Whiskey and Water (21 page)

The poet released his blade, winced when
he heard it clatter on stone. The anger he'd been swallowing for seven long
years flared hot, dimmed, and blazed like blown coals. "The Fae do not
have souls. When they die, they
die,
madam."

"And?" Quizzical, eyebrows
lifting under wet white hair.

"We had a lover in common, you and I.
And he is dead by your doing." And Kit—he supposed there was no point in
calling himself anything else if everyone he met was going to recognize him in
a heartbeat, even if it wasn't his name anymore —Kit let his unrestrained hand
dart to his belt. There were gloves there, soaked burgundy leather, and he had
them slipped free and in his hand and was striking a sharp, wet, stinging blow
across her cheek before the archmage could flinch. It left a welt; he was not a
man for striking women, but he did not pull this blow.

Jane Andraste gasped and staggered back,
one hand raised to the weal on her cheek, and let go Kit's blade arm.

"I await your seconds," Kit
Marley said, and turned his back, and stepped away, a curt, imperious gesture
that he would pay for later, beckoning Whiskey to his side. He was almost to
the elevator when her voice pursued and collared him.

"Christoferus Magus!"

He stopped and turned. "Madam
archmage."

Her hand drew back. She hurled something
to him, a glittering something that flashed silver in the glow through the
newly cracked skylight. His hand shot up, and he caught it: red power twined
through iron and platinum, clear in his
otherwise
eye. "Your
ring," she called across the broken stone. "My second will find you
in the morning."

He smiled, and slipped the ring onto his
smallest finger, where it fit tightly enough to chafe. "I shall look forward
to it," he said, and having seen the detective do it earlier, made short
work of summoning the elevator and commanding it to open.

When they were gone, Jane glanced around,
watching the water run over the cracked stone, and remembered the police
officer sprawled on the floor. The spell Marley had used to immobilize him was
a good one, but an old one, archaic. It wouldn't have worked anywhere but here,
where Promethean power was concentrated—as her own attack on Whiskey would have
failed elsewhere. Promethean magic was either very subtle—the ability to see
things, to convince persons, to create resonances—or so vast in its effects as
to be nearly undetectable. Forest for the trees.

Jane untangled the spell with a few
passes, and offered the policeman her hands. He looked ashamed, but he took
them, and as he did she happened to glance into his eyes.

Jane peered into the abyss, and Mist gazed
back at her, a complacent monster sharpening her claws on stone. And Jane
looked down.

Hello, Detective Touched-by-Dragons.
"You wanted to ask me some
questions?"

I understand," he said, extricating
his hands from hers without trying to hide how they were shaking, "if now
isn't a particularly good time."

Matthew had to walk away. There was a
garden down there, graveled paths for walking, and he needed to be somewhere
else. Somewhere away from Jewels and her butterfly flurry of delight and questions,
her carved-up back, and her saturated eyes.
And you have do much latitude to
throw stones, Matthew Magus.

Unconsciously his fingers fretted the cuff
of his shirt, scratching at the ink-labyrinthed skin beneath. His marks were
different. They had a purpose. They chained power.

And herd chain power too.
In a different way.

He frowned and put one foot in front of
the other, pretending he didn't hear the boots crunching along the path behind
him until Geoff gave up and called out. "Matthew? "

He slowed his step, but didn't halt.
"What do you want?"

"Are you all right?"

And that stopped Matthew. He turned, and
frowned at the kid. Geoff's pants jingled when he walked, as bad as Matthew's
jacket.
Sleigh bells,
Matthew thought, and laughed.

It wasn't a pleasured laugh.
"No," he said. "You know what your girlfriend just did is seven
kinds of dumb, right?"

"It's what she's always wanted."

"Like a kid's book about a magic
kingdom."

