Read Online Welcome to Bordertown by Ellen Kushner, Holly Black (editors) - Free Book Online Page A

after I walk in, without first coming over to ask me what I’ll have. She scowls as she does it, but I give myself two points all the same. I’m a regular now.
    It’s quiet at this hour. I like to come well before the first act of the evening begins, sitting in the corner writing postcards home while Rosco snoozes at my feet. The band for tonight, Monkeyshines or something like that, has already set up their gear, their spellboxes, and their special effects. They’re running an illusion spell that’s meant to turn these dark, dusty, shabby rooms into some kind of enchanted sylvan glade, complete with trees rustling in the wind and birds twittering in the foliage overhead. And, yes, it’s weird to use words like “illusion spell” and “sylvan glade” out loud. The uncles would laugh me right out of the house if I came home and actually talked like that, but here that’s how everyone speaks and what they are called. Like I said, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
    So I’m sitting writing my uncle Harry on the back of a hand-drawn postcard of Elfhaeme Gate when one of those damn birds tweeting overhead keels over and plops into my drink. I fish it out. It appears to be made of a strange elfin metal, light and pliable, with some kind of a motor inside that is whirring and groaning and ticking faintly.
    “Oh, crap,” says the Queen of Elfland, swooping by and plucking the creature from my hands. “They’ve been falling from the ceiling all damn day.” She glares at me like it’s personally my fault as she moves to put the bird into her pocket.
    “Wait a minute, can I see that?” I ask. “I’m curious about how they work.”
    The waitress snorts (and even her snorts are haughty) as she tosses the bird onto the table. “They
don’t
work. They just fall down dead.” She whacks it once more for emphasis. “This, sir, is an
ex
-parrot.”
    For a moment I’m so startled by the Monty Python reference that I just sit there like the village idiot as she shrugs and stalks(regally) away. Then I’m turning the bird over in my hands, eager to determine what makes it, well, tick. A latch is concealed in the creature’s belly, which opens to expose a mechanism that is almost clocklike in design—but not like any clock I’ve ever seen. A wickedly clever arrangement of gears and levers is run by an ordinary little motor, attached to a kind of battery. On second look, the “battery” is a lump of wadded-up paper in battery shape. There are words on the paper in a tiny, tiny hand—some kind of spell, perhaps. Or poetry. Or both.
    So what, I wonder, has gone wrong here, causing the mesh of magic and mechanics to fail? It could be a faulty spell, or the famous unreliability of Border magic—but my fingers tell me the fault is in the mundane workings of levers and gears and wires. My fingers are never wrong about these things. If it’s possible for human beings to have magic, then my magic is in my hands. Like I said, I can fix almost anything. Even weird little birds with mechanical hearts, drenched in elfin spells and peri.
    I have my tool bag with me (of course), and I pull out my smallest screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, an oil rag, and I make a series of small adjustments, testing, listening, trusting in my fingers. Then I’ve got it. I’ve
got it.
I know what’s wrong, and I fix it with some copper wire, two tiny screws, a piece of gaffer tape, and spit. The sound of the little motor grows steady; the bird flaps its wings, moves its beak, and starts to tweet. I fish out another postcard and write a quick note detailing the repair; then I hand it to the Queen of Elfland as I pay my check. “Tell them it’s an easy fix.”
    She
almost
smiles. “Aren’t you staying for the show?”
    I shake my head. I never stay. I go outside to my usual spot, where Rosco and I can sit in the shadows and observe the crowd that is gathering. It’s the kind of crowd I imagine that Trish might like: heavy on the Faerie velvet