Nita looked over at Kit; his expression was wry, and a little sad. He motioned Nita over to one side, where her aunt was looking nearly as pale as Doris. “You okay, Aunt Annie?” Nita said, anxious.
Her aunt nodded. “What about you?”
Nita’s aunt was wearing an understandably preoccupied expression. She was looking off down the hillside, toward the place where Enniskerry would have been, and past it. “It’s awfully dark down there,” she said softly.
Nita looked down the slope, past where the valley fell away along either side of the thirteen-bend road. Down where Bray should have been, there was a wall of blackness so opaque as to seem nearly solid. It gave Nita a bad feeling just looking at it.
“Something’s on the other side of that,” Kit said. “And it’s watching us.”
Her aunt looked at Nita regretfully. “I’m beginning to wish I’d left you home.”
“You couldn’t have. I’d have found a way to come along, and you know it.”
Her aunt suddenly reached out and hugged her. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.
“Listen, I was going to ask you about that—”
“Anne,” Johnny said from one side. “Can I have a word?”
Feeling slightly embarrassed, Nita brushed herself off, and was a little amused to see her aunt doing the same thing. “Look,” Johnny said, “we can’t have another set-to like that. Too many people got killed.” It was then that Nita noticed the tears running down his face, incongruous when taken together with that his calm voice. “I think we’re going to have to play our aces a little early.”
Nita’s aunt hefted Fragarach. Or was it the sword itself that lifted eagerly in her hand? Nita had trouble telling. “If we use them too early,” her aunt said slowly, “we won’t have them for later. You’ve seen the way wizardry is behaving here.”
“That’s precisely the problem. First of all, these three Treasures were never much good against Balor the last time. And secondly, if we’re all killed or driven off by his creatures before we get to him—or if they delay us past the point where our wizardry, or even that of the Treasures, still works, then all of this will have been for nothing. I want you to use Fragarach on the next lot—because they’re out there waiting for us, under cover of those next two patches of woodland. If we get hit again after that, Doris will use the Cup. And I can use the Stone the same way, if there’s need.” He paused and looked at her. “Something wrong? You look pale.”
She shook her head. “Shaun,” she said, “I just don’t know if I can do this.”
“Not lack of power, surely.”
“Oh, no. It’s just—” She held Fragarach up. “Shaun, we speak so lightly of ‘re-ensouling’ these things. The trouble is, it worked. There’s a soul in this, and an intelligence and a will—one much older and stronger than mine, one that considers me mainly a form of transportation. Once I actually start to use it—” She laughed a little. “It’s a good question which is going to be the tool and which the user. I don’t know how much of me is going to be left afterwards; even now I can feel it pushing, pushing at my mind all the time. I don’t know if you get the same sense down your rapport with the Stone—it’s Earth, after all, and mostly passive. But if Air, the lightest and most malleable of the Elements, behaves this way—” She shook her head. “And what about Fire, then? I have some experience, some ability to resist. But what’s going to come of that poor child? What happens when the Power that comes with the Spear puts forth Its full force—?”
She mentioned no names. Johnny shook his head. “Anne,” he said, “we’d better just hope that it does; otherwise we’re lost. Meanwhile, can you do your part? If not, I’ll look around for someone else. But you do have the rapport.”
She looked at him. “I’ll manage,” she said.
Johnny headed off. “Get yourselves together,” he said to the wizards he passed. “We’re moving out, and the Fomori are going to come after us again.”
Nita’s aunt went after him. Nita watched her go, and stood thinking a moment about Ronan. He doesn’t have her experience, she thought. But he has the power.
Not as much, she heard Kit thinking. Not as much as he might if he were younger...What’s this going to do to him?
She glanced over at Kit, unnerved. They tended not to accidentally hear each other thinking any more: but evidently this otherworld had more effects than on merely active wizardry.
And the shout went up from down the slope. Nita saw the mass of dark forms come charging down at the wizards, out of the trees again.
