Jack, the giant-killer (23 page)

“You came for the swangirl, didn’t you?” she asked.

“In part,” Eilian replied. “But we came to make an end of the Unseelie Court here as well.”

“Is she your girl?” Moddy Gill asked.

“Who? Lorana?” Eilian laughed. “I doubt she knows I exist. I came here to help our dear Jack, not looking for swangirls to wed.”

Kate gave him a considering look. There was something in his voice when he spoke of Jacky that made her think that he had more in mind than simply helping her.

“I know something,” Moddy Gill said. Her pig’s head was nodding thoughtfully, the tiny eyes fixing their gaze on Eilian. “I know where they keep the Laird of Kinrowan’s daughter. They hang her out by day, but not at night. Then they put her in a cell—a secret cell—and I know where it is.”

“When our Jack comes, will you help us rescue her?”

Moddy Gill sighed. The sound was a long wheezing snuffle. “We’ll never get free,” she said. “And the night’s coming soon when they’ll give her to the Samhaine dead and then they’ll stew
us
for their feast.”

“Well, at least someone’s speaking sense here,”

Arkan said.

Kate frowned at him. “Why are you being like this?” she demanded. “I thought you were going to help.”

“And I wanted to help, make no mistake about it, Kate. Your courage made me feel small, but moon and stars! I remember now why I had such a lack of it myself. We were helpless against the horde that ambushed us, and they were but a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the Court Gyre has gathered in this place.”

“We’ve no magics here,” Finn explained. “Not hob magics, nor Laird’s magics—nothing saintly. Not even a gruagagh’s spells will take hold in a place so fouled by the Host.”

“Then we’ll just have to depend on something other than magic,” Kate said.

Eilian nodded grimly. “Until we’re dead, there’s hope.”

Arkan looked as though he meant to continue the argument, but then he shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

“I heard a poet say once that we make our own fortunes and if our future goes bleak, we’ve ourselves to blame as much as anything else. ‘Be true to your beliefs,’ he said, ‘and you’ll win through.’ They’re just words, I thought then, and I think so now, but sometimes words have power—when they fall from the proper lips. I’ll mourn our deaths no more—not until the blade falls on my neck.”

“Oh, they won’t use axes,” Moddy Gill said. “They like to throw folks in their stews while they’re still kicking—for the flavour, you know.”

“And have you tasted such a stew?” Eilian asked. Moddy Gill shook her head. “I’ve no taste for another’s pain, Lairdling. Not when knowing so much of my own.”

Kate patted the girl’s shoulder, then stood up to investigate the wooden grating that served for the door to their prison. The beams were as thick as a large man’s thighs, notched together, then bound in place by heavy ropes that appeared to be woven from leather thonging rather than twine. The beam that lay across the door, held by a stone slot at either end, had taken five bogans to set in place. They didn’t have close to that kind of brute strength in their own small company.

“Why did they just use rope?” she asked Eilian as he joined her.

“Faerie can’t abide iron.”

“And even steel’s got a high iron count—big enough to make no difference,” Kate said with a considering nod. She turned to Eilian. “But what about those bridges the trolls live under—and the buildings in the cities? There’s iron in all of them.”

“True enough. Faerie that live in or near your cities and towns come to acquire a resistance to it. Some can simply abide a proximity to it, but can’t handle it themselves. Others, like our forester here, seem to have developed a total immunity—how else could he use your vehicle with such ease?”

Her car. Judith was dead and gone now. “And what about the Host?” she asked.

“They’re a wilder faerie, not always used to urban ways. Against many, a penknife would be enough defense.”

There was a long moment’s silence, then Kate grinned and reached into her pocket. “Like this?” she asked.

She opened her hand to show her Swiss penknife. Opened, it had a blade length of two inches. She could have kicked herself for not thinking of it earlier when they were struggling with their bonds. But it didn’t matter. They had it now.

“Oh, Kate!” Eilian replied. His eyes shone with delight. “Exactly like that.”

“But these ropes are so thick…”

“They were woven with faerie magic. Even your little blade there will have no trouble cutting through them.”

“All
right
.”

She pried the blade out of its handle and began to saw away at the nearest rope. The others gathered round to watch the little knife cut through the first thick cord as though it were no more than a piece of string. Moddy Gill regarded Kate with awe.

