IGMS Issue 44 (17 page)

It kept raining, and the fringes of the world stayed grey. I started to believe it was normal. Then one day Red Hand came running into the lab.

"Take it." He pointed at the gripe water and tossed me a silver canteen. "Let's go."

There were a few students hunched over one of the lab benches. They stared at him with wide eyes. He was wearing jeans and a dusty leather jacket, but he still looked like he had wandered out of yesterday's basement. And there was a hatchet stuck in his belt.

The gripe water had waited, nearly forgotten, in its silver bowl on a shelf most of the semester. It tossed crystal reflections on the ceiling now. There was too much of it to fit in the canteen, but it pulled itself together and flowed into it anyway. I followed Red Hand into the corridor.

"This is Janie Wringer."

I had seen her before, in local artists' shops. She looked as old as Red Hand looked ageless, but she matched us stride for stride down the hallway.

"The gripe water's been calling all winter. Didn't you hear it?"

I shook my head and then thought of the rain.

"Is that why it's been so grey?"

Red Hand shook his head. "It's grey because Mab is gone."

I followed them until we were standing outside the science building in the half-overgrown quad between clock tower and parking lot.

"Someone used a word of power," Janie whispered.

"It was your bird," Red Hand grunted. "The crows were said to have had one. Mab may have forgotten. Or imagined they had. Or not cared. What did you tell him?"

"Who?"

"Your bird. He spoke it on your behalf."

"I don't remember." I paused. "I think I told him I wanted my life back, that I wanted to be left alone."

Red Hand looked at me like I was a child who had disappointed him.

"What do you care?" I glanced past the two of them, both almost wholly ciphers, to where there were solid, unyielding cars in the parking lot. Beyond that was a road clustered with lights and advertisements. "Why should I? I did whatever it was she wanted me to do. You're back, and apparently the others won't be far behind. You guys go do the things that old wonders do when they get back together."

The canteen sloshed against my thigh.

"We're Mab's hand." Red Hand held up his own. "The first five she named. What's a house of mirrors without light?"

I gritted my teeth. "You're not making sense. You said yourself that I had it backward."

Something huge shuddered into view over the horizon, and I had the impression of the uppermost reaches of a ship's rigging rising out of a cloudbank.

"Christopher 57," Janie explained. "It took him longest. He woke up in the South Sea, and he said someone had built a city on top of him whilst he slept."

"You need to bring her back."

"Why me?" I fought the urge to sit in the grass and refuse to move. "I was supposed to bring
you
back."

"She's like a child. And you spurned her."

"I don't know what Hamilton said to her. Maybe that we both just wanted to be left alone."

The shape swung into view again between the trees, impossibly large, with flanks of thunderheads.

"No one is alone," it rumbled. I felt the voice in my teeth. "To request solitude is to provoke exile."

How could you ask the storm and the light to leave you alone? Where would it go if you did?

"Okay."

I forced myself to look upward at its impossible bulk.

"Follow me."

My garage had not changed. For the past few months I had been reluctant to go into it. Thirteen Shades joined us on the walk home, and the thing they were calling Christopher 57 waited above like a minor planet. I pushed the door ajar and looked around.

The god of the garage was waiting on top of an aluminum ladder.

"I wondered when you'd be back."

"I need to get back into the Blur," I told him.

"You were never really there, remember?" He winked at me, or at least one of the old beer bottle caps caught the light. "You never kissed her."

"She was the wrong one."

"Was she?" I always felt like he should have had a pumpkin head, but he never did. This time it was a plastic watering jug. "I'm never quite sure which way these stories will go. I thought maybe that was your exit."

"It wasn't. Can you get us there?"

He motioned to a door in the wall that had never been there. "I couldn't do this before, but what with all the old wonders out and about again." He shrugged. "Only room for one though."

"Yeah."

It had begun to storm.

It was a long time before I found her, out there at the edge of the Blur where the legends get raggedy and start bleeding off the map. She seemed faded in those winds, and I had to yell for a long time before she turned.

"They're all here," I told her. There were clouds where her eyes should have been. "They've all come back."

I held up my hand. It was impossible to tell how many fingers there were.

