Carousel Tides

by Sharon Lee

She extended a hand, and paused, sending me a wise look from under the rim of her cap.

  “Everything all under control now?”

  “Said so, didn’t I?”

  “You did.” She took the key and shoved it into her pocket. “I’ll be back at six-thirty.”

  “Perfect.” Over her shoulder, I saw a foursome detach itself from the crowded midway and walk toward the carousel.

  “Customers on the way,” I said, stepping back to the control station. “Thanks, Nancy.”

  “No problem.” She took herself off, giving the approaching customers a friendly nod as they passed.

  “Welcome to the Fantasy Menagerie Merry-go-Round,” I said, when they offered me their tickets. “The oldest amusement ride in Archers Beach.”

  The foursome took themselves onto the carousel and chose their mounts—the ladies to the unicorn and the hippocampus; the gentlemen to the charger and the Indian pony. By the time they were settled, there were eight more in line, tickets to hand, and more coming in. People avoided the batwing horse, I noted. One man in a dark suit and owlish glasses did put a hand on its back and made as if to mount, then changed his mind and sat in the chariot instead.

  I would, I thought, have to have a word with the batwing horse.

  I uphold my side of the bargain, Keeper, the loathsome voice whispered between my ears. Surely I am not to blame because some of your patrons are more discerning than others?

  “Try to look adorable, all right?” I muttered, as I hit the warning buzzer and started the carousel turning.

  After that, the ride was busy all afternoon. At two, a miniature Lee, who gigglingly gave her name as Debbie, brought me a delicious-smelling bag and a large cup of coffee. I snacked on egg rolls and dumplings while the carousel described its circle.

  “That smells wonderful,” the woman at the head of the line said. “Where can I get some?”

  I swallowed and pointed across the midway. “Tony Lee’s Chinese Kitchen, right across from here. There will probably be a line. Believe me, it’s worth waiting.”

  “Thank you!” she said, and turned to talk to the folks behind her, all of them pointing in the general direction of Tony’s—which was fine by me. If Tony and Anna were intent on making egg rolls while the sun shone, I was glad to steer more custom their way.

  The ride glided to a stop. I hit the buzzer, and smiled at the woman heading the line.

  “Ticket, please.”

  * * *

  There were still people in line when Nancy showed up on the dot of six-thirty.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever sold this many hotcakes,” I told her, rubbing the back of my neck and moving my shoulders to work the kinks out. “Ticket box is full or near enough. I’ll take ’em down to the office and do the count.”

  Nancy shrugged and slipped between the fence into the control station. “Don’t forget your meetin’,” she cautioned.

  “I won’t,” I promised, thinking that I’d have plenty of time to drop off the tickets and still make Neptune’s at seven for my meeting with Borgan.

  I knelt down and opened the ticket box. Four seconds, tops, to change out the full bag for the spare, then I closed the box and slid between sections of fence, taking the bag with me.

  “See you soon,” I said, and headed out.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Monday, April 24

  High Tide 9:12 p.m.

  Sunset 7:35 p.m. EDT

  I should have figured out that I wasn’t going to be the only one arriving at the office with a bumper crop of tickets. Of course, there was only Marilyn on at the desk—Fun Country not believing in over staffing—and of course her count didn’t match Brand’s and of course he insisted on a recount right now . . .

  The upshot of the whole thing being that it was closer to seven-thirty than seven by the time I hit the entrance ramp to the Pier.

  I probably should have foreseen that the Pier was going to be absolutely packed with tourists in their pretty polyester clothes, some wearing shorts and short-sleeved polo shirts in defiance of the brisk breeze off the water. Others had made a token concession to the April evening and donned windbreakers and khakis; still others had wrapped up like they were on an expedition to the North Pole.

  All of them, though, were rubber-necking, strolling nice and slow like they were on vacation or something; stopping dead in the middle of the walkway to chat and point; and crossing from one side to the other as fancy took them.

