Ink & Sigil

by Kevin Hearne

Nadia’s jaw dropped and she looked to me for confirmation. I nodded and said, [He’s supposed to stay out of your way.]

  My manager did not think that point could be emphasized enough. “Aye, wee man, you do that. Ye come at me and ye’ll leave with missing body parts.”

  “Well, hello there,” he said.

  “I don’t say hello tae bastards who boost ma beer. Ye want tae get along with me, ye’ll replace that and then some.”

  Buck wisely checked with me to see if she was serious.

  [I’d do it. I may have neglected to mention last night that Nadia is a battle seer.]

  Those perfect teeth flashed at me. “Naw! For reals, ol’ man? A battle seer? I’m gonnay have tae confirm that.”

  Before I could warn him again—I had warned him against messing with her—he dropped the empty beer can, belched, and popped off the table with his little disappearing trick. Nadia, who was standing just inside the doorway leading to the stairs, took one step forward and spun, throwing her fist into empty space. Except when it got to the space where her head had been, Buck’s face materialized and promptly got crunched with her studded knuckles. He grunted and crashed to the foot of the stairs, his nose broken and perhaps a tooth knocked loose as well.

  “Is that confirmation enough, ya wanker?” she said, and was satisfied with a weak moan in reply. She nodded once and turned to me, hooking a thumb in Buck’s direction. “Honestly, Al, I’m no impressed. He’s no very bright, trying to pop behind me like that.”

  [He’s a hobgoblin,] I replied. [They have to learn the hard way sometimes. Come sit for a second, please.]

  Nadia moved forward while I fetched a plate and scooped my fry-up onto it, turning off the stove before joining her at the table.

  “Aw, thanks, Al,” she said, neatly stealing my tomato, which I let happen without comment. “Do I get an explanation, then?”

  Instead of answering, I asked, [How was the wedding?]

  “Auch, it was a nightmare. Surrounded by straight people. Pretending tae be their idea of normal so the bride’s family could feel smug. The worst. Except ma brother was happy and he thanked me at the end for being so kind tae him. And I got the phone number of the hot bridesmaid, just to remind myself that I still got it. How was your night?”

  I shoveled in a mouthful of haggis and typed while I chewed. [Got my arse kicked by a troll and woke up in an alley. Might not have made it without the hob.]

  “So that’s why you’re all askew! Shite. Is the troll still around? Ye want me tae take care of him?”

  I shook my head. [Rematch later. I need you to give me an alibi for the time of Gordie’s death up to when you arrived. The police may come calling.]

  “Ye want to run that program that Codpiece gave us for the security tapes?”

  I gave her a thumbs-up with one hand and ate some more with the other.

  “Awright. But we’ve discussed several items already besides item number one. That will no do.”

  She got a fond smile for that and a gesture to continue. In response, she pulled a rolled piece of paper out of the top of her corset and slid it over to me. It had some numbers on it, respectable ones but less than she was worth, and I wondered when it had become taboo to speak of money out loud. There always seemed to be this business of writing figures down. We could and probably should blame the English.

  Considering what Nadia had already done for me and would continue to do, I pulled out a pen and wrote my counteroffer. Her eyes widened when she saw I’d written a larger instead of smaller figure.

  “What’s this for?”

  [Putting up with my hobgoblin. He’s deathly allergic to iron. I need the iron surfaces covered up as much as possible—especially the stairs and balcony. And thank you very much for wearing gloves with chrome studs on them today. Your steel ones might have killed him with that punch.]

  Nadia turned to gaze with narrowed eyes upon Buck’s prone form. “I might still kill him later if he’s no careful around me.”

  Buck moaned again, and I snorted in amusement. [I think he’ll be careful.]

  “MacBharrais!” he wailed. “Ye got any more o’ those healing sigils?”

  I retrieved one from my coat and handed it to Nadia. A small smile appeared on her face, which was the equivalent of incandescent glee for her, and once she took it she briefly laid her gloved hand on top of mine and squeezed, an admission of genuine affection.

