Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

  “I’ve come to raise a very limited and specific sort of hell, in a localized area. You found the three of us in close proximity because what I’m about to do would be likely to splatter on Mick and Sparrow if they’re nearby. Far from joining forces with them, I was hoping to get them out of range before I started.”

  “That’s very noble of you,” said Mr. Lyle, his dark face exquisitely grave. It had been so long since he’d last spoken that I jumped a little.

  Frances, equally grave, ignored him. I saw Mr. Lyle smile out of the corner of my eye. “If you think the text of all these messages from beyond is that you should help me,” Frances said to China Black, “then you could hide Mick and Sparrow, and tell me about anyone highly placed and crazy enough to be Tom Worecski on his horse.”

  Beside me, Mr. Lyle made a dreadful sound. It was laughter, I realized, genuine merriment distorted by that broken voice. “You’re trying to force the world into a shape. You were a soldier. Do you know the saying ‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’?”

  Frances turned to him, her face very still. “More so with some enemies than with others,” she said at last. “Yes. Point taken. In the meantime, shall I plan on help from you, or hindrance?”

  “We cannot help you,” said China Black. She stood very straight by the fireplace, once again the stern, judging image. “We were warned, I think, of your coming. The loa never said we were to serve your cause.”

  It was the word “serve” that did it. China Black had received no instructions. But Sherrea — or a voice in her mouth — had given some to me. They couldn’t be connected to this. If they meant anything at all.

  The front doors rattled under three solid blows. Frances was on her feet, the butter knife held low in one hand. I’d risen, too, I realized, but my hands were empty, and I was wondering about other exits.

  The door banged open, and a voice yelled, “China? Where are you?”

  “Ti-so!” China said, her grim look melting. “Come quick!” The intruder appeared in the door, disheveled and wide-eyed. It was Sherrea. She wore a black tank top and purple harem pants that looked like a pair of collapsed dirigibles, and a gold-shot sash around her hips that flailed the air behind her. Her neck and arms were hung with amber.

  “You see, I have found them for you!” cried China Black, looking nearly as smug as her dog had.

  “Sparrow!” Sher crossed the room in a leap, stopped before me, and put a light hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, because something stiff in my throat kept me from speaking. Her hand slid off my arm.

  “Gracias, mi hermana,” Sher said to China Black, beaming. “Was it a bitch to do?”

  “Oh, no, they were wandering around the Night Fair like old women on market day.”

  “Were you?” Sherrea asked me intently.

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought. The old crow just wants to save it up ’til she can make me feel guilty about all the work she did.”

  “Pah! I would never be so stupid. I know you have no conscience at all, so!”

  They were friends. They were good friends. I felt as I had at the Underbridge, when I heard her call Robby by his nickname, when I discovered she knew Theo.

  “… Theo!” I gasped. “Sher, where’s Theo? Is he okay?”

  She blinked and turned to China Black. “You didn’t explain?”

  “There were more important things to discuss.”

  “Sure. I bet you forgot,” Sher grumbled, scowling. She sent that glare at Mr. Lyle next. “You could have said something.”

  Mr. Lyle grinned. “I had no chance, little sister. When she gets like Iansa with her horsetail, what can poor mortals do?”

  “I apologize,” Sherrea sighed. “These two would tell a gopher how to dig, but a little thing like saying whether your friend’s alive or dead—”

  “Is he?” I blurted.

  “Dead? Nah. Theo’s upstairs — or he’s supposed to be. Resting up. If he comes downstairs before tomorrow, I’m gonna kick his butt.”

  “Get your pointy shoes, then,” said Theo from the doorway. He was smiling and rumpled and pale, and his right arm hung in a black cloth sling. “I was cool with it, ’til somebody broke down the door. Then I got curious. Hey,” he said to me, and the smile was wider.

  “Hey,” I answered. He looked embarrassed. I felt embarrassed.

  I wondered if he had any idea why; I sure didn’t. “Oh, Cha — here, have a seat.” I moved quickly away from my chair.

