Landslayer's Law (14 page)

“I recognize this place,” Gary whispered to David. “Didn’t Myra use it as a background for one of her paintings?”

David nodded. “Alec and me and Aik as elven warriors makin’ one desperate final stand.”

“Good choice,” Gary breathed, gazing about appreciatively.

David agreed. The sky had played hide-and-seek all day, and there’d been a return of rain during the rehearsal, but now whatever front had been weirding out the weather had largely dissipated, leaving a sky like fresh-dyed black velvet dusted with new-cut gems. The moon, conveniently enough, was full, and by its light the world had gone silver-blue and eerie, transfiguring even the most prosaic-looking of their (mostly attractive) band into beings wild, dangerous, and fey.

“We gonna stand here all night, or we gonna move?” Aikin rasped. “We’ve still gotta cross the dam, and I’d like to make final landfall well before midnight.”

“Why midnight?” Brock asked Calvin. The kid’s eyes were feverishly bright, as though they existed solely to drink moonbeams.

Calvin looked at Myra. “I was afraid you’d ask that,” she grumbled, gazing at Brock in turn. “And the fact is, that since this is all ceremony anyway, the actual time doesn’t really matter, except symbolically. The point is, we come to Whitehall, which is the nearest Straight Track to Athens, on one of the nights we know the Faery Folk ride. We wait by the Track a suitably reverent interval, then we eat. Probably we see nothing—we never have before. We leave token offerings ’cause that’s what people used to do. We stay until we get tired, then split. The journey’s the thing, not the arrival.”

“Cream for the brownies, eh Piper?” LaWanda giggled, elbowing Piper in the ribs.

“Cool it!” Aikin hissed. And with no further ado, he turned and dashed up the ruin’s lone functioning flight of stairs. An instant later, he reached the summit, with David right behind. Without bothering to wait for the others (and likely frustrated by their noise, when silence was one of Aikin’s deities) they proceeded across the yard-wide top of the dam. It made David giddy—things like that always did, especially bridges, even low, wide ones—but he tried hard not to let his step falter as he reached the middle of the span. The dam stretched each way now, water whooshing and rumbling two yards below his feet, and David couldn’t help but recall (as he always did) the sword bridges in all those Arthurian stories: the ones knights had to dare in order to win their ladies. Liz took his hand as he lingered there, and squeezed. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Aye,” he acknowledged—and followed his friend to the other side.

The wood that awaited them was not properly part of Whitehall Forest, and in fact abutted a number of suburban backyards not all that far away. Yet somehow it had largely escaped man’s attention. Aikin swore there was a small patch of old-growth timber in one hollow, and the fact that a Track lay close upon the Lands of Men there perhaps bore that out. Certainly those woods had a vaguely primeval feel, with denser, lusher foliage than typical, often so thick they had to force their way through. “Aik
does
know where he’s goin’, doesn’t he?” Darrell (who sported the only completely bare legs) complained, as he found his skin assailed.

“Briars,” David supplied. “Just look for briars.”

“Shit, man, they’re fuckin’ lookin’ for
me
!”
Darrell wailed.

Whereupon Aikin curtailed further comment by uttering a low, but very clear, “We’re there.”

There
was nothing special to the ordinary eye; merely a short stretch of relatively open ground close by a bifurcated maple. But David could already feel his eyes starting to itch and tingle, as they did (somewhat unpredictably) in the presence of Faery magic. Especially active Faery magic, as would be the case should the Sidhe choose this particular Track as the route for the Rade, their periodic processional riding to the coast. They might so choose; then again, they might not. The American Southeast was webbed with Straight Tracks, leading not only to and through Tir-Nan-Og, but to a variety of other Worlds, many of which were tiny pocket universes, and only a few of which he knew anything about at all, save that many were, in spite of their size, inhabited. As for Aikin—he was a damned ballsy guy, to return here after the chaos that had transpired when (with Aife’s unwitting aid) he’d managed to activate a Track, then get lost upon it, all on a Halloween night.

