Ink Read Free Page B

shifting story of Evenfall.
    Then the Hinter came, and he lost… what did he lose?
    The last time he looked, every page in the Book of All Hours was as blank as the white waste of snow and bone around him, featureless plains of vellum stretching out beneath his fingers, his own glyph fading to gray. Sitting at the last remnants of his burnt-down campfire, hypothermia blurring his mind, he'd scrawled his name in charcoal on the opening page before passing out, a message to whoever found his body.
    “Es mortu,”
he'd heard a voice say.
    “Neh
, es liffen.”
    Then he'd woken up in the city, in a hospital of sorts. He'd taken his clothes out of the locker by his bed, put them on, picked up the Book and just walked out the door, into a city at the end of time, where mobs of teenagers broke the wings of angels in the alleyways, tortured them for sport.
    A homeless man sits huddled at the entrance to a covered escalator which glides down, step turning over step, to the subway station at the foot of an elaborate iron bridge of electric candelabra streetlights and wrought heraldry emblazonings. Posters for gigs and clubs peel from its square stone pillars and Reynard watches the people passing into and out of the brown perspex entrance with its garish orange “U” for
underground;
some of them wear suits, others dress casual, but all of them look soft, middle-class—even the ones in ripped, badged thriftwear. Across the bridge a Gothic spire rises up from among a jumble of sandstone walls, slate roofs and branches. A pine-furniture shop sits beside the stone steps that lead down, parallel to the escalator, to the car park and grass patched with snow around the subway station. It's a university district of lecturers and students, professional bohemians and bohemian professionals. The street map that he carries shows a large park down there to the south, nestling in a nook of river, a good place to sleep rough if it comes to that, if he can't find a doorway to shelter him from the Hinter night.
    He's standing, leaning on the bridge, and trying to stop his shakes—as he has been for the last ten minutes—when he feels the hand on his shoulder.
    “Nove migres?”
    It's the homeless man. Reynard shrugs, shakes his head, blithers desperate apologies, his body still shaking with that tension between laughter and tears, I
don't understand. I don't understand.
He trails his fingers through his hair.
    “Peregrim nove en de stadde, ev? Tu ne sprash lingischt?”
    “No.” He sort of understands. “No, I don't speak the language.”
    And the man reaches into his cup and gives him, with a toothless grin, a goldish coin.
    “Per kave,”
he says, pointing over the bridge at God knows what.
“Kave, ev?”
    He lifts the cup to his lips, tilts it once, twice. Kave.
    Reynard nods dumbly, realizes that the tension has released itself; he's both laughing and crying as he says,
“Thank you. Thank you.”
OUT OF FABLE AND FOLKLORE
    My last meeting with Jack was even less official than the first, not even a meeting as much as a farewell. It was months later and the wounds on his back had long since healed. Apart from the scarred stumps on his forehead and the eerie absence of wings, which gave him the somewhat eldritch appearance of a graey straight out of fable and folklore, he was quite healthy, physically speaking. Stretching his arms out wide and arching his back as he stood just outside the sliding glass doors of the hospital entrance, as if gathering the morning-fresh air and the future to him, he had a limber grace, moving the way an athlete does, entirely at one with his body. He looked over his shoulder as the porter whirled his wheelchair away, back through the doors into the hospital.
    “Thank fuck,” Jack had said. “Christ, I'm not a fucking cripple.”
    I'd shrugged, smiled wryly. He'd complained about being wheeled all the way to the door.
    “Hospital policy, Jack. Insurance.”
    “I'm fucking fine,” he'd said.
    I knew,