Of course, so did the Klingons. I wondered where Orm Klash and his brethren and sistem were this morning.
I got the cashbox and the jewelry and a few other odds and ends and headed up for the bam.
This time I didn't miss my chance to swing by the cabins and see if Julian was there. He wasn't. I wondered which of the workshops he was attending—without the cashbox, he probably wasn't up at the dealer's table. Imagination failed. I could not imagine Julian —ascetic, cerebral Julian — engaged in any of the well-meaning anarchy of a HallowFest.
As if to underscore this, the cabin was as neat as a monk's cell, with everything folded and put away as if Julian intended to make a habit out of living here. The scent of cold incense smoke covered the cabin's mustiness with a sharp tang: frankincense, mostly, and—
And amber, cinnamon, bergamot, and myrrh—at least if Julian was following the Tesoraria rituals, which that silver knife he'd gotten from Ironshadow indicated he was.
Interesting, but hardly of immediate importance. Julian is a student of magic; he's nearly always engaged in some magickal operation or other. Something niggled at the back of my mind, then, but I ignored it in favor of getting set up for the day. 1 wondered where I'd be sleeping tonight. I didn't think I could manage another night in the back of the van.
I had customers waiting when I got upstairs and no Julian in sight, which kept me busy suppljring catalogs and making change for the next half hour. Since this was Sunday, business was picking up —people had done their window-shopping yesterday and now were ready to buy. One of my customers volunteered to go downstairs and get me coffee and I bought a couple of trail-mix muffins from the bake sale table next door (chewy, but filling) and settled down at the table.
410 Bell, Book, and Murder
A Welsh trad named Gerry came and asked me if we had any ritual robes —he'd seen Hallie's and didn't like the informality of the tie-dye. I was sure we'd packed some on Friday, but a quick search of the boxes under the table turned up altar cloths and Tarot cloths and everything but. I promised to keep looking, and Gerry promised to come back later, and possibly both of us would keep our promises.
Business slacked off with the start of the eleven o'clock workshop. It would probably pick up again at the lunch break, and then there'd be a last go in the late afternoon before Merchanting was shut down for the night. Tomorrow there'd be no workshops; the merchants would be able to open for a couple of hours before loading to leave. The last event of the weekend would be the "opening" ritual for next year's HallowFest. The closing ritual for this year's Festival was still a year away.
Ironshadow wasn't here yet, but he'd partied hearty and late last night and had the added advantage of merchanting a small and portable stock; I supposed he'd be here when he felt like it, if he didn't just decide to deal what he had left out of his tent today instead. / would have, given the option; the day outside was one of those bright autumnal glories that actually make people want to live in the country with kamikaze skunks, woodlice, and attack deer. I'm a city girl, myself.
It got to be noon. I wondered how Larry's evening on the cutting edge of law enforcement had been, and tried to remember if I'd seen him around the Warwagon this morning. I wondered where Julian was, since he wasn't in the cabin and didn't seem the type to go for long nature rambles. And then, for a change of pace, I wondered why Lark hadn't come around to see me this morning. It was true we hadn't parted on the best of terms, but with Lark that didn't mean a helluva lot, unless he'd changed more than I thought. If I was even thinking about tapping him for my working partner I was going to need to know exactly where I stood with him and whether he was, in the quaint patois of Organized Crime, a "stand-up guy."
And if not Lark, who? I began going over all the males of my acquaintance who were (a) semidetached and (b) initiate Gardner-ians, trying to think of who would do for me. Assuming, of course, that I would do for them. When that got frustrating enough, I looked around for something to do and realized I hadn't brought a book with me —not a problem, you'd say, since I was running a
table for a bookstore, but Julian had brought up a collection of books I'd either already read or wouldn't read if the alternative were illiteracy.
He doesn't like the stock bent anyway.
So I read the more expensive of the two Tesorarias for a while but got bored with that too, since a grimoire's got as much plot as a cookbook—a really boring one.
