Anthology 1: The Far Corners Page 7

  I shook my head. Tink came to stand beside me, long pale arms crossed over her chest, the faint smells of old sweat and new perfume wafting off her yellow spandex bike suit. Runes played among the corporate logos emblazoned on Tink's top; the runes had gotten so good at mimicking the slashes and swooshes and helmet-wearing frogs of bike maker logos I couldn't tell which were Tink's runes until they waved and danced away.

  "Now, now," said Tink, nodding toward the corpse of her Trek. "Is it so bad that even the sons of Adam must despair?"

  I shook my head. "Look," I said. Her perfume was getting to me, so I stepped away, pointing things out as I spoke them.

  "Fork is ruined. Frame is ruined. Your crank is bent. And this -- Tink, what did this?"

  I hadn't seen it, until I'd moved behind the bike. But there, on her back wheel -- half her derailleur was gone.

  Bitten in half. I could make out plain the impressions left by a dozen curving fangs -- impressions left in a titanium-carbon alloy I couldn't have scored with a chisel and a sledge-hammer.

  Her chain was still attached only because she'd been on the third hub when the damage occurred -- had she been a few gears higher, she'd have lost her chain. And, from the looks of things, lost her life as well.

  I looked up at her, and she looked away, and for the first time since I'd known her Tink was speechless.

  Speechless was bad enough. It's rude to stare, among the Fair Folk, but as they're quick to point out I'm hardly Fair and no part Folk. So I took in the five-fingered row of scratches left in the spandex on Tink's right thigh, the torn fabric at her knees, the dark circles showing faint under her eyes, the droop of her sheer, still dragonfly wings -- droop, Hell, one of them was hanging crooked.

  She saw me looking, and tried to pour on that Faery glamor, but I've been in Tir Na' Nog long enough to brush it off with a sort of sideways squint.

  "You've got troubles bigger than a ruined bike," I said.

  "Troubles that are none of your concern, mortal," she said. She tried to make her voice Elf icy, but didn't pull it off.

  I sighed.

  "Okay," I said. "We'll stick to the bike. That won't take long, because it's ruined."

  The light in her eyes dimmed even more. A hint of plain old blue even showed through the dancing motes of gold.

  "Surely you can . . ." She trailed off, waved her hands in a flourish that made me think of rabbits and hats and tall men in black capes.

  That's a problem, when dealing with the Fair Folk and machines. Cause and effect don't often hold true, on this side of the Veil. Broken swords get mended with a bit of mumbo-jumbo. Thrones and Halls burn in a flash and are just as easily restored.

  But take a bike, or anything else, from my side of the Veil, and certain things come with it -- one thing being that damage is permanent, and enough damage is irreversible.

  "Look, Tink," I said. I'd been through this with her before, when the bandersnatch had tap-danced all over her favorite Groovy Bean helmet. But that's just a part of the Fair Folk; they live, but don't learn. "It's like this..."

  Heavy footfalls sounded, on the street outside. I'm not talking big-man-in-boots footfalls; if an eighteen-wheeled semi truck from my side of the Veil suddenly put on steel-soled jack-boots and came stomp-tromping to your door, the noise we were hearing was the noise it would make.

  I lifted an eyebrow.

  "Your wee spill?" I asked.

  Tink went pale. My tools began to rattle on their hooks from the rhythmic falls of many heavy feet.

  "Stay put."

  "You'll not turn me out, will you, Dale my dove?" she asked.

  "Never," I said, with a wink. "You owe me too much money."

  The footfalls were nearly to my door. I turned from Tink, wound around her ruined bike, ducked under my rows of hanging wheels. There's a shelf by the wall; atop it are three 120-volt Veil plugs and my power tools. Below it -- I won't say exactly where -- is a fine old Winchester pump-action twelve gauge shotgun, and two dozen boxes of special-made soft iron ammunition.

  Outside my shop, a dozen steps beyond my 15-amp Veil plugs and the Alabama road-sign sigils on my ceiling, the Winchester would be useless as anything but a club. But as long I stayed close it would fire just fine. I'd pointed this out often enough for word to get around.

  I keep cold iron buckshot in the Winchester's chamber, and was glad of it as the heavy tramping pulled to a many-legged halt outside my steel garage doors.

