Dangerous as hell. But I was desperate.
A falconer, I guessed that he’d lived in or near the city. Idon’t think this was where she’d meta wizard before, but it’s a partial explanation of why she would nest with therumble of trucks and busses shaking the air around her. I think I’ve readsomewhere of falconers who would catch a bird, train a bird and keep her for afew seasons and then let her fly free again. They loved the training more thanthe hunt, loved getting such a fierce wild thing to trust them and cooperatewith them.
But I’m guessing this falconer, this face I could see withhawk’s eyes, found his bond with birds and his skill at training through thesame half-world power that I draw on for mage-work. I’ve told you that normalpeople can use that power, they justcan’t see it, feel it, smell it, taste it the way we can. The way a hawk can.
Normal people can’t make it work consciously. It just happens.Miracles. As some trainers have a “miraculous” touch with the animals theytrain. Or even that they don’t train. I know a man, no magical skill you canmeasure, who attracts cats. If he walks down a sidewalk in a strange town, catshe’s never seen before will stand up from their sun-patch on the front stoopand stretch and saunter down the steps, tail crooked high, for him to scratchtheir ears and rub their chins and cheekbones. Magic attracts cats.
I asked my hawk to move ahead, cornice by cornice, windowledge by window ledge, and followed her. My hawk, I call her, but as I said Inever claimed an ownership neither of us felt. She was her own hawk, always.Think of her as my partner, not my property. I never owned Maggie. I wouldn’t dareclaim to own Cash.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre. . . .”As if I didn’t have enough on my mind, just trying to hold touch with the hawkand stay alive at the same time, I kept running that Yeats poem through myhead. I wondered where we stood in it, all of our characters in this play.Sandy had the passionate intensity down pat. Did Cash and I lack allconviction?
And who qualified as best and worst? All a muddle, all of us.I had a suspicion of why Sandy had killed John Doe, what she had taken from himand how Reverend Fred had planned to use it. If I turned out to be right, Icould understand her motives. I could even feel some of them myself. None ofthat righteous indignation I should have felt instead, passionate intensityversus lack. The same went for that second courier, Wolfgang, with the papers,and I didn’t think much of Bycheck myself.
But she’d killed two innocents and tried to kill Nef. She’dinvented a new magic trick that could rip a hard-won balance apart around ourears. I had to track her down.
That brought me at last, alive and without tire-prints up myass, to my office building and the alley leading around to its back court. Iswung down that alley on my crutches, avoiding empty wine bottles and a fullwino sleeping huddled under cardboard in a cellar way, crunching over tatteredfaded styrofoam burger-boxes and empty paper coffee cups, the flotsam andjetsam of city life.
I gimped around the corner and into the littered courtyard,the hawk turning and turning her gyre against the sun, pigeons huddled tense ontheir ledges overhead ready to flush in a firework of feathered confusion. Ipicked out a victim and focused on it and froze its left wing with my mind. Thehawk knew. Our shared eyes knew, one pair below, one pair above, as she stoopedand the other birds exploded in all directions, clattered, wheeled, dodged, butshe held, we held focus on one targetand one target only in that flock, the bird that couldn’t fly. Wings belled outinto a parachute timed for impact, talons flashed forward and gripped, I feltthe impact on the soles of my feet. Feathers burst loose.
And then I stood, hanging on my crutches, seeing with my owneyes only. Feathers drifted down. I saw her wings flurry as she changed herhold, and then she lifted up from the ledge to settle on the parapet above. Shebent her head, plucking more feathers to drift like snowflakes in the wind,almost innocent if you didn’t count the spattered blood on them.
My heart hammered. I stood there for a minute, two, justbreathing, letting the stoop and killing wash out of my bloodstream whereshared adrenaline zinged my nerves and muscles. I understood the falconer inthose minutes, passionate intensity again. To hold lightning and death on hisfist, loose it, follow it, not commanding but partnering with it — and thentake off the jesses, throw her into the air one last time and turn away, lether go, flying free. He must have been a better man than I am.
I drew another deep breath and turned and crutched my way backthrough the alley’s trash, out front and in the door and facing the stair.Three floors up, no elevator, I’d used to call it exercise. Bully for me. Ikept my weight forward, damn sure I wanted to fall forward rather than back ifI did fall, fumbled my way up acouple of steps, finally pulled one crutch out from under my arm and grippedboth with the opposite hand and trusted my weight to the handrail, hopping upand bracing a crutch and hopping up again, wondering if I’d be better off justcrawling the steps and sliding the crutches ahead.
By the time I reached my office floor, drenched in sweat andgasping, sore from banging against the rail and the stair nosings, I understoodBycheck a little better. Maybe I needed to find another office.
I stood there for a moment, leaning my forehead and then myback against the
