No Man's Land

One

The address was in West Erlsley—­they often were—­in a maze of run-­down tenements and concrete walkways that stank of piss and the charred extinction of small conjuring fires. Pathetic remnants of bone and fur and feathers in sheltered corners, where the meager sacrifices had been made. Huldu runes scrawled across the stone in charcoal or daubed in blood. As far as Duncan could tell, most of it was gibberish. Certainly, there was nothing you’d call a functional spell anywhere on these walls. Here and there, he even spotted the odd piece of mathematical notation in the mix, though his math was not good enough to work out if it had any more coherence than the Huldu symbols it coexisted among.

None of which surprised him in the least.

In the trenches, he’d seen men cling to all and any systems of faith they could muster, some even distilling their own homegrown superstition, ritual, prayer, whatever—­anything at all to give the illusion of control over the vast impersonal forces that brought them death on a daily basis. One soldier under his command in early 1915, Private Greaves, had carried with him a set of intricately whittled wooden figures that he would take out whenever he had leisure, set up in some configuration that evidently had meaning to him—­though the configuration often changed—­and would then crouch and whisper softly to them under his breath, like a mother soothing small children to sleep.

Greaves had taken some sour ribbing for this early on, but Duncan had ordered it staunched, and after that the other men left him alone. Later, when Greaves had proved remarkably long lived, given the action they’d all seen, a couple of the other soldiers from the company even started to gather round and join in with the ritual. They’d stand and watch diffidently while Greaves set out the whittled figures, wait until he gestured them closer, and then crouch with him, and begin. Their pooled murmuring would softly rise and fall in the lamp glow and gloom of whatever bivouac they’d lucked into. It managed to be both eerie and strangely comforting at one and the same time.

Now that he thought back, Duncan realized that there might have been something of Huldu slenderness and poise in those carved wooden figures. And he wondered belatedly what home Greaves had come from, what part of Britain, where such things might already have had currency, even back then. It wasn’t something he’d ever find out now—­Greaves died in the mud at Ypres, along with almost everyone else under Duncan’s command at the time. The way he heard it later, a tank whose driver was addled on carbon monoxide fumes lost control nosing around a machine gun nest revetment. The tank veered, clipped and toppled three men, Greaves among them, then crushed them into the ground as it churned desperately in reverse. Duncan supposed the slender, whittled wooden figures met a similar fate.

Wake up, Duncan.

Stir of other figures now, blunt and hunched against the cold as they spilled across the concrete walkway ahead; clink as a boot caught an empty bottle and sent it skittering. The sound yanked him back to present concerns. He slowed a little, assessed the spread. It didn’t look like much—­local toughs, three of them, pinched pale faces under rain-­damp hoods, bulky workman’s jackets that made them look bigger than they were. Booted feet, stumbling a little with the booze or maybe just with sitting too long in the cold. Long-­necked brown beer bottles, too loosely held to be weapons. war debt malaise, blared the headlines, economy stalled, no solution in sight for forest crisis. Fear, panic, exhaustion, unemployment spiraling steadily upward, and well, here’s your result.

Duncan eased to a halt.

“Gentlemen,” he said warily.

“F***ing Otherkin,” one of them spat uncertainly.

Duncan couldn’t really blame him. It was in the cut and weave of the hooded jacket he wore, the boots with their intricate tooled leather. For clients, he dressed to broadcast his trade, to sell how well he belonged in the Forest, and that look wasn’t a million miles from all the cute and cheap and practiced signifiers the dress-­up brigade pulled to ape the Huldu they’d mostly only ever met in the pages of novels and maybe the sepia-­tone projector slides of a Russell Maynard Dalton lecture. To the young toughs’ boozed-­up eyes, Duncan looked the part. Wannabe Fae f*** pretender at large. Dilettante. An easy mark.

If they’d seen Duncan’s eyes and expression and stance more clearly, they would have understood their mistake.

