Unexpectedly his throat closed for a moment, as longing for home hit him like a physical blow, and he bit his lip. God, he was so tired of running. . . . Home had never felt so far away, so unattainable; at least in the past, he'd known where he was, what to expect, what the limits were. Here, it was all up in the air. And he would give almost anything to see a familiar face. Would he ever see anyone he knew again?
"What's the matter?" Shar asked, quickly putting one soft hand over his cold one, as his face reflected some of his feelings despite his effort to hide them.
He shook his head, intending to say nothing, but it came out anyway. "I want—to go home," he whispered hoarsely. "All this—it's all so strange. I've never been this far Underhill before. I've never been anywhere but Elfhame Fairgrove, Furhold, and—I just want to go home."
He couldn't continue. Fairgrove was a short step, and I was back on my side of the Hill. I wasn't lost. And even if someone was trying to kill me, it didn't matter, because I was standing by my friends. He had to face the reality of the situation: he could die here, and no one would ever know what had become of him. He was pretty sure by now that Shar was on his side, but they could be separated—they would be separated if they were caught—and he would die alone here.
"I've never had a home, as such," Shar said wistfully. "I have my own domain, but it's really just a place to live. I've never felt comfortable enough with the kitsune to live in their realm. I certainly don't want anything to do with my father, or his allies. I have a few friends, but not many. Maybe that's why I spent as much time on your side of the Hill as I did." Her tongue flicked out thoughtfully. "Things are simpler there. At least on your side of the Hill I know the rules, and they don't change."
"Simpler—" He nodded. "That's not a bad thing." Then he shook off his mood of melancholy with a heroic effort. They didn't have time for this. Maybe Hamlet could take time in the middle of a firefight to soliloquize, but real people had to keep on running and shooting.
"I'll go set the Gate," she said, as if reading his mind. "Be back in a few seconds."
She slipped out of the blanket and the car at the same time; a rush of cold air numbed his ears as she opened and shut the door. She stood beside the Mustang for a full minute, staring at the stone arch, one paw-hand raised to it, palm outward.
The stones began to hum.
He didn't realize what it was at first; he thought that the cold might have introduced a new note into the rumbling of the Mach I's engine. But then, as the sound built, he realized that it came from the stones in front of him, a deep note just barely in the audible spectrum, that vibrated in his chest and made his hands and feet tingle.
Shar slipped back into the car, bringing with her another rush of cold air and a sparkle of frost. "Whenever you're ready."
He put the car in motion, creeping slowly forward, as the dark mist filled the space defined by the three stones. This scene was beginning to take on the uncanny feeling of familiarity; as the Gate swallowed up the lights, the hood, crept toward the windshield, he simply braced himself slightly, the same way that he braced himself against the lurch of an airplane take-off.
This time, though, the moment of disorientation was much shorter. The blackout lasted barely long enough to blink twice, then the Mach I moved smoothly into a thick, gray fog, illuminated from everywhere and nowhere.
He hit the brakes as soon as the tail cleared the Gate; red light washed up behind them as the brake-lights reflected through the mist. He killed the headlights and turned off the engine. There was no point in advertising their presence here with the glare of headlights, even though the fog swallowed up most of the light. Behind them, the Gate was a smooth arch carved of white stone, easily lost in the mist of the Unformed now that the haze of activation was gone.
That was probably the point. If a mage blundered too far away from the Gate, he'd better be able to use his powers to find it again, or he was going to be in trouble.
The Unseleighe were great believers in Darwinism, it seemed.
"Tannim—" Shar said suddenly. "Look at what the mist is doing!"
At first he wasn't sure what she meant; a moment later, though, as he followed her gaze to the hood of the Mustang, he realized what it was she saw.
The mist of the Unformed curled away from the Mach I, leaving a shell of clear space between the metal and the mist. Was the car repelling the mist? Was the mist reacting to the metal, trying to avoid it? The mist was charged with raw magical energy, after all. Or was the mist reacting to the spells of protection on the Mustang?
