by Caleb James
“Tell us what to do,” a troll mother surrounded by her children shouted from the balcony.
“Stay calm. Stay within these walls. We are prepared for this day and for months to follow if need be. We have food and water. We are secure. No one leaves these walls. No one is to enter without being vetted by myself. And this is perhaps the most important thing.” He took a deep breath. I am such a hypocrite. “No one is to touch or taste fairy dust.”
A missile whistled overhead. The room fell silent as it screamed toward the ground… toward them. It exploded at the Center’s outer wards.
Redmond held still. He glanced back at Finn.
“She is here for me,” Finn whispered.
Nimby sang, “The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out. The worms crawl in and they wiggle all about.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Redmond whispered. He turned back to his anxious audience. “She will attempt to pull us apart and to create dissension within these walls. We must hold firm. For should we fail, have no doubt that our queen will not forgive, and every single one of us will be marked for death… or worse.”
“We shall fight!” a tiny pixie dressed in a battle helmet and purple tutu screamed from the chandelier. Her cry was taken up by dozens of others in an odd array of warrior dancewear.
“We shall,” Redmond said. “But now we batten down and wait for our moment. Our walls are strong.” He scanned the crowd from one end to the other, from the ceiling down to the insectopods with their mishmash of bug and humanoid limbs and heads, clustered deep in front of the podium. “Our walls are strong.”
A family of frosted mini-gnomes piled onto a single seat repeated his words. “Our walls are strong.”
Without prompting, others joined in. “Our walls are strong.”
Finn, with Nimby buzzing around his head, came to Redmond’s side. “What’s happening?”
“Watch. Listen.”
“It’s magic.”
Nimby clapped her hands and changed her tune. “With a mickle and a care I shall go into a hare.”
“Yes. Collective magic. They all came here for a purpose. Mostly it was to find a life free from May’s insanity. This is their home.” The chant swelled, and the room filled with a golden glow that pulsed and grew. Redmond raised his arms over the crowd. He made a motion for silence. And like a conductor, he brought the sound down. “Our walls are strong. Stay within them. Keep your children safe. And above all else, stay far away from fairy dust.”
With missiles flying overhead, he watched the Center’s residents disperse to the streets and their homes. He wondered how many would survive.
“I can stop this,” Finn said.
It was all Nimby needed to pick up with a Supremes’ song she’d learned in the See. It came with well-crafted choreography that started with one hand on her hip and the other in the universal sign for Stop.
Redmond looked past Nimby’s antics. “You can, Finn. But you were not born into our magic. In that she has the advantage. Magic does not travel in straight lines, but it is twisty and carries options. As you said, on this day fate takes a holiday. There is choice here, and there is strategy. She batters our walls and incites us to panic.” He gazed on Finn and realized with crushing certainty that any moment might be their last. “Once she has what she wants—” He rested his hand on Finn’s chest. “—she will resume her prior objective. Many will die.”
Finn nodded.
Nimby shifted her tune. “We’re all worm food in the end. We’re all worm food in the end.”
Redmond caught something in Finn’s expression. “Tell me what runs through your head.”
“Veritas ex Cineribus. Truth from the ashes. It’s the logo of the Bureau of Fire Investigation.” Finn stared out over the departing crowd, many of whom still chanted “Our walls are strong.” But it wasn’t his eyes that fed him information but his nose. “It’s them.”
“Tell me.”
Finn paced across the stage. Nimby circled his head.
“May is a creature of fire and magic. She eats her subjects,” Finn stated.
“Yes,” Redmond said, “and that is the source of both fairy fire and fairy dust.”
“She is a cannibal.” Finn stopped and met Redmond’s gaze. “And the ingestion of dust….”
“Yes, I get it,” Redmond said. “Trust me. I’m not proud of the fact. She has enslaved her army.”
Finn pointed a finger at him. “No.” And without explanation, he left the auditorium.
