Landslayer's Law Read online

  “Nine times nine,” the girl replied, taking Alvin’s hand. “Now come away, child; you can hide with me.”

  Jamie clamped his hands over his eyes, leaned into the rough bark of a nearby pine, and began: “One—two—three—” He’d reached twenty before he recalled that it wasn’t like Alvin to agree to hide with anyone, much less a girl. And he’d reached seventy-four before he realized he had never once mentioned his name.

  Prologue II: and Back Again

  (Gargyn’s Hold—Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)

  “Da’s comin’!” The Littl’un crowed from the cottage’s open door, eyes round as the bottom of one of those all-too-perfect bottles the Quick Folks discarded so carelessly—and as green as some of them, too. He was fidgeting like a hop-toad on a griddle: bouncing from foot to bare foot almost too quick to see. Dirty feet, Borbin noted. Torn shirt. Mud on the hem of his kilt, and the Lord Lugh knew what kind of leaves stuck in that impossible thatch of crimson hair, which more than hinted that the lad had been where he oughtn’t—like the feathery woods visible across the melon patch behind him.

  Borbin sighed wearily—tolerantly, though she hid that lapse at once—and wiped her pudgy hands on the snowy apron that encircled her ample girth: ample for a bodach, anyway. “An’ where, a worried mother might inquire, did you do this seein’, my child?”

  The Littl’un braced himself on the doorjamb, which stabilized his upper half somewhat, though his lower part kept right on twitching. “Out by the—” His face fell. His eyes grew even rounder.

  “By the Hole, perhaps?” Borbin snapped, suddenly all steel.

  The boy turned pale—and stilled as far down as the knees, likely from raw terror. “I didn’t mean to! Me an’ Urgo was playin’, an’ all at once we were just there, an—”

  “Urgo’s gonna be the death o’ you,” Borbin grumbled—”an’ it’s hard to kill one o’ us, as well you know!” A pause for breath, and to take an ominous step closer, then: “Don’t let me tell you again! Them Holes is dangerous. They’re eatin’ through everywhere ’round here now! Why, one could gnaw through right here ’tween us, ’fore we knew it! Lugh knows one opened up under poor old Maddy MacOrpins t’other day, an’ she ain’t been seen since! I oughta—”

  She paused abruptly. “What did you say?”

  The Littl’un looked puzzled. “When?”

  “When you came in!”

  “That Da’s home—”

  “Gargyn!” Borbin shrieked, and forgot her youngest entirely until she was ten strides out the door—and only recalled him then because she tripped over the mechanical manticore Gargyn had carved him before his voyage. And by the time she’d picked herself up, Gargyn himself was running through the melon patch toward her. She winced, even as she laughed, certain she’d heard at least two ’loupes split beneath that reckless tread. Markon, the eldest old’un, wasn’t far behind: any excuse to get out of work, though she supposed she’d forgive him this time. Wasn’t every day your sire returned from a voyage to Ys. Wasn’t every day a voyager to Ys made it back safe and sound, not anymore; not with the Holes nibbling away on the Seas Between as much as on land, so she’d heard.

  “Sweet wife!” Gargyn yelled.

  “Darlin’ husband!” Borbin hollered back. And a moment later they were entwined like newlyweds among the pumpkin vines.

  Eventually Gargyn released her, but she knew the news wasn’t good long before then, by the way his embrace had seemed impatient and tired, dull eyes had capped what she knew from centuries of wedlock was not a sincere smile, never mind the preoccupation hiding in his kiss.

  “Any news?” she prompted softly, even as she drew him toward the piled stone wall between the patch and the cottage proper. Gargyn’s shoulders slumped as he collapsed against her. His feet were dirty too, just like the Littl’un’s, and raw and blistered, as though he’d run most of the way from the haven at the coast. He smelled of sweat and weariness. But all that was for later, for now he needed peace—as much as she needed to know.

  Finally Gargyn spoke, voice thin as his shanks, his shoulders, and his sides. “Bad news,” he agreed. “Herself’s withdrawn her offer. Says Ys is bustin’ at the seams now; says she can’t take no more refugees, an’ may have t’ send some of the ones is there now back. Says Lugh’s let the trouble go on too long, and it’s for him to fix—which I’ve been sayin’ all along.”

