Welcome to Bordertown Read online

  “He roughed up Ashley,” says Tristan. “In an alley near Mock Avenue. Tried to get her to tell him where I—Robert—was.”

  Alain turns. There is real concern on his face and in his voice, making it sharp. “Is she well? How badly was she hurt?”

  Tristan looks surprised at the vehemence in Alain’s tone. “She wasn’t hurt—just shaken up. But it means he’s coming after us. Our best chance is to go after him first.”

  “I told her I’d walk her home,” Alain mutters, and Ashley realizes he is still talking about her. She wouldn’t have expected him to care that much.

  “Are you listening to me, Alain? We have to go after Barrow and his crew before he comes to the Magic Lantern and burns it down.”

  “I hear you and I agree.” Alain sounds grim. “Meet me tonight by the Mad River. There is an alley across from Dragon’s Claw Bridge with lots of useful shadows. We’ll search Nigel’s warehouse, see what he’s been up to. Tell the other eighteen to be ready in case we have need of them.”

  The other eighteen? Ashley is so stunned she barely hears Tristan’s muttered acknowledgment. She presses herself back into the shadows just before he rushes past, letting himself out the theater’s back door. When it closes behind him, she peeks out again, but Alain is already gone.

  Everything looks like it always does, except for a trunk shoved haphazardly back in place. Nothing she would have noticed before. She drags it out from the wall. The loose floorboard is obvious, and when she pulls that up, more than two dozen Rowan Gentleman costumes are revealed.

  Ashley slips out the door after Tristan, her heart pounding in her chest, a cloak and mask in her arms.

  * * *

  Having barely slept the night before, Ashley naps fitfully through the day before rising at sundown. The apartment is empty—everyone else is out taking advantage of the night off. Everyone but Tristan, and she knows where he is.

  She dresses herself carefully in a Gentleman’s outfit—the material is soft and flexible, the trousers only a little too long. She folds them over at the waist and ties her hair back, tucking it up under the hood of the cloak. In Kit’s cubicle, she finds a prop sword that could pass for the real thing and tucks it against her side, beneath the cloak. She feels the same shivery excitement she often feels before stepping out onstage, ready to throw herself into a part, to embrace someone else’s life.

  Ashley finds Dragon’s Claw Bridge easily, and the alley across from it. It is as shadowy as Alain had promised—so shadowy that at first she doesn’t see him. When he steps out from the darkness in his black cloak and red mask, she nearly yelps out loud. He actually does look frightening.

  He ducks his head in greeting. “Tristan. Are you ready?”

  Ashley is speechless. This is not how she thought it would go at all. She had thought she would arrive and confront them both, not that Alain would mistake her for Tristan. Where is Tristan? She opens her mouth, but no words come out.

  Alain takes her silence for agreement. “All right, then. I’ll take point.” He steps in front of her. What she had thought of before as a lazy stride now has a fluid and deadly grace.

  Ashley follows him through the street, copying the way he tips his head forward so the hood of the cloak hides the mask. Her fingers go to the pommel of Kit’s fake sword, closing around it as though it were real. Unless Nigel Barrow is afraid of splinters, the sword is useless—and so is she.

  Just as she convinces herself to tell Alain the truth, he slips into a doorway.

  “I walked by before,” he says, sticking a pin into the lock. “No one home. Lucky us. Remember, we touch nothing. We’re just here to find out what’s going on.”

  Ashley nods once and then Alain turns the knob, leaning his shoulder against the door and is inside.

  “Alai—” she whispers, trying to make her voice sound low, like Tristan’s.

  “Shhh,” he says, cutting her off and motioning her inside.

  It’s a big, mostly empty room, lit by moonlight. There is the reek of sweat and the strong smell of Mad River water. It’s hot, almost swampy, and it’s not hard to see why. There’s a row of fireplaces along one wall. Fires burn in each of them, heating the bottoms of massive iron cauldrons.

