Emerald Magic

by Andrew M. Greeley

Genres: Historical Fantasy; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

Mythology and magic come alive in this collection of Irish fantasy stories by some of today's finest authors. Ireland is a nation that holds fast to its history and heritage, and nowhere is that more true than in its folktales and legends. From the great Celtic myths featuring the bard Taliesin, the terrible Morrigan, the heroic Cuchulain, or the noble and cunning Sidhe to strange and mysterious tales of today, the stories and traditions of the Emerald Isle hold a strong attraction for many. Stories are told in cottage hearths from Galway to Dublin, and from the windblown rocky Cliffs of Mohr to the seaside villages where fishing boats still roam the oceans. Tall tales and town stories are as much a way of life as a pint and good conversation at the local pub. Emerald Magic brings together today's best fantasy authors to explore the myths of the Irish, telling their own versions of these ancient tales of luck, love, and honor, or drawing upon centuries of Irish myths and folktales and updating them into brand-new stories. Edited and with an introduction by bestselling author Father Andrew M. Greeley, Emerald Magic contains fourteen wonderful stories of legend and lore, including:"A Woman Is a Fast Moving Picnic" by Ray Bradbury. A group of pub regulars set out to discover the truth behind a local song and answer that age-old question: Just how fast does a person sink in a bog?"The Isle of Women" by Jacqueline Carey. In an age long ago, a warrior sailing for vengeance happens upon an island ruled by a woman like no other. But if he is to continue his quest, he must choose between her and his duty."Speir-Bhan" by Tanith Lee. A woman who finds and reads her grandfather's diary unleashes the specter of an old debt that, even in today's modern age, must be paid---one way or the other."A Drop of Something Special in the Blood" by Fred Saberhagen. In the late eighteenth century, an Irish author encounters a being that he will turn into his greatest literary creation."The Cat with No Name" by Morgan Llywelyn. A lonely girl neglected by her parents finds an unexpected friend in the alley behind her home---one that may be more than it first seems."The Butter-Spirit's Tithe" by Charles de Lint. Even in twenty-first-century America, it is still not wise to anger the spirits of the world, as a young musician discovers when a butter-spirit who had cursed him nine years earlier comes to claim his soul."Land of Heart's Desire" by Elizabeth Haydon. A young man discovers the magical truth about his parents' marriage, and sets a chain of events in motion that will force him to choose between the life he has always known---and another life he could have."The Swan Pilot" by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. In the far future, spaceship pilots travel through interdimensional portals from planet to planet---and the only thing more important than knowing how to fly is knowing how to handle the strange hallucinations that appear during the journey. Filled with the spirit and magic of the stories of Ireland, Emerald Magic is a collection of fantasy stories that will delight and captivate from the first page to the last. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 1, 2007

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 368

Sample

Herself

By Diane Duane

I met the leprechaun for the first and last time in the conveyor-sushi bar behind Brown Thomas. It was the "holy hour," between three and four, when the chefs go upstairs for their own lunch, and everything goes quiet, and the brushed stainless-steel conveyor gets barer and barer.
The leprechaun had been smart and ordered his yasai-kakiage just before three. He sat there now eating it with a morose expression, drinking sake and looking out the picture windows facing on Clarendon Street at the pale daylight that slid down between the high buildings on either side.
While I'd seen any number of leprechauns in the street since I moved here-our family always had the Sight-I'd never found myself so close to one. I would have loved to talk to him, but just because you can see the Old People is no automatic guarantee of intimacy: they're jealous of their privacy, and can be more than just rude if they felt you were intruding. I weighed a number of possible opening lines, discarded them all, and finally said, "Can I borrow your soy sauce? I've run out."
He handed me the little square pitcher in front of his place setting and picked up another piece of yasai-kakiage. I poured shoyu into the little saucer they give you, mixed some green wasabi horseradish with it, and dunked in a piece of tuna sashimi.
"You're not supposed to do that," he said.
"Sorry?"
