“Well, thank you, and yourself, my lord?” Hardhands says politely.
The two men have not taken eyes off each other. They are in public and must be polite. Then Julien says one word, a harsh guttural word that blossoms a brief burst of dark red fire in the air. The word is in Gramatica, of course, the language of those things which cannot be spoken, and this word would have turned to ashes—literally—in an ordinary mouth. Julien Brakespeare has not an ordinary mouth, though, he’s an adept of the rank of 0=11, the only such Califa has seen since the death of the Georgiana I, some seventy years previously, and in his mouth the word is forceful and compelling. The sea-salt gray dogs flop over, pink noses tipping upward in sleep. The egregore, who was slopping the albino bear grease in a ramekin, stops in mid-glop, eyes suddenly dead and empty. Relais’s grip relaxes and he sits down with a thump that no one notices. Cyrenacia’s whining stops. A sudden silence cups the Magick Box, a silence then broken by Julien’s soft voice: “I must leave in three days or your grandmamma will have my lungs.”
“She will not act against the law,” Hardhands says. “She’ll try to get around it, but she’ll not go obviously against it.”
Julien sighs, a sigh which holds the weight of the world in it. “I fear that the Pontifexa has blood, not justice, on her mind. I did not kill Sidonia, Ban. I swear it. She died in childbed, died of our son, leaving me alone and bereft. All I wish is to live in my House, peacefully with my daughter, and to forget the past. But the Pontifexa will not realize it, she will not accept my sincerity. I truly rue, I do, Banastre, and so did Sidonia. She died with Georgiana’s name on her lips and wanted nothing more than to see us reconciled.”
“I told you, Julien,” Hardhands says impatiently. “She plans on moving around the law with this sub-rosa marriage. She is too conscious of her high standing position to move against you any other way. And her plans are worthless now—I will forestall them, as I promised. The marriage will never happen; she’ll be dead first.”
“Yet she thinks she acts from the best of intentions,” says Julien.
“Ha! She says she acts from love—what the hell does she know of love? She is duty and honor and nothing more. She only knows her own Will, the Wills of those around her are invisible and irrelevant to her, she asks for others to sacrifice, but she will give up nothing. Damn her. Damn her to hell!”
“You speak treason,” Julien says, grinning.
“Ayah, so? It’s the truth and we know it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter—none of this matters, for she’ll be soon enough dead and you will have nothing to fear, Julien,” Hardhands says, breathlessly.
Their hands meet again, only this time, as the avid audience is now blissfully unaware, their fingers intertwine, and then their bodies follow suit. Since the trial began they have seen each other infrequently, and then under the lens of the Pontifexa, the court, or the diva-dreadful newsrags. Secret meetings have been few and far in between, but when so, they have been hot and burning, and full of schemes. Hardhands is riding the rapids of youth, and all he can think of is Julien, and the force and fire of their love. Nothing else seems to matter.
After a few seconds, Julien disengages and says: “What of Springheel Jack?”
Hardhands answers, somewhat distracted: “I couldn’t reach him, but it matters not. I have a better plan. Less messy.”
Julien frowns. “And this would be, darling?”
Hardhands tells Julien about the poison and his plans for administering it to the Pontifexa. Julien’s frown disappears. He kisses Hardhands tenderly, and for a minute Hardhands feels like a shell has exploded inside his skull. Julien’s love is that potent. Their reverie is broken by the sound of growling coming from somewhere around their knees. They break apart and look down. Tiny Doom is gamboling around their boots, yipping and growling.
“Get up, Cyrenacia,” Hardhands commands. “That floor is filthy.”
“Woof-woof!” says Cyrenacia, worrying the hem of his kilt with sharp little teeth.
“Stop that!”
Cyrenacia paws at his boots, begging like a puppy who wants to be petted. This doggie thing is getting out of hand. It was cute for the first five minutes, but those five minutes are long since past. Before Hardhands can do anything to scotch her behavior, Julien reaches with one somewhat unkindly hand and hauls the child upward.
“You were told to stop,” he says.
Cyrenacia halts in mid-growl. Her mouth opens, to roar, and then her father says: “Don’t you dare,” and such is her surprise that no sound actually comes out. “This child has terrible manners, Banastre.”