"They were just names," she said sadly. "Invented things."

"Right. Your old wonders. They found me, like you said they would."

There were things that rode the wind. A fleet of them passed near us now, trailing tiny beads of lightning.

"There was a girl who wakened forms."

I nodded. "Carla."

"What did she tell you?"

I thought about the night beside the barn. "That it was Platonic. That I was an unfrozen form. Is it true?"

"We are as true as all false and solid things can be. Only those things which do not end are real. In a thousand years she may be me. She may try to gather all the things she has stirred to life."

"You need to come back," I said helplessly. "Return and do . . . whatever it is a fairy queen is supposed to do."

She was turning away again. Her face was revolving like a star, like something huge and heavy that would take a million years to circle, a million years for her eyes to swing back into view.

"Mab, I'm sorry." I wasn't sure what for, but I said it. Then I said it again.

The wind ripped the words away as soon as they were past the safety of my lips, and they fled toward the horizon. Her form was receding now as well. The clouds kept coming down from the sky and breaking between us.

I yelled again.

I had no hold on her. I had nothing to offer. I hadn't even brought her museum back together. It was like she had said, they had all found me. I wasn't an actor here. I wasn't an agent.

What did I have to give?

"Once there was a man," I began randomly. "A man who . . . was in charge of lighting all the stars every evening. They were lanterns, hanging from a boat that had been turned upside down. That had crashed a long time ago. But no one remembered, and he had to light the lanterns every night."

She paused, her bare shoulders white as distant mountains.

"And he did this for as long as he could remember. Alone each night, climbing the hull of the wrecked ship, kindling each wick with a long taper. Every morning the wicks would burn low and the Sun would rise again, and every evening he would climb the long, cold planks of the ship to light them."

The wind was moving her back toward me, but not in a straight line. She curved off to one side, or I was curving around her. Straight lines were impossible in the Blur.

"And one night when the Moon was high," I continued, grabbing at words that kept trying to scatter. It had been easier when she was turned away, but now her eyes were bright and locked on mine. "One night he noticed something he had never seen before. In the moonlight he saw that the old, wrecked ship held a figurehead. A statue, carved up at the front of the ship. The, uh . . . the prow."

It was okay. The story did not have to have an ending.

"She was beautiful, but she was ivory and cold, and the old man loved her, though he did not know how to wake her."

When they touched my own, her lips were the rain and the earth and the leaves.

We left the Blur together, though parts of it spilled out around us and into the garage, until years later people wondered why there was a bower of vines and flowers and an impossible valley behind that particular house.

The old wonders were waiting for her, and she sent them forth, commanding, back out into the world down paths that were strange and winding. Their coming, however, was not completely unexpected, nor were the changes they wrought.

In the evenings we haunt the hills together.

Through the window of his elevated seaside shack, Jafartha watched as a deep red moon climbed out of the ocean to join the two copper orbs that had risen several hours earlier. Though he knew there was still time until the three moons aligned, Jafartha was increasingly anxious. Tonight was too important: it was time for the Procession of Kings. It was time for his youngest son, Kitja, to become a man.

Kitja had always been smart, the smartest in their family by far, and in the past year he'd gotten immensely strong working the family's fishing nets. But Kitja was squeamish -- and that made him weak. He wouldn't try to catch the simka fish; he wouldn't go near a cayalla beetle; and worst of all, he didn't want to cut off his mother's upper left arm.

Jafartha could no longer lie patiently in bed, watching and waiting while the Sky Kings decided where to converge. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, propping himself with his lower arms on his knees and his upper arms against the windowsill.

He gazed down below, at the tide surging against the pylons that held his shack high above the ebb and flow of the sea.

A chill breeze blew through the night.

Jafartha closed the window against the cold, but it was no use; the wind blew right through the cracks in the walls of their meager shack. Goosebumps crept over his hairless body, starting in his midriff and radiating down his two legs and out all four arms.

Jafartha hated being cold.

His wife sat up in bed and slid behind him, rubbing his back feebly with her underdeveloped lower hands.

He snorted.
Women
. Their lower arms possessed less strength than a whimpering newborn.