by Tom Deitz
(Nichols Mountain, Enotah National Forest, Georgia)
“…Faerie?”
Aikin’s last word was still melting into the thick cool air. And with it, the final vestige of Mighty Hunter vanished, leaving only a frustrated junior forestry jock who feared he’d said too much.
…Faerie…
He could tell by the way David’s blue eyes glittered, the way normally merry lips hardened to a thin grim line as his jawline tightened beneath its well-tanned curves, that he’d struck a naked nerve. And most times that would’ve bugged him; most times he’d already have been seething with guilt at having deliberately trespassed on taboo ground.
But he’d just flat out had enough! They’d been at it for over four years now, Dave and Alec had. Never mind Runnerman and Gary and Dave’s girlfriend, Liz Hughes—and that new Cherokee guy, Calvin McIntosh, and who-knew-who-else: disappearing unexpectedly, and not explaining shit when they returned wearing very grown-up shadows on their faces, joy and wonder in their eyes he’d not been asked to share.
And there was no reason he shouldn’t share those things! No way he was any different from the others—including the entire Gang—who’d walked upon the—what did Dave call ’em? Straight Tracks? After all, wasn’t his appellation, besides Mighty Hunter, GameGod? Earned because he was a master at creating fantasy worlds for role-playing adventures. Which was cold comfort when the rest of his buds were having real ones.
Of course they literally couldn’t tell him—at first, not Dave and Alec and Liz. They’d finally confessed that much: how they’d been bound by a magical geas not to speak of what they’d seen in certain places, done in certain others. But there were ways around injunctions like that, ways to avoid direct questions: to listen without being seen, to pause outside doors or tent flaps or windows, to creep silently back when you’d loudly walked away. Dave himself acknowledged him to be the quietest person he knew, save Calvin. But even Mad David Sullivan didn’t know how quiet Aikin Daniels could be, how stealthily he could move when frustration gave him cause.
And so he’d learned a few things, by repute and a scatter of begrudged conversations. But not once had he ventured in the flesh to that mysterious realm he’d just named. “Faerie,” he repeated, to force himself to confront it—and further lay the goad to David’s soul. “Or Galunlati?” he added, louder—though his voice shook in a way he loathed.
“Prob’ly,” David grunted, not looking at him, though the resigned slump of his shoulders proclaimed as loudly as words that he was about to relent. Alec would’ve caved in already, had he not been taking cues from Dave. Once, Aikin admitted wistfully, he’d have been calling the shots. He’d never fully accepted his demotion to Alec’s number two bud.
Nor did he break eye contact with Alec as he slowly reset the Winchester’s safety, folded himself down in place, and with deliberate nonchalance laid the weapon athwart his thighs: a woodland king with his sword of state. “If we’re gonna keep on bein’ friends,” he announced, “we gotta talk.”
“I thought you wanted to hunt!” David choked—and Aikin knew he’d won.
“I can hunt any time. You won’t talk about this stuff any time, and I don’t feel like workin’ up nerve to hit you with it again.”
“It’d take all day, to tell right.”
“I know a bunch of it anyway,” Aikin countered, “the stuff about you havin’ the Second Sight and seein’ the Sidhe ridin’ through your dad’s back forty one summer night. The magic ring one of ’em gave you…”
“Hmmm,” Alec mused. “Maybe we oughta ask what you know.”
Aikin ignored hm. “How ’bout we start with the deer? What was it? More to the point, where’d it come from? What’s it doin’ here?”
David sighed resignedly and slumped back against his tree. “Okay,” he began, “first…I don’t know what it was—exactly. Obviously it was some kind of cervid. Equally obviously it wasn’t any kind that lives in this World—”
“I’d guess it was from Faerie,” Alec inserted, casting a nervous eye at his glowering friends. “Critters from Galunlati tend to be our critters only more so: Pleistocene America and newer—plus odd lots, like the uktena or the water-panthers—”
“Hold it!” Aikin broke in. “First things first. What do you mean by World? The way you said it, I mean?”
