Stories: All-New Tales ngss-1

by Neil Gaiman

  Well, I say friend. He’s one of our kind, but you know how it is. Fire and rainstorm-we don’t get along. Besides, in his present Aspect he stood taller, weighed heavier, hit harder than me. His face was a thundercloud, and any thought I had of fighting the guy evaporated like cheap perfume. I sheathed the sword and took the better part of valour.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s Our Thor.”

  He sniffed. “Try anything, and I’ll douse you cold,” he said. “I’ve got an army of stormclouds ready to roll. You’ll be out like a light before you can blink. Want to try it?”

  “Did I ever? Nice greeting, friend. It’s been a long time.”

  He grunted. “Arthur’s the name in this present Aspect. Arthur Pluviôse-and you’re dead.” He made it sound like some weird kind of naming ceremony.

  “Wrong,” I said. “Brendan’s dead. And if you think I’d be a party to the murder of my own brother-”

  “Wouldn’t put it past you,” Arthur said, though I could tell the news had shaken him. “Brendan’s dead?” he repeated.

  “’Fraid so.” I was touched-I’d always thought he hated us both.

  “Then this wasn’t you?”

  “My, you’re fast.”

  He glowered. “Then how?”

  “How else?” I shrugged. “The Shadow, of course. Chaos. Black Surt. Choose your own damn metaphor.”

  Arthur gave a long, soft sigh. As if it had preyed on his mind for such a long time that any news-even bad news-even terrible news-could come as a relief. “So it’s true,” he said. “I was beginning to think-”

  “Finally-”

  He ignored the gibe and turned on me once more, his rainy-day eyes gleaming. “It’s the wolves, Lucky. The wolves are on the trail again.”

  I nodded. Wolves, demons, no word exists in any tongue of the Folk to describe exactly what they were. I call them ephemera, though I had to admit there was nothing ephemeral about their present Aspect.

  “Skól and Haiti, the Sky-Hunters, servants of the Shadow, Devourers of the Sun and Moon. And of anything else that happens to be in their way, for that matter. Brendan must have tried to tackle them. He never did have any sense.”

  But I could tell he was no longer listening. “The Sun and-”

  “Moon.” I gave him the abridged version on the events of last night. He listened, but I could tell he was distracted.

  “So, after the Moon, the Sun. Right?”

  “I guess.” I shrugged. “That is, assuming there’s an Aspect of Sól in Manhattan, which, if there is-”

  “There is,” said Arthur grimly. “Her name’s Sunny.” And there was something about his eyes as he said it, something even more ominous than the rain-swelled clouds above us, or his hand on my shoulder, horribly pally and heavy as lead, that made me think I was in for an even lousier day than I’d had so far.

  “Sunny,” I said. “Then she’ll be next.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Arthur. “And yours,” he added, almost as an afterthought, keeping his hand hard on my shoulder and smiling that dangerous, stormy smile.

  “Sure. Why not?” I humoured him. I could afford to-I’m used to running, and I knew that at a pinch, Lukas Wilde could disappear within an hour, leaving no trace.

  He knew it too. His eyes narrowed, and above us the clouds began to move softly, gathering momentum like wool on a spindle. A dimple appeared at its nadir-soon, I knew, to become a funnel of air, stitched and barbed with deadly glamours.

  “Remember what they say,” said Arthur, addressing me by my true name. “Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you.”

  “You wrong me.” I smiled, though I’d never felt less like it. “I’ll be only too happy to help your friend.”

  “Good,” said Arthur. He kept that hand on my shoulder, though, and his smile was all teeth. “We’ll keep to the shadows. No need to involve the Folk any more than we have to. Right?”

  It was a dark and stormy afternoon. I had an idea that it was going to be the first of many.

  SUNNY LIVED IN BROOKLYN Heights, in a loft apartment on a quiet street. Not a place I visit often, which accounts for my not having spotted her sooner. Most of our kind take the discreet approach; gods have enemies too, you know, and we find it pays to keep our glam to ourselves.

