A City Dreaming (17 page)

“When are you due?” he asked.

“June.”

“The father?”

She smiled and looked down at her belly. “He's a good 'un.”

“I'm glad.” Surprised to discover he wasn't lying, M decided to repeat it: “I'm glad.”

“Thanks. It keeps me in a lot. I don't see much of the old crew these days.”

“Don't you miss it?”

“Not so much. There's not really a point to it, you know? All those loud noises and bright colors but you never quite get anywhere. It's all a little,” she shrugged, made a gesture with her hand like she didn't want to say anything to offend him, then went on and did it anyway, “childish.”

Eventually the drink was over, and then a second drink was also over, and two drinks is the stopping point after which once lovers become lovers once again, and it was clear that was not going to happen. M insisted on paying, though he didn't really have any money that month, but still, better to skip a few lunches than sully your pride.

He walked her outside and caught her a cab, and she held his hand and stared into his eyes, and M wondered if maybe he should have pushed harder for that third drink, belly bump or no belly bump. She had very pretty eyes. The moment stretched. Beneath his turban the taxi driver scowled, annoyed to be wasting potential fare at the busiest time of the day.

She hugged M tight, and then she patted him on the back, and the moment was over. “You can't keep doing this forever,” she said as she slid into the cab, M holding the door open to allow her passage. “We all have to grow up at some point.”

M didn't answer. He watched her car retreat into the distance, thinking he would probably never see her again. Hoping, really, because this was as good an endpoint as you were going to find—a wise man notices when the credits start to roll.

Then he shook out a cigarette and lit it and observed an abandoned building in his peripheries, casting strange shadows on the asphalt. And he remembered this conversation about megapolisomancy he was having with Andre some days earlier: that certain buildings are nodes, nexuses of ley
lines, pulsing centers of energy for the metropolis, which wasn't true as it turned out, or at least this building wasn't one of them. But in the basement, there was a creature that M had never seen before, and it was enough to keep him occupied until after dinner, and by the time he made it home that night, he mostly had stopped thinking about her altogether.

Mostly.

They noticed walking out from the bar, though it might have happened earlier.

“Are those gas lamps?” Boy asked.

“Shit,” M said.

“Who's been mucking about?” Stockdale asked.

“Wasn't me,” Andre insisted. “Boy, did you sneak something into the drinks?”

Boy and Andre had started to see a lot of each other since M had introduced them, and this meant, by the inverse-square property of dating, that M saw a lot more of both of them. He had mixed feelings about this. He liked Boy and even sort of tolerated Andre, especially when he was kept on a leash, but being the mutual friend meant that he spent a lot of time watching them kiss and a fair bit of time stopping them from killing each other.

“Not yet,” Boy answered, “though now that I think about it, the bar seemed a bit too authentic with its pre-Prohibition furniture, even by the standards.”

“Nineteen twenty-five did not look like this,” Stockdale said.

The snow had been there when they had walked into the bar, but not anything else: not the narrow alleyways, which curled below the steeples of castlelike brownstones; not the wood smoke hanging like an opaque shower curtain; not the cobblestones in the main street or the horseshit atop them; and certainly not the darkness, which alone would have made it clear they weren't
where they had been, which lay thick as wool over a pre-electric or post-electric or at the very least un-electric city.

When M turned from inspecting their new reality, he discovered that Andre had somehow traded his ladies' jeans and button-down shirt for trousers, a waistcoat, and a set of aviator goggles. A short blade and a strange-looking flintlock with an oversize barrel rested on opposite hips.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Stockdale asked. Stockdale himself wore a black leather duster that ran down to his black leather boots. His rapier had a basket hilt and a jeweled pommel.

“Of course, you would have a sword,” M muttered.

Boy was dressed in something between a corset and a wedding dress. One side of her head was shorn bald, and from the other a cascade of blond hair trailed down to her ankles. She carried a Gatling gun, which nearly equaled her in height and mass.

“You look like an extra in a pop-punk video,” M said.

“You're one to talk.”

