by Kevin Hearne
Casual discussion of murder is not normal for me, but my head was already nodding in agreement. Because someone had murdered my apprentices so deviously, I had not even recognized them as murders until now. Their deaths had appeared to be such freak accidents that I’d never considered not getting another apprentice, thereby feeding the appetite of what must be the most passive serial killer ever.
“Is there anything you can tell me about who might have done this? Even by way of eliminating possibilities, as you did with the Tuatha Dé Danann?”
“It’s someone highly skilled, who demonstrates such mastery over magic that I doubt that it’s anyone human. It’s conceivable that it’s the work of a god. Which would make killing them a difficult proposition.”
“…Yes.”
“But if all else fails, you have work-arounds, right?”
“How so?”
“This enemy may be too powerful to confront. But you have already figured out how to use technology to get around the first curse, which turns your friends to enemies. The second is easily defeated by not taking on any new apprentices.”
“True, but then they win. I want the curses gone. I can’t get my apprentices back, but maybe I could have friends again. Talk to my son again. And teach an apprentice who’d actually make it to mastery.”
The goddess nodded. “I would wish that. It’s a quest worth pursuing. I cannot promise to help you along the way, except to be receptive when you ask. I may have to tell you no because I have obligations and responsibilities to other pantheons, many of which you are already aware of. Without knowing who your enemy is, I can only be vaguely supportive.”
“I understand and think that is very kind.”
Brighid raised her finger and caught the eye of Harrowbean—or Heather MacEwan—and then twirled her finger, nodding as she did so, to indicate that we were ready for drinks. That was a signal for a change of subject, I realized, and I would have to stow away these revelations and emotions for now and unpack them later. We did have other business to discuss.
The bartender brought me my usual Pilgrim’s and tonic and brought Brighid a Boë violet gin garnished with a bit of grapefruit. A violet drink for the violet hour.
The First among the Fae beamed her gratitude at Harrowbean, and once the bartender had retreated, we poured our tonics over the ice lounging in a gin bath and enjoyed the pleasant bubble and fizz.
Brighid held up her glass, and when she next spoke, there was a bass and a soprano note riding along with her typical alto. I’d heard legends about that triple voice: She could tell no lie when she spoke that way, for it was speaking three times all at once. “I appreciate you seeing to so many contracts and enforcing our treaties over the years, Mr. MacBharrais,” she said. And then her voice returned to normal. “I wanted you to hear that from my own lips and know that it was sincere. Sláinte.”
Stunned into silence and perhaps a bit of panic, I realized that this would be the ideal time—if any time was ideal at all—for me to present my poem to her.
“I’ve, uh—” I cleared my throat of a sudden obstruction and begged her pardon. “It’s been my honor. And I don’t know, uh…if it’s right. I certainly mean no offense, but I wrote a few lines in your honor, just some doggerel—”
“A poem?” She brightened. “For me?”
“Well, yes, for you in the sense that I wished to honor one of your aspects, but not about you, and it’s just nine lines, hardly a poem at all, but—”
“That’s perfect. Sometimes they can drag on a bit.”
“Oh. Well.” Apparently, Buck was misinformed as to Brighid’s preference for epic poems. Either that or he’d outright lied to me.
“Do please share.”
“Right. Uh. Let me see.” From my coat, I pulled the folded sheet of paper that represented hours of ludicrous effort, tried to smooth it out, and began to read my own handwriting.
The soft scrape of a heel on pavement
Can trigger again my bereavement;
I often remember her laugh or her face
At any inconvenient time or place
And weep salt tears for the years we’ve lost
And the boundary that only she has crossed;
But what I shall forever cherish—
At line seven I realized that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and I stopped. It was not my writing anymore. Or, rather, it looked like my handwriting, but I had certainly not written that down.
“What? That’s not all, is it?” Brighid asked. “It sounded like there was supposed to be more. At least two more lines about what you’ll cherish?”
“Well, yes, but they’re not my lines.”
“Don’t be modest, Mr. MacBharrais.”
“They are seriously not mine. My hobgoblin has clearly changed them, and they are now tremendously profane.”
The goddess grinned. “Your hobgoblin changed the last two lines of your poem?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I’m sorry.” I was also furious. While I had gone to the bathroom to freshen up, or while he was supposed to be shredding cheddar for nachos, he’d obviously made the switch.
She clapped her hands together three times in excitement. “This is great! I can see you are acutely embarrassed, so your hob has done an excellent job. Let’s hear it.”
“I don’t think they’re appropriate to be read aloud.”
“In poetry, Mr. MacBharrais, every word is sacred. None is profane. You have my assurance. Read them to me without delay.”
How could I refuse? I couldn’t. I took a deep breath and said the last three lines, since they were one single phrasing.
But what I shall forever cherish
Are the ripe, overgrown, and garish
Pubes around the knob of Al MacBharrais.
Brighid made the tiniest effort to stifle a giggle but wound up snorting and then laughing uproariously. She pounded the table. She startled everyone in the restaurant. She pointed at me and kept laughing.
“Your mustache! Is glowing! Because your face! Is so red! Ahahahahaha!”
