by Kevin Hearne
“Whaaaat?” Nadia gave a teasing laugh and waved at him. “Get out o’ here! Ye’re full of shite.”
“It’s truth! I tell ye three times. Lookit.” The ogre began to undo the belt of his trench coat, and Nadia stretched out a hand to stop him.
“Wait. Ye have trousers on under there, right?”
“Aye.”
“Okay, go ahead. Show me these wards.”
He was telling the truth. He had magic-dampening wards sewn into the lining, using thread dyed with the proper inks. He had them in his trench coat, his waistcoat, his shirt, and Nadia stopped him there because we didn’t want to see or possibly smell his undershirt. Regardless, I’d never seen an ogre wear so many layers. I wouldn’t know how effective the wards were without a practical demonstration, but I didn’t think they needed to last long. They only needed to keep the ogre upright long enough to get hold of Buck, and then it would be pretty much over. Buck wasn’t going to overpower an ogre, and neither was I. The brute was a lorry full of muscle tissue.
But while Durf was very scrupulous about not revealing his employer’s name, he was not so bright about keeping his defenses a secret. We knew now that whoever was behind this would be prepared for Buck’s magic and we could employ tactics to counter this. Tactics like standing behind Nadia.
I typed on my phone as Nadia congratulated Durf on his battle preparedness against hobgoblins.
[The individual you seek is now under my protection, and he remains on this plane legally under a contract I drew up myself. You may tell your employer that and be satisfied. Without official reason to be here, I must ask that you return to the Fae planes immediately, in accordance with the treaty.]
The ogre flinched, as if making a request of him was a physical blow. “Wot? Naw, I cannae leave without Gag Badhump. If ye won’t help, I’ll just go find him myself.”
[I can’t allow that.]
Durf flashed his rotten teeth at me. “How’re ye gonnay stop me?”
Nadia glanced back at me with one eyebrow raised, and I nodded to give her permission.
“He won’t stop ye. I will,” she said, and she pulled her straight razor out of her jacket pocket and unfolded the blade. The ogre’s expression turned incredulous, then amused.
“Haw! I’ve got toothpicks bigger than that.”
“Just tae be fair, Durf,” Nadia said, “have ye ever heard why Al is the most feared of all the sigil agents?”
The ogre’s amusement faded. “He’s supposed tae have a battle seer or sumhin like that.”
Nadia winked. “Atta boy. And have ye heard about the battle seer’s weapon?” She twisted the blade so that the light flashed along the flat side, where painted sigils could be seen.
“It’s supposed tae have a Sigil of Iron Gall on it.” It had more than that, but Iron Gall was the one that mattered to the Fae. His shoulders slumped.
“Aye, ye’re a bright one, in’t ye? I can see ye’re puttin’ it all together now.”
“No one told me the battle seer was a woman who worked in his office.”
“Aye, I can tell ye weren’t briefed properly. I’m givin’ ye a fair chance tae change yer mind now. Go back home and eat some nice pixies, forget all this.”
He shook his head. “I cannae go back without the hobgoblin. They have ma family. So there’s no hope for poor Durf now.”
I frantically typed [Who are they?], but its sound was lost in Durf’s roar as he lunged at Nadia, arms wide to prevent her escape. They collapsed together and she wasn’t there, having ducked and rolled to her right, toward the office door. I backed away but not far enough, as Durf’s momentum propelled him forward and he delivered a beefy shoulder to my upraised arms. It slammed me back against the bookcase hard enough to dislodge some volumes, and I groaned, my bruised ribs crying out at the renewed punishment. But Durf was getting his, off-balance from his lunge. Nadia had rolled to her feet and slashed him three times on his upper left arm, swish-swish-swish, right through his layers. They weren’t deep cuts, but they didn’t need to be. The steel of the blade had iron in it, already deadly on its own, but the Sigil of Iron Gall made it ten times worse. It burnt him badly like acid, his flesh instantly blistering and even bubbling, and he flinched, twisting his left side away so that Nadia couldn’t keep slashing at him there.
