by Scott Duff
“They’re attempting a resonance,” I said, turning to Gordon, who understood what I meant immediately. He’d done nearly the same thing earlier, sort of.
“Through the water tables?” he asked incredulous.
“Underneath them, all the way to the coast and back.”
“But they’ll be killed, too!”
“They’re already dead in their minds,” I argued.
“How do we stop that?” he asked, shocked at the concept. Could. Not. Blame. Him.
“One of you tell me what is going on. Now!” demanded Bishop.
“All energy is cyclic,” said Gordon. “We think the elves are driving ley line energy below the surface, probably in pulses and at specific intervals, cyclic intervals.”
“And it’s bouncing around on the rocks at different strata and coming back,” Cahill took up the story, sitting down hard on the dais. “The more they bounce around into the different layers, the more destructive resonance waves they create.”
“And you think they can create enough destructive force to destroy us here?” Bishop asked. “Bullshit.” The house shook. “Believing a little more,” Bishop said quickly. “What can this do?”
“Depending on how big the resonance gets, they could drop that mountain range into the ocean,” Gordon said, stone-faced.
Bishop shouted orders through the wards, trying to find some way to stop the elves. He sent small teams to harry the lines of elves as they moved to change the attenuation patterns.
“What can we do about this?” Peter asked. “We have to drain the energy away somehow. Stop it from bouncing back. How?”
“What does this need to look like to work?” Gordon asked. “I need a frame of reference.”
“Well, they have to be controlling the direction of flow,” I said. “They seem to be forming something like theater seating between their draws. I assume that’s when they pulse the energy, but it’s grounded and I can’t see it.”
“So they increase the amplitude of the wave with each pass. Does it look like the focal point of the ellipse is moving closer to them or farther away?” Gordon asked.
“I can’t say. It’s erratic,” I answered. I could see why he was asking though. If it was closer to them, then they were tightening their “beam” and trying to give it more direction and control.
“Bishop,” I called for his attention. “Are there mountains directly between us and the coast?”
He whipped a pad and pen out of his jacket pocket. Jumping down off the dais in front of me and sitting, he drew a squiggly line on the paper, two more almost parallel to the squiggle and an ‘x.’ “Coast, mountains, then us,” he said. A very slender corridor to the ocean, but it was enough if the elves were guiding it.
“We need to sink the energy and fast,” I turned to Peter and Gordon. “What absorbs ley line energy?”
“Your rock,” said Gordon. Both Cahill’s and Bishop’s head snapped to Gordon, shocked. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever heard of that will.” Gordon held up his battery to me, offering it to me.
“Take mine,” said Peter. “It’s almost empty anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I snapped at Peter. “Trade!” I held out my hand and Peter took it. I pushed a fresh battery into his cavern and took the nearly depleted on out. Then just because I was irritated that he took the chance, I shoved a second one over. Checking my supply, I was surprised to see six, three of them brand new and never charged. Made me wonder where I was when I made them. I kept Peter’s partially charged one and pushed two of the totally uncharged stones into my hand.
“Do you think two will be enough?” I asked Gordon.
“One will if we can funnel it right,” he answered. The house shook again, harder this time.
“We don’t have time for fine tuning here, Gordon. Let’s err in our favor,” I said.
“Okay, okay. We’ll need to bury them. Maybe a hundred, a hundred fifty yards deep. Funnel the energy into them.”
“How far away from the house do we need to be?” I asked.
“I’d guess at a half-mile, maybe a mile,” he said.
“How do I make the funnel?” I asked, twitching to stones in my hand.
“I can do that,” said Cahill, snatching one of the stones from my hand. “Take me with you.”
“I’ll do the other one,” Gordon said, snatching the other one.
“I can’t just take either one of you,” I protested. “I have to know where I’m going and how am I going to get it underground once I get there?”
“I’ll take care of that, too,” Cahill said, waving me off. “You just figure out how to get us there.” He and Gordon stood together for a moment talking quietly, then both started concentrating. I felt the light pull from both of them, the lightest touch I’d felt from either of them before.