  “But the gate? I thought—”

  Gargyn shook his shaggy head. “Gate’s got to be too dangerous—she says. Says even she don’t dare poke through the World Walls no more—not since Lugh cheated her out of the Openin’ Stone.”

  Borbin snorted. “Wouldn’t o’ worked no better”—an old argument. “First off, it weren’t his to give or hold back; it belonged to one of the Quick Folks—though how that ’un got such a thing, I have no idea. An’ second, a Hole in the Walls is a Hole in the Walls, far as I can see.”

  “’Cept she said she thought the Walls might heal ’round a permanent one,” Gargyn countered. “If it was made with Power, I mean.”

  “Fuck they would!” Markon grumbled, stomping up to join them, sweat streaking the dust on his bare chest and legs. He peered at his parents sullenly from beneath the wide brim of an intricate purple velvet hat one of the Seelie Lords had lost last time they rode by. He sat down without asking—breathing, Borbin thought, a little too hard for the amount of hoeing he’d actually accomplished. Concern made her ignore the Quick Folks curse she’d had no luck eradicating.

  “What’re the World Walls?” the Littl’un blurted, out of nowhere. “An’ who’s she?”

  “The Queen of Ys,” Markon hissed. “Rhiannon—’less Rigantana’s took over like folks was sayin’ she might, on account of how she’s better at dealin’ with the Quick Folks—”

  “She hasn’t—yet—that I know of,” Gargyn broke in, fondling the Littl’un’s head. “As for the World Walls…they’re whatever separates this World from the Lands of Men, or the Quick Folks Land, or whatever you want t’ call it. Don’t you remember nothin’, lad?”

  “I forgot,” the Littl’un mumbled, turning red.

  “They’ve got Holes all through ’em now,” Markon inserted. “Like them places where Quick Folks iron has burned through. But there’s even worse Holes where a couple o’ Quick Folks boys got hold o’ some kinda stone from another World an’ started usin’ it to jump from World to World, only those Holes had Power mixed up in ’em, an—”

  “An’ the Queen of Ys tried to steal that stone to make a gate to that other World she’d found beyond Ys, where nobody lived, that she was gonna open up to us bodachs and other small folk what feels like the Seelie Lords give us short shrift.”

  “And now she won’t,” Borbin finished for him. “Which is a damned fine how-de-do.”

  “So wha’cha gonna do?” Markon inquired, scratching his scrawny bottom through his threadbare kilt.

  “Gonna go see Lugh himself,” Gargyn sighed.

  “Again,” Borbin sighed, more loudly, in turn.

  “Again!” Markon spat, and rose, kicking at a convenient cantaloupe. “Blood an’ iron, but I hate Quick Folks!”

  “Yeah,” Gargyn agreed with a final sigh. “I do too.”

  Chapter I: Changing Shifts

  (Athens, Georgia—Thursday, June 19—sunset)

  “Marlboro-Lights-in-a-box,” snapped the girl with the Maori tattoos binding her thin wrists like tight black handcuffs wrought of some odd lace. Scott Gresham spared her face the briefest glance—she looked of age to buy smokes—and reached up reflexively to snare the requisite white-and-gold pack from the eight-foot rack suspended above the newsstand’s checkout counter. Free Camel matches joined the box on the flat plexiglass sheet beside the register, beneath which an array of Zippo lighters gleamed like metal ice. To his left, Byron was already ringing in the purchase. Meanwhile, Scott’s gaze had meandered from the girl’s nondescript visage to her more intriguing waist, where was displayed the first bare midriff—wit
h attendant pierced belly button—of the evening.

  Transaction completed, Scott caught Byron’s gaze and winked. Byron grinned back enigmatically from beneath his trademark X-Files cap. They were an unlikely pair at best. Byron was a citizen of the world: erudite, witty, and charming; muscularly compact, short-haired—and black (one of Scott’s two friends of that persuasion). Himself: born-and-bred in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, bright but not brilliant, sarcastic rather than clever, likeable in lieu of charismatic; and lankily tall, curly-topped, and Nordically Caucasian. They got along famously. Or perhaps it was merely the camaraderie of shared combat in the behind-the-scenes trenches of Barnett’s Newsstand. God knew it was damned hard work, much of that resisting the ongoing urge to tell the terminally brain-fried to fuck off. Or to tell the fatally lottery-addicted to find their own fortunes. Not that he was any example, he hastened to add; what with a still-incomplete geology dissertation hanging over him like the geode of Damocles.

