Warstalker's Track

by Tom Deitz

  Liz eyed him narrowly. “You’re sure he’s not just gone crazy? Think what he’s been through, Finno: a coup, torture, sickness—or whatever you guys get. Do you have any proof that iron dust didn’t get into his brain and rot it?”

  “God, I hope not!” David gasped. “But my guess is that Lugh’s been around the block enough to know his own body and his own mind. I think he could fight madness.”

  “He didn’t fight the poison that took him out,” Liz countered.

  “He didn’t know to fight it,” David shot back. “Whatever happened here was premeditated.”

  Uki scratched his chin, the edge of his anger having faded, though there was a raw harshness in his voice. “Were I a chief who had been deposed and exiled,” he mused, “I would seek the most powerful allies I could find. I would also seek anyone loyal to me who would see me regain my throne.”

  “Yep,” Kirkwood agreed from his silent, watchful corner. “Which is why he’d chase down Silverhand. Lugh hears the clock ticking. He might find allies here, but he’d have to do some convincin’, and he doesn’t know how many warriors, if any, he could count on. His captain’s in our World, though, and back in Faerie, he’s got a ready-made army—assumin’ he can collect ’em.”

  Fionchadd nodded sagely. “Wisely said—for someone who relies on reports and rumors.”

  “And history and human nature,” Kirkwood appended. “I think you are right, too,” the Faery went on. “Most of Lugh’s guard are loyal, though without any true leader, and most of the mighty in Tir-Nan-Og would support him, assuming he could be found. He would therefore seek to rally his troops.”

  Sandy eyed the oracular pool speculatively. “I agree. But it still seems to me that what we do here depends on what Lugh does…wherever. Which means we really do need to try to find him.”

  Calvin gazed her askance. “Which means…?”

  A deep breath. “Well, basically, I was just wondering whether that pool can look at any other World besides this one?”

  The silence that ensued was as loud as the previous thunder.

  Uki’s face was grim, though whether from residual anger, ongoing pain from his still-oozing wound, or newfound concern, Sandy was uncertain. For a time he stared at the pool, then gazed pensively at Okacha, who’d silently claimed his other side. “To spy upon your World here requires blood of your World. And that blood must be born of pain.” He fixed Sandy with a challenging glare. “Are you ready to dare that pain?”

  Calvin coughed. “Does it have to be her?”

  “I’m willing,” David chimed in, though he looked pretty uncertain—with reason, given what he’d been through lately. It was easy to forget that his father had been wounded and might well die. She doubted he’d forgotten, though; how else explain that stony expression, or why her lover’s best friend was no longer in the thick of things. She wondered when he’d bring up the healing water.

  Uki shook his head. “You are warriors. You bear war names. You know pain. Yet woman’s Power is stronger than ours at times. A woman’s blood it must be.”

  Sandy exchanged glances with a pensive-looking Liz. “I’ll do it,” she declared. “It’s necessary. It won’t kill me—I hope. And a year from now I’ll remember the results, not…whatever.”

  Uki nodded gravely, drummed a certain cadence in the sand, and promptly snared the copperhead that responded to that unheard call, then offered it to Sandy.

  She swallowed hard, but received the serpent with steady hands. A country girl herself, she had no fear of snakes per se, but poisonous ones were another matter. Calvin reached up reflexively to stop her, then withdrew his hand. “You damned better take care of her when this is over,” he growled at Uki.

  Uki shot him a sharp glare, then returned his attention to Sandy. “Perhaps I will; perhaps I will not! Uncertainty will strengthen the summoning.”

  Sandy swallowed again. “Does it matter where?”

  “Closest to your heart.”

  “I was afraid of that!” A deep breath, and Sandy closed her eyes, keenly aware of the snake’s weight where she supported its body in her other hand. It was cool but not cold, and she could feel its blood race, the long slow pulse of its heart. Her own was going ninety beats a second.

  A final breath; she shifted her grip—and thrust the snake down her shirt and into the vee between her breasts, angling its head toward the left one. Muscles twitched beneath her fingers and the jaws sprang open. Its breath was unexpectedly hot.

