by Tom Deitz
The Track had emptied into a stretch of dryer, more open land than the swamps he’d been navigating, though stands of the odd gold-toned cypress still circled its three or so acres. Impossibly large birds perched on limbs here and there, none close enough to see clearly—which was a blessing, as the skies were already thick with dark shapes slowly spiraling down on vast dark wings.
Carrion birds, for certain—and there was definitely carrion. Rhiannon’s troop evidently hadn’t been far ahead of the Hunt at all—or had heard them coming and sought to meet them where the Track emerged—for the first body lay not ten paces inside the clearing. A man—a Faery man—it had been, and fabulously handsome as most of them were—had his chiseled features and beardless chin not been contorted in a rictus of something that clearly transcended pain, something that was probably linked to a large, neat hole in his chest from which blood had erupted in a perfect star to pattern his gold surcoat.
The next man had been dealt with even less pleasantly; indeed had been cloven nigh in twain, from the juncture of neck and shoulder. Fortunately, that part faced away from Aikin, so he was spared the full gory spectacle. Spared the sight, rather, for the air was rank with the stench of blood, viscera, and a nebulous something that could only be called fear.
The third body was a horse, and the elk went skittish at that, for the stallion’s entrails twined in a sort of cat’s cradle around its legs—and to his dismay, it still breathed faintly. He would have put it out of its misery, but the elk moved on, and he had little choice but to follow the Track toward the clearing’s heart.
A warrior woman’s corpse loomed into view to the right, face strangely peaceful for someone with the back of her head caved in. Her possible twin lay just beyond, crushed beneath a horse whose neck had been cleft in twain. A smaller shape sprawled beside her, a skinny feral-looking boy in motley of russet fur and emerald feathers: one of the lesser fey, a mascot perhaps. The sword that lay just beyond his outstretched fingers would scarce have made Aikin a dagger.
For some reason that affected him worse than the others, and his gorge rose unbidden. He lost it entirely when a vast crow lit atop that scrawny chest and poked its beak into an eye that had obviously been born to twinkle. He was barely able to turn his head in time to avoid soiling both his leg and his steed, and was only grateful that the elk seemed to sense his discomfort and strode past.
At which point a troubling thought struck him: Supposing the ulunsuti was here: how did he find it? And fast on the wings of that realization came another, that would have occurred far sooner had he not been so everlasting tired.
This was all his fault!
He, Aikin Daniels, had slain these folks as surely as Neman had caused the death of David-the-Elder! These folks had families who would hear of this massacre and curse his deeds, friends who might be prompted to seek revenge, who might cross the World Walls to effect it, as Dave had sought to do.
All because he was a coward. All because he’d tried to save someone who was no better than these folks from a similar doom.
He really was sick then—so sick he had no choice but to slide off his steed or faint. The ground was already soggy with his vomit when he fell upon it, and he doubled that amount twice over, heaving and groaning until there was no more to gag forth. When he looked up again, it was to see the dark lump of a fallen horse he’d not truly noticed before—and rising from where she’d evidently been crouching beyond its belly, a woman.
A survivor? He hoped? He feared?
But this was no warrior maid of Rhiannon’s; this was another sort of woman entirely.
—Red dress, red hair, crazy eyes, blood on her face and arms clear to the shoulders…
Macha!
The reveler among the slain.
“A fine feast,” Macha chortled, as she paused to wrench a crimson…something in twain and thrust it into her maw. She chewed noisily and spat out blood and gristle.
Aikin was too stunned to move.
“No,” he mouthed silently—helplessly. “No…no…no…” The world reeled.
The ground hit him hard.
When he awoke, it was to see Macha bending over him, her mouth far too close to his own. He could smell her breath, hot and fetid. But her eyes, when he glimpsed them, were clear.
“Yes, look at me, boy!” she commanded. “Look, and see me sane, as I briefly am at the quarters of the day. Look, and hear, and know I speak true when I say that you had no part in this. I knew you were pursuing someone when we met upon the Tracks, but it was I who clouded your reason, I who bade you urge the Hunt to this slaughter. The knowledge that Rhiannon’s host rode ahead was in your mind, but I brought it to your tongue.”
