Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Boys, eh? What can you do?” Dad said to Kieran nonchalantly, smiling and shrugging. Murrik recognized him from the botched emissary event, clearly.
“No, we want Louis Marchand,” Kieran said patiently to the door greeter. “This is Phillip Murrik. Louie is taller, whinier.” I opened a hole in the wall behind him and he fell through backwards, slamming to the floor and wheeling his arms wildly.
“Hurry back now,” I called as he scrambled to his feet. He scowled at me over his shoulder as he ran down the hall again.
“Phil, what the hell are you wearing?” Ethan asked stepping up to Murrik and putting his arm on his shoulder to pull him forward. Once Murrik was within our circle, Ethan whipped the cape off his shoulders and showed him and his mummy suit in full glory.
The man was both scared and arrogant. “We are committing ancient rites of Ra and Isis to charge amulets, if that’s any of your concern,” he snapped, picking up on the mummy idea by himself.
“Really?” Ethan drawled, whirling the cape through the air. “Interesting how there are no Egyptian sigils on your cloak, though.”
“The cape is not part of the ceremony,” Murrik said acidly.
“Right, not the correct Amon, I suppose,” Ethan answered, throwing the cloak into a wall. “Who’s the benefactor of your sacrifice, then? And why are you so willing to give your life for someone else?”
Shock tore through Murrik’s aura, but he somehow managed to leave it out of his of his face. “There will be no sacrifices in this ceremony,” he growled, lying outright.
Groaning at the lie, Kieran said, “Don’t, Phil. We aren’t appreciative of liars and aren’t well known for patience. You’re obviously dressed as a receptacle of some kind, a holding cell, perhaps.”
“A collecting channel,” I offered. “Sorta like a pressure cooker’s steam valve. That’d be my bet.” The English-speaking door greeter was lost in his own house down the cross-hall, randomly opening doors. I yelled down the hall in aggravation, “Stop. I’ll get him myself.”
I found Marchand on the third floor on a balcony shouting out to the guards that were patrolling the house. He was trying to get out with someone else in the room. One of the guards was already three-quarters of the way to the nearest mercenary encampment, running for help. Marchand looked different from the last time I’d seen him, probably due to doctoring his aura. His companion, fidgeting in a chair, I thought I knew quite well. I grabbed all three of them and tossed them into the Faraday cage.
“Lucian, aren’t you dead?” I asked as I walked up and stood beside Kieran, leaning on his shoulder casually. “I seem to remember digging up a casket recently and finding a body and everything, yet here you sit…” Kieran got angry fast and was well on his way to blowing up. “Calm down, brother. He’s not worth a stroke and we can restore the balance before going home again.”
“There is that,” he agreed, grinning down at me sideways. “So Lucian, how did you manage to fool me so well? How
didn’t
you die?”
Lucian screamed in abject fear and pain. My cage broke the binding that kept the memory of the tortures of the past few days at bay. Marchand chuckled in surprise, letting his sadistic side remain in the light now that it was out. I shifted the cage to exclude him and feed energy back into the binding until we could get some answers. Healing him only to kill him seemed senseless and we still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of how much responsibility he bore in the destruction of the Pacthome. His story was highly suspect now. Dad hauled him up none too gently and shoved him against the hall wall until he could recover somewhat.
“Well, Louis, it looks like the Council made a good decision when it ousted you,” Kieran said glaring at the Norwegian. “You’ve been very bad.”
Marchand snorted. “Self-righteous prig. You have no rights here and you have no right to order us around. Even the European Council has no legal sway here. In fact… you’re trespassing!”
“D’you hear that, Ehran? We’re trespassing,” I repeated, chuckling.
“He does have a point, though. Legally, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Kieran said. “But trespassing? We did ring the doorbell, after all, and nothing blocked our path from the road.” Except the gate and four armed guards, but we didn’t come that way.
“We did only come to talk to him, after all,” I answered. “We didn’t expect to find Lucian. Is he any better, Dad?”
