A City Dreaming (24 page)

“Positive reinforcement is not his strong suit,” Flemel told Boy conspiratorially.

That he was impossible to offend was one of the things M did not like about Flemel. M kept trying anyway, though. M was not one to back down at the first sign of difficulty. “That was not a suggestion, that was an order. I'm the one wearing the conical hat and sweeping the wand around, dig it? It's your job to mop my fucking floors, but today I don't want my floors mopped. I want you to find a way out of the greater metropolitan area.”

“You keep telling me I'm not your apprentice,” Flemel said. “You told me that three times today. When I came in, you told me that I wasn't your apprentice and that you never wanted to see my baby face again. And then I think you called me ‘Backstreet Boy,' which really just showed your age.”

“He probably wouldn't be able to escape the flood,” Boy said. “Not unless he can get off the Eastern Seaboard. But either way, we don't have time to argue about it—and your presence most assuredly will be missed, so let's get a move on.”

M couldn't think of a clean way to leave Flemel behind, and anyway it sounded like he was going to need every drop of Managerial goodwill that he could hold on to, and so Flemel ended up following them to the nearest subway stop and onto the next train.

“The old meeting spot?” M asked.

“Yup,” Boy said.

“You want to do the honors?”

“No need. The queens have sprung for a gate—anybody with a hint of talent will find themselves on an express train to Midtown.”

“Shit on a shingle.”

“I told you, it's crisis time.”

“Is someone going to explain what this is all about?” Flemel asked.

M shrugged, stared out the window at the underground caverns below, and made a gesture toward Boy like she might as well satisfy Flemel's curiosity.

“You know Manhattan Island?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“It's not really an island.”

“What is it then?”

“It's a lot of things, depending on how you're looking at it. But for right now, it's a giant turtle who's been kind enough to hang around a while, so that we could build the greatest city since the fall of Rome on his back.”

“Oh,” Flemel said. “OK.”

“He's a lethargic fellow, the World Turtle,” Boy continued, “and when he gets fitful, every fifty years or so, all the practitioners in the city get together and give him an extra-strength shot of Xanax, and he dips back under.”

“But?”

“But for some reason he hasn't slept as long as usual,” M broke in, “and if he wakes up he's going to go wherever it is that he was before he was in the river, and that will be trouble for those several million people who live and work and fuck on top of his shell. In hopes of heading off this unfortunate event, the two most powerful magicians in the city, who have hated each other desperately and for the better part of forever, have put aside their differences and called a conclave in a magic clubhouse, and we're going there now, to meet up with everyone who can do anything that everyone else can't to try and figure out some way to put the old bastard back asleep for a few more decades.”

The train slowed to a crawl. “What's below the turtle?” Flemel asked finally.

“It's turtles all the way down,” M informed him, stepping out of the now-open doors.

The chamber had been built a century earlier, when the great lords and ladies of that age—the Childe Rothstein, Alastair “Bossman” Tweed, the being whom the uninitiated refer to as Mary Astor—had hoped that building a council house might serve to unify the city's wizards, to offer a neutral territory to hash out the problems of the day. It had been a stupid idea. M had told the Childe that once, in a bar in the Bowery, celebrating the beginning of Prohibition with Canadian liquor. Wizards were a factitious and untrustworthy lot, and there wasn't any point in spending untold millions (and back then, millions had been a lot of money) and no small amount of the Management's goodwill just to build a drawing room that wouldn't see use more than once or twice a century. As it turned out Rothstein hadn't gotten to see it at all: He was shot in the back over a gambling debt, if you believed the history, though everyone who knew anything about anything knew he had been carried down into Hell for trying to fix a papal election. But that had been the thing about the Childe—too smart for his own good, didn't like a scam unless he could watch it double back on itself a few times.

