Darkthunder's Way (24 page)

David, for his part, had seen that the movements of the rabbit’s nose and mouth did not match either the sounds he thought he heard or the meanings that appeared in his head. He was gaping foolishly.

Tsistu snorted again, this time in what could only be exasperation. “Of
course
I came to guide you! Your chants were echoing in Galunlati so loud I had no choice, if I would ever sleep again.”

Calvin eyed him narrowly. “But I was dreaming of a bear.”

“Me too,” David confessed.

“So was I,” Alec and Fionchadd acknowledged as one.

“Ah yes, a bear,” said Tsistu, letting an ear droop ever so slightly. “Truly it
was
he you summoned, for it was he who woke me complaining of your noise, and sent me on ahead to see what you wanted. He is slow, you see; Yanu Tsunega is; and I much faster. I am to fetch you to him.”

“You know our errand then?” Fionchadd asked.

“Of course I know: you would have me guide you to Galunlati.”

“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” Alec muttered.

The rabbit jerked its head toward him. “I heard that! I hear all. Mine are the finest ears in all of Galunlati, or the Lying World either. I can hear the clouds move or a shadow fall; I can hear the snap of the fires of your curious sun and the laughter of comets in the empty spaces.”

“Can you hear our thoughts, I wonder,” Fionchadd mused.

“I could if I chose,” said Tsistu. “Though yours might be difficult, because your skull is so thick and your wits so dim. A shame in one with ears so nicely pointed.”

Fionchadd glared at him.

Tsistu hopped toward the door. “Enough of chatter. Shall we be traveling?”

Calvin eyed David intently. Fionchadd saw that stare and appended one of his own. “I don’t know, Lord Rabbit,” the Faery said at last. “We have all dreamed of a bear, yet there is no bear, only a common hare. I have an ill feeling about this. I am not at all certain I trust you.”

“You are a hunter,” the rabbit replied calmly, though his eyes—blue now—had narrowed. “I smell the blood of many of my kin upon you, yet I came—and it is not a particularly pleasant journey. Would I have done so had I not been compelled?”

Fionchadd lifted an eyebrow. “I do not know. Would you?”

“Would you be happier if I swore that what I tell you is true?”

“And what would you swear on?” asked Fionchadd, and David knew his alert and devious mind was at work.

“On whatever pleases you.”

“Would you swear on your life? Would you swear that what you say is fact; that you might drop dead should you be lying?”

“Gladly I will swear it.”

“Finny, I—” Calvin began.

The Faery silenced him with a glare. “Oaths are a powerful thing among my people, red-one. Be sure I will listen clearly.”

“Finny—”

“Silence! I will hear this one’s oath.” He gazed at the rabbit expectantly.

“Very well,” Tsistu replied, sparing a wary glance at Calvin, who in turn eyed both him and the Faery with ill-concealed suspicion.

“The oath,” Fionchadd prompted.

“Ah, yes. Well, since you insist.” And with that the rabbit sat back on his haunches and drew himself up to his full height—presently three feet. “I, Tsistu, Lord of Rabbitkind in Galunlati and The World Beneath, and the Seven Levels of the Lying World, do swear that all I have said is true; that I have come in answer to a summons wrought by those here present and with the knowledge of Yanu Tsunega, the white bear who is their proper totem but too slow to meet them before the road to Galunlati passes. I likewise swear that should anything I say or have said prove false my life is forfeit, and may I fall down dead on the spot and be prey to worms and serpents.”

Silence filled the asi.

“Was
that
sufficient?” asked Tsistu with more than a touch of sarcasm.

Fionchadd inclined his head. “No more may I demand. I will follow you.”

David started toward the door, then hesitated and glanced down at his steam-slick nakedness. “Uh, what about our clothes?”

“Yeah,” Alec said. “And our gear. Can we take our gear?”

