Renegade Mage (Paranoid Mage Book 2) Read online

  Paranoid Mage Book Two: Renegade Mage

  After escaping from the Guild of Arcane Regulation and the Bureau of Secret Enforcement, Callum has lost his greatest protection: his obscurity. Now the powers that be know who he is, and hiding is harder than ever. Nor is hiding a plan, just a reaction.

  Now Callum is forced to decide how he wants to approach the supernatural world, and how he’s going to keep himself secure when the apparatus of government is arrayed against him. Even if he wanted to live as a mage, that bridge has been thoroughly burned, and even if he wanted to live as a normal person, he is far too deep to close his eyes to what he’s seen.

  He has to make his own terms.

  Foreword

  This book would not have been made without the tireless work of my editor, Kaorin, and the support of my many patrons and readers. Here's to more Paranoid Mage!

  Visit me on the web at http://www.inadvisablycompelled.com

  If you feel like supporting me, you can check out my Patreon.

  Renegade Mage Copyright © 2022 by InadvisablyCompelled

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – Hiking

  Chapter 2 – Hunting

  Chapter 3 – Destinations

  Chapter 4 – Portals

  Chapter 5 – Dragonblooded

  Chapter 6 – Night Lands

  Chapter 7 – Pursuit

  Chapter 8 – Recovery

  Chapter 9 – Inquiries

  Chapter 10 – Target

  Chapter 11 – Reconnaissance

  Chapter 12 – Jailbreak

  Chapter 13 – Involvement

  Chapter 14 – Bunkering

  Chapter 15 – Grievances

  Chapter 16 – Groundwork

  Chapter 17 – Blame

  Chapter 18 – Ramifications

  Chapter 19 – Recriminations

  Chapter 20 – Heretic

  Chapter 21 – Rescue

  Chapter 1 – Hiking

  “Man, so, yeah, there’s all kinds of ghost stories down there. Dogs baying and horns in the night, all kinds of creepy stuff.”

  “Dude.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a ren faire there.”

  “Oh.”

  “I keep telling you, that stuff isn’t real!”

  “Ghosts are totally real!”

  Callum finished paying for his bottled water at the supply outpost, wishing he could say something to the group of teens chattering behind him. He’d like to tell them that while perhaps ghosts weren’t real, other things were. Real and dangerous things, that he’d just escaped from. But it wouldn’t do any good, and if anything might endanger both himself and them. Instead he just sighed and packed away his supplies before heading back out onto the trail.

  Callum really felt his age. For all that mages were supposed to have some unreasonable longevity, he hadn’t gotten any younger since he started using vis. Maybe a bit healthier, but that might just have been down to magical healing fixing things he hadn’t been aware of. The healing didn’t help his back be any less sore when he woke up from sleeping on a cot out the wilderness.

  He’d been practically incapacitated for a couple days after his emergency teleport, nauseous and achy and bleary-eyed. Something he hadn’t known about the paste-and-powder method of enchantment was that the stuff degraded. Callum wasn’t sure if it was time or use or a combination of the two, but the already nauseating transfer had become something truly hellish, and he could sense some wobbles in the enchantments that just trying to refresh it didn’t fix. He wasn’t sure he trusted it, but he didn’t have a way to replace it just yet.

  His emergency cache had a lot in it. Clothes, weapons, cash, backups of all the literature he’d gotten and CAD drawings he’d made, everything he needed to start over. What it didn’t have was any enchantable material. That was gone, along with his motorhome, a good chunk of his resources, and all the focuses he’d made, both temporary and permanent.

  Pleased as he was to have successfully gotten away from the Mages In Black, he was keenly aware of how damn badly he’d screwed up. His greatest protection had been obscurity, and now all the scary magical people knew who he was, what he looked like, and that he was a threat. They knew his type of magic, and they knew what he was capable of.

  In hindsight he really should have waited to escape, maybe built on the bluff about the secret organization they assumed he was part of. If he could have made it look like he was being rescued by someone outside the BSE compound, it may have disguised his ability to teleport out of custody at least a little bit. Now, of course, he didn’t even have that, since he really didn’t trust his homebond after forty-plus hours of semiconscious suffering.

  For the moment, his only goal was to let the excitement die down. The MIB were probably still on high alert, but they couldn’t remain so for weeks and months. He just had to lay low, be careful, and avoid any place with concentrations of supernaturals. If he did use magic, he needed to make sure that he was nowhere near anyone and that he cleaned up after himself. In a less obvious way than random ball bearings, at that.

  Callum could probably have laired out in the mountain wilderness for a while. Possibly for a very long time, just hiding away from the world, if he was willing to. But that wasn’t living, that wasn’t even properly surviving, that was cowering like a beaten dog. Someday, he wanted to go back to Tanner, which he still thought of as his real home. He wanted to walk around without fearing a black ops team ambushing him from the shadows. Even with his newfound abilities as a mage, he still wanted to keep his hand in with architecture, since he genuinely found it interesting.