But she had, of course, foreseen his withdrawal, knew where she could press her attack, and she did. Durf had removed his scarf earlier, and now his face and neck were unprotected. Nadia darted in and opened up a red line on his throat with her razor. Durf gurgled, his eyes going wide and his right hand clutching the wound, bloody bubbles leaking out from his fingers. The fight was already over, and he knew it. There was no coming back from those cuts; they would never heal. While he could in theory amputate his left arm and stanch the bleeding at the stump, he’d never get the chance. He’d bleed out long before that.
Durf surrendered, falling to his knees and bleeding onto my carpet, and Nadia stood ready should he try anything else.
“I’m sorry it hurts,” she said quietly to the ogre, compassion in her voice now that the battle was won. “I tried tae make it quick so ye wouldn’t suffer long.”
He nodded weakly, understanding in his eyes, along with tears. I had time for one last attempt at learning something.
[Who has your family, Durf? I can try to help them.]
His eyes rolled to me and he shook his head, twice, then keeled over, the lights in his eyes extinguished. The iron from the sigil continued to work at dissolving the magic in his being, burning and consuming his flesh in the process, and soon his body began to crisp and then crumble into ashes, a fine rotten mess gone grey in a heap of clothing.
Nadia sighed. “He was a pretty nice bloke as far as ogres go. Damn shame.”
[Whoever sent him is a pure bastard.]
“Ye got that right.” She folded her razor closed and returned it to her pocket. “Shite. I’ll go and get a vacuum and call the carpet cleaners.”
The Irishman who found me near Aviemore in Cairngorms National Park and made me his apprentice was hunting the same thing I was hunting: gall nuts.
He was also hunting the hobgoblin Holga Thunderpoot, though I didn’t learn that until much later. At the time, we were both startled to find someone else into the same hobby.
Gall nuts are growths on oak trees caused by gall wasps laying eggs in the buds at an important early stage in their growth. These nuts—which are not really nuts at all and have the look and feel of a gourd more than anything else—contain tannic acids essential to the production of black inks since the Middle Ages. Many inks used to be made with gall, and gall-nut production has become industrialized the same way silk production has: Groves of oak trees are exposed to gall wasps and the insects do their thing, just as silkworms turn mulberry leaves into silk. The tannic acid is used for all sorts of things, not merely ink.
But I was in a wild area—or as wild an area as anyplace could be on an island continuously occupied for millennia—and the gall nuts were scattered and needed to be sought out rather than easily spotted in a grove.
“Beggin’ your pardon,” his voice called to me from some distance away in the forest. “Ye wouldn’t be huntin’ gall nuts, now, would ye?”
“I am,” I said, surprised but also guarded. He was dressed fancy in a white suit and hat, not the sort of outfit one typically wears into the forest. It was the sort of getup one wore to polo and cricket matches, sipping mint juleps and laughing at the silly struggles of the working classes.
“Oh, well, in that case, I’ll stop. I’m not local and can find some elsewhere. Were ye planning on making ink with them?”
“I was,” I admitted, my surprise increasing.
“Ah, excellent! Would ye mind sharing your recipe? I’m a bit of an ink enthusiast.”
It was already the strangest conversatio
n I’d ever had at the time, and I thought I might be hallucinating the whole thing. Was I really about to shout an ink recipe to a stranger in a white suit?
“Are ye taking the piss?” I said instead.
The Irishman laughed. “I’m very serious, I assure ye. But, look, I don’t mean to make ye uncomfortable, and I can simply leave. I know talking to strangers is probably a low priority for ye, so I won’t take it too hard.”
“What’s your recipe, then?” I asked. “I mean, if you’re really here for gall nuts, you’d know an ink recipe and could share it right now. Otherwise I guess ye’re here hoping to run across a nice boy to murder.”
“Right, right. Well, I use a cold bath rather than a boil for the gall, and then I use iron sulfate and gum arabic like anyone else, plus a couple other things.” He listed the ingredients and proportions to me, and I felt a smile splitting my face at the thought that we might have created a new hobby: ink shouting.
