Warstalker's Track Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Warstalker’s Track

  This one is for Deena

  Acknowledgments

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  Prelude: The Prisoner

  Prologue: Holed Up

  PART ONE

  Chapter I: Ongoing Chaos

  Interlude I: Travelers’ Tales

  Chapter II: Muster

  Chapter III: Weapons Practice

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  Chapter IV: First Blood

  Chapter V: Prisoners of War

  Chapter VI: Dropping In

  Chapter VII: Aftermath

  Chapter VIII: Divide and Conquer

  PART TWO

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  Chapter IX: Swimming Upstream

  Chapter X: Second Gate

  Interlude II: Catching Up

  Chapter XI: Something Fishy

  Chapter XII: Tossing the Dice

  Interlude III: Candlelight Afternoon

  Chapter XIII: Absent Friends, Absent Foes

  Chapter XIV: Relics

  Interlude IV: Dish

  Chapter XV: Power in the Land

  Chapter XVI: Talking to Gryphons

  Interlude V: Time and Tide

  II

  III

  PART THREE

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  Chapter XVII: Return to Sender

  Interlude VI: Moves

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter XVIII: Cutting Edge

  Interlude VII: Road Warriors

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter XIX: Life’s Blood

  Interlude VIII: Within Walls and Without

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter XX: The Darkest Hour

  Interlude IX: Edge of Battle

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter XXI: Earthshaking Events

  Interlude X: Claims

  II

  III

  Chapter XXII: Going Home

  Epilogue: Spoiling the View

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  Warstalker’s Track

  By Tom Deitz

  Copyright 2016 by Estate of Thomas Deitz

  Cover Copyright 2016 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Hunter Martin

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1999.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Tom Deitz and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Windmaster’s Bane

  Fireshaper’s Doom

  Darkthunder’s Way

  Sunshaker’s War

  Ghostcountry’s Wrath

  Stoneskin’s Revenge

  Dreamseeker’s Road

  Landslayer’s Law

  www.untreedreads.com

  Warstalker’s Track

  Tom Deitz

  This one is for Deena

  and

  in memory of Monnie and George

  Acknowledgments

  Jennifer Brehl

  Diana Gill

  Amy Goldschlager

  Brenda Hull

  Linda Jean Jeffery

  Tom Jeffery

  Deena McKinney

  Howard Morhaim

  And, once again,

  a special bow of appreciation to

  Buck Marchinton

  for general expertise on guns, warfare, and critters

  and for lending me John Devlin

  Scott Gresham’s Journal

  (Sunday, June 22)

  Testing…testing…one…two…three. Oops! Wrong medium….

  Hmmm: What do I say? I’ve finally got around to puzzling out this fancy laptop the Mystic Mountain folks gave me last week, so I guess I ought to put something official in it, like a journal, which is what I’ve called this. Only something tells me the stuff I really ought to include isn’t the boring day-to-day log of me trying to put one over on my employers about this staff-geologist-thing they’ve hired me to do and which I’ve suddenly found out I ought not to do, and to lay out all this magic stuff instead: this stuff that’s had me freaked-to-avoidance since that business at Scarboro Faire a couple of years ago, when I first found out there was such a thing as Faerie.

  Thing is, I wasn’t the first. Myra’s brother’s friend David Sullivan was first. He accidentally got the Second Sight back when he was in high school and found out that the Sidhe, who are basically the Irish Faeries, lived in an invisible world that overlapped his corner of north Georgia but which only he could see. Short form (long form later), he knew they were there, they knew he knew, and some of ’em liked it and some of ’em didn’t—which didn’t stop him and his buds bouncing back and forth between here and there off and on for the next umpteen years. Up until now, I guess.

  (God, I’m rambling! Maybe I’ll just think of this as an outline and fill in the details some other time—not that I’m likely to keep this, anyway.)

  Anyway…David’s crowd and my old Athens crowd eventually got together and started holding these yearly picnics near a Straight Track (which is a kind of road between the Worlds), down in Athens, on one of the days the Faeries are supposed to ride in procession. Nothing’s ever happened before, but then this year something did happen. I was supposed to be with ’em, only I’d just that day been offered this job with Mystic Mountain Properties as staff geologist and had to come up here to Enotah County, thinking I had this neat new job I needed really badly, doing surveying for a resort a bunch of money men from Atlanta wanted to build near some of David’s old turf.

  But anyway, this year a kid from Faerie, whose name I don’t remember, came riding up and told ’em that they were summoned to an audience with Lugh, who’s High King in Tir-Nan-Og, which is the local Faerie realm. Short form (again): Lugh’s apparently in a bad political situation because iron from our World’s been burning through over there a lot, and this resort I’m working on is kind of like the last straw, so he summoned every human who knew anything about the existence of his folks to a big council to pick their brains, except he also gave them an ultimatum: stop the resort or he’d flood Sullivan Cove, which is where the resort’s going to be.

