Dreamseeker's Road (39 page)

“No!” another voice countered, sailing clear across the field. “She will not!”

The Faery spun around. Aikin scrambled to his feet—to see riding from the woods a mixed company of Rhiannon's knights and Lugh's, with Rigantana in the van beside Eellar's second. Rhiannon's men were obviously prisoners.

“Rigantana,” the Faery spat. “But you do not act in the name of your dam.”

“I act in the name of Lugh Samildinach, High King of Tir-Nan-Og, whose land this is, and whose honor has been besmirched by my mother's subterfuge,” Rigantana retorted, suddenly very close indeed. “And I act as the heir to the House of Ys.”

“Your mother—”

“—Has no right to contravene Lugh's laws, which she has done, nor to risk Lugh's realm as she has done likewise. You will escort her back to Ys when Lugh arrives.”

The knight did not reply. Aikin stared at Rigantana, who loomed above him: a beautiful woman still in mortal togs, astride an Irish elk. It took his breath away—and more when she smiled at him.

“You have what you came for?” she asked.

Aikin swallowed, then nodded awkwardly. “I…have.”

“It is yours to return to your friend, to do with as he will; but I would ask you all to use it carefully. I doubt it can heal the World Walls, but perhaps it can prevent further damage.”

“It's not my call,” Aikin told her. “But I guarantee you: me and old Alec are gonna talk!”

“Perhaps I will too,” Rigantana said, with an even wider smile. “I still have business in your World. And I must admit that my mother had the right idea about the ulunsuti—if not the right means of achieving it.”

Aikin shrugged. “Yeah, well, I guess if our World's wearin' through into Faerie, they've got a right to be pissed. And a right to emigrate.”

Rigantana's brow wrinkled with thought. “It's a no-win,” she sighed.

Aikin puffed his cheeks. “Maybe. But I think if you asked Alec nicely…”

Rigantana smiled again. “Well now, oh Mighty Hunt-er—and yes, I know whence comes that name—you soften him up for me, and then I will ask him myself!”

Aikin grinned back. “I will,” he laughed. “Never doubt it.”

The Heir of Ys gazed at the sunless sky and frowned. “I would love to continue this conversation,” she murmured. “But the Tracks run strange this time of year, and if you would return whence you came in time to set your friends at ease, you must leave now!”

“But…”

“Now! I will summon your steed, but you must hurry. And tell Alec McLean and David Sullivan I will see them again—and not only on microfilm.”

Aikin nodded mutely and pocketed the ulunsuti. By the time he'd located his mount, it was halfway across the clearing. By the time he'd retrieved his sticky squares, it was nuzzling the back of his neck.

Rigantana gave him a leg up.

He didn't look back when he left the meadow, but for all the tension, all the strange sights and experiences of the last few hours, his heart was strangely light.

He felt like Enya and Tori Amos, like Horselips and Clannad, like Pearl Jam and Live and Led Zeppelin—and like John Williams and Beethoven and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Too bad he didn't have a CD player.

Chapter XXIV: The Waking

(The Straight Tracks—no time)

“Is it my imagination,” David asked Liz, the air, and his horse's mane, “or is the Track turnin' red?”

“'Fraid not,” Liz replied nervously, pacing her mount as close beside his as the encroaching briars allowed: they that looped and whorled in sullen copper-rust profusion along a Track too narrow to suffer riding abreast. “Or if it
is
your imagination, then I'm doing it too.”

David scowled and tried to peer around the Morrigu, who rode vanguard of their odd company—a company that had grown increasingly grim and purposeful as their interminable trek progressed. Unfortunately, horse-plus-rider, plus his own mount's head blocked most of the forward view—that and an increasing number of what looked like branches of long-needled pines thrusting out above the briars past the middle of the Track. They would've been a comforting reminder of home, too—had their needles not been jet black, and the scaly bark that bore them the iridescent blue-green of a scarab's shell.

Never mind that the fragment of the Track he
could
see had definitely shifted from its usual luminous gold at least to orange, and—where the motes that comprised it floated nigh to their horses' chests—nearly to crimson. The effect was of heated metal cooling from yellow-white to dull, though incandescent, red.

