by Tom Deitz
Calvin grimaced helplessly. “There was no easy way to tell you.”
“Smart, though,” LaWanda mused. “He don’t have to hurt nobody, and he gets his way without either revealin’ himself directly or raisin’ questions that could lead to him by a crooked path.”
“It really is a backup plan, too,” Calvin emphasized. “I think.”
“So much for that council,” David groaned. “I knew it was too good to be true.”
“No,” Myra countered. “It was sincere. I don’t know how I know that, but…it just felt right. Any good leader’s gonna have contingencies, though, and Lugh’s had centuries to plot and plan. Christ, he’s probably had millennia. This is no different. He’s given us time—basically a burning fuse, I guess it is now. But it really is clever—and I’m sure, based on what I’ve heard, that he can not only do what he says, but has figured out a way to make it seem like a natural occurrence—natural as we define it in the Lands of Men, anyway.”
“So the Cove gets flooded,” David spat. “And Lugh gets to keep his palace and his crown.”
“Was there any doubt about the latter?” Alec snorted.
David shrugged. “Maybe. Just a guess, but my feelin’ is that Lugh’s throne isn’t as secure as he’d like us to think it is. For one thing, where were the other Sidhe? Just Nuada and Finno—unless those other folks were bogus too, and set up for our benefit: shapeshifted Sidhe or plain old illusions, maybe.”
“But not Finno,” Alec pointed out. “Or if that wasn’t him, it was someone enough like him to activate the Track.”
“And violate the Ban,” Liz appended. “Which means that whoever summoned us was acting on Lugh’s orders.”
“So we distrust Finno too?” Alec sighed. “Great! So, who can we trust?”
“Nobody,” David muttered. “Nobody here, except—well, maybe just nobody.” He paused thoughtfully. “One thing I can do when we get home—assumin’ we do—is to call John Devlin—that guy in the corner with the glove on his left hand, for those of you who don’t know him. I don’t know Dev real well myself, though I’ve been up to his place one time and we’ve talked a bunch. But I can phone him, and if he was actually here tonight, I’m pretty sure he’d tell me.”
“Unless he’s been one of theirs all along,” Alec cautioned.
David was already formulating a reply when he froze. “God, you’re right!” he gasped. “We really can’t trust anybody. Shoot, since I didn’t see most of you guys until you showed up today, I’m not even sure I can trust all of you!”
“We could check,” Alec ventured. “We could all hold something iron.”
David shook his head. “Wouldn’t help. We could be human and ensorceled; God knows the Sidhe don’t have any qualms about fuckin’ with our minds. Or we could be Faeries in human substance, which lets ’em touch iron.”
All at once LaWanda chuckled, then laughed out loud. “Conspiracy theory,” she chortled. “That’s what this sounds like: the world’s ultimate kick-ass conspiracy theory!”
“Which doesn’t change one thing,” David replied. “There’s still at least an even chance that two weeks from now, if we’re lucky and it takes that long, the place I grew up in, where my folks and my favorite uncle and my kid brother live, will be underwater. I’ve gotta stop that. And there’s only two ways to do that: stop Lugh, which I can’t imagine doin’, or stop the resort from bein’ built, which I can barely imagine doin’.”
“I dunno, Davy,” Liz began, but at that exact moment a firm knock sounded on the door. An image promptly formed in his mind. Nuada.
“Bad time for company,” David grumbled. “But I reckon we’d better answer it.” Without waiting for reply, he rose and padded toward the door. It was unbolted. He pulled it aside. And sure enough, the figure on the threshold was Lugh’s second-in-command. The Faery’s face was hard and grim. Unreadable. But his eyes spoke eloquently of anger: flashing like summer lightning.
Yet Nuada made no move to enter. “It would be good if you let me in,” he said, in a voice like low, rolling thunder. “I cannot enter otherwise, though some evidently preceded me, even as they evaded me just now.”
“You knew about that?” David blurted. “What the hell—”
“Learned about it,” Nuada snarled back, as angry as David had ever seen him. “Never imagine that one such as I thinks remotely the same as you!”
