“About that—” Mort said.
“I know,” I replied. “That’s the other reason I’m taking the path.”
“Know what?” Dawn asked, suspicious.
“The last time I took the fairy path, it bonded Alynon and me more tightly. But, well, I thought I was mutating, but I think maybe that was Alynon separating and I willed him back into me. If I do the opposite, if I will the separation to happen, I think it might actually succeed.”
*What?!* Alynon practically shouted. *I—wait. Where would I go?*
Most Fey spirits could not last very long in our world without being anchored to something physical.
If I’m right, then Grandfather will be opening a portal to the Silver Court at dawn. You will hopefully be able to reach it and go home.
“Hold your horse d’oeuvres,” Dawn said, her eyes narrowing. “If you separate from Alynon in the fairy path, and Alynon is what’s keeping you from going mad—”
“I’m hoping to time it so we separate at the end of the journey, right before I exit,” I said.
“Maybe you can take the car instead?” Dawn said. “And do this whole separation thing after you’ve had a little more time to work it out?”
I shook my head. “Whatever Grandfather has planned for Mattie, it involves necromancy. And I have a feeling we’re going to be outnumbered as is. They need me. She needs me, as soon as possible.”
“God damn you,” Dawn said, her eyes growing watery. “I love you, but I’m not sure I can handle this constant risk of losing you without taking up some seriously unhealthy drinking.”
“After this, hopefully I won’t have to risk my life anymore,” I said. “If we stop Grandfather, and Alynon is gone, it’s going to just be boring old me trying to figure out my life.”
“Fine. Then maybe I’ll start drinking unhealthily out of boredom. But at least I’ll have you around to pick me up off the bathroom floor.”
“You and your rock star life,” I said.
“Get used to it, baby,” she replied.
I took her hand, and stepped close, looking into her eyes. “I’d really like to.”
Mort groaned. Pete punched his arm.
I kissed Dawn. Except it was less a kiss, and more an exchange of promises through the touch of our lips, the give and take of gentle pressure and warm breath, and then the touching of our foreheads.
The honking of the hearse’s horn broke the moment.
I looked in the direction of the car. “I don’t suppose I can talk you into just heading home?” I asked.
Dawn arched one pierced eyebrow at me. “So, if you do have some control over the whole fairy path Monster Maker thing, rather than an extra limb maybe you can go for a third nipple, or, like, apple flavored genitalia?”
I coughed, and choked on my own spit as my face felt on fire and Pete and Vee made a show of looking anywhere but at me. When I could speak again, I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good,” Dawn said. “Just don’t screw up, you dork.”
“And don’t you make everyone look too bad by comparison.”
“Hey, I have no control over the awesome,” Dawn said. Then she grabbed Mort’s jacket sleeve and said, “Come on. Let’s go not get killed some more.”
I sighed as I watched her go.
“Finn,” Pete said. “Sammy’s not going to hurt Mort, is she?”
“No,” I said with as much confidence as I could. “Now come on, we have a Fey apocalypse to stop, Mattie to save, and an annoying spirit to be rid of.”
*Hey!*
I was talking about Grandfather. Mostly.
*La. Be that as it may, Finn, thank you. And I should say—and I mean this most sincerely—it is about damn time.*
“Silene, Sal,” I said. “Can you guide us to the Earth Sanctuary?”
“Yes,” Silene said. Gratefully she, at least, didn’t have any commentary to share on my decisions.
“Not without us, you ain’t,” a familiar voice said behind me. I turned to find Priapus and his small gang of loyal gnome captains marching up to join us. As promised, he had responded to his sigil placed under the gnome statue.
“Priapus!” I said. “I won’t lie, we can use all the help we can get. But, well—I think the Chaos Demesne is involved in this whole mess.”
“So?” Priapus said.
“So, we might be saving their butts from a double cross here, or this whole mess may be what they wanted all along. I don’t know which, and have no idea how they’d look at you helping us.”
