Spirits White as Lightning

by Mercedes Lackey

  Urla had brought Eric here—to what Eric thought of as the Blind Lands—when he was bringing Eric to Aerune. There was a Gate directly into Aerune's domain from here.

  Somewhere.

  "I get the feeling it isn't a good idea to linger here," Ria said, summoning her own light. Etienne was fidgeting wildly under her, and Eric could tell that Lady Day was equally spooked. The black elvensteed pulled and fretted against Kayla's grip on her reins.

  "Me neither," Eric said. "But I don't want to end up right in Aerune's lap, either. I've been here before. The Gate here leads directly into Aerune's domain."

  "Does it lead anywhere else?" It was Toni who asked the question. Eric's eyes widened in surprise as he looked at her. The sword in her hand was glowing brighter than the elf-light, the blade as fiery as a bar of burning phosphorus.

  "We'll have to find it to tell."

  A tremor suddenly shook the ground, as if something heavy—many somethings—ran hard nearby, but even with the elf-light, Eric could see nothing. The two elvensteeds trembled like mad things, eyes rolling and coats dripping with foam, but stood their ground.

  Turn back, look for another direction? They could wander Underhill for years and miles and come no closer to Aerune's domain than this—and Jeanette had said that most of the pathways to the Goblin Tower led through worse places.

  "We need to get out of here," Paul said, his voice tight. He gestured at Kayla. The young Healer stood, staring around her with eyes wide and terrified. Her fists were clenched at her sides, and her whole body was rigid.

  "Everything's afraid," she said in a small voice.

  As if her words had shaped the thing itself, Eric could suddenly feel the fear pressing in around him, waiting only a kindling spark of their own terror to fill them all with panic. Urla must have had some sort of safe-conduct, to bring him through here unscathed before. The seven of them had nothing.

  And Hosea began to play.

  The banjo's notes sounded flat, almost muffled. For a moment Eric thought he'd stop, but the novice Bard persisted, playing grimly, almost doggedly. A moment later he began to sing. " `You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile—You mustn't leave a fiddle in the damp—' "

  The sense of panic drew back, as if affronted.

  When all else fails, try Kipling. It was "The Song of the Banjo," set to a tune of Hosea's own creation, one as impudent and saucy as its bragging words. Hosea strode forward, moving as easily and certainly as if he knew precisely where he was going. Only Eric saw the strain and concentration on the big man's face, the effort it took to keep his own fear out of his voice and the music.

  The chorus came round, and now Ria joined in, her voice soaring bell-like over Hosea's rumbling baritone. Eric joined her, his clear tenor soaring and twining with the other two as though they'd rehearsed for months. Whether by accident, or good guess, Hosea was moving in the direction of the next Gate; Eric walked back to Lady Day and swung up into her saddle. The elvensteed was quieter now, though she still trembled.

  Paul handed Kayla up to Eric. She held on tight, and he could feel the shudders that racked her body, but she took a deep breath and added her voice to the others. Eric dug the flute from his gig bag and began to play, the flute weaving its silvery counterpoint into the banjo's sparkling melody as the black mare trotted after Hosea. The music seemed to form a bubble of protection in which they could move safely through the mad blind terror that surrounded them.

  They did not dare stop singing. It did not matter that between the light and the music they were attracting the attention of anything within ten miles. It was one of Kipling's longer poems, and Hosea knew every word, but he'd reach the end eventually, and the music they made was the only thing that would keep the Blind Lands' utter despair at bay long enough for them to cross it alive.

  The song ended. It was Ria, surprisingly, who saved them then.

  "Oh, what do you do with a drunken sailor—" The chantey had dozens of verses, and new ones were easy to make up on the fly. Eric sighed with relief. They could keep this one up for hours—and he had, on occasion.

  And so they arrived singing at an enormous henge whose black stones were the size of city buses. Eric dismounted, handing Kayla Lady Day's reins, and advanced upon the Gate.

