What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  “Any useful supplies?”

  “For us? Not really.”

  “What about prisoners?”

  “Nah. There’s just one other guy here. And he’s been here a while. You were the only one Abarta intercepted in the void.”

  “Why is that?” I bent down and rummaged through the remains of my gear, salvaging one intact gun, a couple full magazines, two tactical knives, and my RTP talisman. “Why not grab all the fleeing Watchdogs?”

  “Too much effort for too little reward, I guess.” He shuffled to the cell door and peeked out into the hall. “That spell he used to grab you homed in on your magic signature, which he could pick out in the void because he’d encountered your magic before. In order to snatch the rest of your people out of the void mid-transit—”

  “He would’ve needed an impression of all their magic signatures.” I stuck my recovered gear anywhere it would stay put and hobbled toward the door. “You can only get those from direct contact with a practitioner’s magic, or by stealing something imbued with that practitioner’s magic. Using either of those options, it would’ve taken weeks for Abarta to get impressions of every Watchdog’s signature, and he had more important things to do.”

  I huffed. “He just wanted to make sure he put me down for the count before he kicked off his grand plan, since I’ve managed to thwart his schemes in the past.”

  “Would’ve worked too,” Drake pointed out, “if I hadn’t come around with the healing potion.”

  “Yeah,” I said bitterly, “I know.”

  He moved into the hall with silent steps. “Dungeon shift changes in about fifteen minutes. That’s how long we have to get off the castle grounds unnoticed.”

  At Drake’s beckoning, I fell in beside him, and we power walked the length of the dreary dungeon, passing empty cell after empty cell, all their doors hanging open. The only cell that didn’t fit the pattern was the last one on the left, which sat near the stairwell exit. That cell’s door had no wards and was instead secured with a wooden bar. A small window had also been cut into the door’s panel, revealing the room inside.

  Drake continued on past the door, uninterested in the cell’s occupant. But I was curious enough to take a peek at the man Abarta had been holding in custody for an extended period of time.

  Sitting on a clean but well-worn mattress in the middle of the room, staring idly at the wall, was Nolan Kennedy.

  “Drake, hold up.”

  He paused on the bottom step. “What is it?”

  “This guy, what do you know about him?”

  Glancing anxiously up the narrow staircase, Drake backtracked a step and said, “Not much. He’s some weirdo who talks like a Wikipedia article being read by a monotone text-to-speech program. When I visited this place with Vianu a few months back, Abarta brought the guy out and asked him a series of questions about ‘Unseelie military urban defense strategies,’ or something like that. Thought it was kind of weird, since the guy obviously isn’t a faerie. But he didn’t act all that human either, so…”

  “He verbally responded to the questions?” I pressed.

  Drake nodded. “All of them, and pretty thoroughly too. You know the guy?”

  “Unfortunately.” I grabbed the bar on the door and hefted it up. “And I know we can’t leave him in Abarta’s company. He’s the reason Abarta was able to set the whole summoning scheme into motion in the first place.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An asshole turned repository of knowledge.” I lugged the heavy door open. The effort sent another echo of pain dancing up my arms, but it was mild enough now that I could largely block it out. “Name’s Kennedy. Used his family connections to get a detective job in Kinsale. Terrorized my old precinct for a while. Before he demanded I take him for a spin in Tír na nÓg so he could get some glory points and pass himself off as the big damn hero. His arrogance landed him in the Well of Knowledge. He swallowed some of the water and had thousands of years of written information crammed into his mind.” I tapped my temple. “Fried his brain.”

  Drake winced. “Yikes.”

  “Anyway, if he can talk now, that means Abarta managed to ‘reboot’ his brain to some extent.” I assumed Fragarach’s robust truth-seeking magic had something to do with that. Abarta was around back when the sword was first forged, and he was friends with the Tuatha blacksmith who forged it. He probably knew how to apply its powers to a person’s mind with much more finesse than me and the Watchdog researchers who’d been experimenting with it since I swindled it away from Manannán.

