Blood and Whispers, page 10
“Because your grandmother probably only knew the stories the monks wrote down for posterity,” I told her. “The Tuatha Dé were a popular subject because they were seen as the heathen gods Christ supplanted. The Christian monks focused on the common stories or those that made them look bad—look how the Dagda is described as fat and ridiculous when he meets with the Fir Bolg. They weren’t interested in literal accuracy but spreading their own propaganda. Most of the stories you know bear very little resemblance to the truth of things, I promise you. You’ve never heard of the Faerie prison because the monks either never heard the stories of Dún Dubh or, more likely, deliberately chose not to record them. Even talking about the place was taboo among those who knew. The tales were rarely told, and only then in broad daylight. There was too great a fear that the Fae would take vengeance on those who told the secrets of their prison.”
Aengus was nodding in agreement. “The monks heard the stories. Everyone heard the stories. Some even dared to write them down, with their conviction that they were merely myths. But those manuscripts didn’t survive into the modern era. The Morrigan keep their secrets. There are many things about the Tuatha Dé and the Aes Sidhe your grandmother did not know, and many things she likely thought she knew that are wrong.”
“I’ve never been there,” I told her. “I’ve never had reason to go. Very few humans have. But nothing I’ve heard has been nice. And no one has ever escaped the fortress. If the Avartagh has been there for centuries, he wasn’t involved in Evan’s murder.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course he wasn’t involved in Evan’s murder. He’s not real. You guys know that, right?”
My eyebrows shot up. I glanced at Aengus, who had cocked his head in confusion, and Detective Lajoie, who shrugged.
“I thought we’d gone over that,” I replied.
She laughed. “What, you mean the tricks with the limo and the people in costume? I’ve been to sci-fi conventions before, Quinn. I was happy to roll with it if it actually helped us get some answers, but I think we’ve indulged your fantasies long enough if you’re seriously suggesting a mythical creature locked in Faerie prison might be involved in our case.” She looked over at her partner. “This has been fun, but I think enough’s enough, don’t you?”
There was the other shoe, after all. I was almost impressed at her ability to rationalize the wonders she’d seen that evening. But I’d specifically requested she keep such opinions to herself for a reason. The Fae are proud. Aengus had lived in the human world for a long time, but if he were to take umbrage at her condescension, her implication that he—and everything around us—was nothing more than an elaborate charade, we could be in a great deal of trouble.
“Adrienne,” Detective Lajoie began, almost pleadingly, but I interrupted.
“None of this is a trick or a game, Detective Connors.” My voice was deadly serious. “Aengus here is a Faerie, as was Zoya. I’m a sorcerer. Those satyrs you saw, and the giants and kobolds and all the rest, aren’t wearing costumes and playing pretend. The Market Taxi was not an illusion. It’s all very real.”
She looked at me with a frank expression. “Fine, then. If you’re a sorcerer, prove it. Do some magic.”
“No.”
Aengus looked alarmed. He knew how I felt about this subject.
“Why not, O mighty sorcerer?”
I closed my eyes, took a long, slow breath, let it out through my nose.
As it turned out, Aengus’s potential reaction to her behavior wasn’t the only cause of concern this evening. I thought I’d be better able to ignore her insults, but my knuckles were white as I struggled to control my rising wrath. I could hear that little voice growing louder and louder in its insistence I let it loose.
I fought it back down, refusing its demands. I had faced far worse than Detective Connors’s skepticism. It would take a lot more to make me lose the control I’d struggled so hard to achieve over the past decades. But it wasn’t easy. That voice was seductive. It would be so simple to let it have its way…
“Because,” I said quietly, meeting her eyes, “I am not an exhibitionist.” I bit off each word distinctly. I had suppressed my flash of rage, but it was still near the surface, and I focused on calming down.
