by Tom Deitz
Thank God for Dale, too; running interference like he was, and keeping David informed on the one hand, JoAnne calm on the other, while laying down considerable law about how this wasn’t over yet, that it was far bigger than she dared think, and that David was doing what he had to, with his father’s full blessings.
As for the slain: Nuada, Fionchadd, and Aife had gone out there to check, along with himself, Cal, Kirkwood, Aikin, and Devlin. There was blood aplenty, but no bodies.
Whether that meant the enemy had gone into hiding, returned to Tir-Nan-Og, or simply dispersed (as Nuada had hinted they might), David had no idea. Nor cared, now that it was daylight and they could breathe easier. Tonight—that was what they were debating now, sitting on Devlin’s porch, drinking coffee, orange juice, and herbal tea, and eating breakfast biscuits and omelets contrived from groceries Myra had provided.
“So you think tonight’s attack will be worse?” Sandy was saying through a mouthful of ham and cheese.
Nuada shrugged. “That would be my intent if I knew where my opponent lay and that he had valuable personages with him who were so injured he dared not move them far, nor could, with ease.”
“And if I had tested his defenses,” Aife added.
“But dared not let my own actions be closely observed,” Fionchadd concluded, “lest the tide be turned once more.”
“Bottom line,” LaWanda said. “We gotta hurry.”
“Where? And to what end?” Sandy wondered.
David took a deep breath and slapped Calvin on the thigh. “Fargo, my friend”—he grinned—“we think we should get Lugh to Galunlati.”
“Galunlati!” Calvin cried, genuinely surprised, which surprised David in turn.
“Galunlati,” David affirmed. “I figured you’d already considered that, else why bring all those scales?”
Calvin shook his head. “Yeah, well, I thought somebody might want to zip off there, maybe chase down some help or something. But I never thought that Lugh—”
“Yeah, well, listen,” David broke in. And told him about their plan.
“There’s also the healing lake,” Aikin reminded them, at which point Alec perked up, but Liz looked unhappy. “We used to have some water from there,” she said, glaring at Aife. “Used to, but no longer.”
“Another debt I acknowledge,” Aife murmured back. “Another reason I am here instead of plotting your destruction.”
David slapped his knees. “So we’re agreed, then? We get Lugh to Galunlati—today, if possible.”
“Possible,” Calvin acknowledged. “Difficult and a pain, but possible.”
Liz continued to look troubled. “But what about John? He’s the one who’ll have to deal with this attack if it comes, whether or not Lugh’s here. I mean, think, folks; the enemy won’t know Lugh’s gone if they can’t read through all the steel around here.”
“They can read that much,” Nuada corrected. “Power such as Lugh commands, whether directed inward or without, would shine from this house like a beacon.”
“So there’ll be no attack?”
“Shouldn’t be,” Devlin mused. “Then again, there’re things like anger, retaliation, senseless slaughter. Down and dirty meanness. This is war, folks. In war there are no rules except win, and these folks we’re fightin’ here never heard of the UN. Our ancestors took heads, don’t forget—those of us with Celt blood in our veins, which is most of us. These folks still take heads!”
David nodded grimly. “I’ve seen ’em do it.”
“So, what about you, then?” Alec ventured.
“I stay,” Devlin replied. “With Lugh gone, I’m a lesser target, whatever else happens. I’ve got protections of my own, and more I can call up if I have to, and…other eyes to watch.”
Aikin cleared his throat. “I take it that we’re plannin’ to split up again?”
David looked at Devlin and Nuada, the two seasoned warriors present. “Your call, guys.”
“I don’t have enough scales for all of us,” Calvin stated flatly. “As it is, I’ll have to finagle some stuff.”
“How many do you have?” Liz asked.
“Seven—that I can use.” He fingered the one on his neck thong meaningfully.
“Well, that settles one thing,” David sighed. “We know how to save the King. Now all we gotta do is figure out how to save what that King thinks is the enemy country.”
Silence.
“Any ideas?” he prompted. “Anything at all?”
Silence.
