The Winter Oak Page 5

  And dangerous. Life with her was walking through a minefield. Oh, he knew why she showed the world nothing but detonators and foul language. The things she'd been through would have killed a lesser woman, or driven her insane. That didn't drop the tension to a level he could bear.

  Her drinking could, for a little while. But when she sobered up she was more dangerous than before. So he mostly tried to get out of her way, be someplace quiet and relatively safe like this dusty dark rabbit-warren of ancient tunnels and rooms that twisted around under the hilltop and keep like Fiona's green maze. It made a good excuse.

  It would be so easy to be someplace else. Someplace far away. Someplace calmer and a hell of a lot safer.

  But she'd asked him if he would stay, and he'd said yes. The first night they'd met, she had touched something deep inside him, something that had grown powerful in the strange weeks that followed. And he'd told her that he loved her, after he'd known damn well what the whole package meant. He'd lived before with Death resting a skeletal hand on his shoulder for months and years on end, with less reason.

  If he left her now, odds were that the betrayal would push her over the edge into madness. She skirted it close enough as it was. So he had to weigh that, as well.

  Buggering psychological blackmail, like threatening suicide if she doesn't get her way. No. Be honest. She hasn't said anything like that. You've just thought it.

  Brian grimaced, sighed, and shook his head. He'd been gnawing at the problem for days now, without an answer. Mapping the cellars was simpler and more straightforward. At least the corridors and rooms stayed in one place, didn't move around impossibly like Fiona's hedge. Or at least he thought they didn't. Judging by the feel of creeping fingertips on the back of his neck, the corridors might change if they thought it necessary.

  He'd told Maureen he was looking for the back door. That was half of it, the part she'd understand. He searched for something else as well, something less defined. This keep felt wrong. The stones resented people -- humans, Old Ones, men, women, impartial. The hilltop held a grudge deep in its heart, old and festering. And it resisted prying. Coming down here took an act of will.

  Judging by the finishes, the cellars had been important once. Judging by the undisturbed dust and stale air, nobody had entered them in centuries -- long before Dougal's time, anyway. Why did people avoid these tunnels?

  Some of the rooms had held supplies, old bins of wheat and barley long gnawed to scattered hulls by mice, kegs of wine evaporated to red vinegar stains in the wood. Rooms full of weapons, short javelins with age-split shafts and rust-eaten heads, bundles of warped arrows with shreds of fletching, longbows that shattered when he tried to string them. He'd found racks of swords, short Celtic swords with straight heavy blades, but none of them showed any sign of magic. So much for finding Excalibur.

  Siege stores, anyway. Some ancient castellan had expected to have to hold this tower against an army, without the option of escaping through the walk between the worlds. That logic troubled Brian.

  Or was he wrong? Did the prospect of siege mean something lurked down here that was worth defending? Something that shouldn't, or couldn't, be carried away? Something forgotten, even in legend? Something that wanted to stay hidden? So he kept searching.

  Another doorway loomed ahead, dark in the shadows from his flashlight, age-blackened wood in a carved stone frame. He ran his fingers over the worn jamb and lintel, trying to trace out a design. This doorway opened to the left, into the raw native stone. His skin prickled in the peculiar fashion that had stopped him half an inch from putting his hand on a lump of rock while tracking Yemeni guerillas up the eroded yellow sides of a wadi. He'd stepped back that time, studied the trail, and only then noticed the clean gravel scattered over dust. Tripwire. Anti-personnel mine.

  He shuddered at the memory. And stepped away again, careful with his feet, just as he had that time before, because sometimes the buggers hid another booby trap close by, where you'd trigger it while avoiding the first.

  Undisturbed dust covered the floor, the only marks his own footprints. He pulled out the brush again and uncovered the stone pavers, as gently as he had probed for that deadly little mine. The floor's pattern flowed continuously along, the grout all matching and gray with time, without gaps or cracks that could mean a pit trap or tampering. Nothing different or suspicious on the walls, either.

