Whiskey and Water (11 page)

' I didn't bring a crowbar," Carel
said. She crouched beside him, a hand on his shoulder, and Matthew felt her
breath on his neck and her breast against his arm. Her warmth and her shifting
aroma—now oranges, now vanilla, now peppermint and sandalwood—were tickles of
distraction that were far more welcome than he would have wished to admit.

You're not her type,
he told himself sternly, and was then
bizarrely flattered that she would forget herself enough to treat him like a
person, and not a man. They had been almost friends, once, with the porcupine
friendship that was the best two wizards could manage, and he'd mourned that
more than he expected once things fell apart.

Or maybe it was simply that she couldn't
think of him as a threat because he wasn't exactly a man by her standards.
She
knew about the unicorn. There was what she'd said, about blood and
whatever—
Oh,
Matthew thought, his left hand hesitating over the spike.
What
do you suppose that's worth, Matthew Magus? Not to Carel: her idiom is raw
power, earth and flame, not symbols. But to a witch, or to a Mage? What do you
suppose the virginity of a unicorn's chosen would be worth?

More than he could easily calculate. He
knew what his blood and his brother's death had bought.

He handed Carel the coat. She held it
tightly folded over her knees, her charms and bangles rattling. Geoff and
Jewels stood breathing behind her, pressed together like owlets in the nest,
eyes huge and wild. Matthew flexed his fist, kneaded the fingers together
convulsively, and reached out to lay his hand on the spike that, seven years
before, closed a door into Faerie.

The jolt raced up his arm again, locking
his fingers, clenching his shoulder muscle, and flashing across his heart.
Oversensitive, over-tuned. The same rawness that kept him from understanding
half of what his city said to him, in the broken babble of its multitudinous
voices, and the same undirected power that crippled his magic. Magician's Tourette's.

The problem wasn't denial. Unless that was
denial too. He found it, found the magic under the shock, the wit under the
pain, found the rust and the blood and the binding. The power was there, but
the craft was naive, unpracticed.

He teased the snarl apart like a child's
badly tied shoelace and the spike slid into his hand, leaving a smooth-walled,
rust-stained wound. He looked up, gasped, and rose on the balls of his feet to
stand, his left arm numb and tingling. He transferred the spike to his right
hand, slipping it into the curve of withered fingers, and shook his left arm.

Wordlessly, Carel offered the topcoat
back. He took it and held the spike out to Geoff. "Hold on to this,"
he said. "You might want to slip it into your pack or something. Oh, and
don't drink or eat anything in Faerie, unless you get a promise first, or you
won't be able to leave."

Jewels nodded, knotting her hands to hide
the trembling.
This is happening. This is happening.
"We should
stay with you?"

"If you can." He patted her
shoulder, absently. "You'll see a lot of magic. Manifest magic, not like what
you're used to seeing in our world."

"I've seen Fae," Jewels felt
bound to insist, but Geoff's question rolled over the end.

"Not like what you just did?"

"Child," the Merlin said, with a
sigh and the settle of her palms on generous hips, "what he did was barely
magic at all."

"Thanks for the vote of
confidence."

She flashed him a grin. "It was
Magery, sure, but their work is all bound up in symbols and material things.
It's magic for the iron world, and you see the results, maybe, but not the
magic itself. A Promethean spell—no, you don't know what a Promethean is,
either, do you?"

"Fire from the gods," Jewels
snapped.

Matthew laughed. He knew all this, rote
and drill, and it was easy to recite in ways that actually talking about what
the Prometheus Club had done for him—and to him—before he destroyed it could
never be. "More than that.
Taking
fire from the gods, and bending
it to the service of man. My order was founded in the sixteenth century, and
its original members numbered among them some very . . . notable folk. Sir Francis
Walsingham, for example, who was Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. And William
Shakespeare too."

"You're kidding." That was
Carel, her brows beetled over flashing eyes. "You just made that up."

