by Tom Deitz
And with that, he scrambled on hands and knees across the deck, and—after one brief check above the rail on the seaward side, rose like a spring uncoiling and leapt overboard.
David flopped back against the gunwale, gaze fixed firmly on his Faery friend. “What the hell is goin’ on?”
“More than I knew, apparently. But it seems I have friends where I did not expect them—or at least they are not foes.”
“If they’re on Lugh’s side, they’re not on mine,” David retorted.
“Some sides…face two ways,” Fionchadd sighed wearily. “Sometimes even three…or four…or five.”
“Strange bedfellows….”
Fionchadd regarded him strangely. “Sometimes.”
“So—can we trust him?”
A shrug. “He bought us time. He told us things we might find useful. He risked himself.”
David surveyed the coast. “From what he says, though, those ships, that you said were piloted by Lugh’s folks…were really crewed by the Sons of Ailill?”
“So it would seem. Whether that means mutiny, or treason in the ranks, I have no way of knowing.”
“And that guy…?”
Another shrug. “He will swim in secret back to that ship. He will regain his own shape—presumably with the aid of his friend, the trusted bowman. If both are fortunate, no one will be the wiser.”
“And if someone finds out?”
“The Death of Iron, I suppose. That is the normal doom of traitors, and Arawn would certainly style them thus. I—”
“What’re you guys doing?” Alec hissed from the top of the cabin stair.
“Wasting precious time,” Fionchadd grumbled—and made his way, still hunched over below rail-level, toward the stern, where the tiller was.
David watched him go, even as Alec approached. Other faces showed behind, but David waved them back, then grabbed Alec by the leg and yanked him down. “Go get everybody,” David ordered, “and tell ’em to run out here all crazy, like Finno’s just been killed!”
Alec gaped for a startled moment longer, then complied. Myra, it evolved, proved especially apt at keening.
* * *
“I can’t believe that worked,” Alec breathed what seemed like hours later. “I absolutely cannot believe it!”
David gazed pointedly at the deck—better that than the chaos that had swallowed all view of the shore and the fleet behind them, or the nothingness that loomed ahead: there, in what he’d come to call the event horizon. Fionchadd was still at the tiller, which he could maneuver from below the rail—and would linger there a brief while longer. Annwyn was a tiny blot at the end of the Hole (odd that those things didn’t necessarily lie flat upon/within the water, as David had always assumed they would, the few times he’d heard them mentioned). The Track was a glitter in their wake, save that closer in it had dissolved into a sort of crooked spiral that twisted around the sky before vanishing entirely. “Luck,” David offered eventually. “Of which we seem to have more than our share, both good and bad.”
Alec nodded glumly as he ambled across the deck. David joined him, laid a comradely arm across his shoulders and gave them an impulsive squeeze. It was the first time he’d done that in ages. He wondered, suddenly, how much they had drifted apart: victims of larger events; flashier, more demanding friends; inconsistent priorities and interests. He’d always counted on Alec’s absolute loyalty, the same way he relied on breathing. But maybe he shouldn’t take it so much for granted.
“Love you, man,” he murmured.
Alec smiled wanly. “Just in case.”
“What?”
“We don’t get out of this.”
“That’s not what I was thinkin’.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Alec whispered. “Love you too.” Silence.
And then, quietly, but clearly from Fionchadd. “It would be wise if you went below.”
* * *
“If we weren’t up to our butts in alligators,” David informed Brock, “I’d make you answer those questions before I pass this over. I haven’t forgotten your promise,” he added, pointedly.
Brock snatched the medallion from David’s fingers, smiling smugly, even as he composed his face to innocence. “Thank God for ’gators, then.”
“’Gators,” Liz snorted from the cabin’s corner. “This all started with one of them.”
“There’s one thing good about all this, though,” Myra mused, with a sly grin at Piper, who was polishing his pipes in the opposite corner. She paused expectantly.
Piper evidently caught that cue and glanced up curiously, less wired than any time lately. “What?”
