Whiskey and Water (10 page)

The poet hurled another handful of corn
violently, and the wind sheered it aside on concentric arcs. Pigeons scrambled,
skewbald and charcoal and gray with rainbow throats, and one that was white as Lucifer's
wings and lame in one malformed foot. The poet threw it a piece in particular.
His aim was good.

Whiskey let his head droop, sun warming
his nape. If he could but shrug on his stallion-shape for a moment and stand in
the sun, the wind lifting his mane, the light warm on his white hide and
scorching against his black —"Make haste to where?"

Whiskey turned to stare as the poet
crumpled the popcorn bag and twisted his hands around the paper as if to
throttle it. The poet frowned across the water as another carriage rustled
past. "If I had something of Jane's, I could trace her with it."

You were Cairbre's student. And
Morgan's."

And Raleigh's, and Baines', and Dee's. Not
all at once." The poet dismissed them familiarly, the names of
acquaintances not recently seen. That spell you used this morning?" The
pass-unseen? A bardic trick." "You learned nothing in Hell?"

Thomas hesitated, and glanced down between
his knees, slim scarred fingers whitening on the paper. "You know, I'm not
that other Thomas. It was more than seven years in the service of the Queen of
the Faeries. And I am not constrained to the truth."

You learned witchcraft."

Thomas nodded. "I was Lucifer's
student as well, though I no longer use those spells. But any magicker can
trace someone with a bit of hair or blood; you needn't be a witch for
that."

"Something of Jane Maga's?"

"Some rag or scrap that belonged to
her—as, for example, that pretty little bastard in the bloodred coat, if he is
her liegeman —I could find her with it."

"He's left the city."

"Yes, and hang me for an imbecile,
I've no better ideas."

Whiskey considered. "I can think of
nothing," he said at last, and tossed his head.

Thomas picked bits off the bag and rolled
them between his fingers before flicking them away. Pigeons scrambled, but were
disappointed. "We should be doomed that she'd be the first to venture Faerie's
gates and leave not a scrap of herself in the otherworld. Most of us, it tears
strips off."

"She never was to Faerie. Or not so I
knew of it. She sent her Magi, and stayed safe in the iron world herself."

"Sorcerers and towers," Thomas
said, disgusted.

Whiskey kicked earth. Less satisfying than
pawing at it, and Thomas' impatience was wearing at him, raising the hair at
the nape of his neck. He wished the poet paced. Anything would be better than
this stagnant fury, like scowling thunderheads. "Very like. We have got a
scent of the policemen who came for the murder."

"You have a scent, mayhap. I did get
a look at the two who liked each other least, the ones who were not in uniform,
but deferred to. Lord protectors of some sort, or commanders of the militia, I
wot?"

"More or less." Whiskey had
better things to do than explain the organization of a modern police force to
an Elizabethan poet, even if he himself were certain he knew how it worked. His
hands ached so badly they tingled, and the pain was creeping up his wrists, and
starting to infest his knees and hips. "I thought if we found the police,
since Jane's man was at the scene, then they might lead us to her."

"It's not an impossible
thought."

"Oh." Whiskey blinked. Even his
eyes itched with mortals and their doings. "I lie.

"That's what devils are for,"
Thomas said unpleasantly. "Tell me more."

"I have something that belongs to
Jane Andraste," Whiskey said, and grinned wide enough to show his worn
yellow pegs to the root. "Or something close enough for sympathy. I have
her daughter's name and soul."

"Then why are we limed to this park
bench?"

"Stand up, Sir Thomas," Whiskey
said. "Suddenly, I feel the urge to be afoot."

"You and mischief," Thomas
answered. But he stood and cast the remains of the bag into the chained can,
which sighed a few particles of dust. "We'll need a private place."

"I know one. Unless it's changed
since I hunted here."

The poet fell in alongside Whiskey. He
cleared his throat. "Do I detect a hint that the Fae avoid this place?"

