Chapter 19: Discovey by Gnomes

“Arno, what do you need, and where can we meet. I have had enough mental conversation today.”

“How about you come to my place, And we can talk.”

“Ok. Let me get dressed and get downstairs. I’ll be at the arch in twenty minutes.”

Going through Archs between places was always a real rush. It’s hard to describe, walking through to a different world. It’s like going through a doorway to the outside and having a beach or a mountain side right there and when you go back, they are gone. Its’ hard to describe.

And the two large and armored dwarves standing there as escort was a little different. I am not used to being escorted, but I followed their lead to the smaller Brazilian palace. Arno had the larger one torn down and turned into a warehouse for shipment when we set up the shipping to Georgia and built a more modest place for his Brazilian palace. The meeting was in the office, not the throne room, which was interesting.

“Hank, This Gnome is a member of your Clan.” Arno stated

“Ok. What has he done and what do I do to rectify his actions with you?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?” Arno asked.

“Because I want to provide restitution to whoever was hurt, if indeed they were hurt. I assume you feel someone has suffered damage, which is why you called me here, and I want to make sure they are made whole if they have suffered realistic loss. That is what a Friend of Fae does.” I replied.

“Hank, YOU are the one who has suffered.” Arno said.

“Arno, I know of no suffering or damage that I have suffered as the result of this Gnome’s actions. And I won’t unless he or you tell me.”

At that point we both looked at the Gnome. And he looked familiar. I remembered him as being one of the ones who worked on the Arch Park, and who had been escort and spy when we sought to release my sister and her friend.

“I know this man and he is a member of Clan Lambert. What is the accusation?”

Arno smiled and shook his head. “Our enterprising friend here has undertaken a commercial enterprise. He has asked and received several capture artifacts from a Mage named Jeffery and sewn them along the river Volga above the Caspian Sea.”

“Ok. Is this a crime to you?” I asked.

“As you may know from history there was an enormous battle there called “Stalingrad” in your last human war. It was a major conflict with literally hundreds of tons of munitions that were copper and brass clad. We Fae cannot touch Iron. Dwarves can but only with special protections. For trolls, gnomes, goblins, and orcs such tools of steel are almost poison. So to us, Bronze and Brass are our key metals. Silver somewhat less of an allergenic, as is gold. But both of those last two metals are not very durable as tools. Hence, we love Copper, Brass, and Tin.” Arno continued.

“And the result of this?” I asked.

“He has deposited over ten tons of copper, brass, and some tin in the metal repository and has had the credit for this added to the Lambert Clan Account at the Brazilian bank.”

“Is there any difference between the amount deposited and the monies credited to the account?”

“No. As you know, Gnomes are strenuously honest. But my question is “Did You Know Of This commercial transaction?””

“I know of it now. I am sure I would have known of it if I had asked Natalie, or Jeffery, or Paula. Or Carla. I do know that None of the Fae would have lined their own pockets with any monies that they gained without contacting me. I assume that he did contact the right people in my organization and that I have not caught up with it yet.” I replied.

“Gnome. Who did you tell of the credit of deposit in the Lambert Clan?” I turned to my Gnome and asked.

“Carla. She took the receipts and sent them to Natalie.”

“Have you been credited for these deposits?” I asked.

“No. Why would I?”

“Because, as you are acting on your own initiative and without supervision, you deserve a commission on all the value you generate, just like we do with Pat and the Dwarves who do rune works. For Pat it is thirty percent. You deserve that same amount. Please identify that as a percentage of your findings and give it to Natalie to give you a check drawn on the Brazilian bank.” I said. “People who do things which benefit Clan Lambert deserve reward for their actions. Unless there is some violation of Fae Law that he committed while doing this mining, for which we will provide payment for any indignity you have suffered, Prince Arno.”

“Hell, here goes another emigration rush to get to Lambert” Arno thought to himself “Ok, Hank. That’s not the reason we called you here, though.”

“Ok. Is there anything else?” I asked the Gnome.

