Crow Jane

by D. J. Butler

  and Adrian himself collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

  Jane fled the room at a run, gun pointed at the ceiling and hoof under her arm. The Model 1910’s magazine held seven rounds, which left her only three shots. Really, she had not been thrifty with her ammunition. One shot would have been enough to induce madness in the rock and rollers, and the only reason she had fired more was the presence of the fairy.

  The gun’s bullets injured fairies and could kill them, but its sound did nothing to their minds. This, Jane guessed, was because fairies were already insane.

  A net struck her, flung from a passage to her right, and bowled Jane sideways. The snare was woven of something elastic and slightly sticky, and weighted with what looked like giant acorns. Under the force of the attack, Jane slipped to her knees, but she managed to avoid dropping anything.

  “What is it, what is it, a big ugly outsider!” Three thin-bodied persons in leather armor sprang from a shadowed alcove and raced in a circle around Jane, shaking wooden spears over their heads. One had a skunk’s tail and coloring, one a monkey’s, and a third kept shifting back and forth between a humanoid shape and the shuffling, wheezing form of a small brown bear. “Outsider, topsider, flatworlder!” they chanted, not in unison. “Big-footed, ugly, smelly human!”

  Beyond them, the crow settled onto a head-sized knob at the bottom of a staircase banister and glared at her.

  Jane listened and thought she could hear Adrian chanting. Whatever had knocked the wizard out, his friends had him awake again, and he was probably dealing with Twitch’s injury. She also heard the pounding of many feet, and flapping wings.

  Dragging the weight on her shoulders, Jane stood. The three fairies stopped and staggered back at the sight of her.

  “Do you not know me?” Jane demanded slowly. “I am the Marked Woman.”

  A horse whinnied behind Jane, in the maze of the Outer Bounds. The fairies before her slipped away, fear and embarrassment on their faces.

  “We’re the Queen’s Rangers!” Brown Bear gruffed.

  “Vengeance rides in my wake,” Jane added, beginning to get irritated, “sevenfold and hungry.” She shook the net with her hand and found that the fibers clung to her skin and the fabric of her duster and hat.

  “We can’t!” Skunk squealed. “We can’t do it!”

  The fairy raised his tail in excitement and his comrade Brown Bear grabbed it and yanked it back down with a look of warning on his face. “Duty!”

  “Release me,” Jane said flatly, “or die.” She heard the horse Twitch coming after her again.

  The fairies scattered. “It’s spider silk!” Monkey called over her shoulder as she scrambled under an archway no bigger than a cupboard door. “We can’t release you! You’re stuck until it melts!”

  Jane muttered in Adamic and poured her ka into the spider silk net, burning it instantly into ash. She strode forward in the falling curtain of cinders, regretting the low, drained state to which she had reduced her ka and kicking herself for having been caught in an ambush set by fairies, of all creatures.

  Gunfire erupted behind her, but her ears didn’t pick up the popping and snapping of bullets passing her, so she guessed the shots must be coming from the guns of the rock and roll band, and they must not be shooting at her.

  The fairies were attacking them, too.

  She picked up the pace, jogging. She was surprised and a little annoyed at how long it was taking her to get to her destination, though of course distance on earth and distance in the Mirror Queendom bore no correlation to each other. She wondered if she might have been better off just running out the front of Wellman’s in ordinary mortal space, but cut off the line of self-doubt immediately. She’d had no way of guessing the rock and rollers would be this persistent, and once she shook them, passage through the Outer Bonds would be a good first step to shaking off pursuit. Besides, she hadn’t been foolish enough to leave her ride in front of the roadhouse.

  It occurred to her that it was strange that they were following her. Maybe Twitch wanted revenge for the pain and humiliation Jane had inflicted on her. But was it possible that the band somehow realized she had the hoof, and were chasing her to get it back? Could they have communicated with Jim somehow?

  Jane holstered the Calamity Horn and pulled the hoof from her pocket. Examining it slowed her pace, but running forward into unknown peril was a fool’s choice, and the band seemed occupied with the Queen’s Rangers anyway.

