A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition (34 page)

In our time the People of the Hills leave their anger at home when they ride—their day is done, and their angers are a matter of the songs their bards sing to while away the endless afternoon. But that afternoon was broken, now, and the legendary past had come haunting them as surely as it had come after the mortals. The Sidhe rode in anger now, as the People of the Air, in the whirlwind, with a clashing of spears that shone with the pale fire that flickers around the faery hills on haunted nights. Their horses burnt bright and dark as stormclouds with the sun behind them as they came galloping down the air. There was no more chance of telling how many of the riders there were than there was of counting the raindrops in a downpour. But two forms stood out at the head of them: the Queen with her loosened hair flying wild, on a steed like night, and the Fool on one like stormy morning, with their spears in their hands and a wind and a light of madness about them.

At the sight of them, a great shriek of despair and terror went up from the Fomori. The Sidhe cried out in answer, a cry of such pure delighted rage that Nita shuddered at the sound of it, and the
Sluagh Ron
hit the great crowd of Fomori from the southward side. The wizards parted left and right to let them through, and the Sidhe drove the Fomori straight downward into the Glencree ford, and up against the ridge on the far side. Wailing the Fomori went, and the press of riders and the darkness borne on the wind hid them from sight.

After what seemed a very long while, the wind died down, leaving the riders standing there, and the wizards looking at them, among the dead bodies of Fomor, and the twitching, witless ones, driven mad by the sight of the onslaught. Johnny went from where he had been talking to Nita’s aunt, who held a Fragarach much damped-down and diminished-looking, and stood by the tallest of the riders, taking the bridle of her horse. “Madam,” he said, “we hadn’t looked to see you here.”

“We were called by our own element,” the Queen said, looking down at Nita’s aunt, and Fragarach. “Besides, it has been too long since I went a-foraying; and since our world seems like enough to die here, this is a good time to ride out again. We have not done badly. But I think we may not be able to do much more. All magics are diminishing in the face of our enemy’s
draoiceacht,
and I feel the weariness in my bones. Do not you?”

Johnny nodded. “Nevertheless we will press on,” he said.

“We will go with you and look on this ending,” said the Amadaun; and paused. “If an ending is indeed what we are coming to.”

“One way or another,” Johnny said.

Johnny waved the wizards forward, and they started down the winding way that paralleled the river, and led towards Bray.

“Did you hear that?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head; she was very tired. “Hear what?”

“What the Queen said. ‘The weariness.’”

She had to laugh at that. “After what we’ve been through today, you’d be nuts not to be tired.”

“Yeah, but that’s not it. Don’t you feel tireder than you were when we were up at the top of the hill?”

Nita blinked. “You’re right.”

Kit nodded down at the darkness in front of them. “That,” he said. “There’s some kind of energy-sapping spell tied up with it. Don’t exert yourself if you can avoid it—you may need that energy for later.”

She looked at him with very mild annoyance; sometimes Kit’s practical streak came close to getting him hit. “What I really need right now in terms of energy is a candy bar,” she said, “but the only thing I’ve got left in my pack is a cat. And I can’t eat that.” She made an amused face. “Too many bones.”

Tualha hissed in Nita’s ear, not amused. Kit grinned, and produced a candy bar from one pocket. Nita took it, squinted at it in the dimness. “It’s got peanuts in it!” she said. “I hate peanuts!”

“Oh, okay,” Kit said, grabbed it back, and started to unwrap it.

Nita grabbed it away from him, scowled at him, and began eating. Tualha snickered at her.

They kept walking along the course of the river: it would have been the route of the thirteen-bend road, in the real world. Trees arched close overhead in the gloom, and the sound of the river down in its stony watercourse was muted.
If something should hit us here, we’d have nowhere to go,
Nita thought, as she took another bite out of the candy bar.

And then the screaming began again, very close.

It’s not fair!,
she thought, as she saw the drows and pookas come crashing in among the wizards from down the steep slope to their right. At that point she also discovered something else: that a wizard with a mouthful of caramel and peanuts is not much good for saying spells, even the last word of one that’s already set up. She pushed backwards out of the way while fighting to swallow, managed it, and shouted the one word she needed just in time to blow away the drow that was heading for Kit on his blind side while he did the same for a pooka.

Something grabbed her from behind by her throat and chest, choking her. Nita fought to turn, for you can’t blast what you can’t see, but the stony hands held her hard, and she couldn’t get her breath; her vision started to go.

Then there was a roaring noise behind her, the pressure released suddenly, and Nita fell sprawling and gasping. She levered herself up, looking around her. “Kit—” she said, “did you—”

She ran out of words. All around them, the path through the forest was awash in blue-green light that rolled and flowed like water; and off to one side, the river was climbing up out of its banks in response, and running up onto the path. Both flows, of light and water together, were rushing with increasing speed eastward, leaving the wizards untouched, but washing the drows and pookas and other monsters away like so much flotsam.

Nita struggled to get to her feet again, against the flow. To Kit she said, “Looks like Doris is using the Cup.”

Kit nodded. “Come on, we should be breaking out into the open pretty soon. This path comes out in that flat ground by the freeway, doesn’t it?”

“The motorway, yeah.”

Several more bends of the watercourse brought them out into the open ground. There was a great scattering of drows there, half-buried in the earth as if about a year’s worth of mud had buried them there; many others, dealt with by the wizardry of individuals, lay broken or helpless. The last traces of the blue-green light of the Cup’s wizardry were sinking into the ground like water, along with the real water, which was running down into the watercourse of the Dargle, which the Glencree stream had just met. Kit and Nita splashed across the ford and up the other side, looking around them.

Nita sagged against Kit as she looked northward along the flood-plain of the Dargle toward Bray. The darkness was getting solider and solider, and she felt about ready to collapse.

