Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (51 page)

“Seth,” called Cahill, “MacNamara sets great
measure in your predictive skills. How do you see this battle
ending?”

“I’m afraid I have too much emotion invested
here to predict anything reliably, sir,” I said, turning to him to
answer the question. “While I’d like to say I don’t actively hate
anyone, they have both pushed that idea to the limits.” Both
Florian and Cahill laughed at that. Kieran merely nodded
agreement.

“They do have those skills finely attuned,”
said Florian, his accent only mildly touching his words.

The second bell tolled and unlike during
previous battles, the outside walls of the cityscape descended into
the ground allowing the two men into the city blocks. The center
wall that kept them apart stayed intact. Both men entered the
roadway but neither pulled in any power to indicate their location
to the other. Ferrin ducked behind a building, forcing the
perspective spell of the Arena to swivel around. It was
disconcerting, to say the least.

“Ehran,” I asked, “this perspective spell
that MacNamara has on the Arena, is this something that can be done
on the fly, out in the world?”

“Yes and no,” he answered as he watched the
field intently. “It works similarly to the wards at home which you
are tuned into perfectly and don’t need this kind of visual acuity.
You wouldn’t want to do it on the fly because it would show your
position to whomever you were trying to see because of the
necessary loop-back structures in the feeds. And it takes a
considerable amount of power to feed those structures, at least on
so many different levels.”

“You tie in that tightly to your wards?”
asked Cahill, clearly impressed. “Maybe you should look at mine
when you come. All we get is something is wrong.”

“If you can spare the time, I wouldn’t have a
problem with that,” answered Kieran. “I would not consider doing
such alone in your home.”

“Nor would I allow it. We are a suspicious
lot, aren’t we?” Cahill said with a smile.

The third bell tolled and the center wall
came down to much hooting and hollering from the crowd. Harris
continued walking down the center of the road, searching back and
forth for the ambush he expected at any moment. He was too far away
from where Ferrin actually was, but he had no way of actually
knowing that.

While I waited for them to get closer, I
investigated the visual aid spell on the Arena. Kieran was correct
about it being laid out like a warding spell. It was tiled onto the
floor of the stadium and linked together onto the field.
Conceptually it wasn’t that difficult to understand, but looking at
the actual implementation of it was daunting. These weren’t static
overlays but were constantly and rapidly moving. It wouldn’t work
at all if the warding didn’t allow each and every member to link
directly into the ward itself, thereby subconsciously controlling
the direction himself. It definitely created a wicked power loop
that marked each user, just as Kieran described, but here it was
fed back into the matrix of wards to be reused. It also meant that
if you knew someone intimately you could search through this ward
and find that person.

Curious, I hooked into the ward and forced
the perspective around to look at myself. It was strange to see
myself with my own eyes, sitting with Martin and Peter on the wall.
It was even stranger that, at the moment, I couldn’t see all of
Peter, confirming that the warding spell couldn’t pierce whatever
was hiding our auras. I moved the perspective around to see Kieran
and Cahill sitting together and confirmed the same with them,
seeing Cahill perfectly and Kieran only partially. I pulled the
perspective back to view our balcony from a distance and saw we
were pretty unremarkable. It figures then that if anyone was spying
on us, they would have to look pretty hard to even find us.

The first of Ferrin’s attacks on Harris came
from a distance and was an obvious distraction, at least to us, but
it brought my attention back to the battle. Three separate
explosions occurred in rapid succession around Harris but nowhere
near him. Harris didn’t stop walking forward but his aura shifted
slightly as he cast about on the astral plane, searching for
Ferrin. Two loud thumps of something hitting the ground and a
strong pulse of energy from Ferrin announced to Harris his exact
location.

Harris looked up to see two large bags of
cement mix flying overhead. A quick consideration of trajectory
told him that they would land atop the buildings on either side of
him, missing him completely, so he ignored them. He turned back to
the construction site as the bags hit the buildings. He probably
should have paid a bit more attention to them, though, as they
seemed to hit perfectly on the corners of each building, bursting
the bags, and sending dust and small rocks into the air and over
the street. It seemed to be far more than the two bags would
normally hold, but I really didn’t know.