  The hoof was curved like a crescent moon, wide as two of Jane’s fingers and thick as one. It was yellowish in the light of the Outer Bounds, odorless and smooth like ivory, like a stone worn from millennia of lying in a river bed.

  Except, Jane’s fingers found with practiced probing, for one tiny little chip.

  Either the power that had smoothed the hoof fragment out—the waters of Dudael, Jane guessed, having been there recently and seen the holding pit of her one-time conflicted antagonist—had missed a tiny divot, or since the hoof’s extraction from the waters, someone had cut from the inside a tiny flake, a chip the size of her own pinky’s nail.

  Which could be how they were following her.

  Jane cursed, her words of annoyance shaking dust from the lintel of a doorway under which she passed and sending a scuttling thing like an orange centipede scurrying for cover. She sent some of her precious reserves of ka-force over the clipping where her fingers had been, searching for the connection she guessed must exist—

  and there it was. Jane felt it with her ka like a ribbon of water, tenuous, subtle and invisible, stretching away into the maze behind her. It must be the wizard Adrian, she guessed. These thieves feared other criminals, and so they had taken measures to allow them to track the hoof if anyone stole it from them.

  She considered briefly how this impacted her plan and decided that it was a good thing. The more noise these loose cannons of rock and roll made, the more likely they were to attract the renegade, which was all Jane cared about. The band was nothing to her, the hoof was nothing, even Azazel was nothing; she just wanted to carry out the task appointed by the Legate and get her reward.

  And kill Raphael.

  The crow flapped ahead of her in the maze.

  It wheeled in front of two figures, who waited before a window in the wall the size of a ladies’ compact mirror, or the rear view mirror of a motorcycle. They stood tall, straight-backed and regal.

  Jane put the hoof away and drew the Horn.

  “You travel cloaked in myth,” one of the figures smiled gently. She was a tall, thin woman with pale skin, long hair like spun gold and a crown of oak leaves on her head. She wore a green gown and green slippers the color of dew-spattered grass.

  “I bought the coat in Sydney,” Jane said. “You supposed to be Mab, then?”

  “Am I?” the Queen arched an eyebrow. “Australia is a long way from Kansas, in mortal space.” The waves of her efforts to seduce Jane splashed around them all and rebounded off the walls, but Jane was unmoved. It was like smelling rotting meat—she couldn’t miss the stink, and she certainly didn’t want to take a bite, however widely the person offering it might grin. Even without the quicksilver in her palm, Jane was resistant to the charm of the fey folk, but with it, she was immune. “But I see you travel as one of us.”

  Jane shrugged. “I get around.”

  “You must be tired.” These words came from her companion, a man of the same height, with jet black hair and an identical crown. “Why don’t you rest with us? I’m sure we have a lot to share.” He was also dressed in green, in a tailed coat and velvety green trousers and he, too, stank of seduction like fly-blown meat.

  “Let me pass.”

  “You are the Marked Woman.” Now his voice sounded wheedling and, ever so slightly, uneasy.

  “So that gives you a hint as to why your Glamour doesn’t affect me. It should also tell you that you really ought to get out of my way,” Jane said. It was hard to be certain, but she thought the gunfire was getting c
loser. She didn’t want to fight, if she could avoid it. The fairies in front of her didn’t have visible tails, and each wore a leather belt with a sword hanging from it.

  “You are in my lands now,” the Queen said.

  “More or less,” Jane grunted. She turned the pistol so the fairies could get a clearer view of it.

  The King nodded solemnly. “As she said, you travel cloaked in legend.”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Jane said, “but I won’t have my hand forced.”

  “You would murder Queen Mab on her own doorstep?” the Queen looked affronted, staring at Jane down her long nose. “Queen Mab and her consort Oberon, Peerless Among the Fey?”

  Jane laughed and swore in Adamic. The curse word shook the mirror hanging behind the two fairies askew. “Maybe,” she said, “and maybe not.” Behind her, she definitely heard the sound of fighting getting louder. “You can’t kill me, and I have no people you can retaliate against. Why should I hesitate at the thought of killing Mab?”

