Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (58 page)

“Gordon, would you give me a hand, please?” I
asked as I knelt down in front of his father. “Felix, stretch your
leg out straight for me.”

“What do I do?” Gordon asked, nervously,
afraid for his father and himself.

“I need to you come over here,” I said,
patting Cahill’s left side, “and hold your father down carefully.
What I’m going to do is going to be a shock for him, but he can’t
move. Just keep him calm and still and everything will be fine,
okay?”

I called the Night sword forward as Gordon
moved around to his father’s side. Cahill tensed at the sight of
the black and ivory blade. Gordon gasped and slowed, not taking his
eyes off of it as he descended to one knee, taking his father’s
hand. The room seemed to dim in the Sword’s presence.

“Oh, Lord, Da,” Gordon whispered, glancing
nervously between his father and the Night.

“He’s done this once already, son,” Cahill
said, tightening his grip on his son’s hand. “He can do it
again.”

“Ready?” I asked, touching the cold sides of
the blade, feeling its eagerness, but my question wasn’t directed
there. Both Cahill’s gulped and nodded. Felix relaxed his leg as
much as he could and Gordon braced his arm against his father’s
shoulder. I touched the tip of the rapier-like Night to Cahill’s
thigh about a quarter of an inch below the brand. The Night began
to hum a Cicadas’ rhythm as it slipped into the skin, different
from the deep basses of Calhoun. This time, it came in from
underneath the curse, dropping Cahill out of its influence in
staccato releases of tone, as if holding the curse in the fugue.
The blade popped free from Cahill’s leg flat rather than having to
be pulled free, but the curse was evaporated into the Night sword
completely. I sent the Sword home.

“Da?” cried Gordon. “Are you okay? Da?”

“’M’alright, Gordon, m’alright,” said Cahill,
groggily.

Gordon looked up at me with teary eyes, “Is
it out?”

I nodded, “Yep, all gone,” I said while I
searched his aura for fluctuations or any manifestations that might
relate. “You just sit here and relax for a bit, Mr. Cahill. I’ll be
back in a few minutes so you can tell me what you felt. If there
are more of these out there, we’ll need to find another way to
identify and remove them. You might give us some clues in that.
Okay?” I stood, shaking the blood back into my legs as he nodded to
me.

I turned to the group to see them talking but
not hearing it. I stepped over the shield wall, Ethan’s, to hear
Peter say, “…and I think the brand destroyed that part. If we saw
it before, we’d see the complete trigger.”

“I’ll grant that,” Ethan said, walking
underneath the first projection. He reached up and started pulling
it apart, separating pieces out and moving them aside. Most had a
recognizable purpose, like dissecting a bug. What I couldn’t figure
out still looked kind of organ-like. “What bothers me more than
what we don’t see, is what we do. See this?”

“I’ve seen it before,” I said softly, moving
to Ethan’s side and looking at the area he indicated.

“I didn’t expect you to say that,” Ethan
said, looking sideways at me. “Do you remember where?”

I was already trying to remember. A million
swirls of color blended together rapidly in my memory without
anything to connect them to. It had to be buried in one of those
places where things were moving fast and I just glimpsed it.

“Let me save you the struggle,” Kieran said,
lightly grabbing my shoulders from behind, talking softly in my
left ear. “You were with Peter in Atlanta. You shot your
consciousness through a one-dimensional point onto a
two-dimensional plane then onto a three-dimensional plane. You
homed in on…?”

“Ethan,” I murmured, pulling the memory up
and seeing the correlation, the similarity.

“Yes,” Kieran said, releasing my shoulders.
“Which means that whoever cast these knew a little something about
the magic that cast Ethan’s kind as well. And that should not be
possible.”

“Why?” asked Peter.

“Because all that knew that kind of magic are
all quite dead,” said Ethan calmly, still studying the curses.

I turned to look at the Cahills. Felix had
pulled his pants back up and was sitting forward in the chair with
his head face down in his hands. Gordon was sitting on an ottoman,
watching us, rubbing his father’s back nervously and consoling him.
I walked through Ethan’s wall to talk to them, but he collapsed the
field, deciding our privacy was over for the moment.

