The Sword (22 page)

“No, my dear brother,” Morganen all but caroled, thumping his sibling on one thickly muscled shoulder as he strode around the table. “
You
are wrong!” He continued around, and caught up Kelly as she finished laying the last fork and spoon down. Sweeping her around, arm at her waist, his hand catching hers, he hummed a little tune, dancing with her in a rocking little two-step.

“Morganen!”

The roar made Kelly jump, blinking at the rage in Saber's voice, as he came into the hall.

“Just celebrating with my sister-in-law-to-be, dear brother!”

“
He's
in a good mood,” Trevan quipped to no one in particular, helping Saber fetch the steaming platters of food from the kitchens at the base of the north wing, next to the great hall.

Saber narrowed his gaze, but his youngest brother wasn't touching her improperly; one hand was at her back, above her waist, the other held her hand, and there was a full hand-span of distance between their bodies. He grunted and allowed it. “Why are you dancing with my bride?”

“Because she made us clean the hall!”

Dominor snorted from up on the second balcony level, where he was knocking the lightglobes into life. His voice echoed down to them. “And you
thank
her for it with your little dance?”

Morganen twirled Kelly out, la-la-la-ing to the tune he had swept her into. “But of course, lalalaaaah!” He caught her as she came back again, and dropped a brotherly kiss on her forehead before stepping back and bowing over Kelly's hand in a courtly way, while his eldest sibling glared. Morganen ignored his brother. “My dear lady, we all owe you a
deep
debt of gratitude!

“
Think
about it, my brothers,” he added, releasing her fingertips and turning to look at the others. “At first there were no teleported invasions. Then they slowly began increasing, and within a span of five months, were coming frequently. If our unknown assailant had any paintings of this hall, then it would have taken him or her time to adjust to all of the dirt and grime in his mind's eye for accurate, successful teleportation. It would be a painting, since all of our mirrors are enspelled against scrying, and the distance to the mainland's coast is too far to do it easily by such directly scryed means. That would also explain the five or so months it took our tormentor to focus firmly on us.

“But,”
he added, holding up a finger, “once we started
cleaning
the hall, scrubbing and painting the walls and moving the furnishings, it changed the look of all the rooms!”

“And as every mage knows,” Rydan added, speaking the most words Kelly had yet heard from him, especially since he was glancing at her with his night-dark eyes as he explained it for her, “only through deep familiarity can a mage teleport something elsewhere, or through an indirect but
accurate
scry, such as a painting.”

After a quick double-blink, his twin, Trevan, got over the shock of Rydan speaking so much to them all at once and continued Morganen's line of reasoning and Rydan's proffered explanation. “But only after deep meditation and with great strength, perhaps even with some forgotten article we left behind in Corvis; it cannot be easily done over any great distance, and not one
noticeable
thing must be different between what is known and what is actually here, which means that the task is exceedingly difficult. There can be some minor differences of the sort that would take a second or third look to register, but nothing stronger than that.”

“You cannot teleport anything without knowing exactly where it will fit into the part of the universe it goes to,” Wolfer added in his rumble, his mouth quirking up slightly on one side. “Or it will not go there at all. So
I
will thank you, too, Lady Kelly, for working our knuckles raw with so much soap, spell, and water.”

“Wait, wait; there's more!” Morganen asserted gleefully, eager to recapture everyone's attention. “It will take a little preparation and a very careful layering of spells and paint, but I have come up with a way to
ensure
that no one not intimately familiar with the new look of Nightfall Castle can ever teleport anything into it from afar! And again, I have
you
to thank, Lady Kelly—or rather, my peeks into your universe to ascertain the settling flow of its aether, to thank.

“They have these boxes,” he continued, relating the tale to his brothers now, “that glow and flicker with different images, as if the most detailed of paintings had sprung to life. They call it the
teevee
, and while it does make most who sit before it slack-jawed and witless—no offense, Kelly—it
does
constantly change.

“So I was thinking, perhaps
I
could come up with a type of paint that changes from hour to hour, day to day, in its colors and images—murals of panoramic, pastoral scenes, perhaps, or drifting clouds, or maybe even both. Something subtle and tasteful, but still there, and still
changing
,” he stressed as his deeply interested brothers slowly nodded, agreeing with him. “Not enough to distract from everyday life, but certainly enough to change each wall from hour to hour, and thus change the vital appearance of each room, altering them too much for our unknown mage to easily reach us again! Even if he sends more creatures to peek in through our windows, the trick won't work more than just the once, in that very moment!”

“It also explains,” Trevan agreed, lingering to hear his brother's words, “why those wyvern were peering into the rooms instead of attacking us more directly, to do a secondhand scry for the mage—one can also scry through the eyes of a largish animal, if one has the right spell for it, and enough power to not only master the will and resistance of the creature for long enough, but also the strength to do so over such a long distance,” he added in explanation to Kelly. “The larger and smarter the animal, the more likely it'll still follow orders over a long distance.

“But it's a risky matter, because the size of Gates needed to send such large creatures over such a long distance makes it more likely that the Council of Mages will notice what is going on and put an end to it. These beasts being sent our way are forbidden for anyone, outside of the government, to create or possess in times of peace, for wartime breeding purposes.”

“Wasting the energy to hunt us with larger beasts certainly proves we angered our foe by cleaning the castle and thwarting his or her scrying,” Saber mused, pulling out Kelly's chair for her.

