Powers Page 8

  Or look around for some sand, scouring agent of choice in her water-poor hills. He’d eaten enough sand in those years, it had been coming out his pores.

  He started to gather dishes in the sink, then turned to her, with a thought. She was headed for the bathroom, his bathroom, without asking. Just move right in, take over. Like Mother—the only boundaries that mattered were hers.

  Turn about is fair play, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Gender. Whatever. “You asked if I was umma or ulema. Are you?”

  She paused in mid-stride. “I ask questions. I don’t answer them.” Then, over her shoulder, “Telling you will make life easier for me. The answer is the same as yours. No. Neither.”

  Hence her thirst for a cold beer at the end of a long day’s work in the ash-stink of a burned-out hulk.

  “Well, you can identify two sentences out of thin air by chapter and verse. In translation.”

  He saw the back of a shrug. “Scripture—Muslim or Christian or Jew, it’s useful to throw their own holy words back at them. Even Shaitan can quote scripture for his own purposes. Which isn’t scripture. I haven’t found a holy man yet who obeys every single word. Or a holy woman, either.”

  Then she vanished behind the bathroom door.

  He remembered scripture easily, too. One of the few things he could remember with precision, one century to the next. Funny thing, that, with him not believing it. It had to be those three—Jewish, Christian, Muslim. He couldn’t remember Hindu or Buddhist or Sikh writings worth a damn.

  Belief could be useful, could have kept Legion the hell out of his apartment, if Albert had faith. Crosses, the mezuzim of the Jews, graceful flowing Arabic calligraphy from the Qur’an—they guarded home and hearth for believers. Symbols and belief hold power, great power, even over the hidden world. Every opening into Albert’s building showed crosses to the outside, even the plumbing vents through the roof, remembrances of previous owners. They hadn’t had much effect on Legion. Just as those six-pointed stars, Solomon’s own Seal, hadn’t kept a salamander out of that abandoned synagogue.

  The salamander had been able to enter the synagogue because believers had abandoned it. The faith had left, decades ago. Legion had gotten into Albert’s apartment because Albert wasn’t a believer.

  Oh, yeah, he knew gods and demons and angels haunted the world. That wasn’t faith, that was personal witness. What he didn’t do was worship them. He’d consign them all to their own particular hells if he could. The best of them acted like spoiled brats if they didn’t get every whim satisfied, right down to the brand of toilet paper you used and whether you washed your right hand first or your left, and the worst turned nastier than Caligula with a hangover and bad hemorrhoids.

  That wasn’t even considering the way humans had warped religion to serve their priests and kings and tribal elders. After a few centuries of perspective, he’d started noticing things like that.

  So crosses and the like didn’t do him any good. He’d take the trade and call it even.

  Those thoughts saw the dishes stacked in the drainer and his skillet back drying over the stove’s pilot light. He was swabbing the counter and kitchen table with a rag when she came out. Hair damp, bleeding from her scalp wound stopped. He touched his own head, tested his nose. Same thing. No blood. Maybe they were cousins, improbable though that seemed.

  That name Legion had used for her, Noshaq or however you spelled it, that was a mountain in the wilds of Afghanistan if he remembered right. He’d seen it once, far on the horizon, menacing. A serious mountain, in serious wilds, one of those kill-you-as-soon-as-look-at-you high places ruled by a bitch storm goddess, the weather and the rocks and the ice as much as the people.

  Whereas he was some kind of northern European, as best as he could tell. Simon Lahti, the one name out of hundreds that Legion had chosen to use . . .

  “Simon.” Yeah, Mother used to call me Simon among other things, pretending we were Christians, but the last name . . . I have no idea what my father’s name might have been. I never knew him, don’t know if she had more than a few minutes’ acquaintance with the man or if I shared his genes with my brothers and my sister.

  The “Lahti” part, that just means I was born in a dark smoky room on some back alley of that town of the Troll-King’s Finnish realm. Or so Mother told me—I’m not in any position to say. I can’t tell you which king or even the dynasty. We weren’t Saami. We didn’t care. We left there when I was so young the memories merged into dreams. Not true Gypsies, outsiders even to them.

