Renegade mage paranoid m.., p.34
Renegade Mage (Paranoid Mage Book 2), page 34
“Then get yourself equipped at the armory. I’ll ask Grand Magus Taisen to put you into one of the shifts.”
“Yessir,” Ray replied, and braced himself to head back into the unseasonable heat.
***
Lucy felt like her head was stuffed full of gauze wrapped around thorns. It was hard to think, and when she did think she couldn’t think about some things or else the thorns would start tearing and twisting, cutting through her memories and ideas. Trying to turn her into something else. The fae magic from before was terrible, but it hadn’t been like this.
She sat on the cot, holding her head in her hands, prodding at the chains the fae king had bound her with. It wasn’t the same as the compulsion which had made her act in accordance to strict rules, and it wasn’t like the siren song, which had made her believe something that wasn’t true. It had some components of those but it was all together in a single thing that she could feel poised around her, waiting to strike.
It was terrifying.
Just trying to think around the edges was hard and painful in a way she couldn’t properly describe. It would have been a lot easier to just relax and go with the flow, just lean into the geas and let whatever happened, happen. But if she did that, she had a terrible suspicion, creeping in from behind the gauze, that she wouldn’t be able to change her mind afterward.
Yet, as she groped around thoughts of the big man and shied away from them as the thorns threatened her, she felt there were gaps in the hedge. The geas had too many components, too many moving parts where things didn’t quite meet up. She couldn’t even articulate the thought that she could exploit them, but the feeling was there, down deep where the thorns couldn’t see.
She had to act natural, but she also had to find out everything she could. Be friendly and inquisitive, but not to the point of arousing any suspicion. Any time she got a chance to call in and inform them about what was going on, she had to, but at the same time could never do so where the big man or anyone with him would notice. The conflicting mass of requirements hurt her head, she refused to let them come together or try to make them make sense.
It would have been easy, and she was so tired, but Lucy had been lorded over by the magical all her life. This wasn’t new, or at least, that’s what she forced her fuzzy brain into thinking, even if deep down she knew. She knew she was in trouble so deep that she could never dig her way out on her own.
She had to rely in the big man. Even in the privacy of her own mind she didn’t call him by name, and it galled her to have to just hope for external help. She’d worked hard to become self-reliant and self-sufficient, as nigh-impossible as that was for a dud serving in GAR. But that didn’t mean she was so stupid or proud as to not know how bad things were.
The ambient magic was so high it hummed against her skin, vibrating off her teeth and making the back of her neck itch. She didn’t know what it was, and the geas kept her thoughts from doing anything but idle uselessly for fear of being torn, but it was just another tiny torture to add to the rest of the mass of misery. She could recall how she’d felt after the first time they’d interviewed her, and how inconsequential that seemed in comparison. Lucy was sure that, one way or another, someone would pay for this.
“I don’t like this.” The sound of someone else’s voice made Lucy twitch and peer blearily up to see Gayle sitting on a chair on the other side of the cell, lips pressed together in distaste. The geas twisted around, assuring Lucy that Gayle could be trusted and that she should tell people Gayle could be trusted.
“I’m not a combat mage. I don’t even like using reversed healing!” Gayle continued to complain, though it seemed to not really be directed at Lucy. “I bet grandpa doesn’t even know,” she continued darkly. “Got half a mind to go out there and tell him.”
Yet, she didn’t.
***
Grand Magus Taisen laced his fingers together, frowning at the others in the room. He couldn’t deny that Wells was the BSE’s responsibility, but he misliked using the Deep Wilds outpost for it. It was never meant to be a containment facility. Like all the garrisons he’d built, it was designed as a training outpost and a staging area for eliminating some of the worst threats the portal worlds had to offer.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the ability to overrule two Archmages and the Master of Weltentor. In theory he had the authority, but pragmatically they’d just ignore him at best and remove him at worst, and Taisen doubted anyone else understood the logistics that kept the portal worlds under control. There were factions that already decried the resources he needed, and ignored the fact that small problems became large problems.
Just like Wells, in fact.
“We all want our pound of flesh,” Hargrave said, his aura crackling slightly. “But there isn’t enough to go around.”
“He’s a spatial mage, so he’s mine,” Duvall said flatly. While her raw magical might didn’t match her fellow Archmage, her wealth and influence could absolutely bury House Hargrave if she wanted to.
“A spatial mage that nobody has been able to keep under control,” Taisen pointed out, keeping his voice mild. “How do you propose to do so?”
“Lock him down with vis drainers and set him to enchanting for the next decade or two,” Duvall replied, waving it away. “Even if he never amounts to anything else we know he can make enchantments. Speaking of which.” She glared at Jahn.
“We’re in the process of confiscating the teleportation pads,” he said mildly, showing remarkable aplomb for someone who ranked far below everyone else in the room both in terms of status and prowess. “They have been stalling a bit but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had them before anything happened here. Even if Chester is playing against GAR he’s not willing to completely defy us.”
“And what of the vampires?” The Master of Weltentor, Victor Dumas, spoke in a calm and controlled voice. Taisen doubted he actually cared too much about the deaths himself, but as the nominal head of mage-vampire relations he had a valid complaint. “If nothing else, we are owed a weregild for the deaths of so many at the hands of this group.”
