After Hours: Tales From Ur-Bar

by Joshua Palmatier; Patricia Bray

  Three of the four walls were lined with shelves packed with alchemical ingredients and bottles of rare liquor—and if you don’t consider well-aged scotch a treasure, you’re a heathen and a fool. The fourth wall was taken up almost entirely by the twin of the upstairs bar. It was backed with a silver mirror, and held books instead of bottles. Some of those volumes were older than any tongue still spoken on the Earth. Most were alchemical in nature. Others dealt with the arcane art of bartending. They served as a personal library, and as excellent camouflage for the pride of my collection: the sacred tablet of Ninkasi, containing the original recipe for brewing beer.

  “Put her on the bar,” I said, as I lit the lamps. “Without destruction of property this time, if you would be so kind.”

  James moved to do as I instructed, positioning her in apparently perfect repose. The effect was eerie, especially with the mirror gleaming behind her.

  “Snow White is not a good look for anyone,” I muttered, and began taking bottles down from the shelf. “I must warn you, I’ve never attempted anything like this before. I can be reasonably sure I won’t kill her, but I can’t guarantee results.”

  “I understand, and will pay you for your time regardless.”

  “Mmm. I might like you after all.” I walked over to place the bottles I’d selected on the bar next to Margaret. “Quiet, please.”

  James nodded, and went silent.

  Mixing a potion and mixing a drink are more similar than most people would think. Both require a steady hand, a firm understanding of the ingredients, and a good idea of the desired result. Just now, this was the early resurrection of the human embodiment of winter. Not as easy as pulling a pint of ale, perhaps, but a good sight simpler than turning lead into gold and getting it to stay that way.

  I didn’t dare use mistletoe or quicksilver, for all that they were very “wintery” ingredients; Winter Queen or not, I had to work on the assumption that Margaret was still essentially human, and would look poorly on being poisoned. Bearing that in mind, I began with gin, for juniper berries and the smell of pine forests. The lady’s looks influenced my next ingredient: applejack, the fruit of Snow White’s downfall and a hundred harvest fairs. The resulting liquid was clear and slightly golden. I added a shot of pomegranate molasses, for Persephone’s folly, which brought about the winter to begin with. “This wants ice,” I said, and dropped a slice of crystallized ginger into the liquid, to add the bitter bite of winter. “Sit her up.”

  “What is it?” James boosted Margaret into a sitting position, leaning her against him like a full-sized rag doll.

  “Either the best drink I ever mixed, or a waste of some excellent alcohol. We’ll know in a moment.” I uncorked the last bottle, adding a single shot—and with it, the ice. As soon as the liquids met, frost began to form, spreading up the sides of the glass to sting my hand. I gave the concoction a single stir with a silver spoon from my workbench, more for show than anything else, and offered it to James. “Here. Give her this.”

  He looked at the icy glass warily. “What’s in it?”

  “Gin, applejack, pomegranate molasses, ginger, and a shot of liquid midnight, captured on the coastline on winter solstice. If that isn’t enough to bring her around, I can’t help you.”

  “How did you bottle midnight?” James took the glass from my hand, the frost melting instantly where his fingers touched. Stirring had turned the drink from clear amber with dark red at the bottom to an overall autumnleaf red. It smelled like snowfall, and like secrets.

  “Trade secret.”

  “I see. Thank you, whatever the results.” James inclined his head solemnly toward me, and raised the glass to Margaret’s lips. It was disturbingly like watching a child playing tea party, offering drinks to stuffed rabbits and favored dolls.

  Then the dead woman raised a pale, trembling hand, folding it over his, and began to drink on her own.

  Her first sips were tentative ones, still mostly asleep and acting only on instinct. Then she started drinking in earnest, back straightening, head coming up as she started to support her own weight. James released the glass, and she held it on her own, still drinking. The light coming off him was getting brighter as relief overwhelmed his ability to damp down his connection to the summertime. It failed to make a bit of difference in the overall illumination, because even as the light began to pour off of him, the dark began to radiate from her. It wasn’t true darkness, not exactly—I could see her as well as I ever could—but it was the opposite of light, all the same.

