Sons (Book 2)

by Scott V. Duff

  “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.”

  Jimmy got on the other side of the bed and helped me pull back the bedclothes. Then we gently tugged off the bandages while the treed druids climbed down. Several of the wounds were already festering and going septic. Four druids from the thicket came into the clearing, alarmed from the shouts of the two in the tree. Jimmy barked at them to bring clean linen, bandages, and hot water immediately. Any kind of healing on Cornell was going to be difficult, I knew that going in. He really didn’t have any natural life to draw upon and he’d used much of his stolen energy in staying alive through what they were doing to him.

  Moving on instinct I pulled a mortar and pestle from somewhere in my room. When I looked back, I found I had a laboratory wedged in between my office and the kitchen, behind the ovens specifically. Don’t know if that matters. Picking up a knife, choosing the berries, leaves, and fruit was the next problem. Cornell needed restoratives, not regeneratives. His mind was shut from the pain his body endured, maybe even shut down. Esteleum was the first ingredient, properly de-seeded. Mixing bowls of various sizes appeared at my side as I cut a quarter of the fruit off into the mortar. A small wedge went into his mouth, under his tongue, while the rest I set aside. Leaves and bark from their sacred trees—the oak, ash, and thorn—went in next, picked and scraped from the tops of their favorites. I began chanting as I picked up the pestle and ground these together into a paste. That mixture went into one of the mixing bowls. Handing the mortar and pestle off to a druid to wash, I grabbed another from my lab.

  I was moving faster than Jimmy and the druids. They were carefully cleaning the wounds, washing away excess blood and pus and other noxious fluids. That left the specimen collections to me. Thankfully, the Adjudication left me with a sense of their other properties and most of them were farms of some kind. I could get the animal parts I needed without the slaughter. Fresh goat’s milk mixed gently with goldenrod and thistle along with a few unripe mulberries. That got handed off to a druid to simmer on the fire. Trading the druid my clean mortar for the dirty one, I went to another farm for the horse’s urine and the sheep’s uterine cells to mix with another quarter of the Esteleum, and—okay, very strange—garlic and bay leaf. This went on for twenty minutes and over three hundred ingredients. In the end, I found myself standing by the fire, stirring a large cooking pot and being watched intently by Hamish, Kendrick and nearly two dozen priests of the inner circles as I stopped chanting.

  There were six levels of goo in the pot and I only wanted two, the first and the fifth. Pulling a shallow ladle from my lab, I drew the iridescent green fluid off the top and poured it into a drinking glass, thinking of the horse’s urine and the goo’s pale yellow tinge and shuddering. The next four layers I just raised up out of the pot and inverted, then brought the entire pot to Cornell’s bedside. I wanted sterile gloves for this part, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Jimmy did a good job with the druids in cleaning him up, but Cornell had bled and seeped more in the time I was preparing my gunks. Scraping out a good amount of the brackish paste out of the pot with my knife, I peeled the biggest bandage slowly away and smeared the mixture onto the wound, pressing it closed as I went. Jimmy pressed another bandage into place, careful not to tape across another wound. Cornell groaned in pain, the first sign of life he’d made since we came into the copse. Encouraged, we kept going until he was almost a mummy. When I checked his mind, surprisingly he was actually awake.

  “Cornell,” I said gently, my voice rough from so much singing in so many voices. I had zoned out, working on instinct and trusting Jimmy to watch my back, trusting my brothers to watch our backs. I’d actually have to think about what I did. “We need to sit you up a little, so you can drink something. You know how this works.” I gently lifted his head up and Jimmy slid a pillow under his shoulders to cushion the bandages. Cornell’s dark eyes watched me through slits as I held the drinking glass to his lips and began the guttural chant to bind the three together. It was a bit of a gamble to sing in their original tongue since I wasn’t exactly certain how many would recognize it. Cornell finished the whole glass without complaint and Jimmy and I eased him back onto the bed.

  In an excessively good mood, Hamish stood and started adding the power of his circle to the binding, the first compassionate act I’d seen from him. Kendrick came to my side of Cornell’s bed and did the same. Then I shocked them both by going to the end of his bed and closing their circle, empowering it to its fullest extent and intent. Eight druids fell into an incomplete circle around us, flowing east to north to west and chanting to empower their own circle of protection and health. This was Davis’ sacred circle, the one he was thrown out of yesterday. I raised a second voice and closed it for them. Then another sacred circle of this glen began chanting but moving with the sun, east to south to west. They were only six in number until Jimmy joined them, singing with two voices, and again, I closed their circle. I crackled with power and all druid eyes were on me as I funneled the energy into Cornell. The four elemental energies of earth, air, fire, and water coursed through me and into him, working the bindings I placed on his body as he convulsed and spasmed uncontrollably on the bed. I stopped the power flow when the spell I wrought no longer had effect on him. It resonated against the veils hiding the glen from London and told everyone that High Magic was performed here. High Magic that they weren’t privy to.

  Ethan brushed against the anchor lightly as the high priest of each circle broke its sacrosanct nature, last to first. I let him see what was happening, but I still held considerable energy until Hamish broke his. There were still a dozen or so druids and acolytes in the copse that simply stared in awe of Jimmy and me. The Hilliards were the only ones to know what exactly was done here, but they all knew power when it rolled over them. Hamish fell back on the bed, giggling and clapping like a little girl. Neither of us knew what to think of that.

  After shoving every dirty item remaining into every free hand I encountered, all that left was three mixing bowls and the big pot. The remaining contents had to be destroyed in specific ways, so I paired a druid with an acolyte and explained the process for each. The steps were familiar to them, but the magnitudes of energy and the order I required was more extreme than they were used to. These would take awhi
le to clean, but the rest went back to my kitchen on Gilán to be washed again. I told Cornell’s physicians to remove his bandages in an hour, but to feed him before then, a light chicken broth only. Then Jimmy and I turned to leave.

  “Archdruid McClure,” Hamish called after me, trotting up to us like a puppy. He held out two thick manila envelopes to me, one labeled ‘Names’ and the other ‘Rites.’ “Your lists, Lord Daybreak.”

  “Thank you, Hamish,” I responded with a tired smile, then we left the copse and re-entered the world at large. Looking up at the sun, I estimated the time at ten-forty. “Crap, we still have time for the opening ceremonies.”

  Jimmy laughed, the bastard.

  Chapter 57

  We walked. That was my mistake. I just wanted a few moments of relative quiet.

  But for all my new knowledge in druidism, I really didn’t understand the true power of speech, I suppose: Gossip travels at light speed.

  The druids provided crowd control, ushering the incoming magicians and wizards into the main pavilion near the single building at the center of the glen. The newly outed druids surprised most of the wizards since the practice was thought to have gone wholly into the realm of New Age romanticism. The presence of the Breach warning and over two hundred druids cast considerable doubt on that belief. The resonance of High Magic shattered it completely. The Hilliards’ protections around the glen were amazing. Regardless of which entrance a person or group used, he, she, or they were shunted to one place and led here and if you weren’t meant to be here, you didn’t see an entrance at all. If you weren’t on the guest list, you weren’t here. Except for Davis, who came in with us.

  We arrived five minutes before the ceremonies started, thinking the large number of druids at the back of the pavilion would allow us to sneak around to the podium casually, unnoticed. I think I would have been less noticed if I dropped into the Summer Court. One druid turned and saw me, whispered, “Archdruid,” and started an avalanche of genuflects. Every druid in sight turned and fell to his or her knees, bowing repeatedly. It was embarrassing.