[Wild Roses] Last One Standing
Title: cat's cradles
'Verse/characters: Last One Standing; Aodh
Prompt: 85F "jump"
Word Count: 8166. Because I apparently needed to double the poll's current wordcount.
Notes: Hmrf. Let's try that again, shall we? This supersedes the '07 sketch sparks. Possibly by an order of magnitude. O.o;
I've been working on this for three days. I have no idea how it's going to read. (Also, to prevent confusion, he changed boarding-houses between now and lead and glass.)
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He made it through the day without losing it. Lit the candles he needed to, re-lit others' candles, even managed to get a spider-thread knotted the right way to redirect a breeze without getting caught at it or breaking the thread.
It wasn't until he made the mistake of hopping out to Rua da Arvore a little before sunset to check on a friend that he lost it, in fact. He might have managed if he'd thought to key off somewhere less public than the harbour, dropped in on one of the ridge-paths and trekked down quietly, but no, he hadn't thought that far. Had forgotten. Somehow.
Private memorials were one thing. Two, five candles at a time, and if he didn't think about how many he was visiting, he could get away with it.
The Trickwood's first city was something else again. He'd dropped in just off the downriver edge of the harbour, expecting to turn away from the water and follow a path uphill, but he was blind as soon as he arrived. The harbour glowed gold in the fading light, unabashedly burning, every pier, every dock, every berth alive, awash with candlelight. If he half-closed his eyes--and he had to--he could barely see paving stones laid atop the wooden docks, the manticore vellum and waxed-paper shields protecting the lights from the wind off the water. The candles had crowded up over the defined edges of the stones, chewed away the walking paths someone had set up until there were only traces at the ends of the docks, darker spaces defined by light.
The massed candles might have been beautiful under other circumstances. He'd seen candles used to great effect elsewhere, as something other than an immense chorus of wordless loss--
He didn't even try to tell himself the stinging in his eyes was the smoke. Just took a deep breath past the lump in his throat, tensed his legs, and leapt, even as he automatically noted that the candles were stacked more than ten deep in places.
He knew he'd leave almost no trace, that one or two of the very nearest candles might flicker but wouldn't go out, and still felt guilty about it.
Ten minutes later, he dropped an unexpected eighteen inches and landed half-knelt, boots tucked under him in case he needed to spring. He had no idea where he was. Somewhere in full daylight.
He was taking too-fast breaths around the knot in his throat, and made himself slow down, dig his toes a little farther into the sandy soil he'd landed in. After a couple of dusty breaths, he discovered he'd just barely missed a fist-sized rock with his dropped knee. It was digging gently into the side of his calf, not hard enough he could make himself reach down to toss it aside, yet.
Another breath and he felt his shrunk-down card-case digging into his thigh where his pocket bunched, the layers of knotted strings, beads, leather and silk cord around both his wrists. Knew there was a knife in the hip pocket on his other side, though the spell on that kept it from even distorting the line of the cloth, let alone sticking him when he moved.
Knew he'd ducked and jinked and changed directions a few times on his way, just in case someone was following.
Knew, too, that his face was wet, and his bad eye hurt even worse than the good one, and that if he swiped at his face with his forearm he'd leave streaks nearly up to his elbow across his unmarred skin and the cotton bracelet that was all he had visible at the moment.
Did it anyway, swiped his forearm up across his bad side and his wrist back across the good, knotted cotton scratching at the delicate skin below his eye, heaved one more deep breath, then stood up.
. . . Nope, still didn't know where he was. He'd have guessed one of the deep, hidden pockets of the Trickwood--somewhere he'd never so much as seen on a map--but there was a walled city cuddled up against a blue-water harbour off to his left. Walls and blue water weren't hard to find in the 'wood, but that city was big. Much too big for the 'wood, but not big enough for Autumn's younger sister or the Keep's suburbs, assuming one ignored the lack of rivers. He couldn't, of course, and he wondered what the city used instead.
Squinting, he estimated it to be four or five times the size of the old barony fortifications and probably three times the size of Rua, but it was hard to be accurate. The edges of the city walls were wobbling, wavering like heat mirages in summer. It made his eyes ache.
Closing his bad eye didn't help, just let him see there-and-gone-again battering on the walls. Looking away--rubbing gently at the scars that weren't there with his thumb in a way he'd never allow himself at home--he counted two, then looked back. Still there. Still wobbling, but as he watched a gust of wind picked up, scattered dust, and should have blown right over him.
Didn't. Not so much as a tickle of dust against the shield he'd raised to keep grit out of his eyes. That was interesting.
The walls resolved a little as he got closer, made it possible to see that they weren't one structure with come-and-go damage but many structures. The distortion was less the distance, and more that he could see many many more than one of them at a time, like a sheaf of sketches laid over one another and held up to the light. He was walking in sand, but didn't have to be. He had options of sandy soil, desert proper, thin grassland, even steppe summer if he wanted to change. They all had a version of the walled city. The colour of the water changed, the condition of the walls changed, even the sky shifted if he wandered through the different layers, but there were always walls.
Some were so abused that they barely counted anymore, mostly but not only in the sandier versions. The single version reduced all the way to an oddly-shaped hill was covered in gold-headed grass, much like the plain it bordered. When he stepped over onto the grass, though, there were no signs of wildlife. No grazing animals had been through--he couldn't even hear any birds.
There was a sea-scented wind coming up over the hill, which should have been attractive. Instead it made his teeth itch, set off prickles up his arms and the back of his neck. He stayed well back, circled a few times to see if the itch faded, but it only went away when he left the hill entirely, stepped back from the grass into one of the other layers. After debating further investigation, he decided to hike up to sandier climes instead.
He'd never run across anything like this, realities layered like thin shale but still technically distinct from one another. Trickwood internal borders were more in light changes as one walked up a hill or through a forest, breezes that came out of nowhere, abrupt changes in tree types and soil.
He'd been pretty sure before, but stumbling across a road tipped him over into certainty. Trickwood roads, like almost any road at home, ran from water. Preferably to water, but not always. This one came out of scrubby land dotted with dense tangled cacti and meandered towards one of the three gates he could see on his side of the walls of the city. Jumping for height only told him there were more cacti and a few smaller branches of roads out in the distance. Faraway hills bristled with even more cacti and spiky succulents, some of them big enough to register as close by.
Unfocusing his eyes gave him even more roads, more dry-climate plants, bigger or smaller hills, but no water, no rivers, and more importantly no traffic.
Creepy. He hoped he hadn't found Winter--though the completely alien layout and surroundings would have gone a long way towards hiding a familiar city that went missing, to be fair. It didn't look like any of the stories he'd ever run across for Winter, not from the walls, but they might have been built after the disaster.
He was actually giving serious thought to that, he realised, and shook his head at himself, half-laughing. Stupid to look for familiarity when there was no reason for it.
He was still curious, and he really didn't want to go home yet, so he slunk out onto the road, set off towards the gates visible at the end of the dusty not-quite-only-dirt road. No sense going overland to walk the base of a big wall looking for a gap when there were gates to be had.
He hadn't been moving five minutes when a soap bubble popped behind his right eye, made him jerk away, shaking his head. When it didn't happen again, he took a few wary steps back over, circled.
It took nearly stepping on something tucked behind a road-marker to set off the warning again. After shaking the feeling back out of his head, he knelt down, peered at it.
Glass. Prettily worked, almost pretty enough to be just for the looks, but it wasn't. Delicate blue threads coiled like webs over a green bubble, holding in and anchoring a spell worked to last. Fox-make. Well, fox-make, or fox-taught, and surprisingly polite for both: 'pay attention', not 'go away'.
Even more interesting. He shook out his wrists absently as he sat back on his heels, spent some time looking at the road as he did. Not completely abandoned, the way he'd first thought. Light traffic, at best, road surface built for heavier than it'd received in a while, but traffic had gone through. No obvious additional fox-sign, either worked into the surface or carved on the other side's road-markers. Frowning, he unfolded from his crouch and went casting around, looking for more.
--
He found it, eventually. It hadn't been the road the other fox was interested in, so it'd taken a while, cuing off the occasional warning-marker on various paths, until he saw the glass. The closer he went to that--and it was far from subtle, smeared thickly across ten different versions of the desert outside what averaged out to a set of city gates--the more liberal the scattering of markers. He was almost certain now that it was a fox, not a fox-taught, old and powerful enough to have hit eight at the low end. Maybe even another Nine--not one he knew.
That should have been enough to make him wary of entering a stranger's claim. It didn't. Every marker he found, whether it was worked glass or neatly-carved lines in the occasional boulder, called for attention, edged with caution. Even when he walked out onto the near-volcanic glass, waves of angry sparks massing at his feet and trying to crawl up his boots, the impression he got from the net surrounding the edge was 'Don't start stupid shit' instead of 'Fuck off'.
The hair on his arms was standing straight out by the time he wandered back off, and when he ran absent fingers through his hair it crackled. He spat a little lightning bolt at the sand next to his foot, contemplated the tiny curl of smoke rising from the sand while he licked one of his canines, shrugged. Felt for his cigarette kit.
It should have been keyed to one of his right-side bracelets--whether or not anyone but him could see the bracelet--but the spell had shorted out. It turned a two second snag into five minutes of rummaging, and that carried over into sitting on top of a boulder by the glass amid the debris of everything he'd come across before the kit. He hadn't realised he still had any of those double-headed fish coins, let alone five, but there they were. So were a handful of chipped-stone beads, a cut spinel the size of his thumbnail, two knives, a tangle of blue string that might have started life as leftover warp from someone's loom, and a variety of other things, including stray chocolate candies.
