Three Slices

by Kevin Hearne

  No, those are off-limits. We’re not here to eat cheese. We’re here to make cheese.

  While Mekera heated the milk and watched the temperature gauge, I found a chair by the wall and sat down, staying out of her way, and Oberon lay down beside me.

  Sort of. Do you want me to explain it or just say it’s magic and leave it at that?

 

  All right. Divination works to some extent because our world is a system with certain predictable constants built in like clockwork. Creatures act according to their desires and most of those desires are somehow related to hunger or sex.

 

  I can predict that you would like a sausage or some quality time with Orlaith without the help of divination. But human behavior can get a little more complex, especially when people change their minds in reaction to other people or for no reason at all. Still, their behavior tends to follow patterns, and those patterns can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy if you have the right medium and the ability to interpret it.

 

  It is for Mekera. I could never do what she does.

 

  I suppose I could learn, but I wouldn’t want to. It took her years, and I have already spent years learning other methods. Plus, look at the setup she needs to practice her art. It’s a lot of equipment and you need the proper ingredients.

 

  Because she gets much better results than I ever could with my wands or with augury. I mean, she told me fifty years ahead of time that Tempe would be a great place to hide for about ten years starting in the late nineties. I was supposed to come back to see her after that but never did until now. Everything she’s ever predicted for me has been spot-on, though—she’s as close to infallible as you can get.

 

  No, it’s pattern recognition. She watches the cheese as it transforms from one state of being to another, spurred by a natural catalyst. The pattern of the milk or cream as it curdles mirrors the pattern of the future transforming in response to the catalyst of the question she holds in her mind during the divination. The patterns created in the process of curdling the milk are almost fractal in their complexity, allowing her to see far more than anything I could manage with the juxtaposition of five wands tossed in the air.

 

  Your memory is very impressive, Oberon.

 

  I haven’t actually asked her yet. When she’s ready, she will say so.

  I was hoping she would be ready soon. Most cheeses took days to complete, and if we had the time, I would have asked for one of those, but we were doing something simple and fast because we had a deadline of sundown looming. We still hadn’t seen the vampire’s thrall, but he had surely called in reinforcements and we could expect them to descend upon us a couple hours after sunset. We had to reach a tethered tree well in advance of that, and there weren’t any nearby.

  Mekera cranked a timer and its rapid clicking as it counted down signaled to me that she was available to talk for a few minutes. Too late, she realized the same thing. Her eyes darted to me, panic around the pupils, and I spoke up before she could pretend to be busy with something else.

  “Hey, let’s talk about something fascinating, like why you’ve been living here all alone since the end of World War II.”

  Mekera cursed. “I knew you were going to bring that up.”

  “Have you ever talked about it with anyone? You’ve had more than seven decades to brood about whatever you’re dwelling on.”

  “I find solitude therapeutic.”

  “Excellent. You’ve had lots of therapy, then, and should be able to discuss it freely.”

  “No.”

  “Help me understand, Mekera. I know we don’t see each other often, but we’ve known each other for a long time. We met in Bahir Dar and you introduced me to coffee. Back then, you liked people. What happened?”

  I got stony silence and a glower for a while, but I returned her look with patient expectation. She finally shifted her chair around so that the back faced me and she straddled it like that, hugging the frame with her arms and resting her chin on the top of it. Her eyes fell from my face and she stared at a spot on the floor, but I know that’s not what she was seeing; she was visiting a memory. Her mouth drooped at the corners, then her lip quivered a bit and her eyes filled. The left one ran over and a tear trailed down her cheek.

  “I lost somebody I loved,” she whispered. “I know that doesn’t make me special. Happens to everyone. She made me feel special, though, more than anyone else I’d met in five hundred years.” She wiped at the tear on her cheek. “I don’t know if we would have made it last forever, but damn if we weren’t going to try.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I replied, and didn’t ask for any further details. None were necessary. Lost loved ones could be crippling sometimes.

  Silence stretched out between us—apart from the ratchet noises made by the timer and Oberon’s occasional snore. Like most dogs, he had the ability to nap at will.

  “You had a wife back then,” she said, no longer whispering but keeping her voice low. “Down in Tanzania? Married for a long time, lots of kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Tahirah.”

  “That’s right. I remember it rhymed with mine. What happened to the kids?”

  “I don’t know. They were all adults when I lost her, and I said goodbye and took off. Kind of like what you’re doing, except I didn’t isolate myself. I just went elsewhere to try to heal, try to forget. Funny thing is, I was on my way to try to reconnect with my family when I met you.”

  “And did you?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It was a couple hundred years after I left, so I was really trying to track down descendants, and was only partially successful.”

  Her voice rose with irritation. “A couple hundred years? And you’re giving me grief for seventy or eighty?”

