Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (63 page)

“No, not yet,” he said. “That could be
dangerous, even for the Night Sword.”

I was more than a little surprised. Both by
the fact that Kieran wasn’t cut at all by the sharp edge of the
knife and that the Night didn’t object at all at being turned aside
so close to consuming some potent magic. Apparently, the Night
Sword knew it had limits that it didn’t desire to exceed. I sent it
home.

“Then no, I can’t,” I acknowledged. “It looks
self-contained, just floating in space.”

“Okay then,” he said. “We got what we came
for. Let’s leave this for another day and go back to Ireland.”

We left the room then, not really in a hurry,
but certainly with a purpose. We backtracked through the house and
back through the garden up to the gate. I pulled open the gate. The
ground shuddered. We were tossed violently backward at least ten
feet from the gate, crashing us together a few times and into
shrubs and small trees in the vicinity. The Stone instantly brought
protective shields around me and the Swords ached to come out, but
they couldn’t identify the threat any better than I could. The
quake stopped when the gates slammed shut.

“Please tell me that’s not normal,” I said as
I stood up, dusting off my pants.

“Hardly,” said Kieran advancing on the gate
cautiously. I joined him, examining the spellcraft on the gate. It
was an immense work, well beyond my comprehension at the moment,
though I could recognize different hands on parts. A rustling noise
in the bushes behind us caught my attention.

I turned to see a small insect sitting atop a
nearby shrub, its pale green in sharp contrast to the dark green of
the bush. It looked similar to a scorpion except with five legs on
each side and a triangular head and its stinger was flat instead of
sharp and piercing. It also had a slight magical aura to it, which
was odd for an insect. At least I’d never seen an aura on an insect
before.

“Kieran, what’s that?” I asked, not taking my
eyes off the thing.

“What?” he asked absently, still looking at
the gate.

“That,” I said more emphatically. I pushed my
awareness more directly at the thing to get a better idea of what
it was, still wishing I had a better word for what I was doing
here. I looked at its aura first to try to figure out why it had
one. That was actually easy. It was its primary sensory organ, tied
in directly to two pairs of eyes. It was looking for other auras
and it was confused by the pull of the magic of the gate but
finding nothing to cause it. It just sat in the bush with its
triangular head scanning back and forth across the gate,
waiting.

The second surprise was the biggest: the
stinger. It was flat instead of sharp. Whatever this thing was, the
stinger wasn’t a weapon, like in a normal scorpion injecting venom
in prey for food or for defense. I couldn’t see what it did,
though.

“I have no idea,” muttered Kieran, finally
taking his attention from the gate. “It looks like a domare bug but
it’s the wrong color and too many legs.”

“It’s just sitting there. Why? Does it belong
here?”

“No, it doesn’t. Let’s see if it reacts to a
little power,” he said. Reaching out with his right hand, he threw
out a shell containing explosive energy onto the path about twenty
feet away from us. When it hit the ground, it exploded with a lot
of light and sound, leaving the shell behind. The bug jumped from
the bush and hit the shell directly, forming pale green pincers on
its forelegs in mid leap. It grabbed the shell with its newly
formed pincers and slammed its tail onto the shell, injecting
something into it. The bug then released the shell and jumped away
backward, not that it got far since Kieran formed a spherical
shield around it the moment it released the shell.

I went for the shell while Kieran went for
the bug. Inside the capsule-shaped shell was a spell, about an
inch, inch and a half long and an inch wide, sucking off the
remaining energy. It was able to move by flexing itself, sort of
like a caterpillar, but it was far more rigid and therefore slower.
Peering down close at the thing, I recognized it fairly quickly as
a living version of the curse that Clifford Harris bore not so long
ago.

“Well I think we found a delivery system for
the curses. This one is a live version of Harris’,” I told Kieran.
Picking up the shell, I had the Stone swaddle the thing in another
layer for our protection, just in case. Then I turned and looked at
Kieran. He’d squeezed his sphere down flat forcing the bug down
into no doubt unnatural positions for it. He was staring at the
stinger portion of the bug, intent on the striking portion that
still glowed faintly with the passage of flared, intense magic. I
took a good solid look at the thing again and cast out around us
looking for others. Twenty to thirty feet out wasn’t much of a
problem, but we needed more, a lot more.

