Oh.
Wait.
The White
Horse
.
The
White
Horse.
The White Horse.
I
’D BEEN HERE
before.
If I’d come from the main road, I’d have known it. Plodging down a farm track, coming from the other side – well, no. Do you know how many inns in England are called The White Horse?
Me neither, but a lot.
Only one of them, though, was here. This place,
this
. I really should’ve known.
The road from Hell is rudely paved, and entirely at the mercy of its master. He thought I might be family, maybe; he was never going to dump me at random, however far the planet had turned while I was in his kingdom. There would be a reason, sure, for setting me here. And this, surely, would have to be it.
The Overworld and the mortal world are perilously intermingled, but there are places, confluences, where they lie more open to each other. Ley lines are like bastes, tacking-stitches, holding each to each but loosely. Stonehenge is a rivet.
Here, too. A rivet.
I still didn’t know why he’d sent me here, only that he would have had a purpose. Even if it was nebulous, like his offer of help. I’d spurned that, but I thought perhaps he’d tried to help me anyway.
It would be silly to feel patronised. He was Lord of Hell, and I was a mortal girl; I should be grateful for his patronage, for anything. If he seriously wanted to take me into his family, I thought he’d be disappointed – it was Jordan’s call, after all, or else it was mine, and either way I thought it wouldn’t happen – but even so. For now, I should be feeling overwhelmed. And frantically taking advantage, if I was wise. I guess I never was that wise. At best, I found it slightly difficult to be grateful, not knowing what he’d had in mind to drop me here. Still, I’d been a Girl Guide; I did my best. I was here, at least, there was no changing that. And there was beer, and food, and more food soon enough. And no doubt there would be more beer afterwards, and I’d ask the nice landlord if he still had rooms, and if not he’d know a farmer or a pensioner who’d be glad of a paying guest, and no one knew where I was, and...
And the White Horse is a rivet.
For maybe twenty minutes there, the time it might’ve taken me to make my way down the valley, nobody knew where I was. Except Jordan’s dad, of course, and anyone he chose to share it with. I did hope he hadn’t told Jordan, but I probably shouldn’t bet on that.
For maybe twenty seconds after I walked into the pub, still nobody knew where I was.
There was... a dog, call it a dog, sprawled vast and grey and shaggy on the flagstone hearth. No fire at this time of year, but even so: some places are warm by association, I guess. Hearthstones, Hell. Like that. All in the mind.
By the time I saw it, it had most emphatically seen me. It had lifted its head, and was looking.
I looked back. No collar on the beast, no sign of an owner; people were gathered in twos and threes, men mostly, and none of them was paying any attention to the dog.
Even when it got unhurriedly to its feet and padded out of the room. Watching me all the way.
This was an old place, still laid out like a coaching-inn with public bar and lounge and private parlours. It might have been going anywhere, in search of anything.
The more I looked at it, the less it looked like a dog. If I’d asked anyone, I guess they’d have called it a wolfhound.
That’s almost a joke. I was almost laughing.
Never mind. I thought it was a fairly safe bet now that someone knew just where I was. A quick shift out of wolf-shape, a quick phone-call,
Hey, this girl just walked in and she doesn’t smell right. Smells like a daemon to me, with the dust of Hell all over her. Guess who she’s been talking to...? Yeah, I thought so too. And we know what daemon girl’s been hanging out with that family, don’t we...? Yeah. You want to tell him, or shall I...?
Something like that, I thought was going on right now. Oz has, oh, let’s call it an affinity with shapeshifters.
Okay, I guess I wasn’t staying after all. Never mind. I’d wait for dinner anyway. Werewolves weren’t a problem, being spied on was just an irritant, and even Oz Trumby would need a bit of notice to stir up something worse. By then I’d be gone. There were bikes as well as cars parked up outside. I’d stick to just the single beer, and once I’d eaten I’d steal something discreetly and be off. I didn’t even need my Aspect for that, except maybe to break a security lock; you pick up skills, in the assassin trade.
I wasn’t actually much of an assassin, never actually killed anyone for money, but hey. I had the skills.
Oh, and I did take the money, of course. Two out of three ain’t bad.
T
HIS WAS AN
old pub, but that didn’t mean they’d done no work on it. There must have been a water-mill hereabouts, a little way upstream; now there was only the mill-race left, running right by the inn on its way to rejoin the river, and some architect had had the bright idea of building an annexe out above it. With a glass floor, so that diners and drinkers could sit and watch the water scoot beneath their feet. Illuminated, of course, to show the tangled weeds and the lurking fish and the dark stones of the bed.
So what do you do, when you’re alone and tired and upset and a little scared, or more than a little perhaps?
You sit there with nothing to read while you wait for your dinner, with a pint of bitter when everyone knows that alcohol’s a depressant, and you stare down between your feet at all that rushing water and you start to feel gloomy. Of course you do. You think of what you’ve left behind, what you’ve run away from, one boy and then another. You think how confusing that is, the way you want to knock both their heads together and then kiss them better, kiss them both.
More than kiss, perhaps.
You think about that, and you just grow more depressed.
And then you think about the future, all this running that lies ahead of you, and...
At least you have somewhere to run, short-term. Errand of urgent mercy. It’s good to have goals.
After that... Well. Survival is a goal, I guess. But it’s a bloody depressing one.
H
ERE CAME DINNER.
Fork and fingers, and sod it: yes, I’d like another pint of bitter, please. Alcohol in my bloodstream wasn’t going to be a problem, not with my Aspect on standby to burn it off; being breathalysed really wasn’t a problem, as I wasn’t planning to stop for any cop. Or any reason else. As soon as I was done here, I was off.
