Paranoid Mage

Chester’s place was the de facto meeting spot for what Callum considered the non-GAR factions, and he was pretty sure that was mostly because of him. Even if he was on fairly reasonable terms with House Hargrave and House Taisen, he didn’t trust them enough to walk into their lairs. Frankly, he didn’t trust them enough to meet them in person even at Chester’s, but there wasn’t much of a choice.

He couldn’t even sit in the corner, since he was in part the host of the gathering, so he just found a chair in Chester’s sitting room and did his best not to scowl. Lucy sat next to him, having left Alex with some other parents off in another part of the compound. While he would have liked to have his son closer to him just in case, it was also not the kind of discussion that was appropriate for a two-year-old, and it wasn’t like Alex was out of range of his perceptions.

Gayle and Glenda had come, but they were for once accompanied by Archmage Hargrave himself, which did not make Callum at all comfortable. It didn’t seem to be all that long ago that Hargrave was gunning for him, and he doubted someone who’d lived however many centuries was so quick to let go of grudges. But they’d also had nominally friendly relations since and he was pretty sure Gayle at least would keep Hargrave from lashing out.

Archmage Taisen was there too, in a black tactical suit, with no outriders. Unlike Hargrave, Callum was pretty sure Taisen had nothing against him personally, but also was the one most likely to act if he thought Callum was overstepping. In a way, Taisen was the most like Callum, which made him the most concerning.

The American Alliance itself was represented mostly by Chester and Lisa, but Shahey had been invited, too. His old-man avatar lounged in a corner chair, smoking a pipe. The smoke itself, though, only billowed and curled theatrically, a constant low-grade exertion of dragon magic keeping it from actually producing any smell for the other people in the room. Assuming it was real tobacco to begin with; it was clearly an act, so he wouldn’t be surprised if Shahey wasn’t smoking anything real.

“Yesterday, a strike force including Archmage Duvall assaulted my home,” Callum said. “This is a state of affairs that cannot continue. I need to make it clear that I am outside of GAR’s jurisdiction and not subject to their authority. Alpha Chester has suggested that the best route to that is for you all, and the American Alliance, to treat me as a peer with the same kind of power. Which I know is a lot for an individual, so I’m intending to couple that with something I was already planning. I’m going to close the portal to the Night Lands.”

Reactions were varied. Taisen grunted, Hargrave scowled, Gayle gaped, and Shahey grinned. There were, at least, no immediate cries of objection. Either Chester had briefed them somehow, or they just weren’t surprised that he could claim to do such a thing. Of course he’d made no secret of his distaste for vampires, so he was hardly breaking precedent.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Taisen conceded after a moment. “Vampires are a dangerous tool at best, and their most base nature is to feed on living vis. They will eventually turn on mages, given the chance, and they’re entire incompatible with mundanes. Better to remove things now than deal with the mess later.”

“GAR depends on the vampires to counterbalance shifters and fae,” Hargrave said. “Removing them would change the composition of GAR and what Houses have influence on Earth. I don’t know if it would be for better or worse, but no matter what it would hurt their power. Which I personally support, but it would not go unanswered.”

“I don’t necessarily want to strand people on either side, since presumably there are a few mages of the vampire-aligned Houses that aren’t complete monsters. Worse, with no way back, vampires on Earth could do a lot of damage. On the other hand, I need that closure to have meaning.” Callum paused, then shrugged. “I don’t think it’s possible to sustain the mana flow from the Night Lands without it, but it’s impossible to know how long it would be before that would start affecting things.”

“What about enchanting?” Glenda pointed out. “Closing the Night Lands is going to remove a primary source of our most useful materials.”

“Two things,” Callum said, since this was one of the things he’d actually anticipated. “One is that Taisen will still have a portal to the Night Lands and can still send people out to the cenotes. The other is that I am preparing to open up new portal worlds. Preferably ones without any inhabitants. Once I locate useful enchanting materials in them I could provide teleports or portals in.”

That got rather more of a reaction than his announcement about closing the Night Lands. A couple people spoke at once, then Taisen gestured to Hargrave. The older Archmage leaned forward, eyes sharp.

“You can access new portal worlds?”

