Warstalker's Track (39 page)

Kirkwood grinned. “To echo my fellow ethnic minority: both.”

“You can use mine,” David offered. “Alec, what about yours? We seem to have a spare atasi and a person who shouldn’t even be here.” He fixed his gaze on Brock, looking long and hard at the boy as though they shared some secret. “So how ’bout, it, Badger? Wanta have a go with a war club?”

Brock, who was standing with his arms folded across his chest looking by turns scared to death and sullen, drew himself up straighter. “That’d work.” He’d recovered the Ruger, too, just in case. Alec wondered if he was prepared to use it. He caught the boy’s eye and gestured a silent summons. Fumbling a little, he freed his atasi from the belt loop where he’d thrust it and held it out to the boy. It gleamed in the light of the flickering torches: two feet of wood shaped vaguely like a double-bladed ax, but with the handle continuing into a knob. Good for smashing bones, capable of rending flesh if you hit hard enough. By repute, able to send off—or fend off—bolts of lightning. Cal’s could, at any rate. His own? Who knew? He’d never tested it. Brock’s eyes glittered as he took it solemnly. To his surprise, Alec’s misted back. “Just stay alive to return it.”

“Well,” David announced, “best I can tell, we’re as ready as we’re gonna be.” He glanced at Aife, then at Fionchadd, and finally at Elyyoth. “You say midnight’s best to start this wingding? We’ve got fifteen minutes, then. I suggest we all use it makin’ peace with whoever needs makin’ peace with, and anything left over just off by ourselves makin’ ready.”

Alec found a rock near the juncture of mountain, woods, and overlook, and sat there alone, staring at the jar that held the ulunsuti. What would he see there? he wondered, when he, Myra, Piper, and Liz fed it the blood that figured so much in all this ritual and began their scrying? More to the point, what was the secret David’s band were hiding and thought no one suspected, and would he live to see it revealed? They were playing for keeps now. Chivalry was Lugh’s province, and chivalry was dead, as far as their enemies went. Come…whatever, they would receive no mercy.

Sneak attack,
Aife had urged. Start the ball rolling, set Tir-Nan-Og moving, and catch the Sons before they could act.

Yeah, sure!

“Okay,” David proclaimed far too quickly, “it’s time.”

*

Somehow it all fell together. Those who would work the spell—Aife, Fionchadd, and Elyyoth—stripped to their undertunics, leaving arms, legs, and feet bare, then waded into the pool, with Aife clutching Colin’s grimoire. Fionchadd carried Uki’s obsidian knife
(When had he got it?),
and Elyyoth simply stood there looking grim. If Alec understood things right, they’d all offer blood (not that different from what he’d done in Tir-Gat, actually), and then Aife would call the Tracks. According to Myra, they spiraled around various axes, and if you stayed in one place long enough, one would conveniently sweep by. All Alec knew was that they’d better!

And with the Sidhe all up to their knees in cold mountain water, the others took their places.

Alec, Liz, Myra, and Piper sat down in a second circle between the edge of the pool and the sheerest edge of the overlook, arranging themselves so that all but Piper had a view of Bloody Bald, with the ulunsuti jar in the center. Liz had another knife
(Lord, but this was a bloody undertaking!),
but wouldn’t use it until David gave the signal.

The rest—the warriors—formed a protective crescent around the sorcerers and the scryers, with the heavy, dark mass of the mountain closing up the unguarded side. They’d alternated, too, gun-toters and blade-or-club men: Kirkwood, Scott, Aikin, Brock, David, Sandy, LaWanda, and Cal, in order from the road. They were all standing very straight, Alec noted, as though they were warriors in truth, not volunteers and halfhearted conscripts. Weapons gleamed in their hands: shotguns, rifles, and pistols wrought in the Lands of Men; swords and machetes of iron or Faery metal; wooden war clubs and Calvin’s bow, made in Galunlati; and poison-tipped arrows from their foes. Most wore black. A few sported odd bits of garb from Galunlati or Tir-Nan-Og.

Wind whipped their hair, and the mist began to thicken as Fionchadd’s shield, which he no longer dared sustain, began to dissolve. They had wards, of course: another circle of sticks and chanted words, but the location of the pool and the mountain had made it impossible to fix them neatly with the quarters, so that neither Cal nor Brock were certain they were viable.

