Ink & Sigil

by Kevin Hearne

  “A fucking leprechaun?” Buck cried out in disbelief. And then the blighter was pummeling him and cackling madly, blue eyes blazing underneath an unruly mop of red hair.

  The large brute charged me as the drunkard clambered unsteadily to his feet. I saw the anvil of a fist coming my way and did my best to roll with it since I couldn’t avoid it, for all the good it did me. It cracked my ribs despite the Ward of Kinetic Denial applied to my coat—I felt them break—and sent me flying to crash some distance away.

  When you see that sort of thing happening in movies—stuntmen and actors flying on wires and brittle sugar plaster breaking behind them on impact—it makes you think flesh and bone will somehow win out over masonry. But it doesn’t. I fell on the brick of the ramp, and it hurt like hell.

  Kinetic wards can stop most anything if you have enough of them layered on top of you to do so. Coriander is famous for being untouchable in combat. But while the simple ward I’d crafted took some of the sting away, it couldn’t match the force behind that fist.

  “Haw!” the big bastard barked at me, pulling back his hood so I could see his gruesome nightmare of a smile. There were gaps in the teeth and maybe some bits of flesh trapped between them. “Trollskin wards won’t protect you from me!”

  “No, I guess they wouldnae,” I admitted. For the speaker was in fact an actual troll, the kind that used to guard bridges and terrorize travelers with their threats of violence and inevitably foul breath. They were thick enough in the head that most sigils wouldn’t work on them. Might as well try to hack the brain of a rock. But a ward made in part from a troll wouldn’t affect a troll at all. I was lucky he hadn’t put his whole fist through my torso.

  Bastille had been smart to send a troll to confront a sigil agent. I didn’t have a lot of options, and that fist was coming back for an encore.

  Something tore inside as I rolled away from another hammer blow. The troll grunted as his knuckles smashed into the stones, but more out of frustration than pain.

  I gasped and wheezed as I scrambled to my feet, trying to think of some way to defeat the monster and coming up blank. I backed away in an effort to put some space between me and those fists and saw that the clurichaun had lost what little patience he had. He was standing knock-kneed and attempting to figure out how to make the gun in his hand work, shaking it and peering at it.

  “Gonna kill ye,” he promised. “Shoon ash I can figger out thish fucking ting.”

  Thank the gods for safeties, I suppose. My ward wouldn’t stop bullets any better than a troll fist.

  Buck and the leprechaun were biting and snarling and rolling around, each trying to get advantage on the other and failing, while they shouted grave insults about the sexual predilections of their close relations.

  I thought my only chance was to help him out. If I could get the leprechaun or the clurichaun to retreat, perhaps the troll would go with them. There was nothing I could do to him at this point except get out of his way.

  So when he charged me again, I charged back, which he had not expected. He tried, belatedly, to adjust, but I pitched forward into a somersault, ribs grinding as I rolled between his legs and came up with nothing between me and the clurichaun but the shards of bottles thrown down on the dock by sozzled twats like him.

  He saw me coming, and his eyes flicked over my shoulder, where the troll was no doubt turning around and reacquiring his target. All the clurichaun had to do was stand his ground long enough for the troll to catch up. I raised my cane in an obviously telegraphed swing that he could easily duck, but it was all a feint. As I began to bring it around, he planted his feet and ducked, and that is when I teed off and punted him in the privates.

  He curled inward with a noise somewhere between a gasp and a moan and toppled over, dropping the gun to cradle his bruised bollocks with both hands. I gave the side of his head a good whack with the cane to concuss him as I passed, then scooted sideways toward Buck and the leprechaun to make sure the troll couldn’t zero in on me.

  Twirling the cane once, I whipped it around at the leprechaun. It caught him on the back, and he cried out and disengaged from Buck before I could do it again. He scarpered away to regroup, cursing all the while, leaving a bloody hobgoblin behind. I caught his gaze and lifted an eyebrow.

  “Can ye pluck out an eye for me?” I asked, and he grinned with bloody teeth before disappearing with a small pop of displaced air.