I felt it heating up even more after that. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so embarrassed, and this was a significantly less dignified meeting than I’d hoped for.
Brighid eventually wound down and wiped at a tear on her cheek.
“Oh, I haven’t laughed like that in centuries.” People said that all the time as hyperbole, but in Brighid’s case it might have been true. “That gift of laughter was at your expense. You have my sincere gratitude and should feel only goodwill from me, Mr. MacBharrais. What were the last two lines of your poem before your hobgoblin changed them?”
“Something about how my love for the late Mrs. MacBharrais would never perish. I can’t remember the exact phrasing.”
“Oh, my. He hobbed your mourning poem? That’s a pair of brass bollocks he’s got.” She sniggered and then tried to master herself. “I mean, I am of course very sorry for your loss. Your sentiments for her were expressed very well for someone who’s not a deft hand at verse. But still. As far as taking the piss out of your new employer is concerned, you have to admit: Buck Foi has made a spectacular debut.”
I sighed and managed a weak chuckle. “I did tell him to be creative and nondestructive.”
She laughed again. “So he followed your instructions! And he wasn’t here to enjoy your discovery of the switch. Iron and forge, that’s a rare hob indeed! You’ve managed to snag an excellent one. I know you might not appreciate it at this moment, but you are to be congratulated, Mr. MacBharrais. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more sophisticated pisstaking from a hobgoblin.”
“Thanks,” I said tightly before finishing my drink and ordering another. Brighid likewise drained hers and twirled a finger for a second round.
“Right. We have actual business to
discuss, do we not?”
“We do.” I caught her up with all I had learned and suspected of Gordie and the mysterious Bastille, who had paid for the trafficking of a clurichaun, troll, leprechaun, undine, pixie, and a fir darrig. I informed her that my hobgoblin was supposed to be next and he claimed that Clíodhna of the Tuatha Dé Dannan had offered him an employment contract with my alleged approval.
“Clíodhna is behind it? That is a serious charge.”
“Yes.”
“One that we’ll not be able to solve without some proof. A hobgoblin’s word cannot be taken over Clíodhna’s, and she will certainly deny it.”
“Understood. I just wanted to make you aware that this happened to Buck and may or may not have happened to the others. But they were tempted to this plane somehow, then Gordie trafficked them to Bastille. What is particularly alarming from a sigil-agent perspective is that someone wrote down an ink recipe for Gordie. I found it in his papers.”
Brighid’s eyes flashed with blue flame. “They wrote it down, you say? Which ink?”
“Manannan’s.”
I withdrew the scrap of paper and pushed it across the table to her. “Do you recognize the handwriting?”
“No, but I doubt Clíodhna would do this herself. She would have made one of the bean sídhe do it for her. It still bears investigation. I will give this to Flidais—have you met her, the goddess of the hunt?”
I nodded and said, “Aye, we’ve met before, in Edinburgh.”
“I will ask her to track down whoever it was. She’s much better than a barghest. If it’s possible to track the author, she will do it. Why are you making that face?”
I hadn’t realized I’d been making one but quickly attempted to correct it. “It’s nae bother, really. Flidais calls me the Scots wizard, that’s all. But I’m no a wizard.”
Brighid smiled. “Take no offense. She calls anything that’s not Druidry either wizardry or witchcraft. We’ll see what she can find.”
She tucked the paper away and then placed her hands flat on the table on either side of her glass. “So. I have not been to this plane since that business with Loki required my presence.”
She was referring to the Norse god’s failed attempt to trigger Ragnarok the year before. Plenty of deities came to earth without permission that day but informed me of the visit and cited an emergency clause in their contracts to avoid Dire Consequence. I’d had to fly up to Sweden and throw around a lot of sigils to shut down the investigation of the aftermath and keep it from blowing up in the mainstream press.
“Perhaps it’s because I’ve had a couple of drinks,” Brighid continued, “but I’m not quite ready to go back without first punching someone. This news that someone is trafficking Fae has annoyed me, and I shouldn’t go back to my throne that way—the Fae will sense it immediately. So tell me, Mr. MacBharrais: Where can I go in Glasgow to find someone who deserves a good thrashing?”
That is how I wound up going to a pub full of football fans with a pagan goddess and telling her that she could easily start a fight in Glasgow by blaring a certain song on the speakers. Neither of Glasgow’s two top teams, Rangers or Celtic, was playing that night, so the crowd was mixed and watching other teams on the telly. All Brighid had to do was somehow get Tina Turner’s hit song “The Best” to blast in the pub, and since it was the entrance music for Rangers, all the Rangers fans would immediately start to sing along. That would enrage the Celtic fans, and violence would shortly ensue, guaranteed.
“Ye might have a fight just getting it going, because no pub in Glasgow will play it on purpose unless they know the whole house is full of Rangers fans.”
“I appreciate the challenge. Where would I find this song?” I pointed to a DJ booth in the far corner that was used for late-night dancing, and she immediately strode to it. I nearly asked if she knew how to run modern entertainment systems but on second thought kept my mouth closed, on the principle that it is never wise to ask a deity if they know something, lest they take offense at the implication that a mortal knows something they do not. She did, however, know how to operate the system. She started the song—and therefore the brawl—without delay, and I stepped outside to wait while she ended it too.
