House of Cards

by C. E. Murphy

  “You’re always hungry. I’ve seen you eat a five-course meal and look for a snack twenty minutes later. I don’t know why you don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”

  “Because I run in the park every night,” Margrit said reasonably. Cole made a face, then looked pleased as she took a bite of potato and sighed contentedly. “S’ferry good,” she promised around the mouthful.

  “Of course it is. Okay, Grit. Tell me something.” Cole elevated an eyebrow in challenge and Margrit nodded agreement around another mouthful. “How much of this job change idea is about Tony?”

  The bite or two she’d taken turned heavy in her stomach. Margrit straightened up, feeling heat come to her cheeks and doubting she could blame the warm meal. “Tony?”

  “Yeah, Tony. The guy who called here four times this evening trying to invite you to dinner.”

  “He—Crap. I thought he was working. I thought—Why didn’t he call my cell?”

  “He did. You didn’t answer.”

  “Crap.” Margrit closed her eyes and pushed the food away. “I turned the ringer off while I was in court. I didn’t see any messages from him when I checked earlier.”

  “It was hours ago now. So come on, ’fess up. How much of this has to do with him? I know you two’ve been trying to stabilize things.”

  “And my job’s a sore point.” Margrit looked back at the potatoes, unable to find an answer. The easiest one was to let Cole believe he was right. It rankled, though, in a way that pretending the morality of defending criminals bothered her didn’t. If she’d been pretending. For a disconcerting moment, Margrit was unsure whether she had been or not. “I really hate the idea of giving up my job for a guy,” she finally said.

  “You would.” Wryness colored Cole’s response. “It’s archaic. Nobody’s going to give you a hard time, Grit, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah.” Margrit wet her lips and tried for a smile as she looked at her dark-haired housemate. Guilt stabbed her, though, and she dropped her eyes again. She hadn’t lied, but she’d given Cole a neutral statement that could easily—obviously—be interpreted as an agreement to his hypothesis. It was a wonderful trick to pull off in a court. Using it against a friend made her feel tired.

  And yet it was better than the truth. “Cole, don’t say anything to Tony, okay? I need to talk to him myself.”

  “You mistake me for a busybody. That’s Cameron.” Cole jerked his chin toward the meal she’d abandoned. “Eat your dinner. Talk to your parents and Russell and Tony and get things figured out. And if you decide to go work for the richest man on the East Coast, when you get the Upper East Side penthouse apartment Cam and I are totally moving in with you.”

  Margrit laughed, surprise washing away some of her gloom. “But no pressure, right?”

  “Absolutely none at all.” Cole winked and turned back to the dishes, leaving Margrit to finish her dinner with thoughts of surviving the Old Races swirling in her mind.

  “What do the gargoyles know of the selkies, Stoneheart?”

  Janx asked the question without preamble, dancing a cigarette through long fingers and watching the casino below through the windows. Malik had appeared in the shadows, a smear against burnished walls. His glower and the throttlehold he had on his cane were more damning than words could be, making it clear that he resented Alban’s presence. Alban, no happier about it, doubted the djinn would appreciate their solidarity.

  He shifted his shoulders, making the hem of his coat swing. “I know as little as you do. They bred themselves out, disappeared into humanity. If there are full-blooded selkies left they’re well-hidden and deeply secretive. Cara Delaney is the only one I’ve seen or heard of in decades.” Though Margrit had mentioned a selkie, Alban recalled with a jolt. He hadn’t thought to ask if it had been Cara, though using the phrase “accosted by” in reference to the slight girl seemed overblown.

  “I didn’t ask what you knew.” Janx came to his feet and stalked to the windows, his impatience drawing Alban away from his thoughts. “I asked what the gargoyles know. Lore keepers, living memory, history-makers.”

  “Recorders,” Alban objected. “Not makers. Even when I last joined the memory, the selkies were a dying race. You know that, Janx.”

  “I know that’s what we believe. But that selkie girl came into my territory—”

  “Yours?”