  He studied the doorway again, the jambs and header of carved stone set into the natural rock. Old. Worn by centuries of hands bracing against the drag of the door, smoothed by centuries of bodies brushing through. He held the flashlight so its beam just grazed the surface, bringing out carved forms. The remains of a faint line skipped and dotted down the center of each side, a vertical stem with horizontal or slanting branches extending to either side in varied lengths -- Ogham runes, the tree alphabet of the ancient Celts.

  His fingers brushed the latch, nervous, as if he expected it to bite. He rested his hand on the hilt of his kukri, the Gurkha knife he wore as unconsciously as the belt on which it hung. He gnawed at his lip.

  Hell, you'd think I wanted to live forever.

  He shrugged with a wry grin, reached out again and tripped the latch, and shoved the door open with his foot. It swung away, jerky and groaning with rust on the hinges. Blackness waited behind it, and nothing came flying out at him to cut or bite or burn. He aimed his flashlight into shadows.

  Firewood. Ranks and ranks of firewood marched away into the gloom, ends hewn rather than sawed, stacked wall to wall and within a hand-span of the ceiling higher than he could reach. Brian shook his head.

  He eased into the room, sliding each foot in a curve ahead of him before he trusted his weight to it, still wary of traps. Whoever had stacked the wood, centuries ago, had left space to work next to the door. Brian studied the piles of wood again. Just wood, bark and grain looked like oak, nothing remarkable about it except that it was about as well-seasoned as firewood could ever get.

  He turned to the door behind him, eased it nearly shut, and examined the latch and hinges with his flashlight. Iron latch and lever and hook, iron hinges, nothing remarkable. Sockets for a heavy wooden bar to block the door from the inside, which did seem strange, as if the man who'd designed and built this long ago had intended the room as a last retreat against invaders. Brian wondered if he'd finally tracked down that missing back door.

  And that, and the siege stores, nagged at him. What of the walk between the worlds? Not just escape, but attack as well. Stepping into an unknown space was dangerous as hell, but so was assaulting a castle. If your enemy hated you deeply enough to risk his own life, he could just walk through nothing into your bedroom and kill you as you slept. Damned few Old Ones were willing to take such a risk. Most preferred to kill their enemies in safer ways. This whole picture, though . . .

  Did something ward this keep against trespass? Jo and David had stepped out of the keep, but that was a different thing, with no one trying to stop them or track them through the void. Another puzzle.

  He liked puzzles, as long as they didn't bite.

  He flashed his light across the exposed stone wall, dusting with the brush, searching for any other inscription, Ogham or otherwise. Nothing showed, but the surface on the hinge side seemed darker. Darker, he noticed, from hip to shoulder height, as if hands or bodies had brushed up against it for countless years and left a thin smear of oil and sweat behind. He probed the woodpile with his flashlight beam. Close along the wall, the light found black hollows instead of log after log, bark face after split face after bark face.

  Brian smiled and started stacking firewood, shifting sticks from the one side to the other. Now he knew why they'd left as much empty space as they had around the door. He sneezed, and blinked, and sneezed again, stirring up centuries of dust. And he opened up a hole and a passage along the side wall that slipped away into darkness.

  The way was narrow, a single body wide, and he moved cautiously. This sort of thing was made for trap
s, where you could force an enemy to place his foot on a single particular stone. Ten paces, then a turn to the right. His flashlight beam picked out motes of dust and bored on into darkness, past still more ranks of wood.

  A shadow along the wall turned into a niche and then into another door set into the thick uncut stone. If he hadn't gotten confused by the twists and turns, it led under the oldest tower of all, the simple stonework that predated any of Dougal's changes. The chill of Power flowed over Brian's skin, raising hairs on the back of his neck.

  He licked his lips. Damnfool thing, doing this alone. He ought to go back, find Maureen and a couple of those smithy boys whose biceps were bigger than their brains, and figure out just what he was getting into before he got into it. Call for backup before poking his nose into an IRA arms cache.

  But he liked puzzles.

