Hot Lead, Cold Iron

by Ari Marmell

  Another wave. The redcap stood and poured her some wine, then looked at me. “Free and clear,” she assured me, “same as the fruit.” And then, “You’re staring, Mr. Oberon. It’s not polite.”

  “I’m sorry. I just… You’re being surprisingly generous.”

  “For an Unseelie?” she asked, her tone gone just a touch dangerous.

  “No, I mean…” I was floundering a little, knew it, and couldn’t help it. “I mean for, uh, what you… That is, what you are.”

  “Ah. That.” She chuckled softly.

  Eudeagh, you need to understand, was what you folk used to call a “buttery spirit.” (That’s “buttery” as in “an old-fashioned term for the cellar,” not as in “covered in butter.”) In your world, they set up shop in the basements and cellars of hotels, restaurants, that kinda joint. Specifically those that shortchange their customers, or serve small portions, or stint on costs—basically anywhere they’re supposed to be about hospitality but wind up chintzy or cheats instead. Buttery spirits feed on that sort of miserly behavior. People around ’em get too generous, and the little bastards can actually starve. (And they’re welcome to it, frankly.)

  “Do I look to you as though I’m going wanting?” she purred at me, running a hand across one hip. “I’ve plenty to eat here, and if I ever need to hop out for a quick bite, there’s always more to be had among the mortals.” She stretched out a hand and clacked her glass orbs together like marbles. “I can afford to be a gracious host. Surely you wouldn’t offend me by refusing?”

  “Course not. Mead, then.”

  I watched the redcap serving me, made sure he didn’t put anything in the drink, and raised my glass to hers. She guzzled her wine with the same show of grace and manners she’d eaten with, and then stopped, cocking her head to the side.

  “Can you hear them?” she asked, her voice reverent.

  “All I hear’s the panting of that mutt by your feet.” The dog growled at me.

  “The sluagh,” she said; I’d have described her expression as “staring off at nothing” if she’d had anything to stare with. “They’re riled tonight. Have been for weeks, in fact. Something has them stirring, something in the mortal world, I expect.”

  “Oh. Swell.”

  Queen Mob laughed again. “Nothing to do with you, I’m sure.” Yet another wave—how the heck did her people tell ’em apart, anyway?—and the redcap and the black dog both strolled from the room. Guess they weren’t important enough to be here for this.

  “All right, Mr. Oberon,” she said, twisting cat-like in her chair until she found a more comfortable spot. “It’s not every day that someone with as colorful a reputation as yours requests a sit-down. What is it you want, exactly?”

  Now that it was time, I was having second thoughts. Hell, I was probably up to fifth or sixth thoughts. Did I actually want the Unfit caught up in this? Did I want to tell Boss Eudeagh what I was doing? What if they were involved, and decided I was a liability? What if other Fae learned I was blabbing about them to the Unseelie Court? This whole thing was starting to feel like a real bad idea.

  You know what felt like an even worse idea, though? Getting this far, sitting in front of Queen Mob, and refusing to tell her why. Plus, I was still pretty well strapped for leads if this didn’t accomplish anything.

  So, however reluctantly, I told her. More or less all of it.

  To which Eudeagh thoughtfully replied, “Hmm.” And then we just sat.

  Eventually, for lack of anything better to say, I asked, “So why’d you agree to meet?”

  “Curiosity, mostly. I thought it peculiar you sent me the request at all, even more so that someone tried to bump you off in the middle of the Lambton Worm.” Then, at my furrowed brow, “I have people everywhere, Mr. Oberon. Even in the Seelie Court. Or, well, not people, necessarily, but you know what I mean. I knew of the attempt on your life before the detective arrived to question you about it.”

  So was she showing off, or was this her way of telling me that she hadn’t ordered the hit? I wasn’t entirely sure. What I was sure of is that I wasn’t about to flat-out ask.

  A few moments more of silence, and then the queen waved the two elderly gentlemen over. They leaned over in perfect unison, mirrors of each other, to whisper in her ears. I couldn’t make out a word, but I caught the perfectly synchronized head shakes.

