Drinking Midnight Wine (20 page)

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Authors: Simon R. Green

BOOK: Drinking Midnight Wine
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Gayle looked at Toby. “Know any other magic words? Preferably ones with an element of threat and imminent mayhem to them?”
Toby thought for a moment, and then grinned and produced a thoroughly filthy crumpled gray handkerchief from his trouser pocket. He held it up so the mirror could get a good look at it. His reflection studied the appalling handkerchief with fascinated eyes as things fell out of it.
“That is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen that wasn’t actually under a curse. Why are you showing it to me?”
“I want you to study it.”
“I can hardly take my eyes off it. The last time I saw anything that filthy Hercules had been using it to clean out stables. Tell me it’s a clue, or a piece of evidence. I’d hate to think you kept it about your person by choice.”
“This gray handkerchief was a white handkerchief when I first put it in my pocket,” said Toby, not without a certain amount of pride. “It has been in my pocket for so long that whole colonies of bacteria have grown on it, evolved into sentience, created space travel and left my pocket to go in search of other trouser worlds. This hanky is now so filthy it could make the ebola virus vomit. And unless you agree to call Mr. Thunder
right now,
I am going to use this hanky to clean your surface. Give it a good rub.
All over.
”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
Toby brought the hanky close to the mirror, which actually shuddered in its silver frame. “Call him,” said Toby, in a deadly serious voice.
“Never!
Never never never!
I am his security, sworn to protect him . . .”
Toby rubbed his hanky all over the mirror’s surface, putting plenty of elbow grease into it. Streaky marks appeared.
“All right, all right!” sobbed his reflection in the mirror. “
Animal!
I’ll call him, I’ll call him!” Toby stepped back, his handkerchief still ostentatiously at the ready. The mirror made loud hacking and spitting noises, and then Toby’s reflection glared venomously at him as it raised its voice in a desperate bellow. “Mr. Thunder! Mr. Thunder!
They’re bullying me again!
”
Gayle studied Toby approvingly. “That is a really vicious streak you have there. You’ll go far in Mysterie with an attitude like that. Good to see you’re learning. Nice use of lateral thinking. You’re . . . you’re not actually going to put that back in your pocket, are you?”
“Why?” said Toby innocently. “Do you want to borrow it?”
Gayle snorted, and actually backed away.
Footsteps sounded, from far away. Steady, purposeful footsteps, growing gradually nearer. Toby’s reflection looked at him spitefully. “See! He’ll be here soon, and then he’ll make you pay for persecuting me. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, waking him up so soon after he’s gone to bed. I just hope he hasn’t caught a chill. Out all hours of the night, not enough sleep, and never time for a proper breakfast; it’s no wonder he’s a martyr to the sniffles. And I hate nursing him when he’s ill. All he does is wrap himself in a blanket in a chair by the fire, and yell endlessly for fresh cups of beef tea and more chocolate Hobnobs.”
“Talk a lot for a mirror, don’t you?” said Toby.
“You needn’t look so smug, Mr.
I’ve-got-a-hanky-and-I’m-not-afraid-to-use-it
! I can play dirty, too, you know. Here, take a good look at what you’re going to look like in fifty years’ time!”
Toby’s reflection in the mirror leaned suddenly forward, grinning maliciously. The smile stretched unnaturally as wrinkles spread across his face in quick spurts, like ice cracking on the surface of a pond. His cheekbones rose sharply as his face sank back onto his skull like an ill-fitting mask and his eyes peered darkly from the sunken caverns of their sockets. His hair receded rapidly, till nothing was left but bare mottled skin and a few white strands. His whole posture changed, becoming stooped and tired and thin. But for all the changes, it still looked like him.
The reflection still wore Toby’s present clothes, making the change even more disturbing. Toby wouldn’t let himself look away. He tried hard to accept the aged image dispassionately, but it felt as though someone had hit him in the heart. Intellectually, he’d always known that how he looked would change as he grew old, but to be faced with such grim evidence of his own mortality and frailty, so bluntly and suddenly, took his breath away. The old, shrunken, broken-looking man before him was a blow to his spirit as well as his pride. No one likes to admit that in the end we all die by inches, gradually losing all the defining visual characteristics that make us
us
. Toby fought to keep his face calm, and tried hard to come up with something positive, if only to spite the mirror.
