"All right, all right, I'm awake! Lay off the rough stuff; I'm delicate. Especially first thing in the morning."

"It's afternoon," I said.

"To you, maybe. For me it's the beginning of a new day and I really wish it wasn't. You'll have to excuse me. The old gray matter is never at its best first thing, at least until I've had a few cups of coffee and a ciggie. Now, who are you, what are you, and why are you persecuting a poor fairy at this unG.o.dly hour? I didn't order out again, did I? I could have sworn the escort agency said my credit wasn't any good any more, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

He squeezed his eyes shut, coughed up half a lung, and then stared at me blearily. His eyes widened as he finally got a good look at me, and then he scooted back across the crumpled bedsheets, holding up his hands defensively, until he crashed into the headboard and couldn't go any farther. He tried to smile but couldn't pull it off convincingly.

"Eddie! It's you! If I'd known you were coming, I'd have tidied up a bit, made a bit of an effort...Help yourself to anything you like, make yourself at home...Oh, G.o.d, Eddie, don't kill me, please! I'm no threat to you!"

"Interesting," I said. "You should only know me as Shaman Bond. But you know my real name. How is that, Blue?"

"I can see your torc," he said, blinking rapidly. "I'm half elf, you know. Of course you know. You Droods know everything. And I have been known to do the odd job for your family, on occasion. I have to. They give me money. Don't kill me, Eddie, please. They made me do it!"

"All right, Eddie, lay off him," said Janissary Jane, moving forward to stand beside me. "h.e.l.lo, Blue. It's me, Jane. You've got yourself into some real trouble this time, haven't you? Even I may not be able to get you out of this one. What exactly did you do for the Droods that you're so ashamed of?"

"Ah, Jane," said the Blue Fairy, calming down a little. "And Molly too. How nice. Welcome to my humble abode. Excuse the mess, but I live here. And I just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to give a d.a.m.n anymore. Terribly lax of me, I know, but that's life these days. My life, anyway. Still, I'm glad you're here. If one is about to die horribly, it is marginally better to do it in the company of one's friends. Could you perhaps persuade your friend the a.s.sa.s.sin to let me put some clothes on? I really would prefer not to meet my maker wearing just my underwear."

"Get dressed," I said, amused despite myself. "I'm not here to kill you, Blue. Just ask you some questions."

"Wait till you hear the answers," said the Blue Fairy.

We all backed away from the bed, and he levered himself up off the slumping mattress and pulled on a battered old silk wrap. He ran his hands through his thinning hair, took a cigarette from the pack by the bed, lit it with a fingertip, and took a deep drag. He then had another long coughing fit, accompanied by really horrible noises, and sat down on the bed again, his face gray and sweaty. He was carrying too much weight, p.r.o.nounced in the jowls and puffy cheeks. His face had an unhealthy sheen, and his eyes were seriously bloodshot. The word was, he'd been quite a dandy in his time, back in the heady days of glam rock, but he hadn't aged well. The Blue Fairy had lived not wisely but too well, and it showed. He might have been a personage to be reckoned with once, but that was long ago. Still, if he really had done half the things he was supposed to have done, in and out of bed, it was a wonder he was still here at all. Presumably even half elves are very hard to kill.

"G.o.d, you're a mess, Blue," said Janissary Jane. "You look worse than your room, and that's saying something."

"I know, I know," said Blue, drawing on his cigarette again and stifling another coughing fit through sheer effort of will. "Think of me as a work in progress. I keep hoping that if I drink enough, or ingest enough things that are bad for me, I won't have to wake up again to this awful room, this awful life. This hole that I dug for myself, this burrow I have crawled into...But I always do. It's hard to kill an elf, even when he's cooperating as hard as he can. Even a half elf. Bless dear old Daddy and his rampant gonads."

"For someone so determined to die, you seemed very concerned about me being here to kill you," I said.

"I would prefer to go with some dignity," said the Blue Fairy. "Not kicking and screaming all the way, as you reduce me to small b.l.o.o.d.y pieces. I know how you Droods operate."