“I am not a cheap stage magician,” I continued, “and I do not perform on command. Magic is a serious matter, and I will not demean myself with tawdry acts for your amusement, Detective Connors. I have done things in my life that you cannot imagine. I have seen things you have not dreamt. I am an old man, and I do not live for your approval. You and your partner asked for my help, and I have given it. In return, you have twice now insulted me to my face. If you choose not to believe me, after everything you have seen tonight, very well, that is your prerogative. But I will not be your dancing monkey just to make an ignorant child feel more comfortable with the truth.”
“Child?! Why…” she began, but Aengus stopped her with a voice like a whip crack.
“Enough!” he declared, glaring around. He wasn’t speaking loudly, but his tone brooked no dissent.
“Detective Connors,” he addressed her, “you are very lucky I am not so quick to take offense as many of my kin. I understand you are skeptical of magic’s existence, so I will let your breach of my hospitality pass.” He paused for a moment as she sat back, her expression unconvinced.
“Do you share your partner’s concerns?” he asked, turning to Detective Lajoie.
“No,” he answered. “Quinn has shown me the truth.”
At this, she frowned and opened her mouth to speak, but he shot her a glance and raised a hand to stop her interrupting. She closed her mouth tightly and sat back, her armed crossed.
“As Quinn said,” he continued, “my grandfather was a part of this world, and the sorcerer here and I spoke about it at length yesterday. Then he showed me proof, the ambush spell the killers left at the second crime scene, which he trapped in a sphere of energy not three feet from me. I saw it with my own eyes, and it was no illusion. But frankly, all of that matters a lot less at this exact moment than solving this case.” He looked meaningfully at his partner, who looked away at the implied reproach. “So if there’s anything you can do to help us with that, I’m listening.”
“Good enough,” Aengus replied, then looked back at Detective Connors. “It is a great deal to accept all at once,” he said with a softer tone. “But before this night is through, I am certain both of you will have seen enough to believe.”
She rolled her eyes, but kept her mouth shut. Maybe her partner’s reminder that solving the case was what really mattered had gotten through to her.
“What do you mean?” Detective Lajoie asked. “What more is there to see?”
Aengus smiled at him without a trace of humor, then shifted his gaze to me.
“The Avartagh is in the Dún Dubh, so he cannot be a party to the crime. Where does that leave you?”
“If someone else is copying his ritual,” I mused, “we need to know why. That might help us figure out who. You can read the focusing glyphs—what do they say?”
He frowned. “They focus the energy released in the ritual toward something called ‘Tamesis,’ which is not a Fae word. But that’s what the glyphs spell out.”
I cocked my head. “It’s Old Brythonic.” Being a bookworm with an ear for obscure languages was sometimes useful. “It means ‘darkness.’ Which, while somewhat ominous, doesn’t tell us much about the goal of the rite.”
Aengus bared his teeth in what might charitably be called a smile, by someone who had only read descriptions of them and never seen the real thing.
“No, it does not. But we do know someone who could answer that question. And we know where to find him.”
“Are you saying,” Detective Lajoie sat up straighter in his chair, “we could go visit this Avartagh guy in that Faerie prison you mentioned?”
“Yes. That is precisely what I am saying.” This time Aengus’s smile was genuine. “But we shall have to get permission. Very few sorcerers have ever visited the Dún Dubh, and I do not think an uninitiated human has ever done so. This is a treaty matter. It will require a special dispensation.”
“From whom?” Detective Connors asked, her tone still skeptical.
“The High King. We shall have to go see Lugh.”
She rolled her eyes once again but didn’t say anything else.
I spoke up. “There’s one other thing you should know, Aengus. I sampled the residual magic at the second ritual site. It may not have been the Avartagh, but there was a Faerie present when he died. And it took an active part in the ritual. Whoever flayed the victims was inhumanly skilled with a blade.”
Aengus frowned for a moment, but then nodded. “All the more reason to speak with him.” He looked thoughtful, then stood up and looked me in the eye. “Alright, Sorcerer, you and your companions have my countenance. Let us go meet Lugh.”
He walked to the far end of the tent, the side that was up against the mural-covered wall. He opened a flap like a door, through which light shone, revealing a grassy plain and a single small, gnarled tree. He gestured for us to precede him through the doorway.
