Close to, they looked very little like Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner. Close to, everything about them—age, features, dress, gender—pulled apart into fuzziness and shimmering smudge, a newspaper photograph blown up beyond clarity. They smiled and moved their mouths and made human sounds, and no one else seemed to notice that they were no more human than cream cheese. Looking at them for very long made Farrell feel dizzy and seasick. He thought he would die if they should happen to touch him.
“Simulacra,” Ben said tonelessly. “The old Norse wizards made things like that; Egil knew about them. Easy enough to create, but they go bad fast. These will rot away into air by sundown—she only wanted them to hold us here for a while. Worked just fine.” He was gripping Farrell and Julie like a pair of hammers, using them to batter a way through the crowd sweeping across the tourney field. Farrell sheltered his lute and kept looking backward, straining for one more glimpse of the simulacra, although he dreaded the idea of their soft, grinning, bloodless images sticking to his retinas. Then the three of them were out on the street, gasping under the parking lot portcullis, and Julie was saying, “My bike’s parked on Escalona, I’ll meet you at the house.” But Ben held tightly onto her arm as she turned away.
“You meet us right here. You are not to go to the house alone.” His voice was as gray as his face, so low that the late-afternoon traffic all but drowned it, but Julie looked at him and nodded, and Ben let her go.
She was waiting astride the BSA when they returned in Madame Schumann-Heink. Ben leaned out of the window and called to her. “Take the back road, around the hill.” The BSA made a sound like feeding time in hell and leaped forward past the tents and pennons and TV trucks on the lawn of the Waverly. The two falcons were still circling above the hotel, and Farrell could see them in his rear-view mirror long after the blue-and-gold Sagittarius of the League for Archaic Pleasures had sunk from view.
“Why this way? It’s no quicker.” The BSA was flying ahead of them on the laneless foothill road, dipping in and out of traffic like a darning needle, committing Farrell to a steady flow of criminal offenses just to keep Julie in sight.
Ben said only, “Yeah, it is,” the words half muffled by his fist as he crouched forward against the dashboard. His other hand kept coming back to the gearshift, gripping it hard enough to make the rusty metal creak like rope, no matter how many times Farrell slapped it away.
Farrell said, to be saying something, “Those things, those doubles, she did a pretty good job. If she hadn’t tried to improve on herself a bit—”
“I told you, that shit is easy.” Ben’s voice was angry and insulting, unraveling like the simulacra. “Sorcerer’s apprentice stuff, goddamn training exercises. Will you pass that senile moron now, for Christ’s sake?”
“Will you give me my goddamn gearshift back?” Farrell swung out and around a quarter-mile of station wagon, whose driver promptly speeded up, making a three-lane freeway out of the road for a brief but thrilling period.
Beside him, too bitterly frightened to pay any respect to imminent death, Ben muttered, “She is not that good, she is just not that good. Sia could butter the walls with her.” Farrell passed a truck and a schoolbus on a blind curve, because Madame Schumann-Heink was at her very best going downhill.
A long string of tarnished-silver clouds suddenly jolted into motion all together, exactly as if a train were towing them. That was the only warning Farrell had before the wind hit, making the VW shudder and boom, like the time the bear smelled my tuna fish in Yosemite. Madame Schumann-Heink wallowed almost to a stop until he threw her into second gear and struggled on down the slope, concentrating on nothing but keeping her from going over. The rain courteously held off long enough for them to reach the bottom of the decline and start up the other side; then the trees went out and the windshield turned to cement. Madame Schumann-Heink’s headlights only really worked in top gear, and her wipers were overmatched in a heavy dew. Farrell spread himself over the wheel, navigating by the lights coming toward him and silently reminding Kannon that he knew a friend of hers.
Ben was frantic from the moment the rain started, screaming at Aiffe and Farrell alike, while Madame Schumann-Heink rolled and sputtered and chattered her transmission and kept going. Farrell would have missed the BSA entirely if an approaching headlight had not picked it out, almost upside down in a manzanita bush a little way from the road, with Julie trying to pull her legs free of it. He stamped on the brakes, which floored faster than the accelerator ever did, skidded suicidally enough to shake Ben back to functional sanity, and pulled up at last with one tire in a ditch and a great many total strangers honking for his blood. At that point, give or take a little, the hail began.
Julie was soaked, dazed, and furious, but unharmed, swearing in Japanese, as Farrell had never heard her do, while Ben and he carried her back to the bus and dried everyone off with bedrolls and oil rags. “Black ice,” she kept snarling, “black ice in fucking September, and both forks bent to hell. Okay, now the bitch dies.” There was no talk of salvaging the motorcycle; they left it to bleach in the desert and lunged along, while hailstones the size of gumballs flayed the remaining paint off Madame Schumann-Heink. Two side windows blew out, but the windshield held, though Farrell worried more about the engine vibrations as he felt them through the frame. He had driven the ancient VW by the seat of his pants for too long not to know when his seat felt wrong.
The back road followed the eastern frontier of the university, flirted momentarily with a freeway, considered a serious career as a link between Avicenna and the incorporated shopping malls beyond the hills, then shrugged and looped down toward drowsily flowering Scotia Street. The hail was slacking off, but the wind still came clawing out of a sky the color of phlegm. Ben said heavily, “I thought maybe she wouldn’t be watching for us on this road. I’ve never seen her do anything with weather, I didn’t think.” The last words trailed away into hopeless exhaustion, and Julie took his hands between her own.
There was an explosion behind them, and then another, and Farrell said, “She’s good with engines, too. We just blew two pistons.” He cut the motor, sighed very deeply, and let Madame Schumann-Heink drift the last three blocks to Sia’s house, braking to a stop at the ragged rosemary hedge and the redwood flags leading like invading footprints straight to the place where the front door had been. The carving that Sia had been working on that morning was propped on the back of the living-room sofa. Farrell sat at the curb and looked at it through the hole in the house.