Windmaster's Bane

by Tom Deitz

  AND SO THE BANSHEE CAME FOR HIM . . .

  David shifted the changeling so that it cradled awkwardly in the crook of his left arm. Slowly he eased himself down to a wary crouch, but his gaze never left the eyes of the banshee—eyes that burned round and red like living flame. Eyes that had nothing of beauty about them, only of hatred: hatred of life. He freed his right hand and took a firmer grip on the knife.

  “Greetings, Banshee of the Sullivans,” he said, swallowing hard. “I can’t let you have what you came for.”

  The wailing of the banshee faltered.

  David carefully laid the changeling before him on the porch floor. “I have a child here, a Faery child. I don’t know if he has a soul or not, but I guess I’ll have to find out very shortly, unless some things change real fast. This knife—this iron knife—will have some effect.” He raised his voice and looked up. “You hear me? I’m going to kill the changeling. The Sidhe took my brother; I claim this life for myself!”

  He raised the blade . . .

  “Delightful . . . it kept this reader turning pages late into the night.”—Robin W. Bailey

  “A FUN, FAST READ!”—A. C. Crispin

  “Superlatively drawn . . . one of the most original heroes in modern fantasy!”—John Maddox Roberts

  Other Avon Books by

  Tom Deitz

  DARKTHUNDER’S WAY

  DREAMBUILDER

  FIRESHAPER’S DOOM

  THE GRYPHON KING

  SOULSMITH

  SUNSHAKER’S WAR

  STONESKIN’S REVENGE

  Coming Soon

  WORDWRIGHT

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  AVON BOOKS NEW YORK

  For Louise

  who started it

  For Vickie

  who sustained it

  and

  For Sharon

  who said what she thought.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to:

  Mary Ellen Brooks and Barbara Brown

  Joseph Coté and Louise DeVere

  Linda Gilbert and Mark Golden

  Gilbert Head and Margaret Dowdle-Head

  Christie Johnson and Lin McNickle-Odend’hal

  Klon Newell and James Nicholson

  Charles Pou and James Pratt

  William Provost and Paul Schleifer

  Vickie Sharp and Mike Stevens

  Sharon Webb and Leann Wilcox

  PART I

  Prologue I: In Tir-Nan-Og

  (high summer)

  A sound.

  A sound of Power.

  A low-pitched thrum like an immense golden harp string plucked once and left to stand echoing in an empty place.

  And then, ten breaths later, another.

  But it was the golden Straight Tracks between the Worlds that rang along their sparkling lengths, as they sometimes did for no reason the Sidhe could discover—and they had been trying for a very long time. Success eluded them, though, for the half-seen ribbons of shimmering golden light that webbed the ancient woods and treacherous seas of Tir-Nan-Og—and which here and there rose through the skies themselves like the trunks of immense fiery trees—were not of Sidhe crafting at all, and only partly of their World.

  In some Worlds they were seen differently, and in some—like the Lands of Men—they were not seen. This much the Sidhe knew and scarcely more, except something of how to travel upon them—and that was a thing best done only at certain times.

  Yet the Tracks were there, in all Worlds. And they had Power—in all Worlds. For Power was the thing of which they were chiefly made.

  It was the half-heard tolling of that Power whispering through the high-arched windows and thick stone walls of the twelve-towered palace of Lugh Samildinach which awakened Ailill Windmaster a little before sunset.

  At first Ailill did not know it as sound, for the song of the Track was as much felt in the body as heard with the ear: a swarm of furious tiny bees trapped in his bones and teeth, a tingling in the blood like the bubbles in artfully made wine, a dull tension in the air itself that sang to him alone.

  Ailill allowed a smile to twitch at the corners of his mouth. It had been a long, long time since the Tracks had sung a song his particular Power could answer.