“I can,” Callum acknowledged. “In a way I’m surprised that Duvall hasn’t, since it’s not impossibly difficult. I think I can understand why not, but I know she could.” He had advantages in his recordkeeping, what with the 3D modeling software, and the ability to open portals far away from himself, where nothing could get through. But Duvall had centuries of practice, far more power, and access to the rest of the magical world in a way Callum didn’t.

“People have asked,” Hargrave said. “She refuses to entertain the idea.”

“It’s not exactly safe,” Callum conceded. “But I have ways of ameliorating the issues. Though that brings me to the issue of Duvall herself. She’s one of the people who can give me trouble and I don’t want to deal with her trying to hunt me down all the time.”

“Oh, you haven’t heard?” Hargrave said, then shook his head. “Of course you wouldn’t have. House Duvall has decided to mark and avoid you. No member of House Duvall will even acknowledge your existence now. Archmage Duvall is hardly going to agree to track you down anymore.”

“Huh.” Callum blinked. “I guess I scared her.” It also made him revise how dangerous a huge anti-mana portal was if she didn’t want to get near it. On the other hand, it seemed dangerously convenient for Duvall to declare him off-limits. “But how far does that really go?”

“Duvall’s a coward,” Archmage Hargrave said bluntly. “More, you can’t possibly afford to endanger her. The reason she has so much sway is that she is the only person who can make portal worlds safe for permanent habitation. There isn’t a single House that would let you get away with removing her.”

“As opposed to letting me get away with what I already have?” Callum asked, somewhat doubtful that the rest of the magical community could really do worse than they already had.

“That includes me,” Hargrave said grimly. “Though, under the circumstances, I would undertake to resolve things between you if Duvall hadn’t already made her stance clear.”

“I hope you realize the potential issues of opening a new portal, however,” Taisen added. “The Defensores Mundi would prefer not to have yet another front to deal with, even if you might well be closing one.”

“Not a problem,” Callum assured him. “I won’t get into it just yet, since I’m still doing experiments, but no matter how it shakes out the access won’t be vulnerable.” Since he could keep paired portal or teleport links, there didn’t even need to be an active portal, even if he wanted the ability to make one.

“That’s interesting. Duvall never would touch making new portals,” Shahey said.

“I don’t blame her. Without certain advantages it would be an extremely bad idea,” Callum said. “With modern tools, though, I can take proper precautions.”

“I’d definitely like to see these precautions,” Taisen said, then waved his hand, putting aside the topic of the portal worlds. “Before that, when did you intend to close the Night Lands portal?”

“Essentially, now,” Callum replied. “Or as soon as may be.”

“They attacked our home,” Lucy said darkly. “I don’t want them doing that again.”

“So we’ll give them something else to focus on,” Callum concluded. “I’m aware it’s not just the vampires I need to worry about, but as a statement of power, they’re the only ones I can target with no compunctions.”

One of the benefits of dealing with principals meant there was no need for follow-up meetings or for someone to consult someone else. Not that he was dependent upon their approval, even if he was seeking their help. The access to new portal worlds was a very considered carrot to go with the stick he wanted to employ. Though it wasn’t aimed at any of them, if they put their weight behind it he needed to provide some measure of appreciation.

To him, the most important part was getting Taisen to be in charge of the remaining portal in. He couldn’t actually remove Taisen’s existing portal without crossing some rather hard lines anyway, so convincing him to be gatekeeper was key to keeping things from getting too severe. Though having everyone else do the political heavy lifting was a godsend, since Callum didn’t trust himself to come off as anything other than unhinged if he had to present himself in public.

Under the circumstances, Gayle was going to stand by in the next room for emergencies while he worked, but it was going to be him and Lucy in their little complex at Chester’s. He would have preferred the war room, and not just because he wasn’t used to having an audience, but it was safer to have help on hand. Besides, there were plenty of trustworthy people who could keep an eye on Alex.

Even Lucy didn’t have all that much to do compared to their usual stuff. There weren’t a bunch of drones to track or people to call. Mostly she had a layout of which set of buildings belonged to which House, so he could figure out where to focus his efforts. The general paucity of spatial enchanting meant that there weren’t likely to be paired anchors squirreled away in forgotten basements, and he could focus on the feeder portals and the main connections to Earth.