Another sigh. “Don’t want much, do you?” David chided. “But the best way to describe ’em, I guess, is to think of our World—our primary physical reality—as a toy globe; and then think of the other Worlds as pieces of wet tissue paper torn into random shapes and thrown on it. They stick and conform to the globe’s shape and depend on it for support; but they also wrinkle, at which points they don’t touch our World—and they don’t cover it all over anyway. Oh, but they can land on top of each other; and if our World disappeared, they’d collapse into mush. Somehow our gravity extends there and maintains ’em, even though most of ’em really do have finite edges—you really can walk off the end of the world in some of ’em. But anyway, there’re a bunch of these Worlds that overlap and interconnect, but most of the ones we know about overlap northwest Europe and the eastern U.S. The most…accessible ones are collectively called Faerie; and the inhabitants—the human-type inhabitants—all arrived here from one place and settled ’em, but not all at once.”
He paused for breath, then went on. “So like I said, there’re three main Faerie realms separated by some kind of tenuous quasi ocean that doesn’t always exist, as best I can tell. And each of these realms overlaps our World at a different place—and time, so I’ve been told, which I don’t understand at all, since they all exist at the same time in their own space. The closest one’s Tir-Nan-Og, which covers the present-day southeastern U.S.—I’m not sure where the boundaries are, but they go at least as far south as Cumberland Island, where they’ve got some kinda port where the ships from Annwyn arrive. Then there’s Erenn, which overlaps Ireland in the eighteenth century, and Annwyn, which overlaps medieval Wales. I think there used to be one called Norwald, which was destroyed by iron, which is mondo dangerous stuff there ’cause it’s supposedly never cooled since…the Big Bang, I guess. And there’re all kinds of pocket universes and stuff that bud off the big ones, that can be reached from just one point or World. Like, there was a tower on an island inside Stone Mountain—”
“Fine,” Aikin interrupted. “So what about the deer?”
“Actually, I was sorta gettin’ to that by a long road when I started in about the Worlds,” David replied. “See, the Worlds connect with each other via something we call Straight Tracks, though I’ve also heard ’em called Ley Lines and a couple other things. They’re apparently lines of ‘cosmic force,’ or some such. Might be sort of solidified gravity, or they could be related to cosmic strings—that’s what Calvin’s lady thinks. But what’s major is that they connect all the Worlds. They can exist where there’s literally nothing outside. And they even reach to other stars. The Sidhe—they’re kinda the Faerie high nobility—got here on ’em from somewhere else, though they’re interfertile with our kind, in spite of it. So anyway, these Tracks run all across our World, unseen—’cept that I can see ’em with my Second Sight, which you know about—”
“The deer, Dave, the deer!”
“Oh yeah—well, normally I’d say it got on the Tracks in Faerie and got off here. ’Cept that doesn’t make a lotta sense, ’cause to get on or off a Track requires a certain skill—which nobody I know in our World has. Folks in Faerie can do it, and sometimes animals from there. But the thing that’s buggin’ me about the big white guy, is that there’s no Track anywhere near here. Nuada—he’s one of the Lords of the Sidhe—showed me where all the local ones were one time—at least the ones that connect with Faerie—and the closest, which is in the woods behind my folks’ place, is still more than three miles away. Also, there’s the matter of ‘the substance of this World’”—David made quote marks with his fingers. “What that means is that beings tend to wear the…m
atter, I guess you could say, of whatever World they’re native to, and the farther from their own World they get, and the longer they stay away in their own substance, the more that World’ll draw ’em back—like a bungee cord, or whatever. Some of the Sidhe can get around this by putting on the substance of our World—in which form they can use iron, but lose most of their magic. And how this connects with old whitey is that animals generally can’t do that, which means that even if one somehow got on the Tracks in Faerie and got off here, there’d be a draw on its instinct that’d keep it close to where it came in.”
“So this guy,” Aikin exclaimed, “evidently got here some other way!”
“And the only one that makes sense is that it didn’t get here by the Tracks at all, but came straight through the World Walls, which it shouldn’t have been able to do.”
“Unless,” Alec noted, “the World Walls are weak somewhere nearby, which can happen—’specially where there’s lots of iron in our World.”
“Which that weird wind we felt right after we saw it supports.”
“The…World Walls,” Aikin mused. “They’re the…interface between Worlds, right?”
David grinned. “You’re in the wrong major, man.”
