Only two destinations were coded, the other four left blank, their buttons dark and lifeless. As he touched each of them, an image of the place formed in Eric’s mind. One led to Aerune’s domain. The other probably led someplace worse—he jerked his fingers back with a gasp, heart hammering, with a confused impression of an arctic wasteland filling his mind. They wouldn’t last ten minutes there. The weather alone would kill them.
One or the other, and both choices bad. But Eric was a Bard, and there were four unused destinations available. With skill, and luck, he could make the Gate take them where he chose.
Only he’d have to withdraw his magic from protecting the others to do it.
He had no choice.
He reached out and touched the Gate itself. The stone was as cold as dry ice beneath his fingertips, burning painfully. This must be what Kory, what any of the Sidhe, felt when they touched Cold Iron. He imagined blisters welling up, bursting, the blood freezing as it oozed over this cold burning.
He shut out the pain, reaching into the stone with his magic. Its music was dark, unsettling, sliding off-key in a jangle of minor chords before settling into a new mode for a few seconds. He could feel a dim slumbering mind deep within the stone, passive yet malevolent. An echo of the magic that had formed it. He fought to control the shifting chords he heard in his mind, to make sense of them.
Here.
Yes, here was Aerune’s domain. The shape and sense of it filled his mind in a wordless knowing impossible to explain. But that wasn’t where he wanted to go. Near it, yes, but outside. Just outside, into the unclaimed Chaos Lands where every stray thought could become real. Had he warned the others about that? Could any warning be enough?
He forced himself to concentrate. To shape the sense of his destination was like transposing music into a different key, adapting a known melody to the needs of an entirely different instrument. With the way into Aerune’s domain to guide him, he changed, edited, added, and at last produced what he could only hope was a viable direction.
He opened his eyes, not remembering when he’d closed them, and saw that now three, not two, destinations were marked with a cool blue-green fire on the Gate’s surface. How long had he been entranced? His Bard’s silks were drenched in sweat, and every muscle ached. He withdrew his hand from the stone, feeling a pang of relief that the skin was whole and unburned. Had the pain been only an illusion? Or would the damage have become reality if he’d failed?
Ria’s elf-light and the two Guardians’ swords were their only source of light here in the Blind Lands. The singing sounded ragged—they’d moved on to a startlingly bawdy ballad, of which only Ria seemed to know all the words. Hosea’s playing sparkled with metronomic precision, but Eric could sense the other Bard’s weariness at the unfamiliar exertion.
Wonderful. We’re all exhausted before we start. Great tactics, Banyon.
But there’d been no other way. They couldn’t Gate directly to their destination, and they couldn’t drive there either—or ride. This was the best they could do. Maybe they could win a breathing space before Aerune noticed them. God, I sure hope so. He won’t even break a sweat if he takes us on while we’re in this condition.
But to delay here a moment longer than they absolutely had to would be fatal, with only their magic to protect them from the baleful influence of this realm. Eric took a deep breath and keyed the Gate to the destination he’d chosen. The opening shivered and went white. The glare made his eyes water after so long in the Blind Lands. He waved the others forward.
SIXTEEN:
WELCOME TO MY
NIGHTMARE
“So where are we now?” Toni wanted to know, resting her longsword point first against the ground and leaning upon its quillons. She took a deep breath of relief, seeming to regain more strength with each passing moment.
Everything around them was grayish-white and misty, with the flat even illumination of indirect lighting, or of sunlight on a very cloudy day. Even the ground beneath their feet was colorless and springy, as if it were made of modeling clay.
Hosea stopped playing, and the banjo’s silver strings whispered to silence. He rubbed his fingers, grinning at Eric reassuringly.
Eric grinned back—it had worked! They were all here, all safe—or as safe as you could be in the Chaos Lands. And they could find another way home.
“We’re . . . exactly nowhere,” he said in answer to Toni’s question. She made a face. “No, seriously. This is what Underhill looks like when nobody decides to impose their own reality on it. They call it the Chaos Lands.”
