Paranoid Mage

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…”

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.

It was impossibly, incomprehensibly complex. Callum could at most glimpse a fraction of whatever it was Ravaeb’s vis did, but something blasted out from the fae and twisted and contorted every cubic inch of the surrounding space. Bones crumbled, fae reeled back. Before Callum could close his portal to the gun, the fae magic shoved through it.

He’d actually been using his nexus, opening two sets of portals. One was to an empty box near the anchors, and the other was from the box to the target. The empty box abruptly imploded, boiling into the sea. In the next step in the chain, the rifle dissolved into black sludge and the water barrels nearby burst apart, spilling rotting goop everywhere.

Then there was a numb shock and disorientation as the world wheeled around him, his thoughts blown to the four winds as someone caught him and put him back to his feet. He didn’t even know what had happened until thought came rushing back, his face and hands aching as his brain scrambled to keep up with the speed at which supernaturals operated. His perception sphere only belatedly informed him that there was some monstrosity where the table used to be. A towering horror of bone and rot that he could only blearily see through eyes that refused to focus.

He found Lucy being supported by some other shifters on the far side of the clearing, which quenched a panic that he hadn’t even realized was building, and shook his head. His brain still seemed to be catching up to his sense as sound slammed into him, a horrific clotted gurgle of rage from the thing that Ravaeb had somehow, somehow sent right to him washing over him.

“We’ve got this,” Chester shouted, dodging a blow that practically vaporized the remains of the table. “Finish it!”

Callum blinked and reached back out through his portals. He’d been so disoriented by the impact that he’d completely lost track of what was going on in the pavilion. It’d only been a few seconds at most, but at the speed supernaturals could move that was a lot of time.

Ravaeb was still in the pavilion, thankfully, standing with his chest heaving and whatever passed for blood dripping onto the polished floor. The retaliation seemed to have taken more out of him than Callum’s weapons, but he was clearly injured and the fae around him all had a lot of magic swirling about to protect themselves. Unfortunately, the biggest and baddest weapon Callum had was black slime on the floor of his cave so he was forced to scramble through his backup plans.

He started out by dropping all his flashbangs into the group of fae on the pavilion. Gravitykinesis let him yank the pins easily enough and launch them from a dozen yards away. It wasn’t a very accurate shot but it didn’t need to be, especially since the fae protections stopped the flashbangs in midair. For some reason the shield didn’t even destroy them, which he’d figured would happen and was the reason he used them all. On the off chance one of them would be intact.

Two of the fae, tall thin things with too many arms actually reached out to pluck the cannisters from where they hung in the air, only to very clearly regret it when the flashbangs went off a second later. Most of the fae reeled backward, hands went to eyes or ears or both, but it disrupted the shielding around Ravaeb enough that Callum reached through to the anchor located in Picaya and hurled a deluge of lava.

A horrific crunching, bubbling noise distracted him and he focused on the horrific fae thing Ravaeb had sent at him just before his shifter guardian hauled him off faster than he could track. A line of steaming black ichor lay where he had been, and despite a half-dozen shifters worrying at it, the rot thing was still moving. Not for long, by the look of it, but it was obviously still trying to get at him.

The monster was a weird parallel to the lava streaming down over the pavilion: aimed at Ravaeb but quite happy to take any other fae that was in its path. Callum wasn’t sure what would actually do damage, the heat or the impact of that many tons of liquid rock, but a high-speed stream of the stuff slammed into Ravaeb and his retainers. Only to instantly freeze into rock.

He couldn’t tell which fae had done it, there was too much fae magic swirling around, but for a moment Ravaeb was trapped inside solid stone. Even if the heat of lava hadn’t seemed to do much, Callum took the opportunity of that momentary imprisonment to ignite some thermite and dump it on his head. Lucy had made a nice little igniter with plenty of magnesium, and the entire mass of thermite flared to life with another press on the remote she’d made for him.

That seemed to at least bother Ravaeb, because when the mass of ignited metal landed on the bone skull he shook his head and then burst from the encasing stone. That scattered burning thermite everywhere, so it wasn’t nearly as effective as when Callum had used it on the vampires, but the fae king was at least moving slower.

The wounds Callum had inflicted were practically gone, as far as Callum could sense, and while the thermite had made a few holes that was about it. The greatest difference was that both Ravaeb’s vis and the mana level of the enclave in general seemed to have been reduced. The best guess was that Ravaeb was burning power to survive and to retaliate, since even impossible Fae magic took resources. Still, Ravaeb was more or less whole despite everything.

