Renegade Mage (Paranoid Mage Book 2), page 9
If anything, learning that Wells was some kind of spatial magic mastermind should have excused the escape, but for some reason it just made Patriarch Fane more angry. Sen was suffering under a cloud from no fault of his own, and a displeasure that had resulted in him being assigned to support the Bureau of Secret Protection that was deploying to Europe. Not to head the team, no, just to play backup, despite his demonstrated prowess with wind and fire.
He knew that the Patriarch had leaned on someone to make sure he was included. Sen wasn’t stupid; he realized that the idea was that he’d be able to redeem himself by bringing down Wells, but he thought this was all rather much for one man. Though it was true he was looking forward to seeing that bastard brought appropriately low.
“It’s all hurry up and wait,” one of the other men grunted, some agent with a completely nonsensical European name, something Polish or the like. The relations between the Chinese mage clans and their European counterparts were not as strained as the mundane ones, but neither were they particularly warm.
“Why do we have to sit here all suited up if nobody knows anything about the guy?” Another complained, though he didn’t stop sorting through his combat foci.
“Because he’s a spatial mage and he’s not going to stay in the same place for long.” Sen explained the obvious, ignoring the answering glare. “The moment we get anything I bet you that Duvall herself comes to deploy us.”
“Possibly, but it’s unlikely.” Zarin, the BSE leader with a surprisingly pronounceable name, disagreed. “Archmage Duvall is incredibly busy with the portal worlds and has better things to do than our job. Besides, she has an aversion to violence. She might make an exception for a spatial mage, but we expect to find more than just a spatial mage.”
“I don’t like how little information we have,” the first agent complained.
“Neither do I,” Zarin said. “But considering what this group’s already done we can’t sit back and wait.”
“What worries me is the reports that he’s associating with the dragonblooded,” said the man with the annoying name. “That’s not something even we should be tangling with.”
“They’re not really that impressive,” Sen said. “My Patriarch has killed several.”
“Yeah? And how has that worked out for him?”
Sen scowled. The feud wasn’t active anymore, but there had been some rather vicious fighting between the dragonblooded and the Fanes around the turn of the eighteenth century. Some of the older members of the House still didn’t like leaving the bounds of the Middle Kingdom.
“That’s just a rumor,” Zarin chided them. “The dragonblooded don’t align themselves with any factions on this side of the portal. If there’s one around, we ignore it.”
“Yes, sir,” said the annoying man. Sen sighed, and went back to checking his foci.
***
Callum wasn’t really eager to go into the vampire world, for many and obvious reasons, but it was clear he had two choices. One was to take a few risks and get the materials he needed to set up infrastructure, or hide under a rock. Even if he chose the latter, all that meant was that it’d take longer for GAR to find him and he wouldn’t be prepared when they did. In the end, it wasn’t a choice at all.
Contrary to expectations, the vampire portal world, the Night Lands, didn’t have its entrance in Transylvania. In fact, the locations of the portal worlds seemed rather disconnected from their mythological sources, as the fae portal wasn’t in Ireland, but rather the Black Forest of Germany. Considering Shahey’s mention that the legends of dragons came before the dragons themselves, Callum had suspicions that supernaturals were not as old as they liked to style themselves.
From the official history he’d found, the fae portal was far and away the oldest, since it had been around long enough for people to actually colonize it, but it was in Germany, which wasn’t generally connected to Titania and Oberon in legends. The Alps didn’t really seem like the best place for dragons, and the Ardennes, in France, didn’t scream vampire.
Those three places were, however, nicely remote areas for someone to experiment without being disturbed while still being close to civilization. Or, alternately, they were areas where a portal could be moved to that were not in the path of common travel. The limited amount of literature he had access to didn’t hint anything about their origins, but there was no reason they’d always been where they were now. After all, he could move his own portals without dismissing them.
He was fresh and recharged after spending time in the dragonlands, so he wrapped himself and his luggage in his vis and started teleporting northward. The one ID he had was only good for the states, certainly not for Europe, and he wasn’t sure how well just paying cash or hitchhiking would be taken. They were used to American tourists, certainly, but he didn’t have a passport and he wasn’t sticking to the tourist traps.
That said, it was still two hundred miles from the Matterhorn to the Ardennes, which was a fairly long haul. If he could take what Shahey said at face value then the fae shouldn’t have been able to track him after he entered the dragonlands, and the same would be true in the Night Lands, but it was a tossup as to whether they could locate him in between.
Accordingly, he traveled quickly, with his senses spread wide, ready to head off in another direction if he caught a hint of anything supernatural. Even if the area was remote and so perfect for a fae enclave, the preponderance of dragonlands mana probably kept them away. Even so, he made sure to teleport to spots screened by trees or brush, because he’d learned his lesson about snipers.
An hour or so later, he’d slowed down on his teleports as there didn’t seem to be any pursuit happening. With a little bit of breathing room, he decided that he’d be perfectly capable of fleeing from a moving train if someone did catch up to him, so he made his way to a train station and bought a ticket to Basel. He found his nationality and complete inability to speak anything other than English was not a problem, though he was warned that crossing the Swiss border was a little more involved. Not that he had to worry much about that.
