This story is a deleted section from a novel that will make its debut in 2017. There’s nothing second-rate about it; the novel just went in a different direction. Of the characters, our narrator Strephon Larkinsteet, Anhedonia, White Smyth, Dolven and Wolken made the final cut though under other names. Glev remains Glev. Kavieng is still a night club owner in the novel, but an entirely different person. Larkinstreet is 1/8 shelleycoat, 1/8 kornbock and 1/8 Chinese storm dragon with a smidgen of vodianoy on his mortal mother’s side. Do your own math.
This is White Smyth’s last tale. I guess that makes it important. It’s the last thing I can tell you about White Smyth, and then my story goes on without him. If you don’t want to read this part, you can skip over it, but I think you should read it.
Kavieng’s was jumping. Ensconced in the dark cluster of box-shaped warehouse buildings on the city’s near north side, it glowed and sparkled below us like a mortal carnival.
White Smyth set us down at the front door. Humans walked past, oblivious to our presence, humans with worn jeans and dilated eyes darting beneath shocks of hair dyed coal black. Kavieng’s was not in a nice part of humantown.
The whole building was slenched. It belonged to some mortal landlord, but Kavieng had simply appropriated it with Masque. Once the magick settled into place, even the owner would forget about his property until Kavieng was done with it. It was customary for any fairy who had usurped real estate in this way to compensate the landlord with a miracle or two. Or the guy’s children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, depending on how long the fairies held on to the place.
The doorman was Kavieng himself.
“Mr. Larkinstreet,” he said in his sighing, night dweller’s voice. “And this would be the extraordinary White Smyth.”
Of course, Kavieng already knew all about him; he was showing off. His club was the central data bank for fairy gossip pretty much nationwide. He knew everything about everyone in Faerie. And he never forgot a name. And besides, White Smyth was semi-famous. Kavieng looked at him more like he wanted to eat him than make love to him.
“Your advance notices did not exaggerate, Taleteller,” he said. The overhead light shone on his dark, wavy hair, seamless skin and full lips. His tuxedo shimmered like fine silk. “Enter, honored guests.”
“Hey, thanks, bud,” I said. Gods, I really hated that chilly, ooh-aren’t-we-chic-creatures-of-the-night thing that Kavieng and a lot of his darkness-dwelling patrons were into.
We passed into the dark foyer. The coat check man was also Kavieng.
“Nothing to declare,” I said cheerily. He watched White Smyth from below fine, feathery eyebrows as we passed.
“Ah, Mr. Larkinstreet,” said the maitre d’, who was also Kavieng, “Your party is expecting you.”
He led us to our table.
The location of your table was a relative thing at Kavieng’s. If you were a person of no particular distinction, your table would seem to be right by the main entrance; but no sooner did the host seat you than you discovered yourself in another spot, far removed from the maitre d’s stand. In our case, he walked us all the way across the room. He wanted everybody to see White Smyth.
It’s hard to tell you what the place looked like. It looked like everything. At Kavieng’s each table got whatever decor they wanted. As we followed him I caught glimpses of royal baroque banquets, medieval revels, art deco supper parties, beach parties, punk parties, and fairy motifs you wouldn’t recognize if I told you. Fairy musicks of every available form and style and key mixed discordantly as we passed through the multitude of overlapping reality bubbles.
I held White Smyth’s hand firmly. It was easy for newcomers to get lost in that place. There were a few cases of people getting real lost, but let’s not go there now. The trick was to keep your attention focused on Kavieng as he ushered you to your table. And you needed to watch real carefully, or you might accidentally start following one of the other Kaviengs as they zoomed by with trays of food and drink.
I guess you’ve figured out that everyone who worked at Kavieng’s was Kavieng.
His father was Sansfoy, a happy little paramindo from Milan. Sansfoy had been chef royal and, later, major domo to the Appenine fairy court before he set out for the New World. He was the founder of Sansfoy’s, a very upscale fairy restaurant on Michigan Avenue. Everybody was crazy about old Sansfoy.
Then he fell in love with a wanda akaine, a kind of vampire-fairy from Papua New Guinea. Well, that was the end of him, of course. But she managed to give him a child before she did him in, the child being Kavieng, who inherited his father’s culinary talent along with his mother’s abilities to create illusions, bend space and exist in several places at the same time.
