And now here:
Up until this very second, Hardhands has been feeling dandy as candy about this night: his invocation has been powerful and sublime, the blood in his veins replaced by pure unadulterated Magickal Current, hot and heavy. Up until this very second, if he clapped his hands together, sparks would fly. If he sang a note, the roof would fall. If he tossed his hair, fans would implode. Just from the breeze of the Vortex through his skin, he had known this was going to be a charm of a show, the very pinnacle of bombast and bluster. The crowded club still hums with cold-fire charge, the air still sparks, cracking with glints of magick: yowza. But now all that rich bubbly magick is curdling in his veins, his drummer has slid back to the Abyss, and he could beat someone with a stick. Thanks to an idiot boyfriend and a bothersome five-year-old his evening has just tanked.
Hardhands’ perch is lofty. Despite the roiling smoke (cigarillo, incense, and oil), he can look out over the big big hair and see the club is as packed as a cigar box with hipsters eager to see the show. From the stage Hardhands can see a lot, his vision sharpened by the magick he’s been mainlining, and he sees: hipsters, b-boys, gothicks, crimson-clad officers, a magistra with a jaculus on a leash, etc. He does not see a small child or a pink pig or even the tattered remnants of a small child and a pink pig or even, well, he doesn’t see them, period.
Hardhands sucks in a deep breath and uses what is left of the Invocation still working through his veins to shout: “Οι!”
The syllable is vigorous and combustible, flowering in the darkness like a bruise. The audience erupts into a hollering hooting howl. They think the show is about to start. They are ready and geared. Behind Hardhands, the band also mistakes his intention, and despite the lack of drummer, kicks in with the triumphant blare of a horn, the delirious bounce of the hurdy-gurdy.
“Οο!” This time the shout sparks bright red, a flash of coldfire that brings tears to the eyes of the onlookers. Hardhands raises an authoritative hand towards the band, crashing them into silence. The crowd follows suit, and the ensuing quiet is almost as ear-shattering.
“Οι.” This time his words provide no sparkage, and he knows that his Will is fading under his panic. The club is dark. It is full of large people. Outside it is darker still, and the streets of South of the Slot are wet and full of dangers. No place for a Tiny Doom and her Pig, oh so edible, to be wandering around, alone. Outside it is the worst night of the year to be wandering alone anywhere in the City, particularly if you are short, stout, and toothsome.
“Οι!” This time Hardhands’ voice, the voice which has launched a thousand stars, which has impregnated young girls with monsters and kept young men at their wanking until their wrists ache and their members bleed, is scorched and rather squeaky:
“Has anyone seen my wife?”
II: Historical Notes
Here’s a bit of background. No ordinary night, tonight, not at all. It’s Pirates’ Parade, and the City of Califa is afire—in some places actually blazing. No fear, tho’, bucket brigades are out in force, for the Pontifexa does not wish to lose her capital to revelry. Wetness is stationed around the things that the Pontifexa most particularly requires not to burn: her shrines, Bilskinir House, Arden’s Cake-O-Rama, the Califa National Bank. Still, even with these bucket brigades acting as damper, there’s fun enough for everyone. The City celebrates many holidays, but surely Pirates’ Parade ranks as Biggest and Best.
But why pirates and how a parade? Historians (oh fabulous professional liars) say that it happened thusly: Back in the day, no chain sealed the Bay of Califa off from sea-faring foes, and the Califa Gate sprang wide as an opera singer’s mouth, a state of affairs good for trade and bad for security. Chain was not all the small city lacked: no guard, no organized militia, no bloodthirsty Scorchers regiment to stand against havoc, and no navy. The City was fledgling and disorganized, hardly more than a village, and plump for the picking.
One fine day, pirates took advantage of Califa’s tenderness and sailed right through her Gate and docked at the Embarcadero, as scurvy as you please. From door to door they went, demanding tribute or promising wrath, and when they were loaded down with booty they went well satisfied back to their ships to sail away.
But they didn’t get far. While the pirates were shaking down the householders, a posse of quiet citizens crept down to the docks and sabotaged the poorly guarded ships. The pirates arrived back at the docks to discover their escape boats sinking, and suddenly the docks themselves were on fire, and their way off the docks was blocked, and then they were on fire too, and that was it.
