by Tom Deitz
But maybe the worst thing was Aife. Lugh’s curse was that she be a cat in the substance of the Lands of Men for most of the time, only returning to enfield form briefly at dusk and dawn. But where there was no dusk or dawn, nor never was, apparently—whatever drove Lugh’s magic had clearly slipped the bounds of control. One moment she was a cat, the next, an enfield, then the cat once more, and at times a bit of both, in the most outlandish combinations, and all the while venting the most ungodly screams, yowls, and whistles David had ever heard. He had a good idea what was prompting them too, given that his own experiences with shapechanging were nothing to write home about, comfortwise; in short, it hurt like hell. And to have that happening all the time, with no control, and with instincts winking in and out, and senses playing realignment games, and knowing somewhere at the heart of all that chaos a sentient intellect lurked—well, he hoped, if they ever got out this, Lugh would consider this punishment enough and lift the curse.
Alec would probably go for that too—assuming Alec, or anyone else, ever went for anything again.
At which point the whole of reality gave one final twisted lurch and stabilized.
“‘Once upon a midnight dreary,’” David cried, in hopes sound was working as it should, which it presently seemed to be.
“We can’t be nowhere,” Myra objected, belatedly. “In all of space-time, there has to be…somewhere we can be.”
“You sound like Sandy,” Brock snorted. “She’d eat this up with a spoon.”
Liz snorted in turn. “She’d be scared as shitless as the rest of us, you mean. I don’t think it’s sunk in on you yet, Brock…but we can’t get out of here—can we?” She gazed at Fionchadd.
The Faery’s face was grim; his shoulders slumped. “I should have been watching,” he reiterated. “Yet the last time I sailed this way there were no Holes. And there has never been one so large so close to shore.”
Alec glared at him. “You knew about those things and didn’t warn us to look out for them?”
“Do you worry about Krakens when you go to the beach?”
Brock scowled in confusion. “Krakens?”
“Giant squid,” David supplied impatiently. “He means that you don’t look for things where you don’t expect to find ’em. And while I’m certainly not happy about bein’ here, I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by pointin’ fingers.”
Fionchadd spared him a wary smile. “I suppose if I am to die, I could do worse than the six of you for company.”
Piper, who’d withdrawn into a corner with his pipes, twitched at that and peered out from beneath his tangle of hair. “Die?”
“Eventually. It happens.”
David shook his head. “No, I won’t accept that. For any problem, there’s a solution. We got into this thing from a physical place, therefore that place still exists, therefore the juncture between that place and this likewise exists. Therefore, we should be able to find it.”
Fionchadd shook his head in turn. “You amaze me,” he confessed. “In the face of all this, you still retain hope.”
“I’ve got things to do,” David sighed. “Folks’re dependin’ on me. I’ve got a kid brother I’d like to see grow up and go to college. I want to swim in the Cove again before whatever happens, happens. I don’t want poor Scott and Aik and Calvin to spend the rest of their lives wonderin’ what became of a bunch of their buddies.”
“What do you propose?” Fionchadd challenged. “My power comes from my World. The further from my World I go, the less Power I can call upon. And here, I must tell you, the cord is stretched very thin indeed.”
“I thought we weren’t in a World,” Myra countered. “Stick a knife through an onion,” Fionchadd replied. “Which layer is the blade in?”
Liz slapped her fist against the floor. “This isn’t doing any good! We can sit here for what might be a pretty odd forever making neat little similes, but that won’t help us get out of here. I’d prefer to come up with a solution before we all go apeshit from despair.
Fionchadd shrugged helplessly. “I have no Power that would do us any good.”
“What about Piper’s music?” Liz retorted. “Surely there’s a song somewhere that’ll get us—”
“They resonate with the Tracks, but there are no Tracks in a Hole—or else everything is a Track, as one of my mother’s kin once implied,” Fionchadd explained. “But even if that last were true, it could take longer than you have to live to locate the right set of tones.”