  The Pier had managed to get every shop, game, and food counter along its length open and manned. If some of those doing the manning were underage, overage, or just a wee bit tipsy, it detracted nothing from the sheer organizational guts it had taken to open on, as it were, a goddamn dime. True, the chalkboard outside the Chart House, at the head of the Pier, announced that they were serving only bottled beer, but it didn’t seem to be slowing business down any. The tees and sweatshirts on offer at the Sandpiper Emporium were surely left over from last Season, but the little shop had a line out the door. Across the way, a guy selling potato guns had set up a target on a cord over the rail. That was good for a traffic jam, made up in equal parts of those who wanted to take the weapon for a test drive and those who wanted to watch.

  With all of that, I didn’t make very good time back to Neptune’s Retreat, the all-purpose dive and live entertainment center at the far end of the Pier, where I’d been supposed to meet Borgan some time back. I considered giving him a buzz, to see if he’d given up on me, which was when I realized I’d left my cell in the pocket of my jacket, hanging from the back of the operator’s stool behind the carousel control station.

  Honestly, Kate, I scolded myself, much good it did me. Well, at least Borgan’ll be easy to spot.

  There was a small line at the entrance to Neptune’s while each person was passed in by the bouncer, a whip-thin black guy in his mid-forties, dressed in biker’s leathers, head shaved and oiled, profile perfect, if you didn’t mind the slight leftward list to the nose, where it had gotten broken, back when he was a big kid and rolling his youngers for their lunch money. He’d been in his first year of high school and I’d been in seventh grade.

  He was running the show for all it was worth.

  “IDs, please, deahs,” he said to the white-haired couple immediately ahead of me. The woman of the pair laughed, pulled a thin black folder out of her jacket pocket and flipped it open.

  The bouncer glanced at it, at her face, and shook his head. “You don’t get by me like that, missy!” he said, mock-stern. “Your momma know you got her license?”

  She laughed again, delighted, and he waved her through before taking a look at her companion’s ID and whistling conspiratorially.

  “All right,” he said, waving the old gentleman through. “But you treat her right now, man, or I’ll be taking her away from you!”

  The two of them disappeared into the open bar area, and the bouncer turned, his grin fading as he took me in.

  “Hi, Domino,” I said, calmly, to show that I was willing to let our pasts stay behind us.

  He rolled his eyes, and threw a glance over my head at the people waiting behind. “Kate,” he said, low-voiced and not particularly cordial. “Anything particular you want here?”

  “I’m meeting a friend,” I said, and pointed to the packed region at his back. “In there.”

  “That so?” For a second, I thought he wasn’t going to let me by, and maybe he did, too. In the end, though, the need to make nice in front of the tourists carried the day. Or evening. Domino swung back from the gate with a flourish and a bogus grin.

  “You don’t find your friend, c’mon back and give me a chance!”

  As if.

  “Thanks.” I slipped past before he had a change of heart, dodging into the wide space between the end of the bar and the supply closet. At my back was a motorcycle that I took to be Domino’s, facing the ocean over the weathered wooden rail, its saddle bags rich with silver studs.<
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  Standing on my toes, I scanned the crowd, looking for Borgan, and not having one bit of luck. Sighing, I stepped out of the cul-de-sac and mingled with the crowd heading for the serious action at the end of the Pier.

  By the time I hit the dance floor, I’d lost most of my company to the seductions of microbrew bottles in tubs of ice, and fresh-made margaritas. Those who hadn’t succumbed drifted past me, toward the building at the very end of the Pier—the Sea Change bar and casino. A pale, smoky reflection of the Sea King, the gambling house of the Beach’s heyday; still, the few ratty one-armed bandits and tatty blackjack tables held an allure for some. I thought about it, but decided it wasn’t likely that Borgan’d be in the casino. It was much more likely that he’d just given up on me and gone elsewhere to find some fun. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be sure, and I looked around me for a vantage point.

  The open air dance floor at Neptune’s Retreat is not for the faint of heart—or for those who had partaken liberally of the booze on offer. The only thing between the dancers and a dunk in the ocean is a rail made out of a pair of two by fours. Every Season, one or two dancers go over the side in a fit of exuberance and have to be fished out. Back in my day, Neptune’s always had a couple staff members trained as life guards on duty, open to close, during the Season.

