The mortal waited for a full minute, but nothing happened. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she yelled, stamping in frustration.
“Shut your filthy mouth, pig-fucker.” The voice was smooth and resonant and confident and female.
A warrior dressed in a leather jerkin and breeches stood in the road behind the mortal. Her hair and her eyes were a uniform brown. She had slung about her a variety of swords and sickles and dirks and daggers. In her hands, the warrior held an improbably large machinegun—the sort of weapon that had been popular in the mortal’s own world in the late 20th century.
Beside the warrior stood an olive-skinned man with short-cropped black hair. He was tall and lean and held himself with a hunched posture that looked meek, at first…and then it looked aggressive. He was dressed in hand-made jeans and a t-shirt. His eyes were pale; dripping with adoration for the warrior that kept him. A sickle made of bone and obsidian hung from his belt.
“I’m a grown woman and I’ll swear as much as I fucking well want to,” said the mortal. “What are you, the Warrior Queen?”
“Yes.”
“And him?”
“You don’t know about him,” said the Warrior Queen, “But I will warrant that you know of his father.”
“His father is…my uncle?”
“His father was the magus.”
“Of course,” the mortal replied. “Otherwise it would be too bloody simple, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“So…you’re Zildjian, or whatever? You’re supposed to be dead.”
“I am the daughter of Zelioliah.”
“Awesome.” The mortal hefted the greatsword. “I thought this was D&D, but it turns out to be Happy Families.”
The Warrior Queen sneered. “Is that gesture a threat? Are you truly so foolish?”
“You know, you’re exactly how my uncle described your mother to me,” the mortal said. “But, honestly? I can’t understand what he saw in you. Um, I mean, her.”
“I am physically identical to my mother,” said the Warrior Queen, “But she was the most beautiful thing in all of the worlds, and I am not beautiful at all.”
“Oh, you’re okay,” the mortal replied. “Don’t be hard on yourself. Nothing wrong with you that a bit of foundation and maybe some lippy wouldn’t fix.”
“I may not be beautiful, but I have far more power than my mother ever did,” replied the Warrior Queen.
“Have you got a name?” asked the mortal. She looked at the son of the magus. “Does he?”
“Malo,” said Malo, shifting uneasily.
“Of course I have a name,” said the Warrior Queen. “Do you?”
“Oh, whatever,” the mortal replied. “I’ve had a gutful and I just want to go home. Tell me what I have to do and let’s just get on with it.”
“Do?” said Malo.
“Tell me how to complete my hero quest, or whatever bullshit is necessary for me to go home.”
“There are no heroes,” said the Warrior Queen. “You have no quest. You’ve come here without a purpose of your own, and there’s no way out for you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Of course there’s a quest.”
“That’s true, of course. But it’s not your quest. It’s mine.”
“Great, whatever. I get it. It’s all backwards. You’re the questor and I’m the questee, that’s fucking fabulous. You found me—now tell me what you want from me.”
“Justice.”
“What?”
“Your kinsman slew mine; now I will slay you.”
“That’s not justice.”
“Justice is whatever I would call by that name.”
The mortal brandished her greatsword. “Ok, so, really, you’re the Big Bad? If I kill you, that’s it, right? This is the last level?”
“I am Queen of the Warriors.”
The mortal shook her head. “I copped the cheat codes. Let’s just jump ahead to the final cut-scene and save ourselves the button-mashing, okay? I’ll not be playing the sequel.”
The Warrior Queen raised her machinegun. “You had power when you came to these Realms,” she said, “but, here in the presence of my dog-friend, you do not.”
Malo looked up, as though expecting food scraps to be thrown to him.
“You’re full of shit,” the mortal replied. She raised the greatsword overhead and accelerated her avatar towards the Warrior Queen, intending to deliver a killing stroke in between the gap between virtual seconds…
…but the sword was suddenly heavy in her arms, and the terrain was uneven beneath her feet. Her cut was slow and clumsy, as though her true flesh had swung the weapon. The Warrior Queen avoided the attack easily, stepping outside of the blade’s arc and letting it swing harmlessly past.
The mortal staggered as momentum spun her around. The sword fell point-first into the dirt. It had become too heavy for her to lift.
The Warrior Queen cocked the machinegun and raised the muzzle.
“You know what I’m thinking, right?” said the mortal to the Warrior Queen.
“I don’t care what you’re thinking." The Warrior Queen braced the weapon, aimed low, and squeezed the trigger.
The mortal’s ears filled with thunder. Gunfire smashed her legs from under her and she crumpled.
The Warrior Queen shouldered the machinegun and smiled. “Dog?”
“Dog,” said Malo, nodding. He came forwards, swinging his sickle.
The mortal rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up with her hands, willing herself…her avatar…to stand on her…on its…mangled legs. She got her hands on the cross-guard of the greatsword and used it to lever herself upright.
Malo closed on her, taking short, bent-kneed steps, just as the Warrior Queen had taught him.
