Windmaster's Bane
AND SO THE BANSHEE CAME FOR HIM…
Chapter III: Music in the Night
Chapter IV: The Ring of the Sidhe
Chapter XI: What the Lightning Brings
Chapter XIV: The Lord of the Trial
Chapter XV: Of Knowledge and Courage
Chapter XVI: The Stuff of Heroes
Chapter XVII: The Justice of Lugh
Windmaster’s Bane
By Tom Deitz
Copyright 2014 by Estate of Thomas Deitz
Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Tom Webster
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1986
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
AND SO THE BANSHEE CAME FOR HIM…
David shifted the changeling so that it cradled awkwardly in the crook of his left arm. Slowly he eased himself down to a wary crouch, but his gaze never left the eyes of the banshee—eyes that burned round and red like living flame. Eyes that had nothing of beauty about them, only of hatred—hatred of life. He freed his right hand and took a firmer grip on the knife.
“Greetings, Banshee of the Sullivans,” he said, swallowing hard. “I can’t let you have what you came for.”
The wailing of the banshee faltered.
David carefully laid the changeling before him on the porch floor. “I have a child here, a Faery child. I don’t know if he has a soul or not, but I guess I’ll have to find out very shortly, unless some things change real fast. This knife—this iron knife—will have some effect.” He raised his voice and looked up. “You hear me? I’m going to kill the changeling. The Sidhe took my brother; I claim this life for myself!”
He raised the blade…
*
“Delightful…it kept this reader turning pages late into the night.”—Robin W. Bailey
“A FUN, FAST READ!”—A. C. Crispin
“Superlatively drawn…one of the most original heroes in modem fantasy!”—John Maddox Roberts
For Louise
who started it
For Vickie
who sustained it
and
For Sharon
who said what she thought.
A
cknowledgments
Thanks to:
Mary Ellen Brooks and Barbara Brown
Joseph Coté and Louise DeVere
Linda Gilbert and Mark Golden
Gilbert Head and Margaret Dowdle-Head
Christie Johnson and Lin McNickle-Odend’hal
Klon Newell and James Nicholson
Charles Pou and James Pratt
William Provost and Paul Schleifer
Vickie Sharp and Mike Stevens
Sharon Webb and Leann Wilcox
Windmaster’s Bane
Tom Deitz
PART I
Prologue I: In Tir-Nan-Og
(high summer)
A sound.
A sound of Power.
A low-pitched thrum like an immense golden harp string plucked once and left to stand echoing in an empty place.
And then, ten breaths later, another.
But it was the golden Straight Tracks between the Worlds that rang along their sparkling lengths, as they sometimes did for no reason the Sidhe could discover—and they had been trying for a very long time. Success eluded them, though, for the half-seen ribbons of shimmering golden light that webbed the ancient woods and treacherous seas of Tir-Nan-Og—and which here and there rose through the skies themselves like the trunks of immense fiery trees—were not of Sidhe crafting at all, and only partly of their World.
In some Worlds they were seen differently, and in some—like the Lands of Men—they were
not
seen. This much the Sidhe knew and scarcely more, except something of how to travel upon them—and
that
was a thing best done only at certain times.
Yet the Tracks were there, in
all
Worlds. And they had Power—in all Worlds. For Power was the thing of which they were chiefly made.
* * *
It was the half-heard tolling of that Power whispering through the high-arched windows and thick stone walls of the twelve-towered palace of Lugh Samildinach which awakened Ailill Windmaster a little before sunset.
At first Ailill did not know it as sound, for the song of the Track was as much felt in the body as heard with the ear: a swarm of furious tiny bees trapped in his bones and teeth, a tingling in the blood like the bubbles in artfully made wine, a dull tension in the air itself that sang to him alone.
Ailill allowed a smile to twitch at the corners of his mouth. It had been a long, long time since the Tracks had sung a song his particular Power could answer.
It was not that he lacked Power himself, that wasn’t the situation at all; Power was as much a part of him as his black hair and night-blue eyes, as his tall, lean body and devious wit. But when Power came from Without as well as within, it was best to grasp it, to shape it at once to one’s will—or risk the consequence. Power loose in the World was not a good thing, as all the Sidhe knew from bitter experience. For it was such random sounding of the Tracks that once of old had wrenched them from the place of their beginning and sent them wandering along the Straight Tracks to this World, where they had founded Tir-Nan-Og and Erenn and Annwyn and the other realms of Faerie that now lay scattered in the web of the Tracks like the tattered wings of dead insects.