"But why do you want to die at all?" said Molly. "If you don't like your life, change it, turn it around. There's still time."

The Blue Fairy smiled fondly at her. "Ah, there speaks the innocence and optimism of youth. When life still seems full of promise and possibilities. But no one loves a fairy when he's fifty. They want their magic from a younger bit of stuff. And my magic, sad to say, is not what it was. It faded, along with my good looks...which were magnificent, once upon a time. I was invited to all the very best parties, you know. Mixed with all the celebs, had my face in the glossies every week...But alas, we half elves bloom early and fade fast. Daddy dearest's energies were never meant to be contained in a mostly human form. The candle that burns twice as fast...turns out not to be much of a bargain, in the end.

"Now I'm no longer good-looking enough to hang on to all the pretty boys and pretty things that alone make life worth living. Sweet young things do still turn up in my bed, but only when I pay them. And the fortunes I once had, that I thought would last forever, are gone, long gone. On this...and that. I never worried about money until I didn't have it any more. Which is why I have to take whatever work I can get these days. Even the jobs I know will come back to haunt me afterwards."

"What have you done, Blue?" I said.

He looked at me pleadingly. "I didn't have any choice. One of your people turned up here quite unexpectedly. I didn't think the Droods even knew I existed anymore, let alone where to find me. But he had work for me, and the money was good. Very good. And the threat behind it was very real. You don't say no to a Drood. And since all he wanted was a little strange matter...I didn't see the harm. Acquiring unusual objects from other dimensions is one of the few things I'm still good at. It's in the genes, you see. I got some strange matter for your family's Armourer once, some years back, and it must have been on file somewhere, because when they wanted some more they came to me."

"Who did they send?" I said.

"Matthew," said the Blue Fairy. "They always send Matthew when they're not prepared to take 'Go to h.e.l.l' for an answer."

"Of course," I said. "It would have to be Matthew. He'd do anything for the family. Go on, Blue."

The Blue Fairy blinked nervously at me, picking up on the coldness in my voice. He stubbed out the last inch of his cigarette on the bedside table and tried to sit up straight, clasping his hands together in his lap so they wouldn't shake.

"Well," he said, "I went fishing. That's what I do. Drop a line into the other realms and see what I can hook. Strange matter isn't easy to find. I call it that because I haven't a clue what it is, or what it's for. It's organic...maybe alive, maybe not, and it has some...quite unique properties. Fishing the dimensions can be very dangerous, you know. You never can tell when you'll hook something big and nasty by mistake, and then up it comes through the planes, mad as h.e.l.l and looking for revenge...But I got Matthew what he wanted, and he paid me in cash right there on the spot. Good money. Far too much, for someone in my reduced circ.u.mstances. That was when I started to get suspicious. But I didn't do anything. I had new booze to drink and new drugs to take, and...he was a Drood, after all. You don't mess with the Droods. Then I heard you'd been ambushed by an elf lord with an arrow made of strange matter and hired by the Droods...and I knew. I felt bad, Eddie; really I did. I've always known you were a Drood; you can't hide a torc from elf eyes. And we'd had some good times together, in the old Wulfshead...You bought me drinks and listened to me talk, and you never laughed at me. So after I heard...what had happened...I waited for you to come looking for me. And here you are. But you're not here to kill me, are you? You want something."

"The strange matter's still in my body," I said. "And it's killing me. Can you get me a cure?"

"No," said the Blue Fairy, meeting my eyes steadily. "It doesn't work that way. I need to know exactly what I'm looking for when I go fishing, or I can't find it. And I don't know nearly enough about strange matter to have any idea of what its counterpart might be. I'm sorry, Eddie; really I am. I didn't know what they were going to do!"

"Would it have made any difference if you had?" I said.

"Probably not," he admitted. "It was very good money."

"How would you like a chance to redeem yourself?" said Molly. "How would you like to go fishing for something for us?"

"What did you have in mind?" said the Blue Fairy.

