Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  Looking back as I shut the hole down, I saw Sean pointing back at me and saying to his father, “That is one serious freaking hole in the wall.”

  Mike started laughing as Kieran fell onto the couch heavily.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Ethan said, rubbing his face. “That was so boring. I’d rather watch a river flow than waste more time like that.”

  Kieran chuckled. “That was just the first in a long line of such extravaganzas, my friend, so get a good mental picture of that river. You’ll need it.”

  “Hey, at least we’ll be able to get out of a few of them,” Peter said slyly. “They don’t have that luxury.”

  “I get why I don’t. Why doesn’t Kieran?” I asked him while Ethan snickered.

  “I may… have made it seem like I was the power behind the throne,” Kieran said, picking invisible lint off the sofa.

  “O-kay,” I drawled. “While I’m not exactly offended by that, why? You’re just asking for trouble there, aren’t you? You’re gonna catch hell about anything I do wrong.”

  “He stepped in it,” Mike said, pulling calling cards from his pockets. “Pure and simple.” When he finished emptying his pockets—he pulled them from so many pockets he looked like a television magician doing a playing card trick to impress a jaded audience—he had three stacks, each two inches high.

  “There were that many people there?” I asked in shock.

  “No, there were not,” Mike affirmed for me. “But every time I turned around, there was someone else handing one of you a card, which I took. It’s going to take me a week to go through all of these.”

  “Pete, d’you get a chance to call your father?” I asked, sliding my jacket off my shoulders.

  “Left a message,” he said, shaking his head and hauling himself up from the chair. “I’ll try again in the morning before we leave. Which bed am I in?”

  “You’re in with Seth,” Kieran pointed over his shoulder and Peter headed that way. “We’re at the attorney’s at nine, right? Want breakfast out here at eight?”

  “It’s already setup for seven-thirty,” Mike said. “I’ll crash on the couch so you can sleep in.”

  “Nah, seven-thirty’s good for me, too,” I said, following Peter. “Y’all got the dirty part of this. You get to deal with traffic. Least I can do is match your schedule.”

  “Gentlemanly,” Mike said smirking. “See you in the morning, then.”

  I wasn’t sure how I did it, but I was down to silk boxers under the covers before Peter got the second cufflink off. “Goodnight, Peter,” I yawned.

  Chapter 7

  The first ray of light into the room started the process. The wavelength was too blue, too slow and wide for the human eye to capture. The next, too fast and red, but they started the choir all the same.

  Each change in color started a new voice, raising me further out of sleep. It felt like a slow process to me, adding those voices to the choir that sang to me, but it was much faster than I realized. Mere seconds had passed, two maybe three, and I was floating above my bed, glorying in my power, the energy flowing around me randomly, shifting me to face my sun as it rose to light my valley.

  I watched the myriad colors burst into the valley over the mountains gleam and bounce off the waters of the lake and waterfall. A partial view into the life on my world burst into sight below me, just as beautiful and glorious and fantastical as the very first day. And the whole world was singing my name to me.

  But there was another name there, too.

  You’ve done well here, Little Brother.

  That there was suddenly a fifteen-foot, ruddy-skinned giant standing next to me and talking to me as I floated in rapture before the huge window in my Palace did not alarm me at all. I’ve actually been expecting it. I began to turn to face him.

  This is your Eden, your…

  Gilán, the choir sings. At least that’s the portion that humans can hear. There are a couple of thousand other sounds in there that differentiate my world in the celestial darkness.

  He’s gone in the partial second it takes me to turn. In his stead, between the wall of my bedroom and the giant window out onto the valley is a glowing blue sphere, sitting above a dark pool of water. I sank down slowly to the floor into the veritable jungle of plants in the alcove, staring at the blue globe. It was a huge crystalline structure, about ten feet in diameter, slowly spinning on an axis above the pool. The alcove itself was made of black stones, granite I presumed, and none of the plants grew past its borders on the floor, preserving walking space. The walls were the same black stone and held the privacy of the globe on three sides. Neither the water nor the stone reflected the globe’s blue light.