“Aw, c’mon, folks. How many degrees we got in this room? How many SAT points? How much cumulative IQ? How many years of experience, you Faerie folk? Doesn’t that count for something? Imagination? Passion? Dammit, why doesn’t somebody just think, so I don’t have to!” And with that David rose and began to pace.
“Lateral thinking,” Liz murmured at last.
Most of the company looked puzzled, but David scowled thoughtfully. “You wanta explain that?”
Liz did: it was simply looking at a problem from a different direction, or at the literal, rather than implicit, meaning of words. “Like a knight on a quest for a virgin,” she suggested. “He meets all these people and asks where he might find a young and virtuous lady, not realizing that, as stated, he could as well find a dried-up old crone or even a man.”
Kirkwood frowned thoughtfully. “Okay, then, how ’bout this?” He paused for a sip of coffee, then leaned back against a porch post and folded his arms. “First off, best I can tell, the problem is that whatever separates Faerie and this World is being eaten away by iron on our side, which does the other side no good. The more basic problem is that Faerie depends on our world for existence, only ours doesn’t have to be inhabited, it simply has to exist. But the root cause of all this—what’s brought matters to a head—is the fact that some real estate developers are gonna put up a lot of ironwork on the one place in this World that Faerie is linked with most strongly.”
Calvin elbowed him in the ribs. “What’re you gettin’ at, Churchy?”
“What I’m gettin’ at is—well, what do most people do when one thing intrudes too much on another? You destroy one of those things. Or you—”
“Move ’em!” Liz cried. “Of course!”
“Yeah,” Alec echoed sourly. “Of course! Liz, what’re you thinking about? You can’t separate our World and Faerie!”
“Can’t you?” Calvin retorted. “Maybe you can’t separate those two, but something like that has been done. My people speak of it as myth, but half the people here have been to Galunlati and met Uki, and we know for a fact that it was moved seven times before they got it right, and then, much later, moved again—away from us.”
“And if Galunlati can be moved, no reason Tir-Nan-Og can’t be.”
Nuada stroked his chin. “An audacious plan, but not one I would dismiss out of hand. Either hand,” he added, flourishing his own. Sunlight struck both, but one glittered metallically, the other gleamed with healthy flesh. Slowly he brought them together. “Two hands. Two Worlds. Air between.” Then he drew them apart. “Two hands. Two Worlds. The same relationship to one another, save one thing: more air between.”
David’s mouth popped open. “You mean—”
Nuada dropped his hands. “If moving Worlds is possible, then we should look into moving Worlds. It is certainly better than war, for either side.”
“Won’t argue that,” Devlin murmured.
Myra cleared her throat. “In that case, I know of at least one other case of moving Worlds—Worlds like we’re talking about.”
“Oh, shit!” LaWanda gasped. “Girl, you don’t mean—”
Myra nodded mutely. “That place we wound up after that crap went down at Scarboro Faire all those years ago, that fucked Scott up so bad he’s still not over it.”
Calvin shook his head. “Don’t know about that, not much.”
“Too much to tell in a hurry,” LaWanda growled. “Basically, some magic dude from one of these Faery countries disco
vers Tracks that are silver, not gold, and not only that, he finds out he can control ’em and use ’em to steal little bits of other places and build a country—a World, I guess—of his own. Well, we fucked up his plans and he was destroyed, and his country got shook up some, but might still be there. Even if it isn’t, the Tracks might be. And if they can move little bits of Worlds, I figure they could just as easy move big ones.”
Nuada’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “I know this tale, but had forgotten it—which I should not, just as I should not have forgotten Alberon of Alban, whose realm we visit but seldom and who sits and sulks and keeps his own council these days, even more so than Arawn and Finvarra.”
“Finvarra knows about them, though,” Fionchadd supplied. “I was imprisoned in a place with a view of them, and Finvarra sent me there. Whether he has studied them, however…”
Nuada shrugged in turn. “Do not forget that as time runs differently between your World and Faerie, sometimes, too, it runs differently between the realms of Faerie. Time runs slow in Alberon’s realm indeed, and less time will have passed there than in this World. I doubt he has had time to learn much at all. And Finvarra little more.”