"We need a skeleton key, to get us past the Hall's defences," I said.

"Is there such a thing?"

He smiled suddenly. "Oh, yes. There is...I've waited years for someone to come and ask me. It's really very simple. Quite elegant, actually. But are you sure you want to do this, Eddie? Once word gets out that the Drood's defences have been breached..."

"Let it," I said. "Let the whole family crash and burn, if that's what it takes to get to the truth."

We went out into the next room. The Blue Fairy dug through a pile of debris and came up with a very ordinary-looking fishing rod and reel. The kind of thing people use when they go fishing for recreation rather than compet.i.tive sport. The Blue Fairy then produced a knife out of nowhere, pulled up the left sleeve of his dressing gown, and made a shallow incision just above the wrist. I could see a whole series of scars reaching up his arm to the elbow, some old and some not, from where he'd done this before. Golden blood welled up from the cut, and he held his arm out over the s.p.a.ce he'd cleared on the floor before him. The blood dripped down to form a golden pool. When it was about three or four inches in diameter, the Blue Fairy pressed his fingers against the cut and muttered under his breath, and the wound healed over immediately, leaving just another scar on his arm.

The Blue Fairy pulled his sleeve down again, not looking at the three of us watching, and snapped out half a dozen words in Old Elvish. I caught some of it, but his accent was unfamiliar. The pool on the floor blazed suddenly with a golden light and spread out on the floor until it was almost a yard in diameter. It didn't look like a pool of liquid anymore. Looking into it was like staring into a deep well that just kept getting deeper the longer you looked. I felt like I was off balance and might fall. I grabbed Molly's arm for support just as she grabbed mine. We both smiled at each other a little shamefacedly. Janissary Jane didn't look into the pool. She kept all her attention on the Blue Fairy. And she had both her punch daggers at the ready.

The Blue Fairy took up his fishing rod, checked the hook was secure and the line was running smoothly, and then dropped his line into the glowing golden pool. The hook disappeared, followed by more and more line as the Blue Fairy kept feeding it in.

"How far down does it go?" said Molly.

"All the way," said the Blue Fairy.

"Some questions, you just know you're not going to get an answer that helps," said Molly.

"Elf blood has many useful properties," the Blue Fairy said calmly.

"Even diluted, degraded blood like mine. All elves have an built-in talent for travelling. They can walk sideways from the sun, access other planes of existence, enter dimensions you and even I couldn't even conceive, let alone operate in. But the blood itself is enough to open doors and allow me to go fishing. Sometimes just for the fun of it, fishing at random for whatever's there...sometimes to order, for a price. If I concentrate hard enough, I can find pretty much anything...and what you need, Eddie, is a Confusulum."

"A what?" I said.

"A Confusulum," the Blue Fairy said patiently. "Don't ask me what it is is, because I've no idea. That's the point. It doesn't actually change anything, just confuses the h.e.l.l out of everyone. It works on the uncertainty principle that nothing is necessarily what or where it seems to be. I found the first one years ago, quite by accident, and it scared the c.r.a.p out of me. Everyone needs some certainties in their life. I threw it back in, but something about it stuck in my mind. The Droods' family defences are based around certainties: friend or foe, permitted entry or not, that sort of thing. But the Confusulum will take all those certainties out of the equation. The Hall's defences will be so confused they won't know whether they're operating or not, whether you're permitted entry or not, even whether you're actually there or not. They'll be so confused you'll be able to walk right through them while they're still struggling to make up their minds. By the time anyone at the Hall notices that their defences have just had a major nervous breakdown, you'll be in.

"The Confusulum isn't one hundred percent guaranteed; its uncertainty even applies to its own nature. So there's no telling exactly what its effects will be or how long they'll last. But since I'm the only one ever to encounter a Confusulum, you can be sure your family have no specific defences against it."

He fished randomly for a while, just getting himself in the mood, and Molly and Jane and I sat more or less patiently around the golden pool, watching. I was having trouble getting used to the idea that I could be going home so soon, and that my family's notorious protections could be brushed aside so easily. And all because of a little man nursing a grudge and just waiting to be asked.

