Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

"God, you’re a mess, Blue," said Janissary Jane. "You look worse than your room, and that’s saying something."

"I know, I know," said Blue, drawing on his cigarette again and stifling another coughing fit through sheer effort of will. "Think of me as a work in progress. I keep hoping that if I drink enough, or ingest enough things that are bad for me, I won’t have to wake up again to this awful room, this awful life. This hole that I dug for myself, this burrow I have crawled into…But I always do. It’s hard to kill an elf, even when he’s cooperating as hard as he can. Even a half elf. Bless dear old Daddy and his rampant gonads."

"For someone so determined to die, you seemed very concerned about me being here to kill you," I said.

"I would prefer to go with some dignity," said the Blue Fairy. "Not kicking and screaming all the way, as you reduce me to small bloody pieces. I know how you Droods operate."

"But why do you want to die at all?" said Molly. "If you don’t like your life, change it, turn it around. There’s still time."

The Blue Fairy smiled fondly at her. "Ah, there speaks the innocence and optimism of youth. When life still seems full of promise and possibilities. But no one loves a fairy when he’s fifty. They want their magic from a younger bit of stuff. And my magic, sad to say, is not what it was. It faded, along with my good looks…which were magnificent, once upon a time. I was invited to all the very best parties, you know. Mixed with all the celebs, had my face in the glossies every week…But alas, we half elves bloom early and fade fast. Daddy dearest’s energies were never meant to be contained in a mostly human form. The candle that burns twice as fast…turns out not to be much of a bargain, in the end.

"Now I’m no longer good-looking enough to hang on to all the pretty boys and pretty things that alone make life worth living. Sweet young things do still turn up in my bed, but only when I pay them. And the fortunes I once had, that I thought would last forever, are gone, long gone. On this…and that. I never worried about money until I didn’t have it any more. Which is why I have to take whatever work I can get these days. Even the jobs I know will come back to haunt me afterwards."

"What have you done, Blue?" I said.

He looked at me pleadingly. "I didn’t have any choice. One of your people turned up here quite unexpectedly. I didn’t think the Droods even knew I existed anymore, let alone where to find me. But he had work for me, and the money was good. Very good. And the threat behind it was very real. You don’t say no to a Drood. And since all he wanted was a little strange matter…I didn’t see the harm. Acquiring unusual objects from other dimensions is one of the few things I’m still good at. It’s in the genes, you see. I got some strange matter for your family’s Armourer once, some years back, and it must have been on file somewhere, because when they wanted some more they came to me."

"Who did they send?" I said.

"Matthew," said the Blue Fairy. "They always send Matthew when they’re not prepared to take ‘Go to hell’ for an answer."

"Of course," I said. "It would have to be Matthew. He’d do anything for the family. Go on, Blue."

The Blue Fairy blinked nervously at me, picking up on the coldness in my voice. He stubbed out the last inch of his cigarette on the bedside table and tried to sit up straight, clasping his hands together in his lap so they wouldn’t shake.

"Well," he said, "I went fishing. That’s what I do. Drop a line into the other realms and see what I can hook. Strange matter isn’t easy to find. I call it that because I haven’t a clue what it is, or what it’s for. It’s organic…maybe alive, maybe not, and it has some…quite unique properties. Fishing the dimensions can be very dangerous, you know. You never can tell when you’ll hook something big and nasty by mistake, and then up it comes through the planes, mad as hell and looking for revenge…But I got Matthew what he wanted, and he paid me in cash right there on the spot. Good money. Far too much, for someone in my reduced circumstances. That was when I started to get suspicious. But I didn’t do anything. I had new booze to drink and new drugs to take, and…he was a Drood, after all. You don’t mess with the Droods. Then I heard you’d been ambushed by an elf lord with an arrow made of strange matter and hired by the Droods…and I knew. I felt bad, Eddie; really I did. I’ve always known you were a Drood; you can’t hide a torc from elf eyes. And we’d had some good times together, in the old Wulfshead…You bought me drinks and listened to me talk, and you never laughed at me. So after I heard…what had happened…I waited for you to come looking for me. And here you are. But you’re not here to kill me, are you? You want something."

"The strange matter’s still in my body," I said. "And it’s killing me. Can you get me a cure?"

"No," said the Blue Fairy, meeting my eyes steadily. "It doesn’t work that way. I need to know exactly what I’m looking for when I go fishing, or I can’t find it. And I don’t know nearly enough about strange matter to have any idea of what its counterpart might be. I’m sorry, Eddie; really I am. I didn’t know what they were going to do!"

"Would it have made any difference if you had?" I said.

"Probably not," he admitted. "It was very good money."

"How would you like a chance to redeem yourself?" said Molly. "How would you like to go fishing for something for us?"

"What did you have in mind?" said the Blue Fairy.

"We need a skeleton key, to get us past the Hall’s defences," I said.

"Is there such a thing?"

He smiled suddenly. "Oh, yes. There is…I’ve waited years for someone to come and ask me. It’s really very simple. Quite elegant, actually. But are you sure you want to do this, Eddie? Once word gets out that the Drood’s defences have been breached…"

"Let it," I said. "Let the whole family crash and burn, if that’s what it takes to get to the truth."

We went out into the next room. The Blue Fairy dug through a pile of debris and came up with a very ordinary-looking fishing rod and reel. The kind of thing people use when they go fishing for recreation rather than competitive sport. The Blue Fairy then produced a knife out of nowhere, pulled up the left sleeve of his dressing gown, and made a shallow incision just above the wrist. I could see a whole series of scars reaching up his arm to the elbow, some old and some not, from where he’d done this before. Golden blood welled up from the cut, and he held his arm out over the space he’d cleared on the floor before him. The blood dripped down to form a golden pool. When it was about three or four inches in diameter, the Blue Fairy pressed his fingers against the cut and muttered under his breath, and the wound healed over immediately, leaving just another scar on his arm.

The Blue Fairy pulled his sleeve down again, not looking at the three of us watching, and snapped out half a dozen words in Old Elvish. I caught some of it, but his accent was unfamiliar. The pool on the floor blazed suddenly with a golden light and spread out on the floor until it was almost a yard in diameter. It didn’t look like a pool of liquid anymore. Looking into it was like staring into a deep well that just kept getting deeper the longer you looked. I felt like I was off balance and might fall. I grabbed Molly’s arm for support just as she grabbed mine. We both smiled at each other a little shamefacedly. Janissary Jane didn’t look into the pool. She kept all her attention on the Blue Fairy. And she had both her punch daggers at the ready.

The Blue Fairy took up his fishing rod, checked the hook was secure and the line was running smoothly, and then dropped his line into the glowing golden pool. The hook disappeared, followed by more and more line as the Blue Fairy kept feeding it in.