“Moon and stars!” Arkan said. “When I find that poet, I’ll gift him with enough ale to keep him drunk for a fortnight.”

Finn nodded eagerly. “This hope’s a potent magic all on its own,” he said.

Arkan grinned. “And the next time you hear me whispering against it, Kate, just give me a good strong clout across the back of my head.”

“With pleasure,” Kate said as she continued to saw away at the ropes.

She didn’t bother to mention that once they got out of their cell their troubles would be just beginning. There was no point in dashing their sudden

enthusiasm. But they were going to have to come-up with something more than a little Swiss penknife before they got out of this place. And then there was Jacky. Had the bogans caught her as well? Or was that strange being that had snatched her on the highway one of the Wild Hunt in another guise? She had the sinking feeling that the nightmare was just starting to get under way.

CHAPTER TWENTY

« ^ »

“What’s up now, Tom Coof?” Jacky asked in a whisper.

“Whisht—just for once,” the fiddler hissed back at her.

They were hidden in undergrowth, high up in the forest and rough terrain that was, Jacky supposed, near the Giants’ Keep. The land was certainly wild enough. The tree covering was mostly pine and cedar, with some hardwoods. Granite outcrops jutted from the ground like the elbows of buried stone giants. Roots twisted around the outcrops; deadfalls surrounded them. It had taken them the better part of the afternoon to get here from the road—Jacky in her hob jacket and Kerevan using his own spells. The forest was alive with the creatures of the Host, searching for her. Jacky was just about to repeat her question when she saw what had driven them into hiding once more. As tall as some of the trees around them, a giant came, moving with deceptive quiet for all his huge bulk. He sniffed the air, a nose the size of Jacky’s torso quivering. Jacky stopped breathing. Finally the giant moved on. Gullywudes and bogans moved in his wake. Not until they were five minutes gone did Kerevan speak.

“Do you see that small gap? There—just the other side of the deadfall?” he whispered.

“In the rocks there?”

Kerevan nodded, but neither of them could see each other, so the motion was wasted. “That’s one of their bolt holes.” he said. “Take it and follow it into the heart of the mountain and it will bring you straight to where Gyre the Elder holds his Court.”

Jacky bit at her lower lip, which was getting all too much wear of late. “You’re leaving me here?”

“This is the Giants’ Keep. You
did
want to come here, remember?”

“Yes, but…” She sighed. Somehow she’d hoped that, once they’d reached the place, Kerevan would change his mind and offer to help her.

“A word of warning,” the fiddler added. “Seelie magics are of no use inside—so your hob coat won’t hide you, your shoes won’t speed you, your cap won’t show you any new secrets, and even the wally-stanes you took from me will do you no good. Not when you’re inside.”

“Is that why you won’t go in?”

“It’s suicide to go in there,” he replied. “A fool I might be, but I’m not mad.”

Jacky looked in his direction. If she squinted and looked very hard she could just make out the vague outline of his shape.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do, or where to begin. Can’t you give me some advice—or does that require another bargain?”

“This advice is free: Go home and forget this place.”

“I can’t.”

“Then do what you must do, Jacky Rowan, and pray you didn’t use up all your luck these past few days.”

“And nothing will work—I mean, none of the

magics?”

“Not one.” Kerevan sighed. “There was a reason that no Seelie’s gone to do what you mean to try, and now you know it. It’s not so much a lack of courage—

though the Seelies left are not so brave as once their folk were, and who can blame them? Once in that Keep, they would be powerless. You’ve seen the Big Men. You’ve seen their Court—the bogans and all. How could hobs and brownies and the like stand up against them, without their spells to help them? Even Bhruic would have no more than his natural strength in there.”

“Okay, okay. You’ve made your point. I go by myself and it’s kamikaze time.”

Kerevan knew what she meant, that it was a suicide mission, but he said: “Do you know the actual meaning of that word? ‘Divine Wind.’ Perhaps you should call on the gods to help you.”

“I don’t believe in God. At least I don’t think I do,”

she added, hedging.

“The desert god your people hung from a tree couldn’t help you here anyway,” Kerevan replied.

“This is the land of the Manitou. But Mabon walks that Great Mystery’s woods sometimes and the Moon is sacred everywhere.”