Perhaps Califa had no army, no navy, no militia, but she did have citizens with grit and cleverness, and grit and cleverness trump greed and guns every time. Such a clever victory over a pernicious greedy foe is worth remembering, and maybe even repeating, in a fun sort of way, and thus was born a roistering day of remembrance when revelers dressed as pirates gallivant door to door demanding candy booty, and thus Little Tiny Doom has muscled in on Hardhands’ evening. With Grandmamma promised to attend a whist party, and Butler Paimon’s night off, who else would take Tiny Doom (and the resplendently costumed Pig) on candy shakedown? Who but our hero, as soon as his show is over and his head back down to earth, lucky boy?
Well.
The Blue Duck and its hot dank club-y-ness may be the place to be when you are tall and trendy and your hearing is already shot, but for a short kidlet, big hair and loud noises bore, and the cigarillo smoke scratches. Tiny Doom has waited for Pirates’ Parade for weeks, dreaming of pink popcorn and sugar squidies, chocolate manikins and jacksnaps, praline pumpkin seeds and ginger bombs: a sackful of sugar guaranteed to keep her sick and speedy for at least a week. She can wait no longer.
Shortness has its advantage; trendy people look up their noses, not down. The potty is filthy and the floor yucky wet; Tiny Doom and Pig slither out the door, right by Relais, so engaged in his conversation with a woman with a boat in her hair that he doesn’t even notice the scram. Around elbows, by tall boots, dodging lit cigarettes and drippy drinks held low and cool-like, Tiny Doom and Pig achieve open air without incident and then, sack in hand, set out for the Big Shakedown.
“Rancy Dancy is no good,” she sings as she goes, swinging Pig, who is of course too lazy to walk, “Chop him up for firewood . . . When he’s dead, boil his head and bake it into gingerbread . . .”
She jumps over a man lying on the pavement, and then into the reddish pool beyond. The water makes a satisfying SPLASH and tho’ her hem gets wet, she is sure to hold Pig up high so that he remains dry. He’s just getting over a bad cold and has to care for his health, silly Pig he is delicate, and up past his bedtime, besides. Well, it is only once a year.
Down the slick street Tiny Doom galumphs, Pig swinging along with her. There are shadows ahead of her and shadows behind, but after the shadows of Bilskinir House (which can sometimes be grabby), these shadows: So what? There’s another puddle ahead, this one dark and still. She pauses before it, and some interior alarum indicates that it would be best to jump over, rather than in. The puddle is wide, spreading across the street like a strange black stain. As she gears up for the leap, a faint rippling begins to mar the mirror-like surface.
“Wah! Wah!” Tiny Doom is short, but she has lift. Holding her skirt in one hand, and with a firm grip upon Pig, she hurtles herself upward and over, like a tiny tea cosy levering aloft. As she springs, something wavery and white snaps out of the stillness, racing towards her, whip-crack fast. She lands on the other side and keeps scooting, beyond the arm’s reach. Six straggly fingers, like pallid parsnips, waggle angrily at her, but she’s well beyond their grip.
“Tell her, smell her! Kick her down the cellar,” Tiny Doom taunts, flapping Pig’s ears derisively. The scraggly arm falls back, and then another emerges from the water, hoisting up on its elbows, pulling a slow rising bulk behind it: a knobby head, with knobby nose and knobby forehead and a slowly opening mouth that shows razor-sharp gums and a
pointy black tongue unrolling like a hose. The tongue has length where the arms did not, and it looks gooey and sticky, just like the salt licorice Grandmamma loves so much. Tiny Doom cares not for salt licorice one bit and neither does Pig, so it seems prudent to punt, and they do, as fast as her chubby legs can carry them, farther down the slickery dark street.
III: Irritating Children
Here is Hardhands in the alley behind the club, taking a deep breath of brackish air, which chills but does not calm. Inside, he has left an angry mob who’ve had their hopes dashed rather than their ears blown. The Infernal Engines of Desire (opening act) has come back on stage and is trying valiantly to suck up the slack, but the audience is not particularly pacified. The Blue Duck will be lucky if it doesn’t burn. However, that’s not our hero’s problem; he’s got larger fish frying.