He ate the stale chili-dusted truffle while he was assembling the first cigarette. The wrapper was going to taste slightly of chocolate, but that was all right. He lit the end with an unusually smoky flick of his thumbnail, and tasted barely-there spice in the smoke as he inhaled. Shaking the flame out turned into dusting his hands off, trying to scrape the last traces of spice away before he tackled the spell. A few smoke rings later, he decided that was close enough. He took a deeper drag on his cigarette, ashed it off the side of the boulder, cracked his knuckles. Slipping off the bracelet, he turned it a couple of times to make sure there was only one break, then opened the knotted end with his fingernails. It was an easy fix.
Easy, yes. With two hands. He'd forgotten--again--that ripping back to the knot that had blown and re-knotting his way forward was all but impossible to do one-handed. He'd tried. Sometimes for much better reasons than not wanting to drip ash on his thigh. He didn't particularly want to spit out the cigarette, but letting go would mean starting over on the knots, which was just annoying. Mumbling a smoky curse to himself, he leaned over, hands to one side, head and cigarette to the other, and kept working.
Seventeen knots later, the ash was long enough to see from the corner of his eye. Pinning the end of the cigarette between his teeth, he shook his head a couple times, then blinked. Stared at the glass as his fingers finished the last few knots, more ash forming, then slipped the bracelet back on, hand rising to his mouth as he took a deep drag.
There were dark, oily-looking rainbows curling through cracks in the center of the glass, glinting purple and pale blue and yellow-white as they caught the light or passed between juxtapositioned cracks. Small swells of light met and fractured one another, split from one wave to four or back again as they moved across the glass.
He put things back into his pockets without looking at them, keying the string by feel to a bracelet, the spinel to another one, and set the truffle wrapper on fire when he lit his second cigarette. There was a deeply unsettling lack of repetition in the light patterns, like the glass was rolling between layers, twisting over on itself. It made for fascinating watching, in a 'keep a knife handy' kind of way, and he had to deliberately make himself look away, look around.
Despite the proximity of the walls--and the gates that were or weren't there depending on how he looked, and how hard--there wasn't a road out to the glass. No road skirting its edges, either, and not a single scraggly flat-lobed cactus sharing so much as the same air as the glass.
That implied recent--and unwelcome.
With no road, he had two choices to get to whichever of the gates he decided he wanted. He could walk across the glass, careful as could be that he didn't slip and take a header into it, or--
Flicking the very end of his cigarette onto the sparking glass, he dropped off the boulder and deliberately fell through the ground. Landed a little deeper than he'd meant, missed where the glass stopped by four layers of desert. He blinked, flexed his toes inside his boots as he stood, then started walking across the empty sandy space where the glass should have been.
He could still feel it. It lurked, massed over his head like a thunderstorm just waiting for a chance to break, the first surge from the ground that would let the lightning flow. Frankly, even with a four layer buffer, it was making the hair stand up on his arms again.
He'd be shocked if that fox wasn't using chips of it to power their glass. They wouldn't need to do more with their own magic than aim the raw material where they wanted it.
Contemplating how he might manage something himself brought him to the raw-edged hole where a gate used to stand on the layer he'd dropped to, and he hastily untangled a don't-mind-me when he got a look through it.
There were people in there. A lot of people--wait. Most of them weren't on the same layer as he was.
Actually, hardly any of them were on the same layer as he was. Which made sense, given the gaping hole in the wall; he'd slipped through and tucked himself onto a crumbling built-in staircase on the inner face while he'd been tugging the don't-mind-me on. At the same time, what he was seeing really, really didn't make sense.
And looking technically-through buildings was starting to give him a headache, so he padded back down the stairs and started threading his way towards the center of the city, where he could see heavier foot traffic. Most of it was well away, more than ten layers up, but individuals . . flickered. Came briefly closer, abruptly went farther away, and from a distance he couldn't figure out what was going on.
Proximity helped. Proximity helped a lot. Proximity explained that while there might be ten or twenty or a hundred cities layered one overtop the others, there was really only one population. Keeping himself from staring in fascination was a physical effort, the way climbing up layers as he climbed a fire escape's ladder to a mostly-abandoned layer wasn't. He settled down on a rickety iron-mesh platform a few storeys up, pulled out the smokes he'd rolled outside the walls. Slumped comfortably over his crossed legs, he lit up, people-watching with his head tilted to one side.
There'd been rain recently on several of the layers, but no-one's coat was wet. Potholes and crumbled curbs should have left marks on shoes, maybe even mud. He only saw one: a man intent on something else stepping straight on a morass of broken cement, and even he didn't do more than start to slip. Recovered his balance by rebounding off a solid version of the same space, took two strides so he was clear of the mess, then dropped back where he'd been and continued on his way.
Aodh had paused partway through lighting another to watch, and while the man on the street didn't look up, a few other people did. Just quick, assessing glances, noticing movement, and their eyes slid over him easily enough. Don't-mind-mes weren't hiding spells. He'd blown a smoke ring for the woman who'd stared longest, and she'd gone on her way shaking her head a little. Amused, not afraid, and that said good things.
The lack of children visible on well-trafficked streets said bad. Not catastrophically bad--he'd seen worse--but he relaxed fractionally when a group of yelling teenagers streaked by, chasing a couple others over what looked like well-defined roof-roads. Everyone on the street looked up as the pack went by them. Most looked back down after the same sort of assessing glance they'd given him, but a few scowled, shook their heads, and changed their path, dropped lower, nearly out of sight, before going on their ways. That was interesting. Disapproval over the kids being out at all? Being that loud? Acting like a pack of hounds in pursuit of running foxes?
The thought of foxes brought him back to the markers outside the walls. He lost the fleeing kids while he was looking for carvings--only found a few that looked more like numerals carved on corner buildings where streets met--but their pursuers hadn't. An outraged roar jerked his attention back, and he found the pack again in time to watch most of them clear a street-width gap to the nearly flat roof of a dressed-stone building. While they raced across the roof and disappeared over the other side, he blinked at the building they'd chosen. He might have been able to get a look through it if he tried, but it shared its sturdy bones with other versions for a good six layers around it.
While the resounding clangs of a protesting fire escape announced the pack of kids were dropping down to street level, he reached up and tapped the riser for the set of stairs heading toward the roof behind his perch. The vibration-based sketch of a spell he drew with his bare fingertip wouldn't last, but it shouldn't need to. He wouldn't be sleeping on this thing, but a chance to know he needed to vacate the platform before feet hit the treads seemed . . prudent.
The guarding fence on his left looked the sturdiest, would probably hold him with one hand wrapped around the rail, boots braced on the outside of the fence slats, even if he went over the top at speed. Squinting through the mesh at the wall under his platform as he shook out the end of his finished cigarette, crushed it cold between thumb and forefinger, yeah. Even if the fence didn't hold, he could make the jump to a windowsill without too much effort.
He paused in the act of fishing out his kit again. Licked one of his canines while he considered how many he'd already had, and how long it'd been since he last ate. Come to think of it, he kind of wanted a drink, too, and he levered himself up off the mesh. Stretched, even hooked his fingers around the edge of a stair tread to do a pull-up, then climbed--carefully, in deference to the aging metal--back down to street level. All the fire escapes he could access from where he was looked equally old, equally rickety, so he didn't bother changing layers. Just dropped the last few feet when a rung twisted under his hand, dusted off his palms, and wandered back out into the street.
There had to be a nearby bar on one of these layers.
Five minutes' walking informed him that 'one' was an understatement. 'Fifteen' might still be an understatement, and he was sort of impressed. This city collected drinking establishments the way the Keep's harbours collected restaurants. Most weren't marked, which he didn't mind, but most were also closed-door, which he did. No sense in barging in on someone's private party.
Ignoring the ones set more than halfway down alleys cut his options by two thirds, so he was changing layers every few steps in the hopes of following his nose to food. He might not have his cousin Conall's accuracy, but he got by.
Wasn't having much luck, though, mostly catching the smell of his own cigarettes and the occasional puff of other smoke in the air. He tried turning down one of the bigger streets, letting passerby dodge around him without reacting, looking for open doors, nose lifted a little, feeling for a wind. Had luck after two more blocks, saw a door that opened inward sitting propped wide, and heard quiet, competing conversation in many voices through the opening, over the noise of commuters and fast-moving shoppers. He dodged through the traffic flowing down the street, fetched up on the sidewalk in front of the door, and stepped through.
Two blinks forced his eyes into adjusting as he crossed the threshold, stepping towards the wall so he could take a look around. Pretty quiet for midafternoon, maybe seven men on his current layer, one of them behind the bar, and twenty total. He caught glances from three of the closest, nodded politely, and they went back to their drinks. He couldn't see the kitchen from where he was standing, but the open space was L shaped, lined with windows and the door along the short arm, and if the long arm didn't terminate in the alley behind the building he'd be shocked.
Steam was rising from plates on a slightly deeper layer, so he took a step farther into the bar, let himself drop the layers as he did. He stopped when he found himself the center of undivided attention. Every single human--he was assuming--in the place was staring, including both barmen and the aproned woman who'd just come out of the back.
