He Said, Sidhe Said

by Tanya Huff

  "But…"

  "Do it."

  She used as little power as she could, but enough had been diverted that she lost another thread or two or three… Breathing heavily, she tightened her grasp on those remaining.

  At Bloor Street she crossed to the north side and turned west, moving more slowly now, her feet and legs beginning to swell, the taste of old pennies in the back of her throat.

  "Could be worse," she found the breath to mutter as she approached Bay Street. "Could be out in the suburbs."

  "Could be raining," rasped a voice from a under a sewer grate.

  She nodded down at bright eyes. "Could be."

  From behind the glass that held them in the museum, the stone temple guardians watched her pass. Fortunately, the traffic passing between them was still heavy enough, in spite of the deepening night, that she could ignore their concern.

  By the time she reached Spadina, more and more of her weight was on the cart. When the phone at the station began to ring, she shot a look toward it so redolent with threat that it hiccoughed once and fell silent.

  "Right back where… I started from." Panting she wrestled the cart off the curb, sneered at a streetcar, and defied gravity to climb the curb on the other side. "Should've just spent the day… sitting in the… sun."

  By the time she turned north on Brunswick, the streets were nearly empty, the rush of people when restaurants and bars closed down already dissipated. How had it taken her so long to walk three short blocks? Had she stopped? She couldn't remember stopping.

  Couldn't remember…

  Remember…

  "Oh no, you don't!" Snarling, she yanked the power back. "When. I. Choose."

  Overhead, small black shapes that weren't squirrels ran along the wires, in and out of the dappled darkness thrown by the canopies of ancient trees.

  "Elderly trees," she snorted. "Nothing ancient in this part of the world but me."

  "You're upsetting the balance."

  She stared down at the little man in the red cap perched on the edge of her cart, twisting the cap off one of the bottles of Tabasco sauce. "Not so much it can't be set right the moment I'm gone. Trust me…" Her brief bark of laughter held no mirth. "…I know things."

  "You're supposed to be gone now," he pointed out, and took a long drink.

  "So?"

  That clearly wasn't the answer he'd been expecting. "So… you're not."

  "And they say Hobs aren't the smartest littles in the deck."

  "Who says?"

  "You know." She thought she could risk taking one hand off the cart handle long enough to gesture. She was wrong.The cart moved one way. She moved the other.

  "You're bleeding." The Hob squatted beside her and wrinkled his nose.

  "No shit." Left knee. Right palm. Concrete was much tougher than old skin stretched translucent thin over bone. She wouldn't have made it back to her feet without the Hob's help. Like most of the littles, he was a lot stronger than he appeared and he propped her up until she could get both sets of fingers locked around the shopping cart handle once again. "Thanks."

  He shrugged. "It seems important to you."

  She didn't see him leave, but it was often that way with the grey folk who moved between the dark and light. She missed his company, however brief it had been, and found herself standing at the corner of Brunswick and Wells wondering why she was there.

  The night swam in and out of focus.

  Halfway down the block, a door closed quietly.

  Her thread…

  His thread…

  Mrs. Ruth staggered forward, clutching the pattern so tightly she began to lose her grip on the power. She could feel her will spread out over the day, stretched taut behind her from the first phone call to this moment.

  This moment. The moment her part of the pattern crossed his.

  A shadow reached the sidewalk in the middle of the block, a still form draped over one shoulder. The shadow, the still form, and her. No one else on the street. No one peering down out of a darkened window. A light on in the next block – too far.

  This was the reason she'd stayed.

  The world roared in her ears as she reached him. Roared, and as she clutched desperately at the fraying edges, departed.

  He turned. Looked at her over the flannel-covered curve of the child he carried.

  It took a certain kind of man to break silently into a house, to walk silently through darkened halls to the room of a sleeping child and to carry that child away, drugged to sleep more deeply still. The kind of man who knew how to weigh risk.

