by Peter McLean
I swallowed. No, I didn’t think she did either.
“Well there’s fuck all we can do about it.”
“Mmmm,” Trixie said.
I looked at her, waiting for her to say more, but it seemed that was going to be the end of it.
“What else did Adam have to say for himself, then?” I asked her. “What about those dickheads in the pub?”
“The Soulless?” she asked. “Yes, he sent them. I asked him and he didn’t deny it, Don.”
“What the fuck for?”
“Adam… well, Adam does that sort of thing,” she said, and I’m sorry but that sounded a bit lame to me. “He enjoys, I don’t know– theatre I suppose you might call it.”
He’s a fucking ponce, the Burned Man thought, and I had to agree with it.
“Has he been sending anything else after me?” I asked her. “You know, for the fucking theatre of it?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He would have wanted to boast about it if he had, I’m sure.”
Yeah, I supposed he would have done at that. Wanker. I thought about the child again, and how it had looked scared of Trixie when it saw her. No, I supposed that probably hadn’t come from Adam, come to think of it. It would have been expecting Trixie if it had, after all. So what the fuck was it then, and more to the point who was controlling it? I was convinced someone was – I still wasn’t buying it actually being a ghost, but it was definitely something.
“Why do you ask?”
I sighed. Fuck it, now I was going to have to tell her wasn’t I?
So I did.
“It sounds like a talonwraith,” Trixie said, when I was done.
“Yeah I know it does,” I said, “but it can’t be. I mean, I can see straight through glamours and all I was seeing was that poor kid, only… you know. Wrong, and dangerous, and scary. If it was a talonwraith I’d have seen a talonwraith, or at least its aura anyway. Talonwraiths are invisible after all, and come to think of it I met the bloody thing on the astral as well and I should have been able to see a wraith there well enough. Only I didn’t.”
“Could a strong enough magician have done something else to hide it?” Trixie asked me. “Something other than a glamour I mean?”
I frowned. “Maybe,” I said after a moment. “I mean, I’m only going on theory here. If someone knew what I had done, and how much it had fucked me up, and if that person had got close enough to me to skim my mind and lift the memory and maybe imprint it somehow onto their summoned talonwraith then… oh fuck it Trixie, I don’t know. That’s proper fucking magus stuff. I don’t know anyone who could actually do it. I know damn well I couldn’t.”
“But it can be done?” she said.
I nudged the Burned Man.
Yeah, it can be done, it told me. That’s heavy mojo, though. Actually manifesting someone’s nightmares in physical form is proper magus stuff, like you said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, in theory it could be, anyway.”
“It sounds like you’ve made another powerful enemy then,” Trixie said.
Oh fucking joy. Didn’t my life just keep on getting better and better?
I got up and paced over to the window. It was getting dark outside. I found myself wishing there was some booze in the flat. There wasn’t, I had already looked. Repeatedly.
“I want a bloody drink,” I said. “Do you want to go out for dinner or something?”
“Not really,” Trixie said.
I turned and looked at her then, and noticed for the first time that she looked a bit out of sorts. I couldn’t help wondering what else Adam had said to her while she had been in London.
“Are you all right?”
“Not really,” she said again.
She wasn’t meeting my eye, I noticed, and even though she had just put a cigarette out she was already lighting another one. I went and sat beside her on the sofa.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
She sighed and blew smoke at her boots, still not looking up.
“Adam said…” she started, and trailed off. “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
Oh for fucksake, I’d heard enough of “Adam said” last year to last me a fucking lifetime.
“You can’t trust that prick,” I told her. “Come on Trixie, you know what he tried to do to you.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “And then he fought a Dominion with me. That has to be worth something.”
Of course I love you, we fought a Dominion together, she had told me. And yeah, so had Adam. I knew that. To be fair it was true as well, but Adam had been doing it for his own reasons, as she bloody well knew. Trixie could have a very selective memory sometimes, I had to admit.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb and bit back the urge to have a go at her. It wasn’t worth it, I knew it wasn’t. Fuck but I wanted a drink.
