Hallow Point (39 page)

I was on him before he could even catch his balance, parrying the pike aside with the flat of my hand, stabbing at him with the L&G like it was a dagger. Everything I’d thrown at Raighallan a minute ago, I used to pound Grangullie now, made just that little bit worse by the physical blows. The redcap was already looking pretty well pummeled from our dust-up in the basement. His efforts to push me back, land a punch, or bring his pike to bear, were pretty feeble and growing weaker.

And a damn good thing. I could be in a
lotta
trouble, here. Now that the box was vulnerable, I hadda keep ’em both reeling, put ’em down before either of them got their hands on…

From behind, I heard the click of a latch opening.

It wasn’t an impressive sound, nothing unique or important or scary, but I swear the whole world went quiet. Grangullie’s rapid breathing, not to mention my own; the distant echoes of traffic from outside; light rain on the skylight overhead; the soft hum of the minimal nighttime lighting. All of it paused as Raighallan, battered as a used cake pan, reached into the box and hefted its contents for all to see.

You know, it didn’t actually look all that impressive. Was a tad shorter’n I’d expected—the box hadn’t needed to be quite as long as it was—and not real ornate. Functional, undecorated wooden haft that had frankly seen better days; and a simple leaf-bladed tip of iron, with a couple feathers and an unevenly shaped stone or two, dangling from the base of the blade by tangled twine.

That’s how it looked. How it
felt
…

Everything in my head glowed, lit by something that wasn’t any kinda light you’ll find leaking from a prism. Memories cast shadows; thoughts changed color. It was a spotlight, a note, a dream of places and people long forgotten or never known.

It was beautiful. And terrible. It was life and death, and it valued neither over the other.

Gáe Assail. Ahreadbhar. Among the most awful creations of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

The Spear of Lugh.

Raighallan lifted the spear, and the spear, like an overeager hound, leapt to the call of his hatred.

I don’t think he even meant to use it, not yet. He didn’t know how, didn’t know what he was doing; it hadn’t finished telling him. If he had, I wouldn’t be here to jaw about it. But from his emotions alone, the anger and pain and humiliation, the spear took purpose.

And it took steps.

The whole room
rippled
, swept beneath a wave of pure mystic force. One glass case shattered; another merely cracked, but from those lines it began to
bleed
. The elephant’s tusk repaired itself, which wasn’t
too
big a deal, but the thing also turned its head to a new angle, which kinda was. Stone dust drifted from the ceiling. Behind me, in the various hallways, power flowed through exhibit after exhibit. It left most untouched, but some it shattered, some it shook. A few bones turned into rocks, a few rocks to fur or ice or just other rocks. Several bits of ancient metal tools melted, shrinking away like butter in the summer sun.

As for me? The blast lifted me clear off the ground, but I didn’t know it at the time, because even the fundamentals of “me” were in question.

I am a worm, crawling, wriggling, digging, ignorant of everything but the soil ahead. But then how do I know “I”? I am a human, infant, squalling, suckling, all of life ahead and none behind. But then why do I remember?

I am a beast, I am a bird. A fish, a flower, a corpse, a kid.

No! I am none of these! I am—

I hit hard, crashing to the floor way down one of the smaller halls. I skidded to a halt, angry and aching—but I was still myself.

Because whatever else the spear’s magic tried to make me, above all else, I was—I am—
aes sidhe
. Older than many, older than most of you could ever fully understand. Tuatha Dé Danann, when that was a title to shake the earth and set armies to rout.

I carry the weight of millennia in my memories, and unless I wish otherwise, they are immovable, immutable, as the foundations of the earth.

Fuck Raighallan
and
Lugh is basically what I’m sayin’.

I braced my hand on the wobbly glass front of an exhibit, using the leverage to stand. From behind the transparent barrier, I locked stares with of one of the Tsavo man-eaters, and even though I know they’re stuffed animals with glass eyes, I swear it glared at me for being so grabby and careless with its pen.

“Sorry,” I muttered. Oddly, it didn’t really look all that mollified.

I trooped through broken glass, keeping to a low crouch, to retrieve my wand. I’d apparently finally dropped it somewhere about halfway through my abbreviated flight.

