Paranoid Mage

Callum didn’t entirely trust the cloak, though he had to admit the pageantry around it was impressive. It also further established that fae magic was complete nonsense; there had not been nearly enough vis to form solid matter out of nothing, so far as he could tell. And it was real matter too, not just conjured pseudo-matter.

He knew his ability to perceive magic was better than most mage senses, barring some of the tools that the Guild of Enchantment made, but he was pretty sure that the complexities of what went into the cloak were beyond even what he could tell. Not that he’d be able to unravel it anyway, since it was all rippling faerie magic, flowing and liquid.

As Felicia had said, the magic didn’t actually affect him directly. He could see how its magic simply rolled off his vis. Exactly how it functioned was a mystery, but if it provided its protection without having to actually touch him with the faerie magic he was a lot more comfortable with using it.

One of Chester’s people brought in drinks and a new type of cheese cracker that Lisa had made, as Taisen and Felicia explained a bit about Faerie. Obviously they couldn’t get into all the complexities of the politics and local scene, any more than he could have given a full explanation of the full history and culture of the United States in a few minutes’ briefing, but they did cover the high points.

The Seven Lesser Courts were, despite their name, fairly powerful, and charged with relations between Earth and Faerie. Deeper in, the fae got stranger and reality bent more thoroughly, to the point where it wasn’t safe for humans to even exist. So the Lesser Courts had gotten fairly close to the various mage Houses, gaining power from being the gateway for fae who wanted to pass over to Earth and from dealing with the stories and goods the humans themselves brought. Not just the individual fae, Callum understood, but the entire domains benefitted from the process.

“So they’ve allied themselves with this sort of shadow council that’s taken control of what’s left of GAR,” Taisen concluded. “Probably for broader access to Earth. I suppose it’s obvious, but without people like Hargrave and myself, there isn’t much pressure to keep supernaturals limited. It’s not like they live here and have to deal with the would-be conquerors they’re sending our way.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Callum acknowledged. It was the same pattern that had happened millions of times throughout history. “But why did they target Ray, specifically? It doesn’t seem related, unless it’s just part of being anti-you.”

“Because of me,” Felicia wrote. She’d returned to using her tablet after squaring away the issue of the cloak. “Not only am I a valuable piece if they could somehow get ahold of me, but my being on Earth is problem for any claim they would wish to stake. Faerie’s magic itself would recognize me over them. So they wish to draw me away from my chosen world.”

Callum grunted. Supernatural politics again, but it made some kind of distant sense. He preferred to avoid that kind of thing, but he could see an opportunity when it strolled up and smacked him in the face. Supporting Felicia as the global interface between fae and humans was a far-ranging move, but it was clear someone needed to be there, the way that the Fae operated.

“So I get Ray back, and they don’t have any leverage on you. That means you could stand opposed to them and it’d matter. Them being, the people who have been invading Earth these past couple years, and not playing nice with humanity.”

“I don’t have an army,” she wrote.

“No, but you have legitimacy, and an Alliance with a vested interest in keeping things from going too far,” Callum said, making a circle of the room with his finger.

“I’ll consider what I can do.” Felicia wrote slowly, her lips pressed tight. Callum was a little bit sympathetic, because he understood what it was like to have to completely discard everything and start a new life. If anything, she had his respect for being willing to sacrifice her career and identity for the sake of her lover.

It was a better reason than his.

“Well, if this cloak works as advertised than we might as well get started,” Callum concluded. "Generally I don’t have witnesses, but in this case having someone who knows Faerie and who and what we might be looking at will help a lot. Chester, do you have a space where we can set up a bunch of monitors?”

“Of course I do,” Chester said easily. “You don’t think we have movie night?”

“I know the place,” Lucy laughed. “Can you pull over the monitors and my laptop, dear?”

“Sure,” Callum said, standing up. The war room would probably have been slightly better for what they were doing, but he wasn’t ready to extend that much trust yet. True, the house would be moved at some point, but the thought of strangers in his home was just too much.

They all trooped over to another part of the sprawling not-a-mansion, where there was a large blank wall with a projector, and Callum teleported half a dozen spare monitors over along with Lucy’s laptop. She fiddled with the connections as he plugged in the electronics, watch by a bemused Taisen and Felicia. Chester was more used to it, and he helped to sort everything out. Despite all that magic could do, getting electronics cables into their proper slots was still a tedious task.

