Chapter 46

Looking back over this journal it seems odd, much of what I do and how I live simply hasn’t been mentioned. It’s all dramatic deeds and political machinations within the Departments and Bureaus. Yet life for me is fairly predictable when I’m not doing anything direct for my Mage and/or the Council.

I still lived with Róisín in London, although now we sort of had a full time lodger in apprentice (soon to be journeywoman) Seer Abigail who, despite officially living with Arch and Jemima, had decided along with Róisín that she was ready, willing and able to be the second partner in our plural relationship. No, I did not really get a say in the matter. It was simply enough for Róisín that I liked Abigail (as did she). That made sorting out her needs fine by Róisín and Jemima. Nor, as yet, did Abigail joining us mean that we had to move as yet, though Róisín had already pointed out if the plurality grew, we most certainly would. That said, we still had to do the shopping, pay the bills and in my case make sure our car, a Ford Cortina, was mechanically sound even though we hardly used it, save for getting the shopping in. Seer Jemima, who had initially said Abigail should wait until her apprenticeship was over, had finally relented in the face of Abigail’s pleading and begging to join Róisín and me, so long as we made sure that Abi’s training did not suffer. As for what training an Apprentice soon to be a journeywoman Seer needs, neither Róisín nor I had a clue; we simply made sure Abi turned up in the London office on time.

Financially we were well set, our investments worldwide were healthy and my ability to make Null medallions brought in funding from various Bureaus and Council members to supplement my income. Róisín moonlighted as some sort of software trouble-shooter for the various companies out there in video game design. Her ability to read, memorise and correct the software as it was actually running giving her a major advantage on simply having to go through lines of code. Her fees, to me, were exorbitant, but it also ensured that she was only called in if there were real problems. Naturally we both had an income from the Council so from an outsider’s point of view we were quite well off and our status as Mages meant that we had some sort of ‘hands off’ status with the Inland Revenue for investigation so long as we filed all taxable income with them and paid our way and did not have to declare where the Council income came from. Morgana had handed on to Mage Roxanne control of a company of accountants who looked after the finances of the London department. They were ‘encouraged’ to simply get on with the job and not enquire as to the undisclosed incomes the Mages there had, nor the apparent longevity of said Mages. As Róisín and I were still based in London, we naturally kept in with this company and allowed them to simply get on with looking after our investments.

I also spent a great deal of my free time learning from Mage Roxanne the rudiments of swordsmanship, as and when she had the time to train me. I was now classed as ‘competent’ by her and kept a highly magnetised, magically enhanced rapier in a pocket dimension for occasions when I would be forced to go up against the Sidhe or other worlds where a code duello was in place (most all save Tiamatia and Phaëtonia). She was also training Róisín, Abi and I in the rudiments of knife fighting and various martial arts as well, in which she was somewhat an expert in the same way Mage Arch was an expert in concealed weaponry.

Our time when not doing ‘actual’ work was spent training or studying, because Róisín and I were High Mages in training despite both being journeymen/women. This was done at Morgana’s Manse, or rather the part of it that was situated in the Southern Alps of the South Island of New Zealand, somewhere near Mount Cook; not the bit that was in the penthouse of the Savoy Hotel. Such was the isolation of the small warded valley we used that any explosions etc. were unlikely to be noticed by a mundane. Morgana had also tasked me to replace the small mountain I’d ‘destroyed’ in my first attempt at enhanced magic and I’d completed it fairly competently in her view, not that anyone had noticed as satellite imagery of the area was very sparse in those days. Morgana had however resolved that, if taking on another journeyman Mage, such training would take place ‘off planet’ as the mundane world’s technology was improving rapidly. For our training we had a variety of tutors, mostly from the Council itself, but also the heads of the various Bureaus or their second-in-commands too. Morgana had a vast array of spell books and dissertations from various Mages as to how to do or apply magic to various situations. They were mostly to do with how to apply and control the forces and energies used to prevent a Mage from coming apart in a small nuclear explosion. Our tutors were there to make sure such an incident did not happen; they were however mostly there to talk to Morgana and give their input to the Enforcement Office of the Council on what was happening in their areas of responsibility around the world. Moves were also afoot to change the power base in the Council to allow the Bureaus voting rights, though this was taking some time and looked likely that all they could achieve was a block vote of all the non-voting members in the immediate future. Still, that would (probably) increase the Vanguard entente’s influence, so naturally was being fought tooth and nail by the other factions. Not that my Mage was a member of said faction, her voting record, such as it was, showed her to be independent of factionalisation and she voted using common sense and her conscience as far as I could tell.

