“She’s the daughter of a Sidhe named Tarax,” Michael told John, too low for his mother to hear.
“I was born in the Realm,” Shiafa said to Ruth.
John glanced at Michael. They stopped halfway down the stairs, eavesdropping by silent and mutual consent.
“Oh? That’s what we called Faerie, until now, isn’t it?”
“I do not know.”
“You know, you remind me of... Well, never mind that. Have you known my son long?”
“Not long,” Shiafa said.
“Is he important to you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” Ruth said breathlessly, fitting the top sheet and blanket over the couch cushions. She kept a constant watch on Shiafa from the corner of her eye. “Will you be staying with us for some time? I’m sorry. That’s not polite.” She stood, smoothing her hands down her legs, and tossed a strand of hair back. “This is not easy for me to accept. Are you and Michael, my son...lovers?”
“Jesus,” Michael breathed, immediately resuming his descent.
“No,” Shiafa said. “He is my teacher.”
“Mother, no time for this now,” Michael interrupted. “Shiafa probably won’t be sleeping. She may want to clean up—”
“Good...God,” Ruth said, staring at Michael with a fierce expression. “John, is any of this happening?”
“You know it is,” John said.
“She looks just like my great-grandmother. She could be my great-grandmother!”
“No, she couldn’t,” Michael said.
“They’re all over the world now, aren’t they? Just like her?”
“And like us, Mother,” Michael said. He gripped her shoulders tightly with both hands. “Listen. You’re better prepared to accept what’s happening than most people. Shiafa is a pure Sidhe. I’m training her, or at least going through the motions. The men upstairs—”
Her expression changed from anger to pain. “Michael,” she interrupted, “what can we say to those men? John, what can we say to them? To Mozart! Famous dead people?”
John shrugged.
Michael grinned despite himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have called ahead.”
“Damn you!” Ruth said, but she was beginning to laugh and cry at once. “Damn everything.” She turned to Shiafa. “I’m sorry. We don’t know how to react to all this.”
Michael could feel tension radiating from Shiafa. If he didn’t isolate her soon, he wasn’t sure what would happen.
“We have to leave now. I’ll be back in a few hours. There are people I have to call—but the phones are restricted. So I may have to talk to them in person. Mahler and Mozart are just the beginning. I came back with many others—about five thousand of them.”
Ruth’s face went white. “Here?”
“They’re in Dodger Stadium. That’s where I called you from. I have to make arrangements for them. They’ve been in the Realm for a long time, some of them thousands of years.”
“All right,” Ruth said. She pointed with a nod of her chin at Shiafa. “Will she go with you?”
“Yes,” Michael said. “This is difficult for her. She can’t go home.”
“There is no home,” Shiafa said distantly.
“So please, bear with me, with us,” Michael said. “If I’m not mistaken, Mahler and Mozart are going to sleep for hours. I hope to be back before they wake up. I don’t have much time.”
“We’ll manage,” John said, hugging his wife to him with one arm. “Won’t we?”
“We’ll have to,” Ruth said. “What do they eat?”
“Go easy on the meat,” Michael advised. “They haven’t had much of that where they’ve been.” Shiafa’s skin grayed noticeably at the mention of meat.
“You look very tired,” Ruth said. “Both of you. I’m sorry about reacting badly...”
“No time to rest. And no self-recriminations. We’ll be back soon.”
“Why was the Waltiri house full of birds?” Ruth asked.
“Please, Mother.”
“All right. Go.”
Michael reached out to feel for Edgar Moffat and found him sitting in the recording room in the studio where they had first met. His probe seemed to be surrounded by razors, the harsh reality now that the Realm had beached itself on Earth’s shoals.
“Will we take the machine again?” Shiafa asked.
“It’s the easiest way,” Michael said. “I think my car is still full of gas.”
They walked back to the Waltiri house under the gray, overcast afternoon.
“This place smells horrible,” Shiafa said sharply. “It smells like death.”
