But she had, of course, foreseen his withdrawal, knew where she could press her attack, and she did. Durf had removed his scarf earlier, and now his face and neck were unprotected. Nadia darted in and opened up a red line on his throat with her razor. Durf gurgled, his eyes going wide and his right hand clutching the wound, bloody bubbles leaking out from his fingers. The fight was already over, and he knew it. There was no coming back from those cuts; they would never heal. While he could in theory amputate his left arm and stanch the bleeding at the stump, he’d never get the chance. He’d bleed out long before that.
Durf surrendered, falling to his knees and bleeding onto my carpet, and Nadia stood ready should he try anything else.
“I’m sorry it hurts,” she said quietly to the ogre, compassion in her voice now that the battle was won. “I tried tae make it quick so ye wouldn’t suffer long.”
He nodded weakly, understanding in his eyes, along with tears. I had time for one last attempt at learning something.
[Who has your family, Durf? I can try to help them.]
His eyes rolled to me and he shook his head, twice, then keeled over, the lights in his eyes extinguished. The iron from the sigil continued to work at dissolving the magic in his being, burning and consuming his flesh in the process, and soon his body began to crisp and then crumble into ashes, a fine rotten mess gone grey in a heap of clothing.
Nadia sighed. “He was a pretty nice bloke as far as ogres go. Damn shame.”
[Whoever sent him is a pure bastard.]
“Ye got that right.” She folded her razor closed and returned it to her pocket. “Shite. I’ll go and get a vacuum and call the carpet cleaners.”
INTERLUDE
Having the Gall
The Irishman who found me near Aviemore in Cairngorms National Park and made me his apprentice was hunting the same thing I was hunting: gall nuts.
He was also hunting the hobgoblin Holga Thunderpoot, though I didn’t learn that until much later. At the time, we were both startled to find someone else into the same hobby.
Gall nuts are growths on oak trees caused by gall wasps laying eggs in the buds at an important early stage in their growth. These nuts—which are not really nuts at all and have the look and feel of a gourd more than anything else—contain tannic acids essential to the production of black inks since the Middle Ages. Many inks used to be made with gall, and gall-nut production has become industrialized the same way silk production has: Groves of oak trees are exposed to gall wasps and the insects do their thing, just as silkworms turn mulberry leaves into silk. The tannic acid is used for all sorts of things, not merely ink.
But I was in a wild area—or as wild an area as anyplace could be on an island continuously occupied for millennia—and the gall nuts were scattered and needed to be sought out rather than easily spotted in a grove.
“Beggin’ your pardon,” his voice called to me from some distance away in the forest. “Ye wouldn’t be huntin’ gall nuts, now, would ye?”
“I am,” I said, surprised but also guarded. He was dressed fancy in a white suit and hat, not the sort of outfit one typically wears into the forest. It was the sort of getup one wore to polo and cricket matches, sipping mint juleps and laughing at the silly struggles of the working classes.
“Oh, well, in that case, I’ll stop. I’m not local and can find some elsewhere. Were ye planning on making ink with them?”
“I was,” I admitted, my surprise increasing.
“Ah, excellent! Would ye mind sharing your recipe? I’m a bit of an ink enthusiast.”
It was already the strangest conversation I’d ever had at the time, and I thought I might be hallucinating the whole thing. Was I really about to shout an ink recipe to a stranger in a white suit?
“Are ye taking the piss?” I said instead.
The Irishman laughed. “I’m very serious, I assure ye. But, look, I don’t mean to make ye uncomfortable, and I can simply leave. I know talking to strangers is probably a low priority for ye, so I won’t take it too hard.”
“What’s your recipe, then?” I asked. “I mean, if you’re really here for gall nuts, you’d know an ink recipe and could share it right now. Otherwise I guess ye’re here hoping to run across a nice boy to murder.”