  “What is this?” Alain says, clearly baffled. “What are they doing here?”

  Ashley shakes her head and shrugs, not daring to speak. She’s in it too far now, she realizes. She has to keep pretending to be Tristan unless she wants to endanger them both. Instead, she points at the long wooden table that runs the length of the room’s center. Stacked on the table are glassine packets of reddish dust—the same substance the girl in the theater coughed up when she died.

  Alain moves gracefully over to the table, running his hands over the packets. “Could it be …” He looks up, and though his expression is hidden by the half-mask, Ashley can tell he is angry. “They’re dehydrating Mad River water,” he says. “Processing it—turning it into a drug you can easily smuggle into the World.”

  “Lydia, the halfie girl,” says Ashley. “They must have been using her as a mule. That’s why she coughed up powder when she died.”

  Alain stands frozen, staring at her, and Ashley realizes with a sinking feeling that she has forgotten to disguise her voice. “Ashley?” he says, in a voice that does not sound like his own. He stands stock-still. “Is it you?”

  She is trying to think of how to reply when the doors burst open and Nigel’s crew swarms into the room.

  * * *

  It is her fault, all her fault. As Ashley sits in the hot, stinking darkness, pulling at the rope binding her wrist, waiting for Alain to wake up—hoping Alain will wake up—that’s all she can think about.

  He was shocked, staring at her, off-balance. One of Nigel’s men ran at Ashley, and instead of trying to get out of there, Alain threw a knife at him. It hit, but a moment later, the rest of them were on him. It was shocking how many he took down. Maybe ten, some of them looking as though they might not get back up again.

  Ten wasn’t enough.

  Alain stirs, finally, and groans a little. They are tied to sturdy wooden posts in what Ashley has guessed is a storage room. They are only a few feet from each other. Alain raises his head and looks at her; his face is bloodstained, bruises blooming on his cheek.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice breaking. “So sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t mean to—”

  Alain makes a harsh sound that it takes her a moment to recognize as laughter. “Not much surprises me these days,” he says. “But you, Ashley, are always a surprise.”

  “I overheard you and Tristan—Robert, I guess—talking in the wardrobe room,” she says. “First I thought he was the Rowan Gentleman; then I thought maybe you both were—”

  “There are twenty of us,” says Alain matter-of-factly. “Nineteen members, and one to lead them.”

  “And that’s you,” Ashley says.

  “And that is me.”

  “And all this time I never thought you cared about anything,” she marvels.

  Alain says nothing to that.

  “Why do you do it?” Her voice drops a level, as if someone might be listening, as if she’s asking him to tell her a secret, which, she supposes, she is. “I mean, you’re helping humans, right? Humans and halfies, you’re getting them out of Bordertown when they’re in trouble. Why?”

  He’s quiet for a long moment. “Where I grew up, my parents had no use for humans, save as servants. They treated those servants very poorly, though the servants seldom complained of it. Glamour can make a bare closet seem like a bed heaped in silk. It can make the most meager, most foul food taste like roasted duckling and spiced cake. But I saw them as they were: thin, covered in sores, some worse than that. Eventually, it was a game between my parents and me—how many servants could I smuggle out without getting caught? I got quite skilled at it. So skilled they asked me to leave. They procured me the Magic Lantern on the condition that I never return.” />
  Ashley shudders. Sure, her mom had been a drunk and a mess, but she’d never thrown Ashley out. Never paid her to leave. “Why there of all places?”

  “When I was very little, I would ask for stories from my human nannies. And I was told marvelous ones, big epic, grand adventures. Sometimes a nanny would get maids or the butler to help her act them out. It was only later that I realized those stories weren’t written down in any book. They were films. Casablanca. The Wolfman. Star Wars.”