Then I ducked back behind an exhibit of antelope, turtling my head just out of sight when Raighallan appeared at the end of the hall, silhouetted against the larger main chamber, spear in one fist, wand in the other.

He was laughing, maniacally, a high, harsh barking sound that made me think of a consumptive clown.

A twist of his arm, a flick of his wrist, and he hurled the damned thing. It was casual, almost gentle, but the spear launched forward like a
real
big bullet. More display cases shattered in its path, filling the air with a glittering, crystalline shower. The spear sank well over half its length into the back wall, then just as swiftly leapt back out, reversing its flight to slap snuggly into Raiggy’s waiting mitt.

“Shall that be your end, Oberon?” he called out to me. “Cored through by Gáe Assail? Not bad, as deaths go. All I—
we
—need do is see you for the spear to follow you, though you run for all your days!

“Or perhaps you prefer fire?” The tip of the weapon crackled, a lot louder’n my bracket’d done. “Shall I feed you to the storm?”

Why do they always get more flowery and purple once they’re exposed as the bad guy?

I was tryin’ to decide if it was safe to answer him—to try to keep him booshwashing while I figured out what the hell to do—or if just my voice’d be enough for Gáe Assail to pinpoint me on the next throw, when Raiggy made it real obvious he didn’t care to wait for my reply. The lightning flash at the tip of the spear began to spread in every direction, a few inches at a time, longer and farther with each flicker. Faster’n faster, until individual forks of electricity turned into a spider-web of energy, growing every second. Some of the broken glass around Raighallan’s feet started to fuse, and I could feel the first waves of heat even where I was crouched.

The lightning flickered again, painting an intricate net in the air a good couple yards across—and then it caught fire.

The web of ozone-stinking, crackling electricity
caught on fire
.

Smoke poured from the edges and from the very tip of the spear, and I figured it was time to go. No way I could handle this head-to-head now, not on my own. I hated the notion of giving Raighallan longer’n he’d already had to fiddle with the spear, to understand and to master its powers, but I didn’t see that I had any option. Only possible way to beat him now’d be to take him by surprise, and since he knew exactly where I was, what I wanted, and what I was capable of, surprise didn’t really look to be part of tonight’s agenda.

I tensed up, ready to make a desperate leap from cover, to try to vanish into the other hallways and take the run-out before he got wise to what I was doing. Gáe Assail cracked and thundered even louder, as though it knew what I was thinkin’ and didn’t much care for the idea. Raighallan took a step nearer, spitting taunts or questions—or, hell, singing psalms, for all I could hear over his deafening toy.

And then I got sharply reminded that if “surprise” was on the agenda, it wasn’t really a surprise, was it?

Raighallan shrieked, arching backward sharper’n your average longbow. His wand clattered to the floor and bounced off to the side.

And more importantly, so did Ahreadbhar.

The thunder and the flame vanished the instant it left his grip, snuffed out like a cheap matchstick. It spun partway across the room, not just dropped but hurled by the bastard’s sudden flailing, eventually rolling to a stop by the farthest free-standing display case.

Seems to me now that I shoulda checked to see what was
in
that exhibit, just to see if there was any sorta symbolism—or irony—but it never occurred to me at the time. I don’t even remember deciding to stand up from cover, frankly. Just sorta found myself creeping back toward my opponent and the main hall.

Still bent backward, stumbling, Raighallan clawed over his shoulder and around his waist, trying to reach something behind him. Finally, gurgling, he twisted to one side and fell to his knees, giving me my first clear slant on what’d just happened.

An old knife—and I mean
real
old, coulda-come-from-its-own-exhibit old—was sunk deep into Raiggy’s back, nice’n centered. The hilt was wound in fresh cloth, but enough protruded beyond the makeshift wrapping for me to guess its age, and even though I couldn’t see so much as a hair’s width of the blade, I didn’t even
hafta
guess at its composition. I could feel the pure iron from here.

All of which wasn’t near as bemusing as who it was who’d been
wielding
the knife.

“Ramona?”

Even in the middle of everything, her smile remained breathtaking.

“You didn’t really think I believed this was all over, did you?”