Alec shifted restlessly, looking first at the overlook, then ten degrees sideways at David, who was staring at his watch; then back at his own timepiece, noting that the flashing numerals had synchronized with his heart.

“One minute,” David warned. Whereupon Fionchadd flourished his knife. Liz laid hers on Alec’s thigh as he reached to the center of the circle formed by their touching knees and opened the jar which held the ulunsuti. A pause for breath and he tipped the stone onto a black silk scarf Myra had provided.

“Now!”
David said softly into the night. Barely a whisper that was, yet Alec heard him even above the patter of rain and the rush of sliding water. He took the knife from his thigh, slid it across his other palm without considering it might actually hurt, and closed his eyes. Around him, he sensed, more hands than his own were bleeding.

Around him, too, the torches wavered and the rain fell harder.

Interlude VII: Road Warriors

I

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

The tall thick grass of the Plain of Lost Stars had long since given way to the close-grown stubble of the Vale of Dhaionne Chainnai, as the bodachs thereabouts called the place where the famed mortal historian had dwelt after Lugh kidnapped her to write her history of Cymruw. She’d died there, too: an old woman surrounded by strange stumpy dogs, and been buried beneath a jet-black stone carved with thistles, ravens, and bears. She’d befriended the bodachs, though, and, the place having no other appellation, theirs had persisted.

Now, however, that vale, with its meandering streams and mile-off view of the twelve-towered palace, was ripe to be named again: the Vale of Remorseless Slaughter.

Lugh had expected them: these warriors in the livery of the Sons of Ailill, which was such a poor parody of his own. Turinne had to have at least one seer (though not Oisin, for whom Lugh was deeply concerned), and that seer was bound to have noted his approach. The usurper wouldn’t send his best, though, if he had yet to confirm his bond to what was still not his throne; therefore, these armed shapes who rose from the grass as from the earth itself would be expendable and likely halfhearted in the bargain. Most likely they were meant to delay anyone who sought to attack the palace.

As for the Bonding Rite—well, Turinne was certainly one to take risks. He’d risked unseating a king, after all. And though the ancient Laws of Dana said one king must die (or abdicate) on the day that marked his birth for another to supplant him (and such had been Turinne’s plan), the
form
of the rite was common knowledge, and it would be like Turinne to try to force his own bond with a Land already bonded and let the Land decide. It was against that choice Lugh rode.

Faster, then; bearing down on those who raised sword and spear to daunt him. Nuada was at his side. His tithe and another that had joined along the way, not all of them Daoine Sidhe, rode at his back. He thought to stop and fight, for bloodlust was strong within him, but that would waste precious time. And so he raised his spear, so that the long, strong rays of westering sunlight caught it and glittered along its length, and those who stood against him, who did not throw themselves to the ground at once, withered beneath that weapon’s fire.

And the Vale of Dhaoinne Chainnai drank deep of thick, rich, heart-pumped wine.

II

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

“Lord…” Cemon ap Cadwyr, Arawn’s page and cabin boy, ventured as he padded to a stop at Arawn’s back, feet wide braced on the rolling deck. “Lord,” Cemon dared again. “There is—that is, the lookouts have sighted another fleet approaching.”

Arawn never moved from his place at the forward railing, from which, through a curious complex of mirrors and engraved metal, he was observing what transpired in the Vale of Dhaoinne Chainnai. Yet the muscles tensed along his jaw, and the hand that held his sword grew marginally tighter. “Lugh? Or—?”

“Finvarra,” Cemon panted. “Whether he pursues or shares your goal—”

“He is no fool, or else I am one,” Arawn retorted. “He will know what I know, and will have heard the news at one time and the same.”

“Will he fight with us or against us?” Cemon persisted.

Arawn watched the empty southern reaches of Tir-Nan-Og flash by beneath him: woods and vales and a few farmsteads or private palaces; herds of beasts, and flocks of birds around the many lakes. It was too alive for him, too lush, too bright, too green. It was an implicit insult to his own dark, dry, morbid-seeming Land. And that was reason enough to contest it.

“Does it matter?” Arawn replied languidly, not turning, though he could all but feel the boy’s frightened scowl. “Either way, we will all be bloodied. Either way, things will change. Either way there will be poems to write, songs to sing, and stories to tell.”

“Which will do no good if no one survives to hear them,” Cemon gave back bravely.

