by Tom Deitz
“I get the message,” Aikin broke in, as he drew the gleaming blade along his thumb. “Let’s do it.”
Though Aikin’s attitude pissed him a little, Alec could think of no useful reply. Instead, he nodded at David and likewise stared at the septum, following the instructions he’d just passed on: to visualize the mountain a few miles away, and what lay unseen upon it.
For an instant, he saw nothing. But then the septum pulsed with ruby light—and reality ripped asunder as the whole world became a mass of faceted towers, flying arches, and extravagant gardens rushing at him at alarming speed.
Too fast! Far too fast! He resisted instinctively, tore his gaze away—
“Shit!” David gasped, as Alec met his eyes, neither of them daring to look directly at the crystal that pulsed like a strobe between them, making their skin seem to shift ’twixt dead and flayed.
“Double shit,” Alec echoed, as the effect slowly faded. “That’s never happened before.”
“What?” From Aikin, who had likewise wrenched his attention from the stone and was staring at Alec with a mix of joy, awe, and terror.
“That sort of intense reaction,” Alec gulped. “Not remote observation, but headlong rush!”
“Probably ’cause we used that kind of blood,” David mused. “Or of us bein’ so close to the target at what’s still pretty near a magical time of day.”
“Let’s hope,” Alec yawned. “And, dammit, I’ve got a mother-effer of a headache. Stuff like this always gives me one, but this is a real banger—and only from that little time!”
“I’ve got one too,” David admitted. “Seems like I always forget about the side effects.” And then he, too, was yawning.
Aikin rolled his eyes. “I wish you’d warned me about that—’cause I’ve also got one.”
“The price of knowledge is pain,” David chuckled—and yawned again.
“So now you know,” Alec agreed. “It gives you a headache and puts you to sleep.”
Aikin checked his watch. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind a nap. We did get up early, and then we had to lug Bambi’s mom—”
“And we’ve nowhere to be until supper,” David finished, rising. “I just wish we’d fixed up the lean-to.”
“See you in the Dreamtime,” Alec murmured lazily, stretching out where he sat.
“Not if I see you first,” David grinned, and sprawled beside him.
Aikin said nothing at all—because he was snoring.
Chapter IV: Dreamseekers
(Lookout Rock, Georgia—Saturday, October 24)
…a hand smooth as ivory, soft as silk brushing the hair from his brow. His head pillowed on a beautiful woman’s lap, his eyes, half-closed, gazing upon a sky ablaze with the stars of Georgia summer…
“Alec,” she breathed, and his heart skipped to hear his name whispered with that voice, through those lips that had so lately kissed him. He blushed, sure she had seen some sign of this wild inner joy that possessed him. Certainly she could have noted any shift in his face at all, any change in the whole of his body—for he was naked, as he had never before been with a woman. He had no secrets from her now; she knew the whole length of him: his curves and his planes, where he was soft or smooth, firm or rough—hard or hairy. What it felt like to have him inside her.
“Alec, my Alec,” she murmured once more.
He shifted as he smiled, and felt the woman’s discarded skirt bunch beneath his buttocks, where he lay amid the ruins of a burned-out dwelling on the ridge above the MacTyrie Athletic Field. She smiled back, though he could scarcely see her face, there in the soft summer dark. Only a cloud of hair, each strand backlit by moonlight; only the curve of her cheeks, the arch of her brow, the spark of magic in her eyes as she bent to kiss him once more, while her hands went roaming to places no woman had ventured before that night…
“Eva,” he sighed, when she had finished, and closed his eyes.
“My Alec,” she answered, softly as an echo—but something had changed: he no longer lay languid and sated in his first lover’s lap, but crouched in the yard of an ancient farmhouse beneath a storm-torn midnight sky. Lightning flickered ominously, limning wind-whipped trees and the billowing cloaks of a host of Faery warriors, who sat coal-black steeds between writhing poplars, then crowded in respectfully to where one of their number lay crushed upon the ground while a blond-haired boy who instants before had been a raging serpent-monster huge enough to coil around a building sprawled dazed and senseless beside her.
