by Tad Williams
"Let's go, then," Theo said. "I might as well have my heart attack walking as standing."
The sea of unfamiliar fairy faces which at first had seemed fascinating, and for the last half hour had mostly gone unnoticed, now swirled past him like a nightmare. At any moment he expected someone to point at him and shout, "Impostor!"
Most difficult of all was the feeling — no, the certainty — that something with a clammy white face was moving up behind him, reaching out a hand for the back of his neck . . .
"Don't you dare turn around," said Applecore. As he fell in with a group of people his own size moving down the platform of Track Twelve, heading for the first-class section, something came to him like a splash of cold water.
"Oh, my God, Tansy's cousin must have the tickets!"
"No, he doesn't. I took 'em off him an hour ago and stuck 'em in your coat because I didn't trust the poor daft lad not to lose 'em."
"And I didn't notice?" She snorted. "I could have shoved the Parliament building into your pocket and you wouldn't have noticed. You were lookin' at girls. Now turn here — get on!"
He stepped up into the third-class compartment. Inside it was a zoo, almost literally, as creatures of all shapes and sizes struggled for a place to sit down. Applecore whispered that it would be just as well not to get wedged in, so they moved to the far end of the car and stood near the door, among a group of other human-sized but apparently lower-class fairies who eyed Theo's clothes and quickly turned away. He wondered what that meant.
"Why won't this stupid train leave?" he whispered to Applecore. He could feel the trio of hollow-men out there as though they were fins circling his leaking boat. He wanted to run down to the engine and take the driver by the neck and bang his head until he throttled up and pulled out of the station.
As if the distant engineer could feel this potential threat to his well-being, the steam whistle let out a great pteranodon shriek.
"Thank God," Theo gasped. An instant later two corpse-faced, black-clad shapes hustled past the windows of their railway carriage. For a moment he thought the hollow-men would come into his car and his stuttering heart would stop completely, but instead they shoved onward through the crowd on the platform, heading toward the first-class cars. A few moments later the train began to ease its way out of the station.
"Did they get on?" Theo asked Applecore. "Or did we leave without them?"
She shrugged, but she did not look either happy or confident.
————— It rode the planar winds like an invisible kite, a shapeless presence stretched wide, wide, every bit of it alive and alert to the thing it sought. It was close now — even in the midst of all the similar creatures surrounding its quarry, the irrha sensed its target as easily as an owl might spot a single small motion of warm life in the midst of a forest of undergrowth.
Following that target had not been easy this time: the journey between the two planes was more difficult than the irrha had, in its unthinking way, anticipated — rougher and more strenuous. Things had changed during the slow millennia it had sleepwalked in the dark between-places. If a tireless thing could be weary, it was. If a thing without emotions could be frustrated, it was that, too. To be so close to its goal — to touch the quarry, nearly — but not to close and seize and complete its burning directive, had filled the irrha with a sensation it had not experienced in so long that it did not remember what it was. But one thing the hunter did know: it did not like the sensation at all.
Closer, closer . . . there. It had located its target precisely. All that remained was to cross that last fragile membrane and become embodied, to take form by joining with something that could move through this plane before the quarry slipped away again. It had chosen badly in the last place, first wearying itself dispelling the body's living inhabitant, then finding that the fleshy envelope was so damaged that it had been forced to spend valuable time supplementing the damaged parts with bits of other bleating, warm meat-things. The quarry was so close here, actually within reach — the hunter could not afford to be slowed again by such resistance or such incompleteness.
It swooped, spun, fell closer. So much life here, so confusing for senses honed in the chasms of the deepest, most lightless and warmthless dimensional oceans! But the irrha was determination itself. It found what it was looking for and moved to take possession, bursting out into a jittering, exploding worldsphere of light and color and sound.