I sent the perspective down onto the field,
curious if I could see as Harris was seeing, and was delighted to
find I could. He would be blinded by the dust for a moment or two,
but still reasonably safe behind his shielding. Harris’ shields
were spherical so Ferrin wouldn’t have as easy a time as with the
Italian. Turning to see what Ferrin was doing, I saw him leaving
one of the side buildings carrying a large mirror back to the
building site on the far side of Harris’ position, still out of
sight. He ducked down low as he ran, even though Harris was still
waiting for the dust from the cement bags to settle. Ferrin shoved
the mirror into the sand, leaning it against a pole and angling it
toward a path between the adjacent building and the site. Then he
ran to one of the girders that framed the building and climbed it
like a squirrel. He had more upper body strength than I gave him
credit for—I hadn’t thought he could tear a sheet of paper in
two.

Ferrin scampered along a girder to come to
the side of the building that Harris would travel. He sat down on
the girder and waited, leaning back against another beam, legs
stretched out. Harris didn’t come along the path Ferrin wanted,
though. He walked through the middle of the site, meandering past
obstacles, and scanning left and right, up and down for Ferrin. For
his part, Ferrin was relying on the cold steel to mask his aura and
the heat signature of his body. I wasn’t sure why it was working
because I was seeing him without issue.

“Why doesn’t Harris see him?” Martin voiced
the question for me.

“I’d say he does,” said Cahill. “He’s just
waiting for the other shoe to drop. That close to steel, anything
that Ferrin throws at him will be fairly diluted so he’s not really
that much of a threat. Any real magical threat is already on the
ground.”

“Hmm,” I grunted. “You’re missing the point
with Ferrin, then, and if that’s what Harris is thinking, so is
he.”

Ferrin slowly reached inside his jacket and
pulled out a slingshot, the American kind made with rubber, not the
whirl over your head kind. He aimed it back up the road and let it
fly just as Harris passed under the girder he sat on to obscure the
act. It was an amazing shot, no doubt helped along with a little
magic, that hit a small wedge of wood tenuously holding back a
large weight, barely balanced, cantilevered over the ledge of the
next rooftop. The weight fell, providing the necessary energy for a
catapult sitting on the ground below, to fire another bag of cement
into the air. Harris looked up at the missile and casually flared a
hand out and surrounded the bag with a soft field of energy, just
enough that it wouldn’t burst on impact. Then he turned back to
face Ferrin, but he wasn’t there anymore.

The bag of cement crashed to the ground
behind Harris, startling him. He stepped forward, whirling in place
and crouching. Ferrin chose that moment to leap as high as he could
off the first floor girder he stood on and down into the road. He
fired a single burst of violet magefire down onto the sandy ground
near Harris. Catching Ferrin’s reflection in the mirror, Harris
fired a similar shot of magefire at the mirror, wrongly taking it
for Ferrin. His spell crashed through the mirror, but reflected
back on something behind it and shot back through his shields,
stunning himself. Ferrin’s shot broke through the plywood he’d
placed on the ground. Harris fell into the hole in the ground as
Ferrin flew overhead, rolling to a stop carefully.

Harris’ head showed over the top of the hole.
He was in obvious pain. Ferrin scurried quickly to the edge of the
hole and fired another shot of magefire deep down into it, hitting
Harris’ legs and throwing him into unconsciousness.

It took the crowd, and us, a moment to figure
out how Ferrin had won. Kieran started laughing almost immediately,
so I suppose he knew all along. The hole Harris was in was lined
with metal rods and wooden staves shoved into the sandy ground to
about waist level, then covered with plywood and sand. The mirror
hid a melted mixture of sand and graphite that Ferrin had formed
apparently with the first blast of magic earlier in the bout.

Everything else that Ferrin had done was all
about herding Harris into the hole. The third bag of cement was a
diversion to get Harris to turn toward the mirror so that Ferrin
could break the plywood and cause the reflection. The reflection
was to make Harris fire at the reflective surface behind the mirror
to dull his senses enough that he would fall through his shield
when the ground fell out from under him, so he’d wrack himself on
the staves and rods in the hole.

