Street Magicks

by Paula Guran

  The Chinese waitress looked great in her leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings. She wore a blood-red camisole tucked into the waist of the skirt, which made her pale skin seem ever paler. Her hair was the black of polished jet, pulled up in a loose bun that spilled stray strands across her neck and shoulders.

  Blue-black eye shadow made her dark eyes darker. Her lips were the same red as her camisole.

  “How come she looks so good,” Sue wanted to know, “when I’d just look like a tart if I dressed like that?”

  “She’s inscrutable,” Jilly replied. “You’re just obvious.”

  “How sweet of you to point that out,” Sue said with a grin. She stood up from their table. “C’mon. Let’s dance.”

  Jilly shook her head. “You go ahead. I’ll sit this one out.”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not going out there alone.”

  “There’s LaDonna,” Jilly said, pointing out a girl they both knew. “Dance with her.”

  “Are you feeling all right, Jilly?”

  “I’m fine—just a little pooped. Give me a chance to catch my breath.” But she wasn’t all right, she thought as Sue crossed over to where LaDonna da Costa and her brother Pipo were sitting. Not when she had Zinc to worry about. If he was out there, cutting off the locks of more bicycles . . .

  You’re not his mother, she told herself. Except—

  Out here on the streets we take care of our own.

  That’s what she’d told Sue. And maybe it wasn’t true for a lot of people who hit the skids—the winos and the losers and the bag people who were just too screwed up to take care of themselves, not to be mentioned look after anyone else—but it was true for her.

  Someone like Zinc—he was an in-betweener. Most days he could take care of himself just fine, but there was a fey streak in him so that sometimes he carried a touch of the magic that ran wild in the streets, the magic that was loose late at night when the straights were in bed and the city belonged to the night people. That magic took up lodgings in people like Zinc. For a week. A day. An hour. Didn’t matter if it was real or not, if it couldn’t be measured or cataloged, it was real to them. It existed all the same.

  Did that make it true?

  Jilly shook her head. It wasn’t her kind of question and it didn’t matter anyway. Real or not, it could still be driving Zinc into breaking corporeal laws—the kind that’d have Lou breathing down his neck, real fast. The kind that’d put him in jail with a whole different kind of loser.

  The kid wouldn’t last out a week inside.

  Jilly got up from the table and headed across the dance floor to where Sue and LaDonna were jitterbugging to a tune that sounded as though Buddy Holly could have penned the melody, if not the words.

  “Fuck this, man!” the Anglo said.

  He threw down the bike and took off at a run, his companion right on his heels, scattering puddles with the impact of their boots. Zinc watched them go.

  There was a buzzing in the back of his head. The streetlights were telling him to run too, but he saw the bike lying there on the pavement like a wounded animal, one wheel spinning forlornly, and he couldn’t just take off.

  Bikes were like turtles. Turn ’em on their backs—or a bike on its side—and they couldn’t get up on their own again.

  He tossed down the wire cutters and ran to the bike. Just as he was leaning it up against the railing from which the Anglo had taken it, a police cruiser came around the corner, skidding on the wet pavement, cherry light gyrating-screaming, Run, run! in its urgent high-pitched voice—headlights pinning Zinc where he stood.

  Almost before the cruiser came to a halt, the passenger door popped open and a uniformed officer had stepped out. He drew his gun. Using the cruiser as a shield, he aimed across its roof at where Zinc was standing.

  “Hold it right there, kid!” he shouted. “Don’t even blink.”

  Zinc was privy to secrets. He could hear voices in lights. He knew that there was more to be seen in the world if you watched it from the corner of your eye, than head on. It was a simple truth that every policeman he ever saw looked just like Elvis. But he hadn’t survived all his years on the streets without protection.

  He had a lucky charm. A little tin monkey pendant that had originally lived in a box of Crackerjacks—back when Crackerjacks had real prizes in them. Lucia had given it to him. He’d forgotten to bring it out with him the other night when the Elvises had taken him in. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d remembered it tonight.