“Right here?” he asked, glancing at the sidewalk where Tommy had shot himself.
“Everywhere. The entire city.”
Michael shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t notice.”
“It smells like dead forests,” Shiafa said. “Like one of Adonna’s abortions.”
He realized that what she was objecting to was not just the smell of smog—very light this day, he thought—but of technology and human habitations in general. The houses around them, including Waltiri’s, had been made from unconsecrated wood. The power lines overhead could upset a Sidhe’s sensibilities. If other human technologies still worked, the air would be full of beamed energy—radar and television and radio. How were the tens of thousands of other Sidhe reacting to this sudden change in their surroundings?
Shiafa’s mood was upon him now. He brushed it aside with a small shudder and told her to stand away from the driveway. He unlocked the Saab and got in.
The engine caught quickly and rumbled to life, murmuring with twin-exhaust throatiness. As he backed the car down the driveway, he glanced through the opposite window at the wall of the house and the entrance to the crawl space.
The wine bottles in the basement.
During the first few minutes of his first visit to the Realm, Michael had crossed a decaying vineyard behind the ruined Clarkham mansion, covered with the twisted, blackened and thick-boled stumps of thousands of dead vines. Nothing Clarkham did was uncalculated.
Clarkham brought Waltiri bottles of wines as a gift. Waltiri passed some of them on to his neighbors.
He almost stopped the car. One thing at a time. Priorities. Reaching over to open the car door for Shiafa, Michael felt a buzz of excitement. Clarkham had failed at creating a personal song of power; he had always relied on the genius of others, even at the height of his sorceries. He had interfered with poets, composers, dancers... He had failed at architecture. Had he cultured vines simply to please himself—and perhaps anger the more abstemious Sidhe...or had he an ulterior motive?
Shiafa sat reluctantly on the seat. “Close your door,” Michael instructed her. She stared at him, eyes burning. He sighed and reached across. “Like this,” he said, grabbing the handle to pull it shut.
“There is too much iron,” she said quietly. “It kills.”
“You can stand it. The Sidhe use iron for their own purposes.”
“Not like this.”
He drove out onto the street. The trees cast long shadows. Time was passing too quickly; the Realm’s chronometry was evident on Earth now. What that ultimately meant, there was no way of knowing. Was it a temporary effect—no pun intended, he thought wryly—or a permanent distortion?
He frowned as he guided the Saab through the empty streets of the city. Other changes: leaves on the trees seemed darker and the streets and buildings less hard-edged, as if viewed through a fog.
“Your world is sick,” Shiafa said as he turned onto Melrose.
“How do you mean?”
“It is suffering.”
“Because of the Realm?”
She nodded, staring at him with an expression he had never before seen—a mix of barely subdued greed and deep concern. It shook him.
“How do you know?” he asked, arguing more out of pique than disagreement.
“Even beyond the dead smell, it is afflicted.”
r />
He pressed his lips together and shrugged. Now he was really worried. Who was working to set things right again—Tarax, who had plowed the Realm onto a reef and perhaps started the disintegration of the reef? Clarkham, hiding somewhere...
in a bottle of wine
“Jesus,” he whispered. A wine of power. Flavor that seduces, a finish that lasts forever. It seemed quite possible that Clarkham had kept that art as a backup, almost inaccessible to the Sidhe, who—as Clarkham had stated—“love human liquor entirely too much.” What they loved, obviously, was not the flavor but the numbing effect. Because of that, the best of the Sidhe—those who might be interested in Songs of Power—would fastidiously avoid alcoholic beverages.
What was the word for the art of wine-making? The study of wines? Oenology. Having failed at everything else, Clarkham could have hidden himself, biding his time, waiting for the proper moment. Preparing to spring a surprise.
In the Realm, Clarkham had served not wine but brandy...hiding his craft for decades in Waltiri’s cellar, where not even the mage of the Cledar would suspect chicanery.