Aikin grinned back in spite of himself. “I puzzled a lot of this out a long time ago, guys. I mean, a lot of it’s in books, if you can get hold of the right ones. Some of it’s even in gaming manuals.”
“Which are not, however, to be trusted,” David snorted.
“So what now?” Alec prompted. “Seeing how you’ve got us started.”
“I…don’t know,” Aikin sighed. “Much as I’d like to hear more of this, we’ve gotta get back to hunting. So how ’bout if we just settle for a promise to talk about it again—like real soon. Or—” He paused, as another idea struck him. “What I’d really like is for you guys to show me something.”
“No can do,” David shot back immediately. “Sorry.”
Aikin felt his anger rising to a head again, and had to fight to keep his voice low. “Well goddamn, guys! What the fuck have I gotta do? I mean—”
“We can’t access the Tracks,” Alec told him. “Shoot, Dave can’t even see ’em—or sense ’em, or whatever he does—unless they’re activated, which means the Sidhe are traveling on ’em. It’s like a wire glowing red when it conducts electricity.”
Aikin’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “But aren’t there other ways? Can’t you guys look between the Worlds, or something?”
“The World Walls weaken at the quarters of the day,” David admitted. “Sometimes you can see stuff then.”
“Except there’s nothing to see ’round here,” Alec added. “And the sun’s already up.”
“But—” Aikin began—and broke off abruptly. His sharp ears had caught a rustling in the leaves across the ridge. The white stag returning? Maybe? Probably? he prayed.
Only…this didn’t sound exactly right. There was something different about the pacing of these steps, something more…tentative…more uncertain. More mundane. Yet surely a real deer wouldn’t approach so close to three far-too-talkative hunters, however low their voices.
Unless the remnants of the fog had muted their tones—that and the mass of mountain ’twixt here and the quarry.
And at that exact moment, what he’d taken for a spray of sweet gums along the ridge crest moved—to reveal, sixty yards away, silhouetted against a sky now far more blue than pink or purple, a small spike buck: probably one that had been a fawn last season. And just ahead of it, a much larger doe—both good old American Odocoileus virginianus.
Fortunately, Dave and Alec had caught his reaction, if not yet the focus thereof, and quieted obligingly. Barely daring to breathe, Aikin twisted around onto his belly, to sprawl along the slope like a grunt in one of those Vietnam movies he’d obsessed on a few years back. A squint through the scope confirmed the target—the doe, which had lowered its narrow head to nibble along the ground: a perfect profile, with virtually no fog between. Once more he released the safety. Crosshairs found the heart, then slid toward the neck: quicker death that way.
And then instinct took over. He got that odd sensation he always did when prey was in his sights, of a thousand generations of elder Danielses peering over his shoulder as he enacted that most ancient of survival rites. Nor did he choose—consciously—when to pull the trigger.
Yet one instant there was absolute silence, the next, a boom loud enough to wake the world—and a solid slab of fiberglass stock slammed back into his shoulder: a shadow of the pain he’d just inflicted.
But what he saw—not through the scope, not any longer—was the little buck leaping away and the big doe collapsing where she stood, a bullet—his bullet—in her spine.
“Way to go!” David cheered behind him.
“Alright!” Alec echoed, already scrambling up the slope.
Aikin hauled him back by an ankle, sprawling him among the leaves. “Not yet!” he hissed—for no obvious reason since his shot had just put every critter in earshot on red alert. “We gotta hold off a couple minutes. I could’ve just stunned ’er.”
Alec blinked uncomprehendingly. “So?”
“They’ve been known to come to when you’re right at ’em,” Aikin informed him patiently.
“So?”
“How’d you like to have your throat laid open by a hoof?”
“But the blood…”
“Oughta be plenty in the thoracic cavity,” Aikin assured him with a fiendish grin, as he reached for his knife, “—from bone splinters, if nothing else. And I tell you what, McLean, you can have first slice!”
“You can carry her, too,” David chimed in gleefully, with a wider grin of his own.
Aikin suppressed a chuckle. “We will talk more,” he told them. “And I don’t mean about hunting.”
