Sunshaker's War

by Tom Deitz

  “And this is another, right?”

  “Right. Heart says you don’t wanta, says you’re scared, and with good reason. Head says you oughta, says you can do it if you try, says you can always stand one more thing.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You can stand anything, Calvin—long as you know for how long.”

  “Your philosophy?”

  He shook his head. “Myra Jane Buchanan. You know, Runnerman’s sis?”

  “Good lookin’ blonde in the picture on his dresser?”

  “Calvin!”

  “Right.” He frowned then, fell silent, stared at the ground a long time. Finally he looked back up at David. “I’ll do it,” he said. “If I didn’t, and things go wrong, I’ll always wonder if they’d have gone better if I’d done something else. This way I won’t have to worry.”

  David rose, embraced him impulsively. “Good man.” Calvin shrugged. “Yeah, well, I guess I decided you had a point, too. You go south and try to cover as much territory as you can. I go north and try to bring help. That way we’re both workin’ on different facets of the problem, and one or the other of us is more likely to have some luck. So…when do I fly?”

  “How ’bout as soon as we’ve choked down this blessed broth. Probably need your help to feed Finno anyway.”

  Calvin’s grin was almost rival to the sun. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

  *

  The broth was awful, thin and weak, but with Calvin’s help David managed to get a fair bit of it where it would do the most good: inside their Faery friend. David tried once or twice to wake the boy, but had no luck.

  An hour passed, maybe, though it was still long before noon, but David was starting to get antsy. He put out the fire, started gathering gear. “You ready, Fargo? I mean it’s not like I’m tryin’ to get rid of you or anything, but we probably really do need to get goin’.”

  Another shrug. “No, I’m not ready—but I never will be. Any messages for old Mister Darkthunder?”

  “Yeah,” David replied. “Tell him I said, help!”

  “Will do,” Calvin replied, and started stripping.

  He fell silent then, and David could tell he was psyching. Calvin had reclaimed his scale necklace sometime before, and was now wearing it around his neck. He turned and mounted the boulder behind him, stood clear in open air.

  “Good luck…Edahi,” David whispered.

  “Good luck to you too, Sikwa Unega.”

  And with that Calvin closed his eyes and clamped his fist hard on the scale.

  David did not watch; something told him he did not want to see. But he saw the Indian’s shadow, saw it spread and twist, and change. Not until he heard the harsh, shrill cry did he dare look again.

  He wasn’t certain what kind of bird Calvin had become, except that it was some kind of raptor. But he’d have bet anything it was fast. Probably a peregrine falcon.

  “Take care,” David called—and then the falcon flapped its wings and was rising into the sky. It circled twice, and turned north. David was once more alone.

  He gathered up his meager gear, and knelt beside Fionchadd (who had stopped moaning once he was fed). “Come on, Finno,” he sighed. “Best we travel.”

  Fionchadd’s eyes suddenly popped open. “No,” he said. “I think we ought to fly too.”

  Chapter XXIV: Wooden Ships

  (Orton Carlton State Park, Georgia—Monday, June 16—evening)

  Somewhere around sunset Alec McLean stared down at his hands and realized they were no longer hurting. Oh, they were still chained together, of course, but the awful, burning pain was gone. He breathed a sigh of relief—and immediately regretted it, fearful one of the guards might hear him and investigate. He didn’t know what they knew, but he certainly didn’t want to have to answer any awkward questions—not when he hardly dared believe how the healing had been accomplished himself.

  It had all been blind good luck. He’d spent most of the time since their capture combating pain, trying to conserve energy, and attempting to think, none of which worked very well. At some point he’d faded out entirely, only to come to again about the time that Y’Alvar fellow flew in and started going on about fleets, and ships, and rendezvous, and stuff.

  And then they’d started talking about the ulunsuti.

  They’d got it out, naturally, passed it around, examined it from every angle, poked it and prodded it and tried to scratch it with knives. It was magic, they all agreed, but of a kind they did not know. It would make a fine curiosity for Finvarra, might even get them off the hook for the loss of the prisoner.

