by Tom Deitz
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Other Avon Books by
Tom Deitz
DARKTHUNDER’S WAY
GRYPHON KING
STONESKIN’S REVENGE
SUNSHAKER’S WAR
WINDMASTER’S BANE
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a tale of vengeance
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Prologue: The Horn of Annwyn
Tir-Nan-Og, where Lugh Samildinach rules the youngest realm of Faerie, is a bright land—brighter by far than the dreary Lands of Men that float beneath it like a mirror’s dull reflection. Its oceans shine like liquid silver; its deserts sprawl like lately molten gold. The very air imparts a gleam to field and forest, man and monster. Even the Straight Tracks take on a sharper glitter there—at least those parts that show at all as they ghost between the Worlds like threads of tenuous light.
But a thousand, thousand lands there are, linked by the treacherous webs of those arcane constructions. And some are less idyllic.
Erenn, that mortal men call Eire, is one such country. Finvarra holds court there in his ancient rath beneath the hill of Knockma, king of the greater host of the Daoine Sidhe. Erenn’s sky is much more sober; its air not nearly as clear. It rubs along the Mortal World at an age more distant than its fellow to the west, yet the smoke of human progress still seeps through at times to grime the Faery wind with soot and the smells of death. Sometimes, too, the awkward, eager clatter of some man-made invention breaks the Barrier Between to haunt the Fair Folk at their feasting. Finvarra smiles but seldom.
And there is Arawn’s holding: Annwyn of the Tylwyth-Teg, which humankind name Cymru. If Tir-Nan-Og is early morn, and Erenn afternoon, then Annwyn is twilight. By day the sun looks veiled and dusty; at night lamps made by druidry shine brighter than the moon. Shadows tend toward purple there; the sky ofttimes takes on the hue of blood. The wind is not always gentle. And the borders are not clear—for in spots the very ground simply fades until it will support not even a spider’s passing. Many of the Straight Tracks end in Annwyn, or else lead into places where even the Elemental Powers merge and fragment endlessly like the dreaming of the damned.
“Will you go with me to Annwyn?” Lugh asked Nuada Airgetlam one morning. “If we do not visit Arawn’s court ere the Mortal World unfreezes, we may find no chance again for many ages.”
Nuada’s dark eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And what has fueled this sudden haste, my master? What difference can their weather make to us? The Walls Between the Worlds make cold no danger; and as for the Road, no ship of man can pass there, whatever be the season.”
“Leif the Lucky has beached his boats near the red men’s northmost holding,” the High King told his warlord. “Winter may hold them yet awhile, but spring will bring them south and westward. Tir-Nan-Og is safe at present, for my Power is great, and the glamour I have lately raised is strong. But I fear our time of peace will reach an ending, once word of Leif’s good fortune spans the ocean. Soon, I think, we must set watch on our borders!”
Nuada sighed his regret. “I too fear men’s coming and the tools of iron that always travel with them. But it is a thing that was bound to happen. You are right about Annwyn, though: if we would leave Tir-Nan-Og unguarded, we must start the journey eastward very shortly.”
And so, on a day when snow sparkled bright on the Lands of Men, and Leif the Lucky sang of Vinland and the kingdom he would carve, Lugh Samildinach and Nuada Airgetlam took the Golden Road across the sea and came to Arawn’s kingdom.
The Lord of the Dim Land received them well and feasted them for many days. Deep grew the bonds among the three, and diverse were the pleasures the three lords shared—in hunting and in trials of arms, in the savoring of song and poetry and subtle arts of women, and most particularly in the study of wondrous objects strangely fashioned.
“There is one thing left in Annwyn I would show you,” Arawn said one evening. “But I would not reveal it here.”
“And what might that thing be?” Lugh asked his host.
“We will ride out on the morrow,” Arawn answered, and no more would he tell them.
And so, in the shallow light of dawn they journeyed forth: Lugh astride his great black stallion, black hair bound by a fillet of gold, black mustache stirring in a west-blowing wind, gold silk surcoat shimmering loose above tight black leather; and fair-haired Nuada beside him in white and silver, his left arm clothed in creamy satin, the other a shoulder-stub forever cased in shining metal; and showing them the way, Arawn himself, in dark gray velvet and blue-tinged bronze. No banners flew above that riding, no trumpets marked its passage. Arawn’s squire alone went with them: a sullen, tight-mouthed Erenn-lad whom the Dark King had in fosterage. Ailill was his name, though some already called him Windmaster—and in bringing him along that day Arawn was very foolish, though how much so would not be clear for nearly a thousand mortal years.
They rode all day, and at dusk were riding still.
At sunset they found themselves on a cold, black-sanded plain, so near the tattered fringe of Annwyn that even a nearby Track showed as nothing more than a smear of sparkling motes, like brass filings strewn across the ground. A solid sheet of clouds hung low above them; before them was a country Arawn liked but little and the others not at all. A dead-end, blind pocket of a place, it was; open to nowhere else save Arawn’s kingdom: an ill-lit land where gray mist twisted in evil-smelling whirls among the half-seen shapes of stunted trees and shattered, roofless buildings.
