But throwing Týr had thrown Moony. It takes strength to cast the runes of the Elder Script, and most of his glam was already gone. He opened his mouth – to speak a cantrip, I thought – but before he could, the overcoats moved in with that spooky superhuman speed and I could smell their rankness once more, but so much stronger, like the inside of a badger’s sett. They closed in, unbuttoning their coats as they ran – but were they running? Instead they seemed to glide, like boats, unfurling their long coats like sails to hide and envelop the beleaguered moongod.
He began to chant – the mead of poetry, you know – and for a second the drunken voice cracked and changed, becoming that of Mani in his full Aspect. A sudden radiance shone forth – the predators gave a single growl, baring their teeth – and for a moment I heard the chariot chant of the mad moongod, in a language you could never learn, but of which a single word could drive a mortal crazy with rapture, bring down the stars, strike a man dead – or raise him back to life again.
He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused – and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora? – and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness – for a wing’s beat, for a breath – before it gutters, burns and dies.
But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry. They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.
Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down – not with a crash but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured – and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.
There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They hoovered him up from blood to brain – every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling – and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.
Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.
A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.
‘That was nasty,’ I said at last. ‘Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the end of the world.’
‘Did you hear him?’ said Brendan.
‘I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?’
My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.
I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.
‘Well, I’ll see you later, I guess—’ and I sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.
I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had – I’d never see that Aspect of him again.
I slept till late the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered – the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it – and sat bolt upright.
The guys, I thought. Those two guys.
I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its effects I called Room Service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.
I pondered on my lucky escape – well, I guessed that if they hadn’t sniffed out Moony first, then it would have been Yours Truly and Brother Bren for a double serving of Dish of the Day – but my heart was far from light as it occurred to me that if these guys were really after our kind, this was at best a reprieve, not a pardon, and that sooner or later those overcoats would be sharpening their teeth at my door.
So I finished breakfast and called Bren. But all I got was his answering machine, so I looked up the number of his restaurant and dialled it. The line was dead.
I would have tried his mobile, but, like I said, we’re not close. I didn’t know it, or the name of his girl, or even the number of his house. Too late now, right? Just goes to show. Carpe diem, and all that. And so I showered and dressed and went off in haste under gathering clouds to the Flying Pizza, Bren’s place of work (but what a dumb name!), in the hope of getting some sense out of my twin.
It was there that I realized something was amiss. Ten blocks away I knew it already, and the sirens and the engines and the shouting and the smoke were just confirmation. There was something ominous about those gathering thunderclouds, and the way they sat like a Russian hat all spiky with needles of lightning above the scene of devastation. My heart sank lower the closer I got. Something was amiss, all right.
Looking around to ensure that I was unobserved, I cast the visionary rune Bjarkán with my left hand, and squinted through its spyglass shape. Smoke I saw; and lightning from the ground; my brother’s face looking pale and strained; then fire; darkness; then, as I’d feared, the Shadow – and its minions, the wolves, the shadow hunters, boxed into their heavy overcoats.
Those guys, I thought, and cursed. Again.
And now I knew where I’d known them before – and they were pretty bad in that Aspect, too, though I had more on my plate at that time than I do nowadays, and I’ll admit I didn’t give them my full attention. I did now, though, casting runes of concealment about me as I skirted the funnel of black smoke, the funeral pyre of my brother’s restaurant – and for all I knew, of Brendan himself, who had looked pretty wasted in my vision.
I got there at last, keeping an eye out for overcoats, to find fire engines and cop cars everywhere. A line had been cordoned off at the end of the road, and there were men trying to spray water over the great fizzing spume of fire that had already dug its roots deep into the Flying Pizza.
I could have told them they were wasting their time. You can’t put out the work of a firegod – even a god of hearth fire – like it was just a squib. The flames sheeted up, thirty, forty, fifty feet high, clean and yellow and shot through with glamours that would probably have looked like dancing sparks to your kind, but which, if they’d touched you, would have stripped you, flesh to bone, in one.
And Brendan? I thought. Could he still be alive somewhere?
Well, if he was, he must have run. There was no way anyone could have survived that blaze. And it wasn’t like Bren to flee the scene. He had turned and fought; I’d seen as much in my vision, and my brother was so dead set against the use of glamours among the Folk that he wouldn’t have used them if he’d had any kind of choice.
