War for the Oaks (37 page)

Eddi knew the stunned silence that sometimes preceded applause, that was a greater accolade than all the noise a crowd could make. That was what she heard, what she contributed to.

"I saw the damn thing appear in her hand," she said wonderingly, "and I still forgot it wasn't a real apple."

The phouka nodded. "It put that poor boy's castle to shame."

She thought for a moment. "The apple was harder to pull off, wasn't it?" she asked the phouka.

The phouka leaned back on his elbows. "Your imagination filled in
the blanks in the castle. The apple was all observation, uncolored by the wishes of the heart."

Eddi grinned down at him. "That's bad art, you know. Copying reality without interpreting it."

"Mmm. But illusion is not art. It can be a tool for art, but there is nothing of genuine creation in it." He looked distant suddenly, and a little sad. "You'll find precious little creation among us, dear one. For the most part, we are only excellent copyists."

"Why? Is there some reason why you
can't
be creative?"

"Habits of thought. Tradition like a weight upon the chest." He tipped his head back and stared at the sky.

Eddi touched a finger to his lips and saw them soften into a smile. "Don't be bitter," she said.

"No. Not tonight. Tell me then, sweet, if you made an illusion, here and now, what would it be?"

Around them, the knot of audience was unraveling, drifting away across the grass and up the hill. Eddi leaned on one elbow, so that she was stretched out on her side next to him. He began to stroke a finger lightly through her hair, as if it demanded all his concentration.

"Something musical," Eddi said finally. "All those sounds in my head, that the instruments I know of can't make. You'd be surprised at how clearly you can hear something in your head and not be able to reproduce it."

His fingers were motionless in her hair, and he looked into her eyes without smiling. There was meaning in the look, and the need to be understood. "You have already played a piece of the music inside you. You did it tonight."

Eddi remembered playing for the circle of the dance, remembered the feel of it, the power and confidence and exhaustion. "What did I do?"

"The very fire danced in rhythm," the phouka said softly. "There were instruments and voices where there were none to play or sing. But more, the music seemed to fly straight from your heart and mind into all those who heard it, and they understood it without words or images."

"You're sure that wasn't just you?"

He laughed, embarrassed. "I think not, but it's true that I may have felt the effects more than some. You go directly to my head, sweetling, just like your dreadful brandy."

Eddi laughed, too, and leaned over him to kiss him. The feel of him along the length of her body was like fire running up the bark of a tree, and the kiss became rather more than she'd intended. His arms went round her. Her hands, without any effort from her, found their way inside his coat, where they felt his back muscles through his vest and shirt.

She had hardly any warning at all—only the phouka going tense under her. Then he was off the grass and in a fighting crouch near her head, and she had only the most muddled notion of how he got there.

Past him, she saw the cause of his quick movement. It bared its long, discolored teeth at him, studied them both with its pearly deadfish eyes. Then it laughed; Eddi had heard Carla make a sound like that by running a drumstick down a ridged, hollow wooden block.

"So charming," it said thickly, as if its tongue and teeth were illmade for speech. The voice itself was hoarse and dry, and sounded like old bones and dead wood. "Young things rutting on the grass."

"Drop dead," Eddi said, rising slowly and with great care.

It laughed again. "Truce, little things." It was, in fact, shorter than Eddi, but she knew the adjective had nothing to do with size. It spread its long gray hands in a parody of benevolence. "No hostility here, yet you are without a kind word. Is it not truce?"

"It is," said the phouka, his voice perfectly neutral. "Which is why all that stealth makes me so suspicious."

"Stealth? Is it wicked to be quiet by nature? No matter." It turned to Eddi and sketched a bow. She realized that all its movements looked like parodies of human ones, as if it were a computer simulation or a very good marionette. "The Lady sends her invitation to you, to speak with her if you would."

Eddi frowned and looked to the phouka.

He said, his eyes still on the gray messenger, "Meaning, the
other
Lady."

The messenger laughed.