We entered what appeared to be the grand dining salon of a turn-of-the-century cruise ship, and I remembered that it had been Anhedonia’s turn to chose an environment. The place was festooned with black crepe and mourning cloth, and the long dining table had a shape that was, well, oddly hexagonal. Candles were the only source of light and a thick fog roiled outside the portholes.
Anhedonia sat at the head of the table supping on a platter of rare hothouse flowers, arranged by one of Kavieng’s artists. She would place one long, blood-red fingernail on each blossom in turn and it would crumble into black powder as its life force channeled into her. (Anhedonia was only half vordylak, so she had no taste for people.)
Needless to say, the funereal surroundings had no effect at all on the mood of the group. Party time was party time. The whole Circle had emigrated to Kavieng’s and they seemed to be tightly packed around the immense dining table, but I knew that when White Smyth and I looked for a seat, with Kavieng’s solicitous assistance, there’d be room.
They’d gone ahead and ordered without us. The sideboard was piled high with typical fairy eclecticism. Fairy banquets aren’t quite like their human counterparts; fairies are easily distracted and very inventive at entertaining themselves, so everybody doesn’t stay in their seats and eat for two hours. If your food gets cold, a few fairy gestures will warm it up again.
Also, everyone gets served different food, even in a private home. From a human perspective this might seem like bad manners, but the complexity of American fairies’ racial backgrounds—me being a good example—made it necessary. There were no menus at Kavieng’s. You just ordered what you ordered and you got it.
White Smyth, Shaddock and I could all eat normal mortal food; White Smyth and I had to—he had almost as much human in him as I do. Wolken, on the other hand, was 100% fairy, a descendant of Greek and Roman wind entities, an assortment of weather elementals from different countries, and the grandson on his father’s side of an Icelandic geyser troll. His dinner consisted of a sequence of bottles, served one at a time. Each contained a different concoction whose aroma Wolken inhaled. He feasted on smells. One of his favorite stunts was to go into a mortal restaurant, order heavily, smell the food until he was full, then hand the untouched meal back to the waiter and tell him how good it was. And if that doesn’t sound too nutritious, one day I’ll show you some of the bodybuilding magazines with Wolken on the cover. He used a mortal nom de flex which anyone into the sport would recognize.
His second cousin Dolven, also part troll, was served a tray of gemstones and a lighted candle. She held the jewels up to the flame and dined on the light they projected.
The only major relationships in a fairy’s life are with the members of his Circle. A fairy Circle isn’t just a bunch of pals who hang out together. The group is founded on and held together by a fundamental compatibility of magicks and character traits. Most Circles cohere for centuries. It’s the principal social unit of Faerie.
There were two places open to Anhedonia’s right, across from Marmalet and Aileron.
“Hello,” White Smyth called to them over the din.
“Larkinstreet!” Wolken shouted, as if announcing an act at the circus. He whomped me on the back with one superbly muscled hand, almost forcing my head into the table.
“So,” Mu Meson said, “you have escaped from the belly of the beast.”
Wolken raised his mug on high. “To Larkinstreet! Dragonmaster!”
He went mostly unheard amidst all the racket and the stupendous organ music Kavieng had piped in at Anhedonia’s request, but a few of the revellers raised their glasses in ragged unison. At all our gatherings Wolken carried this big Viking beer stein sort of thing that he pounded on the table all the time. Hail fellow, and well met. Given that he never ate or drank, this was nothing but macho affectation, but Wolken was like that.
He asked me how things went with Granddad in the museum. The story was a little more action-packed than they’d expected [You’ll have to read the novel to find out about that], so by the time I was finished, everyone at the table had quieted down completely so they could listen to me. Story-telling, as you might expect, is an honored practice in Faerie.
“Another human?” said Anhedonia. “You taste in lovers bewilders, Lark.”
“Well, nothing to be done,” White Smyth said.
I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘nothing ot be done?’”
“Certainly you can’t argue with him about it. He’s a dragon lord, for gods’ sakes.”
The others weren’t pleased by his remarks, and they muttered to each other.
