Fireshaper's Doom (26 page)

For several minutes the night resounded with the clatter of spears being gathered (Liz held hers white-knuckled, grim as a Valkyrie, Alec thought), of daggers and knives being adjusted; and finally with the muffled grunts and groans of sore bodies once more resuming their mounts.

Throughout it all Gary said nothing. Nor did he say anything when Cormac once more gave him a hand-up behind him. But Alec, who was watching him closely from his place behind Regan, noticed that his eyes sparkled with a strange, fierce joy, as if he were finding this new worldview not a threat but a revelation.

“Would that I shared your delight in this adventure,” Cormac sighed, as he urged their mount in line behind Nuada’s. “But alas, I have no good feeling about it.”

Froech was already on his way out of the clearing, his horse keeping its nose close to the ground in what seemed to Alec an appallingly unhorselike posture.

“He has found it,” Nuada called, and as Regan’s Snowwhisper followed Bessie downslope, the forest closed around them.

*

If I never see another laurel bush, it’ll be too soon,
Liz thought sleepily to herself, as Bessie thrust through yet another thicket of the thick, shiny leaves.
And if I never ride another horse again, that’ll be too soon as well.
For what felt like the millionth time she peered around Uncle Dale’s back to see, beyond the mare’s narrow skull, the dark shapes of Cormac and Gary riding in front of them. Gary’s shoulders were wider than the dark-haired Faery’s, she noted idly. Froech and Nuada were somewhere out of sight at the front of the line.

The trail bent steeply downhill then, forcing her to grab Uncle Dale’s belt to keep her balance. Simultaneously the laurel began to diminish, giving way at last to the rough trunks of a stand of ash and poplar through which moonlight filtered like gold-tinged fog. Liz held her breath for a moment, caught up in the beauty of the night. It was peaceful, so relaxing…

Her eyes closed. Her head tilted forward…

The horse stumbled, shaking her. She started, jerked her eyes wide open; blinked, looked around. Felt once more the heavy, insidious drag on her eyelids. Drifted off again, and was only vaguely aware when the land flattened at the bottom of a valley.

“Halt!” Froech called suddenly, wrenching her to squinting, muddled wakefulness, just in time to see him dismount and kneel in the leafy mould beside a trickle of small stream. A brace of ferns feathered about the hem of his dark gray tunic.

“He drank here,” the Faery boy said. “The prints are close together. And this leaf shows blood drops spattered atop each other, as if he paused here for a long time.”

Nuada stared at the water with a twisted smile upon his lips. “So even the mighty Ailill stoops to consume the substance of the World of Men,” he chuckled. “That is a thing I never imagined I would see.”

“How so, sir?” Gary asked innocently.

Nuada shrugged, suddenly distant once more. “It is the way he is. As you would not eat rottenness, so Ailill refuses the food of this World. It is a function of his overweening pride.”

“Sounds like a real son of a bitch.”

Nuada raised an amused eyebrow. “Not an unlikely comparison, I think.”

Uncle Dale had crossed the stream and was pacing Bessie a few yards farther down to their left, following a scrap of weed-grown sand that clearly showed Ailill’s footprints. All at once he brought the mare to a halt and commenced staring at the ground intently.

“Well, I’ll be a…! Damn tracks just ends!”

Dismay grabbed Liz’s heart with a gauntleted hand. “What? What?” she cried, leaping off to scan the ground by the mare’s silver-shod feet. “Oh no! They do—but they
can’t
!”

Froech stood up abruptly, leapt easily across the creek and joined them, staring not at the cutoff line of footprints, but at a certain piece of ground a yard or so beyond it. He frowned and sketched an intricate series of curves in the air, frowned again and sketched another, then nodded decisively.

A sparkle of golden light sprang into being along the forest floor, as a Straight Track woke to life. Liz glanced expectantly at Nuada as the rest of the company joined them, but the Faery lord’s eyes seemed blank and distant.