I stood up and looked at Detective Connors.
“Are you coming? Or do you need proof first?” I asked scornfully.
She glared at me, but stood up when her partner did, and nodded.
“Lead on, then,” she said.
With a scowl of my own, I stepped through into the Otherworld.
Chapter 10
After the relatively dim lighting inside the tent, the blazing sun overhead made me squint. Everything was too bright and vivid: the grass was greener than it should have been, the sky a deeper blue. Colors seem to have more substance in the Otherworld.
The air was noticeably warmer, as well. I wanted to shrug off my overcoat, but the protection it gave me as a declared member of the Arcanum was worth the discomfort. I was glad I was wearing just a T-shirt underneath.
The two detectives stepped through behind me, and I heard Detective Connors gasp. I guessed she’d seen the twenty-foot stone archway the door led through, reminiscent of its cousins on Salisbury Plain. Such structures weren’t the only gates into the Otherworld, but they were permanently bound and required a lot less energy to open and maintain compared to opening a portal. Someone like Aengus could open most any of them from anywhere on Earth, with no more effort than opening a physical door. I couldn’t make use of them as easily, but there were a few I knew well.
Looking around, I realized this wasn’t one of them. I didn’t recognize where we’d arrived, though the tree was familiar. Hawthorn. They grew in places where the boundary between our world and the Otherworld were thin, on both sides of the veil.
I heard the faint whisper of the gateway closing after Aengus stepped through.
“This isn’t Rath Nechtan,” I muttered. I’d expected we’d be heading to the great fortress of the High Kings of the Tuatha. I’d been there many times, but I wasn’t sure where Aengus had taken us instead.
“No,” Aengus replied from behind me. “It is Lughnasadh.”
That explained it. For me, at least.
“What’s Lughnasadh?” Detective Lajoie was looking around in wonder, much as he had when we’d first entered the Market.
“A festival celebrating the High King,” I explained. “Kind of like a month-long royal birthday party. And it means Lugh’s court isn’t at his fortress—the festival takes place in the Plain of Delight. One of the nicer parts of the Otherworld.”
Detective Connors was stubbornly silent as I looked over at her.
“Still don’t believe in magic?”
She shot another glare at me, the reaction I’d expected. But then something changed, a sudden realization struck her. I could practically see the acceptance of this new reality enter her eyes.
Adrienne Connors might be stubbornly cynical, but she couldn’t just dismiss what all her senses were telling her. Her expression transmuted into something almost heartbreaking, as I watched her struggle to accept the truth that the world she knew was, well, not exactly a lie, but certainly only a small part of the universe.
I felt almost ashamed at causing that pain. The Taxi, the Market, meeting Aengus, none of that had been enough to push her over that edge. She’d been able to tell herself it was an elaborate game, illusions, costumes, that there was a perfectly rational explanation for it all.
But this—stepping through a magical door into a world that couldn’t possibly exist—sent her tumbling into the wild, terrifying awareness that she was beyond the edge of the map. And the old cartographers had gotten it right: “Here there be monsters.”
She had to realize this more than most in modern society, as the tales her grandmother had told her were undoubtedly the real Faerie tales, the ones Walt Disney didn’t show. The stories of violence and betrayal, of great love and greater loss, of blood and whispers in the darkness, right alongside the songs of mighty heroes and their glorious deeds. She might not know exactly what the Otherworld held in store, but she had a good idea of how dangerous it could be.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a realization hit someone, but it was the first time with an adult. Children are more accepting of such a huge shift in their worldviews. They haven’t grown comfortable with the world as they know it yet. It was different with a grown woman. It was tragic.
But it was necessary. She wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
The whole process took a few seconds, but her eyes remained locked on mine the whole time. Before she could answer the question verbally, I just nodded. She looked away, at Aengus, her eyes growing wide as she realized he really was a Fae creature from her grandmother’s tales. For a few seconds I was afraid she would have a full-blown panic attack, as her breathing sped up and she looked off into the distance.
