Chapter 9

The next few years were pretty hectic, mostly involved in move and counter move by members representing the Council versus those on the side of the Coalition. I realise the conflict, such as it was, will look odd to anyone used to the normal human methods of armies and nations, but Mages do not operate on that kind of scale. Indeed, there are only somewhere in the region of 100,000 Mages on the planet, there would have been more given our longevity but some have chosen to live elsewhere on empty worlds. The assassination of key members of either side had reduced the numbers somewhat. Also it was rare for our gift to breed true; the chances of two Mages having a gifted child were slightly higher than the norm, but only just. A lot of research was being done as to the why and wherefore of the talent manifesting itself, but nothing definite was being pointed to as a major factor, other than angered frustration, which sadly did not work on the children of ages, or at least not too often. Not that female Mages have many children, when you have control of your reproductive cycle and time most definitely was on your side, well, the inevitable was often put off till Mr Right was to be found. Which generally meant relationships were transient, sexual (as in friends with benefits) and not guaranteed to be long term, though a lot of the female Mages practice a form of share and share alike with their partner with the senior or primary partner choosing amongst friends as to who also shared the relationship. The preponderance of female Mages to males made relationships a lot different than it would in the normal world. That's not to say there weren't lifelong partnerships, just they tended to be the exception, not the rule.

We believe the Coalitions attempts to set up a breeding programme using anti-magic collars to enslave any female Mages who took their fancy to have been a deliberate attempt to try and breed as many potential Mages as possible. It was the sort of thing which seemed to appeal to them, though the fallout from our revealing the camp was still causing them no end of trouble and a lot of their lower levels whilst not flocking to the Council's side, were definitely becoming neutrals.

Most new Mages were therefore the sons and daughters of normal people and we caught a good few before they could kill themselves, but not the majority. Being a Mage or rather becoming one is just sheer bloody dangerous.

It was at the end of 1966 that I collected the last part of thirteen for my Null shield amulet. Morgana had spoken to the Council (don't ask, I had no idea at this time how she did it or even called them) and taken our first Dvergar craftsman to look over a world where humanity had never developed and the highest life form was some sort of cave bear, well it was at the top of the land based food chain anyway. Agreement was made and he and his tribe along with several other tribes plus a good few individuals from the rest numbering in the region of around ten thousand souls migrated to this world. Those that were left were apparently the 'Faere believers', those who thought one day the Sidhe would come back to claim them. Faith truly can cause some warped views and I just hoped they'd never meet up with the Sidhe again as I doubt they'd enjoy the experience one bit.

The first thing I did with the parts of the amulet was to duplicate them several times in all their complexity. Once something has been made, provided we have the materials to reproduce it, we can do it relatively quickly. It's making something new and complex from scratch that's really hard, though several chats with Ketty on the Over-master world had alerted me to a source of complex pattern making of micro-glyphs and sigils from the way they manufactured their computer chips that would be worth investigating in a few years' time.

After that I took one of the duplicated samples and levitated them into the forming jig so as not to mar their surfaces, once precisely aligned I used the jig to clamp them and sent a small series of electrical charges through the forms to allow the horizontal symbols to bind with the vertical ones throughout the forming amulet and then condensed the gravity over the jig to fuse all the plates into one whole.

Unclamping the jig I took the amulet out and examined it minutely for flaws in the strata and not finding any I repeated this for the other two remaining samples and retested.

I then took the assembled amulets to a tailors dummy situated in a field out near Reading and set their parameters to Mount Erebus in Antarctica switched one on and unleashed a bolt of hellfire at it. Hellfire is just superheated plasma directed by a Mage using gravity to compress the air and electricity as the targeting system as well as the ionising agent, the superheated plasma created was then used as the weapon. Essentially we use our mind to ground the target and unleash hell. It's easy enough to deflect if you spot it coming and have the measure of your opponent, but a powerful enough Mage will force it home against an inexperienced one 99 times out of 100.

