Welcome to Bordertown (20 page)

T
here was blood on his shirt.

Not a great deal, not so much that a death lay behind it—though there might be more of it elsewhere from the same source. He did not think it was his. It blotched the white linen like ink in the harsh conjured light of the lamp stabbing at his eyes. He could smell it, faintly: the rank odor of butchery after a hunt. His thoughts ran, spun, hurtled against each other and the walls of his mind like a herd of captive …

Captive something. Penned. With small, hard hooves and delicate ears … Even as he grasped after the picture, it scattered. He held nothing but the vision of his thoughts in frantic disarray.

“Name.” A grating voice without music from beyond the lamp.

His shirt felt dry against his breast, at least.

“Name!” the voice repeated, and the light shifted until he could peer through it to the pale, fair face of the one who held it. “Come, my merry flower, my own fleeing rat, you may withhold whatever else you like, but your name we will have before you pass us.”

He ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. Sight was
thought’s widest window; perhaps in wiping the glass he might freshen his mind.

“
Drunken
rat,” another spoke from beyond his inquisitor. That new voice was bright with amusement and sweetly pitched. “And if that blood’s not yours, make sure you don’t do whatever you did back home on
this
side of the Gate. Because if you try it in Bordertown, we’ll see you don’t run away from the consequences.”

“Perhaps he has no speech?” suggested the first voice.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to use it out here in public.”

Hard fingers fastened on his upper arms, pushed and dragged him sideways, though he clutched at the earth with his toes and twisted against those unfriendly hands.

His toes? Why had he no boots? Or even slippers suited for the smooth floors of … of … But he had crossed floors, he was certain.

Then he was under a roof, where the light was gentle and general. He gathered his scattered wits and senses and bid them work.

It was a tiny room; the wooden table and unmated chairs nearly filled it, and the people fit themselves in as best they could. The walls were made of ruddy bricks in their lower parts and ridged and painted metal in their upper, like a tree with trunk below and leaves above. Lamps that burned some foul-smelling fuel hung from the low beams overhead, darkening the night to oily black through the single window.

Those who gripped his arms so tightly, one to each side, were of the Blood. They were as tall as he, and as pale. The grim-mouthed woman on his left had hair the color of milk and a warm tint to her eyes like tarnish on a spoon. The hair of the man on his right was so white and brilliant it might have been bundled threads of glass, and his eyes were silver touched neither with gold
nor blue. Both wore some glossy gray livery without crest or insignia, in a fabric soft with wear and washing.

He had trespassed, perhaps, in some private or forbidden place. He tried to recall if he knew of any such within his common reach.

But he couldn’t remember what his common reach
was.

Seated across the table from his guards (they must be guards) and himself was a woman with curling hair red as corn poppies and skin brown as an acorn shell. Her features, her very silhouette, were softly rounded, as if she were made of clouds and not hard bone. A human, he realized. He had seen them depicted, but had never been in the presence of one, alive and moving and exuding a warm animal scent like the fur of a cat.

She, too, wore the gray. The little silver oak leaf on her breast might have been an ornament or a badge of rank. A ledger lay open before her, and the gold-nibbed pen she held had smudged her fingertips with ink.

“Name,” she said without looking up. The guards eyed him with an air of expectation.

His
name. That was what they wanted.

He felt the mindless terror of a dumb beast entrapped when he realized he had none.

He jammed his heel against the wooden floor and twisted. The two who held him were braced, perhaps, for something else. A burning, bruising pressure against his arms, the pop of breaking linen threads, and he was free.

He was half through the doorway of the hut when someone behind him said a word. He stuck there like a leaf caught in ice.

“Thought that might come in useful. Get a decent grip on him this time, and we’ll try again.”

His two guards pulled him back to his place before the table.
Like ice, the spell in the door seemed to have stolen the warmth from his blood. It shamed him to shiver before these strangers, but he had no choice.

The poppy-haired human gazed up at him. “Look. This is just a formality. You haven’t done anything wrong in B-town, as far as we know. Yet.” Something in her words seemed to amuse her. “We just need a name. Over on your side they got their ears in a clamp over having lost a bunch of kids during the Gap, so we have to keep records now. It won’t help, but we have to do it anyway. So try not to make trouble when you don’t have to.”

He parted his lips to speak. A wave of new fear rose in him when at first he couldn’t. Was it true that he had no voice? He gave a ravenlike croak, and coughed, and found that fright and disuse had dammed his throat, but there were words behind the obstruction after all. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember my name.”

The human lifted her eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling. “Oh, good grief. A drama llama. My shift is officially perfect.”

“Drama llama?” echoed the fair man whose hands held fast to his right arm.

“Heard it from the New-Come. They practically invented a whole new language out there, seems like.”

“And in your scant hours of rest,” said the woman on his left, her words seasoned with laughter, “you disport yourself in Soho’s clamorous dens?”

