Powers (11 page)

Funny thing, after all his years in a village a day’s walk outside of Edo—the words he remembered mostly tied to weapons and steel. Little else had stayed with him. Told you things about
his
culture and history . . .

She stared at the steel as if hypnotized, lost in the matte gray acid-etched surface—the “storm-wave” pattern of his forged laminations. Her left forefinger reached out to test the edge, just her nail.

“Don’t—”

Blood beaded on her fingertip, below the split nail. She kept her nails short, just like her hair—made sense if she spent her days poking around the insides of arson crime-scenes. Now she stared at the blood.

“I didn’t even
touch
it!”

She looked up, met his stare. “
This
would buy your blood away from me.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t fit you. You need a longer knife. A larger grip. A guard for meeting blade with blade. A style for someone who seeks danger, not the last defense of a hermit.”

No, he didn’t quite know where he’d come up with that horoscope in steel.

She weighed the knife in her hand, fluid grace shifting through different combat grips and tossing it from right hand to left and back, then nodded. Sheathed it and set it back on the counter, her hand lingering as if reluctant.

“We come back to my first question the other night. What
are
you? That blade didn’t come from any human forge.”

He shrugged, slipped his arms into his jacket, and settled the sheathed knife into a pocket sewn below the collar and angled across his back between his shoulder blades. No guard, the knife would lie flat and concealed by the padding to either side, pommel just out of sight, while the pocket held snug against the
kumihimo
braid on the sheath so he could draw his weapon with one hand. He tested it. Smooth. Attention to detail had saved his ass more times than he could count.

“I am what I am. Nobody has ever put a name to us, not even Mother.” He glanced at her hand. “Your finger okay?”

She held it up. No blood. “Enough talk. Legion seems to think we’re working with a deadline. Get your ass down those stairs. You first.” She picked up the pheasant feather and the note. “Since Allah in His beneficence has given me a star to follow . . . ”

“Speaking of stars, why aren’t you tracking that Seal from the ashes?” Ali Akhbar Khan spoke again from his memory, on the roof of his mud fort and enjoying the spectacular night sky of his hills, “And He it is Who has made the stars for you that you might follow the right way thereby in the darkness of the land and the sea . . . ”

She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Because that manifestation of Allah’s infinite mercy led nowhere. Two steps and gone. That’s why I came here. You’re the only person I’ve ever had trouble following.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
”

“You found me . . . ”

“I was following my own blood on your cane.”

He headed down the stairs, avoiding his little ineffective traps, picking up his cane on his way.

Her voice followed him. “You really should replace some of these steps. A person could get hurt.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Turn left down the next alley.”

She’d led them back into that beyond-bad section of town, the bombed-out-Berlin landscape near the synagogue. Or what was left of the synagogue.
“Led” isn’t accurate, either,
he thought.
It’s “No way in hell I’m gonna let you behind my back. Not with
those
blades. You take point.”

Apparently she didn’t trust Legion as a mediator. That was okay. Neither did he.

He heard rats in the trash, snowdrifts of trash that oozed out from dingy graffiti-splashed windowless brick canyon walls to nearly block the alley, too narrow for a car, trash that had been picked over with even the dubious-value rusty metal sorted out to sell by the pound to junk dealers to buy junk. The kind you injected or smoked or sucked up your nose. How could you find so damn much trash once you pulled out any scrap metal or burnable wood or even cardboard sheets large enough to block a draft? Plastic jugs. Broken glass. Discarded clothing too far gone even for the homeless. Tattered remnants of plastic sheeting, rattling in the wind. Cotton-stuffed mattresses spilling their piss-reeking guts onto the cracked asphalt and brick pavement. Dogshit. Damned if he knew what the dogs found to eat back here. Maybe the rats.

Some of those rustlings probably
weren’t
rats. People sheltered in trash igloos braced against the crumbling bricks. He felt their wondering, paranoid goggle-eyed straggle-haired stare from the shadows, what those two clean strangers were doing in this filthy down-and-out world. Stranger means danger . . .