  Ashley laughs a little at that last one, but it isn’t really funny. It’s sad. She thinks how lonely he must have been, a child up in one of those big houses on Dragon’s Tooth Hill, left alone most of the time with no one but humans—who must have been half crazy by then—to take care of him. She hopes they loved him, more than his parents did. They must have, to have made him so determined to pay them back somehow.

  Ashley wishes she could reach across the darkness and touch his hand. His eyes have a silvery shine as he meets her gaze. “Why did you give me all those presents?” she asks.

  Before he can answer, the door swings open. Ashley yelps in surprise. A tall man in the costume of the Rowan Gentleman is there, mask over half his face.

  “Tristan?” Ashley says quietly.

  The Gentleman looks from Alain to Ashley and then back again. Finally, he pulls off his mask. It’s not Tristan, but Kit.

  “You told her?” Kit asks, sounding surprisingly petulant.

  “She followed me,” Alain says. “And seems to have stolen your sword, too, so please don’t start on how I should have been more careful.”

  Kit raises his eyebrows. “When you didn’t show up, Tristan called in the troops. I think we got most of them. Quite a laboratory downstairs.”

  “I wonder how much of the stuff made it to the World already,” Alain says. “Or if it works so far from the Realm.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Kit says, “because Nigel is no genius. If he’s thought of it, others have, too.”

  Alain grunts. “Now perhaps you could untie me?”

  “Got him,” Kit calls back into the hallway, and two more masked Gentlemen—one slight enough to be a girl—come into the doorway.

  Kit makes quick work of Ashley’s bonds, and the other two cut Alain free. Ashley watches him get up, grabbing for the window frame for support. Under the cape, she is sure he is a mass of bruises.

  He moves carefully out into the hall and down the stairs, a parody of his affected laziness.

  Nigel and a few other men are tied to chairs, blindfolded and gagged. Another Gentleman is carefully writing a letter to the Silver Suits on the wall, with arrows pointing to the no-longer-boiling cauldrons, to the bags, and finally to the men.

  As Alain steps into the center of the room, the dozen or so masked Gentlemen walk toward him, exclaiming loudly. Then they see Ashley—see the cloak on her shoulders and her bare face—and stop. Alain just smiles and reaches into his pocket.

  “You were a Rowan Gentleman tonight,” Alain says. “Would you like to cast the berries?”

  It’s intimidating to be stared at by a bunch of masked people. “Uh, sure,” Ashley says.

  Alain passes the handful to her. They are bright red and hard, like rubies.

  “I just throw them?” she asks.

  “You just throw them,” says Tristan, looking slightly aggrieved. She can’t blame him; he probably panicked when he got to the meeting place and there was no sign of Alain. She’ll have to apologize to him properly later.

  Ashley casts the berries, high and wide, and they land near one of the fireplaces. That is the signal for the group to disperse, for one by one they slip quietly out the doors, until only Alain, Ashley, and Kit are left.

  “I’m heading back to the apartment,” says Kit, leaning around the door. “Do you want to come?”

  “Let me accompany Ashley home,” says Alain, in a voice that brooks no disagreement.

  Kit shrugs. “Have it your way,” he says, and is gone.

  Ashley walks slowly, matching her pace to Alain’s. He is still wincing, but he doesn’t seem to have sustained any serious injuries. It’s close to dawn, and the sky is lightening, the Mad River turning from black to red.

  “I’m sorry,” Ashley says, after the silence stretches too long. “I guess I never really believed in the Rowan Gentleman because I just couldn’t believe there was someone like that—someone who helps people just for the sake of helping them. I think I came here tonight expecting to find out it was some kind of elaborate joke. But it isn’t. This is really what you do.”

  “It really is,” Alain says. “But don’t be sorry for not believing. Sometimes I hardly believe myself.”

  “But now …” Ashley pauses, but she knows she has to go ahead and say it. The truth. “Now I’m afraid you won’t let me be one of you. Because I acted crazy and messed up your plan tonight.”

