Beyond World's End

by Mercedes Lackey

  The ground was cut up and torn in a wide area, almost as if someone had been trying to plow it, or to dig something up, and there were wide burn-scars defacing the grass that remained. Ria blinked, summoning up her mage-sight. Now she could see that a lot of magic had been thrown around here. There were the scars of levin bolts on the grass and the trees, and the entire place reeked of Unseleighe magics and human death.

  And as if that weren't trouble enough, the Wild Hunt had been here as well. Perenor had sometimes spoken of the Unseleighe rade—he'd had the right to call one, but had never done so, dismissing the Hunt as too flashy and undisciplined for his needs. More to the point, Ria thought now, it would have motivated the drowsing Court of Elfhame Sun-Descending as nothing else could have, creating an opposition that Perenor hadn't wanted to face. Every Elfhame within a thousand miles must know about this one—she was only surprised that the park wasn't crawling with Highborn.

  But Central Park is in the middle of New York City. No elf would come here without a damned good reason. And you walked right into the middle of it, didn't you, Eric?

  The Wild Magic she'd followed down into the slums was everywhere, stronger than she'd ever seen it before. Someone with Power had died here, in addition to humans and Sidhe. Ria could still see the dead wizard's ghost, hovering like a plume of red smoke in the air. Dead, and recently, and slain by the levin bolt whose backlash she'd been hit with.

  But it wasn't Eric, which was some small relief.

  Once she'd sorted out the Wild Talent and the Hunt, the remaining traces were easy to read. The lingering effects of very neatly done magic, all wrapped up with no loose ends, spelled Eric as plainly to her Second Sight as if it were a neon sign twelve feet high. He'd been throwing Bard-magic around as if he'd been trying to put out a fire, but even in the middle of a fight, his work was neat, disciplined, careful, the work of a fully trained Bard, confident in his skill. He hadn't killed the Wild Talent—that wasn't his style—so it had to have been the Unseleighe rade. But from what she'd seen before, the Wild Talent and the Unseleighe were allies of some kind.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Both Toni and Logan were giving her a lot of elbow room.

  Someone else wasn't.

  "You gonna do a spell, Blondie?" Greystone asked hopefully.

  Ria shot him a deadly look. "I haven't seen everything that's here to see, yet—something else was here besides your Dark Lord and Eric, but it wasn't magical, so it isn't leaving traces."

  "Does this help?" On its stony palm, the gargoyle held out an expended shell casing. "I found it on the ground."

  Ria took it from him with a gratitude she was unwilling to show. "It might." She held it in the palm of her hand, gazing intently down at the small piece of brass. :Speak to me, smith-wrought forging. Who has touched you? Where have you been?:

  The shell casing was too small to retain much information, but Ria gained a blurry impression of men with guns—many guns—all holding shells like this one.

  "There were soldiers here," she said slowly for Greystone's benefit. "Some kind of paramilitary group, anyway." She handed the casing back to Greystone.

  She frowned, trying to piece the puzzle together. Eric, the Hunt, and a wild Talent had been here. So had a team of purely human mercenaries. Since she couldn't imagine Eric allying himself with either group, the best guess was that Eric had been caught between the two and needed to get out of the way fast. The half-built Nexus would have been the weakest point in local reality, so he must have used it to escape to Underhill, which would explain why it had vanished so neatly. . . .

  Ria relaxed slightly. He was alive. Eric had a lot of allies in Underhill, and even enemies would treat a Bard with respect and probably be willing to ransom him back to his own people. So if he was in trouble at the moment, it wasn't urgent trouble, and she could call in a few favors to make things easier for him if it wasn't possible for her to track him down herself.

  She walked back over to where Hernandez stood. She wasn't interested in the situation here any further, but she supposed she owed Toni a hint of what the Guardians were dealing with.

  "Do you know what a Wild Hunt is?" Ria asked.

  Toni blinked, as if she were taken off-guard by the question. "Some kind of a . . . it's when the dead ride out to hunt down the living, isn't it?"