  “Yes, because I pulled out of it by living in the world. The kind of funk you’re in doesn’t appear to have an exit strategy except the final kind.”

  That stung her and she sat up and back, letting go of the sides of the chair and instead resting her arms on the top where her chin had been, locking the elbows and letting her hands dangle in the air. One of them twitched in my direction and her tone was brisk, impatient. “Let me ask you something, Siodhachan.”

  “Okay.”

  “Was Tahirah the love of your very long life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever love again?”

  “Yes. Rather recently, in fact. Her name is Granuaile.”

  “Ah, so there’s hope for me!” Her mouth split into a wide but false grin. “Now, how many hundreds of years was it between Tahirah and Granuaile, exactly?”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s longer than I’ve been alive, isn’t it?”

  “Look, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy and I’m not saying it’ll happen at all, much less soon, but I am saying that it is possible to love again. Unless you’re living all by yourself in the middle of a wilderness.”

  The timer dinged and startled Oberon awake from a dream in which he apparently had been accused of shenanigans.

 

  Mekera stood and made a brushing motion with her hand, waving away my concerns. “Enough. It’s time to get to work. What do you want me to look for?”

  I didn’t think we’d reached a happy place in our conversation, but she had a point—we had to proceed since time was against us. “Well, the vampires liquidated most of my money and I kind of need
it to stick it to them.” Yewmen mercenaries weren’t cheap. “But I can’t ask you anything regarding myself or my cold iron will mess up your tyromancy.”

  “Do you just want money?”

  “Money is my primary goal. But a close second would be some way to cause them great inconvenience and perhaps some personal grief. I don’t know if personal grief is possible for vampires and lifeleeches, but a guy can hope.”

  Mekera stared at me unblinking for a few beats, considering, before she spoke. “I can share something with you that may sway your question,” she said, “but I cannot guarantee you that it will yield anything useful.”

  “Please share it and I will consider carefully before asking you to proceed.”

  She nodded once. “Fair enough. The lifeleech did not ask me for a single cheese. He asked for two because he had two questions. One led to Kodiak Black, which you already know. The other was…strange.”

  “What was it?”

  “He wanted to know where he could hide something from you. I remember his exact words. ‘Where is the one place on earth that Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin is least likely to return?’” he asked.

  “Oh, no. And you told him?”

  “Yes. Toronto.”

  “Fuuuuck!” Toronto was the last place on earth I wanted to see again. And yet, by confessing this to me, she had made the possibility that I would return more likely. She could not have foreseen this pattern before, because my cold iron obscured it. My appearance there—if I chose to go—would be completely unpredictable. So, if Werner Drasche followed through on her advice, I might possibly be able to deal him some kind of debilitating blow. All I needed was the courage to return to Toronto.

  Money would be simpler. Mekera could tell me where to score plenty of money fast, no problem. I could score some without her help—my abilities would make a life of crime simple if I wished. But that would hurt other people instead of Werner Drasche. And I so wanted—no, needed—to pay Werner in kind for what he did to my friend Kodiak.

  “Can you tell me what he’s hiding in Toronto and where?” I asked.

  “Possibly. If he’s hidden something there, I can tell you. But I have to warn you that he might not have acted on my advice. If I look for that answer and nothing comes up, we won’t have the time to try again before sundown. You have only the one question.”

  “Understood,” I said, and took a moment to think. I concluded that the potential payoff was too great to ignore. If it turned out to be nothing, I could pursue other methods of raising money. “Ask this: What is Werner Drasche and/or the vampire known as Theophilus hiding in Toronto and where?”

  “Technically, that’s not a single question,” she replied, “but that should be manageable. I will ask.”

  “How long until sundown?” I asked, unable to tell in the depths of the basement. Mekera glanced at her wristwatch, an antique windup number on a worn leather strap.

  “Three hours,” she said. “Or thereabouts. I won’t be able to give you anything significant for at least another hour, maybe more.”

  “Okay, thanks for the warning.”

  “You’re going to have to stay awake. I report what I see as I see it and I don’t repeat.”

  “Understood.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll begin.”

  She turned back to her small industrial mixing vat, which had an automatic mixing arm spinning around in it, and poured in a beaker of rennet as the cream spun. Then she began speaking in Amharic, a musical Semitic language still spoken today, and which I did not speak. The closest language to it that I knew was Aramaic. Presumably, she was asking my question, binding it to the curdling of the milk, and catalyzing the divination.

 

  I imagine it’s something like that, but I don’t know for sure.

 

  I know, the one with Chihuahuas.

  Oberon gave a mental snort of amusement.

  As Oberon drifted to sleep and Mekera continued her work, chanting and staring into the vat, I brooded on the news. I hadn’t been in Toronto since 1953 and I hadn’t planned on ever returning. I had chosen to go by the alias of Nigel then, which, when coupled with a tragic coincidence, turned out to be one of the worst decisions of my life. Drasche could not know the reason why, but forcing me to return there would reopen an old wound, and I could already feel my stomach churning with acid at the thought.

