The Otherworld

by Mercedes Lackey

  Gundar knew all about SERRA, of course, but he had simply never thought of it as a place where Bob could fully realize his abilities. Winterhawk had been a little surprised that the elves knew about the organization, though—he'd thought the magic being practiced down there was entirely human in origin.

  I wish I'd seen both their faces, Al thought with amusement. The Great Stone Face meets Glacier-Cliff, and both of them crack with surprise. Must have been a sight.

  So now Bob was with the Fayetteville shop, and was helping Al baby-sit the first aluminum-block mage-built engine to go into entirely human hands, hands ignorant of its true origin. Keeping the secret under wraps had been a job in itself; more than once Bob had showed ingenuity in the area of creative deception.

  Even if you had to pry conversation out of him with a forklift.

  "Don't you ever ask questions?" the Sidhe asked, perplexed. "Not about cars, I mean, about us—my foster kids have been eaten up with questions every time they've run into a different group of the Folk."

  Bob thawed a little more, and some of his true age of twenty showed through. "You don't mind? Gundar said not to be a pain in the ass, but you people are a lot different from the alfar."

  Al laughed aloud. "Hell, no, I don't mind. Not even close. In Outremer we're Scottish Celts, for the most part, both the human fosterlings and us, and you should know the Scots—if you won't tell us something on your own, we'll find it out. That's why Scots make such good engineers. I'm used to it. Ask away."

  "How did you people ever get involved with racing?" Bob asked. "I know about the Flight; Gundar told me about that—but it seems damned weird to me for you people to leave Europe because of Cold Iron everywhere, then turn around and start racing and building cars."

  Alinor chuckled. "Two reasons, really. First, we've always measured ourselves against you. I—don't suppose you've studied old ballads and stories, have you?"

  Bob shook his head.

  "Well if you had, you'd find a lot of them with the same theme—the elf-knight challenges a human to a duel, either of wits or of swords, the fight goes on for quite some time, the human wins and carries off some sort of prize. Usually gold, sometimes a lover." Lost and won a few of those myself, before I got tired of the Game. "We did that quite a bit, although needless to say, the times when the human lost were never recorded in ballads." Al eased the bill of his cap up with his thumb and gave Bob an ironic look over the rim of his sunglasses.

  Bob smiled wryly. "What happened when the human lost?"

  "Depends on what he—or she, believe it or not—looked like, what skills they had. Usually they had to serve us a year and a day, human-time. Some of the knightly types with big egos and small brains we taught a little humility to, making them act as servants. Generally we had them get us things we needed, news, new fashions—or we had them find the kids that were being mistreated and tell us who they were."

  Bob's eyes brightened. "Then what?"

  Al shrugged. "Depended on the circumstance. Worst case I ever heard of was a little German town with a real high birthrate. They'd had a witch-scare and killed off all the cats, so the rats had gotten so bad they started biting the kids in the cradles. We stepped in, then, and we got rid of the vermin. But that meant the Black Death missed them entirely."

  "So?" Bob said. "Sounds like a good thing to me—"

  "It would have been, except that they exported dyed and woven wool, worked silver and other metals, wine—luxury goods. But after the Death, there weren't as many people around to buy their exports. Prices dropped. Food was more expensive, without serfs to till the land. Things got bad. Half the youngsters in the place went around with welts and bruises."

  "That sounds familiar—" Bob ventured.

  Al snorted. It should. It's even survived into this day and age. "Place called Hammerlein. Hamlin, to the English."

  Bob shot him a glance that said quite clearly that he thought Al was pulling his leg. Al shrugged. "Ask Gundar. His German cousin was the Piper. We ended up with so many fosterlings we had to spread them out over a dozen Underhill kingdoms."

  "Sonuvabitch," Bob said thoughtfully. "Say, when you Folk went up against humans in combat—wasn't that a little one-sided?"

  "We did have a bit of an edge where armor and practice was concerned," Al admitted. "But when it came to a duel of swords, humans had an edge too, in that they were fighting with Cold Iron." Al smiled reminiscently. I can still remember the thrill of evading an edge by the width of a hair. . . . "Put a kind of savor to it, coming that close to the Death Metal. Well, dueling and challenging people at crossroads went out of fashion for the humans, partially because knights were like Porsches—expensive to maintain."

