Paranoid Mage

Breaking into government records was more involved than Callum had thought. Between Lucy handling the digital stuff and his own ability to get anywhere, he’d gotten probably a touch lazy and overconfident about such tasks. Or maybe it was just that GAR and mage Houses weren’t all that large, unlike the federal government.

There were hundreds of offices scattered over multiple states, and just trying to find out where all the records were stored was an ordeal. That went for both physical and digital, since it seemed that the network that stuff was stored on was ancient. Getting Lucy access was easy enough, but things didn’t go as smoothly as they had before.

“Why is it so terrible?” Lucy groaned, slapping the table next her laptop, which was plugged into a server in an obscure room through a portal. “It’s like, fifty year old languages and database software! I haven’t even touched this stuff! Ugh, I’m going to have to go learn it all.”

Callum laughed. He wasn’t unsympathetic, but of all the complaints to be had about government level security, the age and obsolescence wasn’t one he’d anticipated. Though it wasn’t like the physical filing was any better. How anyone got any work done was beyond him.

“Well, best to focus on the immediate stuff for now. Get rid of any of the communications or memos directed at Chester. Did you find out who incited it at least?”

“Yeah, Director Cornell. I figure, just wipe everything of his to start. Copy it all and give it to Chester, though I don’t know if his lawyer could do anything even with proof.”

“Probably not,” Callum agreed. “They couldn’t even answer how they got it, even if the government admitted it was real. But it’s worth a shot. Right, let’s pay a visit to Cornell and move on from there.”

Callum wasn’t certain if he was more surprised at how little magical protection there was on government offices, or how much. The relative lack of it showed that there really weren’t many supernaturals, or at least not supernatural interest, high up in the government bureaucracy. But there were some places that were warded or had some kind of fae protections. Though he didn’t know if that actually meant there were supernaturals directly involved. It was entirely possible some people had family trinkets with fae warding on them.

Cornell’s office was so messy it made him actually appreciate the organization at GAR. At least the filing cabinets Constance had kept were properly alphabetized and divided. Instead there were piles of manila folders and an honest-to-goodness cathode ray tube monitor, with the computer password written on a sticky note adhered to the oversized bezel of said monitor.

Admittedly, this was all inside a bunch of mundane security that Callum could completely ignore. People tended to get complacent about their personal security when they had others to take care of it for them. He didn’t even know where the Director was, despite it being work hours.

Both he and Lucy wore gloves, reaching through useful portals rather than actually going there directly. No need to leave more of a presence than necessary. They expected to find a receipt for whatever had started the harassment, but any information would help. Even if it was just another location to look through.

“What do you think they’ll do if all the stuff related to Chester keeps disappearing?” Lucy asked idly. “I mean, it can only help, but won’t they realize someone is messing with them?”

“Sure, a few people will, but it’s a huge bureaucracy. Without a paper trail and clear instructions, it’s just going to mire itself in confusion and internal investigations.” Callum flipped through a folder and grimaced at the dense columns of numbers attached to a name he didn’t recognize. “I’d feel guilty about it, except it’s just a lot of bad actors weaponizing other bad actors.”

“Tell you what, I feel properly secret-agent-y breaking into top secret facilities,” Lucy said, having less compunctions about their search than Callum. “Though it’s a little disappointing I don’t really get to use the vulnerabilities I’ve learned. All that work and people leave passwords out or have unpatched fifty-year-old code in their computers!”

“Turns out that the government is banal and dusty, who would’ve thought?” Callum said, and Lucy pouted at him.

Despite their complaints, there was some information to point them to other locations, not far away. There was so much bureaucracy in one place, and yet it wasn’t actually centralized. It was as if someone had gone out of their way to make it as obtuse and inefficient as possible.

“At least we don’t have to walk it,” Lucy said, looking at the drone footage. “It reminds me of all the GAR hallways, except worse.”

