Prophecies, Libels & Dreams

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  Well, that’s fine, Alfonso is just a garnish, not necessary at all. Is not Tiny Doom his own blood? Does not a shared spark run through their veins? He closes his eyes again, and stretches arms outward, palms upward, and he concentrates every split second of his Will into a huge vaporous awareness which he flings out over Califa like a net. Far far at the back of his throat, almost a tickle, not quite a taste, he finds the smell he is looking for. It’s dwindling, and it’s distant, but it’s there and it’s enough. A tiny thread connecting him to her, blood to blood, heat to heat, heartbeat to heartbeat, a tiny threat of things to come when Tiny Doom is not so Tiny. He jerks the thread with infinitesimal delicacy. It’s thin, but it holds. It’s thin, but it can never completely break.

  He follows the thread, gently, gently, down darkened alleys, past shuttered facades, and empty stoops. The streets are slick with smashed fruit but otherwise forlorn. He hears the sound of distant noises, hooting, hollering, braying mule, a fire bell, but he is alone. The buildings grow sparser, interspaced with empty lots. They look almost like rows of tombstones, and their broken windows show utterly black. The acrid tang of burning sugar tickles his nose, and the sour-salt smell of marshy sea-water; he must be getting closer to the bay’s soggy edge. Cobblestones give way to splintery corduroy, which gives way to moist dirt, and now the sweep of the starry sky above is unimpeded by buildings; he’s almost out of the City, he may be out of the City now, he’s never been this far on this road, and if he hadn’t absolute faith in the Haðraaða family bond, he’d be skeptical that Tiny Doom’s chubby little legs had made it this far, either.

  But they have. He knows it.

  Hardhands pauses, cocking his head: a tinge suffuses his skin, a gentle breeze that isn’t a breeze at all, but the galvanic buzz of the Current. The sky above is now obscured by wafts of spreading fog, and, borne distantly upon that breeze, a vague tune. Musick.

  Onward, on prickly feet, with the metallic taste of magick growing thicker in the back of his throat. The musick is building crescendo; it sounds so friendly and fun, promising popcorn, and candied apples, fried pies. His feet prickle with these promises, and he picks up the pace, buoyed on by the rollicking musick, allowing the musick to carry him onward, towards the twinkly lights now beckoning through the heavy mist.

  Then the musick is gone, and he blinks, for the road has come to an end as well, a familiar end, although unexpected. Before him looms a giant polychrome monkey head, leering brightly. This head is two stories high, it has flapping ears and wheel-size eyes, and its gaping mouth, opened in a silent howl, is large enough for a gaggle of school children to rush through, screaming their excitement.

  Now he knows where he is, where Tiny Doom has led him to, predictable, actually, the most magical of all childhood places: Woodward’s Garden, Fun for All Occasions, Not Occasionally but Always.

  How oft has Hardhands been to Woodward’s (in cheerful daylight), and ah the fun he has had there (in cheerful daylight): the Circular Boat and the Mystery Manor, the Zoo of Pets and the Whirla-Gig. Pink popcorn and strawberry cake, and Madam Twanky’s Fizzy Lick-A-Rice Soda. Ah, Woodward’s Garden and the happy smell of sun, sugar, sweat, and sizzling meat. But at Woodward’s, the fun ends at sundown, as evening’s chill begins to rise, the rides begin to shut, the musick fades away, and everyone must go, exiting out the Monkey’s Other End. Woodward’s is not open at night.

  But here, tonight, the Monkey’s Eyes are open, although his smile is a grimace, less Welcome and more Beware. The Monkey’s Eyes roll like red balls in their sockets, and at each turn they display a letter: “F” “U” “N” they spell in flashes of sparky red. Something skitters at our boy’s ankles, and he jumps: scraps of paper flickering like shredded ghosts. The Monkey’s Grin is fixed, glaring; in the dark it does not seem at all like the Gateway to Excitement and Adventure, only Digestion and Despair. Surely even Doom, despite her ravenous adoration of the Circular Boat, would not be tempted to enter the hollow throat just beyond the poised glittering teeth. Despite the promise of the Monkey’s Rolling Eyes, there is no Fun here.

  Or is there? Look again. Daylight, a tiara of letters crowns the Monkey’s Head, spelling Woodward’s Garden in cheery lights. But not tonight, tonight the tiara is a crown of spikes, whose glittering red letters proclaim a different title: Madam Rose’s Flower Garden.