M looked down to discover he also had on a rather striking Edwardian getup—though not for very long. Despite the cold he removed his coat and tossed it on the ground, adding an empty scabbard and a bejeweled spyglass, both of which had appeared as suddenly as his new clothes. “Not interested, thanks,” M said, wrapping his arms tight and shivering.

“Suit yourself,” Boy said, inspecting her new weapon.

They went into the bar and then out again, but it didn't do any good, as M had known it wouldn't. The entrance was never the egress in this sort of situation.

“If it's an illusion,” Stockdale said, scaring some idling pigeons with a practice draw of his sword, “it's a remarkably good one.”

“This goes on forever,” Andre said, reaching his arm into a black leather purse that had appeared on his person. “That is not an exaggeration.”

“We weren't near any of the main portals,” Boy said.

“Impossible to be familiar with all of them,” Stockdale said.

Boy's right shoulder, which coincidentally or not was the one her gun hung off of, was the mottled pink of an old burn. “A curse?”

“Forever, I tell you, that was not hyperbole.” Andre was pulling out bottles
from his pack, tiny vials like jewels and thick glass canteens that resembled grenades.

“Awfully elaborate,” Stockdale said, running through a dance of thrusts, parries, ripostes, tripostes, coulés, derobements, and flèches.

“You learn those with your third from Oxbridge?” M asked.

“They sometimes are,” Boy said. “I once spent three weeks as a child in Victorian-era Britain before I finally realized my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend was playing a nasty little trick on me.”

“How'd you take that?” Stockdale asked.

“Badly.”

“Wait, no, we've reached the end,” Andre said, a row of philters, jars, ewers, jugs, and urns laid out on the ground before him, as well as the tools to make more of them, alembics and crucibles and pestles—a veritable alchemist's shelf. “Still, though, that's a hell of a satchel.”

Boy and Stockdale spent a while longer trying to figure out why they were where they were, though M didn't really see the point. He had learned long ago that things are so much bigger than you could ever have any sense of that there was no point in supposing what was happening to you just now had any connection to anything that had happened to you before, or for that matter anything that had happened to anyone before.

And indeed, by the end of the discussion they had reached no conclusions, except that it was clear that this New York winter—for it was an ineffable but undeniable certainty that they were still somehow in New York—was far worse than theirs. Colder, at least. Despite her outfit, Boy displayed no care for the frost, laughing and dancing in the snow, which was white and soft as freshly sheared wool, though less itchy. Stockdale and Andre swaggered happily after Boy, hands tight on the pommels of their weapons. M alone seemed unhappy about the business, and not only because he had gotten rid of his coat. The city was lonely-beach quiet, back-of-the-moon quiet, locked-in-a-coffin-beneath-the-ground quiet. Occasionally the
clop-clop-clop
of hooves and the clamor of hansom cabs behind them broke the silence, and M was not slow to note that on every carriage, a man rode shotgun while carrying the same, and each stared hard at the companions as he passed.

“There has to be someone who can send us back,” M said.

“Why do you think that?” Boy asked.

“There always is. Or a glowing door or something. It's the way these things work. The problem isn't getting out; the problem is not getting sucked in.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean don't get too attached to that gun.”

“I love this gun,” Boy said, hefting the barrel toward the sky. “I feel like Sarah Connor.”

“Well, it isn't really yours and try not to get confused on that point. You're going to have to get rid of it eventually. Sooner rather than later, if I have anything to say about it.”

They walked aimlessly. There was nothing else to do. Mostly they seemed to be enjoying themselves, their new toys and this fine adventure. Except for M, of course. After an hour they had passed hostelries and blacksmith shops, apothecaries and cobblers, towering cathedrals without any visible crosses and butcher shops with foreign cuts of meat in the windows. But they had not passed any magic portals or backlit doorways, nothing that suggested a passage back to their own existence. Down a narrow side street—and weren't they all narrow side streets in this faux-Dickensian hellhole—they saw a sign depicting a fat man eating a ham and stopped in front of it.

