Bilskinir’s Aviary is famous; has been featured in The Alta Califa more than once, and is open to visitors three times a month for the modest fee of two lisbys. Jack’s never been there, of course; as a child they’d no money for such touristing, and as a man, he’d no desire. But Archangel Bob had given him a feather to use as a dousing to find the Aviary, for the layout of Bilskinir is no easy thing. Fletching calls to fletching, Bob had said, this feather shall fly true. Jack whips the arrow from his weskit, wincing as it rewards his incautious handling with a prick. The vane of the arrow is razor sharp. As he points it, the tip of the arrow blushes brightly. Two steps forward increase this luster; two steps backward dim it.
So forward he follows the enticing glow, dancing into the crush of fancy dancing folk, his red tippy-tapping boots springing & leaping, but smally now, in the steps of a jig, a tarantella, a fox-trot. The feather dances with him, dipping, whirling, twirling him about through the spiral of people, and now the tip of the feather is a molten-glow, heat radiating down the rachis, the calamus burning the tips of his fingers black. But the scorch is a small price to pay, and the spiraling gay music is camouflage to his pain—
He realizes, he’s the only one still dancing; the music has dwindled to a sawing squeak and the dancers dropped out of step, turning back and forth, bewildered at the sudden silence.
Which is then broken by a trumpty triumphant voice shouting:
“Arrest that man!”
Jack doesn’t wait to see if that order pertains to him; he knows it does. Still clutching the arrow, Jack taps his heels upon the redwood boards, and springs aloft, soaring high over the crowd. His heels clip the elephant figure perched atop the chief justice’s wig, and bend the angel feather topknot of the Voivode of Shingletown. Screams of alarm and excitement create their own orchestration to Jack’s flight. Below him a swarm of sangyn coats tries to mirror his progress across the ballroom. But he has empty air through which to soar, and they are trapped in a confusion of outraged guests, and have little hope of laying hands upon our bouncing boy. Jack heels off the chimneypiece, powdering a stone or two in the process, and hurtles toward the chandelier. The antlers make an excellent trapeze, and so Jack dangles there for a moment, heels swinging above the heads of his pursuers, who vainly try to whack at his feet with their bayonets, while poisonous snakes’ head spittle splatters upon their upturned faces.
Screaming, the Alacráns fall back, and into their void appears a tawny streak whose jump is almost as high as Jack’s own. The coyote leaps into the air, foam flying from open muzzle, sandy ruff puffed in anger. Teeth scrape on one sole; Jack kicks and coyote falls back, but only to gather up energy and spring again. Lucky for Jack, he’s already increased the arch of his swing, the coyote’s bite latches onto the bottom of his frockcoat, but the momentum of his swing pulls him away, and the coyote falls back again, torn fabric flapping in its jaws.
“Oi, that’s my quetzal-tail coat,” someone shouts, and by this Jack knows for sure that his glamour has worn off. He’s aiming for the musicians’ balcony; he achieves his goal, landing upon the second cellist. The cellist heaves for breath, Jack doffs his hat in apology, and then tosses the Hand of Glory he’s excavated out of that aforementioned capacious crown into the coyote’s face just as she clears the balcony railing. Without waiting to enjoy the results of this feint, Jack scarpers, only to run headlong into a massive blue chest, as stout as a stone wall, and just as immovable. This chest is as tall as the sky, as wide as the deep blue sea; squinting upward, Jack can just barely make out the gleaming tusks, the glittering eyes, the drooping mustachio of the most fearsome denizen in Califa.
Paimon.
Jack pivots, and vaults over the writhing, snarling coyote, who is busy trying to toss off the Hand of Glory attached to its muzzle. He balances briefly upon the gleaming bar of the railing, and then launches out into the largest longest leap of his life. The failure of which will cost him exactly that. He’s not about to die unsatisfied.
