The irony is that it isn’t a particularly attractive street. Oh, it’s clean enough, so the beautiful people won’t get their beautiful shoes dusty, but there are nicer streets to be seen in Skullcap—or anywhere else, for that matter.
Still, a custom is a custom, so when I was summoned to one of the most exclusive hotels in the Beautiful Street, I decided to wear Benedetta for the occasion. Of all my jumbled personae, Benedetta is the most attractive. She exudes a certain warmth, an indefinable air of quality. I do have more beautiful personae to call upon, but they’re either totally psychopathic or just plain brain dead, set aside in my Absolute Emergency (don’t ever go there) category.
So it was Benedetta in her red and white polka-dotted frock with built-in bodice straps who breezed into the bar of the hotel, and slid into a marble-tiled booth.
It was several minutes before the Chef came over, and I was already furnished with a high glass of bubbles and ice cream that a passing waiter had spontaneously given me, no charge. I love being Benedetta.
“Are you ze agent from Claddius?” the Chef growled in an accent I couldn’t place at all. The Beautiful Street probably demands its food service professionals display fake accents so that the clientele can feel superior.
I batted my eyes at him (well, Benedetta did) and toyed with my straw. “Who would you like me to be?” That’s the main drawback with being Benedetta. She flirts like it’s her job.
The performance had little effect on the Chef. “What eez your name?”
“Benedetta,” I said coyly. Damn, but the novelty soon wears off with this one. I hate being coy.
He dropped his accent like a hot mouthful of stew. Ha, I knew it. “Your real name, doll. Think I don’t know a Switcher when I see one?”
Doll? I looked around to make sure no one would notice the sudden appearance of my less than perfect nose in the midst of the Beautiful Street glamour. Then I switched to my original form, with less sex appeal but more brains and a better sense of humour.
The Chef nodded, his theory had been confirmed. “Name?”
“Delta Void,” I told him in my most business-like voice, squirming in Benedetta’s little polka-dotted dress. Those bodice straps fit her a lot better than they fit me. “DV for short. Claddius said you had an assignment.”
I’m an odd job agent (not a mercenary, they’re illegal you know) and Claddius handles the business side of it. He gets me the weirdest gigs, especially when he muddles me up with his other main client—Barko the circus act.
“I need a unicorn,” the Chef hissed at me. “Soon as possible, yesterday at the latest.”
I would have laughed out loud, but I didn’t want to draw attention towards my less than perfect nose. “Are you serious?”
Nervous, he retreated to his obscure accent. “Ze gossip minstrels ’ave announced ze latest diet fad to ze Street, and a unicorn eez ze main ingredient. I must ’ave eet.”
“Of course it’s a good diet food,” I snapped back. “Extinct animals mean zero calories. Can’t you just slaughter something and say it’s unicorn?”
He gasped, wounded to the quick. “Weez ze discerning palates in zis street? I zeenk not!”
I tried to spell it out for him “There aren’t any unicorns left, except in—” The bastard was grinning. “Oh, no. I’m not going there!”
“Where ze bluegums grow,” said the Chef.
“There are no more bluegums,” I told him desperately. “The last plantations were wiped out by the Glimmer—they were all turned into clockwork typewriters or something. Purple clockwork typewriters.”
“Zey are plentiful in zee Outback,” the Chef told me smarmily.
“And that’s where I’ll find you a unicorn, I suppose,” I sighed. “Do you know what that place is like?” It was worth a shudder, so I shuddered.
“Obviously you do. You ’ave been zere before, yes?”
“I had the personae to cope with it in those days,” I growled at him. “My collection is more depleted now.”
He named a figure. A big one.
I drew my eyebrows together and named an even more exorbitant figure, hopefully one that would make his legs fall off in shock, so he would forget the whole idea.
He added the two numbers together, scribbling the result on a scrap of parchment, and handed it to me.
I’m a sucker, I know I’m a sucker. But 212 is my lucky number, and a girl can’t resist an offer like that, not when her boot soles are worn as thin as mine are.
