Night fell slowly over the mountains with a long, lingering twilight that turned the surrounding ridges into ragged strips of airbrushed cardboard. The sky was clear, and as dark set in, the stars came out—singly, in clusters— constellations switching on as though toggled from some master lighting board.
In full stage clothing and makeup, her hair backcombed and spiked out until it was a crimson mane that glittered in the multicolored stage lights, Christa dropped Ceis’s strap over her shoulder and plugged in. The chains looped from her belt and around her boots rattled crisply in the night air, and the
failge
at her wrist clinked with a muted music of their own.
On the other side of the stage, Melinda’s Fender Precision gleamed like a sword of jet, and the lights shimmered across its strings. The bassist lifted her hand to give her lead guitarist an okay sign, and her studded leather gauntlets flashed in fiery coruscations.
Devi was loading her programs. Bent over the microcomputer rack-mounted above her keyboards, she stared intently at the screen, now and then tapping in instructions. The red LED on the disk drive finally winked out. She nodded to Christa.
Lisa crashed a cymbal. “Come on,” she yelled. “Let’s get this party cookin’!”
At the mixing console behind the stage, Kevin brought up the volume faders. The PA speakers hissed when he switched in his headset mike. “Ready when you are, Chris.”
The stars were bright. The lake and the cliff were fading into the evening. A trout lashed in the water. The waning moon had not yet risen. In the distance, flickering on the edge of vision, the barrier that Christa had erected the day before burned blue-white. No one outside the circle would disturb them, no one would hear them.
Christa felt warm and comfortable, confident, almost cocky: after so many gigs, her stage persona manifested itself automatically. She had but to don her stage clothes, pick up her guitar, hear the hiss of an active PA, and she was Chris Cruitaire, lead guitar for Gossamer Axe. With a familiar grin, she grabbed her microphone. “
You guys ready to rock
?”
“Right on!”
Lisa pulled her microphone boom into place and pitched her voice into a nasal whine: “Gee, Yogi, Mr. Ranger’s going to be mad at us.”
They all laughed. At Kevin’s touch, the stage lights brightened and shifted from red to blue to yellow as Lisa laid down a fill and left the sound of her cymbals shivering in the air. Christa pointed to Devi. The synth player put her hands to the keys and began a slow introduction full of eerie whispers and fragments of melody.
At the proper moment, Christa entered the music with the guitar, lofting out a long, wailing lead line. From the stars above, from the earth beneath, from the water and stone about her, she drew such energies as would smash an entry into another universe and tunneled it into her music.
The spell built, taking the form of a huge arc of light. It spanned the lake from one side to the other, filling in slowly with ghostly flashes of pale fire. Christa risked a glance at her bandmates and found them staring at the materializing gate.
“
Goddam
…” Lisa’s voice, awe-struck.
Christa stretched a note, held it. The lake was suddenly no more, its place taken by a luminous floor of mist and cloud. “Are you still with me?” she shouted into her microphone.
“To the end, Chris. Brigit bless.”
Devi’s eyes were dark as she stepped on a volume pedal, and Christa found that the available energy had suddenly doubled. The synths and guitar built. Thunder rumbled from Devi’s sampling keyboard. The gate and the floor solidified. Melinda brought up her volume and stood with her hands poised over the strings.
Ceis was roaring now, shrieking out a song that chiseled at the barriers between Christa and the Realm, etching the gateway with lines of yellow fire that burned and sparked and snapped with all the brilliance of a wounded star. In another minute, the veil between the Worlds was thin, weak, ready for breaking.
Christa nodded. Lisa lifted her sticks and smacked out a four-count.
Siudb has been deposited like a block of marble on a stone bench to the side of the great hall. She can see nothing other than what is directly before her eyes: columns, dark windows that have never known anything of daylight, bas-reliefs that tell stories of cherished and unending monotony. Now and again, a bright robe flicks into vision, or a guard stands in her line of sight, his pale Sidh face watching her carefully for signs of escape. But there can be no escape: Orfide’s spell holds her frozen.
The bard himself stands behind her, his harp in his hand, watching the reactions of his king to the proposal he has set forth.
“It does seem,” says Lamcrann, “that yours is the only way.”
“Otherwise,” replies Orfide, “this will happen again and again. Cumad is affected by this subtle madness. Who knows how many others have been touched? Glasluit… well…”
“What has become of him?”
“He ran off into the shadows.”
