Songs_of_the_Satyrs (8 page)

“Good point. But can’t you tell him you don’t want to do it anymore?”

Marco was shaking his head before the faery had finished speaking. “Not that simple. Leo made a commitment to the Master to collect . . . It’s a commitment we have to honor as a clan.”

“So ask for a different job.”

“Doing what? This is who we are. I either contribute, or I’m a liability. The clan can only have so many members. The only way to replace me is when I die. Then they can create a replacement.”

“Unenlightened.”

Marco nodded and put his face back in his hands to wallow in the gloom.

“There may be a way out of this,” Alphrein said, slowly. Marco raised his head. “There’s only one slight problem.”

“What?”

“You need to go out into the Mundane.”

There was a long silence.

“It’s the only way,” said Alphrein. “There’s a place I know of. They have people there. People who can help with situations like this.”

“Satyrs?”

“No, idiot,” snapped the faery, a flash of fire flickering behind his eyes. “People who have a problem with wine.”

“Really?”

The faery nodded. “Think on it first. You’d be taking a big step. Finding a way to get off the wine isn’t exactly in the best interest of your clan.”

“So what do I have to do? And how can I go out into the Mundane? I can’t be seen. You know that’s not allowed.”

“I can help with that,” said Alphrein.

Marco’s heart sank. Here came the sting. The price. “How much?”

The faery tried to look wounded, but didn’t quite succeed. “A trifle, nothing more. I can provide you with a glamour to disguise your more . . . obvious non-human features.”

“How much?”

“For now, nothing. I’m just looking to do a friend a favor.”

“How. Much.”

“When you die, I inherit your estate.”

“What?”

“The Faerie are long lived. We can take the time to speculate when we accumulate. By the time you die you could be a pauper, or you could be fabulously rich. I’m betting on the latter.”

Marco said nothing, but thought furiously. Anything from the Faerie that seemed fair by definition wasn’t, but he couldn’t see the catch in this—and that worried him.

“You don’t have to tell me now,” said Alphrein. “You need to go away and think this through anyway, so . . .”

“No, I want to do it,” Marco blurted, almost surprising himself. “I want to go see this person. Maybe they can help, or at least give me an option not to go on like this . . .”

“I understand,” said Alphrein, a cooing sympathy in his voice. “So if you could just make your mark here . . .”

From out of nowhere a short parchment appeared, fluttering gently to land in Marco’s lap, while Alphrein proffered him an ink-ready quill that had not been there a moment ago.

Marco took the quill and scanned down the document. It seemed to say exactly what they had discussed: a glamour to allow him to walk freely in the Mundane in exchange for all rights to his estate upon his death. He made his mark and both parchment and quill faded away.

“When should I go?” Marco asked.

“Tomorrow,” the faery replied.

“So soon?”

“The next opportunity would be eight days hence. Can you wait that long?”

“No,” Marco said, without having to think about his answer. “What do I do?”

“The glamour will invoke as soon as you leave the grotto. Leave by the normal exit to the Mundane. Take a left out the door and keep walking until you see a building with the sign
Midtown Community Centre
. Go inside, then up to the second floor. Look for the number 208, and go in. Others will be there. Say nothing except to the one who introduces himself as ‘Tom.’ Tell him you have come for help.”

“Is that everything?”

“You must be in the room before eight. I’ll tell you when to leave. Do not tarry in the Mundane.”

Marco made him run over it again, just to be sure he had everything, then Alphrein wandered off into the forest.

***

Marco trembled as he stepped out onto the street. He had never visited the Mundane before. Noise hammered uncomfortably at his ears, and he was jostled by the press of people before he had taken two steps from the door. Yet for all the mass of humanity, he had never experienced a place so dead. Nothing connected to anything else, except for brief angry flashes that made him even more nervous. Everybody on the pavement seemed to be pushing at each other, and in the opposite direction that he needed to travel. He kept close to the wall as he tried to swim upstream.

Cold, hard stone surrounded him, breaking his contact with the earth—the very thing that kept him grounded in the world. Stray emotions floated in the air around him, battered him when they drifted too close. The farther he got from the door, the greater the desire grew to turn tail and run back to the grotto, to drown himself in wine, no matter what the cost.