  What the hell. He shrugged. He'd been doing that a lot, lately. Sharing a bed with Maureen must be giving him a new perspective on the relative risks of life. Anyway, he reached out and touched the latch with the back of his hand. Nothing bit him.

  He tripped the latch and pushed. Hinges groaned again, and the door shuddered away from him. The air that flowed out of the darkness seemed warmer and somewhat fresher, with a tang of forest and something odd, almost brine and seaweed. Brian could feel Power beating on his skin like sunshine. Whatever had drawn people to this hill through the ages, star-stone or sacred circle or magic well, lived in that darkness. And it was angry.

  His flashlight beam probed here and there. It lit a smooth stone wall, then poked to right and left to draw form out of the gloom. A large room, circular and maybe forty feet across, centering on a stone pillar as an axis. A crucifix hanging on the pillar, crude work but powerful, old and dusty, and some long-dead hand had chiseled a flat for it. That was the only evidence of finishing on the rough-shaped stone, and Brian had seen its like in Wales and Ireland and Brittany. Menhir. This room had once been open to the sun and stars.

  As in so many places, the Christians had worshipped in a space already sacred to the old Powers of the land. He circled the room, feeling that Power swell and ebb. It seemed strongest just in front of the crucifix, and he didn't think that was coincidence. With this much Power flowing from the land, even humans could have felt the presence of their God.

  He stopped and closed his eyes, feeling the air around him. The anger still throbbed, low and slow and with the patience of a thousand years. Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath and an angry God casting the damned into hell. That atmosphere would have suited the old brimstone Christians. But the sense of hiding had faded, had left him at one door or the other. Two separate puzzles?

  And now that he thought about it and separated it out, the hiding had a flavor he'd tasted more than once before, the same dark tingle as the oldest wardings on the secrets of the Pendragons. Those dated back to Merlin.

  Brian shuddered at the thought. He'd never much cared for Merlin. To hell with the pretty legends -- that man had been a dangerous paranoid. His spells had teeth.

  Brian looked the room over with fresh eyes. His footprints had stirred the dust, uncovering a design on the floor. It seemed irregular, perhaps part of a single larger figure rather than repeated patterns. Odd. He knelt down and cleared more of it.

  This paving looked old, buff stone of a slightly paler color set into smoothed native ledge. He traced the design, a single hand-span wide as it led in twists to right and left across the floor. A maze. No, a labyrinth, a single winding line without false turns or dead-end passages. Medieval Christians had set these into their cathedral floors, a reminder of the one true path to God and an aid to meditation.

  But this was older than the Christians, older than Merlin, and it led to the center of Power just in front of the menhir. A starburst of white quartz filled the spot; he couldn't tell if it was natural or set into the stone by a master craftsman. He settled back on his haunches and stared at it. He'd never seen, or felt, anything like this before. When he ran his fingers over the quartz, it hummed at him, low and soothing.

  Meditation. Comfortable. Inviting.

  Almost the opposite of Maureen.

  And the opposite of the menhir. Now that he could sort out the conflicting Powers in this room, he knew that the menhir held the anger. It remembered ancient injury and hated anything on two legs. It held the malice that darkened Castle Perilous.

  Meanwhile, Brian decided he could use some soothing. He stood up and found the entry to the labyrinth. He set his right foot on the narrow line and then his left, letting the room fall away from him as he concentrated on each step, each twist, each shift in the feel of the Power warm and electric against his body as he approached the quartz focus and receded and circled it from right to left and back again.

  Maureen just needed time. The land would heal her. The forest would heal her. But could he last that long? He knew, from the inside, the deep dark secret of the drunk. A drunk won't give up the bottle unless he has no other choice. He'd been there. He'd managed to come out the other side, to the rare balance where he could take that demon rum or leave it -- and actually could stop at just one drink. But he didn't dare take a second.

  Maureen wouldn't stop until the cost of drink stood up and punched her in the nose. Until she hit bottom, as they called it in the programs. And she needed him. He grimaced. She needed him, in a way that went far beyond sex and into magic. She'd bound her heart to him with the same seduction spell that broke Fiona's hold on his mind and body. With Buddy Johnson lurking in her memory, that was the only way she could force herself into sex. Brian shook his head. What would she do if he left her?

