Landslayer's Law (27 page)

It
was
a toy boat, or appeared to be. More properly, it was a model. An exact replica of what most resembled a Viking longship with a small central cabin, the whole thing no more than a foot in length. It was made mostly of wood, and every detail was depicted, from the incredible delicate carving on the dragon-head that graced the prow and the spiraling tail at the high-curved stern, through the thread-fine rigging, to the line of tiny shields along either side.

“No oars,” Piper remarked, to David’s astonishment. Even more amazing, Piper’s eyes were dancing.

“That is where
you
come in,” Fionchadd replied. “But not yet.”

“I’m not gonna ask!” Myra muttered. She whipped her black cloak around herself with a theatrical flourish and slumped down on a stump, sipping from the coffee she alone had had sense enough to bring along.

“You have seen this like before,” Fionchadd told David and Liz, as he slipped down to the water’s edge and set the boat gently in the shallows. “You have seen a ring much like these two as well,” he added, raising his hands to display matching bands on each fourth finger: a silver Ourobouros with blue eyes on the left; a golden, red-eyed one on the right. He scratched the gold one affectionately, then extended it toward the boat. Brock hissed in alarm, and Myra too cried out, as the tiny head opened its jaws and vented a spark of flame. The fire promptly ignited the miniature rigging, and an instant later the entire vessel was ablaze. “No!” Myra groaned, reaching forward. “If you didn’t want it—”

David caught her before she could do anything rash. “Watch!” he urged with a smirk. “I did exactly the same thing first time I saw it.”

“If you say so….”

“Oh, Jesus, man!” Piper breathed behind them. “It’s…
stretching
!”

And so it was. As the model burned, so it expanded, growing larger and larger by the second, so that less than a minute later it was the size of an actual vessel—a hundred feet or more end to end, and fifteen at least across the beam. The mast brushed the overhanging treetops. It had also drifted further from shore, so that it now rode high and proud fifty or so feet out.

“Son of a bitch!” Piper mouthed.

“Not what I’d have said,” Myra retorted. “But I know what you mean.”

Brock’s eyes were big as saucers. “How—?”

Fionchadd’s face knotted in a resigned scowl. “I see I am going to spend this entire voyage fielding questions, but the simple answer is that the ship was made mostly of Fire, and in order to make it smaller, that Fire was removed. When I relit it, the flame was restored. It is quite simple, really.”

“Right,” Brock snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

“Think freeze-drying,” David suggested absently, turning his gaze toward Liz. “You’re remembering, aren’t you?” he continued, more quietly. “The way you and I first did it on a ship like this—place like this too, actually.”

Liz responded by blushing.

He kissed her impulsively.

“Uh, I hate to mention this,” Brock broke in, “but…I thought we were going to the coast.”

“We are,” Fionchadd assured him.

“This is a long way from there,” Brock persisted. “And that’s a mighty big boat, and I don’t think there’s a river big enough to hold it up here….”

“Not here,” Fionchadd agreed. “But somewhere
between
here and Faerie. It is for that I require Piper’s aid.”

Piper started. “Me?”

A nod. “You have your pipes, have you not?”

Piper first looked shocked, then stricken, then despondent. He shook his head.

Fionchadd scowled at him. “But how do you propose to learn tunes if you do not have your pipes?”

Piper studied the ground.

“Never mind,” Fionchadd sighed, with a wink at David. And with that he returned to the place from which he’d retrieved the ship and drew out something far less wieldy than a toy boat, and far, far larger. It sprawled across the Faery’s arms like a nerveless octopus. A set of pipes.
New
pipes, to judge by the gloss on the wooden drones and chanter, and the bright plaid fabric those pipes were set into. Uillean pipes, too: for there was also a shiny new bellows.

Piper’s mouth dropped open. “These—” he began, then faltered. “These are fit for a—”

“A king,” Fionchadd finished. “Which is convenient, for it was a king who wrought them.”

“But….”

Fionchadd peered up at the sky. “Not now. We must hasten. I have talked too long and the Worlds draw apart. If I would set us on our path aright we must hasten.”

Alec gazed about anxiously. “Aife….”

Fionchadd puffed his cheeks, then closed his eyes. An instant later, a familiar yellow shape darted toward them through the bracken. Alec picked her up and stroked her. She purred.