Lucy connected to their wifi through one of the portal anchors, and Callum reported on which drone he was using. They didn’t have one in Faerie itself, but he did keep one near enough to the Faerie portal that he could get there in short order. He wasn’t entirely comfortable showing people the entire process, but it was broadly known that he had surveillance capabilities. Besides, it wasn’t obvious exactly how all the moving pieces operated.

Soon enough there was an image from the camera feed up on the overhead projector, with other angles on the smaller monitors. It was kind of arbitrary which camera was the primary one, but it was easier to have a front and a back so he could orient himself when he moved it around. The image blurred and refocused in short bursts as he used his Alcubierre trick to move the drone from its post in Luxembourg to the GPS coordinates of the portal in Germany.

“So what made you go to join Archmage Taisen instead of sticking with GAR?” Callum heard Lucy ask. He doubted anyone else present realized how much courage that took, given how much her bout in GAR custody had affected her. The sound of Felicia’s stylus scrawling on her tablet sounded as he approached the Faerie portal.

It had more infrastructure around it than any of the others. In fact, it was a small town in the middle of the Black Forest, entirely shrouded in glamours of the fae sort. It looked pleasant enough, closer to normal than what he’d seen in some of the enclaves, but he knew there was some catch to it.

The portal itself was in the center, set inside an arrangement of standing stones, and despite it being in the open air there was enough structured magic in the air that he knew it wasn’t unguarded. If anything it was more thoroughly protected than the Night Lands portal had been, between the actual magic and the small fae that seemed to make the standing stones their home. Small in stature, but he could sense the density of vis inside them and knew they were heavy hitters.

This was the first test of the cloak. He felt a little silly wearing the thing but, if it worked like it was supposed to, the drone would be no more noticeable to the fae than it would have been to humans. The wording that Felicia had used was his magic was invisible, not his devices, and he wasn’t about to get overconfident.

“Alright, silent mode,” he said, cutting into Lucy’s quiet conversation with Felicia about Ray. He hadn’t been watching directly, but he’d gathered from Lucy’s half of the conversation that they’d been abused by the bureaucracy. A part of him thought that was only appropriate, but he stepped on that pretty firmly.

Lucy cut the power to the drone’s propellers, and he teleported the machine into an appropriately-sized chimney with the flue closed, close enough for him to sense his way through the portal. The other side was also surrounded by standing stones, though they were far more impressive than the Earth equivalent.

Instead of six or eight feet, they were six or eight stories tall, though at the same time the space around them twisted so they didn’t quite take up the space something that big ought to. There was also really nothing to demarcate any difference between structured fae magic and the ordinary background of the portal world. The mana flowed every which way in constantly-changing structures, as if the entire area was under one big enchantment. Which it might well be.

He located a likely hiding spot, inside a small hollow of brush at the base of one of the stones, and teleported the drone in. Then he waited, seeing if any alarm would be raised, or any magical response would come. The lack of any attention on the Earth side was hopeful, but Faerie itself was the real test.

“That is impressive,” Taisen said, watching the display flicker between locations. The main display didn’t show much at the moment, just some too-green grass, but the overhead camera showed the venerable-looking standing stones framed against a painfully blue sky with absolutely picturesque clouds. “Even though I know you can move around that way, seeing it is striking.”

“Faerie looks ridiculously story-book,” Callum said, more or less ignoring Taisen’s comment.

“Yeah, everything there is exaggerated,” Lucy agreed. “I mean, it’s pretty and all, but look at it too long and it seems kind of weird.”

“Felicia says that given time, the land will adapt to the inhabitants,” Lucy reported, since Callum couldn’t spare his attention to twist around and read the tablet.

“No time for sightseeing, alas,” Callum replied, and looked at the map that Taisen had provided. The human region sprawled out from the portal location, over five hundred square miles of House compounds and acreage, farms and vineyards of various sorts. All of it had been stabilized by Duvall, which gave him a serious perspective on what longevity could accomplish.

