A half-dozen dream-catchers dangle before a broad window, colors washed away by the glooming on the other side of the glass, relieved only by the pinpoint brilliance of a lamp across the street, there before a three- or four-storey pile of bricks, the huge high windows of it as dark as everything else. She lifts a hand, surprising the shadows, reaches along the sill to nudge a small round mirror in an octagonal frame, shifting it until the silvered surface catches a corner of streetlight flaring, she blinks, lashes artfully thickened by mascara, lids carefully lined. Scoots the mirror back as clack of latch, key-jangle, lights flick on out in the front room, “what we’ve been doing,” someone’s saying, “I think you’ll see,” and she sits up, smoothing wrinkles from her lap.
Lights flick on in here, and there she is, sat on the couch in her charcoal suit, corkscrew curls, dourly patient mien, but he doesn’t seem to see her as he bustles in, grizzled and jowly, doughy in tie-dye, to lean over the big desk, shuffling through an assortment of red- and blue-jacketed files. The second man stays in the doorway, tall and achingly slender in a long pale cardigan, and he does seem to see her, a smile cocked in his lush brown beard, so neatly combed.
“Here we are,” says the grizzled man, manila folder held up, a trophy, “participation,” he says, and then he sees her, too, and his bluster’s whisked away. “Who,” he says, “how, how did you, what are you doing here?”
“Might we have the room, Mr. Stiles?”
“I,” he says, looking to the man in the doorway, who, still smiling, shrugs a slender shoulder.
“A few minutes only,” she says.
“I could just,” he says, pointing, past the man in the doorway, out. “I’ll wait in the car,” he says, stepping back into the front room. At the sound of the outer door closing, she says, “You despise him.”
“Nelson?” says the man in the doorway. “That’s a strong word, despise. I merely prefer when I don’t have to think of him.”
“And why do you have to think of him now?”
“Can we skip, to where you tell me I’m in your way, I need to get out of it?” he’s stepping out of the doorway, into that back room, “you’ll have to forgive me, I’m not up on the etiquette in this sort of situation.”
“What sort of situation is that, Mr. Lake?”
“Luke,” he snaps, and then, “the situation,” gathering up his splintered insouciance, “of being ambushed by an occult operator.”
“Are you feeling ambushed, Mr. Luke?”
“Just, Luke.”
“Plain, simple Luke.”
“That was you, wasn’t it. The sunburst, downtown, a couple days ago.”
She looks to the mirror on the sill, the reds and greens of the frame now clear in the artificial light. “We’re not the only players at this table, Luke.”
“What I don’t know,” he says, folding his arms, “is if it means your little excursion across town was a success, or a failure.”
“Why do you find yourself having to think of Mr. Stiles?”
That smile in his beard flashes teeth. “You must have some idea,” he says. “You knew enough to meet me here.”
Her arm, stretched out along the back of that couch. The rumples shadowy soft of her charcoal sleeve, of her exactingly baggy trousers, one leg crossed over the other, glossy grey pump tocking aloft there, a metronome portentously adagio. The expertly painted expression brightly expectant.
“He has something I want.”
That expectancy dims a little, disappointed. The metronome ceases.
“Need,” he says. “His, contacts. The good name of this, organization,” with a gesture that takes in the back room, the front room, the desk, the files.
“The Urban Restoration squad,” she says. “Founded by Nelson Stiles, and Michael Sinjin Lake.”
Not a trace of that smile can be found in his beard.
“What I don’t know,” she says, “what I can’t, quite, discern, is, well,” a fillip of her fingers, “why.”
He looks down, lush beard lapping his shoulder, thick hair brushing the cardigan lopped open over a stark white shirt, his khakis the color of sand, his monk-strap sandals. “Surely,” he says, and then, looking back up to her, a hint of that smile returning, “you’ve heard my speeches.”
“Oh, indeed,” she says. “And read, the interview, in Street Roots. You’ve managed quite a lot in little over a week.”
“Then you know.”
“One bad day,” she says, limned eyes widening as she relishes the quote. “Your message discipline is admirable. All the petit lumpen. But,” leaning forward, elbows braced on her knees, “to what end, Luke. Toward what purpose.”
