Whiskey and Water (30 page)

"They
will
keep letting you
read." Morgan reached out with a splay-fingered hand and let it rest on Kit's
ankle, over the cloth of his trousers and the leather of his boot.

He lifted his head and let his other foot
drop to the flags, iron nails thudding on marble, but didn't pluck his limb
away from the witch. "Hell and Faerie have extensive libraries."

"And you've a Bard's memory."

"Latin grammar school," he said,
and almost smiled. "God bless Henry the Eighth, and keep Great Harry's
rotten corpse 'til Judgment Day. Can I remember Ovid for four hundred years,
I've no fear to not recall Lewis Carroll after fifty."

"And yet you still affect that
ridiculous accent." She smiled. One of her dogs twitched in his sleep, whining,
claws scrabbling stone.

Kit laughed. "It comes and
goes."

"And what wilt thou do, now that thou
art without service, Master Marley?"

I will not serve. 'Twill make a pleasant
change." Her hand slid up his leg and his eyebrow rose with it. Footsteps:
Matthew was coming up behind him. Morgan, who must have seen the Mage
approaching, gave no sign. Kit flicked the flower at her. It tumbled end over
end until she picked it from the air. "There
can't
be any use thou
hastn't put me to already."

No love for remembrance?"

"I'll send thee a wreath of
rue," he said, and shook his leg out from under her hand as he stood. She stayed
in her crouch, grinning up at him with a child's smile crinkling her eyes and
plumping her cheeks, a long lock of hair fallen over her eyes. He bit his lip
and stepped aside, forbidding himself the heat her touch engendered, if he
lingered on it.
Aye. I'll give thee remembrance.

Matthew," he said. The blond Mage
drew up ten or twelve feet away as Kit turned to face him. "Tell me you've
come to take me to . . . Staten Island."

"No," Matthew said, his gaze
flicking from Kit to Morgan and back without comment. Morgan stood, straight-backed
as ever, and withdrew against the balustrade, removing herself from the conversation.
Matthew greeted her anyway, before turning to Kit. "Good morning, Morgan.
Sir Christopher, I've a favor to ask."

Kit stepped forward, opening his hand,
sweeping it away from his body in a broad, stagy gesture that spread wide his
cloak and tossed it over his shoulder. Matthew turned to walk alongside, enough
taller that Kit craned to see more of him than his shoulder and the line of his
cheek and jaw. "Ask it."

"I'm going to consult an oracle. The
Merlin suggested I might bring company."

"What oracle would you consult?"

"The Dragon," Matthew answered.

"Oh," Kit said, and turned to
retrieve his pack from where he'd left it beside the wall. "Yes, I know the
way."

The path was as Carel described, and Kit
and Matthew walked it with strangely light hearts. Gray mist curled between
pewter trunks, smoky and strange in the slanted light of the rising sun, and
the litter underfoot was scrambled as if by the passage of something large and
hurried. Matthew dropped one knee beside the path where the bank was soft and
traced a shod hoofprint as broad as his outspread palm. He glanced up at
Marlowe and shrugged.

Marlowe shrugged right back. "Even a
queen wants to run away once in a while."

"Especially a queen." They began
walking again.

"There's a troll," Kit said,
when they'd come within sight of the river, and Matthew answered, "The Merlin
told me," and they grinned at each other like truant schoolboys.

"She said something about
seven-league boots as well."

"Could speed our travel," Kit
admitted. He unslung his rucksack and rummaged under the flap, retrieving a
long black feather, each strand lustrous. A little more digging produced a
chamois pouch that clicked softly when Kit handled it. He tucked the feather
between two fingers and poured a handful of semiprecious stones into his hand.
Before returning the rest to the pouch, he picked out a nearly flat, square-faceted
piece of tourmalinized rock crystal the size of a dollar coin. The quartz was
transparent as a palmful of water, the tourmaline crystals rayed through it
from one corner unusually limpid and a deep coniferous green. Kit returned the
pouch to the pack and the pack to his shoulder, then blew on the gem and held
it to the light.

