Fireshaper's Doom

by Tom Deitz

  A glance over his shoulder showed the dragon head entering that flaming wall. The boat heaved up at an angle, steeper and steeper. Heat lashed across David’s back.

  But he had his hands on the hatch then, and an instant later had it open. Just as he thrust himself inside, the ship trembled, slamming him against the far end of the enclosure. Above him the hatch banged shut as he lay panting upon the floor. His senses whirled: one moment he was certain he was upside down, in the next that down was the end against which he lay.

  David was inside the pillar now, rising upward in a kind of spiral around the flaming inner wall, as the golden line of the Track bent to follow more subtle paths between the Worlds. Always ahead, if he looked ahead, the Track seemed straight, but he could see it curving away on the other side. Or were those other Tracks? He had no real sense of direction.

  David closed his eyes and held on, ignoring the dreadful vertigo that had claimed him when he had realized where he was: a fly on the wall of a pillar of fire that ran from Heaven to Hell. But closing his eyes didn’t help, for his stomach still spun, his semicircular canals whirled like drunken gyroscopes. And the most extravagant images had begun to flicker behind his eyelids: creatures from nightmares or his most outrageous fantasies.

  Another glance out the window showed him the Track spinning by, but it was spinning faster and faster now. He took a long swallow of wine from the skin he had slung across his shoulder, and immediately regretted it. The stuff made him dizzier, made his head hurt. Almost made him sick to his stomach. He felt his grip on reality slipping away.

  In the end, he was forced to lie down and clasp his hands over his ears to keep out the droning of the flames, the creaking of the timbers. The floor heaved and shuddered once more. Fear filled him. His stomach was a knot of queasiness threatening to rebel. “Liz—Alec,” he whispered hopelessly. “Oh, God, I need you now.” And with that, tears burned in his eyes, bringing with them a strange calming peace that carried him into oblivion.

  Chapter XXX: Searching

  (The Lands of Fire)

  The tail of the dragon ship slipped into the pillar of fire in a spiral flourish of carved golden wood that merged quickly with the red/yellow/white flicker that wrapped the base of that immense construction: briefly seen, then gone: a leaf within a conflagration.

  From the riverbank nearby an arm-long serpent watched, the tiny brain within its angular blue skull crammed almost to madness with the pulsing, watchful thought of Morwyn verch Morgan ap Gwyddion.

  “Fare you well, David Sullivan.” Morwyn’s low voice curled into the heavy heat of the flat, white plain on which she stood a half-day’s riding distant. “May your journey be safe and your quest a successful one,” she added.

  Abruptly the sorceress withdrew the thread of awareness that had stretched thin across the leagues between her body and the serpent. It was out of her hands now: the boy was on his own.

  The snake blinked its slitted eyes in sudden, vague relief. A dainty scrape of claws hinted at a mouse nearby; a thrust of tongue confirmed it. Hungry, it turned its attention there, its tenure as a vessel of Power ended.

  Morwyn, however, had a great deal more trafficking with Power in mind. She frowned and addressed herself to the task she had set: the summoning of Ailill Windmaster.

  His blood stained the Mortal World, she knew: leaking from a wound sustained in that land and shadowing him into the maze of the Tracks where it would be well-nigh impossible to find him. This would be a difficult searching. But at least she had a point from which to begin.

  She closed her eyes and called upon her Power, grateful that she, at least, was not cut off from its source as Ailill surely was from his by the sealing of the borders. The Land of the Powersmiths was still open, she knew—as open as it ever was, anyway—and she could sense it feeding her strength across the intervening distance: as sure and unobtrusive as gravity or sunlight.

  At first nothing marked the ruddy darkness behind her lids as she sent her Power questing, but then she fixed four things in her mind and made those things her focus: a splatter of blood upon the earth; the grim, dark-eyed face of a black-haired Faery lord; the antlered head of a red-gray deer; and a moonlit mountain in the Mortal World down which a man-road twisted.

  One by one she reached out and caught the threads of force that bound her to the land; severed them; allowed herself to float free a handspan above the ground.