“Which means that nobody here better think too hard,” Ria said, “because whatever you think about is likely to come walking out of that mist and bite you.”
“We’re shielded, of course,” Paul said. “I’d say that being here is pretty similar to casting a spell—the magician had better keep a tight rein on his intention. But that may make it a little hard for Aerune to find us when the time is right.”
“Oh, he’ll find us,” Ria said darkly.
“I don’t think Aerune will notice us until we make him,” Eric said hopefully. “Let’s take a breather. Is everyone okay?”
The others nodded. The Guardians looked shaken, but not as worn down by their ordeal as Eric had feared. José was his usual imperturbable self, Paul looked like a cat with a new toy, and Hosea and Toni were looking better by the minute. Even Kayla managed a grin and an impudent thumbs-up when he looked at her. She reached down to pat Lady Day’s neck, and the black elvensteed shook herself and tossed her head, making the silver bells on her tack jingle.
I wonder why she chose to be black for this trip? Eric thought. The question wasn’t an idle one. Elvensteeds could look like anything they chose and Lady Day usually had a reason for choosing to be a particular color or shape.
“Everything’s just ginger-peachy,” Kayla said sardonically, swinging a leg over Lady Day’s back and dropping to the ground. “Sheesh! And I thought L.A. had some bad neighborhoods.”
“Jeanette says there’re worse ones here. Much worse,” Hosea said.
“I don’t want to go there,” Kayla answered simply.
Ria dismounted from Etienne, patting the elvensteed on the neck. The white mare was ghostly, almost insubstantial, in the formlessness of the Chaos Lands. It was good camouflage. She nuzzled her mistress as Ria reached into one of the saddlebags and pulled out a two-quart hiker’s canteen.
“Water, anyone?” she asked, passing the canteen to Kayla.
The teenager twisted off the cap and drank thirstily, passing the canteen to Hosea. “Good job with the tunes, stud,” she said.
Hosea actually blushed, pulling out a bandanna to wipe his face. “It wasn’t anything more than a bit of plinking. If I thought this Aerune’d answer to that kind of medicine, the rest of you could have stayed home.”
“So what do we do now?” José asked, looking from Toni to Eric.
Eric reached into the bottom of his gig bag for the little wooden box. He opened it and took out the maze-seed. Its magic buzzed in his hand like a trapped honeybee, stronger now that it was back in the world it had been made for. All they had to do now was get Aerune here and trap him inside.
“We call him,” Eric said grimly. “And then we lock him up forever.”
Aerune mac Audelaine, born to the Bright Court, later called among mortalkind the Lord of Death and Pain, sat in his dark throne room in the heart of the Goblin Tower, contemplating his own thoughts.
The encounter with the upstart Bard should have been more satisfying. Certainly it had been an elegant insult to gift him with Aerune’s mortal hellhound, knowing that her dying would wound the soft-hearted mortal far more than the loss of her would inconvenience Aerune. But there was something about the whole matter that left Aerune feeling vaguely unsettled, as if he had made some unfortunate mistake.
But there had been no mistake. The hound’s death was meaningless and completely inevitable, once he had lifted the spell of ti
melessness that kept her alive in mortal lands. She had never been more than a diversion for Aerune, her real worth lying in his ability to withhold her skills from his foes. It was true that he had so far forgotten himself to boast of his plans to the mortals, but again, there was no loss to him in doing so. Though the conspiracy was small and inconsequential now, what he had set in motion in the World of Iron would thrive—with his help—until it had consumed humanity utterly. Aerune was an excellent judge of men, and he had chosen Parker Wheatley well. The man’s ambition and self-hatred would lead him to follow Aerune’s plans blindly, unable to see anything beyond his own immediate advantage. The simple toys with which Aerune had provided Wheatley had helped to befool him—artifacts from an Underhill realm where the memory of magic lost had caused the inhabitants to craft ever more subtle engines to counterfeit its actions. As the first small blemish upon the apple presages the destruction of the entire fruit, so did Wheatley’s first faltering acts herald humanity’s doom—a war against the Underhill realms which would cause the Sidhe, both Bright Court and Dark, to rise up and destroy the World Above.