The first thing he pulled out of the pool was a seven-league boot with a hole in its soul, followed by a small black lacquered puzzle box, a stuffed moomintroll, and a statue of a black bird. The Blue Fairy threw them all back, and then stared into the pool with a look of fierce concentration on his face. His eyes bulged, and his lips drew back from his gritted teeth in a fixed snarl. Beads of sweat popped out all over his straining face. His line jerked suddenly, sending slow ripples across the surface of the glowing pool. The Blue Fairy let out a long breath and began to slowly reel his line back in. He took his time, keeping a light but constant pressure on the line, staring so intently he wasn't even breathing anymore. And finally he brought something up out of the golden pool.

I couldn't tell you what it was, exactly. It clung to the hook, writhing and twisting like a living thing, even though I knew on some deep instinctive level that it wasn't alive and never could be. It changed size and colour, shape and texture, from moment to moment, its dimensions snapping in and out and back and forth. It looked like all the things you see out of the corners of your eyes when you've just woken up and you're still half asleep.

"Quick!" said the Blue Fairy, his face contorted with concentration.

"I brought it here for you, Eddie, so it's up to you to give it a shape in this dimension. Impose a single nature on it, so it can survive here. The link you make will mean it will serve you and only you. But do it quickly, before it becomes something we can't bear to see with only human eyes."

I concentrated on the first image that came to me. It just popped into my mind: a simple circular badge I'd seen in an old head shop in Denmark Street years ago, a white badge bearing the legend Go Lemmings Go. And just like that, the twisting unnerving thing on the hook was gone and the badge was resting on the palm of my hand. It looked and felt perfectly normal, perfectly innocent. I pinned it carefully on the lapel of my jacket.

"All the things you could have chosen," said Molly. "Everything from Excalibur to the Holy Hand Grenade of Saint Antioch, and you had to choose that. The workings of your mind remain a complete mystery to me, Eddie."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," I said, and we both smiled.

"By any chance, are the two of you an item?" Janissary Jane said suddenly.

"We haven't decided yet," I said.

"We're still working on it," said Molly.

"We're...partners, on this particular enterprise."

"Partners in crime."

"Or possibly a suicide pact."

"You two deserve each other," said Janissary Jane, shaking her head.

None of us had noticed that the Blue Fairy had inadvertently allowed his line to drop back into the glowing pool. He cried out abruptly as something below grabbed the hook and tugged hard on the line. The Blue Fairy was almost pulled forward, and the line whirred through the reel until it ran all the way. The Blue Fairy was jerked forward again but hung on grimly.

"What have you got?" I said. "What were you concentrating on?"

"I wasn't thinking about anything! I didn't catch this; it caught me!"

I hit the b.u.t.ton on my reverse watch, and nothing happened. I hit the b.u.t.ton again, and still nothing. I shook my wrist vigorously.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," I said.

"It sounds so much more helpless when he says it," said Janissary Jane.

"He's had a lot of practice recently," said Molly. "What's wrong, Eddie?"

"I appear to have broken the reverse watch," I said. "Or exhausted its batteries, or whatever the h.e.l.l the d.a.m.n thing runs on. I think I asked too much of it when I forced it to save you."

"So it's my fault?" said Molly.

"Always," I said, smiling.

We all looked on as the Blue Fairy wrestled with the fishing rod, the taut line jerking back and forth across the pool. It snapped abruptly, and the Blue Fairy stumbled back. And something huge and long and inhumanly strong burst up out of the golden pool, reaching for him. It was a single tentacle, dark purple in colour and lined with rows of suckers full of grinding teeth. More and more of it burst up out of the pool, snapping back and forth.

"Get out of here!" yelled the Blue Fairy. "I'll handle this!"

"Don't be a d.a.m.ned fool!" Janissary Jane yelled back at him. "You can't handle this on your own!"

