Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) (14 page)
Read Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Five) Online
Authors: Kevin Hearne
I was about to begin the next sequence when Oberon’s insistent voice broke through my trance.
Unwilling to pull myself entirely out of the trance, I paused, dropped the thorn, and spoke to him.
How do you know?
Somebody’s out there. You’re right. Damn it five thousand ways. Judging by where I am in the tattoos, it’s only been about three weeks. And you know you shouldn’t eat that meat, right?
It was all training for this particular moment, see? You’re alive instead of dead like those dogs in the movies
.
Can you see any tracks? Smell anything besides the meat?
It’s not turning human. You can still smell the meat
.
Don’t touch it, Oberon. Don’t even lick it. It’s poisoned for sure. Look, I’m going to come out there and see if I can spot any clues. Stay there, keep a sharp ear and nose out, and let me know if you sense anything
.
And stop staring at the meat. Look around for who put it there
.
Canine Psychology 101. Seriously, don’t look at it. Look for the dastardly villain
.
Oberon. It’s dead meat. You are stronger than other dogs. Look away
.
Oberon! Watch out for the cows raining down from the sky!
Don’t look back at the meat! Look around for who might have dropped it
.
I’ll be there as soon as I can
.
I made apologies to Gaia and Granuaile. Anybody with the heart to poison a dog would have the heart to do us harm as well, and we couldn’t ignore it. //Pause necessary / Will continue binding later//
“Atticus? What’s going on?”
“Someone’s out there. They dropped a T-bone in Oberon’s path, and it’s a good bet that it’s poisoned. We need to take care of this before we continue. Find your knives and strap them on.”
“We
can
continue? We
will
continue? I’m just checking,” she said as she found her knife holsters and attached them to her belt.
“Yes to both. You’re going to cast your first magic before I go.” I tossed aside my backpack, looking for Moralltach. It was still where I’d stashed it, and I slung the scabbard on the strap over my back.
“I can do that without the binding being complete?”
“Yeah. Everything I’ve done so far is complete in itself. The inhibitor loop on the bottom of your foot worked immediately. Same for these other bits.” I fetched her staff and returned to where she was sitting. Granuaile seemed disoriented by the sudden change in plans—and perhaps a bit dizzy, because her leg was still swollen and oozing blood. I offered her a hand up and she took it. Pulling her to her feet, I said, “Cast the binding for magical sight.”
“Okay, but how?”
“What do you mean, how? Did you forget the words? I made you do all those drills for nothing?”
“No, but …”
“Say the words, see the knots, and be the hand that ties them. The power is there now.”
Granuaile didn’t have any charms to cast bindings via mental commands. She’d have to speak everything until she could craft her own charms. And so she began, in a halting voice, disbelief in her eyes that she could make this happen. I triggered my charm so I could watch it: When she finished the final phrase that energized the binding and drew power from the earth, I saw the white glow of magic flow up from the cave floor and illuminate her tattoos underneath the skin, and I heard her gasp as her eyes saw much more than they were used to seeing. She put out her hands, suddenly unbalanced. Magical vertigo—sensory overload.
“Sensei? This isn’t … oh, shit.”
I stepped closer to make sure she didn’t fall. “Search for the outlines of things.”
“This isn’t like looking through your eyes. It’s too much.”
“I know. You need to ignore the gossamer threads of all the bindings around you. If it’s below your feet, block it out; you don’t need to see all the bindings there. You have to train yourself to ignore the sensory input of these peripheral bindings, the way freeway drivers ignore billboards and speed limits and so on. You understand?”
“Uh … yeah? I think? Whoa.”
“When you’re driving, you don’t focus on everything at once, but you have peripheral awareness of it, right? You focus on what you need to at any given moment, whether it’s the car in front of you, the jackass in the lifted truck passing you, or the sirens behind you, whatever. Everything exists, everything is there, but you don’t have to see it all at once. Does that help? You don’t have to see all the bindings you’re seeing right now. Just focus on the outlines of the physical stuff you saw before.”
“Yeah, well, the bushes don’t give me much of an outline, sensei, because they’re fucking bushy.”
“Here,” I said, thrusting her staff into her hands. “That should be a simple enough shape to focus on.”
“No, because I see the oil from my fingers and the wood cells and—what is that thing? Is it some sort of bug larvae living in my staff?”
“Bring it up close to your eyes. Focus on the shape. There’s a big censor bar across your vision. That’s all you see, only the outline.”
“Oh. Wait, that helped.”
“Good. Now keep your vision in that mode, if you will, when you lower the staff. See outlines instead of everything.”
She slowly lowered the staff and sighed in relief when the mass of bindings didn’t blind her with light.
“Okay,” she said, putting one end of the staff on the
ground and smiling at me. “This is just a little bit awesome. I’ve cast my first Druidic binding.”
“Congratulations. I need you to cast two more before I can leave.”
The smile disappeared. “Leave?”
“To check on Oberon, remember? We’re not alone.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Cast the bindings to increase your strength and speed. I don’t care which one you do first.”
Coming soon, buddy. Almost ready
.
I cast the same two bindings on myself. She cast speed first, and once she was done she grinned. “I so want to spar with you now.”
I was so proud of her and I wanted to hug her rather than spar, but then I’d have to start thinking about baseball, and this wasn’t a good time for that.
“Keep that in mind. If I move quickly now, does that mess up your vision?”
