by Scott Duff
I shrugged, saying, “I’m sure it’s just a metaphor or something. We are hovering in your imagination, after all. There’re all sorts of things you can do in here.”
“Show me,” he urged.
I hesitated, remembering the previous day. Looking around the cavern slowly then back to Peter, I shook my head. “No, Peter,” I said. “This is you. This is your mind, your soul, your center. I shouldn’t be doing things in here. Right outside is the boundary to the astral plane. It might link up to other planes I don’t know about yet. There’s too much I don’t know to be playing around in your head. I’ve already taken one big risk here. I won’t do that again.”
“But I trust you not to hurt me,” he said.
“I appreciate that, Peter,” I said, smiling. “But what you mean is that you trust me not to hurt you intentionally. You still see me as some miracle worker with a magic touch, but the truth of the matter is much different. What I am is a seventeen-year-old kid who’s been extremely lucky. Well, at least I’ve been lucky for the last few weeks, anyway.”
“What risk?” he asked.
“Huh?” I stuttered. I hadn’t really expected that question. Should’ve, but didn’t.
“You said you’d ‘already taken one big risk here.’ What risk?” he asked again.
I blanched. Outside on the couch, I squirmed uncomfortably. Peter turned on the couch to face me. “Well?” he insisted on both planes.
I sighed audibly and astrally. I recounted the story of the Loa healing and trickery to him as detailed as I remembered it. It wasn’t a pleasant tale for me or, I suppose, for Peter.
“Once I’d dealt with the Princesses and Kieran and Ethan had the rest under control, I went back in,” I continued with the story. “This time, though, when I walked the path, there was a difference. It was hard to detect at first—I almost missed it. But more and more, it became obvious that your subconscious mind was trying to edit your memories. I had no idea what that would do, good or bad. How that would change you. It scared me, really, almost as bad as the Loa attacks. You are the one port of ‘normalcy’ I’ve had in the past two weeks and I still have no idea why you’ve bothered, but I didn’t want to lose you.
“Our plan, mine and your subconscious’, was to push my power through your memories back through the holes to sorta rewrite them. It set everything up while I was gone to not include certain aspects I didn’t understand. So before I loosed my power, I put everything back to the way it was.”
Peter tilted his head slightly to the side as I told the story, his big brown eyes watching me intently. They moved in unison, both pair.
“So your big risk was to put me back together as closely to normal as you possibly could?” he asked calmly, in both worlds. It was an odd stereo quality. I nodded stiffly, waiting for the outburst, whatever it might be.
Snickering wasn’t it. Peter snickered, then said through the laughs, “You’re right, Seth. Sometimes it is hard to remember that you’re only seventeen and terribly naïve. I don’t know what would have happened either, but I’m quite happy with myself the way I am, so thank you for not allowing me to be a monster.” In the cavern, he kissed me on my forehead and messed my hair up. “You are so adorable, sometimes.”
He stood up from the couch, pulling his shirt down, and said, “Now if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I have to go to the bathroom.” I returned to myself.
Kieran stood with Ethan at the food table getting a second helping. He glanced Peter’s way as he scurried to the bedroom we shared and started snickering. Ethan and I exchanged looks as I walked up, then turned back to Kieran who started snickering harder. Kieran took off with his plate to the balcony while Ethan got an “A-Ha” look on his face, leaving me in the dark.
“What?” I asked.
“If he’s not going to say, you think I am?” Ethan said, pointing after Kieran. “Not my place, man.” He finished fixing his plate, grinning the whole time. Shrank flew back into the room from the balcony.
“Lord Kieran is in a jolly mood,” he squeaked as he flew over the table snatching berries, then headed back out. “Master Seth, he said you may want to see the match that is about to start. You know one of the combatants, a Clifford Harris.”
Chapter 25
We both moved immediately toward the balcony, plates in hand, but everything else abandoned. We sat down around Kieran and started shoveling in food while taking in the field. It was pared down to half its original size, then quartered by blue force lines raised about a foot off the ground now. There were a few people milling around the gates, but none of them appeared to be combatants. I really couldn’t tell what they were there for.
