Paranoid Mage

Chapter 21: Rescue

Callum paced back and forth beside the campsite hed set up near the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala, counting down the hours as his cane dug into the lose, rocky ground. Hed gotten a little sleep, somewhat further away from the actual lava flow than his staging point, but only a little bit. The anxiety was just too much for him to relax.

He ran over his supplies in the cave cache once again. Guns, his spatial grenade materials, and a number of boulders. None of which he wanted to use, but he had to be prepared. Food and drink and a medical kit, because there was no telling what shape either of them were going to be in afterward. He had his van parked near a hospital in Mexico, with the telepad relocated from his house to the cave.

Thered been no traces of supernatural activity at the trailer. That was good, since it was that as a bolthole or a random hotel, and Callum didnt much trust hotels. The less he showed his face, the better.

Once he finished yet another inventory, he stopped to review the map hed gotten of the BSE base. The problem was that Chester couldnt guarantee where the portal anchor would be placed, or that Lucy was actually in one of the cells. He wanted to move as quickly as possible once he activated the portal, so hed need to get himself oriented and figure out which building was which from his sensory sphere.

Undoubtedly they were waiting for him, but unless they had every square inch of the facility locked down and under surveillance, he was pretty sure that the activation wouldnt be obvious. His major worry was that the portal anchor itself would be blocked, because even if Chesters shifters got caught smuggling it in, having the anchor dumped in some lockbox wasnt an issue. Even if it was somewhere offsite, he could just teleport the anchor back through the portal and do things the hard way.

Even though assaulting the BSE facility was in many ways incredibly stupid, he wasnt going to just rush in, guns blazing. He had some idea of the capabilities normal mages possessed, and more importantly, what they didnt possess. They couldnt see through walls the way he could, and they couldnt cast through walls the way he could. In a weird sort of way, their facility was more of an advantage for him than it was for them.

All that said, he couldnt stand up to combat mages. At all. Which was why his plan was to simply not be exposed to combat mages, though of course no plan survived first contact with the enemy.

Callum gnawed on a stick of beef jerky and opened a portal through the connection in his implant to the area above his cave-cache. He could just see the bones of his bunker through the trees, but more importantly, his cell phone could get signal so long as it was high enough. Hed solved that problem by balancing it, along with a solar charger, in the canopy of a tree.

As with every time hed checked it so far, there were no messages, so he snapped the portal shut and went back to pacing. He had too much nervous energy, though his knee was complaining about the uneven ground, cane or no cane. It was well past dawn in whatever time zone Guatemala counted for, but he had no idea what time it was in the Deep Wilds. For all he knew it was an eternal time like the Dragonlands and Night Lands, but there had to be some sort of standardized shifts. Probably. Hopefully.

Once again he snapped open a small portal to his cell phone, even though itd been less than five minutes, but this time when he peered through the opening he saw it had a text notification. He reached through the portal and grabbed it, the few moments the old phone took to open up the text display seeming to take forever. It was from Chester.

Package should be delivered.

Callum didnt like the qualifier, but it couldnt be helped. He imagined that there was no actual communication between the facility and the outside, so the best Chester could do was verify that the person with the portal anchor had gone there. Possibly with some time buffer to account for getting it past security. Considering it was small and inactive, it was probably not too difficult for a shifter to keep it hidden. Or even for it to pass through in plain sight; hed seen that shifters did have foci for one reason or another on occasion.

He set a timer for five minutes, just to give it a little more padding, and went and took care of his ablutions before the final checks. Callum doublechecked the body armor, even though it shouldnt matter at all, finishing off the jerky and taking a few swallows of water. His hands felt sweaty, and the worm of fear gnawed at his gut, but he took a deep breath and watched the timer tick downward.

When the alarm rang, he silenced it instantly and teleported himself closer to the lava flow, where a portal anchor sat in the dewar. The vacuum bottle was, in hindsight, probably not even necessary, but it was still a hundred yards closer to the flow than he felt comfortable going himself. Mesmerizing as a lava river was, it was still twelve hundred degree rock.

Callum reached out and energized the portal anchor. It sprang up right away, and mana started flowing through. It was in a portal world. His perceptions flowed through, and he concentrated on feeling out exactly what was on the other side.