  Janx shifted his attention from the casino to Alban, the weight of his gaze enough to give even a gargoyle pause as the air went still and hot around him. “Mine,” Janx said in a low, even voice. “Do you contest my ownership, Stoneheart?”

  “I only thought Eliseo might object,” Alban said mildly, not intending it for an apology. Jade glittered bright in Janx’s eyes before his lashes tangled, shuttering emotion. When he looked up again it was with the long-toothed smile that so often graced his face, and the heavy pressure in the room lightened.

  “That’s a topic for Eliseo and myself, and none of your concern, kind as you are to show it. Now, if I may continue without further interruption?” His eyebrows, half-hidden by falling locks of hair, arched, and he smiled another serpent’s smile when Alban inclined his head. “I’m grateful. That selkie girl came here and now I sense a change in the currents. I would know how many of them are left. Ask the histories.”

  “Janx.” Alban’s gaze flickered to Malik, then back to the dragonlord. Janx fluttered a hand in a swirl of smoke, and Malik curled his lip before dissipating. Neither gargoyle nor dragon moved for several seconds, waiting for the djinn’s scent to fade, proof that he was truly gone, before Alban said, “It is not my secret I protect by remaining outside of the gestalt.”

  “Gestalt.” Janx laughed, bringing his cigarette to his lips. “What a very human word, Alban. After so little time, she’s corrupted you so thoroughly. First in your loyalties, now in your language. Where will it end?”

  Alban rumbled, deep sound bordering on a growl even from the lesser breadth of his human chest. Janx’s eyes narrowed and he gestured with the cigarette again, following the swirl of smoke with obvious pleasure. “I’ve learned what I can about the gargoyles’ memory-mind. You can enter and extract memories without leaving any of your own. Our old secrets will be safe.”

  “You’ve been misinformed.” Alban turned away, watching the frantic casino below. “Entering the histories is never a process of only taking. The mental bonds that link gargoyles are fluid. Surface memories, the most recent or the most recently brought up, can be read and made part of the—” He broke off, then repeated, “Gestalt,” with a note of defiance. “Willpower alone defines how much is read, and I am badly out of practice. An active seeker might pull more from me than I want shared.”

  “Are you claiming your will is weak, Stoneheart?” Janx’s voice floated on the air, mocking and light. “After your earlier arguments? Do you now say a gargoyle who has held himself deliberately apart from the memories and minds of his people for three centuries is weak-minded? I would think such discipline would take extraordinary willpower, when done by choice instead of force.”

  “In time, it ceases to matter. I’ve become unwelcome in our memories, and without a clear show of repentance, an offering of my experiences will likely be driven out. I believe that’s why Biali stays in New York,” Alban added, more to himself than the dragon. “To enforce an exile I put on myself. He has reason enough to resent me.”

  “How delightful.” Genuine good humor brightened Janx’s voice for a moment. “The only two gargoyles on the planet holding a grudge match, and they’re both in my employ. I do so love life, don’t you? You work for me now, Stoneheart.” Humor dropped, leaving heat without anger. “You’ll pursue my request, and keep secrets safe at whatever cost. I want to know how many selkies are left, and if possible, what they’re doing here. Find out, and tell me.”

  “Ask properly.” Alban lifted his eyebrows in cool challenge as Janx’s eyes popped with surprise. “There are rituals, Janx.”

  “And if I refuse?”
/>
  “Then I may also refuse.” He hadn’t required that Margrit follow the rituals when she’d sent him into memory to see what he could learn about his life mate’s death. But Margrit was human, and the laws that governed the Old Races didn’t apply to her.

  All the more reason to keep away from her, and do what he could to make sure she remained as uninvolved as possible at this late hour. Alban waited on Janx, keeping his expression neutral. Those two things, at least, a gargoyle was good at.

  After an exasperated moment Janx blew out a breath and muttered, “I come to the moonlit memory of our people to seek what we’ve forgotten beneath the burning sun. I come from fire born of earth and wind born of sky. My name is Janx, and I ask that you share history with me, your brother. Happy now?”