  She didn’t actually feel the prick of the fangs, but the flood of fire-hot poison that accompanied them roared through her like molten lava. For an instant she was certain her breast was about to explode. It’s only pain, she told herself as agony pulsed in strong, sick waves. Pain is only a warning. It is no danger by itself. It is chemicals. Electricity. It—

  It hurts like a son of a bitch!—as tears sprang shamelessly into her eyes. Yet still she pressed the snake there, through endless microseconds during which hot blood began to slide down her flesh. Her stomach knotted. Sweat soaked her body. Reality vanished and returned.

  Hands brushed her: male, but surprisingly soft and gentle, and from the wrong quarter to be Calvin. The snake was withdrawn. But it was her own hands that unbuttoned her shirt, baring her chest so the blood could drip upon the water into which she even now was wading.

  It was cold as ice! She gasped, opened her eyes, glanced down, saw the two tiny holes closer to the nipple than she’d expected, and the rivulets of blood that slid down the milky skin like the rivers on the landscape already forming below.

  She reeled. “Back,” Uki murmured. To which she was only too glad to assent. Reality whirled again.

  A word; more corn, more lightning; and a strange new vista clarified. Even so, it took a moment to identify the familiar contours of her native Southeast, partly because she was gazing at it from an odd angle, and partly because it was defined without artificial boundaries, with mountains and rivers in their natural shapes and colors, ornamented with numerous tiny bright jewels that had to be towns and cities. Atlanta was the brightest, the largest and most prickly. But Asheville was present as well, almost home, and beyond it what was probably Charlotte. And there were Chattanooga and Knoxville, and farther south in Georgia: Savannah, and a thin blue crescent of the coast. West vanished at the rocks, but she had no idea how far Faerie went that way, for surely she was only seeing those parts of her World that were also of concern to Lugh.

  A blink, and she could make out the remnants of the map of Walhala lying below the brighter, clearer one her blood had wrought, like a reflection in cold, still water. Ripples appeared abruptly, born of sand Uki tossed across that phantom landscape. And where those ripples touched and mingled, patterns slowly took form, like tiny bolts of electricity tracing the intricacies of a complex printed circuit.

  For easily a minute they meandered aimlessly, but then those motes slowly joined, clarifying into a brighter focus centered near the tiny silver splatter that was Langford Lake, which bordered Sullivan Cove.

  She stared at it, fascinated, and actually cried aloud when a slap of Uki’s hands sent another lightning bolt spearing the heart of that brightness. The image shattered, then reformed as suddenly into something more recognizable, viewed at closer range.

  Lugh: clad as they’d last seen him, in breechclout and feather cloak, and sprawled facedown across a rough, lichen-crusted boulder the size of Sandy’s Explorer. Shadows dappled him from unseen sunlit trees, and wind stirred the pine limbs that framed her field of view. A blink, and she gazed not across Lugh’s shoulder but through his very eyes, and saw with the Faery King’s seeing.

  It was the lake at the end of Sullivan Cove. There was the cone-shaped mountain offshore that was called, perhaps too aptly, Bloody Bald. And there was the sweep of wooded strand, the storm-swollen water still high enough to mask the rocky shelves that lined it, though that water was receding. Closer in was a spear of peninsula, where a campsite was all but flattened, tent
and utensils strewn about like shrapnel.

  And very close indeed were two vans, each bearing the logo of Mystic Mountain Properties. Men stood about, anxiously watching the road that threaded through Sullivan Cove, sole link to the outside world. An instant later, she saw the cause of their concern when a flatbed truck rumbled in, followed by another truck pulling a small house trailer made up to be an on-site office. The flatbeds bore a generator and a backhoe: bright yellow and brand-new. Scott was right: Mystic Mountain didn’t cut corners.

  Speaking of Scott, where was he? By rights he ought to be smack in the thick of things. Oh, there he was! Talking to a fat man she recognized from a photo Scott had shown her as Ralph Mims, the moving force behind this development. By the way Scott was gesticulating, he was clearly pissed as hell. Intrigued, she strained her hearing and caught the end of a conversation.

  “Can’t wait any longer,” Mims was saying. “You don’t have to finish A before you start on B, and there’ve been too many delays already.”

