Authors: Scott V. Duff
This was an old trick: I just swapped the doors and where they opened up. It was funny to watch Dad shouting as the front door of the temple burst open and a pair of shrubs waddled out hurriedly. Slamming the door shut behind the six of them, I met Murrik’s eyes and gave him a congratulatory smile and that fake opera applause thing. He clung to Lucian and highlighted his Sig Sauer pushed hard under Lucian’s chin.
Thick as water from a fire hose, a jet of fire shot from Dad’s hands to greet the first of the shrubs before their camouflage failed. The fire glanced off the first man’s incomplete shield, but incinerated the second man with his nonexistent one. The still-burning body of the second fell into the first and flared as new fuel was added and the spell burst into action again. The man was burned to char and gristle within his own magic.
Murrik stared at the bodies, bug-eyed, as they fell. When he snapped out of it, he threw a much stronger shield in front of them and started a slow crab-walk to the right. The other two wizards gave up on the aura masquerade and surrounded them, augmenting Murrik’s shield and preparing offensive spells. Of the four of them, only Lucian wasn’t scared out of his mind, but that was drugs and the Pact Lock’s stupor. And for some reason, Murrik thought Lucian was a bargaining chip for getting out. I put up a wall of my own to block their way while shaking my head slowly.
Ethan shouted words of power into the cacophony playing out around us. Jagged lightning reached up from the earth and down from the sky and met at Murrik’s shield. Coruscating electricity arced and crackled against the shield as gigawatts were expended violently until the two battle mages were suddenly thrown back hard against the temple wall. Ethan dropped his spell as Murrik reeled within his much shrunken shield.
Lucian was fighting to stay on his feet, too, but that didn’t last too long. I looked back at Dad expectantly and saw him having conscience problems even with his previously murderous rage. Still in Ethan’s shield webbing, it was quiet enough for raised voices. “Dad,” I asked, baffling the space between us more to keep from shouting. “Do you want me to do it? This doesn’t have to be you, you know.”
“They were good people, Seth,” he said sadly, his voice catching on my name. I think he was talking about Lucian’s parents, but it could very well have been his sons and daughters, the aunts and uncles I never met. Or even all of them, the entire Guild.
“I know they were, Dad,” I said as comfortingly as possible in the middle of a battlefield. Rolling my shoulders, I turned back to Lucian and raised my arms, calling the Crossbow forward. With this magical tool, you didn’t need to aim for the Bolt to fatally hit its target, but I did. Before I could squeeze the trigger, a shaft of blue-white fire shot past me, forcing me to jump to the right.
“Don’t mean I can’t fry the psychotic freak that killed my kids!” Dad yelled maniacally. He’d managed about three seconds at that power level. The beam hit Lucian’s aura and obliterated him in a quarter of that time. Then hit the temple wall, blowing out a hole ten feet wide. The shrapnel of six-inch thick stone wall flew in all directions at once. Thousands of super-heated projectiles hit Murrik’s shield, throwing him hard to the left of the field. Neither battle mage survived the explosion and I wasn’t sure Murrik was getting up again.
Dad was my worry as he collapsed slowly to the ground. Ethan saw me turning to run and beat me to him, so Dad never face-planted, thankfully. I wouldn’t have been fast enough. When I looked into him, he was in shock. I didn’t know what to do; there didn’t seem to be a reason for it.
“He’s burning up,” Ethan commented, wiping the sweat from Dad’s face. Then he whispered a few words that built a flexible field of much cooler air around Dad. “What is wrong with him? I see nothing but damage.”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, already frustrated. Sinking my perceptions deeper, part of me entered the seat of his consciousness. He wasn’t there at the moment. His brain was doing loopy things, his energy reserves were nearly depleted, and a large number of his controlling paths were… charred? “Is it possible he channeled too much power and hurt himself that way? Sort of burned himself out?”
“Damn, that does sorta look like the beginning stages of every burnout I ever had,” he answered, a touch of hysteria in his voice. “But this isn’t a systemic failure. I think. Please tell me I’m not just hoping, Seth.”