There was really only one option left, one Callum had hoped to not need because he wasn’t sure it would work. It was a single shot weapon, and it wasn’t exactly precise. Not to mention that he had only tested it once and using it took a lot out of him. Besides which, it required enough space that the cave-cache or the target area weren’t usable, and that meant in general he needed to do it near himself. Which carried a lot of risks.

While he wasn’t confident enough to craft bullets, he’d still made a set of bane darts out of some of the remaining scrap. Callum conjured a new portal pair nearby, since if this wasn’t enough to finish Ravaeb, he’d have to see if the shifters could manage it and he wasn’t sure he’d have enough juice to make another portal afterward. The pair were just oriented straight up and down, an infinite loop much like the electrical setup he had planned, and he teleported the corite dart into the middle of it. Then he applied as intense a gravity field as he could.

If offsetting one gravity for a volume was like holding one pound in his hand, then faking a hundred gravities was like holding a hundred pounds. Doable, but not for any real length of time. On the other hand, an acceleration of nine hundred eighty meters per second, per second, meant he didn’t have to keep it up for long. A ripping, crackling noise came from the loop, from a sonic boom sweeping past dozens of times a second as the vis drained out of him almost instantly.

“God’s blood!” The shifter still holding onto him said, though Callum could barely hear him over the roar of the dart as it tore through air, and the sound of the wind itself as it whipped through the crowd of shifters. Even if the atmosphere between the portal was subject to the same acceleration, it escaped from the sides of the gravity column and mixed with what was nearby, so while it was slower than the dart it still generated a localized gale. Callum had no idea whether it’d be enough, but he was scraping at the bottom of his reserves, body taut with concentration as he maintained the field. Before he failed and set off a bomb right in front of his own face he snapped open a portal below the loop, the other end aimed right at Ravaeb.

The Fae’s magic lashed out right as Callum banished the portal loop, but the bane dart was going so fast that it didn’t matter. The impact was beyond his wildest expectations. The dart blasted through the portal and exploded. Callum didn’t know exactly why, and couldn’t track everything because it was moving so fast, but the entire pavilion blasted apart. Along with Ravaeb.

Debris flew back out of the nearby portal, along with several chunks of fae king, as vis exhaustion crashed down on Callum. He struggled to keep the portal open for some reason his brain couldn’t manage to recall under the sudden wave of weariness and the bleariness in his head. It collapsed too, and all he could think as pure exhaustion dragged him under was if that hadn’t killed Ravaeb, nothing would.

***

Archmage Hargrave simmered all throughout the service. The House cemetery was gorgeous and picturesque even as the snow fell and laid a white blanket over the monuments to the dead. There were two new ones, thanks to the attack by the bastards from House Fane, the obelisks raised by earth mages but chiseled by hand.

His granddaughter, Gayle, didn’t look any happier under her coat and scarf, knitted hat pulled down around her ears. She’d been able to save almost all the mages injured by the Fane thugs, but only almost. Negative healing was terrifying and the fact that House Fane brought it out showed that they’d really slipped the bit. Other aspects could fight, but negative healing only killed.

“…and by Your command we return to dust…” Father Horan said, as the service drew near its end. Hargrave himself wasn’t a believer, but enough mages and shifters of the House were that they had a priest on staff. Though mages died infrequently enough that the funeral services were hardly ever required.

As the head of House he presided over the funeral anyway, schooling his features into a neutral mask. He didn’t talk about what he was going to do to make the Fane bastards pay for what they’d done, or the role GAR had played in it. The faces in the assembled crowd were too preoccupied with the recent loss for that, even if some of the older mages showed more anger than grief.

Unfortunately he didn’t personally know either of the guards that had died. They were all under the command of his cousin Philip Hargrave, and Phil was in charge of the eulogy. But they deserved the head of the House to at least commend their dedication to duty and the bravery of their sacrifice, so he did, feeling that it was partly his fault for not investigating the alarm immediately. He’d thought it was just another probe.

His part of the speech was short, and he yielded to Phil for something more involved as he chewed over what he was actually going to do. House Fane had more or less declared war, though without Archmage Fane he wasn’t worried about that as such. It was more about what exactly would happen with GAR, and whether it was even worth trying to reconcile with them.

Hargrave was almost glad when the ward alerts went off again.

