Beyond World's End

by Mercedes Lackey

  Logan was standing where he could watch both the doors and the windows, a cup of coffee in his hand. He regarded her impassively, and then gave a short nod of approval.

  "Let's go." He held out a black watch cap. "Wear this. Blondes aren't that common in some parts of town."

  * * *

  Eric hadn't told Ria exactly where the unfinished Nexus was, but once she got into the Park, the trail of Unseleighe taint was fairly obvious. Logan followed her like a silent shadow as she cast around, working her way into the center of the magic.

  Here.

  The partial Nexus shimmered in the dry winter air, invisible unless you were Gifted and knew what you were looking for. Its twisted magic made even Ria shudder inwardly. This was Unseleighe work, fuelled by death, human death. She could still see the faint smudges of levin bolts on the grass where the Sidhe Lord had destroyed the bodies of his victims.

  The surrounding trees looked faintly haunted. If the Nexus came fully into being, this would become a bonewood, the trees taking on a malicious life of their own in imitation of their dark master.

  So he—whoever he is—was here. But where did he come from, and where did he go? In and out of Underhill, of course. She wouldn't be able to track his movements Underhill from here, and even if she'd had the power to force an entry into Underhill from a standing start, she knew too little about her foe to make it a good idea. She turned her attention to another part of the problem. Eric had been here as well, and recently. Had he seen what she saw, she wondered? And if he had, where was he now?

  Not chasing the Unseleighe, that's for sure. There's nothing to track.

  She circled the area, frowning faintly. This wasn't Unseleighe Sidhe work alone. There was something else here as well.

  Her hands wove small patterns through the air as she called upon her magic—not the Gift that was the birthright of the Sidhe, but sorcery that she'd learned painstakingly over the years. She worked slowly and carefully, and at last she had banished everything that was wholly of Underhill from her perceptions.

  But something remained, the human taint she had noticed at first.

  And that left a trail she could follow.

  * * *

  An hour before Ria left her hotel room with Logan, Eric headed into Central Park. He stopped just inside the grounds to dig his flute out of his bag and put it together. He blew a soft note into the mouthpiece to warm the cold silver, and seemed to feel the trees around him shiver in response. More proof, not that he needed it, that someone had been using major magic here—enough magic to wake the trees, let alone the dead.

  Carrying his flute in his hand, Eric walked deeper into the park, back to the place Toni had brought him to last night. The scorch marks were still there, and in the daylight he saw something he'd missed the night before—the deep cuts of horses' hooves in the frozen turf.

  And sure, there are bridle paths through the park, but they're clearly marked and the riders stick to them. And these tracks sure weren't made by any New York Rent-a-Nag. Where were you going, Mister Dark Lord of the Sidhe? And who were you after?

  Let's see just how you've been spending your time. . . .

  He lifted his flute to his lips and began to play. A few trills and runs first, just to warm up, and then he segued into "Sidhe Beg, Sidhe Mor," letting the plaintive demand of the music speak for him.

  The light seemed to shift, some colors growing brighter, others vanishing entirely. The hard brightness of the afternoon sun became muted, fading almost into the unchanging silvery light of Underhill, while the latticework of the unfinished Nexus burned bright and clear, like a sculpture of purest purple-black neon. The constant background noise of New York—sirens, traffic, and the hum of a thousand conversations all taking place at once—faded to silence. Now Eric could see the magic plainly, yet he himself was as invisible to mortal eyes as magic normally was. Cloaked in his music, Eric could pass through the city unseen, even by his quarry. He turned, casting about.

  The whole park was dotted with hoofprints that glowed with a deep scarlet light—the Unseleighe Lord, whoever he was, had been making himself right at home, him and his elvensteed. The creature's glowing scarlet trail crisscrossed the grass from a dozen directions, giving the dry winter grass a spuriously festive look.

  I can't follow all of these! Eric shifted his bag higher on his shoulder. He had to pick one—but which?

