Paranoid Mage

Callum took some time out to rest, but not much.

After he and Lucy had stopped operating on dregs and he’d had time to attend church for his own peace of mind, he decided it was time to get in contact with Chester again. That meant heading back to Winut to drop off the portal anchor once again. Once Arthur actually drove the portal anchor to Chester’s place, he wouldn’t need to use that route again, but as it stood he didn’t actually know where Chester’s compound was. His sense of direction didn’t really work through teleports to unknown places.

“You know, this whole deal sounds better than the GAR transport network,” Lucy said, looking at one of the little portal anchors. “I mean, sure, it doesn’t go as many places but the teleporters can’t bring whole trucks through either.”

“Wait ‘till you see the flying chair,” he told her. “It’s very useful but it feels so very makeshift.”

“Ooh, you know I’ve never been flying,” Lucy said, eyes sparkling a little.

“I don’t actually know that it’s safe to come along on that thing,” he told her regretfully. “I mean, it’s only got one seat but it’s also a weird space magic application. If I’m not careful my normal teleports are pretty rough on people, so I’d be afraid this would do real damage.”

“Aw, that’s no fun,” Lucy said with an affected pout.

“If I ever manage to snag a proper flight focus I’ll take you up,” he promised. “Or, you know what? We can work on a tandem flying chair, because you’re right, flying is pretty great. And I don’t have to do the Alcubierre bit.”

“It’s a date, big man,” Lucy said.

“Flying for our first date?” He asked, not entirely joking. “What about dinner and a movie?”

“I’ll hold you to that when you get back,” Lucy said. “Now come on, show me this magical portal space where you’ve stored everything.”

It felt rather odd showing off the cave cache, considering that of all places that was the most private and important. Admittedly it didn’t look like much even with the work he’d done, and after seeing Lucy swinging a flashlight around he made a note to rig up more lighting. Not everyone could just use panoramic magical senses to navigate.

“So, this shouldn’t take too long,” he told her. “I’ll pop back once I deliver the anchor and we should be able to talk to Alpha Chester soon after.”

“Sure, big man,” Lucy said, experimentally turning on one of the LED lamps he had scattered about. “It’s a bit chilly but I can hang out here.”

“Yeah this isn’t really equipped for living.” It was fortunate that it was winter, because it really wasn’t pleasant to hang out in the cave without a proper jacket. “Right, see you in a bit.”

“Later, big man!”

He went through the entire process of recalling to Montana and using the chair to get to Winut. The small town still sparked a twinge of nostalgia for him, even though he hadn’t been there long. In hindsight he really should have spent more time being sociable; the people in Winut had been nice folk. Maybe in some distant future he could visit openly once again.

He found Arthur Langley at the pack compound rather than on patrol, playing catch with younger relatives. Some of them were on two feet, and some on four. It didn’t seem necessary to interrupt the game so he left the portal anchor at the front door, writing a quick note for Arthur and his family, and recalled to the cave. Lucy was sitting with a blanket and the crate of books, since there was no wifi down underground. At least not yet. Amusingly, she’d gotten out a book by the same author as Gayle and was thumbing through it.

“All set,” he told her. “We can head back to where it’s warmer and wait for other people to do the transportation.”

“Works for me, big man,” Lucy said.

“You know, you can probably call me Callum now,” he said, escorting her onto the teleport plate. Since it was still in the armored van, it wasn’t obvious where to go from the cave, and in fact it was quite unintuitive to get into the back of a vehicle to get out of a cave.

“I probably can, but I like big man more,” Lucy told him. He laughed and activated the teleporter, and the surroundings changed. Lucy’s eyes widened. “What the heck,” she said. “I could feel that!”

“Feel what?”

“Like, the actual spell form. Used to be I could feel that magic was around but this time I could kinda sense the details. That’s never happened before.”

“Mmm.” Callum mused, tapping his toe on the receiver plate. “Maybe after being exposed to more magic, the fae thing and Mictlān and all, your sensitivity has improved?”

