Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

“The darkness is a rare thing, Grey, but the leanansidhe isn’t the only fey that touches it. I’ve seen it far too many times recently.”

“So have I. Something drained the essence from the dwarf victims. If a leanansidhe didn’t do it, who did?”

He considered me with surprise and annoyance. “Vize, of course. He has the same darkness in him as the leanansidhe . It’s the same thing in you.”

My memory flashed to the leanansidhe hissing in the dark. She’d called me “brother.” The night of the riots, I saw Vize, saw the darkness in him, and recognized it as the same thing in me. “You’re wrong, Brokke. It’s not in his head. It’s in his hand.”

He gestured with his glass at my arm, the one with the silver-branch tattoo, hidden beneath my jacket sleeve. “Does that need to be in your head for it to have power?”

Self-conscious, I slid my arm off the table and dropped it in my lap. It was pointless to ask him how he knew about the tattoo. “How does he know how to use it?”

“How do you?”

I wasn’t about to confess my personal involvement with the leanansidhe . “Answer my question.”

“I have, in a way. You showed him, Grey. When you touched him with your darkness the night of the riots, you disturbed something within him. I was on the bridge that night, too. I saw what happened. The darkness in Vize exploded when you attacked him. You showed him the way,” Brokke said.

Dread gripped my stomach. When the leanansidhe ’s darkness touched mine, I understood her, understood how she used the darkness. I never realized I had done the same for Vize. “What have I done?” I said, more to myself than to Brokke.

“I don’t know. Our minds see it as darkness because we can’t visualize it as it truly is,” he said.

A chill ran over me. “You know what the darkness is?”

Brokke’s hand shook as he reached for his glass, his smug self-assurance slipping. “No one knows what is beyond knowing. It exists in opposition to existence. If I could describe it, it would exist in the world. It doesn’t exist in the world because it is outside It.”

When powerful people showed fear of something, it was a sign to start worrying. “The leanansidhe said something like that to me. She said the Wheel of the World has two sides and that we—she—touches both sides.”

Brokke eyed me. “It’s not a side. It is. It is what was and will be. The Wheel of the World, Grey, is what comes between.”

“The Wheel of the World has no end and no beginning,” I said.

Brokke shook his head. “What is destruction but the seed of creation? What is creation but the fruit of destruction? The Wheel of the World at once turns infinitely in both directions yet begins and ends. What happens between is the Gap, out of which the Wheel might arise again or not. The Gap was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. It is the source of everything and nothing. It drives the Wheel forward and brings It to a standstill. It devours the Wheel as it creates the Wheel. It is greater than the Wheel and less than the Wheel. It will end us all if we let it and it allows us. It is the place of power from which opposing forces spring and create the Wheel of the World. But the Gap never vanishes, Grey. It shrinks as the Wheel grows and turns until there is nothing left but the Wheel, and the Wheel begins to feed on itself, and the Gap appears anew. We cannot escape it, and it cannot escape us.”

His words had the cadence of a chant. He knew this thing, had a sense of it, and there was a sense of truth to what he said. I gazed into my beer. “Why have I never heard of this?”

He made a dismissive sound. “You Celts love to lord over others with your superiority while you wallow in your ignorance. Your people turned away from the truth long ago, Grey, content to indulge themselves with no thought for the future or the past. Do you know why Convergence happened? Because the Celts believed the world would never end because for them it never began. With all your talk of the turning of the Wheel, you and your people act like It turns in place, that nothing was ever different, and nothing would ever change. And that’s why you know nothing of the Gap. You know nothing of the past and have no understanding of the future.”

Annoyed, I sipped my beer. “You want a religious discussion? I could say the Teuts caused Convergence because of their doom and gloom. When you think the world is going to end, you start acting like it, then you cause it. You create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You sit there and tell me the Elven King wants the faith stone so he can challenge Maeve; and then you want to blame the Celts for the destruction of Faerie? Spare me.”

“You cannot stop what is coming. The darkness is beyond comprehension,” he said.

“It can be controlled. I’ve seen the leanansidhe use it. If something can be controlled, it can stopped,” I said.

“That thinking, I fear, will bring ruin to us all. No one can control the Gap,” he said.

“This isn’t an abstract discussion, Brokke. You’re telling me that I’ve handed Bergin Vize a dangerous weapon that can destroy everything. He has to be stopped.”

Brokke pursed his lips. “What makes you think I’m any more comfortable that you have the same power?”

I woke alone at midday. Meryl, praise be, had set up the coffeemaker. She left a note to join her for lunch if I managed to get up before the sun went down. The funny part was she wasn’t being sarcastic. We were both night owls and cast no stones in the waking-up-late department. I took a leisurely shower, then walked over the Oh No bridge to catch the subway.

At Boylston Street, the train left me with a screech of metal on metal as it rode a sharp turn out of the station. When no one on the platform or in the token booth was paying attention, I slipped through the break in the fencing near the stairs. I walked the access curbing beside the tracks toward the next station in Copley Square. I had told Murdock that Boston was riddled with tunnels—some official and legal like the subways and some not so much. Not far into the tunnel was a concrete niche that wasn’t concrete but a glamour hiding a not-so-official tunnel that led to Meryl’s office in the Guildhouse.

Meryl had been with the Guild a long time. She had worked her way up in the archives division until she became the Chief Archivist. Despite doing important work, she isn’t respected by the investigative division the way she should be. I should know. I was one of those jerks once. I knew Meryl before I lost my abilities and made assumptions about her that weren’t fair. I thought she was lazy and grumpy. Once I was bounced out of the Guildhouse, I learned she was neither—far from it. Taken advantage of at work, sure, but not lazy. I still think she’s grumpier than she claims, but a lot of that has its reasons. I wouldn’t have her be any other way.

In the course of her career, she had discovered things in the Guildhouse—beneath the Guildhouse—that had been forgotten or lost. Tunnels layered their way into the earth, complicated mazes of stone and brick that only dwarven crafters could have produced. Long-hidden rooms filled with rare treasures lay dormant until Meryl had found them. She had made a few improvements of her own along the way, like the secret bolt-hole out of her office into the subway system.

As our bond grew, Meryl had given me privileges she gave to no one else—like tuning some of her wall illusions to my body signature so that I could enter or leave the Guildhouse unseen. I eased down the steps that led from the concrete niche. At the bottom, a long, narrow tunnel ended at her office, a bright rectangle of light in the distance.