David was taken aback, but stepped numbly aside to motion the Faery in. Nuada strode straight toward the prostrate—and bound—body of the captive assassin. “Dead, by his own foolishness and his own will,” he declared. “By the time he lives again this will all be over, one way or another. He is both clever and a coward: clever enough to spy on his betters, and brave enough to risk the consequences of attacking you. More than that, I would be a fool to suggest until I have more knowledge. For now”—he spun around in place—“I must get you out of here. In fact you must leave now. Collect your gear at once.”
“Aife too?” Alec dared, as the rest dispersed in frantic haste.
“Of course,” Nuada snapped. “She saved David’s life. She nevertheless cost many others. It is for Lugh to release her, not I.”
“Good thing we had her, though,” David noted, trying desperately to relieve tensions he sensed reaching critical mass among everybody present. Which was just as well. Acting meant not thinking, and thinking was too close to worrying, and he had more than enough to worry about right now.
“You are all stronger than you know,” Nuada admitted. “That makes you valuable friends. It also makes you dangerous foes. I would prefer the former, but I may not have that choice much longer—and in any case, you must depart at once. The fewer who know about this the better. Come with me! Quickly! Now!”
And without further ado, he turned and marched, not toward the door and the hall and the rest of the palace, but toward the garden in the center of their suite.
David stared at him stupidly, there being no obvious escape route there save the sky. Then again, this was Faerie, where anything could happen; God knew it had before. A pause to retrieve his scanty baggage—the rest of his clothes, the boom box, and a backpack full of snacks—and he followed his one-time mentor. Liz was by his side in a flash, and for some odd reason, Piper, for a wonder trailing LaWanda.
“Don’t like this place,” Piper confided. “Hate it, really. Freaks me. I was here once before, see; and they…they weren’t nice to me. Not even your friend”—he fairly spat out the word—“Lugh.”
“Why?” Brock wondered (obviously eavesdropping), as they reached the garden.
“He won’t tell you,” LaWanda broke in. “They made him play for them. They made him play and play and play. They’d have made him play forever—or until he died—if a friend of ours hadn’t accidentally…called him away.”
“Other days, other magic,” Piper proclaimed. “Thought I was through with that crap.”
“Not when you play as well as you do,” Nuada informed him, from where he had halted by the near edge of the pool. His face was as hard as David had ever seen it; a dangerous, almost maniacal, glint lit his dark blue eyes. “In fact,” Nuada went on, stroking his elegant chin. “It is well you mentioned that, for it will aid me.”
The rest had arrived by then, and David did a quick body count. Everyone was accounted for, even Aife, back in her plastic cell. Alec was taking no chances.
Nuada too surveyed them, and sadness joined the harsher emotions on his face. “I am sorry your visit ends on so foul a note,” he sighed. “I truly had no idea affairs had fallen so far as to violate Lugh’s peace in his very citadel, and when we find those who have, friend or foe, they will die the Death of Iron.
“But that is for another time,” he continued, gaze once again sweeping over them, to fix at last on Piper. Piper flinched, as though the Faery’s stare actually hurt him.
“Not for this palace would I harm one such as you,” Nuada vowed, and it was as if he spoke to Piper alone. “But time diss
olves, and with it hope, and with it also options. Therefore…play for me, Morry Murphy, that tune whose name you dread.”
Piper blanched, then frowned, then grimaced wearily. He slid the bellows that powered his pipes under his arm and began very quietly, to play “The King of the Fairies.”
“Faster,” Nuada commanded. “And when I give the word, all of you, close your eyes and…jump.”
David knew better than to argue, and was far too eager to see an end to all this chaos to conjure up the energy to dread. Instead, he simply gripped Liz’s hand with his right and felt for someone else’s with the other. The flesh he found was rough and male—probably Aikin. But then it didn’t matter, for as the tune increased in tempo at the start of the second round, Nuada shouted, “Now!”
Startled as much as anything with the force of the Faery lord’s shout, David leapt. Forward…forward, and then down…and down…and down.
