Wormwood Gate (10 page)

‘I don't rightly know,' said the rabbit with an air of dejection. ‘I was sort of hoping you'd know, being one yourself. But of course you're a blow-in – you've no more notion of why the queen was hunting you than me left hind paw.'

‘I just wonder,' she said, ‘if the – I don't know if it's accurate to call them “rules”, exactly – the underlying mechanism around names … does that even apply to me? Do I even
have
a true name? I mean, this place, it's like Dublin, kind of, but the real Tower of Light is just a big spike in the middle of a street. It makes a good landmark if you're lost, but there isn't room inside it to fit a single cell, much less a whole prison.'

The rabbit looked confused. ‘What do you mean, real? This
is
real.'

Aisling sighed. ‘I suppose it is, at that. Real enough, at least. But …' She was on the verge of saying, ‘Where I come from, you can't change a person's life just by changing their name,' but she wasn't sure enough of that to say it out loud. You could even change the spelling of a name, and that would make a difference. Her second favourite singer was called Siouxsie Sioux, not Suzy Sue.

She crept to the edge of the alley, keeping close to the wall, and peered out. ‘We're near the river,' she whispered. ‘Do you suppose we could swim? People do swim in the river, sometimes.'
Very masochistic people
, she added in her head.

‘Not
people
,' said the rabbit quietly. ‘Merhorses and the dead. Though I suppose you couldn't call what the dead do “swimming”.'

There has to be a way
, said Aisling to herself. To the rabbit, she said, ‘What's the deal about the Wormwood Gate, anyway?'

The rabbit made another of those movements that might have been a shrug. ‘It moves. It's the only gate that moves, so the queen can't close it or keep a guard on it. It was still for a while, but then it started moving again. It disappeared for a bit, and there was rumours that the queen had destroyed it, though I didn't credit them. She's powerful, but not
that
powerful.'

‘Is there another way to cross the river?' said Aisling. ‘Any bridges the queen doesn't know about, or –'

‘There's one bridge she can't set a guard on,' said the rabbit, ‘but you can't cross it on foot. It's a railway bridge, and there's trains going back and forth on it all the time.'

‘Could we catch one of those trains?'

‘Do I look like I carry train fare in me pockets?'

‘Well, how much would it be? Or … do we absolutely need a fare? I mean, I've fare-dodged a couple of times when I didn't have money on me, and it's not that hard.'

The rabbit gave her a hard stare.

‘You must have a brass neck,' it said after a long pause, ‘to want to blag a free ride on the trains with the queen on the rampage and you not half an hour out of prison!' It laughed a slightly wheezy laugh that went on for a long time, and when the laugh finally died down, it nodded and hopped towards her until it was crouched at her feet. ‘Let's chance our arms,' it said. ‘The worst that can happen me is I get reborn as a slug or something. I don't know what the worst would be for you, but you don't seem to care, so what matter? Pick me up, would you? Me legs is tired.'

Aisling bent to pick the rabbit up. ‘Where's the nearest station?' she said as she straightened up.

The rabbit peered around, sniffing the air. ‘This way,' it said, indicating the right direction with its head. ‘I'll give you a steer if it gets complicated.'

Aisling started to walk in the direction the rabbit had indicated, hoping that it wouldn't be too far a walk; the rabbit was heavier than it looked, and her own legs were pretty tired. She was tired in general, for that matter; she had got no sleep at all, and between the climbing and the running and the stress and the excitement, she felt she'd done more in the … however long it had been … that she'd spent in the City than she'd normally do in a year.

She looked around as she walked, trying to get a better sense of what the City was like. Now that the sun was rising and she had an idea of what to look for, she could see that the City was not as much like Dublin as it had seemed by night – or rather, it was much
more
like Dublin than it had seemed by night, more like Dublin than Dublin itself, as if the boring and generic bits of Dublin had been filtered out and only the unique and interesting bits had been left behind. There were no chain stores here, no blandly inoffensive bars, no fast-food restaurants, no billboards; there were precious few new buildings, despite what the rabbit had said. Everything she saw seemed refined, simplified, like a drawing of itself, or a photograph that had had all the distracting extraneous details airbrushed out.