Given the separation between him and the anchor, he had approximately five hundred yards of range through the portal anchor, maybe a little more. The total distance of his perceptions had probably grown a touch, but hed not done any specific tests for a while. That was still a large enough sphere to encompass a building, if not quite big enough for the entire campus that was supposed to be on the other side.

Chesters agent had deposited the portal anchor in a utility closet, among a jumble of cleaning supplies. At least thats what he assumed all the bottles of liquid were, among mops and brooms. The building itself seemed to be something like a barracks, with a number of rooms with bunk beds arranged around a central hall. Outside of the barracks, there was a thick, magically reinforced wall in one direction and what seemed like warehouses in the other.

There were three mages and six shifters within his sphere of perception; two of the mages and three of the shifters were in bunk beds, scattered throughout the barracks, the others were on the wall, where it turned into a dome overhead. He waited with bated breath to see if they noticed the portal focus, but none of them so much as twitched. Though it wasnt like the portal itself was a particularly large or intense bit of magic, by anyones standards, so it wasnt too unreasonable that they didnt notice.

Callum looked at the map, figuring out where the anchor had ended up. The buildings werent even warded to speak of, just having some minor enchantments around the windows and doors. They didnt look like the screens of wards, anyway, and the way the mana flowed through the structure was different, but he intended to avoid them anyway.

From the reference he had, the anchor had wound up on the north side of the compound. There was no gate leading in or out; they probably used magic for that. The warehouses and barracks were more or less as he had suspected; mostly empty at the moment, but he put that down to it being the off-season at the moment. Or maybe just during local day.

He wrapped his threads around the portal anchor, extending his vis out to the warehouse through the mana-saturated ground, and pushed. It wasnt much of a jump, but with his range he really didnt need too much to cover most of the rest of the facility. The perspective bubble on the end of the anchor shifted, and the portal bobbled. If he were cleaner with his threads, or used tubes instead, he could move without the portal destabilizing, but he was in a hurry so he had fix it by shoving more vis into it instead. It didnt take much, but it was a concerning tradeoff when he knew he was relatively vis-limited.

The new location meant new buildings came into range. They were more central; the administration, the communal hall, the processing center. They were far more warded, and it took time for him to get through into the interiors. He cared little for what was stored in the warehouses, mostly normal supplies from what he could see, but even if there was any magic stuff there he couldnt afford to raid it. Betraying his presence before it was absolutely necessary was a terrible idea.

That particular consideration was immediately tested when he brushed his perceptions through the administration area and found a case with a number of lumps that were very mana-dense. They seemed quite similar to mordite, so he could only guess they were silverite, harvested however and stored somewhere secure. It was annoying that he only ever ran across interesting things when he had more important issues at stake, because he didnt dare touch the silverite no matter how much he wanted to.

In addition to the extra warding, there were a bunch of mages around and a number of them were using active vis senses. They were little feathery pulses drumming through the air or the ground, which Callum regarded with a lot more trepidation than the wards. Enchantment spellforms were limited, but he had no idea about direct magic scrutiny. Evading a security system was one thing; evading the naked eye was another.

Unlike the naked eye, he could actually see the use of the vis senses and where they were aimed. Some of them were just everywhere, others were focused, sweeping here and there, so there wasnt really much space for him to run a thread that wouldnt be observed. That said, he only needed a single, small thread to move the anchor from one place to another, and the anchor itself was a small thing.

The various sorts of warding seemed to block the active senses fairly well, and there were all kinds of enchantments active in the buildings he could sense. Were he to try something large and flashy, especially out in the open, itd be noticed immediately, but he might well be able to hide most of his activity behind the existing enchantments.

There were lots of mights and maybes, but he couldnt take forever to make a move. Just because nobody had noticed his portal yet didnt mean they wouldnt ever. The outflow of mana alone might alert someone if the portal stayed open long enough, and if a searcher got closer to where his anchor was hidden they might well find it.

His target, the cell block, was a little bit further along. If he could teleport the anchor to the full extent of his perceptions like he preferred, hed already have it within range, but he was limited to sneaking about and hiding the anchor in storage drawers or other places that werent immediately visible. Even though he could loft the anchor with his gravitykinesis, he had to assume the moment any mage or even shifter laid eyes on it theyd sound the alarm.

