Fireshaper's Doom (10 page)

“Stood in front of you, you mean,” Alec amended.

“
Stood
in front of you?” The man’s mouth hardened to a thin line. He looked thoughtful, almost troubled.

“Yeah, I know it must sound funny,” David said. “But that’s what happened. I rounded that corner just like you did, and there it was, just standing right there in the middle of the highway.”

The ranger’s face clouded. “Anything…special about this deer?” he asked carefully.

Dave glanced first at Alec, then at the ranger. “You saw it: you tell me.”

The older man’s nose twitched; he shot a troubled glance at his partner. “Uh, yeah… Look, if I tell you boys something fairly confidential, can you keep it quiet? Nothing really bad, we hope, but it don’t hurt to be careful. It wouldn’t do to upset folks right at the start of tourist season.”

“Sure thing,” David replied, though he personally would have been glad to see something upset tourist season.

The older ranger took a breath. “Yeah. Well, I think it was what we’ve started calling the Crazy Deer—if it even
is
a deer—looked more like an elk to me. Anyway, there’ve been a number of…encounters, you might say—most pretty much like yours. Animal appears virtually out of nowhere. Runs across the road sometimes, but most often just stands there and stares down cars, almost…almost like it was
trying
to wreck them. That’s what unnerves folks: that strange behavior—even more than the size and that funny-looking rack. Doesn’t seem scared of people at all, or cars either. Even chased a bunch of picnickers off over near Hiawassee.”

“That far?” David whispered incredulously.

The ranger nodded. “Been seen all over.”

“Hey, Benj, look here,” the younger ranger called from the other side of the road. They all followed him to the soft dirt beyond the shoulder, almost at the guardrail. There, amid the stray leaves and bottle caps, was a single cloven hoofprint almost as large as a man’s outstreched hand. A few inches away a solitary splatter of dark blood gleamed atop a chunk of schist.

Benj’s eyes widened. “Look at the size of that thing! Maybe it
was
an elk. Ralph, you check down the bank a ways and see if you can see anything, then I guess you’d better go on down to that curve and try to warn anybody you see coming this way. I’ll see about getting these boys out. Can’t leave that car there.” He headed back to the Cherokee as David and Alec returned to the Mustang.

“I live just over the ridge,” David called. “’Bout three miles. You couldn’t give me a tow home, could you?”

Benj shook his head. “’Fraid not, son. Insurance won’t allow it. But let’s get you outta there and then decide. Looks to me like you might be able to drive her.”

While the younger ranger kept an eye out for approaching traffic, Benj wheeled the Jeep directly in front of the Mustang.

David looked dubiously first at the Jeep, then at the disabled car, but gamely helped the ranger set a hook on the front cross-member before sliding back into the driver’s seat. The winch whined, the cable tightened, and the Jeep began to inch slowly backward. There was a jolt and an agonizing grinding sound, and then the Mustang rested again on level pavement. Alec climbed in while the older man disconnected the hook.

David tried the engine—and it caught. He put the car into first and eased down on the gas, slowly releasing the clutch. The car began to creep forward, but there was a hideous squeaking from the right front, and the wheel shuddered in David’s hands. He frowned and gritted his teeth, but continued grimly on. The squeaking became louder, much worse as he tugged the wheel to negotiate a slight kink in the highway.

Ahead lay Franks Gap, guarded now by the Valley View Restaurant. Only completed the previous spring, the Valley View was a low-slung series of stonework shelves and glass planes artfully merged with the surrounding landscape by virtue of the rock and heavy timber from which it was constructed. It also had a very large parking lot—mostly empty now.

A hundred feet before he got there, David heard a loud, muffled pop, and more thumping. The right front corner of the car sagged and the steering wheel jerked hard, bruising the inside of his fingers. The last fifty feet were the worst, as the tortured tire shredded itself from the wheel and he had to continue on the rim, a shower of sparks marking his passage.

“Just hope it doesn’t get down to the brake disc,” David muttered. He eased the car into the Valley View parking lot, and was relieved to see the rangers turn in behind him.

“Didn’t make it, huh?” Benj said. “Well, there ought to be a phone in the restaurant. Anything else we can do?”

David shook his head. “I guess not. Thanks for the help, though.”

“Our pleasure—but keep quiet about the Crazy Deer, okay?”

“Right…uh, what do
you
guys think about it, anyway?”

The rangers exchanged glances again. “To be honest, son, we don’t know what to think. Sure didn’t look like your regular old Georgia whitetail, though. Nor like any deer I ever saw, to tell the truth—not moose, not elk, not even caribou.”

“Well, if we see it again, we’ll give you a holler,” David called as the men headed back to their vehicle.

Benj paused with his hand on the door handle. “You do that, son. You keep a close eye out.”

Chapter
VII: Lugh’s Stables

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

In the cold, dim light of early morning, Tir-Nan-Og seemed an island shrouded by a veil of mist. The sun had not yet risen, and fog hung among the trees like ghostly tapestries. The empty plains were silent, the forest tracks yet sleeping. The wind was still. Even the great dome-shelled Watchers relaxed their vigilance, their tiny brains awash with dreams of darkness.

In all Lugh’s realm, in fact, three minds alone were fully conscious, and only one of them was sapient.

Locked in a stall of pure white marble in the sprawl of the High King’s palace, Fionna had not slept for the three days that had passed in Tir-Nan-Og (nor the nine that had lapsed in the Lands of Men) since Morwyn had trapped her in horse shape.

The first day she had been too angry either to think or to take any action. The second she had spent in consideration of her circumstances. On the third day she was ready.

Taken by themselves, the fourfold shaping spells she had drawn upon herself would have been no problem to escape. She had touched them before and knew their form and structure.

