by Scott Duff
Kieran turned to Ethan, eyebrow cocked but not saying a word. Ethan glanced up quickly, then back down at the ground, blushing in embarrassment, running thick fingers through his fine blond hair.
“I’m sorry, Seth. It seemed harmless at the time, but you’re right. I can’t protect someone I’m not even close to,” he said, humbly.
“I thought I was helping,” said Peter, giving me a weak smile and a shrug. “I’m sorry.”
“That is a reasonable plan, little brother,” said Kieran, nodding to me as he started us moving down the aisle again. I fell in step with them beside Peter. We passed the fallen shelves and headed for the double swinging doors at the end of the aisle. Peter put his arm over my shoulders and pointed to the broad yellow lines painted on the floor around the aisles. Whistling a few bars from “We’re Off the See the Wizard” got him a mild chuckle from me and relieved a little of my tension.
“Where is Shrank?” I asked, suddenly remembering him there somewhere.
“Right here, Master Seth,” he squeaked, barely audibly. He was on Peter’s shoulder, wrapped in his aura, hidden. I guess if he had to hide in an aura, it had to be Peter’s.
“We’ll explain this in another place, Seth,” whispered Kieran, pushing open the swinging doors.
What lay beyond was a big empty room. It still had loads of ambient energy flowing through it but nothing else. Facing us was a rolling door big enough to drive a semi through and to the right of that another set of double doors with a crash bar. We headed for that. Ethan slowed as we got within a few feet of them, looking back and forth between the doors and the rolling door.
“Wait,” he said, before Peter pushed the door open. “That leads outside.”
“Yeah,” said Peter, slowly. “That’s where the portal is, right?”
“Yes and no,” Ethan answered. “All space has direction inherent in it. A portal is built to branch two different spaces together in directions that are not natural to it. The result is that you can have a portal that can only be reached in a particular direction if that is what you want. That’s what we’ve got here. It’s on the other side of that door, but it’s flat. We’re gonna have to raise the door.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, not understanding. “What do you mean, space has direction ‘inherent’? There is no inherent direction in the space we’re in right now.”
“Yes, there is,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “You’re just used to it. Left, right, up, down, front, and back. Six directions of mobility, though you could consider three of them as negative aspects of the others.”
“Okay,” said Peter, apparently understanding the argument easily. I, on the other hand, was going to have to think about that for a while. I mean, I’ve dealt with this conceptually in physics and mathematics for several years, but in reality? Reaching up beside the exit door to the right, he hit a bright yellow button marked “Up” and joined us in the center of the room as the door started rolling up into the ceiling. Light poured into the room as the door rolled and the ambient energy level shot up incredibly high, flooding the room. When the door finished rising, the back dock looked like… well, a back dock, but with huge striations of power, as thick as telephone poles, emanating around the edges shooting off into the sky in all directions in dark blue and black but wrapped in a bright pink. It felt violent, reeked of violence even.
“I believe this is when we need an invitation,” Kieran said calmly, staring out the door.
“Yes,” came a voice behind us. We all jerked around to face the newcomer none of us had felt come up.
Newcomers, there were three of them. In the doorway to the warehouse stood the elf from the pictures of my grandfather and my parents. He seemed taller here and less colorful. His hair was completely white and hung loosely on his head, feathering back slightly around his face, ears protruding through it and far more pointed and swept back. His skin looked like pure ivory, unblemished by time. His eyes had two colors in them, a pale blue like the earliest morning sky rimmed ever so slightly with the orange of the rising sun. The pin-stripes in his white day suit matched the blue of his eyes as perfectly as his tiepin and cuff-links matched the orange rim. He held matching pale blue gloves in his hands atop the black cane, casually askew as he watched the four of us. His top hat was missing, though.
On either side of him, a step back, stood two identical elves, identically attired in white suit with tails, a gold vest and white shirt and tie. They looked like snobby butlers to me. Same white hair falling to their shoulders. Same pointed ears poking out slightly. Their eyes were darker blue, rimmed in the same orange, and their skin was still as pale. But they didn’t have quite the same sense of presence.