  But Sunny was different. For a start, according to Arthur (what a dumb name!), she didn’t know what she was anymore. It happens sometimes; you just forget. You get all wrapped up in your present Aspect; you start to think you’re like everyone else. Perhaps that’s what kept her safe for so long; they say gods look after drunks and half-wits and little children, and Sunny certainly qualified. Transpires that my old pal Arthur had been looking after her for nearly a year without her knowing it, making sure that she got the sunshine she needed to be happy, keeping sniffers and prowlers away from her door.

  Because even the Folk start getting suspicious when someone like Sunny lives nearby. It wasn’t just the fact that it hadn’t rained in months; that sometimes all of New York City could be under a cloud but for the two or three streets surrounding her block; or the funny northern lights that sometimes shone in the sky above her apartment. It was her, just her, with her face and her smile, turning heads wherever she went. A man-a god-could fall in love.

  Arthur had dropped his raingod Aspect, and was now looking more or less like a regular citizen, but I could tell he was making a hell of an effort. As soon as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge I could see him beginning to hold it in, the way a fat man holds in his gut when a pretty girl comes into the room. Then I saw her colours-from afar, like lights in the sky, and the look on his face-that look of truculent yearning-intensified a little.

  He gave me the critical once-over. “Tone it down a bit, will you?” he said.

  Well, that was offensive. I’d looked a lot flashier as Lukas Wilde, but looking at Arthur right then I thought it a bad time to say so. I turned down the volume on my red coat, but kept my hair as it was, hiding my mismatched eyes behind a pair of snappy shades.

  “Better?”

  “You’ll do.”

  We were standing outside the place now. A standard apartment at the back of a lot of others; black fire escape, small windows, little roof garden throwing down wisps of greenery into the guttering. But at the window there was a light, something rather like sunlight, I guess, occasionally strobing here and there-following her movements as she wandered about her flat.

  Some people have no idea of how to go unnoticed. In fact, it was astonishing that the wolves hadn’t seized on her before. She’d not even tried to hide her colours, which was frankly beyond unwise, I thought-hell, she hadn’t even pulled the drapes.

  Arthur gave me one of his looks. “We’re going to protect her, Lucky,” he said. “And you’re going to be nice. Okay?”

  I made a face. “I’m always nice. How could you possibly doubt me?”

  SHE INVITED US IN straightaway. No checking of credentials; no suspicious glance from behind the open drapes. I’d had her down as pretty, but dumb; now I saw she was a genuine innocent, a little-girl-lost in the big city. Not my type, naturally, but I could see what Arthur saw in her.

  She offered us a cup of ginseng tea. “Any friend of Arthur’s,” she said, and I saw his painful grimace as he tried to fit his big fingers around the little china cup, all the while trying to hold himself in so that Sunny could have her sunshine…

  Finally, it was too much for him. He let it out with a gasp of release, and the rain started to come down in snakes, hissing into the gutters.

  Sunny looked dismayed. “Damn rain!”

  Arthur looked like someone had punched him hard, right in the place where thunder gods keep their ego. He gave that feeble smile again. “It doesn’t make you feel safe?” he said. “You don’t think there’s a kind of poetry in the sound, like little hammers beating down onto the rooftops?”

  Sunny shook her head. “Yuck.”

  I lit the fire with a discreet cantrip and a fingeri
ng of the rune Kaen. Little flames shot out of the grate and danced winsomely across the hearth. It was a good trick, though I say it myself-especially as it was an electric fire.

  “Neat,” said Sunny, smiling again.

  Arthur gave a low growl.

  “So-have you seen anything strange around here lately?” Stupid damn question, I told myself. Move a sun goddess onto the third floor of a Manhattan brownstone, and you’re apt to see more than the occasional pyrotechnics. “No guys in suits?” I went on. “Dark overcoats and fedora hats, like someone from a bad fifties comic strip?”

  “Oh, those guys.” She poured more tea. “Yeah, I saw them yesterday. They were sniffing around in the alleyway.” Sunny’s blue eyes darkened a little. “They didn’t look friendly. What do they want?”