  “Problem is,” I continued, “now that he’s no longer a vegetable, he’s instead a huge threat to the faerie courts. Because the knowledge in his head is a huge boon for Abarta’s efforts to resurrect the rest of the Tuatha and launch a new war against the sídhe. Consequently, we can’t leave him here.”

  I stooped to enter the small cell. Kennedy perked up as my shadow fell across him and turned his head toward me, but he didn’t offer me a greeting, or an insult. His expression was totally blank, like he had no feelings about his current situation and was simply waiting for someone to prompt him.

  “Kennedy,” I said quietly, “you remember me?”

  “Vincent Whelan,” Kennedy replied hoarsely. “Born in the city of Camhaoir in the Unseelie Court in the year—”

  “A ‘yes’ would’ve sufficed,” I interrupted, before he spilled my whole life story to the dhampir loitering behind me. “So, I take it from that response that you’ve completely lost your old personality?”

  Kennedy blinked very slowly and said nothing.

  “God,” Drake murmured from the hallway, “he’s like a robot from a bad eighties sci-fi movie.”

  “He really is. I’d call it sad if he hadn’t been such a massive dick before.” I rubbed the back of my neck and pondered my limited options here. My gut instinct was to put Kennedy out of his misery, to kill him and release his soul so his tortured mind could finally escape the brain damage inflicted by the knowledge the well had forced down his throat. Doing so would also deprive Abarta of his best intelligence resource and put him in a less advantageous position against the sídhe.

  However, I was currently in such a bad position relative to Abarta that I needed to cling for dear life to every advantage I stumbled upon. I needed to learn what Abarta was up to, and every possible way I could thwart his plot in the limited amount of time I had left until the clock struck doomsday.

  So even though dragging Kennedy along for the ride through this mysterious plain in Tír na nÓg—which was teeming with enemy combatants who practically salivated at the idea of murdering me—created a risk that he would fall back into Abarta’s hands before the day was out, I had to take that risk. The alternative, running full speed into a situation I knew nothing about, would almost certainly result in my death.

  If I fell before I irreparably sabotaged the summoning, Kinsale would likely fall with me.

  “Come on, pal. We’re going on a little trip.” I took hold of Kennedy’s bony arm. He was much skinnier than he should’ve been, due to his extended coma. But otherwise, he seemed to be in good physical shape. Judging by his freshly laundered clothes and the tray of food next to his mattress, Abarta’s people had been feeding him and cleaning him regularly. Which made sense. He was a very useful tool, so they’d want to keep him healthy.

  Happiness, on the other hand, was not a requirement. Hence the dreary cell.

  Kennedy stood at my coaxing, but when I ordered him to follow me out of the cell, he moved at an unbearably slow speed. I had to lead him along by the hand as I rejoined Drake at the bottom of the stairwell.

  Drake raised an eyebrow, as if to say, You’re really going to drag him around like a dog on a leash?

  I dismissed his criticism with a wave and reminded him we were on the clock. To which he shrugged and started up the stairs at a brisk jog. I followed on his heels, checking over my shoulder every few paces to make sure Kennedy wasn’t stumbling on the uneven steps. T
he short man’s gait was a bit awkward, but it seemed his brain damage hadn’t cost him his balance.

  At the top of the curving stairwell, Drake gestured for me to hang back while he peered through a gap in the crumbling stone frame of an old wooden door. Spying nothing of concern, Drake pushed the door open halfway and ushered me into what had once been a long and narrow castle corridor. Many of the stones that made up the walls and ceiling had long been displaced, and someone, Abarta’s crew I imagined, had recently arranged the scattered building material into neat piles across the expanse of the castle’s former sprawl.

  The three of us hunkered down behind one of the larger intact sections of wall. While Drake surveyed the surrounding area to map out the current positions of the svartálfar guard patrols, I took a minute to familiarize myself with this bizarre place that sat just beneath the surface of Tír na nÓg.

