Echo City Page 4

  "Not easily."

  "But let's say I wanted to. What would I need to do?"

  "Are you planning on it?"

  "No, but just in case. I mean, this would really have come in useful against Scylla."

  "We did ward the house against Scylla," Muirin said. "If you'll recall."

  "So is warding separate from inviting?"

  "Some of the time."

  "But in Scylla's particular case?"

  "You couldn't rescind the invitation because you weren't the one who issued it," Muirin said.

  Ohoho. Now we were getting somewhere. "Drew did," I said, and she nodded slightly. "But Drew died. Scylla killed him. So he couldn't ... but his ghost could, couldn't he?"

  "No. The rules of the living no longer apply to the dead. They have their own rules."

  "Like not being able to manifest during the day or leave the house."

  "Precisely," Muirin said.

  "So the person who gives the invitation is the only one who can uninvite someone. Even if they live in the same house?"

  "Yes ... Usually."

  "I knew you were going to say that."

  "But," Muirin went on, ignoring my interruption, "it is possible to put extra effort into keeping something out. An invitation, once given, is difficult to rescind entirely, though not impossible. You can, however, put extra force behind ... hmm, you have no specific verb in English for the opposite of inviting, I don't think. But just as you can invite with extra emphasis, you can also do the opposite."

  "Keep out with extreme prejudice."

  "Which is what we did with Scylla."

  "But all of that wouldn't matter if Drew had been alive to uninvite her."

  "Well, she still would have been able to force her way into a weakly warded house," Muirin said. "A threshold isn't inviolate, just hard to get past. You've seen me do it. It hurts, and it weakens me, but it's certainly possible."

  I hadn't known it hurt. "What would I do if I wanted to uninvite you? Hypothetically speaking," I added. "Look, you know I don't. But I might need to know this for something a lot meaner than you."

  "You decide it," Muirin said. "I don't know how to be any clearer than that. What you call magic is a matter of will and ritual, but the ritual is mainly to focus the will. Your ability to keep someone out, once invited, depends upon your determination to keep them out. And now—" She took a breath; it sounded relieved. "We are nearly there."

  Binghamton is a small industrial city located on the convergence of two rivers. In the two months or so that I'd known Muirin, I had never been to her house, though I'd driven through Binghamton a couple of times before I met her; it's on I-81, and one of the main highway routes from Ithaca to New York City goes through it.

  We crossed the Chenango River and drove through a rather pretty little downtown before crossing a larger river, the Susquehanna. On the far side, the city trailed off into strip malls, gas stations, and run-down neighborhoods with turn-of-the-century houses.

  On one of these streets, Muirin slowed and turned into a wide gravel driveway. The house was white-painted, peak-roofed, and narrow. The covered porch abutted the sidewalk behind a narrow strip of overgrown lawn, while the driveway was alongside the house, shaded by oak trees. There was a fairly extensive addition in back, and at some point the narrow city lot had been joined to the one next door, which now contained nothing but trees and an overgrown garden. A homemade child's swing dangled from one low branch, abandoned and forlorn; a canvas tarp covered up some sort of project car under the trees. Muirin's huge, beat-up dump truck was parked beside the house. She pulled in behind it.

  "It's the O'Connors' house," Muirin said, unlatching the side gate while I retrieved the sword from the backseat. A flagstone walk led around the corner of the house to the kitchen door. "Mine now, I suppose. I've always lived with them, as a sort of distant relative. In past centuries it was quite common for families to have relations hanging about—a spinster aunt here, an orphaned cousin there. No one asked questions."

  I found myself imagining the life that she must have led, bound unwillingly to the family (or had it been unwilling? I supposed I had assumed so without asking). Pretending to be one of them, but set apart by her immortality, her magic, her age.

  "Didn't anybody notice that you never—" I began, and then stopped. Never aged, I was going to say, but the answer smacked me between the eyes. "Oh. Glamour."