“You think I give two humps of a hippogriff at this point?” Priapus asked. “Forget about it. Them Arcanite jergoffs are gonna bring the apocalypse, yeah?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Bada-boom. We’re gonna stop them. And when we do, you’ll owe us. These here Silverbrights will owe us. Hell, the whole friggin’ Bright Realm will owe us. And I figure that will come in real handy when it comes time to start taking back what’s mine, got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“Gnome,” Silene said. “Can you send word to my clan of where we go and why?”
Priapus frowned, but looked behind him, and said, “Yeah, I think that can be arranged. For, say, three quarters normal rate?”
“Are we not allies in this?” Silene asked.
“Sure, but allies don’t mean you get somethin’ for nothin’, honeytree.”
Sal growled. “Youself best to speak more carefully.”
“All right, all right,” Priapus said. “Don’t get all in a fluff there, Fist of Furry. Like the lady says, we’re allies and all. I’ll go ahead and do this one for half-rate, because I like you all. Joey the Hoey, get up here.”
The youngest-looking of the gnomes came up, carrying a long-handled hoe like a spear. “Yeah, boss?”
“Message for the Elwha Silvers camp. Lady there’ll give ya the words.”
While Silene gave Joey the message, I filled Priapus in on what we knew. Then Silene said, “This way.” She motioned for us to follow, and led us into the woods surrounding the Archon’s house. This was not the old and tangled growth of the Olympic National Forest, but a lighter kind of forest, the trees well spaced, the underbrush a low carpeting of ferns and moss. Crickets cricked and gnats gnatted at our passing, and a light breeze rustled the leaves and fronds, carrying the rich pine scent down to us.
A moment of peace, the calm before yet another storm. I took deep breaths, and worked through the mental exercises meant to calm my mind and focus my will. I prepared to turn that will against the man who had taught me to use it.
I suppose I should not have been surprised that Grandfather would use the Earth Sanctuary as the launch point of his attack.
The sanctuary was the work of one of the guys who’d been behind officially mapping the ley lines in Seattle. He’d arranged for hundreds of acres of property to be designated as a nature preserve, with a five-hundred-year plan to restore it to old growth habitat. And as part of that, he’d consulted with experts in spiritual energies and sacred spaces to install a number of symbolic and ritualistic structures, like the dolmen, and the standing stones. He wasn’t an arcana, or even Gedai, but the ARC had made sure to guide his work given the sensitivity of the area, and now took care to secretly patrol the area against Fey invasion or dark magical practices.
It was a place intended to help people connect with the spiritual side of nature and themselves. So of course my grandfather would use it as a weapon.
“Here,” Silene said as we approached two trees whose trunks grew together and merged, forming a low arch.
I felt a strong mental resistance as we approached it, like trying to press two opposing magnets together, or trying to win a political argument, or thinking of your parents having sex, compelling me to turn away, to forget its existence. But I focused on it with my arcana senses, and the resistance was replaced with a sense of nausea, like seasickness, as if space-time were gently rocking on waves of distortion.
&nbs
p; Petey stood behind me, with Vee before me, and put a hand on each of my shoulders. “Hold on to Vee,” he said. “We won’t let you get lost.”
“Bangarang.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll need you to signal me just before we exit.”
“I’ll pat you,” Pete said, and slapped my shoulder twice.
I nodded, and we walked forward into that tree arch in a single line.
The forest vanished, and suddenly I was squeezed through a tube of warped rainbow color and underwater sound. The world spun around me, and I didn’t so much walk along a path as move from one unexpected state of being to the next, all sense of up or down lost.
And as before, my body began to stretch and warp and change like the reality around us. A second head began to grow out of my chest like Kuato come to prophesize blue skies on Mars. The head developed Alynon’s features.
Rather than fight it as before, I tried to sense the boundaries between that which was me, and that which was Alynon, and to slow but not stop the separation of the two.
Then two pulses echoed from my shoulder.
Pete. The signal.