“Seems to me,” Liz drawled, “that you and that cat, which you claim to hate, are getting along better and better.”

Alec bared his teeth.

Fionchadd cleared his throat. “Come, oh talkative ones, our vessel awaits.” And with that he strode into the lake.

David followed. So did the rest. The water had almost reached David’s chest (it was cold, too, and he wondered what they were going to do about dry clothes) before he was able to snare the rope ladder hanging down the side halfway back. He eased left to let Liz and Myra ascend before him, with Fionchadd assisting them aboard, then clambered up himself, ahead of Alec and Piper. Alec handed up Aife. Piper handed up his fine new pipes. A moment later they were all on deck.

Fionchadd slapped his hands against his gray-clad thighs—which were already, David noted sourly, dry. “Now, Piper,” the Faery said. “I will whistle a tune, and that is the tune you should play.”

Piper eyed him warily. “I’m not that good.”

“The hell you’re not!” Myra cried. “I’ve heard you reconstruct songs you heard weeks before note for note.”

“I have faith in you,” Fionchadd acknowledged. “Now listen.”

And with that he pursed his lips and whistled a slow, plaintive air. Twice he repeated that melody, and by the time he had begun a third round, the new bellows were pumping, the bag was full, and Piper’s fingers were dancing along the chanter.

And the ship was moving. Slowly, at first, and then more rapidly, it swung around in that narrow, hidden cove and eased into open water. David’s heart sank, for surely this would put them in plain view of anyone watching through the glamour that shrouded Lugh’s palace, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone there to know what they were about. Yet when they finally cleared the cove, Bloody Bald was gone.

So were the rest of the mountains.

A mist had risen around them, appearing so stealthily it was as though it had congealed from the very air. That air was glowing—or the lake was—and when David hurried up to the prow to determine which, it was to see the unmistakable glitter of a Straight Track lying upon sun-gilt water. An upward glance showed blue sky; a downward glance, the light of an unseen sun glittering on oddly transparent ripples. But all around was mist: mist that looped and whorled like certain all-too-familiar briars. And all the while, Piper kept on playing.

* * *

The interval that followed had the quality of a dream. The sky never gained a sun, but was otherwise unchanging. The ship glided smoothly. The fog showed no sign of dissipating, though sometimes the whorls and spirals roiling through it took on a different cast than at others. Piper no longer played—Fionchadd had told him to stop as soon as they came fully onto the Track, and had cautioned him not to amuse himself with trying to repeat that melody, and absolutely not to attempt themes and variations. As best David could tell, it had something to do with the Tracks having a certain resonance, and matching that resonance with the pipes. Magic was also involved, of course—Power, as the Sidhe would say—but whether that magic was born of the Tracks, the pipes, the ship, the tune, or Piper’s artistry, David had no way of knowing. For himself, he was content to relax while they waited for their mundane clothes to dry—Fionchadd had found them loose tunics in the tiny central cabin. Liz had queried that, but the Faery had only smiled and informed her that he had far less Power than some of his tribe, had used it lavishly of late, and would rather the sky assumed the task of leaching water from fabric than his own poor humble self.

They’d also eaten: leftovers from the council, if David wasn’t mistaken. And now, warm, dry, full, and relatively unharried, they followed Fionchadd’s advice and slept, strewn in a comfortable pile in the bow; everyone—probably by design—in partial contact with someone else, as though to affirm their reality in the face of pervasive strangeness.

Fionchadd stood in the prow, watching. Once Brock joined him. Once, as well, did a yawning David, though he could think of nothing useful to say. And then, again, he slept.

Myra was in heaven. David could see that by the way her lips curved as her pencil raced over the pad of what was not quite paper Fionchadd had produced from the cabin-of-many-wonders. She looked incredibly content, too: curled by the gunwale atop a sprawl of thick, green-hued fur. She had long since relinquished her Tracking togs (the cloak and minidress had been a mistake, she’d been first to admit) in favor of a plain loose tunic of blue-grey velvet that had likewise come from the cabin.

David strained to peer over her shoulder—which always bugged her, though by now she ought to be used to it. “Looks just like ’em,” he opined.