  "That's right. I did age, in fact, to mortal eyes, only to appear in a different guise later on." She unlocked the kitchen door, while I trailed behind, looking around the backyard. The lot was much deeper than it appeared from the front. An unmowed lawn stretched down to a pond where a couple of ducks paddled around. I couldn't help taking out my phone to snap a picture. On the far side, a pair of houses with better-kept lawns shared communal access to the pond, their yards divided by an honest-to-God white picket fence. There was an old guy in a yellow slicker up on a ladder in the left-hand yard, pruning branches with a big pair of shears.

  Even with illusion to hide her unchanging nature, Muirin couldn't have gotten to know anyone—no one who wasn't in on the O'Connor family secret, at least. I felt for her. It'd take a heart of stone not to be moved by the idea of a thousand years of loneliness.

  Muirin leaned out. "Are you coming?"

  The atmosphere in the house was an odd combination of old family home and bachelor pad. Bill had been the last child in the family, and he was in his fifties when I had met him just before his death. After that, Muirin had been living here alone, I assumed. There were dirty dishes in the sink and power tools on the kitchen counter. I wandered around the living room with its low, dingy ceiling, looking at the pictures of O'Connor ancestors that decorated the walls. The resemblance to Bill was obvious in most of them; they were all square-jawed, salt-of-the-earth types, men and women alike, with broad shoulders suitable for butchering cattle or swinging a sword.

  The actual sword itself couldn't be photographed. I'd tried, in the interests of scientific experimentation, and always got either nothing at all, or a faint rainbow smear that looked like a lighting filter. I thought I could see something like that in a couple of the pictures, but most of the photos were amateur film-camera photos, low-quality and rather blurry, so it was hard to tell.

  The photos went all the way back to tintypes of unsmiling, severe-looking O'Connors in stiff black formal clothes. The most recent I could find were yellowed 1970s-era pictures of a gawky teenage Bill with a shyly smiling redhead who must be his mother. I wondered what had happened to her. There were no recent signs of her presence, no newer photos.

  If I let myself think about it too much, there was something heartbreaking about that parade of O'Connors, dwindling until it was just Bill and Muirin. And now just Muirin.

  Who, I noticed, did not appear in any of the photos. Was she impossible to photograph, like the sword? Or just not deemed worthy of inclusion?

  "Kay!"

  Speak of the devil.

  Muirin leaned into the living room and crooked a finger at me. I followed her through a side door into the woodworking shop. It was the most modern-looking part of the house that I'd seen so far, with overhead fluorescent lights and a concrete floor littered with wood shavings. I'd enjoyed shop in high school—it was art too, in its own way—so I recognized table saws and jig saws, drill presses and lathes, many of them quite new. The fresh smell of cut wood and sawdust filled the air.

  "Bill enjoyed working with wood," Muirin said, stroking a gloved hand along the curve of a half-finished chair back. "As do I. The techniques most familiar to me are old ones, of course, with a different technology. But it is a satisfying thing to make something useful with your own hands." She glanced at the sword. "Especially when one spends so much of one's time in the warrior's trade."

  It was the first hint I'd gotten from her that the destructive aspect of the Gatekeepers' work might bother her, if not as much as it did me.

  Muirin took a piece of smooth reddis
h wood from one of the worktables and held it out to me. "See how this feels. It's oak. I've already done the basic shaping, but I need to balance it properly for your grip and height."

  The slab of wood, though it looked awkward and plain, had a similar heft to the sword. I lifted and swung it in the across-the-chest move that Muirin had first taught me, and almost smacked it into the lathe. Muirin hastily dragged some of the larger freestanding tools out of the way, clearing me an area in the middle of the floor.

  "How does that feel?"

  "It feels good," I said, running through my moves again. I did the across-the-chest cut, shifting to a backswing, and then a forward thrust that Muirin said was the prevailing style of swordfighting when she was young—"with bronze swords, of course, but the technique is the same."

  Muirin adjusted my grip on the training sword, repositioned my hands and then used her fingers to measure the length of the hilt remaining below the edge of my palm. By now we'd trained together enough that I'd gotten used to her moving me around with the impersonal briskness of a housekeeper fixing a bed.