“It is as I feared,” he said at last. “Ailill’s presence has awakened a Track and he has taken himself upon it. And though we can certainly follow his way there as clearly as anywhere else, I am not certain that we should with so large and inexperienced a company.”

“What do you mean?” Alec protested. “We’ve come this far we’re not going to stop now. Not when we’re finally on to something!”

Nuada grimaced. “Perhaps, but I think you mortals should wait here. The Tracks can be dangerous, more dangerous than you dare suspect. And what of these others? Do you think they are strong enough to see every belief they have ever held called suddenly into question?”

“What
is
a Straight Track, anyway?” Gary asked.

“They are roads between the Worlds,” Nuada answered. “Both the Worlds as you know them: spheres in space, and other Worlds as well. Worlds that lie against each other like the pages in a book, Worlds that lie inside each other like the layers of an onion, that follow each other in time like beads on a string. Do you begin to see?”

Gary hesitated. “I think so.”

“The Tracks connect them all. They can stretch distance, or compress it—as Froech did when we were fortunate enough to come upon one on our way from the lake to the farm, though I did not tell you then for fear of arousing such questions as this.”

“But why are they so dangerous—and why haven’t we heard about them before?”

“As to the latter, humans cannot usually see them, unless they have the Second Sight, and only then if they are activated. And as for their danger—why, it is because of their very nature. You might step off a Track at one place and enter one World, and step off it again a few paces farther on and enter a different World entirely. And if a person should then attempt to reenter at the wrong point, he stands a chance of becoming irretrievably lost. Do not forget that the Sidhe have had thousands of your years to study the Tracks, and yet we understand only that they are mostly made of Power and a little of how to travel upon them. They are tools to be used, but not to be trusted.
That
is a concept you should understand very well, considering some of the forces you folk would turn to
your
service!”

“Well, I’m not scared,” Gary replied. “Davy’s my friend, and I’m going.”

“Right,” Alec affirmed, nodding vigorously.

“Absolutely,” Liz agreed, though the idea of once more traveling that hazy golden ribbon almost made her sick with fear. She fought it down. “Right, Uncle Dale?”

“Ain’t got no choice, way I see it. Always did like to see new places, anyhow.”

“I think it is decided, Nuada,” Regan said softly. “I think we are all bound to ride the Road.”

Nuada bit his lip. “So it seems. Let us hope then, that this Road finds an ending soon.”

“I think we all wish that,” Liz said, trying to sound braver than she felt. She glanced at Alec, tried to smile. “So let’s to it.”

Froech nodded to no one in particular, and led Firearrow onto the Straight Track.

*

Things seemed normal at first, as Alec recalled they also had on that August evening when he and David and Liz had set forth on the Trial of Heroes. There was simply a straight path among the trunks, not obvious, even; it simply happened that no trees grew where the Track lay. And the Track itself was faint, a mere glimmer upon the ground—though he suspected that some eyes saw it differently.

But gradually the forest changed. There were more briars at first, then blackberry brambles, and then a wilder, thicker kind of briar he didn’t recognize. Soon even the trees grew taller and more widely spaced, fading from oak and ash and maple first to pines, then to vast, tall spruces; a little later to thick-trunked conifers with hairy red bark; and finally to dark-leaved trees whose first limbs sprang out two hundred feet above the ground. Alec had never seen their like before. Right in front of him Uncle Dale was craning his head in appreciative, silent awe, and farther ahead he could see Gary rubbernecking as well. His friend’s joyful “All right!” suggested that he too was enjoying this part of the trek.

Eventually the briars closed in again, first rising scarcely knee-high, then to waist level, finally piling on top of each other until they towered far above the riders’ heads where they collapsed together to shroud the Track in a tunnel of living green. And as the briars rose in height, they increased in girth, becoming thick-stemmed monsters big as Gary’s biceps, red as blood, and with thorns that made his sturdy hunting knife look cheap and flimsy.

“What
is
it with these blessed bushes?” Gary said irritably as one of them snagged his pant leg, leaving a clean rent in the gray fabric. “Good thing it wasn’t my friggin’ leg!”

