Blood and Iron (7 page)

They stood poised a moment longer, until she brought him around with a hand on his neck and a word in his ear. “Stand steady,” she commanded, throwing a leg across his haunches to slide down. He stamped before she was well clear, but the dinner-plate hoof did not brush her. She patted Whiskey on the shoulder as she might any horse.

“Shall I wait here, mistress?”

“I'll make my own way home.” A risk to let him go. More of a risk to let him overhear. She waited until the clop of his hoofbeats died away, and started walking. The moors beyond the river of blood lay silent and smiling in the dim afternoon. Seeker called out, “Seeker of the Unseelie Fae! It is I, the Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe.”

Two Queens ruled Faerie, a kingdom divided between them. One Queen for the dark things, and one for the bright. The elder was the Mebd, the Summer Queen. The younger was the Cat Anna, the Queen of Winter, the White Witch. There had been others, Queens and Kings of air and darkness, ghosts and shadows: Oonagh, Titania, Oberon, Niamh, Finnvarra.

All were gone.

A cold wind sighed across the moor, flicking the ends of Seeker's hair like snakes' tongues. In this land, the Cat Anna's land, the shadows showed her nothing. Something small, clad in a pointed cap and a layer of filth, scurried into winter-bleak brush. Seeker flexed her fingers, shadows of a cat's claws dancing at the tips. With an effort, she straightened her hands; the talons fled.

“Bold, sister.” Someone unraveled from the shadows under a gorse shrub, uncoiling taller than anything had a right to from such a small hiding place. The woman swayed like a cobra, standing clad only in a deluge of golden bracelets and necklaces and a bright patterned sarong that stood out like blood on black marble against her skin. Rubies glittered in her ears, her nose, her navel. Rows of tiny beadlike scars shiny as drops of sweat covered her breasts, her arms, her forehead.

Seeker thought if she laid a hand on the other's cheek, she could cut her palm on the bone. “Kadiska,” she said, bowing.

The Seeker of the Unseelie came forward. “We are watched,” she whispered, bending in a matching bow. Her shadow flared a hood, balanced long and supple, stretching its length into the grass, and then broadened, widened, flaring ears and massive shoulders. “Your skin is cold. I see your fear.” Her tongue tasted the air, and she smiled from bottomless eyes.

“It's good to see you.”

“And you as well.” The other's formal tones fell away. “I heard you bound the Kelpie.”

“I did.” Seeker came forward and laid her hand on Kadiska's arm. “And your own hunting has been rich?”

Kadiska's legends were not Elaine's, and neither of theirs were the legends of Britain. But stories twine like the web of a spider, taken deep enough. And the Fae had spread their blood wide. The two Seekers might be cousins. Changelings, once taken, were rarely told who their Faerie ancestors might be, no matter how far removed.

Their Queens were sisters. And enemies born.

“Let us walk,” Kadiska said. Her shadow tail-lashed, flattening ears more tufted and longer than those of Seeker's cat-shadow. “Someplace with fewer ears.”

She spoke in the language of cats, which is not really speaking, and then she led Seeker along the riverbank until they came to a copse of rowan and thorn. “Here.”

A bench perched there, above the river, as if someone might want to take in the vista. Kadiska seated herself and gestured that Seeker do the same. For a long moment, they sat companionably thigh-to-thigh and made sure nothing fey was close enough to overhear. Then Kadiska turned with a rustle of gold chains and tilted her head. “Word of your mission travels fast, sister. I will compete with you.”

“I had assumed you would. It's too good to pass up.”

“Aye.” Kadiska rolled her shoulders. “Of course, our Queens know we will conspire against them. And each other.” A musical laugh revealed teeth filed sharp as a snake's.

Seeker laughed too. “It's the nature of bondage. Do you have a starting place?”

Kadiska bent and scooped up a stone, then tossed it into the crimson river. “America,” she said. “The previous Princes—there has been a general, if erratic, progress westerly.”

“There has?”

