Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God

by Scott Duff

  “Why don’t you three take the boys into town and go shopping? We all need some more clothes again and Ian and Michael don’t have anything right now,” Kieran said. Looking over at Ferrin and finally seeing the look of pure shock on Ferrin’s face, he asked, “What?”

  “I-I don’t…” Ferrin stammered and sighed. “I don’t understand you lot. You’re just giving me a million dollars? With no conditions? The last time we met you threatened to kill me, for Christ’s sake!”

  Peter started snickering.

  “I didn’t say there weren’t conditions,” I said.

  “Finally!” Ferrin said. “What’s the catch?”

  “You have to use the money to take care of Ian and provide for his education,” I said. “I thought that was clear.”

  Shrank bolted out of the centerpiece on the table, stopping in midair a foot from Ferrin’s face, and squealed, “I told you!” In a flash of golden light, he took off again and lit on Kieran’s right shoulder, biting a blueberry in half and sucking greedily on his tiny fingers as the juice ran down his hand. Peter snickered louder and harder.

  “As to the threats to kill you,” Kieran said, “I believe that it would be counterproductive to follow through on that considering the preparations for your brother’s future, don’t you?”

  “Well, um, yeah,” Ferrin stuttered.

  “And what position do you wish to take in the current problem we’re dealing with?” asked Kieran, leaning on the table.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Kieran shrugged softly and said, “I have no problem allowing you to continue here with us since you were a victim. I believe you have the right to find out why and to be part of the retribution. But you are going to be dealing with people who are outside of your normal sphere of influence. People who have lived with power and money their entire lives and, with the exception of Peter, we’re the oddballs.”

  “I take exception to that!” cried Peter. It was my turn to snicker and I did. So did Kieran.

  “What you sayin’ is, I’ll be dealin’ with a buncha snobs and knobs, eh?” retorted Ferrin.

  “Partly,” Kieran said, grinning. “And while they may defer to a small degree to us, mostly because we confuse them and we have garnered a reputation in the past month, I don’t know how they will react to you.”

  “I’ll lay odds on how Cliffy will react,” I said, laughing outright. So did Peter.

  “Happy lads, aren’t they,” Ferrin muttered in Kieran’s direction.

  “They’ve earned it,” Kieran said softly to Ferrin, grinning at us.

  “I think I can handle myself with anyone here,” Ferrin said confidently. “I may not live in places like this, but I make it my business to know who does. I’m a little shaky in Asia and South America and the Near East is in constant flux, but I have sources.”

  “All right,” Kieran said. “Then one last thing, everyone in our, uh, business has secrets, whether trade or personal. Do not attempt to obtain any from us. You will not like my reaction. If you want to know something, ask. If there is a reason we cannot tell you about something, then there is a good reason. Live with it. Otherwise, we’ll tell you.”

  “That’s fair,” Ferrin said cautiously.

  “Speaking of,” I said, coming out of my laughing fit, “Gordon knows who Kieran is. I slipped up after the sending. It was really powerful and I’d never gotten one before so I was surprised by it. Sorry.”

  Kieran shrugged it off. “We didn’t expect it to last forever anyway.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Ferrin.

  “When Seth and I first met, we had no idea who the other was,” explained Kieran. “When he asked my name, I gave him the closest English approximation to the name I was given in the land from which I had just come, which was Kieran. It was only later that we found we were related by blood and my homecoming at that time and place was more than mere coincidence. The name however has meaning for the four of us so we continue to use it.”

  “Sorta like Yonnie for Ian,” Ferrin suggested.

  “Very close, yes,” Kieran agreed. “Seth, there is something I’d like you to do tonight after we talk with the Cahills.” He paused, looking off into space, having difficulty framing the question from what I could see. Kieran’s aura was as bright and stable as usual. The only turmoil seemed intellectual.

  “I need you to go get Ethan,” he said, turning to me and shrugging. “If what I believe is true then I cannot go. He would force me into answering questions that would make him stay away.”

  Well.

  “What sort of questions would he be asking?” I asked him slowly. That statement was loaded with a boatload of innuendo.

  “I would prefer not to say,” Kieran answered as neutrally as he could. “I would prefer not to prejudice your discussion with him in any way, except to say this: Ethan started a life here. He got three people to care about him. Why give that up for something that may or may not happen?”

  “So he’s given up on his purpose?” I asked, trying to get more information out of Kieran. I wasn’t going to get anything obvious from him, so I had to look for hints. Ethan considered Kieran a god, so whatever Kieran wanted to hide from Ethan had to be big and scary. Freakin’ big and scary.

  “No,” asserted Kieran. “Definitely not.”

  Huh. That would seem to imply that Ethan either was or would be responsible for the big and scary thing, otherwise it wouldn’t matter if he hid or not. “Kieran, you’re not being helpful here,” I said.

  “I know, little brother, but I have faith,” he said softly. He stood up, drawing in confidence as he drew in breath. “Now let’s see how badly the world is falling apart, shall we?”

  Chapter 45

  We got up and followed him out of the dining room. I lagged behind, somewhat lost in thought trying to decide how to talk Ethan out of his self-imposed isolation. This was getting very confusing to me and Kieran was not helping at all.

