Whiskey and Water (12 page)

The water itself was cloudy green and as
full of light as jade. The whole place had a sense of hyperreality to it, an
oil-painting depth and saturation of color, but if the poet looked too closely,
it resolved itself into facets and flickers, pointillist dots. Unreal, fractal,
unsettling.

Much better to look at the Bunyip, who was
preparing to speak again, with peculiarly fair words to ease past those tusks
and the flesh-ripping teeth revealed when he opened his mouth.

"Also," Bunyip said, curling his
flukes under him, "I am never out of the Dreaming, because the Dreaming is
everywhere."

Whiskey snorted and shook out his mane.
Salt water spattered the poet's back and Bunyip's face. "Am I here to
fence with you, Bunyip?"

Bunyip shifted his weight, slithering, his
bulk leaving a broad channel pressed in the malleable bank. When he moved, it
was fast as a mongoose, a heave and a twist that sent his meaty shoulder
barreling into Whiskey's, his thick neck thrust over Whiskey's back, a
resounding body slam that tumbled the stallion over in the mud and sent the man
sprawling, diving out of the way. Bunyip thumped across Whiskey's barrel and
lay there, his tusks lowered like daggers to press Whiskey's throttle. Pale
silken hide dented under ivory scimitars, as the water-horse thrashed and then
froze, forehooves pressing, back arched like a rabbit straining at a snare.

"You're here to answer to me,"
Bunyip said. "Your demesne is un-managed, your subjects unruled. And I see
you without strength, and I hear you have been bound. But there is no chain on
you to say why storms and calms intermingle without reason. So answer me: when
the seas are wild or merciful, where is the will behind the wave?"

He lifted his tusks and rolled back, like
the tide, and left Whiskey mud-covered, struggling to his feet as splay-legged
and shaky as a colt. The stallion put himself between Bunyip and the poet,
while the poet, less smutched, also stood.

"I have no heart for it."
Whiskey's hooves sucked on mud, each one a plop like frogs jumping. "There
is no death in me now, and the horses of the sea are sleeping."

"You are failing," Bunyip said.
The poet walked slowly, letting Whiskey's broad barrel fill the space between
him and the Bunyip. He did not like the monster's lantern eyes.

"Are you here to eat me for it?
Because I'll fight."

Bunyip paused, his heavy head bobbing on
the truncated cone of his neck as he lurched and turned. He eyed Whiskey
speculatively, and Whiskey watched, ears up and neck arched. Mud and algae
clung to the shaggy hair feathering his ankles, splashed up bicolored legs. He
didn't seem to notice.

"No," Bunyip said, a rumble like
rocks rolling under water. "Not yet. But Rainbow Snake—your Mist, the
Dragon—is concerned. The spirits of the sea are restive, and it
id
your
fault. Too calm in places, too wild in others. It's not just sirens freed of
Promethean bindings running vessels up on rocks, though there is that. But the
sea itself goes unhelmed, and the sacrifices taken by the deep are not prepared
to the Dragon's liking, and storms rage unchecked, and wrecks are found and
looted. Dragons do not like their stolen treasure stolen in return. And when
the archmage realizes you're not at your work, Whiskey, she'll turn it to her
advantage."

I have custody of a mortal soul,"
Whiskey said, an admission that still wrenched. He stomped one hind hoof, ears
twisted flat. "Should I damn it for your convenience?"

That's rubbish." Bunyip's shoulders
hunched and his head went down. His black body undulated as he heaved forward.
"You should damn it for your duty."

Whiskey's ears flickered. He didn't move,
four hooves square on the bank, tail rippling. The poet stroked the stallion's
shoulder; warm skin quivered under his touch, but he never would have known otherwise
that Whiskey trembled. "And if I don't?"

Bunyip's heavy head swung back, jowls
swaying, eyes flashing gold and green. "Then I shall kill you."

A flicker of light and a splash and
Bunyip's scaled length vanished down the bank into the river, and they stood in
the park—after nightfall, a whole day gone in Faerie—with a cold wind rattling
leaves over sidewalks and prickling gooseflesh up the poet's neck, and every
black iron lamp burning bright.

