Emma Bull (2 page)
Authors: Finder
I raised my head like a cat hearing a can opener.
A B B YY.c
"Road trip?" Tick
-Tick and I had a pleasant and profitable line of work established, guiding
foragers,
explorers, mer
chants, and whoever through the less-charted areas of the Borderlands, the Neverneve
r.
There the magic boiling out of the Elflands makes Alice's looking-glass garden, where you have to walk away from your destination to get there, seem like a trivial navigation problem.
"No, sorry. Not work for us, just for you. It's probably only the work of fifteen minutes, but I'll pay you in dinner. And it's an excuse to stop what you're doing."
"You're my partner, you ass. You don't have to pay for it."
"All right." She grinned, and commanded, "You may find my torque wrench
and
do me the favor of joining me for dinner."
I laughed as the last glass slid from my fingers back into the water. Then—"Ah," I said. "That was quick."
I can't explain it well. I've lived with the phenomenon for eight years, and still it defies proper description. Somewhere in me, in my mind or my bones or my nerve endings or none of these, there was a pulling sensation, a highly directional drag at my attention. It was both less and more uncomfortable than I make it sound. I knew that, if I ignored it, it would go away in a few hours, but that they would be an unpleasant few hours. Not painfulùjust unpleasant. I told you I couldn't explain it well.
The very asking of the question does it. "Where is… ?" and fill in the blank with the non-abstract noun of your choice. But it has to be something that either the client or I know exists. Your left shoe; your grandmother's diamond ring (even if you've never seen it, if you know it exists, and it hasn't been pitched in a volcano, I can find it); a jar of mustard (a specific one, or just the nearest available for sate—you have to tell me which). And once the question's been asked, I can't just tell you "Under your bed," or "At the Marvel Mart at the corner of Ho and Peppergrass." I have to follow the pull; I have to track it down myself, as if I were a dowsing rod. It's not a perfect system. But at one time or another, everybody loses something, and my rates are reasonable.
Now the Ticker raised her eyebrows hopefully, and I said, "Thataway," and pointed.
"Bless you, my child. Get your hat, then. We'll go straight from Thataway to dinner."
I got my sunglasses instead.
I admit to a certain bias, but in my opinion Tick-Tick had some of the best wheels in Bordertown.
Harley-Davidson made most of the rig in about 1962, but the Ticker rebuilt and modified the engine and installed the spellbox that operated the bike in the pockets of the Borderlands where the sensible mechanisms of real-world physics turn tail and run. She put on six coats of midnight-blue lacquer and bought a spell that protects it from flying gravel. Best of all, she found the sidecar. Riding in it, I felt like an oil sheik with my bodyguard.
I pointed out the turns to her, playing hot-cold-hot from block to block to find my way around buildings.
Horn Dance passed us on their way to a show: twelve assorted bikes, their riders' jackets trailing a wake of flying ribbons, more ribbons snapping from the antlers mounted behind the headlights, engines not quite drowning out the ringing of morris dance bells.
We crossed Ho Street at Danceland's corner, and I saw that the club's black-painted doors stood open to
A B B YY.c
catch a little breez
e. It was too early for a band, too early for the most determined would-be audie
nce;
Dancer must have se
t the staff to cleaning the place.
Snappin' Wizard's Surplus across the street was open and the tempera-paint sign on the front window glass read, "Chase Lights! Curse Limiters! LEDs! Pre-owned Spellboxes! Big Big SALE!" Tick-Tick slowed down for just a moment; she could never completely resist the siren call of Snappin' Wizard's.
But she must have remembered that it was her wrench we were after, because it was only a moment.
Outside the Free Clinic near Fare-You-Well Park I thought I saw somebody wave. But I was in pursuit of a feeling with a torque wrench at the end of it, and we couldn't pause to talk.
We were well south of Ho in a neighborhood full of what had probably been warehouses and light
manufacturing back before the Border appeared, with the Elflands on the other side of it, to make Bordertown what it is today. I flagged Tick-Tick to a stop outside a squat brick building with no windows, and she killed the engine.
She tugged her helmet off and smoothed her already precise cap of chrome-yellow hair, fluffing the single long lock that fell, fine as mist, over one eye. She was smiling. "That's interesting," she said.
"Walt Felkin's place."
"I don't suppose you lent him the wrench and forgot."
"Good. I'm glad you don't. Are you in a wagering mood?"
"Um. Depends."
"I'll wager you five dollars that he'll deny ever having seen my wrench until he finds out who you are."
I snorted. "I might as well just buy my own dinner."
"Quite right. Never mind." She was whistling something under her breath as she picked her way through the stacks of old tires at the curb. It sounded suspiciously like Camper Van Beethoven's "When I Win the Lottery." There was a broken piece of tailpipe lying against the side of the building; she snagged it up and swung it like an umbrella as she walked to the door.
She used the tailpipe to knock. It didn't make a friendly sound. After a minute's wait we heard locks being unlocked. The door opened a crack; Tick-Tick jammed the tailpipe in to hold it open. A wide, watery blue eye appeared in the space.
