Echo City Read online

  "Long story, tell you later." I was breathless from Fresca's hug, and just from the nearness of her. If I thought I'd managed to get my crush out of my system with a couple of kisses, I was starting to realize it had only made things worse.

  Fresca let me go, either oblivious to the effect she was having on me, or deliberately choosing to be. "So you got her! Was there a fight? Secret passages? Skullduggery and cloaks and daggers?"

  "Actually none of the above," I said, as we started up the stairs. "They just let us walk out." There had been no guard on our speedboat, no attempt to stop us. Muirin had stopped to speak briefly to Fand; I didn't know what they had talked about. And then they let us go.

  "I forgot to tell you to have fun storming the castle. I've been thinking about that the whole time you've been gone."

  "Missed opportunity," I said. "Well, the way my life is going, you'll probably get another chance sooner or later."

  It wasn't too hard to slip back into our old normal, the rapport we used to share. At least, as long as I didn't think about it too much. I hoped I could be around her without having my heart broken all over again every time I looked at her. That would be the worst of all, if I tried for her love and lost her friendship too.

  This time we ended up in a room I hadn't seen before, a dining hall behind the kitchen. It was the largest room I'd seen in Gwyn's warren so far, with high enough ceilings that "grand" would've been a good word if I hadn't already been blitzed by the staggering scale and complexity of Manannán's palace. I liked Gwyn's style better, though: quiet and homey, with bookshelves everywhere. Manannán's city on the sea would be fascinating to explore—I still regretted not getting to look around—but this was a place to come home to.

  There was a fireplace at one end of the dining hall, backing onto the fireplace in the kitchen and, I guessed, sharing a chimney. Rather than a single long table like a castle dining hall from a movie, there were a number of smaller tables with plank benches. We congregated at one of these, me and Fresca on one end, Gwyn and Taliesin at the other. Muirin, looking decidedly awkward, settled in the middle, equidistant from both groups.

  The kitchen lady and the servant kids brought us plates of bread and meat, bowls of a spiced fish soup, and wooden mugs that turned out to contain wine that had been watered down until it was completely disgusting. I had read of watered wine in books, and now that I knew what it tasted like, I was never going to be able to read about it without wincing again.

  Fresca jumped up suddenly. "Oops, forgot a thing," and she scampered off, leaving me with nothing to do while I ate but watch Gwyn and Muirin having the world's most awkward conversation. There were long pauses and lots of staring at the cutlery rather than each other.

  "You are well, I take it," Gwyn said.

  "As well as can be expected."

  "Ah."

  "Manannán's made a few interesting additions to his labyrinth since last I was there," Taliesin said. No one paid any attention to him.

  "I expect you still know your way around my lands."

  "It's different when the dogs aren't chasing me," Muirin said, and took a sip of her wine.

  "Oh, don't play the wounded party," Gwyn said. "You tricked me."

  "And you betrayed me."

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Much longer in the mortal realm, I assure you."

  "I sent you messages," Gwyn said.

  "I do not wish to receive messages from you. I believe I made that abundantly clear."

  About the time I was half expecting Taliesin to get up and start juggling bread rolls to break the tension, Fresca came back with a heap of books. "While you were storming the castle," she said, "I've been doing research. You can thank me later."

  She looked cheerful and energized. I recognized that look—Fresca was a bibliophile English major, and she looked like she'd just seen the book promised land. I wondered if I could sneak a peek at Gwyn's library myself before we left.

  The books that she spread out between our two place settings were in English—I'd been a little worried about that—and all of them were histories of New York or biographies of William Tweed. "Huh," I said, picking up a fat hardbound tome with an old black-and-white photograph of Tweed on the cover. He was easily recognizable even with the stiff, posed look of a 19th-century portrait, although there was less of him, somehow, in the picture. An extra dimension was missing. When Tweed was in a room, he filled every facet of your awareness. There was barely room for air, let alone other people.

  "So what do you know about Boss Tweed, anyway?" Fresca asked, opening one of the books with her soup spoon in her other hand.

