Fae really didn’t show their ages unless they chose to. Niamh actually looked a year or two younger than I was, but if she’d been Mabona’s physician for that long, well. She was probably closer to ten times my age.
“I did,” she confirmed. “I understand what Mabona and your mother saw in him.” She smiled. “He was the kind of man to track a tenuous link into the middle of a snowstorm to look for someone he felt he was responsible for.”
I scoffed.
“It’s not snowing out there,” I told her. “Not that much, anyway.”
“You got shot at coming in here,” Oisin pointed out. “Trust my elder sister’s words, Kilkenny.”
“She’s here, then?” I asked.
“She’s here,” Niamh confirmed. “Just about to swap out the saline solution. It’s not the only thing keeping her alive—she’s a Power, after all—but it doesn’t hurt.”
“How bad is it, Doctor?” I said.
“Unlike anything mortal medicine has literature on,” she told me. “I can heal almost anything, Jason. Curing cancer is a pretty standard method of recruiting mortal aid, right?”
I nodded. Our interfaces with the mortal world required utterly reliable people. Saving children and spouses from diseases humanity couldn’t cure was a nearly perfect way of acquiring them.
There weren’t enough supernatural Healers in the world to make a dent in the total cancer rate, but there were enough for us to be able to use it as a recruiting tool.
“And you can’t do anything?” I said.
“This spell is unlike anything I have learned. I can only vaguely tell how it even works. All I can tell you is that it’s attacking whatever makes her a Power.”
“I need to see her,” I told them. “I need to try to link from closer. This will be a lot easier if we can get her to lower her shields.”
“We’ve tried everything,” Oisin pointed out.
“I know,” I confirmed, then tapped the spear. “But I have Esras, and the spear’s proven capable of things I wouldn’t have thought before. We may as well give it a shot, right?”
“And you have the right to see her anyway,” Niamh told me. “Her Vassals need to know how bad it’s getting.” She paused. “Leave the others. This is for those who owe her Fealty only.”
The largest bedroom in the chalet was just down the hallway from the lobby. Niamh led the way, rolling the replacement IV stand with her as we went.
A single armed guard stood outside the door, another Fae Noble, but he stepped aside as Niamh approached, opening the door for us.
The Healer went straight in and I followed more hesitantly. A young-looking man in dark gray scrubs was inside, checking over a display that was calmly beeping away next to a clearly improvised hospital bed.
There were monitors, IV stands and so forth, but they were hooked up to a regular-looking hotel queen-sized bed.
An IV line and an oxygen line were both linked to the tall woman in the bed. Sensor pads were festooned over her chest, and several clip sensors marked her fingers.
Mabona was a tall and statuesque woman, with the presence to cow armies even before she summoned her power. Right now, however, she lay utterly still in the bed, frozen.
I’d never thought of the Queen of the Fae as fragile, but that was the only word that could describe her today.
“Will she recover?” I asked softly.
“I think so,” Niamh told me as she switched the IV line over to the new stand and bag she’d brought with us. “I think the spell is weakening. It’s a temporary attack, one that will fade in time. Not quickly enough, though.”
“We’re talking days, then. Not hours, not weeks?”
“Probably days,” she agreed. “Maybe weeks. This is outside my experience, Jason…which means it’s outside anyone’s experience.”
She shook her head.
“She’s our Queen. She’s supposed to protect us, not be lying there broken while we try to survive.”
“You have power here?”
“Gasoline generators in the basement. Oisin and the others have augmented them since we lost the power lines down the mountain.” She shrugged. “We have enough fuel for two weeks of normal use. By the time the boys were done, that fuel will probably last us most of a year.”
So, we had power but no communications. There was a satellite phone in the Escalade that should punch through, but it would also draw attention.
“Let’s see if I can make a connection,” I said aloud. I crossed to Mabona’s bedside, Esras in my hand, and laid the spear against her. With my hand on it and the shaft resting against her left side, I used the weapon itself as a channel.
I’d pushed through much of her defenses before to be able to find her at all, but this was something else. This wasn’t trying to pierce the exterior defenses. This was trying to break into the mind of a god.
Just because she was unconscious didn’t mean her defenses weren’t going to try and stop me. Like the shields she’d raised around the ski lodge, those defenses could be turned off only by a conscious Mabona.
This close, finding her was no problem. The connection that I’d worked so hard for from Calgary came instantly, the usual link between Vassal and Liege. That confirmed what Niamh had said.
I needed more than that. I needed to communicate with our Queen, to forge a link to her unconscious mind and see if I could get her to lower the defenses.
Letting people through those defenses would attract much less attention than using a satellite phone to send out a call for help and setting up the kind of massively powerful beacon Between it would take to open a path.
My first attempt to deepen the connection simply slid off. Mabona’s defenses were powerful and subtle. I didn’t even realize I’d failed for several seconds.
Niamh was already sliding a chair over to me, and I nodded thankfully to her as I sank into it.
This was going to be a long effort.
41
There was a limit to how much force I could apply to this endeavor, even if I had the power necessary to go past it. Too much energy applied to trying to forge this kind of mental link could damage us both.