She showed Seeker her teeth. “I know of one or two perhaps you don't. You Americans think you invented civilization. ”

“We invented the Big Mac. That has to be worth something. ”

“Hegemony isn't civilization.” But Kadiska still smiled as she turned away.

Not the next day, nor the day after that, Matthew was forced to admit that the spirit-trace had failed—had not revealed the movements either of the Seeker of the Daoine Sidhe, or of the Seeker of the Unseelie Fae. As if their souls were given into soul-jars. As if they left no trace at all.
Hell of a way to find a Merlin, this.

And if I were a modern Merlin,
Matthew thought, rising to lock the door of his office after the last of the students left,
and I were not already a Promethean Mage, who and where would I be? And what would I be doing with my life?

How is a Merlin different than a Mage, in any case?
He paused with his hand on the latch, and shook his head. “Start from a point, Matthew,” he said under his breath, and reached up to grab his jacket from the peg upon the wall. “How do we find new Magi? How did Jane find
me?
”

His office hours weren't technically over for another fifteen minutes, but he didn't glance at the clock as he tugged the door shut behind himself and started down the tiled corridor with his hands stuffed into his pockets. And stopped, suddenly enough that an undergrad stepped on the backs of his shoes. “Dr. S, I'm sorry—”

“If you want to know something, and you don't know where to look it up, who do you ask?” Matthew turned around, looking down at the freckled redheaded girl who had almost run him over. He recognized her from his Critical Theory section, and smiled. “Hypothetically speaking.”

She blinked and stepped back, tilting her chin up to meet his eyes. Melissa. Her name was Melissa. “An expert?” she hazarded, uncertainly.

“Say you don't know any experts. Say it's an obscure fact.”

“Reference librarian,” she said. “Go to the library.” Matthew grinned, and pushed both of his hands through his unbound hair. Echoing his gesture, she tugged on one of the braided pigtails that did nothing to make her seem like a little girl, and lifted an eyebrow hopefully, and something deep in his heart that he'd thought healed—or at least scarred over—broke into fresh blood. “Excellent, Miss Martinchek,” he said, and nodded. And turned away quickly, before his queasiness could show in his face. “I'll see you in class, won't I?”

He glanced back over his shoulder to see her standing, frown line between her eyebrows as she watched him walk away, one thumb hooked under the padded strap of her knapsack. Something in her gray-blue eyes snagged his attention and drew it back.
That's who we do it for. Smart girls like her.

How do you find a Mage, Matthew? That's how. You look a little more carefully, is all.
Whistling now, and telling himself the sound filled the emptiness under his breastbone and made his footsteps light, Matthew let those footsteps lead him to Patience, and to Fortitude.

The streets bustled on a sunny September afternoon as Matthew left Hunter College. He played a game as he walked, reading unreliable futures in the flight of pigeons and the scud of clouds. Anything to distract his mind from worrying over old disappointments. Such a denatured term,
disappointments
. But Matthew was a Mage, who knew the value of the true meaning of a word.
Disappointed in love, disappointed in career, disappointed in one's suit upon a lady—the Victorians had it right.

The Victorians also had brain fever, fates worse than death, and women who were no better than they should be, honesty constrained him to recall. And they did not have Patience and Fortitude. Matthew's footsteps halted at the base of the wide white steps leading up to the main entrance of the New York City Public Library building, where he pushed his spectacles up his nose and nodded left and right—once at each of the lions crouching in guard by the portals of knowledge.

Patience and Fortitude dated from 1911: no earlier. They had not gained their modern names until the Great Depression. Their true names were no deep secret, though, and Matthew knew a great number of Names.