  He reached into his pocket to get it out and wake its magic.

  “You’re just being silly,” Sue said as they collected their jackets from their chairs.

  “So humor me,” Jilly asked.

  “I’m coming, aren’t I.”

  Jilly nodded. She could hear the voice of Zinc’s roommate Ursula in the back of her head—

  There are no patterns.

  —but she could feel one right now, growing tight as a drawn bowstring, humming with its urgency to be loosed.

  “C’mon,” she said, almost running from the club.

  Police officer Mario Hidalgo was still a rookie—tonight was only the beginning of his third month of active duty—and while he’d drawn his sidearm before, he had yet to fire it in the line of duty. He had the makings of a good cop.

  He was steady; he was conscientious. The street hadn’t had a chance to harden him yet, though it had already thrown him more than a couple of serious uglies in his first eight weeks of active duty.

  But steady though he’d proved himself to be so far, when he saw the kid reaching into his the pocket of his baggy jacket, Hidalgo had a single moment of unreasoning panic.

  The kid’s got a gun, that panic told him. The kid’s going for a weapon.

  One moment was all it took.

  His finger was already tightening on the trigger of his regulation .38 as the kid’s hand came out of his pocket. Hidalgo wanted to stop the pressure he was putting on the gun’s trigger, but it was like there was a broken circuit between his brain and his hand.

  The gun went off with a deafening roar.

  Got it, Zinc thought as his fingers closed on the little tin monkey charm. Got my luck.

  He started to take it out of his pocket, but then something hit him straight in the chest. It lifted him off his feet and threw him against the wall behind him with enough force to knock all the wind out of his lungs. There was a raw pain firing every one of his nerve ends. His hands opened and closed spastically, the charm falling out of his grip to hit the ground moments before his body slid down the wall to join it on the wet pavement.

  Goodbye, goodbye, sweet friend, the streetlights cried.

  He could sense the spin of the stars as they wheeled high above the city streets, their voices joining the electric voices of the streetlights.

  My turn to go free, he thought as a white tunnel opened in his mind. He could feel it draw him in, and then he was falling, falling, falling . . .

  “Goodbye . . . ” he said, thought he said, but no words came forth from between his lips.

  Just a trickle of blood that mingled with the rain that now began to fall in earnest, as though it too was saying its own farewell.

  All Jilly had to see was the red spinning cherries of the police cruisers to know where the pattern she’d felt in the club was taking her. There were a lot of cars here—cruisers and unmarked vehicles, an ambulance—all on official business, their presence coinciding with her business. She didn’t see Lou approach until he laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “You don’t want to see,” he told her.

  Jilly never even looked at him. One moment he was holding her shoulder, the next she’d shrugged herself free of his grip and just kept on walking.

  “Is it . . . is it Zinc?” Sue asked the detective.

  Jilly didn’t have to ask. She knew. Without being told. Without having to see the body.

  An officer stepped in front of her to stop her, but Lou waved him aside. In her peripheral vision
she saw another officer sitting inside a cruiser, weeping, but it didn’t really register.

  “I thought he had a gun,” the policeman was saying as she went by. “Oh, Jesus. I thought the kid was going for a gun . . . ”

  And then she was standing over Zinc’s body, looking down at his slender frame, limbs flung awkwardly like those of a ragdoll that had been tossed into a corner and forgotten. She knelt down at Zinc’s side. Something glinted on the wet pavement. A small tin monkey charm. She picked it up, closed it tightly in her fist.

  “C’mon, Jilly,” Lou said as he came up behind her. He helped her to her feet.

  It didn’t seem possible that anyone as vibrant—as alive—as Zinc had been could have any relation whatsoever with that empty shell of a body that lay there on the pavement.

  As Lou led her away from the body, Jilly’s tears finally came, welling up from her eyes to salt the rain on her cheek.

  “He . . . he wasn’t . . . stealing bikes, Lou . . . ” she said.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Lou said.