  Only two destinations were coded, the other four left blank, their buttons dark and lifeless. As he touched each of them, an image of the place formed in Eric's mind. One led to Aerune's domain. The other probably led someplace worse—he jerked his fingers back with a gasp, heart hammering, with a confused impression of an arctic wasteland filling his mind. They wouldn't last ten minutes there. The weather alone would kill them.

  One or the other, and both choices bad. But Eric was a Bard, and there were four unused destinations available. With skill, and luck, he could make the Gate take them where he chose.

  Only he'd have to withdraw his magic from protecting the others to do it.

  He had no choice.

  He reached out and touched the Gate itself. The stone was as cold as dry ice beneath his fingertips, burning painfully. This must be what Kory, what any of the Sidhe, felt when they touched Cold Iron. He imagined blisters welling up, bursting, the blood freezing as it oozed over this cold burning.

  He shut out the pain, reaching into the stone with his magic. Its music was dark, unsettling, sliding off-key in a jangle of minor chords before settling into a new mode for a few seconds. He could feel a dim slumbering mind deep within the stone, passive yet malevolent. An echo of the magic that had formed it. He fought to control the shifting chords he heard in his mind, to make sense of them.

  Here.

  Yes, here was Aerune's domain. The shape and sense of it filled his mind in a wordless knowing impossible to explain. But that wasn't where he wanted to go. Near it, yes, but outside. Just outside, into the unclaimed Chaos Lands where every stray thought could become real. Had he warned the others about that? Could any warning be enough?

  He forced himself to concentrate. To shape the sense of his destination was like transposing music into a different key, adapting a known melody to the needs of an entirely different instrument. With the way into Aerune's domain to guide him, he changed, edited, added, and at last produced what he could only hope was a viable direction.

  He opened his eyes, not remembering when he'd closed them, and saw that now three, not two, destinations were marked with a cool blue-green fire on the Gate's surface. How long had he been entranced? His Bard's silks were drenched in sweat, and every muscle ached. He withdrew his hand from the stone, feeling a pang of relief that the skin was whole and unburned. Had the pain been only an illusion? Or would the damage have become reality if he'd failed?

  Ria's elf-light and the two Guardians' swords were their only source of light here in the Blind Lands. The singing sounded ragged—they'd moved on to a startlingly bawdy ballad, of which only Ria seemed to know all the words. Hosea's playing sparkled with metronomic precision, but Eric could sense the other Bard's weariness at the unfamiliar exertion.

  Wonderful. We're all exhausted before we start. Great tactics, Banyon.

  But there'd been no other way. They couldn't Gate directly to their destination, and they couldn't drive there either—or ride. This was the best they could do. Maybe they could win a breathing space before Aerune noticed them. God, I sure hope so. He won't even break a sweat if he takes us on while we're in this condition.

  But to delay here a moment longer than they absolutely had to would be fatal, with only their magic to protect them from the baleful influence of this realm. Eric took a deep breath and keyed the Gate to the destination he'd chosen. The opening shivered and went white. The glare made his eyes water after so long in the Blind Lands. He waved the others forward.

  SIXTEEN:

  WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE

  "So where are we now?" Toni wanted to know, resting her longsword point first against the ground and leaning upon its quillons. She took a deep breath of relief, seeming to regain
more strength with each passing moment.

  Everything around them was grayish-white and misty, with the flat even illumination of indirect lighting, or of sunlight on a very cloudy day. Even the ground beneath their feet was colorless and springy, as if it were made of modeling clay.

  Hosea stopped playing, and the banjo's silver strings whispered to silence. He rubbed his fingers, grinning at Eric reassuringly.

  Eric grinned back—it had worked! They were all here, all safe—or as safe as you could be in the Chaos Lands. And they could find another way home.

  "We're . . . exactly nowhere," he said in answer to Toni's question. She made a face. "No, seriously. This is what Underhill looks like when nobody decides to impose their own reality on it. They call it the Chaos Lands."

  "Which means that nobody here better think too hard," Ria said, "because whatever you think about is likely to come walking out of that mist and bite you."

  "We're shielded, of course," Paul said. "I'd say that being here is pretty similar to casting a spell—the magician had better keep a tight rein on his intention. But that may make it a little hard for Aerune to find us when the time is right."