“Finn!” Redmond shouted, but either Finn didn’t hear, or Nimby’s constant songfest distracted him. “Finn!” Redmond ran after him, accompanied by several of the ogre guards and a handful of students.
Finn headed to the outer walls. He climbed the zigzagging flights of stairs and looked out over the fields and past the broad outer lake toward May’s massed troops.
Redmond flew to his side as May, from her perch upon her salamander self, made eye contact first with him and then with Finn.
She shouted and fueled her words with magic so they could breach the distance. “Hound, you can end this.”
Finn nodded. He whispered to Redmond, “We know that she has created an army of addicts. They follow her out of need. They have lost any semblance of free will. Tell me, can they be healed?”
Redmond grew quiet. The first time he’d beaten his addiction had come at a terrible cost. He’d had one of his students lock him in a cell deep below the earth. For more than a year he had wished for death. The mechanics of dust were simple and cruel. It fused with every molecule of your being. Detoxification was rare, prolonged, and excruciating. It carried a high fatality rate, and relapse was almost inevitable. I should feel all of that now. Something is different. “Truth from the ashes.” He turned from May, whose hands were a blur of motion. “Even now she seeks to pull you from these walls with magic. She will fail… for now. I need to go back to my chambers.” He drifted off the wall and flew toward the spire of his chambers.
“Damn you! Wait!” Finn shouted.
“I forgot.” Redmond turned back. “You do not fly.”
“No, I don’t.” He grabbed Redmond, rubbed noses, licked his cheek, and then kissed him hard.
Nimby did a series of cartwheels, bouncing across Finn’s shoulders, her song now an ancient tune about shopping for puppies in windows.
“I do this,” Finn growled and in front of all transformed into the massive wolfhound. He butted his flat head against Redmond’s flank.
“Get on!” Nimby shrieked.
And like mounting a horse, Redmond did.
The Hound raced down the stairs and through the Center toward Redmond’s tower.
Redmond worked the locks and, unused to taking the stairs, grabbed fists of thick fur with both hands as he was carried up hundreds of steps to his chambers among the clouds.
Once in his quarters, Redmond went to the drawer that had held his stash. It smelled of neither piss nor fairy dust. “I should be sick. I should be horribly sick.” He looked at the Hound and felt inside himself for any trace of dust withdrawal; there was none. “It’s been over a day. And once an addict relapses,” he said, as though talking to one of his classes, “it’s like they’d never been sober. This makes no sense. I should be sick. Very sick. Fever, vomiting, uncontrollable diarrhea….”
The Hound licked his hand, the air shimmered, and he turned back into Finn.
Redmond stared at him. “That’s it. You. You’re the answer. You are the truth in the ashes.”
Finn looked at the empty drawer and then at Redmond.
“Ding, ding, ding,” Nimby cried. “We have a winner. Johnny, tell us what he’s won.”
Finn shook his head and captured Nimby in two fingers around her waist. “Please shut up for half a second.”
Nimby clamped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes grew large, and her cheeks puffed out like the effort might make her explode.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” He stared at Redmond. “So
what you’re saying is I need to go out there and pee on a few thousand fairies.”
Redmond nodded. “Yes, that might do it.”
Thirty
FINN’S LAUGH ended with a bark. Truth from the ashes, Jesus! Let it go. Today is one hell of a different day from yesterday. And the night of a thousand fires. Stop!
He looked at Redmond. A day ago you didn’t have him. “I’ve got to get with the program.”
Nimby alit on the tip of his nose. “Woof,” she said and sang again about puppies in windows.
He looked past her whirly tattoos, crazed red eyes, and swallowtail wings that beat fast to keep her balanced, and focused on Redmond. “You said withdrawal from dust is bad.”
“Very. It took me a year.”
“You don’t look sick now.”
“I’m not. Not in the least.”
“Maybe you didn’t pick up a habit this time.”
