by Tad Williams
"Nice of you to join us," said Rufinus. "Yeah, cheers." She turned to Theo. "Don't turn around too suddenlike, but there's some fellas I don't much like the look of across the station. In front of that Wingworks shop. They're watching you."
He looked. "I don't see anybody there." She rose up off the table for a quick survey. "They've gone, now." She turned to Rufinus. "Three fellas, your size but a bit strange. No, a lot strange. Cool and collected, though — not street hooligans. Wearing dark coats."
Now Rufinus was squinting too, but with the absent air of someone examining a cloud that a child has claimed looks like a duckie or a horsie. "Maybe you were mistaken, Kettledrum. Of course, there are lots of people in long coats. On account of the rain, you know."
"It's Applecore," she said, but without the heat Theo felt sure he'd have received in Rufinus' place. It's a class thing , he realized. She treats me like an equal and expects the same back. But she doesn't think she's going to get it from him — and she won't either, from what I've seen.
"Still, it's good of you to be concerned," allowed weft-Daisy. "And I am not altogether unprepared. Fear not, Master Vilmos, should something happen, I will protect you. Cousin Quillius gave me some quite fine little counter-charms against attack, for one thing. And I also have more than a bit of experience with other forms of defense. Did you know I captained the fencing team at Evermore my last year up at school?"
"His intramural team," Applecore whispered loudly. "From his residence hall."
"But you don't have a sword," Theo pointed out. Rufinus smiled so happily that for a moment Theo almost liked him. "Ah — so you believe, my mortal friend. But look here." And he lifted his valise and tugged something out of the bottom. As it slid out, Theo saw that it was either a short sword or an extremely long knife — the blade seemed a good half a foot longer than the width of the valise.
God help us, he's one of those guys who thinks he'd be good in a fight. Now Theo was beginning to feel really, really nervous. He had been in just enough serious combat himself, mostly because of playing music in nasty little dives, to know that not only wasn't he any good in fights, but that being good just made it more likely someone would bust a pool cue across the back of your head when you weren't looking.
"So let's finish our refreshments, shall we?" said Rufinus. "We have the best part of an hour until the train leaves."
Theo forced himself to sit still and drink his tea. There was nothing he could do to get home any faster or any more safely. It was like being in trouble up on top of a Himalayan mountain: you could moan and scream about it all you wanted, but ultimately you still had to find your way down.
————— "Goodness, two cups of Gossamer Hills has gone right through me," weftDaisy declared, pushing back his chair. "But there should be plenty of time for me to take a little walk and find the first-class lounge — so much nicer than using the facilities on the train."
Theo had still not entirely got used to the idea of fairies urinating, but it was growing clear to him that within their own world, or universe, or dimension — whatever the hell this place was — they were just as physical as humans on Earth. "So should I just wait for you here?"
"No, I think you should go to the train, Theo," Applecore said firmly before Rufinus could speak. "Don't want to cut it too close. I'll help him find the track," she told the fairy lord. "Then you can just meet him there."
"Ah, very kind of you. Well, if you'll excuse me." He started away across the restaurant, then came back for his valise. "Wouldn't do to leave this behind, would it?"
Tansy's cousin had only just disappeared from sight when something yanked hard on Theo's earlobe.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing? That hurt!"
"Come on. You're not going to sit here, and you're not going to sit on the platform, either."
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw those three fellas who were watching you and they weren't nice. Do you trust me?"
"More than anyone else I've met here, yeah." She wrinkled her tiny nose for a moment, weighing the remark. "Well, that's as much as I can expect, I s'pose. Anyway, I think Tansy's lad is a bit of a dobber, and I think you need to be watching out for yourself."
"That makes sense to me." "Good. Then we're going out of here through the back door and see if we can't find a bit less obvious way to get you on the train. That's one of the reasons I didn't try to hurry you lot out of here. Just as well to wait 'til just before the train goes out to board. Follow me." She rose into the air and led him down the aisle toward the employees-only section of the tea shop.
"What are we doing?" "Nipping out the back, like I said. It'll be easier to get across the station without attracting attention if we just go round that way, where they dump the rubbish and all."