  It was not that he lacked Power himself, that wasn’t the situation at all; Power was as much a part of him as his black hair and night-blue eyes, as his tall, lean body and devious wit. But when Power came from Without as well as within, it was best to grasp it, to shape it at once to one’s will—or risk the consequence. Power loose in the World was not a good thing, as all the Sidhe knew from bitter experience. For it was such random sounding of the Tracks that once of old had wrenched them from the place of their beginning and sent them wandering along the Straight Tracks to this World, where they had founded Tir-Nan-Og and Erenn and Annwyn and the other realms of Faerie that now lay scattered in the web of the Tracks like the tattered wings of dead insects.

  No, unbounded Power was not a thing to be ignored, and Ailill was never one to ignore Power in whatever form it presented itself.

  He sighed reflectively and folded his arms behind his head. The time for action was not yet. Sunset would be better and midnight best of all, for Ailill was night-born, and at midnight his own Power would be at its height. This particular resonance would not last that long, though; of that he was reasonably certain, and so sunset it would have to be. It was a good thing it had come today, too, for at midnight tomorrow would be the Riding of the Road, and that he would not miss in spite of certain apprehensions.

  Meanwhile he studied his quarters: those apartments located high in the easternmost tower of Lugh’s palace which were by tradition set aside for the Ambassador of Erenn. In particular his eyes were drawn to the high-relief sculptures worked into the four square panels of cast bronze set deep in the pale stone opposite the window: Earth and Water, Fire and Air. Human work, he thought with a frown. And wondrously well done. Why can the Sidhe not do such things?

  A rampant horse first, for Earth, which was substance; to its right, a leaping salmon for Water, which was the force that bound substance together and made it move. And below them, their mirrors: the displayed eagle of Air for spirit; and for Fire, for that which bound spirit together and allowed it to act, the two-legged dragon called a wyvern. Framing them all was a rectangular border that bore the endlessly interlaced image of the serpent of Time which enclosed all things. Earth and Water, Fire and Air—and Time. Of these five things the world was made.

  And of these, the greatest is Fire, one form of which is Power, Ailill thought. And of Power I am very fond, indeed.

  Ailill arose then, and dressed himself in a long robe of black velvet, dark gray wool, and silver leather elaborately pieced together in narrow lozenges. A fringed cloak of black silk covered it, and a thumb-wide silver circlet bearing the fantastically attenuated images of a procession of walking eagles, worked in rubies, bound his long hair off his face.

  He took himself from the palace without being seen. A close-grown grove of splendid redwoods soared about him, their summits yet less lofty than Lugh’s walls, but Ailill chose a narrow gravel path that ran eastward through a tightly woven stand of stunted hazel trees, where tortured branches twisted together like the knotted brooch that fastened his cloak on his left shoulder. As sunset approached he increased his pace, Power now sparking through his body like the cracklings of summer lightning.
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  Eventually, his lengthening strides brought him to the low embattled wall that bordered the grove on the eastern side. Impulsively, he leapt atop that barrier, and stood transfixed as the empty immensity of darkening sky exploded before him. Glorious, he shouted in his mind alone, absolutely glorious! Ailill smiled, but no good showed in the sensual curve of those thin lips. Carelessly he stepped closer to the edge of the white marble merlon, let the rising wind send the shining silk of his cloak flapping behind him like the wings of the Morrigu. He did not fear to fall, for he could put on eagle’s shape and ride the breezes back into the High Air—far higher than the tall palace of Lugh Samildinach that now erupted from the wood-wrapped peak above him.

  Power, he thought as he edged closer to the brink. Raw as rocks. Free for the taking, free for the shaping. But what to do with it? he wondered as his eyes narrowed and his brows lowered thoughtfully.

  All at once he knew.

