Warstalker's Track

by Tom Deitz

  “You saw the old man?”

  David nodded. “Oisin. Lugh’s mortal seer. He’s kind of a friend.”

  Fionchadd regarded him solemnly. “It will not go well with him. Being mortal, he will not be able to resist certain things. Being Lugh’s seer, he will also know many things.”

  “Including us?” Liz dared.

  “If they know how to ask about you. Oisin is wily; he knows how to answer such questions as they will pose. He will betray no more than he must. He—”

  “Enough!” Uki broke in. “We have spied on three Worlds today, and I have heard every one of you speak of war, and war it is I see brewing, yet no one has related the tale that brought you here, though much I have divined already.” He stared at Calvin meaningfully.

  “Aye, adewehi,” Calvin sighed. “Maybe you oughta sit down, though, and have some black drink, ’cause this is gonna be a long one.”

  “I have time,” Uki said solemnly, stalking back to the soapstone table.

  “I’m not so sure that we do,” Calvin countered. “Not if they’re gonna do the Cove in the morning. In the meantime, this is how it goes…”

  He spoke for almost an hour, by guess; since Sandy’s watch—no surprise—wasn’t working. (Watches often didn’t in places like this, though their failures were as inconsistent as they were inexplicable.) Throughout the narrative, Uki said little, but his face grew more and more troubled.

  “…and here we are,” Calvin finished, leaning back and shaking his head before helping himself to a cup of bitter black drink.

  “Here we all are,” Uki echoed ominously, rising to his feet. For a moment Sandy thought he was going to storm the cavern again. Instead, he strode to a raised terrace, wrought of the cavern’s natural stone, and climbed atop it.

  “Yanu-degahnehiha,” he called to David: He-wrestles-bears, which was his warname in Cherokee; “Utluntadehi”—to Calvin; it meant He-killed-Spearfinger—“and your kinsman: Kirkwood, as I recall. You will join me.” A pause, a scowl. Then: “These words have vexed me greatly, so that I cannot plot proper action alone. Come, warriors, I must construct a Power Wheel.”

  Calvin started. “But, you’ve already got one!”

  Uki nodded stonily. “Outside, to reach which takes time. And any time saved now may save all of us in turn.”

  Calvin didn’t reply. All Sandy could do was gnaw her lips in anguished perplexity at what could so disturb someone like Uki. And for a moment, all anyone heard was the waterfall’s heartbeat thunder.

  Chapter XIV: Relics

  (Tir-Gat—high summer)

  It was just as well he was sitting on soft, cushiony moss, Alec thought wryly, else they’d have heard his chin drop all the way to the other side of this screwy little pocket universe. But what other reaction was possible—when, right in the middle of their last and most crucial trial, with Piper playing the best he ever had: a tune so sad and full of pain it even had a tough broad like LaWanda going all soft and misty; and then—bang—he just stops? Whereupon the door opens and out walks Yd, wild-eyed and grim-faced, with his britches bagging around his hips and that preposterous cloak flapping in the breeze like the wings of a dozen birds of paradise?

  And keeps right on walking into the sand as though the rest of them weren’t even there, whereupon he turns and says, without expression, “I concede. I wish you joy of what you seek.”

  And keeps walking.

  Alec watched spellbound—they all did—as the former guardian of Tir-Gat dwindled to a dark point against the silky glare of the mirror-sands. And then was gone.

  “Did he—?” Myra choked. “That is…”

  Aife shrugged. “He arrived here somehow; perhaps that is the way he returns, though I would not be him when I came to face my King. Or perhaps this World simply ends out there and he stepped off.”

  “Or through.” Myra shivered. “This place isn’t all that stable, as I recall.”

  “It is farther away from your World than it was then, however,” Aife observed.

  Myra had just opened her mouth to ask how far when Piper appeared in the tower’s open doorway. He was drenched with sweat, had his shirt open all the way down, and wore the bellows for his pipes still fastened around his waist like panniers. But the smug, shy, uncertain grin he was flashing would’ve lit up a small country. “I…won!” he mumbled, half dazed. “I…actually…won!”

  “Figured,” LaWanda snorted, then grinned even wider than her lover and rushed forward to sweep him off his feet and spin him around, only stopping when her wounds made her stagger.