  Alain laughs. “The Rowan Gentlemen are—all of us, to a one—mad as cats. We don’t recruit people known for making reasonable decisions. We’re all crazy and if you’re crazy, too, then I’m happy to know it.”

  “Does that mean I’m recruited?” Ashley asks.

  “Maybe.” He gives her a complicated smile. “If you like. But before you agree, I should tell you that those gifts—the shoes, the shawl—they were given to you with less than noble intentions.”

  “You mean you wanted to get in my pants?” Ashley grins.

  She expects him to smile, too, but he doesn’t. “I try to maintain a certain reputation. Incompetent. Lazy. Spoiled. And so I thought that courting a girl who cared nothing for me would fit.”

  Ashley frowns. “You thought that I—”

  “Love cannot be bought,” Alain says. “And you, quite smartly, distrusted me for trying.”

  “And now?” she asks.

  “Now I am ashamed,” he answers. “I chose both poorly and too well when I courted you. Poorly, because you saw right through my artifice, but too well, because now that I wish to declare my true admiration, I must do so knowing that you have little reason to believe me.”

  “So, if you were courting me for real, there would be no presents, no dinners, no nothing?”

  Alain laughs. “Perhaps I have no knowledge of courtship, false or true.”

  Ashley gently bumps against his side. “Maybe I could help you learn. Why don’t you let me start by buying you something?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Buying me something?”

  “It won’t be anything fancy like nine-million-thread-count sheets or exotic bath beads from the Realm,” she warns him. “I was thinking we should start small. I could buy you breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Breakfast at Café Tremolo. You, me, muffins, a couple of espressos, and an ice pack for your face.”

  Alain’s smile is as wide as the sunrise. “I’d like that.”

  THE SONG OF THE SONG

  BY NEIL GAIMAN

  There’s a song that they sing

  at the edge of the world

  about leaders and armies

  with banners unfurled

  and the blood of the brave

  on the glittering sand

  while the mountaintops ring

  with the crash of the band

  and they sing it a lot.

  It might even be true.

  But it’s not.

  Listen, you …

  There’s a boy loves a girl,

  she has skin fair as milk,

  she has breasts like ripe apples

  and lips soft as silk,

  so he sings of such stuff,

  how he’ll love her for aye

  though he’s ragged and rough

  and he sleeps in the hay,

  yet love makes no mistakes.

  It is perfect and clean.

  She is gone when he wakes,

  and I mean …

  On each side of the Border

  wherever you stand

  in these days of disorder
/>
  you must understand

  that some songs are convincing,

  persuasive and smart,

  so in moments they’re mincing

  away with your heart,

  like songs do. They inspire,

  but beware, because song

  (like desire)

  can go wrong.…

  So heed my example

  I was once a young ditty

  on all sorts of lips

  as folk wandered this city

  but now I’m forgotten,

  replaced by new strains

  while my rhyme scheme is rotten

  and little remains.

  But I told them the truth

  for a while. So beware

  of a song

  sung when nobody’s there.

  A TANGLE OF GREEN MEN

  BY CHARLES DE LINT

  - 1 -

  When Tía Luba talks, everybody listens. That’s just the way it is for us kids, on or off the rez.

  I’m getting my release from the Kikimi County Young Offenders Correction Facility, which is just a fancy way of saying juvie. I’ve been on good behavior, done my time. Studied for my classes—even got my grade nine. Didn’t mouth off to the guards or psychologists or counselors. Moved rocks and dirt around on the weekends to build character and amuse the guards. Basically, I kept my head down and my nose clean.

  The guard accompanies me from the buildings to the outer gate. As we walk toward it, I get a good look at the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence with the barbed wire on top that makes a big loop around the facility. I’ve stared at it for the past eight months, but the last time I was up this close, I was on the outside being bused in from the city.

  The guard talks into his walkie-talkie and the gate swings open. I step through and taste freedom.

  “There’s two buses a day,” the guard says. “You missed the first one but another comes by at five.”