The chair had been added next to his on his side of the large, eight-sided table they had built for their own use when they had been exiled to the isle. It struck him for a moment that there was enough room at each of the eight sides for two people to sit, not just one brother each…enough room on each of the eight sides for a husband and a wife to sit, come to think of it. Morganen had directed the size of the table during its making. Not Trevan, who was the one most talented at furniture making. Saber was going to have to talk to his youngest brother, before Morg's matchmaking tendencies got out of hand…or rather, now that the situation had definitely gotten out of hand.

Strawberry blond hair swung into his vision, as his bride-to-be sat down, drawing his eyes to her. Kelly of Doyle, seated beside him, was but the first of the Prophesied brides awaiting him and his brothers.
Or maybe I won't have a talk with him…

“You think he's been angered that much?” Kelly asked, reasoning it out for herself. “As opposed to his normal level of insane rage, I suppose? Was that triple attack the most powerful, so far? Wyvern, watersnake, and demon-thing?”

“Yes,” Wolfer rumbled, taking his own seat. “Normally he or she sends only one type of creature at a time. Once in a while, there will be two types of beast to worry about, but not often. They are expensive to create, breed, and maintain, especially when done with the need to keep their existence absolutely secret. So we have clearly angered our foe, that he would waste so much of his or her power and resources in attacking us.”

“I'm not surprised he or she would be so chary with the beasts,” Morganen asserted, as his twin and Evanor came out of the hall that led to the kitchens with the last platters of food, and Dominor descended into the hall to join them. “The Council of Mages has a policy of severely discouraging the breeding of such monsters; if the war-monsters have killed anyone, either through accidental escape or deliberately being set, the sentence is automatically death.

“This mage would have to maintain a secret compound somewhere, housing and breeding the beasts, but not a very large one, else it would have long since been discovered. And he or she would send the fast-breeding things, such as the mekhadadaks, to plague us the most—as often as one out of every two or three attacks, in other words,” he added to Kelly. Making her shiver. “In some ways I think it a miracle we've survived this long, but somehow we have, and with only a few close calls. Such as your own bout with the watersnakes.”

Kelly shook her head as she picked up her fork. “I don't see what the eight of you are harping about where I'm concerned—frankly, you're
already
plagued with a major Disaster!”

“We will track down this would-be murderer. Eventually, following the traces of his or her own power,” Wolfer rumbled with the surety of a basalt mountain. Implacable and impossible to deter from its position. “When we do, we will kill our attacker. It is that simple.”

“Our foe must be extremely powerful, though,” Dominor admitted—and that was something, that the most arrogant of the brothers would admit such a thing about someone else. “Even Morganen cannot find the source of these sendings.”

Morganen shrugged at the damned-with-faint praise. “I do work on it, whenever I have the chance to trace the energies through the aether right after an attack. But it would be better, I think, to concentrate on making that special paint first and redo every wall inside the castle with it immediately. It does make more sense that our foe uses a painting for scrying rather than memory or a mirror. It is far more likely for them to have a painting of this castle than to have come to this rarely visited isle prior to our exile.

“But now our enemy has a clear, wyvern-gained view of the exterior of the donjon and similarly clear glimpses into the interior. Painting the inner walls won't work alone. We should probably change our exterior walls as well.”

“I am loath to change the exterior blatantly. Especially using the same changing paint as we would use on the interior; it would be easier for them to study and learn the pattern if it were on the outside walls,” Saber stated, shaking his head. “I would rather have something more subtle…something different. Not as blatant. I certainly don't want the traders coming and noticing the changes in the distance and talking about them. But I don't know what.”

“Camouflage,”
Kelly said suddenly, making Wolfer eye her as he passed a basket of rolls.

“Camo-what?” the second eldest asked.

Kelly smiled. It was about time someone
else
did a terminology double take! “
Camouflage
is a word in my native language that basically means ‘to obscure or conceal through a blending with one's surroundings.' If we paint the outer walls of the castle in patterns like the jungle, it will blend into its surroundings and make it difficult for creatures like the wyverns to fly out here, spot the castle quickly, and attack before anyone knows they are here. They'll be busy hunting around looking for it, giving us more time to see them and ready ourselves for a counterattack.”

The third-eldest sighed. “I must agree. Painting over the gardens, courtyards, and all the glass of the windows would be too difficult, and the shapes of the buildings would still stand out too easily,” Dominor pointed out, making his own offering to the others. “But an
illusion
, cast over the whole of the castle grounds, added to and augmenting the warning-and-warding spells we have already cast over everything,
that
might work.”

“A combination of the two would work best,” Saber stated. “Dominor, work on the illusion; you're the best enchanter we have. If you set it in an object, we can fix it to the storm-vane on the peak of this hall, and it will be able to spread out like a dome, allowing us to see everything on the island from within as it actually appears, but still be able to hide the castle from those beyond its walls. Set it to work effectively both from a distance and from close up, and from either the ground or the air…and make it so that those who are given verbal permission from one of us to enter the compound can actually see the entrance gates and such when they do draw near.

“I would like to be able to find our home from an approach on the ground, but some camouflage at ground-level would still be helpful. Morganen, work on your paint. Try to see if you can make it last a good few decades with only minor touch-up spells. I have reason to hope it will not take much longer to find our foe, now that he or she grows more agitated at being thwarted, and thus potentially more careless. But others may think to do the same later on, if word ever gets out that there is now a woman in our hall.