Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (82 page)

“Hhn,” I grunted in understanding. “Guess
that means we should’ve burned the bodies, then.” Peter and Gordon
were both startled by the thought, eyes snapping together.

“You used a disassociation spell,” Peter
said. “I felt it.”

“I’ll use a proxy,” Gordon answered, smiling
slightly. “Another slim lead, but more than we had.” He scribbled
on a notepad for a few moments, obviously enjoying the puzzles at
hand. I envied him that, being able to enjoy this.

“What about you, Mike?” I asked Ferrin.
“Isn’t this your line of work?”

“I’ve been out of touch since MacNamara’s,”
Ferrin said. “’Sides, this ain’t the sorta work I do. I’d likely be
too high profile for them right now, anyways.”

“Okay, but could you find out anything about
who was looking for people to do this kind of work then?” I
asked.

“Not from here,” he responded. “From Dublin,
maybe, or London, more likely.”

“How long will you need?”

“Few days,” he said. “I’ll need some cash, to
grease some wheels and loosen lips.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “We’ll get that
tomorrow, too.”

“You’ve got that much money at your
disposal?” Ferrin asked, raising his eyebrows at me.

“I have enough,” I answered calmly.

“Yeah, I suppose you do,” he said, rolling
the orange stone through his fingers.

“Those are rare, Mr. Ferrin,” said Kieran. “I
suggest you treat it respectfully. We have no idea what will happen
if it’s damaged and I doubt you’ll be given another.”

“I think that answers your questions, though,
doesn’t it?” I asked Kieran. “We need time to question the
prisoners from the school. Billy is talking to the colonel and the
captain; Bishop and Marchand have the bulk of the prisoners at the
school. Gordon is gonna try to backtrack the mages that attacked us
without getting caught and Ferrin is gonna find out what he can
from the rumor mill. I don’t see what else we can get from
this.”

“What about the elves?” Gordon asked.

Damn. So close. The elves were a… personal
problem.

“What about them?” Kieran asked, taking a
little weight off of me.

“There were at least six cases where the
attackers were elven,” said Gordon. “And Seth told Marchand that
the two he destroyed were neither Summer nor Winter. He was quite
emphatic about it. How is that possible?”

“I have no idea how those things are set,” I
answered, hoping to throw the topic off in some way. “Can their
participation be bought and sold?”

“Well, yes,” said Cahill, “but I don’t think
their allegiance can, not to their court. The geas holds that in
place. If the geas are failing, then there are big problems in
Faery.”

“The geas are not failing,” Kieran said. “But
the question of the elves is not one we’ll be able to decipher at
this juncture, I think. Maybe when we have more information about
the rest of our issues.” That was authoritatively dismissive. I
could see that Gordon was trying to come up with some argument for
it, but couldn’t. There really wasn’t an argument against it.

And I had a pretty big job ahead of me
anyway.

“Well, if we’ve done what we can here, I have
something to do upstairs,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” said Peter, standing. “I
need to get the laptops.”

“And I’d like to check on Ian,” said Ferrin.
Gordon offered to walk up with him to show him the way.

I’d created a train of people leaving the
room, but my mind was on what I would say to Ethan. I didn’t have a
clue.

I closed the door to my room, kicked off my
shoes, and jumped onto the bed spread eagle, springing up and down
a few times, just to relax. It didn’t help. I still have no idea
what to do or what to say. I sighed heavily, closed my eyes, and
let my body take care of itself while I centered my full attention
down in my cavern.

There were still three batteries sitting
there, two fully charged and one still feeding energy through the
spot caught between the Pact and its lock. I slowed the feed down
to a stop then disconnected it, looking at the little dot on the
colorful sphere carefully. This was my connection to Ethan and his
connection to everything. That’s just… weird.

“All right, Ethan. Time to quit sulking. Talk
to me,” I said to the spot, arms crossing on my chest. I didn’t
expect this to work, so when it didn’t, I also didn’t feel too
foolish. He was going to make me work for this. Or maybe he thought
I wouldn’t know what to do, which both did and didn’t make sense.
It made sense since no one should be able to do what I was about to
do, at least the way they explained it to me. I mean, this was
going between worlds, out of normal space, where I would be losing,
what, height? Width? I didn’t notice the first time, I was moving
so fast. It didn’t make sense because I’d done it once already. Now
it looked like I was going for twice.

