Sunshaker's War (20 page)

“But
why
?”

“I…I just don't like to use it, David. It
scares
me, man!”

“But why? I mean I
know
you've been doing minimal upkeep on it…I read up on it some in
Myths of the Cherokee,
and it agrees with what Uki told us: you're supposed to feed it blood once a week, and once a month heavy-duty blood or it'll go wild. Since it hasn't gone wild, I presume you've been feedin' it blood. Not,” he added with a touch of sarcasm, “that you've bothered to let me know.”

Alec's mouth worked, but he still did not look up at his friend.

David clamped a hand on his thigh and squeezed hard. “You have been, haven't you?”

Alec nodded sheepishly.

“Hey, man, don't worry 'bout it. It's what you're supposed to do. It's part of the responsibility of havin' the damned thing.”

Alec turned at him, face grim. “But don't you
understand
,
David? How many times do I have to tell you?
It's not rational
—and
I'm a rational person.” He gestured around the room. “All this stuff: the computer, the TV, the CD player, the VCR: all of it makes sense. You line electrons up a certain way and push a button and off they march. You turn current on and off, and letters appear or math gets done or lines get drawn. But you take a piece of God-knows-what-kind of transparent material out of the head of a monster snake from another world and feed it blood and it shows you the future—that I can't accept. It freaks me out. It just doesn't
fit
!”

“And therefore it scares you,” Calvin finished for him.

“Yeah, something like that,” Alec conceded. “I guess…I guess I figure that if I accept that, then everything else will be suspect, and my whole reality system'll fold up like a house of cards.”

“You could think of it as opening up like a flower instead,” Calvin suggested. “'Stead of shuttin' it out, maybe you should be tryin' to work out a…a unified field theory of magic, or something.”

“Give me a
break
!”

“No, think about it, McLean,” Calvin went on reasonably. “We know a fair bit about the cosmology of Faerie, or you guys do, anyway. Why not try to put it all together and work out more? That way we might learn something really useful, and you wouldn't have any reason to be scared of it.”

“You forget one thing.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah…like that people have been trying to work out a unified field theory of our known reality for years and haven't got anywhere. How's an eighteen-year-old supposed to throw Faerie into the mix and get an answer any sooner?”

“Good point, but—”

“But we're getting
beside
the point,” Calvin broke in. “I mean look, McLean, it's your property, you can do what you want with it. But if you don't want to try it, at least let me do it. I've been trainin' with Uki some, I know the technique.”

A shadow of strain crossed Alec's features. “No,” he said again. “Then…oh crap, guys, okay…but just once, and that's it. Deal?”

Calvin shook his head. “I can't agree to that. But just once
today
unless something really serious is going on, how 'bout that?”

“And we each get a vote,” David added. “Two out of three does it, and we all try to be sensible about it. Do what's right, not what we want to do. Head over heart, and all that.”

Alec sighed. “Reckon I don't really have any choice then, do I?”

“You've always got a choice,” Calvin told him. “But sometimes you don't know what you're really choosin'.”

Alec did not reply, but pulled out the top drawer of his night stand and withdrew an earthenware pot plugged with a thick bark stopper. He tipped it on its side and shook out a white deerskin bag which bounced once on the bedspread. Alec loosened the drawstring and emptied the ulunsuti into his left hand where it glistened tantalizingly. David gasped involuntarily as a stray beam of sunlight lanced through the window and struck it, projecting a rainbow onto the R.E.M. poster on the wall behind them—a rainbow whose red stripe was pretenaturally bright.

“What now?” David asked.

Alec shrugged. “I've never used it prophetically. The first time I used it at all, I was just staring at it and wondering about something. I was kinda tired and dreamy and all, so I wasn't making any real effort, but then suddenly it took control and gave me the answer I wanted. And then later when you were hurt, we used it to call you back.”

“Right,” Calvin inserted. “You use it to focus mental energy.”

“Whatever.” Alec glanced at Calvin. “Guess you'd better tell us what to do and we'll try to follow. You're the shaman here.”

David giggled suddenly, and both his friends looked at him. “What's funny?” Alec asked, scowling.

“Oh, just that up until now it's always been me playin' boy-sorcerer, and now it's you-all! I don't have a bit of magic to my name, 'cept Second Sight that can't see anything, but here you both are playin' with Cherokee mumbo-jumbo.”

Calvin cleared his throat. “Okay, guys, we've got a job to do.”

“We're waitin',” David told him, grinning attentively.

Calvin frowned thoughtfully. “Well, this may be a major working, and since we don't have the kind of power Morwyn had when she used it to spy out the future, we'd probably better all try to do this together—” He looked at Alec. “Sorta like we did when we called David back. Also,” he added with a sigh, “I suppose we oughta do what we can to enhance our power.”

David cocked an eyebrow. “What'cha got in mind?”

“Two things right off: We'll have to do this sittin' on the floor hand-in-hand with the thing between us, but if you just do that, it kinda cramps the energy flow—so one thing we can do is to drop our britches and sit with our bare knees touchin'.” He flopped down on Alec's bed, and began tugging off his boots, while Alec and David did likewise on the floor and windowseat respectively.

“And the other thing?” Alec wondered when Calvin had stripped down to falcon T-shirt and black briefs, and he and David had rejoined him in a sort of lopsided triangle on the faux-Persian throw rug beside Alec's bed.

“You won't like it.”

“I
already
don't like it.” Calvin picked up a boot and reached into the top, to draw out a potent-looking hunting knife. “Blood,” he said. “We prime it with blood.
Our
blood.”

