Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (106 page)

One arrow may have pierced his lung, but I
couldn’t see closely enough through the armor and the Stone
wouldn’t release it. That seemed arbitrary considering it let me
face the big man down a few minutes ago. Smartest thing I could
think of was to send him to the Cahills’, so I wrapped him in a
portal and away he went. He could fight with me tomorrow about it.
Right now, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I was still in the throes of
speaking an ancient troll name. Very guttural words, some of them
you had to have magic to even say, or an extra long tongue and some
extra bicuspids. More elven bodies collected on the ground as the
Quiver refilled itself.

I turned back to MacNamara, jumping in
between him and Gordon and sweeping the Day across his guard. He
parried and turned my blade with an ivory staff, slightly longer
than the sword with a veritable encyclopedia of elven lore etched
in the finest hands. The magic that promised to be encoded there
was supremely High Elf magic—Liege level. If he made it and it
fails, that would be a severe blow to his ego, possibly even to his
mind. Oh, yeah, I have to get that to fail.

So I pounced on him, swinging in with Day and
thrusting in with Night. He adjusted quickly to the moves I was
using. I would have to adjust, find a way.

“Stop it!” he snarled, striking out hard and
furiously with the staff in rapid succession, battering me back
into the line of his elves. He screamed suddenly, whirling left
with the staff in his right hand. I shoved the Night out fast,
embedding it in his stick. It was indeed High Elf magic and it
fought hard with the Night for control of itself. If I was a better
magician, I would have tried to read the magic and control the
flows of energy, but I had a liege of Faery to kill. I swung the
Day back in and cut the ivory rod above MacNamara’s hand. The Night
happily blew the rest of the elf’s magic right back at him like a
firehose, blasting him across the field a good forty yards. One of
Peter’s throwing knives stuck handle up in the ground. That could
explain the scream.

I continued my chant of MacNamara’s
encyclopedic name as I exchanged the Day for the Crossbow, dropping
another thirty in a semi-circle around me. There were far fewer
elves on the field now, but that didn’t make the situation easier,
it made it harder. My indiscriminate killing helped, but it didn’t
remove the best fighters, just the most. The rest were now homing
in on Peter and Gordon with greater accuracy and less distraction
from their peers. Peter and Gordon were getting tired and most of
the elves hadn’t gotten started yet. Over fifteen minutes of
serious fighting with no real breaks, they had to be close to
gassing out.

Quite a few had seen the destruction of
MacNamara’s ivory rod. So far, our victories have been
disconcerting for them, but they hadn’t felt fear yet. They hadn’t
felt the possibility of losing. I reached out through the Night for
the ivory shards of MacNamara’s destroyed staff and found them
still hot from the mangling of the Liege Lord’s power, but eager to
answer the Sword’s bidding. MacNamara was beginning to rise. I
whipped the Night quickly through the air in a wide arc and down to
the oncoming horde facing Gordon and Peter. Thousands of tiny white
needles shot through the air following the tip of the Night,
crashing down in a torrent of hot, white fire.

My timing couldn’t have been better as I
shouted into a crescendo of the final segment of MacNamara’s name:
Race Traitor. The needles burned with hatred as MacNamara fought to
regain his feet. Distant explosions said the Americans were still
bombarding to the north and the Europeans were still setting their
fires and bombs to the south. For the first time, the elves tasted
fear. They didn’t like it. They didn’t know how to handle it.

“Stop it!” MacNamara screeched at me. “Stop
it! Stop it!” In two strides, he was on me. He landed a solid right
across my jaw before I knew he was swinging at me. The Day moved
fast enough to nick his left arm slightly as he launched me off my
feet and into the frenzy of elves I’d just caused. The Night,
though, got a nice slice into his right arm, sucking deep into his
aura. He screamed as I flew back through the air away from him.

The armor absorbed most of the impact when I
landed. The ten or so elves I plowed through absorbed some, too,
but my body took the rest and I saw stars and smears of light. He
managed to stop my chant of his name. Pause it, anyway. Shaking my
head to clear away the haze as I tried to stand, I felt MacNamara
reaching out for the fountain, reaching for power. The Night had
hurt him.