Monday afternoon, Felix Luray had fretted
a thumb across the iron ring on his right middle finger and tried not to curse
as his prey vanished into thin air like the spirits that they were. By Monday
evening, he was drowning his sorrows in sake and caterpillar roll not far from
Madison Square. He was a slender man, tall, habitually dressed in expensive
gray suits with a vaguely Edwardian air that made him look out of place without
a bowler pressed over his coarsely waved iron-black hair.

He was just sitting back from the counter,
replacing his spoon in an empty bowl, when a sandaled footstep on the
goza
mats
and a scent like dragonsblood incense turned his head.

The woman who looked back at him stood out
as unusual even in New York. She wore blousy vermilion trousers and an ivory
vest stiff with mirrors and silver embroidery, and her arms and face and her
chest in the gap of her collar were lined with shiny, knotted scars like strings
of black pearls.

The cricket in its bamboo cage by the cash
register chirruped and whirred.

"Felix Alexander Luray," she
said, her words twining sibilantly through filed teeth. Beads and bangles clashed
on her wrists. Her golden earrings twirled, flashing reflections from hammered
facets. "I can't imagine why I didn't think to check for your corpse in
Faerie, once-Mage."

He pushed a bill under square
crackle-glazed pottery and stood, giving her his shoulder. It made her smile
almost as much as the iron ring on his right hand. "Did they let you keep
that? Or did you have to get another one made? Maybe bought it mail-order, from
one of those places that advertise magnetic jewelry on late-night
television?"

"Kadiska," he said. He nodded
thanks to the chef, who was eyeing his new companion and hefting a cleaver in
one callused fist. "Three little, four little, five little Fae in New York
in a day. Surely, that can't be a coincidence."

She shrugged one-shouldered, the gesture
rolling a sharp-edged collarbone and shoulder blade under her vest, lifting
the chains around her neck. Her shadow coiled and spread a cobra's hood on the
floor behind her. "I only knew about the one," she said. "But
once I saw you watching him, I could hardly resist a visit for old time's
sake."

"All the cats in Katzenstein,"
he said. "Do you have somebody holding your tail up too?"

"If I do, I hadn't noticed." Her
eyes were a strange, mossy color in the squint of her smile, paler than skin
like polished cocobola wood warranted. The color shifted, lichen
gray-green-brown. A color he knew; one that marked her an enemy.

As if he hadn't known that already.

Her sandals scratched the
goza
mats
against the terra-cotta beneath. She shuffled, as if unused to walking in
shoes, and nodded thanks when he got the door for her. A brushed aluminum push
bar clicked under his fingertips. The door was painted with hex signs and ward
signs from three cultures, and a garland of zigzag
Shide
strips swung
against the glass, bronze and iron coins wrapped in prayers dangling between
the paper charms. A straw rope twisted with tassels hung over the lintel:
Shimenawa.

Felix looked at the Fae and put a question
on his face. Before the Dragon,
Shimenawa
had been used in shrines, to
mark the passage between the sacred and the profane. But they also provided a barrier
to spirits, which is to say, the Fae. It should, he thought, have kept anything
Fae out of the restaurant, even the changelings that made Seekers.

She dropped her ear to one shoulder, and
reached out to brush one of the paper-wrapped iron coins as she walked by.
"We never did let you know everything we could manage, Murchaud, Àine, or
me. I'm still a Seeker, Felix. Though of the Daoine, now." She stuck her
fingertip in her mouth. "Born mortal. It takes more than a little iron
over a cradle to keep me at bay."

And you're here to steal me away to
Faerie?"

You'd like that too much. Tell me why I
shouldn't make sure Jane rinds out you're in her city, once-Mage." Kadiska
kicked out of her sandals as soon as she reached the sidewalk, and let them
dangle from one hand.

Felix considered her question. "Do
you think she'd react any better to your presence?"

The Fae turned to examine her reflection
in a window smeared with neon. "It still hurts, doesn't it? The way your
archmage shrugged you off like an outworn coat, took up with a boy whose chief
qualification was being one of two brothers with so much magic the Fae would
find them seductive?"

