by David Hair
‘But I—’
‘It’s happening now, Mat! Kiki is meddling. Every reading is about him seizing the path to the sky: I’m getting an inverted King of Swords or inverted Magician every time I think of him, and The Chariot inverted, too. He’s usurping control of the quest, and unless you wake up to this, you won’t even get a chance to join it.’ Abruptly she flipped over a handful of cards and then pulled one out and thrust it at him. The Empress. ‘Take it. Say her name.’
His hand wavered over the proffered card. ‘Huh?’
Evie tasked impatiently. ‘It’s associated with powerful women. Someone of your skills should be able to use it to contact Aroha. She may not be so far gone into sleep that she can’t fight what Kiki is doing.’
Mat stared at the card, and then into Evie’s one eye, bright with passion and fear. Slowly, fearfully, he reached out, touched the card — icy cold to his fingertips — and whispered Aroha’s name.
All at once, he was seized by a sudden vision that filled his sight, and then all of his senses, so that the café and the girl before him vanished. Instead, he was standing in freezing mist, feeling like he was speeding through space yet remaining still, like a man on a bungy cord falling through cloud. All at once he reached the final extension and hung there, in a fog-filled space, a few metres from a young Maori woman on a stone slab beneath a feather cloak. It was Aroha, lying as if dead, except that her arms were extended before her as if plucking an unseen stringed instrument. Her fingers were blindly fumbling, and there was a look of puzzled concentration on her almost vacant face.
‘Aroha?’
Her eyes flew open, bright and chilling as they locked on him. ‘Matiu?’ she croaked, through dry lips. Then her eyes went back to her hands, and she gave a small squeal of fear. ‘The path, I had it in my hands — I don’t understand …’ Her hands went to her face as a look of anguished horror crossed her face.
Mat swallowed. ‘Aroha, Evie thinks …’ He swallowed as Aroha’s expression turned almost savage at mention of Evie’s name. ‘She thinks that Kiki has stolen control of the path, and is about to trigger it.’
Aroha’s face went grey. ‘No.’ Her hands went to her chest, and she wheezed like an old woman. ‘No, not that … Impossible. He’d need—’ Then her eyes went wide and she turned away, shrieking one word: ‘FATHER!!!’
Her voice echoed unanswered all about them. With a nauseous look, she sank to her knees, her mouth working soundlessly while tears sprang from her eyes, her mask gone, raw anguish and sorrow revealed beneath.
Mat dropped to his knees beside her, but couldn’t touch her, though at that moment he wanted to with all his heart, to ease her pain. For long seconds she sobbed, tears burning down her face, steaming in the icy air. Then abruptly her face blazed in fury. She flowed to her feet, glared at him. ‘I will forge a new path, now! I will send it to you, this very night! Await me at the appointed place!’
‘I can’t! I’m not in Napier — I’m in Wellington.’
Her eyes went round. ‘But … Wellington … Why?’ She stammered, then fell silent, her face taut with agonised concentration. ‘Do you have a place there that you are bound to? Somewhere that bears your essence?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Then how am I to bind the path to you?’
‘Can’t you just aim it at me?’
‘No. A man is too insubstantial; the energies must have a solid thing, which has existed for centuries, to focus upon. Something that contains something of you.’ She stared at him with desperate pleading. ‘Are you sure? Surely you have some ancestor who lived here? Even some relic? Anything! I need something to anchor the path to.’
He shook his head helplessly. At his back he could feel a sense of pulling, that same sense of being on a bungy cord, but this time the recoil that would jerk him away. He tried to think, to give her something, but the forces were beginning to draw him away. Aroha reached for him, but suddenly he felt himself falling away from her.
‘I’ll send something! I’ll find a way!’ she cried, and then suddenly she was gone in a rush of searing cold air that tore at him. He opened his mouth to shout …
… and found himself in the café, staring at Evie with blinking eyes, mouth wide open and his heart pounding fit to burst.
It took him a minute before he could talk, while outside Riki paced back and forth, the cellphone jammed to his ear. Evie waited, her hand jerking toward his and then away as if she had some kind of nervous tick. On the table, The Empress card was charred to flakes, and his fingertips were scorched and stinging. He sucked them painfully.
