by Kevin Hearne
I connected with the bird’s bright threads of consciousness, and the aged whiskey voice of the Gray Wanderer filled my head with Old Norse.
That’s very kind. But how did you hear I was in trouble?
The Morrigan is dead.
She foresaw this five or six years ago?
I let that eulogy pass unremarked. Odin, how did you find me? I’m shielded from divination.
She’s not mine. She belongs to herself.
You’ve been watching?
What other gods?
Odin continued as if I hadn’t spoken.
Who can dictate this to the Olympians?
Thinking back to a particularly vivid dream I had twelve years ago in Flagstaff, I asked, Might one of those gods be Ganesha?
Odin ignored me again.
So we are entertainment for the gods? We run for your sport?
What others?
So we’re not only entertainment, we’re a method by which someone gets to pursue a personal grudge?
I recalled. It was not my finest hour.
I suppose you won’t be helping us, then.
The link broke and the ravens’ wings blatted into the morning sky like fat motorcycle engines.
The Morrigan’s assertion that we had to run the whole way made a bit more sense now. The gods had decided Europe was their Colosseum and we were the gladiators.
“No rest for the Druids,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”
Chapter 8
So much for my theory about faery tails. We were being watched constantly through divination, and Granuaile was the antenna. What Odin could do, others could do just as well, so Odin’s point that there were other interested parties was well taken. The reason we had a vampire and dark elves waiting for us near the Slovakian border was because someone in Tír na nÓg was coolly divining Granuaile’s location, quite correctly assuming I’d be nearby, and then dispatching assorted evil minions to slay us. They’d done this repeatedly in Greece while we were trying to get Granuaile bound to the earth; we’d shaken them for a while in the French Pyrenees, perhaps because we were spending nights inside a mountain and the scryer could not figure out where we were, but eventually they must have zeroed in on us. We’d left just ahead of an oncoming horde of vampires, if Oberon’s nose could be trusted, and it usually could.
After we raided Hel and killed Fenris, Granuaile and I had been left alone in Mexico for a couple of blissful weeks—why was that? I’m sure her presence there would have been as easy to divine as anywhere else, and I was most certainly very close to her during that time. It must have been because the puppet master, whoever it was, couldn’t get minions out to us in Mexico. If that was correct, then that told me quite a bit.
I had bound Mexico to Tír na nÓg long ago, back when the Maya were still running around and building future tourist sites. The Fae could have shifted and found us in short order if they wished. And Mexico certainly had its share of vampires; if they had wanted to find us, there would be no reason for it to take two days to locate us, much less two weeks. So this mysterious person was not using local vampires and wasn’t shifting minions around using tethered trees. Instead, he or she was using a specific set of vampires—perhaps a specific set of Fae and dark elves too—and shifting them around using the Old Ways in Europe. That meant Mexico was safe territory. The whole New World was safe territory. And now that I knew that, Faunus had made sure that safe territory was unreachable.
It also meant that there was something important about the Old Ways that I was missing.
Eastern Germany had an Old Way to Tír na nÓg—several, in fact, hidden among the river valleys of the Ore Mountains, which divided Saxony from Bohemia. But the nearest was a wee bit southwest of the city of Hoyerswerda in Dubringer Moor, a wetland populated around the edges with birch, pine, and alder, spreading their roots in its marshy soil. Unlike the vast majority of the Old Ways, it wasn’t in a cave. A few, like this one, were open-air mazes without walls. Walk through the birches in a certain pattern, end at a particular alder tree and circle it thrice, and you’d be in Tír na nÓg. It wasn’t the sort of Old Way that you could collapse with an earthquake. You could clear-cut the trees or set fire to the landscape, and perhaps we would find something like that had happened, but it was more likely to be guarded.
Or not. How do you guard a place that’s open to the air—and open to the public—
without generating some attention? With caves you can hide the guardians inside.