Matthew dug in his breast pocket for the silver flask he carried and climbed the steps until he stood on the south end, dwarfed beside Patience's enormous paw.
Ask a librarian. Of course.
He spilled a little brandy on his fingers, and dabbed it on the lion's nose, then stretched to touch anointing fingers to its eyes, its breast, its massive gentle paws, and slipped the flask back inside his camouflage jacket, which he zipped to the neck before he bound his hair. “Leo Lenox,” he said, and—having glanced over his shoulder to see if he was observed—he leaned forward and blew into Patience's alcohol-scented marble mouth. “In my Name, in the Name of Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak Magus and all the angels of God, I command thee:
Awake.
”

Almost nothing: a trickle of his own slight strength, no more, and the lion's cold marble eye blinked once. And then once again. Patience—Leo Lenox—was so steeped in love and tradition and the heartbeat of the living city that he was very, very nearly awake already. Very nearly a Genius. All Matthew had done was reach out just a little, and shake his shoulder.
:Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak Magus:
Patience said, his soft eye tracking Matthew's movements.
:You have a question for Me?:

“Leo Lenox, I have,” Matthew said, and felt as if the stone under his fingers took on some of the character of coarse black mane. “Warden of knowledge, I come to ask of you a question.”

“What is the price if I fail?” He kept his voice low, though the lion's voice boomed in his chest like a drum.

“Will it be answered if I choose not to play at riddles, Leo Lenox?”

“Then ask.” Matthew drew a breath, listening closely.

“To the crossroads,” Matthew said automatically. And blinked. “Times Square.”

:The crossroads of the world:
the lion said.
:The answer to the question you have not asked is, you must follow the magic and the music to their source, and face what you have lost therein:
And once again, the beast was stone.

Chapter Four

Promontory Summit, Utah: not Cheyenne, but the West nonetheless, and Seeker felt less weary for it. She stepped from a red rock's shadow under a sky pale as the Kelpie's eye and stretched, raising her face to the sun. Old pain lay like dust across the desert. This was the place where the New World had been struck in chains, old magics manacled by new subtleties; the reek of that binding still rose from the dun-colored land.

The grade of the old railway, torn up for scrap steel during the Second World War, hosted a party of hikers eastbound in the light of an October noon. The day held cool and bright. Seeker turned the flannel collar of her shirt up and smiled. If there was anywhere in the Americas she would find traces of a Merlin not yet come to his power, it was here. Here where the spell still lived—although roadways and highways laid the bindings now, a more intricate set of chains.

Seeker crouched, boots creaking, and laid her hand flat on the dust between her feet.
“Your predecessors have had some success with this,”
the Mebd had said. Nimue convinced Merlin Ambrosius to take her as a student; she seduced and entrapped him. The wisdom was taught from priest to priestess and back to priest, in the old days. But that trick wouldn't work this time, if this Merlin was in fact untaught, untried.

I'll have to be the teacher.
Her fingers spiderwebbed trails across dry earth.
The seducer.
Air redolent of sage and creosote turned bitter in her lungs.
As Keith was to me.

She frowned, and sketched another word in the dust. Ogham, the writing an uneven ladder above and below the centerline. But there was only blankness. It might have been Kadiska, here before her, but it didn't feel like the other Seeker's touch—the power wasn't used or drained. Just—gone. Walled away.

And who has such strength?
Seeker didn't like the answers. She scraped fingers through her writing, obliterating the form of the ancient letters, and raised her eyes to the glaring sun.
Otherwise
glimpses of the hikers caught her attention, seen from the depths of shadows salted here and there on the barren plain: images of a jackrabbit, a road-runner, a floating dragonfly windblown from some oasis.

Seeker moved westward along the old line of the track. A coyote ghost winked from beneath a rock and she offered it a sideways smile. Out of touch with the land that remained, but the old spirits still stalked here as elsewhere. And the rules were different, for the ones who had been gods. She kicked a pebble. There might be other places she could look, places where the power of men crossed the power of the Fae as that of the Merlin was made to do.

America. A big place. Full of ancient, chained magic and stains of spilt blood. No worse than the Old World, certainly. But no better.
How am I supposed to find one man in all of this?

Blocked. Which meant someone had blocked it.

“Why can't she ever just
ask?
” Seeker said to the wind, and went unanswered. “I wanted to talk to her about the Kelpie anyway.”