by L. EE
Gail frowned. This smelled off. Nia had been jumpier than a cornered rat ever since getting that message. Sure, she was always a bit… high-strung, but this had felt different, like she was a glass left on the edge of a table, ready to go crashing down if someone so much breathed on her wrong.
“Are you going to read the whole paper?” Arthur asked her and she absently passed him half.
For a little while they sat in silence. Gail half-read some article about the threat of inflation and mulled over some questions that had taken root in her mind during the past week and which were finally starting to put out leaves. “I’ve been wondering something.”
Arthur looked up from the sports section – though there wasn’t all that much in it, seeing as the stadium had sprung a leak and the mayor was still scrambling for the money to fix it. “What?”
“I was just thinking, why didn’t they send more magicians in the first place?”
Arthur stopped fretfully drumming his fingers on the corner of the paper. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s great they’re going to give us help now and all.” She managed to keep most of the sarcasm out of her voice. “But if they wanted Connery so bad, why did they just send Nia and you? Why not just have lots of magicians combing the city? It might have sped things up a little.”
“Sometimes smaller groups are more effective.” Arthur shrugged. “You work alone, right?”
“Yeah, sure, but the kind of work I do involves keeping a low profile, so you don’t spook the people you’re investigating. Connery’s dead. He’s not going to care what sort of profile we keep.”
“His associates might, though. If they find out we’re looking for him, they might move him somewhere else.”
“Hm.” That wasn’t a bad point, but something still didn’t fit. Of course, as long as she couldn’t figure out what was bothering her, all she was doing was thinking herself into knots. “But now they’re sending us help?”
Arthur was studying her, obviously perplexed. “Well, yeah, because Nia asked for it. The Academy can be stingy with their resources. They want Connery, but they want to get him for as little cost as possible.” He smiled a bit sardonically. “They were probably hoping Nia wouldn’t ask for more magicians, but once she did, they couldn’t exactly say no.”
Gail found herself remembering what Nia had told her about Arthur the night before. She guessed the very existence of bound wards proved the truth of Arthur’s analysis. They neutralized the bound wards by strapping down there magic, but kept them around to be useful in other ways. That way, nothing was wasted. It made sense – in a coldhearted bureaucratic kind of way – but Gail guessed the Academy had a city to run.
Pushing herself away from the table, Gail stood. “I guess we’ve got some time to kill then. I’m going to go work on my reports for a bit. Want to meet for lunch around one o’clock?”
“Sure.” Arthur lifted his half of the paper. “Do you want this back?”
“Nah, keep it. We can trade again at lunch.” She looked up and smiled when she caught sight of a familiar face coming down the stairs. “Hey, Xavier! I’ve got some work to do, but you can come keep Arthur company while I’m gone.”
Xavier, who had a small suitcase in one hand, and Arthur exchanged startled looks, but then Xavier smiled.
“I’m heading back to Gracetown today, but I’ve got a little time, if Mr. Graves doesn’t mind, of course.”
“I don’t mind.” Arthur closed the paper to make room for Xavier beside him. “I did ask you to call me Arthur, though.”
“Right. Sorry, Arthur. I guess I didn’t recognize you without that hat of yours.”
Arthur’s brow furrowed, mouth opening to ask, “What –” then he stopped, a sly grin spreading across his face. “That was a low blow.”
Xavier grinned back. “I know.”
Gail patted Xavier’s shoulder as she passed him on her way to the stairs. “You kids have fun. I’ll see you around one.” She felt bad just abandoning them like that, but her head was beginning to hurt again, a low persistent ache just behind her eyes and she knew all the clanging and scraping in the dining room would only make it worse. They’d probably have more fun without her anyway.
As she climbed the stairs, the pain in her head intensified and she gripped the bannister hard to keep from stumbling.
“Damn,” she muttered. “I hardly drank anything last night.” By rights, it should be Nia and Arthur with sore heads and crawling stomachs. Without thinking, she wiped the back of her hand across her cheek, but of course it came away bloodless. What the hell had she expected?
When she got back to her room, she tossed her half of the newspaper on to the bed and went to get her papers from the safe. It took her three tries to get the damn thing open because her fingers kept trembling on the dial. By the time the door finally popped ajar, she was so frustrated by the whole business that she sent papers flying across the room by yanking out the folder too roughly. Worse, when she bent to the collect them, the room blurred into a dizzy mess of color.
She stayed perfectly still for several seconds, breathing deeply, until the room stopped swimming. What the hell was the matter with her? She had actually slept better last night than she had for the rest of the week combined, so why the hell did she feel like she was running on empty?
Gritting her teeth against the dizziness that accompanied each step, she walked to the bed and dumped her notes down beside the newspaper. This was a shit time for a cold or a flu or whatever the hell this was.
Not that there was ever really a good time for any of those things. Goddamn, she hated being sick.
Dad been sick at the end. The kind of sick that only got worse, the kind of sick that made a man forget that the water leaking through the roof would only make him worse. Or at least made him not care.