He stopped, breathed deeply, until he clawed back a small measure of control and stepped forward again.

Finally he stood beneath a sign reading
Midtown Community Centre.
His heart hammered in his chest and he felt profoundly alone. Even the scorn of his clan-mates was beginning to seem preferable to this.

He prevaricated in front of the double glass doors, jiggling gently from hoof to hoof and making a staccato tapping on the sidewalk. As he turned away to run back to the grotto, a hand touched his shoulder. He flinched and turned to see a human standing uncomfortably close, hands raised in a non-threatening gesture.

“Don’t give up now, man. You’ve made it this far.”

Marco cocked his head slightly to one side. “How would you know why I’m here?”

The human offered a wry smile. “You have the look.” He nodded, then walked toward the glass doors, which hissed aside and allowed him through.

Marco stepped away in surprise, but not far enough to put him back in the river of humans on the sidewalk. Doors that slid sideways were a novelty to him. He almost turned away, but the human had a point: he had come this far.

Was there any harm in finding out what this Tom person had to say?

He walked hesitantly forward, flinching again when the doors slid apart before him, and on into the lobby.

It took him a few minutes to find the stairs, and he tried not to clatter too much as he trotted up them. Glamour or no, his hooves were still there and still made a sharp racket on the hard tiles.

Once he reached the second floor, finding the door with 208 on it was relatively simple, and he paused outside for only a moment before pushing it open and walking in. As he passed the threshold, a tingle of fear ran up his spine.

The room was ten paces along each side. Flat walls battered the sound of people talking from side to side. Four windows were shuttered against the night by some slatted material. Most of the furniture was pushed out to the sides, apart from a circle of twenty chairs.

A group of people huddled outside the circle, and Marco saw a face he recognized—the human who had spoken to him outside. Marco started to panic as the man walked over, smiling broadly.

“Glad you made it. I’m Tom. That was your first step, and almost the hardest. We have another new recruit today. I’ve already spoken to her, so we’ll let her start. You just wait till I call on you, then you say the same as she says, okay?”

Marco nodded and made no protest when Tom pushed him gently toward one of the chairs. The rest of the group took that as a cue and soon all were seated. Marco looked around at them. Each pair of eyes offered him a level of acknowledgement; sometimes an encouraging smile, sometimes a sharp nod and a haunted stare.

Tom sat next to him and, next to Tom, an overweight woman who looked as though she had been weeping. Tom raised a hand and silence slowly fell, replaced by an expectant hush and rapt attention aimed toward their side of the circle. The woman stood, spoke, and Marco’s throat dried up. Was he expected to do this?

There was ecstatic applause and catcalls as the woman sat down. She looked flushed, but happy. Marco realized Tom was looking expectantly at him. He swallowed hard. Tom nodded an encouragement and Marco made it to his feet. He looked around the circle of faces, all waiting on him, anticipation in every one. He drew a deep breath.

“My name is Marco, and I am an alcoholic.”

Nobody moved. He had said the same as the woman, he was sure. Had he done something wrong? Then he realized that nobody had blinked since he had spoken, and his stomach began to churn.

Tom stood up and walked to the middle of the circle. He was chuckling, then he coughed and harrumphed and pulled himself together as he put his fingers between his lips and made a piercing whistle. He started to laugh again, his form slowly rippling like heat haze on a summer road, shrinking and solidifying into something very different, and Marco heard a noise from the corridor.

Alphrein started laughing again. “Don’t look so surprised, Marco,” he said.

“But . . . ?”

“But what?”

There was another sound, like distant thunder, coming from the corridor. Marco almost recognized it—enough to shift from upset stomach to bowels of water.

“You said these people would help.”

“Did I? I said they can help with situations where people have a problem with wine. I didn’t say they were going to help
you
.”

Marco realized the tingle he had felt when he had entered was not fear, but his passage through a faery portal. The room was in the Unreal, or at least connected to it. He had been set up.

“Leonides loved the idea when I suggested it to him,” Alphrein said, still hiccupping giggles. “He paid me even more than I’ll inherit from you.”