MacNamara himself trod out from over our heads, walking on air to the center of the Arena. He was ablaze in the sunlight in a golden silk shirt with billowing sleeves and sky blue silk pants. The wind whipped his white hair back and his smile glinted in the midmorning sun. The elf knew his entrances.
“Honored guests, welcome to the finals of the solo competitions,” he said, in his own voice. The Arena went wild. Oh, yeah, he knew his crowds, too. I wondered how long he had his repeaters that this was truly unusual. This was the second time he’d addressed the audience personally. From the response, I’d say not in anyone’s lifetime. At a guess, at least two hundred years, maybe two twenty. MacNamara got quite an ego boost from it, I’m sure, considering it took over ten minutes to calm down enough for him to continue.
“There have been a few surprises in this year’s competition. With the withdrawal of the Fae after young McClure’s second embarrassment of the Princesses…” Once again, the Arena went wild and MacNamara had to pause in his speech, smiling broadly. He glanced in our direction with a gleam in his eye, his amusement at this situation obvious.
“Damn, I wish I could have seen that,” said Peter, sitting down beside Ethan.
“I’ll share my memory of it with you when we get home,” Ethan offered, grinning. “It really was funny.”
“You can do that?” I asked. “Show him Kieran telling off the Queens, too, then. That was downright scary.”
“You can do it, too,” said Ethan. “I’ll show you how at the same time.”
It took a few minutes longer for the crowd to calm. I wondered if that bothered him at all, but if it did, he didn’t show it. I took the extra time to peruse the stadium. The crowd had thinned considerably from the first day, mostly from the lack of the Fae it seemed. Since this was only the third day of competition and Peter said it normally lasted about a week, I suppose that their absence had shortened matters considerably. It also meant that we were notorious now. Well, Peter, Ethan, and Kieran were notorious now. I was just more notorious.
“With the withdrawal of the Fae,” MacNamara had regained control of the Arena. “The human penchant for devious and unpredictable behavior shone beautifully and provided us with one combatant that before would have not made it past the second round and one previous winner. Indeed, this should be interesting. Without further ado, let the games begin!”
He burst into a thousand rays of golden light and once again, the crowd burst into thunderous cheers. Two referees shot out from each entrance to the field and took positions opposite each other on the blue force lines. Barely a minute later, another referee came out of each entrance escorting a single man to the field.
“May I join you?” asked MacNamara. He stood at our gate, his shoulders hunched forward as he leaned in, totally at ease.
“Most certainly, sir,” said Kieran. Peter started to get up for the gate but he settled back in when MacNamara flicked his wrist and the gate unlocked and opened on its own. He stepped in just as Shrank flew out with a couple of blackberries in his hands. He shrieked and turned straight up to the sky, his wings beating as fast as they could carry him.
“Oh, stop, pixie,” said MacNamara, chuckling, “I’ve known you were here from the beginning.” We shifted our chairs to make room for the tall lounge chair that suddenly appeared behind us i
n the center of the balcony. MacNamara sat between Kieran and Ethan as the last two men took to the field. I was surprised to see that one of them was our friend, Blondie the Brit.
“I thought you might find that amusing,” said the elf before Ethan or I could react to our surprise. “He is much more at home in the concrete and steel warrens your people favor, but he has achieved favorable progress this year.”
Harris stood in the center of one quarter of the field, calmly looking around the Arena while he waited for the procession to end. He wore a black tunic and pants, similar to a gi, tied at the waist with a red belt. I didn’t recognize the significance of it. Didn’t care either. He tried to look bored, but his aura showed his tension and his fear. Still, he was confident.
“Who’s against who?” I asked.