“So we go ask some Faery king to tell us everything he knows about some Tracks that almost flicked up his own Land?” Alec snorted. “I don’t think so.”
“No time to get there, anyway,” Nuada agreed. “Still, if Colin’s realm—for such was the name of the druid who wrought that realm—yet survives, perhaps some clue remains there that might explain how he was able to manipulate the Silver Tracks.”
“He had books,” Piper volunteered, speaking for the first time. “Lots of books. I saw ’em in his tower.”
“Which was destroyed,” Myra countered. “The land may well have been.”
Nuada shook his head. “Not all. We watched these things. We should have investigated and did not. We thought we had all the time we needed.”
“So the records may still be there?” Myra whispered. “Oh, Jesus!”
“Yeah,” LaWanda grumbled. “And I got three guesses who’s gonna have to try and find ’em.”
Myra reached over to squeeze her friend’s hand. “You and me, girl, together again.”
“And me,” Piper sighed. “I don’t think you can get there otherwise.”
David frowned. “It was a cold place, surrounded by water. If it’s the tower Finno was locked up in.”
“It was not,” Nuada said. “There were two towers, one greater, one lesser. The one you visited was the lesser. The one your friends visited, the greater. When Colin died, his land fragmented. Parts drifted away.”
David eyed him dubiously. “If you say so.”
No one spoke.
“Well,” Sandy said decisively into that lull, “now that’s all decided, I guess the next thing we figure out is who goes where.”
“And stays,” Nuada amended. “Some of us ought to. Some of us may have to.”
Calvin checked his watch. “Well, if Lugh’s goin’ anywhere before dark, we’d better get to talkin’.”
“Or rolling dice,” Aikin put in, a trifle giddily. “Might be just as effective.”
“No,” Sandy assured him with a smile. “I’ve been thinking.”
PART TWO
Scott Gresham’s Journal
(Sunday, June 29—morning)
This is really great! Just fucking ducky! First of all, here I sat actually doing what’s almost real work on Mr. Laptop here—for a change—and then all of a sudden I get this phone call from Myra wondering if just maybe, perhaps, might I kinda, from the goodness of my heart, being as how I’m a really nice guy and all, want to dump everything here and bop down to Athens so I can hare off to Faerie with a bunch of ’em looking for some kind of fucking magic book that may not exist.
And yeah, I know they’ve got a real and true important job to do (Myra caught me up on that, and old man Dale’s kept me posted fairly well, so maybe I’m only sucking next-to-hind tit now), but I just can’t seem to get it through anybody’s head that while, yeah, a lot of really important things hinge on what they do in all those places, I’ve still got to function in the real world, and they’ve mostly been piss-poor at helping me cope. I mean, I finally, at the absolute eleventh hour dissertation-wise, finally get this really neat, good-paying job doing stuff I don’t mind doing, and all of a sudden at the eleventh-and-a-half hour I find out it’s completely at odds with all my friends’ wild romantic notions of what I ought to do.
And the trouble is, they’re right. And they’ve promised to help me keep my head on straight after this, but you know, Mr. Laptop, it’s gonna be me having to list Mystic Mountain Properties on every job application I ever fill out from here on out, and something tells me I’m not gonna get an A-one recommendation. “Oh, right, you worked for that group that fucked up the mountains.” Yeah, sure.
So I told Myra no. I told her I’d like to help ’em out on this Faerie-thing (which is true). But I told her I also had to cover my ass, and had (as they’d said) an important job to do here, so that I can maybe keep my nose clean. I…
Fuck it! Just fuck it! (They oughta call these rant machines.) Just goddam mother fuck it! I keep trying to do the right thing and I just can’t seem to make it happen. Oh well. Elyyoth says he knows some kind of spell that might make it hard for them to get heavy equipment in here. Well, except that he also says it may not work on iron. In any event, he’s a pretty cool dude, so maybe I’ll get one good thing out of this.