Hawklike he soars through the vault of the ballroom, tattered quetzal tail trailing behind him like the tail of a shooting star. The upturned faces below are a blur of astonishment, the wind roars in his ears, the enormous brim of his hat catches the air currents like a sail, propelling him farther onward than he has ever managed to go before. Breath sucks from his lungs, tears well in his eyes, the room fades, he feels as though he flies through the star-studded night sky, leaping, hurtling toward the glimmering glow of an enchanted moon—as he flies this glowing blur brightens, resolves into the glistening form of a girl, the most beautiful fantastic gorgeous delicious delightful spectacular girl in the world. This girl is a dish; she’s a cream puff; she’s the perfect cup of coffee; she’s a hot towel after a cold shower. She’s the tune in a fiddle; the cream in a coffee; the glitter in the bomb.
Like an arrow, Jack flies toward her, his heart singing: “Girl of my dreams, it’s you, girl of my dreams, it’s me!” He will fall at her feet, his quest over at last happily ever after, here he comes—
And then Cake intervenes.
Birthday cake, that is, a towering confection of marzipan-encrusted sponge cake studded with amaro-soaked cherries, draped with fondant furbelows. A cake twenty feet tall and six feet around, and it’s an iceberg of an obstacle that Jack’s heels, finally flagging, can just not surmount. He sees the collision coming; is incapable of braking to avoid it, wheels arms, flings back his brim to create a drag, to no avail. He’s going faster and faster, and the cake is getting closer and closer…at the very last minute Jack closes his eyes.
The impact is stunning; marzipan and sponge shrapnel splodge through the air, a shower of gooey sugar that drenches the lavish guests, the routed redcoats, the still battle-locked coyote and Hand of Glory, the aghast orchestra. The walls are smeared, the guests are smeared, the floors are smeared, and Jack is not just smeared, he’s buried so far deep in what remains of the majestic pastry that only his red shoes are visible, heels dangling limply.
In the middle of awesome awestruck silence, everyone struck dumb by the calamity that they can’t believe they just witnessed, a sparkly blue blur spins into existence, coalesces into a sparkly blue butler, not quite as big an obstruction as before, but definitely hugely oversized. With exaggerated care and a moue of distaste hovering around his mustachios, Paimon unsnaps one immaculate cuff and rolls up his silken sleeve to reveal a ham-sized forearm. With a hand the size of a full side of bacon, he takes a hold of one of Jack’s limp ankles.
Jack slides out of the wreckage of the cake covered in sugary vernix like a newborn babe. Bruised and battered, with blood bubbling from his nose (the marzipan exterior was as hard as concrete), he sprawls in a manger of crushed sponge cake. All the bounce has left him; the heels are spent, he can’t get up.
Paimon shakes out a hankie the size of a horse blanket and wipes the goo from his arm, resleeves his arm, and shakes his cuffs out. Jack bubbles, and licks his lips. The smell of sugar is sickening. He feels a hard pressure on his chest, pinning him into place. He rolls up crusty eyelids and manages to elevate his head just enough to see a small purple patent leather bootee is planted right on top of his heart. The bootee belongs, of course, to the most splendiferous girl in the world, who is, of course, the Pontifexina Georgiana Sidonia Haðraaða, the Birthday Girl.
What do you say to the Girl of your Dreams, when you have just crashed her party with the intent to steal from her, and crushed her cake, and covered her guests in marzipan and sponge cake, and are now going to be hauled away by her angry denizen and handed over to her mother’s guard to be broken upon a wheel and have your bloody pieces displayed all over town? Well, my little winkles, what would you say?
Poor Jack can’t really say anything; the pressure of the bootee is making it hard for him to breathe, or maybe it’s just the proximity of the girl of his dreams that is making him feel faint. But anyway, anything he might try to say
would have been drowned out by the sudden peals of laughter cracking the ominous silence. Explosive, delighted, full-throated laughter that is contagious in its merriment and immediately joined by supporting laughter, as those around the Pontifexa take up her cue. With a sideways slant of his aching head, Jack sees the slant-wise visage of a woman in a black-and-gold caftan laughing so hard she is almost choking. Of course, Jack recognizes her; does not her portrait adorn every office in the city, does not her statue stand regally in the center of the center city horse fountain, does not her profile appear on every diva coin? Though the Pontifexa is not known for her sense of humor, apparently she finds this situation hysterical.
