He raised the cup, and light flowed out like spilled wine, and the irks raised a great shout, and all the Outwallers too, and the high-pitched war cry ripped out into the night.
‘Now drink and dance!’ Tapio said. ‘Those are my only commands.’
The wreckage of the hall was fitting tribute to the finest revel Bill Redmede had ever witnessed, or joined, and he himself was almost too drunk to care what happened under the table, behind the tapestries, or on the dais at the head of the hall.
Bess reached out to a beauty – a fair irk woman with a slim figure and a halo of golden hair – and the woman caught her hands and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Child of man.’ She laughed. ‘You taste better than I’d imagined. A bright Yule to you and your mate.’
Bess curtsied. ‘You are all so beautiful!’ she breathed. ‘Where are the hideous irks? The ugly faces and the fangs?’
The irk maid passed her silver fan over her face and there she was, a glowering hag with a nose six inches long and warts with hair. ‘Would you go to war dressed for a party?’ she asked. ‘Or to a party, dressed for war?’ she asked, and her face returned to its elfin beauty. ‘I have as many faces to wear as a child of man has dresses. Fair is fair,’ she added, and kissed Redmede until his head spun. The irk maid spun away on light feet. ‘Your mouths are rich, children of men. Be love!’
And later still, when only a hardy few eaters were picking the bones of a deer carcass on the centre table, and a hundred faeries flitted high in the cavernous ceiling, leaving streamers of pale fire as they moved, and half the hall was dancing and the other half was singing or playing instruments – hautboys, sackbuts, and corinettos and oboes and recorders and whistles and lutes and harps and a hundred stringed instruments that Bill Redmede had never seen before – some very small, or possessing just two or three strings, so that the vast cavern that was the Faery Knight’s hall seemed to move with the dance – then Mogon came and squatted on her haunches by him.
‘The time is now,’ she said. ‘This is a magic time. The aethereal is wide open to the real. Thorn will be blind as a bat, and without high-pitched sounds to help him, and all his little helpers will be deaf until morning.’
Nita Qwan, the Sossag, was resting under the table on the trestle. He emerged with a flagon of Yule ale. Redmede worried briefly what the Outwaller had seen – he and Bess had been a little busy.
‘May I see Lord Tapio now?’ he asked Mogon.
Mogon nodded. ‘You’ll see him, as he invites you.’
Nita Qwan and Redmede bowed to their companions – those still upright – and followed the Duchess through the hall. The great warden danced among the dancers, passing light-footed through the intricate whorls and turns of a hundred couples and two different figures.
At the back of the hall hung a tapestry of a unicorn, done in white spider’s web on a tissue of spider silk by a thousand faeries. It was so light that it fluttered in the breeze and so vivid that Redmede expected the unicorn to move.
They passed behind it, and the tapestry blocked all sounds – and light. The reverse showed the same unicorn, but with the image turned.
They walked through a broad cavern lit with torches, and into another, and then came to a heavy oak door with decorations wrought in bronze – half moons and stars and comets. Mogon rapped it smartly, and it opened.
Inside was a room that might have been at home in any lord’s castle – the whole panelled in old oak, with oak table and chairs and great bronze candlesticks. A fire roared in a huge fireplace that filled one wall – a sorcerous fire, white and blue, and the walls were hung with armour and weapons. And heads. Two Wyverns, a dozen great beasts, an unidentifiable monster – and rows of human heads.
Bill Redmede was arrested by the heads.
‘Welcome, fair guessstsss.’ Tapio put a hand under Redmede’s elbow and seated him at the great table. And then he went around. ‘Lord Geraaargkh of the Blueberry Moeity, who comes as the Steward of the Adnacrag Bears. Mogon, Duchess of the Western Lakes, and Lady of the Wardens of the Wild. Tekksimark, Marquis of Mound Five and representative of one hive of the Western Boglins. Nita Qwan, for the Sossag – and perhaps for other Outwaller men, as well. Bill Redmede for the Jacks, and perhaps for other men in Alba and the east.’
There was a sudden, polite babble of complaint – Bill Redmede didn’t feel he held any remit to speak for men, nor did Nita Qwan, and Tekkismark chittered animatedly that his hive was one of the smallest.
Tapio swept out an arm in a magnificent gesture. ‘I agree that none of us can actually speak for a race. Nonetheless, it is time to act, and when they make songs of us, we will stand for our peoples.’ He frowned. ‘If any songs are made in the days to come.’
Mogon showed her long pink tongue and a smell of burning soap filled the air. ‘You are too dramatic, my friend,’ she said. ‘No matter who wins, there is always someone to make songs.’
Tapio’s frown turned to a smile. ‘Tamsin and I will have to stand for the irks, although no two Eld folks agree on anything from the best wine to the best way to kiss a mortal.’ He sat, his deerskin shirt glowing from the odd fire. ‘I agree that while an irk lives, someone will be making songs.’ He crossed his legs – his legs which were longer than any mortal’s. His hose were of deer-skin. ‘But we are not here to talk about the vagaries of art, are we? Some of you are already engaged in war, or near war, with Thorn. Others of you are as yet undecided – indeed, one of you is only just discovering the purpose for which we have gathered.’
‘What is that purpose?’ demanded Tekkismark.
‘We are here to bring about the defeat of the entity known as Asssh, currently posssesssing the sssorcerer Thorn.’
The bear growled, then sat back – a very human gesture as it tucked its big arms behind its head. ‘What is possessing, in this context?’ he asked with a rumble like a cat’s purr.
Mogon leaned forward. ‘Possession is against the Law.’
Tapio shrugged. ‘Isss it? ’ he hissed. ‘And when doesss Asssh ressspect the Law? ’
Bill Redmede leaned forward, looked at Nita Qwan and met the same incomprehension in his blank stare, and turned to Tapio. ‘Lord – who is Ash? What does he have to do with Thorn? What is he to me?’
Nita Qwan nodded his agreement. ‘And of what law do you speak?’ he asked.
Tapio exchanged a long look with Mogon. Geraaargkh took his clawed paws from behind his head and turned his glistening black eyes on the two men. ‘Trust two men not to know the Law.’
Mogon shook her great head. ‘Why? We take care that they do not learn too much of the Law of the Wild, even when they have lived among us for fifty generations, like the Sossag.’ She paused, and the spines on her head raised, the whole crest coming erect with a snap. ‘The Law prevents us from destroying each other in times of drought and famine. It was formulated long ago when the first human sorcerers began to manipulate the elements in a way that we had not foreseen.’
‘How long ago?’ Nita Qwan asked.
Tapio rubbed his bare chin. ‘Nine thousand years, as men count time.’ He looked at Mogon, who shrugged.
‘There was no time, before men came,’ Mogon said. ‘It is pointless to count the time since, merely to satisfy the ignorance of men.’
‘There was a great war, that covered all the earth,’ Tapio said very quietly.
‘Men against the Wild?’ Redmede heard himself ask. He put a hand over his own mouth.
‘No,’ Mogon said. She stared into the fire. ‘Not at all.’