The old grey matter was already past that on to other questions. Big one being, had she wrapped the handle in cloth just for a better grip—or to keep from touching the iron herself?

Even weirder than her being here, though? Way behind her, near invisible in the gloom and the shadow of the fighting elephants, was someone else. Someone I couldn’t make out, ’cept for his general shape…

And the dull glint of his sunglasses.

Which, of course, opened up a whole new floodgate of questions in my noodle. But this wasn’t the time to pick at ’em.

Ramona’n me looked aside almost simultaneously. Even floppin’ like an amorous salmon, blood pouring from his mouth, Raighallan followed our gaze. From across the hall, leaning hard on a display case to keep himself upright, Grangullie stared, too.

All of us locked on the same sight, still right where it’d ended up after Raighallan flung it.

Well, almost all. I got no notion of
what
Sealgaire mighta been doing.

It was almost a weird game, for a minute. I’d watch the spear, then one of the others, who was watching the spear, then one of the others or me… Our eyes danced like we were attending a table tennis match played by ambidextrous octopuses.

We waited for something, though I dunno what. If this’d been half a century ago and a lot farther west, I’d have expected a tumbleweed.

“You’re just gonna have to fork it over if you get it, y’know,” Grangullie gloated, albeit weakly.

“Not really,” I told him, offering a sweet smile. “You told me this whole task was a sham, that it’d never really had anything to do with my debt, remember? If you wanna go fetch Eudeagh so she can call in her marker
again
, you go right on ahead and be my guest.”

The redcap howled. And maybe that was the signal we’d all somehow been waiting for, ’cause everyone broke at once.

I swept out with the L&G, not at Grangullie or Raighallan, but at Ramona. Felt a little rotten about it, but it made the most sense. A quick jerk on luck’s strings, and she tripped over the crawling Fae’s legs even as she tried to step over him, her ankles getting tangled up in his. She toppled forward with a sharp gasp, slowing the both of ’em down for…

Oof. Ouch.

Well, slowing herself down for a moment, and Raighallan more or less forever, seein’ as how she landed on the knife hilt still jutting from between his shoulders. Bone cracked, the blade scraped on the floor beneath him, a fine red mist sprayed from his mouth’n nose, and then he shuddered and went still.

My whole gut went cold, not like ice so much as dull, heavy rock. No matter what he’d done, or planned to do, I couldn’t celebrate the death of another
aes sidhe
. So many centuries of knowledge, sensation, sheer
life
, stolen from the world, just like that. And there’s so few of us left, compared to what we were…

Regret didn’t stop me moving, though.

Grangullie’d been farthest from the fallen spear, and he wasn’t at his swiftest, not after the pounding I’d given him. So even after my belated start from dealing with the two Rs first, he was a good couple paces from the damn thing when I tackled him, once more stabbin’ with my wand.

Yeah, I don’t got the same issues with redcaps dyin’ as I do certain others.

Gotta give it to him, though, he was a tough little fucker, even compared to most of his people. I’d pumped enough pain and misfortune into him over the course of the evening to kill a troll. But Grangullie was still kickin’, still fighting—as a solid sock to my temple and a small chunk bitten outta my arm made all too plain. Woulda been a lot more’n a small chunk if I hadn’t pulled away so quick. As it was, the sleeve of my coat now perfectly matched the gaping rents in the back.

Funny the details that occur to you while you’re shaken by a good smack to the brainbox.

I heard running from behind me. Ramona was back up.

I spun away from Grangullie, who wasn’t in any shape to try’n stop me, and dove for the spear.

But I’d left it too late. Ramona was just that extra step closer’n I was, and I could see right off that that’d make all the difference…

Sealgaire appeared behind her, pretty much outta nowhere. Ramona jerked hard to a stop with a sharp yelp as a big frickin’ meathook snagged her by the collar.

My own mitts closed around a long haft of ancient wood…

Fire. The conflagration that ignited in my head, searing the edges of memory, blackening every thought to cross through, was brighter than the ambient lighting by a hundred-fold. A thousand years of civilization and restraint burned away to ash; pride and hatred and wrath flared high, pillars of flame reaching to the farthest vaults of mind and soul.