  Tink saw the weapon, and took a step back. Guns don't work, unless they're in a place, like my shop, that is half in Faery and half across the Veil. But like I said, word gets around -- especially if two of the words are 'cold iron.'

  "That won't be enough," she said.

  I flicked the Winchester's safety off.

  "We'll see."

  The door to my room is dead center of the back wall, just to the left of the Nick's hooks on the wall. I hooked a thumb at the door, and wished I'd made my bed. "In there," I said. "I've got a customer."

  She started to disagree. But at that moment, something knocked, doing so with sufficient force to rattle the all nine panels of the thick steel garage doors.

  Tink went, and shut the door. I tossed a tarp over her ruined Trek, and, Winchester in hand, I slapped the door remote and moved to stand in the middle of my shop.

  I shot a glance at the Nick as I moved. His silver Mockingbird wheels were turning, and I heard a bemused singsong humming behind the sound. I grinned; if the Nick wasn't worried, I wasn't going to be, big stomping or no.

  The doors groaned up, letting pale grey Faerie sun wash past the widening opening at the bottom, and revealing a line of two dozen or so elephantine ankles stuffed into worn black leather boots -- size 400 hundred double-D or better boots, I'd guess.

  The doors went up and up, and elephant ankles became woolly mammoth knees, and the only way to describe the smell is to suggest dusty hot rhinoceri and fresh peppermint, mixed in equal quantities.

  "Welcome to Cannon Dale's Bicycle Palace," I said, working the Winchester's well-oiled pump once just for emphasis. "What can I do for you today?"

  * * *

  "Is it gone?"

  "It's gone," I said. I put the Winchester quietly away. "Come on out."

  Tink darted through my door and cast a quick glance about the shop. She seemed surprised everything was still standing.

  "How --" she began.

  "It asked me three times if you were here," I said.

  "And you lied?"

  "Hell yes I lied," I said. "I couldn't have held that thing off with a tank and a hundred Marines, much less Grandpa's shotgun."

  Tink's eyes got big. He runes fled for her back, peeking out at me from under her arms and behind her collar as if I'd inexplicably donned a hat made of just-lit dynamite.

  "But you lied?" she said. "Three times?"

  "You'd prefer the alternative?"

  She shook her head. "No," she said. "But still..."

  I lifted my hands toward a far-off Huntsville sky. "Look," I said. "I don't know why you're so bent out of shape about this. I've been lied to by Fair Folk, a Hell of a lot more than three times."

  "But, when asked thrice by a cocklehunt!"

  I shrugged and sighed and set about making some coffee. Tink regarded warily me all the while, still a bit wide-eyed at the thought of my thrice-repeated prevarication to a booted cocklehunt.

  "How could you?" she said, at last.

  I ran water, plugged my battered Mr. Coffee into the nearest Veil plug and shoved a pair of chairs to face each other.

  "Sit," I said, to Tink. "Sit, and I'll explain. Again."

  * * *

  Maybe I've been in Tir na Nog too long, because I'm suddenly reminded of how Tink and I first met.

  I'd only had the bike shop for about a month, shop time. Bikes were flying out of my doors faster than I could get them prayed across the Veil; I had a stack of back-orders on my desk that reached halfway to my ceiling, and I added more every day.


  There was one bike in particular, though, that even I waited on with a real sense of excitement. It was the latest and the greatest street bike, and it was costing one of the Families a mint. And that didn't include the extras I'd ordered for it, either -- the custom wheels from Crying Mountain, the Italian tires that each cost more than entire cars I'd owned, shifters and brakes hand-crafted by Snark himself in Germany. Hell, the chain was made by a recluse who'd retired from JPL, and who turned out a whopping six chains a year.

  So when Tink crossed my door for the first time, with that same wondrous bike wet with glittering Tir na Nog snow in her hands days before it was due to even start its slow chant-fueled crossing of the Veil, I'd made a damned fool of myself.

  I was still new to Tir na Nog, remember. Time is rarely a neat linear affair here, on this side of the Veil. Magic is motion, and motion is magic, the Fae say -- but when a bike that didn't yet exist showed up at my door for minor repairs, I'd spilled my coffee, cussed, and sputtered "Damn, Tinkerbell, where'd you get that bike?"

