Still there. He felt that there was a skeleton inside him—not locked in some closet, but in his very flesh—a different man, another adulthood. He had seen himself grow up twice. The first time he had grown into a woodsman, a warrior, an acquaintance of savages and fairies.
Fairies. Such a childish name. The Wyrim. Odd how it had taken a mental effort to remember it. Some things he had forgotten much as he had forgotten the forest language the farther from the wood's heart he had gone.
But this was his other adulthood, his real life, he reminded himself harshly. This was the reality of the world he would remain and die in: these faces with their slurred urgency across the bar, and the stink of the beer, the rumble of the traffic outside. This was his own world, without wonders, grey and tired with striving; a potbellied, short-of-breath world. That leaner, deadlier man that he might once have been was as dead as a half-forgotten dream. And in any case, he did not want to go back. The nights were bad enough as it was, here in this urban labyrinth, this tamed place.
He was given a break after four hours and walked out of the back of the pub for a breath of fresher air, fumbling for his cigarettes as he went. Out here there were red-bricked walls and overflowing dustbins; a cat cleaning its paws. The sky was bricked off, a mere square far above him lined with jet trails and deepening now into a street-lit night. Other buildings soared up on all sides, metal fire escapes hung with washing. There were children's voices up there somewhere, a baby crying, the sound of a young woman's laughter.
He smoked the cigarette down to the butt and lit another, setting his backside on a dustbin. It would be a long night. He was there till the end, the last shift, and one of the night's final tasks would be throwing out the reluctant drunks. The manager had given him the job because of his size. They never argued. Perhaps even now there was Something in his eyes which told the quarrelsome to walk away. The thought pleased him. Still a trace of that hardness there, the man who had been Cat's lover, Ringbone's friend and a killer of men.
The evening was quiet for the city. Something—a cat—crashed off a dustbin, clattering the lid and yowling loudly. The alley backed away into thickening shadow filled with rubbish, peppered with vertical and horizontal bins and the wreck of a discarded and stripped van. It was empty.
His cigarette glowed like a hellish eye as he sucked on it. Winos slept in this alley sometimes, huddled in old news-papers. They rooted in the bins, competing with the rats, and were as furred and foul-smelling as animals themselves. Per-haps there was one out there tonight, curled like a foetus in its womb of trash, watching him.
Hard to believe that a brick wall away there was a crowd of people drinking and talking and doing the things people enjoyed doing in the city. It was so still out here, still as a wood on a windless night. From the surrounding buildings a few faint lights glimmered, and on one ceiling he could see the blue flicker of a television. But it seemed almost as if there was a thickness of silence, a depth of it as thick as smoke, down here where he sat amid the rubbish, the papers and the dogends, the scraps of littered food and wrappers of chips and sweets. The flotsam of the streets.
He blew out smoke that was becoming invisible in the gloom.
Something moved down the length of the alley, furtive, lurching. As his hand came up to his lips again ash fell on his shirt. His fingers were trembling.
One of the winos rummaging for a bed or the leftovers from someone's snack.
Because something was watching him. He could feel its stare crawl up and down his plump body. He knew he was not alone in the alley.
Behind him he heard a burst of ragged laughter from the windows of the pub. They were pools of yellow light now, and made the alley seem all the darker. Had he been out here so long? Best to be getting in before he got told off for skiving.
Something there, in the shadows.
He backed away with the cigarette hanging from one moist lip. His heel clanged against the bin and he cursed ever so softly.
Not here. Not now. That was done with.
There was a snarl in the shadows, a low, liquid growl coming from deep in some massive chest. The cigarette dropped from his mouth. He turned and ran for the safe throng of the pub.
THEY HIT UPON the village near midday and at once climbed one of the surrounding trees, the shotgun bumping at Michael's back, to take a look at the lie of things and see what they were up against. Fancy they had left tethered half a mile behind them, much to Michael's misgiving, but Mirkady told him that no Wyrim would touch an iron-shod horse with more iron in its stirrups and a bunch of holly—they had found some in the thickets—tied to the pommel. The animal was safe from any non-human forest dwellers who happened to chance by, and few people ventured so far from the villages or the Great South Road. Cat had reinforced his argument and Michael had given in, though was uneasy about the idea of the ordinary fauna of this place. Lions and tigers and bears, no less. Nothing would have surprised him. And he 'placed little faith in the pungent plant Mirkady had crushed on the blade of his dagger.