She led him through the kitchen, where two fat little manlike creatures, both smoking clay pipes — he guessed they were what Applecore called "bogles" — stood on stools that raised them to the necessary height to do their work. One of them was tending the fry basket, the other lifting and inspecting pastries in the open oven with a long-handled paddle.
"Whither goest, tinyfry?" the bogle by the oven asked Applecore lazily. He sounded like a Shakespearean comic rustic, with a broad accent that sounded vaguely northern England to Theo, who didn't know much about English regional accents beyond the Beatles. He still couldn't figure out why fairies should sound like British and Irish folk, anyway.
"Out the back, you great ball of guts," Applecore said. "It's lucky you're good-looking, because you'll never be a cook — your millefois tastes like shoe leather."
As the fry cook laughed, the oven-bogle grinned. "And it's lucky for you that you're such a sweet-talker," he said, "because you're going to need to be able to make new chums — your boyfriend just stepped into the walkin refrigerator."
Theo heard this last just as the door swung shut behind him with a resounding ka-chunk. He was suddenly very, very cold.
But I didn't touch the damn thing, he told himself. It just closed, like . . . magic.
Shit. He had to stand, shivering, as Applecore argued with the cooks about opening the door. He heard her call the bogles lots of names, which made him feel a little better, but unlikely as it seemed, there were moments when she seemed to be laughing as she did it.
His teeth were chattering pretty hard when the door finally popped open again. "What use dating a petalhead such as yon when he can't even muster a cantrip for latchlifting?" the fry cook chuckled as he beckoned Theo out. "Come out, our frosty master. Else we might mistake you for something edible and put you in a stew, then go up before the Assizes for floricide."
"Sass," said Applecore, but Theo didn't think she looked very indignant on his behalf. "If thou shouldst grow bored and pissed off with petalheads, small nifty, and return to dating your own social equals," grinned the fat oven-bogle as he waved good-bye, "you'll know where I might be found."
"Yeah and some verily," said the other. "Up to his overworked mouth in flour, as always. Door to the service corridor's that way."
"Nice enough fellas," said Applecore as they made their way down the narrow hallway that ran behind the row of shops.
Theo had a feeling that if Rufinus had made that comment, he would have automatically added, "for bogles." "They liked you," he told Applecore. "Get away with you."
"Oh, they didn't? So why are you blushing?"
"Am not. Shut your gob." As they reached the last door in the corridor, Applecore flew up close to his face. "Now, when we step out, don't look around — that's the kind of thing people notice. Remember, you've just been doing something you're supposed to do and now you're on your way to do something else you're supposed to do. Don't look around. That's what guilty people do."
"Wow. You're pretty impressive. Like a miniature John LeCarré out of a box of Cracker Jacks."
"I don't even know what that means, but I'm sure it won't keep me from kicking you in your earhole. Now shut up and push the door open." He wondered bri
efly how people Applecore's size opened doors like this when there weren't people Theo's size around, then they were out and walking past the ladies' room for another station restaurant. At least, he assumed it was the ladies' room, since one of the several silhouettes on it looked humanoid and female, although most of the other silhouettes looked more like vacuum cleaner attachments. Theo decided it didn't bear too much thinking about.
The business was a book and magazine store full of browsing travelers. The place was festooned with harvest-holiday decorations, sprays of leaves and piles of produce on almost every surface and stylized moons hanging from the rafters. At least he assumed they were decorations — it was hard to tell, here in Faerie, what might be just the normal weirdness. As he followed Applecore down the rows of glossy magazines, he experienced the strange cognitive dissonance again: he could understand everything written on them without understanding a word of the language or script. "Making Oak Blight Work for You!" trumpeted something on the cover of one that his brain translated as Roots — the Dryad Magazine. There were dozens of others, all equally unlikely — it was like walking through the set of some expensive Hollywood comedy: Wingspan — for Working Mothers with articles like "Forget Your Frost-Charms — A Fresh Mabon Feast in Minutes!" and newspapers called The Trooping News and The Arden Intelligencer with headlines proclaiming "Coextensives Fighing to Hold Coalition Power" and "Holly's Generator Outages Blamed on Worker Morale."