  “Very well,” she said as they straightened back up. “Neither I nor my aides have any memory of this ‘Ottati’ family, but we’ll look into it.” She rose from the chair—as far as she could “rise,” at her height—and scooped up the glass eyes. Taking the napkin in her other hand, she dipped a corner in the wine and scrubbed at her, uh, “mouth sockets,” transforming the lipstick into a gory smear on the fabric. Then, after a quick lick and a quick polish on the dry end of the napkin, she popped first one false eye, and then the other, into place. I cringed at the squeal of glass on teeth, and then she clamped her mini-mouths tight around them. With the false lashes and maybe a dab of makeup, yeah, they’d look real—from a distance, anyway.

  “I trust you can keep yourself entertained while you wait?” she asked from her remaining mouth. “You’re welcome to serve yourself, and to read anything you want. Just keep in mind that some of these books are irreplaceable. You break it, you buy it.” And then she was moving toward the door.

  “Wait!”

  She stopped, spun, hands on hips. “Yes?”

  I knew I should just close my head, not risk gumming up the deal, but some things I just ain’t prepared to chock up to good luck. “You’re gonna help me out? That easy?”

  “Oh, Mr. Oberon, you’re so cute.” She shook her head and actually clucked at me. “I have to know precisely what information I have to offer you before I can decide what it’s going to cost you to acquire, don’t I?”

  And she marched on out, leaving me there to ponder that little ominous tidbit. I looked up to meet the boggarts’ twin gazes.

  “You guys going with her? And if not, either of you got a deck of cards, or maybe some dominoes?”

  They grinned, both of ’em in unison. And they kept grinning, until the corners of their mouths met on the backs of their skulls and their heads literally flopped open like they were hinged, leaving nothing but a tooth-rimmed hole at the top of their necks. Those holes then fell straight to the floor, the rest of their bodies vanishing through ’em on the way, and the boggarts were both gone.

  I really hate the Unseelie.

  Bound and determined not to be cowed (or not to show it, at any rate), I sidled up to one of the dullahan, who clearly were not planning to go anywhere. “How about you, bo? Got any cards? I bet you’ve got a mean poker face.”

  Somewhere in the Otherworld, a disembodied head scowled at me. I’m sure of it.

  So since my only companions weren’t too friendly, and lacked either interest in, or a few basic requirements for, meaningful conversation, I passed the next couple hours examining Eudeagh’s library and munching on more forbidden fruit. After thumbing through the musty and vaguely mildew-smelling A Midsummer Night’s Dream—yeah, it was the uncensored original; I cringed at the descriptions of King Oberon and Queen Titania, and stuck it back on the shelf before I got too tempted to rip it up—I settled into one of the chairs with a few pulp magazines.

  Yes, magazines. Whaddaya want? I’ve read all the ancient Celtic and other European epics already, and when it comes to modern literature, I prefer Weird Tales to the Brontës.

  I was just about through with Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” when Queen Mob strolled back in, one of the creepy boggart twins dogging her heels. She waved at me to stay seated—or I think that’s what the wave meant; it’s what I did, anyway—and glided into the chair directly across from me.

  “Well, Mr. Oberon, you’ve certainly produced a tough nut. None of my people have any knowledge of the particular child in question. It’s certainly possible that someone in my organization performed the swap and then trade
d, killed, ate, or otherwise lost track of the girl—” it was less what she said, and more the casual way she enumerated the possibilities that chilled me “—but I think someone would recall. It’s also possible that the swap was performed by one of my rival gangs in the Court. We’d probably know of it—we keep very close watch over each other—but there’s no guarantee. I have people looking into this prospect.

  “But let’s be honest with ourselves, Mick. May I call you Mick?”

  “Uh, sure…”

  “Neither you nor I believe that this changeling is an Unseelie child, do we? Not after Judge Ylleuwyn’s reaction and the attempt on your life.”

  “No.” I sighed. “We don’t.”

  “And you,” she said, abruptly angling forward, “didn’t come here for information.”

  “Um, I didn’t?”

  “No. You came for our help in prying the info you need from Ylleuwyn’s clutches!”

  “Uh…”

  “We can do this for you, Mick. We can get you what you need. What you won’t get anywhere else.”

