Doc Sidhe (20 page)

By Novimagos reckoning, the current year was 28 R.B.G.—twenty-eighth year of the reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan, the current king and queen. Before these rulers were Gwaeddan's parents Dallan and Tangwen, who ruled forty-eight years: 1 R.D.T. to 48 R.D.T. Each royal reign reset the year to one, and each sovereign nation had a different chronology. Acadia, to the north, was in its eighteenth year under Jean-Pierre's widower father, King Henri IV—abbreviated 18 H.IV.R. It was maddening.

Still, there were a few benchmarks. Years were often translated to a chronology dated from the union of the nation of Cretanis, 1435 years ago. Most historical volumes translated one date from each reign to this dating system, usually referred to as "Scholars' Years." But not even Cretanis used that dating system routinely; they were currently in year 248 of the reign of their current queen, Maeve X. Gaby marvelled at her longevity.

Duncan Blackletter first showed up in Scholars' Year 1368, nearly seventy years ago. A young man then, leader of a gang, he was tried for the train hijacking of a gold shipment from Neckerdam to Nyrax. The gold was not recovered, and Duncan and some of his men escaped the next year. The dim photographs of him showed a lean, handsome, arrogant face; Gaby could recognize him beneath the years of the face Duncan wore today.

Over the years, Duncan's plans became more ambitious and deadly. He constructed a metal-hulled ship with a ram and used it to pirate shipping routes; it was finally sunk by the navy of Nordland, but he escaped. He exterminated an entire community in Castilia because its rulers would not share their scholarship with him. He used his growing fortune to finance the development of new and bigger explosives, then used them to blackmail entire cities. In Scholars' Year 1398, he nearly bought the kingship of the southern nation of New Acadia through political corruption in its capital, Lackderry. Two years later, he emerged as one of the forces behind the development of glitter-bright, the narcotic liquor that first appeared in the faraway land of Shanga.

It was then that Doc first appeared. Gaby found reports of a brilliant engineer from Cretanis named Desmond MaqqRee building a bridge across the River Madb in the Cretanis capital, Beldon. Doc had uncovered and thwarted a plot by Blackletter to assassinate the Queen. Gaby noted with interest some mild criticism in the newspapers that he had not been knighted for his efforts. This was thirty-five years ago, so she had to revise Doc's estimated age up again, to sixty or higher.

Not long after, there was an obituary notice for a Deirdriu MaqqRee. A suicide, she'd jumped from one of the high towers of Doc's bridge. She was survived only by her husband . . . Desmond. Doc.

There was no explanation, no other account of the death, no hint as to what Deirdriu might have been like or why she killed herself. Gaby fumed over the incomplete picture she was assembling. She kept at it.

Duncan had invested in munitions and reaped big profits during the Colonial War between Castilia and the nations of the New World. A few years later, Scholars' Year 1412, he was at it again. There were hints that he manipulated the kings of the Old World into the war called the World Crisis. The same year, the papers reported Doc refusing a commission in the army of Cretanis and being exiled from that nation; he accepted citizenship in Novimagos.

He was by this time appearing in the news as leader of the Sidhe Foundation, accompanied by an Acadian princess and other like-minded people; they settled disputes, turned the tides of some battles, and followed the trail of Duncan Blackletter across the landscape of the Old World.

Then it was Scholars' Year 1415. Obituaries for Duncan Blackletter, Whiskers Okerry, Micah Cremm, and Siobhan Damvert—the last survived by her grieving prince of a husband, only two years away from becoming king himself, and her grim twelve-year-old son Jean-Pierre.

The end of Duncan Blackletter . . . until his botched plan to kidnap Gaby resulted in Harris finding the fair world.

Gaby sat back from her studies. With so much history between Doc and Duncan, Duncan and Jean-Pierre, there was no way they were all going to emerge from it alive. She feared for Harris and her new friends.

Harris kept his fedora low on his face and left the Monarch Building by one of its side exits. He tried to use reflections in storefront windows to spot anyone who might be following, but couldn't spot anyone. If no one were following now, and if the device in his pocket were working right, then he'd be all right . . . but he felt more secure for having the hard, heavy lump pressed against his kidney, the revolver Noriko had given him.

