Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Hmm, but to be so attached to the land in Faery,” Kendrick mumbled.
“Gilán isn’t in Faery, though it is a faery land,” I said.
“How does that happen?” Hamish asked.
“Beats me. Probably the same way Faery started, what, one hundred, two hundred-thirty thousand years ago?” I answered. “Let’s talk on the way to the sink, okay? There’s work to be done here.”
There were thirteen areas of interest here. I really didn’t have time to explain the changes that needed to be made, but they were very happy and eager to please now. With the spell floating in the air around us, I filtered the signatures into the Ogham runes that they read so easily. It had no flow for me in that form. It was an imagery thing that they equated with power so I used it. Frankly, all I had to do was point at the region that I needed them to repeat and I would sing Cornell’s part then insert the tonal building blocks into the real spell. During one “measure” I had Hamish and Kendrick switch parts while I pulled a faery trick and spoke two parts, adding a fourth voice briefly. It strengthened a conduit and removed the need for six different power structures. Physics and math are everywhere.
“Cornell really did excellent work here,” I said, picking up the lodestone. It was pretty much depleted from charging the sink. Yeah, I know, seems oxymoronic to have to charge something that pulls energy away, but there ya’ have it. “This could have been a lot harder. How is he?” Jimmy joined us quietly, waving for the white-tuniced druids to come on.
“He’s resting now,” Kendrick said. “This morning’s bindings were quite an effort for him.”
“No doubt,” I said, waiting for the druids to get closer, but they were scared of us and slow or I was impatient. Surely not the latter… “First, would you have them bring some food and water for their masters to the third sink, please? This is taking more out of them than they realize. Then you can join us.” Then turning back to Hamish and Kendrick, I said, “Shall we go to the third, gentlemen?”
The Hilliard brothers were almost skipping with eagerness. Jimmy didn’t wait for the druids to come; he went to one of them. The druid he spoke to moved far more quickly in response to my request, but I had a feeling they would all be moving more quickly for us very soon.
“Lord, where did you find the second Tear?” Hamish asked once we were out of earshot.
“I didn’t. I made those two and many more,” I said. “Though a friend of mine was given what looked like a piece of one of mine at the Rat Bastard’s last Games.”
“Merlin worked in secret for decades perfecting the mineral and magical content of the vessel. It obviously didn’t take you that long,” Kendrick said.
“No, it didn’t,” I answered. And I didn’t tell them it was an accident either. “What exactly was Merlin, anyway? A druid? A wizard?”
“Yes, and much more,” Hamish said. “In the beginning, Merlin simply was. He roamed the British Isles, all of them, helping people to live and survive, learning the ways of the land and the sea and the wind. He began to teach the ways before we were born, but we were among the first. Merlin made bargains with others to learn the ways of power to fight the elves. He didn’t teach us everything he learned, though, before he passed on. He said some things were just too dreadful to know.”
“He was right about that,” I said mildly, recalling some of the things I saw in the Rat Bastard’s mind and in theirs. “Some things are just too terrible.”
“How is it made?” Kendrick asked, turning the stone over in his hands repeatedly, feeling the surface for imperfections.
“Well, I take eight different kinds of magical energy and form the strands into six cohesive boxes of power that really don’t like each other,” I said, glancing down at the withered little man. “Then I squoosh them, each in a different way, and snap them together into another box until they look like a milkcan and let go.”
“There are eight kinds of magic?” Kendrick asked.
“I’ve seen about fourteen, myself,” I said as we climbed the short hill to the final sink. There were several of the Hilliard druids milling about the edge near the control structures. Raising my voice, I yelled for them to clear out by at least two hundred yards, like before.
“We only know of the four kinds of magic—earth, air, fire, and water—bound by will and intent,” Hamish said.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, especially considering what you accomplish with it,” I said, moving to the center. They didn’t need to know I couldn’t identify which of the fourteen colors were the four they knew. I would ask either Peter or Kieran about that later today and if there were more than the fourteen I knew about. It seemed rather important in some way.