The Seven Lesser Courts were roughly east, whereas to the west was a massive feral wilderness. Not that direction worked right in faerie. The digital compass built into the drone kept blinking different orientations even as it sat still, magic bending whatever magnetic field there might be into transient knots. There were landmarks, though, and by comparing Taisen’s map to the standing stones he managed to figure out which direction was which.

No fae came by to investigate the drone and no particularly noticeable magic seemed to target it. They hadn’t left GAR-controlled lands, so Callum wasn’t completely convinced the cloak was working, but the early signs were promising. Since the infiltration seemed to be working, he began teleporting his remote through the countryside.

It was like going through a combination of the best parts of New Zealand, Europe, China, and America – and those were just the inspirations that he recognized. Despite the human area ultimately not being all that large, it was absolutely packed with grottos and groves and waterfalls and mist-shrouded spires. There wasn’t a single spot that was just ordinary landscape.

Once he got far enough out, an area that was supposed to be mostly agrarian, he lifted the drone with gravitykinesis and tugged it in the direction of the border. The pseudo-Alcubierre effect he was so used to drained his vis, and a few seconds later he let it go. The landscape that snapped into view was quite different than the one they’d left, with no actual ground visible under a massive tangled carpet of roots the size of houses, twining up to a mountain-scale tree in the distance.

“The Court of Prince Galivrick,” Taisen said, as a flock of what Callum would swear were Pteranodons flew past the camera feed. “Probably not where he is, but we’ll have to check anyway.”

“Finding one person in something that size,” Callum sighed, looking over at his guests. “We’ll take a look, and eavesdrop. What’s the difference between a fae prince and fae king anyway?”

“There is only one king in Faerie,” Felicia wrote, her mouth set into a hard line. “I may not know exactly where he could be but I know how they think. Ray would be a ‘guest’ of the prince himself. There will be a gilded cage in the prince’s estate, and Ray will be there. If not this Court, than another.”

“That’s better than having to sweep the entire place,” Callum said, somewhat relieved. It was one thing to commit to help, it was another to see the scope of a city-sized region and know he had to find a single person within it. Even with his perceptions and assuming that Ray was going to stand out thanks to the mage bubble, it would have taken ages. More than a day, and he definitely intended to keep his promise to Alex and set aside time to play with his son.

Part of him would really have liked to look around at the enormous variety of ridiculous wildlife that inhabited the sky and the ground in Faerie. He was pretty sure he spotted not only dinosaurs, but absolutely mythical wildlife like gryphons and unicorns. Of all the portal worlds, Faerie seemed closest to an actual magical world, but he didn’t have the time to marvel at the causal wonders it held.

Callum tugged at space again and the drone blurred right up to the tree, stopping pressed against a trunk with bark that was five hundred feet thick. He began teleporting the drone upward, still on the lookout for any possible hue or cry thanks to the drone’s presence, but none of the animals paid the tiny drone any heed. Of course, he kept it as hidden as possible, but with the fae he doubted that would have been enough by itself.

The crown of the tree was practically a city of its own, but from the cameras he could tell exactly where the Prince’s dwelling was. The biggest, fanciest dwelling, half-grown and half-carved, in the center of the canopy. He made a beeline right for it, jumping the drone from roof to roof or hollow to hollow, keeping as circumspect as he could even though he couldn’t exactly hide his magic. It was the cloak that made the subterfuge possible.

A few minutes later he was inside an astoundingly extravagant complex. Not exactly a building or a palace, not with the way it was integrated into an enormous branch of a living tree, but close enough. The sheer scope of the mana moving about was intimidating, swirling and flowing and dancing through the gold and silver and frescoed glass, but it seemed to pass right through or maybe around his vis threads. The fae prince himself was obvious even if he wasn’t actually inside Callum’s perceptions. The density of the mana pointed right to him, shifting as the prince moved about his palace.

There were dozens of rooms, pools, groves, and dark oubliettes within the palace, but Callum was looking for non-fae. It wasn’t until he’d gotten further into the sprawl of rooms that he found someone who wasn’t part of the actual Court. But it wasn’t a mage. There was a small set of what Callum could only characterize as apartments with a bunch of normal people.

“Well,” he said grimly. “This is something else I need to deal with. We have to get them out of there.”

