Kingfisher(9)
Her father’s voice, or the memory of it, drifted in and out of her dreams until she wove it into a rich night-language that almost made sense, that almost made her see what it was conjuring.
Then the moon set, and the wild chanting stopped.
3
Somewhere south of Cape Mistbegotten, a sign in one of the little towns along the coast highway caused the traveling Pierce Oliver to veer impulsively off the road.
ALL YOU CAN EAT FRIDAY NITE FISH FRY the sign said. His sudden, overwhelming hunger drove the car to a halt beneath it.
He got out. It took a moment to find the door, hidden within a makeshift tunnel beneath scaffolding that went up and up, higher than he would have expected from such ramshackle beginnings. Part of a turret, a cone of white, jutted incongruously from behind a plywood wall covering the face of the building. There were no windows in sight. The sign was scrawled in chalk on a large board hooked to the scaffolding. It clattered and swung in the gusty wind blowing in from the west, or from the south, or from anywhere, according to the tipsy weather vane on top of the turret, which squealed crankily as it spun.
Odors wafted through the door as Pierce pulled it open. He smelled citrus, garlic, onions, and felt his empty stomach flop like a fish out of water. The vast cavern beyond the door was shadowy; he stood blinking, aware of a bar at his right, stretching off into the dimness, ghostly glasses floating upside down above it, a body or two on the stools, the dull gleam of amber and silver and gold from the bottles lined behind it. Other things were scattered among them: weird paintings, masks, street signs, totems that had drifted into the place through the years and clung. A mobile of porcelain Fools’ heads hanging from the gloom above the bar swung slowly, glint-eyed and grinning, as though his entrance and the wind that pushed in behind him had disturbed them.
“Hello?” he called. He couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. That morning? The evening before? Time blurred in his head like the light and shadow blurred in this twilight place where, in the depths of the cavern, near the ceiling, a star blazed suddenly with light.
“Up here,” a voice said briskly from above. “What can I do you for?”
“I saw your All-You-Can-Eat sign?”
“Ah. Dinner will be along anytime now as soon as my brother gets the crab traps in. Crab cakes tonight—your lucky night. You can wait in the restaurant through that door, or in here.”
Pierce’s eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, threaded here and there by golden, dusty tendrils of light of no perceptible origin. The size of the place shifted by greater lengths and depths. He blinked again. A ladder stood in a muddle of tables, chairs, stools, worn couches, odd, mismatched pieces of furniture. Above the ladder, an immense crystal chandelier depended: a lovely ice flower with a hundred petals. That, he realized, explained the star. The speaker stood near the top of the ladder with a cloth in his hand, polishing the prisms.
A voice from one of the barstools near Pierce rumbled, “Join me?”
Pierce felt eyes, glanced around to meet them. “Thanks.”
The man had long, shaggy, dark hair, a wolf’s pale eyes, beads in one ear and braided into his forelocks. For a second Pierce, light-headed with travel, saw the full face of the wolf, taking him in through its long, lean muzzle as well while it regarded him without discernible human expression. Then the man was back, beginning to smile, gesturing with one broad, capable hand at the barstool next to him.
Pierce sat. The stranger pushed a bowl of assorted pretzels, chips, and nuts over to him. “Tye’ll be down in a moment to take your order. Passing through?”
Pierce, his mouth full, nodded and swallowed. “From the north coast. Cape Mistbegotten.”
The man sipped beer, musing. “Isn’t that where the sorceress lives?”
Pierce’s fingers drummed on the mahogany; he wished suddenly, urgently, for a beer. “She retired. She’s running a restaurant now.” He felt the wolf’s eyes, alert, waiting. He added reluctantly, “She’s my mother.”
“No shit.”
He shook his head. “Nope. She spends her time trying to grow weird heirloom vegetables for the only decent restaurant on the cape.”
He heard rhythmic descending steps. “Which would make you Heloise Oliver’s son Pierce,” the bartender said, reaching the floor. “I’ll be a cockeyed halibut. Have one on the house.”
“How—” Pierce began, then stopped, not wanting to know. She was his past, what he had left, like the perpetual mists and the big, silent house up the twisty coastal road. How could she have found her way into this bar with him?
“What’ll you have?”
He consulted the chalkboard dangling, by no visible means, above the draft handles. “I’ll try a Goat’s Breath Dark.”
“Excellent choice. You look like her. That red hair. Those eyes.”
Pierce nodded briefly, wondering how they knew her. He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to know; he was on his way south, and he would keep going until the voice of the ocean changed from a roar to the siren song of Severluna. The bartender, a tall, burly man with lank hair the color of duck fluff and a pair of square, dark-rimmed glasses on his nose, set a beer in front of Pierce. He drank deeply, came up for air, and found the mild eyes behind the glasses studying him.
“I’m Tye Fisher,” he said. “My brother Hal owns this place. He and your mother are related in a roundabout fashion; they know each other in the way that big families do. You need a place to stay, we can open one of the rooms for you.” Pierce felt his expression change, lock into place. Tye added quickly, “Stay the night, I mean. The old hotel hasn’t been officially open for decades.”