Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  At the end of the hall rose a dais, and upon its mirror-white marble surface rested a throne of peeled bone-white thorn branches bound with rainbow silk. The branches curved into a spike-tipped heart over the head of the woman who sat at her ease within them, her long arms emerging bare as ice from the translucent layers of her gown. She did not rise, but leaned forward among her thorns. "Child," she said, extending a white hand, "I will give you music such as you have never known."

  Kelly stopped, the stones cold through the soles of his shoes. And then he went to her. Across the white pavement, in front of the Unseelie court, he went to the Winter Queen. And there she stripped him, and there she had him, on her throne of white, white thorns.

  * * *

  Matt found the iron rings upon the ground. He dropped to one knee and pinched them up, sliding them onto his right hand. Another Faerie gate to seal. But first, to exploit.

  He patted his pockets until he found a pen and a card among his clutter, and on the card he wrote out the Lord's Prayer. He wasn't Christian. But the fey folk were. In a crooked fashion. There was also a steel ball chain in his pocket, along with some packets of salt stolen from a McDonald's and other useful things—a horse-shoe nail, steel pins, a stone with a hole, a paper pouch of apple spice oatmeal, and so on—and he punched holes in the card with the point of his pocket-knife and threaded the chain through them. It would go around his neck.

  But first he took his shirt off and turned it inside out, buttoning it before he pulled it on over his head. He should do the jeans too, but he didn't have time to unlace his boots, so he made sure his buttons were buttoned and his shoelaces tied, though he loosened the laces on the left one. He thought he was more likely to have to throw it than to run from anything.

  And then he stood again and took a cleansing breath or two. He knew the technique. He hadn't actually done it. But he closed his eyes and turned widdershins three times and stamped his foot on the ground, and visualized extending his hands until his iron ring caught on something, and then easing the world open like a door.

  He fumbled the pierced stone from his pocket and held it before his face, so he should see through it first when he opened his eyes. He didn't need an incantation, not exactly, and incantations were mostly a matter of focus anyway, so he cleared his mind and let the words of the Russian fairy tale hang before him like embers. "There is the fire for thy stepmother's daughters! And may they joy in it!"

  And when he opened his eyelids, he wasn't where he had been before. The first thing he saw was a beautiful dark-haired fat woman, her thighs like stalactites, leaned back in a flurry of cellophane wings, shaking her avoirdupois with ecstasy. Something coiled and gnawed between her thighs, under the overhanging curve of her belly. Small winged creatures, like dragonflies and like naked women with barbed silver arms, lifted her soft shuddering breasts by the nipples, tugging until she moaned and arched her back, swaying from foot to foot in a slow, erotic dance.

  Matt swallowed, hard, and looked away, shifting against the seam of his jeans. Somewhere in here, he would find his brother.

  The door was still open, still clenched in his hand. He replaced the stone in his pocket with the other one. One of the pins stuck quite easily in a corner of the world when he pinched the door open. He did not care to be sealed in a Faerie mound, and this would help keep the time-slip from running away with him.

  He also didn't care to return home in two hundred years—or tomorrow, two hundred years older.

  He stepped forward into light, into a vast white room full of people. Everything he saw was an education. He fisted his hands, his own ring on the left hand, his brother's on the right. They bit flesh painfully.

  It was like seeking one candle in a cathedral. But it was simple to track someone by magery, if you had something they habitually wore.

  * * *

  The music filled him, the curve and weight of the notes, the glow of the horns. The thorns in his flesh were nothing, less than nothing, because all he could feel was the caress of the music, perfect and sharp, like the weight of the beautiful woman who drove him—white as snow, black as ebony, red as blood—who ripped his flesh with her fangs and her claws and straddled him and impaled him back on her throne.

  He heard it now, the music, the way he'd never heard it before. He understood it.

  He could make that too.

  He lost himself, in a crescendo, in a dream, in the sweet sharp clash of notes rising in a whorl like the sparking vortex over a fire. And then there was a different woman in his arms—the dark one, with her wild eyes and her teeth that left circles of pain in his skin—and after her there might be another, or a man, unless they tired of him and bid him dance until they wanted him again.

  The music rang in his ears, and he understood it.

  In the morning he would lose this. Like a perfect book read in a dream, whose pages fade when turned. In the morning, they would send him home. In the morning.

  But he would remember it. Clearly, presently, not like the fading sparkles of a dream. And he could make it anew.

  It was all his.

  * * *

  Matt paused in the long hall, feeling the tug of direction from his right hand. He closed his eyes, he closed his ears, as he walked among the feasting and frolicking, the flogging and fucking. He made no attempt to move in secrecy, and some of the Fae turned from their diversions to watch him pass. Some of those were intrigued enough to follow, fanning out behind him like a trailing cloak, though they all stayed far enough away that he could not have reached them with a lunge.

  By the time the crowd had cleared enough that he could glimpse the head of the hall, he knew what he would see. There were darker shapes on all that whiteness, and as he pushed his glasses up his nose with his thumb, the steel frames chill on his skin, he saw Kelly, naked and banded like a tiger, on his knees amid the Fae.

