Hot Lead, Cold Iron

by Ari Marmell

  And there was the driver. Short and hunched even shorter, he had skin the color of worn leather, beady red lamps, and a kisser big enough to fit my whole head, full of teeth like a shark’s mother-in-law. His suit was a brown pinstripe that clashed nauseatingly with his skin—except his hat, an old-fashioned bowler, that was a deep, rich crimson. And not from any dye, either.

  Fucking redcaps.

  People were going outta their way to avoid us, now, even crossing the street to stay well away from the coach. See, for all the political and territorial wrangling, all the rivalries and competition, all the duels and ambushes and skirmishes, the two Courts ain’t openly at war. There’s some trade, some commerce, even some business partnerships, between Fae on the two sides. So seeing one of the Unseelie in Seelie territory—or vice-versa—ain’t unheard of.

  But that don’t mean the average Joes on either side much care for it. And they care for it even less with some kinds of Fae than others. Redcaps are popular hitmen with the Unfit, since they tend to eat the evidence when they’re done, which makes ’em unpopular with, well, everyone else.

  This one dropped from the seat and opened the door—not so much to show off his manners, I think, but to make sure I couldn’t miss the brass .38 and the bronze meat cleaver hanging on his belt. He reeked of rotting beef and cheap aftershave.

  “Boss wants to see ya,” he growled at me, slurring a little around the not-so-pearly whites. “Get in the flivver.”

  I shoulda been surprised that she got my message and reacted so quickly, or nervous about getting into any vehicle driven by a redcap, or afraid of this maybe being a trap. Instead, I threw a tantrum. Not sure why I picked that moment for it—maybe it was frustration over my situation, or leftover adrenaline—but something about the whole shebang just rubbed me wrong.

  “For Pete’s sake, it’s not a goddamn ‘flivver’! Do you see an engine? Do you see a gas tank, or a steering wheel? ’Cause I don’t. I see reins, and wood, and friggin’ horses! You slack-jawed meatheads don’t even care what it is you’re parroting, do you? Just as long as you think you sound like the humans do!”

  The redcap blinked twice at me. Then, “Get in the flivver.”

  I sighed, and got in the carriage. Damn it.

  It managed to feel cramped, even though it wasn’t that small a coach—possibly because of all the black and the lack of windows. The air was stale, and smelled of soap, making me think they’d just freshly cleaned it out. The seats, also dyed black, were surprisingly comfortable: a type of leather that I wasn’t familiar with, real soft and supple as a baby’s…

  Oh, fuck me.

  I shuddered, violently, and had to repress an urge to leap screaming from the coach, or at least huddle on the floor as far from the benches as I could get.

  All things considered, I don’t think you can blame me for taking a minute to realize that the carriage wasn’t, in fact, completely enclosed. A single window—a horizontal slit, barred in bronze filigree—sat high in the front wall. Through it, I could look out and see the sky ahead of us, but not the actual road or anything we might be passing.

  I also couldn’t see the redcap, who was seated next to the window; it was perfectly placed so that, even if a passenger could knock out the filigree, it’d be all but impossible to aim a blade or a heater at the driver.

  So I stared at the sky, mostly to avoid thinking about what I was sitting on. I watched the passing clouds, and listened to the rattle-and-thump of tires on brick, and felt the carriage sway as it turned. And even without being able to see where we were going, I could tell that it wasn’t the way I’d expected, not if our destination was Unfit territory. I felt my hand twitch toward my wand as I leaned forward toward the window. “Don’t we wanna be taking Cobbler’s Way?”

  The redcap’s grumble came drifting in between the shapes of bronze. “Duel.”

  I’m pretty sure I groaned loud enough to be heard in your world.

  Here’s the skinny. As I said, there’s not a lotta open war in Elphame—it ain’t civilized, see?—and the Chicago Courts’re no exception. Yeah, now and again a couple of Unseelie factions might go to the mattresses for a while, but that’s about it for what you’d call genuine warfare.

  Which don’t mean there ain’t violence aplenty. It’s just a lot more focused, and a little more organized.