The results were spectacular, the amulet easily dispersed the magic holding the hellfire and the transference sigils built into the amulet directed the plasma to Mount Erebus, a close inspection showed me it wasn't even warm. I tried various other spells upon it, each one closing to within about a foot of the dummy before being absorbed and redirected. The only disappointments were that like micro Null, its time was limited to about 30 minutes, possibly less depending on the power of the Mage attempting to overcome it, also with area effect spells, where the effects of magic rather than magic itself affected the dummy. Still I thought, it was a good start.

Morgana took receipt of the amulets the following day to hand over to the Council for further testing, examining the work minutely with her mind and attempting to trace the various symbols within to no effect, part of the construct was deliberately designed to be opaque to intensive probing. Future amulets could also be pre-set to individuals too, so stealing one locked to another Mage to use for yourself was not an option.

"This is incredible, John," she said. "An amulet of last resort and a potential ward breaker too."

"It has its limitations," I said. "You can't use magic when it's activated, so bullets or other physical weapons will kill you, but it will allow a chance to escape or evade or even get close enough to get physical ourselves, for as long as it lasts anyway, handling so much power causes the substrates to break down eventually, but I'd need a very strong Mage to test for that."

Morgana nodded. "Yes, it's no panacea in our war, but it gives us an advantage if used under the right conditions."

"I'm still trying to work towards a directed Null beam," I said. "But that's proving a lot trickier."

"I'd tell you that that was impossible," said a smiling Morgana holding up the amulet. "Except I'd have said this was impossible too."

I nodded and left it with her, I'm sure she'd do some testing herself, well, I certainly would if given a new toy to play with...

"Are you off to Edinburgh now?" Morgana asked?

"Yes, new apprentice to meet and greet," I replied.

"Very well, see you when you return, John," she dismissed me with a smile.

After leaving Morgana's office I set off on tackling one of the bread and butter jobs that the Department deals with, that of visiting a new apprentice and his Mage, mostly to put a face to a name, but also to make sure that they knew the rules. I had not met Mage Benjamin before, he was one of the many Mages who moved around from country to country, rather than give the appearance of aging and had recently settled in Edinburgh only for a new Mage to develop right on his doorstep.

It was a long journey north by train, but eventually I arrived that evening at the home of Mage Benjamin in the Fountainbridge area of the City. He had of course been notified of a visit from the Department, though any Mage who acquires an apprentice can more or less assume a visit from the Council's representative from the local office, in this case the Department for Investigative Studies.

Benjamin himself greeted me at the door and invited me in.

"Thanks for coming," he said warmly. "Callum's through here and still at the stage of missing his family, though he knows why he has to remain anonymous. Personally I think he'd rather it would all just go away at the moment."

"Took me a number of years too," I said. "Though Morgana's Manse was not somewhere I could get back to my family from."

"I have considered doing something like that," Benjamin said. "But unfortunately I have a few obligations I feel I must attend to before then."

"Your work at the University?" I asked.

"Yes," he grimaced. "I gave my word to teach for a few years and for all I could make them forget, I don't like doing that, sets a bad example."

"Any other Mages interested?" I asked.

"Again, I found him so feel obliged to do this," Benjamin said.

I found myself rather liking Benjamin, though I was worried that he was biting off far more than he could chew. I know how hard it is to train a Mage, at least to the level where they aren't in any danger of drifting off in a cloud of fiery atoms, I'd seen Morgana struggle with me after all.

"Let's see Callum then," I said "And I'll ensure he knows what's going to happen."

Benjamin led me down a hallway to a room at the back where I found myself facing a very nervous young man.

"You must be apprentice Mage Callum then," I said with a smile. "I'm John; I represent the Department for Investigative Studies, which is the Council of the Wise's investigatory and enforcement arm in Europe. I'm just here to make sure you understand what you've let yourself in for."