  Hardhands closes his eyes against the flashes, feeling all the blood in his head blushing downward into his pinchy toes. Madam Rose’s Flower Garden! It cannot be. Madam Rose’s is a myth, a rumor, an innuendo, a whisper. A prayer. The only locale in Califa where entities, it is said, can walk in the Waking World without constraint, can move and do as their Will commands, and not be constrained by the Will of a magician or adept. Such mixing is proscribed, it’s an abomination, against all laws of nature, and until this very second, Hardhands thought, mere fiction.

  And yet apparently not fiction at all. The idea of Tiny Doom in such environs sends Hardhands’ scalp a-shivering. This is worse than having her out on the streets. Primo child-flesh, delicious and sweet, and plump full of such energy as would turn the most mild-mannered elemental into a rival of Choronzon, the Daemon of Dispersion. Surrounded by dislocated elementals and egregores, under no obligation and bound by no sigil, indulging in every depraved whim. Surely the tiresome child did not go forward to her own certain doom

  But his burbling tum, his swimming head, knows she did.

  If he were not Banastre Haðraaða, the Grand Duque of Califa, this is the point where he’d turn about and go home. First he might sit upon the ground, right here in the dirt, and wallow for a while in discouragement, then he’d rise, dust, and retreat. If he were not himself, but someone else, someone lowly, he might be feeling pretty low.

  For a moment, he is not himself, he is cold and tired and hungry and ready for the evening to end. It was fun to be furious, his anger gave him forward motion and will and fire, but now he wants to be home in his downy-soft bed with a yellow nasty newsrag and a jorum of hot wine. If Wish could be made Will in a heartbeat, he’d be lying back on damask pillows, drowning away to happy dreamland.

  Before he can indulge in such twaddle, a voice catches his attention.

  “Well, now, your grace. Slumming?”

  Then does Hardhands notice a stool, and upon the stool a boy sitting, legs dangling, swinging copper-toed button boots back and forth. A pocketknife flashes in his hand; shavings flutter downward. He’s tow-headed, and blue-eyed, freckled and tan, and he’s wearing a polka-dotted kilt, a redingcote, and a smashed bowler. A smoldering stogie hangs down from his lips.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind, never mind. Are you here for the auction?”

  Hardhands replies regally: “I am looking for a child and a pink pig.”

  The boy says, brightly, “Oh yes, of course. They passed this way some time ago, in quite a hurry.”

  Hardhands makes a move to go inside, but is halted by the red velvet rope which is action as barrier to the Monkey’s mouth.

  “Do you have a ticket? It’s fifteen divas, all you can eat and three trips to the bar.”

  Remembering his empty pockets, Hardhands says loftily: “I’m on the List.”

  The List: Another powerful weapon. If you are on it, all to the good. If not, back to the Icy Arrogance. But when has Hardhands not been on the List? Never! Unthinkable!

  “Let me see,” says the boy. He turns out pockets, and thumps his vest, fishes papers and strings, candy and fish-hooks, bones and lights, a white rat, and a red rubber ball. “I know I had something—Ahah!” This ahah is addressed to his hat, what interior he is excavating and out of which he draws a piece of red foolscap. “Let me see . . . um . . . Virex the Sucker of Souls, Zigurex Avatar of Agony, Valefor Teller of Tales, no, I’m sorry, your grace, but you are not on the list. That will be fifteen divas.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  Hardhands takes a pushy step forward, only to find that his feet can not co
me off the ground. The Boy, the Gatekeeper, smells like human but he has powerful praeterhuman push.

  “Let me by.”

  “What’s the magick word?”

  “Ουδενβακ.” This word should blossom like fire in the sultry air, it should spout lava and sparks and smell like burning tar. It should shrink the boy down to stepping-upon size.

  It sparks briefly, like a wet sparkler, and gutters away.

  He tries again, this time further up the Gramatica alphabet, heavier on the results.

  “ΕΙΟΥΑΕΗ!” This word should suck all the light out of the world, leaving a blackness so utter the boy will be gasping for enough breath to scream.

  It casts a tiny shadow, like a gothick’s smile, and then brightens.