  That broke whatever emotional logjam had been in effect, however, and they besieged their wiry, tousle-haired friend. Backs got thumped, hugs were given, kisses exchanged without discrimination. Only Aife looked troubled. “A strange man, that: a guardian, yet his heart was not in it. Such a one should be fierce, should give no quarter, should…”

  “Maybe it was like you said,” Myra mused. “Maybe his heart really wasn’t in it. Maybe it was a punishment or something.”

  “Yeah,” Alec agreed. “Seems to me like folks over here tend to exile the weird ones to out-of-the-way places.”

  “Beats killin’ ’em,” Aikin muttered. “Killin’ doesn’t really matter when they can come back sooner or later.”

  “Whatever,” Alec sighed. “What say we grab something to eat and go plunder that library?”

  *

  As Yd had reminded Piper upon departure, Colin of Tir-Gat’s library occupied the tower’s second level, which was accessed by a wide, freestanding stone stair that curved around the inside of the ground-floor room. Nor was reaching it difficult, though the footing was somewhat problematical, what with a few loose treads and one place where two steps had fallen away entirely, so that they had to step across a two-foot gap. Fortunately enough of the carved stone railing remained to make even that passage relatively easy.

  Myra giggled. “Going up at your own speed sure beats running down in the middle of an earthquake, with a bunch of crazy men in tow!”

  LaWanda smirked back. “That’s for sure!”

  Myra eyed her male companions. “Well, one thing hasn’t changed.”

  And then they reached the second level.

  If navigating the stairs had been uncomplicated, what awaited them at their terminus was not. Though the room itself occupied the entire floor and was mostly open to the sky, chaos was everywhere, courtesy of the next two levels’ having collapsed atop it, leaving a hollow shell that continued several levels higher. There’d been fire up there, too, but it hadn’t reached this low—fortunate, if you were looking for fragile artifacts. Still, blackened timbers and fallen blocks of masonry, both carved and plain, and much of it inlaid with malachite and lapis-lazuli, were everywhere and had to be stepped over or steered around, all the while keeping watch for unstable portions of floor and rotten timbers. Some of the latter bore disturbing marks, too: as though they’d been gnawed—or clawed—by something larger than Alec wanted to contemplate.

  But this really was the library, Alec knew right off, because the far quadrant of wall was still lined floor-to-ceiling with rough wooden bookcases, many of which retained their precious cargo.

  “Oh, wow,” Myra gasped, clearly in awe, as she got her first good view. “Oh, fucking wow!”

  “You read…Sidheish?” Aikin chided, though Alec could tell his friend, who was a serious bibliophile, was also wildly impressed.

  Alec froze in place. “Good point,” he said seriously. “We’re here, but how do we know what we’re looking for? I mean, I hate to say this, folks, but we haven’t really thought this through very well. We’ve mostly been going on hunches, guesses, and dead reckoning.”

  “Which seem to work pretty well,” Myra shot back. “Besides, you’re supposed to be the logical one: you and Hunter-boy. I, sir, am an artist, as is Wannie.”

  “And we’re women and therefore more intuitive,” LaWanda added sarcastically. “We don’t fight. We don’t do nothin’.”<
br />
  “’Cept fret about birthin’ babies,” Aikin teased.

  LaWanda threw a chunk of charcoal at him and reached for another.

  “No!” Piper said flatly. And to Alec’s amazement, she stopped.

  “Sorry.”

  Alec simply stared.

  Aife had eased into the lead, eyes narrowed intently as she scanned not only the shelves but the shattered detritus of equipment and furniture. Alec followed her gaze, realizing belatedly that this had not only been a library but also a lab. The proverbial sorcerer’s den, in fact. “I assume we oughta ask before we touch anything, right?” he murmured, trying not to stare too long at a particularly well-wrought sculpture of a pair of naked lovers cast in pure gold, though smudged with black and partly obscured beneath a block of masonry that itself was inlaid with a hunting scene in copper cloisonné and precious stones.

  “It would be wise,” Aife agreed, pausing to regard Myra curiously. “You were here before, were you not? When this place was intact? You climbed the stairs to the roof. Would you have seen this room as it was then?”

