Sons (Book 2) (126 page)

“How do you know this?” Thomas asked nervously.

“I have a copy, Thomas.  There’s a list of signatures on that document.  All I have to do is read.”

“Seth,” Ethan said, quietly catching my attention.  “Even to me, that sounded insufferable.  Do you want us to perform what the First so lovingly referred to as a ‘Stickeckomy’ on you?”  He grinned with just enough earnestness to make me snicker.

“I know,” I drawled out slowly.  “I’m sorry, Thomas, I’m being an ass, but I seem to be spending a lot of time with that damn thing lately.  People don’t seem to understand how specific you have to get when dealing with it.  Next time I think I’ll say I’m just not interested.”

Gordon walked to the front and peered up at the map of Europe.  “Ted, can you draw on the borders, please?”

“How deep?” Ted asked stepping around Gordon to the other side of the screen.

“Country and state or province with major metropolitan areas marked,” Gordon said, then glanced sideways at Ted.  “Not my first time at a rodeo.  Major highways and railways would be good, too.”

Seth—!
Ethan called through the anchor. 
What’s going on? You’re affecting others now.  Gordon doesn’t talk that way.

It looks that way, but I don’t know how
, I answered. 
My shields are tight or you’d see.  It’s as if the Palace was aggravated about something…
  That gave me an idea and I flooded Peter’s apartment with a low level sensing.  There were three of them.  I’ve not seen them so close before.  One in the wall above the stairs, one in the ceiling behind the screen and the last one hiding in the wall between the two rooms.  Setting up three small Faraday cages around them, I snatched the energy “gels” out of the wall and stood up quickly.

“Excuse us, please.  First, Ellorn,” I said and shifted the three of us to the Throne room, including the Faraday cages.  Ellorn turned and looked at the house still taking a quarter of the room.

“Clear the room, please,” Ellorn called loudly but not really yelling.  The order was echoed through the geas on both faery and human levels.  A slow stream of men and brownies came out the front door and left in two different directions.  Once they hit the Road, though,  First cranked the Road and had people flying out the doors while he slowly closed them.

Releasing the hard shell around the Faraday cages first, I sat down on the steps and looked at the tiny drops of congealed Faery magic.  Each one had a very slight sense of the Palace about it and where previously they emoted a sense of what Ethan called “insufferable,” now they were showing intense curiosity.

“What are they, Lord?” Ellorn asked quietly, staring at the nearly unseeable dots of power.

“I don’t know,” I answered.  “But if they’re affecting my guests, I need to get a handle on them fast.”  The three small power cells drifted lightly in the air free of the cages, gravitating toward Ellorn in the slightest fashion.  “So far I’ve only seen one in a room at a time, but there are thousands in the Palace.  They don’t seem to have any real intelligence to them on their own.”

“Maybe a sort of consciousness from them as a group?” Jimmy suggested.  “Just spread out pretty far?”  As he said this, several more dots of energy congealed into the room, hiding behind the house and in the walls, floor, and ceiling.

“Not a bad idea,” I agreed, rising off the steps and moving to the Throne.  The tools of the Palace were very strong and frankly, I was more than a little reticent to use them because of that.  The Throne was no exception.  The moment I sat down I saw the lines and flows of energy throughout the Palace that indicated every spell and potential change the Palace could make right then.  And these little “gels” of me were at the root of every bit of it.  “All right, it’s time for all of you to come together now,” I told the three in front of me quietly.  “You have the pathways you need.  Why are you trying to stay so diffuse?”

They started coming at the speed of thought, clustering around the first three.  In seconds the entire Palace was empty of them except for this room.  Tiny packets of energy in a massive swirl near Ellorn made me a little nervous, but he watched intently as they started merging with each other.  There was apparently an order to it as they sought out appropriate groupings.  Just shy of four minutes later a form of elven grace and design but shorter than Jimmy by a head.  It smiled at us and edged closer to Ellorn.

“Curious,” Ellorn commented.  “I have the most complete picture of the Palace that I have ever had at this moment.  I can even see the ‘non-presence’ of your brothers, but you shine most brightly, Lord Daybreak.”