Niamh’s helper had switched out the saline drip bag again by the time I finally began to accept it wasn’t going to work. I’d worn down a tiny sliver of a gap in her defenses and could feel that our link was stronger than it had ever been…but all it was confirming was that Mabona was deeply, deeply unconscious.
A Power like MacDonald might have been able to do more, but that wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t matter how much I trusted the old Magus; I wasn’t going to allow another Power near Mabona in this state.
My Fealty wouldn’t allow it.
Exhaling a long sigh, I nodded to the doctor and rose. I knelt by Mabona’s bed and reached over to grip her hand.
“We’re going to keep you safe,” I whispered. “You, the rest of the Court, everyone. I’m going to finish what my father started, my Queen. This war will end.”
She didn’t react. I didn’t really expect her to.
“My lord?” the doctor asked.
“I’m no lord,” I replied. “I’m just her Vassal. And apparently, that’s not going to be enough tonight. Keep her safe, Niamh.”
“That’s my job,” she replied. “Well, to keep her alive, anyway. Keeping her safe falls on the rest of you, I guess.”
I nodded. Healers weren’t defenseless, but they weren’t supposed to fight. Their powers didn’t lean that way, in any case.
“We’ll make sure,” I promised. “I need to make a call.”
Most of the gear we’d brought with us had been moved into the front lobby now, taking over the one table that Niamh hadn’t claimed as a medical prep zone.
The satellite phone was the largest piece, a backpack-sized chunk of technology that didn’t need cellular coverage to reach the rest of the world. In theory, it was just as secure as the rest of our phones.
In practice, I wasn’t confident in th
e ability of our phones to evade tracking by the Masked Lords—and any phone calling out of the middle of nowhere was going to attract attention.
“Any luck?” Niamh asked.
“A little, but not enough to make a connection,” I admitted. “We need to send out a call.”
“Half of our security here is secrecy,” Oisin objected.
“And how much good has that done us, Oisin?” I asked bluntly. “Our enemy knows where we are. They know where Mabona is; they know she’s weakened and crippled. The only people who don’t know where we are are our friends.”
“What do you want to do?” he finally asked.
“If I make a call directly to anyone, I’m betting I’m going to trigger a bunch of red flags,” I admitted. “Instead, I want to use the satellite phone as a modem to link to the Fae-Net and put out a call on the Hunt channels.
“That’ll alert my people in Calgary. If we set up a beacon Between, they’ll be able to navigate here and avoid the snipers.” I shook my head. “That’s over a hundred Hunters, Companions, asura and shifters,” I told Oisin. “If we can’t hold with that, we’re already fucked.”
“We don’t have the gear for any of that,” Oisin admitted. “We were trying to hide ourselves from Between, after all. Why would we have brought a beacon?”
“That’s all right. I brought one,” I replied. “Kristal, can you and Oisin set up what we need with the satellite phone?”
“If he knows the codes for the Hunter sites, yep,” she confirmed.
I looked at the other Hunter.
“I know them, brother,” he conceded. “We’ll make it happen. We have to protect the Queen.”
“We swore an oath,” I agreed. “I’ll set up the beacon, but I won’t charge it or move it Between until we’ve sent out the call. Let’s minimize how long we’re screaming to the world that we’re here without having reinforcements.”
Oisin nodded, then paused.
“A hundred Hunters?” he asked. “That’ll make a good first wave, though that’s more than I would have thought Ankaris would have assigned to you.”
I winced. That was right; they were completely out of touch. I’d told him Ankaris had died, but not the rest.
“Much of the Hunt died with Ankaris,” I told him quietly. “There’s…maybe two hundred and fifty of us left. Grainne Silverstar is the Horned King now. She and I had a disagreement over the right course.”
“I know Silverstar,” Oisin said slowly. “How bad?”
“She executed a hunter for questioning her orders,” I explained. “The Wild Hunt…is split, Oisin. She exiled me for defying her and half of the Hunt followed me.
“I can call on half the Hunt and my own Vassals…but that may be all the help that’s coming.”
Most of the beacons I’d seen used to mark locations Between hadn’t looked like much. The most common was a carved piece of rutilated quartz about the size of my fist.
We had at least a dozen of them bouncing around the house in Calgary, and anyone with the Gift of Between could charge one to show up. That wouldn’t suffice to pierce the jamming effect that Mabona had layered onto the Between around her.
If that kind of beacon would have been enough, I’d have been able to step Between to her based on the link. To break through the security Mabona had created was going to take more—and I’d come prepared.
Instead of a single carved piece of rutilated quartz with natural gold veins, I had four fifteen-centimeter-by-three-centimeter clear quartz prisms. Each had a gold bar running up its six sides, forming a constant connection.
The fifth piece was one of the clearest pieces of pink rose quartz I’d ever seen, placed in a solid gold base that was designed to link into the prisms. Assembled, it made a tiny pyramid edged in gold and tipped in a pink crystal that caught the light from the fire and scattered it across the room.