  He reached into the air, drew on that force he felt coiling there, shaped it into the storm it wanted to become, and held it poised in an indignant froth of wind-whipped clouds as he called upon the Power and looked between the Worlds upon the homely splatter of silver lakes, gray-green mountains, and plain white houses that marked the Lands of Men. The sun setting behind him—in both Worlds today, which happened but four times a year—cast a shimmer of red light upon the landscape. But even to Ailill’s sight the shapes twisted and blurred like a torch reflected in unquiet water, obscured by the same shifting glamour Lugh once had raised to further hide his realm from mortal eyes.

  That would be an excellent place for his storm, Ailill decided, laughing softly—even as tingling sparks shot from his fingertips and thunder rumbled among those lesser peaks.

  And so he caused it to be.

  It was a delight to command such things, he thought when he had finished. Windmaster, they called him, and not without reason: Windmaster, Stormmaker, Rainbringer—all were names that had become attached to him, and he gloried in every one. His mother had told him—she who had been a queen in Erenn before his father had put her away—that a storm had raged in both Worlds on the night he was born, and thus, just as a person’s Power was strongest at the same-hour of his birth, so did one feel closest to the weather that had watched him into the world. He shrugged. Whatever the reason was, he did not care; it was the storms themselves that mattered. He was a storm child. The storms he forged were his children—a truer reflection of himself than the son of his body could ever be. And this was an especially fine one.

  For a long while after that he listened to the echoes of his handiwork frolicking noisily in that other World. The Tracks no longer called to his blood, and he relaxed into languid reverie.

  Gradually, though, another sound, a gentler sound, began to creep through the grove to disturb his contemplation: the distant, muffled crunch of soft leather boots on the path that threaded the wood a short way behind him. It was a very faint sound, but clear to one of Ailill’s lineage.

  All at once the need came upon him to follow those footfalls, and so he did, leaping with easy recklessness from merlon to merlon as the battlement spiraled precipitously down the mountainside until at last a clearing opened among the dark shadows of the ancient oaks to his right. He paused there at the edge, masked by a gnarled gray branch that grew close against the wall—and he saw who came there, tall, golden-haired, and dressed in white: Nuada Airgetlam, who, if not yet his enemy, was certainly not his friend, and who certainly would not like his storm.

  Pointless, that one would say. Irresponsible. The World shaped itself in its own good time and to its own good purpose. To impose one’s will upon it without good reason was to set oneself above the Laws of Dana. It was always the same tiresome litany.

  Ailill sighed and craned his neck. Nuada had knelt and was carefully inserting a hand among the ivory blossoms of an unfamiliar bush that flowered in the glade. He sprang from the wall then, silent as leaf fall, but Nuada looked up, frowning, as Ailill’s long shadow fell dark upon his.

  “Well, Ailill, do you like it?” Nuada asked when the other showed no sign of speaking first. “A Cherokee rose, mortals call it. I have but newly brought it from the Lands of Men.”

  “I like it better like this,” said Ailill, languidly extending his left hand in an apparently careless gesture.

  Blue flames at once enfolded the white blossoms, through which the flowers nevertheless shone unwithered.

  Nuada did not reply, but the slanted brows lowered over his dark blue eyes like clouds over deep water, and he scratched his clean-angled chin with a gauntleted right hand.

  “. . . or maybe this way?” Ailill continued as a subtle movement of his first two fingers quenched the flames and encased the flowers in sparkling crystals of ice.

  “. . . or like this?” And the bush burned on one side and glittered frostily on the other.

  “I like it like this,” said Nuada with an absent flick of his wrist, and fire and ice were gone.

  Ailill sighed and leaned back against the mossy parapet, arms folded across his chest. He shook his head dramatically. “What is it with you, Airgetlam, that you favor the things of dull mortality above that Power which is born into us, to use as we see fit?”

  Slowly and deliberately Nuada stood and turned to face Ailill, eyes slitted. “Ours to use, not misuse . . . and as for the dullness of mortality, do you not find immortality dull? Were it not for mortal men I would long since have left this World from boredom.”

  “I find mortal men most boring of all,” Ailill replied, glancing skyward in arrogant avoidance of the other’s searching stare. “It is seldom indeed that they do anything worth noting.”