I turned to Peter, the last person to pay any attention to me. “How do I get them out there?” I asked in frustration.
“You can create portals to places you can see but have never been to, right? Like what we did in the field a few minutes ago,” Peter said, thinking.
“Yeah, it’s how Kieran and Ethan skip the car during our trips. Why?”
“Earlier, in the wards, I moved us above the elves and you shot down on them, remember?” he prompted me. I nodded but wasn’t getting what he was saying.
“If you create a portal out into open space, say, twenty-five hundred feet out and look down, then create another one to the ground…” He was leading me like a horse and I finally drank from the stream.
“I might kill us, but it might work,” I said. “I’m willing to try. We’re short on options.” The house shook again. The tremors were coming more often with greater strength. I turned to the Cahills and heard a crackling ripple, similar to tin foil tearing. Peter appeared suddenly next to Gordon, smiling at me.
“I’ll take Gordon,” he said. “He’s more resilient, just in case I drop him.”
“How…?” I started to ask.
“I learned it from you,” Peter said. “Maybe with practice, I can get as smooth as you, but I doubt it.”
I moved up quickly to Cahill and quickly considered how to do this. I couldn’t hold him, he was too round. Turning around, I bent to one knee. “Okay, Felix, piggy back, arms around my neck, put the rock in your pocket.” Peter had more fun.
“Howdy, handsome,” he said to Gordon then grasped him in a bear hug, wrapped them both in a portal, and they were gone.
I grabbed Felix’s arms tightly and thrusted up, wrapping us both in portals, and then we were falling. Damn, it was dark. I could barely see the ground. I moved us closer before we could gain speed. Then a little farther north. Cahill started choking me. I moved us closer. Then we were crashing into the ground and rolling. The armor absorbed most of my impact. I stood and helped Cahill to his feet.
“You all right, Felix?” I asked. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but he’d be bruised in the morning. “Felix?”
“Aye, aye,” he muttered, his brogue reverting under stress. “Ah’m fine. Just a wee bit shocked, is all.” He stood up a little shakily and tried to orient himself. “Where’s the house?”
“Back that way,” I said pointing back over our shoulders, then forward of us. “The coast is that way.”
He pulled the orange stone from his pocket and placed it on the ground. He planted his feet solidly to the earth, reared back both arms and slammed both hands together directly over the stone. The clap he created with his hands alone sounded like a strike of lightening in the summer sky as a storm began. It was a comfortably dangerous sound. A few moments later, I heard an answering crack about a half a mile away. Peter and Gordon had made it. The ground shook again as the energy wave passed underneath us on its way once again to the coast, gathering speed and power again.
I scanned the hillside. We weren’t that far from the house—considering the speed of an elf, it is easily possible to run into one or twenty. I might be invisible to them, but Felix was
n’t. Felix was… Felix was hurting himself.
“Stop!” I yelled at him. “What are you doing?” It was purely reflex on my part. With two giant strides, I grabbed him by his coat and waist and hoisted him away from the hole he was digging. At the same time, I yanked every bit of the power out of his body that was tearing through him like tissue paper. It was a considerable amount of energy, but I also had plenty of storage space. As carefully as possible, I laid him on the grassiest spot available.
Unhooking the Day’s scabbard from my belt, I knelt beside him and scanned around us again. Calling everything else in, I had the Stone cover us in a veneer of grass, dirt, and stone, almost mirroring the current background excluding us. Pulling the Day out six inches gave me enough light to see Cahill. His face was wracked in a scream he wouldn’t let out. It was a horrifying sight.
Shoving both palms down onto his massive chest, I urged power down through tortured channels to soothe blocked passages. Damn, I didn’t know what I was doing here. He was hurting in so many different places that I didn’t know where to start. Any place was better than indecision. I released the tension in his arms, pushing down on the nerve structures. Blood flow was sluggish. Moving into his shoulders and chest, I panicked again. More and bigger problems. He wasn’t breathing right and his heart was seizing, beating irregularly and incompletely. The muscles were stretched and crushed in places. The impulses from his brain were timed wrong, too—totally chaotic. He was having a heart attack.