You did realise that we were talking about free meals, didn’t you? 212 meals in the Beautiful Street is 212 damn fine meals, even if I had to dress up as Benedetta every time to claim one. And maybe I could trade some of them for a new pair of boot soles.
–§–§–§–§–§–
That’s how I ended up wandering through the multi-coloured peaks of the devastatingly weird Skullcap Mountains, looking for a gateway into the most bloody horrible alternate dimension ever devised. And that is how I met Lance.
I was wearing Herna the Huntress at the time and she spotted him a mile off, marching along in his brown leathers and dull grey furs—he stood out like a beacon among the bright, acrylic leaves and tangles of this part of the Skullcaps, which is mostly fuschia and fluorescent green.
Since Herna was dominant I couldn’t prevent her from throwing a spear at him, though at least I deflected her aim so it only struck him in the leg. I switched to DV and hurried over to see how he was. I can be caring! Well, actually I’m not that good at caring, so I switched over to Bettany the seamstress (I haven’t had any healers in me since the Year of the Superflood).
Still, Bettany did the trick, stitched him up and kept him happily drugged on lionsbane (don’t ask me how she knows what these herbs do, she has a weird background) until he was fixed. By this time it was almost sunset and I was willing to do almost anything to avoid going into the Outback, so I let Bettany set up camp and cook a nice stew, then I switched over to DV in order to eat it. I’m no fool.
Lance was still groggy, but I managed to get his name out of him and some soup into him before he lapsed either into sleep or a coma.
Sleeping on the ground isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They never mention that in epic poetry, do they? “And the hero was extra bad-tempered because he had a crick in his neck and dust in his shoes from a night with a dead log as his only pillow, so he slew them all, including the damsel in distress…” Now there’s a bedtime story with some realism.
Morning came, and my newfound knight in grubby leathers awoke. As the smell of sizzling bacon overpowered the annoying smell of nearby bluegum, he told me what he was doing in these parts.
I stared at him, gobsmacked. “You’re a what?”
“A dragon hunter,” he replied, smacking his own lips around a piece of bacon.
I laughed at him. “You’re kidding! You hunt dragons? What, were the sheep a bit much for you? Got bored of stalking kittens with long spears?”
He was disgruntled, as if I had mortally offended him, which I probably had. DV may be my natural form (well, as natural as forms get for a Switcher like me) but she doesn’t have much tact.
Anyway, this Lance person swelled up his chest. “Dragons are a ferocious and deadly beast, milady. Only the bravest and the noblest of heart can slay a dragon.”
I gave him a slow and steady look. “You’re not from around here, are you?” The only dragons I know are farmed for their scales, docile as bunny rabbits.
He ignored that, biting savagely into his bacon. “What are you hunting, pray? When not spearing strange knights in the leg, that is.”
“I’m hunting a unicorn,” I said glumly. “Fool’s errand, but a job’s a job.”
He smiled beatifically. “Ah, the chaste young maiden seeking to capture a unicorn to be her love slave.”
“I beg your pardon?” I grabbed my own piece of bacon and blew hard on it to cool it to eating temperature. “Not a maiden, thank you very much, not particularly chaste, and
I don’t need a love slave. What book of epic poetry did you pull that one out of, mate? I’m snaring a unicorn for the cooking pot.”
He stared at me in horror. “You mean—to eat?”
“Gods know why. It’ll taste terrible, tough as old boots.” I stuffed the rest of the bacon in my mouth and wiped my hands on my trews. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a terrifying alternate dimension to ransack. Have a nice day.”
He grabbed my arm, almost apoplectic with shock. “B-B-but unicorns are beautiful magical, aethereal creatures. Precious to the gods, symbols of purity!”
I gave him a long, hard stare. “You’re really not from around here.”
The long and the short of it is that the well-meaning clot decided to come along with me, in search of his big ferocious dragons (I don’t know who spun him that tall tale) and in the hope that he could convince me to give up this idea of catching a unicorn for the dinner table. And miss out on all those free meals? Not likely. Besides, I knew something he didn’t about unicorns.