  Scott’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, well, it’s just that I wasn’t done yet, and I really wanted to do a good job, and all this fuckin’ rain’s played hell—

  “No reason you’ve gotta stop,” Mims broke in. “Continue your survey. Look for gemstones. Check the stratigraphy. But we’ve got enough here to go on.”

  Scott studied the sky apprehensively, then checked his watch. “So what’s your timetable?”

  Mims fairly beamed. “Tomorrow we bring in the Porta Pottis. By noon, we oughta be placing stakes and stringing guidelines. Backhoe’ll be digging by three.”

  “Stakes,” Scott managed weakly. “What kind of stakes? You’re dealin’ with rock ’round here.”

  “Steel spikes,” Mims enthused. “If they won’t go in easy, we’ll use a jackhammer on ’em.”

  Sandy blinked—or Lugh did. The Faery looked up apprehensively, peered over his shoulder, shook himself like a nervous animal, then checked behind again, and frowned. Words whispered into the air, and Sandy no longer shared his senses, though she was aware of him rising and calling on Power as he whipped the cloak around him. Somehow, too, there was a sense of a door being opened, but she never saw what lay beyond, for something twitched between her brain and her eyes, and she was wrenched away. She gasped, saw nothing, blinked again, and when vision cleared it was to gaze into Calvin’s worried brown eyes.

  “What’d you see?” he demanded. “Best I can tell, the rest of us saw the map of our World, and then it all went to sparkles.”

  She took a deep breath—and told them.

  “Well,” Fionchadd mused when she’d finished. “That is very interesting indeed. It makes sense, too, that he would spy out your home place first, for that will tell him something of how much time he has in which to act, which he would then have to hand when he meets Nuada—if he is Lugh’s next goal.”

  “But wouldn’t the map show that?” Liz wondered, peering at it intently.

  “No,” Uki replied flatly. “One scrying is all one bite can purchase.”

  “Bite,” Sandy echoed, gazing down at the bloody holes marring her creamy white flesh. They hurt like hell, and there was already some swelling, but she could handle it. For a while. She thought. God knew she’d endured as much before. Okacha evidently observed her discomfort, however, and fetched a clay pot full of sweet-smelling unguent. Sandy dabbed it with a finger, then smeared it across her wounds. Coolness and healing flowed in at once, and the distant pang of nausea that had haunted her since the first whiff of ozone departed as well.

  Which was just as well, because Fionchadd was speaking once more. “Blood and pain,” he muttered, looking at Uki. “You said it took blood and pain to do such a scrying as we just witnessed. I wonder, though, could we not scry out Tir-Nan-Og as well, either to see how things fare with Lugh, if he is there, or with those who would unthrone him?”

  Uki’s brow darkened into a scowl. “I do not like that idea, yet I do not know why I do not like it, save that it troubles my scaly servants. Very well…you may make the attempt. Be warned, though: to look two Worlds away is very difficult. It would be impossible unless you supply the blood.”

  “At your leave,” Fionchadd replied formally.

  By the time Uki had summoned a third serpent—two, actually: a pair of the less venomous cottonmouths—Sandy was feeling considerably better, but Fionchadd was looking anxious. Clad only in the breechclout Uki had lent him upon arrival (though he had other clothing to hand), it was a simple matter for him to seize each serpent behind the head and press them both to his smooth, pale chest. Sandy assumed he had a higher pain threshold than her fellow mortals; still, it had to hurt, and she wasn’t surprised to hear him gasp and see his jaw tighten as he fought for control.

  Another gasp, and he let the serpents fall. They slithered away harmlessly into a hole beside Liz’s foot, evoking a sharp cry from her, born more of reflex than fear. Liz was as tough as they came, but instinct was instinct, regardless.

  Meanwhile, Fionchadd was bending over in the center of the pool, so that the blood that dripped from his chest fell clear into the water. Both previous landscapes still ghosted there, like layers of glass beneath each other, but a third now manifested atop them, aided by a thunderclap from Uki that sent Fionchadd, who’d been gaping as though ensorcelled, scurrying back to shore.

