Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman - [PUPI 03]

  Another vendor, off to the side and out of the direct line of sight, served up sodas to people who were drawn in to see what the fuss was about. The atmosphere had become less bucolic and more like an arena, spectators gathering to watch the blood spill.

  “What happened?” one of them, a tall blonde with a small blond dog at the other end of a bright green leash, asked. The dog looked mournfully up at his mistress, who seemed oblivious, so the vendor slipped it half a hot dog that had fallen on the ground earlier.

  “Damnedest thing. One minute they were doing bang-up business, you should pardon the expression,” the vendor said, deftly fitting the woman’s hot dog onto a bun and handing it to her, “and the next thing there’s a crash like you wouldn’t believe, and they’re going at each other like gangbusters. If the cops hadn’t shown up, I bet there would have been blood.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “Lady, I got a rule. I don’t see nothing if it don’t involve me. One guy hits another, somebody steals some lady’s purse, your dog snitches one of my hot dogs... ”

  The blonde looked down just in time to see the last of the purloined sausage disappear into the dog’s mouth, and let out a horrified cry. “Damn it, Snooks, you’re going to throw it all up tonight, aren’t you? Damn it.”

  The vendor grinned, as though pleased at the distress in the woman’s voice, but when she looked up again, his leathery face was solemn, and his gaze was more on the still-arguing combatants than his customers. The cops had managed to calm them both down, hauling them to separate corners to get their reports, and, show over, the bystanders had started to move on. “Huh.” The vendor sounded disappointed. “I really thought they’d have done more than yell at each other.”

  “It’s a good thing the cops were nearby,” another man said, coming to the front of the line. “Pepsi, please.”

  “Did you hear about the fight that broke out on the 72 crosstown last month?” his companion asked. “Speaking of cursing. The driver had to pull over and haul them off each other. Man, never ever piss off the little old ladies. They’re fierce.”

  They accepted their sodas and walked on, leaving the square that, fun over, was rapidly emptying of people. The hot dog vendor cocked his head and pursed his rubbery lips thoughtfully, his nostrils flaring as though scenting something pleasant. “Buses. I hadn’t thought of buses. And subways!” The eyes that had seemed sunken and tired before now sparkled with a literal light, a muted dark gold. “Everyone trapped, tired, and anxious... Oh, that will be fun!”

  His hand – oddly gnarled and twisted in the wrong direction, if you looked at it carefully – made a flat pass over the top of his cart, and the metal construct – hot dogs, sodas and all – disappeared.

  A second later, so did the vendor.

  * * *

  five

  Much to my surprise, I’d managed a hard seven hours of dead-to-the-world sleep, got up in time to not rush through my shower, and still made it to the office by 8:00 a.m, even stopping on the corner to grab a bagel with a-schmear from the coffee cart guy.

  The teenagers were missing from the stoop again.

  I forced myself to take the elevator, shivering slightly as I did so. But the doors opened safely on the seventh floor, and that felt like victory. Someone had just gone into one of the two offices across the hall – the photographer’s – closing the door softly behind them, but other than that the hallway was empty.

  I unlocked our door, shucked my jacket, and hung it in the closet. Only one coat there – Pietr’s – but the weather was nice enough that that didn’t mean anything. There was the low murmur of conversation from the small workroom, and a light showing under the door, down the hallway in Stosser’s office. Since we’d long ago tossed the idea of nine to five out the window, I wasn’t surprised not to be the first one in, despite being early.

  I went back to the break room and grabbed my mug – Sharon’s gift, with a brightly feathered, very dead parrot painted on the side – out of the cabinet, filling it with coffee and doctoring it to a proper consistency, and took a long hit, feeling my brain start to kick in for real. There were, as I saw it, two options. I could hang around and see what was happening, or I could get to work.

  I got to work.

  “Steady... ”

  It took real willpower not to growl at the helpful – and unwanted – voice in my ear. “I do know how to do this.”

  The voice backed off – a little, and the sense of current up against my back, supporting me, faded. “Right. I’ll go fetch you some coffee then, shall I? Decaf?”

  I waitted until Pietr left the room – double-checking to make sure he actually had left the room, and not just disappeared – before letting out a heavy sigh and lowering my shaking hands to the table. I shouldn’t have snapped. He was right; I wasn’t at top form. There were too many other things crowded into my head – Venec, mainly, and the damned Merge. But I was still better at reconstruction than he was, so his advice really wasn’t all that damn useful, and he knew it.

  I looked down at our work, trying to see it with an impartial eye.

  The diorama Venec had asked for was an outgrowth of the re-creation spell we used to glean and then display crime scenes, when we needed an overview rather than an eyewitness view. The thing was, the diorama was made entirely of current, built out of the observer’s original memory made three-dimensional. That meant the caster had to maintain control at all times, or it would snap back and burn you. Not fun. The spell Lou and Nifty had been working on when he got ashed, apparently, was a variant that would make a stable diorama, allowing the creator to anchor the current used to create the display into the diorama itself, so that it would self-maintain. So far, no matter what they tried, it still snapped back the moment they took control off. That had been what caught Nifty.

