Paranoid Mage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh,” said Lucy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So how are you two feeling? Any issues?” Callum asked, crouching down to look Alex in the eyes. He kept his perceptions focused on them, ready to teleport them out if there was anything untoward about the way the portal world affected them.

The one thing that worried him was that the vis inside their bodies didn’t alter the basic, slightly different structure of the portal world. It made sense, since it wasn’t exactly a magical effect, but it wasn’t something that he could let go unaddressed for long. He, on the other hand, still had normal earth flavor inside of his body. If he had to guess, that was one of the benefits of the internal spatial reinforcement — he was immune to the distortion of portal worlds. Not immune to any of the hostile environment, but the space itself didn’t affect him. It would have made him a perfect explorer, if he’d been inclined in that direction.

“Nope, feels normal to me,” Lucy said.

“Floaty!” Alex said, jumping up into the air and going three times the usual height thanks to the falling-elevator effect the islands had going on.

“Well, if you start feeling weird, let me know. I’m going to be fixing up the local space anyway, but this isn’t Mictlān.” He wished he knew how Duvall managed the permanent alteration that she was so known for, but if it were easy then she wouldn’t be the only one doing it.

“I think we’ll be fine,” Lucy said, looking around at the little clearing. Thick-trunked trees with broad, flat leaves grew to about ten feet tall and wildflowers in blue and yellow waved in the brisk breeze. Pragmatically speaking, there was no end to the tests that would be necessary to make sure every single aspect was safe, because there could be toxic berries or some equivalent to poison ivy, but Callum intended to make a bit of a walled garden.

“There’s nothing large nearby,” one of Taisen’s men reported. “You’ll wants wards to secure the sky, but there are no native threats on this island.”

“Fantastic,” Callum said. “I’ll go see if they’re ready to do the landscaping.

In general, Callum hadn’t seen much large scale mage work. He’d witnessed Taisen’s people fighting once or twice, but relative to what he knew mages could do he’d only encountered a small fraction. So he watched in fascination as the House mages spun out huge spell constructs like nothing he’d seen before.

Working in concert, a half-dozen mages from House Hargrave flattened out the landscape, yanked the native foliage out of a large patch of earth to leave churned dirt, and raised thick stone walls around the edge of the island. The river and lake were adjusted slightly to accommodate the landscaping, and drains were bored through the entire island at specific points to prevent any flooding.

It took less than an hour for the mages to make it ready for him to bring the house over. The most finnicky part was setting up the rock slab at the right depth to encompass the basement. Nearby, there were another set of stone slabs at the surfaces, one for the machine shop and the other for a barn to replace his cave-cache.

“Go ahead and bring it in,” said the guy in charge of the whole thing, a bald air mage who was the only one Callum had seen with a habit of chewing tobacco.

“In three, two…” Callum counted down, and then tapped into all his spare vis crystals to teleport his house once again. It popped into existence on the prepared foundation, and Callum braced himself against the wave of weariness from the effort while the earth mage went to work melding things together. A moment later he transferred over the machine shop too, so he could hook it back up to power after everything was squared away.

From the cave-cache he retrieved a few sacks of ground cover seed, and the bald mage dispersed it over the entire cleared patch in a few seconds. Sadly, there weren’t any human mages that could grow plants faster, not even healers. That would have to wait for nature to take its course.

At least, that was what he thought until Lucy suggested that he have someone import the entire garden from Mexico. The garden was vanishingly tiny next to the acres and acres of back yard, but it’d be better than bare dirt outside the back door. It was a blind spot for him; he’d essentially written off the entire area, but it didn’t take that long to send a drone back there.

Surprisingly, it was pretty much untouched. Showing a little bit of overgrowth from a couple weeks of no attention, but it didn’t seem like anyone had been by with enough interest to bother the plants. Maybe GAR and the others who had been after him had written it off for much the same reasons.

While he could only supply a small portal, the earth mage didn’t really see it as a problem, effectively chopping the garden into ribbons of earth that floated through the portal into the new back yard. It was a better solution than Callum’s teleportation, since ripping out a bunch of plants and dirt was actually a lot of effort for him. It was very clearly no big deal to the earth mage.

With all that done, the only remaining tweaks were to get water in and septic out. With the former, just diverting from the river was good enough. He’d still be running it through a number of filters, but it was water. With the latter, once again the mage ability to shape rock and earth made it simplicity itself. It made him envy earth mages, considering how broadly their skills could be applied.

Though he wouldn’t trade teleports for anything.

In less than a day, really only a few hours total, the island had been transformed from untouched fastness to about ten thousand acres of tamed land and five times that of buffer forest. Trees near the outer wall had been trimmed away so that no small creatures could jump from the branches into the courtyard. It was still vulnerable to flying things, but a large-scale glamour enchantment would probably be sufficient to deal with that.

Not that he’d be letting his son wander around unsupervised for a while. Even if Taisen’s people had cleared the area, there was no guarantee there wouldn’t be some hidden danger somewhere. Which was still better than the vulnerability of remaining on Earth.

“Thanks, everyone,” he said, not offering a hand because mages didn’t do that, but he had offered beers. Only a few people had taken him up on that. “That was easier than I expected.”

“Benefits of having a House,” the bald mage said. Callum still didn’t know his name. “No single aspect can do everything by itself.”

“Tell me about it,” Callum said. Admittedly, the earth mages had done most of the work, but air and water mages had done their share with shaping the protected area. Those types would have been more useful in the maintenance and upkeep, but he wasn’t going to be bringing mage groundskeepers over.

“The wind muffler will decay after about a day,” the mage added. “So you’ll want your own version up before then.”

“Great,” Callum said, and opened a portal back to Chester’s compound. “I’ll let you all know if I need anything else.”