  This plain resembled a windswept moor, low grasses and craggy bushes scattered across rolling hills that occasionally curved up into low, weathered mountains. Small lakes dotted the landscape, their waters crisp and clear, and a few babbling brooks zigzagging down the mountainsides kept them fed. Near many of these lakes lay ancient stone structures, all of them ravaged by time. Some were no more than scattered stones half-hidden among tall grasses, but the sturdiest of the bunch had retained their overall shapes and faded into lichen-covered monuments of the distant past.

  It was a beautiful place, and it made absolutely no sense.

  For one thing, the whole place was lit up like it was midday, but there was no visible light source. The rocky walls and ceiling sported no cracks large enough to allow so much light in, and even if they had, the light was too evenly distributed to have been spillover from a source outside the cavern.

  Secondly, the ceiling—which was bone dry, no hint of condensation on its jagged face—wasn’t tall enough to allow for the formation of rainclouds. Yet water was constantly flowing down from the mountains, which themselves were too low to grow ice caps.

  And finally, I sensed no magic in the air beside a few whiffs from nearby elves. If this cavern’s ecosystem ran on magic instead of logic, the whole place should’ve been teeming with it.

  A shudder rocked my body as an unsettling memory floated to the surface of my mind: the cavern that contained the Well of Knowledge vanishing under the force of a powerful earthquake that had no mundane or magic explanation. I’d contemplated that event many, many times, and my best explanation for that cavern vanishing into the ether was that some primordial force of nature that was neither physical nor magical had moved the cavern somewhere else, possibly at Mab’s behest.

  Tír na nÓg wasn’t like Earth after all. It was a realm beyond reason, whose history had been written and rewritten by warring godlike powers over the course of more millennia than human civilization had even existed. Many of those powers, like the sídhe, had been interlopers from neighboring realms, and each had brought with them new magic and old mysteries that were gradually woven into the fabric of Tír na nÓg. There were wild and inexplicable things that persisted in this world’s shadows, even in these modern times. Perhaps this strange and beautiful plain was among those things.

  An idea struck me, and I leaned over, whispering into Kennedy’s ear, “Answer the following question as quietly as I’m speaking to you: what’s the name of this plain?”

  Kennedy almost started speaking with his head facing away from me, so I grabbed his chin and turned it toward my ear before he said, “This is Maige Itha, the ancestral home of the Fomóraig, as well as the battlefield on which they fell to the Followers of Partholón.”

  “The Fomóraig?”

  “The Fomóraig are commonly called the Fomorians,” he clarified.

  My brows drew together. This was history I didn’t know. “How long ago did the Fomorians fall?”

  “The exact date is unknown.” Kennedy spoke mechanically. “Sídhe historians estimate the Fomóraig fell roughly seven thousand years prior to the arrival of the sídhe in Tír na nÓg.”

  “Christ, this place really is ancient,” I muttered. “Has it always been underground?”

  “The prevailing theory among experts is that the Fomóraig intentionally sank Maige Itha beneath the crust of Tír na nÓg in an attempt to protect it from the Followers of Partholón.”

  “Is its current location known to the faerie courts?”

  “The current location of Maige Itha is a matter of speculation among sídhe historians.”

  “Then how did Abarta find it?”

  Kennedy didn’t answer. Which I took to mean I needed to rephrase the question.

  “Is the original location of Maige Itha mentioned in the historical record? Perhaps on a map?”

  “The original location of Maige Itha is marked on map number seventy-two of the last remaining copy of the Fomóraig Standard Atlas, which is currently housed in the Unseelie Court’s Grand Rowan Library.”

  “If you know that much, you almost certainly know enough to have given Abarta the clues he needed to approximate its current location. All he had to do was ask you the right questions.” I massaged my temples. “And now he has himself a well-hidden staging area in the heart of Tír na nÓg where he can cast an apocalypse-grade summoning ritual.”

  Drake tapped my shoulder and said softly, “I think I’ve found a route out of here that bypasses all the guards, but it’ll take us the long way around the castle grounds. We’re going to be cutting it real close to the arrival of the next dungeon shift.”

