Wizard of the Pigeons (25 page)

She continued to hammer at him wordlessly. He caught one of her flying wrists and restrained it. With her free hand, she dealt him a slap on the side of the head that clapped his ear painfully and stung his cheek. ‘Lynda!' he protested, but she swung again, a backhanded slap that smashed his lips against his teeth. Damn, she was
strong. He tasted blood. Anger coursed through him and he squeezed the captured wrist and began to turn it. The night pressed close all around them. Electrically grey.

He let go and sprang back from her so suddenly that she fell. ‘No!' he told her frenziedly. ‘No!' He turned and ran from her. She shrieked obscenities after him and the sodden hem of his robe flapped against his ankles as he ran. He fled through the night, a hunted thing. Mir had stalked him well, from a perfect blind. Its raking claws had touched his soul and marked him. It would have him this night.

The city marked his cowardice and turned on him. He collided with dumpsters in alleys. At an intersection a yellow light winked suddenly green, and a car roaring from nowhere blasted its horn at him. He raced up streets that were all uphill. A passing squad car suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree and squealed a u-turn to pursue him. He darted up a crowded alley, knocking over garbage cans as he fled, then turned left and ran half a block before dropping to roll into hiding beneath a parked truck. He lay flat and still, the front of his robe absorbing an oily puddle of rainwater. He held his breath until he could force himself to breathe silently. He thought of Lynda's eyes gone huge and grey and hungry in the night. He shuddered. Cassie had been wrong. It was hiding, not only in the city, but within him. Like was calling to like, and when they united, it would have him. Lynda had come perilously close to letting it out. It had been stalking him all this time.

The cold water met his skin and chilled it painfully. He endured it, lying still until he was sure that the patrol car was far away. Then he rolled from under the truck and
stood again in the bitter November wind. There was a heaviness inside him, a sense of carrying as if he bore the seed of a deadly disease. It hid in his chest and in the muscles of his back, questing tentatively into his biceps, probing into his wrists and hands. Waiting. It could materialize in his fingers, or use his feet as its tool. His body was rotten with it. The knowledge disgusted him. It was worse than the idea of internal parasites. He would have preferred intestines full of tapeworms or the cellular anarchy of cancer, leprosy, or plague. But he had not been given a choice.

‘“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,”“ he muttered. He laughed bitterly. It was past the stage of a hand or an eye. He would have to cast his whole body aside to be free of it. Now, how did one go about that? The word was like a snake sliding through dry summer grasses. Suicide. The cold certainty of it settled on him even as he denied it. Cassie would never have sent him out to face it if that were the only way he could win. But, then, Cassie had not known as much as she thought she did. She would not believe that it lurked inside him: not as a figment of his imagination, but as a fragment of himself. Maybe Estrella had known more than she had been able to tell. The Hanged Man. A helpful suggestion from your friendly neighbourhood fortune-teller. But it wouldn't be his foot in the loop. The plan did not please him, but there was a bitter satisfaction in knowing that by losing, he would win.

One detail disturbed him, and it took him a moment to find it. There it was. He did not want anyone weeping over his body. Not Lynda, dramatic in black, not Cassie, shaking her head. A vision came to him, clear and cold as
ice. He saw himself standing on one of Seattle's bridges, the rope looped several times around his throat, simply looped, not a noose at all. He would jump, and the weight of his body at the end of the rope would be enough to break his neck. Then the slow turning of the body at the end of the rope from the natural torque of the woven strands; the rope unwinds itself from the throat, and the body drops neatly down, to be carried away by the moving water. In the morning, an empty rope dangling from a bridge. He was almost positive it would work. If it didn't he'd never know. Tidy, he congratulated himself, and tried to ignore the grey chuckling in the back of his mind. As for the rope – had not the dumpsters of the city always provided him with all his needs before? So would they this night. His stride was purposeful.