  China Black frowned. “We need another cup. I’ll get one.”

  As she disappeared into the hall, Frances studied Sherrea. “I think I misjudged something a few hours ago,” Frances said. “I’m sorry if I seemed patronizing, back on the riverbank.”

  Sher shrugged. I watched them size each other up, and realized, with a jolt, what Frances was reacting to. Sher and China Black weren’t just friends. They were peers. China Black, with her limo, elegant clothes, haughty manner, and easy power, behaved as Sherrea’s equal. The Sherrea I thought I knew, the adivina with the cheap cards and the melodramatic apartment, barely older than I actually was. What had I missed?

  I was irritated. It was another change, another upset to my delicately balanced routine. I found myself suddenly too grouchy to converse. I would have dropped into my chair, but Theo was in it.

  “Here,” Sher said. She’d dragged two low-backed chairs to the other end of the tea table. That was irritating, too: the second-guessing, the attention, the proximity.

  “Thank you,” I said, and sat down. She gave me a sideways glance, filled the last clean cup for Theo, and sat, too. Then China Black returned with a cup for her.

  “I bet everybody’s told everybody everything,” Sherrea said. “But would you mind telling it all to me, anyway?”

  “Starting from the Underbridge,” Theo added across his tea. I didn’t feel like talking, but they were looking at me. Well, I was the one they knew, not Frances or Mick. Chango — or whoever — it seemed strange that they didn’t all know each other. I knew them, and until a few days ago, I would have described myself as knowing no one and happy about it.

  I started from the Underbridge and didn’t get far. As I came up on the image of Mick in the archives, I realized I was in trouble; I should have started earlier and explained Mick. But I couldn’t explain Mick, because that would mean telling about his dead body, and revealing that he was a Horseman, which wasn’t mine to tell. And then there were the archives. I dragged to a hand-waving stop.

  “They’re Horsemen,” Sherrea said briskly, nodding. “I knew that. Which one was riding the redheaded woman?”

  I stared at her.

  “It was the only thing that explained what happened. What did you think, that she was having a religious conversion?”

  I gave up on chronology and explained Frances’s vendetta against Tom Worecski and our interception by China Black and Mr. Lyle.

  “How did you sandbag Mick?” Frances asked. “It’s a bit of a trick to get one of us unconscious before we think to jump horses.”

  Mr. Lyle nodded. “You have to be very slow, or very fast. In this case, it was speed. And one can’t suspect every large, friendly dog one sees.”

  Mick half grinned, sheepish, at Frances. “He distracted me.”

  “I’ll remember that. Too bad it wouldn’t work on Tom; he hates dogs.”

  Sherrea folded her knees up under her chin and wedged her feet on the chair. “So you want to find a guy who could be anywhere and look like anybody, who might not even be in the City. Why not give us a hard one?”

  Frances turned her hands palm up. “It was the best I could do at short notice.”

  “Ti-so, this has nothing to do with us,” China Black said urgently.

  Sher looked up at her. “How can you be sure? It has something to do with Sparrow.”

  China Black’s gaze went from Sherrea to me, and narrowed. She tapped a finger against her lower lip. She looked a
s if she were planning to move furniture, and I was a sofa.

  Sherrea began to push empty dishes and the samovar to the far half of the tea table. Mr. Lyle caught the muffin bowl as it was about to heel off the edge, and stacked it and anything else in danger on the tea tray. Then Sher pulled a wad of electric-blue silk out of her sash. It fell open when she put it on the table, in a way I recognized. I wondered if anyone else there knew it was a new cloth, and knew why.

  Given my last reading from Sher, I wanted to volunteer to take the dishes to the kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where it was. I lifted my eyes from the cards to the rest of the audience. China Black was haughty and nervous; Mr. Lyle was calm, as if this was the logical progression of the conversation. Theo was leaning forward and peering. “Groovy cards,” he said. “Where they from?” Mick was looking, and looking blank. But Frances was sitting straight-backed on the edge of the couch, her face frozen.

