Warstalker's Track (2 page)

Rebellion.

Someone—many someones, likely, else his guard were more lax than he had cause to assume—had won through a palace crammed with defenses mundane and arcane and stolen a reigning sovereign from the heart of his own realm. He had to admire their bravery—their audacity, anyway—and already had an idea what group had worked his downfall.

The Sons of Ailill.

But why was he a prisoner?

One reply alone made sense: the same reason there had been talk of rebellion before and increased disaffection among the smaller Fay as recently as yesterday.

The mortal situation.

He should have listened, he supposed, to the tidings Nuada brought him, he who was closest observer of what chanced in the Lands of Men. But also to what everyone of late had seemed to whisper: that the Lands of Men were grown too close, that Holes were burning through the World Walls everywhere, and ever nearer to the heart of Tir-Nan-Og. That by ones and twos, in families and clans, the folk of his realm were fleeing, claiming shelter with Rhiannon of Ys, or Arawn of Annwyn, or Finvarra of Erenn—or simply seeking some new World upon the Tracks.

Lugh wasn’t certain he blamed them. But he strongly disapproved of how they had chosen to resolve the situation, when he had just set the final stone in his own plan to counter the increasing encroachment of the Lands of Men.

Which brought him to the boy.

The
mortal
boy. David Sullivan—who, though not by design, had already brought him too much pain.

And then whatever—wherever—it was that held him shifted, as the weight of bodies came upon it. For the briefest instant, fresh air flowed in, and Lugh thought he might be on the verge of release. He inhaled—

—and breathed agony beyond belief, while more pain spread like flowing lava across his body. It was dust: some fine powder riding in with that air to settle upon his sweat-soaked skin and form a thin film there.

No ordinary dust, however—

They had coated him with powdered iron!

Perhaps, he reflected, as his dark prison echoed with the grinding of immortal teeth, unconsciousness was no bad thing after all.

Prologue: Holed Up

(near Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

Firelight woke dancers of black and red upon the cave’s rough granite walls. Dancers already posed there, however, their shapes crude yet graceful, their forms human, yet not quite so, the paint with which they were limned clear though dulled with years uncounted. Blood bound that pigment (not all of it based on hemoglobin), and the fat of beasts as well, whose genes sometimes showed a fifth and sixth amino acid. Handprints showed there, too, outlined in ocher blown through bone: five-fingered hands, but with some of the digits oddly attenuated or smaller than those of the smallest child.

And the beasts—most had four legs, but many also sported wings, and some showed equal parts bird and fish, or mammal and reptile, and (not all that rarely) aspects of all four. There was writing, too, perhaps, though neither of the men watching that firelight dance among those painted revelers could have read that curling script. It had been there when the older man’s folk had entered that land. The younger’s kin had dwelt in caves then, and wrought art of their own: painted horses, fat women of clay, and scrimshaw work on ivory and horn.

The fire burned in a cavern a hundred yards from the fractured cliff face that masked its mouth. The floor was sand washed in by centuries. The air was chill because the rocks were, but the fire warmed it, and gave light and security. Fish baked in clay shells beneath the coals, but no smoke fouled the air, for Power whisked it away before it could torment either set of lungs.

Both men were magicians, after the notions of their kind. One was mortal, one was not.

The immortal—taller, fair-haired, and with the smooth, unlined face of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of the eons-aged—leaned back against the pillow he had contrived from what remained of a fine white velvet cloak, laced fingers cased in leather and silver metal across the flat plane of his chest, and regarded the other with the wry, wary stare of the warrior he was.

“You were wise not to sleep in the palace,” that one observed, careful to avoid names here where names had Power and those who presently commanded Power were even now reshaping the order of the World nearest without.

The other—the mortal; once also a warrior, now called poet—looked rougher. He wore new jeans, a black T-shirt, and a jacket of faded denim. And a leather glove on his left hand. His hair was short, auburn-brown—and unkempt. He looked older than the other, with experience if not actual wear, but was tenscore centuries younger. His teeth caught the light when he grinned, and the warrior recalled that they were both, by some obscure linkage, born as tearers of meat.

“I was…warned,” the poet confided. “I’d prefer you didn’t ask how, and surely you already know why.”

