Warstalker's Track (23 page)

*

“Wakey, wakey!” LaWanda teased, dragging Aikin up from far too deep a slumber by tugging on his ear. Aikin blinked groggily and knuckled his eyes, aware that not only had he slept, but that it had been very deep sleep indeed, and that he was having God’s own trouble freeing himself from it. “What time—?”

“Just past noon,” Alec supplied, thrusting a bag in his direction. “You zoned through the lunch-and-potty break up in Commerce, plus the run by Myra’s place to retrieve a certain manuscript.”

Aikin snared the bag and peered within: McDonald’s Quarterpounder, big fries—and water: his standard order, courtesy of Alec. And then he looked outside.

He didn’t immediately recognize the place, though he knew enough from his two forays into other Worlds to identify their own home turf: good old Lands-of-Men, or whatever.
How
he knew he had no idea: sounds, maybe; or the smell of the air? What was important was that Myra had parked at the side of a freshly graveled road not far from a set of railroad tracks, over which they might have jolted hard enough to rouse him, though he doubted it; and that they were effectively screened on all sides but one by the scrubby pine woods ubiquitous to middle Georgia. The other side—it looked like a castle gate but wasn’t, unless castles were made of cinder blocks and painted plywood, and had signs over their portcullises proclaiming, in large Gothic script, “SCARBORO FAIRE: East Georgia’s Own Renaissance Festival.”

“We’re in luck,” Myra announced, peering through the windshield as the others disembarked. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s around.”

“Didn’t figure there would be,” LaWanda snorted as she thrust Piper out ahead of her. “They closed last weekend.”

“Unless somebody’s rented the place for a banquet or something,” Myra shot back. “But to judge by how empty the parking lot is…” She gestured ahead and to the left, through a break in the trees.

“No time like the present,” LaWanda prompted as Myra trotted around back to unload gear. Piper accompanied her, looking at once eager, expectant, and scared out of his mind.

Aikin could think of nothing useful to say. A yawn and a handful of fries, and he joined Myra in divesting the cargo bay of their equipment, including the shotgun he had no intention of letting out of his sight. He checked the sawed-off double-barrel automatically, though he’d cleaned it once that day already, then passed a Ruger to Alec. “Brock was totin’ this, but I co-opted it, since Devlin’s bound to have something he can use if he needs
a
shootin’ iron. Best you go armed, though.”

Alec rolled his eyes. “’Least it’s not that heavy old Enfield you’re always sticking me with.”

Aikin rolled his eyes in turn, then jumped half out of his skin as a preposterous noise shattered the peace of the forested roadside. A screech, it sounded like, and a wail, and a mournful, ripping cry, which finally coalesced into Piper tuning up the fine new set of Uilleann pipes Fionchadd had brought him out of Faerie a week and a lifetime gone by.

Myra checked her watch again. “Reckon we oughta wait until sunset, now that we’ve missed noon?”

LaWanda shook her head. “We’re burnin’ daylight. Try now, and if it don’t fly, try again later.”

For her part, Aife looked pensive, almost morose. Aikin wondered if it was some carryover from riding in a steel vehicle, though that shouldn’t have been a problem, given that she’d succumbed to good sense before their departure and put on the substance of the Mortal World. She thought no one had noticed the actual transition, and indeed the change had been subtle: just a sort of head-to-toe shimmer-twitch, as though every atom in her body simply rotated ninety degrees, emitting a flash of light as it did. Which could well be the case for all he knew. In any event, Aikin
had
noticed, and was damned proud of himself for having done so.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Alec said with atypical decisiveness, as the last backpack was retrieved and Myra secured the vehicle with the remote lock. Aikin followed the rest, moving instinctively to the open space beneath the gate. “Boy-girl-boy-girl, I think,” Myra mused, shouldering an impressive-looking knapsack and reaching out to catch Alec’s hand with her right and Aikin’s with the other.

“Sounds reasonable,” Aife affirmed as she claimed Alec’s other hand. LaWanda promptly snared Aikin’s left and extended the remaining one to Piper, before realizing that he needed both of his free to accomplish what he must. She settled for clamping one strong black hand down on his right shoulder, motioning Aife to follow suit.