“That sounds like a better recipe than mine,” I said, and shouted my ingredients back at him.
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard that one before. Look, what’s your first name?”
“Al.”
“Okay, Al, I’m Sean FitzGibbon. I’m going to leave a business card here in the crook of this tree, and I hope you’ll give me a call, because finding people who are into making inks by hand is rather rare these days. I might have a job for ye—a really good one—so let’s have tea together soon in a nice public place, and you bring along some friends or whatever ye need to feel safe, and we won’t need to shout anymore. All right?”
“Aye, that sounds good. But the shouting’s been fun too.”
“Ha ha. Excellent. Good hunting, then. I’m off.”
He waved, and I watched him go and then retrieved the card. We had tea together two weeks later in Glasgow, and that’s how I became apprenticed to an Irish sigil agent and learned that the Tuatha Dé Danann were bloody dangerous.
My phone buzzed with a message from Saxon Codpiece. Up for a brew? I have news.
Sure, I sent back.
Bier Halle on Gordon St. at half past noon, he replied.
Right you are, I said, and smiled at his choice of venue. The Bier Halle was an underground pub, which fit with Saxon’s preference for subterranean living. I’d thought I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks, since he’d given me the impression a couple of hours ago that he’d be dropping out of sight entirely, but apparently something had come up.
The Bier Halle had over one hundred bottles from around the world on their menu and an impressive tap list too. It was a sort of cement bunker filled with wooden tables and squat, square stools with brown leather upholstery. They served pizzas, pretzels, and a list of other foods that skewed toward German tastes. Saxon had secured a table in the corner and waved at me when I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the dining space. We shook hands and I got my phone out.
[What happened to disappearing?]
“Still at the top of my list of things tae do. After lunch, though. Ye feel like slamming down a bevvy?”
I nodded, and when the server arrived I pointed at my menu, to a German beer called Fürstenberg and then to the giant pretzel with mustard. Saxon asked for a sausage dog to eat and ordered a Krombacker Pils on tap. Then he pulled out his laptop and grinned.
“Got yer tinfoil handy? Tear off a few sheets and sculpt it lovingly around yer crown. Have a keek at this.” He pulled up a news article with the headline MONSTERS ATTACK VILLAGE IN UKRAINE and pointed at it. “Someone is taking down shacks and flats in the Ukraine that we’re pretty sure are occupied by Russian intelligence. And by we I mean British intelligence.”
[British intel? You have access to what they think?]
He smirked at me. “Let’s just say I have multiple reasons to go intae hiding right now.”
I shook my head in wonder and gestured that he should continue. “The thing is, they have no idea who did it. Eyewitness reports are claiming they were monsters, and one person is even quoted as saying there was a flying faery. A small humanoid with wings. That could be yer pixie, eh?”
I shrugged. It was possible.
“I was just thinking of those pictures on Gordie’s phone. If that crew was wrecking shite, then I could see people thinking they were monsters. That troll’s face was like an arse with hemorrhoids and teeth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone thought he was a monster. He bloody well is a monster.”
[True,] I admitted.
“And it fits with that bloke I told you about this morning. If he’s CIA and he wants to flex with his pet Fae super squad, then why not take out some targets of the old enemy?”
[I suppose it’s possible.]
“Anything’s possible, sure. Absolutely. But what I’m saying is that it’s likely. This is what it’s all about, Al: winning the spy game. It’s an addendum to what I said before.”
[What’s that?]
“I said they wouldnae go around assassinating folk because that draws too much attention. But killing spies is different, in’t it? If ye’re a nation with spies and some of yer spooky bastards get kilt, ye don’t go squawking about it in the press and expelling diplomats and threatening war. Ye try tae find out who got ye and then get ’em back all soft and shady. But Russia cannae find out who got ’em in this case because they’re bloody Fae. They slipped in and out of there, no travel records, no facial recognition, no fingerprints or anything. So Russia’s stuck with floating a monster story. It’s a better distraction than admitting they got rolled. It gets people thinking about where the monsters came from rather than what was going on in those flats.”
