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Archive for ‘March, 2010’
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I threw myself back, slamming into the concrete wall set into the embankment. Another Redcap landed in front of me, the heavy metal pole he carried smashing into the earth, right where I’d been standing.
It’s raining men, I thought. I wanted to look at Bradley but didn’t dare. The Redcaps were between us.
And the one that faced me was swinging his iron staff again. I ducked, and the pole just barely missed me. He tried to stop it and pull back, but I fired before he could recover. The iron bullet slammed into his side and knocked him off his feet. He landed hard and didn’t move again.
Redcaps look like tiny little old men… little old men with muscles like stevedores. The eponymous hats are dyed in the blood of their victims, and they wear iron-shod shoes and carry iron staves. But they aren’t immune to iron. They wear it, carry it, as a sort of Fae machismo thing, to prove how tough are. They have no spurking fear of iron – no point waving the Badge at them – but it sure as hell can hurt them.
I looked around. Bradley was standing, thank Goddess, but the little bastard had clipped him on the way down. Bradley was bleeding from the side of his head and his left arm hung limp, as though he’d taken bad hit to the shoulder.
Bradley was backing away slowly, gun levelled at the Redcap in front of him. It was advancing, iron staff raised high to strike. I aimed my gun, but the three of us formed an almost straight line, and there was no way to take a shot without the risk of hitting Bradley.
And I didn’t want to shoot Bradley. The paperwork would be a bitch, for one, and… I cut the thought off when I saw it.
There was a third Redcap, and it was closing on him from his left with a vicious feral smirk and a pike made of iron.
“Bradley, eight o’clock,” I called.
I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me, or understood, and I still couldn’t risk a shot. Hand-to-hand it is, I thought, and ran towards them, but I was too spurking late.
“My kill,” cried the one in front of Bradley, and swung its pike.
“Nay, mine,” shrieked the other, and swung too.
Bradley twisted and dropped, and my heart and stomach lurched, but he was just in time. Like a dancer, like a spurking dancer, he slipped under the pikes as they met just over his head with a clattering clang. The Fae behind Bradley was knocked back and fell on his wizened ass.
Then Bradley was up again, he’d dropped his gun, and with his good hand he grabbed the pike of the Redcap in front of him, twisted and pulled.
And then it was Bradley who held a pike. He swung, and then there wasn’t a Redcap standing in front of him with empty hands. It was lying on the ground, and what was left of its head was the same color as its cap.
Bradley tried to hoist the iron staff again, but couldn’t. He used it to prop himself up instead. The last Redcap scrambled to his knees and reached for his pike, but reconsidered when it found itself looking down the barrel of my gun.
Bradley took long, slow, deep breaths and leaned on the pole.
└ Tags: All That Glitters
Yes, welcome to our site. I still have a few small changes to make (like the font colour in the sidebar) but things are mostly in place.
I would also like to direct your attention to the blog, where Stephen has been posting the prose stories of Mac and Martin, two other dectectives in the Borderland Guard. The two stories are independant of each other and take place in two different cities in the our world. I hope see those archives back up soon so you can enjoy Stephen’s writing as much as I do.
Let’s try this again, shall we?
A couple of weeks ago, just as we launched a big outreach campaign, our website was hacked. Patrick took the opportunity to re-design and overhaul the site — and did a heck of a job, I think — and now here we are, trying again. With any luck, we won’t get hacked this time.
So: Hello and welcome. Thanks for checking out Cold Iron Badge. If this is your first visit, you should know that the page you see above is #107 in an ongoing story. You can read from the beginning by clicking on the ‘Archive’ tab above, scrolling down to Page #001 and clicking on it.
If you’d like to know a little more about what this story is about before you read further, you can check out the ‘About’ tab. And here, just for new readers, is a little bit of a teaser:
This is a fairy tale.
But nobody lives happily ever after.
