Chapter Four

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The next two days passed uneventfully. I received no calls from Audgrim, no inexplicable messages, nothing. And so I spent the time much as I normally did. I slept as poorly as usual, and woke in the afternoon still tired. I had conversations with my houseplants, which still did not reply to me. I was grateful for that, really. I figured that it was a little weird to talk to plants, but I was strange enough in general that it just further cemented me as eccentric. If they started talking back, that was when I’d know I’d gone insane. Or, at least, more insane than I already was.

I spent some time drawing, started work on that music video, wrote a bassline and drum section for another musician I was friends with. Music was another thing I did entirely as a hobbyist. I had a lot of hobbies, if only because I had a lot of time to fill.

If someone were to ask how I felt about this, and I decided to be honest in my answer, I might admit to a certain disappointment. I might acknowledge that part of why I dabbled was because I was unable, for a variety of reasons, to do any of these things more seriously. I might even say that I sometimes felt a deeply-rooted pain and resentment about having been effectively consigned to the life of a dilettante. I could have acquaintances among ordinary people, but not real friendship; I could spend my time doing anything I cared to, but I couldn’t do any of it well or seriously enough to satisfy me.

I didn’t say these things often. People didn’t often ask, and I didn’t like to complain about what was, in the grand scheme of things, a very small anguish. And besides, what good would it do? Nothing that either I or they could do would change the reality of my situation. I could write music, but I would never perform it in front of people. I could make art, but it would never look quite right to anyone else. They might like it; I was skilled, and people said my work was beautiful, vivid and surreal. But it was always vivid and surreal, always strange, never quite lining up with anyone else’s world. Even when I tried for realism, people universally said I got it wrong, that it had a sort of uncanny valley quality to it.

These statements had always been true for me. Barring wildly unforeseen circumstance, they would remain true. It didn’t really matter what I, or anyone else for that matter, thought about it. Didn’t matter what I wanted. It was just the reality of my life, the natural consequence of existing how I did. I couldn’t change this reality. I had understood that since childhood, even if I hadn’t entirely known why back then.

I had a lot of hobbies. I didn’t like free time. Free time had too much room in it for thinking.

It was a long two days.

---

Getting another call from Audgrim was, in its own way, a relief. It wasn’t that I felt any real urgency about his situation. I was still detached, not really emotionally invested in what he was dealing with. But the idleness was wearing on me more than usual, the hours blurring together into a dissociated haze. From experience, I knew that this was prone to become a complete fugue, one in which seconds passed like minutes, hours dragged on like days, and days blurred past in the blink of an eye.

I’d have been grateful for almost any disruption to my routine at that point, anything to anchor me and give me something to hold my attention. External inputs usually seemed to work better for interrupting that kind of progression than if I tried to distract myself. The specific nature of this interruption had nothing to do with the relief it provided.

All the same, I don’t expect I sounded very happy when I answered the phone. He hadn’t actually woken me out of a nightmare this time, but I hadn’t slept well in days, and the fact I was already awake by nine in the morning wasn’t a whole lot better for my mood.

“What is it?” I kept my tone to merely surly rather than hostile, but that was about it.

“Have another oddity for you,” Audgrim said.

“Another incident?”

“No, actually. I’ve been asking around a bit based on what you found at the last one. Not a ton of progress so far, but found someone for you to chat with and compare notes.”

I saved the sketch I was working on and started shutting down my computer. “Who’s that?”

“Jack Tar. You familiar?”

I had to laugh a little. “Yeah, heard of him. You’re really sinking some resources into this, huh? I mean, buying my time is one thing, but Jack Tar is a different animal entirely.”

“You said it was mostly human magic. I figure talking to human mages is a good plan.” I could almost hear Audgrim shrugging. “Besides, it was easier than you’d think. His people have apparently got their own stuff going on, and he was pretty happy to collaborate. You in?”

“Sure, why not. Might be fun to meet him.”

“Awesome. I’ll pick you up in five, already in the area.”

