Powers Page 4

  Even taking away the soot and bruises and the blood, you wouldn’t call her pretty. Nose like a beak, broken years ago, dark hooded eyes, hollow cheeks, chin with rather too much character. He’d seen brown hawk-faces like that before, the dry dusty tribal hill-fort villages of Pushtu and Paktia, where he watched and learned from smiths who could forge automatic weapons out of tin cans and scrap cast-iron pots. The women of those tribes wore veils or full burkas when they went out at all. She didn’t. He wasn’t sure the change improved the landscape.

  She studied the cane. She started to pull her left hand out of her pocket, winced, and sagged against his anvil. Maybe he could get to that gun . . .

  Her glare said, Don’t even think about it. She straightened up, it looked like sheer will, and followed the glare with a shake of her head. “In your dreams, runt.” Yeah, she was taller than him, maybe half a foot. No trace of a Hill accent there, more like Bronx. He guessed second or third generation away from the tribes. Not that he could see any sign the move had softened her.

  She poked at the blade with her pistol, keeping her eyes on him. “Where did you get that?”

  He was proud of that blade. Watered-silk folded steel, rival to the best pre-Meiji tanto or katana, keen enough to cut a thought, cut the wind, yet springy as a fencing foil, he’d sweated blood on that one short blade. He didn’t know that he’d ever done better work. Equal, yes. Not better.

  “I forged it.”

  Her eyes widened, and he didn’t think it was pain. She stepped back from the anvil and raised her pistol to her forehead in salute.

  “I know men who would give several thousand dollars U.S. for that blade, alone. Two, three times that for the whole cane. What the hell were you doing, poking around my crime scene?”

  Tell her a demon twisted his arm? Not likely. “You had a salamander there. I smelled it.”

  She cocked her head to one side and then winced. “You smelled it? And my Sight shows at least three hundred years behind you. I repeat, what are you?”

  He shrugged, as well as you can shrug with hands in the air. “If you find that out, please tell me. I don’t know. I just am.”

  Taking another of those risky moves that he was making habit, he lowered his hands without asking. She let him. Maybe that Sight she claimed didn’t call him a threat. Not that it had warned her in the burned-out synagogue. He never asked how another person’s gift worked or didn’t—he had enough trouble with his own.

  Now that she stood closer to the light, he could read the patches on her coveralls. City police, indeed, and a name tag that said “el Hajj.” From what he knew of Muslim names, that meant someone in her ancestry had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, from a time and place where that was notable.

  “I thought I’d checked for anyone following me . . . ”

  She managed a wry smile. “I’m very good at following people and finding things. That’s one reason why the Chief puts up with me.”

  She waved her pistol toward the door and the cellar steps. “Now, if you’d just let us out. Don’t move fast enough to make me twitch. I had a gunsmith spend a few hours on the trigger sear.”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  Another wry smile. “None of your business. I’m here. That’s what matters.”

  He didn’t agree with that. But she held the gun—a Colt .45 automatic, now that he could see it well. Nothing he wanted to argue with.

  He’d never needed to know much about police procedures. He hadn’t been arrested in something like fifty years. Still, he thought she was being awfully casual about this. He went ahead, unbarring and unlocking, up the cellar stairs, unlocking and unbarring again, her staying well back with that cannon in her hand. He could have dodged out and around the corner at that point, he didn’t think she could move fast enough to catch him or even get a clear shot, not with her limp and all it implied. But she was good at finding things and following people . . .

  No gain there. Like with the demon, running wouldn’t do him any good. She already knew where to find him.

  Outside, in the alley that stank of wet dust and the pizza joint’s garbage and a winter’s worth of dogshit now thawed with the spring, she waved him back and tucked the pistol somewhere under her coverall. At that point, things clicked together like the blade locking into his cane.

  He blinked. “You aren’t arresting me?”

  She started to shake her head and then didn’t. “What for? I’m pretty sure you didn’t start that fire. As for the rest, if Allah so wills, I’ll drink your blood. When the demon lets me. I don’t need some soft-hearted law of the infidel dogs for vengeance.”

