The Night Sheriff, page 8
The room was sheathed in dark velvet, and lit with several dozen candles. There was a small round table, inlaid with assorted designs of wood and bone. A silver bowl sat in the center. She silently indicated that we should sit, and we all observed each other in silence for almost a minute.
When she spoke, it was with a delightful French Creole accent that I found most charming, and we spent a pleasant half hour or so engaged in polite conversation, which in retrospect, we realized, consisted of us regaling her with our biographies and philosophies, while she revealed … nothing at all. It was very well done, and afterwards, Mr. Mortimer acted positively starstruck. However, I myself had a growing feeling that something was off.
I had initially been thrown by the panoply of charms and amulets she wore, but while Mr. Mortimer talked, I allowed myself to concentrate on the person beneath the aura. While there was no denying that the woman before us had a great deal of magical ability, it was becoming evident to me that all of it was learned, as opposed to being innate. This puzzled me. The weave I had sensed over New Orleans, even the one that enveloped the house—not only could this person not have constructed it, but I found it hard to believe that she could have maintained it so perfectly. There was a mystery here.
Suddenly a bell faintly chimed, although I saw none in the room, and L’Enfant stated that she would like to talk to each of us separately, starting with Mr. Mortimer. I was shown to a comfortably appointed room, where the hollow man said that refreshments would be provided. I demurred, naturally, and was soon examining what, in retrospect, remains the most interesting collection of books I have ever encountered, when I suddenly realized that I was no longer alone.
I turned, and there in the doorway was a young girl child, no more than ten, if I was any judge. She was dressed in a simple shift, and her hair was contained within a bright orange kerchief. A black rag doll was clutched under one arm. It was obvious from her facial features that she was related to L’Enfant, and she examined me with the same dark and unnerving gaze.
I bowed slightly and gave her a closemouthed smile. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.”
Never breaking eye contact, she gave an elegant curtsy and replied, “Good evening to you, Monsieur Monstre.”
A perspicacious child. I settled down onto the sofa and examined her. Interesting. The L’Enfant had an obvious aura of magic. This child did not. Unnaturally so. As a rule, people have at least a flicker of the arcane to one degree or another in their makeup. I have heard it debated that it is this ineffable something that elevates humanity above the animal. But this child, the probable daughter of the current L’Enfant herself, presumably conceived, born, and raised here in the heart of New Orleans, had nothing.
“My name is Celeste,” she volunteered. “What is yours?” I told her, and she surprised me yet again, by repeating it back perfectly. “That is a very old name,” she said.
“It was brand-new when I got it.” This actually produced a smile. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Le zombie brought me here.” I was not familiar with that particular term at the time, but I assumed she was referring to the hollow man. She tilted her head to the side. “I think you’re supposed to eat me.”
Three seconds later, I was in the hallway, about to tear the hollow man in half, when I felt a small hand on my arm. It was Celeste. I was astonished. She was calm and, indeed, had a small smile upon her face. After my explosive exit and furious attack of the hollow man, I would have expected her to be scared, or, at the very least, surprised. She was neither. “Please put le zombie down,” she said seriously. “If you rip him up, his spirit will be confused, and it will take a long time to get him back to where he belongs.” She paused. “And I’d have to sweep him up off the carpet.”
“What is going on here?” I demanded. “What do you think I am?”
“I still do not know what you are, Monsieur Monstre, but I’m beginning to get a better idea.”
I wheeled upon her and snarled, exposing my beautiful teeth. “I do not like games at my expense.”
At once I was thrown back, as if I had been struck by a physical force. Eldritch power filled the room. I realized that this child, far from having no power at all, possessed so much that she had been able to hide it from me. I had never heard of anyone who could do such a thing. But I am not without resources. I gathered myself and flowed between the lines of magic she wove and stopped inches from her face. That startled her, and she took an uncertain step back, but I still felt no fear. I looked into her wide eyes and the old soul I saw within was something quite special. Enough so that I pulled myself up short.
Usually a soul “lives in the moment,” as it were. The part of you that identifies itself as Johan Smyth, wheelwright, for example, will have no problem the next time around identifying itself as Kim Lee Sun, locomotive engineer. But the soul before me was under no such illusion. It knew who it was, and who it had been. I stepped back, and again made a bow, slightly lower this time. “Madam Selene L’Enfant, if I may guess. This is an unexpected honor.”
The child gave a very adult sniff of displeasure. “Call me Celeste, s’il vous plaît.” She glanced back at the doorway and lowered her voice. “Ma merè doesn’t deal as well as she should with unexpected phenomenon when it affects la famille. She’s been like that ever since she was ma petite bébé.” She smiled wistfully, and then focused her attention back at me. “But you. You have abilities I was uninformed of.” I had no idea of who her informants would have been, but the icy tone of her voice seemed to cause the very shadows in the room to shrink back slightly into the corners.
“As do you,” I said. We returned to the room and I again settled onto the sofa and regarded her with interest. “Do you remember all of your incarnations?”