“Look,” I said after a moment, “it’s been a hell of a day. I’ve just found out I’m a father, for fucksake. I can’t be doing with Adam now, and I really want to wet the baby’s head, you understand me?”
Trixie finally looked up then, if only to give me a bewildered look.
“You want to do what?”
I laughed. “It’s an expression,” I said. “Wet the baby’s head. It means… actually I don’t know what the fuck it means, it’s just something people say. You have a few beers to celebrate the birth, yeah? It’s like a tradition.”
“Oh,” she said, obviously none the wiser. “Take Mazin, I’m not in the mood.”
I sighed. Going drinking with Mazin didn’t really sound like it was going to be a lot of fun but I supposed it was better than not going drinking at all. I left her to brood and went and rounded him up.
“We’re going down the pub,” I told him. “Wet the baby’s head, and all that shit. Trixie’s orders.”
I know that was stretching the truth to breaking point but Mazin just nodded and put his coat on.
“As you say, Lord Keeper,” he said, giving me a short bow.
“Right, two things,” I said. “Anytime we’re going out on the piss together you call me Don, and you don’t bow under any circumstances. You get me?”
He inclined his head in a nod that was as close to a bow as it could get without actually being one. I ignored the Burned Man’s sniggers and let Mazin unlock the front door. This was going to be a barrel of laughs, I could tell.
* * *
It wasn’t.
For one thing Mazin didn’t fucking drink, which I supposed with hindsight I should have seen coming, and for another he had no conversation whatsoever. We were sat in a posh bar a few streets away from the flat, me with a pint and two whiskies in front of me and him with a glass of orange juice. Orange fucking juice, I ask you. He seemed content enough to sit and watch me drink, to be fair, but I’ve always regarded drinking as more of a team sport than some sort of performance art.
I supposed I might as well make the effort to get to know him now we were there.
“What do you do for fun, Mazin?” I asked him. “When you’re not working, I mean.”
“I am usually working, Don,” he said.
I blinked. That was it, was it? That was the full fucking extent of his answer? And they say the art of conversation is dead.
“You got a family?”
“No, Don.”
Jesus wept. He hadn’t got an inch less formal either, he was just saying “Don” instead of “Lord Keeper”. I found myself missing Trixie very badly indeed. She was just so easy to talk to, and to listen to as well. Mazin was neither of those things.
“Right,” I said. “Well, I mean neither have I. Not really. Just my mum, and I haven’t seen her for a few years now. My dad’s been dead since I was a kid. Mum’s married again now but he’s just some bloke she met in a pub, not real family. You know what I mean. And here I am now suddenly a dad myself.”
I necked one of the whiskies and took a long swallow of my pint. Mazin sipped his orange juice and didn’t say a
nything.
“I suppose I really ought to go and see Mum one of these days,” I went on. I was babbling now, talking for the sake of it. I knew I was, but I needed to fill the silence. “I mean I don’t really like Steve, this geezer she married, but he’s all right really I suppose. He’s not like my dad was, anyway. Doesn’t knock her about and that. He’s just a bit of a twat, you know what I mean?”
Mazin gave me a bland look, and I couldn’t help thinking I was wasting my breath. I finished my pint and picked up the other whisky.
You do know coppers do this, right? the Burned Man asked me. Keep quiet so you feel the need to talk, in the hope you say something useful. How much do you really trust this geezer?
I blinked. I supposed I had no idea, really. I mean yeah, Mazin worked for me and was in charge of all that lovely money I apparently couldn’t have any of, and I assumed he actually did all of the things it apparently said he did in the book I fucking still hadn’t been able to read, but… Why? Because he had done all that for Rashid, and his order had been doing it before him for fuck only knew how long. I supposed so anyway, but then I wasn’t Rashid. Rashid had been an immortal of God only knew how much power, whereas I really wasn’t. I was just the poor bastard Menhit had decided got the job after she murdered my predecessor.