  The stage was empty—Neptune’s was depending on piped-in music for this evening’s crowd. Nobody seemed to mind; most seemed so intent on their own conversations I was willing to bet they hadn’t even noticed that there was music playing. That being the case, it wasn’t likely that anybody would notice—or mind—if I took advantage of an extra two feet above the decking to try and spy out—

  “Beer, pretty lady?”

  I turned. Borgan smiled and offered a bottle, still dripping from the tub, label out: Shipyard Brown Ale. Not precisely beer, but I wasn’t about to quibble. I took the bottle with a nod, and a purely ridiculous surge of relief, that I hadn’t missed him after all.

  “Thanks. Sorry I’m late.”

  “I did start to think you’d stood me up,” he said, twisting the cap off a bottle of Bluefin Stout. “Want me to open that for you?”

  “Please.” We traded bottles, he did the honors and we traded back, each taking a sip, while the tourists eddied around us.

  “Time got away from me,” I said. “Every one of our pre-Season guests wanted a ride on the carousel, and some wanted multiple rides. I thought I had plenty of time to take the tickets down to Marilyn—except every other ride in the park had extra tickets in, too.”

  He nodded and had a swig of ale, which looked like such a good idea that I did the same, savoring the chocolate-y smoothness.

  “I did talk to Nerazi,” he said. “Told her about your notion that your gran’d gone over the Wall. She didn’t say it was impossible, given the stakes, but she was pretty sure Bonny’d have rigged a safety line—something to draw her back, if she was gone too long.”

  I nodded. “I thought about that, too. And I think she probably counted on her tree to ground her. The trouble is that there’s . . . not a good interface between us and the Land of the Flowers. There’s so much change here, it affects everything, even magic. That’s why we have to keep renewing the damn’ bindings on the carousel; change keeps unraveling the spellwork.” I took a swallow of my ale. Borgan was watching me with every indication of interest.

  “In the Land of the Flowers,” I continued, “there’s hardly any change at all, and there’s magic in everything—like sand in a gear shaft . . .” I drank some more ale, frustrated by the impossibility of explaining exactly how . . . strange the Land of the Flowers was.

  “So you’re saying that your gran might not be able to find her ’way back across the Wall, even with her tree for an anchor?” Borgan asked.

  I sighed. “I think so. I remember my mother saying that when she first came to the Land of the Flowers, she couldn’t locate north, which she’d always been able to do at home. And then she found out it was because, in the Land of the Flowers, there is no north. No south—no directions at all like we understand direction here. Even if Gran’s still in touch with her tree—if the bond survived her crossing the Wall—she might not be able to parse the direction of home.”

  Borgan shook his head. “I don’t like to say this, Kate, but—your gran’s trenvay, and she’s been gone off her land for a good long time now . . .”

  “You’re thinking she’s dead. But, see, you’re not taking into account the fact that time runs different in the Land of the Flowers. Over there, she might only’ve been gone since Wednesday.”

  Borgan closed his eyes.

  I grinned in sympathy. “Yeah. It makes my head hurt, too.”

  “It does go a good way to explaining why such folks as I’ve met from Flowerland have been so damn’ high-handed.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re high-handed because they’re from the Land of the Flowers and you’re not. The Changing Land . . . isn’t held in very high esteem across the Wall. We’re kinda the slum of the Six Worlds.”

  “That so?”

  “Hey, don’t take it personal.” I drank some more ale, noting with something like relief that the bottle was almost empty. No magic brew here, anyway. Which reminded me.

  “Borgan—what you said about not being able to lay a hand on Joe Nemeier’s people?”

  He looked down into my face, black eyes ironic. “You about to tell me you had another run-in with the man?”

  “No, with another one of his hired-ons. But, listen! I threw a fire-bolt at her and it bounced. So after I knocked her out, I stepped Sideways and had a good, close look. She was wearing an invulnerability spell.” I looked at him expectantly.

