Chapter 9 – Misdirection

“Well?” Constance snapped at Supervisor O’Keefe. She was not used to being summoned, and while pragmatically she outranked O’Keefe, appearances had to be maintained. The new GAR was still fragile and it wouldn’t do to seem like they were fighting each other already.

“Thank you for coming,” O’Keefe said, ignoring her tone. “I got a message from a fae in the American Alliance. He is rather displeased and wants to help us.”

“Huh.” Constance dropped into a chair and wrinkled her brow, considering. Fae were notoriously spiteful, so in a way it was hardly surprising that one of them would be offended enough to turn against Alpha Chester. Yet going directly to GAR was not their normal style. “How so?”

“I believe he’ll want to explain it himself,” O’Keefe said with a sigh. “But he has some insight into how to weaponize The Ghost and destroy his reputation.”

“We’re already weaponizing Wells,” Constance pointed out. “I don’t think we need any special insight for that.” Unfortunately, most of what they could do was spin incidents after the fact. Getting him to attack a target of their choosing was more of an issue. Especially since he mostly went after vampires, and they were fairly easy to control anyway.

“Perhaps not,” O’Keefe conceded. “But this fae is willing to feed us information from the inside, and has said that he can get Wells moving on a target. We just have to make up some convincing evidence.”

“Hmm. I’m not sure we’re in a position where we care that much. But…” She trailed off and considered. There was still the insistence from her fae backers about dealing with Taisen’s faction. It was next to impossible to get any inside information on what they were up to, but people did talk a little bit and there was good reason to suspect Wells had aided them. “It might be worth at least starting in that direction.”

“I’ll call him in,” O’Keefe said, and pressed a button his desk. A DAI agent showed in a rotund fae in a bowler hat, whose face was barely visible behind a bushy muttonchop. Constance hated him on sight. She regarded most fae with the same disdain, but was too professional to let that get in the way of her work.

“This is Toclerane Tinn. Mister Tinn, this is Director Earl of the Department of Acquisition,” O’Keef introduced them. “She controls most of the people who would be involved in carrying out any ideas like the one you had.” Constance frowned at the phrasing but didn’t correct him. Not in public.

“Excellent! It’s an honor to meet such fine personages!” Tinn exclaimed with false exuberance. “I am so glad to meet someone who might take that awful Ghost fellow down a peg or two.”

“Niceties can wait,” Constance said, ignoring Tinn’s outstretched hand. “What makes you think you know a way to direct the Ghost’s attention in any useful capacity?”

“Why, the mere fact that he investigated my complaint,” Tinn said, completely uncowed by Constance’s chill welcome. “If you could have heard the iron in his voice when he contemplated that someone might be threatening mundane children! Well. It’s certainly an easy button to press.”

“I see.” As much of a buffoon as the fae presented himself to be, he clearly knew what he was talking about. That was one of the more irritating things about dealing with fae — the more serious one appeared to be, the less likely they were to be worth dealing with. “Then let us discuss things.”

Once she got past Tinn’s overwrought way of talking, his account was quite detailed, and Constance made notes to check with the other party in the affair — Anexis. It was possible that Wells had done all his research without making contact, but it could also be that Anexis hadn’t reported an encounter with The Ghost.

It also seemed to confirm that the Harper dud was still plugged into the GAR network. She couldn’t imagine any other way that Wells would have established fae bona fides and researched their history so quickly. Assuming he didn’t stay up all night, it was merely hours between Toclerane’s request and Wells’ reply.

It was unfortunate that he did do research, but at the same time, it was something that could be worked around. Planting evidence was not impossible, especially since GAR controlled the way that evidence was reported. Using a few agents to falsify news reports or the like was not difficult either, though it would have to be done with great care.

“We appreciate the tip, Mister Tinn,” Constance said, not entirely insincerely. She could have and would have come to the conclusion on her own eventually, but having it shoved in her face made it easier. “The Guild of Arcane Regulation welcomes the ability to neutralize the effectiveness of The Ghost.”

She’d be testing it first, of course. There were certain fae that she needed to be dealt with that could be easily brought to the Ghost’s attention. She simply need to raise their crimes to be more visible. Once that worked, she’d be ready to aim him at more important targets.

***

“Aha!” Callum smiled at the ugly-looking wire contraption. It didn’t seem like much to the naked eye, but it was doing what he wanted. Which was to say, it blocked the flow of mana. More than blocked; it was like a solid wall, keeping the mana completely contained and allowing the interior to reach equilibrium with the portal anchor inside it.

The downside of such a thing was that he couldn’t work his vis threads through it. The enchantments outside Mictlān were more efficient and permeable to his senses and magics, but they were also immense and that permeability went both ways. Trying to restrain the mana flood of a portal world was probably a fool’s errand, but his little portal couldn’t provide enough pressure to overcome the enchantments.

“Finally got it?” Lucy peered over from her new chair. She was starting to show, so Lisa had sent over something that was supposed to be easier and better for Lucy’s posture.