“Ah, well,” he said finally. “At least I’ll have lived to reach eighty-three. The way everyone else has been talking, I was beginning to wonder if I’d make it through the afternoon.”
“No guarantees!” snapped the reflection in the mirror, reverting instantly to its normal appearance. “That was just a maybe. Jimmy! Jimmy! They’re ganging up on me!” The heavy footsteps drew still nearer, but clearly had some way to go. The mirror sighed, and pouted with Toby’s face. “Look, this could take some time. The Thunder residence is a lot bigger than it needs to be, but then that’s gods for you. The master bedroom’s practically in another time zone. I think you’d better both go through into the parlor and wait there until he reaches you. It’s the second door on the left. And don’t touch anything! Half the stuff in there’s booby-trapped, and the rest bites. Who’d be a secretary? The hours are murder and the pay sucks. I should have been an oracle, like Mother wanted . . .”
The mirror was still muttering darkly to itself about unionizing when Gayle and Toby located the second door on the left and let themselves into the parlor with a certain amount of relief: only to discover another long mirror on the wall, talking to itself in the same annoyed voice, but this time using Gayle’s reflection. In the interests of self-defense, Toby decided to take a careful look at the contents of the room. The parlor was really quite impressive, as thunder gods’ parlors went. The room was easily the size of a banqueting hall, with bare wooden floorboards polished to within an inch of their life, under pelts and furs from a variety of large animals, and solid stone walls covered with great metal shields and many displays of crossed weapons. The swords were all over six feet long, and the great axes looked far too heavy for mortal man to lift without the help of a very supportive truss. The ceiling was so high Toby had to crane his head all the way back to look up at it. Bats of a disturbing size hung upside down from the arching wooden rafters, their eyes shining redly.
Toby looked across at Gayle, but she was still taking it all in her stride. In fact, she had her arms tightly crossed and was tapping her foot impatiently with an expression that suggested, thunder god or not, Jimmy Thunder had better have a pretty damned good reason for keeping her waiting. Toby decided he’d had enough of being impressed for one day and wandered over to study a row of glass display cases in the hope of finding something tacky he could sneer at. The cases held a series of unusual exhibits, each complete with a neatly printed card that provided a name, but no other useful information. Toby moved slowly past THE MIRROR OF THE SEA, THOR’S GAUNTLETS and SURTUR’S TOOTH, and was no wiser for the experience.
The first item was a remarkably ordinary-looking, and blessedly silent, hand mirror in a battered steel frame. It could have been any age, from any period, and there was nothing obviously of the sea about it, until Toby leaned closer for a better look and thought he heard, faintly and far away, the sound of whales singing in the deep. The sounds were gone almost as soon as he identified them, and didn’t return, no matter how closely he pressed his ear against the glass case. He glanced round to see if Gayle had heard anything, but she was still busy being impatient. Toby straightened up and moved on.
Thor’s Gauntlets were just a pair of ratty old leather gloves, studded with sigils and runes of black iron, all but falling apart despite much patching and mending. And Surtur’s Tooth . . . was just a bloody big tooth, about ten inches long, culminating in a jagged broken end, as though it had been ripped right out of the jaw of something sufficiently big that Toby decided he didn’t want to think about it.
“Curios and artifacts from some of my old cases,” said a deep, commanding voice, and Toby looked round sharply to see Jimmy Thunder standing in the doorway of the parlor. Or, to be more accurate, filling it. The huge red-headed warrior figure was immediately impressive, even though he was wearing a flannel dressing gown and pale pink bunny slippers. Just standing there, entirely at ease, the thunder godling was thoroughly intimidating. His sheer bulk made Toby feel puny by comparison. He just knew he could work out with weights all his life and still never end up with a build like that. He’d never seen so many muscles in one place, on one person.
Jimmy smiled easily and strode forward to clasp Toby’s hand in a grip that was nicely calculated to be firm without threatening, though the godling’s huge hand all but swallowed Toby’s. Toby tried for a polite, unimpressed smile, but it didn’t feel particularly successful. Certainly Jimmy wasted no time in moving quickly on to clasp Gayle in a huge hug, lifting her right off the floor and swinging her round, feet clearing the ground. She laughed happily and tugged playfully at his long red beard. He grinned, set her down again, and made to hold her buttocks in his hands before she pushed him firmly away.