  I was going to tell her about Bren, and what had happened to Old Man Moony, but Arthur stopped me with a glance. Sunny has that effect, you know; makes guys want to do stupid things. Stupid, noble, self-sacrificing things-and I was beginning to understand that I was going to be a part of it, whether or not I wanted to be.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” Arthur said with a big smile, clamping a hand on my upper arm and marching me onto the balcony. “They’re just some guys we’re looking for. We’ll camp out here tonight and keep an eye out for them for you. Any trouble, we’ll be here. No need for you to worry. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Sunny.

  “Okay,” I said between gritted teeth (my arm felt like it had been pounded several times with a hammer). I waited until we were alone, and Sunny had drawn the curtains, then I turned on him. “What’s the deal?” I said. “We can’t hold back the Shadow-wolves. You must know that by now, right? You saw what they did to Moony and Bren. Our only chance is to outrun them, to take your lady friend with you and to run like the blazes to another city, to another continent if we can, where the Shadow has less influence-”

  Arthur looked stubborn. “I won’t run.”

  “Fine. Well, it’s been a blast-Ow! My arm!”

  “And neither will you,” said Our Thor.

  “Well, if you put it that way-”

  I may be a trifle impetuous, but I know when to surrender to force majeure. Arthur had his mind set on both of us being heroes. My only remaining choice was whether to set my mind to helping him, thereby possibly saving both our hides, or to make a run for it as soon as the bastard’s guard was down-

  Well, I might have gone down either path, but just then I caught sight of our boys in the alleyway, sniffing and snarling like wolves in suits, and I was down to no choice at all. I drew my mindsword, he drew his. Glamours and runes distressed the night air. Not that they would help us, I thought; they hadn’t helped my brother Bren, or the mad old moongod. And Shadow-or Chaos, if you prefer-had plenty of glamours of its own with which to strike down three renegade gods, fugitives left over from the End of the World-

  “Hey! Up here!” yelled Our Thor.

  Two pairs of eyes turned up towards us. A hiss like static as the ephemera tuned into our whereabouts. A glint of teeth as they grinned-and then they were crawling up the fire escape, all pretence of humanity gone, slick beneath those boxy black coats, nothing much in there but tooth and claw, like poetry with an appetite.

  Oh, great, I thought. Way to keep a low profile, Our Thor. Was it an act of self-sacrifice, a ploy to attract their attention, or could he possibly have a plan? If he did, then it would be a first. Mindless self-sacrifice was about his level. I wouldn’t have minded that much, but it was clear that in his boundless generosity he also meant to sacrifice me.

  “Lucky!” It was raining again. Great ropes and coils of thunderous rain that thrashed down onto our bowed heads, all gleaming in the neon lights in shades of black and orange-from the static-ridden sky, great flakes of snow lumbered down. Well, that’s what happens around a raingod under stress; but that didn’t stop me getting soaked, and wishing I’d brought my umbrella. It didn’t stop the ephemera though. Even the bolts of lightning that crashed like stray missiles into the alleyway (I have skills too, and I was using them like the blazes by then) had no effect on the wolves of Chaos, whose immensely slick and somehow snakelike forms were now poised on the fire escape beneath us, ten feet away and ready to pounce.

  One did-a mindbolt flew. I recognized the rune Hagall. One of my colleague’s most powerful, and yet it passed right through the ephemera with a squeal of awesome feedback, then the creature was on us again, unbuttoning its overcoat, and now I was sure there were stars in there, stars and the mindless static of space-

  “Look,” I said. “What do you want? Girls, money, power, fame-I can get all those things for you, no problem. I’ve got influence in this world. Two handsome, single guys like yourselves-hey, you could make a killing in showbiz.”

  Perhaps not the wisest choice of words.

  The first wolf leered. “Killing,” it said. By then I could smell it again, and I knew that words couldn’t save me. First, the thing was ravenous. Second, nothing with that level of halitosis could possibly hope to make it in the music business. Some guys, I knew, had come pretty close. My daughter Hel, for instance, has, in spite of her-shall we say alternative-looks, a serious fan base in certain circles. But not these guys. I mean, Ew.

  I flung a handful of mindrunes then: Týr; Kaen; Hagall; Ýr-but none of them even slowed it down. The other wolf was onto us now, and Arthur was wrestling with it, caught in the flaps of its black coat. The balcony was pulling away from the wall; sparks and shards of runelight hissed into the torrential rain.