“Glad to visit,” the mage said with a smile. “It’s nice here. Just needs beaches.”

Once they were all gone, Callum relaxed properly for the first time in days. He dropped down into the lawn chair on the back porch, finding that it still had a faint hint of cold about it from being out in the Montana winter for so long. Lucy and Alex joined him, and he put his arms around both of them.

“This is great,” Lucy said, looking around at the open area, the distant walls and the river and lake. “I love it here already. But what are we doing next? Can’t just hide here.”

“No indeed,” Callum agreed, rubbing his eyes. “I’ve got some enchanting to do if I want this place to be really livable, and then — I don’t know. I’ll have to talk with the archmages and then Felicia. We need to make some moves before the other side does.”

***

“Seeker Jarmin has arrived,” reported Magus Tiana, who had taken up the task of managing all of Archmage Janry’s meetings. He wanted to grimace but kept his face under control, for the sake of his niece if nothing else. She didn’t need to be glared at.

“Send him in,” Janry said, glancing around the room to make sure there were no missives or papers the visitor shouldn’t see. Everything inside his extensive study was warded and protected, of course, but that didn’t protect against carelessness.

The door opened and a short, red-haired and red-skinned fae sauntered inside, hopping into the chair with no effort whatsoever. With the smirk on Jarmin’s face, he looked the very definition of impish, and Janry resigned himself to a fairly tedious discussion. Though at least it would be a substantive one.

Janry was irritated by how long it had taken the fae to properly bestir themselves. He knew that the fae had to work in their own time, with their own purposes. Their rules made straightforward action difficult sometimes. Of course, the Courts had long structured themselves to get around most of those limitations, but there was only so much a fae could cheat without weakening themselves.

At least the Lesser Courts had finally marshalled some of their more obscure members to help. The takeover of GAR had gone smoothly enough, thanks to Janry’s people in key positions, but GAR’s sphere of operations was more restricted than it had been before. Getting the fae courts to do more than send malcontents over to Earth was instrumental for his plans.

“I’ve been told you’re able to track down, essentially, anyone,” Janry said.

“Only people who threaten the Court of Roses,” Jarmin corrected, fussily adjusting the cuffs of his dark blue suit. “I am Jusael’s Seeker, not some vagabond knight.”

“Yes, of course,” Janry said, suppressing the urge to roll his eyes with the ease of long practice. “By now I should think it clear that the breakaway Houses are doing exactly that. They are in league with the upstart American Alliance and especially with the heretic known as The Ghost.”

Janry didn’t care much about the old tradition of magical heresy, but it was useful. Some of the more conservative Houses, ones that had barely glanced at Earth for centuries, still gave it weight. As did some of the fae, for their own reasons that were – in his opinion – entirely self-serving. Which was no different than the mage houses, so that was some comfort.

“Yes, we have heard of this Ghost,” Jarmin said, almost sneering. Once again Janry had to suppress a reaction. No matter how powerful a fae was, he underestimated Wells at his peril. Under most circumstances, he would regard Wells as an archmage, though of course that was not possible given the man’s youth.

“The Ghost, Archmage Taisen, Archmage Hargrave, and Alpha Chester are the only targets of consequence,” Janry said, broadening the scope of Jarmin’s attention. While the existence of Wells and his ability to seemingly get anywhere granted the breakaway forces genuine legitimacy, he was ultimately a distraction. Without his allies he was just a single man, with few real resources.

Though if they could remove him, that removed the bedrock on which the bid for independence was based. Neither Taisen nor Hargrave was willing to use the force they were capable of, not really. Otherwise they would have been the ones in charge of GAR. Wells clearly did not have the same problem. Janry would love if Jarmin could find and remove the man, but it didn’t seem likely.

“I’m sure you can find some of them yourself,” Jarmin said, squinting at Janry.

“There is a difference between knowing the locations of certain compounds, and knowing the layouts, strengths and weaknesses, and avenues of movement,” Janry said. He found it necessary to lay things out for fae agents or they’d just pursue what they found interesting. Which didn’t always overlap with what was useful.

“That is more interesting,” Jarmin said, hopping out of the seat in a single bound. “I’ll add that to the Prince’s own orders. Maybe I’ll find something fun when I’m poking around your Earth.”

“Excellent,” Janry said blandly, and the small fae tapped the side of his nose before vanishing from the study. One of those highly annoying habits that fae had, especially in Faerie. He was going to have to talk to Duvall again, and see if she could adjust Faerie further than she already had. Perhaps deny the fae some of the advantages the portal world gave them.

After finishing a few missives, he took a break for lunch and then met with his agent at the DAI. Internal policing of supernaturals was less important these days, and the DAI had been retooled for dealing with mundane power structures. There was little that a mundane could do against a mage or a fae, but they couldn’t simply command leaders or celebrities to obey. It turned out that a sudden break in behavior meant those people were confined or hospitalized or removed, not obeyed.

“To be honest, we could use more gold and silver,” Agent Ferrull said. “Bribing people is still easier than finding a fae minder. Vampires would probably be better, but, well.” Ferrull shrugged and Janry nodded. What vampires were left after the disastrous events of the past few weeks were hardly reliable. Some were evacuating back to the Night Lands, but most were roaming restlessly. Of the over one hundred nests he’d been in contact with, only two were still intact.

“Not a problem,” Janry assured him. It was not difficult for an earth mage to find and pull the metals out of either the Deep Wilds or somewhere on Earth. He’d been cautious about it solely to preserve the value of the precious metals, but he still had effectively unlimited funds available to him. Janry simply wrote out a scrip for Ferrull to take fifty kilograms each of silver and gold out of the House Janry vaults.

“Excellent,” Ferrull said, folding the bond and tucking it into the breast pocket of his suit. “With this, I think we should really be able to get things moving."