---

There are countless varieties of mage. Human magic comes in endless variations, and while there have been many systems proposed to categorize them, they all ultimately fall short. There are a comparably innumerable array of different social structures they form. I knew this, but I knew very little about any of them; as Audgrim had noted, I was not a mage, and I’d never really looked into it much. They all followed a handful of rules, and apparently the enforcement on them was pretty terrifying, but I didn’t even know what those rules were, much less who enforced them. And everything past that was an inconsistent mess.

I was, however, familiar with the Tribe. They were too local and too prominent and just too strange for me not to have noticed. Maddie was associated with them, and I suppose that in some ways I could actually be considered one of them myself. It’s not like they had membership rolls. As social systems went, they were so far towards anarcho-communist that calling it a system at all seemed almost rude. They were more a philosophy than a faction, and while they were mostly human and mostly mages of varying nature and power, they’d take pretty much anyone who saw beauty and magic in modern, urban life.

Audgrim hadn’t been kidding about being nearby. By the time I got my stuff together and got out the door, he was already pulling up. It was the same car as yesterday. Or, I mean, probably. I supposed it was possible it was a different one; the dvergar had money, and it’s not like I’d have been able to tell the difference.

In any case, he barely waited until I was in the vehicle to start driving. I had to wonder once again what exactly it was that had him feeling so pressured about this. Yeah, it was a strange situation, but a little breaking-and-entering and one security guard getting hurt hardly seemed to merit this kind of reaction from him. Audgrim was the main local agent managing the investments of a moderately powerful supernatural nation-state which had significant local influence. I had a hard time seeing this response to something so relatively trivial making sense. So what wasn’t he telling me?

“Okay, so, details?” I asked, rather than any comment about that. I was a neurotic bitch with trust issues, and there was a very good chance I was seeing threat where there was none. Simultaneously, I was a neurotic bitch with trust issues, and if the discrepancies were real, I was hardly inclined to advertise that I’d noticed.

“I don’t actually have many,” he said, not sounding happy about that. “After you told me you felt mostly human magic, I started making inquiries with a few people. Nothing major. Then last night Jack called me saying some of the Tribe were concerned about something and he’d like to talk to me about it. Refused to explain more over the phone.”

I took a moment to absorb that before replying. “Okay. So, just to be clear, we are talking about the same Jack Tar here, right? Lunatic visionary urban druid, probably one of the top five most powerful practitioners in the northeastern U.S.? That guy?”

“Yes,” Audgrim said sourly. “And before you ask, no, he’s not one of the people I contacted. I don’t know how he even got this number. He called me on my personal cell at three in the morning, one I definitely did not use calling around about this. Every single thing about this continues to be weird as hell.”

“Damn,” I said. “Wow. Okay. So where are we going?”

“Some random bridge he requested as a meeting point for no apparent reason.”

I shook my head and settled in for the drive. “Damn. Your life makes mine look normal. I don’t need to say that very often.”

His response was to just put on some older Metallica. It wasn’t my thing, but I could tolerate it, and I figured after the morning he’d had he deserved some comfort music.

---

Jack Tar smelled awful.

This probably should not have been my first thought upon meeting perhaps the most personally powerful human I’d ever seen. Though from what I knew of him he might find it funny, or possibly complimentary.

Regardless, I couldn’t help it. It was overpowering. I wasn’t at all sure how much was real, either. Some, certainly, was just my brain processing and trying to make sense of the power that hung around him like a cloud. His breath smelled like gasoline fumes, his eyes were the same orange as a pigeon’s, his voice had the growl of the bus’s engine underneath it, and everything about him shimmered like an oil slick. He had serious power for me to be able to feel it so starkly from a distance. I’d seen comparable beings, but none of them were human.

Other parts, though, were definitely real. I could tell, because Audgrim looked like he regretted this almost as immediately as I did. The cigarette smoke was just the start. Jack smelled like weeks spent unwashed, sleeping under bridges and in alleyways; from what I’d heard, he actually did, so that made sense. He was too much a creature of the street to want a house around him.