And I guess, if I really want to be objective, the folks did promise to help me out money-wise, but I’m not sure if I want ’em to do that. Even fuck-ups like me got pride.
End of rant. Gotta call the guys back home, and see how my ferret’s doing.
Chapter IX: Swimming Upstream
(near Clayton, Georgia—Sunday, June 29—late morning)
“I don’t feel real,” David grumbled to Liz in the first private moments they’d managed since she and Alec had arrived the previous night. They’d wandered out to the end of John Devlin’s drive, ostensibly to case the place for artifacts the Sidhe might have left behind—or bloodstains, or any other tokens that might supply insight into their adversaries’ strengths and weaknesses. None were forthcoming. What few footprints had survived three sets of invading vehicles plus Dale’s Lincoln Town Car were bare, and all showing aberrations that evoked avian, canine, and feline alike; not unreasonable, for shapeshifters. David kicked at a patch of gravel. “Not real,” he repeated, more loudly.
“I don’t either,” Liz sighed. “And I’m not exactly sure why. I mean, look at all this; every sense we’ve got’s being stimulated to the max: clean air, cooking smells, pine trees, earth, birdsong, bugs in the woods, our friends chattering up at the house, warm wind, sunlight on skin, blue sky, mountains that’re purple-gray-green. Trees in a dozen shapes. Cars in all kinds of colors. Those are the realest things there are!”
David scowled. “And then there’s the war. It’s real, but it’s also remote. Like, there’s a part of me that thinks I’m just goin’ through the motions, that if I’ll only go back to Athens and keep on takin’ classes and hangin’ out in clubs and readin’ and listenin’ to music and goin’ to movies, folks won’t really come out of Faerie after Lugh. They won’t really build that resort back home. The Sidhe won’t really flood Sullivan Cove if they do. Pa won’t really be in the hospital. It’s like—like I feel after a movie. Total immersion for a while, and then heightened senses, but it’s all illusion.”
Liz gazed at him askance and reached over to take his hand. The wind ruffled her hair; the sunlight woke highlights in it: bright flame against darker, but still glowing, embers. “I know one thing that’d make us feel real,” she murmured, nodding toward the nearest patch of woods, which was conveniently screened by a stand of rhododendron. “Looks pretty mossy in there.”
David grinned at her. “And what use would we have for moss?”
Liz’s eyes twinkled with mischief.
“Softer to lie on than leaves.”
David’s grin widened. “I don’t have any…”
Liz regarded him levelly. “This time I think it’d be okay to risk it. I think it’d be more real.”
“Yeah,” David agreed a little shakily. “I think it would.”
*
David wasn’t certain if it was sunlight in his eyes, some subtle shift in Liz’s breathing, or the sound of voices talking deliberately loud that woke him from a drowse he’d neither sought out nor intended. In any event, it took but an instant to realize that he wasn’t exactly in the safest place in the world, that he was naked as the day he was born (as was Liz, beside him), and that decisions were being made even now with which, just possibly, he ought to be involved.
“Liz,” he hissed, “we got company.” And with that he fumbled through his clothes and whipped a sweatshirt over her more interesting bits, where she curled on a nest of moss in his shadow. That accomplished, he found his skivvies, skinned them on, and was just buttoning his fatigues when the voices reached the point where he had no choice but to dash out of the bushes and yell “Whoa!”
Aikin and Alec looked amused, if not startled, and shot him sympathetic grins. “Sorry, man,” Aikin muttered. “Folks are leavin’.”
David donned his T-shirt. “Thanks. I, uh—well, basically, we didn’t mean to—”
“What?” Alec inquired archly.
“Nothing you wouldn’t do yourself, if you had the chance,” David retorted, glancing back at Liz and finding her…progressing.
Alec’s face clouded. “Yeah, well, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? Not that she hasn’t suggested it,” he added hastily. “But it’s been so long, and there’s so much going on. And you know me; I’d as soon do it right, if I’m gonna do it.”
David rolled his eyes at Aikin. “That’s our buddy: ever the romantic.”
“’Least I won’t get leaves in my butt crack!”