I started to chant again, repeating the last
name, yelling with a vehement hatred that almost scared me: Race
Traitor. MacNamara’s attention snapped fully back to me when he
found his connection to the fountain loose and tenuous. His binding
was unraveling and I was close to the end—his end. Fourteen Fae
words away.

Then he did something horrifying. In the time
it took me to say six Fae words, he showed me what the name “Race
Traitor” meant. He healed himself. And he filled himself to the top
with energy and power and hate.

MacNamara, the unknown Liege Lord of Faery,
broke the Geas of his elves. All of them at once. In doing so, he
stole their lives, taking them for himself, feeding on them like a
vampire. Bram Stoker on LSD couldn’t have dreamed this up. The
elves dropped almost as one. The only elf alive drew in a slow
breath, turning to me, long enough for another name.

Shrank shot out, through the armor even, and
stopped at the elf’s eye level, shouting at him, “No! You’ll not
have them!” He turned and flew, fast as lightning, into the lower
levels of the Arena.

“I’d forgotten about them,” MacNamara said,
slyly, following after Shrank a second. “No matter.”

He fixed his stare on me and I panicked.
Wrapping portals around Peter and Gordon, I sent them home to the
Cahills’. I’d have done that same to Shrank, even sooner had I
remembered he was there, but now I had no idea where he was.
Whatever happened now, I wanted to know they’d be safe. At least,
for the time it would take for MacNamara to kill me, then he’d be
on them, but later. Maybe they could figure out another way later.
MacNamara squeezed the space around the fountain after that. There
wouldn’t be another portal for miles. No retreat for me, then.

“Just you and me, now, eh, little boy?”
MacNamara said, his voice crackling with stolen power as he walked
toward me, unhurried. He waved his hand and his power swept past me
to the bodies around me, shoving them back to the edges of the
field. Clearing space to work. Four names away. Another wave of his
hand and weapons of many kinds rose from the mass of bodies,
collecting in a wall on my left. The fountain on my right and
MacNamara in front. Three names left.

“Go ahead, boy. Finish up. You have a
surprise coming.” The smile across his face said I didn’t
understand something. I knew I didn’t understand a lot of things,
not the least of all of them was him.

“Arbiter,” I said his penultimate name
calmly, the Fae language rolling off my tongue. For such a short
intent, the word itself was incredibly long, twelve syllables,
mostly vowels.

“One more,” MacNamara coached, eyes gleaming
with hatred. He stood outside of my fastest striking distance.

“Declared to be fair,” I said, speaking
through the last of the names I heard that day. Nothing happened.
Nothing. Of course, the name was a joke, too. MacNamara, fair?

I don’t know which of us was more surprised
by it, me or him. His hold on the fountain was more tenuous than
before and I could see the binding now, floating as three
concentric rings around the fountain, constricting the flow like a
magnetic bottle constricts a plasma stream. He tried to reassert
his control over the binding, but I was standing in the way. His
power was so wrapped up in the binding that he couldn’t get enough
purchase in the fountain to push me away from it.

MacNamara started toward me, summoning to him
a sword from the wall of weapons floating at his command nearby.
Apparently, he decided it was time to dispatch me and worry about
that problem later. Then it hit me. I understood very suddenly what
the problem was, why the fountain of pure power was still tied to
MacNamara. I laughed, loud and hard. It rang through the Arena,
echoing through the stadium. The elf scowled at me and waved his
tiny sword. Well, tiny on him, anyway.

I set myself into the first defensive
position I knew, holding the Day and Night forward to protect me. I
didn’t dare release the armor, but I really wished I could stare
him down when I said it. I didn’t want to be stupid, though, and I
didn’t know what was going to happen.

“Rat Bastard,” I called loudly. The fountain
released from the elf’s control. I watched the binding snap, first
in the center ring, then both outer rings together. The force of
the outer two provided a fierce feedback at MacNamara, nearly
matching the size of his ego. It flung him back until he hit the
Arena stadium hard, sending the upper levels crashing down behind
him. The Americans had done a stupendous job wrecking the underside
there. It began to collapse in stages around him, but,
unfortunately for me, not on top of him.