Callum waited, counting the beat from the regular pulses of the ground-based active vis, and as soon as he had it down he shoved a vis thread out between one pulse and the next, running it to the plumbing gap behind a sink in the communal hall. The followup teleport was barely in time, and he paused, heart pounding even though all hed done was a little bit of magic. The seconds stretched onward, but it didnt seem like hed been noticed.

He turned his attention to the actual cell block, because it was a painfully bright blaze in his perceptions. There wasnt just warding or rather, he wasnt sure there was any warding at all. Instead there seemed to be some kind of mana overload, something that churned the ambient energy into a chaotic maelstrom. It reminded him a bit of what hed seen in Las Vegas, but with a lot more power.

It was pretty clearly a defense aimed specifically at him. At this point his ability to bypass wards was no secret, and they probably even had some idea of exactly how he was managing it. Whatever was going on with the mana wouldnt be any defense against a shifter or a vampire, but if he tried sending a vis thread in there itd just get shredded.

The sheer amount of mana noise made it difficult for him to tell the details about things deeper in, but he could at least figure out where the walls and people were. Mages were, of course, obvious by their bubbles, which meant the one figure without the bubble was Lucy. Obviously he had to remove the jamming source, but he had to do so without risking Lucy. If they had been really smart, theyd have put it in the same room as her, as close as possible so he couldnt smash it from range.

That was all assuming he was right in his conclusions. He wouldnt put it past them to make the entire cell a complete honeypot and hold Lucy somewhere else. It wasnt like Callum even knew what Lucy looked like, so a ringer was not out of the question. On the other hand, using that kind of bait was a risk in and of itself, and he was fairly sure they didnt care too much about Lucy as such. They would have already wrung out whatever intelligence she had, considering their resources.

Still, the information that she was being held in this particular facility had come from Chester, not through some official source that would be very obviously trying to lure him into an ambush. If she wasnt the one in the cell, there werent very many places in the facility where they could be hiding her. In fact, hed already passed over most of them and hadnt run across anyone else human without a bubble.

The presence of vampires and fae implied there were some of those feeder portals Callum had cribbed his designs for somewhere about, and he considered tracking them down first. He was sure that if he broke them, thatd send some of the personnel into a bit of a flurry, maybe even force some evacuations.

Despite the urgency he felt in the back of his head, he needed to be methodical. There was a mage in the room with maybe-Lucy, so whenever he made his move, he had to be quick. He could only imagine the mage was there to take her hostage if he managed to break in. Or maybe the moment things kicked off.

He took a moment to scrutinize everyone he could reach within his perceptive sphere. For the most part mage bubbles looked all the same to him, but a few people stood out. In near the jammer there was one mage that had a bubble that wasnt just opaque, but almost reflective in how solid it was. A second mage of similar quality was in the admin building, along with a third whose bubble seemed like hammered iron. It wasnt like he could sense through any of the bubbles to begin with, but most didnt seem as substantial as those three.

Callum was absolutely glad he wasnt actually there. Those bubbles were intimidating even if, so far as he could tell, they had no idea he was there. Aside from the normal movements of people, mostly shifters walking from one place to another, there didnt seem to be any real activity. Carefully, he made a mental note of where everything of even marginal sensitivity was placed. The teleport pads, ward boxes there were only two of those, for admin and in-processing the jammer, and the feeder portals. He found three different clusters of the last, so there might be more somewhere out of range, meaning that cutting them off entirely would be difficult.

The jammer would require a little bit more work than the rest, since he had to go through multiple walls or a ceiling and it was right near the cell. But everything else he could reach, and while it might not be all the infrastructure in the facility, it was a lot of it. What he wanted to do was smash the jammer, grab Lucy, and run, but there was no way to guarantee that would work and the cost of failure was too high. Better to spend a second and a bit sowing chaos and preventing reinforcements or communication, because once the element of surprise was lost he wouldnt have much time or space to react. He ran through the actions he was planning over the next few seconds in his head several times to prepare, and make sure he covered all the contingencies.

With a limit of sixteen or so constructs, he felt comfortable targeting four things at a time. Two sets of portals and a high-powered directed gravity field. He picked his priorities, waited for a lull in the active sensory sweeps, and then spun up everything at once.