‘You were right,’ he managed to croak out eventually. ‘She has lost control of the path. She’s going to try and make a new one, but she’s got nothing to target here in Wellington that will draw me up. She said she would try to find something.’ His voice trailed off helplessly. ‘I guess if Riki and I stole a car, we could be in Napier in four hours …’
Evie shook her head. ‘I think every hour Byron has on you will equate to a huge advantage. You would be much better to leave from here if you can.’
He sucked his lower lip in, unable to think it through. If I tell my folks, all the work on the Treaty will go out the window. Maybe Wiri can help? Except he’ll be asleep, waiting for his night shift. ‘She thinks something has happened to her father.’
Evie sucked in her lower lip, and shook her head. ‘I don’t know him. I don’t know enough about any of this. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more help, I truly do.’
‘But you’ve warned us, when we thought we had plenty of time,’ he told her. ‘You’ve given us a chance.’ While killing your own hopes. He made up his mind. ‘I think we have to stay here, and try to second-guess her choice. Can you get another Empress card?’
‘Of course, but it takes months for me to build an affinity with a deck, so it won’t help.’
He sighed. ‘Then I guess it’s detective work. She said she has to focus it on something that has a connection to me somehow. But I’ve never been here before.’
Evie pondered that, while he pondered her. She’s so lovely, eye-patch or not. I wish—
‘Find somewhere that she might settle upon, something that she might tie to you. Think about your parents, or their parents. Ships that might have brought your ancestors here. Even names: names have power.’
He exhaled heavily. ‘It won’t happen,’ he whispered. ‘All that preparation, and we’ve lost already.’
Evie looked away, and he knew why.
She stood. ‘I should go. There’s another thing going on, something else Kiki is doing, and I can’t work out what. I keep getting cards that signify a pending disaster.’
He stood, too, and stepped around the table, reaching for her. ‘Evie, I wish—’
‘Stop, Mat. Please.’ But she still let him draw her in. She was warm against him, her scent lingering in her curly pile of hair, her nose cold against his neck. Time momentarily froze, a fleeting eternity of near perfection as he closed his eyes and simply breathed her in.
Then she was pulling reluctantly away, smiling sadly. ‘Good luck,’ she whispered. ‘I really mean that.’ She was gone before he could reply.
He was sitting down again, his mind whirling, when Riki came in, his face taught with suppressed emotion. ‘The Gisborne police are sending a car around.’ He looked like he wanted punch someone. ‘I called Cass back, and told her I’d sent the cops around. She was kinda hysterical, man. I didn’t know what to say.’ He sat down shakily.
They remained sitting in the café for a while, lost in the helplessness of knowing that if something had happened it was beyond retrieval. Finally Mat got up. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, mostly because he didn’t want to be in the café when the call he feared came through. So they went outside, heading for the harbour for want of a better place to go, despite the rain which was whipping in. The wind was whining faintly in the wires as they darted across Taranaki Street, then over to the
big gas station on the other side of Wakefield. That was when the call came, jangling Riki’s cellphone. He took it immediately and it was over in seconds.
His face told the story. ‘They found Howie. Some bastard shot him, probably three, four days ago.’
Mat huddled in the lee of a wall, on a backstreet, staring at the rain that slanted in, shivering in the cold. Riki had gone home, and he should have gone with him, to keep his friend company. But he didn’t know how to deal with his own rage.
It had to have been Byron. After what Evie had told him, it seemed obvious.
Why can they hurt us so easily, when we can’t touch them?
The answer was obvious: Kiki and Byron cared about nothing and no-one, not even each other. They were like birds of prey who ate their own young if they didn’t leave the nest soon enough; or spiders that devoured their own mates. Predators, with no ties, no roots, phantoms at the edge of sight. Whereas he and Riki had family, friends, loved ones they cared about more than their own lives, and that made everyone of them terribly, horribly vulnerable. It made him so, so angry. Made him want to smash things. To use his powers to find his enemies and hurt them.
Such actions would be makutu: destructive magic. He could do such things. Evil wasn’t in the tool, but the wielder. He could feel that urge, to match violence with violence.