“It isn’t systemic in the sense that everything is shut down,” I said nervously. “But how long until that happens? His brain is doing strange things. The interfaces are in chaos and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Hope you know Queen Mab’s hotline, mate,” Creely called from a dozen yards away, digging uselessly at the grass with his knife. Our heads whipped in his direction. Creely was talking about Seelie, the Summer Queen.
“I do. Why is that helpful, Mr. Creely? Does Mab have some ability to help here?” I asked as politely as I could manage.
“Only way to pull his mind back is what I heard,” Creely answered. “I didn’t stick around to see what happened. You know, the crazy queen of faery.”
“You think the other one is sane?” Ethan asked as I turned back to Dad and sought out his conscious mind again.
“Shit, there’s two?” Creely asked, creeped out.
Not deeming his ignorance worth my time, I needed more: more information, more time, and more help. Mab, the Seelie Queen, was out of the question. She’d be more than willing to go digging around in Dad’s head if it weren’t for the Pact she more or less knew he carried—and she’d love for me to owe her for something—but the Pact would block her every attempt at stealing his soul.
Brothers, Dad’s hurt. We need to end this,
I sent to Peter and Kieran, standing stock-still and back-to-back a few yards away. Their battle was now hundreds of yards off and waged on many different fronts. Gestures and movements were wasteful and slow.
“We agree to a truce. Send your representatives down the temple path now to discuss terms for your surrender,” Peter said loudly, his voice echoing through the trees. Both Kieran and he held their positions for six seconds before whipping around and running to us. Ethan explained what we’d discovered so far while I slowly collected the parts of Dad’s consciousness that I could find in that storm of activity in his brain. I think I was able to slow the degradation down some, too, but the mind is a delicate place and sometimes very difficult to read and handle.
Dad’s consciousness formed in his mindscape, cracked and missing pieces, like a mannequin cut away with a jigsaw. “Seth?” he asked, looking at me lost and confused, his voice cracking and weak. “What’s happened?”
“Near as we can tell, you had a power burnout,” I told him. “Do you know what that means, Dad? What can I do about it?”
He stared at me, thinking through possibilities. After a moment, he said, “Tell your mother I love her. And know that I am proud of both my sons. I am happy to see you grown up into such a good man.” His consciousness shattered into thousands of pieces as if exploding from the inside.
“Oh, no you don’t!” I shouted in both realms and blazed with power. He knew something. I could feel it. Hunting every shard of thought that he sent flying, I seized his mind and found the thought and memory he didn’t want me to see. Dad felt it was a lost hope and it was. The idea was indeed one of the Queens sealing the victim’s mind together in a geas while he healed, but the Pact would defeat the geas in hours, long before healing could complete. If I tried, I would watch my father slowly going insane from the inside. “Damn, Dad, give me some credit for ingenuity!”
Reaching into my Pact Lock, I activated another set of functions not used since the Pact’s inception. For such a compact system, it was amazingly robust. These functions allowed for debilitating illnesses that might be cured by removing the Pact Lock for a time. That’s what I needed. Tugging on my father’s Lock with invisible, intangible hands, it slowly lifted out of his mind, body, and soul. Its tendrils looked irritated and some were blackened by proximity to the burned areas. But most surprising was its size. Metaphysically, it was huge, but on the real, physical plane, the magic was no larger than a dime.
Slathering metaphorical aloe gel over the tendrils, I looked up blankly trying to figure out what to do with it now that I had it out. Kieran might reject it again, not purposefully, but… Ethan, I wasn’t sure he had the right kind of soul to keep it properly fed, so that left— “Pete, would you hold this for a while for me?” I asked, already formulating the kind of geas I needed.
“What is it?” Peter asked, reaching out to take whatever I held out. Bypassing his hand, I pushed the Pact and Lock directly into the channel in his arm, the conduit that I created weeks ago that accessed his internal center. Then I activated the temporary hold within the Library. The Pact Lock in Peter extruded simple tapers into the crux of his mind and soul and simply sat there glowing with its preternatural beauty. “What the hell is that?”