The warrior smiled in turn. “The keeping of secrets is an art well practiced among the Sidhe—in exchange, I fear, for crafting such as this, though something about the proportions of these hands we see around us makes me wonder.”

“I wonder that you never found it,” the poet snorted, reaching out to prod the coals with a stick of wood already vitreous with petrification.

“I never looked,” the warrior admitted. “One must hold some mysteries in reserve when one is immortal.”

“Good thing for both of us,” the poet acknowledged.

“The food was good, though—in the palace, I mean.”

“No better than those fish I smell cooking there.”

“Found ’em in a pool further back. Blind. Caught ’em one-handed, but kinda hated to.”

The warrior raised his leather-gloved hand and studied it absently, flexing the fingers, noting how they still stung from his night’s work with sword and Power. He could have healed himself, of course, but this was not—quite—Tir-Nan-Og, for all that, as best he could tell, this little bolt-hole had once been part of that Land until it had broken away. Or been eaten off by the taint of iron in the Lands of Men and drifted here along a Track, changing as it went, acquiring its own existential conventions.

“I am also glad I found
you…
Poet,” the warrior said at last, with a knowing twinkle in his eye.

“I was wonderin’ about that…Warrior,” the poet replied. “Figured it was rude to ask.”

“You have your secrets, I have mine,” the warrior laughed, trying
not
to stare at a certain silver boss among the many that marched down the front of the other man’s jacket. The same silver, in fact, as the silver arm that had given him his appellation:
Airgetlam
—Silverhand. His first name—his true name—he dared not think. The poet, whose name, safely enough, was John, did not know that Power rode with him most days, though the warrior imagined he was aware that the part always touched the whole, as far as some Workings went, and that connection between the once-joined was never entirely severed.

The poet—John—dug through the ashes, dragged out a hand-long block of hardened clay, and cracked it open, to reveal a feast of pearly, sweet-smelling flesh. He offered it to his visitor, who took it with a certain amount of trepidation.

“Sharing food and fire…” that one said.

“…makes us friends,” the other finished. “Thought we already were—much as your kind and mine can be.”

The warrior ate without reply—odd how hungry he was, no doubt a function of the Power he had spent so profligately of late, spiriting close to fourscore mortals out of Tir-Nan-Og. Eventually he became aware of his companion’s gaze upon him.

“Sooooo,” John ventured. “Feel like tellin’ me why you showed up here? Homage to Bobby Bruce it might be, but I doubt re-creating mortal history was your main concern. No spiders here,” he added.

“I am no king in exile,” the warrior retorted, flourishing his silver arm. “Nor can be, with this. But I suppose I
am
in exile, for the nonce.”

John scowled, cleared his throat. “I’m not sure I’m entitled to speak for my folks,” he began, “but I appreciate what you’ve done. You’re the second most powerful person in Tir-Nan-Og, best I can figure. You chose to help my folks when the crap hit, ’stead of tryin’ to save your own king.”

“Which some would say brands me a traitor,” the warrior observed. “And I would be one, had I not been following that king’s commands.”

John looked startled. “He had wind of it?”

“He has a seer—Oisin, of whom I imagine you’ve heard but doubt you’ve met. Oisin foresaw a threat but could not tell when or where. It was no real news to him. Tonight—the evacuation—was—I think the mortal word is
contingency
.”

“One of several,” John drawled back enigmatically, applying himself to a second fish.

The warrior’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he fought down anger. This was no time for dissension. “Would I be correct in assuming you are concerned for the boy?”

A curt nod. “Got a debt to him. Blood debt. He lost close kin ’cause of me. Somebody got killed trying to connect with me, anyhow.”

The warrior fumbled inside the neck of his tunic and retrieved a disk of oddly glimmering crystal framed in gold. “Would you see how he fares?” Without waiting for reply, he closed his eyes, called upon a trickle of Power and reached to a certain place, then to a certain
other,
and bound them together, then opened his eyes once more.

The disk caught fire as it twirled first between silver fingers, then on the sand between the men. And as it spun, it expanded into a sphere of light as wide as John’s forearm was long. Images moved inside. John frowned in resignation and scooted forward.