Beside…Eva! For he had removed that fallen warrior’s helm, revealing the face of she who had seduced him and loved him and betrayed him most brutally at last. Except that he was running a few emotions behind just now—which fact he realized bitterly as he stared down at one he now knew was a devious Faery woman with her own complex agenda, which surely did not include loving any mortal, much less skinny, naive Alec McLean.
He should have hated her, should have despised this wretch who had twisted his jealousy and caused such grief to older, more loyal friends. Yet as she lay there, her beauty awash with a pain she could only escape by death, he could not. “Farewell, my Alec,” she sighed, and spoke no more.
She was one of the Sidhe, Alec’s dreamself reminded him. And the Sidhe could not die—not truly, not forever the way men did. Sooner or later she would return: sooner or later her spirit would build new flesh and Aife would once more walk the fields of Faerie.
They’d be waiting for her, too: Lugh’s scouts and soldiers and spies would, they whose purpose it was to maintain balance and justice and order in Tir-Nan-Og. And since Aife had betrayed a king along with her mortal lover, that king would claim first vengeance, in whatever form revenge was enacted among the Tuatha de Danaan. Cursed to wear beast shape, she might be, as Ailill mac Angus had been. Or exiled to some island far from comfort and joy. Perhaps the Death of Iron, even, that severed soul and body past reunion—though that was unlikely, for mere traitors.
Yes, all those were possible options. But what Alec knew far more certainly, felt more passionately, there in the heart of his self, was that he still loved her and wanted one last time to be with her honestly, with no deception on either side. She’d loved him, she’d told him once—and lied. She’d come to love him, she’d said again at the edge of death—and, he sensed, spoken true.
So where was Aife now? How could he, Alec McLean, be with her again?
As if in answer, the ruby-septumed stone that lay less than a yard from his head, that had drunk deep of the blood of wild beasts and tame boys, pulsed with scarlet fire…
…“My Alec!”
Alec blinked in bewilderment, for though he knew that he still dreamed, something more subtle assured him he dreamed true. And what he saw was the answer to his desire. Not where Eva and he had made love, or where she had died, but where she presently resided.
“Come to me, my Alec, my dreaming boy-man-lover!”
But Alec could only stare—first at the face of his lady, then at her body, where she sat clothed in shadow-gray samite on a padded velvet seat beneath a high, arched window, gazing out at nothing. And then at the larger room around her: rough stone walls and bare stone floor, across which splatters of furs and skins were strewn like storm wrack…
And at a thrice-barred door, and a staircase leading to it, that spiraled around an open, dim-lit core…
And a tower, ancient, scarred, and broken, in which the love of his life was imprisoned, for whatever space of days Lugh Samildinach deemed just…
And a blasted plain around it, and beyond that a border of nothing, beyond which lay nothing save one Straight Track, along which the Winds between the Worlds both screamed and sang.
And one wind found him and caressed him with a touch like a certain lover’s and spoke to him with her voice.
“None may come here but through Tir-Nan-Og, my Alec—unless Mortal Men have learned to pierce the World Walls. And because my crime was born of love misguided and buried by love misused, I am doomed to
remain in this tower until a mortal man who loves me finds his way here. And since but one mortal man has ever loved me, it is you alone, my Alec, who can accomplish this.”
“Eva!” Alec cried to a cool but cloudless sky on an autumn afternoon. No one heard, though close by either hand his best friends likewise dreamed…
*
…Bloody Bald, Aikin thought sourly, was simply a mountain—a well-nigh-perfect cone, steeper-sided than most Georgia mountains, and solitary, as most were not—with sheer quartzite cliffs athwart its summit that caught the rays of sunset and dawn and blazed red as the blood that bestowed its name. Water lapped around it, encircling it with cold and dark and a man-made lake: one of those R.E.A. jobs that had claimed so many valleys, so many homesteads; displaced so many folks who were his and David’s kin…
Yeah, it was simply a mountain, and no more. He’d been nuts to believe Dave’s stories, however elaborately wrought, of a castle that crowned it all unseen, cloaked from the eyes of men by Faery glamour. A man would be a fool to believe such crap, and Aikin Carlisle Daniels was no fool. If there was magic in the world, he’d know it by now; God knew he’d read enough on that topic to fill a good-sized library.