  Another pop announced his appearance above and in front of the troll’s head, where he simply thrust three stiff fingers into the ugly brute’s eye before dropping to the ground. Not so much plucking but effectively blinding.

  The troll roared as he clutched at it, black blood fountaining from the wound, but it wasn’t long before his remaining good eye searched for us.

  That shouldn’t have happened. We should have gotten a good thirty seconds of cursing and bellowing before he thought seriously about striking back. Trolls were not normally so focused, and neither were clurichauns or leprechauns. Nor were any of them in the habit of working together. Everything about the encounter was wrong. With my internal injuries, I wasn’t prepared to extend this, and I wouldn’t be getting any answers anyway, so I suggested to Buck that we leave while we could. He had a bloody nose and split lip and assorted other cuts. No one was going to go home pretty; simply making it home was the best possible outcome.

  While the leprechaun and clurichaun were content to watch us scramble for the gate, the troll voiced a loud objection and lurched after us. He realized after a few steps he’d be too slow to catch us, so he threw something he’d picked up at my legs—I don’t know what, but it tripped me up like a baton suddenly stuck in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

  My ancient carcass smacked into the pavement again.

  As a rule, pensioners don’t like falling down. Ask any of them. It hurts.

  Senior citizens traveling at high speed with broken ribs really, really don’t like it.

  I made noises like the clurichaun did when I dropped him, the pain too much for me to muster anything more. Buck paused and looked back at me, the troll roaring in triumph and his heavy footfalls growing closer. I pleaded with my eyes for the hobgoblin to do something to save us, because I’d clearly not come prepared to take out a troll.

  “Come on, MacBharrais,” he said, his pink hand clutching my shoulder, and then that strange popping noise happened again, my stomach flipped like it does when a lift descends too quickly, and we weren’t at the ferry docks anymore but sprawled in an alley that I bet wasn’t far away. The troll’s roar of frustration could still be heard, albeit at a volume that reassured me he wasn’t in easy striking distance.

  “That’s it,” Buck said, collapsing near my head. “I’m out of juice, boss. That was the meanest leprechaun I’ve ever met. Strongest too.”

  I groaned and rolled gingerly onto my back. I fished out a couple of prepared sigils from an interior pocket and checked to make sure they were the right ones. I handed one of them to Buck and began to reach for my phone, but it felt too far away, and it would be too much effort in my condition. I spoke aloud instead.

  “Pop the seal on that and look at it.”

  “Wot is it?”

  “Healing sigil.” I said no more but popped the seal on mine and felt the first soothing bliss of my brain pumping happy dope into my system. There would be magic following close behind, but I doubted I’d remain conscious for any of it.

  We’d gotten our arses kicked and learned absolutely nothing about Bastille except that he had powerful friends and a drunk faery on his payroll who didn’t know how to fire a weapon.

  Water bears are micro-animals that have survived pretty much all the mass extinctions and will probably survive us too. Lots of folks call them tardigrades, because that is in fact what they’re supposed to be called. But I have always preferred the colloquial name for them, since I conflate
the word tardigrades with the time my secondary school English teacher took three months to grade my essay on Hemingway’s festering misogyny and simply wrote Indeed! in the margins.

  They look like telescoping donuts, or maybe ravenous swimming penises, with eight chubby legs and claws. They’re only half a millimeter long when they’re full grown, and they can be found snacking on most mosses and lichens. That makes them extraordinarily easy to find in Scotland, since you can grow moss and lichen on most surfaces without even trying, but I require a large number of them for any ink used in healing sigils. A full teaspoon. And they are pure hell to separate out from the moss and lichen. Half a millimeter or less, remember, and squishy. Your typical tweezers aren’t going to do the job, except to mash their wee guts into the moss.