  “Yep,” Myra affirmed, with an uncertain gleam in her eye.

  “Good,” Aife retorted. “If you will grant me leave, I can enter your mind and share your memories of that time. Perhaps I will see something that will aid our search.”

  “But do we even know what we’re lookin’ for?” Aikin broke in. “A book, or…what? I mean, are we even certain this Colin guy wrote this stuff down? Wasn’t he a druid? And didn’t they rely on memory?”

  “Aye,” Aife acknowledged. “But he was old, even for one of the Sidhe, and when one is immortal…eventually one’s mind cannot encompass everything. Since Colin created Tir-Gat late in his life, it is to be hoped that he was forced to record the spells he used to control the Silver Tracks. My only hope is that we can understand whatever tongue or cipher he employed.”

  “And we still have to find it,” Aikin persisted, looking meaningfully at Myra.

  Myra grimaced, shrugged, and sat down on a conveniently chair-sized fragment of sculpture. The stone contained fossils, Alec realized, wondering if it would be safe to make away with some of them.

  Maybe later—for Aife had eased around behind Myra to grasp her temples with both hands. “Close your eyes,” she breathed. “Think back to that day. Forget your emotions, recall only with those eyes that serve you so well. Think of what you saw—and now of what you see!”

  Myra flinched ever so slightly, and Aife’s eyes too slipped closed. For more than a minute they simply sat there, immobile. Alec wondered if he’d ever feel comfortable with Aife again. True, she’d said she loved him as recently as an hour ago, and had been acting as though that were so in their few unstressed moments together since her return. But might she not be playing another role? God knew she’d been acting when first they’d met: pretending to be some lost mortal foreigner in order to win her way into—to be blunt—his pants, since she’d needed his seed to effect certain controls over him. But she’d been one of Lugh’s guard then, though also secretly allied with the Sons of Ailill—more acting there. And then there was the enfield episode, which had certainly served her own ends in spite of its also being punishment, never mind the cat variation that had come after. And now, all of a sudden, she was this high and haughty stranger: by turns judge and jury, but always manipulator.

  So which was the real Aife? And what was her true agenda?

  Nuada trusted her—kind of. But Lugh had as well, and look what had happened to him. Besides, in the last analysis, it was like David said: there really were other, more accessible but equally accomplished women. And it was a seller’s market.

  Which was a damned fool thing to be pondering when you were about to go rummaging through the ruins of a wizard’s lab.

  “Oh…!” Myra’s yip startled him from his reverie. He looked up with a jerk, to see that Aife had backed away from Myra and that Myra’s eyes and mouth were open in amazement.

  “It exists,” Aife said without preamble. “Something with the appropriate characteristics exists, at any rate; for such a book would be written in a certain style and bound in a particular way. And though there are many variations and possibilities around us here, recall that he did not expect to die that day, that death caught up with him; he would therefore have had no cause to hide it. In any event, we seek a book with a gold leather cover emblazoned with silver solar rays. Do not open it if you find it, but call me at once. It would be somewhere near the middle of the room,” she added. “For that is where Myra saw it long ago, all unknowing.”

  “Great,” Aikin grunted. “Right where all those beams fell.”

  “Well,” Myra sighed philosophically. “We won’t find it standing here gawking.”

  *

  It was Alec who actually located it, and that by accident. He’d been moving a pile of dusty square stones stacked like shattered dominoes upon a likely-looking volume—and one of the stones had felt too light, and had proven, upon being wiped off, to be no stone at all but a book. The book, as he announced when he realized what he had. It fit the description perfectly, though he hadn’t expected it to be so large: maybe twelve by eighteen inches, and studded here and there with silver-toned bands and knobby excrescences, some of them sporting jewel-crusted arcane symbols or monsters wrought in brilliant cloisonné.

  He surrendered it to Aife without comment.

  She gnawed her lip, brow furrowed pensively as she scrubbed at the cover with a fragment of tattered tapestry. The silver rays gleamed forth. Another pause, during which she closed her eyes, nodded absently, then flipped the metal clasps that bound its fore edge. A final breath (Was she actually frightened?), and she opened it.