“Looks like he’ll be able to talk in a few minutes,” Dad answered, standing over Lucian as he shook violently against the wall. I don’t think he was getting quite what he expected out of his deal with Marchand.
“Are you members of his fraternal order? Is that the secret to your seemingly wondrous abilities?” Marchand asked with a gleam in his eye.
“Mine?” Kieran asked. “No, no. Years of study followed by more years of study while he—” Kieran jabbed me in the side with a finger playfully, grinning at me—“is picking it up in his sleep. And what ‘fraternal order’ would that be?”
“Yes, I would expect that sort of answer,” Marchand said, a suspicious smile beginning to creep across his face. “For hundreds of years, there have been rumors of a group of men, usually attached to Merlin and those like him, who keep the secrets of magic that man has not seen since the gods walked the Earth.”
“Wow, with those kinds of secrets you’d think they’d run the world,” Peter said sarcastically from Kieran’s right. “Why are they hidden, then, if they’re
that
knowledgeable?”
“I’ve asked a number of questions in a similar vein and it quickly turned into a purely circular philosophical discussion with him,” Marchand said. “And he claims to be of the upper echelon.”
“Does he?” Peter asked cheerfully, turning to where Lucian huddled against the wall. “Robert, would you ask him, please? I’d love to hear this one.”
“So would I. Luke? You awake yet?” Dad asked, squatting down to one side of him. “It’s Robert. We need to ask a few questions, Luke. Are you with me yet, Lucian?” As he asked each question, Dad touched different parts of Lucian’s body firmly, sinking physical probes from his skin into Lucian. There were just four of them, tiny little things, injected through Lucian’s clothing and into his thighs and neck. I didn’t know why he did it, but I assumed he had a reason. “Luke, wakey, wakey.”
Lucian looked up, bleary-eyed and still shaking, and stammered, “R-Robert? Is—Is that you?”
“Yes, Lucian, it’s Robert,” he answered gently. “I need to ask you some questions and it’s very important. Lucian, did you tell Louis Marchand that you are a member of some sort of secret society of secret keepers? He says you told him you were in the upper echelons of this society.”
“No, I never admitted to that or even hinted,” Lucian said, almost sadly. His aura mirrored the truth and the sentiment. “We spoke at length about the possibility of such a group existing and speculating how they might exist and why. Frankly, I found his ideas rather pedestrian and unimaginative.”
“Why did you leave the castle during the battle, Lucian? Why did you desert us?” Ethan asked, still gently. Dad knelt beside Lucian totally implacable. He was fantastically deft at manipulating his aura and hid his homicidal rage well. Thankfully Kieran’s was invisible because he wasn’t controlling his anger as well.
“This is a wonderful spell,” Marchand complimented as he tested the cage, reaching for magic in several directions. “Very dynamic. Who is maintaining it? You must teach it to me.”
“What spell?” Kieran asked innocently.
“This… cage that is keeping magic away from me. It feels like a magnetic bottle,” Marchand said, still probing.
“That’s not a spell, Louie,” Peter said chuckling. “That’s a contest of wills. You’re just losing.” Ooh, score one for Peter on the trash talk!
“His army is going to be here any minute,” I said, seeing forerunners beginning to surround the house.
“I wonder how the German government would feel about a private army within its borders, Louis, complete with battle-trained wizards. You’re risking declaring magic to the world, Louis,” Kieran said cheerfully. “And look at what you’re wearing… Dark magic! From a council member. Shame, Louie, shame. You seem to be the benefactor of whatever vile ceremony you’re going to do tonight. What exactly is your goal?”
Marchand looked panicked for a quick second then said dully, “We are summoning the power of Isis and Ra to charge some amulets.” He adeptly adjusted his aura, but the lie was still evident, clear as a bell across the foggy hills in the morning. Several men just entered through the back door and a stream of men started down the back hallway.