It was a place of mystery and rumor, shunned even by the mighty of the Tylwyth-Teg. Powersmiths lived there: the Powersmiths of Annwyn, some folk called them, though they did not name Arawn their master, and Arawn was not so bold as to set any claim upon that race at all.
But the Powersmiths made marvelous things—things the Sidhe could neither craft nor copy nor understand, and it was just such an object that was the cause of the riding that day.
Arawn drew it from his saddlebag and held it out for Lugh’s inspection. A small hunting horn, it seemed, wrought of silver and gold, copper and greenish brass. At its heart was the curved ivory tusk of a beast that dwelt only in the Land of the Powersmiths and was near extinction there. Light played round about it, tracing flickering trails among the thin, hard coils that laced its surface. Nine silver
bands encircled it, the longest set with nine gems, the next eight, and so on: nine black diamonds, and eight blue sapphires, seven emeralds, six topazes in golden mountings, five smooth domes of banded onyx, four rubies red as war, three amethysts, a pair of moonstones. And at the end, on a hinged cap that sealed the mouthpiece: a fiery opal large as a partridge’s egg.
“It is the most precious thing in all my realm,” the Lord of Annwyn told them. “Most precious and most deadly.” His gaze locked with Lugh’s, and he paused to take a long, decisive breath. “I would make you a gift of it.”
“A gift—but not without some danger, it would seem,” Lugh noted carefully.
“You are a brave man,” Arawn continued. “But you are also prudent, much more so than I. It would be best that you have mastery of this weapon.”
Nuada cocked a slanted eyebrow. “Well, if there is more to it than beauty, then it keeps its threat well hidden.”
Arawn nodded. “The Powersmiths made it. One of their druids set spells upon it—and then he died. It was meant as a pledge of peace, but now I dare not trust it.”
“It does not look much like a sword,” Ailill interrupted. “Does it hold some blade in secret that perhaps I have not noticed?”
“It cuts with an edge of sound, young Windmaster,” came Arawn’s sharp reply. “But perhaps it is best that I show you.”
The Lord of Annwyn gazed skyward then, to where a solitary eagle flapped vast wings beneath the red-lit heavens. “Behold!” he whispered, as he thumbed the opal downward, raised the horn to his lips, and blew.
No sound resulted—or at least no sound that even Faery ears could follow. But their bones seemed at once to buzz within them, and the hair prickled upon their bodies. The solid flesh between felt for a brief, horrifying moment as though it had turned to water. For an instant, too, the air seemed about to shatter in the wake of that absent noise.
And then the air did break, cracked apart in a file of jagged angles that snapped closed again quick as a flash of lightning. But not before a series of shapes had leapt through, to congregate in a milling, hairy horde around the legs of Arawn’s stallion.
They were hounds, or at least they looked like hounds: great rangy beasts with shoulders near as high as the horses’ bellies, and narrow heads almost as long as a tall man’s forearm. Their hair was a remarkable white like sun-bleached bone, and where that hair grew longest—upon their backs and in fringes on their tails and the hind sides of their legs—it looked less like fur than feathers. Four parts alone held any color: their claws were iron black; a deathly gray their tongues; their eyes glowed a startling green. And their ears, up-pointing like those of a wolf, showed red as a warrior’s blood. They swirled among the legs of Arawn’s horse like the pale, foaming waves of a cold and greedy ocean. The sound of their breaths was like thunder.
Arawn’s face froze; a line of moisture condensed upon his brow.
One of the hounds—the largest one, the one with the greenest eyes and the reddest ears—looked up at him.
Arawn took a ragged breath and pointed toward the eagle that still floated against the sky. Somewhere a cloud stretched thin enough for a single ray of dying sunlight to paint the plain beneath with brazen glory.
“I would have the life of that bird,” Arawn said, as though he named his own destruction.
The pack bayed then: one cry. And there are no words in the tongues of the Sidhe, or the Tylwyth-Teg, or of men, either, to give image to that howling. But two centuries later it still echoed sometimes in Airgetlam’s dreams, so that the Warlord of Tir-Nan-Og awoke into darkness with a sweat upon his body, his single hand reaching for his sword.
And then they ran, those dogs that the horn commanded. They ran upon the earth, yet no dust rose at their passing, and the sand where they had stood displayed no padded prints. And then they ran into the sky, describing a tight-coiled spiral that twisted upward with more speed and purpose than the fastest hawk might summon.
The eagle circled once in abstract interest, for never had it been challenged in its own realm by any less than Arawn’s folk themselves, when they put on other forms to frolic there. But these were not the Tylwyth-Teg, whatever shape enwrapped them, and the eagle felt uneasy. It straightened its glide, flapped its mighty wings, then folded them to dive. But by the time it had dropped twice its own length, hot breath fanned its feathers, and in one length more fangs sank into its body. Not even a drop of its blood escaped those dogs to spatter the ground before Arawn’s staring company.