Meantime, apparently, I was still staring down through the floor. Spotting fishes.
Spotting a school, a flock, a flood of little fishes.
No, wait.
Those weren’t fish.
Eels. Baby eels. Elvers.
Swarming elvers. They were meant to be delicious. And increasingly rare, and incredibly expensive. Someone should be out there netting them in the dark and flying them to Japan like living treasure.
Someone should tip off the landlord, if he didn’t know already. But – nah, not me. He kept a werewolf in the house. It might be his son, or his son’s friend; he might be giving it houseroom for all manner of decent reasons; and even so. There may be decent werewolves, but I’ve never met one. The clue’s in the name, they do tend to be wolfish. Doglike, in a bad way: loyal to the strongest, not to the right. It wasn’t the landlord this one had gone padding off to, but he gave it houseroom. I was giving him nothing for nothing.
Maybe I didn’t need to; he might be getting something for nothing already. Those elvers were milling around beneath my feet, not moving on in a mad rush to the sea. These were country folk, they all had egg-sucking grandmothers; of course they’d know about the elvers. Of course they’d have a net across the stream, to pen the creatures here until they could be scooped out and bucketed up and sold on. They were a resource, and people are nothing if not resourceful.
Um. Elvers too, apparently. Finding themselves trapped, they were putting their time to good use, building up reserves for the journey ahead...
Put simply, they were eating the fish that lurked among the weeds there – but ‘eating’ was far too simple a word. Far too decorous. They were ripping those fish apart. I hadn’t even known they were carnivorous, but that milling mass of elvers tore into their victims like sharks in a frenzy, scattering gobbets of flesh that tried to rise in the melee and tried to sink in the water and never got the chance either way, were snatched and fought over and swallowed by one ravening tooth-filled maw or another.
They were quite scary, those glimpses I had of one maw or another, rising out of the turmoil then spinning back into it again. Of course the elvers were only tiny, the length of a pencil, but even so. It was like watching piranhas in the schoolkid myth of a swarm, ripping horses to the bone in moments flat. I was a big strong human being even without my Aspect, and out in the air where they could never come, and even so I was weirdly glad to have that plate of glass between us. Thick glass, glass you could walk on, glass you could trust.
Even so, I couldn’t take my eyes off what was happening down there.
Maybe slaughter’s always been attractive, or maybe I’d just become a ghoul. Maybe years of using my Aspect had hardened me. I’d killed a lot of vampires, a lot of other creatures; maybe I was losing my own humanity. Maybe I should cut down, give up, lose the Aspect altogether...
Actually they weren’t so small, those elvers, not pencil-sized. Unless the glass was distorting them, or the water was. They were quieter now they’d eaten all the fish: digesting, I guess, just lying at full stretch in the water. About the size of a descant recorder, they looked now, the kind we all played at school, really badly.
Oh, wait. Now they were boiling again. No more fish to boil over, so...
Oh. Now they were eating each other.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised. I’d met other creatures, more rational creatures, for whom cannibalism was no kind of taboo. Some of them were human.
I’d never met anything, never heard of anything that grew as fast as these. It was hard to be sure through all the glass and the frothing water, through their churning fury, but from what I saw of writhing bodies, they looked suddenly as fat as my forearm, which –
Oh.
Okay, I’m slow sometimes. I was slow just then, at the back end of a hard day. I wanted an hour off, time to sit and chill before it all started again. I’d forgotten – or just pushed to the back of my mind – that the world doesn’t work that way, to my convenience.
The Overworld certainly doesn’t.
T
HE
W
HITE
H
ORSE
? Is a
rivet
. Two worlds interlock here, things come and go with no hindrance. No notice.
No delay.
Messages, other things.
Of course Oz didn’t need time to arrange a reception committee. Of course there was something right at hand; there always would be, at a nexus like this.
Not elvers, not in any mortal sense. Not edible, or not to us; you really, really wouldn’t want to take a bite of these things. Even if you got the chance. Mostly they’d be getting their bite in first.
I saw a mouth again. It was maybe big enough by now to engulf my head, and those teeth... Yeah. Far too many, far too long and vicious-sharp, with bits of other eel skewered on them. It’s not a good look, even the other side of a reliable barrier. I’d have told her so, if she hadn’t rammed her skull up hard against that glass right then.
If I hadn’t seen it bulge, and heard it creak.
I
WAS UP
and out of there so fast, I swear I left my Aspect behind. I could feel it having to hurry, almost to chase me down, before it could clamp itself about me for whatever offensive protection it was worth.
“Come on,” I growled. “Keep up...”
It is insane, of course, to talk to your talent as though it were a separate occasion from yourself. Even so.
The annexe had a separate exit, straight down into the car park. That’s one reason I’d chosen to sit out there on my own, where I could keep an eye on who came and went, and what vehicles they left behind them. That, and the chance to be alone with my food and my beer and my gloomy mood.
I wasn’t glooming now. Nor aching to be alone. At least my Aspect gave me something to talk to, even if I was only bawling it out.
And I might not need it to pinch a set of wheels – that was a matter of pride to me, not actually to
need
it – but it would make the job a hell of a lot easier, not to mention fast. There isn’t a motor in the land that would dare fail to fire with an Aspect on the case.
It might have proved cocky about that – I did always have the feeling that the damn thing enjoyed its work – only it never got the chance to show off that night, because in fact I didn’t steal a motor after all.
Because I came down the steps into the car park, and I got half a dozen strides towards the bike of my fancy – a big Harley with its engine still warm, ticking quietly to itself in the dark – when the horizon erupted.