Butcher Bird

  The sun was up and the air was warm when Spyder awoke. It was the kind of early morning heat that he knew meant that the afternoon would be an inferno. Hope the river water’s cool, he thought.

  Spyder rolled over and groaned. His side hurt less, but now his right arm was sore. He’d spent a good part of the previous evening drunkenly playing with one of Count Non’s odd weapons. What had he called it? Spyder tried to remember through the haze. It was something unpronounceable, with a lot of back-of-the-throat “ch” sounds. Spyder had just ended up calling it a Hornet, he recalled. His high school football team had been the Hornets and the weapon buzzed like a stinging insect when it was spun properly.

  Spyder held his side and let out a groan when he stood up.

  “The more you move around, the better you’ll feel,” said Count Non. The big man was packing his gear into a pair of leather saddlebags, like the ones Spyder had installed on the Dead Man’s Ducati. The Count’s bags looked hand-tooled, with squids or some weird animals stitched all over them. Spyder envied the bags.

  “That’ll fix my side, but what’ll fix this arm?” he asked, rotating his shoulder painfully.

  “You just need more practice. At least you didn’t cut off your own head with it. I saw someone do that once.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be playing that little movie over and over in my head tonight.”

  “Here, drink some water,” said Shrike. “We’re all going to have to be careful not to dehydrate out here.”

  Spyder sat down next her and took the canteen she offered. The water was cool and delicious.

  “That’s about perfect,” he said. “Did this come from the river?”

  “Yes, the Count and I brought it back this morning.”

  “You were out there all night?”

  “A good part of it. We wanted to know if anyone or anything was coming down that river.”

  “Was there?”

  “Not a soul. Just night animals having a drink.”

  “Must have been boring.”

  “We talked.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “Different things.”

  “Different things are good. I like different things.”

  Shrike took her coat from the ground and, after testing with her hand to see if the ashes were cool, scooped the charred remains of the fire into the lining. She then tied the whole thing in a bundle.

  “What are you doing?” asked Spyder.

  “I don’t want to leave a big arrow pointing to where we’ve been or where we’re headed. We brought some reeds from the river and can drag those over the sand to dampen out footprints. The wind will do the rest.”

  “Any ETA on that city?”

  “A day or two, depending on our pace,” said Primo. He was already smoothing the sand on the far side of the fire with another bundle of reeds.

  “I don’t suppose we have any food?”

  “No, but we have a fresh water source and that’s more important,” said Shrike.

  “And lord knows we’ve got weapons,” Lulu said, using the bottom of her Hello Kitty shirt to polish the blade of a long, thin knife with a yellowed bone grip.

  “When do we move out?”

  “Right now,” Shrike said. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “If the wind will not serve, take to the oars,” said Count Non, hoisting his saddlebags onto his shoulders.

  “What?”

  “From the Romans. Not as poetic as Marcus Aurelius, but not bad. In this case, it means that we should start walking.” He tossed Spyder the weapon he’d been playing with the night before. “Here. Work with that some more. You really weren’t doing too badly. And it can’t hurt to have as many competent fighters as possible on this journey.”

  “Thanks,” Spyder said, not sure if he’d just been insulted or not.

  The river was a few yards beyond the nearby dune wall. The water looked clean and clear. Animal tracks by small stands of reeds and algae-covered rocks lined the banks. Spyder leaned down painfully and scooped some of the water onto his face. It was icy, runoff from the mountains in the distance, he figured. They headed inland, straight toward the unknown city. The Count and Lulu were talking up front, with Primo trailing behind. Shrike dumped the remnants of their campfire in the water and used her cane to navigate the sand and rocks. Spyder walked with her. He had his leather jacket tied around his waist, holding Apollyon’s knife in place.

  “So, straight up, how do we stand right now?” he asked.

  “We were blown out of the air. We’re moving too slowly. And we’re too many people.”

  “Why do I think that last one includes me?”

