Knight of the Demon Queen (20 page)

“Maybe magic’s not about money?”

“Oh, come
on
!” She leaned back a little, crossed her long legs, and considered him as if trying to add up the shabby clothing and old-fashioned spectacles, the scars on his arms and the gray in his long hair. She’d been the one who, at their mutual landlady’s request, had gotten him the job at the House of Two Fragrances, and it was her artless evaluations of the various drugs, behavior stimulators, and addictive foods and candies that had alerted him that paradise wasn’t the only place where nothing was as it seemed. “What’s cooler than money? And let me tell you, the boyfriend who’s picking me up tonight has
really
got money. What are you, some kind of philosopher?”

“Some kind,” John assented with a grin.

Old Docket had accepted without comment or surprise Aversin’s disappointment that the volumes in his shop, and even vocal recordings, were incomprehensible
to him and had spent hours telling him how the world worked, something even the people born in the city mostly didn’t know. John suspected the old man’s advice about gangs and scams had already saved his life, if for no other reason than that it had permitted him to keep Amayon bottled up and out of mischief.

And now the old man was gone.

Demons.

With the conclusion of his shift John walked Tisa to her rendezvous with Lots of Zeroes, as she referred to her latest inamorato, through the slanting rain across Economy Square. Vendors, salarypersons, and students jostled him on their way into, or out of, the subway and el-train stations situated amid a tangle of ’zine racks and steaming snack carts, flickering holo-hats, chattering PSEs. On every building enormous ad screens trumpeted the virtues of Embody shoes (“The circles on the soles make the magic!”) or Ravage clothing or Devour’Em candy or any number of drugs—not that it was always easy to tell what was being advertised—and, lower down, twisting ropes of neon spelled out incomprehensible letters over the windows and doors of bistros and shops, a constant battery of color, shape, and sound.

Parting from the girl at the far side of the square, he turned down Old 21st Boulevard, the thin puddles of the square’s pavement deepening gradually underfoot as the crowds diminished. By the time the boulevard crossed 187th Avenue, there were no more ten-story ad screens, and the buildings shortened and narrowed. Past 186th, water stood in the street to the level of the curb. The air reeked of sewage, chemicals, and salt, and it droned with mosquitoes.

Three or four years ago, according to Tisa, 184th Avenue had been the official boundary of the wet zone, the
street her mother had told her never to cross, though of course she had. The buildings along it were mostly tall and mostly “secure,” as they said—meaning they lacked windows—and such windows as there were glowed with the white even light of ether spots and tiles. Duck-boards had been set up on bricks. Cofferdams raised the doorsills of the biggest shops, permitting them to continue on the first floor.

Metal shutters or grills covered the few street-level windows. Distantly, in the pitch-black alleyways, John could hear the whistling of the gangs.

Old Docket’s bookstore occupied four rooms of what had been long ago a luxury flat on the third floor of a building on the Avenue of Galaxies. Aversin had a thirty-gram crystal flashlight that had cost him most of his first week’s paycheck, and he flicked it to high to examine the prefab plex stairway that ran from the drowned sidewalk grills up to Docket’s door. John played the light along the edges of the steps and particularly on the railings and the jambs of the door but found no sign of struggle. The door itself was unlocked, but the shop’s front room hadn’t been entered. If gangs had been responsible for Docket’s disappearance, the computer would be gone, obsolete as it was. Used chips sold for a half-cred a pound. Moreover, according to Old Docket, most gang members favored a mix of Brain Candy and Lovehammer, a combination that inclined its users to vandalism.

The small room was lined, floor to ceiling, with scuffed racks of red plex filled with book chips. Each thin, smooth chip was about the length of John’s forefinger and half as wide, inscribed with the title in meaningless symbols.
Popular hooey
, Old Docket had scoffed, gesturing about him that first evening.
Three-quarters of them are assists. Maybe you could read an assist? They got a vocal
track to them so you can follow along with reading. Though most of the gangboys, they can’t even follow those unless they’re rewritten to be simple. The assists are the purple chips
, the old man had added as John fingered a chip wonderingly.
The yellow are rewrites.