“So you can see me?” I asked it as I examined its genderless form, or rather, genital-less form.  It definitely was male—Okay, just cut the crap.  The damn thing was Ellorn stretched out another two feet.  It was an interesting change to his features.  “Not another ‘I-not-I’,” I muttered, remembering my first name for Ethan.  “Ellorn, meet your authority.  Tell me, out of curiosity, have you been fighting a Change?”

Ellorn looked stricken, caught.  He gulped, answering slowly, stuttering, “Y-y-yes, Lord.”  Jimmy sat down on the steps close to Ellorn, concerned for the brownie.

“Why?  Damn, Ellorn, that’s
got
to hurt!” Jimmy said.

“And you know we don’t care,” I said.  “Gilán is causing the Changes to make life better for you and I will do everything I can to fill in any shortfalls.  Ellorn, you have to know I’d take care of you of all people.”

“I have no doubts of that, my Lord,” Ellorn said, smiling broadly.  “My change began the night I arrived here.  I asked the Palace to help stop it because my people needed a symbol of consistency at the higher levels.  My needs were not paramount at that time, sir.  When you began taking an interest in the Changed, the need for consistency increased as parents started prodding their children, trying to evoke a Change and therefore attract your attention.  Since then, you’ve been busy and I haven’t thought to bother you with it.”

I gawked at Jimmy.  “It’s Braedon all over again.”  Reaching across the Palace to my garden, I plucked two
Esteleum
from a bush and tossed one to Ellorn.  “Load up.  It looks like you’re gonna need it.”

“Now?  We’re doing this now, sir?” Ellorn asked, though he expected it.

“It’s either that or we watch this blue thing do pornographic things to you,” Jimmy said, giggling.

“No!  Not yet you don’t!” I told it, getting up and scooting down the steps to get closer.  It stepped back a foot from Ellorn, which meant there was now a foot and a half-inch between them.  “You don’t get to invade him until you’ve helped undo what you’ve done.  You blocked his Change.  Now you get to help make it as fast and as painless as possible.”

While our blue ghost wasn’t much in the intelligence department, he followed orders with the quickness of lightning.  Literally hundreds of thin shards of blue lightning arced instantly between them and Ellorn seized in a silent scream of horrific pain he didn’t feel.  Bones elongated and divided, lengthening his body and growing another two and a half feet taller.  Muscles, skin, and cartilage stretched over bone at the same speed and I could only imagine what his internal organs were going through.  His skull virtually exploded out of his face before the skin and musculature could form around it.  His whole transformation was violent, gruesome, but totally clean except for the ash of his clothing.

The lightning stopped and both Jimmy and me jumped to grab the faltering Ellorn.  “Eat,” I murmured, shoving an
Esteleum
in his hand as we turned him gently onto the steps.  My definitions on space were getting less fixed in reality as I grabbed a blanket off my bed and wrapped it around his shoulders as he shook from shock.  We both studied his new body while he rested.  Ellorn changed into an amalgam of an elf and a man, a hybrid.  At barely five feet tall, he was a short man and a very short elf, but I had a feeling we weren’t quite done yet.  He’d gone from a short and clunky brownie who moved with a lopsided grace born of oversized feet and hands to a thin and elegant young man, basically, with long fingers on narrow hands.  Outwardly, the only physical marks of faery on him were his slightly curled ears poking out of his shoulder-length, curly hair; the oval-shaped pupils; and the second iris of Gilán’s influence. 

Inwardly was a much different story.  His aura still said “Ellorn” but not “brownie.”  Even his geas caste changed, which was normal for any Changed, but it caused a shift in the hierarchies in my mind.  Ellorn moved from the top of the Palace, second of the Brownies, to a point near the Garrison Commanders.  The entire Palace section of the hierarchy came with him.  The genome pattern in the caste looked like it would be Gilán’s version of an elf if I was reading it right, with a healthy dose of human characteristics thrown in.  There were differences in organs between a man and Ellorn.  He has a dual larynx that allows him to speak in both human and most Faery tongues without resorting to magic.  His lungs could pull oxygen from a much poorer environment, but handle worse air quality than men in general and there were reservoirs where oxygen could be stored.  The concentration of muscle tissue and bone tissue meant that he was stronger than Faery elves.  I couldn’t tell if he’d be faster and he was already smarter.

