•
Four
When he came to, it had begun to grow dark. He was lying on frozen ground, cold, uneven, hard. Something sharp was digging into his side, and one of his legs had gone completely numb. His back ached. Three. Three broken ribs. And an entirely new set of bruises and lacerations. Wretched horses.
No, not horses. Steeds. Horses didn’t step on people, not if they could possibly avoid it. They hated that, horses did. The entire equine family hated that. Uneven moving surfaces were dangerous, an excellent way to break a—
He sighed.
All about him, the broken stalks of last year’s harvest spiked to the sky, jagged silhouettes against the blue of the twilight hour. He had no idea what time it was, nor how long he had been unconscious. He had not dreamed. He was glad that he had not dreamed.
(Selkie. I am the seventh son of a seventh son, and I was born with the Sight. I have dreamed of your coming. I dreamed it the night before last, and also the night before that. When I dreamed it again last night, I knew that it was a true sending and no deception. I knew that it would be tonight. I know what you have come to do. I...)
“Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle...”
He blinked, momentarily confused. Someone was approaching. He could hear heavy bootfalls, crunching through the frost, snapping the withered stalks underfoot.
“...and above every beast of the field...”
Suddenly he realized who the dead boy in the hospital must have been.
“Upon thy belly shalt thou go.” The boots came to a stop, right before his face. “And dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.”
Youngjack smiled wearily.
“Now, that’s just what I’ve always liked about you, Gunner,” he told the pair of boots. “That sense of moderation.” He struggled up onto one elbow. “A lesser man,” he explained, “a lesser man would have contented himself with a simple ‘Lo! How the mighty are fallen.’ A truly great man, now,” he continued. “A truly great man would have forborne altogether. But not you, Daniel. Oh, no. Not you. You steer the middle course.”
He looked up. Gunner’s cheeks and nose were bright red, and his eyes were watering: it must be very cold out here. He was holding a stalk of fennel in one hand and a shotgun in the other. The wooly bobble hat he had pulled down over his ears was in desperate need of repair: its blue and red pom-pom dangled woefully from a single thread.
“Good lord,” Youngjack murmured. “It’s Minnesota Gothic. Still Life With Fennel. I…” He shook his head. “Good evening, Walker.”
“Evening, Thomas.” Gunner fixed him with a long steady stare, then snorted. “Well! I’d say the Sheriff worked you over pretty good there.”
“Oh, yes,” Youngjack agreed. “She did.”
“Always has had a temper, that woman.”
“Yes. She’s charming. How I do envy the lucky fellow she marries.”
“You should have stayed the hell away from Herschberg, Thomas. I did try to warn you.” He leaned back on his heels and shoved his fennel stalk deliberately back into the pocket of his ratty rust-colored parka. “‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman,’” he cited, with just a bit more relish than Youngjack really thought was called for. “‘And between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’”
“Oh, fear not, Daniel.” Youngjack assured him. “Fear not. I think you will find that the good Sheriff’s heel remains perfectly unblemished.” He bared his teeth. “What may I do for you this evening, Walker?”
“Well, for starters, Manitou,” Gunner told him evenly. “You can get the hell off my land. Why don’t you just move along? Your blood’s not going to do my corn a bit of good.”
“This is corn?” Youngjack considered the field stubble for a moment, then shook his head wearily. “Daniel, if you have corn coming up in November, then surely my blood ought to be the very least of your agricultural worries. But no. No, forgive me. I had no idea that this was your land. I intended no trespass.” He gathered himself to rise, but the world turned very abruptly grey, and he fell on his hand, gasping. “You may,” he said, waiting for the ground to stop spinning. “Have to give me a few moments.”
“The Seven are risen, Manitou.”
“Oh, yes.” The spinning began to subside. “Yes, I know. I’ve met them. Or three of them, at any rate. Delightful fellows.”
“Uh-huh. Thought you might have. They mentioned something about leaving some dog of the Dark to skulk around out here somewhere. Scared the hell out of me, that did. I should’ve realized it would only be you.”
“Daniel.” Youngjack took a deep breath. “I could really use some help here.”
“You’re stronger than you look. You think I don’t know that? I’m not carrying you anywhere. If you can’t walk, then you can crawl.”
“I was referring to a place to stay. Sanctuary. I—”
“You,” Gunner said. “Have got to be kidding me.”
“No, I am not kidding you. What do you think? Look at me.” He sat back on his heels. “If this is what a second warning looks like, do you really think I’ll get a third? I ought to be in a hospital, not bleeding to death out here in your back forty. I have no place to go, I have nowhere to stay, everything that I possess is in a storage facility in Eden Prairie, the National Guard won’t let anyone leave town, and—”
“And if you stay, they’re going to kill you. Yeah. It’s a bad situation, Thomas. What do you want me to tell you? You brought it all on yourself. If you need help, why not ask the powers you serve?”
“Oh, yes,” murmured Youngjack. “That would be an entertaining interview.”
Gunner shook his head. “You serve harsh masters. I can’t help that. Made your decision, didn’t you? You made it before I was even born. The last days are approaching, Manitou. Reap what you have sown.”
“Reap what I have sown? Oh. Oh, Daniel. Do not lecture me on reaping and sowing. I, at least, know better than to look for corn to come up in November. I serve harsh masters? You can see how the Lonshi repaid me for leading them nearly to your front door.”
“They repaid you with your life, Youngjack. What more did you expect? The great powers of the Light bear little love for your kind.”
“If you think,” Youngjack told him irritably, “that they bear any greater love for your own, Daniel, then you are sorely mistaken. Love is not in their nature.”
“Spared your life, didn’t they?”
