Chapter 10

I spent the next month at Morgana's Manse in the secret library that despite having been living there previously for twenty years during my apprenticeship I hadn't even guessed at its existence. I think Morgana hides it in a pocket dimension and the door is only visible to those she wants it to be seen by. Mind you until I started advanced magic I wasn't even aware of pocket dimensions despite the fact that Morgana used them constantly around me to produce objects from seemingly thin air. I assumed she created them, but she had a far simpler and more energy efficient solution, although it would be a while before I got the hang of them as the advanced training had me almost stopped in my tracks as at first I simply could not make head nor tail of it. Morgana was very insistent too that I did not try anything until she was sure I had read and knew the basics and understood what the differences were. I then spent almost a week simply staring at a small cube made up out of a frame covered in a fine wire mesh with Morgana sitting patiently opposite me asking me to describe the patterns that formed by changing the angle of the cube and asking me to form them in my mind, though as yet she wouldn't allow me to do any magic involving the various new shapes she was getting me to memorise, not that at that time I could even understand how I could.

Finally though at the end of the month she took me outside into the deserted countryside around the Manse and pointed out a large rock sticking out of the side of a hill some miles in the distance.

"Right John, I want you to form in your mind the spell we use for hellfire and set up the aim for that rock, but do not release," she said.

I did so and held it there, which was easy enough as it was something I'd done many times before.

"Now, I want you to focus on the spell in the same way that you did with the cube, seeking out the patterns within on the other side of the spell," she requested.

I tried but nothing much happened I sort of saw a flickering, but when I concentrated on it I lost it.

"Relax," said Morgana. "You nearly had it, focus will come later, just look for the pattern."

I tried again and failed again, it was so frustrating, like hearing a slight buzzing noise but being unable to locate it or even hear it when you tried concentrating.

Morgana said nothing, just smiled and waited as I tried several ways to view through the spell until suddenly it clicked into place and I felt myself losing control of the spell.

"Release!" she commanded and I did and blew the top of the hill off.

I collapsed onto my knees, my clothing smoking and I felt cooked inside just as a shockwave reached us and blew the pair of us head over heels for several yards.

I struggled dazedly back to my knees amidst falling debris, raised a small force shield over the area and crawled over to Morgana who was lying face down and unmoving.

I turned her over and she was still breathing, thank God, but unconscious. I desperately called Arch and he ported in and set about healing Morgana and then assisted me with my own healing.

"Told you it was dangerous," he said with a grin as Morgana looked dazedly at us both.

"Dear God, John!" she said looking a little wildly at me. "Look what you did to my hill."

"What hill?" said Arch.

"That one," she said, pointing with a trembling hand at the place where a hill ... wasn't.

"Ah," said Arch. "You forgot to tell him about controlling the flow?"

"I didn't have time, he got it and would have exploded if he didn't release," she muttered, clearly a little embarrassed, the first time I'd ever seen her embarrassed come to that.

"Good job it was the hill then," said Arch grinning at her discomfiture.

We got Morgana to her feet and walked her back to the Manse where we dissected just what it was I saw and did.

I'd like to say it got easier after that, but it didn't. I had major problems with control as my mind found the hidden patterns far too easily and forced me to let rip with maximum effect every time. My first attempt with the hidden telepath channels was a nightmare and nearly caused me to die from a brain aneurism as the world seemed to just pour into my mind. But eventually and with a great deal of pain and a good few nightmarish situations I gained a measure of control which came as a massive relief to Morgana and Arch who at times had been hurt almost as badly as I'd hurt myself. They'd eventually come up with a method where one or the other had shielded up and ported in the moment I set off a spell, more often enough to pick up the pieces with a healing spell. Still, I learned by doing and by the end of the third month I was ready to return to work in the real world and begin the job of ferreting out a possible traitor in the Department.

Róisín of course was delighted when I showed up, we had been in communication of course but my training along with the going over of various reports on failed or poorly successful missions had kept me at Morgana's Manse far longer than I expected and yes, we missed each other physically if not mentally.

The office itself hadn't changed, set just off Whitehall in London, it was a pretty non-descript building that I'm sure most people who even bothered to think about it must have thought it was your standard bland civil service office of some ministry or other. Not that they ever strayed in there, an aversion spell permanently located at ground level kept all uninvited of the non-magical world out. What was different though was the fact that I'd returned to smoke out and capture a traitor. Reading through the reports had given me no clues as to his or her identity, but it had confirmed to my own as well as Morgana's and Arch's suspicions that someone somewhere was dropping hints to the Coalition. There was nothing major involving the High Mages and their critical tasks, but simply clues as to where the people working for the Investigation and Enforcement Section of the Department were going to be at specific times. That suggested that the leak was low level, possibly a journeyman, though personally I doubted it, I suspected a higher level and a cunning covering of tracks.

Morgana of course could simply have ordered a mind probe of the entire building, but the effect on morale would have been bad, particularly if the traitor were not found as there are ways and means of fooling a probe. What Morgana wanted was enough evidence to order a probe of a specific individual or possibly a small group.

Problem was I was still at the 'everyone's a suspect' stage; I hadn't really narrowed it down to a specific floor, never mind an office.

What I was going to have to do was isolate some specific 'fails' or 'not a total successes' to a specific location where only those cases were discussed or paperwork available to view before the failure. I was also going to have to be fairly circumspect as well. Whilst the majority of Mages are decent polite people, we do seem to have more than our fair share of prima-donnas. I personally think it's a case of being able to do stuff no one else but Mages can do and believing that makes us somehow above criticism.