"Mix them like that." He gestured with his chin at the wasabi. "You're supposed to just take it separately."
I nodded. "I'm a philistine," I said.
"So are we all these days," the leprechaun said, and looked even more morose. He signaled the obi-clad waitress, as she passed, for another sake. "Precious little culture left in this town anymore. Nothing but money, and people scrabbling for it."
It would hardly have been the first time I'd heard that sentiment coming from a Dubliner, but it hadn't occurred to me that one of the Old People thought the same way. I'd have thought they were above such things. "Do you work in town?" I said.
He nodded. The waitress came back, swapped him a full flask of sake for his empty one, left again.
"Shoes?" I said.
He laughed, a brief bitter crack of a sound. "Have you ever tried to cobble a Nike?" he said.
I shook my head. It wasn't something I'd had to try lately, though I'd had enough job worries of my own. The Dublin journalistic grind is not a simple one to navigate. I had gone from features editor to subfeatures editor at one of the CityWatch magazines, always being hurled from scandal to scandal-they would keep publishing badly concealed ads for the less discreet of the massage parlors and lap-dancing joints over by Leeson Street.
"That line of work's all done now," he said. "Planned obsolescence.it runs straight to the heart of things. People don't want shoes that last years. They want shoes that maybe last a year. My folk, we couldn't do that. Against our religion."
I didn't say anything, not knowing if it would be wise. I did some interviewing for the magazine I worked for, and had learned to appreciate the sound of a subject that the speaker didn't want you to follow up on.
"It's the death of craftsmanship," the leprechaun said. "Nike and all the other big conglomerates, they'd sooner have slave labor in Malaysia than honest supernatural assistance from a first-world country with good tax breaks." He drank some sake. "No, we're all in information technology now, or high-end manufacturing, computers and so on. It's the only place left for skilled handworkers to go. My clan was all out in Galway once: they're all in Fingal now, for the work. Damn made-up county, nothing real about it but freeways and housing developments. Name me a single hero-feat that was ever done in Fingal!"
"I got from Independent Pizza to the airport once in less than half an hour," I said: and it was all I could think of. It didn't count, and we both knew it. All the same, he laughed.
It broke the ice. We were there for a few hours at least, chatting. The belt started up again while we talked, and some more people drifted in; and still we talked while the light outside faded through twilight to sodium-vapor streetlight after sunset. The leprechaun turned out not to be one of those more-culchie-than-thou types, all peat and poit¡n, but an urbanite-clued-in and streetwise, but also well-read. He knew where the hot clubs were, but he could also quote Schopenhauer as readily as he could Seamus Heaney; and as for culture, he told me several things about Luciano Pavarotti's last visit to Dublin that made me blink. He was, in short, yet another of that classic type, the genuine Dublin character. When you live here, it's hard to go more than a few days before meeting one. But you don't routinely meet "Dublin characters" who saw the Vikings land.
I ordered more sake, and paused. Slipping into a seat around the corner of the sushi bar from us was someone at first sight more faerie-tale-looking than the leprechaun: a baby teen, maybe thirteen if that, in red velvet hooded sweatshirt and fake wolf-claw wristlet. Little Red Riding Hood squirmed her blue-jeaned, tanga-briefed self in the seat as she began picking at some fried tofu. The leprechaun glanced at her, glanced back at me again, the look extremely ironic. By contrast, he was conservatism itself, just a short guy with hair you'd mistake for sixties length, in tweeds and extremely well made shoes.
"She'd have been a nice morsel for one of the Greys in my day," he said under his breath, and laughed again, not entirely a pleasant sound. "Before the wolfhounds did for them, and `turncoat' men ran with the wolf packs, getting off on the beast-mind and the blood feast. Just look at all that puppy fat." His grin was feral. "But I shouldn't complain. She pays my salary. I bet her daddy and mammy buy her a new computer every year." He scowled.
"Do you really miss the shoes that much?" I said.