"It came through my blood," the Blue Fairy said grimly. "So only I can put it back down. Go. You've got things to do. Things that matter. This...is my business. No d.a.m.ned thing from the vasty deeps is going to get the better of me in my own home! Will you all please get the h.e.l.l out of here, so I can concentrate? And Eddie, make your family pay! For what they did to you, and what they did to me."

More and more of the tentacle was forcing its way into the room, yards and yards of it, straining against the edges of the pool that contained it. The Blue Fairy threw his fishing rod aside and sketched ancient signs and sigils on the air with dancing hands, leaving bright incandescent trails on the air. He was chanting in Elvish in a form so old I couldn't follow one word in ten. Magic spat and crackled all around him, and for the first time, he was smiling. A cold, inhuman smile.

Molly and Janissary Jane and I left him there, standing on the edge of the golden pool, defying the monstrous thing that had come fishing for him. I left him there, because I had important things to do, and because...it was the only gift I could give him, for his help. A chance to stand alone against a fearsome foe and either win back his pride...or gain the good death he craved. I looked back at him, one last time, before I closed the door. He stood tall and proud and powerful in his magic; and for the first time it wasn't difficult at all to see the elf in him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

You Can Go Home Again (Provided You Carry a Really Big Stick) M olly and Janissary Jane and I stood in the street outside the liquor store, looking up at the Blue Fairy's window. The vivid flashes of light had stopped, and it had all gone very quiet. People pa.s.sed by, paying us no attention. Thinking this was just another day, no different than any other. They didn't know there was another world, a more dangerous world, that they would see if they would only stop and look. Molly and Janissary Jane and I looked up at a silent, empty window and finally turned away.

"Should we...?" said Molly.

"No," said Janissary Jane. "Either way, it's over. Finished."

"It's time to go home," I said. "For I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

"I love it when you talk literary," said Molly.

"Eddie..." Janissary Jane said. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going with you. I know my limitations. Fighting demons in h.e.l.l dimensions is one thing; taking on your family in the seat of their power...that's way out of my league. I'd just get in your way. So...I think I'll sit this one out, if that's all right with you."

"It's all right, Jane," I said. "I understand. Trust me; if I didn't have to do this, I wouldn't be doing it either." I looked at Molly. "You don't have to do this, Molly. My family probably doesn't even know you're involved. You could still walk away. I'd understand."

"h.e.l.l with that," Molly said cheerfully. "I've been dreaming of sticking it to the Droods where they live for years. Besides, you wouldn't last ten minutes without me to back you up, and you know it."

"Thank you, Molly," I said. "That means a lot to me."

"Just promise me one thing," she said. She held my gaze with hers, fierce and demanding. "Promise me that we're going back to tear the place down. Promise me you won't go soft and beg them to take you back."

"Not a chance in h.e.l.l," I said, meeting her gaze. "This isn't about what my family did to me anymore. It's about what they've done to everyone."

"You've come a long way, Eddie," said Molly. "I wish...I could do something to help you. To save you from what's inside you. All those years I spent trying to kill you, and now something else is beating me to it...I would save you if I could, Eddie. You do know that?"

"I know," I said. "But...I've lived more these last few days with you than in all those years on my own."

"Oh, get a room, you two," said Janissary Jane. "I'm out of here before you start comparing favourite poems."

"We are not an item!" said Molly.

"Definitely not," I said solemnly.

"Yeah, right," said Janissary Jane. "I'll take the black car, and visit my local union branch. See if I can organise some direct action against Manifest Destiny for allowing Archie Leech to use me as a weapon in their fight. The mercenaries' guild looks after its own. And we've always come down very hard on unfair compet.i.tion from amateurs. If secret societies want to build up their own private armies, they should come to us. And pay the going rate. So...Eddie, Molly. This is good-bye. Good luck, guys. You're going to need it. And Eddie...thank you. For saving me from Leech. You could have just destroyed my body and got rid of him that way. It's what most people would have done."

"I'm not most people," I said.