“I’m a man, just like any other.”
“Pig farts. I’m the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, heir to the Woman of Shamlegh. I’ve
Seen
the Hidden People, but I’ve never seen your kind before. Neither man nor gnome; not troll, not djinn, not dwarf under the mountain. I’ve watched dwarves at the forge. They’re good, but they can’t talk to steel that way.”
He knew he talked when he worked. He’d never recorded what he said, couldn’t remember afterwards, couldn’t even tell you for sure what language he spoke when he and iron got together for a little chat. For damn sure, he never let anyone watch and listen. All he knew was, it worked. He and iron understood each other.
She waved the gun, moving him away from his anvil and fire and bellows, away from the finished cane shaft and the blade still showing bare steel. She limped forward into more light, and he could see her jaw muscles clenched. He’d hurt more than just her head and wrist, in that scuffle in the dark.
Even taking away the soot and bruises and the blood, you wouldn’t call her pretty. Nose like a beak, broken years ago, dark hooded eyes, hollow cheeks, chin with rather too much character. He’d seen brown hawk-faces like that before, the dry dusty tribal hill-fort villages of Pushtu and Paktia, where he watched and learned from smiths who could forge automatic weapons out of tin cans and scrap cast-iron pots. The women of those tribes wore veils or full burkas when they went out at all. She didn’t. He wasn’t sure the change improved the landscape.
She studied the cane. She started to pull her left hand out of her pocket, winced, and sagged against his anvil. Maybe he could get to that gun . . .
Her glare said,
Don’t even think about it.
She straightened up, it looked like sheer will, and followed the glare with a shake of her head. “In your dreams, runt.” Yeah, she was taller than him, maybe half a foot. No trace of a Hill accent there, more like Bronx. He guessed second or third generation away from the tribes. Not that he could see any sign the move had softened her.
She poked at the blade with her pistol, keeping her eyes on him. “Where did you get
that?
”
He was proud of that blade. Watered-silk folded steel, rival to the best pre-Meiji
tanto
or
katana,
keen enough to cut a thought, cut the wind, yet springy as a fencing foil, he’d sweated blood on that one short blade. He didn’t know that he’d ever done better work. Equal, yes. Not better.
“I forged it.”
Her eyes widened, and he didn’t think it was pain. She stepped back from the anvil and raised her pistol to her forehead in salute.
“I know men who would give several thousand dollars U.S. for that blade, alone. Two, three times that for the whole cane. What the hell were you doing, poking around my crime scene?”
Tell her a demon twisted his arm? Not likely. “You had a salamander there. I smelled it.”
She cocked her head to one side and then winced. “You
smelled
it? And my Sight shows at least three hundred years behind you. I repeat, what
are
you?”
He shrugged, as well as you can shrug with hands in the air. “If you find that out, please tell me. I don’t know. I just am.”
Taking another of those risky moves that he was making habit, he lowered his hands without asking. She let him. Maybe that Sight she claimed didn’t call him a threat. Not that it had warned her in the burned-out synagogue. He never asked how another person’s gift worked or didn’t—he had enough trouble with his own.
Now that she stood closer to the light, he could read the patches on her coveralls. City police, indeed, and a name tag that said “el Hajj.” From what he knew of Muslim names, that meant someone in her ancestry had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, from a time and place where that was notable.
“I thought I’d checked for anyone following me . . . ”
She managed a wry smile. “I’m very good at following people and finding things. That’s one reason why the Chief puts up with me.”
She waved her pistol toward the door and the cellar steps. “Now, if you’d just let us out. Don’t move fast enough to make me twitch. I had a gunsmith spend a few hours on the trigger sear.”
“How’d you get in here?”
Another wry smile. “None of your business. I’m here. That’s what matters.”
He didn’t agree with that. But she held the gun—a Colt .45 automatic, now that he could see it well. Nothing he wanted to argue with.
He’d never needed to know much about police procedures. He hadn’t been arrested in something like fifty years. Still, he thought she was being awfully casual about this. He went ahead, unbarring and unlocking, up the cellar stairs, unlocking and unbarring again, her staying well back with that cannon in her hand. He could have dodged out and around the corner at that point, he didn’t think she could move fast enough to catch him or even get a clear shot, not with her limp and all it implied. But she was good at finding things and following people . . .