  "Oh, he'll find us," Ria said darkly.

  "I don't think Aerune will notice us until we make him," Eric said hopefully. "Let's take a breather. Is everyone okay?"

  The others nodded. The Guardians looked shaken, but not as worn down by their ordeal as Eric had feared. José was his usual imperturbable self, Paul looked like a cat with a new toy, and Hosea and Toni were looking better by the minute. Even Kayla managed a grin and an impudent thumbs-up when he looked at her. She reached down to pat Lady Day's neck, and the black elvensteed shook herself and tossed her head, making the silver bells on her tack jingle.

  I wonder why she chose to be black for this trip? Eric thought. The question wasn't an idle one. Elvensteeds could look like anything they chose and Lady Day usually had a reason for choosing to be a particular color or shape.

  "Everything's just ginger-peachy," Kayla said sardonically, swinging a leg over Lady Day's back and dropping to the ground. "Sheesh! And I thought L.A. had some bad neighborhoods."

  "Jeanette says there're worse ones here. Much worse," Hosea said.

  "I don't want to go there," Kayla answered simply.

  Ria dismounted from Etienne, patting the elvensteed on the neck. The white mare was ghostly, almost insubstantial, in the formlessness of the Chaos Lands. It was good camouflage. She nuzzled her mistress as Ria reached into one of the saddlebags and pulled out a two-quart hiker's canteen.

  "Water, anyone?" she asked, passing the canteen to Kayla.

  The teenager twisted off the cap and drank thirstily, passing the canteen to Hosea. "Good job with the tunes, stud," she said.

  Hosea actually blushed, pulling out a bandanna to wipe his face. "It wasn't anything more than a bit of plinking. If I thought this Aerune'd answer to that kind of medicine, the rest of you could have stayed home."

  "So what do we do now?" José asked, looking from Toni to Eric.

  Eric reached into the bottom of his gig bag for the little wooden box. He opened it and took out the maze-seed. Its magic buzzed in his hand like a trapped honeybee, stronger now that it was back in the world it had been made for. All they had to do now was get Aerune here and trap him inside.

  "We call him," Eric said grimly. "And then we lock him up forever."

  * * *

  Aerune mac Audelaine, born to the Bright Court, later called among mortalkind the Lord of Death and Pain, sat in his dark throne room in the heart of the Goblin Tower, contemplating his own thoughts.

  The encounter with the upstart Bard should have been more satisfying. Certainly it had been an elegant insult to gift him with Aerune's mortal hellhound, knowing that her dying would wound the soft-hearted mortal far more than the loss of her would inconvenience Aerune. But there was something about the whole matter that left Aerune feeling vaguely unsettled, as if he had made some unfortunate mistake.

  But there had been no mistake. The hound's death was meaningless and completely inevitable, once he had lifted the spell of timelessness that kept her alive in mortal lands. She had never been more than a diversion for Aerune, her real worth lying in his ability to withhold her skills from his foes. It was true that he had so far forgotten himself to boast of his plans to the mortals, but again, there was no loss to him in doing so. Though the conspiracy was small and inconsequential now, what he had set in motion in the World of Iron would thrive—with his help—until it had consumed humanity utterly. Aerune was an excellent judge of men, and he had chosen Parker Wheatley well. The man's ambition and self-hatred would lead him to follow Aerune's plans blindly, unable to see anything beyond his own immediate advantage. The simple toys with which Aerune had provided Wheatley had helped to befool him—artifacts from an Underhill realm where the memory of magic lost had caused the inhabitants to craft ever more subtle engines to counterfeit its actions. As the first small blemish upon the apple presages the destruction of the entire fruit, so did Wheatley's first faltering acts herald humanity's doom—a war against the Underhill realms which would cause the Sidhe, both Bright Court and Dark, to rise up and destroy the World Above.

  No, all went forward as it should—but in that case, wherein lay his unease? No enemy raised its banners before his gates, nor sought to gain entry into his realm by treachery.

  But there was something . . . something well-known to the point of invisibility, that teased his ethereal senses with its elusive familiarity.