  An ache clawed its way through Alban as Janx followed the form, then burst in an unexpected bubble of humor at the dragon’s petulant ending. “Yes. Thank you.”

  Janx huffed another sulky breath and Alban dropped his gaze, half to hide a smile and half in acknowledgment of the loneliness the ritual had awakened. It had been centuries since he’d heard the phrases Janx had spoken. They’d left a hollow place inside him, so empty he hadn’t recognized it until it was filled again. The promises he’d made so many years earlier weighed heavily, borne down now by a taste of regret he thought he’d long ago left behind. “I’ll return when I have what answers I can bring you.”

  Wisdom, if it dictated anything, dictated that he retreat to Grace’s hideaway and try from there to do as Janx… Alban hesitated over the next word, torn between asked and demanded. Duty and desire warred in him again: duty bound by his word, desire to reject that contract and disregard the dragon’s wishes. Duty won, as it must; that was his nature, as profound a part of him as the wings that let him fly unfettered above city lights. Caution, the other god that ruled him, warned again against the poor wisdom of searching the memories beneath the open sky.

  But a memory haunted him, the bleakness of mountain peaks and deep valleys that represented the over-mind that belonged to all the gargoyle race. It had once been vivacious, a place of life and ever-growing knowledge, but too many had died. Terribly few of the peaks grew now, blunted by time and aging memory. Foothills, the memories of children, were few and far between: all signs of a dying people. Reluctance to enter that dour realm again drove Alban high through the city towers, as if remembering under the stars might help bring life back to what had once been a great repository of memory and legend.

  All the history of the Old Races. Not just the remaining five, but innumerable other peoples whose light had faded as humans swept the planet. Exploration and settling was their nature, as much as solitude and contemplation was a gargoyle’s. Humans had not meant, in the first many thousand years, to encroach upon habitat used by different peoples than themselves.

  It had been far more recently that mankind began to hunt the legends: dragons and sea serpents, closely related but diametrically different. Wild men in the mountains, always few thanks to the harsh climate in which they existed, were hunted to the brink of extinction and beyond, until only tales of Bigfoot remained. Harpies, winged and bitter even before their female-heavy tribes were decimated, and the siryns whose songs were so haunting that sailors spoke of them even still. Vampires, hungry for the very blood that gave humanity life, were feared even more than dragons. Men who destroyed vampires were heroes among mortals.

  All of their stories and more lay in the gargoyles’ memories, in the minds of the one race bound so tightly to stone that daylight took life from them and left nothing but the protective state that could shield memory against even the ravages of time. That was the purpose of Alban’s race, beyond all else: to preserve history.

  His people had once gone amongst the others, listening to stories and opening themselves to their memories so histories might be fully recorded. They might be hidden from the world but they would never be forgotten, even as the unadaptable died and were lost to time.

  Only the remaining handful had learned the precarious balance between pretending humanity and remaining true to their own natures. Of those, whole tribes of djinn remained in the deserts, riding sandstorms and acting out their hate against humanity in brutal raids that left reporters bewildered and humanitarians horrified. They were the most united, possibly the most populous, of the Old Races, but their ambitions were reined in by desert boundaries, more by choice than necessity. Humans were too many, and the Old Races, even together, far too few.

  Gargoyles, after the djinn, still held the most numbers, but even those were countable: fewer than fifteen hundred when Alban had last known. The others diminished far more rapidly, with dragons counting in the tens or dozens, and the selkies thought to be all but gone. The memories carried more sorrow than joy now, their price heavy in emotion and heavier still in cost of daylight hours unshared with the rest of the world.

  Alban settled on a building top, reluctance weighing his wings until he could fly no longer. Duty and desire tangled together, becoming more difficult to discern: the last price paid for bearing the memory of the Old Races. A plea for information carried in the gestalt was not to be refused.

  He closed his eyes and let memory ride him.

