Fireshaper's Doom (2 page)

And then the air
did
break, cracked apart in a file of jagged angles that snapped closed again quick as a flash of lightning. But not before a series of shapes had leapt through, to congregate in a milling, hairy horde around the legs of Arawn’s stallion.

They were hounds, or at least they looked like hounds: great rangy beasts with shoulders near as high as the horses’ bellies, and narrow heads almost as long as a tall man’s forearm. Their hair was a remarkable white like sun-bleached bone, and where that hair grew longest—upon their backs and in fringes on their tails and the hind sides of their legs—it looked less like fur than feathers. Four parts alone held any color: their claws were iron black; a deathly gray their tongues; their eyes glowed a startling green. And their ears, up-pointing like those of a wolf, showed red as a warrior’s blood. They swirled among the legs of Arawn’s horse like the pale, foaming waves of a cold and greedy ocean. The sound of their breaths was like thunder.

Arawn’s face froze; a line of moisture condensed upon his brow.

One of the hounds—the largest one, the one with the greenest eyes and the reddest ears—looked up at him.

Arawn took a ragged breath and pointed toward the eagle that still floated against the sky. Somewhere a cloud stretched thin enough for a single ray of dying sunlight to paint the plain beneath with brazen glory.

“I would have the life of that bird,” Arawn said, as though he named his own destruction.

The pack bayed then: one cry. And there are no words in the tongues of the Sidhe, or the Tylwyth-Teg, or of men, either, to give image to that howling. But two centuries later it still echoed sometimes in Airgetlam’s dreams, so that the Warlord of Tir-Nan-Og awoke into darkness with a sweat upon his body, his single hand reaching for his sword.

And then they ran, those dogs that the horn commanded. They ran upon the earth, yet no dust rose at their passing, and the sand where they had stood displayed no padded prints. And then they ran into the sky, describing a tight-coiled spiral that twisted upward with more speed and purpose than the fastest hawk might summon.

The eagle circled once in abstract interest, for never had it been challenged in its own realm by any less than Arawn’s folk themselves, when they put on other forms to frolic there. But these were not the Tylwyth-Teg, whatever shape enwrapped them, and the eagle felt uneasy. It straightened its glide, flapped its mighty wings, then folded them to dive. But by the time it had dropped twice its own length, hot breath fanned its feathers, and in one length more fangs sank into its body. Not even a drop of its blood escaped those dogs to spatter the ground before Arawn’s staring company.

“It is a hunting horn,” Arawn told them grimly, “of a sort. But the hounds it masters are no beasts born of Annwyn. Even the Powersmiths do not know whence they come, or else they do not tell us. The hounds always catch what they pursue, though it flee through all the Worlds. But one must take care when he sets them on a quarry, for once they are loosed, they must have a life. And”—his voice darkened—“they can devour both the body
and
the soul.”

Lugh’s face was as grim as the Lord of Annwyn’s, but he took the horn from Arawn’s fingers. “A gift like this shows trust beyond all measure, for with it one could master whatever land might please him.”

“He would have to be careful, though,” observed Nuada. “For it could also make him many enemies—and many false friends besides. And,” he continued, with the first shudder any there had ever seen upon him, “has one of you considered what—if the Powersmiths cast off such things of Power—they hoard in secret for themselves?”

The Dark King did not answer, and the Bright King was also silent as he tucked the Horn within his surcoat, though his eyes held great misgiving.

Arawn faced his squire then, and his face was hand as stone. “None of this has happened, young Windmaster.
None of this at all
.”
But Ailill had thought already of a lady who might listen.

PART I

TINDER

Prelude: A Sending

(Tir-Nan-Og
—
autumn)

On a beach of black sand in the south of Tir-Nan-Og, Nuada Airgetlam sat astride a white horse and gazed eastward across the ocean.

Water spread before him, and all of it was gray—gray, that is, save where it was silver filigree stretched thin across the towering fronts of monstrous waves, or the froth of ragged ivory lace atop them.