"I've but one feather," he said.
"But quartz is symbolic of reception — even put to Promethean uses, in radio
— "

Matthew's brow beetled. "How do
you
know about crystal radio sets?"

"Murchaud went to the teind in the
year of your Lord nineteen hundred and forty-eight," Kit said. "And
we did get television in Hell."

The worst of it, Matthew decided, was that
the mad poet was as serious as broken glass. "And the tourmaline? We
don't use
that
much."

"No one did," Kit said.
"It's ideal. A stone with no weight of symbolism, one which, to the
ancient magicians, might as well not have existed. And one that can acquire a
static electrical charge. So, you see, I can take this stone" —and he
demonstrated — "and this feather, and transfer a virtue from the feather
to the jewel, and from the jewel to a subject."

"Subject?"

"Victim," Kit amended with a
wink, and cupped the feather and the stone together in his hands. When he drew
them apart, the feather had vanished. Matthew, who had been looking for a
sleight of hand, had seen nothing.

That's not Promethean magic."

No," Marlowe said, crouching to tug
up his trouser cuff and slip the stone inside his boot. "It's not witchcraft,
either, or storyteller's magic. But it owes something of process to all three.
Come on, take my hand."

Bemused, Matthew did so—his left hand,
Marlowe's right—and found himself striding along beside the poet at a
comfortable and considerable rate of speed. Marlowe's hand was dry and smooth,
callused across the grip, a swordsman's or a sportsman's hand.
"Witchcraft?" Matthew asked him, as the trees whirled by.

'Shocked?"

"A little," Matthew admitted.
The low-hanging branches never seemed to strike his face, though he flinched at
the first three or four. "So is
Faustus
a story from life?"

Marlowe glanced at him, breaking
concentration a moment, the corner of his mouth curled up behind the beard that
was so much redder than his hair. "Never kidnapped a pope," he said.
"Though I killed an Inquisitor once. And would again. No, rather, call it
an example of life imitating art. I chose witchcraft, Matthew Magus, because
the Promethean arts would not avail me, and because my soul was already damned
for being too fond of my sins of heresy and sodomy to repent them, and because
I had already sold Lucifer my name and my fame for other considerations. So you
see, I had nothing left to barter the Devil, and God does not bargain.

Kit's voice came out raw and soft,
stripped of passion in its honesty until it rang with a parody of innocence.

"I'm sorry," Matthew said,
because it was all he could think to say.

Kit flickered a smile. "Don't be. It
was pleasanter than you might expect, and it all came right in the end. More
or less. And unlike God, the Devil comes when he is prayed to. But it doesn't
matter; I don't do that sort of thing anymore."

" 'Nor will we come, unless he use
such means / Whereby he is in danger to be damn'd. / Therefore the shortest cut
for conjuring / Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity / And pray devoutly to the
Prince of Hell,' " Matthew quoted, ducking needlessly under another
low-sweeping branch as they broke out on the breast of a hill.

They staggered to a halt as Marlowe
stumbled. "You know it?"

"I teach it," Matthew replied,
regaining his balance. He shook loose of Kit's suddenly moist hand. "Well,
if I haven't been listed as a missing person by now. I was not expecting to
spend a week in Faerie. "An English teacher."

"You'd prefer a sturdy vagrant or a
masterless man?"

Kit stared for some seconds, then laughed
and pushed his hair back with his left hand. "Oh, are a relief to talk
with. Matthew Magus, whatever of mine idiot scribblings do you teach, there's
another three hundred years of it in Faerie. And a few stray bits by some
other men, that may not have survived in the iron world. The Puritans and the
Prometheans were not in all ways our friends."

And you have a talent for understatement,
Master Marlowe,
Matthew
thought, but he didn't say it. "Other men?"

Kit dropped his chin. "Ben Jonson and
Edmund Spenser and Will Shakespeare, and all the poor doomed Toms, Nashe and
Kyd and Watson. I saved what I could — "

Matthew's mouth went dry. He spoke slowly,
so there could be no mistake. "Those are names to conjure with, Sir
Christopher. And what do you want in return?"

