Warstalker's Track (44 page)

“Whatever!” David retorted recklessly.

Faery eyes flashed in more than one face. “You fought the ashes,” Arawn purred. “Would you now face the fire?”

“Whatever,” David repeated.
(Stalling,
Kirkwood realized. Buying time for Aife. He hoped that was his only agenda.)

“I could
burn
you to ash where you stand, little mortal!” Arawn hissed. “Lugh has spoiled you, but not all the Sidhe are like him. Even now he fights for his throne. If he wins and we slay you, we rid him of the last impediment to his plan. If Turinne wins, we remove a nuisance from his borders.”

“We’ve got steel!” David warned. “We’ve got stuff you never even heard of!”

A brow quirked upward. “And we do not?”

David squared his shoulders and took another step forward, which brought him perilously near the edge. He was scared of heights, too, Cal said. So, good for him. “I’ll fight you, then,” David challenged. “Man to man. But only if I can name the weapons.”

“That choice by rights is mine,” Arawn drawled. “Yet I am curious.” He leaned forward expectantly, hands draped across the quillions of his sword.

David swallowed. “No steel from my World. No Power from yours. Weapons neither of us truly know, but with both force and Power in ’em.”

“What would these weapons be?”

David flourished his atasi, bright with more than one kind of blood. “War clubs from another World, that take a man’s skill and strength to wield, yet which contain their own Power.”

Kirkwood’s mouth popped open.
What the hell was Sullivan trying to do?
The kid no more knew how to “wield” an atasi than the man in the moon. Shoot, he barely knew how to use one himself, and most of the flash stuff tonight had been desperation more than skill.

Arawn, however, seemed to be considering the possibility. Good. Maybe Dave
had
bought Aife some time—if only he didn’t wind up paying for it later.

And still Arawn considered.

*

Aife’s hand was cold where Liz held it fast, adding what strength she could to the woman’s own. It was failing strength, too, but in that she was no different from the rest and better off than some—like poor little Brock. Or Elyyoth, whom she’d barely known, or LaWanda, who was shot so full of holes she might never walk again without limping. It was a miracle no one had been permanently maimed, and only two had died.

It was more of a miracle she was standing here up to her butt in cold mountain water when the love of her life was over on that ledge bullshitting the King of the Annwyn Faeries, who was also in some screwy way a Lord of the Dead. She wondered what a bullet from this nice little revolver in her belt would do to all that arrogance.

Blow things all to hell, probably. Besides, it wasn’t her fight. She’d thrown her lot where strength was needed most: in helping Aife control her spell.

It was an odd sensation, actually; rather like bleeding to death. It hurt, but required no effort to maintain, leaving her free to observe, though her head felt strange, almost like being high. Mostly, she watched David. But sometimes, too, she gazed at Piper and LaWanda, who were off by themselves consoling each other over the death of Brock. Or at Alec, across from her, who’d aged a decade in the last hour and looked as rough as she’d ever seen him. Finno was simply
there;
slack-faced but unwounded. Sandy and Myra were present as well, and Aik had veered their way before choosing to stand with David.

A yawn ambushed her. She closed her eyes against the slow, steady rain she’d all but tuned out, it had become so pervasive. And immediately lost herself in Aife’s effort. Indeed, it was as though the border between them had dissolved, so that she felt with Aife’s fingers and saw with the Faery woman’s inward eye.

And what she saw!
Silver Tracks: a dozen at least; all twisting, merging, surging like a spiral river
toward
Tir-Nan-Og, then
through
it and beyond to another place whose position in space and time she couldn’t comprehend.

Do not try!
Aife demanded.
I
alone must aim the spell. A little longer, and Tir-Nan-Og will be anchored. Only then dare we rest.

Liz scowled, having caught something darker, there in the back of Aife’s mind. A second agenda, perhaps? Or merely a misgiving?

Only a little longer,
Aife repeated.
Pray the others can forestall the Dark King.

Dark King.
Liz pondered the phrase absently, realizing how little she knew about any of this beyond its impact on her own life.
Dark King.
Was Lugh therefore the Light?

Abruptly, there
was
light—and thunder, too, as lightning struck close by.

