Fireshaper's Doom (39 page)

Katie reached in her pocket, pulled out her cross and her rosary. Held them straight before JoAnne Sullivan’s startled eyes.

“Because Katie McNally does not lie!”

Little Billy tugged free, started to run toward the logging road that snaked into the mountain behind the farm, then paused, bouncing from foot to eager foot.

“Let’s go, Ma!”

His mother had snagged him in an instant. “Go where, honey?”

“Lookout Rock, Ma!” Little Billy cried, pointing. “It’s Davy an’ Alec’s special place. An’ that cross is right over it!”

“You’re mighty sure, ain’t you?”

“Come
on,
Ma!”

Very, very slowly JoAnne Sullivan nodded. “Well, it’ll just take a little while to find out one way or the other, won’t it? An’ twenty years from now I’ll never miss the time. Maybe a walk up the mountain’ll help take my mind off things.” She glanced back at the old Trader woman. “I’ll put Little Billy to bed, an’ go tell Bill, an’—”

Katie shook her head. “
You
was hard enough to convince.”

“Okay, then,” said JoAnne Sullivan, as she squared her shoulders and stared first at the chain, then at her fractious son, and finally at a fading cross in the sky. “I’ve got a pair of britches a’hangin’ on the line.”

Chapter XXXIX: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

(The Land Beyond the Lake)

A fluff of damp ferns brushed Liz’s face. She stopped in midstride to wipe a hand across her brow, looked for a dry place to rub it on her pants; found none, then dashed forward again. A little way ahead she could barely make out the hunched shape of Regan supporting the unconscious Nuada on Snowwhisper’s back. Closer in, Gary was pushing through another mass of shoulder-high fronds. One of them flipped back toward her. She slapped at it. “God, it’s sticky here,” she muttered irritably.

“Yeah,” Alec agreed, as he trudged along behind her at the tag end of the weary company, “but at least all these leaves’ve managed to wipe off most of the blood Froech couldn’t magic away. We look
almost
human.”

“
You
may think so.”

Alec didn’t answer; he had slowed and was gazing around at the surrounding verdure.

“You know,” he mused after a moment, “you could almost forget you were in another World sometimes. Places like this, for instance; it’s like the Pacific Northwest, or something. The Olympic Rainforest and all that. You know: moss all over everything, and these confounded ferns and bushes, and all this mist, and—”

“
I
don’t forget, McLean,” Liz snapped, spinning around to glare at him. “I remember why we’re doing this, even if you don’t!”

“I remember too, girl,” Alec flung back, startled at the unexpected vehemence of Liz’s remark. “He
was
my best friend, in case you’ve forgotten!”

“
Was?
That makes him sound like he’s dead, Alec!”

“
Is
my best friend, then. Satisfied?”

“Stuff it!”

“The hell I will! You think I don’t care? I’ve known him longer than
you
have!”

Liz’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Shut up, Alec. Just shut up!”

“My pleasure, lady. My absolute pleasure!”

Alec paused, blinking rapidly; then: “Dammit, Liz, all I was trying to do was to take your mind off things.” A tear oozed down his cheek. He brushed it aside and looked up doubtfully, smiling an embarrassed smile.

Liz sighed heavily, reached over to take his hand. “It’s okay, Alec. We both know what we really mean, and why. But we’re tired—tired as convicts, as Granny used to say. God knows what time it is, how long we’ve been traveling, where we are, when we’ll get food or rest.”

“And God don’t seem to be saying,” Alec replied as they rejoined the company. “Ho! What’s that?”

A noise reached them: muffled by vegetation at first, but becoming a louder roar as they continued forward. The earth began trembling beneath their feet. Then the thick screen of overreaching leaves and branches that obscured both the sky and the view ahead fell back.

“Oh my God!” Liz gasped.

It was a waterfall: plunging freely a thousand feet or more from atop a ragged rampart of glowering gray stone that erupted from the earth maybe a hundred yards ahead. A wide black pool lapped about the bottom.

Liz found her eyes tracing the Track toward that water, hoping that some trick of perspective would deny what she now feared: that the golden road led straight beneath the torrent. “Crap,” she muttered in Alec’s general direction. “We can’t go under that!”

“It may be we have no choice,” Regan said. “For that way lies Ailill’s trail, and it is fresher than it has ever been.”

“Lady, look!” Froech cried from the trail ahead. “I think he fell here.”

Keeping her arms wrapped firmly around Nuada’s waist, the Faery lady bent over to stare at a patch of matted grass.

“How long, Froech?”

“Not long ago at all, I think; maybe a tenth of the sun’s arc.”

“Hear that, Liz?” Alec whispered. “Just a little way ahead of us. And then we can look for David.”

“If he’s not dead.”

“Don’t even think that!”

“Sorry.”

They said no more as Froech followed the Track to the edge of the pool, then skirted around it to the fall itself. Mist veiled him for an instant. A moment later he was back.

“Both trail and Track lead beneath the falls,” Froech said. “But the Track has Power enough to turn aside most of the water’s force. There is a cleft in the stone behind the fall, and at its entrance I found more footprints.”

“Any clue as to what might lie within?” Regan asked. “I do not like the notion of traveling underground with Nuada as he is.”

Froech shook his head. “Alas, I cannot say. But Ailill’s antler marks show clear against the rocks to either side. He passed that way; we must therefore follow. And as for your other concern, I think it might be best if you remained here with Nuada while the rest of us go on ahead. You are, after all, our best healer; perhaps if you do not have to worry about keeping Silverhand in his seat you can help him more.”

“Not a bad idea,” Uncle Dale observed. “I ’spect me or you could do the trackin’ now, anyway. If that there cave’s like most I’ve seen, why, ain’t but so many places a deer could get to in there. You folks get me some light, I’ll follow that trail for you. This here mountain don’t look too thick. Oughn’t to take us long to figger out whether to go on or turn back. If we go on, we can send somebody back to tell Miz Regan.”