He cocked his head in silent question. Everyone he'd seen moving could move through the layers. Why was it noteworthy that he could? He wasn't visibly armed, just wearing a short-sleeved shirt and jeans with a few extra pockets stitched in in slightly contrasting fabric. They could hardly be expecting him to hold up the place with nothing but a string bracelet around one wrist and a smile.
Not that he couldn't, but they weren't to know.
After a long, tense second, most everyone looked away, went back to their conversations, their drinks and their food, and he let his held breath out quietly.
There were booths towards the back, a few of them substantial, tables scattered through the open space. A few were angled well to be able to look out through the windows without being easily visible, but it was the stools at the bar he decided on.
Nobody in the room looked old, or terribly young. His was the palest hair in the room, he thought, though maybe not by that much. He was close to if not actually the shortest person he could see. The woman serving tables had a good handspan on him, and hefted her tray like it could be a weapon on a bad night. Both the bartenders were dark; the older looking one had a closely trimmed beard.
The room had buzzed up with conversation by the time he got to the bar, hitched himself up on a stool where he could see the door from the corner of his eye. When the bartender closest to him--the younger of the pair--asked his pleasure, Aodh just pointed. Second shelf from the top, usually a good guess for midgrade; the expensive stuff usually migrated up to the top, out of easy reach, or the bottom, for the advertising being at bar-level offered. Or in the back out of sight, but that wasn't the point.
The man nodded, and was going for the glasses, about to pull down a shotglass, when a flick of Aodh's hand caught his eye. When he turned back, Aodh measured off the height of one of the whiskey glasses with his right thumb and fingers, laid the pinky through center fingers of his left hand against his thumb to show how much he wanted. Smiled, a little wry.
The man blinked, then shrugged, obeyed. Set the glass down in front of Aodh at his edge of the bartop, held out his palm.
A second's rummaging came up with one of the fish coins, which he held up. The man nodded, so he dropped the coin in his palm, accepted the glass he was handed. Took a whiff of the very bright topnotes in the glass, then a generous sip.
Paused, staring into the bar's surface as cayenne and ancho chile burst across his tongue along with the alcohol he'd expected, gently burned the roof of his mouth and the top of his throat as he swallowed. Tongue still burning, he pulled the glass a little away to look back into its amber depths, then grinned at it.
"Ah," the bartender murmured, loud enough for Aodh to hear over the buzz as he took another sip. When Aodh looked up, the man dipped his chin in a near-nod, not quite making eye contact. "Evenin', stranger. In town long?"
Aodh blinked at him. "Not sure?" he said, then realised what'd given him away. Teeth--he'd lost the habitual illusion. Probably, come to think about it, when his bracelet had shorted out on that little sea of glass in the desert. He supposed he'd just have to be grateful the green over his natural eye colour was a stronger spell.
Also that the locals' trade-tongue was so close to languages he knew already. What they were speaking to one another--right at the edge of his hearing, probably trying to avoid him listening in at all--was a lot harder to parse. Also, his drink was agave based under the additives, unless he missed his guess. The undernotes tasted vegetal, not of barley or wheat.
Come to think of it, he was actually hungry now.
"Well, you let us know if there's anything you need," the man said, and Aodh just about breathed his drink. Managed not to cough--or laugh--but knew he was grinning, eyes crinkled at the corners, as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"Whatever that guy's eating smells fantastic."
The bartender craned his neck to see around him, then smiled. "I'll see what I can do."
The woman in the apron turned out to be Olya, at least according to the bartender, and she took to slipping him appetisers after he'd tipped her for delivering dinner with one of the chipped-stone beads from his pockets. They were Trickwood-make, good luck charms that charged by getting carried around, and she had about eight of them by the time he was licking his fingers and getting into his fourth glass of aggressively spiced tequila. They'd been bouncing around among the second-shelf bottles, so he'd found out that in addition to cayenne, ancho, chipotle, and at least three other chiles, their distilleries had access to both sweet and hot paprika.
Whoever'd thought to try smoking the paprika before adding it to the barrels was a genius. Also, even if the temperature dropped like a rock after sunset, he probably wasn't going to need an overshirt for a while. His hands and feet were pleasantly hot.
"Has Radko offered you any water?" Olya asked as she set her tray down on the bartop, along with a scrap of a note. The bartender--Radko--snagged the note, gave her a dirty look to match the one she'd shot him, then started filling a big drinks order.
Aodh chirruped a laugh for her, holding out his perfectly steady hands for her to look at. "'m fine, really." Practice with the language, simply from hearing so much of it around him--and listening to Radko explain the process they used for their alcohol even if it was probably full of lies for unknown audiences--was letting him slip comfortably into the accent, and she blinked at him.
"I really don't know where you're putting it all," she marveled, and he laughed again.
"'ve been gettin' water between rounds," he mentioned, nodding towards Radko, who was affrontedly stacking half-full glasses on her tray. "Think m'mouth'd be on fire by now if he didn't."
She laughed, relaxing. "You're as bad as the old ranch hands--your mouth should be on fire. Are you just in for the day?"
"Might be," he shrugged, accepting the glass Radko bypassed the tray with to hand him. "Don' have a place to stay." This one tasted like whiskey, accented with oak and cinnamon and--clove? He stuck his nose into the top of the glass to examine it better.
"There's a boarding house up Eighth," she said, easing the tray off the bartop. "In case you're looking," she added over her shoulder, smiling, then disappeared into the back.
Aodh and Radko sat for a second, then Radko went and pulled him another glass of water from the barrel set into the back of the bar--Aodh kind of wanted to get a better look at the carvings around the spigot, there was a faint aftertaste that was making him think 'spell'--and Aodh slouched down comfortably, propping his chin in his palm after taking another mouthful of the whiskey.
"Eighth?" he asked when Radko set the glass down near him, and Radko blinked. "Yeah?" he asked back, holding up both his hands for a moment, thumbs folded into his palms.
Yeah, still not in the Trickwood. Aodh clicked his tongue thoughtfully. "H'vn't seen much in t'way of street signs." Or signs at all. Even the bar didn't have a name posted anywhere he could see.
"Ohh," Radko said, sounding enlightened. Reaching under the bar, he pulled out a scrap of paper--not the one Olya had given him--and a stub of pencil. "One, two, three--"
Aodh watched upside-down numerals form, laid out vertically in blocks of ten, and finally had an explanation for the not-fox-sign carvings on the corners of buildings. Grinning a little as he reached over and tapped at one "--we're just back from the corner of Eleventh and--?"
"Tepeyac," Radko supplied. "You'll want to go up--right, on Tepeyac, and hang a left at Eighth."
Noting that 'up' still meant 'away from the harbour'--which was handy--Aodh nodded, sat back on his stool, had another mouthful of the whiskey.
The next time Olya came by, he leaned back, chirped. She paused to drop off her tray with the other bartender, along with a new scrap of paper, then came over. He asked for another plate of appetisers when she tucked in next to him, and thanked her for the recommendation.
She shook her head. "Still don't know where you put it all," but she was smiling. "Big house," she added as he slipped her an oblong chunk of amber. "White stoop, there should be lights on in the front room."
He nodded acknowledgement, and tried not to laugh when she snuck a glance down, then blinked at her hand. The amber was the size of her thumb, pierced for a chain along the long axis and incised with hunting birds that weren't quite griffins proper, but close. He'd been meaning to mix it into a friend's stash of jewelry. It suited Olya just as well, though, and she was visibly pleased by the delicacy of the carving.
"Don't turn off Eighth," she said, tucking it away behind her apron. "Some of the alleys get a little rough."
"'ll keep tha' in mind," he replied cheerfully, rolling the words around with the aftertaste of chiles in his mouth.
The appetisers were good, some sort of lizard-meat skewers served with a chilled yogurt dipping sauce that soothed instead of added to the burning from the latest glass of tequila.
All in all, a pleasant afternoon, more pleasant than he'd expected. He tipped Radko directly with a handful of cast silver beads strung on steel wire, and left a little filagree knife tucked under the edge of the empty plate. Radko'd been clearing his plates off the bartop all evening, along with the glasses, and he'd be more likely to find the knife than Olya.
It wasn't quite full dark as he left the bar, brushing his hand against the hinge-edge of the door to leave an anchor behind. He'd like to come back, and following his nose was much less effective here than at home. A fox-level reminder of where the place was seemed appropriate.
The roof-roads were more active than the streets, he found as he turned up unmarked Tepeyac. He had to keep resisting the urge to turn his head and track movement, stare up through determined twilight to figure out who was moving, and where. Kept his hands in his pockets, his shoulders easy as he walked. Glanced up every so often when there was a particularly loud scuff, but didn't stare.
8th, when he found it, was a discordant jumble of buildings, one layer's subdivided rowhouses overlaid with another's short apartment towers, overlaid with a third's armoury-thick privacy wall. There were alleys, but they were fit for a labyrinth: all blind corners and dead ends.
Wondering just how intentional that was, he kept going. Briefly had to stare up at the buildings on a corner, trying to decide if 8th had branched off itself, or if that was just a particularly big alley--alley, he thought--but he eventually found the building Olya had described. The stoop was indeed white, the curtains in the front windows drawn back to spill slightly cool light onto the sidewalk, and it stood apart from its neighbours on either side. He thought he could see a raised garden, a few layers down, but didn't wander down the side of the house to go looking. Just dropped to the right layer--the one actually possessing the lit windows--padded up the steps, and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered it had a good head's height on him, and jingled slightly as she moved. She cast an assessing eye over him--he resisted the urge to bristle, or lick one of his canines at her--then stepped to the side, allowed him past her into the front room.