It was a mistake. His eyes blazed as he took a plate of the spiced soba noodles, another of the green plates, the least expensive sushi. He didn't have a single blue or gold or silver plate in his "used" stack. "Don't get me started," he said. "Nike, Adidas, whoever: we would have worked with them. We would have worked with them! Work is what we live for; good work, well-done, they could have had a labor force like the world never saw. We could have shod the planet."
The leprechaun chewed. "But no," he said. "A decent wage was too much for them. Why should we pay you minimum wage, they say, when we can get the work for almost nothing from these poor starving mortals over in Indonesia or wherever, who're grateful for a penny a day? And so they gave us their back."
He poured himself more sake, drank. "We were to be here for you, from the beginning of things," he said more softly; "we were to help you have the things you needed when you couldn't have them otherwise. But your people have made us redundant. Spiritually redundant as well as fiscally. So now, as we can't earn, neither can we spend. `And who of late,' he said sadly into his sake, `for cleanliness, finds sixpence in her shoe?'"
"Bad times," I said, looking past the Mercedes and the BMWs and the ladies walking past the sushi bar toward the "signature" restaurants farther down the road, where you couldn't get out the door at the end of the night for less than three hundred Euro for just a couple of you and wine.
"Bad times," the leprechaun said.
"And it's hard to find a decent pint," I said.
His eyes glittered, and I kept my smile to myself. Any Dubliner is glad to tell a stranger, or somebody with my Manhattan accent, where the best pint is. Sometimes they're even right. Sometimes it's even someplace I haven't already heard of. I don't drink the Black Stuff myself, especially since there's better stout to be found than Uncle Arthur's overchilled product in the Porter House brewpub in Parliament Street; but that's not the point.
His eyes slid sideways to betray the great secret, whose betrayal is always joy. "You know South Great Georges Street?"
"Yeah." It was a few blocks away.
"The Long Hall," he said. "Good place. The wizards drink there, too."
"Really," I said.
"That's where most of us go now." There was a silent capital on the "u" that I nodded at. "We go down there Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the back, for a pint. And the wakes," he said. His look went dark. "A lot of wakes lately."
"Suicide?" I said softly. Irish males have had a fairly high suicide level of late, something no one understands with the economy booming the way it's been, and somehow I wouldn't have been surprised to find the trend had spread to the Old Ones.
He shook his head. "Nothing like," the leprechaun said. "None of these people were suicidal. They had good jobs.as good as jobs get for our people these days. Coding over at Lotus, hardware wrangling up at Gateway and Dell. They never seem to stop hiring up there in the Wasteland." It was a slang name for the jungle of industrial estates that had sprung up around Dublin Airport, and there seemed to be a new one every month, more and more land once full of Guinness-destined barley, or of sheep, now full of Europe-destined PCs and other assorted chippery.
"But it's not the same," I said, because I knew what was coming. I'd heard it before.
"No, it's not," the leprechaun said with force. "Once upon a time I didn't even know what the ISEQ was! When did our people ever have to worry about stocks and shares, and `selling short'? But now we have to, because that's how you tell who's hiring, when you can't make a living making shoes anymore." He scowled again. "It's all gone to hell," he said. "It was better when we were poor."
"Oh, surely not," I said. "You sound like those people in Russia, now, moaning about how they miss the good old days in the USSR."
"Poor devils," the leprechaun said, "may God be kind to them, they don't know any better. But it's nothing like what we have to deal with. Once upon a time we gave thanks to God when the leader of our country stood up and announced to the world that we were self-sufficient in shoelaces. Who knew that it could go downhill from that, because of too much money? But people aren't like people used to be anymore. It's not that the money would spoil them. we always knew that was going to happen, maybe. But it's how it's spoiled them. Look at it!"
