"Okay, I have a story," Spyder said. "This was on, probably, my second trip to Paris. You been to Paris?"
"I passed through."
"I went there with this girl, Trina, one Christmas. She came from money and knew a lot more about the high end of the world than me. I was used to staying in squats and youth hostels. When I was with her, we stayed in an actual French hotel. The Hotel Esmerelda, across from Notre Dame. It was cold and wet that time of year. We were under-dressed and freezing, but we did all the usual tourist stuff. The Louvre. The Eiffel Tower. Café Deux Magots.
"There was this older Spanish guy, worked the front desk at night. Really nice. Later, he told us he was Peruvian. We asked him what bar we should go to and he offered to drive us around, give us an insider's tour of the city.
"It's a little after midnight when the guy, Pablo, gets off. He pulls around the front of the hotel in the smallest car I've ever seen. This car'd give a foetus claustrophobia. I'm polite, so I squeeze into the back. Pablo and Trina are up front.
"He starts driving and we don't know where the hell he's taking us. I'm suspicious, because that's my nature. But Pablo is cool. He takes us by some old buildings where Jean-Paul Marat and other French Revolution psychos used to live. He takes us into a dark, wet park where it's just starting to snow. This is the park where the best hookers hang out. Sure enough, there's a woman in a fur coat standing at an intersection, looking like she's waiting to cross. As we pull near her, she opens the fur coat. She's na**d underneath, a Victoria's Secret wet dream. Pablo asks if we've ever seen Versailles. We hadn't, so he drives us out."
Spyder spun the Hornet's metal strands, and thumbed a stud on the grip. Spring-loaded spikes popped from both ends of the weapon. The Count had explained that when a fighter destroyed an enemy's sword, the spikes could be driven into the opponent's mid-section as a finishing blow.
"Now, this is after midnight on Christmas Eve. In Paris. Everything is closed. Does this stop Pablo? Hell, no. He drives us all the way around Versailles until, in the back, we spot a guard gate that's open. This is too good to pass up. We sneak inside.
"There's a guard house maybe ten feet away, and we can hear the guards inside getting juiced on Christmas cheer. They don't care that three idiots are sneaking into a national monument. Did I mention that we'd been drinking?"
"I took that for granted."
"By now, the snow's stopped and there's mist everywhere. We're not drunk enough to try and bust into the palace itself, but there's acres of gardens out back. We wander back there for an hour, whispering, hoping not to set off any alarms. At times, the fog is so thick, we can't see anything, even standing next to each other. Leafless trees appear out of nowhere and then vanish again into the gloom. We sit on benches and smoke and try to peek inside the palace to see the Hall of Mirrors or where the Sun King might have shagged a mistress in secret.
"We couldn't see anything and the cold was starting to sober us up. Now we're getting nervous, so we decided to get out there. Of course, when we went back, the guard door was locked. There's nothing to do but climb one of the stone walls to get out, and the only wall low enough to climb was right by the guard shack. We started up and hoped to god that the guards stayed put. We had to walk along the top of one wall and drop over the side of a second to get out of the place. The whole time we were going, I was praying, Please. Lord, don't let them find us sneaking out of there with a Peruvian. They'll think we're Shining Path guerillas and never believe we didn't plant a bomb or something."
What was weird about the Count's weapon was that, as polished and well-balanced as it was, its surface felt uneven and rough. Like maybe it hadn't been built-and even here, in this insane new world he inhabited, it struck Spyder as an odd idea-but as if it had been grown, like a flower.
"Is that it?" asked Shrike.
"I didn't get to the good part. The guards came outside with their stinky cheese and we had to shoot our way out."
"You did not."
"No, we didn't. We drove back top the hotel, ran upstairs and hid, waiting for the gendarme to come and take us to jail on Christmas day. But they didn't come and we got away with it. I suppose, it's not much of an adventure, as far as adventures go. There's no sex or imminent death or flying monkeys, but for some reason it sticks in my mind as a kind of perfect night."
"And the cynical tattooist is revealed to be a romantic."
"All losers are romantics. It's how we justify our existence."
Twenty Eight
Suspicious Minds
"We'll reach the city by mid-day tomorrow, if we get moving by dawn," said Count Non.