“Mr. Cahill,” I started, “MacNamara asked us
several questions when we first arrived that didn’t make sense to
any of us at the time. One of those was about a ‘kovel.’” I
pronounced it as MacNamara had, like hovel with a ‘k.’ “Do you have
any idea to what that might refer?”

Cahill sat back in the chair, exhaling a long
held breath. “Aye,” he said, “that name came up a few years back. A
temple in India was found buried with markings similar to Paraguay.
Had a single chamber, very small. What could be translated before
the temple was lost mentioned the people of the kovel.”

“The people of the kovel?” prompted Ethan. We
moved closer to the Cahill’s as a group, forming a semi-circle
around them.

“That’s how the report read, yes,” answered
Cahill. “I’ll have someone dig it up again for you, if you
like.”

“Does this relate to the curse?” Gordon asked
before any of us could respond.

“At the moment,” said Peter, “it’s just a
suspicious series of coincidences. We’re just trying to see if
anything relates, is all.”

“How many were in your original group in
Paraguay, Felix?” Kieran asked.

“Eighteen,” he said. His eyes glazed over at
the memory.

“What happened there?” Kieran asked,
quietly.

“Not much to tell,” Cahill answered, glancing
up at Kieran, grimacing. “We really don’t know what happened, at
least in the temple. A small group of us met up with some
Americans, Harris and friends actually, in Paraguay. They were at a
dig in a small temple in the mountains that Harris had found in
some obscure reference somewhere. We’d gone down to investigate
claims of tomb robbing, but it was Harris and he had permission and
his paperwork was in order. He gave us the nickel tour of the
temple, terribly unimpressive for a temple, just three tiny rooms
linked with a short corridor, little to no markings on the walls
remained. It was more impressive that they actually found it than
the temple itself was.”

Cahill sipped absently at his brandy and we
took the small break to gather chairs and sit. Once we were
settled, he continued, “After dinner on the second night, seven
men, including one of mine, were down in the temple. The rest of us
were in camp with a couple of men off to the side with a few norms
in protected areas with computer equipment, trying not to fry
everything. They’d setup a relay about a mile off, including a
satellite telephone linkup. Harris was on the phone to the States
at the time. They found something down in the temple. We all felt
the rush of excitement from three of them, like the edge of a
storm. Then the firestorm hit the astral. Uncontrolled magefire
erupted in all of them, almost simultaneously. It ate the temple in
seconds, killing everyone inside and blasting out through every
hole. It shook the mountain and crashed the temple into so much
rubble. Seven men died in a heartbeat.

“We searched for the cause for days, sifting
through the rubble, piercing the astral for clues. On the third
night, the first curse hit. I watched a man named John Oliver burn
from the inside-out right before my eyes for absolutely no reason.
Just poof. If we hadn’t been on edge and shielded, the three of us
near him would have ignited with him. As it was, the curses just
glowed in sympathy, but now we know we saw what was killing us.
We’d all been marked and we didn’t know how. All ten of us had one
of four different marks on us, but none of the few normal humans
that remained, just the magically active. Two more died before we
were able to come up with something to burn away the curse. In
retrospect I suppose it should have been obvious that the curse
still existed since we couldn’t heal the brand after the curse
wasn’t visible anymore.”

Cahill sounded seriously depressed when he
finished his story, tipping back the snifter and finishing his
brandy in one gulp.

I asked, “So with you, Calhoun, and Harris,
there are five more still with the curse?”

Cahill thought for a moment. “No,” he
answered, “Only three, possibly. I know three of the five died some
time ago in unrelated incidents.”

“Do you think Harris will have any more
information than you?” asked Kieran.

“If he does, I’ll string him up by his
balls,” said Cahill vehemently, eliciting a shocked look from
Gordon, quickly hidden though. Cahill’s children kept seeing their
father in a different light in our presence.

“There’s a five hour time difference between
here and New York,” I said. “I’ll call and make arrangements with
Harris. Have him track down the other two.”

“We have plans after your visit with Olivia,”
said Kieran. I wasn’t aware of this.