Then her partner put his hand on her shoulder and leaned in close, whispering to her. I could see her calm down, regain control. Her breathing returned to normal and she shut her eyes, rubbing her temples with both hands. After a moment she opened them again and met his concerned gaze, nodding and muttering that she was alright. That she would be alright.
I found I no longer needed an apology before I could forgive her most recent insult.
She took a deep breath and held it for a second, then looked over at me.
“Fuck,” she said quietly. “It’s all real?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so, my dear. And there’s no going back now. Can you handle that?”
She looked away again, biting her lip.
Detective Lajoie nodded at me. “She’ll be okay. Just give her a few minutes to come to terms with it. In the meantime, we’ve got work to do.”
Aengus had seen the whole process and kept a respectful silence, letting it play out. He caught my eye and gave a sad smile. But he nodded at the big Haitian detective’s comment and began walking up the long, shallow grassy hill to our right, talking as he went. We followed, listening silently.
“A story you probably never heard from your grandmother, Detective Connors,” he began, “is how my parents met and how I was born. You may know that my father is the Dagda, as he was known among the people of Ireland after our conquest.”
His tone was matter of fact, as if she’d believed he was the Dagda’s son all along, instead of just coming to terms with that reality a minute before. That was kind of him.
“But what you may not know,” he continued, “is that another name for him is Eochaid Ollathair—it means ‘All-Father’ in English. Some human scholars suppose this just to be a common title for major deities. But the truth is simpler. The All-Father of the Celts is the same as the All-Father of the Norse. The Dagda is just another name for Odin.”
I could see the detectives listening intently, the look of wonder on Adrienne Connors’s face. It wasn’t every day that a being out of myth takes the time to explain the truth behind those myths for your edification. And now she recognized that he was in fact such a being, not some crazed occult enthusiast role-playing in an open-air art gallery. She was paying attention. How often do you get the chance to hear a Faerie tale from the lips of a Faerie?
“At that time, long before the rise of the Christians, the Tuatha Dé did not yet even exist. The various Fae peoples spread across the surface of the Earth, where they intermingled with humans, whom they considered their lessers, but still useful allies in their constant wars for territory and power. The humans, in turn, treated the Fae as the gods and protectors of their tribes.
“The Fir Bolg and Fomor lived in the Celtic isles. The territory of the Aesir and their cousins the Vanir stretched from Scandinavia through the Germanic forests of northern Europe. By the time Rome rose to prominence, the Olympians controlled everything around the Mediterranean Sea. And in Iberia and throughout the Alps were the people of Taranis and Danu.”
Aengus was simplifying a great deal, but it was still far more accurate than what either of them would know from the mythology they studied in school.
“You have heard, I am sure, that Odin wished above all else for wisdom, and gained it by giving up an eye for a chance to drink from the Well of Wisdom. Well,” he said with a wry smile, “that is not quite how it happened. The Well was owned by Nechtan, also called Nuada, a great warrior prince, leader of a tribe of the people of Taranis. His lands were in the north of Iberia, and were disputed with other tribes, but he managed to hold them through the power his Well gave him. He jealously guarded it, as any who drank from the waters would gain knowledge of the nature of time itself, one of the most powerful magics even among the Fae.
“Even Nuada’s wife was not permitted to drink of the well’s waters, and over time she grew to resent her husband over this. So when Odin came seeking a drink, she coupled with him—sex does not hold the same taboos among the Fae as among humans—and then snuck him past Nuada, where he drank from the well.
“Nuada knew what had happened as soon as Odin’s lips touched the water. Because the magic was so precious, Nuada could not risk its secrets spreading among the Fae, and he tried to kill the All-Father rather than let him leave in peace. Odin was dazed by the onset of his new wisdom, and Nuada got the better of him, cutting out his left eye. But before he could strike the killing blow, his wife rushed in and stayed his hand for the sake of the child she bore in her womb.