“Damn it, Felix! I don’t know how to fix this,” I whispered hoarsely. I pushed the tears and rips in his aura together and slapped patches down to hold them together. Euphemistically speaking, anyway, but it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t keep his heart working right. They’d hold till later. I pushed blue facsimiles of my hands into his chest and cuddled his heart gently, surrounding the trembling organ. Then I melted them around it and into it. Using mine as an example, I tried to see what was wrong. Much of it was age but there was damage there as well. I cut off the electrical signals to the muscles, forcing my imaginary hands into the form his heart needed to be and started squeezing. I had to keep a regular tempo with that—squeezing—while I rebuilt the muscle.
Muscle, I would need to steal some of his muscle cells. Shooting down to his abdomen, I stole cells from everywhere. I’d done this before so it was quick. I was almost finished when the ground shook so hard we were almost torn apart.
Little Brother.
“Little busy right now, Pete,” I said through the connection he just opened.
You have about two minutes before that wave hits. It’s growing exponentially. One wasn’t enough.
“Damn it. I need help, Peter. Felix is hurt.”
I’m stuck at the house, Seth. Let me see what I can do.
Timing, I needed to adjust his timing. That was in the brain, right? That … looked right. Maybe his hormones were screwing it up. My mind was tossing Latin phrases at me at blinding speed and I didn’t need any of it. I needed functions, not names, with paths and purposes. Send blood to his lungs and out into his body. Oh, damn, he wasn’t breathing either. Suddenly I had a third arm, shining bright blue, forcing his chest to rise and fall slowly.
We’re on our way. I hope this works. The Stone pulled the façade away and the Day slid another six inches out of its sheath.
The emotional part of me knew I wasn’t going to make it, that I’d seen him too late. If I was going to lose him here, then at least he was going to know the little bit about the legacy he left behind. Taking his pain into me, the first memory I pushed into his mind was of Enid as she delighted in dancing through the wards of their home. It was a delightfully elegant image of ethereal beauty. She contrasted his almost geological frame in an interesting fashion.
I went to Martin next. Starting with MacNamara’s, I stepped through every experience I had with Marty, highlighting the ones I was proudest of—Dunstan’s and helping the Ferrins. He was a good kid. How they’d managed to raise him without him being a stuck-up snob, I’d never know.
“There! They’re over there!” I couldn’t tell who yelled that, but the Day wasn’t threatened so I ignored it.
Gordon was a lot easier. I had more to show on Gordon.
“Da!”
“Gordon, find the battery! We’ve got less than a minute!”
The first meeting we had when he was confident with himself but scared to death of us, the Great and Powerful Wizards of Oz. So eager to please that he rolled in a full-length mirror so I could see my armor. Willing to help his friends, like his brother, that he put them in job interviews just to get their names on a future possibility list.
“There! About a hundred feet down.”
“Need another sixty at least.”
Smart, too. Protective of his people and the public. The prism wave from the side of the road in Dublin showed that. Just before he killed for the first time. Then I showed him Gordon running down a dark path behind me, gathering his power as he ran. I let him feel the strength of his son’s energy and resolve as he followed me into a totally unknown situation, knowing he might not survive it. And I showed him the results of his son’s resolve.
Something hit the ground nearby and I turned to look. Peter and Gordon were there, staring at the hole Felix made. It had collapsed when the last wave hit. Gordon punched the ground near it hard. His shirt was ripped to shreds, his chest and back shining with sweat in the moonlight. He punched again with his left on the same spot, and again with a right, driving his power down into the dirt and stone below us. He was beating the battery further into the ground. I showed this to Felix, too. This was his boy, his legacy.
“Release it, Gordon,” Peter said. “Release the damn spell! NOW!”
