Landslayer's Law (16 page)

* * *

It was like no Riding David had ever essayed—though most of those journeys had been under duress, and not necessarily on what he suspected was a High Road favored by the Sidhe. Some things didn’t change, however: the way reality shifted as soon as they’d taken more than a dozen steps down that shimmering golden road. The way the blackberry briars that flanked it in their own World immediately began to whorl and twist and swell in size, so that they quickly formed a tube maybe five yards across completely encircling the Track. The way the Track itself grew brighter and dimmer by turns, as the motes that both comprised it and drifted above its surface ebbed, flowed, and sometimes vanished altogether.

Yet some things were different as well. David could’ve sworn that the last time he’d fared this way the briars had held off, that theirs had been a more gradual transition: a simple walk in the woods, save that the trees had grown larger, taller, older, and eventually more exotic as he’d progressed. And of course he’d had different company. Shoot, he’d ridden with the Queen of Battles herself: the Morrigu, though at the time she’d turned herself into a mare. And though Liz had also been with him then, they’d been on a much more—to him—urgent quest, namely locating Aikin, who, having captured Aife (in enfield guise) when first she’d entered their World (back when they had no idea she was other than what she seemed), had used the power innate in the beast to activate the Track whose location he had dreamed, and so venture into the webwork of Worlds so long denied him.

Yeah, it was different this time, all right, and for other reasons as well.
This
time there was the security of having his closest friends along;
this
time there would be no secrets. Never mind the assurance of having Finno in the lead, who actually knew how to navigate such places. But the main change was the haste with which the journey was accomplished.

It
had
to be the music, and surely Piper had never played so well. They rode in procession, solemnly, almost as though they were themselves on a Rade. And while “King of the Fairies” was properly a fiddle tune and meant to be played ever-faster (every version he’d heard had been rendered thus, at any rate), Piper played it slowly, almost as a lament. Indeed, a sort of sadness seemed to pervade their band. Certainly there was little levity, even from those from whom he would’ve expected it, like Brock and Darrell. Yet
there was no real gloom either, in spite of their somber clothing, the shadow tones of their mounts, and the golden half-light that lit their faces from beneath far more often than distant, filtered suns lit them from on high.

“I feel it too,” Fionchadd acknowledged at last, falling back to pace David and Liz, who rode second in line. “You have not said it, but I feel it: the melancholy. As if we were at the end of all things.”

“Are we?” David dared. “
Something
sure has changed.”

“The edges fray,” Fionchadd admitted. “That which was clear and certain has become muddled and vague.
Here
and
there
are no longer separate entities.”

“Never were, I thought,” David retorted. “According to some philosophy.”

Fionchadd smiled wanly. “Some day I will put on mortal flesh and spend some useful time in your World. Though we are older than you, and wiser in the ways of Power, yet there are many things in your Lands we but vaguely comprehend.”

“I wonder,” David mused, “if there’s really any need for all these barriers.”

Fionchadd blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

A shrug. “The World Walls, I guess. Is there any real reason they have to be? Couldn’t we, like, all live together in one World? Couldn’t we learn from each other? I know it’d be hard at first, ’cause our science would certainly turn upside down; but you folks—”

“You are forgetting iron.”

“You could put on the substance of our World,” David countered. “And if there was only one World….”

Fionchadd shook his head. “You forget. The World Walls were not wrought by us; we only reinforce them—sometimes. You could no more destroy them than you could…destroy the attraction between the sun and moon.”

“But you folks could live in either—and if you put on our substance, like I said—”

“We would still be drawn back to Faerie. If we did not return, we would go mad. And I doubt you want a host of insane Danaans dwelling in your midst!”

“Oh well,” David conceded. “It’s something to think about, anyway.”

“Aye,” Fionchadd sighed, “and though you have not noticed it, we are almost there.”

David started, not realizing how all that thought—all that internalization—had caused him to lose track of the external world entirely. He focused on it now, and focused hard. There were trees beyond the briars—when had they appeared?—and occasionally, beyond them, he glimpsed meadows or flat plains or deserts of odd-colored sand, from which strange glassy forms erupted like dancers frozen into crystal or stone.

“Play faster!” Fionchadd demanded. “Play twice as fast again—and see what we shall see.”

