Warstalker's Track (30 page)

“At your leave,” Fionchadd replied formally.

By the time Uki had summoned a third serpent—two, actually: a pair of the less venomous cottonmouths—Sandy was feeling considerably better, but Fionchadd was looking anxious. Clad only in the breechclout Uki had lent him upon arrival (though he had other clothing to hand), it was a simple matter for him to seize each serpent behind the head and press them both to his smooth, pale chest. Sandy assumed he had a higher pain threshold than her fellow mortals; still, it had to hurt, and she wasn’t surprised to hear him gasp and see his jaw tighten as he fought for control.

Another gasp, and he let the serpents fall. They slithered away harmlessly into a hole beside Liz’s foot, evoking
a
sharp cry from her, born more of reflex than fear. Liz was as tough as they came, but instinct was instinct, regardless.

Meanwhile, Fionchadd was bending over in the center of the pool, so that the blood that dripped from his chest fell clear into the water. Both previous landscapes still ghosted there, like layers of glass beneath each other, but a third now manifested atop them, aided by a thunderclap from Uki that sent Fionchadd, who’d been gaping as though ensorcelled, scurrying back to shore.

The first thing that formed was a complex, three-dimensional webwork of golden lines that had to represent Tracks and Pillars. And around them, slowly, more concrete shapes coalesced. This landscape was smaller than the Mortal World, however, and more tenuous, especially to the north and west. But Bloody Bald’s Faery analog was preposterously easy to pick out, while the haven at the coast also showed brightly.

More troubling were what at first looked like glowing embers: spots of red-edged black strewn here and there across the land like a sprinkling of burning pepper. “Holes,” David gasped. “Those are Holes, aren’t they? Those black things?”

“Likely,” Fionchadd murmured distantly. “Touch me now, if you would watch.”

Sandy did—and suddenly found herself zooming in on the glittering white cone of the surrogate Bloody Bald, watching towers rise and point, while arches and windows, walls and gardens clarified, all wrapped around that impossibly perilous peak.

One garden in particular caught her eye: small, and entirely surrounded by the black-glass and wrought-silver walls of one of the lesser towers that wasn’t numbered among the twelve that gave the palace its most common appellation. It was actually a rather plain garden, almost austere, and Sandy quickly determined that the silver designs inset into the black glass were meant to be winter-blasted trees, and that the paving stone was the same glass but unpolished, across which wrought-silver roots sprawled, rising above the surface and imbedded within it. An irregular, car-sized pool occupied the center, not unlike the one she and her companions contemplated. And around that pool, an assortment of figures were ranged.

Every one was Faery, and most looked very young; younger than Fionchadd, even, or Aife. More were men than women by a wide margin, though the women looked little different, clad as they all were in smooth black leather and a coarser hide of silvery hue Sandy thought might be the wyvern skin she’d heard so much about. They looked tired, too; and not as clean as was typical for the Sidhe. A few sported hair that had been hacked off roughly, and more showed wounds and blisters that looked strange indeed against all that fair, smooth flesh; possibly, she suspected, proof of encounters with iron during a certain recent altercation. All were beautiful, of course, but most faces were hard with anger, hatred, and maybe fear, rather than stern with pride or authority. Something, she reckoned, was rotten in Denmark.

A discussion was in process, too, in the strange tongue of the Sidhe, of which the only words she could make out were
Lugh
and
Turinne.
And with two sets of World Walls between, no thought rode with those words to translate them in her brain. It was, in short, a meaningless, frustrating muddle. By the attentive look on his face, however, it was a great deal more to Fionchadd.

For a fair while that debate continued, only breaking off when a door opened in what she’d taken to be the cast-silver trunk of an enormous tree, and a pair of soldiers entered, with an old man stumbling between them. An old
mortal,
by the look of him: white-haired and clad in a tattered robe that might once have been the silver-blue-gold of bright moonlight. His hands were manacled behind him, and his head bowed with what looked like resignation or outright despair, so that Sandy didn’t immediately get a look at his face. But when she did, she gasped, for it was a young face and an old face at once; beautiful beyond mortal longing, yet clearly that of a mortal man. The eyes, when she finally glimpsed them, were featureless orbs of cold, dark silver.
Blind!
she knew.
Stone blind!