"Just you?" she asked, closing the door behind him, and he nodded. "Jus' me."
"Hm," she replied, looking him over again, then dusted her hands off on her apron. "This way."
"None of the rooms on the fire escapes are available," she informed him as they trooped up a set of creaking stairs. She was still jingling as she moved, but from behind it was obvious it wasn't jewelry. Keys, most likely, and he was proved right when she dipped her hand under her apron to fish out a massive ring of keys on a chain that ran to her belt.
"I've this one on this floor, and two above--" she unlocked a door, hooked the keys back out of sight beneath the apron. Gestured him in. "Bed, window--it only opens this high," she measured a head's width with her hands, "chair, table and shelf. The bedclothes are clean. Bath at the end of the hall, by the back stairs," she took the three steps necessary to gesture off into the space beyond the room's walls. "If you'll come with me--" she bustled him out of the room, took him up the stairs again to show him the others available, explaining all the way.
That conversation took them back down the front stairs, into the receiving room off the door he'd come in.
"I won't ask for a name," she told him, a faint smile playing across her face as she did. "If you're satisfied with the options, you're welcome here."
He nodded, hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to prowl around poking at the decorative plates displayed on the shelves.
"How will you be paying?"
"Huh." He rocked back on his heels, hands still in his pockets, and thought about it. "I've got a couple of pretty stones--" he hooked the spinel, held it up between his index and center fingers for her to see "--but I can also do little spells? Housekeeping things, dust off the curtains, mud off the stoop. Mice out of the kitchen?" His father'd taught him that one.
"How will I know they'll work?" she shot back, reasonably, and he grinned, crinkled his eyes up at her.
"'S fair question. Here," he walked over to the table she was standing behind, set the spinel down with a click. Her eyebrows lifted as he went after a penknife and the tangle of blue string he'd found in his pockets earlier. As he measured off a length of string--two twists had been enough to persuade the tangle to become neat loops between his hands, and her eyes had widened--he nodded to the stone. "'s that reasonable f'r a couple nights?"
She picked it up, examined it with professional fingers, then set it down where he'd left it, nodded. "Two, three if you eat elsewhere and don't hassle the staff."
He eyed her, both hands and one of his canines involved in a series of big looping knots and twists. "Tha' a regular problem?"
"No," she said, not quite flatly, as he hooked a finger through the loop his tooth had been keeping open.
"Ah bon," he mumbled automatically as soon as his mouth was free, slightly bemused. "Here--" he laid the finished hex next to the spinel. "Hang this in your kitchen, near t'floor for preference, and t'mice should go away. Take this for deposit," he tapped his index nail on the stone, "give it back if t'spell works?"
She blinked. Looked at the stone, the neat tangle of blue string, looked back up at him. " . . Deal?"
"D'accord. Up t'stairs, third from the right?"
"Breakfast is at sunrise," she didn't quite agree, and he nodded, took the key she offered him off her big ring.
Padding up the stairs, moving softer as he got higher, he turned the key over a couple of times, walked it along his knuckles. She had second copies, likely for housekeeping, but just as likely for getting rid of troublesome guests, if he read her right.
He wasn't planning to be trouble. Just--cautious.
The bathroom was indeed at the end of the hall. One tap at the sink basin, two at the bigger one for the bath, and unless he missed his guess the runoff from the sink filled the toilet's reservoir. The water that flowed when he opened the sink tap smelled all right, ran clear and very, very cold. He turned it back off, tied a couple of knots around the barrel of the spigot, plugged the drain, and turned it back on. After rinsing off his face, rubbing wet hands through his hair, he took a few mouthfuls of pleasantly hot water, swished them around in his mouth before swallowing. Turned off the tap again, untied the knot, then used the toilet.
Which was connected to a sewer, if the gurgling from the pipes and a distant splashing wasn't lying. Interesting. Someone had put a lot of effort, both a long time ago to build a system, and more recently to maintain it. Not what he would have guessed, from the state of the outer walls, but maybe it was easier to pull back from the walls they couldn't repair.
The window in his room yielded to not-quite-gentle force, and he stuck his head and torso out to get a look at the fire escape. It looked recently used, recently repaired, and he wondered who exactly was paying for the rooms attached to it.
It took him longer to get the window closed again, but the boarding-house was on a near-desert layer, and it was cold out there. Once he finally got it flush with the sill, he went for a couple of his bracelets, left alarms across the windowsill and the doorjamb. He tucked a warming spell under the covers while he fought his boots off, banished most of his bracelets out of sight. Afterwards, still wearing his jeans, he sighed, grabbed one back to summon a pair of sleeping pants. He rarely bothered at home, but at home he had decades of warnings--not all of them his own make--layered into the walls, the ceiling, the floor, every window, even the bed.
The bed was comfortable, though, more so for being warm, and he fell asleep quickly.
The light through his window woke him, hours later. When he opened his door to check, trying not to chatter his teeth, there was no one in the bath. Resisting the urge to bring the top layer of bedclothes in with him as a coat, he slunk in, scrubbed down quickly with the blessedly hot water from the tub's tap, dried off by exaggerating the effects of shaking out arms and legs, and slunk back to his room before anyone else on his floor put in an appearance.
Three knots and a pin in a seam turned yesterday's short-sleeved shirt into a double-layered thicker shirt. The underlying structure was identical, still a tee, but he'd turned it rusty-red, added a waffle-knit pale grey underlayer with sleeves long enough to cover his knuckles. He folded them back after climbing into the shirt, shoved a little so he could get at the bracelets nobody would be able to see. After sitting down in the chair to get his boots back on, he hooked his room key onto his belt loop, and wandered downstairs.
Breakfast was, indeed, at sunrise. He went through four cups of coffee and a half-loaf of bread with the assortment of spreads and jams available--several of them as spicy as the night before's tequilas--and after a moment's thought decided to let the spinel and the hex cover the tab.
Leaving by the front door, he checked to the side of the house, saw there was indeed a garden. Several layers of garden, all laid out along a miniature labyrinth of walking paths, and even though he was still picking raspberry seeds out of his teeth, he sort of wanted to wander through it.
Decided to go exploring instead, and hiked back down 8th towards Tepeyac after leaving another nearly-invisible beacon on the front stoop.
--
When he wandered back in a little before sunset, the house's keeper pounced.
Tossed the spinel back at him--he caught it automatically, juggled it a couple of times, then disappeared it back into a pocket--and mimed the shape of the hex with her hands. He automatically noticed that her skin was chapped, probably from doing dishes, before focusing on the shape she'd made.
"How long will it last?" It was a question, not a demand. He had the feeling that if she had a better grasp of how old he was, she might have tried it.
"Stick't in sunlight, maybe an hour a week? and i'should last--" he mentally calculated, looking past her head at the wall. "Five, ten years?" he guessed, and tried not to squint at the embroidery edging the kerchief she had tied over her hair. Probably wasn't a spell, or if it was, just something to keep the red colourfast.
"You can stay for a week if you make two more of those," she offered.
He grinned. "'ll make you one a week, and y'can do as you like with 'em. Jus' let me know 'cha you want--dust, mice, insects."
She made a show of considering it. "Are they all as fast to make as that one was?"
"Only 'f you know what you're doin'," he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and shrugging.
" . . One every five days?"
"D'accord," he replied, pulling out the string. "ll pay for t'next now."
"Mice again," she told him promptly. "I have a friend who wants one."
He nodded, measuring off, clipping.
The next night when he got back, there was someone watching him from the other side of the street, tucked up out of sight on the roof. He ignored the way his shoulderblades started itching as he climbed the steps. Didn't pause at the front windows to lean down, try to get a look at the roof across the way.
He did leave a heavier set of warnings across the door and window that night, added flashbangs and a shield that would keep the noise from waking the whole house if it went off--just deafen the person breaking down his door or trying to climb in his window.
The watcher was gone in the morning, but he picked up a tail during a late-morning wander through the open-square market, and got stalked back to the boarding-house every night for a solid week without a word.
It was polite, for stalking, just a faintly darker shadow on the roof across from whatever bar he'd found to amuse his afternoon. One that left its perch when he left the bar, prowled along a route that didn't always match his, but nevertheless didn't lose him, either. Not that he tried; he wasn't particularly looking for a fight.
The eighth night, he paused at the corner of Candelaria-- subtly marked with a stenciled flame--and 7th, spent a few contemplative moments digging the pads of his fingers into the decaying mortar between the bricks. Given proper motivation, he could probably make the climb in under two minutes. Less if he went for the windowsills three storeys up, used them for jumping platforms.
A lighter snapped above him, and he flicked his head to the side, making a show of looking for the source of the sound.
Someone with an exquisite grasp of hearing breathed a dry chuckle, lowered his hand just enough to show the outline of his head, the way he was hunched just slightly to protect his light. Tall, big hands from the way he manipulated the light, and Aodh was committing the shape of the underside of the man's hatbrim to memory when the lighter clicked back off.
He grinned wide and white up into the dark, showing every one of his teeth but laughing too. "You'd be th' one people mutter 'bout," he called, louder than his stalker had laughed.
"Could be," his stalker replied, lowering his hands completely so Aodh could see a cherry glow in response to an inhale. "Might not be."
He barely bit down the fox's laugh he wanted to carol, all bright mockery, just shook his head, still grinning. "Must be boring work."
His stalker shrugged, coat fabric rustling in the dark, and Aodh laughed silently up before turning back to the street, padding politely back towards his lodgings.