“Take whatever you are willing to carry, though what
you
have is too much by far. Food and shelter will not concern you, though you might take what medicine things seem good to you. As for dress…my own skin does not shame me, and neither should yours, yet I understand you Pale-men are strange about such matters. But whatever you do, do it quickly!”

David breathed a sigh of relief and joined his friends in frantic dressing. A moment later he was ready, clad in jeans, Enotah County ’Possums T-shirt, and his worn hiking boots, with a denim jacket just in case. The medicine pouch he put in one of the pockets, then fished Morwyn’s ring out of another and put it on. Finally he hoisted his khaki backpack onto his shoulders and grasped his rune- staff, even as Alec took up its twin. Their eyes met. “Ready to travel, Fool of a Scotsman?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Alec replied, slapping an arm around David’s waist. “Come on, oh Mad One, let’s boogie.”

Calvin had also finished dressing: jeans, plain white T-shirt, hiking boots that were even more formidable than David’s, his beaded sweatband—and a hunting knife David had not noticed before that now hung at his side in a beaded leather sheath.

For his part, Fionchadd wore loose gray trousers that were probably wool and a sleeveless, gray-and-green checked tunic cinched at his narrow waist by a belt of square gold links. He carried his bow, and on his back was a quiver full of pure white arrows. The dagger Morwyn had given him to direct
Waverider
was clipped inside the waistband of his trousers. His shoes were of pierced and gathered leather. The gold-and-jeweled torque encircled his neck.

Tsistu surveyed them critically, uttered a sort of half hiss of disgust, and hopped toward the door. It swung open at his approach, and David looked out into fog.

It was the densest he had ever seen, denser by far than the heavy steam in the asi—so dense that he could hardly breathe. He had not gone ten steps into its welcomed coolness before he knew he was not on the farm. Though he could not see his feet, he could feel that instead of the hard, dry earth of Uncle Dale’s backyard, he now trod upon the sponginess of uncut grass. And the wind was strange, for it carried the rustle of leaves and the distant twitter of birds, not the rattle of roof tin and chicken squawks of his great-uncle’s homestead.

He could see nothing beyond the swirling mist, except, when he glanced skyward, a vague yellowing that might be the sun; and at knee-level before him, a flash of white that was Tsistu’s tail. Not daring to speak, he followed; felt the ground start to rise, and increased his pace as Tsistu increased his own, covering the unseen ground in great leaps and bounds.

“Hurry, hurry, Pale-men,” Tsistu called back, though his pace never slackened. “Hurry, hurry, Slow-ones.”

And David hurried as fast as he could—which was barely enough, because Tsistu’s tail was vanishing, slipping so far ahead in the fog that he could only now and then glimpse it. Were it not for the muffled sound of the rabbit’s tread, the constant taunts, he would surely have become lost.

“Slow-ones, Slow-ones, Slow-ones. Hurry, hurry, hurry. The sun soon melts the fog, and we will be stranded here in the Borderlands.”

And David blundered on for what felt like hours, dimly aware of his friends panting along behind him. The world had narrowed to a flash of white tail before him, and to the pain that had quickly made its presence known in his side.

Other aches eventually joined it: in legs that were not used to constant running uphill, in lungs that were already tortured.

And still Tsistu led them onward.

“Faster, faster, faster. We will be lost, and all because of Slow-ones!”

David redoubled his efforts; ran as fast as he ever had, saving only that one terrible time he had blundered onto a Straight Track and been pursued by a then-far-more-threatening Fionchadd. And as if in answer the Faery’s voice arrowed up from behind: “He sets a fearful pace indeed, my mortal friend; one that even I find hard pressed to maintain in the heavy substance of this World’s body. I begin to appreciate the effort you made when first you eluded me.”

“Yeah,” David panted, “ain’t it grand?”

“Faster, Pale-men; faster, Pale-men; faster. We are almost to the border.”

David reached inside himself and found one last ounce of strength. He urged his body onward, trusting to his feet to find the path.