“That,” he says, and there’s his smile complete again, and his teeth. “That’s how I’m going to do it. No one, not a one of you, believes, that I say only what I mean. That I’ll do everything I say.”
“The dispossessed,” she says, “reclaiming what was theirs. Well.” Hands on her knees now, pushing, up on her feet. “You are not in our way today, Luke.” Stepping close beside him, she takes in a long, savoring sniff. Favors him with a benedictive nod.
He doesn’t watch her leave. But when there is no clack of latch or groan of hinge, he turns in the doorway, with a snort, to see that front room empty.
•
His suit, his shirt, his tie, all coolly subtle blues and greys and here and there a touch of pink, and what’s left of his hair’s been slicked straight back. Arms crossed before him, he worries at the watch about his wrist, shining silver, bulbous crystal and a heavy, segmented band.
A laugh bursts over the burble and hum of polite conversation and startled, blinking, he looks up, across the spare crowd in that wide room, there’s Pyrocles in pearly blue, there by the great curving wall of glass, and hard beside him a squat man, thickly thewed, shoulders still a-wobble with hilarity, glossy black hair wrapped in a blue scarf, his two-tone shirt of pink and ivory, embroidered across the back with calligraphy that says Gutter Perfection, crossed by the worn brown leather strap of a sling holster.
Becker looks away.
It’s a varied crowd, these knights and peers and sundry others gathered in this room. The man at the makeshift bar beside him, a folding table, really, dull green jacket and white meshback cap, nodding as he lifts a plastic coupe of fizzing wine from the ranks of identical coupes. The short woman across the table, her black dress brief, taking up two coupes to hand one to another woman, willowy tall, her jacket of black leather. The man there in a linen suit, his sun-browned head quite bald, explaining something desultorily to the woman uncomfortably buttoned up in cyan and bared skin, her close-cropped hair a virulent chartreuse. The stone-faced man, impassive in his olive-green fleece vest. The young man holding court by a waist-high pane of glass, a balustrade about a stairwell leading down somewhere, his pale white tangled dreads just touched with gold, his slim blue suit, his shirt and tie the same flat shade of dusty pink, directing with a magnanimous gesture the attention of those about him to the man at his side, wide face warmly red, jacket of indigo twill.
Becker seizes a coupe, wincing at the slosh of pink wine that dribbles his fingers, takes up a second with more care, and sets off through tendrils of converse toward that great high wall of glass, the evening outside flatly black, blown out by the bright lights here within, and the two men stood before. He offers one of the coupes to Pyrocles, even as he sips from the other, “sorry,” he says, a winsome shrug. “Only two hands.”
The squat man doesn’t seem put out. “Good to see you again, Arnold,” he says, with grave bonhomie. Becker’s eyes slip sidelong to Pyrocles, who lifts his coupe, “Joaquin,” he says, “is to be named this night the Shootist, of our court.”
“Provisionally,” says the squat man. “Needs must we await your next Samani to make it official.” The matte black butt of a pistol grip peeps from that brown leather holster, strapped across his chest, snugged up under a pectoral. “Soon enough,” Pyrocles says, turning aside, “soon enough. Excellency!” to the young man approaching, his blue suit and his pale, pale locks, “how provident, that we might supplement our ranks with the likes of friend Joaquin!”
“Indeed,” says the Viscount. “It seems roses, in the end, do trump saltwater.”
“Excellency, I unfolded a map,” says Joaquin, “and with a finger traced the route from where I’d been, to here, to there, and when I saw just how much further north I’d have to go?” He shakes his scarf-wrapped head. “There’s rain enough in Oregon for my taste.”
The Viscount reaches back, beckoning, then hands a plastic coupe to Joaquin, “We merely await the arrival of Southeast,” he’s saying, “and then we’ll be about our Apportionment.” Looking off to one side, “Someone!” he calls, “play music!” Turning back, smiling tightly as with a clack there’s heard the groaning eloquence of an unseen cello. “Of course, Shootist, you’ve no streets yet to till, but nonetheless you’ll have tonight your measure and your due.”