Aside from its particular purpose of ending all spiritual outside influence on the petitioner. La Tesoraria is similar to other gri-moires of the period. Its rituals require a detailed knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and astrology, and a list of ingredients that not only keeps stores like The Snake in business but guarantees that the legitimate magician will never find himself with time or excess money on his hands. Needless to say, 1 am not drawn to the more esoteric reaches of Ceremonial Magic; in fact I have a suspicion that the rituals in most grimoires — like the advice in their distant cousin, the Kama Sutra—are mostly designed to be read and not done.
For example, at the end of working of La Tesoraria del Oro there are two acts the practitioner must perform. They're impossible, of course, but, like Welsh riddles, once you've gotten that far you have to solve them to finish the game. In order to receive his theurgicad bill of divorcement, the petitioner, once he has completed his year of abstinence and observance, must first slay himself, and then have congress with himself—as the translated Spanish so quaintly puts it. I'd gotten that far in the read-through of the translated manuscript when I asked Julian if he had me working on the world's longest Polish terrorist joke (you know, the one that ends: " — first me, and then all of my hostages!"). He'd just given me one of those smug cat looks.
I suppose it was a dumb question. The similar impossibilities mentioned in most alchemical texts are treated by modem commentators as metaphor for a purely psychological transmutation; most magic is, these days, when only allegorical angels dance on the head of New Age pins. Depending on the inclination of the ma-giciain, there are a number of different ways to interpret what La Tesoraria says, ranging from simple animal sacrifice and bestiality to a rather giiry-fairy congress of the spirit, but the book itself is quite explicit. La Tesoraria calls for human sacrifice. I wondered which allegorical reading Julian was going to give its injunction when he got there. (In this it is not, as I've said, out of line with
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other medieval grimoires, whose recipes suggest that no one short of Giles de Rais has ever properly mastered the Black Arts, but it is also not particularly legal, ethical, moral, or PC. Of course, neither is your classic floor-model magician.)
I'd given up on La Tesoraria and was just about to have to choose between Cats Are Angels Too and New Aeon Crystal Power when Ironshadow showed up to save me from the sin of literary criticism.
"And good morning to you," he said cheerfully. He was looking particularly pleased with himself, which meant that somebody, at least, was having a good HallowFest.
"1 may rise, but I'm damned if I'm going to shine," I answered with moderate good grace, and his grin widened. Ironshadow has enormous white teeth that make him look as if he's capable of eating trees for breakfast. His smile is particularly unsettling if you have the least bit of a guilty conscience, but fortunately mine was almost clear.
"My, my—did we get up on the wrong side of the van this morning?" He set his suitcase down on top of his card table and popped the locks. I watched as he arranged his last few athames and the other samples of his art on the length of black velvet: single-edged, double-edged . . .
But nothing that could have made that hole in Jackson Harm, my helpful brain reminded me.
I decided to think about the late Jackson Harm and how he got that way for a while, as it was more fun than thinking about Lark, Julian, or whether I was still going to be friends with Maidjene after I told her about that gypsy switch I'd pulled with the HallowFest records.
A g
ypsy switch is where you hand someone a package —usually containing valuables — and they hand it back. Or so you think, but the package you get back is never the one you handed over, and the substitution is called after its originators by those in the bunco know. The image set up a faint nagging warning in my back-brain. A gypsy switch —had someone swapped one knife for another to make the knife that killed Hellfire Harm disappear?
And if so, how? What killed Harm had left a distinctive entry wound, to say the least; the knife that made it would be instantly recognizable. But I was the only one who'd seen it. Nobody else would associate a kukri with foul play, so if the killer had helped
himself to somebody else's knife to do the deed, its owner might be walking around with it this very moment, having no idea that he was carrying around evidence in a murder investigation.
And tomorrow he —along with everyone else here at Paradise Lake—would go home, and the chain of evidence would be broken forever.