Kavieng appeared with my dinner, and with White Smyth’s. I got my usual burritos with scorching Szechuan barbecue sauce, but for White Smyth, Kavieng had created a special treat: he had taken different flavors of Necco-wafer-colored ice cream and carved them into the shapes of fabulous beasts—a French vanilla Pegasus, a Swiss almond Manticore, a run raisin Cameleopard, a Chimera made of strawberry, blueberry, and lime sorbets, and a chocolate griffin. They were served rampant on a seacoast of crushed ice sand and blue agar gelatine waves.
After I was done eating, I looked over at White Smyth. He was still eyeing me with grave suspicion.
“Well, what,?” I snapped.
He paused in thought. “Larkinstreet, have I ever told you the story of Gorlois, Defender of the Trees?”
“No, never,” I said sulkily. I could feel a lesson coming on, just like when Twice-Great-Granddad would start to ask me cryptic questions out of nowhere.
“Well, I was visiting my cousin Glev at his … ”
Suddenly, Kavieng was there again. “Please forgive me for interrupting,” he purred, “but am I to understand that you are about to grace us with a narrative?”
White Smyth blinked. “Oh, er…”
“ATTENTION, PLEASE!” Kavieng said. His voice was suddenly amplified, or rather multiplied, as it came out of dozens of Kavieng mouths simultaneously throughout the club, all speaking as one. Our fin de siecle dining room shuddered as a powerful wind whirled around it, dissolving the walls into gold and scarlet gas and carrying them away. Our illusion collapsed, we found ourselves seated around a bare, Formica table in a colossal warehouse filled with dozens of other such tables surrounded by fairies of every breed and stripe.
In a far corner, on a raised dais of crystal and white metal, stood Kavieng, the original, primary Kavieng. The substances that composed his platform were the conduits for his metalocality power. He stepped forward, and the shimmering quartz and silver faded to dull gray. All the auxiliary Kaviengs vanished; trays crashed to the floor, water pitchers tumbled onto tabletops.
“Gentlebeings!” he said to the bewildered crowd. “White Smyth, son of Gelid and Una speaks to us!”
The applause was deafening. White Smyth muttered eloquent fairy curses under his breath. He smiled tightly and stood up. His family was chock full of brilliant fairy taletellers, as were many of the winter clans. His own talents were widely regarded as tremendous.
When the tumult died down, he said to Kavieng, “I thank you, Maestro, for the honor, but…” He gestured helplessly at the enormous crowd.
“Ah, of course,” Kavieng said. “Not quite the intimate setting you require. If you will permit me.” He stepped back to the center of his pedestal and it again shimmered into activity.
And there was White Smyth all over.
At the head of each table stood a White Smyth replica. It was the first time any of us had seen Kavieng use his powers to metalocate someone else. Who knew?
The audience went ‘Ah!’ and applauded again. White Smyth sighed and sat down at our table, and all the other White Smyths sat down, too.
When silence was established, he proceeded to do what fairies do best after partying and making love:
He told a fairy tale:
Michael died four years ago this week. So, I guess that’s why he’s on my mind.
Poor minnow.
The human thing and the fairy thing. They just don’t go, do they, my cousins?
Oh, but let me begin this tale in the proper way…
Once upon a time in a land called Colorado some humans decided to erect a hydroelectric plant in a wilderness area. They first built a fence around the selected site because when humans need to use a thing they first make sure that no one else can use it. It was a chain-link fence furbished with signs that said KEEP OUT and GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.
The day came when the land was to be cleared for construction. A crowd of mortals convened before the chain link gates, waving placards and shouting. They weren’t the elegant humans that our kind mostly prefers. These people were rougher, more emotional, with hair all in disarray, like mine, and battered sneakers and jeans. The men wore beards, or were smooth-faced with eyeglasses. The women looked very beautiful (in a grubby human sort of way) in headcloths and Indian beadwork jackets. It was late autumn, so scarves and leggings and down vests were in evidence everywhere. It was the first day of the year that had been cold enough for me to safely visit that place.
Covered trucks arrived filled with stern-faced men in identical fatigues and mirrored sunglasses, with matching sets of equipment, each of which included a power saw. The crowd booed and growled as the convoy passed through into the boundaries within the fence.
