Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (81 page)

“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?”

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 confusion. 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.”

“What a load a’crap,” said Ferrin, scowling.
“The councils are nothing but a bunch of blue bloods lording over
the riffraff when they deign to look out of their ivory towers. You
saw Marchand. He treated you like you were something to scrape off
his boot before walking on the carpet and you can wipe up the
streets with him.”

“Well, I’d say this was a big problem,” I
said, pointing to the map. “And they’ve come down from their ivory
towers and Felix has done more, as a council member, than lord over
riffraff. But that does show a difference of opinion on how the
councils are run.”

Kieran chuckled softly and said, “There
always is. This argument can be extended into other areas as well,
though. That’s the problem with disparity. It exists everywhere.
While I don’t mind a philosophical discussion, I think we have more
pressing matters to attend to. We need to decide what we know, what
we need to know, and what we can actually find out.”

“Yeah, well, we at least have some lead into
the human aspect,” I said. “What about the mage side. The map is
pretty one-sided on battle outcomes. No prisoners. Any forensic
evidence?”

“Don’t know,” Cahill answered, shrugging. “I
very much doubt it, though. Fights of that kind tend to be very
energetic and the winning side generally doesn’t want evidence of
wrong doing lying about for public viewing, right or
wrong.”