Sunrise Lands

All three nodded. The flash of light that wasn't really light-even the blind had seen it-and the intolerable spike of pain felt by every creature on Earth advanced enough to have a spinal cord. And then the world was Changed; explosives no longer exploded, electricity wouldn't flow in metal wires, combustion engines si lently died, nuclear reactors sat and glowed below their meltdown temperatures until the isotopes decayed and became inert. A civilization built on high-energy tech nologies writhed and died as well. There had been little time then for anything but sheer survival, but in all the years since no slightest hint had been found to account for the why of it.

Eventually a few scientists had measured the effects with what crude equipment could be cobbled together within the new limits; all they'd found was how eerily the Change was tailored, to make a generator impossible but leave nerves functioning as they always had. .. and that beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth everything seemed to be proceeding as normal. You couldn't even prove that the Change hadn't happened before. Prior to gunpowder, who would have known? Most of human ity put it down to the will of God, or gods, or the devil; a stubborn minority held out for inscrutably powerful aliens from outer space or another dimension.

"A dome of lights miles high and miles across, and the water boiling around the edge of it, yes," Knolles said in a flat matter-of fact tone. "Multicolored lights, crawling over it like lightning… that's quite definite. We've collected hundreds of testimonies, and found some eyewitness records written down right afterwards, even a photograph or two. I do not believe it is a coin cidence such a thing happened just seconds before the Change."

"So what did they find there, your Bluenose explorers?" Juniper asked.

Nigel could feel the pulse beat faster in the hand he held, and his own matching it. This wasn't just a rumor, that was proof… though of what, only the Powers could say.

Juniper went on: "Not the dome of lights, still there-that we would have heard of. They'd have heard of that in Tibet, sure!"

Knolles turned to his son. The young officer was in the red coated dress uniform into which he'd changed when he shed his armor, but he'd also brought a small rectan gular box pierced with holes from the diplomatic party's baggage. Nigel had assumed it was a gift of some sort.

Now he brought it up from the floor, and folded back the covers around it. A soft crooo-cruuuu came from it, and behind wire mesh strutted a bird, cocking its head at the light and looking with interest at a piece of bread nearby.

Juniper's breath was the first to catch. She'd been a student of the wilds all her life, long before the Change, and had read widely then and since about the life of other lands and times.

It was an unremarkable bird at first glance; a long-tailed pigeon with a bluish-gray head, the back and wings mottled gray with black patches, paler underparts blush red at the throat and fading to rosy cream. The only thing startling about it was the bright red eyes… .

Juniper made a small choked sound, putting her hand to her torc as if the twisted gold were throttling her. Her eyes went wide as she turned to Nigel.

"Do… do you…" she stuttered, something he'd never heard before, her eyes so wide the white showed all around the pale green iris.

"Yes, my dear," he said quietly, and pushed a crust into the cage.

Then he began to smile, joy and awe struggling with natural reserve as the bird pecked. "It's a passenger pigeon."

"What is it, my dear?" Nigel asked sleepily.

"I don't know," Juniper Mackenzie said, sitting up in the bed and reaching for her robe. "But-"

A fist knocked on the door; she turned up the bedside lamp and hurried over. Nigel was on his feet, hand resting inconspicuously on the hilt of the longsword. When she threw open the door a man stood there, white-faced and stuttering.

Nigel's hand closed on the rawhide and-wire binding of the sword hilt. He knew the signs of raw terror.

"Lady Juniper! Sir Nigel! There's been a fight at the Sheaf and Sickle, terrible bad. Folk hurt and killed!"

Sheaf and Sickle I

Willamette Valley, Oregon

Samhain Eve, CY22/2020 A.D.

Juniper Mackenzie pushed through the door into the familiar taproom of the Sheaf and Sickle, the armsmen at her heels; Nigel was outside, seeing to the circuit of the town walls lest any killers still at large try to es cape. She let out a quiet breath of relief at the sight of Rudi standing beside a table where a healer worked; the twins and Mathilda and Odard were nearby, and all five were unhurt. The smells of blood and violent death were there, mingling horribly with the familiar homey scent of the place.

"Well?" she said. "It's a slaughter this is, of my people on my land, and I'd know the meaning of it! It's the Mor rigu and the Wild Huntsman we're dealing with tonight, and no mistake."

Rudi nodded and gave her an account, succinct and neat as his tutors in the arts of war had taught him; she gasped at his account of Saba's death. His mouth tight ened as anger drove the grue of horror out of him. Up stairs Tom and Moira and their close kin were keening their daughter; the muffled sound of the shrieks rose to a crescendo, then died away into rhythmic moans, laden with unutterable grief, before rising again.

"I'm a warrior by trade," Rudi said bitterly. "Saba wasn't. She shouldn't have had to fight her last fight alone. First I couldn't save her husband, and then this… May she forgive me, and speak kindly of me to the Guardians."

"She's with her Raen in the Summerlands, and with all her beloveds," Juniper said quietly, putting an arm around him for a moment.

"I know, Mother. It doesn't make me feel any better, much less her children."

"It isn't meant to," Juniper said, a little ster

He nodded; they couldn't even do that, not being close enough in blood.

"I'm glad we came here, though," he said. "It would have been worse if we'd stayed at Raven House. These dirt were already here, waiting to strike; they might have gotten away over the town wall."

They glanced aside. The healer's lips were pursed in disapproval as she worked at the big dining table; far too many of the i

Most of the rest weren't making themselves useful. Some of the outlanders had even had the nerve to try to demand service from the staff. Rudi looked at Juniper, and she nodded slightly; he made a chopping gesture to his friends.

The twins pushed the crowd back-once by the simple expedient of seizing a man by the elbows and pitching him four feet into the air, to land mostly on his head-and then drew their swords and stood like slender black and silver statues with the points resting on an invisible line across the room, and Odard and Mathilda beside them. Nobody stepped over it; after a moment a few neighbors came to stand around them, glowering at the strangers. Some of the wiser foreigners headed back to their rooms.

That gave them space and time to go view the bodies of the assassins, laid out on tarpaulins. Juniper had never become entirely inured to the sight of violent death, but she could make herself ignore the wounds and the tumbled diminished look of a corpse when she must.

"This is a strange thing, and you're right, my darling one; these weren't bandits; they're too well fed and they've the look of trained men."