You and me both,
Kit said. She could feel the fatigue in the thought, and Nita looked around at the other wizards with them and saw that they were suffering too; some of them were having to be helped along by others, and not because of injuries. And far down the flood plain, there was a long line of darkness hugging the ground, coming slowly toward them. It was bigger than all three of the previous forces that had attacked them, all put together.

Oh, no,
she thought. I
can’t. And neither can a lot of the rest of us…

“There never was any counting them, even in the old days,” Tualha said. “It seems nothing has changed.”

There was an awful silence. Many of the wizards looked at each other helplessly, hefted their weapons and watched the Fomori come. Nita looked over at Johnny, who was off to the side of one small crowd, frowning, with his arms folded.

The ground began to shake.

The Stone,
Kit said silently, immediately doing the smartest thing: he looked up and around to make sure no tree or rock was likely to fall on him, and then sat down. Nita followed suit. All around them, the earth groaned alarmingly as it was held still where they were, but encouraged to move, and violently, half a mile away. Down by that advancing line of darkness, trees toppled over and huge boulders of Wicklow granite rolled down the hillsides toward the ranks of the Fomori.

They broke, screaming and running in all directions. It did them little good. One of the hillsides shrugged itself up and up until it fell over on the Fomori vanguard. Behind them the rest milled about in confusion between the two ridges that paralleled the open ground where it sloped gently away down toward Bray.

The thunder of the quaking ground suddenly became a roar. Nita clutched at the ground as a single awful shock went through it—not one of the rippling waves they had been feeling, but a concussion like two huge rocks being struck together.

Down towards Bray, the horde of dark forms were abruptly missing from the ground. Nothing could be seen but smokes and dust rising upward in the gloom.

“Let’s go,” Johnny said quietly, and started forward.

***

No one had much to say as they passed the great smoking chasm that had been a green meadow half a mile long, between two hills. One of the hills was flat now, the other had great cracks in it, and from far down among the rock-tumble in the chasm, as the wizards passed slowly by it, faint cries could be heard. Nita shuddered as she followed Kit; they had to squeeze their way along the side of the meadow, what was left of it. The ground tilted dangerously downward toward the chasm. The riders of the Sidhe paced casually along the air above the huge smoking hole, but it occurred to Nita that the wizards might have a slightly harder time of it if they had to leave the area suddenly.

The gloom grew about them, and the tiredness got worse and worse, so that it was almost as much as she could do just to drag herself along. Only the sight of Kit in front of her, doggedly putting foot in front of foot, kept her doing the same.
At least they’re letting us alone now,
she thought.
Or maybe there are none of them left.

We hope,
Kit said silently.
Hang in there, Neets!
Look, Johnny’s stopped up at the top of that hill there.

They went up after him, paused at the hillcrest and looked down over where Bray would have been in the real world. In this other-world, it was normally a great flowery plain that ran down to the sea; but the darkness that lay over everything had shut the flowers’ eyes. It was a featureless place now, flat as heartbreak, right up to where Bray Head should have been; and a wall of black cloud rose there, shutting the sight away.

Nita squinted along the coastline, looking for some sight of the sea. That wall of blackness prevented her, though.
Is it clouds, or some other kind of storm? Why isn’t it moving?...

But it was not cloud, as she had thought. There were regular shapes in that darkness, barely visible. It was a line of ships—but ships like none she had ever imagined before, ships with hulls the size of mountains, with sails like thunderheads. They were livid-dark as if full of thunder, and she could see the chains of pallid lightning that held them to the shore. This was the black wizardry that would drag this alternate Ireland out of its place in the sea, up into the regions of eternal darkness and cold, into another ice-age perhaps. What would happen to the real Ireland, and the rest of the world after it, Nita had no idea.

And under that wall of darkness—

Her mind was dulled with that awful weariness, and at first Nita thought she was looking at a hill, between them and the sea.
Isn’t that weird,
she thought.
That almost looks like a sort of squashed head, there.
And really ugly.
Huge twisted lips it had, and a face that looked as if someone had malformed it on purpose. It was like a sculptor’s model of a gargoyle’s head all squashed down, the nose pushed out of place, one eye squinted away to nothing and the other abnormally huge, bulging out, the lid a thin warty skin over it. All this smashed down onto great rounded shoulders, a crouching shape, great flabby arms and thighs and a gross bulging belly—all the size of a hill. Face and body together combined to make an expression of sheer spite, of long-cherished grudges and self-satisfied immobility. The look of it made Nita feel a little sick.

And then she saw it breathe.

And breathe again.

Loathing, that was almost all she could feel. She was afraid, too, but it seemed to take too much energy.
So this is Balor.

It wasn’t the way she had expected the Lone One to appear. Always when Nita had found herself up against it before, she’d seen the Lone Power as young and dynamic, dangerous, actively evil. It had been nothing like this crouching, lethargic horror, this lump of inertia, of blindness and old unexamined hates. Before, when confronted by the rogue Power that wizards fight, she’d always wanted to fight It too, or else run away in sheer terror. This made her simply want to sneak away somewhere and throw up.

But this was what they had to get rid of; this was what was going to destroy this island, and then the world.

It’s really gross,
came the thought; Kit, tired too, but not as tired as she was.
They’d better get rid of it quick.

Nita agreed with him. Off to one side she saw Johnny, looking almost too tired for words, but his back was straight yet. “Lone One,” he said, his voice calm and clear, “greeting and defiance, as always. You come as usual in the shape you think we’ll recognize least. But this one of our hauntings we know too well, and intend to see the back of. Your creatures are defeated. Two choices are before you now; to leave of your own will, or be driven out by force. Choose now!”