No gain there. Like with the demon, running wouldn’t do him any good. She already knew where to find him.
Outside, in the alley that stank of wet dust and the pizza joint’s garbage and a winter’s worth of dogshit now thawed with the spring, she waved him back and tucked the pistol somewhere under her coverall. At that point, things clicked together like the blade locking into his cane.
He blinked. “You aren’t arresting me?”
She started to shake her head and then didn’t. “What for? I’m pretty sure you didn’t start that fire. As for the rest, if Allah so wills, I’ll drink your blood. When the demon lets me. I don’t need some soft-hearted law of the infidel dogs for vengeance.”
She turned and limped off along the dawn alley, went around the corner and was gone. Yes, dawn. He’d lost the night in his forging. Vanished time again. Until he saw a newspaper, he couldn’t even tell if it was one night, or two, or three. Working iron, he got
involved.
But she’d left some puzzles behind. The demon? She didn’t give a Name, so he couldn’t tell if she meant Legion or some other. The vengeance that she named so calmly you could almost miss it? No puzzle there. Hill people were like that. Blood must be washed out with blood. But the way she invoked the will of Allah? That had sounded like mouth music. No meaning behind it. He didn’t think she cared whether Allah willed or not. She’d do it either way.
The way she’d said “the Woman of Shamlegh”—a title, a title of power,
her
power. Matriarchy, not patriarchy. With some of those hill tribes, he’d learned that Islam was little more than a surface gloss. True beliefs lie hidden deep beneath, far older.
Then he started to shake and felt his bones turn into rubber. He’d been coasting on the high his forge always gave him, one reason that the drug houses didn’t tempt him and he could take good beer and wine or leave them—he had better ways of stepping outside his brain. But, just as with alcohol or opium or hemp, he paid a stiff price after.
Anyway, high from forging, he probably wouldn’t have cared if Legion had shown up with all his buddies, Allah’s eight million afreets, much less a single woman from the cops. Not even with a gun pointed at him. The whole scene had lasted maybe five minutes, his stepping back from the anvil to her limping away down the alley.
Now he cared. Now the drug of his magic washed out of his blood and left him exhausted. A pounding hangover and a rush of fear broke sweat down his spine again.
He stumbled back to the cellar door, down to his forge, and cleaned up from the night’s work. Killed the fire in cold water. Married cane, shaft, and blade. Climbed up again. Locked up.
He limped his way out of the alley and around the corner to his front door—no connecting stairs from the cellar up. Yes, he had ways from attic to cellar, hidden, abandoned chimneys and the shaft of an old dumb-waiter, that sort of thing. But he couldn’t trust his legs to a ladder just then, or to the scattering of brick nubs and rusty brackets that made a climbing path up the alley wall.
Brown paper caught his eye: a long envelope sticking out of his mailbox. It hadn’t been there last night or whenever it was that he went walking. He pulled it out.
No address. No stamps or franking. Sealed. He felt too washed-out to care about modern trivia like evidence or letter bombs or even privacy. He ripped one end open, in the dawn light on the street.
A feather. One solitary tail-feather from a hen pheasant. He blinked and tried to shake some sense past the fog filling his brain.
Mother had taught them a dozen codes and signals, objects you could leave anywhere and people wouldn’t notice them, or, if noticed, make into any sense. Pheasant feathers, well, they meant danger—like his family, they weren’t native to this land. People introduced them as tasty self-propelled targets for the hunt.
And the tail feather of a hen pheasant meant Mother.
His stomach didn’t just growl, it snarled at him. He hadn’t eaten anything since that ham sandwich with Legion, yesterday’s lunch or whatever, and his body
needed
food after the forging. He couldn’t make sense of the feather there, on the street, with fog for brains.
Through the door, lock up and bar again—little good
that
seemed to do against not just Legion and its ilk but the Afghan harpy on his trail. He stumbled upstairs, one step at a time, glanced into the parlor and yes, the food and vodka had vanished from the hearth.
