If I had unintentionally cast myself into the role of Reynard the Fox, I would at least play it to the hilt.
Beyond shaking Fetch off my trail, I had to have more information. I had to understand the reason Titania had trapped me—if it was the old grudge with Silverhand or something else. The only other batch of hostiles that came to mind was the Whitesnake cult, but the Whitesnakes had no friends among the Fae any more than they had friends anywhere else. I had been surprised that enough Whitesnakes were still around to present any kind of threat. I certainly wouldn’t expect them to be able to muster enough forces to do more than put some ragged cultists on my track, so I didn’t see any connection there. I needed to talk to Corvinus. I needed to understand if my old master had any insight into Titania’s motives for setting me up as Fetch’s meat. As for the contract itself, time would be passing swiftly in Faerie. I knew that my time would already have been up by the time I found my way back. Titania would be loosing Fetch on me soon.
I took myself along the track, twisting the simple Road under my feet to move more quickly through that reality than could any traveler bound by the limits of his horizon. Humped, gentle hills crowned by low trees with leaves like dusty green enamel bowed to the broad, brown face of a mighty river. I paused at the riverbank, considering my choices. A river could present access to a great many possibilities. No track made by man can compete with a river in majesty and maturity as a RoadWay, but for that exact reason I doubted the wisdom of using it as my Way. The wild, unbroken spirits of great waters call to like wild powers such as the Fae. The waters before me flexed great, sinewy muscles under a mask of imperturbable calm. The feral spirit of the river, though it cloaked itself under a smooth muddy surface, would not be one to trust lightly.
My hands clenched as I considered how my foolish greed had bound my course and narrowed my path. I worked my way up and down Roads along the riverbank until I found a bridge crossing the river. I could hardly contain my delight at the parallel iron tracks running out of the hills, down over the bridge and into the distance. Here lay a path alien and inimical to the Fae.
Smiling for the first time since the end of my conversation with Titania, I sauntered out onto the bridge. That track had its limitations as well, but I could begin to move in the right direction. The bars of iron lying across the black wooden timbers thrummed as I danced across the bridge in short, irregular hops from tie to tie. The thrumming grew in intensity and a grumbling rhythm built behind me.
I turned to see the broad, indifferent face of the massive locomotive that ran on those tracks, a black cloud of heat and fury crowning the brow. I touched the possibility of the Road in an attempt to surf a wave of possibility ahead of the train. I hoped to catch a wave that would carry me forward far enough and quickly enough that the onrushing train would not be a threat, but the possibility in the Road eluded my touch.
Snarling, with no time to question the strangeness of it, and no time to ready the aid of the Legion, I took Hephaestus’ name in vain as my dance steps metamorphosed into the desperate staccato of flight. The thrumming of the rails grew until the rising thunder behind me consumed them. A shrill, whistling scream cut through the thunder like a metal raptor’s shriek, and I flung myself off the bridge and into a nest of brambles that ran down to the riverside as the train’s passage hammered the air.
For those who have never climbed up a muddy riverbank covered in blackberry bushes in the remnants of a suit never meant to endure the stresses of physical battle, I might recommend it as a character-building experience. I can’t say that I’d recommend it in any other way. Slimy footing willfully attempted to bring me to my belly with every step; thorns covered my only available handholds, maliciously clawing into folds of clothing and exposed skin. Every step became a matter of focus and will. And as the landscape clung to my clothes and my body with every misstep, so did I leave skin and blood and patches of cloth behind. Once I made it to the top of the hill and freed myself from the last clinging tentacle of the brambles, I eyed the track with newfound ambivalence.
I added “taking a leisurely bath” and “acquiring a new set of clothes” to my list of things to do.
I hadn’t walked railroad tracks often enough in the past to be fully cognizant of the fact that any pedestrian is little more than an ephemeral obstacle to traffic. I filed the lesson away, brushed ineffectually at my ruined coat, and studied the tracks. I needed a good jumping off point for a solid Way away from the Fae, and I needed to understand why the Road had failed to respond as it should. I would have expected that I had enough experience by that time that a little thing like an imminent threat would not have interfered with my concentration enough to keep me from using the Road.