Reflex opened her eyes. She saw Alec only in passing, as her gaze darted first to the standoff at the precipice, then to what had drawn every other set of eyes.

She didn’t see the man initially, lost in rain and shadow as he was. But then the rain was swept away, and the shadows by the woods clarified, and what she’d taken for a shrub by the entrance to the trail stepped into the sputtering torchlight.

A tall, muscular man clad in black buckskin studded with patterns of polished hematite, with an atasi at least a yard long in hands far blacker than this or any night.

“Asgaya Gunnagei!” she breathed. The Black Man of the West. Chief of Usunhiyi, the Darkening Land, in which lay Tsusginai, the Ghostcountry.

Who was
also
a Lord of the Dead.

They had come! The Chiefs of the Quarters! One was here now, and the rest were surely close behind. It really
was
going to happen! They really
were
going to move a World, even if Aife failed—which might well happen, the way she was fading.

Sparing the barest glance toward the group in the pool, Asgaya Gunnagei strode toward the confrontation at the cliff. David and Aikin eased aside, relinquishing their place on the precipice. He accepted it without acknowledgment and stood there, staring at Arawn.

“The dead of this place,” he said coldly. “Are mine!”

*

David didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified. Beyond hope, someone had stepped in at the last instant to save their asses. Or maybe not the last instant, given that the Chiefs of Galunlati had oracular stones, a tendency to spy, and a vested interest in events in the Lands of Men.

And a promise made to aid them.

It was all going to be all right!

Or were two Lords of the Dead about to come to blows? “This is not your Land!” Arawn snapped.

“Nor yours,” the Black Man replied amiably. “The dead are another matter.”

“The dead themselves choose most often, so I have heard. My kind do not die that way, and in spite of what mortals say, I have little traffic with their dead.”

“It appears that you would make some,” the Black Man noted.

“It appears,” Arawn hissed back, “that they have made a fair number themselves!”

“Only one of which concerns me…now.”

“You would make an interesting foe, Asgaya Gunnagei,” Arawn drawled, leaning back casually. David wondered if he was scared or merely assessing.

“As would you, Arawn of Annwyn,” the Black Man echoed. “Perhaps we shall test each other someday. Or perhaps our armies will. War one day, games the next. Anetsa and hurley: they are not so different. Or maybe toli.”

“Perhaps,” Arawn agreed.

The Black Man cleared his throat and tapped his atasi meaningfully. “It would seem to me, oh Outland King, that your attention might better be placed elsewhere. What happens here is beyond your stopping or mine. What happens there could go either way. Perhaps you should…observe.”

“Perhaps,” Arawn conceded with a mocking bow, “I will.”

“Now might be advisable.”

David didn’t hear the
word
Arawn gave his fleet, though the anger that drove it throbbed in his skull like a decade of colds borne all at once. It was clearly an order to withdraw, however, for every ship in that fleet—and in the second that had stealthily massed behind it—slowly pivoted around its center. Those behind Arawn’s flagship parted for their King to sail through and closed behind them. The air shimmered, though it was hard to see, for the rain had returned beyond the ledge. And then, like salt dissolving, they were gone.

Leaving David standing behind Asgaya Gunnagei. “’Bout time,” he muttered recklessly, too tired to say other than what he thought.

The Black Man rounded on him, knocking his atasi from his hands with one casual blow from his own. It crackled feebly, a spark where before it had commanded lightning. “I am not Uki!” the Black Man spat. “I come of my own time and choosing!”

“So you said,” David snapped back, anger making him rash, as reason fought to overcome it. “Adawehiyu,” he added wearily. “It has been a trying night.”

“Not for you alone,” the Black Man growled. “Many seek my realm, or its reflections on other sides.”

David didn’t look at him. He really did
not
have patience left for verbal sparring. He wanted this resolved so he could get on with the rest of his life. They were at the critical juncture now, with one spell in place and apparently working. He had to keep things moving.

“I come alone,” the Black Man informed him.

David gaped at him. “No way!” he blurted, aware even as he spoke that he sounded like a pouty kid. “You promised you’d help move Tir-Nan-Og!”

