by Scott Duff
Winter interjected, “What your Greeks called an iota.”
“A dram out of an ocean,” Summer declaimed.
“At first we thought it to be merely push and pull of the balance of the Geas,” said Winter. “But when we took measure of our counterpart…”
“We found we were both losing in equal parts. Small, but equal,” finished Summer, unhappily.
“Didn’t this happen once before?” Kieran asked.
“No, he carved his place from the Wylde,” said Summer.
“And keeps it his through the Fount and our agreement,” said Winter.
“And where was Father when he started this quest for the Architect’s Son?”
“At the Heart of Faery,” again they said this in unison.
“And Father went where?”
“Into the Heart,” again in unison.
That really didn’t sound good. Worse, that pronouncement was their last.
Chapter 34
Kieran had said nothing since the Queens left us at the Crossroads, their departure far less dramatic than their arrival as they simply vanished. They left the storm for us, though. Then the rain started. Even with the shaft of sunlight we had, it was impossible to see very far at all past the circle we stood in. I had more than a few questions from the Queens discourse but Kieran’s aura was in turmoil. A lot of turmoil. There was just too much that I did not know about what was going on. When the sound of freight trains threatened to overtake us, Kieran turned and the world turned with him.
I didn’t even feel the shift, but it was obvious. There was no storm and there was grass. It was a rather idyllic scene, really. We stood in front of a stone wall with a large metal gate. Behind us were a variety of trees, leaves blowing gently in the late summer breeze. Birds and insects twittered and chirped in the distance. The grass was short, but not cut, and the gardens beyond the gate looked planned but not manicured. They hadn’t been tended in some time.
“Can you open the gate?” Kieran asked me, his voice rough, distressed.
I looked at the cast iron grill that barred the entry. It was a simple gate with no real locking mechanism apparent, but there was a huge arcane lock across it. The complexity of it was awe inspiring. I couldn’t understand any of it. It was a lot like that Pact that way. It looked like the Pact in a lot of ways. When I realized that, I just pushed the gates. They swung completely open, slowly and evenly. Kieran and I walked in together, side by side, with the gates closing behind us on its own. We followed the path through the garden.
“So this is the Pacthome?” I asked. It was time I started finding out answers to the dozens of questions I had.
“Yes,” he said, dejected. “It’s a lovely place, isn’t it? It should be bustling with activity about now. Thirty to forty people tending the grounds and the house. Another twenty to thirty people moving around on business. I don’t sense anyone here now. If they’re right, you are the last Pact-holder alive. And that means that they may be right about the Prophecy of the Geas.”
“So this is a realm? Like Faery?”
“It’s more like a pocket dimension,” Kieran said. “Similar to an oubliette, but much larger and more stable.”
“So how many Pactholders were there?”
“Maybe a hundred, all together,” he said. “We really don’t need that many, but it varies in time. There aren’t that many secrets to hold that sacred.” He sighed heavily. “Now there’s only one, unless there was storage that I am unaware of, but that would violate the Pact.”
“So there were Pactholders who didn’t actually hold a Pact?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kieran answered. “There are a number of Guild members that had the Lock without a Pact. Or were. Like you before Ethan came along. Our family, though, has always held the primary Pact. Always.”
“Ours is the only one, then?”
“No, that was the point behind so many locks and such secrecy,” he said. The path we followed turned to the right and the gate was no longer visible. There were several flower and shrubbery beds along the path with plants that I didn’t recognize. The gardeners must have experimented a lot. Or these didn’t come from where I came from. That was certainly a possibility I hadn’t had to consider before.
“The Librarian would know the genealogies,” Kieran said. “And there are contingency plans in place for emergencies. Secrets upon secrets, they are a paranoid lot.”
“Rightly so, it would seem,” I said, looking at what appeared to be an Asian Pear tree with slightly purple leaves and tiny golden yellow flowers beginning to bud. It pivoted us around another corner and finally the house came into view.
