We Will All Go Down Together

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

  “Mmm,” was all Carra could think to say in response.

  Frankly, she hadn’t thought about that part of her heritage in years. For most of her life, it had always been enough to be “plain” Carraclough Devize, psychic savant and haunted house survivor, let alone Jonet Devize’s however-many-greats grand-niece. Or even daughter to Gala Carraclough, who’d met her ex-husband Yancey Devize in Overdeere, where—in one of those typically contortionate Five-Family “coincidences”—Yancey’s own mother had been one of the Overdeere Redcappies, a Sidderstane-style offshoot of the Druir family, sired by Minion Druir’s son Quire.

  All of which made Carra a species of Druir by default, if only to the sixth (or maybe eighth) degree. A dubious distinction at best, which was really saying something, considering the context.

  Studying Abbott closely, now, and wondering: Black Magic Posse aside, Guilden, does this really sound like a job for me? I speak for the dead, speak with them; lay them down, if I can. The Druirs, kinship aside—they’re something different. As much beyond my ken as anyone else’s.

  “You know I’ve never even been up there, right?” she finally asked, for the pleasure of watching Abbott colour as he replied, a bit too quick: “Well, of course I do.”

  I wrote your file, after all.

  Carra nodded. “Just making sure.”

  She turned her attention back to Kim, now looking distinctly as though he wished he’d left well enough alone, and probed the ragged edges of everything he was trying not to think of, as unobtrusively as she could manage. “You have, though—after Ms. Michaels disappeared? Heard the rumours too, I take it. About the Lake . . . Overdeere. That whole area.”

  Reluctant: “Some, yeah. I did research, and Galit kept a blog; server took it down, but I still have printouts. There was this guy—”

  “Someone she’d met, just before. One of the Sidderstanes.”

  Kim stiffened. “How the hell can you—?” Janis touched his shoulder, gently, and he sighed. “Ganconer, that’s his name. Older guy, prematurely grey. Something wrong with his eyes.”

  Carra nodded again, feeling the trance-buzz build. “They’re made of wood,” she told him, voice gone cold, removed. “Lady Glauce took them out, for punishment; they’re in a jar, in a box, under the hill. Down deep in the ground, the apple-stink, where the leaves mould over.”

  Kim’s face twitched all over. “Christ, what? Why the hell would you say that?”

  “Because it’s just true.”

  He made as if to pull back, and her hands shot out, unprompted. One clamped onto his wrist, the other his forearm, hauling hard ’til they were nose and nose. Were her eyes rolling back yet? Impossible to tell, on her end—she could see through everything, lids very much included, her own skull’s bony lens. Watching the flickering images projected inside her forehead shift and whisper, like willows in a breeze—the bank of green rushes o, down in the salley gardens, where my love and I did meet—and narrating what she saw there, mouth numb, tongue dry-sodden, spit reeking of mulch. . . .

  While the words raised themselves all over, soft lead curse-scribblings flesh-rendered, constantly crawling: JOSH PLEASE, NO JOSH PLEASE NO, DONT HELP DONT TRY JUST SAVE YOURSELF, DON’T LOOK FOR ME NO NO NO. . . .

  (Where have you been, my long-lost love, these seven long years and more?)

  “You had a dream,” Carra said, lost Galit Michaels’s handwriting chasing itself from neckline to neck, up over one cheekbone and under her glasses’ frame, then up yet again across her forehead to bury itself at last in her hairline’s bleachy tangle. “Last night, the night before—always the same, every night for a month, ’til you just had to tell somebody. Saw her there, after so long, all those years of trying to forget you ever knew her. Sitting at my cousins’ table in the half-light with a collar of roots grown ’round her neck and a child by her side.”

  “A little boy, yeah. . . .”

  “Not yours. Though, you’d like him to be.”

  Kim’s face was hot, cheeks red. “He has—that guy’s hair.”

  Ganconer Sidderstane, cut-rate Tam Lin of the Lake; Galit was playing the Fair Janet role, here—the abducted mortal bride, this boy of theirs the result. But the brugh was no fit place for a kid to grow up, not with that little old blood in him to begin with. She could see him now, handsome but watchful, already starting to look stunted for his age: seven, eight, maybe nine. A few more growth spurts and he wouldn’t even be able to stand up, completely—his silver hair would muddy itself, turn grey and brown, earth-tainted. Had he ever seen the sun?