“Is Mabon your god?”

“Mabon is the young horned lord.”

Jacky gave him a quizzical look, but he didn’t elaborate. “I guess that when I go down that hole,” she said, “it’s just going to be me and no one else.”

“I fear you’re right.”

“Then I suppose it’s time I got my ass in gear and got to it.”

An invisible hand touched her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Go lucky as your name can take you,”

Kerevan said.

Jacky swallowed. “Thanks for getting me here,” she said. “I know you were just fulfilling your bargain with Bhruic, but thanks all the same.”

“I mean you no ill, Jacky Rowan, and I never have.”

There was nothing more to say, so she moved ahead, past the deadfall to the gap in the rocks. There was a passage of some sort there. A familiar reek rose out of it. This has got to be the way, she thought, because nothing else could smell this bad. Breathing through her mouth, she squeezed between the rocks and forced her way in. The passage wasn’t high enough to stand in, so she moved forward at a crouch, one hand on the wall to her left, the other brushing the ground ahead of her.

Kerevan sighed when she was gone. He touched his fiddle, felt the stag’s head scroll through the cloth material of its bag. He was free to go now. He had done all that he’d bargained to do. Yet he stayed hidden in the underbrush, staring at the bolt-hole. After a long while, he sighed again, then began moving slowly up along the rocky mountainside, heading for the great stone gates that were the main entrance to the Keep.

There’s fools and there’s fools, he told himself as he went. And here I am, all these years old, and I never knew I was still
this
sort of a fool. The smell intensified, the deeper Jacky went down the narrow tunnel. If this was a bolthole, she thought, it could only be one for little creatures, because a bogan wouldn’t fit in and a giant would have trouble just sticking his arm into it. She’d never been one of those people that got nervous in an enclosed space, but this tunnel, with the weight of a mountain on top of it, had her shivering. Combined with the darkness and the stench, and with what she knew lay waiting for her at the tunnel’s end, there were half a dozen times when she thought she would take Kerevan’s advice after all. She was ready to just GoJackyGo right out of here. But then she remembered the pitiful figure of Lorana, hanging from the cliff. Not to mention the fact that Kate and the rest were probably trapped down here somewhere. Not to mention that the Host was out to get her personally now. Not to mention… oh, it made her head ache just to think of it all. Her watch didn’t have a luminous dial so she couldn’t even tell what time it was, or how long she’d been down this hole. It seemed like forever. It had been getting dark when she first crawled in—that time when shadows grow long but it’s still not quite twilight yet. It could be midnight now, for all she knew. But the stench kept getting stronger, so she knew she was getting somewhere. And she’d begun to hear a noise—

a booming sort of sound that rose and fell like speech, but didn’t seem to be a voice. Unless it was a giant’s voice…

An interminable length of time later she came to the end of the tunnel. The reek here was almost unbearable. Light spilled down the tunnel from the gap at its end—a sickly sort of light that flickered as though it was thrown by torches or candles. And the booming sound
was
a voice. A huge voice that had to belong to one of the giants. He was cursing the Court for their inability to find one Jack—“ONE LITTLE

SHITHEAD OF A JACK.” Underlying his roaring was a constant chitter and rattle of other voices—bogans swearing, hags hissing, gullywudes, spriggans and other creatures all adding to the babble. Feeling as though her heart was in her throat, Jacky crept forward.

The end of the tunnel was blocked with boulders. When she dared her first peep over them, she realized that this wasn’t so much a bolthole as an airhole, for she was looking down into an immense chamber. The floor was invisible, covered with a moving carpet of bodies. The Unseelie Court swarmed in that stone hall. Jacky ducked quickly back. Lovely. Perfect. Not only were there more of the creatures than she’d ever imagined waiting for her down there, but unless she managed to grow wings, she had no way to get down. She leaned despondently against the wall of the tunnel. Who was she kidding? What could she do down there anyway, except end up in someone’s stewpot?

The constant babble of noise, with the roar of more than one giant thundering overtop it as they argued with each other, was almost more than she could bear. It wouldn’t let her think. The stench wouldn’t let her breathe. Her helplessness made her want to scream with frustration. Or cry. It all seemed so useless. Oh, she’d been filled with sharp criticism for the Seelie faerie who wouldn’t dare storm the Giants’