'Verse/characters: Last One Standing; Aodh
Prompt: 85F "jump"
Word Count: 8166. Because I apparently needed to double the poll's current wordcount.
Notes: Hmrf. Let's try that again, shall we? This supersedes the '07 sketch sparks. Possibly by an order of magnitude. O.o;
I've been working on this for three days. I have no idea how it's going to read. (Also, to prevent confusion, he changed boarding-houses between now and lead and glass.)
---------
He made it through the day without losing it. Lit the candles he needed to, re-lit others' candles, even managed to get a spider-thread knotted the right way to redirect a breeze without getting caught at it or breaking the thread.
It wasn't until he made the mistake of hopping out to Rua da Arvore a little before sunset to check on a friend that he lost it, in fact. He might have managed if he'd thought to key off somewhere less public than the harbour, dropped in on one of the ridge-paths and trekked down quietly, but no, he hadn't thought that far. Had forgotten. Somehow.
Private memorials were one thing. Two, five candles at a time, and if he didn't think about how many he was visiting, he could get away with it.
The Trickwood's first city was something else again. He'd dropped in just off the downriver edge of the harbour, expecting to turn away from the water and follow a path uphill, but he was blind as soon as he arrived. The harbour glowed gold in the fading light, unabashedly burning, every pier, every dock, every berth alive, awash with candlelight. If he half-closed his eyes--and he had to--he could barely see paving stones laid atop the wooden docks, the manticore vellum and waxed-paper shields protecting the lights from the wind off the water. The candles had crowded up over the defined edges of the stones, chewed away the walking paths someone had set up until there were only traces at the ends of the docks, darker spaces defined by light.
The massed candles might have been beautiful under other circumstances. He'd seen candles used to great effect elsewhere, as something other than an immense chorus of wordless loss--
He didn't even try to tell himself the stinging in his eyes was the smoke. Just took a deep breath past the lump in his throat, tensed his legs, and leapt, even as he automatically noted that the candles were stacked more than ten deep in places.
He knew he'd leave almost no trace, that one or two of the very nearest candles might flicker but wouldn't go out, and still felt guilty about it.
Ten minutes later, he dropped an unexpected eighteen inches and landed half-knelt, boots tucked under him in case he needed to spring. He had no idea where he was. Somewhere in full daylight.
He was taking too-fast breaths around the knot in his throat, and made himself slow down, dig his toes a little farther into the sandy soil he'd landed in. After a couple of dusty breaths, he discovered he'd just barely missed a fist-sized rock with his dropped knee. It was digging gently into the side of his calf, not hard enough he could make himself reach down to toss it aside, yet.
Another breath and he felt his shrunk-down card-case digging into his thigh where his pocket bunched, the layers of knotted strings, beads, leather and silk cord around both his wrists. Knew there was a knife in the hip pocket on his other side, though the spell on that kept it from even distorting the line of the cloth, let alone sticking him when he moved.
Knew he'd ducked and jinked and changed directions a few times on his way, just in case someone was following.
Knew, too, that his face was wet, and his bad eye hurt even worse than the good one, and that if he swiped at his face with his forearm he'd leave streaks nearly up to his elbow across his unmarred skin and the cotton bracelet that was all he had visible at the moment.
Did it anyway, swiped his forearm up across his bad side and his wrist back across the good, knotted cotton scratching at the delicate skin below his eye, heaved one more deep breath, then stood up.
. . . Nope, still didn't know where he was. He'd have guessed one of the deep, hidden pockets of the Trickwood--somewhere he'd never so much as seen on a map--but there was a walled city cuddled up against a blue-water harbour off to his left. Walls and blue water weren't hard to find in the 'wood, but that city was big. Much too big for the 'wood, but not big enough for Autumn's younger sister or the Keep's suburbs, assuming one ignored the lack of rivers. He couldn't, of course, and he wondered what the city used instead.
Squinting, he estimated it to be four or five times the size of the old barony fortifications and probably three times the size of Rua, but it was hard to be accurate. The edges of the city walls were wobbling, wavering like heat mirages in summer. It made his eyes ache.
Closing his bad eye didn't help, just let him see there-and-gone-again battering on the walls. Looking away--rubbing gently at the scars that weren't there with his thumb in a way he'd never allow himself at home--he counted two, then looked back. Still there. Still wobbling, but as he watched a gust of wind picked up, scattered dust, and should have blown right over him.
Didn't. Not so much as a tickle of dust against the shield he'd raised to keep grit out of his eyes. That was interesting.
The walls resolved a little as he got closer, made it possible to see that they weren't one structure with come-and-go damage but many structures. The distortion was less the distance, and more that he could see many many more than one of them at a time, like a sheaf of sketches laid over one another and held up to the light. He was walking in sand, but didn't have to be. He had options of sandy soil, desert proper, thin grassland, even steppe summer if he wanted to change. They all had a version of the walled city. The colour of the water changed, the condition of the walls changed, even the sky shifted if he wandered through the different layers, but there were always walls.
Some were so abused that they barely counted anymore, mostly but not only in the sandier versions. The single version reduced all the way to an oddly-shaped hill was covered in gold-headed grass, much like the plain it bordered. When he stepped over onto the grass, though, there were no signs of wildlife. No grazing animals had been through--he couldn't even hear any birds.
There was a sea-scented wind coming up over the hill, which should have been attractive. Instead it made his teeth itch, set off prickles up his arms and the back of his neck. He stayed well back, circled a few times to see if the itch faded, but it only went away when he left the hill entirely, stepped back from the grass into one of the other layers. After debating further investigation, he decided to hike up to sandier climes instead.
He'd never run across anything like this, realities layered like thin shale but still technically distinct from one another. Trickwood internal borders were more in light changes as one walked up a hill or through a forest, breezes that came out of nowhere, abrupt changes in tree types and soil.
He'd been pretty sure before, but stumbling across a road tipped him over into certainty. Trickwood roads, like almost any road at home, ran from water. Preferably to water, but not always. This one came out of scrubby land dotted with dense tangled cacti and meandered towards one of the three gates he could see on his side of the walls of the city. Jumping for height only told him there were more cacti and a few smaller branches of roads out in the distance. Faraway hills bristled with even more cacti and spiky succulents, some of them big enough to register as close by.
Unfocusing his eyes gave him even more roads, more dry-climate plants, bigger or smaller hills, but no water, no rivers, and more importantly no traffic.
Creepy. He hoped he hadn't found Winter--though the completely alien layout and surroundings would have gone a long way towards hiding a familiar city that went missing, to be fair. It didn't look like any of the stories he'd ever run across for Winter, not from the walls, but they might have been built after the disaster.
He was actually giving serious thought to that, he realised, and shook his head at himself, half-laughing. Stupid to look for familiarity when there was no reason for it.
He was still curious, and he really didn't want to go home yet, so he slunk out onto the road, set off towards the gates visible at the end of the dusty not-quite-only-dirt road. No sense going overland to walk the base of a big wall looking for a gap when there were gates to be had.
He hadn't been moving five minutes when a soap bubble popped behind his right eye, made him jerk away, shaking his head. When it didn't happen again, he took a few wary steps back over, circled.
It took nearly stepping on something tucked behind a road-marker to set off the warning again. After shaking the feeling back out of his head, he knelt down, peered at it.
Glass. Prettily worked, almost pretty enough to be just for the looks, but it wasn't. Delicate blue threads coiled like webs over a green bubble, holding in and anchoring a spell worked to last. Fox-make. Well, fox-make, or fox-taught, and surprisingly polite for both: 'pay attention', not 'go away'.
Even more interesting. He shook out his wrists absently as he sat back on his heels, spent some time looking at the road as he did. Not completely abandoned, the way he'd first thought. Light traffic, at best, road surface built for heavier than it'd received in a while, but traffic had gone through. No obvious additional fox-sign, either worked into the surface or carved on the other side's road-markers. Frowning, he unfolded from his crouch and went casting around, looking for more.
--
He found it, eventually. It hadn't been the road the other fox was interested in, so it'd taken a while, cuing off the occasional warning-marker on various paths, until he saw the glass. The closer he went to that--and it was far from subtle, smeared thickly across ten different versions of the desert outside what averaged out to a set of city gates--the more liberal the scattering of markers. He was almost certain now that it was a fox, not a fox-taught, old and powerful enough to have hit eight at the low end. Maybe even another Nine--not one he knew.
That should have been enough to make him wary of entering a stranger's claim. It didn't. Every marker he found, whether it was worked glass or neatly-carved lines in the occasional boulder, called for attention, edged with caution. Even when he walked out onto the near-volcanic glass, waves of angry sparks massing at his feet and trying to crawl up his boots, the impression he got from the net surrounding the edge was 'Don't start stupid shit' instead of 'Fuck off'.
The hair on his arms was standing straight out by the time he wandered back off, and when he ran absent fingers through his hair it crackled. He spat a little lightning bolt at the sand next to his foot, contemplated the tiny curl of smoke rising from the sand while he licked one of his canines, shrugged. Felt for his cigarette kit.
It should have been keyed to one of his right-side bracelets--whether or not anyone but him could see the bracelet--but the spell had shorted out. It turned a two second snag into five minutes of rummaging, and that carried over into sitting on top of a boulder by the glass amid the debris of everything he'd come across before the kit. He hadn't realised he still had any of those double-headed fish coins, let alone five, but there they were. So were a handful of chipped-stone beads, a cut spinel the size of his thumbnail, two knives, a tangle of blue string that might have started life as leftover warp from someone's loom, and a variety of other things, including stray chocolate candies.
