No Man’s Land

Prologue

He came out of the Forest at Dunsany Crag as night was falling, stood for a moment looking down into the dale.

The evening sky above was bruising steadily to black.

The winking lights of villages showed like clusters of votive candles across the valley floor.

He heard a dog bark in the distance, the iron clank of a farm gate as it closed.

He breathed deep, as if trying to catch a scent to go with these faint sounds of human habitation.

He shoved the cut-down McCulloch trench gun into the leather sheath across his back.

Relaxed for the first time in what felt like days.

Faint hints of a breeze, spider-walking delicately over his face, almost warm.

This time of year, late spring, trembling on the brink of summer, there was no real wind to speak of up here.

But the trees behind him rustled their branches noisily just the same.

They weren’t happy. They didn’t like what had been done.

He supposed they had a point. The scent of the skogsra was still on his fingers, green and musty as he lifted his right hand to his nose and breathed it in. Wry grin. Tree sprites were picky lovers, but nothing if not passionate once aroused. He was going to be sore down there for a while.

His own gratification aside, he counted it well worth the cost. The child drowsed peacefully in her blanket, pillowed on his shoulder, held firm in the crook of his arm.

Little Ellie Furlough, brought out safe and sound, less than three full days from when her mother first begged him to help, and not a mark on her.

He was proud of that, for all that most of the work had not been his own.

Tree sprites were noted gossips; there was little enough in the Forest they didn’t know about.

After some ribald pillow talk, the skogsra led him straight to the sleeping child, and that was that.

Easy money.

There was a sheep track, unwinding down the slope beside the crag, indistinct in the gloom, but nothing his Forest-sharpened eyes couldn’t handle.

It should get him safely down into the rolling pastures below.

Then it was just a matter of homing in on the nearest of the villages.

He couldn’t recall specific names for any of these places; he wasn’t up this end of the valley that much.

They tended anyway toward uniformity in his mind—modest stone cottages, quiet lanes and infrequent streetlamps, cozy inns and neatly kept market squares.

It didn’t matter. A phone box, a taxicab, he was home and dry.

Behind him, darkness thickened through the Forest, as if massing for one last attempt to drag him back in beneath the trees.

He grinned again, drew the blanket up an inch on the sleeping child’s cheek.

He reached up and touched the worn walnut butt of the McCulloch where it jutted at his shoulder—for luck, for comfort, hard to say which.

He shook off a final reflexive shudder in the broad muscles of his back.

Began a careful descent toward the soft beckon and gleam of the lights below.

—

He found the phone box he wanted easily enough, tucked away in a gloomy corner of the village square, the iron lattice cubicle lit wan yellow from within by the light in its roof.

Like most of its kind this close to the Forest, it had been stripped of all but the faintest flecks of paint.

Naked iron—sign of the times. He dug out a coin, thumbed it through the slot, and hit the button.

Asked the operator to put him through to the Erlsley exchange.

Niamh picked up on the third ring.

“Erl—” Throaty, explosive coughing, swiftly stifled. “Erlsley Bird Cabs.”

“It’s Duncan. I thought you quit the Craven As.”

“So I did.” The lie palpable down the crackly line, even through her soft Irish lilt. “Turns out the first thing that happens when you stop smokin’ is this hackin’ fuckin’ cough comes right back. Had it all day.”

“Thought you were going to the doctor, too.”

She snorted. “Sure, I’m made of money, Duncan. It’s just a fuckin’ cough.”

“All right. Listen, I’m out at”—he bent and peered out of the phone box, found the village sign—“Kettley Cross, looks like. I got her.”

“You got her? That’s—two days, Duncan! That’s got to be some kind of record, is it not? How in the name of Mother Mary did you—”

“Believe me, you’ll not want to know. Can you send someone?”

“Sure. Kettley Cross. Gonna be a while before they arrive; that’s way out west. But I can get one of the Holden Bridge drivers to cover it for us. Anything he should bring? You need a doctor?”

“No. We’re all good. Quick as you can, though.”

“Oh, and here I was thinking I’d let it lie for a couple of hours. It’s me, Duncan! You gonna wait there by the box?” She coughed again. Stifled it again. “Like I said, it could be a while.”

“No, there’s an inn across the street here, Man of Oak. Tell the driver I’ll be inside.”

“Got it.” She rang off.

He replaced the black Bakelite receiver, looked at it pensively. Despite everything, scrying had never been his thing. He sometimes got flashes, had learned not to trust them too much.

But that cough sounded bad.

He shouldered his way out of the phone box, pushing the stiff iron hinges on the door with an effort, trying not to bump the sleeping child in the crook of his arm.

Maybe that was what distracted him, or maybe just the lingering concern about Niamh and her—

“Hoy, Treefuckah!”

Duncan whipped about, hand raised to the butt of the McCulloch at his shoulder.

The insult had come crisp and clear through the evening quiet, but there was no disguising the otherworldly melodic chime of the voice.

He took a careful step away from the iron comfort of the phone box, just enough room to draw the trench gun in a hurry if he needed to.

Because now, almost certainly, he’d need to.

High musical laughter, pattering ghostly across the deserted market square.

“And look at that—he can dance, too,” said the voice. “Aren’t we lucky?”

Huldu.

They were perched at random across the square, five of them, like man-sized roosting vultures made of moonlight and tinsel shards.

He clocked and counted them with speed born of long, grim custom.