The parlor he had envisioned had never been very good for much, for all of the reasons M had outlined, but one had to admit that it was really very pretty—the platonic ideal of the early-twentieth-century drawing room, except
bigger, as big as it needed to be, growing antechambers and bars and tables and stools and waiters and liquor and finger food and everything else that might be required at any given moment. And today, with the entirety of the city's wonder workers pressed inside it, the chamber needed to be plenty big—plenty big, indeed.

“Close your mouth, junior,” Boy said, elbowing Flemel in the side hard enough to make him wheeze. “You'll catch fireflies.”

“Fairies more like,” M said. “Christ, what a sideshow.” M forgot sometimes just how many of them there were, these wonder workers and necromancers and illusionists and diviners and cantrip makers and artificers and channelers and chronomancers and psychics and half-holy men and he could go on and on and on but he would rather not. So far as M was concerned being in good with the Management was a means—a means to a supernaturally long life, a life of ease and, if not plenty, at least sufficiency. A means for meeting pretty girls and getting into interesting sorts of trouble and getting out of that trouble with your skin and your skull and your soul intact. So he forgot sometimes that for the greater portion of his confederates, being in good with the Management—oh, hell, why not just say it at this point, everybody else was—being able to do magic was an end in and of itself. It was what made them special, what set them above the rest of the world, would-be Merlins spending their days sniffing around for a dark lord to fight, some grand quest to justify their own pointless existence. They could keep it, M thought. M did not suppose he was destined to do anything, but if he had a fate outlined for him since birth, it involved islands off the coast of Brazil and freshly made caipirinhas.

“They've called in all the freaks on this one,” M said, making their way toward the bar and leaving Flemel to play catch-up.

“You won't have far to walk if you need your palm read,” Boy said.

“I take back what I said earlier: The kid could outwork half these hacks.” One of whom—pale, ponytailed, wearing a black trench coat—shook M's hand in passing and pressed a business card on him. Continuing on M discovered it read,
RAVEN DARKFYRE, INITIATE OF THE THIRD CIRCLE
, then dropped it with a swift shudder.

“He's kind of cute,” Boy said.

“I suppose if you're in the mood for something emo. Wait, you mean my apprentice? You can have him,” M grumbled, but then, seeing the predatory look in Boy's eyes, amended his statement. “For the love of God, woman, he's not enough meal to tide you over till dinner. And what about Andre?”

“What about Andre?” Boy asked.

It turned out M didn't really have an answer to that either. He saw Ibis and Anais through the crowd, was thinking of heading over when he noticed Salome standing beside them, laughing at something Ibis had said, and decided against it. Their liaison had ended the morning after they had met at the goblin market, never to be repeated, and by mutual, if unvoiced, consent, neither had bothered to contact the other. M was wondering vaguely how many other ex-paramours were in this audience when Alatar of the Upper West Side stepped out from the crowd and obstructed M's passage with the tip of his quarterstaff.

“Why, if it isn't Dumbledick himself,” M said. “That's a lovely phallus you're carrying. Bigger than last time, or am I wrong?”

“Last time, last time, last time,” Alatar repeated. “You mean when you ruined my party, set my servants to eating my guests?”

“You shouldn't brood so much over past injuries—bad for the digestion.”

“You got lucky.”

“And I'm feeling lucky today,” M answered, “and anyway we're in the conclave right now, and I'd hardly think the queens would appreciate it if you violated their peace.”

“The queens won't always be around.”

“You know where to find me,” M said, thinking as he said it that he should probably move apartments and change his number.

“How do you know the heavy?” Boy asked, eyes crossed. Boy did not like to be left out of the loop on anything.

“Ask Andre,” M muttered, who by coincidence he happened to see then, taking up space at one of the many bars that dotted the chamber—little islands of alcohol set amidst the opulence, each manned by a pair of floating, oversize, white silk gloves. Bucephalus sat at the other end of the bar, looking frightening and earning himself a wide berth. Stockdale was standing next to him, though in fact M had always gotten the sense that Stockdale didn't like
Bucephalus, only tolerated him because he was friends with M. Of course M didn't really like Bucephalus either, only tolerated him because he was friends with Boy. God only knew why Boy tolerated him.

