Chapter 6 – Direction

It was one thing for some tyrannical magical government to exist, because at least that was a structure full of people and could be grappled with. It was another to think that there were whole groups of supernaturals out there completely off the radar doing whatever they liked. Which might have been hypocritical, since he was exactly one of those supernaturals, but there was no guarantee these off-the-books enclaves weren’t officially endorsed by GAR in some way in the first place.

A government that openly endorsed murder and kidnapping probably covertly endorsed more of the same. He couldn’t imagine it would take much of a bribe to let some supernaturals through on the sly and set up where they wanted. Though he had to admit that the timing implied it was the new guard at GAR that was responsible, not the old one.

Chester’s American Alliance at least seemed to be doing what it was supposed to, though he had no way of really investigating it. He didn’t entirely trust everyone involved was keeping their noses clean, but they were supposed to be keeping an eye on each other. Callum’s reputation as The Ghost probably did more work to keep people honest than anything else.

“There is nothing in the GAR networks,” Lucy grumped, furiously scowling at her laptop and then at the cookies on the kitchen table. She erased the scowl and picked up a cookie, turning in her seat to look at him. “Nobody’s talking about anything of any consequence, I swear. A million emails about meetings and nothing about what’s in the meetings.”

“That’s pretty normal,” Callum remarked, going through the precision exercises that he’d managed to finagle out of the Guild of Enchantment tutor. There were multiple versions, but he had settled on building a ship in a bottle through mana displacement alone. It was tricky, especially since moving too fast could result in mana sliding right through the matter, but it did force him to be both careful and precise.

He wasn’t sure exactly how well that sort of thing applied to his thin threads, or conversely his tubes, since he had a finer control to begin with. Still, he was years and years behind on basic skills and habits. While he had a definite advantage with his perceptions, everything he made was extremely simple and nothing like the complex spell forms he’d seen from Taisen’s men.

They’d almost certainly been using foci, but equally certainly the focus didn’t do all the manipulation. If they were anything like the telekinesis focus he had, there were big parts that were completely under the mage’s control. Instead of individually manipulating threads, it was like flinging around a net; easier to deal with but still requiring finesse.

No matter how fine he could manipulate things, that wasn’t the same as manipulating them correctly. He was entirely self-taught, so it was no wonder that he’d picked up bad habits. Though he was keeping a very, very close eye on the techniques to make sure they weren’t counterproductive either due to his uniquely small threads or just because they were unexamined orthodoxy. On one hand, there were hundreds of years of practice and refining in the approaches and ideas of how to handle vis. On the other hand, this was a society full of secrecy and conflict and people who were probably not above sabotaging future generations.

He had a better idea of what the exercises were for now that he actually had a better understanding of spell forms. Things like teleports and portals weren’t so much the simplest or most instinctive spellforms, though they were not all that complex, as they were the ones that came most naturally to the vis. Just putting a bunch of undirected vis threads in an area drifted into a vague approximation of one of the two, which made doing any other spell form more difficult. All the complex things like shields and whatnot obviously worked, but they all required making vis do things it didn’t naturally want to do. Like any tool, really, but he didn’t have as much an appreciation for it before.

It also made him wonder about his gravitykinesis. It hadn’t taken overly much work to create, so he had to assume other spatial mages could. The Alcubierre effect, though, might not even be possible with a bubble up, or at least not with shields up, which made it less useful for normal mages.

Still, he couldn’t believe nobody had ever found it. Or rather, that Duvall hadn’t, considering she controlled all the space mages. But it was possible that she had – or someone else had in the past – and promptly discarded it due the danger. Accidentally winding up hundreds of miles above the ground was terrifying.

He realized his mind was wandering so he dropped the exercises and focused on Lucy’s complaint. She was still grumbling under her breath as she poked at the laptop, squinting slightly against the midmorning sun coming in from the big front windows.

“I expect we’ll only find out anything if Taisen talks to us again,” he said, finding the thread of conversation again. “Assuming he gets anything out of his captives.”

Callum wasn’t overly concerned with the fate of the man-eating fae that Taisen had taken, just their victims. The mages had essentially cleaned them up, fed them, muddied their memories of the past month and set them down outside a fair-sized city. He couldn’t object to any of that, even the mind manipulation, since it would be easier on everyone if they just knew something terrible had happened and weren’t trying to claim that demons had invaded their village and kept them captive.

Or maybe not. Either way, he was not equipped in any way to deal with a large number of traumatized people who didn’t speak the same language. It was one of the things that kept Callum grounded; he was all too aware that even the best he could do was eliminate some threats. Something like actually saving people was a lot more complicated.

“Well, nothing from him yet. Do have something about Duvall reinstating the travel network. With extra security and all those buzzwords you’d expect from an official communication.” Lucy shook her head. “No explanation of what that security actually is though.”

“Well, I expected the trick to only work once. Though I have to say, there probably wasn’t a better target than the scariest Archmage of all.” Taisen’s shell had been intimidating and had absolutely outclassed Callum’s vis, but the worst he could have done would have been to send something through the portal and out into the bottom of the sea. The nexus portals didn’t even face each other for that reason. Compared to what Fane could supposedly do, that wasn’t particularly scary.

“Yeah,” Lucy agreed. “Though I can tell you from my IT experience that extra security measures are just more ways to mess with the system, half the time.”