  A woman crouched before him, her buttocks pressed to his hips, her breasts pressed to the stone, her head lowered on her arms and her hair all variegated spread out around her. A faun, its little tail flagging like a deer's, bucked against Kelly's ass, horned forehead resting on Kelly's shoulder, arms linked loosely around his waist, hands resting on the hips of the rocking woman. And over them, straddling the woman who crouched on her shoulders and knees, white as snow, black as ebony, gray as pearl, stood a narrow woman who held Kelly's face pressed into her groin with one slender hand and in the other cupped an ornate goblet with a broad, shallow bowl. Lot of use those tattoos amounted to, Matt thought. All that time and pain for nothing. He would have rolled his eyes if he dared take them off the queen.

  She regarded Matt with the perfect impassivity of a pantheress, staring down at him with dark slanted eyes. Kelly's shoulders and back were scratched and raked. Dark blood oozed from a shallow wound along his throat. He rocked between his lovers, and Matt heard him humming.

  "Jesus," Matt said, and the nearest Fae fainted. The Queen herself winced sharply.

  XX

  "Matthew Magus," she said, and brought the goblet to her breast. He saw what she intended; the wine would spill down her sternum, run across her belly, and fill Kelly's eagerly working mouth. Wine, drunk in Faerie. Wine to bind him there.

  Which meant, if she was not bluffing, that he'd not yet taken food nor drink from her hand.

  There was a chance to win him home.

  Her voice was reeds and fiddles. "You should not be here, child. You could lose your whole life in one night."

  "The morning is wiser than the evening," Matt answered, and didn't realize until it was out of his mouth that he'd quoted Vassilisa's magic doll. "I've come for my brother."

  "What have you to bargain with, you who are not a musician?" She ran her fingers luxuriously through Kelly's hair. "Have you come to take his place?"

  As if she could read Matt's stricken fascination, hear the shallow roaring of his heart. Of course. He'd have to pay to bring his brother home. And he could almost taste the temptation.

&nb
sp; "A story," he said. "I'll tell you a story."

  She ran that knife-edged cat-gaze up and down his frame. "Not your body?"

  "I doubt I'd stand up to your tastes," he said, trying for dry and arriving in the vicinity, albeit via shaky. "I will tell you a story."

  Her eyes lidded. Her fingers threaded Kelly's hair. The faun made a little bleating noise and slumped against his back. Matt heard his brother's moan from where he stood, and it didn't sound like pleasure, exactly, but then it also didn't sound like pain.

  His heart thumped harder; he wouldn't stare, dry-mouthed, at the lacerations on Kelly's back and thighs, wouldn't think of how they must sting as Kelly stretched to please the queen and his beaded sweat ran through them. Wouldn't allow himself to wonder how she tasted, as the air thickened with sex and ambergris. But the time on Yukako's table had changed him in more ways than that, and he knew how to pretend disdain. The Queen might tempt him, but she had nothing at all to shock him with.

  He already knew where that particular twist in his psyche led. And he found he did mind the Queen staring at his crotch.

  He swallowed, and began. "There was a girl named Vassilisa, whose mother died when she was but a child, and left her no legacy but a doll carved out of wood—"

  It was a complicated story, and Matt kept his eyes on the white Queen's face as he told it. Which is how he knew she climaxed as he narrated the scene where the Baba Yaga's fire-skull burns the wicked sisters' flesh from bone; it was only revealed in the flick of her lashes, the pinch of her teeth, the flex of long muscles unslackening in her narrow thighs. She let spill not so much as a drop of wine.

  She pushed Kelly away; he fell to the dais, and the woman the Queen had been straddling slid down in exhaustion.

  "Well told," she said. She reclined on her throne, robed in white as if she had always been, scatheless among the thorns. "For that tale, I will sell you a piece of your brother. Will you win him back from me bit by bit, Matthew Magus, if you cannot have him whole?"

  "That was not the bargain," he said.

  She tilted her head and smiled. "In my house, I make the bargains. I think the first thing I will give you is his . . . sight."

  "Your majesty, no!—" Respect. Always speak to immortal things with respect. They have a great deal of time for remembering slights.

  He spoke too late, as if speaking early would have had any effect. His sight blurred and cleared as if he'd blinked away a tear, and abruptly everything he saw changed. For a moment, he didn't understand, and then he realized what dazzled him.

  Those were colors.

  And he did not know their names.

  On the dais, Kelly stirred and moaned.

  "I promised him music, not vision. Strip Matthew Magus," the Queen said, with a negligent wave of her hand. "Enchant him. I've always loved brothers."

  "Your majesty!" Matt cried, stumbling a half-step forward.

  She turned her face. Someone plucked his trouser leg, and he jerked back sharply with a gasp. He jammed his hands into his pockets, barely daring to glance away from the Queen.

  The Fae surrounded him, tall and squat, broad and slight. Limbs like lobster claws and tree branches reached, stroking, catching—

  The first one to grab at his sleeve drew back with a thin little cry. "Inside-out!" it whined, clutching its clawed hand to pendulous breasts. "Its clothes are inside-out, your majesty."

