There were four doors out of the Array’s room and Brandon made it a point to check on each of them every five minutes. He wasn’t sure what he expected to change about them. However that didn’t stop him from walking the perimeter of the room, listening at each door and making sure they were still unlocked. It was the best he could do.
Sheriff Warwick and Cassie were both wrapped up in keeping the lines of communication between the two search teams open. That didn’t leave him with much to do as he made his slow circuit of the room. To pass the time he picked up various pieces of paraphernalia from the shelves and examined them as he walked, putting them down where he was when he lost interest. He could tell by his sister’s wrinkled brow she didn’t approve. Based on what he’d seen so far, Brandon thought leaving von Nighburg’s sanctum in disarray was the mildest possible rebuke the blackguard could get so he didn’t feel bad about doing it.
He’d just started his second loop around the room when Warrwick stirred and said, “Your sister wants to know what’s so interesting about the books.”
It was a little annoying to have Cassie’s messages relayed to him but Tyson’s Nine didn’t harmonize with him nor was he adept with thistledown candles so they had little choice at the moment. “Just checking the titles,” Brandon answered. “The fact that Mr. Harper is checking von Nighburg’s books in the other rooms doesn’t mean we can’t look through his materials here.”
A few seconds of silence passed then Warwick asked, “Do you see anything interesting?”
“Mostly the kinds of advanced Teutonic texts you might expect,” Brandon said. “Verner von Stuttgard’s Introduction to Higher Symmetry. A Brief History of Attempted Solutions to the Tesseract Problem by Herman Bernbach. That kind of thing.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Warwick said dryly. “Never heard of either of those myself.”
Brandon paused at a thin volume bound in blue cloth with a surprising number of slips of paper jutting out of the worn pages. The spine wasn’t wide enough for a title so he opened it to the first page. “How about A History of Black Sun Mesa? I don’t see an author listed here.”
“I’ve heard of the mesa but not the book,” Warwick replied. “It’s about three hundred miles northeast of here, near the border of the Treaty Lands. The Sanna swear up and down it’s a place of evil. I hear they were almost giddy to shove it over onto our side of the border although I’ve never heard of anything coming from there and going after our people so maybe whatever’s there only hates the Sanna.”
“I wonder why von Nighburg thought it was important…” Brandon started to set it back then changed his mind and slipped it into his coat pocket before proceeding onwards. It was a mystery and one that perked his interest enough to look into, later. The door across from where they’d arrived was unlocked and quiet. Brandon continued forward, passing a stack of what looked like spare parts for the thing Warwick called an Immelmann Array. Brandon was very tempted to take them away, too. He didn’t know whether the sheriff’s story about the shield of winter and Stonehenge’s Founders was true or not but if it was the Array wasn’t a thing they should leave lying around.
Also, he still had access to the leaders of Stonehenge. Although Brandon hadn’t reached a level where they would tell him about such things of their own volition they might choose to tell him how true Warwick’s claims were. Showing them the parts would lend credence to the story and increase his chances of an answer. If there were such things as a shield of winter being made in Columbia, Brandon wanted to be on guard for them. However, there wasn’t any point burdening himself with them until they were ready to leave.
“More Teutonic texts,” Brandon continued, pausing to pick up an object the size of a book but with no spine or pages that he could detect. The letters on the front looked similar to Avalon’s but were just different enough he had to struggle. “An Introduction to Particle Technologies. What kind of techniques involve particles?”
“Maybe the Teutonic tradition found some way to successfully embed sulfurite particles in the human body like Arthur did,” Warwick suggested.
Brandon pulled on the ends of the short sides of the object, wondering if it would open up like a scroll. However, after half a minute of fiddling he failed to get the thing open so he put it back. He passed the next door, listened and moved on. “There’s a lot here but, outside of the Array, I don’t see much that you couldn’t find in a well stocked magical library in Avalon. Disappointing, really.”
“It’s unusual, to say the least.”
“I know you have library’s here in Columbia, sheriff.”
Warwick was quiet for a few minutes. “Sorry, van der Klein’s group found a metal shop and he and Harper were debating whether it was used for steel or not.”
“Any signs of the man himself there?”
“No.” Warwick frowned. “Seen from the outside it doesn’t look like a huge shallowing. Perhaps he has a second exit and he’s slipped around us. Van der Klein doesn’t find that likely, something about the inherent structure, but I know if I had an otherworldly bolt hole I’d want two exits no matter what the structure wanted.”
“I don’t think it works that way.” Brandon picked up a book with Cyrillic characters and thumbed through it. The whole thing was in Slavic and that was a language he’d never picked up in written or spoken form and, while that suggested where von Nighburg had learned to create ghouls, there wasn’t much more that he could glean from it.