  The Veil has been pierced often enough and long enough that calling an elf 'Tinkerbell' is akin to tweaking a Mafioso crime lord's nose and asking him if his last name is really Fettucini.

  But Tink just burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she wound up bent double and even got a bit red-faced.

  We've been friends ever since, and while Tink isn't her name any more than mine is Cannon Dale, that's who we are to each other.

  A name -- a true name -- isn't something you toss around lightly. Not in Tir na Nog. Not if you want to stay alive, and retain your original complement of limbs and facial features.

  "But surely you can restore my Moonlight," said Tink, and her tired blue-gold elf eyes dragged me back to the present. "Can't you?"

  "Like I told you, Tink, Moonlight is done," I said.

  Tink just looked at me cock-eyed, as though I'd suddenly burst into a song of backwards Sanskrit. I spoke again, before she had a chance.

  "No way," I said. "The damage is too severe. There's not a part of Moonlight that isn't ruined. And even if you take her to Lottie's or Singer's, all they'll do is make her look whole. But she won't ride, Tink. She won't ride, and she sure as Hell won't have any magic."

  "I must have a bike," she said. "Tonight."

  I sighed. "Look," I said. "Maybe I can loan you a bike."

  "I cannot rely on any other bike," she said. "I must have my Moonlight."

  "Moonlight is dead," I said. Sometimes harsh words are the only words the Fae understand. "I can't raise the dead, Tink. And neither can anyone else."

  "Then I too am doomed," she said. Her eyes fell to the floor, and her voice to a whisper. "Or will be, come nightfall."

  "Nightfall." I pushed back my chair and rose. "Hang on for a minute."

  I keep an old 486 laptop amid the clutter on my bench. The Web hasn't made it past the Veil yet -- and God help the Faery and mortal worlds when it does -- so the laptop's sole purpose is to convert street time into shop time, and vice versa.

  I flipped the laptop's fat screen up and flipped it on. Tink watched, more weary than curious. "What are you doing now, Cannon Dale?" she asked.

  "Surfing for porn," I said, as the laptop whirred and crackled to life. Tink chuckled, as though she understood, and I wondered if maybe she did.

  I tweak the laptop's conversion program from time to time, but it's still a long way from perfect. Call it ninety percent accurate. Half of the time.

  "I'm figuring your sunset into shop time," I said, as the Windows load completed. "If you've got to have a bike by nightfall, I need to know how much time I've got."

  "You've got until sunset," said Tink, tilting her head so that the sharp tip of her right ear peeked through locks of sun-gold hair. "Are all the sons of Adam so dense, these days?"

  "Oh, we certainly are," I replied, tapping keys. With a beep and a flurry of charts, the laptop began its calculations. "For instance, dark might fall in two hours, or forty. I'm hoping for forty."

  The Dell beeped, and a single chart -- part astrological, part astronomical, and part Fae sympathetic mathematics -- remained, and then the sunset countdown began in the background, flowing across the screen in big bright blue numerals.

  Twenty-two hours, sixteen minutes, thirty-four seconds. With an accuracy of plus or minus ten percent, since there was a forty percent chance it was Wednesday.

  I said a word Tink pretended not to hear.

  The countdown fell another pair of seconds.

  I took a breath, and sighed. So much for miracles.

  "It's bad then, is it?" asked Tink.

  I closed the laptop's lid to hide the numbers, because even if Tink didn't understand they were a kind of countdown to her fate I sure as the devil did. "It isn't good," I said. I rose and filled my cup with coffee gone tepid and bitter. "I was hoping for a couple of days."

  Tink's flawless brow wrinkled in confusion. "A couple of days before nightfall?"

  "Skip it," I said. "We've got more pressing things to talk about. Like why you need the bike you can't have."

  "I cannot tell you, friend Dale," she said. She shook her head, and again the tips of her long Elf ears were briefly visible. "I am bound by thrice-spoken oaths, and by sundry fell vows."

  "Dammit, Tink, you have to give me something," I said. Coffee sloshed, and I poured the wretched stuff into a trash-can. "I might be able to help. But I can't help you if I don't know how."

