by Ari Marmell
Lydecker nodded, resembling nothing so much now as a frantic feather duster.
“We never strayed far from the room,” he swore, though whether he meant himself and the two bulls or some other “we” I couldn’t say. “I can’t imagine how anyone might have sneaked past us! But why ever someone would break into a museum to leave an artifact, someone else must have wanted it. It’s gone again!”
* * *
A catacomb of winding halls, some brilliant as noon—if noon was, you know, electric—while others were lit by single, lonely bulbs, manmade fireflies dangling and dying in a spider web. Wooden doors with brass plaques, a few of which were even legible. So-’n-so’s office here, the department of physical anthropological what’s-who’s-ery over there; and everywhere the bug-song of halogen lights and the echoes of footsteps I wasn’t sure we’d even taken yet.
Yeah, this place wasn’t hair-raising at all.
Thing is, I only remember a lot of that in retrospect. At the time, I was too busy gawking bad as a dumb wheat fresh off the bus.
Not at the halls. The rooms.
Rooms? No, more like man-made caverns, even if the rows of metal shelves made ’em feel smaller. Bones, claws, rocks, tools, weapons, dishes, clothes, pelts… A million different gewgaws from a thousand places and a hundred centuries. Some of the crap here was older’n I was. And I wanted to study all of it, spend a few decades just glomming the whole shebang.
Couldn’t help but think of my drawer of curios, back at the flop. All kinds of weird little dinguses, stuff I collected or asked for on whim, payment for my services instead of dough. Sometimes valuable, sometimes not; sometimes important, sometimes not. But always symbolic.
That’s the language of magic: symbolism. Everything’s got power, from holy relics to a worn-out old shoe, if you got the know-how to tap into it, and you figured out what it means, and to who.
This place? Made my drawer look like… well, a drawer. Most people woulda wanted to study all the goodies and oddities here for the history. Me? I wanted to take it all in for the symbolism. I knew there was power here, mentioned that to you before. But this? A strong enough magician might rule the world with all this.
Then I thought about the last powerful magician I’d met, just earlier that year, and decided maybe I wanted to ponder on something else for a while.
All of which is a long way of bringing me back around to the table we stood around, in the room where we’d finally stopped.
According to Lydecker, the museum staff did a lot of work on their Polynesian exhibits right here. A couple of flat stone faces sneered from a nearby shelf, while a much bigger face made of feathers and wicker and teeth contemplated eating me from another. On the table itself, a bunch of necklaces made of shells and hair had been pushed aside, leaving room for the main event.
A tall wicker basket full of spears lay on its side. The wood was dry-rotted, the tips were stone and scratched up yet good, but it was still plain as day you wouldn’t wanna get stuck with one.
“Right in there,” the curator was spouting, not for the first time. “I just came into the room, and it was right there.”
“What was?” I asked him. I’d sorta already picked up on it, from his rambling, but I wanted to get it all straight.
“A spear! As I’ve already told you!”
“Uh-huh.” I made a show of giving the whole bundle a good once-over. “And you know this collection so well you, what, just knew it didn’t belong with the others?”
Lydecker got all huffy, which was what I wanted. I’ve met the type; you probably have, too. Best way to get ’em to explain anything in detail is to imply they might not know it.
“While neither the Polynesian peoples nor the tools of warfare are my specialty, Mr. Oberon, I can assure you that anyone with even the faintest understanding of history would have recognized that something was amiss. I honestly can’t fathom how the intruder thought he might hide the thing here. He must have been truly desperate, or—” no mistaking the slant he cast my way, then, “—a true idiot.”
“All right.” I let him think I’d missed the insinuation. “So how’d you know?”
“In addition to being in much better shape in general—honestly, it appeared expertly restored!—it was quite clearly an Iron Age weapon. I couldn’t tell you from where, precisely, without closer study or knowledge of when in the Iron Age it originated, but I would hazard a Western cultural construction.”
“And what makes you think whoever it was stuck the dingus here to hide it?”
