Authors: Finder
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hair and the thr
ead had been.
"It's unlocked?"
"No, it's locked to anybody but me or my designated surrogate. Doesn't matter which side of the door you're on, or whether you have the key." She stood up and dusted off the knees of her jeans. "There are a few advantages to police work in this town. Come on, we're going in the back."
She put her hand inside her jacket when we moved into the torchlight, and brought it back out holding her gun. On this door, when Sunny tried the knob, it turned. "Heavens, not very wary, are they? Stay behind me," she said, and opened the door.
The hall was dark, but wavering light leaked out of a room on the right. Voices did, too, the musical rise and fall of the language of Faerie. I expected Sunny to do the kick-open-the-door-and-yell-Freeze routine that I'd seen in movies. What she did was slide through the opening and level her pistol in a long sweep that covered the whole of the little space. It was the three elf kids in what was obviously their dormitory. The light came from one fat candle stuck by its own wax to the top of a battered footlocker.
One of the kids sat on the lower mattress of a bunk bed; another sat on the floor at her feet, his back against the bed frame; and the third sat on the cot against the opposite wall, which wasn't far away. The three of them were smoking one herbal cigarette, passing it around like a joint, and I wondered if they were on short rations, or if it was just their last one.
Sunny warned them not to move. She didn't say it loudly, but she'd mastered the voice of authority that made volume optional. She'd also mastered a darned good accent in their language. I suspected that was Linn's doing. She said some other things, too quickly and too well for me to translate exactly, but I think they were the rest of the warning that goes with "Freeze," the stuff about keeping your hands in sight, and why you should pay attention to the person ordering you to do all this, besides the fact that she's the one with the gun.
The kids really were straight out of the Elflands. They hadn't had the time, or maybe the inspiration, to do funny things with their hair and clothes yet, though the girl on the bunk had cut hers off untidily to about chin length. It shone like mother-of-pearl, white with a hint of rainbow shadows, in the trembling light. She wore an embroidered knee-length gown with scalloped hanging sleeves lined in red, and red hose. Her bare arms were white as a marble statue's, but still child-skinny. Her companion on the floor wore a boy's long jacket, indigo blue, with deep cuffs and lapels of pale gray that showed the grubbiness of constant wear. The shirt underneath still had fragments of lace so fine they looked like scraps of mist.
The one on the cot, now that I could see him better and at full length, I decided had run away from home during the elven equivalent of his senior prom. His doublet hadn't been made to stand up to daily use, but in its heyday it had been green and silver tissue, and his narrow black pants were velvet, trimmed with silver knotwork, now torn in places. His feet were bare, as white and childlike and vulnerable as the girl's arms.
I'd stopped paying attention to the flow of Sunny's words, but the silence brought me back. The
youngest boy, after a startled, wild-colt look at Sunny when she came in, had kept his eyes on the floor, but the girl had watched Sunny throughout the speech. Now she said something quickly, apparently to the room at large. The other two looked at her. Then the girl on the bunk gave a cool little shrug and stood up. She moved with breathtaking grace, like water flowing, as if she and the air had some kind of agreement. The little boy beside her scrambled up, too. The boy—the young man, or whatever they call them in Faerie when they've stopped being children but haven't quite made it to adulthood—in green and silver sat for a moment longer, trying to keep his emotions off his face. But he, too, rose at last, slowly,
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and s
tood at parade rest with his chin high.
To me. Sunny said, "Let 'em out the back door, and make sure they leave. I don't want them hanging around to give any warnings or get in the way. Oh, and here." She rummaged in her jacket pocket with her gun-free hand, and produced three of the seven-sided gold coins that Tick-Tick said were called lion's teeth in the Elflands. "Give them to the girl. The little prince there," she said, nodding at the one in green and silver, "won't have the common sense to accept."
"You'll be okay here?"
"I won't stir without you," Sunny answered drily.
On the back steps, I gave the girl the remains of my last pack of cigarettes, and the coins. The torchlight gave the three of them a particularly supernatural glimmering look, glossing their skin and touching their ruined clothes discreetly, and I thought about how my ancestors, centuries ago, had written about visitations from
their
ancestors. Faerie rades, changelings, dancing under the hill.
The girl looked at the coins in her palm. The kid in his ball dress said something sharply to her, but I shushed him just as sharply, thinking of Sunny inside, and what might happen to her, or me, if
somebody decided to check out the argument on the back porch. The girl wasn't any better at keeping her feelings off her face than her well-dressed compatriot. I saw her pride put up a fight and take a serious blow as she closed her fingers over the money. I felt as if I'd hit her, instead of making it possible for her to get along on her own. But learning to distinguish false pride from true is a survival skill, and if the first lesson had hurt—well, if she hadn't wanted to grow up the hard way, she shouldn't have run away to Bordertown.