“Eth’anok’avel, come to me or I’ll come to
you. Your choice,” I said, pushing power into the words as I said
them. My intent was clearly not a threat, but promising to follow
through on coming to him. He knew that was dangerous to me. I knew
it was dangerous to me. So did Kieran and he knew I’d do it. And
Ethan still wasn’t coming.

So I was going. Centering myself on Ethan,
first on his physical self, picturing his blond haired,
blue-eyed muscle god physique with the impish grin. He tried
desperately to fit in with the three of us, but didn’t know how to
do it any better than I did. I didn’t realize how much I missed him
till I pictured him like this. Then I lit him up, lit his aura in
my memory. Now I really missed that. It’d taken me a while to get
used to seeing it in the first place. Even with Peter’s brightening
so much, without Ethan the world just seemed so dull. Not sure that
made sense, even to me.

Even this, though, was only part of Ethan. I
needed to find all of him and go to him. I needed the part that I’d
only brushed up against briefly, a chaotic memory. Even that
wouldn’t be enough though. Power would be necessary, but I had that
in spades. And I had his name, the only name he’d ever had. Names
had power, but I didn’t know how to do that, did I? Make spells to
use Names? I could make portals readily enough now.

Who was I kidding? I didn’t have chance of
creating a spell of any kind. I was just gonna have to wing it. I
projected my conception of Ethan in all its parts and I placed him
on the other side of the anchor on the Pact sphere. Drawing as much
energy as possible into my imaginary form, I said clearly and
forcefully, “Brother to the Fires of Creation, I am coming.”
Except, I didn’t know the language I spoke in. The power I had
drawn in knew and it exploded through me and the world went
black.

Totally and absolutely black.

Not just the absence of light. This was the
absence of all energy.

Black.

Nothing was visible. Nothing was audible or
tactile or sensible in anyway. Then something bit me and I began to
see what the sensory issues were—I wasn’t looking in the right
spot. An odd realization, but when you’re not dealing with reality,
it makes a difference. All my life, I’ve opened my eyes in the
morning and there’s the world, boom, no surprises. Here? First off,
there’s the issue of light. Its dual nature is easier to see here,
because you can see it here, both wave and particle. Obviously, my
vision at the moment had nothing to do with receiving reflected
light on receptors that my brain would then translate, not here
anyway.

That’s when it hit me what had happened, what
I had done. I’d done almost the same thing Ethan did; I had
anchored myself in him. I came to Ethan and he was all around me. I
was currently coinciding with whatever conceptualization he held of
me. If I wanted autonomy here, I could make a body of some kind, I
suppose, but I only wanted to convince him to come home. What this
world seemed to be to me didn’t matter so much. I needed to make
similarities so I could communicate with Ethan. Therefore, I needed
an Ethan, so I made one, a simulacrum, and linked it to the
sensation I had of that “something” that bit me.

And, lo, “Go home, Seth,” Ethan said angrily.
“You could get hurt here, or lost. You shouldn’t be here.” I
wondered idly how I was hearing anything. There wasn’t any
atmosphere around us to vibrate for sound. A question for another
time, though. I was doing that a lot, pushing questions to
later.

“I’m not going without you, Ethan. Why are
you sulking in here, anyway? You were so gung-ho to protect Kieran
and now you won’t come out of your hole? Why?”

“Because the enemy has found me and Kir
du’Ahn is not ready yet to meet him,” Ethan said, seriously. “If I
am with him, he will die.”

“The enemy?” I asked in disbelief. “Kieran
has an enemy? Who? And who are you afraid of?”

“Des’Ra’El’s enemy,” Ethan said with
mechanical coldness. “The first enemy and the cause of Des’Ra’El’s
Folly, the failure of the First Realm.”

I stood there on inky blackness and let that
sink in. It was pretty much meaningless to me since I had no idea
who Des’Ra’El was, outside of Kieran’s teacher, or even what Ethan
meant by “First Realm.”