My current area of study in the late eighties was in the area of tachyons and the quantum field theories surrounding them. This area of study was at that time right on the edges of Mage understanding of our universe and was being studied in order to produce spells with a content that could not be detected by other Mages nor be stopped by current Mage shield defences. Naturally the Council was very protective of such research and as far as I was aware very few Mages were permitted to work on it, the main reason being that in theory a tachyon was faster than light, hence the use of time travel.

Time travel is one of those thorny issues between Mages and Higher Powers. Several Mages in the past have attempted to go back in time to repair past mistakes. In every case this has always brought down the wrath of the Higher Powers who will not allow any interference with the time-stream. It has been theorised that they might permit observers, however no-one really knows, so there has been a lack of volunteers to try out this theory. The reason I mentioned ‘attempted’ is due to the influence of the Higher Powers in that they allow us to remember the name of the Mage, but not what they looked like, nor where they hailed from. They were simply wiped from existence and any presumed damage they did was repaired. Basically we didn’t know anything save that they tried and were dealt with.

The other problem for Mages, naturally, is that it’s a fascinating area of study. The complexity of the math, coupled with the skills necessary to allow it to work, made it the ultimate in challenges and Mages do love a challenge. Still at that time and under a stern warning from Morgana I was restraining myself to simply study the theory and not perform any practical tests, as great as the temptation was.

So as you can see, my life does not revolve around rooftop chases of Coalition or Nephilim agents and apart from the fact that magic is a hell of a lot of fun to play around with, it’s pretty much samey on a day to day basis.

From the Council’s point of view, the war against the Coalition was going well. Their civil war had reduced their power base to the point where it rather looked like they’d lost control of the political situation in Russia and a reformer of sorts, in the form of Mikhael Gorbachev, had gained political power. He was attempting to modernise the Soviet Union and move it away from the influence of the Coalition, who were far too busy trying to kill and avoid being killed by each other. There did remain a hard core of Coalition Mages, numbering in the region of three thousand souls, but was split evenly between the Elymas and the Gilles de Rais factions and although from what we could tell those two Mages were cordial enough to each other when they did meet, behind the scenes there was a great deal of unrest. Nor at this time did we have any sort of clue as to what Merlin was up to. Morgana suspected he was playing kingmaker with him, as ever, the power behind the throne, but we’d had no actual corroboration of that. A whisper had reached us that Merlin had been spotted in Tehran, but checks by various Mages of the Enforcement Office had found nothing and the opinion of most was that it was a mistake as there did not appear to be anything worthy of his attentions there.

The war against the Nephilim was another matter entirely. Granted we weren’t losing, however we most certainly weren’t winning either. Their ‘conquest’ of Tír na nÓg via the ancient Sidhe high Queen Oonagh had blindsided us and, although the Nephilim hadn’t brought through any denizens of the outer realms which would have brought about the wrath of the Higher Powers, it had still given them a foothold on our side of the universe which they were able to exploit. They were now active on several worlds as they attempted to expand in order to put us all back under the power of the Sidhe. Our Earth, being the most technically adept of the known human worlds (save only for Loegria which we kept secret), had become the focal point of resistance to the Sidhe and Nephilim and the Council were, with severe misgivings, selling modern arms to the various regimes in order to contain the incursions. Although these were mostly Nephilim, the ancient Sidhe were for the moment trying to track down and destroy the Seelie Court of Queen Titania and its leading general, Princess Verenestra, along with her aide, Mage William, who made a very unlikely if effective pairing.

