by Unknown
He shot me a dark look, but I had all the dark looks in the world, and I didn’t need to borrow any from him.
‘You,’ he said. ‘You did this. You killed the Wishbringer.’ There was such conviction in his blunt, stupid face. I swear he used his powers on his own reflection, sometimes.
‘I called. I was here first,’ Trevor said. ‘He’s just arrived, like you.’
‘How did this happen?’ Lorne asked, still not letting me off the hook. He had the weak, baffled eyes of a man for whom the world must move only a slight distance to become too complicated for him to understand. Just as well our magics fell out the way they did, or his stupidity’d have ordered whole armies to their doom.
‘Is it the Other?’ I said what was on all our minds.
‘No way of knowing,’ said Trevor.
Lorne was shaking his head. ‘Surely we’d know. Surely we’d know if they’d found us. We’d feel the fence break, surely.’
‘If they were that knowable we’d never have had to run from them,’ I said, looking at Winston’s sad, hollow, dead face.
‘We must do something,’ Lorne stated. His crown of lordly might sparkled and shone impotently. He could have destroyed me long ago if he wasn’t such a moron.
‘We must have a wake,’ Trevor pointed out. ‘Everyone will come. We’ll see if anyone else is missing, or if anyone has felt anything. There are those better placed to know than any of us.’
Lorne nodded sagely, making the crown dance. His turned his eyes on me again. ‘And if I find that you have anything to do with this,’ he warned me. ‘I shall not rest—’
‘I’m sure,’ I cut him off. ‘Whatever.’ He ground his teeth in frustrated anger and grief, and then turned and stormed away, stalking into the dark, a golden man in a crown of lights dwindling into insignificance under the streetlamps until nothing was left but the hat, like a dying firework.
I headed back to reclaim my lads. They did so worry about me, when I went off. Looking back I saw Trevor, the Traveller of Worlds, walking alone along the Embankment with the body of the Wishbringer in his arms.
***
The Call had gone out, and we would all answer. Only Lorne and I had been close enough to reach the scene, but they turned up over a week, one by one, until the whole family was in town. The witless Londoners went about their business, perhaps with more headaches, more bad dreams. To me it was as though there was a storm always about to break. It had been ten years since all seventeen of us had been in one place. Not since the War. Not since we ran from the Others, since we jumped the fence. I spent most of the week out of town so as not to bump into anyone unexpectedly.
We let Lorne make the arrangements. It kept him out from under my feet and made him feel useful. He got us a place in Temple, one of those old Masonic-looking buildings with coats of arms on the walls. No doubt he felt it was something like home. It was nothing like home, not for me, not for pretty much everyone.
They all dragged in, singly or in small groups, according to their nature. They had been catching up, those who cared for company. Winston’s wake had become the social event of the decade. When I arrived they were mostly there. I saw brother Warren’s broad-shouldered bulk in one corner, a can in his hand, cropped hair and scarred face. I’d heard he’d been in the Middle East, or maybe somewhere in Africa, propping up a tinpot dictator or brawling over oil. I almost liked Warren. He was so refreshingly unjudgemental.
Sarah was there, in her dark glasses. She had looked over the body, Trevor told me, but said nothing. No mystic pronouncements, no warnings of the Other, like those warnings we had all ignored before the War. Now she sat, looking washed-out and old, stroking one of her cats, holding onto it to make sure it stayed with her. The cat would rather have investigated sister Anthea, who was standing in a corner looked more like a strung-out hippy than ever. Sleeping in ditches and up trees, and with the stinking animals she was so fond of.
They had laid Winston out in state, like the Old Country. They had washed him, and combed his hair until it was golden again, and dressed him in blue and white, that had always been his colours. With his hands crossed over his chest he looked beautiful again, the youth for whom dreams came true on request, best loved of all of us: unselfish, gentle, generous, dead. If I had been of a mind I could have watched for who grieved and who stayed back, who shed real tears for the loss of our brother, and who had simply turned up for the booze. I wasn’t of a mind. I didn’t grieve. Winston had never granted any of my wishes, after all. Besides, Lorne was standing by the body like a huge imbecilic honour guard, and I didn’t want a scene.
