We Will All Go Down Together

by We Will All Go Down Together (v5. 0) (epub)

  What got him particularly wary was the man the Templars had apparently come to meet—the one Le Prof called Cordellion Federoi. In many ways, he seemed the only true Templar in the bunch: career soldier’s bearing, neatly bearded, a high-end pair of wrap-around sunglasses perfectly adjusted to hide the upside-down crosses branded over his seared-blind eyes.

  ’E is one of the Kissed, the inner circle, Le Prof told him. That’s what they call them.

  One of the original Nine, you mean? Mac asked.

  To which Le Prof frowned, disappointed by Mac’s credulity, and replied—Of course not. Don’t be fooled by the accoutrements; no matter what they may ’ave done to themselves, they’re just people, M’sieu Roke.

  The implication being: odd people, yes. Strange people. Living up to a fearsome and dramatic legend, wielding swords, kissing the Devil’s ass (or maybe just each others’). But . . .

  (But.)

  . . . while Mac could see how thinking that might keep the old guy feeling safe at night, he was content to go with his own instincts, and those said—not so much. Especially since every time Mac moved closer, he saw those obviously dead eyes flick his way, automatic as a REM-sleep quiver, like Cordellion was cruising him telepathically.

  He can SEE me, Mac thought. Or knows he should be able to. And can’t.

  The plan, as such, was simplicity itself: wait ’til the “hatbox” slid down the chute, snatch and grab, then take off running. Aside from Cordellion, the Templars didn’t read as having any sort of real magical signature, so even if they did somehow twig to what was going on, there was only so far they could really follow him—into the nearest guys’ john, into the handicapped stall, but no farther. Not onto the ley line only Mac could see blazing underfoot; certainly not into the Dourvale brugh via the legendary “low road,” once he’d made that particular connection—if he could make it before one of them ran him straight through the spine. It’d been a while for him, after all—

  Yet blood will out, Mac told himself, grimly. And told the guy standing next to him, without preamble: “Give me your cell phone.”

  “Say hella-what?” Dudester replied, goggling.

  No time for subtlety. “Give,” Mac repeated, making with the full Fae power-stare, and the guy did, without further question. Like he’d been tapped good and hard between the eyes with a velvet-wrapped ball-peen hammer.

  Mac dialled one number, spoke briefly, then sent two equally brief, time-sensitive text messages to two other—completely different—numbers. And leaned back against the wall to wait.

  The page summoning Cordellion to the Information Desk—by name, no less, which produced exactly the kind of reaction Mac had hoped for—came through just as human Templars One and Two swung the “hatbox” reverently up, carrying it by its handles as they trailed dutifully after their leader. Mac passed neatly between them like a black wind, tearing the “hatbox” free and throwing a subsidiary glamer over it as well, though the extra strain of maintaining two separate illusions was already enough to make him stagger, vertiginously. He blundered noisily over towards the little stick-man figure sign, bumping into an older lady and a man in a wheelchair on the way, both of whom swore loudly.

  Behind him, he felt Cordellion’s empty gaze switch on, sweeping sharply after him even as the other Templars cried out to each other in confusion, swapping semi-Mediaeval French insults: Guiche, du Metz, où est la tête du grand-maître? Allez! Trouvez-la! I know not—’tis pas ma faute! O, but you lie—ta bouche dans le cul du diable, imbécile, et que celle de ta mère y soit avant la tienne!

  Under that, however, came Cordellion’s voice, low and dark with a blood-deep thrum to it, which reached straight inside Mac’s defences.

  Saying, as though in Mac’s own ear—“Ah, there you are, thief. Je vous vois clairement, et je sais où vous vois dirigez. . . .”

  Not yet, you don’t, Mac thought, grimly. And broke through the washroom doors with the “hatbox” hugged to his chest and both elbows up, like a linebacker, knocking some poor bastard who’d only wanted to dry his hands before catching a flight to wherever right on his ass. No time for sympathy—Mac vaulted over the man’s prone body, skidded past the first three stalls, and barricaded himself inside the last, double-wide one.

  He shifted the “hatbox” under one arm and hammered on the wall with the other, feeling like an idiot as he yelled: “Grandmere, hear me! Your daughter Miliner’s son craves to do you homage, with apologies for my long absence . . . I come to you by the low road, begging entry!”

