Chương 125: Chapter 3-124 - Guilty Parties

-Those were positively identified as Cursed Beasts of the Black Curia, sir! - Jill Grossman, heading up the Overwatch team up on the Breakwall, /replied quickly. -That Archmage that Sama took out was a wanted Blue Deacon with a good six-figure bounty! - -So their Cardinal didn't bother to show up. Typical. Which one was he under?

- Briggs /asked mildly, watching the gathered power of the Shore Mage Formations beginning the ruthless bombardment which would pound the Boondocks back down into the rock and sand they'd been formed from thousands of times. Then the spiked breakwalls that could impale any Aquatics who tried riding a wave current in started rising, just another thing to slow the Aquatics down, although the creatures could certainly pound through them, too. But, they'd just rise again. Earth Magic was annoying that way.

-They're saying he's a known affiliate of the 'Orange' Cardinal, sir. - Jill /answered. Who was the one most involved in any American operations, if I recalled correctly. -The Sages come out? - Briggs /asked calmly, and I looked around for the signs of those doing the most subtle and broadest twinking of the Manafield. -I can feel three of them at work, but they aren't obvious. Four half-Sages buttressing them. - I noted for everyone, which was reassuring.

When added to the standing Hunters and military, it was a very solid line-up for a Sea Ruler to have to face. -Unless there is an Emperor hiding in the waters out there and playing a game, they don't have a chance of making a breakthrough, and there's a good chance of dying if they focus one down. - A Shark Clan Ruler could fly, which when you're talking about a three-hundred-foot Shark is a pretty damn ominous thing to see.

On the other hand, if it ran into a Stillflight Field, it'd literally be a fish sitting on dry land waiting to die. The Wards against flying Beasts were pretty damn effective here, and had only gotten more so in recent years. The Sky into the Sea spell could send literally millions of Fish into the sky, and utterly overrun an area that was not prepared for them with swarms of literal flying killer schools of all types.

That strike in Cuba Sama and Briggs had been in had killed tens of thousands of unprepared people over an immense area. It was still easily shut down by Wards, and it also annoyed the literal piss out of all the flying Beasts on the land, who would rend the magic apart and precipitate said Fish out of the sky angrily. Most island nations didn't have the Ruler-class Avians or Dragons who could pull off such a thing, however...

The KIA team formed the Healing circle for me, other Healers naturally converged on it, and so did the wounded, the winking green Light above it easy to see and familiar to those who worked the Boonies. That didn't mean my Detect Evil wasn't up all the time, or that I wasn't picking out what looked to be some opportunists left behind or concealing themselves among the normal people... or who were just plain arseholes on their own, hard to tell. Reynard noted the ones I was flagging, and went investigating.

Some subtle emotional sensitivity and a very good nose were immensely helpful in certain things, and in no time he'd firmly confirmed at least six people hiding in the crowd nearby who'd had more than a passing affiliation with the Cursed Beasts, and another four probables. There was also a whole stack of heads waiting on a Disk inside a building over there, waiting to be questioned in ways that they didn't have any real defense against...

unless one of the Realm Lords came up and snatched their pitiful little souls. The Shore Mages had already set up the Martial Alert, and there were more soldiers moving into place all along the shoreline. That wouldn't stop me from leaving if I wanted to, or bringing away the KIA people, but that was pretty much the exact opposite of what was expected of a combat mage at this time. Indeed, it had been expected at some point, what with the amount of unrest that was happening in the seas...

"So, what do you think?" I asked Sama, as I tossed the last of the thirty heads I'd questioned via Speak with Dead aside. Burt was standing there, and grabbed the formerly animated head and dumped it into the vivic-burning barrel that had devoured the previous ones there, keeping a straight face. Of course, he peeled off his bloody gloves and threw them in afterwards with a sigh, saying nothing.

Sama was sitting on a couch to the side, having dutifully recorded every little thing that was said, organized the information into her Visual File, and generated about half of the questions that I had asked. She had her feet kicked up and was totally relaxed by eyeball, but in Markspace she was doing about four things at once.

"It's just a shame they can't generate faces," Sama smirked back at me, "or this would have been much more productive. The best thing here is the accounts. Despite their self-destructive membership, the Black Curia is a large organization with many people, and they need to be paid. Theft and extortion and donors only go so far. You need backers with money and continuing income to do what they do, and that money has to go through trusted hands."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Briggs is negotiating a manhunter contract," I deduced.

"He and I have some experience at this sort of thing. And hey, we have some Hunter teams who've been cross-trained in stuff to support all of this, helped along by the new revenue streams that we have." Intelligence staffers of governments and Families tended to be mages. Mages were smarter, faster, and stronger than normal people, and, well, they had magic. Training normal people to do intelligence work sailed right under their radar.

Sure, sure, there'd be spies and runners and snitch networks of normal people, but you didn't TRAIN them up to be secret agents and stuff. Unless, of course, you were Sama and Briggs, and the only type of mages they trained were Typeless...

