Warstalker's Track

by Tom Deitz

  His leg wouldn’t hold him, but he rose on it anyway—stiffly—and used it to prop himself up long enough to lunge one-handed at that man and bring his war club, with all hundred-odd pounds he possessed behind it, down on that man’s skull.

  It exploded into light. The air smelled of ozone, blood, and burned hair. The man slumped atop David, who was trying to catch his breath and crawl from under a corpse.

  Brock stared at him. David stared back, blankly at first, then recognizing him. He grinned a grin that would have lit the whole clearing. “Thanks!” he panted, and collapsed. It was the last thing Brock ever heard, too; because Brock-the-Badger No-Name, who had been born Stanley Arthur Bridges, was dead.

  *

  Aikin felt the tide turn against them as though it were a literal change in the wind, which perhaps it was, since the Sidhe could control such things, and the latest wave—the fourth wave—of attackers were Faery. Made sense, he supposed, alternating like that—as he slapped another magazine into the Glock, since the shotgun took too long to load and he’d dropped a whole box of shells into the effing pool.

  Nope, it didn’t look good for the home team; with Elyyoth dead, Aife bleeding like a stuck pig from the shoulder, and Finno who-knew-where. Oh, the Redskins were doing fine, probably had medicine bags or something; either that, or charmed lives, though he’d lost all respect for Cherokee mojo when the wards hadn’t kept these fuckers out. Of course, they hadn’t warded the mountainside, either, because nobody had remembered there was a Track in there. But they weren’t everybody.

  The rest—well, the noncombatants had performed as expected: all down or muddling, though Liz, Alec, and Myra were doing their best. Shoot, McLean had finally got his ass up and running and was skimming around the edges, cutting the throats of every downed foe—every Faery foe—who dared move. The kid? Who knew? Didn’t look good, though. The others, the ones he’d termed the big guns, which was basically him, Dave, Scott, Sandy, and LaWanda—well, he was the last man standing, and all of a sudden he realized it was really down to him and Cal and Kirkwood, only Cal was all the hell away on the other side with a bunch of fresh new bloodthirsty Sidhe pouring out of the waterfall, swords in hand.

  At least they weren’t using mojo; couldn’t, if what Finno said was true: that you had to concentrate to do it right, and most Sidhe weren’t much better at it than most mortals were at foreign languages. Capacity was one thing, skill and strength another.

  Bloodlust was a third, and he’d had plenty of that tonight; and stayed cool, calm, and collected, and chosen targets just so, and hit most of ’em, and avoided taking out his friends, and all that. Except that all of a sudden he’d realized he was standing all but alone amid the dead and dying, a good chunk of whom were his buddies, and that he was grade-A, number-one prime target. And that four sets of Faery eyes were looking straight at him.

  He stepped back, wishing he had that fucking ammo that was scuba diving down by Aife’s foot; took another, and debated turning to run.

  “Aikin!” someone yelled; Alec, it sounded like, though it was hard to tell above the moaning (not much shouting anymore) and the steady hiss/roar of the increasing rain. “What?” he yelled back through a faceful of streaming water.

  Alec yelled again, voice wild and desperate and full of pain. Another word this time: not his name.

  “…horn.”

  Horn? He blinked, then cursed himself for having forgotten what he’d come to consider a nuisance, there at his hip. The horn Deffon the gryphon had given him!

  He’d said he’d come. Would he still?

  And would he be in time?

  The nearest Faery was favoring him with a far too evil grin and stepping forward. Without a second thought, Aikin yanked the horn from his hip, raised it to his lips, and blew.

  Interlude VIII: Within Walls and Without

  I

  (Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

  The wall was polished white marble quarried in Annwyn, and vanished into a haze of glamour to either side. It was higher than the conifers from the Mortal World that made a grove beside it on that least precipitous face of Lugh’s Peak, and as thick as the greatest of those trees was through. It was beautiful, too; for intricate, yard-wide friezes made bands of knotwork, zoomorphery, and calligraphy at intervals along it, and double doors ten times a man’s height tall were set an armspan deep in the center, there where Lugh’s surviving guard and the bulk of his old court sat their mounts before them, contemplating entry.

