Gambits (Book Two of The Pawn's Game)

GAMBITS

Book Two of The Pawn’s Game

By Victor Nox

Copyright 2014 Victor Nox

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter 1

Marcus Aurelius once said, How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. He meant that statement to be a stoic reflection on the self-destructive nature of anger. However, I could see it going both ways. If that anger turns into revenge then it could work in the persons favor. It could turn what would have been simple retaliation into raining hellfire down on those who have wronged them. Each person has different triggers for wanting revenge. Some demand it for small or even imagined slights. Some have a damn good reason for exacting it. The targets of my wrath betrayed, manipulated, and nearly killed me. My name is Jed Morehouse, and I am very angry.

It would have been hard for me to remember feeling any other emotion on that cold, rainy November morning. For the previous three months my mind was like the Baskin Robbins of hostile emotions. Immediately after our escape from the Conclave compound, I was filled with rage. I raged at my former employers for sending the world into chaos along with trying to kill me and my friends. I seethed at them for opening portals to another world, simply so they could profit by cleaning up the mess that followed. I also was furious with myself for being so naïve in admiring the Conclave in the first place. I thought we were doing the world some good, though not always in the cleanest way possible. My view was that we were doing bad things for good reasons; necessary evils. I was an idiot.

The Conclave had started as a black ops division of King Arthur’s knights. They were tasked with handling the nasty and often bloody business of hunting the monsters that threatened humanity. They were the bulwark that stood between the supernatural and the common populace in the tradition of Sir. Gawain or Van Helsing; at least they were in the beginning. In recent history however, things had changed.

The Conclave was good at their job, too good for some people. With almost all of the supernatural opposition defeated, banished, or extinct, the Conclave found itself in a new age where they and their service were obsolete. By the turn of the twentieth century there were no monsters to hunt, there were no governments renewing their contracts, and there were fewer and fewer new recruits to carry on this work. The leadership, fearing that their fade into irrelevancy would completely dry up the financial teat that they relied upon, hatched a plan to do the unthinkable. They brought the monsters back.

This fundamental betrayal of their charge and my sworn duty was what had ignited my rage. It had burned with the intensity of a potter’s kiln. However, after a few weeks, it lost its furor. My rage gradually changed to frustration and then to a simmering stew of anger as time and time again my attempts to correct my failure and counter the Conclave’s plans came to nothing. They had opened thirteen portals by the information I had, and while my teacher Brian and I had prevented one from completing, twelve were left.

These portals opened into somewhere else. I don’t think more than five or six people on earth knew exactly where. The spherical rocks, referred to as portal stones or Giant’s stones, marked each of the portal locations, working as cosmic doorstops. They kept the portals open and were as mysterious as the portals themselves. All I knew for sure was that the stones worked as lightning rods giving a destination to the powers on the other side of the rift to connect with. Once the stone was destroyed, however, the forces keeping the pathway open would dissipate and the portal would close. The first time I did this, the swirling mass of otherworld entities were sucked back through the hole as it shut. I could only hope that would remain true for the others that still remained open. I had strained my resources trying to find some hard facts about them; risking not only my freedom but also that of the people I reached out to who still worked in the organization. Not even my handler, Al, who by all accounts was one of the foremost experts in all things supernatural, had anything more than theories and suspicions to offer.

Where ever they lead, it was the same place that legends come from. I am not being cute here. When the portals opened, thousands of creatures from myth and legend poured into our world. Horrors and heroes from a myriad of mythologies suddenly returned to a world which had convinced itself that they had never existed. Imagine our surprise. Then imagine how much damage a single dragon or a genuine demon could cause to an unprepared populace. Then multiply that by a few thousand and you get the picture. It was a wonder that we survived the initial onslaught at all. But that, of course, was the plan.

The heads of the Conclave knew this was coming. This was their plan after all, and they were ready for it. They rode in like the proverbial cavalry and the nations of the world were all too happy to hire them to advise and intervene in the situation on behalf of their own interests. Being the ancient guardians of mankind against such horrors as they were, or should have been, they were in a prime position to dictate the response. I doubt that any president, king, or prime minister knew that they were hiring the same people who had brought this travesty into the world.

