Emma Bull (24 page)
Authors: Finder
I went from reluctant to absorbed in the course of those three hours, so it came as a shock when I looked up and found myself a foot from the end of the scarlet feather I was coloring, and the sun low on the skyline. Camphire straightened up from the figure she was working on and commanded, "Okay, stop. I have to end as I meant to begin. Actually, I
did
begin that way, but I meant it, too." She took the chalk from me and finished the feather in a dense, jagged polygraph line that jolted out of its border on both sides and trailed off like a tadpole tail at the end. She took the turquoise chalk from Tick-Tick and did the same thing to an elaborately outlined curlicue. She fished out a canary-yellow chalk from her apron and turned the pointed petals of a lily into a furious squiggle. Then she sat down, suddenly and hard, on the pavement, and dropped her forehead on her knees.
Tick-Tick reached her first. "What's the matter? Are you all right?"
Camphire raised her head. "I'm fine. It's just always a shock, that's all."
I stopped a little ways away from her and stared. Her voice, though still hers, had more decision in it, and her face didn't look as if it were waiting for its next expression. "Hullo?" I said.
She smiled (the smile was different, too). "This happens whenever I finish a really large piece. Don't worry, it wears off after a while. And a good thing it does, too, because I can't get a bit of work done in this state. I just can't concentrate." She stood up and dusted chalk and road grit off her skirt. "Thank you ever so much for helping me finish. I'd set my heart on winding up today, and I didn't think I could do it."
I got my voice back, sort of. "This… always happens?"
"Oh, yes. I suppose out in the World someone would say I was using my art as therapy."
"Seems to work."
"Well, yes, but do you know, I think my present state is the one I'm treating, because however
comfortable
it is to be normal, I find I can't really be
happy
like this."
"Mmm," I said, beginning to wonder if she was completely recovered after all.
"Don't you think so? I'm sure you'd be more comfortable if you weren't fey, but would you be happy?"
It was Tick-Tick, unexpectedly, who answered. "No. You're right. It's better to be happy than comfortable, if you can't have both."
"Artists hardly ever get both," Camphire said with a shrug. "The odd thing is, that if they don't choose happiness, they don't usually manage to be comfortable, either, because they're busy fretting over how unhappy they are."
A B B YY.c
"You're sur
e you're all right?" I asked.
"Perfectly. Oh, Mab! You were busy when I roped you in, weren't you? I'm terribly sorry."
"We're looking for something," Tick-Tick said. "Without much luck, so far."
Camphire's gaze moved from the Ticker to me, with a question in it. I realized that Camphire really did know who I was and what I did, and that the official town finder of things wandering around asking people if they knew where something was made as strange a picture as Camphire being rational. It
would take too long to explain, so I told her about the drug instead.
Her frown made a neat pair of wrinkles over her nose. "Why does that sound familiar?" She interrupted her own thoughts with another glancing smile at us. "You see, when I'm in my usual state, people
will
be indiscreet, sometimes. And I can't think why, since it's not as if anyone believes I'm deaf. It had something to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie."
"That would be about right. He was probably a courier for whoever's responsible."
"Good riddance to bad rubbish in that quarter, I'm afraid, though I know I shouldn't be so quick to say it.
Oh, I remember! It was that poor wretched girl who calls herself Tiamat. Do you know her?"
Tick-Tick and I shook our heads in unison.
"Maybe she swims well. If so, it's more than one would expect. She's a lumpish, angry, red-headed girlùlives above that store on Woodruff that sells art supplies, and works
at
the counter
there sometimes.
She and
someone I don't know were worrying over where to find a new source of something, because word had just gone round that Charlie was dead, and Tiamat said that she was, and I quote, 'damned well going to get it, because I'm planning on the Elflands for Christmas this year.' End of quote. I couldn't think why anyone would refer to the Elflands as if they were on a par with Canc·n, but it makes sense now."
"It does, doesn't it?" said Tick-Tick. "Thank you very much. You've given us the first reasonable hint we've had."
Camphire laughed. "I believe stranger things have happened, but not very many of them. Oh, you didn't tell me what you think of the picture!"
What we thought of a piece of art that we'd had a hand in, and that had been indirectly responsible for a lead? We told her it was swell.
We found the art supply store on Woodruff. It was still open, and one of the people tending it was a red-haired human girl with a grim expression. She had been fat; her skin sagged, doughy and inelastic, on her upper arms and around her neck and chin, where the padding had disappeared too quickly beneath it.
She walked uncertainly, as if her legs were new to her, and a little painful.
The Ticker studied her from across the store, frowning. I'd told her a little about the girl who'd died in the hospital, but nothing like all of it. "She is… there's something odd."
