Fireshaper's Doom

by Tom Deitz

  David nodded slowly.

  “Good. Now, as to where the Horn is, it is in plain sight, in the center of his treasure chamber, or so I have it on good authority; Lugh makes no secret of it.”

  “But?” David interjected. “I can just tell there’s going to be a but right about now.”

  Morwyn smiled disarmingly. “Very perceptive, boy. But what is not known is the exact location of this treasure chamber, except that it is somewhere beneath Lugh’s palace.”

  “And?”

  “And that it is accessible only by an iron stair leading to it from Lugh’s private rooms. The stair, at least, is common knowledge, though few have actually seen it. But what is not nearly so well known is that there is another way—a secret way, known only to those who built the chamber, a way that leads outside: an iron road with walls of glass.”

  David raised suspicious eyebrows. “I thought the Sidhe couldn’t touch iron.”

  Morwyn’s nostrils flared with impatience. “And so they cannot. But the Sidhe did not build the vault, the Powersmiths did—my grandfather, to be precise, which is how I know of its workings. He told me all about it, as much as he knew, anyway, for Lugh was careful not to allow any one person to see the master plan. Thus, those who built the road did not construct the chamber or the stair. This, however, is certain: the walls of glass are in reality Walls Between Worlds; the World of the iron road is not the World of the stone to either side.

  Realization began to brighten David’s face. “Oh, I see. Lugh never thought a mere human might try to rob him. But what about the Sidhe or the Powersmiths? Couldn’t one of you folks make yourselves human and steal it?”

  Morwyn shook her head. “It is one of the Rules of Power: neither the Sidhe nor the Powersmiths may put on the substance of your World while in Faerie, any more than you could put on the substance of Faerie in your own.”

  “But still, if the Powersmiths built the road, and they can touch iron, then one of them should be able to break in whenever they pleased, assuming they knew about the road. Or is there something you’re not telling me? You’re not trying to trick me, are you?”

  “Oh, never that, never that.” The lady’s eyes sparkled in amusement. “But not once have I said that Powersmiths can touch iron—and indeed they cannot. They have other ways of dealing with that metal, however, methods that do not require touch. Unfortunately, I do not know them.”

  “But what about Lugh? If the only way to the treasure is over iron, how can he get at his own stuff?”

  “It is as I have said: the iron road and the iron stair are not truly in Tir-Nan-Og. There is a method known only to Lugh whereby the iron may be banished to its own realm for a space of time. He contrived the rune of banishing in consultation with two druids of the Powersmiths, neither of whom knew the other’s part, then took it from their minds with their approval, so that he alone now recalls it.”

  David took a long breath. “But I’ll be going into this blind. So how am I even going to find the iron road? Your maps aren’t exactly what you’d call clear. And what about the treasure room? You’ve told me about some of the safeguards, but aren’t there bound to be others?”

  Morwyn shrugged. “I will tell you how to find the road in all good time. As to the matter of safeguards—You underestimate our fear of iron. A small amount we may abide; you have seen what a blade’s worth can accomplish. An iron road two arm spans wide is enough to consume us completely.”

  “I don’t know. I think I can deal with the road, but I really doubt that this treasure chamber is as unguarded as you say.”

  Morwyn flicked a haughty glance at him. “Then you will simply have to trust me. Now finish your drink, for we must be on our way.”

  David quaffed the liquor uneasily, stood up, and began stalking restlessly around the room as he waited for the woman to rise. Eventually he became aware of her frank, appraising stare following his every movement. He spun around, folded his arms as belligerently as he could, given the awkward sleeves, and glared at her. “What is it this time? I thought you were in a hurry!”

  The lady’s eyes twinkled. “Those clothes are hardly appropriate.”

  David rolled his eyes. “Well, I kinda thought as much, since I can barely move in this silly tight jacket. But if you think I’m taking everything off again, you’re crazy.”

  “Do you intend to wear such fine array into Tir-Nan-Og, then? You would be a beacon to the blind!”

  “Of whom I doubt there are any, except perhaps Oisin,” David retorted sullenly.

