Crow Jane (5 page)

“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 horizon, 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?

But Mab’s folk knew what she had, she thought, and they wanted it. And the rock and roll band, ragged and disorganized though its members were, was tenacious and motivated and had proved to hold more than one surprise for Jane. It might hold others still, and it would be coming after her and the hoof.

And fundamentally, she thought, fixing her eye on the black bird that had dogged her vision down the millennia, she didn’t
want
to wait any longer. With the Calamity Horn at her side, she didn’t think she needed to.

Jane raised her arms and began to chant, not in Adamic, but in Angelic. She knew fragments of the language, in the way that modern American kids all knew oddments of Spanish, because it had been in the air, part of the environment of her childhood. These specific words, the ones she now incanted, were a rhyme she had heard Father repeat every winter, many, many years ago.

Jane’s plan was simple. She would summon the renegade Messenger, and when he appeared, she would kill him. Just as she had wanted for a long, long time.

Recently, Heaven had come around to agreeing with her.

* * *

Three days earlier, sitting in a slowly-cooling bubble bath, Jane had realized that she was paralyzed.

She had smelled the candle smoke in the same moment, with its thick reek of cinnamon and blood, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Legate paced slowly into her hotel room. He held the candle in his hand, its flame sputtering red like a Fourth of July sparkler.

He wore red, as befitted his office. He was dressed at least a century out of style, even for one holding his office, in a half-cape-like mantelletta over white sleeves, and a broad circular galero that almost looked like Jane’s own hat, though with a flail-like tail. The similarity in their outfits only repulsed Jane; she wore her hat and duster for utility, and this man wore his garb as a statement of affection for the past.

Jane had lived through the past—nearly all of it there was that a human being could claim to have experienced—she remembered it well, and she felt no longing for it. What she wanted was to move forward, to move on.

The Legate smiled an ageless smile, raised his red candle in one hand and drew out a folded piece of parchment with the other. From where she sat, Jane could see the red sealing wax on the parchment, imprinted with the image of a pair of crossed keys. “I hold a letter,” he said, in a voice that was both withered and greasy, like a three-day-old hot dog on a gas station counter.

Jane looked to be sure that the Calamity Horn sat on a hand towel beside the bathtub, in easy reach if she were able to move. Not that she’d need that for the Legate—as far as she could tell, he was a mortal man, though the crow seemed bothered by his presence. The bird had flapped to the furthest corner of the Las Vegas hotel room immediately on the Legate’s entrance and had stayed there since. It looked resolutely out the window, like it couldn’t bring itself even to acknowledge the Legate’s presence.

Nor was she worried that the Legate would steal the gun. Its original enchantment bound it to Jane’s will and person, and anyone who fired it without her consent would find it a mediocre handgun, old and small. Jane had murdered the priest whose rendered fat had provided the curse-bearing anointing, and it was Jane’s will that activated the terrible, murderous enchantment of the Calamity Horn. He might grab it and run, but she would get it back.

“Fine,” Jane said. “I hold a knife.” It was true, but it was also a bluff, inasmuch as she couldn’t move her limbs or raise the blade that rested in the water under her fingers. She did have emergency resources available if she had to draw on them, but she hoped it didn’t come to that.

She didn’t waste time wondering how the Legate had found her or gotten into her hotel room—he was the agent of a great power, and he had means.

Besides, she was almost enjoying this soak, with the raised bathtub right in the middle of the suite and the panoramic windows over the lights of the Strip, and she was determined that the man’s presence wasn’t going to destroy her evening.

The Legate sank with aplomb onto the corner of Jane’s bed. He set the candle on the stand beside the mattress and crossed his hands on his own lap, still holding the letter. Maybe, Jane reflected, he wore the mantelletta and the hat to give him more bulk—he was a thin man, to the point of being bony, and Jane calculated she could easily lift him over her head and throw him. He might be self-conscious; a man’s size could limit his ability to exercise his charisma.

“The contents of this letter might be of interest to you,” he suggested.

That introduction guaranteed that Jane wouldn’t let on that she cared at all. “You’re fancy, for a mailman,” she teased the Legate. “Though I don’t see your patch for the National Association of Letter Carriers.”