  “If you want,” Ferrin said, hanging back from entering the observatory with me, “I’ll go with you to talk to him, for moral support. We can kick his arse all the way home if we have to, together.” He gave me a half-smile, showing me he meant that he’d go but he didn’t mean to do real violence.

  I smiled back at him. “I appreciate that, Mike, I do, but Ethan isn’t so much in a place…” How do I explain this?

  “Volume doesn’t exist where Ethan is,” Peter offered from the doorway, grinning. “Seurat had nothing on Ethan.”

  “Seurat?” questioned Ferrin.

  “A French painter,” I said, chuckling. “He’s being pedantic. Don’t worry about it. He does have a point, though.” I cringed, realizing the pun. Seurat was famous for Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a painting hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago famous for its use of pointillism, tiny dots of specialized color and hue melded closely together to present an almost ethereal view of the seaside.

  “Hooya!” cried Peter loudly, smiling broadly and spinning in the doorway to go in. “Played ya like a fiddle!”

  Ferrin laughed at Peter. I just shook my head, smiling at his back. We filed in behind him, our spirits raised even given the difficulties ahead. Take what joys you can in life.

  Cahill was at his desk, talking on a blocky, old-style telephone. Kieran sat nearby, but Gordon wasn’t in the room. Cahill was listening intently, only occasionally asking questions, usually involving a specific name or place. I only recognized a few of the cities he mentioned, none of the names.

  Gordon came in a few minutes later, carrying several rolled maps and portfolios. Two men I didn’t know followed him in pushing a stand with a glass-encased map of the grounds in it. The men passed close to Shrank’s favorite bookcase and I cast about the room nervously for the pixie. I found him sitting camouflaged on Kieran’s right shoulder smiling mischievously at me. Gordon dropped the portfolios in a chair, turned to the men and positioned the case where he wanted it. The men left as Gordon
unrolled a world map and slid it into the case over the map of the castle grounds. Jenny pushed a cart into the room with coffee, tea, and an assortment of cookies, torts, and small sandwiches. She left it near the new map-board with Gordon calling out thanks as she closed the door.

  When Gordon pulled out colored markers, we all leaned forward and started paying attention. The first two places he marked were the castle and just east of Dublin, in orange. The next was the school, in red circled in black. Then another mark, a simple red ‘x,’ off the Atlantic coast near Galway and another off the Celtic Sea, a black circle. He moved rapidly through Europe, India, parts of Asia and Africa, then to North America. He used more colors and more notations as he went. Cahill tapped on the desk and held out a paper. Kieran passed it to Gordon, who read it carefully, then changed a few of his previous notations and added more.

  When he was done, he had over forty-five separate attacks of varying intensity across the world. It was a relief not seeing Gordon’s hieroglyphics on the Southern US, but there were a couple grouped on New York, Ontario and, some along the west coast.

  “Have you spoken to your parents today?” I asked Peter, nervously. “Or your sister? Are they okay?”

  “No, I haven’t. The thought never crossed my mind,” he admitted. The fear that they could have been involved in something was hitting him hard.

  “Go,” I said, worried about them myself, but more worried about Peter.

  “Wait, we’ve got another line over here,” Gordon said and led Peter further back into the room. This was an amazing room. The way it was laid out and furnished, it just seemed to maintain the perfect size for what it needed to be. And whatever you needed was just around the corner, conveniently placed in some drawer or around some turn. Nothing magical about it, just imaginative interior design. I watched as Peter dialed a long series of numbers then sat back and waited nervously.

  “A’right, lemme take a crack at this,” Ferrin said, standing and moving to the map. “Obviously, each one is an attack with each color denoting effectiveness as well as the type of forces deployed.” He went on to explain the details of Gordon’s display precisely, missing only a few details.

  “No, that’s very good,” urged Gordon. “You couldn’t possibly know about that. It refers to a list of people that wasn’t put together until last night and currently six out of eighteen of those are in this room. We’ll need to reconsider our plans in that regard, now.”

  “I’m not getting this,” I said, looking at the map. “Only four of them were deflected without serious injury and two of those were us. Close to two thirds of them used overwhelming conventional weapons with only minor magical intervention. That’s a lot of men with guns. And they were very successful. Who and why?”

  “They weren’t that successful,” said Gordon, face scrunched in thought. “They weren’t able to destroy much, only three sites completely, and there wasn’t really much there.”

  Ferrin snorted a laugh. “Spoken like the landed gentry, mate. Seth’s right, this was very successful. This wasn’t about destroying things. It was about killing people, important and powerful people. And where it’s important to destroy property, they did.”

  Cahill’s phone conversation interrupted us. “No, Bishop, I don’t care to know how flies eat and quit calling him a ‘boy.’ Give them to the headmaster if you can’t handle it. Now let me get to work.” He hung up, grinning cheerfully at the phone. “Seth?”

  “Yes, sir?” I answered.

  “Stay away from my wards,” he said mildly, getting up from the desk and stretching. I smiled at him and Gordon and Ferrin chuckled. I looked past Cahill to see Peter talking on the phone, relief evident in his aura but tension was beginning to pepper it again. I still took that to mean the rest of the Borlands were safe.