“Yes Master. I smelled the scent of the magic of the murderer. It was close to the river side in the center of the city.”

“You smelled the scent of the person that burned my parents and captured my lovers?”

“Yes. I believe we have isolated him on the West Bank of the Volga River in a large estate house.”

“Did he see you?” I asked Gnome. I smelled something. Fear. “You have nothing to fear from me or others while you are in my Clan. This is information, and the like of which I need to be able to deal with my attackers. Don’ t ever fear telling me the truth.” I said clearly to him directly.

“And you wonder why all of the Fae that see you flock to you like birds to a feeder. You give to them what they most want. Respect and Love. Hank, you will steal my entire kingdom” Arno thought to me in silence.

“Arno, do you object to my clan member coming with me home, so he can commit the incident to a memory stone which will allow my other people to pick it apart and find the source of this malicious Oder?”

“Not at all. He is, after all, your clan member.” Arno said.

“And remember, my friend.” I said as I turned toward the Gnome” The reward for your economic harvest of the Copper and brass and tin was BEFORE you told me about the Oder of the murderer. That is in addition and independent of anything else.” I said loudly so that all could hear.

The trip home was almost silent. The Gnome (XzzyXa or Carl for short) was a little apprehensive. We walked into the reception room on the second floor and I saw our new receptionist where Carla was.

“She’s in her office with Natalie and Paula. Hello Carl. How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?” He replied.

“Doing well. Hank, Carla needs to get on the signature list for checks for Brazil and Suntrust. That’s another thing I was supposed to remind you about.”

“Ugh. Ok. I’ll do that later today.” I said.

Knocking on the door of the office I heard “Come in.” from a very ragged sounding voice. Entering I saw Carla, with a lot of documents on her desk, flanked by Paula and Natalie.

“Great, I have all three of you here. This is Carl or XzzyXa in his language. He has done an amazing job in his own initiative with mining copper, tin, and brass from the Volga River. We need to compensate his great efforts by paying a 30% share to him personally for his work that has yielded almost ten tons of remanufactured ore which he has dumped in the Metals Repository in the Fae colony. We also need to upgrade his bracelet with additional stones and runes to provide greater shields and camouflage, because he is working among humans while he was doing this task.” I said.

“Good morning to you too, boss.” Natalie said.

“Yes, good morning, ladies. Also, are there any other individual efforts going on that are external to the 6 businesses that I don’t know about yet? Isn’t there a bulletin board or chalk board or white board where I can see all of this?”

“Hank, we are going to put a desk for you in the reception area where you can come in and read the news here. Apparently, things are not chasing you down very fast. It will give you a place to stop on your way to the first floor to see what is going on.”

“Ok, but please don’t cover the desk with notes. I know you will organize it in a manner that makes sense and in order of importance.” I said.

“Now that this is out of the way, can we take Carl to the Lounge and get a memory stone from him. He believes he smelled the same scent that was detected with the kidnapping of Lynn and Bernie and Cindy. We want the entire memory of that added to our intelligence section on Mr. Nagy. And I want to do a meeting of combat trained and law enforcement trained people for 10:00 AM today. Is the conference room booked?”

“It is now.” Paula said. “I’ll pass the word.”

The conference room was crowded. Pae’le and Brimstone were there as well as two Dwarves, Carl the gnome, Peter and Jeffery and Paula. We had coffee, soda, a white board, and a hand full of stones. Which everyone got a sample of Carl’s memories.

The great thing about memory stones is that you have the full experience of the sensations that the recorder had. Gnomes have greater sensitivity to smell and sounds but are limited in the color of their vision. Which does not mean much since Carl was working at night setting and recovering the artifact traps. Thus this was a very good first recon.

“Ok. Here is the question. Is there any way we can expand on this reconnaissance and see if this is in fact where Nagy is, or has been recently? Can we get any information or documentation from here that would help us to know what his moves are, what the next plan is, and where we can actually apprehend him?”

That opened up a wide-ranging discussion. The bottom line is that further recon is necessary. And it had to be planned carefully.