The entire planet went into a lockdown state. Democracies, once rooted in the ideals of freedom, established their own military rule. Every border was closed. Air traffic was suspended along with any sort of international trade. We all now lived on isolated islands of civilization, in connection with only those whom our rulers deemed safe to contact. This made it nearly impossible to get to where I needed to go.

Half a dozen times I had tried to sneak across the U.S. Canadian border only to be turned back when the armed patrols proved to be too numerous and too frequent. I couldn’t risk being caught. I was confident that I could take on the four or five soldiers of a standard patrol party if I surprised them, but then the Conclave would be alerted to me. Word would reach them quickly that their very own renegade Hunter had been spotted. They would have a time and a location. That would be all they needed to hunt me down. Having experienced firsthand how the Conclave deals with deserters, I couldn’t risk it. I had to find another way. Luckily, Brian, Al, and I were not the only ones who were working against my former employers. There were also the witches.

Witches, I had found, were some of the few paranormal creatures who had never left this world for the portal realm. They had stayed, despite their dwindling powers and increasing vulnerability, blending in with the normal humans so well that many had forgotten what they were. Presenting themselves as nothing more than vanilla humans proved to be the saving grace for most of them. The Hunters had brought witches to the brink of extinction in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. Most of these women, for they were all women as far as I knew, went deep underground to escape their persecution taking on new names and identities, knowing all the while that if their deception was ever discovered they would be hunted down like dogs. A select few latched themselves onto the Conclave as specialists in exchange for amnesty, keeping track of the unconverted of their kind.

But, as I discovered late in my youth, nothing is ever that simple. The Conclave witches worked from the inside to funnel information out to their sisters helping them stay off of the Conclave’s hit list. Through the work of these double agents, the witches had managed to keep themselves secure and organized even under the Conclave’s constant scrutiny. I had met such a witch by the name of Sarah Sedgwick. She was one of the oldest and most powerful of her kind and under the guise of a Conclave informant, she was in a position to see and hear everything. It was Sarah who had proved to be the key in learning of the portals and the Conclave’s grand design. She had been witness to the meeting that decided to send the world into chaos and death. She was also the person I was waiting for in the Marshall Point lighthouse on the coast of Maine that morning.

My old handler, Al, had managed to get a message to me via a predetermined dead-drop regarding what was perhaps the last mode of transportation that could help me in my mission. When the portals opened, more than monsters had returned to earth. The ancient forces of magic which had lain dormant for the last two centuries had also returned. These long forgotten ways and means were my one hope of circumventing the conventional powers working against me. Al’s message described a trinket called a Fae Stone. It was an artifact of Celtic legend rumored to mark the openings into the Elven pathways that ran in-between dimensions as well as functioning as a key allowing entry. However, when it comes to magic, I am as ignorant as your average armadillo. So, I reached out through the few channels that I still had access to in the hope of locating Sarah and asking for her help.

The response came the previous night in the form of; 10:00 A.M. SHARP, having been scorched into the metal door of my lighthouse hide out. The messenger, if there had been one, come and gone in silence. The unmistakable tang of burning metal woke me from my sleep. Groggy, half-awake, and fearing an attack, I cautiously opened the door and braced myself behind it. Being woken unexpectedly by the smell of welding is not usually associated with a friendly message. As such I readied for anything that may try to barge inside as I cautiously opened the door a crack and peered out. There was nothing outside aside from the sound of crashing of waves and the miserable omnipresent rain. Seeing no immediate threat, I opened the door wider and found the writing. Understanding the meaning of my new door decoration ignited an unfamiliar flicker of optimism along with the first smile to crease my worn features since the day my friends and I had parted company, months before.

So there I was at three minutes before ten the following morning, pacing the bottom floor of the lighthouse. I was never one to be comfortable in idleness. My instincts were always to act, even when acting was the worst possible thing that I could do. Despite my nature, I was stuck sitting on my thumbs in this forgotten lighthouse, scavenging for food among the abandoned houses and shops nearby. With Sarah coming, I could finally get back to my mission. The arms of the lone wall clock ticked down the seconds until the appointed time at an agonizing pace. I felt like a racehorse stomping at the gates just before the buzzer sounds. Then, at precisely ten o’clock, there was a knock on the door.