Whatever the cause, here was a visible sign that the Mach I affected the world Underhill, one that he didn't need to invoke mage-sight to read. He watched in fascination as the mist pulled back into itself, for all the world as if it reacted in pain.
Shar's features blurred briefly, and returned to the human ones he knew best. She had shifted as suddenly as a sigh, and as noiselessly as the mist. He was not entirely certain she had done so consciously.
"Probably we ought to both recon this situation," Shar said into the silence. But she made no move to leave the Mustang.
He didn't blame her; there was something about this mist, uncanny, sinister. Sad, too; his depression returned in full force, and it was all he could do to keep from giving up and curling up into a fetal ball right then and there.
Right. And if you do that, there's no way you're going to get out of here, bonehead!
Shar stared out the window, her own expression pensive, her eyes full of secrets.
"Your parents," she said out of nowhere. "I watched you with them, and I envied you for having two such people to care for and who cared for you. I could not understand why you left your home so eagerly."
It was not a question, but the questions were there, nonetheless. "It's hard to explain," he told her, knowing that it sounded feeble. "I think the world of my folks, and I know that they are prouder of me than they ever let on, but—" He snorted, as a little more of his depression lifted. "This is really going to sound trite, but they honestly don't understand me."
"Well, you are a mage, and they are—good, normal folk," Shar replied sensibly.
But Tannim shook his head. "That's only part of it. They would never understand me, even if I wasn't a mage, but that makes it astronomically worse. They don't know why I do what I do for a living, test-driving, all that. Half the time they think I'm going through some kind of a phase, and after a while I'll get tired of all this and become an accountant, or a car salesman." He ran his hands through his hair in distraction. "They worry about me, that I'll wake up some day as an old has-been driver with nothing to fall back on. And that's just the surface problem."
"And the deeper problem?" Shar prompted.
"There's the magic, the Sidhe—which I can't tell them about." He clutched his hair. "I've tried; they literally don't hear it. Won't hear it. I'm afraid to try anymore; they might think I was on drugs or something. Mom half hinted at that the last time. Usually they just act like they think I'm talking about a book I read or some movie."
"But they love you—" Shar said blankly.
"Love doesn't mean understanding," he replied, letting go of his hair and staring at his hands. "They don't share the same values I have anymore. How can I pay any attention to the package a person comes in, when so many people I'm proud to call my friends aren't even human? Then I get home, and Dad starts bitching about the `foreigners taking over' and signs a petition to forbid every other language in America but English. And that's only the start of it. Dad's a great man—but he's coming down with hardening of the attitude; looking for some group to blame for problems, and not bothering to do something about the problems. Instead of trying to fix things, he's bitching about it."
Shar's mouth formed into a silent "oh." Tannim's lips twitched. "That's one reason why I try to keep my visits brief, because I know that I let things slip that they worry about. Mom isn't happy about my lifestyle; Dad isn't happy that I've turned my back on thr
ee generations of Drakes farming in Oklahoma. I'm not happy knowing that, deep down, they wish I was someone more like Joe." He rubbed the side of his head unhappily. "Sometimes I think I'm a changeling. I couldn't be more of a misfit in my family if I'd been left on the doorstep in a basket."
Shar was very quiet for a long time. "But I thought—you said—"
"I said I loved my parents. I do. And they love me. They just don't understand me." He laughed weakly. "Oh, Shar, it's awfully difficult to explain. Sometimes you can care a great deal about someone, and simply not understand him at all. Especially if you're related to him."
She blinked at him. "Forgive me for saying earlier that life in your world is simpler."
"Life is ne'er simple, lass." Tom Cadge spoke softly from the rear seat. " 'Twasn't when I was a lad, and likely has got no better. There's more grief 'twixt relations than strangers."