  Lou had been able to avoid getting powdered with current, but even with their newest modifications, the spell still required the caster to be aware of it constantly.

  In terms of pure current-use, a gleaning display was easier for me to set up and maintain, but it left the remains tucked into your head like pond scum, which was both unpleasant, and allowed for shifting memories or external influences to blur details. The diorama-spell scraped everything out and put it into real, if miniature, form, leaving your own memory free to fade normally. I preferred the risk for that return, me. Some things you didn’t want to remember in that much detail.

  The real added benefit to the diorama, though, is that it wasn’t a gleaning-display but a true re-creation. A gleaning showed you exactly what was there, forever static. A diorama, you could play with, run scenarios... play hunches and see how they worked out.

  I moved the concrete-block building back a little more, trying to gauge exactly how far it had been from where the body was, and added a few more cars to the parking lot, rearranging the scene to my satisfaction, and then stood up, looking at it from all sides. The current was solid; to anyone looking with plain sight, it appeared like a solid model of the dump scene. Or, more accurately, the discovery scene, where the NYPD Harbor Patrol had spotted the body, and laid it out for display. Where the actual dump occurred was what I wanted – needed – to find out.

  All I had to do was set things in motion.

  Since the diorama was constructed from my own current, I didn’t have to draw down anything more to trigger it. With my hand palm down a few inches over the surface of the water running under the concrete pier, I commanded it: “Water, flow naturally. Bring the body back to me.”

  The uneven surface of the East River stirred and began to move. A tiny lump – the corpse – disappeared from under the tiny orange tarp as the magic cycled back through its movements in time. Sympathetic magic, with a twist. The body should appear from upstream, caught in the currents, and hit the underground net where the cops found it.

  Instead, it appeared across the river, barely a few feet upstream from the net, and splashed into the river without a sound. I sucked my
cheeks in and leaned back from the table in surprise.

  “Huh.” Either the spell wasn’t working – entirely possible – or our theories had just been thrown for a very interesting loop.

  *c’mere*

  Nick’s ping was like a horsefly: unwanted, irritating, and impossible to ignore. *busy* I sent back, a flick of irritation and a sense of actually being, yes, busy.

  *now* That came from Venec, not Nick, and carried the flavor of an order. Venec knew what I was working on, so if he wanted me to leave it... something was Up.

  “Damn it.” I glared at the diorama. Shutting it down was difficult enough, but letting go wasn’t an option. I had no idea if I’d be able to re-create it so well a second time, and the fact that the body had been dumped so close meant it had also been dumped much later than we thought – once it hit the net and the sensors went off, it couldn’t have been more than an hour or so before someone was sent to investigate. That was the point of the city-installed nets, after all.

  Could I freeze it successfully, without snap back? If I could, yay. If not... ow. And the ow could hit whenever the snap happened.

  I decided to risk it.

  Sliding back into a faint fugue-state, I looked at the current with mage-sight, noting the weave and warp of the threads. Seen this way, it was a chaotic and yet ordered mass. I wondered if that’s what atoms looked like to Null scientists, when they broke us all down to our basic parts. J might know, or he’d know who to ask.

  “Freeze and hold,” I told the combined threads, my voice scarcely above a whisper. It wasn’t volume but control that made it work. “Hold and wait.”

  The threads shimmied, like they were trying to break free, but the motion of the water halted, and a stillness fell over the diorama, like a cold winter morning seemed to make the world quieter.

  I swallowed hard, and moved my hand away from the display.

  It held.

  I stepped backward, one careful shuffle.

  It held.

  I turned my back on it, slowly, and felt a quiver from the current-shape. I stopped, and it stilled, just like J’s sheepdog, Rupert, when he’d been a puppy learning his commands.

  “Hold,” I told it again, my voice as even and composed as I could make it, willing myself not to brace against any anticipated snap back. “Hold.”

  It held.

  When I followed the voices toward the break room at the front of the office, I could feel the diorama still waiting. It took everything I had not to flinch, not to anticipate it breaking control and recoiling back into my core... until I walked through the open doorway and saw why Venec thought it worth dragging me away.

  A klassvaak. Not on the same level of a Great Worm, thank god, but it was like being visited by the Pope, if you were Catholic – you knew damn well you weren’t worthy, and the place was a mess, and why the HELL was he in your living room?

  “This is Bonita Torres,” Venec said, indicating my late arrival. I guessed that the others had already been introduced. Pietr was forgiven for not coming back with the coffee.

  The fatae made a sort of half bow, its elongated head dipping toward its chin. I had no idea how to respond, so just returned the gesture, dipping my head slightly lower than it had, and hoped that was right. Of the entire team, I probably had the most formal training in dealing with dignitaries, because of J’s once-and-future status within the Eastern Council, but my mentor had never covered this particular circumstance.

  “This is our entire team,” Venec said, glossing over the fact that Stosser wasn’t present. Where was the boss, anyway? “Will you now share with us what you came here for?”

  The klassvaak turned back toward him, seemingly with relief. I had no way of reading the fatae’s body language, but I thought it was uncomfortable as hell, with everyone looking at it. That made sense, I guess. It wasn’t exactly an exhibitionist.