She
was here? Yes, of course she would be. Sitting in the midst of it all, unwelcome but impossible to exclude. Would that please her? Hurt her? Make her angry? Eddi knew so little of her. "What," Eddi said finally, "does the Queen of Air and Darkness want with me?"

"Speech," said the gray thing. "It is truce. You will not be harmed," it rattled off quickly, like an arresting officer reciting her rights. "You
will not be held against your will. You will not be gone for more than half of an hour."

Eddi looked again at the phouka. "What do you think?"

He shrugged. "I'd not venture it—though those are the reassurances I'd demand. We've nothing to gain from it."

The gray thing curled its lip. "Not so. The Lady has a thing she knows, that you want to know also. A very important thing, and urgent."

The phouka sighed. "It lacked only that, I suppose."

"How do we know it's telling the truth?" Eddi asked.

"We don't lie," the phouka said, sounding disgusted, but not at her. "We'll shade the truth until you'd think that green was red, but we don't lie. And particularly not to each other."

"Well, it's a chance to get to know the enemy," Eddi said with a shrug. She eyed the messenger. "Where is she?"

It smiled, and with an almost graceful gesture pointed up the hill to the tower.

"Now why am I not surprised?" Eddi grumbled, and took a few steps toward the slope. The phouka started to follow—and the gray thing stepped in front of him, grinning. Eddi turned, and they were all still for a remarkably long moment.

"She will
not
go alone," the phouka said, his voice low and ominous.

"Then she remains ignorant," the messenger said. "Her loss."

"What difference can it make that I am with her? As long as you observe the truce, I shall as well. If you intend no harm, you needn't fear my presence."

"Assuredly. But you are still not invited."

The phouka's fingers curled and stiffened at his sides, and his shoulders rose with a long, slow breath. "Why not?" he said through his teeth.

"Because the Lady has no need to speak to you."

The phouka, from his face, might have been considering breaking the truce. Eddi stepped around the gray thing—with room to spare—and touched his arm. "It's your call," she said. "You know more than I do how much they can be trusted, and how much weight to put on this piece of information. I'll go alone, if you tell me I should."

He closed his eyes and turned his face away, but she only moved around to where she could see him again.

"That makes it worse, you know," he said bitterly. "If something
happens to you the fault will be mine, for sending you into their hands."

"I know. But one of us has to decide, and I can't."

Without looking away from her face, the phouka addressed the gray messenger. "Will you take me in her place?"

"No," it said.

The phouka winced, then stepped forward and took Eddi in his arms. She wrapped hers around his waist, under his coat. "Be wary," he whispered. "I shall give them their half an hour, and then to the bowels of the earth with the blasted truce. But be wary still, love."

"I will." She kissed his cheek and let him go. "Lead the goddamn way," she said to the gray thing.

It did not go straight up the hill; it followed a level track through the front of the park, until it came to a little-used thread of trail that disappeared among the young trees growing thick on the slope. Then it stepped off the path and stopped.

"Aren't you going to lead me there?" she asked.

It showed its dreadful teeth again. "Only one tower," it said hollowly. "Only one door."

So why go to the trouble of leading me this far?
she thought sourly.
Maybe it's seen too many horror movies
. She scowled at it and started up the path, though it made her back prickle to have that thing behind her. When it prickled more than she could bear, she looked over her shoulder. There was nothing behind her but empty trail.

Once between the trees, the track turned steep, and was cut down its length with a washout gully. Gravel rolled under her feet. A wind had sprung up, one left over from October. It sank its cold teeth in her until her ears and bare arms ached with it. Other than the daunting hiss of it in the trees, and her own crunching footsteps, she could hear nothing. On this path, there was no moon in the sky, no streetlight, no eldritch glow from any living thing.

Barely visible from where she stood, at the end of a corridor of darkness, she saw the bottom of the trail. The phouka stood there. His very silhouette spoke of stubborn devotion, and Eddi felt suddenly as if she were on a lifeline. When the time came, when there was need, he would reel her back to him.