  “Could we forgo this, do you think?” she asked. “It’s silly.”

  Sherrea raised her eyes to Frances as she shuffled. I watched her small-boned, purple-nailed hands working over the cards, fllllllllt, fllllllllt, as she said, “This won’t take long. And we promise not to tell anybody you did something silly.” Thump — she set the deck on the silk and cut it into three piles. Then she snapped the top card off each pile and onto the table, face up.

  “Oh,” she said, and stopped. Her head lifted again, and this time her eyes went to Theo. “Well, that was easy.”

  Theo leaned even more. “What did — oh,” he breathed.

  The Tower, the Ace of Pentacles, and the Emperor. I looked at Sherrea.

  “For the question-and-three-cards, you want to be pretty literal-minded,” she explained. “Which means he’s in a tall building, the one associated with the most money and power; and either the building is owned by, or he’s in the company of, or he is, the bossman of the temporal reality.”

  “Or all of those,” I said, staring at the three cards. “You mean, he’s in Ego? With Albrecht?”

  She turned again to Theo, so I did, too. He looked like old ivory. “He is,” said Theo, barely audible. His glasses reflected afternoon sun; I couldn’t see his eyes. “Oh, shit. He sure is.”

  Frances’s icy posture was melted. It had been replaced with the hunting-animal intensity I’d seen before, and that was turned on Theo. She hadn’t spoken, but she was waiting.

  “What?” I said. “How do you know?”

  “My dad’s goddamn advisory officer. I know those two freaks who were after you at the Underbridge — they’re goons of his. Oh, shit, shit, it makes too much sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. What does this have to do with Albrecht?” But as I said it, I knew.

  “That’s my dad,” Theo replied.

  China Black sat down suddenly. “Ah,” she said with a look at Sher. “This would seem to be our business, after all.”

  The assembled multitudes were in the parlor, listening to Frances plan her murder, no doubt. I wasn’t with them. I’d found, after a few more minutes, that I needed a walk in the garden.

  The front door didn’t object to the idea, and the path didn’t lead me back to the porch as I’d half expected. It was a brick path at first; then it became a trail of slate flags in a stream of silvery creeping plants. In the shade of a cluster of trees, I found an ornamental pond with a boulder beside it for sitting. So I sat.

  I hadn’t been there long before Sherrea said behind me, “I know just how you feel. Hey, you’ve been doing this to us for years.”

  I decided I wasn’t up to a heated response. I’d try Frances as a role model. Chilly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” she said, and sat down with a bump on the grassy bank. “You’re pissed as hell that you’ve known Theo for years and he never told you who he was. And that you’ve known me for about as long, and I didn’t tell you I was an accredited kick-ass bruja. In fact, you’ve had your nose rubbed in it that life has been going on outside your skin and nobody was filling you in on the details, and it bothers you a lot.”

  At the side of my boulder, almost hidden in a tuft of tall grass, was a thin-stemmed little plant with a cluster of deep pink flowers. The color was so vivid it seemed to vibrate. I pulled it. It had no fragrance. There were short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. I began to strip them off, starting at the bottom.

  “So now you know how all your friends feel,” Sher continued.

  “Not quite,” I said. “You haven’t had any sudden revelations about me.”

  She glared at me. “I’ve had plenty about you. Half of ’em I found out by accident and the other half by putting things together, and every time I found the kind of thing friends tell each other, it made me feel like shit. Because you hadn’t.” Sher dug a stone out of the grass and lobbed it into the pond; I watched the rings of water pulse out toward us as she talked. “If you’d wanted to know anything about me, or Theo, you could have just asked. But then we might have asked you something, and whenever we did, you’d slither out of it until it was pretty clear that you wanted us to keep our distance. Now you’re mad because we did. Were we supposed to keep giving our little secrets to you and never get anything back?”

  “That’s not true!” Careful, careful. Chilly. “I’ve always kept even-up with you. I know the Deal.”