Basketball-sized portals opened up in the maintenance space for the teleporters, by the ward boxes, and one of the feeder portals. A gravity shear accelerated streams of scorching lava through the portals at something like one hundred fifty miles per hour, more or less obliterating the targets and making an absolute mess of everything around them. Despite not aiming at any people, he still saw some debris bounce off the shields of the mages monitoring the ward boxes, as the splash was somewhat more impressive than hed expected.

Immediately he snapped the portals to his next set of targets, the remaining feeder portals and one of the warehouses since he had attention to spare. It took a moment of juggling to keep the lava from breaking his portals, but less than a second later another several hundred pounds of liquid rock smashed into and through walls and enchantments.

Mages started to move, and Callum focused on the jammer.

***

Taisen had mastered the art of waiting long ago, but neither of the Archmages showed much patience. Duvall, especially, clearly wanted to be elsewhere, though Taisen could hardly blame her. He knew a thing or two about having far too much work and far too little time to do it in. Hargrave showed a more ordinary impatience, frowning at whatever reports hed brought with him.

It wouldnt last forever. Even as important as Wells was, tying down two Archmages in addition to himself was an enormous expense. If the man didnt make a move soon, or at all, all the preparations would be for nothing. From the way he read Wells history, though, a credible threat to the Harper girl would be good enough to force his hand.

Taisen pulsed his light-aspect vis outward, sorting through the flash-impression it gave him of every nook and cranny and searching for anyone who might be out of place or acting oddly. The current crop of BSE trainees was off in the Night Lands, since he didnt want a bunch of novices in a firefight with a rogue mage, so there werent all that many people around.

Despite his experience and the steady sweep of his senses, he wasnt ready for the sudden explosion of violence. From absolutely nowhere magic flared up and a confusion of destruction followed. Taisen began moving before he even consciously realized it, his hindbrain cataloguing the targets. Communication, coordination, reinforcements. Valuable infrastructure. They shouldnt need backup, not with a pair of Archmages and a Grand Magus, not to mention a full gamut of BSE agents, but backup was no longer an option.

Force and light shields went up around his sphere, giving him protection and rendering him invisible, the pure corite foci worked into his uniform creating perfectly crisp and clean spell forms as he energized them. Some people swore by banic alloy, but he always found the stuff from the fae lands worked best for him. The bracers around his forearms spun up the beginnings of his preferred offensive spellwork, disks of ravening light and crushing gravitic spheres just waiting to manifest.

Teams one and two, suppress the lava. Taisen had no idea where Wells had gotten ahold of an earth-fire aspected mage, but neither type by themselves could deal with something like a half-ton of molten rock, which was already starting to catch things on fire. Three, surround the cells.

Hargrave burst out of the building just behind him, the door splintering as it couldnt open fast enough, joining Taisen in the air as they swept for Wells. There was nobody immediately obvious who could be opening the portals, nobody clearly out of place, as he spun in the air gauging distances and angles. The realization came just as another portal opened near the cells, and Taisen flicked out a gravity sphere to intercept it.

Wells didnt need line of sight.

He caught a glimpse of a magical construct through the new portal, accelerating lava as if it were gravity but clearly not gravity. He knew what gravity did and didnt do, and something that looked like that wouldnt result in such extreme acceleration. Then his own gravity ball smashed into the portal, disrupting it and rolling up the lava that had been coming through. The glowing ball of rock that resulted would have been a fantastic projectile to send after Wells, if only they could locate him.

Duvall! He snapped over the scry-com. Where are these portals coming from? She hadnt joined them outside, but Duvall was not a combat mage. Spatial mages never were; the spatial aspect had nothing useful in terms of shield-forms, and relying on mana-fed foci for a shield was hopeless. Even Duvalls Archmage-level shield did nothing more than displace her away from attacks.

She was more interested in capturing Wells anyway, so she was stationed near the jammer, in hopes of either catching Wells or at worst spiriting the younger Hargrave out of danger. Taisen and Hargrave were on the same page, though. Wells had to be eliminated.

Archmage Duvall didnt answer immediately, as Hargrave just bulled forward toward the cells. Not that Taisen disagreed; that was Wells ultimate goal, and any other destruction was just distraction. It was just that he couldnt tell where Wells actually was, the portals seeming to open from practically nothing. He focused his senses down, trying to catch anyone who might be disguised or sheltering under some fae artifact.