“My point was, it’s unusual to find such a large collection of esoterica in private hands, especially this far west. Even in Palmyra, the availability of texts from outside the druidic traditions is pretty limited.” Warwick paused as he picked out a new candle from his bag and carefully lit it from the old, then extinguished the stub of the first candle in the traditional form. “I was once considered for advancement to our Founder’s Circle but I’ve never heard of any of those books. Morainhenge had a strong emphasis on military readiness and less of a scholarly bent. There’s a year set aside during squiring for studying what’s known about Sanna magic but that’s about all we look outside our own spellcraft.”
Brandon became very interested in the bindings of the books in front of them, a vague feeling of frustration settling in his gut. “That’s not surprising. All the studious druids stayed in Stonehenge, all the proactive ones set out for the other Henges. We hardly ever go out on errantry now.”
“Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course.” He wished he didn’t taste bitterness as he said it. Everyone seemed to default to the thought that he was he on a task of his own, the first knight sent out to seek the Secrets of Steel in generations. In truth, he’s just been sent to take care of his little sister. Even his father had seen fit to remind him he’d only ever sing harmony before they’d left, the same insipid warning he’d given so many times in the past. The Fairchilds could trace their line back even further than the great candlemaker families. However, he hadn’t inherited his father’s gift for stonesong and so, it seemed, all the honor of that lineage was destined to bypass him and settle on Cassie.
“Brandon.”
Warwick’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife and Brandon whirled to face him. “What?”
The sheriff reached one hand up and carefully pointed at the beads around his neck. Brandon repeated the gesture, his fingers brushing against the small clay spheres, only to feel them crumble in spite of his light touch. The quiet drone of Cassie’s song faltered. Annoyed, Brandon grabbed the string and yanked it off, snapping the thin threads and sending the remaining beads clattering to the floor in clouds of dust. “Worthless junk.”
Cassie abruptly stopped humming. “Brandon, what are you doing?”
“What business is it of yours?” Somehow he’d started yelling without realizing it. It felt quite cathartic.
His sister hurried towards him, her eyes wide as saucers. “Brandon you need that to protect-”
“Don’t lecture me, Cassandra, the last thing I need is more of your constant smug talk!” Brandon waved her off as she tried to pass him her own string of beads. She flinched away from his flailing hand. “Look at you, always acting like you know what’s best simply because father had time for you that he never had for anyone else in the family. Some days it seemed more like he was married to you than mother!”
“I-I-” she stuttered before rallying, “Brandon, I had to learn the repertoire and proper control, you know that.”
There was a soft clank as Warwick set his candle down on the table bedside the Array. In spite of how quiet the noise was Cassie still jumped and whirled to look at him, eyes wild. He held up his hands in a calming gesture, saying, “Let’s slow down, you two. You’re probably feeling some really wild emotions now that Proud Elk’s charms have broken. Why don’t we-”
“This doesn’t concern you,” Brandon hissed. “This is a family matter.”
“Doesn’t concern me?” Warwick shook his head in annoyance. “We’re in the middle of hostile territory looking for the most dangerous man I’ve seen in my five years out west, we all need to be working together. Don’t be absuh-”
The sheriff guffawed mid word. Cassie slowly backed away from him, shaking like a leaf, as his shoulders shook and a second deep laugh burst out of him. “You’re so foolish, both of you.”
Finally the laughter broke through in earnest and he slumped against the table and slid down to the floor, cackling uncontrollably. Cassie backed into a bookshelf and dropped to the floor herself. Brandon watched it all then snorted and spat in contempt, turning to stalk to the opposite side of the room with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. It felt like he was on the eve of his fifteenth birthday again, standing in his father’s library.
Theodore Fairchild had called him there to warn him that he was past the age where the gift of stone song could manifest. Cassandra was the only one who could carry on that legacy, now. “It’s not surprising,” his father had said. “There’s no melody to you, Brandon, no driving tempo or clever improvisation. You’re the harmony to our family. We must have you, I suppose, so you’ll stay with us but the center of stage isn’t for you.”
It was a cruel thing to say to a child about to become an adult and Brandon had turned his back on his father just like he did now, ignoring his father until he left the room. When the door closed behind him some part of Brandon was aware that there shouldn’t have been anyone going through it. Certainly not his father, who was thousands of miles away. However he was too wrapped up in his own bitterness to turn and see who it was and that was exactly what Heinrich von Nighburg had wanted in the first place.
Nate Chen Publications 