  How do you suppose the Fae code of honor and satisfaction looks here and now? Between the aristocrats of the Seelie Court, it’s still nicely old-fashioned: two fellas with a blade or, more often these days, a gat. But when it involves lower Seelie, the Unseelie, or a beef between Fae of different Courts? No such luck.

  They call it a Chicago duel. (Yeah, I know. You guys come up with “Chicago typewriter” and “Chicago lightning,” so we gotta follow. Again, mimics, the whole ditzy lot of us. We can’t even come up with original metaphors.) Basically, it plays out this way: we got our hits and our busts, our shootouts and our police raids, same as you. But since we don’t want anything in the way of open war, we schedule most of the damn things. One fella demands satisfaction from another, they pick a time and place. Then they and their seconds, as many as they can gather, meet up and start plugging and stabbing away at each other until one side gives, or the right guy dies. And then they walk away. As I said, usually it’s a group of coppers and crooks, just like in your Chicago, but sometimes it’s two Unseelie, and occasionally even two Seelie (so you wind up with two “police departments” duking it out). Makes no nevermind to them; they play it the same way.

  Stupid, big-time stupid. And nothing I’d call a duel. But it’s preferable to real war, right?

  That’s what they tell me, anyway.

  Anyway, we took the long way around, accompanied by the sound of very distant gunfire. I sat, rocking with the trundling coach, and staring at the blank blue sky through the tiny window.

  Until the sky wasn’t so blank or blue anymore.

  It coulda just been any oncoming storm, at first, except that the clouds were swirling instead of going anywhere. The sky itself came over purple, but everything else took on a jaundiced cast, like the whole world was suddenly sick. The winds were barely strong enough to shake the carriage, yet they roared louder’n God’s own locomotive.

  Not quite so loud, though, that I couldn’t hear the hoofbeats of something coming up beside us on either side. Something that I assumed had to be there to accompany us, since I didn’t hear the redcap squirting metal at whoever’d shown up.

  Again from that tiny window, I saw just the very tops of the tallest buildings as we drew near. They weren’t that different from the skyscrapers of the Seelie Court: mostly glass, with the occasional stone tower. But the trees that formed the supports for some of those buildings were black and twisted, dead and rotting; and one was supported, not by wood or stone at all, but by thousands of bones, mortared together into jagged pillars. I wondered where they’d gotten that much bone, and then, with another glance at the seat, decided I really didn’t wanna know.

  I also began to wonder how this place’d smell without the constant winds, and decided I’d never been more grateful for the weather.

  The carriage wobbled to a halt. I heard the driver thump to the ground and grumble “Get out,” as he hauled open the door. And the first thing I saw, other’n the redcap himself, were the two outriders who’d shown up to escort us in. My “bodyguards,” in case any rival factions had decided to take a shot.

  There were two of ’em, and honestly, I’d have preferred more redcaps.

  Dullahan. Headless riders in black suits, on headless black horses. The riders normally carried their heads with ’em, under an arm or in a basket; I don’t think any god of any time or place ever knew where the horses’ heads were kept, if they existed at all. These particular dullahan each carried a Chicago typewriter, also black; I had to look close to tell that they were painted brass, not the steel of a human-built chopper. And each had a brass-wire basket welded to its top, where the rider’s head sat
on a thin layer of cushioning. It looked more’n a little funny, I’ll admit, but it kept their hands free for the Tommy guns—and with peepers actually on the gats, you can bet the bastards never missed.

  Trying not to stare at either the empty space where their heads shoulda been, or the unblinking peepers where the heads were, I climbed from the coach and slipped past ’em. The winds weren’t too fierce, as I said, but they were cold. In the Seelie territory, and in your world, spring had moved right in, but here, winter wasn’t too willing to take a powder. The mounds from which the buildings rose were gritty, covered in thorns and dead scrub, and even the glass was dark and gloomy. Distant screams rode the air like dead leaves. And way off on the horizon, the sky grew even darker—not with clouds, but with the whirling black hosts of the sluagh, neither ghost nor Fae but something horribly, awfully between.

