Chapter 165 The Zingarees
POV: Tom the Cracksman | Hermetic Facility, Ward Perimeter
The deal with the Seelie Court had been struck three weeks ago, in the same breath as every other preparation Callum had made once Ash's blueprint arrived. Tom had negotiated it himself, which was the only way to negotiate with fae, because fae contracts required someone who understood the specific weight of words and could hold the shape of an agreement in their head without letting it blur at the edges.
The terms were clean, which was unusual for Seelie dealings and suggested they wanted this particular outcome badly enough to offer clean terms. Ten warriors, one night's service, directed against Hermetic Order magical defenses only. No other targets, no collateral obligations, no extensions. Payment: one favor, unspecified, to be called within ten years.
Tom had accepted because an unspecified favor in ten years was survivable. Twelve children in a Hermetic facility tonight was not.
He stood at the facility's eastern ward boundary and felt the fae strike team arrive the way you felt a pressure change before a storm, the air going dense and slightly wrong in the way that happened when beings from Arcadia crossed into London's material reality in numbers. They came through a gate he opened in the wall of a maintenance alcove, which was not a door in any structural sense but which fae movement required a threshold to anchor to, and he had prepared the anchor three hours ago.
Ten of them. Seelie warriors looked like humans the way that a blade looked like a stick, the resemblance present and fundamentally misleading. They wore the Court's colors, pale gold and deep green, and they carried weapons that existed in two places simultaneously, the material blade and the magical one occupying the same space, which was what made them effective against ward constructs.
Their captain addressed Tom in old fae, which he spoke passably.
"The human mages," she said. It was not a question. It was an identification of target.
"The wards first," he said. "The facility runs four layers. I'll take the outer two, they're keyed to supernatural signatures and I can work with the key sequences we have. The inner two are pure Hermetic construction. That's yours."
She looked at the building with the assessment of someone for whom assessment was a physical process, pulling information from the air and stone and the magical residue that every ward left on its surroundings.
"Three minutes," she said. "Then we move."
Tom used the three minutes to center himself, which was the fae-touched practice he had learned from the scout who had found him picking pockets at twelve years old and which he had never stopped needing. The fae magic that ran through him was not his in the way that his hands were his. It was borrowed, or perhaps more accurately it was a channel that ran through him without being of him, and using it well required being very clear about the difference between himself and the channel.
He was Tom. The magic was a tool.
He exhaled and opened the outer ward.
It resisted, which he had expected, the Hermetic construction pushing back against the fae key sequence with the stubbornness of something built by people who had been thorough. He pushed through it with the particular quality of attention that fae work required, not force but precision, finding the seam in the construction where the key sequence matched and applying it exactly, the magical equivalent of a lock picking that worked by understanding the lock's own logic rather than overriding it.
The outer ward collapsed in twelve seconds.
The inner wards were different. They were older construction, layered in ways that suggested they had been built up over years rather than designed as a unit, each layer added as the facility expanded and each layer keyed to a different magical signature. They pushed back against fae influence in the way that Hermetic and fae magic always interacted, two fundamentally different systems recognizing each other as incompatible.
The fae captain put her hand on the wall.
The strike team moved into formation around her, connecting through physical contact, and Tom felt the combined magical output of ten Seelie warriors focus into a single directed assault on the ward structure. The air in the maintenance alcove went cold, genuinely cold, the temperature dropping ten degrees in the space of a breath. The ward resisted, held, and then began to fracture.
It did not collapse cleanly. It came apart the way old structures came apart under too much load, in sections, each section failing independently, the facility's alarm system responding to each failure with a new layer of sound until the alarm was running at a frequency and volume that made the floor vibrate.
Tom worked with the collapse, finding the sections that were failing and accelerating them, guiding the fracture pattern toward the cell block rather than the research levels.
The last ward came down.
Inside, three floors below, he could hear the sounds of Callum's team moving through the cell block, which meant the timing had held. He could also hear other sounds, higher up, the sounds of people moving quickly with purpose, which was the Hermetic security team and possibly Fell himself.
Through the facility's now-unshielded structure, a voice carried down from the upper level with the clarity that unshielded spaces produced.
Fell. Professional, precise, the voice of someone managing a bad situation according to a prepared protocol.
"Get the viable subjects out," Fell said. "Burn the rest."
Tom was already moving toward the building.