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  He’d had a mason reopen and line one fireplace and flue when he had the whole apartment torn apart for renovations about fifty years ago. He didn’t like to let strangers past his door, but roof leaks had gone far beyond the drip-bucket stage and he didn’t mess with gas lines and electricity. They bit.

  Yeah, I don’t like strangers in my lair. More to the point, skilled work costs money. That pile of gold—I pinch every penny that comes my way. I have to. I can earn a dollar here and there by day labor, but a steady job, paying good money? With every piece of official paper forged? Not likely. My driver’s license, the other documents, they’re good enough by themselves. But I can’t afford the kind of paper that stands up to a serious check.

  Sell my blades? Custom knives and swords bring real money, but you need to be a public person to make the sale, fair to middling famous in the collector’s world. I don’t dare walk that path.

  He couldn’t even wave a birth certificate under some official nose. As far as Immigration was concerned, he was another illegal just arrived from Canada or Mexico. Sure, he’d lived in the U.S. for over a century and a half. Fat chance on proving that to a judge. Only reason he didn’t get hassled more, his blond hair and blue eyes made him look like he belonged. Except for being short, and even that made the cops ignore him. Short people, especially short people walking with a cane and limp, aren’t seen as a threat.

  So, most repairs, he did himself or did without. Besides the money problem, too many awkward questions could come up, like the almost-human skeleton in tarnished silver chains bricked up inside an offset in one wall. He could remove that one and dump it, bone by bone out on the river or in the woods, but he couldn’t guarantee that the bones would stay separate and dead . . .

  He shivered at the memory. There were other memories of this place that could give him the shivers too, but now he let salamanders come and go and play in the fireplace, kept dry wood laid on the hearth for them. He’d come back to the place in the morning or late evening and find cold ashes where he’d left wood, sometimes felt and smelled a difference when he started a fire himself to give life to the space. Elementals of air and fire helped clear out the ghosts, the must and dust of old wood and plaster, made the air smell fresh and clean and friendly, and they respected the limits he’d set for them.

  His eyes stung. He took a deep swig of beer, probably drinking too much too fast, or not—considering he had a demon sitting just across the table.

  Yes, a lot of bad memories tied to this place. Still, bad memories or not, every time he’d given his feet to Mother’s wanderlust, turned nomad and gone on walkabout for twenty or fifty years, somehow he ended up back in this same room. He’d come back to find everyone he knew and cared about had vanished, or been replaced by grave markers.

  Even Mother. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead. Or something else.

  “Simon Lahti, we know that you respect our companions, and you do not trust powers that are beyond mortal control. We know of this.”

  That . . . name . . . repeated a third time as a charm. Icy fingers ran down his spine. “Simon Lahti” was not his name, neither the name on his current driver’s license nor the name he was known by many years ago, but it said things about him he’d prefer that no one knew. Not even demons.

  Sure, in theory, he knew that Others lived all around him, not seen but seeing. He knew this, but he was just as capable as any man of forgetting it for years at a time. Now Legion kept rubbing his nose in it.

  But that had nothing to do with finding out who abused elementals. The past was gone, and often had little connection with any particular future. And he couldn’t change it. The future, now, sometimes he could change that. What he could do . . .

  Dangerous. Likely fatal. He refused to think about it. He got up from the table, surprised that his knees seemed willing to hold his weight. Crossed the kitchen to the front parlor, to the old oak roll-top desk that held those papers connected to his current name and station in the world. Found the nerve to pull out the bottom drawer on the left and took from that a linen bag, lurking alone in the solitary space it wanted, hand-loomed fabric brown with the grease of generations of fingers, smelling of time and graves.

  II

  A stream of yellow-brown dice spilled into his palm, small bone cubes hand-cut and less than perfect, the scratches and chips and grime of centuries not masking the runes slashed across the faces of each die. They’d belonged to Mother, and she’d left them when she vanished. Where she got them, God alone knew. But which God?