"Cross my heart," Matthew said,
and the gesture he made with his ruined hand was so amused and full of
self-mockery that she believed him, or believed he believed it. "His plays
are Promethean artifacts, and the transcontinental railroads are ours too.
Leland Stanford—" He stopped himself, and shrugged. "I'm making it
sound like the Skull and Bones with magic wands."

"Isn't it?"

He ignored her, and Carel grinned.
I
should have looked him up years ago.

"Originally, the Prometheans wished
to protect England and Elizabeth from Spain and the Catholics, but Elizabeth
did not live forever, and when she died, we needed another purpose. We opposed
the Wild Hunt. We brought Faerie and wild magic under control. We would have
destroyed it for good, but — " He stopped, restarted. "It was a long
war, and in the end we lost."

Jewels stood with her arms folded,
absorbing, the sunlight flickering through the bare oak branches to dapple her
shoulders and her hair. Geoff leaned on her, feeling her taut attention, the
near-craving she felt for every hint and tidbit Matthew offered. He said,
"So. That's the kind of magic we're not going to see."

It is." He shrugged. "One of the
seven categories. Magic of symbol, to which almost anyone can be trained. Magic
by gift, which is to say, there are some who are born special in some way. And
then there is magic by initiation, where the power is earned by sacrifice.
That's bought and paid for."

Matthew's right hand rubbed the white
cotton cloth over his heart for a moment before he covered the gesture by
shrugging into his coat. Geoff remembered the scar there, amid the black
patterns of ink, and didn't ask—but he caught Jewels looking too, and knew she
"was wondering the same thing.

"What about witchcraft?" Jewels
asked, leaning forward, oblivious to her own shivers. The wind cut through her
coarse-knit sweater. Geoff opened his coat and tucked her inside it, under his
arm.

"Wicca," Matthew asked, "or
witchcraft?"

"There's a difference?"

The Mage smoothed stray strands of hair
behind his ears. "Yes. One, Wicca—modern Paganism—you exercise through the
manipulation of symbols. It's not so different from High Ritual Magick, the
Golden Dawn sort. Both Wicca and Magick are . . . sort of hedge counterparts to
Magecraft. Although those who follow those paths wouldn't be pleased to hear me
say it.

"Also, it helps to be stubborn.
That's a fourth kind of magic"—he checked on his fingers—"fourth. Willmagic,
power claimed through sheer force of personality; exactly what the name
implies. One imposes one's will on the universe, or on another creature, simply
by being . . . stronger than it is. Willmagic, you'll run across in Faerie.
It's what's behind the magic of bindings and namings, and if you weren't both
human creatures, I'd caution you to keep your true names private. Names are
tricky things."

Jewels nodded, face paler now, as if she
was listening and believing and—finally—a little scared.

"What about the changelings?"
Geoff said, balling a knobby fist against the nylon lining of his pocket, steel
zipper teeth scratching his wrist.

"Magic by blood." Carel twisted
her bangles, listening as they chimed. "Magic by birth. Werewolves, Fae,
spirits of the wood and vale. Nothing any of us can touch; it's yours, or it's
not."

"And glamourie," Matthew said.
"The art of illusion."

Geoff said, "So those are the rules?
Stay with you, and don't tell anybody my name, and don't eat or drink?"

"Stay on the path." Matthew
buttoned one button on his topcoat and turned away from them, toward the white
oak and the wild rose and bramble tangled around and behind it. "Stay on
the path. Don't look back. Never trust the guardian. That's all there is to
know."

"That," Carel said, amid a flash
of teeth, "and nothing that walks into Faerie emerges unscathed, or unchanged."

Matthew just nodded.

"Grab my hand," the Merlin said,
and Jewels did, holding on to Geoff with an arm around his waist. He wrapped
his hand around hers through the pocket lining. The wind lifted her dirty hair,
and when he looked down at her, some light seemed to sparkle and fill the
shadows on her throat and the hollow under her chin, as if she wore a dress
sewn with sequins or leaned out over water on a sunshiny day.

