We Will All Go Down Together (39 page)

(
never mind
)

The wall lapped over him, re-sealing as it went, and Mac found himself thrust headfirst out through a colon-close tunnel into an equally sticky-floored hall: Lady Glauce’s Receiving Room, located at the Dourvale
brugh
’s unnaturally still heart. A vaulted cavern of a place whose cold dirt walls smelled of rot and apples.

“Give ye good-even, coz,” Saracen’s voice came, predictably, from somewhere in the darkness at his elbow. “I see ye ha’ finally ta’en up yuir invitation.”

Mac reeled, spat in his non-hatbox-holding hand, and wiped it on his coat, hoping the place was so dim no one would notice. “Yup,” he managed, at last.

The
brugh
looked about the same as the last time Mac’d seen it: tapestries of dead leaves hung slack as skins in every direction, a thousand variegated shades of decay sewn each to each with spiderweb, then stuck fast to the roof with luminous mould. Half the furniture was stolen, while the other half seemed cobbled together from anything handy—shells and muck, living tubers, long-scraped bones.

At the table’s head sat Lady Glauce herself, gleaming in the hall’s eternal dusk, a too-thin salt-soap parody of her own spectral beauty—literally statuesque, so huge she was forced to stoop even in her own home, yet so far gone into the opposite end of her hag-cycle that even her leafy crown seemed withered. On one side, her husband Enzembler with his vacant stare, ill-set head nodding slightly; on the other, their remaining children (and some of
their
children, to boot). Minion, a full-fledged ogre, whose bottom eye-teeth curled up like tusks. Ganconer Sidderstane, leaned back in his chair at his half-niece Ygerna’s slimy elbow, raw wooden eyes weeping tears of pus in their barely healed sockets.

Saracen was already moving to take his rightful place at his grandmother’s side, naturally enough . . . and here came Enzemblance herself, flowing ’cross the wall like shadow to meet him, while some cute little human thrall-girl scuttled to keep herself safely out of both their paths.

Taking full advantage of her creepily long reach, however, Enzemblance managed to chuck the thrall roughly under the chin before she sat, telling her: “Do ye play for us, Galit, now we be all met taegether—something lively. My nephew’s yet tae hear ye, and I’d no’ deprive him of that sweet grace.”

“I will, milady,” the girl agreed, voice dull, eyes downcast—and now that he came to think about it, Mac
could
vaguely recall somebody by that name having gone missing last year, up ’round Overdeere way. Ganconer couldn’t quite keep himself from twitching at the sound, which was interesting, though not enough so to distract.

Mac’s mother would have had a chair with her name on it here as well, once upon a time—somewhere between Minion and Enzemblance, probably, with Army Roke snugged in right alongside her; husband and father of her son, though descended directly from the alliance of Callistor Roke and Miliner’s own firstborn sister, Grisell. And what the hell
did
that make Mac, anyhow? Could three halves really make a whole?

It only takes one drop of red blood to make you human, Maccabee,
he heard Fr. Gowther’s voice whisper. Which would’ve been more reassuring if Mac hadn’t already known his blood showed up blue under most lights.

So. “Nice,” was all he said to Enzemblance, buying Galit-the-thrall enough time to thread a crude fiddle with one long lock of her own hair—still thick, once dark, now shot and streaked with grey. “That’s old school, seriously. Sure beats the hell out of an iPod, doesn’t it?”

Enzemblance gave a wolfish grin at this, and raised a slanted brow to Saracen; their too-alike smiles met and matched, in nasty concert.

“Ah, Maccabee,” she said, “I’ve missed yuir pleasantries, these many years gone by. Yet I have my own leman now, d’ye note it?”

“Couldn’t not, really.” To Saracen: “And how ’bout you, ‘coz’? You bring a date?”

Saracen shook his head. “I’d no time, more’s the pity. Still, I see
you
brought something—a tithe for grandmere, as is only right and proper.”

“Yeah, sure, I . . . what?”

Lost, Mac followed Saracen’s nod and saw—
something
, lying in what he assumed was the corner. A pair of boots caught in a tangle of cloth, with a soft pink hand just emerging—cries and burbling, the rounded head and peering eyes of all newborn mammals. What no doubt used to be a big, hard-muscled hunk of Templar, before his sudden passage through the
brugh
’s ley-line-unlocked wall . . . a journey all but bound to mess with anyone who wasn’t at least some degree of Fae.