“Shit, am I boring you Mazin?” I asked. “You ain’t saying much.”
“My apologies, Don,” he said. “I am not a talkative man, but I very much enjoy listening to you.”
Do you? Do you really, or are you playing me like a copper would?
I went to the bar and got another round in. He was having another sodding orange juice whether he liked it or not. Live a little, Mazin, it’ll do you good. Push the boat out and have a two orange juice night.
I turned back to our table with the tray in my hands, with two pints and two whiskies all for me and another miserable sodding orange juice for Mazin on it. I nearly dropped the whole fucking lot on the floor when I saw who had joined us.
We were in a posh, swanky bar in the heart of Edinburgh’s exclusive New Town, two streets away from a branch of Harvey Nichols. The last person I expected to see sitting there was Davey.
Grotty old Davey belonged in places like that flat-roofed hellhole on the sink estate at the edge of Glasgow, not here. Davey looked and smelled like a tramp, with his long greasy grey hair and his scabby bald spot and his unkempt beard. He was even still wearing his horrible old tramp’s greatcoat.
There were doormen at this bar but somehow he’d managed to walk in anyway, like they simply hadn’t seen him. Perhaps they hadn’t, at that. I still didn’t even know what sort of magician he was, but I had a growing suspicion that he was very, very powerful – who knew what he could do, when he bent his Will to it. I dreaded to bloody think, to be honest.
I looked at Davey, and my imagination ran riot. I don’t know why, but I could suddenly picture him presiding over some awful, depraved sort of Roman circus where men and women and animals tore each other to pieces for the amusement of a baying mob.
He looked like he would have been at home in a place like that, standing behind the emperor’s throne like Rasputin and whispering lies in his ear. The very thought of it made me shiver. He turned and grinned at me, treating me to a view of his eight remaining brown teeth.
I put the tray down on the table and he helped himself to a pint and a whisky from it, and only then did I find myself wondering why I had bought two pints at once. Two shots maybe, but I like my beer cold so I never get two pints in at once or it gets warm before I can drink it. Only just then I had, and I hadn’t even given it a second thought at the time.
That, now that I thought about it, was bloody odd. Fucking hell, Davey was a subtle bugger, wasn’t he? Whatever sort of magician he was, he had obviously been tweaking my head before I even saw him. Get me a drink, you cunt, I could almost hear him thinking, but by then of course I already had.
“Thank you kindly,” Davey said. “Have a seat before you fall on your arse, Donny boy.”
I sat down and glanced at Mazin. He looked like he’d been hit between the eyes with a brick, and I wondered if he even knew Davey was there. Probably not, thinking about it. I picked up the remaining beer and tried to play it cool.
“All right, Davey?” I said.
“I am, and thank you for asking,” he said.
He took a swig of his pint and his eyes twinkled at me over the rim of the glass as he did the same kindly, fatherly old-gentleman-of-the-road act he’d been doing before. My skin crawled just looking at him, the same way it had back in Glasgow. I ignored it and focussed on him, hard this time. I knew there was something about this bugger that wasn’t right, and I was determined to find out what it was before it bit me on the arse. His aura was the same dull, fuzzy blue it had been before, the same boring human colour as yours or mine. There was something wrong about it, though…
I wasn’t even sure what I was sensing. It was like if you run your fingertips over a smooth wooden surface and there’s a tiny little splintery bit, not sticking up enough to snag your skin but enough that you can sort of just about feel it even though you can’t see it for looking. Davey’s aura was sort of like that. Human, sure, but there was something so fucking wrong about it. Something hidden, lurking beneath the surface like sharks in deep water.
“Are you done?” he asked. “I don’t like being inspected.”
His accent was weird too, I realized. He sounded Scottish most of the time, but sometimes it was more Irish or even a little bit Welsh. Native Gaelic speakers sometimes sound like that when they’re speaking English, in case you didn’t know, although having Gaelic as a first language these days is pretty bloody unusual.
