Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God

by Scott Duff

  “Shrank, be nice to Mr. Calhoun,” I said sternly, leaning over to look at him on the floor. “He’s going to be with us for seven hours now and he’s been nothing but nice to us. Now get up here and get comfortable, just like before.” We’d done this on the first trip, from Huntsville to New York.

  “Ethan, you ready?” I called. Kieran passed me a pillow and sat down again, buckling in. I have no idea where he got it from, but I shoved in between me and the seat so Shrank could snuggle in. He got comfortable in the crook of my arm on the pillow.

  “Whenever you are. Oh-five, right?” Ethan asked.

  “Yes, please,” I answered, glancing sideways at Calhoun. “Ehran will explain once we’re airborne.” Faraday cage, right? Still didn’t see quite how that name related, but I knew what I needed to do. Keep magic away from the airplane while keeping Shrank alive.

  I pushed out my awareness of the flows of energies around me, feeling the cycles of atoms, the pulse of machinery, and the heartbeat of life. Seriously, it is a weird sensation and it’s somewhat intoxicating. I reached out into the cabin of the plane and started drawing in all the errant magic sparks lying about, then spread out past the shell, and again past the wings until I completely encompassed the jet within the field. I started drawing all the magical energy in, but blocking the energy outside the jet. Florian and Huerta turned in their seats to look back at me. It wasn’t something I could hide. I was basically pulling on their coattails. The pilot announced something I didn’t pay attention to and the jet started moving slowly. I could feel a definite difference between this and our first trip from Huntsville. There was energy to actually pull here, whereas before there wasn’t. Several wizards on this flight.

  Ethan’s awareness snapped sharply into place in my mind. He was mapping ahead of us. Anything that might interfere with what I was doing he would notify me through the anchor at least a half of a tenth of a second before the jet intersected with it. While that seemed incredibly fast, faster than the mind can operate even, we were already operating outside of reality. Real time didn’t quite have the same meaning where we were. It made me understand better how Kieran could spend over four hundred years in another realm. A ten to one ratio didn’t seem that large now. Ethan’s current mapping extended into minutes instead of seconds, but that would change when the jet got to speed.

  Shrank settled down further into the pillow as I formed a bubble around him to keep a reasonable amount of energy in the environment for him. Then I seriously stripped every bit of magical energy out of the field. I tried to leave the cabin alone, but I’m pretty sure I killed a few of Calhoun’s amulets and maybe one or two of Huerta’s. There was something in Florian’s briefcase that cocooned itself against me, so I left it alone, but watched it for the trip.

  As the jet took off, Ethan discarded possible intersections from the map he presented to me, and I changed the shape of the outside field I was manipulating, forming a pointed cone. I left Shrank’s bubble and the cabin alone. I just needed to repel the outside magic so a complicated geometry wasn’t necessary outside. It meant I could at least follow the conversations in the cabin, if not take part in them. Personally, I thought Ethan had the tougher job, scanning out thousands of square feet into space in front of us, identifying what could affect us. Not once did he let the map fall below one second and he participated in the conversations in the cabin, moving around at will. Showoff.

  Before I knew it, the jet was banking around and descending, readying for a landing. Ethan’s map became much more volatile, demanding more of my attention. There were a lot of possible hits to take here, nearer the island of Ireland, but I was handling them easily, adjusting the outer shape to better redirect the energy conflicts and shed them away. I think Ethan was getting a little bored with it by that time, though. He started varying the times on his map, making me adjust more quickly in places, giving me time in others.

  A few hundred feet off the ground, he totally collapsed his map down to half a tenth of a second and made me work for it. I could hear him leaning backward on the seat in front of me as we landed—totally not buckled in—saying repeatedly, “Come on, Seth, you can do it!” We pierced a thick red ley line as the wheels touched the surface. I pushed out against the angry energy that threatened to overcome my misshaped shield then decided to just let it come. We’d be through it before it had a chance to attach to any of the electronics. I released both the outer shield and the cabin, holding Shrank’s bubble until everything around us equalized.