“I mean, it must’ve. I know the toppest tier of duds can actually see magic, which honestly has got to be the worst. Being able to see it without being able to cast.” Lucy’s face scrunched up in a moue of distaste. “Honestly if I had to be a dud I’m glad I couldn’t be put into any of the magical inspection stuff. I prefer computers anyway.”

“Well, I can give you some of the exercise books to see if you can get anywhere, but your internal vis hasn’t changed much,” Callum cautioned.

“Oh boy, you’re talking about the little kid books aren’t you?” Lucy rolled her eyes. “Well, I’ll give them a look.”

It wasn’t much longer before Arthur Langley wrapped up his game, and when Callum opened a phone-portal the shifter seemed almost completely unsurprised. Not much later, Arthur was driving down toward Chester’s with the portal anchor in his pocket. It seemed that in the two days between Lucy’s rescue and his call the telepads he’d made for Chester had been confiscated.

“I think they’re slapping Alpha Chester with fines, as well,” Arthur said as he drove. “I don’t know if he’s going to pay though. There are some rumblings that make me think he won’t.”

“Can he even do that?” Lucy asked, leaning closer to the portal that was hovering over the table between them. It led to the cave cache, where a second portal set led through the anchor, so they could talk without a direct connection. Lucy had ribbed him over the precaution, but he still used it. “I mean, I know the big man and I are outside of GAR now, but he’s got a lot of people.”

“Don’t I know it,” Arthur said. “But he’s been a good Alpha so far. If he thinks he can get away with it, I trust him.”

Callum followed the course Arthur took and found that Alpha Chester’s compound was just over the state line in Nebraska, which meant that actually getting the portal there was not much different than getting it to Winut. Of course, the compound was much larger and there was noticeable security so if he made the trip in person it wasn’t likely he’d remain undetected.

“It’s Mister Wells again,” Arthur told the door guard bluntly, and while Callum winced it wasn’t like his identity was at all secret. At this point it wasn’t really even secret that he worked with Alpha Chester. That explanation was enough for them to let Arthur through, and he headed for the inner portion of the compound where Callum had talked with Alpha Chester before. The area protected by wards.

The Midwest Alpha himself was actually in the kitchen helping his wife roll dough. When the word got passed, he finished up whatever pastry he was working on and washed up, shifting into war form as he headed down to the secure area where Arthur was waiting.

“Mister Wells,” he said as he entered, spotting the portal hovering in the middle of the room. “I understand you managed to perform the entire operation unscathed.”

“More or less,” Callum acknowledged, and nodded at Lucy.

“Hey boss man, I’m unscathed too. More or less.”

“Lucy,” Chester said as he seated himself in his oversized armchair. “It’s good to hear you’re alive and whole. Though needless to say, resuming your prior job at the moment would be a rather fraught undertaking.”

“Yeah, I hear you boss man. No worries, I’m gonna be hanging out with the big man for a while anyway.”

“Be sure you take care of her, Mister Wells,” Chester said seriously.

“Yes, sir,” Callum said, completely understanding the tone in Chester’s voice.

“Good man,” Chester said, leaving Lucy red-faced and spluttering. “Now, I assume that you didn’t just call so Lucy and I could chat.”

“No,” Callum said, “though I’m perfectly happy to leave the portals open so she can catch up with anyone over there. I wanted to check in about the enchanting materials. The sooner I get them, the sooner I can start recycling it and get you some new telepads.”

“Excellent. I am glad I was right and you are a man of your word.” Chester signaled one of the other shifters in the room, whom Callum recognized as one of the two linebacker types from way back when he’d first gone into the basement of the café in Winut. The man headed off to another room, presumably to bring the loot. “I have a pallet of stuff, which we mostly can’t use. We haven’t tried disassembling it, since there’s a lot silverite in there.”

“Sure, that’s not a problem.” Callum hadn’t even thought about the issues of bane metals, but it only made sense that vampires would have more silverite or ironite around than mordite. “I can grab it through the anchor here right now if that’s okay.”

“Can you do everything through the anchor?” Chester asked, and it wasn’t just an idle question.

“Essentially,” Callum admitted. “So I know it’s maybe a bit of an ask to hang onto one, but if we’re going to be keeping in touch it’s more secure than a phone. More useful, too.”