  Speaking of which, it was almost 9:30, which was when the Money Talks numbers were drawn, which was also when (because of reduced demand on the lottery machine) he got off.

  Got off job numero uno, rather. He still had numero dos to attend: his quasi-assistantship over at UGA’s cartography lab.

  “Quick pick on Lotto,” a new arrival coughed. Scott shifted toward the machine, but Byron was there before him, dusky fingers dancing across the keypad. Scott grimaced and leaned back against the shelf behind him, head barely clearing the assortment of rolling tobaccos kept there. He ignored the short businessman (by his dress) even now receiving the requested random numbers, for his gaze had been snared by a pair of figures pounding up the sidewalk beyond the glass windows up front. And before his weary brain could do more than catalog the set, they had yanked the door open and burst inside, tumbling to a breathless halt beyond the counter.

  Alec McLean and Aikin “Mighty Hunter” Daniels; at twenty-twoish, a fair bit younger than Scott’s own pushing-thirty, and more friends-of-his-friends than actual friends themselves—had not the three of them been party to certain extraordinary secrets. Secrets so extraordinary, in fact, that they’d make Mr. X-phile here abandon his little cap in the despair of the utterly outclassed if he even suspected.

  Otherwise—basically they were typical UGA seniors. Aik was shortish, with close-cropped dark hair, silver-framed specs, and a tendency (as now) to dress in black T-shirts and cammo fatigues—which made sense, given he was a forestry jock. Alec—whom Scott knew better because the lad had been in a geology lab he’d TAd—was almost depressingly average: average major (computer science), average height, average weight, mouse-brown hair above blandly handsome features. True, he sported the obligatory loop earring, subtly spiked hair, and carefully trendy clothes, but the overall effect was too contrived, too—there was no other word for it—neat.

  Well, except for the moment, when he was flushed, panting, and had his shirttail half undone.

  He was also lugging a beige plastic pet cage of a size to contain an average (of course, it being Alec’s) feline. Which, to judge by the caterwauling issuing from behind the chrome steel bars, the cage, at least at present, did.

  Alec, having now regained his wind (and Scott’s assessment having expended less than a second), managed to compose himself sufficiently to blurt out a desperate, “Whew, Scotto, thank God you’re here; I need a major favor now!”

  “Oh?” Scott drawled back, with the deliberate languor of someone who’d had to contain himself with too many people for too long and now found an opportunity to push someone else’s buttons for a change.

  Alec’s eyes were wild, almost panicked. A glance at Aikin showed much the same, with a fair bit of resigned irritation thrown in. “We need to borrow the back room! I mean, it’s an emergency, okay?”

  “Sure,” Scott agreed amiably, having concluded (in part from certain suspicions about the cage) that perhaps this wasn’t the time to prod the proletariat after all. Byron was looking bemused—and relieved, the Lotto Machine having, for the ten minutes of the draw break, shut down.

  “Oh wow, thanks, man!” Alec gasped, already scooting past a twelve-foot rack of cigars toward the door to the Staff-Only storeroom-cum-office.

  “Back in a sec,” Scott told his coworker. “Sorry.” Byron shrugged and proceeded to sell a stubble-haired kid in an REM T-shirt a pouch of American Spirit.

  Scott joined the two invaders in a cramped and cluttered cubby walled on two sides by shelves bearing an assortment of spare-stock magazines and newspapers, as well as several boxes of returned publications sporting such evocative titles as Busty, Manshots, and Shaved Orientals.

  “So what’s the deal?” he demanded, even as Alec plopped the cage on the relatively uncluttered surface of the owner’s desk and fumbled with the latch. Then: “Hey, you’re not gonna let that loose in here, are you?”

  “No choice,” Alec countered, as wired as Scott had ever seen him. Evidently the occupant of the cage was clawing him through the barred front, thereby complicating its own release. A release it apparently craved in no uncertain terms, to judge by the screeches and very unfeline whistles issuing from within, which sounded like a bobcat trying to mate with a bagpipe and a flute.

  “Thank God!” Alec sighed, as the door finally opened.

  “You may thank me instead,” Scott shot back, then, in spite of the fact he’d seen it numerous times before, gaped at what had just stepped onto Midge Lee’s green felt desk pad.

