to keep one in any of the portal worlds that seemed even mildly useful. Which wasn’t many, so far, but when the number of drones he could spare was in the single digits it didn’t take many.

“What’s our next site?” He asked, already feeling his focus slipping. Though he’d left most of the route planning to Lucy anyway.

He had been skipping his drones to different locations around the world, opening dimensional portals to find different destinations and hoping to stumble on one that was more inviting than the chilly tidal plain. At Lucy’s suggestion, he targeted areas of the Mediterranean and tropics in the hopes that the portal worlds would reflect the climates there, and it sort of worked. The metaphysics of portal worlds were more confusing than ever, but there did seem to be a rough correlation.

One of the dimensions he found had a nice enough temperature, but the howling winds there had nearly ripped the drone apart before he pulled it back. Another one was so dimensionally foreign, beyond even Mictlān, that he didn’t bother exploring past the giant columns of boiling ice that surrounded the initial portal. Between delving attempts, he spent time with Alex and funneled his excess vis into the crystals so he could try again without exhausting himself.

“Man, we should have started here,” Lucy said, checking her notes. “Barbados! Maybe it’ll be like that vacation house. That was nice.”

“It was nice,” Callum agreed, shifting the drone out to the Barbados area and Lucy piloted the drone down toward the nearest speck of land. It was small enough that it didn’t even have infrastructure, and probably didn’t even have a name. Once landed, he tapped into his crystals to punch open a dimensional hole. The lack of any dramatics was promising, as was the fairly normal space his perceptions found on the other side. He teleported the drone through and the two of them watched the laptop screen.

“Huh,” said Lucy.

The drone had appeared in the middle of a clearing, which was ordinary so far as it went, but what was not ordinary was all the islands floating in the sky. At first he’d thought they were some sort of strange clouds, but after closer inspection they were genuinely chunks of rock. There were three of them visible from the clearing itself, hanging in the air with a dusting of greenery on top, though it was difficult to tell the scale.

“Well, let’s check it out,” Callum said, and lifted the drone into the air. The trees looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t say if they were earth species or not, but the lack of anything grotesque or severely out of place was a good sign. There was a ribbon of blue marking a river that led into a lake, and back out again. Then right off the side of the island.

Getting more distance from their landing point, it became clear that the portal itself had opened onto the surface of one of the islands, all of which were hovering in a blue void of sky. There was a vague smear of light overhead, not quite a sun, but nothing below except the dots of more islands, scattered about. In the distance there was even a fractured rainbow from a waterfall off the side of one of them, as if it were some fantasy poster instead of a real landscape.

The thermometer registered in the upper eighties, a summery temperature which was practically perfect. Though Callum didn’t believe for one moment it was quite as idyllic as it looked. There was surely some catch, but at first glance it seemed to be a fairly good candidate for the house.

“Well that is gorgeous,” Lucy remarked. “It’s like some kind of fairytale! Well, except it’s not all exaggerated like Faerie is.”

“We’ll put some mice there and see how they fare, and then if it’s all good we can go ourselves,” Callum agreed. “The only thing is I’m not sure that this one will have that much in the way of enchanting material. There doesn’t seem to be much material overall. But it’s not like we can’t get it elsewhere.”

Lucy piloted one drone down to the original island and Callum scanned the area for animal life before he brought the mouse cage over. If the mice got eaten that certainly gave him some data, but he was hoping to find out whether the local atmosphere was breathable or not first. But the island seemed to be more like the Night Lands, with a truncated ecosystem. Few insects, and only a few birds about that reminded Callum of Darwin’s finches. It might well be that the islands were like the Galapagos, with very few natural predators at all.

Leaving one drone there, they took a second one to tour around the visible landmasses. As they approached the next one over, which seemed considerably larger than the original, a small flock of great winged shapes burst from the canopy and circled around before heading off into the distance. They looked like some kind of variant of albatross, but it was a good reminder there might be airborne beasts to watch out for.

Diving in closer, he swept his senses around and found the larger island had a few prowling, cat-like animals, but it was nothing too terrible. He didn’t discount the possibility that those, too, could fly, but it seemed like simply selecting the proper island might be enough to ensure no lurking predators. Though it wasn’t clear exactly where all the water was coming from, portal worlds didn’t exactly conform to conservation of mass and energy to begin with.

“I do like the look of this,” Callum said, flicking through the drone feeds. “I’m sure there’s some catch that I’m missing but, barring anything horrible, I think it’s worth trying.”

“So long as the mice don’t fall over dead,” Lucy agreed cheerfully. “Speaking of, that riptide world seems to be livable. No mutations yet.”

“Might as well offer that one to Taisen or Hargrave then,” Callum decided. “It’s not great but I’m sure a team of actual mages could deal with it. Bunch of earth and water mages maybe.”

“Right, about that,” Lucy said. “Since the portal world thing isn’t exactly a secret location, how about getting in some mages to landscape whatever place we wind up putting the house? Make it flatter, put up some walls, strengthen the foundation, all that kind of thing.”

“Hmm. Yes, that would make things much easier,” Callum conceded. He still wasn’t a huge fan of bringing in other people to work on the house, but the strength of a portal world redoubt was in its inaccessibility. He could make a public statement about where his home was located and it wouldn’t make it any easier for people to access it. Except maybe for Duvall, but she’d clearly wiped her hands of that, and even then he’d be shifting things through the moon nexus first.

On the other hand, a few mages would substitute for weeks or months of work by people with heavy machinery. Pragmatically, they could even do things that no normal equipment could, like make bedrock flow around an existing foundation. Or change a slope without disturbing the foliage atop it.