  She began to turn in place then, very slowly, and as she did the images she had conjured shifted in relation to one another, now to the left, now to the right, drawing ever closer together and sometimes touching. And the more she turned, the more they touched, one now overlapping the other, nearly merging.

  Too far a rotation—the images drifted apart again. She must back up.

  Man, rock, deer: three of them lay atop one another.

  Man, rock, deer . . .

  And road.

  She found her beginning place.

  And then she began her Calling.

  Chapter XXXI: Wanderings

  (The Straight Tracks)

  The company rode onward for a time uncounted: a time that attenuated or compacted—time that scarcely felt like time. And all the while the cloven prints of Ailill’s feet, the occasional thin spatter of his blood, were a marker and a guide for Froech’s silver stallion.

  No one spoke for a long while.

  Eventually, though, Nuada’s shoulders began to sag, his head to droop farther and farther forward. Regan, who sat behind him, found herself bearing an ever-increasing share of the work of holding the Faery lord upright. Finally she had to contrive bindings from pieces of torn fabric and guide Snowwhisper by the strength of her mind alone, though that effort, coupled with the Power she was already expending at her healing, made her dizzy, and ate up Power faster than the Track renewed it. Nuada groaned often and coughed more than that, though he was still occasionally lucid.

  And then a series of violent spasms wracked him, and Regan felt something warm and wet drip onto the arm she had snaked around his chest. She drew it back fearfully and stared at it: a glob of glistening saliva veined with telltale red. Then she noticed the spreading crimson stain on the Faery lord’s plaid shirt.

  “Halt! We must halt,” she cried. “Help me get him down, if you will, Froech.”

  “Wha? Huh?” came Gary’s sleepy mumble, as Froech slid off his mount and ran back to where Regan was already untying the knots that bound Nuada upright.

  Gary stretched and yawned. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “If you’d stay awake, you’d know,” Liz hissed at him. “Nuada’s getting worse.”

  “Crap!” Alec muttered. “All we need. If anything happens to him, we’re sunk!”

  “That’s no way of thinkin’,” Uncle Dale told him sharply. “Hey, you folks need a hand? Hang on a minute.”

  Froech held Nuada’s opposite leg as Uncle Dale slipped up behind him and helped the dark-haired lady ease the Faery lord from the horse’s back. By the time they had laid him on the ground Nuada was unconscious.

  The Track flowed around him, turned his fair hair to true gold, washed his white Levis with light. But nothing could disguise the horrible yellow pallor that colored his skin, or the sickly ochre that tinged his eyeballs when Regan raised his lids. The tips of his fingers showed bluish purple.

  Regan bent close to examine him, gently pulling aside his shirt. The place where the manticore’s stinger had struck was bad enough, for that ugly red gash right below the heart had become surrounded by great, festering blisters ripe with blood and fluid. But even worse was what she found when she drew his shirt farther to the side. Wide parallel bruises disfigured the smooth flesh along Nuada’s ribs and chest, and in those ugly, swollen blotches cracks had formed, from which blood and a foul-smelling yellow ichor had begun to ooze. The stench made Regan’s stomach heave. What it would do to the mortals she did not dare imagine.

  “His battle with Fionna gave him more serious wounds than he le
d us to believe,” she observed with more dispassion than she felt. “The poison does its work. It takes all my strength to turn that evil aside from his heart and his brain, yet that strength is not enough, for he has other wounds inside, and the venom feeds there now. I fear our friend may die.”

  “That didn’t seem to bother you before,” Liz muttered.

  “I spoke the truth then; I speak it now. Dying is never a thing to do capriciously.”

  “Is there, like, any choice?” Gary asked with heavy irony.

  “But Nuada’s Faery,” Alec interjected. “Aren’t you folks supposed to be immortal? I mean, I know about iron and all, but what about sickness and stuff?”

  Regan did not look up. “We are immortal—in our proper flesh; yet pain is still pain regardless. Were the barriers not sealed and Nuada able to reach into the substance of Tir-Nan-Og, why, then he might heal himself, and think no more of these wounds. But since the link to Tir-Nan-Og is severed, Nuada has been unable to renew his strength.”