Calling it a house is an injustice. Mansion would have been closer, but palace, too much. Too plain to be a palace. This place was built for function rather than grandeur, though on the ethereal, the warding on the house was certainly impressive enough. I paused for a half step looking at the way several of the spells layered into one another so artfully. Not that I had a single clue as to what any of it did, but the articulated flows of energy and the fields they generated were beautiful. The physical house could have been a shanty, to tell the truth. It was curious that a four-story building couldn’t be seen from the gate when most of the trees I’d seen hadn’t been much taller than twenty-five to thirty feet tall. Especially with that watchtower extending another twenty feet up in the air.
The house itself was rather simple, all things being equal. The stonework was a minimalist’s wet dream. The laser-like precision meant that in some places you couldn’t see the seams between the different rocks. There was no mortar, just interlocking bricks. Three stories of red granite with five-foot tall windows every twelve feet, punctuated by small, marble balconies on the second and third floors every so often. The fourth floor was smaller, but for what purpose, I couldn’t tell from the ground. Our grassy path gave way to cobblestones leading to a two-story porch with huge black double doors, almost Colonial in style. There were bentwood rockers, chairs, and small tables placed casually along the length of the porch.
The front doors had wards similar to the gate so I didn’t wait for Kieran to ask, I just opened them and peered inside. The entrance was a huge hallway leading to a staircase that split in two halfway up. There was a doorway leading back further into the house on either side. On the right of the entrance was a huge ballroom decorated in a European style I didn’t know the name of. Lots of pastels, fleur-de-lis, and the like lined the walls. Stairs on the ends of the room led to a balcony that circled the room. There were several arches on the left wall that lead to other rooms, but I didn’t progress into it to investigate yet.
To the left was a library of sorts. This I did step into, curious about a library of a secret society of magicians and wizards. Who wouldn’t be? I was certainly surprised at the size of the room—about a tenth the size of the ballroom across the hall. When I looked through the stacks, all I saw were popular titles found in bookstores across the world over the past twenty or so years, several items the same in different languages. Kieran waited by the door until I wandered out.
“That’s just a popular library,” he commented, seeing my confusion. “For traveler’s and the staff. For entertainment. The research library is bigger than the house and stays locked up in various bubble dimensions nearby.” He started up the stairs, so I followed. He took the left branch of the stairs, leading me back further into the house.
This area looked more like offices than a house. The hall was all unmarked doors of dark wood and half panels of glass. I looked in the first one we passed—definitely an office with a large oak desk and table lamp, reams of paperwork lining shelves and on the desk. It looked like whoever worked here had just left for the day. Each office I glanced into looked the same, until we turned right, back into the bulk of the house. Then they got just a little nicer and the paperwork started disappearing.
Kieran moaned softly, stopping before a set of double doors. I saw a sharp lightning attack of grief shoot throug
h his aura, through his soul, as he stood in front of the doors. The room was dark behind the glass. It occurred to me then to wonder where the lighting for the other offices and halls came from. There weren’t any obvious fixtures outside of desk lamps. It just seemed to exude from the ceiling somehow. Not even MacNamara’s Arena did that. But not in this room, the only one so far.
“Whose office was this?” I asked quietly, tentatively.
“Lucian’s,” he said. “The Librarian and the closest to being the one in charge here. If he’s gone, then things got very, very bad.”
“Does this really mean everyone is dead?” I asked, moving closer to the doors and peering in. The thought gave the whole building a creepy feeling.
“No, not necessarily,” Kieran said. “Some may have disappeared into the population. There is some hope of that.” His voice was sullen and depressed. “Once we’ve been in the public eye for awhile, maybe we’ll get some feelers from them, but it’ll take years.”
I looked over my shoulder at him as he stared into the darkened room. Reading through the turmoil in his aura, I said, “You knew it would be like this. Why did we come here?”