I focused, and … pushed. I gave birth to Alynon from my chest. And as I did, I began to lose the sense of myself. Did Pete grip my shoulder, or the edge of a cliff overlooking a rainbow ocean, or perhaps he held the end of a mountain chain where my head rose as a giant volcano at its center?
Reality began to unfold around me, revealing its true nature, like a million origami flowers blooming in geometric neon beauty, taking me deeper and deeper into their secrets, into dimensions and levels of perception beyond—
We emerged. Or at least, the wondrous beauty of the universe’s hidden code abruptly vanished, and my mind scrambled to readjust, to shrink back down to limited human perception and understanding. But none of the colors or sounds or sensations that blasted into my awareness made sense to me. It was like trying to experience the world through a kaleidoscope.
Was I convulsing, or was that the spin of the Earth jostling me around?
A bright light pierced my mind, then diffused and gently resolved itself into the yellow-green glow of sunlight through leaves. It faded, and I realized I lay on the ground, my eyes closed, someone holding my head.
I opened my eyes and saw that we were in a forest again, in a small clearing with the night sky and bright stars overhead.
Pete held my head in his lap, and Silene stood over me, one finger pressed to my forehead.
“Finn?” Pete asked anxiously.
“I—I’m okay,” I said, and sat up. I could see the shimmer of a pond ahead of me, a little ways downhill from us, and frog song filled the night air.
Aly, you there?
No response. And no sense that he was holding back one, either. It was … strange, after all this time.
Then I spotted him, floating around the edge of the clearing, where the gnomes had fanned out to guard the perimeter. Alynon looked like his Ziggy Prince self, but made of dry ice, semi-transparent with misty wisps evaporating off of him as he slowly lost the energy holding him together.
He put his hands together and gave me a regal nod of his head in thanks. Somehow, he made even that gesture feel sarcastic.
I sighed, then gave a courtly flourish of my hand and nod of my head in response.
Pete frowned from me to where I was looking, and said, “I think maybe you need more healing.”
I realized then that the others couldn’t see Alynon. Not surprising if he were a human spirit, but surprising since he was a Fey spirit. “I’m fine,” I said. “Alynon is free, and floating over there.” I waved in his direction.
While the others tried to spot Alynon, I eased myself to my feet. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Earth Sanctuary,” Silene said. “Sal is scouting our enemy.”
Sal stepped out of the tree line as if summoned, his red-brown fur resolving itself out of the mottled colors of the forest. “Dolmen is yon direction,” he said. “Path leads from it to where badbright mages are gathered. Iself could not tell if a portal is opened.”
I felt for magical resonance in the direction Sal pointed, and could just sense something like a buzzing on the edge of hearing.
“I think it is, or they’re in the process of forcing one open.”
Alynon waved farewell, then flew in the direction of the portal.
“Let’s go get Mattie,” I said.
We moved quietly through the woods in the direction of the dolmen. Or at least, everyone else moved quietly, while I snapped branches and made “Oof!” sounds with each sudden hole or dip discovered in the uneven ground of thick grass and bracken.
Then we reached the tree line, and I saw the dolmen on a slight rise, a cube of stone slabs about the size of a low-roofed closet. And staring out from a window-like gap in the stones was Mattie, her expression terrified, her green-and-blue hair a wild mess.
I reached out with my arcana senses, and could feel the tingling of magic between my eyes. “I’m guessing it’s trapped,” I whispered.
But Pete already strode toward the dolmen.
“Pete, wait!” I ran to catch up with him. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Help me, please!” Mattie said, her voice trembling with fear.
“I’m not leaving her in there!” Pete said. “I can heal fast.”
“Not from death,” I said. “Mattie, just hang on. We’ll get you out of there.”
“Hurry, please!” Mattie said. “This place, it hurts!”
“I help,” a gravelly voice said behind us. I turned in surprise to find Borghild, Dunngo’s sister, rolling on a mound of dirt across the path toward us, her obsidian eyes fixed on me.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked.
