Warstalker's Track
Chapter VIII: Divide and Conquer
Interlude III: Candlelight Afternoon
Chapter XIII: Absent Friends, Absent Foes
Chapter XVI: Talking to Gryphons
Chapter XVII: Return to Sender
Interlude VIII: Within Walls and Without
Chapter XXI: Earthshaking Events
Warstalker’s Track
By Tom Deitz
Copyright 2016 by Estate of Thomas Deitz
Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Hunter Martin
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1999.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Tom Deitz and Untreed Reads Publishing
Windmaster’s Bane
Fireshaper’s Doom
Darkthunder’s Way
Sunshaker’s War
Ghostcountry’s Wrath
Stoneskin’s Revenge
Dreamseeker’s Road
Landslayer’s Law
Warstalker’s Track
Tom Deitz
This one is for Deena
and
in memory of Monnie and George
Acknowledgments
Jennifer Brehl
Diana Gill
Amy Goldschlager
Brenda Hull
Linda Jean Jeffery
Tom Jeffery
Deena McKinney
Howard Morhaim
And, once again,
a special bow of appreciation to
Buck Marchinton
for general expertise on guns, warfare, and critters
and for lending me John Devlin
Scott Gresham’s Journal
(Sunday, June 22)
Testing…testing…one…two…three. Oops! Wrong medium….
Hmmm: What do I say? I’ve finally got around to puzzling out this fancy laptop the Mystic Mountain folks gave me last week, so I guess I ought to put something official in it, like a journal, which is what I’ve called this. Only something tells me the stuff I
really
ought to include isn’t the boring day-to-day log of me trying to put one over on my employers about this staff-geologist-thing they’ve hired me to do and which I’ve suddenly found out I ought
not
to do, and to lay out all this magic stuff instead: this stuff that’s had me freaked-to-avoidance since that business at Scarboro Faire a couple of years ago, when I first found out there was such a thing as Faerie.
Thing is, I wasn’t the first. Myra’s brother’s friend David Sullivan was first. He accidentally got the Second Sight back when he was in high school and found out that the
Sidhe,
who are basically the Irish Faeries, lived in an invisible world that overlapped his corner of north Georgia but which only he could see. Short form (long form later), he knew they were there, they knew he knew, and some of ’em liked it and some of ’em didn’t—which didn’t stop him and his buds bouncing back and forth between here and there off and on for the next umpteen years. Up until now, I guess.
(God, I’m rambling! Maybe I’ll just think of this as an outline and fill in the details some other time—not that I’m likely to keep this, anyway.)
Anyway…David’s crowd and my old Athens crowd eventually got together and started holding these yearly picnics near a Straight Track (which is a kind of road between the Worlds), down in Athens, on one of the days the Faeries are supposed to ride in procession. Nothing’s ever happened before, but then this year something
did
happen. I was supposed to be with ’em, only I’d just that day been offered this job with Mystic Mountain Properties as staff geologist and had to come up here to Enotah County, thinking I had this neat new job I needed really badly, doing surveying for a resort a bunch of money men from Atlanta wanted to build near some of David’s old turf.
But anyway,
this
year a kid from Faerie, whose name I don’t remember, came riding up and told ’em that they were summoned to an audience with Lugh, who’s High King in Tir-Nan-Og, which is the local Faerie realm. Short form (again): Lugh’s apparently in a bad political situation because iron from our World’s been burning through over there a lot, and this resort I’m working on is kind of like the last straw, so he summoned every human who knew anything about the existence of his folks to a big council to pick their brains, except he also gave them an ultimatum: stop the resort or he’d flood Sullivan Cove, which is where the resort’s going to be.
Somewhere in there, too, there was an attack on the mortal-types, and David’s crowd had to retreat back here—right on top of my campsite, actually—so they figured they’d see what they could do. Bottom line was that a bunch of ’em decided to seek aid from some really powerful dudes who live over near (I believe) Wales, and have gone there. The rest of us are supposed to try to slow things down here, which I’m doing by dragging my heels and trying a bit of very clandestine industrial espionage, like sugar in gas tanks and stuff like that. And some more folks are going to see what they can do to mess up things via the Net, while my old friend LaWanda and David’s friend Calvin (who’s a for-real Cherokee) are supposed to be trying to delay things here by making it rain, only I’ll believe that when I see it.