“How did that work?” exclaimed Peter. “That
was so convoluted. There are at least fifty things that could have
gone wrong with that. How did that work?”

Kieran’s only response was to laugh
louder.

“You know he’s going to say it’s your fault,
don’t you?” I asked. He nodded, still laughing, and fell into
Cahill’s shoulder, hitting him weakly. Cahill was smiling, enjoying
the camaraderie. “I told him to be on his guard around Ferrin, but
he wouldn’t listen.”

“So you attempted to help Señor Harris
against our own fair Ferrin?” asked Florian, overdramatically.

“Well, we did leave him on better terms than
we did with La Castrata Harris,” I responded, pretty sure I’d
murdered whatever language I was trying to fake. It didn’t seem to
matter to anyone, though. Even Ethan was laughing.

When I looked back toward the field, I saw
the warden standing patiently at the gate for us. “When you are
ready, gentlemen,” the warden said in a high, melodic voice.

We all stood reluctantly, not wanting to
relinquish the fellowship. As I looked at Martin watching his
father, I was pretty sure that he hadn’t seen this side of Cahill
before, where he was “just a guy with his friends.” Kieran was good
at that, putting people at ease. And Cahill needed it. Martin
needed to see it happen. At least the day wasn’t a complete
bust.

“Do you wish to visit the armory?” the warden
asked us at the door. When we declined again, he bade us good luck
and closed the door.

“I wonder if we get to know anything about
our opponents today,” muttered Ethan, sitting down on the nearest
bench, instantly looking bored.

“Does it really matter at this point?” asked
Kieran, sounding depressed. “Kill and win or lose and be
killed.”

A knock at the door stopped any response. The
warden opened the door and escorted MacNamara in, followed by his
repeaters dressed in their traditional pale blue day suits piped in
orange.

“So we come to the final battle of the
competition!” MacNamara said cheerfully, leaving his repeaters out
of the loop and being as flamboyant as ever. “Any last requests
that I may behest? Knowing, of course, that they must fall within
the rules of the contest. Mustn’t favor either side, now.
Especially now.”

“Just to know the field and our opponents,”
answered Kieran, sitting on the bench next to Ethan, looking up at
the elf. Technically, I supposed it was disrespectful. I think
MacNamara chose to disregard it.

The elf made a show of thinking about the
question, one fragile-looking arm wrapping around his chest and the
other cradling his chin. And it took a few seconds. You’d have
thought Kieran asked for an explanation of quantum physics in fifty
words or less.

“You will be outnumbered three to one,” he
said, stroking his chin and staring at the ceiling as if in great
thought. “They will be less cohesive but just as single-minded in
their goals as your first; they are a paramilitary group with a
rabid dislike for anything non-human. They fought well in their
first three bouts, losing only four men to disability in their
original group, but this time they will field all of their team
instead of limiting their numbers.

“The venue? I haven’t decided yet,” MacNamara
continued, arching an eyebrow high on his nearly pearl-white face.
“The forests of Afghanistan, the streets of Paris, perhaps the
green hills of Summer’s domain, that might be fun, indeed.”

“I’m sure you’ll choose a venue perfectly
suited to disruption on both sides,” Kieran said diplomatically. At
least the tone was diplomatic. The elf chuckled at it,
regardless.

“Your opponents are far more spirited than
you, at the moment, more eager, Ehran McClure,” MacNamara said, his
voice dropping in pitch and tapping his bottom lip with his index
finger. His eyes were aglow with a fiery iridescence. “You would do
better to face the challenge than sulk in a back room.”

“You are right, Lord,” Kieran acceded,
honestly. “I know that we were extremely fortunate about the uproar
everyone made when Seth tossed the Faery Princesses out of the
Arena. It saved us from at least two different sets of combat and
killings. I am happy that our path of destruction has been limited,
but I still regret that it continues. Still, I agree with you, I
need to change my attitude now.”