The rest of the lavish guests are now laughing too, and so is the Pontifexina, a pearling, girlish laugh that shows off the green glints of the emeralds inset into her dainty teeth. Only the tawny-haired woman in the red serape standing now next to the Pontifexa doesn’t laugh. The Hand of Glory is crushed in her grip and her green eyes are cinders. She lets drop the pulped flesh, flexes a finger, the thud of boots vibrate the floor beneath his back as her guards surround him.
Jack squinches shut his eyes; salt tears mar the sugar crust on his face. So close and yet so far! Too late, too late! But when the grasp comes, it’s not the brutish hands of angry guards, but the delicate brush of a finger across his frosting-encased face. He cracks his eyes again, and then cracks a grin, white teeth flashing through the mask of cake goo.
“He’s adorable, mamma,” the Pontifexina says, licking her icing-capped finger. “My favorite flavor. Can I keep him?”
The Pontifexa scrubs her face with a silken hankie handed to her by the woman hovering to her right side, a cupcake of a girl, who has a gorgeous cerulean blue parrot perched upon her shoulder, and a creamy smug smile on her face.
“Please, mamma? Please?” the Pontifexina pleads.
Her mamma says fondly, “Of course, sweetie pie, you may keep him.”
The Alacrán captain swirls her serape and vanishes in a puff of rage. The Norge Azul pecks the Holy Whore of Heaven’s cheek. The Pontifexina shrieks her delight and claps her hands.
And that, my little dumplings, is how Jack was caught.
◆ ◆ ◆
Jack Shade is a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed, and to perform other magical tasks, such as the finding of souls that have been lost. The story that follows is one of a series of vivid and highly imaginative stories that Rachel Pollack has been writing about Jack’s adventures. The magical system used in the Jack Shade stories is one of the most intricate and unusual ones employed in modern fantasy today, and the mystical world that Pollack creates in them, one inextricably wrapped around and interacting in many different ways with our modern everyday world—the double vision of the things around him that Jack possesses enable him to see a taxicab on the Manhattan street as a taxicab but also at the same time as the Piss-Lion that it actually is—form a mystic ecosystem of supernatural checks and balances, layered hierarchies, and rival Powers that is rich and complex and strange. (The Jack Shade stories also contain a shout-out to old farts like me who have been around long enough to remember another morally ambiguous traveler-for-hire whose business card consisted only of his name and the silhouette of a chess piece knight.)
Here Jack must find a way to defeat a seemingly unbeatable enemy bent on destroying the whole world of magic…
Rachel Pollack is the author of forty books, including Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award, Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Temporary Agency, short-listed for the Nebula Award. She is also a poet, a translator, a comics writer, and the author of a series of bestselling books about tarot cards, including Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, in print continuously since 1980. She is also a visual artist, having designed and drawn The Shining Tribe Tarot. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and sold around the world. She has lectured and taught on five continents. Her most recent work is The Fissure King—A Novel in Five Stories, featuring Jack Shade and the other characters seen here in “Song of Fire,” though “Song of Fire” is an independent story.
◆ ◆ ◆
RACHEL POLLACK
1.
After Jack Shade had taken the case—after he and Archie and Carolien had decided what had to be done, and the others had left—Jack poured himself a glass of Louis Trey brandy and went to stand by the window in his room at the Hotel de Reve Noire on Thirty-fifth Street. He should have known, he told himself. Should have seen the signs, the markers. He’d taken the room originally because it let him see the Silver Skies: the Traveler name for the two linked skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, with its piercing antenna, and the Chrysler Building, with its gargoyles. How many times had he stood there and just felt the energy that passed between them? So why didn’t he see, this past week, what was missing?