“I’ll consider it, but not just yet,” Chester said. “You haven’t even come yourself. There needs to be more trust between us.”

“That’s fair enough,” Callum admitted. He wasn’t about to pop over to the shifter compound to prove himself, but maybe in the future he wouldn’t feel so twitchy about being around a bunch of high-powered supernaturals. Maybe. “In that case, I’ll deliver an anchor the next time we need to talk.”

Chester’s minion wheeled out the pallet, which was full of boxes and crates. Callum could sense a goodly amount of enchantments inside, and he spent a little bit of time surveying the contents to make sure there was nothing obviously active or dangerous. Though if they were in Chester’s house, they’d already gone through a teleport without exploding or something.

He simply teleported the pallet into his cave-cache. The shifters twitched at its sudden disappearance, but that was their only reaction. They clearly understood the threat that he could pose, and he revised his thoughts on the mutual trust issue a bit. He was going to have to do something or else risk losing the only supernatural allies he really had.

But first, there was work to do.

***

“There’s really not even a Wells case anymore.”

Ray Danforth sat with Felicia Black in the briefing room at GAR East, where the principal investigators of The Ghost, aka Callum Wells, were gathered. Agent Jahn had somehow ended up in charge of it, and while Ray had nothing against the man he didn’t like the idea of just giving up on things. Though he had to admit there wasn’t anything to investigate. Everyone knew who Wells was and what he could do, but finding him, catching him, and holding to account – that was a problem beyond what Danforth could manage.

“It’s a manhunt at this point, and we have no idea where he is. Considering the abilities he’s displayed, it could be anywhere in the world.” Jahn looked around the room. “So, most of you get to do other things. I’m looking into various resources for tracking him down, but until then there’s no point having anyone on standby.”

Most people looked just as happy to be done with it. The various BSE personnel were clearly fed up, especially since Wells had wrecked Garrison Two, though a few were just as displeased as Ray was. The man had made damn fools of some very experienced mages by simply not attacking in any way anyone had considered.

Not to mention there was a lot of tension between people of various Houses thanks to the interrogations from the internal investigation that had revealed Lucile Harper. Ray was damned glad that he and Felicia had the shield of GAR because there were some very upset mages who wanted their hides. He wasn’t sure whether some of those grudges would ever fade, no matter that they were doing their jobs under the auspices of some very powerful Archmages.

Various Houses threatening to leave GAR was nothing new. Some had even followed through with it, though they tended to fade into irrelevance fairly quickly. But there was a difference between a single House breaking away, or even a coalition, and the current fractious rumbling. There was no telling what would happen if the unhappiness catalyzed into real action.

Jahn spent the next few minutes calling names and mostly releasing people back to their previous chain of command. He saved the pair of them for last, tilting his head toward a side office as people filtered out of the meeting room. Ray exchanged glances with Felicia and followed.

“Now, I did say there’s no Wells case anymore, but we do have a known connection,” Jahn said without any preamble. “Alpha Chester. Considering how difficult it might be to let this go completely, I thought I might put in a word with GAR to have you put on that investigation.”

“We’d appreciate that,” Ray said, for both Felicia and himself. “Who are we working with?”

“Archmage Janry, for the most part. Yes, I know, Archmages are supposed to be outside GAR but you need something to counterbalance an Alpha like Chester.” Jahn shrugged. “Plus there’s whoever he decides to appoint. Frankly, Janry’s never been a particularly energetic fellow when it comes to anything outside his own House so I don’t entirely trust him to get the job done.”

“Huh. You want us to take over control of the investigation?” Ray asked doubtfully. It was true the Earth Archmage spent most of his time on his estate in the Deep Wilds, but he was still an Archmage. “We haven’t exactly covered ourselves in glory.”

“Who has?” Jahn asked, mostly rhetorically. “At least I know your reports are accurate. Which is another thing, I want you to send me a copy of those reports. If there’s something that ought to be followed up on, I can step outside the chain of command for it.”

“That would be welcome, I think,” Ray said cautiously. Felicia nodded firmly and wrote on her tablet.

“What kind of thing are we looking for?”