"The Daoine do, and the Unseelie
mostly fear the Queen."

"And the undine we saw wasn't
Unseelie?"

"Oh," Whiskey said.
"Unseelie enough. If she slips in and sups the blood of rats and tomcats,
who's to know? If she took a human life, things might be different. But this is
Matthew Magus' home. And Matthew Magus —your pretty bastard in the pretty coat,
Sir Thomas — does not care to see Fae in his city."

"They stay away out of respect?"

"They'd respect better, if he
enforced the rules as he should."

The brief walking silence that followed
was broken by a lower tone. Have you noticed, Whiskey, that we are
observed?"

Whiskey smiled, bent over Thomas, and
murmured in his ear, "Which one:

Across the pond. A dapper but otherwise
rather nondescript fellow in a gray suit of clothes. Slim, with dark hair.
Don't these Americans wear anything with color in it? It's all black and brown
and gray, unless it's laborer's clothes. And the cuts are very plain." I
see
you've
adopted trousers."

Thomas shrugged. "They're comfortable.
But these people dress like Puritans."

"They're American. What do you
expect?" Whiskey straightened up as if stretching his back and flared his
nostrils wide. Warm morning air and women's perfume, the savor of horses and
human sweat, asphalt and oil and vomit and dried leaves rustling under trees.
And a thick, cold thread like iron on a winter's night, like the raw red metal
in rust and blood weathering from balcony railings down the gray faces of
buildings, tearstains etched by acid rain. "Magus," he said without
hesitation, louder than he had intended.

"Promethean?"

"Aye," Whiskey answered. "I
can smell his ring. It seems Jane Maga has found us."

"Then we don't have to find Jane.
Where's your other observer, Master Whiskey? "

"By the boat launch."

The poet turned casually, as if they were
setting out to complete a walk delayed by their conversation. "The Moor in
the hat, with the newspaper?"

"The same." Whiskey laid his
hand on Thomas' sleeve. "He's no more a mortal man than I am."

Thomas examined Whiskey's objective as
carefully as he could without seeming to stare, but saw only a wiry man,
dark-skinned and light-haired, with sun creases thick across his cheeks despite
the broad-brimmed hat shading his eyes. A mortal man, to all appearances, with
no foxlight of feyness around him. "You're going to ignore the
Promethean?"

"On the contrary," Whiskey
answered. "I plan to lure him into a dark corner, terrorize him, question
him, hold him under until he stops kicking, and possibly consume him afterward."
He shrugged, and started forward again. "But first, we have to deal with
this fellow, don't we?"

The poet cast a longing look at the Mage.
"Dammit," he said. "You'd better hurry."

"Don't worry, Sir Thomas. There's
nothing I am looking forward to more than dragging Jane Maga's head home to my
mistress like a cat with a most particularly juicy rat. But it's unwise to go
into battle with an unconsidered element on your flank." He paused, and
blinked long-lashed eyes at the poet. "Now come along. I thought you were
in a hurry."

* * *

Jewels laced her fingers through Geoff's
and followed Matthew and the Merlin down broad dished steps and across a richly
green slope to a pedestrian crossing. A rural highway sliced the easternmost
edge of campus off the main sprawl, and behind the row of redbrick dormitories
a steeper slope down to the river was forested and laced with deer trails and
poison ivy. They veered left, across a tributary brook in the bottom of a
willow-verged gully, the last branches fluttering their length on a breeze that
was chill in the shade.

When they emerged, the sun was warmer by
contrast. Jewels and Geoff looked across a road and up the hill that had been
visible from the Merlin's office window. Jewels tightened her grip on Geoff's
hand and settled on her heels to look up. Mown grass settled long shadows in
the slanted morning light, and the wind freshened. A horse whinnied, high and
quavering, and the sound of hoofbeats echoed off the bank and rolled back.

Althea would have loved it, and Jewels
flexed her fingers tight against Geoff's to stop herself from thinking about
it.