No, all went forward as it should—but in that case, wherein lay his unease? No enemy raised its banners before his gates, nor sought to gain entry into his realm by treachery.
But there was something . . . something well-known to the point of invisibility, that teased his ethereal senses with its elusive familiarity.
From the magic that surrounded him, Aerune formed a familiar, a part of himself in the shape of a great black bird, and sent it forth to search. It soared over the bone-wood, finding nothing, and he sent it through his Gate to the Chaos Lands beyond, searching.
There!
The hound. His hound. His toy and victim, here—Underhill—and alive!
Infuriated by the insult, Aerune sought no further. He strode from his throne room in a black fury, shouting for his horse and his hounds. He would reclaim her, whip her to his kennels, and make her beg for the death he would forever deny her.
The first hint they had of disaster was when the landscape around them began to darken. The mist boiled away to emptiness at the touch of another’s mind.
:Trouble . . . : whispered the banjo. :He’s coming.:
There was no need to ask who.
The Guardians formed a circle around Kayla, facing outward. Ria and Eric stood outside it, preparing to take the first assault. Eric heard a crashing major chord—someone opening a Portal—and then Aerune was there, astride his black stallion. Giant black dogs crouched at his horse’s feet, and behind him, changing and nebulous as fog, rode the hosts of the damned, called from nothingness by the power of Aerune’s will.
“Fascinating,” Paul said. There was a hiss as he pulled his blade free of the sword cane. “A classical Northern European Wild Hunt.”
Aerune glanced at him, eyes blazing red, but Paul did not hold his interest. Toni did. The Latina Guardian held her sword in her left hand as she crossed herself, her lips moving in soundless prayer.
“So . . . you would use your iron nails to slay Faerie?” Aerune growled. “Die as all who have set the White Christ’s magic against me have died!”
Eric was barely fast enough to shield Toni from Aerune’s first attack—crash of major chords, high skirl of a piccolo, deep booming of a chorus of horns—but somehow he couldn’t draw Aerune’s attention to him no matter what he did. Something about Toni infuriated Aerune to the point of recklessness. He concentrated his fury upon her, and she barely held her own, though her blade glowed so brightly that Eric couldn’t even look in her direction. He had problems of his own, though—the shadowy creatures that rode with Aerune—monsters and damned souls all, if the legends held any truth—were spreading out to encircle them. He moved forward, searching for an opening, his fingers clutched around the maze-seed, raising it up and—
—rubbing the smoothing stone gently along the shaft of the bone flute.
The afternoon sun was warm against his back as he squatted here in the clearing in the center of the crescent of turf huts that made up the village of his people, and from time to time he would stop, holding his work up to the light so he could judge his progress. Once he had scraped the bone smooth it would be time to drill the holes along its length with a sharp deer-horn drill, then polish it again with fine sand and deer hide until it was as smooth as river-tumbled stone, then rub it with beeswax until the bone turned a translucent gold. When he was but an apprentice Bard, his teacher had told him it was important to make the bone as thin as possible so that the sound would be pure, and he had always remembered that. Only the very best was worthy to be offered up to the Bright Lady Aerete, source of all Bardcraft and magic.
Eric frowned, his thoughts elsewhere. They would need their best if they were to win their next battle with the Eastmen, who had come to the Isle of the Blessed in their wooden boats to kill and enslave the Folk, armed with weapons of the gray metal that broke stone and bronze as if they were nothing more than rotted wood.
But they would win. Eric was a Bard of a Hundred Songs, blessed by the Lady herself, and his apprentice, whose instrument was the harp, had already learned his spells and genealogies, and had made a good start on learning the songs which contained all the wisdom of the Folk. In the doorway of their hut he could see Hosea putting fine new strings of deer gut upon his bride-harp, whose white body was carved from the shoulder of a black bull which had been slain at the start of the Dark Year. His songs could soothe the sick and ailing, ease a wounded soul’s transition to the Summer Lands.