As for Piper, he looked soulful and distressed, a condition not alleviated by his black jeans, boots, and trademark linen shirt
(handmade
by LaWanda, as she’d noted more than once), the latter also black in lieu of the traditional white, and capped by a black leather jacket with silver-studded pockets.

Nevertheless, his expression softened to mere resigned dismay as he checked the bellows under his right arm, massaged its twin beneath his left, and commenced playing—a soft, slow air to begin with. “To soothe you guys,” he explained with a wry smile.

And then that other. Low notes at first, eerie yet almost bouncy, to establish an otherworldly ambiance, followed by a jauntier tune, possibly a reel, if Aikin knew his Irish music right. And then the whole played faster. Aikin had recognized the piece from the first bars, of course: the frantic fiddle tune called “The King of the Fairies.”

“Close your eyes,” Myra hissed. “Picture a tall, Celt-style tower, only with crenelations around the crown and the whole thing stuck in a plain of glittery gray sand. Might not hurt to add the Silver Tracks either: just bands a couple of yards wide radiating from the base of the tower.”

Aikin did as instructed and found it surprisingly easy to conjure the requisite image, possibly because Myra had once painted the same vista, then sold it to a Virginia art collector. And with his eyes closed, it really was easier to focus on the way the music kind of drew you out of yourself. As a final adjunct, Myra began to read from the mysterious manuscript she’d retrieved from her apartment, the dog-eared paper vying for contact with Alec in her right hand.
“I am called Satan, I’m Lord of this World…!”

Which were the first lines of that long-lost mystery play in which Colin had hidden the formula that awakened his country.

For a moment, nothing happened save loud music and Myra’s firm, if slightly flat, recitation. But then Allan noted that he was growing warmer and that the breeze had shifted and was stirring his pant-legs quite forcefully, as though he stood in the midst of a tiny whirlwind. And when the chorus came around again and Piper began to pickup the tempo, the tempo of the whirling increased as well.

Aikin was mightily tempted to open his eyes, but dared not. And then it didn’t matter, because, with a wrench and a jolt of not-unexpected pain, he lost command of his senses entirely for about ten seconds, and when he recovered them, it was to find soft moss beneath one boot and silver sand beneath the other, and to see, at maybe half a mile’s remove, the fractured but still-imposing shaft of what could only be Colin’s tower.

“We’re ba-ack,” LaWanda giggled, though she’d already shifted her machete to her hand.

“So it appears,” Myra acknowledged. “Frankly, I’m surprised to find it so intact. I mean, when we were here last, the whole place was either falling into ruin or dissolving away as the Tracks passed by.”

“Appears you were wrong, then,” LaWanda retorted, looking at Myra appraisingly, then at Aife. “So which of you ladies wants to take the lead?”

She did not, Aikin noted, even consider Alec, himself, or Piper, though hopefully that was a function of age. Myra and LaWanda ranked him and Alec by easily eight years, and Aife ranked everyone by…centuries. Too, while Alec was smart aplenty, he didn’t think well on his feet; and LaWanda didn’t know his own sly self well enough to trust him. Piper had let himself out. He was at least as old as Myra, but, to quote the musician’s own words, “I do not lead—ever. I do not take charge—ever.
I
pipe—whenever I can.”

“Flip you for it,” Myra chuckled, eyeing Aife speculatively.

Aife shook her head. “I was once a warrior. Best it is that I take charge.”

Aikin simply stepped up beside her in the ranks they were forming, with Alec claiming her other side.

Poor Alec! To have loved someone in vain for so long, then have that person live with him for a couple of years, but only as a cat—except when she was an enfield, which was another of those heraldic beasts Brock was always talking about, this one essentially a fox with an eagle’s talons in lieu of forepaws.

Like the gryphons hereabouts, he supposed, except that they were supposed to have a lion’s body and an eagle’s wings and head. And except that instead of wings, the males sported thin, flexible plates like softened rhino hide, from between the joints of which shafts of light shone when they moved.

Poor Alec, hell!
he reminded himself an instant later.
Poor them!

For it was
hot
in this flicking place: hot as a desert. Hot as the Iron Dungeon, and there’d been a
reason
for all that heat. Here nothing at all hung in a sky that though deep purple seemed at the same time as well lit as the clearest summer day.