Once the fire was doused and the scent of bacon washed away, the bluegums were easy to smell. The Skullcap Mountains are a weird place—so many magical explosions and mystical convergences have happened here that mysterious portals are stacked three-deep, tucked between the cracks in reality.
I have a good nose for these things. Well, Sadonna does. She’s my most mystical persona, a willowy creature with long hair and trailing jewellery. She can get high on one incense stick, and does so too frequently for my liking, but she’s good at sniffing out doorways to other universes, which was just what I needed.
No one really knows what the Outback is. It’s a broad land with desert up to your neck and sky down to your ankles. A land where the bits and pieces of reality go when they’re no longer needed. I went there, once upon a time, for some stupid reason or another, and at least six of my personae got themselves killed. I wasn’t looking forward to this trip. But the bacon had been the last of my supplies, and I didn’t plan to go hungry this winter, so…
Sadonna moved forward, trailing wisps of sea-green lace and sniffing healthily.
Lance followed, his eyes squarely on her prominent cleavage, which was boosted by various arcane means. I’ve never understood the whole underwire thing, myself. “How do you change like that?” he asked eagerly. “Your whole body, features, personality. How do you do it?”
Sadonna gave him a much more tolerant smile than I ever would have. “It’s ma-agic,” she said dreamily, and stepped forward. Into the Outback.
I switched back to DV and took a deep breath to clear my head from Sadonna’s vague personality. “Well, here we are.” I swung my rucksack back over my shoulder. The smell of bluegum was intoxicating, only slightly toxic. “Seen any dragons yet?”
“Nay,” said Lance, in his know-it-all voice that told me a lecture was on the way (I knew him so well already). “The beasts only nest in the mountain tops and the deep caves, they would never be seen out in the open like this, and at night.”
It was night here, did I mention that? The moon was succulently full and everything seemed blue, even the gritty ground. There was a glow of something like fire in the distance. I shaded my eyes, trying to make it out. A moment later, I realised what it was.
Even before Lance could tell me ‘I told you so’ about dragons being large and ferocious, it was already on top of us. Don’t ask me where it came from—maybe it was a leftover from the old days, when knights were bold and stupid. Maybe there were other doors that led from the Outback—doors to distant lands, where dragons were too bloody big for their own good. Then again, maybe the daft berk had conjured it up out of his over-active imagination. I wouldn’t put it past him. Trust me, the claws and teeth were real.
Lance threw himself forward with a crow of triumph, sword in hand. He was going to get himself killed. I sifted my mind for a persona who could cope with this situation, but most of them lay cowering in the back of my subconscious. Only one came to mind, and it was a full moon too, damn it, damn it. I could feel her rising to the occasion, swelling up in my over-crowded psyche.
“Excuse me,” I called out apologetically to my travelling companion, and switched.
Into Miss Lunatic.
The moon filled me up with light and I tore forward, clawing, shrieking, ten foot tall. I ate into the dragon, bit his flank and felt the blood drip down my body—Miss Lunatic always leaves me with excessive dry-cleaning bills.
The distraction allowed Lance to fit together his namesake, a long pointy pole that I presumed he was planning to stick into the dragon at some point. I was thwacked from behind by a tail (or a wing) and went flying, my werewolf senses momentarily dazed.
Lance charged the dragon full on, but the canny beast simultaneously sidestepped and sideswiped him. As he fell, Lance yelled my name or something very like it, but it was too late for me.
Miss Lunatic gets easily distracted, and while Lance was fighting for his life with the overgrown lizard, Miss Lunatic was off with the faeries, dancing the werewolf dance across the desert floor of the Outback, baying to the moon. More trouble than she’s worth, that one.
–§–§–§–§–§–
Sunrise came to the Outback, and I woke up (DV again, and none too soon) with a fit of coughing, spitting up hairballs and feeling like death warmed up. I crawled back to the mouth of the overgrown desert dimension, half-expecting to find several little wet pieces of Lance that would need burying.
He was still alive, though he had an oozing claw wound in his side. The dragon was dead.
Feeling seedy, I nudged the beast with my toe. “Need help harvesting?”