————— Cornelia Yarrow surveyed her purchases — a flying toy powered by a simple but long-lasting charm, a goblin doll in traditional dress of feathers, beads, and dragonwing cloak, not to mention a selection of sports pennants with the insignia of leading houses and butterfly-patterned scarves that friends had assured her were being worn by all the fashionable ladies and gentlemen in the city, as well as dozens of other trinkets. She thought she had spent a little more than she should have on a few of them, but the main thing was that she still had half an hour until her train back home to Willow and she had finished buying gifts for everyone on her list, her niece and all the many grand-nieces and grandnephews. Out in their little forest village, her relatives considered Penumbra Fields to be almost as big as the City itself: they would have been terribly disappointed if Aunt Cornelia had not brought back gifts from her trip to the Honeysuckle Academy for Girls' tricentennial reunion.
Thinking of her grandnieces, one of whom was going up to Honeysuckle next year, she suddenly felt old. Could it really be three hundred years since she had walked those echoing halls as a student? Sometimes it seemed only a few seasons in the past.
As she put her parcels back in her wheeled basket she could not help noticing that the unpleasant odor around the bench had grown worse. She looked at the sleeping man down at the far end. He was well-dressed, but you never knew what these upper-class folk might get up to, especially the young ones. Out on some kind of sustained rag, no doubt. Still, he didn't smell drunk, he smelled . . . unclean.
The stranger's head turned toward her and the eyes popped open. Cornelia Yarrow could not suppress a gasp of surprise. There was something wrong with the Flower lord's eyes — they seemed blank and dull, almost blind.
The mouth worked. When he finally spoke, the young noble sounded as if he had never used any language before, let alone the proper diction his social station demanded.
"Where . . . ?"
"I beg your pardon?" "Where . . . is . . . ?" The blank-eyed man shook his head as if the effort to speak was too much, then stood up. A messy something slid off his lap and onto the station's tiled floor with a wet slurp.
That's extremely inconsiderate, Miss Yarrow thought, he's just dropped his lunch on the ground, what kind of manners do they teach these young people today . . . ? But as she looked at the red, slippery mass of tubing lying beside the bench and the bits that still hung out of the young man's tattered shirt, Cornelia Yarrow came very close to screaming. Instead, she fainted dead away onto the bench.
The irrha, apparently satisfied with Rufinus weft-Daisy's body, which although most decidedly dead was still flexible and not too badly disabled, turned away from the bench and began walking slowly across Penumbra Station, stuffing its dangling innards back into its clothing.
15 THE PLAINS OF GREAT ROWAN
The shape of Faerie itself is even stranger than the nautilus plan of the city I call New Erewhon — for it is no shape at all. To accurately reflect the experience of traveling there, a map of that land would have to revolve like a child's top or go through some other metamorphosis I cannot quite conceive, for Faerie simply will not lie flat and behave itself . . .
"Reading something?" Depressed by what was, for Fairyland, a rather brooding landscape smearing past the rainy windows, mostly hilly meadows empty of trees, and by the crush of weird creatures and their strange smells in the thirdclass compartment, Theo had been trying to reexamine a little of his greatuncle's book. He looked up to see the owner of the voice, something vaguely sheeplike, leaning in from the seat beside
him, its belligerent little red eyes squinting beneath knotted gray fleece.
"Uh . . . yes. I'm reading something." "Can't read, me. Never learned." It showed long, flat yellow teeth in what might have been a smile, but might just as easily have been a smirk of menace.
"I'm sorry. To hear that." "Oh, I admire you clever folk who can." It didn't sound very admiring. It leaned a little closer, giving him a whiff of breath like souring milk. "You must think them like me are stupid."
"No, I don't . . ." "Just a stupid padfoot, you'll be thinking. And who could blame you? You with your education and advantages and all."
Theo was beginning to wish quite desperately that Applecore would come back from her inspection of the rest of the train. He had hoped that just keeping his mouth shut and avoiding eye contact would keep him out of trouble.
"Hey, yarnback," said a more human-looking fairy, one of the few Theo had seen that actually looked middle-aged. This one was dressed in worn but clean clothing and had a few lines on his face and the closest thing to a tan Theo had yet glimpsed. But he was also wiry and strong, and he was not looking at the padfoot kindly. "Why are you pestering the lad?"