But Morwyn’s binding had complicated her plans considerably, for it had insinuated itself through the layered sorceries and locked them tight around her. It had taken her a long time to find the gaps, but the enchantments Caitlin had contrived, and to which Lugh and Nuada and the Morrigu had each applied their Power, had been set to hold another body and to drown another memory. Thus they did not fit her quite precisely.

It therefore took Fionna the better part of a day to twist her thought through the innermost entrapment. It was subtle work and painful, so she worked carefully, removing the substance of the bindings a thread at a time, as one might unravel fabric and yet preserve the pattern. The first shape-spell she broke this way; the second followed quickly. The third was far more trouble, for the weaving there was tighter, yet it she breached as well, straining her Power through like water through fine linen. The fourth was easiest of all, for by then almost nothing remained of horse-thought to distract her.

By dawn Morwyn’s spell alone retained its substance, like a hard layer of lacquer casing the fragile filaments of the other four. That one
had
been made for her and fitted her much better, yet it too had a weakness. In her final desperation, Fionna had sent a Shaping arrowing toward Ailill, and though Morwyn had broken off that contact, the way of its passage had left a frayed spot in her sorcery. It was a tiny thing, that thinning, yet Fionna found it, and poured her Power through.

Part of her was free now, though not corporeal. A moment later there was more. She split her Power then, and applied it to her bindings both from outside and within. There was resistance at first, but then a weakening that became more obvious as she put forth greater effort.

Suddenly Morwyn’s spell collapsed, and with it the other four pooled away to nothing, like melted ice. One moment Fionna was a black horse; a moment later a fair-skinned, black-haired woman.

She smiled her exultation.

“Morwyn, your head is
mine!”
she whispered. “As soon as I find my brother.”

Fionna studied the entrance of her prison. Statues of rampant stallions carved from jet-black marble flanked the opening; the double doors of the gates were a grillwork of cast brass, their junctures bridged by four hand-sized knotwork medallions wrought of gold-wound iron—human work that, and very dangerous. Those locks did not daunt her, though, for she had learned something of their workings in that part of Froech’s mind she had seen when she bespelled him, and she had passed long hours since then surveying them more closely. It would be a simple matter of Power applied to the golden wire alone: just
so
—and the first lock tumbled open—and
so,
and
so,
and
so…

The four magic locks were even simpler, for their pattern too she had stolen from Froech and carefully remembered.
So,
and
so,
and
so,
and
so…

But what form, she wondered, when she had finished, would make her escape most certain? Not the perilous human nakedness that now enwrapped her, though clothing it would be no problem. No, it must be another shape, possessed both of subtlety and cunning, for Fionna knew that she had spent too long in a skin of other-seeming to change again so quickly and expect to retain control. No, whatever shape she chose must be able to sustain its own survival.

She cast her gaze about the stables, fixing it at last upon a disk of gold-chased silver that had snapped from some bit of harness and rolled against the stone wall opposite.

The very thing!
she rejoiced, when she saw the creature graven there, and so she caused it to happen.

Her body drew in upon itself, shrank once more onto all fours, put forth again a tail. Red fur cloaked her skin, black hair marked her feet and nose and ear tufts. In ten short breaths, Fionna nic Bobh became a vixen.

She slipped through the open gates and entered the arched corridor beyond the stalls, nostrils twitching warily, seeking such odors as might presage some danger. But no scents rode the air in the High King’s stables save the normal ones of horse and dung and fodder; metal, stone, and leather. Nothing told of danger, but the fresher air came from the right, and so she turned that way.

But in spite of her precautions, Fionna did not escape unnoticed, for as she picked her wary way among the scalloped shadows, two other sets of eyes espied her. She had not sensed their owners, for they had been bespelled to aid their watching. They were also the only other beings in all of Tir-Nan-Og who were fully conscious.

Silently they paced her: creatures scarcely taller than herself, with lean, dark bodies, steel-strong feline hindquarters, and heads the same as her own. One thing more there was about them, though, that gave their shadows strangeness, and that was the feathered forelegs that sprouted from their shoulders and ended in red-clawed talons more cruel than any eagle’s.

Chapter VIII: Home

(Enotah County, Georgia)

It was with considerable relief that David saw the battered old Ford pickup truck chug around the last curve below the gap. He’d called home from the Valley View, filled at once with a vague, nervous excitement and considerable trepidation. There was always a chance Big Billy might answer the phone, and he was not quite ready to confront his father with news of his accident, regardless of its origin. Big Billy’s response to crises was unpredictable, and he had been known to react to almost identical situations in entirely different ways. News of the wreck might send him into a rage (or what was almost worse, into a tirade about David’s driving), or it might not faze him at all. But to David’s intense relief, it had been Uncle Dale who had picked up the receiver in the Sullivans’ kitchen and who’d said he’d be right over.

The ancient black pickup crunched onto the gravel of the parking lot. David could see two figures inside: Uncle Dale at the wheel, face shadowed by the battered straw hat he would wear all summer; and a shorter, towheaded form beside him. David’s face lit up when he saw them. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the family. Almost before the truck stopped, the passenger door scraped open and a small shape launched itself toward him, crying, “Davy! Davy!”

David tried not to smile too widely. “Heeey kid, how’re you doin’?” he laughed, as he swept up his little brother and swung him around and around at chest level.

“Goooood!” Little Billy squealed joyfully, as the spinning turned his cry to ululation.

David set him down with a breathless gasp. “Gettin’ heavy, kid. What’s Ma been feedin’ you lately? Lead?”

“Cookies!” Little Billy exclaimed. “While you was gone I got to eat all of ’em!”

“Yeah, I bet you did.” David poked his brother’s rounded tummy. “Shows, too.”