Portal Pawns

"There are worse things between the worlds than the cold. I've shaken hands with most of them."

"I really need to register somewhere closer," I muttered, mostly to my own aching legs, as I started up the last of the hill.

There wasn't a portal within cooee of Luke's place—not one I'd ever opened, anyway—so I'd come out at the only Hobart foothold I had that was any use to me: the tumbledown shed on the empty lot where I'd spent more hours than I'd care to admit watching Gladys's house from a safe distance. From there it was better than an hour and a half on foot. Up Berriedale Road with the morning traffic grinding past, across the roundabout where Mary's Hope Road cut in, and on again until the houses thinned out and the land began tilting up towards the mountains and away from the river. Wallcrest Road. Number two. I'd walked it a dozen times in my head and never once on my feet, and my feet were making their feelings known.

Guardian's work keeps a man hard or it puts him in the ground; at forty-nine I was still on the right side of that, most days. But the hill went looking for the parts of me the years had already found, and I came up over the top of the drive blowing like a spent horse, hands on my hips, taking a breather I'd have been wiser not to take.

There was a truck in the driveway. A little delivery job, nosed out towards the street the way they leave them for a quick turnaround, its back end pointed up the drive at the big gated fence that closed off the top of the property. Both its rear doors—the swing kind, not a roller—stood wide open on their hinges, and with the tail of the truck turned to the fence like that, the pair of them walled the whole of the back end off from where I stood. Whatever was going on in there, the truck and its doors kept it from me. Luke's had an early start, I thought, and I'd got maybe three steps nearer when a voice came out of the quiet and stopped me where I stood.

"Speak to me, boy!"

Gruff. Heavy. Used to being obeyed. It went through me like a bucket of cold water—and worse than the voice was that I knew it. Nelson Price. There are names that get said low and quick around a Guardian's fire, and his is near the top of the list: a Portal Pirate with a reputation built out of other men's bones. The last time he and I had been this close to one another was in Los Angeles, and I'd got out of Los Angeles by about the width of a whisker. I hadn't reckoned on ever being this near him again. I surely hadn't wanted to be.

"Where are they?" Nelson said, somewhere the far side of that truck, and he didn't need to lift the threat in it for me to feel it land.

"Luke." His name left me on a breath, no sound to it worth the name. If Nelson Price was standing in a Hobart driveway asking where they were, then Luke was in trouble up past his ears—and so, likely, was every soul Luke had dragged into this with him.

I went quiet and low, the way you learn to when the other option is dying, and put myself hard against the flank of the truck with my back to the cold of it, making myself small in its shadow. Off past the bonnet, the front door of Luke's house stood open a hand's width. An invitation or a warning—I couldn't say which, and neither one was any good. Shit.

The body of the truck stood between me and whatever was happening at the back of it, and the open doors walled off what the body didn't. But the tray rode high on its chassis, and beneath it—between the underside of the bed and the concrete—there was a good foot and more of open air, and through that gap I had a clear enough view of the drive on the far side. Boots. Black, worn down at the heel, planted wide and unbothered. Nelson's, from about the knee down, the rest of him lost up behind the steel. I watched them turn and cross the last of the drive towards the fence, in no hurry at all, a man strolling for a bus—and then I watched them step up off the concrete and into a low shimmer of colour standing against the palings. The boots went first, and the shins after, and then there was no more of him at all.

A portal. Open against the fence. And it didn't fold shut behind him.

It took me a beat longer than it should have to grasp what I was looking at—that the shimmer wasn't Nelson's doing at all. It was a Guardian's doorway, stood wide open against the back fence in the broad light of a Hobart morning, and there was only the one Guardian it could belong to. Luke's. It had to be Luke's.

After all my long years of waiting, here was my first true look at what we'd hung the whole of our hopes on: a portal left standing wide open against a suburban paling fence, like a front door left swinging with the keys still in the lock. The green, fatal carelessness of a man handed the power of the worlds before he'd the faintest idea what it costs to hold. He'd left the door between the worlds gaping open behind him. And something had walked straight in through it.