“Ok. My question is this.” Jeffery said. “What reasonable resources can we expend to further recon this area and get more information? How should we cloak them? And how can we insert them and retrieve them safely and without detection?” Jeffery said. “We need a recon plan and first stage of that is diagrams of the target.”

“Ok. So that means we need to formalize an intelligence capture of that area. Who here would be best to do that?” I asked.

“We have the best. We have our archivist draft up maps and diagrams from the records we have already and see if we can tickle more documents to show up, be updated, and sent back after being copied. Hank, we have that stuff accidentally showing up here all the time. We need to find out what’s causing it, and make it aimed a little better.” Peter said.

“Ok. First step, figure out what is causing the document retrieval. Second step, duplicate it with a finer focus for specific information. I don’t want the “General Net” to stop. We get too much value out of the broad band of information. Who wants that chore?” I asked.

“That’s for me and Amelia and William. And I suppose we should bring in Helen too. She can put together a better structure as a document then I can.” Paula said.

“Ok. And we want a list of Goals for this discovery. Who, Who else, When, Where do the come and go, What do they do here, and What artifacts and assets do they have here. This guy is over three hundred years old, has made and lost fortunes of an entire nation. He is bound to have acquired some interesting tricks and toys. I don’t normally say “Pillage and burn” but he did that to me, and I think we are justified for doing the return to him.” I said.

The remainder of the day was occupied with Planning, in addition to all of the other items on our everyday worklist.

Intelligence Capture

Wednesday started off as a calmer day. I was supposed to meet Helen, Paula, and Amelia in the Lounge after breakfast and work on “how are documents showing up?”

I had never paid any attention to this in the past, thinking that it was the documents that drove the flight to my shelves. But in retrospect, it had to be something that I was doing, or Paula was doing when she started to acquire documents and texts as well. Jeffery’s interests were slightly different, as he seemed to have an affinity to combat and intelligence related documents.

What all of these had in common was the desire on the part of the Mage or Wizard to have that specific knowledge, and to have it show up as a document that often was in need of repair and refreshment. Which we did while we copied the contents and then sent the original back. Hence our library had new copies of old documents with full clarity.

One of the biggest challenges to this was with a lot of older documents that were palimpsests of documents. These were documents that (due to the papyrus shortage) were overwritten with later writings. The older ones were removed to provide space for the new. We had to determine what was relevant, the old or the new. And to make the new AND the old as copies of the same document. This took some time. We returned the documents as found but in better condition.

A few libraries were aghast at our activities, but in our defense, we didn’t take them (The documents). They came to us voluntarily. Or so it seemed.

The volume of our entries was such that it kept almost two full time people (Amelia and William) busy doing filing, cataloging and shelving and two part time people (Jeffery and Paula) doing duplication, salvage, regrowth and returns. I needed more mages, or other people running a standard set of scripts to rehabilitate, copy and return submissions.

I also needed a rune-based script to allow a “Go and get a document that has _______” where the user filled in the blank and executed it. Kind of like the Dragon Runes that Paula had when she turned the two guys into tomato paste.

The script had to be completed with the “Definition” first, and it had to be fine-tuned to minimize the document retrieval. We didn’t need to wade through two thousand documents which had the word “Rune” in it.

Our research yielded some interesting results. Nobody (except Jeffery) had even heard of George Stephenson of the FBI, or Harry Bligh director of Domestic Intelligence DOD, or of Carol Crossman at the NSA. Getting the unredacted records of their meetings and briefings was a wakeup call. Finding out that Abigail Anders was a listed informant before she was shipped to the Balkans was a very interesting piece of news. When the damage she had already done was added to her other activities, I wondered why I didn’t drain her brain when I had the chance two years ago. 20/20 Hindsight.

Still, by Wednesday night, we had a workable framework to get documents retrieved. Now all we needed was more Mages with the level of talent to do so. And by the way, these spells had to be kept Top Secret, Compartmentalized. This stuff in the wild would be very dangerous.