She peeked down at the rabbit, warm and silent in her arms. It looked a little unreal too, now that she was looking at it properly.
And why a rabbit?
she thought
. How does that make sense?

They came to an area she recognised as being near the Four Courts, and then with a jolt she realised that the vaguely silhouetted building she'd been seeing peeking over the tops of the houses
was
the Four Courts. It wasn't that any of the details of the building's structure or design were different – it had the same dome, the same pillars, the same imposing grandeur – but somehow in the dawning light of the City of the Three Castles, it looked … sinister. Frightening. When she'd passed it by in Dublin, she'd always been able to admire it as a work of architecture, but now she could only think of the number of times people must have gone in there hoping to be cleared of crimes they hadn't committed and had their hopes dashed; and the people too who must have gone in there hoping that a person who had done them some terrible wrong would be punished for it and been bitterly disappointed.

‘Here,' said the rabbit. It was quivering in Aisling's arms, its eyes darting around. Aisling glanced around, spotted two sets of tracks running in parallel down the middle of the street, a small platform with a sign saying FOUR COURTS –
Na Ceithre Cúirteanna
and a very uncomfortable-looking bench. She sat down on the bench to wait and started stroking the rabbit absent-mindedly. It occurred to her a moment after she'd started that this might be an unforgivable liberty, but the rabbit didn't seem to mind, so she didn't stop.

‘This is a Luas station,' she said after a while, ‘not a train station. That's no good to us if we want to cross a railway bridge.'

‘You wha'?' said the rabbit. ‘Lewis? What are you on about?'

‘Huh,' said Aisling, ‘never mind; it doesn't matter.'

There was a familiar
clang clang clang
, and Aisling stood up as a tram approached. Or was it a train? She couldn't tell. It had the shape of a Luas tram, but the colouring of a DART train. The effect was very disconcerting. The doors too were a weird hybrid of DART and Luas doors, and there was a gap between the train (tram?) and the platform that was deeper and wider than it should have been.

She took a window seat in a set of four and put the rabbit down on the seat beside her. There were a few other passengers, all of them odd – though by now that was what she had come to expect. One was a ragged old man wearing what looked like multiple overcoats layered one on top of the other, muttering to himself. One was a middle-aged woman dressed all in black, her hand resting on the handlebar of a pram full of vegetables, singing the Schubert ‘Ave Maria' in a cracked and melancholy voice. One was a tall, thin man with a face made up like a clown, wearing an ankle-length white fur coat and riding a unicycle back and forth from one end of the tram to the other.

She was a little disappointed that there were no talking animals or other mythological creatures to be seen, but perhaps it was too early in the day.

The woman with the pram got out at the first stop, and the rabbit bumped Aisling's arm with its nose.

‘Lift me up to the map there,' it said. ‘I want to be sure we don't get off too early.'

Aisling obeyed, taking a good look at the map herself. It confirmed her suspicion: whatever the reason, the City of the Three Castles didn't distinguish between the DART, the Luas, and any other train that happened to pass through Dublin; they were all smooshed together to form one uber-rail service, which made the map a little complicated to read.

‘Tara Street,' said the rabbit quietly. ‘Is that near where yous got dropped off?'

‘I don't think so,' said Aisling, just as quietly. ‘It's on the right side of the river, but we were further west down the quays.'

‘Ah, bejaysus, more walkin',' said the rabbit. ‘Ach, I suppose it can't be helped. But I've a powerful hatred for walkin' more than fifty feet. It's not dignified, sure it's not.'

‘You're a rabbit after my own heart,' said Aisling, who never walked anywhere if she could get away with it.

‘Tickets please!' cried a voice, and Aisling's heart began to pound. She sat down and tucked the rabbit under her coat, folding her arms over the bulge this formed and closing her eyes.
I'm not here
, she thought fervently,
and if I am here, you already checked my ticket. I'm not here, and if I am, you already checked my ticket. Oh, if I believed in God I'd be praying right now!