Jack had moved into the hotel after his crazy time, as he called the period that followed his wife Layla’s death. “Death” was really too neat, too noble a term. A poltergeist had invaded their daughter, Eugenia, and Layla had begged Jack to do something about it. It’s okay, he’d insisted, geists inhabited adolescent girls for a time, but they never did any real harm. And then the terrible day came, when the knives and cleavers began to fly around the kitchen, leaving Layla’s body soaked in blood on the floor, a scar down Jack’s right cheekbone, and Jack with no choice but to send his daughter somewhere safe, where she couldn’t harm anyone. “Safe” turned out to be the Forest of Souls, a land of the dead, where Genie was the only living creature. He’d been trying to figure out how to get her back ever since. Or at least once he himself had settled down in the hotel.
Before that, for several weeks, he’d lived rough and done things he shouldn’t. They were just meaningless stunts, really, but he’d done them in front of nons: Non-Travelers, whose “Linear” world did not include such events as carousel horses coming to life and sprouting wings. Finally COLE—the Committee of Linear Explanation, whose job it was to cover up such irregularities—had ordered Jack to knock it off. Settle down, they’d told him, or he’d find himself locked away somewhere, maybe the Forgotten Woods outside of Yonkers.
So Jack had found the room at the hotel and managed to take some comfort watching the light glint off the gargoyles, and sensing, if not actually hearing, the messages they passed to the Empire State Building for broadcast to the wider Non-Linear world. Which is why Jack should have realized that it had all gone silent. And if he couldn’t have heard, he certainly could have seen. All the luster had gone from the gargoyles, the silver had tarnished. The ESB antenna too had a dullness, despite the colored lights the building owners used for publicity. The true light had gone cold.
Pay attention. His teacher, Anatolie, had told him that over and over. She’d have him recite the First Directive—
See what there is to see,
Hear what there is to hear,
Speak the thing you must speak,
Touch whatever you touch—
And then she would send him around town, usually somewhere public, and have him report back via Bluetooth what he encountered, not letting him return until he truly saw. Once she had him go to the Staten Island Ferry, where she had him describe all the passengers. He’d listed their ages, their ethnicities, their clothes, and all she’d said was, “I don’t care about that. What do you see?” Finally he’d noticed it—a small group of men and women blinged out like some hip-hop band, but when he looked closer he spotted flickers of flame in their eyes, around the tip of the tongue, and when they spoke to someone and smiled, the person shrank back.
When Jack had reported this to Anatolie, she’d grunted and said, “Very good, Jack. You’ve just had your first experience of the Djinn. You can come back now.” He’d wanted to ask her if she�
��d known they’d be there, but she’d already hung up. She did that. A lot.
Jack sighed and finished the last of his Louis Trey. Time to get started.
* * *
—
It began during a poker game. Jack hadn’t played in a while; he’d mostly been resting after a disaster of a case involving a Jersey housewife named Carol Acker, but his friend Annette had called him to tell him that a couple of great fish—suckers with lots of money—had come to New York and hoped to play in one of Jack Shade’s legendary private cash games. Annette herself couldn’t come—she was playing in a tournament in Europe—but she wanted to make sure Jack knew. So Jack had called Charlie, his dealer, and a few friends, and let it be known he was available.
For poker, Jack rented a luxurious suite at the top of the hotel. With its lacquered tables and ancient drink stands (originally writing tables from a poetry contest long ago), it was far grander than his living quarters or the small room on the second floor he maintained as an office. Very few of the people in Jack’s games knew he lived in the hotel. Charlie, of course, and Annette, and a couple others, but mostly Jack kept his poker life and his real life separate.
Part of that separation was the way he dressed. When he worked, Jack was all in black, mostly so he could hide his carbon-bladed, ebony-handled knife in the sheath in his black boot. In poker, however, he went for color. It caused some to underestimate him, always a benefit. First they underestimate, then they fear. That night, he wore a pale gray suit with a blue silk shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. Jack wore his clothes well. Six foot three, muscular but loose, his ropy hair cut by a hairdresser friend to look like Jack cut it himself, his face handsome except for the scar, Poker Jack looked like nothing mattered in his life except cards and parties.
The Book of Magic Page 17