  Eventually, though, they’d tired of trying to figure out how to work it and put it aside.

  And then had begun Alec’s good fortune. They had not heeded precaution, had not returned it to its deerskin pouch or the pottery jar. Rather, Y’Alvar had simply stuffed it back in one of the packs—and left the flap open so that Alec had a clear view of most of it.

  Now being the rational sort that he was, Alec had not intended to try any magic just then; his mind simply did not work in a way that considered that a prime option. But he nevertheless found his eye constantly drawn back to the ulunsuti. And as the sunlight waned, the desire to stare at it became ever more compulsive. Perhaps it was the way it had of gathering light—almost attracting it, so that as evening gloomed the land, the crystal continued to grow brighter. In any event, he soon could not tear his eyes away from it. It seemed to be trying to tell him something, too, but every time he thought he understood the vague tickling in his mind, his hands would throb again and he’d get distracted. Eventually he’d gotten so frustrated that the passive desire for relief became an active obsession.

  And with that, the pain began to vanish. That was all it took: desire focused on the ulunsuti by its master. The more Alec wished the pain away, the faster it fled. Eventually he gained a fair bit of control. It helped to be quite specific, he found: concentrate on this joint of this finger, then the next, and so on. It took nearly an hour, but eventually he was healed.

  He was just trying to figure out some way to indicate this to Liz when the ship arrived.

  The sight fair took Alec’s breath away. One moment there was clear sky to the southeast, its eastern fringe still fading scarlet between the tree trunks, but its higher reaches already a glorious midnight blue quickly awakening with stars. The next instant there was a spark of silver that he first thought was a meteor, except that it continued to grow brighter—and larger—and clearer—as it flashed and glimmered in and out of sight, until a very short while later a ship hove into view in the air above their tiny clearing.

  Their captors rose as one, gathering possessions, straightening garments. An unintelligible order sent two striding toward him and Liz.

  But he was not looking, for he was too caught up in the wonder of the Faery vessel. It was silver, though whether that was metal, paint, or simply “glow,” he could not tell. In shape, it was long and slender and low of draft like a Viking ship. Like one of them, too, it had a dragon prow and a mast and sails. These last were a little strange, for they were black emblazoned with red eagles that did not quite fit the color scheme of the rest of the vessel. He supposed, though, that if it were a ship Finvarra had captured from Lugh, those might well be sails the captors had added. There were oars, too: ten at least to a side, all stirring empty air. As he watched, they ceased their action.

  Buzzing filled his head, making him blink and squint with a sensation that was not quite pain. It was an echo of the mind talk the Sidhe sometimes used among themselves, he knew. But he didn’t like it because this way, when it was not directed at him, it was sort of the mental equivalent of white noise, disrupting all other language processes, as if those parts of his brain that made sense out of speech were receiving two sets of inputs at once and producing gibberish.

  The upshot was that he was staring stupidly when Y’Alvar came up to him, gripped him under the shoulder, and with the aid of another guard simply rose wit
h him into the sky.

  He almost lost it at that, and would have cried out except that a sudden paralysis gripped his throat. More Faery magic, probably, but that didn’t stop the gag reflex—with the result that the first thing he did when he arrived aboard the beautiful silver airship was to toss his cookies all over the gleaming deck—and one of the guards.

  He got a forearm in his face for that, and a quick, if unpleasant, interface between the deck, his butt, and his elbows. But he also got a small twinge of satisfaction. He was just starting to gather himself up again when he saw Liz likewise levitated on board. She seemed to be behaving with better grace than he had, but her eyes, visible in the reflected glow of the twenty-odd torches that ringed the long narrow railing, were ablaze with indignation and fury.

  More voices buzzed in his head, hands hauled him up and brought him over to where Liz was standing. The chains went around their legs again, and another set joined them to the mast—closer than they’d been to the oak tree. Obviously the commander of this vessel did not want them roaming around.

  A final set of barked orders, a thrum through the hull, and they were moving.