“MacNamara,” Kieran said, bowing his head politely to the lead elf. “It is an honor to meet again.”
“Ehran McClure,” said the elf on the right, not the one I thought was MacNamara at all, but that one did return Kieran’s head bow. “It is an honor.”
“You have changed over the years,” said the elf on the left.
“Such is the way of mortals,” said Kieran, still to the center elf. I was getting confused.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” asked the right elf.
“We are searching for my father and his mother,” said Kieran. “Our research has led us to your games. We wish to talk to several people there.”
“You?” asked the left, inflecting disbelief.
“Wish to join the games?” asked the right while the center elf seemed horrified.
“No,” said Kieran quickly. “We merely want to talk to certain people.”
“Then why should I?” asked the left, petulantly.
“An exchange?” asked Kieran, coyly. “Information?”
“What could you,” started the right elf.
“…have that I want?” finished the left elf.
Kieran merely smiled and shrugged slightly, teetering up and down on the balls of his feet. I was getting the hang of the outer elves talking for the middle one. It was like bad stereo. The elf stared at Kieran for a moment, assessing his demeanor.
“Very well, McClure,” said the right.
“An exchange, then,” said the left. I could feel the inherent threat in the word exchange, though. The right elf held up an over-sized square envelope, but made no effort to approach us.
“The Black Hand has lost its bite,” Kieran said softly.
All three elves stood stock-still, staring at Kieran. MacNamara’s face was surprised and his eyes searched Kieran’s for signs of deception. After a moment, he started laughing, heartily and deep in his belly. He did, not the right and left elves. They were too busy being shocked and staring at MacNamara. He threw his head back laughing. It echoed through the empty room and it took him a few minutes to stop.
“I thought that might amuse you,” Kieran said mildly, crossing his arms in front of him.
“Who else knows of this?” MacNamara himself asked in a high tenor, his voice cracking from under use.
“Oh, one would assume its masters,” Kieran answered, mildly. “There may be a few humans who have seen one or two of the teeth in use once or twice.”
“Do you know who? How?” he asked, moving forward and taking a more amicable position to Kieran’s right, gesturing politely to lead through the open doorway. We fell in behind them and his compatriots turned to each other simultaneously, then fell into step behind us. Ethan and I both glanced back several times at them, but they merely marched along with us, watching MacNamara.
Walking through the portal wasn’t like I’d imagined it would be. I figured it would be like walking through a sheet of water, feeling the plane hit you as you traveled through it until you were done. I watched Kieran and MacNamara walk through. They were there then not there. When I stepped into the plane, I felt the difference immediately. It felt like a heavy wet blanket covered my entire body all over, suffocating me, lifting me up, twisting me, then it was gone and I was through and in a different environment
completely. I looked back and the elves appeared behind me like they didn’t have a care in the world. The portal wasn’t there anymore.
We’d come out onto grass, a pasture it looked like, a dozen yards or so from what looked like the entrance of a circus a hundred years ago. Huge poles dug into the ground held colorful banners across the promenade, guy wires streaming down on two sides of each pole with pennants running down their length. Canvas tents and pavilions stretched down to the left and right. There were plenty of trees around. The sky was bright and sunny, but the wrong color from the sky we’d just came from and completely cloudless.
“Someone has taken ownership of each, yes,” said Kieran, smiling up at the elf. MacNamara stood a good six inches taller than Kieran when he stood up straight.
“A bargain for another time, then?” MacNamara said, raising his brows and turning to survey our troop. His elves took up station behind him again.
“I imagine it will become obvious before I can use such with you,” said Kieran, showing dejection I don’t think he felt. MacNamara chuckled as we bunched up behind Kieran.