  She turned and limped off along the dawn alley, went around the corner and was gone. Yes, dawn. He’d lost the night in his forging. Vanished time again. Until he saw a newspaper, he couldn’t even tell if it was one night, or two, or three. Working iron, he got involved.

  But she’d left some puzzles behind. The demon? She didn’t give a Name, so he couldn’t tell if she meant Legion or some other. The vengeance that she named so calmly you could almost miss it? No puzzle there. Hill people were like that. Blood must be washed out with blood. But the way she invoked the will of Allah? That had sounded like mouth music. No meaning behind it. He didn’t think she cared whether Allah willed or not. She’d do it either way.

  The way she’d said “the Woman of Shamlegh”—a title, a title of power, her power. Matriarchy, not patriarchy. With some of those hill tribes, he’d learned that Islam was little more than a surface gloss. True beliefs lie hidden deep beneath, far older.

  Then he started to shake and felt his bones turn into rubber. He’d been coasting on the high his forge always gave him, one reason that the drug houses didn’t tempt him and he could take good beer and wine or leave them—he had better ways of stepping outside his brain. But, just as with alcohol or opium or hemp, he paid a stiff price after.

  Anyway, high from forging, he probably wouldn’t have cared if Legion had shown up with all his buddies, Allah’s eight million afreets, much less a single woman from the cops. Not even with a gun pointed at him. The whole scene had lasted maybe five minutes, his stepping back from the anvil to her limping away down the alley.

  Now he cared. Now the drug of his magic washed out of his blood and left him exhausted. A pounding hangover and a rush of fear broke sweat down his spine again.

  He stumbled back to the cellar door, down to his forge, and cleaned up from the night’s work. Killed the fire in cold water. Married cane, shaft, and blade. Climbed up again. Locked up.

  He limped his way out of the alley and around the corner to his front door—no connecting stairs from the cellar up. Yes, he had ways from attic to cellar, hidden, abandoned chimneys and the shaft of an old dumb-waiter, that sort of thing. But he couldn’t trust his legs to a ladder just then, or to the scattering of brick nubs and rusty brackets that made a climbing path up the alley wall.

  Brown paper caught his eye: a long envelope sticking out of his mailbox. It hadn’t been there last night or whenever it was that he went walking. He pulled it out.

  No address. No stamps or franking. Sealed. He felt too washed-out to care about modern trivia like evidence or letter bombs or even privacy. He ripped one end open, in the dawn light on the street.

  A feather. One solitary tail-feather from a hen pheasant. He blinked and tried to shake some sense past the fog filling his brain.

  Mother had taught them a dozen codes and signals, objects you could leave anywhere and people wouldn’t notice them, or, if noticed, make into any sense. Pheasant feathers, well, they meant danger—like his family, they weren’t native to this land. People introduced them as tasty self-propelled targets for the hunt.

  And the tail feather of a hen pheasant meant Mother.

  His stomach didn’t just growl, it snarled at him. He hadn’t eaten anything since that ham sandwich with Legion, yesterday’s lunch or whatever, and his body needed food after the forging. He couldn’t make sense of the f
eather there, on the street, with fog for brains.

  Through the door, lock up and bar again—little good that seemed to do against not just Legion and its ilk but the Afghan harpy on his trail. He stumbled upstairs, one step at a time, glanced into the parlor and yes, the food and vodka had vanished from the hearth.

  On to his apartment perched on the fourth floor, up stairs long and steep to the gold coins still gleaming in the sunrise on his kitchen table. At least Legion hadn’t decided to lay another jest on the stupid mortal chump. Him.

  Yet.

  He grabbed some food, random calories in quick form, gulped a beer, and collapsed on his bed. Didn’t bother to shuck off the sweaty gritty sooty clothes first.

  Laundry and personal hygiene didn’t make it onto his list just then. Or the end of the world, whichever came first.