“Yeah, there’s nothing more depressing than big government buildings — wait a minute.” Callum frowned as his perceptions ran across a bit of magic where it shouldn’t have been. For the most part he ignored the normal people doing their own jobs, since they were just government employees. Even if there were occasional fae artifacts around in offices, it wasn’t surprising given how wealthy people ended up with gifts or heirlooms.

But there was a difference between that and seeing fae magic actually in a person. While he still couldn’t really read the structure of fae stuff, he had seen something similar before — the geas that had been put on Lucy. Perhaps not as strong, but it was still some kind of manipulation.

“Looks like someone under a geas. A weaker one, but still a geas.” Callum sat up straight in his chair and Lucy let out a long breath.

“Guess we’ve got to do something about that,” she said.

“Yeah, let me get my cloak,” Callum said, standing up and reaching through his portal network. Since it was made out of fae magic, he couldn’t store it in the redoubt without destroying it. He had to leave it in an Earth-side cache, and leave open a portal while he used it so there’d at least be some fae type magic around.

He put it on, feeling a little bit silly, even if the cloak was itself quite comfortable. But it seemed to do what it was supposed to, and any time he acted as The Ghost he figured he might as well wear it. Dealing with the fae was tricky.

“Aight, if you could get pictures of this person and his name, I’ll just clean him up.”

“Sure,” Lucy said, fingers dancing across the keyboard of her laptop as she searched for the person’s identity. “But who are we gonna tell?”

“Well, we do have a fae princess who’s supposed to be moderating faerie stuff on Earth. Eventually.”

“Okay, but what’s Felicia going to do?”

“I sure have no idea, but frankly, that’s her problem,” Callum said. Lucy raised her eyebrows at him. “If she asks for help, that’s one thing, but I wouldn’t dare to suggest policy when it comes to fae power struggles.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Lucy said. “Okay, got the name and photos.”

“Great,” Callum said, and focused on the government official in question. He was sitting in a conference room with a few other people, eating lunch and playing on his phone. Nothing out of the ordinary. After calculating sight-lines for a few moments, Callum opened up a very small portal behind the guy, leading to an anti-mana dimension.

He was getting slightly better at it, and didn’t need to lean on his vis crystals as often, which was good since anti-mana was by far the best way he had to deal with hostile magic. The anti-mana that bubbled out from the portal swept through the man’s body, erasing the fae influence before Callum collapsed it.

The portal itself hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed; wherever it led did have its own atmosphere, and a gust of wind shoved a few papers around. People shifted and looked about confused, and one of them may have seen the dark circle behind Callum’s target, but since it vanished so quickly he suspected they’d just write it off.

The guy he’d just purged the mind control from, or whatever it was, didn’t seem to notice, but that was fine with Callum. It was better than undergoing a sudden seizure or something because a fae had twisted his brain around so much he was just an empty shell. In a way Callum was glad that GAR had been run by people with no interest in Earth, simply because hijacking leaders and governments would be so easy to people with magic.

“Done,” Callum said. “Guess I’d better sweep for others. I don’t think whoever is doing this would stop at just one random bureaucrat.” Though for all he knew the man was important. There was no telling who had control of what in a bureaucracy, not really.

He focused on his perceptions as he swept the drone through the building, and moved on to the neighboring ones, focusing on any trace of magic. Aside from the three fae artifacts he’d already found – all old coins, in some kind of display case – there was someone with a charm necklace and one rug. None of them seemed to really affect people, though. It wasn’t until he moved through to the more rarefied echelons that he ran into another affected person.

The victim that time was an older lady, in yet another conference room, having a meeting. Which seemed to be about the only thing that went on in the government complex. He teleported the drone into a likely corner, putting the little box on top of a projector, and waited for Lucy to capture the face of the woman before purging the fae magic out of her.

She actually wobbled, but didn’t fall over, and listening to the drone feed she merely made claims of being tired, low blood sugar, and other such excuses. Which she probably believed, though Callum didn’t like how it had affected her. She might have been under their control for a long time.