At a word from the red-haired youth who was leader of that cadre (Turinne? Was that his name?), the soldiers flung the old man forward on his knees, where he remained unmoving. More discussion followed, and then one of them chanced to look up, as though he were a doll who’d just discovered that someone larger was observing his machinations, and the contact dissolved. The pool rippled, then skimmed over with featureless dull red. A final bolt from Uki, and the red dissolved like fractured glass, leaving eight exceedingly puzzled people.

“Well, Finno,” David prompted. “What was all that Faery mumbo jumbo?”

Fionchadd took a deep, shuddering breath. “Many things, but four in particular. First, that was the rebels’ ruling council, with Turinne at its head, and they have vowed that they
will
find Lugh. The second is that they still intend to flood those parts of the Lands of Men that lie beneath Tir-Nan-Og, commencing with Sullivan Cove. The third is that they plan to start tomorrow.”

Calvin scowled uncertainly. “Our time or—?”

“I corrected for the change,” Fionchadd snapped.

“And the fourth thing?” David persisted, a nervous edge on his voice, as though he already knew but needed confirmation to validate that fear.

“You saw the old man?”

David nodded. “Oisin. Lugh’s mortal seer. He’s kind of a friend.”

Fionchadd regarded him solemnly. “It will not go well with him. Being mortal, he will not be able to resist certain things. Being Lugh’s seer, he will also know many things.”

“Including
us
?” Liz dared.

“If they know how to ask about you. Oisin is wily; he knows how to answer such questions as they will pose. He will betray no more than he must. He—”

“Enough!” Uki broke in. “We have spied on three Worlds today, and I have heard every one of you speak of war, and war it is I see brewing, yet no one has related the tale that brought you here, though much I have divined already.” He stared at Calvin meaningfully.

“Aye, adewehi,” Calvin sighed. “Maybe you oughta sit down, though, and have some black drink, ’cause this is gonna be a long one.”

“I have time,” Uki said solemnly, stalking back to the soapstone table.

“I’m not so sure that
we
do,” Calvin countered. “Not if they’re gonna do the Cove in the morning. In the meantime, this is how it goes…”

He spoke for almost an hour, by guess; since Sandy’s watch—no surprise—wasn’t working. (Watches often didn’t in places like this, though their failures were as inconsistent as they were inexplicable.) Throughout the narrative, Uki said little, but his face grew more and more troubled.

“…and here we are,” Calvin finished, leaning back and shaking his head before helping himself to a cup of bitter black drink.

“Here we
all are,”
Uki echoed ominously, rising to his feet. For a moment Sandy thought he was going to storm the cavern again. Instead, he strode to a raised terrace, wrought of the cavern’s natural stone, and climbed atop it.

“Yanu-degahnehiha,”
he called to David: He-wrestles-bears, which was his warname in Cherokee;
“Utluntadehi”—
to
Calvin; it meant He-killed-Spearfinger—“and your kinsman: Kirkwood, as I recall. You will join me.” A pause, a scowl. Then: “These words have vexed me greatly, so that I cannot plot proper action alone. Come, warriors, I must construct a Power Wheel.”

Calvin started. “But, you’ve already got one!”

Uki nodded stonily. “
Outside,
to reach which takes time. And any time saved now may save all of us in turn.”

Calvin didn’t reply. All Sandy could do was gnaw her lips in anguished perplexity at what could so disturb someone like Uki. And for a moment, all anyone heard was the waterfall’s heartbeat thunder.

Chapter XIV: Relics

(Tir-Gat—high summer)

It was just as well he was sitting on soft, cushiony moss, Alec thought wryly, else they’d have heard his chin drop all the way to the other side of this screwy little pocket universe. But what other reaction was possible—when, right in the middle of their last and most crucial trial, with Piper playing the best he ever had: a tune so sad and full of pain it even had a tough broad like LaWanda going all soft and misty; and then—bang—he just stops? Whereupon the door opens and out walks Yd, wild-eyed and grim-faced, with his britches bagging around his hips and that preposterous cloak flapping in the breeze like the wings of a dozen birds of paradise?

And keeps right on walking into the sand as though the rest of them weren’t even there, whereupon he turns and says, without expression, “I concede. I wish you joy of what you seek.”

