Windmaster's Bane (28 page)

The wind almost wrenched the door from his hand, but he caught it before it could slam and was down the steps and into the yard almost before he knew it. One thing was for sure, he considered as he splashed across the sodden grass: He wouldn’t leave any tracks. He glanced up toward the night sky, wishing for the witchlight of the Faery moon that had accompanied him the night he met Oisin, but it was not there. The rain itself imparted a sort of silver shimmer to the world, though, that was almost as alien—but still he could hardly see.
Well,
he thought resignedly,
it’s uphill all the way; long as I’m going uphill and don’t run into trees, I’m on the road.

Magic,
he mused. He’d had enough of magic to last him a lifetime already. He was tired of tingling eyes and burning rings, and of animals that talked, and of not being able to trust anything at face value—not even his brother. That was the heart of the problem, all right: not being able to trust anything. He could no longer be certain if a white animal was
only
a white animal, a friend
only
a friend. Even the rocks and trees were suddenly suspect.

He dismissed that stream of reasoning as frivolous in light of the day’s events.
Trust,
he thought.
Ha!
Who could trust him now? He’d lied to everybody he knew, yet he couldn’t expect them to believe him if he told the truth. Shoot, he wouldn’t have believed them either, under the same circumstances. It was Ailill’s fault—his and Nuada’s, damn them both. Nuada was no better than Ailill. Yes, he was doing the right thing, all right; Better to let the Sidhe have him and be done with it.

“You hear that, Silverhand? I’m gonna talk to you! Gonna meet you man to man. You guys want me, you can have me—but at my place, and on my terms.” He spoke the words low and clear into the gloom and started up the road.

The rain whipped at David, soaking him in spite of the poncho. He tried to throw back his shoulders and walk proudly and unafraid, but that notion lasted maybe ten steps before doubt settled in, weighing his shoulders down like the water that had already drenched them. Thunder rumbled like the evil laughter of giants, and the wind howled around his ears, forcing the rain into those few hidden places of his body that yet remained dry. He hunched over, pulled the hood of his poncho closer over his head and tried not to breathe too heavily. Already the cold was making him sniffle. And he had forgotten that his glasses would be utterly useless. “What the heck?” he whispered to himself. “I can see what I need to see without ’em. Almost don’t need ’em anymore, anyway.” He took them
off,
stuffed them into an inside pocket, and continued miserably onward.

He tried to blank his mind to all but the movements of his legs against the flow of water, and nearly succeeded. The wind swallowed his thoughts almost as soon as he thought them, carried them away to roll among the thunderclouds, so that he had trouble recalling much of anything beyond the endless left-right, left-right, the tiny trickles of cold sweat oozing out here and there as he exerted himself against the wind, against the ever more treacherous footing. It was probably stupid to go on the road and not under the meager shelter of the forest, he told himself. But somehow the forest did not appeal to him. He was already walking nearly blind, and at least on the road it was possible to tell where he was going.

He plodded onward for a good while, not knowing how long he had been away, nor caring, aware only of cold and the hiss of his breathing and the howling of the wind. He was half blind, half deaf, soaked to the skin, his fingers numbing as the rain grew colder, his feet freezing, so that he was less and less certain where he stepped, and his legs were getting tired too, as the water sometimes rose above his ankles even on the road. He had never tried walking uphill in a flood before—but, then, floods were pretty scarce in north Georgia. It was funny how someplace you had been a thousand times could suddenly feel different—even threatening—when you realized there was one aspect of it you hadn’t seen.

David tried to sing once, “The Old Walking Song” from
The Lord of the Rings,
but he couldn’t remember the words; tried a John Denver tune then, but the wind shrieked louder and he quit.

He squinted at his watch, the green numerals barely visible in the gloom, and saw that it had stopped. He shook it furiously, saw the second hand feebly creep a few degrees and stop again. Another try produced the same results, and he gave up. He felt like his watch: run down. Could hardly make his legs move, could hardly
feel
his legs. He set himself a goal: a swirl of dark water thirty feet ahead that might mark a hidden boulder. Reaching it, he set another, and then another. There shouldn’t be much further to go, if he didn’t miss the landmarks and pass the turnoff.

Another goal reached, and another. And then he brought his foot down on an unstable stone and staggered sideways, arms pinwheeling, his staff flying from suddenly loosened fingers to disappear beneath the torrent further to his right.

“No!” he shrieked as he leapt after it, touched it, felt it slip again from his fingers.

All at once he was near the edge of the ditch, and it was deep there, and the incline steep. He felt the earth crumble away beneath his feet, felt mud and stones carrying him downward into turbulent water, felt his feet covered, his legs engulfed. He tried to jerk himself upright, but the ooze sucked him back against the bank to lie there winded, half buried in mud, half covered by water that rose above his waist and poured down upon his head—and he could feel the current tugging relentlessly at his feet.

A long moment passed before he realized what had happened. He looked to his right and saw towering cliffs, of darkness that would be blood-red clay in the daylight, but here at night they were bulwarks of sticky black muck that were already fitting themselves greedily around him. He was slipping further into the water every second. And there was a cold seeping up at him through the ground itself; he thought he could feel it covering him softly, softly. David realized that if he didn’t move very soon he would drown—or be entombed by mud. And fail his quest. The Faery boy had said David had the stuff of heroes in him.
Hero?

Ha!
He closed his eyes and lay still a moment longer and thought about heroes. And he thought about dying, and a resolve grew in him. Cuchulain would never drown in a ditch by the side of the road, no sir. He’d boil the water with his own fury. Finn would laugh at it and dare it to touch him. Oisin would point a finger and it would be gone. Well, David Sullivan would not give up, either, not when he had business to attend to. The earth had already claimed one David Sullivan, and that was enough. What would David-the-elder say now, if he could see him?
Get your butt up out of there, boy, you got better things to do!
I
didn’t teach you what I taught you to have it all end here in the mud.
Well, it
wouldn’t
end here.