Lance stared up at me, looking worse than I did. “Harvest?” he croaked.
I picked a handful of bluegum leaves and passed them to him to staunch the wound. 101 uses, you know. “Sure. The meat and the scales—though gods know what use the scales will be, they don’t seem to hang together nicely like normal-sized dragon scales do.”
Just as well, really, or you’d get the burly drakherd sons up here, trying to catch a beast to mate with their Flossies and Shirlies, and I know for a fact that they shear the dragons every year by whirling them around their heads and frightening the scales off them—having crossbred their little Flossie with Draco here, the drakherd boys would break their backs come harvest season, though I doubt if even that would stop them.
“What a horrible idea,” Lance said distastefully. “There will be no desecration of this body.”
I stared at him. “Why did you kill it if you weren’t going to harvest the meat and scales? You could have run away. Why provoke it?”
He shifted slightly, to give me a better view of his belt. And the notches on it.
I was too horrified to speak, too horrified even to think, and I probably would have hit him in his pretty-boy face if the unicorn hadn’t chosen that moment to come out of the bushes.
From a distance, unicorns look aethereal and lovely. Close up, they look more like me after a hard night’s werewolf rave. This fellow was greyish rather than pure white and he had a straggly little beard that trickled down to his knobbly knees. His nasty yellow eyes were bleary. His horn was at a disreputable angle. Still, he was definitely unicorn shaped.
Lance’s face was beatific, and he reached longingly out to the creature. “Oh, beauteous one. Cleanse me, heal me. Let me share your magnificence.”
The unicorn stepped towards him and I readied myself, because there’s one thing I know about unicorns that Lance, being from well out of town, doesn’t. The thing about unicorns is, they’re evil bastards.
Perhaps Lance realised from the horrible glint in its eye, because he flung himself aside at the last minute and the horn caught him smack in the left shoulder instead of through his heart. I suppose that was a good thing. As he screamed with pain and the horn was temporarily occupied, I switched to Herna the Huntress and wielded my trusty machete, chopping the horn off at the stem.
The other thing about uni
corns is that once you remove their horn, they’re totally lamblike. Old Goat-Features didn’t even mind carrying a wounded knight on his way to the soup pot (we dropped the blighter off near the Skullcap docks to catch a boat back to wherever he came from).
So the Beautiful Street ate soup, and the unicorn’s horn was a trophy displayed to prove that the unicorn soup was the real thing (although I know for a fact that the Chef thickens his stock with farmed dragon meat, to make it go further) and everyone was happy until the new fad came along.
As for me, I ate well that winter and I had new boot soles too, the kind which go click-clack on the cobbles, because I’d finally figured out a use for over-sized dragon scales.
Hey, I call it a happy ending.
Delta Void’s Day Off
It was the middle of the afternoon when I stepped on to the docks, surveying the city of Skullcap. I’d been away long enough that even the usual dockside scents of salt, grease and fish fish fish were welcome to me.
I walked with purpose towards the Business District (which, thanks to the small size of our city, is also the Theatre District, the Restaurant District, the Palace District and the Strangely Fashionable Little Antique Shop District).
My manager Claddius has an office on the ground floor of a skinny brick building in Chartreuse Street, which just goes to show that he’s wealthier than he claims to be. Ground floor rents are sky-high around here because the tightly packed buildings, narrow streets and houses built out of oil-soaked driftwood make the city a major fire risk. Ground floor tenants are the ones most likely to survive when Skullcap inevitably goes up like a bonfire on heat.
My routine goes something like this—I stroll into the office and harass Claddius’s secretary to pay me for the last job I completed. She in turn smiles sweetly and pretends not to have the faintest idea who I am. We exchange insults, threats and blows. About the time that I’m on my knees, trying to scratch her eyes out while avoiding her talon-like fingernails, Claddius will pop his head in from his back office, express surprise at seeing me and then express even further surprise that I think he owes me money. He offers me barter goods such as eggs, dried fish and live goats, reminding me that Mocklore is mostly a cash-free society. We exchange insults, threats, blows…and I eventually get paid, because he fights like a limp kitten.
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 98