  Before me I saw a broad glass door, leading into a large mound. Light, yellow but a little cleaner than the sky, poured from within, and I figured that was where I was supposed to go. It didn’t take me but a few steps to spot that, while I hadn’t cast a shadow in Seelie territory, here I had two: one stretching out behind, nice and regular, and one in front of me, reaching toward the light.

  The redcap moved ahead of me and pushed the door open, leaving the dullahan to stand post outside. I glanced back, and saw one of ’em put his head up on the horse’s saddle to keep watch while the body set about brushing road dust off his Tommy gun. Then I turned my attention back to where I was, and saw a wall of muscle blocking my path.

  A huge, pus-colored troll in a three-piece suit loomed over me, staring through black, piggy eyes. He leaned in, smiling, displaying shreds of skin and cotton between serrated teeth.

  “Frisk him, Geddo,” the redcap ordered.

  The next few seconds were kinda how I imagine being trapped in a cement mixer would feel, but I dealt with it. The troll took my rapier and my wand, and somehow, I didn’t much feel up to protesting.

  You gotta understand, I could appreciate their paranoia. The Outfit in your world is run a lot more like a corporation these days (even if they want people to believe that Netti’s in charge), but the Unseelie still function the way it was under Capone. Yeah, there’s someone ostensibly in charge of the whole shebang, but you got lots of rival factions, groups of outsiders who don’t follow the rules, and a dozen guys who’d be more’n happy to knock off the boss if it meant moving up the ladder. So the Unseelie here are at least as careful as Capone ever was, and with even better reason.

  (Did you know that a few Unseelie actually treat the day Al was sentenced as a day of mourning? Seriously. They practically worship him and his ilk. Heck, that’s where our little nickname for them—the Unfit—came from: Unseelie, Outfit. See? Yeah, yeah. Listen, we take our humor where we can find it. And besides, it gets ’em nice and steamed when we call ’em that, so there’s a plus.)

  Anyway, after getting manhandled and bruised by the troll’s car-door-sized meat hooks, and after Geddo was convinced I wasn’t packing any hidden heat or otherwise planning to whack his boss, he went back to his post by the door. The redcap, flanked by a couple goblins who’d appeared outta nowhere, waved at me to follow.

  The wide chamber looked like another hotel lobby, though not as nice as the Lambton. Chairs ranged from rickety bundles of twigs to sofas covered in leather that looked uncomfortably similar to what I’d seen in the carriage; arches of stone or dead branches created all sorts of murky nooks, from which gleamed a heaping mess of glowing peepers (a few of which didn’t even have the common courtesy to come in pairs). There weren’t as many humans wandering around here as there’d been in Seelie territory, and those there were looked just as drugged, but not nearly as happy about it. Crunches, snaps, groans, and screams emerged from the darkest corners.

  The center walkway, at least, was well lit by chandeliers hanging above. And I was happier in the light, if only a little—until I glanced down, and in the corners of my vision, I swear I saw my “extra” shadow moving before I did.

  At that point, I decided on a new plan: keeping my head held rigid and my gaze locked firmly straight ahead. And it was a plan I managed to stick to, through several doorways, between multiple pairs of trolls and dullahan, down a carpeted staircase with mahogany banisters…

  And finally into the presence of my host.

  Eudeagh, queen of Chicago’s Unseelie Court, herself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The underground room was a study, and a big one, lit by glass-enclosed lamps of what I can only describe as “illusory fire.” More of a private library, really, it was clearly designed to guide the eye precisely from end to end.

  Bookcases ran along both side walls, with fancy portraits of past Unseelie nobles, in all their bloody inhuman glory, between them. The books themselves ran the gamut; in just one quick glance, I saw antique diaries and mystic grimoires, dictionaries and encyclopedias, dime novels and pulp magazines. I stopped briefly on what I swear looked like an unexpurgated version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I thought we’d destroyed the last of those back in the early seventeenth century), and a Bible written in Ancient Greek.