We looked out the window toward the brick fa‡ade that the back of Brown Thomas shared with the Marian shrine that also faced onto the street. You could look through one archway and see a painted life-sized knockoff version of the Piet , the sculpted Lady raising a hand in a "what can you do?" gesture over her Son's sprawled body, her expression not of shock or grief but of resigned annoyance-"Never mind, he'll be right as rain in a few days."-and through another doorway, a few doors down, you could see Mammon in its tawdry glory, all the Bally and Gucci and the many other choicer fruits of world consumerism laid out for the delectation of the passersby. The Piet  was not entirely without Her visitors, but plainly Brown Thomas was getting more trade. Closer to us, the street was full of cars; fuller of cars than it should have been, strictly speaking. There was a superfluity of Mercs and Beemers, and the occasional Lexus, all double-parked outside the restaurant, next to the entrance to the Brown Thomas parking structure. The cold fact of the Garda Pick-It-Up-And-Take-It-Away fleet working its way around the city had plainly not particularly affected these people. They could soak up the tickets and the impound fees and never even notice.
"In God's name, what's happened to us?" the leprechaun said. "What's happened to us that we don't care what happens to other people anymore? Look at it out there: it's nothing much right now, but this street's a bottleneck; in twenty minutes the whole of center city will be gridlocked. And it's worse elsewhere. The rents are through the roof. It's a good thing I can just vanish into one of the `hills' in Phoenix Park at night. Otherwise, I'd be in a bedsit twenty miles south, in Bray, or somewhere worse-Meath or Westmeath or Cavan or whatever, with a two-hour commute in and back, in a mini-van loaded over capacity. And probably with clurachaun as well. Have you ever been stuck in a minivan for two hours between Virginia and the North Circular Road with a bunch of overstressed clurachaun trying to do.you know.what clurachaun do??"
Another unanswerable question, even if I had been. "It's tough," I said. "Hard all around."
There wasn't a lot more out of him after that. All the same, I was sorry when he called the waiter over to get his plates tallied up.
He looked up at me. "It's not what it was," he said, "and it's a crying shame."
"We all say that about our own times," I said. "They've said it since ancient Greece."
"But it's truer now than it ever was," said the leprechaun. "Look at the world we were in a hundred years ago. We had poverty, and starvation, and unemployment from here to there, and people being forced out of their homes by greedy landlords. But we still had each other; at least we had a kind word for each other when we passed in the road. Now we have immigrants on the street who're poorer than we ever were; and people getting fat and getting heart attacks from the crap ready-made food that's nine-tenths of what there is to eat these days; and work that kills your soul, but it's all you can get. And forget being forced out of anywhere to live, because you can't afford to get in in the first place. The only kind word you hear from anybody nowadays is when you take out your wallet.and it's not meant. Things are so wrong."
He eyed me. "But you'll say there are good things about it, too," he said.
"You've been here longer than I have," I said. "Maybe I should keep my opinions to myself."
"It was different once," the leprechaun said. "It was different when She ran things." And he stared into the last of his sake, and past it at the black granite of the sushi bar, and looked even more morose than he had before we'd started talking.
He tossed the rest of his sake back in one shot. "Good night to you," he said at last, slid off the cream-colored barstool, and went out into the night.
So it was a shock, the next day, to find that he was dead.
* * *
Leprechauns don't die the way we do: otherwise, the Gardai would have a lot more work on their plates than they already do with the burglaries and the joyriders and the addicts shooting up in the middle of Temple Bar. At the scene of a leprechaun's murder, you find a tumble of clothes, and usually a pair of extremely well made shoes, but nothing else. That was all the Folk found the next morning, down the little back alley that runs from the Grafton Street pedestrian precinct to behind Judge Roy Bean's.
At first everyone assumed that he'd run afoul of some druggie desperate for money and too far separated from his last fix. They may be of the Old Blood, but leprechauns can't vanish at will without preparation: you can get the drop on one if you're smart and fast. Various pots of gold were lost to mortals this way in the old days, when there was still gold in Ireland. But the leprechauns had the advantage of open ground and nonurban terrain into which to vanish. It's harder to do in the city. There are too many eyes watching you-half of a leprechaun's vanishing is skillful misdirection-and, these days, there are too many dangers too closely concentrated. The sense of those who knew him was that he just got unlucky.
