Warstalker's Track (31 page)

“No!” Piper said flatly. And to Alec’s amazement, she stopped.

“Sorry.”

Alec simply stared.

Aife had eased into the lead, eyes narrowed intently as she scanned not only the shelves but the shattered detritus of equipment and furniture. Alec followed her gaze, realizing belatedly that this had not only been a library but also a lab. The proverbial sorcerer’s den, in fact. “I assume we oughta ask before we touch anything, right?” he murmured, trying not to stare too long at a particularly well-wrought sculpture of a pair of naked lovers cast in pure gold, though smudged with black and partly obscured beneath a block of masonry that itself was inlaid with a hunting scene in copper cloisonné and precious stones.

“It would be wise,” Aife agreed, pausing to regard Myra curiously. “You were here before, were you not? When this place was intact? You climbed the stairs to the roof. Would you have seen this room as it was then?”

“Yep,” Myra affirmed, with an uncertain gleam in her eye.

“Good,” Aife retorted. “If you will grant me leave, I can enter your mind and share your memories of that time. Perhaps I will see something that will aid our search.”

“But do we even know what we’re lookin’ for?” Aikin broke in. “A book, or…what? I mean, are we even certain this Colin guy wrote this stuff down? Wasn’t he a druid? And didn’t they rely on memory?”

“Aye,” Aife acknowledged. “But he was old, even for one of the Sidhe, and when one is immortal…eventually one’s mind cannot encompass everything. Since Colin created Tir-Gat late in his life, it is to be hoped that he was forced to record the spells he used to control the Silver Tracks. My only hope is that we can understand whatever tongue or cipher he employed.”

“And we still have to find it,” Aikin persisted, looking meaningfully at Myra.

Myra grimaced, shrugged, and sat down on a conveniently chair-sized fragment of sculpture. The stone contained fossils, Alec realized, wondering if it would be safe to make away with some of them.

Maybe later—for Aife had eased around behind Myra to grasp her temples with both hands. “Close your eyes,” she breathed. “Think back to that day. Forget your emotions, recall only with those eyes that serve you so well. Think of what you saw—and now of what you
see!”

Myra flinched ever so slightly, and Aife’s eyes too slipped closed. For more than a minute they simply sat there, immobile. Alec wondered if he’d ever feel comfortable with Aife again. True, she’d said she loved him as recently as an hour ago, and had been acting as though that were so in their few unstressed moments together since her return. But might she not be playing another role? God knew she’d been acting when first they’d met: pretending to be some lost mortal foreigner in order to win her way into—to be blunt—his pants, since she’d needed his seed to effect certain controls over him. But she’d been one of Lugh’s guard then, though also secretly allied with the Sons of Ailill—more acting there. And then there was the enfield episode, which had certainly served her own ends in spite of its also being punishment, never mind the cat variation that had come after. And now, all of a sudden, she was this high and haughty stranger: by turns judge and jury, but always manipulator.

So which was the real Aife? And what was her true agenda?

Nuada trusted her—kind of. But Lugh had as well, and look what had happened to him. Besides, in the last analysis, it was like David said: there really were other, more accessible but equally accomplished women. And it
was
a seller’s market.

Which was a damned fool thing to be pondering when you were about to go rummaging through the ruins of a wizard’s lab.

“Oh…!” Myra’s yip startled him from his reverie. He looked up with a jerk, to see that Aife had backed away from Myra and that Myra’s eyes and mouth were open in amazement.

“It exists,” Aife said without preamble. “Something with the appropriate characteristics exists, at any rate; for such a book would be written in a certain style and bound in a particular way. And though there are many variations and possibilities around us here, recall that he did not expect to die that day, that death caught up with him; he would therefore have had no cause to hide it. In any event, we seek a book with a gold leather cover emblazoned with silver solar rays. Do not open it if you find it, but call me at once. It would be somewhere near the middle of the room,” she added. “For that is where Myra saw it long ago, all unknowing.”

“Great,” Aikin grunted. “Right where all those beams fell.”

“Well,” Myra sighed philosophically. “We won’t find it standing here gawking.”