  Borgan didn’t say anything, which was disappointing; I thought he was quicker than that.

  I sighed and laid out the pieces for him. “It looks like there’s an Ozali with an interest in Joe Nemeier’s business.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” he agreed. He took a swig out of his bottle, sighed, and made a long arm, setting the empty down on the corner of the stage. “Kate, if those folks’re wearing magic grease and that’s why we can’t touch ’em, how come you’ve touched two?”

  I stared at him, mouth hanging open like my jaw hinge had broken. Borgan waited. I closed my mouth, opened it, closed, and finally said, “Good question.”

  “That mean you don’t know?”

  “Give me a minute. I’m sure there’s a perfectly—”

  Jikinap sparked along my nerves. Lots of it. And close.

  “Kate?”

  I looked around—and saw exactly nothing out of the ordinary, of course.

  “Somebody just triggered a pretty potent working,” I told Borgan. “I can’t see it unless I step Sideways, and I don’t—”

  “Oh,” Borgan said softly, “fuck.”

  I blinked up at him. “Don’t you think we should date first?”

  “Hey!” a voice came out of the crowd. “Hey, Indian!”

  He sighed, took the bottle out of my hand, and put it next to his on the edge of the stage.

  “This could get messy. You do what I tell you, Kate, hear it?”

  “Oh, yes sir, mister—” I closed my mouth in mid-snarl as two T-shirted guys in their twenties eeled their ways through the crowd by the bar.

  “We can’t touch them,” Borgan said quietly. “That don’t mean they can’t touch us.”

  He put his hand under my elbow, turning me into the crowd at our left, but not before I’d seen two more T-shirts moving purposefully in our direction. One of them was worn by a thin woman with flyaway blond hair. She was frowning, like maybe her head hurt.

  The pressure on my elbow changed, and I moved with it, obediently, shaking as the power rose in my blood, lusting after more of itself.

  “This way, I think . . .” Borgan murmured.

  But “this way” was blocked, too, and I glimpsed yet another familiar face when we tried to angle toward the Sea Change.

  All aro
und us, hundreds of tourists remained oblivious of our close personal danger—chatting, drinking, taking in the fresh salt air along with the smell of popcorn. Maybe they thought we were all actors, paid to provide a little authentic Maine color.

  Or maybe, I thought, beginning to get a clue as my blood heated dangerously, they were under the influence of jikinap.

  I turned my attention back to our current problem, and counted six of Nemeier’s finest; between them they’d cut us off from all the exits.

  The boy whose knife was snug against my backbone stepped forward, pushing people out of his way with a hard hand. They moved without turning their heads, their conversations uninterrupted, the boy and his crew obviously invisible to their eyes. Invisibility spell, then—or maybe not. We weren’t invisible. Were we? And there was damnall I could do about any of it; I had to see the spell to counteract—supposing that I could. And in the meantime there was the very visible trouble already moving in our direction, feral eyes bright, making no effort to conceal their weapons.

  We dropped back, matching step for step, the tourists moving, unseeing, out of our way. Borgan took his hand off my elbow and stepped in front of me.

  The leader stopped and smiled. “Well, now. Two for the price of one.” He turned his head. “That’s the bitchy witchy Mr. Nemeier wants to talk to, Jimmy,” he said to the man on his right, a short, rat-faced guy wearing a leather vest and tattoos. “We’ll take care of the Indian. You make sure she stays right there until we’re ready to take her home.”

  The rat-faced guy grinned and stepped forward, and the land, which had been silent ever since I’d hit the Pier, helpfully offered a collage of sensation—edges and explosions being foremost among them. And all around the tourists talked among themselves, entirely uncurious in the face of imminent mayhem, blood and broken bones.

  “Run,” Borgan muttered, for my ears alone. “Now.”

  Some times, you just don’t argue.

  I turned and sprinted, getting a crazy two-sided visual as the land showed Jimmy jumping after me, Borgan throwing a table, the others surging forward—and still the tourists paid not one scrap of attention.