And the two of them—mortal and immortal, poet and warrior, John Devlin and Nuada Airgetlam—both at the same time saw…

…mountains: lumpy with age, now softened more with the summer-toned crowns of countless trees—conifers and hardwoods in equal riot…roads webbing them like scars of silver-gray; lakes splashed among them like melted mirrors…

…water everywhere: rainwater…drowning the lowlands, ignoring the banks of streams, filling every hollow with silt scoured from those mountains like flesh flayed away to granite bone…washing every rooftop, sheening every leaf plastering every hair on man or beast to the precise contour of skin and skull…

…closer now, as though a bird flew there, or wide-ranging thoughts gained more focus…

…
a wide road through bottomland, thick with corn and sorghum but framed by mountains to either side…a thinner road running off it, once gravel, now washed down to bedrock beneath a glaze of mud…a farmstead crouching on the mountains’ knees…a church, a graveyard, an iron-ringed family cemetery…

…
closer…

…a farmhouse on the road’s southern side, its boards decayed, its roof retained by patches…its front porch in ruins, its back stoop scarcely better…glass in half the panes, and a chimney a yard shorter than it ought to be, from which thin smoke wheezes, before drowning beneath the ongoing storm…

…cedars in the yard; a house trailer on a knoll nearby…cars in the drive: a Dodge minivan, a brand-new Lincoln Town Car, a red ’66 Mustang, an aging Mercury Monarch, a new Ford Explorer…a BMW touring motorcycle…

…and now inside…

…
an old room, all but abandoned—but crammed to the rafters with people. A door opens onto the collapsing porch, a window gapes beside it. In the left-hand wall, a massive stone fireplace stands behind an imposing hearth. Opposite the entrance, another window overlooks a backyard. Doors to the right lead to bedroom and kitchen, with the remains of a sofa between. A man sits on the hearth, folded upon himself as though his shoulders bear a world’s worth of pain. He is golden-haired, armored, and wears clothes not seen by mortal men in half a thousand years; his face bears the same alien cast as Nuada’s. John does not recognize him. Nor can he identify many of the others strewn about the room, save that he has seen them once before. Among those strangers are a slight, wiry fellow carrying bagpipes, and beside him an imposing black woman who, by the way she hovers about him, is clearly the wiry lad’s lover.

There is a boy, fourteen or thereabouts, with a surly expression and waist-length jet-black hair.

There is a woman a little older than the rest, clean-featured, and with hair bound atop her head like a blond fountain. Her clothes—black minidress and tights—scream Gothic. Something in her face brands her an artist to her soul.

And there is a man in his late twenties, lanky, angular of jaw and chin, blond and worried-looking, as though guilt and fear wage some inner race to consume him.

The rest John knows.

There is Dale Sullivan, close to eighty, white hair worn in a tail; khaki-clad, hard as a fence post and nigh as gnarly-lean—and all but father to John’s lost friend.

There is Calvin McIntosh: black-haired and rusty-dark, with features that proclaim, unmistakably, Cherokee Indian.

There is Sandy Fairfax of the waist-length light-brown hair, athlete’s body, and scholar’s mien.

There is Aikin Daniels: twentyish, brunet, compact, and furtive; clad in cammo and black; with a forestry degree all but completed.

There is Alec McLean: slender and blandly handsome, and even amid the surrounding chaos, somehow a trifle too neat.

There is Liz Hughes: a slight, pretty redhead, with more magic about her than she dreams.

And there is the one he knows best: David Sullivan. Mad Dave. David
Kevin
Sullivan, to give his whole name: the same as John’s dead friend. He too is twenty-odd; a tad on the short side, and built like a wrestler or a gymnast. He has thick blond hair caught back in a tail, and a handsome, snub-nosed face. He is also the leader of this company, though clearly unhappy to be cast into that role.

And there are two other people in the room. Like the fair-haired man, neither of them is mortal.

One would be barely more than a boy—had he not also been immortal. He might be a younger version of Nuada; then again, all Daoine Sidhe tended to look alike.

The other is a woman: hair like black ice and perilously fair. She stands in the doorway between living room and kitchen, looking dazed, and with some odd garment clutched about her, as if she had donned it in haste…