“Not how it works. Once a dusthead, always a dusthead. If you’re able to withdraw, all it takes is a single bunny and it’s as if you never stopped.”
“Seriously?” He waggled his eyebrows and drew a tick mark in the air.
“Very funny. Clearly you never heard the story of how questions killed the questling, but yes. I should be puking my guts out at this moment.”
“And nothing.”
“Nope. I just have….”
“Say it.”
“I want to rip that silly robe off of you and….”
“Yeah.” Finn gently plucked Nimby from the air and placed her next to Redmond’s stash box. “So piss. Any piss or just mine?”
“Yours.” It was Redmond’s turn to chuckle.
“Say it.”
“Hair of the dog.”
“I guess, though more like piss of the dog. Does she know this?”
“Doubtful, and as a medical doctor, you’d think this would be something I’d have run across. This is huge. An actual cure for dustheads. It’s unprecedented.”
“So maybe we caught a break. Then again, she was with the Hound. She might know this. She seems to be the source of dust, or at least a lot of it.”
“There are others, but they are not sentient.”
“Come again?”
“Dust,” Redmond said. “The usual sources are volcanic. Whenever there’s an eruption, the dealers harvest the drug.”
“Not so different from her, now that we know a portion of the drug comes from dead fey.”
“Yes.” Redmond snaked his hands under Finn’s robe and held him fast. Finn brushed his nose through his hair. “You smell good… clean, different.”
“Tell me.”
“You’re not dusted. You are you. No additives. No preservatives.”
Nimby chimed in with a twisted margarine lyric. “If you think it’s butter, but it’s snot.”
Redmond ignored her. “May might know of this. In which case, it’s not just your heart she’s after. She’ll need you dead to maintain her army of addicts.”
“How much piss are we talking here?” Finn asked.
Redmond’s hands drifted lower. “A few thousand gallons should suffice.” A missile wailed overhead.
They held their breath and waited as it reached its apex and then hurtled down toward the Center. The explosion shook the tower. Through the window they glimpsed embers of twinkling fairy dust as they drifted down.
Finn pulled back. “What you told them back there. That these walls could withstand her. It’s not true.”
“It is and it’s not.” Redmond voiced the thing he most feared. “The walls will stand.” He stared at the sparkly dust. “She is filling our streets with dust. The walls will fall from within, not from without.”
“But we know what to do. I just have to pee on everyone. Shit! A few thousand gallons. Not impossible. All we have to do is analyze it. Figure out what’s in it, how to synthesize it, and…. You have a lab here?”
Redmond’s expression was somber. “It’s a plan, Finn. A good one. But not one for this world… it’s of yours.”
“No chemistry here?”
“No, alchemy, it’s the source of magic objects like your houndstone. But to pull apart the structure of a thing and make more of it… lots more of it, that’s chemistry, and it belongs to the See, not here. When the realms were divided, you got science. We got magic.”
“So we’ll go to the See. We’ll go together.” Three fairy fire missiles screamed overhead.
“Finn. I can’t go.”
“I didn’t break. And isn’t love protective?” Finn said, misreading Redmond.
“Your fairy did.” Redmond looked him in the eyes. “She knew she would.”
“What?”
“Your pixie. She sacrificed herself to get you here intact. She’ll do the same to get you back.”
“She most certainly will not!”
Redmond gripped Finn’s hand and brought it to his lips. “This is war. Finn, there have been horrible casualties, and there will be more. Too many. Your coming here was fate, and now you need to go back. Find your chemist, preferably one with a taste for alchemy, make a few thousand gallons of magic wolfhound piss, and bring it back.”
“I’m not leaving you. I’m a hound, remember? You’re coming with me, or I’m not—”
Redmond put a finger to Finn’s lips and then kissed him. It tasted of love, lust… and loss. “My place is here. If I left, the Center would fall, and there will be no safe place left. I can’t do that.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You must.”
The pain, like losing Rory again, tore at his guts. “I can’t.”