  "The historical one? Uh, that he exists." U.S. history wasn't my worst subject, but it wasn't something I'd gone out of my way to learn about, either. "He was some kind of New York political bigwig, and he was famously corrupt. And that's about it. Oh, and Tammany Hall was like ... a thing. Tammany Tigers. I remember that part."

  "Right, it's a good thing I'm here, then," Fresca said. "So Tammany Hall was the political machine that ran New York City in the mid to late 1800s, and Boss Tweed ran Tammany Hall. Basically he got himself in charge of everything, and stole a ton of money from New York taxpayers before they took him down."

  "It's the taking him down part that I'm mostly interested in," I said, leafing through the book. I paused on a cartoon of Tweed with a bag of money for a head. The caption helpfully told me about the cartoonist Thomas Nast, who was famous for popularizing the image of Tweed as a corrupt strongman and personifying Tammany Hall as a top-hat-wearing tiger.

  Thanks, Nast. Now I know who to blame.

  "In the real world, Kay, we're talking, like, smearing him in the papers with political cartoons and then filing charges against him, not a crossbow bolt between the eyes."

  "I figured that much out, thanks." I flipped to another cartoon, this one representing Tammany Hall as a tiger mauling a lady representing Democracy. That one hit a little too close to home. I shuddered and quickly turned the page.

  "The problem here is there's no higher authority to appeal to," Fresca said. "I mean, when it came right down to it, Tweed owned the cops in New York City, but he didn't have any control over the National Guard or the Attorney General's office. It's not like he was gonna secede from the U.S."

  "But that's exactly what this Tweed has done," I said. "He has his own country. And he owns it completely." The next page had another Nast cartoon, a foolish-looking Tweed caricature that bore only the most passing resemblance to the terrifyingly charismatic man who had killed my friend. "What do you suppose happened to the shadow version of Thomas Nast? If Tweed exists, I'm sure there must be a version of him too."

  "He's gone," Taliesin said, overhearing us. "Along with anyone else who was involved in bringing scrutiny onto the mortal Tweed—the editor of the Times who campaigned against him, corruption reformer Samuel Tilden from the New York Democrats, and the real Tweed's entire inner circle. That was one of the first things he did when he began to consolidate his power. We are not the only ones who can read history books from the human world, after all. Rather than friends and employees, he has Tigers."

  I turned back to the tiger cartoon, forcing myself to look at it until I had to flip to one of the more buffoonish Tweed caricatures. "Perfectly loyal minions."

  "As close as possible, anyway," Taliesin said. "Nothing is truly perfect. Nor is Tweed himself."

  And he certainly wasn't perfect in Nast's cartoon—not a terrifying, almost superhuman figure, but a silly-looking old man. Which I guess was the point. That's why political cartoonists and writers are first up against the wall when dictators start cracking down, I thought, skimming the text beside the cartoon. Even in a world where reality wasn't as directly malleable as in Shadow New York, a skilled op-ed writer or some firebrand reformer mounting a smear campaign could swing the tide of opinion in her own direction, and bring down a ruler ...

  It couldn't be that simple, could it?

  "Oh my God,
" I whispered, staring at the book, my eyes crossing slightly as it blurred out of focus. "I think I have an idea."

  "What?" Fresca said, and the Gwyn and Muirin clique of conversational awkwardness left off avoiding each other's gaze and turned to look at me too.

  I waved the book at them. "How'd they take down Tweed before, the real Tweed? By airing his dirty laundry in public. By making him look stupid. Nobody could take him on when they thought he was invincible. Make him look like a buffoon, and all of a sudden he was someone you could beat." My heart raced. This was the point where everyone would tell me my idea was stupid and I didn't know what I was talking about—except no one was saying that, they were all listening. "At least that's how it worked in the real world," I said. "And Shadow New York is a place of ideas, right? Everyone's always telling me so. If you made Tweed look stupid there, wouldn't he actually—"

  "It's been tried," Taliesin said gently. "You are not the first to think of it. Tweed has learned from the failings of his real-world counterpart, and he always makes a point of going after such people. Not just Nast, but anyone who tries to rally the opposition—journalists, artists, troubadours who made up songs about him ... it's not a good way to have a long, healthy lifespan. Why do you think Greenwich Village is now cut off from the rest of the city? It would have been wiped out, otherwise."