  All of that required that he do something other than vanish to some desert island somewhere, though he didn’t have an actual plan just yet. He just knew he had to do more than hide. For the moment there was an easy cover nearby and something to do while he was thinking: the Continental Divide Trail. Walking it was only natural since it passed not too far from his cache, and nobody would question a random, disheveled hiker who was traveling it. He had no idea what evidence had been left in his motorhome, so he had to write off everything except the cache, and maybe Lucy’s phone number.

  He wouldn’t really need magic to just hike, and the places nearby would be used to scruffy strangers wandering in to rest and resupply. While he’d lost a lot of his stuff, he still had a lot of cash and enough changes of clothes to start. The problem was what else could fit into a backpack, since he couldn’t take everything he’d cached and with the homebond on the fritz he couldn’t casually return once he started off.

  He had the normal backpacking essentials, which added up to be heavier than he expected, and he couldn’t lighten his load with a little bit of surreptitious gravitykinesis. Or rather, he didn’t feel comfortable doing so. What he really wanted was a spatial container. Callum had only found references to them, so he had no idea how common they were, though his guess was not very. Aside from the teleportation network, it seemed that spatial stuff was very rare. He wasn’t sure if it was a materials or labor issue, or both.

  The extra guns and gold had needed to stay. He had zipped up his coat and settled his backpack into place. Considering the time of year, he was heading south. He didn’t want to deal with heavy snow, though he intended to stop well before Mexico on the southerly route.

  According to the maps he’d gotten from Lucy, there was only a light supernatural presence in the areas he was traveling. Certainly no vampires or mages, but there was one area that was a distinct fae region, and he’d have to skirt around that. The normal glamours to keep people out wouldn’t apply to him, so he might walk into a place he didn’t want to. There were s
ome places that went through the outskirts of shifter regions, but nobody really wanted to live in a desert.

  He felt a little out of place waving to people who were enjoying an autumn hike along the trails, both because he wasn’t doing it for fun and because he’d spent so much time avoiding people. Even when he went into towns he kept to himself. Out on the trail, though, people were friendly, reminding Callum of his hometown but at the same time making him a little uncomfortable. Intellectually, he knew that people would forget him the moment he was around the next bend but any attention made him a bit twitchy.

  The up side was that there was absolutely nothing magical in his perceptions. There were just trees, bushes, rocks, and occasionally people. That was quite relaxing, but it also reminded him that he needed to drastically increase the range of his spatial sense. Slightly over five hundred yards was impressive, but if he wanted to be able to catch mages before they noticed him, he needed more like five thousand yards. Which probably wasn’t possible, but he could still do better than he was.

  Setting up the tent at night, he realized how much he’d been spoiled by the shed. It might have been small and uninsulated, but it was more shelter than just the tent’s walls, even if it was a pretty good tent. For some reason it seemed absurd that he was able to use magic but he couldn’t use it to make himself more comfortable, even if he dared use as much as he liked.

  After a few days on the trail to distance himself, he followed the signs and asked a few hikers, and made his way to the nearest bastion of civilization. There he had his first hot meal in days, and after a shower groped habitually for a razor before reminding himself that he needed to keep his facial hair. The bed and breakfast even let him use their phone in privacy, which he did. Lucy’s number was one he’d memorized.

  “Big man!” Lucy sounded absolutely gleeful as she answered the phone. “I’d say you started a firestorm when you broke out but it’s been dead fucking quiet which is more impressive. Nobody’s admitting anything, so you must’ve pushed someone’s nose in.”

  “All I did was leave,” Callum said, somewhat amused by her enthusiasm. “Though I’m sure that they weren’t happy about my doing so.”

  “Well they got you labeled a terrorist now, so yeah, very unhappy.”

  “Terrorist, huh?” Callum grimaced. That wasn’t all that surprising, but for some reason it still hurt. Maybe he wasn’t exactly a hero, but he’d taken care of murderers and monsters. “Sure you want to be associated with me?”

  “Bah, they’re just mad you pushed their noses in, big man. Now spill! What was it all about?”

  “Maybe I can tell you someday, but at the moment I don’t think it’d be that good an idea. I’m pretty much hiding out for now⁠—”

  “Even more than before?” Lucy said. “What are you going to do, live in a cave?”

  “I thought about it,” Callum told her.

  “Wait, you’re serious? What do you—”

  “Hang on,” he told her. “I’m just borrowing a phone for the moment so we can’t chat overlong, but I wanted to make sure that none of you had any troubles after they found me? Pretty sure they took my stuff, and I don’t think any of it implicated any of you.”

  “Nah. Well, someone got kind of bothered about the magic books they found but I made sure those were scrubbed before they got to you.”

  “Great,” he said. “Next time I call I hope I’ll have rebuilt some of my resources, but I have some requests for research.”

  “Hit me, big man.”

  “Since the cat’s out of the bag, I want everything you can find on spatial magic and enchanting. Also some way to buy enchanting supplies. Blanks? Material for permanent enchants.”

  “I’ll start working on the first, but I already know the second. It all comes from the portal worlds so it’s all highly regulated by the Guild of Enchanting. They decide who gets it.”

  “Of course they do.” He considered that and put it off for another day. “Then can you get me all the information you can on portal worlds? And the text of whatever agreements GAR has with vamps, shifters, and fae. Maybe some common knowledge type stuff for dealing with them.”