“You show very little deference for the Legate of Heaven,” the man frowned. He had a faint accent, which Jane thought might be Lebanese or Armenian or Hittite. She wondered where Heaven had found this man. He dressed a bit like a Cardinal, but that was mere fashion. He might be a rabbi by background, or a Sikh, or a Qodesh of Asherah. He wore wooden beads on a long string around his neck, but they were beads only, not bearing any other ornament. He thumbed slowly in a circle around the beads with his hands, and Jane saw a tattoo on the back of one hand that might be a picture of a tree, or a many-armed candlestick. “I was warned, but the extent of your indifference surprises me still.”

“You people cursed me,” Jane pointed out. She could have said it bitterly, but the centuries had pounded the emotional vehemence out her. The facts were the facts, and she endured. “
Indifference
isn’t the word I’d choose to describe my feelings. You’re lucky I don’t kill you right where you sit, with a knife in the eye.”

“This letter,” the Legate continued, “contains the release of your judgment. It contains your forgiveness.”

That caught Jane’s attention, but she let no hint of her interest slip.

“This letter contains your death.”

Jane trembled, slightly, from the neck up. “Sounds all right to me,” she allowed. “Why don’t you leave it on the table there, and help yourself to something from the minibar on the way out?”

“Forgiveness isn’t free,” the Legate shook his head like he had just discovered this terrible truth for himself. “Not for sins as serious as yours.” He slowly licked his fingers and snuffed the candle. “But I’m pleased that you’re willing to talk.”

“Now’s the time to hit me up,” Jane chuckled to hide her relief at being able to move again, drawing her heels up to her buttocks in the deep, bubble-capped water. She wasn’t afraid of death—she longed for it—but she hated being told what to do, and imposed paralysis was someone else telling her what to do. “I put down some mad dogs for the State of Nevada last week and then I hit it big on the Cockroach Road. What do you want, a hundred grand?” Money didn’t matter to her, so Jane either had it in buckets or had none at all. She couldn’t starve to death and paid no utility bills and the Mare could catch her own provender, so when Jane got money, she spent it. Eat, drink and be merry, might have been her motto, for tomorrow you will certainly not die.

“An eye for an eye,” the Legate intoned. “A tooth for a tooth.”

“A death for a death,” Jane shot at him, and now she did feel bitter. “So why not kill me and get it over with?” Suddenly, she felt the full weight of the millennia at her back, and her heart filled with the pangs of the hundred cities that had burned around her and the thousands of men who had died on her blades. She was tired, she was unspeakably old, and she just … kept …
going
.

“You lost your death when you took your brother’s life from him,” the Legate said dryly, as if she didn’t remember. He picked up the candle and tucked it into some hidden pocket beneath his mantelletta.

“What, then?” Jane asked, but in her heart she knew where the conversation was going. She willed herself not to look to the side at the Calamity Horn.

“You can have your death back,” the Legate finished, shaking the letter gently like it was a birthday present and he was weighing it to guess what might be inside, “in exchange for the death of another.”

“Why don’t you do it yourselves?” Jane asked. “You guys aren’t exactly averse to smiting, when you get the idea you’d like to do it. Ainok, Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, Pompeii, San Francisco, New Orleans … why not strike this guy with a good old-fashioned thunderbolt, or a plague?”

She knew the answer, but she wanted the Legate to say it.

“This is a case where discretion will be necessary,” the Legate said slowly. “Heaven would rather not attract any attention.”

Jane shook soap off her hand. “And you came to me,” she said, picking up the FN Model 1910, “because of my reputation for great discretion. Also, because I carry the Calamity Horn, a gun that is capable of wounding and striking down even the children of Heaven. And also because you have something you can hold over me. Here I am in Las Vegas, and Heaven is making me an offer I can’t refuse.”

The Legate nodded. “All true. And also, we came to you because the target in question is an old friend of yours.”

* * *

On the rooftop of the meat packing plant, standing on top of the lightning bolt-bearing case, Jane raised her arms to the roiling sky and called the Messenger. Angels didn’t have true names, not in the way humans did, because the ka, the
ba
, and the body of an angel were not separate things, needing a name to bind them together and casting a shadow over the space among them. An angel was a unitary creation, a spiritual point rather than a cluster, and it had no secret name. Therefore, she couldn’t compel it; so instead, she invited it.