Not far from the LA4 Gate, Arcadia side, was a path to Duke Skyhollow’s estate. I’d glimpsed it before when Caryl first sneaked me into fairyland to negotiate with our manticore friend, back when he was terrorizing Skyhollow out of rage at his lost chance to meet his Echo.
The path looked like a heat mirage over the golden sand, long and serpentine and leading to what appeared to be distant haze-cloaked towers against the apricot sky on the horizon.
I hadn’t bothered trying on my suit for this Tuesday afternoon visit, because if it protected the path’s spellwork from me, it stood to reason it would also protect me from the spellwork. That meant with the suit on I wouldn’t be able to keep up with Caryl and Claybriar and without it I’d destroy the path, so I had to stay behind. I did put on some latex gloves, out of respect for Claybriar.
I wasn’t willing to let anyone else take the Medial Vessel out of my sight, so the two of them had to go and bring Brand back to where I waited near the LA4 Gate. They needed me not only because I was keeping an iron grip on the Vessel, but because if Brand decided to start cursing people the minute he popped out of there I could whip off my gloves and fix everything with my iron touch.
I also happened to be the only person Brand was 100 percent unwilling to eat.
When Caryl and Claybriar returned from their trip to the estate, Claybriar was carrying the crow in a dainty wooden cage. The bird looked neither happy nor healthy. Claybriar looked strangely smug. Caryl was in her element, having been brought in on all the geeky details by Shock via text message, so her stress level was fairly low.
“He lets me handle him sometimes,” said Claybriar, standing there in the bright sun in the full shirtless glory of his native form. “So I’m probably the best person to do the actual, uh . . .” He mimed cramming something into a bag.
“What exactly is going to happen?” I asked Caryl. “I mean, how’s the manticore going to come out of that thing?”
“He will not be emerging from the bag,” said Caryl. “The destruction of the crow, as with the destruction of the dog, will leave Brand’s consciousness trapped at the site of the ‘death.’ Meanwhile, once the spellwork enters the intermediate space, it will trigger its original function and rotate the alternate form into place at the site of last sensory input.”
“What I’m getting at,” I said, “is where exactly is this gigantic lion-scorpion guy going to appear? On top of whoever’s holding the bag?”
“At the last place from which the crow perceived the world, so . . .” Caryl acquired a sudden look of dismay. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. At the opening of the bag.”
“I feel like this isn’t going to end well.”
Caryl cleared her throat, fidgeted with her gloves. “Well! Let us simply do our best to stand clear of the opening, shall we?”
That wasn’t the only problem, we realized, now that the bag and the bird were in the same place. In comparison to each other, the opening of the bag was slightly smaller, and the crow slightly larger, than we had quite anticipated. Claybriar reached into the cage and grabbed the bird around its middle, and I held the bag’s mouth open wide, but we could tell just by looking that he wasn’t going to fit.
One of Claybriar’s ears twitched. “This is a problem,” he said. The crow just stared into space listlessly, feet dangling.
“Perhaps,” said Caryl, “we should cut the bird into pieces.”
The bag fell out of my hands, and Claybriar made a plaintive sound.
“Are you kidding me?” Clay said as I bent carefully to retrieve the bag from the sand. He cradled the bird against his fuzzy chest, which was too much indignity for it to handle even in its current state of depression. It struggled feebly. “I’ve been taking care of this stupid thing for a week, and you think I’m going to watch you mutilate it?”
Caryl let out a stormy exhale and fixed Claybriar with an exasperated look. “We are preparing to consign it to an eternity of timeless nothingness!” she snapped. “What difference does it make if we mutilate it first?”
“It’s moot anyway,” I said, “because I seem to have forgotten my hacksaw.”
“I will use a spell,” Caryl said.
“Hell no!”
“I mean I shall ask a spirit, as the commoners do. We have the luxury of a few moments for me to attempt this, do we not? I have been very curious about it, and I even have Claybriar here to guide me.”
Claybriar looked startled. The bird was really starting to fight him now, so he put it back into the cage. “It’s, uh, kind of an easier thing to do than to explain,” he said. “You’ve never done it?”
“No, but I am a quick study.”
He considered. “I’m told it’s a bit like praying.”
“I have never done that, either.”
“Ah.” Claybriar scratched at a horn. “Well, just hold in your mind the image of what you want. And, uh . . . cast your mind out into the infinite . . . uh . . .” He gestured expansively.
“Clay,” I said, “you are the leader of a revolution. You really need to get better at explaining shit.”
“It’s my first time, all right?” He folded his arms. “Just think about reaching outward. Casting, like you’re fishing.”
“I have never—”
“Done that either, right. But you know what I mean; don’t be difficult. The point is to remain open, to put your idea for a spell out there, like bait. Keep holding it, even if it’s tiring, and wait for a spirit to come to you and say ‘Let’s do this.’ Or they might negotiate a bit, or clarify, but it’s all—without words. It feels like it’s all in your mind. Then either they’re in or they’re out. If they agree, you’ll know it when you feel it. Like a sudden burst of energy that’s yours to shape.”
Caryl sat on the spongy sand, cross-legged, as though meditating. She closed her eyes.
“This feels ridiculous,” she said after a moment.