  “If the occupants of the Mirror Throne were crassly murdered by a Flatworlder,” the Queen sniffed, “there would be war between the worlds. Are you so detached from your father’s and mother’s descendants that you can accept that?”

  Jane shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe,” she said again, “and maybe not. But I’d sure as hell kill a couple of Queen’s Rangers stupid enough to dress up in costume and try to fool me. And nobody would go to war over that.”

  They didn’t blink. The King curdled his eyebrows like she’d said something distasteful. “Queen’s Rangers?” he sneered.

  She pointed the gun at him. “Drop your pants,” she ordered.

  He sneered and did nothing.

  Pop! Pop! Whizzang!

  The sudden presence of bullets in the air told Jane that the band had caught up to her and she was out of time. If her ka weren’t so drained, or her pistol, she’d turn and fight them. On the other hand, if her resources were less exhausted, she could have just blasted these annoying fairies into oblivion. Instead, she raised the pistol and fired a shot into the air.

  Bang!

  “Two left,” she said, pointing the muzzle at Oberon. “I don’t miss.”

  “Stop!” he pleaded, his eyes suddenly serious.

  “Oberon …” the Queen warned him.

  With quick but trembling fingers, the King undid his belt buckle and dropped his green pants into a velvety puddle around his pointy-toed shoes. A donkey’s tail twitched nervously into sight.

  “I thought so.” Bang! Bang! Jane emptied the Model 1910, firing the last two shots into the center of the fake Oberon’s chest. He flew back without a sound, hitting the wall and sinking to the floor.

  “Give my regards to Mab,” Jane snorted. She stepped past the surviving fairy chanting in Adamic, burning nearly the last of her ka-fire in the act.

  The gate opened and she flowed into it, her whole body passing through the window, tiny though it was.

  “Stop her!” she heard at her back, but then the fracas and the Outer Bounds were gone. The crow, of course, followed her through.

  The night outside Dodge City, Kansas, was cool and clear, with a thick cloud cover blocking out the stars overhead. Jane stepped out of the mirror, turned, and plucked it from the saddle strap to which it had been clipped. She dashed it on the roadside gravel. To be sure, she ground it into even smaller shards with her heel.

  She had other mirrors with her, but it would take the wizard Adrian longer to find them.

  “Easy, girl,” she said.

  She stood several miles away from Wellman’s, at the bottom of the bank below the highway and at the edge of an endless field of sorghum. The bushy grass waved cheerfully at her in the darkness, and before she did anything else, Jane stopped and reloaded the Calamity Horn. She filled the clip with thirty-two caliber Auto rounds and then holstered the gun. The shells were unimpressive, weak as far as modern handgun ammunition went—the gun and its curse were everything.

  At the right end of the sorghum field was a two-pump gas station, closed for the night, but automatic pumps and vending machines still meeting the needs of one customer in a red pick-up truck. At the left end was a boxy brick building, the sign at the front of which read FINE CUTS, INC.

  Jane swung into the saddle easily, though the horse—the Mare—was enormous. The Mare, not domesticated and not friendly but accustomed to bearing Jane, curled back its lips to reveal sharp, feline teeth and pranced sideways a step. The Mare smelled of sweaty beast and smoke; she always did. She snorted thickly in acknowledgement of her rider and Jane snorted back. The Mare was the last of the horses of Diomedes, a brutal, bullish man rumored to have been one of the many sons of the profligate Semyaz. The others had been killed centuries ago by an aimless scoundrel whom minstrels had turned into the hero Herakles. This one seemed to be immortal, and she was a fighter; the Mare would eat other animals, but her favorite food was human flesh.

  Like Jane, the Mare traveled in disguise. The wards of seeming on her insured that to any casual passerby she appeared as a long, black, growling motorcycle.

  “Come on, girl,” Jane patted the huge horse and whistled to the animal to calm it. She pulled a fresh vial from one of the saddlebags and poured her drop of quicksilver into it, tamping it shut and replacing it in her pocket. She checked the hoof to be certain it was secure, then clucked with her tongue and pulled the Mare’s reins to turn her around.