Cold Iron Badge is a police procedural… about cops whose beat includes Elfland. It’s about a world just like our own – except that the gates to Fairyland have opened, and the Sidhe have returned. It’s the story of the officers of the Borderland Guard, the men and women who patrol the border between our world and Faerie, and the price they pay when their lives intersect with a real fairy tale – with all the traditional blood, madness and wild magic…
└ Tags: About Cold Iron Badge
I glanced at the mouth of the pipe. We’d been standing right in front of it, and talking a lot, for longer than was a good idea. I moved out of the channel, onto the at least dry-ish land at the bottom of the embankment – and out of line-of-sight of someone, say, inside the pipe.
Because Bradley was right again, or half right; it wasn’t technically a sewer. I waved him over to join me.
“Okay,” I said, “But I’m warning you now. This is perfectly logical.”
“So it won’t make sense, right?”
I hid my smile by scratching my chin. He thought he was joking. No such luck.
“With the Border sealed,” I told him, “He’s going to need to go to ground. Do you remember what he said about being glad to have a roof over his head?”
“He said it beat sleeping under a bridge.”
“I’m guessing that part of his patter was true,” I said. “But almost every bridge is the city is either staked out heavily by the Guard, or already claimed by other Fae. No joy there.”
He did that almost-smile lip-twitch again. “Let me guess. There’s another but.”
“But,” I said, “And most people don’t know this, there used to be dozens of rivers and streams crossing what became Toronto. Some got diverted, some dried up as their sources got paved over. And some,” I went on, “Got buried. They’re still there, but flowing through underground pipes. They still wind up in the lake,” I pointed to the mouth of the pipe, “Same as the stormwater drains.”
I could almost see the penny drop behind his eyes. “So this isn’t just a drain,” he said, “It’s a river. And a road that crosses a river is a bridge. Which means that every part of the city that’s above the drain…”
“Counts as a bridge,” I finished.
“But that doesn’t make any…” he stopped himself. He reflected, redirected and resumed, “I get what you’re saying, but the whole theory lives or dies by a freaking technicality.”
“Forget it, Bradley,” I said, “It’s Fairyland.”
He looked at me, and cocked his head.
“It’s Fairyland?” I repeated, “Don’t you…? I mean they have their own rules, and they stick to them. Yeah, we’re talking about a loophole, but it’s one they’re smart enough to exploit. And you,” I added, “Have no appreciation of the classics.”
He held up his hand. Oh, spurk, I thought, and listened.
Yeah, I heard it too. But it wasn’t coming from the tunnel, as I feared. It was coming from the top of the embankment, from the concrete blocks around and above the pipe. Something, or someone… no, more than one… was moving around up there, making an odd, sort of scraping sound, like…
I lost the thought when Bradley held up a hand again. He pointed at me, then traced an upwards arc that pointed behind me then to the top of the embankment.
I go back, up and come at them from the side, I thought. Made sense. I nodded.
He pointed to himself, then straight up.
Since he probably wasn’t trying to explain that he was Superman, I surmised that he meant he was going to take the direct approach.
That struck me as a Very Bad Idea, but before I could say so, I heard the scraping sound again. It was the sort of sound that makes your teeth tingle. It sounded like metal, scraping on the concrete. As if someone was creeping around up there wearing metal shoes.
Metal shoes oh spurking hell.
I pulled my gun and my Badge just as the little man in the red hat jumped on Bradley’s head.
To Be Continued
└ Tags: All That Glitters
The latter being me, of course. I have the latest installment of ‘All That Glitters’ written and ready to post. Fat lot of good that does, since I don’t have the file with me.
Last night, I had one of those occasional completely-forgetting-what-day-it-is moments that I like to think happen to everyone but it’s probably just me. I was under the impression until this morning that the update needed to be posted tonight, to be up in time for tomorrow morning.
So the next chapter of my deathless prose waits patiently on a memory stick at home, sitting on the shelf where I keep things that I don’t want to forget to take with me, like my keys, my wallet and my memory stick.
Sorry, to everyone who was waiting to see what happened next — and I like to think there are at least a few of you. I’ll post Part 23 tonight.
There is one upside: All this means that the day I thought was going to be Thursday is actually Friday. And that’s a lovely thing to realize. Less lovely than when I means that I’ve blown a deadline, but at this point I’ll take what comfort I can.
