Chapter 40: Ride Sharing
In which Strephon finds an unexpected traveling companion in the back seat of Tobias’s cab and is offered a tempting proposition.
A discreet knock came at the door and the woman in the doggy pullover poked her head into Pastor Shepherd's office. "Pardon me," she said, "but Mister Bellman's cab is here."
"Oh, my," Strephon said. "I forgot all about Tobias. I beg your pardon, Reverend; I've taken up enough of your time." He engaged in a few parting pleasantries and permitted Shepherd to escort him out of the office.
Arriving out on the sidewalk in front of Shepherd's mission, he was surprised that Tobias did not scold him for his tardiness, but merely opened the cab door for him with a pleasant, but silent smile and helped him into the back seat. As Strephon lowered his head to pull himself into the cab, he saw a long, slender leg on the other side, with a silvery, iridescent tattoo which started at the ankle and ran up the side of the leg much further than Strephon felt comfortable following.
"Inanna." He spoke the work less as a name than as a curse. Then a bit louder he said, "You may bring back the chair, Tobias. I've changed my mind. I'll stay here a bit longer and you may pick me up when you are finished with your present fare."
Tobias did not respond. He simply finished stowing the wheelchair in the boot of the cab and returned to the driver's seat.
"He can't hear you," Inanna said.
"What have you done to him?
"Oh, nothing serious and nothing permanent. I just need him to be oblivious for a little while." She raised her voice slightly. "Driver, just drive around for a while. Someplace scenic. I'll tell you when to stop." Then she turned back to Strephon and resumed her conversational tone. "The things I wish to discuss with you are not for mortal ears. Don't worry; he'll be perfectly fine. I'll even give him a handsome tip."
"In fairy gold?"
Inanna laughed. "Good British banknotes. As real as the Bank of England. I hope that's respectable enough for you."
If she expected some witty retort, she was disappointed. Strephon was in no mood for banter. "What do you want?" he said.
"First of all," she said in a more contrite tone, "I wish to apologize."
“Indeed.”
“For that little incident at Melchior’s party the other week. With the computer game and Miss True.”
“And…?”
She gave a huffy sigh. “Young Sanders was about to violate his non-disclosure agreement with the Company to that girl, and I couldn’t allow that. And I was rather cross with you for spilling your champagne on me. And...” she permitted herself a petulant pout. “I suppose I was a teensy bit jealous of her. So I switched out the games in Saunders’s game console.”
Strephon kept his expression impassive and his eyes fixed on the front of the cab.
Inanna took a deep breath and added. “It was wrong of me and I regret it.”
“You will have to forgive me if I harbor doubts about your sincerity,”
This clearly annoyed her. “What is it with mortals and their obsession with sincerity?” she snapped. “The mortal world has been a bad influence on you, Bellman. If you won’t believe my sincerity, then at least credit my pragmatism. Were I interested in you, and I won’t say I’m not, I could hardly win your affection by harming those close to you. Besides...” she gathered herself once again. “The girl is important to you, and you are important to us.”
Strephon turned to face her. He scrutinized her countenance for any sign of duplicity, but she seemed completely earnest. The fae, he knew, were good at that.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “It will not happen again.”
“Is that a promise?”
She tensed, and held his gaze for what seemed a long time. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you.”
“Yes. I am.”
Inanna set her mouth in a hard line. Finally she said, “Very well. I swear, upon my faerie oath, that I will take no action that will harm your friend, Miss True, whether in body or in spirit. Does that satisfy you?”
Strephon considered. Faerie oaths were binding, and Inanna would not make such an oath unless she were utterly confident she could keep it. He mentally prodded the promise for loopholes – there were always loopholes – but on the face of it he could see few flaws. The temptation with faerie promises was always to try to fence it about with caveats and limitations which usually only created new loopholes for the fae to exploit. This one seemed pretty comprehensive, and Strephon could hardly demand more. “Very well,” he said. “I suppose I must.”
She relaxed a bit at that, but Strephon remained wary. “You said I was important. How so? And don’t tell me that Melchior needs my endorsement to get on the Council. He already had Kurayami’s recommendation, and if his party the other week is any indication, he already has plenty of contacts both in the Supernatural Community and the Daylight World. So why does he need me?”
Inanna smiled. “That brings us to the other thing I wished to discuss.” She paused to gather herself, as if preparing for a memorized speech. “There was a time, I’m sure you know, when the Faerie Realm and the Mortal World were not separated; when it was as easy to cross from one to the other as it is to step across a crack in the pavement.”