Asgaya Gunnagei lifted a brow the color of a coal mine. “And is Tir-Nan-Og not moving?”

It took a moment for the words to sink in. “It…
is
?”

The Black Man nodded. “What we would have done, your other allies have discovered on their own and effected already. We could do no more than they. You do not need us.”

“Then why’re you here?” Aikin protested, sounding as angry as David felt.

“Because someone here has
died.
Someone who dared my Land before and so won great honor.”

“Brock!” Calvin whispered. You’ve come for Brock!”

“He is not of my Land by lineage, but still it is his right.” David gnawed his lip as logic reasserted. “The…death!” he dared. “Was it Brock’s? Or those guys we fought, who died in the pool? Or…what?”

The Black Man glared at him. “What you are about requires the power of Life. It has cost one death freely given and a score sold unaware. It may yet cost another.”

“What—?” David began, not wanting to believe what he’d just heard.

The Black Man wasn’t listening. Wordlessly he made his way back to where the remainder of their companions stood locked in some kind of half-assed trance in the middle of the pool. David followed him. Fuck danger or decorum, Brock was still his friend! And Cal’s even more, as he slowed so his companion could take the fore.

“Poor little guy,” Calvin murmured when the Black Man knelt beside the slight young figure who still sprawled where he’d fallen: pale face half buried in gravely mud, black hair slicked to his skull where it wasn’t floating in water.

“Whatever happens,” David whispered back, “it’ll be better than what we’ve gone through.”

“Yes,” the Black Man agreed, not turning. And with that he gathered Brock into his arms and waded into the pool. Ignoring the circle still at work there, he marched straight for the waterfall. Nor did he stoop as he passed through, though the water steamed where it touched his skin.

David watched unblinking, eyes afire with unshed tears. Cal did too. All at once they were sobbing. Calvin’s arms enfolded him; he hugged back. And for a while two grown men bled sorrow into the night.

Music found them there: Piper, still alive and functional, still with his Uilleann pipes. He was playing “Green Fields of France.”

Interlude IX: Edge of Battle

I

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

Lugh was beginning to think that perhaps he should not have built such an enormous palace. He hadn’t
intended
to, of course, but even one room added per year for a thousand years amounted to quite a number, and the place was ten times older.

They were in the old parts now and still on horseback, though that was becoming more difficult as corridors became narrower, ceilings lower, and floors more slippery, never mind the stairs. The straight ones they could manage, but not the tightly curved ones, which affected the route they chose.

He could’ve abandoned his steed of course: faithful golden Sunstorm, ninetieth of his line. But though he still held the advantage as he and his burgeoning band bored ever deeper into his citadel, height, mass, and a longer view were virtues that couldn’t be ignored. And now, though he was as sure of victory as he was certain he’d confront Turinne, still he was loath to relinquish whatever advantage he commanded. A man on foot
might
have presence; one on horseback always had more.

They were approaching an intersection now, the narrow corridor they trod giving onto a wide one more than halfway to his throne hall, where lay the heart of his realm. Closer, and he knew with senses subtle and obscure that ambush waited there. A brow cocked at Nuada bestowed him the favor of the charge. Heels touched silvery sides, and Nuada surged forward, bent low, sword in hand. Carmagh thundered by on his left, likewise poised for attack. Forty strides… thirty…twenty…

Men poured from either side in the livery of the Sons of Ailill, all afoot. Nuada took the head of the foremost. A second knelt to fire one of those coward’s toys from the Mortal World. Lead rang off granite and chipped the horn from a carved unicorn, but Lugh was ready. Such they might use, but such could not prevail against something as simple as air—when Lugh summoned winds to aid him. Shot flew indeed, but shot turned aside in the tiny tornado that rose between the foe and Nuada. Let them have their fun, take their risk; he would do the rest.

“Throw down your weapons!” Nuada roared, as his sword clanged loud against mortal metal. “Throw down your weapons and save your lives, mortal men and Faery!”

“Throw down yours and
die
!”
someone yelled from the side, releasing a barrage of shot. Nuada caught it on his shield, faster than any mortal could have imagined. Pellets made patterns in the intricate boss, and the metal smoked but held firm.