Kit knew it was madness to trust this
creature so easily. It was Matthew's sharp good looks and the lonely smile, and
the air of calm that surrounded him and never seemed to touch the Mage himself,
and Kit did not fool himself otherwise. But he had always been a gambling man.
"It's yours," he said, with enough gravity to indicate that he
understood the generosity of his offer, and did not take it lightly. "No bargains.
It's not the sort of thing that ought be bargained for, and I've hoarded it
long enough. And
that
should see you safely landed, if your patronage is
spent in Faerie, seconding a secondhand Mage. Morgan knows where to find it, if
I do not survive Jane."

"If you don't survive Jane, I'll have
bigger problems than a few missed classes," Matthew said, seeing his
opportunity. "Tell me about Morgan." Marlowe grabbed his hand again,
and they charged down the hill. It was almost like hang gliding, except
Matthew's feet brushed earth between each enormous bound, water sparkling as
they cleared the stream in a prodigious leap, though they never quite seemed to
take flight. What would you know?" Marlowe asked.

"Is
she a witch?"

Is she Lucifer's, you mean?"
"Yes."

No," Marlowe answered, with a hang on
the end of it that told Matthew there was more to come. "No, not
precisely. She's what we used to call a cunning woman. Not really a witch, not
really a bard. Not a priestess or a Promethean, either. Her magic is in
stories, and in the intersections between stories, in what she can make a man
do without his understanding why, because of who she is. She knows her own
legends, and she . . . rides them, like a gladiator astride a team of
horses."

He glanced at Matthew, as if to be sure
Matthew understood, and Matthew nodded, encouraging. Kit's voice came to
Matthew strange and attenuated over the rush of the wind. "She has many hounds,
Matthew Magus. You do not wish to be one."

"She has nothing to offer me,"
Matthew said. He noticed Kit's bitter, answering smile.

"She'll find something, if she thinks
you have aught to offer her.
I
am just a toy, at this juncture. She teases
me because it amuses her, but like a cat, she'd be after fresh prey were it
presented."

Matthew remembered her mouth, her kiss,
and wished he dared blink. At least Kit would likely think the sting moistening
the corners of his eyes was from the wind. "What does she want?"

"With you, or me?"

"Overall."

"Power," Kit said, and slowed at
the edge of the beechwood. He pointed through the trees with his free left
hand. "See? There's her cottage now."

It was a rustic affair, thatched stone
tumbled over with roses. Matthew took it in at a glance: a warm meadow, a path,
buzzing bees and an empty paddock with the grass grown high and tasseled gold
along the rails. "Why show me this?"

"So you can find it again when you
want it."

"And if I don't want it?"

Marlowe laughed at him, a cruel joy that
made him beautiful. "You will."

They traded a look, light hearts gone to
quiet in the heat of morning and the insect hum. Matthew cleared his throat,
unwilling to loft words into a silence so heavy. "How is it you of all
people walked out of Faerie unmarked, Sir Christopher?"

Matthew had thought the previous spate of
laughter a transformation. If it had been, this one was a seizure, and Marlowe
was choking, doubled over, one hand on his knee and the other on his mouth by the
time he was done.

"Oh, Matthew," he said, sinking
down between his heels, red-faced and breathing hard. "Oh, if only."

Nimble fingers opened the lacings at
Marlowe's collar, baring a pale chest, collarbones and the shadow of ribs
visible beneath. And under them, over his heart, Matthew saw a white, sharp
cicatrix, a pale crisp outline of a Hebrew letter,
mem.
A brand: the
skin was taut and hairless. Most striking, a thin horizontal line bisected it,
distorted the edge.

Matthew recognized that scar, angled so as
to slip between the ribs. His fingers shook as he opened his own collar,
left-handed, baring flesh and black ink charged with iron, and his own thin,
perfect white scar.