“Now you have to start over,” said Claybriar. “You can’t be thinking about anything else, including how ridiculous you feel.”
“Focus is difficult for me without—” A flicker of distress passed over her face, and then irritated determination. “I shall try.”
She sat for a very long time. It was extremely boring.
I looked over at Claybriar, met his eyes, lifted an eyebrow. He shrugged and walked over to me, careful not to disturb Caryl.
“Caryl told me about your suit,” he murmured, taking my hand.
“Yeah?”
He leaned in then, to whisper about a quarter inch from my ear, and traced a little circle on my gloved palm with his thumb. “It would take some creativity, but I think I could show you a good time in that thing.”
I smacked him on the arm, and he grinned.
“It worked!” Caryl said, childlike. I gave a guilty start and stepped away from Claybriar. Caryl was oblivious; her eyes sparkled with wonder, and her cheeks had gone pink. “A spirit came to me!”
“Cool!” I said, surprised into sincerity.
“Apparently, it enjoys severing things! It wants to know how many pieces.”
“You make the loveliest friends, Caryl,” I said.
Caryl closed her eyes again, to all appearances communing with the spirit. I had no way of eavesdropping, and things went on for so long I started to wonder if negotiations weren’t going well. Meanwhile Clay removed the crow from the cage again, holding it carefully.
“Easy there, fella,” said Claybriar. “Try not to—”
The bird fell from his hands into eight cauterized segments. They pattered to the sand in a heap.
I let out a strange, hysterical laugh, and then my stomach gave a lurch. I backed away from the remains, wiping at my damp forehead.
“You all right?” Claybriar asked. He wasn’t looking so hot either.
“Just put the pieces in the bag,” I said.
“I shall do it,” said Caryl, seeming more pleased than disturbed by the carnage.
She had only gotten six pieces in when suddenly there was a sickening wrench in the immediate atmosphere, an indescribable torsion of reality. My ears popped, and then I think I might have had a slight consciousness brownout, because next thing I knew, Claybriar was helping hold me upright despite the obvious pain it caused him to touch me. As soon as I felt steady again I pulled away.
The manticore lay on the sand, his terrifying ruby red eyes as fixed and lifeless as billiard balls.
“Oh God,” I moaned. “Is he dead?”
Claybriar pointed to the creature’s shaggy red rib cage, which slowly rose and fell.
“Brand,” I said gently. I stepped closer to his horrible face, so close to human, but big enough to serve tea for two on. Hesitantly I touched his brownish-red mane with my gloved hand.
Words emerged slowly from the manticore’s too-wide, ear-to-ear mouth, in a distant echo of his usual panic-inducing brassy rumble.
“Don’t . . . ever . . . pet . . . me.”
“You’re alive!” I said. I laughed, tearing up a little. “You’re all right!”
“By what . . . fucked-up . . . definition . . .” He let out a sudden barrage of coughs like two trains crashing into each other, and a venomous spine shot off his jointed tail, narrowly missing Claybriar.
“Fuck!” said Claybriar, standing rigid.
Brand shuddered and lay still again.
I hovered over him. “You don’t look so good,” I said. “You need something to drink? Someone to eat?”
“Millie,” said Claybriar sternly. But the corners of Brand’s mouth twitched upward, and it filled me with glee.
Brand tried to get up. I was reminded of his first efforts to work the dog body Shock had made him back in the fall. His huge bat wings unfurled halfway, flailed and then furled again. His feet slid out from under him, and he face-planted in the sand.
“Take it easy,” said Claybriar.
“The wings are still in my head,” Brand droned without even lifting his face. “Four sets, two I can feel that aren’t there, two I can’t feel that are. But backward now. Vivian . . . Vivian . . . find me a naughty unicorn! I could eat sand. Does Parisa still want me? She’ll feed me . . . I’m a good doggie. I’m a good doggie . . .” He trailed off into an incoherent groan.
Caryl began to look fretful, wringing her hands and worrying at her lower lip. “I do not think he is in any condition to help us,” she said.
“We should feed him,” I said.
“You’re kidding, right?” said Claybriar. “He eats live fey.”
“Well,” I said, “surely there are some fey that are slightly more disposable? Fey cows, fey zebras? I saw something that looked like a deer or a horse, back in Daystrike.”
“Whatever you saw,” said Claybriar, “it was just as intelligent as you or me. No matter what the sidhe tell you, we don’t have animals here. Everything has a soul. Plays games, feels love and despair, makes art.”
“Okay, but they all die, eventually, right? Some of them eat each other?”
“If it’s part of a Hunt, then it’s a game. There’s honor in it: The stronger party gets to live and the other to die, and all that. But he is in no condition to Hunt; we’d just be kidnapping some poor creature and feeding it to him.”
“Is there a quick way to find someone willing? Someone dying of a wasting disease or something?”
“The Seelie don’t get diseases, and the Unseelie don’t die from them.”
“Condemned prisoners? The White Rose has a prison. Does Skyhollow?”
“It does.” Claybriar looked thoughtful for a moment and then suddenly straightened. “Oh.”
“What?”
“I may have an idea.”
“What? What is it?”
“It may be nothing. But it also could be a big deal. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. Just wait here, and make sure that Brand doesn’t go anywhere.”
I looked down at the manticore, who had just begun to snore gently. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” I said.