“Alright, why don’t you ping Taisen and Glenda and see what they want to do about it. I’ll need more to really start making a difference, but one is better than none.” Callum was also quite happy to leave the first exploration of a new portal world to people who were used to alien environments and might have all kinds of tricks and magical items that would keep them safe.

With the new portal world, Callum felt accomplished enough to go spend some time with his wife and son without worrying about heavy matters for a while. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shake the thought that if he wanted a world where his family could live safely, he needed to do something to make it so. Part of him was tempted to close the portal to Faerie too, but it wasn’t like the fae were fundamentally an issue like with vampires. That would just be an expedient solution and, ultimately, the wrong one.

There was a reason why people like Alpha Chester or Gayle Hargrave were willing to work with him, despite his hardline stance and remaining outside the authority of the Houses and the supernatural community in general. Callum didn’t overstep, and didn’t have collateral damage. At least he tried; closing the Night Lands had been rather more of a bugbear than he’d expected, even though he’d been certain to give the Houses there a lifeline back to Earth. But his restraint gave him a kind of legitimacy that couldn’t be bought.

He was pretty sure being able to provide new portal worlds would help, though.

“You know, there haven’t been any new portal worlds since we found Six,” Taisen said, gathered in the courtyard of Chester’s compound the next day. He and Archmage Hargrave had extra mages with them, what Callum could only describe as troops. Combat mages, anyway, despite the fact that there weren’t any animals in the portal world so far as Callum could tell. Not that he was going to object to their caution; he would have done the same.

“The Night Lands is actually the most recent,” Hargrave said absently. “Five and Six are probably the oldest portals timewise.”

“And now it’s gone,” Taisen said, almost with a laugh. “Hopefully this one won’t cause as many issues.”

“It’s small and uninhabited,” Callum said. “Least so far as I can see. Not like there’s a permanent portal anyway.”

“We’ll need one to replace the mana loss from the Night Lands portal eventually,” Hargrave warned. “There’s already noticeable depletion in the larger cities.”

“A problem for another day,” Callum said. “Ready for the portal?”

“Yes,” Taisen said, glancing back at the sled that had a bunch of supplies. Including one of the portal frames, because neither of them wanted entry or egress to be dependent on Callum’s presence.

Callum threaded his vis through the portal network, past the drone that was still sitting on the tidal plain, and opened a portal. The bleak light of the tidal plain bled through, along with the sound of water and the scent of salt. Gayle’s magic pulsed lightly, taking care of any microorganisms that might be drifting through. Not that anyone had worried about that with the other portal worlds, and Callum suspected that there wasn’t any real risk of cross-contamination. Portal worlds would be either too alien or just not have the teeming bacterial life of a true world. Such liminal spaces didn’t seem to be entirely real to begin with.

Taisen barked a few orders and the mages trooped through. Once the archmage had tested the portal frame to ensure it worked, Callum left them to it. The drone was there just in case, but they didn’t need his supervision to figure out what value, if any, the portal world had.

He did catch glimpses over the next day or two though, and by that point he was chomping at the bit to get his house finally moved and restore his home to normalcy. Or as close to normal as things would get in a portal world. The sun did rise and set in rough accord with the Earth’s rotation, so that was close enough, but he’d still have to do some work to deal with the peculiarities of the liminal space.

Stolen novel; please report.

The main one was that the islands weren’t floating. They were falling. Not quickly, not at the terminal velocity of a big chunk of rock, but observing the mice and the air whistling past the edges of each island made it clear. It wouldn’t be enough to erect a wall around things; he needed to add enchantments to adjust local gravity, and probably to muffle sound too. Fortunately, there was more than enough mana in the portal world to support such a thing.

He didn’t have to worry about the islands suddenly smashing to pieces against the ground, either. There was no ground, or rather, it seemed to wrap around itself like the tidal plain did. Why there was still air movement past the islands he didn’t know, but once again, liminal spaces were weird. He was lucky that he hadn’t run into a place where the islands were careening against each other like bumper cars.

When the mice seemed to be fine after a few days of exposure, he had no compunctions about asking for the aid of the allied Houses in setting up his own home in the portal world. Things were past the point of using money; access to another portal world was literally priceless. Nor were the people of either House Hargrave or House Taisen really for hire. In fact the professional landscaper mages were based out of House Janry, which meant they weren’t exactly accessible. Or trustworthy.

Once again a bunch of mages assembled in Chester’s courtyard and Callum opened a portal. That time, it was warm air that spilled out, and the scent of greenery. Taisen’s team went through first, to sweep and secure the area just in case there was something Callum had missed, then Hargrave’s people. Callum went last, with Lucy and Alex following once Taisen’s people gave the all-clear.

Actually crossing over to the island felt like stepping into one of his low-gravity areas, and while there wasn’t too much wind on the surface, he could hear the whistle of it from where he stood. He’d selected one about five miles across, which was one of the smaller ones but it did have a spring, a river, and a lake, which was all that was necessary from Callum’s perspective. Mages could do the rest.

Running his perceptions through the ground hadn’t uncovered any caves, but there was a fairly mana-dense core on each island that might well be something he could use for enchanting material. Not that he was going to excavate the island he intended to live on, but there were plenty of candidates around. For the moment, he was primarily focused on getting something established.

“At least it’s warm here,” Lucy half-shouted over the noise. “Kinda loud though.” Alex made an unhappy noise, hands over his ears.

“There’s definitely some sound muffling enchants,” Callum called back. “I can—” The last two words were yelled into silence as one of the mages set up exactly the sort of effect Callum had been talking about. “Well, that,” he finished more quietly, and Lucy giggled.