  “You. Wake up!”

  He shook himself out of those thoughts. She’d vanished her pretty-pretty knife somewhere in her coveralls and was staring at the note and pheasant feather, still lying on his table. Something about her face, her eyes and the squint-wrinkles around them, made the hair on his arms prickle—she seemed to be focused about ten miles beyond the table-top, somewhere deep in the earth below.

  “Arm yourself. We’re going pheasant-hunting.”

  “We?”

  “We. Legion won’t let me kill you, and I’m not going to chance you talking to your so-called mother. I want to know where you are. Safer.”

  So-called? Not many places where people would raise doubts about your mother. Father maybe, but motherhood is usually not an item of dispute.

  Not that he really cared. Legion wouldn’t let him kill her, either, and people usually thought killing was the proper response to that kind of slur. As if knowing his father or his mother changed who he was.

  People were strange. Albert shrugged. Arm yourself? That implies some interesting things about her “pheasant hunt.”

  Arm yourself. He thought about this and that and the other thing. His cane, of course. Nothing else that people could see—walking out the door into maybe a swarm of cops? He checked the street-side windows, saw two police cars angled into the curb with flashing lights, saw one officer scanning rooftops and sidewalks and windows, talking to a microphone on a long coiled cord reaching back inside the cruiser he leaned against. Leaning rather casually, not crouching to use the car for cover.

  That wasn’t the body-language of fear and a sniper-hunt, there. Looked like he’d already decided they’d been called out for firecrackers or an engine backfire.

  Ms. Detective el Hajj should be able to talk him past that, being a fellow cop and all—as long as he wasn’t carrying a rocket launcher over one shoulder or some other obvious threat.

  Which eliminated the katana or any other kind of long blade. Well, he wasn’t much of a swordsman, anyway. Being short suited him better for close-in fighting. Cut ’em off at the knees, then you can reach the throat.

  Short blades he had in plenty. Weapon only, or something shaped for utility use, prying and cutting and splitting as well as stab and slash? He didn’t know where they were going, what they would face . . .

  The front room closet gave him a choice of cloth-wrapped bundles. One felt comfortable in his hand, balanced, well remembered, even while still hidden. He’d custom-forged many of his blades for others—they’d never felt right to him, even though his hammer and anvil knew they were right for the man or woman who would carry and swing that metal.

  This one, though, he’d felt growing to his own hand as he formed the glowing steel. He’d started in to make a blade for sale to some stranger, needed the money. Ended up with something that carried more than the usual splinter of his own soul bound within its working.

  And it wanted to come along on this hunt.

  He unwrapped it while walking back to the kitchen, then laid the sheathed knife and the linen wrapper on the counter and turned away to dig a padded jacket out of the closet. A little warm for the season, but no need to advertise his weapon.

  A quiet gasp behind him made him turn back. She was staring at the knife like a mongoose waiting for the perfect moment to pounce on a cobra. He studied the knife like it was a new thing, trying to see what had caused her reaction.

  He’d formed the h
ilt as a traditional aikuchi tsuka ito, including the Japanese-style kumihimo raw-silk braid wrap, patterned black and red, that would give him a firm grip even soaked with sweat or blood. Not like that stone on her knife. Minimal dark bronze guard and pommel: simple, smooth and flush with the sheath, just a single rune cast into the guard on each side of the blade—Þurisaz for “Thor” on one side, giant-killer, god of the hammer even if not known as a smith; Tiwaz for “Tyr” on the other, god of single combat, victory, and heroic glory. Bits of Nordic, consciously ironic whimsy when he was carving the lost-wax forms for casting.

  Her hand reached toward the grip and then pulled back, once, twice, doing a shy dance as if outside her control.

  “May I?”

  First time she’d asked for anything. He nodded, reluctant. Knives were personal, weapons were personal, if they had any value at all. Touching his knife was moving inside his personal space, too much like touching him.

