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appropriate for them to know. Many have sought that knowledge, though few have
found it, and fewer still have profited by it.
 But where you are different is that you have knowledgep. 84backed by
proof the proof that lies sparkling upon your chest. And such knowledge places
you in a position dangerous both to yourself for in Ailill Windmaster you have
made a powerful enemy and to certain others who sometimes share your
World.
The dog hesitated a moment, though its eyes never left David.  Thus it is that
you have two choices: If you end this quest for knowledge now, when it is
scarcely begun, and try to forget what you have seen and turn your thoughts to
other things, there may still be time to forestall Ailill s intervention. But
if you do not, never again will your life be as it has been. Do not seek to
know more than you do or be prepared to pay the consequences of that seeking.
And it was gone.
David felt the hair prickle once again on his neck and arms. He picked up the
toothbrush and rinsed it off mechanically, but he found that no matter how
hard he tried, he could not quite hold his hands steady.
The ring continued to send forth pulses of low heat, and to glow softly. A
final shudder shook him, and the coiled fear began to disperse.
Well, he thought, maybe I d better leave that trail alone for a while.
Or, he added, maybe I should memorize the fortuneteller s book.
PART II
Prologue II: In Tir-Nan-Og
(high summer)
p. 87
It is good to be an eagle, thought Ailill, who now wore that shape. Wings,
longer than his man s form was tall, swept from his shoulders, caressing the
air like the fingers of the most sensuous of lovers.
Feathers black as his hair covered him; eyes sharp as his devious wit peered
over a beak cruel as the desire for vengeance that burned within him.
It is good to fly, Ailill added to himself.
It is good to rule the air, to ride winds no mortal bird could dare, to
breathe air too thin for their clumsy lungs, to fly so high that stars appear
above, so high the curve of the mortal World shows when I look down.
It is good to look down on the World of Men and think how it would be to crush
them, to beat them into the iron-sodden dirt from whence they came. Or better
yet, to hurl them into the cold blackness that surrounds them. Tenuous indeed
is their hold on that World if they but knew.

He blinked his yellow eyes and spiraled higher on the merest suggestion of an
updraft, then drew upon his Power and looked down again, to see both
worlds the round Lands of Men clustered close and thick and fearful, bound all
unknowing within the less easily described shapes of the far-flung Realms of
Faerie, all laced about by the glittering golden lattice of the Straight
Tracksp. 88that wrapped all
Worlds and rose past him into space and time as well binding them together in
ways at once too complex all
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and too subtle for even the Sidhe to fully comprehend. Though not Faerie, the
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Faerie-born could travel of upon them, if they dared and mortal men as well,
if they had the art, as none now did, except possibly that detestable boy who
Nuada had virtually snatched from his hand, and who had cost him considerable
trouble and no little pain in the days since.
Nuada!
Ailill felt the tendons that worked his claws tighten when that name entered
his thoughts. Unconsciously he ground the edges of his beak together, then
uttered a harsh shriek of rage into the cold empty air that surrounded him.
Nuada Airgetlam, whom men called Silverhand. Once King of the Tuatha de
Daanan, once disarmed in the most literal sense by a blade of iron, once slain
in the Lands of Men and yet another barrier between Ailill and the war he
desired between the two Worlds, between men and gods, if men chose to call
them that. But there was another thing Ailill wanted now, and that thing was
vengeance: vengeance against Nuada, who had thwarted his plan and made him
look the fool in the bargain; and against the mortal boy, David Sullivan, who
somehow bore some arcane protection about him whose nature Ailill could not
discover, nor his Power break.
He was the unknown, the unloaded die, the rogue element in the orderly plan
Ailill was formulating.
He is the one I must control; he is the one whose blood this body would taste
this day if I gave myself to it, and if someone

or something did not protect him.
That is what I must discover, and if it is an object which protects him, then
that object I must possess.
The eagle shape he wore spoke to him then, in that part of his mind where
instincts had their dwelling.
And what it spoke of was hunger.
Ailill gazed about himself, at the glitter of stars in the black sky, at the
Worlds both Worlds spread below gleaming in the encompassing golden lattice.
And then he narrowed the focus of his vision, so that he gazed only into the
Lands of Men.
And there he saw what his body sought.
p. 89He folded his wings and dived, felt the air thicken about him, felt his
body grow warm from the force of that fall, knowing as he did so that if he
put upon himself the substance of the mortal world, as he must do to remain
there for more than a few hours, that the thing men called friction would burn
him to nothing before he reached his goal.
But he was not of that substance. This body, like his man-body, was formed of
the stuff of Faerie, and so was bound by the laws of that World.
Below him the land spread wide, the distant coast was a thin-edged glimmer on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]