Ink & Sigil

by Kevin Hearne

  Clíodhna did not answer right away. In fact, she sighed to communicate that she’d be thinking over her answer a bit. I was patient. A couple walked through the court, and another, passing through on their way to somewhere else.

  “I suppose ye might have a keen insight into the heart of the matter, if not the mind,” she finally said. “Hypothetically.”

  “How so?”

  “The old days are often mourned. We were freer then. The air was fresher, the grass greener, all of that. Ye have the right of it in that there’s not a faery around who wouldn’t wish to return things to that time. But we all know that we can’t go back. Fand proved that when she had her rebellion against Brighid. The only direction we can move is forward.”

  “So they thought that trafficking was moving forward?”

  “Immunity to iron is moving forward.”

  “But those Fae have hurt people. Killed people. They’re in unforgivable territory as regards the treaty.”

  “Ah, here’s where your empathy fails ye, sir. I was alive when there were just a few million people on the whole planet. How many are there now, five billion?”

  “Approaching eight.”

  “Are ye, now! Well. If I truly wanted to return to the old days, I’d be slaying billions of humans, wouldn’t I? Ye don’t see anybody doing that. But I also don’t give a slick selkie shite if a few humans exit early. The whole lot of you are poisonous—with the notable exception, perhaps, of your departed wife.”

  “That’s kind of ye tae say,” I said, though I wasn’t actually sure it was.

  “Well. I don’t know about kindness. But I know I haven’t spoken so much to a mortal in many a year. Can’t say it was pleasant, but it was, at least, interesting. Farewell.”

  I nodded at her in farewell, and she retraced her steps to Tír na nÓg via the Old Way.

  “Bollocks,” I muttered. The secret lab was still secret. Where was it hiding, and who in all the hells had figured out how to grant the Fae immunity to iron?

  “May I get ye anything else, Al?” Harrowbean said as I returned to my table inside.

  [One more, thanks, plus a bar napkin and the bill. Remember to include that arsehole’s tab on mine.]

  “Coming right up, sir. And I appreciate ye getting rid of him.”

  I drew out my pen for doodling and fidgeted until Harrowbean returned. I settled the tab with her, took a swallow of my drink, and then wrote a list to help me think.

  Corrupted Fae

  1. Troll

  2. Clurichaun

  3. Leprechaun

  4. Fir Darrig

  5. Undine

  6. Pixie

  The troll, thank the gods, was no longer an issue. But since Eli hadn’t chimed in with any intelligence, he obviously hadn’t found any leads yet. I’d have to generate my own. This problem of the corrupted Fae was mine to solve.

  The undine was the strangest one on the list, to my way of thinking: What had they offered her that was more enticing than the waters she typically inhabited? Or had they threatened her instead?

  I stared at the list until my eyes glazed over. I tried to shake my thoughts loose from the meaningless circle in which they were trapped by bringing the gin to my nose and inhaling the botanicals. Some people loathe gin and proclaim that they only smell medicine and rubbing alcohol, and while I never say anything because one’s preferences are of course their own, I privately think they shouldn’t have tried drinking shite gin. The Scots have discovered that gins, like whiskies, have some glorious tales to tell to the nose and tongue, if one is only open to exploring them. For me, I find their various scents invigorating, and it resets my mind somehow: I become open to possibility. I could also achieve the same state through meditation, but a nose full of a master distiller’s craft had proven to be a shortcut for me.

  I took a couple of deep breaths with my eyes closed, no tasting at all, and I realized that I’d forgotten a crucial fact. My eyes flew open, I set down the glass, and I circled number six on the list.

  I checked the time: almost four in the afternoon. I Signaled Nadia.

  Are ye free to kick some arse tonight? I need the battle seer.

  How late? I was gonnay watch a movie with Dhanya.

  Can ye reschedule? I need the van. Whisky and cheese for Lhurnog. The whole shebang.