“Why, yes. Yes, they did. And very generous of them it was, too, given that they were the ones threatening it in the first place. Your people have a very strange notion of love, Gunner.” He sighed. “Do you know, when I first sensed their presence, in the hospital, I thought that what I was feeling was my master, come to speak with me? It’s tragically easy to make that mistake, have you ever noticed that? They’re virtually impossible to tell apart, Daniel, your masters and my own. Now why do you think that might be?”
“‘Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.’” Gunner hawked and spat. “Spare me your filth, Manitou. You’ve always been a liar. You serve the Father of Lies himself. What the hell would you know about love?”
Youngjack tilted his head to one side and squinted up at him through his one good eye.
“Albert Feinstein does not rest,” he said coldly.
Gunner shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me. Murderers often don’t.”
“Neither do their victims. You call me a liar, Gunner? Did you really think I wouldn’t have known who must have fired those shots? As if it weren’t bad enough to break your faith with me, you had to send William O’Halloran? A man whose keen marksmanship is exceeded only by his utter stupidity? Oh, Daniel, Daniel. Onto my campus? Into one of my dormitories?”
“Didn’t know they were yours.”
“We,” Youngjack spat. “Had an arrangement. An agreement, Gunner. Not. On. My. Campus.”
“I wasn’t the first to break that agreement, Thomas.” Gunner shook his head sadly. “I hadn’t even thought that your people were capable of that. Of reneging. No fool like an old fool, I guess. I should have realized that your kind would have to be deception through and hrough.”
Youngjack stared at him.
“I," he stammered. "I, I, I? Renege? Oh, Daniel. My dear. If I were in the habit of reneging...”
“You’ve been harboring a wolf, Youngjack. Our agreement—“
“Applied only to biters. The wolf’s not a biter.”
“No? We had one wolf in this town. Now we got two. You going to tell me it was passed on through a goddamn toilet seat?”
“Biting someone—”
“You were supposed to come to me the instant you knew you had a biter on that campus of yours. Instead, you been covering up for the damned thing. Far as I’m concerned, that makes any agreement we might have had null and void.”
“Biting someone—”
“Null and void, Thomas.”
“Biting someone,” Youngjack gritted, “does not make someone a biter.”
Gunner stared at him, then let out a single bark of amazed laughter.
“What?” he said. “You want to say that again? Maybe backwards this time? That’s...that’s not even sophistry. That’s just plain bullshit, is what that is. And you know it as well as I do. Who the hell are you protecting?”
Youngjack said nothing.
“The wolf bit someone, okay? Maybe you don’t care about that. Guess you probably don’t. Why the hell should you? But I do. So who is it?”
Youngjack continued to say nothing. Gunner took a step toward him.
“Who is it, Youngjack?" he growled. "God damn it…”
“Oh, what are you going to do here, Gunner?” cried Youngjack. “Beat it out of me? Fine. Go right ahead. You’ve had an amazing stroke of luck, as it happens, because I come to you tonight pre-softened. Tenderized, even. Even a man your age could probably break me in about three minutes flat. Try that shotgun. It won’t take long, and then you can go out and gun one of your own down like a dog. Cold-blooded murder, Daniel. Or, alternatively, you might consider actually thinking for once in your life. Do you really believe that I would permit some ravening monster to go rampaging out of control on my campus?”
“I think you might.”
“Please. I’m the chief of campus security.”
“Not anymore, you aren’t. You resigned, remember? Besides which, you never really were. That wasn’t your job, it was your cover. So stop talking to me like I don’t know what the hell you are. You aren’t human, you serve the forces of Darkness, and your people are deception itself. I don’t even know if I believe you really feel pain. You sure look sick as a sheep right now, but what does that tell me? Nothing.”
“I feel pain. Daniel, you’ve known me for thirty years.”
“No I haven’t. I’ve known your disguise for thirty years. You think I believed for a minute that was really you? You think I’m a goddamned fool? You think I don’t know the difference between a person and a persona?”
“The difference?” Youngjack closed his eyes wearily. “The difference is a single vowel, Gunner. It’s exactly the same difference as that between human and humane. Would you please just think? If the wolf is such a menace, then where are all the corpses? I know of only one: the Feinstein boy. Two silver bullets through his heart. Dead, in human form, on the night of the full moon. My people are deception personified? Shall I tell you the key to that? You have to ask yourself: what is my motivation? You have to adopt the premise. You have to entertain the hypothesis. You have to assume,” he said, and smiled suddenly. “You have to assume,” he said, “the position. You might want to try it yourself some time. Why don’t you ask yourself the question? What is your motivation? Pretend to be a persona for just a single moment and think about it, will you? Because who or what I serve isn’t really the issue here at all, you know. What you serve is. And just what is that, precisely? Do you even know? Do you even know what it is that you serve? Do you have the slightest idea what your motivation is supposed to be? Or are you just making this all up as you go along?”
“I know what I serve.” Gunner was staring at him. “I don’t know what the hell it is that you think you serve, but I know what I...I…hell, goddamned Manitou, I should never let you people talk to me. God damn, but you creatures could talk Christ Himself down from off the cross.”
“Oh, no,” Youngjack told him pleasantly. “We couldn’t. We did try, you know. But He just wouldn’t budge.”
“Please,” he added, after a moment's silence. “That was...forgive me. I meant only to lighten the mood, Daniel, not to mock your faith. I am most terribly sorry if I gave offense.”
“Offense.” Gunner shook his head. “Shit. I was just trying to figure out if you were joking or not.”
“Oh, please. Of course I was joking. The wolf is harmless, Daniel. I swear it.”
Gunner balanced his shotgun against a dried stalk of corn, fished in his pocket, and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He began slapping it contemplatively against one palm.
“Cigarette?” he asked, after a moment.
“I quit ten years ago. You know that.”