  Sometimes they’d speak to him. He didn’t know how. Their magic lived inside them, came from the songs and smokes and potions and whispered spell-chants of whatever forest-witch or desert shaman had formed and smoothed them centuries ago. If they spoke, they spoke true.

  Generally, they didn’t speak. No use at all for the stock market or picking horses. He didn’t know why. His small powers didn’t run that way.

  He rolled them clicking in his cupped hands, looking off through plastered brick walls into the distance rather than at them. He thought about their number, twenty-seven, three-cubed of cubes, probably important and if he lost or cracked one they’d never speak again, or would speak gibberish. He thought about the demon, behind him and making the skin crawl up and down his spine. It had manifested small, no larger than Albert and he was practically a dwarf by modern standards. He knew that it could grow to the size of a mountain in an eye-blink if it wished, or shrink to a gnat and fly up his nose to eat his brains out from the inside.

  He cast the bones on the floor, against the baseboard so they bounced and muttered and rattled on the broad pine boards. Out of that rattle, he heard a word, syllables and sounds in some language he’d never heard on any human tongue. But he knew what it meant.

 

  Nothing vague and Delphic about that. He shuddered. Saying “no” to a demon . . .

  He thought about the heap of gold on his kitchen table, wealth enough for lots of good food and good music, even a stereo or refrigerator newer than the last ice age. He got by, just barely, by not owning a car, not paying rent, staying away from medical care. His palms itched for that gold.

  He found it hard to think straight with gold in the room. It wasn’t just money, that heavy soft rare metal. It seemed almost like a drug to him, sensuous in the way it called, the way it blocked sense and self-preservation—lust and envy and covetousness and the rest of that list rolled into one. Sort of like sex to humans.

  But when the cubes spoke at all, they spoke true.

  He gathered the cubes into a pile in his hands and cast them again, this time staring at them, at the spin and bounce and tumble of the runes, hoping against hope that the bound spirits or whatever would change their minds. Six letters formed among the runes, Roman characters, and then vanished again as soon as he’d noticed them.

  REFUSE.

  All capitals. The magic thought it needed to shout.

  He decided he didn’t want to try again. After all, the bones just told him what he already knew.

  Never trust a demon.

  As he thought that, the letters flashed again before fading back into dark runes cut into yellow bone and shaded with what looked like ancient blood. Runes he couldn’t read, runes he’d never seen in any book or museum in all his years and wandering. Maybe the magic itself had made them, for just this one set and purpose.

  He shivered again. He gathered the cubes, dumped them rattling into their bag, and tucked the bag into its drawer, to wait in darkness for the next time someone called them, whether that someone would be him or Mother or some stranger that the magic first called to itself. He had a general idea of what would come next. Not specifics, no, but he had been getting bored with life.

  His brothers and his sister finally hunted for their deaths. His kind couldn’t count on age or disease to find them and give them rest.

  But evidence said they weren’t immortal. Which might be just as well.

  He st
ood up. He faced the demon.

  “No.”

  The demon lifted its right eyebrow, just the ridge of “skin” over “bone,” no hair—Albert noticed for the first time that it didn’t have any hair at all. That oversight told volumes about how his brain was working. Or wasn’t.

  Fire spread from Legion’s fingers, coating walls, floor, ceiling, wood and plaster and brick alike, scorching and curling the faded wallpaper and boiling centuries of varnish and paint off wood. Black smoke filled the air, biting deep in Albert’s lungs and throat, and when he lifted his hand to cover his mouth he saw his skin blister and char. The pain hadn’t hit him yet, but heat drove deep into his flesh and bone, the demon raising the fires of hell to torment him.

  “Breaker of guest-law!” He coughed the words out and tried to hold what little breath remained behind them. It had been easy to be philosophical about death, until he looked it straight in the face.

  The burning froze. The demon walked through the flames to stand in front of him, frowning, a curl of smoke hooked in one nostril.

  “Yes, your kind would use those words. And we accepted bread and salt from you, even if you did not bind us with peace-words in the giving.”