  Behind him, the doors banged open and the fallen man groaned, as if kicked. Mac felt the plaster warm under his fingers, praying it wasn’t his imagination; was that a subtle pinkening hovering beneath the once-white expanse of paint? A flash of flat cheekbone, sly silvery eye, eerily lit-from-within half-quirk of teeth?

  (What is’t ye dream of, nephew?)

  You, aunt. For this one time, and only: You.

  Ah well, then. I am answered.

  Time slowed, but only in the ordered world—that roundhouse one Templar gave the stall door, half-ripping it off its hinges, became nothing more than a slap that felt like a kiss, molasses-soft. Mac saw the wall peel back in front of him like a lip, fungal, stop-motion; his hand immediately sank to the wrist, time-space ripples scurrying out sidelong. At which point he felt another hand, slim and nail-less, knit most of its fingers with his, and knew exactly who it must belong to—so he braced himself as it pulled hard, teeth gritted, giving himself over entirely to what was no longer refutable.

  Was that another hand, grabbing for his shoulder? Fingers grasping painfully hard and—slipping?

  (never mind)

  The wall lapped over him, re-sealing as it went, and Mac found himself thrust headfirst out through a colon-close tunnel into an equally sticky-floored hall: Lady Glauce’s Receiving Room, located at the Dourvale brugh’s unnaturally still heart. A vaulted cavern of a place whose cold dirt walls smelled of rot and apples.

  “Give ye good-even, coz,” Saracen’s voice came, predictably, from somewhere in the darkness at his elbow. “I see ye ha’ finally ta’en up yuir invitation.”

  Mac reeled, spat in his non-hatbox-holding hand, and wiped it on his coat, hoping the place was so dim no one would notice. “Yup,” he managed, at last.

  The brugh looked about the same as the last time Mac’d seen it: tapestries of dead leaves hung slack as skins in every direction, a thousand variegated shades of decay sewn each to each with spiderweb, then stuck fast to the roof with luminous mould. Half the furniture was stolen, while the other half seemed cobbled together from anything handy—shells and muck, living tubers, long-scraped bones.

  At the table’s head sat Lady Glauce herself, gleaming in the hall’s eternal dusk, a too-thin salt-soap parody of her own spectral beauty—literally statuesque, so huge she was forced to stoop even in her own home, yet so far gone into the opposite end of her hag-cycle that even her leafy crown seemed withered. On one side, her husband Enzembler with his vacant stare, ill-set head nodding slightly; on the other, their remaining children (and some of their children, to boot). Minion, a full-fledged ogre, whose bottom eye-teeth curled up like tusks. Ganconer Sidderstane, leaned back in his chair at his half-niece Ygerna’s slimy elbow, raw wooden eyes weeping tears of pus in their barely healed sockets.

  Saracen was already moving to take his rightful place at his grandmother’s side, naturally enough . . . and here came Enzemblance herself, flowing ’cross the wall like shadow to meet him, while some cute little human thrall-girl scuttled to keep herself safely out of both their paths.

  Taking full advantage of her creepily long reach, however, Enzemblance managed to chuck the thrall roughly under the chin before she sat, telling her: “Do ye play for us, Galit, now we be all met taegether—something lively. My nephew’s yet tae hear ye, and I’d no’ deprive him of that sweet grace.”

  “I will, milady,” the
girl agreed, voice dull, eyes downcast—and now that he came to think about it, Mac could vaguely recall somebody by that name having gone missing last year, up ’round Overdeere way. Ganconer couldn’t quite keep himself from twitching at the sound, which was interesting, though not enough so to distract.

  Mac’s mother would have had a chair with her name on it here as well, once upon a time—somewhere between Minion and Enzemblance, probably, with Army Roke snugged in right alongside her; husband and father of her son, though descended directly from the alliance of Callistor Roke and Miliner’s own firstborn sister, Grisell. And what the hell did that make Mac, anyhow? Could three halves really make a whole?

  It only takes one drop of red blood to make you human, Maccabee, he heard Fr. Gowther’s voice whisper. Which would’ve been more reassuring if Mac hadn’t already known his blood showed up blue under most lights.