I opened the door a crack at first but threw it wide when I saw Sarah standing on the step. I opened my mouth to greet her but she beat me to it, You look like shit, Jed.

It wasn’t the greeting I was expecting. She wasn’t wrong, though. I was essentially on the run since we had last seen each other and since supplies were limited everywhere, not to mention I didn’t have a penny to my name, my personal upkeep had gone to hell. I didn’t care much while I was on my own, whether I shaved every day was not on the top of my priority list. Still, that being the first thing to come out of her mouth, I felt the need to shoot back, And, you look like the Gordon’s Fisherman.

We stood there for a moment, me in my torn jeans and with three days’ of stubble on my face, and her in a ridiculous yellow rain slicker and matching hat. She was a tall woman, having three or four inches on me, and gave the appearance matronly self-assurance that only experience and hard earned wisdom can instill in a woman. She looked to be about forty five but that was an illusion. By her own admission she was over a hundred and her real appearance was something she kept well hidden. I had seen her true form only once, when a magic inhibiting collar blocked her contact with the elemental forces she wielded. The best thing I could say about that was that she looked pretty good for having lived a hard life for over a hundred years.

We both cracked a grin at the same time, breaking the silence and the tension, It’s good to see you Sarah. Thanks for coming.

How could I refuse? If nothing else, hanging around you is never dull. Now, are you going to let me in or do I have to stand out here in the rain all day? she said.

I stepped aside and she walked past me through the door. I shut it and turned the lock, then dragged a couple of chairs out from beneath the stairwell and placed them next to the eastern facing window. She took off her rain gear and draped the dripping garments over the banister of the lighthouse’s spiral staircase. She had traded in the hippie themed clothes I had met her in for a more practical slacks and shirt combo. Her hair too had changed. Gone was the frizzy mop of bright red. She now wore it short and slick. My first impression of her had been of someone’s crazy aunt, now she looked like a corporate power player on vacation.

I sat down in one of the chairs and she took the other. Then she waved her hand over the space between us and a small blue globe of fire appeared. She rubbed her hands together vigorously over the orb of flame, scrubbing the damp and cold away. I could feel the warmth emanating from it seeping through my skin relaxing my muscles and mind both. I hadn’t noticed how tense my body had become in the constant rain and the slim protection of the draughty lighthouse.

She gave me a moment before getting down to business, So, you want to go talk to Tiffany?

Tiffany? Who’s Tiffany? I asked you here to help me get a Fae stone. Al’s last dead-drop note said there was one in this area. It’s supposed to be in a cave out on one of those islands, I said gesturing out the window.

It is. That cave, and that island belong to Tiffany though. You’ll have to deal with her if you want that Fae stone. I take it that Al didn’t give you all the particulars, she said.

He couldn’t tell me much. He’s still inside the Conclave. He’s already risking his neck by making me aware of this artifact. Is it important?

Sarah grimaced, Oh, it is important. You might have screwed yourself already by coming here looking for something in her keeping and not acknowledging her. She doesn’t take kindly to rudeness. I have no doubt she knows you’re coming and what you want.

I raised an eyebrow and said, What do you mean, she already knows? I only found out about this thing a week ago, and haven’t spoken to anyone except who I had to in order to get your attention. Wait, was she the one that burned your message into my door?

No, that was an acquaintance of mine who happened to be passing through the area and was willing to give me a hand. I was occupied with some other matters. My plate is very full these days, as you might have heard. So Al told you nothing about Tiffany?

Yeah, I’ve heard whispers about the witches organizing in some way. I don’t get out much lately. I don’t want the Conclave tracking me, but when I am I try to stick around the likely spots for practitioners. Sometimes I overhear conversations. Though I admit, most of the witches are tightlipped around here. As for Tiffany, I don’t know a damn thing. I didn’t even know she existed until just now. Is she going to be a problem? Translation: am I walking into a fight?

No, not as such. Not a problem you could handle on your own at any rate. I just hope I didn’t waste time and trip out here. You should know a bit about her, though. If nothing else it should help you walk out alive, she said.