Inwardly, Siudb is raging against the spell that holds her, but she is helpless. She cannot move. She cannot harp. She cannot even sing.
O Mother of All, help me!
Lamcrann circles the wayward Celt, stroking his chin. Orfide, he knows, is right. Cumad is nearly mad with thoughts of stars and suns and the passage of time, Orfide is drawn and frayed from his battles, and he himself— yes, even the king of the Sidh!—is growing weary of this sunless place, of flowers that neither bloom nor fade.
And Siudb could be his. Her nature need not be changed greatly. Only a little change, the smallest of transformations. The Realm would be safe then, and she would be happy. Oh, she might rail and complain still, but her words would be ineffectual: merely the whining of an overindulged child.
“Do it then,” he says.
Faint, but plainly audible over the sounds of the revel, comes a rumble as of thunder. A wisp of melody floats through the hall, circles in the air, hangs like bright fire.
Lamcrann looks toward the door. Orfide’s hand tightens on his harp. Siudb sits, frozen, motionless.
“What is that?” asks the king.
“Nothing.”
More thunder. The melody returns, stronger now: wailing, screaming into upper octaves. Impossibly high overtones claw at Sidh ears with razor talons.
Siudb is suddenly hopeful. The instrument is alien, the strangely haunting music totally foreign, and yet she thinks that she knows whose hand is on the strings.
“Why do you say
nothing
, bard?” asks the king. “My ears do not lie.”
Orfide ignores him and starts for the door to the courtyard; but he perhaps can be forgiven his discourtesy, for the music is growing louder, resounding through the palace, shaking the foundations of the building.
Another crash of thunder. Orfide is running now, a presentiment growing on him in spite of his denials.
The music is a rain of heat on his face as he steps into the courtyard. Other Sidh are there, dragged by curiosity or fear from their amusements; but Orfide hardly notices them, for the wall that separates the courtyard from the gardens has vanished. In its place is a towering archway of fire, a latticework of blazing strands that burn as though the very air has been ignited. As Orfide and Lamcrann watch, a fragment falls away, chiseled from its place by the hammer-blows of sound. Another falls. And another. Through the gaps, they see another sky, one filled with stars.
The music builds to a crescendo—roaring, deafening— and is suddenly augmented by the thudding of bass notes and the crash of percussion. The gateway explodes as though struck with an axe, and showers of sparks fly as the curtain that separates one universe from another crumbles, revealing a world of blazing, parti-colored light; of threatening figures clad in leather and steel, chains and studs; of music that cascades into the Realm like molten iron tipped, fresh and hot and white, from out of a furnace.
The fat, searing chords pummel the Sidh, thrust them back; and now a voice lifts up, thin and reedy, but full of menace. Lamcrann thinks he recognizes the singer—a woman with a mane of hair the color of an angry sunset, her face painted and vivid with sensuality and power, her body glad of life, swaggering and arrogant with mortality.
Orfide himself has no doubts. He knows now. Chairiste has returned.
“Are you surprised to see me
Standing here at your door?
Thought that it was all over between us, huh?
Thought you could forget about it all?”
He does not understand the language, but the music speaks in terms he cannot fail to comprehend. This is a challenge: battle to the death.
“I’m here
And I’m calling you out
So get your ass out here, boy,
’Cause it’s time to get down
To the firing line!”
The red-haired woman leaps into the air, her agile hands already blurring into a solo of moving harmonies and changing chromatics that Orfide cannot track. But the music is battering him, ripping at his ears, at his brain; and the vocals return, venomous, full of contempt.
“Did you really think I’d just
Give up and walk away?
Did you really think I could?”
By the time the song ends, his mind is fuzzy, likewise his vision. But he shakes himself roughly in body and in spirit. He is a bard. He has been challenged. He will defend his Realm.
For a moment, the women on the stage are silent, and then Chairiste steps forward, chains rattling ominously,
failge
glinting as she points at Orfide. Her words roll out across the courtyard, echoing and swirling as though shouted by an angry Goddess.
“All right, you son of a bitch:
let her go
!”
Leaping, bounding, juggling her instrument with all the casual flash of a seasoned guitar hero, Christa had nonetheless been as piercingly aware of the pale Sidh faces turned toward her from the gaping hole she had smashed into the Realm as she was of the startled expressions of her bandmates. But though the music had faltered at the instant that the gate shattered, it had come back strongly. Lisa had whooped behind her and added a fill that Christa recognized as a show of support. Devi had permitted herself one of her rare smiles. Melinda had pumped grimly on her bass, her hands fluid, moving.