“You know, this isn’t as widespread as I expected,” Lucy remarked.

“They probably can’t do it to just anyone,” Callum said. “I mean, fae magic is bullshit but it does have rules. Plus, from what I’ve seen it’s pretty obvious when people are manipulated. It’s not like these people have unquestioned authority, either, so there’s compromises to be made.”

While he didn’t have the time to survey literally everyone in Washington, DC, he made a pass through all the important areas of governance and purged three more people. None of them were particularly high up, but there was clearly some kind of plan at play. Hopefully one that would be derailed by removing the control.

“You know, there’s probably people all over the world who have some kind of control on them,” Lucy suggested.

“Possibly, but I can’t scan literally everyone,” Callum sighed. “I swear, the more we look the worse this gets. I really hope that Felicia can clean it up more directly.”

***

“It fits in with what I heard over in Faerie,” Ray Danforth said, sitting with Felicia and two archmages. Neither Archmage Taisen nor Archmage Hargrave were particularly happy to hear what Wells had to report, though it wasn’t like they could be targeted by any government. Neither House existed in any mundane records or could be accessed by mundane enforcement.

“Now, I’m pretty sure they’re going to backstab House Janry and GAR the moment they can,” he continued. “But for the moment they’re working hand in hand. Exactly why they want to control Earth’s governments is beyond me, though.”

“Power,” Felicia wrote. “There are billions of humans to play parts in whatever stories they decide to pursue. There aren’t even millions of fae. The incursion of the Ways will help spread the mana of Faerie too, bringing the two worlds closer together.”

“Essentially, an invasion,” Taisen concluded. “Do they realize how dangerous it is if the mundanes catch wind of it? Have any of them seen what a modern military can do? Glamours aren’t really going to help against bombs and missiles.”

Ray grunted. He didn’t see how bombs and missiles would help defend against fae blending in and manipulating people, but the worry about Earth finding out about the supernaturals had turned from theoretical to real all too quickly. Now that he was out of it, he didn’t have much good to say about the Guild of Arcane Regulation, but they had kept that from being anywhere near a possibility for a very long time.

“I guess the question is what Wells expects you to do about it,” Ray said to Felicia.

“Resolve it,” Felicia wrote. “He expects me to do my duty as a daughter of Oberon.”

“That seems a little…” Ray paused and considered his words. “It’s a bit much to expect.”

Felicia sighed and rubbed at her eyes, then dropped her glamour. Which was fairly unusual, though Ray was not unfamiliar with the sight of her native fae form. He was pretty sure she had somehow put on a few inches, though, and her skin was shading toward a darker blue.

“Now that I have taken up my heritage, it’s not something I can put aside,” she said, putting her tablet down. Her words hung in the air, an almost physical presence. “I have to either fulfill it or fail at it, now.” She reached out to him and he took her hand.

“Felicia, I—” He stopped, not entirely certain what to say. She’d sacrificed more than he ever would have asked to get him out of Faerie, and he knew he didn’t fully understand what all the changes meant. Things had gone beyond the days of being ordinary agents and investigators, or even just the days of being partners. He had no idea how he’d measure up to a fae princess, but he certainly had to try.

The ping of the emergency comms network interrupted his stalled train of thought. The Antarctic base had a broadcast system just in case, but it was rarely used, so the tone jerked everyone to attention. Taisen was out of his chair before the voice cut in.

“Case Zulu in Storage-5, Transport-7,” a voice came. It was calm enough, but he knew the various codewords Taisen had drilled into his people. Case Zulu was an invasion by a hostile party.

“There are fae here,” Felicia said, ignoring the fact that there were plenty of fae already working for House Taisen, but Ray knew what she meant. While it was possible that some hostile House could find the Antarctic base, trying to assault through the protections Taisen had set up would be difficult. At least for anyone who wasn’t Wells, but he was pretty sure Wells wasn’t involved. Fae, though, could skip past some of the protections.

