Dreamseeker's Road (26 page)

“The Tracks are a vast country,” the Faery observed icily. “You speak of them as though they all touched each other, but while all ultimately connect, those your friend has assayed could be as remote from this as…1-85 is from the M-1 in Britain or the German autobahn.”

David frowned. “You know a
lot
about our World.”

“It is to my advantage, and the advantage of Faerie, to know these things. Do not your own people say, ‘Know thy enemy?' Do you yourself not know Lord Nuada, who makes a special study of the affairs of men?”

“You know Nuada?”

“All in Faerie know Nuada Airgetlam.”

“About Alec,” Liz reminded them, looking pointedly at the Faery. “It seems to me that you're evading that issue. I mean just 'cause Alec
might
be on a Track that's remote from this one, doesn't mean he
is
.”

The woman glared at her.

David studied the Faery thoughtfully, still wildly uncertain whether he could trust her, but equally fearful of screwing any chance they might have of rescuing—if that was the proper term for one who might or might not be in danger—his best friend.

“—Besides,” Liz persisted, “what would it
hurt
to just check the Tracks and
see
if you can find him? I mean, we're not asking you to take us to him, if there's some reason you can't. It was his stupidity that got him here, or wherever. But it's our obligation to try to get him back—or don't you understand about friends? If you've been in our World any time at all, you
have
to
understand about friends.”

“I understand all too well,” the woman growled. “And I understand loyalty too!”

David lifted an eyebrow expectantly.

“Very well,” the woman sighed, “but hear what I say and pay heed. I will seek your friend upon the Tracks. But I tell you plain, I fear that if he
is
here, the Hunt will target him next, for his very alienness will proclaim his presence like drums and trumpets. And if you are too close, the Hunt will seek you—us—as well.” She paused, then went on. “And this too, I will tell you: I will have to be very careful indeed, for any Power set upon the Track when the Hunt rides will attract his notice. Would you risk this? Would you have me call the Wild Hunt to you?”

“We've risked as much before,” David noted grimly. “I'd risk twice as much again.” And fell silent.

“Even if you
don't
do it,” Liz added, “I will—or try to. You're not the only one here who can search for him, you're only the one who can do it most easily. But I can work magic too—sort of. I don't make a big deal out of it, and I don't like to do it, but…I can scry.”

“I will do it!” the woman repeated. “I have said as much, and I will be as good as my word. But I thought it my duty to warn you.”

“Fine,” David grunted, noting absently that the rain had moved off and that the sky was marginally lighter. A star glimmered through a rent in the heavy clouds. He wiped his hair out of his face and waited.

“I will need something that belonged to him,” the woman told them. “A part of him would be better—hair, perhaps.”

“You didn't to find Aikin,” Liz observed, while she searched her pockets.

“Only his footprints beside the Track,” the woman retorted. “Only air he had breathed.”

Having no pockets in his running shorts, David searched his fanny pack—and was very surprised to find nothing that had belonged to his roomie. He had scads of stuff at home, of course, and a bunch in his wallet. But when he'd strapped on the pack he'd only transferred his license, car keys, and cash, not the photos or other small mementos.

“Aik?” David prompted, exasperated.

“Nada.”

David grimaced sourly. “You'd think as much as we borrow stuff, and all, there'd be something.”

Aikin shrugged helplessly. “Evidently not.”

David stared at him perplexedly, as though he might catch something his buddy had missed. But no, those were definitely Aik's clothes: sweatshirt, vest, cammo fatigues… “Those the pants you were wearin' when we went huntin'?” he asked suddenly.

Aikin nodded. “'Fraid so.”

“The ones you got blood all over?”

Another nod. “We got blood all over everything.”

“You washed 'em since then?”

“Of course—but the blood didn't all come out. Not that you could tell just now.”

David gnawed his lip. “Then they're the ones Alec wiped his hand on!”

“Huh?”

“You remember! He nicked himself when he sliced into the deer, and you said something snotty, and he wiped his hand on your leg!”

“But it was just a smear, and I've washed 'em, and now they're wet again.”

