by Scott Duff
“It’s a very powerful trap, I admit. And totally beyond your power to commit. Yes, Night Haunt, I know a little of the one who did this, but just a little. Far too little. But I have been able to figure out a few things about this trap. For instance, did you know that a paradox doesn’t handle another paradox very well? And I seemed to have created one of those when I stuck my hand inside of it.” I pushed energy along the connection from the anchor to my armored hand, creating a solid energy line between my cavern through another dimension and back to myself—a circle that should not exist.
A paradox of space.
Ethan’s hand closed around my forearm and I grasped his forearm and hauled with all my strength. Ethan and Kieran shot past me as the sphere flared in violent white, arcing chaotic bolts of energy inside and across its surface. It shrank away quickly as our reality squeezed it away, the magic holding it here failing fast. Ethan and Kieran landed many yards away, exhausted and panting. I didn’t wait to see how they were. I just wrapped portals around them both and sent them to the Cahills’ while MacNamara watched, horrified that I broke his big and borrowed toy.
“Now, ya Rat Bastard,” I said, raising the Day high in the sun. “Let’s dance!”
I skirted inside his guard while he gawked and swung before he registered that I moved. The Day took a thin slice across his chest as he bent away, rolling languidly into a backflip and kicking at me in the process. I was already moving past him, pulling the Crossbow and firing rapidly into the line pushing in between Peter and Gordon. Switching the weapons became a complicated dance that was oddly comfortable. Fifteen Bolts left the Quiver in rapid succession, mowing down and stopping momentarily the elves pressing in on Gordon.
Ferrin stood on the stone bleachers, whirling the leather strap over his head like a slingshot, then let loose one side with a yell. Pellets of iron shot out into an oncoming rush of elves like buckshot and Ferrin leapt over the railing, barely missing a flurry of arrows from a trio of archers further up in the stands. I fired the Crossbow three more times then returned it as the Day jerked me hard to the right.
MacNamara had armed himself with a sword and the Day rose to meet it, blocking his initial blow with a flash of light of blinding intensity. The smile on his face was hideously evil, but he dropped it when I twisted his shirt with the tip of the Night inches away from his heart. He had a better reach, but I had better weapons. He jumped back and began circling me, feinting in and out, cat-like. His eyes literally pulsed with power as he filled himself, the bright orange of the second iris becoming the more dominant.
That gave me an idea. He had used his throne to cap the fountain. The fountain dominated his architecture in the Arena apartments. It was the basis for his power here—he was bound to it. Unbind him.
To me, they were tonal absurdities, just random sounds spliced together with occasional words from Fae languages thrown in, like Sealbreaker, Night Haunt, and Race Traitor. I didn’t care how I knew the translations; I just said the words with power behind them. And I went after him with a vengeance, letting the Swords move freely. Fluid movements, just like Ethan said, made the difference in this fight. The elf was preternaturally quick, so I had to match him, blow for blow as well as attack on my own. I was severely limited by the number of attack postures I knew, and the Swords didn’t seem eager to teach today, working hard to keep me alive. Still, I kept up with him. Till Ferrin screamed. Rat Bastard was on a down swing, aiming for my pelvis just passing out of his range. Bringing the Day’s hilt down hard on his hand, I whirled into the blade, thrusting the Night through the elf’s hilt, piercing his hand on the way out.
The Night ate the sword’s connection to the elf instantly. It used the elf’s blood to power the feeding frenzy it had on the sword itself. He ripped himself free before I could raise the Day to strike. I wrapped myself in a portal and jumped to Ferrin, slicing into four different elves with one swing. The middle two fell dead to the ground while the other two lay choking and gasping for air, their necks cut. It was doubtful they would survive long. Sheathing the Night, I pulled the Crossbow and cleared a wider radius, then knelt down beside Ferrin. He had an arrow shaft through his thigh and another through the leather strap and into his shoulder. I lifted the Crossbow up and without looking, fired out a rapid fifty shots. The Quiver still gave me excellent perspective, even without the major perspective spell of the Arena.