  Often when she’d been with Zinc, Jilly had had a sense of that magic that touched him. A feeling that even if she couldn’t see the marvels he told her about, they still existed just beyond the reach of her sight.

  That feeling should be gone now, she thought.

  “He was just . . . setting them free,” she said.

  The magic should have died, when he died. But she felt, if she just looked hard enough, that she’d see him, riding a maverick bike at the head of a pack of riderless bicycles—metal frames glistening, reflector lights glinting red, wheels throwing up arcs of fine spray, as they went off down the wet street.

  Around the corner and out of sight.

  “Nice friends the kid had,” a plainclothes detective who was standing near them said to the uniformed officer beside him. “Took off with just about every bike on the street and left him holding the bag.”

  Jilly didn’t think so. Not this time.

  This time they’d gone free.

  Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada. This author of more than seventy adult, young adult, and children’s books, he has won the World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine Awards, among other honors. De Lint is also a poet, artist, songwriter, performer, and folklorist, and he writes a book-review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Theradane is nowhere near our world, which is good: the beleaguered city is constantly beset by warring wizards and under assault from deadly magic raining from the sky. Its magic-soaked streets are seldom safe to traverse.

  A Year and a Day in Old Theradane

  Scott Lynch

  1. Wizard Weather

  It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain. It came down in pale lavenders and coppers and reds, soft lines like liquid dusk that turned to luminescent mist on the warm pavement. The air itself felt like champagne bubbles breaking against the skin. Over the dark shapes of distant rooftops, blue-white lightning blazed, and stuttering thunder chased it. Amarelle would have sworn she heard screams mixed in with the thunder.

  The gods-damned wizards were at it again.

  Well, she had a thirst, and an appointment, and odd rain wasn’t even close to the worst thing that had ever fallen on her from the skies over Theradane. As she walked, Amarelle dripped flickering colors that had no names. She cut a ghostly trail through fog that drifted like the murk beneath a pink and orange sea. As usual when the wizards were particularly bad, she didn’t have much company. The Street of Pale Savants was deserted. Shopkeepers stared forlornly from behind their windows on the Avenue of Seven Angles.

  This had been her favorite sort of night, once. Heavy weather to drive witnesses from the streets. Thunder to cover the noise of feet creeping over rooftops. These days it was just lonely, unpredictable, and dangerous.

  A double arc of silvery lights marked the Tanglewing Canal Bridge, the last between her and her destination. The lights burned within lamps held by rain-stained white marble statues of shackled, hooded figures. Amarelle kept her eyes fixed on her feet as she crossed the bridge. She knew the plaques beneath the statues by heart. The first two on the left, for example:

  BOLAR KUSS

  TRAITOR

  NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS

  CAMIRA THOLAR

  MURDERESS

  NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS

  The statues themselves didn’t trouble her, or even the lights. So what if the city lit some of its streets and bridges with the unshriven souls of convicts, bound forever into melodramatic sculptures with fatuous plaques? No, the trouble was how those unquiet spirits whispered to passers-by.

  Look upon me, beating heart, and witness the price of my broken oaths.

  “Fuck off, Bolar,” muttered Amarelle. “I’m not plotting to overthrow the Parliament of Strife.”

  Take warning, while your blood is still warm, and behold the eternal price of my greed and slaughter!

  “I don’t have a family to poison, Camira.”

  Amarelle, whispered the last statue on the left. It ought to be you up here, you faithless bitch.

  Amarelle stared at that last inscription, just as she promised herself she wouldn’t every time she came this way.

  SCAVIUS OF SHADOW STREET

  THIEF

  NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS

  “I never turned my back on you,” Amarelle whispered. “I paid for sanctuary. We all did. We begged you to get out of the game with us, but you didn’t listen. You blew it.”

  You bent your knees to my killers before my flesh was even cold.

  “We all bought ourselves a little piece of the city, Scav. That was the plan. You just did it the hard way.”