You make her sound dangerous.

She is. Tiffany is the caretaker of some of the most powerful and forbidden items the witches have secreted away over the centuries. In essence, she is our analogy to the Conclave’s McCarthy, she said, her eyes conveying the gravity of her statement.

McCarthy was in charge of the Conclave’s warehouses. The warehouses were where the Conclave kept all the relics, artifacts, and weapons that they deemed to be too dangerous for the world at large to be aware of. They were a treasure trove of mystical power either stolen from their targets or given to them for safe keeping by their allies. 1500 years worth of trouble was stored in the warehouses, and McCarthy was responsible for it all. But if the witches had their own form of warehouses, they probably contained things that were too hot for even the Conclave to handle. I had no idea what those things might be, but I was starting to understand why Sarah was talking about Tiffany with such foreboding. She must be something extraordinary if she was the guardian of that Pandora’s Box.

She must be one hell of a powerful witch if she’s in charge of your warehouses. I’m glad you’re coming with me. Maybe you can talk to her, you know, witch to witch, I said.

Sarah let the little blue flame die and gave a short, quiet laugh before saying, Tiffany is no witch. She couldn’t channel a spell to boil water. No, she and I don’t have common ground like that. If she was a witch, then you would be dealing with me instead of her and we could come to some sort of deal on our own. If you had listened more closely to those overheard conversations, you would know that I have become the de facto leader of the independent witches now. A lot has changed since the flow of magic returned, Jed. But, Tiffany Morgan lies outside of that. She’s not a witch. Her powers don’t come from the elemental forces that I know.

So what is she? I asked, getting a little impatient.

She is a psychic, one in a long line of them in fact. Her family, the Morgans, has passed down the position for generations. She is now the last of that long line as far as I know. I wonder what we’re going to do without her when she too is gone. Psychics are just humans with a genetically different mind. They don’t have the witch’s longevity or physical powers, for instance. The real ones, the genuine psychics are everything history reports though and anyone would be a fool to cross one. I wouldn’t try, for instance, and that is saying something.

So, Tiffany was a psychic. That certainly changed things. The Conclave records had files on people like Tiffany, and they made for some very interesting reading. It was required reading during my apprenticeship, along with the histories about witches, vampires, and anything else my superiors thought I was likely to come into contact with. The psychics specifically were a strange group. The gift, or curse as you could rightly call it, ran in families, through bloodlines. The unfortunate man or woman who inherited this ability usually went irrevocably insane shortly thereafter. Having to deal with one’s inner most thoughts was a frightening prospect that most people choose to avoid. Having to deal with not only the thoughts of yourself but also with all the dark and dirty secrets, desires, and ambitions of everyone around you; well, that could drive anyone mad.

That’s where we get the legends of the mad advisor or witchdoctor in so many cultures. They could read minds and send their consciousness outside of their body. They could gather tons of hidden knowledge, but they could never get away from the thoughts, the fears, and the hopes of anyone around them. I could understand why Tiffany chose to live in a cave on an ignored island. It was a sanctuary, a place where she could have some peace and quiet.

Now I get it, I sighed, With all the time I have spent hiding here, and she has had plenty of time to learn anything she wanted. Well, I guess there is no point in strategizing now, I snorted a laugh, She’s probably listening to our conversation right now. Are you ready?

Sure, whenever you are. Just try to be polite Jed. She’s not a bad person, just a person with a ton of responsibilities, she said.

I’ll be as diplomatic as I can. I have no desire to get on the bad side of a psychic. And, after all, I don’t really have much of a bargaining position. I’ll pay whatever price she wants; I don’t really have a choice. Besides, if she’s willing to barter with me, then she knows how we all stand, I said.

OK, then. Follow me outside. You know how this works, she said, putting her rain slicker and hat back on.

I got my heavy leather jacket and wide-brimmed hat and followed her out onto the jagged rock that formed the foundation of the lighthouse. Sarah stood close enough to the edge that the waves lapped at her boots. I stood a little behind and to her right, with my left hand on her shoulder. She scanned the near horizon through the cold rain until she seemed to find what she was searching for. When her eyes locked on to it, they started to glow a dull orange color and I braced myself.