  “We should get a move on then.” My gaze drifted to the rickety wooden door. “Say, where are the current dungeon guards?”

  Drake scratched his cheek, reluctant to answer, but eventually directed my attention to the partial ceiling above us. The bodies of four dark elves hung limply from the rafters, pinned in place by wooden stakes.

  “Damn,” I said. “That’s brutal.”

  “That’s what I was raised to be.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining. Unless you’re planning to scrap with me again.”

  He scowled. “I had enough of you the first time around. I’m good.”

  “Same.” I swept my hand back and forth, indicating the general sprawl of the crumbling castle. “So, which way do we go?”

  Drake jutted his thumb in the direction I dubbed east, but his attention lingered at the zoned-out Kennedy beside me. “You know he’s probably going to give us away, right?”

  “Something always gives me away when I’m trying to be sneaky. Might as well be him this time.” I patted Kennedy’s shoulder. He almost tipped over sideways. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Or, more accurately, I’ll freeze the bridge and shatter it with a force blast.”

  “You know what, Whelan? You’re a crazy son of a bitch.” Drake rose to a half-crouch and searched the shadows of the ruins one last time for enemies lying in wait. “But for some weird reason, I actually kind of like you. So I guess I’ll roll the dice your way, and just pray I don’t land snake eyes.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Everything was going great until the alarm went off.

  We managed to slip past fifteen svartálfar stationed throughout the ruins of the castle, crawl through hip-high grass to avoid the attention of the redcaps loitering on the perimeter of the castle’s grounds, and take cover in a small copse of ash trees—the only such copse for two hundred yards in any direction—just before a whole squad of dark elves crested the top of a nearby hill.

  One of the elves paused before following his comrades down the hill, keen elf eyes trained on the trees. But there were dense patches of hazel under the tree canopy, so the three of us could’ve only been less visible if we were squatting behind a wall. Since nothing of note cropped up, the elf eventually shrugged off whatever had snagged his attention and jogged down the hill to catch up to his squad.

  When the squad disappeared into the castle ruins, we set off around the hillside and headed toward a larger patch of woodland a quarter-mile away. Unfo
rtunately, when we were halfway there, someone back at the castle activated the perimeter alarm ward that Drake had suppressed when he first snuck onto the grounds.

  A high-pitched shriek warbled around the hills, each altering pitch accompanied by a faint thrum of magic. Behind the earsplitting sound came a flurry of baffled shouts, followed by a few raspy svartálfar voices dishing out orders to search the area for intruders.

  The new dungeon guard shift had found their dead friends. And now all the guards were gunning to find us.

  Kennedy wasn’t moving fast enough to outrun a snail, so I slung him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and broke into a sprint. My back protested to the added weight, but I kicked its complaints to the backburner and threw all the strength I could muster into a desperate attempt to reach the trees before the goon squad spotted us.

  Drake passed the tree line ten steps ahead of me and made to dive behind a large hazel shrub off to the left. As he was turning, however, something in the distance behind me drew his eye. His mouth dropped open to yell a warning at the same moment my ears picked up the sound of a blade zipping through the air.

  I dropped to my knees. The knife sliced through the space where my neck had been and buried itself to the hilt in a tree trunk. I spun around on one knee and located the source of the knife: It was the dark elf who’d hesitated at the top of the hill. He was now standing at the base of that hill, his hand still outstretched from the knife toss.

  He hissed something that was lost under the loud alarm, then drew the short sword at his waist and made an odd running jump. Memories of my past fights with the svartálfar welled up from the jumble in my head. As the elf disappeared in a puff of black smoke, I mentally spoke a contracted invocation. A field of thick ice spikes formed around my body like a shield. Right before the elf emerged from another dark cloud less than two feet away from me.

  The momentum from his jump carried him down at an angle, his sword arced for a brutal swing. But with a quick push of will, I redirected all the spikes his way and released them like a hail of machine-gun fire. At least fifty of the spikes pierced him to the bone—and then I spoke the explode command.