  “Yer a good boss. That number will be fine. And I’ll get on those things for ye.”

  I typed quickly as she rose from her seat, and she waited for me to finish. [I also need a conference call set up with the other sigil agents when I’m done here. Tell them it’s an emergency.]

  “Right.” I kept fueling myself and watched Nadia move over to Buck. She squatted down next to him and held the sigil in his vision.

  “Listen, wee man. Ye made a mistake with me, but it’s easy tae forgive as long as ye learn from it. So can we agree tae this? Ye get me a growler of a very specific craft beer tae replace the can ye stole from me and we’ll start over. We both have work tae do here, and we don’t need bad blood simmering between us.”

  Buck was suspicious. “What’s the craft beer? Something impossible tae find?”

  “Naw, it’s easy. It’s called Drink Beer Hail Satan, and though it’s brewed in Nottingham, they have it right now at Shilling Brewing in town as a guest tap—6.66 percent ABV, of course. It’s a black IPA with blackberries, black currants, and sour cherries.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Yeah? Awright.” Nadia’s hand disappeared into her tutu or something—everything was so black I couldn’t really see if she had a pocket or a hidden belt pack or what, but she produced twenty quid and held it up next to the healing sigil. “In that case, when ye get me a growler, ye can buy yourself one on me.”

  “I was just going tae steal them.”

  “Of course ye were. Still, take it. Buy sumhin else tae make ye smile. Are we good, wee man?”

  “Aye.”

  Nadia handed over the sigil and the money and said she’d be happy to talk more about beer later, but she had to get to work. She took the steps quickly as Buck broke the seal on the sigil and sighed in relief.

  “Where in the nine planes did ye find her?” he asked.

  [An underground fight club. She was destroying men twice her size and using her winnings to pay for college.]

  “So a prizewinning pit fighter was what ye were looking for in a printshop manager?”

  [Precisely. Not the typical inclusion on the CVs of most applicants. But this is not a typical printshop.]

  I finished my breakfast and fried up some more for Buck. [Clean up when you’re finished, then you’d best go get that beer for Nadia. But return as quickly as you can.]

  He grunted around a mouthful of food and I went upstairs to the offices. I told Nadia I was ready for the conference, and she said they’d show up on the monitor in my office.

  The sigil agents came on one at a time, and since we were scattered around the globe it always meant that somebody was going to be sleep-deprived and irritable as a result. In this case, nine A.M. in Glasgow meant the U.S. Eastern time zone was about four A.M. So my colleagues in Philadelphia and Chattanooga would show up last, no doubt, and be in a foul mood.

  Wu Mei-ling in Taipei appeared first, and we politely inquired after each other’s health. She had looked to be in her fifties for about forty years now, a petite woman in a traditional Chinese dress whom I fully expected to outlive the rest of humanity. She had a cup of green tea at hand and radiated calm. A younger, earnest face blinked at me behind her right shoulder.

  “May my apprentice listen in, Al?” she asked, her English only slightly accented. That apprentice would most likely take over Mei-ling’s territory upon her retirement.

  [Forgive me, Mei-ling
, but this particular emergency should be kept between full agents only.]

  She gave the barest nod and then dismissed her apprentice in Mandarin. Said apprentice, a woman who was in her second year of training, bowed and departed.

  Lin Shu-hua was next, dialing in from Melbourne. She had been Mei-ling’s first apprentice and now had an apprentice of her own and an active agency throughout that part of the world. She asked the same question about her apprentice, and Mei-ling answered abruptly in Mandarin, obviating my need to reply.

  Shu-hua was dressed in western men’s clothing, a suit and tie tailored to her size, with her long hair pinned up on top of her head. Like her former master, she had a cup of green tea at hand. Once her apprentice left, she poured more tea from a pot into her cup.

  “Now you’ve got me curious, Al,” she said, her voice lower than Mei-ling’s and speaking English with an Australian accent. “Turning up the dial on the theatrics already.”

  [I wish it was nothing but theatrics,] I typed. [But if it was, I wouldn’t have needed to bother you.]

