by Tom Deitz
“Uh, I hate to mention this,” Aikin broke in. “But where, exactly, are we goin’? I mean, we gotta get Lugh somewhere. And we need to get Dave’s dad to a doctor—a real doctor—no offense.”
“Which sounds like we gotta get back to our World,” LaWanda observed.
“Your place, Dave?” Aikin ventured.
“No fuckin’ way!”
Aikin stared at him.
David countered with a glare. “You wanta bring these guys down on my folks? Think, man! We’re a bunch of puny mortals, with one fully functional Faery around. Two if you count Finno.”
“Best not,” Aife advised.
“In any event, whether or not we manage to shake ’em in here, that’s the first place any pursuit would look!”
The woman nodded agreement. “So it would seem.”
“Then where?” David persisted. He was, he realized, stroking his father’s forehead. Big Billy never moved.
“A hospital,” LaWanda emphasized. “Preferably one near a Track—assuming we have to stay on Tracks with this thing.”
“It helps,” Nuada acknowledged from where he lay stretched on the floor, looking as if he’d been bled nearly dry of vitality—which perhaps he had.
“But it doesn’t have to be?” David countered, suddenly alert.
“No,” Nuada conceded, face brightening as he, with some effort, sat up. “And that may be our salvation!”
David’s scowl deepened. “Huh?”
Nuada’s face was alive with animation, in marked contrast to its dull pallor of instants before. “A vessel such as this can travel anywhere if the dragon has a scent to pursue. But suppose we could set a scent in our vessel’s nostrils the other could not duplicate?”
“Couldn’t they just follow us anyway?”
“Perhaps,” Nuada conceded. “Or perhaps they will be busy with other things.”
“You’ve got a place in mind, then? And a means to get _ us there?”
Nuada—almost—grinned. “I have, though I would rather not speak of it lest we be captured beforehand.” And with that he rose stiffly to his feet and steered toward the door.
Aife rose up there, blocking him. “Lord, are you sure you have strength?”
A shrug. “I have strength for some things. Whether they be the right ones is not for me to know. For the first part of my task, however, yes, I have strength.”
And with that, he pulled aside the door and staggered up the stairs. Light framed him as he paused for breath: flickering red-gold-orange, mixed with a duller red like congealed blood, as though he stood at the open door of a furnace. The air smelled hot and seemed to surge into the cabin to sear their lungs, so that more than one of them began coughing. David hoped Fionchadd was okay, up there in all that. And Nuada—there he went now.
“Wait!” David yelled, and then he too was dashing up the steps. Fortunately, Aife’s warnings had sunk in, and he kept his gaze fixed firmly on the deck, where shadows danced and frenzied to the tune of competing brightnesses from everywhere. The heat was beyond fierce, so that he felt the skin start to tighten across his cheekbones as though he’d stayed in the sun too long.
Still, he had to know, and so swept his glance carefully upward and aft until he glimpsed Fionchadd’s boots where his friend stood braced beside the tiller, garments whipped nigh to tatters by the force of a battering wind.
And Nuada? There he was, up by the figurehead, speaking a word aloud—likely one Fionchadd had passed him mind to mind.
However it was transferred, it seemed to be working, for the carved dragon was turning around, and Nuada was placing something in one gaping wooden nostril. David tried to see what it was, but the glare and the sweat running into his eyes made it impossible to make out more than that whatever it was glinted like metal and was small enough to fit inside an adult male hand.
By the time the head returned to its normal position, David could’ve sworn that they were moving faster, as though their vessel were some hound that had finally scented a long-sought quarry. As for Nuada, he had reeled, then fallen back, aided by Aife, who’d materialized from nowhere to support him. David waited to see if they would go or stay, and when it became apparent they intended to remain on deck, turned his attention elsewhere. He should go below, yet still he lingered, shielding his face with his hand from the glare ahead as he turned back toward the stern, whence whatever disaster might strike would issue.
Fionchadd still manned the tiller—likely because the buffeting inside the Pillar was sufficiently severe that constant adjustments were required to keep them on track—and, of course, to evade the pursuing vessel, which still hung grimly on their tail, closer, if anything, though with the bulk of the Dungeon between.