  I wished right about then that I could climb inside my own mouth and vanish, same as the boggarts had done, or at least slink under the chair and hide. “And in return?” Considering who I was dealing with, I’m real proud of the fact that my voice was steady.

  “Well… You’ve a much greater understanding of, and more contacts in, the mortal world than we have. And even in your current state of disfavor, some useful connections among the Seelie as well. Let’s call it… a favor. A boon that we can call in down the road a ways.”

  Oh, shit. That was exactly the last thing I wanted—a hanging debt to the fucking Unseelie Court! And I’ve told you about Fae pacts; this wasn’t something I could just renege on, and not only ’cause they’d hunt me down and butcher me if I tried.

  It was a nightmare, pure and simple. And she was asking me to step right into it, put the noose around my own neck.

  “I’m only bound to this if whatever we try works,” I insisted.

  “Of course.”

  “And I won’t help you hurt anyone. We gotta understand that going in.”

  Eudeagh literally spit her glass peepers back out into her open palm and “gazed” at me with open mouths and twitching tongues. “I’m not entirely comfortable putting such limitations on our arrangement, Mick. I fear we may not have a bargain, after all.”

  Her tone hadn’t changed, but I saw the dullahan behind her stiffen, like they were paying attention for the first time. Even without mouths, without throats, I thought I heard a pair of distant, expectant sighs.

  Well, that wasn’t a good sign, was it?

  I cast about for something, anything to salvage this without backing me into a nasty corner. “All right, how about this? I won’t do anything for you that gets me and my friends in hot water with the law, and I won’t help you hurt anyone who I don’t think deserves it.”

  For what seemed to be a few thousand heartbeats—which, at that point, woulda just been a couple minutes, honestly—she pursed all six lips at me. “You understand,” she said finally, “that your honest judgment of who ‘deserves it will be a formal part of the pact you swear?”

  “Yeah.” Meant I wouldn’t be able to lie about whether I felt someone did deserve to be hurt or not. I also wouldn’t be able to limit my participation to how much I thought they deserved it, either. I might wind up having to help the Unfit whack someone who hadn’t earned more’n a mild beating or a short spell in the cooler. But I was behind the eight ball and out of options. “I dig.”

  “Good. Swear it.”

  I’m astounded she could understand a word of it, through my gritted, grinding teeth—but I swore.

  And if you’re thinking that I’d come to regret that someday, congratulations. You’ve been paying attention.

  But for today, it was done. “So what’s the plan?” I asked her.

  “Well, Mick.” She smiled and settled back in her chair. The first boggart leaned in with a gleaming grin; the other appeared from the shadows at the back of the room, behind the dullahan, where no entrance stood. “Let’s put our heads together and figure that out, shall we?”

  * * *

  Dawn spread itself across the sky—sorta like margarine, really—to shine down on the brick roads and glass buildings of Chicago’s Seelie Court. Other than a few white puffs casually sauntering across the brightening expanse of blue, no sign remained of the earlier rains; and that meant that the nostril-filling, tongue-coating, brain-smothering perfume of a hundred trees and a thousand flowers was back in full. Men, women, and otherwise strolled the sidewalks or rode the streets, making ready for the day’s business.

  An average, everyday morning in Elphame. For most.

  Clad in shirt and trousers creased sharp enough to trim the hedges—guess he didn’t bother with the formal robes until he got to the hall—Judge Ylleuwyn strode the sidewalks like he owned ’em. One hand behind his back, the other on the hilt of the Dark Ages broadsword at his waist, and his head held high as an unfurled banner, this was clearly a fellow whose hoity-toity education had somehow failed to include the definition of the word “humility.” He was conversing, as he strolled, with a dog so shaggy it coulda been a walking mop.

  Well, assuming your mops are leaf-green in color and the size of a calf. The thing wasn’t all that much smaller than the black dog I’d, uh, met yesterday.

  And when I say Ylleuwyn was “conversing,” I don’t mean he was jabbering aimlessly to a pet, the way some of you do. I mean they were having a conversation. The cu sidhe may resemble dogs (kinda), and they may have the personalities of hunting hounds, but they’re Fae, same as the aes sidhe or the glaistig. They ain’t all that sharp, but then, neither are a lot of the humans I know. Smart enough to hold a chat, anyway.