“How long will we be unavailable?” I asked
him. Considering the way he brought it up, I didn’t want to ask too
many questions.

“Most of the afternoon,” he answered. “You
and I will be visiting the Crossroads.”

“The tavern?” asked Gordon, obviously
confused.

“No, lad,” answered Cahill with a guffaw,
standing. “He means they’re going Underhill. They’re going to see
the Queens of Faery.”

Our rooms in the Cahill castle were attached
to each other through a small hallway, six rooms in total. Three of
them actually had secret passageways hidden behind sliding panels
leading to crawl spaces to thin hallways to other parts of the
castle. The mechanisms were jammed, but it was still possible to
exit that way, if the need arose. There wasn’t a common room for us
to gather in, but mine was the first down the hall and got that
honor.

Apparently, there was an invisible fashion
advisor in our group tossing dressing tips at us in our sleep: the
next morning, all four of us came out of our rooms wearing
MacNamara’s green silks. Ethan and Peter were going to work out
while Kieran and I went on our walk-about through Faery, so it made
sense. It just seemed odd in a funny way.

Peter came into my room, jumping onto my
unmade bed as I searched through my suitcase. Ethan and Kieran came
in a moment later.

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” Peter asked.

“My brush,” I muttered, raking my still-damp
hair back. “I think I miss the brownies. At least I could find
stuff with them around.” I glanced up from the suitcase at Peter as
he hugged a pillow to prop himself up. His hair was cut.

“Are you cutting your own hair?” I asked.

“No, Shrank did it for me,” he said. “Did a
great job, too, don’t you think?”

“Yes, he did,” I said, then called in my best
sing-song voice, “Oh, Shr-ank.”

He floated leisurely through the door,
bobbing slightly as if in a breeze. “Yes, Master Seth?” he asked,
airily.

“You seem to be enjoying the castle,” I
noticed, chuckling.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said, a bit more firmness
in his high-pitched voice. “The currents and eddies are
marvelous.”

“How long would it take for you to cut my
hair for me?” I asked him.

He turned in the air and looked at my hair,
appraising me. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, depending on the
style you want,” he said, “though I would wait till after you came
back from your visit with the Queens.”

“Really?” asked Peter before I could.
“Why?”

“They would see it as falling out of favor,”
he squeaked. “As if you had done something to anger Lord Kieran.”
He twisted again, this time toward the door. “Someone is
coming.”

“Why would they care about the length of my
hair?” I asked, ignoring the oncoming person. Whoever it was hadn’t
turned down the hall to our rooms yet.

“It would mark you as lower within your
caste,” said Shrank.

“Caste? We don’t have a caste system here,” I
argued, finally finding my brush in the suitcase. I swore I
searched the back pocket twice already.

“Yes, we do,” said Kieran, looking at me in
the mirror as I fought to keep the shaggy curls out of my eyes. A
man I didn’t know turned off the main hall into ours. A servant
sent to get us, it seemed. Ethan was already moving to the door to
intercept him.

“How do you mean?” I asked. “How are we in a
caste system here?”

“At the very least, there is an economic
caste of the rich and the poor,” said Kieran.

“That’s not a caste,” I said. “That barrier
can be crossed.”

“In limited ways, yes, and only in certain
parts of the world,” admitted Kieran, “But most wealth is
hereditary. Talent for magic is, too, mostly. Sometimes it
spontaneously generates in the general populous and I have to
imagine that with the population as big as it currently is that
there are a large number out there now who are untrained but able.
But these are exceptions, not the rule.”

I tossed the brush on top of my open suitcase
and went for the door, following the rest out. “That just goes
against everything I believe in,” I muttered, as Shrank flitted
around us.

“Why?” asked Peter as we filed out of the
room. “It’s a fact of life. Everything has a place. Why would being
on top bother you?”

Ethan waited in the main hall with a short
man in a suit, a butler I presumed. The man nodded politely to us
and headed down the hall, leading us to breakfast I hoped.

“How am I on top all of the sudden?” I asked
Peter.

“’All of the sudden’?” asked Kieran, glancing
back at me, grinning. We’d paired up behind the butler, Kieran and
Ethan, then me and Peter.