A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 3
Zoe had tracked the crew for several days. They worked for either Malleus or the Belgian’s council, she hadn’t figured out which. They handled the spellcraft while their B-team buzzed Jill and Darnell’s house, doing performative drive-bys and glowing their headlights from the shadows. So far, everything had aligned with Zoe’s expectations. The slow campaign of psychological terrorism and constant, low-level mystical attacks followed SOP close enough to the letter for the breaches and bifurcations to seem like honest mistakes. This was what they did.
Zoe had never led up a civilian anti-personnel gig, herself, but she’d read the documentation.
People didn’t kill people, anymore. Especially not in civilian arenas, places where police and mundane investigative agencies would bring scrutiny to the crime. Instead, different in-field agents performed rigorous surveillance and espionage activities. They collected data, since all data had use, but the real purpose was to instill paranoia and fear in their subjects. Ideally, the subject would report these things to friends, family members, or local authorities. Over time, the nature of the carefully scripted ‘crying wolf’ led the subject’s credibility to decline. This dismantled the subject’s ability to reach out, communicate, and organize resistance. More importantly, paranoia tended to generate more paranoia.
The FBI never followed Earnest Hemingway. They never followed him right up until he put a bullet in his head.
Meanwhile, the primary members of the anti-personnel squad worked on magical approaches. With most civilians, this meant psychic and dream magic, minor illusions to further their paranoia, and basic bad luck hexes, curses weakening their immune systems, and other subtle but increasingly destructive spells aimed at attenuating their targets physically, mentally, and spiritually.
According to SOP regarding the neutralization of entities possessing human-like consciousness, a sentient target was ‘neutralized’ when their avenues for attack were cut off and their means of recovery prohibitively limited. Sometimes this meant homelessness, sometimes institutionalization, sometimes prison—sometimes just flat-broke, beat-up, make-it-stop concession. Very rarely did it end with death. When it did, it seldom mattered. Suicides didn’t threaten the same scrutiny that homicides did.
Working anti-personnel for rogue agents, known terrorists, and active necromancers was much easier, both morally and practically. SOP for those gigs involved extensive research on the eradication of evidence, mundane and otherwise. There were fewer steps.
The group Zoe had tracked had rented a small house about five miles from Jill’s. Approaching, Zoe felt the ritual space in her sixth sense. It was subtle but her sixth sense was sharp. In the basement, an accretion of supernatural energy thrummed her sensory periphery. She felt it like a gentle tug pulling her inside. So gentle she barely noticed it; but she did.
The property’s narrow yard and short fence provided little cover for breaking and entering. Clad in all-black, bullet-resistant helmet over armored leather jacket over armor-reinforced pants, she clung to the shadows and crept to the rear of the building. Just after three in the morning, no lights shone down from the surrounding windows.
Shouldering her quick-kit to the gray-white cement backing the house, she withdrew a set of lockpicks and unrolled them. Even with her mystically-enhanced eyesight she had to squint to see in the deep dark of the cloud-swaddled night. She got to work on the back door. She’d learned, at some point, that the mundane act of picking locks took a fraction of the time it took magic to accomplish the same feat. So she’d taken lessons.
The lock unlatched. She paused, packing the lockpicks back up. Focusing on her sixth sense, she closed her eyes and reached out. She searched for a ward, an alarm or a trap that might trigger when someone invaded their space or entered uninvited or crossed a specific threshold. Magic crackled inside the house. She couldn’t feel a particular warding spell but she couldn’t find certainty that one didn’t wait for her, either.
She pushed the door open.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happening meant little. Most wards weren’t traps. Just because she didn’t feel a ward go off, and just because none of the magical effects specifically targeted or affected her, didn’t prove a ward hadn’t triggered. It didn’t prove anything at all, except that she’d broken into her enemy’s house and nothing bad had happened to her yet.
Crouching, she found herself in a kitchen. She maneuvered the walking space slowly, listening for movement, a footstep, a dog’s huff, something. She heard nothing. Closing her eyes, again, she attuned herself to her sixth sense. She felt no jolt of warning or thrum of foreshadowing. She felt several spells active in the vicinity. She felt magic buzzing in the basement.
Opening her eyes, she moved toward what felt like the direction of the ritual space.
A lot of practitioners in Zoe’s realm of esoteric espionage used basements as ritual spaces. A basement represented a large chamber, private, that society demanded neither to intrude nor witness; a part of a building so frequently windowless that nobody ever questioned its windowlessness. It didn’t surprise Zoe that a group of well-trained mystical operatives would use a rented basement for their local spellcraft.
What surprised her was what she saw when she crept through the basement door and peered down.
“Holy shit,” she whispered to nobody, her hand reaching for an amulet she’d brought for the job. The jewelry had been imbued some generations ago with a simple ward, a slight bit of magic that gently muffled all the sounds its wearer made. The techniques used to enchant the necklace were so old that only Jill knew how to renew the ward, so its effectiveness had grown dubious over the years. She hadn’t touched it for that reason, anyway. She’d touched it instinctively. She’d touched it because she’d needed to touch something after what she’d seen.