  “What will happen if he doesn’t?” Liz asked, fear shadowing her face.

  “He will simply fade; in time his spirit will flee the body. Only when Lugh’s sealing ends—and let us hope that is soon—may he commence his own healing. If it is not too late.”

  “And in the meantime, we’ve still got a deer to catch and a boy to find,” Uncle Dale reminded them. “You think he can travel? Or you think we ought to leave him and somebody stay here with him? I can, if you need me to.”

  “Here or there, it makes no difference,” Regan sighed, as Froech lifted Nuada and carried him once more toward Snowwhisper.

  “It will be there, if I have any say” came Nuada’s unexpected whisper. His eyelids fluttered open, and he managed a ghost of a smile.

  “If it is your will, Lord—but I am fearful.”

  “So am I,” said Nuada. “But there are worse things to fear than dying.”

  It was a grim-faced company that hastened on.

  Sometime later Liz rode up beside Regan. The Faery lady raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Something concerns you, child?” she asked.

  Liz nodded slowly. “I hate to bother you with questions, while Nuada’s . . . like he is. But, well, I’m still confused over some stuff.”

  “What would you like to know? I am far from the wisest of my people.”

  “Well, uh, I’m puzzled about Fionna and all. I mean she’s Faery just like you and Nuada and Froech are, yet she seems to have a lot more Power, or at least she did back at the clearing. Why is that?”

  Regan sighed. “Oh, child, what a question to ask when a thousand years are not enough for its proper answering; yet I suppose I must try. Part you know already: that Nuada and I now wear the substance of the Lands of Men. We put it on when we entered your World, for we intended to remain there for some time, and if we had not, Faerie would have begun to draw on us, and that draw would have become greater the longer we were away. Eventually we would have had to heed it, and perhaps not at a time of our own choosing. And there is the matter of iron and its wielding, as well; we knew we would have to handle it in your World, thus another reason for wearing your flesh—but of that Nuada has told you already.

  “You know, too, what he said of your kind’s small tolerance for Power: that great magic will consume your very flesh, so that in order to work any great magic in your world, we had to once more put on the substance of Faerie—as we did when we performed our first scrying.”

  “But what about Froech? And the Tracks—and Fionna?”

  “When Lugh sealed the border Nuada and Cormac and I were already engaged in a working of Power. The sealing cut us off—so abruptly that we had no choice but to return to man’s flesh while we could, for we had no idea how long that sealing might last, and to continue as we were would not only have risked our minds, but made us too vulnerable to iron—and now we cannot change back.

  “Froech, however, does not much like the Mortal World and does not often travel there, thus it simply did not occur to him in time to change his substance to suit your World. Or perhaps he had no idea how long his visit would last. But whatever his reasons, the fact that he alone among us now wears Faery flesh makes him more Powerful than either Nuada or I, for he yet has recourse to that portion of his own Power he brought with him out of Tir-Nan-Og. Unfortunately for us all, that is a finite amount, and with the linkage severed, grows ever smaller the more he uses it. He can—we all can—draw some Power from the Tracks, but compared to the strength we derive from our own land, it is very little. Froech can draw more, because the stuff of Faerie more easily accepts such things. Such Power as Froech spent on his shape-shifting would have destroyed Nuada utterly.”

  “And the deal with Fionna and Ailill’s the same as with Froech, I suppose?”

  Regan looked thoughtful. “Somewhat—at least in Fionna’s case. She too wears the stuff of Faerie, and almost certainly she was on the Tracks when the sealing rose, so that it probably caught her unaware, as it almost surely did Ailill. But Fionna is stronger than Froech. She is stronger than I; as strong as Nuada, so he says, for Fionna is of the royal house of Erenn, and they are very Powerful indeed. Thus, she had more of her own strength to start with, as well as having the Tracks to renew herself from later.