Would the Wild Hunt be out
this
night? David wondered, with a shudder Liz noted with visible alarm. And why, with so much intellect, creativity, and sheer mental energy among them, was no one talking? For the entire crew had fallen silent and seemed as one to be aping Aik’s example and folding themselves down into a ragged double file along a ten-yard stretch of ground distinguished mostly by the uncannily straight growth of blackberry briars along either side, and by the fact that the ground itself, though rugged with moss and grass, did not seem to encourage other growth—nor stray insects or fallen leaves—to accumulate there. Aikin caught David’s eye and motioned the three of them forward, to a position at the presumed head of the line—the direction from which the magic had flowed (so Aikin swore) once before.

“Where is it?” Brock muttered, squinting into the gloom. “I don’t see a thing.”

“Nothing
to
see,” Calvin advised him. “’cept briars growin’ in a straighter line than briars have any right to grow.”

“Mojo,” LaWanda muttered in turn, beside Piper. “Some major mojo here, white boy.”

David turned to regard the woman. He didn’t know her well, and she tended to make him uneasy. Not because she was black, but because she was just so confidently…blatant. LaWanda never did anything by halves, or to suit any pleasure but her own. She was her own woman through and through, said what she thought, and had a knack for cutting through the undergrowth to the heart of the chase. Definitely a lady to have on one’s side in a fair fight—or unfair either. You just had to watch your step around her, because if you acted like a fool, she’d be the first to call your bluff.

“Mojo, indeed,” David echoed at last. “And I’m mighty glad you’re here,” he added—because he wanted to, and it was true.

Brock was still squinting madly. “I still don’t see it.”

“You won’t,” David replied. “Not likely, unless the Sidhe actually ride on this one—which ‘activates’ it—or unless you’re like a couple of us and have some form of Second Sight. Even then, it helps if they want you to see it.”

“But how does it look?” Brock persisted, though David suspected he already knew.

“Like a strip of glowing golden dust just above the ground,” Alec said, as he adjusted the cat-cage in his lap. “Ideally, it’ll start to glow in the direction from which the Sidhe are riding, and the glow will get stronger, and the dust thicker, and the briars’ll diminish, and then you’d better cover your ass and go to ground, ’cause I kid you not, this may be fun to you, but meeting the Sidhe—or anybody from the Worlds—is serious business, and bloody dangerous.”

“And, to be honest,” David concluded, “I doubt we’d even be out here if we thought there was any real chance of ’em happenin’ by. I mean, there are thousands of ways to the coast, so I’ve heard, and I know the Sidhe like variety.”

“I know
I’d
like some silence,” Aikin growled from the middle of his line.

“I’d like a beer,” Darrell snickered, until an elbow in the ribs from his glowering older sister silenced him.

“I’d like to know where Scott is,” that same sister mumbled in turn, twisting round to peer over her shoulder. “He said he’d be late, but still…he
could’ve
phoned.”

David shrugged helplessly. “Who knows?” And with that, he unsnapped a CD case and flourished a glimmering disk, which he inserted in his cherished boom box before setting it on the ground on the very fringe of the Track. The strains of Enya’s “The Celts” wafted softly through the woods.

As though by unspoken consent, conversation ceased, and the only sound save Enya was that of bottles of Sandy’s homemade beer being opened and, per ritual, passed down the line.

“We wait for an hour,” Calvin informed Brock, as he handed the boy a brew. “Officially, thirty minutes either side of the witching hour. We try not to think frivolous thoughts. And about the time we’ve started to feel really stupid and our stomachs all start to growl, we assume nobody’s comin’, kick back, and stuff ourselves silly.”

Brock squinted at the Track again. David, who was enjoying watching him, couldn’t help but smile, which he masked by looking down. Even so, he saw Brock start and the boy’s eyes grow huge. “Uh,” Brock whispered hoarsely, “am I wishing too hard, or isn’t this sucker glowing?”

Someone dismissed him with a snort, but David felt his eyes start to burn even more strongly. “No,” he corrected, rising. “Brock’s right!”

“He is?” From Aikin, who was likewise staring at the ground.

“Yeah,” Liz assured him, easing surreptitiously around to guard Aikin’s back—which, to judge by the sudden alteration in his expression from romantic expectation to full-out alarm, was a good idea, David reckoned.

Someone gasped. Someone else choked in awe. A bottle fell with a thump and eruption of fizzy foam. And then David’s eyes seemed to catch fire, and he saw, sure enough, the Straight Track spring to life a scant yard beyond his sneakered toes.

