“Thank you,” he said thoughtfully.
Madrigal raised an eyebrow but then her attention moved back to Malachi. “So?”
“I didn’t want to be here,” he said. “Too much chance of getting caught.”
“Fneh, Jack couldn’t catch you,” she said. “I think you prefer life in the other worlds.”
“Maybe so,” he said. He felt unaccountably strange, seeing her after such a long time apart.
“What do you say, Nixas?” Madrigal asked, indicating that they could, if they wished, share her fire.
All of them except the demon crowded around.
“I say, I say, I say,” Nixas began softly, staring into the flames. “What begins with the dark and ends in the dark and has no body to speak of?”
“Cold, dead Jack,” Madrigal said. “Too easy. Why you think of that?”
“It will be midwinter night day after tomorrow.”
“The day he dies,” Malachi said, licking his lips unconsciously with the memories of that same day ages past. He glanced at Madrigal but she was introspective, fire-staring.
She gave a soft laugh. “Jack’s holiday it is, we say. Three moons in the lands of the dead, in his other home.”
“Mad,” Malachi said urgently. “My friend has the key. I believe it brought her here. This year it will turn the lock, Jack or no Jack.” He explained as best he could about the humans’ problem—his problem—with the Mothkin, their need to find a hunter capable of gathering them.
“And that’s all? You think the key rose from darkness just to help the humans out of some little faery fix?” she was openly astonished.
“When you put it that way,” he said, “no.”
“It is that way,” she said shortly. “Who found it first?”
“Me,” Viridia said, putting up a small hand. She was wrapped up in her own hair, arms clutching her bony knees to her chest, her nose and the ends of her long ears red with cold. She sniffed. “It was on the bottom of this lake. I just happened to be there.”
Madrigal made a face to show how much store she set by this information. “What lake? When?”
Viridia rolled her eyes as if it was all too tedious for words and gave one of those teenage twisting shrugs that says everything that’s happening is a torment to the soul. “That one in Alfheim. With the dragon in it. When Zal got stolen and the witchy elf woman wanted to stick him with a blood pact. We was there to rescue ‘em and it was a big battle in the water and we went down a long way…” she coughed slightly and muttered something which made Malachi guess she was fudging something “… and I got all the way to the very bottom—which is a long long way down, let me tell you, much further than any faery might ever have gone bef…” she caught the expression of those watching her and said primly, with pique, “There was this shelf, the last bit of the world, sticking out into nothing, into the Void, where all the water was hanging at the Dragon Gate—not that you’d know what one of them is—anyway, right on the edge of this shelf of rock was a load of stuff that’d fallen in over the years and got right down to the bottom. There was all sorts, I can tell you, like jewels and bones and this book with a big clasp on it and some old writings and daggers and a headband made out of gold ..
“Vee!” Poppy snapped.
Viridia shot her a look. “The key was right on the edge. Right so close to the edge that if I’d have tried to pick it up the wrong way I’d have just pushed it over. And the fighting up above had made the water move… and I had too… and the water was nudging it along and it was about to go over and I wanted to pick up some of the other things but I thought the Gate might not like me being there too much because it was starting to do something and I thought that anything that was about to go over was something that must’ve been there the longest and was probably the most interesting and valuable so I just grabbed it and came back up before the dragon got there.”
“And what made you give it to this Otopian woman?” Madrigal demanded, trying but failing not to express impatience. “Did you know what it was?”
“I put it under me pillow and had a dream that night. We was campin’ in the elf woods looking for Zal and Lila and we found them but they was… busy… so we just set ourselves up a way off and went to sleep and I dreamed something big and dreadful and frightening was coming and that faery was going to be reversed because of this thing so I guessed it might be the Key and then Pop and me decided we didn’t want it so we thought we’d pass it on to someone who’d keep it safe on account of not knowin’ what it was at all and not bein’ a faery.”
