Emma Bull (8 page)
Authors: Finder
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"Not
very damned much."
"What about the thing I saw? That jumped at meùhim."
Rico sighed. "An illusion. Hell to do in full sunlight, but it only had to be convincing for a second. Still, it's beginning to seem like our friend is finest-kind illusionist."
"Sounds like an elf."
"You'd think so." Rico smiled at me, another of her humorless ones, and stood up. "But you can find things you've never seen and do psychometry with corpses. I'd say the species stereotypes are going to hell in this town." She crossed the room, turned in the doorway, and took something out of a jacket pocket. "Catch," she said, and tossed it. When I caught it, I found it was a flask, black leather over silver. "Don't waste it. It's Tully. Probably older than both of us."
I remembered the taste over my tongue: honey on fire. "I don't need—"
"Yeah, you do. And lock the damned door behind me. If for no other reason than that a guy who sleeps bare-assed should be more concerned about who might walk in."
She closed the door behind her. There was only the one candle; I don't think, even if she'd waited for it, that she could have seen me blush.
This time the thunder cracked before the lightning's afterimage started to fade. It sounded like the World Tree had been split, and to say it made me jump would not quite cover it. Maybe tomorrow it would be cooler.
You can do psychometry with corpses
. As if it were now part of my permanent repertoire. Well, it wasn't. It had been traumatic, dangerous, and not even particularly useful. And embarrassing, besides.
To hell with it, and to hell with Sunny Rico. When next she asked me to find something, I'd pretend to come up zero, and live with the resulting discomfort.
I lay back, closed my eyes, and found the pavement of High Street rushing up at me behind my eyelids.
Rico had been right. I spent an hour in intermittent conference with her flask before I could sleep again.
Valid I.D.
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I woke of my own volition, more or less, at nine in the morning. From the feel of it, someone was tearing my brain tissue down the middle like a piece of paper, and my mouth tasted like an old felt hat. I decided that I must have been drinking, but I couldn't remember having any fun. I lowered my feet carefully to the floor and sat up. I'd once put the stub of a candle in a jacket pocket and forgotten it was there; when I found it a month later, it was covered with lint and hair and all the unidentifiable stuff that
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makes its way
to the bottom of a pocket. According to my stomach, I had swallowed something
remarkably l
ike that candle. I lay back down.
The sight of Sunny Rico's flask on the bedside table jump-started my memory. Oh boy, oh boy. And we were to start all over again at noon. I had three hours in which to do something about the state I was in.
This time I managed to get all the way to my feet and across the room to the kitchen, where I worked the pump and stuck my head under it. Then I drank a lot of water, stumbled down the hall to the second floor toilet, and returned feeling, if not better, at least different. And hungry, in spite of the candle wax in my stomach. Well, of course; Rico had spoiled my appetite for dinner at the Hard Luck, and after that things had been a little busy. I knew what I'd find, but I looked anyway. In the bread box, one heel of whole-grain, rigid as ceramic tile. In the cupboard, a half-tin of cocoa, a box of peppercorns, and the dregs of a bottle of soy sauce. In the icebox, the last three bottles of homebrew out of the dozen Hawk had given me for finding him a copy of Pinkwater's
Fat Men from Space
. For a moment, I thought about one of thoseùcarbohydrates, after all—but only for a moment.
Well, I had told Tick-Tick I'd stop by today. I hadn't meant it to be quite so short a distance into today, but if she wasn't up yet, I knew I could trust her to tell me to go away. I pulled on a T-shirt and cutoffs, combed my hair with my fingers, grabbed my sunglasses, and headed downstairs to the street.
Last night's storm hadn't lowered the temperature much, but it had given the humidity a serious leg up.
All the potholes were full of water, unstirred by so much as the threat of a breeze. Above the ragged, ambling roof-lines of Soho I could see the sky over the Border. It looked as if someone there had seen a few animated fairy tales and meant to duplicate the style: improbable pastel clouds came streaming out, toward the World, against a watercolor turquoise backdrop. It's stuff like this that makes it impossible to predict the weather in the Borderlands.
