Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,6
“Friend or foe, and state your business!”
“My business is my own,” Jane said coolly. She sheathed her iron knife, but slowly, making sure that the fairies saw it first.
It had the intended effect; they both shuffled back a step and tightened their grip on their spears.
Jane kept the quicksilver in her fist—she’d need it to get through the Bounds, anyway—and deliberately doffed her broad-brimmed hat, letting her long black hair fall out behind her in its loose plait and allowing the Rangers get a good look at the tattoos all over her face. “And I’m no one’s friend. I’m a fugitive and a vagabond … hadn’t you heard?”
Both Rangers gasped. “The Marked Woman,” Badger growled uneasily.
“Let me pass,” Jane told them, replacing her hat. “You have no choice, anyway. You can’t kill me, and if you get in my way I’ll surely kill you. This one, though,” she turned and kicked Twitch hard in the belly, “this one is one of yours.”
She straightened her duster and walked on. She knew that she had the initiative, but she would only retain it if she kept moving.
“How did you even get in here, Outcast?” she heard Badger grunt behind her, and then came pummeling sounds that boded ill for Twitch.
Light shone in through all the windows around Jane. Each window let in luminescence of a different quality—noon’s blaze here, starlight there, and in a third place a fluorescent flutter—resulting in a dim and shifting patchwork of illumination in the maze Jane now traversed. Nowhere was there darkness, but nowhere was there any light a traveler could trust. She whispered instructions in her birth tongue to the drop of quicksilver, infused it with her ka, and then followed its directions as it strained within her hand.
The fey were overwhelmingly convinced of their own cleverness, but a little insight and a few basic tools were all one needed to handle them.
Before she’d activated the quicksilver, the crow had sat on a high step and stared at her. Now it preceded Jane up a staircase, across a needle-thin bridge, under a series of arches so low Jane had to stoop, across a vault the size of a football stadium and into a warren of twisting halls only a cubit wide. At her every step she heard the muffled swishing of things moving, just out of her sight, not quite in sync with the metallic jingle of her spurs; Jane ignored the sounds. The crow stopped at the window she was looking for, the gate she had willed her quicksilver guide to locate.
With a single word, Jane cleared the frosted surface of the window and looked through. She saw what she expected and hoped to see: the silvered back of the bartender John’s head, a row of bleary-eyed college boys flipping cups at the bar, and beyond them, a table with a circle of giggling young women chattering at the tall singer, Jim.
Azazel’s son. Azazel had had another son.
And Jim had the hoof.
Jane didn’t have an empty vial. She drew the FN Model 1910, the Calamity Horn, the weapon Heaven had loathed and now coveted, and fired off a round into the maze. Bang! the discharge echoed loud, but there was no mortal in earshot to be driven mad by it. The sound that Jane was looking for was the tinny rattle of the brass shell as it hit the floor. The noise might discombobulate Foxtail and Badger, but she was indifferent to their concerns.
Jane holstered the gun. She stooped, picked up the shell, and poured the quicksilver bead into it. She tamped a bit of wax from a candle stub in her pocket into the top to seal it; that would have to do for now. She pocketed candle and shell again and turned to face the window. She stretched to look down at the floor at John’s feet, watching his movement and his shadow. When he stood to calmly refuse another beer to a buzzcut boy who looked like he was on the verge of throwing up his last one, she cast the opening spell—
stepped through the gate, still mumbling in Adamic—
and touched down in John the barkeep’s shadow, safely invisible.
John stiffened, straightening his back and looking around him. The Appalachian wanderer knew too much; Jane stepped quickly away from him, exiting the print of his shadow and slipping out of his arm’s reach, letting the wards of dissembling take over again. She crouched quickly, stepping under the hinged flap in the bar leading