  I opened my eyes to see Ethan grinning at me as time took hold again. “Good job,” he said, then twisted himself in the chair, falling and bouncing into the seat. “Finally! I was getting claustrophobic.”

  Shrank started to rouse himself, stretching out his arms and legs, slowly beating his two sets of wings. He took to the air and it was my turn to stretch and yawn. Calhoun had abandoned his seat for another. Shrank peered out the window, taking in the silvery moonlit glow. He turned back around when the jet coasted to a stop, grinning and brimming with enthusiasm.

  “You did great this time, Master Seth!” he squeaked. “I don’t feel the slightest bit tired.”

  Jumpsuited men in huge gray headphones ran up to attend to the plane. Calhoun opened the door to the cabin, leaning out to latch it into place, as a truck drove up to the side with a stairwell running over the top of it. Two large silver gray vans pulled up beside it. A single man got out of one and went to wait beside the stairs.

  “This has certainly been an interesting flight, Ehran,” said Florian to Kieran, extending his right hand. “I can honestly say I haven’t been to a single conference or workshop in over fifty years that has been this enlightening, in theory…” He turned his head to look past Kieran’s shoulder to me, smiling wryly. “…And in practice.”

  “Thank you, Diego. It has been delightful talking with you,” said Kieran, shaking his hand. “Have a safe trip to Sweden. Pull your passports out, boys, customs awaits.”

  Shrank flew to Kieran’s shoulder and pulled his disappearing act. Calhoun watched from the corner and as we filed past him, I recharged his energy deprived amulets. One didn’t take the energy well; it had some sort of check valve on it that limited the amount of flow it could leech in.

  “Mr. Calhoun,” I said, stopping in front of him, pointing to his left hip. “This one will not accept the energy that I took from it earlier. Is it malfunctioning?”

  “What?” he cried out, grabbing for his belt, trying to rip off his jacket and shirt at the same time. “It’s still there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Is that a problem?”

  “Yeah, it can kill me,” he growled.

  “Ehran!” I yelled, touching his hip below the healed burn of a brand. I lightly pushed searching energy up through his entire leg, mapping the space hopefully without disturbing it. I started discarding the parts of the map that didn’t matter, paring it down to the spell and how it hooked onto him. Then I blew the image up a few times, pushed the slightest bit of power into it to light it up, and pushed it out onto the astral plane in between me and Calhoun. Kieran rested his hand on my left shoulder as he looked at Calhoun and then at my astral handiwork. Florian slid over onto my right side. To anyone with magical sight, a red and yellow stick-like spider fixed onto Calhoun’s hip exploded into space between us and hung in the air. On his body, it was roughly an inch and a half long.

  “This is what I’m seeing, Mr. Calhoun. Is this what you’re afraid of?” I asked him.

  “God, yes,” he cried out. “Get it off, get it off, get it off!”

  “Madre dios,” muttered Florian.

  “What is it?” asked Kieran. I know he wasn’t asking me.

  “The mark of a tomb robber,” said Florian, scowling.

  “Just ripping it off doesn’t look like good idea, Mr. Calhoun,” I said calmly. “It looks like it might take a good chunk of your pelvis with it if we tried that.” I pushed a faint violet light through my model to represent pullin
g it off and where the resultant energy would go. It would rupture a major flow juncture. The resulting explosion would in turn rupture a major artery. He’d bleed to death fairly quickly without a surgeon close at hand. His mantra of “Get it off” changed to “Oh, God, Oh, God.”

  “Ehran asked what this is, Mr. Calhoun,” I said. “Maybe you should tell him now. It might be helpful.”

  “It’s a… curse,” he rasped out softly, still showing his hip with the unseeable mark. He was considering lying to us, wondering if he would get away with it. “Got it back in ’86 in Paraguay exploring a structure we believed at the time to be a temple to a sun god to a civilization we hadn’t seen before.”