The sheer volume of paranormal power contained in the chamber overwhelmed her sixth sense. She tried to shove the panic-sensations into the back of her mind, tried to make sense of the spellcraft beyond the mere mass of it. Whoever these practitioners were, whatever organization they worked for, they did not trifle.
Zoe closed the basement door behind her. Relying on the invocation that lent her nightsight, not wanting to turn on her phone’s flashlight even noiselessly in the basement, she descended. Her sixth sense hammered at the back of her skull, demanding attention. She controlled it. She focused on the evidence.
She recognized some of the glyphs and sigils. Every practitioner had their own spin, their own calligraphy, but it was all variations on a theme. When a practitioner discovered something that worked well, that saved some degree of time or effort in the laborsome task of spellcrafting, everyone else started using the same short-cut ASAP.
Historically, this practice had led to a significant amount of cultural appropriation and, eventually, cultural exchange. It turned out, whatever magic was, it responded to earnestness. A practitioner couldn’t benefit from, for example, a faith-based warding short-cut without developing in themselves a knowledge of and respect for the faith that originated it. Magic didn’t abide vacancy, irony, or disdain.
So, over centuries, most high-level practitioners became pseudo-culture vultures.
(Were there seven keys, a secret doctrine? So much more than that.)
Also over centuries, all the numerous short-cuts discovered for numerous spells solidified into a recognizable set of sigils, items, and behaviors. Examining them closely enough could tell a practitioner what spells might hum and stir in the ozone-stink air, what loose threads of reality awaited tugging, sometimes even what trigger might set something off.
Zoe picked out a couple scrying spells, mystical means of long-range spying, but she doubted they were strong enough to pierce the wards ensconcing Jill’s house. The team renting the house had also constructed several psychic assaults, mostly in the form of nightmare curses meant to cause sleeplessness.
Nightmares and paranoia hexes were small potatoes, they affected very little in terms of physical reality, and so the team had been able to hyper-charge the sigils and get them through Jill’s defenses. Judging from the sigils, glyphs, crystals, and burnt offerings, Zoe figured that four people in the Briar-Tims household suffered nightly terrors, and five suffered from a faint, background sense of growing dread, the spell subtly altering their hormonal levels and sending a mystic hum through their bodies at an inaudible 18hz. For efficiency’s sake, Zoe imagined the team aimed for as much overlap as possible.
She found a few wards, all of them well-attended. They’d used the standard perimeter defenses to shield themselves from non-human interlopers, outside entities, and other supernatural and paranormal threats, but all the other wards she found served the purpose of obscuring the place from notice. Maybe that explained how faintly she’d first felt so much powerful and concentrated magic. Maybe.
The death curse stopped her in her tracks.
SOP didn’t include death curses.
She bent low, examining the sigil, its smaller surrounding glyphs, the narrow runes painted and dug into the unfinished cement around those…
It was definitely a death curse.
Magic couldn’t guarantee things like death. Few practitioners attempted true death curses in the modern age—a true death curse, the kind that later appeared as aneurysms or accidental death, took practitioners months or years to charge and cast, and even then they only worked in about twelve percent of known cases. To truly guarantee someone’s death through supernatural means alone, a practitioner of Zoe’s level would have to invest between six and nine years of ritual, each day requiring two to three hours of spellcraft. In the modern age, people mostly just shot each other or paid other people to shoot each other for them.
And so, in modern parlance, a ‘death curse’ was just a curse that altered probability fields and other accretions of million-variable vectors (sometimes mistaken for ‘luck’) to drastically enhance the chances that a target would come to some sort of physical or psychological harm. It was still very much not part of protocol.
Except…
Zoe felt stupid, realizing.
It wasn’t part of Malleus protocol.
But there was an organization in their world, aligned with Malleus, that Malleus loved to criticize over their ‘uncivilized’ tactics. The Belgian’s initiative, his council of twelve, took a much more conservative and aggressive stance on secrecy issues. A more violent stance, too.
How convenient, she mentally sneered.
How useful, she mentally corrected.
Standing, she peered at the basement ceiling. Had she heard something? She waited, ears burning. No sound muffled through, no floorboard creaked. She rolled her neck, cracked her knuckles. She had to sabotage the death curse, at least. Immediately. Before leaving.
Luckily, magic tended to be a tenuous thing. A person with training could dismantle someone else’s spell in a fraction of the time it took to build up.
Zoe had a lot of training.
Flexing her hands, fingers interlocked, she froze.
She’d definitely heard something that time. A footstep. Two. Three, four—two pairs of footsteps.
She clutched the grip of her sidearm and scanned the basement for cover.
“You sure you felt something?” a groggy male voice asked.
“Yes,” a woman replied, sharp and awake. “I felt it.”
“Okay, where?”
“‘Where?’ I don’t know, Frank. Someone broke a perimeter ward.”
“Okay, but where are they?”
“Somewhere inside the perimeter. Jesus.”
The groggy male, apparently Frank, grumbled. “I just thought maybe you had more specifics.”
Zoe pulled her sidearm from its holster. Little cover existed in the basement; the team had cleared most of it out to make room for ritual use. A water heater and furnace boiled in a corner. She pursed her lips.
The basement doorknob twisted.
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