Marco suddenly recognized the sound outside the door as thundering hooves. A second later the door burst open, and the clan he had just betrayed rushed in.

My troubles began on paper, as they always seem to do.

The satyr I had been dealing with emerged from the back office once more. He wore that blank automaton look I have come to know and loathe every time I see it on the faces of the clerking classes as I travel. Among all the peoples and creatures of our many, mighty, miscellaneous, and mixed-up nations, that look is the one trait shared by all alike, from faun to faerie, from minotaur to man. It is the look that signifies one has passed all reasonable point of appeal. It is the look that tells you that you are about to embark upon a tour of those machines of bureaucracy any creature sane enough not to work for government agencies abhors.

He trotted back to the desk, his half-moon spectacles—hanging from his neck on a dainty chain—sitting at the very tip of his nose, pretending to put great consideration once more into the documents I had handed to him over an hour ago, pretending he wanted to find in those pages of invitation, recommendation, transit, and port-passage the detail that would enable him to enable us.

With a leathery hand he hiked his woolen kilt up a little higher to his hips and stood, cocking his horned head as though the ink on the paper before him was restless, as if it had wriggled somehow into meaningless scrawls. Behind me I felt the continuing presence of the armed guard who had ushered me forward out of the pens that filtered new arrivals through from the dock.

The clerk stopped before me and did not sit down, seemingly so absorbed in his task he had lost sense of his surroundings. He continued his perusal of our papers, as if intent on finding some clue or key upon them that would allow him to release my wife and me from this predicament. I know a man with his mind made up, however, and believe I am experienced enough in the ways of other kinds to know that look in other species, too. I knew the communication with his superiors, from which he was returning, could not possibly have brought me good news; or else why make this show of studying our documents again?

I looked back to those others, waiting in the pens; the erl-lords, and their pet dryads, with whom we had shared passage on the higher decks; the aelfes, far from the collectives their restless ancestors had confederated long ago, who had berthed in the middle decks; and the timid hobgoblin families from steerage who waited now with their heads kept low—who had learnt not to look too hopefully at anything at all in the world lest it be snatched away from them by means as varied as treaty and force; and at my wife.

Concern had begun to bloom in her eyes.

Last night I had seen for the first time how our expected child had started to change her breasts, making them bud upward into pleasantly larger handfuls than ever before. I had put dry lips to her little swell of belly and kissed it, whispered nonsense as unformed as the child inside, and she had laughed happily. The tang of her last kiss was still on my lips, despite the cup of ground neptune-seed tea this official had offered me whilst I waited for him to complete the conversation he felt he needed to have with his superiors in his office, over the wires.

I looked up at him, my chair creaking as I so realigned my perspective on the world, and this brought his attention back to me as a reality, a thing to be dealt with.

His eyes were utterly emotionless: “Master Sennufer,” he said, “I’m afraid we are going to be detaining you and your wife a little longer. Please come with me.”

***

Twelve years ago I took part in my one and only protest against the practices of the Satyric Empire.

That was the year the satyrs forcibly occupied the Star-Gazer’s Ziggurat on the southern border of the centaur’s kingdom, Egepy. The satyrs still claim to this day that that act was a sacred reclamation, even though their kind have never practiced Celestialism as profoundly as centaurs do; and they continue to deny that wresting the tower from the control of the centaurs was meant as any kind of symbolic gesture at all—even though all of the holy rites of centaurs revolve, in some way, around the Ziggurat and its environs.

The enmity of the satyrs and the centaurs is ages old. No scholar I’ve ever read has been able to pinpoint exactly how and why this conflict started, nor postulate a formula that might bring it to an end. It’s a tribal thing, I suppose, as ingrained in both races as any view we observers from outside cultures might have in response to it. As with any conflict of this kind the rivalry has certain predictable characteristics: the Empire of the Satyrs and northern Egepy share a border that has always been disputed territory; the two races spring up from the same ancestral stock. In many ways the two cultures have mutual philosophies. It is, in short, the battle of one brother against another—as most longstanding disagreements always are.