Shoot, I wouldn’t believe it at all if I hadn’t seen some other things to kind of make me believe. So here I sit, in this nice paid-for motel room in Enotah County, wondering what I’m gonna do, because I thought I was looking out for myself, only I’ve wound up
being on the side of the bad guys. And…
Shit. I don’t feel like playing the self-analysis thing right now. It’d just make me more depressed. Sun’s out, so maybe I better go up to Sullivan Cove and pretend to look for a sapphire mine somebody told me was around there.
Gotta figure out how to hide this file, too. Shit. I hate computers.
Prelude: The Prisoner
(a dubious place—high summer)
It was the first time in the uncounted ages since his birth, unreckonably far away in time
and
space, that Lugh Samildinach had ever been unconscious.
Against his will, anyway, for even the Sidhe must sleep; their bodies were not so unlike those of mortal kind to preclude
that
necessity—besides which, without sleep there could be no dreaming, which was in itself an art to one as skilled in the shaping of Power as he. And of course there had been revels uncounted: drunkenness, drugs of every kind, besottedness on sensuality that might as well have been unconsciousness. But never had he passed from full awareness to the realm inside his skull abruptly, without consent.
He had even been dead. Immortal he was, and yet could die; for what was death to one of his kind save the severing of the bond ’twixt soul and flesh? Indeed, he had died so many times—all before his last rebirth, in Ethlinn’s Tower—that he was expert at it. It was amazing what meat, bone, and blood could withstand. Swords had pierced him, poison ravaged him, starvation—once, on a dare—reduced him to a shriveled shell. But he was strong—the strongest of his kind in this fourth of Faerie—and Power, which was to spirit as energy was to matter, was his in profligate amounts to command. As long as he—himself: his soul—had Power…well, the body that housed it was of no real consequence. Time would (as mortals said) heal all wounds. And time he had aplenty.
He did not think much of it, this unconsciousness. It was darkness without dreams, dull heavy pain with only the ghostly hope of relief. But it was
not
forever.
He blinked—and saw naught save the same colorless geometries that spun behind closed lids in the darkest caves of his realm. Blinked again, and saw neither more nor less. But he noticed three things at once.
The most imminent were the bonds that held him spread-eagled and naked in midair: shackled at wrist, neck, and ankles.
Iron
it was that gripped him: iron, which none in Faerie could work, for the fires that had wakened in that metal at the Worlds’ first making never cooled. Iron that contained his limbs but did not touch them, shielded by the thinnest sheets of impervious wyvern skin, so that he felt the pain of proximity where those fetters clasped his flesh but did not—quite—consume it.
Iron was the second thing he noted as well; for not only did it restrain him but chains of it stretched away into unguessable dark, to bind his bonds to a greater mass of that metal that entombed him like the shell of an egg in which he was embryo. Or the core of a ball of flame: a sun, perhaps—irony there, for mortal men had styled him Sun God and given him a feast-day to prove it: Lughnasadh, celebrated in that World and Faerie alike.
But the iron sun had him now, and not one of the Powers at his command could win through that fierce ferrous fire and escape. Not even thought.
The third thing he noticed was how very badly he missed the Land. He had
lost
the Land, though his rational aspect, that every second fought past panic and pain to greater ascendancy, knew that as long as he lived and Tir-Nan-Og endured that bond could not be severed.
Which set him to thinking more alertly, as impressions gave way to knowledge and supposition bowed to the force of fact.
Fact.
He had not become thus of his own free will. He had drunk wine—poisoned, probably—and dozed in his bath, not yet dreaming—and awareness had simply vanished into darkness, like a candle blown out. And before he could rally his Power and recover, there simply was no air.
Too quickly.
His substance had needed that support before spirit could muster itself to flee, and so he had
thought
one urgent plea for help, and one command—and passed out.
Fact.
Whatever had occurred had required intervention by another conscious will. Which could not have been accidental. Which in turn awoke that word he had long, in his most secret parts, dreaded.