Whiskey and Water (63 page)

The light dimmed, what little there was.
It hadn't been helping him avoid the peeled seams and popped rivets slicing his
palms. He'd need a tetanus shot. He corrected: presuming he
Lived,
he'd
need a tetanus shot.

"Matthew?"

A tentative voice. Jane's, not Felix's, as
she leaned over the hole she'd punched under his feet. Then she wasn't ready to
declare the duel done. Not that he would have let her.

The echoes could help as well as hinder
him. He'd been listening to them. He turned his head, pitched his voice into a
nice bouncy corner, and called up, "Do you yield?"

Her laugh jostled drips into his hair.
"Do you?"

A knee-knocker divided the corridor between
him and the sharp patch of brightness overhead, the sort of thing you'd step
over almost without thinking. His reaching hands found it and he bit his lip so
as not to sob.

"I'm just getting started."

Elbows up on the lip of the knee-knocker.
His coat had fallen closed across his chest. He slithered over like a crocodile
slipping off the bank into a storm, just as muddy and on just as unforgiving a
night. "Are you too stubborn to yield, Matthew? It wouldn't go badly for
you."

"Jane," he said, as his fingers
closed over the cold, blessed bar of the ladder that he'd been praying for,
"you're going to have to kill me."

That won him a longer pause. He wondered
how many languages she was counting to ten in. "Hell of a thing to say in
front of a cop," she answered, when she had her voice arranged.

"I mean it."

"I'm sure you think so." So
smug. He imagined how her lips would curve if she thought no one was looking.
"You were the most talented apprentice I ever taught. The strongest Mage.
It doesn't have to be over yet."

"It's been over for years. And
anyway, talent's not everything." She was still circling the gap where he'd
fallen through. He clung to rusted steel with one and a half hands and one
useful leg and—whispering
Lie for me
to the submarine chaser—he began to
climb.

Carel caught Ian as he slumped. Strained
cloth in his doublet popped threads; she dug her nails in and lowered him
gently. The Queen's reaction was automatic, defensive. She turned to Àine,
Gharne flaring a hood of menace around her head, and only Keith's hand on her
sleeve restrained her.

"Carel," he said, and winced.

Carel kept her head down, her eyes on
Ian's wound as she stripped off her shirt and packed it. She was wearing
another blouse underneath, the straps of the knife sheath stark against her
forearm. The silver in the blade would keep the wound from simply closing, and
Carel hoped she'd guessed right about how much damage a werewolf could survive.

"Carel?" The Queen's voice had
dropped, softened. Carel recognized it: the voice of the woman, not the Queen,
unheard in seven years. In another circumstance, she might have found it
beautiful.

"It won't kill him," Carel said,
hoping she wasn't lying. She flexed her fingers, arched her palm, as if she
could scrub away the sensation as of the knife-tip popping plastic wrap. There
was almost no blood. "He'll live. Keith — " "Merlin?"

She smiled at him across the stones, one
dragon to another, and saved a tooth for Lucifer. She gestured to the strand
across the cobblestones, the space between Àine's galleries, the impassive,
waiting angel. "Your battle awaits.

Keith nodded. "Fetch Morgan," he
said, and drew his sword from his scabbard. The Queen shied from the sound, the
harsh rasp and ring of steel, and Keith let her go, grateful she didn't look at
his face. "And, Carel?"

"Dragon Prince?"

He smiled behind his beard before he
turned. "I thank you for your betrayal."

"You keep strange company,"
Whiskey said, as the last swishing horsetail disappeared under the silver
portcullis into the shadow of the gate. "It's strange to keep company at
all, for us." Bunyip hitched himself up the slope, his flukes sliding out
of the water. His body rippled with caterpillar muscularity. "I'll be quit
of them soon enough; their ambitions are foreign to mine. But we bargain as we
must."

Whiskey shifted, ears up, tail bannered to
the wind. He had a solid place to stand, and the sea rolled long on either side
of him. "Have you come to bargain for your shadow?"