“Right, right. Well, I use a cold bath rather than a boil for the gall, and then I use iron sulfate and gum arabic like anyone else, plus a couple other things.” He listed the ingredients and proportions to me, and I felt a smile splitting my face at the thought that we might have created a new hobby: ink shouting.
“That sounds like a better recipe than mine,” I said, and shouted my ingredients back at him.
“Ah, yes, I’ve heard that one before. Look, what’s your first name?”
“Al.”
“Okay, Al, I’m Sean FitzGibbon. I’m going to leave a business card here in the crook of this tree, and I hope you’ll give me a call, because finding people who are into making inks by hand is rather rare these days. I might have a job for ye—a really good one—so let’s have tea together soon in a nice public place, and you bring along some friends or whatever ye need to feel safe, and we won’t need to shout anymore. All right?”
“Aye, that sounds good. But the shouting’s been fun too.”
“Ha ha. Excellent. Good hunting, then. I’m off.”
He waved, and I watched him go and then retrieved the card. We had tea together two weeks later in Glasgow, and that’s how I became apprenticed to an Irish sigil agent and learned that the Tuatha Dé Danann were bloody dangerous.
CHAPTER 19
The Spy Who Mauled Me
My phone buzzed with a message from Saxon Codpiece. Up for a brew? I have news.
Sure, I sent back.
Bier Halle on Gordon St. at half past noon, he replied.
Right you are, I said, and smiled at his choice of venue. The Bier Halle was an underground pub, which fit with Saxon’s preference for subterranean living. I’d thought I wouldn’t hear from him for weeks, since he’d given me the impression a couple of hours ago that he’d be dropping out of sight entirely, but apparently something had come up.
The Bier Halle had over one hundred bottles from around the world on their menu and an impressive tap list too. It was a sort of cement bunker filled with wooden tables and squat, square stools with brown leather upholstery. They served pizzas, pretzels, and a list of other foods that skewed toward German tastes. Saxon had secured a table in the corner and waved at me when I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the dining space. We shook hands and I got my phone out.
[What happened to disappearing?]
“Still at the top of my list of things tae do. After lunch, though. Ye feel like slamming down a bevvy?”
I nodded, and when the server arrived I pointed at my menu, to a German beer called Fürstenberg and then to the giant pretzel with mustard. Saxon asked for a sausage dog to eat and ordered a Krombacker Pils on tap. Then he pulled out his laptop and grinned.
“Got yer tinfoil handy? Tear off a few sheets and sculpt it lovingly around yer crown. Have a keek at this.” He pulled up a news article with the headline monsters attack village in ukraine and pointed at it. “Someone is taking down shacks and flats in the Ukraine that we’re pretty sure are occupied by Russian intelligence. And by we I mean British intelligence.”
[British intel? You have access to what they think?]
He smirked at me. “Let’s just say I have multiple reasons to go intae hiding right now.”
I shook my head in wonder and gestured that he should continue. “The thing is, they have no idea who did it. Eyewitness reports are claiming they were monsters, and one person is even quoted as saying there was a flying faery. A small humanoid with wings. That could be yer pixie, eh?”
I shrugged. It was possible.
“I was just thinking of those pictures on Gordie’s phone. If that crew was wrecking shite, then I could see people thinking they were monsters. That troll’s face was lik
e an arse with hemorrhoids and teeth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone thought he was a monster. He bloody well is a monster.”
[True,] I admitted.
“And it fits with that bloke I told you about this morning. If he’s CIA and he wants to flex with his pet Fae super squad, then why not take out some targets of the old enemy?”
[I suppose it’s possible.]
“Anything’s possible, sure. Absolutely. But what I’m saying is that it’s likely. This is what it’s all about, Al: winning the spy game. It’s an addendum to what I said before.”
[What’s that?]