“There is nothing beyond them but chaos,” Nuada answered calmly. “Perhaps a bubble of air, or an island of grass, but beyond that only the not-stuff of which everything else is made.”

“Awesome, just awesome” was Gary’s only reply.

The briars closed in more, twining so closely together that there was scarcely space between them for leaves. Here and there they curled so tightly that their thorns gouged one another’s stems, sending a disturbing red liquid trickling across their smooth surfaces.

Time ceased to have much meaning. And then Alec became aware of a slowing of the file.

Another Track had intersected their own, almost like the intersection of two large-diameter pipes at right angles to one another except that there was a small, round clearing at that juncture, maybe a hundred yards across. Grass and moss grew there, and a few flowering shrubs mingled belligerently with the briars, but that was all. Alec did not dare consider the chaos Nuada had mentioned. The nothingness that yawned just beyond those thorny walls, that perhaps lay scant feet—or inches—below his feet. Suddenly he began to sympathize with David’s fear of heights as his own sporadic claustrophobia threatened to reawaken.

Froech’s horse started into the right-hand Track, then hesitated and turned toward the left; then it paused at the Track in the center.

Apparently frustrated, the Faery youth vaulted from his saddle and fell to examining each in turn.

“Got a problem, boy?” Uncle Dale called as he joined Froech
on
the ground by the central tunnel, then examined the other two in turn “Yep, I see,” he mused. “They’s a whole bunch of prints goin’ even which way in and out of all three of these here things. Well, that’s a fine howdy-do; can’t tell which ones is freshest! That’un was here all right, but which way he went when, no way I can figger. How ’bout you, Mr. Froech? Looks like that fancy horse of yorn’s met his match!”

Froech glared at the old man and started to say something, but then bit his lip and nodded sullenly.

“Perhaps if we explored a bit farther down the Tracks,” Nuada suggested. “It is possible we might find clearer prints somewhere farther on.”

“Oh, lord,” Gary groaned. “Not more riding.”

Nuada looked at him. “Perhaps you are right. You young folk rest here with Regan and Cormac. Those of us who know something of tracking will each take a trail and ride half a thousand paces down it, then return. If we have no clearer answer then, I think we must try another scrying. Maybe here on the Track we will be more successful.”

“Now wait a minute,” Alec noted, as he slipped off from behind Regan. “I thought you guys were cut off from Tir-Nan-Og.”

“And so we are,” Regan answered, joining him on the ground. “But the Tracks have a Power of their own, and we can draw on that a little. It is much, much easier if one wears the stuff of Faerie, though, as Froech does.”

“Well, if we’re goin’, let’s be gettin’ at her,” Uncle Dale called, holding Liz’s spear while she slid off from behind him.

Alec watched them go: three riders on Faery steeds down three very disturbing passages. A startled grunt drew his attention to the right just in time to see Gary fall on his butt beside his former mount while a grinning Cormac looked on beside him. Even the reserved Regan stifled a giggle.

Gary hauled himself to his feet indignantly and stalked over to join his two friends by the left-hand tunnel. He stabbed his spear firmly into the ground beside theirs, threw himself down on the grass next to Alec, and began massaging his thigh muscles thoughtfully, grimacing all the time.

“Feel like I’m rubbed raw,” he confided to Alec. “It’ll start rubbing my balls off next, I guess.”

Liz sat down beside them. “I’m sore too, and
I
know what I’m doing.”

“I sure could use a nap,” Gary sighed, as he flopped back in the grass.

“Gary, how could you—at a time like this!” Liz flared.

“Simple. I’m sleepy.”

“Sleepy! With David gone how can you—” Her eyes misted, and she swallowed awkwardly, unable to continue.

Alec heaved himself up and laid his right arm across her shoulders, gave her a brotherly squeeze. “Easy, girl. G-man’s not your enemy. Know what I think?” he continued, finding his eyes suddenly misting. “I think you and me both need a real good cry.”

Liz laid her head on his shoulder. “Maybe so… Maybe— Damn!”