The train ride gave him a little bit of time to try and ponder the new insights he’d gotten from the portal worlds, but he didn’t have the ability to actually practice anything. He’d leave smears behind him in the mana field as the train moved, and he still felt that masquerading as an ordinary person was the easiest way to hide from supernatural attention. Instead he got out his laptop, reading up on the Night Lands while the back of his head marveled at how bizarre the encounter with Shahey was.
There was no telling how old the dragonblooded was, but by his own admission, Shahey had been in Tanner throughout Callum’s entire life. It was hard to believe the dragonblooded didn’t know more about his parents or even Callum’s talents, but at the same time he wasn’t someone Callum could push for answers. Although, Shahey had been remarkably forthcoming about the nature of dragons and Callum’s parents, which made Callum wonder what exactly Shahey was trying to manipulate him into doing.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know enough to figure out what Shahey’s angle was, or if he was just messing around. The uncertainly made him even more anxious, chewing his lip as he looked out the window at the landscape passing by. Eventually he wrestled his thoughts back around to being careful in the moment, rather than in the future.
Each time the train entered a major city, he got a little twitchy because there were obviously supernaturals around, and he ended up teleporting off the train before it actually arrived at the station. There were too many mage trails to be comfortable and some obvious fae, so he decided to circle around and pick up the train on the other side whenever there was such a stop. While he’d done it before, teleporting from a moving place to a stationary one or vice versa was a bit weird, the relative positions changing constantly.
He wasn’t sure what happened to the velocity difference, but he certainly felt no deceleration. It did imply that he ought to be able to fling stuff if he had a moving teleport anchor, though the logistics for that were somewhat fraught. It was one thing to have himself and a stable piece of land to reference, it was another thing to move the framework willy-nilly. Portals might be better, and he added that to his notebook as a topic of practice.
Callum got off the train for good just before he reached Basel, leaving behind a cleanup enchantment in the screws of the seat he’d been using, and made his way northward a few score miles until he found a French train station. There he purchased another ticket, one for his real destination of the Ardennes. Something he did note as he traveled was the shifting mana as he passed by the fae portal, somewhere over in Germany. Even though he couldn’t really tell the difference between the different types, there were definite currents.
With the precautions he was taking, there were only two times when he got really alarmed. Both times he saw mage bubbles moving in his direction and he popped himself orthogonally a few times and waited to see if he was followed. Fortunately he wasn’t, but that still was an unpleasant experience.
Callum wished to himself that he could afford to be less jumpy as he finally got off near his stop. Just like when he was near the Alps, he could sense a higher flow of mana coming from somewhere out in the Ardennes. Also like the Alps, it was quite picturesque despite the chilly weather and he wished he had the time to actually enjoy it, rather than blaze through as fast as possible.
He sighed and headed inward toward where the map marker placed the portal, though with somewhat more caution than he had approached the dragon’s portal. He expected one that was actually trafficked would have more infrastructure, and indeed it didn’t take him long to find the edges of a ward. Of course, it was made easier by how quickly he could move with teleports; as far as walking went it would have been quite a trip.
Unlike the dragon’s portal, the vampire portal was a full GAR installation, which was actually more worrisome than actual vampires. He had a number of advantages, but enough people and defenses could make any kind of infiltration impossible. No matter how much he needed materials, if it was too busy he wouldn’t even dare.
Upon actual surveillance, though, it wasn’t actually that large a compound. While he was intellectually aware of how much the teleport network changed things, it was weird to see a large building off in the woods and completely disconnected from anything else. At the very least it should have been a small town, if it was a staging point for the draft and a connection to one of the major supernatural races, but it wasn’t.
The building reminded him more of a courthouse than a castle, large and squat with a single oversized story, the walls all a single piece of smooth stone. There was only a single set of windows by the door, which was a heavily reinforced number facing north. It was pretty boring to look at, really.
The outer wards were probably actually glamours, designed to hide the place from prying eyes. They didn’t have the rotating connections that he’d seen in more advanced wards, and were just a loose screen that was easy to get past. Beyond those there was some heavier warding that seemed like actual security systems.
Even if there weren’t any windows he located a tree for cover before he teleported himself through the outer wards, so he could bring the entire building inside the range of his perceptions. It took him a while to see through the weave of vis that made up the security ward, but the interior wasn’t complex either. The actual portal was in the center, inside of a room that looked fairly fancy and even included a ramp going through the center of the portal to the other side. There was a guardpost set at the door leading into and out of the room, with some complex enchantments that he couldn’t even begin to puzzle out.
That guardpost had a pair of mages, but neither of them seemed to notice Callum. In fact, they were reading and not really paying attention at all. The rest of the building was given over to facilities for the guards and a set of GAR teleporters. One of the normal ones, and one that had a far, far larger pad, presumably for cargo. It did make sense that they didn’t need more than a set of observers and access control on the Earth side of the portal, but it still felt weird.