On to his apartment perched on the fourth floor, up stairs long and steep to the gold coins still gleaming in the sunrise on his kitchen table. At least Legion hadn’t decided to lay another jest on the stupid mortal chump. Him.
Yet.
He grabbed some food, random calories in quick form, gulped a beer, and collapsed on his bed. Didn’t bother to shuck off the sweaty gritty sooty clothes first.
Laundry and personal hygiene didn’t make it onto his list just then. Or the end of the world, whichever came first.
And the evening and the morning were of the third day. Or whatever day it was, anyway. He woke to sky glowing pale yellow in the east, just about what he’d seen before crashing into bed, and had to assume he’d slept the clock around. At least once. Maybe twice. He really needed to start keeping a diary, if Legion was going to add even more gaps to already sketchy memories . . .
He lay in bed feeling like three kinds of shit, still down after the high that working serious iron gave him, a kind of whole-body hangover that wasn’t exactly bone-ache fever or sore muscles or exhaustion. He woke alone, of course. He’d slept alone, lived alone for fifty years, a hundred years. Sometimes, dark times awake in the middle of the night, he understood why his brothers sought death, why his sister sought death. He’d come close to following them. Their long lives weren’t
lives
as such, just existence.
Living
required getting close to other people, and they didn’t dare. Besides the dance of moving and changing names, dodging questions, pretending they were human, they always faced the pain of watching someone they loved grow old and change into a dry shriveled husk that once was vibrant. After the third, the fourth, he’d decided it was safer to never love again. He didn’t keep cats or other pets, either. They become part of your life and then vanish into smoke at the blink of an eye.
A shower helped some, clean clothes, and coffee. Mozart helped more. Like all mortals, he had died, yes, died young, but he left lasting joy behind him. Albert threw some ingredients together and turned them into buttermilk pancakes with orange-blossom honey instead of maple syrup, and added rounds of bulk sausage heavy on the sage and pepper. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or today, if Allah so willed.
Besides, he was rich. At least temporarily. He kept staring at the demon’s pile of gold and the pheasant feather while he cooked and ate.
Talk about ambiguous. That feather—the problem with codes and signals lay in interpretation. Mother always liked to be a mystery, even to her own children. She liked to keep things vague. He’d jumped to conclusions when he saw it, his brain dull and dizzy and too full of that day’s things. The infamous cold light of morning gave him other answers. Or, more accurately, other questions.
He didn’t know if the feather was Mother warning him that he was in danger—in which case she was a little late—or saying
she
was in danger and needed help. Or maybe the end of the world loomed, just like Legion said, and she wanted him to do something about it. In any case, a few details had gone missing. He hadn’t seen her in twenty years or so. He hadn’t known if she was still alive, much less in town.
He didn’t even know for sure that the feather came from her. She could have taught the same code to someone else. He had those brothers and a sister, all dead years ago. At least, he
thought
they were dead, although all he had was second-hand reports. Never saw the bodies.
He had some cousins, an uncle and aunt, a niece and two nephews that he knew about. He hadn’t seen any of
them
for over a hundred years. For all he knew, he had family he’d never met. Like maybe a father.
Hell, he’d been away from Mother long enough at times for her to bear a child and raise it and send it out into the world without her bothering to tell him. His family, well, it was a little strange. Private. They all kept their lives in little boxes and were damned careful about what they let out past the walls.
Nobody
got straight answers out of Mother. She’d find some way to evade and muddle anything, even if she was standing next to a window and you asked her if it was raining. What he knew about her, she’d let slip in passing, or as part of a tale that could be nine parts lies or even the whole cloth.
The feather might tell tales, itself. It would remember who had touched it, where it came from. Like with his cane, things once connected stayed connected. You just needed to ask the right questions in the right way.
The dice wouldn’t work for that. Besides, he wasn’t happy with those bone cubes at the moment. They’d tried to get him killed. He only had the one small magic—he couldn’t see the future or the past. He didn’t trace things, find people, walk through walls like that Afghan harpy, read tea leaves or palms or entrails or stars or hear voices from the cave. He just could talk to iron.