Oh, crap.

And now Lady Glauce was rising, interest caught; Enzembler looked vaguely ’round at the motion, but quieted again once he felt her reassuring hand on his. She rustled forward, towering over Mac where he stood, frozen, with Enzemblance and Saracen both smirking at his obvious discomfort. While Galit-the-thrall’s sweet voice soon began to climb upwards, disappearing into the fog and filthy air above:

There were two sisters walking alone,

Hey the gay and the grinding,

Two little sisters walking alone

By the bonny bows of London—

“Is’t true, Maccabee?” Lady Glauce asked him, her own voice a juiceless rasp. “For I know thy mother surely taught thee a’right—thou wouldst no’ think tae cheat me of my due, no’ in my ane hall.”

“No, grandmere.”

“Then this changeling be mine, I wist, tae do wi’ as I wish.”

Mac bit his lip. “Uh . . . no, grandmere. Not exactly.”

At this, the whole hall seemed to share one caught breath, and Mac wondered a bit himself why the idea of just turning little
M. de Bébé
over there over and walking back out scot-free needed to be such a damn problem in the first place—
he
didn’t know the guy, after all, aside from him having sworn an oath and made his bed, just like Mac had. Wasn’t like they’d
eat
him, now he was suddenly all small and tender. . . .

(probably)

But no: the various freaks who made up Mac’s family were—if nothing else—intensely practical. So they’d just raise him in a dark hole, feed him on leaves and glamer, use him as a go-between whenever they wanted news of the humans’ Iron World—another Ganconer, now he’d disqualified himself from that same position. Up until they finally pulled this new version’s eyes out whenever
he
did something they didn’t like, too.

Not Mac’s call, though. He probably couldn’t stop them if he tried, and he certainly didn’t
have
to care, one way or the other. . . .

 . . . not unless he wanted to.

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work,
Mac thought, and cursed himself for still remembering the Gospel according to John, at all (9:4, 13:15).
For I have given ye an example that ye should do as I have done to you. . . .

And what
would
Jesus do, ex-Father Roke? Drop the kid, take off running? Not look back and not feel bad about it, either?

Probably not be fucking dumb enough to ever let himself end up here, in the first place.
I mean, you know. Son of God, and all.

“Look,” Mac heard himself tell Lady Glauce with grim disbelief, “I didn’t mean to bring him, so I can’t give him away, because he’s not mine to give. And if that’s wrong somehow, I apologize, but. . . .”

Here a bleak gust brought Enzemblance suddenly up against him, teeth bared, snarling: “How dare ye? Y’are but a poor, ingratitudinous thing, church mouse, for all yuir posturing! If not for me, this same whelp would have killed ye, sure . . . and tae insult my mother in her ane house, after—”

“Sister,” Minion rumbled.

While Saracen chimed in, at the same time: “Mother, give over—”

“I will not.” That awful stare latched fast to Mac’s, gelid-grey, as though she had leeches set in both sockets. “You, Roke’s son, traitor to two worlds twice-over; you, who threw yuir heritage away with both hands! You, who are nothing times nothing—”

Fear in his face, bigger than life and just as ugly. But maybe there really was some giddy place beyond, because Mac seemed to have teleported straight there; he felt his spine stiffen, lips peeling back in crazily similar fashion. Replying: “And two wrongs don’t make a right, right? Listen up, aunt—your own son told me the
brugh
was open to me, so if it hadn’t been
you
on door-duty, it’d’ve just been somebody else—”

“Oh, and ye could have entered
without
help, mine or some other’s? You who canna e’en shield yuirself from harm wi’out their Almighty’s skirts tae hide yuirself behind—”

Lady Glauce’s imperious growl broke through, whipping them both silent. “
Enzemblance
! Never think tae quarrel on my part, as though I was unfit tae do so. I will have nae brawling, here or elsewhere, sae dinna think tae wreak thy vengeance on him later in some sneaking way, as I know ’tis thy wont—”

Enzemblance spat, sheer vitriol, fizzing against the
brugh
’s earthen floor. “I ha’ done my share for this family in yuir name, mother mine—aye, and more! I will not—”

“You
will
as
I
will, daughter. Now sit thee, and be silent.”