He felt a little bad for sabotaging the enchantments in the Houses, since they hadn’t done anything against him directly, but he needed to cut off the Night Lands as much as possible and he didn’t imagine the mages who were allied with the vampires were going to be very sympathetic to his viewpoint of them. Nevertheless, the only thing he was doing was cutting off the connections.

Even if there were a few teleports or portals lingering around, he wasn’t all that worried about them changing the impact of closing the main portal. By the cubic calculations, it’d take hundreds of man-size portals, constantly open, to match the volume of mana flowing through the original. By square calculations, it’d still take quite a few, more than could be found in a short amount of time. Ones that Duvall would have to make, something she would not be likely to do if he understood the position she’d set out.

“Okay, House Grummond,” Lucy said, examining the map. For this particular mission they didn’t have a full drone, but rather a tiny box not much larger than the bad penny itself. It wasn’t like the Night Lands had much aerial traffic and considering vampire senses they didn’t want anything that could attract attention.

He teleported the anchor around, sneaking his vis through the wards with extreme caution. It didn’t seem likely that mages would have an anti-healing booby trap when anyone could set it off, but he didn’t intend to find out. Instead he skimmed over the place with his perceptions, finding the portal frame set up in a vestibule, and relocated his box into a little cubbyhole under the floor. While the big mansion style dwellings were clearly mage-crafted, they still had all the weird nooks and crannies of buildings that had been around long enough to see changes in form and function.

The anchor for the portal was in the floor beneath the frame itself, and unlike the GAR installations it was not something easily accessible. Someone would have to unbolt the whole portal frame and pull it out. Not actually difficult, but definitely intended to be more permanent than not. Which didn’t matter to him, since he didn’t need to actually physically access the cores anymore.

Instead he formed a very tiny anti-mana portal just above where the core was. A half-inch of steel at the bottom of the portal frame didn’t mean much to the anti-mana, which passed straight through and erased the enchantment below. In fact, it erased the mana right out of the enchanting material, rendering the whole thing inert. Then he let it collapse, the anti-mana erasing any traces of his vis — though he doubted anyone would have a good time if they tried to reopen it, assuming someone other than Duvall could. Just in case, he left one of his own cleanup beads where the anchor box was before he teleported back out.

“Check,” Callum said, and Lucy scribbled a note on the list.

Even with the range on his perceptions it took quite some time to move his box from place to place and find each teleporter or portal. Especially since he had to be careful not to tip off anyone, trip any alarms, or attract any attention. While a box a few inches on a side was not exactly obtrusive, he didn’t want to underestimate supernatural senses. Or the complexity of what a ward could detect.

Despite all his precautions and advantages, he wanted to get this done quickly and quietly.

***

The Master of Weltentor paced restlessly though the halls of his castle. Something felt off, an oddness in the air of his domain that he couldn’t quite place. Though perhaps it was just being unsettled after the failure of the Janry raid on The Ghost. He didn’t yet have details, save for Duvall’s proclamation about it, but there seemed to be no survivors other than her. Which meant the Ghost was still alive and it was only a matter of time before retaliation. Whether that retaliation would be against him or his allies remained to be seen.

Nevertheless, he had made preparations. The Ghost was the only supernatural who seemed willing to directly act against him, and not just by acting as a watchdog for the Defensores Mundi. Which was another annoyance, but he had to admit the nests that Taisen’s people removed were being injudicious. At least, in the current climate.

There were plans for being far less judicious, and far more obvious. There was, after all, no point in obeying the rules if doing so resulted in death. Or even stagnation. He was hardly going to ask his subordinates to hold themselves back and play well if The Ghost was going around picking them off as he wished.

Which was why he’d provided as many with he could with the gu defenses. Ones that they could activate at their leisure, whether it was the Ghost they suspected was assaulting them or someone else. Or, should there be some threat the gu defense couldn’t handle, they had his instruction to go out and do as much damage as they could, wherever they were.

If he couldn’t target The Ghost directly, Weltentor could at least threaten him with something he cared about. Since The Ghost’s stated goal was to protect mundanes, for whatever reason, then it was simple enough to just massacre mundanes to hurt The Ghost by proxy. How long would he be willing to attack nests if it resulted in mass death?