I confess it was partly curiosity that brought me to the wake, where I was told all this. But it was partly the astonishment of having another of the leprechaun's people actually look me up at the magazine. There he stood, looking like a youthful but much shorter Mickey Rooney in tweeds, waiting in the place's glossy, garish reception area and looking offended by it all. I came out to talk to him, and he said, "Not here."
My boss, in her glass-walled inner office, was safely on the phone, deep in inanely detailed conversation with some publishing or media figure about where they would be going for lunch. This happened every day, and no one who went missing from now to 3:00 P.M., when the Boss might or might not come back, would be noticed. I stepped outside with the leprechaun and went down to stand with him by the news kiosk at the corner of Dawson Street.
"You were the last one to see him alive," the leprechaun said. I knew better than to ask "who?"; first because I immediately knew whom he meant, and second because you don't ask leprechauns their names-they're all secret, and (some say) they're all the same.
"He was all right when he left," I said. "What happened?"
"No one knows," said the leprechaun. "He wasn't drunk?"
"He didn't have anything like enough sake." Privately I doubted there was that much sake in the city. You haven't lived until you've seen someone try to drink a leprechaun under the table.
The leprechaun nodded, and he looked as grim as my dinner companion had the other night.
"He was murdered," he said.
I was astounded. "How? Why?"
"We don't know. But he's not the first. More like the tenth, and they're coming closer together."
"A serial killer."
"We don't know," said the leprechaun. "Come to the wake tonight." And he was off down Dawson Street, quick and dapper, just one more self-possessed businessman, if shorter than most.
Who would kill the Old Folk, though? I thought. Who stands to profit? It's hard enough for most mortals even to see them, let alone to kill them. One or two might have been accidents. But ten?.
There were no answers for my questions then. I went back to work, because there was nothing better to do, and when my boss still wasn't back by four, I checked out early and made my way down to the Long Hall.
The place doesn't look very big from the frontage on South Great Georges Street. A red-and-white sign over a wide picture window, obscured by ancient, dusty stained-glass screens inside; that's all there is. The place looks a little run-down. Doubtless the proprietors encourage that look, for the Long Hall is a pint house of great fame, and to have such a place be contaminated by as few tourists as possible is seen as a positive thing in Dublin. If you make it past the genteelly shabby facade and peeling paint, you find yourself surrounded by ancient woodwork, warm and golden-colored, and glossy wallpaper and carved plaster ceilings that were white in the 1890s, but are now stained down by time and smoke to a warm nicotine brown. The pub's name is deserved. It's a narrow place, but it goes on and on, nearly the width of the block in which it resides. There are barstools down the right side, and behind them a bar of great height, antiquity, and splendor-faded, age-splotched mirrors, bottles of every kind racked up to the ceiling, and most importantly, long shelves running the length of the back of the bar, to put pints on.
I wandered in, pushed between a couple of occupied barstools, and ordered myself a pint. This by itself gives you plenty of time to look around, as a well-pulled pint of Guinness takes at least seven minutes, and the best ones take ten. Right now, the front of the bar was full of people who had left work early. It was full of the usual sound of Dubliners complaining about work, and the people they worked with. "So I said to him, why don't you tell him to go to the F ing Spar and get a sandwich and then sit down for five F ing minutes, sure she'll be back then. Oh no, he says, I can't F ing spare the time in the middle of the F ing day-"
I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes.yet still I had to smile. This is how, when I return home, I know for sure that I'm in Dublin again. The second you're past passport control in Dublin Airport, you hear it.and after that, you hear it everywhere else in town, from everyone between nine and ninety-five. Only in Dublin do people use the F word as casually as they use "Hey" or "Sure" or "Listen" in the US. It's an intensifier, without any meaning whatsoever except to suggest that you're only mildly interested in what you're saying. Only in Ireland would such a usage be necessary: for here, words are life.