“We didn’t have to stage a burial at sea for Finno.”
Piper looked perplexed. “That would have been…very bad.”
“Yeah,” Myra gave back smugly. “I couldn’t have stood another reprise of Amazing Grace.”
Piper threw a drone at her—then looked appalled, scrambled after it, and kissed it in desperate apology. It was good, David reckoned, to see even that much sign of the pre-voyage Piper.
“Cool it,” Brock snapped from the middle of the cabin, “you may think this finding-thing’s easy, but it’s not; I need your help if we’re gonna get outta here.”
David nodded. “Good point.” And scooted over to join him.
“And a good question,” Liz appended, “is where, exactly, are we going, anyway?”
“That could be a problem,” Fionchadd admitted from the door behind them—beyond which David could once again see that awful colorless sky. He quickly turned away.
“How so?” Liz inquired.
The Faery shifted his weight. “I am not certain how our young friend’s Power functions,” he began. “But before, he had a name for the place he sought. The place from which we came—by which we entered the Hole, I mean—has no name I have ever heard. It is not Tir-Nan-Og, but a realm that lies…above it.”
Brock fidgeted with a stray lock of hair, face tight with nervous anxiety. “Names have power, Cal says, but…that last time, I mostly just asked for the way out.”
“Worked, too,” Myra drawled.
Fionchadd ignored her. “I have been pondering that, however; and it now seems to me that it might be wisest to simply seek out Tir-Nan-Og. If we are fortunate, we will arrive well beyond sight of that coast. Perhaps if we then sought some other landfall than the traditional southern haven….”
David frowned. “In that case, why don’t we just return to our World and be done with it?”
Fionchadd frowned in turn. “We cannot—from here. The Hole began there…yet it has not burned through there. It is the same as…as swinging that medallion through the air. You can pass your finger through the places it has been, but not through the medallion itself.”
“Ah,” Alec said. “Like it’s the laser beam that cuts, not the machine that makes the beam, only you can’t have the beam without the machine.”
The Faery gnawed his lips, then nodded. “I think so.”
“Yeah,” David mused. “But what about the Powersmiths? Couldn’t it take us straight to them, without bothering with Annwyn?”
Fionchadd slowly shook his head. “To tell you true, I know little about Holes—none of us do. But one thing I do know is that they cannot take one everywhere, at least not directly. Were it not for Brock, we would be lost entirely, and even so, we have taken more risks than you know—and been luckier than you can imagine. As for this Hole, it is a Hole through one part of the Seas Between, yet as best I know, such Holes only touch the seas of Worlds close about them. The Land of the Powersmiths touches this World only in Annwyn, rather as Tir-Nan-Og touches your World; its seas touch other Worlds entirely. It—” He broke off, shaking his head again. “There are no words for these things in your tongue.”
“Well then,” Myra told him sweetly. “Someday you and Sandy’ll have to invent ’em.”
“And there’s not gonna be any someday,” Brock warned, “if you guys don’t form a circle over h
ere so we can get goin’.”
“Coast is clear!” Fionchadd called from the deck. “Come on up!”
“More you hang around us, more you sound like us,” David chuckled, as he scrambled toward the cabin door. Liz was right behind. Lord, but she was good woman, to put up with so much…crap. They’d just escaped from a situation that didn’t bear thinking about by the razor edge skin of their teeth—a situation that had him quaking in his boots, and nearly made him shit his britches, had he been wearing any. (They were all still slumming around in knee-length Faery tunics.) Yet she’d stayed cool throughout. Maybe it was a woman thing: strength under fire—grace under pressure, or whatever. Or perhaps it was just that Liz was a lot more sure of herself and of what she really wanted than he was. She lived in the present and found what pleasure she could there. He still lived, he feared, in his boyhood “someday” and “tomorrow” and “whenever.” Not that he couldn’t function in the real world, he hastened to add. It was just that there was so much he wanted to do, or had to do, or was looking forward to, or regretting, or dreading, that he rarely had time to afford any of those myriad possibilities the absolute conviction they deserved. He was like Alec and Scott, he realized, with a sick little twist in his gut: just some self-absorbed little brain-fried space cadet, going through the motions.