No, unbounded Power was not a thing to be ignored, and Ailill was never one to ignore Power in whatever form it presented itself.
He sighed reflectively and folded his arms behind his head. The time for action was not yet. Sunset would be better and midnight best of all, for Ailill was night-born, and at midnight his own Power would be at its height. This particular resonance would not last that long, though; of that he was reasonably certain, and so sunset it would have to be. It was a good thing it had come today, too, for at midnight tomorrow would be the Riding of the Road, and that he would not miss in spite of certain apprehensions.
Meanwhile he studied his quarters: those apartments located high in the easternmost tower of Lugh’s palace which were by tradition set aside for the Ambassador of Erenn. In particular his eyes were drawn to the high-relief sculptures worked into the four square panels of cast bronze set deep in the pale stone opposite the window: Earth and Water, Fire and Air.
Human work,
he thought with a frown.
And wondrously well done. Why can the Sidhe not do such things?
A rampant horse first, for Earth, which was substance; to its right, a leaping salmon for Water, which was the force that bound substance together and made it move. And below them, their mirrors: the displayed eagle of Air for spirit; and for Fire, for that which bound spirit together and allowed
it
to act, the two-legged dragon called a wyvern. Framing them all was a rectangular border that bore the endlessly interlaced image of the serpent of Time which enclosed all things. Earth and Water, Fire and Air—and Time. Of these five things the world was made.
And of these, the greatest is Fire, one form of which is Power,
Ailill thought.
And of Power I am very fond, indeed.
Ailill arose then, and dressed himself in a long robe of black velvet, dark gray wool, and silver leather elaborately pieced together in narrow lozenges. A fringed cloak of black silk covered it, and a thumb-wide silver circlet bearing the fantastically attenuated images of a procession of walking eagles, worked in rubies, bound his long hair off his face.
He took himself from the palace without being seen. A close-grown grove of splendid redwoods soared about him, their summits yet less lofty than Lugh’s walls, but Ailill chose a narrow gravel path that ran eastward through a tightly woven stand of stunted hazel trees, where tortured branches twisted together like the knotted brooch that fastened his cloak on his left shoulder. As sunset approached he increased his pace, Power now sparking through his body like the cracklings of summer lightning.
Eventually, his lengthening strides brought him to the low embattled wall that bordered the grove on the eastern side. Impulsively, he leapt atop that barrier, and stood transfixed as the empty immensity of darkening sky exploded before him.
Glorious,
he shouted in his mind alone,
absolutely glorious!
Ailill smiled, but no good showed in the sensual curve of those thin lips. Carelessly he stepped closer to the edge of the white marble merlon, let the rising wind send the shining silk of his cloak flapping behind him like the wings of the Morrigu. He did not fear to fall, for he could put on eagle’s shape and ride the breezes back into the High Air—far higher than the tall palace of Lugh Samildinach that now erupted from the wood-wrapped peak above him.
Power,
he thought as he edged closer to the brink.
Raw as rocks. Free for the taking, free for the shaping. But what to do with it?
he wondered as his eyes narrowed and his brows lowered thoughtfully.
All at once he knew.
He reached into the air, drew on that force he felt coiling there, shaped it into the storm it wanted to become, and held it poised in an indignant froth of wind-whipped clouds as he called upon the Power and looked between the Worlds upon the homely splatter of silver lakes, gray-green mountains, and plain white houses that marked the Lands of Men. The sun setting behind him—in both Worlds today, which happened but four times a year—cast a shimmer of red light upon the landscape. But even to Ailill’s sight the shapes twisted and blurred like a torch reflected in unquiet water, obscured by the same shifting glamour Lugh once had raised to further hide his realm from mortal eyes.
That
would be an excellent place for his storm, Ailill decided, laughing softly—even as tingling sparks shot from his fingertips and thunder rumbled among those lesser peaks.
And so he caused it to be.
It was a delight to command such things, he thought when he had finished. Windmaster, they called him, and not without reason: Windmaster, Stormmaker, Rainbringer—all were names that had become attached to him, and he gloried in every one. His mother had told him—she who had been a queen in Erenn before his father had put her away—that a storm had raged in both Worlds on the night he was born, and thus, just as a person’s Power was strongest at the same-hour of his birth, so did one feel closest to the weather that had watched him into the world. He shrugged. Whatever the reason was, he did not care; it was the storms themselves that mattered. He was a storm child. The storms he forged were his children—a truer reflection of himself than the son of his body could ever be. And this was an especially fine one.