“But…why?” Aikin choked, as he scrambled up on his elbow.
“Because Macha prefers many deaths to few, and thinks it better yet if a certain mortal goes insane. And best of all, if the folk of Faerie take the battle into his World. Then will Macha truly revel among the slain.” She paused, and madness glazed her eyes again, all hint of rationality fled. “No, not Macha…me…I will revel among the slain!
“The slain…! The slain…!” she went on in a kind of childish singsong, as she danced away across the field. “…Blood and gore and the brains of the slain…!”
And then distantly a horn sounded. And as Aikin watched in gut-twisting awe, the crazy woman raised her arms, flapped them twice, and became the largest crow he’d ever seen, which flapped away across the clearing.
Leaving him alone in a battlefield, trying to convince himself that all this grief was not his fault. The elk hadn’t fled, but was not close to hand, so he gave himself to aimless wandering, knowing he should seek the ulunsuti, yet loath to come anywhere near those ruined bodies, among which there was no sound save the rustling wings of eerily mute ravens and the hiss of wind through bloodstained grasses.
And, to the right, an odd humming. He started at that, eyes narrowed, tired, and wary. There it was again: a steady buzzing drone that seemed out of place in this land of swamps, death, and Straight Tracks. His curiosity promptly awoke, and he stumbled toward it, stiff-legged from all that riding. He freed Alec’s sword as he limped along: three feet of sloppily forged iron, that was also three feet of death past revival to anyone from Faerie.
The hum was louder now, easier to trace; and before he knew it, he was running back the way he’d come, but at an angle that looked poised to bring him upon what he now saw was another Track—likely that from which Rigantana’s host should soon appear.
He almost stepped on it before he could stop.
It was the ulunsuti: humming like a crazy thing, where it lay in a pool of blood beside a young blond knight whose throat had been sliced open. It quieted as he squatted beside it, and more as he reached out to retrieve it left-handed. Yet something stopped him. The thing was primed! And who knew what would happen now? Could he simply ignore it and let it fall quiet? Or did it have to expend all that latent power he could practically feel? Certainly it’d had power enough already to sense him worrying about it and summon him. But what could he do besides wait? Yet how could he stand to remain here with all these dead bodies? How could he explain them to their kin? It was Macha’s fault, she had herself admitted. But would anyone believe him if he repeated that tale? Even if it were true?
“God,” he gritted, “I wish these folks hadn’t died!” And then, with absolutely no warning, the World turned to light and heat, and he knew no more.
*
Aikin awoke to the fine clear pain of a sword point lodged between his pecs, and to the sight of a grim-faced Faery man whose high-crowned helm was silhouetted against a brassy sky. Something warm pulsed in the fisted hand he pressed to the blood-soaked ground, and even without looking he knew it was the ulunsuti.
“I do not know who you are, mortal lad,” the Faerie knight rasped blearily, “but I awoke here and found my fellows dazed as though newly roused, our horses running wild with a vast-horned stag, and only my brother still dead,
in whose blood you seem to lie.”
“Unnnhhhh!” Aikin groaned, and felt that more than sufficient reply.
“I seem to have lost something, however,” the knight went on. “Have you perhaps found a certain…jewel?”
Aikin froze. Lord, it was true! He’d wished the dead alive, and here they were!—confused as much as he, and anxious to deliver the ulunsuti to Rhiannon’s ships at the coast, but alive! Abruptly he followed the Faery’s gaze to his left hand.
So what was he waiting for? Why didn’t the guy simply grab the thing?
Because something lay beneath that hand, dropped clumsily when he’d fallen, but evidently sufficient to dissuade random pillaging: the hilt of Alec’s sword. Iron sword, such as all in Faerie feared. And unless this guy killed him, he couldn’t touch the ulunsuti while his hand lay upon it. Slowly, carefully, with the stone still in his palm, he eased his fingers part way ’round it.
“Raise your arm and live,” the knight snapped, as his blade sliced through Aikin’s T-shirt.