She went down the steps and into the alley, where the light barely fell on her, and jerked her head to order the others to follow. It was the first ungraceful motion I'd seen her make. The younger boy came promptly, and she started away, an irregular brightness in the night. The older one paused, and looked at the door and me one last time; then he, too, disappeared into the dark. I hoped that when the girl gave him his share of the gold, he'd have the brains not to refuse it.
Sunny may have thought I was silly to worry about her, but she'd kept her word anyway; she was still in the little dormitory. "Okay, extra careful," she said. "Don't assume there's only one person left in the building, and don't assume that just because he seems like a self-absorbed wanker he can't do you damage."
There was, as it turned out, only one person left in the building. And he might have been able to damage us, in some other place, at some other point in his life, under some other set of rules. Just then he was sitting at the table where the kids had been packing contraband, holding up his head with both hands, staring at the tabletop.
This time Sunny did the rap in a language I could follow. "Police. Don't make any sudden moves, and keep your hands where I can see them. I accuse you of taking life and of conspiring to take others, and declare that your freedom is forfeit until such time as this accusation may be tested in fair trial. If you attempt to flee this test now or in future, it is my sworn duty to stop you, even unto the resort of causing your death. And I have to admit, that would give me a lot of satisfaction right now."
Not the same one she would have used on the kids; and I was pretty sure that the last sentence was not standard.
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Our quarry looked up as she began to spea
k, his eyes wide, and as she went on his fac
e, his whole body,
sagged. It was
one defeat too many to be called a setback. "So!" he said when Sunny fini
shed. "My dear
companion sold me out to his fellow officers, did he?"
Sunny shook her head. "He's next."
Bitter satisfaction flew across his face. "That's more than I had hoped, that the others might be held to some account."
"Why shouldn't they?" Sunny said, seeming about as casual as the context allowed for.
"Oh, they meant the blame and all the payment to be mine. Small minds are the same in any land. I did the best work I could with what they gave me, and they never gave me what I asked. But here is all come to ruin through their smallness, and it's 'Hai, Malicorne, you evil dog, you have set the Gatherer upon your own race!' They will lie, they will lie, but it was none of my doing. None. Upon the Crown and upon the Hill, I meant no harm."
It's not true that elves can't cry. That's a piece of slander left over from what the World used to believe about witches. It's true that they don't do it easily, however. This one certainly didn't. Grief and fear swallowed up his fey prettiness; his white skin blotched pink as the tears ran past his nose and down his chin. He gave a gulping sob and his long fingers scrabbled at the tabletop. Then he pushed himself roughly out of his chair and turned his back on us, his shoulders hunched.
"As I remember it," Sunny said, "the old command is 'Do no harm.' It doesn't say anything about
'mean.'" Watching her, I thought it was better that the elf had turned his back. She didn't show any signs of being in a forgiving mood.
And if Sunny didn't forgive him, it suddenly occured to me to wonder, what were we going to do with the bastard? We couldn't take him to the copshop in the sidecar with Sunny in his lap, for God's sake. I wasn't even sure we could take him to a cop shop at all, given there was a cop involved; how chummy were the various stations around town?
"The harm was none of my doing. How can you presume to judge me, who are not of my kind? I would have given you the means to raise yourselves, but you are too weak, too weak."
"I don't presume to judge you," Sunny said. "I only presume to bring you in. The judging part is somebody else's job. But I wouldn't advise you to give me too much crap about it, because my best friend has the virus and is looking pretty bad, and I'd hate to find I was unduly influenced by that."
He looked over his shoulder at her, open-mouthed. "Your best friend is…"
"Some of us are more broad-minded than others. Now, you have a couple of choices to make. I can tie you up and leave you here, so I can find you in a hurry. Or you can tell me where you live, and swear on the stars of the four quarters and the moon in their net to go home and stay there until I come and get you, and not speak to anybody in the meantime."
I stared at her, shocked; but then, so did the elf. "May that oath burn your lips! No human should speak of such."
"I warn you, I meant it when I said don't give me trouble. You'd rather be tied up?"
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He thrust his fingers into his poet's curls and
yanked on them. "I don't—"
"Remember," Sunny told him, sounding a little less implacable, "I'm willing to believe that whatever else may have happened, you aren't an oathbreaker. If you prove that I wasn't wrong, it'll weigh in on your side with the people who hear your case." She looked toward the dark window, which meant that I had a better view of her face than he did. I thought she might be speculating on something—it was a gambler's look. "And I'd need to know that you wouldn't try to escape across the Border."
There was a moment's silence. Then he said, in a small voice, "I cannot… go again into the true lands."
Sunny nodded briskly. "I'll hear your oath, then."
She coached it out of him. I could tell that this was something she'd done a lot of, by the watertight nature of the results. If he abided by it, he'd be as safely locked away as if she'd sent him to San Quentin.