  The Twice-Dead God’s words pealed through my mind again as I stepped forward, This is your Eden, your... As I put my foot down on the black stone, the wall behind the globe lit up with power and the globe changed radically. Most importantly, though, my world sang to me again and I started putting a few pieces together.

  Gilán.

  The blue orb in front of me flowed with my power, changing and becoming an exact duplicate of my realm, my planet, right before my eyes. Behind it on the center panel, characters formed into my name then into the glyph we’d seen so prevalently in the jewelry, the symbol for Gilán. Together on the wall, they formed a tight geometric pattern, but the energy faded as the sun rose. I would study the images later, I decided, turning my attention to the globe.

  This is my world and its name is Gilán. I wasn’t quite sure what to call the emotion I was feeling as I looked on my Gilán: sedate elation, satisfaction, happiness, I don’t know really. But if my realm could have an emotion, right then it was relief followed by joy. A huge pulse of energy rang throughout the Palace, making even the stonework vibrate with its name for the briefest of time. That pulse sang to my people throughout the world. He accepts us. We are Gilán.

  Like I could do any less from the first sunrise on this world.

  As I watched the pulse flow across the surface of my realm, I felt the Fae join in to the choir singing my name and learning the name of our realm. Now I realized that we’d made a slight error in language. What the Fae were calling the “Great Claiming” would be the laying of the geas, true. The first geas on Thursday, though, wasn’t the “Great Claiming” as we thought. This was.

  The center panel flared once more with that nearly cobalt blue energy, forming Gilán’s symbol as the pulse reached the far side of the world. As it began to fade, another word pushed forward on the stone in a language I’d never seen, characters I didn’t even know existed, but I knew the words. I knew the words well. They were the glue that tied both Daybreak and Gilán to me: Little Brother. They were gone as fast as it took to read them. Talk about “Eyes Only” secrets, the CIA’s got nothing on mine!

  I walked to the edge of the pool, watching the globe. It moved slowly, very slowly, and as I watched the lighted side turned away. It was rotating with the world itself in real time. Picking out where I thought I would be on this rendition, I peered in more closely, thinking I might see better, but it wasn’t quite working well enough. Until I projected the perspective onto the black stone panel on the left behind it. Then I got a perfect aerial view of the valley, clouds and all. My sense of the valley was as perfect as the image I was seeing here. This was seriously cool.

  I experimented and played with the globe, trying and testing hundreds if not thousands of different locations around my world, both in daylight and in night. Slightly more than half of my world was land spread across three continents. Three oceans separated them, one freshwater and two briny. A moon flew through near space, currently perfectly rendered on the night side of the world, and created tidal forces in the seas. A few other satellites in near space orbit were rendered there as well, two others large enough to nearly be moons themselves. I wondered why but like so much else right now, there was just so much going on, that would have to wait.

  After a year or two, I might get tired of this
, but I managed to pull myself away after maybe thirty minutes. Looking into the pool below my stunning representation, the liquid was simple water, a spring fed from the lake behind the Palace and coming up gently in a fountain in the center a foot above the surface. The black stonework made it appear deep, but the pool was filled with glowing cobalt blue gems ranging in size from a sixteenth of an inch to four inches across, tiny to freakin’ huge. Sitting on the ledge of the pool, I shoved my hand down under the surface of the water, reaching down to the bottom to see how deep it went. Surprised that I couldn’t touch the bottom, my reach extended as my senses pushed down another foot. The field of gems was almost a yard deep and fourteen feet in diameter.

  Pulling some of the larger stones with me as I sat up, I studied the stones. Carbon in a lattice structure, tightly packed together, with a cobalt atom exchanged every so often giving it the rich blue color that was so similar to Gilán’s energy. Except that wasn’t cobalt and the color was wrong. In each position of each diamond I looked at that should have been cobalt was empty, replaced instead by another energy formed into matter. Gilán inhabited the diamonds and held the valences together. And the diamonds glowed with its power.

