CHAPTER SEVEN

Iddo

II

You catch on quickly, Ms. Totkins, Iddo replied in Ez’s mind. Jack often spoke of your intelligence. For once, it seems that he did not exaggerate.

You knew Jack?

Oh yes. Better, I think, than anyone, with the possible exception of yourself...

A vision suddenly filled Ez’s mind of Jack, seated across a small table from her, fingering the handle of a tankard of dark ale. A second tankard, significantly larger—more a bucket than a tankard, really—sat before her on the table. They were in some lofty windowed chamber full of sky. “I can’t stand it anymore,” Jack said. He looked haggard. “Ez thinks I’m a professional musician. Closest thing I could tell her to the truth. Musician sounds a bit like magician, see? I keep hoping she’ll piece the clues together. She’s a genius when it comes to numbers and machines and stuff...” He took a gulp of beer. ”Who am I kidding? There’s no loophole in the Secret. I tried everything. I guess it’s wedding bells or bust, just like you said. But I’ve asked Ez to marry me a dozen times—she isn’t ready. I can’t blame her, I suppose. She’s only nineteen. And a traveling flautist doesn’t exactly sound like the ideal husband, does it? I’ve got to show her I’m dependable. I can’t keep running off every few weeks.” He took a breath. “I’m planning to quit, after this next round of deliveries.”

“That,” Ez felt herself say, in a rich, supercilious baritone, “is a very dangerous idea.” Ez realized that she was Iddo in the vision, seeing Jack from his perspective. Oddly enough, it felt perfectly natural. She was still vaguely aware of her surroundings in Real Life; she simply seemed to be remembering—remembering a memory that was not her own.

“Damn it, I love her,” Jack said, his color rising. “The Agency will have to understand. It’s not as if I’m turning traitor.”

“I have never seen a man become so drunk after a single swallow of beer,” Iddo said. “Forget the Agency for a moment. What do you intend to do about the Apadagabla-va?”

Jack’s color drained as fast as it had risen. “They don’t know my true identity,” he muttered. “There’s no way… unless someone from the Agency blabbed… but then I’d already be dead, wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, not necessarily,” Iddo said. Jack briefly disappeared behind the rim of the bucket-size tankard as Iddo took a drink. “Ahh... No, I think Tirzah would be very reluctant to discard a tool as useful as yourself, regardless of where your true allegiance lies. In fact, a known double agent might be more valuable to him than a loyal henchman. Tirzah doesn’t view people as friends and enemies, remember, only assets and liabilities. So long as he believes he can control you, I suspect he will continue to regard you as an asset. But if that should ever change… if, say, you attempted to retire from the Apadagabla-va…”

“What, then?” Jack demanded. “I’m at my wits’ end, Iddo. This is tearing me apart. You know it’s been almost a year since Ez and I finished our cottage? And I doubt I’ve spent a hundred nights under its roof. The whole idea was for us to live together, but I still feel like a visitor… like a guest in my own home. You got me into this mess! How the hell do I get out of it?”

“Correction,” Iddo said. “You got yourself into the Apadagabla-va, and if there had been an easier way out, you would never have allowed me to recruit you to the Agency. Your mission is your way out. Stay the course.”

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There was a pause.

“And if it can’t be done?” Jack asked quietly. “If it turns out to be impossible?”

There was a longer pause. Then Iddo said, “I see no profit in entertaining that potentiality, Jack.”

The expression on Jack’s face was haunted. He suddenly seized his tankard and guzzled the rest of its contents, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he tossed the empty tankard over his shoulder, and it flew away. Jack slumped back in his chair. “You know…” he said, “Ez has the greenest eyes… I really miss those eyes… I always forget how green they are… Whenever I go home, I’m like, Whoa, babe, you’re more beautiful than I remember! She thinks I’m being corny, but it’s true… memory can’t do her justice.” The romanticism of this was somewhat spoiled by the foam mustache clinging to Jack’s real mustache.

“Yes, that’s the simulacrum aesthetic degradation effect for you,” Iddo said. “Textbook example.”

“Must’ve been one of the textbooks you wrote,” Jack grumbled. “I never understood a word of those. It’s like when Ez starts talking math… all these asymptotes and integrals and things… makes my brain itch.”

“Mathematics,” Iddo said grandly, “the language in which God writes the universe, the poetry of logical ideas. This Ez of yours sounds an intriguing interlocutor. It beggars belief that a barbarian like you could seduce a woman of such evident refinement.”

Jack chuckled. “Someday, I’m going to introduce you two,” he said. Then he sighed. “Someday.”

“Given that I personally constitute incontrovertible proof-positive of magic,” Iddo said, “I’m afraid that day will have to be your wedding day.”

Jack nodded glumly. But he perked up as his tankard glided back to him, refilled. “Hell…” he said, taking a sip to reapply his foam mustache, “wouldn’t that be a way to break it to her? First thing after the ceremony, as we’re walking off the stage… you appear out of nowhere and start lecturing her about, like, retrocausality or something? She’ll think she’s hallucinating! And then I’ll tell her, Ez, this is my best friend and mentor, Iddo. We brought down the world’s oldest magical crime syndicate together.”

“Hnggrrnt hnggrrnt hnggrrnt…” For a moment, Ez thought Iddo was choking on his beer. Only when Jack joined in did she realize that the peculiar grunting-snorting sound must be the yak’s version of laughter. “Hnggrrnt hnggrrnt hnggrrnt...”

“Ha ha ha…”

“Hnggrrnt hnggrrnt hnggrrnt...”

“Ha ha ha ha ha…” Jack smacked the table. “We’ll do it,” he declared. “Poor Ez. I’ve had this whole speech planned out in my head for ages, all about the Secret, and how magic works, and how sorry I am that I couldn’t share it with her sooner… but you know what? Screw it. She’ll understand. This is a once-in-a-lifetime pranking opportunity. It would be crime to let it go to waste.”

“Far be it from Jack Fark to commit a crime,” Iddo said, with irony.

“Who, me?” Jack placed a saintly hand over his heart. The conversation seemed to have revived his spirits, or perhaps it was the beer. Either way, he grinned broadly at Ez—well, really at Iddo—but it was Ez who felt the aching pressure in her chest. It’s been almost a year since Ez and I finished our cottage… that was what Jack had said, which put the date of this scene, this memory, assuming it had really happened, within a few months of his murder. And here, Ez was almost certain, was the reason he’d been killed. It was a hazy picture, but a picture nonetheless… a picture of divided loyalties and shadowy organizations… the Agency… the Apadagabla-va… and a mission, a mission Jack had wanted to abandon—for her.

Jack ran both hands through his dark hair. He said, “All right, god damn it, I won’t quit. Tirzah was born a man. He’s got to have a weakness. We will bring down the Apadagabla-va. And then I’m going to marry Ez, and you’re going to be there, Iddo, at our wedding to reveal the Secret to her—it’ll be the funniest way the Secret’s ever been revealed. And then…” a distant look came into Jack’s eyes, “then, I’m going take Ez flying.”

“Amen to that,” Iddo said. A shaggy white arm extended toward Jack, at the end of which, the bucket-size tankard was somehow grasped in a cloven hoof.

“Amen,” Jack echoed. His jaw was set. Ale sloshed as he knocked his tankard firmly against Iddo’s.