“Honestly, anything. We know he’s in contact with Wells, so every infraction you can ding him for. I don’t think anyone wants open war, but we might be able to drag him down with death by a thousand cuts. At the very least make him second-guess dealing with Wells.”

“I’m not sure how much I like that part,” Ray grimaced. “There’s got to be thousands of rules we don’t really care about that are still on the books.”

“Yes,” Jahn agreed. “But this is politics. We’ve got a bunch of Archmages, branch heads, and vampire Masters that want Wells’ head. If we can bring him in, then we can head off the worst of it. There will have to be concessions and favor-trading in the meantime, but we have to make it clear GAR is doing something.”

“You think bringing in Wells will stop everything?” Ray asked.

“He’s the legitimacy for their rancor. Get rid him, get rid of it. Which is why we need to move against anyone who supports him, too. To be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if someone makes a more violent move against Chester, but that’s not my problem. I just want you to dig as deep as you can. If we’re lucky, he’ll have some information buried somewhere about where to find Wells.”

“Yes, sir,” Ray said. “If something’s there, we’ll find it.”

***

“That’s some serious equipment, big man,” Lucy said, managing to make it a double entendre. Callum laughed and waved at the metalworking equipment.

“Yeah, and it’s going to be a lot of work taking this stuff apart and melting it down, even with magic.”

“Don’t let it be said I’m not willing to get my hands dirty,” Lucy said with a wink. “Seriously though, can you just melt down enchantment stuff? Seems a little simple to me.”

“I know you can with mordite,” Callum said. “I’ve never tried silverite or corite though. Hopefully we can scavenge most of this but I know that low-quality stuff can become useless.”

“Guess we’ll find out.” Both of them had on work clothes, Lucy managing to look attractive even in heavy overalls and safety goggles. Callum simply started teleporting the contents of the crates out into the workspace behind the trailer house.

Just on the face of it, a lot of stuff wasn’t going to be recyclable. There was a lot of bladed weaponry – knives, swords, and even an awl-pike – that just had some sort of lacquered coating on it. He could sense the mana in it, but the metal of the weapons was simple steel. The one exception to that was a short sword that seemed to be carved entirely from something that seemed like transparent, lustrous silver glass.

“I guess this is pure silverite?” Callum tapped it. The stuff was definitely not a metal. It felt more plastic, not glass, but harder and heavier than any plastic he was familiar with.

“Ooh, I think so. I’ve heard that silverite is actually some kind of amber, instead of metal.”

“Huh.” That was nowhere in the books that he’d read, or maybe it had been and he’d missed it. There was an awful lot of literature to get through. “It probably doesn’t melt down, then.”

As much as he disliked ruining a perfectly functional weapon, Callum got out a couple of clamps to see how hard the silverite actually was. It wasn’t like an intact sword was going to fit in his crucible. While he worked on that, Lucy started unscrewing ward boxes and similar items, something she was quite a deft hand at.

It was nice to have someone else around to lend a hand, and Lucy was really happy with something to do. Without something to work on she tended to withdraw into herself, and besides being there for her there wasn’t much he could do about it. At the same time, he didn’t want to condescend to her and find useless busywork, so he was glad there was something substantive for her to help with.

He was still somewhat disconcerted at times from someone else being in his space. Not that he allowed himself to develop bad habits, but it was still weird to have a person inside his house. Though he certainly didn’t object, even if they’d put off an actual date until after they got some of the work sorted.

Callum was broken from his musing by the silverite snapping. It took an awful lot of force to break the stuff, which sheared rather than bending. A few applications of a blowtorch didn’t do any noticeable damage to it, so he resorted to more extreme measures. Namely, he tossed it in the crucible and turned up the heat, though well away from them just in case the silverite burst into magical flame or something.

While that was cooking, he took the plates that Lucy had disassembled or, in some cases, pried out of their casings, and started transcribing the enchantments. She couldn’t open the plates without actually cutting things up, which would break the enchant, but he could note things first and scrap things later, since he could sense right through the protective metal.

He was a fairly deft hand at tracing things out, especially since there were a lot of similar pieces. Certain patterns were standard, like the mana acceptors and intakes, or the conversion portions. It all contributed to a library he was slowly building, though he had no idea to what extent it’d be useful. A lot of it he couldn’t do himself.