"Is it your affair, old-timer?" the sheeplike thing asked. "Or are you just certain that anyone with manshape is in the right?" "Manshape's got nothing to do with it," said another creature that certainly did not fall into that category, with an armadillo-like hide and a tiny, plated head that barely poked out of the top of the bony armor. "You're just looking for trouble. Before we even got into Penumbra you were bumping and swearing at some poor boggart because you said he spilled your lunch."
"He did! Clumsy little needlenose knocked over a whole box of hayslaw!" While the argument continued, Theo slowly sank back into the corner. He lifted his book up to block out these impossible train companions and struggled to focus on his great-uncle's handwriting.
Faerie is divided into regions called "fields," and these regions are not always the same. That is, they remain the same within themselves, but they are not always in the same relationship to each other — at least that is the closest I can come to explaining it, or even grasping it myself. It sometimes seems as though the lands of Faerie are in rings which move, so that one week two lands seem to be beside each other, then the next week it is not so. But it is even more complicated than that, because there are no clear rules to this either in amount of movement or regularity. One day you cannot get to the field of Gateway Oak from Ivy Round or from Great Rowan to Hawthorn Scathe. Then the next day the paths from Oak to Ivy are again clear, but Rowan and Hawthorn may remain divided.
I traveled little outside the City so I did not see many of these effects myself, although I did once, as I will describe. But I often heard it spoken of in precisely the same way that people in my world might talk of the weather without bothering to explain why you should take an umbrella on a rainy day — assuming that any sane adult listener would know. Thus, acquaintances of mine would say, "Alder is far this year, but so beautiful at this season. I think we should gather a traveling party and go — we could be there in a few days." At some other point I might hear that same person say, "I was in Alder Head yesterday evening . . ."
Something tickled Theo's neck and he stiffened, imagining it was the woolly muzzle of the sheep-man again.
"There's no sign of the hollow-fella," Applecore said into his ear. Theo tried to keep his voice low. "He's not on the train?" To Theo's immense relief, as the train had pulled out of Penumbra Station they had seen two of the slug-faced hollow-men standing in a crowd on the station, but since one was still unaccounted for, Applecore had been searching the other compartments.
"There's no sign of him, which isn't quite the same thing. The train's pretty full and he could be in the jacks or somethin'. I hope you didn't expect me to force my way into every lavatory on the bleeding train."
"No. So what do we do now?" "Talk a little quieter, for one thing. I'm standing right next to your jawbone, remember? I can hear you even if you barely whisper, but most other folk can't. What do we do now? Keep on to the City, I guess. I'll get you to these people who want to see you, then I'll head back to my old ones and my brothers and sisters."
"Should you . . . call someone in your family? Let them know where you are?"
"Nah, I'm a big girl. But that reminds me — we have to tell Tansy what happened."
"How?"
"He gave you that speaking-shell."
"Oh, yeah, we'd call it a phone."
"Whatever. He needs to know. At the very least, the Daisy-clan folk should know that someone's killed one of their family." "Call from here?" Theo looked around. The padfoot had lapsed back into sullen silence, and was winding a lock of fleece around its dirty gray hoofhand while glaring at the fairy who had intervened. There were perhaps two hundred other living creatures in the compartment and very few of them looked remotely human. Some of them had ears like bats, and for all he knew were listening to his and Applecore's every word.
"You're right, for once. When's the next stop?" She looked up. "It's a good long way to Starlightshire still, so you probably won't lose your seat if you get up and go to the jacks."
"That's the toilet, right? Let's go." The restroom was at one end of the car. Theo lost his balance several times, once having to steady himself on what he thought was the back of a seat and found out only when its owner grunted in irritation was actually the raised neckplate of something strange and lizardlike.
"Maybe we should have snuck into Second Class instead of settling for Third," Applecore whispered as Theo backed away with fulsome apologies. "Seems they'll let anyone on a train these days."