  You’re gonnay pray to Lhurnog with me?

  Aye. I’m thinking this will be a pretty good rammy.

  Hell yes! I’ll cancel the movie now, then.

  I’ll be at the office in about an hour.

  She acknowledged that and I switched to Signaling Buck.

  All clear, wee man. Safe to go outside. Get your arse back to Maryhill, where we first met. I need you to steal something for me.

  That is the most beautiful message I have ever received, he replied. With that in motion, I downed the rest of my drink and motioned to Harrowbean once I stood.

  [I need a good dug to wait in my office for a new contract,] I said. [I should be there in an hour or less.]

  “I’ll arrange it, Al.”

  I tipped my hat to her and hoped I’d get to see her again. If I actually found this lab it would be one thing. Taking it down would be another.

  It was simple for Buck to pop into Gordie’s apartment and remove the pixie cage I’d left behind. I was careful not to enter the building or get near it, really, since I didn’t have my derby hat on and had no wish to be caught on camera entering the premises. We took the train from there back to my office, where a Fae packmaster waited with a barghest for hire. He was sitting across the whisky table from Nadia, who was playing hostess in my absence.

  Buck hung back a little bit, not precisely comfortable around a barghest after the attack we’d suffered. I felt that too, but using one here was our best chance at finding the lab. I was betting that the lab also served as living quarters for these Fae now, since we’d heard no reports of them renting a flat in Edinburgh or anywhere else.

  [We’ll need your GPS tracker,] I told Nadia. The barghest would track the pixie for us, and provided it stayed in-country, we’d track the barghest from the van. If it the pixie was in Scotland or the north of England, we wouldn’t even need a second tank of petrol.

  While Nadia left to fetch the device, I wrote up the contract and paid the packmaster with a writ for an hour of agency services to be provided later. Bartering services in this manner was much easier than trying to figure out a form of legal tender between the planes and far safer than trading nebulous favors.

  [Please explain to the barghest that this is a seek mission only. He’ll have to carry a GPS tracker and remain corporeal as much as possible so we don’t lose the signal. Halt within a hundred meters of the target and wait for us to arrive to fulfill the contract.]

  The packmaster, a solemn faery with kind brown eyes, knelt next to the barghest and murmured to him in Old Irish. Nadia came back and he took the tracker and affixed it to a collar, which he then looped around the barghest’s neck. Then he presented the pixie’s cage for a target scent, and the ghost hound snuffled and whuffed at it, absorbing the smells. When he finished, he looked up at the faery and said something that sounded remarkably like, “Roof.”

  “He’s ready,” the packmaster said. “Would you like him to begin now?”

  [Maybe not quite yet. Does he have an idea of which direction we’re headed?]

  The faery asked the hound something in Old Irish and the hound spun around a few times with his nose in the air, then sat down again. “Ohwhuff,” he said.

  “He says north.”

  [So we’ll be staying in Scotland, then.]

  “Aye. He can’t track across oceans.”

  [Let’s wait a half hour. I have preparations to make.]

  The packmaster explained this to the hound, who lay down on the car
pet, content to stay. I asked if it was okay to give him a roast, and the packmaster said that would be fine. He left as I tossed the meat into the barghest’s jaws.

  [I need to get some sigils ready for this,] I told Nadia. [And I should warn you that the Sigil of Iron Gall on your razor is not going to work on the Fae we’ll be fighting. These are immune to iron and stronger than usual.]

  “Fae immune to iron? I didnae know that was possible.”

  [Neither did I. You might wish to choose a weapon that’s more immediately fatal.]

  “The idea here is to be fatal?”

  I nodded grimly. [These Fae have killed humans directly on this plane. That violates our treaty, and the punishment is capital.]

  “I’ll go home and get ma sword, then.”

  She left and Buck asked, “Awright if I go home quickly to grab a couple things too?”

  [Like what?]

  Buck flashed his perfect teeth at me. “I have a clever plan.”

