Alter's Writing Journal

Nameless, Chapter 2

2009-05-23T22:26:05Z

As I had expected, there were mushrooms coming up in Fort Tryon park. Not that many; if I was really looking, I'd have gone up to Van Courtland Park, in Riverdale. But then, I wasn't really looking for mushrooms for eating; in general, if you go to an oracle, and the future he sees for you is so appalling he runs in terror, I'd recommend avoiding wild mushrooms for at least a day or two.

The sort of things I was looking for weren't particularly tasty, but could be used to achieve various magical effects. And I found them. A few slime molds and a bit of old oak with green stain, but it wasn't just fungus I was looking for; I also picked up a ragged little chunk of garnet, a dime that had been in the ground since 1923, and the tail feather of a hawk. There was other stuff that I might have been able to use – a discarded hypodermic needle, and a used condom – but I mostly don't work in those directions, and also, eww.

Fort Tryon Park was one of my favorite hunting grounds, not so much because it was rich in the sort of random trash that wizards use, but because it wasn't as thoroughly picked over by other wizards in the way of somewhere like Central Park, or Union Square. Both because a lot of wizards can't be bothered with the trip uptown, and because of the between places of Fort Tryon.

There isn't anywhere without between places, areas which aren't exactly of this world, but which aren't part of the inner, magical world. The sizes vary, from pinholes I've embedded into shotgun shells, to fairy kingdoms almost the size of Manhattan. And while the between places of Fort Tryon weren't particularly dangerous, they were . . . grotty. There was one full of filthy, long toothed child things with knives, for instance, and another featured shambling corpses moaning around decaying Victorian ironwork.

The feral children, the corpses, and so on, weren't real threats, not to someone who was prepared, but they were gross and unpleasant, and people with more skill than I am did their shopping at classier joints, as it were. Which is just one of the many reasons why I'm more formidable than most people who are better than me at magic.

Anyhow, my point is that while it's not a pleasant place for workers in magic, Fort Tryon Park is a safe place for workers in magic. Or at least, it's supposed to be. Just after I found that dime, someone tried to kill me. I was a bit downhill from the Cloisters, on a path with the occasional other person, and I had sort of been ignoring the various joggers and dogwalkers that had been ignoring me. Then one of the joggers, who looked like every other thirty-something contract attorney trying to stay fashionably stringy, tried to stab me.

It was purest luck that I saw the glint of the knife before it hit. It was not even a little bit a matter of luck that her knife couldn't get through my windbreaker. That had been a long and tiring process, but once I finished, there were few windbreakers as knife and bullet resistant as my attractive gray Member's Only number, vintage 1985. Which I think is cool again, rather than painfully elderly.

When her knife bounced off my jacket, I knocked her back with the butt of my shotgun, and then I shot her in the face. That ended the argument. Or at least, that ended that phase of the argument; once she fell down, a pair of cops further along the path started shooting at me.

This was wrong for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't think that police are supposed to shoot at someone unless they're threatening someone, and I totally wasn't. I mean, it wasn't as though the jogger I shot was going to be any more dead if I shot her again. There really wasn't much left of her head, after that blast in the face. That's not the something CPR can help with. For another thing, while they looked like cops, the uniforms weren't right. I'm not an expert, but they looked like twenty years or more out of date. Also, they were shooting at me. That wasn't right at all – they shouldn't have been able to see me.

They had guns and I had guns, so I did what any rational person would do; I turned tail and ran like the dickens. The thing about a fair fight is that "fair" means "that I might lose". You keep playing games that you might lose, and you will lose, sooner than you expect. Not that running was a sure bet, but it seemed more survivable. Fort Tryon Park has a lot of stone walls and trees for ducking behind, so the chase took a while, and it took the cops a while before they could get close enough to shoot at me. It was all very invigorating, and was doubtless doing my cardiovascular system good. Of course, if one of them actually shot me, that would doubtless be bad for my cardiovascular system.

As we ran merrily through the park, I got a few more indications that the cops weren't actually cops. For one thing, they didn't talk at all – I've seen enough TV to know that they should have been yelling at me to stop, or possibly swear words. And, for another, when I wasn't looking directly at their faces, I had the impression that they looked approximately like I would have expected – white guys with mustaches. But, when I actually looked at their faces, there was nothing there, just a featureless expanse of sort of white guy colored skin. And, come to think of it, I didn't recall seeing the stabby jogger's face either, even before I shot it.