  "Oh." My cheeks heated. This was where the old Kay would apologize and sit down. And yet, it felt so right—I had a bone-deep certainty that this had to be the way to go about it. "But you didn't say it couldn't work, just that nobody's ever managed to avoid his attention long enough to try. What if the whole city—I mean, he can't go after everyone at once, can he? We're talking about New York City. We're talking about Harlem and, and Greenwich Village and SoHo and all the art galleries and the symphonies and everything. It's like the next best thing to Paris when it comes to creative people all bouncing off each other. We've got an army. All we have to do is mobilize it."

  "It still wouldn't be enough," Taliesin said. "The best you could hope for is to weaken him somewhat. Long before you could do any serious damage, his army of Tigers would set upon your rebellion and destroy the neighborhoods that were causing the problem."

  Fresca squeezed my hand. "What if it was a distraction?" she suggested. "You said it's been tried, so he's familiar with that kind of attack. He'll be expecting it. But what if the real attack is somewhere else?"

  "Such as?" Taliesin asked, but he was listening intently now.

  "One thing everyone in Shadow New York seems to agree on is that the sword is something special," I said. "St. Clair wanted it. Tweed obviously wants it. It can kill Tigers, and apparently that's just about impossible otherwise." Skathi had done it with what appeared to be relative ease, but I was starting to realize that Skathi was way out of everyone else's league.

  "The sword brings light and banishes darkness," Muirin murmured. She'd said much the same to me when I first met her, when she first explained to me what the sword could do.

  I nodded. "Darkness is how Tweed's magic works, I think—literal darkness, I mean. Shadows. The sword is genuinely dangerous to him, in a way that nothing else seems to be. We could use a PR assault to draw the Tigers away while we try to get our hands on the sword."

  Something snapped in Muirin's gray eyes—a spark of pride, perhaps. She leaned over to Gwyn. "This is why they won, you know. Humans. For all our magic and longevity."

  "They won because they breed like rabbits," Gwyn murmured back.

  "And that. But they are clever, creative, inventive. And bold. They think around corners, and dream things we do not."

  "The power of bards," Taliesin mused. "That's why people love us and fear us. If we make a king look small in the eyes of his people, he is small, indeed."

  "I'm right, aren't I?" I said. "We could win that way, couldn't we?"

  "Don't get ahead of yourself," Muirin said. "How do you plan to accomplish this?"

  "I don't have any idea. But I do know one thing. If the artists and writers and musicians of Shadow New York are our army—" I pointed at Taliesin. "Then we have a general."

  Taliesin was happy to help. Gwyn, however, refused to be part of it.

  "I can't," he said. We'd retired from the main dining hall to one of those fur-covered sitting rooms, sprawling on shaggy furniture with bottles of dark, warm beer. Muirin had positioned herself in the chair farthest from Gwyn, which incidentally put her next to me. "There are rules for these things. I told you I couldn't break into Manannán's fortress; equally, I cannot approach Tweed except through the usual diplomatic channels, unless I want to bring an army against him. A monarch cannot become a guerrilla in another monarch's land. And, in all honesty ..." He lifted one shoulder in a small shrug. "I don't really care to. It's not my affair. If Taliesin wants to help you, that's his business; I never know where he is half the time anyway. Who can keep track of bards?"

  Taliesin smiled gently. "Do you plan to tell them how Greenwich Village came to be severed from the rest of Shadow New York?"

  "Impertinent minstrel."

  "The resistance did it," I said. "At least, that's what Lily told me. Didn't they?"

  "They tried," Taliesin said. "But the neighborhoods are locked very tightly together by the network of doors, which Tweed now controls. They don't know this, but they had some help from the person who showed them such things could be done in the first place."

  "You," I said to Gwyn, who sighed. "So you aren't banned from interfering if you really want to?"

  "The bookstore is there, hence a small piece of my own domain. And my presence put the entire neighborhood at risk. A good case could be made that I had no choice but to intervene."

