Authors: Finder
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disemboweled gear box on her workbenc
h. But beyond that, Tick-Tick, in a red silk kimono that
contr
asted startlingly with her dandelion-yellow hair, was setting a waffle ir
on on her gas stove. (The
Ticker is one of the few people in B-town I'd trust with a gas stove. Sometimes, touched by the passing of one of the Border's logic-devouring eddies of magic the gas doesn't flow, or won't light. Some people forget to close the gas cock when that happens. A few hours later, they light a cigarette and find out that the gas has come back on. Several blocks in Soho have undergone sudden urban renewal because of
that.)
"Waffles would be nice," I said.
"Fresh out. Will you settle for waffles?"
"Ugh. I'm too tired to keep that up. What can I help with?"
"Wash your hands first, my chick. There's no saying where they've been."
I went to the kitchen sink. "Where's the soap?"
"Oh, that's right, I used it up. Unwrap another bar, do; they're in the drawer."
I opened the drawer she'd pointed to and found an impressive stash of soap in about twenty different colors, wrapped in about as many ways, bearing labels from out of the World, the Elflands, and from here in town. The smell was pleasant, but staggering. I took out a pale purple bar. "How about this one?"
The Ticker looked, and sighed. "Not in the
kitchen
, my dear. That's lilac. There should be a rather nice lemon in there, somewhere."
"Why not lilac? It smells nice."
"Very. But not in the kitchen. Fruit or spice or, possibly, herb for the kitchen. Flowers and the strong perfumes, like patchouli, for the bath."
I stared at her, and tossed the bar of soap and caught it a couple of times. "There's supposed to be some kind of internal logic to that, isn't there?"
Tick-Tick gave me a wide smile. "I'm sorry; I'd quite forgotten that wasn't your long suit. Now wash your hands."
I used the lemon.
"Now, slice those," she said, pointing at a cutting board heaped with ghost-white Border strawberries each the size of my thumb, "and pour some of that on them."
I uncorked the That bottle and sniffed. "Hey-
yah
. I'm already hung over."
"Fear not. We're going to set breakfast on fire before we eat it."
There was a label on the bottle, a brown, brittle, faded paper one. It was about as legible as a fallen leaf.
I sniffed again. The fumes breathed out memories of seasons past, spring in strawberry beds, summer among raspberry canes, autumn in orchards full of plum and peach and apple. " 'Sweeter than honey
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from the rock,' "
I murmured. Then I remembered the source of the quote was Christina Rossetti's
"Goblin
Market," and that it was one of a class of st
ories that wasn't exactly complimentary to the Fair
Folk.
But the Ticker laughed. " 'Men sell not such in any town.' Just so, my lad. It's from over the Border."
I looked up quickly, and the liquor slapped the side of its bottle with a little chiming note. "I thought—"
And thought better of asking, and shut up.
She didn't. "That I'd not go back? I haven't, and I won't. I took this in payment for fixing Mother Mayeye's sewing machine. I believe it began life in my father's cellars, and when I think of how little pleased he'd be at where it is now and what I did to earn it, I treasure it even beyond its deserts. Blessed Isle, my father would rather have cut my hands off at the wrists than see them used to make and mend foul Worldly machinery."
"He'll never know."
"No, indeed he won't—I'd heard he died a year or two ago. My brother, I think, still lives. And if my brother objected to the provenance of that bottle, I doubt he'd have the backbone to say so to my face. So there; time has robbed me of these childish pleasures."
It made me uncomfortable, to hear her speak of the past. "You don't have to talk about it."
She turned away to pour batter on the hot iron, and over the hiss she said, "I know. If I had to, I'd fight it like death itself. But with you, I don't have to. So I can."
"Ah."
The Ticker cast a look over her shoulder. "Nor do you have to reciprocate."
I knew I should. She was my friend, and even if she'd just said that I didn't owe her the story of my personal road to Bordertown, who the hell else did I owe it to? Rico?
I sliced strawberries with all my attention. They were particularly fine ones, large and white clear through without a hint of pink. (Wild Borderland strawberries are one of the Border's little jokes. They form bright red, and fade as they ripen. No strawberry has ever been so sweet.)
"So, can you tell me about last night's adventures?" Tick-Tick said.
"She didn't say not to." I told her about Charlie in the morgue, and how the keys worked, and how the ceiling fell on us at the derelict apartment building. As I'd expected, she made me go back over that part.
"Rico thinks it was the light?" she asked, intent. "Then why assume the trigger was magical, and not photoelectric?"
"The thing in the corner was. Magical, I mean." I drizzled liqueur on the strawberries—sparingly, however glad the Ticker might have been to squander the stuff on mortals. The smell made me want to lie down in the bowl. "Oh, and so was the other thing, that scared Charlie off the roof."
She stopped in the middle of plucking a waffle off the griddle and raised her eyebrows at me.