  “We shall see, we shall see,” Nuada mused, his eyes shining faintly red in the reflected light of sunset, “for as the suns of our two Worlds align ever nearer to midnight and the strength of the Way to Erenn waxes, time again draws near for a Riding of the Road. Who knows what may happen when we do?”

  “That Track still passes too near the Lands of Men,” snapped Ailill. “This I have told Lugh more than once. I do not see why he tolerates such things.”

  “This is not Erenn, Ailill—or Annwyn, either,” replied Nuada with a toss of his head. “What was it?—five hundred years at Arawn’s court, which hardly touches the World of Men at all—and that in their past? And then straight here? Well, much can change in five hundred years, and mortal men not the least of them. It is true that their works intrude here, but no place is free from that now. And one thing at least may be said in their favor They do not visit storms upon us. As to the Riding—you do not have to go. I ride as Lugh’s vanguard this Lughnasadh.”

  Ailill did not reply. The sun had passed from sight. From somewhere in the darkness above them a fanfare of trumpets split the air to mark the evening.

  Nuada fixed Ailill with one final searching stare, and turned his back.

  Ailill frowned as he stole from the glade. He paused once at its edge, looked back, and softly snapped his fingers.

  The roses took on the color of blood.

  Chapter I: A Funeral Seen

  (Friday, July 31)

  Death was fast approaching—death in the form of old age, and it was approaching them both. Yet Patrick the priest was not concerned, not when there still remained any chance of salvation for the soul of the man sitting on the stony ground beside him. Oisin was stubborn, and his arguments were cunning, but he was a pagan, and had once been a warrior: a follower of Finn mac Cumaill, in fact, who had been the greatest champion in Ireland. Just now Oisin was defending Finn’s prowess on the field of battle. The words of his boastings were a study in Gaelic eloquence.

  So much eloquence, in fact, that they fairly leapt from the page of the worn blue volume David Sullivan held open in his lap.

  He could see them clearly, the two old men, one thin and frail, robed and hooded like a monk, the other yet well-muscled, mail and helm and sword shining bright in the morning. It was a wonderful image.
r />   “Daaaavy!”

  The image shattered. Footsteps pounded up the rickety barn stairs behind him. Cursed be younger brothers, he thought. Won’t even leave you alone for thirty minutes. David frowned at the book in grim determination.

  Oisin sang now of the virtues of Finn, no longer simply as a warlord, but as a man accomplished in every art. It was getting good. The pagan was winning.

  “Pa got the tractor stuck just like Ma said he would,” Little Billy cried gleefully as he galloped past to stand perilously close to the open door of the hayloft.

  David snorted irritably. He rearranged himself in the dusty old rocking chair, adjusted his wire-framed glasses, scratched his chin where a trace of stubble had finally begun to grow, and returned to his reading.

  “That sure is a big black station wagon,” said Little Billy, peering out the door and down the hill.

  David ignored him.

  “There sure are a lot of cars behind it, and all of ’em have their lights on, and it ain’t even dark yet!”

  David shook a stray lock of unruly blond hair out of his eyes and glanced up reluctantly, a little surprised to see patchy blue sky and scattered shafts of July sunlight where only a short while before clouds had held uncontested sovereignty above the familiar riverbottoms and high, rolling ridges of the north Georgia farm he called home. Wisps of clouds still hung wraithlike here and there among the dark green hollows across the valley. Just like Ireland must be, he thought, until he lowered his gaze toward the muddy gravel road at the foot of the hill where a line of cars crept reverently along behind a hulking black vehicle.

  “It’s a funeral procession,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Just a couple more lines . . .

  “A funeral procession?”

  “A funeral procession,” David growled. “You ought to know that, old as you are . . . and if you ask me any more questions, you’ll soon have firsthand knowledge of one—from inside the hearse.” His last words hung ominously in the air.