I glanced toward the back of the bar. Between the front and the back of the pub was a sort of archway of wood, and looking at it, I realized that it was a line of demarcation in more ways than one. A casual glance suggested that the space behind it was empty. But if you had the Sight, and you worked at seeing, slowly you could see indistinct shapes, standing, gesturing. You couldn't hear any sound, though; that seemed to stop at the archway.
It was an interesting effect. I guessed that the wizards the leprechaun had mentioned had installed it. I walked slowly toward the archway, and was surprised, when I reached it, to feel strongly as if I didn't want to go any farther. But I pushed against the feeling and kept on walking.
Once through the archway, the sound of conversation came up to full as if someone had hit the "unmute" button on a TV remote. There had to be about eighty of the Old People back here, which was certainly more warm bodies than the space was rated for; it was a good thing all the occupants were smaller than the normal run of mortals.
There was just as much F-ing and blinding going on back here as there had been in the front of the bar, but otherwise, the back-of-the-pub people were a less routine sort of group. There was very little traditional costume in evidence; all these Old People seemed very city-assimilated. I glanced around, feeling acutely visible because of my height-and I'm only five-foot-seven. Near me, a tall slender woman, dressed unfashionably all in white, turned oblique eyes on me, brushing her long, lank, dark hair back to one side. Only after a long pause did she smile. "Oh, good," she said. "Not for a while yet." And she clinked her gin and tonic against my pint.
"Uh," I said. A moment later, next to me, a voice said, "It's good of you to come."
I glanced down. It was the leprechaun who had come up to the office. "This is one of the Washers," he said.
Even if I'd thought about it in advance, the last thing I'd have expected to see in a city pub would've been a banshee, one of the "Washers at the Ford" who prophesy men's deaths. I was a little too unnerved just then to ask her what her work in the city was like. She smiled at me-it was really a very sweet smile-and said, "It's all right. I'm not on duty. Days I work over in Temple Bar, in a restaurant there. Dishwashing."
"Dishwashing??"
She took a drink of her G and T, and laughed. "Most of us give up laundry right away. Won't do their F ing polyester!"
We chatted casually about business, and weather, and about the departed, while I glanced around at the rest of the company, trying not to stare. There were plenty of others there besides leprechauns and bansidhe and clurichauns. There were a few pookas-two of them wearing human shape, and one, for reasons best known to himself, masquerading as an Irish wolfhound. There were several
dullahans in three-piece suits, or polo shirts and chinos, holding leisurely conversations while holding their heads in their hands (the way a dullahan drinks while talking is worth watching). There was a gaggle of green-haired merrows in sealskin jackets and tight pants, looking like slender biker babes but without the tattoos or studs, and all looking faintly wet no matter how long they'd been out of the Bay. There was a fat round little fear gorta in a sweat suit and glow-step Nikes, staving off his own personal famine by gorging on bagged-in McDonald's from the branch over in Grafton Street. And there were grogachs and leanbaitha and other kinds of the People that I'd never seen before; in some cases I never did find out what they were, or did, or what they were doing in town. There was no time, and besides, it seemed inappropriate to be inquiring too closely about everybody else while the purpose was to wake one particular leprechaun.
They waked him. It wasn't organized, but stories started coming out about him-how much time he spent down around the Irish Writers Center, how he gave some mortal entrepreneur-lady the idea for the "Viking" amphibious-vehicle tours up and down the river Liffey: endless tales of that kind. He was well liked, and much missed, and people were angry about what had happened to him. But they were also afraid.
"And who the F are we supposed to tell about it?" said one of the
dullahan to me and the banshee at one point. "Sure there's no help in the Guards-we've a few of our own kind scattered here and there through the force, but no one high up enough to be paid any mind to."
"We need our own guards," said another voice, one of the clurachauns.
"And you'd love that, wouldn't you? You'd be the first customers," said one of the leprechauns.
There was a mutter. Clurachauns are too well known for their thieving habits, which make them no friends among either the "trooping" people like the Sidhe or the "solitaries" like the leprechauns, dullahans, and merrows. The clurachaun only snickered.