The Merlin held out her left hand and
laced it into Matthew's right, her touch so delicate and warm it didn't even
hurt. "Open sesame," she said. They stepped forward together, passing
through the thornbreak as if it had never existed.

The real world turned to watercolor and
washed away, just as Geoff realized that Matthew had only named
six
kinds
of magic.

A New York Minute

S
lanted American sunlight, softened by smog and the
curve of the earth, filtered over Bunyip's shoulder.

He turned another page of his newspaper,
giving no sign that he was aware of Whiskey crossing the green mown lawn to
intercept him, or the earthly knight walking beside him. The paper crinkled
under the pads of his fingers, denting where his thick, ridged nails dug into
the fibers.

There was a surprising amount of water in
paper, trapped.

Bunyip sighed. He missed his billabong —
although the women wandering along the lakeside looked like fine eating, and
there was enough water and muck close by in the Meadowlands to provide a congenial
atmosphere for dining.

Unfortunately, he had business first.

A shadow fell across him, and Bunyip
folded his newspaper and settled his hat. He tilted his head back and met
Whiskey's china-blue eyes, strange and unsettling in the darkness of his face.
Walleyed, they called it in horses. It seemed to make Whiskey squint a little
in the sun.

"You're a long way out of the
Dreaming, cousin," Whiskey said. Thomas stayed at his left hand, quiet and
watchful, as if he understood the danger of the situation.

"And you're a long way out of the
Isles," the old man said. He tucked his newspaper under his arm. "Which
is why I've come to have a word with you. Will you introduce me to your
friend?"

Whiskey stepped aside. "Thomas the
Rhymer," he said, making a delicate gesture at odds with the sprawl of his
fingers. "Meet Bunyip. Bunyip, True Thomas."

Bunyip rose to his feet, heaving himself
up as if he weighed far more than his long, spindly body indicated. The poet
thrust out his hand; Bunyip accepted, and for a moment the poet felt him
otherwise,
the long stick and twig hand resolving into a damp clawed flipper. The poet
craned his head back as a shadow cooled his face. It wasn't a tall
woolly-haired man in a black broad-brimmed hat that looked back at him.

The head that hung over him was jowled
like a mastiff and whiskered like a seal, flews clinging to projecting walrus
tusks. Black velvet skin, soft as a horse's muzzle, drooped around eyes full of
glaring planes of light like black opals. The neck was thick and conical—a sea
lion's neck, a bull's—blurring into shoulders like a wall of meat. More black
crushed velvet covered the massive muscles, and behind them the ponderous body
tapered to a scaled and armored tail, the flukes arched over his back. Bunyip braced
itself on one burly leg, which ended in a flippered claw, and extended the
other delicately, a cat poking dust motes in a sunbeam.

The poet had shaken the hands of demons
and queens and Ben Jon-son. He managed not to jump back with a yelp, but it was
a very near thing.

A pleasure," the human said, as
Bunyip shifted his weight onto his tail and extricated his hand from the human's
grasp without accidentally crushing him to death.

He smelled delicious.

With that momentary brush of fingers,
Bunyip brought them into the Dream. The human surprised him again; they usually
panicked, trembled, curled into themselves when confronted with the richness
of chipped, shifting colors and lights. This human glanced around once,
quickly, like a startled bird, and then set his shoulders and crossed his arms
over his chest, breathing calmly. He had gone wide-eyed over Bunyip's revealed
aspect, but mastered it in a moment, and he didn't seem overly perturbed by the
Kelpie's Dreaming shape, the wet-maned stallion pied white and black as a
magpie.

He was shaman-stuff, then, and initiated.
And perhaps not for eating, no matter how delicious he smelled. Bunyip huffed
through bean-shaped nostrils, hiding his annoyance.

The poet stared at the monster in
preference to the landscape. It could have been a riverbank in Faerie, mud
redolent and primeval underfoot and ferns and mosses rich along the bank.
Concentrating on the beast kept the jittering surge of his heart and the
shaking of his hands from showing in his voice.