"I've come to take it back,"
Bunyip replied, and darted forward with a speed impossible to credit. Quick,
but not deft, and the momentum of that slithering, scraping mountain of flesh
was not an easy thing to redirect. Whiskey soared into the air, a standing
capriole, and let Bunyip's charge carry him underneath. Silver-shod hooves
lashed out, but Bunyip rolled and dropped his shoulder, his tusked head twisting
to slash. Whiskey's hooves thumped the beach and stones scattered as he
whirled.

They faced each other, grinning, each
where the other had been. 'Whenever you want to start, I'm ready," Whiskey
said.

Bunyip thrummed, a deep pleased noise that
buzzed the earth against Whiskey's hooves. He stood up on his tail like a
dancing dolphin, towering, awesome, grasping after Whiskey with webbed
bear-paws. And Whiskey in turn rose and hurled himself against his enemy, teeth
rending, hooves lashing.

They met like storm waves striking, the
unyielding impact of mountainous waters, and the sea itself rippled with the
force. Bunyip's tusks slashed Whiskey's shoulder and glanced away from bone; Whiskey's
teeth rent Bunyip's throat where the hide and blubber lay thick. They screamed
and hammered each other, red thick blood glossing black hide and staining
white, striving chest to chest and eye to eye.

Whiskey fell back and Bunyip humped after
him, growling. They circled. Heads slung low, teeth bared, angled to shield
throats.

"Cowards fight on land," Whiskey
called.

"No one follows
me
into the
sea."

"Who said I meant to follow? "
Whiskey asked, and hurled himself in Bunyip's face.

Bunyip reared again, clinging, embracing,
swaying like a waltzing bear. His claws raked Whiskey's flanks, white skin laid
open over red flesh and whiter bone, and Whiskey kicked off, hard, slamming upward
under Bunyip's chin, behind his tusks, using his own bony head as a ram. The
crack
of skulls knocked Bunyip's jaw up and Whiskey buried his teeth in the angle
of Bunyip's neck, clenched where rending wouldn't help, and
gnawed.

Bunyip's arms tightened around his chest,
squeezing until ribs cracked like green barrel-staves. He grunted at the
burrowing pain of Whiskey chewing like a rat. Blood oiled both bodies. Bunyip
heaved, his bulk slamming Whiskey's chest. The water-horse trembled under the
weight, his hind legs shivering as he shoved, kicked, shoved again. Under the
tusks, inside the terrible embrace of those arms.

He did not fail. He pressed up. He fought,
each whooping breath a little shallower as Bunyip squeezed him, each exhalation
spraying Bunyip's blood and his own into the air.

Bunyip clutched him tighter, and they
toppled into the sea.

Bodies rolled in the shallows, bright and
dark, the white foam lathered pink among the stones . . . until a wave broke
over them, and they slid into the deeps, still striving.

*                                                           *       *

The only brightness in infinite blackness,
Lucifer Morningstar bent his head over his folded hands. Angels are not limited
in place and time — one presence, one existence. He knew he was approached, but
waited for his guest to announce himself.

It was only polite.

Even if it was wasted effort. "Truly,
creature," Michael said. "Hast
no
shame?"

:Do the damned not pray?: Lucifer turned
to his brother, a monolithic light wrapped in that bony mortal form like a
goddess in a paper dress.

"But are they heard? And there's no
need for thy thought-games with me, Morningstar. Not when we're alone." As
they were: alone indeed. Michael ached with it, in his assumed human heart, in
the imagined bones of his human hands.

This is Hell,
Marlowe had written.
Nor am I out of it.
And
even standing in the courtyard of Faerie, or walking the earth itself, some
part of the Devil was never out of Hell.

"Thy pardon," Lucifer answered.
His voice was light and sweet, the timbre of violins. It would have driven a
man to his knees. "I have not much opportunity."

Michael looked up, the fine lines and
hollows of his throat and face shadowed by the light gleaming through his
mortal husk. "How dost thou bear it—no, don't answer. I have another
question, and better. Dost permit thy servant to challenge me?"

"Tell the truth and shame the
Devil," Lucifer said. "Yes."

