Immortal at the Edge of the World (37 page)

“Hello?” I shouted. My voice sounded weirdly loud, like I was hearing it ricochet back at me through an amplifier. In response to my voice, the man—it looked like a man—moved more quickly and directly toward me, fast enough to suggest that he might be a threat.

“
BRESSSSSSS
!” the man shouted, followed by a series of words in a language I had never heard before.

It wasn’t until I saw the shiny blade in his hand that I realized I was looking at no man. I was looking at a faery.

“I’m not here to hurt you!” I shouted, and my voice echoed some more. The faery seemed shorter than the last one I had seen, but that was an illusion because the truth was I was taller. I could see my own footprints behind me and they looked like the prints of a child. I couldn’t compare them to more recent prints because I was no longer leaving any.

The faery shouted “Bres” again—it was a name, and I knew the name but I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it before—and continued to charge, looking very much like he wanted to kill me. I was not armed, and even if I had been I didn’t think gunning down the first faery I met was a great way to make friends. Instead I put up my hands, which was the closest thing to a universal gesture of
no harm
I could think of, and hoped this allayed his concerns, whatever those might be.

There was a word I was supposed to speak, but I couldn’t remember it, and he was almost on top of me. And then there was a second faery, only this one was right next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and spun me around and shouted. “
BRESSSSS
!”
and I still didn’t know what this meant. But that was okay, since I was about to die. He raised his curved blade and meant to bring it down on my head, and just then the word came out of me all by itself: “
BYRGDDUN
!”
 

I raised my hands in self-defense, and in doing so dropped the astrolabe . . .

. . . and then I was all alone on the hillside again. I fell backward and landed unkindly on the rocks, but my head had not been cleft in two so it was definitely not the worst outcome possible.

“Hello?” I called out, my heart pounding almost out of my chest.

There were no faeries materializing anywhere that I could see. I got to my feet slowly and found the astrolabe. It was intact, fortunately. The settings had been altered on impact, so it no longer pointed to the star that wasn’t there. I was intensely curious as to whether I would still be able to see and touch it if it hadn’t been jostled, because I was pretty sure I had just traveled to Hsu’s faery land and had left only because I’d dropped his trinket. The astrolabe might have stayed behind if the settings hadn’t been altered.

I decided I didn’t want to know all that badly, though. For whatever reason, I was clearly not welcome there.
 

At least they didn’t follow.

“Mirella’s never going to believe me,” I said aloud. It was good to hear my voice sound non-echoey.

I started heading back up the hill to the castle. On the way I spotted one of the fourteen known stars from the astrolabe and decided to calibrate it to my watch again. When I’d done this a few minutes earlier the watch and the astrolabe were only a few minutes off, due more to user error than anything else. Accuracy relies on my being able to hold the astrolabe as straight up and down as possible. For truly accurate measurements, one is supposed to dangle it from a string tied to the top loop, something I didn’t much bother with because I do, after all, own a watch for timekeeping. Also, even if I held it perfectly correct, I was still eyeballing my angle to the star.

It is not a terribly scientifically accurate tool is my point. However, I did expect it to be—for want of a better term—equally inaccurate from reading to reading. But while I’d gotten within a few minutes of my watch’s time earlier, now there was a roughly forty-minute difference.

Either the watch was broken or the astrolabe suddenly didn’t work properly. Or—and this was my least favorite possibility despite being the most likely one—time passed at a different rate in faery land. It was the most likely explanation because it also explained how Hsu could have been as old as he claimed while looking as young as he actually was.

*
 
*
 
*

“I don’t believe it,” Mirella said.

“I didn’t think you would.”

“No, I believe
you
. I can’t believe you aren’t happier about this.”

“Because I solved an old mystery? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You have an object that allows you to actually
exit
this world in the same way your redhead does, and now we have a way to get in and out of there alive, and you look disappointed to have been proven wrong by a dead man.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear the part where they tried to kill me as soon as I showed up there.”

“I could go with you. I’ll fight the faeries—I’m sorry do I have to call them that?”

“That’s what Hsu called them. You can call them something else if you want.”

“No, it’s all right. I can fight the faeries while you go and rescue Clara and Paul.”

“Well, no, you can’t.”

“You don’t think I can handle them?”

“I actually don’t. I’ve seen one fight and you haven’t, so you’ll have to take my word for it. They are big and fast and scary. Besides, as soon as I let go of the astrolabe I dropped out of . . . wherever the hell I was.”

“If I have to call them faeries, you have to call it faery land.”

What I was actually thinking about was what the physicist said to me when I asked him about branes. He would have called the place I went the
bulk
, I think. But that sounded even worse than faery land.

“I only stayed there as long as I had the astrolabe in my hand. I could maybe hold your hand but you can’t fight a faery one-handed.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know that you think you can fight anything one-handed, and I know that the day you’re wrong about that you’ll end up dead. These things aren’t going to congratulate you for giving them a good fight, they’re just going to kill you.”

“Fine,” she said with a harrumph. “But that plan can’t be any worse than the one we’re actually trying.”

“There I agree with you.”

We looked at pieces of that plan together. It was scattered around the room, taped to walls and lying on tabletops. We were in one of the three dining spaces the castle had so there were plenty of tables from which to choose.

The plan hinged upon the efficacy of the hallucinogen we had introduced to the compound’s food and water supply. If we’d worked out the dosage correctly and if enough of the people inside—or at least enough of the ones with guns—got dosed, this would be easy.