The scream ripped his decision. It was a strange cry, thin and short, terror with no breath to vent it. He could not decide if it came from deep inside himself or only echoed there. It was a sharp sound, pained and despairing and grey. He crossed his arms on his chest, holding it in and muffling it. He heard three quick scuffs, soles against pavement, and the gong of a heavy body colliding with a dumpster. Then silence. Fear roiled through Wizard. He wanted to stopper his ears and keep walking. He had reached a decision for his grey Mir, and he wanted it to be a final one. He doubted he had the strength to face anything else this night. But his traitorous ears brought him the harsh breathing of a predator on a blood trail. It came from an alley mouth, less than half a block away.

Wizard kept walking, his steps reflexively silent. He would reach the alley mouth and pass it, search for his rope elsewhere. His own burden was all he could carry, and
his mission was clear in his mind. If other evil walked in Seattle, that was no affair of his. Someone else would have to handle it. He was already doing as much as he could.

The alley loomed on his right, blacker than the night itself. It was a deadend alley, walled up so that it offered no light or escape at the far end. Entering it was a one-way journey to the pit. Coldness emanated from it. He kept his eyes down and straight, watching the sidewalk in front of him. He walked soundlessly past the mouth of the alley and continued walking. The greyness wriggled inside him, chuckling. He clenched his arms tighter around it.

‘Oh, please!'

The cry, whimpered with no hope of clemency, halted him. The stalker had found his prey and was upon her. The greyness giggled inside him, rejoicing in wickedness and the turmoil in Wizard's soul. If it was no affair of his, why did he Know that the plea was directed to him?

‘Ah!' A soft little sound, beyond terror or pain. He knew it well. Once, in a small hot black place, he had made that sound, not once, but many times. Death was better than the uttering of such a sound. He had to turn to it.

The alley was black, the greyness inside him a cold, heavy thing he must guard. He stepped with care, straining all his senses. Soft, ugly sounds were coming from a far black end. With no warning, he felt the knife. It was hot and keen, and its razor edge was being scraped slowly up and down his throat, paring away layers of skin that left exposed new cells stinging. It had not drawn blood yet. It made a paralyzing whispering against his skin that left him powerless to think of anything else, not even the fingers that prodded and probed in a parody of tenderness.

It was too real. It froze Wizard for a long instant, until he
realized it was a Knowing. This was happening, but not to him. To someone who lay amid the trash at the end of the alley, knowing that to scream was to die, and that to keep silent was to die more slowly. The magic had come back to him, but he could not rejoice in it. What it was showing him was too great an atrocity. ‘If this be Knowing, I would rather walk in ignorance,' he muttered soundlessly. And Knew it was not the first time he had made that decision. But this time the magic ignored his wishes and pressed the Knowing into his brain. If he touched the man, the knife would kill her. He must draw the attack to himself.

‘Stand up!' he barked. ‘Drop the knife and put your hands above your head.'

He didn't expect obedience and he wasn't disappointed. But the man was quicker than Wizard expected a man interrupted in such a game to be. He turned, rose, and attacked in one motion. Wizard made the perfect counter, a kick that would take his attacker in the chest and keep his knife at a distance. It would have stopped the man dead, if Wizard had been wearing pants.

The robe was cut full and loose, but not loose enough to allow for the full swing of the kick. It snapped tight, jerking the balance from Wizard's other leg. He staggered sideways and the hungry knife went slipping past his ear. He caught himself and spun to face it, but the knife was already before him, weaving a song of blood as it hovered before his face. Like a steel hummingbird, it moved faster than his eyes could follow. Feet planted, hands loose and ready, Wizard shifted and wove before it. The magic limned it for him, setting it glowing with a toadstool light in the blackness of the alley. He saw nothing of the one who held it and commanded the dance. The mind behind the blade trusted
its cutting edge implicitly. There would be no kicks, no sudden jabs of fist to spoil the perfection of the knife's killing skill. Wizard's eyes followed the blade as hands hung loose and ready, slightly away from his body. He tried to remember there was a man behind the blade, but the magic forced his attention back to the steel edge. He struggled with it and then, with relief, let go. The knife, then. Counter to all his embedded training, he would fight the knife and not the man behind it. He relaxed and felt the tingling of power run over his limbs and up his spine.