  Sherrea looked at me as if I’d sprouted antennae. “Damballah, you can bite me now,” she muttered. “For instance,” she went on, stronger, “there was when I found out you weren’t a woman.”

  The stem bent in my fingers.

  “There’s one you can pay Theo back with; I don’t think he’s been disillusioned yet. He still talks as if you’re a guy, anyway.”

  “Make up your mind,” I said. It came out thin. “Which am I?”

  “My mind has nothing to do with it. When I figured out that either you were both or neither, I started watching for it. You do a chameleon thing — maybe it’s not even conscious — that makes you seem female when you’re with a woman, and male when you’re with a man. Like you take on the local coloring. In a mixed group you kind of shift around. I was still trying to figure out if you were natural or technological when the Horseman showed up. Then I knew — I just did — that they were in it somewhere. And I was afraid she could control you with it, so I said what I did to you.”

  “You said… I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

  “That you don’t belong to them. Never did, and don’t now.”

  I blew air out through my nose, like laughing. “Maybe I don’t now. But as far as ‘did,’ you’re wrong. I was a custom order.”

  “No.” She rose and brushed nonexistent grass off her trousers. “I’m the kick-ass bruja, and I say so. You never did.”

  I’d peeled all the leaves; now I had a bare, battered stalk with a little cluster of magenta blossoms. “What kind of flower is this?” I asked suddenly. She stood with her hands in her pockets, her feet planted. She didn’t answer immediately; then she said, “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know.” Inside each star-shaped circle of petals was another ring, little bristly projections, like eyelashes around a circular eye. It still didn’t smell like anything. I tossed it on the water, where it wandered until it disappeared along the bank.

  “I’m going back to the house,” I said, and slid off the boulder.

  “Can I go with you?”

  “It’s a big house.”

  She didn’t flinch; she just closed her eyes for a moment.

  6.2: Time stands still on the road

  Altogether, my stay in that house was four days long. It seems longer; not because time dragged, but because of things I did, of things I looked at, of conversations I had. It seems strange that they all happened butted up against each other in four days. Maybe time, during those days, ran the way the hallways did when Frances and I’d tried to find our way out. The hallways themselves, after that first surreal morning, remained where th
ey were put.

  Mr. Lyle had promised me the library, and delivered when I came back, still snappish, from the garden. It was another long-windowed room on the first floor. The heavy moldings around the door and windows, the shelves, the pedestal table, were oak; the chairs were high-backed and upholstered in a dark fabric full of birds and flowers. The shelves were anywhere the windows weren’t, except for the floor and the ceiling. The rug under the table and the smaller ones by the windows were deep red, figured with detailed geometric medallions in many other colors. There were lamps on brackets and on stands by the chairs, and a huge oil and candle chandelier over the pedestal table. Reading after dark, it seemed, was expected.

  I was impressed, but I was also in a lousy temper, and not inclined to show I was impressed. I began to read spines. I’d been caught off-guard in the ivy parlor; it would be a good deal harder to make me gape now.

  Part of the collection might have been acquired in reaction to the events of the last hundred or so years: all the books in the Foxfire series, for which I had a sort of uninvolved respect; several works, theoretical and not-so, on global warming; a delectable variety of how-to books on solar and water and wind power, and the attendant wiring, storage, water heating, and whatnot. (The latter were shelved in plain sight, which nearly ruined my resolution. How secure was this house, its land, this island? Any City deputy who got a glimpse of those books would burst a blood vessel.)

  The rest of the shelves, the majority, had been filled by the process of finding a book that looked interesting and bringing it home. The finders, I hoped, had been plural; there was a point at which diversity of interest became multiple personality, after all. Eventually, under Mr. Lyle’s benign eye, I found the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I took a volume down at random and pecked at the beginning. And began, after a little, to grin.

  “Which?” said Mr. Lyle.

  “You’ve read this one?”

  He nodded. “The bit about the maid shaking the pillowcase, and the pistol falling out and going off.”

  “You read Spanish?” he asked after a moment.