We had to turn due south to get to Dubringer Moor, skirting a huge lignite strip mine at Kausche but otherwise enjoying the mixed evergreen and deciduous forests that surrounded wee hamlets until we arrived at the moor. Trees grew out of some juicy ground around the edges of it, but near the center it was a swampy marshland. I stopped at a birch tree that had three knots reminiscent of a triskele on one side. After looking around to make sure we were unobserved, I shifted to human and drew Fragarach from its scabbard.
“Ready?” I asked.
Granuaile shape-shifted and held Scáthmhaide at the ready. “Yep. Go.”
In the magical spectrum the Old Way was plain to see, but Oberon couldn’t see it at all and I didn’t want him to step off. “We’ll go slow. Look and listen for guardians. Don’t forget the treetops. And, Oberon, if you smell anything weird, let us know.”
“And stay close to us. Single file. No chasing squirrels or anything else.”
We advanced ten paces to another birch, directly south of the first one. “Walk around this counterclockwise,” I said, demonstrating, “and then we go west.” They followed me to the tree next door and then we turned south.
Oberon asked,
“No, you can’t, buddy, I’m sorry. The path itself is the tether to Tír na nÓg. It can be walked both ways. If a tree dies, then the path gets adjusted a tiny bit, but it essentially remains the same. The alder tree at the end of this must be the twentieth different tree anchoring this Old Way since I learned about it. And the same goes for the birch where we began. But if you step off the path, you have to start over.”
We crept through the birches, following a sinuous trail and stopping periodically to listen and watch for trouble. Nothing alarmed us, aside from the paranoia that every step brought. We kept expecting faeries or some sort of monster from Greco–Roman myth to jump on us, but we had this portion of the moor to ourselves. When we reached the alder tree, I grew super-cautious, peering up into the canopy.
“There has to be something here,” I said. “It can’t be that easy.”
“What’s easy?”
“This is it right here. We walk around that tree three times and we’re in Tír na nÓg. Boom. Escaped. We shift to the New World and send all these ass bananas a postcard that says, suck it, you’ll never trap us again. But it doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe they forgot about this one?” Granuaile ventured.
“Maybe. Maybe they’re just being clever with their ambushes. Maybe someone’s invisible?”
“Let’s check the magical spectrum.”
“Already there, but go ahead, you might see something I didn’t.”
Granuaile scanned the tree and noted it had a whisper of color about it as a tether, but there wasn’t anything else to be seen. Nothing glowing in the canopy. Nothing glowing on the ground.
“Oberon, what do you smell?” Granuaile asked.
His nose twitched for a few moments before he gave a mental shrug.
“All right, we’ll just take it slow.” I crept forward and led them toward the alder tree. We had to go clockwise around this one. I peered up into the branches but spied no threats. The first orbit around the tree was uneventful, and I began to hope. But the second trip around put us halfway between the planes, and we saw what was waiting for us if we kept going: A semitransparent second world overlaid the one we were walking. And waiting there, in Tír na nÓg, one more circle around the tree, was the guardian we’d been expecting all along.
I should say, rather, that we expected a guardian—but not this particular guardian.
“Eep!” Granuaile squeaked, startled. Oberon barked at it. I raised Fragarach and watched it carefully. It smiled at us with three rows of jagged teeth but did not move, except to raise its tail. The end of it was blackened and bristling with what looked like very large cactus thorns. Except for the tail and the human face with an abnormally toothy grin, it had the body of a red lion. The face was framed all around by a magnificent mane, with the lush hair growing out from the neck reminding me of nineteenth-century American Romantic poets.
“If that’s what I think it is, then it’s not Greco–Roman,” Granuaile said, “and it’s not Fae either.”
“No, this guy would be Persian,” I said. “But I have no idea why he’s involved in this.”
“It’s a manticore,” I said. “And it shouldn’t be in Tír na nÓg.”
Oberon growled low in his throat, a steady rumble of warning.
“Can it attack us?” Granuaile asked.
I lowered my sword. “Not from where it currently is.”