  “It is your safety with which I am concerned.”

  “Oh, all right.” David sighed. “What’ve you got in mind?”

  Morwyn smiled her cat smile. “Armor.”

  Chapter XXII: Ashes

  (MacTyrie, Georgia)

  Smoke filled the Trader camp, rising in arrogant spirals from the charred and twisted ruins of tents and wagons. A few of each remained, but the loss had been terrible.

  Katie blinked once, twice; raised a rag of spangled silk to dab her tears: smoke and sadness. Gnarled old fingers crushed the bright, soft fabric. It was all that was left of her boy’s things: the brilliant gold and sea-green wagon whose complex panels had taken young Pat McNally two years to design and three years more to execute.

  And not a fragment left—not a bolt or nail but was melted, not a board that was not turned to ashes. The color was one with the wind and the air now. One with the fog and the night.

  The fog: which wrapped all about the quiet camp like a waiting thing; wrapped the police cars and the fire trucks, wrapped their still-flashing lights, wrapped the uniformed men and the loud-voiced circle of Traders who faced them, gave them challenge for challenge, and charge for charge, and lie for lie.

  But here amid the wreckage, where Katie sat forgotten, was only emptiness and cold—too cold for Georgia in August, but then, she was always cold now. Katie reached for her cane and groaned with pain as arthritic fingers closed around it. With great care she used it to stand, then draped the scrap of bright silk around her head and shoulders like a scarf. It was not sufficient. Too thin to keep out the cold, and not nearly long enough.

  Another tear rolled down her cheek. All this trouble to please Them Ones, she thought. All this trouble to help Those! But the local girl had been nice enough—like her own lost Ellen, she’d been. Hair the same red and everything. Too little a thing, too pretty a thing to get mixed up with the Perilous Folk. Maybe all this burning wasn’t so bad, if it had helped the young folks escape. Besides, it had been Lin’s orders she’d followed, and Lin was her chief, head man of all the Traders in this part of the world. Lin’s people had fought beside hers for five hundred years. Friends close as brothers of both her folk and his lay together ’neath the green fields of France—and of England—and of home.

  A knot of breeze snatched away the smoke, eased aside the fog, showing Katie other cause for grief.

  There was Lin now, up there with those policemen. Trying to explain things. Trying to talk about horses and fires, about two brand-new cars with no drivers, with that blond-haired boy not making things any easier.

  But he’d fail, Lin would, in spite of his efforts, because he was too honest. He’d lie, but they’d see through him. Tomorrow, sure as sunrise, it’d be the road for them again, or the lockup.

  Katie hoped it wasn’t prison. She was too old for that.

  She started forward, then shook her head. “I’d do them no good,” she muttered. A lock of gray hair escaped her makeshift shawl and tickled her nose. She let it.

  She was so tired. Maybe she’d go over there by that stack of horse blankets piled by the empty corral and grab a wink or two. Maybe—

  No, Katie McNally. The words had drifted in from the swirling mist behind her. Or were they words? Had she truly heard them?

  She whirled around, quick for an old woman, raised her cane—but saw nothing except a thick place in the white, a congealing of fog that might have been man-high.

&nbs
p; “Who’s there!”

  A friend.

  “Come where I can see you.”

  That would not be a good thing for me to do.

  “Ah, it’s another one of Them you are, then? More playing of pranks with the folk of God’s green world, I’ll wager. But I’ll be havin’ none of ye!”

  She turned her back on the fog.

  Not one of Them, no. One of you—flesh and blood as you are flesh and blood. Old as you never thought of being old.

  “Who are ye, then?” Katie muttered over her shoulder.

  My name is not important, though you have heard it spoken, I think, and read those words I never thought to write that Macpherson gave to me. Think of me as the one who watches without seeing, who hears with more than ears.

  “Riddle me no such riddles!”

  Very well, come with me and I will tell you my name.

  “I’ll not!”

  “But you must!” And Katie realized suddenly that those were the first words she had actually heard her unseen temptor speak.

  “The devil hides behind words like yours!”