But suppose Dave’s tales were true?
Suppose magic was rampant in the north Georgia woods and he had missed it? Had missed the Seelie Court riding in procession four times a year, had missed Faery critters that watched his friends, and Faery runners that ran races with them and kidnapped their brothers and shot elven arrows into their uncles. Never mind journeys to those other Worlds, whose names themselves conjured dreams: Tir-Nan-Og and Annwyn and Erenn; Galunlati and the Lands of Fire and the Realm of the Powersmiths.
He wanted to believe it all, dammit! Did not want to brand his best friends as crazy, fools, or liars. Yet to believe, one needed proof, had to see the Faeries riding, had to hear the horns of Elfland saluting dusk and dawn.
And one odd-coated, queer-horned stag glimpsed in the woods of a foggy morn was not sufficient.
He had to have more; had to see the castle on that mountain, had to find his way to Faerie and all those other realms.
But how could he? He who, though hungriest, had longest been denied that wondrous feast?
But then his subconscious lodged against that most stubborn and deepest-set desire, and the force of that soulfelt need set fire in a certain stone.
And so the dreamshape that was Aikin Daniels stood on the most perilous edge of the precipice that looked on Bloody Bald, and wished most fervently to see what was hidden there.
And Aikin saw: Lugh’s mountaintop citadel, and the perilous peak beneath it, and the wide green country that spread about its base, where in the Lands of Men was only mountains and lakes. And he saw a webwork of gold laid upon those meads and meadows, upon those forests and streams. And he found he could follow those strands, away from Tir-Nan-Og and through countless other Worlds that layered ’round it like the chambers of some complex seashell, some more alien than the Lands of Men and some achingly familiar, for he had chanced on them before in less potent dreams.
One Track in particular intrigued him, for it swept farther afield than the mountains. He traced it: south—and east, over hills, over ridges, into the rolling Piedmont. Settlements blazed by—Helen, Cleveland, Gainesville, Jefferson, Arcade—sensed but not truly seen. And then Aikin came upon one particular town.
He pronounced its name. Athens. Oz Upon the Oconee. The place he lived. The place he went to college.
But the magic ran there as well: a glitter of Track far less than a mile from his cabin in Whitehall Forest. He had only to locate it in his World, and somehow, someway, he would walk there.
All he required was a landmark: something to mark it past mistaking.
He sought one, even as the Straight Track vanished save for the merest glimmer, even as the rest of the world grew hard and dirty and…real. Real as that lightning-blasted oak beside the maple with the bifurcated trunk. Them he would remember; them he would seek when he awoke…
* * *
David dreamed of guns. He dreamed of the rifle he had hunted with that morning, and he dreamed of he who had bestowed it, who had died seven years gone by, and in whose honor he had dedicated that day’s kill. David-the-Elder, he’d been styled, after David himself had been born. David Thomas Sullivan: his father’s youngest brother.
David-the-Younger’s role model, who had taught him how to affect the good-ole-boy facade a guy needed to survive a rural mountain high school—and those more sophisticated skills a college man must possess so as not to be thought a hick or a geek or a dweeb; so that he could ride a horse, drive a tractor, chop sorghum, dig ’taters, pour concrete and weld—and run almost forever, swim well nigh that long, hold his own at wrestling in spite of being not very big, drive a twisting road without brakes, and shoot anything that walked, crawled, sat still, or flew. But he’d also read all of Shakespeare before high school—and Malory, Milton, Tolkien, Lewis, and Poe; and could write passable iambic pentameter, transliterate Norse runes and the Hebrew, Greek, and Sindarin alphabets; as well as identify almost every song played on the airways more than twice during the last nine years, and drink anything alcoholic, however foul tasting, without coughing or making a face. All because David-the-Elder had said that was what a man who was really alive should do.
…guns…
He’d rehearsed that awful afternoon once that day already, the one when Uncle Dale had appeared at his bedroom door to proclaim his nephew’s death. And he’d relived his private salute after the funeral.