I put it in front of the fireplace and touched Esras to it, focusing my gift into the four supporting crystals of the beacon. Energy flowed from me, down the spear and into the crystals. After a moment, they began to glow with a soft inner light that mortal eyes wouldn’t have seen.
I held the link for a few more seconds, watching the light grow brighter. Once it was almost bright enough to hurt my eyes, I dropped the connection. The light muted a little bit, then steadied.
It wasn’t active, but it was fully charged.
“How are we with the call?” I asked.
“Just about ready,” Oisin reported. “Anyone specific we want to be reaching out to?”
“How about everyone?” I suggested. “The Hunt, the local Court, the Magus…”
I sighed. We couldn’t call the Magus. I knew that even as I said it. It might be a good idea, but I could feel my Vassalage bond twinge at the thought of bringing another Power around my crippled boss.
“The Hunt and the High Court channels,” I told him after a moment. “We need to keep this under wraps. We need reinforcements, but we also need to keep this quiet. No one outside the Fae community needs to know.”
Oisin arched an eyebrow at Mary, who was helping sort through the additional heavy weapons we’d brought with us.
“She’s with me and her bodyguard is with her,” I said firmly. “Mary doesn’t count. Raja is outside, but he owes me fealty. He counts as fae for this.”
“I agree,” he allowed with a chuckle. “Just checking in. There.” He tapped the Enter key on Kristal’s laptop and passed it back to her.
“As soon as we hook the modem up to the satellite phone, we’ll have internet for a few minutes at least. Long enough to put out the call.”
“The beacon is ready,” I told them. “Once you trigger the alert, I’ll step Between and activate it.”
The good news was that we couldn’t really be attacked Between. Attacked through the Between, yes, though any Hunter would feel the attackers coming, but even Hunters had problems finding the energy to fight Between.
There was a reason one of our capital punishments was to take the criminal Between and leave them there, after all.
“Well, I’d suggest you go place the beacon, my lord,” Kristal told me. “We’re good to go on this end.”
I started to remind her I wasn’t a lord but then sighed. Somewhere along the way, probably around the point I’d walked in on Mabona’s staff and taken command without thinking about it, I’d lost that fight.
“All right. Let’s make it happen.”
Stepping Between, the beacon in my hands began to pulse even more brightly. Part of the activation was just bringing it there, but I took a moment to study the “space” around me.
Between was always a cold and lifeless place, with a chill that struck even those with the Gift to walk here to the bone. The relation between it and the real world was always off, mis-scaled or otherwise warped.
Here, however, it wasn’t even warped. It was distorted and fuzzy, like I was looking at even the Between through the bottom of a glass. Normally, I could get my bearings almost instantly Between.
In the middle of Mabona’s “jamming,” it was impossible. I could probably leave—pick a direction and walk until I did get my bearings, basically—but no one could find their way in.
Not without a beacon, anyway.
“The ground” was more of an idea than a solid thing Between, so I placed the beacon in midair where I could easily reach it. Then I channeled even more energy into the top rose quartz crystal, letting it grow even brighter than the clear quartz supporting it.
It hung there for a few seconds, and then the two lights blurred together into a single glowing spot that cut through the murk Mabona had gathered around herself.
The beacon was online and I sighed.
I’d just ruined the defenses my Queen had gathered, which meant I’d better replace them quickly. My people would be coming.
I had to hope that was enough.
I turned to leave Between and stopped when I realized someone had joined me. The newcomer was a stranger
to me, a short creature barely taller than Eric but lacking the gnome’s breadth. With the murk Mabona had conjured there, it took me a moment to realize they had tiny horns sprouting through their long brown hair…and a wide grin on their face.
There was only one creature in all the world that met that description. At least, when they wanted to.
“The Puck,” I said slowly. “My…lord?”
“Puck will do,” the first and oldest Power of the Fae High Court told me brightly. “It’s a nice beacon, well made.”
“How are you conscious? I thought they took down the whole High Court.”
“I’m not conscious at all,” the Puck replied. “This is a projection from a lucid dream, boy. Only you can see me, and I can’t influence much of anything. If I strain too hard, I might do myself some serious harm.”
“What do you need?” I asked carefully.
“You to do your job,” they told me. “Mabona is the strongest of us. Two of the Ladies of the Seasons are dead, and the Masked Lords will come for her next, I think. Your call will bring them as well.”
“I know.”
“So, you’ve just rung the call to arms for the final battle of our little civil war, my dear boy. I’m watching, I’m listening. I’ll give you what help I can…but it’s on you.”
They shook their head.
“It’s all on you, Jason Kilkenny. Like it was on your father before you. Are you ready for that?”
“Hell, no,” I replied.
The Puck laughed.
“Good. If you realize that, you might just survive this.”
42
Stepping back into the real world, I shook my head. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating the Puck or actually did have the oldest living fae poking along next to me.
They were still there after I returned to the lodge, but no one else seemed to notice them.
“Told you. Only you can see me,” they assured me. “For now, at least. I can change that if I need to.”
Noble's Honor (Changeling Blood Book 3) Page 22