  Some day you will share this vigil with me.

  “I’m done with all that now. Light your bridge and leave me alone.”

  There was no having a reasonable conversation with the dead. Amarelle kept moving. She only came this way when she wanted a drink, and by the time she got off the bridge she always needed at least two.

  Thunder rolled through the canyons of the streets. A building was on fire somewhere to the east, smoldering unnatural purple. Flights of screeching bat-winged beasts filled the sky between the flames and the low, glowing clouds. Some of them tangled and fought, with naked claws and barbed spears and clay jars of explosive fog. The objectives the creatures contended for were known only to gods and sorcerers.

  Gods-damned wizards and their stupid feuds. Too bad they ran the city. Too bad Amarelle needed their protection.

  2. The Furnished Belly of the Beast

  The Sign of the Fallen Fire lay on the west side of Tanglewing Street. Was, more accurately, the entire west side of Tanglewing Street. No room for anything else beside the cathedral of coiled bones knocked down fifteen centuries before, back when wild dragons occasionally took offense at the growing size of Theradane and paid it a visit. This one had settled so artistically in death, some long-forgotten entrepreneur had scraped out flesh and scales and roofed the steel-hard bones right where they lay.

  Amarelle went in through the dragon’s mouth, shook burnt orange rain from her hair and watched wisps of luminous steam curl up from the carpet where the droplets landed. The bouncers lounging against eight-foot serrated fangs all nodded to her.

  The tavern had doors where the dragon had once had tonsils. Those doors smelled good credit and opened smoothly.

  The Neck was for dining and the Tail was for gambling. The Arms offered rooms for sleeping or not sleeping, as the renters preferred. Amarelle’s business was in the Gullet, the drinking cavern under the dead beast’s ribs and spine, where one hundred thousand bottles gleamed on racks and shelves behind the central bar.

  Goldclaw Grask, the floor manager, was an ebony-scaled goblin in a dapper suit woven from actual Bank of Theradane notes. He had one in a different denomination for every night of
the week; tonight he wore fifties.

  “Amarelle Parathis, the Duchess Unseen,” he cried. “I see you just fine!”

  “That one certainly never gets old, Grask.”

  “I’m counting glasses and silverware after you leave tonight.”

  “I’m retired and loving it,” said Amarelle. She’d pulled three jobs at the Sign of the Fallen Fire in her working days. Certainly none for silverware. “Is Sophara on bar tonight?”

  “Of course,” said Grask. “It’s the seventeenth. Same night of the month your little crew always gets together and pretends it’s just an accident. Those of you who aren’t lighting the streets, that is.”

  Amarelle glared. The goblin rustled over, reached up, took her left hand, and flicked his tongue contritely against her knuckles.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole. I know, you paid the tithe, you’re an honest sheep living under the bombardment like the rest of us. Look, Sophara’s waving. Have one on me.”

  Sophara Miris had mismatched eyes and skin the color of rosewood, fine aquamarine hair and the hands of a streetside card sharp. When she’d paid her sanctuary tithe to the Parliament of Strife, she’d been wanted on three hundred and twelve distinct felony charges in eighteen cities. These days she was senior mage-mixologist at the Sign of the Fallen Fire, and she already had Amarelle’s first drink half-finished.

  “Evening, stranger.” Sophara scrawled orders on a slate and handed it to one of the libationarians, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the contents and locations of all the bottles kept the bar running. “Do you remember when we used to be interesting people?”

  “I think being alive and at liberty is pretty damn interesting,” said Amarelle. “Your wife planning on dropping in tonight?”

  “Any minute now,” said Sophara, stirring equal parts liquor and illusion into a multi-layered concoction. “The self-made man’s holding a booth for us. I’m mixing you a Rise and Fall of Empires, but I heard Grask. You want two of these? Or something else?”

  “You feel like making me a Peril on the Sea?” said Amarelle.

  “Yours to command. Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll be over when the drinks are ready.”