"Don't misunderstand me. I love my folks, Thomas," Tannim protested. "I just don't fit in their lives anymore. Their home—just isn't home for me now. I don't belong there anymore. I can't go back without feeling like an alien."
"Well, now, that's as it should be, eh?" Tom cocked his head to the side and turned his bandaged face toward Tannim. "The chick don't go back in the shell, do he? Nor the wee bird go back to his mam's nest come spring again? Ye can't go back to a home, lad, not once ye be a man grown. Ye have to make your home, your own home, or it ain't really your home, if ye take my meanin'."
"What about those who've never had a home, Thomas Cadge?" Shar asked softly, with a note of bitterness in her voice.
Tom turned his head toward her, creating the odd impression that despite his blindness, he still saw right through the layers of bandage over the grisly ruins of his eyes. "Those who've never got a home has all the more reason to make one, milady," the old man said with odd gentleness. "Even an old man, half mad an' all blind has a reason t' make a home. An' them as never got a home, well, mebbe they ought t' look to them as knows what a good home is, to show 'em how t' build one. 'Specially summat who's a friend. Bain't that what friends be for?"
Tannim stared at the swirling mist as the silence lengthened. "Well," he said, finally, "Before we get out of the Mustang, we'd better get ourselves in a better mood. That mist out there is going to react to what we're thinking, and even more to what we're feeling. The car's got shielding enough to keep us from creating any nightmares, but once we get out to study the situation—"
Shar straightened visibly, and her face took on an expression of determination. "Absolutely right. I think we're letting this miserable place get to us. And absolutely the last thing I want to do is conjure up my wretched father out of the Unformed." She made a grimace of distaste. "One of him is bad enough; two would be unbearable."
"Oh, I don't know," Tannim replied, managing a chuckle. "From what you've said, if you created a second Charcoal, they'd be so in love with each other we'd never have to worry again."
Shar actually smiled. "You have a point," she agreed. "Still, let's not take any chances." She pulled her hair back from her face, and closed her eyes for a moment. "Right. I assume you don't know anything about the Gates, since you haven't volunteered to examine them with me."
Tannim spread his hands helplessly. "Not a hint. Haven't the vaguest notion how to look into the things. I make my own Gates when I need 'em, but only back in America. However, I do know a bit about the Unformed, since Fairgrove got involved in the cleaning up after the disaster at Outremer. If the Gate doesn't pan out, I can probably find that physical connection to the next realm."
"You can?" Shar brightened visibly. "Oh good—I can tell there's one out there, but I can't locate it."
"Then I think we have our two tasks laid out for us; nothing like a proper division of labor. And I believe I'm ready for the mist, if you are." Tannim put his hand on the door and gave Shar an inquiring glance.
"As ready as I'm likely to be." She sighed, and opened her own door with an expression of resolution on her face.
The Unformed was not precisely "mist" as any human knew it. It was neither cold nor damp. It had no odor, no taste, nothing to feel—in fact, if Tannim had closed his eyes, he would not have known it obscured everything in every direction. Anything more than three feet away might just as well be invisible. As he understood it, the theory went that the mist was a physical manifestation of the available energy in these pockets of Underhill. Raw energy at that; the theory was that once that energy was given a form, it ceased to be random and started to obey normal laws of physics. Until then—you had this mist, potential in its purest form.
It tried to trick you into giving it a form, too. There were phantom shapes out there, shapes that teased the mind and made it strive to put definition on the vague shadows. The more the unwary person peered, the more his mind tried to match the half-seen shape, the more the half-seen shape fitted itself to the image in a watcher's mind.
In the case of one particular child, in a sea of Unformed mist outside Elfhame Outremer, those images had been very terrible. . . .
Forget that. Don't look out there. Don't let it trap you. Just hunt for the pathway into the next domain. Shar might be the expert on Gates here, but that was something he could do, though it was a tricky bit of work, and akin to echolocation.