  Bob laughed. "Eyah. You don't risk a Porsche in a back-country county-fair drag-race."

  Al nodded. "That was when some of us moved. For a while we played at other things, but the Church was making it hard for us to stay hidden, and it just wasn't the same—and besides, there was more Cold Iron around with every passing year. So, in the end, almost all of us moved."

  "The Flight." Bob cocked his head to one side and wiped a trickle of sweat from his neck. "Then what?"

  "We `rusticated,' as my father is fond of saying." Al sighed. In many ways, those days had been halcyon, if a little boring now and again. "Then the Europeans followed us across the sea, and rather than compete with them, we went into seclusion, at least on the East Coast. Found places we weren't likely to be bothered. Eventually we set about recreating the Courts in the wilderness." He looked out over the heat-hazed countryside. "For a long time, this was enough of a challenge. It was like starting over, and for the Indians that lived out here already, well, we fit right into their beliefs. No problem. Before the horses came up from Mexico, our elvensteeds would counterfeit deer, bear, or anything else big enough to carry us; it didn't matter that deer and bear wouldn't take riders. After all, we were spirits, and our spirit-animal-brothers would do things no ordinary animal would do. For some reason, perhaps that they were closer to natural power than any white man we knew in Europe, picking fights with them just wasn't any fun. It didn't feel right. So we cohabitated, in harmony, for a couple centuries."

  Bob gazed at him thoughtfully. Though the human didn't say anything, Al knew the keen mind was absorbing everything he said. The young man was quite interested—probably because he'd only heard the alfar side of the story. The Nordic elves never moved from their chosen homes; instead, they had created places where humans passed through without noticing where they were—places that weren't quite in the "real" world, but weren't quite Underhill either.

  "Then the Europeans caught up with us. At first we sympathized with them, these settlers who were trying to make homes with next to nothing, and certainly no magic, in the wilderness. We had done it ourselves, so we knew it wasn't easy. But with them came Cold Iron, so we had to keep our distance from them. When their settlements came too close to our groves, we played tricks on them, appearing to them as demons in order to frighten them away."

  Al saw the hint of what might be the edge of a wry grin of amusement. Like a shadow drowned with sudden light, the hint of a smile faded, replaced with Bob's familiar unreadable expression.

  "For a while that kept us entertained. Until they started throwing knives and shooting at us . . . which put an end to that silliness. Especially since a lot of their weapons used steel shot as well as lead."

  "I can see that," Bob commented. "I'd say Cold Iron in that form would ruin any elf's day—and you people aren't immune to a lead bullet if it's placed right."

  Al nodded. "All we could do then was avoid all humans. The Indians were slaughtered, absorbed into the white population, or relocated, so we lost our allies there. As more humans invaded the areas we once inhabited, those Low Court elves unfortunate enough to have located their groves near human cities had serious trouble. The rest of us transported our magic nexuses and Low Court cousins to places even the humans wouldn't want. Isolation, and seclusio
n, became necessary for us once again. And, once again, we were bored silly."

  "Bored?" Bob said. "Eyah, I can see that. Live long enough, you do about everything there is to do."

  "A hundred times. And get almighty tired of the same faces," Al agreed. "Now the story gets local, though. A few human lifetimes after that, we started seeing those new-fangled horseless carriages around Outremer. And people were challenging each other with them." He sighed, remembering his very first look at a moonshiner-turned-race-car, the excitement he'd felt. "Well, what they were doing—races along deserted country roads or on homemade tracks—that was just like the old challenge-at-the-crossroad game, only better, because it was not only involving the skill and wits of the driver, it involved the skill and wits of the craftsman. There's only so much you can do to improve armor past a point of refinement, but an engine—now, there's another story."

  Bob's attention wandered for a moment as their car roared past, then came back to Al. "So your lot began racing? Fairgrove, Outremer, Sunrising, that bunch?"