There were a few more moments of confusion, milling around, screams. Then Kit grabbed her arm, and pointed. Down the slope, she saw it, the upraised little line of red light that grew from a spark to a tongue of fire, and from a tongue to a lance of it that arrowed up into the threatening sky. The wind began to rise behind them, moaning softly, then louder, a chorus of voices in the trees, uncertain at first, then threatening themselves, long howls of rage; and the wind rose and rose, bending the trees down before it, whipping leaves and dirt through the air so that it became hard to see. The wizards staggered against the blast of it, but even as she fought to stay upright, Nita had a feeling that the wind was avoiding her, and the threat in it was for someone else—
She and Kit headed downhill, because that was the way the wind was pushing them; but the great mass of wizards were pushing down that way too, their cries mingling with the wind’s. The two fronts of Fomori that had struck them from either side were staggering back and away, further down the slope, blown that way, forced down by the raging wind that blew them over and over, that dropped trees on them and tossed logs from the wood after them like matchsticks. The Fomori were almost at the bottom of the hill now, into the little dell where Enniskerry village would have stood. There was no bridge over the Glencree River, in this world; they would have to ford it. The wizards and the relentless wind pushed them down into the dell—
The wind rose to a scream, then; and there were more sounds in it than screams. An odd sound of bells, that Nita recognized; and the sound of hooves, like glass ringing on metal. Nita looked up and saw what few mortals have seen and lived afterward: the Sluagh Ron, the Dark Ride of the Sidhe.
In our time the People of the Hills leave their anger at home when they ride—their day is done, and their angers are a matter of the songs their bards sing to while away the endless afternoon. But that afternoon was broken, now, and the legendary past had come haunting them as surely as it had come after the mortals. The Sidhe rode in anger now, as the People of the Air, in the whirlwind, with a clashing of spears that shone with the pale fire that flickers around the faery hills on haunted nights. Their horses burnt bright and dark as stormclouds with the sun behind them as they came galloping down the air. There was no more chance of telling how many of the riders there were than there was of counting the raindrops in a downpour. But two forms stood out at the head of them: the Queen with her loosened hair flying wild, on a steed like night, and the Fool on one like stormy morning, with their spears in their hands and a wind and a light of madness about them.
At the sight of them, a great shriek of despair and terror went up from the Fomori. The Sidhe cried out in answer, a cry of such pure delighted rage that Nita shuddered at the sound of it, and the Sluagh Ron hit the great crowd of Fomori from the southward side. The wizards parted left and right to let them through, and the Sidhe drove the Fomori straight downward into the Glencree ford, and up against the ridge on the far side. Wailing the Fomori went, and the press of riders and the darkness borne on the wind hid them from sight.
After what seemed a very long while, the wind died down, leaving the riders standing there, and the wizards looking at them, among the dead bodies of Fomor, and the twitching, witless ones, driven mad by the sight of the onslaught. Johnny went from where he had been talking to Nita’s aunt, who held a Fragarach much damped-down and diminished-looking, and stood by the tallest of the riders, taking the bridle of her horse. “
Madam,” he said, “we hadn’t looked to see you here.”
“We were called by our own element,” the Queen said, looking down at Nita’s aunt, and Fragarach. “Besides, it has been too long since I went a-foraying; and since our world seems like enough to die here, this is a good time to ride out again. We have not done badly. But I think we may not be able to do much more. All magics are diminishing in the face of our enemy’s draoiceacht, and I feel the weariness in my bones. Do not you?”
Johnny nodded. “Nevertheless we will press on,” he said.
“We will go with you and look on this ending,” said the Amadaun; and paused. “If an ending is indeed what we are coming to.”
“One way or another,” Johnny said.
12: Tir na nÓg
Johnny waved the wizards forward, and they started down the winding way that paralleled the river, and led towards Bray.
“Did you hear that?” Kit said.
Nita shook her head; she was very tired. “Hear what?”
“What the Queen said. ‘The weariness.’”
She had to laugh at that. “After what we’ve been through today, you’d be nuts not to be tired.”
“Yeah, but that’s not it. Don’t you feel tireder than you were when we were up at the top of the hill?”
Nita blinked. “You’re right.”
Kit nodded down at the darkness in front of them. “That,” he said. “There’s some kind of energy-sapping spell tied up with it. Don’t exert yourself if you can avoid it—you may need that energy for later.”
She looked at him with very mild annoyance; sometimes Kit’s practical streak came close to getting him hit. “What I really need right now in terms of energy is a candy bar,” she said, “but the only thing I’ve got left in my pack is a cat. And I can’t eat that.” She made an amused face. “Too many bones.”
Tualha hissed in Nita’s ear, not amused. Kit grinned, and produced a candy bar from one pocket. Nita took it, squinted at it in the dimness. “It’s got peanuts in it!” she said. “I hate peanuts!”
“Oh, okay,” Kit said, grabbed it back, and started to unwrap it.
Nita grabbed it away from him, scowled at him, and began eating. Tualha snickered at her.
They kept walking along the course of the river: it would have been the route of the thirteen-bend road, in the real world. Trees arched close overhead in the gloom, and the sound of the river down in its stony watercourse was muted. If something should hit us here, we’d have nowhere to go, Nita thought, as she took another bite out of the candy bar.