Michael was so excited he had to bank his hyloka to keep from flaming his clothes and the car seat. Shiafa regarded him with that same new hungry, greedy expression...and he felt himself responding. He had used her magic. That had somehow bonded them, and it could draw them together...
Shocked, he avoided Shiafa’s gaze and focused his attention on the road.
The studio’s Gower gate was open. The guard blinked passively at Michael and Shiafa as they walked through the door, leaning forward to say, “Hey. Nobody’s here. Everybody’s home.”
Michael smiled at her and nodded. “Edgar Moffat’s here.”
“Yeah,” the guard said. “Edgar’s here. Is he expecting both of you?”
“No,” Michael said.
“But he knows you.”
Michael nodded again.
“I remember you, but not her. Where’s Kristine Pendeers?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I’m looking for her, and I thought Edgar might help.” That was a minor fib, but he hoped it would play. It did. The guard shrugged and leaned back in her seat.
In the hallway of the music building, Michael knocked on the recording-studio door. Moffat himself answered this time, wearing gray slacks and a rumpled white business shirt. His crown of hair stood straight up, stiff and dark with sweat, as if he had run his hands through it all night long. He hardly reacted when he saw Michael, but his expression changed to nervous anxiety as he stared at Shiafa.
“We need your help,” Michael said.
“I’m the only one here. I think Hollywood packed up its bags and went to hide in the hills. Did you feel the earthquake?”
“Yes. We need you to organize things for us. You and Crooke.”
“I haven’t talked to Crooke for days. I don’t even know where he is.”
“This is important. Did Kristine tell you what she knew?”
“You mean, about you and the man who disappeared in front of her?”
“Yes.”
“She told me a little. Enough to make the rest of this a real nightmare. A little knowledge is worse than none at all.” Edgar opened the door wider and motioned for them to come in. “Who’s your designer?” he asked Shiafa. “You could be the toast of the garment district.”
“I have some men I want you to meet,” Michael said. “And when you’ve met these men, I’ll need you to organize a rescue operation. Get together all the artists and musicians and writers you know. We’ll need houses—hundreds of houses—and we’ll need them in the next couple of days.”
“Why?”
“Refugees,” Michael said.
“Who am I going to meet?”
“Gustav Mahler and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” Michael answered.
Edgar smiled warily. “Napoleon, too? Maybe Christ?”
Michael shook his head. Edgar’s smile vanished. “Jesus. Crooke said he’d dreamed about Mahler, just as if he were still alive.” Edgar swallowed convulsively, and his hands fluttered. “The real McCoys?”
“And five thousand others.”
“Brought back by the concerto and the symphony?”
“In a way. Are you up to it?”
Edgar glanced at the banks of electronic equipment and ran his fingers through his hair again. “Just one more question. Is the world coming to an end because of what we did?”
“No,” Michael said.
“All right. I’m just wasting my time here anyway. Nobody’s going to be making movies for some time. Who needs fantasy? The world’s full of the real thing.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
One thing at time. Michael had located Crooke sitting on a bench near the Griffith Park Observatory—simply sitting and staring out over the city. Griffith Park, Michael sensed, was full of hidden Sidhe. The police and National Guard had unofficially made it off-limits. Michael and Shiafa, working their discipline together, had penetrated makeshift barricades and driven up the winding road to the observatory, where they spoke with Crooke and persuaded him to come with them.
Moffat waited in his car in front of the Perrin house. Moffat and Crooke followed Michael up the steps and through the front door, held open by his father. Michael then introduced them to Mahler and Mozart. Crooke gaped.
“You did well,” Mahler said to him. Mozart hung back, frowning. His frown changed to consternation when Moffat approached with an almost worshipful look on his face.
“You are Mozart,” Moffat said. “Everybody said the portraits were bad, but I recognize you. I know you through your music.”
“Well,” Mozart said, still edging away. He shook Moffat’s hand quickly. “All this. What is it for?”
