Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(89)
When the movers come, my supervisor Madame Quill is with them. The movers are supposed to relocate the bodies to where they were originally supposed to die, or as close as possible. I doubt this crew’s ever handled empties before. They’re all suited up head to foot so only their eyes show, but I can tell all of them are feeling green around the gills. At least they don’t have to move the one in the bathroom; she died right where she was supposed to.
While they’re mopping up the remains and trying not to yack, Madame gives the bedroom a thorough inspection. After palpating the windows, tapping the walls, and stomping around the floor, she strips the bed, shaking out every sheet and blanket. Then she guts the mattress with a nasty-looking switchblade. I didn’t know she had one but I’m not surprised either.
Madame is quite a character and not the lovable eccentric kind. You could mistake her for the kind of sweet little old lady who used to teach etiquette at an old-time finishing school but that could turn out to be your worst mistake if not your last. She’s got more in common with a trained assassin, sans the whimsy. Even when she doesn’t scare the shit out of me, she scares the shit out of me.
For a while, she surveys the mess she made. Then she turns to me and says, very gravely, “We should have been prepared. Birds are highly motivated little creatures. They don’t want to die. What’s more, they don’t want to die out. Of course, that’s a priority with all species, but it’s more muted in humans; they think in terms of self-preservation rather than species preservation.” She’s staring at me so pointedly that I wonder what she’s really looking at. But I do the safe thing and nod to show I’m paying attention. “Who would have imagined the bull-goose predator—no pun intended—would even consider an alliance with a class that includes species it eats?”
This time I don’t so much nod as dip my head and shrug a little, like, Yeah, people—who knows what they’ll do?
“Still, it does make sense,” she continues. “Humans and birds have much to offer each other. Humans have the intellect and longer life span, birds have the freedom of flight, the wider range of vision, and a sense for magnetic fields. I guess opposable thumbs aren’t everything.”
Madame grabs my shoulders and, holding me at arm’s length, gives me an intense once-over. Actually it’s a thrice-over, like she’s searching me with X-ray vision. Uncomfortable in excelsis deo—I don’t know whether to make eye contact or squeeze my eyes shut and try to pass out till it’s over. It could be two minutes or two lifetimes before she lets go. “You can do this,” she says.
“I can do what?” I say before I can think better of it.
“There are feral parrots all over London,” she says.
It’s not just the non sequitur that throws me; something’s happened to her face. It looks so weird. I’ve never seen it like that before—oh shit. She’s smiling.
I am so doomed.
On the train back to central London, I look at the instructions Madame put on the iPad. They’re embedded in an ebook called Twitching: The Observant Lifestyle, which I have to keep reading to find them. So far, I have learned 1) twitching is a kind of birdwatching where people concentrate more on just listing the birds they see rather than learning anything substantial about them, and 2) Madame threw me into the deep end. Well, I have only myself to blame.
Listen, if you ever start screwing around with necromancy and someone just happens to mention that it’s maybe not the best idea you ever had, take it seriously and stop. Most of what passes for any kind of sorcery in the material world is completely harmless, rituals meant to blow off a little steam and dissipate the urge to act out in a more self-destructive way. That’s most—not all. Every so often, some clueless civilian has the bad luck to hit on a live one and that never, ever, ever ends well. Trust me, I’m the voice of experience here.
Violating natural law in the material world is the Crime; do it and you’ll find yourself answering to an authority called the Continuous Realm of All Things. Claiming you didn’t know won’t cut it, and there’s no first offence thing or mitigating circumstances or pleading insanity because there’s no trial. You did it, you’re guilty, the end. And don’t bother asking why live magicks are just lying around in the open where mere mortals can trip over them. You’ll only get a long lecture about free will. I mean, a real lecture; you’re stuck to a hard seat in an auditorium with hundreds of other people, most of whom seem to be grad students in philosophy for two hours. The q-and-a at the end, which you also have to stay for, goes almost that long and you’re expected to take notes—lots of notes. If you don’t, you have to sit through the whole thing again. And you’ll still have to serve your sentence, which is for life, possibly longer, depending.
The Continuous Realm of All Things sentenced me to work as a census-taker of the recently deceased, both regular and cheaters, although lately I’ve had mostly cheaters. To the rest of the (natural) law-abiding world, I look like a meter-reader or a survey-taker or a door-to-door salesperson—if they even notice me, that is. The normal, un-enhanced, non-magical human gaze slides around me like oil in water and I blow past them like air. It’s impossible to draw attention to myself. If I try, everything just gets very quiet and far away, like I’m straitjacketed in a soundproof room, staring down the wrong end of of a telescope