“Well, maybe,” Lucy said, watching the camera feed. The drone was parked in a high corner, atop a bookshelf, with a view of a young man happily painting the view from the balcony outside his apartment. “Doesn’t look like he needs a rescue.”

“They’re just ordinary people,” Callum said with a sigh. “Probably making the best of a bad situation. Or completely brainwashed.”

“Or they made a deal,” Lucy pointed out. “The Department of Acquisitions isn’t the only way people run into the supernatural. I mean, sure, some of them might be prisoners here but do you want to assume that about everyone?” There was a pause and the sound of Felicia’s stylus as Callum navigated the drone through the apartments. “Okay that’s a good point,” Lucy said, and Callum glanced away from the feeds.

“Some of them might only be alive due to the influence of Faerie,” Felicia had written. “I know that some of the Lesser Courts have poets from centuries past, only still alive thanks to their bargains.”

“That makes things more complicated,” Callum asked, taking another look at the man on the drone feed. He didn’t look familiar, and his art didn’t strike any chord, but for all he knew that guy might be some ancient Dutch master, preserved like a fly in amber. “If there are people there that don’t want to be, they should be helped, but you’re right. If it’s something they chose I’ve got no right to mess with it.” He rubbed at his temples.

“It’s something you’ll have to sort, I think,” he said to Felicia. “You’re right, it’s too complicated for me to figure out. Just assuming these people are victims is reductive, but some of them certainly are.” Felicia’s face firmed into stern resolution and she nodded. He was glad that she was willing to commit, because while he wasn’t going to make it a condition of his help, he was more than willing to heap work on someone who’d stepped up as a person of authority.

“I will address it as soon as it becomes possible,” she wrote, and he continued on. There was a core or so of humans in the palace, but no mages, so Callum left them alone and moved on. The map of Faerie was vague, but that was because of the spatial twisting that made things harder to get through. Which, amusingly, didn’t matter to him since he could teleport straight past any contorted maze that separated one point from another.

If Galivrick’s court was effectively elves, then the next Court was pretty much dwarves. Not that it was coincidence, since the fae adapted human stories. The mountain stronghold, the abundance of gold and silver, the short and stocky fae populating the galleries of stone. All of it was such a direct copy of fiction that Callum found it actually uninteresting, for all the fantastical nature of it. The architect in him was fascinated, but there wasn’t all that much cleverness in the structure, but rather all the effort had been put into the frills and decoration.

The mountain city had its own version of a palace, a suite of enormous rooms at the center of the network of mines and elevators, but there were no mages there, either. There was some sort of oubliette near the back, inside of which was something that looked exceedingly nasty, a spider crossed with a cutlery shop, but he couldn’t tell whether it was a prisoner or a beast to be fed. Or if there was really any difference.

“You know, you could do an awful lot of information gathering with this,” Taisen noted. “I’m not exactly a spymaster but if nobody’s noticed your devices by now then you could find every little secret these people have.”

“I guess so, but that’s not what I do,” Callum said distractedly, trying to pay attention to Felicia’s tablet while scanning both with his eyes and his senses. “Internal affairs aren’t my business. It’s threats to ordinary people, or to myself.”

“The mantle is for The Ghost,”

“Ah,” said Taisen, enlightened. Callum nodded. He didn’t exactly have specific limitations on The Ghost, but spying on people for any purpose but planning a method of execution was off the table. The Ghost was not someone else’s tool.

Getting out of the mountain required as much time as getting in, since he couldn’t just Alcubierre his way out of it, but soon enough the drone was free and he reoriented himself on the map. The Seven Lesser Courts formed a sort of semicircle around the mage lands, though the way that space itself could shift meant that wasn’t exactly a solid border. The boundaries between each Court were a contorted mess that, without teleportation, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to navigate.

The third target was at least somewhat more interesting. Callum didn’t recognize the source material, but it was a great gloomy wood with stone-brick towns and cities built in under the dark canopies of the enormous trees. They weren’t mountain-sized, but they easily met or surpassed redwoods, even if they looked more like ancient oaks.