  Diego Salazar came online next from Chattanooga, knuckling sleep from his eyes and still looking unfairly handsome with a few days’ stubble on his square jaw. When he wasn’t being a sigil agent, he sparked rich fantasy lives by simply walking around town. He dressed sharply as a rule, but at the moment he wore SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and still looked sultry enough to grace the cover of a steamy novel.

  He had a faint Spanish accent I envied, as he hailed originally from El Salvador. “What’s the emergency, Al? I like these conferences better when you’re the one losing sleep.”

  [We’re still waiting on Eli,] I said. [How goes your search for an apprentice?]

  He blew a raspberry and shrugged. “I have a couple of leads. Trying to figure out how to tell them the Fae are real without them pretending to remember something they need to do anywhere else but where I’m at.”

  That had already happened to him a few times. Diego had no problem finding people willing to listen to him, since he had tremendous personal charisma, but when he started speaking of the Fae, they inevitably said they knew he was too good to be true and exited with alacrity. Looking as he did, people were willing to believe a limited number of things about him and fled when he didn’t conform to any of them.

  Chattanooga seemed at first to be an odd location for a sigil agent, but the Fae preferred the Appalachians and Smoky Mountains above all else in the western hemisphere, and he was quite busy as a result. Plus, there were plenty of American Civil War ghosts to contend with. He traveled as needed to handle contracts and disputes with other pantheons in Central and South America.

  Eli Robicheaux finally appeared from Philadelphia, pouring a cup of coffee for himself, which he’d obviously taken time to brew before showing up. He wasn’t in pajamas but wore an old Wu-Tang Clan concert shirt with the sleeves cut off. It was the most casual I’d ever seen him; usually he dressed formally, like me, except better. He was from a large African-American family in Louisiana and most of his relatives were still there, but he had come to Philadelphia for college and got recruited into the world after he stumbled across a ghoul in the Laurel Hill Cemetery and defeated it with his bare hands. He would have died shortly thereafter from the pestilent wounds the ghoul gave him, but the sigil agent he eventually replaced arrived on the scene and healed him. He still had scars on his torso and had nightmares about the undead, but he was the most capable fighter among us.

  “S’up everybody,” he said, his voice a deep bass thrum. “I don’t need my apprentice here, do I? ’Cause it would take him like a half hour to get here.”

  [No, we just need you,] I said. [I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that Gordie is dead.]

  They each expressed dismay at that, and I nodded at their sympathy and well wishes while I typed the rest, holding up my phone when I was ready to hit RETURN so they would know to stop and listen.

  [The worse news is that Gordie was trafficking Fae for some kind of scientific experimentation. I have proof. The person he’s selling them to goes by the name of Bastille. Does that ring any bells for you?]

  I had to catch them up and answer plenty of questions after that, but the takeaway for me was that they didn’t know who Bastille might be and they were as flabbergasted as I was by the concept of trafficking Fae. The truly awkward bit was when I had to broach the subject of Gordie’s illicit knowledge.

  [Gordie somehow knew how to make Sigils of Iron Gall and Dampening Magic and also had the ingredients to make the inks for them. I had not taught him either the sigils or the ink recipes. So my first question is: Did any of you share those with him? And my second is: Have you taught those sigils to your apprentice yet? Answer one at a time, please, beginning with Mei-ling.]

  Wu Mei-ling’s face shifted subtly to hardness. “I did not share them with him, of course. And I just taught the Iron Gall recipe to my apprentice last week, so she could not have passed on the information to him before that.”

  Lin Shu-hua replied that she did not share anything with Gordie and had yet to teach Iron Gall and Dampening Magic to her apprentice. Diego had also not shared them and remarked that he was faintly offended I even needed to ask. Eli’s reply was identical to Shu-hua’s, but he had some extra thoughts to add.

  “Hey, Al, I can see everybody’s being polite here, and I don’t wanna speak for anybody else, but I’m gonna say it for myself: You pissing me off with this. Insinuating we’d break the rules or step over the line like that is messed up. It’s your apprentice who did some shady shit and got killed, and then you wanna come at us like it’s our fault? Step back, man.”