As a theory it was pretty unworkable, since Harm had been killed early Saturday morning and not too many people had been around then to loan the murder weapon to Harm's killer, but I was equally willing to entertain the theory's evil twin: that the killer had stashed the knife he'd used among others somewhere here at the Festival, hiding it in plain sight.
Competing theories—all in need of more baking than they'd currently had—jostled and proliferated in my head until the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to turn HallowFest inside out looking for something I wasn't even sure I could put a name to. I wondered if our friends the police felt the same way.
"Reality to Bast," Ironshadow said.
"You call this reality?" I snarked. "I could pull a better reality out of a hat."
He just grinned in a self-satisfied way and settled himself behind his table. "You hear they're out there dragging the lake this morning?"
"What?" I hadn't seen anything like that when I came in. I hoped my co-religionists weren't giving Bat Wayne too much grief.
'They were just getting things set up when I went by. Big-old gasoline generator, winch, seining net. Going to pull up every carp and Coke can in the whole damn thing, take forever, and find them exactly zip."
And Maidjene would be right there reminding them about our Fourth Amendment rights, no doubt. 1 had an appointment with her that I didn't want to keep, and the addition of the Sheriffs Department to the mix didn't sound calculated to improve her forbearance or the idle hour.
"And speaking of guns and their nuts, have you heard anything about Larry?" I asked.
"He wasn't booked. Jeannie had to go down to the station in Tamerlane and pick him up, though." Ironshadow looked disapproving; Maidjene had a lot of friends and none of them liked Larry.
"Is he still here?" I asked. It would have been lovely to be able to pin Hellfire Harm's murder on Larry, but I really found it hard
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to imagine Larry stabbing anybody, although I could certainly see him shooting someone, probably by mistake.
'The Warwagon," Ironshadow remarked to the ceiling, "has not left the grounds, either yesterday or today. It would, of course, be amazing if it had, with four flat tires, but . . ."
"You didn't!" I yelped, laughing in spite of myself.
Ironshadow turned the blandest of bland gazes upon me. 'That would be vandalism," he said solemnly, "which would be illegal. And as young Lawrence has not so far disturbed the peace of the Festival, it would be wrong of someone to chastise him."
I hoped Larry Wagner had Triple-A. I hoped they'd send someone who could either patch a flat on a Winnebago or tow one. And while it was wrong of me to take such unholy delight in Larry's probably-deliberately-engineered misfortune, I did feel that the punishment fit the crime.
So what crime had Harm committed to merit his punishment— and did it fit as well?
I was abruptly cross again and might have said something regrettable, but fortunately Julian finally showed up. He was dressed, as always, in severe and funereal black—clerical collar, hammertail coat, trousers to match the coat, and glossily shined shoes. He stood in the doorway of the barn's second floor, polishing his glasses with a handkerchief and blinking as his eyes adjusted to the relative gloom after the bright light outside.
Julian is not a creature for bright light. He looked jarringly out of place here, but tomorrow the creature of the night would return to the night.
I reminded myself that I really ought to bear in mind that all this Gothic nonsense about Julian was the product of my imagination and not his lifestyle. People aren't like works of fiction, with every piece matching perfectly. At some point in his life Julian must have gone to kindergarten and the dentist and had birthday parties and the flu just like everyone else. Had what mainstream America would call a normal life.
In theory.
He was looking toward my table, and so he was looking toward the windows. The light shone full on his face; smooth skin, smooth shaven (it seemed unreasonable to think that Julian shaved, but he must) that granted the superficial illusion of youth, but the tiny lines around his eyes revised his age upward from Generation X to Woodstock I. It was odd to think of Julian not only subject to
t±ne but as a person somewhere near my age, although I'd known he wasn't young. If nothing else, it takes time to master the magical skills that I knew he had. He put his glasses back on and came toward me.