“Continue,” Hargrave said gravely to the mourners, half of whom had already energized focuses. “I will take care of this.” He armored himself and shot off toward the source of the alert, near the rear entrance to the estate. Surprisingly, there was only one man standing outside the wards, though he had the characteristic shell of an Archmage to Hargrave’s mage sight.

“Horace,” the man said as Hargrave landed on the interior of the wards. Archmage Hargrave stared.

“Taisen?” He asked, though he already knew the answer. “Finally decided to push on through, I see!”

“I should have long ago,” Taisen sighed. “I just needed a kick in the teeth to show me that. May I come in?”

“Certainly,” Hargrave said, reaching out to the ward locus and contacted the bit of his vis there as authorization. “And congratulations.” The ward quieted itself and a small portion deactivated for a moment, letting Taisen stroll through. Hargrave might have been more cautious if it was any of the other Archmages, save those from aligned Houses, but Taisen had his high regard. He was one of the few mages who actually understood what it meant to commit to the martial path, and in fact had done it better than Hargrave himself. It took a brave man to give up his House.

“Thank you,” Taisen replied, hands in the pockets of his coat as he strolled inside. “Didn’t mean to interrupt what you had going on, though.”

“Yes, I should get back to the funeral, but I’ll be with you once it’s over.” He lifted himself into the air and Taisen followed, allowing himself to be escorted to the House reception hall. Hargrave left him there with head butler Jenkins to keep an eye on him, but even as he rejoined the funeral with assurances about the alert he wondered about Taisen.

The former Grand Magus wasn’t exactly a personal friend, though he was a friend of the family through his daughter-in-law, but Hargrave respected him. Especially since he had protected Gayle inasmuch as he could without compromising his own position during her stint with the BSE. Hargrave might have wished he’d done more, but Taisen wasn’t that kind of man. He’d even abandoned his family name when he formed the no-House rule so long ago, and had gone by a single name ever since. Which made his appearance at House Hargrave immediately after becoming Archmage – for Hargrave certainly hadn’t heard the news from anyone else – suggestive.

Once the service was over and people dispersed, Hargrave returned to the house and invited Taisen into his office. It had extra wards and was far more private, since he very much doubted whatever business brought the new Archmage by was anything he wanted to be public. He flicked open his drinks cabinet with a thought and poured them both a few fingers of a literally warming fae liquor as Taisen took a seat.

“I would like to know what brings you here,” Hargrave asked bluntly, since it was just the two of them. “What made you finally push through?”

“The Bureau of Secret Enforcement is unfit for purpose.” Taisen shrugged. “I thought that I could keep it aimed generally in the right direction, especially since I managed to make the no-House requirement stick, but there was just too much cruft from other forces.” He sighed. “Well. When we got our teeth kicked in by Wells it was obvious things had gone too far.”

“So you’re going to reform the BSE?” Hargrave frowned as he sipped the fae drink. By custom if not by law, Archmages didn’t actually run anything in GAR, even if the apparatus as a whole answered to the Archmages. The idea was to keep any one House from using it against the others, but Taisen had no House.

“No. I’m re-creating the Defensores Mundi. GAR can keep its secret police; I only care about real threats.” Taisen frowned at the shot glass on Hargrave’s desk before taking his own sip. “And I’m going to be taking my people out of BSE to do it. I’d like your support.”

“Support?” Hargrave asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Not people,” Taisen assured him. “But with the other Archmages. Most of them don’t even live on Earth anymore; they don’t actually care. But they do like their secret police and bullying new Houses. I wouldn’t mind backing.”

“I see.” Hargrave pursed his lips. “I’m considering breaking House Hargrave from GAR entirely. Not only is there the whole Wells issue, they keep issuing warrants against my granddaughter. They don’t even have a teleportation network anymore, so why cede any sort of sovereignty?”

“An alliance, then?”

“At least an alignment,” Hargrave said. “I know you have no interest in the power games of Houses. Though you should at least do yourself the favor of declaring yourself one, since no-House won’t work now that you’re at Archmage level.”

“Ugh.” Taisen made a face. “I suppose. I do have the Garrisons.”

“We’ll back you if you back us,” Hargrave said. “Between us we could hold off an army.”

“I agree,” Taisen said, swallowing the last bit of the liquor. “I’d like to beg another favor while I’m here, too. There aren’t any GAR or Fane healers I’d trust, but now that I’m Archmage I’d like one to give me a refresh.”

“Certainly,” Hargrave agreed graciously. “I think Gayle would be happy to see you.”