Alec rolled his eyes.

David sighed. “Might work. Won't hurt—much—to try. One of us, or all?”

“All,” Calvin replied. “That would be strongest.”

David nodded. Alec closed his eyes and swallowed.

Calvin bit his lip, held out his left hand and made a quick stab along the length of his index finger, allowing bright red to show, then handed the weapon to David. David followed suit, more quickly than he'd expected, for the blade was unexpectedly sharp and he cut further and deeper than he intended before he knew it.

Alec went last, and hesitated longest, but finally he too drew the blade along his finger.

Calvin took the ulunsuti and placed it on the center of the intricate design. Then, at a nod from him, they all reached forward and smeared their life-essence across the crystal. It remained there for a moment, veiling the glitter, then slowly faded as the ulunsuti absorbed it. But where before the talisman had shone softly, now it blazed with an arcane light, and the red line in the center was bright as fire.

“It does that when you feed it,” Alec admitted.

He started to wipe his still-bleeding hand on a convenient dirty sock, but Calvin restrained him. “Leave it till we're finished. It'll aid the power flow. Now,” he added, “we all join hands and touch knees and try to concentrate on the red line in the crystal—and keep one part of our minds open to the question: just wonder real hard about what's going on in Tir-Nan-Og.”

“Shouldn't we maybe have a more specific goal?” David wondered. “I mean, we don't want the ulunsuti to get confused. Maybe we should try for a person—Lugh, or somebody. He should be fairly close by, so to speak, and we know him and know what he looks like—and he might be less alarmed than some if he detected us spying on him.”

“Good idea,” Alec agreed. “Anything to take the heat off a tad.”

“Okay then,” Calvin said. “Grab hold and let's to it.”

David took a deep breath and took his buddies' hands: Alec's firm but a little soft, Calvin's much harder and rougher, though with a certain gentleness of touch that surprised him. Another breath and he let his eyes go out of focus, trying to see only the ulunsuti's red septum. He resisted the temptation to close his eyes; tried, rather, to call Lugh's face to mind: long black hair, narrow, angular chin, flowing mustache, blue eyes…

Nothing happened for a moment, but then the red slowly expanded. David felt his eyes drawn toward it, and his other senses seemed clearer as well. He was aware of Calvin's hand and knee to the left, of Alec's to his right, but now he thought he could detect a gentle flow of warmth spreading from Calvin's flesh into his own, up his arm and across and into Alec, while a parallel flow entered his knees and flowed through his groin and back down his other leg.

But an instant later he forgot that, for his thoughts had turned to Lugh, and this time the image formed rapidly. One moment he saw only a line of red, and then it had been replaced by a vista he had seen before: Lugh's primary palace—the one at the heart of his kingdom.

In plan, it was shaped like a star; with six lesser, towered points, and six greater. Each tower was white and two hundred feet tall, and each bore a banner on top: a golden sun-in-splendor upon a field of crimson.

David did not know whose body he shared, only that it was gazing north. He saw the terraced grounds of the keep, the narrow band of open country that surrounded them—

But where forests had once ringed the castle, marching a hundred leagues in a thousand shades of green edging slowly to blue and then the not-color of the horizon, now was only devastation.

It was destroyed, all of it: the stuff of a thousand navies a million times larger than Finvarra's. Trees a hundred—a
thousand—
feet tall, all straight and true and so ancient many must have started growing when Tir-Nan-Og first gained mass enough to hold their roots; those same trees lay on the ground, broken, rotting, torn to pieces by the fury of Finvarra's storms which had laid open even the land itself. It reminded David of two things almost simultaneously: the ravaging of the Amazon rain forests he'd been seeing nightly on the news, and the devastation in Siberia following the explosion of the Tunguska object: trees blown flat, radiating from a common center.

But it was not man's greed nor nature's caprice that had wrought this, but a war that embodied them both. Storms: wind and rain, all driven mad by magic. And followed by Finvarra's hordes, which now marched toward Lugh's citadel.

From the northmost tower a figure looked down on Finvarra's troops spread across the land like black ants, their lines stretching far into the shattered forest to merge with the scattered smokes of the trees that had been set aflame lest even their hulks be used to build new vessels.

A woman rode forward from Finvarra's host: a tall Faery lady astride a huge black horse, both liveried in the black and scarlet of Finvarra's house. She took off her golden helm and looked toward the tower, raised her voice to the folk who stood above.

“Lugh Samildinach,” she called. “High King of the Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og! Know that I am Macha, Mistress of War of the Sidhe in Erenn, second only to High King Finvarra who may not touch your soil until you relinquish your claim!”

“I know who you are,” Lugh shouted back, not bothering to remove his black helm. “Why have you come here? Why have you blackened my land?”

Macha laughed, the sounds clear even in the weighty air. “Ships must have wood, Ard Rhi; and wood you had a plenty, far more than Finvarra. And now wood you have
no more. The seas are heavy with the wrack of your fleets, and they may not be rebuilt. You have no longer any way to attack Finvarra. I have come to ask your surrender.”

“And what of the boy?” Lugh inquired casually.

“Fionchadd? He has been hidden where no one can find him. Not even I know where he now resides.”

Lugh's eyes bored into her, even from that distance. “Do you not? No, I suppose you speak the truth. It would be exactly like him. True form for the Spider King.”

Macha ignored his remark. “Ard Rhi, I await your reply.”

Lugh sighed with theatrical nonchalance. “If it is an answer you must have, I fear I must give you one you will not like.”

“And what is that?” Macha asked. “Do not forget that we can kill the boy past hope of return.”