Joaquin’s nod is one of phlegmatic approbation. “Southeast,” he says. “This would be the gallowglas,” but then, a puzzled frown at the Viscount’s admonishing hand, “I’d thought the Duchess to be a gallowglas?”
“Her grace,” says Pyrocles, “does not,” as the Viscount says, “I fear the only mortal to grace us with his presence is the Anvil’s, ah, companion,” a knuckle to his chin, “it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Becker,” says Pyrocles. “Arnold,” says Joaquin. Becker empties his coupe with a gulp. “Even so,” says the Viscount, looking to a bustle at the doorway of that wide room, “ah!” he says. “And here’s Southeast. Clear the table! Make room, make room!”
Stepping from the hall, his rough brown jacket pattered with fresh rain, his hair a jet black cap, beside him an older man in a blue coat, shoving back a damp grey mane, up to the folding table that’s been cleared, not a coupe left in sight, as the Viscount stands himself at the other end. “Luys!” he says. “Good Sir Mason, what bricks have you brought us tonight?”
Luys sets a modest canvas sack on the table, “There was no time to press and mold, I fear,” he says, tugging open the mouth of it to reveal a plastic bag within, sealed up about a heap of loosely golden dust.
“Beauty’s in the stuff itself, and not the shape it takes,” says the Viscount. Looking up, from the sack to the crowd of them, thick about the table, “Friends,” he says, “peers, neighbors, gentles all, before we divvy up our dower, a moment, to mark the loss of the Glaive Rhythidd, wise counselor, trusted advisor, dear friend, beloved brother,” an inclination toward the bald man in the linen suit, who does not look up to meet it. “A Huntsman, murdered in the street; an awful parody sent to accost us – let us hope her majesty’s – ”
“Your sister,” says someone in that crowd, quite low, but audible enough.
“I,” says the Viscount, suddenly cold and terrible, “have. No. Sister. Therefore,” a deep breath, “it cannot be said my sister has done,” lifting his hands, fingers spread, “anything. Now. Let us take another moment, more pleasant, I assure – ”
“What of the Count?”
“To admire,” grits the Viscount, turning away, a gesture back, toward the great dark empty window behind, “the labor undertaken by our Soames, to restore this hall to its former grandeur – ”
“At great expense!” says the man in the meshback cap, and the tension run through them all relaxes, then, with chuckles, nudges, though their attentions all return to fix upon the bright sack on the table. “All hail the Soames,” says the Viscount, “and his mighty rabbits. Now – ”
“Where is the Count?” It’s the stone-faced man, off to one side, glaring fixedly not at the sack but the Viscount, whose hands are on the table now, by a small set of silver scales, the precise brass cylinders of graduated weights. “Grandfather,” he says, “is indisposed.”
“And the Princess?” says the woman in black leather. “Also indisposed?”
“Baronness,” says the Viscount, “Barons, peers and delegates – let us cut and weigh and portion out our bounty. There’s time enough for business, at another time.” He’s lifted a slender glass tube from the neat wooden rack of them, there, gleamingly upright, empty, and the breath of the room is held as he dips it into the modest sack of light.
Becker looks down, the pinkly sticky coupe in his hand, the sharp crease of his trousers, the grey of them shot through with threads of blue and lavender and silver, his softly polished tobacco leather shoes. Shuff of a sliding step aside. Under a threadbare scrim of freshly unswept sawdust, spangled still with crumbs of broken glass, a coprolite of caulk, the floor, it’s faded, but an unmistakable stain, an irregularly ruddy brown, blotching once-polished boards. Becker steps back, and back again, away and off, “I’ll, uh,” he says, “bathroom,” but Pyrocles has pressed close about the table with the rest of them.