└ Tags: All That Glitters
“Bradley? Bradley!” I called as I looked back and forth.
Nothing. I turned around, and peered into the depths of the outflow pipe. I couldn’t see anything, of course, and I couldn’t hear anything but the water flowing, the city and the lake. I hadn’t seen him go in there. But I hadn’t seen him do anything at all, and now he was nowhere.
Spurk, I thought. Surely not even Bradley would be so arrogant, so chip-on-his-shoulder thick, as to go in there alone, not knowing what he was going to find.
I thought about it again. Oh, spurk.
I slipped my badge into my left hand. Pulled my gun with my right.
And nearly jumped out of my skin as Bradley landed beside the mouth of the pipe.
He saw me standing there, weapon aimed at the darkness, and pulled his own gun. I shook my head.
“It’s okay,” I said, lowering my pistol, “There’s nothing. I just… Where the spurking hell did you go?”
He slid his Glock back into the holster. He looked at me for a moment, then at the pipe.
“You thought…?” he started to ask, and his lip twitched, just a bit, “No,” he said. He held up his left hand; he was holding a Maglite, “I had this idea that you were hinting that we were going in there. So I thought I should go back to the car and get this. Since you were busy on the phone anyway.”
I flushed. I would have loved to have been in a position to lecture the smug bastard about not being forthcoming with his plans.
“Sorry if you got bored while my partner gave me vital information about the perp,” I said, and filled him in on the details.
At the end of it, he looked puzzled, “So why would a tree elf be stuck in the fall?” he asked.
“We don’t know enough to be sure,” I said, “Maybe he’s a Year King who skipped out three-quarters of the way through his term.”
Bradley just looked blank.
“Or maybe,” I went on, “He’s connected to a tree, and it’s the fall where the tree is. Maybe he’s from somewhere in Fairyland where it’s always autumn. Maybe it’s a time-share and he only has the tree between summer and winter,”
Bradley snorted, and I shook my head, “No, for real,” I said, “It’s one possible reason. Of a huge mess of possible reason.”
“And none of them,” he said, “Make any freaking sense.”
“It’s Fairyland,” I told him, “The parts that make sense aren’t logical, and the parts that aren’t logical…”
He looked at me. “Is it always like this, for you guys?”
“Like what?”
“Guessing,” he said, “Improvising.” He gestured towards mouth of the pipe with his flashlight, “Walking blind into the dark,”
It was my turn to snort. “Pretty much,” I said.
We were both silent for a moment.
“I didn’t know,” I told him, “That Jackson was Fae. Until we were already in the room.”
His gaze was as cool as the breeze coming off the lake.
“I thought,” I went on, “That the real Jackson was the one in the apartment. I figured the one in the bank was the Fae, and he’d stolen Jackson’s identity.”
I suddenly understood how it must feel to be sitting across a table from Bradley, answering awkward questions.
“Then, I thought he was just a Puck. A little trickster. That’s who pulls the money-that-changes-back-to-something-else scam, not a spurking giant psychopathic tree spirit. I didn’t want to tip him off, so I kept him talking until I could make him touch cold iron. It broke the glamour – the disguise – and if I’d been right, it would have knocked him on his ass, too. But I was really, really wrong.”
Damn, I’d been wrong about something else, too: Bradley was good.
He looked at me for another long, silent moment. And he smiled.
“Hell, MacAvoy,” he said, “We all screw the pooch in this job once in a while. I like that a lot better than being your pet mushroom.”
I stared at him. He stepped forward, gave me a companionable clap on the shoulder, and turned to look into the mouth of the outflow pipe. “And on the subject of being kept in the dark, now maybe you can explain why we’re going into a sewer.”
To Be Continued
└ Tags: All That Glitters
Earlier this week Cold Iron Badge was hacked. In the aftermath of that, Stephen and I decided to take this as an opportunity to renovate the site and make a few changes. So we ripped up the carpet and knocked out a few walls and now we are rebuilding. The full archive will be re-uploaded in a day or two. After that, we will be rolling out our new look. In the mean time please put on your protective head- and footwear and enjoy the show.