He sniffs the air, smelling: the distant salt spray of the ocean; drifting smoke from some bonfire; cheap perfume; his own sweat; horse manure. He closes his eyes and drifts deeper, beyond smell, beyond scent, down down down into a wavery darkness that is threaded with filaments of light which are not really light, but which he knows no other way to describe. The darkness down here is not really darkness, either; it’s the Magickal Current as his mind can envision it, giving form to the formless, putting the indefinable into definite terms. The Current bears upon its flow a tendril of something familiar, what he qualifies, for lack of a better word, as a taste of obdurate obstinacy and pink plush, fading quickly but unmistakable.
The Current is high tonight, very high. In consequence, the Aeyther is humming, the Aeyther is abuzz; the line between In and Out has narrowed to a width no larger than a hair, and it’s an easy step across—but the jump can go either way. Oh, this would have been the very big whoo for the gig tonight; musickal magick of the highest order, but it sucks for lost childer out on the streets. South of the Slot is bad enough when the Current is low: a sewer of footpads, dollymops, blisters, mashers, cornhoes, and others is not to be found elsewhere so deep in the City even on an ebb-tide day. Tonight, combine typical holiday mayhem with the rising magickal flood and Goddess knows what will be out, hungry and yummy for some sweet tender kidlet chow. And not even regular run-of-the-mill niblet, but prime grade-A-best-grade royalty. The Pontifexa’s heir; it doesn’t get more yummy than that—a vampyre could dare sunlight with that bubbly blood zipping through his veins, a ghoul could pass for living after gnawing on that sweet flesh. It makes Hardhands’ manly parts shrivel to think upon the explanation to Grandmamma of Tiny Doom’s loss and the blame sure to follow.
Hardhands opens his eyes; it’s hardly worth wasting the effort of going deep when everything is so close the surface tonight. Behind him, the iron door flips open and Relais flings outward, borne aloft on a giant wave of disapproving noise. The door snaps shut, cutting the sound in a brief echo which quickly dies in the coffin-narrow alleyway.
“Did you find her?” Relais asks, holding his fashionable cuffs so they don’t trail on the mucky cobblestones. Inside his brain is bouncing with visions of the Pontifexa’s reaction if they return home minus Cyrenacia. Actually, what she is going to say is the least of his worries; it is what she might do that really has Relais gagging. He likes his lungs exactly where they are: inside his body, not flapping around outside.
Hardhands turns a white-hot look upon his lover and says: “If she gets eaten, Relais, I will eat you.”
Relais’ father always advised saving for a rainy day and though the sky above is mostly clear, Relais is feeling damp. He will check his bankbook when they get home, and reconsider Sweetie Fyrdraaca’s proposition. He’s been Hardhands’ leman for over a year now: blood sacrifices, coldfire-singed clothing, throat-tearing invocations, cornmeal-gritty sheets, murder. He’s had enough. He makes no reply to the threat.
Hardhands demands, not very politely: “Give me my frockcoat.”
Said coat, white as snow, richly embroidered in white peonies and with cuffs the size of tablecloths, well, Relais had been given that to guard too, and he now has a vague memory of hanging it over the stall door in the pisser, where hopefully it still dangles, but probably not.
“I’ll get it—” Relais fades backward, into the club, and Hardhands lets him go.
For now.
For now, Hardhands takes off his enormous hat, which had remained perched upon his gorgeous head during his invocation via a jeweled spike of a hairpin, and speaks a word into its upturned bowl. A green light pools up, spilling over the hat’s capacious brim, staining his hand and the sleeve below with drippy magick. Another commanding word, and the light surges upward and ejects a splashy elemental, fish-tail flapping.
“Eh, boss—I thought you said I had the night off,” Alfonso complains. There’s lip rouge smeared on his fins and a clutch of cards in his hand. “It’s Pirates’ Parade.”
“I changed my mind. That wretched child has given me the slip and I want you to track her.”
Alfonso grimaces. Ever since Little Tiny Doom trapped him in a bowl of water and fed him fishy flakes for two days, he’s avoided her like fluke-rot.
“Why worry your good luck, boss—”
Hardhands does not have to twist. He only has to look like he is going to twist. Alfonso zips forward, flippers flapping, and Hardhands, after draining his chapeau of Current and slamming it back upon his grape, follows.