  [My apologies, Eli, and everyone. I didn’t think any of you did anything improper. I’m only eliminating possibilities. I know this is my problem and I will work on solving it. However, since someone is obviously trying to traffic Fae and there’s a buyer out there, either you or one of your apprentices may be approached next. I wanted you to be aware.]

  Diego said, “Gracias, amigo. Also—just so I’m aware—how many of your apprentices have died now? Because this isn’t the first, am I right?”

  I held up seven fingers.

  Diego whistled. “Seven? Mary mother of God, Al. I appreciate your help on contracts and disputes and kicking the occasional cabrón off the planet, but whenever I do get an apprentice, I won’t be coming to you for advice.”

  [Understood. Last thing is that Gordie had some ink ingredients I’d never given him and he’d never had time to collect, like nautilus ganglions. So you might want to inventory your ingredients to make sure everything is still there.]

  Mei-ling hissed at that and logged off without saying goodbye, and Shu-hua’s eyes widened in response.

  “Wow, Al. I’ve never seen her do that before. Looks like you’ve been missing a lot right under your nose lately, so I don’t want you to miss this too: She’s incredibly angry with you. I am also, but I hope you’ll make it right somehow later.” She switched off as well, leaving me to face Diego and Eli. Diego rested his chin on his fist and stared at me with a silly grin, and Eli shook his head before bursting into laughter.

  “You know this shit is going to follow you forever, right?” he said. “It’s gonna be the thing we use to cover our asses for years. Like if Coriander ever gets snippy with me, I’ll say, Yeah, I done fucked up, but at least I didn’t pull an Al MacBharrais, right? And then he’ll say I’m right and I’ll get away with whatever it is because that’s how bad this shit is. I almost wanna go out right now and do something stupid, because you’ve practically given me a free pass. It’s just too damn early.”

  I nodded, understanding that I’d earned the abuse and taking it was a small part of the penance I’d have to pay. Eli took a swig of coffee and continued.

  “Look, I’d love to stay and chat some more, but I’ve been informed I need to inventory all my ingredients
, so I better get on it. Later.” He switched off and I was left staring back at Diego, who had blinked a couple of times but otherwise had not moved.

  [What?] I typed. No response. Just that sappy grin. Slowly, I realized he was enjoying the awkwardness and seeing me shamed, and he was staring at me to savor and remember it. [Fine. I hope you get a pox on your cock,] I said, and he laughed as I reached to turn off the monitor.

  I paused to take a few deep, calming breaths, then I Signaled to Nadia. Where’d you put all of Gordie’s inks and stuff?

  The reply came back quickly: I hid them because you nicked it all from a crime scene.

  You are brilliant, I said.

  I know. Did you want to go through it now?

  The thought had little appeal, and I needed a shower and a change of clothes. Besides, it was Thursday, and I had a long-standing date.

  No, keep it secret. Keep it safe.

  Am I supposed to be Frodo or something? You telling me the One Ring is in that stuff?

  What? No.

  Just asking, boss. The shite you get into tends to be either deep or weird or both.

  I sighed, suddenly tired. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning, but I felt weary. Chastised. Dressed down. Chewed out. An impending tornado of self-loathing and recrimination was spiraling in my frontal lobe, and I needed to vacate the premises before it touched down and obliterated my mental landscape.

  Going home to clean up. Mind the shop?

  I always do.

  I fetched Buck from the basement. He was still cleaning up after breakfast, staring at the bottom of a skillet in befuddlement.

  “How do they get the nonstick coating to stick to the aluminum?” he asked me. “Can we conclude that they’re lying because obviously it does stick, or is it magic?”

  [It’s chemistry. Come on, I’m taking you home. After you know where it is, can you pop in and out of there?]

  “Near there, I imagine,” Buck corrected. “Because I’m assuming you have it warded tighter than a Puritan’s dry and puckered hole.”