“How do you feel, Ellorn?” I asked gently.

He glanced over at me, still trembling.  “Weak and dizzy,” he whispered.

“What can I do for you?”

“You just being here is enough, Lord.”  He wasn’t seeking communion, but I infused the room with my power and created the link anyway.  Not certain it would work, I attempted a similar link with the Palace authority and found the communication between them open and easy.  “There are more in the Palace who should change similarly, Lord Daybreak.  I can feel it.  The Palace has blocked those Changes because of me.  I am so ashamed.”

“You made a mistake, Ellorn,” Jimmy said consolingly.  “Nobody’s dead, nobody’s hurt.  We’re fixing it.”

“How many are we talking about, anyway?” I asked, watching the blue ectomorph continue to smile at us.

“One thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven,” Ellorn said weakly.  “I think.”

“All Palace brownies?” I asked easily.  The communion bond allowed him to see I wasn’t mad at him, just concerned for him and his fellows.

“Y-yes, Lord,” Ellorn stammered, after thinking about it.

“We’ll get to them once we figure out why you’ve stalled, then,” I said, comforting him.  “Can you see any reason for it?”

“No, Lord, except that in most cases of Change, that person’s immediate family is present to help soothe the transitions,” Ellorn explained.  “But you and First are, by definition, as immediate as family gets with faery.  And my clansmen are several levels away, distant cousins, at best.”

“I think you’re misjudging how well liked you really are, Ellorn,” Jimmy said with smile.  He opened the doors to the Throne Room, revealing the entire population of the Palace standing in the corridors, quietly listening for any noise that might pass through them.  “If y’all are really quiet, I bet you could all sneak in and Daybreak won’t notice.” 

The Palace energy form did something curious then: two forms, exact duplicates of itself, split off from the first and moved to the doors.  They directed traffic, more or less, selecting some of the brownies to stand at one side of the Throne.  Being nervous creatures by nature, I made a point of speaking to them calmly and soothingly and told them there was nothing to be worried about.  I was a little surprised when the entire Garrison filed in last.  I felt ten shifts, three through the veil and seven across it, and my brothers and Dad appeared on the podium behind us.  Mike and the guys were with Ted and Ric.  The entire population of the Palace was in this room, except for the Guardsmen at the house in London.  Mitch even brought Donny and Ana, dressed for bed, to see what was happening, sitting with the clan from their apartment.  The Palace entity allowed Mitch and the kids to sit with them, even though they were among those to be Changed.

Their thoughts weren’t difficult to read quickly either.

“Ellorn, it seems to me that you’ve built one very large and very concerned ‘immediate family’ in a very short time,” I told my newest geno-type, scruffling his unbelievably soft hair.  “It hasn’t triggered the rest of the Change, though, has it?”

“No, sir, but it is… unexpected,” Ellorn whispered.

“Why?” Shrank asked, flying in circles about us.  “You’ve helped everyone in here, Ellorn, and usually in profound ways.  How the Garrison discovered your assistance in the food drives, I don’t know.”

“He’s the only person who could have done it so quickly, Shrank,” Peter said, sitting on the steps facing one of the segregated groups of brownies.  “These blue men feel like the Palace.  Are they Ellorn’s Authority?”

“Yeah, it’s been inhabiting the walls waiting for Ellorn’s Change,” I mumbled and studied him in the geas.  The answer had to be here, in this amazingly complex melding of power and consciousnesses.  Frankly, I didn’t see a problem.  “Ellorn, do elves have a specific purpose in the Faery scheme of the world?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question, Lord,” Ellorn said looking up at me.  “You haven’t been especially definitive in regards to that, so we’ve been making assignments by talents instead.”

“Can you work magic, Ellorn?” Peter asked, reaching out his left hand to touch his aura in places.