  So. “Nice,” was all he said to Enzemblance, buying Galit-the-thrall enough time to thread a crude fiddle with one long lock of her own hair—still thick, once dark, now shot and streaked with grey. “That’s old school, seriously. Sure beats the hell out of an iPod, doesn’t it?”

  Enzemblance gave a wolfish grin at this, and raised a slanted brow to Saracen; their too-alike smiles met and matched, in nasty concert.

  “Ah, Maccabee,” she said, “I’ve missed yuir pleasantries, these many years gone by. Yet I have my own leman now, d’ye note it?”

  “Couldn’t not, really.” To Saracen: “And how ’bout you, ‘coz’? You bring a date?”

  Saracen shook his head. “I’d no time, more’s the pity. Still, I see you brought something—a tithe for grandmere, as is only right and proper.”

  “Yeah, sure, I . . . what?”

  Lost, Mac followed Saracen’s nod and saw—something, lying in what he assumed was the corner. A pair of boots caught in a tangle of cloth, with a soft pink hand just emerging—cries and burbling, the rounded head and peering eyes of all newborn mammals. What no doubt used to be a big, hard-muscled hunk of Templar, before his sudden passage through the brugh’s ley-line-unlocked wall . . . a journey all but bound to mess with anyone who wasn’t at least some degree of Fae.

  Oh, crap.

  And now Lady Glauce was rising, interest caught; Enzembler looked vaguely ’round at the motion, but quieted again once he felt her reassuring hand on his. She rustled forward, towering over Mac where he stood, frozen, with Enzemblance and Saracen both smirking at his obvious discomfort. While Galit-the-thrall’s sweet voice soon began to climb upwards, disappearing into the fog and filthy air above:

  There were two sisters walking alone,

  Hey the gay and the grinding,

  Two little sisters walking alone

  By the bonny bows of London—

  “Is’t true, Maccabee?” Lady Glauce asked him, her own voice a juiceless rasp. “For I know thy mother surely taught thee a’right—thou wouldst no’ think tae cheat me of my due, no’ in my ane hall.”

  “No, grandmere.”

  “Then this changeling be mine, I wist, tae do wi’ as I wish.”

  Mac bit his lip. “Uh . . . no, grandmere. Not exactly.”

  At this, the whole hall seemed to share one caught breath, and Mac wondered a bit himself why the idea of just turning little M. de Bébé over there over and walking back out scot-free needed to be such a damn problem in the first place—he didn’t know the guy, after all, aside from him having sworn an oath and made his bed, just like Mac had. Wasn’t like they’d eat him, now he was suddenly all small and tender. . . .

  (probably)

  But no: the various freaks who made up Mac’s family were—if nothing else—intensely practical. So they’d just raise him in a dark hole, feed him on leaves and glamer, use him as a go-between whenever they wanted news of the humans’ Iron World—another Ganconer, now he’d disqualified himself from that same position. Up until they finally pulled this new version’s eyes out whenever he did something they didn’t like, too.

  Not Mac’s call, though. He probably couldn’t stop them if he tried, and he certainly didn’t have to care, one way or the other. . . .

  . . . not unless he wanted to.

  I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work, Mac thought, and cursed himself for still remembering the Gospel according to John, at all (9:4, 13:15). For I have given ye an example that ye should do as I have done to you. . . .

  And what would Jesus do, ex-Father Roke? Drop the kid, take off running? Not look back and not feel bad about it, either?

  Probably not be fucking dumb enough to ever let himself end up here, in the first place. I mean, you know. Son of God, and all.

  “Look,” Mac heard himself tell Lady Glauce with grim disbelief, “I didn’t mean to bring him, so I can’t give him away, because he’s not mine to give. And if that’s wrong somehow, I apologize, but. . . .”

  Here a bleak gust brought Enzemblance suddenly up against him, teeth bared, snarling: “How dare ye? Y’are but a poor, ingratitudinous thing, church mouse, for all yuir posturing! If not for me, this same whelp would have killed ye, sure . . . and tae insult my mother in her ane house, after—”

  “Sister,” Minion rumbled.

