"Why the hell would you want an eight-legged horse?"
"It was supposed to be Sleipnir. The horse of Odin. From Norse mythology. Anyway, I bet I could find an eight-legged horse here. It's the kind of place where it would fit right in. Hey, listen to that."
They paused on the sidewalk near the door into a restaurant; the neon sign above the door read "Tifania's." Each patron who entered or left—and there were quite a few—let a wash of music escape. Harris heard a pretty jumble of many stringed instruments.
With the music came the smell of fresh bread. Harris' stomach suddenly woke up. He gestured toward the door. "After you."
The corner bar and the restaurant tables took up about half of the establishment's large main room, while the dance floor and a raised band platform took up the other half. Even at this hour the band was playing merrily away and the dance floor was crowded.
Young men and women of the fair world, even more brightly clothed than the average people on the street, were doing circle dances or paired off in something like a double-time ballroom dance. Some of the music called for steps that looked like sword-dancing without any swords on the floor.
The band played more of the Irish-style music. The instruments were mostly woodwinds and strings; the standout performer, a dumpy man with nut-brown skin and a goatee, battered away at a hammered dulcimer with skill that Harris found amazing.
A waitress with sand-colored skin and an abbreviated dress of headache-inducing red seated them in the restaurant section. There were no menus; Harris asked for the house special, while Gaby ordered a drink by pointing and asking for "what he's having." On the tables were cloth napkins, two-pronged forks and sharp knives, nothing too strange to their eyes.
"So, you got me to Neckerdam," Gaby said. "If it's real. No, I'm not really doubting it. I'd rather enjoy it. But I was going to ask—what now?"
"I wish I knew. It really upset Jean-Pierre to hear that Duncan Blackletter is on Earth—on the grim world. So they probably don't know what the hell they're going to do yet."
She made a face. "I was hoping you had some sort of plan in mind. Sic the police on the bad guys, put them in jail, and everybody go home."
Harris' gaze was drawn to a man at a nearby table. He was of greater than average height for the Neckerdam people, nearly six feet, and well-built; with his thick red hair, green suit, and pipe, he looked like a human-sized leprechaun who'd spent a few months on a Nautilus machine. He kept looking at Gaby as though he recognized her.
Harris tensed. Maybe Duncan's people had caught up to them already. Maybe he should have told Jean-Pierre to stuff himself and that Gaby
was
a sort of prisoner for now; at least she'd be safe.
The red-haired man stood and came their way. As inconspicuously as possible, Harris slid his hand into his pocket and got a grip on Doc's pistol. He was suddenly a little light-headed. Prefight adrenaline.
The redhead came up to the table and beamed down at the two of them. "Grace," he said, and turned to Gaby. "Pardon my manners. Are you two lovers?"
Gaby looked at him, wide-eyed. "
Excuse
me?"
"Well, you don't act like lovers. So I wanted to ask if you would join me on the floor." He gestured toward the dancers with his pipe.
"Oh." She glanced at Harris a little guiltily. "Well, thanks, but no thanks."
The redhead spread his hands in a comfortably familiar "can't hurt to ask" gesture. "Well, then. How about to bed? My flat is close, and I treat the ladies well."
Gaby gaped at him a long moment and didn't answer. Finally she managed, "Thank you, but not this morning."
"Ah, well. Fair morning to you, then." His step jaunty, the redhead returned to his own table.
Harris tried to unlock his shoulders. His hand didn't want to let go of the gun. He managed it anyway. "Son of a bitch has a lot of nerve."
"Maybe. He was very polite, though. I've heard lots worse." She glanced at him, then smiled. "Harris, you're blushing."
"No, I'm not." He found himself annoyed.
"Yes, you are. But never mind."
Harris was saved from offering a rejoinder by the waitress' return. His "house special" turned out to be a ball-shaped loaf of fresh, mealy bread, a little bowl of jam, and a crock of potato-and-sausage hash. He tore into it, prepared to devour just about anything to satisfy his hunger, but it turned out to be good—spicy and filling.
Gaby started to sip her drink, then looked at it warily. "Maybe I'd better not."
"Why?"