“While I’m here? Poor timing,” Hargrave said, his force armor appearing and rendering him into a faceless titan.

“Or purposeful,” Taisen said, his own force shield rather less showy than Hargrave’s, but certainly no less potent. “All the targets together,” he said before he started snapping orders through his comm-link. Ray shored up his own shields, extending his sphere of authority around Felicia.

“I need to confront them,” Felicia said, brooking no argument. “We’ll go to the fight.”

Ray was glad that neither Taisen nor Hargrave argued, though really there wasn’t time. He channeled his vis through Felicia’s uniform and the two of them took off flying after the archmages. The base was built large enough that mages could use their movement techniques, both horizontally and vertically, and they shot past other personnel following drilled-in responses. Not everyone in House Taisen was a combatant.

They reached the vertical shafts and dived downward four levels, hearing the sharp crack and rumble of magic in use. A moment later they emerged into a scene out of a horror movie. Walls and floors were no longer metal and stone, but flesh and bone and wriggling things. Blood stank and spattered everywhere, most of it inhuman, but that didn’t seem to matter to the intruders.

Eye-twisted tentacles rose from the floor, while distorted beasts, looking like some careless god had smashed parts from a dozen animals together, crawled along the walls. If it was just flesh it wouldn’t have threatened even a subpar mage, but he could see the magic twisting thick about it, turning limbs and teeth into something harder and tougher than steel. Things moved far faster than anything a human could track, blurring from one position to another, easily evading concentrated fire.

In the gore it was impossible to tell how many mages were down, but Ray didn’t believe for a moment there hadn’t been casualties. If a fae had enough power to transmute that much metal and stone, then they had enough to breach the shields of most mages. Especially if it was a surprise.

“The hell is this?” Ray muttered, channeling vis into his combat foci. A vicious cyclone spun out, tearing apart one of the lumpen chimeras and scattering unidentifiable pieces over the already-gory floor — only for the pieces to shift and merge and reform into other, smaller horrors. “This isn’t fae stuff,” he complained, even though he saw it had to be.

“I recognize the stories,” Taisen said, conjuring some sort of spell that set swaths of eldritch organism to smoldering. “Doesn’t burn as well as it should, though.”

“Allow me,” Felicia said, and raised her voice, which was something Ray had almost never heard. “I charge House Taisen under my authority to remove the enemies of Felicity Blackblood. Any who surrender and swear to me will be spared. Those who persist will be destroyed.”

A pulse of mana swept out from her; it wasn’t much power, but it seemed to change the tide of the battle in its wake. The mages that were having trouble keeping the heaving mass of flesh at bay found it suddenly far easier to cut and cauterize. Taisen’s magic severed and compartmentalized and crushed, revealing that the change of the storage area’s walls was a true transmutation, not just illusion. It also revealed a tunnel of flesh leading down into the ice, from which terrible wet noises came.

“I’ll take care of—” Taisen started, but Felicia interrupted him. Ray understood why; if she wanted to be a princess, she had to be in charge. But interrupting Archmage Taisen made him wince.

“They get one chance,” she said. “Purge any who refuse to surrender. Archmage Hargrave, might I request your aid in eliminating the rest of these insurrectionists while Archmage Taisen deals with this?” She pointed out into the hall. There was at the very least another level of fae to deal with, and that was assuming more hadn’t arrived.

“I’d enjoy it,” Hargrave said, his golden armor glowing as he surveyed the carnage. Taisen merely snorted and dove down the tunnel, burning things as he went.

“C’mon, Ray,” Felicia said, and he spun them around and headed down the seventh floor transport hall. Instead of a sea of flesh and tentacled horrors, there was a swarm of enormous fish-like humanoids, as if in some mockery of Felicia’s own inhuman traits. They were being held off almost entirely by a single metal mage with a barbed wall, but each blow from the fishy fists dented it, and their blue-green skin simply shrugged off projectiles of fire and ice.