  Those doors were the tenth most complex constructions in Faerie, and not only for the designs worked upon them. For they were made of every known substance in that Land save those which quickly decayed, and included many of them, like ice that never melted and Fire frozen in Time (a Powersmith specialty). Never mind bones of the Daoine Sidhe, bodachs, and selkies; gryphons, enfields, and wyverns—and jewels, woods, shells, fabrics, paper, glass, metals—even insulated iron. All these made up Lugh’s doors. He confronted them now: the one bather between himself and his palace—them and a building’s worth of battle, for word had it from a turncoat survivor of Dhaoinne’s Vale that Turinne had summoned all the Sons of Ailill to witness his coronation.

  All, save a tithe who’d ridden out like the Fomori themselves were on their tails shortly before Lugh’s arrival. Where they were, he had no idea, nor cared. Perhaps seeking some artifact needed to seal the ceremony.

  The rest—he would fight them, though the Spear was not so Powerful now that the sun was setting. Mortals, he would blast ere they came near enough to wield their iron weapons. Sidhe he would disperse more slowly, so that he might savor their deaths as they would have savored his. No amnesty this time. Nor had Nuada, who championed such things, urged it.

  “Well, Lord,” Nuada murmured at Lugh’s right, in that place he treasured most. “It seems that the vintage of the day is blood, and not only in this World, or I miss my guess. Soon enough you will stain your white halls with gore and the lives of those who follow you and defy you alike. But hear this: take your Land now or lose it forever! I know this, for the Power of my house is upon me, and I know that the Land will resist this choice!”

  Lugh grinned at him, impish as a boy, then brandished the Spear aloft. And then he looked at those massive, enormous, wonderfully wrought doors and whispered a word, so softly not even Nuada could hear.

  The panels promptly split from top to bottom, but instead of opening, they dissolved, like the leading melting free of a burning stained-glass window.

  “Lord—” Nuada gaped, aghast.

  “I will not be sealed in against my will, nor have my forces sundered from me or myself from them.” He twisted around in the saddle and regarded the host at his back. “Ride or dismount, I care not, only follow. Little time remains and we must use it to advantage. When in doubt, kill, and let wergild be on Turinne’s head!” And with that, he leveled the Spear straight before him and rode into his palace.

  The first man he met fled in terror. The second groveled and was ridden down. The third, fourth, and fifth stayed to fight, but Carmagh, Lugh’s squire, slew them with blowgun darts before they could find their ground.

  Then came the first cross corridor—and attack. Swords flashed, shields glittered, voices chimed like bells of brass, and marble echoed with the songs of metal against metal, hand against hand, and life against life.

  The pavement in their wake was far more crimson than white.

  II

  Lugh’s famous twelve-towered palace blazed before the sun like a mountain aflame. The fires of sunset washed its walls with glowing red, vivid orange, and twilight purple. But the building itself blazed as well, for every window held a light, and every single one of the countless stone embrasures that crowned towers, walls, and turrets alike bore a torch. Banners flew there: Turinne’s and the Sons of Ailill’s.

  But not Lugh’s—yet—though Arawn doubted the returning King would suffer usurpation uncontested, if contest it he could. What amazed Arawn was the haste wi
th which Lugh had raised such a formidable force. Most were older than most of the Sons, so said rumor, which made them slow and predictable, for Sidhe. But they were also wily and more experienced, and some had faced up to iron.

  Iron—Arawn stroked the never-sheathed blade that hung at his side. It was not made of that metal, though he would’ve liked to own a mortal blade as a curiosity. In any event, he was still debating who should taste it. If Lugh and Turinne met, one would die—likely forever—and he would have only one foe. If he caught them before, however, it was possible he could meet them both with blade and battle. Or—

  He froze, for the instrument he’d been consulting on his forward rail showed a strange new image: a mountainside outcrop in the Lands of Men, around which close to a dozen mortals engaged a troop of Turinne’s in what looked more ambush than battle. The mortals were holding their own, too, though several were down, and, now he looked, they did number a few of Faery kind among them, notably Fionchadd mac Ailill, who had become quite a problem indeed.

