"Mister Wibert, you fancy yourself a professional interlocutor, I understand. You speak with my kind at whim or at others' behest, aided by your ability to discern us no matter the precautions we might take to remain unnoticed and unseen. You pull us from our preferred anonymity."
"No…only if…you want to talk." My voice was still shot with nails but recovering. My shoulders were beginning to sink into molten lava. My ankles were still numb, which boded ill for any escape attempts.
"If we
want
to talk?" There was a slight anger in Shu's face. He frowned down at me. "It is not the talking. It is your perception of us regardless of our will that concerns me. For that reason, I determined that when I wished to discuss the present situation with you, I would do my small part to make you understand the degree of presumption you take up when you address one of us despite our wards.
I was starting to get annoyed. That was good; if I had room past the pain for anger, I was still functioning at a relatively high level. "Wait, you're saying you had me kidnapped, knocked out, tied up in a basement and dropped here on this bench because you wanted me to know how it feels when I turn to you on the fucking subway and say 'hi?' That's a little out of proportion, don't you think?"
"Obviously not, or I would not have done so." Shu sighed and hitched one buttock up onto the workbench. "I do not expect you to agree. Just take it from me that the degree of offense is roughly comparable."
"F…fuck you."
Shu nodded. "Yes, whatever. Now. Are you alert enough to discuss our difficulty?"
I tried experimentally to move my right hand to my left wrist. It worked, despite igniting pyrotechnic joint pain in both arms and shoulders. I rubbed at my left wrist, jerkily, feeling the groove the thongs had cut into them. "What difficulty? We've never even met."
"No, that is true. But as I said, you brought my brother here."
"Hapy? Why the hell does everyone keep saying that? I didn't bring him here. I want to find out what the hell he's doing here myself."
Shu shook his head. His short black hair shifted. "You may deny it all you wish. However, I know the truth. You brought Hapy here, and disrupted the balance significantly. Not in my favor. Were you another Elder, I would simply accept this as a move of the game, but you-" he poked my right shoulder, hard, eliciting a whining hiss from my throat, "-you are a
human
. You have no blood in the stars; you have no power. You
dare
to make a move in the game and to sit there and tell me you had nothing to do with it?" His anger was back, and rising. I was still trying to figure out what the hell I'd done to piss him off.
"I…" I subsided into coughs; not difficult. Apparently he actually wanted an answer. He pulled out the water bottle again and fed me sips of it for a minute or so while I thought as hard as I could under the circumstances.
Shu. Know his name. Brother of Hapy. God of ancient Egypt, then, but which? Name is familiar. Had me snatched. Wait, that was a wraith and what looked like a sylph under it. That means God of Air, most likely. God of Air. What the hell does that mean?
I sipped again, nodded.
"Look, can I assume that since you've gone to all this trouble that we can actually talk now?"
"We are talking. For how long is the question."
I didn't like the sound of that. "Okay. You're upset that Hapy showed up in Manhattan. I'm confused and concerned at Hapy's showing up in Manhattan. Various individuals seem convinced that it was my doing, but I swear to you on the icons you took from me that I didn't do it. At least, if I did, I have no memory of doing so and had no intent."
"That is irrelevant."
"Fine. What balance did I disturb? Can I at least know what I'm going to die for, then?"
"You will most likely not die. You will not be in any condition to interfere again in my affairs for some years, however."
Yikes. That sounded not so pleasant. "Well, before that."
Shu shook his head. "No. It is enough that you interfered. You have no need to know how. It will make it less likely you are tempted to repeat any form of action that might irritate me in future."
I tried to stretch my legs out flat. They almost made it. The pain was indescribable. I writhed for a moment while Shu watched me impassively. When I could place my wrists at my sides I did so and turned my neck to look at him. My neck hurt from sympathetic strain, but it hadn't undergone any direct trauma.
"Did you send that slyph and wraith after me?"
"Of course. You interfered again. Ariel is useless to me for some time, due to your actions with your stupid handgun."