It was much as he’d seen it before; much as Alec had just described—and yet both mouth and memory provided only dull approximations. There was no truly accurate way to describe what occurred when two Worlds met along what Sandy had speculated might be some odd form of super-string. But that was physics, this was magic: magic that awoke light along a perfectly straight stretch of ground, magic that conjured motes of gold-toned dust from nowhere, magic that made the hard stems and sharp thorns on the nearby briars seem as insubstantial as reflected rainbows, and as drab as day-old mud.

“It’s awake!” Brock breathed, incredulously.

“Aye,” Calvin sighed. “Which means someone’s awakened it. Which mean’s somebody’s coming. The question is, who?”

David, at the head of the file, wondered that same thing, and found himself more than a little uneasy. The Tracks awoke in the vanguard of the Sidhe, that was a fact. And on the solstices, the equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days, the Sidhe rode in slow, solemn file—and the Track awoke at that same slow pace ahead of them. But this Track was awakening rapidly—which, as best he could tell, implied that it was being traversed in considerable haste. Trouble was, it didn’t bode well when Faeries hurried. They were immortal, after all; had literally all the time in the world.

Liz too seemed to sense a subtle wrongness, and to judge by his companions’ stiffened postures and troubled glances, many of them did as well.

And then it didn’t matter, because the Track flared to full, glorious flame: a thick yet tenuous carpet of frantically flickering motes that did not quite touch the ground, yet lay at places both over it and in it, and which seemed at once solid and ethereal. His eyes were on fire, and he rubbed them frantically, as tears blurred that miraculous view. By the time he’d regained a modicum of vision, he heard the steady muffled rumble of hooves pressed hard and in anger.

The Track waxed brighter still, lighting every awestruck face with a blaze of gold, and with it that pounding sounded louder yet, but joining it David also now caught the labored hiss of heavy equine breathing.

“Riding hard,” Liz noted.

“Yeah,” David grunted. “I—”

He didn’t finish, because the Track flared up as though it would ignite the world, and out of that nimbus of light that now stretched higher than their heads and ran and expanded for more than thirty yards to either side, appeared the shape of a horse and rider.

Faster they came, and faster yet, with the rider bent low over his mount’s neck, and the cloak on his back billowing like clouds in the vanguard of a storm.

And then, with no warning, the rider yanked hard on the reins and leaned back. The horse slowed, then stopped, then rose up on its hind legs in a glory of white mane, gold barding, and wildly flashing eyes.

“Hold!” the rider—a slim but well-built man in high white boots, white hose, and beautifully cut tunic of honey gold—cried, in a voice like bells of crystal ice. And with that, the horse fell back onto all fours. Yet even before that last fore-hoof touched the ground, the rider had dropped his reins and dismounted, all in one deft motion.

“Finno!” David yelped, as the rider pushed back his hood, to reveal a young and incredibly beautiful face, framed with a short mane of thick, silky, gold-blond hair. “Uh, Fionchadd, I mean…I guess!”

The Faery youth sketched a hasty bow that, while it obviously included them all, seemed somehow meant for David alone. “Hail to you…Dave, I mean David Sullivan…I guess—and to all of you veterans of the Tracks. Glad I am to see you all, and in numbers even I dared not hope. Yet the errand I am on is grim, and I fear we have no time for revelry and a very great need for haste.”

“Haste?” Liz managed, aghast.

Fionchadd nodded. “Aye, lady, you are summoned this very night to attend the council of Lugh Samildinach, High King of the Daoine Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og.”

PART TWO

Chapter IX: World Travelers

(Whitehall Forest—Friday, June 20—midnight)

Alec’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Already he was backing away from the glittering line of the Track that stretched as far as David could see to either side, and which glowed so brightly the thick-grown trunks that flanked it seemed wrought of molten brass, their leaves of new-cast gold.

David sensed his friend’s movement as much as saw it and eased over to steady him with an arm around his shoulders. The guy was trembling—actually
trembling—
his
spare, lean muscles taut as bow strings. A sharp, concerned glance at him showed a frightened face awash with tears.

“Jesus, man,” David hissed. “Cool it! It can’t be
that
big a deal!”

Alec shrugged the arm away and rounded on him savagely, avoiding Aife’s cage by the slimmest of knife-thin margins. Leaves rustled under his feet. “Can’t it?” he challenged.
“Can’t it?”
he repeated, when David didn’t reply.