The mortal changed her grip on the hilt of the greatsword, preparing to yank it from the ground and surge upwards; determined to take at least one of these fairy-tale motherfuckers with her before a saviour arrived. Her uncle, perhaps. Or the freak from the Council of the Magi. Or perhaps even the black thing. Or the dog-man, or some other ludicrous creature she was forgetting. These bloody fairy stories always ended the same way.
Malo kicked the greatsword from her hands and swung his sickle. It punched into the mortal’s abdomen just below the ribcage. He jerked the blackglass blade upwards even as she fell upon it; shattering one rib after another; tearing through her lungs and piercing her heart.
Malo held her there for a moment, looking down at her. His pale blue eyes were darker than she could comprehend. He pulled the blade free and the mortal slumped at his feet.
The Warrior Queen turned the corpse over with the toe of her boot and inspected it. “Kin for kin, blood for blood. I have wronged the man who wronged my mother.”
“Wronged,” said Malo.
“Now he will return.” The Warrior Queen slung the machinegun behind her and ruffled Malo’s hair. “He will return to the Realms of the Land, and we shall be here waiting for him.”
Book 4
Black Wings
1. Dreaming
Awake
He awoke from a sleep that was closer to death than to dream.
Though he slumbered too deeply for even his subconscious to function, some new information had yet lodged in his mind. Information that drew him back from the abyss; returned him to the worlds of truth and fiction.
She was dead.
The mortal cast off the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the narrow bed.
He had sent her in his footsteps, and she had died because of it.
The mortal stood up and looked each way down the rows of hospital beds. None of the other patients slept as deeply as he, though few of them would return to waking. Intravenous drips fed them; catheters drew away their wastes. Blinking machinery monitored their vital sign
s.
There were no such devices around his bed. He had been unplugged, but he had failed to die.
The world had aged while he slept, but the mortal had not. Such was the benefit, and the price, of living two lives simultaneously. Mortal and immortal, real and fictive. He was still human, although to a different degree than most.
The mortal found his old pair of patched and faded jeans in the small cabinet beside his bed. He put them on, and then the pale t-shirt that had once been either white or black. Time had bleached or stained it to an indeterminate shade that he wore much more comfortably. He laced up his scuffed old army boots and pulled on the thick nylon jacket.
The cabinet also contained the rucksack in which he had kept his talismans and trophies. He emptied it into the waste paper basket. After a moment’s contemplation, he threw the rucksack in as well. He squared his shoulders and walked out of the ward.
As he walked the white-enamelled halls he allowed his vision to lose focus. The phosphorescent strips embedded in the hand rails and the luminous lines painted on the floor blurred until they showed him the direction he sought.
Nobody crossed his path as he followed the flickering lines, for he walked in the interstices between footfalls. His feet fell in the gaps between the seconds; the chasms that yawned between moments.
The lights overhead dimmed and the handrails vanished. The geometrically precise lines on the floor began to bend and twist, and their accompanying directions came to be written in languages no mortal could comprehend. Yet he walked on, and onwards, for the way remained clear to him.
The lines disappeared altogether and the hard, polished flooring changed beneath his feet. It became rock, then bare earth, then grass. Before long he found himself standing atop a hill, looking down upon a village. Three score low, stone buildings were cupped in the valley, which had been cut from the hills by a broad, silvery river. The only road that ran amongst the misaligned buildings was the central thoroughfare, which was presently serving as a marketplace.
“The village,” he said, and began his descent.
2. Sequence
The species of the Worldtree could not easily be determined, but the size of it was another matter.
If one were to measure its girth and height, one would surely discover that the Worldtree was big. Inside, it was bigger; a maze without walls, with exits into many different worlds. Some of those exits were better used than others. Some were blocked, and some were guarded.
The exit into the Land of the Faerie was not merely guarded; it had been barricaded like a fortress besieged.
In the shadow of those fortifications, the Warrior Queen and her man-dog strove together in combat. The Queen beat the man-dog’s weapon away and kicked him to the ground. She sheathed her sword and turned in the direction of the village while he gasped the breath back into his lungs. He was pretty good, for a mortal.
Malo picked up his sickle and got unsteadily to his feet.
The Warrior Queen did not turn to look at him. “He has risen,” she said. “He is here.”
“How?” said Malo.
“I don’t know. He did not pass through the Tree.”
The Warrior Queen dispatched a corporal to summon the three special warriors she had reserved for just this contingency. It took longer than she would have liked for them to attend her, although she knew that the three warriors made their bivouac away from the rest of the battalion. Still, there was something insolent about the way they came striding into the shadowy place at the foot of the Worldtree that displeased her. That insolence was among the reasons she had chosen these three for their task.
“The mortal has eluded us already,” said the Warrior Queen. “But he’s not far away. You will pursue and capture him for me.”
“Name a direction, Majesty, and we will chase him down,” said the first warrior, who wore a matched pair of scars from the hinges of its jaw to the orbits of its eyes.
“I can do better than that,” the Queen replied. “I can tell you his exact route. The village, the grove, the mountain pass. The Sea City on the Plains. Then along the river, over the mountains, and through the Sinewed Forest to the Ore-lands. From there he will proceed through the pastures into the Tree Queen’s realm. Then he will cut through the black forest and return to the Worldtree.”