I cast outward, feeling for the lines in the
area. There weren’t many, but they were strong and regular. And by
regular, I mean they were geometrically regular. This place wasn’t
natural. But I could feel the land better through the lines. A few
yards outside the fence, the land turned into a wasteland, much
like the one we’d just left but fading into fuzziness that promised
to dissipate into whatever joined with it. The fence itself was
three lines bound together, twined and forming a ward. Its
complexity was amazing. It was held together and maintained by the
gate. Thankful that I didn’t have to break through, I pitched part
of my consciousness into the hum of the ward and raced along the
perimeter of the land. The Pact in my head harmonizing with the
gate, I could feel everything within the confines of the fence,
just like the ward at home.

“Seth, what are you doing?” Kieran asked me
anxiously, obviously feeling the power rushing through me
suddenly.

When I looked at him, I understood why he
asked. I had to look down, for one, I was suddenly about twenty
feet in the air, and for another, I was throwing out a blaze of
silver energy. I had no idea where it was coming from.

“I’m looking for more of those things you’re
holding,” I answered. “Why am I floating in the air?”

“Probably because of the energy you’re
throwing off,” he said calmly. “Are you connected to the ley ward?
Is that why I can no longer sense you?”

“Yes,” I said, getting a better understanding
of what I was feeling. It was definitely amazing to feel the warmth
of the sun on my leaves. Such warmth everywhere at once felt so
good.

“Seth, don’t get lost,” Kieran warned me.

“Lost?” I mumbled, turning the water of a
creek in the back a little so the taproot of my oak could drink a
little more deeply. Oh, yeah, I needed that. It felt good to be
moving again, too. I needed to find the fires, move, and find the
fires. Burn the fires out. That’s what I needed to do, burn the
fires out.

“Ow!” I yelled. My left foot was suddenly and
seriously on fire! My attention shrank swiftly down into my body
and just as suddenly, I was falling out of the air. My arms
flailing as I dropped as if I could flap them like wings and fly.
Kieran was laughing at me by the time the Stone decided to slow my
fall about eight inches from the ground. He laughed harder when it
dropped me on my butt those last eight inches while I shucked my
shoe off to examine my burning foot.

“There’s nothing wrong with your foot, Seth,”
Kieran said, his amusement obvious as he squatted down beside me.
“I just had to get your attention before you got too lost in the
ward. Ley wards have more depth than you’re used to.”

“There are more of those things here,” I said
as I examined the bottom of my foot anyway, then glaring at him.
“That hurt!”

“It was meant to,” he said, still grinning.
“Could you tell how many?”

“’Bout three hundred,” I said as I pulled my
sock back on. “They’re moving this way, too. I think I felt a slit
in space that they’re coming through, near the back of the fence.
What the hell are they, anyway?”

“Don’t know. Could you sense any intelligence
in them?”

“Not really. I mean, it just felt alien to
me. Sorta insect-like. ‘Find the fires, burn the fires out.’ Didn’t
make sense to me.”

“Do you think you could do it again and not
get lost?”

I thought about the feelings I got when I
connected to the ward as I put my shoe back on. I was… giddy, I
guess. Intoxicated, maybe. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can avoid that
this time.”

“Good,” he said and stood up. “Once you do, I
need you to let Ethan in when I call. He’ll push and you just let
the gate open. Okay?”

I looked up at him through the hair that’d
fallen in my face in my graceless landing, not quite understanding.
“Just let the gate open. Right.”

He grinned. “You’ll understand when he gets
there. Peter will be with him.” He stuck his hand out to help me
up. I took it and he hefted me up effortlessly.

I inhaled deeply as I stood, relaxing,
letting go of the ghost of the pain of my burning left foot and
connected to the lines again. Shifting my awareness out into the
ward again, I felt for the scurrying little things searching for
fire and found them instantly. They were closer, some of them mere
yards away and slowing. The count was up—they were coming through
that tiny crack in space.

I looked down at Kieran as I rose into the
air with the power of the ward again.

“They’re coming.”