  At last he saw one set of hoofprints of a slightly different color than the rest—almost maroon, instead of the bright vermillion of the others. As he stepped into them, he caught a faint whiff of something . . . something almost raw and primitive next to the ancient malice of the Unseleighe Sidhe.

  As good a way to make a choice as any, Eric decided, and began to follow the dark track.

  The track quickly took him across town and out of the high-priced spread. He could see splashes of magic along the way—as if someone had been carrying it in a bucket that kept slopping over, staining the sidewalks and buildings. When he got further downtown, a fine red mist seemed to hang in the air like a fog of magic—too thin to really have any effect, but more evidence that its source—or even many sources—had passed through here, all leaking magic like a sieve.

  What is this? A mage's convention? And if so, why wasn't I invited? he thought whimsically.

  The odd thing was, the "splashes"—for lack of a better word—seemed to be concentrated around the street people. None of them seemed to be the source, but somehow they'd been near the source, and not very long ago. Eric guessed the Nexus point in the Park hadn't been started more than a day or so—the timing of its building coincided perfectly with his dream—and the traces he was following would fade away completely in another day or so.

  Cold weather to be on the streets, Eric thought, watching an old man pushing along a grocery cart full of bits and pieces of unnameable junk. A Sidhe Lord down here. Now THAT's culture clash.

  The contrast between the busy, purposeful shoppers—all of whom had homes to go to—and the shabby homeless that cowered back from them like hungry ghosts was jarring. He didn't remember there being so many street people the last time he'd been in New York—hell, he didn't remember there being any, but the Upper East Side tended to run them out of the area pretty rigorously. He'd gotten used to seeing them in the last few weeks—as used as you could get, anyway—but as he headed east, he realized that the ones in his neighborhood were just the tip of the iceberg. As he left Yuppieland and entered the area of clinics, flophouses, and SROs6 the tribe of the disenfranchised seemed to multiply, and for the first time Eric realized how very many people in this city had no other home than the streets. Not hundreds. Thousands.

  And not just people living in slums or in welfare housing, but people who didn't have any place to go at night at all. He walked past a man in a tattered overcoat who might have been any age from forty to seventy and was carrying on an angry, animated conversation with the empty air. His hands were covered with small unhealed sores, and there were flecks of spittle on his cheeks. Greyish stubble covered his cheeks, and even in the cold he stank of urine, unwashed body, and illness.

  Isn't anybody helping these people? That guy shouldn't be out on the street. But even as he wondered, Eric knew the answer. These were the "borderline" people, the ones who'd been dumped out onto the streets from the institutions where many of them had spent their entire lives to make their way as best they could in the world. The idea was that they'd have caseworkers and live in supervised housing, but there weren't enough beds or caseworkers to go around, and so most of these walking wounded ended up alone on the streets. Add to that the junkies who stayed away from social services for fear they'd be jailed, the street kids damaged by predators or the homes they'd run from, and you had thousands and tens of thousands of people living on the streets—the population of an entire shadow city living invisibly in the cracks of the city most people saw.

  A bright flare caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. Magic—the s
ame magic he'd been following. It ended at a brick wall, the glare of it so bright it nearly hurt his eyes. He touched the flaking brickwork, and recoiled when his fingers came away sticky and dark. He rubbed his fingers together. It was blood. Old, but not that old.

  This wasn't Unseleighe magic he'd been following, but human magic. Eric blinked, bringing up the image of the human city to overlay his mage-sight, and bent over to inspect the wall and the sidewalk. Now he could see that there were bloody handprints on the concrete. The wall itself was covered with blood, great arcing gouts of blood, as if somebody had tried to batter his way through the bricks with his body.

  And I'm betting that's exactly what happened, Eric thought grimly, straightening up. He felt nauseated. Echoing through his mind, preserved in the stone, were ghostly screams of fury, as if the raging spirit were still trapped here. He scrubbed his hand on his jeans and raised the flute to his lips, playing the first tune that came to mind, an old folk tune called "She Moved Through The Fair," the sweet wistful lament seemed to soothe the energies here, sending the spirit on its way in peace, washing away the death-fury that had happened here.