The browsers were just as unlikely a collection as the periodicals, everything from be-hatted and veiled fairy women who looked like they'd been flown in from a remake of A Passage to India to a group of talking hedgehogs all wearing what appeared to be matching rugby shirts and carrying pennants and coolers, shoving and arguing good-naturedly while one of their number bought a bag of salted grubs.
"You're looking around too much," Applecore hissed in his ear. "Walk faster. You're on your way somewhere." He had hesitated in front of a magazine rack, staring at something called Aodh's Harp — he figured that of the two kinds of periodicals he generally liked, in a land of women who always wore head-to-toe clothing he was probably going to have better luck with music magazines — but he realized she was right. Thinking about how little he knew here made him feel hopeless and twisted that skewer of homesickness in his guts again. It was one thing to make him up to look a bit more like a fairy, another thing entirely to expect him to pull it off. It was like dumping an ice cream vendor into a particle physics conference and telling him to fake it. If all he had to do was sit and look like he knew what was happening — well, maybe. But ask him to get up and discuss quarks? Disaster.
"Track Twelve," Applecore said as she led him out of the magazine store and onto the concourse. They were half a dozen storefronts down from the tea shop, which reduced the chance of someone spotting them coming out. Applecore quickly found a group of people moving generally toward the tracks and Theo wrapped the crowd around him like a cloak.
I guess I should be grateful everyone else here isn't Applecore's size. Then I'd really have trouble blending in. He saw no sign of the sprite's trio of rough-lookin' fellas, and for a moment wondered if Rufinus might not be the more sensible after all. Why would anyone send some kind of professional fairy detectives after a know-nothing mortal? Maybe the whole thing with that poor Hollyhock guy's heart had been some kind of mistake, nothing to do with Theo at all. He basked for a moment in the warmth of the idea, although he didn't really believe it. After all, somebody had sent that dead thing after him.
Applecore hissed at him. "Over here! I've just seen 'em!" His heart now bumping along quite quickly, he let his winged companion lead him to a sheltered space just across from Track Eleven, between a pillar and a little windowed kiosk with the name Ariel's, a spot where he would be out of obvious sight while she went to investigate. Theo tried to look as though he were reading the advertising in the windows carefully. The kiosk sold what he at first thought were waffles, but after a while spent watching the hairnetted brownies handing out the little bundles wrapped in waxed paper, Theo decided their product was some kind of pre-processed frozen honeycomb dessert.
Something touched his ear. He jumped.
"Don't do that!" Applecore said in a strained whisper. "Just stand still! Look through the window and out the door on the far side. See?" He did. Twenty steps on the other side of the kiosk, three dark, lanky figures stood by a bench watching people go by without being obvious about it. Even though their faces were mostly shaded by their hats, he could see the suggestion of something pale and shiny-wet between brim and collar, a sandcrab gleam.
"Oh, my God." "Just stay here. The train won't board for another few minutes, but we may be all right. They're looking down the other way so they don't know we're already past 'em." She settled on his shoulder. Her presence was oddly but unquestionably comforting. "Hollow-men."
"Hollow-men? What does that mean?" "They're a sort of troll. Underground folk. Man-stealers, they used to be, when their caves still opened in your world. They're good at what they do and they keep their mouths shut. Someone's paying a pretty penny for you, boyo."
"Jesus! What does everyone want with me? I'm just a guy!"
"Ssshhh." Her tone was more urgent now. "There's Tansy's cousin. Bloody eejit certainly took his time." Theo started to say something, but the hollow-men abruptly slid away from the bench and moved toward Rufinus, smooth as wheeling sharks. They vanished for a moment into the crowd at the edge of the railheads, then closed in behind him and on either side as the young fairy reached Track Ten. He looked at one of them without seeming to notice, but then his head swung to the other side and he stopped. The hollow-men quickly surrounded him at arm's length. For a moment no one seemed to do much of anything: the foursome could have been chance acquaintances chatting about the dodginess of railway schedules. The creatures' chins were close to their chests and their faces were mostly hidden by collars and hats, but Theo felt sure they were talking to weft-Daisy, because the alarmed and cautious look on his face was becoming something else, an expression almost of contempt.