In less time than it takes to blink, Sarah and I went from standing on a rocky outcropping to standing on a soaking sandy shoreline. I was never going to get used to that. Magic, like most things in our weird wonderful world, is nothing like they show in the movies. On a screen it’s a big, flashy thing with lights and explosions. The way that Sarah worked, it just happened. She reached out her will, twisted a little bit of reality, and it was done. Maybe a less experienced witch needed the abracadabra and eye of toad. But for a pro like Sarah it was done deadpan and was all the more frightening because of it.

As my eyes readjusted to my new surroundings, Sarah headed away from the shoreline and into a thatch of stunted looking trees. I hurried to catch up to her and noticed to my surprise that while the trees were small for their kind, a maple I passed came up only to my waist; they seemed to be healthy, even vibrant. Anyone looking at this island from a passing ship or from overhead would no doubt see a blasted rock in the middle of the ocean. But up close, it looked more like I was walking through the most elaborate banzai garden I had ever seen. While interesting, the trees were not why I had come, and I tried to ignore them as we approached a large and ornately carved cave entrance.

The roof of the cave hung around ten feet off the ground and there was no mistaking the several layers of runes that were chiseled into the solid rock, encircling the opening. Some I recognized as Nordic or Celtic. Some seemed to be from African or South American tribal practices. Each pattern meshed with its neighbors, working seamlessly with each other to produce a barrier, securing the cave from anyone who wasn’t welcome. It was the U.N. of home security and it thrummed with latent power.

Tiffany. It’s Sarah Sedgwick and Jed Morehouse. Can we come in please? Sarah called into the cave.

After a brief moment the thrumming died down and the feeling of standing next to an industrial power station dissipated. We took that to mean we were welcome and walked into the dim light of Tiffany’s home. The second we crossed the threshold, the thrumming began to rise again and soon reached its previous strength. She had shut the door behind us.

Around a bend in what passed for the cave’s foyer, the light brightened and we came into what I took to be the living room. It was sparse but seemed comfortable enough. There was a hearth with a well-tended fire warming the space along with something fragrant in the cast-iron pot that hung over it. The walls were lined with framed pictures of tourist destinations. Rome, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro decorated the mantel piece. Other pictures of other locations encircled the room at roughly head height and gave the impression that they were windows into far distant lands. I was going to ask about them but realized that would be rude and I didn’t want to start off on a bad foot. Or at least, a worse one than I was already starting on.

Tiffany may have come out to this place to find peace but it was obvious that this sanctuary had also become her prison. The canned goods and the military surplus M.R.E.s stacked in one corner testified to that. It was enough food to feed one person for maybe six months. Combined with what I knew of her situation, it may have been years since she last set foot off this island. The posters were her view on the world. It was a kindness to one who was cursed to see everything and know everything in the mind but never able to witness it in reality. These pictures were the only way her eyes could see the world her affliction had shut away from her.

I was starting to pity this woman to whom I had come to bargain when a voice echoed off of the inside of my skull, Do not pity me Hunter. I am many things, not all of them kind, but I will never be the object of pity.

I started, not so much from the words but rather the mode of communication. Having words, speech, come unbidden inside my own mind was something I was not ready for. Her voice was clear and booming in my mind as if she was speaking through a P.A. system installed in my head.

‘Alright then, don’t pity the psychic,’ I admonished myself and tried to reorganize my thoughts in a way that wouldn’t immediately offend her again. As I did, I moved toward the fire and the overstuffed armchair in front of it. In the flickering light I could now see Tiffany clearly. Her age I could not even guess at. The shriveled form sitting there, strait backed, with her arms resting on the arms of the chair, looked like a fallen queen ruling her cave from a throne of upholstery. Her drawn face, matted hair, and fragile limbs doing nothing to dissuade her regal impression. Seeing this made me feel that my earlier inclination toward pity was a stupid notion. Tiffany was nothing if not formidable.

Ms. Morgan, I have come to you with a request, I began but was interrupted by another of her mental transmissions.

"I know why you come to me Hunter, and I am obviously open to making a deal with you. I have allowed you entry into my home after all. You wouldn’t have laid