  TEN

  SALT TAINTED THE air. Salt and the scent of fish, bound to the incessant roll of water against the shore. Such unfamiliar sounds and tastes verged on unpleasant to a creature born of inland mountains. The craggy peaks Alban was familiar with lay to the east, blue with distance created in his own mind. The landscape of memory could juxtapose unrelated features and moments in time without difficulty, but to navigate them required structure. It had been a relief to leave behind remembrances of the gargoyles themselves, the worn mountain range too much a shadow of what it had once been.

  No barrier had risen up to bar his way this time. No challenge from Biali, the gargoyle set to watch over the exile. No dispute over whether Alban had a right to histories. Perhaps it was because he sought memory for another race, rather than for himself. Perhaps it was a sign of forgiveness, though Alban doubted it. Stone did not forgive easily.

  He wheeled in the sky, watching a black echo of his own form flash over the village below. Young children ran back and forth at the water’s edge, dragging sealskins with them and popping up water-sleek heads when the surf surged. A handful of indulgent older children, not grown enough yet to fish the waters and provide for the village, watched over them without worry; drownings happened, but rarely, amongst a people born to both ocean and earth.

  This was their existence for centuries immemorial, a life of hard work and idyllic play. Time passed in a blur, children growing up, hunters lost to the seas mourned, the selkies’ numbers increasing slowly, but more consistently than other Old Races had. Increasing enough that some of the more daring left their native shores to explore the world beyond.

  Memory skittered, pulling Alban far away from the village below, until in the distance of his mind it seemed he hovered above a world pinpointed with water-blue light. Along coastlines where the children of selkie explorers had settled, bright spots gleamed then faded away, legend in the making. Within the bodies of continents another series of sparks lit up, earthier brown, and faded more rapidly.

  Then bloodred tinged the whole of the world and Alban’s focus was drawn down to a single representative village again. The waters turned brown with pollution, waste from human settlements. Human towns and villages encroached on selkie territory, driving them farther into the sea, farther from fishing areas, farther from sustainable life, until the soul of what they’d once been was diminished to little more than stories carried on the waves. Sorrow colored the telling of memory, one death after another, until a single old man stood alone on a windswept beach. Alban alighted beside him, settling into the comfortable crouch that was a gargoyle’s hallmark, and waited.

  “Thank you for coming. I know it’s been a long journey, and now I have so little time before dawn.” He gestured toward the e
ast, where the sky already brightened with the first promise of sunrise.

  “You’ve aged.” The voice was not Alban’s, the scrape of granite on granite, but something smoother: stone so hot it flowed, warmth emanating from every deep word. Confusion laced that comforting warmth now. “We do not age, my friend. The Old Races do not age.”

  “My mother was human, Eldred.” The old man turned from watching the horizon and encroaching dawn to smile unhappily at the expression of shocked revulsion Alban felt shape his face. “I have stayed behind to tell you this. We are dying.” He looked eastward again, shaking his head. “All of us are, we Old Races, but perhaps we selkies fastest of all. Is it so terrible?” He put his hands out, studying lines of age and thickened veins. “Is it so terrible to do what is necessary to ensure survival?”

  “Humans.” Disapproval roiled in Eldred’s liquid voice. “Humans weaken what we are.”

  “And yet you never suspected.” Glendyr lifted a still-strong chin, gentle defiance in the action. “Centuries of friendship and you’ve never imagined me to be anything less than one of our peoples. I prefer to let history judge us, rather than the passion of new knowledge. We’re dying,” he repeated. “With sunrise I go into the sea to join my family. We will not return. The selkies will live or die apart from the other Old Races, so that we might honor our living and our dead without censure from all. But history should know. Remember us, Eldred. Remember my people.”

  Glendyr bowed, fluid movement of a creature born to water’s weightless environment. His smile, as he straightened, was a thing of regret and love. Alban lowered his gaze, undone by the selkie man’s grace, and Glendyr put a hand on his shoulder, a brief, easy touch. “Goodbye, Eldred.”