“Best we get started, then,” David advised, looking at Piper.
Piper shuddered and clutched himself more tightly.
Myra studied him for a moment, then: “Maybe sometime, but not now. No, folks, there has to be something else, some other means of finding our way out of here.”
Silence
Breathing.
Aife, who’d stabilized as an enfield, vented a pitiful whistle that ended on a disturbingly human note.
“Finding,” Brock blurted abruptly.
David gaped at him. “What?”
The boy’s face was all but glowing. “Finding. Myra said we had to find our way out of here.”
“So?”
“So I know a charm for finding.”
David’s eyebrows invaded his hairline. “A charm…?”
“Cherokee.”
David felt as though a vast weight had lifted from his soul, though another part knew it was far too early to raise hopes as faint as these. Still, it had worked before, if the boy was suggesting what he supposed. Shoot, it had even worked on him—had drawn his consciousness back to his body when he lay dying in Uncle Dale’s house, the same night the house had been trashed beyond repair. “You got a stone?” he found himself asking.
Brock promptly pillaged his pockets.
Fionchadd, meanwhile, was gaping like a fool—odd indeed on Faery features. David shot him a hopeful grin. “That’s what we brought him for, remember? Magic from a different tradition than any of us are used to.”
Myra looked easily as confused as Fionchadd, but Piper actually seemed marginally intrigued. Certainly the ball he had contracted himself into had loosened.
Brock’s face fell. “No.”
“What are you looking for?” Myra wondered. “Maybe I—”
“No,” David broke in triumphantly, “I’ve got it! And with that he removed the medallion he’d replaced around his throat, all that vague time ago. “Will this do?” he added, to Brock.
Brock reached for it, but David snatched it back. “I’ll respect your privacy for now—such as it is, or is ever like to be—but someday you and me are gonna talk about this thing.”
“Someday…we will,” Brock agreed, as David relinquished his hold.
“I learned this from Cal,” Brock confided, folding his fingers around the talisman. “He learned it—I think—from Uki, or his grandpa. I had to fake it one time, but that scared me a bunch, so I learned how to do it right.”
“It?” Alec queried impatiently.
“The finding ritual. The Cherokee finding ritual. I mean, I know it’s a long shot, since we’re the ones who’re lost, but— Oh, crap, I forgot something! This may not work!” He gazed expectantly at Fionchadd. “It’s safe on deck now, right? If you don’t go all vertigo, or something?”
The Faery nodded.
“And you can still steer this thing?”
Another nod.
“And…are we moving?”
“We were moving when we entered the Hole. All rules I know say that we should continue to do so until something stops us.”
“So you should be able to steer this thing? To make it go where we want?”
Fionchadd wrinkled his nose. “I should—assuming I had a direction.”
“And where was it we were going to start with?” Brock persisted.
“Annwyn—first.”
“Why not back where we were?” Alec countered.
“If we’re going anywhere,” Brock replied with exaggerated
patience, “It might as well be where we want to go, instead of back where we’ve already been.”
“And,” Fionchadd amended carefully. “It is possible we might actually gain time in the bargain.”
Brock frowned for an instant, then set his mouth. “Okay…everybody cool it for a minute and let me think. And—I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but maybe you guys oughta all hold hands or something.”
“Wish I had my ulunsuti,” Alec grumbled as he scooted in to complete the rough ring they were forming around the boy. He was referring to the magical seeing-stone he’d seen destroyed two autumns back—at the cost of one very important Faery life sacrificed to save him and David and Liz and Aikin.
David suppressed a giggle. ”I thought I’d never hear you say that.”
Alec didn’t reply—possibly because Brock had glared at him. “Quiet!” the boy snapped. And with that, they all fell silent. David took Liz’s hand in his left, Fionchadd’s in his right. They were equally smooth, which in no wise surprised him. The Faery’s, though, was stronger.
