Briefly, I thought he was ignoring me. Briefly, I thought he wasn’t there.
Then there was a flare at the heart of the flare, a sudden focus of white fire like an oxy-fuel cutter lighting up, making the leap of flame around it look washed out, washed up, common and ineffectual.
It slipped itself free of that nimbus and came slithering down the chimney like a snake, like the snake from the heart of the sun, too vivid to look at directly. Well, too vivid for me. Horse wasn’t bothered – and actually I’d seen it before, I knew what to expect. I had the skater’s shades at the ready, in my jacket pocket. Sometimes it’s important to be cool.
Sometimes it’s important to be hot. He’d always thought so, anyway.
He’d looked small, up at the peak there: small but potent. Potent, but small. Perspective shifted, that way it does, as he came down – or else he did the shifting, taking a tip from Horse, putting himself in scale.
By the time he stood on the ground, he was my height, more or less, as he always had been. Still a fire spirit, still a lick of flame. Still dazzling.
Then he changed, dressed himself in flesh, looked to be a man again, the way I’d mostly known him. Fire in his eyes. And hot, oh, yes. And naked, that of course. Clothes don’t survive transition. Besides, he’d never think to take them with him, when he went dancing off. He was always the very definition of a free spirit.
I could have made him otherwise. The very definition of otherwise: extinguished, static, dead. Sometimes I thought he ought to be grateful.
Sometimes I thought he ought to burn me from the inside out, like he did his clothes. Sometimes, I was quite surprised he never had.
Right now, I was quite surprised to find him here where he’d said he’d be – if I were him I’d have moved on, long ago – and surprised too that he came down when I called him.
Still. Down he came, and there he stood. And looked at me, and said my name: just, “Desi.”
At least it was that name that he acknowledged. It’s never good when people call me Fay.
I looked him in the eye – how not? those eyes are hypnotic, like flame dancing over coals – and said, “Thom. I’m so glad you’re here.” Glad and more; surprised, and more. That all went without saying. At least, I didn’t say it. “Listen, I’m really sorry, but I think you have to move.”
“I won’t be sorry.” His voice had that edge of dry and bitter humour that I guess comes naturally when you’ve spent the last years hiding out in the burn-off of toxic gases. It also still had the knack of making me shiver from the inside out, from bones to skin. Or from deeper, from the marrow of the bone. I’d never loved him, but. Well. Hot is hot.
I said, “No, but...”
He said, “Tell me,” though his eyes had shifted now to Horse.
Tell me about that,
I thought he wanted to say, only he had too much old-world courtesy. Of course he did. I’d hesitate to guess, which of the two was older. No person had ever tried to cut a shape for Thom.
I said, “Oz knows I didn’t kill you.” I was meant, I was sent to snuff him out, but it took me too long to understand that. By the time I did, it was too late; I couldn’t do it.
Oz, you should manage us mortals better. You should know how, you used to be one of us. Or was that just too long ago, have you forgotten how it felt? Or how to feel, have you forgotten that?
Thom flickered briefly, as though his flesh were flame, a candle in the wind; then he steadied again and looked at me and said, “So now there’s two of us.”
“There always were,” I said. “From the moment I lied to him – or earlier, the moment I decided to lie. The moment I decided not to do it. We were both on his kill-list after that, it’s just that he didn’t know it yet.”
“Until now.”
“Right.”
“Well, then.” His voice was warm by nature, when it wasn’t searing hot; he said small things, and whole universes of comfort lay behind his words. He said
Well, then,
and I heard
I guess we should look after each other, then
, and never mind how close I’d come to killing him, back when he trusted me most, when I was all betrayal. Almost all
. There’s strength in depth
, I heard, and
two’s company,
and
we can watch each other’s backs.
And I wanted to leap onto Horse and gallop away and pretend I was relying on myself alone; I wanted to think that I’d delivered the warning and that was enough, I’d done my bit, I was free to get the hell away from there. From him.
I wanted to betray him again, and maybe I would have done that thing, who knows? Only I was too late again, too slow again, as I always was around Thom. He slowed me down, apparently; he made it hard to think. He took my edge away. Maybe it was only comparative, because he was so quick himself, fast as a flash-fire, no slow smoulder for his fuse. He always made me feel less than I could be, and less than I ought to be. Which is maybe why I never learned to love him, because a lover really shouldn’t do that to you. They ought to do the other thing, bring you up a level, make you better than you were.
I guess that made it his fault, then, that he could scorch me to the soul and never touch my heart.
Well, good.
Even so: I was here because he was here, and I owed him a duty of care. Once spare a man his life, and apparently you need to keep on looking after it, not to let your good work go to waste. Who knew?
I wanted to be full of plans, the ready one, all organised. Really, though, I’d done nothing but dash up here, fleeing eels and riding a white horse. Wasn’t that enough? I’d given precious little thought to what came next after this moment, here, now.
Here, now, there seemed precious little point in worrying about it.
Here, now, here came a feather falling down.
Black feather, crow’s feather. Eager to tell us something.
I think we all looked up, instinctively. Horse, fire-spirit, daemon: guilty and confessional and found.
Not that we saw anything. At least, I didn’t. Still night, and all. My Aspect was a stretch away, a long stretch, and it came only reluctantly to my tug; by the time I was looking with enhanced eyes, I could find no shadow of a bird up there. What eyeless sockets saw, or fire-sight, I couldn’t tell. Thom said no more than Horse did.
Even so. I think we all knew we’d been found. Stupid, perhaps, to imagine that Horse could move through England without raising a wake, without rousing every creature with any sense of what lies deep within us. Of course they knew; of course the Overworld was told.
Oz is many things, and many of them dubious, but no one has ever doubted his intelligence.