  Damn it, I thought. I’m going to die wet. And I flung up a shield using the rune Sól, and with the last, desperate surge of my glam I cast all the firerunes of the First Aettir at the two creatures that once had been wolves but were now grim incarnations of revenge, because nothing escapes from Chaos, not Thunder, not Wildfire, not even the Sun-

  “Are you guys okay out there?” It was Sunny, peering through a gap in the curtains. “Do you want some more ginseng tea?”

  “Ah-no thanks,” said Arthur, now with a demon wolf in each hand and that stupid grin on his face again. “Look, ah, Sunny, go inside. I’m kinda busy right now-”

  The thing that Our Thor had been holding at bay finally escaped his grasp. It didn’t go far, though; it sprang at me and knocked me backwards against the rail. The balcony gave way with a screech, and we all fell together, three floors down. I hit the deck-damned hard-with the ephemera on top of me, and all the fight knocked out of me and I knew that I was finished.

  Sunny peered down from her window. “Do you need help?” she called to me.

  I could see right into the creature now, and it was grim-like those fairy tales where the sisters get their toes chopped off and the bad guys get pecked to death by crows and even the little mermaid has to walk on razor blades for the rest of her life for daring to fall in love…Except that I knew Sunny had got the Disney version instead, with all the happy endings in it, and the chipmunks and rabbits and the goddamned squirrels (I hate squirrels!) singing in harmony, where even the wolves are good guys and no one ever really gets hurt-

  I gave her a sarcastic smile. “Yeah, wouldya?” I said.

  “Okay,” said Sunny, and pulled the drapes and stepped out onto the balcony.

  And then something very weird happened.

  I WAS WATCHING HER from the alleyway, my arms pinned to my sides now and the ephemera straddling me with its overcoat spread like a vulture about to spear an eyeball. The cold was so intense that I couldn’t feel my hands at all, and the stench of the thing made my head swim, and the rain was pounding into my face and my glam was bleeding out so fast that I knew I had seconds, no more-

  So the first thing she did was put her umbrella up.

  Ignored Arthur’s desperate commands-besides, he was still wrestling with the second ephemera. His colours were flaring garishly; runelight whirled around them both, warring with the driving rain.

  And then she smiled.

 
It was as if the sun had come out. Except that it was night, and the light was, like, sixty times more powerful than the brightest light you’ve ever known, and the alley lit up a luminous white, and I screwed my eyes shut to prevent them from being burnt there and then out of their sockets, and all these things happened at once.

  First of all, the rain stopped. The pressure on my chest disappeared, and I could move my arms again. The light, which had been too intense even to see when it first shone out, diffused itself to a greenish-pink glow. Birds on the rooftops began to sing. A scent of something floral filled the air-strangest of all in that alleyway, where the smell of piss was predominant-and someone put a hand on my face and said:

  “It’s okay, sweetie. They’ve gone now.”

  Well, that was it. I opened my eyes. I figured that either I’d taken more concussion than I’d thought, or there was something Our Thor hadn’t told me. He was standing over me, looking self-conscious and bashful. Sunny was kneeling at my side, heedless of the alleyway dirt, and her blue dress was shining like the summer sky, and her bare feet were like little white birds, and her sugar blond hair fell over my face and I was glad she really wasn’t my type, because that lady was nothing but trouble. And she gave me a smile like a summer’s day, and Arthur’s face went dangerously red, and Sunny said:

  “Lucky? Are you okay?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “I think so. What happened to Skól and Haiti?”

  “Those guys?” she said. “Oh, they had to go. I sent them back into Shadow.”

  Now Arthur was looking incredulous. “How do you know about Shadow?” he said.

  “Oh, Arthur, you’re so sweet.” Sunny pirouetted to her feet and planted a kiss on Our Thor’s nose. “As if I could have lived here this long and not have known I was different-” She looked at the illuminated sky. “Northern lights,” she said happily. “We ought to have them more often here. But I really do appreciate it,” she went on. “You guys looking out for me, and everything. If things had been different, if we hadn’t been made from such different elements, then maybe you and I could have-you know-”