There was something weird about the light back there, too; it was ruddier than that ahead, for one thing, which tended ever so slightly toward violet. Which made no sense, unless it was due to the red shift: approaching light compacting into shorter wavelengths than that behind. Which said a lot about the nature of the Tracks and would’ve intrigued the hell out of Sandy. David made a mental note to tell her, assuming he survived the next few hours.
“Dave, you better get down here,” Aikin called from the foot of the stairs. “It’s your dad.”
David’s heart skipped a beat. Ignoring the swirling, flaming chaos above decks, he made his way back to the cabin.
LaWanda was wiping his father’s brow with water poured onto a scrap of David’s surcoat and singing softly. Or chanting. Big Billy was awake again. His face was tight with pain, but he seemed to relax when he caught sight of his son.
“How’re you doin’, big guy?” David murmured inanely, patting his father’s shoulder.
“Been better,” Big Billy whispered hoarsely. “Tell you what, boy; this thing hurts like hell—not so bad I can’t handle it, but—”
“We’re workin’ on it,” David promised helplessly.
“Better put ’er in overdrive, then,” Big Billy retorted, with a cough that, to David’s dismay, brought forth blood, likely from where the splinter had grazed a lung. What else it might’ve grazed, he had no idea. Liver, perhaps? Kidneys? Good thing his pa had back muscles like steel cables, so there was a fair bit of meat to fight through before you hit anything important.
“We’re doin’ the best we can,” David assured him.
Big Billy patted his hand. “That’s all you can do, then. But Davy—Dave. I don’t wanta scare you or nothin’, but I gotta tell you two things. One is that no matter how I’ve acted, I love you. I know there’s stuff to you I don’t understand, and maybe I ain’t tried real hard, and that’s a mistake I’ll admit. But I still love you. But tell JoAnne and Little Billy, that I love ’em too, and not to be pissed at me for goin’ off and leavin’ ’em. Tell ’em we wouldn’t be here in the first place if our folks way back yonder hadn’t gone off and left folks they loved for whatever reasons. And tell ’em I’m doin’ this so they won’t have to go away from a place they love.”
David took his father’s hand and clutched it desperately. “I’ll do it, Pa. I swear. But don’t forget what Dale always said: we’re hard to kill. Wars get more of us than anything, and even then—” He broke off, appalled at what he’d just blurted out.
“This is war,” Big Billy said simply. “But there’s one other thing I gotta tell you…in case.”
“Anything, Pa,” David whispered, distantly aware of Aikin’s hand resting gently on his shoulder.
“Don’t ever—” Big Billy began, before another round of coughs wracked him. “Don’t ever,” he tried again, “let your kids get smarter’n you. You watch ’em from the time they’re born and read every word they read and watch every movie and TV show they watch, and maybe you can keep up with ’em. ’Cause that’s the sad thing about all this: how I’ve raised you and not raised you, both; seen you go places I can’t, and wished I could, but not took the time to even try. Folks always want their kids to avoid their mistakes, and then make others instead. T
hat was the worst of mine. Don’t you do it.”
“I promise,” David vowed. “’Course that’s still a ways off, I hope.”
“Maybe,” Big Billy mumbled back. And closed his eyes once more.
“Good advice,” LaWanda affirmed. “My granny told me the same.”
“The juju woman?” Aikin ventured.
“Yep. She— What th—?”
The entire vessel suddenly jolted, as though something solid had struck it. “Oh, shit!” David groaned, already scrambling for the door, with Aikin and Brock right behind, leaving LaWanda to minister to Big Billy. For a moment he thought to stop his two friends, then dismissed such efforts as futile. “Try not to look above the rail,” he cautioned, and once more started up the stairs. “Finno, what—?” he yelled at the top, praying his voice would carry above the thunder of flames.
Either the Faery youth heard him or he caught the urgency of David’s thought out of the ether itself. “They are firing upon us: arrows tipped with poison!”