He ate the stale chili-dusted truffle while he was assembling the first cigarette. The wrapper was going to taste slightly of chocolate, but that was all right. He lit the end with an unusually smoky flick of his thumbnail, and tasted barely-there spice in the smoke as he inhaled. Shaking the flame out turned into dusting his hands off, trying to scrape the last traces of spice away before he tackled the spell. A few smoke rings later, he decided that was close enough. He took a deeper drag on his cigarette, ashed it off the side of the boulder, cracked his knuckles. Slipping off the bracelet, he turned it a couple of times to make sure there was only one break, then opened the knotted end with his fingernails. It was an easy fix.
Easy, yes. With two hands. He'd forgotten--again--that ripping back to the knot that had blown and re-knotting his way forward was all but impossible to do one-handed. He'd tried. Sometimes for much better reasons than not wanting to drip ash on his thigh. He didn't particularly want to spit out the cigarette, but letting go would mean starting over on the knots, which was just annoying. Mumbling a smoky curse to himself, he leaned over, hands to one side, head and cigarette to the other, and kept working.
Seventeen knots later, the ash was long enough to see from the corner of his eye. Pinning the end of the cigarette between his teeth, he shook his head a couple times, then blinked. Stared at the glass as his fingers finished the last few knots, more ash forming, then slipped the bracelet back on, hand rising to his mouth as he took a deep drag.
There were dark, oily-looking rainbows curling through cracks in the center of the glass, glinting purple and pale blue and yellow-white as they caught the light or passed between juxtapositioned cracks. Small swells of light met and fractured one another, split from one wave to four or back again as they moved across the glass.
He put things back into his pockets without looking at them, keying the string by feel to a bracelet, the spinel to another one, and set the truffle wrapper on fire when he lit his second cigarette. There was a deeply unsettling lack of repetition in the light patterns, like the glass was rolling between layers, twisting over on itself. It made for fascinating watching, in a 'keep a knife handy' kind of way, and he had to deliberately make himself look away, look around.
Despite the proximity of the walls--and the gates that were or weren't there depending on how he looked, and how hard--there wasn't a road out to the glass. No road skirting its edges, either, and not a single scraggly flat-lobed cactus sharing so much as the same air as the glass.
That implied recent--and unwelcome.
With no road, he had two choices to get to whichever of the gates he decided he wanted. He could walk across the glass, careful as could be that he didn't slip and take a header into it, or--
Flicking the very end of his cigarette onto the sparking glass, he dropped off the boulder and deliberately fell through the ground. Landed a little deeper than he'd meant, missed where the glass stopped by four layers of desert. He blinked, flexed his toes inside his boots as he stood, then started walking across the empty sandy space where the glass should have been.
He could still feel it. It lurked, massed over his head like a thunderstorm just waiting for a chance to break, the first surge from the ground that would let the lightning flow. Frankly, even with a four layer buffer, it was making the hair stand up on his arms again.
He'd be shocked if that fox wasn't using chips of it to power their glass. They wouldn't need to do more with their own magic than aim the raw material where they wanted it.
Contemplating how he might manage something himself brought him to the raw-edged hole where a gate used to stand on the layer he'd dropped to, and he hastily untangled a don't-mind-me when he got a look through it.
There were people in there. A lot of people--wait. Most of them weren't on the same layer as he was.
Actually, hardly any of them were on the same layer as he was. Which made sense, given the gaping hole in the wall; he'd slipped through and tucked himself onto a crumbling built-in staircase on the inner face while he'd been tugging the don't-mind-me on. At the same time, what he was seeing really, really didn't make sense.
And looking technically-through buildings was starting to give him a headache, so he padded back down the stairs and started threading his way towards the center of the city, where he could see heavier foot traffic. Most of it was well away, more than ten layers up, but individuals . . flickered. Came briefly closer, abruptly went farther away, and from a distance he couldn't figure out what was going on.
Proximity helped. Proximity helped a lot. Proximity explained that while there might be ten or twenty or a hundred cities layered one overtop the others, there was really only one population. Keeping himself from staring in fascination was a physical effort, the way climbing up layers as he climbed a fire escape's ladder to a mostly-abandoned layer wasn't. He settled down on a rickety iron-mesh platform a few storeys up, pulled out the smokes he'd rolled outside the walls. Slumped comfortably over his crossed legs, he lit up, people-watching with his head tilted to one side.
There'd been rain recently on several of the layers, but no-one's coat was wet. Potholes and crumbled curbs should have left marks on shoes, maybe even mud. He only saw one: a man intent on something else stepping straight on a morass of broken cement, and even he didn't do more than start to slip. Recovered his balance by rebounding off a solid version of the same space, took two strides so he was clear of the mess, then dropped back where he'd been and continued on his way.
Aodh had paused partway through lighting another to watch, and while the man on the street didn't look up, a few other people did. Just quick, assessing glances, noticing movement, and their eyes slid over him easily enough. Don't-mind-mes weren't hiding spells. He'd blown a smoke ring for the woman who'd stared longest, and she'd gone on her way shaking her head a little. Amused, not afraid, and that said good things.
The lack of children visible on well-trafficked streets said bad. Not catastrophically bad--he'd seen worse--but he relaxed fractionally when a group of yelling teenagers streaked by, chasing a couple others over what looked like well-defined roof-roads. Everyone on the street looked up as the pack went by them. Most looked back down after the same sort of assessing glance they'd given him, but a few scowled, shook their heads, and changed their path, dropped lower, nearly out of sight, before going on their ways. That was interesting. Disapproval over the kids being out at all? Being that loud? Acting like a pack of hounds in pursuit of running foxes?
The thought of foxes brought him back to the markers outside the walls. He lost the fleeing kids while he was looking for carvings--only found a few that looked more like numerals carved on corner buildings where streets met--but their pursuers hadn't. An outraged roar jerked his attention back, and he found the pack again in time to watch most of them clear a street-width gap to the nearly flat roof of a dressed-stone building. While they raced across the roof and disappeared over the other side, he blinked at the building they'd chosen. He might have been able to get a look through it if he tried, but it shared its sturdy bones with other versions for a good six layers around it.
While the resounding clangs of a protesting fire escape announced the pack of kids were dropping down to street level, he reached up and tapped the riser for the set of stairs heading toward the roof behind his perch. The vibration-based sketch of a spell he drew with his bare fingertip wouldn't last, but it shouldn't need to. He wouldn't be sleeping on this thing, but a chance to know he needed to vacate the platform before feet hit the treads seemed . . prudent.
The guarding fence on his left looked the sturdiest, would probably hold him with one hand wrapped around the rail, boots braced on the outside of the fence slats, even if he went over the top at speed. Squinting through the mesh at the wall under his platform as he shook out the end of his finished cigarette, crushed it cold between thumb and forefinger, yeah. Even if the fence didn't hold, he could make the jump to a windowsill without too much effort.
He paused in the act of fishing out his kit again. Licked one of his canines while he considered how many he'd already had, and how long it'd been since he last ate. Come to think of it, he kind of wanted a drink, too, and he levered himself up off the mesh. Stretched, even hooked his fingers around the edge of a stair tread to do a pull-up, then climbed--carefully, in deference to the aging metal--back down to street level. All the fire escapes he could access from where he was looked equally old, equally rickety, so he didn't bother changing layers. Just dropped the last few feet when a rung twisted under his hand, dusted off his palms, and wandered back out into the street.
There had to be a nearby bar on one of these layers.
Five minutes' walking informed him that 'one' was an understatement. 'Fifteen' might still be an understatement, and he was sort of impressed. This city collected drinking establishments the way the Keep's harbours collected restaurants. Most weren't marked, which he didn't mind, but most were also closed-door, which he did. No sense in barging in on someone's private party.
Ignoring the ones set more than halfway down alleys cut his options by two thirds, so he was changing layers every few steps in the hopes of following his nose to food. He might not have his cousin Conall's accuracy, but he got by.
Wasn't having much luck, though, mostly catching the smell of his own cigarettes and the occasional puff of other smoke in the air. He tried turning down one of the bigger streets, letting passerby dodge around him without reacting, looking for open doors, nose lifted a little, feeling for a wind. Had luck after two more blocks, saw a door that opened inward sitting propped wide, and heard quiet, competing conversation in many voices through the opening, over the noise of commuters and fast-moving shoppers. He dodged through the traffic flowing down the street, fetched up on the sidewalk in front of the door, and stepped through.
Two blinks forced his eyes into adjusting as he crossed the threshold, stepping towards the wall so he could take a look around. Pretty quiet for midafternoon, maybe seven men on his current layer, one of them behind the bar, and twenty total. He caught glances from three of the closest, nodded politely, and they went back to their drinks. He couldn't see the kitchen from where he was standing, but the open space was L shaped, lined with windows and the door along the short arm, and if the long arm didn't terminate in the alley behind the building he'd be shocked.
Steam was rising from plates on a slightly deeper layer, so he took a step farther into the bar, let himself drop the layers as he did. He stopped when he found himself the center of undivided attention. Every single human--he was assuming--in the place was staring, including both barmen and the aproned woman who'd just come out of the back.
He cocked his head in silent question. Everyone he'd seen moving could move through the layers. Why was it noteworthy that he could? He wasn't visibly armed, just wearing a short-sleeved shirt and jeans with a few extra pockets stitched in in slightly contrasting fabric. They could hardly be expecting him to hold up the place with nothing but a string bracelet around one wrist and a smile.