I knew when Tessa was at my elbow; she was impossible to overlook. I turned on my best smile for her, and she swapped it for one of her own, no more sincere. She was like Warren. We understood each other.
‘My dear,’ she said. ‘How dreadful it is. Our poor Winston.’ She had never much liked him either.
‘Indeed,’ I rumbled. She was still a feast for the eyes, the Breaker of Hearts. She had adjusted well, I’d heard, here where it wasn’t de rigeur for men to fight duels over her. She had other ways of leading them into ruin. I could chart her career in high-profile suicides and stock market crashes. ‘How’s the minister?’
‘Which one?’ she asked, bored as always with her current lover. It was the chase, with her. I could appreciate that. ‘You know I can barely tell them apart. Cars and shares and credit cards. Not like you.’ She gave me one of her top of the line smiles. ‘It’s almost worth poor Winston dying just to get to see you again.’
‘Never again,’ I told her, still smiling. ‘We tried that once. Let’s give it a wide berth.’
‘You’re boring,’ she taunted me. ‘And of all of them, you had the most potential to stay interesting. You’re becoming like Lorne. Set in your ways.’
I remembered our liaison. The memories had lost none of their power to thrill. A year of my life given over, five years before the War, to Tessa. The heights of ecstasy and the depths of anguish, and the loss of control of my mind and feelings that I could never again allow myself. Especially not now, not if They had found a way to follow us, after all.
She saw the thought on my face. ‘You don’t think that… The Traveller said there was no way…’
I looked across the room at Trevor who was standing beside Sarah’s chair, neither of them speaking. ‘And he knows?’
‘Well what do we do then? Do we run? Can we stand?’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Tyrant, many of us will look to you. I will look to you. You will protect me, surely.’
Her old strategy, in time of danger. When the Other had come, it had been Lorne’s arm she had clung to, I remembered that well enough. My own strategy in such times is not to encumber myself. I forced myself to look her in the face, beyond the magic.
‘You would inflame the passions of a priest,’ I told her, ‘But not mine. Not any more.’
She pouted, still not giving up, and I frowned.
‘You’re wearing make-up,’ I noticed. She hadn’t been sparing with it, either.
‘So?’ she asked. ‘It’s done, here. It’s the done thing.’
‘You’re wearing make-up,’ I repeated. She stared at me, and I thought I saw her lip tremble.
‘So?’ she repeated, but I said nothing. The Breaker of Hearts, the Temptress, perfection of woman, driver of a thousand jealousies, and she had caked it on like an old woman.
Plastering over the cracks.
I left soon after. Lorne had got rowdy, drunk on grief and scotch. He was calling for vengeance. ‘My brother lies slain!’ he cried. ‘The Wishbringer, the greatest of us, lies slain! Treachery! Some ill hand has struck him down!’ I knew it was time to go. I had no worries. He would not turn the rabble onto me. When I got out into the cold air I realised how thick with fear the atmosphere inside had been. Fear in sixteen hearts, fear that the Other had found us at last: that those who had torn our halls down and slain our people and driven us from our world were coming to finish th
e job.
A busy few days. I’d not been to the office in two weeks now, what with business, and then Winston. I couldn’t concentrate with all the family in town. I’d taken a holiday from it all, left it with the lads to handle the money and the beatings. They knew the trade.
I knew there was something wrong as I stepped through the door. It was a pokey little place, fourth floor of an old tenement. I only used it to have somewhere to send the paperwork. Three rooms: office, bathroom, storage. The office was mostly my desk and chair. When I walked in the lights were out, only the flicking red of the answerphone flashing a dim beat in the gloom, that landline I didn’t even use any more. The blinds were down but the breeze rattled them. I never opened the window. Someone else had done me the favour.
That someone was still in the room. I could sense him. I singled out their breathing, felt my fists clenching. ‘Come out,’ I snapped, using all my voice. I heard movement, slapped at the lightswitch.