Brock, meanwhile, inhaled deeply and let the medallion slip through his fingers, then closed his eyes and began to chant softly, in a language David had heard before but couldn’t even vaguely claim to understand, bar the odd word or phrase here and there—plus some English Brock had been compelled to slip in. As the boy continued, he began to swing the medallion in a slow, wide circle.
Sge! Ha-nagwa hatunganiga Nunya…bright medal ,ga-husti tsuts-kadi nigesunna. Ha-nagwa dungihyali. Agiyahusa…my way, ha-ga tsun-nu iyunta datsi-waktuhi. Tla-ke aya akwatseliga. Stanley Arthur Bridges digwadaita.
He repeated that thrice, then started over, this time in English.
Listen! Ha! Now you have drawn near to hearken, oh bright medal! You never lie about anything! Ha! Now I am about to seek for it. I have lost my way, and now tell me where I shall find it. For is it not mine? Mv name is Stanley Arthur Bridges.
That too he repeated thrice, before returning to bastard Cherokee. David held his breath, watching intently. He was also, at some level, trying to ease into a trance himself, even as he wished, very hard, for the desired effect to occur. Fionchadd, he realized, was sweating.
Brock had recommenced the English version, but nothing seemed to be happening: the disc still swung in the same wide circle.
Or did it? Wasn’t the trajectory shifting the merest fraction? Wasn’t it becoming more oval?
It was! Beside him, he heard Liz’s soft gasp. She’d seen it too. And it really was altering, the oval narrowing into an ellipse, tending in one direction, as though unseen forces drew it there.
Fionchadd’s face had also brightened as he stared at the disc with rapt interest. Hope showed there for the first time in…however long it had been. And if Finno was optimistic, they surely had cause for celebration.
Whereupon Brock broke off abruptly and opened his eyes.
The medal no longer moved, but neither did it hang straight down. Rather, it slanted slightly, but clearly, toward the cabin’s aft port corner.
Fionchadd rose at once and opened the door, then closed it quickly behind him—just as well, because David still couldn’t stand to look at that vast…nothingness out there.
No one moved for a long time—not until the cabin gave the tiniest of lurches and slowly began to realign itself along the axis indicated by the medallion.
Brock remained where he was, staring fixedly at what he had wrought. He was barely breathing and clearly trying hard neither to speak nor move. David felt very sorry for him. This was something they hadn’t considered. The boy had shown them the way out—maybe. But who was to say how long that journey would last? And if anything disturbed their…finder, would he be able to repeat the procedure? Or had that been the Galunlati equivalent of a magical one-shot deal?
But then footsteps pounded on the stair, and Fionchadd thrust his head through the doorway, face alive with joy.
“I have lashed the rudder” he proclaimed. “Unless that medal lies, we should be free of here anon.”
It was only then that David realized what had saved them. Cherokee magic. And iron—which was anathema in Faerie.
* * *
“Land ho!” Fionchadd shouted.
David roused himself from where he’d been napping in the cabin, Wedged between Alec and Liz, with Brock at his feet like a puppy. (Why did that image keep recurring, along with that infuriating urge to pet him?) Myra sprawled behind Alec. Piper was as far from the stairs as possible. And snoring. Aife was a cat again.
“Wha—?” Alec mumbled. “Huh?”—as David jostled him on his way to his feet. David squinted into the half-opened doorway, still fearing what might lurk beyond. Fortunately, Fionchadd filled most of it, but the Faery was grinning like a fiend.
When David finally summoned up nerve to peek around him, it was to see what could only be night sky. That woke the need to press forward, leaving his companions to respond as they wished. Fionchadd gave him a hand up the stair.
“Son of a bitch!” David yipped, “you weren’t lyin’!”
Nor had he been. Not only had they returned to tangible reality—wave, clouds, and the line of the Track between—but they had arrived within sight of land: an unbroken range of ominous, blood-dark cliffs that marched off to haze to either side beneath roiling, night-lit heavens the color of tarnished steel. Even close at hand, the surrounding seas were black as ink.