  It was an odd mix, actually: steel weapons, both bladed and guns (or whatever they were called); and what looked like simple wooden clubs but clearly weren’t; ranged against more guns, swords, and what minor-level sorcery the rank-and-file Danaans could conjure while engaged. It was raining, too, which always made combat interesting, as did the fact that half those in Turinne’s livery were mortals.

  “This I must see with my own eyes,” he told the gaping Cemon. “Tell the captain to steer the course I give him.”

  III

  Arden mac Alben sometimes wondered why he’d joined the Sons of Ailill. Boredom, perhaps; or the need for change. What he hadn’t bargained for was standing guard in the vast white emptiness of Lugh’s high-arched audience hall watching mortals disperse the iron cage they’d erected around Lugh’s throne.

  He could feel its heat even here, a dozen paces away: iron bars, iron bands, and iron bolts and other fasteners; all transported separately by unsuspecting mortals and assembled in haste around Lugh’s judgment seat, which was not only the symbol of his sovereignty but also his actual linkage to the Land. The Land hated that prison, too, he could tell, in spite of the precautions Turinne’s mortal overseer had contrived to soothe it, notably the lavish use of wyvern skin insulation at the four points where the stuff of the Mortal World rested on more refined Faery matter. Even so, the floor smoked a little, and new depressions showed in the stone beneath those metal feet.

  At least it was two thirds gone now, and the remainder wouldn’t take long to disassemble, now that key bolts and junctures had been removed. Then came the cleansing, the scouring of blood, and the coronation. Not the ceremony it would’ve been, but effective nonetheless. And once the Land accepted Turinne, then there’d be time to—

  The ground shivered, gave a little jolt, as though something vastly heavy had slowly begun moving underfoot. He knew that sensation, too, for he’d felt it often in his youth in the quarries of Annwyn, from whence half the stone in this palace had come. It had been play then: boys standing on fresh-cut stones which rested on smooth, round rollers—then pushed into movement and set racing down those perilous, steep roads. This felt exactly like that: the merest of movements, but implicit within it the certainty of continued, ever more rapid, progress.

  Again! Or the same—but stronger.

  The palace shifted ever so slightly; marble dust drifted down. A mortal braced for balance against the cage and came away unscathed. A Faery did likewise and jerked back a smoking hand.

  A third time, and the movement became ongoing, so slow and insidious one wouldn’t notice it if one weren’t attending—like breathing or the pulse of one’s heart.

  What could be causing it, though? There were no earthquakes in Faerie, though the Tracks and Pillars could do strange things sometimes. Or perhaps this was the Land’s preemptory response to what Turinne soon would dare; as though it would wrench away from that confrontation.

  Or embrace it.

  One thing was certain, however: Tir-Nan-Og was moving. “Go tell Turinne,” he told his page, a wide-eyed bodach girl. “Tell him the Land is resisting.”

  IV

  (Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Monday, June 30—just after midnight)

  Big Billy Sullivan almost didn’t recognize his house, though everything was the same as when he’d left it, save that his pickup was gone, for which he imagined there was a reason. Other than that, it was the same yard: half grass, half mud, mostly all water now; the same porch in need of paint; and the same clapboard siding he’d intended to upgrade as long as he and JoAnne had been married. Same outbuildings, too; same worn boards on the porch; same linoleum in the kitchen; same tacky-looking brown shag in the den he demanded JoAnne help him into.

  But it was not the same. Maybe it was the clammy, unseasonable chill, or the light (something weird about the light); or the odd little things that had moved. A gun here (with a note from Aikin, saying he’d borrowed it); a pair of boots there that belonged to none of his clan. A cloak somewhere else that had nothing in common with any fabric he’d ever encountered. The scent of whatever Elyyoth smoked in that weird pipe he’d brought with him out of Faerie.

  Or maybe he was simply seeing it with observant eyes. Eyes that would drink it down and remember.