  Ice clinked against her teeth as she upended the glass, emptying the last of its contents into her mouth. The sides were coated entirely with frost now, although the places James had touched seemed to have acquired a somewhat thinner coating. She swallowed. She took a breath. And the Winter Queen opened her eyes.

  They were the color of deep glacial ice, so dark a blue they were almost physically painful to look at. She frowned in obvious bewilderment, turning her head as she made a slow study of the room, which became a slow study of my person. I flushed red, burying my hands in my apron and resisting the urge to curtsy. James alone had been odd, but not so odd as to warp the world around him. The two of them together, and her all out of season. . . .

  This was not the way the world was meant to be. And it was, without a doubt, my fault.

  Finally, Margaret turned to her husband, and said, “It’s August. This is August.”

  “Yes, it is,” James agreed, glowing even brighter. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you awake. Can you stand?”

  “That’s beside the point. It’s August.” She shook her head, bewilderment still plain. “I can’t be awake yet. The harvest horns haven’t sounded. I’m supposed to be waiting for the winter. Why am I awake?”

  “That would be my doing,” I said. I promptly regretted it, as they both turned to look in my direction. A good alchemist is ready to defend his—or her—work against an uncomprehending world, and so I cleared my throat, and said, “I mixed a tincture at your husband’s request. It appears to have worked. I may write a paper. Although I can’t imagine it to have terribly wide uses—”

  “Miss Norton is an alchemist,” James said. “I asked her to wake you because Jane and Stuart are back, and this time they’ve set the authorities on us. Reported me for improper storage of a corpse in a residential neighborhood—and implied that I was using it for things which were, ah, even more improper. The police were preparing to arrest me if I didn’t agree to your removal.”

  Margaret coughed into her hand. “Are you saying that my sister was going to have you arrested for necrophilia?”

  “Ah, the modern world,” I said, sotto voice.

  They ignored me, which was probably for the best. “That’s the gist of it,” said James.

  Margaret sighed. “I really don’t think you’re equipped to spend your summers unsupervised.”

  “Which reminds me,” I said, louder this time. The seasonal monarchs looked my way. “I’ve left my bar essentially unsupervised while I dealt with the two of you. If you wouldn’t mind continuing your charmingly unseasonal reunion upstairs, we can discuss the matter of my payment.”

  “We’re in a public house?” said Margaret, wonderingly. When James nodded, she began to laugh, and kept laughing as the two of them followed me up the basement stairs.

  We were almost to the storeroom when the screams began.

  The door to the storeroom had been blown off its hinges by impact with some large, solid object—Andy, whose body lay in shards all across the floor. I came skidding to a halt, feeling a scream of my own building in my chest. It only needed a target, which presented itself, readily, in the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who stood in the smoking remains of the doorway. Her clothing was cut to shout “expense”; it probably cost no more than Margaret’s, but proclaimed its value several times as loudly. The man next to her was attired much the same, and his hair, while also dark, had been bleached, badly, to a dead straw gold.

&n
bsp; Margaret and James shoved up behind me, knocking me a step forward. A piece of Andy crunched underfoot. “Jane!” said Margaret. “How dare you?”

  “How dare I?” Jane sneered. “I find the Winter Queen awake out of season in a den of iniquity—”

  “This is a perfectly respectable establishment!” I shouted. “And even if it isn’t, that does not give you leave to detonate my employees!”

  “—and you want to know how dare I? How dare you, sister dear. I have had quite enough. You could have gone quietly, slipping into the death you’ve avoided so long, but no. You couldn’t see the value of a gentle exit. And now, I’m afraid, this is going to be much harder.” Jane attempted an expression of sisterly affection. I’ve seen more loving looks on a rattlesnake. “On all of us.”