Theyre coming from Earth, Duvalls reply came just as another portal snapped open, this one just in front of the walls of the cell block. A car sized boulder smashed through the wall and carved a path of destruction before a quick-reacting earth mage turned it to sand with a flare of mana. Unfortunately, a ten ton boulder just turned into ten tons of sand, rather than vanishing like an earth-magic construct, and the resultant destruction might actually have been worse than if it had remained a boulder. He might not even be here!

Then how? Taisen cut himself off as he caught a bare flash of vis connecting the portal to somewhere else. It vanished when Hargave collapsed the portal with a bar of pure force, but there was enough to get a lead. He let Hargrave deal with the cell block while he concealed himself and floated into the communal hall, hunting for traces of the man.

Taisens estimation had been that Wells, no matter what tricks he used, wouldnt be able to stand up to a real mage for more than a few seconds. Wells clearly agreed with that sentiment, if Duvall was right and the man wasnt even physically present. The problem was, Wells tricks were really good.

***

The mages were a lot better than Callum had even figured. They hadnt been able to stop the damage of the initial chunks of lava, but theyd reacted basically instantly and didnt seem at all confused or surprised. The first pair of portals hed made to try and smash the jammer had been absolutely rebuffed; one by the elite mage inside the cell block and another by a different elite that was hovering in the air.

Every moment that slipped by tilted the advantage away from him, so he gave up trying to finesse it and just sent a boulder at the wall. Not aimed directly at Lucys cell, or even at the jammer, but to open up a hole for subsequent salvos. It worked, but it was a shock to see how easily an earth mage had dealt with it, and how easily the mage bubbles of the people in the way had shrugged off the attack.

Those shields made him feel a bit better about throwing a lot of lava through his next portal. He aimed the spray of molten rock directly at the jammer source, but it still spewed everywhere once it left the acceleration field, splashing over everything and everyone along its path. To his utter shock the opaque-reflective mage actually blinked aside, or rather, outside, in a ripple of somewhat-familiar magic that made him believe it was a spatial mage.

The shock made him pause for a moment, part of him wishing that he could see what had happened more closely. The way the mages teleport had worked was so unlike what he did that he knew he could learn from it. But he didnt have time.

Since he couldnt hide his vis threads like he had before, another of the elite mages homed directly in on the hall where his anchor was hidden, waves of vis washing through the building. There really wasnt much time. Thankfully the lava hed hurled through the gap in the cell block walls, covering practically every surface in molten rock, did its job. The jamming field dropped, heat or impact finally damaging some part of the enchantment, and he could finally properly sense into the cell.

The mage bubble overlapped where Lucy had been, but he didnt have time to try and figure out how to disentangle the two. The one mage with the impossibly strong bubble was sweeping in toward the cell, straight through the walls in the way. Before he could second-guess himself, Callum opened as big a portal as he could make and swept it over the mage bubble, cot and all, as fast as he could so the portal wouldnt get disrupted by shields, dumping everything sideways into the containment room hed made.

He'd actually taken apart his infinite-energy portal pair for this particular purpose, and put one end in yet another cave, somewhere in northern Texas. There was no way that Lucy didnt have some sort of tracking on her, magical or technological, whether it was an implant or something woven into her clothing or what. While he would have liked to make the rescue in comfort, there was no way that was in the cards.

The mage bubble and its contents had to wait for a moment, because Callum wasnt done quite yet. His last bit of magic had been enough to betray the location of the portal anchor, since the mage that had been hunting it down started flicking out little lances of vis that tore apart the wall the anchor was behind. Callum wrapped his threads around the anchor and teleported it back to his hand.

His perception of the BSE base vanished, the portal destabilizing and collapsing. He hadnt been seeing with his eyes or hearing with his ears, but it seemed like a sudden silence regardless, just the empty volcanic landscape and the small cave with a mage and, hopefully, Lucy. Callum turned the portal anchor over in his hand and put it in his pocket. Job done.

***

What the hell was that? Archmage Hargrave was furious. Not quietly furious, either, his voice a stentorian bellow as he vented his spleen at Archmage Duvall. Why did you let that maniac kidnap my granddaughter?

I could ask you the same thing! Duvall snapped back. You know Im not a combat mage. You were supposed to keep anyone from even getting close enough to matter!