“Steading,” she said, her voice echoing out of the opening that formed in her stone face. “Gnome bring word.”
“Borghild,” Silene said. “You should not have come. What if the Shadows attack our home?”
“I come make sure badbright mage no destroy other brightspirit.”
I knew she meant me, not Grandfather.
Borghild rode her wave of dirt up to the edge of the dolmen hill, and studied it for a second, then appeared to shrink.
No, not shrink, but sink. She disappeared into the ground, leaving a tunnel sloping into the earth. After a minute, Mattie exclaimed, and looked down. A second later, she dropped from sight. I heard noise in the tunnel, and countless anxious heartbeats later Borghild came rushing out.
“Is trap!” the dwarf shouted, just before the earth behind her exploded outwards pelting us with bits of dirt and grass and chunks of Borghild, her still-living head spinning off into the forest trailing an angry shout. As earth elementals, Dwarves were notoriously hard to kill as long as any large chunk of them remained intact to hold their spirit. But any concern for Borghild I might have had was quickly pushed aside.
Mattie appeared. Except where her legs should be, something else burrowed up out of the earth, some dark machinelike form on top of which Mattie waggled like a hand puppet.
“That was very clever,” the Mattie puppet said, and straightened to look at us. “You avoided all the traps the Master set on the dolmen. All except one.”
And then Mattie disintegrated, revealing the horror beneath.
33
RUSTY CAGE
“Oh shi—” I said, then scrambled back as Mattie’s skin cracked and flaked away, and what was beneath impossibly unfolded itself like Wilt Chamberlain climbing out of an airplane seat in coach. It rose up, a massive armored body of rusted iron and tarnished brass, seven feet tall at least, like a four-armed ogre sculpted by a mad welder as the stage prop for a death metal band.
An autozombaton. Oh gods.
“Gnomes!” Priapus shouted. “Form up!”
I chose to Run Away, the excellent advice of Python’s King Arthur, and any martial arts instructor worth their salt when retreat is an option. I turned and ran past the gnomes as they formed into a wedge shape behind Priapu
s. It would have been suicide for me to stand toe-to-toe with that creature.
I stopped when I reached Pete and the others, now hopefully out of easy striking range, and turned to face our enemy just as Priapus raised his deadly little sickle and shouted something in gnomish. Vines twisted up around the creature, and its plodding march toward us halted.
I knew that would not last.
“Fate protect us,” I whispered.
These horrific automatons had been banned since the Fey-Arcana War of the Civil War era that spawned them, for much the same reason civilized countries tried banning chemical weapons, human cloning, or tabloid journalism—the cost to our humanity was just too great.
How they came to exist in the first place had been a series of desperate solutions to problems that should have been dropped into a dark hole and forgotten to begin with.
First, you have to understand that zombies tend to move slower than a frozen slug past a traffic cop, and are dumber than a Biff Tannen book report. Part of that is that their brains and bodies are rotting away of course, and part of it is that they lack a real spirit to give them true will. Zombies are just meat puppets animated with life force stolen from other living beings. Which is why, even in the most desperate times of war when the ban on dark necromancy and zombies had been given a blind eye, there were no zombie armies, and certainly no zombie apocalypse. All you had to do to escape a zombie was be able to move. At all. And failing that, just hit them hard—rotting corpses tended to fall apart pretty easily.
Then it was discovered that, for some weird reason, the slowness problem goes away when you re-animate a hardcore bigot.
Before banning experimentation on arcana prisoners, researchers learned that some people were severely lacking in will, the force that not only helps us get up in the morning but allows us to make the difficult choices and changes. These people were instead partly animated by a kind of small nuclear power source in their lizard brain, as if a small bit of their spirit had been mutated by the primitive, unreasoning emotional energy there: a kind of spiritual cancer. Nobody truly understood how or why it happened, but on further research it was found that all of these people were serious, scary bigots in some way.
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