“Big old bear,” she said fondly. “Good to see you again.”
“Always good to see you,” said Jimmy, his voice so deep now it was practically rumbling in his chest. “You spend far too much time being real, you know. It can’t be good for you. You need to get out more, like me, and savor the best of both worlds. You weren’t always so . . . retiring.” He looked across at Toby, grinning. “You know the two of us used to be an item?”
“She hadn’t actually got around to telling me that,” said Toby. “But yes, I’d sort of guessed. So . . . you’re a godling?”
“Damn right,” said Jimmy Thunder cheerfully. He sat on a handy wooden bench and pulled Gayle down beside him. She hit him playfully on the shoulder, but he didn’t even feel it. Toby sat down on another bench facing them. Jimmy slipped an arm round Gayle’s waist and Toby tried not to seethe too obviously.
“Long, long ago, back in the mists of time, when Veritie and Mysterie weren’t quite as separate as they are now, my ancestor was the god Thor,” Jimmy said easily.
“Hard to tell exactly how long ago, but still—Thor. Norse god of storms and lightning, Odin’s son, big hammer, the whole bit. And somewhere along the line he paid a visit to Veritie, had his way with a willing Norse lass, as gods were prone to do in those days, and got her with child. Many, many generations later, I came along, my divine inheritance greatly diluted by so much mortal blood. Essentially, I’m powerful, long-lived, but not actually all that special. Especially in a town like this. All I really inherited from my distant progenitor was a hammer that can’t find its way home, more red hair than I know what to do with, and the ability to know when it’s going to rain. There was a horse with eight legs, but it ran away. Never liked me anyway. Ugly great thing.” He sighed heavily, suddenly morose. “Not much of a god really, as gods go. No powers, no miracles, can’t even change water into mead. Family history’s a bloody dirge, all gloomy Eddas and prophecies of getting our arse kicked at Ragnarok. Why couldn’t I have been descended from one of the Greek gods? Those guys knew how to have fun.”
“Don’t you put yourself down like that!” said the mirror sharply. “There are always plenty of people only too willing to do that for you. You have a famous and vitally ethnic heritage, and more muscles than a whelk farm. That’s the trouble with you Norse gods; always prone to mood swings. Now introduce me properly to your guests or I’ll start singing opera again. In German. With all the vibratos.”
“The loud and obnoxious thing hanging on my wall,” said Jimmy, smiling in spite of himself, “is Scilla. Apparently once a Rhine Maiden (though the second part was often loudly disputed), whose spirit ended up inhabiting a mirror as a result of cheating at cards with a rather bad-tempered dwarf. In her own annoying way, she’s probably more immortal than I am. My dad wished her on me in his will, and I still haven’t forgiven him. She currently works as my secretary, in charge of making appointments, overseeing the paperwork, billing clients and keeping track of ongoing cases.” Jimmy paused for breath. “She also nags me about my weight, the length of my hair, and my unmarried state. She seems to think she’s my mother, and that I couldn’t manage my life without her.”
“Well, you couldn’t,” said the mirror. “Some days I’m lucky if he’s wearing the same color socks. And if I didn’t constantly remind him about his weight, he’d pork out so fast it would make your head swim. You should see his waistline during the winter months. Some years I wouldn’t be surprised if he started hibernating. And someone’s got to think about the next generation of thunder godlings! I don’t see why you can’t meet a nice Norse goddess and settle down . . .”
Jimmy looked apologetically at Gayle and Toby. “Sorry about this, but she’ll go on forever if I don’t get us out of here.” He snapped his fingers sharply, and the world dropped out from under Toby. The parlor disappeared, swallowed up in a darkness that rushed in from every direction at once, and Toby grabbed frantically for something to hold on to as he plummeted through nothing at all. And then the light returned, the sensation of falling was abruptly gone, and Toby was sitting in a cheap plastic deck chair, clutching at his chest with both hands to try to stop his heart from palpitating. Jimmy and Gayle were sitting opposite him, also in deck chairs. Jimmy looked rather smug, for the second or two before Gayle slapped him hard about the head.

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