  “I didn’t say that, but I still don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “I appreciate that and double-down on that particular wish. But we’re alive and moving. Besides, we’ve got the Count with us now. The way I see it, Lulu and I are the only dead weight.”

  “I don’t believe in dead weight when it comes to people. People are too complicated. Too capable of surprises.”

  “For an ex-princess stuck in the desert with a bunch of semi-cripples, you’re awfully Up with People.”

  “I like the heat. It reminds me of home.”

  “What’s your reading on the Count? Sounds like you spent a nice day and night getting to know each other.”

  “That’s an odd way to put it.”

  “He’s sure your type. Tall, armed to the eyeballs, a hunk of burnin’ love. He even has better saddlebags than me. I don’t have any illusions about you and me, you know.”

  “Now who’s jealous?”

  “This isn’t jealousy. This is the voice of pure reason. I just know that slumming for a few nights with a drunk ink monkey doesn’t mean anything. Hell, he’s even royalty. You can compare scepters.”

  “I’m not picking out bridesmaids dresses yet.”

  “Red is in this year. It goes with everything.”

  “I asked you silly questions when you brought Lulu, remember? We’re still working on this trust thing.”

  “That remains the sad truth.”

  “Tell me a story,” said Shrike.

  “What kind of story?”

  “Something about your life before. Something illuminating and revealing. Not tattooing or sexual conquests. An adventure.”

  “You don’t think sex is an adventure? Tough room,” Spyder said.

  He played idly with the Hornet. The weapon had a long cylindrical grip wrapped in a light, tough leather. At the top hung several whip-like strands of a stiff, saw-tooth metal. From the weight and feel of the weapon, the metal strands seemed to slide around the edge of the cylindrical grip on some kind of internal runner. With a little practice, Spyder discovered that he could spin the metal strands until they hummed like a swarm of locusts. When he had the rhythm right, the whirling strands formed a kind of shield that pulverized anything they made contact with. It was like holding off an enemy with a wood chipper. Spyder remembered Lulu and Primo taking turns chucking rocks and burning wood from the fire at him. The only times anyone hit him was when he lost the rhythm that kept the strands moving at top speed. He wondered what those saw-tooth blades would do to flesh.

  “Okay, I have a story,” Spyder said. “This was on, probably, my second trip to Paris. You been to Paris?”

  “I passed through.”

  “I went there with this girl, Trina, one Christmas. She came from money and knew a lot more about the high end of the world than me. I was used to staying in squats and youth hostels. When I was with her, we stayed in an actual French hotel. The Hôtel Esmeralda, across from Notre Dame. It was cold and wet that time of year. We were under-dressed and freezing, but we did all the usual tourist stuff. The Louvre. The Eiffel Tower. Café Deux Maggots.

  “There was this older Spanish guy, worked the front desk at night. Really nice. Later, he told us he was Peruvian. We asked him what bar we should go to and he offered to drive us around, give us a
n insider’s tour of the city.

  “It’s a little after midnight when the guy, Pablo, gets off. He pulls around the front of the hotel in the smallest car I’ve ever seen. This car’d give a fetus claustrophobia. I’m polite, so I squeeze into the back. Pablo and Trina are up front.

  “He starts driving and we don’t know where the hell he’s taking us. I’m suspicious, because that’s my nature. But Pablo is cool. He takes us by some old buildings where Jean-Paul Marat and other French Revolution psychos used to live. He takes us into a dark, wet park where it’s just starting to snow. This is the park where the best hookers hang out. Sure enough, there’s a woman in a fur coat standing at an intersection, looking like she’s waiting to cross. As we pull near her, she opens the fur coat. She’s naked underneath, a Victoria’s Secret wet dream. Pablo asks if we’ve ever seen Versailles. We hadn’t, so he drives us out.”

  Spyder spun the Hornet’s metal strands, and thumbed a stud on the grip. Spring-loaded spikes popped from both ends of the weapon. The Count had explained that when a fighter destroyed an enemy’s sword, the spikes could be driven into the opponent’s midsection as a finishing blow.