‘Tyrant.’ Trevor stood there, in all his shabbiness. Locked doors and closed windows would not stop the Walker of Worlds.
‘Traveller,’ I got out. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘Do we? This is about Winston?’ I could never bring myself to call the man by his proper title. It felt too twee on the tongue.
‘In part. But more than that.’
‘They find out who killed him yet?’
He looked from me to the dingy office walls. ‘Let’s go somewhere, to talk. Please, Tyrant.’
People said ‘please’ to me a lot and I’m seldom feeling generous, but recent days had been anything but typical, so I led him to a little restaurant that owed me. Never pay for anything, that’s the key to a good life. I had steak, rare. Trevor had a salad, to my disgust. It looked like his first chance for a good meal in months, from his thin face and ragged clothes, and he had a salad.
‘So talk,’ I said. The waiter brought some halfway decent wine, compliments of the house.
For a long time he stared at me, searching for something, and then he said, ‘No.’
‘Don’t play games.’
‘No. You must have seen it for yourself at the wake. All of us together, and what? What were we? Shadows.’
Now it was my turn to be silent.
‘We’re losing it, Tyrant. We’re losing what makes us who we are. Our heritage.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘When did you last use your magic?’
‘All the time,’ I told him flatly.
‘For real? For life and death? When did you last trust everything to your title and your power? Last year? Five years ago?’
I thought of the junkie’s knife frozen before my face. Six, six years.
‘You saw them all,’ Trevor’s mournful voice droned on. ‘The Warrior could rend steel and slay armies bare-handed. Now he wears body armour and carries a gun. The Huntress still talks to animals, but do they talk back? Sarah’s second sight is blinder than her first.
Tessa paints her face, I thought, but I said nothing.
‘It’s this place,’ Trevor said. ‘This place I led us to. We’re not meant to be here. It’s poisoning us. We’re losing it all. Eventually we’ll be just like them. We won’t even remember the Old Country. This dead place, this soulless, godless world.’
‘Not that I believe you,’ I told him slowly, ‘but what do you propose to do about it?’
He stared at his plate as though salad leaves had just got interesting and mumbled something.
‘Speak,’ I commanded. He looked up at me sadly.
‘I’m going back.’
I was speechless. I’d been living with the memories at arm’s length since Winston died but they forced themselves on me then: that last frantic flight, the Other tearing down the walls of our palaces, so many of us lost to its cruel oblivion. The loss of all my dominion, my slaves and servants and power. All of us, we family, enemies and friends together, running for the door that the Traveller held open, and many there were who did not make it in time.
‘If there’s a cure, it will be back in the Old Country,’ Trevor went on.
‘The Other holds the Old Country,’ I pointed out.
‘We don’t know even if it’s still there.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘I’m going back,’ he said again. ‘While I still can. I will bring help, if help is to be brought. If the Other catches me, I’ll be gone.’
‘Leaving us trapped here.’
He stared at me, suddenly angry, in his miniscule way. ‘Much longer and everyone’s trapped here. This is our only chance.’
‘And if the Other killed Winston, if it’s hunting us here already?’
‘I don’t believe that. Neither do you.’ And he was right. I didn’t.
‘You haven’t thought this through,’ I said.
‘Haven’t I?’
‘No, because even if the Other hasn’t found us, if you go back that may be all the trail They need, and then what do we do?’
‘I’ll be careful.’
‘No, you won’t, because it’s the Other and there is no being careful,’ I snapped. People were looking at us now. I stood up and shouted, ‘Mind your own business!’, and they did, just like magic. It’s amazing how magical a huge shouting man can be.
Trevor was standing, his salad half-finished. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d understand. Goodbye, Tyrant.’
He turned his back on me and walked out. In my throat rose the words to bring him back, the commands that would bind even family.
I left them unsaid, and told myself it was not because I was unsure whether they would still work.
***
I had little time, then. On my way back to the office I called up all my lieutenants. By the time I stepped out of the lift they were waiting for me.
‘What’s the deal boss?’ asked Larry, the best and brightest of them. ‘Making omelettes?’ because you can’t, you know, without breaking things.
