Warstalker's Track (12 page)

Steam—or sweat—or simple shock—veiled his vision, and when he could see again, it was to gaze upon chaos. Aife was to his left, sword dancing as she fought one Faery, while the corpse of another—a woman—lay behind her. Aikin was wrestling frantically with a lavishly bleeding human twice his size. Brock was nowhere to be seen, though an occasional bark of gunfire from the other ship suggested that he alone had ignored Nuada’s command to board. LaWanda was a dark blur darting here and there, hiding, and choosing her targets with clinical precision. Nuada was still engaged with the man he’d first assailed, but
that
encounter was difficult to see, and David suspected magicks went on there. Probably the man was the most Powerful among their foe, and as such, Nuada’s natural nemesis.

As for Fionchadd—no sign, so probably his cry had heralded an injury.

And Big Billy—

Christ? Where was his pa?
He’d been next to him at the gunwale, had been vaguely aware of him leaping beside him to this vessel. But now?

“Dave!” came Aikin’s strangled gasp, and reflex sent David stumbling to his friend’s aid, where he still struggled to subdue his human foe. Four yards and he was there, Beretta poised to end that battle. Only…they were moving too fast to risk it, with Aikin in the muddle, and no way Aik wouldn’t have shot already, had he access to any of his artillery. For an instant he caught Aikin’s gaze: hazel-eyed and furious. And then David grabbed the enemy by the shoulders and heaved him up and away. As if in response, the ship promptly tilted, and all three fell, and when David figured himself out again, he was sprawled atop that man. Fortunately, he was a decent wrestler for a little guy, and was able to pin the fellow’s arms with his knees as he brought the shotgun down hard across his foe’s unprotected throat.

“Kill ’im!” Aikin gasped behind him. “Shoot the bastard!”

“He’s one of us,” David hissed back. “I don’t want—”

And then it didn’t matter, because something cracked beneath David’s fingers, and the man suddenly ripped free, to tear wild-eyed at his throat while he vented awful, gurgling sounds and flailed ineffectually for air. David stared at him incredulously, not believing what he’d done.

“Oh, fuck,” he sobbed. “Oh, flyin’ fuck!” Then, to Aikin, who had scrambled up beside him: “Oh, fuck, Aik; I crushed his windpipe and I didn’t mean to!”

Aikin’s eyes were cold. “People die,” he spat, and gave David a handup as he likewise rose.

“I think we’re winnin’,” David choked back. “I—” He didn’t finish his sentence, for the flurry of movement in the prow that was Nuada and the Faery captain suddenly clarified, to reveal Nuada alone, standing slump-shouldered above a mass of
something
that presumably had been his foe. Victory showed on the Faery Lord’s face for an instant—and then, to David’s horror, abject concern.

“Back!”
Nuada shouted, motioning wildly toward their own boat.

David started to yell a protest, but Aikin was already shoving him that way. Others rose to join him, thrusting aside foes who no longer struggled or gave token resistance at best. He saw Aikin—Aife—LaWanda—all leap toward their home vessel.

But where was his father?

Oh,
there
he was: shoving aside a bald guy who’d been trying to wrest away his shotgun.

And then they were at the ship’s side, and leaping, and back on their own deck.

The first thing David saw was Fionchadd, sprawled across the boards, bleeding from a dagger wound in his side. Aife was already there, however, hands a blur as they probed the injury. Fionchadd’s face was white as snow, but he smiled as David came up beside him. “We…I think we won.”

“Maybe,” came Nuada’s voice behind him. “Or not. I—”

For the second time in far less than a minute, his words were cut off, this time by a rumbling explosion. Flames erupted from the vessel they had just abandoned, and a cloud of heat and stench and steam rolled over them. Already queasy, David vomited—and yet somehow managed to rouse himself in time to see one final figure come hurtling across the gap between the vessels.

“Pa!” he yelled, reaching to brace his father when he touched down.

“Shit!” Big Billy yelped back as David grabbed him. In spite of both their efforts, they fell. And then another explosion lit the air, and a dreadful shrapnel of wood, metal, flesh, and bone rained down upon them. Big Billy’s face smoothed with a relief David was insanely glad to see, then contorted abruptly.

“Pa! What—?” David gasped, as his father slapped at his back and collapsed, a foot long splinter of metal-bound oak lodged close beside his spine. Blood was everywhere.