“When we find out who else is working with him, and what their resources are, we’ll make sure to include you,” Jahn said.
“I’m not sure there is anyone else working with him,” Taisen said, speaking at last.
“Oh?” Jahn suddenly looked more interested. “We have at least Wells and Hall that we know of.”
“True,” Taisen conceded. “But I’ve looked at the reports of the various incidents. I don’t pretend to know how it was done, but it all has the feel of a single mind, a single approach.” He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but it was the sort of instinct he’d learned after dealing with thousands of engagements, both supernatural and mundane.
“If it’s just one mage, then our preparations ought to be more than enough,” Hargrave said. “He folded easily enough the first time. Two Archmages and however many mages and shifters are here already ought to be more than enough to take care of him.”
Taisen suppressed a sigh. That was exactly the sort of attitude that caused disaster. He couldn’t really blame Hargrave though; the man was an absolute monster and practically invulnerable. There were few people on Earth that could really threaten Hargrave, and not much in the Portal Worlds either. But Hargrave wasn’t the target.
“Archmage Duvall,” he said instead. “As you say, he is a spatial mage and in your jurisdiction. But I’m unclear what your role is in our defense. Is there a method whereby you can suppress his spatial abilities?”
“No more or less than any other magic,” Duvall said with a tremendous scowl. “Spatial magic is special because of what it does, not how it acts. Any of you should be able to shatter his shell if you get close enough. From what the younger Hargrave said he is a far cry from being an Archmage.”
“Grand Magus Taisen,” Jahn said. “Ultimately, the actual combat is in your hands. We are trying to capture Wells, or whomever he brings with him, but I understand how difficult that can be.”
“He’s one of my spatial mages,” Duvall growled.
“Archmage, so far he has proven extremely difficult to deal with, and demonstrated abilities that don’t comport to spatial magic—”
“That…” Duvall sputtered. “That heretic is abusing some very dangerous and unusual corners of spatial magic. Nothing that could stand up to any real spellforms.”
“Heretic or not, he has done immense damage to GAR and to BSE.” Jahn said firmly. “Whether captured or killed, if— when he comes here, he will not leave.” The response to that was nods all around.
“Agreed.”
Chapter 21 – Rescue
Callum paced back and forth beside the campsite he’d set up near the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala, counting down the hours as his cane dug into the lose, rocky ground. He’d gotten a little sleep, somewhat further away from the actual lava flow than his staging point, but only a little bit. The anxiety was just too much for him to relax.
He ran over his supplies in the cave cache once again. Guns, his spatial grenade materials, and a number of boulders. None of which he wanted to use, but he had to be prepared. Food and drink and a medical kit, because there was no telling what shape either of them were going to be in afterward. He had his van parked near a hospital in Mexico, with the telepad relocated from his house to the cave.
There’d been no traces of supernatural activity at the trailer. That was good, since it was that as a bolthole or a random hotel, and Callum didn’t much trust hotels. The less he showed his face, the better.
Once he finished yet another inventory, he stopped to review the map he’d gotten of the BSE base. The problem was that Chester couldn’t guarantee where the portal anchor would be placed, or that Lucy was actually in one of the cells. He wanted to move as quickly as possible once he activated the portal, so he’d need to get himself oriented and figure out which building was which from his sensory sphere.
Undoubtedly they were waiting for him, but unless they had every square inch of the facility locked down and under surveillance, he was pretty sure that the activation wouldn’t be obvious. His major worry was that the portal anchor itself would be blocked, because even if Chester’s shifters got caught smuggling it in, having the anchor dumped in some lockbox wasn’t an issue. Even if it was somewhere offsite, he could just teleport the anchor back through the portal and do things the hard way.
Even though assaulting the BSE facility was in many ways incredibly stupid, he wasn’t going to just rush in, guns blazing. He had some idea of the capabilities normal mages possessed, and more importantly, what they didn’t possess. They couldn’t see through walls the way he could, and they couldn’t cast through walls the way he could. In a weird sort of way, their facility was more of an advantage for him than it was for them.
All that said, he couldn’t stand up to combat mages. At all. Which was why his plan was to simply not be exposed to combat mages, though of course no plan survived first contact with the enemy.
Callum gnawed on a stick of beef jerky and opened a portal through the connection in his implant to the area above his cave-cache. He could just see the bones of his bunker through the trees, but more importantly, his cell phone could get signal so long as it was high enough. He’d solved that problem by balancing it, along with a solar charger, in the canopy of a tree.
As with every time he’d checked it so far, there were no messages, so he snapped the portal shut and went back to pacing. He had too much nervous energy, though his knee was complaining about the uneven ground, cane or no cane. It was well past dawn in whatever time zone Guatemala counted for, but he had no idea what time it was in the Deep Wilds. For all he knew it was an eternal time like the Dragonlands and Night Lands, but there had to be some sort of standardized shifts. Probably. Hopefully.