  “Now, this is after midnight on Christmas Eve. In Paris. Everything is closed. Does this stop Pablo? Hell, no. He drives us all the way around Versailles until, in the back, we spot a guard gate that’s open. This is too good to pass up. We sneak inside.

  “There’s a guard house maybe ten feet away, and we can hear the guards inside getting juiced on Christmas cheer. They don’t care that three idiots are sneaking into a national monument. Did I mention that we’d been drinking?”

  “I took that for granted.”

  “By now, the snow’s stopped and there’s mist everywhere. We’re not drunk enough to try and bust into the palace itself, but there’s acres of gardens out back. We wander back there for an hour, whispering, hoping not to set off any alarms. At times, the fog is so thick, we can’t see anything, even standing next to each other. Leafless trees appear out of nowhere and then vanish again into the gloom. We sit on benches and smoke and try to peek inside the palace to see the Hall of Mirrors or where the Sun King might have shagged a mistress in secret.

  “We couldn’t see anything and the cold was starting to sober us up. Now we’re getting nervous, so we decided to get out of there. Of course, when we went back, the guard door was locked. There’s nothing to do but climb one of the stone walls to get out, and the only wall low enough to climb was right by the guard shack. We started up and hoped to god that the guards stayed put. We had to walk along the top of one wall and drop over the side of a second to get out of the place. The whole time we were going, I was praying, Please, Lord, don’t let them find us sneaking out of there with a Peruvian. They’ll think we’re Shining Path guerillas and never believe we didn’t plant a bomb or something.”

  What was weird about the Count’s weapon was that, as polished and well-balanced as it was, its surface felt uneven and rough. Like maybe it hadn’t been built—and even here, in this insane new world he inhabited, it struck Spyder as an odd idea—but as if it had been grown, like a flower.

  “Is that it?” asked Shrike.

  “I didn’t get to the good part. The guards came outside with their stinky cheese and we had to shoot our way out.”

  “You did not.”

  “No, we didn’t. We drove back to the hotel, ran upstairs and hid, waiting for the gendarmes to come and take us to jail on Christmas Day. But they didn’t come and we got away with it. I suppose, it’s not much of an adventure, as far as adventures go. There’s no sex or imminent death or flying monkeys, but for some reason it sticks in my mind as a kind of perfect night.”

  “And the cynical tattooist is revealed to be a romantic.”

  “All losers are romantics. It’s what keeps us from blowing our brains out.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SUSPICIOUS MINDS

  “We’ll reach the city by midday tomorrow, if we get moving by dawn,” said Count Non.

  “Good news,” said Primo. “We need to reach the Kasla Mountains by the full moon. A shadow cast through a certain rocky promontory is the only way to find the entrance to Hell. If we miss the moon, we’ll have to wait a month until the next one.” He made a face and rubbed the shoulder where his arm was missing. Spyder felt for the guy. His side was hurting after the all-day hike.

  “Fuck that,” said Lulu. “Fuck that with Michael Jackson’s pet monkey.”

  “Full moon’s just a few days off. Think we can make it?” Spyder asked Shrike.

  Shrike was smoking Spyder’s last cigarette, puffing, then passing the butt to him. Spyder took a drag, then passed the precious smoke to Lulu, who opened her mouth to accept it like a communion Host. She smoked and passed the butt to Shrike, who leaned on her cane, lost in thought.

  “We have to make it,” Shrike said. “We can’t hide out here like bugs in the sand for a month. We’re lucky to have made it this far.”

  They sat in the entrance of a shallow cave, which served as cover for the small fire they had going to ward off the cold desert night. Earlier in the evening, they’d stacked brush at the cave entrance to diminish the glow of the fire, hoping not to be spotted by any scouts from the Seraphic Brotherhood, the Erragal prince or any of the other far too interested parties who might be looking for them. Spyder wasn’t sure if “lucky” was the word he’d have used to describe their situation, but they were alive, and he had to admit that that counted big time in the luck department. But his gratitude lessened with every stab of hunger and throb of his injured ribs.