“Perhaps,” he answered, nodding slightly. “Since your exchange was so amusing to me, let me offer this gift: know the rules. It is a dangerous place in there. Now I must take my leave.” MacNamara turned and evaporated into thin air. At least that’s what it looked like. The other two elves went with him, leaving the four of us at the gate to his carnival.
As a group, we turned to look through the posts. It was a big letdown, really. All the stress and worry of getting here, going through the warehouse, facing down a massively powerful elf to stand in front of a county fair. From here, it looked like an empty county fair.
“Well, let’s go find Grandpa,” I said and took the first step in.
Chapter 14
“Wait, Seth,” said Kieran, uneasily. “I have to do something unpleasant first. Shrank?”
“Yes, sir. I’m ready,” said the pixie, sullenly, flying out from Peter’s shoulder to face Kieran, hovering at chest height.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking over at Peter. He didn’t know either, apparently. There must’ve been conversations neither of us had been privy to. Kieran gathered power from around us, an easy task since the environment was rich with it.
“I did the pixie a disservice, it seems,” said Ethan softly. “Even though it was what he wanted and every Fae dreams of. When I removed his geas, I removed them all, which included the Original Geas, passed from mother to child. It governs, among other things, fealty to the Queens. Without that, he would be seen as a Wylde Fae by his peers, to be either slain or tamed. Kieran is going to replace that geas with another. Neither of them wants this, but both know the consequences of doing without it.”
“Catch-22,” said Peter, nodding grimly. I’d read the book a few years back. Didn’t really care for it.
Ethan just watched as Kieran moved the energy he collected in a circle between Shrank and himself. It coalesced into a band of gold, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Shrank stared at it, horrified. Kieran mumbled low, moving his hands about in the air in a complicated pattern, shifting the ring of power. A fine script flowed around the outside edge of the ring as if engraving itself on the band. Palms out, Kieran pushed the ring to the pixie until it spun slowly around him. Kieran mumbled more urgently, faster, and the ring spun faster and faster. Shrank stopped beating his wings and merely hung in space as the golden ring spun on a different axis and took on a bubble shape. He hung limply, his arms and wings drooping and his tongue lolling out. Kieran clapped his hands together, the golden bubble burst, and Shrank fell to the ground like a stone, bouncing. Ethan caught him before he hit twice, coddling him to his chest and taking the pixie carefully to Kieran.
“That hit him harder than I expected,” said Kieran softly, looking at Shrank.
“It is an old magic,” said Ethan, just as softly. “He will recover quickly, and he will be happy to not hide from his own.”
A feminine voice called our attention back to the entrance. A lone elf stood between the banner posts calling out quietly in a language I didn’t know. She could plainly see us, so I assumed she wasn’t talking to us. Kieran strode forward a few steps and spoke to her in the same language, full of vowels and rolling consonants. She was briefly surprised that Kieran spoke but hid it quickly. Whatever Kieran was saying, she didn’t believe readily. She was easier to read than MacNamara or his goons. They went back and forth for a few minutes, with Kieran apparently asking questions and the woman supplying answers. She pointed to the banners and the pennants running down the guy wires at one point, then back behind her generally. They bowed their heads toward each other and took a step back, then she turned and walked back into the empty concourse.
We split the distance between us, meeting Kieran halfway to the entrance. Shrank was stirring drunkenly in Ethan’s cupped hands.
“Either Peter’s information was off by a day,” said Kieran, “or MacNamara held us up for a day. I wouldn’t put it past him, either.”
“Could that be why it felt like being wrapped in a wet blanket?” I asked, thinking about how I felt when I walked through the rift.
“Yes, but I didn’t feel that,” Kieran said, looking to Ethan, who shook his head. “He hid it pretty well from us. I wonder if he just didn’t hide it from you or if you saw through him?”
I just shrugged. “All I did was feel a wet blanket.”
“Where are we exactly?” asked Peter.
“In Faery, in MacNamara’s realm,” answered Kieran.
“Is that in Winter or in Summer,” Peter asked.
