"So I see," said Hellebore, but did not move. "I came to talk to you. I've brought someone. This is…"
"I know who it is," the boy said with a grin. Even the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles, no stranger to disturbing sights, could not help noticing that the child's smile went his stepfather's grimaces one better: it did not touch his eyes or warm the rest of his face in any way, a grin like someone pulling up the corners of a corpse's mouth. "We're old friends, he and I."
"Ah. Yes. In any case, I wanted to ask you a few questions. Get your advice about something."
"About Theo Vilmos."
It was surprising in itself to see Hellebore surprised. "Yes."
"He's still free."
"How did you know?"
"Oh, come, Stepfather, that doesn't require any great art. What else would bring the two of you here? Your esteemed guest scarcely ever leaves his house in the waterfront district. And if you had managed to get your hands on this Vilmos, this… mortal," he gave the word an unusual, even poisonous emphasis, "then why would you be asking me for advice?" The boy stretched, then beckoned to one of the nurses. She came, shamefacedly sneaking glances at Lord Hellebore to see if he objected. The boy shrugged off his robe and stood, rosily and plumply naked. "Dry me. I wish to be dressed now."
As the nurse began to rub him with a towel, Lord Hellebore sent one of the other nurses for chairs. He sat, stretching out his long legs. "Well, then. Tell me why we have not succeeded."
"Because this is not a runaway servant or a spy from one of the other Houses you seek. Success will not come so easily."
"Are you suggesting that somehow this creature is outwitting us?"
Where another child might have rolled his eyes or snorted, the boy only became more still. Even as his outside was being briskly rubbed, he seemed to retreat into some quiet place within himself, barely within shouting distance. "No," he said at last. "I am saying that things like this — things of which this Vilmos person is a part — are never simple. He is an attractant of sorts, especially now that he is in our world, and so he will draw unexpected forces, cause unforeseen accidents, spawn unlikely coincidences. Look at the things that have happened around him already, consider the momentous events of which he has unwittingly been a part. Is a fish powerful? But throw one into a quiet pool where cranes and crocodiles are sleeping and things begin to change." The boy turned his exotic, brown-eyed stare on the Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles. "You should know that."
"I do. But you put it nicely."
"Thank you. My stepfather has sacrificed much so that I might have a good education."
The Remover nodded. "Let's hope he has not sacrificed too much."
Silence fell. Hellebore did not break it, but rose and gestured. The other nurse came forward, her arms full of soft pale clothing, and the two servants began to dress the boy. "Come," the lord said to the Remover. "I have kept the car waiting for you."
"Give my love to Stepmother," said the boy, smiling again.
Hellebore grunted as if he were too distracted to reply. He did not look back, and did not speak again until he and his guest were out of the steamy room and moving down the corridor, the air cooling with every step.
"Everything that was ever written about creating a Terrible Child is true," said Hellebore thoughtfully. "He is an abomination."
The Remover nodded. "Then you got what you wanted, my lord, didn't you?"
18
SIDEWALKS OF NEW EREWHON
"You have to tell her, Theo. You know you have to."
He didn't want to do anything of the sort. He much preferred looking out the window at the nighttime streets. It was a place strange beyond all imagining, this city of muted bronze and jade and shiny black glass, even here on its outskirts with most of the sky-clawing towers still miles away.
Johnny Battistini had gone to Japan once as a replacement drummer for a metal band past its prime — "They made me wear a wig, Theo, no shit. I looked like Phyllis Diller!" — a one-shot gig that he had talked about for years afterward. At the time Theo had been frustrated by Johnny's inability to describe Tokyo and why it had made such an impression on him. Although he spoke about it frequently, summoning up the memory without warning from a haze of post-practice weed smoke, he could never explain his fascination more clearly than: "It was just… weird. It's like a regular city, but then it's all different and shit. But to them, it's not different. And that's the really weird part!"
I finally get where you were coming from, John-boy.
Theo felt a sharp, sharp pang of homesickness, as though a less substantial version of the knife that had killed Tansy's nephew had sliced him open and left him helpless against the strangeness of this new place. For the first time in his life, he truly missed Johnny B. The drummer would have reduced the whole of the experience to, "Wow, this place is crazy!" and by doing so made it palatable.
Other than the bizarre variety of creatures going about their lives just as though they were normal people in Theo's normal world, it was hard to say what about the City was so alien. The buildings, although a bit strange in shape and decoration compared to those back home, were still within the bounds of comprehension — no matter how gossamer-thin the walkways between buildings or shimmeringly translucent the stone facades, general engineering seemed at least similar to the mortal world: sprites and other fairies might fly, but the buildings largely resisted such notions. The nature of the City's artificial lights was different, of course, but he had seen that from a distance — he was just seeing it more closely now. The limousine had come out of a long stretch of darkened industrial warehouses on the outer rim of the City and was rolling through a lively network of streets lined with stores and theaters and clubs and restaurants, many decorated with stylized moons and apples, apparently for the harvest holiday, all with signs ablaze, but these arrangements of glowing tubes and bulbs had a spectral, twilight quality, as though even the fiercest, hottest spotlights were draped with shrouds of pale green and silver and gray. They weren't, of course: it was the light itself that was unusual, the otherworldly radiance of Faerie, a spectral glow beneath which mortals first lost their way and then lost their souls…
"Theo!" Applecore's whisper was so loud it hardly qualified as a whisper anymore; it felt like she'd stuck her head all the way into the hole of his ear. "You have to tell her."
"Why can't she just let us off somewhere near where this Foxglove guy lives… ?"
She shushed him with surprising force. It felt like she'd stuck a bicycle pump in his eustachian tube. Jesus, she sure has a loud voice for a tiny person, he thought, wincing. A friggin' six-inch-tall drill sergeant.
"We're not goin' anywhere near that shower!" she hissed. "I told you, I don't trust Foxglove. And don't mention any names, anyway!"
Theo shot a glance toward Poppy, who was sitting with her head tilted back against the seat, listening to the music with her eyes closed and a little smile on her face. She was holding Theo's hand quite tightly. "Okay, but why can't she drop us off near wherever it is we really are going?"
"Because the more she knows, the more dangerous it is for us — and for her, if for some reason you're suicidal and my life doesn't mean much to you. We don't want her able to tell anyone anything except she dropped us in the Deepshade District."