Four readers, their screens white, crowded together at the front of the shop before mangled green plex chairs. With Old Docket’s help John had tried to make sense out of a purple assist, a novel called
Thunder-hump
. The recorded language on book chips would not speak to his mind any more than the transmissions of the ad screens did.

What, if anything, he wondered, playing the flashlight’s hard white beam around the three-sided polyplex counter, had the old man told the League of the White Black Bird about him?

A book lay on the floor in the fenced-in square between the counters, shoved nearly under the computer. John swung himself over the counter and pulled it out. It was thin and small but a real book, similar to what he knew and treasured at home. It had a hundred or so sofplast pages covered in a hard shell of blue plex.

Had it been dropped there in the scuffle? In spite of Tisa’s disparaging scorn, Old Docket kept the place scrupulously neat. Books of all formats—actuals with pages, three different sizes of disks, old-fashioned thick chips and the newer thin chips—heaped the shelves and edges of the readers in every room, but nothing was ever suffered to lie on the floor or pile up on chairs.

Not being able to read was a hindrance, of course. John left the book on the corner of the counter and walked down the narrow hall to the room where the actuals were kept. Its window had been bricked up as a security measure at some time, and an ad screen partly
covered the spot. The amount the advertisers paid of any apartment’s rent was calculated by the number of hours the screen was left at half volume or higher. This one was turned down to a volume exquisitely calibrated to balance with the rent.

All things considered, it was a miracle he heard anyone else enter the shop.

“How could they have gotten in?” a voice in the front room asked, and John hit the dimmer on his flashlight and stepped back fast into the shadows between the bookshelves. With the ad screen displaying seminude girls playing doink to a bouncily brain-numbing tune—
what are they advertising? sand? doink? pink shoes? the girls?—
it was impossible to hear sounds in the front room, and of course now he could not turn down the sound without giving his presence away. But he felt the vibration of feet on the flooring and edged into the room where Docket kept outmoded disks and chips, staying behind the archway that led into the front room again.

It was Bort TenEighty, Garrypoot, Clea, and another of the league—a leathery, bearded man called Shamble who wore a laborer’s cheap bright poly-knit and a holo-hat that enacted and reenacted the image of a very fat man exclaiming, bug-eyed, the once-comical punchline of some incomprehensible commercial play.

It was Garrypoot who had spoken. “Wouldn’t there be some sign if it were demons?” the boy went on. “Smashed furniture?”

“You think demons are the way they look in the vids, dear boy,” Bort reproved. He turned over the chips stacked along the edge of the nearest reader. “As if any creature would traipse around the city seven feet tall with special effects zapping out of its horns and eyes and tail. They wear the bodies of men—men with eyes like
broken glass. How do you think they’ve been able to do the alley murders?”

“That’s demons?” Shamble came over from turning down the front-room ad screen. The jingly doink tune behind John sounded all the louder. “The freelancers in the deep zone make crazy drugs.”

“If it was drugs,” Garrypoot added. “It might have been some kind of initiation rite.”

“It was demons,” Bort said somberly. Like John, Bort was nearsighted and one of the few people in the city to wear spectacles. Old Docket had told John, when he’d pointed out the various members of the league one day, that for some reason Bort was unable to undergo the procedure to correct the poor eyesight with which at least three-quarters of humanity was born. His spectacles consisted of a single strip of crystalline plex that fit his heavy, dark-browed face from temple to temple, modeled over the bridge of his lumpy nose. Its curved lens was subtly faceted, so the pale blue eyes behind it always appeared to be shifting their size and placement. “They eat pain. Live on it, as we live on food.”

“Well, not really.” John stepped around the archway behind the fat man’s shoulder; Bort and the others nearly jumped out of their shoes. “They don’t eat pain anymore than we eat music. But they live on it and for it, the way opera geeks and rock fans live on and for what comes out of their systems.” He scratched the side of his nose. “Only of course music doesn’t destroy those who make it. Not right away, anyhow.”

Garrypoot’s eyes bulged. “You know!” he whispered reverently, and Bort tilted his head, regarding the lithe unprepossessing form from behind his faceted band.

“What know you of demons, Moondog?”

“A bit.” John held out the blue-covered book. “What’s this one called?”