  Tell her. One more week. Quit the drinking, or I'm gone. I'll stand by her while she fights it, but she has to fight.

  With that decision, Brian felt tension flow out of his shoulders as he walked the pattern, eyes on the buff stone set against the yellow.

  The path straightened out in front of him and broadened, until he walked easily. It felt like the way a Zen archer finds the target growing in his mind until it is so large and clear and close that missing is impossible. He loosed himself as an arrow and found the quartz starburst as his target.

  Brian opened his eyes, blinking, amazed that he had walked the last steps blind. The pattern had drawn him in and taken his will. But he was left . . . hungry? Left with a sense of powerful magic somehow incomplete. A sense that something should have happened.

  He stared at the menhir right in front of him and the crude flat chiseled on one face. Now it radiated pain as well as simmering rage.

  Chapter Six

  A gust of wind and cold rain chased Jo under a portico. She stood there, dripping and shaking wet hair out of her eyes and swearing under her breath, biting her tongue out of ingrained deference to the funeral home behind her and the long solemn black cars waiting for their next load.

  A funeral home, for crissakes, with the hospital only a block away and in plain sight. It seemed a little tacky. At least the florist's shop on the next corner held out the promise of birth and spring and "Get Well" cards in their display window, keeping the funeral wreaths tucked discreetly away in the back cooler.

  She'd never noticed those things before, but then she was noticing a lot that had just been common background to her life. Part of it was contrast with the magical forest she'd just left, part almost reached into paranoia as she kept an eye out for the perennial cop cruiser. They were following her around, a constant reminder that Sergeant Getchell didn't believe her story.

  Oh, she could make them go away. Just like she could make Sergeant Getchell wrinkle his nose in irritation and let them walk out past the buzzing electronic locks of the police station every time they went in to tell their muddled and inconsistent stories about where two months of their lives had vanished and what had happened to Brian and Maureen.

  But then she'd look over her shoulder and see a cruiser again, just like she'd pick up the phone to hear the sergeant's gravelly voice "suggesting" that he'd like to tal
k to them again. She'd always been . . . ambivalent . . . about policemen, but she had to admire their tenacity. Bulldogs, never letting go once they sank teeth into their prey. Sort of like a Maine winter. If only they'd been like that with Daddy . . . .

  Jo shuddered away from her memories and returned to the current problem. Sooner or later, she was going to have to step across into Maureen's world. Ask her and Brian to come back to this mess and prove that they were still alive.

  Cars splashed past, throwing up muddy spray from the gutters as four month's worth of road sand worked its way towards the storm sewers. Jo's goal frowned at her, blurry through the rain. Wet stains darkened the concrete jumble of boxy slabs and see-through corridors and elevator towers, turning the medical center into some kind of grim futuristic Bastille, poking a line of battlements and angles and narrow windows against gray skies. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

  Jo shrugged herself deeper into her jacket and stood under cover, waiting out the burst of rain and glowering back at the ugly mess of additions that spread out from the old brick cube of Naskeag General Hospital. She did not want to go in there. She'd rather stand out here and flirt with hypothermia, given the choice.

  Her experience was, people died in hospitals. Grannie, Grandfather O'Brian after his wreck, Nan Langlais back in high school . . . Hospitals meant pain and sickness and bad smells, all glossed over with the fake promise of healing. Oh, sure, some people came out better than they went in. The damned places didn't kill everybody. Go in with a nice simple broken arm and you might get out alive. Or you might die of the drug-resistant pneumococcus you picked up in the emergency room while sitting for three hours in a crowded stinking waiting area. That was what killed Grannie.

  But they weren't going to cure Mom. "Therapy." "Rehab." "Adaptive equipment." "Support from visiting nurses." "Respite care." Those were the weasel-words for "She ain't gonna get better." Modern medicine offered damned few miracles for a brain damaged by a stroke.