Geoff paused, and tilted his head as if he
were really thinking it over. Beside them, translucent in the sunlight, banks
upon banks of daylilies mounted, rioting in tiger shades. "And at the end
of the magic books, the children go back through the wardrobe, or Dorothy goes
back to Oz, and they're stronger and wiser for their journeys but no time has
passed in the real world, and they're ready to grow up and take charge. But
that's not what Jewels needs, you know? '

Matthew kicked at the gravel and started
walking again. "Those are bad books. Well, they're very good books, but
that's not the point. They're wishful thinking. Besides, if you read on in
either series, the children inevitably go back to the magic kingdom. The
authors may preach responsible adulthood, but deep down, they don't believe in
it. They can't make it stick." He took a deep breath of the dense air of Faerie
and shivered at its sweet, heady strength. "Books are lies. All books are
lies, but the books that say you can walk out of Faerie unscathed are more so.
It's not that you come back and not a moment has passed —it's that you're gone
a moment, and fifteen years have gone, and everyone you loved has forgotten
you."

Geoff squared his shoulders. "How
about
Peter Pan?"

"I am an English teacher, you
know."

"Yeah, I'm finding that out. Answer
the question, Matthew."

"Peter Pan
gets it right," Matthew said.
"The book, not the movies. You can't have it all; you have to choose. The
iron world, or Faerie. You can't have both, and once you visit one, you can't
return untouched. The otherworld is greedy."

Geoff lifted his chin, settling his
weight, hipshot with his hands in his pockets, and Matthew let him command the
moment, stopped and turned. Geoff said, "Some of us are born in the wrong
world. Born the wrong species."

He wasn't talking about himself. Matthew
could see that his gaze was past Matthew, over his shoulder and over the garden
and on Jewels, if she hadn't moved from where Matthew had left her.

Some of us are," Matthew said.
"Sometimes people are born the wrong sex too, or missing a limb, or with a
mathematics learning disability when all they really want out of life is to be
a physicist. It's sad, but it happens." His epaulets jangled. "Every
one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope."

Geoff's snort of disgust was forceful
enough to knock Matthew back a step. The Mage tilted his head quizzically and
spread his hands.
Well, keep talking.

Geoff shrugged and brushed past him,
hesitating only for a parting shot. "Well, what's your minor tragedy,
then? You seem pretty blessed to me."

His bad luck that Matthew knew the answer.
"My minor tragedy? I never wanted a damned thing to do with magic,
kid."

Pity," said a third voice, a rough
contralto that prickled on spider feet across the back of Matthew's neck.
Morgan's hand followed, warm between his shoulder blades, undeterred by the
talismans strung around him like ornaments on a Christmas tree. "You used
to be so good at it."

So maybe Geoff hadn't been looking at
Jewels after all. Morgan smiled at him first, and then, for a little longer, at
Matthew. "Am I interrupting?"

She knew she was. And by the blush on
Geoff's face, he didn't care. "What you said earlier. I could be a
Mage?"

Matthew swallowed to ease a dry mouth.
"A good one." "Thanks," Geoff said. He pushed his hair out of
his eyes, and now he
wad
looking at Jewels, past both Matthew and
Morgan. Matthew turned to follow his gaze, an excuse for a sidelong glance at
the witch. She was smiling right at him when he looked, freckles crinkling
across the bridge of her nose. "But no thanks," Geoff finished.
"Not my scene." "At least one of us has some sense."

Morgan laughed. "He knows what
he
wants.
And you, Matthew Magus? I overheard what Elaine asked, and have a question of
my own. In seven years, have you decided yet whose side you're on?"

He knew what she meant. When last they
met, she'd given him a choice, and he'd refused her. Refused her to go home to
a city he didn't trust, and a wardenship he didn't want, and a vow that he'd betrayed.
"No," he said. "I don't know what I want."

"An honest man. There had to be one
in Faerie." Her hand grew warmer. She let it slide down his spine.
"Do you
want
to find out?"

"Are you offering to tell me?"
More sharply than he might have, if Geoff had not been watching, blinking wide
light-colored eyes in confusion.