  Shakespeare provided me solace as he so often did. In many ways, Hamlet is not a good role model, but once he’s aware of his uncle’s plans to have him killed in England with the aid of his erstwhile friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he determines to outwit them: “And ’t shall go hard, / But I will delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon.”

  “It’s somewhere in downtown Toronto,” Mekera suddenly said in English, and then amended it. “A sort of financial district.” She squinted. “Do the letters R, B, and C mean anything to you?”

  “Yes. That would probably be the Royal Bank of Canada.”

  “There you go.” A pause of fifteen minutes, and then she said, “Okay, these are numbers I’m seeing related to the bank: 5, 1, 7.”

  “What’s that for?”

  “A safety deposit box is my guess. It’s not long enough for a PIN number.”

  “All right. What’s in there?”

  Mekera stared at the swirling cauldron of curds for another half hour and finally shook her head, grimacing. “I can’t get a grasp on any specifics. But it’s not money or anything like that. It’s just…paper. A big stack of it. Information of some kind, maybe a list.”

  “Werner Drasche is storing a written list in a safety deposit box in the RBC and that’s what he doesn’t want me to find? That’s what would hurt him?”

  “It’s both him and Theophilus. They’re in this together, so that was a good call, but the answer is yes.”

  “Is that all?”

  She pointed at the swirl of curdling milk and sighed. “It’s trying to give me names and addresses, but this isn’t that kind of cheese. We don’t have enough time to get that specific, you understand? Because this cheese will be finished in a few minutes and it doesn’t have the time to give me detailed answers, so it’s rushing and it’s no good. It’s like when you force a high volume of water through a small area—all you get is pressure and noise.”

  Oberon, who I thought had been dreaming of small rascally dogs, had woken up at some point and chose to offer his own analogy.

  You’ve never been to a comic con.

 

  “Okay, Mekera, thank you. How much time left until sundown?”

  A glance at her wristwatch and she said, “A little over an hour.”

  “Okay, gather whatever you like and we’ll run to the nearest tree I can tether.”

  “What about the thrall?”

  “I can take care of him first if you want.”

  “Well, shouldn’t we?”

  “Not unless you believe he’s an immediate threat. The vampires will be able to track us by scent whether he’s alive or not. He will probably wait for the vampires to arrive and then point in whichever direction we run, hoping to be rewarded.”

  Mekera disagreed. “I think they will tell him to follow us and phone in updates as they close in. He has a satellite phone.”

  That could potentially cause problems. If we ran back toward the trees we used to shift into the area, we would be heading in the direction the vampires were most likely to come from, nearest to the local airport at Gambela. If we spent time searching for the thrall, every minute would be one less we could use in escaping. We co
uld run away from the airport instead, searching for an exit point to the south and thus increasing the transit time of any pursuers over land, but I would then need some time to bind a new tree to Tir na nÓg. There were risks no matter what we chose.

  “Do you know of a large tree somewhere to the south of here?” I asked. The small scrub species I’d seen peppering the savannah were too fragile to be anchored to Tir na nÓg. Mekera’s eyes swung up to the ceiling as she thought it over, then snapped back to me once she remembered.

  “Yes. There’s a baobab tree down that way, an old one.”

  “How far?”

  The tyromancer shrugged. “Ten miles? Fifteen?”

  That would probably work out well. The thrall, whoever he was, wouldn’t be able to keep up with us on a ten-mile run, and the vampires wouldn’t be able to move at full speed while they were tracking us.

  “All right, let’s go as soon as you can manage.”

  After consulting with Odin, the Bifrost deposits us back at the foreman’s house alone. Orlaith’s snout rises immediately to sample the air.

  Where? Not our cabin?

 

  Let’s go, but quietly.

  Atticus and I had warded the cabin against fire, but only the magical kind that Brighid or Loki might sling around. It’s not immune to a match and lighter fluid. As we draw closer, however, Orlaith reports that the smoke isn’t coming from our cabin at all. she says.

  Okay. I want to check the cabin first, though. I actually want to check the wards to see if they have been disturbed or if anyone or anything is hiding nearby. Fires are infamous distractions and I don’t want to fall for it.

  Putting my hand to the earth outside our cabin and speaking the words for magical sight, I examine our wards and see nothing wrong with them; they remain intact. No flames dancing in the windows, either, so that’s a plus.

  Staying alert and guarded, I pad down through the white pillars of aspen trees to Sneffels Creek, the cold mountain stream that eventually feeds the Uncompahgre River in Ouray, reminding Orlaith to remain at my side and not rush ahead. A plume of smoke in the air draws me to a dangerously large fire and an extremely tall figure standing over it, arms crossed.