But it was a gloomy autumn afternoon in West Erlsley, glowering black rain clouds hung low and soaking up what little decent light was left in the sky. And these angry, idle young men were neither close enough nor sober enough to pick up on the details of the mess they were about to make.

“I’m looking for Umber Cottages,” he preempted them. “This the right way?”

It stalled whatever they’d had in mind. They looked at each other, unsure. The biggest of the three swigged exaggeratedly at his beer. He lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth. Belched loudly. Gestured broadly.

“It’s this way, yeah. But, uh . . .” Swaggering closer, visibly gathering courage. “You gotta pay a toll, like.”

Duncan looked at him. “No, I don’t.”

The moment stretched, twanged, and snapped. The tough looked away.

“You’ll want to let me pass,” Duncan suggested.

Confused looks between the other two. They hadn’t seen what the first man had, but they weren’t too drunk to sense the shift. The lead tough stood reluctantly aside. Duncan moved past them with every appearance of casual amiability. He grinned at them, nodded. Later, sobering up, they would try to piece it together and fail, and bicker and blame each other. But Duncan’s eyes would linger in all their memories, and each would privately understand that this was not a scuffle they could have won.

Meanwhile, Duncan made his way along the concrete walkway, undecided if he was happy to have avoided the fight or not. As ever, his rage simmered close to the surface. But something, some remnant of shame and regret for the mess with Ellie Furlough last spring, was enough to hold it down.

Just enough.

He took a couple of turns in the concrete warren, following the directions he’d been given, and shortly after that, he stumbled on Umber Cottages. It was one of the worst misnomers he’d ever seen—­a short, ugly terraced row of two-­story worker housing in cheaply finished gray stone. Raw concrete steps led up to wooden front doors with peeling black paint. Pokey little windows sat high up, like eyes peering myopically into a future printed too fine to read. The facades were modern—­probably put up in the early days of Re-­clearance, when it was still thought the advance of the Forest could be stopped, and thousands were drafted for the work—­but already the stonework looked stained and tired.

Duncan found number sixteen and knocked. A wan-­looking woman of about fifty opened for him, looked him up and down with narrow suspicion.

“We don’t want none o’ that,” she snapped, in accents from somewhere a long way south of Erlsley. “She’s to be left alone. G’ahn, or I’ll call the bottles on yer.”

“Duncan Silver,” he said. “For Irene Rush. I’m expected.”

From within the dimly lit spaces behind the door, something shrieked like a howitzer shell descending.

The noise froze the woman where she stood. Duncan nodded.

“Perhaps you’d better let me in.”

She stood aside, wordless. Duncan ducked his head and stepped through into the hall space. The shriek came again, intensified. He tracked it to a side room, door solidly closed. He moved past into the living room. No gas in these premises, certainly no electric; what light there was came from hurricane lamps stood on the sideboard and main table, wicks cranked up, and a struggling fire in the grate. Shadows capered on the walls.

“Are you him?”

She sat coiled and wrapped in a shawl and nightgown in an armchair at the sole window in the room, staring out at what must have been the backyards of the row. Legs drawn up under her, one naked foot trailing from under the hem of the gown. Hard to tell in the dim light, but she seemed young. Pale skin. Long dark hair, left down and uncombed, he reckoned, for quite a while. There was a livid mark on one cheek where someone had struck her hard enough to break the skin. Glimmer of recent tear tracks she’d left unwiped.

“Aye, I’m Silver.” He said it as gently as he could. “Like the pirate.”

“Like the pirate,” she repeated mechanically.

Speaking seemed to stir something in her. She turned in her chair to look at him fully, and it dawned on him that she was an attractive woman. The pale face framed in all that hair reminded him of someone—­one of the actresses he’d had postcards of as a boy, perhaps. Ethel Warwick, tits out for Whistler, or maybe that American one he’d liked, Marie Doro. Fey, young, silk-­draped things, all big beckoning eyes, leaves and flowers strewn through their hair.