Authors: Ysabeau S. Wilce
Only the realization that I would then become an even bigger target kept me from bolting.
Act cool if you want to stay cool,
Nini Mo advised. I tried to act cool, but my heart was near to boiling out of my chest. What were all these entities doing, standing around the portico of the Califa National Bank at two in the morning? Why were they not constrained? Magickal entities can only walk in the Waking World when they are called to do so by a magician, and even then they must suit their actions to the magician’s Will. How were these entities looking so carefree?
I leaned against the giant bronze turtle and tried not to quiver, ready to rip open my fan at the first sign of trouble. Not that it would do much against this lot, but just clutching the cool steel ribs made me feel as though I was not completely helpless.
“I see the car lights!” the Ghoul hollered.
Finally, two little purple lights were crawling up the Slot—which was a bit odd because horsecar headlights are normally yellow. Maybe it was a new model. Whatever the case, I was very happy to see that the car was on its way; hopefully they’d all get on and leave me to wait for Lord Axacaya alone.
The Antler dæmon said, “It’s about time. I never waited so long. I’m gonna be late for my shift.”
“The Current is slow to rise tonight,” the Ghoul answered.
The darkness rustled about me as the entities went down the steps to queue up by the car sign. I was glad to see them go and even more glad that they were no longer paying attention to me. But a tall figure was making its way up the stairs. I shrank back against the portico and clutched the fan tightly. The figure crossed under the lamplight and was illuminated.
Axila Aguila, Lord Axacaya’s Quetzal guard. Quetzals are the result of marriage between male eagles and women. From the neck down, Axila Aguila is shaped like an ordinary woman, but she has the head of an eagle. In the Huitzil Empire, the Quetzals are considered sacred creatures, but I find them extremely creepy. There’s something very disconcerting about how they are neither human nor eagle, but a weird combination of both. It doesn’t help that Axila Aguila’s golden eyes are the eyes of a predator, pitiless and inhuman. I couldn’t shake the feeling that any moment she might try to tear my throat out.
But tonight I was very glad to see her. She might be a danger, but she was a known danger.
“Ave, madama,” I said. I made the courtesy An Unexpected Pleasure.
Axila opened her beak slightly and spoke: “Ave, Madama Fyrdraaca.” Her voice was raspy and slightly accented. “Let us get in line. We do not want to miss the car. It only runs once tonight.”
“Where’s Lord Axacaya?”
“He will meet us. Come. The car will not wait.” Another disconcerting thing about Axila Aguila is that an eagle’s face doesn’t change expression at all. I thought I detected a slight tinge of irritation in Axila’s voice, but I couldn’t be sure, and her face gave me no clues.
By now the horsecar had pulled up in front of the bank. It looked like no other horsecar that I had ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t a horsecar at all.
It was a dragon.
A
FTER
I
GOT OVER
my choking first look and took a less-choky second look, I realized the horsecar wasn’t a real fire-breathing dragon. It was a trolley car that had been painted and papered to look like a dragon, and the illusion was powerful. Steam puffed out its whiskery snout, and purple headlamp eyes glowed out from under red spiky eyebrows. Four stubby legs pumped up and down, supporting a scaly blue and gold body. The dragoncar’s rounded rooftop was ridged with triangular spikes, which grew smaller but no less sharp as the snaky body tapered into a long switchlike tail, which lashed back and forth, stirring up dust and trash.
“Come,” the Quetzal said. “Let us board.”
I hesitated. A row of small round windows marched down the dragoncar’s side, through which I could see the silhouettes of riders—and I didn’t like the look of those silhouettes at all. “What kind of car is it?”
Axila Aguila’s eagle head could make no human expressions, but somehow I could still tell that the look she turned upon me said,
Are you an idiot?
She answered, “It’s the K dragoncar.”
There are four horsecar routes in the City. The B car goes out along the Gun Road to the Presidio. The N car goes across the Outlands to the Pacifica Playa. The R car goes up and down the Slot, from the Embarcadero ferry terminal to the foot of Twin Peaks. The Q car goes along the waterfront, from Black Point to China Basin. There is no K car of any kind, horse or dragon.
“Will you get on or not?” The driver leaned out of the door. “I can’t hold up the route any longer. I’m off schedule as it is. The Current is sluggy tonight.”