“That is not yet decided,” said the elf, pointing to the referee with Blondie and the fourth man still on the sidelines. “There is a coin toss occurring as we speak. The first will be to decide which field each will take and the second to decide which wall will come down. None of the four will know the outcome of the second until the walls actually come down, though, just to make it deliciously suspenseful.” The smile on his face was disturbing.
Blondie took the quarter of the field opposite Harris, giving the other quarter to the shorter, Italian-looking man. So Harris would be up against either Blondie or an older, grizzled man of Asian descent who was dressed like a Buddhist monk. He was not a monk, that was clear to me, but he dressed for it. It was probably calculated misdirection on his part. He was plenty powerful, too. His aura glowed with the same orange as his robes.
The first bell tolled and all four walls rose quickly into place about twenty feet high, cutting all four combatants off from one another. They all leaned in toward the center, waiting for the first clue as to which wall would fall to show their opponent. The second bell tolled and they all changed their positions away from the centers while raising defensive shields and pulling power from the background. All but Blondie, he didn’t pull power just yet.
Blondie started running for the center of the field at top speed. A half of a second before he would hit the corner the third bell tolled and he leapt. The wall dropped instantly, showing he would be fighting the Italian. He erected an oddly shaped, low-power shield and bounced against it like trampoline, shooting high into the air over his opponent. The Italian searched the opposite field, firing bolts of magefire and other weird magic, believing Blondie was hiding behind a veil. Blondie shot his own incapacitating fire down on the Italian almost lazily in a ballistically-controlled flight path rather than magically-controlled. The Italian hadn’t even seen where he was yet, but he wouldn’t get the chance now. Blondie landed hard on the ground, rolling to disperse the kinetic energy of the fall.
He rolled an extra few feet and slithered a bit like a snake to watch his opponent, making sure he wasn’t playing possum. The crowd roared again, the third time in thirty minutes. Blondie had won his battle in less than five seconds and used very little magic to do it. I didn’t know whether to boo or cheer for him. I admired the technique involved and wondered how much he had to practice before executing it.
MacNamara laughed, loudly. He tried to speak several times but couldn’t. He just kept laughing.
Harris had a harder row to hoe. The Asian man was grizzled all right, for a reason. His defense took whatever Harris threw at him. Then he turned around and gave as good as he got. I hadn’t seen the first volley, but on the second, Harris started pushing slowly toward the old man, firing powerful spells of twisted intent and deflecting or absorbing those thrown at him. It was an amazing display of energy flow on both sides. But they were toying with each other, searching for limits. At least, that’s what the Asian wanted it to look like to Harris. He shouldn’t have been so lazy about it; Harris wasn’t.
On the third volley, Harris sent two spheres of black energy about six inches wide to attack the shields of the Asian man, sapping energy off at short distances. They were easily batted aside and behind by his opponent. He ignored them as Harris stepped closer, eager to close whatever trap he’d planned. Harris gave him a simple direct blast of magefire then sent two more globes of black power against his shields, but this time he made a gesture with his left hand, recapturing control of the first two forgotten spheres, and sent all four against him. Harris patterned the four in a pyramid around the Asian, forcing him to pattern his shields in a very odd way because of the way he generated them.
I understood the energy flows, the ways the different magical types were blended together to bend reality. I was getting that. What I didn’t know was how you put the stuff together. My opinions of how anybody doing what they’re doing on the field were pretty much what any armchair quarterback’s opinions are: crap. Still, I’d say Harris was pretty damn good.
Harris fired a few more destructive spells at the man while the black spheres beat down methodically at his defenses. He couldn’t return with anything before Harris fired an ebony shot of eldritch energy at the top of his pyramid. The spheres grew in size in tandem to over a foot wide. Ebony lightning fired out between each sphere, lighting the outside edges of the shield walls it touched, pushing on them and suspending the man in the center of the pyramid. The Asian screamed in silent agony, the sound not penetrating his shield. It finally cracked when Harris tossed a dark green globe similar to the one Peter uses. It missed him completely, but his shield cracked wide open and he slumped over, falling to the ground.