One arrow may have pierced his lung, but I couldn’t see closely enough through the armor and the Stone wouldn’t release it. That seemed arbitrary considering it let me face the big man down a few minutes ago. Smartest thing I could think of was to send him to the Cahills’, so I wrapped him in a portal and away he went. He could fight with me tomorrow about it. Right now, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I was still in the throes of speaking an ancient troll name. Very guttural words, some of them you had to have magic to even say, or an extra long tongue and some extra bicuspids. More elven bodies collected on the ground as the Quiver refilled itself.
I turned back to MacNamara, jumping in between him and Gordon and sweeping the Day across his guard. He parried and turned my blade with an ivory staff, slightly longer than the sword with a veritable encyclopedia of elven lore etched in the finest hands. The magic that promised to be encoded there was supremely High Elf magic—Liege level. If he made it and it fails, that would be a severe blow to his ego, possibly even to his mind. Oh, yeah, I have to get that to fail.
So I pounced on him, swinging in with Day and thrusting in with Night. He adjusted quickly to the moves I was using. I would have to adjust, find a way.
“Stop it!” he snarled, striking out hard and furiously with the staff in rapid succession, battering me back into the line of his elves. He screamed suddenly, whirling left with the staff in his right hand. I shoved the Night out fast, embedding it in his stick. It was indeed High Elf magic and it fought hard with the Night for control of itself. If I was a better magician, I would have tried to read the magic and control the flows of energy, but I had a liege of Faery to kill. I swung the Day back in and cut the ivory rod above MacNamara’s hand. The Night happily blew the rest of the elf’s magic right back at him like a firehose, blasting him across the field a good forty yards. One of Peter’s throwing knives stuck handle up in the ground. That could explain the scream.
I continued my chant of MacNamara’s encyclopedic name as I exchanged the Day for the Crossbow, dropping another thirty in a semi-circle around me. There were far fewer elves on the field now, but that didn’t make the situation easier, it made it harder. My indiscriminate killing helped, but it didn’t remove the best fighters, just the most. The rest were now homing in on Peter and Gordon with greater accuracy and less distraction from their peers. Peter and Gordon were getting tired and most of the elves hadn’t gotten started yet. Over fifteen minutes of serious fighting with no real breaks, they had to be close to gassing out.
Quite a few had seen the destruction of MacNamara’s ivory rod. So far, our victories have been disconcerting for them, but they hadn’t felt fear yet. They hadn’t felt the possibility of losing. I reached out through the Night for the ivory shards of MacNamara’s destroyed staff and found them still hot from the mangling of the Liege Lord’s power, but eager to answer the Sword’s bidding. MacNamara was beginning to rise. I whipped the Night quickly through the air in a wide arc and down to the oncoming horde facing Gordon and Peter. Thousands of tiny white needles shot through the air following the tip of the Night, crashing down in a torrent of hot, white fire.
My timing couldn’t have been better as I shouted into a crescendo of the final segment of MacNamara’s name: Race Traitor. The needles burned with hatred as MacNamara fought to regain his feet. Distant explosions said the Americans were still bombarding to the north and the Europeans were still setting their fires and bombs to the south. For the first time, the elves tasted fear. They didn’t like it. They didn’t know how to handle it.
“Stop it!” MacNamara screeched at me. “Stop it!
Stop it!” In two strides, he was on me. He landed a solid right across my jaw before I knew he was swinging at me. The Day moved fast enough to nick his left arm slightly as he launched me off my feet and into the frenzy of elves I’d just caused. The Night, though, got a nice slice into his right arm, sucking deep into his aura. He screamed as I flew back through the air away from him.
The armor absorbed most of the impact when I landed. The ten or so elves I plowed through absorbed some, too, but my body took the rest and I saw stars and smears of light. He managed to stop my chant of his name. Pause it, anyway. Shaking my head to clear away the haze as I tried to stand, I felt MacNamara reaching out for the fountain, reaching for power. The Night had hurt him.