Aikin considered this. The guy had a point…far too sharp a one. Certainly he could kill Aikin before Aikin could fumble a useful grip. It would then be a simple matter to roll him away from the weapon. On the other hand, he had reinforcements in transit…
“I wished you alive just now,” Aikin said, trying to sound formal and imperious, as he did in the games he ran. “I wished your souls free of the Wild Hunt, and so you live. I did it with the stone in my hand, but I could also wish you dead again—faster than you could slay me.”
“You lie!”
“Wanta try me?”
The man paused. “Others will be joining me soon. I will wait.”
“Yeah,” Aikin shot back, daring to ease himself up on his elbows, careful to maintain his grip on both sword and ulunsuti. “Or perhaps I can wish them away as well. Perhaps there is no end to my wishes.”
“You would be wise to wish yourself gone,” the knight snarled, as he withdrew his blade but did not sheathe it. Aikin managed to sit upright. “Rhiannon will make short work of you,” the Faery added with a smug smirk. “She will cast a glamour on you so fell you will do anything to be free of it, even release the oracular stone.”
“No!” another voice countered, sailing clear across the field. “She will not!”
The Faery spun around. Aikin scrambled to his feet—to see riding from the woods a mixed company of Rhiannon’s knights and Lugh’s, with Rigantana in the van beside Eellar’s second. Rhiannon’s men were obviously prisoners.
“Rigantana,” the Faery spat. “But you do not act in the name of your dam.”
“I act in the name of Lugh Samildinach, High King of Tir-Nan-Og, whose land this is, and whose honor has been besmirched by my mother’s subterfuge,” Rigantana retorted, suddenly very close indeed. “And I act as the heir to the House of Ys.”
“Your mother—”
“—Has no right to contravene Lugh’s laws, which she has done, nor to risk Lugh’s realm as she has done likewise. You will escort her back to Ys when Lugh arrives.”
The knight did not reply. Aikin stared at Rigantana, who loomed above him: a beautiful woman still in mortal togs, astride an Irish elk. It took his breath away—and more when she smiled at him.
“You have what you came for?” she asked.
Aikin swallowed, then nodded awkwardly. “I…have.”
“It is yours to return to your friend, to do with as he will; but I would ask you all to use it carefully. I doubt it can heal the World Walls, but perhaps it can prevent further damage.”
“It’s not my call,” Aikin told her. “But I guarantee you: me and old Alec are gonna talk!”
“Perhaps I will too,” Rigantana said, with an even wider smile. “I still have business in your World. And I must admit that my mother had the right idea about the ulunsuti—if not the right means of achieving it.”
Aikin shrugged. “Yeah, well, I guess if our World’s wearin’ through into Faerie, they’ve got a right to be pissed. And a right to emigrate.”
Rigantana’s brow wrinkled with thought. “It’s a no-win,” she sighed.
Aikin puffed his cheeks. “Maybe. But I think if you asked Alec nicely…”
Rigantana smiled again. “Well now, oh Mighty Hunt-er—and yes, I know whence comes that name—you soften him up for me, and then I will ask him myself!”
Aikin grinned back. “I will,” he laughed. “Never doubt it.”
The Heir of Ys gazed at the sunless sky and frowned. “I would love to continue this conversation,” she murmured. “But the Tracks run strange this time of year, and if you would return whence you came in time to set your friends at ease, you must leave now!”
“But…”
“Now! I will summon your steed, but you must hurry. And tell Alec McLean and David Sullivan I will see them again—and not only on microfilm.”
Aikin nodded mutely and pocketed the ulunsuti. By the time he’d located his mount, it was halfway across the clearing. By the time he’d retrieved his sticky squares, it was nuzzling the back of his neck.
Rigantana gave him a leg up.
He didn’t look back when he left the meadow, but for all the tension, all the strange sights and experiences of the last few hours, his heart was strangely light.
He felt like Enya and Tori Amos, like Horselips and Clannad, like Pearl Jam and Live and Led Zeppelin—and like John Williams and Beethoven and Andrew Lloyd Weber.
Too bad he didn’t have a CD player.