  “I wonder what Rubi’s doing right now,” said Lulu.

  “Missing you,” Spyder said. “Cursing me.”

  “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own…” Lulu sang softly. “Elvis should have stopped right there, you know? He never did fuck all after he left Sun Records.”

  “If he’d stopped there, he wouldn’t ever have done ‘Suspicious Minds.’”

  “Was it worth dying on the shitter for?”

  “For ‘Suspicious Minds’? Most definitely.”

  “I’m going to have to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one.”

  Spyder was sorry that Lulu had brought up Rubi. It made him think of Jenny, whom he no longer really missed, but who remained a kind of sick ache in his stomach. He couldn’t even describe the sensation, but it was compounded of regret and the sense that he’d failed as a human in some fundamental way and that her desertion was the starkest proof of that. On the simplest level, though, it just made him gloomy to think that someone he’d been so connected to was walking around hating him. He gave Shrike the last of the cigarette, went to the cave entrance and sat down, letting the night breeze blow over him. The cold made him stop thinking.

  He heard someone coming up behind him and saw Shrike settling down.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” she said.

  “It’s a quiet night.”

  “You’re thinking about home.”

  “I’m not thinking about anything right now.”

  “I liked your France story.”

  “Did you?”

  “Would you like to hear one of mine?”

  “Not right now. I mean, I want to, but I’m hurting and tired and won’t be able to listen right.”

  “All right,” she said. She held up her face to the wind as it blew into the cave. Spyder thought she looked like a young wolf when she stretched her head up like that. She was beautiful.

  “Tell me about being blind,” Spyder said. “About how there’s ‘blind and then there’s blind.’”

  Shrike poked at the sand with her cane. “You probably sensed that I have moments where I appear to see things.”

  “From the first night we met.”

  “It’s not really sight. It’s simple magic, the only kind I know. I never had any formal magic training and just picked up things along on the road. Traded for spells. Bought them. Stole
them. There has always been a little magic in my family, but my mother had that knowledge and she was dead. I studied weapons because it made my father happy.

  “When our kingdom was scattered and I was on the road, I only had the possessions I could grab from my bedside. A few family heirlooms. One of these was a kind of bracelet with a casting of a bird on top. A shrike. That’s my family’s totem animal.

  “We also had family gods which we prayed and made offerings to. All the royal families have household gods. You need a deity or two on your side to keep other Houses from taking what’s yours. Those who knew how could petition the gods for favors. I didn’t have that knowledge. But I got it.

  “I’d run off some bandits from the property of an odd little man, Cosimo Heisenberg, a kind of mechanical wizard. He made machines that were like people. ‘Karakuri,’ he called them. Little windup men and women who could sing an aria or write a sonnet or sew a wedding gown.

  “He wanted to pay me with a new set of eyes, but I didn’t like the notion of depending on mechanical, windup sight. So, he helped me use the gifts I already had better. He made this cane for me, which, as you’ve seen, is more than a cane. He also examined my heirlooms to see if there was anything of value. He was the first person I’d trusted since leaving home.

  “He checked out the bracelet with the bird and figured out what it was for. You see, it made no sense as jewelry. The maker had cast the bird’s claws from razor-sharp steel and fitted them to the underside of the piece, so that they were in contact with the skin of the person wearing the bracelet. There was also a spring mechanism to rake the claws down the wearer’s arm. What use could there be for something like that?”

  “Cutting. Blood,” said Spyder, who’d seen his share of bloodletting and scarring rituals among the überhipster modern primitive crowd in San Francisco.

  “Exactly. The bracelet was an instrument of sacrifice, a device for making a blood offering to my family gods. Say the right incantation and release the spring on the silver shrike. The blades would take your blood and help you get what you want. On a small scale. It’s not much of a sacrifice. Only good for small favors. Like a second or two of sight.”