Gunner grunted. Youngjack watched as he bent over his lighter, hands cupped to protect the flame from the wind which was picking up all around them. He could smell snow on the air: there was a storm on the way, a bad one, maybe even more than one. Gunner closed his Zippo with a snap, shoved it back in his pocket. He rocked back on his heels and puffed.
“Wolf’s not a threat, you say,” he said, at length.
“Not a threat, Daniel. You have my word.”
Gunner nodded slowly, then shrugged. “I didn’t send Bill out to gun for that Feinstein kid,” he said. “That was just some damned fool notion of his own. None of the O’Hallorans has ever had a lick of sense. You know that.”
“Yes,” sighed Youngjack. “I know that.” He looked up at the sky, at the clouds building there, the storm front rolling in. “We’ve got some bad weather coming, Daniel.”
“Uh-huh. I can feel it.”
“It’s going to be a very cold night to sleep out here in your field.”
“You’ve never felt the cold in all the years I’ve known you, Thomas. You’ll live. Probably.”
“I really am,” Youngjack told him irritably, “beginning to understand just why it is that you never married. Good lord, Gunner, even Cain managed to find himself a wife.”
“I’m not your kin, Manitou.”
“Are you so sure about that? You’re hardly infallible. I need a place to spend the night. One night. Is there really not a drop of balm in Gilead? Human, Daniel. Humane. Why don’t you be a big spender and splurge on the vowel for once in your life? What are you so afraid of? Of me? Please. I’m hardly dangerous. I can’t even stand up unassisted. What harm could I possibly do you? Do you think that I plan to steal your silver? Do you think that I have the power to corrupt your soul? Where is your faith? Why don’t you place your trust in God, Walker?”
“Would you shut up already? You talk too damned much.” Gunner took a last drag on his cigarette, then flicked it across the field. It bounced a few times, spraying sparks, before going out. “Don’t make any trouble for me, Thomas,” he said, reaching down to haul Youngjack to his feet. “Any of your people come looking for you, I’m kicking you straight out the door. I don’t need the goddamned Dark descending on my property. You got that?”
“I understand that,” gasped Youngjack, clutching at him. “Daniel, those ribs are broken, please…”
“And if Hiram hears where you are, I’m not protecting you. I don’t need any more trouble with Hoover and his boys. This isn’t sanctuary, Manitou. This is a bed for the night. You got that?”
“I understand.”
“I don’t care how bound you might be. I still don’t trust you. You say you’re not dangerous?”
“I’m not—”
“You are dangerous.” They began to stagger their way across the field. “And you damned well know it.”
“Not to you.” Youngjack shook his head and coughed. “Not…never as a guest in your home, Daniel. I can’t be. The Law...” He coughed again, harder this time. Blood. Oh, terrific. “The Law of Hospitality forbids it.”
“Law of Hospitality.” Gunner snorted. “Sometimes I think you just make up all those goddamned laws as you go along.”
“Well, of course we do.” Youngjack stared at him. “You mean you didn’t know that, Walker? Of course we just make them up as we go along. After all...” He closed his eyes, concentrating on the rough field stubble underfoot, trying not to fall. “After all,” he said. “Somebody has to.”
•
Five
Monday
November 24, 1990
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Mark muttered.
The student sitting at the table beneath the giant banner in the Student Union looked up at him with a weary smile. The banner read:
STOP TORTURE WEEK
“You want to sign the petition?” she asked.
“It’s a petition to stop torture?”
“It’s a petition for a stay of execution.”
“I’ll sign it,” said Matilda eagerly. Matilda would sign anything, and in fact occasionally had to be prevented from signing things twice or thrice or even four or five times, thus rendering them invalid in the eyes of the law.
Elgin sidled his way up to the table and bent down to read the specifics. “Lethal injection?” he said, frowning. “But that’s not torture, surely?”
“No,” the student told him, rolling her eyes. “Execution.”
“But your banner says—”
“We’re against execution too, okay? The petition is a separate thing. It’s not part of the overall Stop Torture Week drive, all right? Amnesty International multi-tasks, okay?”
“Oh!” Elgin, who had been peering at her, suddenly smiled. “You’re a friend of Sam’s, aren’t you? You’re…Alice?”
“Allison.”
“Yes, of course.” He bent down to pick up the pen. “So what did he do? This Washington fellow?”
“Raped and murdered a fourteen year old girl.” Elgin put the pen back down. “Allegedly,” she added quickly.
“Allegedly? But he was convicted?
“Yeah,” sighed Allison. “He was convicted.”
“How do you know that he doesn’t want to die?” Mark asked her.
She stared at him as if he’d gone completely mad. “Razor blades,” she pointed out, “are inexpensive. And readily available over the counter of any corner store.”
“Sorry, old girl,” Elgin told her. “I don’t think I can sign this.”
She shrugged. “Your tax dollars. You want to fucking kill people with them, then don’t sign the fucking petition.”
“I can’t believe you’ve actually declared one week out of the year 'Stop Torture Week,'” said Mark. “I mean, what’s next? Stop Evil Week? Stop Badness Week?”
“That’s in March,” Alison told him.
He blinked. “What?”
“Stop Badness Week. That’s in March. We can only take on one issue at a time, you know. Don’t want to bite off more than we can chew.” She was wearing, he noticed, one pink sock and one orange sock, and she looked exhausted. “Washington dies in a week,” she said. “If nothing happens to stop it. Seven days. He dies.”
He signed the petition.
“Mark,” Matilda said. “Have you read this?” She was looking up from the Amnesty International flyer with big eyes. “Do you know what they do to people in these places? They—”
“You know what?” Mark told her. “I really don’t need to hear the details to know that I’m against torture, thanks.”
“And they have doctors,” she said, “who help them. How could a doctor do that? Aren’t they supposed to be sworn to help people?”