  She grasped the hilt and the matching kumihimo of the black-lacquered wooden sheath. Drew the blade—seven inches, eight inches, he’d never measured it, it was what it was, what it had asked to be, fitted to his size. Straight, edged partway down the back, heavier and broader than his sword-cane blade, he could clamp the tip in his vise and support his whole weight on the hilt, no spring to it. Closer to yoroi toshi—“armor-piercer”—than the slim blade of a traditional aikuchi. The Japanese language used great precision in naming blades and other parts of weapons. Told you things about a culture and its history.

  Funny thing, after all his years in a village a day’s walk outside of Edo—the words he remembered mostly tied to weapons and steel. Little else had stayed with him. Told you things about his culture and history . . .

  She stared at the steel as if hypnotized, lost in the matte gray acid-etched surface—the “storm-wave” pattern of his forged laminations. Her left forefinger reached out to test the edge, just her nail.

  “Don’t—”

  Blood beaded on her fingertip, below the split nail. She kept her nails short, just like her hair—made sense if she spent her days poking around the insides of arson crime-scenes. Now she stared at the blood.

  “I didn’t even touch it!”

  She looked up, met his stare. “This would buy your blood away from me.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t fit you. You need a longer knife. A larger grip. A guard for meeting blade with blade. A style for someone who seeks danger, not the last defense of a hermit.”

  No, he didn’t quite know where he’d come up with that horoscope in steel.

  She weighed the knife in her hand, fluid grace shifting through different combat grips and tossing it from right hand to left and back, then nodded. Sheathed it and set it back on the counter, her hand lingering as if reluctant.

  “We come back to my first question the other night. What are you? That blade didn’t come from any human forge.”

  He shrugged, slipped his arms into his jacket, and settled the sheathed knife into a pocket sewn below the collar and angled across his back between his shoulder blades. No guard, the knife would lie flat and concealed by the padding to either side, pommel just out of sight, while the pocket held snug against the kumihimo braid on the sheath so he could draw his weapon with one hand. He tested it. Smooth. Attention to detail had saved his ass more times than he could count.

  “I am what I am. Nobody has ever put a name to us, not even Mother.” He glanced at her hand. “Your finger okay?”

  She held it up. No blood. “Enough talk. Legion seems to think we’re working with a deadline. Get your ass down those stairs. You first.” She picked up the pheasant feather and the note. “Since Allah in His beneficence has given me a star to follow . . . ”

  “Speaking of stars, why aren’t you tracking that Seal from the ashes?” Ali Akhbar Khan spoke again from his memory, on the roof of his mud fort and enjoying the spectacular night sky of his hills, “And He it is Who has made the stars for you that you might follow the right way thereby in the darkness of the land and the sea . . . ”

  She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Because that manifestation of Allah’s infinite mercy led nowhere. Two steps and gone. That’s why I came here. You’re the only person I’ve ever had trouble following. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “You found me . . . ”

  “I was following my own blood on your cane.”

  He headed down the stairs, avoiding his little ineffective traps, picking up his cane on his way.

  Her voice followed him. “You really should replace some of these steps. A person could get hurt.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  VIII

  “Turn left down the next alley.”

  She’d led them back into that beyond-bad section of town, the bombed-out-Berlin landscape near the synagogue. Or what was left of the synagogue. “Led” isn’t accurate, either, he thought. It’s “No way in hell I’m gonna let you behind my back. Not with those blades. You take point.”

  Apparently she didn’t trust Legion as a mediator. That was okay. Neither did he.

  He heard rats in the trash, snowdrifts of trash that oozed out from dingy graffiti-splashed windowless brick canyon walls to nearly block the alley, too narrow for a car, trash that had been picked over with even the dubious-value rusty metal sorted out to sell by the pound to junk dealers to buy junk. The kind you injected or smoked or sucked up your nose. How could you find so damn much trash once you pulled out any scrap metal or burnable wood or even cardboard sheets large enough to block a draft? Plastic jugs. Broken glass. Discarded clothing too far gone even for the homeless. Tattered remnants of plastic sheeting, rattling in the wind. Cotton-stuffed mattresses spilling their piss-reeking guts onto the cracked asphalt and brick pavement. Dogshit. Damned if he knew what the dogs found to eat back here. Maybe the rats.