Sprinkled throughout the shifting mob of humans were many fairies. Mythical activity in the area had been intense over the past twenty-four hours. The trolls had been frantically clearing out their warrens, and the river tritons dismantling their riverside pleasure tents. With frenzied haste, the life forces of the woodland fairies whose trees were to be chopped down were transferred into seedlings for replanting; the poor, dear tree-ladies (and -men) were all lying in state at the fairy Healery in Colorado Springs where they would remain for several years until their new saplings had grown strong enough to hold them. (Incredible that in the Old World the dryads simply died along with their trees! Barbaric!)
I sat and watched the protest from a nearby boulder with my cousin Glev, the river lord whose waters would be powering the electric plant. Glev was an easy-going sort of river lord, fat as Herod and inclined to live and let live provided his own pleasures went undisturbed. He had accepted the human intrusion into his realm with sighing resignation.
“The way of the world,” he murmured in his genderless voice, more to himself than to me, “the way of the world.”
On a neighboring boulder a camera crew from a local TV station fussed with their equipment, conferring and pointing. What a scoop they’d have had if Glev’s Masque had wavered!
“There’s someone staring at us, Glev.”
“Oh? And why shouldn’t he stare at us?” Glev was vain about his bloated, blimp-like obesity, as if it were all gleaming muscles.
“He’s over by that tree. With a sketch pad.”
“Why does he sit sketching?” said Glev, not deigning to look where I’d pointed. “Why isn’t he down protesting with the other fairies? Not one of my constituents, I gather.”
“He’s human.”
Glev started up. “What! Where?”
“Lie back. Act as if nothing’s happened.”
“Is my Masque in place?” He looked nervously at the news team.
“Yes, yes ”
“Ah. So. He has the Sight.” He relaxed again and stretched out.
The human was curled up under an old cypress with his sketching tablet on his knees. An array of colored pencils poked out of the front pocket of his denim jacket.
He was thin as a finger, with thick hair so black it had no sheen. It seemed to take in light and release none. His face was laid out in vertical and horizontal lines with a grave, straight-across mouth. His clothes were a jumble of cheap and expensive, an Armani pullover sweater with bottom-of-the-line corduroy slacks; designer socks and K-Mart sneakers. It was easy to see what his mother had given him and what he had bought himself.
His eyes were hidden behind capacious sunglasses. He kept his head pointed slightly away from us, as if he were observing the crowd below, but I knew he was really examining Glev and me with sidelong stares. Still, it was an effective subterfuge. He didn’t seem to be looking our way. I reasoned that he’d had a lot of practice.
Glance up.
Sketch.
Pretend to admire a stray leaf.
Sketch.
Pretend to look at the sun.
Sketch.
He was good. Sneaky.
“Investigate, Cousin,” said Glev.
“Try to look natural, dear,” I said.
“Who? Moi?”
While the human’s head was bent over his sketch pad, I slipped down the back of the boulder and slybooted in a wide arc through the undergrowth. In a moment, and without noise, I was behind him.
He didn’t notice me. I stared over his shoulder and looked at what he’d drawn: Glev, the boulder, me.
“You’re very good,” I said.
He froze momentarily, then went back to his work, as if he’d heard nothing.
Very smooth.
“Not many artists can manage my hair color,” I went on. “And you can see great detail at a distance as well.” He began to hum tunelessly, as if lost in concentration. “Of course, your eyes are special, aren’t they?”
He continued to feign ignorance. I noticed that his hand had started to shake.
“However, you’re putting too much green in my bomber jacket.” I reached around and yanked the pencil out of his hand.
“Oh, butterfingers,” he muttered. He looked around him, patted the grass with his hands. “Where did I drop it?”
“That’s very clever. You’re very good. But the jig is up, as they say.”
He stopped fumbling. He turned his head towards me, keeping his eyes averted.
“Is that right?” His voice was flat and hollow. The force of his words dissolved somewhere in the dark of his throat. It was the voice of a boy who’d never learned to speak out, who never shouted; a boy who kept his pencils and sketch pad with him at all times, even on dates.
“My name is White Smyth.”
He didn’t move.
“And you are?”
“Michael.”
“Stand up, Michael. Let’s have a look at you.”
Slowly, he rose and turned to face me, head down.