I used Ós – the rune of mystery – to scry my brother’s fate. I saw their faces, thin and wolfish; saw his smile, teeth bared so that for a second in my vision he could have been me, wild and furious and filled with killing rage. He could be OK, my brother, you know; it just took more time to fire him up. I saw him draw his mindsword – flaming, it was, with an edge that shivered translucent light. A sword that could have cut through granite or silk with the same easy slice; a sword I hadn’t seen since the last time the world ended, a flickering flame of a firegod’s sword that just touched the shadow inside an unbuttoned overcoat and went out like a puff of smoke.
Then, in the dark, they
were on him. Question answered. Well, at least my brother went out in style.
I wiped my face and pondered the points. Point one: I was now an only twin. Point two: unless he’d taken his assailants with him (which I doubted), by now the two coats would be on my tail. Point three—
I was just embarking on point three when a heavy hand fell onto my shoulder, another grasped my arm just above the elbow, and then both applied a painful pressure, which soon became excruciating as the joint locked and a low, familiar voice rasped in my ear.
‘Lucky. I should have known you were in this somehow. This shambles has got your mark all over it.’
I yelped and tried to free my arm. But the other bastard was holding me too tight.
‘Move, and I’ll break it,’ snarled the voice. ‘Hell, perhaps I ought to break it anyway. Just for old times’ sake.’
I indicated to him that I’d rather he didn’t. He locked my arm a little further – I felt it begin to go and screamed – then he shoved me hard towards the alley wall. I hit it, bounced, spun round with mindsword ready half-drawn and found myself staring into a pair of eyes as grim and colourless as a rainy day. Just my luck – a friend with a grievance, which is the only kind I tend to have nowadays.
Well, I say friend. He’s one of our kind, but you know how it is. Fire and rainstorm – we don’t get along. Besides, in his present Aspect he stood taller, weighed heavier, hit harder than me. His face was a thundercloud, and any thought I had of fighting the guy evaporated like cheap perfume. I sheathed the sword and took the better part of valour.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s Our Thor.’
He sniffed. ‘Try anything, and I’ll douse you cold,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an army of stormclouds ready to roll. You’ll be out like a light before you can blink. Want to try it?’
‘Did I ever? Nice greeting, friend. It’s been a long time.’
He grunted. ‘Arthur’s the name in this present Aspect. Arthur Pluviôse – and you’re dead.’ He made it sound like some weird kind of naming ceremony.
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘Brendan’s dead. And if you think I’d be party to the murder of my own brother—’
‘Wouldn’t put it past you,’ Arthur said, though I could tell the news had shaken him. ‘Brendan’s dead?’ he repeated.
‘’Fraid so.’ I was touched – I’d always thought he hated us both.
‘Then this wasn’t you?’
‘My, you’re fast.’
He glowered. ‘Then how?’
‘How else?’ I shrugged. ‘The Shadow, of course. Chaos. Black Surt. Choose your own damn metaphor.’
Arthur gave a long, soft sigh. As if it had preyed on his mind for such a long time that any news – even bad news – even terrible news – could come as a relief. ‘So it’s true,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think—’
‘Finally—’
He ignored the gibe and turned on me once more, his rainy-day eyes gleaming. ‘It’s the wolves, Lucky. The wolves are on the trail again.’
I nodded. Wolves, demons, no word exists in any tongue of the Folk to describe exactly what they were. I call them ephemera, though I had to admit there was nothing ephemeral about their present Aspect.
‘Skól and Haiti, the Sky-Hunters, servants of the Shadow, Devourers of the Sun and Moon. And of anything else that happens to be in their way, for that matter. Brendan must have tried to tackle them. He never did have any sense.’
But I could tell he was no longer listening. ‘The Sun and—’
‘Moon.’ I gave him the abridged version of the events of last night. He listened, but I could tell he was distracted.
‘So, after the Moon, the Sun. Right?’
‘I guess.’ I shrugged. ‘That is, assuming there’s an Aspect of Sól in the neighbourhood, which, if there is—’
‘There is,’ said Arthur grimly. ‘Her name’s Sunny.’ And there was something about his eyes as he said it, something even more ominous than the rain-swelled clouds above us, or his hand on my shoulder, horribly pally and heavy as lead, that made me think that I was in for an even lousier day than I’d had so far.
‘Sunny,’ I said. ‘Then she’ll be next.’
‘Over my dead body,’ said Arthur. ‘And yours,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, keeping his hand hard on my shoulder and smiling that dangerous, stormy smile.
‘Sure. Why not?’ I humoured him. I could afford to – I’m used to running, and I knew that, at a pinch, Lukas Wilde could disappear within an hour, leaving no trace.
He knew it too. His eyes narrowed, and above us the clouds began to move softly, gathering momentum like wool on a spindle. A dimple appeared at its nadir – soon, I knew, to become a funnel of air, stitched and barbed with deadly glamours.