Weltentor had found that humans didn’t have the strength of will to do what was necessary. Mage or mundane. Fae at least didn’t seem to have any compunctions, even if their quirks made it difficult to depend on them.

He touched the fae charm amulet that hung around his neck, walking down through the castle to walk the roads of Weltentor Landing. If his collaboration with the fae had gotten him anything, it had been protections that might well be proof against the Ghost, considering it would be combined with his own strength and power. Not to mention access to the Ways, admittedly in a very limited capacity.

“Anything to report?” He asked the guard on duty at the portal room. It was staffed by mages and vampires both now, and while they had yet to catch anyone, there was always a chance they might notice some tiny detail.

“No, Master Weltentor,” Sullivan said. Weltentor hadn’t been a fan of the vampire in question deciding on an Irish name rather than the traditional German, but it was oddly close to the name in the original tongue so he’d let it pass. “I haven’t heard or scented any presence of person or machine.”

“Carry on,” Weltentor said, and left the castle itself. He didn’t have anywhere in particular he was going, but rather let the ebb and flow of the Night Lands’ own magic guide him. If there was something he couldn’t place, perhaps the world itself would guide him. There were few mages out and about, but he passed them at speed, moving too quickly for them to even react.

More than once he’d been tempted to just grab one and rip the vis out for himself, especially the weaker and less able ones, but he had long ago learned restraint. There were at least two Archmages in the Night Lands, and he couldn’t quite stand up to one of them yet, let alone both. When he could, it might be a different story.

Without a destination in mind, Weltentor toured the settlement, circling the multi-acre sprawls of the various Houses on the brightly lit walkways of mage-wrought stone. The flow of the Night Lands pulled this way and that, small and subtle shifts that seemed unnatural and so probably were. But there was no telling what the mages were up to at any given time.

Despite his instincts, he couldn’t find anything particularly out of place until the alarm went up at House Hofmann. The strobing mana combined with the piercing wail and a shaped fire spell shooting into the air certainly got his attention, along with everyone else’s, and he blurred along at maximum speed to arrive at the gates in under a second. There was a shield there but he shoved right through it, less worried about the safety of the House than he was about what the alarm might mean to the security of Weltentor Landing. He knew the layout of each of the Houses, having been guest there more than once over the centuries, and he rushed through to the main room, stopping only when he saw a vampire member of House Hofmann security.

“What’s going on?” He demanded, and the vampire jumped, not yet having enough of his own power to track Weltentor with his own senses.

“The outbound portal was sabotaged,” the guard responded after a moment of startled recognition. “It’s completely dead.”

“What about the other Houses?” Weltentor demanded, immediately considering the angles. There was very little point in sabotaging just one House’s access. The only reason anyone would bother was if they were cutting off everyone’s way out as a prelude to an attack.

And there was only one person he could think of who could manage that kind of sabotage.

“Never mind that, assume The Ghost is here,” Weltentor decided out loud, and reached for his scry-comm. It was one of the things he’d traded from the mages, even if he needed to work it physically, and it let him join the House communications networks. It wasn’t something he used much, but he was glad he had it.

“Everyone. The Ghost is assaulting Weltentor Landing. Activate all wards and protections. Check and guard your portals and teleports.” He switched off the scry-comm and changed over to his own personal communicator. “Gu defenses now,” he ordered, which only encompassed Weltentor Castle, but it might be sufficient to deter The Ghost. It was up to his subordinates to get any mages out. Or not. Their deaths could always be blamed on The Ghost.

He left before Archmage Hofmann could get out of whatever study he’d buried himself in and pester Weltentor with questions. There were more important things to do than humor a scatterbrained, if powerful, old man. Without knowing what The Ghost’s objective was, Weltentor had to be as careful as possible, and be in as many places as possible.

Moving at his best speed, he circled Weltentor Landing but couldn’t sniff out The Ghost with any of his senses. Which was about as expected, but still disappointing given how much more powerful he’d become in the past few years. The only real trail he had to follow was the vague and uncertain ebb and flow of the Night Lands. Something that could be incredibly powerful, but was indirect and not exactly timely.