  "I'd like to outfit you with a couple of different ones. A heavy waster that mimics the feel of the sword, and a lighter one of cheap wood for basic muscle-memory and reflex training." She picked up a length of some kind of light-colored wood, pine or spruce, and tapped it against her palm. "There's another thing we need to consider, as well. You need to select a fencing teacher."

  "I thought you were my fencing teacher."

  Muirin shook her head. "I can teach you some basics, but I'm not an expert. All I know is a seat-of-the-pants fighting style that I've cobbled together for myself, and as you've probably noticed, I'm faster than a human. This limits my ability to effectively teach you, since you could never learn to do everything I can do."

  "What about Bill and his family?"

  "I helped as needed," Muirin said, "but their fighting skills were passed down from father to son, and they looked outside the family for expert tutors in different styles. You will need to select a fighting school of your own. Sooner is better than later, because the more bad habits you pick up at the early stages, the more you'll have to unlearn later."

  Every time I thought things were settling into a predictable routine ... "Will you help me figure out which one would be best? I don't know anything about this stuff."

  "Yes, but in the end the choice must be yours, since the decision you make will set the—just a moment."

  She retrieved her phone from her jacket pocket and retreated to the far end of the shop. I heard her say, "Who is, now?"

  I did some more practice cuts with the training sword, then laid it down and drew the actual sword, comparing the two. The sword in practice sessions didn't draw on my body's energy as it did in combat, but it still felt light compared to the wooden one; the actual weight was about the same, but it was the difference between live weight and deadweight, between carrying a cat and carrying a similar-sized bag of flour. The sword moved with me, sometimes in control, sometimes leaning into my swings. It wasn't sentient, at least in any way I'd been able to recognize, but it was, in some sense, alive. Or at least it was more responsive than any inanimate object had a right to be.

  I'd fallen into the rhythm so thoroughly that it took me a minute to realize Muirin had finished her conversation and was briskly putting away the tools she'd taken out. "Let me see you with the waster again," she said. I picked up the training sword, and she made some pencil marks on it around my hands, then had me hold a lighter one and did the same. "I'll finish trimming and planing these, and bring them up to Ithaca for you the next time I come."

  She seemed to be in a hurry. "Are we leaving already?" I asked.

  "Something's come up. Finishing the waster will have to wait. The Gatekeepers are meeting in the city, and they need me there."

  "You're my wheels," I reminded her. "My car's in Ithaca."

  "I know. Actually, I was thinking you could come along. I'd rather not take the time to drop you off back in Ithaca. If we leave now, we'll make New York by early afternoon."

  "Are you planning to be gone overnight?" I asked.

  "I'm not sure yet. I need to grab a few things. I'll meet you at the car." And she was gone.

  Gee, there's nothing like having a split second to make a decision. But I'd have to meet the other Gatekeepers sooner or later. If we didn't make it back in time for my afternoon shift at the bookstore tomorrow, I could call in sick; I'd had a worrying number of sick days lately on account of the whole monster-hunting thing, but at least they were used to it..

  I headed outside, where I found Muirin tossing a military-green knapsack into the backseat of the car. "New York, here we come," I said.

  She gave me a slight smile and handed me something wrapped in a paper towel, which turned out to be a microwave burrito, hot on one side, still frozen in the middle. "Lunch," she said. "Eat on the road."

  Chapter 4

  There wasn't much small talk on the drive to the city. Muirin's relatively friendly mood had evaporated; it was obvious she was stressed. My attempts to ask questions or even offer comments on the passing scenery fell into a silence, so eventually I entertained myself with phone games. I texted Fresca to let her know where I was going.

  Call me later and tell me about the weirdos at the party, she texted back.

  "So, hey," I said at last, as we passed the exit signs for Stroudsberg and Netcong. "Who's gonna be there, anyway? Anyone I might have heard of?" If we were about to meet someone from mythology, I could at least look them up and avoid embarrassing myself.