I stood alone in the middle of the Potato Patch as Axila boarded. Getting onto the car, filled with entities who might want to eat me, did not seem to be such a good idea. What if it was a trap?
“Hurry up!” the driver said impatiently “You run me late!”
Would Nini Mo have been afraid to climb aboard? She would not have hesitated. Though it might be the last thing I ever did, I would not hesitate, either. I climbed up the steep step.
“Fare?” A crushed top hat sat askew on the driver’s head, and an opera cape was draped over his bare muscular shoulders. He looked completely human, except that his skin was dark purple.
I looked to Axila for guidance, but she was making her way down the aisle. She had already paid, and I hadn’t seen with what.
The driver refused my offer of a glory, with a shake of his head. I held out a diva. He shrugged that off as well. Heckling started to emanate from the other passengers. I offered two divas—no dice. I fished in my pockets. A chocolate bar? A needle-case? A button from one of my favorite red booties? Udo’s cheek rouge? A paper-pin? All were rejected. In a minute, I was going to be rejected, too. The heckling was starting to turn personal.
“What do you want?” I finally asked, frustrated. My face felt as hot as a furnace.
“I don’t need any of that. But I need an answer. That’s the fare. An answer.”
“What’s the question?”
“What’s the square root of thirty-six?” the driver asked, and he didn’t look like he was joking.
“The square root of thirty-six? What kind of a fare is that?”
“It’s my fare. Come on, now. Don’t take all day The Current falls, and we gotta go with it.” Now the driver grinned. His teeth were glassy red; they glowed in his dark face, and they looked razor sharp. I had no idea what the square root of thirty-six was—in Math we’d covered square roots, but I freely admit that math is not my best subject. I’d memorized enough to pass the exam and then let all that memorization drain out of my brain. Who but accountants, gunners, and engineers needs math? At this moment, I did. And badly.
“Um, the square root of thirty-six,” I said again, hoping to buy some time. Oh, how I wished I had paid more attention to Arch-Calculator Mox-Mox and his blackboard scrawls. Thankfully, before the driver could kick me off, I was saved by the kindness of a stranger. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the minotaur sitting behind the driver had dropped her knitting and was wiggling her hands at me.
Not hands—fingers. Six fingers.
“The square root of thirty-six is six,” I said quickly.
The driver snapped the door shut behind me. “All right, then. And I’ll take that chocolate bar, too.”
Relieved, I handed over the chocolate, promising myself that I would pay closer attention in Math. Clearly a ranger should be prepared for anything—even on-the-fly mathematical calculations. The dragoncar lurched forward, almost throwing me into the minotaur’s lap. I apologized, mouthed my thanks; she winked, and I careened down the narrow aisle toward the very back row of seats. There, I took the last seat, squeezing in between the Quetzal and an Apoplexia Dæmon, which causes men’s heads to explode with anger. The Apoplexia had a jaculus perched on his shoulder; the lizard hissed at me as I sat down, flapping its tiny wings and almost putting my eye out with a flick of its arrowhead tail. I gave the Apoplexia a dirty look, but he didn’t look up from his magazine. He was munching on a bag of pink sticklike snacks that I hoped only
looked
like human fingers.
The interior of the dragoncar was not much different from an ordinary horsecar’s: swinging oil lamps, rickety wooden seats, wooden floor. It was the passengers that were extraordinary. Directly across from me, a vampyre was giving me the hairy eyeball. When I gave him the eyeball back, he licked his lips with a long black forked tongue, licky-licky until I looked away.
Next to me, the Quetzal huffed. Her feathers were fluffed with damp, and this dampness communicated misery She shook her head, fluffing further, and crossed her arms across her chest. She wasn’t dressed for the weather; her tunic looked like it was made of thin cotton and her arms were bare.
“This city is too cold and wet,” she said. “I do not like it. My feet are ice.”
No wonder her feet were cold. They were bare, extremely muddy, ordinary human feet. The feet of the finger-munching Apoplexia were webbed like a duck’s. The vampyre wore polished black boots.
“You need galoshes,” I said. “Or at least waterproof boots.”