How I had managed to take the sinks in order of complexity was a mystery to me, but this was by far the most monstrous and difficult to understand. Like the second sink, the barrel was variable but it was too short for the containment field. They attempted to adjust for that by making the barrel stronger, but it was too wide and too strong. The walls of the circles were too rigid to hold against the pull. There was more than the possibility of a power buildup to failure of the sink. There was a possibility of an explosive failure as parts of spells were disrupted.
Lifting the spell out, I asked, “Was this the last one you did?”
“The second, sir,” Hamish said. “This sink is designed to hold a full warding for a magician while another batters it to show any weaknesses. The inner circle will hold against errant magic of the attack and take both into the earth.”
“First, come down here, please,” I called. “We’ll need your voice, too.” Marking the places of interest in the floating runes of the spell that needed adjustments, we had a hundred fourteen changes to make, with at least fifty of them needing major overhauls. Marking the sections that merely had to be resung in pale blue, I started to rewrite the more complex sections using a pale yellow, which definitely got Hamish and Kendrick’s attention. It took me ten minutes just to get the rewrites done.
“First, can you follow this?” I asked, looking back at Jimmy at the center of the sink. “It’s not what you’re used to, I know…”
“I think so,” Jimmy said. “Those aren’t so much words as collections of sounds, right?”
“Yeah, but you have to make two sounds at once, like when you’re talking to the brownies in their language,” I explained. “Can you do it? I can get Kieran here if you’re unsure.”
“No, I think I can do it,” Jimmy said. “Though it would be easier if we could exchange a few notes.”
“Show me which ones, and while he’s doing that, Hamish and Kendrick, look over what I’ve done. If I’ve made any mistakes, now is the time to say so. You’re the experts here,” I told them, and totally meant it, too. This wasn’t my magic and I would have done it completely differently. The changes Jimmy wanted made sense in that the tones were very close. Mostly I could exchange one of his for one of mine, but there were three occasions when I had to exchange one of the Hilliard’s.
“For one so young, you have an amazingly elegant hand,” Hamish said, still reading the largest changed section. “I don’t see any problems here. Kendrick?”
“No, brother, no problems here,” Kendrick said. “Lord Daybreak has written deviously simple craftings to the problems we have encountered.”
“Good,” I said, smiling at their compliments, even if I didn’t feel them particularly warranted. “Then let’s get this going. We’re running out of time and this will take longer than the other two.”
We started at the beginning where I played the part of Cornell again. This went quickly into the more complex parts and Jimmy moved in easily with us, singing the dual parts with me and adding the second trio of voices to twine and interleave into the first. If either Hilliard was upset about losing their position in the chain, neither complained about it. I didn’t like that the conference was open and we were still working on this sink, but apparently the druids were keeping everyone away from here. That, or this sink was uninteresting right now. Even with the increased voices in almost half the spell, the overall volume of the spell was decreased by a third. The initial charge of energy was less than what it held during its live state before I discharged it and pulled it out of the ground, so that was encouraging. All three protective circles formed perfectly and stronger than the original. The containment field was now reduced and would fall into the variable destruction barrel, then reform as soon as the barrel ceased its barrage. And there was now a secondary repulsive field capped over the second circle. Nothing would escape the barrel’s destructive influence. The final touch of my changes added another set of roots to the taper so that the energies released by the barrel into the spiral had more and deeper places to go for cleansing.
Picking up the lodestone from the center of the sink, I wrapped us in portals and moved the four of us to the top of the sink. “First, would you find the druids with the food and water, please? Hamish and Kendrick will be feeling the drain very soon now.”
And you did exceptionally well in there. Thank you.
He smiled sheepishly as he ran off to find the druids for me, but he had done well, really. After watching us for just a few minutes at the second sink, he picked up enough to chant the necessary parts of the magic and knew enough about his own limitations to ask for changes in his part.