  Salt. Oatmeal. A packet of pins. Matt yanked them from his pockets, bulled through the ring of Faerie—forward, where the line was thinnest, shocking them that he would willingly approach the Queen. She rose from her throne like a handkerchief drawn on a string, and he paused a step away. The pins were in his right hand. As she stepped forward, he scattered them on the floor all about his feet and between himself and the throne.

  They rang like silver, but they were steel.

  The Unseelie Queen froze with one foot uplifted, and Matt showed her his other hand. "Salt," he said. "Oatmeal. And I've never lain with a woman. I stand in your hall in my power and my purity, and in the name of the Christ and the Holy Ghost and the Father, in the names of all God's angels, you will abide by our bargain."

  The Queen flinched cruelly, but did not step back. Behind him, Matt heard cries of pain, and weeping.

  Matt paused, trembling, and made his voice strong and deep. "Give me my brother, and I'll go."

  "Seize him," she said, blind to any irony. But the tall black-skinned Faerie who had brought Kelly here came up to the dais, and ran a hand along his outline without touching cloth or skin. "He's blessed," she said, her words as much a caress as her gesture. "He wears a fresh blessing, your majesty. And we were offered one, not both."

  The Queen seemed to swell, no more awkward one-legged than any hunting heron. "I'll have no blessings in this house!"

  "Give me my brother," he repeated, "and I'll go." He tore open the green-printed paper of the Quaker oatmeal, the sound echoing through a silent hall.

  "Kelly, my love," the Queen said, slowly. "Dance for me."

  Matt couldn't look. He did not look away from the Queen, burning in all her nameless colors, even as Kelly rose up, panting, trembling, drawn with exhaustion, and lifted his arms to the sides. His feet, Matt saw, left smears upon the stone.

  Red. That must be what red was.

  The musicians were well-trained, or heavily cowed. They had already resumed playing. "Why don't we play a game?" the Queen asked. She had not glanced away from Matt, either. "Why don't we both call him. Neither of us moves, and we see to whom he comes?"

  "Fine with me," Matt said, and with an abrupt jerk of his arm, threw the powdered oatmeal over Kelly.

  Kelly twitched, stumbled, went to his knees. Coughed, gasped—and seized, long jerking convulsions, smearing saliva and blood on the stones. "Oh, such a clever mortal," the Unseelie Queen purred—and the floor around Matt buckled and heaved, shivered into pieces, and each of the pieces became an ember glowing red.

  Red, Matt's first color.

  "Clever clever mortal. Kelly," she said, softly. "Kelly. Stop that. Sweet child. Come to me. I will make you happy."

  And Kelly stood. Matt saw his feet clearly now, and could not hide his cringe. And as for Matt—he stood on an eighteen-inch island, a puddle of white marble in the midst of an eight-foot ring of fire. If he called Kelly to him—if Kelly would come—he would be staggering over coals.

  And the alternative was leaving him here.

  "Kelly," the Unseelie Queen said. "Come here to me."

  Matt crouched in his narrow island of safety, dropped the salt packets on the ground, and began untying his left boot. He could not let haste make him fumble. Kelly was turning, blindly seeking the Faerie Queen's dulcet voice. There was no time for second attempts.

  "Kelly," he said. "Don't do that. Come to me."

  And Kelly hesitated. He didn't turn; but his groping footsteps lagged. "Matty?"

  "Come to me." Matt stood, his left shoe in his hand. All his command in his voice, a Mage's conviction. The simplest form of magia—command. Not quite Faerie glamourie, but people would obey it because it was easier than saying no. "Come to me right now!"

  Kelly turned, suddenly decisive, and stepped onto the coals. He seemed to feel nothing; his face remained slack, wondering, as he advanced. But Matt heard the sweat and the blood, and then the meat, sizzle.

  The Queen jerked forward, reaching out. And Matt hit her hard, over the breasts, with his hurled steel-toed boot. "This is yours!" he shouted. "That is mine!"

  She grunted, caught it reflexively, and dropped it as if he'd thrown her a handful of her own smoking coals.

  And Kelly came one more step toward him.

  "Come on, man," Matt said. He held out his hand, leaned forward as far as he could without moving his feet. Is it dawn yet? It is sunrise? Is she lying? "Reach for me, big brother. Dammit, man, reach."

  "I curse you, Matthew Magus," the Faerie Queen said, her voice like silver and ice, as Kelly grunted with each step, the coals
powdering his feet with ash and char. "I curse you to a cold life and an ill death. I curse you to kinslaughter and betrayal."

  Kelly reached. Matt grasped his fingers, reached more, got his wrist, pressed his hand adorned with Kelly's own iron rings to Kelly's flesh. He reached out with his left hand and pulled out the pin he'd left holding a flap of the world aside.

  The Queen drew herself up, and spoke her final words like the tolling of a bell. "As I have taught you to see as other men, so I curse you to the death of your illusions."

  "My lady," Matt said, "I wish you the death of your own."

  And stepped through, onto the cold hillside in the pewter light, his brother in his right hand and a bit of bent steel in the left.

  * * *

  Soul Searching