“It would be enough,” the Faery broke in. “Blood holds one's most fundamental essence. Very little would be sufficient.”

Aikin regarded her dubiously. “Do I gotta take 'em off?”

The woman flashed him a wicked smile. “I would not
object
if you removed them, but a touch should suffice. Only show me where.”

“I don't know where,” Aikin mumbled back, and David suspected that if the light were better, he'd see that his friend was blushing. “I think it was on my thigh. My left thigh.”

“Never mind.” the woman said, and knelt before him.
Without further ado, she ran her hands over the designated limb, starting with the knee and working up. David grinned at Aikin over the woman's head. Liz glowered.

The hand froze midway up the leg. “Do not move. This won't hurt, but do not distract me.” And with that she closed her eyes and laid her other hand flat on the ground, where the Track still glimmered faintly. It immediately pulsed like silent lightning and David saw that brightness flash outward along its length, like the flow of electrons along a power line. The air went tense. His eyes burned. He shut them at once—then turned his gaze back to the ground, to the pool where he'd watched the change, wondering, all at once, if he could see Alec there.

He certainly saw something—but not his roommate. Rather, he beheld a complex lattice of straight lines superimposed upon the black, along which a point of light raced faster than his eye could follow, like Alec's computer creating, then solving, a maze. But instead of reaching a terminus, the light slowed, then stopped—as another light flared to life a short way ahead of it. The woman's light promptly switched directions and fled back the way it had come. The other light followed doggedly, but far more slowly.

The woman gasped, then jerked her hand from the ground as if burned. Aikin grunted and knocked the other away. “Sorry,” he mumbled instantly, slapping at his leg, from which steam—or smoke—was rising. “Sorry, but that hurt!”

“Sorry I am too,” the woman echoed, as she rose shakily to her feet. David braced her, for she seemed on the verge of fainting. “Sorry, I am,” she repeated. “For I bear doubly ill tidings. First, he who shed that blood is not on the Tracks, or surely I would have sensed him.”

“Not on the Tracks?” David groaned. “Then where the hell is he?”

“I do not know,” the woman gasped, with a tremor in her voice. “But something
else
most certainly is, and is coming this way very quickly.”

Chapter XVII: Childe Alec to the Dark Tower Came

(An uncertain place—no time)

Behind gleamed the white tile walls of a bathroom in Jackson County, Georgia: before him a black tower loomed in a nameless land: a cutout of jet against a silver sky.

Likewise at his back, someone was rapping on the front doorjamb—but someone more beguiling beckoned beyond heavy oak portals ahead: unheard, unseen.

The image still swam in Alec's inner eye: the focus he'd tried to hold firm while he ignited certain herbs in the tub and drizzled certain others atop the ensuing flames, then primed the ulunsuti lavishly with his own blood (the slice in his left palm still throbbed unmercifully), and, when the fire blazed high, thrust the oracular stone within and watched the gate between Worlds arise: a borderless shimmer of
otherness
where a wall and window had been. He'd not conjured the tower, though, but the face of a beautiful dark-haired woman: wing-browed and ivory-cheeked, slender but nigh as tall as he, dressed gypsy-hippie style, and with a dimple in her right cheek when she smiled.

More knocks rattled the screen door.
This was it, then.
Holding his breath, he twisted awkwardly around, reached back through the gate, and snatched the ulunsuti from where it glowed and sparked within the fading fire that was still scorching iron-stained porcelain a World away. The image faded instantly, struck from his mind by the double trauma of hot quasi stone against injured flesh. The air of two Worlds thickened with the stench of hair crisping on his fingers.

Another round of knocks vanished with a hiss like a TV switching channels—and the gate dissolved.

The pain promptly pushed past overload. With a flinch, he dropped the ulunsuti. A sparkle fountained up where it hit: gray-silver and glittering, as though a billion antique mirrors had been ground to dust and spread across the land. “Shit!” he spat, having almost damaged his only means of returning—his only means of rescuing Eva, of quelling the principal demon that had haunted him for nigh on four years now.