Meantime, Two of the Elves in residence to were working on sterling silver amulets for our Gnomes in our Recon teams. Very Heavy Shielding, Very Heavy camouflage, Very strong medical support and a capability to transport the Gnome back to the foyer or to Brazil immediately with the touch of a rune. We wanted our people to be able to leave immediately even if shielded in a trap. The tricky part was to make all of this undetectable to others, either Magic or non-magic, and to make the user return at the slightest chance of detection.

This was in keeping with my “Friend of Fae” Title. No intelligence is worth the scout’s life.

That got me a few arguments from the Fae, who wanted to get information regardless of the risk. But I think I won the respect of more friends that way in the end. No life of my friends was worth the information. We could wait and try again later.

Jeffery wanted to add additional sensitivity to magic to the runes. Passive detectors that would alert the wearer to magic either as a booby trap or as a ward. “A trap that you know about is not a trap anymore.” Was his advice. The Gnomes were already sensitive to wards and magic defenses, but these amulets doubled that sensitivity. Good idea Jeffery.

Sunday Night, Monday Morning

It was five in the afternoon, when our extra five gnomes went with Gnome Carl, through the gate to Brazil, then to Europe, and then to Volgograd. It was just after midnight Sunday, local time, and we were hoping to get the area of the smells, down to a small geographic location. Maybe as small as a street, or a block. From that, we could research the documents and find the location we felt would deserve greater focus. And we wanted to get some estimate of what the opposition had in place.

Five nerve wracking hours later, all our explorers returned. And they had news.

“There is a large mansion on the eastern bank of the Volga River, opposite the Volgograd Energy college. I don’t know if there’s a connection but here are the memories that we have. The place is surrounded by avoidance runes, and it’s tightly sealed against incursion, but not nearly as sensitive as we are here. And we have a notational address for it. The scent of Nagy is the same around the entire perimeter, so we are sure that he’s been there. The scents are fresh, so I assume that he was either there currently or in the near past.” Carl said.

“Wonderful. I want to thank all of you. Do you think any of you were detected?” I asked.

“No. We were careful not to trigger any alarms and we were quiet as mice.” Carl the Gnome said.

“Good. Now let’s see if this location is on a map, if we can get some satellite photos and maybe even some close-up shots of the area. Jeffery, who would we go to for this?”

Research Project.

It took four days, but we made some real progress on several fronts.

First, we managed to get a more focused response in our library capture. And we got a bonanza. It seemed that our friend Kajudourich kept a comprehensive diary of his prisoner questioning. When we asked for the results of questioning Cindy Taylor, we got a comprehensive playback journal entry. What was curious was the document indicated the location of the “Mind Raper” and the assorted crystals that went with them. I wanted those. I wanted to be able to bury those things that were ripped from my parents and my girlfriends. I wanted that back and I wanted him to suffer for having taken it. Peter had to quiet me down a couple of times when I got to thinking about that too much.

“Stay on track. Stay on mission. We will clean everything up. But stay focused. And remember, these guys are not the only evil ones. Some others are at least acquiescent about these things, and we need to locate them all.” Peter said more than once. It helped to keep me focused. It did NOT notice my desire to find and do some experimentation with some of these individuals. Some of these experiments would be enjoyable. For me.

Athens, Greece

“Nagy, what could you possibly want from me now?” an alarmed Abigail Anders /ne “Abigail Phillips” asked the caller.

“Abigail, what I want to know is how did this stupid kid in Georgia find out so much about all of the history of the Mages in Europe. I heard from a reliable source that he got ahold of your diaries and journals. Did you leave those where others could find them?”

Abigail began to panic. Her diaries? Her Journals? She was forced to leave them behind in Atlanta in the secret room under the house after the fiasco of the last Conclave. It would take a major Mage or a wizard to open that door. But if it was opened.

“Nagy, I have explained to you that I was shipped out overnight after the revolt failed. I never expected to have to secure everything in my home. Hell, the only slave I had with me was Thomas, and he barely escaped with my last orders. All they really could have gotten is the invoice and training stuff for the product I built for the European and Mediterranean markets. There wasn’t anything else there.”