“Are you sure you’re a detective?” Then, with another huff, “Can you think of any other reason for this?”
Sure, I could. “Nah, not really. After you spotted it, then what? Since you didn’t make a ‘close study’ or whatnot.”
Yeah, I was probably winding him up more’n I needed to. Whaddaya want from me? He was irritating.
“I felt, detective, that it was more important to ascertain the object’s origin. It didn’t seem to fit with any of the exhibits we currently house, but I still had to check and make certain it hadn’t simply been misplaced from another room. Only after that did I discover evidence of the break-in, and I’ve been dealing with you lot ever since.”
Amazing how much “you lot” sounds like profanity when you got the right inflection behind it.
I opened my yap to ask another question, but it wasn’t my words that came blasting through the room.
“How the fuck did you lose it?”
Guess Galway’d finally gotten wind of what had happened. He was still making his way down the corridor—I could tell by the echo, voice and hocksteps both—but he might as well have been at my shoulder.
Cat was loud, is what I’m sayin’.
“It was in a room full of policemen! In a building surrounded by policemen! How in the ever-fucking-flaming fucking hell…?”
Actually, it was in a room containing maybe two or three policemen, and there weren’t enough of ’em outside to surround a parking space. But I didn’t really figure it’d do me, or anyone, any favors to say so.
What I did say was, “Pete, I’m gonna make myself scarce a spell.”
The suggestion I’d made to Galway regarding my participation would probably hold, but the mood he was in? No sense in giving him cause to rethink it.
Pete nodded. I got a puzzled blink from Lydecker as I slipped out into an adjoining room through one door, right before Detective Megaphone darkened the other.
After listening for a tick as he ripped into Pete and the others—seemed to have slipped his mind that Pete wasn’t even here when the spear went south—I figured I didn’t find museum exhibits all that disturbing, after all, and made my way back upstairs.
Quietly.
* * *
By chance, or so I figured at the time, I found myself wandering through Dynastic Egypt, past a whole mess of stuffed and preserved birds stuck in glass displays or hanging on wires. Eventually I reached the Mammals of Africa. Sure, why not? Gazelles bounded over grassy savannahs, rhinos squatted and glared, lions crept… Ah, fuck it. It was dead, the whole lot of it. Throat-chewing formaldehyde and sawdust and glass eyes and wood-colored resins, in a morbid fever dream of nature.
I finally wound up staring peeper to glass peeper with the taxidermied carcasses of the Tsavo Man-Eaters, one flopped out on the fake rocks, the other standing alert like he was thinking of popping out for a bite. It crossed my mind that these lions ate themselves a few dozen workers while the British were trying to bridge the Tsavo River, so maybe preserving ’em and putting ’em on display wasn’t the brightest move, savvy? Especially when they’re so damn close to Bastet the cat goddess’s shrine over in the Egypt department. Just a smidge too much symbolic resonance for my comfort. Most of you mugs ain’t exactly wise to the spiritual and supernatural, and no, and they didn’t much feel haunted or cursed to me. But c’mon.
And yeah, all of that was me wasting time while my brain pounded away at the real problem in front of me.
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It didn’t none of it figure. The whole situation made a lot more sense if there was no intruder, no mystery spear; just some drunk kids breaking windows, and an over-tired curator getting his artifacts confused. Or maybe staging some kinda hoax, though I really couldn’t noodle out why he would. I really wanted to call it just that way and go take a load off. Okay, yeah, Lydecker seemed awful sure of what he saw, and if the situation was on the up-and-up, it was certainly hinky enough to be interesting. But I was tired, I didn’t know if this was even an earning gig, I sure didn’t want to work with Galway, and it wasn’t as if any actual harm had been done.
Nah, this was a curiosity, not a real case. Two inches of column space in the city section before the papers moved on to the next bit of urban weirdness. Nothing more to do with me.
Except that was all of it hooey, wasn’t it? Pure bunk. And part of me’d known it the whole time.