IV: Who’s There?
Here is the Roaring Gimlet, sitting pretty in her cozy little kitchen, toes toasting on the grate, toast toasting on the tongs, drinking hot ginger beer, feeling happily serene. She’s had a fun-dandy evening. Citizens who normally sleep behind chains and steel bolts, dogs a-prowl and guns under their beds, who maybe wouldn’t open their doors after dark if their own mothers were lying bleeding on the threshold, these people fling their doors widely and with gay abandon to the threatening cry of “Give us Candy or We’ll Give you the Rush.”
Any other night, at this time, she’d still be out in the streets, looking for drunken mashers to roll. But tonight, all gates were a-jar and the streets a high tide of drunken louts. Out by nine and back by eleven, with a sack almost too heavy to haul, a goodly load of sugar, and a yummy fun-toy, too. Now she’s enjoying her happy afterglow from a night well-done. The noises from the cellar have finally stopped, she’s finished the crossword in the Alta Califa, and as soon as the kettle blows, she’ll fill her hot water bottle and aloft to her snuggly bed, there to dwell the rest of the night away in kip.
Ah, Pirates’ Parade, best night of the year.
While she’s waiting for the water to bubble, she’s cleaning the tool whence comes her name: the bore is clotted with icky stuff and the Gimlet likes her signature clean and sharply shiny. Clean hands, clean house, clean heart, the Gimlet’s pappy always said. Above the fireplace, Pappy’s flat representation stares down at his progeny, the self-same gimlet clinched in his hand. The Roaring Gimlet is the heir to a fine family tradition, and she does love her job.
What’s that a-jingling? She glances at the clock swinging over the stove. It’s almost midnight. Too late for visitors, and anyway, everyone knows the Roaring Gimlet’s home is her castle. Family stays in, people stay out, so Daddy Gimlet always said. Would someone? No, they wouldn’t. Not even tonight, they would not.
Jingle jingle.
The cat looks up from her perch on the fender, perturbed.
Heels down, the Gimlet stands aloft and tucks her shirt back into her skirts, ties her dressing gown tight, bounds up the ladder-like kitchen stairs to the front door. The peephole shows a dimly lit circle of empty cobblestones. Damn it all to leave the fire for nothing. As the Gimlet turns away, the bell dances again, jangling her into a surprised jerk.
The Roaring Gimlet opens the door, slipping the chain, and is greeted with a squirt of flour right in the kisser, and a shrieky command:
“Give us the Candy or We’ll Give you the Rush!”
The Gimlet coughs away the flour, choler rising, and beholds before her, knee-high
, a huge black feathered hat. Under the hat is a pouty pink face, and under the pouty pink face, a fluffy farthingale that resembles in both color and points an artichoke, and under that, purple dance shoes, with criss-crossy ribbands. Riding on the hip of this apparition is a large pink plushy pig, also wearing purple criss-crossy dance shoes, golden laurel leaves perched over floppy piggy ears.
It’s the Pig that the Gimlet recognizes first, not the kid. The kid, whose public appearances have been kept to a minimum (the Pontifexa is wary of too much flattery, and as noted, chary of her heir’s worth), could be any kid, but there is only one Pig, all Califa knows that, and the kid must follow the Pig, as day follows night, as sun follows rain, as fortune follows the fool.
“Give us the CANDY or We’ll GIVE YOU THE RUSH!” A voice to pierce glass, to cut right through the Gimlet’s recoil, all the way down to her achy toes. The straw-shooter moves from present to fire; while Gimlet was gawking, reloading had occurred, and another volley is imminent. She’s about to slam shut the door, she cares not to receive flour or to give out yum, but then, door-jamb held halfway in hand, she stops. An idea, formed from an overabundance of yellow nasty novellas and an underabundance of good sense, has leapt full-blown from Nowhere to the Somewhere that is the Roaring Gimlet’s calculating brain. So much for sugar, so much for swag: here then is a price above rubies, above diamonds, above chocolate, above, well, Above All. What a pretty price a pretty piece could fetch. On such proceeds the Gimlet could while away her elder days in endless sun and fun-toys.
Prophecies, Libels & Dreams Page 9