A B B YY.c
"It gets odde
r, if you let it."
"Mmm. Want me to mind the door?"
"I don't think she'll bolt. She might feel a little ganged up on with two of us, though."
"I'll be near by."
The red-haired girl was taking boxes of colored pencils out of a carton when I approached. "Excuse me,"
I said, and she looked up with an expression that suggested that I was not excused, and wouldn't be anytime in the near future if she could do anything about it. "Are you Tiamat?"
She nodded.
"My name is Orient. I'm… looking for some stuff that Bonny Prince Charlie used to have. A mutual acquaintance said you knew about it." It was surprisingly hard, this time, to talk about it.
"Who's the mutual acquaintance?"
Thick, Orient—you shouldn't have said that. "I don't think I ought to say. But the stuff—it has to do with crossing the Border."
"Humans can't cross the Border," Tiamat said, and turned back to the colored pencils.
"Not ordinarily."
"I don't know any Bonny Prince Charlie."
"Nobody does anymore, unless there's an afterlife."
"Does that mean he's dead?"
"You know he is."
"I don't know anything about him, and I don't know about his stuff."
"Yes, you do. You're taking it. I can see the effects."
Her hands stopped moving, stopped sorting. I noticed how long the fingers were, out of proportion to the palms and the thumb. What weird compound of ingredients would make your fingers grow and neglect
your thumbs? Or was it even that predictable? I looked up, into her face, and found her staring at me with an unnerving mixture of hope and anger.
"What effects?" she said, and I understood. She wanted me to tell her it was working. The way the girl in the hospital had asked Rico if she could see it, could tell by looking that the transformation had happened. My stomach felt pinched.
"It's killing you," I said. "It doesn't work. You'll be dead before you see the Elflands."
Her chin came up, shifting the folds of pasty skin. "If it doesn't work, how come you can see the
"Sudden weight loss won't make you an elf. You could get the same result shooting smack. I swear to God, I just saw somebody die of this a little while ago. And she looked pretty strange, but she was still human when she died."
"You can't prove it won't work."
I was silenced; she was right. Being able to dispense truth is not one of the jobs of a finder.
"But I can prove it will work," she added.
"How?"
"By taking it until I'm changed and walking across the Border."
"And if you take it 'til you're dead, that'll prove it doesn't work, and much good it'll do you."
"No. That'll just prove it doesn't work on me."
We stared at each other again. Her grasp of the scientific method beat the hell out of mine, and her need to believe trumped that. She needed to believe in this transformation, even if it killed her.
"Where are you getting it?"
"If it doesn't work, why do you care?" she asked, with a haughty little smile that said she knew exactly why I cared, and she wasn't going to tell me anything.
"He's right," said Tick-Tick over my shoulder, in an unsteady voice. Not a voice I was used to from her.
I turned and found her face was pretty unsteady, too. "You have… what's been done to you is unnatural.
You must stop taking this—no good can come of going on."
Tiamat gave the Ticker the once-over; the sullen anger that seemed to be her most common expression mixed with envy and a terrible wistfulness. "Where do you get off?"
"I'm… I'm sorry. I can tell___What could make you do this to yourself?"
"Oh, you wouldn't know. Coming from the Elflands, where everybody is so beautiful that nobody thinks it's important. Well, in the World it's different. If you're not beautiful, they make sure you know it's the most important thing ever. So what if you're smart, or nice? If you're not pretty, they tell you to settle for what you can get, and what the hell did you expect, anyway? So don't tell me to settle, pretty girl. Pretty elf girl. I've tried that." Tiamat bit her lip suddenly and grabbed up the rack of pencils. For a moment I thought they'd spill, but she righted them and slammed them onto a shelf.
I almost said, "I'm sorry;" I confess I was that stupid. Not stupid enough to let the words get to my tongue, though.
"Better think twice about trying to cut off the passport," Tiamat said, still with her back to us. "There's a lot of us who think it's our big chance. People don't like losing their big chance."
A B B YY.c
The pas
sport. Well, everything had a name. "It's not a passport to the Elflands," I s
aid. "If you change
your mi
nd, just ask around. I'm not hard to find."
I had to take Tick-Tick by the arm and propel her out of the store, because she seemed to have forgotten how to go by herself.
We were a block away and around the corner before she dug in her heels (actually, grabbed the fender of a gutted, rusted-out car that still stood by the curb) and refused to be moved. "That was it?" she asked me, still wearing that shaken face. "That was what had happened to the girl who died?"
"Except that there was a lot more of it."
She rubbed her hands over her face. "That wasùblessed Isle. It was a parody of Faerie. A parody of
me
.