“Surrender or be destroyed,” Felicia thundered, her words sweeping past the defending mages – who were disadvantaged by not wanting to bring tons of ice down on their heads – and made the attacking fae flinch. Hargrave darted in ahead, shrugging off the spells from the other mages, and went fist to fist with the nearest monsters. They did not survive the experience.

After the combat went from an effective stalemate to a slaughter, the dozens of assaulting fae suddenly broke and tried to run back through a hole in the ice. Hargrave’s force wall blocked them off with contemptuous ease, and Ray contributed some of his own piercing winds to whittle down the numbers of the fishmen fae. Only with nowhere to go did some of them actually start to surrender.

“Mercy!” One of them cried, then another. “Mercy, Princess Blackblood!”

Taisen’s people hesitated, but Hargrave went in closer, boxing the fae off in an impenetrable wall. Ray followed with Felicia and she stared down at them imperiously.

“Swear to me,” she said. “Heart, mind, and breath.” Several of them blanched, but Felicia merely waited, and Hargrave began reducing the size of the box around the fae. That was all that was needed for one to start reciting the oath, quickly followed by several of its compatriots.

One of them started screaming something at Felicia in a language Ray didn’t know, but whatever it was, he was set upon by several others in the box and torn to pieces in a sudden burst of claws and jaws. Ray was used to some level of casual violence from the fae, but it was strange to see them turn on each other so quickly and thoroughly.

“You can release them,” Felicia said, after all the fish-men inside the box had either sworn their oath or been massacred for refusing to swear. “They won’t move against you.” Not that they were all that much of a threat after Felicia had, through whatever fae interaction, crippled the opposing magic.

Hargrave released the force box, and Felicia surveyed the gaggle of fish fae. Already their forms were blurring, and they’d probably return to something similar to human in short order. Once a fae’s story was broken, it was left with only a vestige of power and whatever form they’d been born with. Ray had a suspicion these fae had adopted their current form only recently, if they were using stories that Archmage Taisen recognized, since they had to have come from the Lesser Courts in Faerie.

“Not the most auspicious start to my own Court,” Felicia said, surveying the beaten fae. “But it is a start. If Archmage Taisen—” As if her words caused it, there was a shaking and shuddering from somewhere deep underneath them, where Taisen was undoubtedly eradicating the much more powerful fae that had started converting the base. One of the sworn fae leapt at the nearest mage while they were all distracted, only to shriek and wither away in midair, turning to dust.

“The hell was that?” Ray asked, staring at the place where the fae evaporated.

“Oaths are not to be taken lightly,” Felicia said, but her grip was tight on his arm. Despite the harsh mien she had adopted, it was clear she was finding it difficult to deal with everything. “I expect that nobody else will be tempted,” she added, her words nearly flattening the gathered fish-men.

“So where did they come from?” Ray asked, looking at the hole in the back of the room, opening into an ice tunnel. He didn’t see how that could have happened without setting off the wards, though just because it looked like a physical passage didn’t mean it was.

“Someone must have opened a tunnel from Faerie,” Felicia said, taking a deep breath. “There is a Way involved, I can smell it.” Then she turned to Hargrave. “My thanks for your help, Archmage Hargrave. The Court of Blackblood owes you a favor.”

“Glad to be of help,” Hargrave said after a moment, clearly processing what exactly it meant to be owed a favor. Ray took a moment to consider it himself. He still didn’t know how he felt about Felicia being a direct daughter of the rulers of Faerie, especially since she still didn’t act like it. Her sudden assertion of authority over the attacking fae was an exception, but he suspected it would eventually be a rule.

That more or less stopped the attempted sabotage of the Antarctic base dead. Ray doubted that either of the archmages would have been in any danger, especially not with all the precautions that Taisen had in place, but it was very possible that the base itself would have been destroyed. Not to mention how many of the less skilled mages could have been hurt or killed.