Nobody wanted to get near a spat between two Archmages, even if neither of them were being so gauche as to move beyond words. Hargraves solid force armor rendered him a faceless automaton, but he wasnt even flexing his outer shields. Possibly he was too mad to.

We knew he was slippery! You should have gotten Gayle out of there the moment things started happening!

What, in the five seconds before someone battered the wall down with sand?

Five seconds is a hell of a long time Hargrave began, then cut himself off as Taisen floated down toward the pair. So howd he get in? He demanded of the head of Bureau of Secret Enforcement, whose facility it was supposed to be.

I dont think he did. Taisen was less upset than either of them, and more thoughtful. Like Archmage Duvall said, I dont think he was ever here. Im not sure how he was sending portals over here, thats not my business. He looked pointedly at Duvall.

I can think of a few possibilities, she said grudgingly. None of them seem likely, but he did do it.

Regardless, there were two things that struck me during the attack no, three. One, he didnt need line of sight. Taisen held up a finger, looking from Archmage to Archmage. Neither of them responded. Two, he was using some construct that acted like gravity, but wasnt. If it were gravity it would have resulted in things being drawn in and crushed, not launched like it was.

Heretic, Duvall muttered. I dont know where hes learned but hes twisting space magic all out of bounds. Taisen ignored that. Hed had any preconceptions about proper or improper magic use beaten out of him by long experience with hostile creatures and mages alike. What worked, worked, and what didnt, didnt. The Houses were slightly touchier about things, which was one reason why the BSE was of no House.

Three, he said. There was some tiny bit of something that he was doing behind one of the sinks in the canteen. I couldnt find anything, but maybe one of you can.

Ill go, Duvall said immediately. Hargrave just growled silently and loomed behind as Taisen went to show Duvall to the spot. Along the way, mages were already cleaning up. Most of the damage was easily taken care of by earth and fire mages, to quench the lava and shift the stone, to repair walls and doors. The damage that would take real repairing were all the enchantments. There was also the quickly vanishing touch of the other portal worlds. Itd take hours, but they would need to evacuate the vampires and fae before it ran out entirely.

Unless Duvall could conjure up a new connection, but that seemed unlikely. Wells seemed to be able to open a portal wherever he wished, but Duvall wasnt as flexible. It took an actual portal anchor, preferably one made with pure portal world material, to bridge something like that.

Danforth and Black were guarding the site. Taisen felt a little sorry for them; theyd been stationed at intake and aside from getting slightly lava-scorched when the teleportation pads got destroyed, they hadnt gotten near their quarry. Duvall ignored them and homed in on the location, seeming to go by smell. Taisen certainly couldnt sense any residual magic.

There was a portal anchor here, Duvall announced, frowning at the spot. Very small. She did something he could barely follow, her speed and precision better than his, despite her lack of combat experience. Damnation, she said. His terrible thin threads just snap. I cant re-open it. Taisen carefully concealed his reaction. He didnt know Duvall could open portals just from their residue, though now that he did, certain past incidents he was not supposed to be privy to made more sense. It also meant Wells wasnt impossibly conjuring portals from nowhere, which at least brought the mans abilities back to reasonable ground.

Then I suggest you find another way to get my granddaughter back, Hargrave said, voice hard as diamond. Duvall replied, but Taisen wasnt really listening. He was thinking about how damn pathetic their defenses really were.

If Wells could run roughshod over the barriers and wards of Garrison Two, there was no reason to think that it was actually effective. Someone else, or something else, from the portal worlds might have some of the same talents. Who knew what things had passed through the portals that they hadnt even noticed?

Wells was a threat to GAR, but Taisen really didnt care about that. He didnt even care about how much Wells had wrecked Garrison Two, since that could just be repaired. Taisen was more worried about what his abilities meant for the safety of the world. Wells was many things, but he wasnt some otherworldly horror lurking in the dark.

As far as Taisen was concerned, all Wells had done was demonstrate that GAR did not have as good a handle on things as they said. Hed been defending the Earth from the portal worlds for years before GAR came in and merged him with the BSE. That was something hed had to accept at the time, but things were different now.

Let GAR handle Wells. He needed to return Defensores Mundi to its roots.

END BOOK TWO