Which left the other one.

"Stand up!" A different voice. Younger, meaner, nearer—right inside the back of that truck, the far side of the open doors from me.

I eased up to the corner of the nearest door, near enough to lay a hand on the edge of it, near enough to hear a man breathing on the other side of the steel. Every part of me had gone still and cold and ready. Whatever came next, I had about one move in me before it did, and I hadn't yet worked out what the move would be.

I never got the chance to. There came a sound I'd know anywhere and would give a good deal not to—the short wet work of a blade going into a man—and then the choking after it, and the drowning, and the last heavy drop of a body onto the tray of the truck. Somewhere in the middle of that I went from cold clean through to white-hot. I hadn't been a breath too slow. I'd been slow by a whole life. Somebody's whole life, finished an arm's length from me while I crouched in the dark totting up my options.

The rage was still climbing in me, and moving was the only answer I had to it. I got a hand on the edge of the open door and I swung it into him with everything I owned, just as he came down out of the back of the truck to see what the morning had fetched up. The edge of the steel caught him across the shoulder and the side of the head and folded him off the tray and down onto the concrete—and I came after him, already reaching.

He came up off the ground far faster than that shoulder had any business allowing, one arm hanging half-dead where the door had done its work, blood already sheeting down from a split above his ear.

"Ah. Cody Jennings." He said my name like he'd found money lying in the gutter.

Griffin Langley. I'd have known him blind. There was history between us, him and me, and none of it the sort you'd sit and reminisce over. "Griffin," I said. "You've lost a few more teeth since last we spoke."

"Been a rough year." He grinned it at me, red to the gums, and spat a mouthful of blood onto the concrete between us to make his point.

His good hand had started drifting, slow and easy, towards his hip. "Don't," I told him.

The knife came out regardless. Small, quick, wicked—the sort you gut fish with, or men. He turned it so the edge caught the sun. "I'm the one holding the knife here, Jennings."

"Pull it," I said, "and I'll be the one holding it in a minute." I meant it, and he could hear that I did. Griffin was dangerous—Griffin had always been dangerous—but he was a brawler, not a craftsman. He led with the knife and with his temper both, and temper's a loud thing; it tells you what's coming a full half-second before it comes. I'd been reading his kind since before he drew his first breath.

He came in low and fast, the blade going for my belly, and I turned off the line of it so it opened nothing but the air and the hem of my coat. Before he'd gathered himself I drove my elbow into that split above his ear and felt it tear wider, and he bellowed and slashed backhand at my face so close I felt the wind of it on my teeth. I gave ground—once, twice—letting him herd me back down the drive, letting him believe he had me on the run.

"You know what we call your lot?" I said, giving another step, keeping my voice as easy as a man's can be with a blade hunting him—because there's nothing riles a temper worse than someone who won't rise to it. "You call yourselves Portal Pirates. We don't."

He came on, breathing wet through a broken mouth, past hearing me now, wanting only to open me up from hip to hip.

"We call you Portal Pawns," I said. "On account of that's the whole of what you are. Disposable. Nelson spends men like you the way I'd spend coppers—and here you all are, still queuing up to be spent."

That was the one that did it. Whatever thin thread had been holding him to any kind of plan snapped clean through, and he came at me with the whole of himself behind the knife—everything committed, nothing kept back—which was exactly what I'd been coaxing out of him since the door slammed into his skull.

I let him get almost home. Close enough to feel the cold breath of the steel go by my ribs. And then I wasn't where he'd spent everything to be, and I had his knife arm caught up in both of mine.

He was strong—fear and fury will lend a man that—and for a long moment we stood locked and shaking, his weight grinding the blade back around towards my throat by inches, my arms afire with the holding of it. I was too old for a straight contest of strength and I knew it, so I didn't give him one. I dropped my weight, turned his wrist the wrong way past its stops, and put the whole of him against the whole of me. It went with a sound like a green branch under a boot heel, a wet green crack, and his hand sprang open and the knife rang away across the concrete.