  That sweet face, pale as a guttering candle. An uncertain little light.

  “. . . Elver, that’s his name,” she said, to herself. “‘Little eel.’ Little elf-boy.”

  His mother strumming at some sort of instrument, its drum a hollow gourd, song rising plaintive as her gaze held steady on his bent back, playing in the leaves underfoot: Yet what are those goodly hills the sun shines sweetly in? Those are the hills of heaven, he said, where we shall never win.

  “It’s not right,” Kim replied, voice tight. “Galit’s an adult, Sidderstane, too. But this little guy. . . .”

  “He was born, that’s all. Born into it. Same as they were.”

  Same as me.

  “But who are they? I mean—I know what people say in Overdeere, and that’s total crap, gotta be. Criminals, crazy rich assholes buying their way out of everything, living like animals in a hole in the ground ’cause they choose to, for some fucking reason. But not—”

  “The Happy People? The Fair Folk? ‘We dare not go a-hunting, for fear of little men?’”

  Kim sighed again, baffled. Carra felt herself soften.

  “Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t call most of them faeries to their face, but . . . yeah.”

  And now, in the dim light of the brugh, a further shadow stirred; came shrug-pulling itself effortlessly up, half through the floor and half the wall. Grub-white with icy eyes and a sly, quirking mouth, its high head crowned in glossy red maple-leaves—it reached for Galit, stroking her cheek with one six-fingered hand, and chuckled when she tried not to cringe.

  “Enzemblance Druir,” Carra named her, not opening her eyes, “Laird Enzembler’s eldest daughter, Torrance Sidderstane’s widow. She’s the one who took her.”

  Kim swallowed. “The one from the photo, at the Lake.”

  “Yes. That’s how you recognized her, right from the minute you saw her.”

  “And you’re related to . . . that?” His eyes flicked up and down, searching for proof. “You don’t look it.”

  “Oh, my ties are distant, comparatively; been a hundred years since my Devize relatives left Scotland, fifty since Minion Druir’s kids started having enough kids to make my grandmother on my Dad’s side. But Enzemblance, same as Minion, her Mom, her Dad—she came here directly, like opening a door. Dourvale Prime in the reign of King James is the day before yesterday for them.”

  “A wormhole, time travel? Fucking magic?”

  “That’s one name for it. Now . . . sssh.”

  Waving him quiet, and thinking, at the same time: What am I feeling here, exactly? Wait, I know . . . I’m angry. That’s what this is.

  (Bones in the rock, a splayed skeleton hand. Hell-holes left open, traps for the unwary. Minion’s own thrall-wife, brought along from Scotland . . . what had she done to merit that, rent headlong between centuries, stranded and abandoned? What had Galit done to merit her confinement, beyond mere exercise of curiosity?)

  Nothing. Because no one ever did.

  They prey on us, Carra thought, these changeling-makers. They think they can, because they always could, and no one dares to stop them. No one even tries.

  She glanced at her wrist, now encircled with a continually rotating bracelet of STAY AWAY STAY AWAY STAY AWAY. Looked up, and met Kim’s tired black eyes straight-on.

  “What are you prepared to do?”
she asked him. “To get her back.”

  “What’re the options?”

  A shrug. “Take me there, I suppose. To Overdeere, the Lake . . . Dourvale. We’ll knock on the hill together, see what happens next.”

  The suggestion made Abbott—who’d thus far stayed quiet, watching it all spin out from behind his desk, hands tented—suddenly sit straight up. “That would be . . . unadvisable.”

  “Thought you weren’t my Dad, Guilden,” Carra replied, coolly. Then, as he breathed in at the slap of it, appealed to Janis: “Look, you’re the one who thought I could help—what’d you expect me to do?”

  “Scry the site, long-distance,” Janis answered. “Confirm whether or not his dreams were true, and then—ugh, I don’t know; name a contractor, sit back, and let them get on with it. There are rules for getting people out of hills, right?”