“You’re gonna have to do better than that,
Ethan,” I said, shaking my head. At least I think I was shaking my
head.

He fixed a blue-eyed stare on me that chilled
me. “All right, I will.”

Once again, my world exploded, but this time
I got the sensation of rapid movement and I saw light. It was
everywhere at once, bright traceries of it everywhere, going far
too fast to follow. Definitely out of Ethan’s world then. I erupted
outward with it, first in a straight line, then dipping and
swirling as gravity was born and time took hold. I was creating
space just by being and it was a glorious feeling, like dancing to
the music of an angel’s choir. And I didn’t know why.

Suddenly, Ethan stood ahead of me, bright in
the darkness. Not wanting to stop, I changed my course slightly,
but he stayed in front of me regardless of my changes. I expected
our collision to be full of force. Instead I was simply standing
beside him, looking out into whatever I was just part of.

“You’ve just witnessed creation,” he said
softly, watching the light parade by us, as awed by it as I
was.

“Of what?” I asked.

“Of everything,” he answered, chuckling, then
moving back into a depressed monotone. “I’ve been here since the
beginning. Not like I am now or was before, but here
nonetheless.”

We watched for a time as the energies flowed
around us at speed, awash in them without knowing their cause or
nature or purpose. There were billions of changes that neither of
us could possibly follow going on around us so we just watched. It
was rather like a fireworks display. Sometimes it was boring, but
if you looked another way, something exciting was going on with
flares of light and sound.

“Then I was given purpose,” Ethan said.
Suddenly our world was snapped taut and our attentions were
centered in two directions only: up and down. Our movements were
restricted in this dimension as well. “My countless brethren and I
were given the purpose of protecting this world from intruders. At
the time, we didn’t know by whom or why, we just did; it was our
purpose. We were quite successful for a long time.”

He gave me the sense of his Brothers as he
felt them. As well as he could, anyway. Countless wasn’t exactly
the same as infinite, but in my mind it may as well have been and
my mind isn’t geared toward handling infinity beyond a symbol. Then
I felt an intruder, someone trying to breach the Brothers’ shield
for the first time. The Brother at the point of the breach merely
brushed it off, but when the intruder pushed harder, all the
Brothers answered with a decisive “no” and there was no longer an
intruder to insist. It was like the heat of a hundred suns suddenly
opened up and said, “Wanna bake some cookies?” The intruder’s whole
realm burst into a nuclear conflagration and was never heard from
again.

But there were others, better prepared and
stronger. Many of them through time, some of them were even
slightly successful in that some of the brethren were removed, but
they were countless. It was like digging through the Atlantic with
a shovel—you weren’t getting to the bottom of the ocean that
way.

“So for a very long time, we guarded a dead
world,” Ethan said. He changed his perspective from his Brothers to
the world they guarded. It had an ethereal beauty to it, rich in
red rock, veined in yellow and pink. I doubted it had any elemental
relationship to what I was used to. I wondered which metals could
be mined from the terrain. Did iron even exist here? Or water?
There was no life evident anywhere, plant or animal. I got a vague
impression of something like a river in the distance.

“Then the impossible happened,” Ethan said.
“Someone got through.” He shifted our perspective again, moving us
closer to the river I felt, and showed me a body: a boy, skinny,
exhausted, near death, and totally naked. He looked emaciated, both
physically and in his aura. Emotionally he was totally despondent.
It was like he was willing himself to die from sorrow and the
universe was obliging him. The boy looked a lot like Dad to me.

“Is that Kieran?” I asked Ethan and we were
suddenly standing beside the prone body, seemingly solid but I knew
this was a memory.

“No, not yet. This is Ehran McClure,” Ethan
said. Then I felt another presence, much larger than Ehran or
Kieran, larger than the Faery Queens, together even. It was moving
toward us, slowly, ponderously, measuring the intrusion into its
world. This was something that hasn’t happened in a long, long
time. It wasn’t exactly curiosity that drew the being to Ehran; it
was more like a feeling of kinship—their sorrows held similarity in
their depth and shape. It was almost like they resonated with each
other. As slowly as I felt it moved, it was still on us amazingly
fast.