Like dying stars,
he thought—and shuddered; for here, where the Tracks might be anything from cosmic string through points of frozen time to gears in a cosmic clock, even that was a real possibility. Shoot, that glowing carmine spark that had just bobbed past his stallion's nose could be someone else's Betelgeuse or Arcturus or Antares—which made him, Liz, Alec (with Eva the cat/enfield), and the Morrigu the four horsemen of some microverse's apocalypse. And even as he watched, the Track beneath the Faery's mare pulsed redder.

“Is this normal?” he ventured finally, pushing aside a particularly persistent bough of not-quite-pine. “Is it that Crimson Road you mentioned earlier?”

The Morrigu twisted around but did not slow her steady pace. “This stretch of Track lies very near your World,” she answered tersely. “These branches that slow our progress are the shadows of trees in the Lands of Men frozen by Time and the World Walls and given substance. As for the Track: Iron rails lie in your World where it passes. It is not unlike the taint which forces our folk into your World near your family's dwelling.”

“It's…eerie,” David gave back. “I usually feel good when I'm on the Tracks, but this is too damned spooky.”

“The ghoul-haunted Woodland of Weir,” Alec quoted, from the end of the file.

“Mr. Poe,” the Morrigu called back, “and you are more correct than you imagine.”

David didn't ask for elaboration; indeed, was increasingly unwilling to think about anything. So much had happened the last few days he barely knew which end was up. Simply making it through classes alone had been a pill; never mind agonizing over David-the-Elder; plus his friends' assorted crises—which latter, however, seemed slowly to be resolving.

But his own resolution loomed ahead, and he had no idea what form it would take nor how he would deal with it, only that it would occur, and a day from now it'd all be over and he'd finally get some peace. He wondered if Calvin had felt this way: there on the threshold of the Ghostcountry. Of course, Cal had
chosen
to go, and had known what he was getting into, and had talked about it afterwards; the Morrigu was as silent as the proverbial grave—and well-nigh as encouraging.

And for once he had nothing to say himself.

For a long time he simply rode, lost in reverie, his attention focused on the rump of the Morrigu's steed, the ears of his own, and the increasingly ruddy glow of the Tracks. Maybe he slept in place.

Certainly his consciousness had achieved
some
degree of separation from time, space, and his body when he found his mount slowing. He blinked, yawned, then stretched mightily—and blinked again when he saw that the briars had been superseded entirely by the shadowy pines, among the trunks of which the Track flowed like a river of luminous blood, a flood of cooling lava.

“We must go slowly now,” the Morrigu advised, “or we will miss it.”

David didn't ask of what she spoke, but very soon he knew.

It was a Track:
another
Track, that either intercepted theirs at an oddly oblique angle or else broke off at one. It was damned disquieting, too; and David couldn't help recalling H.P. Lovecraft's “alien geometries whose angles were slightly askew.”

But even more troubling was that both sections of Track led beneath rough stone arches twice as tall as him and his horse together. Like the trilithons at Stonehenge, they were: massive fingers of glimmering granite set among the pines. But if both Tracks were still disturbingly red, there was something even stranger about the one on the right. It seemed to shimmer and waver, as though it were not wholly…
there,
but perhaps a reflection of the other mirrored in murky air. Abruptly, he looked away—trying to force it into focus was making him queasy as hell—but as soon as he did, the image clarified in the corner of his eye.

“
Closing
them might serve better,” the Morrigu advised, “at least until you pass beneath the gate.”

“What…is this place?” David asked shakily. “I've never seen anything like this on the Tracks. It makes me feel…weird.”

“Better ask
when
is this place,” the Morrigu retorted. “As for the rest, the Track on the right is the one you must take, but it only takes a form we can access on this one night of the year, and any business we have upon it must be concluded that same night or we are all lost—even me.”

And with that she reined her horse to a halt and turned full around to face him. “This is your quest, David Sullivan,” she intoned formally. “You determine where and when this gate leads; you must be first to pass through.”