The song finished, her challenge uttered, Christa watched Orfide shake himself free of his stunned disbelief and step forward out of the shadows. He recovered quickly, but the ironic smile he assumed seemed a trifle brittle.
“Why, if our dear Chairiste has not returned to us,” he said. “She seems to have taken up with mountebanks. Such coarse entertainments find little favor here at court.”
“What’s he saying?” asked Lisa.
“He’s insulting us, Boo-boo.”
“Uh… yeah. Tell him to go blow himself.”
Christa smiled thinly. “Oh, be assured, I will.” She switched back to Gaeidelg. “I have come for my lover. Bring her out.”
“Your lover?”
Christa did not reply. She put her hands to Ceis, popped off a harmonic that stung the ears even of the veteran rockers, and jerked up on the tremolo bar. A high pinnacle of the palace exploded into powder with a dull flash of light and rained dust on the heads of the Sidh. “Siudb,” she said when the echoes had died away. “I am sure you remember her.”
A guard brought a stool for Orfide. He seated himself and put his harp on his lap. “I believe,
crossain
, that this calls for individual combat.” He looked meaningfully at the other members of the band.
His name-calling meant nothing to her. “I believe, bard, that I am interested in results only. Individual combat be damned.” Christa fingered Ceis again and was satisfied when she saw a number of the Sidh shrink back. Part of the battle was already won. “You might consider giving her up peacefully…”
Orfide struck a chord, but before his spell had time to manifest, Christa was at her microphone. “ ‘Metal Health’! Let’s go!”
Lisa was already pounding out the opening fill, and the first chord hit Orfide like a spear in the chest. The bard reeled.
“I’m an axe-grinder, a pile-driver,
Mamma says that I never, never mind her.
Got no brains, I’m insane
Teacher says that I’m one big pain
…”
A pick scrape chain-sawed its way out of the PA; and as Christa kicked in the full overdrive of her amplifiers, the bard winced and shut his eyes in pain.
But he was still playing. Christa felt his spell reaching out, trying to deaden her thoughts, and even though she continued with the Quiet Riot song, she was altering chords and changing rhythmic values to create a counterspell that twisted Orfide’s own magic against him.
The bard was taking no chances: he was fighting at strength. Had Christa been equipped only with a harp, she would have been hard pressed. But the massed sound of Gossamer Axe roared like a breaker into the Realm, shredded Orfide’s music, rebounded off the palace walls with such force that a number of the assembled Sidh looked up to see if perhaps the whole structure were coming down upon their heads.
“Bang your head!
Metal health will drive you mad!”
And so, seemingly, it would, for Orfide nearly fell from his stool as the energy buried him. Lamcrann held him upright until he recovered; and with a determined crease to his brow, the bard set his hands to the strings again.
Christa threw speed and pyrotechnics into her solo, letting him know what he was going to face if he continued the fight. Orfide was subtle, she knew. Best to make him capitulate before he could think of a suitable defense.
“Bang your head!
Wake the dead!”
The song hammered at the Sidh. Some fled, others cowered in the shadows of the palace; but Orfide fought back, reweaving the fabric of Christa’s magic, battering it aside with block chords that, even though they could not be heard above the PA, had power and strength behind them.
But Christa was winning. Each subsequent song only increased her command of the battle, and when she saw Orfide playing and did not feel any effects, she assumed that she had at last mastered the bard.
She smashed out a last chord. “Had enough?”
Orfide stood up. “You have fought well, Chairiste Ní Cummen.” His voice was, as always, dulcet, a steel blade balanced between each word. “But your continued belligerence puzzles me. You have no lover here.”
Christa blinked, felt a sudden sickness in her belly. “What do you mean?”
“Siudb Ní Corb decided long ago that her lot will be better with immortals,” he replied. “She has become one of us.”
“I do not believe you.”
The bard shrugged. “Then ask her yourself.”
He gestured at the door of the palace, and a figure— longed for, familiar, loved—emerged. She was clad in the gossamer garments of the Sidh, her brown hair lustrous, her dark eyes bright and flashing.
“Siudb!” It was all Christa could do to keep from throwing off her guitar and rushing to her.
But the girl smiled softly and shook her head.