I wasn't the only thing awake, but I was close to it. On Desire Street I saw an auburn-haired girl hanging out laundry from her fire escape, singing something about a smiling Trojan horse to a lilting, scampering sort of melody. A calico cat teetered on the top pipe of a chain-link fence and regarded me gravely. "I'll live," I assured it. It lashed its tail and leaped down to investigate a storm drain.
Trudging uphill to Tick-Tick's sweated some of the hangover toxins out of me. Still, when I yelled under her window and she leaned out to look at me, she shook her head. "Back to the pit that spawned you,"
she said.
"That bad, huh?"
"You should have a mirror in that little hideaway of yours. Then you could at least try to turn degradation into a fashion statement."
"This isn't a fashion statement?"
"The young Lou Reed on a three-day bender? No, my dear. Or at least, I hope not."
"Who's Lou Reed?"
Tick-Tick covered her eyes with one slim white hand. "Blessed isle. So much for the notion that only cool people come to Bordertown. Would you like some breakfast?"
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"Nah. I figur
ed I'd hang out here some more and we could wake up
all
your neighbors."
Tick-Tick yanked on an iron ring mounted next to her window frame. The latch on the green-painted double doors to the building said
clack
, and I shouldered my way in. The Ticker was the only tenant in the building who didn't have to come to the front door to let her guests in. It wasn't selfishness; she'd promised to set up remote mechanical latches like hers for at least three of her neighbors, just as soon as she got around to it. But having solved the problem and implemented the solution once already, she'd found the thrill wasn't in it anymore.
I slid my sunglasses off as I passed through the lofty center room. The grubby skylight two storeys above me dropped morning sunshine grudgingly over someone's unfinished project: a tapestry woven of dyed jute rope. On it, a young man sat under a tree in a forest, his arms at odd angles and his mouth open. Three other figures could be seen from behind, in the background. Ravens sat in the trees above, and the beginnings of two wolves showed at the working edge of the weave. There was a lot of detail in the thing, considering that it was made of rope, and the finished effect was obviously going to be disturbing.
The tapestry was already twenty feet long, and seemed to be no more than two-thirds done, if that. I wondered where Tick-Tick's neighbor planned to hang it ultimately. Just then, it was suspended from the railing that ran around the room on the second floor, from an artfully twisted Volkswagen bumper, a wrought-iron garden bench, and a street-sign post whose sign read, "Yellow Brick Rd." The found-metal balcony rail had been another neighbor's project two years before.
The elevator was passenger-powered; I stepped into the cage and hauled on the rope. The pulleys it ran over squeaked just enough to let the second-floor inhabitants know someone was coming. By the time I stepped out, the Ticker's door, further along the balcony, was open and letting out kitcheny sounds.
The Ticker had half the second floor. It was one of those cavernous warehouse rooms that everybody wants, but hardly anybody knows what to do with. Tick-Tick refused to divide hers up with walls; she claimed that the whole point of a space like that was being able to see from one end of it to the other.
Since there were windows on three sides, it was a little like living in an open field. Instead of walling them off, she'd defined the "rooms," or at least, the areas devoted to particular activities, by turning the floor into a series of connected plywood platforms, each one about a foot and a half higher than the last, and devoting a different level to each room. Inside the door, at the former floor level, she had her workbench and tools, the table saw, the drill press, and all the other equipment that was neither too big to get through the back door, nor too dangerous to keep indoors. I think the reason her workshop was the first thing you came to was that Tick-Tick was convinced that ideas are fragile, and when she came flying upstairs in pursuit of the execution of an idea, she was afraid the mere sight of creature comforts would drive it clean out of her head.
The next level up was the kitchen, with cabinets with carved doors and a countertop under the windows.
The indoor necessary plumbing was on this level, too, but on the opposite side of the room from the windows, where the walls that made it private wouldn't interfere with the sight lines. The platform above that was the area that in anybody else's place would be called the living room. This meant you had to go through the kitchen to get to it, but as Tick-Tick pointed out, everyone goes to the kitchen first anyway, so why not design for it? The two levels above that served as library, study, guest bedroom, and
whatever. Beyond them were the front windows, and the Ticker's bed raised like a treehouse in a loft above the window frames.
So the first smell that greeted me as I came in the door was engine oil, and the first sight a