He waved at us as we approached, as though there were ambiguity about who we were here to meet. Everything else aside, he looked to be the only person standing on the bridge. It was starting to rain, and the few other pedestrians were there because they were going somewhere else.

“Mister, ah, Tar, I presume?” Audgrim managed to not sound like he was obviously reevaluating his life choices. Barely.

The druid waved vaguely with one hand, the one holding the cigarette. “Call me Jack, please. So you’d be Áslaug’s boy, eh? How’s she doing?” He didn’t look at us, just kept staring out over the river. His voice was much more pleasant than his odor, low and slightly rough with a grey-green feeling about it.

I’d never heard Audgrim’s mother’s name. From the look on his face, he hadn’t been expecting to hear it today either. “Uh. She’s doing well, I think. Little stressed but she was in a good mood the last time we talked.”

“Good, good. Who’s your friend?”

“This is Kyoko Sugiyama, she’s—”

Before he could finish, Jack interrupted. “Eyyy, heard of you. Some of mine say you’re good company.” He flicked his cigarette over the edge of the bridge and turned to look at me. And then, completely fluidly, he transitioned into Japanese very nearly as good as mine. “You’re a raiju, no?”

I responded in the same language, slightly stiffly. I appreciated the gesture, really; Audgrim knew about most of this, but Jack didn’t know that. It was a courtesy to not include him in this exchange, and how many dvergar know Japanese? “Only half. My mother was, but my father is human.”

“Ah, excuse my rudeness. It is an honor, Miss Sugiyama, and I humbly beg your kindness.” And then, just as fluidly, he dropped back into English, simultaneously dropping the formal tone. “So I hear you’re in a rough spot, eh?”

“Maybe so,” Audgrim said. He sounded, at best, guarded. “You wanted to talk about something?”

“Yup. C’mon, let’s go for a walk.” Jack started off along the bridge, not waiting to see if we were following. “So I know a little bit about your thing, not a ton, but a little bit. Hear your guy got pretty fucked up.”

“Yeah.” Audgrim didn’t say anything about the context, about the other incidents.

“One of my friends you called, she had some interesting things to say. Said it looked real nasty. I think the word ‘necrosis’ was used, no?” Jack lit another cigarette. I tried not to groan. Smoke itself was fine, I had no objection to combustion products, but tobacco smells vile.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that your friend was well informed,” Audgrim said. “You said you might have something that would be important.”

“Might just,” Jack said, slowing down and brushing his hand against the railing as we walked. It was a long bridge. Pittsburgh has some pretty serious rivers, and more bridges than Venice, literally. His fingers traced the graffiti, and I could feel the ripple of his power, the slight sharpening. Not, I thought, a conscious action. But Jack Tar was a mage of considerable power, a druid who saw more clearly than perhaps anyone else the vibrant, pulsing life of the concrete jungle. People who operated on that scale, their magic wasn’t exactly an inanimate force, and his couldn’t not respond to the contact of graffiti, any more than a pyromancer can fully ignore the flame.

Audgrim waited for a few moments. When it became obvious Jack was unlikely to continue, the half-dvergr said with what I felt was a fairly impressive amount of patience, “What is it?”

“Well,” Jack said, “it’s easier to show than tell, I think. Not too far. I think you’ll see what I mean when we get there.”

After that rather ominous little sentiment, we walked in silence. I was occupied mostly with trying not to gag, even leaving a fair gap between myself and Jack. How he could stand his own odor was beyond me.

We got to the end of the bridge, the southern bank of the river, where we technically weren’t in Pittsburgh anymore, but rather the suburb of Homestead. You couldn’t really tell the difference, except that the population had more black people and there were a lot more people under the poverty line. Jack started down the steps meant to allow pedestrian access to the bridge, but then turned and climbed over the concrete wall beside them. The barricade was supposed to be tall enough to prevent that, and it was definitely trespassing to do this. Jack hopped over it easily without hesitation or comment.

Audgrim eyed the barricade dubiously. He looked at me. “Think this is a good idea?”