It was taking longer than it ought to impact, though; and his body had gone utterly numb. How else explain how he could no longer feel anyone’s fingers, how the air was neither hot nor cold, how his very senses themselves had dissipated—how he seemed to have drawn in upon himself, save that his arms could still move a little fore and aft, and his torso still twist from side to side.
He knew without doubt that he was falling, but then some odd new sense that had nothing to do with his inner ear did something screwy to his balance, and another urgency entirely bade him be aware of what transpired before his newly opened eyes.
He saw water flashing up at him from a pair of preposterous angles, then struck it, and continued down. He gasped for breath, watched a bubble escape his mouth, chased it, and before he could stop himself inhaled again, through his…gills!
For it had hit him all in an instant that he was no longer an efficiency-sized tweenaged boy, but some kind of fish. A salmon would be most appropriate. The Salmon of Wisdom, say, or given his propensity for stumbling into World-sized trouble, the Salmon of Terminal Ineptitude.
Right…and wrong, came a thought into his brain—Nuada’s, he assumed.
Follow, that one demanded in turn. Do not think, for that way lies danger.
That last injunction proved even more difficult than usual for David to heed, thanks to the new distrust of all things Faery that all but overwhelmed him. Still, he was able to do as commanded and chase the tail flipping ahead of him. Down and down it swam, and some part of him determined that they were making for some secret bolt-hole in the bottom of the pool, for a deeper blackness than the surrounding ink-dark waters loomed there. Beside him—around him—he was aware of the others; and, uncannily, of a continuing ghost of Piper’s melody.
And then that darkness reached up to enfold them, and it was like being sucked into a maelstrom.
It seemed forever that journey lasted, but just as he began to feel real concern, that voice once more entered his mind. Two words only it spoke. The first was upward; the second was farewell.
Upward sounded a fine idea, and David swam that way. The water was growing colder, he realized, and he was tiring. His body felt thick and heavy. His tail had lost its strength and a muffled ringing clogged his ears.
His ears!
He had ears again! And feet! And full-length arms. And…apparently, clothes.
Waterlogged clothes.
And a backpack.
He couldn’t breathe water, though; and drowning was already lapping at the gates of his nose and mouth. Summoning all the strength he possessed, he forced himself to rise, angling toward that bare glimmer of light he desperately hoped marked the surface.
Closer and closer—and he broke through. Air flooded his lungs. He drank it down hungrily, breath after thankful breath, treading water.
Other heads appeared: Aikin’s first, then Alec’s, then Gary’s, then Myra’s, and finally, at long last, Liz’s. More followed, but he had eyes only for his lady. She swam over to him. “Welcome home,” she sputtered.
“Home…?”
She raised a dripping hand from the dark water and pointed to the sky. Moonlight gleamed there. Their own moon, exactly as it had appeared when they’d crossed the dam at Whitehall all those hours back. Which was typical. One never knew how time ran in Faerie. Not that it mattered now.
What mattered was reaching shore, getting dry, and contriving a battle plan. (When had he made that decision?)
Only…where was the dam? Silverhand had spirited them from the pool in Tir-Nan-Og back to the Oconee River, but where exactly in the Oconee had they arrived?
“Shit!” Darrell sputtered. “Where are we? No, don’t tell me— Oh crap!”
David twisted around to look at his friend, but then he saw what had lain unseen behind him and shock escaped in a startled gasp. They would find no dam because they were nowhere near Athens. Athens was on the Piedmont; this place was surrounded by mountains. Nor were they in a river; this was a lake—a most particular lake. For behind Darrell, gleaming like a beacon in the bright moonlight, rose the perfect stone cone of Bloody Bald—Silver Bald they should call it now, or Icy Bald, or Bone-White Bald.
“Christ,” Alec breathed beside him. “We’re back in Enotah County!”
“Better’n where we were,” Calvin coughed, then motioned to his left. “Shore’s that way. I say we get there pronto.”
No one argued. Fortunately, they were all decent swimmers—even, as they discovered, Aife, the no-longer imprisoned cat.