Liz’s eyes widened in horror. She gazed up at Nuada’s closed eyes, his slack limbs, the poison-ravaged body still encircled in Regan’s arms. “You mean you’re just going to let them
stay
here? With the shell-beasts somewhere back there!”

“There is little need to worry,” Froech replied. “This is not the World that was; the Watchers do not come into this one. Our friends will doubtless be safer here than we, if we are as close to Ailill as I think. But Nuada should not go on, that much is certain.”

“But—” Liz began.

“Enough,” the Faery youth said. “His fate is no concern for mortals.”

Liz stared at him, teeth gritted as she sought to control her anger.

Froech looked away deliberately, glanced toward a stand of rushes that grew by the edge of the pool. “I think I can make torches from those.”

“Torches? Can’t you magic us some light?” Gary asked.

“I am nearly out of Power,” Froech replied. “I used much to dispose of the blood, since you mortals insisted on it; what little was left I have been directing toward my tracking—or to Nuada.”

He set himself to breaking off bundles of reeds.

Regan was eyeing the margin of the pond where a variety of small weeds and bushes twined. “Katie has taught me of the healing arts of men,” she said. “Some of those plants may have some virtue, if I can just recall… Gary, if you will help me with our friend?”

*

A short while later the remaining companions faced the fall, with one of Froech’s bundled torches for each of them. Uncle Dale was the first to step upon the Track, first to cross the pool—not wading, but walking
on
the water itself—then go beneath the rumbling cataract.

Liz looked up as her turn came to pass beneath the wall of water. She could see it before her, feel its electric coolness in the air. But then she stepped into it and the force diminished. The roar dulled and receded. And though she could see the water falling above her, feel it around her, it was as if it fell at a slower rate, as if she walked in the most delicate of spring rains. And then she was through and looking upon a dark wall of smooth and shiny rock, against which a vertical fissure showed darker yet, illuminated to perhaps knee height by the yellowish glow of the Track.

Alec’s heels were already disappearing through that slit, and Liz followed as quickly as she could, at once disturbingly aware of the mountain’s mass as an almost palpable oppression upon her spirit.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the flickering torchlight that one instant splashed a uniform glare of red across the walls, and the next highlighted every knob and plane with its own capricious black shadow. She found herself blinking too, as smoke burned into her eyes. The way was fairly narrow at first, but after fifty or so paces, the tunnel began to widen. The echoes of Alec’s footsteps called back to her. And then the walls swept away, as the tunnel opened into a vast, almost spherical cavern, maybe two hundred feet in diameter. She gasped: only the shallow ledge on which the company now crowded stood between them and the gulf. A narrow, railless arc of natural stone bridge bisected that emptiness, carrying both trail and Track into a darkness that was broken only by the stark glimmer of a vertical slit in the opposite wall.

Uncle Dale stooped and scraped his index finger along the floor, then raised it to his nostrils. “Deer passed this way not long ago,” he grunted confidently, rubbing the red stain with his thumb. “Blood’s so fresh it’s still got some warm to it.”

“Want to go back and get Regan and Nuada?” Gary ventured.

“Let’s see what’s other side of that there crack, first.”

And with that the old man stepped onto the span, the others following, Liz again bringing up the rear.

She very nearly lost her balance at the halfway point, very nearly tumbled headlong into the darkness that yawned beneath her. More than once she had to stop, to stand swaying as she regained her nerve. Three times she had to steady herself with a hand on Alec’s arm. And then she could see the walls again, curving in to meet her at the sliver of light.

That light was straight in front of her now, the Track humming beneath her feet. But underlying its vibration was another: a trembling of the rock of the mountains.

Alec’s body blocked most of the view ahead, though a breath of dampness crept by him to kiss her cheek.

And then he was gone and she was following.

All at once she stepped into light.

A veil of falling water lay before her, and she thought for a moment that the Track had played some trick on them, that they were back where they had started.

But as Alec’s head disappeared beneath the curtain ahead, Liz heard his joyful cry: “Good God, I know where we are, Liz, it’s—”

The sound was cut off, for Liz had followed him under the veil of mist.

And emerged in the rich pink glow of sunrise in the Lands of Men. She looked down for an instant, saw the Track paling into vapor as it arched away above the small, placid pool at her feet.

Beyond that pool was a clearing circled with pines and strewn with boulders and fallen logs that broke off suddenly into a sheer precipice. Beyond the precipice were mountains, like a pile of nubby, red-purple blankets spread loosely on the bones of the land. A shimmer of water flattened the low places between the nearer peaks, one of which was particularly pointed.

“That’s Bloody Bald!” she gasped, as she followed Alec off the Track. “We’re on Lookout Rock!”

But as her foot left the strip of gold, a pain stabbed into her hip from where she yet carried David’s ring. She started to cry out, but a dull paralysis suddenly clogged her throat. Her tongue felt thick, her limbs abruptly weak and distant. Her brain filled with a buzzing that drove away her own will and left her helpless. Dully she followed Alec’s stooping shoulders into full light. From somewhere derisive laughter sounded in her ears: two voices, one high and clear, one lower but no less melodious.

Her awareness rapidly fading into lethargy, Liz nevertheless strained her vision, seeking among the black-shadowed rocks for the source of that unnerving laughter.

And found it—for stepping from beneath the boughs at the edge of the lookout were the shapes of a tall, black-haired man, and beside him a beautiful, black-haired woman who looked to be his close kin.

The man held a naked sword at arm’s length before him, point-up, its S-curved quillons at near eye level. He stared at it with a vague, unfocused intensity even as he continued to walk forward.