It was all overdone gothic architecture, which he rather wished he had time to look at more closely. But he didn’t have time to transcribe the designs, instead working his way inward toward the center of the Court. It was an enormous castle complex that was practically city all to itself, linked to outlying castles and towers with bridges and buttresses.

Callum teleported the drone through the area, stretching his thousand-foot-plus sensory range to its limits as he looked for where the prisoners might be. He accidentally stumbled across a vault, which had literal tons of various magical and nonmagical riches, along with a goodly amount of corite locked away in thick-walled steel boxes. Tempting as it as, he wasn’t there to steal things, so he moved on.

It wasn’t until he got to one of the towers that was surrounded by fae spatial contortions that he struck paydirt. The presence of a mage bubble had him convinced he’d found his target even before he teleported the drone into range. Callum parked it on the top of a bookshelf, behind some kind of potted plant, just in case the mage happened to be looking in that direction. One of the unfortunate aspects of mage bubbles was that he had no insight into lines of sight or attention, which made them harder to work around than other supernaturals.

While Felicia’s cloak seemed to work well enough against fae, he’d underestimated the sensitivity of mage senses. There was nothing shielding his magic from mage perceptions, and while they didn’t have the range and sensitivity of his passive abilities they were hardly blind. Despite how small the teleport was, and the drone itself was, it was enough to attract some attention. The figure mostly obscured by the plant’s gold and red leaves turned around, and a pulse of vis swept out from the mage.

“Dammit,” Callum cursed, castigating himself for his carelessness. He’d been too worried about fae noticing him to remember about mages. “We’ve been noticed. Better hope that’s him.” If it wasn’t, Callum doubted that the mage could keep him from ‘porting the drone away, and it wasn’t likely anyone would connect some unknown bit of magic with The Ghost snooping around, but he didn’t trust to chance.

He caught a glimpse of a face through the gaps in the plant, blurry because of the lack of focus and, while he didn’t recognize it, Felicia visibly brightened. She hastily scribbled on the tablet, holding it up to him.

“Can I speak to him?” Callum nodded, and Lucy poked at a few controls and pushed the laptop in her direction. He kept his eyes and senses focused on the person in the room, worried more about potentially losing the drone than a specific threat. It was fae magic that went through his portals. That and negative healing.

“Ray, it’s me.”

While Callum didn’t feel any of the power in Felicia’s voice himself, he could see its effects when walls and desks actually vibrated from the quiet words. Curiously, at least to him, that effect seemed to carry across the microphone despite there being no direct connection. He could see the swirl of fae influence pushing out from where the drone was, which frankly was worrying since even if he was shielded, that didn’t mean Felicia was.

“Felicia?” Ray’s voice came through the pickup, sounding more than a little suspicious. Which raised Callum’s estimation of the man, since he’d be pretty skeptical too. A daring rescue from nowhere was more fiction than reality.

“The Ghost located you,” Felicia said, her voice clipped and crisp. “I’m leaving the details of your extraction to him.”

“Archmage Taisen, I assume you can handle him if there’s any fae magic still on him,” Callum said, since even with the mage bubble up and Felicia’s recognition, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the person they were rescuing was a ringer.

“I can,” Taisen said, cold and hard.

“Then—” Callum stopped as the underlying mana swirled, and someone stepped out of the corner of the room. He recognized that particular bit of oddness, even if he had no idea how the fae could teleport without any noticeable spatial distortion. “Time’s up.”

He reached out to open a portal for Ray, but with the arrival of the fae prince, for it could be nobody else, the mana of the area locked itself down, completely under the thrall of the prince. Callum knew that he didn’t have quite the punch of an archmage, so the sudden rigidity of the mana might not even have been conscious. Without extra tricks, there wasn’t much he could do to contend with the power of above-average supernaturals.

Which was why he didn’t ever commit to something without extra tricks.

“Princess—” The fae prince got out just the one word before Callum tapped into his vis and opened an anti-mana portal.

Not inside Faerie, of course. He’d found that it was mostly real universes that were reachable from the portal worlds, and trying to open a dimensional portal from an unknown place in some liminal dimension wasn’t guaranteed to lead anywhere in particular, even if anti-mana seemed to be a common portal destination.