Chapter XXIV: The Waking
(The Straight Tracks—no time)
“Is it my imagination,” David asked Liz, the air, and his horse’s mane, “or is the Track turnin’ red?”
“’Fraid not,” Liz replied nervously, pacing her mount as close beside his as the encroaching briars allowed: they that looped and whorled in sullen copper-rust profusion along a Track too narrow to suffer riding abreast. “Or if it is your imagination, then I’m doing it too.”
David scowled and tried to peer around the Morrigu, who rode vanguard of their odd company—a company that had grown increasingly grim and purposeful as their interminable trek progressed. Unfortunately, horse-plus-rider, plus his own mount’s head blocked most of the forward view—that and an increasing number of what looked like branches of long-needled pines thrusting out above the briars past the middle of the Track. They would’ve been a comforting reminder of home, too—had their needles not been jet black, and the scaly bark that bore them the iridescent blue-green of a scarab’s shell.
Never mind that the fragment of the Track he could see had definitely shifted from its usual luminous gold at least to orange, and—where the motes that comprised it floated nigh to their horses’ chests—nearly to crimson. The effect was of heated metal cooling from yellow-white to dull, though incandescent, red.
Like dying stars, he thought—and shuddered; for here, where the Tracks might be anything from cosmic string through points of frozen time to gears in a cosmic clock, even that was a real possibility. Shoot, that glowing carmine spark that had just bobbed past his stallion’s nose could be someone else’s Betelgeuse or Arcturus or Antares—which made him, Liz, Alec (with Eva the cat/enfield), and the Morrigu the four horsemen of some microverse’s apocalypse. And even as he watched, the Track beneath the Faery’s mare pulsed redder.
“Is this normal?” he ventured finally, pushing aside a particularly persistent bough of not-quite-pine. “Is it that Crimson Road you mentioned earlier?”
The Morrigu twisted around but did not slow her steady pace. “This stretch of Track lies very near your World,” she answered tersely. “These branches that slow our progress are the shadows of trees in the Lands of Men frozen by Time and the World Walls and given substance. As for the Track: Iron rails lie in your World where it passes. It is not unlike the taint which forces our folk into your World near your family’s dwelling.”
“It’s…eerie,” David gave back. “I usually feel good when I’m on the Tracks, but
this is too damned spooky.”
“The ghoul-haunted Woodland of Weir,” Alec quoted, from the end of the file.
“Mr. Poe,” the Morrigu called back, “and you are more correct than you imagine.”
David didn’t ask for elaboration; indeed, was increasingly unwilling to think about anything. So much had happened the last few days he barely knew which end was up. Simply making it through classes alone had been a pill; never mind agonizing over David-the-Elder; plus his friends’ assorted crises—which latter, however, seemed slowly to be resolving.
But his own resolution loomed ahead, and he had no idea what form it would take nor how he would deal with it, only that it would occur, and a day from now it’d all be over and he’d finally get some peace. He wondered if Calvin had felt this way: there on the threshold of the Ghostcountry. Of course, Cal had chosen to go, and had known what he was getting into, and had talked about it afterwards; the Morrigu was as silent as the proverbial grave—and well-nigh as encouraging.
And for once he had nothing to say himself.
For a long time he simply rode, lost in reverie, his attention focused on the rump of the Morrigu’s steed, the ears of his own, and the increasingly ruddy glow of the Tracks. Maybe he slept in place.
Certainly his consciousness had achieved some degree of separation from time, space, and his body when he found his mount slowing. He blinked, yawned, then stretched mightily—and blinked again when he saw that the briars had been superseded entirely by the shadowy pines, among the trunks of which the Track flowed like a river of luminous blood, a flood of cooling lava.
“We must go slowly now,” the Morrigu advised, “or we will miss it.”
David didn’t ask of what she spoke, but very soon he knew.
It was a Track: another Track, that either intercepted theirs at an oddly oblique angle or else broke off at one. It was damned disquieting, too; and David couldn’t help recalling H.P. Lovecraft’s “alien geometries whose angles were slightly askew.”