The Quetzal leaned forward to inspect my feet. Having run out of other things to clean, Poppy had spent an entire day polishing and waterproofing every piece of footwear he could find in the house. Thanks to his industry with the bear grease, my boots were extremely watertight and my feet were toasty warm.
“Where do you get these boots?”
“Well, mine came from the Army-Navy store,” I said, “but you could get them at the Emporium, too. Any dry goods store. Ask the clerk to waterproof them.”
“I will go there tomorrow. This city is very wet.”
I stifled a giggle at the image of Axila Aguila striding into the Army-Navy store, rifling through the racks of boots. I don’t think about cruel, scary Quetzals getting wet or cold, but if half of Axila was human, she would not be immune to the weather. And she did come from the desert, too. She wasn’t used to the damp.
The dragoncar turned off the Slot, and chugged its way along Montgomery, past Saeta House—outside of which a few revelers were still straggling—and then stopped at the intersection of Montgomery and Califa.
“Kanaketa’s Magick Shop!” the driver hollered, snapping the door open to let several passengers off.
I had never heard of Kanaketa’s Magick Shop; in fact, I thought there were no magick shops left in the City; because the Birdies don’t believe that anything relating to the Current should be bought or sold. When I had been trying to restore Valefor, that shop would have come in very handy. I’d have to remember the location and come back later to check it out.
The K dragoncar lurched forward, and in the next few minutes made several stops—always in the middle of an intersection. Never did the dragoncar stop at a corner or in the middle of a street, but always dead center in the crossroads.
The Eschata,
I recalled, had an entire chapter on the power that can be found where two pathways meet, an important nexus point. Some sigils can only be performed at a crossroads, and there is even a magickal guardian of the crossroads, whom the magician must summon—duh. I
was
an idiot.
“Is the driver Ronové, the Denizen of the Crossroads?” I whispered to Axila.
“Who else would he be?”
Her expression remained inscrutable, but I was sure I heard humor in her voice and maybe even saw a brief spark of amusement deep in her golden eyes.
The dragoncar turned off Montgomery, and was now chugging its way up Russa Hill, the third highest hill in the City It’s so steep that no horse or mule can get up it, not that teamsters hadn’t tried. After many attempts ended up with crushed horses entangled in the wagon wreckage, the Warlord banned all four-wheeled traffic. If you want to get to the top, you must walk, a horrible shin-burning exercise. The buildings stop a quarter of the way up the hill, and few people have any reason to go all the way to the top. The only thing there is a heliograph station and it’s off-limits to civilians.
But the dragoncar was having no problem making the grade, although we passengers had to grind our bottoms into our seats and hold tightly to the poles to keep from sliding. Being in the very back of the car suddenly didn’t seem like such a prize; if gravity took over, the Quetzal and I would be crushed under a mighty heap of praterhuman weight. I held the pole with both hands and tried not to consider what would happen if the dragon lost its footing and slid back to the bottom of the hill—it was a long way down. But the dragon didn’t lose its footing, and Axila and I were not crushed. The car chugged to the top of the hill and stopped.
“Leathertongue Fripperies and Falderas!” Ronové hollered.
Another place I had never heard of, and I’ve been to the top of Russa Hill. Long ago, when I was just a tot, Mamma had taken me to the heliograph station on one of her inspections. I had been fascinated by the mirrors and how each flash was answered by another far across the Bay in the Alameda Hills. To my childish eyes, it had seemed like magick. Now I realized it was just sunlight and glass.
The vampyre got off, and so did the medusa sitting next to him. Maybe they were together. I peered through the smudgy window, but the night was dark and the store lights weak. I couldn’t see much except wide display windows filled with mannequins in assorted lingerie, including some very handsome stays—just the kind I needed. But I had the strong feeling that if I tried to come back later, Leathertongue Fripperies would be gone.
If going up one side of Russa Hill was bad, going down the other was awful. The dragoncar lurched forward and then dropped into a belly flop that turned into a scooch that turned into a horrible sweeping stomach-turning slide. Everyone and everything that hadn’t grabbed tight was suddenly hurtling toward the front of the car. Screams mixed with shrieks, which mixed with roars, which competed with howls. I tried to brace myself in my seat, found myself slipping, reached out wildly, and then was wrenched back by a strong grip. Arms flailing, I grabbed back, threw my arms around Axila and held on for dear life.