“I said they wouldnae go around assassinating folk because that draws too much attention. But killing spies is different, in’t it? If ye’re a nation with spies and some of yer spooky bastards get kilt, ye don’t go squawking about it in the press and expelling diplomats and threatening war. Ye try tae find out who got ye and then get ’em back all soft and shady. But Russia cannae find out who got ’em in this case because they’re bloody Fae. They slipped in and out of there, no travel records, no facial recognition, no fingerprints or anything. So Russia’s stuck with floating a monster story. It’s a better distraction than admitting they got rolled. It gets people thinking about where the monsters came from rather than what was going on in those flats.”
I nodded because that much was true, at least. Putting monsters in the headline would distract from everything else. But while this theory might make sense on the human side of things, it made zero sense on the Fae side. Not to take anything away from Saxon’s analysis: He simply didn’t have all the facts. Whoever was running things in Tír na nÓg—whether Clíodhna or someone else—they wouldn’t give a single nugget of dry crumbled shite about the squabbles of human nations. Since I couldn’t investigate there, however, I’d have to work on the human end and pass along the information in hopes it would illuminate something on the Fae side. The pints arrived, and we clinked glasses and enjoyed a cold swallow before Saxon continued.
“I have tae admit this is some wild and woolly bollocks, Al. We’re only ontae this because of yer boy Gordie. If it weren’t for him, we’d be as clueless as the Russians right now. We’d be looking at this article and saying what the fuck like everyone else, eh? Ye can bet there’s a Russian intelligence officer screaming, Who’s got monstrous assets in this area? Who? with spittle flying and a vein bulging in his temple and borscht erupting out his backside. It’s cheerful, in’t it? I mean, besides all the death, o’ course.”
[All the death does tend to dampen the joy,] I said, then I pointed at the article with a question in my brows, and Saxon nodded.
“Be my guest, mate,” he said, nudging the laptop in my direction. I pulled it a bit closer and squinted against the glare of the monitor’s screen.
MONSTERS ATTACK VILLAGE IN UKRAINE
Six people are dead and three buildings are cinders after a string of early-morning attacks by what eyewitnesses describe as “monsters.” Residents of Kercz in Crimea awakened to fire alarms in the early hours of Sunday morning, as strangely shaped humanoids of varying sizes were reported at each site, and in one case a flying creature was said to be involved.
Police have not identified the victims yet but have stated that they were first murdered before the attackers set fire to the buildings. Two victims were missing limbs.
A string of eyewitness accounts followed, including one that claimed to have seen a small flying creature working in concert with the hooded assailants. I took that to mean that the pixie was now involved in these operations.
The most interesting part of the article was buried at the end, where the target locations were listed. [These flats—can you map them for me in relation to any parks or green spaces in Kercz?]
Saxon looked bemused but shrugged and said, “Sure. Why?”
[If the monsters in the article were the Fae, they’d use bound trees to get in and out of the city.]
“Bound trees?”
[The Druids bind trees on earth to Tír na nÓg. One can shift planes that way. If we were Druids or Fae, we could go down to Kelvingrove Park and shift to Tír na nÓg, then take a different bound tree wherever we wanted to go. Melbourne, Tokyo, Denver, wherever there was another bound tree. It’s a sort of transit system.]
“That’s . . . pure stonkin’. It’s like teleporting.”
[Close, yes. That’s why people thought Druids could teleport.]
“Okay, give me a minute.” He tapped away at his keyboard for a while and I tried to figure out why Clíodhna—or anyone in Tír na nÓg—would have an interest in allowing the Fae to be used this way. Had they chosen sides in human concerns? It seemed unlikely; it would be akin to us choosing sides between warring hives of termites.
“There. Is that what ye mean?” He pointed to a city map of Kercz with a green blob in the middle of it and three red pinpoints around its perimeter. “That park in the center of the fires—I can’t pronounce the name of it, but it has trees.”
[That would do. I don’t know if there’s a bound tree, but if there is and the monsters were Fae, they entered and exited the city that way.]
“That’s an amazing data set. They could do multiple strikes a night around the world.”