  To be truthful, you can’t really get hold of enough of them in a reasonable amount of time without the help of a Druid or the Tuatha Dé Danann. They can bind a load of them together and collect a teaspoon without harming them. But neither Druids nor members of the Tuatha Dé Danann are readily available for such work. It makes crafting those inks near impossible unless you know someone who can help. Which is, of course, the point. Brighid doesn’t want just anyone making healing sigils and curing themselves of diseases and wounds that are only doing their jobs at culling the population. She wants such magic available to only those few mortals who have labored on her behalf.

  Which was why, when I was an apprentice, I spent nine days cursing as I scraped off moss and tried to collect a teaspoon of the little bastards, before I got some help. The key was that they had to be alive all at once, and it took so long to get any that by the time I’d gotten enough at the end of the week, the ones at the beginning of the week had died. I was trapped in a hell of water-bear collection.

  And then Coriander came to me and introduced his glorious self. He gave me a small bottle with more than enough.

  “You needed to learn how difficult it is to collect this ingredient,” he said, “before we simply gave it to you. Proceed to make your ink and draw your healing sigils in advance. If you ever wind up needing them, you probably won’t be able to draw them on the spot.”

  That was excellent advice.

  Someone shook me awake and my eyes opened on daylight. A familiar voice said, “It’s the polis,” and an unfamiliar one said, “Are ye all right, sir?”

  Blinking, I sat up and squinted up at a florid constable staring down at me. I nodded at him, but he wasn’t satisfied.

  “What are ye daein’ in this alley with this, uh…this person?”

  “That’s right, I’m a person,” Buck affirmed. “Well spotted.”

  I pointed first to my mouth and then made a slashing motion at my throat to indicate I couldn’t speak.

  “Oh, ye cannae tell me? Well, let’s see. Ye’re covered in blood, and it might no be yours. In the interest of public safety, I should probably find out whose it is and how it got there. So I’m givin’ ye both a free ride to the station so we can sort it out. Come on, let’s go.”

  I nodded and rose to my feet, noting that my ribs still ached but there wasn’t the sharp bright pain I’d experienced last night.

  We didn’t have a good explanation for our appearance, of course, and I didn’t want to create any kind of incident report. I pulled out my sigils of authority on the goatskin and flashed them at the constable. When his eyes focused on them, I said, “Walk away and forget about us.”

  He blinked and did precisely that.

  “When do I get some o’ those sigils, then?” Buck asked. “Tae aid me in the performance of ma duties, y’know, workin’ the will of MacBharrais on the world?”

  I quirked an eyebrow and pulled out my phone. [You’re never getting these. You’d tell humans to jump in the Clyde.]

  “Well, maybe, but only for a laugh. I’d never do it maliciously.”

  [The distinction hardly matters.]

  “What now?”

  [Haggis, neeps, and tatties. I’m hungry. How about you?]

  “Sure, I could eat. Probably wash up. That healing sigil closed up the cuts, but I feel like a mess. Home, then?”

  [No, the office. There’s a kitchen and washroom in the basement.] I also needed to draw some more sigils, and most of my rare inks were there. And it was past time to contact the other sigil agents; they needed to know what was going on.

  We hopped onto the train at Garscadden station and pretended not to notice people staring at us. They were interested in either my mustache or Buck’s strangeness. I imagined they weren’t sure he was quite human, but while they had no problem staring at him, they were too polite to question his origins out loud. Or maybe they were just worried about the dried blood and dirt all over him. Much of it was his, but some of it was no doubt the leprechaun’s.

  When we got off at High Street not far from my shop, I made sure to compliment him.

  [That was good fighting last night. Thanks for getting us out of there.]

  Buck snorted. “I suppose it was good in the sense that we’re still walking around afterward. But I have no had ma arse kicked that badly in a long time.”

  [Have you fought leprechauns before?]

  “Aye. That one wasnae normal. Sumhin different about him. Maybe he just inhaled a barrel of amphetamines on the ferry over, but I think he was different in a permanent way, if ye know what I mean. He’s been…altered.”

  Thinking of my conversation with Saxon Codpiece regarding the idea that someone was performing experiments on the Fae, I nodded and typed in a question. [Did the clurichaun and troll seem altered as well?]