His body was nothing to write poems about: lank and square-hipped, with joints that seemed thicker than the limbs they connected. His clothes hung on him as if on a drying rack. His hands, however, were worth a verse or two. I thought how I would like to be touched by them.
“Are you going to look at me?” I asked him.
He thought for a moment, still staring downward. “There’s an old story,” he said. “From Ireland.”
“I’m part Irish.”
“Uh-huh.” His tongue darted nervously across his lips. “About a man who could see things. He lost one eye in an accident, and the remaining eye developed Glam-sight.”
“Not very scientific. But a good premise for a story.”
“He used to watch the King of the Leprechauns moving invisibly around the town square on market day. One day the king realized he was being watched. He spit in the man’s eye, and the man went blind.”
“I see. A draconian solution, wouldn’t you say, Michael?”
“Uh, what?”
“Well,” I said, “that sounds like something old King Brian would do. My great-grandmother is a half-sister of his and she tells me stories. But really, Michael, this is America.” I put one finger under his chin and raised his head. “We have laws against that kind of thing.”
I gently pulled off his sunglasses and tossed them in the grass. I watched his pale green eyes fill up with the sight of me. I wonder if the thrill ever wears off, of being seen by a mortal? We fairies take each other’s looks for granted. It’s fun to dazzle on occasion.
“Are you real?” he said.
“Last time I checked.”
His eyes surveyed me once again.
I held out my hand. “May I see?”
He looked down at his sketch pad, which by some animal reflex, he’d tucked under his arm. Reluctantly he handed it too me.
I flipped it to the front and went through it page by page. He was very talented: I expect drawing was the only thing at which he’d ever dared to excel, so all his caring and creativity had been channeled into it. All the drawings were of fairies: a golden man with antlers propositioning a mortal woman in a crowded bar; two satyrs dancing in a shopping mall, one wearing a t-shirt that said “Keep on Truckin’”; a woman with crystal wings flying next to a ski-lift occupied by muffled humans; two fairy lovers on a rocky seashore, their fishtails intertwined; fairies of every stripe and shape, sitting on car hoods and on the roofs of suburban homes, fairies on a subway platform, fairies capering invisibly on stage amongst mortal actors. (The humans were performing, I think, Death of a Salesman.)
His style was scrupulously detailed, and he had the talent for capturing the essence of each subject, the one posture or facial expression that revealed the whole identity.
“Very beautiful,” I said. “There’s magic in your eyes, no doubt about that.” I returned the pad to him. “How long have you been Sighted?”
“Uh, been what?”
“Sighted. You have the Sight. That’s why you can see such things.”
He fingered his sketchbook nervously. “Since I was eleven or so.”
“Ah. Puberty.”
“I guess.”
From the plain below came the grrrhhnnnn of power saws cutting into wood. The crowd roared angrily. A mournful fairy wind moaned through the leaves above us. The clearing of the trees had begun.
“Bastards!” said Michael.
“The mortal devaluing of Nature in favor of machinery. We don’t understand it, Michael.”
He glared at me, his fear dissolved by anger. “Why don’t you do something! Stop them!” His rectilinear face was suddenly flushed and pleated with rage.
“Stop them?”
“You’re magic, aren’t you? You have powers! Blind them! Turn them into pigs! Strike them down with lightning!”
“Oh, I would if I could, old friend. Well, perhaps not lightning. But we have Laws. And one of them forbids interfering with human society. And another prohibits killing humans. Except for nourishment, of course.”
A ripple of apprehension passed below his anger. “Nourishment?”
“Oh, well, that was just a clause the Founders…certain special-interest groups.” I fluttered my hands foolishly. Was this mortal boy actually making me self-conscious? “Never mind.”
The camera crew ambled down the incline with their equipment towards the roiling crowd of protesters. The pretty blond woman spoke into her microphone with mannered intensity. Glev sat on his boulder, head in hands.
“Come,” I said. “Meet my cousin Glev.”
Why did I pull him into it? For the usual fairy reason: he amused me. And if I needed to rationalize it, he was already halfway in anyway. What harm?
Glev invited us over to his place.