Strephon frowned. A rather ill-chosen metaphor, he thought to himself, unconsciously glancing down at his own crippled legs. He did not draw attention to her faux pas, but he did respond perhaps a little more peevishly than he intended. “My mother did attempt to instill in me some knowledge of history pre-dating William the Conqueror. Our realms were separated by some antediluvian pact or other. Something to do with a divorce settlement between the Queen of Faerie and one of her many paramours, I believe.”
“Not just any pact,” Inanna corrected him. “THE Pact. The one between our Queen and the Prince of the Nephilim, establishing the bounds of reality and the rather baroque rules governing the interaction between fae and mortal. It’s also the foundation of Faerie Law. Have you never wondered, Bellman, why we have so many preposterous taboos? How our glamours can be dispelled by uttering the name of a saint, or turning one’s garment inside out; how mortals can become vulnerable to our spells if they walk around a church widdershins? How we can be compelled to count scattered grain? And your own ludicrous situation, mortal from the waist down and faerie from the waist up, as if you dressed yourself in the dark and put on the wrong trousers?”
“I’ve always been given to understand that it was simply the way things are; that it was an intrinsic part of Faerie Magic.”
“It all came from the Pact.”
“And what of it?”
“The Pact was intended to protect mortal men from faerie magic. Men were weak then and ignorant, and vulnerable to faerie influence. But the Pact also constrained mortals, limiting their access to magic.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve known one or two mortals who seemed fairly adept at the mystic arts.”
Inanna waved her hand impatiently. “Magic always finds a loophole. But still, the greatest mortal sorcerers require complex formulae and geometries to achieve enchantments that our kind can achieve simply by wishing. Or they require access to beings of magic or have some innate abilities of their own. Such beings are quite rare, actually. There are just more in this city because of a quirk of geography. It sits on a magical nexus which skews the thaumaturgic demographics.”
“Thaumaturgic fiddlesticks,” Strephon snorted. It sounded like the sort of thing Melchior would say. “Return to the point. Why are you telling me all this? Melchior never mentioned a word of it to me. I’ve never known any of our kind to be terribly concerned with the lives of mortals and Melchior does not exactly strike me as the altruistic type. He seems more interested in financial considerations.
“Melchior believes that all mortals are motivated solely by amassing wealth and power, and so he tends to speak in those terms.”
“In other words, he judges them by his own priorities.”
“Indeed.”
“Whereas you believe mortals to be motivated chiefly by lust.”
Inanna neither acknowledged nor denied the remark; she merely smiled and replied, “And what is your favorite Deadly Sin?”
“Sloth, if you must know. But you seem to be speaking rather freely about your employer, are you not? Unless...” he paused, as if thinking of something for the first time. “Unless, you are really working for somebody else.”
Inanna’s smile went from coy and enigmatic to full Cheshire Cat. “Surely, Bellman, you must have figured out that this is much bigger than a scheme to capture the computer game market.”
“And is Melchior aware that he is merely a pawn in a greater scheme?”
“The pawns never do.” She placed her hand on Strephon’s knee. “That is why I’m telling you all this; so that you will know the truth.”
More flattery. Well, let her think he was buying it. He needed to learn more. But no commitments.
“And who is moving the pieces? For whom do you really work?”
She hesitated. “That individual has not authorized me to divulge that information.” Then, more sweetly, she added, “Not yet. I’m sure you will understand that we will first need to know each other better. I will, however, tell you everything I may.”
So, whoever Inanna was working for had bound her with a Faerie Oath. Not too surprising. “I notice that you are careful not to specify this person’s gender. May I infer from this that your employer is a woman?”
“You may infer anything you please.” She was too canny to be tricked that way. Her sweetness of tone could indicate that his guess was wrong; or it might mean she truly wanted to tell him he was right, but could not explicitly say so. Or, what was more likely, that she preferred keeping the conversation at verbal fencing. Time to return to the subject.
“I’ve never known any of our kind to be terribly concerned with the lives of mortals,” Strephon said.
“It is not merely mortals who are affected. The barrier between Faerie and the Mortal World limits us too: how we interact with mortals and how well we understand them. We may think that we are lords of magic, snug behind the walls of Faerie-land, but in fact, we have grown complacent and stagnant. We, who are immortal, are dying; not of age, as mortals do, but of ennui. We have come to rely too much on the imagination of mortals because our own has atrophied. We have come to regard mortals as pets, existing solely for our entertainment, and that is healthy for neither mortal nor fae.
“You mean the way you treat young Sanders, that game designer?”