“She was the best person,” Poppy said defensively. “She’s lethal and completely bad tempered. And she was nice to Zal and he’s one of them that the Kindly Ones like, so he’s not easy to fiddle with either so…”
Madrigal held her hand up. “I get it. But now, just a few months later, here she is in Jack’s City. Cat,” she looked up, “you must have known something about this. She is your ally.”
“I thought she’d keep it far from here,” he said.
“Do you think she’s one of the ones?” Madrigal asked after a minute thinking.
“What does that mean?” Teazle said, surprising them, because he’d been so silent.
“One for the Hall,” Poppy said. “We thought Zal was one, but then it turned out he wasn’t.”
Viridia nodded.
“One what?” Teazle demanded.
“Someone who should be lost,” Malachi said. “One of the Champions of the Light. Individuals with great power of some kind, combined with a passion for doing the right thing.”
Poppy continued to nod enthusiastically. Her feelings shifted with violent speeds but they never wavered. “You know how dangerous they are. We like to find them and then…”
“… lose them.” Viridia said. “Strategic’ly. So as things don’t get bad. So we’ve got a Hallway in Under that we use to lose them.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to lose the ones with a passion for doing the bad thing?”
Viridia looked at Teazle as if he’d lost his mind. “No no. They extinguish themselves. Piffling minor they are. Easy to spot, easy to kill. Quite pathetic really. Devils won’t even touch them. It’s the ones who think they’re doing good you have to watch out for. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
“I could never stomach her advice,” Teazle grumbled with a wry snort that sounded a lot more beastlike than angelic.
“You’re all getting way ahead,” Madrigal stated with the authority of one who has heard it all a thousand times before. “Your immediate problem is that Jack wants the key, your friend has it, and she is no doubt with Jack now. If he gets his hands on it then he will open everything, not just the Hall.”
“Why?” Teazle asked.
“Because of the Queen’s magic,” all the faeries said at once in a singsong way as if it was the most obvious answer in the world, ever.
“Indulge me,” the demon suggested. “Unless we’re going off to Jack’s place now for some killing you may as well fill me in on the reasons for said killing. I assume there’s going to be killing?”
“Probably,” Malachi said, shivering. “What’re your swords made of, by the way?”
“Some kind of light,” Teazle said in a tone that wasn’t interested. “But tell me about the Queen. Sounds sexy.”
The faeries hesitated as one.
“The trouble is,” Malachi said after they all shared a look without Teazle and came to the conclusion that he was the spokesperson, “we’ve been stuck so long here that we don’t remember the answer. Everyone remembers “the queen’s magic,” but nobody actually knows what that means anymore.”
Madrigal nodded. “All the fey exist at all levels of faery—all the true fey, I should say—across time, but this place has been stuck fast, nobody has gone beneath it or travelled up past it since the time of the fall, when… the trouble is that we like to put important information and things where they can’t be found by accident, or tripped over,
or used unwisely…”
“To hide something is to lose it,” Poppy put in eagerly. “Otherwise, it’s not properly hid.”
“And so,” Malachi concluded, “we’d like to tell you, but we can’t.”
“I see,” said Teazle, marvellously amused. “So the answer to our problem is down below, where we can’t get at it. You think it would be bad for this Jack person to get the key and undo the lock… but really you can’t be sure about that.”
“It must be bad, or it wouldn’t be lost,” Viridia pointed out, her voice rising at the end of her statement to indicate that she was declaring the obvious to an idiot, lifting her chin as she did so.
“Touche,” Teazle said. “I don’t need to know stories. I need to know how to get to my wife. Where is she, Fruits?” He looked expectantly at Madrigal and licked his lips again.
Madrigal stared at him. “Jack’s city,” she said. “If you walk in you won’t walk out.”
“I don’t need to walk,” Teazle got up and shook some of the darkness off himself. “Who’s with me?”
There was a universal pause.