  The first thing that formed was a complex, three-dimensional webwork of golden lines that had to represent Tracks and Pillars. And around them, slowly, more concrete shapes coalesced. This landscape was smaller than the Mortal World, however, and more tenuous, especially to the north and west. But Bloody Bald’s Faery analog was preposterously easy to pick out, while the haven at the coast also showed brightly.

  More troubling were what at first looked like glowing embers: spots of red-edged black strewn here and there across the land like a sprinkling of burning pepper. “Holes,” David gasped. “Those are Holes, aren’t they? Those black things?”

  “Likely,” Fionchadd murmured distantly. “Touch me now, if you would watch.”

  Sandy did—and suddenly found herself zooming in on the glittering white cone of the surrogate Bloody Bald, watching towers rise and point, while arches and windows, walls and gardens clarified, all wrapped around that impossibly perilous peak.

  One garden in particular caught her eye: small, and entirely surrounded by the black-glass and wrought-silver walls of one of the lesser towers that wasn’t numbered among the twelve that gave the palace its most common appellation. It was actually a rather plain garden, almost austere, and Sandy quickly determined that the silver designs inset into the black glass were meant to be winter-blasted trees, and that the paving stone was the same glass but unpolished, across which wrought-silver roots sprawled, rising above the surface and imbedded within it. An irregular, car-sized pool occupied the center, not unlike the one she and her companions contemplated. And around that pool, an assortment of figures were ranged.

  Every one was Faery, and most looked very young; younger than Fionchadd, even, or Aife. More were men than women by a wide margin, though the women looked little different, clad as they all were in smooth black leather and a coarser hide of silvery hue Sandy thought might be the wyvern skin she’d heard so much about. They looked tired, too; and not as clean as was typical for the Sidhe. A few sported hair that had been hacked off roughly, and more showed wounds and blisters that looked strange indeed against all that fair, smooth flesh; possibly, she suspected, proof of encounters with iron during a certain recent altercation. All were beautiful, of course, but most faces were hard with anger, hatred, and maybe fear, rather than stern with pride or authority. Something, she reckoned, was rotten in Denmark.

  A discussion was in process, too, in the strange tongue of the Sidhe, of which the only words she could make out were Lugh and Turinne. And with two sets of World Walls between, no thought rode with those words to translate them in her brain. It was, in short, a meaningless, frustrating muddle. By the attentive loo
k on his face, however, it was a great deal more to Fionchadd.

  For a fair while that debate continued, only breaking off when a door opened in what she’d taken to be the cast-silver trunk of an enormous tree, and a pair of soldiers entered, with an old man stumbling between them. An old mortal, by the look of him: white-haired and clad in a tattered robe that might once have been the silver-blue-gold of bright moonlight. His hands were manacled behind him, and his head bowed with what looked like resignation or outright despair, so that Sandy didn’t immediately get a look at his face. But when she did, she gasped, for it was a young face and an old face at once; beautiful beyond mortal longing, yet clearly that of a mortal man. The eyes, when she finally glimpsed them, were featureless orbs of cold, dark silver. Blind! she knew. Stone blind!

  At a word from the red-haired youth who was leader of that cadre (Turinne? Was that his name?), the soldiers flung the old man forward on his knees, where he remained unmoving. More discussion followed, and then one of them chanced to look up, as though he were a doll who’d just discovered that someone larger was observing his machinations, and the contact dissolved. The pool rippled, then skimmed over with featureless dull red. A final bolt from Uki, and the red dissolved like fractured glass, leaving eight exceedingly puzzled people.

  “Well, Finno,” David prompted. “What was all that Faery mumbo jumbo?”

  Fionchadd took a deep, shuddering breath. “Many things, but four in particular. First, that was the rebels’ ruling council, with Turinne at its head, and they have vowed that they will find Lugh. The second is that they still intend to flood those parts of the Lands of Men that lie beneath Tir-Nan-Og, commencing with Sullivan Cove. The third is that they plan to start tomorrow.”

  Calvin scowled uncertainly. “Our time or—?”

  “I corrected for the change,” Fionchadd snapped.

  “And the fourth thing?” David persisted, a nervous edge on his voice, as though he already knew but needed confirmation to validate that fear.