Once again he snapped open a small portal to his cell phone, even though it’d been less than five minutes, but this time when he peered through the opening he saw it had a text notification. He reached through the portal and grabbed it, the few moments the old phone took to open up the text display seeming to take forever. It was from Chester.
Package should be delivered.
Callum didn’t like the qualifier, but it couldn’t be helped. He imagined that there was no actual communication between the facility and the outside, so the best Chester could do was verify that the person with the portal anchor had gone there. Possibly with some time buffer to account for getting it past security. Considering it was small and inactive, it was probably not too difficult for a shifter to keep it hidden. Or even for it to pass through in plain sight; he’d seen that shifters did have foci for one reason or another on occasion.
He set a timer for five minutes, just to give it a little more padding, and went and took care of his ablutions before the final checks. Callum doublechecked the body armor, even though it shouldn’t matter at all, finishing off the jerky and taking a few swallows of water. His hands felt sweaty, and the worm of fear gnawed at his gut, but he took a deep breath and watched the timer tick downward.
When the alarm rang, he silenced it instantly and teleported himself closer to the lava flow, where a portal anchor sat in the dewar. The vacuum bottle was, in hindsight, probably not even necessary, but it was still a hundred yards closer to the flow than he felt comfortable going himself. Mesmerizing as a lava river was, it was still twelve hundred degree rock.
Callum reached out and energized the portal anchor. It sprang up right away, and mana started flowing through. It was in a portal world. His perceptions flowed through, and he concentrated on feeling out exactly what was on the other side.
Given the separation between him and the anchor, he had approximately five hundred yards of range through the portal anchor, maybe a little more. The total distance of his perceptions had probably grown a touch, but he’d not done any specific tests for a while. That was still a large enough sphere to encompass a building, if not quite big enough for the entire campus that was supposed to be on the other side.
Chester’s agent had deposited the portal anchor in a utility closet, among a jumble of cleaning supplies. At least that’s what he assumed all the bottles of liquid were, among mops and brooms. The building itself seemed to be something like a barracks, with a number of rooms with bunk beds arranged around a central hall. Outside of the barracks, there was a thick, magically reinforced wall in one direction and what seemed like warehouses in the other.
There were three mages and six shifters within his sphere of perception; two of the mages and three of the shifters were in bunk beds, scattered throughout the barracks, the others were on the wall, where it turned into a dome overhead. He waited with bated breath to see if they noticed the portal focus, but none of them so much as twitched. Though it wasn’t like the portal itself was a particularly large or intense bit of magic, by anyone’s standards, so it wasn’t too unreasonable that they didn’t notice.
Callum looked at the map, figuring out where the anchor had ended up. The buildings weren’t even warded to speak of, just having some minor enchantments around the windows and doors. They didn’t look like the screens of wards, anyway, and the way the mana flowed through the structure was different, but he intended to avoid them anyway.
From the reference he had, the anchor had wound up on the north side of the compound. There was no gate leading in or out; they probably used magic for that. The warehouses and barracks were more or less as he had suspected; mostly empty at the moment, but he put that down to it being the off-season at the moment. Or maybe just during local day.
He wrapped his threads around the portal anchor, extending his vis out to the warehouse through the mana-saturated ground, and pushed. It wasn’t much of a jump, but with his range he really didn’t need too much to cover most of the rest of the facility. The perspective bubble on the end of the anchor shifted, and the portal bobbled. If he were cleaner with his threads, or used tubes instead, he could move without the portal destabilizing, but he was in a hurry so he had fix it by shoving more vis into it instead. It didn’t take much, but it was a concerning tradeoff when he knew he was relatively vis-limited.
The new location meant new buildings came into range. They were more central; the administration, the communal hall, the processing center. They were far more warded, and it took time for him to get through into the interiors. He cared little for what was stored in the warehouses, mostly normal supplies from what he could see, but even if there was any magic stuff there he couldn’t afford to raid it. Betraying his presence before it was absolutely necessary was a terrible idea.
That particular consideration was immediately tested when he brushed his perceptions through the administration area and found a case with a number of lumps that were very mana-dense. They seemed quite similar to mordite, so he could only guess they were silverite, harvested however and stored somewhere secure. It was annoying that he only ever ran across interesting things when he had more important issues at stake, because he didn’t dare touch the silverite no matter how much he wanted to.
In addition to the extra warding, there were a bunch of mages around and a number of them were using active vis senses. They were little feathery pulses drumming through the air or the ground, which Callum regarded with a lot more trepidation than the wards. Enchantment spellforms were limited, but he had no idea about direct magic scrutiny. Evading a security system was one thing; evading the naked eye was another.
Unlike the naked eye, he could actually see the use of the vis senses and where they were aimed. Some of them were just everywhere, others were focused, sweeping here and there, so there wasn’t really much space for him to run a thread that wouldn’t be observed. That said, he only needed a single, small thread to move the anchor from one place to another, and the anchor itself was a small thing.
The various sorts of warding seemed to block the active senses fairly well, and there were all kinds of enchantments active in the buildings he could sense. Were he to try something large and flashy, especially out in the open, it’d be noticed immediately, but he might well be able to hide most of his activity behind the existing enchantments.