  While Saracen chimed in, at the same time: “Mother, give over—”

  “I will not.” That awful stare latched fast to Mac’s, gelid-grey, as though she had leeches set in both sockets. “You, Roke’s son, traitor to two worlds twice-over; you, who threw yuir heritage away with both hands! You, who are nothing times nothing—”

  Fear in his face, bigger than life and just as ugly. But maybe there really was some giddy place beyond, because Mac seemed to have teleported straight there; he felt his spine stiffen, lips peeling back in crazily similar fashion. Replying: “And two wrongs don’t make a right, right? Listen up, aunt—your own son told me the brugh was open to me, so if it hadn’t been you on door-duty, it’d’ve just been somebody else—”

  “Oh, and ye could have entered without help, mine or some other’s? You who canna e’en shield yuirself from harm wi’out their Almighty’s skirts tae hide yuirself behind—”

  Lady Glauce’s imperious growl broke through, whipping them both silent. “Enzemblance! Never think tae quarrel on my part, as though I was unfit tae do so. I will have nae brawling, here or elsewhere, sae dinna think tae wreak thy vengeance on him later in some sneaking way, as I know ’tis thy wont—”

  Enzemblance spat, sheer vitriol, fizzing against the brugh’s earthen floor. “I ha’ done my share for this family in yuir name, mother mine—aye, and more! I will not—”

  “You will as I will, daughter. Now sit thee, and be silent.”

  Inevitably, age and noblesse won out; Enzemblance turned, flash-flowing away to plump herself back down next to Saracen, shrugging off his sympathetic touch. Casting at Galit, as she did: “Play on—play, I said! Are ye deaf? For I can make ye so, be very sure of that. . . .”

  “Yes, milady. No, milady.”

  “So, Maccabee,” his grandmother said, a bit more softly, as the strumming began once more—leaning down, lowering herself almost to his level, though never quite. “What hast thou to say for thyself?”

  “Only that I never meant any insult, grandmere. But I did bring a tithe of another sort—if you’ll accept it.”

  “Show me, then,” was all she said.

  Mac rummaged in his pocket and drew out the envelope he’d filled that morning. On one level, an utterly bland twist of paper and glue folded over on itself; on another, a net for catching dreams, scribbled all over with angelic and demonic script alike. Those long years in the Connaught, studying banned and forgotten texts of every possible disposition, had to turn out to be good for something, eventually—and though magic had never really been Mac’s area of expertise, he knew he did have an inborn inclination for it. Which was exactly why he gave in to it so seldom, fo
r fear of simple preference developing into genuine hunger.

  He popped the envelope open, shook out its contents—a pixie-dust shower of particles, flickering bright through the brugh’s constant half-dusk—and stood back. Waited as an image of his mother took shape, life-sized and fully formed, solid from every angle: “Millie” Druir Roke in all her sad glory, from green-tinged hair to bare hippie toes, assembled painstakingly from treasured memories. An avatar. A ghost.

  The one thing no soulless half-Fae could ever leave behind, or so the Church—

  (and Lady Glauce as well, given where and when she came from)

  —believed.

  Planned like a true Jesuit, Mac thought. Then: I really am a bastard.

  The shimmering Miliner-shape smiled up at her mother, happily, as though they’d never been parted. While Lady Glauce stared back, leaf-shielded eyes suddenly wet, though probably not with tears.

  “Oh,” she said, at last. “So th’art a wizard after all, Roke of Druir.”

  Mac flushed. “You know us church mice, grandmere—we aim to please. To give everyone what they want, if we can.”

  “Aye, so thou dost, at that. And make well sure we pay full price for it, after.”

  Stretching out one huge hand, she carded her whiter-than-white fingers through the Miliner-shape’s hair, cupping its chin to look deep into its untroubled, mindless eyes. Then Lady Glauce shook her head, and blew Mac’s offering away in one brisk puff, reducing it back to its component parts of time, grief, loss. Allowed it to find its way back into the envelope again, sealing the gummed flap fast behind.

  “’Tis a worthy tithe, certes,” she told him, “but one I canna accept. One Roke I gave my Grisell away to, for the family’s ane sake; another took my Miliner and drew her tae her death, though she had no objection. Whilst thou, Maccabee, mind’st me strong of both and of neither . . . and in this th’art my ane for certain, my grandson twice over. So I canna charge thee passage, as though thou was’t human only; to go through the brugh is thy right by birth, which nane may deprive thee of—as thy aunt well knows, were she tae think on’t.”