“Yep. Space stuff, part two,” he said, and slid the wire box across the table to her. It was more like a sphere, and the ugliness was more to do with the three enchantment layers not lining up and resulting in something without symmetry or pattern. That was a feature rather than a bug, since the structures locked together in weird ways once the enchantment was activated. To his spatial perceptions it was far more aesthetically pleasing. “Still gotta test it of course, but if this works we can make a bigger one and start actually putting things in space.”

“I wonder how hard it’d be to build like, a room we could put in space,” Lucy said thoughtfully. Callum chuckled.

“I might be an architect, but that’s a bit beyond my expertise. Atmosphere, radiation, all that stuff. It’s probably something that’ll have to wait until after we have all the portal stuff worked out,” he told her. “Besides, it’s one thing to have a little box floating around. Something room-sized might cause issues even with a glamour.”

“You’re still underestimating how much room is up there,” Lucy disagreed. “Outside of certain orbits you could have Everest floating around and it wouldn’t inconvenience anybody.”

“Huh.” Callum pursed his lips, momentarily considering how hard it’d be to teleport Mount Everest, then shook his head. “Well, that might not be a bad idea. It might even be a better place to put a cache, assuming we can solve the engineering problems. Or find someone who’s already solved them.”

“The internet is a wonderful place,” Lucy agreed.

It didn’t take all that long to set up the mana test drone, which Lucy had festooned with Ghost Space Program stickers. Calling their little experiment a space program was perhaps overwrought, but it was fun. Besides, they could get into space. Even if he was cheating with magic, that felt special.

He lofted it into space the same way as before, though the containment was deactivated since the enchantment was powerful enough to interfere with his spatial box. He actually needed two anchors to monitor everything, since the insulating bubble blocked his perception and he needed to see what it looked like from the outside, too. Mana leak testing was something he had to do manually. There weren’t any instruments to measure mana density that he knew of, and it’d be hard to calibrate them on Earth anyway.

Once activated, it was obvious that the first pass wasn’t going to work. Callum wasn’t sure if mana really followed the rules of pressure or mass or what, but it seemed like the disparity between the mana flooding from the anchor and the manaless vacuum was too much. Under pressure, what had seemed like a solid wall turned out to have a lot of holes. It leaked, and badly, not quite able to keep the density that Callum wanted inside. Though he was pretty sure he could take care of that with another layer or two.

“Getting there,” Callum muttered. “A few more iterations and we can start thinking about moving the nexus.”

So far there hadn’t been any new attempts to crack open his portal anchors, but he’d also been very careful to clean up every place he used his magic. Even Toclerane’s house and Jissarrell’s court had gotten a number of his vis scrubbers to make sure that there was nothing to trace. When it came to security he and Lucy were on the same page. She had dozens of stories about how a vulnerability in the IT world could go unseen for years until it suddenly caused disaster, and he didn’t want that to happen with his portals.

Putting his nexus in vacuum still wasn’t perfect security, but it’d make things a lot harder for people. In fact he’d bet that most mages weren’t really even clear on what a vacuum was, let alone the proper precautions for dealing with one. A quick-thinking mage or one with a homebond probably could survive, but most people weren’t ready to pop out into an airless freefall hundreds or thousands of miles from anywhere.

There was also some part of him that wanted to actually do something real with it. Easy access to space was a lot like the infinite portal loop electricity. If mages actually worked with the rest of the world, they could do amazing things. But they didn’t, and Callum was pretty sure he wasn’t the best person to change that. There was no accounting for what might happen in the future, though.

All that was just wild-eyed speculation and wishful what-ifs. There was still an awful lot of work and learning to do, and a few months of practice with the Guild of Enchanting tutor was hardly enough. Especially since the tutor couldn’t see his actual spellwork to give him pointers. He wasn’t about to risk that kind of exposure, though.

While he was less worried about GAR hammering down his door, he still had a faint suspicion the Guild of Enchanting was trying to track him. Unless they managed to hack a portal anchor he was pretty sure they couldn’t. All the electronics used a portal to link up rather than the actual internet, and tracing Lucy’s online presence would only lead to the off-site server.

The largest worry he had was that they’d slip a locator of some kind into the equipment or materials they sent him. They knew he wasn’t as talented at spellwork as other mages his age, and while they didn’t know about the way his senses worked he still worried that they might get something past him. So he swept every single thing he took from them very thoroughly before teleporting it to a separate, remote cave. Only after they’d been there for a few days did he bring the materials to the bunker.

Time slipped away surprisingly quickly. Lucy and Callum worked on their respective projects, the garden grew, and the days grew hotter. He was glad that he’d designed the house with sufficient air conditioning, and had the power to run it. The summer heat was absolutely brutal.

In their regular meetings with Chester, he saw Clara and Arthur and Jessica on occasion. Clara started driving, and started thinking about college. With access to the Deep Wilds restored, Jessica ended up announcing her own pregnancy, so of course Lucy had to make friends.

GAR kept reorganizing, as any bureaucracy did when there was blame to be allotted. Neither he nor Lucy really paid too much attention to it, but various departmental heads stepped down and were replaced. Some internal reorganization recurred, this sub-bureau or that being shuffled into an adjacent larger structure. The end result seemed to be a more streamlined hierarchy, but there was really no telling how well it actually worked.