  “Come on, girl,” she said again and headed in the direction of the meat packing plant.

  ***

  Chapter Five

  Jane rode once around the meat packing plant to be sure there were no cars parked on its asphalt skirt, cracked and riddled with potholes. Early in the morning, no doubt, there would be trucks and men to load them with butchered carcasses to be shipped off, a piece here and a piece there, to grocers and restaurants in Amarillo, Oklahoma City, and Wichita. By then, Jane hoped to be finished and gone.

  And maybe dead.

  She had no way to detect the renegade Raphael, but she guessed that he must be close, and would come quickly when she called.

  Jane would have preferred to stave in the door of the plant by arcane means, but her ka was drained and weak. Under the crow’s humorless stare, she instead wrapped the Calamity Horn in a saddle blanket to muffle it and shot the lock off the back door. Inside the packing plant, she hit the light switches and looked around while she reloaded.

  She stood in a small entry area with pegs on one wall heavy with lined white smocks like lab coats, red hard hats and gloves. Signs reminded employees to wear safety gear and shoes with good soles, and to punch out for any break longer than ten minutes. Human resources gibberish festooned much of the space, and there was one small office with a window that looked into the entry, dominated by a single desk and a horde of pencil stubs.

  Too small for her purposes.

  Jane passed into the main chamber of the plant, leading the Mare by the reins. The big room was refrigerated, and she pulled her duster closer across her chest against the cold as she looked around at a forest of cattle carcasses. The meat hung headless and shoulders down on hooks in snaking lines, from a door in the corner where Jane assumed the live cows were brought to be punched in the head, along conveyer belts where the meat was cut open and organs were removed and sorted, and finally ended in a thick grove of frozen chests that were fully prepared, and cardboard boxes full of organs and limbs, by a rolling cargo bay door.

  The space was big enough for the renegade to move around in without immediately exiting. It gave Jane some cover, and limited entrances to have to watch.

  The staircase up to the roof was wedged into a corner of the building between a supply closet and the back of the office. Jane hitched the Mare to a column within reach of plenty of good, if chilly, grazing, and climbed to the top alone.

  A light rain was beginning to fall, and the wind picked up, threatening to rip away Jane’s hat as it gusted to storm levels. Jane scanned the hor
izon, noting the small clump of lights that was Dodge City—and Wellman’s, just at its outer edge—and the strip of shadow that was the highway, cutting among farm houses, tractor repair shops and a saddler’s on its way into town. That was the direction from which the rock and roll band would come, if they really could follow the hoof and they chose to come after her.

  Maybe, knowing who she was, they would give up.

  The crow cut, swooping, across her vision, becoming visible in the darkness for a moment by virtue of the light it blocked out.

  “Still you,” Jane said. “Always you. Well, not for long.”

  The Legate had offered Jane a flare-scroll to get the renegade’s attention, but Jane had declined. Such a device would only alert her prey that he was hunted, and she knew how to contact the Messengers. It was a skill she had learned from her Father—though not one he’d ever meant to teach her.

  Her ka was beginning to recover from her exertions at the bar and in the Outer Bounds. It wasn’t much, but it should be enough—she needed very little. The rooftop itself was covered with gravel, which made it a poor surface for her purposes; the little rocks would make it impossible to draw an unbroken circle. There was a big metal box that housed a generator, though, or something to do with the building’s power system. Jane chuckled at the lightning bolt decals on the side of the device, took a Sharpie from her pocket and drew a careful circle, three feet across, on top of the case. Around the outside of the circle she drew a second, meticulously inking in a line that was tidy, perfect, and steadily parallel to the inner one. She filled the space between with Adamic words—a name, single repeated over and over again, and words of calling.

  When she was done she climbed atop the box and stood inside the circle. The wards themselves, the words and the circle, generated power, and she rested a moment within them, feeling the warmth as her ka slightly replenished itself. For a moment she was tempted to wait, to sit within such a circle and restore her depleted reserves.

  She had been waiting six thousand years; couldn’t she wait another day?