  He saw the dragon prow come around, saw the constellations of Georgia summer slowly swing past it, and then they were pointing south and gathering speed. Speed, yes, but there was no sensation of movement. He only knew that the bits of landscape he could make out beyond the railing were sweeping by with unnatural haste. Yet the sails, though swollen, were not straining, and the torches did not seem to be aware of any wind.

  *

  The transition to Faery came suddenly. As soon as they were no longer over land, and thus no longer over mortal territories that overlapped Tir-Nan-Og, there was an abrupt, awful, twisting sensation; the world sort of turned in on itself; and suddenly they were sailing above the choppy seas of Faerie.

  Alec had never seen them before, and though he was scared, and pissed, and had the taste of stomach acid in his mouth, he nevertheless could not help but appreciate them. It was as if blue velvet had been overlaid with emerald green glass, and the whole sprinkled with dancing diamonds. The air was perfect: warm but soothing, with maybe the merest hint of some distant storm to give it passion; and there was a smell of both salt and cinnamon. A flock of seagulls was still quarrelling and protesting and insulting them from when the ship had emerged from nothing in their midst.

  And the sky: more velvet, but a different shade of blue, and without the glass—but with jewels that were the stars, all far brighter and with far more clarity of color than he had ever seen on the skies of earth. There was an aurora to the north, too; and now he looked more closely, both earth and sky were alive with the pale, golden glitter of Straight Tracks.

  With absolutely no warning, the deck tilted and he found himself flung shoulder-long into Liz. The impact jerked a grunt from her, and he felt the paralysis on this throat relax. “Liz,” he managed in a sort of half croak, half whisper.

  “Yeah,” she told him. Then: “Hey, I can talk again!”

  “Good thing, too, ’cause—”

  The deck tilted again, even more steeply, and the air filled with shouts. Some of the crew had already fallen overboard, but a fair number more were shifting shape and taking wing into the dark skies of the east. He and Liz seemed to have been forgotten.

  “Dana!” someone swore. “Ambush!”

  “It’s Lugh!”

  “Curse his luck forever!” That from another.

  “Lugh?” Alec shouted, glancing at Liz. They were almost on their side, keeling over on an ocean of air a hundred yards or more above the water. But this time when the ship jerked and twitched they could see what caused it.

  There was another vessel there—no, an endless file of them, all rowing in the empty air, while an even greater fleet darkened the seas below it. Alec wondered that he had not seen them before, but then he had no more time for thought because a light blazed out from that first ship and arrowed straight toward them. It caught the sail above them and set it aflame. A second bolt wrapped the dragon-prow with fire.

  The third blast of flame struck the hull even with the mast—which meant it was even with them. Alec felt it lick at him, heard Liz’s scream, even as he surpassed it with his own, which was born both of surprise and his new dread of fire. He felt his eyebrows crisped away and caught the stench of burning hair. This was it then: Mama McLean’s only boy, would-be rocket scientist, hacker extraordinaire, was gonna buy it by being cooked alive in a flying boat over the seas of an unreal ocean. Poetic injustice for certain!

  A fourth bolt flowered where the other had, and with that, the boat tipped over.

  Alec closed his eyes and prayed. They were gonna die, were gonna die, were gonna die. From impact, from drowning, from flame, from monsters that lived in the sea.

  “Shiiiiiittttt!” he heard himself yell as he started to slide. They would have smashed into the railing, had they not been chained to the mast, but just as they were yanked up short, he heard a crack, saw one final bolt lance out from the fleet, and center the mast.

  It shattered, blasting them with shrapnel. They were upside down now, hanging by the chains that wrapped their feet. Liz seemed to be unconscious, but then she’d been closer to the impact. He hoped that was all she was. He caught her awkwardly as she flopped into him again. If they went down, at least they’d do it together.

  And then something snapped and they were falling.

  Alec flailed out—felt—heard—air rushing past his ears, saw glittering blue darkness rushing up at him, and had only time to duck his head and grab one final breath before impact.