  Somewhere in there, too, there was an attack on the mortal-types, and David’s crowd had to retreat back here—right on top of my campsite, actually—so they figured they’d see what they could do. Bottom line was that a bunch of ’em decided to seek aid from some really powerful dudes who live over near (I believe) Wales, and have gone there. The rest of us are supposed to try to slow things down here, which I’m doing by dragging my heels and trying a bit of very clandestine industrial espionage, like sugar in gas tanks and stuff like that. And some more folks are going to see what th
ey can do to mess up things via the Net, while my old friend LaWanda and David’s friend Calvin (who’s a for-real Cherokee) are supposed to be trying to delay things here by making it rain, only I’ll believe that when I see it.

  Shoot, I wouldn’t believe it at all if I hadn’t seen some other things to kind of make me believe. So here I sit, in this nice paid-for motel room in Enotah County, wondering what I’m gonna do, because I thought I was looking out for myself, only I’ve wound up being on the side of the bad guys. And…

  Shit. I don’t feel like playing the self-analysis thing right now. It’d just make me more depressed. Sun’s out, so maybe I better go up to Sullivan Cove and pretend to look for a sapphire mine somebody told me was around there.

  Gotta figure out how to hide this file, too. Shit. I hate computers.

  Prelude: The Prisoner

  (a dubious place—high summer)

  It was the first time in the uncounted ages since his birth, unreckonably far away in time and space, that Lugh Samildinach had ever been unconscious.

  Against his will, anyway, for even the Sidhe must sleep; their bodies were not so unlike those of mortal kind to preclude that necessity—besides which, without sleep there could be no dreaming, which was in itself an art to one as skilled in the shaping of Power as he. And of course there had been revels uncounted: drunkenness, drugs of every kind, besottedness on sensuality that might as well have been unconsciousness. But never had he passed from full awareness to the realm inside his skull abruptly, without consent.

  He had even been dead. Immortal he was, and yet could die; for what was death to one of his kind save the severing of the bond ’twixt soul and flesh? Indeed, he had died so many times—all before his last rebirth, in Ethlinn’s Tower—that he was expert at it. It was amazing what meat, bone, and blood could withstand. Swords had pierced him, poison ravaged him, starvation—once, on a dare—reduced him to a shriveled shell. But he was strong—the strongest of his kind in this fourth of Faerie—and Power, which was to spirit as energy was to matter, was his in profligate amounts to command. As long as he—himself: his soul—had Power…well, the body that housed it was of no real consequence. Time would (as mortals said) heal all wounds. And time he had aplenty.

  He did not think much of it, this unconsciousness. It was darkness without dreams, dull heavy pain with only the ghostly hope of relief. But it was not forever.

  He blinked—and saw naught save the same colorless geometries that spun behind closed lids in the darkest caves of his realm. Blinked again, and saw neither more nor less. But he noticed three things at once.

  The most imminent were the bonds that held him spread-eagled and naked in midair: shackled at wrist, neck, and ankles. Iron it was that gripped him: iron, which none in Faerie could work, for the fires that had wakened in that metal at the Worlds’ first making never cooled. Iron that contained his limbs but did not touch them, shielded by the thinnest sheets of impervious wyvern skin, so that he felt the pain of proximity where those fetters clasped his flesh but did not—quite—consume it.

  Iron was the second thing he noted as well; for not only did it restrain him but chains of it stretched away into unguessable dark, to bind his bonds to a greater mass of that metal that entombed him like the shell of an egg in which he was embryo. Or the core of a ball of flame: a sun, perhaps—irony there, for mortal men had styled him Sun God and given him a feast-day to prove it: Lughnasadh, celebrated in that World and Faerie alike.

  But the iron sun had him now, and not one of the Powers at his command could win through that fierce ferrous fire and escape. Not even thought.

  The third thing he noticed was how very badly he missed the Land. He had lost the Land, though his rational aspect, that every second fought past panic and pain to greater ascendancy, knew that as long as he lived and Tir-Nan-Og endured that bond could not be severed.

  Which set him to thinking more alertly, as impressions gave way to knowledge and supposition bowed to the force of fact.

  Fact. He had not become thus of his own free will. He had drunk wine—poisoned, probably—and dozed in his bath, not yet dreaming—and awareness had simply vanished into darkness, like a candle blown out. And before he could rally his Power and recover, there simply was no air. Too quickly. His substance had needed that support before spirit could muster itself to flee, and so he had thought one urgent plea for help, and one command—and passed out.

  Fact. Whatever had occurred had required intervention by another conscious will. Which could not have been accidental. Which in turn awoke that word he had long, in his most secret parts, dreaded.

  Rebellion.