In a few more steps, the trees were bare, and she was surrounded by the last bleak breath of autumn. It was an illusion. She fought against it, but it was too strongly made, or she had waited too long.
The only break in its surface was a nighthawk that burst out of the trees, its white wing patches shining in the darkness. She welcomed the start it gave her; it was a summer bird.

She scrambled out of the trees at last onto the pavement that surrounded the tower. The base of it, high as anyone could reach, was covered with graffiti. Previous scrawls and slogans had been covered up with a broad band of white paint, but that had only served as a canvas for the current array. There was a cluster of spray-painted dope leaves, and LED ZEPPELIN, and THE MISFITS over a skull and crossbones. There was a stenciled drawing of two figures, one holding a gun to the other's head and blowing out its brains, with the caption YOU'RE IT! There was the usual collection of initials and names of high school teams, and a few pentagrams and six-sixty-sixes that probably had more to do with heavy metal bands than Satanists.

And there was the door.

It was unguarded, unattended—in fact, there was no one on the hilltop at all, that Eddi could see. She should have been able to see the lights of the city on her right, over the treetops. She saw only darkness there.

It was made of iron, strapped and barred and painted rusty red. It was set in a concrete arch at the top of a short flight of steps. A chain hung through the bars—probably the one that, on other nights, fastened the door closed. Tonight it hung loose. The door stood open by a hand's breadth.

Phouka
, she thought, as if it were a prayer or a curse. She walked up the stairs and pushed through the door.

She felt her way for three paces, sliding her foot along the stone with each step and stretching her hands out before her. Then light bloomed along the walls.

They were not wall sconces. They were white living hands holding torches, and they swung to follow her progress. Sometimes the white fingers shifted a little, seeking a better grip, perhaps, and the torchlight wavered unpleasantly.
"Beauty and the Beast,"
Eddi snapped, her voice over-loud against the hard walls. "You ripped this off from Cocteau."

She looked behind her and saw that the door was shut, almost lost in the gloom. With a shrug and a shudder, she went down the hall, and the torches sprang to life ahead of her.

The hall was three times as long as the diameter of the tower, and perfectly straight. Just when Eddi grew irritated with that, it ended at
the base of a flight of spiral stairs. With darkness above and below her, isolated in a puddle of torchlight, she couldn't tell how far up they went, or if they followed the right size curve. When she arrived at a set of double doors, intricately carved and curiously hard to see, her legs ached. She saw no door handles and no knocker; she pushed them open.

The room was round and enormous. It had no walls—only the pillars of the unglazed arches that were its windows, and the stone railings, hip-high, in each arch. The circle of arches was uninterrupted, and Eddi wondered what had happened to the double doors she'd passed through. From the curve of the ceiling, Eddi guessed it was the tower's witch-hat roof.

An immense red-patterned rug, perhaps twenty feet by thirty, lay like an island on the stone floor. At the far end of it were a pair of lamps in the form of great brass bowls on tripod stands. They might have been burning scented oil or incense; the air was full of a spicyflower smell, like peonies. Between the lamps stood a lacquered black table and a high-backed black wicker chair, and in the chair sat the Queen of Air and Darkness.

She stood up and inclined her head graciously. Eddi began the long walk down the rug.

"I'm pleased that you've come," said the dark queen, her throaty voice rustling in the high ceiling like a disturbance in a flock of nesting birds. "Though of course, we both benefit from your presence here. Can I offer you tea?"

"No, thank you." Eddi reached the table at last, wishing she'd been offered a chair instead. "I think we should do our business and I should leave."

The queen smiled. She was even more elegant than when Eddi had first seen her. She wore a dress of silvery twill-weave silk with a wrap top and a broad sash, like an obi, at the waist. The sleeves were kimonolike, too, and lined with scarlet. The skirt was narrow and stopped at the knees. She wore high-heeled red satin pumps. Her black hair was pulled back from her face again, wound into a complicated knot at the back of her head, and held in place by two long silver sticks ornamented with what might have been rubies. On the table before her was a silver-and-glass dish that held a half-smoked black Sobranie cigarette.