“I’ll have to talk to my new subjects, and find out who they are and what they know.” Felicia’s voice still resonated in the air, powerful even if it wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. “Then, I’ll see if I can do anything about what The Ghost asked,” she added, lowering her voice until only Ray could hear her. “An embarrassing amount of my power comes from the legitimacy his recognition grants me. The least I can do is return the favor.”

***

The Master of Weltentor stepped out of the Gate of Bones, baring his teeth at the weak mana of Earth. Already he could tell that the savory breath of the Night Lands was waning, some vital element gone. The amount puffing out from the Ways was hardly going to be noticeable, and the Ways mostly carried Faerie’s stink anyway. The connection into the Night Lands was not and never would be particularly strong, so it wasn’t even possible to send subordinates and repopulate, but it was at least a way through to Earth.

The gate itself was no longer in South America, that particular avenue having been closed with prejudice. Somehow the fae had conjured up an entire castle in a dark and rainy country, where whatever sun there was failed to penetrate the clouds. He suspected that it was some piece of fae nonsense, though at the moment it was welcome. The Earth’s sun was irritating.

“Welcome,” said Prince Jusael of the Court of Roses, with just a hint of mockery, as if his form weren’t enough. Weltentor restrained himself. Despite his personal dislike of Jusael, the fae protections had been proof against mordite and it was only through the Ways that Weltentor had any access to Earth. The fae had a superior position, and he would be a fool not to recognize it.

“Prince Jusael,” Weltentor said neutrally. “How go your plans?”

“Frustratingly,” Jusael said, with a hiss. “The mages refuse to commit to a war, which is the only way to decide such things. Free passage to Earth helps a lot, but I’ve seen what archmages can do. This entire thing could be over in a few days if they united.”

“Humans are bad at uniting,” Weltentor said, taking a seat and glancing out at the rain-swept, bare-branched forest beyond the castle. “Given a chance they’ll each form their own faction.” Both vampires and fae were far better at centralizing power, but it was an unfortunate fact that humans had the advantage on Earth. By raw numbers, if nothing else.

“Our opponents are irritatingly united,” Jusael remarked. “It’s much harder to assault a fortified position than a divided nation.”

“Which, I take it, is what you wanted to see me about.” Weltentor said, somewhat exasperated by how Jusael danced around any topic for ages until he finally got to the point. He preferred to be direct.

“Now that we’ve found the daughter of Oberon, she has proved unfortunately evasive. Preferring to hide behind the power of mages.” Jusael sneered, waving a dismissive hand to show what he thought of that. “Nor will she meet any of her peers on the field of battle, preferring to only deal with the less powerful among us. However, a vampire might do just fine.”

“Preferably a vampire that can stand up to archmages,” Weltentor said, nodding understanding. “Of which there are very few.”

“Precisely.” Jusael showed his fangs. “With Princess Blackblood removed – and I would prefer capture, considering the value of her bloodline – then we would be free to establish more footholds on Earth. Her very presence makes it more difficult.”

“I wouldn’t be opposed,” Weltentor conceded, having been made aware of the connection between the fae’s target and his. Useful as the fae were, he needed a more personal reason to come out to Earth than the fae wanting him to hunt down one of their number. The Ghost was about the only reason he could think of, and it was the name that had lured him out.

“But it seems foolish to provide The Ghost with such a target,” he said after a moment. “So far nobody has had any luck holding a prisoner The Ghost is interested in. He has yet to bring anyone back from death.”

“That is a risk we are willing to take,” Jusael said, without quite conceding that he’d had someone taken from under his nose. “It is certain that much of his ability comes from her to begin with.”

Privately, Weltentor doubted it, but he wasn’t going to argue with a fae. It would only make Jusael more stubborn and pigheaded. As if any fae prince needed to be more insufferable. While he was looking forward to meeting The Ghost in person, as it were, he wasn’t going to do so while holding onto a hostage. Though if Jusael managed it, so much the better. There was no way he was going to let the Ghost get away with severing the Night Lands. Even if he couldn’t target the man directly, he could do enough damage to hurt.