“Can you make a Gordon's Breakfast?” M asked.

The glove snapped its fingers and set to it.

“What's the news?” M asked after he had finished fortifying himself.

“Apart from the fact that the old man is looking to take another dip?” Stockdale shrugged. “We're all waiting around for Red and White to get the thing started.”

Bucephalus began to curse then, lengthily and potently enough that M worried it might attract the attention of some malevolent deity. He paused to take a swig from what looked like a bottle of grain alcohol, and then he said, “You know how much pull this is going to take? Last time we put him down I didn't have enough mojo left to light a candle.”

“I remember,” M said.

“I don't,” Flemel said, having found them again despite M's best efforts. “How did we manage it?”

“Brute force,” Boy said. “Don't get too close to any of these seventh-rate chicanerists. Half of them will find themselves drained to the quick come evening.”

“What do you mean?”

“Small fish tend not to fair so well in these sorts of things,” Stockdale said. “Get pulled too deep into the ritual, exhaust themselves entirely.”

“Speaking of which, anyone know what ritual we finally settled on?” Boy asked.

“It was lunar-based,” Stockdale recalled. “The Chinese zodiac, if I'm not mistaken. So no help there.”

“I remember it took the queens three days to agree on it,” Boy said.

“It'll be worse this time.” Stockdale finished his old-fashioned and was handed another by the floating left glove. “They hate each other more.”

“They hated each other quite a bit back in the day.”

“Sure, but back then they were just two women who didn't like each other. Now they're ideas, sides, team colors. It's not the same.”

“How the hell are we going to put him to sleep?”

“That's not really the question, now is it?” M asked quietly.

“What is?”

“Why is he waking up?”

But before they could speculate there was a—well, it wasn't a sound exactly, but that was the easiest way to think of it, as if a small man inside your skull was ringing a cocktail spoon against a glass flute. And then the room did something that violated the laws of Newtonian physics and probably quantum physics as well, though M was not as familiar with the latter. And then they were all, every one of the several thousand individuals in attendance, circled closely around a small stone dais atop which the elite of New York magical society sat.

“Wow,” Flemel said.

“Don't embarrass me,” M hissed.

There is no position so critical, no office so important, that the occasional, and even the more than occasional, utter incompetent will not wind up filling it. Heart surgeons, popes, presidents, it makes no difference. Look around and you will see an existence replete with people who are betraying, in a most egregious manner, the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them.

Which is to say that M would not have given a thimbleful for most of the eight men and women considered important enough to sit up at the round table. Abilene and Celise were there, of course, at opposite ends of the circle, and though he disliked the former and distrusted the latter, he had to admit that they were the only wizards on the podium whom he would not have preferred to see buried in a coffin and dropped into the sea. They had power and they weren't simpering fools, and if they had not already been the de facto rulers of New York, he'd have been happy to vote them into that miserable position.

Especially when compared with the other candidates. To the immediate left of Celise was Herald Sampson Fitzgerald Dupont VII, or maybe VIII. He seemed unable to sit still for more than a second or two, every pocket concealing a different electronic device competing for his attention, like a John Cage symphony of cacophonous beeping. Clockwise to Dupont sat Qashi Corlo, looking like he'd come straight from a board meeting and would be
going back to one as soon as he was through with this business. Across the table sat a wizened East Asian in a perfectly tailored suit whose name M did not know. Next to him was Alatar, leaning back in his chair and straining his hand around his oak staff. And next to him was—oh, hell, M didn't even want to look at them anymore. It was enough to make a person want to go square, work a regular nine-to-five, grow old and fat, and crumble to dust—at least you'd be surrounded by other adults.

“Would you like to begin, Celise?” Abilene asked.