splattered with red, the dangerous crimsons and dark shades that meant vital blood had been spilled. I rubbed my breastbone, feeling sick. There was too much to think about, too much to assimilate and far too little time.
People hid behind every cockeyed piece of street, some dead, some dying, others mourning and still others screaming out their defiance against the Hunt that rode through them. As I watched, a line of soldiers, arm in arm, stood up together and walked forward. Before them, the street shivered and reformed, cobbles lying back down under the force of their will. Behind them, it lay smooth, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the chaos that was the Wild Hunt.
And down the newly relaid road they came, a dozen too-solid riders and the lonely pale mare. Cernunnos rode at their lead, his elegant antlers sweeping back to tangle with his ashy hair. He carried the new double-edged sword. Beneath the blood, it gleamed as bright a silver as the rapier I’d taken from him. As I watched, his stallion leaped a still-broken section of road, and Cernunnos smiled brilliantly at a young woman scrambling to get out of the way. Her lips parted and she went still, fear replaced by the compulsion of the god’s green eyes. He laughed, like the music of breaking glass. His deadly bright blade swept down in a gleaming arch, and the girl stiffened, waiting for the blow.
I whispered, “No.”
The god’s sword smashed into my spoken word like it was a shield, and rebounded. Cernunnos jolted back, and for a moment the entire Hunt hesitated. The girl, freed from Cernunnos’s eyes, turned and ran. With precise slowness, Cernunnos transferred his sword from his left hand to his right. He curved the fingers of his left hand down, rubbing them against his palm, and stretched them wide again. Then he lifted his hand, palm up, and looked slowly around with the intent of a deadly, confident predator.
It was suddenly important that I face him before he called me out. I pushed away from my tree root and walked forward, coming into the street ahead of the line of soldiers, who stood still now, remaining arm in arm, waiting and watching. Their healing power still rolled off them, spreading out through the ruined city of Babylon. A wave of fierce protection wrapped around my heart.
Cernunnos watched me silently, fascination visible even in features only half-human. Behind him, the archer and the thick-shouldered rider exchanged glances. The thick-shouldered man smiled before returning his attention to me; the archer nocked an arrow, but didn’t draw. I thought it was rather unsporting of him anyway. I’d seen how fast he could nock an arrow, earlier. It wasn’t like he needed the extra time afforded by doing it now.
“Little shaman,” Cernunnos said. The beautiful voice was harsher now, distorted by the thickened neck and changed vocal cords.
“My lord master of the Hunt,” I replied. The thick-shouldered man did smile at that. Cernunnos did too, a twist of a mouth that had the fullness of the man’s lips pulled into a stunted muzzle, neither human nor animal. He bowed from the waist, a small gesture as impossibly elegant as anything I’d ever seen him do. It wasn’t enough, though, to wipe the blood from the blade he carried. The power I’d borrowed boiled in my belly, asking to be used.
“I hardly expected to see you again, little shaman.”
“I hardly intended to leave you here. This isn’t your place, Cernunnos.”
“Oh, but it is,” he murmured, and lifted his hands, bloody sword in one, to encompass the bleak red sky and the death in the streets. “Look what I have wrought.”
“You marked it. That doesn’t make it yours. Come on, my lord master of the Hunt.” The words sounded like they would if I’d said them to Morrison, full of sarcasm. “Mano a mano, eh? You and me. If you win, I take the child’s place in the Hunt and you ride unbound. If I win, you leave this place now and forever and return to Earth with me.”
“Now and forever?” the god asked, a gleam in his brilliant eyes.
“That remains to be seen,” I said steadily. He lowered his head, ivory horns catching the bloody light, and considered me.
“How did you say it? Mano a mano. So it shall be. I swear it by my name and by my power and once more by my immortal life. Should I lose here to you, nevermore shall the Hunt return to Babylon, and with you we will go, to the place you call Earth.”
I wondered, briefly, what that name he swore by was. It was not, I was sure, Cernunnos. There was something deeper, more private, that he answered to in the most secret part of his soul, and no one else would ever know that name.
Scathing disdain filled Cernunnos’s vivid eyes. My mouth twisted in a smirk. “Don’t have much sense of humor, do you?” I straightened my shoulders. Being a smart-ass might help keep my courage up, but this was important. My heartbeat, steady as the drum, sounded loud in my ears as I spoke. “As you swear it, so shall I, by my name and my power and my all-too mortal life. If I lose to you here, I’ll ride in your missing child’s place, and try no more to bind you.” A constriction came over me as I spoke, a very real compulsion, and it occurred to me once more that I’d gotten in way over my head. There was a proverb about that. Looking and leaping. Maybe someday I’d remember it before I leaped.
God knows what I was expecting. It wasn’t the force of Cernunnos’s will smashing down on me like a hammer, though. My words were still lingering in the air when he hit me, green strength like a mountain coming down. I dropped to my knees, the air crushed from my body, and held onto the contents of my stomach through clenched teeth.
Cernunnos dismounted with predatory grace, stalking toward me across the new cobblestones. I swayed, watching him and distantly remembering the helpless fear in the woman’s face a few minutes ago. I had been here before, weighed down under his power. Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t here this time to haul my ass out of the fire. I was going to have to do it myself. I reached for the internalized strength I’d borrowed from my friends, and hesitated.
Not yet. Cernunnos stopped a few feet away from me, easily within the reach of his sword. “Thou art bold, little shaman,” he murmured. “Foolish, but bold.” He drew the blade back, preparing for a deeply disabling strike. I didn’t think he was going to kill me. Not unless he knew a way to capture a newly released soul, which, now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t put past him. That didn’t make me feel any better.
He lunged forward, and I fell over.
It certainly didn’t have any of the grace the god persisted in showing, but it did get me out of his path without me having to fight off the weight of his power to get up. He stumbled, taken off guard, and I rolled forward, into his legs. Gratifyingly, he lost his balance for a moment. I twisted on my back and drove a booted foot up into his groin.
For one horrible moment Cernunnos stared down at me and I was afraid I might as well have kicked one of the Joshua Spires.
Then he screamed, so deep and angry it twisted my bones. The gray veil that I had willed Babylon behind shivered and faded. Cernunnos flung both hands up, his sword knotted in his fists, and drove it down toward me.
The weight of his power was gone, though, shattered by pain as thoroughly as crystal was by sound. I came to my feet as the sword slammed down into cobblestone. As he began to draw it back out I kicked him in the jaw. He spun around, torso moving faster than his legs, one full turn and an aborted half, just like Charlie Chaplin.
Against all the rules of good sportsmanship, I kicked him while he was down. I caught him one solid blow in the ribs, moving his whole body a few inches, but the second time he caught my foot and twisted it hard to the side. Something that shouldn’t have popped in my knee and I screamed, collapsing almost on top of the god. For a few seconds we lay there, panting at each other. I saw a flash of anger in his eyes.
It was just enough warning to throw up a shield as his power slammed down on me again. This time I could see it, the deep snarling green of his strength pushing at the silver-gray barrier I’d flung up, testing it for weaknesses.
And finding them. Uncertainty, lack of knowledge, simple fear, they were holes I didn’t know how to plug up. Like the Lilliputians with Gulliver, Cernunnos pinned me down through those holes, threading green power into the stone around me. He grinned, feral and strange on the half-animal face, and rolled to his feet, dragging his sword out of the stone.