  “But I am not the devil. I am with Them, but not of Them. I stayed outside, hidden by the command of he who rules Them. I felt the fire, heard the screams, the sirens, but I also felt five horses run away, and on those five horses eight riders. And I knew where they rode and why, for such things are sometimes given the blind to know, when those who see—even Themselves—can only guess.”

  “And what did you see, old man?”

  “I saw a road of gold, and you and me walking on it.”

  Katie sighed. “I am too old to walk on golden roads.”

  “Not if I am there beside you,” said the voice. “Now come, for we must pass through darkness for a way.”

  Katie closed her eyes and held her breath; a coldness gripped her heart. All at once a hand gripped hers, warm as the air was chill. She looked down, saw flesh old as her own, but firmer, saw fingers curved around her own—saw rings upon those fingers, and every one of them solid silver.

  She glanced up into fog that had somehow become more man-shaped and looked upon eyes as gray-white as that swirling.

  “Come, Katie McNally,” the man said, gently twisting one of his rings in a certain manner and thus wrapping darkness about them. “The golden road is waiting.”

  Chapter XXIII: From Trail to Track

  (Franks Gap, Georgia)

  Thank God for moonlight, Alec thought as he scanned the graveled shoulder of the highway on the south side of Franks Gap. Now if we could just find what we’re looking for.

  The pavement to his right was a uniform pale gray, showing clearly the dark swirls the Mustang’s tires had left that afternoon. The sky was more blue than black: the apocryphal midnight shade seen far past its proper hour, with the moon blazing gold-white within a pale corona. The mountain was black: a looming, fractured wall of raw rock shadow-drowned beneath tier upon inky tier of oaks and maples just like the ones they’d ridden through on their way overland from Uncle Dale’s farm.

  He straightened for a moment and shrugged to relieve the stiffness in his shoulders, wishing he could do something about the more painful stiffness in his thighs that an hour’s impromptu riding had given him; wishing too that he’d had time to grab a nap during their brief stop at the farm. The old man had plied them with coffee laced with moonshine (which the Sidhe had appeared to enjoy), but it didn’t seem to be doing much good just then.

  Together with Uncle Dale, Nuada, and Froech, he was scouring the side of the road for the telltale cloven prints that would mark the beginning of Ailill’s trail. So far they’d found nothing except gum wrappers, a couple of beer cans, and a page from a paperback romance novel. Twice they’d been forced to scramble back downslope when they caught the flash of approaching headlights around the whiplash curves. Froech had always been the first to leap, too; and he avoided the metal guardrails as if they’d been set afire. It would have been hysterically funny—if only the surrounding circumstances hadn’t been so grim.

  The rest of the company was either seeing to the horses they had tethered in a clearing fifty yards or so below the highway, or else trying to explain as much of the current situation to Gary as they could. Liz was helping there—deliberately keeping herself busy, Alec decided, and that was a good thing.

  She’d helped with the weapons too, ransacking Uncle Dale’s house to unearth the collection of hunting knives they all wore clipped to their belts or thrust into their boot tops. And she’d made the company’s four spears as well, by lashing some of the old man’s kitchen cutlery to broom handles and such-like. He hoped he wouldn’t have to try out the one he’d been using for a paper sticker.

  He yawned, twisted his neck, felt it pop, and stooped to renew his search. More rocks, more paper, a half-full can of Classic Coke that he sent clattering down the mountainside with a flick of his spear.

  And then Nuada’s joyful exclamation cut the night: “Here it is!”

  Alec whistled his relief and jogged the ten yards downhill to where the Faery lord was squatting by the side of the road.

  “ ’Bout time,” Uncle Dale muttered, as he joined them from beyond the guardrail. He stared at the ground intently, then pointed a knotty, horn-nailed finger. “And ain’t that blood on that rock there?” He hunkered down beside Nuada, and Alec heard his knees crack.

  Nuada touched a finger to the brownish stain that had splattered across a flat, plate-sized chunk of garnet-encrusted schist. “This is better than I dared hope; for it is possible a scrying might be done from this, if Froech is willing.” He glanced up at the younger Faery, who did not look as if the suggestion pleased him much.