“Poison!”
“Not aimed at me,” Fionchadd added, “aimed at this vessel. It is to some degree alive, and there are poisons that can affect it. You felt it shudder just now. It would be as if a wasp or bee stung you.”
David rolled his eyes, as one mystery was revealed only to be replaced by another. “How dangerous?”
“More, the more bolts strike us.”
As if to punctuate that remark, a series of dark spots materialized from the glare behind them—spots that thunked into the deck and became arrows. The ship twitched again, as though to shrug away that irritation, and David’s heart sank, for they were also slowing. “Can we shoot back?”
“To no avail, for we have no such poison with us.”
“What about guns?”
“Even your iron bullets would not harm their vessel sufficiently to slow it, and your odds of hitting a person are tiny. There is more between us than sight reveals; it would be like—like shooting underwater.”
“So we either slow ’em down or make ourselves faster?” Fionchadd risked another glance over his shoulder. “Correct.”
“Then…couldn’t you free the Iron Dungeon? It’s gotta be holdin’ us back. And what if all that iron were to impact those other guys?”
Fionchadd countered with a thoughtful pause. Whereupon David’s mind rang with a word, a very particular and potent word, to judge by the way it clogged his brain. The world went briefly white as that silent command blocked out all his senses, yet with it came a wave of relief and desperate appreciation.
Forgetting his own admonitions, David raised his gaze above the railing, to where the vast, impossible curve of the Pillar of Fire enfolded them, around the inner arc of which they spiraled like a fly climbing the inside of a hollow pipe. Behind—closer, even, than he’d feared—came the other ship. But streaking toward it—rolling, bobbing, gyrating like a beach ball amidst wild surf—went the dark knobby clot of the Iron Dungeon. David held his breath as he traced its trajectory. Fortunately, the farther it went, the more it seemed to track true, and he watched in vast amazement as it bore down upon the pursuing vessel. Their prow twitched as their helmsman tried to steer around it, but such were the tides within the Pillar that evasion was all but impossible.
One moment—one blink of David’s eyes—and Dungeon and ship were two entities. The next, they were one, as a twenty-foot sphere of heavy metal slammed into the prow of a wooden vessel, staving the entire front half to shards and splinters. Bodies—man-shaped, if not actually mortal—flew free, silhouetted against the ruddy glare. One or two seemed to hover there in the hot between, then shifted shape and winged away. The ship itself was ruined, likely as much from the Dungeon’s mass as the fact that it had been made of iron. Already it was hard to see, such was their speed away, as their own vessel lurched forward, much the lighter.
“Congratulations,” Fionchadd called. “We have clear sailing—”
“We do not!” Aife snapped back, shaking her head vigorously. For the warriors on the vanished vessel had evidently managed one final volley, of which the majority had just struck home. And with that, their vessel gave the strongest shudder yet and began to slow once more, losing all the momentum so lately gained.
“How—?” David gaped, at once aghast and fascinated.
“They entered the…bubble of our World that accompanies this vessel,” she replied, gazing intently back the way they had come. “Do not forget that more than space lies between us and our pursuit. But enough of that.” She shook her head as though to clear it. “Quick! If you must remain above, help me!”
Darting aft, she began jerking the arrows free of the planking. David joined her, desperately glad to find some task he could actually accomplish, in lieu of watching, or waiting for that to happen.
It was hard work, though, for the bolts were barbed and the planking very dense. More troubling was the fact that the barbs were coated with a thin, shimmery liquid which, if its effect on organic matter matched its stench, was damned potent poison indeed. Aife avoided touching it like the plague, and the boards where the older shafts had entered were already corroded. Those shafts alone came free easily. David collected a clumsy handful, but when he made for the gunwale to toss them over, a cry from Aife stopped him. “Dangerous they may be, but we would be more than fools to abandon potential weapons before Nuada has seen them.”
David cast about for something in which to cache them, but Aife flung him part of her cloak. He wrapped the arrows carefully and had started to add Aife’s to the stash when the boat shuddered again: the most violent yet. Fionchadd swore—or such was the sense of the word David caught only as a slash of Faery speech accompanied by a flood of frightened anger.