"Call for help, you daft fool!" Applecore said urgently but quietly. For a confusing second, Theo thought she was speaking to him. Instead, Rufinus weft-Daisy turned abruptly and began to walk along the concourse. The trio of trolls walked with him, surrounding him. One leaned close and whispered in Rufinus' ear; the fairy stopped and lifted his valise in both hands.
He's pulling that blade, Theo realized, but in the instant it took for the thought to form the black figures had already folded around weft-Daisy like a gloved fist. Rufinus slumped a little, as though he had suddenly grown dizzy. The hollow-men helped him walk a few steps toward the bench where they had originally been waiting and let him sit down there. They leaned together briefly, then turned and glided toward the tea shop in loose formation.
"What . . . what happened?" "Stay here, Theo. Don't make a sound!" Applecore dove from his shoulder to floor level and shot away. He had one brief glimpse of her slaloming around the legs of other station patrons, then he thought he could see her hovering beside weft-Daisy, who still sat on the bench with his mouth open as though he were the recipient of stunning news.
Which, in a way, he had been. Moments later Applecore dropped back onto Theo's shoulder from nowhere, making him jump again so that he bumped his nose against the Ariel's kiosk window. A pair of young goblins sharing a honeycomb looked up at him in amusement.
"He's dead," she whispered.
"What?"
"When you're not alive anymore! Dead!" "I know what it means!" Panic rose higher now, threatening to choke him. What kind of world was this? "How can he be dead? He had charms or something! What happened?"
"Cathedral knife, I think — no charm can stop one of those. They opened up his belly — he's got a lapful of his own guts. Terrible." Her crisp words hid her own shock and fear, but not completely. "And they took his case, too. He's just sitting there. Someone will notice any moment."
"I should damn well
hope so!" "Well, you'd better hope it doesn't happen before you get on that train or the constables will hold everyone here and start checking identification." Her voice was tight with desperation. "You'll wind up in the Penumbra Fieldshire jail and sometime before Tansy's solicitor gets here you'll decide to hang yourself in your cell."
"I'll what . . . ? But I wouldn't . . ." He suddenly realized what she was saying. His heart was thumping away like a methedrined woodpecker. "How could that happen?"
"Whoever hired these fellas isn't joking around, Theo. There aren't but a dozen or so Cathedral knives in the whole of the land — they're made of spell-hallowed glass from the ruins on the Old Mound itself. They don't get handed out to every Tom, Dick, and Hobthrush, y'know — those fellas are working for someone important."
"What do I do now? Oh, shit, poor Rufinus — he was an idiot, but I can't believe he's dead!" Theo wiped sweat off his face. The only idea he could come up with was to run screaming across the station, but it didn't seem like a good one. "How will I get to the city without him? I don't even know what it's called!"
To his amazement, Applecore burst into shrill, near-hysterical laughter. "By the Trees, fella, you really do take it all. What's it called? The City, man, the City! There's only one! It's like saying you don't know which 'up' someone's talking about." The sprite fell silent. She seemed to be oscillating between terror and a kind of fast-thinking omnicompetence. After a long moment of close-eyed concentration, she said, "I suppose I'm going with you, then, amn't I?"
"Oh, Jesus, can you really? Will you?" "Stop saying that blasted name — you made that lady over there shiver and she didn't even hear you. No more talking." She shot off for a moment, then returned. "Those three fellas are still poking around down by the tea shop. Step out from behind here and just start walking toward Track Twelve. See if you can find some other people going that direction. Whatever you do, don't look around!"
Rufinus' body had begun to sag and now stared down at the floor with glassy eyes, as though it had lost something and was looking for it there. A little fairy woman with a rolling basket full of parcels had seated herself at the other end of the bench from the corpse. At the moment she was oblivious to her companion's condition, but how long could that last?