“Most invigorating,” she said when she emerged smiling a few minutes later. She did not appear to have actually been in a fight, except for a spot of blood on her top. “Very salutary. Just what I needed. I can find my own way back to Tír na nÓg, Mr. MacBharrais. You will hear more soon via Coriander.” She kissed three fingers and touched them to my forehead. “Go. You have my blessing.”
I did not know what that meant, exactly, but I felt better than I had in a long while as I bowed and took my leave.
The boiling of fish bladders, tendons, and skin to make a gooey and rather smelly adhesive must periodically be undertaken. It’s used in small amounts in many inks as a low-level binder. It’s a pain to make—especially descaling the skin. There’s no quick way around it, and the scales get everywhere, much like glitter. You wind up finding them in your cracks and folds days later, and it can be mortifying when someone points out that you’ve got a bit of fish in your dimples. But taking pains to make fish glue and using rare ingredients ensures that no one is accidentally creating inks potent enough for sigil work.
Whipping up a batch of fish glue is a perfect task to assign to an apprentice. It’s a chore I’d set for all seven of them, who were doomed to die before becoming masters because I didn’t realize I was lugging a deadly curse around on my heid.
I’d have to do it by myself from now on, and I figured that for all its inconvenience, it was a wee penance to pay for a truly massive cock-up. I know Brighid said I bore no responsibility for the deaths of my apprentices, but I felt guilty anyway and knew I always would.
It only took half a block for the euphoria of Brighid’s blessing to wear off. My dizzy heid was busy reevaluating all my years as a master sigil agent, thinking I was shepherding my apprentices to greatness while I was in fact ushering them to their doom. Reviewing the progress of their education before they’d passed, I didn’t see a correlation between them learning something specific and then dying soon afterward; the curse must use some other benchmark than sigil training to know when to trigger. I should have asked Brighid more questions about the mechanics of it, and I winced the way one always does when a moment’s passed and you suddenly wish you could go back and say or do the perfect thing you thought of twenty minutes too late.
I didn’t know the precise trigger conditions for my other curse either, but I always remembered the moment when it did trigger, because it was never a gentle ghosting when someone decided they didn’t like me anymore. They let me know about it. Loudly, often with bared teeth and occasionally a thrown fist.
Eleven years ago, when I was in my fifties and my dear wife had already passed, and I was stuck in a morbid Shakespearean fugue where every third thought was of the grave, and I was wondering if perhaps I should find an enforcer like Nadia, the curse went off for the first time. Dougal, my own son, landed a right cross on my jaw, said he hated me and never wanted to lay eyes on my worthless carcass again and I shouldn’t call or text. This was at his house: He’d just given me a cup of tea, I had said, “Thank you,” and that did it. I left bewildered and gave him some space, and after it happened again and again with friends that I spoke to in my distress, I tried to speak to him once more to see if time had reduced his anger at all.
It had not. If anything, it was worse. His face turned red, spittle flew from his mouth, and he promised to kill me if he saw me again.
I made sure he didn’t see me after that, but I checked in on him from time to time. After the revelations Brighid had bestowed on me, I thought he was due for another checkup.
Dougal was a bartender at a nice pub called The Citizen on St. Vincent Place, an easy walk from Queen Street station, and only ten minutes’ wal
k away from my own flat. The pub was often busy, and it was now, so he never saw me come in. The press of bodies around the bar was too thick and he was too slammed with work to look up and scan the faces.
I ducked in and asked for a table, was led by a pleasant hostess past the mixed gabbling horde of business folk and tourists to a small place in the dining room beyond the bar and out of sight, and there I ordered a finger of seventeen-year-old Balvenie DoubleWood, which Dougal would eventually pour for me.
He was busy shaking a cocktail as I passed him by that night, perhaps a Last Word or a Bee’s Knees. He looked well, and that was all I really needed to know. I ordered my drink as soon as I was seated and it arrived in six minutes, whereupon I asked for my bill.
I examined the dram, curling the glass and tilting it in my fingers, the amber liquid swirling inside representing the only commerce I’d been allowed with my son for eleven years now. It was a sad pour for a stranger, and that was what the curse had made us: strangers. I did not know if he followed football anymore or how my grandchildren were doing in school. I didn’t know who they wanted to be when they grew up or what hopes Dougal and my daughter-in-law held for their futures.
That and so much more had been stolen from me. And despite Brighid’s assurances that a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann hadn’t performed the actual curse, the truth was, one of them was as likely to be responsible as anyone else. The Tuatha Dé Danann could have hired the work out, and most certainly would have done if they intended to curse me, knowing that their work could be inspected and possibly identified by anyone with magical sight.
You had to pay attention to what the Tuatha Dé Danann didn’t say as much as to what they did say.
Whisky, at least, had its own language, and I could pretend that Dougal would have intended the dram’s notes for me back when there was warmth between us. Honey and apples in the nose, a bright and luxurious crispness. Flavors of vanilla and honeysuckle on the tongue, and a sweet, lingering finish of caramel and old wood. It evoked feelings of camaraderie and compassion.