Jimmy came back with a group of seven druids in tow. The Hilliard brothers were just beginning to feel the effects of our spellcraft and visibly sag from their efforts. The Hilliards tried to dissuade the druids from encircling them until Jimmy reminded them that I called for the food in the first place. They quite happily accepted the assistance then, which confused the druids but didn’t stop them from chanting their circles around the Hilliards.
“Time to go politicking, I guess,” I grumbled lightly, scanning through the glen for anything else to do,
anything
. “Hamish, when you’re feeling better, please bring me the list of names I ordered yesterday and keep it private.” Hamish nodded, his mouth full of some stew that looked like roots, twigs, and leaves in dark tea. I started for the entrance with Jimmy, not too eagerly.
“I’m expecting giant card people to come over the hills any minute now,” Jimmy said. “And little plates of cookies with placards that say ‘Eat me’.”
Laughing, I said, “I think even the Queen of Hearts would run from here and I doubt Alice would have stood a chance.”
“True, a sweet little blonde girl?” he said, grinning. “Are we going to check on Cornell? It seems odd that he’s the only one of the three who was wasted after building the sinks.”
“Nnnnyah, not really,” I stammered, changing directions slightly. “The Hilliards aren’t full of equanimity. The others thought that if Cornell can get himself into a ten-year fix, then he could damn well work himself out of it. He did an admirable job of it, too. I thought they would have gone to their inner circle for another voice, but that won’t be a problem when they go to teaching.”
“How can he teach if he can’t communicate?” Jimmy asked.
“He can’t talk. There are more ways to communicate than talking, Jimmy,” I said, chuckling. “You should know that by now.”
“No one is allowed here, gentlemen,” a druid said stepping out of the small copse of trees as we neared. No path in the dense undergrowth showed from where he came. “I will be happy to escort you to your correct destination, though.”
“I’m here to check on Cornell, so I’m at my correct destination,” I said. “You can, however, take me to him.”
The druid looked like he was having a stroke for a moment as he dealt with conflicting instructions. “No one is allowed here, sir, and Master Cornell is resting. Is there somewhere else I can take you?”
“I’m Daybreak,” I said simply. Let’s see what kind of welcome I get.
“Right this way, sir,” the druid said, turning quickly on his heel and leading us along a path suddenly in the underbrush behind him. The thicket was larger than it appeared, containing two full circles of nine, each maintaining aspects of the defensive magic around the Hilliard brothers’ new home. I almost laughed as we came out of the thicket and into the middle of the copse of trees. The Hilliards had made themselves at home overnight, or probably more precisely, their first circle made them at home. Three twin beds lined the far side of the clearing. The beds were canopied against the weather as was the desk. A pair of druids cooked something that smelled atrocious on a fire on the opposite side of the copse from the beds.
There was a constant buzz of chanting that converged on the thicket from different spells throughout the entire glen. I felt the druids’ hatred of me like rain in a thunderstorm on my skin. Ignoring it, I found Cornell on the left-most bed, covered in a deerskin blanket in the warm day. The druids from the fire crossed in front of me carrying their stinking pot as they moved to Cornell’s bedside. One slowly pulled back the deerskin, revealing nasty bandages underneath, smeared with the mixture from their pot from previous applications. I stepped over and looked at the master druid. He was a mess of cuts, abrasions, and even two broken bones where he had used the tools of his trade on his own body to make the necessary sounds to create the magic he needed. Cornell could have done a lesser job and not done this much damage to himself, but either pride or Hamish demanded more.
“Stop,” I said, moving to his bedside and pushing my senses more deeply into his body. The druids ignored me and continued to apply their vile smelling mixture to his bandages again. “I said ‘Stop’!” I said a little louder this time, and with force of will behind it. Everybody stopped and I picked the druids up with the Stone, shoving them high into the nearest tree. “He has enough arsenic in his system without you adding more.”