Authors: Scott V. Duff
“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” I said coyly. “There are thirty-six different species of flowers that can be grown from seeds within the Seelie pot or formed in combinations on the Unseelie. They will only grow under Gilán’s influence, so the diamond is necessary. With proper cultivation and care, the flowers can bloom indefinitely, just not outside this pot.”
They still hadn’t moved. It was creepy to the extreme, even the other five were gawking motionless. I felt obliged to say so.
“This is kind of creepy,” I said, cocking my head to the side and turning to Avenour. “First, let’s go ahead and pack these up for transport, please.”
“Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically and twisted around to help.
One of the brownies reached for the Seelie flowerpot’s cover to replace it. The Prince took an almost reflexive offense that something as lowly as a brownie would touch it, would
think
to touch it. With a savage snarl and a nasty epithet in Faery, the Prince lashed out at the brownie at lightning speed only to have his hand casually batted aside by a white staff, forming a solid wall of Gilán’s fire in its path.
The First of Gilán had arrived and he was as fiery as in the Throne Room last night. “Lord Daybreak charged me with their safety, so hands off,” he said sternly. He kept his position now with the staff fully expanded as he watched the elves, especially the angry one rubbing his wrist.
“May I present my First,” I said proudly and a bit coyly. I’d been waiting for a moment like this and I let them gawk while I helped crate up the pots. “First, would you mind taking the boys home? Thanks, guys, you did great!”
Ethan and Peter both called out good-byes to the brownies and Kieran waved as Shrank flew away backward toward him. Jimmy actually paused long enough for a few quick trills and waves in return before shifting all of them back to Gilán. He was back five seconds later, shrinking his staff back into truncheon-size but still blazing. He outshone everybody and I didn’t feel the need to boost the shirt’s output.
“But he’s human?” asked the Unseelie Prince, Laranis, in a mutter of provincial Fairy.
“So am I,” I answered in Faery common.
“We do apologize, Lord Daybreak,” both Princesses stepped forward in lock step once again and still speaking Faery common. “You have provided us with a number of surprises tonight and it has led to some frayed nerves. We are certainly delighted to accept the responsibility of transporting your most excellent gifts to our mothers. They also sent gifts with us for you, but we were expecting to find you in more need than you seem to be. Indeed, the tools that we have brought may well be useless to you.” They both were rather forlorn over the fact.
Jimmy stepped from the front of the Seelie Queen’s gift with a smile and sweeping gesture, playing to his audience. It earned him a groan from both Peter and Ethan.
“Well, there’s certainly enough I don’t know I need until the consequences of not having it rear their ugly heads that I would like to see what they have offered,” I said as sweetly and innocently as I could muster. As it turns out, when Daybreak pushes this attitude, it’s nearly impossible to disbelieve. Didn’t hurt that it was mostly true.
“Certainly, Lord Daybreak,” the Princesses said, both turning slightly inside to open a clear path to the wagon at the rear of their party.
Jimmy and I were through before they finished turning. Kieran led the rest of our party around the Seelies to see what we were doing. Jimmy stood on the ground a few feet away from the wagon watching me in an amused manner while I climbed up the wheel and peered over the edge of the tall vehicle, excitedly. Everyone else followed at a more sedate speed.
“Well, go on! Climb in and quit wagging your ass over the edge,” Peter called behind me as Dad popped in beside him. “Others want to see, too!”
I laughed and called over my shoulder, “You’ll like your current view better, trust me!” But I climbed in so he could climb up and looked. The moment my foot touched the floor of the wagon, both the Stone and the Night protested loudly. The Queens’ magic bound the tools to the floor of the wagon, releasing them only to a specific type of force. If the bindings didn’t see that force, they would protest quite violently. I was showing the right kind, but not enough.