Or gold where the Straight Tracks threaded through them.

But it was not the healthy sun gold that told of easy passage; it was the weak, shifting color that told of danger and the perilous way. For the Circles of the Worlds turned out of track this season: the suns rose against each other in the Lands of Men and Faerie; the moons added each their contentious influences. And in the skies of the Mortal World was a hairy star that wrought its own disruption.

And so all the seas of Faerie ran high, and not even the ships of the Tuatha de Danaan could sail upon them. Storms raged in the High Air, so that those same ships could not skim above those seas, nor birds any longer fly there. And the Tracks between the realms were so weak and fickle that no foot or wheel dared pass upon them, as had not been the case in five hundred of the years of men.

“Lord, you may not pass. You would not return,” said the border watch. “The way is sealed, no one goes that way, except to lose himself forever.”

“But what of my ravens?” Nuada asked. “I would set them a-traveling: word must be sent to Annwyn and Erenn of what passed at the Trial of Heroes. Nearly a month that word has waited, and it can wait no longer.”

But wait it did, for almost a change of seasons. It was summer in the Lands of Men before the eastward Road reopened.

Chapter I: Mail

(MacTyrie, Georgia
—
Friday
,
June 21)

David Sullivan—Mad Dave, as he had somehow come to be called during the previous school year—had what his mother would have termed in her Georgia mountain twang “the nervous, pacing fidgets.”

Except that he wasn’t exactly nervous—just impatient, which was generally worse because it was usually somebody else’s fault. And except that he wasn’t, for the moment, pacing—but only because Alec McLean had just asked him, quite forcefully, to stop. For the fourth time in twice as many minutes he flopped down in the window seat snuggled beneath the dormer of Alec’s second-floor bedroom and took another stab at reading the page of
New Teen Titans
he had likewise commenced four times before.

And once again was not successful.

Before he knew it, his gaze had wandered away from the comic to survey the neat, odd-shaped room beyond his cubby. An aluminum-framed backpack dominated his view, bulging lumpily atop the double bed at his left like a blue nylon hippopotamus. And just beyond it, David knew, lay the very heart and center of his impatience: a pair of half-empty suitcases.

“
Well,
McLean,” he growled. “Do you think I’d be out of line if I asked you if you could maybe, possibly, you know, like
hurry
just a little? I’ve been sitting here like a knot on a log ’til I’m about halfway mildewed.”

A tall, slender boy straightened from where he had been thumping around on the floor of the closet in the opposite wall. He aimed an exasperated glare at David, one hand snagging a pair of shiny black ankle boots, the other grasping a pair of wrinkled burgundy ENOTAH COUNTY ’POSSUMS sweatpants. He rolled his eyes with the tolerant resignation of the much-put-upon.

“Give me a break, Sullivan,” he retorted sourly. “This packing for two trips at once is a real bummer. Camping overnight with the M-gang and staying six weeks at Governor’s Honors with the brightest kids in Georgia demand fundamentally different logistical and aesthetic approaches.”

“Ha!” David snorted at his friend’s attempt at high-flown language, which he didn’t have the patience for just then. “Didn’t take
me
all day.”

Alec gave the sweats a tentative sniff and wrinkled his nose distastefully, but nevertheless stuffed them into the backpack. The shoes thunked into one of the suitcases. “Well, considering that
your
entire wardrobe consists of holey T-shirts, scruffy jeans, scuzzy sneakers, and sweaty red bandanas, I’m not surprised.” He turned around and began rummaging in his chest of drawers.

David sighed and glanced down at his current attire, which indeed precisely reflected his friend’s assessment: plain white T-shirt stretched tight across a chest that had thickened considerably in the last year; cutoff Levis beltless around a narrow waist, their side seams ripped almost indecently high; Sears second-best sneakers loose on sockless feet. He raised a black eyebrow into a tossled forelock of thick blond hair—shorter now than he had ever worn it, though still nearly shoulder-long in back. “I resent that, McLean! I’ve got two pairs of cords and—”

“One of which I gave you for Christmas.”