  Some of those rustlings probably weren’t rats. People sheltered in trash igloos braced against the crumbling bricks. He felt their wondering, paranoid goggle-eyed straggle-haired stare from the shadows, what those two clean strangers were doing in this filthy down-and-out world. Stranger means danger . . .

  He wondered what they thought he could take from them, what they thought they could take from him, and resisted the impulse to reach back and touch his knife-hilt to prove he still had it.

  Never tell the world where you hide your weapons.

  She kept about fifteen, twenty feet behind him, calling out directions now and then, far enough back so one grenade wouldn’t get both of them. Where did that image come from? Was I in some army somewhere? But he couldn’t shake the feeling of being on patrol in hostile jungles, her “point-man” reference, with her as backup rather than enemy. She had at least one gun still, and that silly gaudy Isfahan dagger. Plus whatever else she hid in her coveralls.

  From what he’d learned of her so far, that probably included a brigade of heavy dragoons held in reserve. Another army reference. Damned memory. Was I drafted at bayonet-point, sometime since gunpowder came on the scene?

  Which could have been three or four centuries back, lost in the mists of time . . .

  Armies don’t have much interest in drafting a midget with a limp. Big strong not-too-smart farm boys, that’s what they want, and lots of ’em, the kind of soldier you could expect to march across a mile of open field into the cannon’s mouth. March in neat skirmish lines through barbed wire against machine guns.

  More likely I heard soldier jargon while I repaired their weapons in the armory. Or made pretty-pretty swords for the officers.

  Or I picked the phrases up from Ali Akhbar Khan. Heavy dragoons and grenadiers—those sound British enough.

  He kept scanning the alley as he walked. And wrinkling his nose. No indoor plumbing in those trash igloos. “Do the note and the feather lead in the same direction?”

  “Turn right at the next alley.”

  So she wasn’t going to say. He turned. The next alley looked vaguely familiar, wider and also s
omewhat cleaner. You could drive down this one. Someone bothered to keep it clear. Backs of buildings, not the sides, loading docks and rear entries and such. No windows below the second floor, to make breaking-in harder.

  Third building down on the right, a blank wood door, fancy inset panels with the varnish weathered off, wood gray and splintering, stone-trimmed gothic arch capped with some kind of shield surmounted by a cross. The shield had eroded far enough by acid rain, he couldn’t read what it once carried—words or symbols. Church-type detail but not a church. Chapter house? Rectory? Offices for a church no longer standing? Or maybe the cross just warded against demons?

  He’d seen that before, something to do with Mother, something at least forty or fifty years gone in the mists of time. Weeds grew on the threshold, rooted in dust and sand blown into the eddy over years. Door not used.

  “This one?” He glanced back at her.

  “No. Keep going.”

  Why did he remember this? Blank brick wall except for the door and its stone trim, no windows. Judging by the change in brick, a narrow building about forty feet wide, maybe four stories high, a story taller than the ones to either side. Looked like old work, not machine-made uniform brick, slightly lumpy and uneven but in better condition than its neighbors. Anonymous. No hardware on the outside of the door—no lock, no knob, no knocker or bell. Not unusual on an exit door . . .

  “Move it, little man!”

  He moved it.

  Two buildings further, on the opposite side of the alley, she focused on a blank steel door with locks and handle. Locks, plural, three of them. Even standing back, he could see dings and gouges along the lock-side jamb where someone had tried to pry it open. Old rust on some of the scratches, others looked newer.

  “This one.”

  He remembered it too, vaguely, again something associated with Mother. But then, they’d been in this town a long, long time, even by his standards. Faded scratched peeling letters on faded scratched gray paint, HAIRSTON’S ANTIQUES and ATLAS SECURITY on a badge-sticker that looked like it had been there forty years. Buzzer-button to summon your genie, if you had a delivery to make.