The Nephilim themselves seemed to have given up on trying to infiltrate our Earth which suited us fine and also allowed Jerhz and his wife Mergna to counter-infiltrate back and bring out ever increasing numbers of rebels to their new home of New Azurana, whose existence we were also keeping hidden from both the Nephilim, certain members of the Council and the Coalition. So far they’d managed to bring through over thirty thousand of their people, who were settling in nicely if slowly as many of the rebel Nephilim had no idea of life on a real planet and often at first struggled to adapt. The one good thing from their standpoint, other than having escaped the clutches of the Caddiysh and Malakha, was that their children were a lot safer on the world they’d chosen in that they only had to worry about the wildlife, not the magical nature of the land itself. That the portal still worked was somewhat of a mystery as Queen Oonagh was no longer ‘in residence’ on Azurana, yet Jerhz assured me that the same weird command of raising an arm allowed him to bring his people through to Nottinghamshire and hence to New Azurana.

The Council itself had tasked Morgana and the Enforcement Office to scout out Azurana in the outer realms and we were receiving some assistance from Mergna, the wife of Jerhz, mostly in survival tactics. It seemed most Nephilim who got out had no intentions of going back ever and volunteers to lead our scouting parties were thin on the ground. Still, we’d set up a forward camp in the vicinity of the masking stream I’d accidentally discovered and were beginning to map out the area near the fortress town which was the staging post for the Nephilim armies that they would occasionally send through. They were sent mostly to Tír na nÓg and hence onward to various Earths where they thought they stood a chance. Our current estimate of Nephilim forces in the field stood at around about 100,000 Caddiysh and 10,000 Malakha Mages, though these were fighting on over fifteen different worlds and causing no end of problems through their barbaric practices on any captured natives. Still, overall we felt we had them contained. Gradually the forces of each world under attack were becoming more focussed towards expelling the invaders along with a goodly selection of ex-Warsaw Pact weaponry we supplied to assist them in doing so.

The selling of such weaponry had of course caused problems in the Council and was continually condemned by Mage Hermes and his Amity caucus. Naturally enough they had no suggestions other than cease and desist and were simply being ignored until they came up with a working solution. This of course continually took up Council time and prevented any other reforms, which I believe was their intent all along. Especially as their mostly Interrogation Office based support was struggling to get any sort of co-operation from Enforcement to carry out their allotted tasks of investigating breaches of the Mage Accords with the various Earth governments without providing a reason for an arrest. Something they appeared to be dead set against ever providing.

Naturally they complained to the Council about the lack of trust shown by Morgana and the Enforcement Office, particularly as they still hadn’t figured that Róisín and I had circumvented their security and had all the files anyway. They were simply, as ever, trying to tie the Council up in knots to prevent any action they deemed unwise, which from my admittedly jaundiced point of view meant any action at all. Morgana also regularly received a complaint of some form or other about my behaviour and conduct on a weekly basis to the point that she’d set up some form of automatic reply whilst filing it straight to a waste basket of some sort if it did not come from a Council member itself. Those that did come from Council members she did read and almost always sent them straight to waste after sending some sort of reply as to not bother her with trivialities over minor misdemeanours. Most of which came from my applying the rules of conduct between Mages, journeymen and apprentices properly in order to insult, misrepresent or ignore requests by the members of the Council if they weren’t couched properly to me. Naturally any requests from the likes of Simon, Rowenna and Julia were carried out impeccably, I was just picky about whom I devoted my time to. In this I was backed up to the hilt by Morgana, Arch and Thea who were not easily intimidated, particularly Arch who was as big a target for complaints as to his behaviour as I was.

Not that it stopped us handing over various Nephilim (and other) captives to them via Mage Vera at Kurukshetra, nor constantly bombarding them with requests for information and having the Council berate them for their tardiness. In essence everything appeared to be in a complete stalemate, save only that Simon had empowered the various Bureaus to go ahead with the defence of our Earth and they had set up their own forum to co-operate with the Enforcement and Intelligence Offices in the Council. They were currently doing Simon’s bidding and bypassing the Council itself, much to the annoyance of the Amity caucus, who were unable to prevent this from happening.