I nodded, and Saxon grabbed his beer and leaned back in his seat. “Holy shite,” he breathed, and took a much longer pull on his pint.
[Is that the news you had for me?]
“Aye, that was part one. Ye made a request of me and it didn’t take long tae get results. Thought I would take care of it before I disappeared. Felt like I needed tae do it.”
Our food arrived, and Saxon said we should eat first so our appetites wouldn’t be ruined. We fell to and Saxon started talking again after a couple of bites.
“So ye already know that I’m technically what ye call a sex worker on a part-time basis. I mean, it’s just me, or a part of me, online,” he said, as he gestured significantly to his sausage in a bun, “and I get a modest revenue stream from that. But I’m the exception tae the rule in terms of being in the business voluntarily and completely in charge of my own situation. Or maybe it’s changed and I am part of the rule now—I think that might be true. There are lots of folks like me who just do things on one side of the camera because that’s safe, and there are lots of niche services that fall short of the full shebang, so tae speak, that allows people tae do it as a side gig tae help pay the bills while they keep their day jobs. The thing is, plenty of people are not in it by their own choice, but because some are, people who pay for sex like tae think that everyone’s consenting and that if they’re committing a crime it’s a victimless one. But, no, victims of sex trafficking have been tricked, manipulated, and abused every step of the way, and that’s a situation that’s ongoing. They have little tae no control of their lives, and that’s the way their pimps want it.” He paused, shook his head, and tore into his sausage sandwich. Around a mouthful, he said, “I fucking hate pimps, Al.”
[Understood.]
“So I’m going tae give ye two names and two addresses, and you do whatever ye’re going tae do with it. The names are pimps, and I want them tae be punished. The addresses are where their victims are living, and I want them tae be treated like people who need help instead of people who need tae be arrested.”
[Agreed.]
He handed over an envelope and I put it into my coat. “I’ll contact ye when I return. If the pimps are in jail and their victims are no, I can give ye more later.”
[Thanks, Saxon.]
“Right. Well, I best be off. Need tae stay out of jail ma self. Can ye get the check?”
I nodded, and he beamed at me before cramming the rest of his food in his mouth.
[What if your place is raided?]
He chuckled and swallowed before answering. “I have a Plan B. And also C through Z. Backups for my backups. Good luck, Al,” he said, and unfolded himself from the seat, securing his laptop.
[You too.]
“I’ll Signal you from a n
ew number when I’m back.”
[Okay.]
He gave me a salute, I tugged my hat brim, and he left first this time. I wondered if it was too soon to contact D.I. Munro with these names. It almost certainly was, but I didn’t want to wait long. Now that I knew where there were people in need of saving, I didn’t want to let them suffer any longer for the sake of appearances with a detective. I scanned the restaurant and discovered that everyone was ignoring the old man in the corner. Public places can be spectacularly private at times.
I withdrew the envelope, opened it, and read the contents. One of the addresses I recognized: It was Nadia’s tenement. She’d be livid if she knew that there were sex-trafficking victims being housed underneath her nose like that—as livid as I was that Gordie had trafficked Fae under mine.
It was all around us.
I took out one of my Retro 51 pens filled with a basic blue ink recipe that had no magical potential; it was for correspondence only. I wrote a note to D.I. Munro:
Dear Detective Inspector,
Our brief meeting this morning filled me with boundless civic pride, awe of your commitment to public safety, and admiration for your professionalism. You mentioned that you may be able to pass certain information on to relevant parties in pursuit of human traffickers. The National Human Trafficking Unit, perhaps, as I believe it’s called? Regardless, it is my dearest wish that your colleagues focus on the traffickers and not their victims, who have been trapped and manipulated into most unfortunate circumstances. Below you will find the names of two such traffickers, and I hope your colleagues will move quickly to prove their criminal activity and arrest them so that their victims may be free of their bondage.
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