  From the magic that surrounded him, Aerune formed a familiar, a part of himself in the shape of a great black bird, and sent it forth to search. It soared over the bone-wood, finding nothing, and he sent it through his Gate to the Chaos Lands beyond, searching.

  There!

  The hound. His hound. His toy and victim, here—Underhill—and alive!

  Infuriated by the insult, Aerune sought no further. He strode from his throne room in a black fury, shouting for his horse and his hounds. He would reclaim her, whip her to his kennels, and make her beg for the death he would forever deny her.

  * * *

  The first hint they had of disaster was when the landscape around them began to darken. The mist boiled away to emptiness at the touch of another's mind.

  :Trouble . . . : whispered the banjo. :He's coming.:

  There was no need to ask who.

  The Guardians formed a circle around Kayla, facing outward. Ria and Eric stood outside it, preparing to take the first assault. Eric heard a crashing major chord—someone opening a Portal—and then Aerune was there, astride his black stallion. Giant black dogs crouched at his horse's feet, and behind him, changing and nebulous as fog, rode the hosts of the damned, called from nothingness by the power of Aerune's will.

  "Fascinating," Paul said. There was a hiss as he pulled his blade free of the sword cane. "A classical Northern European Wild Hunt."

  Aerune glanced at him, eyes blazing red, but Paul did not hold his interest. Toni did. The Latina Guardian held her sword in her left hand as she crossed herself, her lips moving in soundless prayer.

  "So . . . you would use your iron nails to slay Faerie?" Aerune growled. "Die as all who have set the White Christ's magic against me have died!"

  Eric was barely fast enough to shield Toni from Aerune's first attack—crash of major chords, high skirl of a piccolo, deep booming of a chorus of horns—but somehow he couldn't draw Aerune's attention to him no matter what he did. Something about Toni infuriated Aerune to the point of recklessness. He concentrated his fury upon her, and she barely held her own, though her blade glowed so brightly that Eric couldn't even look in her direction. He had problems of his own, though—the shadowy creatures that rode with Aerune—monsters and damned souls all, if the legends held any truth—were spreading out to encircle them. He moved forward, searching for an opening, his fingers clutched around the maze-seed, raising it up and—

  —rubbing the smoothing stone gent
ly along the shaft of the bone flute.

  The afternoon sun was warm against his back as he squatted here in the clearing in the center of the crescent of turf huts that made up the village of his people, and from time to time he would stop, holding his work up to the light so he could judge his progress. Once he had scraped the bone smooth it would be time to drill the holes along its length with a sharp deer-horn drill, then polish it again with fine sand and deer hide until it was as smooth as river-tumbled stone, then rub it with beeswax until the bone turned a translucent gold. When he was but an apprentice Bard, his teacher had told him it was important to make the bone as thin as possible so that the sound would be pure, and he had always remembered that. Only the very best was worthy to be offered up to the Bright Lady Aerete, source of all Bardcraft and magic.

  Eric frowned, his thoughts elsewhere. They would need their best if they were to win their next battle with the Eastmen, who had come to the Isle of the Blessed in their wooden boats to kill and enslave the Folk, armed with weapons of the gray metal that broke stone and bronze as if they were nothing more than rotted wood.

  But they would win. Eric was a Bard of a Hundred Songs, blessed by the Lady herself, and his apprentice, whose instrument was the harp, had already learned his spells and genealogies, and had made a good start on learning the songs which contained all the wisdom of the Folk. In the doorway of their hut he could see Hosea putting fine new strings of deer gut upon his bride-harp, whose white body was carved from the shoulder of a black bull which had been slain at the start of the Dark Year. His songs could soothe the sick and ailing, ease a wounded soul's transition to the Summer Lands.

  Reluctantly, Eric set aside his work, wrapping it tightly in a painted doeskin to keep it safe. He could not spend as much time as he wished here. It was time to go among the wounded once more, to add his magic to the Healers' craft. Too many of their village's warriors lay wounded, kissed by the deathmetal of the Eastmen despite all the protection spells Eric had laid upon them.