Tsistu’s tail grew clearer. “Soon, now; soon, now; soon…”

Faster, for one more moment…

Abruptly David found himself enfolded by a cold that clamped around his heart and squeezed.

—and was gone. Before him Tsistu sat calmly, licking his front paws. Around him his friends sank down as one, even Fionchadd. David threw himself on the ground, and it was a moment before he could even open his eyes.

When he did, he saw that the fog still surrounded them—but there were shapes in it now: the pale outlines of bare trees that twined delicate limbs and empty branches among the drifting swirls. Light showed beyond them, unsourced but distinctly yellow. The only sound was the heavy pant of their breathing.

Tsistu hopped up to him and nudged him with a paw. “A pleasant morning’s run, was it not? I do ten times as much and twice as fast each evening. Sometimes I race sounds for the joy of it.”

David was too tired to even think.

“Rise now,” said Tsistu after a moment, “for we are yet in the Borderlands. A fair way further we must travel.”

David sighed and levered himself up with his staff. Tsistu hopped away to the right, and David saw a path there, a clearer place in the fog. He followed the rabbit—now gray-striped and the size of Darrell’s worn-out sheltie, Scooter—onto it.

They had not traveled long—still at a steady jog—before the fog finally began to dissipate and the landscape to clarify. It was not much different from what David was accustomed to—except, he somehow knew, these tall, thick trees had never known the touch of man’s metal, nor would. They had leaves now, though the small ones of early spring, but very soon those leaves became fuller and took on the darker shades of summer. A short while later they halted beside a river where water flashed among dark rocks jagged as tigers’ teeth while steep banks loomed around it. Tsistu hopped calmly in and looked up at them from a point where the froth was just beginning.

“This is your path,” the rabbit said. “You must follow me.

Calvin eyed the water skeptically, and Alec, if possible, even more so. “Just what I needed: cold feet to go with a blistered heinie.”

David rolled his eyes in agreement. “Tell me about it! Fire and ice for certain.”

Tsistu’s right ear drooped quizzically. “Is something
wrong
?”

“We can’t cross that!” David groaned.

Tsistu stared at him in obvious disgust. “You of all people should know not to trust your eyes. This is not water, it is the road to Galunlati.”

David exchanged troubled glances with his friends. Fionchadd started forward nonchalantly, but David steeled himself as the Faery came abreast, so that they entered the river at the same time.

—and found themselves on a broad strip of soft grass that ran straight as an arrow in either direction.

“This has the feel of a Track,” Fionchadd said, “yet it is unlike any I have encountered.”

“Tell me about it,” David replied, then motioned for his friends ashore to follow. “Come on, guys; it’s an illusion.”

Alec looked at Calvin, and Calvin at Alec, and together they joined David and Fionchadd.

Tsistu wrinkled his pink nose disdainfully and hopped onward.

They jogged on for a while, along the flat grassy trail. Forest flanked them on either side, but mist hung thick among the branches, and David could not make out what kind of trees they were, save that they were hardwoods.

Finally, just as David was beginning to think he could truly go no further, they stopped on the bank of a second river. A few yards to their left a tree-tall waterfall thundered into a pool of swirling black water before exploding over rocks taller than any of the boys and breaking into fast-moving channels.

Tsistu halted at its edge and hopped aside for them to enter.

“We can’t go into that,” Alec cried. “It’d carry us off in a second.”

“Again, you rely on untrustworthy eyesight,” Tsistu told them. “But it is to your souls you must harken, not my words.”

“Doubtful, those,” Fionchadd muttered.

“I heard that,” Tsistu said. “Have I led you wrong so far?”

“Have we come to Galunlati?” Fionchadd retorted.

“We are very near. It lies beyond the falling water.”

David looked at Alec and grimaced. “No choice, as best I can figure.”

Calvin caught him by the arm and held him back. “I’ll go first this time.”

David stepped aside and let him. Calvin extended a foot tentatively, then squared his shoulders and put his full weight forward—and immediately slipped in over his head.