"So, they dotted some I's and crossed some T's for you?" I inquired, sitting back and rubbing my temples. It was a given that conversing with the dead required a lot of Will to force them to reply. I didn't like compulsion magic, but I liked torture less, so there it was. Ramming Truth down their throat really paid dividends on the hapless bastards.

"Uh-huh. Might be really bad news in at least one way." She tilted her head, looking at nothing.

"Asshole in a really high place?" I asked rhetorically.

"Oh, no, that's a given, and there's plenty of arseholes up there, they are in fine company," she smirked.

"Nope, I'm talking about Folgers." My eyes narrowed, and I glanced at Burt, who pursed his lips.

"That was one freaky town," he admitted, part of a slew of our guys who'd driven through the place to scope it out more closely, not daring to hang around and do much more than pick up something to eat, get fuel, or grab a quick item at the local hardware store before driving off.

"I did not like the vibes of it at all." It was the southern Ohio town we'd been advised to go through by Briggs and Sama, as it seemed to pop up regularly in their investigations of certain individuals with nasty Auras.

"That whole town might just be Black Curia, or those affiliated with it," Sama said.

"I've got four connections to the Fifth County Bank, which is a local thing with like four branches, all in that county, and with a rather unusual amount of money moving through it. Very consistent, very smooth, no more problems than the usual expected hiccup, just something to look at and forget about, small town bank doing its thing."

"I imagine they've got good computer people who like sticking it to magical society, but they aren't expecting ones of our caliber looking back at them. What's your big alarm button?" I asked with a sigh.

"Well, eighty-seven percent of the mortgages held by the bank are non-scanned paper agreements that never made it to the computers."

"In this day and age?" That was literally unbelievable.

"Small town means a farming community, too. It means you have to put boots on the ground to find out who owns what, instead of just digging through computer files."

"And you can hide the sources of a lot of money that way," I mused.

"Especially if you store a lot of it off the official books..."

"You still need people to handle the money, so people are the weak point. They are always looking for other mages, so it is good to have alternatives." She gave me a hard side-eye.

"Your chauffeur took you through Folgers, didn't he?"

"Conscientious fellow that he is... why, yes," I confirmed. Not tracing a Lived-line to a potential point of that much interest would just be stupid. I still tried to get in a couple of hours driving every day, even if it looked like I was just snoozing in the back seat, because it was basically my Meditation time. Being totally unconscious didn't affect the Line, so Meditating was just fine.

"Think you can sneak off and do some in-depth scouting of the whole area?" she asked me. I steepled my fingers thoughtfully.

"Yes and no. I can do some very precise Commune with Nature- centered scouting of the entire area AROUND the Rift that's there. Pressing in on the Rift area with that level of magical attention may stir something up that realizes it is being looked at. I would actually have to infiltrate the central area where the Rift is and line-of-sight the important stuff to do it without alarming anything."

"So, actually not all that much more effective than if I did it?" she asked.

"You'll be better at avoiding magical attention absolutely, but you won't be able to find out the range of information I can, and you'll be more vulnerable to literally being stumbled across than I am. If something inside there is willing to put out the juice and shake out the magic enough, I won't be able to hold concealment against an effective higher-Valence effort."

"That might just draw attention to them," she frowned, meaning they wouldn't dare.

"I think that one of the first things we're going to find looking at the place is some very powerful Stelae set down to keep what is growing down there completely concealed from passersby. Getting through those concealment and detection Wards is going to be the first order of business." Sama smirked somewhat, as she could simply walk through such things if she wanted to.

"Are we teaming up for this, then?"

"Probably not a bad idea," I confirmed.

"Use your Null to thwart the Wards, I can use Divs to collect information. Just have to get some black pajamas to ninja through the place..." Sama was silent for a moment, doubtless conferring with her Fuzzy and considering the situation here in Boston. We both could get back here in seconds if needed... unless we were in the middle of a stealth op...

"Briggs is venturing that this Boston op here was just a massive diversion," she said slowly.

"The Cardinal wasn't here, meaning there was no personal investment, and a Deacon, however nice, doesn't rate this as a major operation from the standards of the Black Curia. It was just something they helped put into motion." Even Burt blinked at that one. I looked away, swearing at nothing in particular.

"I really, really miss being able to Commune with Heaven right now, you know!"

"A Divination?" Sama asked leisurely, unperturbed by the news of the thoughts of some additional violence to be inflicted upon the hapless.

"You know that the Prophet side of Divination Magic is a total fucking headache, right?" I groaned at her. Touching Time to read what was going to happen was a total pain in the ass, and didn't help with Briggs there, although his influence was really only extending from those in his Allegiance or Marked by him. A little Podunk town in Nowheresville, Ohio, not so affected.

As a note, not a single damn one of the many 'seers' around had spread any bad omens or anything about today, because the static of Briggs' existence rendered it all moot. Only my Caster Level, specifically looking at the shit that might happen if he wasn't there, had been able to garner the possibly bloody results of the day.