  "Close enough," Ria answered. "Except that it's usually the Unseleighe Sidhe riding, not human dead. Bottom line: a Hunt has ridden through here recently. It looks to me like they clashed with some men with guns—the police had a report of gunfire here in the park about half an hour ago, didn't they?"

  "Yeah. They checked it out and didn't find anything. Decided it was kids with cherry bombs. But why would elves be fighting humans here? Or maybe that question should be asked the other way around: how did the men know the elves would be here?"

  That's your problem, not mine, Ria thought. You're the ones who didn't want Eric's help when he offered it, and I'm not a public utility. "I don't know. But apparently Eric didn't think you were taking his warning seriously enough and decided to look into things for himself. I know he came back here today around noon, but I wasn't with him so I don't know where he went from here." Not that I can't find out if I have to.

  Toni Hernandez looked as though she were going to press Ria for more details, and Ria was debating how much more to give her, when the other woman—Jimmie—came running back.

  "Look!" she said with excited self-mockery, "a genuine clue. Somebody's been moving trucks—big trucks, heavy enough to leave tracks even with the ground being frozen—through the park. I found this near one of the sets of tracks. Someone must have dropped it while they were bailing." She held it out to Toni. Toni took it, and held it up so Ria could see it.

  "It looks like one of those magnetic hotel-room keys," Toni said, turning it over in her fingers. "But there's no name on it. Just a logo."

  "May I see it?" Ria said, keeping her voice even with an effort.

  She schooled her face to blankness, inspecting the card. It was grey, easy to miss in the dark on a quick inspection, and anyway, the police that'd been here earlier had been looking for perpetrators, not evidence. The card had a gold logo stamped on it . . . a logo Ria had become very familiar with over the past few days.

  Threshold Labs. That's a LlewellCo subsidiary!

  Someone is going to pay for this. Dearly.

  "No, I'm sorry," she said, smiling sweetly as she handed the key-card back to Toni. "I travel a lot on business, and I thought I might recognize it, but I don't. Sorry." And with her shields at full strength, not even a telepathic gargoyle could get through them to see that she was lying through her teeth.

  "Oh." Toni sounded disappointed. "Can't you tell anything else? You're one of them, aren't you? An elf?"

  Ria winced slightly. "No, sorry." Just a mongrel that neither side wants to claim. "I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but I'm afraid I'm not on the Unseleighe Sidhe's Christmas card list, and this isn't really something I've got much experience with." She tried to keep her impatience from showing. Threshold was her problem, her responsibility. She intended to deal with it without any kind of New Age Occult Police help.

  "You've been a lot of help already," Toni said meditatively. "I just wish we knew where Eric was."

  Ria raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I thought I'd explained that. He took the Gate into Underhill with him. But I'm sure he'll be back as soon as he can."

  "I guess you're right." Toni looked as if she had more questions to ask, so Ria spoke quickly to forestall them.

  "If there's anything else you need, Eric has my number." She turned and walked quickly away, leaving the two Guardians and Greystone staring after her.

  * * *

  All of a sudden, everything was quiet.

  Eric straightened out of his half-crouch, lowering the flute to his side and blinking in the deafening silence. The elves and the soldiers were gone, it was "day" instead of night, and it was warm enough that he was p
erspiring in his sweater and leather jacket. Eric was alone, somewhere Underhill. He looked around cautiously.

  He stood in the middle of a primeval forest, one lit by the sourceless silvery light of Underhill. Trees that had grown unmolested since the beginning of Time rose high into the sky, and the ground beneath his feet was carpeted with a thick pale moss filled with tiny glowing blue flowers, making it look as if the earth beneath his feet were carpeted with stars. Despite its beauty, the forest had the faintly unloved air of a theater between performances; a stage without actors. None of the High Elves were in residence here, then—only the Lesser Sidhe, the Low Court, those which could not survive except in Underhill or near a Nexus grove. The low elves were scatterbrained at best; he could expect no help there.