Out, into the hall, long and dim, lit only by a spot at the far end striking shadows from the rails and stiles of a yellow front door. Becker feels his hesitant way along until there, to the left of that door, can be made out a stairwell climbing its shadowy way up in an enclosed spiral, and a man stood on the first step, arms folded in a suit forbiddingly dark, skeptically chewing his lower lip. Becker turning about steps right, blinkingly into a lemon-bright kitchen, a woman in a white apron, kerchief about her hair, halted in the clattering act of unloading an armful of empty plastic coupes into an ungainly garbage bag, “Not yet!” barks someone, someone else, a grumpily narrow man, shirtsleeves tightly rolled above his elbows, flat black vest buttoned up to the white collar upright like a fence about his gin-blossomed jowls. He’s roughly stripping the plastic wrap from a plastic tray of chopped raw vegetables, cucumber slices, pepper strips of red and yellow and green, whole cherry tomatoes, baby carrots orange and magenta and yellowing white, florets of broccoli and cauliflower, “Not yet!” he snaps, again, more plastic trays of crudités stacked one on another beside him, “it will come, it will come,” and he flings a gesture at the doorway, but Becker’s already backing through it, “Sorry,” he’s saying, “sorry,” back out into the hall.
•
“Moody!” he bellows, boots loud on the boards in this darkly narrow alley between towering boat-bows crowded close, the unlit façades of floating homes, “Moody!” over the lop and slap of the water below, the ringing chimes of fittings jostled, taut buzz of cables strummed by wayward gusts. “You will answer for what you’ve done!” Kicking a cleat wound about with thick grey line that stretches a-sag out over the water to the blocky snout of a houseboat, porched-over bow of it blankly anonymous behind those darkling screens. “Hey!” No gangplank braced between wharf and deck, no sign of one laid about anywhere. He plants himself on that very edge, slopping water below, cargo shorts and a bulky sweater, pale tangle of beard and unkempt hair. What little light there is to be found here snags the edges of the swords he carries, one in either hand, spread challengingly wide as he roars once more, “Moody!”
A flare dazzles over him and wharf and bow and all, he steps back, an arm thrown up to shade his eyes, blade bright in his hand, “Moody?” he says. A step toward the light, and another, “Face me, you wretch!”
“Ain’t nobody here, Harper,” the snarl in response. “But keep it down anyway.” The light swoops away, settles brightly to reveal the rough grey boards between them, his boots, her enormous canvas deck shoes. “Peg-Meg?” he says, querulously.
“Always the games.”
“You went over to Moody?”
A guttural plosive that might be a laugh, or a spit, or a cough. “Moody works for the Commanding Officer. Commanding Officer rents. This dock?” That light swings back and forth between them, tarries, lapped a ways up his bare shins. “The Soames,” she says.
“You’ve gone over to the rabbits?” he says, even more incredulously, and the light swoops away, back down the length of that alley, “Needed a watchman,” she says.
“Meg Greentooth, gone to the rabbits,” he says. “Five-fingered Pwyll to the hounds. Red Gaveston to his doxies, all in a day, I just don’t – ”
“Kern Gradasso gone to dust,” she says. The light’s switched off.
“Margie,” he says, thickly.
“Go,” she says.
•
The colorless key stops just short of the lock, bobs a moment, is folded back into fingers that seize the handle, lever it easily down, unlocked already. He opens the flimsy door, and a groan of springs as he steps his weight within, head and shoulders stooped against the close curl of the ceiling. A step to the right, and he sits himself with a creak in the booth there in the nose of the unlit trailer. A crackle across the little table, from a cigarette’s glowing coal.
“Your grace,” he says.
“My lord the Mason,” says Jo Maguire.
“I had thought you’d meant to quit.”
“I meant,” she says, “to walk out of the city and never come back.” Another crackling flare. “Lately I’m shit with the grand pronouncements.”
“Where had you meant to go, on foot?” he asks, gently, genuinely interested.
“I don’t know,” she says. “East.”
“That way lies the desert.”
“Not like any thought went into it.” The coal swoops to be swiftly snuffed, a ruddy glimpse of the rim of a plate, his closed hands on the table, bit of leather tied about one wide wrist. “But there,” she says. “That was it. Last one.”
“As pronouncements go, that’s not so grand.”
“It’s a promise,” she says. “Big difference. Whatcha got, there.”
His one hand’s tucking away that key. His other, the one that leaks a faintest glimmer through his fingers’ interstices, he opens to reveal a slender glass tube, capped by dark-waxed cork, and within a filament of gold. “A portion,” he says. “Same as any other.”