I turned to the fountain to see it spouting
energy up into the sky in its full glory. It was a magnificent
sight to behold. Awesome, really. I needed to control it now,
before MacNamara could. I ran closer to it, staring into the
bright, phasing lights as the strands of energy moved in on itself
like giant snakes writhing in a pit. I opened up my mind and
welcomed the power in.

Then I opened up my mouth to scream, but no
sound came out. I couldn’t breathe. Or move. Or even think. It was
overwhelming, the power. It was also familiar in some way. I
ignored that thought to fight for control. MacNamara stirred in the
rubble, crawling out slowly to the field. While I couldn’t turn to
see him, I was very much aware of every pebble, every mote of
falling dust in the arena—it was no longer fair to capitalize that
word.

“You… insolent… pile… of… worm… dung,” he
whispered hoarsely as he pried himself loose from the rubble. My
senses were far too keenly attached to the fountain, and I still
had no control. “There you are,” he said urgently. I felt him crush
another set of geas to dust and suck the power down. I heard a
hypersonic keening. It must have been a clan of fairy or maybe
brownies. He used the modicum of power he’d disgustingly stolen to
heal his crushed pelvis. Not completely, but he could walk better.
I hoped the pain was excruciating.

He reached out to his wall of formerly
floating weapons now lying on the ground in piles and called a rod
to him. Not as a weapon, though, he used it as a crutch and began a
slow, steady march toward me. His eyes glowed red around the edges
as he glared at me. “Not so easy, is it, Pactman?” he snarled.
“Taking my power away from me. Now hold on to it while I kill
you.”

I fought for control, but I wasn’t gaining a
foothold. It was just too much and there wasn’t anywhere to shunt
the energy. The elf wasn’t trying to take it from me either. He
didn’t need to. If I let go to protect myself, he’d grab it and
drown me in it. If I didn’t let go, he could shove a knife through
my heart. He could get around the armor. He would defeat the Stone.
I knew it and he knew it. I couldn’t just cap this sucker either.
Batteries or not, they’d fill faster than I could produce them and
I’d be spewing orange rocks so fast I’d look like a volcano
erupting.

“Your kind was still swimming in brine when I
ruled,” he said weakly. He’d made it halfway across the field now,
using the rod to pull himself along, his right leg dangling loose
on the ground. His left arm hung loose at his side, too. He shouted
now, “And you Named me?”

I smiled at that. “Rat Bastard,” I managed a
whisper, my voice echoed through stadium, strong with the
fountain’s power. He roared and increased his pace.

“You can’t keep it, boy,” he taunted,
stressing the “boy” to rile me. “The fountain requires a land and
you haven’t got one. And this one is mine!”

Well, thank you, arrogant elf. That was
exactly what I needed to know. I pushed the opening to the Pacthome
onto the fountain and forced the energy into the field around the
ward. I slipped into the opening, too, and stood halfway in.
Activating the ward, I started shifting the power of the fountain
and relieving the pressure in my mind. Oh, yeah, the fountain
definitely needed a land, I could see MacNamara’s point quite
clearly now. And if I had started this when he first began crawling
out of the rubble, I would have finished in time.

MacNamara was at my throat before I could
regain any motion. He broke the bones of my left hand through the
armor wresting the Night sword out of my hand without touching it,
knocking it away with his crutch. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t
think about that. Quite literally, I couldn’t think about it. He
was cackling while he did it, so I’m pretty sure he didn’t
recognize what I was doing. Even if he killed me, though, in a few
moments, his precious fountain would be forever out of his reach. I
took some solace in that. Not much, though.

The elf twisted savagely at my right arm to
free the Day from my grasp. When he finally managed it, he took the
Sword up himself, resisting its angry attempts to eat him. He swung
it experimentally, but weakly as it fought him. Neither Sword liked
elves.

“I should have killed you last year,” he
whispered in my ear. Grasping my shoulder, he shook me hard, trying
to break my connection to the millions of live wires of the
fountain. I almost laughed as I closed the connection to the
Pacthome. I was exhausted. Totally and truly out of energy. Tired
to the bone. He shook again and I fell back on my butt.