“You came back with how many, again?” Crooke asked. Michael had given him a brief explanation in the car.
“Five thousand, approximately.”
Crooke took Moffat aside, and they conferred for a few minutes. When they returned, Moffat said, “I think this is a job for Mrs. Pierce-Fennady.”
Crooke agreed. “She raises money for the Huntington. She knows lots of people.”
“We’ll introduce her to Mahler and Mozart.”
“Mein Gott,” Mozart moaned. “Society women!”
“She’s much more than that,” Crooke said. “She’s a real mover and shaker.”
“Does she keep her rooms warm?” Mozart asked, but he did not explain what he meant.
One thing at a time.
“I’m leaving now,” Michael said. “Shiafa’s going with me. We may or may not be back soon.”
“What are you going to do?” Ruth asked, her face pale. She kept glancing at Shiafa with anything but approval.
“I’m not sure,” Michael said.
You are what you dare.
Dusk formed a wall of fire above the treetops. The air was cool and sharp, electric. As Michael and Shiafa approached the Clarkham house on foot, he saw little streaks of darkness shoot inches above the black grass of the nearby lawns. Roses in a well-tended garden glowed in unnaturally bright pinks and blood-reds.
The two-story Clarkham house seemed covered by a shadow darker than the evening around it. Michael edged the door open slowly. Behind him, Shiafa kept her eyes on his back, as if willing him to do something. He could feel her attention, but he could not riddle her thoughts. Still, he felt he might need her; his own magic might not be strong enough for what lay ahead.
And if he resorted to using her buried power one more time... What then? What commitment would he feel, and what would she demand in return?
He ignored the stairs and looked through the service porch and kitchen for the doorway he knew must exist. Shiafa sensed the unspoken object of his search; she summoned him to the back of a walk-in pantry and pointed to a small door sealed with an ancient brass padlock. Michael drew a small percentage of his strength from his center and melted the hasp, singing the wood behind it. A small, ghostly curl of smoke rose and spread under
the low ceiling. Shiafa breathed deeply. He glanced at her and turned away quickly. Her face glowed like the moon in the dark confines of the pantry.
The door opened easily and silently. He descended the narrow steps after asking Shiafa to remain above. The basement spread under the length and breadth of the house, broken only by dark outlines of vats and racks and large square supporting beams.
In one corner, a large Archimedean screw nestled at the bottom of a metal trough—a grape crusher. Wooden boxes in the opposite corner held the dried and dusty remains of crushed grapes and their stems—looking not unlike Tommy. Michael peered closer at the remains and saw a faint rainbow-hematite-oil sheen hovering about them.
“Vintage,” he murmured. Their smell was sweeter than any grapes he remembered, as sweet as the perfume he had exuded in the Realm whenever he had come in contact with water, or the fragrance of the manuscript of Opus 45.
The racks were empty of bottles. He searched the corners of the cellar meticulously and found no evidence of hidden caches. The cellar had not been used for some time—perhaps fifty years.
There was no choice but to return to the Waltiri house and disturb the birds—the Cledar—again.
Shiafa blocked him at the top of the stairs. Her face was a cool, mellow beacon, lovely in the darkness. Her lips parted expectantly, the teeth behind them like white mother-of-pearl. Her red hair spread like feathers around her head, loose and fragrant. “Nothing?” she asked.
He shook his head, regarding her steadily.
“We can join to search,” she suggested.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You’ve taken my power from me once already,” she said. “It’s not as if we’ll be doing anything unfamiliar. Isn’t that why you brought me with you?”
He nodded. “It is. But I don’t need help just now.”
“Perhaps I need yours,” she said.
Kristine suddenly seemed far away and not very well-suited to be the partner of a mage. How could he live with a purely human woman, who had no idea of his problems and abilities?
Michael took another step up, and Shiafa backed out of his way reluctantly. “I know where we—I need to go,” he said. She followed him out of the house.