I hadn’t just come up here to escape Galway’s huffing and puffing, had I? It wasn’t “pure chance” that had dragged my feet through empty, echoing halls to this particular set of exhibits. I’d felt it, sensed it on instinct long before it had busted through my thick skull enough for me to be aware of it.
Whoever he, she, or it was, they were packing enough magic to make Circe swear off bacon. And they were really, really close.
All right, then, Mick. Let’s see how much swift you still got.
I thrust my hand under my flogger, yanking the Luchtaine & Goodfellow from the shoulder holster. I’d had the hardwood wand for so long, I’d worn the grip down to where it perfectly fit my clenched mitt. I dropped low in the same breath, hopefully clearing the line of any fire—figurative or literal—might be coming my way.
I didn’t turn away from the Tsavo kitties. No point, since I didn’t have anywhere to aim at.
Yet.
Pumping my own magics through the wand, I swept the room, hoovering up scraps of fortune. I mean, think about it. All the artifacts on display in the Field? How long had they survived in order to wind up here? What had they made it through that a thousand other bits and gewgaws hadn’t? There’s enough ambient luck in any real museum to choke a sluagh.
Course, I didn’t wanna take too much from any one piece, but that still left me plenty.
In, and right back out again, surrounding me, seeping into me, giving me the luck I needed to punch through any sort of mystic veil, whether shadow or illusion.
I still almost missed him. Damn, this bird was good! I swear he was hiding between the glass and the reflection of one of the displays, and if you’re having trouble picturing that, imagine being there!
He was off like a shot before I was even positive I’d seen him, faster’n most of the animals on exhibit, and it was all I could do to beat feet after him. Whoever he was, I didn’t buy he was here by coincidence. He knew something about something, and no way was I letting him vanish without singing first.
If I’d gotten a halfway decent slant on him, enough to even begin to figure out who he was, I mighta rethought some of that.
CHAPTER TWO
So, right. Think that about catches us up to where I left off—Herne dangling me off a damn balcony by a neck that was probably two inches narrower and longer’n it was when this all started.
He didn’t so much drop as throw me.
It’d be a cliché to tell you time slowed down, but it really felt like that. I saw the pillars reaching up past me, the ceiling receding at a steady, uncaring pace. This was one of those “ain’t likely to rub me out but could really, really hurt” situations. I used what time I actually had to wrap myself in the luck I’d stolen from Herne’s leap, and then…
Wham.
Not the floor, not yet. Lemme tell you, ricocheting off the back of a pachyderm ain’t nearly as delightful as it sounds.
That whole “time slowed” thing? I had just long enough after hitting the elephant to think “Howdah, pardner”—I know, I know, but it’s what I thought—before…
Wham. Again.
Yep. That would be the floor. Goddamn ow.
I wondered, pain radiating through every limb and nerve, how bad that woulda hurt if I hadn’t protected myself. I wondered if I’d even still be conscious. I wondered just how far in over my head I was.
I wondered why the light above me had suddenly gone dark.
Oh.
I rolled, far enough and quick enough, that Herne missed me when he landed—by about the length of a cricket’s manhood. A particularly proud cricket, maybe, but still…
He struck the floor in a crouch, fist hammering down where my chest’d been, putting a long hairline crack in the stone. I think I visibly shuddered thinking about how that poke woulda felt if it’d landed, which I’m sure intimidated Herne something fierce.
He rose slowly to his full height, rock powder sifting from his knuckles. I scrambled awkwardly to mine, wand extended like a dueling blade.
Coulda been worse, I guess. One more floor down, and we mighta been close enough for Pete and the bulls to hear from the basement.
Oh, sure, I’d have welcomed help. The coppers, though? They weren’t help, not against Herne. They were collateral damage. Maybe sport.
“It doesn’t have to go down like this,” I told him. I’m pretty proud of how steady I sounded.
“It already has.”
Sigh. I knew he’d say something along those—
And just that quick, he was on me.
A freight train of muscle and magic. Trying to take him toe-to-toe was a bad idea—but I knew Herne of old. I couldn’t match his strength or his speed, but I might be able to out-finesse him.