  Little Brother, where are you? Peter called, opening a link with my Name, worried.

  Gilán, I sent back, smiling with satisfaction at the word and sending it with the full force of the choir of voices behind it. Peter would hear most if not all of them.

  Gilán, Little Brother? he asked, repeating the name, and was pulled across space. He stood beside me in a bathrobe, sipping from a steaming cup of coffee. “Ow!” he cried, startled and sloshing hot coffee on his hands. “What the hell?”

  I laughed, “Welcome to Gilán!”

  Peter looked around, holding the cup away from him, arms outstretched and his robe falling open. He’d slept in the nude, apparently, reminding me I was still in my boxers.

  “Where are we?” he asked as his eyes fixed on the world floating in front of him. Except that I wasn’t wearing them now, curiously.

  “My bedroom in the Palace,” I said. “I woke up here at sunrise.”

  “How long ago was that?” he asked.

  Glancing out the window, I was surprised to see the sun had risen more than I’d realized. “About two and a half hours ago. What time is it?”

  “About seven-twenty,” he answered. “What’s this?” He pointed at the globe.

  “Gilán,” I answered. “Kieran and Ethan up yet?”

  “Mike was rousing them when I went to look for you,” he said. “They don’t know we’re gone yet…”

  Little Brother, where are you? Ethan called worriedly.

  “They do now,” I said, grinning. “Be right back.” I dressed before I shifted back to the hotel. It was an instantaneous transform. Black shoes and slacks with a Gilán blue short-sleeved shirt, all of some silk-like material. Ethan didn’t bat an eye when I appeared in front of him, grinning like a shit-eating dog.

  “Where have you been?” yelled Kieran from across the room. I turned to see him coming out of Peter’s and my room, angry from worry.

  “I woke up on Gilán,” I told him cheerfully. “Put some clothes on. I have something to show you before breakfast. Peter’s there now.” Between two fingers, I held out the large diamond I still had in my hand, a two-inch sphere of cut and polished carbon. I heard Mike’s gasp near the door and Kieran moved closer as Ethan took the gem out of my hand to study.

  The three of them huddled up around Ethan to stare at the rock, so I went for a cup of coffee from the room service table setup against the far wall. Taking a scone as well, I went back to the huddle and peered over Mike’s shoulder.

  “Guys, Peter’s waiting,” I gently reminded them. “It’ll just take a few minutes and we can come back.” Ethan returned the diamond and followed Kieran into their room without a word from either of them.

  “Is that a diamond?” Mike asked me, still staring at the stone.

  “Appears to be to me,” I said, tossing it up and catching it again.

  “It’s gigantic for a diamond,” he said, his eyes wide. “And the color and clarity are amazing.”

  “They’re certainly beautiful to me,” I said, agreeing. “There’re a lot of them, too.”

  Mike stood there, shaking his head in fascination when Ethan and Kieran came back dressed quickly in simple shorts and shirts. Ethan still had his shoes in his hands when I shifted the four of us over, the chair he was moving to sit in becoming the ledge of the pool. He took the shift in stride and continued to put his shoes on slowly, taking in his new surroundings, turning slowly.

  “What is that?” Kieran asked immediately, pointing at the orb above the pool.

  “That is Gilán,” I said. “A bit more impressive than a diamond, wouldn’t you say?”

  Peter stepped into view from the other side of the pool. “Yeah and watch this…” he said and held his hand up to the orb, closing his eyes, concentrating. The left side panel lit up with an aerial view of the area Peter was holding his hand over. It wasn’t as detailed as the images I was pulling out, though, and Peter had to sink some energy into it. I could see the power flow.

  “Can you manipulate the image?” I asked, curious about how much control he had over my map.

  “What do you mean?” Peter asked.

  “You know, zoom in and out, shift the perspective around, see what direction the winds are blowing, the streams and rivers are flowing, that sort of thing,” I said. I set the center panel over the same area Peter was showing and twisted the perspective around as I mentioned each aspect, giving examples as I went. Peter’s eyes got wide and he blinked, shaking his head.