And then the screaming began again, very close.
It’s not fair!, she thought, as she saw the drows and pookas come crashing in among the wizards from down the steep slope to their right. At that point she also discovered something else: that a wizard with a mouthful of caramel and peanuts is not much good for saying spells, even the last word of one that’s already set up. She pushed backwards out of the way while fighting to swallow, managed it, and shouted the one word she needed just in time to blow away the drow that was heading for Kit on his blind side while he did the same for a pooka.
Something grabbed her from behind by her throat and chest, choking her. Nita fought to turn, for you can’t blast what you can’t see, but the stony hands held her hard, and she couldn’t get her breath; her vision started to go.
Then there was a roaring noise behind her, the pressure released suddenly, and Nita fell sprawling and gasping. She levered herself up, looking around her. “Kit—” she said, “did you—”
She ran out of words. All around them, the path through the forest was awash in blue-green light that rolled and flowed like water; and off to one side, the river was climbing up out of its banks in response, and running up onto the path. Both flows, of light and water together, were rushing with increasing speed eastward, leaving the wizards untouched, but washing the drows and pookas and other monsters away like so much flotsam.
Nita struggled to get to her feet again, against the flow. To Kit she said, “Looks like Doris is using the Cup.”
Kit nodded. “Come on, we should be breaking out into the open pretty soon. This path comes out in that flat ground by the freeway, doesn’t it?”
“The motorway, yeah.”
Several more bends of the watercourse brought them out into the open ground. There was a great scattering of drows there, half-buried in the earth as if about a year’s worth of mud had buried them there; many others, dealt with by the wizardry of individuals, lay broken or helpless. The last traces of the blue-green light of the Cup’s wizardry were sinking into the ground like water, along with the real water, which was running down into the watercourse of the Dargle, which the Glencree stream had just met. Kit and Nita splashed across the ford and up the other side, looking around them.
Nita sagged against Kit as she looked northward along the flood-plain of the Dargle toward Bray. The darkness was getting solider and solider, and she felt about ready to collapse.
You and me both, Kit said. She could feel the fatigue in the thought, and Nita looked around at the other wizards with them and saw that they were suffering too; some of them were having to be helped along by others, and not because of injuries. And far down the flood plain, there was a long line of darkness hugging the ground, coming slowly toward them. It was bigger than all three of the previous forces that had attacked them, all put together.
Oh, no, she thought. I can’t. And neither can a lot of the rest of us…
“There never was any counting them, even in the old days,” Tualha said. “It seems nothing has changed.”
There was an awful silence. Many of the wizards looked at each other helplessly, hefted their weapons and watched the Fomori come. Nita looked over at Johnny, who was off to the side of one small crowd, frowning, with his arms folded.
The ground began to shake.
The Stone, Kit said silently, immediately doing the smartest thing: he looked up and around to make sure no tree or rock was likely to fall on him, and then sat down. Nita followed suit. All around them, the earth groaned alarmingly as it was held still where they were, but encouraged to move, and violently, half a mile away. Down by that advancing line of darkness, trees toppled over and huge boulders of Wicklow granite rolled down the hillsides toward the ranks of the Fomori.
They broke, screaming and running in all directions. It did them little good. One of the hillsides shrugged itself up and up until it fell over on the Fomori vanguard. Behind them the rest milled about in confusion between the two ridges that paralleled the open ground where it sloped gently away down toward Bray.
The thunder of the quaking ground suddenly became a roar. Nita clutched at the ground as a single awful shock went through it—not one of the rippling waves they had been feeling, but a concussion like two huge rocks being struck together.
Down towards Bray, the horde of dark forms were abruptly missing from the ground. Nothing could be seen but smokes and dust rising upward in the gloom.
“Let’s go,” Johnny said quietly, and started forward.
***
No one had much to say as they passed the great smoking chasm that had been a green meadow half a mile long, between two hills. One of the hills was flat now, the other had great cracks in it, and from far down among the rock-tumble in the chasm, as the wizards passed slowly by it, faint cries could be heard. Nita shuddered as she followed Kit; they had to squeeze their way along the side of the meadow, what was left of it. The ground tilted dangerously downward toward the chasm. The riders of the Sidhe paced casually along the air above the huge smoking hole, but it occurred to Nita that the wizards might have a slightly harder time of it if they had to leave the area suddenly.
The gloom grew about them, and the tiredness got worse and worse, so that it was almost as much as she could do just to drag herself along. Only the sight of Kit in front of her, doggedly putting foot in front of foot, kept her doing the same. At least they’re letting us alone now, she thought. Or maybe
there are none of them left.