"Well, some of my father's stories . . . you eat their food, you don't come back."
"I ate their food. And I came back." Harris shrugged his unconcern and attacked his hash again.
"True." Gaby sipped her drink. "Hey, ginger beer!"
"Blech."
"No, it's good. Care to try a sip?"
"Thanks anyway. The last time I took a drink, I ended up in Neckerdam."
That earned him another smile. "Okay." She watched the crowd, alert, soaking up the local color with her journalist's eye. "Interesting," she said after a while.
"What is?"
"Differences. Women with purses, that's the same. But they leave them unguarded on the tables to go over and dance, and they're still there when they get back. I saw a guy standing at the edge of the dance floor who seemed to be looking one over, but the other people eating are keeping an eye on
him
."
"Canary yellow suit and red tie?"
"That's him. Then there's the guy who came in with the rifle."
Harris looked around, startled. "I didn't see him. Where?"
"Oh, he doesn't have it now. He left it with the hat-check girl by the front door."
"Jesus."
"Nobody thought anything about it! And then there's the hookers."
"Where?"
"Exactly. Where? This isn't exactly a family restaurant. They're groping each other to distraction out on the dance floor. When the music suits it, that is. And there's kind of a meat market attitude to some of them here. But no one I can identify as a hooker. I didn't see any on the street in the blocks we walked from Doc's building . . . and this is not the jazziest block we came through."
"You're right. Well, it's going to take a while to figure this place out. We have to
live
to figure it out, though."
"We'll go back as soon as you're finished eating. Promise."
Harris' coin was easily enough to cover the charge; the waitress came back with a handful of coins—big copper ones, small copper ones, small silver ones. He slid one of the silver coins under his plate as a tip and hoped he'd guessed right.
The waitress, hovering, asked Harris, "By your leave—are you two lovers?"
Used to be, yeah.
He glanced at Gaby. She wore her uncomfortable look again. "No."
She smiled. "My duty ends in a chime. Care to come to my flat for lovemaking?"
He forced a smile and hoped that he wasn't blushing again. "Well, thank you. I'm flattered. But my own, uh, duty calls. Maybe some other time."
"Well, then. I'm Miarna." And she was gone.
Harris clutched his heart for comic effect.
Gaby smiled uneasily as she stood. "People aren't exactly repressed here."
"Nope. One more difference." He rose. "If we don't want those differences to trip us up, I suggest we go and learn what they are."
Duncan Blackletter and Adonis knelt in the center of Duncan's ritual circle. This was no improvised thing made of rocks or paint; the inner and outer circles, like the words that lay between them, were of gold laid with an artisan's skill into the veined green marble floor. Candles rested in notches cut for their presence; the gold incense burner, from which the bitterly strong smell of myrrh exuded, rested on its own upraised marble stand.
He breathed in the incense, focused his mind on the task at hand, and called upon the Crone.
On the grim world, she was so quiet, so deeply asleep, so close to death that it wrenched his heart whenever he invoked her. She was his favorite: the snipper of life-lines, the weaver of epilogues, the spirit of endgames, the weathered grandmother smiling fondly at her descendants while knowing that one day she must take their lives, too.
Perhaps, when all was done, he could speak some word or play some music so loud and glorious that it would awaken her here, too.
His sideline thoughts were drawing him out of his focused state. He put them from his mind and concentrated on finding the spirit of his goddess.
We sit within your sight,
he thought.
Tiny specks within the great circle of your eye. With all my heart and spirit, I beg of you, open your eye, cast your gaze about, and tell me: Are we the only ones? The last two straying motes left to be swept away?
Again and again, he repeated his prayer, as though with each repetition he could hurl it farther and farther into the depths of the goddess' sleeping mind. With each completion he felt himself grow farther from his body, from the aches of age and joys of life, and he knew the familiar fear: would this be the time that the goddess just took him, cut him free from his life as easily as cutting a thread with shears?
Are we the only ones?
"Yes." The word sighed out of Adonis' gaping mouth, distant and fuzzy and indistinct, as though numberless worms deep in his chest had taken that moment to look upward and issue one word. The interruption jarred Duncan out of his concentration, snapped him back to resentful wakefulness.