“Well, this is interesting,” I said quietly as I started to slowly push up the undershirt’s output. Once I hit about sixty-eight percent, the Night’s warnings ebbed and at seventy, they both stopped completely. It made me wonder if that was as powerful as they were, they thought I was, or they thought that the limit of someone’s ability to fake.
“Kieran,” I asked in whisper as I squatted down to examine a piece of… something close to him, “do you see the warding on the floorboards?”
“No, I don’t,” he whispered back, concerned. He leaned further over the side and looked directly down onto the wood, then he slowly put a hand down. I watched the magic, too, as he approached the edge of its trigger. It snapped just as I grabbed its power and Kieran jerked his hand back with a yelp. Even the trigger had a bite.
“Gimme,” I said, grabbing at his hand. “Let me have a look at it.” Already sending probes into his hand anyway, I was pretty sure there was no real damage. We’d both been fast enough.
“They wove that tightly enough,” he muttered quietly. “Doubt even their daughters would see that. And the avoidance spell on the wagon itself is strong enough for her daughters as well. They weren’t trusting anybody with these little tidbits, were they?”
“They shouldn’t trust me with them,” I said lightly, smiling. “Would you like to have your own realm, Lord Kieran?” I pointed at the centerpiece of the collection. It was vaguely reminiscent of an automobile transmission, vaguely but seriously. “From all directions that would appear to require three separate agreements to form the temporary realm in the Wyldes.”
We needed a bit more privacy. I brushed the anchor and brought a piece of Ethan’s consciousness down with me into my cavern. We stood before an exact duplicate of the structure in the center of the wagon. Then I reached mentally across to the point on Peter that I’d entered twice before, asking him to join us. My father reached over and grabbed Peter’s shoulder and had short, concealed conversation with Peter.
“Your father would like to join us,” he said as he materialized across the link I’d set up. “Damn, yours is so much cooler than mine.” He looked at the sigil-level internal schematic I had drawn out on an overlay. Kieran shrugged and Ethan nodded. Peter wouldn’t have suggested it if he were against it.
You know, I’ve never
really
wanted to take my measure against my father. Just never saw the need. Now that I see we have a few things to argue about, I still don’t see that need. And now I had to. Reaching across the astral plane, I touched my father’s consciousness lightly. He was right, I do see differently than he does. And a considerable amount more on different levels. He would be as confused looking into my cavern as I was looking into his. And I was confused.
“Do I see the world so much differently than everyone else?” I asked idly while I considered how best to bring Dad into the conversation. Really should have kept my mouth shut.
Kieran answered without delay, “Yes.”
Ethan muttered under his breath, “How would I know?”
And Peter all but shouted, “God, yes!”
“That was rhetorical,” I said as I pushed out again onto the astral to my father, finally realizing I’d reached out the first time. Like I said, I didn’t want to take his measure and he is a
very strong
wizard. Grabbing hold of what he thought was a simple psychic link, I pushed through and around him. The filters were thick around him when I managed to finally manifest his consciousness. “You doing all right in there, Dad?” I asked, adjusting a few of the higher banding dimensional filters.
“Damn,” he said as he stared at the faery realm maker. “This is how you see the world?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “It’s as much as I can show you without turning you mind into jelly. I don’t know why. But not to put too fine a point on it, we’re being watched. You let me know if something starts to overwhelm you, though, if anything either burns or itches.”
“I don’t see it,” Ethan grumbled as he prowled around the several gazillion sigils floating in the air.
“Think with your other part,” Kieran said quietly. “That’s a dangerous thing to cart around.”
“This is nothing to shake a stick at either,” I said as I brought another tool into my cavern. “This little gem appears to rend ley lines from their positions and make them flow where you want them. Not really sure why you’d want that.” But if I ever really needed it, I had an image of it…
“Oh, you have
got
to be kidding!” Ethan cried as he crouched on his fingertips over the physical device, looking up into final energy manipulation stage, just before the waves are spread across the necessary territory. He looked at me and asked, “That’s it? That’s all you need?” I just grinned and nodded.