  This particular cu sidhe was also about to ruin the whole damn thing; no way the judge would do what we needed him to with a witness around. We got lucky, though; just as they came into view of City Hall, the cu sidhe made some final comment and trotted off ahead. Maybe he was late for work, or maybe he just wanted to chase a squirrel; I dunno.

  It was now or never; the streets and the stairs of the hall weren’t too crowded this early, so it could still work. Ylleuwyn was just crossing the last street before he got there when someone appeared from behind a nearby corner.

  “Hsst! Hey, judge!”

  A goblin—the same goblin, in fact, that I’d accosted not far from here the night before last—glanced around furtively and then scooted over. Ylleuwyn’s shoulders tensed, and he instantly peered around him, looking for an ambush, while the fingers on his hilt visibly tightened.

  “I’ve nothing to say to you, you vile creature,” he announced. Pompous jackass.

  “Fine by me, judge. I’ll do the talking.” He was right up on Ylleuwyn, now. Several inches of the earl’s blade were showing outside the scabbard—and he almost drew completely when the goblin held out a hand.

  Except that what it held was no weapon, but a sheaf of papers.

  Ylleuwyn couldn’t have been any more immobile if the blind date knocking on his door wound up being Medusa. He didn’t much seem inclined either to take the papers or to resheathe his blade. A few folk were starting to stare in his direction, but so far nobody’d taken too much of an interest. If that sword came free, though, or this took too much longer…

  The goblin smirked. “We know you’re having some, ah, disagreements with Alderman Rycine.” (Which was no surprise, since Ylleuwyn and Rycine had been rivals since before either of ’em came to Chicago—or, for that matter, there’d been a Chicago to come to.) “Consider this your secret weapon.”

  The judge made no move to accept, though he did, finally, slide the sword back home. “I’m not so easily bought, you little fool. Whatever you want of me, I’ll have none of it! Be on your way.”

  But the goblin didn’t look apt to breeze any time soon—and for all his posturing, Ylleuwyn wasn’t exactly walking away, either
.

  “Not asking nothing of you, judge. Just take it.”

  If Ylleuwyn’s hackles had risen any further, they’d have torn his shirt. “Nothing comes free from the Unfit.”

  Now the Unseelie bristled, but he knew his job. “Look, buster, it’s a delivery, see? Gift from a fella calls himself ‘Oberon,’ if you can believe that.” The goblin shrugged. “Said he hoped this’d make you reconsider helping him out with something or other. You want more? Ask him.”

  “I see. Yes, he would stoop to dealing with your sort.” Ylleuwyn started to turn away, stopped, and tried unsuccessfully to hide a grin inside his beard. “That’s all you were to do? Deliver this? Not to collect any promises or oaths?”

  Another shrug. “Just delivery, with Mr. Oberon’s compliments.”

  “Very well.” Ylleuwyn took a last gander around and then snatched the documents so quick the messenger actually jumped. “Now get gone, before I find something to charge you with.”

  The goblin wandered away, muttering, and Judge Ylleuwyn resumed his trek to the hall, shaking his head and grinning—presumably at my “foolishness.”

  Where was I during all this? Oh, y’know, not too far away… A few dozen yards, in fact. Hidden by leaves and branches, and by an extra layer of ambient luck—I didn’t think the judge’d spot me, but I sure as hell didn’t need some curious pixie fluttering overhead and squawking at me—I was crouched, nice and awkward and uncomfortable.

  With a camera.

  Or, well, the Elphame equivalent. It looked like a camera, anyway. And it did the same job.

  Soon as Ylleuwyn had vanished up the stairs and through the glass doors, I was up and running. Ignoring the stares, and the occasional curse when I shoved past people meandering too slowly for my tastes, I pounded down the sidewalk, through the doors of the Lambton, and over to the elevators. (I didn’t know, and didn’t care, whether Slachaun just wasn’t around to notice me, or whether I flew by too quick for him to do anything.) I stood rock-still—not sure I even breathed—for the elevator ride, which took about ten thousand years, and finally I was in my room.