Fireshaper's Doom (31 page)

Only it had not been wild talk. It had been the truth, of that she was now convinced; and the one beside her had told her, when she had asked, how he alone now had Power in the Lands of Men, for he alone was
of
that land, soul and flesh, and he alone knew how to command the Powers of that world as even the Sidhe did not. It was his Power that had taken her from the camp to the Track, though it had tired him, he’d admitted. And it was his Power that now bore them along.

It would be her own Power she must soon find and discover how to use; that was something else he had told her, and it puzzled her. But her questions brought only: “I know only that you are to follow the cross in the sky.”

“What cross?” she’d said, thinking perhaps he meant Cygnus the Swan, that some called the Northern Cross.

But no answer had he given.

They had walked onward then, in silence.

Eventually the man spoke again. “We are nearly there, Katie McNally, and beyond here I cannot go. You must walk your own roads now.”

Katie squeezed the warm hand in her own.

It squeezed back, sending warmth and love and comfort into her. But then it was slipping away, releasing her hold though she sought to drag it back. Going…

My name is Oisin…

Gone.

Katie was alone at the edge of a forest, gazing down at a slope of field. Ahead was a house old and wrinkled as one of her hands. There were several cars there, and the buzz of conversation came to her even where she stood, a quarter mile away across the valley. Closer in was a dirt road, and far left on this side was the silver steeple of a tiny church. Almost across the road from it was another house. Lights glared there too, from the top of the rounded hill where that house sat, and she squinted her good eye (now
very
good, she was surprised to note), and saw that though similar to many of the older houses she’d seen in north Georgia, it had a sprawl of new additions tacked onto the back.

“Bright for moonlight,” she muttered, then gazed skyward, checking.

And saw the cross in the sky.

Truly there
was
a cross in the sky, an equal-armed rent in the heavens, maybe an outstretched hand’s breadth wide, shining like Sunday above the black mass of mountain that dwarfed the tiny homes before her. It was as if the night itself had been ripped open and a glimpse of God’s True Light allowed to peek through.

It was a sign of Our Lord if ever there was one, and it proved to Katie once and for all that Oisin had told the truth—for surely the devil could not lie about such wondrous things.

She continued staring, as wonder crept within her veins and set her soul to joyful blazing.

“God be praised,” she whispered.

And saw a spot appear at the center of that cross: there and then gone, a spot so quick and tiny she thought her eyes must be playing tricks. But no, there was something there, not in the cross now, but falling out of the dark.

She blinked, knew an instant of fear…and something whistled past her cheek and smote the ground before her. She felt the land tremble beneath her feet as she had never felt it before.

She opened her eyes again, saw lying in the broom sedge before her two fourteen-inch lengths of chrome steel chain that lay atop each other in the shape of a cross.

“God
be
praised!” she repeated. Then she frowned, for the wind once more had found her, bringing a return of the cold.

But no, that wind was now her friend; chill it might be, but with it came scents that spoke to her: of horses that were more than horses and men that were more than men, and of men who were
only
men as well, young ones and an old one. Of the subtle perfume the red-haired girl had worn, of the smell of coffee and moonshine on their breaths. And those smells came from the road ahead, and the mountain beyond, and the sky above as well.

And a sound rode that wind with the odors, a sound from out of the east where the little house was: the sound of a woman weeping.

Chapter XXIX: The Burning Road

(The Lands of Fire)

David jerked himself awake with a start. He’d fallen asleep somehow, wedged into the tight angle of the dragon ship’s bow, his head pillowed on the arm he’d stretched along the railing. His tongue felt swollen. A distant ache pounded against the back of his eyes—a result, no doubt, of his earlier drinking; the same indulgence, he suspected, that was responsible for his drowsiness in the first place. His body felt strangely heavy too—and damp; he became aware of a steady prickle of spray against his face. The air pulsed in time to the slap of wavelets against the hull, as loose-fastened timbers creaked a counterpoint. He glanced down, saw sunlight strike painful sparks from the glitter of mail exposed on arm and leg, and scratched his cheek distractedly, certain it now bore the imprint of those circular links. A trace of roughness along his jawline told him he would soon need to shave again. That would be twice a week now—as if it mattered. It might never matter again.

He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted into the hot air, careful not to let his gaze shift too high—the blazing sun would surely blind him. Before him lay the slope of pine wood deck, with the arrogant sweep of mast and gaudy sail erupting amidships, and standing in the stern, proud as an ocean goddess, Morwyn. Her hands rested lightly on the tiller, her face shone rapt and distant as if her thoughts were a thousand years away. She was beautiful; any man would gaze on that beauty and despair.

But not David, because he knew her for what she was. Almost he was sorry for her, because a part of him truly wanted to like her, in spite of what she had done to him. God knew she’d had plenty of justification for her actions—his own encounter with Ailill had proven that one’s callousness. But in spite of Morwyn’s beauty, in spite of her lavish generosity, he dared not drop his guard, dared not trust her. For he was certain that, given the need, she’d suck him dry in an instant: use him for everything he was worth and then discard him, and immorality be damned. He was mortal, she was Faery; and for her—for all her kind—there
was
no immorality, as far as the World of Men was concerned.

He twisted around to gaze down at the river swishing by the hull, then across to the nearside bank, where the surrounding escarpments had grown lower, so that the plain itself was sometimes visible in dips and hollows.

It was cooler there in the river-rift; for that, at least, he was grateful. What did Morwyn mean, anyway, to dress him in such heavy and confining attire, when—to judge by the glare of the sun on the deck and the heat devils that now swept along the cliff tops almost at eye level—it must be well over a hundred degrees in the surrounding desert. Only the steady breeze along the river’s surface and the boxed-in sides of the canyon relieved that pervasive oppression.