  As if the thought had summoned them back, he began to hear faint far-off birdcalls, and slowly, the forest filled with sound once more. An enormous purple butterfly, silver crescent moons upon its wings, wafted regally past, and at Eric's feet, something small and grey and furry exploded into action, zipping into hiding before Eric could quite see it. He grinned in spite of himself.

  He was better off than he'd been a moment before, and even if the terrain was unfamiliar, there was plenty of magic here to play with. Unless he ran into a High Magus in a real bad mood, Eric could handle anything this stretch of Underhill had to throw at him.

  But since I'm not going to be staying, the situation isn't going to come up.

  He could open a Gate right here and step back into the mortal world, but without a Nexus to anchor him—and with no idea of where "here" was—he might find himself appearing on Earth centuries in the past—or the future, or thousands of miles from where he went in. It would be better to have an experienced conductor for this little trip, and Eric knew just where to find one. Elvensteeds were created for situations like this.

  But first, he had to change his clothes before he fried.

  That was a lot easier here than it would have been back in New York. Here there was so much magic in the air that it was like breathing pure oxygen. Eric concentrated for a moment, considering what he should wear, and settled on just getting rid of the heavy sweater and turning his wool slacks into a pair of jeans that wouldn't get ruined so easily by a walk through the woods. He might need the jacket if he Gated to someplace colder, and besides, he was more attached to it than he was to either sweater or slacks. There was no guarantee that having once banished them, he'd ever get them back; magic was funny that way.

  Having switched to cooler clothes, Eric breathed a deep sigh of relief. He rolled his shoulders, easing out the kinks.

  Now to get out of here. Maestro, a little traveling music. . . .

  He raised his flute to his lips and began to play. First a few trills to reassure the forest that he meant it no harm, then he segued into his Calling. The forest around him shivered, half-wakened by Eric's magic, and, as if from far in the distance, he heard Lady Day's faint acknowledgement inside his head. The elvensteed would find him wherever he was, and reach him as soon as she could.

  Now all he had left to do was wait—which was just as well, as he had a lot of thinking to do about recent events. Eric looked around, walking through the forest a bit until he found a comfortable place to sit. One of the great trees had fallen (or more likely, a fallen tree had been created by one of the Sidhe at just this spot the way the Victorians used to build "ancient ruins" in their gardens), and its trunk provided a pleasant seat from which to think matters over—and if he got hungry waiting, he could just conjure up whatever he wanted to eat or drink from the magic in the air. While Eric hadn't mastered kenning, the ability to create exact duplicates of anything he knew well out of pure magic, he could certainly summon up anything within a reasonable distance to come to him.

  So it's a great place to visit, but I don't think I'd actually want to live here. All things considered, Eric preferred the "real world," even though New York didn't seem to be a healthy place to be at the moment, at least for elven-trained Bards.

  He'd blundered into something big and nasty back there in the Park—something even worse than Dharinel's gloomy warnings about conquest-mad Unseleighe—and if he didn't want to have his head handed to him the next time he ran into the Guys With Guns, he'd better stop and think things through now, while he had a breathing space. Dharinel always said that a moment of thought could save a year on the battlefield.

  The Guardians said there was trouble in Central Park, and I found out that the Dark Sidhe was trying to put up a Nexus about where I dreamed of the goblin tower, but when I followed the trail of the magic he was using, it seemed to be all tangled up with the homeless folks downtown. At the Park, I think there was some kind of a mage with the soldiers that the Wild Hunt was trying to get at, but when the Unseleighe Lord saw me, he killed the mage, and that got rid of the monsters I was trying to take out. And I beat it out of there, but the Sidhe's already seen me. And EVERYBODY loves a Bard.

  So . . . could things be any more of a mess? Maybe, Eric decided with a sigh. But not easily. Guns and Sidhe don't mix. He kicked at the moss beneath his sneakers. Tiny beetles glowing in a rainbow of colors scurried out of sight, and Eric watched them for a moment, fascinated. The air was filled with birdsong now, making his fingers itch for a notebook so he could try to get some of it down on paper. Whatever he wrote would be a poor copy of the original, though. Still, it might be fun to try.