Touching the iron Road’s currents of probability, I noticed that the skeins of possibility in the Road had been ripped and torn to lifelessness. I studied the damage, pushed my senses down past small hamlets surrounded by farms to a mining community where the note grew discordant. The Road had been damaged. Something had ripped up the tracks, a destructive force unexpected in that place and time, able to destroy not only lives and homes and schools but also able to touch and destroy the possibilities in the Road. Something like a storm with a spiritual presence.
“It did escape, then,” said a still small voice in the back of my mind. The thought so echoed my own that it took me a moment to realize the White Wolf had spoken. The fear in his voice, the disturbed quiet like the aftermath of a violent storm, betrayed how deeply his short captivity had affected him.
I thought again about the barrier I had broken to flee the Gold’s prison. I had shaken the Gold off my trail, but it was still dangerously close. Did it hunt me now that it had broken free? Had it blocked the path deliberately? Whoever had imprisoned the thing must have known that the Gold could travel the Ways. Apparently, it could also manipulate them. Was it hunting me? Trying to trap me? Or was the destruction a byproduct of its madness? I looked to the White Wolf for answers. “Tell me what you know.”
“It took us early, but it had trouble digesting its conquest,” the White Wolf said in that same subdued tone. “It’s an ancient thing, made now of the broken pieces of lives and memories swallowed over the ages to keep itself alive. The man who gave it life trapped it there, and went first to feed it. The thing that became the Gold was some kind of machine, I think, but also more than that: a TechTown kind of monster, a machine with a soul. Its memories were old and buried, and we were not yet completely absorbed and so I did not know the Gold fully, but I knew that when it woke to the need and blind hunger of life, the man was there. And the machines were there. It controlled the machines—had been built to be their master. It took the man, as it’s taken every other life that came before it in flesh or spirit. It came to bind even the winds to its madness, ravaging out along the Roads, until at last three WayShapers imprisoned it. They lost their lives in the effort. Now all that’s left of it is need and blind hunger. And rage.”
I didn’t have any answer for that. “Can you find it?” I asked.
He hesitated before answering. “I am afraid.”
I rocked back on my heels. I first thought of compulsion, my mental hand twitching toward a conceptual whip. But I have never had the need or desire to rule so strictly through overt domination. I prefer loyalty to fear, when I can have it. “What about the track? The Gold’s not subtle. Can you track it indirectly? I can’t afford to risk losing you to it again. I don’t want you to approach too closely. Make for me a steed of the air, and I will follow close behind. I need to know if it hunts us. I need to be able to chart us a course out of this.”
His eyes brightened at the prospect of close reinforcements. “I will find it,” he said. “What happens when I do?” He whuffed out a heavy breath. “We’ll see if together we can bring it down. It has its own Legion, you know. It does not simply devour, but also binds.”
“We’ll do what we have to,” I reassured him. “We may not need to confront it directly.”
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The steed of the air rose before me in a rippling heat shimmer of impatient motion. I drew my legs up and over its broad back, furry with dust kicked up from the tracks, and then the strength of it swept me off to course my hound’s trail. We flew down the tracks, toward the destruction I had sensed through the Road. A neatly groomed, compact roan pulling a covered buggy along the dirt road paralleling the tracks gave itself to a generous paroxysm of hysterics as we shot by. I couldn’t see the driver under the rounded canopy, so perhaps I went unseen by him as well. If not, he would have some tales to tell at the local tavern.
The White Wolf’s howl held a measure of hate as it came drifting back, and as I crossed over a gentle hill and saw the wake of the Gold, I understood why. Smoke drifted among hills of rubble; men with black faces rose from the shelter of the mine shaft to pick through shattered stone looking for traces of their families. And when the brick and stone had been lifted away, the light fell gently down over small, limp and twisted forms. Rough denim and gingham cloaked the worst of the wounds inflicted by the Gold in its passage. I looked away. Perhaps the damage had been incidental.