“It is a hunting horn,” Arawn told them grimly, “of a sort. But the hounds it masters are no beasts born of Annwyn. Even the Powersmiths do not know whence they come, or else they do not tell us. The hounds always catch what they pursue, though it flee through all the Worlds. But one must take care when he sets them on a quarry, for once they are loosed, they must have a life. And”—his voice darkened—“they can devour both the body and the soul.”
Lugh’s face was as grim as the Lord of Annwyn’s, but he took the horn from Arawn’s fingers. “A gift like this shows trust beyond all measure, for with it one could master whatever land might please him.”
“He would have to be careful, though,” observed Nuada. “For it could also make him many enemies—and many false friends besides. And,” he continued, with the first shudder any there had ever seen upon him, “has one of you considered what—if the Powersmiths cast off such things of Power—they hoard in secret for themselves?”
The Dark King did not answer, and the Bright King was also silent as he tucked the Horn within his surcoat, though his eyes held great misgiving.
Arawn faced his squire then, and his face was hard as stone. “None of this has happened, young Windmaster. None of this at all.”
But Ailill had thought already of a lady who might listen.
PART I – TINDER
Prelude: A Sending
(Tir-Nan-Og—autumn)
On a beach of black sand in the south of Tir-Nan-Og, Nuada Airgetlam sat astride a white horse and gazed eastward across the ocean.
Water spread before him, and all of it was gray—gray, that is, save where it was silver filigree stretched thin across the towering fronts of monstrous waves, or the froth of ragged ivory lace atop them.
Or gold where the Straight Tracks threaded through them.
But it was not the healthy sun gold that told of easy passage; it was the weak, shifting color that told of danger and the perilous way. For the Circles of the Worlds turned out of track this season: the suns rose against each other in the Lands of Men and Faerie; the moons added each their contentious influences. And in the skies of the Mortal World was a hairy star that wrought its own disruption.
And so all the seas of Faerie ran high, and not even the ships of the Tuatha de Danaan could sail upon them. Storms raged in the High Air, so that those same ships could not skim above those seas, nor birds any longer fly there. And the Tracks between the realms were so weak and fickle that no foot or wheel dared pass upon them, as had not been the case in five hundred of the years of men.
“Lord, you may not pass. You would not return,” said the border watch. “The way is sealed, no one goes that way, except to lose himself forever.”
“But what of my ravens?” Nuada asked. “I would set them a-traveling: word must be sent to Annwyn and Erenn of what passed at the Trial of Heroes. Nearly a month that word has waited, and it can wait no longer.”
But wait it did, for almost a change of seasons. It was summer in the Lands of Men before the eastward Road reopened.
Chapter I: Mail
(MacTyrie, Georgia—Friday, June 21)
David Sullivan—Mad Dave, as he had somehow come to be called during the previous school year—had what his mother would have termed in her Georgia mountain twang “the nervous, pacing fidgets.”
Except that he wasn’t exactly nervous—just impatient, which was generally worse because it was usually somebody else’s fault. And except that he wasn’t, for the mome
nt, pacing—but only because Alec McLean had just asked him, quite forcefully, to stop. For the fourth time in twice as many minutes he flopped down in the window seat snuggled beneath the dormer of Alec’s second-floor bedroom and took another stab at reading the page of New Teen Titans he had likewise commenced four times before.
And once again was not successful.
Before he knew it, his gaze had wandered away from the comic to survey the neat, odd-shaped room beyond his cubby. An aluminum-framed backpack dominated his view, bulging lumpily atop the double bed at his left like a blue nylon hippopotamus. And just beyond it, David knew, lay the very heart and center of his impatience: a pair of half-empty suitcases.
“Well, McLean,” he growled. “Do you think I’d be out of line if I asked you if you could maybe, possibly, you know, like hurry just a little? I’ve been sitting here like a knot on a log ’til I’m about halfway mildewed.”
A tall, slender boy straightened from where he had been thumping around on the floor of the closet in the opposite wall. He aimed an exasperated glare at David, one hand snagging a pair of shiny black ankle boots, the other grasping a pair of wrinkled burgundy ENOTAH COUNTY ’POSSUMS sweatpants. He rolled his eyes with the tolerant resignation of the much-put-upon.
“Give me a break, Sullivan,” he retorted sourly. “This packing for two trips at once is a real bummer. Camping overnight with the M-gang and staying six weeks at Governor’s Honors with the brightest kids in Georgia demand fundamentally different logistical and aesthetic approaches.”
“Ha!” David snorted at his friend’s attempt at high-flown language, which he didn’t have the patience for just then. “Didn’t take me all day.”
Alec gave the sweats a tentative sniff and wrinkled his nose distastefully, but nevertheless stuffed them into the backpack. The shoes thunked into one of the suitcases. “Well, considering that your entire wardrobe consists of holey T-shirts, scruffy jeans, scuzzy sneakers, and sweaty red bandanas, I’m not surprised.” He turned around and began rummaging in his chest of drawers.