Ruthlessly David forced himself upright, feeling the mud pulling stubbornly at his back. His fingers brushed something smooth.
His staff!
He grasped it thankfully, poured his strength into it, used it to lever himself the rest of the way up. Water swirled about his thighs for a moment, and he almost lost his balance again, but he anchored the staff in the earth, and then he was clambering awkwardly out of the ditch.

Once back on the top he paused breathlessly, letting the rain strip the worst of the mud from his body. He glanced back down the road. It was like sighting into a long black tunnel full of ancient spiderwebs blending into a shiny floor. He turned his gaze uphill, then took a step forward. Another landmark, another goal to strive toward. All at once he became aware of a sudden warmth from somewhere to his right, and a prickling about his right hand. He stared at it curiously and noticed a faint light issuing from his runestaff: a pale ruddy radiance that glowed but did not illuminate, almost like phosphorescence. He recalled how the staff had glowed when he had given it to Liz that time in the woods. “Things have Power because you give them Power,” Oisin had said. Well, this was certainly Power. Maybe it only required the presence of a little real magic to awaken more. That was interesting, but he didn’t have time to waste on such speculation. His eyes were tingling. Magic was afoot.

The glow did not spread, but the warmth did, seeping slowly up his hand, through his arm, across his chest to where he felt it loosen a constriction that lay about his heart, a tightness that he had not noticed until it was lifted. The warmth continued downward, and up into his head. When it reached his eyes, his vision cleared for a moment and he saw ahead the break in the trees where the narrow track went out a short way to Lookout Rock. He had almost reached his goal.

And when he reached the place itself, David
knew
that magic was afoot, for the clouds were torn away like gossamer before a torch, and the witchmoon showed overhead. But he could see the familiar stars as well, Cygnus high in the northwest, his favorite constellation after Orion. He raised his runestaff in salute, half fearing to see the wings of the sky-swan flap in response. Stranger things had happened lately. He cleared his mind, trying not to think of arcane matters. And then he laughed. It was a good sign that such an image had come to him; it meant his brain was working again.

He walked over to the precipice, stood as close as he dared to the edge, listening to the roar of the waterfall behind him drumming on the rocks like the low song of the hosts of night on the march. Straining his ears, he could hear the faint cries of bats and night-jars and whippoorwills. Warily he glanced down, but the shapes twisted and blurred, showing at one moment clouds and at one moment moonlit mountains.

Bloody Bald reared up straight across from him, and David tried to conjure the Sight, tried to see again the castle he knew was there. But nothing changed about the mountain; whatever glamour hid it was more powerful than Second Sight. Perhaps only at dusk and dawn did it reveal itself.

David shrugged and turned his thought to other matters.

How does one summon the Sidhe?
he wondered.
Stand up here and yell “Here I am, come get me”?
But he was less sure of himself now. Did he want to go through with it? Well, he’d come this far, and the Sidhe were obviously waiting for him—somebody was, or they wouldn’t have been fooling with the weather. Slowly he raised his ash staff above his head, gripping it with two hands. The wind whipped his hood away, slapping damp strands of hair across his face.

“Silverhand!”
David cried into air that still vibrated with the thunders of the mortal world. It almost seemed that he could see the words hanging visible in the air, as uncertain as he was.

“Silverhand!”
he cried again, and put more force into the cry, but the sound again seemed muffled.

He took another breath, filled his lungs to their depths as if for a long dive, steeled his throat and vocal cords, and cried again:
“Silverhand!”
The word sprang forth, hard and clear into the night; he could almost feel it rip his mouth and throat as it burst out like the report of a rifle, could almost see the air spring aside in surprise at the presumption of its volume, could hear it echo from mountains and rocks, heard even above the falls:
“Silverhand,
Silverhand,
Silverhand…”

He sat down then and waited, watching the lightning that played among the lowlands like lost stars.

Nothing happened.

He leaned back on his arms, his hands braced behind
him…
and abruptly jerked erect when a pain stabbed through his right hand. Something had pierced
it…
a snake?

He twisted around—and saw an ice-white raven sitting placidly preening its feathers behind him, its ivory beak the instrument of his pain.

The raven looked up at him. “Silverhand,” it said.

“You?” asked David.

“Raven,” said the raven.

“Raven?”

“Raven.”

“I called Silverhand. Nuada of the Silver Hand,” David said impatiently. He was in no mood to talk to a bird; his resolve was weakening by the minute.

“Messenger,” said the raven.

David folded his arms and looked away. “I need to talk to Nuada.”

“Forbidden,” said the raven.

“Why?”

“Lugh’s law.”

David stood up and paced back and forth, precariously close to the edge. He faced the raven again. It sat implacably. David gestured around at the night. “So what is all this?”

“Power.”

“Whose Power? Ailill’s? Nuada’s?
Lugh’s?
”

“Enemy! Enemy!” squawked the raven, suddenly agitated. Even as David opened his mouth to frame another question it spread its wings and took flight.

David found himself cast abruptly into shadow. A darkness passed overhead, eclipsing the starlit sky, and then was gone.

David jerked his head up, frowning. Cygnus still blazed. He looked at another part of the sky and saw Corona Borealis, which the Welsh called Caer Arianrhod, the Castle of the Silver Wheel. It reminded him of the ring. And then his eyes took fire, and he was plunged once more into darkness.

A sound reached his ears, then: a concussion of the air, as of vast wings flapping. David looked up to see the raven fluttering frantically about, only a little above his head. And beyond it, shadowing half the sky, the outstretched pinions and dagger talons of a vast black eagle—fully forty feet from wing tip to wing tip.