"Pleased to meet you, Mage John," said Callum politely.

"I'm a journeyman Mage," I said with a smile. "I'm busy paying off my debt of training, still got another 69 years before I'm a Mage."

"Wow," was all Callum could say.

"Living a long youthful life is one of the perks," I said.

I went through what the rules and obligations were, telling Callum that Mage Benjamin was responsible for his welfare in so far as for the first twenty years he'd train, feed, clothe and house him along with a small allowance. After that Callum would work either in the normal or magical world and pay back the debt he owed Benjamin whilst also still being trained and supported until after a further one hundred years Callum would be a fully qualified Mage and entirely self-supporting.

"But what jobs do Mages do?" asked Callum.

"Well, Benjamin here teaches at the university," I said. "Though within the magical community he's renowned for his work on crystal lattice imagery and memory. Much of what he does is used by Mages to record a holographic image with sound of their experiments or in the case of my Department we record instances of protocol breaches."

"We won't know where your talents will take you for a number of years yet, Callum," said Benjamin. "But you'll have to study hard; magic can be dangerous until you have a good grasp of what you're doing."

"But I can't read or write," Callum said miserably. "I tried but the letters just get all jumbled."

"Dyslexia," said Benjamin. "Don't worry, I've already sorted that out for you."

"Impressive, Mage Benjamin," I said.

"A gift of mine," he said. "Drove Mage Rowenna mad when I couldn't explain how I do it."

"Been there, done that," I said with a smile and then explained the 'fountain of youth' treatment.

"Oh my," Benjamin chuckled. "She'll have loved that."

We chatted for a while after that before I bade them farewell and made my way back to Waverley Station in the heart of Edinburgh.

I hadn't gone too far when I realised I was being followed, not that I could see anyone, I just knew as all my magical senses were shrieking at me to get out of there. I picked up the pace a little hoping to shake off whoever it was, though to no avail, nor could I contact anyone telepathically, that too was being blocked along with teleportation, not that I would try that assuming whoever was stalking me was as powerful as I suspected. I could now detect a massive aversion spell coming into being around the area I was in; I was pretty much on my own. Looking frantically about me all I could see was a red telephone box and I ran to it, not that I was planning on making a call, I just was hoping to find something to assist me. The receiver was, of course, dead, nor could I activate it or see anything obvious to help me, until, glancing down, I had an idea.

I stepped out of the box and waited, running was no longer an option and an eerie fog now surrounded the area I stood in, hands in pockets whistling nonchalantly.

Several dark figures stood surrounding me, though they stayed in the fog, no faces showing.

"So you're the boy Merlin fears?" came a cold voice as a tall oriental man stepped into the circle where I stood.

"You seem to have the better of me," I said. "Do I know you?"

"I suppose you know of me, though we've never met," he said. "Zhang Jue, at your very brief service."

"Ah, the Yellow Turban Mage," I said. "One of the Coalition's big hitters."

"Its biggest hitter when I take you down," he said.

"If," I said with a whimsical smile.

He frowned, that was the only warning I got and I used a minor spell to blast out some of the Null dust I'd developed in an arc around me towards the shadowy figures circling me before racing directly towards Zhang Jue. He sent a stream of hellfire straight at me but fortunately did not expect my displacement charm or the Null dust and although it did brush against me and hurt like hell it didn't kill me. It was then I pulled my sock that I'd filled with the pennies from the phone box from my pocket and hit him for all I was worth on the side of his head. It worked and he went down as did all the spells he'd cast owing to his shock and the disruption to his senses and grabbing him I used my teleport charm to take us out of the area whilst his associates tried to cast in a seething storm of red hot particles. We landed in my London flat with a massive crash and I sent out a frantic call to Morgana whilst landing Zhang Jue another good blow to the head as he dazedly tried to pull himself together. It was however Arch, not Morgana who ported into my flat and swiftly summed up the situation.