Alec cleared his throat. “Uh, just to be on the safe side, folks; I was in a deserty place like this before, and there were some little folks that came up out of the sand and attacked me. Don’t know about here, but we might oughta be real careful.”

“Already am,” LaWanda replied flatly. “All day, every day.”

“God,” Alec muttered back. “What’ve
you
got to be afraid of?”

LaWanda’s snort could’ve been heard for miles. “You can tell you ain’t never been black, white boy!”

“Sorry!”

And with that, Aife stepped from moss to sand.

Dust rose up immediately, and Aikin found himself coughing at once, not surprising, given his allergies. There was something odd about that dust, too: a certain sharpness, as though the particles retained the razor-sharp edges they’d possessed when they were sheets of glass. Idly, he scooped up a handful, and flinched at the wash of pain across his knuckles.

“So much for that!” he grumbled, and returned to the matters at hand: keeping a close eye on the tower lest it somehow slip away, and a closer eye on their environs.

And on they trekked: alert, wary, ever on guard for the appearance of foes.

They saw none. Nothing at all, save the undulating ripples and flourishes of the sand, some of which looked disconcertingly like Celtic knotwork.

“Perhaps it is,” Aife replied when Myra commented on that fact. “We know that the Power of the Silver Tracks passed over this place, for otherwise the maze would not have been blasted so, though I believe Alberon had a hand in that as well. And I know that these shapes, when properly constructed, hoard and amplify Power, yet at the same time are shaped by it, where there is dust or sand.”

“Well,
that’s
interesting,” Myra murmured, and fell silent.

It wasn’t a bad trek, actually, though Aikin would’ve been happier if they’d left footprints, since the dust filled in their tracks as quickly as they formed.
Oh, well,
he reminded himself philosophically, he was pretty damned good at dead reckoning.

Somehow, too, they reached the tower before anyone truly expected it, and stepped into the welcomed coolness of a shadow that shouldn’t exist in a place that had no obvious sun. In any event, the relative freedom from the pervasive heat was a welcomed respite, as was the ragged sward of moss that ringed the rough-stone shaft. “Drink!” Aife ordered, “those of you who will. And then we go inside.”

Aikin needed no second prompting and chugged at least a third of the canteen of mountain spring water he’d brought down from Devlin’s. That accomplished, he helped himself to the rest of his burger, then joined Alec before the tower’s only obvious entrance: a thick, if rather squatty, oak door set deep into the nearby wall; the whole held together by the most intricate wrought-metal strapwork Aikin had ever seen. Alec had just reached out to touch the grinning imp’s face that comprised the latch when Aife stepped in front of him, knocking his hand away. “You may be my lover,” she snapped. “But that does not excuse you from being a reckless fool!”

Alec started to bite back; that much was clear to Aikin, standing right beside him, and in fact he caught the sharp, inhaled hiss, followed by grinding teeth, as a very wired Alec McLean fought to hold his peace.

“If everyone is ready,” Aife continued coolly, in a voice that brooked no dissent, “we will go in.”

“Hmmm,” Myra mused, as she joined the Faery woman before the massive door. “Somehow I figured there’d be a guard.”

Aife’s reply was to close her eyes
(casing the place with Power,
Aikin assumed), then scowl uneasily, flip the latch, and slowly push the panel inward. It moved smartly for a short distance, then fetched up short against some obstruction: not unreasonable, given that the place had been on the verge of collapse when Myra’s previous invasion force had fled. Or so LaWanda had described in graphic detail on the journey down.

Aikin had his shotgun loaded and ready when he followed Aife inside. Not surprisingly, it was fairly dark in there, with no windows at all on the level they’d entered, and only a few impressive-looking cracks in the high stone walls to remind him there’d ever been light. What illumination did find its way in seemed focused on the single enormous tapestry that still hung upright beneath an upward-curving stair, which hanging featured an even mix of preposterous animals (mostly gryphons) and gaudily garbed bards.

“Where’s the library?” Alec asked edgily, crowding between Aikin and Aife, who in turn moved forward to admit the rest of their crew.

“Upon the second level,” someone replied. It took Aikin half a dozen heartbeats to realize that the voice belonged to no one in their party. And that many more to determine that it echoed from all around them.

“Who speaks?” Aife demanded, in the sharpest tones Aikin had ever heard from her. For an instant, he fancied that she glowed.