  "Are you familiar with the term 'rules-lawyering'?" Fresca said.

  "I never said I liked Tweed or the way he runs his kingdom. But I respect him and I respect his authority over his own land. In any case, it is nearly Midsummer and I am at the nadir of my power. Even if I were inclined to move against Tweed, which I am not, this is not the time I would choose to do it." There was a solid finality to his words, closing the door on future argument.

  "I don't know why you're so set on bringing down Tweed," Muirin said to me. She'd changed into loose, brown wool pants and a matching jacket that had probably belonged to one of the servants. They were too large for her small frame, making her look childlike until you saw her face. The box on its gold chain hung against her chest. Could it still contain ashes after two thousand years? "He's the legitimate ruler of his domain. Even if his people object to it, that doesn't make it your affair."

  "He's a dictator."

  "Yes, and so? You hope to replace him with another dictator, perhaps? Or leave Shadow New York in anarchy? That always ends well."

  "I don't know, Muirin. What do you want me to do? Let him kill and disappear people, and make shadow puppets of the rest?"

  "Yes," Muirin said simply. "It's not your business."

  "We can't let him keep the sword."

  "Getting the sword back is a separate issue from deposing a dictator. You have made them one and the same."

  "He killed my great-grandmother, who was also my friend. Right in front of me. I can't walk away from that."

  "So it's revenge you want?"

  "It's justice!" I said, feeling trapped.

  "And you're the arbiter of it?"

  "Stop badgering her," Fresca snapped.

  Her defense warmed me, and having a moment to breath, to think, helped me back down. "Thanks," I told Fresca, squeezing her hand, and I gave Muirin a level look, which she returned.

  "You're right," I said, and she smiled a little. "Up to a point. You're right, my motives aren't pure. But I'm not wrong about Tweed. He's evil, and he's dangerous, and he's hurting people. He's hurting the city itself, in the real world as well as over there. I ... I can do something about it. And I'm going to. You don't have to help me."

  "At the very least, you're correct that we can't leave the sword with him," Muir
in said. "Is it possible to arrange a trade of some kind? Bring leverage against him?"

  I shook my head. "I don't think so. He doesn't seem to have anyone he's close to, and he already has everything he wants. We're going to have to take it."

  "Where is he keeping it?"

  I described the sword's shadow prison to her, remembering as I did so that Muirin was a magician in her own right, as well as perhaps the world's foremost expert on the sword. "Can you get it out?"

  "I will have to see the wards to know if I can break them," Muirin said. "You've been to his stronghold. Do you have suggestions for getting inside?"

  "No. As far as I can tell, Tweed uses shadow magic to come and go. Below that, there's about a hundred stories of Tiger-infested building to get through."

  Muirin speared Taliesin with one of her sharper looks. "I don't suppose the Ways of Taliesin extend to the heart of Tweed's land, do they?"

  The bard raised his drink in a rueful salute. "Ah, would that they did, lovely lady."

  With a thin-lipped look of impatience, she turned her attention back to me. "You said Lily-Bell used a hang glider."

  Her name still cut me. "Yeah, but the Tigers can fly, and I'm guessing he's alert to an aerial assault now."

  "We will set aside that part of the plan for now, then," Muirin said, though she looked thoughtful. "Seth may have ways. I will ask him."

  "Will the Gatekeepers help?"

  "Not as a group. Certain individuals might, perhaps. But I have few close friends among them that I could call on for something like this."

  She subsided into a thoughtful silence.

  Creiddylad pushed her shaggy head into my lap, and I scratched her ears. I noticed Taliesin's alert gaze on me.

  "I don't suppose it would be a problem if a few hounds wanted to go with me," Taliesin said to Gwyn. "To keep me out of trouble."

  "Impossible task, that," Gwyn retorted. "But it'll be a good outing for them. Beware, bard: if my dogs are damaged, it won't be worth your scrawny hide." There was a slight smile on his lips when he said it, as sharp as a knife blade. For an instant I glimpsed something much darker under his casual human facade, a hint of the god of winter and death that was his real self.