He opened the restroom door, which other than a very low, very wide toilet and a sink with a tiny ladder running up the wall beside it, did not contain anything too frightening in the way of facilities. "Do you want to come in?"
"I should keep an eye open for trouble."
"Looks like there's a latch on the door. Come in. What if Tansy asks me something I can't answer?"
She frowned. "I've never gone into a public toilet with a fella. Not since my da took me when I was a little one."
"We seem to be experiencing a lot of firsts this week," Theo said. "Come on." With the door closed, it would have been a tightly uncomfortable fit with any second person except Applecore. She dragged a paper towel out of the dispenser and spread it on the edge of the tiny sink like a picnic blanket, then sat down. "At least the place isn't too horrid," she said. "I hate the mess some people leave in places like this."
"I know what you mean," said Theo.
"No, you don't," she said. "Not until you're my size and the mess is twenty times bigger." "You win." He stared at himself in the mirror. "I'm going to scrub off this make-up Dolly put on me. It's starting to rub off on my clothes, and anyway, there are lots of people on the train who are as tan as I am."
"Yeah, but they're workin' folk." "I don't care. There are so many different kinds of people on this train, no one'll notice. I just want to get it off." He washed his face with warm water, then used a dispenser-towel — it felt more like silk than paper — to scrub away the small creamy traces left around his ears and jaw. Feeling a bit more comfortable, he lifted the case out of his pocket and opened it. "Now we get down to business." He looked at the filigree bird-shape nestled on the velvet. "Do I lift it out?"
"Just talk. Call Tansy."
"Call him how?"
"By name. His first name's Quillius." Theo leaned in until his breath misted on the golden object as he said Tansy's name. Nothing happened. He tried again; after a moment the statuette began to gleam as though it had been lifted and turned toward the sunlight.
"What is it?" Although the ornament was in the case, the voice was in Theo's ear and it was unmistakably Tansy's. "I've just sat down to eat."
"Things have gone very wrong," Theo said.
"Who is this?" "Jesus!" Applecore glared at him. Theo tried to speak more calmly. "Can't you even guess? How many other peo
ple have you tossed to the wolves lately?"
"Vilmos?" Suddenly the fairy lord's voice was sharp in a very different way. "What do you mean?" "Your cousin, nephew — whatever he was — he's . . ." He paused. He might not like Tansy, but that didn't mean he should deliver bad news this way. "I'm afraid something bad has happened. Rufinus has been attacked and killed."
"What? Where are you? What's going on?" Theo tried to explain as succinctly as he could. Tansy seemed very surprised, but if he was brokenhearted it did not show — he might be hearing from the gardener about what looked to be an expensive case of lawn-blight.
Maybe I'm not being fair, he thought. They're not like me.
"Is the sprite there?"
"She is, yeah." "I wish to speak to her, too. Applecore?" There was a sudden pop in Theo's head. When the little fairy answered, her voice was suddenly in his ear as well, as though she were perched on his shoulder instead of sitting fastidiously on a disposable towel.
"I'm here, Count Tansy." "Thank you for staying to help our guest. What Master Vilmos has said . . ." He hesitated — he clearly wanted to ask, "Is it all true?" but felt that would be an insult to Theo. ". . . Is there anything you want to add?"
Maybe he's a little bit human after all, Theo decided.
"Not much, sir. We're in a great steaming pile of trouble, though, that's sure." "When you get to the city, you must go straight to Hollyhock House. No, wait. Someone also killed the young Hollyhock lad who was sent here. That could mean a number of things, not least that there are spies in their household — or in mine, which seems more likely considering that there were people lying in wait for you and poor Rufinus as well." Tansy was silent for a long moment; when he finally spoke, he seemed strangely hesitant. "The most trustworthy and sensible Coextensive outside of our Daisy clan is Lord Foxglove. He's a clever man and as well-acquainted with the city's eddies and undertows as a nymph is with her river."