Neither his confidence. His spy had let a feather fall, and not by chance. Whether that was a Corbie up there or a simpler bird, its feather was a message. We were seen, we were known; we were watched. This was asymmetrical warfare, and we couldn’t get away.
Couldn’t get away and couldn’t hide. Theoretically, we didn’t stand a chance.
Oz might have control of the air – and of the underworld, wyrms and eels writhing up from below – but at least he didn’t have bombs. His birds could follow us but nothing else, nothing worse. And if they came too close, well. Thom is quick and hot-tempered. Someone might get roasted.
I could hope.
Meanwhile, I could pull myself together. Never mind if my Aspect was laggard and sluggish, at least it was here: like an old rough security blanket to be pulled around my shoulders. Never mind the holes and the faded patches and the fraying hems, it was familiar and comfortable and right when nothing else was. I felt whole again, and strong enough to take charge if nobody else was going to.
I said, “We need to move. Thom, are you good to go, or – ?”
I think I cut myself off, before he laughed at me. I think I did.
Laughing anyway, he said, “Or what, do I need to pack some smokes? Bid farewell to my favourite fumes?”
“Well,” I muttered, “you might have left some things somewhere about, just in case...”
He shook his head. Of course he did, what was I thinking? “Not me. I came as you see me; I’ll leave the same way. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know” –
yet
– “but, well, into the world. Where people wear clothes. Almost all the time. We’ll need to do something about that. For the moment, though...”
I pulled the boy’s lighter from my pocket, flicked it open, didn’t spin the wheel.
Held it out, like an invitation.
I said that he’s hot-tempered; I didn’t say that he has the vocabulary to go with that. It’s not a problem, it’s a feature. We endured the blast of it, for what felt like a long time. Horse just stood there waiting; so did I.
At last he ran down. I was almost as implacable as Horse, still standing there with the lighter still held out, open, ready. When he stopped cursing, he seemed to have nothing else to say; so he shrugged, and shrugged off his human form, turning in mid-movement into an arc of flame that had just enough impulsion to dive neatly into the lighter’s gape.
It flared at me, brighter, hotter than it had before. I grinned, perhaps a little savagely; mutely blessed the sullen werepup for his cool Zippo; and took prompt advantage of it, snapping the lid down hard.
No surprise, that the brass case just kept getting hotter. A simple lack of oxygen was never going to extinguish Thom. I held it in my hand, because I was gloved by Aspect and a simple core of heat was never going to trouble me, but it might set my jacket ablaze from the pocket outward. That wouldn’t be good. A blazing woman riding a mythic shining horse? I’d never wanted to be written into folklore. Besides, the idea was to avoid attention, not to attract it.
I still had no idea how to do that. Not if night-flying crows were overhead. Standing here wasn’t helping, though.
“Horse? Can we ride again? I don’t know where, just... Somewhere else. Not here.”
He’d be glad enough, I thought, to be not here. He really didn’t like it here. Something in the way he stood, disdaining the ground beneath him, disdaining the very air he stood in; or you could see that entirely the other way around, that the concrete repelled him and the petrochemical fumes too. He stood utterly isolated, out of his place and time, cut off from the bones of old England. Needing soil and grass and rain, clean wind and sun and starlight, not the dull cast of smog overhead that reflected back the glare of the flares above us.
He dropped a shoulder in invitation, and I vaulted up.
He didn’t have actual shoulders, but even so. Invitation and acceptance: we understood each other perfectly.
This time, I made a conscious effort to keep my Aspect with me, but no go. It just stayed behind, fell away, wasn’t coming. I almost looked back, looked down, for the coat that had slipped from my shoulders. I almost called to it aloud, impatiently, like you’d call to a stubborn sulky child or a pet.
And then I did actually talk to it, because – well, I don’t know why, but I said, “All right, then. You’ll just have to catch up in your own sweet time. Horse, let’s get moving.”
Along the river, but against the flow: that should be the quickest way away from tarmac and pollution, up into the hills where these waters rose, where people didn’t build so much or destroy so much, where...
Where Oz would find it easier to get at us, oh, yes. That too. Ah, well. I couldn’t take Horse into town, even if he’d come; I’d feel like Lady Godiva, nakedly exposed with all my clothes on. Riding on a horse’s bones, a whole new kind of bareback. Never mind that he felt all horse to me, all the horse that he needed to be. All the horse that any horse had ever been, or all of them together. I have no faith in gods, I’ve met too many, but he could be the source, the spirit-horse, first among equals, stripped down to the essentials.
And I could sit on him. Apparently. For now. Even with all the riders and codicils, I still couldn’t quite believe that I was riding him.
Or that he’d go where I asked. Which was why I wasn’t asking now, why I let him make the choices, up and up. I might be just as exposed out there, but it was native country for him; that had to count for something.
Didn’t it?
H
ONESTLY,
I
DIDN’T
know. I didn’t know anything; I didn’t know what I was doing. Trying to help a friend, bringing trouble right to him. Both.
If anything bad turned out to be my fault, I could feel guilty about it afterwards. That was my regular approach. Right now, I was too busy. That was also normal; that was how the bad stuff happened. And I did know that, and even so. You don’t get to say
slow down, guys, let me think about this or I’m going to be making mistakes
. Not to the bad guys, you don’t; and often not to the good guys either.
Even assuming you’re quite sure which is which.
Right now there was me and Horse, and Thom in the lighter in my fist – and I really wasn’t sure about either of them. Horse was bigger than good or bad, older, beyond my judgement; beyond my reach, except that here he was between my thighs. Ambiguous, even there. And Thom... Well. Thom had been there too. And had reasons enough to think me bad beyond measure, except that he didn’t seem to; and he was a spark between my fingers, and what was I going to
do...?