Another voice cried, ‘Tickets please!', this time in a Polish accent, coming from another direction. Aisling opened her eyes and darted a look back over her shoulder. Prawo Jazdy was approaching them from behind, wearing a startlingly yellow high-visibility jacket over a dark blue uniform, ticket clipper in one hand, smartcard verifier in the other. She glanced in the other direction, and saw Abayomiolorunkoje, in an identical uniform, coming towards them from the other end of the train.

‘Well, isn't this a fine to-do,' the rabbit muttered, poking its head out from between the flaps of Aisling's coat. ‘Though there's few enough people in the City these days that a thing like this was bound to happen.'

‘What do you –'

‘Shh! I'll do the talking.'

Abayomiolorunkoje reached them first. He gave them both an assessing look. Aisling wasn't sure whether she felt more scared of what he might do or more creeped out by the odd way his eyes reflected the light. ‘I suppose you do not have a ticket, do you, Coney Bawn?'

‘Sure why would I want one, when I know me old butty Abayomiolorunkoje is always happy to give me a scooch?' said the rabbit.

Abayomiolorunkoje looked from Aisling to the rabbit and back again. Aisling held her head straight, though it was an effort not to look away or lower her gaze from those strange eyes
. I didn't do anything wrong
, she thought,
so I'm not going to act guilty
.

‘What is going on?' said Prawo Jazdy, coming up alongside their seat. ‘Ah!' he cried when he saw Aisling. ‘You got away! You have not been caught?'

‘I don't see why I should tell you anything about that,' said Aisling. ‘You two, and your friend, you were going to sell us to the queen. Are you going to do that now? Whistle for the seagulls and have us carried away to the Tower?'

Abayomiolorunkoje took a step back. ‘No need to be hasty,' he said. ‘Why don't we –'

‘No need!' Prawo Jazdy shouted. ‘How can you say no need?' He threw his clipper and his verifier to the floor with a clatter and reached for Aisling as if he was going to lift her out of her seat and toss her over his shoulder. Aisling wrapped her arms around the rabbit, pulling it close to her chest and shrinking down into her seat.

And between one blink and the next, Prawo Jazdy disappeared.

Aisling's mouth fell open. ‘What …' Her voice was hoarse. She cleared her throat and tried again. ‘What just happened? Coney Bawn, did you do that?'

The rabbit shook its head vigorously. ‘That wasn't me,' it said in a quiet, scared-sounding voice.

‘Nor me,' said Abayomiolorunkoje, though he didn't look scared so much as grimly resigned, as if this had confirmed the truth of something he'd been fearing for a long time.

‘Then what …' Aisling loosened her arms a little. She could feel the rabbit's heart pounding against its ribs, even through all the fur. ‘What was that?'

‘That was the City fading a little,' said Abayomiolorunkoje.

‘I've never seen it with me own eyes,' said the rabbit. ‘Usually you look away, and it's when you look back that things have changed. Or gone.'

‘It has been happening more and more,' said Abayomiolorunkoje. ‘To people, to buildings … whole streets have been vanishing before my eyes.'

‘And what would you care about that?' said the rabbit, its tone sharper than Aisling had ever heard it. ‘Sure, you're not a Betweener.'

‘He's not?' said Aisling.

‘What does that matter?' Abayomiolorunkoje said. ‘The Realms Between have no native-born children, only those who pass through and make a home here. I have wandered far from my homeland, and you have too, I think. I can care about a realm that is not my own. I like this City. At least, I used to like it. It was once a fine place to sit and spin a web. I would rather not see it destroyed.'

‘That's not what you said last night,' said Aisling. She was only half following the conversation, but what she could pick up didn't seem to accord with what she had overheard Abayomiolorunkoje saying to the others the night before.

Abayomiolorunkoje shrugged. ‘The sun has risen, and the world is different,' he said, taking off his cap and scratching his head. ‘Soon, either the queen will fall or the City will collapse. It cannot survive long in the Realms Between as it is.'

‘This girl's trying to stop that from happening,' said the rabbit, and Aisling nodded.

Abayomiolorunkoje put his cap back on and exhaled sharply. ‘If I can help you in any way that is in my power, I will come if you call for me. That is a promise! And if I cannot help you, call for me all the same. There are creatures scattered through all the Realms Between who owe me favours and will come when they hear my name.'