Interlude I: Live Audience
(Banba’s Wood—Tir-Nan-Og—approaching Samhain)
Gargyn took a deep breath and strode from the shelter of head-high ferns onto the gleaming gravel of the High Road where it turned west through Banba’s Wood. He wore his best kilt, a fresh white linen shirt, and the black felt hat Borbin had made for special days. Beneath it, his crimson thatch was as neat as could be managed with a broken onyx comb one of the Seelie lords had abandoned; and his face, hands, and knees were as clean as a summer sky. His bare feet could have used some work; then again, they had worked all afternoon to bring him here, in quest of a certain meeting.
Bad luck breeds blind hope, he told himself, repeating what Borbin had declared the day before, when he’d finally recovered wit enough to dare the forest where the Littl’un had first seen the wyrm. The one from which it—or one of its kin—had roared out yesterday morn. He’d found no dragon—no bloodred shev-ro-lay—but what he had unearthed was far more disconcerting.
A hole.
Not a dirt-walled digging full of decaying leaves and the odd feisty beetle, however, but a full-out hole: a strip forty paces long and half that wide, where the forest floor simply wasn’t. Ragged at the borders it was, and with a few roots and tufts of grass clutching grimly at the edges, where they had not yet dissolved—but mostly simply a patch of nothing where a hunk of his hold had been. And even as he’d stood gaping, a stone right at the marge—just by his left foot, in fact—had sifted away to…gone.
He’d mumbled a certain Word then, and held his mouth a particular way, and, with one eye open and the other closed, had peered through the World Walls that bordered that troublesome not-place, and into the Lands of Men.
It was iron, sure enough: a long, ripply fence of the cursed ever-hot stuff half as high as he was tall, endlessly long, and fixed to a series of wooden poles set in the earth between two stretches of quick-folks’ High Road. A trifling work, for them, Borbin had informed him, something they built beside their roads to keep their shev-ro-lays from grazing—or butting heads. But the World Walls were thin at that point, and with all that new iron there, the Mortal World had simply burned
through. Fortunately, most quick-folk were numb as rocks when it came to matters of Power and couldn’t look into Faerie anyway. Most would see nothing at all—an instant’s disorientation, a breath of too-fresh air, and they’d be none the wiser—save, perhaps, in their dreams. A few might glimpse a patch of fog, and the very talented maybe the shadow of something old, alive, and rooted—like a tree. Only those with the Sight must needs be wary, and they were scarce as white krakens in the distant sea.
But there were more of ’em all the time: seers, quick-folk, big iron things, and holes in the World Walls, all; and Gargyn was tired of fretting about his clan. Which was why he was here, in his very best clothes, waiting for one of the Seelie folk to ride by and hear his case. One often did this time of day, Borbin’s brother had confided over an ale: one who’d harken to even a humble bodach’s woes.
He didn’t have long to wait—far less time than three sturdy quick-folk lads took to tote a dead deer two mortal miles—before a subtle pounding began to jolt up through his ankles. And very soon after that, he heard the scratchy thunder of hooves at a steady run.
He almost fled when she careened around the corner, so tall and fair and fey that lady was. But then she saw him, and reined her smoked-silver stallion, and smiled at him like lightning at stormy dawn—and Gargyn could not move, perilous though Seelie folk might be. She wore no crown, nor suffered any escort, yet was she clearly a queen. She also looked dangerously preoccupied.
“Hail, master bodach,” she called from the saddle, as her gown of pewter, charcoal, and greenish gray settled around her, like waves beneath a nervous sky. “Is there a reason you assay Lugh’s High Road on so fine an afternoon?”
Gargyn felt heat rise in his cheeks and decided to ponder the ground, but the woman’s eyes caught his and drew his gaze like a moth toward the flame of her own. Fierce, she looked, and angry, though not, he felt, at him. But sympathetic she likewise seemed, and so he told his tale.
She listened with patience and silence, then nodded when he was done. “Your plight is not rare,” she acknowledged, “though your own king does not seem to deem these…erosions worth his note. Then again, he has never cared much for you small fey, has he? As though you were a blight on the bloom of his oh-so-perfect realm. But Rhiannon of Ys knows your worth and would welcome you to my shores—were there not so many of you so suddenly, all fleeing these troublesome holes. Yet come, if you will, and I will comfort you, for I have found a World where you could dwell in peace forever.”
