"Sir Gardner," said a voice behind me. "You beseech my aid?"
I didn't so much turn as revolve on the spot.
"Yes!" I said. There was so much smoke that it was hard to see our reinforcement. But as she took up so much of the lobby it was kind of hard to come to grips with the totality of her anyway. There was the sheen of bright scales, the glitter of a line of diamond teeth, the sudden sweep of a surprisingly prehensile tail about the size of a dozen firehoses braided together, a couple of talons the size of the firedogs . . . and then there weren't any firedogs. Just distant yelping that rapidly got more distant, and a nasty crunching sound, which would be the two or three of the pack that didn't turn tail fast enough.
I lay on the floor where the air was kind of OK and gasped. Gurl leopard-crawled across to me and propped nearby.
"It knows I'm with you, right?"
"She," I whispered. "Lady Alyss of the Corben Ravelin."
I raised my head a little and peered into the smoke.
"Gramercy, Lady Alyss," I said.
"A trifle," replied the dragon. "Have you the tokens?"
I threw the coin and the tooth up to where I thought her head was. Smoke swirled and parted, and I caught a glimpse of Alyss's serpentine head, dark as gunmetal, in stark contrast to her shining wings and body.
"Ach," grunted the dragon. There was a ghastly hawking sound and then the tooth shot past me like a stone from a slingshot and shattered on the floor. "A most disagreeable curse lay on that tooth, Sir Gardner."
"I regret that I was forced to rely upon such a token, and I apologise unreservedly for its use," I said. Possibly I had just got myself out of the skillet and onto the stove. Alyss was notoriously touchy about her honor, and I would have no chance fighting a duel with her. Even with all my stuff, and all my wits about me.
"Indeed," sniffed Alyss, her intake of breath clearing out most of the smoke. "I shall let the matter pass, as you were clearly in extremis, Sir Gardner. Till we meet again, at the Ebb Muster."
"Till we meet again, Lady Alyss," I said, standing up to bow. I'd just scored another obligation. Calling one of the Order's dragons was worth at least two years' service from the likes of me, and Lady Alyss had just made it official. Come the Ebb Muster, I had to report or be forsworn.
Of course, I'd be well dead by then, because Grandma's folk would catch up with me long before then. Or whoever put the curse on me in the first place.
Lady Alyss vanished, taking the remainder of the smoke with her, except for a little bit in my lungs that I had to cough out. Gurl clapped me on the back so hard I thought one of my natural teeth might fly out.
"The bastards got me at the dentist," I said, once I'd stopped coughing. "Or one of them was the dentist. I never should have let them give me the gas; they must have translated me while I was under, implanted the cursed tooth and then sent me back."
"Afraid of the pain, were you?" said Gurl. "Somehow I'm not surprised."
"Come on, it was a crown replacement," I said. "But I could have taken the pain, I just enjoy the gas . . . oh shit. A crown replacement. That is fiendishly clever. A cursed tooth for a crown replacement . . . Granny the witch-queen . . . they made me into an assassin that would kill with bad luck!"
"Got to give them points for that," said Gurl. "Has to be the new queen that set it up, I guess, and we get offed by the either the old queen's guards or the new queen's friends."
"I'm sure that's their plan," I said. My brain was finally getting itself into thinking order. "But if we can survive Granny's guards, we might have a chance."
"Why?"
"Because no one can guarantee who the new witch-queen will be. It's not something you can plan on, or subvert. I mean there's at least a hundred and one heirs of the blood, by birth or adoption. Each heir gets to hold the old witch-queen's knife, and put on the necklace and the stupid hat, and those three things choose . . . or not. The consequences of them not choosing are severe, so most potential heirs don't even try. Besides, who would actually want the job?"
"Whoever it is, we'd better find somewhere to hide out right now," said Gurl. "It'll be bats next. Or the Inner Coven. We'll have the best chance in the alter-world. Can you get us there yet?"
"Hang on a minute," I said. "I'm thinking."
"We have to—"
"Shhh!"
I was thinking. Very hard. The central part of it being my own question: Who would want the job? Even Granny used to talk about giving it up.