  “There is no known remedy for such curses,” said Florian. His disdain for how Calhoun had gotten the curse had seeped quickly away into pity and remorse. “Mostly because the victim does not survive long and the curse fades with them.”

  “What’s the delivery system?” I asked. Kieran looked at me oddly.

  “It varies with these curses,” said Florian.

  “Mr. Calhoun, how did you know you had this?” I asked.

  “Searing pain in my side late at night,” he growled.

  “So the curse hid on something,” said Kieran, “he brushed up against it and it latched onto him and grew, like an insect or a spider—your delivery system.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “It does seem to mimic a spider a bit through here and it is very sensitive to his aura, like a spider to its web.” I pointed out into empty space where my model hung in the astral plane, showing what looked like a shell. “What triggers it, though?”

  “It was dormant before you fucked with it!” growled Calhoun, angrily.

  “No, Mr. Calhoun, it wasn’t,” I answered calmly, but a little shocked. “I wouldn’t have had to take away its energy if it was dormant. Have a little common sense, please. And some courtesy. Or we’ll leave you with this problem and continue on through Customs. We don’t have to be here, ya know.”

  “I could remove it,” said Kieran, “but I’m not certain I could do it fast enough to not cause irreparable damage to him.” He pushed and tugged on my astral model so I could see what he intended. The odds looked about even that it would latch into that juncture and blow out his pelvis before Kieran got even halfway through, even with his lightest touch.

  I stared down into the foam of space at the spell, watching the energy of Calhoun’s life pulse through and around the spell. Marveling at the mimicry of life that the writer had put into it, I let my mind wander through the spell until I got to the warping and twisting parts. The parts that turned the predator seeking to continue its life into a killing machine intent only on murder. The Night Sword hummed a deep bass note in my mind, echoing my dislike for the thing. It hummed a different note, in resonance with the first, then another.

  “Stand back a bit, please,” I whispered, trance-like, as Night slid down my left arm, appearing in my hand. Calhoun shrieked when he saw the blade manifest and Huerta inhaled sharply from somewhere behind me. I touched the tip of the sword with my right hand, for the first time feeling its unearthly coldness. It wanted to drink me in, to pull me forever into the darkness of the ebon Night made solid, but it knew who its master was. Still, it was sobering.

  I knelt on one knee and touched the tip of the blade to Calhoun’s hip, just below the inch and a half long “spider” and listened to its song. I slid the blade slowly into his skin, watching as the edge split the foam apart, guiding it with my fingertips, separating Calhoun’s aura slowly from the red and yellow “spider,” disentangling it from its web subtly. The Night Sword sent harmonics through reality, masking itself from the thing. When the tip of the Sword was two inches in, I stopped. It was completely disengaged from his body. Kieran reached down and snagged it off. It pulsed mildly along one jagged edge. Just a minor touch of energy, really, but enough to cause a cascading overflow of energy that would have ruptured arteries at the least, and quite possibly blown apart his left hip.

  I pulled the Night out of Calhoun as slowly as I pushed it in, then Kieran tossed the curse onto the sword. It happily sucked the “spider” up quickly, glad to have gotten something for its work. I put the Sword away as I checked Calhoun’s hip. Night left no marks of its passage, though. Quite a feat for a knife that size, I thought.

  Apparently, I should have been looking more “globally” than his hip. He passed out. Fainted dead away and slumped into the corner, hitting his head against the wall and everything. Panicked me for a moment, but his body looked healthy and nothing was exploding or rupturing beneath the skin.

  His partner pushed in from the back. “What’s going on?” he exclaimed, moving in on Calhoun and shoving us to the side.

  Peter said, completely deadpan, “He was showing his ass and apparently even he realized how embarrassing that was.”

  Laughter broke out through the cabin. Everyone but the partner, that is. He just glared at Peter as he bent over Calhoun, then went about trying to rouse him. It didn’t take but a second or two for Calhoun to start coming back into the world. Florian and Huerta were already ushering us out the door again, still laughing at Peter’s joke. We gathered at the bottom of the stairs around a short man with a clipboard. He stamped our passports and wrote something on his clipboard, then pointed us to the first of the two vans, yawning. As we pulled away, we saw Florian and Huerta getting into the second van and Calhoun stumbling slightly away from the Customs man toward it with his partner close behind.