At this point, I decided to do something clever. The land of the horrible feral children wasn't far away, so I leapt a stone fence, clambered up an exposed bit of gray rockface, which gave the fake cops a few clear shots, which fortunately missed, and then I jumped into a tree, and through to the between place.

This was one that wasn't too different from the real world, or as things not from the real world called it, the outer world. The rock was still that gray Manhattan schist, the trees were still sort of scruffy and untended maple, oak, and ailanthus, but it clearly wasn't the real world, either. The air wasn't right, there weren't any birds, and nobody was shooting at me.

Nobody was shooting at me, briefly. I had a few seconds to catch my breath, but rather than being stabbed in the thigh by a fat, bespectacled fairy child, as I had been expecting, a quartet of men as faceless as the cops that had been chasing me stepped out from the behind the trees, and as soon as they spotted me, they started shooting as well.

So, back through, to more faceless people shooting at me. This time, I came out gun blazing, and actually managed to hit one of the cops. I'm not sure who was more surprised by that, him or me, but he was certainly more killed by that. One of his companion's bullets hit me in the shoulder, which was unpleasant, but the jacket turned that aside as well. Huh; I had thought that faceless magical policemen would be using something that could get through my jacket, but apparently not.

Don't get me wrong. It hurt like hell, and my pants are nowhere near as magical as my jacket, so it wasn't as though I was invulnerable. But at least something went my way.

So, I took off again, headed down towards Broadway. Behind me, I could have sworn I heard hounds baying, in addition to people crashing through underbrush, and gunfire. I took another bullet to my jacket, this one square in the middle of my back, which knocked me off me feet, but that was the last of the shots that found me, before I got out onto Broadway.

Sadly, it seemed that my pursuers were not limited to the confines of the park. I pounded down the street, they followed. And there was one guy already on the street – someone with a face, and a backpack, who started shooting at me with a rifle. The rifle was harder for me to see than his face; it had a very good invisibility spell on it. Someone who wasn't a wizard, watching that, would see him making gun shooting type motions with his hands, but wouldn't see or hear the rifle. A neat, albeit stupid trick. My eye-slide spell worked better, and must have been easier to cast.

Lord knows this wasn't the first time I was chased down Broadway by an angry mob. But it was a bigger mob than average, to judge from the sounds, and normally, they didn't have guns. Or dogs; this group had both.

Fortunately for me, there was a manhole cover near the intersection of Broadway and Dongan Place that didn't actually grant access to the NYC sewers, despite what was printed on it. I found the spell as I got close, released it. Then I darted out into traffic, and slid into the hole, a hair ahead of a gypsy cab. I put the avoidance spell back up as I started down the tunnel. Not that it would keep the various things chasing me from finding their way down after me, but if I didn't put it back up, there'd be some sort of hideous car accident within the next five minutes.

The tunnel I was in was narrow, which was great; if I were an angry mob, I'd hate to try and fit into somewhere like that. I resisted the temptation to stay close to the entrance, and shoot at them from there. One grenade would turn that from an excellent plan into a terrible plan. Instead, I scooted down the passageway for a bit, then turned and waited. There was a dull thump, probably a grenade behind me, and then nothing.

If they were trying to sneak up on me, they'd have some sort of darksight on. So, I waited a minute or so, then got a flare out of my pack, and threw it. As it turned out, there was nothing there. Whoever those faceless men and crazy people were, they had given up, rather than following me into my burrow. Which was too bad – I had all sorts of surprises waiting for people who followed me.

There were reasons why my tunnel ran up Dongan Place other than the fact that it was a street with the word "Dong" in its name. One of those was the flow of earth and air lines that the tunnel created, which gave me a sort of whirlpool, which I could use to power the sort of spells that I tend to need after being run to ground. The first was a sort of delousing; there are all sorts of subtle spells that you can put on various projectiles that'll allow you to follow someone. The delousing spell takes care of all but the very best of those.

As I had expected, there were a few spells of that sort. They had been riding the bullets, and clung like burrs to my jacket. The smart thing to do would be to lift them gently, and put them on a passing car. Unfortunately, some days, I'm not that smart, often when smart means putting some random guy I don't know in danger he's probably not capable of dealing with. So, I flushed them. Someone more pugnacious than I was might have followed the tracks of those spells back to their casters, but it was a fight I hadn't even wanted to start, let alone continue.