"Hallo, Walt," said the Ticker. "I believe you've borrowed something of mine."
"I got nothin' of yours."
"Oh, Walt. It's a torque wrench. I find I have need of it. Do pass it out like a good fellow, and I'll let you get back to your dirty magazines, or whatever it is you do to pass the afternoon."
"Get gone, Ticker, or I'll pass you a couple inches of this." In the opening, something metallic flashed.
The Ticker slammed the tailpipe upward. There was a curse from Walt, and a clatter; the knife fell half-in, half-out of the door. Tick-Tick kicked it out onto the sidewalk with her foot and used her assault
A B B YY.c
weapon to lever the door open. It must have b
anged into Walt's nose, because he was clut
ching it when
the door fi
nally swung all the way open. He was wearing grease-stained jeans and no shirt. He didn't have a tan.
"Walt," said Tick-Tick, smiling, "you know Orient, don't you?"
His face went blank and white as restaurant china.
"Hi," I said. "Sorry to barge in on you like this."
"The wrench?" Tick-Tick reminded him.
A patch of pink appeared on the skin under each of his eyes. "Uh. Oh, has it got, um, blue paint on the end of the grip?"
"Yes," said the Ticker, smiling. "Exactly the color of my bike, in fact."
"Oh. Hey, I thought that was Chillie Billie's wrench, Tick-Tick. Honest. I'll, uh…" He'd already backed his way out of the door; the rest of the sentence was lost somewhere inside the building as he
disappeared. Then he reappeared with a torque wrench and another "Honest," even more desperate than the last.
As soon as Tick-Tick laid hands on the wrench, the nudging, pulling feeling in me stopped. A little tension went out of my shoulders that I hadn't known was there.
"Thank you, Walt. I
do
hope it works as well as it used to."
Walt nodded as if the back of his head wasn't very firmly attached and he had to be careful. Then he shut the door.
As I climbed into the sidecar, I said, "Weren't you a little hard on him? The knife aside, I mean."
"I don't like thieves."
"Wasn't being caught at it enough humiliation?"
She turned to me, surprised. "You don't know about Walt Felkin, then?"
I shook my head.
"He's an under-lieutenant in the Pack. He's admitted to that spot of arson at the Dancing Ferret, and bragged about beating up shopkeepers in Dragontown. No one can be brought to make a claim against him, though. The Bloods have sworn to make fiddle strings of his guts at the first opportunity. He's an oily little Nazi."
The Ticker sounded very much unlike herself, and it was a few minutes and several blocks before I said,
"But he caved in as soon as he knew I was with you. And you knew he would. You could have told him I was there as soon as he opened the door."
We travelled even more blocks. Her helmet kept me from seeing her expression, but her jaw was stiff.
A B B YY.c
We w
ere growling down Ho Street (the technology was on, just then) when she finally said, "You're
right. I wa
nted to frighten him. I think I rather hoped for an opportunity to hit him. That was inexcusable."
"It's not as if you make a habit of it."
She lifted her head. "It's easier," she said, slowly, "to be angry on someone else's behalf than on my own. And yet I find I have a well of anger in me, that I have been filling for years from my own hurts. If I spill it out in defense of another, I can deny that it's mine." She swung the bike up to the curb outside the Hard Luck Cafe and killed the engine. "Does that make sense, or is it a purely fey madness?"
"Oh, no," I answered. "It makes a lot of sense."
She smiled with half her mouth, the little wry twist that has as much sadness in it as anything. "Silly question. Of course you understand."
I swung my legs over the lip of the sidecar and slithered out onto the pavement. "Hah. If we're so single-minded, why don't you understand about my tan?"
"But I do, my rambling boy! With my head, if not my heart."
Elves are given to quicksilver slides from mood to mood, but when you know one of them well, you can tell the difference between that and genuine gratitude for a change of subject. I held the door for her, and we swaggered into the Hard Luck like the pair of reigning outlaws we pretended to be.
It was warm inside in spite of the fans, and busy, and noisy, and remarkably like a combination of farmhouse kitchen, private club, and arts salon. Anyone who makes trouble at the Hard Luck Cafe is considered an incurable misfit, even within the loose social contract of Bordertown, and is not welcome anywhere, to anything. Consequently, the Hard Luck's habituΘs include humans, elves, and halfies, people from Dragontown and shimmers from up on the Tooth, painters and gang leaders. It's such a
desirable place to simply
be
that it's almost too much to hope that the food is good.
The food is good.
I peered at the back wall and the blackboard that serves as menu. The Hard Luck is a cooperative, and the people working the kitchen cook whatever they feel like that day. Certain things are almost always availableùburgers for the philistines, for instance—but if the staff decides they want to do Chinese that day, that's what's for dinner. If you don't like it, that's—all together nowùYour Hard Luck. That day it looked like mixed down-home: fish chowder, lentil and spinach casserole, stuffed peppers, Brunswick stew.