David stared at the dark archway dubiously. The eager pines grew close to either side: onyx and indigo; the upright stones gleamed gray and silver; the Track was the color of blood, but beyond was only blackness marked by one thin line of scarlet. He swallowed hard, paced his horse forward a step, then paused uncertainly, filled with deep foreboding. Suppose the Morrigu was lying. Suppose nothing lay beyond these rocks but death. Suppose all that fine talk about trifold sisters and madness and sanity had been a fabrication and this woman who styled herself the Morrigu was as mad as both her twins. Suppose he was already as beguiled as that poor bitter soldier had been, who'd veiled irrational jealous hatred with hashish.

“You will not know until you go,” the Morrigu stated flatly. “And either way, you will have cause to rejoice and cause to regret.”

“Yeah,” David snorted. “I know!”

And before he had time to consider further, he kicked his horse in the flanks and surged ahead.

For an instant he knew cold past his nightmares of freezing, then heat washed up at him from the Track, which seemed wrought of sparkling embers: an endless road of dying fire. His horse's hooves crunched there, which had made no sound on the Track he'd abandoned. More crunchings behind spoke of his friends joining him, as he was not certain they had either courage or leave to do.

“This is your quest,” the Morrigu repeated, her voice riding a rising wind. “You must lead. And whatever happens, you must not look back.”

David didn't even nod, simply rode and let the stallion set its own pace. There was nothing to see: no whorling briars, no pines, no fantastic landscapes, merely an empty plain stretching endlessly to an absent sky. Lines of fire laced it like whip scars lashed into the earth, but there was no other color.

And on he rode.

Eventually a second gate appeared: another trilithon, beyond which he glimpsed a blur of nighted landscape: mountains that did not extend past that opening to either side. And he likewise felt a brush of air that carried the scent of life.

He kicked his horse to a trot.

The gate reared up.

He passed beyond…

…And almost cried out, for what he gazed upon was all too familiar.

He'd spent the first eighteen years of his life there!

Sullivan Cove. Enotah County. Georgia. Land his folks had dwelt on for nigh on two hundred years. Land that once had belonged to the Cherokee.

Somehow he was there again! A hundred miles north of Athens, riding down the logging road that snaked up to Lookout Rock, and not a hundred yards farther on became his parents' drive. Already he could see the barn roof to the right, the hilly pasture where his pa kept his rangy cows easing into view to the left.

A ridge loomed beyond: backdrop to the Sullivan Cove Road that ran past his pa's land through Great-uncle Dale's and thence to the lake that embraced Bloody Bald, where Lugh the Many-skilled hid his stronghold behind walls of glamour.

But…something was wrong! The barn was visible now, and other outbuildings, and the house itself; yet while the shape, size, and location were correct, all the details had altered to those of an earlier place and time, so that spirals and curves now danced along the heavy corner posts, while attenuated beasts battled upon steel-strapped doors. The tin roofs were now wrought of wooden shakes, and carved beams crossed at the gables, while the extensions that saluted the air had been shaped into knotwork dragons.

“Not your dream,” the Morrigu whispered, “but his. This
is
Sullivan Cove, but you are in his World now.”

“…Whose?” David ventured faultingly.

“You know whose.”

“My uncle's?”

“If that is whom you seek.”

“Where…do I find him?”

“Where you saw him last.”

“Not in the house?”

“He dwells in a darker house now.”

David nodded grimly and swallowed again, ignoring a stomach that seemed intent on spoiling all this eerie solemnity by growling, and rode on down the drive, passing the house on the right to turn left along a wider road, along which he continued for roughly a quarter mile before turning left again, uphill. He paused there, saw the mountains lifting higher than they ought above a barren knoll, on the brow of which rose a mound that absolutely should not have been present. Torches flickered and smoked at intervals around it. It looked, he realized, like a Viking burial mound—or the rath of an Irish King.

“He whom you seek is within,” the Morrigu murmured at his shoulder. He wanted to turn, to look at her, to gaze on Liz and Alec to see if they truly still rode with him or were themselves now wraiths and shadows. “You must continue afoot,” she went on. “And when you arrive, you must relinquish what the dead desire most.”