Oblivious to the preposterous surroundings, David ran back there, fighting hard to resist the notion that his footsteps sounded not on any horizontal surface but on a wall. Ruthlessly, he forced his gaze to the deck. And almost brained himself on the tiller before skidding to a halt.
“Finno? What’s—?”
The Faery’s face was hard with concentration, as though more than hands on the tiller steered them along their fantastic path. “The ship dies,” he said through clenched teeth. “Already I must direct it as much with my mind as with this mechanism, and its pain is my pain. But it is dying. My only hope is that we can reach our destination before it succumbs.”
“How much longer—farther, or whatever?”
“Not long, I hope. Now leave me. I have no time for this.”
David started to voice another of the countless perfectly reasonable questions that had welled up in his mind, but before he could choose among them he felt hands on his shoulders, drawing him away. Aife—of course.
“What’re you doin’?” he demanded. “Can’t you see—”
“I can see that we are slowing and veering away from the Track, which means we must be nearing our goal.”
Curiosity got the better of David. He dared a glance at the route ahead, noting that the flames beneath them were now the same familiar gold as the Tracks, but, more to the point, they were edging away from that flaming path onto one less well defined. Unless he was mistaken, too, the flames beneath them were thinner, neither as substantial as heretofore nor as hot.
Another jolt wracked the boat, and they left the Track entirely. For a moment, David thought he was about to fall, or slide across the deck, or simply go hurtling off into space; for up and down, in and out, and all such things briefly held no meaning—or all those meanings at once. Abruptly, like a swimmer’s hand slicing into water, the vessel entered the flame in truth—or sank within it, or slid through.
David held his breath as the fires reached up to enwrap him; closed his eyes as he felt them brush his hair and face with molten fingers that miraculously did no damage.
Another jolt. Up and down shifted again, and profound darkness replaced the light, and when David’s eyes popped open, the Track was gone.
Wherever they’d emerged, there we
re stars overhead—familiar stars: the ancient constellations of summer in his World. “We’re back,” he gasped. Then, more doubtfully, “Aren’t we?”
Aife nodded and started back toward the cabin. “Best we get below.”
Instead of following, however, David dashed over to the nearest gunwale and studied the landscape passing beneath. Beneath, for they were easily several hundred feet above terrain that looked hauntingly familiar. The mountains were identical to those back home: worn-out old things wrapped in thick robes of forest as though to shut out the chill that came of being older than dinosaurs. Lakes quicksilvered the lowlands, and a network of roads slashed them, like sunlight on morning spiders’ webs. There were lights, too: a town to the north, but not a big one. Smaller patches were freestanding businesses or such facilities as schools and…hospitals! His heart leapt at that, the first real hope that they might actually be able to save his father.
Again he hesitated, torn between seeing what evolved and going below to check on a parent who could as easily be dead, awake, or dying. Still, if anything were amiss, someone would summon him. Thus, he remained in place, gazing over the gunwale as the boat continued northwest, lower now, almost brushing the trees that crowned the nearer peaks. He hoped no one bothered to look up. UFO would be the most logical thing anyone would say. And with Silverhand below and largely out of commission, and Tir-Nan-Og in shambles, who knew when anyone would spin-doctor such things again.
Restless—or desperate—he stretched forward along the figurehead, in search of some surer clue as to their destination.
And almost fell overboard when something jarred the boat from beneath. It bucked like a shying horse, then continued its slow earthward glide.
Lower.
Something snapped: important-sounding, and aft. Another of Fionchadd’s curses followed on its heels. David glanced back to see the Faery’s fists pounding what was clearly a broken tiller.
Another crash, another jolt, and David decided sitting might be wise, and managed to wedge himself into the vee behind the prow. He could still see enough to note that they’d entered the less populated end of whatever state this was—it looked like Georgia—and were shadowing a big north-south highway that resembled Georgia 129, which connected, among other things, Athens, Georgia, and Knoxville, Tennessee, by way of countless tourist traps.