  Al nodded. "I was all for it from the beginning; I was a smith, and I hadn't had anything to do but make pretty toys for, oh, a couple of centuries. Some of the rest wanted to use elvensteeds shape-changed, but the fighters really squashed that idea."

  "Wouldn't be fair," Bob said emphatically. "Elvensteed damn near breaks Mach one if it's streamlined enough."

  "Exactly. We wanted a challenge, not a diversion. So, we started making copies of cars from materials we could handle, learning by trial and error how to strengthen them, and copying your technology when it got ahead of ours." Al sent a probe toward the car, but the engine was behaving itself, and he withdrew in satisfaction.

  "You wouldn't have dared let people get too close, early on, though," Bob observed. "One look under the hood, and you'd have blown it. So that's why you stuck to club racing?"

  Al nodded, with a little regret. "We still don't dare take too much out of the club." He sighed. "Much as I'd love to pit the Fayetteville crews against the Elliot team, or the Unser or Andretti families, or—well, you've got the picture. Best we can do, Bob, is send you fosterlings out there and take our triumphs vicariously."

  "You're here," Bob pointed out.

  "I'm one of a few that can be out here," he said soberly. "Lots of the Folk can't even be around the amount of iron that's at the Fairgrove complex, much less what's in the real world. I can, though it's actually easier to handle Cold Iron magically when it's heated. That's why I try and do my modifications while the car's running. Cold Iron poisons us, but like any poison, you can build up a tolerance to it, if you work at it. I worked at it. I still have to wear gloves, and it still gives me feedback through my magic to have to `touch' it, though. And I'd have third-degree burns if I handled it bare-skinned."

  Al held up his gloved hands; the Firestone crew thought he had a petroleum allergy. That was a useful concept, since it would explain away blisters if he accidentally came into contact with the Death Metal.

  "We could get only so close to the real cars in the beginning," he added. "When the manufacturers began using alternative materials—like fiberglass bodies, carbon fiber, aluminum parts—it became that much easier. Some humans despise the concept of the `plastic car.' We've been encouraging it for decades!"

  "Eyah," Bob said, laconically. "Never could stand disposable cars myself. I always thought a car should last at least twenty-five years. The next time I see a plastic car I'll think differently of it."

  Al gloated a little over the "triumph" of getting Bob to speak, with a certain wry irony. That was actually a stimulating conversation.

  But the respite was brief. The spark of conversation dimmed, and their attentions turned to the track, the team—the unrelenting heat, the hammer of the sun, the fatigue setting over even the best-rested of them. Weariness began to settle in around him again, this time with a vengeance. How many laps were they going to pull in that car today? he thought, now with some irritability. The RV sounds mighty inviting right now.

  He smiled a little at the idea of a Sidhe regarding such a vehicle as a shelter. He recalled the time he told Gundar about the RV, the human-made Winnie that was sheathed with the Death Metal. It took some convincing before Gundar finally believed one of the Folk could live in such a thing; Al's friend had yet to build up a tolerance to Cold Iron and shied away.

  Al sat down on a stack of chalkmarked tires, a few feet away from Bob. He needed to keep his distance—not from Bob, but from the rest of the team. The Folk had a high degree of sensitivity to energies not usually discernible by humans. Since Al worked closely with humans, his shields had to be much, much better than any of the Folk who never ventured out of Underhill. He had learned when a youngster that he was unusually sensitive to human emotions. His shields had required some specialized engineering to filter out the more intense or negative feelings generated by many humans in order to be able to work around them. Even Bob had caused him a few problems. He didn't have to think about the shields much anymore; the whole process of maintaining them was pretty much second-nature. The only time he remembered the network was there was when an intense emotion somehow managed to breach it.

  Like—now.

  Now what? Al thought, becoming aware of a nagging feeling of someone in distress, somewhere outside his shields. He reached inside his overalls and withdrew a small package of Keeblers and starting munching absently, his thoughts drifting beyond his immediate world, seeking the source of emotion. The cookie things helped him concentrate, though he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was all the sugar.