“Only the last two,” she admitted. “I believe I am older than that, but I did not become aware of le grand cycle until I was the first L’Enfant. I suspect that it is a combination of this family’s bloodline, combined with something unusual about my own psychic composition.” She sighed. “I do not detect anything similar about the intervening generations, so I must assume that it is something about moi même.”
“Fascinating,” I mused. “Do you have any Tibetan in your family tree?”
“Tibetan?” The girl shook her head. “I’ve never heard of that. Is it a family name?”
I waved a hand. “A kingdom in the mountains somewhere near China, or so I’ve been told. I only ask because in my travels I have heard similar stories of serial reincarnation pertaining to some of their holy men.”
Celeste considered this, and then climbed onto the sofa beside me. Companionably, she patted my arm. “You have the potential to be an endless source of wonder and surprise.” She looked up at me. “We should be les amis,” she said seriously.
“I would like that.”
Her mouth tightened. “As would I, but we shall see,” and I thought I detected a touch of inexplicable sadness. “So you are willing to put yourself under this geas your friend is proposing?”
I shrugged. “I am not thrilled about it,” I admitted. “But as I do not condone attacking children in the first place, I do not see as it being a hindrance. And, if it puts Mr. Mortimer’s brother at ease, then so much the better.” I looked at her and steepled my fingers. “Do you think I should not?”
She let out a huge sigh and fell back into the sofa, looking at me with an unreadable expression. “You are a strange one, you know. The idea of being under a constraint causes you to bristle, yet, as I understand it, you willingly confined yourself to a small village for centuries.”
I acknowledged the dichotomy. “It was where I belonged.”
“I see. Yes, that is important. Well, ever since your Mr. Zenon specified what he wanted, I have been consulting auguries and asking a great deal of advice from the higher powers.”
“I don’t think it merits that much effort.”
“Nor did I, when I started, but rest assured that every indicator shows me that, as you so well put it, this Zenonland will be where you belong.”
“Well, I certainly appreciate the effort.”
She leaned in and looked me directly in the eye. “Hold that thought.”
And thus, less than a week later, the elder L’Enfant, Mr. Mortimer, and I stood at the geographical center of the soon-to-be park, and as the moon rose, words were said, documents were signed and burned, and Mr. Mortimer (as a blood representative of the family) and I did the little dance (which neither of us was one hundred percent sure was really necessary, but Celeste had included it in her instructions). We shuffled about like a pair of inept vaudevillians, and to my shock, when the last heel had been turned, I felt a smack on the back of my head that, although it caused me no pain, drove me to my knees.
Mr. Mortimer stared down at me owlishly, and then gave a deep sigh as he offered me a hand up. “It is done,” he said to no one in particular.
I noticed that L’Enfant, even though I had seen her do nothing, looked exhausted. “Are you all right, Madam?”
She looked up at me and smiled weakly. “Merci. I will need a chance to rest.”
I never got to know the woman well. Celeste told me that the interstitial L’Enfants, who by any other metric would be considered powerful practitioners of the Art in their own right, suffered from being all too aware that they were mere placeholders, and they retired as soon as their reincarnated daughter reached the age of majority. People who work with Magic do not like being around another magic user who is better or more powerful than themselves, if only because when the situation is reversed, they tend to exploit the weaker person unmercifully. One would hope that such a dynamic would not apply within a mother/daughter relationship, but magic users do tend to be very unpleasant people. As I collected up the paraphernalia, she took Mr. Mortimer’s arm, and we headed towards the exit.
I could tell that Mr. Mortimer’s emotions were in turmoil, which was very unusual. He took a deep breath. “I want you to know that I really think this was for the best.”
I waved a hand. “I understand. Hopefully your brother will feel more secure.”
He stopped and looked at me with genuine distress upon his face. “No, I am first and foremost concerned with your safety, my friend.”
We came to the sidewalk outside. “I don’t know why you always think I need protecting—” Which was when I first ran into the barrier.
Mr. Mortimer and L’Enfant continued on past, and then turned back to face me. “Well,” he said, “you’re still too trusting, for one thing.”
I couldn’t see it, the night air still blew in my face, but I couldn’t go forward. I stepped to the side—again I couldn’t go forward. I felt a touch of panic. “What have you done?”
L’Enfant spoke up. “In addition to preventing you from attacking children, I have placed a restriction upon your movements, Monsieur. You cannot leave Zenon property.” She glanced towards Mr. Mortimer. “As I was engaged to do.”
I was trapped. Trapped in a place that I knew nothing about. “How dare you?” I snarled. “You said nothing of this! Why would you do this to me?”
L’Enfant disengaged herself from Mr. Mortimer’s arm. “This is now a conversation between two old friends, oui? Our business is done.”
“You cannot leave me like this,” I screamed. “I did not agree to this!” But without a backwards glance, she moved off towards a waiting car, which, after she entered it, drove away into the night.
Mr. Mortimer saw her go, sighed, and when he turned back to me, looked years older. “Why have I done this? Because, my dear friend, everything goes in cycles. You taught me that. Politics, fashions, and most importantly—tolerance. You’ve seen what I have, these last few years. For whatever reason, western civilization is increasingly determined to turn its back on the things of the night and embrace the mathematical surety of pure science.