Jean-Pierre's directions were on target. Damablanca turned out to be a narrow, winding street with two-way traffic moving between tall residential buildings of brown brick; only at street level, where storefronts were crowded with neon and painted signs, was there any color along the street.

And then, a few blocks later, there was Banwite's Talk-Boxes and Electrical Eccentricities, offering enough color and motion for any two normal blocks of storefronts. The shop's name was picked out in gleaming green neon Celtic knotwork letters and surrounded by a gigantic yellow neon oval; just outside the border of that oval ran a bronze model train, upside down when it turned to chug along the underside of the sign, always sending gray fog from its smokestack floating up into the sky. Like most of the ground-floor shops in Neckerdam, Banwite's had no windows at street level, but in the windows up one, Harris glimpsed dozens of talk-boxes and moving mechanical toys.

He shoved his way in through the front door, heard the clang of the cowbell hanging overhead, and walked in on a gadget-freak's vision of paradise. The shop interior was like a repeat of the exterior, only more crowded. In one corner was a gadget that looked like a diving suit's arms and legs sticking out of a water heater. A model aircraft with articulated pterodactyl-like wings hung from the ceiling. A grandfather clock with moving figurines instead of a pendulum behind the glass belled six, hours off from the correct time.

Brian Banwite stood behind the massive black-and-gold cash register at the main counter. "Help you, son?"

"You can take my money." Harris set a lib in front of him.

"Always glad to oblige. But you have to take something for it."

"I did that already." Harris lifted his hat. "Remember, about a week back, I stole a ride in the back of your truck—lorry?"

"That was you!" Banwite scooped up the coin and pocketed it. "Done, then. I knew you were good for it. You seem to have done well for yourself." He shot Harris a suspicious look. "You haven't fallen in with bad eamons, have you? No gangs, no glitter-bright?"

"A sort of gang, yes. The Sidhe Foundation."

Banwite sighed, relieved.

"You have a neat shop. Do you make all this, or just sell it?"

"Half and half. If it's electrical or mechanical, I can make it for you. Ask Doc."

"I'll do that." For politeness' sake, Harris took a walk around the shop, marveling at dioramas of moving figures, flashlights that were so small by fair world standards they looked almost normal to him, folding knives with extra tools like half-hearted Swiss Army knives. Then he tipped his hat to Banwite on the way out and went looking for the tailor's.

It was two blocks further on, much less conspicuous than Banwite's. The owner, Brannach, was a comfortably overweight pale man with bright eyes and big, blindingly bright teeth. He'd never heard of denim, but showed Harris his selection of materials.

One of them, demasalle— "That's more properly serge de Masallia, of course"—was the right stuff, but was available only in red and green.

"Can you dye it blue, like that?" Harris pointed to the one blue garment in the shop.

"With ease." The tailor looked uncomfortable with Harris' color choice, but said nothing about it.

So, half an hour later, poorer by about a third of his coins, Harris left. Three sets of jeans for Gaby, three for himself, ready within a few days; he'd have to pay the other half then.

It was just two errands, but he'd pulled them off without any of Doc's associates leading him around by the hand, without screwing up three ways from Sunday. He smiled at the skyscrapers of Neckerdam and turned back toward the Monarch Building.

Gaby accepted Alastair's proffered hand and stepped up out of the car. She looked dubiously at the mound of a building. "And these guys are supposed to be able to figure me out."

Doc joined them on the sidewalk. "If anyone can."

The building was a mountain of brick. This was no accident of design, no passing similarity. The structure was ten stories tall and took up an entire block. It rose in gradual, irregular curves, slopes, and cliff faces. Bushes grew from outcroppings—and from planters set outside the many lit windows. The shutters across the closed windows blended in with the surrounding brick in color and texture.

At street level, the doorway into the building was flanked by bearded men sitting against the brick front. One was gray haired, the other brown haired and much younger. Both wore stained garments in dull brown and green. Their eyes were focused on some distant point invisible to Gaby; they did not react to her or to the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk.

The three of them entered the building's dark, low-ceilinged lobby. "What's their problem?" Gaby asked.