“It’s right in front of us.”
“No, it’s in Tír na nÓg and we’re not quite there yet. We’d have to go around the tree once more, and then he could attack us.”
“Or he could go around the tree the other way.”
“No, that wouldn’t get him here. He can’t get out of Tír na nÓg without walking the proper path—it’s just as complicated from that side as it is from here. We had to take many steps to get this far, and he would have to take as many to get to us. And I bet you he doesn’t know the way. He can’t see the path in the magical spectrum like we can. He was placed there by somebody else, and he has to wait for us to come to him.”
“But he’s in Tír na nÓg, right? So if we get past him we’re golden, correct?”
“Well, yes. But getting past a manticore is next to impossible. Their venom is supposed to be a death sentence. Doesn’t matter if it comes out of the tail or from his bite. Even the claws are deadly, if reports are accurate.”
“Reports or myths?”
“Myths, you’re right; I’m sorry. There are no reports of people surviving manticore attacks, because they would have to survive to report it.”
“Couldn’t we break down the venom ourselves by unbinding it? I mean, we’re sort of immune to poison, aren’t we?”
“I suppose we are in some sense. But that takes concentration, and while you’re working on not dying from poison, he’ll spill your guts on the grass or bite your head off. And the third member of our party is not immune.”
Oberon stopped the barrel roll of his growling.
The manticore’s face, a malevolent visage promising painful death, abruptly turned to one of earnest appeal. He raised a paw to beckon to us, indicating that we should come through.
“Okay, that’s really creepy,” Granuaile said.
“Yeah. It’s kind of a ‘step into my parlor’ kind of thing, isn’t it? Well, we’re not going to play his little manticore games. We have our answer now. The Morrigan was right—everything’s being watched. But it’s a bit staggering.”
“You mean, all this effort to kill us?”
“Yeah. It could be done in a simpler fashion, but whoever’s behind this wants to make sure no blame accrues to them.”
“Huh. Atticus, could every Old Way in Tír na nÓg be guarded without Brighid’s knowledge?”
I considered. “Probably not for an extended period of time, but for a short while I don’t see why not.”
“Well, I don’t see why. How can she be unaware?”
“She has to be informed, just like a president or a prime minister does. She won’t know there’s a problem until somebody tells her.”
“Okay, so that means she could conceivably be the one behind this, or she’s aware of it and complicit, or she’s flat-out clueless.”
“Don’t forget aware and incompetent. Conceivable, but doubtful.”
“All right. I want to talk about it some more, but
let’s step away from those teeth first.”
“Yep, good call. We need to move on.” We’d doubtless ceded some ground to Artemis and Diana during this little side trip, and we could ill afford to give them any more.
The manticore’s face melted into desperation once we began to backpedal, and then he gave up all pretense of pacifism and sprang at us, mouth agape and claws extended. It was entirely silent and phantasmal: He passed right through me, not being quite on the same plane as I was.
The manticore faded entirely from view once we stepped off the path. We agreed to resume our run and continue northwest through Germany until we safely cleared the Harz Mountains, and then we’d head straight west for the Netherlands according to the path laid out for us by the elemental Saxony. It was already somewhere around midday, and we wouldn’t get out of Germany before night fell.
“Can we run as humans for a while to save Oberon the effort of relaying our conversation?” Granuaile said.
I shrugged. It would be slower going, but we had a bit of a lead and we needed to talk. “Sure.” We adopted a ground-eating pace and trusted Saxony to guide us around developed areas as much as possible. With any luck, our streaking would go unnoticed. Or, if someone did see us, they might reasonably conclude we were running away from the very large dog behind us.
“So who’s in charge of the Old Ways on the Tír na nÓg side?” Granuaile asked. “Who would inform Brighid if there was a problem?”
“Ah! The rangers. I see where you’re going with this now. If Brighid isn’t responsible and no one’s told her what’s going on, then someone has suborned the rangers.”