Instead, he took advantage of the fact that the middle of a portal was not magic at all, just a hole in space. By using both a dimensional portal and an ordinary portal, he simply funneled the output from the anti-mana dimension through into Faerie. While Callum was mostly trying to get the leeway he needed for a person-sized portal, the reaction that it got was wildly out of proportion.

The fae prince let out a wild keening noise that shrieked through the speakers, forcing Callum to clap his hands over his ears. A moment later either the speakers or the microphone gave out, leaving a ringing silence. The coiling mana retreated, pulled into the prince’s body, and Callum took his chance, snapping open a portal for Ray. He didn’t like having a direct connection between the room and Faerie itself, but with Archmage Taisen there it was probably a better idea than dumping Ray onto some random part of the world.

To Ray’s credit, he recognized what was going on and pulled in his bubble as he darted through the portal. The fae prince, visible with the glance through Callum’s portal, looked to be a pale guy with storybook chiseled muscles and bat wings, baring his teeth to show sharp fangs. He lunged after Ray, moving in a blur, but rebounded off some reflexive cast of Taisen’s, a wall of force flashing out with a speed that Callum wished he could duplicate. It had to be something like a shield, but extended beyond the personal bubble.

Then Ray was through and Callum banished the portal, withdrawing the drone and teleporting it into the tidal plain that he’d found earlier. He didn’t quite trust that it was free of the taint of Faerie. Felicia stood up and threw her arms around Ray while Taisen did something complicated with his vis. Scanning for problems, Callum assumed, since an Archmage could probably see through a bubble in a way Callum couldn’t.

“What the hell was that?” Callum glanced over at Taisen and blinked. He didn’t need to act coy, since it was pretty obvious that the archmage was referring to the anti-mana. Even if Taisen hadn’t gotten a clear view of it, the residue and the fae reaction was enough to show that it was something unusual.

“One of my secrets,” he said. “I’m sure every mage has them. Given the weight class of the stuff I’m dealing with, I need ‘em.”

Taisen grunted and let it go, though he clearly wasn’t happy with the answer. Still, he clearly wasn’t going to press. Callum almost wanted to tell him that it wasn’t anything that Taisen could mimic, but he was resolved to give out no hint that he didn’t have to. He’d already tipped too much of his hand, since Felicia’s presence had drawn out the fae prince.

It was not the surreptitious jailbreak he’d been hoping for. While Callum knew that he’d have to deal with the Faerie types eventually, it would have been far better to delay any confrontation until he had his redoubt. They may not even have really known about his existence, as removed as they were, but he very much doubted that was the case anymore.

Callum was pretty sure they’d just declared war.

***

Prince Jusael of the Court of Roses growled, flinging out his hands in frustration and crushing the furnishings of the room into miniscule fragments. The bait he’d set out had caught the prey twice now. The first time he’d seen the immediate advantage in seizing Princess Felicity’s paramour, but even with that leverage the Princess herself had been too careful to actually enter his territory and instead she’d taken his prize away.

The irritation of that made him smash a few windows, sending glass splinters out over the stone far below. With a daughter of Oberon and Mab of his own, he could have been more than a mere prince of the Lesser Courts. Jusael had no concerns about subjugating the Princess herself, because despite her lineage and her gifts she’d been stupid enough to try and build up a small, heroic story, rather than taking the power that could be so easily grasped by anyone with sufficient vision.

He stalked around the point that was still scarred by the horrific piece of Hel that had been let through. Not that he knew exactly what it was, but it had burned like nothing he had ever encountered before, tearing out part of his own estate and consigning it to oblivion. The actual damage was not that great, in the totality of things, but the sheer foreign shock of it had taken him by surprise.

There were remnants of the mage workings that had been involved, but he didn’t dare touch them in case they were trapped with that same invisible fire. Not that he needed to trace them. The very nature of what had happened was enough proof. There was only one person who would be allied with the Princess, be able to enter Faerie without any trace, and then take away one of Jusael’s guests so easily. The Ghost.

Jusael whirled and took three steps, all that was needed to reach anywhere in his princedom. There were messages to write, including one to be taken through the Ways to where it connected with the Night Lands. Eventually the mages would get what was coming to them, but for the moment it seemed all the targets of both Court and House had gathered in one place. For good or for ill.