‘Remember what they say,’ said Arthur, addressing me by my true name. ‘Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you.’
‘You wrong me.’ I smiled, though I’d never felt less like it. ‘I’ll be only too happy to help your friend.’
‘Good,’ said Arthur. He kept that hand on my shoulder, though, and his smile was all teeth. ‘We’ll keep to the shadows. No need to involve the Folk any more than we have to. Right?’
It was a dark and stormy afternoon. I had an idea that it was going to be the first of many.
Sunny lived in Hell’s Kitchen, in a third-floor apartment on a little back street. Not a place I visit often, which accounts for my not having spotted her sooner. Most of our kind take the discreet approach; gods have enemies too, you know, and we find it pays to keep our glam to ourselves.
But Sunny was different. For a start, according to Arthur (what a dumb name!) she didn’t know what she was any more. It happens sometimes; you just forget. You get all wrapped up in your present Aspect; you start to think you’re like everyone else. Perhaps that’s what kept her safe for so long; they say gods look after drunks and half-wits and little children, and Sunny certainly qualified. Transpires that my old pal Arthur had been looking after her for nearly a year without her knowing it; making sure that she got the sunshine she needed to be happy, keeping sniffers and prowlers away from her door.
Because even the Folk start getting suspicious when someone like Sunny lives near by. It wasn’t just the fact that it hadn’t rained in months; that sometimes all of New York City could be under cloud but for the two or three streets surrounding her block; or the funny Northern Lights that sometimes shone in the sky above her apartment. It was her, just her, with her face and her smile, turning heads wherever she went. A man – a god – could fall in love.
Arthur had dropped his raingod Aspect and now looked more or less like a regular citizen, but I could tell he was making a hell of an effort. From five blocks away I could see him beginning to hold it in, the way a fat man holds in his gut when a pretty girl comes into the room. Then I saw her colours – from afar, like lights in the sky – and the look on his face – that look of truculent yearning – intensified a little.
He gave me the critical once-over. ‘Tone it down a bit, will you?’ he said.
Well, that was offensive. I’d looked a lot flashier as Lukas Wilde, but looking at Arthur right then I thought it a bad time to say so. I turned down the volume on my red coat, but kept my hair as it was, hiding my mismatched eyes behind a pair of snappy shades.
‘Better?’
‘You’ll do.’
We were standing outside the place now. A standard apartment at the back of a lot of others; black fire escape, small windows, little roof garden throwing down wisps of greenery into the guttering. But at the window there was a light, something rather like sunlight, I guess, occasionally strobing here and there – following her movements as she wandered about her flat.
Some people have no idea of how to go unnoticed. In fact, it was astonishing that the wolves hadn’t seized on her before. She’d not even tried to hide her colours, which was frankly beyond unwise, I thought – hell, she hadn’t even pulled the drapes.
Arthur gave
me one of his looks. ‘We’re going to protect her, Lucky,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to be nice. OK?’
I made a face. ‘I’m always nice. How could you possibly doubt me?’
She invited us in straightaway. No checking of credentials; no suspicious glance from behind the open drapes. I’d had her down as pretty, but dumb; now I saw she was a genuine innocent; a little-girl-lost in the big city. Not my type, naturally, but I could see what Arthur saw in her.
She offered us a cup of ginseng tea. ‘Any friend of Arthur’s,’ she said, and I saw his painful grimace as he tried to fit his big fingers around the little china cup, all the while holding himself in so that Sunny could have her sunshine …
Finally, it was too much for him. He let it out with a gasp of release, and the rain started to come down in snakes, hissing into the gutters.
Sunny looked dismayed. ‘Damn rain!’
Arthur looked like someone had punched him hard, right in the place where thunder gods keep their ego. He gave that feeble smile again. ‘It doesn’t make you feel safe?’ he said. ‘You don’t think there’s a kind of poetry in the sound, like little hammers beating down onto the rooftops?’
Sunny shook her head. ‘Yuck.’
I lit the fire with a discreet cantrip and a fingering of the rune Kaen. Little flames shot out of the grate and danced winsomely across the hearth. It was a good trick, though I say it myself – especially as it was an electric fire.
‘Neat,’ said Sunny, smiling again.
Arthur gave a low growl.
‘So – have you seen anything strange around here lately?’ Stupid damn question, I told myself. Move a sun goddess on to the third floor of a Manhattan brownstone, and you’re apt to see more than the occasional pyrotechnics. ‘No guys in suits?’ I went on. ‘Dark overcoats and fedora hats, like someone from a bad Fifties comic strip?’
A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String Page 10