"Good news," said Primo. "We need to reach the Kasla Mountains by the full moon. A shadow cast through a certain rocky promontory is the only way to find the entrance to Hell. If we miss the moon, we'll have to wait a month until the next one." He made a face and rubbed the shoulder where his arm was missing. Spyder felt for the guy. His side was hurting after the all-day hike.
"Fuck that," said Lulu. "Fuck that with Michael Jackson's pet monkey."
"Full moon's just a few days off. Think we can make it?" Spyder asked Shrike.
Shrike was smoking Spyder's last cigarette, puffing, then passing the butt to him. Spyder took a drag, then passed the precious smoke to Lulu, who opened her mouth to accept it like a communion Host. She smoked and passed the butt to Shrike, who leaned on her cane, lost in thought.
"We have to make it," Shrike said. "We can't hide out here like bugs in the sand for a month. We're lucky to have made it this far."
They sat in the entrance of a shallow cave, which served as cover for the small fire they had going to ward off the cold desert night. Earlier in the evening, they'd stacked brush at the cave entrance to diminish the glow of the fire, hoping not to be spotted by any scouts from the Seraphic Brotherhood, the Erragal prince or any of the other far too interested parties who might be looking for them. Spyder wasn't sure if "lucky" was the word he'd have used to describe their situation, but they were alive, and he had to admit that that counted big time in the luck department. But his gratitude lessened with every stab of hunger and throb of his injured ribs.
"I wonder what Rubi's doing right now," said Lulu.
"Missing you," Spyder said. "Cursing me."
"Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own…," Lulu sang softly. "Elvis should have stopped right there, you know? He never did f**k all to match those early Sun records."
"If he'd a stopped there, he wouldn't ever have recorded `Suspicious Minds.' You got to suffer through some white Vegas jumpsuits to make it to `Suspicious Minds.'"
"Was it worth dying on the shitter for?"
"For `Suspicious Minds'? Most definitely."
"I'm going to have to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one."
Spyder was sorry that Lulu had bought up Rubi. It made him think of Jenny, whom he no longer really missed, but who remained a kind of sick ache in his stomach. He couldn't even describe the sensation, but it was compounded of regret and the sense that he'd failed as a human in some fundamental way and that her desertion was the most stark proof of that. On the simplest level, though, it just made him gloomy to think that someone he'd been so connected to was walking around hating him. He gave Shrike the last of the cigarette, went to the cave entrance, and sat down, letting the night breeze blow over him. The cold made him stop thinking.
He heard someone coming up behind him and saw Shrike settling down.
"You're quiet tonight," she said.
"It's a quiet night."
"You're thinking about home."
"I'm not thinking about anything right now."
"I liked your France story today."
"I'm glad."
"Would you like to hear one of mine?"
"Not right now. I mean, I want to, but I'm hurting and tired and won't be able to listen right."
"All right," she said. She held up her face to the wind as it blew into the cave. Spyder thought she looked like a young wolf when she stretched her head up like that. She was beautiful.
"Tell me about being blind," Spyder said. "About how there's `blind and then there's blind.'"
Shrike poked at the sand with her cane. "You probably sensed that I have moments where I can sort of see things."
"From the beginning."
"It's not really sight. It's low rent magic, which is the only kind I know. I never had any formal magic training and just picked things along on the road. Traded for spells. Bought them. Stole them, too. There has always been a little magic in my family, but my mother had that knowledge and she was dead. I studied weapons because it made my father happy.
"When our kingdom was scattered and I was on the road, I only had the possessions I could grab from my bed side. A few family heirlooms. One of these was a kind of bracelet with a casting of a bird on top. A shrike. that's my family's totem animal.
"We also had family gods which we prayed and made offerings to. All the royal families have household gods. You need a deity or two on your side to keep other Houses from taking what's yours. Those who knew how could petition the gods for favors. I didn't have that knowledge. But I got it.
"I'd run off some bandits from the property of an odd little man, Cosimo Heisenberg, a kind of mechanical wizard. He made machines that were like people. `Karakuri,' he called them. Little wind up men and women who could sing an aria or write a sonnet or sew a wedding gown.
"He wanted to pay me with a new set of eyes, but I didn't like the notion of depending on mechanical, wind-up sight. So, he helped me use the gifts I already had better. He made this cane for me, which, as you've seen, is more than a cane. He also examined my heirlooms to see if there was anything of value. He was the first person I'd trusted since leaving home.