  “Beer’d be good,” he told JoAnne as she and Dale and Billy (who was stronger than JoAnne now) eased him down into the leather lounger they’d bought with some of the gold that turned up on the porch now and then. He didn’t add that whatever piece of his innards had been nicked when that stick went in had just split most of a seam and was now bleeding much more freely. It wasn’t a bad feeling, exactly; kinda like being filled up with warm water. But no way it portended anything good.

  Who’d’ve thought it, though? To have survived the ’Nam and all the shit that went with it, and then die from a poke in the back! And the thing was, no one would know what Dale had confided (that David had told the old man alone): that just as iron could eat away at the substance of Faerie, there were metals there that could do the same to the stuff this World was made of. The stake that had got him had been bound with some kind of greenish metal. It had broken; the metal had dissolved because of the iron in his blood. But suppose a sliver of that metal hadn’t dissolved, or dissolved more slowly, or reacted with mortal iron? And if it was a small enough piece, it might not show on X ray.

  Which didn’t really matter any more than it mattered that a .44 got you ’stead of a 30.06.

  What was important was the road he’d took to get here, and nobody but nobody, and certainly not his wonderful, strange, frustrating older boy, would ever be able to say he hadn’t done his best. Whatever happened tonight, Big Billy Sullivan had gone down fighting.

  It didn’t even hurt much, though he was really tired and kind of thirsty and wished JoAnne would get back with that beer. In the meantime, he wondered if that ongoing wailing didn’t sound like “Amazing Grace.”

  Chapter XX: The Darkest Hour

  (Lookout Rock, Georgia—Monday, June 30—past midnight)

  Sound called David back to consciousness.

  He’d heard the Horn of Annwyn once: that which summoned white hounds with red ears to appear from some place that was not of Faerie to devour both the body and the soul of whatever they were set upon. It had been on this very ledge, when he, Liz, Alec, Nuada, and a bunch of Faeries he hadn’t heard from since had blundered from that same hidden Track that lay behind the waterfall straight into the clutches of Ailill and his half-mad sister. That horn had saved his life then, but he wouldn’t have said the sound was sweet.

  The horn Aikin had just winded, however—perhaps it was merely the fact that it was the first thing that registered clearly after he’d roused from some kind of blackout, but he doubted he’d ever hear anything so beautiful again: high and pure and clear, as though all music were distilled into that one note.

  The air trembled. The hiss of rain and the mumble of the waterfall vanished, as though the
y likewise hearkened to that sound. The Faery warriors wading thigh-deep through a pool full of blood and floating bodies stopped where they were as well.

  Which proved their undoing.

  For the barest instant, the pool glowed silver as though lit from beneath, then erupted around those gaping warriors: water first, followed by solid shapes—two, three, five—each with a lion’s body and the head and front talons of an eagle. Three had wings, two did not, though light pulsed from junctures in furred body armor.

  “Gryphons!” David gasped as he shrank back in dread and awe. Horn or no, the way things had gone tonight it was no given that anything from there that showed up unexpectedly could be presumed an ally. And maybe these beasts weren’t. But the first to emerge—one of the big males—dragged a talon along the chest of a Faery who might’ve moved to block his way, ripping him open for his trouble. The warrior died screaming through a torn-out throat, courtesy of a second swipe. Might as well have died, anyway: the pain forced his soul from his body, which was as close as the Sidhe came to death when iron wasn’t involved. Unfortunately, he tumbled into David, sprawling him across the bulky mortal he’d seconds before crawled from underneath.

  From fighting for his life, David was jolted into playing spectator at what strongly resembled a Roman gladiatorial combat, save that none of the humans were Christian (and the mortals among them were apparently all dead), and most of the lions had wings. And of course there was the small fact that the carnage was taking place in a pool of mountain water.

  “Fuck!” Aikin gasped, staring at the horn as though it had bit him. “Did I do that?”

  David didn’t answer, concerned as he was with keeping one eye on the combat (which was obscured by vast plumes of red-tinged water amid which gryphons bit and tore, while Faery warriors had at them with swords, then hands, and finally, in one case, bloody stumps) and, more to the point, with getting his ass out of there.