“Well, my dear, my cousin Cecile’s last name was used as an identifier in a meeting and that set her off. If they have the history of her, who else do they have?”

Thinking fast, Abigail came up with a plan to defer some of Nagy’s worries.” Come here and look at what I have since I got to Greece. You will see that there is very little historical data in any of my journals since I was kicked out of the U.S. Whatever they pieced together they had to get from other sources. Not just me.” She said, hoping he wouldn’t accept.

“I’m tied up this week. Next week, I’ll leave my mansion with Kaj while I am there with you. We will dig into this mess and find out what this child has done. No one has managed to cause this much upheaval since Alexander the Greek.” Nagy replied.

Studies.

You know how teachers say “Pay attention. This subject can change your life?” Well, Magic changed mine. Going back to the “Magic for Dummies” book that I got from Pat almost two years ago, I had been reading and studying and practicing for almost two years and it had become second nature with almost everything I did. What made me (and my friends Jeffery, Paula, and gradually, Natalie) different is that we kept asking “Why” did things work, and “How” could we make it different. Some things you just had to do as they were. Like changing a tire, you had to the mostly the same thing the same way every time. But Alchemy and spells were not like cooking a roast. They were unique and distinct activities that you could do well or screw up. You wanted to diagram what the spell said and did so you could get the result you wanted.

We learned that the rule was “Magic is Power + Intent = Visible Result.” The intent part was critical. You had to bind the power within specific boundaries of behavior and provide the intent to yield the result. And the descriptors (Or language, or rune, or focus object) of the intent were critical.

But the Power is the main thing. We were all so “Not bound” by the historical teachings of Magic, that it was all new to us and we were able to do new things with it. And sometimes we “Powered Through” some things where others would work to apply a fine defined finish. We were House Painters playing Picasso or Monet. We covered the wall and moved on.

Paula was the first really artistic “Layer Lady” of the group. She nested her magic quickly into layers. For instance, her stripping a person naked starting at the upper layer of skin came from her vision of a Biology Lab experiment she had in college. She saw the outer layer of human skin and just pushed out from it to remove hair, clothes, artifacts, jewelry, and anything that was against the skin. She taught me that technique. I was tempted to take it a step further and get “under the skin” of someone and see how their bodies were held together. Or not.

The exception was her Dragon fire weapon’s expression. The two goons she caught attacking Jeffery, who we found out were Nickoli Argel and Christos Myconos, were caught in a complex internal boil that started in a core, ran vertically up and down through the bodies and out to the hands and feet, and boiled from the inside out. The conversion of human bone and flesh into immediate steam boiled the next layer, and the next until the skin finally expanded and then exploded. Hence tomato paste on the walls, ceiling and floor. Now that was impressive, and it was so easy to learn. For me and Jeffery.

Jeffery was a bit more focused in some respects. He got really into the bindings of things. With spells, he was able to diagram, decouple, and recouple passages to yield new results. He had a wide enough dictionary that he could substitute passages as a construction and see what it looked like.

He did that with everything he came in contact with. His mind could delve into a construct and see it as almost a “wireframe” of a construction. His “other eye” saw inside of buildings, and structures, and weaknesses and strengths. He could literally see through walls, and bank vaults. He could watch the inner workings of a vault door. I taught him how to visualize the workings of the human circulatory system as well as engines. That made him the ultimate anesthetist. (Next to me.)

Peter was our Mentor. And he was absolutely amazed at what we did. Jeffery and Paula had easily managed to use my trick with shields, and Grace caught up with it as well. She could do three. Eventually she coached Peter to do the linkage and he eventually was able to do several linked shields for himself. Which greatly improved his confidence. And some respect for the team we were growing here.

All of this “stuff” we were working on we kept in the family. When we put it into Runes, we set the runes to hide on artifacts that build the same sort of items on them. This enabled Ogres, Orc’s and Goblins and Gnomes to have shields if they wore amulets or other enabled artifacts. And of course, we did the same for our normal people. Like Carol and Natalie. We wrapped six shields each around each of them, with amulets that they could take off themselves, but which were not removable by anyone else. Carol thought of it as everyday jewelry. Natalie thought of it as more serious, and never took her’s off. (I think Lech was an instigator of that.)