David froze as though he’d himself been shot, then gazed about wild-eyed. “Aik!” he screamed. “Aife! Nuada!”

Aife was beside him instantly, leaving Nuada to tend Fionchadd. She touched his father’s body but briefly, then looked David square in the eye. “He bleeds within,” she said, “in a way I am not trained to heal.”

“But can’t you remove that?” David protested.

Aife shook her head. “I dare not. If I do—”

“He’ll bleed to death,” David finished for her, feeling oddly calm. Or numb.

“I’ll be okay—” Big Billy gasped, trying in vain to roll over.

Aife touched his forehead and he went slack, though he didn’t quite lose consciousness.

David rounded on her. “What do you think you’re doin’?”

“Conserving his energy,” the Faery woman snapped. “Blocking his pain. For now, as your kind would say, we have other fish to fry.”

Nuada rose from where he’d been tending Fionchadd and strode over to join them. “What happened?” David demanded, because he had to say something and dared not think about his father. Not when their mission was still unfinished.

“Their captain was Powerful indeed,” Nuada replied, removing his helm to reveal golden hair slicked to gloss with sweat. “As Powerful as I care to meet, weakened as I am. I fought him because no one else could have, and fortunate it is that we had the advantage of them for a crucial moment. It was enough to turn the tide in our favor, but the captain saw that, and would have destroyed both our ships had I not read that intention in his eyes and called retreat.”

“But…why?” Aikin panted.

“Think, boy!” Nuada snorted. “If he survived or surrendered, we would have had prisoners, and so the Sons’ cause would have been compromised, whether or not we succeed in freeing Lugh. If he died, we died with him, and others there surely are who can take his place guarding the Iron Dungeon.”

“Others,” LaWanda mused, staring at the dome far above. “There
will
be others,” Aife emphasized. “We must hurry.”

“Aye,” Nuada sighed. “For the last thing I sensed as the captain’s soul fled his body was a warning to more of his clan who even now approach from without.”

“Shit!” LaWanda groaned, wiping her brow.

“But my pa—!” David cried.

“If we flee with him now he stands a chance of living,” Nuada said coldly. “If we free Lugh, his odds grow less. But consider, boy, the things that hang in the balance.”

David fixed the Faery Lord with a glare that could have flayed him. And then he looked at his father: barely conscious, but with his face—almost—at peace. “I have no choice,” he said grimly. “There’s more than just what I want at stake here. Assuming,” he added savagely, “there even
is
an Iron Dungeon!”

“Take heed…
mortal!
”
Nuada snarled back. “You try my patience!”

Chapter V: Prisoners of War

(the Iron Dungeon—high summer)

“…you try my patience!”

Nuada’s warning hung in the air like the pervasive steam, the incessant drizzle, yet David barely heard it. For a long sick moment, he stood frozen: mouth open, arms hanging limp at his sides, shotgun dangling loose in half-numb fingers. Sweat slid into his eyes, indistinguishable from the tears starting there. A stray gust of whatever odd wind whirled about the spherical cavern that constituted present reality whipped the remnants of his surcoat against his legs.

And still he stood. Gazing at…nothing, really. And then, in spite of himself, back at his father, motionless on the deck, heavy body contracted into a fetal crescent, as though to shrink away from the splinter lodged in his back.

“Ma is gonna kill me,” he said at last, to nobody. “She is gonna fucking
kill
me.” What had he been thinking, anyway, to drag his pa into crap like this? And what had his pa been thinking?

“I knew the risk,” Big Billy rasped through a sleepy cough. And with that, his body went limp.

For a moment—far
too
long, as though time itself held its breath—David thought his pa had died. But then he caught the swell of his ribs, the pulse of a vein where his surprisingly small ear met the rough auburn thatch of hair. Abruptly he was on his knees, weapons thrust roughly aside, oblivious to the confusion of voices around him: questions, answers, groans, and cries of jubilation—his companions trying to sort out the battle they had just, somehow, survived. A second only it took to locate his cloak and roll it into a pad to slip beneath his father’s head. Barely longer was required to rip away the tatters of his surcoat and, very gently, use it to wipe away the blood (What kind of blood? Human? Or Faery?) that ensanguined his father’s face. Aikin joined him, silent, face a screwy mixture of elation and concern; and with the aid of his friend’s trusty Gerber, David managed to cut the heavy khaki work shirt away from the wound. A strip from the surcoat made a makeshift dike against the steady seep of blood. Only when they’d finished did Aikin speak. “If that was war, I don’t like it.”