Hardhands wrinkles his white brow. Tiny Doom is annoying, true, but he’d never particularly noticed terrible manners. In fact, both Paimon and the Pontifexa are harridans when it comes to “please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me,” and thus Hardhands and Tiny Doom rarely forget to echo these sentiments appropriately.
“She has been under the Pontifexa’s thumb for only six months and look at her.” Julien hauls the child up higher, in such a fashion that she cannot possibly wiggle her way free. Her face is screwed up, but she makes no sound, staring up at her father with eyes like little blue marbles. “Why was she permitted to leave Bilskinir dressed like that? She looks like a rag picker, not the Heir to the House Bilskinir and the City of Califa.”
Hardhands looks at his niece. “I thought she looked rather swell,” he says, somewhat doubtfully. “I mean, she’s cute, isn’t she?”
He reaches over and takes Tiny Doom out of Julien’s grip. She’s as rigid as a wooden doll, but as soon as Julien lets go of her, she snatches at Hardhands and holds on to him for dear life, clutching at his shoulders, her knees digging into his sides. Her hair smells orangy; Hardhands is suddenly reminded of his darling grandmamma.
“Tiresome, I think is the word you are looking for,” Julien says. He brushes his hands together; he has not taken his gloves off, and now they are slightly grubby, for Hardhands had been right; the floor Cyrenacia had been crawling on is filthy. “Not that it shall matter much, soon.”
Cyrenacia is now snuffling into Hardhands’ neck, so he digs into the pocket of his frockcoat for a clean hankie and while he mops her nose, he and Julien make their final plans. Then Julien flicks another Gramatica word off his tongue. This word is bright cerise and it fills the room with a jagged light. When the light fades, the hounds roll over and yawn, the egregore finishes glopping, Relais sits up suddenly, and Julien is gone. Tiny Doom howls when Hardhands tries to put her down. Even when they stop for ice cream and pink popcorn—at a place cleaner than Guererro’s but not as flavorable—she will not let go.
IV.
So, here we have Hardhands in his parlor, his office, his Conjuring Room. As he does not rely on atmosphere to get his Will off, the room is simple and compact, with none of the falderal so often associated with the magickal arts. The walls are curved and white, the floor soft blue, and at the apex of the domed ceiling a circular window stares like an eye into the night sky. As with most liminal spaces, the room is round.
Handhands stands in the middle of a circle drawn out of blue cornmeal. His eyes are closed, his arms extended outward, as though to catch the magickal Current, and the air surrounding him glitters and sparks from the sound that is humming in his chest. This noise does not throb and blast like the noise from a percussion dæmon, but it’s a pretty darn big vibration and from its incredible vibrato all the nasty little flourishes that cluster around the Current, that cluster around the Will, that just plain cluster, evaporate in horror. Hardhands can banish like no other; Aethyr that has been scrubbed clean by his aural vibrations stays clean for days, even when the circle is dropped. He’s good at pushing things away, is our boy, and not so perhaps clever at drawing them in, but he is still young.
The last vowel vibrated and the banishing done, Hardhands launches right into the opening of a Vortex. He spins his arms, stopping at each quarter of the circle, to expel an incendiary Gramatica word. These sounds hang in the air, incandes
cent coldfire flames that flicker brilliant colors off Hardhands’ set face, striping him as if with warpaint. When he is done, and the last explosive word burns before him, patterning a burning crosshatch of four arrows, eight points in all, he gathers into himself all of his Force and Fire, his Galvanic Heart, his Steel Will, and flings this mass of energy outward with a flick of opening fists. The force of his fire hits the Vortex, which catches it and holds it in the center of its pointed web. For a minute the energy hangs there in the middle cross-hatching, and then Hardhands reaches out with a casual hand, and gives the topmost arrow point a good spin.
The Vortex begins to spin, slowly first, then gaining momentum, the colors of the arrow points swirling into one sinuous octarine blur. As the Vortex picks up movement, it starts to hum, a low sound that cannot be heard but which rattles the floor beneath, shakes the wall, and slowly turns into a gathering roar that echoes outward. The floor is shivering, the paint on the wall rippling. A crack has appeared in the center of the Vortex, and through this crack spills a dark blackness that is blindingly bright. Anyone outside the circle who looked into the Vortex’s heart would find their eyeballs dribbling right out of their sockets.