He even took care of a couple more vampire nests and a couple of fae that were brought to his attention. But according to GAR records there were thousands of vampires and possibly tens of thousands of fae, so even though he absolutely was removing monsters it was hardly a dent in the totals. He wanted to do more, but didn’t know how to locate the source of the issue.

The entire time he was expecting another communique from Taisen, since he heard through Lucy’s grapevine that there were still investigations ongoing, but it was quiet. They had more contact with House Hargrave in the form of Gayle and Glenda, whom they regularly met at Chester’s place to give Lucy check-ups. Which Callum still felt twitchy about, but when his paranoia ran up against his family’s health and safety, family won out.

It was during one of those checkups, sometime in early fall, that Lucy brought up the first inklings of more trouble. She was the one who was plugged into the wider world, and he was content to leave it to her. He was busy enough trying to shore up the holes in his self-taught magical capabilities, not to mention all the thousand chores of just living life. Lucy was the one to kept an eye on the outside world.

“Hey,” she said, glancing between Glenda and Chester. “Either of you know anything about an Alpha Curran?”

“Name doesn’t ring any bells,” Glenda said, and Gayle shook her head in agreement.

“European, I think,” Chester suggested. “Unless there’s one of the fae-aligned packs I don’t know about with that name.”

“Huh. Well, I’m starting to see some stuff about them outta GAR and I was hoping you would have more insight.” Lucy shifted under Gayle’s hand. “It’s surprisingly hard to dig up stuff about that pack.”

“The European shifters are generally more closely attached to mage Houses, rather than being independent,” Chester said. “One reason why I was much happier with being here in the US. More room here anyway.”

“Huh,” Lucy said. “I guess that’s why there’s nothing about them on GAR servers. House stuff is still kind of separate still.”

“I can ask,” Chester offered.

“I don’t know how well that’ll work,” Lucy sighed. “What I’m seeing is some hints that they’re going out hunting for people nearby.”

“So something I would need to take care of,” Callum said unhappily. He wasn’t much of a fan of Lucy bringing it up in front of the Hargraves either, on the off chance there was some connection there.

“If Curran is part of a House, then going after him means going to war with that House,” Glenda warned. “That’s not like a fae enclave that’s going to fall apart when the King dies. That’s the kind of feud that would go on for years.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“House Fane fell apart pretty well,” Callum said. He wasn’t entirely certain what their status was now, but they seemed to have practically vanished off the face of the Earth.

“That’s because House Hargrave – that is to say, us – destroyed them,” Glenda said with grim satisfaction. “The Archmage removed all their top people and the other Houses divided the remains. Without anyone of note and after all the ill will they’d built up, there wasn’t anyone to hold them together.”

“Ah.” Callum grimaced. He hadn’t had anything against any of the other House Fane people, just Fane himself. But none of his actions occurred in a vacuum; anyone he removed represented a power vacuum that would be filled. Sometimes that helped people like Chester, but sometimes that would result in further destruction. Which wouldn’t stop him from removing monsters as he found them, but did make things more complicated.

“Well, I’m not sure that would be much different from GAR already being after me,” he decided. “There’s a reason none of you know where we live, even if we are allies. Though I’m surprised nobody’s tried leaning on you yet. Or maybe I’m just overestimating my own importance.”

“Oh, I’ve had some inquiries,” Chester said. “But unless they want actual war they can’t really pressure me. One of the benefits of being completely independent.” Chester chuckled softly. “We even have our own contacts with the Guild of Enchantment and, of course, our own black market enchantment supplier.”

“Good to hear.” Callum well knew that he wasn’t all that much help politically, and that his only real talent was basically just to threaten assassination. Hardly the best way to get allies or assuage the fears of anyone neutral. There needed to be some way to build things too, if he really wanted to improve the world, but that was sadly not his path. “When we get home we’ll see about looking into Alpha Curran.”

“We’re almost done,” Gayle said, standing up. “I wish there was more diagnostic stuff in healing magic,” she said. “I swear that would make things a lot simpler and faster.”

“Maybe you can invent it,” Lucy suggested. “With House Fane out of things aren’t you kind of the top healer around?”

“Um.” Gayle looked stunned by the suggestion. “I’m definitely not the best healer around. But I guess without House Fane’s expertise we have to start rebuilding techniques anyway. Diagnostic magic though? I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“I dunno either.” Lucy shrugged. “Not a mage. But the Guild of Enchanting might have something. They can measure magic output, right?”

“Yes…” Gayle frowned thoughtfully. “I know they can measure total mana and they provide the aspect sensors.”

“Then maybe they can measure more,” Lucy suggested.

“The feedback from wards reminds me a lot of old style television,” Callum put in. “Big old pixels. I don’t know if that means you can turn the magic feed into something that works the same way but it might be worth asking.” Gayle exchanged a look with her mother and nodded thoughtfully.

“I’ll look into it,” she said.