He wondered what they thought he could take from them, what they thought they could take from him, and resisted the impulse to reach back and touch his knife-hilt to prove he still had it.

Never tell the world where you hide your weapons.

She kept about fifteen, twenty feet behind him, calling out directions now and then, far enough back so one grenade wouldn’t get both of them.
Where did
that
image come from? Was I in some army somewhere?
But he couldn’t shake the feeling of being on patrol in hostile jungles, her “point-man” reference, with her as backup rather than enemy. She had at least one gun still, and that silly gaudy Isfahan dagger. Plus whatever else she hid in her coveralls.

From what he’d learned of her so far, that probably included a brigade of heavy dragoons held in reserve.
Another army reference. Damned memory. Was I drafted at bayonet-point, sometime since gunpowder came on the scene?

Which could have been three or four centuries back, lost in the mists of time . . .

Armies don’t have much interest in drafting a midget with a limp. Big strong not-too-smart farm boys, that’s what they want, and lots of ’em, the kind of soldier you could expect to march across a mile of open field into the cannon’s mouth. March in neat skirmish lines through barbed wire against machine guns.

More likely I heard soldier jargon while I repaired their weapons in the armory. Or made pretty-pretty swords for the officers.

Or I picked the phrases up from Ali Akhbar Khan. Heavy dragoons and grenadiers—those sound British enough.

He kept scanning the alley as he walked. And wrinkling his nose. No indoor plumbing in those trash igloos. “Do the note and the feather lead in the same direction?”

“Turn right at the next alley.”

So she wasn’t going to say. He turned. The next alley looked vaguely familiar, wider and also somewhat cleaner. You could drive down this one. Someone bothered to keep it clear. Backs of buildings, not the sides, loading docks and rear entries and such. No windows below the second floor, to make breaking-in harder.

Third building down on the right, a blank wood door, fancy inset panels with the varnish weathered off, wood gray and splintering, stone-trimmed gothic arch capped with some kind of shield surmounted by a cross. The shield had eroded far enough by acid rain, he couldn’t read what it once carried—words or symbols. Church-type detail but not a church. Chapter house? Rectory? Offices for a church no longer standing? Or maybe the cross just warded against demons?

He’d seen that before, something to do with Mother, something at least forty or fifty years gone in the mists of time. Weeds grew on the threshold, rooted in dust and sand blown into the eddy over years. Door not used.

“This one?” He glanced back at her.

“No. Keep going.”

Why did he remember this? Blank brick wall except for the door and its stone trim, no windows. Judging by the change in brick, a narrow building about forty feet wide, maybe four stories high, a story taller than the ones to either side. Looked like old work, not machine-made uniform brick, slightly lumpy and uneven but in better condition than its neighbors. Anonymous. No hardware on the outside of the door—no lock, no knob, no knocker or bell. Not unusual on an exit door . . .

“Move it, little man!”

He moved it.

Two buildings further, on the opposite side of the alley, she focused on a blank steel door with locks and handle. Locks, plural, three of them. Even standing back, he could see dings and gouges along the lock-side jamb where someone had tried to pry it open. Old rust on some of the scratches, others looked newer.

“This one.”

He remembered it too, vaguely, again something associated with Mother. But then, they’d been in this town a long, long time, even by his standards. Faded scratched peeling letters on faded scratched gray paint, HAIRSTON’S ANTIQUES and ATLAS SECURITY on a badge-sticker that looked like it had been there forty years. Buzzer-button to summon your genie, if you had a delivery to make.

Antiques? In
this
neighborhood? New lamps for old, pottery jars big enough to hide forty thieves? She had thrown him into metaphors of the
Thousand Nights and a Night.
Always had thought Scheherazade would be a pretty little girl, soft hands and voice, not that harsh hill-tribe face as sharp as her blade or tongue, gnarled strong fingers scarred by the decades and callused to knife and pistol . . .

No keypad to disable the alarm system. Probably inside, have to punch in the code within a minute of opening or it would start screaming for the cops. He tried the knob. Locked.