“I’m fine mate,” I said, meeting his twinkling blue eyes. “Do I have to say ‘Kelmeth at midnight, in the shadow of the La’hah’ again? Because I still don’t know what that means, and it sounds fucking stupid anyway.”
“Aye maybe it does, but you remembered it for six months just the same, didn’t you?” he said.
I blinked. I supposed I had at that, or the Burned Man had anyway.
Was that you? I asked the Burned Man, but it ignored me.
“Whatever,” I muttered. “What the fuck are you doing here, Davey?”
“You owe me a truth,” he said.
Oh fuck, so I did. That had been so long ago I had almost forgotten about it. I owed this frightening, grotty, not-at-all-what-he-seemed tramp magician a truth, and it sounded like he was finally about to call it in. That was just what I needed. I kicked Mazin under the table, and he blinked at me.
“Thank you, Don,” he said, and picked up his fresh orange juice.
“Mazin, this is Davey,” I said.
Please tell me you can fucking see him too, I thought.
“Good evening, Davey,” Mazin said, giving the old man a nod.
Well I supposed that was something. At least I wasn’t totally off my nut and he really was actually there. Davey grunted and otherwise ignored him.
“A truth, Donny boy,” Davey said.
I shrugged. “Fair enough,” I said. “You won it fair and square, as far as I could tell. Mind you, I still think that just means you’re better with cards than I am.”
“Better at cards, maybe,” Davey said. “I told you, I’m no a cheat.”
You did tell me that, I thought, and I didn’t believe you. I still don’t fucking believe you.
“Go on then, what do you want to know?”
Davey laughed, and I could see his spit bubbling up in the gaps between his few remaining teeth. Oh, he really was a delight wasn’t he? No he really wasn’t, but again I could feel that thing I couldn’t put a name to, that slight edge like a splinter in the smooth finish of his persona. That fucking wrongness that I couldn’t quite describe, the thing that made me want to just run the fuck away from him and not look back. His persona was about as real as the wood trim in a cheap car, I was sure of it. He was hiding something, and I didn’t like
not knowing what.
“Oh, old Davey wants to know a lot of things,” he said, and I was sure he’d said that to me before too.
“I bet he does,” I said, getting pissed off with him now. I mean fuck it, yes he was scary but so was I, when I wanted to be. Well, when the Burned Man wanted to be, anyway. “Where to have a fucking wash might be one of them.”
The Burned Man might have gone quiet on me but I knew it was still in there and it would be ready to come to life if this all went pear shaped and I got myself into a situation where I needed it. At least, I sincerely hoped it would be. I was starting to rely on the damned thing too much, I knew I was.
“And what might you mean by that?” Davey asked me.
I sighed. I had come out to wet my baby’s head, not get into an argument with this horrifying old git. Mazin might have been shit company but at least he wasn’t Davey, you know what I mean? I really wanted the old bugger to just fuck off.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just ask your bloody question and do one, all right?”
“Now, that’s not very polite, is it?”
“It’s not meant to be,” I said.
“You’re a fucking rude prick, as I think I told you before,” Davey said. “It’s all right though, I don’t mind. I’ve dealt with ruder pricks than you over the years, and broken them on my wheel. I’m not impressed, Donny boy.”
His wheel? I thought, suppressing a shudder. Jesus, why does the sound of that make me want to pull my own eyes out? Who is this bloke? What fucking wheel?
Something shoved me in the side of the brain as the Burned Man woke up.
Trust me, you don’t want to know, it said.
I was about to speak when it mentally barged past and took over.
“Now you listen to me, you fucking dirty old hippy,” it said with my voice. “You might be old and you might be famous, but you ain’t me, you understand? Fuck your wheel. I’ll boil you in your own piss and pour vinegar into your rotting carcass while you bow down before my harpies for a thousand years before I’ll tell you anything. Do you fucking understand me, you dirty old cunt?”
Davey blinked at me, and then he started to laugh.