Nimby circled around them. “To war, to war, we go to war.”
He stared at her as Redmond’s revelation sank in. “Right. This is war.” And for the umpteenth time that day, he told the rational part of himself to shut up. This was not the time or place for logic. “Find what’s in my piss. Make a few thousand gallons, and come on back. Piece of cake.”
Redmond’s expression mirrored his despair. “It’s possible.”
“Then it’s certain,” Finn said.
Nimby landed on his shoulder and marched in place. She sang, “To war, to war, we’re off to war. To fight, to fight, that is our plight. To die, to die, some will die. We pay today so our children may play.”
With Nimby on his shoulder, Finn ran his fingers through Redmond’s hair. “I will return to you. You have my heart. I’m coming back for it, and I’m coming back for you.”
Thirty-One
DOROTHEA GAZED up at the split queen. “Your Highness, you are magnificent.”
From atop her salamander self, May, dressed in a golden breastplate with her jeweled hair streaming behind her, looked to the Center. “It will fall. Time, years, and centuries are irrelevant. It will fall.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Dorothea, I have been blinded by treachery. Now I shall finally taste the fruits of what should have always been mine.”
“Yes, this is your time.”
May marveled at the strange sensations as her thighs straddled her other half. I am beast and queen, creator and destroyer. Her salamander self slurped down a family of pixies. Their magic tingled through them both as the tiny creatures screamed.
Salamander May belched and reared back. Here it comes. She produced a glorious fireball that arced high in the sky. It hurtled across the broad moat and over the flower-emblazoned meadows.
“Ooh,” Dorothea moaned. “I have never seen such power.”
May tracked her missile’s flight and watched it land hard on the Center’s protective wards. “They still hold.”
“Perfect aim. And they won’t hold long,” Dorothea added. “See how the magics waver at the edges. You are almost in.”
Twinkles of fairy fire rained down on her target. They sparked as they connected with Redmond Fall’s protective spells.
“Look.” Dorothea pointed. “Some dust falls through. Too fabulous.”
May chuckled a
nd sang, “Come and taste my fairy dust.” Her gaze tracked to the right, the left, and then to the rear. My army is strong. “Dorothea.”
“Yes, my queen.”
“Tell me our numbers.”
“They vary.”
“Yes, I’m aware… I was hungry.”
“I meant no criticism.”
“Just tell me, give or take a snack or two.”
“Twenty thousand.”
“Good. But his magic… I should never have allowed this place to be built. Should never have let him grow so strong.”
“True, and it served a purpose.”
“I suppose. Back in the days when I did not want my appetites to be known. I should have just eaten them, all the deviants and the defectives. But there are concerns with such practices.”
“So true, Your Highness. We are what we eat. But look, more dust falls through.”
“My time approaches.” May turned back and surveyed her army. “Less than half will be able to make it across his moat.”
Dorothea’s head cocked to the side. “Something’s happening.”
“Tell me.” But as she spoke, she felt it. “Someone’s turning a lock.”
“Yes.”
“Either they’re letting someone in or….”
“They left a door,” Dorothea said.
“Someone’s trying to escape. And I know who. This is my chance, and it won’t be years or centuries. I will have my heart. I will be whole.” Her salamander self inhaled and exhaled and, using its lungs like bellows, produced a different form of fairy fire. She hacked it up, and as it shot through her lips, she clamped down tight and, propelled by its force and magic, took to flight.
With Dorothea and twenty thousand winged, webbed, and footed creatures at her back, she flew toward the source of the magic’s breach. She clung tight to her smooth white back and willed herself higher and faster. “Hurry!” She glimpsed down and saw some of her army get pulled, screaming, into the depths of the moat. Razor-tipped jaws of rare creatures made quick work of her dusted minions as others flew by her side and at her back. Several trolls and ogres clung perilously to the legs and backs of their flying brethren. Some made it across, and some fell screaming into the depths.