“No,” snapped Mark. “They’re sworn to do no harm. It’s not the same thing. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite.”
I, he thought, am not having this conversation again. This is just not happening to me.
But Matilda just looked up at him with that irritatingly wet, well, freshman look and said nothing. And so then, of course, he had to tell her.
“You just can’t know, can you?” he said. “When you try to do good. You can’t possibly know what effects your actions might have. Take Amnesty International, for example,” he said, with a dark look at Allison. “Sometimes what actually happens when they send off all those letters and petitions to foreign countries is that the prisoners just end up getting punished for it.”
“Actually,” Allison told him. “That very rarely happens. The vast majority of the time, the prisoners’ conditions are greatly improved.”
“Good can come of bad. Bad can come of good.”
“I can show you the statistics on that, if you want,” said Allison.
“Just look at Cambodia, for instance.”
“Cambodia?” Elgin squinted at him. “Was that bad coming of good, or good coming of bad.”
“Wasn’t that just a lot of people getting bombed?” asked Matilda. “And then being killed by death squads and in work camps and stuff?”
“Well, that’s just my point!” Mark yelled. “If all of those people had just worried about doing no harm, then no one would have been hurt, now, would they?”
“That was your point?” Elgin shook his head.
“You can’t know, you can’t ever really know what—“
“Mark,” Matilda said suddenly. “She’d already been dead for hours. You did know that, didn’t you?”
He stared at her.
“She’d been dead for hours,” repeated Matilda. “I mean, she would have been, um, cold, you know? So you couldn’t have done anything either to help or to harm her. Brittany was just being Brittany. I mean, I thought you knew that.”
He said nothing.
“She’d been dead for, like, half a day,” Matilda said.
“Who had?” asked Elgin.
Mark turned on one heel and stalked away.
“No one,” sighed Matilda. “Just forget it, Elgin.” She shook her head, then looked back down at the flyer. “I don’t know how people can do this sort of thing,” she said. “I really don’t.”
“It’s easy,” Allison said then, in a voice so hard and flat and cold that both Elgin and Matilda turned to stare at her.
“It’s so easy,” she said again. “It’s easy as shit. What, you think it’s just weird scary foreigners? You think it’s done by people with some kind of fucked up sadistic esoteric training or something? It’s just people, okay? It’s just what people do.”
They stared at her in silence. She shook her head.
“Shit,” she spat. “I fucking hate Stop Torture Week.”
•
Tuesday
November 25, 1990
Aurobindo Naidu, who was known as Sri to his colleagues, and as Bindi to his friends—none of whom lived on this continent, or even in this hemisphere—and as Jeff to the young woman he now watched on the ten-inch black-and-white monitor affixed to the wall above the desk, lit a cigarette and scooched in closer to the small electric space heater which was, he was coming to suspect, really nothing more than a fan with delusions of grandeur. Certainly the air it was blowing into his face didn’t feel at all warm, and it was blowing smoke in his eyes to boot, so he turned it away from him irritably. When that University President who had secured this place for them had warned them that the building was unheated, he hadn’t really thought that it would be anything like this. He was used to a different climate. He hunched down over his tea, shivering.
Of course, it would be even colder outside of the office, in the main portion of the warehouse where the girl now pressed herself up hard against the pillar to which her manacled hands were tethered. Not that the cold would bother her. Not with the sort of things that had gone into her breeding.
She turned herself around again. She had been turning herself like that all day, pressing herself first this way then that against the central column, and Sri, watching her, nodded to himself, remembering the rough stone wall, the way that it had beaded sometimes with evaporation, or maybe with condensation, with the moisture that at times he had become convinced was a part of him, not just his sweat or tears or blood or piss, but him, his very soul, oozing drop by drop out of his very pores.
The girl pressed her forehead against the column, and he nodded, remembering.
Cool, he thought. So very cool.
Towards the end there, when his tongue had been so swollen in his mouth that it had protruded like a dog’s and he had felt that he had no bones, no bones left, become nothing but jelly beneath his black and suppurating skin, he had come to believe that the wall, if only properly approached, might yield something back to him. He remembered rubbing his head against it in patterns, tracing out sigils and symbols and obscure formulae, begging for it to return something of him to himself, even a single drop. Blood from a stone.
She wasn’t quite there yet. Soon. A few days.
Behind him, Ghopal had rolled himself out of the stale narrow cot which the two of them shared—for of course, they had to sleep in shifts—and Sri could now hear him splashing water back there, washing himself as best he could given the primitive conditions: no heat, no hot water unless you boiled it yourself on the hotplate, no running water at all, only the jugs and jugs they had been forced to lug in themselves, carting them one by heavy one from the van. There were protocols to be followed, necessary courtesies, when quarters were this cramped and conditions this stressful. Sri did not turn around, nor in any way acknowledge the other man’s presence, until he heard that he had finished dressing himself, and until he was himself addressed.
“Fuuuuuuck,” Ghopal moaned, which was his usual morning greeting. He stumbled to the hot plate, putting up some more hot water, and then started scooping some of that slop he ate from the big tupperware container into a smaller bowl to be microwaved. Sri nodded to him, then switched the volume back on. It should never have been off, of course—it was supposed to be on all the time, carefully monitored, carefully evaluated, carefully assessed—but that was pure bullshit, and everyone knew it. No one followed that protocol. You learned that very early on. It would drive you crazy, listening to them every hour of the day; you would never get any sleep. And besides, the girl had stopped making the slightest bit of sense a day ago or so anyway.