“Hey, Lucy, do you think there’s anything you can do with this?” Callum asked after he’d scribed in the new enchantment pieces. “I dunno how much you’ve played with CAD tools but I could use some help figuring out how to make this mess more useful.” He pushed the laptop over to her, and she happily started clicking away.

“Oh yeah, I’ve used this one before. It’s not my favorite, but I used to do all kinds of 3D-printing stuff. Lemme grab my laptop and I can start doing stuff. Oh hey, thanks!” The last sentence came as he waved his hand theatrically and teleported her laptop from where it was charging on the table inside. He had to use gravitykinesis to unplug things first, but that was easy enough.

“I’m not stuck on that program, you can use whatever you want. I’ve got some notes there, but honestly I’m used to designing houses. Not enchantments.”

“Sure, sure.” Lucy was busy on both computers as she fiddled with things. “I pretty much know how to build up a proper library. Don’t worry, big man, I’ll get this stuff sorted.”

“Thanks, Lucy!”

She gave him a big thumbs up and went back to work. He started scrutinizing various scrap when the silverite in the crucible abruptly lost all of its mana at once. It dispersed into the surrounding air, and he jumped over to verify with his eyes what he thought he sensed. It’d caught fire, very suddenly, and was merrily turning to ash. That more or less confirmed that he couldn’t recycle silverite that way.

“Any thoughts?” He asked Lucy, mostly rhetorically.

“I wish I had the enchanter’s guild stuff, but I don’t think they ever put any of it on the intranet,” Lucy shrugged. “Maybe when I get stuff built back up we can find out.”

“Righto,” he replied, and moved onto the other materials. There were a couple of the crests that he’d found from before, which he set aside for later since they seemed to be banic alloy and it was rare enough he’d like to find actual literature on how to process it. Then there were the wards, which didn’t look to be mordite. The color wasn’t right, and when he found his bottle of moonwater and brought it near the stuff, the enchanted wire didn’t shimmer.

By process of elimination it was corite, the fae bane-material. He was pretty sure other things could be used for enchanting, but the bane materials seemed far and away the best. Like with mordite, he didn’t have access to useful information like melting temperature or tensile strength, so he bisected a ward try to expose the corite and got out the blowtorch again. Even if silverite was a bust, corite seemed to be metal so he ought to be able to melt it down. Besides, it was clearly wire, so it could be worked.

After playing the blowtorch over an area for a while he noticed the section losing mana in a similar, if far slower, manner to the silverite. He snapped off the flame and tapped at the heated metal wire, only to see it crack like glass. Callum scowled at it.

“Dammit. How do they work this stuff? It’s useless if you heat it up.”

“Well, it is called cold iron, big man,” Lucy called out from the main worktable.

“No. I refuse to believe it,” Callum said, even as he teleported the other half of the tray, which hadn’t been heated up, into his freezer. “That would be too silly.”

“Well, I mean, it means they probably don’t melt the stuff.”

“Yeah, and I know you can cold-forge, but that requires a lot more effort than I want to deal with.” Callum grimaced. “Turns out you can destroy the usefulness of silverite and corite if you get them hot enough though. That’s not fun. Still, I know they use it so it’s just a matter of figuring it out.”

“Ugh. If I still had my access I could probably find something. An email or post at the very least.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Callum reassured her. “You said the enchanting guild keeps things close to their vest anyway, so there wouldn’t have been much.”

“Even so.” Lucy sighed, flexing her fingers. “I hate to say it, but it’s freezing out here, big man. Mind if I work inside?”

“Oh, no, go right ahead! I’d bring some of this junk inside too but there’s just not much room in there.”

He continued sorting the enchantment material, getting several piles. One was stuff that was coarse enough that he could pry it out manually, or was fixed in wood rather than metal. One was a few other pieces of pure silverite. The last was the lacquered stuff, which he presumed was also silverite, though he didn’t know the process for how it had been applied.