“A bite or two couldn't hurt,” Boy said.

“Someone has clearly never read Washington Irving,” M said, but he was too hungry to put up much of a fight. The fire inside was, if not roaring, at least mewling vigorously. There were long wooden tables and benches below those tables, all of which were empty.

“Good to see you, friends, good to see you,” the publican greeted them, coming out from behind the bar. He had ears like cauliflower and skin like a potato. He was either a troll or an incredibly trollish-looking human. “Not so many come out to the Crown Inn now that the Pale King holds sway.”

“That's enough, Mr. Tumnus, thank you so much,” M said swiftly. “Just need a bite to eat, and then we'll be back on our way. No interest whatsoever in being dragged into any of this Pale King business.”

“I wish you luck, my friends,” the not-quite man said, leading them to a table. “But I'm afraid the Pale King's hand reaches everywhere and is not particular about what it snatches.”

Dinner was roast turkey, or what looked like a turkey, skin crisped and crackled, served with stewed apples and thick brown bread and about half a keg of ale between the four of them.

“Who do you think this Pale King character is?” Stockdale said, forking a piece of meat.

“It's nothing to do with us,” M insisted. In the candlelight one could see a portrait of a scowling child just above his left wrist.

“When evil roams without fear, is it not every righteous man's business? And woman's,” Stockdale added quickly, hoping to avert trouble.

But Boy wasn't listening. “I'm going to be pissed if I can't fire this at someone,” she said, buffing her gun with the fold of her dress. “Like borrowing Ron Jeremy's cock and going to mass.”

“Any idea what would fit in my flintlock?” Andre asked. “The one thing that seems to have been forgotten in my bag is gunpowder.”

“When did you start writing for
National Review
?” M asked Stockdale. “We have to start instituting regime change in fictional nations? Also, did any of your slick new outfits come with relevant money?”

Inside Stockdale's pockets were a handful of thick octagons made of some sort of blackish metal and featuring a glowering gentleman with a winter storm on the obverse. One proved more than enough to satisfy the innkeeper, so much so that he added another round of stout and even sat down to drink it with them.

“We're looking for a way out of here,” M said, midway through his cup.

The innkeeper shrugged, his shoulders like knots in an oak. “We've a backdoor, but it just goes to an alley.”

“No, I mean . . .” M thought for a while about what he did mean, and how he could explain it to the innkeeper. “Let's say we needed to get somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. Oz. Lankhmar. Poughkeepsie. Not here. Who would we see about that?”

“Don't know if I can help you there. I'm just your average boggan, trying to keep his head down through the Pale King's winter, like all of the benighted people of the metropolis. If you're looking for a hymn of transport, the wisest of the witches and the highest of the magi can only be found within
the walls of the island. But most of them have long since thrown in with the Pale King, and they'd be loathe to help you without payment, and probably not even then. The Spring Bride could have taken care of it in an instant, were she not frozen solid by the Pale King's curse, her dandy lions and legions of ivy kept sleeping long after their time.”

“How long has she been frozen?” Stockdale asked, and to M's annoyance Boy had put aside her cannon and seemed to be listening eagerly. Andre was staring down at Boy's cleavage, rendered voluptuous in her new garments, but still, M could feel the thing slipping away.

“Who speaks of time, when each day brings with it the same blank snow, the same fierce winds? What is a year when there are no seasons? Besides, it is better not to remember the days of summer, nor even to mention them. The Pale King has many eyes watching, in the wind and in the night, for despite it all he still fears the Four to Come. The Four who will end his rule and bring harmony once again to the city.”

“A bit on the nose, don't you think?” M asked, hurrying them upward and back into the evening.

Outside the gas lanterns were making a brave but futile stand against the falling dark. The moon, if there was a moon, was nowhere to be seen, obscured by the winter storm. Following them to say good-bye, the innkeeper's eye went wide as milk saucers, and he pointed one trembling finger into the night. “Winter men!” he shrieked, before darting back inside and slamming shut the door.