"Glitter-bright," Doc said. "Highly addictive, very destructive. It's illegal in most kingdoms, but sold everywhere. That's where crime makes a lot of its coin."

Several old men and women sat on the lobby's sofas, many of them reading newspapers, some playing chess. A set of wooden doors in the far wall vibrated with the music playing beyond. It was much like the music Gaby had heard several times in the fair world, but she had the impression that it was wilder, more powerful.

Doc's hand closed around her arm, bringing her up short. She looked around in surprise. She was halfway across the lobby, halfway to that set of doors, and couldn't remember getting that far.

"We don't want to go in there," Doc said.

Wrong, he was wrong. She could feel something pulling at her from beyond the doors, something very demanding and exciting. "Yes, I do. Why shouldn't I? What's in there?"

"A dance. A dance from the Old Country. Very potent." He drew her toward another doorway; she could see stairs through it.

She hung back, trying to pull free. "What's wrong with just taking a look?"

He smiled thinly. "Nobody just looks, Gaby. You join in. And if we were to join in . . . well, I would have a very good time. Alastair would probably die. And you would become pregnant."

"Oh, not likely. Even if I were interested, which I'm not, I'm on the pill. It's the wrong time of the month anyway."

He shook his head. "None of that matters."

"I'll just take a peek." She tried to pull away, but his grip was like metal. Protesting, she found herself pulled into the narrow stairwell and up dimly lit wooden stairs.

After a couple of flights, she realized that her breathing was slowing. It startled her; she must have been practically panting before. And the appeal of the dance going on beyond those closed doors was suddenly lost on her.

She gulped. "Doc, I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me—"

"I do. Don't concern yourself. It's the usual reaction. One good reason why people with a lot of grimworld blood shouldn't come into neighborhoods where the old customs are kept."

"On the other hand," Alastair said, "when I'm old and I've decided to die, this is the place and that's the way I'll do it."

After eight flights, Gaby swore to herself that she was going to start running again. And that she'd never again wear the damned heeled pumps Noriko had found for her. Her toes felt as though mechanics had been at them with pliers and her back was already giving her trouble.

In the narrow hallway up nine, Doc knocked on an unmarked door. It opened to reveal a woman who couldn't have been more than three and a half feet tall. She was middle-aged and heavily built, with a round, florid, happy face. She wore a bright red shawl and a dark green dress. Gaby decided that she looked like a large rose sprouting from an unusually hefty stem.

She beamed up at them. "Doc."

"Hedda." Doc stooped to kiss her. "I bring you Gabriela Donohue and Doctor Alastair Kornbock."

"Gods' graces on you." She stepped back to allow them entry. "You are the young lady with the troublesome Gift?"

"I'm afraid so." Gaby decided the woman sounded German.

"We will unwrap it for you."

The flat beyond was dim, its inadequate electric lamps illuminating age-darkened walls, but clean. Chairs, tables and sofas were drawn away from the center of the room, and a rug was rolled up against one wall. A dented platter painted with apples sat in the floor's center, loaded down with little pots and jars.

It was all very homey and charming, but there was something about the place. The shadows were thick against the walls and seemed darker than they should have been; Gaby fancied that she saw deeper blackness rising and ebbing within them. She smoothed down the hair on her arms where it tried to stand.

Hedda shut the door behind them. "We will do this very slow, with tradition and care. But first, there is something important I must know."

"What is it?"

"Would you like xioc? Tea? There is fresh pastry."

Kneeling, Gaby read the words aloud, the ones Hedda had spelled out phonetically on the piece of paper before her. She kept her thoughts focused on the words, on the smell of jasmine incense, on her contented state of mind.

Around her was the conjurer's circle she and Hedda had made together. The diminutive woman had told her to hold each piece of chalk, each little pot of paint. Only when Gaby had warmed it in her hands would Hedda take the item and begin working on the circle. The outer circle was of yellow chalk and an unbroken stream of yellow sand; the inner, the same but in red. The symbols between, carefully chalked in by Hedda and then painted by Gaby, each in a different color. It had taken nearly an entire bell to complete.