Gordon slammed his fist one more time into the ground with a savage snarl that would have sent a gorilla back into the jungle, then collapsed. The ground shook and I felt the energy rushing toward us through the ground as it shook unlike any of the previous tremors. As it crested and met with other waves, bouncing and increasing its amplitude, it finally met with something new. The funnel Cahill had created in front of my battery had sprung to life and started its work. As with most everything in the universe, the energy suddenly found an easier path to follow than going through rock and stone, so it took it. The energy flowed through the funnel and into the battery. Very little to destroy in there.
“See, Felix, you done good,” I said to him.
“Da!” Gordon called hoarsely, rolling himself up off the ground. He was caked in dirt and twigs, muddy now. “Oh, lord, Da!” He scuttled across the ground to the other side of his father, grabbing his hand in both of his. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said softly. “He was burying the battery while I watched the surrounding area. When I turned to look at him, he was trying to push it down through a massive amount of pain. It looked like his chest had been crushed. When I got him on the ground, he was having a heart attack and he wasn’t breathing. I don’t know how to fix this, Gordon. Right now, I’m keeping him alive, but I don’t know how long I can keep doing this. I’m sorry, I’m just not good enough.”
“Can we get him to a healer?” he asked?
“Where?”
“We can’t get back to the house. It’s still too thick there,” said Peter. “And I don’t know the world well enough to open portals into other places.”
“A hospital, then,” Gordon said. “Any place is better than here!” I had to agree with that.
“I don’t know any hospitals, Gordon,” I said softly.
“Is he in pain?” Peter asked, coming up behind me.
I didn’t want to answer that. “Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?” Gordon asked.
“Seth, are you—” Peter started, but I interrupted him.
“Hush, Peter. Felix is very aware of his surroundings. I’m sure he’s frustrated enough.”
“Is that why you can’t do anything else, Seth?” Pet
er asked me, kneeling down beside me and putting his hand on my shoulder.
“Among other things, yes,” I said, keeping my voice even and light. “And no, Felix, I won’t do that. I will accept failure, but I will not accept giving up.” He needed to know that, captive of his body as he was. Emotionally he was in turmoil. Hit with immense pain until I took it from him, his body was still in the throes of a heart attack. I hadn’t found what was causing the problem to start with and I’d been controlling his heart for moments only. Correctly was still in question. So was blood gas level. Was he getting enough oxygen to his brain?
Felix brushed his consciousness against mine weakly. Well, I’m sure he pushed as hard as he could at that moment. Opening up my mind is a bad analogy for what actually happens. It’s more of an intertwining acceptance of being alive and having purpose and determination. Yeah, let’s just say I opened my mind as widely as I could to him, much like I had with Peter. What I got from him was a barrage of images of his family on his estate doing various everyday things. His sons pulling pranks on each other, thinking they hadn’t been caught. Dancing with his wife at a family wedding. Each of his sons’ births. He wanted to go home to die.
“Why, Felix, that is a very good idea,” I said, still keeping my voice even. And I leaned forward to look down into his eyes to make certain I had his attention. “But Felix, if I do this for you, you have to make me a promise. You have to promise me you won’t give up on me. Win or lose, just don’t give up.”
Sitting back down on the back of my feet, I made sure I held Felix together as well as I could. His nervous system was firing like mad throughout his chest, arms, and legs, and I was holding it back from him by taking it myself. If I knew more or even had more time and control, maybe I could block it instead, but I was afraid I would cause more harm if I tried that. Now my problem was I was going to have to divert my limited attention to creating a portal to the Cahill’s home.
“Peter, Gordon, move in close, please,” I said. “This is going to be tight.”
They were confused by the request, having no idea what I was plotting with Felix, but they huddled in close. I pictured the room in the Cahill’s home I wanted the portal to open into and exactly how large the openings would have to be, trying to expend as little effort as possible in the transfer. It was still going to hurt. As soon as I let go of that control for something else, it would be like trying to grab the loose end of a firehose in the dark. Without any prompting from me, the Day Sword rose from the ground quickly and floated into the space about Felix and the foundation Stone lifted all of us a foot off the ground.