He drew a breath in slowly and sighed. Focusing on me, he said, “We need a book from this office. And we need to move the entrance. Someone who shouldn’t obviously knows where it is.”
Kieran walked up and pushed open the doors. A blue sphere of magefire appeared in the air above him as he strode into the darkness. I followed in his wake, just a few feet behind him. The first room had a few couches and chairs spread out through the room with a desk toward the back next to a door. Kieran ignored all of this and went through the door into the back office. This was reminiscent of Cahill’s observatory with a huge oak desk and walls lined with bookshelves packed with books. There were several couch and chair combinations set around the room. Even in the pale blue light, it seemed a convivial room to me. I did think the rosy pink glowing smiley face over the desk was a bit much, but I didn’t know the man.
Kieran went to the front of the desk and pushed on the front panels in a complicated pattern. One of the panels fell down revealing a small leather-bound book, which Kieran took. He hit the rim of the desk with his fist and the panel clicked back into place.
As he turned to leave, I asked, “What’s with the big smiley face?”
He froze, staring at me. Turning slowly back to the desk, I felt him slowly building a shield around himself very close to his body. He moved in a complete circle, searching for the glowing smiley face and not finding it.
“It’s right over the desk,” I said, softly, concerned now that I realized he couldn’t see it. “It’s about eighteen inches across, spherical, rosy pink in color with a bas-relief smiley face on it.”
“What do you mean by a ‘smiley face’?” he asked.
“An advertising campaign for something years ago made it famous,” I answered. “It’s just a circle with two dots for eyes and a curved line for a smile. This one looks like a helium balloon hanging over the desk. Why can’t you see it?”
“It must be keyed to the Pact,” he murmured. “Can you see what it’s anchored to?”
I moved closer and stared deeper into the sphere. Just trying to see what held it in place wasn’t easy. The rosy gloss on top was intentionally obfuscating the sphere’s intent. I called for the Night Sword for help to ease my way through the muddled space, but before I could even get the rapier’s blade near the shining globe, Kieran grabbed the Sword by the blade and pulled us back.
“No, not yet,” he said. “That could be dangerous, even for the Night Sword.”
I was more than a little surprised. Both by the fact that Kieran wasn’t cut at all by the sharp edge of the knife and that the Night didn’t object at all at being turned aside so close to consuming some potent magic. Apparently, the Night Sword knew it had limits that it didn’t desire to exceed. I sent it home.
“Then no, I can’t,” I acknowledged. “It looks self-contained, just floating in space.”
“Okay then,” he said. “We got what we came for. Let’s leave this for another day and go back to Ireland.”
We left the room then, not really in a hurry, but certainly with a purpose. We backtracked through the house and back through the garden up to the gate. I pulled open the gate. The ground shuddered. We were tossed violently backward at least ten feet from the gate, crashing us together a few times and into shrubs and small trees in the vicinity. The Stone instantly brought protective shields around me and the Swords ached to come out, but they couldn’t identify the threat any better than I could. The quake stopped when the gates slammed shut.
“Please tell me that’s not normal,” I said as I stood up, dusting off my pants.
“Hardly,” said Kieran advancing on the gate cautiously. I joined him, examining the spellcraft on the gate. It was an immense work, well beyond my comprehension at the moment, though I could recognize different hands on parts. A rustling noise in the bushes behind us caught my attention.
I turned to see a small insect sitting atop a nearby shrub, its pale green in sharp contrast to the dark green of the bush. It looked similar to a scorpion except with five legs on each side and a triangular head and its stinger was flat instead of sharp and piercing. It also had a slight magical aura to it, which was odd for an insect. At least I’d never seen an aura on an insect before.
“Kieran, what’s that?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the thing.
“What?” he asked absently, still looking at the gate.