“We fear the unlocking of what lies underneath,” Madrigal said, to explain it as Teazle waited. “We don’t know what it will mean. Before the fall Faery was a monarchy ruled by the King and Queen and all of us were in their courts, high and low. Since the fall we have been an anarchy. In part we’ve succumbed to warlordism, like here, where Jack’s madness holds sway. But not everywhere. Above, we don’t all want to go back to the old ways, but with the return of the old magic the old manner must come back, it’s feared.”
“Who knows the truth?” Teazle asked.
Madrigal and the girls shrugged. Nixas shook his head hopelessly. But Malachi took a deep breath. The others turned to stare at him.
“The one who knows all of it,” he said, with fear and resignation. “The patterner.” His voice dropped even further and he whispered, “Lachesis.”
“Ahhhh…” sighed the demon and sat back on his heels. “Zal’s friend.”
Now it was the faeries’ turn to stare.
“Is she a faery?” Teazle asked after a second. He genuinely didn’t know.
“Not exactly,” Malachi said. “In the same way that her sister isn’t Dead and her other sister isn’t a Ghost.”
“Do you demons know something more about the Kindly Ones?” Madrigal asked, her face childlike with attention.
“They are like the angels,” Teazle said. “They came before us, or, at least, in a different way. They are closer to the aether, further from matter. This makes them godlike to aetherial creatures, in the way that the ultimate material creation is godlike to material beings.”
“We never knew what that last material thing was,” Poppy said sadly.
“It’s obvious,” Teazle replied, and when Poppy gave him a blank look he said, “Lila.”
“Who is Lila?” Madrigal said.
“My wife,” Teazle said. “But to be more accurate, she isn’t yet finished, so I may be premature in calling her into equality with the Fates and suchlike. Certainly she was made by their equivalents in the material plane.”
“Others,” Viridia whispered, shivering.
“No wonder you were so damn keen to get wed,” Malachi snarled.
Teazle laughed. “That wasn’t the reason.” He got up and stretched. “I’ll be heading out now, if you point me in the direction of the city.”
Malachi sighed with unhappiness at the idea. “One by one we’ll all go in and get stuck.”
“You have no faith,” the demon said. “What happened to make you all so certain?”
“The turning of the lock,” Viridia replied. “When Jack was imprisoned here, and all below shut fast. Above things may change by and by, but nothing moves here. How could it?”
Madrigal abruptly stood up and kicked over the fire, scattering its embers and ashes, causing the others who hadn’t stood up yet to leap backwards and tumble over in the snow. “He wasn’t always mad, but winter is the worst time. You can’t go alone. I’ll come along. Cat, come with us. Nixas, you too. You horses head back to my westerly house, it’s along the lakeshores, on the other side from the city. If we can get out we’ll meet there. If there’s trouble at least you can have the lake.”
“Trouble!” Teazle said dreamily. “Now you’re talking.”
Lila and Zal followed Moguskul as Jack ordered: they walked through the narrow streets, beneath the drunken overhangs of two-storey buildings and the icicle-bound edges of snow-laden roofs. They wound through little circles where houses faced each other around frozen fountains, the water caught in midsplash so that the droplets hung in the air. The meaning of this was clear; time had frozen in this winter, not only the weather and the land. Nobody was about, though they heard many voices and saw movement in the warm yellowed windows of the homes and stores, and their path was mapped by footprints of all kinds and sizes.
“Where is everyone?” Lila dared, watching her breath frost in the bitter air.
“This close to midwinter it’s curfew come sunset,” Moguskul said. His voice was gravelly and resonant, full of emotion which, after some replays, Lila decided was anger. “All are indoors awaiting the dawn. The streets aren’t safe.”
“Why?”
But she got no answer. Inside her chest, Tath was coiled like a spring. Between the two of them Lila could feel the answer, distinct and clear—the streets were hunted by night. She shared a look with Zal and saw him thinking the same thing. They didn’t need to ask to know who the hunter was and it made her shiver involuntarily. To give some relief, and to find a way to voice her conclusion, she said, “But aren’t these Jack’s people?”