He screamed—but a screaming man is a fighting man still if you leave him the room for it, and I didn't. He threw his skull back into my face and caught me high on the cheekbone, and the morning went white and starry for half a breath. He clawed at my eyes with the ruined hand. He stamped a boot heel down the length of my shin hard enough to near fold the leg under me. It was ugly, close, graceless work, the two of us grunting like beasts in the cold, and there's none of the shine on it the stories like to put there. There never is. There's only who'll do the next hard thing first, and not flinch from it.

I would. I always have; it's the whole reason I'm still above ground to say so. I hooked his good leg out from under him and rode him down onto the concrete on his face, dragged the broken arm up hard between his shoulder blades until the fight went out of him in one long grinding howl, and drove my knee into the small of his back to keep it out. Then I hooked the fallen knife off into the flax along the fence, well shut of him, and leaned my weight down until all that was left to him was to breathe and bleed and curse my name into the ground.

"I did tell you," I said, close to his ear.

And from there, pinned down at the foot of the tray beside him, I got my first proper look up into the back of the truck.

A man lay in it on his back, in a spread of his own blood gone black in the shadow, his eyes open and fixed on nothing at all. Young. A delivery fellow, by the shirt—somebody who'd driven up a hill of a quiet morning to leave a parcel and walked instead into the middle of a war he'd never heard of and now never would. And beneath the horror of it—God forgive me—came a thin, cold thread of relief. Because whoever the poor lad was, he wasn't the man I'd climbed that hill to find; he was only the fellow who'd brought the parcel, caught in the wrong driveway at the worst hour of a bad morning. I hated the relief even as it moved through me. It didn't make him one scrap less dead.

"Nelson'll kill you for this," Griffin said into the concrete, half a laugh in it despite the arm.

"Not if he can't find me."

That got the laugh out of him proper—an ugly, wet, bubbling thing. "You reckon we don't have your patch already? We've had it for years." He turned his head enough to fix one red eye on me, and there was something in it I cared for even less than I'd cared for the blade. "We just don't fancy it. Nobody wants what you've got, Jennings. That's the one and only reason you've still got it."

It landed harder than he could have known. Because he wasn't wrong—the whole of my life's work was a place so poor and so cold that not even the men who take everything could rouse themselves to come and take it off me.

So I stopped his mouth. I took a fistful of his hair and put his forehead into the concrete, once, hard, and the talk and the fight and the ugliness all went out of him together, and he sagged slack and heavy under my hands.

For a moment I stopped there on top of him, down on the cold of the concrete, and only breathed. My cheek was singing where his skull had found it, my shin was screaming its own song, and every year I'd ever lived came and sat on my back at the one time. Too old for this. I'd been too old for this a good while now, and the world hadn't seen fit to notice.

Luke's portal still stood open against the fence, glowing quietly away to itself, patient as a set trap. I couldn't use it—a Guardian's no more welcome through another man's doorway than a stranger is through his bedroom window—and I'd not have trusted where it let out even if I could. So I got to my feet, drew my own Portal Key, and opened my own road home against the bricks at the side of the house. Colour bloomed across the surface, no two shades of it the same, purple sliding down into blue into green.

Then I got my hands up under Griffin's arms and I dragged. He was no small man and he was all dead weight now, and the concrete fought me the whole way, up over the little garden bed with its river rocks and its flax, my breath sawing in my ears and the dead boy in the tray at my back the entire time, watching me go with eyes that would never watch anything again.

We went through together, the pirate and I, and the quiet Berriedale morning—the truck, the swinging doors, the boy, the blood, and Luke's fool portal still hanging open behind the lot of it—folded shut behind us and was gone. I hadn't got what I'd climbed that hill for. I hadn't got Luke. But I had a thing Nelson Price would want back badly, and a man in my hands who knew a great deal I was going to need to know.