  "Mister? Hey, mister?"

  Eric lowered his flute. He'd put so much of himself into the music that he'd lost his cloak of magic, and with it, his invisibility. He turned in the direction of the voice. There was a man watching him, a man only a few years older than Eric with haunted, lost eyes. That could be me, Eric realized in pitying horror. A little more bad luck, a few more missed chances . . . not meeting Beth, or Kory. Missing out on the Faire-circuit. That could be me.

  "That's pretty music," the man said, when he had Eric's attention. "I'm Gary."

  "Hello, Gary," Eric said quietly, so as not to startle his new friend. Though his body was full grown, it was clear that the mind behind the eyes was much younger. "Do you know what happened here?"

  Gary's face turned sad, as transparently as a child's. "Fury died. We always used to call him that. He got sick and yelled at everybody, and then he started to fight with the wall." Easy tears glinted in Gary's eyes. "Nobody fights a wall," he said sadly.

  Not with any chance of winning, Eric thought, glancing at the bloodstains. He was tempted to slip back into his magic and leave, but he'd already seen enough to know that he had a lot of urgent questions without answers. Maybe Gary had some of the answers.

  "Have a lot of people died lately? In just the last couple days? People like Fury?"

  Gary stared at him blankly, a sudden sourceless fear growing in his haunted eyes. "The angels take them—the night angels. I have to go," he said suddenly.

  "Hey—wait! I didn't mean to—"

  Gary turned away and scuttled quickly down an alleyway, vanishing from sight.

  "—scare you," Eric finished, gazing at the empty street.

  He could run after the homeless man, but he didn't think Gary had any more to tell him. Fury's death hadn't fed the Nexus—those deaths had occurred back in the Park. And what were the night angels? Unseleighe Sidhe? If the Dark Court was using Manhattan as a hunting ground, there should be unadulterated traces of their magic all over, but the only thing he'd found here was the magic he'd followed.

  Nothing was adding up. It was as if he had all the puzzle pieces—and they all turned out to be from different puzzles. He sighed and looked around. At the end of the block a blue neon cross shone into the night. Eric raised his flute to his lips again, gathering his cloak of invisibility around him once more. The light at the wall was gone now, thanks to Eric's music, but somehow the neon cross shone even brighter in his Shifted sight. It was a sign for a mission, one of the places that tried to feed and shelter New York's rising tide of homeless. Reluctantly, Eric turned toward it. He didn't want to see any more horrors, any more forgotten men and women, but he needed to find out why Sidhe magic was tangled up with the homeless here.

  The inside of the mission was warm and welcoming. Tables were set up where men—and women, some with children—sat spooning up soup. At the kitchen in the back, volunteer workers doled out more soup, sandwiches, and chunks of bread to a long line of those patiently waiting. They were talking among themselves in low voices where the diners couldn't here. Eric crept closer.

  "Not a lot of people here tonight," a woman said. Her companion sighed, rolling his shoulders to take the kinks out.

  "There's something bad out there on the streets. A lot of our regulars are afraid to come in. I heard Johnnie Rags talking to Lindy earlier. They think we might be poisoning them."

  "Poisoning them?" The woman recoiled in shock.

  The man shook his head grimly. "I've heard from some of the other soup kitchens and flops. A lot of people are dead. And more have just . . . vanished. All in the last seventy-two hours. I thought at first that a shipment of bad drugs might have reached the street—but where would our guys get the money for drugs? They can't even afford beds, most of them."

  "Unless the dealers have started handing out free samples like the tobacco companies." The two of them laughed together in disbelief, sharing the bitter joke.

  "And what are the cops going to do? A lot of people die down here every day," the woman went on.

  "Not like this," the man said grimly, shaking his head. "Not like this."