Two on the drystone wall that led in from the lane; one on the driver’s bench of a horseless dray parked by the Man of Oak—neatly blocking Duncan’s way to the inn door; one on a low cottage rooftop; and one, as if to make a point, on the tall, brand-new sandstone war memorial cross in the center of the square.

It was the one on the cross who had spoken.

The one with rank, the one with the most voluminous glimmering robes hanging about his ivory-pale flanks. The one now grinning a thin-lipped, wolfish grin full of sharper-than-human teeth.

Duncan nerved himself up. Flexed the fingers of his right hand, preparatory.

Perhaps seeing this, the Huldu leader rose on his perch with a full-body shudder, sprang lightly down from the war memorial, and landed in a crouch.

He straightened up in front of the engraved names of the fallen, adjusted his robes with mannered care—it was like watching someone wrap themselves in the emptied-out fragments of a thousand smashed kaleidoscopes.

He squared his shoulders and slowly raised his head.

Six foot six, maybe closer to seven. Muscled like an Olympic swimmer.

Eyes like pitch with a tiny candle glimmering in the depths of each one, moonlight thrown back from the mirror black.

The stare was meant to paralyze with fear.

He ambled toward Duncan like the promise of death.

“You have something of ours there, I believe.”

“Certainly do.” Duncan reached up and cleared the McCulloch from its sheath—single unhurried pull, soft strop of it leaving the leather. He pointed the gun, one handed. “Small grape, unrefined iron load, eight balls. Where do you want them, Fae?”

The Huldu stopped dead. The grin turned upside down, the fangs gritted.

“That’s better,” Duncan said. “Now suppose you fuck off.”

“We are five, Treefucker. And you are one.”

“Makes no difference.” Duncan willed his voice not to tremble. “I don’t know how fast your pals are, but it won’t matter to you. You’ll be down and screaming with your guts torn out.”

“Is that so, mortal?”

“Count on it. And I’ll be sure and put the second shot right through your fucking skull. That’s a stone promise. You want to die, immortal?”

The Huldu shifted on their perches, exchanged glances with each other behind their leader’s back. Something rustled among them. Duncan hoped it was fear. He could just about work the pump action on the McCulloch once without dropping Ellie Furlough, but if it came to a real fight…

The Huldu’s leader hissed, like the world’s biggest, angriest black cat.

“I don’t think you realize who I am,” he snarled.

“I don’t care who you are.” Duncan reaching now for the old rage, feeling how it fueled him, how it fed cold iron into his voice. “I hate your whole fucking species, pal. It doesn’t matter to me which ones I send back to the Gray. And it might as well be you tonight, so give me a fucking reason!”

The shouted words hung in the air like smoke.

And now he was shaking; he couldn’t help it.

Ellie Furlough stirred and frowned in her sleep, snuffled and burrowed closer into Duncan’s shoulder.

But she didn’t wake. The Huldu leader’s gaze glittered as it switched from his confrontation with Duncan to the toddler’s sleeping face.

“Oh, you hate us, yes, how you hate us.” It came out a sibilant whisper. “But I see that hasn’t stopped you taking our culture when it suits you.”

“This?” Duncan tipped his chin down at Ellie. “This is a curative, a resting glamour. Learn ’em from any woodswoman or witch in the county.”

“Yes.” The Fae leader’s eyes seemed to kindle with tiny flames. “And where do you think your woodswomen found their magic in the first place? Where do you think they went, like bitches in heat, to suck and fuck and be paid in kind for their whoring?”

High chimes of laughter once again from the other Huldu, like shards of stained glass, falling and shattering. But Duncan knew a climbdown when he saw one. The relief coursed through him, hot as fresh piss.

He kept his face stone.

“That is none of my concern,” he said.

“Well, this little squealer”—the Huldu reached out toward Ellie’s sleeping head with one pale long-taloned hand; the hunger in his elfin face was terrifying—“was also none of your concern. And yet you saw fit to interfere and take her from us.”

Duncan’s forearm was starting to ache from the strain of holding up the McCulloch with just one hand.

“It’s what they pay me for,” he said.

“Pay!” The Huldu spat out the word. “Tree thief, in your whole pathetically short life, they couldn’t pay you enough to cross me. You made a grave mistake tonight. You fell into a trap.”

“You going to talk all night, Fae? Here she is. Come and get her.”

Small silence and stillness in the air between them now—as if the whole village square and the confrontation in it had become a daguerreotype of times past, silvery and smudged and hung to be peered at on some drawing room wall. The Huldu leader drew in breath across his teeth. He shook his head.

“No. We’ve had our fun. For now. But mark this, tree thief—the next time someone asks you to set foot in the Forest and bring back some pretty little brat we took a shine to, understand that you are known and marked.

That we have found you, and now our eye is on you.

Your time is ending, Duncan Silver.” The Huldu leaned in a little, the fanged grin came out again.

“Or should I call you Master Duncan of Stac Dubh?”

The daguerreotype, bleaching out, protective glass shattering…

The mansion—crashing into his mind—blond sandstone Victorian grandeur, four stories tall with the cupola, neatly kept lawns and graceful sweep of gravel drive, architectural statement and testimony to an age now renounced.

He sees the wooded rise of the Munro behind, the peak set against a torn and tarnished silver evening sky, a light on in the window of his third-floor room…

It was an image so rock solid it could only have been summoned by glamour. Pulled hard from his memories by the creature in front of him, given fresh life in both their mind’s eyes.

Like a storm wind howling through his head…

Duncan pulled the trigger on the McCulloch without a second thought.