Kneeling down beside Lucian, I did what I didn’t want to do and dove into his mind. Marchand did a lot to break down his psychic shields, but the Pactholders are taught shield spells stronger than most. His were still weak. I slipped easily past them and into his memory. Truly an unpleasant task as it defined his guilt in exacting detail from his own perspective. I saw what the plan was. Lucian was an absolute idiot. Even if it worked, he was dog meat.
Dropping into my cavern, I called my brothers in. “He did leave the Pacthome on several occasions many years ago in his pre-Librarian days. Never told anybody he left and nobody saw him come and go. He met Sondre during one of those trips of depression and she showed him a few tricks to get un-depressed. One thing led to another and he decided he wanted out so that he could be with her all the time. Now we know the end of
that
story. Apparently, they don’t.” Kieran clamped his eyes shut, stifling a laugh. Peter and Ethan just stared at me in awe.
I just kept going. “Marchand spotted him at a party because three elves were stalking him at an odd position in the crowd and having fun doing it. There’s a rumor among the elves that if two Seelie and one Unseelie can find a Secretkeeper unaware of them and form triangles with the Secretkeeper as the center that the elves will be given brief visions of the Pact as it moves. They consider it a great wonder since it’s basically their version of heaven.”
“But how did they know Lucian was a Pactholder?” Kieran asked.
“And how likely is it that he was followed home?” asked Ethan. “He’s not exactly on the keen and savvy side of life.”
“I have the lock but I talk about it freely. Is it just because I feel like I never agreed to it that I’m not bound by it?” I asked.
“You weren’t bound by its sister power either, the Unseelie Accords,” Kieran said. “They are highly related in history and simultaneously bound by the Architect in a language so staggeringly complex that no one since has ever understood the smallest part of it. So I guess this makes sense too. If it’s not binding, then you can give it up at any moment.”
“Yeah, but I gotta find somebody good enough to give it, too, and strong enough to rebuild new clans from outsiders. This isn’t a wimp’s job. And dumb ass there just helped devastate the entire pool of candidates. And
that
fool thinks he can pull that same working that Sondre did and jump into Lucian and steal the Pact from him that way. But to answer your original question, the Pact Lock is intact. Lucian did not lie when he said he admitted to nothing and made no insinuations or inferences to Marchand.” I kept to myself the fact that Marchand brought in
Sidhe
to test that rumor. We’d deal with that later.
“Where does Murrik fit in?” Peter asked.
“He’s the channel, the blender,” I explained. “He will take the spell and the energy from the sacrifices, put them together, and move the resulting structure into the reservoir, in this case, Lucian.”
“Where does that put us with everybody else here?” Ethan asked.
“You tell me. I don’t really know what to make of them. I mean, the mercenaries I can understand. They’re paid. It’s the battle wizards I don’t get. Why are they here? Is it just for the money, too? Or is there something going on behind it? Am I being paranoid?” I drew in the house around us in wire-frame and placed the soldiers around us. They were unable to open any of the doors to the foyer even though the handsets turned easily enough. Wedging the doors shut was a simple trick. The men moved in slow motion compared to us.
“I say we give Lucian to your Dad,” Peter said. “He deserves it for how well he’s holding it together. It’s like your dad knew when he saw Lucian. Talk to a battle mage or two and find out, then kill Marchand and Murrik. They’re both so fucking ready to die anyway.”
We had a quick discussion about the other things that we had to do, like find the other blood magicians and have a few words with them, delve into their spy network, find out who else they worked with, and a whole laundry list of things to know. That meant keeping some of them alive, though we’d prefer leaving them all that way. A knock at the front door told us we were running down the clock. Decisions were made and it was time to go to work.
The first thing to do was seize control of Marchand and his trained monkeys in the foyer with us. I opted for a fascination instead of compulsion and had them gather the uniforms from the guards that Pete sent into the hills naked. They huddled in the far corner with the ripped-up shirts over their heads, happy as clams in the surf. Kieran and Peter headed for the door while Ethan watched the back, just in case. I headed for the far more odious task of Lucian and Dad.