  [Be back in thirty minutes or less. And bring my derby hat.]

  He disappeared, and I went to my desk to press the stud that opened my ink library. I locked the office door and took off my topcoat, going through the many interior pockets and removing all the sigils I wouldn’t be needing—sigils for contracts and the like. I had a couple of different sets, or loadouts, that I used when I knew I was walking into a certain kind of situation. This one called for some especially destructive sigils that I rarely used. One of them, the Sigil of Unchained Destruction, I had never used at all except when I achieved my own mastery. It was the last sigil an apprentice learned before mastery, and I unleashed it to prove I could do it, and then, of course, never managed to get one of my own apprentices to mastery. The one I had prepared had sat under seal for a good forty years. I wasn’t even sure it would work anymore. Its potency might have faded after so long, like batteries left unused in a torch for years. I hoped I’d have no cause to find out.

  Just as I finished my preparations, my phone buzzed. It was D.I. Munro.

  “Mr. MacBharrais, I hope you’re still at work? You haven’t left for the day?”

  “Aye.”

  “Good. Because I’m in your lobby. I’ll be right up.” She disconnected and I swore, fetching an ink bottle full of a navy-blue mixture that I’d need to replenish soon. I drew three quick sigils and sealed them, but it wasn’t quick enough: D.I. Munro was mashing the office doorbell before I could finish. No matter; the door was locked, and she’d just have to wait until I was ready. Whatever she was here for was probably not good at all. Surprise visits by the police are never polite social occasions. She probably had backup if she had it in mind to arrest me for something, so that was why I prepared extra sigils.

  There was no use calling to her that I’d be right there, because the office was soundproofed. She’d have to wait and get angry. And I’d have to figure out why she was here.

  As I walked out of the library with my fresh sigils and shrugged on my coat, I spied the pixie’s cage and the barghest sitting by the whisky table and realized I’d have difficulty explaining either or both to the detective inspector.

  “Come on, pooch,” I said, snatching up the cage and returning to the library. “Come on. Wait in here for a wee while, please? In here.”

  Barghests are smarter than any earthly hound. They might not understand my English the way they understood Old Irish, but they understood body language and intonation well enough. Since they were under contract and knew it—and I was also someone who occasionally produced a roast—I was temporarily someone to be obeyed. The huge hound shuffled into the library and sat where I asked, and I thanked him. I set the cage down on my worktable and hurried to my desk to close up the bookcase. Only when it was fully closed and I had typed up a text-to-speech welcome did I open the door and welcome D.I. Munro into my office, pressing PLAY on my app.

  [Apologies. I was finishing up a very important email before the end of the business day.]

  Two constables walked in behind her, as I’d feared. This was not the friendly fishing expedition in the coffee shop.

  “How important can anything in this business really be, Mr. MacBharrais? Yer business is putting ink on paper. That’s it.”

  [That is indeed it.]

  Her eyes roamed the office, not looking at me at all. “Perhaps ye were up tae something other than an email. I’d be willing to bet ye were.”

  [How can I help, D.I. Munro? Are you here to tell me the trafficking victims have been rescued?]

  “No. I mean yes, they have been rescued. The boys in Trafficking caught them as they were waking up for the night and most of them agreed tae give up their pimps, so la di da, thank ye very much, they won’t be on the streets tonight and NHTU is very happy with ye now. But I am not.”

  She hadn’t stopped looking around, even moving behind my desk and pulling out the chair to peer underneath it. But once that was done, she looked up at me with a scowl, and I tried my best to look concerned. I raised my eyebrows in consternation and typed, [Oh, dear,] just to make her explain. Though I suspected I already knew what she was looking for.

  “Did ye know, Mr. MacBharrais, that inside that completely fucked room of Gordon Graham, your late employee, there was a smelly aluminium cage?”

  [I didn’t. I recall telling you and D.I. Macleod I was never there.]