His captors’ grips were strong, but by their talk they might as well have forgotten him. He found no solace in it; it touched him, indeed, like an insult.

“Just honoring my roots, hon. All right, then.” The mortal woman lowered her pen nearly to the paper’s surface and held his eyes with hers, brows lifted. “What name was it you’ve forgotten again?”

Without an answer, they would not let him pass. And he must pass. Why, he also could not remember, but he was as certain as he was of body and breath that he could not return whence he came.

“Perhaps he bears a curse,” offered the woman on his left.

The man on his right made a rude noise in the back of his nose. “Or just a lot more beer than is good for him.” He leaned closer and made much of sniffing the air. “Or brandy? Don’t drink it if you can’t hold it, boy.”

“All right, you two, don’t rile him up. I’d like to get home for breakfast.”

The woman at his left with the tarnished eyes pinched his arm fiercely through his shirt and smiled when he flinched. “Do as your fellow winsome emigrants, and speak a false name. We neither know nor care for the truth, stripling.”

Her companions did not correct her, but only waited.

Desperation drove all names from his head, not merely the one he owned. He cast his eyes about the room, seeking any object that would offer a word to call himself by. The human woman’s pen hovered over the ledger, impatient to tie him to this place with ink and paper—

“Page,” he declared, too loud, and he was grateful they would accept a lie, for no one would have believed it true. “I am called Page.”

“I’ll just bet address and place of birth are a great big mystery, too.” Had the red-haired woman been of the Blood, he would have judged her both annoyed and entertained.

The thought of being anyone’s entertainment revolted him. He closed his lips and lifted his chin, and was almost glad the vacancies of his mind left him nothing to tell her.

She nodded and gave her attention to her ledger. “No … 
fixed … address,” she pronounced, the pen point skipping and scratching across the paper.

For all he knew, he was a vagrant indeed, and all his pride was false.

“There. Was that so hard? Welcome to Bordertown. Enjoy your visit. Stay out of trouble.”

As if her words were an incantation, the bruising fingers on his arms unclenched. He drew himself up tall and brushed his sleeves, pretending he might tidy away the creases and the lasting soreness. The man with the brilliant hair observed the motion and shot a mocking smile at him, straight as any arrow.

You shall regret what you’ve done this day
, he thought. But why? One fey boy with nothing but the clothes he stood in, and those fouled and torn—were he to say aloud “You shall regret,” the room would riot with laughter. Even the human would laugh at the elfling with his bloody shirt and false name.

But he inclined his head as if acknowledging those of lesser rank, turned on his heel, and strode boldly from the hut.

He faltered in the ill-lit street. What he’d thought was a hut while inside was only an anteroom for the larger building behind. Along one of its brick flanks stretched a gray stone terrace, breast-high, as if it had been built to stand above some seasonal flood. Doors yawned down its length, each one tall as two men and wide as two with arms outstretched. A flat wagon on iron wheels backed up to one door; two people unloaded its freight of cloth-wrapped bales and stacked them on the terrace, where another figure seemed to be inspecting them. He couldn’t tell if the workers were human or of the Blood.

To his right stood the Border that marked the bounds of the Realm. It fluttered, luminous, alive with motion like a curtain in a breeze. It looked soft as fog, but where it met the humans’
buildings of brick and stone it seemed to slice through like a blade through a neck. Did the structures’ other halves exist beyond that wall? He couldn’t remember.

An arch of some material like poured stone rose above the pavement. Its pillars stood square and simple on the earth; but as they rose higher their surfaces roughened, forked, until the apex of the arch seemed made of braided branches of a stone tree, its bark scaled like a serpent’s skin. In the deep shadows of the carving, specks of light came and went, like stars obscured by a passing cloud. There was nothing to be seen between the pillars but the shifting glow of the Border.

Through that Gate he had lately passed. He could not go that way now.

He turned left, down the street between blocky human-built structures that smelled of oil and dirt, strange spices, and mortality.

Even in darkness, he felt naked and small on the broad way that led from the Gate. Was he a fugitive? He turned at the first street-joining, then turned again and again, until he’d lost the route back. Always he walked downhill. Down was farthest from where he’d begun.

At first he did not properly see the avenues and passages he walked; he did not look, for fear of being looked upon in turn. But as his breath grew short and his steps slowed, he gawked like …

Word and image failed him, as if water had spilled across the surface of his thoughts and washed memory away. Frustration knotted his throat and wetted his eyes. He shook his head fiercely. He would not weep where strangers might see.

Now he noticed that much in the city was not human-built. Beyond the crossing of two streets, he found the way bordered by a high hedge made of glass roses. A hammered silver gate set in the hedge showed him his own face, distorted. Among the nodding,
glittering canes above his head he glimpsed silver-latticed windows.