“No, I can still see the outlines. I can see the surface features, too, without getting overwhelmed. It’s like everything has this soft glow around it, and if I don’t focus on the glow I’ll be fine.”
“Excellent. That’s exactly what you want. Now, I don’t know who’s out there. It might be a magic user. When I come back, I should look like this. If you see me plus something else—two different outlines, in other words—it’s not me. It’s something else, casting a glamour. Whack him. Or her. Or it.”
“So that’s why you want me to have magical vision on—”
“For positive ID. Right. Be back as soon as I can. Vigilance!”
Casting camouflage on myself, I eased out of the cave and past the thornbushes to descend to the stream.
Which way from the cave, Oberon?
The watering hole was the outer limit of the range where I could still hear him in my mind. I began to mince his way, trying to keep quiet and scan the area for movement.
And you haven’t seen anything in all this time?
You’re not staring at the meat again, are you?
And you haven’t heard or smelled anything?
Yes. Okay, I’m on my way, trying to move quickly but also quietly. I’m having the bushes move apart for me where necessary. I’m in camouflage
.
I didn’t hear anything either, except for the soft sounds of my own footfalls on the ground. Oberon was right. This was unnaturally quiet. Five minutes’ determined march through the growth brought me to the watering hole. Nothing moved except for the water in the stream.
Walking south from there, it was less than a minute before I came upon Oberon and the steak.
Yes. It’s me
. I dissolved my camouflage so he could see me. Oberon’s tail wagged.
I examined the steak. Clearly it had been carefully placed. There was no dirt on the sides or top, as there would be if it had tumbled haphazardly from someone’s grasp. It was discolored in several places, more than would be expected by simple exposure to air; there were subtle shadings of red that Oberon’s canine eyes wouldn’t have picked up. Something had been sprinkled on it. What the poison was didn’t matter
to me. What puzzled me was Oberon’s insistence that he’d seen no tracks nearby. I had doubted that because I figured he’d simply been blind to anything except the steak, but there truly were no tracks here except his and mine. That led me to several unsavory conclusions.
It probably wasn’t a deity; a deity wouldn’t have silenced all the creatures. Still, it was something with the ability to manipulate the earth like a Druid—or it wasn’t touching the earth at all. Something that could fly.
“We have to get back to Granuaile,” I said. “Right now!”
That’s when I got an arrow in the back.
I should probably back up a wee bit. As I was telling Oberon we needed to return to the cave, his ears pricked up and he looked into the distance behind my right side. And then, saying nothing more than
I cast camouflage on us almost by instinct, then belatedly remembered as another shaft whizzed overhead that I should camouflage the bloody arrow sticking out of me too.
Go, Oberon! See if you can circle around and flank them
.
I didn’t have far to look. A squad of five yewmen, spread in a skirmish line, approached from the direction of the watering hole, bronze leaf swords raised high
over their right shoulders, advancing as samurai would through the brush. Their tiny dark eyes searched for me—and found me. They could see through my camouflage.
Though only three feet tall, they were terrifying creatures, knotted and gnarled with anger, sprung from the boughs of the enchanted guardian trees in the Morrigan’s Fen. They were the Morrigan’s answer to many of the Tuatha Dé Danann, for while they were living, they weren’t animals and thus weren’t subject to Flidais’s control; Moralltach meant nothing to them, for they were not made of flesh, and Aenghus Óg’s old sword would not affect them except in the way any normal blade would—which wasn’t much. I’d be better off with an axe. Someone had done their homework to send them against me.
In Druidic circles, yew was the harbinger of death, an omen of ill news, and this, coupled with the fact that they were the Morrigan’s creatures, meant that even among the Fae the yewmen were feared; they were creatures that made goblins wake up sweating in the night. They served the Morrigan for a hundred years, guarding the Fen—which was really her stronghold as the Fae Court was Brighid’s—itching for a fight and never getting one, until she let them go to Tír na nÓg, where they became eager mercenaries.
I had little to no hope that the Morrigan would appear to defend me now. She’d made it clear some years ago that she depended on me to take care of myself, despite her vow to prevent my death by violent means.
Oberon, they have swords and they know how to use them. I don’t want you engaging them. What they don’t have are bows and arrows. See if you can find the archer and tell me where he is
.
These lads didn’t fly, and that arrow had come from a
higher angle than they could conceivably achieve. Whoever had dropped that steak wasn’t a yewman, and he was out there ready to take a potshot at me; that’s why I bothered to keep my camouflage on.
Their stances gave me an idea—they were providing such lovely targets. I created a binding of like-to-like, so that their bronze blades abruptly bound together on either side of the one in the middle. The effect was amusing, because the yewmen didn’t want to let go. They were yanked by their swords toward the lad in the center, and once he was holding not only his sword but four other yewmen with their swords bound to his, he had a bit of trouble, and the whole mess of them fell in a heap to the ground.
I thought of binding the yewmen together in the same way, except that I was afraid of what would happen if I tried. These were the Morrigan’s creatures and would hardly be effective against the Tuatha Dé Danann if they could be bound like any other piece of wood. Rumor had it that the Morrigan had prepared for that—perhaps it was a rumor she’d spread herself. Still, it would be silly to allow her yewmen to be bound and unbound by their bark; they had to have protection. Olympia, however, might be able to help me. The yewmen were never intended to walk on this plane; they were the boogeymen of the Faerie lands, but to Olympia they were simply odd trees.