The smell of Ghopal’s food began to fill the tiny room: some heavily spiced rice dish with peas and far, far too much anise. After only two days of this, just the smell of it had become enough to make Sri’s stomach roll. The man had come supplied with an endless quantity of the stuff; he ate nothing else. How could anyone do that, he wondered, eat the same thing for every single meal, every single day, day in and day out? It wasn’t normal, surely, not natural, for a human being to eat that way? That was the way animals ate, wasn’t it? Not even wild animals, either: tame ones, animals in zoos, animals being raised as food. Bestial, really, Ghopal and his food. Or feed, rather. Ghopal feed.
He shook his head. He knew that this was merely the strain of the close quarters, the unfamiliar country, the high stakes of their mission here, the terrible, terrible power of their subject. Stressful. And while he had worked with Ghopal before, it had never been in a situation like this, never only the two of them, never with no backup, no one to contact should anything go wrong. The only contact they had here was that Hoover, and he wasn’t even their contact, not really. He wasn’t their contact, but Michaelson’s, and even Michaelson wasn’t really theirs. He wasn’t of their Order. They were dealing here with two degrees of removal, contacts of contacts...it wasn’t a situation that inspired confidence.
Ghopal shoveled down his food, or feed, rather—as, to be fair, Sri supposed he really had to, with a metabolism like that—and had just managed to clean his bowl when the alarm went off. He sighed and rubbed his hands over his face wearily, staggered over to the bucket where they kept the canes soaking to keep them supple, selected one, cracked his neck from side to side, and left the room.
Sri reached over to turn the volume way down. He glanced once more at the monitor, noting the blur surrounding the girl. It was brightest at the wrists, of course—although much of that was the aura from the heavily-warded manacles themselves—but it surrounded her utterly, a faint distortion, a flicker in the corner of the camera’s eye. She was still effusing. But that was no surprise. She would, he knew, only stop effusing on the fifth day.
That had been foretold.
He sighed and took a final drag on his cigarette and glanced first out the window to the falling snow and then, with some irritation, at the poster on the wall, the poster that Ghopal had insisted on putting up there.
At the elephant-thing.
He shook his head. No. No, that was disrespectful. At Lord Ganesa, God of the removal of obstacles, and therefore certainly, as Ghopal had pointed out to him, a most suitable manifestation of the divine to honor here—in this squalid tiny office that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and stale bodies and stale Ghopal feed, of bored and tired and irritable stale men. Honor.
It was not, of course, anything about Ganesa Himself that irritated Sri. Of course not. Many paths, many paths, and all that. It was just something about those posters, those cheap posters, not even well-executed, not even well-designed. If you wanted to honor a deity, then why not invest in a nice statue? They were hardly expensive. Or at least put the poster in a frame. Ghopal’s Lord Ganesa poster had holes and tatters at all of the corners, where the tacks he had used to stick it up who knows how many other places had ripped right through the paper. At the bottom of the image, right beneath Ganesa’s foot, the number 1452 served to pronounce just how large a series of such images this particular company had managed to churn out, as if this were something to be proud of. As if quantity were quality.
And that, he supposed, was really what lay at the heart of it, wasn’t it? He had not been completely truthful, perhaps, when he had claimed that his distaste for the poster had absolutely nothing to do with Ganesa himself. It was something about the iconography, the imagery, something that reminded him of the city streets back home, of the noise and the crowds and the filth and the squalor, and of all of the hands: hands that opportuned, hands that groped, hands that picked your pockets. He would admit it: he didn’t really like the images of all of those Hindu gods. He didn’t like the way that they always had far too many—
“—hands.”
Sri started.
“What?” he gasped.
“I said,” Ghopal told him, dropping the cane back into the bucket and massaging one shoulder, “I don’t like the look of her hands.”
“They’re just a little swollen,” Sri told him, but he looked away as he said it, because he hadn’t much liked the look of her hands either, the last time he’d been in there.
“They’re too swollen. It looks like edema to me. And she’s sweating too much.”
“You’ve read the reports. She’s a rock. With the filth they bred into her line?”
“I don’t like the look of her hands,” Ghopal repeated, a bit sulkily.
Sri stubbed out his cigarette. “Our protocols are laid down by the will of the great divine power,” he said gravely. “Have faith.”
Ghopal nodded, slowly.
“I need to get some sleep,” Sri told him. “You’re on for four.” He stood up and stretched. Ghopal slipped into the seat he had just vacated and turned the volume back up. Very considerate. Sri spared the monitor one last glance. She was hugging herself to the column now, sobbing, pressed hard against it. He nodded.
Cool, he remembered. Cool—and now he could see it, once again, the cup that had been offered him when he had finally been taken down, too weak to stand, his vision nothing but a blur, his hands swollen and shaking and useless. She had slipped one hand behind his neck to help support his lolling head, and where her lips had touched his forehead, they had been so very—
“Cool,” whispered Ghopal, behind him. Sri blinked. He supposed that he’d always known that, or at least assumed it—that their training had been very similar—but still, it startled him, a little.
Even before it had touched his lips, the cup that she had raised for him, he had been able to see it, to feel it, just how cool it was, and how moist. He could tell how cold it must be from the moisture that had condensed there on the outside, a single bead wending its way down the simple bowl, and he had begun to cry then, without tears, without sound, amazed to find that he still had any longing left in him at all.
Oh, he had tried to say, and even if he could not speak, he knew that his words were heard, were understood. Is that, is that me? Is it? I thought that I had lost... Is that really me? Are you really giving me back to me?
—I caught it all, she had told him then. I caught it all. I did not spill a single drop. So take it back now, child. All of it. Drink.
And she had raised it to his lips, and then stroked his throat to help him swallow.
He walked now to the jugs of water and poured himself a glass, then opened the window just a crack, ignoring Ghopal’s objecting glare. He held the glass outside for a minute or so. To make it cold. To make it cold.