I had told the White Wolf we might not have to confront the Gold directly. Three WayShapers had died trying to bind the thing. And if the Wolf feared it enough, when I faced it, my Legion might be divided. The risk would be great. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that risk. Perhaps I could find a path that did not cross the Gold’s. Perhaps it would find its way to Faerie, and return a little of the madness it had brought here. I didn’t need the distraction of the Gold. The way I figured it, looking over the ruin of the town, someone else could deal with the Gold while I dealt with the more personal problem of Fetch.
I looked back down into the ruins of a red brick schoolhouse. A man’s face caught my attention, a face weathered by hard years sifting a life out of the depths of a hostile land. The man’s eyes, fathomless and dark as nuggets of coal, searched the horizon as rough hands worked gently, pulling brick and stone and splinters of wood and pieces of mortar away from a small, unmoving form. Those eyes looked through me, unseeing, as the hands continued their deft, gentle movements, and it seemed to me that miner was looking for answers that lay past the horizon, in the heart of the uncaring whirlwind, in the underpinnings of creation itself.
Creation had lost its voice in that moment, overwhelmed by destruction. Mute, all glory had no answer for that unvoiced question as to why such things happened. No one and nothing could say why children had to die. Something shifted within me, there on my steed of air, and I understood that I could not evade this responsibility. In escaping to this place, I had loosed a monster. I had broken the barriers on the Way and freed the Gold from its prison. Releasing the Gold laid on my shoulders a heavier burden than my own fate—I could do no less than my all to bring the Gold’s threat to an end.
If I didn’t provide that miner at least that much of an answer, his unvoiced question would haunt me for the rest of my days.
I tried to ignore the whisper of fear in the back of my mind. Three WayShapers had bound it. They had all died in the binding.
I would have to take another approach. Binding it to a location would take too long, and expose me to the force of its winds. I would have to bind it spiritually, break its will. How many sorcerers had died going after the Gold? Its Legion would be a rich prize, but would also make it incredibly dangerous. And none before me had succeeded. I wondered if they’d had nature spirits to bind its winds, or if the Gold’s will was simply too strong for them. I thought of the White Wolf’s fear. And then I set myself to my task.
I hunted along the trail of the Gold’s destruction, running through a wake of havoc stretching across the verdant countryside. The ruin of a farmhouse, the destruction of a copse of trees, razed towns with names like Gorham and Murphysboro and DeSoto and Annapolis marked the Gold’s footsteps. Always in its wake drifted the ruins of lives, and the dead.
I couldn’t let this thing spread out across the Ways. And I couldn’t just trap it again, not if it had taken three WayShapers to trap it before. The Gold had a spirit, so I could try to bind it, but I had never faced such raw power before. I’d have to divert a considerable part of the Legion just to protect me from the power of the Gold’s winds. I’d have to find its heart and strike for that.
I ran fast enough, far enough, and long enough to begin to glimpse the rising cloud of its dust. I called to the White Wolf. “Can you mark its passage? It seems to almost be aiming for these towns.”
“Not almost,” the White Wolf snarled. “It’s hungry. But it’s moving so fast. I don’t know how long it will take to catch it.”
“Can we get ahead of it?”
“You want to face it now?”
“I must. Can you face it with me?”
“I … don’t know if I can. And I am not alone in this.” Fear weighted his voice. “Those of us once caught in the Gold’s influence will hesitate to close with it again.”
Could I risk facing this monster and its own Legion while driving my own? I thought not. I considered the nature of my enemy, and my allies. “Protect me.”
“What?”
Shift the focus, I thought. Use his fear. “The winds will be a significant threat. Take the forces you had when the Gold took you the first time, and chain the winds.”
“What about its hunger?” he asked slowly.
“I will face its hunger,” I said. “All the rest of the Legion will face its captive spirits. Can you stand against the strength of its winds?”
He stiffened. “If you can stand against its hunger, I can stand against its winds.”