He bit his lip, lest further curses disturb the thin dry air. Already he was sweating—though that could've been from nerves or pain as easily as heat, which was as pervasive as a desert's. Dropping to a wary squat, he retrieved the crystal with his undamaged hand and fumbled it into a backpack, where it joined certain supplies. That accomplished, he wiped the other on his jeans and dared a look at it. Logic promised one thing, experience another; but experience won, and showed neither an inch-long gash at the base of his thumb, nor burn blisters across his palm; merely a pale white line centering a splotch of red: the mirror image of the ulunsuti.

The dust was still stirring, too, and found its way into his nostrils, prompting a sneeze. It smelled like glass and silver, like stale memories flaked away so that only impressions remained to prickle inside his head.

As he rose, his good hand brushed the hilt of the sword thrust through his belt—not that he knew how to use it, of course, beyond the bare minimum of blocks and parries David had tried to teach him. Not that it mattered anyway, for the sword was mostly a prop their artist friend Myra had acquired at Scarboro Faire and presented to David on whim. David had real swords, real
Faery
swords in fact, but he'd dared not appropriate one of them. Something told him not to: something that said a weapon conferred with honor, belonging to someone honorable, should not be used for covert activities, nor to rescue someone who perhaps had no honor at all.

So why had he brought the damned thing?

As a comfort, foremost, he supposed; he wasn't fool enough to roam Otherworlds without some kind of protection, some minimal intimidation factor. And because it was three feet of solid steel—and if there was anything Faeries feared, it was ferrous metal.

Impulsively, he yanked it out and flourished it—spinning in place to slash at the air where the gate had stood—then felt foolish and lowered it again, but did not sheathe it. Better to take stock of his environment—such as it was.

He stood upon an endless flat plain, though it could as easily have been the bottom of a vast sphere, for there was no obvious horizon and the sky was the same color as the gray-silver sand he bestrode, save that it seemed somewhat brighter.—Certainly bright enough to reveal a single shattered stump of black and blasted tower rising like defiance an indeterminate distance before him: the tower from his dream. Nothing living moved in that landscape, but a steady wind hissed and whispered and raised strangely shaped dust devils from the plain. Between him and his goal was emptiness, save a smattering of slender man-high stones that rose like angular fingers probing their way up from underground.
Best give them a wide berth,
he concluded, though the direct route to the tower ran among them.

From habit, he checked his watch, but the LCDs showed nothing useful; the numbers flickered faster than he could focus one instant, froze in place at some incomprehensible time the next.
Not good.
He'd hoped to have this over quickly. In and out had been the plan: gate through to Eva's prison, grab her, then gate back. Less than five minutes max, and most of that spent building another fire to raise that second gate.
Assuming
Eva cooperated. Assuming she hadn't lied when she'd told him as she lay dying in Dale Sullivan's yard that while she'd only pretended to love him initially, she'd discovered at last that she loved him clear and true.

As, he thought, he still loved her.

He hadn't counted on arriving
outside
the tower, though, and wondered why that had occurred. Perhaps because the stone didn't always respond to what you
thought
you were asking; perhaps because he'd assumed he'd been thinking of Eva when the stronger image in his mind, being more recent, was of the tower itself.

But he'd come this far, no way he'd go back now; not when there was no obvious threat.

And so he strode toward his goal, skirting the first of the faceted stones by a healthy distance, yet near enough to determine that they were columns of fractured obsidian.
Sharper than the finest steel weapons,
he reminded himself. Something against which he dared not let himself fall.

But while he was squinting at the next one, his gaze drifted away from the tower: and when he looked back again, it was far, far closer.

In fact, it filled a quarter of the perceived vertical height of the sky—near enough to show fissures and a shattered crown and deeper darknesses along its shaft that might be windows and doors. There was an organic feel about it too: as though it had not been drawn by architects and made of blocks set one by one, but had been spun up from the liquid stuff of the under-earth itself into a shape like a vast tree trunk wrought of frozen obsidian wrapped with ropy lava.