'Just know that you're allowed to pass,' she instructed, and walked into the gap between the barriers. I concentrated my limited resources on remembering that I was a valid ticket holder and to my surprise the barrier flipped open.
Outside I was confused. The day had vanished into twilight. I looked around, able to support myself now, at least physically. 'Where did the day go?' I asked Blackbird.
'We were down there some while.'
She guided me over the cobbles and down a side street to a pub that had emptied of tourists and not yet packed with office-workers released from their labours. We entered between floods.
It was dimly lit and although there was a juke-box, it was mercifully quiet. At the back, there was booth seating where Blackbird left me at a table propped against the cushioned back while she went to get me a drink. I closed my eyes momentarily, trying to recapture the vision, then shied away from it when the sense of vertigo returned. It hadn't been the best of days, overall. I had started out dead and now I felt like crap.
I thought of Kareesh sitting in her nest of cushions and hangings somewhere beneath my feet. It was hard to reconcile the waking world around me with the dream-like one she inhabited. I had once had a bad dose of flu with a temperature that made me delirious. The way I felt reminded me of that. The sense of disconnection, of unreality, was overwhelming.
I looked at Blackbird's back, over at the bar. Here she was, shepherding me around, introducing me to creatures I hadn't even known existed a day ago. What did she get from all this? She had said that she'd gained a degree of responsibility for me. How far did that responsibility extend?
She was close to both Kareesh and Gramawl; affectionate even. What was it that was between them? Kareesh said that she was hiding. What was she hiding, and from whom? I hadn't even had the opportunity to ask whether Kareesh was a female troll. She was much smaller and not hairy, but maybe she was just old. All those teeth in their measured rows; I felt cold inside.
And then the thought occurred to me that actually I had no idea what Blackbird really looked like. As I had discovered, she could appear how she pleased. I had a sudden mental image of Blackbird sitting in the booth beside me, rows of tiny sharp teeth reflecting the mood lighting. Could she and Kareesh be related? Is that what Blackbird really looked like?
Had we been visiting an old friend or had I really just been introduced to her mother?
FIVE
My mind was buzzing with the after-effects of the vision Kareesh had granted me and stray thoughts as to Blackbird's true appearance were doing nothing to calm me. My sight shimmered at the edges with the promise of migraine. I closed my eyes in the hope that it might cease, the thumping headache easing slightly.
'Lost, are ya?' The tone was belligerent, but not out of the ordinary in the back-streets around Covent Garden. It was a nice area as long as you stuck to the tourist track. I opened my eyes to view the couple that had appeared in front of my table.
'Sorry?' I tried to focus on them. I was having a bad moment and suddenly felt quite nauseous.
'I said,' the tall youth intoned for the benefit of his female companion, 'you're lost, are ya?' He grinned at her. He was dressed in gothic style and would have been a punk had it been thirty years earlier. They were the type that always fell in with the darker fashions. He was upwards of six feet tall with strands of long black hair trailing around his face. His T-shirt said 'Heavy Metal' in gothic script, visible between the dull gloss lapels of his leather coat. His face was curiously androgynous, clean shaven with eyebrows sculpted in an almost feminine shape. The similarity to his companion made me wonder whether they were brother and sister, or whether the likeness was contrived.
She was wearing marginally more eye make-up than he was, and her lips were fuller than his, though that could have been the purple lipstick. Her skin was deathly pale and I wondered if the pallor was also make-up or whether she simply never saw the sun. Her T-shirt proclaimed 'No Rest for the Wicked', which might have been a band or just a slogan.
'I'm just having a quiet drink with my friend, so I wouldn't say I was lost, no.' My brain banged on the inside of my skull.
'I think he's lost,' he jeered. 'If he wasn't lost he wouldn't be here, would he?' His companion apparently followed the intricacies of this negative logic, because she shook her head.
'You've strayed from the path, my lad, and now you've gotta pay.' This time she nodded enthusiastically.
I was about to tell him to piss off before I threw up over them when his words about straying from the path rang a faint bell. 'Path?'
'Yeah. You're in my stomping ground now, bumpkin, and you're not leavin' till you've paid the price.' His companion nodded again. 'What have ya got?'
He sat down opposite me, sliding into the empty seat with animal grace, his shoulders rolled under the leather of his coat in a way that wasn't quite human.
'I'm sorry, but I don't have any spare change. I'm clean out. So you'll be better off going and pestering someone else.'
'Ya hear that, Carris? He wants to buy us off with coins. Up in town to trade and he reckons he's got nothing, does he? He must take us for bumpkins like he is, eh?'
I was beginning to suspect that this was not the average yob out to intimidate the tourists into making a 'donation'.
'Look, mate. I don't have anything, so it's not worth your time, all right?' I tried to appear as uninteresting as possible.
'Well, if you've got nothing to give then we'll have to see what there is to take, won't we?' He made to touch my hand, but I snatched it away.
'Stay away from me,' I growled.
'Or what, bumpkin? What ya gonna do, eh?'
'He's not the one you want to worry about.' The familiar voice came from behind Carris. She spun around, stepping wide to brace herself for an attack, her movements lithe and graceful.
Blackbird walked around her blind side, navigating around the table so she could slide in behind the table next to me. She placed a pint of black liquid in front of me, the head creamy.
'Guinness. It'll help to clear your head.' She explained it as though we weren't facing off with these thugs.
She turned back to the youth, who still looked expectant.
'You gonna pay up for him then?' he queried, hand out, making a grasping motion reminiscent of the gestures used by Gramawl. Blackbird made to touch him and it was his turn to snatch his hand away.
'No, Fenlock, I'm not going to pay up for him and you're not going to ask him again. Instead, you're going to apologise to both of us for disturbing our drink then leave us alone.'
'And why would I do that?' His companion leaned forward over the table to add to the threat or simply to overhear the conversation.
'Because if you don't, I'm going to shout your true name loud enough for every goblin and nixie for miles around to hear,' Blackbird stated calmly.
Fenlock hesitated, calculating, then recovered.
'You don't know it, do ya? Ya can't,' he leered at her.
'Don't I? You need to be more careful who you tell it to then, don't you? Once a secret's told then you just know someone will find it out. Perhaps if you chose to mention it to someone who was more discreet…?' Blackbird arched an eyebrow and looked up at Carris, who was still leaning over us. Fenlock's expression darkened.
He spun around, tipping the chair onto the floor and standing in one movement. Carris staggered backwards, caught by the sudden reversal.
'Who did you tell?' His tone was quiet, but darkly threatening.
'Me? I didn't tell her. She's lying, she is. She can't know it. I didn't tell her.' Carris eased backwards slowly