While he was doing that he noticed that despite heading inside of her own initiative, Lucy seemed to be staring off into space instead of actually getting work done. He didn’t like that, and while he couldn’t really sort stuff inside – there just wasn’t room – there was no reason he had to leave her alone. He was used to speaking portals anyway.

“So, while I’m doing this and you’re doing that, go ahead and start considering how to get your access back. It’s not something we’re going to do now, but I’m sure you can come up with a game plan.”

“Oh!” Lucy jumped slightly, turning toward the small portal he was using to speak. It would let a bit of cold air in, but not more than the house’s HVAC could handle. He hoped. “Yeah! Okay, definitely. That’ll be fun, actually.”

He continued chatting with Lucy while he worked, somewhat amused by using portals to cross twenty feet of space, but glad that he could. The total amount of enchanting material wasn’t all that large in the end, though it was more than the mordite he’d acquired. Even if most of it went back to Chester he could at least build another portal anchor, maybe two. More than that, if he could figure out silverite. Callum was half-amused and half-annoyed when he took the tray out of the freezer later on and found that the corite had softened quite a bit. Lucy was insufferably smug, but smug suited her quite well.

Corite was more like gold than putty, but certainly soft enough that he could pry it out of the half-frame without any real issues. That wasn’t something he could go to a friendly metalworker to help with, but at least it meant that stuff like wire-drawing equipment would work on sufficiently chilled corite.

Simply chilling it was not enough to remove the enchantment the metal already held; to clear it out he needed to abuse it a bit. Even if he couldn’t melt it, he could still process it by putting it in a press, crunching the fairly thick wire back into something resembling an ingot. Even that didn’t clear out everything, until he repeated the process in the higher mana density of the cave-cache.

Which suggested a possible reason why GAR had so much infrastructure in the US. There might well be noticeably less wear and tear in the lower mana environment. Sure, there was higher mana from the portal taps, but that wasn’t the same amount as in Europe, and it really only enriched the area nearby.

It didn’t seem likely that his crude and labor-intensive method of recycling corite was how it was normally done, but it still worked. How well the metal would work in his wire-drawing equipment remained to be seen, but at least in theory he could make good on his deal with Alpha Chester.

That left the silverite. He really loved the idea of the lacquer, because that was something that could be painted onto a surface, but making that sort of thing took more than just crude physical tools. It was chemistry, and way beyond him. Maybe Chester would have some idea, but considering it was silverite he doubted it. Asking someone to work with their own bane material would be an issue.

Since he had the weapons and couldn’t process them, he went ahead and equipped himself and Lucy with a silverite dagger each. A gun with silverite bullets would be better and he didn’t have any intent to stab a shifter, but some protection was better than nothing. At least until he could get them better armed.

There was no telling when the supernatural would catch up with them again.

***

Archmage Fane Xun narrowed his eyes at the man in front of him. Most people had the sense not to bring him bad news, but everyone knew he was somewhat more gentle with his direct family. The combination of those two things meant that whenever he saw one of a particular set of nephews he knew there was something that was bound to displease him.

“Speak,” he said.

“Great Patriarch, House Hargrave has refused to communicate further regarding the new initiate. Nor has she been remanded to the custody of the Bureau of Secret Enforcement.”

“I thought this was already settled,” Fane said dangerously. He’d established that anyone who discovered Gu would be stripped of their House a long time ago. Then they would have nowhere to turn but House Fane. It had kept all the truly skilled healing mages within his House for many years. “Why is GAR not intervening?”

“I do not know, Patriarch.”

“What about Taisen?” The Grand Magus was a useful tool, spending more time off being a wilderness savage than paying attention to the BSE itself. With him often gone it was simplicity itself to apply pressure to the various deputies to ensure the right actions were taken.

“The Grand Magus is in seclusion.” Fane scowled. That could mean anything, but probably that he had hared off into the Deep Wilds again and couldn’t be found. Annoying, but potentially useful.