He was very gracious to Michael. He presented his hand to be shaken (or kissed, I wasn’t sure) and called him “My dear boy.” I could see that look in his eyes, so I stuck close to the lad. We struck out through the woods with Glev in the lead. His ovoid bulk crushed down a path for us in the undergrowth. His huge buttocks and thundering thighs seemed densely massive yet buoyant, like pontoons.
He spoke to me on Frequency, so that Michael wouldn’t hear. “What are we going to do with him, White Smyth?”
“Do? I don’t know. Feed him lunch, I suppose. Why do anything with him?”
Glev’s flutey voice turned grave and sorrowful. “We’ve made contact with a Sighted human. We’re supposed to report him.”
“Well, then, we’ll report him. He’s not a danger, Glev.”
“To himself, perhaps.”
“What?”
“He has the Sight, after all…”
“You’re gazooly!” I said. I turned and found Michael staring absent-mindedly at the area around my chest. I smiled. “See anything you like?”
He blushed and looked away. He asked me about the camera crew. “They couldn’t see you, apparently?”
“No, we were in Masque.”
“Fairy Glamour! They look at us and see birds and rocks and things! Right?”
I laughed. “Glamour! Oh, no! Michael, that’s like gas lighting and outdoor toilets! Glamour!” He frowned, and I quickly explained myself. “Magic advances. We stopped using Glamour back in your horse-and-buggy days. We have Masque now. It was invented by Cyrus O’Cyrus, one of our great fairy geniuses, the fairy Einstein.”
He nodded. “I get it. They see you, but they don’t notice you.”
We were approaching Glev’s river, the sound of it like a crowd mumbling in the trees. It was a big river, perhaps half a mile wide. “You’re very quick, Michael.”
“I see the truth in things,” he said, something no fairy would every claim for themselves.
The banks of the river were empty, stripped of all fairy habitations. River tritons, male and female, lay about in the reeds and on the rocks, basking. They saluted lazily when Glev appeared, not bothering to rise from where they were.
“O’Cyrus,” I said, to continue our conversation, “is now trying to find a Masque that can block the Sight.”
A tremor of alarm crossed his face. “Will he succeed?”
“Most certainly. But not soon. Dr. O’Cyrus is very tenacious.”
“Bring him below, White Smyth, will you?”
“Yes, Glev.”
Glev vanished into the water, submerging like a bathysphere. The tritons began to slide below the surface, one by one, like lazy crocodiles.
“Bring me below?” Michael said.
“Below, yes. It’s perfectly safe.” I waded knee deep into the tumbling water,
He stayed where he was on the shore. Probably visions of man-drowning mermaids were going through his head.
“Come,” I said. “Take my hand.”
He stared and said nothing, his features all at right angles.
“Well, now, old friend, I’d have killed you already if I’d wanted to, wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Would you?”
He walked to the rivers edge. He set aside his pad and knapsack and squatted down to unlace his sneakers.
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Just come as you are.”
He looked up at me blankly.
He stood and pulled his knapsack over his shoulder. He took my hand.
I smiled. “Thank you, Michael.” He smiled back weakly. “Now, come!”
We jumped and descended. The waters closed over our heads as we glided down feet first.
Glev’s people kept their river admirably free of silt, so the view was fine with the noonday sun shining clear down to the bottom. The whole of the riverbed was paved in blue and yellow mosaic tiles for two miles on either side of us. This floor showed up quite clearly in aerial photographs, though Masque kept the humans from noticing it, even in pictures. The shimmering sculptures, furniture and weighted knick-knacks of the tritons were on display as far as we could see. Although the air above had been sufficiently chilled for me to venture that far south, I found the river to be uncomfortably warm, like an overheated room.
I realized that Michael was holding his breath. His face was contorted with the strain.
“Breathe, old friend,” I said. I slammed him on the back.
His eyes bulged with panic as his air supply shot out of his mouth in a jet of bubbles. His body clenched as he sucked in river water, and he began to scramble towards the surface.
“Relax, Michael,” I said, or gargled, rather.
He did.
“I’m breathing,” he said through the water.
“Yes?”
“Breathing water.”
“Is there something else down here to breathe?”
Our eyes met and we laughed. It was the first laughter I’d seen from him, and it had a pained look to it, as it he were exercising muscles that had been in long disuse. We swam along and I let him marvel a