He always kept a glass of water by the side of his bed when he slept, finding it comforting somehow to know that should he awaken suddenly, he could always roll over to see it there, or even to have a drink. He always made sure that it was very cold first. He liked to be able to look over and see how cold it was, to see the condensation on the outside of the glass.
“But why?” he had asked her, when he had finally been able to speak once more. “Why?” She had drawn the cloth again over his swollen hands, washing them for him, helping him because he could not clean himself.
“Because,” she had told him, “you already knew how to do what it is that we do. And you know, you understand, why it must be done. But that just isn’t enough.”
The cloth had been cool, and her voice soft.
“It is also necessary,” she had told him, “to know what. What it is that we do. You needed,” she told him. “You needed to understand that.”
He placed the glass carefully on the floor beside the cot, careful not to spill a single drop, and lay down on the thin hard mattress, rubbing his fingers wearily over his face and through his hair, over his forehead where there, where her lips had touched him, was the mark of his Order, the sigil of Those Who Serve With Both Hands. The Blade and the Chalice.
The mark of the Order of Haurvatat and Malach-Ra.
•
Monday
November 24, 1990
“Brittany?” Janis pounded on the door, then waited, shifting from foot to foot in the corridor outside of apartment five. “Brittany, come on. I overslept, okay? I’m sorry.”
Mark shook his head.
“I don’t think she’s in there.” He didn’t believe for a second that Brittany would actually stay in her apartment sulking for two whole days just because Janis had stood her up. One day, maybe. Two days, no.
If she’s in there, he thought. Then she’s probably dead.
But of course, he wasn’t going to say that out loud.
Janis reached out and turned the doorknob all the way, then stopped, frowning. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. I just meant to rattle it. I didn’t think it would...” She shook her head, brow furrowed. “Brittany doesn’t leave her door unlocked.”
Mark, who thought that she very well might, particularly if it were just about time for her next dose of medication, said nothing.
“Maybe she caught my cold,” said Janis. Her own cold had disappeared virtually overnight. Mark, who had been convinced that she had been heading straight for pneumonia, found it a bit disturbing, actually.
“Did you ever see a doctor about that cold?” he asked her.
“What? Oh, no. I didn’t bother.” She shrugged. “I just got some sleep. Things like that usually go away on their own, don’t they?”
Not when they sound like yours did, thought Mark.
“So,” said Janis, turning the knob and just pushing the door open. “What was it you and Stephanie had a fight about yesterday, anyway?”—a question that came so completely out of left field that Mark could only gape.
But then a moment later he was gaping at Brittany’s apartment instead.
It was filled with lamps. There were lamps covering every conceivable surface, and lamps all over the floor, and even a few lamps sitting on the sofa. Extension cords snaked wildly across the ugly beige carpeting, plugged in turn into even more extension cords. They snarled across the floor like ganglia, bulbous nodes forming at their ends, where three or even four plugs had been jammed into the sockets side by side by side by side.
I can’t believe that she didn’t blow the circuit breakers with that, Mark thought, but even as he thought this, there was another, more compelling thought running underneath.
She’s dead.
He knew it, knew it in his bones. Not only was she dead, but she was dead in here somewhere, somewhere in this very apartment. She was lying drowned in her own vomit on the bed, an empty bottle of pills on a table beside her. Or she was bloated and cold in the bathtub, her wrists slit deeply and vertically, her hair floating in a sticky pink—
Oh. No. The water rationing. So maybe not. But still…
“Maybe we should call the police,” he heard himself say.
Janis looked at him as if he’d gone quite mad.
“Because she has lamps all over her floor?”
“Janis.” He took a deep breath, steeling himself for what felt like a betrayal of confidence. “Brittany is... She’s not well. You knew that, right? In the...” He trailed off, because he really just couldn’t say that, couldn’t say in the head. It sounded far too brutal. “She’s...she’s had some problems.”
Janis was staring hard at him, brow furrowed, the way she always did when there was something that she simply failed to grasp. Then her forehead smoothed.
“Oh,” she said. “You mean what she was taking all those pills for?”
“Yes.” He nodded, relieved. “Yes.”
“Mark.” She looked troubled. “On Saturday, she was cutting back on her pills. Didn’t you notice?”
“She what? No, I didn’t notice that. She shouldn’t do that. Not on her own. Not without consulting her doctor.”
“Well, she was.” Janis walked through the living room, stepping carefully over all of the desk lamps in her path. “Brittany? Brittany!”
“Janis.” She stopped and turned, and Mark no longer knew quite what to say to her. Not only was his conviction that there was a corpse somewhere in here totally irrational; it was also no excuse for leaving. Someone had to find the body. Someone always had to be the one to find the body.
He just didn’t want it to be him again. And he even more badly didn’t want for it to be Janis.
“Nothing,” he said, then shivered. “Jesus, it’s cold in here,” he complained. “Doesn’t she ever turn on her heat?”
“Is it?” Janis shrugged and turned the corner into the kitchenette. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
Mark was at her side in an instant.
One side of the tiny kitchenette of Brittany’s apartment was completely taken up with jugs of water, not the kind that had been distributed as rations, but the sort sold in office supply stores, designed to fit water coolers. She had stacked them one on top of the other, and Mark thought that it had probably been difficult for her, too; she was not really at all strong.
“Fuck,” he said, most sincerely impressed, then frowned. There had been no bottled water to be acquired for love or money in Herschberg for two days now. “She must have picked them up Saturday morning,” he said. “Just after the rationing was announced, but before...” But Janis was shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “No, she didn’t. She was as surprised as everyone else to hear about the water thing. Remember?”
“She was just pretending to be. She’s good at that.”
“I don’t think so.” Janis had crouched down, was bending over to peer at something near the bottom of the stack of jugs of water, and suddenly Mark didn’t like where this was going. He didn’t like it one bit. He knew, already knew what it was she was looking for, and he turned quickly and started to walk back into the living room. But it was too late.