  IV

  And the evening and the morning were of the third day. Or whatever day it was, anyway. He woke to sky glowing pale yellow in the east, just about what he’d seen before crashing into bed, and had to assume he’d slept the clock around. At least once. Maybe twice. He really needed to start keeping a diary, if Legion was going to add even more gaps to already sketchy memories . . .

  He lay in bed feeling like three kinds of shit, still down after the high that working serious iron gave him, a kind of whole-body hangover that wasn’t exactly bone-ache fever or sore muscles or exhaustion. He woke alone, of course. He’d slept alone, lived alone for fifty years, a hundred years. Sometimes, dark times awake in the middle of the night, he understood why his brothers sought death, why his sister sought death. He’d come close to following them. Their long lives weren’t lives as such, just existence.

  Living required getting close to other people, and they didn’t dare. Besides the dance of moving and changing names, dodging questions, pretending they were human, they always faced the pain of watching someone they loved grow old and change into a dry shriveled husk that once was vibrant. After the third, the fourth, he’d decided it was safer to never love again. He didn’t keep cats or other pets, either. They become part of your life and then vanish into smoke at the blink of an eye.

  A shower helped some, clean clothes, and coffee. Mozart helped more. Like all mortals, he had died, yes, died young, but he left lasting joy behind him. Albert threw some ingredients together and turned them into buttermilk pancakes with orange-blossom honey instead of maple syrup, and added rounds of bulk sausage heavy on the sage and pepper. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or today, if Allah so willed.

  Besides, he was rich. At least temporarily. He kept staring at the demon’s pile of gold and the pheasant feather while he cooked and ate.

  Talk about ambiguous. That feather—the problem with codes and signals lay in interpretation. Mother always liked to be a mystery, even to her own children. She liked to keep things vague. He’d jumped to conclusions when he saw it, his brain dull and dizzy and too full of that day’s things. The infamous cold light of morning gave him other answers. Or, more accurately, other questions.

  He didn’t know if the feather was Mother warning him that he was in danger—in which case she was a little late—or saying she was in danger and needed help. Or maybe the end of the world loomed, just like Legion said, and she wanted him to do something about it. In any case, a few details had gone missing. He hadn’t seen her in twenty years or so. He hadn’t known if she was still alive, much less in town.

  He didn’t even know for sure that the feather came from her. She could have taught the same code to someone else. He had those brothers and a sister, all dead years ago. At least, he thought they were dead, although all he had was second-hand reports. Never saw the bodies.

  He had some cousins, an uncle and aunt, a niece and two nephews that he knew about. He hadn’t seen any of them for over a hundred years. For all he knew, he had family he’d never met. Like maybe a father.

  Hell, he’d been away from Mother long enough at times for her to bear a child and raise it and send it out into the world without her bothering to tell him. His family, well, it was a little strange. Private. They all kept their lives in little boxes and were damned careful about what they let out past the walls. Nobody got straight answers out of Mother. She’d find some way to evade and muddle anything, even if she was standing next to a window and you asked her if it was raining. What he knew about her, she’d let slip in passing, or as part of a tale that could be nine parts lies or even the whole cloth.

  The feather might tell tales, itself. It would remember who had touched it, where it came from. Like with his cane, things once connected stayed connected. You just needed to ask the right questions in the right way.

  The dice wouldn’t work for that. Besides, he wasn’t happy with those bone cubes at the moment. They’d tried to get him killed. He only had the one small magic—he couldn’t see the future or the past. He didn’t trace things, find people, walk through walls like that Afghan harpy, read tea leaves or palms or entrails or stars or hear voices from the cave. He just could talk to iron.

  A thought chilled him, and he ignored it by brewing another cup of coffee. The image waited and still lurked there in one corner of his brain when he came back to it with the mug warm in his hands. He made it wait some more, sipping hot bitter caffeine. It didn’t go away.