"Just say I shot him. It's less confusing."
"You
shot
an ancient spirit, one of my most trusted assistants, and dispersed his coherence. I presume you used one of your filthy tools to do so; he would not have noticed a mere bullet."
I grinned weakly. Score one for the stupid team. "Wouldn't you like to know."
"Mister Wibert, you cannot goad me into releasing you. I
have
released you, and it has done you no good. I have no interest in this conversation as a contest of any sort."
"Oh, but I do." I was still grinning. It took two coughs to get that out.
"That may be. In any case, I tell you this simply so that you understand that even if you survive my displeasure, Ariel will eventually be in a position to make his own unhappiness known."
"Tell him I'll shoot him again."
Shu actually looked up at the darkness above the table in exasperation. "There is no point in continuing this." He stepped back and waved. The door opened and closed again; I could see two somewhat fuzzy shapes approached the table. Since I could now move my head, I could see that they looked an awful lot like the shape I'd seen lying on the floor of the alleyway. I squinted, but couldn't make out any facial features. Sylphs, then. They lifted me to the floor and held me in a standing position. I was aware of a crackling, as that of static electricity during a storm; there were popping sensations in their grips.
"As you can tell, they are not terribly happy with you. You have deprived them of their Lord's guidance. I've told them they are free to express their displeasure, so long as you can be said to survive at the end of the process."
"Gee, thanks so much." I cast about me with my will, searching for any familiar feeling of energy which would betray the presence of my icons, but there was nothing. Shu didn't strike me as the type to bring his captive's weapons into the cell.
Shu turned away. I raised my voice; he stopped at my words, facing away. "Shu. One last thing."
"Yes?" He did not turn to face me.
"We're going to have this discussion again. And I'm going to get answers."
"Are you attempting to threaten me, human?"
"Take it however you want."
He just shook his head and moved off into the darkness. There was a slight howling noise, wind in the far-off distance, and then he was gone from the room. I turned to the sylph on my right. "Okay, Tinkerbell, let's get it over with."
Despite not having a face, its head wrinkled in what I could tell was anger. I was thrown down onto my knees, and closed my eyes in expectation. I didn't have any tricks left; I just knew I wasn't going to let any of them get the last word. I'm the damn talker around here.
The first blow was painful.
The second was incandescent.
After that, I think they began changing the ambient pressure inside and around my joints, and I passed out in the agony of my skeleton locking into a frozen shape of hurt.
Waking the second time was worse. On the plus side, I didn't expect to be somewhere nicer, so my expectations weren't disappointed. On the debit side, all my prior aches were still there, now with extra joint pain added. From what I could tell, my knees, elbows and wrists were swollen enormously. I hoped that didn't mean permanent damage.
I appeared to be in yet another dark place. It wasn't the same as the first one, however, because the air was heavier and cooler. I managed, after the first few attempts, to roll over onto my back. There wasn't any dust on the floor. Dirt, sure, but with the thicker and more oily consistency that indicates true urban grime.
Of paramount importance, though, was that there was a slight angle in the floor which led to a low point in one corner. In that corner there was a drain - a metal plate set into the floor with holes punched through it. It was maybe six inches across - no chance I was going out the thing. I couldn't see well enough to see a faucet, but dragging my feet across the walls near the drain produced no such thing. If it was a shower, I was out of luck; there was no way I could stand, much less stretch above my head.
The drain, though. The drain had possibilities.
At the back of my head was a glimmer of an idea. I couldn't quite get the shape of it, though, so I continued exploring. The room was entirely bare save for the metal shape of what must be the door, set flush with the hinges on the other side. I wondered at that for a moment; it indicated some forethought in using this as a cell, or it meant that the door didn't lead to a generally populated place, like, say, a corridor. Neither was encouraging, but there wasn't much I could do about it.