From hand to hand the knife leapt nimbly in its wriggling, gliding dance. Wizard himself moved with it, in a swaying counterpoint that kept all parts of his body just beyond the knife's leap. The knife, the knife! Why was the magic focused on the knife? Was he supposed to grab the damned thing? He imagined a sudden successful clutch, and the fingers slipping silently from his hand. No. That couldn't be it. Silence but for two men panting, the soft scuff of wet socks against the pavement, and the far whimpering of the one who huddled at the end of the alley. The knife flickered and flashed, burning before his eyes. He reached and felt for it with the magic.

This knife was a Ruana, a fine old blade shamed by this new owner. Its tempered steel haft was enclosed on both sides by bone grips. It was balanced, it was honed, it was a joyous tool perverted to butchery. It fitted the killer's hand like an extension of his body. He sensed the man's twisted soul pulsing in the blade.

So he froze it.

Swifter than any kick of leg, then any twitch of muscle could ever be, as swift as the flicker of a thought, the
Knowing came to Wizard and he used it. As simple as snuffing a candle flame with a pinch. He reached and froze it, the metal cooling past imaginable temperatures and then exploding into icy shards in the killer's grip. The man screamed aloud, clutching at his wrist with his other hand and squeezing it, trying to hold out the pain invading his body. He doubled over with the agony of it, holding the mangled hand out away from his body as if he were bowing and offering it to Wizard.

Wizard stepped back from the glimpse of that familiar face. The killer bolted past him, grunting with the pain of every jolting step. Wizard smiled and followed him. The man heard his shadowing steps and moaned in terror. He staggered on, pain dazing him, the terrible warmth of his own blood soaking him as he tottered. When he fell, there was the awful shape of the man from his nightmares, the man cloaked and robed with the night sky itself. The stars and crescent moons glittered balefully, but the man's face was shadowed into blackness by the broad brim of his hat. He did not find the bent tip of that hat amusing. It pointed at him like an accusing finger. And when Wizard spoke, his eyes glittered like two chunks of blue glacier ice. He whispered.

‘If ever thou takest up a knife in thy hands again, be it even for so innocent a thing as the buttering of bread, the metal of the knife shall find revulsion in thy touch, and break again into a thousand splinters. But those splinters will pierce thy eyes and thy heart. Go now. Remember I have granted thee mercy this time, but justice will be thine the next time.'

He nodded, he wept, and in agonized fear he thanked the man who had maimed him, grovelling away from his
feet. Wizard stood, watching him go. Power swelled in him, pulsing through his veins. This was a better way, so much a better way. In the instant he had frozen the knife, he had seen the killer's maggoty little soul. He would take up a knife again; not tonight, or even this month. But when the hunger became too much for him, he would take up the knife and perish by it, even as Wizard had foretold. He had wielded his power fearlessly and permanently. No knife would tolerate his touch.

He felt more than satisfaction as he watched the staggering figure retreat. Exultation. The wheel of his existence had rotated a half turn, carrying Wizard from the bottom to the top. The magic was back, in such strength as he had never known. He who had been the prey was the hunter; from being at the mercy of circumstances he had risen to be the controller. He had found his strength and his dreams would fall into his hands. So heady was this feeling he could not keep the smile from his lips. Suddenly he had it all: the magic, Cassie, and the strength to conquer his enemy.

He turned his strength inward, found the lurking grey inside himself, and squeezed it to a thing of infinite smallness. So simple once one knew how and was not afraid. Was this what Cassie had been trying to tell him? Pick up your weapons, indeed! Had even she guessed at the new strength of his magic? Like a butterfly pumping fluid into his wet wings, he stretched to feel the limits of his power and laughed aloud.

The gasp of a quickly drawn breath recalled him to himself. A small shame nibbled at the edge of his conscience. So enraptured had he been by his vanquishing of the killer that he had forgotten the victim.

‘Come out now,' he called softly to her, peering into the darkness of the alley. ‘You're safe now.'

There was no answer. Concern that she had been hurt more than he suspected creased his brow. He stepped quickly back to the place where the killer had crouched over her. ‘Where are you?' he called again, and spun as she broke cover behind him. He caught a fleeting glimpse of her under the streetlamp as she ran, her torn clothing clutched around her bruised body.