  Not a cat—entirely—at the moment. Or more precisely, it seemed to have begun as your basic orange tabby—the head had clearly been short-muzzled and green-eyed when it emerged. But already the nose was growing longer, the fur assuming a ruddy tinge, the eyes shifting to yellow-gold. And the forelegs—well, they’d started out standard old Felis domesticus issue: round, soft, and furry; only now they were bare and scaled from the elbow joint down (and feathered for another joint above it), ending in what closely resembled the claws of a good-sized raptor. An eagle perhaps, or something more exotic, like an African secretary bird.

  As for the tail (which had now joined the rest of the beast in the cold electric light of not-quite-day), it was exactly like that of a small red fox—as indeed (save the front limbs), was everything else.

  Scott exhaled a breath he didn’t recall holding, and as if on cue, so did his accomplices. “Well,” he began preemptorially, “which of you lads would like to explain why you felt compelled to bring the fuckin’ enfield in here, right at shape-shiftin’ time?”

  “Not ‘the fucking enfield,’” Alec corrected. “Aife, since that’s her name. And we brought her here because—well, basically, we had no choice.”

  “Would you like to explain?” Scott repeated, leaning back with his arms folded expectantly.

  “Shouldn’t have to,” Aikin grumbled from the corner.

  “You don’t have to explain the critter,” Scott conceded wearily. “I’ve seen it a time or two, even in that shape. What I wanta know is how two bright lads like you happen to be luggin’ a patently magical animal around downtown Athens, when you know the damned thing changes from Aife-the-housecat back to its enfield secret identity at dusk and dawn. I still don’t understand that,” he added. “Why it has to change, I mean.”

  “Don’t ask me!” Alec spat. “That was Mr. Lugh’s bright idea!”

  “It has to do with keepin’ brain patterns imprinted, or something,” Aikin supplied. “And with keepin’ McLean on his toes by remindin’ him this is a magical beast he’s got custody of.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Alec groaned. “Doesn’t help that she’s also my girlfriend.”

  “Was your girlfriend,” Aikin amended. “Lover, anyway.”

  Alec bared his teeth and shot Aikin a warning look which took even Scott (who knew how wimpy Alec usually was) aback.

  “Sorry,” Aikin grunted. “As to what we’re doin’ here—uh, actually, it was an accident.”

  “A stupid accident, okay?” Alec admitted.
“See, Aik’s been bugging me forever to let him do some before-and-after X-rays of our furry friend here”—he patted the now complacent enfield encouragingly—”so anyway, a bud of his who’s in vet school finally found a slot when he could zap her with the nukes off the record, and—”

  “You told somebody else?” Scott yipped, aghast.

  Alec shook his head. “Favor for favor. Guy showed Aik how to work the gizmo; Aik promised him two packs of venison.”

  “It’s addictive,” Aikin explained helpfully.

  “Right. So anyway, the plan was to sneak in at sunset in a forestry van we’d got hold of, and do the deed—except that somebody showed up who wasn’t supposed to, which means we had to boogie before we even got the first round done.”

  “And then we had to explain ourselves,” Aikin added, rolling his eyes. “Which cost a bunch of time, which meant we had to get Miss Aife here home before she shifted.”

  “So guess what?” Alec took up again—to Scott’s amusement; it was like watching a comedy relay team, which concept would have chagrined the hell out of either nominally sober boy. “Guess whose van died in the middle of downtown Athens?”

  Scott lifted an eyebrow.

  Aikin nodded sourly. “Piece of shit. More to the point, piece of shit with no upholstery in back, which means Our Lady of the Iron Phobia looked set to do her thing in the worst place you can imagine.”

  “But being the quick thinking lads we are,” Alec went on, “we abandoned our wheels and beat feet to the nearest safe haven. Actually, we tried Myra’s place first, but she wasn’t home.”

  “Right.”

  “And we thank you for it,” Alec concluded, then turned to inspecting the enfield, which was quietly combing its elegant vulpine tail with one not-so-elegant claw. It trilled happily.

  Scott eyed the door with alarm. “Please don’t let it do that again. I’d hate to have Mr. X-Files barge in.”

  Alec turned pale. “Sorry. Like I said, it was the only place we could think of to let her out to change.”