Whereupon Liz pinched his butt, which set him in motion of another kind.
The air, when a sudden breeze found its way into the stairwell, smelled like heaven. It was sheer bliss to be back topside, too; after another enforced, temporally-ill-defined incarceration in the dragonship’s ever-more-claustrophobic cabin. Before he could stop himself, David had ducked between Liz’s legs, hoisted her up on his shoulders, and was running laps with her around the deck. Alec joined in at once, grabbing Brock on the fly as they embarked on another lap. Myra snickered tolerantly. Fionchadd gawked in bemused disbelief. Piper grabbed his pipes and pumped up a jaunty reel.
David skidded to a clumsy halt and sank down, laughing. Liz tumbled off his back, laughing even louder. The ship rang with it: clear Faery air thrumming with human joy.
“Are we back?” Brock burst out. Sweat sheened his face.
Fionchadd rubbed his chin. “We are away from the Hole. I think we are where I desired, which is to say this is Faerie. Beyond that”—he shifted his weight—”truly I hate to disrupt all this levity, but…we are still in danger.”
David froze on the verge of jumping atop Alec and giving him the thorough tickling his far-too-serious buddy clearly needed. He looked up, scowling.
Fionchadd’s brow likewise furrowed. “These are the seas of Faerie. The shores of Tir-Nan-Og cannot be far off, for I smell that strand. But— There is no easy way to say it: I fear ambush.”
“Ambush?” David countered. “Or interception?”
The furrows deepened. “Both, perhaps. Lugh still commands this coast, or did when we departed. The coast in the next World…up has apparently fallen to the Sons of Ailill. Lugh may know this, or he may not. There are circles within circles in this, and I cannot see them from far enough off to see them clear.”
“’Specially as you may be a circle yourself,” David remarked.
“A very small one,” Fionchadd returned. “You have far more true friends than I.”
“It would seem, then,” Liz said slowly, “that the smart thing to do is get the hell out of Faerie entirely and back…wherever.”
“Our own world, I hope,” Alec urged.
Fionchadd clapped him on the shoulder. “It would certainly be an attractive option.”
“Okay,” David declared, “let’s do it.”
Fionchadd caught his arm as he made to leave. “It is not so easy. I knew the tunes that took us on the journey we just assayed, but I had taken time before to learn them. From here… One could return to the Lands of Men from here, but no place useful. And then we would be bound by distances there, for the Tracks, as you know, do not lie everywhere.”
“So where’s the nearest?”
“The nearest that would be helpful would be the one where I found your company.”
“The one out at Whitehall?”
“Aye.”
David puffed his cheeks. “And we can’t get there from here?”
“Not unless we go somewhere else first.”
“Which would take time.” David inhaled sharply, feeling suddenly very uncertain in his stomach. “What time is it, anyway? What day?”
Fionchadd studied the sky—though what he saw in all that green-blue blankness, David had no idea. “Five days since we left.”
“Five days! But we lost three days in the Hole!”
“And no time at all returning.”
“So we’re actually…ahead of schedule?”
“We have none to waste, if what we learned in Annwyn is true, but yes.”
David grimaced sourly. “So basically what you’re sayin’ is that we’ve got time, but we’ve gotta hurry.”
“I am saying that it is not wise to remain here long.”
“Therefore we need to reach, optimally, the Track at Whitehall.”
Brock gaped at them incredulously. “By boat?”
“Of course,” Fionchadd acknowledged with a cryptic grin. “Do you doubt me?”
Brock shrugged.
David eyed Fionchadd askance. “And there’s no way to get there from here? I mean, I’m not doubtin’ you, or anything,” he went on instantly. “It’s just that I’ve noticed you tend to think a certain way—have to, I guess—and sometimes you ignore what to the rest of us seems pretty obvious.”