  Even seeing it upside down at a yard’s remove, Alec couldn’t suppress a gasp at the beauty that lay within. He’d seen the world’s great books, of course, in photographs; and part of the greatest—The Book of Kells—when it was displayed at the Smithsonian. But beside this—well, Kells and The Book of Durrow and The Lindisfarne Gospel together couldn’t compare with the incredible wealth of intricate detail that blazed forth from just the first page.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Myra gasped, actually staggering, so that Aikin had to brace her to keep her from falling. “Oh, my God—Jesus Christ!”

  “Mighty fine,” LaWanda agreed. “Mighty fine. Question is, does it have what we need, or does it just look good?”

  “Does it matter?” Aikin breathed. “One page of that, you could buy a country.”

  “Over my dead body!” Myra snapped back, glaring at him. “Anyone damages that book for any reason deserves to die.”

  “They used to put The Book of Kells in cow troughs to cure diseases,” Aikin retorted.

  “Silence!” Aife spat, alone of that company unimpressed with such preposterous intricacy and beauty. “I think this is what we sought, but this script—for there is script—is damnably difficult to read.” And with that, she effectively shut them out, eyes darting from side to side, but otherwise not moving save when, with great reverence, she now and then turned a page.

  The rest of them spent the time variously. Myra rebandaged LaWanda’s wounds. Piper cleaned his pipes and tried to nap; like Brock he tended to do that when he was stressed. Alec and Aikin explored the rest of the library. A few books they examined, and a few scrolls, but none could compare with the one they’d just located, though many bore illustrations of fabulous beasts or buildings, or strangely delineated maps that seemed to rise up to engulf them if they gazed at them too long. More than a few, too, fell away to dust upon being shifted, and one literally shocked the hell out of Aikin when he accidentally brushed it with a finger.

  After that, they contented themselves with scouring the floor for interesting detritus: stray jewels, bits of enamel, general odd lots that could fit into pockets and packs. “Christmas shopping,” Aikin grinned, scooping up a wooden box through the crystal lid of which the board and pieces of an incredibly delicate chess set gleamed, wrought
of opal and hematite, with accents of silver and gold. “This stays with me.”

  “Assuming Aife lets you keep it,” Alec cautioned, ambling back to where his troublesome lady was still turning pages in the center of the room. “Find anything?” he ventured, after watching her read a good minute longer. The script, he noted idly, was like nothing he’d ever seen, though Arabic calligraphy came closest. “He can’t have really written that,” he added, when Aife still didn’t reply. “You people can’t do art, remember?”

  Aife slowly raised her gaze to him. “Nor could many men duplicate those books you so admire. But like every possible endeavor, there is always someone who is best. And at calligraphy, Colin of Tir-Gat excelled.”

  “In both Worlds,” Myra acknowledged.

  “Maybe,” Alec gave back. “But don’t forget how much stuff we’ve lost: burned, and whatever. We lost the Alexandrine Library, and all those Greek plays; like, we’ll have one or two masterpieces by somebody like Aeschylus, but they might’ve written fifty or more. And don’t forget how much the Vikings liked sacking monasteries. Shoot, they were full of things like the Ardagh Chalice, but they just wanted ’em for the gold and precious stones.”

  “Don’t forget the Spaniards in the New World, either,” LaWanda broke in. “What was it? A room full of gold ornaments melted down to ransom the Inca, and they killed him anyway? And those incredible illuminated codices they burned in Mexico just ’cause they were pagan.”

  “Which is all very interesting,” Myra sighed, looking at Aife intently. “But what, exactly, does it say?”

  “I…cannot say,” Aife replied sadly. “That is, something forbids me. I know the words when I see them, but they sink into my brain before I can comprehend them. Perhaps I might know them if I actually tried to command the Silver Tracks, but that I dare not do, not now, now here.”

  Alec gnawed his lip. “So you haven’t learned anything we can actually use?”

  Aife shrugged. “I have learned how to locate one of these Tracks when in another World, or at least how Colin did it while in Faerie, which this is not. And more importantly, I learned that to work them, Colin utilized a well that once occupied the top of this tower. Beyond that, I am not certain if I do not know, or if I read and can no longer recall.”