"No," she said. "I'm not
all that interested in what you want, Matthew Magus. But as long as you're
here, you could always take the Queen's advice a step further, and go and ask
the Dragon how to be rid of that magic you carry, if you truly wish it
gone."

He shouldn't tell her. She was far more
like an enemy than an ally, no matter how sweetly she smiled. But there she
was, and here he was. And even if he couldn't trust her, it wasn't as if he had
anything to lose. "I can't control it," he said. "Not since the
war. I can't do a damned thing with it that's more complicated than tying my
shoes. When I'm out of Faerie, I'm half drowning in signal all the time."

"I can solve that riddle," she
said, lifting her hair over her shoulder, smoothing it behind her ear.
"All you must do is stay in Faerie, then."

Felix Luray arrived too late. As he stood
on the grass of Central Park, watching the Kelpie and the Mage follow the cop
into the archmage's tower, he twisted his ring in frustration. He'd wanted to
speak to Jane before she found out from other sources that he was in New York,
but if the water-horse was here, then Kadiska was likely just behind him. She
might choose to keep her own counsel, or not.

He interlaced his hands behind his back
and slowed his breathing. This wasn't a disaster — or even proved a setback,
yet. And the information he had now would at least buy an audience, if nothing
more.

Meditation would pass the time. And
perhaps he could find his own way back to the heart of New York, without Jane
Andraste. He tilted his head back and fixed his gaze on the penthouse where she
lived now, the one that had been a Promethean meeting hall and ritual space in
brighter days. Things changed, but the city pounded along, underfoot, overhead,
protean and powerful.

Like the city, the beast has many hearts.
As many hearts as there are empires, so one might swell as another shrivels. As
many as there are mountains, as many as there are treasons, as many as there
are pearls. Even the beast cannot know the truth of her soul. All books are
lies, and all stories are true.

Felix pressed bright-polished oxblood
loafers into the grass and felt the blood and bedrock underneath, found the old
mad power running there and invited it in, invited it through. The beast was a rough
lover, and the Promethean discipline had been to keep it chained, caged,
channeled, tamed—a tiger in a magic show. But those chains were broken now,
and what had once been demands upon its power had become supplications.

Felix was not comfortable with surrender.
But he let it happen, laid himself open and gritted his teeth, and thought
about the wild young city thrusting under his soles.
"Fallen, fallen,
is Babylon the great, that hath made all nations drink the wrath of the impure
wine of her passions."

Not yet, though. There was blood in this
dragon yet. And that was part of the secret too. There were many Babylons, one
for every fractal heart. Felix found New York in his memory, as he had first
seen her on a sun-drenched morning in 1973. He'd known no one in America—not a
soul. He'd gone to Central Park because that was what one did, and been a
little dizzied by the sun and the bell-bottoms twined with amateurish
satin-stitch embroidery and the pretty, long-haired, soft-bellied girls with
nearly nothing on.

The prettiest girl had a transistor radio
on the blanket beside her, tuned to WNEW Through synchronicity or destiny, it
was playing Paul Simon's "American Tune" when Felix wandered past.
He'd stopped, thunderstruck —and the city, or the beast, had reached inside him
and made him a Mage.

Not long after, Jane Andraste—heartsick
and furious and building an army to win her stolen daughter back from Faerie
—found him and trained him. And then she'd taken New York away from him, but
she hadn't been able to take his power, even if it wasn't the equal of hers —
or her darling Matthew's.

Felix heard the city singing, millions of
threaded melodies, a massive, surging fugue . . . and it would not sing to him.
He laid himself open, nails driven into his palms, eyes clenched tight as his
fists, and the power rolled over and through him and took no notice of him at
all.

He opened his eyes and took one deep, raw
breath that he wouldn't call a sob, only seconds before he felt the wards
around Jane's tower ring like a steel drum hammered hard.