Windmaster's Bane (13 page)

“Huh?” queried Liz.

“Werewolves and such,” Alec muttered.

“No, not really,” continued David. “But let’s not talk here.”

They went outside, blinking into the glare of gaudy lights. The rain had indeed stopped, and the crowds were tentatively feeling their way back to the rides. The rich soup of mud was even worse than before.

“Ugh!” said Liz. “We gotta walk through that?”

“Let’s take our shoes off; we can wash our feet somewhere later, before we leave.”

“Ugh,” Liz said again.

“Why Liz, don’t you like the feel of mud squishing up between your toes?” teased Alec.

“I’ll squish mud up against your nose if you don’t shut up, McLean!” Liz flared, and then broke into laughter over her inadvertent rhyme.

David bent over, untied his sneakers, and picked them up. “I’m gonna take mine off anyway; anybody rides in my car has gotta have clean shoes.” He stalked off, leaving Alec and Liz frantically pulling laces in the mud.

*

Fifteen minutes later they had found a place where they could talk: the unused chemistry lab of the high school building. Alec had been a lab assistant the year before and had a key no one had asked him to return, so they had crept in and were now sitting on the floor below window level, the room illuminated only by a blue mercury vapor lamp outside, exactly like the one at David’s house.

“So spill it,” Alec burst out.

“There’s really nothing to tell,” David said. “She just told me we’d be seeing a lot of each other for the next few weeks or so, and that our fates were bound up together.”

David didn’t want to lie to his friends, but he knew he couldn’t tell them all the truth, at least not yet. This time, though, he had had time to decide on his ploy during their walk up to the lab.

Alec’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Is that all? You talked longer than that.”

“All of substance; she told me some garbage about marriage and death and cars, but nothing very specific, as you’d expect. What did she tell you guys?”

“There you go again, David,” grumbled Alec, “not being straight with us, I don’t think. But I guess I’ll have to live with it. I think she told you a lot more than you’re saying—serious stuff, too, judging by your expression when you came out.” Alec tapped the metal leg of a lab stool before continuing. “All she told me was to help you during the next few weeks as much as I could—that you were under a sore trial but didn’t know it yet, and would need my help.”

Liz looked up in surprise. “That’s almost exactly what she told me—that three were mightier than one, but one was mightiest of the three, and that one wouldn’t survive without the other two. That was weird.”

David looked straight into her eyes and smiled. “All the same crap.”

“What did you expect from a fortuneteller?”

“I dunno. Never been to one.”

“I’m not going back, either,” said Liz. “Gave me the creeps, but I think she was serious. It didn’t sound like what I expected to hear. It just
felt…
right.”

“Yes, it did,” Alec nodded.

“You’ll get no argument from me there,” agreed David. “Let’s go wash this mud off and go home. I think we can use the restrooms up here.”

*

It was very late when David finally got back home. Nobody was up, he was relieved to find. At last he had some time alone. He contrived a quick snack and crawled into bed with the fortuneteller’s book. He needed some answers, and he needed them quick.

David looked at the cover curiously:
The Secret Common-Wealth, Or A Treatise Displaying The Chief Curiosities Among The People Of Scotland As They Are In Use To This Day.
It was a brittle old book, very thin, and written in an archaic style that was sometimes difficult for him to make out—not surprising, when he learned that it had originally been composed in 1692. The author—a Reverend Robert Kirk—had been a Scottish minister who had become so interested in the local fairylore that he had written the first important study of the fair-folk—apparently coming to believe in them himself.

David flipped the pages rapidly; halfway through he found part of what he had been looking for;

There be odd solemnities at investing a man with the priviledges of the whol Misterie of this Second Sight. He must run a tedder of hair (which bound a Corps to the Beir) in a Helix about his midle from end to end, then bow his head downward: (as did Elijah I King 18.42.) and look back thorow his legs untill he see a funerall advance, till the people cross two Marches; or look thus back thorow a hole where was a knot of fir. But if the wind change points while the hair tedder is ty’d about him, he is in peril of his Lyfe. The usuall method for a curious person to get a transient sight of this otherwise invisible crew of Subterraneans (if impotently and over-rashly sought) is to put his foot on the Seers foot, and the Seers hand is put on the Inquirers head, who is to look over the Wizards right shoulder (which hes an ill appearance, as if by this ceremonie, an implicite surrender were made of all betwixt the Wizard’s foot and his hand ere the person can be admitted a privado to the art.)

Then will he see a multitude of Wights like furious hardie men flocking to him hastily from all quarters, as thick as the atomes in the air, which are no nonentities or phantasm, creatures, proceeding from ane affrighted apprehensione confused or crazed sense, but Realities, appearing to a stable man in his awaking sense and enduring a rational tryal of their being….

There were a bunch of footnotes giving additional biblical quotations cited by Reverend Kirk, and David scanned them, but did not really notice what he read.

So!
He smiled in satisfaction.
It must have been the funeral procession Little Billy and I saw.
He recalled then, seeing it between his legs.

But that was a difficult concept for a rational man to swallow, he realized after a moment’s consideration. There was simply no connection between the two events that he could discern, not even the vaguest sort of cause and effect. And then there was that business about a “tether that has bound a corpse to a bier.” He had certainly done no such thing—yet he had the Sight, which didn’t make sense, unless the bit about the tether was just a bit of nonsense to keep people from trying it willy-nilly. Probably the folk with the Sight had enjoyed a special position in the community and didn’t want everybody getting in on the act, so they just made up a complicated bit of apparatus to go with it.