With that done, I popped out of what had been the coal chute of one of the apartment buildings on Dongan, and made tracks for the train station on 181st. There were other things that I had wanted to collect before I started looking into whatever it was the elves had stirred up, but it seemed like going back to Fort Tryon wasn't the best of all possible ideas.

The turnstiles at 181st street were metrocard only, just like every other turnstile in the subway system these days. But there was a little bump, where token slots used to be, so I pressed the token that the elf had given me against that. As I had suspected, it dropped through the metal, and disappeared. The turnstile turned, and, I guess, stiled, and I followed the crowd to the bank of elevators that led down to the platform.

As is usually the case, there are two elevators that work, and two that don't, and most of the people waiting knew that. But this time, the doors of one of the elevators that never worked opened. None of the other people waiting seemed to notice. I sighed, and stepped into it. The doors closed, it went down, then it went sideways for a bit, then it went further down, then the doors opened. If there wasn't a legitimate security reason for this, I'd be irritated.

The elevator doors opened, and I stepped out into a somewhat grungy corridor, of the sort that you'd expect to see in the basement of an recently abandoned building. Exposed pipes, concrete floor, the sort of industrial paint colors they liked in the 70s. I unslung my shotgun, and chambered a round, mainly because I like that "Ca-chunk CHUNK" noise that the pump makes, and also because it was a kinda creepy passageway.

There were doors along the sides of the passageway, but there wasn't any indication that I should go into any of them, so I continued down the corridor. There was a faint clink behind me, so I turned around, and raised the gun. It was Thenin, stepping out of one of those doorways, armor glittering in the fluorescent light. I didn't shoot him.

"Hiya," I said.

"I am sorry that I did not meet you at the entrance," he said. "But as I said, the probing of our defenses have grown increasingly frequent. If you'll follow me, I'll show you what I mean."

"Is this going to involve people trying to kill me?" I asked. "Because I'm really not in the mood for more people trying to kill me."

"No," replied Thenin, "we've repaired the breach. But it might be informative for you to see the exact nature of our problem."

"If you say so," I said, and followed him back through the doorway he had come out of. It might have been related to the machinery that drove the elevators – there were all sorts of winches and gears and suchlike. There were also some dead guys wearing MTA uniforms. I turned one over with my foot; he didn't have a face.

"Oh," I said. "These guys."

"You've encountered them before?" asked Thenin.

"Yeah; they seem to have taken over some of the between places in Fort Tryon Park," I said. "They were equipped with decent magic, but they weren't very good at using it."

"These are Faceless Men; they are the footsoldiers of the Dark. And, as you say, they have been moving into the neglected corners between the inner and the outer worlds. There is some Baron of the Dark who has set to make this corner of your island into his private domain."

"So you've said," I replied. If the choice was between craven flight, and having to fight legions of the evil fey to retain my home, I'd probably start looking at some apartments in the Bronx. Or Queens; depending on how I worked it, I might have a yard if I moved out to Queens. But once I had taken the magical elevator ride, it seemed discourteous not to look at whatever it was that Thenin wanted to show me, see if the snozzberries really tasted like snozzberries, and so on.

As it turned out, while the breach might have been sealed, they hadn't entirely eradicated the Faceless Men. Some were dressed as transit cops, others in armor, and they were going at it, hammers and tongs, with Eadmon and a red-headed girl that I hadn't seen before. Eadmon was bashing away with an ax, not really noticing when the things hit him, and the girl was fighting with sword and shield. It was an elegant, but remarkably pointless way to fight, and took way longer than just shooting them would have. Elves would be elves, I suppose.

"How often do you get attacks like this," I asked Thenin.

"If you had asked me that question last year," he replied, "I would have said perhaps twice a year. Now, it's every week, and the frequency has been increasing."

One of the transit workers swung a wrench at Eadmon; he took it square in his midsection, and brought his axe down, splitting the thing nearly to the waist. Another tried for the girl; she stepped back, just out of reach of its swing, and drew a line across his throat with her sword. That was the last of them.

"But nothing more serious than these guys."

"No," he said.

"They are serious enough," said the girl, coming up to us. "If they crossed-"

"Oh, come on. A dozen or so mooks at a time, attacking you somewhere that has to be fortified to hell and back? If you can't handle this-"

"He's right," said Thenin. "It's not a serious attack, not yet. They are testing our defenses, trying to work out the angle of attack for when they decide to take the well."

"Speaking of which," I said. "Now that I'm here, I may as well get a handle on what it is that you're protecting."