  It gestured, and the flames vanished. The damage vanished. No smoke, no heat, no charred flesh on the hand in front of Albert’s face, no sense that anything at all had happened in his rooms. No pain.

  Demons.

  “We obey ‘guest-law.’ This house and hearth are sacred. But we will find you in another place.”

  Which could mean the instant Albert stepped out of his door, or ten years or a hundred years from now, on the far side of the world. Who knew what time and space meant to a demon? Nothing, most likely . . .

  The demon had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He decided that maybe he wasn’t ready to die yet.

  “Where and when has this abuse happened? What can I do to stop it? Can I call on your kind and your companions for help?”

  Time grows short. A week, two weeks, as mortals measure time. The demon had said that. Already, we feel change. Your kind broke the balance, opened the path. Repair it, or this world shatters.

  The demon wasn’t telling him everything. Albert knew that. He headed down the stairs anyway. Down through the dark abandoned third floor of drifted musty dust and peeling wallpaper and chunks of age-broken horsehair plaster gritty on the wide-plank flooring, avoiding the first and fifth and eighth treads of the stairs—he didn’t invite people home, and anyone who fell through those worn old cracked boards should never have been there in the first place.

  Shatters, and becomes what? “World” as universe, or planet, or laws of physics, or society? Repair what? This isn’t just about “companions.” This was a demon speaking, maybe lying, maybe twisting double-meaning words into something hidden, very different. Armageddon? Ragnarok? Or some demonic joke?

  He stepped into the second floor, fancier with varnished hardwood flooring and plaster moldings around the ceiling but just as abandoned and stale with last year’s air, the old gaslight fixtures still in place, dust-furred gray sheets shrouding mahogany Victorian furniture: monstrosities bought new at the height of fashion back when Mother invited strange men home and lightened their pockets of excess gold. They’d owned this building for something like a century and a half, through a corporate fiction that didn’t draw official notice if it lived forever. The pizza joint’s rent paid the taxes these days, successor to a dozen similar greasy spoons or beer halls in the past.

  He paused at the fireplace in the front parlor where a marble mantel and columns framed a blackened brick hollow that hadn’t felt heat in decades. Stooping, he left a pint of vodka, a brick of dark chocolate, a wedge of Emmenthaler, and half the remaining loaf of rye on the hearth. They wouldn’t be there when he came back. He didn’t know what happened to the empty bottles, or want to know.

  Most people ignored the hearth-spirits of their homes. Mother had taught him the price of that. They’d take their due without the gift, and you’d never know why you lived under an unlucky roof. He’d give a pint of cheap vodka any day to keep those little . . . friends . . . out of his hair and cupboards. If they held drunken midnight parties with punk-rock music cranked up to “ten,” they did it in some pocket universe where he couldn’t hear.

  On his way out, he picked up his cane where he’d left it next to the parlor door. He kept almost-innocent things like that scattered around his home, always in the same places where he could find them in the dark, a habit of long survival in dangerous places. Most people wouldn’t see a cane as a weapon, especially an orthopedic cane—rubber grip and rubber tip and what looked like a shaft of brushed aluminum. Sign of a cripple, not dangerous . . .

  That’s why he carried it. He hefted the cane, stainless steel, much heavier than your eye would suspect, just in case. Enough weight to break a wrist, a knee, a skull—he’d done all three. Like many small people, he was much stronger than he looked.

  He let his hands and the steel remember each other and loosed a twist he thought only his peculiar brain could work. The cane separated below the grip, unsheathing a foot-long blade of laminated steel, a fighting blade much more complex than his kitchen knives. The sight of it woke memories of smelting the raw ore, furnace panting like a live animal, carbon blending with iron under the blue-flamed red bank of charcoal. Then time outside of time at his forge fold-welding yellow-hot sparking metal again and again and yet again to judge the grain of the metal by its bending, wrapping keen brittle steel around the tough heart that made it strong, forming, grinding, heating, quenching, polishing to bring out the grain of watered silk—as keen and deadly a blade as his centuries of skill could conjure out of iron.

