Warstalker's Track Read Free

profligately of late, spiriting close to fourscore mortals out of Tir-Nan-Og. Eventually he became aware of his companion’s gaze upon him.
    “Sooooo,” John ventured. “Feel like tellin’ me why you showed up here? Homage to Bobby Bruce it might be, but I doubt re-creating mortal history was your main concern. No spiders here,” he added.
    “I am no king in exile,” the warrior retorted, flourishing his silver arm. “Nor can be, with this. But I suppose I am in exile, for the nonce.”
    John scowled, cleared his throat. “I’m not sure I’m entitled to speak for my folks,” he began, “but I appreciate what you’ve done. You’re the second most powerful person in Tir-Nan-Og, best I can figure. You chose to help my folks when the crap hit, ’stead of tryin’ to save your own king.”
    “Which some would say brands me a traitor,” the warrior observed. “And I would be one, had I not been following that king’s commands.”
    John looked startled. “He had wind of it?”
    “He has a seer—Oisin, of whom I imagine you’ve heard but doubt you’ve met. Oisin foresaw a threat but could not tell when or where. It was no real news to him. Tonight—the evacuation—was—I think the mortal word is contingency .”
    “One of several,” John drawled back enigmatically, applying himself to a second fish.
    The warrior’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he fought down anger. This was no time for dissension. “Would I be correct in assuming you are concerned for the boy?”
    A curt nod. “Got a debt to him. Blood debt. He lost close kin ’cause of me. Somebody got killed trying to connect with me, anyhow.”
    The warrior fumbled inside the neck of his tunic and retrieved a disk of oddly glimmering crystal framed in gold. “Would you see how he fares?” Without waiting for reply, he closed his eyes, called upon a trickle of Power and reached to a certain place, then to a certain other, and bound them together, then opened his eyes once more.
    The disk caught fire as it twirled first between silver fingers, then on the sand between the men. And as it spun, it expanded into a sphere of light as wide as John’s forearm was long. Images moved inside. John frowned in resignation and scooted forward.
    And the two of them—mortal and immortal, poet and warrior, John Devlin and Nuada Airgetlam—both at the same time saw…
    …mountains: lumpy with age, now softened more with the summer-toned crowns of countless trees—conifers and hardwoods in equal riot…roads webbing them like scars of silver-gray; lakes splashed among them like melted mirrors…
    …water everywhere: rainwater…drowning the lowlands, ignoring the banks of streams, filling every hollow with silt scoured from those mountains like flesh flayed away to granite bone…washing every rooftop, sheening every leaf plastering every hair on man or beast to the precise contour of skin and skull…
    …closer now, as though a bird flew there, or wide-ranging thoughts gained more focus…
    … a wide road through bottomland, thick with corn and sorghum but framed by mountains to either side…a thinner road running off it, once gravel, now washed down to bedrock beneath a glaze of mud…a farmstead crouching on the mountains’ knees…a church, a graveyard, an iron-ringed family cemetery…
    … closer…
    …a farmhouse on the road’s southern side, its boards decayed, its roof retained by patches…its front porch in ruins, its back stoop scarcely better…glass in half the panes, and a chimney a yard shorter than it ought to be, from which thin smoke wheezes, before drowning beneath the ongoing storm…
    …cedars in the yard; a house trailer on a knoll nearby…cars in the drive: a Dodge minivan, a brand-new Lincoln Town Car, a red ’66 Mustang, an aging Mercury Monarch, a new Ford Explorer…a BMW touring motorcycle…
    …and now inside…
    … an old room, all but abandoned—but crammed to the rafters with people. A door opens onto the