“Unfortunately, by your very existence, you call that surety into question, at a time when they do not want questions. Rather than try to deal with you, understand the things that you represent, they will try to scrub you from existence.”
“Let them try,” I screamed. “I have lived for a thousand years! What can they do that hasn’t been tried hundreds of times?”
“I don’t know,” he said firmly. “Because after they try everything old, they’ll try something new. Something from this century—something you and the rest of the world hasn’t even imagined yet! Things are changing! Things are different! Do you think—honestly now—do you believe that something like you could show up in an established community and remain undetected for another thousand years? There are libraries now. Telephones. Science. No! Anywhere you go, you’d be exposed and exterminated in less than a month!”
“And yet you’ve trapped me here in America. In the heart of this science-land!”
“No. He has trapped you in a place that science will overlook. A place where you will be safe,” a delicate voice from behind me said. I whirled and there was Celeste. When I saw her, I roared and reached for her—but just before I touched, I doubled over in sickness and agony, and my face slammed into the concrete. I was close enough that I alone heard her quiet sigh of relief, but the face she turned to Mr. Mortimer was calm and self-possessed. “Your geas has now been demonstrated to be fully operational, Monsieur. Make sure that your check clears.”
“You are no child,” I swore, as I climbed unsteadily to my feet.
Celeste raised her chin and let the force of her personality flow free. “I am in every way that is important, Monsieur Monstre.” She then astonished me by placing her tiny hand upon my arm. “You feel betrayed. Tricked. Trapped. That is naturellement, if only because it is true. But your Mr. Zenon, and I, we did this to you because he is your friend, as I wish to be.” Celeste turned to Mr. Mortimer. “Let me speak to him, monsieur.”
Mr. Mortimer looked off into the distance. He was clearly troubled. At the time I had thought it simple guilt. If only … But he said nothing, and so the girl walked back into the park. Deliberately, I turned my back on Mr. Mortimer and followed her. I regret that now.
We walked silently, side by side, until we arrived at the mechanized tower that stood before what would be known as Futureopolis. I had noticed it before, a gigantic amalgamation of gears and pistons that, when activated, moved in a hypnotic dance that did nothing. There she turned to face me. “Look at this ridiculous thing.” She shook her head. “It evokes Science like a voodoo doll evokes a living man. But a voodoo doll is not a living man, hey? Just like nothing here will really be what a scientist would call Science.
“No, like everything here, it is a celebration of magic. Fairy tales! Ghosts! Spaceships! All equally make believe. Oh, I am not saying that Science is not real. It is a legitimate way of knowing the world. Looking at it. Learning from it. But the all-powerful Science that the people of this age desperately want to believe in—the Science that will give them their houses on the moon and their mechanical zombies—that is as much dreamstuff as my old twopenny love potion.”
She sighed. “But I sold a lot of that particular dream, because it was something that people wanted to believe in, and today they still want to see Magic, but—and this is the important part—they want to call it Science.
“I cannot deny that the old magic has a lot to answer for. There used to be a reason you wanted cold iron over your door. Why the smart huntsman kept a round of silver bullets in his belt pouch. People remember the bad old things, and they embrace Science because it tells them that these things do not exist, and the people, they do not want them to exist.”
I considered this. “But they do exist.”
Celeste nodded. “Oui. An inconvenient truth, and a part of humanity, a deep part, knows this, knows that there are things that do not answer to science, and thus, at that deep level, it needs to believe that there is still good magic to help protect them against the bad.” Celeste waved her hands to encompass the park. “And that is the wondrous thing that this Monsieur Zenon is doing, though I cannot think that he is doing it deliberately. Oh, he has his vision of what this place can and should be, of course, and it’s a charmingly utopian one, but even he does not know what it is that he has created.” She looked at me and shrugged. “I could almost believe that he is some higher power’s catspaw, unwittingly doing what needs to be done.”
I was in no mood for philosophy. “So what is he doing?”
She placed her fingertips together and spoke slowly. “He is creating nothing less than a place where the concept of good magic can continue to openly exist. Where it can lodge inside a child’s brain and heart and take root and be passed on as a viable idea. Dismissed as mere entertainment, of course, but kept alive within the memory of mankind will be the knowledge that there is something that can keep the Bad Things away.”
I stared at her. “You still haven’t explained why I’ve been trapped here.”
“Because this will be a place of magic, hidden in plain sight from a larger world where real magic will not be tolerated. You and your magic will simply be another accepted wonder. You will be safe here, and …” She looked off into the distance.
“… And?”
“And”—she looked at me with a serious expression—“you will be needed here.” She shook her head. “I did not trap you here lightly. I know what it is to be bound by a web of obligations so strong that you can move in but one direction, as I myself will be again. But every augury I consulted told me that what I was doing was The Right Thing To Do. So I did it.”
“So you say, but I do not wish to be trapped here forever!”
At this Celeste actually smiled. “It will not be forever, mon ami. Your Mr. Zenon stated that you comprehend the nature of cycles better than most. Think! A denial of the true nature of the world this extreme cannot hold for long. The names of the monsters may change, but they do still exist, and in time it may well be humanity’s cherished Science that proves their existence.