It did too. Fionchadd stood in the narrow angle behind the ship’s prow, gazing forward intently, his profile like chiseled marble. Brock stood right beside him in precisely the same pose, long hair whipping behind, but little different otherwise, save for a stubbier nose. Myra had captured them exactly: two fine young men of two Worlds, both displayed in profile, both posed identically, with the intricately carved curve of the prow curling up and around and eventually out of frame. It was not the first sketch she’d assayed since the voyage began, nor would it be the last. Even with no landscape visible beyond the pervasive fog, she hadn’t lacked subject matter.

“With a face like that,” she confided, nodding toward Fionchadd, “I could fill up a thousand pages.”

“Actually,” the Faery replied with a troubled scowl, “I thought I was rather plain.”

Myra snorted derisively and flipped the sheet over. David wondered what her next subject would be—Liz playing catch-the-string with Aife, perhaps (would the enchanted Faery woman admit to such frivolity should she ever wear her proper shape again?); or Piper polishing his brand new pipes; or Alec sunbathing in his skivvies when there was in fact no sun.

Instead, Myra rose, stretched, and sauntered over to stand beside Fionchadd. “One complaint, oh tour guide,” she remarked with a wary chuckle, “not a lot of background ’round here.”

“Soon enough,” Fionchadd assured her, turning back to the Track ahead, then straining forward abruptly, as though he’d finally seen something there besides fog. “In fact, sooner than that,” he amended, “if you do not object to drawing more ships.”

Brock, who’d let himself be distracted from sentry duty by Myra’s arrival, uttered a startled yip and clambered halfway up the carved figurehead—a dangerous perch for certain. “Brilliant!” the boy enthused. “Oh wow!”

“Wow’s right!” Myra agreed. Then: “You! Dave! Fetch my pad!” As soon as he delivered it, her hand was back in motion.

David didn’t blame her.

The fog had thinned before them, though it still loomed heavily alongside and aft, and the Track still glittered across the waves. David wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but it wasn’t a rugged semitropical coast crowned with more of the milky haze, below which, as in a harbor, a half-dozen ships similar to their own rode at anchor. Their sails were furled, but seemed to be white; and white-and-gold pennants snapped from their single central masts.

“Jeeze,” Brock blurted, even more enthusiastically. “They’re…hovering!”

And so they were: their keels fully exposed a bare hands breadth above breakers that seemed not one whit affected by what hung like silent leaves in the spray-filled air overhead.

Fionchadd squinted into the unaccustomed glare. “So are we,” he told the boy, “but you are correct, and I am a fool not to have noted as much myself. I saw what I expected, not what I feared.”

Liz squeezed in to David’s right, likewise squinting at the vista that drew ever nearer. “Something wrong, Finno? You look tense as…as Aife when she’s surrounded by iron.”

Fionchadd’s face was grim. “I feared this,” he repeated through his teeth. “This Track does not emerge into the Seas at Lugh’s coastal haven, which I went to more lengths than you know to avoid, lest we be detained there and questioned. I knew, however, that he was seeking other havens less subject to the vagaries of the Seas, which, like the Lands, are being eaten away by your World. I thought these were merely scout ships, but our sharp-eyed friend here says those ships hover above the water, which only ships made by the Powersmiths can do.”

David frowned. “Is that a problem?”

The Faery scowled in turn. “Lugh has few such ships, and I one only because of certain…connections and certain kin. But those
are
Lugh’s ships, and such ships always carry warriors. These are surely charged with guarding this new coast.”

Alec ambled up to join them. “What gives?”

Fionchadd’s scowl deepened as he turned back around, shading his eyes. Myra kept on sketching. “Nothing, maybe, or maybe much, depending on whether they see us. But— Wait, they
have
seen us! Those on watch point this way.”

Alec yawned. “So…?”

“If they see us they will detain us. This is no warship and we are no warriors, not against those who crew those vessels. I—”

“—They’re coming this way,” Brock interrupted.

“Bloody hell!” Fionchadd spat.

David raised a brow and started to say something about the Faery having been around humans too long, but then he saw his face, which was growing darker and more worried by the second.

“We cannot let ourselves be stopped,” Fionchadd gritted. “Yet how can we elude them? Those are ships of Powersmith making, to cleave the air as well as the water, and such ships are swift indeed.”