Not that he couldn't, but they weren't to know.
After a long, tense second, most everyone looked away, went back to their conversations, their drinks and their food, and he let his held breath out quietly.
There were booths towards the back, a few of them substantial, tables scattered through the open space. A few were angled well to be able to look out through the windows without being easily visible, but it was the stools at the bar he decided on.
Nobody in the room looked old, or terribly young. His was the palest hair in the room, he thought, though maybe not by that much. He was close to if not actually the shortest person he could see. The woman serving tables had a good handspan on him, and hefted her tray like it could be a weapon on a bad night. Both the bartenders were dark; the older looking one had a closely trimmed beard.
The room had buzzed up with conversation by the time he got to the bar, hitched himself up on a stool where he could see the door from the corner of his eye. When the bartender closest to him--the younger of the pair--asked his pleasure, Aodh just pointed. Second shelf from the top, usually a good guess for midgrade; the expensive stuff usually migrated up to the top, out of easy reach, or the bottom, for the advertising being at bar-level offered. Or in the back out of sight, but that wasn't the point.
The man nodded, and was going for the glasses, about to pull down a shotglass, when a flick of Aodh's hand caught his eye. When he turned back, Aodh measured off the height of one of the whiskey glasses with his right thumb and fingers, laid the pinky through center fingers of his left hand against his thumb to show how much he wanted. Smiled, a little wry.
The man blinked, then shrugged, obeyed. Set the glass down in front of Aodh at his edge of the bartop, held out his palm.
A second's rummaging came up with one of the fish coins, which he held up. The man nodded, so he dropped the coin in his palm, accepted the glass he was handed. Took a whiff of the very bright topnotes in the glass, then a generous sip.
Paused, staring into the bar's surface as cayenne and ancho chile burst across his tongue along with the alcohol he'd expected, gently burned the roof of his mouth and the top of his throat as he swallowed. Tongue still burning, he pulled the glass a little away to look back into its amber depths, then grinned at it.
"Ah," the bartender murmured, loud enough for Aodh to hear over the buzz as he took another sip. When Aodh looked up, the man dipped his chin in a near-nod, not quite making eye contact. "Evenin', stranger. In town long?"
Aodh blinked at him. "Not sure?" he said, then realised what'd given him away. Teeth--he'd lost the habitual illusion. Probably, come to think about it, when his bracelet had shorted out on that little sea of glass in the desert. He supposed he'd just have to be grateful the green over his natural eye colour was a stronger spell.
Also that the locals' trade-tongue was so close to languages he knew already. What they were speaking to one another--right at the edge of his hearing, probably trying to avoid him listening in at all--was a lot harder to parse. Also, his drink was agave based under the additives, unless he missed his guess. The undernotes tasted vegetal, not of barley or wheat.
Come to think of it, he was actually hungry now.
"Well, you let us know if there's anything you need," the man said, and Aodh just about breathed his drink. Managed not to cough--or laugh--but knew he was grinning, eyes crinkled at the corners, as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"Whatever that guy's eating smells fantastic."
The bartender craned his neck to see around him, then smiled. "I'll see what I can do."
The woman in the apron turned out to be Olya, at least according to the bartender, and she took to slipping him appetisers after he'd tipped her for delivering dinner with one of the chipped-stone beads from his pockets. They were Trickwood-make, good luck charms that charged by getting carried around, and she had about eight of them by the time he was licking his fingers and getting into his fourth glass of aggressively spiced tequila. They'd been bouncing around among the second-shelf bottles, so he'd found out that in addition to cayenne, ancho, chipotle, and at least three other chiles, their distilleries had access to both sweet and hot paprika.
Whoever'd thought to try smoking the paprika before adding it to the barrels was a genius. Also, even if the temperature dropped like a rock after sunset, he probably wasn't going to need an overshirt for a while. His hands and feet were pleasantly hot.
"Has Radko offered you any water?" Olya asked as she set her tray down on the bartop, along with a scrap of a note. The bartender--Radko--snagged the note, gave her a dirty look to match the one she'd shot him, then started filling a big drinks order.
Aodh chirruped a laugh for her, holding out his perfectly steady hands for her to look at. "'m fine, really." Practice with the language, simply from hearing so much of it around him--and listening to Radko explain the process they used for their alcohol even if it was probably full of lies for unknown audiences--was letting him slip comfortably into the accent, and she blinked at him.
"I really don't know where you're putting it all," she marveled, and he laughed again.
"'ve been gettin' water between rounds," he mentioned, nodding towards Radko, who was affrontedly stacking half-full glasses on her tray. "Think m'mouth'd be on fire by now if he didn't."
She laughed, relaxing. "You're as bad as the old ranch hands--your mouth should be on fire. Are you just in for the day?"
"Might be," he shrugged, accepting the glass Radko bypassed the tray with to hand him. "Don' have a place to stay." This one tasted like whiskey, accented with oak and cinnamon and--clove? He stuck his nose into the top of the glass to examine it better.
"There's a boarding house up Eighth," she said, easing the tray off the bartop. "In case you're looking," she added over her shoulder, smiling, then disappeared into the back.
Aodh and Radko sat for a second, then Radko went and pulled him another glass of water from the barrel set into the back of the bar--Aodh kind of wanted to get a better look at the carvings around the spigot, there was a faint aftertaste that was making him think 'spell'--and Aodh slouched down comfortably, propping his chin in his palm after taking another mouthful of the whiskey.
"Eighth?" he asked when Radko set the glass down near him, and Radko blinked. "Yeah?" he asked back, holding up both his hands for a moment, thumbs folded into his palms.
Yeah, still not in the Trickwood. Aodh clicked his tongue thoughtfully. "H'vn't seen much in t'way of street signs." Or signs at all. Even the bar didn't have a name posted anywhere he could see.
"Ohh," Radko said, sounding enlightened. Reaching under the bar, he pulled out a scrap of paper--not the one Olya had given him--and a stub of pencil. "One, two, three--"
Aodh watched upside-down numerals form, laid out vertically in blocks of ten, and finally had an explanation for the not-fox-sign carvings on the corners of buildings. Grinning a little as he reached over and tapped at one "--we're just back from the corner of Eleventh and--?"
"Tepeyac," Radko supplied. "You'll want to go up--right, on Tepeyac, and hang a left at Eighth."
Noting that 'up' still meant 'away from the harbour'--which was handy--Aodh nodded, sat back on his stool, had another mouthful of the whiskey.
The next time Olya came by, he leaned back, chirped. She paused to drop off her tray with the other bartender, along with a new scrap of paper, then came over. He asked for another plate of appetisers when she tucked in next to him, and thanked her for the recommendation.
She shook her head. "Still don't know where you put it all," but she was smiling. "Big house," she added as he slipped her an oblong chunk of amber. "White stoop, there should be lights on in the front room."
He nodded acknowledgement, and tried not to laugh when she snuck a glance down, then blinked at her hand. The amber was the size of her thumb, pierced for a chain along the long axis and incised with hunting birds that weren't quite griffins proper, but close. He'd been meaning to mix it into a friend's stash of jewelry. It suited Olya just as well, though, and she was visibly pleased by the delicacy of the carving.
"Don't turn off Eighth," she said, tucking it away behind her apron. "Some of the alleys get a little rough."
"'ll keep tha' in mind," he replied cheerfully, rolling the words around with the aftertaste of chiles in his mouth.
The appetisers were good, some sort of lizard-meat skewers served with a chilled yogurt dipping sauce that soothed instead of added to the burning from the latest glass of tequila.
All in all, a pleasant afternoon, more pleasant than he'd expected. He tipped Radko directly with a handful of cast silver beads strung on steel wire, and left a little filagree knife tucked under the edge of the empty plate. Radko'd been clearing his plates off the bartop all evening, along with the glasses, and he'd be more likely to find the knife than Olya.
It wasn't quite full dark as he left the bar, brushing his hand against the hinge-edge of the door to leave an anchor behind. He'd like to come back, and following his nose was much less effective here than at home. A fox-level reminder of where the place was seemed appropriate.
The roof-roads were more active than the streets, he found as he turned up unmarked Tepeyac. He had to keep resisting the urge to turn his head and track movement, stare up through determined twilight to figure out who was moving, and where. Kept his hands in his pockets, his shoulders easy as he walked. Glanced up every so often when there was a particularly loud scuff, but didn't stare.
8th, when he found it, was a discordant jumble of buildings, one layer's subdivided rowhouses overlaid with another's short apartment towers, overlaid with a third's armoury-thick privacy wall. There were alleys, but they were fit for a labyrinth: all blind corners and dead ends.
Wondering just how intentional that was, he kept going. Briefly had to stare up at the buildings on a corner, trying to decide if 8th had branched off itself, or if that was just a particularly big alley--alley, he thought--but he eventually found the building Olya had described. The stoop was indeed white, the curtains in the front windows drawn back to spill slightly cool light onto the sidewalk, and it stood apart from its neighbours on either side. He thought he could see a raised garden, a few layers down, but didn't wander down the side of the house to go looking. Just dropped to the right layer--the one actually possessing the lit windows--padded up the steps, and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered it had a good head's height on him, and jingled slightly as she moved. She cast an assessing eye over him--he resisted the urge to bristle, or lick one of his canines at her--then stepped to the side, allowed him past her into the front room.