“Back off.” She waved him across the alley, as if she planned to blow the door open with a limpet mine. Military idioms again, probably
her
fault again. Bent over the locks as if she was talking to the pins and tumblers and bolts, her body blocking his view of the door.

“There’s an alarm system . . . ”

“Dummy sticker. No such company.”

She
was
the cops. She’d know.

He couldn’t remember what day it was, weekday or weekend, with Legion’s habit of screwing up the flow of time, whether they were breaking into a store that was open or closed. Or even, from the outside evidence, whether it was still in business. Again he wondered, antiques, in
this
part of town? But she didn’t look like she planned on walking around to the street side of the block and using the front door like a law-abiding citizen.

She turned the knob and the door swung in, unlocked by whatever words and incantations she’d muttered. Or lock-picks, more likely, with incantations like, “Come on, you mangy slit-eared misbegotten son of a yellow pariah dog mated to a pig . . . ”

Darkness inside. She pulled her flashlight out, splashing blue-white probes into the shadows, side and floor and ceiling, not trusting. He didn’t hear any alarms. No shouts or threats from inside, either. She stepped over the threshold and studied the door’s frame behind her, probably checking for wires or switches or a keypad. Then moved on into darkness.

He crossed the alley and followed. A quick sniff told him that they weren’t burglarizing a working business—stale air, dust, damp, winter’s chill lingering in the unheated darkness. Her stabbing flashlight beam and thin light filtering past boarded-up shop windows told him what kind of business it had been. Junk. The “antiques” label covered old battered tables and dressers, cookware better suited for scrap metal, some console radios that dated back halfway to Marconi without being old enough to start gaining in value once again. Electric heaters with exposed coil elements that could burn down whole city blocks given any chance.

Veneer peeled off dusty sideboards and china cabinets. Stacks of crockery, he could see chips and cracks even in the gloom. This stuff would drag
his
apartment down a notch or five in the
Gracious Homes
décor scale.

Then the stabbing light settled on feathers. A cobwebbed hen pheasant—not even good taxidermy when it was new—sitting in a forest of table lamps with frayed cords and decayed shades.

Minus all its tail.

The flashlight beam poked here and there on the floor. No recent footprints in the dust. Mother, if it had been Mother, had collected those feathers a year or more ago.

He saw the harpy’s silhouette against the light, cocking her head to one side, as if listening and . . . sniffing. She pulled the feather out of her coveralls and left it lying on the dusty table next to the stuffed bird. No further value, except as a message if Mother came back?

She turned back and waved him out. “Okay, now we track the paper. Probably same result, but what the hell, won’t know if we don’t try . . . ”

So the two traces didn’t lead to the same place. Nice to finally get
that
answer.

Out in the alley again, blinking against the light. She locked up behind him, click and clunk and click again. Generous of her, not leaving Ali Baba’s Cave open to the neighborhood looters. He hadn’t seen it, but probably they could find
something
in there worth stealing. If you looked hard enough. If you were desperate enough. Or maybe, just break up the furniture for firewood to heat a can of beans and hold frostbite at bay.

She marched him two blocks down the alley, back past that door he recognized—she didn’t give it a second glance. Then through another narrow alley, out on a different street with a few stores hanging on, teeth and toenails, and she picked a security-grilled door with a dingy sign that offered news, magazines, and smokes. Once they stepped inside the narrow tiny store he saw it was mostly cigarettes and cheap cigars, some loose tobacco and a variety of wrapping papers for dope, but the place also offered a few racks of newspapers and lurid gossip tabloids. There were a few girly and muscle-boy magazines in plastic sleeves so you couldn’t peek at the goodies without paying. He wondered what they sold out of the back room.

El Hajj pulled a tablet of lined paper off one shelf, carried it over to the cashier behind his scarred Plexiglas shield, paid for it, and waved at the door. Albert took the hint.

Outside again, on the cracked sidewalk under the tattered canvas awning, she pulled Mother’s note from one of her pockets. She unfolded it and fitted the torn top edge against the matching ragged edge of the tablet. Mother hadn’t even bothered to steal or buy the whole thing, just had taken the one sheet.