‘A special hit,’ I told him. Lorne would try to kill me, after this, but I was ready for him. I’d cut that crown off his head with a bandsaw before I was done. I’d had time to plan. ‘I can give you a description, but not where he’ll be.’ Anywhere, he could be anywhere, but I knew somehow that he would not have gone far, would not have gone yet. ‘Larry, trust me on everything I’m about to tell you.’ I pushed my way into the office and through to the storeroom, Larry and his goons crowding behind.
From the bottom draw of the back filing cabinet I took them: the lodestone and the clay ball. The clay was crumbling slightly, revealing the texture of what was beneath, fibrous like coconut husk. I stared Larry down, fixed him with all my presence. ‘Listen,’ I commanded. ‘Ask no questions. This stone on a string, just follow the pointed end. Take a car, he travels fast, but there’s nowhere he can go that this won’t find him out.’ Except one place, which is why there’s no time to lose. Larry was looking as if the world had slipped a gear, but he was nodding. Good lad.
‘He’s a skinny guy, thinning hair, wears camos, looks like a tramp. I want him dead. Really dead. He’ll be tough as hell, but no fighter,’ I said. ‘When you’ve got him down, break his head open with this.’ I passed over the clay ball. Larry was easier with that. He was used to killing people in odd ways. It was part of the trade. He wasn’t to know that in that ball was the minced up skull and brains and hair of one of our own. Only we could kill each other. Larry on his own wouldn’t have had a chance.
Unless Trevor was right. I thought of Warren, in his bullet-proof vest. How much had we lost?
‘Go,’ I said. ‘Call me when it’s done. Don’t screw this up, Larry.’
Larry was reliable. In twenty seconds he and his boys were legging it for the stairs.
I sat at the desk and thought, and thought, and the tenor of my thoughts was not pleasant. At last the blinking eye of the answerphone recalled me to myself. I didn’t even give that number out, these days,
mobiles being as handy as they are. Frowning, I pushed the button, took the message.
A minute later I got on the phone to Larry again.
‘Not found him yet, boss,’ was his terse report.
‘Give up,’ I told him. ‘Come back.’ I felt utterly empty, sick at heart, and some of it came through in my voice.
‘Everything ok, boss?’ asked Larry.
‘It’s fine, Larry. Just testing you, you know how it is. Congratulations. You pass. Have a drink on the way back. Take your time.’
‘Right boss.’ The relief in his voice showed just how mad he’d thought I’d gone.
I sat there in my office and stared at my hands, thinking many things. I was thinking of all the times I’d let my magic off the leash, the last five years. How many times? How many times had I given the command, and had it obeyed not from any power of my own, but because of my reputation, because of mere fear, because of the mundane authority I could put into my voice. I thought of all the times I’d faced down someone who wanted to kill me, because I knew no mortal hand could strike my death-blow.
The bitter thoughts: What have I got left, and do I dare put it to the test? And when did I lose it? And, like poor relations at a will-reading they flocked in: Did I ever have the magic? Was there ever such a place as the Old Country, really? I wondered for a moment whether Larry would have followed the lodestone in circles through London forever.
Mostly I thought of that message, that last message that had been sitting patiently in my answerphone for over a week: Winston’s last words, his last day, probably his last minute judging from the sounds in the background, the traffic and the noise of the river. I had no idea who he thought he was calling.
‘I can’t cope,’ he had said. His voice had been ragged, raised above the cars. ‘I can’t live like this any more. It’s gone, all of it.’ The Bringer of Wishes had been weeping into his phone. ‘I can’t do it any more. I can’t make people happy any more. I can’t even help myself.’ I remembered how starved he had looked, even after they cleaned him up. ‘Help me,’ he had said, and his voice would have echoed in my empty office. Then, quiet but unbearably clear, like a child’s voice: ‘Was it ever real? This game we played? I used to be able to grant wishes. I used to be able to...’ And the traffic receding, and then static and the call’s end as Winston’s last wish was denied him. Or, perhaps, was granted.