Chapter 1

It was such a delightful late spring day in Austin that it was tragic to get called into the BMA's local field office for yet another round of routine harassment. Or as we like to say around here, your typical average Thursday.

The 'Grand Wizard' (and all around Pooh-Bah) Whitaker, the head of our local Bureau of Magical Affairs (BMA) field office views himself as a mighty big fish in an even bigger pond and likes to justify his excessive salary, and ever widening ass. Despite being head of a fairly minor understaffed and badly overworked regional field office, his own unexercised ass hasn't ever left his desk once to my knowledge to actually crook a wizardly finger to do any real work. His forte is paperwork and making the life of Public Adepts such as myself, as miserable as possible. It just sticks in his craw that some of us are legally independent from his control (within certain boundaries) and not subject to his every whim and notion.

Austin might be the Capitol of the large and relatively prosperous Republic of Texas, but the real governmental power is scattered about elsewhere. Mostly in Galveston where our Emperor of the Great Western Alliance (GWA) keeps his spring residence, or else in the bigger cities scattered over a thousand miles of territory. Texans and Texicans hate government and try to subsist on the fewest possible laws and ignore a big chunk of the rare laws that do get enacted in Austin. This is usually a good thing.

Like it or not, Austin is a sleepy backwater fit only for stashing away otherwise useless bureaucrats well away from places where the real work actually gets done. Everyone with even an ounce of common sense knows this ... except for idiots like Whitaker. Fuck him.

Just because I almost burned down an entire neighborhood once (I had a very good reason at the time), my name got very prominently established near the top of Whitaker's 'Shit List' in bright red ink. He can't quite make me march to his tune, but he's got enough political clout to force me to at least tap along to the music.

Last month, the hassle was still concerning the endless paperwork covering the 'Christmas Stalking' incident. I'd completed my reports months ago and Whitaker's local pencil pushers had even finally stamped the case as closed. Now apparently, some Imperial Wizards up the line were reading about the case and, quite understandably, wanted more questions answered. I didn't really blame them.

No one wanted to really believe that a mere 'Sensitive' who wasn't supposed to even be able to channel magic, like my client Gloria, could have summoned a major league outer planar 'Visitor' ... especially a Shadow Stalker. Those guys are pure nastiness and able to kill even trained high powered Wizards, and sometimes do. Well she did it, but she cheated at nearly every step along the way — and it quickly cost her, her life in the process.

Me, 'Zak' Zyphyr, a mere licensed Adept, without Wizard level powers or skills, had taken it down and more than a few buddies of his in the process. Ok, in turn I had a bit of help; I'd caught the shagnasty critter outdoors in daylight and it stopped to beat up on some weaker relatives it had a grudge against before it came looking for me, giving me a chance to work out a plan to nail it. I nearly got my ass totally handed to me in the process, spending just about a week in the hospital afterwards. But I sort of walked away from the fight - the Stalker didn't.

Scoreboard: Zak -1, Evil Nasty Stalker - 0

Everyone was grateful that I had handled it ... but the questions just kept on coming.

The truth was, most of her 'help' came from the illegal possession and use of an old Wizard class Artifact. It was the biggest and hottest piece of magical 'Hamburger Helper' I'd ever seen or even heard about. When worn (and juiced up), this pair of wrist bracers gave Gloria enough raw power to do lots of very nasty, dangerous and very forbidden things, without any proper training — or requiring the slightest bit of common sense. After summoning a succession of increasingly powerful creatures she swung for the fences and landed a majorly nasty Shadow Stalker.

It wasn't impressed by her skill. It ripped out her soul and was amusing itself fucking her eviscerated corpse when I discovered them, an instant before I tried running for my life whimpering like a spanked schoolgirl. I ended up taking the monster down, literally hanging the Stalking on the chimney on Christmas Eve, but no one else appreciated the joke. I was in too much pain for awhile to laugh much myself. Given five more rematches, the Stalker would probably win all five times ... easily. I had been damned lucky.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than to be good.

I kept her illegal artifact. I had a semi-legal contractual right to it, via her breach of a Contract Oath with me, and it was much too nice of a toy to turn over to the BMA assclowns. It wasn't technically illegal for me to possess it, or even use it ... if I could get it charged up again, but it was very much against custom and sooner or later folks would try to take it away from me, legally or otherwise, if they knew I had it. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, and all that.

Keeping secrets from the BMA didn't make me feel the slightest bit guilty.

Today, the agenda for harassing poor Zak concerned my most recent part-time job, working as an Artifice Engineer for a local arcane technology (Arc-Tec) company, Advanced Magical Devices, off of Ben White Blvd. It was fairly close to my home and they did pay very well, but Whitaker knew enough of my dislike of corporate life to know that I must have an ulterior motive. Namely, why I was now very interested in obtaining Major Arcana Stones. The biggest, baddest batteries on the market for storing and channeling Wizardly energies.

It's hard to keep anything secret in the magical community apparently. I was most certainly very interested in finding these stones. Enough so to even actually work an honest nine to five day job in order to get them. I'd worked out a contract deal with AMD to receive six 'slightly irregular' stones in trade for my help with one of their Arc-Tec engineering projects — namely working on an improved miniature internal magical power source of a new generation of consumer products. A tricky problem of Artificement — but right up my alley of expertise. I'm a born tinkerer and don't mind at all the not-so veiled snide comments about 'gadgeteers'. Sometimes it's the simplest things that save your bacon some days.

Artificement, the relatively low level ability to infuse magical properties into mundane devices is one of my particular strengths, so I thought it wouldn't raise too many eye-brows if I put my private consultation business on the side for awhile.

The problem was Major Arcana Stones were almost exclusively used for Artifacts, items made by Wizard level practitioners, strictly for use by other Wizards. They weren't rare items per say, but they were scarce enough that supply never quite equaled demand. I'd bought two on the open market using most of the proceeds of my reward from Gloria's ex-husband, for keeping him alive during her increasingly reckless assassination attempts. Now I still needed six more to completely restock the Artifact into full functionality. Payday was tomorrow ... and I couldn't wait to finally get my hands on them!

I still wasn't 100% sure what the darn thing did or how she found this pair of virtually indentical matching wrist bangles in the first place. I was planning to power them up and conduct a quiet test drive somewhere out in the middle of no-where. I was sure that it boosted magical ability - a lot. It had made a 'Sensitive' like Gloria who shouldn't even be able to touch, let alone use, magic become a mid-powered Wizard in raw ability (but not training). I suspected my own greater abilities would increase accordingly.

They were probably way too powerful for wearing every day, but I was sure sometime I'd need this extra power and was more than willing to give it a good safe home until then.

The bracers weren't quite identical as I had thought at first. The right handed one was older ... much older, than the left one, which was apparently crafted to resemble it as much as possible in design, style and function. I really wanted to let a 'divvie' or properly trained psychometric examine the older item to give me its origin and history but I didn't know any that I was friendly enough with to beg the favor of.

My best guess, based upon an IntraWeb photo of a similar designed item, was that the original piece was of pre-Columbian Inca origin, probably designed for some Royal Incan Wizard, but that's just a guess. Still, this was all the more reason to keep the thing out of Whitaker's greedy fat fingers.

Today's interrogation lasted for nearly three hours. No bets but what I was sitting in the middle of an extremely powerful Truth Circle. I'm good at making these myself and I know their strengths and their weakness. It did help that my story was at least 99% true.