"It's a kindness."

"How unlike me?" Lucifer smiled.

Michael did not. "Thou'lt not be
damned for good works. Always plotting. So tell me; this is thy machination.
Why?"

"Why permit Keith to fight thee,
angel?"

"Why
arrange
it?
They
may
not know. But thou canst hide not the hand behind his choice from an angel.
When it was the son, I wasn't certain of thy complicity."

Lucifer shrugged, his wings bellying.
"He begged my indulgence. There was no reason to refuse." "Thou
liest."

"I often do."

"What didst thou bargain the
Dragon?"

"Her sacrifice the sooner? She's
still weak, brother mine. The Prometheans brought her lower than her servants
understand. Hast never wondered why she has Merlins and Princes?"

"The stories give her strength,"
Michael answered. "They give her weight in memory."

"I find," Lucifer said,
"that it's always better to master one's own legends. When one can."

"Keith MacNeill still dies damned.
Attacking Heaven."

"But he dies alone," the Devil
answered.
"He dies alone."

Michael just stared. Hands in his pockets,
glass-green wings folded tight against his shoulders. "Besides"
—Lucifer shrugged —"who's to say the Dragon Prince is a Christian? Surely
Valhalla has room for one more — "

"I believe thee not."

"Thou never didst, as I recall."
As if by accident, the Devil's wingtip brushed the angel's arm. Michael shivered,
but didn't withdraw. Lucifer looked away, up, into the empty blackness then.
:Tell me, Michael—as thou knowest mine—tell me, where is His pride? Can He not
love those with whom He takes exception? Will He let a Devil love more? Ask Him
that, for me.:

Michael curved his wings about him like a
shell, like a shroud. "I will ask."

If one must choose, a luxurious prison was
preferable to durance vile, if only because it provided room to pace. Autumn
watched from the east-facing window until Carel and the rest passed out of
sight below, and then she availed herself of that room, stalking back and
forth.

No window faced west, into the courtyard,
but Autumn heard when the shouting rose, first briefly and then in heartfelt
argument. She heard the neighs and the clash of bodies, and
that
battle,
she witnessed, her hands tight on the window ledge, her forearm flexing against
the warm flat of the knife.

The door lock looked crude, but she
couldn't pick it or rattle it open. There wasn't enough fabric in the
bedclothes to braid several stories' worth of rope.

Back and forth, back and forth, until she
half thought her best chance of escape was wearing a hole in the floor. An echo
reached her: the roar of voices raised together until they no longer sounded
like voices at all. She turned, hands spread as if her fingers could grasp her
frustration and snap it in half.

The pitcher on the washstand winked at
her.

Her palms curved around the smooth, solid
weight. She lifted it. Turned it over. Let the water fall, first just a
trickle, then a solid stream spattering into the basin. Overflowing the basin.
Never ceasing. The window ledge was midchest height. The hinges were on the
outside; the door opened out. Water weighs more than eight pounds to the
gallon.

Autumn left the pitcher overturned,
stuffed the crack under the door with the bedclothes, lashed herself to the bed
frame with the sheets, and steeled herself to wait.

The Queen and the Merlin sat with two
empty chairs between them, in the torch-haunted shadows of a gallery unoccupied
except for them and a pensive Morningstar. Carel crouched in her seat, head
sunk between hunched shoulders, twisting the tail of her shirt between her
hands. Mist had left the Merlin to brood on the scraps of blood on her cuffs
and etching half-moons under her nails. The Queen sat chill and proud, her
fingers laced and her face still. She stared ahead and did not turn.

On their left and right, the gallery
extended, boxes separated from their own by wind-curved tapestries. Below and
across, the bleachers teemed with Unseelie, horned and hooved and twisted like
tree trunks and harvest dolls, and chipped like ancient flint. Neither woman
paid them any heed, even when carelessly managed antlers thumped on the wooden
planks below their feet. The Queen's furrowed brow was only for the man and the
angel below, and Carel never glanced away from dark and pale Àine, seated
opposite, resplendent in queenly violet and green.