"Of course," said Thenin. "This way."

I followed him back to the corridor, in through another door, and then into yet another wacky elevator. This one was clearly old – hand operated brake, and a little bronze arrow that was supposed to point to either "mezzanine" or "platform". Just like an elevator that actually served a purpose, which this one probably did, back in the 1920s or whatever. We started below the platform, and went further down. This time, the defenses were more substantial; I could feel them probing at the elevator, and the people at it. If I hadn't used the token that Thenin had given me, it would have been an actively unpleasant, rather than a boring ride.

"It's interesting that these Faceless Men are the servants of the Dark," I said.

"Oh?" replied Thenin.

"Yeah; a bunch of them were shooting at me, an hour or so ago."

"So you've said," said Thenin. He didn't see what I was getting at.

"There are some that might construe that as a technical violation of the compact." For the last three hundred years, the Great Compact had regulated the interaction between various denizens of the Inner World and the wizards, or at least, those wizards who belonged to schools affiliated with the Chamber. Now, my involvement in the politics of the wizard schools was as minimal as I could manage, but I was pretty sure that shooting at me wasn't allowed.

"The compact," snorted Thenin. "That is a convenience for the Dark, nothing more – you didn't seriously expect them to keep their oaths, did you?"

As I recalled, the elves weren't signatories to the Great Compact, as they were considered too minor a power to be worth negotiating with. Or making concessions to, for that matter – I wasn't supposed to shoot at anyone on the Dark's team, but I could blow Thenin away without upsetting anyone. Well, without violating the compact.

It wasn't so much that I expected the Dark to keep their oaths; they used their magic differently than humans, so it wasn't as though oaths they made were binding, let alone oaths they made on the behalf of others of their tribe. I did, however, expect the Dark to be more careful about breaking the Compact. The peoples of the Inner World tended to believe themselves better, more real than those who lived in the real world, but there was no faction of the Inner World, dragons included, that would want to fight with the Chamber. And shooting me risked that, assuming that I had paid my dues to the Collegium of the Three Coins. Which I may not have, but that was beside the point.

"Soooooo," I said, looking over at the girl. "I'm a wizard that Thenin has called in as a sort of consultant; I met Eadmon, but we haven't been introduced."

"No, I don't suppose we have," she said.

"That's Lisa," said Thenin. "My thrall." Then he pulled the brake, and Eadmon opened the door, and we were at the well.

Nameless, Chapter 1

2009-05-14T21:02:56Z

There's a door to the street I live on. Most people can't even see the door; it doesn't register as anything other than another stretch of wall, or perhaps a ground floor apartment. But even for those who can see the door, it doesn't attract much attention. It's a metal door, painted a dull green-gray. The paint is peeling, and there's rust in the corner, and it looks like any other bit of New York urban scenery – half the buildings in the Heights have something like that to get to the spaces between the buildings, where garbage is stacked before being taken out to the curb, or where the entrance to the super's apartment is hidden.

But if you can see the door, and if you have the key to it, beyond the door lies a perpetually damp corridor between two buildings, and beyond that lies my street. There's a sign that looks a good deal like the sort you get on real streets saying "Anthony Wayne Terrace", and there are a half dozen narrow clapboard houses, on either side of a cobblestone street.

One of those houses is mine; the others are owned by other . . . well, call them people, for the sake of convenience. Some are actually people, as far as I can tell, but I haven't pried. It took a certain amount of work to get this house, and I don't want to risk it. There isn't any parking, but I've got three bedrooms and two baths, and don't have to pay any property taxes, or anything like that. Unlike a lot of these sort of places, Mad Anthony Street is actually a real place in the physical world; it's just been hidden. By people who are good at hiding things.

Which was why I was surprised when someone knocked at my door. Being a cautious sort, I had one of my shotguns with me when I went down to answer the door, and being an incurable optimist, I actually answered the door, rather than just opening fire once I lined up on the other side. Despite the precautions that those living here have taken, there were occasionally people who slipped through – last year, we got Chinese menus under our doors every day for a month, and once I got a notice that UPS had tried to deliver a package, but I wasn't in. Which I had been, but I digress.

On the other side of the door were two people; a short, slightly built man, with slightly pointed ears, and a much, much larger fellow, wearing a cape over a three-piece suit. I sighed, unlocked the door, and opened it. I took a step back as the door opened, and brought the gun halfway up.