David merely nodded—and didn’t look up until a shadow fell upon him. “You have done what you can,” came Nuada’s voice: a veil of silk across polished metal. “Now come; the sooner we complete our mission, the sooner we can attend his healing.”

“No,” David mumbled. “I don’t have any fight left in me right now. No ideas. No feelings. Nothin’. Just…go away.”

A hand brushed his shoulder: Nuada’s living one. He flinched, tensed to fling it away, then felt the reality of it, and a sense of—not love, but honest concern that leapt the gap between their selves and their races alike. The Faery’s anger, it seemed, had been short-lived.

Even so, David started to protest, but Big Billy opened his eyes. Funny how David had never noticed how startlingly blue they were. “Go on,” his father whispered. “I can hang on. And if I don’t…well, at least I’ve seen some things most folks ain’t.”

David nodded mutely, patted his father on the shoulder, and rose to join the others sprawling in a rough semicircle around Fionchadd, who, minus his tunic, was sitting up, looking very pale. David sought automatically for the wound in his side, but saw no more than a patch of red-stained skin surrounding an angry pucker that even as he watched grew smaller. “Would that all wounds were of such like,” the Faery volunteered.

“Would,” Aife agreed in a hard voice. “I—”

“So where’s this Iron Dungeon?” Aikin broke in, already breaking down his shotgun. “Second question: how long have we got to find it?”

Aife puffed her cheeks. “Look around you and recall what you know about the substance of Faerie, the nature of iron, and reaction between the two.”

Aikin frowned, but Brock spoke up at once. “Iron’s hot—in this World. And this water’s boiling, which means—”

“That the Iron Dungeon is within the water,” Aife finished for him. “Very good.”

David’s heart sank. “So we have to go…underwater?”

Aife shook her head. “The Iron Dungeon is the heart of this cavern, at once within it and not, as the Pillar is here and elsewhere. And the cavern is equal parts air and water, as its shell is earth, and fire pierces it, top to bottom. The Dungeon is exactly in the center of it all.”

David craned his neck to peer over the gunwale toward the Pillar of Fire that had delivered them here, more than ever convinced it was not entirely present.

“It is not,” Aife confirmed, as though she’d read his thought. “That is how we were able to pass through the Dungeon itself, before we were spat out here.”

Brock shook his head in utter confusion. “I don’t get it.”

“You’re not supposed to,” David muttered. “I don’t either.”

Aikin, too, regarded the flame uneasily. “You said that the folks guardin’ this place had sent out a call for help? So when’ll they get here? More to the point, can we assume they’ll also come through the Pillar?”

Aife shrugged. “Soon, probably, to the first. As to the latter, I would suppose so.” She glanced at Fionchadd. “Do you think…?”

“It would be my best guess.”

“What about the Dungeon itself?” LaWanda wondered. “What, exactly, is it?”

“Different things at different times,” Aife replied. “To some degree it conforms to the strengths and weaknesses of whomever it imprisons.” She paused, fished in her belt pouch, and to David’s surprise, withdrew an ordinary yellow pencil and a small pack of Post-it notes upon which she began to sketch. A sphere, divided at the equator, chains extending inward to support the body of a man spread-eagled by manacles at his extremities—all exquisitely rendered in about ten seconds, giving the lie to Faery infacility at art.

Aikin scowled at it. “Is this accurate?”

“An accurate guess. The chains support him so that his body does not actually touch the iron, yet its heat can—almost—destroy him.”

The scowl deepened. “So I assume he’s got an air supply?”

“His captors would not have him die of suffocation before they are ready for his death in truth.”

“So why doesn’t he just shapeshift and escape that way?”

“Because the pain of the iron makes it impossible for him to concentrate, and even one such as Lugh must exercise discipline in order to alter his form. Too, even if he did escape his manacles, he would fall to the bottom of the sphere, which would be his doom. Oh, he might hover in bird shape for a space of hours—days, maybe even years—but eventually he would tire. So, no, there is no escape from that place, for one of Faerie. Its designers knew that very well.”

It was David’s turn to look puzzled. “Still, whoever controls the Dungeon has to have some way to get prisoners in and out. You folks can’t actually teleport, best I can tell, therefore there has to be an opening—hinges—something. The thing can’t all be in one piece.”