  James stepped up to take my elbow, tugging me out of the direct line of fire. The light bleeding off him was so bright that standing next to him was like standing on Market Street at noontime without a parasol. “I apologize for what’s about to happen, Miss Norton,” he said.

  I risked a glance at the other three. The dark was gathering around Margaret like the pomegranate syrup staining the gin, and as it came, so did the cold. Frost was spreading around her feet, biting and warping the floorboards. As for Jane and Stuart, they might not have had seasons to call their own, but that didn’t render them defenseless. Jane’s hands glittered with witchfire—horrible stuff, no magical practitioner worthy of the name would touch it—and Stuart, more distressingly, was holding a small tube of quicksilver speckled with red, which I recognized as one of the nastier weapons in the alchemical arsenal.

  “You might have mentioned that she was a witch married to an alchemist,” I said.

  “Slipped my mind,” James replied. Then Jane flung the flame in her hands at Margaret, who met it midair with a blast of frigid cold, and the fight was on.

  It’s true that, unprepared, I am little more use in a fight than your average bystander. I don’t dare strike anyone with my unprotected fists, as my work depends upon possession of agile hands, and I have never really trained in any of the more common weapons. It’s also true that, in a fight where all other combatants are either supernaturally powered or at least very well-prepared, I am likely to be overlooked. Taking that to my advantage, I began to creep around the edge of the room, only pausing to duck poorly aimed blasts of one thing or another. What failed to hit me frequently succeeded in hitting the storeroom shelves, and I kept a silent-but-steady accounting of the damages as I crept.

  Andy’s head had rolled to a stop beneath the workbench near the door, still almost entirely intact, if somewhat chipped. I stooped to scoop it into my skirts, and stayed stooped over as I scurried out the shattered door and into the bar proper.

  The place was deserted. This was something of a relief, as it proved my customers had at least the common sense of wharf rats. The screams we’d heard must have been theirs, uttered as they fled. The damage caused by Jane and Stuart’s entrance seemed confined to the storeroom door and the shelves to either side of it. That was still quite a lot of wasted liquor, but it was nowhere as bad as it could have been. Small blessings.

  Pulling Andy’s head from my skirt, I placed it on the bar. He opened his eyes and looked mournfully up at me.

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I tried to stop them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Andy. Did they hurt you when you blocked their way?” He nodded. “And is that when everyone screamed and ran away?” He nodded again. “There, you see? They didn’t enter the storeroom until after the screaming had started. You did exactly what I asked of you.” Almost as an afterthought, I added, “And I’ll construct you a new body as soon as this tedious business is concluded.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  A blast of cold air poured out of the storeroom doorway, and small white flowers were beginning to sprout from the floor. I sighed. “Stay there, Andy. I’m afraid I need to stop some very silly people from leveling the place.”

  The fact that Andy couldn’t have moved if he wanted to didn’t appear to change his calm acceptance of my instructions. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Very good, Andy.” The majority of my supplies were in the basement, but I would be a poor alchemist—and an even poorer bartender—if I didn’t possess at least a small talent for improvisation. Taking a bottle of rum from the shelf, I grabbed a pitcher and began to pour.

  And that would be the point at which the fight, not content to leave me to work in peace, spilled out of the storeroom and into the front of the bar.

  James was the first out of the storeroom—largely, I believe, because he was flying through the air, propelled by a blast of dirty orange witchfire. He slammed into an antique table that originated in a tavern in Barbados, reducing it to splinters. I said a word even my father would have been shocked to learn that I knew, snatching Andy’s head off the bar and shoving it behind a stack of pint glasses. Crafting a new body was one thing. Crafting a new brain was something else entirely, and would be substantially more work.

  Another blast of witchfire emanated from the storeroom, followed by Jane, who had her hands raised in preparation for another blast. She didn’t have time to deliver it.