Over the next few minutes he got confirmation that most Houses had been sabotaged already, with only a few retaining any access. That was bad enough, but only a moment later House Lehmann reported that their previously-working portal had gone dead after some unknown mana void appeared. House Richter started scrambling to pile through their own portal before it closed, even though they didn’t really have any holdings on Earth. They wanted out before the noose closed, rather than trying to stay and fight. Though without being able to find The Ghost, fighting was not an option.

“Captain Friedrich,” Weltentor said into his personal communicator. “Send out word to prepare for unlimited culling, to be executed if they don’t hear from me within twenty-four hours.” While he still had hope that the gu defense might stymie The Ghost, there was always the possibility that there was something cataclysmic on the way.

But if he couldn’t stop the attack, Weltentor could damn well make certain that The Ghost regretted it.

***

Callum actually managed to spot and disable about three quarters of the likely portal anchors before anyone noticed. It was later than he feared, but sooner than he’d hoped, since the more loose connections to the Night Lands existed the less overpowering the closure would be. The wards and shield flared around the House his anchor was stashed in, and he had to work at it to find a hole to slip through. The lockdown versions were far less permissive than the normal warding, probably because they didn’t care about ordinary magic setting it off.

Of course, he could make a tiny anti-mana portal to poke a hole in one if necessary, but he had only so many vis crystals to replenish his reserves, and while he’d budgeted a few extra just in case, he needed most of them to deal with the dimensional portal. As yet he didn’t have the reserves of an Archmage, so he couldn’t just throw magic around willy-nilly.

The next House already had people camping on top of the portal frame, mage bubbles completely excluding it so he had to skip it. Perhaps he could have wriggled through if he was willing to spend the time and vis, but it wasn’t worth it. An incomplete purge was preferable to failing his main objective.

His following target didn’t have theirs so well-guarded, and he sniped it out from under the noses of the mages that were hanging around the portal room. Their heads snapped around when the anti-mana spilled out, but he pulled everything away an instant later so he didn’t see the reaction. It seemed he wasn’t going to get away with any further mischief unnoticed.

Of the remaining Houses, one had the portal active and people were going through, one had jammers up so he couldn’t get near, and one had such intense shielding that he couldn’t punch through without using a vis crystal, so he didn’t. With everyone on guard, he had to accept that cutting most of the Houses off would suffice, and he’d have to target them later on if it mattered. It was time for the main event.

“Right,” he said. “Going to close the big portal now.” Lucy glanced at him and circled the Houses they’d missed on her map printout, then leaned back in her chair.

“Ready here,” she said. While she didn’t technically have a direct hand in the process, she was prepared to jump at a moment’s notice if he fell over for some reason. Or alternately, smash the anchor he was using to connect through the nexus to the Night Lands.

Callum teleported the anchor back toward the central castle, seeing that it was warded too, but when he tried to sneak his vis through it the magic latched on and started to race up the thread. He jolted and then snapped off the thread a heartbeat before it rushed into the nexus, and he found himself half-standing and tense. He was suddenly glad he’d encountered it before, and was ready to sever a connection, otherwise the anti-healing would have taken him out.

“What is it?” Lucy said, reaching out to take his hand.

“Castle has a negative healing defense on it,” Callum said. “I can’t get to — wait, I’ll just do it from the other side.” It didn’t seem likely the anti-healing defense, if it reacted to any mage vis, was something that GAR had installed on the Earth side of the portal. If it had, he’d have to resort to something dramatic, but he doubted anyone there realized what his true target was.

The moon nexus wasn’t excessively large, but he still had enough drones to have a couple stationed in Europe, so five minutes later he was looking at the Earth-side version of the Night Lands portal. It had wards up, but they weren’t nearly as strong as the ones he’d seen around the Houses on the far side. Bracing himself, he experimentally poked a vis thread through, but considering there were active mage bubbles he doubted the negative healing defenses were up. Sure enough, nothing adhered to his vis thread.

The feeder portals were placed just above the portal room, with some of the mana-redirecting enchantments pushing a tithe of the huge outflow to them. He wasn’t entirely certain why the feeders weren’t in the Night Lands itself, but he suspected that perhaps GAR didn’t trust the vampires quite as much as it seemed. Since they weren’t in the Night Lands, he didn’t actually care about them. If the portal closed, they wouldn’t work.