“Other traditions,” Brock summarized. “I could always use the medallion again.”
“You could,” Fionchadd agreed. “But”—once more he stroked his chin—“Actually, there may be something simpler—in this World, anyway.”
David raised a brow. “Wanta tell us?”
Fionchadd turned toward Alec. “You are the only one here who brought anything beyond the cloths on your back from your World, correct?”
Alec’s brow furrowed. “I’ve got my fannypack, if that’s what you mean?”
“Well, then,” Fionchadd prompted, “go get it!”
Alec regarded the Faery sullenly when he returned a moment later with the green nylon object in hand. Fionchadd pondered it as distrustfully. “Metal tape—zipper, I mean. Iron. Would you mind…?”
Alec bared his teeth as he unzipped the pack and emptied the contents onto the deck. David was amazed at the diversity Alec had managed to secret in there—everything from a tiny pocket calculator through three packs of sugar to a bright orange condom, still in its (slightly mildewed) wrapper. Alec blushed but made no move to hide it. Fionchadd merely sorted through the pile. “A-ha!” he cried at last. “I have found what we need.” And with that, he held up what David took for a dark shard of broken glass.
Alec stared at him as though he’d just grown another head. “That? That’s just a point I made in an outdoor skills class.”
“Precisely! Something you made—presumably in or near Athens.”
Alec nodded dubiously. “So?”
“There are several means by which Powersmith vessels navigate,” Fionchadd explained. “One is by music; one is simply by the tiller. There are some of which I may not speak, but one of which I can is that a weapon made by hands and placed in the dragon’s mouth will lead the dragon to the place where that weapon was wrought—or close by.”
“So,” Alec ventured, brightening, “that edge I made two years ago might actually take us back to Athens?”
Fionchadd nodded. “The Track at Whitehall, at any rate.”
Alec turned to study the dragonhead, then snatched the stone from Fionchadd’s fingers and passed it to the startled Brock. “Here, kiddo,” he purred, nodding toward the carved prow. “This is a job for a young man.”
The fog was back. Which was just as well, David reckoned. Magical landscape was fine if you had nothing better to do than watch it drift past a carved oak ra
iling. But those landscapes were not always to be trusted, and more to the point, the very fact of their existence held alarmingly dark implications. Shoot, back home in Enotah County chubby redneck housewives were lolling in red plastic loungers, eating pork rinds and reading romances, while holding Camel cigarettes between fingers bright with cheap diamonds and red lacquered nails. Street kids in Athens were squatting atop garbage cans in front of Barnett’s Newsstand, reading Flagpole and trying to panhandle enough cash for the day’s first Mello Yello and Jolly Rancher. Lawyers were litigating over nothing. Legislators were trying to determine what constituted marriage.
And there was about to be war in Faerie.
War that could slop into the Lands of Men.
David wondered if Jesse Helms was ready.
He shifted in place, sparing the dragonship yet another cursory inspection, while wondering, not for the first time since they’d begun this (hopefully) final leg of their odd tour, if this was a good time to conclude a certain bit of business concerning Brock and an iron medallion. Or Liz and that medallion, for that matter—if he could get either of them alone long enough for serious discussion—or for serious scrying. Oh well, he conceded, maybe someday.
He sighed, inhaled deeply—and coughed.
Another breath, a sniff, and he noted the odors this time. Sure enough it bore the unmistakable scent of pine trees, diesel fumes, and (faintly) sewage. “Liz!” he bellowed. “We’re back!”
Back, however, was surprisingly slow arriving, and day became night before the fog cleared entirely. There was at least one sunset-or-dawn in there too, to judge by Aife’s brief transformation. Yet by the time the last wisp of clinging damp whiteness fell away from the vessel’s flanks, and the ship itself began to slow, there was no doubt about it: they were sailing down the Middle Oconee—probably (and hopefully) near Whitehall Forest, to judge by the heavily wooded banks slipping silently by on either hand.