  Warm water enclosed him, and he found himself bulleting far down before friction slowed him and survival instincts took over. Something dragged against his arm, though: Liz—a dead weight there—maybe dead in the most literal sense. He hoped not, but then the need for air became uppermost, and he was swimming for all he was worth, fighting the pull of the water against his clothes, the stronger tug of the chains, the fire in his lungs as he made them wait a little longer.

  Abruptly he broke surface, almost brained himself on a bit of shimmering timber. He grabbed for it, slipped, grabbed another and held, managed to get Liz’s head out of the water. Good, she was still breathing. Water slapped into his mouth and he sputtered. “Liz?” he called softly. “Liz?”

  Her eyelids fluttered, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “Liz, oh thank God!”

  “Where are we?” she gasped between fits of coughing.

  “The ship crashed. I think Lugh ambushed it.”

  “Lugh!” she cried. “We’ve gotta get hold of him, gotta signal!”

  Alec felt his heart flip-flop, for that really was a good idea. But then he gazed skyward—and saw to his dismay the vast airy armada already almost out of sight to the east.

  “No!” Liz groaned hopelessly, and sagged against him, her eyes awash with tears.

  “But at least we’re still alive,” Alec tried to reassure her, though he took small comfort from the fact. “That’s more than a lot of these guys are.” He nodded at a corpse that was bobbing past—one of the yellow-booted guards. The Faery was floating face down. His tunic had been flamed away on one side, leaving his back and one arm exposed, and they were covered with blistered and crisped flesh. But the other hand—Alec could not believe his luck. The other hand still clutched the bag that held the ulunsuti.

  “Oh, Christ, Liz—I’ve gotta get that!” Alec cried, already starting to paddle toward it.

  The words were scarcely out of his mouth, though, before his elation faded. For even as his fingers brushed the tattered remains of the Faery’s cloak, the pouch slipped free and sank beneath the waves.

  “Damn!” Alec spat helplessly, his eyes also welling with tears. “Christ, it was so close! So goddamn close—and now we’re stuck here!” He sank back against the float, not caring whether he held on or not.

  Liz stared at him, her face suddenly hard. “Snap out of it, Alec! It’s gone, there’s not
hing you can do about it. We’ve got more important things to deal with now!”

  “Yeah, but it’s our way outta here. I’ve blown it!”

  “No you haven’t,” Liz told him sharply. “None of this is your fault.”

  “Yes it is,” he retorted. “It’s all my fault—from the moment I didn’t believe David when he told me about meeting the Sidhe. I—”

  “Well then do something about it!” Liz interrupted. “We’ve always gotten through these messes somehow, we’ll get through this one too! Use your famous brain to think, not feel sorry for yourself! Shoot—use the goddamn ulunsuti!”

  “It’s lost!”

  “Is it?” she asked suddenly. “It’s under water, but that’s not the same. If…we were in the desert and you’d seen it roll down a sand dune and out of sight, would that be lost? Besides, you’re its master—master it!”

  “But…” Alec began, and then his face brightened. Perhaps she had a point. “You’re right, Liz, maybe there is something I can do.”

  And with that he began fumbling with the mess of chain and broken mast. There was an angle of ragged metal there—one that kept poking him in the back, but maybe… The ulunsuti responded to blood, so it was just possible…

  He twisted around in the water, gulped a mouthful of the stuff, and brought the heel of his right hand against the brass projection. Once, twice, and he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, and slashed his hand across it really hard—and felt a warm trickle of blood. This was it then—the experiment to end all experiments. He closed his eyes, tried to envision the ulunsuti somewhere at the bottom of the sea, then tried to imagine his blood wending its way there—and tried not to think about sharks and such like.

  A deep breath, and he began his call: Come…come… Over and over, endlessly repeated, while he tried to think only of one thing: the ulunsuti on the bottom of the sea, slowly absorbing his blood, wakening to it with that bright light it held—responding!

  He never knew how to describe it afterwards, but he somehow became aware that he had connected. Come…come…he continued his litany.