The drain appeared to be clear. I could press my fingertips against the holes in the metal plate; the pads went some millimeters into the holes with no resistance. Laying my ear to the drain, however - that was what pulled the faint form out of my subconscious. I could hear water flowing. Very, very faintly, but regularly. Not dripping, no; the hissing rill of water in motion in a confined space.
If there was water flowing beneath me, open enough to hear and constant, the odds were very good that I was in a basement. That, coupled with the stair bottom I'd seen, upped the chances further. I couldn't swear to it, of course, but honestly, I didn't have a lot of choice.
The problem was what I was going to have to do. Luckily I was already in fairly constant pain, and I didn't give myself a chance to think about it. I moved my head to my left forearm, in the fleshy part near the elbow, and chewed as hard as I could. The pain was merely a descant to the ache already there, and the fluid-swollen flesh gave way fairly easily. I gagged at the familiar iron tang of blood, then, after making sure it was running down my arm, I pressed the arm to the drain, held it there.
Luckily I had warmed the plate somewhat in my explorations, so it didn't cool my arm enough to impede the blood flow. I listened as carefully as I could, but couldn't tell if my blood was dripping down through the plate. All I could do was hold my forearm there, massaging my bicep, and wait.
I think I started singing something. Something stupid, pop from the radios I moved among as a Manhattan denizen without ever touching them. Moving around Manhattan is to live in a reverse panopticon of sound; leaving a cab with a song blaring in it, you will pass (some moments later) a person lying on the park lawn with their radio playing the same song. The advent of personal electronics hasn't done away with this, merely jumbled the signal - for now you will hear a smaller number of tunes more frequently, but not in synch. Each person's radio will be at a different place in the song, and those few times you move from one sound field to the next and hear the song move 'with' you, you stop and wonder - are both of those people listening to the radio? Or are they merely listening to recordings which, by the wonder of statistics, are this time in sync?
Even I have to admit that my musings aren't entirely rational.
I could feel the blood slowing in its drool down my forearm. I considered reopening the wound, but decided that for what I had in mind, the actual amount was probably irrelevant. Either it would work, or it wouldn't, and thinking about it in reasonable ways by wondering about how
much
blood I was spilling into the waterways of Manhattan was foolish.
I hoped to hell I
was
in Manhattan.
After a time, I think I slept, there in the dark.
* * *
I'm not sure what woke me. When I blinked, trying to clear my eyes of the film that had gummed them shut, I wasn't aware of anything different. It was still dark. My arm had stuck slightly to the drain, and I pulled it free. Ignoring the ongoing aches, I blinked again and looked around. It was still dark, but I think my eyes had adapted better, I could see a very, very faint outline around the door where light from outside was making its way through.
Something else was different, though. It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but I finally placed my head to the drain again. The water had stopped flowing. Or, at least, I couldn't hear it anymore. Instead, there was a steady, rhythmic noise; a gentle
swish, swish, swish
in its place. I couldn't think of anything that would cause a running storm sewer or drain to pulse its flow, and anyway, this wasn't loud enough. I was about to roll back over when I heard the whistling.
It was very faint. What there was of it was coming up through the drain fluttered in and out of audibility, a bad cellular reproduction of a whistle, but it was definitely there. I turned my head and stuck my other ear to the drain, and it seemed slightly louder. Waiting, I listened to the swishing noises increase in volume, and the whistle move up into audibility. I knew the tune, as well, and due to the time I spent in Irish bars it only took a few moments of listening before I was mouthing words:
Oh gray and bleak, by shore and creek, the rugged rocks abound,
But sweet and green the grass between, as grows on Irish ground,
So friendship fond, all wealth beyond, and love that lives alway,
Bless each poor home beside your foam, my dear old Galway Bay.
I rolled my head over and held my face over the drain. "Kevin?" I tried to shout as well as whisper for safety's sake. What came out was more of a harsh and strangled hiss. "Kevin? Is that you?"
The swishing sound stopped, as did the whistling. A voice came faintly. "Michel?"