The exception to the rule of limits were applied to two species of our Fae creatures. Brimstone and Brynstan (our two dragonets) were the beneficiaries of massive, powered artifacts (gem impregnated collars) that included multiple shields, and multiple weapons, in addition to the ability of the dragonets to project raw power as a flame and tomato paste producer. I added to that with a few magic “Tricks” like putting things into storage chests and being able to both store things and retrieve them at will. These were things that, technically, were not quite legal except that they were part of my personal protective retinue. And I took full advantage of it.

My team of Gargoyle Sentinels was protected too. When I realized that the use of Obsidian stone objects, like knives or spears, could penetrate the hides of the Gargoyles, I set about adding shields to protect them as well. Since they were all members of my “Protective Detail” I didn’t expect any fuss. Even if they did, I wasn’t paying any attention.

Our team all practiced “recall” of documents that we thought were interesting. (I had to send the “Bill of Rights” back twice when I was talking about the fifth amendment. Peter was not amused.)

Sensing, and seeing an object in your mind’s eye made it’s “Come here” behavior much more easily accomplished. Seeing a person’s signature on a document made retrieval of ALL of that person’s documents easier. George Stephenson’s signature got a whole bunch of documents that would cripple the image of the FBI if they were to be made public. Jeffery read those in great detail and had a massive heartburn. “This is not what the Agency is supposed to do.” He said time and time again while reading them.

I finally had to corner him and say “Jeffery, we all know. Paula would never have accepted your invitation to dinner and later invited you into her bed if you were the person that this clown was. Every agency has bad people who do bad things. And no, you cannot BBQ this man. He’s gone. Let it be.”

“This is what our Clan means to you. You totally accept the responsibility for what people do, and guidance to keep them from doing things that reflect badly on themselves and you. That’s what the Fae see when they say Friend of Fae. They are never doing or allowing others to take actions which you would not support” Jeffery said with amazement in his voice.

“Jeffery, you have it in one.” I said.

“How the FUCK did you get that old man’s mind into your 18-year-old body?” Jeffery asked.

“An older friend of my sister’s used to say “the Serenity Prayer” every day. I didn’t know why at the time. HE was a member of AL-A-TEEN. The Fae I have met all treat me as a Friend and they say that about themselves all the time, hoping to not do anything that would embarrass me or themselves. I hope I never do anything to lose that reputation.” I said.

I admitted to him that the only time I stumbled with this was when I thought about the black connection in my mind that went to the black image in space. The one where I said to it” I love you but I must let you go. That, Jeffery, was the hardest thing I have ever done. I sensed that there was still something there, and I let it die.”

Jeffery looked at me with sad eyes and said “I understand.”

Our education got a big jump when Paula (did I say that this woman took to magic like a duck to water?) mistyped in her mind a seek for a spell “That let me grasp as owner all spells that I encounter”. And that came to us from a VERY dusty section of the Vatican. Fortunately, we did know Attic Greek. And the parchment was an overwritten copy of a spell that combined runes and intent. And it was simple and yet powerful

And it was from Alexander the Great. Who was a Power Mage. Who died in 323 BC (according to history books). We don’t know what he devolved to or moved to, but thirty-five years seems to be a damn short lifetime for a Mage, or especially a Wizard. And when Paula read the spell that was hidden within the scroll, she almost feinted from an overload. Jeffery did the same thing. I tried it and I got dizzy but was not as strongly affected as my two friends.

I found out why. Or I think I found out why. My focus on power kept my “Spell Dictionary” small. So, its conversion was fairly fast on a very healthy body. And I was not doing a lot of Mind Expansion. Paula and Jeffery were doing nothing but. They were constantly studying and learning form the day they emerged almost five months ago. I was just plugging along doing my normal thing except for when I was pushed to try different things.