“Mark,” Janis said, her voice funny and small. “Look at this.”
He didn’t want to.
“Mark,” Janis said. “It’s the date.”
He already knew what it would be.
“Mark,” Janis said. “She bought these on the Ides of November.”
“Weird,” he said flatly and then, forgetting for the moment that there was almost certainly a corpse in here somewhere, said: “I’m going to use the bathroom.” As he started down the hall he could hear her back there in the kitchen, opening cupboards and then the refrigerator. The walls in this place were thin, thin. Someone who lived in the apartment next door was listening to some old song from the early ‘80s.
“Da da da you don’t love me I don’t love you,” it went. “Da da da you don’t love—”
“Mark,” said Janis. He stopped, thinking: Oh, no. Her head’s in there, isn’t it.
“What?” he said and was amazed, really, at how calm his voice sounded. “Is something in the fridge?”
“Not in the fridge. In the freezer. Come look.”
He really didn’t want to.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Cold turkey.”
•
Wednesday
November 26, 1990
The sudden rise in volume made the speakers crackle and pop. Sri leaned over quickly to turn the knob.
“I thought she’d done with that,” said Ghopal. The girl was begging for water.
“She’s stubborn.” Sri smiled at the monitor. He was becoming quite fond of her, really. “The stronger the resistance the better, in the end. You know that. Has she pretended to faint on you yet?”
“Are you sure she’s not really fainting?” Ghopal shook his head doubtfully. “She’s sweating too much. It looks kind of...wrong. Oily. The way she’s sweating. I think she may be really sick.” He was shoveling in more of his feed, really bolting it down, too. “And I still don’t like the look of her hands. We ought to get someone in here to take a look at her.”
“She’s not sick. Have you seen her files? She has unbelievable resistance to injury and disease. She can control her body temperature, she can control her pulse, she can control her blood pressure. She doesn’t even really need to breathe all that much. She’s a rock. They finally got that right with the Caulfield line, at least. There’s nothing flaky in there. Nothing unstable. Not like some of those others. I don’t even really think she feels very much in the way of pain. Not the same way we do, anyway.”
“She managed to cut herself on something in there, I think,” Ghopal told him. “She was bleeding.” Sri frowned, then crossed the tiny room to peer into the bucket.
“How hard were you hitting her?” he asked sharply.
“Not that hard.”
The water in the bucket had a strange, lurid pink tinge to it. It didn’t even really look very much like blood; it was the wrong shade altogether. He blinked at it.
“Strange,” he said, then shrugged. “But unimportant. We would have been told about it if it were important.”
“True.” Ghopal took another bite, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed. “It has a funny smell," he said. "I noticed that earlier, when she lurched into me.” He shook his head. “Got it all over myself. I really do think we need to get a doctor in here to take a look at her. Maybe she can control her blood pressure, but that doesn’t mean that she knows how to. And I really don’t like the look of her hands.”
•
Tuesday
November 25, 1990
“You aren’t really going to buy that, are you?” Matilda asked Stephanie, who had picked up a bottle of shampoo in the toiletries aisle of Zabar’s and was contemplating it thoughtfully.
“Why not?”
“They test that on animals.”
“So?”
“So? What do you mean, so? Can you imagine it? They torture them. They blind them. Just to make sure that the perfume won’t hurt your eyes.”
“Well?” Stephanie looked at her. “Would you want the perfume to hurt your eyes?”
“They don’t have to do it like that. It's not necessary.”
“Oh, all right.” Stephanie sighed and put the bottle back. “You’re probably right. I’ll get one of the nice PC ones instead.” She smiled. “You really do like animals a lot, don’t you?”
“I am an animal,” Matilda told her. And then, after a moment’s pause, added: “And so are you.”
•
Saturday
November 22, 1990
“It’s how they change,” Bitsumi whispered. “That stuff. It’s their natural response to stress. It’s—”
“Yeah, I know that part, Jack.” Everyone knew that part. The Manitou could not hold an injured form. It was one of the ways you could spot them. Alastair rubbed his temple wearily. “So...”
“If,” croaked Bitsumi. “If it’s bound, if it can’t shift, then it can’t produce the—“
“I know that part too.” The blood of a bound shifter was nothing but blood. “Cut to the chase here, Jack, okay?”
“But. If, if the organism is stressed beyond a certain threshold, then the system begins to break apart. It begins to produce in great quantity.”
Alastair stopped rubbing and looked up sharply. “Even if it’s bound?”
A brief expression of disdain, almost of contempt, crossed Bitsumi’s face.
“Only if it’s bound,” he said, in what might have been a snap, under different circumstances. “If it isn’t bound, then—”
“Then it couldn’t ever reach that level of stress. It would shift out of it first. Yeah, okay.”
“It's like a histamine dump. That’s when—”
“I know what a histamine dump is.”
Bitsumi’s lips moved soundlessly, but Alastair had caught it.
Yeah. I’ll bet you do, was what the man had said.
“So under stress,” Alastair prompted, “stress beyond a certain threshold, it starts to dump the mirrorstuff?”
Bitsumi shook his head weakly. “Not the...not that stuff. A relative. A...derivative.”
“The source for the drug.”
He nodded. Alastair sighed.
“Just what kind of stress are we talking about here, Jack?”
“I don’t, I didn’t...I didn’t have anything to do with, with that. I just, just worked, you know. In the lab. I didn’t—”
“Yeah.” Didn’t matter. They both knew what stress meant. “Okay.”
“They don’t feel pain,” Bitsumi breathed then. “Not the way we do.”
Alastair looked closely at him. “Do you really believe that, Jack?” he asked softly.
Bitsumi shook his head.