"I'll watch the table for a while," Julian said. 'There isn't anything else to do here," he added, dismissing the Festival and all its workshops with a shrug.
"Sure," I said. I started to tell him about the morning's transactions and the state of the stock, but Julian wasn't interested. He came around the table, sat down in the chair I'd been standing beside, and pulled La Tesoraria over to him, much as if I wasn't there. I could smell cinnamon and oranges; the formula from Lxi Tesoraria.
If I hadn't still been morbidly sensitive I might have stayed, since, interesting or not, I'd missed the start of the workshops and didn't want to come in late. But this particular morning that feat of detachment was beyond my skill.
When I got to the first floor of the bam it was practically empty. Both doors of the bam were open to the October sunshine and a perfunctory hand-lettered sign announced that the workshop on "Finding Your Faerie Guardians" had been moved to the Bardic Circle. Further investigation revealed that the Woods Walk had met down by the bridge and would be gone for two hours, and "Ritual Swordsmanship" had been moved from the Lake Meadow to the lower parking area. There was a notation "due to Faschist [sic] Pigs" on the paper after that one. From the direction of the lake 1 could hear a lawnmower-on-steroids sound that was probably the winch engine, and a lot of businesslike male voices making shouted conversation over the din.
I looked around. Nobody in sight through either door or the windows. I turned around and went through the door to one of the main bunkrooms.
There are two of them, and they occupy most of the first floor of the bam. Each one sleeps around thirty, in two rows of double-decker bunks. I remembered Maidjene saying that one of the rooms had been given over to parents with small children (Iduna sprang to mind). Out of a lunatic sense of expedience she'd made it the one nearer the bathrooms; I went into the other one.
It showed the signs of untidy overoccupancy by a tribe not noted, by and large, for its housekeeping or wilderness survival skills. Sleeping bags were in the minority; most of the bunks were
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piled with patchwork quilts and satin-edged blankets, Holofil comforters with Kliban print designs, and assorted stuffed animals. The luggage consisted of duffel bags and backpacks and plain cardboard boxes and the odd Samsonite suitcase; ritual robes were hung off the foot of most of the upper bunks, uneven hems trailing on the floor.
It was a familiar homely clutter; one I was so used to that in any year but this I would have walked in and simply taken it for granted. This was the way things were.
But
this year was different in so many ways. I found myself thinking that there was no way I could search this mess even if I wanted to. It looked like an explosion in the Department of Lost Luggage.
All but one comer.
There were —I blinked, but they didn't go away—footlockers at the foot of two bunks in the comer and the beds were made up with black satin sheets. There was a banner hung on the wall between the two footlockered bunks, and another one covered the window. Everything was militarily neat and precise.
I moved closer, carefully negotiating the encroaching-or-escaping collections of personal possessions. Someone had brought what looked like six cases of Classic Coke with them this weekend and was doing pretty well at emptying them, if the clear trash bag full of empties was any guide. Considering that I was surviving the weekend more or less entirely on smoked oysters and warm Diet Pepsi I wasn't in any position to throw stones, but still, there are limits.
I had no idea what I was looking for or why, and I even more certainly had no right to look for it—only a nagging unsatisfied might-be hubris that told me 1 had to search for . . . something.
I suspected I'd found the Klingon Wiccans.
The Klingons had made their encampment into a complete home away from home. There was a rug on the floor—gray, shaggy, and real fur—and a small table in the comer with a candle in a glass chimney on it. I looked up and realized the banner on the wall wasn't quite what it seemed. The stylized bird design was composed of knife sheaths, and every one of them was filled.
I reached up toward it.
"What do you think you're doing?"
It was the Klingon woman with the hubcaps, the one I'd seen on Saturday with the elaborate leather armor almost as impres-
sive as Orm Klash's. She'd either slept in her latex appliances or found some way to put them on even under HallowFest's rudimentary sanitary conditions, and 1 don't think she'd internalized the love-feast protocols of the New Aquarian Frontier.
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