"Just you?" she asked, closing the door behind him, and he nodded. "Jus' me."
"Hm," she replied, looking him over again, then dusted her hands off on her apron. "This way."
"None of the rooms on the fire escapes are available," she informed him as they trooped up a set of creaking stairs. She was still jingling as she moved, but from behind it was obvious it wasn't jewelry. Keys, most likely, and he was proved right when she dipped her hand under her apron to fish out a massive ring of keys on a chain that ran to her belt.
"I've this one on this floor, and two above--" she unlocked a door, hooked the keys back out of sight beneath the apron. Gestured him in. "Bed, window--it only opens this high," she measured a head's width with her hands, "chair, table and shelf. The bedclothes are clean. Bath at the end of the hall, by the back stairs," she took the three steps necessary to gesture off into the space beyond the room's walls. "If you'll come with me--" she bustled him out of the room, took him up the stairs again to show him the others available, explaining all the way.
That conversation took them back down the front stairs, into the receiving room off the door he'd come in.
"I won't ask for a name," she told him, a faint smile playing across her face as she did. "If you're satisfied with the options, you're welcome here."
He nodded, hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to prowl around poking at the decorative plates displayed on the shelves.
"How will you be paying?"
"Huh." He rocked back on his heels, hands still in his pockets, and thought about it. "I've got a couple of pretty stones--" he hooked the spinel, held it up between his index and center fingers for her to see "--but I can also do little spells? Housekeeping things, dust off the curtains, mud off the stoop. Mice out of the kitchen?" His father'd taught him that one.
"How will I know they'll work?" she shot back, reasonably, and he grinned, crinkled his eyes up at her.
"'S fair question. Here," he walked over to the table she was standing behind, set the spinel down with a click. Her eyebrows lifted as he went after a penknife and the tangle of blue string he'd found in his pockets earlier. As he measured off a length of string--two twists had been enough to persuade the tangle to become neat loops between his hands, and her eyes had widened--he nodded to the stone. "'s that reasonable f'r a couple nights?"
She picked it up, examined it with professional fingers, then set it down where he'd left it, nodded. "Two, three if you eat elsewhere and don't hassle the staff."
He eyed her, both hands and one of his canines involved in a series of big looping knots and twists. "Tha' a regular problem?"
"No," she said, not quite flatly, as he hooked a finger through the loop his tooth had been keeping open.
"Ah bon," he mumbled automatically as soon as his mouth was free, slightly bemused. "Here--" he laid the finished hex next to the spinel. "Hang this in your kitchen, near t'floor for preference, and t'mice should go away. Take this for deposit," he tapped his index nail on the stone, "give it back if t'spell works?"
She blinked. Looked at the stone, the neat tangle of blue string, looked back up at him. " . . Deal?"
"D'accord. Up t'stairs, third from the right?"
"Breakfast is at sunrise," she didn't quite agree, and he nodded, took the key she offered him off her big ring.
Padding up the stairs, moving softer as he got higher, he turned the key over a couple of times, walked it along his knuckles. She had second copies, likely for housekeeping, but just as likely for getting rid of troublesome guests, if he read her right.
He wasn't planning to be trouble. Just--cautious.
The bathroom was indeed at the end of the hall. One tap at the sink basin, two at the bigger one for the bath, and unless he missed his guess the runoff from the sink filled the toilet's reservoir. The water that flowed when he opened the sink tap smelled all right, ran clear and very, very cold. He turned it back off, tied a couple of knots around the barrel of the spigot, plugged the drain, and turned it back on. After rinsing off his face, rubbing wet hands through his hair, he took a few mouthfuls of pleasantly hot water, swished them around in his mouth before swallowing. Turned off the tap again, untied the knot, then used the toilet.
Which was connected to a sewer, if the gurgling from the pipes and a distant splashing wasn't lying. Interesting. Someone had put a lot of effort, both a long time ago to build a system, and more recently to maintain it. Not what he would have guessed, from the state of the outer walls, but maybe it was easier to pull back from the walls they couldn't repair.
The window in his room yielded to not-quite-gentle force, and he stuck his head and torso out to get a look at the fire escape. It looked recently used, recently repaired, and he wondered who exactly was paying for the rooms attached to it.
It took him longer to get the window closed again, but the boarding-house was on a near-desert layer, and it was cold out there. Once he finally got it flush with the sill, he went for a couple of his bracelets, left alarms across the windowsill and the doorjamb. He tucked a warming spell under the covers while he fought his boots off, banished most of his bracelets out of sight. Afterwards, still wearing his jeans, he sighed, grabbed one back to summon a pair of sleeping pants. He rarely bothered at home, but at home he had decades of warnings--not all of them his own make--layered into the walls, the ceiling, the floor, every window, even the bed.
The bed was comfortable, though, more so for being warm, and he fell asleep quickly.
The light through his window woke him, hours later. When he opened his door to check, trying not to chatter his teeth, there was no one in the bath. Resisting the urge to bring the top layer of bedclothes in with him as a coat, he slunk in, scrubbed down quickly with the blessedly hot water from the tub's tap, dried off by exaggerating the effects of shaking out arms and legs, and slunk back to his room before anyone else on his floor put in an appearance.
Three knots and a pin in a seam turned yesterday's short-sleeved shirt into a double-layered thicker shirt. The underlying structure was identical, still a tee, but he'd turned it rusty-red, added a waffle-knit pale grey underlayer with sleeves long enough to cover his knuckles. He folded them back after climbing into the shirt, shoved a little so he could get at the bracelets nobody would be able to see. After sitting down in the chair to get his boots back on, he hooked his room key onto his belt loop, and wandered downstairs.
Breakfast was, indeed, at sunrise. He went through four cups of coffee and a half-loaf of bread with the assortment of spreads and jams available--several of them as spicy as the night before's tequilas--and after a moment's thought decided to let the spinel and the hex cover the tab.
Leaving by the front door, he checked to the side of the house, saw there was indeed a garden. Several layers of garden, all laid out along a miniature labyrinth of walking paths, and even though he was still picking raspberry seeds out of his teeth, he sort of wanted to wander through it.
Decided to go exploring instead, and hiked back down 8th towards Tepeyac after leaving another nearly-invisible beacon on the front stoop.
--
When he wandered back in a little before sunset, the house's keeper pounced.
Tossed the spinel back at him--he caught it automatically, juggled it a couple of times, then disappeared it back into a pocket--and mimed the shape of the hex with her hands. He automatically noticed that her skin was chapped, probably from doing dishes, before focusing on the shape she'd made.
"How long will it last?" It was a question, not a demand. He had the feeling that if she had a better grasp of how old he was, she might have tried it.
"Stick't in sunlight, maybe an hour a week? and i'should last--" he mentally calculated, looking past her head at the wall. "Five, ten years?" he guessed, and tried not to squint at the embroidery edging the kerchief she had tied over her hair. Probably wasn't a spell, or if it was, just something to keep the red colourfast.
"You can stay for a week if you make two more of those," she offered.
He grinned. "'ll make you one a week, and y'can do as you like with 'em. Jus' let me know 'cha you want--dust, mice, insects."
She made a show of considering it. "Are they all as fast to make as that one was?"
"Only 'f you know what you're doin'," he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and shrugging.
" . . One every five days?"
"D'accord," he replied, pulling out the string. "ll pay for t'next now."
"Mice again," she told him promptly. "I have a friend who wants one."
He nodded, measuring off, clipping.
The next night when he got back, there was someone watching him from the other side of the street, tucked up out of sight on the roof. He ignored the way his shoulderblades started itching as he climbed the steps. Didn't pause at the front windows to lean down, try to get a look at the roof across the way.
He did leave a heavier set of warnings across the door and window that night, added flashbangs and a shield that would keep the noise from waking the whole house if it went off--just deafen the person breaking down his door or trying to climb in his window.
The watcher was gone in the morning, but he picked up a tail during a late-morning wander through the open-square market, and got stalked back to the boarding-house every night for a solid week without a word.
It was polite, for stalking, just a faintly darker shadow on the roof across from whatever bar he'd found to amuse his afternoon. One that left its perch when he left the bar, prowled along a route that didn't always match his, but nevertheless didn't lose him, either. Not that he tried; he wasn't particularly looking for a fight.
The eighth night, he paused at the corner of Candelaria-- subtly marked with a stenciled flame--and 7th, spent a few contemplative moments digging the pads of his fingers into the decaying mortar between the bricks. Given proper motivation, he could probably make the climb in under two minutes. Less if he went for the windowsills three storeys up, used them for jumping platforms.
A lighter snapped above him, and he flicked his head to the side, making a show of looking for the source of the sound.
Someone with an exquisite grasp of hearing breathed a dry chuckle, lowered his hand just enough to show the outline of his head, the way he was hunched just slightly to protect his light. Tall, big hands from the way he manipulated the light, and Aodh was committing the shape of the underside of the man's hatbrim to memory when the lighter clicked back off.
He grinned wide and white up into the dark, showing every one of his teeth but laughing too. "You'd be th' one people mutter 'bout," he called, louder than his stalker had laughed.
"Could be," his stalker replied, lowering his hands completely so Aodh could see a cherry glow in response to an inhale. "Might not be."
He barely bit down the fox's laugh he wanted to carol, all bright mockery, just shook his head, still grinning. "Must be boring work."
His stalker shrugged, coat fabric rustling in the dark, and Aodh laughed silently up before turning back to the street, padding politely back towards his lodgings.