And keeps walking.

Alec watched spellbound—they all did—as the former guardian of Tir-Gat dwindled to a dark point against the silky glare of the mirror-sands. And then was gone.

“Did he—?” Myra choked. “That is…”

Aife shrugged. “He arrived here somehow; perhaps that is the way he returns, though I would not be him when I came to face my King. Or perhaps this World simply ends out there and he stepped off.”

“Or through.” Myra shivered. “This place isn’t all that stable, as I recall.”

“It is farther away from your World than it was then, however,” Aife observed.

Myra had just opened her mouth to ask
how
far when Piper appeared in the tower’s open doorway. He was drenched with sweat, had his shirt open all the way down, and wore the bellows for his pipes still fastened around his waist like panniers. But the smug, shy, uncertain grin he was flashing would’ve lit up a small country. “I…won!” he mumbled, half dazed. “I…actually…won!”

“Figured,” LaWanda snorted, then grinned even wider than her lover and rushed forward to sweep him off his feet and spin him around, only stopping when her wounds made her stagger.

That broke whatever emotional logjam had been in effect, however, and they besieged their wiry, tousle-haired friend. Backs got thumped, hugs were given, kisses exchanged without discrimination. Only Aife looked troubled. “A strange man, that: a guardian, yet his heart was not in it. Such a one should be fierce, should give no quarter, should…”

“Maybe it was like you said,” Myra mused. “Maybe his heart really wasn’t in it. Maybe it was a punishment or something.”

“Yeah,” Alec agreed. “Seems to me like folks over here tend to exile the weird ones to out-of-the-way places.”

“Beats killin’ ’em,” Aikin muttered. “Killin’ doesn’t really matter when they can come back sooner or later.”

“Whatever,” Alec sighed. “What say we grab something to eat and go plunder that library?”

*

As Yd had reminded Piper upon departure, Colin of Tir-Gat’s library occupied the tower’s second level, which was accessed by a wide, freestanding stone stair that curved around the inside of the ground-floor room. Nor was reaching it difficult, though the footing was somewhat problematical, what with a few loose treads and one place where two steps had fallen away entirely, so that they had to step across a two-foot gap. Fortunately enough of the carved stone railing remained to make even that passage relatively easy.

Myra giggled. “Going up at your own speed sure beats running down in the middle of an earthquake, with a bunch of crazy men in tow!”

LaWanda smirked back. “That’s for sure!”

Myra eyed her male companions. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed.”

And then they reached the second level.

If navigating the stairs had been uncomplicated, what awaited them at their terminus was not. Though the room itself occupied the entire floor and was mostly open to the sky, chaos was everywhere, courtesy of the next two levels’ having collapsed atop it, leaving a hollow shell that continued several levels higher. There’d been fire up there, too, but it hadn’t reached this low—fortunate, if you were looking for fragile artifacts. Still, blackened timbers and fallen blocks of masonry, both carved and plain, and much of it inlaid with malachite and lapis-lazuli, were everywhere and had to be stepped over or steered around, all the while keeping watch for unstable portions of floor and rotten timbers. Some of the latter bore disturbing marks, too: as though they’d been gnawed—or clawed—by something larger than Alec wanted to contemplate.

But this really was the library, Alec knew right off, because the far quadrant of wall was still lined floor-to-ceiling with rough wooden bookcases, many of which retained their precious cargo.

“Oh, wow,” Myra gasped, clearly in awe, as she got her first good view. “Oh, fucking
wow
!”

“You read…Sidheish?” Aikin chided, though Alec could tell his friend, who was a serious bibliophile, was also wildly impressed.

Alec froze in place. “Good point,” he said seriously. “We’re here, but how do we know what we’re looking for? I mean, I hate to say this, folks, but we haven’t really thought this through very well. We’ve mostly been going on hunches, guesses, and dead reckoning.”

“Which seem to work pretty well,” Myra shot back. “Besides, you’re supposed to be the logical one: you and Hunter-boy. I, sir, am an artist, as is Wannie.”

“And we’re women and therefore more intuitive,” LaWanda added sarcastically. “We don’t fight. We don’t do nothin’.”

“’Cept fret about birthin’ babies,” Aikin teased.

LaWanda threw a chunk of charcoal at him and reached for another.