"Good morning," said the little one.

Mad Anthony Street had a roof, way up at the level of the buildings it hid between, to keep from being visible by air; all the light the street got was from a few antique gaslights. So while I knew it was morning, I'd have to take his word that it was a good one. "Hi," I said.

They didn't try to push their way in, and I didn't try to shoot them in their faces. Which seemed to work out well for all of us. "Are you the worker who was responsible for the disappearance and recovery of the Lost Man's Lake?"

"Maybe," I said, cautiously. The real answer was "Yes, I totally was, and it was awesome," but I didn't know these people at all. Strike that – it took a little while for me to pick up on things like this, but they weren't people. I didn't know these whatsits at all, and there were bound to be some ill feelings about the Lost Man's Lake affair. As well as other things; I seemed to get involved in things that caused ill feelings from time to time.

"Well," continued the little guy, with an affable smile. "If you are, or if you aren't, we need your help."

"They're trying to take our well," said the big one, in a deep gravelly bass.

"Indeed they are," continued the other one. "But I fear my associate has gotten ahead of himself. I am-" and here he gave a series of trilling notes that sounded a bit like a flute, or running water. "And my friend's name is Eadmon."

I nodded, and tried my hand at repeating those notes. My version was good enough to get his eyes to widen slightly in response. I can also do birdcalls. "Thenin of the Blue Forest House, in the usual translation, I think?" I said, displaying my erudition, as well as my vocal abilities.

"Something along those lines," said Thenin. "May we come in?"

I hesitated. The little guy was an elf, and the big one was some sort of construct; some sort of golem or whatnot. All in all, it would be really difficult to fight them off without my house's wards helping. But they had given their names. Or at least, they had given names. "Sure," I said, gesturing towards the downstairs parlor. Anything for an interesting life.

"Thank you," said Thenin. He moved with a sort of birdlike quickness, revealing a coat of mail beneath his overcoat, as he sat himself down on the couch. Eadmon moved more slowly, the floor creaking at his every step, and he chose not to sit down, which I was greatful for – some of the chairs might have taken his weight, but then again, they might not have. And getting furniture through that door was a royal pain.

"We are the appointed guardians of a well; it is a small well, and well protected, and there have not been any serious attempts to take it. Which is not to say that there have not been attacks; small scale probes, a shifter or two. Recently, the probes have become more frequent, and more serious in nature. Unless something changes, I estimate it will be less than a year before we are destroyed by them."

"That does sound unfortunate," I said.

"He doesn't want to help us," said Eadmon, indicating that he had accurately read the message in my response.

"No offense intended," I said. "But I really don't see this as my problem."

"You don't draw on the power of the wells," said Thenin, "but you can be affected by it. Our well is not far from here, and while I do not know who it is that is trying to take the well, he seems more malign than the usual run of the Dark."

Which was true, but still not that relevant to me. There were lots of things that might hurt me, but most of those wouldn't unless I went out to the aquarium, and jumped in their tank. The same, as far as I could tell, applied to the elves enemies, despite Thenin's assertion, even if I believed it, which I didn't.

"There is, of course, the possibility of payment," he continued, which was considerably more interesting. From the inside of his coat, Eadmon produced a long and thin wooden case, and passed it over to me. I hadn't put my shotgun down when I had taken my seat in the white rocking chair, and briefly considered what to do before I put it down, and took the case. What the hell; if you can't trust armored, palpably dangerous weirdos who show up uninvited at your well hidden home, who can you trust?

Inside the case was a sword. It was, as far as I could tell, a very nice sword. "She is three thousand years old," said Thenin. "Her name is," and he gave a series of trilling notes that translated roughly to "Blade of the Coming Dawn."

"And this would be my payment for securing your well against the current batch of those who are trying to take it away?"

"It seems fair to me," replied Thenin. "We would be willing to pay in advance, and put our faith in your word."

Of course they would – a wizard is bound up in words, and can't tell lies of that sort. Even stretching the truth a tad when it comes to promises to do something can reduce a worker's power considerably.

"I tell you what," I said. "I'll poke around, see what I can find out. No promises that I'll get involved, but I'll try and get a sense of the scope of the problem."

"Fair enough," said Thenin. Eadmon held a hand out for the sword, and I returned it to him. "Our well," continued Thenin, "is a between place; the best entrance is in the 181st street IRT station." He reached into his jacket, and took out a token. It was one of the old style ones, with the Y cut out of the center. "This should show you the way through most of our defenses."