Arawn almost struck him for insolence, then decided that such scarce-disguised disapproval was likely the bravest thing the boy had ever done.
“Someone
will hear,” he chuckled. “If nothing else, we will kidnap mortals and make them give our bards a hearing. But put your heart at ease; for now I am set to contest with Lugh, and if that avails not, with Turinne. And if neither give me satisfaction, I may give Finvarra of Erenn a go. If he is as bored as I am, he would relish it. It would be interesting to rule three realms at once, whether that king be Lugh, Turinne, Finvarra, or…me.”

“The Powersmiths—” Cemon dared again.

“Are very far away,” Arawn snorted.

“Will we fight on the ground? Or indoors? Or…aloft?”

Arawn stroked his chin and gazed behind him. “It is true,” he mused, “that I have never
waged
battle from on high.”

III

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

Turinne paused with one hand on his ceremonial helm and stared through two windows at once. They were set close together in the eastern corner of the tower he’d chosen for his suite, but neither opened on the World Without; not as it was, anyway. For the openings were glazed with a mesh of clear glass and mirrors, milky-clear panes, and stained (kin to the apparatus Arawn used at that very moment, had he known). Usually they made pictures of their own devising, but now they filled another function entirely.

Now they sought out threat.

Not threat to him, however; a room’s worth of windows couldn’t display all those now, and he rather relished that notion. Rather, these windows showed threat to the Land itself. And while Turinne knew his own mind well enough to know that Kingship had its own enticements, this whole elaborate plot had at its heart a true and abiding love for the Land that had nothing to do with any ulterior cause.

Mortals were threatening it—Tir-Nan-Og first, but the other realms in time—and that threat, while unintentioned, was insidious. Men fought wars and men died, but the Land was always there after, sometimes injured but always recoverable. Mortal men, though, had iron in abundance, and that iron had burned through to devour the Land, and
that
Land could not be reclaimed. A finger gone, for him, was a finger that would grow back eventually. A farm or a field or a wood devoured by an iron-wrought Hole: that was gone forever.

Which had decided him. Lugh
was
the Land, but Lugh
ignored
the Land in its pain. Turinne would not ignore it, therefore he must destroy that which would be its bane: mortals in general and whichever ones were annoying the Land now.

He saw them clearly, for all it was dark in the Lands of Men. Mortals they were, and with them traitors to his own kind: Fionchadd mac Ailill, Aife of Tir Arvann, and Elyyoth whose lineage he did not know; all engaged in some complex
working
whose nature he couldn’t tell, for the window showed only threat, not reason, distance, or kind.

But the place he
did
know: a place he’d heard of in the Lands of Men that had almost as much Power as some parts of Tir-Nan-Og.

But he had time yet. It was far too dangerous to stake his claim before sunset, and so minor a skirmish as he had in mind didn’t require his presence. Besides, his warriors were restless. They’d vowed revenge on this very same band of mortals, and who was he to say them nay?

“Fetch”—he counted through the window, speaking to the guard who lingered by—“fetch a tithe; half of it mortal, half of it Sidhe. Go to that place, slay all you find there, and return with their heads to me.”

IV

(west of Clayton, Georgia—Sunday, June 29—near midnight)

“This is a crock,” JoAnne Sullivan grumbled from where she was driving Dale’s big Lincoln far too fast for slippery mountain roads; antilock brakes and traction control notwithstanding. The wipers beat at the downpour: fierce as her anxiety, steady as her pain.

Safely ensconced in the back seat, Little Billy blinked stoically and tuned out her latest tirade on why his dad should’ve stayed at Rabun Regional, how he shouldn’t have gone off to fight in the first place, why that wailing he and Dale still heard now and then really could
not
be the family banshee. And finally, and most forcefully, how a stick in the back was just flat out not an acceptable reason to die. Dale, in the front shotgun, had tuned her out, too, by the expedient of playing ’possum. Which was just as well; it left Little Billy alone with his pa—his
dad,
rather; he’d never liked that old-fashioned term Davy, against all sense, continued using.

Might not be a problem much longer, though, ’cause Big Billy looked pale as a ghost, and if truth were told, wasn’t hardly breathing. Frankly, it was a miracle they’d released him, and if Bill hadn’t threatened to sue, and had Dale to back him up (and himself, too, if an eleven-year-old counted), they’d still be back there waiting.