“It’s Bransle’s—” Garrypoot began, and Bort laid a hand on his young friend’s shoulder to silence him.

“Why do you want to know?”

“’Cause me guess is the demons pretended they were customers.” John crossed behind him to the counter and pointed to where he’d found the book. “There were others on the counter?”

Bort nodded toward one of the reader tables. “Just that. SeventyfiveTwoOne’s.”

“Any way of findin’ out who bought ’em?”

“I could tap into the cred numbers,” Garrypoot offered. “They’d be filed in the computer, and I could trace the buyers.”

“If the demons were fool enough to let Docket put their cred into the reader,” Bort said. “I wouldn’t, were it me.” Garrypoot, who’d come around the counter already and flipped the power toggle, looked at John inquiringly, asking what to do next.

“I notice there are no empty spaces on the shelves,” John said. “It looks like Docket had ’em out and ready for a customer who’d queried beforehand. It’s what I’d do, if I wanted to meet him here after closing hours.”

For a moment Bort and Garrypoot looked at one another. Then Bort said, “Check.”

While the younger man called file name after file name to the softly glowing screen in search of recent correspondence from the Op-Link, Bort asked again, more quietly, “What do you know of demons? Don’t tell me you’re one of us?”

“And who,” John asked, even more softly, “is this
us
you’re talkin’ of? Wizards?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Bort folded his arms and
settled his chin in its deep scraggy beard; he was heavy and pudgy, but oddly powerful despite cheap, ill-fitting clothing and the sour air of failure. “Surely you’ve seen how now and then a black bird will be hatched that isn’t black but white? And how the other black birds peck it and drive it from the flock because they cannot endure its whiteness?”

“Well, it ain’t so much an aesthetic choice as a defense,” John remarked, realizing as he spoke that the language used in the city had no word that distinguished raven from crow from blackbird. They were all
black birds
. The only other birds he’d seen were the carnivorous pigeons that infested the city as rats did, and what were called
wild birds
, meaning any of a dozen varieties of sparrow. “Black birds
do
flock, you know, and a white one’s goin’ to get ’em seen in the trees by somethin’ big and nasty and hungry, which I hope isn’t the case with you and your friends and me.”

“Oh.” The heavy man looked momentarily nonplused. “Oh, that’s why they do it? Not the only reason, of course,” he went on, swiftly resuming his ponderous dignity. “And in any case the metaphor remains valid. We are those born misfits in this world—born with an understanding, a sensitivity to, forces and emanations beyond the comprehension of the average run of humankind. We understand that there are things—powers—beyond what human eyes can see.”

“Magic?” John shoved his hands behind his belt buckle and leaned his back against the counter. “Or stuff like what keeps the lights goin’ and how come we can see whacko games and hockey that’re taking place a couple thousand miles from here?”

Bort waved impatiently at the ad screen. “Plasmic ether was the refuge, the fallback, of those who craved
cheap and easy solutions,” he said. “It’s a natural force, like steam or gravity or electricity. But I believe that its very pervasiveness has contributed to the downfall, the death, of true magic.”

“Magic did exist,” Shamble added, his weak blue eyes catching a fragment of neon from outside and seeming to burn in the gloom. On his head the fat man did a thousandth bug-eyed double take and mouthed the catch phrase that had made the image famous. “We know it did. It has to have. And we who were born with it still in us, in a world where it no longer functions, are condemned to a lifetime of being misunderstood.”

“The great mages have all been persecuted,” Bort agreed. He sounded as if persecution were at least recognition of specialness. “The knowledge has been passed down in secret, corrupted by those who do not understand. But the wise, like Old Docket, kept it safe.” He gestured toward the back room, to the stair that ascended to a further floor, where the old bookseller had had his cluttered sleeping chamber.

“And in the past thirty years, with the Op-Link, we’ve been able to contact others like ourselves, in all parts of the world,” Clea added. “There are areas and nodes on the Link where the children of magic come to trade experience and advice with one another. The Link may be able to help us find Docket, or learn about demons—”

“Or let the demons learn about you.” John had heard about the Op-Link from Old Docket, though it made as little sense to him as personal enhancement institutes or embodiment training.