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"Oh, sorry. T
hat was the rest of the night, after you went home." I described the dream, and, s
ourly, Rico
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reappearing
in my apartment.
"That was well done of her," said the Ticker.
"It was? It didn't feel like it at the time."
"Hah. You're only ashamed to have been caught in a moment of weakness."
She was probably at least partly right. I decided that trying to think of the other parts would make my head ache.
Tick-Tick handed me a bowl and a whisk, and pointed at the milk bottle. "Pour the cream off the top of that and whip it, would you?"
"Wait a minute. That's work."
"It's exercise. Do you good before breakfast. Linn is right, you know. These dreams can harm the dreamer; I've heard of it happening even over the Border, where one might expect people to know how to prevent such things. If Rico knew the signs, then she would be able to wake you if she saw them."
I remembered the end of the dream, suddenly and for the first time. It had been as if something had reached past Charlie's memories and tapped mine on the shoulder. It could have been my own ego,
denying death for all it was worth. Or it could have been someone in the room, doing or saying the right things, whatever they were. Nothing that happened after I woke up told me which it was. If Rico had saved me from unspecified damage, she'd been self-effacing enough not to tell me so. I wondered, while I whipped the cream, if that made me feel less nervous, or more.
"Ideally,
not
butter," Tick-Tick said. She was standing next to me, unlit match in hand. In front of her were two gilt-edged plates bearing waffles and strawberries. "Whatever your flaws, my bonny boy, you've always been reasonably alert. This sudden tendency to fall into abstraction—" (the liqueur gave off a satisfying
foomph
, and a toxic-looking blue-green flame) "—is not like you. I put up with it in Wolfboy because I can't tell when his eyes aren't focusing anyway."
"Um."
" 'Um,' indeed. And I would love to know whose face you were seeing in that poor cream." With that, she used it to put out the last scuttling bits of flame.
I thought about it. "Mine, maybe. Probably I was just spacing out."
We sat at the round table that was just the right size for two; I don't know if the Ticker ever has dinner parties. If she does, she can probably find another table. This one was made of some highly-polished golden wood in high Art Nouveau style. Heaven only knows how these things come into Bordertown,
or, once they have, why they should land on Tick-Tick's doorstep instead of in some parlor on
Dragonstooth Hill.
The alcohol was gone from the liqueur, the strawberries were warmed and softened, and some of the sugars had caramelized. The waffles were crisp all around the edges and soft in the middle. And the Ticker had stopped me just in time on the whipped cream. There was hot tea to wash it down with,
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which ta
sted something like Darjeeling and something like not. It was related to last night's s
hower: It
was a meal to make m
e grovellingly happy to be alive.
So I was grateful that Tick-Tick waited until I'd finished before she said, "And who did you kill?"
"Pardon?"
She looked patient. "That was two syllables, so I know you're stalling. If you really didn't know what I was asking, you'd have made do with 'Huh?' Or is this Richard Paul Somebody not you after all, in which case, what does he have on you, my lad, that you'll go out and get ceilings dropped on you rather than tell Rico to go bother him?"
On second thought, it would have been useful to have some food to push around the plate, so I could pretend to be distracted. "I thought I didn't have to reciprocate."
"Of course not. But that was in matters of confidences freely given. This is a direct question. I ask because I want to be of use, and I can't trust you, once you're fully sunk in misery, to recognize when I
can
be of use."
I wanted to say, "Nobody you know," and let her figure out if it was the answer to her first direct question or her second. Stylish, if the Ticker would have let it stand at that. "It's all from before I came here. Tick-Tick, you know every stupid thing I've done since I got to Bordertown. Aren't those enough?
Can't I leave the restback in the World?"
"Well played. You've been going to the movies again. What would Rico's answer be?"
"She hasn't asked about it." I remembered then that she had, in the car at the stop sign. But she'd apologized for that. "I don't think she cares about the details, as long as I help her find this guy."
Tick-Tick shook her head and reached for my empty plate.
"No, you cooked. I'll wash."
"In your present state, do you really believe I'd give the good china over into your hands? No, you'd jump at a falling leaf, and there I'd be with fewer plates than saucers. Go home, you ninny. But by the holy trees, do remember that I'm here, and good for something."
I stood up, feeling at once ashamed of myself and obscurely comforted. "I'll remember. Thanks for breakfast, Tick-Tick. And if… if I told anybody about it, I'd tell you."
" If would make water run uphill." She followed me to the door, out of the reflexes of the perfect host, I thought. But at the door she took hold of my shoulder, her thin fingers almost cool through my T-shirt, and turned me gently around. She spoke carefully in the language of the other side of the Border, putting all the endings on as a courtesy. "You do what you are, and you become what you do." She looked away swiftly, then back at me. "Wear fortune as a coat, true friend."