I nodded because that much was true, at least. Putting MONSTERS in the headline would distract from everything else. But while this theory might make sense on the human side of things, it made zero sense on the Fae side. Not to take anything away from Saxon’s analysis: He simply didn’t have all the facts. Whoever was running things in Tír na nÓg—whether Clíodhna or someone else—they wouldn’t give a single nugget of dry crumbled shite about the squabbles of human nations. Since I couldn’t investigate there, however, I’d have to work on the human end and pass along the information in hopes it would illuminate something on the Fae side. The pints arrived, and we clinked glasses and enjoyed a cold swallow before Saxon continued.
“I have tae admit this is some wild and woolly bollocks, Al. We’re only ontae this because of yer boy Gordie. If it weren’t for him, we’d be as clueless as the Russians right now. We’d be looking at this article and saying what the fuck like everyone else, eh? Ye can bet there’s a Russian intelligence officer screaming, Who’s got monstrous assets in this area? Who? with spittle flying and a vein bulging in his temple and borscht erupting out his backside. It’s cheerful, in’t it? I mean, besides all the death, o’ course.”
[All the death does tend to dampen the joy,] I said, then I pointed at the article with a question in my brows, and Saxon nodded.
“Be my guest, mate,” he said, nudging the laptop in my direction. I pulled it a bit closer and squinted against the glare of the monitor’s screen.
MONSTERS ATTACK VILLAGE IN UKRAINE
Six people are dead and three buildings are cinders after a string of early-morning attacks by what eyewitnesses describe as “monsters.” Residents of Kercz in Crimea awakened to fire alarms in the early hours of Sunday morning, as strangely shaped humanoids of varying sizes were reported at each site, and in one case a flying creature was said to be involved.
Police have not identified the victims yet but have stated that they were first murdered before the attackers set fire to the buildings. Two victims were missing limbs.
A string of eyewitness accounts followed, including one that claimed to have seen a small flying creature working in concert with the hooded assailants. I took that to mean that the pixie was now involved in these operations.
> The most interesting part of the article was buried at the end, where the target locations were listed. [These flats—can you map them for me in relation to any parks or green spaces in Kercz?]
Saxon looked bemused but shrugged and said, “Sure. Why?”
[If the monsters in the article were the Fae, they’d use bound trees to get in and out of the city.]
“Bound trees?”
[The Druids bind trees on earth to Tír na nÓg. One can shift planes that way. If we were Druids or Fae, we could go down to Kelvingrove Park and shift to Tír na nÓg, then take a different bound tree wherever we wanted to go. Melbourne, Tokyo, Denver, wherever there was another bound tree. It’s a sort of transit system.]
“That’s…pure stonkin’. It’s like teleporting.”
[Close, yes. That’s why people thought Druids could teleport.]
“Okay, give me a minute.” He tapped away at his keyboard for a while and I tried to figure out why Clíodhna—or anyone in Tír na nÓg—would have an interest in allowing the Fae to be used this way. Had they chosen sides in human concerns? It seemed unlikely; it would be akin to us choosing sides between warring hives of termites.
“There. Is that what ye mean?” He pointed to a city map of Kercz with a green blob in the middle of it and three red pinpoints around its perimeter. “That park in the center of the fires—I can’t pronounce the name of it, but it has trees.”
[That would do. I don’t know if there’s a bound tree, but if there is and the monsters were Fae, they entered and exited the city that way.]
“That’s an amazing data set. They could do multiple strikes a night around the world.”
I nodded, and Saxon grabbed his beer and leaned back in his seat. “Holy shite,” he breathed, and took a much longer pull on his pint.
[Is that the news you had for me?]
“Aye, that was part one. Ye made a request of me and it didn’t take long tae get results. Thought I would take care of it before I disappeared. Felt like I needed tae do it.”