"Thanks," I said, taking it. Then I rifled through the little cabinet next to my rocking chair, got out a pair of Butterfingers, and passed them over to Thenin.

"These are?" he asked, confused.

"They're candy bars," I said. "A very extensive advertising campaign has convinced me that not only are they both crispety and crunchety, they are peanut buttery as well."

"I see," said Thenin. "And why are you giving them to me?"

"Because I'm afraid I am not entirely ready to accept gifts from you just yet. So it's an exchange for your token."

Thenin weighed the candy bars in his hand. "I see," he repeated. "And this, then, is the value that you place on the token."

"More or less," I replied. "Value depends on how much you want something."

Thenin didn't show any reaction to that, but Eadmon didn't seem very happy. "They are king sized," I said. "That's a lot of delicious chocolate."

"Indeed it is," said Thenin, and the bars vanished into his coat. "When might we expect you?"

"A couple of hours," I said. "Probably; there are a few other things that I'd like to take care of, first."

And then they left. After I had carefully locked the door behind them, I sat down on my couch, and thought a bit. Then I got up, got myself a Butterfinger, and sat back down. If there are people who are capable of having a conversation about candy, and who can then not want to eat that candy, I don't want to know them.

But once I had the candy bar, I was able to think about the whole peculiar chain of events that had led to me eating a candy bar. The elves were one of the innumerable races of the inner world. In years past, those who still called themselves elves had lost a civil war; they called the other side the Dark, and the Dark are, even by the standards of the inner world, colossal jerks. But while the elves were better, I didn't know anything about them to make them people I'd go out of my way to help.

And certainly not for a sword. I mean, seriously. What the hell was I supposed to do with a sword? I mean, sure, swords are cool, but now we have guns to kill people with. It's like trying to pay someone with one of those old cameras that you have to put a sheet over your head to use. And if past experience was any guide, trying to sell something like that sword to someone who actually wanted it would offend everyone involved, including the sword.

The only thing that kept me from turning them down flat was a certain basic caution. If there was something happening locally that might prove a threat, I'd at least take a look before deciding to ignore it, and hope it went away. I mean, I'd attempted to ignore the Guiliani administration, and that didn't work at all. Once I was done eating candy and thinking, I put together a bag, and headed out.

If Thenin and Eadmon were already at war with some particularly persistent member of the Dark, there was a good chance they were being watched. Now, Mad Anthony Street had protections against that sort of thing. But trying to pick a surveillance spell once I was out on St. Nicholas would be a bit tricky. For most people. I had taken some precautions.

Explaining exactly what I did would be a bit technical. To give a crude analogy, let's say that magic is a sort of giant penis, and . . . actually, I'm going to abandon that analogy, as it's cruder than strictly necessary, and doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Let's say that surveillance spell is sort of like an electric fan. You can use a battery powered fan, but those can't stay on for that long, and aren't very powerful. You can plug the fan into an outlet, but if you're trying to hide a fan, it's going to be challenging to keep people from noticing something plugged into the wall. You can also string an extension cord to a more distant outlet, but you have to hide the extension cord, and it might get cut or unplugged or something if it runs across a street, or through someone else's house or whatever.

So. Any reasonable way to set up a surveillance spell has serious drawbacks, but it would take a lot of time to root out anything that might be waiting. So, I set a honeypot. There's a strong Earth line that runs roughly parallel to St. Nick, and the constant flow of cars sets up a swirl of metal, gas, and low level anger. What I did was to emphasize some of the natural features of the building opposite so that what might have been a minor swirl of energy turned into the sort of vortex that works as the sort of power outlet that I was talking about.

But this one was shielded from view, thanks to a sign, and the residual trace of rainwater that constantly dripped from the roof overhead. It looked natural, and hard to spot, and when someone wanted to watch the comings and goings of the denizens of Mad Anthony Street, they'd attach it there, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

In general, my neighbors are as interested in their privacy as I am, so it's hard to tell if they noticed that this particular whorl was anything other than natural, but nobody disrupted it, so I guess that they didn't mind. Or didn't notice; there are at least one or two people there who had only the faintest traces of magical talent, and just saw their place as a slightly weirder than average illegal sublet. And, yes, there was spy-eye sitting in that whorl. It was a . . . workmanlike spell. Nothing fancy, or elegant, but it would have got the job done if I hadn't blanked it. I took a quick look at the other places where someone might have anchored a spyeye, found nothing.