What would I do if I knew where Byron’s parents lived? Maybe they even lived here in Wellington, if this was where Byron had grown up. He could probably find out in an internet café in a few moments. Could I go around there and do to them what he did to Howie? He knew he couldn’t, and wouldn’t. Would Byron even care if I did it? Is the difference between us the lengths we’re prepared to go to win, or the degree to which we’ve turned cold inside? Or both?
It was a moot point. He would not seek to win in such a way. So all he could do was wander the streets, trying to find something — anything — that might get him to Aroha before Byron.
He glanced around him, trying to get his bearings. He was on a T-intersection off Cuba Street, having wandered semi-oblivious up the walking part of the street, famous for its alternative culture. There’d been plenty to gawp at if he’d felt less numb: bohemian girls with full-length dresses and dyed dreadlocks, punkettes with mohawks and spikes, guys with tattoos or piercings or both, hipsters and punks, folkies and Goths, aging philosophers and people who just looked plain lost. Lots of cool, together-looking people comfortable in their skins, and others who looked like try-hards, still struggling to nail down just who or what they were. It made him feel drab and ordinary, and a long way from provincial, conservative Napier.
Another gust of wind-driven rain moaned down the street, sending a shiver through him as he huddled against the wall. Since Riki had left, he’d walked down to the harbour, stumbling through mist and light rain as only the most dedicated of the lunchtime runners plodded past, making his way past the Eastbourne ferries beside the restaurants in old Customs and port buildings, until he made the railway station, a massive red-brick edifice like something dropped out of old Europe. He’d had lunch at a Subway near Parliament, then looped back along Lambton Quay, the ‘Golden Mile’ of shopping in Wellington, full of everything he might have wanted except for any kind of clue as to what was going on in Aotearoa. That led him back to where he started, at the foot of Cuba Street, and none the wiser. He’d wandered up, hoping this older area might give him inspiration. It was after four, and the offices were about to empty, but right now the street corner was quiet, the only foot traffic going into the second-hand record store across the intersection.
‘Hey, fella, looking for a good time?’ a woman drawled.
He looked around. It was the corner of Ghuznee and Marion streets, and he was leaning against a wall which had been cleverly painted to look three-dimensional, resembling a brick building from days gone by. He looked up and down, but no-one was near.
‘Coo-eee! I’m right here!’
He peered about. Still no-one. Then a movement caught his eye.
Painted onto the wall, right beside him, was a woman, with shoulder-length blonde hair, a black one-strap crop-top and a red miniskirt. Her midriff and most of her thighs were bare, and she only just came up to his shoulders despite her knee-high boots. She was waving at him sarcastically.
‘Yeah, right here! You got an eye problem, kid?’
The painted woman’s mouth was moving. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and looked again, thinking he must be more tired than he thought. When he looked again she was still moving: now standing hands on hips, preening provocatively, an effect somewhat ruined by the fact someone had drawn on her face in green marker pen. Not that she was terribly alluring anyway.
‘Hey, now you’re looking the right way. Like what you see?’ She teased her skirt up a little.
You’re kidding! A painting is trying to pick me up! He looked about worriedly. Have I wandered into Aotearoa? He reached out with the little spark of awareness inside … and no, this was the modern world. The painted lady didn’t go away, though.
‘Honey, I been watching your ass this past half hour — nice pert little thing that it is — and I’m thinkin’ you and me could do some business, know what I mean?’ She edged closer along the wall.
‘No way!’ he exclaimed, drawing back.
‘Aw, c’mon cutie! Whatsa matter? Am I a little one-dimensional for you?’ She strutted closer. He threw a frantic look either over shoulder, saw no-one watching, and backed away. ‘Don’t ya like the way I’m drawn?’
‘Uh, I’m not … um, really interested.’
She struck a pose, chest out, and threw him an amused look. ‘Don’t gimme that, honey. You’re a tightly sprung coil of pent-up tension. I know the signs. You need a bit of lovin’ to settle you down.’
‘I really don’t think so.’
She tsk-ed with vexation. ‘Aw, c’mon kid, I haven’t had a punter for days.’
Days? ‘Really?’
‘Well, weeks. Possibly decades, who knows?’ She pouted. ‘Only fun a girl gets these days is going down to Opera House Lane to chat up the street-art there. Otherwise there’s just the graffiti on Cuba Street, and they’re just riff-raff.’