  I ran over what little I knew of this particular breed, which wasn’t much. Not because I hadn’t been paying attention to J’s lectures, but because there wasn’t much to know. The klassvaak had come over with the first Dutch settlers. It was, as far as anyone knew, the only one of its kind, although opinions were mixed whether that had always been the case – making it closer to an Old One than I was comfortable with – or if the others had died out or otherwise drifted out of the mortal world. The klassvaak was a night-dweller, its moon-pale skin a little too reminiscent of a corpse’s tinge for human comfort, its eyes round, lashless, and deep blue over a tiny little nose and thin mouth.

  I wondered, suddenly, if the klassvaak had been the inspiration for Nosferatu.

  “No pleasure in being here, me,” the klassvaak said. Its speech was thick, as though it didn’t use English – or any human language for that matter – very often. I wasn’t even sure how its needle-thin lips could form the words, honestly. “But warning you deserve. The Roblin’s come to town.”

  “The Roblin?” Sharon asked, leaning forward, and then realized her mistake when Venec glared at her. The klassvaak didn’t even seem to notice or hear, still looking at a spot somewhere to the left of Venec’s head. That was high-end manners, among the fatae – a direct stare was a challenge. Like cats, they preferred to look indirectly, even when in the middle of a conversation.

  Most Westerners, human ones, anyway, found it distressing or rude, historically labeling it an indication of sly deceit. Venec didn’t seem bothered by it at all.

  “The Roblin’s come to town,” it repeated, as though speaking to a slow but not disliked child. “Mischief calls it, and mischief it will do.”

  I looked at Venec, trying to gauge if he knew what the hell the klassvaak was talking about. His face, and his core, were still, not giving anything away. Nobody else had a clue: I could tell that from the way they were watching Venec, waiting for a cue, the same as me. There was – not tension, exactly, but a sense of frustrated impatience building.

  “Mischief toward whom?” Venec asked, and his voice was that low, not-quite-cajoling tone he used when we were working our way through a problem, the one that said “you can say anything to me, no matter how crazy, I’ll back your play.”

  “Mischief it does,” the klassvaak repeated. Its gaze shifted from the side of Venec’s face; just for a second, but I caught it. Exasperation? No, annoyance. And a desire to be gone, clear as if it had shouted. The fatae was not used to interacting with those who spoke, only those who dreamed. It was uncomfortable here, being confronted and questioned.

  “Elder Cousin,” I said, in passable-but-not-fluent German, playing a hunch. “We do not know this name, The Roblin. Inform us?”

  I hoped to hell that’s what I had said, anyway, and that I used the proper formal verbs. My language classes were years ago and I hadn’t had time to travel and polish them since well before graduation.

  The klassvaak switched to German with what seemed like relief. “The Roblin is.”

  Well. That was helpful.

  The klassvaak shifted its too-pale body again; whatever had driven it here, out of its comfort zone, to talk to us, clearly done and dealt with. It wanted to go now.

  “Thank you,” Venec said, standing and bowing like a Japanese diplomat. Our unexpected visitor didn’t even bother to acknowledge it, but was zippity gone. I didn’t know anything that old could move that fast. At least, not without wings.

  I rubbed at my eyes, feeling a headache building.

  “What the hell was that, and what the hell is a Roblin?” Nick was the first one to speak after the door closed, of course. From being fanboyishly intrigued with fatae when he first started, through to a deep distrust of them, Nicky now usually projected a very New Yorker attitude of “yeah, yeah, whatever.” But this had been bizarre even by our standards.

  “I have no idea.” Venec turned the straight-backed chair he’d been sitting in around, and sat back down on it, straddling it like a cowboy. I forced my brain not to go where my body wanted. “Lou, go through every source you can find, look for any refe
rence at all for this ‘Roblin,’ any spelling variants you can think of. Don’t limit yourself to the Cosa – if it’s as old as our guest, you’re more likely to find it in the fairy tales.”

  Lou nodded, and whipped out her notepad, taking notes, I presumed of any variant spellings she could come up with. Nifty leaned over her shoulder, idly scratching at his arm, to make suggestions.

  “Can we trust it? I mean, it’s fatae, and... ” Nick saw the look I gave him, and stared back, refusing to be cowed. “Give me a break, Bonnie. I’m not being a bigot – you know what I mean. Fatae – especially the older breeds, the ones that don’t much like humans – they’re tricksy. History proves that, over and over. What if our visitor is this Roblin, or whatever, messing with us, trying to get us chasing after something, distracting us from, hell, I don’t know, something going on, or something it wants to do?”

  I blinked, and leaned back against the door frame. Okay, that was tricksy, worthy of a fatae. I was impressed, and admitted I’d never have thought of it. My thought process was too linear, in a lot of ways, but Nick more than made up for it, the way he could swerve and dodge.

  “No.” Venec was positive of that. “Unless this Roblin’s a shape changer, that’s not it.”

  There were seven known, verified shape changers among the fatae breeds, and each of them moved from one specific form to another, not whatever caught its fancy. Of course, if there was a breed that could do that, how would we ever know?

  That thought gave me the very unpleasant woogies.