*

It was Alec who actually located it, and that by accident. He’d been moving a pile of dusty square stones stacked like shattered dominoes upon a likely-looking volume—and one of the stones had felt too light, and had proven, upon being wiped off, to be no stone at all but a book.
The
book, as he announced when he realized what he had. It fit the description perfectly, though he hadn’t expected it to be so large: maybe twelve by eighteen inches, and studded here and there with silver-toned bands and knobby excrescences, some of them sporting jewel-crusted arcane symbols or monsters wrought in brilliant cloisonné.

He surrendered it to Aife without comment.

She gnawed her lip, brow furrowed pensively as she scrubbed at the cover with a fragment of tattered tapestry. The silver rays gleamed forth. Another pause, during which she closed her eyes, nodded absently, then flipped the metal clasps that bound its fore edge. A final breath
(Was she actually frightened?),
and she opened it.

Even seeing it upside down at a yard’s remove, Alec couldn’t suppress a gasp at the beauty that lay within. He’d seen the world’s great books, of course, in photographs; and part of the greatest—
The
Book of Kells—
when it was displayed at the Smithsonian. But beside this—well,
Kells
and
The Book of Durrow
and
The Lindisfarne Gospel
together couldn’t compare with the incredible wealth of intricate detail that blazed forth from just the first page.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Myra gasped, actually staggering, so that Aikin had to brace her to keep her from falling. “Oh, my God—Jesus
Christ!”

“Mighty fine,” LaWanda agreed. “Mighty fine. Question is, does it have what we need, or does it just look good?”

“Does it matter?” Aikin breathed. “One page of that, you could buy a country.”

“Over my dead body!” Myra snapped back, glaring at him. “Anyone damages that book for
any
reason deserves to die.”

“They used to put
The Book of Kells
in
cow troughs to cure diseases,” Aikin retorted.

“Silence!” Aife spat, alone of that company unimpressed with such preposterous intricacy and beauty. “I
think
this is what we sought, but this script—for there
is
script—is damnably difficult to read.” And with that, she effectively shut them out, eyes darting from side to side, but otherwise not moving save when, with great reverence, she now and then turned a page.

The rest of them spent the time variously. Myra rebandaged LaWanda’s wounds. Piper cleaned his pipes and tried to nap; like Brock he tended to do that when he was stressed. Alec and Aikin explored the rest of the library. A few books they examined, and a few scrolls, but none could compare with the one they’d just located, though many bore illustrations of fabulous beasts or buildings, or strangely delineated maps that seemed to rise up to engulf them if they gazed at them too long. More than a few, too, fell away to dust upon being shifted, and one literally shocked the hell out of Aikin when he accidentally brushed it with a finger.

After that, they contented themselves with scouring the floor for interesting detritus: stray jewels, bits of enamel, general odd lots that could fit into pockets and packs. “Christmas shopping,” Aikin grinned, scooping up a wooden box through the crystal lid of which the board and pieces of an incredibly delicate chess set gleamed, wrought of opal and hematite, with accents of silver and gold. “This stays with me.”

“Assuming Aife lets you keep it,” Alec cautioned, ambling back to where his troublesome lady was still turning pages in the center of the room. “Find anything?” he ventured, after watching her read a good minute longer. The script, he noted idly, was like nothing he’d ever seen, though Arabic calligraphy came closest. “He can’t have really written that,” he added, when Aife still didn’t reply. “You people can’t do art, remember?”

Aife slowly raised her gaze to him. “Nor could many men duplicate those books you so admire. But like every possible endeavor, there is always someone who is best. And at calligraphy, Colin of Tir-Gat excelled.”

“In both Worlds,” Myra acknowledged.

“Maybe,” Alec gave back. “But don’t forget how much stuff we’ve lost: burned, and whatever. We lost the Alexandrine Library, and all those Greek plays; like, we’ll have one or two masterpieces by somebody like Aeschylus, but they might’ve written fifty or more. And don’t forget how much the Vikings liked sacking monasteries. Shoot, they were
full
of things like the Ardagh Chalice, but they just wanted ’em for the gold and precious stones.”

