Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(37)
Unfortunately, I found something unusual in the very first place I visited, which was so packed that I had to step inside to do a thorough job: Across the room, a faery wearing the glamour of a surly, dusty miner glowered at the other patrons, doing the same thing as I was: Searching for someone. Searching for me.
The face underneath the glamour was a familiar one. He was one of Aenghus óg’s boys, and, remarkably, he had a gun and wore gloves so that he could handle the iron. I exited with alacrity and prayed to the Morrigan that he hadn’t seen me. Then I prayed there weren’t any more faeries in town, or, if there were, they’d take care of the demon for me and I could simply leave.
In the meantime, I needed to hide and not do anything to draw attention. I retreated to my room with The Pickwick Papers, after first retrieving Fragarach from the hotel safe, and told myself it was a perfectly logical course of action to lay low for a small while. This demon was clearly a threat to humans but not, at the moment, a threat to Gaia, and I could afford to wait out the Fae and let them believe I wasn’t in San Francisco. Give them a day or two or five and they’d move on.
The demon didn’t move on, however. Sheriff Hays banged on my door in the middle of the night to report a new massacre in another saloon, which followed the same pattern: An incredibly lucky gambler drew plenty of attention until, suddenly, violence erupted and people died. That was food for thought, but I doubted I’d learn anything more by visiting in person, and I didn’t want to leave my room yet.
“I can’t help unless you know precisely where the demon is this instant, Sheriff,” I told him, which earned me a clenched jaw and a glare.
Once he left, I thought about the similarity of the incidents. The greater demons found it amusing to hunt via the seven deadly sins, and this demon appeared to have a pattern: He began by appealing to greed. The anger and violence necessary to harvest the souls was a necessary end but not the means by which he led them into temptation.
I remember sitting in my room on a rather uncomfortable chair at that point and saying out loud, “Oh, shit,” and putting Dickens aside. “What if it’s Mammon? What if Pastore was crazy enough to summon the biblical manifestation of greed?”
And once I framed my thinking that way, I knew what I had to do. Get out of town for a few days to throw off the Fae, sure, but I also needed to beat Mammon at his own game. I inquired at the front desk where I might be able to purchase a horse, and by dawn I was negotiating the sale of a recently captured mustang named Sally, about a hundred years before the song or the sports car came along. After breakfast I was outfitted and galloping south to round the San Francisco Bay. Once I got there on Sally’s own power, I dismounted, took off my shoe, and had a brief conversation with Sequoia, letting her know what I was up to and asking her to give Sally energy. With the elemental’s agreement and help, I remounted Sally and we headed west faster than Gandalf on Shadowfax, completely hidden from the awareness of Aenghus óg and the Fae.
<Wait, Atticus, wait. I’m trying to picture this. You were wearing some kind of special hat as you rode Mustang Sally, right? Please tell me it was pointy.>
“It was a bowler hat, Oberon, which has a rounded top. Not a pointy wizard hat.”
<Yet again you fail your audience! The embellishment was there, waiting to be plucked like a Thanksgiving turkey, and you passed it by. And I haven’t heard about any vintage poodles either! One star.>
? ? ?
Leaving a demon behind me didn’t come without a good measure of guilt. In all likelihood I was dooming who knew how many men to die as a result of their own greed. But if I stayed in town, I may well have spent the days I’d be traveling trying to catch up to the demon anyway and they still would have died. And if the demon truly started to drain Gaia, Sequoia would tell me and I could shift back. In the meantime, it was important for me to ditch the Fae and fetch some demon bait.
We rode for a couple of days until we got to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Calaveras County, a good while before Mark Twain wrote about its celebrated jumping frog. By that time, Sequoia had communicated to the Sierra elemental what I needed, and it was waiting for me in a crevice of a granite cliff face that expanded into a small cave. It was an impressive pile of pure gold nuggets, the sort that dust-covered miners dreamed about, coaxed from the volcanic geology and collected for me in a shallow basin, ready to be stowed in my saddlebags. Just a small fraction of what would eventually be pulled out of those mountains, but it represented a fortune and the key to solving the problem of Mammon.
There was a mountain snake guarding the hoard like a miniature dragon, though he wasn’t particularly motivated. He gave me a desultory flick of his tongue but otherwise ignored me.
“Hold on,” Granuaile said. “You had Colorado move all that gold here so that Coyote could use it. Why didn’t you do the same thing back then?”
“Well, Coyote wasn’t there to force me to do it, I guess. And I had to get out of town anyway. Plus, this was my first experience of any kind with mining. I’d never bothered with it before, preferring to let the earth keep her treasures.”
I got back to San Francisco near the close of business on the third of May, confident that the Fae would have given up and moved elsewhere by then. South of town, I dismounted from Mustang Sally and removed my right shoe so that I could draw upon the earth’s energy. I took the tiniest sip, just enough to unbind a gold nugget into gold dust and then re-bind it to my coat and hat and even my pants, with a few flecks on my face and in my mustache for good measure. I was no longer a drab English nobleman: I was a shiny rich young man, quite literally covered in wealth.