  The driver was much more awake and talkative than the Customs agent. The dash clock read 1:10, but it still felt like eleven in the morning to me. He rambled nonstop once we pulled away from the airport, telling us local landmarks we passed in the night with practiced ease, advising us to return in daylight. We wove through public roads for about half an hour before turning onto Cahill’s property through an innocuous gate. A laser reflected something off the van and opened the gate without the driver stopping at the keypad standing ready in the dark. The roadway itself changed after that and became a lot more winding as we moved up the low mountain. He pulled onto a paved road that turned out to be the driveway to the manor.

  Castle. It was definitely a castle. It was lit beautifully, capturing the majesty of the intricate stonework against the lush mountain surrounding it. Two ley lines ran close, but were fairly minor, lighting the sides with an unearthly glow. Most striking was the line, bright amber in color, that rose up through the mountain, up through the bowels of the castle and flowed out through the front. It was quite beautiful. The driver went slowly up the drive so we could take in the view.

  “Seth,” Ethan said from the seat in front of me. He nodded to the cluster of people waiting near the front door. I focused on them: Cahill stood with a woman I’d only seen once, presumably his wife. Another stocky man I didn’t know but had a strong family resemblance to Cahill and to Martin standing off a step or two to the right. Then I saw who Ethan was calling my attention to. The woman sitting on the bench at the bottom of the steps, watching intently as the van drove up.

  Mama.

  Chapter 31

  The Stone completely surrounded my mother the instant the van stopped, protecting her from me as I ran in, colliding with her and crushing her in a hug. I pushed on my aura, like Kieran had for her in the hospital, letting her see me as I rushed in.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” I whispered in her ear.

  I felt the others pass silently behind us and up the steps. Cahill greeted Kieran, Ethan, and Peter and introduced his wife, Enid, and son, Gordon. I released Mother from the hug finally and looked down at her smiling face. It’d been so long since I saw that smile.

  “You’ve grown,” she said. “And you’re such a nice looking boy.” She fussed with my hair a little and straightened my jacket. She hadn’t done that since I was little. It was kind of cute. She took my arm, facing the steps to the house, and we started up slowly. The Stone released its hold on my mother gradually, but
never quite gave up its protection completely.

  “So how are you feeling?” I asked, letting her set the pace.

  “Oh, I feel fine,” she said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that there are times when I can’t string two thoughts together.”

  “It will get better,” I said, trying to console her. “You’ve come a long way in a week.”

  She looked up at me as we passed into the great hallway of the house. “What about you?” she asked. “What about all the stories I’ve been hearing about you and the last few months? How true are they?”

  “That depends on what you’ve been hearing,” I said, laughing. “Like I would ever fall for that.”

  She smiled. “They won’t tell me anything. Felix would only say that my father would not bother us again and that you were with Ehran looking for Robert. He explained about your auras being… invisible, but it’s quite a different thing to experience. And when you… did whatever you did and I saw you that brief moment shining so brightly… Oh, Seth, I thought I lost you to that thing.” She started crying into my shoulder.

  I shushed gently and rocked side to side. “He can’t hurt us anymore,” I murmured, kissing her forehead. “I took care of it myself, Mama. He will never hurt you again.” We stood like this for a short while before Mother pulled herself together. I didn’t mind; I understood.

  “Oh look what I’ve done,” she said, pulling back a little and sniffling. She tried to wipe up tearstains off my shirt with a handkerchief she pulled from somewhere. Then she wiped away her tears, saying, “I must look a mess.”

  “You look beautiful,” I said. She smiled up at me, dismissing it as a polite lie. She had no idea how true it really was.

  “Was that Peter Borland I saw?” she asked, looking into the room everyone had gone into. I’d call it a parlor but this was a castle so I had no idea what it’s really called.