I laughed and scrambled up over the barricade as quickly as Jack had. It was raining, and the concrete was slick, but this wasn’t my first rodeo. On the other side, I dropped down into a stand of trees, and saw Jack was moving back north, towards the river.

Pittsburgh was a weird city. I’d never seen an urban area with so many random patches of forest. It wasn’t parks, either; there were plenty of those too, but this was actual forest. There were lots of places where the hills were too steep to be worth settling, and so they never did. You could be in the concrete jungle one moment, and then the next you’re in the literal one, in what is for practical intents and purposes a patch of temperate rainforest. I liked that about it.

This was a dense little grove. I didn’t know why it wasn’t developed, when on either side there were roads and buildings. There’s no logic to this city’s layout at all. Audgrim was slower following over the barricade, and clumsier, and he was clearly starting to quietly freak out trying to figure out what was going on. I was just following Jack and enjoying the smell of the forest, the rain on the leaves. I loved these random wild spaces within the city. I was grinning.

And then we turned, and I saw what Jack had been talking about, and the grin went away pretty fucking fast. You walk up on a dead guy by surprise and that tends to happen, I find. Looked to be a young man, twentysomething, laid out on the grass in a small clearing among the trees. There was another guy sitting on the ground at the edge of the clearing under a tree, but he seemed pretty obviously to be a sentry rather than the murderer.

Jack Tar had gotten rid of the cigarette. I wasn’t sure when. He had lost the casual cheer, too, and he looked grim as he walked over. “Oy,” he said, quietly enough it wouldn’t carry far through the trees. “Martin, anything happen while I was out?”

“Nope. Nobody showed, nothing changed.” Martin didn’t stand up, and seemed pretty relaxed, all things considered. His voice was casual, almost soothing somehow with how calm it was.

“Good. Aight, come take a look.”

I did not want to come take a look. Corpses did not, as a general rule, bother me. I’d seen a few—not a ton, my life wasn’t immersed in death or anything, but a few—and they weren’t really that bad, broadly speaking. The parts of a person that mattered were already gone. The corpse was just the shell they left behind, just meat. I didn’t really have that aversion to death’s aftermath that a lot of people did.

Did not bother me as a general rule. But I had a strong suspicion I knew what happened to this poor bastard, and I did not want to see it up close. I was now the reticent one, trailing behind Audgrim reluctantly. I did follow, though. No way out but through, and waiting wouldn’t make this any better.

Up close, the body smelled horrible. Absolutely horrible, a miasma of sickly-sweet rot that had even Audgrim gagging when he got close to it. There were extensive areas of his body that were more of a vile black sludge than flesh, some extending pretty far into the tissue. Definitely necrosis rather than natural decay, and I doubted he’d been lucky enough to be dead for most of it.

“I take it this was one of your people,” Audgrim said after a moment. He sounded impressively calm, all things considered.

“Yeah. Kid with a knack for metal, worked with cars a lot.” Jack looked at the body. His voice was…hard to read. “Look about like what your guy had happen?”

“A lot more extensive, but pretty close. Kyoko, think you can compare them?”

“I mean, I didn’t see the last guy, but it checks out. This looks more like necrotizing fasciitis than recluse bites, but that might just be from the severity.”

Jack turned and stared at me. “The fact that you even know how to distinguish those,” he said, “is both fascinating and disturbing.”

“Agreed,” Audgrim said dryly. “But also you know that’s not what I meant.”

I looked at him, somewhat incredulously. I looked at the corpse. I looked back at him. “You cannot possibly expect me to do that.”

“It’s a much better sample. There might be something useful here.” His tone was distinctly cajoling, now, and the two mages both looked somewhat lost trying to follow the conversation.

“Fuck you with your pants on,” I snapped. “The last one was bad enough.”

Audgrim just kept looking at me. I think he was aiming for puppy dog eyes. They didn’t look good on him.

“Ugh. Fine. You owe me for this. Can you all give me some room to work, please?”

They backed up. Not far enough, but then, it was a bit immaterial. This was going to suck regardless. No way out but through, I reminded myself. Grimacing, I closed my eyes and dropped the filters I was maintaining on my perceptions.

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