"What do you call a northsider in a Mercedes? Thief!" said one of the leprechauns, under his breath. "What's the difference between a northsider and a clurachaun? The northsider is better dressed!"
The clurachaun turned on him. The others moved back to give them room for what was probably coming. But there was one of the People I'd earlier noted, a grizzled, older leprechaun whom the others of his kind, and even the clurachauns, seemed to respect: when he'd spoken up, earlier, they'd gotten quiet. "The Eldest," the banshee had whispered in my ear. Now the Eldest Leprechaun moved in fast and gave the younger leprechaun a clout upside the head. To my astonishment, no fight broke out.
"Shame on you, and the two of you acting like arseholes in front of a mortal," said the Eldest. The squabblers both had the grace to look at least sullenly shamefaced. "Here we are in this time of grief when no one knows what's happening, or who it might happen to next, and you make eejits of yourself. Shut up, the both of you."
They turned away, muttering, and moved to opposite sides of the pub. The Eldest nodded at me and turned back to the conversation he'd been having with one of the merrows, who looked nervous. "I did see it, Manaanan's name I did," she said, shrugging back the sealskin jacket to show that strange pearly skin underneath: it was hot in the back of the pub, with so many People in there. "Or.I saw something. I was comin' up out of the river the other night, you know, by where the coffee shop is on the new boardwalk. I wanted a latte. And I saw it down the street, heading away from the Liffey, past one of those cut-rate furniture stores. Something.not normal."
"What was it?" the Eldest said.
She shook her head, and the dark wet hair sprayed those standing nearest as she did. "Something big and green."
No one knew what to make of that. "Aah, she's got water on the brain," said one of the clurachauns standing nearest. "It's all just shite anyway. It's junkies doin' it."
The Eldest glared at him. "It might be," he said, "and it might not. We don't dare take anything for granted. But we have to start taking care of ourselves now. Everybody so far who's been taken has been out in some quiet place like a park, or in the waste places around housing estates. Now whatever's doing this is doing it in the city. Nowhere'll be safe soon. We have to put a stop to it. We need to start doing a neighborhood-watch kind of thing, such as mortals do."
To my surprise, then, he turned to me. "Would you help us with that?" he said. "We could use a mortal's eye on this. You know the city as well as we do, but from the mortal's side. And you're of good heart; otherwise, the deceased wouldn't have given you a word. He was a shrewd judge of character, that one."
"How can I help?" I said.
"Walk some patrols with us," he said. "That's how we'll have to start. We can get more of our city People in to help us if it's shown to work."
My first impulse would have been to moan about my day job and how I had little enough time off as it was. Then I thought, What the hell am I thinking? I want to know more about these People-
"Sure," I said. "Tell me where to meet you.
"Tomorrow night," said the Eldest. "Say, down by the bottom of Grafton Street, by St. Stephen's Green. We'll `beat the bounds' and see what we can find."
* * *
And so we did that for five nights running, six.and saw nothing. People's spirits began to rise: there was some talk that just the action we'd taken had put the fear on whatever we were trying to guard ourselves against. It would have been nice if that was true.
We walked, most of the time, between about nine at night and one in the morning: that was when the last few who'd been taken had vanished. I was out with a group including one of the merrow babes-I could never tell them apart-and two more leprechauns from my first one's clan, over on the north side of the Liffey, not far from the big "industrial" pubs that have sprung up there, all noise and no atmosphere. As we went past the biggest of them, heading east along the riverbank, we heard something that briefly froze us all. A shriek-
As a mortal I would have mistaken it for a child's voice. But the People with me knew better. The three of them ran across the Ha'penny Bridge, past startled tourists who felt things jostle them, saw nothing, and (as I passed in their wake) started feeling their pockets to see if they'd been picked. The People sprinted across Crampton Quay in the face of oncoming traffic, just made it past, and ran up the stairs and through the little tunnelway that leads into Temple Bar. And there, just before the alleyway opens out into the S