“Don’t forget the Spaniards in the New World, either,” LaWanda broke in. “What was it? A room full of gold ornaments melted down to ransom the Inca, and they killed him anyway? And those incredible illuminated codices they burned in Mexico just ’cause they were pagan.”

“Which is all very interesting,” Myra sighed, looking at Aife intently. “But what, exactly, does it say?”

“I
…cannot
say,” Aife replied sadly. “That is, something forbids me. I know the words when I see them, but they sink into my brain before I can comprehend them. Perhaps I might know them if I actually tried to command the Silver Tracks, but that I dare not do, not now, now here.”

Alec gnawed his lip. “So you haven’t learned anything we can actually
use
?”

Aife shrugged. “I have learned how to locate one of these Tracks when in another World, or at least how Colin did it while in Faerie, which this is not. And more importantly, I learned that to work them, Colin utilized a well that once occupied the top of this tower. Beyond that, I am not certain if I do
not
know, or if I read and can no longer recall.”

“Either might be the case,” a harsh voice answered, the tones wild and fierce and feral. “But what I would like to know is who, exactly, you are and what business it is that brings you here.”

Alec jumped half out of his skin, but before he could locate the source of that voice, Aikin identified it for him. “Oh, my God!” Aikin cried. “It’s a gryphon!”

Interlude IV: Dish

(near Clayton, Georgia—Sunday, June 29—mid-afternoon)

Faeries didn’t make good houseguests, John Devlin decided wearily, as he pondered the piles of dirty dishes that had transformed his stainless steel sink into a collection of mini pagodas made of china by way of Wal-Mart. Oh, sure they (Nuada, rather, him being the only Faery presently present) were tidy in their own way, brilliant conversationalists, and not at all hard to look at (and he was
straight,
for God’s sake). Still, when one was immortal quasi-royalty and not that far from godhood, one probably got accustomed to having servants around to attend things like cleaning. And to be fair, steel
was
steel, even when it was stainless; and chrome, such as ornamented his various faucets, was actually worse than ferrous metal as far as the Fair Folk were concerned, so he supposed that also conferred them some grace when it came to washing up. But could Silverhand maybe use the
same
glass more than once?

Or was he simply so fried he was being petty?

This
was
war, after all; it just didn’t look like one—yet. And while that neat bunch of folks who were trying to run things (and doing a damned fine job of it, actually) acknowledged that, and a few of them had even managed to get themselves sufficiently bloodied to skin the romance off the concept right fast, he still wasn’t convinced that the cold
reality
of the thing had sunk in.

He wondered, too, what part he ought to be playing. He was mortal, the Mortal World was under attack, and he was nothing if not loyal to whatever causes honor demanded. A batch of these folks were on the ragged edge of being friends, too (and that didn’t count Nuada), but the particulars of this were not his battle.

Except, dammit, if the incumbent regime in Faerie lived up to their threat and flooded
every
place Tir-Nan-Og overlaid this land—well, he might just find himself with beach-front property, or worse. The thing to do, then, was to afford what aid he could but volunteer nothing—and wait

—Not long, apparently, because the kid in the wardroom was all of a sudden raising holy hell for him to get back there.

Sighing, John dismissed the dishes (perhaps Silverhand had a cleaning spell) and strode back to see what had got the kid’s boxers in a wad.

One look at the flaring candles told him. An instant later, shotgun in hand and boy in far-too-eager tow, he was marching across what remained of his yard to where Nuada was busily engaged with someone (he hoped it was someone and not
something)
at the border.

He couldn’t help but grin when he saw what three traditions worth of wards (his own, Calvin’s, and Nuada’s) had wrought: a sort of invisible cage that admitted certain beings with certain qualities for a certain distance but denied them retreat, while certain other Powers fenced…
whatever
in from either side.

This captive proved to be a woman: Faery, a Son (so to speak, and judging by the black-and-silver livery) of Ailill, and pissed as hell—as evidenced by the way she kept shape-shifting and yelling things the wards conveniently kept unheard.

Nuada seemed to be mightily amused, which put John on guard at once. Usually when Fair Folk got tickled, it meant their egos were acting up and they were getting cocky. His experience said to
never
underestimate an enemy.