There was a peculiarity to the rock walls of Underhill pockets; they reflected magic. Real rock didn't do that, so Tannim could only assume that the caves of Underhill were not exactly made of rock.
I wonder if they only look like caves because that's what the creatures who first came to this place expected. The mist was psychotropic, after all. . . . If you had enough mist, could you form rock walls out of it?
But that wasn't getting anything done. The point was that the rock walls reflected magic, but a place where the rock wasn't obviously didn't. So he had to become the human equivalent of a bat.
He walked around to the front of the car, settled himself on the hood of the Mustang, absentmindedly pulled a cherry-pop out of his pocket, and unwrapped it. He tucked the cellophane neatly back in his pocket and the candy in his cheek, crossed his legs, and went to work.
* * *
Shar faced the Gate, the Mach I a solid and reassuring presence behind her, and closed her eyes, sinking her awareness into the fabric of the pale stone arch. One of the settings she already knew; the frozen plain they had left behind. Her first action would be to count the number of settings this Gate had; after that, she would worry about where they went.
She tended to think of them as directions in three dimensions; forward and back, left and right, up and down. "Filled" settings pulsed with power; the "empty" places where settings would be—when there were any such empty slots, which wasn't often in a public Gate—held power, but not as much, and always felt to her as if she touched the surface of a glass, warmed by sunlight, holding a gentle glow of magic.
"Up" is the plain that we just left. Damn, the rest are active, too. No chance to add a setting of my own. Ah well, it had been a faint hope, after all. In pure reflex, she checked "down" first, and got a nasty shock when she recognized it for what it was.
One of Charcoal's domains? As a destination for us? I don't think so! Of course, as a powerful mage as well as a dragon, her father had more than one little pocket kingdom. He might not be using this one; as she recalled, it was smallish, as small as the ersatz apartment she had built for herself. Charcoal preferred grander dwellings; he mostly used this one as a place to leave people he wasn't sure were guests or prisoners. It was one of the places he had graciously allowed her to use when she was a child.
It's tempting, though. There's at least one setting on every Gate he builds that goes someplace neutral. Charcoal might be insufferable, but he wasn't stupid, and he always kept his options open.
Long familiarity with the Unseleighe let her quickly identify the other four destinations. They all were Unseleighe Sidhe holdings, and all of them places she had visited, thanks to her father's habit of playing both ends ag
ainst the middle: the Shadow Tower of Bredna, the Hall of Tulan the Black Bard, the private hunting preserve of Chulhain Lorn, and Red Magda's stud farm.
Best not ask what she raises. She might feed you to them.
All of them grim destinations, and all too small to escape from readily. Smaller, even, than Madoc Skean's holding.
The one saving grace was that none of the four were on good terms with Madoc. In fact, Red Magda and Tulan had little private feuds with him that virtually guaranteed they would turn him away with a curse if he came to them on the trail of Tannim.
Of course, this did not mean that they would help Tannim. Since the young human was an ally of Keighvin Silverhair, they would probably be perfectly happy to hunt him down on their own. Magda hunted any humans she could find or kidnap just on general principles; she preferred the Great Hunt over any other kind. And as for Shar—well, they'd probably treat her the same as a human.
I have no notion how I'd stack up against them. Rather not find out by meeting them head-to-head, either.
It was rather interesting, though, to discover that she recognized all the destinations of this Gate. Were they finally getting back into familiar territory? That could be good or bad news. Good, if it meant finding a neutral destination at last—bad, if all that happened was that they worked themselves deeper and deeper into the holdings of the darker creatures. Shar had heard rumors of those who'd worked themselves into places where even the Unseleighe Sidhe were afraid to go. And once, when she was a child, her father had returned silent and stiff from one of his own journeys of exploration—and he would not talk about where he had been, only sealed off the setting on the Gate that had led there. Now that was an unsettling recollection.
Lackey, Mercedes - Serrated Edge 05 - Chrome Circle Page 28