“Okay, good to go,” he said.

“Here’s hoping it’s enough,” Lucy replied. He was pretty sure it would be, but there was no way to test it beforehand.

“Fingers crossed,” he replied, and reached through his gut-port to tap all the remaining vis crystals. The actual dimensional portal was about thirty feet in diameter, so his portal would nest right inside it. Even with a bunch of auxiliary vis he wasn’t sure he could make something quite that large, and he was genuinely worried about turning it permanent if he did so. It didn’t seem likely, since the anti-mana would erode the portal itself at some point, but it was a chance he didn’t want to take.

He pulled heavily on the crystals and snapped open a five foot diameter portal in the middle of the Night Lands one, perpendicular to it, a ring within a ring. The moment it opened the anti-mana smashed out in a great flood, absolutely devouring the structure of the Night Lands portal. The complicated mess dissolved like spun sugar, the anti-mana washing out to wreck the warding and shielding of the Earth-side facility and the castle like.

Callum had done a lot of testing with portals of various sorts, but he’d never tried to collapse two dimensional portals onto each other at the same time. From what he’d seen it wasn’t likely to result in the sort of insane space contortions that science fiction seemed to use; things should just go away. Unfortunately for the Earth-side and Castle both, that wasn’t quite the case.

The outer portal collapsed into the inner one before it destabilized naturally, the two points of dimensional shear tangling with one another and turning into some kind of knot that made Callum’s brain hurt. His senses pinched as the knot broke, sending out a sharp wave of mana-charged space. It was like a bomb hit the place, walls and floors shearing and crumbling, dust billowing up from the earth.

Mana and vis seemed to be some proof against the distortion. None of the mage bubbles faltered, and the enchanted portions of the building seemed to weather the wave better than ordinary stone. Even though the building had been made with magic, the stone wasn’t magical as such.

“Goodness,” Callum breathed. The entire Night Lands outpost was absolutely wrecked, though it wasn’t an explosion as such. It was more like it’d been hit with an earthquake, the shock wave traveling a good five hundred feet or more before it faded enough to stop affecting matter. Which meant his drone was safe, though his vis around it probably would have stopped things anyway.

The castle fared better, though he could only see part of it through his senses. Between the higher ambient mana and the material itself being mana-infused, it weathered the shock wave with only some minor crumbling of the room the portal was housed in. There had been no mage bubbles there to begin with, so he was less concerned with the fallout, but there were going to be an awful lot of repairs needed.

“All done?” Lucy asked, putting her hands on his shoulders and squeezing them to relieve Callum’s tension.

“Looks like,” Callum said, focusing on where the Night Lands portal had once been as he reached up to put one of hands on hers. The space there was disturbed, locked into something slightly different from what he considered the normal background of Earth. It didn’t surprise him, though he wasn’t sure whether to attribute it to the portal being there for so long or the violent way it had been closed.

“Better announce it before anyone else does,” Lucy suggested.

“Yep,” Callum agreed, standing up. The two of them walked out into the other room, and Gayle hopped up.

“You closed the portal?” She asked, eyes wide.

“I did,” Callum agreed. “Now to capitalize on it.” He waved a hand and opened a portal to the main room, the three of them stepping through to join Chester and the Archmages.

“It’s done,” he reported, and Hargrave stood.

“We’ll make our announcement,” he said, and beckoned for Gayle to join him and Glenda.

“I will as well,” Taisen said. “Glad we had time to write it out beforehand.”

“Yeah,” Callum said, glad that he’d been convinced into letting people know. “I’ll be here for now, if you need me.” The relocated bunker house had power, but without water or sewer it wasn’t really a great place to spend much time.

He wasn’t expecting to actually be needed. Barring someone re-opening the portal, which was to say, Duvall, his part was pretty much done. True, he hadn’t gotten every portal out, but there weren’t many connections left and making artificial ones wasn’t simple. Besides which, he could still remove them later. While he would have preferred a clean severance, a delayed death was good enough. Unfortunately, it wasn’t more than a few hours later that Taisen returned, accompanied by a full squad.

“We need your help,” he said, the moment Callum walked into the room. “Vampires all over the world are killing people in public. They’re going to crack the secrecy wide open.”