Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (62 page)

“Yes, we know your father well enough,”
Seelie said with a touch of dislike tingeing her voice. “But he,
too, has disappeared from beyond our reckoning. Will he return with
similar abilities?”

“Doubtful,” Kieran said simply, offering no
explanation.

Unseelie arched an eyebrow at his single word
answer. “What of the secrets your family held? Is the ninth son of
the rogue privy to them?”

Kieran chuckled and raised a finger to his
nose. “Ladies, that would be a secret.”

Lightning once again danced across the sky,
from cloud to cloud and, finally from cloud to ground. The
Crossroads was a single shaft of sunlight as all around us the
weather churned and damaged the now-stony landscape. More tornadoes
sprouted down from the clouds in the distance, barely visible
except when the lightning flashed. It was a terrifying environment
to stand in.

“Do not jest with us, human,” one of them
said, I couldn’t tell which. “You will not appreciate our sense of
humor.”

“Probably not,” Kieran answered, looking out
over the land as the tornadoes closed in on us. “So you believe
that the Prophecy of the Geas is verging on fruition. You spoke to
my father about this, then?” Obviously I missed something while
watching the weather.

“Yes,” they spoke in unison.

“And he agreed with you?” Kieran asked with
disbelief.

“He agreed with the possibility,” Winter
said.

“Humans are so hard to convince on matters of
prophecy,” said Summer.

Kieran sighed heavily, then asked, “Where did
he go, then?”

“In search of the Architect’s son
presumably,” answered Summer, standing from the divan that wasn’t
there anymore.

Kieran let out a guffaw. “One impossible feat
after another. The Architect is gone. He had no children.”

“And yet, still he took that leap,” said
Winter.

“We are not the soul of cooperation,
McClure,” Summer said, “But over the period of time that Robert
McClure began missing members of his clan, we too noticed a slight
lessening of our power.”

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.

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
through 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.