  That woman, el Hajj. She claimed to be very good at finding things and following people. She also wanted to cut out his heart and eat it. You need a definition of “vendetta,” go to the Pamirs and the Karakoram country and the tribes. They held grudges and blood feuds that reached back to Tamerlane.

  He’d once lived ten years in those unforgiving hills, learning the ways they talked to iron. They knew him as a member of the tribe of smiths, a different kin-tie but one they recognized. They’d accepted him for that. If he’d set a foot or hand wrong, though, they would have killed him without a second thought. They didn’t have laws. They had guns and knives and what they called honor instead, some of which he understood and some he didn’t.

  As far as he was concerned, she’d attacked him. Shining a high-powered flashlight in dark-adapted eyes from four feet away, that’s assault. She hadn’t identified herself as police, hadn’t said a word or even made a noise before that. Her blood was on her own hands.

  He didn’t think he could make her believe that. Besides the tribal honor thing, he’d noticed that cops never made mistakes. That was another tribal culture.

  The second cup of coffee didn’t help. He’d never heard of anyone finding visions of the future in the brown liquid. A third would just crank up his twitching nerves another notch.

  He gathered the demon’s gold into a paper bag and stowed it in a plumbing chase behind the bathtub where he’d chipped out three bricks years ago. No reason to leave temptation lying around—Mother still had keys, if she really was in town, and she’d see that pile of coins as hers. All wealth and property belonged to the Queen, you understand. Anything she left you was just a gracious gift.

  He needed more information. To him, that meant “library.” As far as he was concerned, public libraries ranked up there with flush toilets and central heating as great advances of civilization. He remembered life before those good things, and had no wish to return.

  So he grabbed his cane and headed down three long flights of creaking dark stairs through the dust and out, no mysterious brown envelopes sticking out of his mailbox this time, but enough advertising and financial offers and other junk that he suspected he’d lost more than one day to the demon and the forging and the crash that followed. He dumped everything unopened in a trash bin down the street, no keepers—if someone wanted to steal those credit-card offers to a name he hadn’t used in a generation, fat lot of good they’d find in the theft—and walked across town to the pile of yellow brick and stone and arched windows under a green copper roof that served as the local temple of knowledge. The place even smelled of learning: centuries-old paper and dark waxed wood and radiator dust in the long close-spaced s
helves of books.

  Also smelled of homeless people—stale cigarette smoke and layers of unwashed clothing and sour cheap-wine breath—but that was decreasing with the spring warmth and less need to get out of the arctic wind before you froze to death. He didn’t know why homeless people always smelled of cigarettes. There was true addiction for you, scraping up the bucks for a pack of smokes when you couldn’t keep a roof over your head.

  Anyway, he got there just after the library opened, giving him first shot at the morning newspaper and a quiet chair in a corner. Early enough that he had to ask for the paper from the gray-haired librarian in the periodical room, and he gritted his teeth a bit before walking up to her with a smile he didn’t feel.

  She recognized him, of course. “Good morning, Mr. Johansson.” She stared at his face for a moment like she always did, before pulling the newspaper out of a pile waiting for her to shelve. She shook her head, again like she always did.

  The librarian thought he was his own son, or maybe grandson. He looked a lot like a man who used to come in thirty, forty years ago when she’d just started working. Charming little guy, they’d talked a lot, she’d had dreams, embarrassing dreams. Of course, that man had a beard . . .

  Couldn’t be the same man, obviously.

  She’d commented on this several times when he checked out books. He’d told her the truth—he never knew his father, and his mother didn’t talk about him. That hint of personal scandal meant the librarian wouldn’t ask again. Much.

  This was one of the reasons he didn’t stay around any one place longer than twenty years and allowed long intervals before he returned. Good thing most people don’t or won’t believe their eyes.

  A quick look at the date and yes, he’d lost two days. Lucky it wasn’t three, or he’d have wasted his walk and found the library closed for Sunday. Legion said the world would change, was changing, doom rushing toward the world like an express train on a single track, and Simon Lahti had two weeks at the most . . .