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t ask a girl her age, kid.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘I know about your sort, though: sometimes the magic seeps through, from the Other Place. You know what I mean, don’t ya? I can smell it on you, under all that testosterone and longing.’
‘OK, let’s pretend I know what you mean.’ He studied her. ‘Have there been many others passing through here, with that same touch of the Other Place?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. You gonna make it worth my while?’
He rolled his eyes, and looked at her more closely. ‘I know what I could do for you: someone’s drawn on your face with marker pen: do you want me to wipe it off?’
She almost melted. ‘You’d do that for me? Oh, honey, you get that muck cleaned off and I’ll be yours for free. Well, a big discount, anyway!’
‘Hmm.’ He pulled out his handkerchief, wet it with rainwater, and rubbed away at her cheek and mouth, until the offending marks were mostly gone, so far as he could manage without a proper solvent. ‘There, that’s better.’
A passer-by peered at him oddly, but went on. The painted hooker had flashed back to her normal spot in an eye-blink. She did her hip-swaying walk back to him again as soon as they were alone. ‘Why honey, you’re a real gentleman. Why don’t we find a room and I’ll show you some real gratitude?’
‘No way! Anyway, you were going to tell me about people from the Other World you’ve seen.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh OK, kid. I can see you ain’t gonna be any fun anyhow. Let’s see … there’s a magic shop down Cuba Street, near the Bucket Fountain, where one of the girls at the counter is a genuine wiccan. And there’s a li’l baby taniwha in the old stream-bed of the Waimapihi stream, where Courtenay Place is now
. The old stream’s just a piped drain now, and he’s kinda grumpy. An’ there used to be a guy called himself a wizard, but he weren’t no real wizard. But there’s some who are the real thing, like you. And there was this Maori kid used to come down here, nasty little tyke. But he’s gone away, best luck. He used to teach the graffiti and cuss-words to roam about at night.’
Byron? ‘The secret life of street-art, huh?’
‘It’s a concrete jungle out here, kid. You gotta be tough.’ She puffed up a little, like a cornered cat. ‘I ain’t as vulnerable as I’m painted, y’know. I’m all-weather and durable.’
It was hard not to laugh. ‘Cool. What’s your name?’
‘Whatever you want it to be, honey. Go on, pick me a name for the night.’
He frowned, cast about. ‘Um, “Resene”?’
She pondered that. ‘Resene? Resene …’ She swayed a little, a slow smile spreading over her face. ‘Yeah, that’s kinda nice. Sounds exotic and sexy. Yeah, call me Resene, baby.’ She grinned. ‘What’s your handle, kiddo?’
‘It’s Matiu.’ On reflex, he went to shake her hand, then just waved it vaguely.
‘Matiu?’ She frowned. ‘Now, what does that remind me of?’
His heart thudded. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Something … something …’ she scowled. ‘Something about Eastbourne and the ferry.’
‘The Eastbourne ferry? Really?’
‘Hey, you can smile!’ She bared her shoulder again. ‘How about it kid? Last chance for paradise?’
‘No thanks. But it’s been nice talking to you. Amazing, even.’ He backed away, and suddenly she was just lifeless paint again. Did that just happen? But then his excitement took over.
The Eastbourne ferry … He’d gone past them earlier, without taking much notice of them. Perhaps he’d missed something?
Mat hurried back down Cuba Street, heading for the harbour. The streets were filling up, and the bars were starting to attract a few customers, although not many due to the storm warnings. The Bucket Fountain emptied with a cascading splash as he scurried past, the wind whipping the droplets of water everywhere, mingling with the gathering rain. He walked faster, every moment precious, glimpsing newspaper billboards warning of the storm. His breath was steaming and the rain stinging his cheeks. Lights from shops shone garishly in the gathering darkness. Stumbling through the gusts, he scurried between the Town Hall and the curiously shaped Michael Fowler Centre, fringed Civic Square and crossed the six lanes of Jervois Quay via a wooden land-bridge full of surreal wooden carvings. Thunder rumbled in the distance as he ran from shelter to shelter, past the boating lake and through the grass and concrete of Frank Kitts Park, towards the big indoor arena where the netballers and basketballers played. He seemed to be the only person mad enough to be out and about, the restaurants at the docks almost empty as he glanced in the windows as he hurried by.