“Kieran, would you explain?” I asked while I started searching deeper into Dad’s psyche again. I needed all the pieces for this to work right. Before, when Peter’s mind was doing something like this, there was utter stillness. Dad was utter chaos. The geas would create order and from that healing, but it had to be crafted carefully or I could break him. No, if I invade him, I will break him. He’s an old man with an old mind, older than the eight hundred we believed.
“Seth, what are you doing to him?” Kieran asked carefully. “Why did you give Peter his Pact? I don’t understand what’s going on.”
Adjusting the
Ransé
geas so that I could remove it would work, but that is going to require him to stay either with me or the
Saun
or to stay on Gilán for the duration. I decided that he’d live with it and that I’d talk Mother into coming over, too. I would have preferred to let him make this decision, but he was slipping further and further into his own head. With an intense flash of Daybreak, I captured my Dad in the
Huri Ransé
geas without taking his memory. I had the sense of his being already when I called him from the Fountain. He is Dad. I didn’t need anything else. Then I walled him off from the rest of the
Ransé
and
the
Saun.
My dad needed his privacy. This was a medical necessity. He wasn’t joining the Cult of Seth permanently, after all.
“Seth, no!” Ethan said appalled as he looked at Dad.
“Oh, Dad,” Kieran said softly, falling on his knees beside me. “He was that bad off?” When I nodded, his head fell a few inches downward. Peter was actually ignoring the Pact to be with us. That took more self-control than I had in the beginning.
“What the hell did you do?” Creely called, advancing a few more yards with his knife before him again. “His aura looks like a
fuckin’ elf
now!”
“You should get out more, Creely,” Ethan said sadly. “The world is a much bigger place than you’re aware.”
Shifting Dad to his bed on Gilán, I said, “Ellorn, take care of my dad, please.”
Yes, Lord, immediately.
Feeling Dad sense the presence of the Palace, a pervasive feeling of Daybreak all around him, I relaxed slightly as he relaxed into a more comfortable rhythm of chaos. It was a good sign. “I’ve got to talk to Mom.” I sniffled. Crap, now I was about to cry.
“Hello in the field!” a voice called from the woods. Three men stood in single file at the end of the path to the temple waiting, scared out of their wits, forty-something men in military uniforms without national affiliations. We had the visual advantage since it was pitch dark now—wait, no, I’m wrong, one of them is a wizard—a beat-up-on but fairly strong wizard who was currently almost empty of power. Well, he’d be more so in a few moments, I’d see to that.
“Go ahead,” I murmured to Kieran. “I’ll start easing the way so I don’t startle her by just showing up. Besides, I think I could use the support when I explain this.”
Kieran stared hard at me. “I’m not sure I do support this, Seth.” He turned anxiously back toward the men then waved at them. “Peter, would you?” Peter trotted off quickly toward them, throwing a small light into the air ahead him. He left a small portal in the air behind with us, right at the edge of his hearing.
Trifling
, I thought as I created the links between us,
do they forget how easy this is?
The four of us stood in my cavern in empty space, continuing in the physical world as normal. “All right, Kieran, what’s the problem? Creely said it would work. Dad said it would work. I did it the best way I could.”
“But you’re guessing!” Kieran argued. “You used Librarian functions to remove the Pact. There are Librarian functions that can be used to heal and aid medically as well. You should have used those! They’re safer!”
“But I don’t know those, do I?” I asked angrily. “I haven’t had the time with Gilán and the druids and the Pentagon and other Pact crap! Or the training to learn them, totally lacking any tutelage from the two people who have any knowledge of it at all! Try another lecture, brother. That dog won’t hunt.”
“Seth,” Ethan interrupted, calmly stepping between us. “Will you show us the geas, please?”
“Yes, of course,” I snapped, pulling on the constant buzz in my head that represented the geas in my mind. With quick hand movements, I brought up the core of the geas structure, iconically dangling Dad, the
Saun
, and the Commanders in the colorful swirls of faery magic between the four of us. Glancing up at Ethan, I gave a sheepish apology for snapping, then started explaining what I was showing them.