Hardhands throws his head back, his loosened hair whipping loligo-like around his face and chest. “Χηαψοφαθυε!”
The Vortex sucks into itself with a thunderclap. The window above cracks, and little fragments of glass shower downward, speckling Hardhands’ hair like falling stars. Bilskinir shudders once, like a man who has just been drenched with a bucket full of cold water, and drops a full three inches before Paimon, jerked out of his jelly-making, is able to stabilize the House’s foundations. Happy for Hardhands that the Pontifexa is attending a performance of Guillermo el Sangre at the Hippodrome and that by the time the ritual’s shockwave reaches into the City it has dissipated into a small rumble that is absorbed by the opera’s orchestration. The sangyn-colored aiguillettes in the Pontifexa’s hair do bob a bit, but she attributes that to the incredibly high range of the soubrette singing the part of the ingénue and does not at all consider that her grandson may be at home ripping apart the Aeythr with his bare hands.
Back in his circle, the explosion has left Hardhands fireblown but unburned. His hair is sparking a bit, though, and there is a faint glow to his skin, the glow of satisfaction, of completion, of a really damn fine evocation. His Vortex has gone from immediately apparent to lingering afterglow, and now he’s ready to get down to brass tacks. The Aeythr around him is scrubbed clean of nasties and charged crackling full of Current. Time to begin.
He breaks the circle of cornmeal because he doesn’t need it anymore and, wringing his hair back from blood-speckled shoulders, kneels before a small humpback trunk. From this trunk he withdraws a pack of cards and a small mortar and pestle. He takes these things back into the center of the circle, scattering cornmeal with his bare feet, and sits down cross-legged. The air is supercharged, waiting, and as he draws it into his lungs, his blood tingles in his veins. He’s feeling spiffy, and he sings Let me be your salty dog, or I won’t be your man at all, let me be your salty dog just for the sheer joy of watching his own voice snap and crack around him.
The items that he purchased from the Magick Box are already unpacked and waiting. Brushing his wayward hair back, yet again, Hardhands bends to the task at hand. He pours and mixes, whispering fragments of Gramatica that wisp about his face and hands like wiggly little moths. A stray word flutters about his face and he waves it away absently, twists and ties threads into sigils, words into colors, powders into power. It’s a dangerous procedure, one wrong move and he could blow a hole right into next week, but he has supreme confidence in his own abilities and he does not falter once. The sigil completed and glittering before him, he takes a pot of Madam Twanky’s Fornication-Red lip pomade and squashes its brilliant pigment into the mortar. He adds the glittering sigil and begins mashing. It takes a few minutes of muscle-cracking, teeth-clenching effort to incorporate the sigil into the pomade, but he presses downward, nudging the process forward with a few swear words, and then it is done. He glops the now quivering pomade back into its small pot and puts the lid back on. Madam Twanky’s face stares at up him, teeth caught in a grin, her hair piled high on her head like whip cream, surrounded by grinning monkey putti heads. Let Angels Kiss Your Soul in Bliss! scrolls underneath Madam Twanky’s friendly face. Angels, indeedy.
Hardhands seals the pot and puts it to one side. He sweeps the remnant of his sigil-making into the crumbled paper bag and then, cracking the Aeyther around him slightly, thrusts the evidence through. There is nothing to show for his business but the faint glimmering riming the interior of the mortar and the smirk on Hardhands’ face.
Now that the work is done, he’s in a cheerie cherry mood, thinking of the fun to come and the joy with Julien, and how once the Pontifexa is removed nothing is going to get in their way. Julien can rule the kid, do the power thing, and Hardhands and his band will do everything else. Wanting to revel in his spiffy mood and anticipate the future happiness ahead of him, Hardhands decides to indulge himself in a little divinatory spelunking and spills the cards out of their stained silk wrapper. They fall like leaves before him, little plackets of bright colored pasteboard whose backs are marked with a six-pointed hexagram. He scatters the cards further with a brush of his hand and says:
“Present!”