Unfortunately, there was always the possibility that I was up against someone clever enough to using another method of finding me, beyond a simple spyeye set up in the obvious place. Now, I didn't see any particular reason for anyone to assume that the elves had been to see me, rather than any of my neighbors. Or, for that matter, that whoever the elves turned to would decide to help them. But, and I imagine that this will come as a shock to you, but there are people other than the shadowy enemies of Thenin and Eadmon that dislike me.

There were people who didn't appreciate the whole business with Lost Man's Lake, for instance, and there was a manticore in Park Slope who viewed me in approximately in the same light as I viewed whoever it was that was responsible for the cancellation of Gargoyles. Also, I like carrying my shotgun around with me, and now that the Heights have been gentrified, the police get all upset about that sort of thing.

So I use a sort of invisibility spell when I go out. And when I say, "a sort of invisibility spell", I mean, "it's technically not an invisibility spell at all." An actual invisibility spell wouldn't be that much use, walking the streets. If they can't see you, people will bump into you, and some of them will realize that they bumped into something invisible, and so on. Also, I'm not really strong enough to manage a full on invisibility spell, most days.

I use a sort of repulsion spell. People see me, but their eyes sort of slide off of me. So they don't bump into me, but unless I'm actually trying to kill them, they generally don't notice me. It wasn't going to stop determined pursuit by experts, but very few things do – that's sort of what makes them experts.

If I was being followed, they were good enough that I didn't notice them, as I headed across to Fort Tryon Park. It was a nice day, autumnal and crisp, and it had rained earlier in the week, which meant that I might have some luck with mushrooms. And with other things.

My first stop wasn't at the park; the guy I was looking for took some effort to find, and I eventually tracked him down to one of the landings of the stairway between Overlook and Fort Wash. He was behind his shopping cart full of garbage, spread out on a sheet of cardboard. Underneath the crusted filth and hair, I figured he was an older white guy, but he was dirty enough that I could be wrong about any of that. I know the coolest people.

"Hey," I said. "You up?"

He grumbled at me. So, somewhere between "yes," and "fuck off."

"How did you even get a shopping cart up here?" I asked, considering the stairs stretching off down to Overlook.

"By magic, asshole," he said. Which was a lie, because as far as I knew, he couldn't work any magic. Also, I'm not an asshole. But at least he was responding.

"I need a reading," I said.

"Go away," he replied.

I was wearing a jacket with big pockets. I took a pack of cigarettes out of one of them, unrolled a few. Then I got out a little flask of rum, and poured a bit over the tobacco, and lit it.

"That doesn't work," he said, as the smoke drifted up.

It took a minute or so before a pigeon fluttered noisily out of the sky, then another, and another. "What's your question?" he asked, in an entirely different voice.

"There's an elf who asked me for help," I said. "Should I help him?" When you ask an oracle a question, it's a good idea to be specific.

The oracle of pigeons reached out, grabbed one of the birds that had settled near him, an orange speckled male, who had been puffing out his throat, doing that sort of "broop-broop" song that pigeons do. It gave one startled half broop when the oracle grabbed him, but didn't start struggling until his head was ripped off.

The oracle of pigeons is not a nice man, and he has many odious personal habits. But he does kill a pigeon or two when you ask him a question, and that forgives him a great deal. He used his thumbnail to split the bird open, and poured its entrails out on his cardboard mat.

"Where's the liver?" I asked. I've been round this once or twice before, and each time, he's read the liver, and came up with answers.

"It's missing," he said. "So's the heart."

"That's good, right? Means I'm going to get some delicious pie any minute now?"

He gave me a look. Then he got up, and started running up the stairs. "What," I called after him, "and leave all of this behind?" That was a square of cardboard and a stolen shopping cart that wouldn't stay without an owner for long, not in New York.

This was why I don't pay oracles up front.

So, first drafty, but I like it. Anyhow, I'd like to think that I'm going to post the rest of it here, but given my track record of posting to this journal, that's a little unlikely. We'll see what happens, I guess.

Just a note.

2003-06-03T12:55:31Z

This is going to be a mostly friends only journal, I think, as it is where I'm putting works in progress, and there are markets that would count putting something up here as burning its first publication rights.

If you want to be added as a friend, add this journal, and I'll add you back as soon as I notice.

Those of you who have wandered here might find my other journal, dhole to be of more immediate interest.