He hoped it would not abandon them.

A good while longer he watched, then found himself nodding again.

The banks had lowered considerably when David roused himself once more, to discover to his dismay that the breeze was losing its battle with the sun. Sweat had sprung out on his forehead, and a trickle had begun to ooze down the hollow of his spine. He reached back to scratch it, but found his movements confined by the mail so that he finally had to stand and rub against one of the spines of the figurehead.

A dreamy lethargy fell upon him, and he gave himself up to watching the featureless white landscape passing by, grateful for any random touch of wind that might stray from the channel to brush his face. Once or twice he twisted around farther to watch the sparkle of Track streaming by, its golden motes blending with the clear water and white sand.

“Pay close attention,” Morwyn called from the stern. “You may see a thing that surprises you.”

David squinted into the blazing glare of light and water, trying to observe the Track both with his natural vision and with the Sight. He succeeded in part, saw the glow increase an order of magnitude as the Sight kicked in, then realized he was seeing
two
Tracks. One lay atop the other, as if the golden ribbon had split horizontally and they now sailed the upper arm of an infinitely long Vee laid on its side, while the other arm fell farther and farther away below them. He looked up. The landscape to either side was as bleached and desolate as ever, except now it was not so flat. Hills stretched in the distance, and terrible golden lights speared the sky at points here and there like bolts of frozen lightning.

The banks grew narrower, and strange excrescences rose from the whiteness, becoming twisted shapes of tortured, fluted stone that here resembled bones, there crystals, and in other places the complex siliceous skeletons of ancient corals. Mostly, though, they resembled thorns, for they curved away from the wind, slanted at identical angles, with concave curves on the leeward side, sharpening to needle-points where the two sides tapered together at the top.

And then David noticed dark shapes moving among those curious, hooked pillars like shadows without substance. Once, one came almost to the edge of the bank, and he saw that its naked body wore a man’s shape, but nothing showed in its black eyes except a feral blankness that marked it either idiot or mad.

The striated stone spires became more frequent, too, growing taller and taller and ever closer together, so that their buttresses overlapped and their points sometimes touched each other. It was like the lacy calcined pierced work of a piece of human bone sliced cross-ways; or like a frost-chilled forest wrought of silicon strands and salt. And always there was the hot white glitter, like a sprinkling of powdered diamonds cast upon the air and burning there.

Here and there serpents slithered among the strange stone growths, and some of them were titanic. An emerald green one stretched a barrel-sized head far across the river, long black tongue flickering curiously, as though it sought to converse with the figurehead.

David drew back instinctively. Snakes,
per se
did not bother him—but when their heads were as big as his entire body… He found himself reaching for the sword, but Morwyn shouted something, and the creature drew back, hissing.

And spat: a spray of oily black liquid. And where those drops fell upon the deck, thin tendrils of smoke trickled into the air from tiny pits eaten in the woodwork.

A larger drop splashed the back of David’s left hand and he screamed as the venom seared his skin. He jerked it toward his mouth, stopping himself only just in time as he stared in curiously removed incredulity at the blistering redness that was spreading across his flesh. Already he could see the skin peeling back as the poison ate its way inward.

“Goddamn! Oh, goddamn, goddamn!” he shrieked, trying to wipe the pain away upon his surcoat, only to discover as he did, that contact with the velvet merely increased his agony.

“Morwyn! Oh God, Morwyn!” He wrenched himself awkwardly to his feet and staggered toward the stern, his injured hand smoking before him. His balance deserted him amidships and he clutched vainly at the mast as he tottered past.

Pain became the focus of his universe.

Suddenly Morwyn was beside him, a whisper of fabric, a sweetness upon the air. Words thrummed in his ears. Something touched his wrist.

The pain was gone. David stared first at his own hand, and then at the smaller, smoother one that held it tightly while its mate described careful patterns in the air above.

“Is that better?” Morwyn asked, her voice soft as he had ever heard it.

David nodded slowly. “Yeah, much better.” He hesitated. “Thanks,” he said finally, looking up.

To his surprise, she smiled. “You are healed? There is no pain?”

David flexed his fingers experimentally. “I think so. That’s a real neat trick you’ve got there.”

“It is a thing I do,” Morwyn replied quietly. “Would that I could restore my son so easily.” She rose gracefully and returned to her place by the tiller.

David watched her, and for the first time he saw the sadness that lay at the heart of her every thought and word and action.

Suddenly he was sorry for her.

Very slowly he climbed to his feet, steadying himself against the mast until he found his legs again. It was cooler here in the aft section; he wished he’d thought of that earlier. The sail cut off most of the breeze that might otherwise have reached him. But, he supposed, when he’d taken up his position in the bow his single motivation had been to get as far away from Morwyn as possible.

Somehow that didn’t matter so much now. Her single gesture of concern for him, the look of sadness on her face as she spoke ever so briefly of her fallen son, had given him a glimpse of the woman behind the image. Morwyn verch Morgan ap Gwyddion—Power-smith, Fireshaper, Sorceress of the Tylwyth-Teg, whatever she was—was far from happy.

Bracing himself against the rail with his newly healed hand, David slowly worked his way to Morwyn’s side.

Her eyes had regained that strange unfocused quality that earlier had so unnerved him. Her lips moved in the words of a slow, plaintive song. She did not look at him.

David stared at the gleaming deck, at the soft draping of Morwyn’s red velvet gown across the toe of one of her slippers, at the pointed tips of his own silvery boots. Thoughts warred in his mind. He cleared his throat. “He was…my friend,” he said quietly. “Fionchadd was my friend. Or he would have been, I think, if we’d ever had the chance to get to know each other.”

“You are much like him,” Morwyn whispered, though she continued to stare into the air. “Brave and foolish, rash and thoughtful, arrogant and naive.”