“Arrange to have our people secure the younger Hargrave anyway,” he finally said. “We can’t afford to look weak at the moment.” Some of the other Houses had held him responsible for the debacle of the mass interrogations that found nothing. The fools. Just because they were so incompetent as to miss the traitor hidden in their midst ⁠—

Fane dismissed the man with a wave of his hand and stood from his chair, which was barely short of a throne in the great hall of House Fane. The windows looked out onto a peaceful slice of Zhongguo, as one of the few Houses that kept their estates on Earth rather than the portal worlds. He sneered at even the thought of giving up the land of his ancestors, just to huddle in protective enclaves like peasants and begging Duvall for scraps. Having to rely on her for feeder portals was bad enough.

Besides, the portal worlds couldn’t be trusted. The Dragonlands being moved out of Zhongguo showed that. All those mages who thought they had nice, stable estates were fooling themselves. Might as well live on the moon, for how hospitable those places really were.

He clasped his hands behind him as he took a few steps to look out over a carefully pruned garden. It was a work of art, perfectly made to his specifications and run with a firm hand. If only people would be so amenable. It still irked him that the dragonblooded ran around without anything to curb them, aside from certain perfunctory rules, but there was only so much he could accomplish on his own. The rest of GAR was reluctant to rally around him on some points, just because they didn’t have to experience the long and sordid history of that portal world.

No, they were more worried about some young buck that was evading their clumsy fumblings to locate him. Fane was personally interested in that particular individual, because any insight into the process of magic was hard to come by. There weren’t so many mages around that many could be spared for his experiments, and he was keenly interested in how someone could go for three decades without manifesting any talent of note.

Elevating people’s intrinsic magical ability was something that had long occupied both his thoughts and his time. Crippling it had proved fairly simple, in the end, and had only needed a few dozen prisoners and criminals. So far instilling it directly into mundanes or duds had eluded him, though not for want of trying.

Generating mages in general was easy enough. If a human lived on a portal world long enough – the exact time varied from world to world – but returned to Earth before truly severe changes had taken place, they might become magic-sensitive. Might. Take those magic-sensitives, repeat the process with their children, and by the third generation there were mages. Tamed areas like the ones Duvall made didn’t count.

The current version of the draft had been irritatingly based on the training process he’d put together for his House, to expose his people to as wide a variety of mana types as possible. Taisen had seen other value to it, and Fane wasn’t going to argue to try and keep his monopoly on the idea. People weren’t that stupid; they’d know he had ulterior motives.

His experimentation had shown that a mage’s strength was directly related to their ancestors experiencing the diversity of the portal worlds. Someone who had only been to one would, in general, produce weaker mages than someone who had experienced four or five. Which was why being banned from the Dragonlands was such a blow. It had been an avenue of strength only available to House Fane lineages, but now he was restricted to the principal four.

Portal World Six wasn’t an option, either. Not just because of the busybody with the ridiculous name, no. It was that Portal World Six twisted humans on a scale measured in hours rather than weeks or years. It was far too dangerous.

That all made him wonder exactly what program had produced an apparent powerhouse like Wells. He had some unproven suspicions on how to make a spatial mage, to be borne out in the coming generations, but making a powerful one was apparently a far better investment than Fane would have thought. Wells had demonstrated himself to be a devastatingly effective assassin, which meant that some House somewhere had just gained a tremendous weapon.

That was a capability he’d like for himself, especially in the current climate of unrest between Houses. If someone thought about making a move – like House Hargrave, perhaps – sending an asset like Wells after them would be the appropriate response. Not to mention, if Wells could stabilize space in the same way Duvall could, perhaps House Fane could in fact have a trustworthy foothold in the portal worlds.

A motion of his hand summoned a servant to his side. A proper human servant; Fane didn’t want any shifter curs or vampire lackwits in his House. The less said about the fae, the better.

“Summon the Divine Fifth Group,” he told the servant. “And Fane Sen. Then bring me everything that was reported about the Wells situation.” Wells had proven extremely capable at dealing with any overt threats, but Archmage Fane really only wanted to get his attention.

He found it a little bit amusing that his ongoing issues with the dragonblooded had, in a way, kicked off the whole thing. So far as he knew there really weren’t any other connections to Wells, and nobody wanted to disturb a dragonblooded. But he didn’t care, and Wells seemed a sentimental enough fool that he could be easily swayed into motion.

It was time to revisit the town of Tanner.