They rounded a curve in the road; there
were barns and paddocks above and a pasture below, and a dirt road split off
from the asphalt, tending upward. Mobiles of iron horseshoes hung over the
barn's tractor doors to ward off the Fae, and Jewels smoothed her hair over
her ears.

Geoff wondered how a cultivated hill bound
in by barns and dormitories, crowned with a knot of trees and houses, could
seem so high and lonely. And Jewels thought of Watership Down, which she'd never
seen but had read about, and when she glanced down found herself watching
Merlin the Magician and thinking,
She has beautiful skin. I wonder if she
would let me cut her, sometime.

The Merlin glanced over her shoulder and
met Jewels' eyes. "Sometime, I might."

Jewels kept walking, a cold sensation
creeping from the cleft of her buttocks to the base of her skull. The Merlin
turned away again.

Bracelets slid and caught on the hairs of
her wrist and on her bones and skin, jangling as she waved up the dirt road
toward the crown of the hill.

The way is closed," she said.
"Prometheans one, thorn trees zero."

"I'm the one who closed it."
Matthew slipped his coat off. He folded it over his arm, a flash of color against
the autumn brown of the hillside that turned the head of a red-tailed hawk
floating on the thermal off the slope. The hawk sheered off when Matthew
started up the side road; this was game too big for its talons. "I guess I
can get it open again."

"That blood of yours has more than
one binding in it. I wonder what else you've got that somebody might be willing
to kill for."

Matthew paused, sun warm on the shoulders
of his T-shirt, one boot on the blacktop and the other on the badly graveled
drive. The freshening wind was unpicking his ponytail, and pale strands
snagged in the corners of his eyeglass frames. The glass twinkled flatly and
sand gritted under his boots when he turned to glare at Carel. "You think
Althea died because of me?"

Carel shrugged, and caught his arm when
she walked past him. Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be tugged into motion,
the gaze of the others scorching his back. "I think it's possible. You or
Jane. She died in your city, and her death brought you out of it —sorry, kids."
She glanced over her shoulder, swirl of braids and clatter of stones, and
shrugged her apology.

"And she died of my neglect,"
Matthew said. "Don't forget to mention that."

Jewels swallowed. Geoff stiffened against
her grip. She squeezed his hand again, twice to calm him, and three times for
the charm, and waited for the sigh and the sideways glance. It came. "She
wasn't meat,' Geoff said, though he kept walking. His matted black hair was
dull in the light, but glimmers of color like fire, highlights of copper and
amber, sparkled off the roots. "You shouldn't talk about her—"

"She was meat," Matthew said
over his shoulder, without turning. Jewels' flinch didn't keep her from noticing
that the Merlin winced too. "To the Fae. Mortal meat, blood and bone. And
if there was something they wanted that her death or torment would pay for, no
more than meat to appease the dogs."

"They'd kill her just to get you to
come to them?"

Matthew laughed like it scratched his
throat. "She's lucky all they did was kill her," he said, and shut
up, hard, but Geoff saw his broken hand writhe inside the glove, a cringe.

Carel's fingers paled as she clung to
Matthew's elbow. "If you can't handle the truth, Matthew Magus, it's no
surprise you can't handle your magic, either."

He didn't answer, just jerked his arm
away. Jewels rose up on her toes and looked like she was about to press, but
she must have caught something of Geoff's understanding, because she settled
back with a sigh. Her lips flattened and she shoved her hair irritably behind
her ears, where it stuck in greasy elflocks. Her face was shiny and unwashed.

They climbed for a few minutes until they
came to the little grove, and the houses warded with hex signs and rowan
clustered among it. A black dog barked in a wire run; Matthew didn't meet its
eyes.

By one tree in particular, he crouched and
pushed the leaves aside. "White oak," he said, and drew his fingers
back as if something had stabbed the tips. An electric shiver wrenched up his
arm. "There it is."

An iron railroad spike was rusted into the
root, crusted ochre-red and driven deep.