Bone Dance

“Donkey. Are you a little baby that I have to tell you right from wrong? You feel every day what you have to do, and you make like you don’t. But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords.”

“All I want is to quit doing downtime.”

Whatever was using Sherrea’s mouth hooted. “My brother already said he’d help with that. You know my brother? Uncle Death?”

I clutched at my knees. “What am I trying to accomplish, at least?”

“To open the way, little donkey!”

“What’re you frowning about?” Sherrea grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was back. Her eyes were where they ought to be, her face was her own.

“Is this your way of teaching me that I get what I pay for?”

“You don’t like the way I read, don’t ask me to do it.”

“I don’t mind your reading. It’s your little friends coming to visit that gives me a sharp pain.” She was sullen. “So you got a visit from Tia Luisa, huh? Better clean up your act, then. That’s for when the querent is in shit up to the chin.”

She put out a hand to sweep up the cards. I put two fingers on hers, lightly, and let go. “Sher. I’m sorry. But four times, it’s happened. I get some kind of physical trauma, not even enough to knock me out, and zip — I wake up someplace else, with the closing credits rolling, and I can’t remember the rest of the movie. Something in my head is broken.”

“Most people’s heads are broken, Sparrow. So what?”

“So I need help. And I’m scared.” That last escaped before I got my mouth closed.

She scratched her lower lip with her fingernail, watching me. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll try a clarification.”

She picked up the cards, all except Joan of Arc, and shuffled them. “Cut,” she told me, and I did. She picked up the piles and began to flick down cards. And slowed, and stopped, finally, with the fourth card, the gri

“Fu

We sat in the dim room, staring at the ugly pictures. I was holding as still as I could, so that none of them would do their foolish dance of transformation. But my nose itched, and it made Baron Samedi laugh.

“I guess you better do whatever it was I told you to do,” Sher said at last, and began picking up the cards, slowly, all her facility with them disappeared.

“You mean, nothing concrete?”

She shook her head. “If you can’t act the way the cards tell you, then react that way. Make your decisions when it’s time.”

She lifted the last card, Saint Joan. Under it, at the precise center of the white silk scarf, was a spot of fresh, vivid red.

“Do what you were told to do.” Sherrea’s voice was thin. “And don’t come back here until you’re sure you’re doing it.” She lifted her face, hard as a marble goddess’s. “The next move is yours.”

I found my shirt and pants in her kitchen, stiff from the clothesline. On top of them was a thin leather cord with a little pendant made out of dark wood: two V shapes, overlapping point to point. I locked myself in the bathroom again and dressed, and after a moment shrugged and dropped the thong around my neck and under my shirt. The pendant felt just like wood.

When I left, Sherrea was still sitting in the living room, in front of the blood-marred white scarf.

Card 2: Crossing The Sun

Waite: The transit from the light of this world to the light of the world to come. Consciousness of the spirit.

Crowley: Collecting intelligence. The lion, the sparrowhawk. Alcohol is his drug. His magical power is the red tincture, the power of acquiring wealth. Glory, gain, riches, triumph, pleasure; shamelessness, arrogance, vanity. Recovery from sickness.

2.0: A place for everything, and everything wired in place

Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that’s out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don’t have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.

The beauty of the Night Fair was that no matter how one defined happiness at a given moment, it was usually available there. The price was negotiable, within limits. That’s why the Night Fair endured: because we never stop needing something to make us happy.

The sun had set in a smear of indigo and orange when I reached that chainlink border. I twined my fingers in the fabric of the fence and felt bits of rust grind away under my grip. I was in my own country again. Here there were no gods but the Deal, no spooks but those that could be conjured for money at the buyer’s request. I was safe from Sherrea’s riding spirits, if not my own.

I traveled the fence line to the nearest of the three gates and found it open. The Night Fair was alive from sunset to full dawn. At any other time it was locked and silent, and no one climbed the fence.

What is that? she’d asked, and, A market, I’d told her. And an ocean is a large body of water, and hearts pump blood. The subtleties are lost.

What the Night Fair had been before I knew it, I couldn’t say. Now it was ten blocks of the City, in various states of repair. There were places where buildings had been knocked down or burnt away, and in those cavities and in the streets were the market and carnival places, the booths, the games of skill and chance, the food and drink vendors, the rides, the freak shows. For less easily granted wishes, one had to look to the buildings. There was no directory, no skyway map, no Guide to Retailers. If one wanted something in the buildings, one had to want it enough to go looking. I was as confident of the Night Fair as any of its patrons, but I went carefully when I left the streets.

I was so hungry I felt transparent, so thirsty that my own saliva rasped in my throat. But that was a state I could change, with a little currency. I could trudge to the other side of the Fair — but that was a long trudge. Besides, I wanted to feel the Deal in action. I had enough concentration left to do a little magic, if I could spot someone who’d shell out for it.

The Fair was half-asleep, so early in the evening; some of the stands were empty, and the ones that weren’t were gaudy islands without their proper context. The smell of cooking-oil lamps seemed strong without the stronger smells of food and fuel and humanity to bury it. But in a courtyard I found the kind of thing I was looking for, or in this case, listening for. A fat Oriental kid was ru

He looked hopeful when I approached, less so when I pointed to the speaker and said, “Sounds bad.”

His mouth turned down at the corners. “Sounds okay to me.”