The portal itself was not the same as the one which led to the dragonlands. In a way that was obvious; it was some other weird dimension, of course it wouldn’t be the same. But it was also a massive tangled snarl of mana rather than the coherent and structured ring of the dragonlands. At a guess, it was actually natural, or mostly natural.
There were structured portions tacked onto the snarl, possibly so it could be moved, and the weird twists and turns of the rest of it were, after a closer look, not actually random. While it was still complex, he could see some familiar patterns. The actual portal anchor structures; the bits that pulled in mana to fuel it; all the usual features were there. They just looked messy and were probably very inefficient, but he could at least believe they’d been made by natural processes.
On the other side of the portal was another, larger room, which he assumed was likewise guarded or at least controlled. That could have been a serious issue, since he absolutely needed to get through unobserved. He was confident he could bypass the wards, but less confident he could bypass actual observers.
Fortunately for him, the vampire portal was positioned very similarly to the one in the dragonlands, where there was a definite front and back. Though the area around it was artificial rather than natural, there wasn’t a wall flat against the unused side of the portal. It made sense, since the actual rim was thicker than the flat plane of the hole it made, but the upshot was that there was a few feet of empty space that he could hide in.
Before he went in, he made sure to charge up his emergency escape. It wasn’t pleasant to deal with, but if he got caught sneaking in he’d need to use it right away. Once the focus was tingling unpleasantly, he sent a thread through the gaps in the warding and popped himself behind the portal.
Chapter 6 – Night Lands
Callum stood in the dusty darkness of the portal rear for a few minutes, feeling the homebond vibrate his vis while he stretched out with his senses to make sure that nobody had noticed his entrance. The little space he was in was screened from either side and there was a lot of mana pouring through, so he hoped that it wouldn’t be obvious that he’d teleported there.
He was proven right when the mage bubbles didn’t move. That was true on either side of the portal, as both sides had an access chamber guarded by people. The difference with the Night Lands was those people were vampires.
Now that he was more familiar with things, he could tell the difference between them and a normal human solely from the vis they carried inside them and not just the change in features. Actually, Callum was a lot more worried about them than he was about the mages. It had become clear that mages didn’t generally have the senses to pick him up so long as he was being quiet and out of sight, but a vampire might well see or hear or smell him and move faster than Callum could react. He didn’t want to stay in close proximity for very long.
The building in the Night Lands actually was a castle, and like in the dragonlands the area was absolutely saturated in mana. It took more effort than he liked to get his perceptions through the thick stone walls and figure out where he was in relation to everything. Like every castle it was far larger than was strictly practical, with a truly fantastic number of rooms and broad, tall hallways. Unlike the compound on the other side, it was built with quarried blocks and practically oozed age.
It was definitely inhabited, or at least staffed, with a mix of vampires and mages and, uncomfortably, normal people. Or at least humans without the standard mage bubble. It made at least a little bit of sense, because a castle demanded menial labor and he couldn’t see mages stooping to cooking and cleaning. But in an off-Earth, vampire-filled castle, that seemed like a pretty terrible existence.
Or they might just be people like Lucy, supernatural duds employed by GAR in whatever jobs. It was a mistake to think that just because the people weren’t supernatural, they’d be on his side. He didn’t notice any marks of blatant slavery so there was at least some measure of civility. It was something to look into after he was finished, because he’d need a hell of a plan to think about dealing with an entire castle in any meaningful way.
Fortunately, castles were not exactly tall. Even if it was a magical castle, the roof overhead was well within Callum’s range and, what was better, had some nice sheltered areas he could put himself in. Selecting an alcove at the base of a turret, he popped himself to the outside.
The first thing he noticed was the moon. It was enormous and full, covering half the sky, seeming almost close enough he could touch it. Unlike the silvery illumination of Earth’s moon, the one in the Night Lands gave off a sort of weird, grey-blue glow, even if it made no sense for glow to be that color. That rendered everything outside dim and dark, somewhere past twilight but not the deep dark of a moonless night.
The moon itself wasn’t crater-scarred and barren like Earth’s moon either, instead slowly rippling as if it were made out of water. It was just as alien a sight as the endless cliff face of the dragonlands, and in many ways far more breathtaking. The utter blankness and blackness of the rest of the sky only emphasized the way the moon dominated everything.
Despite the dragonlands being in eternal day, or at least having a cycle longer than he’d been there, the Night Lands being, well, night still somehow surprised him. It was stupid, especially since the name told him all he needed to know, but actually crossing from day to night so sharply was disconcerting. He was just glad he had his spatial perceptions, because his night vision was not anywhere good enough for the Night Lands.
Not that it was particularly dark in the town. Unsurprisingly, the castle and the portal was surrounded by more buildings, though he wasn’t sure town was the quite the right word for the sprawl of civilization. There were lights along the streets and shining through house windows, a blue-white that reminded Callum of natural gas more than anything, though he suspected it was all enchantment-based. Trees and gardens shone green under spotlights