Gail grabbed her braided hair with one hand, twisting it until the pain grounded her firmly in the present. One, she hadn’t drunk any bad water, so even thinking about it was pointless and two, she had a whole shit load of work to do, so whatever was wrong with her, hangover or cold or just plain old tiredness, would just have to fuck off.
Sitting down on the bed, she flipped open the tattered folder, scanning the notes she had made over the last week. They consisted mostly of sentence fragments, often punctuated with multiple question marks, which seemed to be capture the nature of the case pretty well.
Died on purpose?? Got people looking for him? Who? Have to find him first. Then from the night before: Subway tunnels?? Moving somehow?
Then she turned to the copy of the subway map she had made the night before, figuring – correctly as it turned out – that they would need more than one. It wasn’t a perfect copy; she’d sketched it while already half asleep, but at least she could use it to see if there was any pattern to the places Connery had been passing through.
After ten minutes, she had to admit that the answer was a big fat “nope.” Scowling, she was about to slam the map back into the folder when she had another idea. She dug through her papers, clenching her jaw against the pain caused by that little rustling sound, until she found what she wanted: the prospective subway schematic. She remembered picking it up back when there had been a brief revival of the subway dream – before people actually went down and saw the extent of the water damage. Some instinct had caused her to toss it into her stack of references and she was glad for it now.
The scale wasn’t quite right; the schematic was designed more for color and style than technical accuracy, but after a while – longer than it should have taken, but her head was still foggy – she gave a soft hmph of triumph.
There was a pattern after all. Connery’s stops weren’t random. They corresponded to stations, some nearly complete and some hardly begun but all named. In fact, if she didn’t miss her guess, he was likely following the C-Line. It was hard to be sure with only four points of reference, considering how often the lines overlapped, but Gail was sure she was right.
There was a pen on the bedside table, but when she picked it up and began to write, her usually steady hands betrayed her again. The words tilted and twisted madly across the page, unreadable even to herself. Snarling in frustration, she rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. She supposed she would have to move to the desk. Maybe with the paper pinned down on a hard surface, she would be able to – she pulled the pen away from the paper.
For a several seconds, her mind went blank. What she was seeing made so little sense that her brain simply threw it away.
She had stopped writing. She had. She had stopped writing and had started thinking about moving to the desk, but apparently her hand hadn’t gotten the memo. It had continued scrawling words across the page in large, uneven letters.
IT’S DARK, BUT THE EYELESS BULL ISN’T BLIND. I SHOULD HAVE WORN THICKER STOCKINGS. THE STONE IS COLD. THERE WASN’T MUCH BLOOD. UNTIL THEY STARTED TO PULL ITS SKIN OFF.
She threw the entire folder away from her. It hit the opposite wall, papers exploding up and fluttering down like dying birds. She stared after it, breathing hard, fearing it might start crawling across the floor toward her.
The pen lay where she had dropped it by the bed. Gail forced herself to stoop and pick it up. Maybe it was the pen. Maybe it had been affected by whatever Connery had done to the hotel. Gail closed her eyes, letting the darkness soften the hateful pounding in her temples. The pen had done the writing, not her. That –
A light tickle on the back of her hand.
A fly. It’s just a fly. Gail opened her eyes.
It wasn’t a fly.
THE EYELESS BULL SEES HER was scrawled across the back of her hand. The words didn’t make any sense. She had never heard them before, never read them, never thought them, but they were there. Written in what was unmistakably her own hand.
The world spun. She knew she was actually sitting absolutely still on the bed, but that knowledge only made it worse. Her head seemed to swell with every beat of her heart. Any moment, her skull would crack open like an egg. Perhaps more mad words would come buzzing out of her exposed brain like flies from a corpse. She clutched her head with both hands, only half aware that the stifled voice whispering, “No, no, no, no,” was hers.
She staggered to her feet, arms lashing out to push back the walls she knew weren’t actually curving down around her. She had to get out. Something was wrong. She didn’t know if it was something wrong with her or the hotel, but she had to get out. She had to tell Arthur then he could get to Nia. And Nia could –
The floor pitched underneath her, or maybe she tripped. It didn’t matter, it knocked her down either way. She tried to catch herself, but her hands slipped out from beneath her. She lay with her cheek pressed to the carpet. There were black explosions in her head now, blurring her vision. She tried to hold on to consciousness, but it hurt too much.
The last thing she saw were the words scrawled on to the back of her hand.
THE EYELESS BULL SEES HER.
33
Gail Lin
Gail was dreaming. She didn’t know how she knew. She’d never been one of those people who could recognize and manipulate her dreams. Mostly she just hoped she wouldn’t have them. But this was a dream, she was sure of it. But she still couldn’t wake up.
She was in a dark place. It was cold and there was stone above and below her.
Tunnels. Subway tunnels?
In the distance, she could just make out a line of dim magical lights on the wall. She must be close to one of the half-finished stations. In a display of excessive optimism, they’d all been lit up long before completion, but not even magic light lasted forever, so a few of the lamps were flickering, throwing strange shadows across the tracks.