  “There is another factor as well, though you may find it confusing, and that is that Lugh’s sealing applies only to his own realm, not to all of Faerie. Fionna, being but lately come from Erenn, still has recourse to the Power of that land, as would Ailill, were he to return to his proper mind, had he not offered his blood to Tir-Nan-Og in the Rite of Allegiance—but of that it is best not to speak to outsiders. Erenn is very far away, however; indeed, it does not exist in this Time of your World at all. And it may not be reached except from Tir-Nan-Og, for the Tracks that lead there from outside Lugh’s realm cannot support a body in this season. Some of them will admit the Silver Cord, though, so even with the borders sealed Fionna yet has some contact with her homeland, and can thus draw on its Power. Fortunately, the Cord is very thin, and it feeds her strength but slowly.”

  “What you’re saying, then, is that Fionna’s both more Powerful to start with, and has better access to means to recharge herself?”

  Regan’s brow furrowed. “That is much too simple for so complex a subject, but yes, you are correct.”

  Liz frowned. “So Fionna’s more Powerful now than you, or even Froech?”

  “Much more so. She is probably the most Powerful being on this side of the ocean, except for Lugh himself, or perhaps the Morrigu.”

  “So why doesn’t Lugh do something?”

  “I think he has his own plans, child. He is very patient, and very, very subtle. But his Power cannot reach here, at least not directly, any more than our Power can reach back to Tir-Nan-Og.”

  Liz sighed. “Looks bad for the home team, then.”

  Regan looked at her curiously. “If that means what I think, you are correct. And now I must see to Nuada.”

  Eventually the briars began to shrink, to regain more comfortable proportions. Tree trunks at last showed between them: gray shadows behind the green spirals; and to Alec’s great relief they were a familiar species: willows. The briar patch thinned to nothing, and the company rode in solemn file through a half-lit drapery of trailing, sweet-smelling strands which dabbled their tips in a series of narrow puddles.

  The air was thick with moisture. Drops slid down the leaves, smearing their clothes with damp, making Alec’s nose prickle, dewing Uncle Dale’s whiskers with drops that took on a sudden rainbow sparkle as unexpected beams of brilliant light broke upon them.

  Alec glanced up hopefully, saw a ragged flag of possible sky beyond the froth of treetops. But when the willows opened a moment later onto a wide meadow of short orange and yellow grass, he saw that the radiance came not from the expected sun, but from the glare of twin moons that hung impossibly close together within a pink-gold haze of sky. He squinted and thought he could make out the familiar lunar markings o
n the larger one. But he had trouble focusing on the other, and the markings there were a strange, random cross-hatching of narrow lines etched upon a surface that was otherwise smooth as an egg.

  Beyond the meadow was another forest, which did even more to lift Alec’s spirits, for it marked the first true taste of otherness they’d experienced on their trek, not counting the manticore, the omnipresent briars, and various bits of shape shifting, which he didn’t count, because they were either old hat, or else not very pleasant. If you were going to go wandering around in Faerie, you ought to at least get your sense of wonder stimulated once in a while. And this new forest certainly provided that, for it was truly no forest of the Mortal World, nor ever would be. It was the trees that did it—the trees that might have been oaks, except that their leaves were blue and gold, and their acorns rang like silver bells when he flipped an idle finger against some in passing. He reached up, stripped a handful off a twig, and handed a couple across to Liz, who answered his tentative smile with a puzzled frown.

  Their passage through the fabulous oak wood did not last long, though, and a moment later there was again clear air above them. But now the light had faded to a softer gleam, like twilight; and a single moon—the strange one—showed pale against a sky of dusky purple. Lilies appeared along the Track, beautiful white lilies that smelled like cinnamon and tarragon and cloves, and whose waxy, spiral trumpets were half as long as Alec’s forearm.

  The land slowly fell away into a shallow, open valley, filled almost to overflowing with those same pale blossoms. But commanding the heights, a brooding forest lingered, grim and dark and threatening.

  They pushed through a final screen of shrubbery, and the way steepened abruptly. The forest drew in closer on the left, and at the heart of the vale, where that wood crept nearest to the sparkling line of Track, lay a liquid shimmer like a sheet of water.