“This is BA Cove,” David informed them, as he stroked along. “In case any of you missed that.”
“The heart of the trouble,” Aikin appended. “And the question I have right now is how the hell do we get back to Athens?”
“That’s the least of our worries,” David snorted. “We’ll check in on Uncle Dale. He’s got a pickup and something that passes for a car. Between the two, we’ll manage.”
And on they swam.
More than long enough, too, encumbered in clothes as they were. Eventually, David shed his pack, and was strongly considering shucking sweatshirt and sneakers as well, when he felt mud beneath his feet. An instant later, he tripped on a submerged stump, and by then the water was shallow enough for them to wade ashore. It took him a moment to get his bearings—they’d made landfall a fair way south of the place they usually based their swimming parties. Evidently, there’d been a strong current tonight—or something.
At any rate, they were back on dry ground. His favorite uncle—great uncle, actually—lived less than a mile away, shorter than that if they went overland.
Something about closed-in spaces with short sightlines spooked him, though. Therefore, as de facto leader of the expedition, he chose to escort the whole bedraggled band along the shore. Before long, a thick patch of wood appeared, riding a small peninsula that shielded any view of the more open land beyond, in the middle of which (so David told them) lay the turnaround and the road to Sullivan Cove.
They didn’t see the small tent pitched just north of that low ridge’s spine until Brock literally stumbled upon it. And David truly didn’t see the man lying in a sleeping bag alongside, until he’d tripped over him. Someone swore. A head appeared. David stared at the moonlit face astounded.
“You!” they yelped as one.
“You, indeed,” Scott Gresham grumbled. “Christ, Dave, get off me! I— What the fuck are you guys doin’ here?”
PART THREE
Chapter XIII: Homerun
(Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Saturday, June 21—the wee hours)
“I could ask you the same question,” David gasped, as he braced himself against the nearest tree—a pine, as it turned out; rough bark sticky with resin. He wiped his hands on his fatigues, which reminded him of how wet he was. Waves slapped against the shore of the nearby lake, reminding him again. A chill breeze found him—too cold for what was already an eerily cool June—and he shivered, wondering if that were some after-effect of their precipitous escape from Tir-Nan-Og.
Scott wriggled half out of his sleepin
g bag and squinted up at him, then started—twice—in bleary-eyed double-take. “Christ, Sullivan, there’s a zillion of you guys! What the hell?”
“Twelve,” David corrected, “if everybody made it through.”
“I repeat,” Scott yawned. “What’re you guys doin’ here?” Then: “Myra…? What?”
Myra shouldered through the crowd and crouched down on the sleeping bag beside her sometime lover. “We’ve got a long story; yours oughta be short. We’re wet; you’re dry. So how ’bout you go first?”
“Actually,” David inserted, “you’ve got a point. We’re wet…and it’s not exactly ninety degrees out here, in case you haven’t noticed. So I tell y’all what: my Uncle Dale lives a little ways up the road. He’s safe. We can debrief up there.”
Scott eyed his sparse campsite. David followed his gaze. Everything looked new: the tent, the sleeping bag, the backpack, the cooler. The expensive hiking boots Scott was fumbling around for. Myra found a dry towel hanging from a nearby limb and swabbed it across her face and hands. “Anybody?” she offered, extending it like a trophy. Liz claimed it, and while Scott scrambled into jeans and plaid flannel shirt, and laced up those preposterous clodhoppers, everyone else took a stab at drying off.
David, who was more used to being cold and wet than most of his compatriots, waited until last, though he skinned off his sweatshirt and tried to wring it out. He also surveyed the lake. It gleamed serenely, the waters bright under the full moon, the rocks atop Bloody Bald flaring like a lighthouse further out. A beacon…or a warning? He doubted he’d ever be able to look at it without flinching again. “Fuck,” he grunted, mostly to himself. “Phoney fucker.”
“Okay,” Scott announced, “let’s travel.”
“I can’t help observing,” Myra murmured, easing up beside Scott to stride squishily along, “that you’re nowhere near Whitehall Forest.”