  “Get away from my husband!” shouted Margaret, the ambient temperature dropping by several degrees as she came barreling into the room.

  Jane stopped to look back at her sister, providing an opportunity for James to hit her in the back with a chair.

  “At least they’re keeping each other busy,” I muttered, remaining crouched behind the bar as I reached up and opened the register drawer. Luckily, I’m accustomed to working in the dark, and was able to find what I needed by feel.

  Bottles smashed against the wall as I worked, sending debris raining down on me. Several chunks of glass grazed my arms and cheeks, and I had to stop more than once, scuttling to different points behind the bar. I didn’t like to consider how much damage they were doing. The changes in temperature alone—one moment midsummer swelter, the next midwinter freeze—were enough to guarantee that I’d be needing new windows several years ahead of schedule.

  The fight was still going strong when I finished assembling a drink that would, I hoped, convey the appropriate message. A bottle of rum came flying over the bar. I grabbed it from the air and pulled the cork with my teeth, taking one swig for courage, and a second swig as a prayer to any God of Bartenders that might be listening. Thus fortified, I picked up the fruit of my labors, and stood.

  The Winter Queen was backed into the corner near the window by Stuart, whose entire body was burning with a lambent white flame that seemed to be countering the effects of her frost. The Summer King, meanwhile, had his hands full dodging the fireballs Jane was flinging in his direction. More of those white flowers carpeted the floor, and mistletoe was beginning to drip down from the ceiling. I cleared my throat.

  “Ex-cuse me,” I said, in my most authoritative tone. “If this nonsense does not cease this instant, I am afraid I shall have to put a stop to it myself.”

  Jane laughed. “Good lord, you little slattern. Count yourself lucky that we’re willing to let you go, and run before we change our minds.” She flung another fireball at James as she spoke. He dodged to the side, looking increasingly winded. It was August. His powers were in their natural decline, and Margaret wasn’t even supposed to be awake yet. This was the time of year when they were both as close to the human norm as it was possible for them to get.

  That was good. It meant they were highly likely to survive. “Lucky?” I demanded, letting my temper off its reins. “You’re demolishing my bar! You broke my assistant! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to construct a golem that can pass that well for human? Weeks of work, shattered!” All four of them hesitated, floored by the sight of a seemingly ordinary woman trying to shout a battle for supernatural dominion to a stand-still.

  Which is when I threw the contents of my pitcher onto the lot of them.

  Jane shrieked with indi
gnation as the liquid hit her, and the fire around her hands went out. She didn’t seem to notice. She spun in my direction, hands raised to fling a fireball at me. Nothing happened. I watched her calmly. She blinked, and repeated the gesture. Nothing continued to happen. It made a pleasant change.

  Stuart, meanwhile, had noticed that he was no longer on fire, and did not seem entirely pleased by this development. Lifting a hand, he tasted the liquid dripping from his fingers. His eyes widened, and he turned to stare in my direction as he said, wonderingly, “Why, you little bitch. . . .”

  I smiled. “Salt, spiced rum, three iron pennies, and a shot of the holy water Father Andrews brings me every Sunday. Oh, come now,” I said, shaking my head at Jane’s shocked expression. “Didn’t the presence of a golem behind the bar tell you I was the better alchemist? Using quicksilver as a base for your explosives, I mean, really.”

  Jane and Stuart continued to stare at me. That was fine. It meant they weren’t paying attention when Margaret and James rose up behind them—the one clutching a bottle of port, the other, Andy’s left arm—and clocked them squarely in their respective heads.

  In the end, we decided that the best approach with Jane and Stuart was the simplest. I fetched a memory tincture from the basement and poured liberal quantities down their throats, while James hailed a carriage to take them to the Ferry Building. They would wake miles from the bar, with no recollection of where they’d been or what they’d been doing there—and no powers, either, unless they had the foresight to jump immediately into the bath. The potion I’d mixed would continue to work until they scrubbed the last of it from their persons.