There was something breathing in the darkness. A low thunderous snort.
The eyeless bull.
Gail had seen a bull up close only once. Every few weeks in the spring and summer, the large farms outside of New Crossbridge would have fairs in city squares. People could buy fresh fruit and vegetables on the cheap and those who could afford the permits and wanted to risk losing them to bad water could buy animals. Goats and chickens were the most popular, but there were pets as well, puppies and kittens and even a few rabbits. The farmers rarely brought large animals, maybe a docile old pony for the children to pet or a fat pig for them to giggle at, but that was all.
But one week, they’d brought the bull. Gail had been eight or so. Mom had been dead for about a year, but Dad was still alive. In her memories, he looked a bit worn and gray even then, but she didn’t know if that was how he had really looked or if her memories were just conforming to what she found out later.
She hadn’t been thinking about Dad that afternoon, though. She had been thinking about the bull. It had been raining that day, just a light drizzle, hardly enough to dampen Gail’s hair when she took off her hat. She hated the hat because it made her head itch. It became a game to see how long she could go without Dad noticing and making her put it back on.
But she forgot all about the rain or the hat when she saw the bull. It couldn’t actually have been more than four feet tall, but to Gail it looked six feet, eight feet, ten feet – there seemed to be no end to it. Its horns curved like blades. The hastily erected wooden paddock seemed horribly insubstantial. She felt certain that if it wanted, the bull could knock it down with one touch of those wicked horns. Hell, with one breath.
Of course it didn’t do anything of the kind. It didn’t even move; it just stared disinterestedly at the crowd through big melancholy brown eyes. Later, Gail would think back on the creature with pity. He probably just wanted to get back to his magically-shielded field and away from the loud, dreary city.
That evening, she had even told her Dad that she wanted to take the poor thing home and give him a blanket. That had made Dad laugh.
But this bull was different. Gail couldn’t see it, but she could feel it there in the blackness, feel its hot snorting breath and hear its giant hooves striking against the metal. Its horns were long and sharp and stained with something dark. Its bellows shook the stone, its footsteps struck sparks.
Gail was moving forward, but slowly, too slowly. The bull was coming on like thunder, like a storm shaking the roof from a tin hovel, crushing the young, the old, and the weak beneath its hooves.
There was someone else in the tunnel. Gail could only see her from the back, but there was no mistaking that mass of curly hair and that quick careful stride.
Nia. Nia, look behind you.
But Nia didn’t turn. She was walking along the track, head moving from left to right as though she was searching for something. Once she bent and felt across the track with her hand. Gail didn’t understand how she couldn’t hear the bull coming. Its pounding steps seemed to shake the world.
Nia straightened up, wiping her hands together as she continued on at the same slow pace.
The bull came on.
Nia reached the small pool of light thrown on to the tracks by the station lights. She took a moment to read the name painted on the wall in what had once been a bright cheery blue but which had faded to a sad cracked gray: FERRIS STREET. Gail knew where that station was even without the map in front of her. Ferris Street was the station meant to cater to the students at New Crossbridge’s biggest university. It was a favorite hiding place for the younger sect of delinquents.
The bull bellowed. The foundation of the tunnels seemed to tremble.
Climb on the platform, Nia, Gail thought desperately. The bull’s horns were long and cruel, its hooves crueler, but it was too heavy to drag itself onto the pla
tform. If she got up there, she would be safe.
For a moment, Nia’s head turned toward the approaching bull. Her brow furrowed and Gail felt a spark of hope, but then she shrugged, running her hand briefly along the edge of the platform before continuing to walk.
She can’t hear it, Gail realized, not yet, and by the time she does… Nia was quick and stronger than she looked, but if she went much farther, she wouldn’t be able to make it back to the platform in time. When the bull came…
When the bull came, Nia would turn again. Her gold-brown eyes would flash wide and fill with fear. She try to reach safety, but her feet would catch on the track or her hands would slip on the platform’s rough edge. Then the bull would come.
Damn it, Nia, listen! Listen! Get away, Nia, damn it!
She wouldn’t, though. Gail knew that as surely as she knew the bull was coming. Nia wouldn’t hear until it was too late, she wouldn’t –
Nia stopped, just a few steps past the station. She looked over her shoulder again, intent but perplexed, like she was hearing something she didn’t understand.
Damn it, Nia, Gail thought, desperation pounding through her. You have to hear it, you have to.
Nia took a few steps back toward the station, but she was still too far from the platform’s edge, much too far. Damn it, Nia…
The bull came on.
Something changed in Nia’s face. Her eyes widened and her entire body seemed to pull back, though she hadn’t moved a step.
She heard it.
Many people would have automatically fled in the other direction, away from the heat and terrible noise of the charging bull, but Nia’s instincts were sharper than that. She leapt toward the platform, placed her hands flat on the edge, and pushed herself up.
The bull was coming faster now, as if it could feel her pulling away.
Nia tried to swing her leg up on to the edge, but her knee slipped. Gail heard her stocking tear, heard her gasp as the stone scraped her leg from shin to kneecap.