I started to chant again, repeating the last name, yelling with a vehement hatred that almost scared me: Race Traitor. MacNamara’s attention snapped fully back to me when he found his connection to the fountain loose and tenuous. His binding was unraveling and I was close to the end—his end. Fourteen Fae words away.
Then he did something horrifying. In the time it took me to say six Fae words, he showed me what the name “Race Traitor” meant. He healed himself. And he filled himself to the top with energy and power and hate.
MacNamara, the unknown Liege Lord of Faery, broke the Geas of his elves. All of them at once. In doing so, he stole their lives, taking them for himself, feeding on them like a vampire. Bram Stoker on LSD couldn’t have dreamed this up. The elves dropped almost as one. The only elf alive drew in a slow breath, turning to me, long enough for another name.
Shrank shot out, through the armor even, and stopped at the elf’s eye level, shouting at him, “No! You’ll not have them!” He turned and flew, fast as lightning, into the lower levels of the Arena.
“I’d forgotten about them,” MacNamara said, slyly, following after Shrank a second. “No matter.”
He fixed his stare on me and I panicked. Wrapping portals around Peter and Gordon, I sent them home to the Cahills’. I’d have done that same to Shrank, even sooner had I remembered he was there, but now I had no idea where he was. Whatever happened now, I wanted to know they’d be safe. At least, for the time it would take for MacNamara to kill me, then he’d be on them, but later. Maybe they could figure out another way later. MacNamara squeezed the space around the fountain after that. There wouldn’t be another portal for miles. No retreat for me, then.
“Just you and me, now, eh, little boy?” MacNamara said, his voice crackling with stolen power as he walked toward me, unhurried. He waved his hand and his power swept past me to the bodies around me, shoving them back to the edges of the field. Clearing space to work. Four names away. Another wave of his hand and weapons of many kinds rose from the mass of bodies, collecting in a wall on my left. The fountain on my right and MacNamara in front. Three names left.
“Go ahead, boy. Finish up. You have a surprise coming.” The smile across his face said I didn’t understand something. I knew I didn’t understand a lot of things, not the least of all of them was him.
“Arbiter,” I said his penultimate name calmly, the Fae language rolling off my tongue. For such a short intent, the word itself was incredibly long, twelve syllables, mostly vowels.
“One more,” MacNamara coached, eyes gleaming with hatred. He stood outside of my fastest striking distance.
“Declared to be fair,” I said, speaking through the last of the names I heard that day. Nothing happened. Nothing. Of course, the name was a joke, too. MacNamara, fair?
I don’t know which of us was more surprised by it, me or him. His hold on the fountain was more tenuous than before and I could see the binding now, floating as three concentric rings around the fountain, constricting the flow like a magnetic bottle constricts a plasma stream. He tried to reassert his control over the binding, but I was standing in the way. His power was so wrapped up in the binding that he couldn’t get enough purchase in the fountain to push me away from it.
MacNamara started toward me, summoning to him a sword from the wall of weapons floating at his command nearby. Apparently, he decided it was time to dispatch me and worry about that problem later. Then it hit me. I understood very suddenly what the problem was, why the fountain of pure power was still tied to MacNamara. I laughed, loud and hard. It rang through the Arena, echoing through the stadium. The elf scowled at me and waved his tiny sword. Well, tiny on him, anyway.
I set myself into the first defensive position I knew, holding the Day and Night forward to protect me. I didn’t dare release the armor, but I really wished I could stare him down when I said it. I didn’t want to be stupid, though, and I didn’t know what was going to happen.
“Rat Bastard,” I called loudly. The fountain released from the elf’s control. I watched the binding snap, first in the center ring, then both outer rings together. The force of the outer two provided a fierce feedback at MacNamara, nearly matching the size of his ego. It flung him back until he hit the Arena stadium hard, sending the upper levels crashing down behind him. The Americans had done a stupendous job wrecking the underside there. It began to collapse in stages around him, but, unfortunately for me, not on top of him.