It would take some doing, after all, to bind a corpse to a bier with a tether of hair (and what kind of hair would be long and strong enough for that, or to wind in a helix about one’s middle—surely not human?)—and then sneak in later and remove it. David giggled; it seemed he knew something that Reverend Kirk hadn’t. And, he thought, it might be nice to try that bit about giving the Sight to someone else—to Alec or Little Billy, maybe. He reread that section to be certain he had it right, then checked the footnotes, which he had passed over before. The would-be seer was supposed to surrender himself completely to the control of the Sighted one, he discovered. The Sighted one would then assert his physical domination by the method Kirk had described, while at the same time confirming his control by reciting “Everything between my hands and my feet is mine,” or some similar phrase.

Well, that’s interesting,
David said to himself.
Very interesting indeed.

He spent the next hour or so examining parts of the book he had skipped earlier. Among them he learned about the sad fate of Reverend Kirk: How his body had been found beside a supposed fairy mound, and how some people had said he had been taken by the fair-folk and a changeling left in his place; and that there had been various attempts at setting him free, but that they had all failed. He shuddered involuntarily, thinking how perilously close he had come to that same fate.

His eyes had grown tired by this time, for it was very late, and he turned out the light and snuggled down under the covers. He then realized that his teeth felt scummy and that his mouth tasted faintly of the sour-cream-and-onion potato chips he had been eating. Wearily, he got up and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.

As he turned on the water and got out his toothbrush, he felt a burning sensation from where the ring lay on his bare chest. At the same time he became aware of a voice sounding in his ears. It was like no voice he had ever heard before: so low as to seem almost subliminal; harsh, not unlike a growl; and strangely inflected, as if the mouth that shaped it was unaccustomed to the subtleties of human speech. Sweat sprang out on his body as he stared foolishly about the tiny room in search of the source of that voice. After a moment it spoke again, and this time he pinpointed its origin: the darkness beyond the bathroom window.

David felt a chill race down between his shoulder blades and lodge at the base of his spine; his muscles tensed, and he shuddered involuntarily. Finally he took a deep breath to steel himself and eased aside the curtain, keeping his eyes slitted, dreading what he might see.

It was as he feared.

No man’s shape greeted him there. Rather, the massive head and front paws of an immense white dog stood out against the yard light’s glow. Its claws rested on the windowsill, and its enormous eyes burned like red-hot coals.

They stared at each other for a moment, and then the dog began to speak again, and this time he could make out its words. “One of your own kind, David Sullivan, has said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And so it is. You have a little knowledge, and you seek to make it more, and so it is a dangerous thing.”

David started to say something, but found that his mouth was so dry he could not speak. He swallowed clumsily. The toothbrush slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor with a plastic clatter.

“Now it is widely known,” continued the dog complacently, “that
certain…
things have become known to men—certain shards of a greater knowledge that are perhaps not entirely appropriate for them to know. Many have sought that knowledge, though few have found it, and fewer still have profited by it.

“But where
you
are different is that you have knowledge backed by proof—the proof that lies sparkling upon your chest. And such knowledge places you in a position dangerous both to yourself—for in Ailill Windmaster you have made a powerful enemy—and to certain others who sometimes share your World.”

The dog hesitated a moment, though its eyes never left David. “Thus it is that you have two choices: If you end this quest for knowledge now, when it is scarcely begun, and try to forget what you have seen and turn your thoughts to other things, there may still be time to forestall Ailill’s intervention. But if you do not, never again will your life be as it has been. Do not seek to know more than you do—or be prepared to pay the consequences of that seeking.”

And it was gone.

David felt the hair prickle once again on his neck and arms. He picked up the toothbrush and rinsed it off mechanically, but he found that no matter how hard he tried, he could not quite hold his hands steady. The ring continued to send forth pulses of low heat, and to glow softly. A final shudder shook him, and the coiled fear began to disperse.

Well,
he thought
, maybe I’d better leave that trail alone for a while.

Or,
he added
, maybe I should memorize the fortuneteller’s book.

PART II

Prologue II: In Tir-Nan-Og

(high summer)

It is good to be an eagle,
thought Ailill, who now wore that shape. Wings, longer than his man’s form was tall, swept from his shoulders, caressing the air like the fingers of the most sensuous of lovers. Feathers black as his hair covered him; eyes sharp as his devious wit peered over a beak cruel as the desire for vengeance that burned within him.

It is good to fly,
Ailill added to himself
. It is good to rule the air, to ride winds no mortal bird could dare, to breathe air too thin for their clumsy lungs, to fly so high that stars appear above, so high the curve of the mortal World shows when I look down.

It is good to look down on the World of Men and think how it would be to crush them, to beat them into the iron-sodden dirt from whence they came. Or better yet, to hurl them into the cold blackness that surrounds them. Tenuous indeed is their hold on that World—if they but knew.

He blinked his yellow eyes and spiraled higher on the merest suggestion of an updraft, then drew upon his Power and looked down again, to see both worlds—the round Lands of Men clustered close and thick and fearful, bound all unknowing within the less easily described shapes of the far-flung Realms of Faerie, all laced about by the glittering golden lattice of the Straight Tracks that wrapped
all
Worlds and rose past him into space—and time as well—binding them
all
together in ways at once too complex and too subtle for even the Sidhe to fully comprehend. Though not
of
Faerie, the Faerie-born could travel upon them, if they dared—and mortal men as well, if they had the art, as none now did, except possibly that detestable boy who Nuada had virtually snatched from his hand, and who had cost him considerable trouble and no little pain in the days since.

Nuada!

Ailill felt the tendons that worked his claws tighten when that name entered his thoughts. Unconsciously he ground the edges of his beak together, then uttered a harsh shriek of rage into the cold empty air that surrounded him.