  "But my Vow!"

  I looked up, toward the Nick, and noticed that his wheels were spinning so fast his spokes were blurs. Light glinted in the space between tire and hub, and in that instant I knew just how to get Tink's story.

  "Thanks," I said, to the Nick, and he responded with a brief burst of pure hot Alabama summer sun from the blur between his magic-churning spokes. Tink opened her mouth, but I lifted my finger and motioned for silence.

  "Save it," I said. "Can't ask you to break a Vow. No, not me, no sir. But Tink -- and listen to me carefully, now -- did your Vow forbid you to, say, make up a complete lie about a made-up Faery princess who is perhaps caught up in a situation very similar to your own? I mean, if you told me a story about an elf named Elvira, for instance, would that make you an oath-breaker? If you changed all the names?"

  Tink's eyes widened. She thought for a bit, weighing unfamiliar words and even more foreign concepts.

  "No," she said at last. "No, I never promised I'd not tell a made-up story about -- what was her name, now?"

  "Elvira," I said. I leaned back in my swivel chair, laced my fingers behind my skull, and closed my eyes.

  "So let's get started," I said. I thought about seconds falling away, on the laptop's hidden screen. "Talk fast."

  Tink drained her cup and dived right in.

  * * *

  An hour later, we were done.

  I won't bore you with the details, mainly because, like many things with their roots deep in Tir Na Nog, they faded like morning mist and I can't remember half of them anyway.

  Suffice it to say that Elvira was bound by oath to the service of a lesser Family, and that this lesser Family had provoked the wrath of half a dozen other lesser Families, and that somewhere in the bloody fracas a minor member of one of Tir Na Nog's Finer Families wound up with her feelings hurt.

  That, predictably, was when things got truly nasty.

  Tink, now oath-bound to the service of a doomed Lesser Family, went from being a minor bike courier unknown to one and all to one to being one of the few surviving members. She'd been pressed into service by the wounded Family matriarch to deliver a trinket of some sort to the steward of a Finer Family, and if she didn't arrive before sunup I gathered all bets were off.

  I also surmised that the delivery of this trinket -- all I can recall of it is that it was a magical invisible key of some sort, a key to something called the Broken Door -- would put the surviving members of Tink's lesser Family under the protection of a Finer. Which would of course induce an immedi
ate and profound cessation of hostilities toward Tink and any of her house who survived the night.

  "So you see why I must have Moonlight," she said, brushing drooping bangs out of her face.

  I sighed. It was back to square one. I knew I'd have to go over the many reasons why Moonlight would ride no more again and probably again until the news sunk in with Tink.

  "Okay," I said. "I get this much. You need a bike. And not just any bike."

  Tink nodded. "One heir to Moonlight's magic," she said. "And such magic she had!"

  If magic is motion, here in Tir Na Nog, a well-crafted bicycle is pure arcana on wheels. That's what poor dead Moonlight had been. A rare and complex fusion of Fae magic and mortal mechanics that, rather like the Nick, became something greater here in Faery than it could have been in either world alone.

  Just what Tink would need, I mused, if she were to survive another night in the Alleys.

  I sighed. I stood. I did a mental inventory of the shop, knowing all the while I'd come up short.

  It wasn't that I lacked bikes. Bikes I had. A half dozen Giant street bikes stood in a neat row by my east wall, each bike a racer, built for speed and agility, but bound to their masters by runes and spells I'd not in a million years unwrench.

  I had a venerable old Schwinn single-speed in for a brake job, and though it carried neither bind-rune nor spell and was a friendly old thing, Tink wouldn't make it two blocks from my door at its best speed.

  Otherwise, a Specialized mountain bike with gas shocks all around and knobby Lizardbeak tires lacked bind-runes, but even if I replaced the Lizardbeaks with street thins and lost the shocks and the Borh-Neo handles it would be twice the weight Tink needed and maybe half the speed.

  And that was it. Those bikes, and various parts -- Shimano shifters, a couple dozen Tufflite cranks, assorted Angelwing tubes and Cracked Parrot forks and a generous supply of generic thises and thats -- enough to build a bike, maybe, but would it be a bike fast enough to keep Tink alive?