  “It is for such things as this I wished to conserve my strength earlier,” Froech replied a little sharply. “But still, I have renewed myself somewhat since then. I will make the attempt—but I can promise nothing. I—”

  The soft, quick rattle of frantic climbing on loose stone interrupted him, giving way to grunted profanity as a breathless Gary vaulted over the railing. He poked Alec with the tip of his make-do spear. “Any luck?”

  “Yeah.” Alec nodded. “We’ve found the trail, and what’s better, some bloodstains. And now your friend’s gonna do a scrying to see if he can locate Ailill from them.”

  Gary flipped the weapon onto his shoulder and sucked his upper lip thoughtfully. “Uh, Alec, I hate to sound stupid . . . but what’s scrying?”

  “It’s like what Nuada was trying to do back in the tent: using something that’s been part of something else to try to locate that thing’s current whereabouts. Apparently blood’s about the best focus you can have—and we’ve got some of Ailill’s blood right here.”

  Nuada carefully picked up the suspect rock and rose to his feet with more grace than Alec had thought a one-armed man could possibly muster. “Best we do this somewhere else,” he explained, with a trace of irony in his voice. “It is not good to be interrupted suddenly.”

  He cast a final, wary glance along the deserted strip of highway, stepped neatly across the rail, and started down the bank.

  In a moment they had rejoined their three companions, and a moment after that Froech began the ritual.

  It was really not very complicated, Alec discovered, certainly not as complex as the one he had witnessed earlier in Nuada’s tent, though why that was he couldn’t say.

  The young Faery simply sat down in the middle of a circle comprised of the linked hands of the rest of the company, cupped the stone in his two hands, and closed his eyes. His breath stilled.

  Suddenly the only sound was the quick whisper of a night breeze among the trees; then that too was gone and Alec fancied he could almost hear the tinkle of the moonlight itself as it fell glittering upon the oak leaves.

  No one moved.

  And then Froech opened his eyes again and shook his head as if to clear it.

  “What’d you see?” Liz asked eagerly.

  Froech turned distant dark eyes toward her.
“Nothing useful, I fear,” he whispered slowly. “It was all unclear: running, and more running, and a confusion of fright and pain . . . Oh, there was landscape, but nothing to remember: trees and grass, trees and grass, and yet more trees and grass. And I could not tell what was now and what was memory. I think,” he added slowly, “I think Ailill is close to madness. And for that reason, I doubt he has anything to do with the missing boy.”

  “But that can’t be!” Liz almost shouted, leaping up, fists clenched hard at her sides. “It’s all wrong! There’s water involved, and a woman—I’m sure of it. We’re on the wrong track; we’re bound to be! This is turning into a wild-goose chase!”

  Alec stood up beside her, took her arms firmly in his hands. “No, Liz, there may not be any direct connection,” he told her softly, wishing he believed his own words more fervently. “But there’s no way all this stuff could be going on in Faerie and none of it be related. I mean, think for a minute: none of us can breathe underwater except maybe Froech, so it doesn’t make sense for us to look for David there, anyway. On the other hand, we’ve already located the Crazy Deer’s trail. And I still think if we find Ailill, we’ll find Davy.”

  “The boy is right,” Nuada said decisively. “And now, I think, we have no choice but to follow Windmaster’s trail and see where it may lead us. We know where he was half a mortal day ago. There is only so much farther he could have gone in the intervening time. Froech, if Firearrow tracks as well as I have heard, I think you must ride vanguard.”

  Froech nodded as he rose to his feet and started for the silver stallion that nosed unconcernedly among the weeds at the edge of the clearing. “My horse can track as well as any hound, in this World, or another. Wind or rain or water, none will keep him from his goal once I have set it.”

  “I hope your boast is not in vain,” replied Nuada. “Let us travel, then.”

  For several minutes the night resounded with the clatter of spears being gathered (Liz held hers white-knuckled, grim as a Valkyrie, Alec thought), of daggers and knives being adjusted; and finally with the muffled grunts and groans of sore bodies once more resuming their mounts.