Stories: All-New Tales

He began to chant—the mead of poetry, you know—and for a second the drunken voice cracked and changed, becoming that of Mani in his full Aspect. A sudden radiance shone forth—the predators gave a single growl, baring their teeth—and for a moment I heard the chariot chant of the mad moongod, in a language you could never learn, but of which a single word could drive a mortal crazy with rapture, bring down the stars, strike a man dead—or raise him back to life again.

He chanted, and for a beat the hunters paused—and was that a single trace of a tear gleaming in the shadow of a black fedora?—and Mani sang a glamour of love and death, and of the beauty that is desolation and of the brief firefly that lights up the darkness—for a wing’s beat, for a breath—before it gutters, burns and dies.

But the chant did not halt them for more than a second. Tears or not, these guys were hungry. They glided forward, hands outstretched, and now I could see inside their unbuttoned coats, and for a moment I was sure there was no body beneath their clothes, no fur or scale, no flesh or bone. There was just the shadow; the blackness of Chaos; a blackness beyond colour or even its absence; a hole in the world, all-devouring, all-hungry.

Brendan took a single step, and I caught him by the arm and held him back. It was too late anyway; old Moony was already done for. He went down—not with a crash, but with an eerie sigh, as if he’d been punctured—and the creatures that now no longer even looked like men were on him like hyenas, fangs gleaming, static hissing in the folds of their garments.

There was nothing human in the way they moved. Nothing superfluous. They Hoovered him up from blood to brain—every glamour, every spark, every piece of kith and kindling—and what they left looked less like a man than a cardboard cutout of a man left lying in the dirt of the alleyway.

Then they were gone, buttoning up their overcoats over the terrible absence beneath.

A silence. Brendan was crying. He always was the sensitive one. I wiped something (sweat, I think) from my face and waited for my breathing to return to normal.

“That was nasty,” I said at last. “Haven’t seen anything quite like that since the End of the World.”

“Did you hear him?” said Brendan.

“I heard. Who would have thought the old man had so much glam in him?”

My brother said nothing, but hid his eyes.

I suddenly realized I was hungry, and thought for a moment of suggesting a pizza, but decided against it. Bren was so touchy nowadays, he might have taken offence.

“Well, I’ll see you later, I guess,” and sloped off rather unsteadily, wondering why brothers are always so damned hard, and wishing I’d been able to ask him home.

I wasn’t to know, but I wish I had—I’d never see that Aspect of him again.

I SLEPT TILL LATE the next day. Awoke with a headache and a familiar post-cocktail nauseous feeling, then remembered—the way you remember doing something to your back when you were in the gym, but didn’t realize how bad it was going to be until you’d slept on it—and sat bolt upright.

The guys, I thought. Those two guys.

I must have been drunker than I’d thought last night, because this morning the memory of them froze me to the core. Delayed shock; I know it well, and to combat its elects I called room service and ordered the works. Over coffee, bacon, pancakes and rivers of maple syrup, I worked on my recovery, and though I did pretty well, given the circumstances, I found I couldn’t quite get the death of old Moony out of my mind, or the slick way the two overcoats had crawled over him, gobbling up his glam before buttoning up and back to business. Poetry in motion.

I pondered my lucky escape—well, I guessed that if they hadn’t sniffed out Moony first, then it would have been Yours Truly and Brother Bren for a double serving of Dish of the Day—but my heart was far from light as it occurred to me that if these guys were really after our kind, this was at best a reprieve, not a pardon, and that sooner or later those overcoats would be sharpening their teeth at my door.

So I finished breakfast and called Bren. But all I got was his answering machine, so I looked up the number of his restaurant and dialled it. The line was dead.

I would have tried his mobile, but, like I said, we’re not close. I didn’t know it, or the name of his girl, or even the number of his house. Too late now, right? Just goes to show. Carpe diem, and all that. And so I showered and dressed and went off in haste under gathering clouds to the Flying Pizza, Bren’s place of work (but what a dumb name!), in the hope of getting some sense out of my twin.

It was there that I realized something was amiss. Ten blocks away I knew it already, and the sirens and the engines and the shouting and the smoke were just confirmation. There was something ominous about those gathering thunderclouds, and the way they sat like a Russian hat all spiky with needles of lightning above the scene of devastation. My heart sank lower the closer I got. Something was amiss, all right.

Looking around to ensure that I was unobserved, I cast the visionary rune Bjarkán with my left hand, and squinted through its spyglass shape. Smoke I saw; and lightning from the ground; my brother’s face looking pale and strained; then fire; darkness; then, as I’d feared, the Shadow—and its minions, the wolves, the shadow hunters, boxed into their heavy overcoats.

Those guys, I thought, and cursed. Again.

And now I knew where I’d known them before—and they were pretty bad in that Aspect, too, though I had more on my plate at that time than I do nowadays, and I’ll admit I didn’t give them my full attention. I did now, though, casting runes of concealment about me as I skirted the funnel of black smoke, the funeral pyre of my brother’s restaurant—and for all I knew, of Brendan himself, who had looked pretty wasted in my vision.

I got there at last, keeping an eye out for overcoats, to find fire engines and cop cars everywhere. A line had been cordoned off at the end of the road, and there were men trying to spray water over the great fizzing spume of fire that had already dug its roots deep into the Flying Pizza.

I could have told them they were wasting their time. You can’t put out the work of a firegod—even a god of hearth fire—like it was just a squib. The flames sheeted up, thirty, forty, fifty feet high, clean and yellow and shot through with glamours that would probably have looked like dancing sparks to your kind, but which, if they’d touched you, would have stripped you, flesh to bone, in one.

And Brendan? I thought. Could he still be alive somewhere?