  “That’s a bit of a list,” Lucy said, and he could hear fingers hitting keys on the other end of the call. “Some of it might be harder than others.”

  “That’s fine. I have time. Not like I can do anything while GAR is still on edge anyway.”

  “You probably could, but point taken.” More tapping at keys. “Give me a few days, and the next time you call me I’ll set you up with a document download.”

  “Works for me,” Callum said. “Any advice before I go?”

  “Yeah, Archmage Duvall is pissed. She’s a right harridan so, uh, don’t let her get near you.”

  “I’ve seen her name online, but I don’t really know who she is,” Callum told her.

  “Oh! She is the spatial Archmage. Came up with all the techniques, is in charge of all the spatial stuff. There aren’t any other spatial mages at her level and they’re rare enough that she mentors them all. More like owns them all, if you ask me. You barely hear anything from any of them but Duvall!”

  “I see,” he said. That was exactly the kind of person whose brain Callum would like to pick, but if Lucy was warning him off, she was also exactly the kind of person he couldn’t afford to. Besides, even if he didn’t know what exactly being an Archmage entailed, they were clearly bad news. “Well, thanks for the warning. I’ll make sure we never meet. Can you send me information on the mage Houses, while you’re at it?”

  He wished that he’d remembered to cache the book he’d gotten on the mage Houses, but no, that was gone. Loading Lucy up with a bunch of stupid simple information requests felt bad, but he wasn’t about to go visit a bookstore anytime soon. Or any supernatural business, for that matter.

  “I won’t charge you extra for just throwing you digital copies of books I’ve got anyway,” Lucy said. “Fifty bucks a night, same as usual.” Callum laughed once again, despite himself, then shook his head.

  “That works for me, Lucy. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Hope to hear from you soon, big man!”

  “Yep, I’ll call you in a few days,” he told her, and hung up. Though he felt a little guilty about cutting her off, he quashed that reaction pretty ruthlessly. Acting like a normal human being against his own judgement was what had gotten him in trouble before. He didn’t want to slip back into the same habits. Lucy was nothing like Gayle, and he didn’t think she’d slip and give him away somehow, but it would be stupid to be too incautious.

  He paid the owners of the bed and breakfast with cash peeled from the supply he kept accessible. The excess, something around fifty thousand dollars, was sorted and packed at the bottom of his backpack and took up a surprising amount of space. It was one of the major reasons he really wanted spatial bags. If he was going to have to carry around his stuff all the time, he would have to make hard choices about how much to carry and how much to cache, and where.

  Then it was back out on the trail. In spite of his worries and woes, it was actually a gorgeous hike, even if the autumn was maybe a little too crisp for his tastes. With his self-imposed ban on using magic, he had little more to do all day than stretch out his spatial sense and try to go further. It was already clear he had a finer resolution than most, and it was really difficult to focus on range and finesse.

  Partly, he used his perceptions to study himself. The nausea from the teleportation had lingered longer than he thought was appropriate, and he’d still not been able to crack his glamour blindness, so a bit of self-reflection was in order. Gayle hadn’t given him any reason to think internal vis was complicated, but she’d also been someone who hadn’t even had their apprenticeship yet.

  From what he could tell, vis saturated his entire body, even flowing along with his blood, but there didn’t seem to be anything like a specific core within him. When he extended a strand of vis it just seemed to be from the nearest poi
nt, although if there was some generative structure inside him, it was lost among the rest of it. The only major feature seemed to be that the vis concentration in his brain was significantly higher than the rest of his body, and he shuddered away from inspecting that organ too closely.

  The best Callum could guess was that his brain, eyes, and ears were so saturated with spatial vis that it overrode whatever magic was coming in with the glamour. Though even that didn’t really make sense, since supposedly he should have developed magical sight as he used magic. What he did conclude was that there was nothing he could do to change himself, at least not without the help of a specialist, so he’d have to let it go for the moment.

  Instead, he turned his regard outward. He’d never used his extra senses to just appreciate nature before, though it did lose something since he couldn’t exactly see colors. On the other hand, if he was just relying on eyesight he couldn’t have spotted rabbits, deer, and even a bobcat stalking its prey a couple hundred yards away from the trail.

  It was a welcome bit of fresh air, both figuratively and literally, and a reminder that his problems weren’t all-consuming. That his magic wasn’t just for causing trouble and getting from place to place without having to travel the intervening space. It made him wonder if other mages used their talents to just enjoy themselves, like air mages flying around for the heck of it.

  By the time he reached the next stop, some three days later, he was in a better mood than before. Less grumpy, anyway, thought he still kept caution well in mind. Instead of just shopping around the small rest stop, he consulted his GPS on a phone he’d never used to call anyone and went to another, nearby town with an electronics store. He needed at least one burner phone to call Lucy, and some wifi to get the documents.

  “Hey, big man,” Lucy said cheerfully. “Got your stuff here. Maybe less than you want, some of it is under lock and key, and I mean that literally. No digital copies of most actual magic stuff beyond the basics anyone can find online.”

  “You mean the GAR network?”