"Damn you, Adonis, I have to begin again." He automatically raised his hand to punish the creature and Adonis shrank away from him.
But Duncan froze, perplexed. Adonis never spoke. It couldn't; it lacked the equipment.
This was the voice of the sleeping goddess.
Duncan swallowed hard, afraid to speak again. But he had to be sure. "Are we the only ones?" he asked again, aloud.
Again, the word wafted out of Adonis' mouth: "Yeeessss." The creature's lips did not form to shape the word, and its eyes grew round with confusion. Even Adonis did not know how it was speaking.
The candles guttered for a moment, then grew brighter again, and Duncan felt the last of his rapport with the goddess slip away like the last memories of a dream. She was gone.
Duncan took a long moment to slow his racing heart, then forced a smile for his imbecilic companion. "Adonis, we've done it. Are you ready to home?"
Adonis' face twisted into something like a child's smile; its eyes grew bright and happy.
"Good. Let's pack. We have a lot to do."
Joseph looked up into the eyes of the man he held over his head. Whiskers Okerry, his face twisted with pain and effort. Above him, ceiling beams burned and gray-and-white flame licked off in search of more victims. All Joseph had to do was hold Okerry a little higher and the man, too, would begin burning.
He didn't. It didn't matter that he didn't want to. He hadn't been told to.
He exerted himself and heard the meaty crack of the man's back. Okerry's eyes widened. From pain, from realization that nothing he could ever do would fix what had just been broken, Joseph didn't know.
Almost tenderly, Joseph set him in the room's one corner that fire had not yet touched.
Speak
, he told himself.
Tell him you would rather be dead than do this. Speak.
The words welled up in him. But he could not utter them, could not give them to the dying man as one last comfort.
Duncan wouldn't let him.
The words got bigger within him.
Speak.
Scream.
Joseph thrashed and heard himself shout. In the first moments of wakefulness, he felt his legs somehow hampered by cloth, felt his foot hit the footboard of his bed. Wood cracked and fell to the floor with a bang; the end of his bed collapsed.
He sighed. He'd kicked the footboard off again. He opened his eyes. A little light lurked behind his bedroom curtains.
He should be sweating, the way real men did.
"Joseph." A woman's voice from the other room.
Not alarmed—what could hurt him?—he rose and, naked, walked into the front room. Before he even faced it, he could see the glow shining from the screen of his talk-box.
It had been off when he went to bed last night. He moved to stand in front of it.
A woman stared back at him from the screen. She was beautiful, solemn. He could not determine the color of the dress she wore; even if his were not a gray-shade talk-box, his eyes did not offer him the range of colors that human eyes did.
She did not react to his nakedness. "Joseph," she said, "Duncan Blackletter is looking for you."
"He's dead," he said.
"No. He's just been living on the grim world."
He knew it was the truth. The gods did not love him enough for Duncan Blackletter to be dead. "Who are you?"
She hesitated. "My name is Gabrielle."
"Leave me alone." He turned off the set, and she faded to a tiny white dot.
Harris, still blinking sleep from his eyes, walked into the laboratory with the new box in his hand.
Doc, Alastair, and Gaby sat on bar stools at one of the tables. Gaby was wearing a belted knee-length dress in dark green, obviously one of the fair world styles, and black pumps. Doc looked like his former self, with weariness in his eyes and darkness under them the only visible signs of what he'd gone through. Seeing Harris, Doc smiled and smacked his hand on the tabletop. "It works."
Harris looked at him, confused, and waved the box, a black metal thing about the size of a VCR tape. "I found this on my bed when I woke up. The note said to turn on the switch and come to the lab."
"My note," Doc admitted. "And my box. Yours, now."
Harris moved over to join them. The table, he saw, was piled with food—more of the meat-filled pastries, a big platter of cold cuts and bread.
Alastair waved a hand over the mass: "Care for anything?"
"My stomach isn't awake yet. God, I must have slept almost a whole day. I'll take some of that chocolate drink if you've got it." Harris took an unoccupied stool. "So what's the box?"