  Eric turned away. The answers he wanted weren't here, but he couldn't escape the feeling that he'd just been handed another clue . . . if he could only understand it.

  Even Shielded as he was, Eric was reluctant to leave the light and warmth of the mission for the cold gloom outside, but he knew he had to move on, see if he could follow this trail to where it began . . . or ended.

  As he turned to go, a young woman sitting at one of the tables got to her feet, heading for the door. She was skeleton-thin, but she'd made some attempt at looking pretty. She wore a down jacket a dozen seasons out of date and a thin bright summery dress. Her legs were bare.

  "Where you going, Annie?" the man behind the soup cauldron called.

  "Got me a date," Annie said belligerently. Eric could see they wanted to stop her, to call her back, but before they could do anything she was outside, hurrying up the street.

  Eric followed her. She didn't go far. There was an alleyway a few doors down from the mission. Annie ducked into it with an ease borne of long familiarity. There was a crude shelter there, made of flattened cardboard boxes, and Annie scuttled inside, squatting down and digging into her jacket.

  "Got me a free sample, got me a free sample," she sing-songed under her breath. Eric could see the glitter of a small packet of white powder in her hands. It radiated a kind of non-magical malignity that made Eric blink.

  "Hey—don't do that," he protested, making himself visible again. He dug in his pocket for his wallet. "Don't take that. Here—I'll buy it from you. Okay?"

  Seeing him, Annie crouched back with a feral cry of alarm. Before Eric could react, she'd torn open the packet and poured the contents into her mouth.

  Its effect was immediate and drastic. Her eyes rolled up in her head and she slumped down, unconscious.

  Oh . . . God. Eric stared at her, sure for a moment that she was dead. I've got to help her.

  He pulled out his flute. The people at the mission knew her. They'd know what to do. But their help wouldn't be any good to Annie if she was dead.

  He let the magic flow down into him, reaching out to the flicker of magic—Eric experienced it as music—that every living thing had. Her song was faint, the contents of the envelope poisoning her nearly to death. It was as if two songs were playing at once, creating a jangling discord. Imposing a third one wouldn't help much.

  He listened as hard as he could for the original tune, there in the cold alleyway, and slowly began improvising a counterpoint around it, strengthening it without overwhelming it. The music became stronger—he could almost identify the tune—when suddenly he was knocked off balance by a blast of . . . music?

  It reverberated through his head, soundless yet loud enough to make his teeth ache, overwhe
lming all other sounds. The music wanted him to follow—it was a call, a command, dark and powerful and magical. Resisting it was like trying to stand still in the path of a cyclone. Annie still needed help, but Eric couldn't "hear" his own magic against the howl of the magestorm. He ran toward the mission. He could at least summon worldly aid. The pull of the Summoning grew stronger by the moment; he pushed open the door to the mission and half staggered, half fell inside.

  "Hey," Eric croaked, half-deafened by the buffeting he was receiving. "Annie's out there in the alley. She's sick."

  The woman who'd been talking as she served the soup ran over to him. Dizzy and battered by the dark undertow of the magical Summoning, Eric clung to her for support.

  "Are you hurt? Can you tell me your name? Come over here. Sit down—"

  "No," Eric gasped. "I've got to—I've got to go. Help her. She's in an alley up the street, in a box. She took something. Something bad." It was hard to get any words out against the call of the Unseleighe magic, and finally Eric abandoned the effort. He pushed the woman away and thrust himself out into the night once more, turning in the direction of the summons.

  As soon as he was moving with the pull of the magic, his head cleared enough for him to throw up some stronger shields. The power of the assault had taken him off-guard, but he had his bearings now. It would be a simple thing to isolate himself from its pull entirely, but Eric wasn't sure he wanted to do that. He'd come down here looking for the source of the magic that had befouled the city—and now, it seemed, the magic was looking for him.

  Sorry Master Dharinel. I know you wanted me to stay out of this one, but a Bard's gotta do what a Bard's gotta do. I just hope I'm around afterward to get yelled at for it.