  “Great accent,” says the boy. He is grinning sympathetically, which enrages Hardhands even more, because he is the Pontifexa’s grandson and there’s nothing to be sorry about for THAT. “But not magickal enough.”

  Hardhands is flummoxed. This is a first; never before has his magick been stifled, tamped, failed to light. Gramatica is tricky, it is true. In the right mouth the right Gramatica word will explode the boy into tiny bits of bouncing ectoplasm, or shatter the air as though it were made of ice, or turn the moon into a tulip. The right word in the wrong mouth, a mouth that stops when it should glottal or clicks when it should clack, could turn his tummy into a hat, roll back time, or turn his blood to fire. But, said right or said wrong, Gramatica never does nothing. His tummy is, again, tingling.

  The boy is now picking his teeth with the tip of his knife. “I give you a hint. The most magickal word of them all.”

  What is more magick than Χηαψοφαθυε? Is there a more magickal word that Hardhands has never heard of? He’s an adept of the sixth order, he’s peeked into the Abyss, surely there is no Super Special Magickal Word hidden from him yet—he furrows his pure white brow into unflattering wrinkles, and then a tiny, whiny little voice in his head says: What’s the magick word, Bwannie, what’s the magick word?

  “Please,” Hardhands says. “Let me pass, please.”

  “With pleasure,” the boy says, “But I must warn you. There are ordeals.”

  “No ordeal can be worse than listening to you.”

  “One might think so,” the boy says. “You have borne my rudeness so kindly, your grace, that I hate to ask you for one last favor, but I fear I must.”

  Hardhands glares at the boy, who smiles sheepishly.

  “Your boots, your grace. Madama doesn’t care for footwear on her clean carpets. I shall give you a ticket, and give your boots a polish, and they’ll be nice and shiny for you when you leave.”

  Hardhands does not want to relinquish his heels, which may only add an actual half an inch in height but are marvelous when it comes to mental stature; who cannot help but swagger in red-topped jackboots, champagne shiny and supple as night?

  He sighs, bending. The grass below is cool against our hero’s hot feet, once liberated happily from the pinchy pointy boots (ah vanity, thy name is only sixteen years old), but he’d trade the comfort, in a second, for height.

  He hops and kicks, sending one boot flying at the kid (who catches it easily) and the other off into the darkness.

  “Mucho gusto. Have a swell time, your grace.”

  Hardhands stiffens his spine with arrogance and steps into the Monkey’s Mouth.

  VII. Time’s Trick

  Motion moves in the darkness around him, a glint of silver to one side, then the other, then in front of him: he jumps. Then he realizes that the form ahead of him is familiar: his own reflection. He steps forward, and the Hardhands before him resolves into a Hardhands behind him, while those to either side move with him, keeping pace. For a second he hesitates, thinking to run into the mirror, but an outstretched arm feels only empty air, and he steps once, again, then again, more confidently. His reflection has disappeared; ahead is only darkness.

  So he continues on, contained with a hollow square of his own reflections, which makes him feel a bit more cheerful, for what can be more reassuring but an entire phalanx of your own beautiful self? Sure, he looks a bit tattered: bare chest, sticky hair, blurred eyeliner, but it’s a sexy tattered, bruised and battered, and slightly forlorn. He could start a new style with this look: After the Deluge, it could be called, or A Rough Night.

  Of course Woodward’s has a hall of mirrors, too, a horrifying place where the glasses stretch your silver-self until you look like an emaciated crane, or squash you down, round as a beetle. These mirrors continue, as he continues, to show only his perfect self, disheveled but still perfect. He laughs, a sound which, pinned in on all sides as it is, quickly dies. If this is the boy’s idea of an Ordeal, he’s picked the wrong man. Hardhands has always loved mirrors, so much so that he has them all over his apartments: on his walls, on his ceilings, even, in his Conjuring Closet, on the floor. He’s never met a reflection of himself he didn’t love, didn’t cherish, cheered up by the sight of his own beauty—what a lovely young man, how blissful to be me!

  He halts and fumbles in his kilt-pocket for his favorite lip rouge (Death in Bloom, a sort-of blackish pink) and reapplies. Checks his teeth for color, and blots on the back of his hand. Smooths one eyebrow with his fingertip and arranges a strand of hair so it is more fetchingly askew—then leans in, closer. A deep line furrows behind his eyes, a line where he’s had no line before, and there, at his temple, is that a strand of gray amidst the silver? His groping fingers feel only smoothness on his brow; he smiles, and the line vanishes; he grips the offending hair and yanks: in his grasp it is as pearly as ever. A trick of the poor light then, and on he goes, but sneaking glances to his left and right, not from admiration but from concern.