“They’re their own people,” Moguskul said, treading on with the same stolid movement that had kept them going for the last half hour. “They bide in Jack’s city. That’s all. Safer here.” His last two words carried as much weight as any lengthy statement. They said, with their tone and timbre, that every faery in this part of the world had surrendered to Jack’s power rather than challenge it. In their hearts they felt rebellious and resentful, but they weren’t prepared to take a stand. Now that they were within the enemy, their chances of revolt had diminished. Moguskul’s few words stood in a stark testament to that, she felt. He would not speak directly. Jack was listening, he implied, always and everywhere.
The chocolate box appearance of the faery town only grew as they neared its centre. Buildings became grander, taller, and more ethereal, with spires and delicate icework where a human hand would have set iron as rails or decoration or bars. Snow covered everything like a thick blanket, so heavy that even one more snowfall looked as though it would be enough to flatten everything. The whole world bent under its weight into soft angles and mysterious curves where drifts had caught in the eddies and built new geometries in the alleys and at the turns of the street. Sound was dampened to almost nothing. Golden squares and lozenges lit their way, from the windows which she tried to look through, but saw only the light shining, nothing else. Meantime the cold itself was continuously growing as the night deepened, and it bit hard. Its teeth sparkled on every surface, bright frost. Lila was thinking how pretty it was when she caught sight of something on those brittle surfaces and stopped to look.
At first she thought it was just some reflected colour but as she got closer, and then used her lenses to zoom in, she saw that every flat crystal of frost had an image trapped on it, like photographs reduced and set on microfilm. She bent down to the drift by her knee to see more clearly. Every crystal was different. The images weren’t still however, they moved. She saw tiny figures and skeins of light which at first she didn’t understand. They went through routines.
A fat-bellied man with a beard and pointed hat capered. A child ran laughing, looking back over his shoulder, along the street. A vortex of lights coalesced into the face of a grinning, wicked satyr, then fell apart.
They repeated endlessly.
“Let’s go,” Mogusku
l grated beside her. He made to grab her shoulder but Zal struck his hand aside.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Nothing for you to mind,” he said. “We’ll be late. Follow me.”
She glanced back and found the satyr staring at her. Not falling apart. Staring. It made a sound, or its lips moved, and in the crystal beside it the fat-bellied faery stood still and looked at her. A hand grabbed her T-shirt collar, pulled. She heard a fight start behind her as she stared, utterly absorbed by the sight before she was thrown into a drift and lost the vision.
They had spoken in unison, their lips moving though they made no sound at all.
Help us.
A heavy body fell against her; deadweight stinking of wet fur. She stumbled and powered up sharply, knocking Moguskul aside as he was struggling to right himself. He was nimble and turned his stagger into a sidestep, coming around ready to attack. She saw Zal poised a few metres away. Moguskul hissed and shook the heaviness of elfinduced sleep off him like an animal. “You’re no human,” he said to her, with a mixture of resentment and curiosity. “But you smell like one, and you look like one. No demon either,” he turned to Zal and curled his lip, doglike, “But you smell like one and you fight like one even though you use the elf trick-smothering bastard.”
“Sweet dreams,” Zal said unpleasantly, though he was quite relaxed now and glanced at Lila to check that she was all right.
“Save your breath, sonny,” the huge hunter replied, making a show of adjusting his clothing as he swiftly checked his weapons. “You’ll need that later.”
“There are people inside the ice,” Lila said. “I was only asking why.”
“There are lots of things around abouts,” Moguskul replied. He set his jaw and turned. “None of them your business. Follow.”
“No,” Zal said.
“You must come with me to the castle,” the hunter said, halting but not turning. “If you do not, I will make you.” He was resigned to it.
“Why?” Lila said, getting ready for combat.
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