  At least his responsibilities in this mess were clear. He had to get back to his own time and place, and once he did, he needed to contact Elfhame Everforest and tell them about the Wild Hunt showing up in Central Park. That should be enough reason for the Seleighe Sidhe to break the truce and settle this particular Unseleighe's hash, but that wasn't the only problem. There was still the matter of all those guys playing soldier . . . the ones with the now-dead mage.

  Back in San Francisco, the Feds who were chasing him and Bethie had been tangled up with a project that was trying to tap into natural psi powers. But most people didn't have much in the way of either easily tapped psi or innate Power: the Gift usually ran deep in humans, most of the time needing magic or training to bring it to the fore.

  He flashed back to the packet of white powder he'd seen in Annie's hand in the alley outside the soup kitchen downtown. What if somebody had figured out a way around needing magic or years of training to make a wizard? What if they'd come up with some kind of drug that forced Talent to the surface? That would explain the twisted mage he'd been fighting, and if the bad guys had been testing their stuff on the streets, it might also explain all those deaths that the Guardians—and the people at the kitchen—had been talking about. Magery while you wait. No wonder that nut on the horse was so interested. If that stuff can crank up a human into a mage, just imagine what it would do for an elf?

  Eric shuddered. That was something he'd just as soon not find out about. But if the soldier-boys meant that the Feds were mixed up in things again, he was in even more trouble than he'd thought. Because if they were looking for Bethie, they were looking for him as well . . . and his cover would be blown the moment anyone looked really closely.

  Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into, Banyon. Master Dharinel was right, not that his being right would have kept me from meddling. But it doesn't really look like I've improved the situation once, and now both sides are after ME. Gee, Brain, what do we do now? Well, Pinky . . .

  He needed help and advice, and from someone who was as comfortable with high-level human politics as Eric was with Bardic magic. The trouble was, he didn't know anyone who fit that particular bill but Ria. After what he could tell her about today, he was pretty sure she'd help him if she could, but that help might come at a higher price than he was comfortable with paying.

  Well, we can burn that bridge when we come to it, as Mason said to Dixon.

  All of a sudden the forest fell silent. The birds stopped singing, and the creatures scuttling through the fallen leaves froze where they were. Eric l
ooked around quickly.

  Trouble.

  Nothing in sight, but his shoulders crawled. There was someone behind him. He could feel it. Eric got to his feet, turning around slowly, shields at full, to see what had startled the forest.

  He stared. It looked like a giant lawn gnome brought to hideous life. Upright, it would probably stand almost four feet high, but it was bent over so far it was hard for Eric to judge its size, balancing on grimy bare feet and the knuckles of its long, apelike arms. It was wearing human clothes centuries out of date—calf-length leather pants and a long grimy smock that might have been white once but was now soiled to a grimy brown. Its face was a caricature of a human face—almost noseless, with tiny piggy eyes. On its head it wore a crusty brownish-red cap that it had dipped in some thick liquid that was flaking away now as it dried. The creature stank of undefinable things.

  When it saw Eric's face, it smiled, the grin splitting its nightmare face impossibly wide. Its mouth was filled with long yellow teeth.

  Sharp yellow teeth.

  ELEVEN: LORD OF THE HOLLOW HILLS

  Robert Lintel regarded his temporary headquarters with disgust. Even in December, the smell was incredible. It was filthy beyond anything he'd imagined possible—interior walls torn down, some covered in graffiti, whole rooms used as toilets, people sleeping anywhere, on torn mattresses or just piles of rags. This abandoned building was a haven for runaways. That was why he'd picked it.

  He stared at the terrified band of feral children huddled together in the middle of the room. He was doing these kids a favor, he realized. They should be grateful to him for putting an end to their whole trivial sordid existence. For once in their useless lives, they'd get the chance to do something that mattered, something that would benefit people more important than they could ever be.