  Carra nodded. “Laws of exchange—you pay a tithe, pass a test, like in the stories: This for you and this for me. Galit’s been in there a while, so Enzemblance’s probably kind of bored with her by now. Might not even remember why she wanted her in the first place.” Kim looked away, face twisting. “But then there’s the child, and I don’t remember anything about what to do if the person was born there. . . .”

  “She’d be a thrall, property; something to be sold or traded. He’d be . . . family?”

  “Distant, but yes. All Sidderstanes are Druirs, you go back far enough—even the human ones.”

  Abbott was standing now, clearly unhappy. “Carra, I said no. You don’t know them, and they don’t know you, either—do they?”

  “Of me, probably.”

  “And that’s going to help?”

  She shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

  “The hell it can’t!”

  An uncharacteristically violent outburst for the good Doctor; Carra blinked. Then asked him, mildly: “Is this just about keeping me safe? Because I’m pretty sure I’m not your biggest gun, anymore—you’ve got files full of other assets now, all of them far more reliable. Janis here, for example.”

  “Leave me out of this, Carra.”

  “All right. But the point still stands: what do you care? I can make my own decisions.”

  “Of course, but . . . this isn’t just fieldwork, this is—completely different. The Freihoeven doesn’t confront these things, we never have, we’re not equipped to. We analyze, we document. . . .”

  “Speak for yourself. I’ve done both.”

  “You’re only a month out of the Clarke, for God’s sake—”

  “I’ve been a month out of the Clarke every two to six months, the last twenty years of my life,” Carra pointed out. “So if that disqualifies me for anything, you should probably stop paying me.”

  “You’re upset. You should take the day, go home, think things over—”

  “Nothing there for me, Guilden. You already had them take out the trash, so it’s pretty empty—I sleep on a mattress in the kitchen, not too near the stove, so I don’t have to manage stairs if I want tea. How am I supposed to amuse myself, now the cable’s been turned off and my mother’s ghost doesn’t feel like haunting me anymore? Take Polaroids of all the empty corners, and see what comes out?”

  She didn’t have to check to know that Sylvester was watching her too now, dutiful note-taking forgotten; she conjured a smile in his direction to prove herself fine as she ever was. And as Abbott cast around for fresh arguments, Janis and Kim exchanged a significant look, decision obviously reached.

  “My gig van seats five,” Kim said. “Seven if you cram. Anybody’s worried, they’re welcome to come along.”

  This last was to Abbott, who shook his head, annoyed. “I have funding meetings all week, with Janis doing the presentations; we’ve had it set up for months, same as last year. You know that, Carraclough.”

  “I can go,” Sylvester said. “I’ve got a driver’s licence; I could spot Mister Kim. Does anybody else in here even drive?”

  “Not me,” Carra said. “And not the guy we’re going to want to take with us, either, unless more things have changed than the suddenly-has-his-shadow-back thing.”

  Abbott threw up his hands. “You are not bringing in Jude Hark Chiu-wai on this foolishness, for God’s own sake!”

  “Yeah, okay. Except for the part where, if he agrees to come along, I really kind of am.”

  Abbott covered his eyes with his palms and sighed, gustily.

  While Carra just looked down, thinking of Overdeere, the brugh’s rich dirt, graveyard and mulch-heap, both; Dourvale’s lost settlement, standing empty by the Lake’s cold side, a hollow space in the forest’s heart, where no bird sang and no good thing grew. The place Carra’s mother had been warning her off her entire life, no matter at all that the dead already made her their constant toy, their totem, their barely upright living scribble-pad. Because They’re no’ the same as you nor I, and you must not go to the wood at night.

  NO NO NO, still circling her wrist like ringworm with a shingles-bright burn, again and again—not Galit anymore, not even Gala. Someone else, whose name she’d never known. Familiar words, arranged in an entirely familiar warning.

  NO, VERY DANGEROUS, VERY DANGEROUS FOR YOU, NO. ON NO ACCOUNT, MY LOVE.

  Wanting to lay a comforting hand on Abbott’s bent head, but holding back; wanting to shrug once more, but not doing that, either. Until finally, she looked back up at Kim, at Sylvester. Janis, smiling sadly.