  As he goes, he keeps peeking sideways, and at each glance he quickly looks away again, alarmed. Has he always slumped so badly? He squares his shoulders and peeks again. His hinder, it’s huge, like he’s got a caboose under his kilt, and his chin, it’s as weak as custard. No, it must just be a trick of the light; his hinder is high and firm, and his chin as hard and curved as granite. He’s overstressed and overwrought, and he still has all that sugar in his system. His gaze doggedly forward, he continues down the silver funnel, picks up his feet, eager, perhaps for the first time ever, to get away from a mirror.

  The urge to glance is getting bigger and bigger, and Hardhands has, before, always vanquished temptation by yielding to it, he looks again, this time to his right. There, he is as lovely as ever, silly silly. He grins confidently at himself; that’s much better. He looks behind him and sees, in another mirror, his own back looking further beyond, but he can’t see what he’s looking at or why.

  Back to the slog, and the left is still bugging him, he’s seeing flashes out of the corner of his eye, and he just can’t help it, he must look: his eyes, they are sunken like marbles into his face, hollow as a sugar skull, his skin tightly pulled, painted with garish red cheekbones. Blackened lips pull back from grayish teeth—his pearly white teeth!—He chatters those pearly whites together; his bite is firm and hard. He looks to the right and sees himself as he should be.

  Now he knows, don’t look to the left, keep to the right and keep focused; the left is a mirage, the right is reality. The left side is a horrible joke and the right side is true, but even as he increases his steps to almost a run (will this damn hallway never end?), the Voice of Vanity in his head is questioning that assertion. Perhaps the right side is the horrible joke, and the left side the truth, perhaps he has been blind to his own flaws, perhaps—

  This time he is transfixed by the image that stares back, as astonished as he is: he’s an absolute wreck. His hair is still and brittle, hanging about his knobby shoulders like salted sea grass. His ice blue eyes look cloudy, and the thick black lines drawn about them serve only to sink them deeper into his skull. Scars streak lividly across his cheeks. Sunken chest and tattoos faded into blue and green smudges, illegible on slack skin. He’s too horrified to seek reas
surance in the mirror now behind him, he’s transported by the horror before him: the horror of his own inevitable wreckage and decay. The longer he stares the more hideous he becomes. The image blurs for a moment, and then blood blooms in his hair and dribbles from his gaping lips; his shoulders are scratched and smudged with black, his eyes starting from his skull. He is surrounded by swirling snow, flecks of which sputter on his eyelashes, steam as they touch his skin. The shaft of an arrow protrudes from his throat.

  “Oh how bliss to me,” the Death’s Head croaks, each word a bubble of blood.

  With a shout, Hardhands raises his right fist and punches. His fist meets the glass with a nauseous jolt of pain that rings all the way down to his toes. The glass bows under his blow but doesn’t crack. He hits again, and his corpse reels back, clutching itself with clawlike hands. The mirror refracts into a thousand diamond shards, and Hardhands throws up his other arm to ward off glass and blood. When he drops his shield, the mirrors and their Awful Reflection are gone.

  He stands on the top of stairs, looking out over a tumultuous vista: there’s a stage with feathered denizens dancing the hootchie-coo. Behind the hootchie-coochers, a band plays a ferocious double-time waltz. Couples slide and twist and turn to the musick, their feet flickering so quickly they spark. The scene is much like the scene he left behind at the Blue Duck, only instead of great big hair, there are great big horns, instead of sweeping skirts there are sweeping wings, instead of smoke there is coldfire. The musick is loud enough to liquefy his skull; he can barely think over its howling sweep.

  The throng below whirls about in confusion—denizens, demons, egregores, servitors—was that a Bilskinir-Blue Bulk he saw over there at the bar, tusks a-gleaming, Butler Paimon on his damn night off? No matter even if it is Paimon, no holler for help from Hardhands, oh no. Paimon would have to help him out, of course, but Paimon would tell the Pontifexa for sure, for Paimon, in addition to being the Butler of Bilskinir, is a suck-up. No thanks, our hero is doing just fine on his own.