  “What’s important about those sites?” I asked turning back to the map.

  “Ports of entry, mostly,” answered Ferrin. “Supply lines, communications, and travel lines. Smugglers gonna make a fortune f’r next few years.”

  “Why? There’re plenty of alternate routes. I don’t understand.”

  Ferrin scowled at me. “Not all of us can drop a portal and jump hundreds of miles away, McClure,” he said angrily. “Most of us can’t even get on a plane or even make it through the security checkpoints nowadays. We sit in the middle of buses because there’s a motor in the back of most that’ll stop.”

  “Calm down, Mike,” Peter interrupted him, coming back from the phone. “Remember who you’re talking to. He just doesn’t know.”

  “Aye, you should be angry at me,” said Gordon, crossing his arms on his chest and looking at his map, reappraising it. “I do know these things and I didn’t see how bad it really is.” Cahill came and stood beside his son, reviewing the map with him.

  “Why guns?” Kieran asked. “Why soldiers, mercenaries? Seth showed how easily defeatable that is.”

  “Oh, that’s easy to figure. They’re expendable, for one thing,” I said, pointing to the map. “For another, look at the targets. Where quite a few of them are, they can’t have the kinds of wards that this place and the school have. The school is cocooned by four different lines and several rocky mountains. The wards were locked in place mostly by the geography. Many of them couldn’t have had that kind of warding without them constantly causing problems with their surroundings and vice versa.

  “The bigger question would be why the school?” I asked. “Were other schools hit? What was special about this one?”

  “My only thoughts about that are that it is where Martin is schooled,” answered Cahill. “Perhaps, though, it was because of Mr. Ferrin’s brother and they were hoping to catch them together at the break, which they did. Maybe both.” He shrugged. “It is the eldest and most prestigious of its kind in Eire. That could be the reason. I don’t know.”

  “So this was more like assassinations, then,” said Gordon. “Still very expensive.”

  “Not so much as you’d think,” said Ferrin, waving his hand at the map. “Look at how few got out to collect on their contracts.”

  “And the payer likely got most of his retainers back, too,” I said, beaming at the thought. “Which would be lucky for us if he did.”

  “We were the only ones to take prisoners,” Peter said, sitting up straight on the couch next to me.

  “Probably rather unexpectedly, too,” said Ferrin quietly. He and Peter were following my train of thought, but the rest were just watching us, confused.

  “We’d need account numbers, routing numbers. Who’d have that? The Colonel?” I asked. “Can we trace that from here, even, or would we have to go elsewhere?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Peter. “I’ve never tried to hack into banking records or know anyone who has. It’s probably a better idea to talk to people who have access.”

  “Less chance of police involvement that way,” Ferrin said nodding.

  “What does that give us, then?” I asked.

  “We don’t know what you’re talking about yet, so we don’t know,” said Gordon, glancing at his father.

  “Oh, we want to follow the money trail,” I explained. “These people had to be paid and paid large amounts of money. There has to be a record of those funds moving somewhere. In our case, we want to find the man who bought the Colonel and his men. And maybe the ones who attacked the castle, too. It might have been in cash, but more likely it was a funds transfer considering how large it would have to be to buy eighty men, especially if the buyer wanted to get the funds back.”

  “Assuming it wasn’t the elves to start with. They’re view of cash is quite different than ours. They’d have no difficulty making their own,” warned Kieran.

  “The Colonel and his men took rabid dislike to magic in general and elves in particular. Do we know why?” Peter asked the Cahills.

  “They spent time with one?” suggested Cahill, grimacing.

  “That would do it,” murmured Ferrin. Peter and I exchanged looks of c
onfusion. Obviously, this was something we haven’t experienced and just needed to accept.

  “And magic in general? Fallout from the elves?” Peter asked.

  “Or they got burned by someone somewhere,” said Gordon. “They’re not the most stable lot, after all is said and done. Not hard to convince them that we’re demons from Hell and they’re the righteous bastards. Those that didn’t buy that line probably bought into we’re the haves, they’re the have-nots, and a gun is a great leveler. Or it was just good money.” He shrugged off any further speculation.

  “What about the government? What can they do?” I asked.

  “What government?” asked Gordon, looking back to his map.

  “Yours,” I answered confused. “The European Council. What’s mine doing about this?”

  “Working overtime to cover this up,” said Ferrin, falling into a chair nearby. “You got the wrong idea about what the councils do, mate.”

  “Oh?” I asked, raising my brows up. Ferrin was being a cornucopia of information tonight. “So what do the councils do, then?”

  “Whatever they want,” Ferrin said. I looked at Cahill for an answer since Ferrin’s was so uninformative.

  “We’re politicians, mostly,” he said quietly. “We smooth the edges between our two societies, keep the monsters at bay, that sort of thing.”

  “Are all the councils so loosely described?” I asked.

  “We aren’t a government, Seth,” he said. “We can’t be; certainly not in this world. There are just too many people and not enough of us. We can’t even front enough of a decent force to police our own until it’s turned into a big problem.”