  “Right. Never there. Except I think ye were. I remember seeing ye there. And I remember thinking before I saw ye that room had a lot of jars full of shite the boys in the lab would get excited about. But I didn’t see that cage for some reason. And in Gordon’s bedroom, there were a lot of personal effects and a laptop I was going to investigate later. Then there’s this strange gap in my memory, but I’m still sure I saw ye along with a wee pink man in that apartment. And after that time, well, ye know what I found in those rooms? That smelly cage that I hadn’t seen before, but a whole lot else that went missing, including Gordon’s laptop and all those jars and pots and that. Still, I couldn’t place ye there for sure. Something was wrong with the cameras in the building, which was also strange. So damn strange I took precautions. I put a tracer inside that stinky cage, and what do ye know? It just reported that it’s here. So where is it?”

  Bloody hell, she was good. A good sight better at the business than Macleod. [It’s not here. You just looked yourself.]

  “Maybe ye have it in the shop, then. Where’s it hiding? Because we know it’s in the building.”

  [May I explain? It will require me to take a piece of paper out of my coat, but I will do it slowly. I promise I am not armed.]

  She told one of her constables to get behind me, and he got out his baton just in case I was lying. I pulled out my official ID and showed it to her and she blinked, taken in by the three sigils there. I took the time to show it to the constables too, and once they were all open to suggestion, I gave them the prepared sigils I’d just made and said aloud, “I want you to break the seals on these cards and look at the sigil inside, then hand the cards back to me.”

  Under the sway of Certain Authority, they obeyed this command, exposed their minds to the Sigil of Lethe River, and promptly forgot the last hour, including the fact that I had just spoken aloud. I didn’t like using Lethe River because it might cause someone to forget something vital to their own survival, but it was a stone cold fact that if I had used it in Gordie’s flat on the day he died I could have avoided all this trouble with D.I. Munro. Easy to say in hindsight, but it didn’t matter; I hadn’t taken any Lethe River sigils with me that day.

  In this situation, an hour’s lost memory meant that the polis forgot why they had come to my office in the first place. And they were still under the influence of Porous Mind and vulnerable to further suggestion, so I took the cards back and put them in my pocket, along with my official ID. I smiled at them and returned to typing on my app.

  [Thanks so m
uch for coming by. I’ll be writing a check to the Scottish Police Benevolent Fund straightaway.]

  D.I. Munro squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “What? I beg your pardon, but…I believe I’ve had an episode of some kind. How did I get here?”

  [In the company of these two constables. I imagine you have a car waiting outside.]

  “Yes, but…why am I here?”

  [You came to inform me that the sex-trafficking victims decided to cooperate against their pimps and that they will receive such aid as necessary to rebuild their lives.]

  “I did? That doesn’t make sense. I could have just called. And I wouldn’t have needed constables to come along for that.”

  [No doubt you were on your way elsewhere and just stopped by. But it was a pleasure to see you, D.I. Munro. I hope I can assist the police again in the future.]

  “Right. Well.” She stood there, blinking and trying to recall anything, but those connections were gone. Not knowing how else to proceed, she said, “Good day,” and exited with the constables. I locked the office door behind them and Signaled Buck.

  Are you quite finished? I need you back here.

  On my way, old man, he replied after a few seconds. He knocked on the door only seconds after that, and I let him in. He had that bag from Hatcher’s house with him, along with my hat, and he was sweating and breathing hard.

  “Bit worn out from popping so far and so fast,” he said. “Do ye have anything nourishing, like chocolate-covered marshmallows?”

  [No, those aren’t healthy.]

  “Naw, but they’re important.”

  [Okay, I’ll get you some or something similar. But I need you to take that cage back to Gordie’s apartment and leave it there.]

  “Now?”

  [Right now. It’s got a tracer in it somewhere, and the polis were just here looking for it. When they look again, I want it to be back in Maryhill.]

  “I thought we were going after the pixie.”