  “Should probably get moving, we want to make good time,” she suggested; Kim nodded.

  “I call shotgun,” Sylvester said.

  Jo had heard of Curia, of course, but never before been there. The storefront sat dusty and unwelcoming, crammed so full of various unsorted tripe it made the door seem blocked ’til she put fingers to it, at which point it sprang open—let out a trilling chime, a smell like sage on fire, and the murmur of shop-talk in progress.

  Roke was behind the counter, examining some sort of fetish, well-endowed and studded with rusty nails. “West African, of course,” an excitable-looking old gent was explaining, “from Zaire or Zambia, made of soul-tree wood, for keeping spirits in. Nails’re driven deep in order to make the spirit angrier, you see—thus more effective.”

  “Uh huh.” Roke turned the thing over. “Not this one, though, Simeon . . . you do know that, right? It’s empty, has been for years.”

  “I—are you quite sure, old boy?”

  “As I ever am, yup.”

  Simeon’s face fell. “Oh. . . .”

  Liar, liar, pants on fire, Dav’s ghostly no-voice whispered in Jo’s ear, as Euwphaim gave a satisfied little bone-creak chuckle by the other. For now Jo looked closer, she could see how the fetish strained and pulsed in Roke’s hands, leaking nasty trails of stuff that fanned their way only so far up as they might before hitting his half-human skin, then recoiled whip-fast from the sour, unfamiliar taste of it. All of which Roke ignored, completely, with not a single hair turned at the prospect of taking some sad pensioner’s money under false pretenses.

  Braw canny lad, this, Euwphaim noted, approvingly, same as his grand-dam and his ten-times great-grandfather, before.

  Simeon, meanwhile, was once more deep in negotiation. “. . . simply convinced it may not be quite so poor a prospect as you claim,” he told Roke, voice taking on a lecturer’s lilt. “The sheer number of nails used alone indicates it was originally designed to trap some sort of, eh, animistic resident within. . . .”

  Roke just nodded and smiled, noncommittally. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Sim—it’s empty, so I really couldn’t go more than three bills, three and a half at the absolute outside. For friendship’s sake.”

  “Yet even empty—it must surely still have some prospective market value, eh? As a trap, a vessel. . . .”

  “Not on the open market.”

  “Not that, no! I meant some slightly less public venue. The, eh . . . speciality circu
it.”

  “Yeah, I get it. But, see . . . private sale equals danger, and I’m just not all that interested in being unsafe.”

  “Oh, of course, old boy, ha ha; ’course, you’re right, absolutely. Don’t know what on earth I could’ve been thinking. . . .”

  Jo narrowed her eyes, here, because it wasn’t just that Sim knew he had a losing argument—there was something else at work. Someone else. A distinctive new supernatural influence, sidling in at an angle Jo found—now she’d tuned herself to it—fairly easy to trace to the crevice between a teetering stack of tomes and the fold of drapes, whose hem kept them upright: a slight figure, female most likely, half-hidden in the gloom with her arms crossed and eyes trained on the small of the old man’s blathering back, waiting for whatever she was doing to take its due effect.

  Simeon broke off mid-wheedle, then glanced around, hand rising instinctively to hover above his clavicle, as though he wanted to check his own pulse, feel around for something in his breast-pocket . . . or cross himself.

  “I say, you don’t smell that, do you?” he asked Roke, nose wrinkling. “Something . . . something like . . . something like something, um. . . .”

  (burning)

  Oh, yes.

  Euwphaim eddying closer, leaning over Jo’s shoulder, the ultimate bad angel; Davina eddying back to the very end of her rope, silver cord stretched leash-taut. And that girl in the shadows, with her pale little face and her smudgy black bob, stare sliding fast from brown to hazel to a simmering sulphur-yellow as her pupils twisted slantwise, a matched pair of tiny Nazi flags on fire.

  That one’s had ane o’ the Seven inside her, Euwphaim said with as much approval as Jo’d ever heard her give. Them, or some other of the Auld Fool’s same get: them who Fell, one of the Watchers mayhap, whose seed made us what we are. ’Tis of nae moment which, but that I see their print upon her . . . for she too wears a Mark, though I misdoubt she knows whose.