I turned to the fountain to see it spouting energy up into the sky in its full glory. It was a magnificent sight to behold. Awesome, really. I needed to control it now, before MacNamara could. I ran closer to it, staring into the bright, phasing lights as the strands of energy moved in on itself like giant snakes writhing in a pit. I opened up my mind and welcomed the power in.
Then I opened up my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. I couldn’t breathe. Or move. Or even think. It was overwhelming, the power. It was also familiar in some way. I ignored that thought to fight for control. MacNamara stirred in the rubble, crawling out slowly to the field. While I couldn’t turn to see him, I was very much aware of every pebble, every mote of falling dust in the arena—it was no longer fair to capitalize that word.
“You… insolent… pile… of… worm… dung,” he whispered hoarsely as he pried himself loose from the rubble. My senses were far too keenly attached to the fountain, and I still had no control. “There you are,” he said urgently. I felt him crush another set of geas to dust and suck the power down. I heard a hypersonic keening. It must have been a clan of fairy or maybe brownies. He used the modicum of power he’d disgustingly stolen to heal his crushed pelvis. Not completely, but he could walk better. I hoped the pain was excruciating.
He reached out to his wall of formerly floating weapons now lying on the ground in piles and called a rod to him. Not as a weapon, though, he used it as a crutch and began a slow, steady march toward me. His eyes glowed red around the edges as he glared at me. “Not so easy, is it, Pactman?” he snarled. “Taking my power away from me. Now hold on to it while I kill you.”
I fought for control, but I wasn’t gaining a foothold. It was just too much and there wasn’t anywhere to shunt the energy. The elf wasn’t trying to take it from me either. He didn’t need to. If I let go to protect myself, he’d grab it and drown me in it. If I didn’t let go, he could shove a knife through my heart. He could get around the armor. He would defeat the Stone. I knew it and he knew it. I couldn’t just cap this sucker either. Batteries or not, they’d fill faster than I could produce them and I’d be spewing orange rocks so fast I’d look like a volcano erupting.
“Your kind was still swimming in brine when I ruled,” he said weakly. He’d made it halfway across the field now, using the rod to pull himself along, his right leg dangling loose on the ground. His left arm hung loose at his side, too. He shouted now, “And you Named me?”
I smiled at that. “Rat Bastard,” I managed a whisper, my voice echoed through stadium, strong with the fountain’s power. He roared and increased his pace.
“You can’t keep it, boy,” he taunted, stressing the “boy” to rile me. “The fountain requires a land and you haven’t got one. And this one is mine!”
Well, thank you, arrogant elf. That was exactly what I needed to k
now. I pushed the opening to the Pacthome onto the fountain and forced the energy into the field around the ward. I slipped into the opening, too, and stood halfway in. Activating the ward, I started shifting the power of the fountain and relieving the pressure in my mind. Oh, yeah, the fountain definitely needed a land, I could see MacNamara’s point quite clearly now. And if I had started this when he first began crawling out of the rubble, I would have finished in time.
MacNamara was at my throat before I could regain any motion. He broke the bones of my left hand through the armor wresting the Night sword out of my hand without touching it, knocking it away with his crutch. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t think about that. Quite literally, I couldn’t think about it. He was cackling while he did it, so I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize what I was doing. Even if he killed me, though, in a few moments, his precious fountain would be forever out of his reach. I took some solace in that. Not much, though.
The elf twisted savagely at my right arm to free the Day from my grasp. When he finally managed it, he took the Sword up himself, resisting its angry attempts to eat him. He swung it experimentally, but weakly as it fought him. Neither Sword liked elves.
“I should have killed you last year,” he whispered in my ear. Grasping my shoulder, he shook me hard, trying to break my connection to the millions of live wires of the fountain. I almost laughed as I closed the connection to the Pacthome. I was exhausted. Totally and truly out of energy. Tired to the bone. He shook again and I fell back on my butt.
“You Named me,” MacNamara snarled down at me. To say the elf hated me would be a slight against the word. Hate just didn’t express the emotion well enough. It covered his aura so thoroughly that no other emotion could hope to show through for at least a century. The blade of the Day Sword sat against my shoulder, ready to dig into the Stone’s armor.
