Mike Shevdon: Sixty-One Nails

We waited in complete silence for ten minutes. I found myself listening to Blackbird breathe. The tiny sounds of the overburdened chair under Tate overlaid the faint nameless noises from the rest of the house. If I listened carefully I could hear my own blood pumping in my ears.

Approaching footsteps warned us of the arrival at the door before she appeared. In contrast to Amber, she wore a midlength shift dress, in charcoal grey like everyone else, but it was short enough to show off her bare legs and clung to her curves. She was tall and pretty and moved with a lithe grace that said she knew it. Her hair was blond and fell in long curling ringlets around her shoulders. Strangely, her curls appeared to move on their own, even when she was standing still, giving her an unearthly quality at odds with her pretty girl image. In her hand was a short baton, thicker and shorter than Garvin's staff and polished with a glossy black lacquer.

She nodded to Garvin and smiled at us. "Hello, I'm Fionh. Blackbird, they will see you now." She stepped back from the doorway and waited for Blackbird to rise.

I stepped forward to go with Blackbird, but Tate lifted one hand. "Just the girl," he rumbled.

Blackbird came to me, turning her face up to accept a chaste kiss. "Good fortune," she whispered.

She turned and walked through the door, Fionh and Amber falling in behind, the footsteps fading as they went deeper into the house. There was creak as Tate shifted in his chair. Garvin didn't move.

I went to the armchair Blackbird had vacated and slumped into it. Her warmth lingered in the arm where my hand rested. I had hoped we would be able to see them together, to face them as we had faced other adversaries. We weren't being given that option. Still, Blackbird knew what to say if it came to it. We had no way of knowing why the council wanted to see us. It could be good news. They might want to reward us for the service we had performed, though somehow I doubted that. I had been summoned to numerous board meetings in the past and it was never to give you a pat on the back and tell you what a good boy you'd been.

I pushed my mind away from worrying about Blackbird to thoughts of my work colleagues and what they would say when I resigned. Would they let me resign or would I already have been let go? If I was lucky then there would be a settlement package waiting to tide me over until Blackbird and I had our lives sorted out. That was assuming we still had our lives.

The footsteps in the corridor brought me to my feet. Tate stayed in the chair until the last possible moment, only levering himself up after Fionh appeared in the doorway.

"They will see you now," she said.

"Where's Blackbird?" I asked her.

"She is being cared for, don't worry."

"If she is harmed…" I told them.

Garvin interrupted. "She won't be harmed while she's pregnant."

"How did you know about that?" I asked him.

He shrugged, a seismic movement. "I make it my business to know about the people I have to deal with."

Fionh led the way while Garvin and Tate fell in behind. We went back into the house, which was clearly a substantial property. We passed room after room, some with dust covers over the furniture as if they hadn't been used in years. We came at the end to a set of double doors facing us. Fionh opened one of the doors toward her, stepping to the side to allow me to enter.

"Garvin will go in with you," she said.

Inside, the room was dimly lit. I stepped through the doorway into a room buzzing with power. Outside there had been no trace of it, but within the room it was like walking through a cloud of static.

There was a large domed ceiling with a mural painted on it, like the ones you see in churches, except the angels had far too many teeth and the wrong sort of wings.

The room could originally have been a ballroom. There was a gallery at the far end where the musicians might have sat. In the centre of the floor was a pool of light within which there was a huge seven-pointed star.

"Come forward, Alshirian, called Dogstar, also called Niall Petersen, so that we may see you."

Arrayed in a semi-circle around the star were seven chairs, large enough to be called thrones and set back so they were in shadow. Six of the chairs were occupied, illuminated dimly by some unseen light source. The empty chair was dark.

Whether it was some distortion caused by the power in the room or a quality of the light, the figures in the chairs were isolated, picked out against the dark.

Some of the occupants had features I recognised. The strikingly beautiful blue-eyed lady wrapped in the deep blue cloak had hair that wound around the finials on the top of her chair of its own volition and was just as disturbing as Fionh's had been. The short fellow with the broad nose and the grumpy expression reminded me of Marshdock and Fellstamp. They shared common features in the way a son inherits his father's ears.

A delicate figure with finely boned limbs ending in long spindly fingers sat to my right. Her skin was pale as moonlight and her ears came sharply to a point. She had a small pert nose and a mouth wider than a human mouth would be. Her eyes were slightly elongated and shone green in the dark as she turned a yellow gold band on her left wrist. Next to her was a huge woman, her face broad and flat, her forearms the size of hams. Ivory teeth protruded from her bottom jaw, reminding me of Gramawl, but she was largely hairless and as pale skinned as her neighbour. Heavy silver rings dangled from each ear and she had a broad leather belt around her waist, pulled over a loose shirt with a great silver ram's-head buckle.

Next to her was a man who I would have not looked twice at if I had met him elsewhere. Dressed in a red silk shirt, he had a feral look about him that spoke of something predatory. He regarded me with cold malice.

For a moment, I thought the figure next to him was Slimgrin, the warder who had been waiting in the room downstairs, but the fur on his head had been caught into a topknot and he had a groomed, more cultured look about him. He also had a heavy silver chain around his neck that sat bright against the dark lustre of his fur.

They were clearly waiting for me, so I stepped forward into the circle of light and stood at the centre of the star. Garvin moved in behind me. The light caught the bright edge of a bare blade in his hand. His staff had transformed into a long slim blade and scabbard. I hadn't heard him draw it.

"Is that necessary?" I asked him.

"Not my decision." He shrugged lightly.

I turned back to the dimly lit figures in the seats.

"Is that it? Have you brought me here to slaughter me?"

I was greeted with silence. The power in the room was making my ears buzz.

"If not for that, then why am I here?"

"That's a better question," said the lady in the blue cloak in a light contralto voice. "I am Kimlesh. I speak for the Nymphine Court, the undines and the greyne. That's one of the things we are here to consider. Why you are here."

"You summoned me."

"I meant why you, a wraith, un-bound of the Seventh Court and part-human, are here."

"That, I don't know," I said honestly.

"Blackbird has told you, I'm sure, that the Seventh Court are not known for associating with humans."

"The fact I'm here means someone has been playing away from home, though, doesn't it?"

"Not necessarily."

"How else do you explain it?"

"There was a time, long ago, when the Feyre were not as you see us today. Each of us here holds a strand of that thread. Teoth, there, holds the office of High Maker, held only by the luchorpan and the nixies. Mellion is the Hordemaster, ruler of all the goblins and gnolls of the Goblin Court. These boundaries were made, though. They did not appear by accident."