"Considering what became of Matthew
and Kelly Szczegielniak, and Jane and all her plans for the overthrow of Faerie
and the uplift of the Magi?" He paused; she knew his thoughtfulness for
mockery. "No, it doesn't sting so much as all that. It could have been me
she gave to your Cat Anna, after all. Me, and not that poor idiot kid."

"That idiot kid." More mockery.
He smiled through it. They walked through streetlights, their shadows stretching
and retracting. Hers had tufted ears that twitched or flattened at any sound.
"He had some fire in him. And his brother has some steel. How does it
feel, once-Mage, to walk in a city where a broken Magus stands in the place
that was rightfully yours?"

"I've gotten used to it," he
lied.

"When I was Unseelie," she said,
as pedestrians parted to let them pass, and Felix twirled his iron ring around
his finger, "I had something to do with Kelly Szczegielniak. And a Prince
of Faerie named Murchaud, who had something to do with Prometheus. And
something to do with the Unseelie Fae, and Jane Maga. You remember. I do not
think you took it so gently then, when Jane turned her back on you."

"Did you take it gently that you had
something to do with Kelly, as you say, but you never got your hooks into the
brother?" The pebble he kicked off the path skittered into the lawn and
vanished.

"Jane never offered us
him.
She
kept the strongest for herself, and kept him all mystified as to who her allies
were." She laughed, and tucked a braid back under the kerchief wound
around her head. "Ah, but you knew that, didn't you? I'm sorry."

Trying too hard: that one scarcely stung.
"It hurt then. But if she hadn't used Matthew, I would have died with the
rest of the Prometheans. Instead I stand here on their grave, and you can call
me mocking names, Kadiska, but I'm whole and Matthew is broken. Oh, don't give
me the innocent look"—wide-eyed and incongruous, in a face with filed
teeth and so many careful scars — "we were allies once."

"I liked you then, Felix."

"And now you work for Elaine."

"She who was Elaine. Murchaud's
daughter, and a better Queen than the Mebd ever was. Àine, or the Cat Anna
elsewise."

"Because she's stronger?"

"Because she's kinder."

"What do the Fae know of
kindness?"

"Nothing," Kadiska said.
"But she is not so Fae as all that. Almost a mortal woman, once, before
she sold her name and her soul for a throne. Her mother's as mortal as any
Promethean, and Murchaud carried Lancelot's blood. Morgan's a changeling child,
Elf-fathered but of iron woman born. And Lancelot was a mortal born, adopted as
a pet by Àine after having been orphaned in a war. Elaine's more iron than
moonlight. And she freed me from Àine the Cat Anna, who would have sold all
Faerie to your Jane. There are no knots in the new Queen's hair."

"You say that as if it matters."

She shrugged, and paused for a walk signal
before leading him across Fifth Avenue and past a wrought-iron railing, onto
the walkways of Madison Square Park. She tossed her sandals into a drift of hostas.
Dry leaves rattlesnaked across the pavement. "Merely making conversation.
Why does it matter, Felix?"

He thought about lying to her, but when
one's work is tied up in symbols and true names, a small lie laid in the
foundation can twist a structure entirely: Jane's mistake, with Kelly and
Matthew. Her plan to conquer Faerie all lay on her betrayal of the brothers,
and look what it had won her.

I want what I'm owed." He fiddled his
ring again.

So does Àine. Or what she thinks she's
owed." She smiled when she turned to him, the sclera of her eyes flashing
white, light filtered through the half-bare trees. She patted his shoulder,
offering a glimpse of the curve of her breast and a berry-black areola as her
vest swung open. Gold shone on her wrist. He half hoped someone would try to
take it from her. It was the sort of night where he might enjoy watching somebody
get killed. "You think you can buy your way back into Jane's graces by
bringing her Whiskey's head on a stick?"

"Once-Mage is not a title I gladly
wear."

"No," she said, thoughtfully.
"I would imagine not. Don't try your luck with the water-horse,
Felix."

"Because he's bigger than me?"
Dryly, a flash of wit. He'd enjoyed her, in the old days, when Hell had brokered
an uneasy detente between the Unseelie and the Prometheus Club. Before Jane's
change of heart. Before Matthew Szczegielniak, and the end of the war.