I spun aside—pirouetted, really—when his meat hooks were inches from me, hauling up on my coat with my left hand to make sure the flogger flapped in his face real quick. The museum walls blurred around me, and then I was facing him again, right as he went by. I stabbed out with the L&G like a dagger, punching hard at his side.
I peeled more luck off his aura, but there was no way that’d be enough. Didn’t think my chances of messing with his senses were worth a plug nickel, either, not the way he sees the world.
So… Pain. Every bit of pain in my aching back, my memory of slamming hard into floor and fauna, I channeled it through the wand, an emotional poison to aggravate the wound.
The hunter roared, and if you’re thinkin’ I mean that metaphorically, you go right on and think again. He staggered, almost stumbling to one knee as he flew by me, and I gotta say, I marked that as a small victory. I hadn’t been too positive I’d been able to do even that much to him.
Course, that also meant he was good’n steamed, now, too.
A few almost-crawling steps and he was back on his feet, lunging back at me. Just a touch unsteady, carrying my extra pain, but not a lot slower’n he’d been. The cry had risen in his throat, and sounded more like a hissing cat now. Every running step echoed in the massive hall, until the whole room sounded like the inside of a drum being played by a rhinoceros.
I crouched low, body and wand braced against his charge. It was an obvious move, but we both knew he wasn’t enough of a bunny to fall for my matador trick a second time.
Which was why the defensive stance.
Which was why he did fall for the matador trick a second time.
No stab on this pass. I spun on one heel, letting the wand slide up a coat sleeve, while I thrust out with both hands. Nice solid grip on his tunic, I helped him on his way, throwing him hard enough that he’n the floor were gonna have to write each other to stay in touch.
I didn’t just throw him wild, mind—I ain’t a bunny either, I had to end this fast, if I wanted to be the guy ending it.
Those fighting elephants? Yeah, the tusks are the real goods. One set of them’s pretty well blocked off, since their owner’s trying to stab the other elephant, but the second? Got his trunk nice’n raised.
Wouldn’t kill Herne, but I figured that dangling impaled on a spike fatter than my thigh would make him docile
enough to jaw a bit—or at least stop tryin’ to croak me.
But he wasn’t hurting bad as I’d hoped, I guess.
Herne crashed hard into the elephant, yeah, but between the tusks, not against ’em. Even in mid-air, he’d twisted himself around tight enough to make a corkscrew jealous. Not only steered himself a hair to the right, to less pointy environs, but flipped over so that his goddamn feet hit the thing before the rest of him.
Well… Shit.
I dunno how he did it, but he knifed forward when his dogs hit the thing’s face, as if he was doing a real back-breaking sit-up. His hands cleared the top of the beastie’s head, he flexed his arms, and just like that he was outta sight, somewhere on top of the damn thing.
My crouch was real this time as I swept the wand in a fan out in front of me, ready to fire wherever he appeared from next.
’Cept he didn’t.
Nothing. A minute, and more, of nada.
Know how I don’t sweat? Good thing, because I think the room woulda been flooded knee-high on the pachyderms if I did.
I didn’t wanna go up there after him. I mean I really didn’t. Coming in that close, with him waiting for me? Recipe for some serious sidhes ka-bob. I should wait. Better yet, I should make tracks.
But…
Not even worrying about what he’s doing here, if I left this hall, he could come at me from anywhere. Way too fast and sneaky. Just stand there like Lady Liberty until he showed his mug? I couldn’t see all sides of the elephant display from any one spot. Didn’t seem likely he’d jumped for one of the archways again without me noticing, but I couldn’t say it was impossible.
Unoriginal as it might be to say it: Shit. Again.
I really hope I have the opportunity to regret this.
More power through the wand, everything I’d taken from Herne on that first strike, little bits from the exhibits like I’d done in the Hall of Africa. The wood damn near buzzed with the magic current I was channeling through it. I twisted it around, conducting an invisible orchestra, until I’d woven all of that fortune, all that power, around me. If I was sticking my noggin in the lion’s mouth, I was at least gonna file down his teeth some.