  He bit the head off an annoyingly cheerful vanilla figure and considered: Something strong enough to leak through my defenses must be hot stuff. Where is it coming from? He glanced over at Bob, who was apparently studying an interesting oil stain on the track.

  No. It's not him.

  Focusing on a broader area, Alinor reached, touching the members of the immediate crew. Their emotions paralleled the way he was feeling right now: exhaustion and the heartfelt desire to start stacking a few Z's, coupled with a subtle anxiety over their delicate, powerful creation hurtling its human driver around the track. That wasn't what he wanted. Nothing they were feeling would be strong enough to penetrate the shields.

  Too low level. Boy, someone is really hurting out there. Where is he? Or . . . she?

  Now Al felt a definite female flavor to the emotion, though it was overwhelmed by sheer asexual anxiety. Ah. A clue. That should narrow the field. He knew it was barely possible this meant there was some danger at the track, perhaps even a serious problem with one of the cars.

  There's always worry, but this is close to hysteria, and we don't need that right now, he thought, regarding the other racing teams around him. There didn't seem to be anything urgent going on, though some of the teams were noticeably restless, probably from being out here for so long.

  Don't blame them, Al thought, his search distracted for a moment. I'm ready to go in, too.

  Although the world of racing remained male-dominated even to this day, a fair number of women were on the teams. But none of them were particularly upset about anything.

  Wives? The few who came to the competition at Hallet were not around today. During test lap days there just weren't that many spectators, either local natives or those cheering the teams.

  Odd. He thought. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Who said the source had to be on the track? A barbed wire fence surrounded the entire track, forming a feeble barrier between Hallet and the surrounding Oklahoma territory. Immediately behind them, about a quarter of a mile away, was an ancient homestead, little more refined than a log cabin, that appeared to be as old as the proverbial hills. There, perhaps? Intrigued, Al reached toward it, diverting his dwindling supply of energy towards the house. Immediately his senses were assaulted by—

  A bedroom overflowing with fevered physical activity—brass bedposts pounding like jackhammers against slatted-wood walls pitted and dented by repeated sessions
in the warm afternoons and evenings. . . .

  Alinor staggered mentally backward as he recoiled from the emotional violence he had inadvertently witnessed, the steamy interplay in the farmer's bedroom. Whoops! Lots of intense emotion there, but not quite the kind I was looking for. He felt as if he had been drenched in a scalding shower, and put up every shield he had to protect himself for a moment.

  Bob made no comment.

  By degrees his mind gradually recovered from the thorough scorching it had received, and in about fifteen minutes Alinor was able to gather energies around him again, retrieving his scattered pieces of empathy from around the track.

  He pulled his act together, took a deep breath and probed again. He sent his thoughts out over a wide area, hoping to pick up the source this way, a method that had proven effective before. The lethargic feelings of the pit crew were again a distraction, especially since they so nearly mirrored his own. Echo effect, he thought, shaking his head. Tends to block what I'm really looking for. Maybe if I got some rest, came after this with a fresh set of eyes . . .

  The moment he considered this, a blast of emotion pierced his reassembled shields once again.

  This time he was ready for it; on it as soon as it penetrated. Yes, it was definitely from a female. Now he could sense some other things. The woman was a mother. Images, riding the current of the high emotion, overwhelmed him with a deep sense of loss. But not a permanent loss—the kind caused by a death or irrevocable separation. She must be looking for something, Al decided, wishing his powers would provide him a clearer picture. Or someone.

  Then as if a warm, stiff breeze had blown over his mind, the final image came into focus. Al leaped to his feet, now in a fully alert, combat-ready stance, even though there was nothing here to fight.

  She's looking for her child. And she thinks he's in danger.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A blistering wind dried the tears burning Cindy Chase's face as she stared at the race cars surging across the black, twisting track. She leaned against a tree in a poor parody of comfort. The oak bark pressed uncomfortably through her blue cotton blouse and into her weary muscles. This tree was the only place she had found that was even remotely cool. Her forearms, normally not exposed to the sun, were pink, probably burned worse than they looked. This served only to make her more miserable. It had never seemed this hot in Atlanta.