“—and a paisley shirt.”

“Which
Liz
gave you.”

David flung down the comic and stood up, stretching his fingertips to the dormer’s ceiling—at five-foot-seven, it was nice to be able to touch a ceiling somewhere. He began to pace again: four steps along the narrow space between the front wall and the foot of the bed, and four steps back. “Just move it, okay?”

Alec frowned, unloaded a stack of white Fruit-of-the Looms into the closest suitcase, and snapped it closed. “It was your idea to try to fit in a last-minute camping trip before we leave.”

“And yours for us to head straight to Valdosta from camping.”

“Thereby saving me at least an hour of Mad Davy Sullivan and the Mustang of Death.”

“You may
think
so,” David said, flashing his teeth fiendishly. He paused at one end of his route and hefted the backpack experimentally. “Good God, McLean, what’ve you got in here—lead?”

“You should know. You’ve been watching me like a bloody hawk ever since I started.”

David drummed his fingers absently on the shiny metal. “Negatory, my man, you had this thing half full before I ever got here. All you’ve put in since then’s a pair of stinky britches.”

Alec ran a hand unconsciously through the soft, neat spikes of brown hair he had affected lately. “Well, if you’ve got to know, it’s full of extra clothes, among other things. I have a way of needing them when we go camping. It inevitably rains, or somebody spills beer on me, or worse. I figured if I packed stuff that was dirty to start with, maybe my luck’d—”

“Damn!” David groaned loudly and slapped himself on the forehead. “Damn! Damn! Damn! I
knew
there was something I forgot—I didn’t raid Pa’s beer stash. I— What’re you grinning at?”

Alec patted the backpack meaningfully, his face fairly glowing. “Figured you would—forget, that is. So let’s just say that what you so frivolously referred to as lead is—how shall I put it?—a little bit more liquid and a hell of a lot more potable.”

“You didn’t…” David began dubiously, his eyes growing wide as Alec nodded and raised two fingers. “You
did!
Two six-packs? Oh lordy, lordy—at the ripe old age of seventeen Dr. McLean’s only boy finally becomes a rebel!”

He sat down on the foot of the bed and fell backward behind the suitcases, giggling uncontrollably.

“That’s not
quite
the reaction I expected,” Alec responded with forced dignity, but the dour facade dissolved as his gaze met David’s and a new chorus of giggles erupted. “Snagged a bottle of bubbly while I was at it, to toast the quest with,” he added with a smirk.

David levered himself up on his elbows, his face still flushed. His eyes glistened. “What quest?”

“For the Holy Grail of Knowledge, fruitloop.” Alec dipped his head toward the two suitcases. “Or more accurately, the Holy Shrine of Our Lady of MTV and Saint Shopping Mall.”

“That assumes they have MTV in Valdosta, and even if they do, that they’ve also got it at the college where we’re supposed to be staying. We ain’t roomin’ at the Ritz, after all.”

“Well, it
is
in south Georgia, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely uncivilized—”

“It also assumes we can leave campus once we get there.”

“God, Sullivan, you’re starting to sound like me!”

David flung a convenient pillow at Alec, which he dodged neatly. “No need to get insulting.”

Alec turned to face him, hands on his hips. “Look, if you think I’m gonna spend six weeks just sitting in a classroom with a bunch of other geniuses, while the whole material world waits across the highway, you’re crazy.”

“The rebel rears his head again,” David chortled. “Can cigarettes and leather jackets be far behind? Or maybe a Porsche Speedster? Now
that’s
an idea I could go for.”

“If it’d get me out of here, I’d consider it,” Alec shot back. “But just think, Sullivan: seven hours away from Enotah County. Seven hours from my dad screaming at me to read more of the classics, and yours yelling at you to git outta that bed and into the sorghum patch.’”

“Too true, too true.” David laughed, then glanced at his watch and started to his feet in alarm. “Jesus, man, we have
got
to boogie!”