  After a mile or two, just when I'd decided that she either hadn't heard me or wasn't going to answer, Muirin said, "I don't know who will be there. Whoever is nearby and not otherwise occupied, I suppose."

  "So who might be there? Throw me a bone here. I mean, are we talking fairies, elves, elder gods, the Seven Dwarves? Fifty people? Five? You never talk about the Gatekeepers at all, Muirin, beyond telling me what they do."

  "I don't?" She sounded mildly surprised.

  "No. You don't."

  The Gatekeepers weeded out invasive foreign myths, sort of like those Ag-Sci folks at Cornell who put together weeding programs to wipe out purple loosestrife and the like, except for the magical ecosystem. This had sounded like a good idea when Muirin first recruited me, until I'd realized what I should have seen from the beginning: that mythical creatures are often people too, and the Gatekeepers were in the business of killing them for no worse crime than being in the wrong place. Monster slaying sounds a lot more heroic when the monster isn't capable of talking. Or, as in the case of Scylla, the Greek sea monster that we'd killed this spring, loving and grieving and wanting to protect her friend.

  Along the way, she'd killed a couple of my friends, so I felt guilty but not actually that sorry for her. Sometimes they really were monsters trying to murder people. And ... sometimes they weren't. I couldn't wait until Muirin found someone else to take the sword and I didn't have to make that kind of moral decision anymore.

  "Hmm," Muirin said after a minute. "We're going to Seth's apartment in Manhattan. It's a regular meeting place for us."

  "Who's Seth?"

  "A friend."

  Helpful.

  "So there are usually a few Gatekeepers in the vicinity," Muirin added. "We meet when there is something that requires discussion."

  "Like things being a little out of whack around Ithaca?"

  "Not just in Ithaca. I'm not the only one who's noticed a few disturbances. Besides, we are overdue for a conclave on certain other topics."

  "Such as?"

  "You," Muirin said.

  Oh good.

  "And me," she added.

  "Did you do something to piss them off?"

  Muirin snorted, and one of her faint smiles tugged the corner of her mouth. "Why don't you exercise some patience, and your questions will be answered in time."

  We crossed the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan. It was raining here too, gl
istening on the streets and the cabs and the scurrying pedestrians with their umbrellas. Fresca and I were always making plans to go down to the city, but we'd only been a couple of times, and never for more than a day or two. I had a feeling Muirin probably wasn't going to allocate much time for sightseeing, so I peered out the window to see what I could, while I could.

  Chicago was my home city and I didn't find New Yorkers quite as friendly as the Midwesterners of my childhood, but the city itself, paradoxically, was a more welcoming and pedestrian-friendly place. Walking around in downtown Chicago felt like being at the bottom of a steel-and-glass canyon. I wasn't sure what it was about the construction of Manhattan that made it different—the design diversity of the buildings, the orientation of the streets, maybe just its unfamiliarity—but it made me want to get out and walk around, to touch things and stroll in the greenbelts and feel the city all around me.

  But not today. I touristed from the car until we pulled into a parking garage. I couldn't help noticing the OVERNIGHT PARKING sign, which struck me as a less than positive omen for my chances of getting back to Ithaca before my shift at the bookstore tomorrow.

  "Do you want me to leave the sword in the—"

  "No. Bring it."

  I buckled myself into the swordbelt and hurried after her. We stepped out into the light, misty rain. The day had warmed up, and it was oppressively humid, wrapping around me like a damp towel. Although I knew the sword was covered by its own glamour and couldn't be seen by most people, I still caught myself looking around anxiously. I wasn't up on New York laws regarding swords, but I suspected they fell under the heading of "illegal stuff to carry around on a city street, especially while black." Even if it was only a small sword.

  Muirin waved at the river of yellow taxis crawling past us, and one veered out of the flow immediately. When I looked out of the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the tall, well-dressed, professional-looking blonde that she was pretending to be. Her glamours could be either a vague "see what you want to see" field, or, as now, something specific. She reminded me a little of Jill Frost in that guise.