  She was falling. Moments passing between one heartbeat and the next. Her power had passed. She was no risk to him.

  He smiled.

  His smile said, as clearly as if he'd spoken aloud, "You can't stop me."

  It was funny how she could see his smile when she could see so little else.

  Then he turned to carry the child to his car.

  As the sidewalk rose up to slap against her, curiously yielding, Mrs. Ruth threw out an arm, and with all she had left, with the last strength of one dying old woman who was no more and no less than that, she shoved the cart into his heel.

  Few things hurt worse than a heavily laden shopping cart suddenly slamming into unprotected bone. He stumbled, tripped, fell forward. His head slammed into the car he'd parked behind, bone impacting with impact resistant door.

  The car alarm shrieked.

  Up and down the street, cars joined in the chorus.

  "Thief! Thief! Thief!"

  Their vocabulary was a little limited, she thought muzzily, but their hearts were in the right place.

  Lights came on.

  Light.

  Go into the light.

  "In a minute." Mrs. Ruth brushed off the front of her black sweater, pleased to feel familiar substantial curves under her hand, and watched with broad satisfaction as doors opened and one after another the child's neighbours emerged to check on their cars.

  Cars had alarms, children didn't. She frowned. Should have done something about that when she still had the time.

  He stood. A little dazed, he shoved the shopping cart out of his way. Designed to barely remain upright at the best of times, the cart toppled sideways and crashed to the concrete, spilling black cloth, empty boxes, and bottles of Tabasco sauce. One bottle bounced and broke as it hit the pavement a second time directly in front of the child's face. The fumes cut through the drug and she cried.

  He started to run then, but he didn't get far. The city was on edge, it said so in the papers. These particular representatives of the city were more than happy to take out their fear on so obvious a target.

  The Crone is wisdom. Knowledge. She advises. She teaches. She is not permitted to interfere.

  "She didn't. I did. The power passed before I acted. I merely used the power to get to the right place at the right time. No rules against that."

  You knew that would happen.

  Not exactly a question. Mrs. Ruth answered it anyway. "Nope, I'd had it. Reached my limit. I had every intention of blasting the son of a bitch right out of his Italian loafers. Fortunately for the balance of power, I died."

  The silence that followed filled with the sound of approaching sirens.

  But the cart...

  "Carts are tricksy things, bubba. Fall over if you so much as look at them wrong."

  And the Tabasco sauce?

  "What? There's rules against condiments now?"

  You are a very irritating person.

  "Thank you." She frowned as her body was lifted onto a stretcher. "I really let myself go there at the end."

  Does it matter?

  "I suppose not. I was never a vain woman."

  You were cranky, surly, irritable, self-righteous, annoying, and generally bad tempered.

  "But not vain."

  The child remained wrapped in her mother's arms as the paramedic examined her. The drugs had kept her from being frightened and now she looked sleepy and confused. Her m
other looked terrified enough for both of them.

  "They'll hold her especially tightly now, cherish each moment. When she gets older, she'll find their concern suffocating, but she'll come through her teenage rebellions okay because the one thing she'll never doubt will be her family's love. She'll have a good life, if not a great one, and the threads of that life will weave in and about a thousand other lives that never would have known her if not for tonight."

  The power has passed. You can't know all that.

  Mrs. Ruth snorted. "You really are an idiot, aren't you? She pulled a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of her voluminous skirt and put them on. "All right, I'm ready. Life goes on."

  But you knew it would.

  "Not the point, bubba." She turned at the edge of the light for one last look. It wasn't, if she said so herself, a bad ending.

  Okay, I am not a dog person. I like dogs – better than I like most people – but I'm not one of those people that forms bonds with dogs. My wife is. Our dogs adore her. They follow her from room to room, their ears perk up at every single passing car when she's out, and they throw themselves on her when she comes home. They obey me and they like me well enough, but they don't love me. On the other hand, there are usually three cats on my side of the bed for most of the night. Sometimes four.