Piper did. With the utter seamlessness of a master musician, he picked up the tune as it came around and began to increase the tempo. LaWanda co-opted Calvin’s drum, and with it, she contrived an ever-faster cadence, which Piper never failed to match perfectly. And suddenly all the world became fast music and the slow, steady tread of the horse beneath David’s seat. And then the music waxed faster yet, and the motes of the Track began to rise higher, and higher still; first to the horses’ hocks, then to their withers, and finally over their heads. As the cloud reached his chin, David had the awful sense he was about to drown, and found himself taking deep ragged breaths, straining to keep his head above what felt most like a blood-warm sea that was at once effervescent and charged with electricity.

“Relax,” Fionchadd urged. “Do not resist. Let it become, instead, a pleasure.”

David started to reply that such was easy for him to say, but then Liz leaned toward him. “Close your eyes,” she advised. “It makes it easier.”

A final deep breath—and David found himself in the most profoundly peaceful state he’d ever experienced. He could stay this way forever, wafting along as though he truly had no body. It was like his lone encounter with a sensory deprivation tank—save that there was still Piper’s music, and the light beyond his closed eyelids was golden.

“Halt!” Fionchadd commanded abruptly, his voice oddly thin and distant, as though the mist sucked away its very volume.

David hated to hear that word—indeed, he did not immediately recognize it.

But there was no more music; that had ended in mid-note.

And with it, like water running from a sieve, the drifting golden motes ebbed away, so that a moment later David found himself between a pair of rough granite trilithons twice as high as his head, gazing down a grassy, sunlit slope across no more than a mile of open plains to a perilously steep-sided mountain girt with walls and terraces and gardens, atop which glimmered what he recalled from more than one sighting: the twelve-towered palace of Lugh Samildinach.

“Wow!” Brock gasped, riding up beside David, mouth agape. “I’m sorry I keep saying that,” the boy added. “But sometimes—well, sometimes the right word really is ‘wow.’”

“I know,” David acknowledged. “I remember the first time I saw it. It was dusk, and Alec and I were campin’ up on Lookout Rock back in my home county, and I’d just got the Sight the night before, only I didn’t know it, and I saw what I thought was just plain old Bloody Bald—that’s what it’s called in our World. And then I saw that mountain rise higher, and show—well, I don’t have to describe it, you can see it for yourself.”

“Wow!” Brock repeated, and grinned. And for a moment David too surrendered himself to the view.

A thousand feet—two thousand—who knew how tall those towers rose? And how far around were those walls? Geometry might tell, in theory; but David suspected that anyone assaying them with ruler or tape would find his efforts thwarted. Yet the place was not insubstantial, not ethereal, not ever-shifting. Rather, it was far
too
real, yet impossible in its intricacy. The overall impression was of relentless verticality, determined straining for height, so that the towers sported flutes and subsidiary turrets and buttresses and arches and ornate crenelations and rank upon rank of tall, narrow stained glass windows.

It was Gothic, yet it was not, for it was too spontaneous and organic. It was Celtic in its whorling complexity and the fluidity of its shapes, yet without that culture’s pervasive earthiness. It was Moorish in the delicate intricacy of its ornament, yet almost Art Nouveau where those ornaments were allowed to meld and merge and flow free.

“And you say you have no artists,” Myra snorted, joining them. “I could spend a year studying a square yard of that—and we’re still miles away.”

“Miles to go before you sleep, too,” Fionchadd reminded her, “and I did not say we were the builders.”

Myra’s eyes widened, her brows shot almost to her hairline. But Fionchadd preempted any reply. “Nuada told me that,” the Faery explained. “The line about sleeping, I mean. A line from one of your poets he liked very much—because it said exactly what it ought. It means something different, too, when one is immortal.”

“Someone’s coming!” Alec announced—precisely as Gary, LaWanda, and Sandy shouted the same. They no longer rode in file, but had fanned out across the fringe of the stone-crowned hill atop which they had emerged; yet now they crowded closer, gazes probing the landscape anxiously. By following Alec’s pointing finger, David could barely make out a cloud of pale dust emerging from the eaves of a dark-leaved forest halfway between the palace and their party. Even as he watched, the dust clarified into riders: a whole host of mounted men, with the glint of armor about them and long gold-and-white banners snapping above them in no obvious wind.