This was closely followed by another thought. What if someone just took Granny's place, without undergoing the test of the knife, the necklace and the hat? Sure, they'd lack the secret powers, but given enough front they could at least command the Inner and Outer Covens, the Familiar Circus and so on. If that's what they wanted to do, all that "say unto him go and he goeth" stuff.
"I think I've worked out what's going on," I said. "Part of it, anyway. We have to go back to the nether-world."
"Are you fucking crazy?" hissed Gurl. "Soon as we cross, they'll be on to us. And I'll be a gargoyle again, which let me tell you is not something—"
"I've got a plan," I said. I did too, or at least I had the seed of a plan. Hopefully it was going to grow into something. "Uh, why are you a gargoyle there by the way, and . . . uh . . . human here and in the alter-world? I mean, a gargoyle in the nether-world should just translate across as an ugly desk ornament or a novelty USB flash disk or something—"
"Thanks," snarled Gurl. "I'm not permanently a gargoyle in the nether-world. Your grandma turned me into one, because I wouldn't let her into a party."
"That's all? Seems a bit harsh, even for her."
"I did try to throw her down the steps," said Gurl.
"Well, you got off lightly," I said. "She must have liked you. But you won't be a gargoyle in the nether-world now. You translated out, which would break the initial working, and now Granny's dead the spell won't reattach."
"Oh yeah," said Gurl. Her face, which had been pretty much scowlified since we'd crossed over, suddenly brightened. "I forgot about that. It's hard to imagine her gone. I was kind of . . . kind of getting used to hanging out with her, if you know what I mean."
I did know what she meant and I realized in retrospect I should have wondered about it a lot more on my previous visits. Granny was the last person who'd let anything sentient hang out in her office. Which begged the question of why she'd stuck Gurl on the mantelpiece of that particular fireplace. It wasn't as if she'd been short of fireplaces. Or gutters, which is where you would expect her to put a once-human gargoyle as a punishment, out in the snow and rain for the owls to crap on.
It was another piece of the puzzle and though I now knew I wasn't and never had been a private detective, my brain had finally kicked into feverish activity and was sorting everything out.
Step one, of course, was to survive long enough to find out whether I was right or not.
"If we head a couple of blocks west in this ur-space, to the point that correlates with the Solomon Piazza in the nether-world, we can translate straight through. There'll be a crowd there for sure, waiting for news. We can give it to them."
"What?" snorted Gurl. "Like, 'Hi, Gardner here. I'm the guy who killed the queen, only it wasn't my fault'?"
"No," I said. My mind was really firing now. "What I'll do—"
"Explain as we run," said Gurl. Her head tilted to one side, and one of her pointy ears twitched. "Something else just came through up above."
I couldn't hear anything, but I didn't hang around to listen. We quickly climbed out through the broken revolving door and hot-footed it down the street—quite literally as there were hot . . . let's call them coals . . . all over the place from the frightened passage of the firedogs.
"Tell me," I panted. "How did you know the bag with the screwstone and stuff was in Dextrise and Malboc, volume four?"
"Granny talks . . . talked to herself a lot," said Gurl. "She was muttering to herself the other day about the screwstone, sh
e kept on repeating it, 'The screwstone is in Dextrise and Malboc, volume four'."
"Right at the next avenue," I interrupted. "The cunning old madam."
"What?" asked Gurl as we sprinted around the corner and both slowed at the same time. Third Avenue looked mostly like it would look in the alter-world, minus cars and people, except that about half a mile ahead it curved sharply upwards, as if someone had peeled the road back and let it curl. I allowed my gaze to follow the arching road up into a drearily blank sky of photographically neutral grey sky and wished I hadn't. That absence of color always makes me feel nauseous.
"Shit!" exclaimed Gurl. "Not even a stable ur-space!"
She started running even faster, with me following as best I could. Unless this ur-space was completely whacked-out of alignment, the Solomon Piazza was contiguous with the weird little gothic shrine traffic island at the intersection a block ahead. All we had to do was get there before the whole avenue curled back on itself and disappeared into nothingsville.