Reluctantly, Eric set aside his work, wrapping it tightly in a painted doeskin to keep it safe. He could not spend as much time as he wished here. It was time to go among the wounded once more, to add his magic to the Healers’ craft. Too many of their village’s warriors lay wounded, kissed by the deathmetal of the Eastmen despite all the protection spells Eric had laid upon them.
He got to his feet. Hosea looked up, willing to follow, but Eric gestured for him to stay. It was more important now that he finish restringing the harp, so he could play their warriors into good heart for the morrow. Meanwhile, Eric would see to their wounded.
Eric walked through the village, greeting his clan-fellows. His creature was the lark, as was fitting for a Bard, for birds were especially sacred to the Bright Lords. All bowed their heads in respect, for a Bard was second only to the Lady herself, and the equal of kings and the Chief of all the clans.
The High House was his destination. The great hall stood upon the earthen mound his ancestors had erected when they had first come to this land, beneath which, in vaults of dressed stone, their dead—too many dead, these days—were laid to rest to provide counsel and wisdom to their children. He walked up the hill, toward its carven gateway painted with the totem animals of each clan of the tribe, along the path bordered in white stones.
Ria, chief of the fighting women, approached him as he neared the door. She wore a loincloth of white doeskin, and gold at her throat and upon her arms, for she was a lady of high rank and a king’s daughter. Her hair was braided into one long queue, wrapped with a red cord and studded with the raven feathers of her totem. The marks of warrior’s magic still showed, pale azure against her fair skin. Tonight she and the other warriors would dance to his playing, singing the war-songs and painting themselves afresh for tomorrow’s battle.
“I greet you, Bard,” she said formally, though Eric could see that she seethed with impatience at being denied entry. Those whole in body, and not bound to the Bright Lords as Eric was, were not permitted to enter the High House when there were injured present, lest their war magic disturb the healing magic.
“I greet you, Ria of the warriors,” he answered. “How may I serve you?” I would serve you in all ways I have not pledged to the Lady, did you but allow it.
“I would know how it will go with us upon the morrow,” she answered, her voice as harsh as that of the battle-raven.
“Only the Bright Lords may know that,” Eric said s
harply, for in truth he was afraid to look into the future again for fear he would see another defeat. “Ask of the Lady, not of me.”
He frowned, seeming for a moment to hear the echoes of battle in another place, but surely it was only the ghosts of the newly slain, hovering among their kinfolk to give what comfort they could before making their journey to the Summer Lands to dwell forever with Aerete in her shining palace.
Ria sighed, as if he had given her only the answer she expected. “Then tell me how my sword-sister, Toni, fares, of your courtesy, Bard. I would sorrow to go into battle without her to drive my chariot.”
Eric smiled, glad to be able to give some good news. Toni had taken a blow from a deathmetal sword in the last battle, but had killed her attacker with her spear. The cut was healing nicely, without fever.
“You will have no cause for sorrow,” he said, “for she will be at your side. The Lady wills it.”
The Bright Lady Aerete had been tireless in employing her healing magics for the good of the tribe, and many more than had died in the battles would have been lost without her protection. But no one was all-powerful, not even the Bright Lords, and even her power could not save those whom deathmetal had wounded too deeply. Fortunately, Toni’s cut had been shallow.
“That makes good hearing,” Ria said. “I will leave you to your work.”
She bowed to him formally and turned away, walking down the path to the village through the pale spring sunlight. Eric watched after her for a long time, before turning and ducking through the hanging hides that shielded the doorway to enter the High House.
Inside, a peat fire smoked fragrantly on the round stone hearth, giving heat to the injured. He could see Paul and José moving among them, bringing healing brews and changing the poultices upon wounded limbs. The Lady Aerete had taught them all that mortals could learn of her healing magics, and even Eric stood in awe of their power, that could trick Death when even his songs could not.
A Host of Furious Fancies Page 72