  So, writing a story for an anthology called Sirius the Dog Star was a bit of a challenge. Rising to that challenge, I decided I wouldn't merely write about dogs, I'd be the dog. In a literary sense.

  Plus, I don't much like first person point of view. I find it limiting. (I'm not saying it is limiting, I'm saying that's how I find it.) There are only a few authors who write in first person that I read and out of twenty-eight books and seventy plus short stories, I've written first person point of view three times. Finding Marcus was the second time.

  Also, I've never been asked to be in one of the many cat anthologies. I find that interesting, although, admittedly, not exactly relevant to the matter at hand...

  FINDING MARCUS

  The rat was fat, a successful forager, over-confident. It had no idea I was hunting it until my teeth closed over the back of its neck and, by then, it was far too late. As I ate, I gave thanks, as I always did, that some bitch in my ancestry had mated with a terrier. If I'd been all herder or tracker, I'd have been long dead by now. A puddle from the recent rains quenched my thirst and, with my immediate needs satisfied, I took a look around.

  The Gate had dumped me in an alley, pungent with the smell of rotting garbage, shit, and stagnant water. There were other rats in the big overflowing bins, roaches under everything, and a dead bird somewhere close. The bins were metal. Never a good sign.

  I lifted my head to the breeze coming in from the distant mouth of the alley and sighed. Cars. It's a scent you don't forget. Mid-tech world at least. Although I could already feel the pull of the next Gate, it'd be harder to find it in the stink of too many people and too much going on. Still, it wasn't like I had much of a choice.

  And sometimes the low-tech worlds were worse. A lot worse. Fear and suspicion on a low-tech world had separated us…

  Before I left, I marked the place where the old Gate had been. Not so I could find it again – they only worked in one direction – it's something I've done ever since I got into this mess, a way of saying that the Gates are mine, not the other way around. And besides, sometimes I just need to piss on the damn things.

  I had a quick roll in the bird as I passed. A guy's got to do some stuff for himself.

  At the mouth of the alley, I felt a slight pull to the left so I turned. Nose to the ground, I could smell nothing but the rain. The sky must have cleared just before I showed up. Marcus could be mere minutes ahead of me and I'd never know it.

  Suddenly regretting the rat, I started to run.

  Marcus could be mere minutes ahead of me.

  Minutes.

  By the time I stopped running, I'd left the alley far behind. I knew I wouldn't catch up to him so easily, but sometimes it takes me that way, the thought that he could be close, and my legs take over from my brain. I always feel kind of stupid afterward. Stupid and sad. And tired. Not leg tired; heart tired.

  The pull from the next Gate hadn't gotten any stronger so I still had a distance to travel. I had to cross a big water once. Long story. Long, wet, nasty story.

  The made-stone that covered the ground was cleaner here. Smelled more of people and less of garbage, although I hadn't yet reached an area where people actually lived. At a corner joining two large roads, I lifted my head and sniffed the sky. No scent of morning. Good. It had been nearly mid-dark when I'd entered the Gate one world back, but time changed as the worlds did and I could have lost the night. Lost my best time to travel, lost my chance of catching up to Marcus.

  I dove back into a patch of deep shadow as three cars passed in quick succession. Most of the time, the people in cars were blind to the world outside their metal cages, but occasionally on a mid-tech world, a car would stop and the people spill out, bound and determined to help a poor lost dog. I was hungry enough, hurt enough, stupid enough to let them once.

  Only once. I barely escaped with my balls.

  When the road was clear, I raced across, and though it made my guts twist to ignore the path I needed to follow, I turned left, heading for the mouth of a dark alley. Heading away from the lights on poles and the lights on building, away from too much light to be safe.

  The alley put me back on the path. When it ended in a dark canyon between two buildings, I turned left again, finally spilling out onto another road; a darker road, lined with tall houses. I could follow this road for a while. The lights on the poles were further apart here, and massive trees threw shadows dark enough to hide a dozen of me.