Oh yeah, we also had to do it before the dozen witches on the heavy broom I could hear snorting overhead caught up with us. From the sound of it they'd stuffed at least a score of pegasi spirits into a serious lumberjack-territory pine pole to create a big, fast broom that could carry them and all their hardware.
Not that they'd need to actually catch up to us, though it is much harder to hit a running target from even a big broom than you'd think, either with a wand or a firearm.
This didn't stop them from trying. I wondered how they'd managed to get an antique punt gun aboard even a super-broom, as the hundreds of silvered pellets it fired bounced all over the road a few steps behind me and the bang echoed inside my ear-drums and a good proportion of the rest of my head.
"At least it'll take them five minutes to reload," I shouted. "Unless, they've got two, which is highly un—"
The boom of the second punt gun or rebored nineteenth century swivel gun or whatever the hell it was made us both leap rather than run the last five paces. As we landed, I immediately went into the dance, which strangely enough is much more difficult to do as a human than it is to do in dog-shape. Particularly the bit where you wag your tail widdershins in decreasing circles.
At the last moment, Gurl grabbed my hand and we translated, a microsecond ahead of some kind of hex that I saw as a horribly tusked boar of glowing red light racing towards us.
We landed in the middle of the piazza, which as I'd predicted, was full of nether-worlders of all shapes and sorceries. All of them craning their necks to look up at the perpetually dry fountain statue of Simon the Magus, upon whose broad shoulders the candidates for the succession would stand and try the knife, the necklace and the hat.
As I'd also expected, my no-good cousin J'nelle was rapidly taking the steps carved into Magus Simon's outstretched arm, jumping them three at a time. She had a broad-brimmed black hat on her head, a stone knife in her hand, and a necklace of gold and amber around her neck that went very nicely with her Dolce & Gabbana new season dress.
There was also a pack of ridiculously oversized timber wolves patrolling a nice clear circle around the statue, keeping everyone at a suitable distance, and overhead three score and seven traditional Athenian-style owls were doing the same service in the air. For all I knew, there were ninety-nine magical moles beneath the paving stones too, making sure all was hunky-dory underneath.
The wolves spotted us first. In the second before they started baying for blood, specifically mine, I ripped out the gold drawstring from the red velvet bag and flung it over Gurl's head. I managed that, but before I could get the bag on her head, she'd locked my arm behind my back and pushed me into a very uncomfortable position, one with which I had some familiarity from my student days when frequenting a particular pub.
Over on the statue, J'nelle pointed at me and hissed and the crowd went "oh!" as Grimmaur, the leader of the wolves (yeah, well his name was Cedric in the alter-world and he was a seeing-eye dog) growled out, "Get the assassin!"
Wolves leaped, wizards, witches and various beasties and denizens ran in all directions, owls hooted and began to dive, and the big broom with the punt guns translated through overhead and cleaned up the owls before scraping the side of the statue and crash-landing into the bowl of the fountain, where its dozen witches fell off. Through it all J'nelle was screaming something about claiming the throne.
"Put on the hat," I shouted to Gurl. "Put on the damn hat and take the .45! You're it, stupid! Granny wanted you to take over!"
The arm-lock tightened with a vengeance and for a second I thought I was done for. The wolves were mere yards away, J'nelle had drawn a wand from her sleeve. It was all over, I'd made a stupid gamble and I was going to pay for it with my life.
Then I was twisted around and thrown to the ground. Gurl leant over me. The velvet bag was on her head, only it didn't look like a bag anymore. It had grown a tall crown and a stiff brim and turned the color and texture of a very sleek black cat. The cord was around her neck, but it had also transformed into a narrow torc of reddish gold set with amber.
She slid the .45 out of my waistband, her finger around the trigger curling to match her smile. I heard the safety catch . . . catch on my belt and I shut my eyes. That pistol needed only the lightest trigger pull . . .
"Hold!" roared Gurl and I opened my eyes just in time to cop a face-full of wolf saliva as Grimmaur's jaws set open an inch away from my face with a very loud click. Gurl stood above me, looking taller and tougher than ever, with the hat and the necklace and a knife the color of gunmetal with a cross-hatched grip.