The other thing I'd noticed was that for all I'd been attached to the Department since 1935 I really knew very little of how it operated other than the day to day stuff that I was assigned to. Unlike many of the journeymen there, I'd not been transferred or on loan to the other sections in the building. That I decided, was where I had to start and so after greeting Róisín and promising dinner and some form of evening's entertainment I headed for the circle of Seers, the source of much of the departments intel.

A Seer is a specialised Mage, usually highly intelligent even by Mage standards and capable of absorbing and correlating masses of data on magical use. It is they who alert the closest Mage to a latent first time use of magic; it is they who track various undesirable incursions from the outer realms such as the Faere, Tuatha Dé Danann or the Craebh Ruadh, some of the more expansive or hostile magical realms, though in the case of the Craebh Ruadh they only usually launched punitive raids in Coalition territory to discourage Merlin's people from bothering them after a disastrous attempt by the Coalition to suborn the Craebh Ruadh Earth to their power. They also keep an eye on the various semi-magical creatures that inhabit our Earth such as Sylphs, Trows, Phooka, Fachan, Pixies, Leprechauns, Brownies, Gnomes, Goblins, Spriggans, Undines, Selkies and the Fir Darrig. Some of whom prey on untrained magic users if a Mage can't get to them first. (We tend to use the old Gaelic or Celtic names for these creatures as until the Sidhe left that was where they were documented in folk tales) These creatures tend to be all around us but use glamour to hide from the view of mundanes. Most just want to be left alone in their habitats, but will attack if they think they've been spotted. As an untrained newly emergent Mage can see them, well trouble soon follows unless a trained Mage can intervene. They know to leave us alone and in return we leave them pretty much alone, though I, as other Mages do, have a family of Brownies doing the housework in my flat for small daily bowl of porridge and cream plus a bottle of whisky every month or so, and it had to be a reasonable brand, not something a Mage has thought up with their mind. They know when I'm away but I do ask Róisín to make sure they are OK if I'm going to be away for a long absence. (Mostly to make sure the fridge is full and several boxes of porridge oats are not depleted.) No, they aren't pets and anyone who treats them like pets soon regrets their temerity as they can wreck a home as quickly as they keep it clean.

What I wanted to do was ask the head of the Seers if they listened in to the Department's discussions and how they countered the Coalition in Council territory.

The answer was simple as Seer Jemima head of the Section told me, they didn't, they operated as a gestalt, scanning over Europe and homed in on any magical usage mostly filtering out the everyday stuff as their numbers were few and frankly they didn't have the resources to check every little thing other than to make sure it wasn't an accord breach.

"If we had more Seers," she said. "We could, but if you think Mages are rare, Seers are practically unique, we have twenty here out of a known total of 164 worldwide, as far as I know the Coalition have none. The talent such as it is, appears to be an entirely female genome trait. It also means we rarely have more than four Seers scanning the whole of Europe at any one time. Heck, we didn't even spot you being attacked in Edinburgh until the aversion spell went down; it's just too easy to hide magical activity of a known type from us. We spot incursions easily enough and newly emergent Mages, though often too late to help, sadly, because of the energy release, but listening in on a conversation unless specifically ordered to, then no."

I'd been cleared by Morgana to bring Seer Jemima in on her suspicions; she'd been with the Department and its previous incarnations for over 900 years and frankly could have done a lot more harm than give away the odd agent's locations. She was also Arch's long term partner and he trusted her implicitly and had suggested that she would know if a Seer was going rogue.

"Unless they are all in it including myself there's no way that a Seer would be a traitor," she said. "When in gestalt we're more than the sum of the individual parts and practically live in each other's minds, so you'll have to look elsewhere, John. I'm not saying that somewhere along the line that a Seer isn't involved, just that it will be unknown to them and us."

"I understand and thank you, Seer Jemima," I said with a bow. "I didn't think the leak came from here, but I was tasked to check everything and not make presumptions without checking details."

"I wish you luck, John," she said. "Morgana's right to be worried about this."

Next call was the Diplomatic Section. These were the people who liaised with the various mundane administrations to forward complaints or queries about Mage actions, more to the lines of covering stuff up rather than requests for assistance. Whilst I'm sure there was a little bit of quid pro quo going on, it wasn't my problem, mine was to check to see if or how a traitor to the Department might be hidden amongst the various Mages here and, unlike the Seers, I was not permitted to allow the head of the Section to know what I was about.

The cover story was easy enough though, Morgana had sent some form of memo down requesting that the Section heads were to offer me all assistance as I did an audit (for her) of each Sections activities and needs with regard to a possible restructuring and re-allocation of resources. As it had been over a century since the last audit, the excuse was plausible and indeed I did do an audit for Morgana which highlighted several areas needing assistance to improve their efficiency.

Unfortunately the head of the Section and I did not get along, not that I thought Mage Cadmus was a traitor, it's just he was the Mage who had trained Mage William who had attacked me and humiliated himself in Washington and who had previously had to discipline William when Morgana and Arch had sided with me over William's illegal mind read when he had been working for Investigation and Enforcement. Needless to say his opinion of me was not as good as it could have been. I'd cast aspersions on his blue-eyed boy and this had reflected badly upon him.

Still, the prospect of an increased budget or facilities meant he had to be at least marginally polite to me as he gave me the once over on his department then handed me off to his second-in-command who, as far as I could tell, did all the real work whilst Mage Cadmus held endless meetings with his cronies and consumed a large part of his overheads in tea, coffee or jaffa cakes.

Mage Robert, for all he looked harried and overworked, showed me around the cramped quarters, introducing me to each Mage or journeyman tasked with greasing the wheels of magic in Europe including the countries of the Warsaw Pact.