That seemed to strike a nerve. She looked away from him, and it was a moment or two before she replied. “The whole system is corrupt. I can’t claim to be free of its taint; nor can any fae.” She glanced back at him. “But you, Bellman, are different.”
“Oh? How so?”
“You have faerie blood and can wield fae magic; but you were raised as a mortal. You were christened, Strephon; think what that means! You are not bound by the strictures of the Pact; only to your own conscience. You are free!”
“Well, my conscience and my honor, but those come to the same thing, I suppose. Free to do what?”
Inanna looked furtively around as if she expected spies to be crouching on the boot of the cab or lurking behind the pine-scented freshener dangling from its rear-view mirror. Perhaps there were. She leaned closer to Strephon, and in a low voice said, “Free to call the Hunt.”
“The Hunt?” That took Strephon aback. He was too surprised to feign ignorance. All of the Fae knew of the Hunt; even those who, like Strephon – and he suspected like Inanna too – had not been alive the last time it had occurred. He had heard the Fae speak in hushed tones of The Wild Hunt, the thundering, frenzied, cross-country Bacchanal that had at one time swept across the green lands, driving lost souls, and whatever mortals unlucky enough to encounter it, before it. It was a mass calamity, like a tempest or a swarm of locusts, that brought terror in its wake. And yet, for all that, the Hunt was still remembered with a mixture of dread and a perverse sort of nostalgia.
“As I understand it, only a member of the Faerie Court may summon a Wild Hunt; and the Queen banned the practice several centuries ago,” Strephon said.
“You have the authority to convene the Hunt by right of blood,” Inanna replied. “And you are exempt from the Queen’s ban by virtue of your mortal heritage.”
“In any case, the whole thing is moot anyway. The world has changed since the Hunt was last called. England is covered by a network of iron rails and a web of telephone wires. The Fae cannot… oh. But I see. You and Melchior’s ‘Silicon Fae’ are immune to that, aren’t you.”
“You are clever. I thought you’d figure that out.”
“But to what purpose? What would a new Wild Hunt accomplish?”
“It would open up the barrier between the two realms and usher in a new age of Magic on Earth, in which men and fae may meet as equals. A chance to re-make the world!”
She spoke with a breathless enthusiasm, so different than the sly banter he had come to expect from her. Despite his prudent barrister’s caution, Strephon could not help but feel her excitement kindle in his own breast.
“Think of it, Strephon: You would be shaping that world. You could make yourself completely Fae; not a ridiculous chimera, neither fish nor faerie. Or you could make yourself completely mortal if that is your wish.”
Was that simply a shrewd guess? Or had she somehow read the desires of his heart? Strephon found something out the window to look at and hopes she would not notice his discomfit.
“So, you seriously intend to unleash a flood of magic upon the Mortal World? That will cause all manner of chaos.
“In the long run, things would settle down. A new equilibrium would establish itself, more stable than the current state of affairs. But you are correct: in the short term, there would be instability and panic. It will be a dangerous period. That is another reason we need you.”
“Indeed?”
“The one who summons the Hunt leads the Hunt. As a man of two worlds, you would have the wisdom to guide it into less destructive channels; to mitigate the damage.”
That was indeed the temptation. But could he really guide it? From all he’d heard, the Wild Hunt was an explosion of raw chaos, as amenable to control as a conflagration. He might as well try to saddle a bandersnatch.
Inanna noted his indecision and pounced on it. “You’re worried about Miss True, aren’t you.”
“You promised she would come to no harm.”
“I promised to do nothing to harm her. But I cannot shield her from all harm. Command the Hunt, Strephon, and you can.”
She drew a small, square envelope sealed with a faerie rune from the recesses of her suit and placed it in his hand. “At the Council meeting tomorrow night, when you are called to deliver your testimony, you will be at the spot where the lines of magic converge, and you can tap into its full power. You will know it; you will feel it. At that time, open this. It contains the spell to summon the Wild Hunt. You must read it immediately upon opening, so do not open the envelope until then.”
Strephon stared at the envelope in his hand. He knew he should refuse it, but now that it lay in his possession, it had suddenly become a responsibility. He was not sure what to do.
Inanna turned to Tobias. “Driver, you may let me off here.”
Tobias pulled the cab over to the sidewalk and Inanna slid gracefully out of the cab. After paying her fare, she paused a moment to sink in one last barb.
“Don’t you think, Strephon, that your Miss True deserves a whole man?”
With that, she turned and walked three steps down the sidewalk. Before her fourth step, she shimmered and dissolved into a handful of sunbeams and disappeared, leaving Strephon in the back seat of the cab, alone.
NEXT: Two Suitcases