“Neither. MacNamara holds no sovereigns,” said Kieran, calmly. His green eyes sparkled as he let Peter absorb the information. I had no idea where it led.
“But that’s not possible. You just said so,” he said to Ethan.
“Yes, I did,” Ethan admitted, smiling coyly. “And yet, no one dares the attempt against him. What does that tell you?”
Peter thought for a second, then muttered, “That he’s one bad mamma-jamma.”
We all laughed.
“I don’t know what that means,” said Kieran, still smiling, “but I think the essence of it is correct.”
I glanced up at the sky for a rough estimate of the time. It looked like we had about five hours to dark and I had a sinking feeling that things were going too well for us so far. Back in town, we’d seen over a hundred men. At the warehouse, we only saw one man and one whatsit. And here, nothing. I didn’t want to say anything about it, though, thinking that maybe I’d just seen too many movies. But Peter seemed overly anxious, too. He met my glance evenly and sighed.
“I’m waiting for the teen-aged girl in high heels and a bikini to run by screaming,” he said. “That’d just about complete this scenario.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kieran, raising his eyebrows at the statement.
“This is too easy. We’re being setup for something,” Peter said, waving his hands at the entrance.
“Oh, very definitely,” Kieran said. “MacNamara was aware of our presence from the moment Seth tossed his worker around in the restaurant and the warehouse was far more populated than we saw. We would not be here if MacNamara didn’t want it so.”
Shrank flew up from Ethan’s hands, still a little shaken. He shook off a rainbow of sparkles behind him briefly before righting himself. He flew in lazy circles around us, like he was getting used to flying again. He stopped suddenly, eyeing the pennants on the guy wires, then shot directly to Kieran, stopping barely a foot in front of his face.
“Lord Kieran, we should hurry,” he squeaked, red dust falling in an anxious column under him. “The opening games begin at dusk, barely over four hours from now. If we’re caught out when the Challenges start…”
“We will decline,” said Kieran, matter-of-factly. “I hold that right.”
“Yes, Lord,” squealed Shrank, cowering in the air slightly. “But Master Seth may not, nor Master Peter.”
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“Can we continue this conversation while we move?” I asked. “I’m feeling kinda open out here.”
“I don’t think the high heels would affect him,” Ethan said to Peter in a stage whisper, pointing at Shrank and grinning.
“Shrank, quit cowering. You aren’t arguing with me,” Kieran said, testily. Shrank seemed to relax slightly. “We’ll say they’re apprentices. I am teaching them, after all.”
“That is certainly true and may work,” said Shrank, bobbing in the air, “but the bigger issue is what Master Seth carries. If certain people learn that, it will not matter his status. He could be forced to compete. The thinking would be he is incapable of controlling and wielding such magnificence, any one of them much less all of them. The Queens will support that and it is unlikely that MacNamara will deny them both. They are of Fairy manufacture, after all.”
“Pfft,” I snorted. “No, they’re not.” I was certain of the Sword of Night; it had told me itself. And I was fairly certain of the others as well. The base languages in the deepest magicks aren’t Faery.
“What?” asked Kieran, Peter, and Shrank, at the same time.
I glanced at Ethan, who looked back and shrugged. “I could have told you that,” he said, moving to the gate and looking back and forth down the concourse. He turned back to us and waited.
“So we find a place to hole up,” said Kieran, shaking his head. “Then you tell me what you know about these new teeth you have that I seem to know so little about.”
We joined Ethan in the concourse, picking the right for no particular reason and started walking. I sent my senses floating out while we walked. There were people here, in the tents, either hidden or just resting, guarding their belongings. Certainly, there was abundant power in the air, floating in lines and waves. Huge arcs of it soared overhead as if shielding the area.
“Where is everybody?” Peter muttered nervously after about a hundred yards. It was rather eerie.
“I don’t know,” said Kieran, “but I think it’s high time we find out.” He went to the nearest tent and pulled open the flap slightly, calling, “Hello!” And elderly male voice called back, “Anon! Anon!”