And he’d certainly recalled how none of it was fair, that someone as accomplished as David-the-Elder should die so ignominiously. That, in fact, no one should really know how he had died at all. No one had seen it—or admitted as much; and the report from the Rangers had been frustratingly vague. But he would find out one day, would write the Pentagon for the full report. Shoot, he’d get Alec to hack into the government’s files, as he was perfectly able to do.
But no mere report could relate everything that had transpired; none could fully convey David-the-Elder’s final hours.
But a red-septumed quasi stone in a blood-filled bowl beside his head could. And as fatigue and regret clogged David’s reason, magic from another World revealed that fateful day…
It was like watching TV, David thought, and thought no more, but witnessed.
…a young man in the jeans and Nikes and T-shirt that proclaimed him a Ranger off-duty, prowling the narrow cobblestoned length of a Middle Eastern street. His hair, white-blond like his namesake nephew’s, was a beacon of difference in the harsh sunlight—and possibly a mistake to reveal; but he’d given his Atlanta Braves cap to a brown-faced street boy in trade for a wide white grin and directions to where the best pomegranates could really be found. Pomegranates: the word had the same root as grenade (as in hand grenade), because the two looked alike. He hoped to buy a couple dozen, ship ’em to a friend in Granada, Spain, and have him send ’em to the younger David, with a note not to pull the pins—which his brilliant nephew would understand and appreciate.
Trouble was, he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere between the barracks and the bazaar, and smiling boy directions notwithstanding, very much feared he was lost. Which was not necessarily cool for tow-haired American servicemen in Middle Eastern cities, however ingratiating their honest mountain smiles might be.
But speaking of smiles, here was that kid again, still with his baseball cap, only now it perched atop one of those complex turban-things the locals affected.
With a flourish the lad removed the latter and passed it to him. “Trade,” he said, solemnly. “Trade.”
“Lost,” the elder David countered, as he gamely donned the headpiece. The boy’s grin widened. “Pomegranates,” he called, pointing down a narrow side street.
David-the-Elder thanked him and followed his directions, ambling toward a slit of light glimmering at the end of the alley, where a tinkling splash of water and a
half-seen spray of palms hinted at pleasantry. His hiking stick clicked upon the cobblestones.
But as he stepped into the brightness, something small and dark thumped to the pavement before him. Rock…or—
But he had no more time for thinking, as the world first went loud, then very white—and then traded all trace of noise for a greater, more infinite light.
“No!” the younger David screamed. “No!” But the ulunsuti was not finished, for it knew in its way that what he really wished to know was where that grenade had come from, that had erased a good man’s life.
And so he saw that small plaza, and centering it the fountain, in which a fragment of undifferentiated human flesh was weeping blood. He did not see the body—what remained; and in that the ulunsuti was merciful. But he did note a splatter of red across yard upon yard of stucco and stone.
And on a balcony one level up and four narrow buildings away, he saw a young man’s eyes go wide beneath their cammo and khaki. “Ooops!” that youth exclaimed, his voice as slurred as his eyes were unfocused and his movements clumsy and vague.
“Friendly fire,” his companion across a tiny table opined, through a thickening veil of hashish fumes. The voice was ambiguous: familiar and foreign, at once that of man and woman. “One should never treat weapons casually,” that one continued, “lest one take friend for foe and fling one in lieu of an orange—which you just did. And without the pin, too—or did you assume that was the stem? What must you have been thinking? That he wore the headgear of a well-known terrorist? That the hiking staff he carried was a gun? They will blame the rebels, I suppose.”
“I’m gonna be sick,” the clumsy one announced—and lurched to his feet.
“No,” said the hashish smoker. “Come, let me heal you. Let me make you forget that you hated that man because he beat you at poker, Risk, Jeopardy, and Joust; and everybody liked him, but thought you were impulsive and clumsy and stupid and rude. Let me make you forget that you should never have brought that weapon with you, for such like do not impress me, who have witnessed more war than a thousand like you could ever imagine.”