We weren’t expecting easy, though, which was why we were going in with ten satyrs and lots of heavy guns. In the event we had to fight our way out we would at least be facing people—we’d only seen humans in the compound, which was good news—whose judgment was impaired by the drug.

“This is a very stupid plan,” Mirella said. One or both of us had said this daily since we began putting it together. Hopefully none of the satyrs had heard us say it, because they were surprisingly gung-ho about the whole thing. Part of that might have been their youth, but most of it seemed to be because they were doing this for me, and I was kind of important to their religious beliefs. Amazingly, nobody seemed to question why an apparent god would need a force with machine guns to stand up for him.

“Do you want to back out?” I asked.

She looked at me with a little half smile on her face. She had been doing a lot of smiling these past few months. There had been no repeat of the kiss and I hadn’t pressed the issue, but every now and then something like affection passed between us that I was eager to explore at my leisure, preferably when not planning a siege. I think at this point if she told me to abandon the plan and run away with her, I would. I think she knew it, too.

“I’m not going to go anywhere,” she said. “You know that.”

“I know. And we should probably get some sleep.”

“Yes. But I need you to promise me something first.”

“What?”

“You’re a foolish man with delusions of heroism.”

“Um, thank you?”

“I need you to promise you won’t try and save me.”

“I don’t think I understand,” I said.

“You understand perfectly. It’s my job to protect you and I’m going to do that. You’ll live through tomorrow. I
hope
to. But you don’t get to risk your life for mine. That’s not all right. Do you understand?”

“I’m sure it will never come to that.”

“Tell me you understand.”

“I understand.” I had about a thousand things to say other than that, but I didn’t think she was going to let me say any of it.

“Good. Now let’s get some sleep.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

There was little in the way of protective ground coverage around the compound, which sat in the middle of a flat open field on an island full of such fields, so we had no way to get a scout ahead while it was still daylight to see how things looked on the inside. This made the last half mile of the trip the most terrifying portion, because by the time we were that close to the front gates we could be seen, and so by then there was no turning around. Yet we wouldn’t be able to see what the inside looked like until we got closer.

The delivery had to be during the day because all deliveries were during the day. Negotiating an evening delivery would have required coming up with an explanation for one that made sense. Since the supplies in the trucks were loaded off a boat and we came on the same boat, that explanation would have had to make an otherwise unnecessary nighttime boat trip logical. And it wouldn’t have been worth it because the compound was extraordinarily well lit, so we’d have gained almost nothing by traveling there at night.
 

Despite that, driving there in the sunlight was a little terrifying. I prefer darkness for this sort of thing.

“Can you see anything?” I asked for about the tenth time. I was sitting in a space behind the driver in the lead truck. We were carrying enough food for a hundred and fifty people for four days, and that took up three box trucks when you added in the room required for ten satyrs. An eighteen-wheeler could probably have done the trick if we skimped a little on the food and the satyrs, but there were no eighteen-wheeler trucks for rent on the Isle of Mull.

The driver was a satyr named Lorgus. He was the eldest among them and the one most likely to be treated as a captain if this were a proper army. He also didn’t get all weak-kneed when around me, which was something I look for in people who think I’m a god. “I still see nothing, Philopaigmos,” he said.
Philopaigmos
was my name to them. Long story.

“I can try with the lens,” Mirella suggested. She was crammed next to me. Neither of us were supposed to be there, for although we were dressed in the same coveralls as everyone else, we’d never been seen before inside, and as an ordinary-sized man and woman among a group of heavy-set six-foot-five bearded men, we were going to stand out. The coveralls would buy us an explanation that probably sufficed once inside, but until then there was no need to be seen.

“You can try,” Lorgus said. “But I am telling you, we are not close enough.”

We were speaking English for Mirella’s benefit. Lorgus and a couple of the others were fluent, but for the most part the satyrs responded to Greek. The one in the passenger seat, for instance, had no idea what we were saying. So he looked a little alarmed when Mirella leaned forward and steadied her arm on his shoulder for long enough to hold the telescopic sight up.

“No, he’s right. I’d say everything looks normal, but we’re not close enough to see any abnormality. The gates are closed, as always.”

She’d smuggled herself inside on two runs previously, never leaving the truck, to get an idea of what our formal incursion would be like. I had to think she didn’t learn much while stuck riding like this. All I’d learned so far was that they needed better roads or the trucks needed better shock absorbers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lorgus said. “We’ve been seen by them by now. If the situation on the ground is not to your liking we can just complete the delivery and leave. So long as nobody takes note of the Kalashnikovs we should be free to exit.”

We arrived at the gate a few minutes later. Lorgus brought the truck to a stop and looked up at the camera pointing down from the top corner of the fence so that whoever was on the other side of the camera could get a good look at him.

The place was surrounded by a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence with the usual daunting tangle of barbed wire above it. Inside the chain link was a second opaque white fence ten feet tall that was made of some sort of synthetic poly-blend that was usually used when people wanted something to look like wood but not rot like wood. The only purpose of the second fence was to keep people from seeing inside, and it worked just fine. It wasn’t as impressive as a cement wall might have been, but the compound still had a temporary quality that was perhaps intentional.

Somebody was supposed to show up and open the gates, which slid aside electronically after a button was depressed. That button was in a circuit box attached to the white fence. The circuit box was not locked, but since it was on the compound side of the fence it didn’t much matter.