“Didn’t know we’d started giving ’em out in test tubes,” she says. “Classier than sandwich bags, I guess.”
“Do you believe her majesty?”
“Do I what now?”
“Is that not,” his voice like gravel underfoot, “the crux of this conversation?”
“You weren’t there,” she says, flatly. “You didn’t see him, you didn’t hear him. You weren’t there.”
“I have, now. If he’s truly what you say.”
“If you had, if you truly had? There’d be no doubt.”
“Yet there is,” he says, simply.
A moment passes, before Jo says, “So. You don’t. Believe her.”
A shuff, of corduroy on naugahyde, the clink of crockery displaced. “On this particular point,” he says, picking his careful way, “I do maintain, her majesty’s mistaken,” and then, in a rush, “for I do not doubt the most undeniably compelling of reasons.” A heavy breath, taken in. “I do not doubt her majesty believes. But what she’s done, my lady, because of that belief? Threatens to sunder court, and city, all.”
Click, chime, something in her hands. “What is it she’s done, Luys.”
“Denied the Hound his portion. Banished a fifth entire. Charged them with impossible demands.”
Click, rasp, a pop of flame from the lighter in her hand, that brings out the color in his rough brown jacket, her pale bare arms, “That it?” she says. Couple-three unwashed plates at her elbow, the cigarette butt, a desiccated tea bag crumped against a mug. “That’s all that’s got you upset?”
“My lady,” he says, his expression grave, “it is more than enough.”
Whick, and darkness once more. Squeak as she sits back on her bench.
“Your,” he says, after a moment, considering, “absence,” he says, testing the weight of each word, “did greatly, upset, her majesty.”
“So it’s my fault.”
“I mean only that it was upon your grace’s vanishment that she retreated, to that woman’s warehouse.” Table-creak as he leans toward her. “When you found your way back, it filled us all with hope. And when you helped her turn the owr, that hope was fulfilled, to overflowing,” his voice a husk, he swallows. “But then you left. Again. Walked away. And she announced her plan to give it freely, to any and all, save Southwest.”
Click, chime. Click. “You left out the bits,” she says, “where Southwest attacked her.”
“An exaggeration,” he says.
“Where you there, for the first one?”
“A disagreement, over how best to safeguard her majesty.”
“What, whether to fuck, marry, or kill?”
“No harm was intended – ”
“Were you there?” Slip and pop as she leans toward him, clack of plates, “way I heard it, Marfisa had to throw the goddamn throne through the window to get them both out safe.”
“The window,” he says, “has been restored.”
“Well thank God for that. And the throne? How about the King, Luys? How come nobody talks about that?” And then, “I swear, if you’d asked me, who’d be the true believer, and who’s the triangulating, equivocating fuck-up – ”
“My lady!” He starts back, blinking, as the lighter’s flame licks up once more between them. “Am I?” she says.
“Of course.”
“Then this?” says Jo. “Stops.” Click, the flame is gone, and sudden once more darkness, and complete. “No more footsie with Agravante. Got it?”
Scrape, a grunt, groan of trailer-springs, a gasp, “Let go,” she says.
“We will be torn apart.”
“And you’re the only one can hold it together?”
“Someone,” he says, “has to,” slip, scuff, the hiss of her breath, “Jo,” he says, a roughly secret whisper. “Her majesty is mad. This scheme of hers, her mulish stubbornness, her wasteful dalliances – she sent her Huntsman, it could have been you, to a needless, useless death. Jo. Listen to me. Jo. There is no Bride. A Queen, two Crones, and there is no Bride. Do you,” clink, a clunk, “do you understand?”
Squeak, and a sigh of the cushion, released, she’s getting to her feet. “Tomorrow,” she says. “First thing. As many of everybody as you can, meet me at that, woman’s warehouse.” A step away. “Some friends are missing. We’re gonna find them.” Clack of latch, the flimsy door swings open, streetlight spilling silvery thin, and there she stands, harshly limned against her silhouette. “Now. You want me to send in Sweetloaf? Or you gonna dally yourself?”
“Lady,” he says, choked, but the trailer judders, and she’s gone.