  As it happened, the shadows also hid half a dozen cats.

  Cats are contradictions as far as I'm concerned; soft and sweet and harmless appearing little furballs who make no effort to hide the fact that they kill for fun and can curse in language that would make a rat blush. I took the full brunt of their vocabulary as I ran by. Another place, another night, and I might have treed a couple, but with the Gate so far away, I needed to cover some serious distance before dawn.

  Sunrise found me running along a road between houses so large they could almost be called palaces. Probably a rich merchant area. High-tech, mid-tech, low-tech – some things never changed. People who suddenly found themselves with a lot of stuff had to show it off. Marcus, who never had anything except me and a blithe belief in his own intellect, used to laugh about it. He used to laugh about a lot of things. He wasn't laughing when they tore us apart; he was screaming my name, and that's how I remember him most often.

  I couldn't stay on this road much longer, it was beginning to curve away from the direction I needed. But first, breakfast.

  Low-tech, high-tech; both were essentially garbage free. But mid-tech – when they weren't piling it in metal bins, people in mid-tech worlds actually collected their garbage up into bags and set it out in front of their houses. It was like they were bragging about how much they could waste. A guy could eat well off that bragging.

  Second bag I ripped open, I hit the jackpot. A half-circle of flat bread with sausage and cheese crumbled onto a sauce. I gulped it down, licked the last bit of sweet cream out of a container, and took off at full speed as a door opened and a high-pitched voice started to yell.

  Over time, I've gotten good at knowing when I'm not wanted.

  As I rounded the curve at full speed, I saw that the houses had disappeared from one side of the road. In their place, a ravine – wild and overgrown and the way I needed to go. The spirit pack was definitely looking out for me on this world, but then, by my calculations, I was about due. I jumped the barrier and dove through the underbrush.

  A squirrel exploded out of the leaf litter in front of me, and I snapped without thinking. It managed half a surprised squeal before it died. Carrying it, I made my way down the steep bank, across a path at the botto
m, and halfway up the other side. Someone, a long time ago by the smell of it, had scratched out a shallow den under the shelter of a large bush. I shoved my kill between two branches because I don't like the taste of ants and, if I got lucky, off the ground would keep them off the squirrel. Although, it was sort of comforting that ants tasted the same on every world. Food safe, I marked the territory as mine and made myself comfortable.

  Down on the path, a female person ran by. Nothing seemed to be chasing her. Running beside her was a lovely black and white bitch with pointed ears and a plumy tail. She glanced up toward me as she crossed my trail, flattened her ears, but kept running, clearly aware of where her responsibilities lay. I could appreciate that. Chin resting on my front paws, I went to sleep.

  The heat of the sun warm on my fur when I woke told me I'd been asleep for a while. The question: what had woken me? The answer: a sound. A rustling in the bush above me. When I heard it again, I slowly opened my eyes.

  A small crow sidled toward my squirrel. Only half the size of some crows I'd seen, its weight was still enough to shake the branch. With one claw raised, it glanced toward me and froze.

  "Nice doggy. There's a nice, big doggy. Crow not tasty. Doggy not eat crow."

  "I hadn't intended to," I told her, lifting my head. "But I don't intend to allow you to hop in here and eat my kill either."

  The crow blinked and put her raised foot down. "Well, you're a lot more articulate than most," she said. "Practically polysyllabic." Head to one side, she took a closer look. "I don't think I know your breed."

  "I don't think you do," I agreed. "I'm not from around here."

  Left eye, then right eye, she raked me up and down with a speculative gaze. "No, I don't imagine you are. You want to talk about it?"

  "No." She took flight as I crawled from the den, but after a long, luxurious scratch, I realized she'd only flown up into the nearest tree. "What?"

  "Where's your… what is it you dogs call them again? Your pack?"