Inevitably, age and
noblesse
won out; Enzemblance turned, flash-flowing away to plump herself back down next to Saracen, shrugging off his sympathetic touch. Casting at Galit, as she did: “Play on—
play
, I said! Are ye deaf? For I can make ye so, be very sure of that. . . .”

“Yes, milady. No, milady.”

“So, Maccabee,” his grandmother said, a bit more softly, as the strumming began once more—leaning down, lowering herself almost to his level, though never quite. “What hast thou to say for thyself?”

“Only that I never meant any insult, grandmere. But I did bring a tithe of another sort—if you’ll accept it.”

“Show me, then,” was all she said.

Mac rummaged in his pocket and drew out the envelope he’d filled that morning. On one level, an utterly bland twist of paper and glue folded over on itself; on another, a net for catching dreams, scribbled all over with angelic and demonic script alike. Those long years in the Connaught, studying banned and forgotten texts of every possible disposition, had to turn out to be good for
something,
eventually—and though magic had never really been Mac’s area of expertise, he knew he did have an inborn inclination for it. Which was exactly why he gave in to it so seldom, for fear of simple preference developing into genuine hunger.

He popped the envelope open, shook out its contents—a pixie-dust shower of particles, flickering bright through the brugh’s constant half-dusk—and stood back. Waited as an image of his mother took shape, life-sized and fully formed, solid from every angle: “Millie” Druir Roke in all her sad glory, from green-tinged hair to bare hippie toes, assembled painstakingly from treasured memories. An avatar. A ghost.

The one thing no soulless half-Fae could ever leave behind, or so the Church—

(and Lady Glauce as well, given where and when she came from)

—believed.

Planned like a true Jesuit,
Mac thought. Then:
I really am a bastard.

The shimmering Miliner-shape smiled up at her mother, happily, as though they’d never been parted. While Lady Glauce stared back, leaf-shielded eyes suddenly wet, though probably not with tears.

“Oh,” she said, at last. “So th’art a wizard after all, Roke of Druir.”

Mac flushed. “You know us church mice, grandmere—we aim to please. To give everyone what they want, if we can.”

“Aye, so thou dost, at that. And make well sure we pay full price for it, after.”

Stretching out one huge hand, she carded her whiter-than-white fingers through the Miliner-shape’s hair, cupping its chin to look deep into its untroubled, mindless eyes. Then Lady Glauce shook her head, and blew Mac’s offering away in one brisk puff, reducing it back to its component parts of time, grief, loss. Allowed it to find its way back into the envelope again, sealing the gummed flap fast behind.

“’Tis a worthy tithe, certes,” she told him, “but one I canna accept. One Roke I gave my Grisell away to, for the family’s ane sake; another took my Miliner and drew her tae her death, though she had no objection. Whilst thou, Maccabee, mind’st me strong of both and of neither . . . and in this th’art my ane for certain, my grandson twice over. So I canna charge thee passage, as though thou was’t human only; to go through the
brugh
is thy right by birth, which nane may deprive thee of—as thy aunt well knows, were she tae think on’t.”

Enzemblance tossed her lank red hair, refusing to meet her mother’s gaze. While Saracen simply glanced at Mac sidelong, lips twisting in amusement, and gave him an upside-down wink, mouthing:

Oh, well played, coz—tae the hilt, and in rare style, too. Who would ha’ thought ye capable of such deception?

Well: Saracen, obviously. Though Mac did wish he wouldn’t be so overtly goddamn happy about it, not where his Mom could see him.

Lady Glauce cast a curt, assessing look over the Templar-baby. “Yet for this other, I
do
require a vow of service, if thou wish’t tae carry him hence, in safety. . . .”

Mac dipped her a stiff little bow of his own, thinking:
There’s always a catch.

“Command me,” he answered.

“To see thee more oft is all I wish—tak’ up thy mother’s hearth-place thyself, now and again, instead of thinking tae palm her likeness off upon me. Wilt thou allow me this, at least, in recompense for the true love I bear thee now and ever, and for thysel’ alone?”

Mac felt stupid tears prick autonomically, throat gone suddenly hot and full. Said, thickly: “I swear it, grandmere.”

She bent farther still to kiss his forehead, briefly, lips like cold stone. Pronouncing for all to hear—“Then we stand settled. Saracen, gather the babe, working nae harm as thou dost it; stand fast tae escort Maccabee hither, wherever he most desire’st tae go.”