"Get to your kennels," said Gurl quietly. She looked up and added to the owls, "And you to your roost."
J'nelle squeaked something, possibly a protest, which was a mistake on both counts.
"Take her with you," added Gurl to the wolves and the owls. "Half each, mind."
I shut my eyes again, purely from exhaustion and a sudden failure of the massive amounts of adrenalin that must have been previously pumping through my system. I had no problem with watching cousin J'nelle get dismembered. The crowd liked it too. I could hardly hear anything over the applause and the shouts of "Bravo!"
A sudden pressure on my chest made me open my eyes again. Gurl had set her boot on my sternum and was pressing quite hard.
"I don't need CPR," I croaked.
"Not yet," said Gurl. "You've got some questions to answer first. Like when did you figure it out, and what did you mean when you said 'cunning old madam'? And how come I'm eligible to be her heir?"
Gurl didn't need the wolves to keep a nice clear space about her, and everyone wisely had their backs to us, but I could see a lot of mostly pointy ears tilted in our direction. They all wanted to know the answers too.
"After the curse lifted, I could think a bit straighter," I said. "Eventually I realized that unlike me, Granny had passed portents and auguries with flying colors. I mean she lectured in prophecy and that thing they do with cold spaghetti to see potential futures . . . she must have always known when she was going to die, and of course she'd never just leave the choice of her successor to that stupid . . ."
I paused for a moment. Two slitted eyes had appeared in the crown of the hat, two baleful yellow eyes . . .
"She'd never leave it to chance, I mean," I babbled. "I figured it had to be you because she'd kept you in the office. So you could learn stuff from her, and overhear her talking to herself, and so you'd be there when the time came. Then you got adopted, in the classic way, by drinking her blood. One drop's enough to do the job."
"I don't really want to be queen. I just want to run my club, do some time on the door—"
The "really" was a giveaway. She was already into it. I could tell. Or I thought I could, which meant I probably couldn't. I opened my mouth anyway.
"The nether-city's just like a club really. Let some in, kick some out, take their money, entertain them, serve them expensive drinks . . "
"Technically you're still her assass
in," said Gurl, getting back to the primary subject.
"Ah, can I get up now please?" I asked. "So I can grovel properly? And wipe some of this wolf snot off my face?"
Gurl lifted her boot. I staggered to my knees, palmed the old bean that I'd been lying on after it fell out of the hat, and wiped my face with my sleeve.
"I suppose it could be worse," she said thoughtfully. "It beats being a gargoyle. I have to thank you for that, anyway."
"You do?" I asked. I was more than a little bit nervous about what Gurl was going to do with me. The bit about "technically an assassin" hadn't helped.
"But I seem to remember that immediate execution is the normal punishment for regicide."
"I was set up!" I exclaimed. "J'nelle cursed me. I was only the assassination weapon, not the perpetrator."
I didn't mention the small fact that I now had a deep suspicion that Granny wasn't quite as dead as everyone thought—that J'nelle was almost certainly as much a patsy in the whole affair as I was—and that the whole thing wasn't so much a regicide as an abdication, with a little clearing up done for Granny's chosen heir.
"I guess you were just an unwitting pawn," said Gurl.
I bit back a retort. The old cursed me would have said something, but there is value in strategic silence. Not to mention bowing one's head lower and generally trying to be submissive. I even thought about whimpering but decided it wouldn't help.
"Don't plan on me supporting your stupid plant business in the alter-world though," said Gurl.
"Doesn't matter," I sighed. "I'll have to sell the company or shut it down anyway. Presuming you don't execute me, I'll be reporting to the Bright Hill soon enough and they only give us two weeks off a year."
"Yes, I suppose I owe you for the dragon's intervention too," said Gurl thoughtfully. "Under the circumstances, a pardon should be more than enough."
She touched my shoulder with the knife and I felt a chill strike through to the very marrow of my bones, and I have to tell you that is way colder than you ever want to get and it also greatly increases the chances of getting the flu somewhere down the track.
Eclipse One Page 4