The merciless daylight exposed the street's dreariness. Trash mixed with snow in the gutters, and fog lurked sulkily between the buildings with the sodden winos. It took Stepovich a moment to connect where he was to where he'd been last night. When he did,he felt cornered. This gypsy thing was going to have him, there was no avoiding it, and he didn't need to see Madam Moria stepping up into a park carriage drawn by a mismatched team of horses to know just how bad it had gotten.
Durand drove right past the team and carriage as Stepovich snapped, "Stop here." The man helping Madam Moria into the carriage was dark; no gypsy,but there was something odd about him anyway. He wore contemporary clothes, but they no more fit him than Groucho glasses and a plastic nose would have.It have.Itthe way he tucked the carriage robe around the old woman, covering her against the damp mists and the lake wind, the way he handed up her canes to her, in the forgotten courtesy of a time long past.
Had to be the Coachman. Stepovich's eyes took in details with practiced speed. The Coachman wore a flat leather cap pulled down hard over black hair that curled at the turned-up collar of his worn jacket. His eyes were dark and black mustaches framed lips full and soft as a whore's, but even sadder. His skin was olive, and wind-leathered and lined with good nature despite his mouth. His jacket just grazed the top of his narrow hips, and his jeans were tucked into boots that never came from a store. He looked at the blue-and-white as if it were a pack of wolves. He lifted an arm in a strangely defensive motion, and for an instant Stepovich thought he was reaching for a weapon. But the Coachman only clutched the front of his own shirt, and then clambered up onto the driver's seat of the carriage.
The Coachman was picking up the reins as Durand crammed on the brakes and nosed the patrol car in right in front the carriage. He and Stepovich were out of the car in an instant, Durand already pulling his gun out. Stepovich tried to calm him. "I'll take those two and fasten them down. You…"
"I'll check upstairs," Durand cut in, and he was off, either ignoring or not hearing Stepovich's,"Damnit, not alone, wait a second…"
And there he was, torn, his partner going off in the one direction he shouldn't go alone, and the carriage driver picking up the reins and the wheels were starting to turn, grating against the asphalt. "Damnit, Durand, get your ass back here," he yelled, and then spun to the carriage, shouting, "Hold it!"
He had his hand on his gun, letting them knowhow serious he was. Madam Moria looked at him with disapproval, as if she were a dowager looking down at him from the back seat of her limousine, and he were a street urchin waving a dead rat at her. She was unimpressed. The driver, in contrast, was sitting very still and straight. Stepovich moved up on them quickly. The Coachman sat so stiffly, Stepovich wondered what was wrong with him. Hiding something?The fingers that held the reins were strong and somehow elegant, a magician's hands. The horses, grey and brown, were stolid, waiting. The Coachman looked straight ahead, between his two horses, as if he were totally uninvolved in what was happening here.
"All right. Get down from there, both of you. Move slowly," He intended to shake them down quick, get them into the back of the patrol car and then go after Durand before he got his stupid ass blown off.
They weren't moving slowly; they weren't moving at all. "Did you hear me?" he demanded, wanting to grab the driver and shake him right out of his coat.Thecoat. Then swayed slightly as if getting ready to move, then was still again. Sweat was making Stepovich's uniform stick to him, and his ears were straining against hearing that single gunshot that might come at any moment. There were more sirens approaching, thank god.
"Get in." Madam Moria spoke softly, but testily, a grandma directing an ill-mannered child. "And be quick. The thread grows brittle in my fingers. If we are to follow it back and see where it leads, we must go now, before She sees it and cuts it short."
She pushed her canes to one side and gripped the edge of the carriage and leaned back as if to make room for him to climb in past her, and that was when he saw the brightness on her fingers, shining red, wet and fresh and vital. He caught movement from the corner of his eye, the driver turning and lifting something, something black, and Stepovich dove for the man, launched himself across the side of the carriage and over the seat. He hit the point of his pelvic bone going over, and landed sprawled awkwardly in the carriage, gripping the driver's wrist and shaking the handle and curled lash of a whip out of it.
The driver released it easily, and did not struggle at all. Stepovich dragged his feet up under him and knelt on the seat, gripping the man by one wrist and the front of his jacket. Christ, his hip hurt, and he tasted blood in his mouth where he'd bitten his own lip, but this guy was sitting there as straight as he could with Stepovich hanging off him, and his face impassive, only his mouth pinched tight and hard. Stepovich stared into black eyes deeper than the pits of hell.
Stepovich tightened his grip. "Now, asshole, we are going to get down quietly and slowly, you hear me?" The man nodded slowly, and Stepovich thought he saw a glint in his eyes, but it might only have been the reflection of Madam Moria's wooden cane as she brought it down smartly on the back of Stepovich's skull.
Most of his money was gone before ten
When he smiled, and took out his knife.
"All right," he said, "we'll just try once again.
But this time, we'll play for your life."
"THE GYPSY"
The fog still rested on the city like a coachman's blanket,and the Gypsy decided that there was something at work beyond the capricious ways of the weather. Yet he smelled nothing of evil in it, nor of good for that matter.Smatter. Sohat could lead him to the Wolf, and at the right time? What could lead him to his brothers?His hands twitched, and he thought he could remember a time when he would have been able to learn such a thing easily, and perhaps another time when he would simply have known. He felt a slight desire to escape, to run away, to walk by paths that only he knew. The desire wasn't strong, but it was familiar. He knew, then, that he had not only felt it before, but had acted upon it. He had turned away and run, and-
His head hurt. He took out the piece of paper,which he understood at last, and crumpled it up and threw it away. To clear his head, he breathed deeply of the fog. Even as he did so, he heard the siren-the siren that had followed him for all this time, and seemed to warn of danger impending rather than to call him toward it.
He turned in the opposite direction and began walking. The fog swirled before him, making patterns that amused him although he knew-he knew they were meaningless. What an odd thing to know, he thought.thought.Are there patterns in the fog that do have meaning?
Then he nodded to himself. Yes. This is the magic of the day, and this is a day of magic. He reached out his hands, to take hold of the power that floated in the air around him, and-"You must do this no more…use the skills of another world in this one."
Very well, then. But this world must have its own power and skills. He could find and use them, and he would, because he was-
He was-
No.
He gathered his memories as a child gathers spilled marbles. No distractions, not now, when he had, perhaps, the chance to do something.
He was here, in the city, in the forest of walls, the ocean of lights, the wilderness of sounds, meadows of currents and tides of forces beyond the imaginings of the old gods. Light? Moving, twin beams stabbing through the streets, eyes to peer and a voice to warn,Walls? Endless, one leading to another, all of them high and eternal and shimmering. Sound? The siren was gone now, but something rumbled under his feet,and music came from nowhere and everywhere, and it was the voice of the Beast. And the streets which linked them, forming a mosaic as intricate as the veins on an oak leaf, each different, each the same.