“
Eth’anok’avel
,
Seth’Dur’an
o’an
,” Kieran called aloud. The words buzzed in my brain and
shook my bones. He packed his power in them and they had the force
of Names of the Arcane I had yet to see. And still I knew that the
second word was Peter’s Name. “We have need of you. Will you
come?”

Before he finished speaking the Names, I
could feel Ethan probing, first through the anchor then through the
gate. It was a curious differential. Through the anchor, he was
Ethan as I’d always known him, an echo of myself with a huge shadow
behind him. Through the gate, he felt like, well, he felt like the
Second Horseman of the Apocalypse, the red one, War, full of fury
and wrath. He pushed on the gate slightly, so I willed it to open
for him. I was pleased when it opened, slowly but without
protest.

I watched from twenty feet in the air as
Ethan and Peter coalesced in front of Kieran from nothing. Just
freaking amazing.

“What was that?” exclaimed Peter. “Where are
we? What happened?”

“Why is Seth flying?” asked Ethan calmly,
looking up at me.

“We’re in the Pacthome,” answered Kieran.
“Seth opened the door for you. He connected to the ward through the
leys.”

He snorted and said, “You gotta be kiddin’
me. You did not teach him that.”

“Nope,” Kieran said, shaking his head.

“Will someone tell me what’s going on?” Peter
shouted, moving in between the three of us, but further away from
me. I did not blame him at all.

“Oh, sorry, Pete,” said Ethan. “Kieran called
us for help. That really strong sense of ‘Hey, You, Yeah, YOU! PAY
ATTENTION!’ that you had? That was Kieran using your True Name. He
created a connection between us doing that, but since you didn’t
know how to use that connection, I just picked you up and dragged
you along.”

“You mean we were just summoned?” he asked.
“Like demons?”

Kieran chuckled. “Not quite.”

“We found the delivery system for those
curses,” I said, noting the odd reverberation quality in my voice
that the ward caused. “These bugs are flooding in through a slit in
space in the back of the house. And they’re not exactly easy to
see, even through the ward.”

“Can you see where the other end of the hole
is?” Kieran asked me.

“No, it’s barely more than a slit in
reality,” I said concentrating on the patch of space, watching a
cricket-like thing with six legs crawl out of the tiny slash and
fall to the ground. “If they weren’t crawling through it, I don’t
think I would have seen it.”

“Ethan, would you go with Seth and see if you
can plug the hole into this dimension, then see if you can
determine where the other end goes without endangering anyone.
We’ll be moving this once we’ve killed all the bugs and I’d rather
no one have a backdoor in.”

“Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” Ethan
said, turning to me again and looking up. “It would be easier if
you were down here, though.”

“You think I’m controlling this?” I asked,
crossing my arms. “Kieran shot me out of the sky the first time.
Thought he burned my left foot off.”

“You got lost?” he asked, rising up to face
me. That was kind of weird and unnerving. I still had a lot to get
used to. “What was the last thing you remember before Kieran burned
you?”

“Find the fires. Burn the fires out,” I
said.

“Was that from the bugs that Kieran and Peter
are hunting?” I nodded. “You didn’t get lost,” he said with a grin.
“You got caught, which unfortunately is a mite more dangerous.
Getting yourself lost means you could probably find yourself again
in time. Getting caught means you’re caught. And you’re there until
someone comes along and pokes you with a stick. Or you die,
whichever comes first. So it’s probably not a good idea to play
with this sort of thing without Kieran or me around until we can
teach you a few things, okay?”

The look of horror on my face tickled him.
“Puh-lease! You’re a duck in water! Just be careful about what you
do when we’re not around. Now are we doing this from here or are we
going over there?”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I feel like
I’m already there anyway. What exactly are you going to do?”

He chuckled at the question then abruptly
disappeared from in front of me, reappearing in front of the slit.
I felt the rise and release in pressure on the leys surrounding us
and mimicked his action, appearing at his side on the ground. The
number of bugs in the area was high, maybe about a hundred though I
didn’t bother to actually count them. It was creepy having them so
close. They were moving toward the gate unhurriedly. Apparently,
their numbers assured them somehow, but I didn’t want to reach down
into their psyche to figure out why.