“Lead me, then.”
The White Wolf led me off the trail of destruction, the steed of the air increasing the pace until I had to close my eyes and turn my head from the wind’s force. We moved at a ferocious rate, traveling with such speed that I could only cling to my steed and trust the White Wolf’s guidance. We had to move faster than the Gold by a roundabout path, since it appeared to be traveling with a single-minded determination that followed the straight line of the railroad tracks which took it from town to town. I felt us slow. I opened my eyes to see a stretch of empty fields.
The spring sunlight had grown strangely soft and pale. With that I knew the White Wolf had succeeded in bringing me into the course of our quarry. We stopped in a large field as plowed and bare as the destruction behind us. I descended to the ground, dismissed my steed to free the White Wolf for his preparations, and began rousing the Legion. I called my Captains to me and set them to stir the full host of my conquests.
The Gold came on as a storm spreading across the sky, having picked up clouds on its journey. The first raggedness in the wind warned me. Then the rains came from light streamers of cloud, falling softly like tears through pale, tinted light. The wind grew steadily stronger until the noise of it rose to a familiar rumble, like a mighty river in full flood. When my prey crested the trees, its heart still burned a dark, resentful yellow-brown, but crimson, midnight blue, and ash gray swirled around its edges. The light fell through it as if through the stained glass of a cathedral.
It descended as a swarm of captive lives. I sent the Legion up to meet the swarm. The forces clashed with a silent, raging roar. In a battle of shades, nightmares rose to devour hallucinations. In a war of ghosts, undead will crushed disembodied awareness. I saw them all, the whole of my Legion, sweeping up to close with the host of the Gold, each wave of them following behind one of my Captains. Only the White Rose and her gentler forces remained with me, anticipating the time when her support would be needed. The White Wolf and his forces fought the winds to a standstill, so that I stood in a compressed bubble of calm. My ears felt stuffed with cotton as the pressure soared around me, but I ignored fleshly discomfort. I stood below, watching the spiritual conflict and waiting for the true enemy to appear.
Blade staggered in the midst of the battle. Bane rose to support him, only to fall back as golden light rippled across the broken clouds
. The winds rose with a roar. Fragments of wood and metal came scything toward me out of the heart of the storm. The flying debris exploded without touching me as the White Wolf stood to his duty, bending the winds to his will. I felt then, rising through the heart of the storm, a thing of pain and rage and hunger, a thing as much to be pitied as feared. But I had no pity left. I brought my will to bear and grappled with the monster at the center of the storm.
The Gold fought without subtlety. In a hot tempest of hunger and fury, its strength strove to tear my will into pieces and consume me. I plunged into its depths, searching for its center, trying to find and smash whatever lay at its heart.
The power at the heart of the Gold filled my senses, a maelstrom of light and heat and motion and implacable appetite. The pure, wild nature of that power would have torn at my defenses even without being focused on me, but a will had guided the fury and directed its force. That desperate will brought all of its hunger and all of its strength to bear on me. I shuttered the doors of my spirit as much as I could and drove blindly on, unwilling to present anything other than a moving target for its rage.
I felt stretched, thinning under the strength of the assault. Doors in my mind, barred against invasion, were battered down by the onslaught. Hungry winds poured fury through the doors, eating into my will, bringing pain, and even more frightening, a consuming numbness as they advanced.
The storm peaked, the walls of the fortress of my spirit thrumming with the wrath behind the winds, the White Wolf’s protective bubble bending in around me. Then I felt it falter, and I knew that my Legion had cut away some crucial part of its force. I drove further into its depths. Walls of color surrounded me, waves of motion rose about me. Then at last I burst into a small, still place, and I knew that I had found the heart of the Gold.
I touched it with my senses, to learn its nature and discover its vulnerabilities. What I found there shocked me. At the heart of that fury and monstrous hunger cried a small thing, blind and deaf and tormented by endless solitude. I thought of the story the White Wolf had told me, and I decided that however awful the death of the man who had created this thing, it had not been awful enough.
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