“If his route is known to us, Majesty, why do we not lay an ambush?” asked the second warrior, who carried dozens of blades upon its person–though none of them was larger than a dagger.
“This mortal is tricksy,” said the Warrior Queen. “But so am I. Let me worry about traps and ambushes; your orders are to pursue.”
“And when we find him, Majesty?” asked the third warrior, whose leather jerkin was wet with the blood of the many foes it had slain. “What then?”
“You will bring him to me,” said the Warrior Queen. “Alive.”
The Warrior Queen dispatched her three chosen warriors and doubled the watch she had set. Then she retired to her tent. She sat down upon the bare ground and drew her magic to her. She muttered a word, waved a gesture, and suddenly she was no longer alone.
The semblances of twelve black-robed, hooded beings surrounded her. Their circle was larger than the interior of the tent, but they were all nonetheless visible to her. A gap in the perimeter of the circle indicated her own seat on the Council of the Magi. As usual, she sat in the centre of the ring.
The Speaker for the Council said: “What is it that concerns you, Councillor-Queen?”
“The mortal has returned.”
The Councillors were still and silent.
Eventually, the Speaker said: “That cannot be so.”
“It is so.”
“None of our wards indicate this to be the case.”
“He has returned,” said the Warrior Queen. “I feel it in my marrow.”
“You feel it, Councillor Queen?” asked the Speaker. “Do you feel your intuition to be more powerful than our divinations?”
“In this matter, yes,” she replied. “I feel his mortality upon the Land. My bones are hungry for it.”
“Bones do not hunger, Councillor-Queen.”
“You would know otherwise, if you had a full complement of them.”
The insult did not give the Speaker pause, but it did drive the supercilious tone from its voice. “If this is true…if the mortal is here…why haven’t you destroyed him already?”
“He did not make his passage through the Worldtree.”
“How else can he have crossed over? He is no magician.”
“Perhaps he found a new portal?”
“No,” said the Speaker. “He must follow the sequence of his prior expedition.”
“He’s a mortal, he’s not bound by such laws,” said the Warrior Queen. “But I don’t believe he’s changed his game. He’s just skipped ahead of the opening gambit.”
“You must be sure that he plays through to the end,” said the Speaker.
“Aye.”
They were silent a moment.
“You knew he would return, but you have never explained to me why,” said the Warrior Queen.
“Perhaps he is just repeating his earlier quest. Perhaps he has no reason at all.”
“I have sent warriors after him,” said the Warrior Queen, “But I will await him here at the Tree.”
“Good,” said the Speaker. “He is not so terrible a threat as other mortals we have dealt with, but…”
“But what?”
“But this one has a surprising capacity for destruction, and he has aroused the enmity of many. He must not elude us again.”
“He will not,” said the Warrior Queen. “It is both my chosen and my fated purpose to slay him. He is a weakling and a fool—it will not be difficult.”
“This weakling slew many of our kind. He slew one of his own that was far mor
e powerful than he,” said the Speaker. “This fool has much harm in him.”
“In the past, the dog-man and the Warrior Queen came to his aid. Now, the Warrior Queen and her dog oppose him. He has no one to protect him, this time.”
“Even if he does,” said the Speaker, “Who can possibly protect him from us?”
3. The Village
It was market day in the village, and the streets were thronged with merchants and clerks, spruikers and vendors; servants and dealers; and spouses and thieves. Slaves and agents and thralls and free folk bustled amongst the stalls. Faeries from every nation, every breed, every fiefdom or republic or army or freehold plied their business there. Sidhe from all the Realms of the Land haggled for herbs or glamours, clothing or arms, favours or companionship, knowledge or lies.
The babble of commerce died abruptly. The words of barter seized on their flapping tongues, jammed in their flexing gullets. A figure was coming down the hillside.
It was an unremarkable figure: male; configured with two arms and two legs; neither short nor tall. It was a mortal.
The sun shone bright above him, and his shadow pooled small and stunted at his feet…but the folk in the market froze as if they felt its darkness upon them.
They broke and ran.
Some fled afoot. Others transformed into beasts or birds or fish, and galloped or flew or swam away. Some took to strange mounts and thrashed them with spurs and whips; others clambered into whimsical vehicles and peeled out on clattering wheels. Some of the folk fell into the ground or dissolved into the shadows; others simply vanished. The market was empty by the time the mortal set foot in it.
The mortal walked the length of the deserted boulevard. He browsed the weapons and foodstuffs and enchantments and talismans, the gewgaws and knick-knacks and treasures and trophies that were displayed in the abandoned stalls, though he did not stop to examine any particular one.
At the far end of the avenue was a purple tent. A sign in front of it showed the words, in English, Fortunes Told.
The mortal bent his head and pushed his way through many layers of drapery until he came to the dark centre of the enclosure, where the fortune teller awaited him. It sat with its hands in its sleeves and its head bowed, swaddled in the garment that was also its dwelling.
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