Harris kept the pyramid floating above the man until the referee got close enough then he reabsorbed them. I didn’t really get why he would do that unless they were charms or something. With that thought, I looked at him a little more closely. There, I see it now. He was wearing charms, carefully placed on his uniform. Almost artfully placed. Four of them, fairly small, pinned on his gi, two just below the breast and two below the shoulder blades. One more in the small of his back in his pants and one taped to his back left thigh. They blended in nicely with his aura, so passive as to be invisible.
MacNamara stopped laughing by then and collected himself. “Harris always has been a bully,” he said mildly.
“So I noticed,” I muttered. “Are they going to start the next fight right off?”
“No, they have a break,” said MacNamara. “A long one. You have disrupted the timetables significantly. But what do you think, young McClure? Who would win between Harris and Ferrin?”
So Blondie’s name was Ferrin. “Honestly, I think Harris will mop the floor with him,” I said. “But then, I would have thought that he’d have mopped the floor with me, too.”
“So I heard,” said MacNamara. “But look at the weapons at your disposal versus those at Ferrin’s.”
“Seth wasn’t using them, then,” said Peter, looking at the elf. “That was all him. I was there. He had put everything away.”
MacNamara gawked at Peter for a second. “You do turn more interesting day by day,” he said, turning to me with a smile on his face. There was something unreadable lying underneath that smile that made me a bit nervous.
“So what are your plans after the competition?” the elf asked Kieran.
Kieran shrugged, idly watching as some elves tended to the field below us. “We have no specific timetable, but our goals haven’t changed. We will see to Olivia’s well-being, search for my father, teach the boys.”
“Should you ever decide to open a school, I imagine you would come to considerable wealth and importance,” said MacNamara, the mirth in his tone obvious, “considering your first three apprentices.”
Kieran barked out a laugh, his green eyes bright in the sun. “It’s unlikely I would take on another. My family does not seek notoriety and wealth is…” He shrugged again. “Our family has sufficient wealth.”
“And what of you, personally, Ehran McClure? What are your goals?” the elf continued to press.
“Much depends on finding my father,” Kieran said, “though I will continue te
aching the boys for as long as they wish.”
“What is it you are teaching them?” MacNamara asked, turning in his chair and glancing at Peter. “Outside of how to hide from even the keenest eyes, I should say. The defense seems similar to many forms, but identical to none that I know. Even the castings that you and your apprentice used to burn the Loa were too chaotic and primordial to identify.”
“But you were watching, your Grace,” said Kieran, turning to face MacNamara, eyebrows raised slightly. “You saw both of us initiate and deliver the energy required for the disruptions. Surely you could duplicate the action with that much information.”
“You’re mocking me,” the elf said with a sly smile. “I held the Day Sword just yesterday and cannot duplicate it.”
“Not mocking, merely reminding you that we all have our secrets,” said Kieran. “While I do not exactly hold secrets, there is much that I simply don’t tell.”
“Like where you have been for the last forty years?” asked MacNamara, coyly. Kieran nodded slightly. “What if I were to say I knew where you were?” asked MacNamara. If his smile could have been more snake-like, a split tongue would have slipped out and tasted the air right then.
“Then I would say you know what I’m teaching them,” Kieran said smiling broadly now, with his green eyes dancing as he searched MacNamara’s aura for signs of deceit. “And that you would know how to call the fires we called yesterday.”
“Touché, McClure,” MacNamara said, inclining his head slightly in a bow and tapping the brim of an imaginary hat.
“What do you know of my father’s whereabouts?” asked Kieran.
Finally, I thought.
“I last saw Robert in New Orleans several months back,” answered the elf. “He was seeking Olivia and believed that St. Croix had her. Apparently, his beliefs had merit. I left shortly after Robert arrived, though I did have a representative present that reported quite a violent argument between the two. But Robert was at a significant disadvantage. He had few friends there who would stand with him against St. Croix, but as you saw, the reverse was not true. After that all I have is hearsay, gossip, really.”