  His city wasn’t a nice place. He didn’t live in a nice part of it. He didn’t think he’d ever lived in a nice place.

  If the cops got nosy about why he always carried a cane, even if he walked like he was perfectly healthy, he could point to the sole of his right shoe, built up more than an inch—that leg was shorter than the left and not quite straight. Result of a tangle with a freight wagon, so Mother said, when he was two or three and playing where he shouldn’t. Medical care being what it was, or wasn’t, back then, he was lucky to have two legs. Another bit of his past he’d have to take her word for. He’d always limped from it, as far back as he could remember.

  He headed down another set of dark dusty stairs, another set of treads that creaked their warning if he put a foot wrong. No, he hadn’t booby-trapped the place. He’d just learned to guard himself with what was available. Obvious traps were harder to explain to curious policemen than “accidents” and the wear of age.

  The demon wasn’t telling him everything. He wondered, though, whether the things it did tell him were truth or lies. Why would a demon need his help? If it could flick its fingers and turn his apartment into hell’s inferno, it could do the same to whatever mortal was “abusing” its companions.

  Or were those flames illusion? They’d looked real, felt real, smelled real, even to him. The demon wasn’t using metaphor when it said Albert could see things that others did not see. His senses weren’t human. He could see beyond the human range, into infrared and some into the ultraviolet. Likewise, he could hear above and below the human normal range. His nose twitched at scents that eluded most people.

  Those were not blessings without price. They helped in working metal—judging fuels and fluxes and ores and the metals they become, judging heat, listening to the metamorphosis of iron becoming steel under his hammer—but he couldn’t stand crowds. People stank, and the modern world screamed noise at him from near and far.

  Why would a demon need human help? Or mortal help, anyway, given that best guess says I’m not human? Maybe it has a bet down with its buddies? Betting on me, for or against?

  He froze, one foot up in the air, and then put it back down on a safe stair tread. Another possibility had flitted through his head. He needed to examine it before he stuck his head in
to the noose.

  If there was more than one demon involved . . . not bets, maybe, but either pranks or deadly warfare. Mother had told him that demons—angels, spirits, whatever—they didn’t get along any better than mortals. Just study Loki and his chummy relations with the other Æsir.

  One demon was enough, more than enough. Getting involved in demon politics could be suicide. But did he have a choice?

  He didn’t. He chased that idea down at least five dead-end alleys. Legion would kill him if he didn’t play its game, whatever its game turned out to be. Probably kill him in a way that took five days. The demon had made that plain. If Legion said “Shit!”—the only questions it allowed were “How much?” and “What color?”

  Those thoughts got Albert nowhere, as well as to his front door. He checked the sidewalk through his peephole, unlocked, unbarred, and stepped through. With another twist of thought he reset it all from outside—that door was a lot stronger than it looked, a burglar would find it easier to break in through the brick wall to either side, and that was two feet thick.

  He didn’t want visitors.

  A gesture to convention and any watchers, he touched the crosses that marked and guarded both jambs of the doorframe, invoking God on this journey. He looked right and left, checking for threats again and then freezing like a suspicious rabbit. Dusk had crept in, somewhere during his encounter with the demon.

  He didn’t know why or how, but they screwed up time as well as space. He’d been making lunch at noon. A few minutes later, he stepped out into late spring twilight heavy with the scents of threat and promise—a whiff of sweetish smoke from the opium den across the street mixed with the tomato and oregano and baking crust of the pizza joint, roasting coffee from the warehouse district, traces of coal tar from the gasworks and the paving.

  Albert shook his head. Demons.

  He walked across town as the town grew dark around him. Yes, walked. He knew it wasn’t normal, marked him as different, but he didn’t own a car. Beyond the budget problem, he didn’t trust cars. He should, he supposed, they were just clever metal-working on a larger scale, but he kept looking for the horse or team that wasn’t there. Besides, most machines felt . . . empty to him. Worked metal should have a heart, a soul, the trace and memory of the smith who’d forged it and woke life in it. Machines made by machines lacked that.