Sovereign mage, p.37
Sovereign Mage, page 37
“ Mom,” Alice complained.
“Or women?”
“Mom!”
“What?” Lucy asked innocently.
Alice just sighed and shook her head.
***
Gloran Golarn, the best assassin on three worlds, shrouded himself as he approached the portal. It was different from the Crystal Span, which connected the three worlds of reality — Soria, Loreth, and Gendarn. This was some sort of strange magic, but clearly crude and poorly made. There was nothing sleek or smooth to the design, a mere protected circle with a ramp through the middle.
Nor were the people themselves very impressive, lumpen and dull and probably stupid as well. Surely they’d simply taken the magic to cross worlds from someone else. He didn’t imagine they really knew what they had, since they were so careless as to make the portal actually go to a proper city.
He flitted through the portal into the room beyond, which was lit with crude electrical lighting so unlike the illumination that civilized folk used. Gloran had already seen the use of electricity start to spread through Loreth, where the otherworldly visitors had appeared, and he hated it. No wonder his masters sent him to remove the foreigners.
Gloran wasn’t the only anthren on the other side, as wealthy merchants and wealthier tourists flowed through the small passage. He breezed past them all, invisible and ineffable, out through the trade facility and into the open air of the place they called Earth. Some rubes gawked at what was on the other side, but Gloran just saw ugly towers jutting from the ground, a mockery of the grandeur of the Crystal Span.
At least the towers made it obvious where the important targets were. Gloran had intelligence from other agents on what to look for and where, the names and locations. Clearly the so-called humans were incredibly foolish to allow such easy access, but he wasn’t going to complain about something that made his life easier.
He scaled up the side of the tower that housed the portal, past flat planes of glass, heading to the uppermost floor. It was a common wisdom that was true for as long as anthren history had persisted. All you had to do was kill the king.
The top of the tower housed the head of the enterprise that controlled the portal into the three worlds, even humans realizing that the lofty heights were meant for those of great prowess. Though Gloran wasn’t all that impressed with those he saw through the windows, all of them weak and small. They seemed to be doing paperwork , even.
It was only when he reached the top that he saw the quality of furnishings and decorations that he would have expected from a proper leader. Less impressive than even a moderately powerful lord from the three worlds, but at least approximating the correct trappings of power. The man behind the desk wasn’t any stronger than the rest, though. The foreign magic these humans used wasn’t as easy to discern, but just looking at the person’s stance and bearing it was obvious the man had no physical ability.
That made it boring, but at least it’d be fast and he could move on to other targets. There were a number of leaders on Earth, almost as if it were dozens of worlds rather than one, not to mention some stranger forces. The human mages, the bizarre shifters, and something known as fae. Getting to those leaders would be harder, but he was sure that agents would be drawn to the initial deaths and it would be easy enough to follow them back.
He ghosted straight through the windowpane, exercising his own special technique, and dropped silently onto the carpet of the floor. Gloran’s blades made no sound as he withdrew them from their special sheaths, his body still invisible as he took two steps forward. Just as he was about to pounce, there was a faint noise.
He whipped around to deal with the ambusher, surprised and impressed that someone had been able to bypasses his senses, when a wave of weakness crashed over him. His stealth failed, and even his weapons crumbled from the blast of something , though all he could see was a tiny hole in space.
Gloran crumpled to the ground, all the strength gone from his limbs. He was still struggling to rise again when a stream of water poured from a glass on the bemused man’s desk. Gloran’s target didn’t seem at all surprised as the water came down next to Gloran, building a doorway that a man and a woman stepped through. The woman captured his attention, as she didn’t look like a human, and unlike everyone else he’d run into she did seem powerful. Part of him was satisfied that he had been right, that he could draw out the true rulers of Earth with their pawns, but the rest of him was frozen in horror from having all his powers drained. The man snapped his fingers and Gloran found himself lifted by an invisible force, looking into two pairs of cold eyes.
“You were right,” she said, clearly not to either him or her partner. “He stinks of death. I’ll take him back and question him.”
“You,” Gloran managed to croak, wondering how exactly she spoke his language. “How did you take my magic?”
“I didn’t,” the woman said dismissively. “The Ghost did.”
Worlds away, Callum stopped paying attention to the drama. He’d spotted the assassin and taken care of it, and that was where it ended for him. Most of the time, he was just Callum Wells, and that was fine. When someone needed him, The Ghost was there.
END OF PARANOID MAGE
Afterword
Paranoid Mage has been a wild ride from start to finish. The huge success, the attention – good and bad – that it attracted. I’m glad so many people liked it and found it a fun read. It’s definitely not perfect though, and I think one of the biggest problems is with mismatched expectations.
I knew when I started that Callum would have to remove the mage governmental structure, and to do that in a moral way would mean he couldn’t just murder his way through it. But the first book didn’t really hint at any of that so the entire vibe of Book 1 and even Book 2 was entirely different.
Then there was letting Callum become a drone operator. While it made perfect sense within the ruleset I put forth for magic, Callum’s mini-portal chaining that let him do everything remotely really stymied a lot of the fun action from 1 and 2. It wasn’t obvious at the time how badly that’d affect things, and of course given Callum’s personality he wouldn’t dare approach things any other way.
There was also a somewhat smaller niggle that was still definitely an issue, and that was how my attempt to keep everything condensed and on point meant that the pacing was very pedestrian over the books. It all felt the same, more or less. Coupled with my struggles to move the story into the final act at the beginning of Book 4 it made things slog a bit.
Still and all, it turned out well. It was definitely a fresh take in a lot of ways, and did some really fun things — like Ray and Felicia being the background “normal urban fantasy protagonist” characters. I don’t know that I’ll be returning to the world of Paranoid Mage any time soon — if anything, setting some far future sci-fantasy there would make more sense, since I had to do quite a bit of dancing around to keep it from being pinned to any specific date or include any specific political developments.
For now, I’ll be moving onto a completely different story – and I hope you all will join me.
Compelled, Inadvisably, Sovereign Mage