“Oh?” Callum sat up straighter. “You think that I might still be able to do something with the new and improved teleports? Not that I necessarily want to, but it’s nice to know I could. If we have another Fane.”

“Well…” Lucy made an equivocal gesture with one hand, tilting it from side to side. “Just because I know information security stuff, doesn’t mean I could crack enchantment security stuff. A lot of analog bypasses are stupid tricks anyway, sort of sideways to how the security is meant to work, so we might not have the tools or background. But I wouldn’t completely write it off.”

“Definitely something to put on our list,” Callum said. “Though we’ve got enough on our plates right now.”

“More on your plate than mine,” Lucy said, sliding her chair back and standing up to stretch. Callum watched appreciatively. “How’s the portal world stuff going?”

“Eh.” Callum shrugged. “I need to go back and watch them in action. I can’t make a normal portal stable all by itself, and that’s only one aspect of the dimensional portal.”

“Too bad you can’t ask the Guild of Enchantment people.”

“I don’t think they’d know. Duvall might. Heck, she might have been the one who made the dragonlands portal to begin with.” Callum shrugged. “But if she were willing to talk about it I’m pretty sure Shahey would already know how to do it. Or at least give me some hint. I don’t think he’s posing me challenges for my personal growth.”

“I dunno,” Lucy said, smiling wryly. “Dragonblooded are pretty weird. I could see one doing the wise old mentor thing for funsies.”

“Maybe,” Callum hedged. “But not in this case. I mean, think about it. No two types of magic are the same, so even fae can’t exactly make portals, not the way I can. Plus the dragonlands portal is definitely mage work. I imagine they don’t like that GAR can just shut them off.”

“Wouldn’t that imply GAR could shut off any of the portals?” Lucy asked. “That’s a heck of a threat.”

“I don’t see why not. Which is probably why Chester needs an in. Speaking of which, we should probably call him and see if he’s ready for the deployment.” Actually making a teleport pad was easy enough, as was a feeder portal. Those were his staple enchantments and he was pretty good at them — by his standards, if not the Guild’s. Finding a safe spot to put it on the other end, in the Deep Wilds, was another matter.

There was some kind of politics involved there, though the exact details had never been elaborated on. He didn’t know if Chester and other Earth shifters were political exiles or expatriates or something else entirely, but regardless of their status it was apparently a bit of work to get some safe area over in the Deep Wilds. Chester didn’t want to put him to the trouble of making something until they knew exactly what was allowed.

“We need a secretary,” Lucy complained good-naturedly. “Though we’d need one that can make anonymously screened calls.”

“Those are probably in short supply,” Callum agreed. “What we need is to be less in demand.”

“Ha,” said Lucy. “That one’s all your fault.”

***

Felicia Black frowned through the glamour display at the fae wrapped in cold iron laced chains. He didn’t have her sympathy. Not just for what he’d done, which was a violation of all the laws – and the reasons for those laws – that had once been set out by GAR, but for the choices he’d made.

Some of the fae that came to Earth chose monstrous stories for a reason. A hero gained power, but a monster had power. It was easy, it was lazy, and those who used it got what was coming to them. The fae she was looking at was probably no older than she was, and she was barely older than what her glamoured form looked like, and that sort of inexperience showed. Archmage Taisen would have wiped the floor with them in any case, but they should have put up a better showing than they had.

“You know them?” Ray stepped up next to her, hands in his pockets.

“No,” Felicia said, speaking aloud since it was just the two of them in the insulated observation booth. “But I know their type. The kind of fae that thinks they can bestride the world because it’s their destiny to do so. You can find them by the dozen anywhere you go.”

“Sounds a lot like young mages,” Ray remarked. “So no idea where they came from? Interrogation is doing nothing.”

“Oh, I know exactly where they came from,” Felicia said darkly. “Not that it helps. They’ve got to be from one of the Seven Lesser Courts in Faerie. Some group of troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells being sent out to serve someone’s purpose somewhere else.”

“So nobody’s going to miss them,” Ray said.

“Oh, certainly not.”

“Then why wouldn’t they tattle on whoever smuggled them over?”

“I very much doubt they even know.” Felicia smiled without any humor. “It wouldn’t even be anything so crude as memory manipulation. Everything would have been their own idea. They would have come up with it and they would have run across exactly the right pieces of information they needed by sheer happenstance. It would have been their own cleverness and cunning that got them through the portal – if they even used it – and past the guards. And so on.”

“That’s insidious,” Ray said. “So no way to connect them to Constance?”

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“I don’t see how,” Felicia said, frustrated. “I know she has to be involved. I’ve seen that she’s communicating with the Seven.”

They had spent a lot of time on research for Taisen, tracking down rumors like the one that had ended up locating the fae in India, but that wasn’t all they’d spent their time on. There was also GAR. She couldn’t just cut ties with them, not without severing threads of her story, so she had to find out exactly what they were up to and what had led to the betrayal.

Between Taisen’s own records that he’d kept privately and what the Hargraves had been kind enough to supply, she could read between the lines well enough. Not that the Seven weren’t subtle — but that was the point. There was no need for any of the supernatural factions on earth to hide their influences on GAR. More the reverse; they wanted to demonstrate to their masters or their citizens that they had sway with GAR. But some people, mostly mages, were obviously acting in concert without any apparent contact or collaboration. She was quite familiar with that sort of invisible hand.