“Do not look behind you,” Fionchadd cautioned as they strode toward the prow. “The Hole—or a Hole—still gapes there. But already it grows smaller.”
David needed no second warning. If he never saw anything like that again, it would be too soon. “Is that…Annwyn?” he ventured, wondering why he felt compelled to speak softly.
Fionchadd nodded. “Arawn’s realm. The Lord of the Dead, some of your Folk call him, though they are wrong. But Annwyn is a dark land, compared to Tir-Nan-Og. The sun shines there but dimly, and the light is often tinged with red. Grim land breeds grim thoughts.”
David folded his arms. “So now that we’re here…?”
“—We seek landfall at a place where I hope Arawn will not find us. I do not fear him, precisely, but I fear what he might have to say about our mission. He—like most of our kind—would prefer the Powersmiths kept to themselves. The last time they interfered, he was not pleased.”
“I remember,” David acknowledged. “I don’t blame him.”
Fionchadd started to reply, then caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. He thrust David roughly aside and dashed to the fore-port gunwale, scanning the coast intently.
“What the f—?” David commenced. But then he too saw. “Ships!” he groaned, as he joined the Faery. “I guess it’s too much to hope it’s the good guys bringin’ the welcome wagon?”
Fionchadd did not respond, but his shoulders were taut with tension. “Those are Lugh’s ships,” he gritted, “which alone would not delight me. But,” he continued shakily, “the nearest is the one we escaped when we began this voyage.”
“That’s impossible!”
The Faery looked him straight in the eye. “It is not. Who knows how much time passed in this World while we were caught…Between?”
“So they got here ahead of us?”
A resigned nod. “And surely alerted Arawn. Even now they turn toward us.”
David suppressed a shudder. “Will they take us captive, do you reckon?”
“No,” Fionchadd spat. “This time, I am certain, they will kill us.”
“Kill us?” another voice screeched: Alec stumbling across the deck, face white with alarm.
Fionchadd drew himself up very straight, though he was still slightly shorter than Alec. “We can fight,” he declared. “Or we can run. Which way would you have it?”
“Death now or later? Huh?” David muttered. “Be nice to have and make a choice.”
“Tell me about it,” Alec panted, as he skidded to an awkward halt. “Guess I oughta go get the others. It’ll give me som
ething to do.”
David gaped in in disbelief as Alex spun around in place and retreated across the deck. He would’ve shouted something in his wake, too, had not Fionchadd restrained him with a firm grip on his shoulder. “Any action is better than none, and we have spent much time of late pondering impossible options.”
David rolled his eyes. “I noticed.”
Fionchadd regarded him levelly. “So what do we do? Run, or fight?”
“Can we fight?”
“They outnumber us.”
“Then we run.”
“Fine. Now…where do we run?”
“What do you mean?”
“They may very well catch us on the Track. But we have another choice, one they dare not make.”
David’s mouth popped open “Not—”
The Faery nodded. “The Hole.”
David had to brace himself to keep from shaking. But then he saw the confident, almost triumphant light that filled Fionchadd’s eyes. “It means aborting our mission.”
“It means…redirecting our mission,” the Faery corrected. “There are still ways to contact the Powersmiths. The one I chose was only easiest.”
“Galunlati,” David breathed.
Again Fionchadd nodded.
David dared another glance at that dark coast. And the ships—which had clearly grown closer.
“If Lugh’s ships are here ahead of us, that means it’s…it’s several days after we left, though it doesn’t feel like it. Which means that by the time we get back, we’ll have lost a whole fucking week!”
“True. And our friends will be expecting us.”
“But we can’t reach Galunlati from here?”
A shrug. “I think not. For that, we must go through your World.”
“Not even with the Hole?”
“I would not risk it.”
David thought for a long, cold moment, during which the ships grew closer still. “Well,” he announced at last. “I’ll keep everybody belowdecks. You just…do it.”
And with that, he strode back to the cabin.