A card flips upward in response, turning itself over helpfully. The Three of Pistols: Mutation. Hardhands frowns, a wee bit surprised. Mutation is not an auspicious card; it signifies things gone awry, and when you have just done a major working, involving major mojo, you do not want to be told by the Aeyther that anything might possibly have gone awry.
Hardhands flicks his fingers at the scattered cards, and another piece of pasteboard flips to his command. Eight of Banners: Bombast. Although the meaning of this card is clear enough, as a clarifier to the first card, its appearance is confusing. Bombast is not a quality that young Hardhands wishes to associate with himself. He gives up on the present and jumps to the happiness to come.
“Future!”
Jack of Pistols: Abandon. The frown becomes a deep line between Hardhands’ black-rimmed eyes. Abandon is a wishy-washy card—it can mean the release of restriction, but it can also mean betrayal and being left behind. He flips for clarification: Six of Banners: Skullduggery. Definitely on the wrong side of wishy-washy. The Pontifexa is going to mess him up, still. What is she up to that he does not know?
“Explain.”
Flip. The Scout. Hardhands snatches at the card. A coyote dances across pasteboard, pink tongue lolling in a laugh, brushy tail bobbing insultingly. The Scout is the card of deception, of jibes, of mockery. The coyote has green eyes. The Pontifexa’s eyes are welkin blue, but Julien, oh Julien, has eyes as green as grapes. Hardhands’ lovely dinner (olive and porpoise galantine and coconut fool) is starting to fidget uneasily in his tummy. His lovely dinner does not like these portents any more than Hardhands himself does. He had expected to get all happy cards: Ten of Pistols: Release or Eight of Pearls: Harmony. Instead, it’s all fire and air, which, of course, mix to become lightning, and lightning scorches and destroys all it touches.
Hardhands flips again, this time touching the card with a long finger to hold it still. Three of Banners: Nuisance. Although the image is a familiar one, tonight it has a strange resonance: the Three of Banners shows a small child pulling on the tail of a wolf. The wolf is turning its head, slavering jaws yawning wide, and there’s no question about what is going to happen next. The child has bobbing red hair.
“Future,” Hardhands says again, and now his voice is hoarse.
The Four of Bones shoots upward, and he ducks back. He grabs for it and swears as its edge slices into his fingers. Chastisement. The child on this card has red hair, too. And so does the man who is slitting her throat with a razor. A large pink stuffy pig in dancing shoes is watching this operation, dispassionately, from the abandoned crib.
<
br /> Hardhands puts the card down and stares into the darkness of the room, chewing on his lip, raw still from the ardor of Julien Brakespeare’s kiss. He twists his hands together, once, twice, clenching his fingers into crunchy fists. He looks at the cards laid out before him: Mutation, Abandon, Bombast, The Scout, Nuisance, Chastisement. He cracks his fingers again; now they are almost bloodless from his clenching.
“Alfonso, front and center.”
A jag of darkness opens up and a water elemental squeezes through. It raises its bowler to Hardhands and flips its tail in greeting: “Ayah, jefe? Que quieres? I was having chow.”
“I want to talk to my sister. Find her and bring her here.”
The elemental frowns, scratches its little head with one tiny hand. “I dunno, jefe, your circle is torn, and—”
Hardhands flicks Alfonso with a short but potent word in Gramatica. The elemental momentarily disappears in a haze of roiling color, and when the color fades he looks a wee bit scorched around the edges. Smoke tendrils up from his little hat. The distinct smell of fried fish floats on the air.
“Now.”
The elemental flicks its tail and darts back through the Vortex.
Hardhands puts his gear away, but he leaves the Vortex open for Alfonso’s return. He walks around and around the room, but that doesn’t make Alfonso return any faster, nor does it calm his beating heart. He keeps looking down at the cards in his hands, as though they might have changed through the sheer force of the hammering of his heart, but each time he looks down, they remain the same. The coyote grins up at him until he flips the card facedown, ignoring the plaintive yipping. The wolf still turns to snap at the child. The stuffy pig still stares. Hardhands’ bare feet leave little bloody smears on the floor, from the broken glass, but he ignores the pain. Pain is just weakness leaving the body, and his mind is on other things. A faint fresh breeze, smelling of salt and water, drifts down from the open space above.
Prophecies, Libels & Dreams Page 7