“That,” I said more emphatically. I pushed my awareness more directly at the thing to get a better idea of what it was, still wishing I had a better word for what I was doing here. I looked at its aura first to try to figure out why it had one. That was actually easy. It was its primary sensory organ, tied in directly to two pairs of eyes. It was looking for other auras and it was confused by the pull of the magic of the gate but finding nothing to cause it. It just sat in the bush with its triangular head scanning back and forth across the gate, waiting.
The second surprise was the biggest: the stinger. It was flat instead of sharp. Whatever this thing was, the stinger wasn’t a weapon, like in a normal scorpion injecting venom in prey for food or for defense. I couldn’t see what it did, though.
“I have no idea,” muttered Kieran, finally taking his attention from the gate. “It looks like a domare bug but it’s the wrong color and too many legs.”
“It’s just sitting there. Why? Does it belong here?”
“No, it doesn’t. Let’s see if it reacts to a little power,” he said. Reaching out with his right hand, he threw out a shell containing explosive energy onto the path about twenty feet away from us. When it hit the ground, it exploded with a lot of light and sound, leaving the shell behind. The bug jumped from the bush and hit the shell directly, forming pale green pincers on its forelegs in mid leap. It grabbed the shell with its newly formed pincers and slammed its tail onto the shell, injecting something into it. The bug then released the shell and jumped away backward, not that it got far since Kieran formed a spherical shield around it the moment it released the shell.
I went for the shell while Kieran went for the bug. Inside the capsule-shaped shell was a spell, about an inch, inch and a half long and an inch wide, sucking off the remaining energy. It was able to move by flexing itself, sort of like a caterpillar, but it was far more rigid and therefore slower. Peering down close at the thing, I recognized it fairly quickly as a living version of the curse that Clifford Harris bore not so long ago.
“Well I think we found a delivery system for the curses. This one is a live version of Harris’,” I told Kieran. Picking up the shell, I had the Stone swaddle the thing in another layer for our protection, just in case. Then I turned and looked at Kieran. He’d squeezed his sphere down flat forcing the bug down into no doubt unnatural positions for it. He was staring at the stinger portion of the bug, intent on the striking portion that still glowed faintly with the pas
sage of flared, intense magic. I took a good solid look at the thing again and cast out around us looking for others. Twenty to thirty feet out wasn’t much of a problem, but we needed more, a lot more.
I cast outward, feeling for the lines in the area. There weren’t many, but they were strong and regular. And by regular, I mean they were geometrically regular. This place wasn’t natural. But I could feel the land better through the lines. A few yards outside the fence, the land turned into a wasteland, much like the one we’d just left but fading into fuzziness that promised to dissipate into whatever joined with it. The fence itself was three lines bound together, twined and forming a ward. Its complexity was amazing. It was held together and maintained by the gate. Thankful that I didn’t have to break through, I pitched part of my consciousness into the hum of the ward and raced along the perimeter of the land. The Pact in my head harmonizing with the gate, I could feel everything within the confines of the fence, just like the ward at home.
“Seth, what are you doing?” Kieran asked me anxiously, obviously feeling the power rushing through me suddenly.
When I looked at him, I understood why he asked. I had to look down, for one, I was suddenly about twenty feet in the air, and for another, I was throwing out a blaze of silver energy. I had no idea where it was coming from.
“I’m looking for more of those things you’re holding,” I answered. “Why am I floating in the air?”
“Probably because of the energy you’re throwing off,” he said calmly. “Are you connected to the ley ward? Is that why I can no longer sense you?”
“Yes,” I said, getting a better understanding of what I was feeling. It was definitely amazing to feel the warmth of the sun on my leaves. Such warmth everywhere at once felt so good.
“Seth, don’t get lost,” Kieran warned me.
“Lost?” I mumbled, turning the water of a creek in the back a little so the taproot of my oak could drink a little more deeply. Oh, yeah, I needed that. It felt good to be moving again, too. I needed to find the fires, move, and find the fires. Burn the fires out. That’s what I needed to do, burn the fires out.