  My hob shrugged. “Dunno, MacBharrais. I didnae have a square go with them like with the leprechaun. The clurichaun was as drunk and daft as the rest of his kind. If the troll was juiced up, it didnae help out his eye, y’know?” I simply nodded, and Buck continued in a quieter voice. “I know he was yer apprentice, but I’m doubly glad Gordie’s deid. I wouldnae want tae be handed over to that lot last night. Bloody horrors, so they were. Like clowns and cauliflower.”

  [Like what, now?]

  “Nothing. Recurring nightmare.”

  My receptionist, known to everyone except customers as Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite, was cool and professional when we entered the office and greeted us like nothing was unusual at all about me walking in with a bloody hobgoblin. It was that utter unflappability that distinguished Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite from all other Gladyses in the world. She has greeted everything from deities to demons with the same cool professionalism, and I suspect that she may also be immortal and invincible but simply left those facts off her CV when I hired her. She always dressed in conservative tweeds, her grey hair pinned up on the sides, and peered over her desk through a pair of bright-red horn-rimmed glasses. That grey hair, though—plenty of it actually white—was not an indicator of her age. Her face somehow retained the wrinkle-free skin of youth. I judged her age to be anywhere between thirty and three thousand and knew better than to ask, because she had been referred to me by Coriander and if she wasn’t Fae she was something else more than human. According to her official papers, however, she was Canadian.

  [Morning, Gladys. Coffee on downstairs?]

  “Yes, Mr. MacBharrais. I believe there’s some Danish out too if you’re hungry.” Her pleasant alto came with a Nova Scotia accent and she knew I liked it whenever she pronounced out like oat, so she usually left something out in the downstairs kitchen just so she’d have a reason to say it in the morning. Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite is simply the best. “Do you require anything for your guest?”

  [No, but thanks. This is Buck. You’ll be seeing him around from now on.]

  “Welcome, Buck.”

  My hobgoblin surprised me and bowed. “Thank ye, Gladys. It’s an honor tae meet ye.”

  I thought we’d slipped downstairs to the employee area unnoticed, but my manager found
me after a few minutes, obviously looking for me, because she called my name as she clomped down the stairs.

  “Al? Ye down here? Fucking hell, what is that?”

  The wedding finery was gone. Nadia was in high goth metal that day, her strip of hair spiked and the rest of her attire following the pointy theme. She had a choker on her neck with chrome spikes radiating out from it, a black vinyl corset that descended into a wide studded belt, and a filmy coal-black tutu over jet leggings that disappeared into chunky leather boots with silver buckles and three more dangerous spikes on the toes. She also wore black studded bracers and finger gloves with pointed studs on the knuckles. Yesterday’s red fingernails were black again, but they had a glossy sheen to them that meant it was a color called Negative Sun rather than Satan’s Blackest Hole. I am an expert on black nail polish, thanks to Nadia.

  I had ignored the Danish left out in favor of making a fry-up on the stove and put down the spatula to type a reply. [It’s breakfast.]

  Nadia pointed at Buck standing on the break room table and chugging a beer he’d purloined from the fridge.

  “No, Al, I mean who is this wee pink man covered in blood and shite who’s drinking ma beer? And am I gonnay have tae be seen with him? Because ma family is no gonnay believe anything I say about his existence or why I’m anywhere near him.”

  [We haven’t worked out protocols yet. But this is Buck. Buck, this is Nadia.]

  “Buck who?”

  [Buck Foi.]

  “Are ye joking?”

  [No. Why?]

  “Because it’s Fuck Boi with the initials switched, Al! How did ye no notice this?”

  [I suppose I’m old enough not to give a toss. If he wants to be called Buck Foi, that’s his name.] I noticed Buck trying to suppress a fit of giggling and largely failing as I typed. [That doesn’t mean he’s not a bawbag, though.]

  “I am also his hobgoblin n’ that,” Buck added. “As of last night.”