“No,” he whispered. “No, God help me. I don’t believe that. I never believed it.” He was starting to shake. Alastair, looking at him, thought: aw, fuck, I’m going to have to get Fields in here again.
“Matthias,” he sighed. “Look. Why don’t you go and get Doctor Bitsumi here a glass of—”
And that was when the man had just begun to laugh and laugh and laugh…
•
He looked down at the small metal basin of steaming water, then back up into Dan Gunner’s eyes.
“This is my hot bath?” he said.
“I’m not wasting any more of my water than that on you. You can clean yourself up with what you got there, or you can wait two hours and melt some snow. There’s gonna be plenty of that soon enough.”
“But you live here in such splendid rural simplicity,” objected Youngjack, gesturing weakly at the astonishing array of gleaming polished chrome and glass furniture which filled the main room of the old farmhouse. “I thought surely you’d have a well.”
“Wells are a pain in the ass. If I’d ever had one, I’d’ve filled it in. Are you done with that Percodan?”
Youngjack nodded. He had taken ten of them, and he thought that they might just be finally starting to have some effect.
Resistance to drugs, he thought. Why have I never thought to offer to forfeit that? He sighed and tossed down another shot of whisky.
“There's some clothes on your bed,” Gunner told him. “I got some things I got to take care of. There’s food in the icebox, you get hungry. Don’t make a mess, and don’t break anything. Jesus Christ, what a day. Army's crawling all over town, I got you to worry about, that old fool Shriever has his panties in a twist over the FBI taking his goddamned corpse away—good riddance, you would think, but...What the hell is wrong with you?”
Youngjack had frozen in the act of wrapping a roll of duct tape around the two wooden stakes from which he was fashioning a splint. He stared.
“What?” he whispered hoarsely. “Daniel, what did you just say about Shriever—”
Gunner nodded, once, with an expression of deep satisfaction.
“Thought as much. That girl is one of you people, isn’t it. I knew it. What game’s the damned thing playing, Youngjack?”
“Game? I...this can’t be...What day is it?”
“You must have been kicked one time too many in the head today. It’s Saturday night, Thomas. What—”
“No.” Youngjack rose to his feet, shaking his head wildly from side to side. He had dropped the roll of tape, which dangled from his arm, twisting upon itself, its sticky side catching on his lapel. “No. That’s...Tuesday. They’re not supposed to be here until Tuesday.”
“What the—”
“I had until Tuesday,” he insisted. “Tuesday. Daniel. Give me the keys to your truck.”
“You out of your mind? The truck? You’ve had a fifth of whisky and a half a bottle of my arthritis medi—”
“Give me the keys.”
“You even know how to drive?”
“Gunner.” Youngjack took a deep shaky breath. “Walker,” he said, very slowly and deliberately. “I am going to share a piece of information with you right now. This is absolutely not something that I ought to be telling you. This is a bargain of faith. If after I have told you what I am about to tell you, you feel that it is not worth the loan of your vehicle for just a few fu—” He stopped, closed his eyes. Swallowed. “For just a few miserable hours—and yes, Daniel, I do know how to drive; I have a license, it is current and clean—if you feel that it is not worth all that much, then you will repay me with whatever you think it is worth. Good faith, Walker. I have no time to dicker over price.”
Gunner stared steadily at him, then slowly nodded. “All right,” he said. “So tell me.”
“There are two men in town, if they have not left already. I did not expect them here until Tuesday. Somebody gave me bad information. They do work for the Federal government, but not for the FBI. They go by the names Johnson and Smith, and I imagine they’re probably staying at the Ramada Inn. They have an aesthetic appreciation for trope and will doubtless be wearing mirrored sunglasses and driving a dark late-model sedan. They’re hard to notice or even to remember very clearly, they have a funny way of getting what they want out of people, they are extremely dangerous, and they carry sorghum in their briefcases. They walk, Gunner, but not with God. All right? Now is that worth the temporary loan of your wretched truck?”
Gunner fished into his pocket for a moment, then tossed him the keys.
“Don’t wreck it,” he said.
•
He nearly ran down the coroner as he skidded into the drive, wrestling with the steering wheel, the roll of duct tape swinging wildly and knocking against his chest. He slammed on the brakes as Shriever leapt backwards, then reached down to roll down the window, feeling the truck shudder into its stall.
“Youngjack?” Old Doc Shriever stared at him. “You crazy? Damned fool, coming back here...”
“Abraham.” He was out of breath, almost as if he had run all the way here, and the Percodan was already beginning to wear off. “Abraham. Where’s…” he gasped, leaning out the window. “Where’s the Mankevich girl?”
“Hospital, looks like.” The coroner continued to stare. “Sheriff do that to you?”
“The Jane Doe who looks like Mankevich. Where is it? Her, I mean. Do you still have it? Her? The body? Is it in there?”
Shriever shook his head, still staring.
“Where did they take it? Her. Please. Where?”
“That Gunner’s truck?”
“Where did they take it?” Youngjack screamed. “Answer me!”
“Airfield.” The coroner stared and stared. “You gone mad?”
Youngjack turned the ignition, forgetting that the truck was still in gear. It coughed and choked. He reached across his body for the stick with his one good hand, snarling at the pain in his side, then stopped and leaned out the window again.
“Which airfield?” Shriever had begun to back away from the truck, cautiously, slowly. “Abraham. This is...it’s very important. That I catch up with them. Before...before they take her anywhere. I’m sorry that I snapped at you. Please.”
Shriever shook his head. “Outta luck then.”
“What? What do you mean, out of—“
“Took off already. In a helicopter. Four this afternoon. You crazy, coming back here? Sheriff sees you…”
Youngjack moaned. And pressed his forehead hard against the cool cool vinyl of the steering wheel.
•
•