  “Not like that,” he said, choking a little.

  “Maybe with practice,” I offered, noticing for the first time that Kieran was walking the perimeter of the pool slowly, studying the giant magic-laden gemstone carefully. His body was tightly controlled from showing reaction and his aura seemed to be frozen in state as he walked. That was highly unusual. For anyone, not just Kieran. Ethan, too, seemed to be disturbed by the representation, but he attempted nothing to hide it. He just didn’t understand why he was disturbed.

  “Seth,” Kieran said softly, approaching from the night side. “Is this an accurate depiction? Is your realm planetary?”

  “Well, yeah, what else would it be?” I said, confused. “Stars in the sky, moon passing over, you’ve seen this. Why are you surprised?”

  “But this is a Faery realm,” Kieran argued.

  I grinned. “Trust me when I say that Daybreak and Gilán are very aware of that.”

  Kieran stared at me incomprehensibly.

  “The very definition of gobsmacked, I think,” Mike said. Peter and I got a laugh out of it. “Now you know how we feel, mate.”

  “Cool, isn’t it?” I asked, referring to the globe and ignoring for the moment that they didn’t seem as thrilled about it as I was.

  “Seth, Fae magic doesn’t work that way,” Kieran said, letting his confusion crack and break the façade he held. The rush of worry for me poured out of him faster than the water from the falls out front.

  “Well, somebody forgot to tell that to the Fountain because this is what it built for me,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I considered mentioning my brief encounter with the Twice-Dead God this morning, only to feel the same onus as before descend on me, that Tower-of-Babel-feeling that made me incapable of speech. Another thought occurred to me then, though.

  “How did you get here?” I asked Peter.

  “What?” he asked confused. “You brought me over.”

  “No,” I said. “You linked using my name asking where I was, I told you and you were here. I felt you coming but I didn’t pull you over. You did it somehow.”

  “’Across the link’ means power,” Ethan said. “What did you say?”

  “’Gilán, Little Brother’,” Peter repeated himself, thinking back.

  “I felt that,” I said, sensing the words
as a pressure, almost a pinprick inside me.

  “That’s not the same word Seth’s been saying either,” Ethan said. Opening another link to me, he said, Little Brother, what is the name again?

  “I didn’t catch any of it,” Mike complained as I sent both Ethan and Kieran the name of my realm in its complete form with all of its voices.

  “Understandable, unfortunately,” I said to Mike, grimacing. “It can take a lot of practice to hear all the voices.”

  Ethan disappeared, sinking through the envelope of energy around my realm and re-entering the hotel room we came from. I felt the pressure of the shift equally as he shifted back a second later, easily differentiating the direction of the shift as well. He did it a few more times, then Kieran joined in, shifting back and forth with ease. The moves took little energy from them to make, a tenth as much as a portal, maybe less. Then they started moving to other parts of the world as Mike, Peter, and I watched.

  “Stop,” I said suddenly, when they were both on my side of the membrane, stopping the shift that Kieran had started to some place in Cairo he vaguely remembered from his childhood. “That’s enough, boys, we do have some work to do today,” I said, chuckling at them. If I could contain myself then so could they.

  “Okay, Seth, you’re right,” Kieran said, the gleam in his eyes not dulling at all. “This is seriously cool. We cannot tell anyone about this. No one. Seriously, this is yet another first in the universe.”

  “Well, I’m going for breakfast before it gets cold,” Peter said and promptly disappeared.

  “Congratulations, little brother,” Ethan said, cheerfully. “Now you have a name, a door and a lock for the door. Great start for the day!” Then he disappeared, too.

  “A lock?” I asked Kieran.

  “You stopped us from making a transition,” he said. “So you have control over the veil or field or whatever it is that occludes your realm from the rest of the universe and protects it. At some point, we’ll have to test it and see if you can stop specific people or—”