Page 42 of Fortune's Blade

“We’ll have help,” Mircea said, and then we were swamped.

But not by the fey.

A dozen old cars suddenly appeared, their butts sticking out of the sand like the boulders at Stonehenge. One was close enough that I could see myself in its rusted fender; others were scattered about haphazardly—and uselessly, as they did nothing to the approaching throng except to confuse it. They confused me, too, as they had literally appeared out of thin air.

But not Marlowe, it seemed.

He was staring around wildly, and then at Mircea. “Is she—”

“Yes.”

“Then why doesn’t she shift us bloody well out?”

“Her power is tied to Earth. It works only intermittently here, when the distant portal churns to the location of our world. And even then, what she can do is limited.”

“Wait,” Ray said. “The Pythia is here? That’s who you’re talking about, right? Is she here?”

Nobody answered him, or even acknowledged that he had been talking. And neither did I, although that was due to having to fight off an attack by three trolls, which I did by turning my weapon on them. They dove into the still churning sand, a line of which glassed over top of them, and I punched another in the face who had thrown himself at me while I was distracted.

“So, tell her to get us as close to the damned portal as she can and we’ll run for it!” Marlowe yelled, slamming his elbow back into an ogre who had just grabbed him over the top of a rusted-out Chrysler. “Or just out of the damned arena!”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Mircea said, knocking two more ogres’ heads together.

“Then how does it work?”

Like that, I thought, as a path was quickly formed for us toward the distant royal box by what looked like the contents of an entire junkyard. I did not understand how, but everything but the kitchen sink was being thrown onto either side of a slender alleyway. That included old stoves, bedsteads, couches and refrigerators; a mountain of old tires that bounced everywhere; giant coils of barbed wire, rusty and looking like colossal tumbleweeds; more cars, none of which appeared to be in drivable condition; heaps of scrap metal; and a combine tractor.

And a kitchen sink, which landed in front of us as we started to run, causing me to have to jump over it at the last second.

The fey were not so lucky, and I saw several of them go down under the weight of dressers with cracked laminate, broken mirrors, an old treadmill, a hail of moldy bricks big enough to have built a house, and a rusted-out school bus painted a bilious green. None of these things were whole, and some of them were as mangled as if the giant himself had been chewing on them. And I belatedly realized what my father had meant about the Pythia’s power “not working that way”.

I had faced her in battle once, the chief seer for the supernatural world, and although the memory was hazy, I recalled clearly how easily she had evaded my attempts on her life. She had a power I did not understand, one allowing her to move from place to place without covering the ground in between, a shocking sort of magic even to me who had seen many. But it was usable only when the portal they must have come through flashed by Earth in its churning, ever changing rotation.

And if she attempted to move something here and was cut off when the portal changed to a new location . . .

Well, that happened.

I stared at what looked like a modern sculpture made out of metal as I passed by, but which had probably been another car at one point in time. But it was honestly hard to tell. The piece looked like it had been turned inside out and then . . . scattered, for lack of a better term.

A headlight, just the one, resided atop a long stalk of strained steel, like an eye on top of an alien creature. A fender had feathered into a thousand tiny filaments that blew and chimed softly on the breeze. A door and what might have once been the front windshield had blended, to the point that it looked like the glass had been smeared by metal, or perhaps the other way around.

I couldn’t tell anymore; I just did not want to have the same thing happen to me.

And I supposed that Marlowe felt the same, because I saw him staring about, too, and he did not ask again.

But some things got through unscathed, including a boat. It was a smaller type used for fishing, but its holey hull still seemed to enrage the fey that it fell on, who busted through the side a moment later with a sword in both hands. I blasted him back into the darkened recesses with my spear, because he was one of the huge troll/ogre hybrids and I did not feel like fighting another of those. It worked, but when a regular ogre jumped for me a moment later, the staff did nothing but sputter at him.

So, I bashed him in the face with it, instead.

“Augghhhh, augghhhh, you bastards!” Marlowe was screaming, while staggering under the weight of half a dozen fey.

I pulled several off him as we ran, and Ray grabbed another, a rabid-looking brownie, who did not appear to have expected fangs. He had been making up for what he lacked in size with magic, but he lost his nerve when Ray grabbed his bag of tricks away and snarled at him. And Marlowe managed to clear the rest on his own, while still running.

And then he and Mircea were throwing the rusty pieces we had been provided with at the fey, attempting to keep the corridor ahead of us clear.

They were doing a good job.

A heavy-duty hubcap bashed a troll in the face, and despite the fact that he was another hybrid, hit hard enough to throw him off his feet. A second later, Mircea had the creature’s weapon and was laying waste with it, sending lightning bolts into the sides of the makeshift tunnel, much of which was made out of metal. That sent a load of fey vibrating and then falling backward off the top, although it did not do much to those who had already jumped down in front of us.

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