  On the right wall, two of the cases stood farther apart than usual, leaving room for a broad fireplace of red brick. It wasn’t burning at the moment, leaving me a clear view of the bronze manacles bolted to the inside of the chimney.

  Guh…!

  At the study’s far end, beneath an enormous painting of Friar Rush—the portrait’s cloven feet and hooked nails were embossed with actual fingernails, the edges ragged from where they’d been yanked out—a gaggle of upholstered chairs were clustered around a tea table. Another pair of dullahan stood behind those chairs, coats bulging with heavy roscoes; I had no clue where their heads mighta been, ’cause I sure as hell didn’t see ’em anywhere. A couple kindly-looking gentlemen in silk suits (yeah, silk) sat on the arms of two of those chairs; probably boggarts in human form, if I had to guess. At the feet of one curled a hairy black dog the size of a small pony, panting excitedly, its eyes gleaming green and its snout bared back in a very human grin. Even from here, I could smell the fear on its breath—not its own, either, but belonging to whatever poor sap last slipped through those jaws.

  And between them—curled up in her chair, right in the center of everything, the way she loved it—Queen Eudeagh, Boss of Bosses, il Capo di Tutti Capi, of the local Unseelie. Possibly the single most powerful individual in the Chicago Otherworld, with as many enemies among the Unfit as among the Seelie, and proud of it to boot.

  She preferred the title of “boss.” Most of us referred to her as “Queen Mob.” Look, just remember what I just said about Fae humor…

  Eudeagh woulda been maybe three feet tall, in heels, if she’d been standing. Her hair, cut in a stylish bob, was black as unmined coal; the rest of her sat right on the knife’s edge between “curvaceous” and “chubby,” and made it look damn good. She wore red satin that clung like a second skin, slinky as a tipsy snake. Oh, she was one sweet tomato, no doubt—right up until she smiled at you between her ruby lips.

  All six of ’em. The regular ones, where they were supposed to be, and the two smaller mouths where most of us—human, Fae, whatever—kept our peepers.

  Even though I’d known to expect it, I still had to swallow hard to keep from making an unwanted gift of the bacon and eggs I’d had for breakfast.

  She waved us over, and I followed my redcap “guide” to the chairs. He wandered around to stand at the queen’s side, while I dropped myself into a seat without giving myself a chance to think about it. She waved again, this time at the table, which held a few different carafes of mead and wine, and two bowls, one of golden apples, the other of deep red ones.

  There was also, sitting right in front of her on a napkin of purple fabric, a pair of glass peepers and a selection of false lashes. Somehow, I didn’t figure she was offering those to me.

  “You’ll never have better, Mr. Oberon,” she sa
id when I hesitated. Her voice was sultry; she coulda been a lounge singer, if it hadn’t been so damn disturbing watching her swap mouths in mid-sentence. “They’re imported, fresh from the Hesperides and Tír na nÓg.”

  I gotta confess, I started something fierce at that. “Are you kidding?! Do you know how illegal it is to take apples from either…” I stopped, trailing off idiotically at the amused chuckles from everyone around me (the damn dog included). Musta forgot who I was talking to. “Right,” I finished lamely. Then, because hey, why not? I reached out for the bowls.

  And froze again. “And the price of this fine snack?” I asked carefully.

  She laughed in three slightly different tones at once. “None at all. I offer it freely and without condition, as part of my obligation as your host.”

  I nodded, and took a red apple. They don’t call Tír na nÓg the “Land of Youth” for nothing, I’ll tell you what. Just a couple bites, and I felt a hundred times better. No more exhaustion, no more lingering pain from getting battered into, well, batter.

  She went for a golden apple herself, and watching her eat it almost cost me my own appetite. She fell on it like a starving wolf, taking huge, careless bites. She chewed noisily, desperately, with open mouths. Juice and bits of pulped fruit splattered across her face, and each time that happened, her nearest tongue would come peeking out of its mouth, a fat, fleshy worm, and lap the mess clean. She wasn’t done until everything, down to the seeds and the core, was gone. All she left were the bits of fruit that had fallen to the table, rather than on her, and those the black dog snuffled up in seconds.