  Someone—many someones, likely, else his guard were more lax than he had cause to assume—had won through a palace crammed with defenses mundane and arcane and stolen a reigning sovereign from the heart of his own realm. He had to admire their bravery—their audacity, anyway—and already had an idea what group had worked his downfall.

  The Sons of Ailill.

  But why was he a prisoner?

  One reply alone made sense: the same reason there had been talk of rebellion before and increased disaffection among the smaller Fay as recently as yesterday.

  The mortal situation.

  He should have listened, he supposed, to the tidings Nuada brought him, he who was closest observer of what chanced in the Lands of Men. But also to what everyone of late had seemed to whisper: that the Lands of Men were grown too close, that Holes were burning through the World Walls everywhere, and ever nearer to the heart of Tir-Nan-Og. That by ones and twos, in families and clans, the folk of his realm were fleeing, claiming shelter with Rhiannon of Ys, or Arawn of Annwyn, or Finvarra of Erenn—or simply seeking some new World upon the Tracks.

  Lugh wasn’t certain he blamed them. But he strongly disapproved of how they had chosen to resolve the situation, when he had just set the final stone in his own plan to counter the increasing encroachment of the Lands of Men.

  Which brought him to the boy.

  The mortal boy. David Sullivan—who, though not by design, had already brought him too much pain.

  And then whatever—wherever—it was that held him shifted, as the weight of bodies came upon it. For the briefest instant, fresh air flowed in, and Lugh thought he might be on the verge of release. He inhaled—

  —and breathed agony beyond belief, while more pain spread like flowing lava across his body. It was dust: some fine powder riding in with that air to settle upon his sweat-soaked skin and form a thin film there.

  No ordinary dust, however—

  They had coated him with powdered iron!

  Perhaps, he reflected, as his dark prison echoed with the grinding of immortal teeth, unconsciousness was no bad thing after all.

  Prologue: Holed Up

  (near Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

  Firelight woke dancers of black and red upon the cave’s rough granite walls. Dancers already posed there, however, their shapes crude yet graceful, their forms human, yet not quite so, the paint with which they were limned clear though dulled with years uncounted. Blood bound that pigment (not all of it based on hemoglobin), and the fat of beasts as well, whose genes sometimes showed a fifth and sixth amino acid. Handprints showed there, too, outlined in ocher blown through bone: five-fingered hands, but with some of the digits oddly attenuated or smaller than those of the smallest child.

  And the beasts—most had four legs, but many also sported wings, and some showed equal parts bird and fish, or mammal and reptile, and (not all that rarely) aspects of all four. There was writing, too, perhaps, though neither of the men watching that firelight dance among those painted revelers could have read that curling script. It had been there when the older man’s folk had entered that land. The younger’s kin had dwelt in caves then, and wrought art of their own: painted horses, fat women of clay, and scrimshaw work on ivory and horn.

  The fire burned in a cavern a hundred yards from the fractured cliff face that masked its mouth. The floor was san
d washed in by centuries. The air was chill because the rocks were, but the fire warmed it, and gave light and security. Fish baked in clay shells beneath the coals, but no smoke fouled the air, for Power whisked it away before it could torment either set of lungs.

  Both men were magicians, after the notions of their kind. One was mortal, one was not.

  The immortal—taller, fair-haired, and with the smooth, unlined face of a twenty-year-old and the eyes of the eons-aged—leaned back against the pillow he had contrived from what remained of a fine white velvet cloak, laced fingers cased in leather and silver metal across the flat plane of his chest, and regarded the other with the wry, wary stare of the warrior he was.

  “You were wise not to sleep in the palace,” that one observed, careful to avoid names here where names had Power and those who presently commanded Power were even now reshaping the order of the World nearest without.

  The other—the mortal; once also a warrior, now called poet—looked rougher. He wore new jeans, a black T-shirt, and a jacket of faded denim. And a leather glove on his left hand. His hair was short, auburn-brown—and unkempt. He looked older than the other, with experience if not actual wear, but was tenscore centuries younger. His teeth caught the light when he grinned, and the warrior recalled that they were both, by some obscure linkage, born as tearers of meat.

  “I was…warned,” the poet confided. “I’d prefer you didn’t ask how, and surely you already know why.”

  The warrior smiled in turn. “The keeping of secrets is an art well practiced among the Sidhe—in exchange, I fear, for crafting such as this, though something about the proportions of these hands we see around us makes me wonder.”

  “I wonder that you never found it,” the poet snorted, reaching out to prod the coals with a stick of wood already vitreous with petrification.

  “I never looked,” the warrior admitted. “One must hold some mysteries in reserve when one is immortal.”

  “Good thing for both of us,” the poet acknowledged.

  “The food was good, though—in the palace, I mean.”

  “No better than those fish I smell cooking there.”