“We must meet them!” Fionchadd called—and set heel to his steed and galloped down the hill. David had no choice but to follow, not when he noted his more foolhardy friends (notably Darrell and Brock) getting so far ahead of him. “Hold, guys!” he hollered. “These folks probably know Finno, but if they know any of the rest of us, it’s—uh—probably gonna be me, so I guess I oughta take the lead—if nobody minds.”

Alec grimaced sourly. “My friend the hero.”

“Reluctant hero,” David shot back. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” And with that, he kicked his own mount in the ribs and raced Fionchadd mac Ailill down the hill.

They met on a road of golden stone inset with interlaced spirals one shade darker, surrounded by a plain of knee-high grass that could have been waving strands of silver. “Lugh honors you indeed,” Fionchadd confided as they approached the other party, who had halted in double rows a short way ahead, naked swords set crossways across their saddles, silken banners waving. “He has sent his personal guard.”

David tried to look grim and noble as the parties paced toward each other. They were identical, those Faery knights, and like a dream from another age. White horses carried them, with white velvet barding dripping golden fringe almost to the ground; and silver armor clad them: rings of fine-wrought mail casing arms and legs and throats beneath white velvet surcoats. High-crowned helms covered their heads like caps, the long ear pieces and nasals all worked with impossible swirls and spirals. Shields they bore, too, though set at rest, each bearing Lugh’s device:
argent, a sun in splendor, Or—
so a human herald would blazon it. And that device was repeated on the breast of their surcoats and on the long cloaks that fell from their shoulders on either side, to merge their own fringes with those of the horses’ accouterments.

Fionchadd leaned toward David and grinned. “Come with me—my friend,” he said, then twisted further around. “The rest of you form into file in the order you first trod other Worlds.”

A few mumbled comments followed, and more than a few uncertain glances flitted about, but Liz quickly took charge and got things sorted out—the main problem being what to do about Myra, Piper, and LaWanda, who, though they’d clearly been to at least one other World, weren’t sure how certain events qualified. In the end, they decided that if they’d wound up in a place that weirded them and later discovered that place was connected to some other reality, that counted. The upshot was that Alec came right after David, and that Aikin brought up the rear.

That accomplished, Fionchadd began to walk his horse forward, with David right behind. When the two groups were within maybe ten yards of each other, the two closest knights separated from their ranks and moved out to meet them. They alone wore visored helms, and not until the nearer was directly opposite him, did David note the subtle difference in the armor along that man’s right arm. And then he recognized the glitter of those cold, dark blue eyes. He was gazing not on a mere Faery captain, Lugh’s household guard or no, but on Nuada Airgetlam himself: Lugh’s warlord, counselor, and—no pun intended—right hand man.

Nuada did not remove his visor, but David thought he saw the corners of that one’s eyes crinkle, as though, beneath all that complexity of metal, he were smiling.

As for the other…David didn’t know him, though Fionchadd obviously did. They stared at each other a moment, and Fionchadd actually looked nervous—anxious, anyway. “Have you brought the ones Lugh summoned?” that one demanded.

“I have,” Fionchadd replied. “I have brought them
all
.”

“All
you
were sent for,” that one corrected. “And long enough it took you! Now follow me…and quickly!”

And with that, the Faery jerked his steed around and galloped off down the golden stone road between the long file of mounted knights.

Nuada—if that indeed were he—did likewise. Fionchadd mirrored them. David came next, and heard the rest of his companions fall in behind, then a louder clatter as the knights closed ranks in their wake.

It was a wild ride that ensued, in contrast to the stately pace they had maintained along the Track or the confused jumble of their cross-country gallop to the road. This was simply speed. A mad race down arrow-straight pavement that led through forests and fields and across at least one river, until, very suddenly, they emerged from one final (and very dark) wood comprised of what seemed to be giant sequoias, and found themselves confronting a shining white wall twice as high as any of those trees. At first glimpse that wall seemed unadorned, as it swept off into unguessable distance to either side, but a closer inspection showed that it was in fact thick with patterns: more of the ubiquitous spirals set in wide bands of inlaid stone at man height as far as David could see—except for straight ahead, where the pattern rose in higher relief and stronger color to frame a slender, arched recess ten times as high as the nearest banner pole.