“What’s the problem?” Dad asked.
“You can walk in here, Dad,” I told him. “Ethan, why don’t you dismantle that so everyone can see?” It wasn’t that Peter hadn’t gotten it, but that he hadn’t gotten that far. He was enjoying the twists of the subterfuge above it. In Dad’s case, I wasn’t certain what got through the filters.
“Is he having a fit?” Dad asked as Ethan began gesturing at the faery tool in weird ways.
“Nah, he’s fine,” Kieran answered, looking off into space. Not my space, he was examining the other tools. “Seth, I don’t see that you need any of these. Do you?”
“No, not really,” I said. “And I don’t see that they’d be particularly dangerous against me, either, even the realm maker. Against them, yes, but not me.”
“Really?” Dad asked, surprised. “Why?”
“Here we go,” Ethan said, pulling out what looked like a massive fuel injector, but I think that was a forced image on Ethan’s part for Dad’s sake.
“Gilán has no wild areas,” I responded. Kieran glanced up at me in the real world and nodded once, telling me I said the right thing. The reason was a little more esoteric than that: Gilán didn’t have any edges on which to append the device. “And at the moment, we don’t have ley lines, either.”
“Really?” Dad said, more than a little shocked by my announcements. “But there is so much energy there.”
“I’m not sure the Queens know about that,” Peter said. “Look at how deeply that thing is buried in the tunnel and what’s around it. How old is this thing?”
Both Kieran and Ethan bent over the metalloid device, each looking into an opposing end of the actualizing tunnel that Ethan had cleared. I looked through the sides. Physically, the object could be a million years old or a day; there just wasn’t an easy way to tell. Metaphysically, it felt as ancient as Faery itself, which made sense. Peter was right, though. There was a different sense to the flow of energy and matter in the tunnel. There were multiple translations of energy on several levels between the top and the bottom of the actuator. I’d seen it as merely a necessary step in linking the new owner’s mind to the land and not a clue to its manufacture.
“Hmm, I agree,” I murmured. “Nice catch, Pete.” Dad was confused with what he was seeing, which I could understand. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m being rude even considering time constraints.”
I took the two plates from Ethan and twisted the perspective around a little on what we were all seeing. Essentially, I created a giant spell matrix by mapping the device. Then I held up the plates to him again as two very large and complex panels filled with arcane sigils that twisted and moved of their own accord. They were quite cold to the touch, though.
“What I found is that as long as someone has these two panels, then this device is trivial,” I said, then shoved the plates one after another through a gap far too small to accommodate them. They slipped into their correct places and disappeared from view. “The question then was why would they put such a device at my disposal? They dressed it up very nicely as something that requires three very specific kinds of energy in agreement to bind the free land to one of the three minds.” I started shoving the thing around. “Now, as you can see, everything about this says three intents, one power and one output, and look at where it appears the work is being done.” Breaking the metallic block in half to show the center. “Somewhere between the top of this tunnel and the bottom, but you don’t really see where, do you? It’s not a trick question and it’s not something you’re just
not seeing
. It’s not there. There is no reason for the energy signatures to be different from one end to the other, but they are.”
“And you saw this?” he asked me. “At a glance?”
“After a fashion, yes, sir,” I said, snapping the thing shut again. “It’s not quite as simple as ‘at a glance’ as it might seem. I understood what it did and what it needed to work at a glance, but that was obvious. It took a little more work to find the translation matrix that did the actual work. Kieran and Ethan didn’t see it right off and Peter wasn’t looking for it yet.”
“And you have to understand, Dad,” Kieran interjected, pointing at the huge dull but silvery object I was pushing around, “that what you are seeing here is just a representation of what’s sitting in the wagon. He’s showing you symbols for an arcane system you aren’t familiar with.” He leaned over and, with his left hand on the right side of his mouth, slyly hiding the comment from me, added in a stage whisper “He’s scary!”