Category — Walker in the Gyre

By Max Gladstone

All Rights Reserved

Phase I

Their prison was too brightly lit for comfort. In other respects, though, it was well appointed, with a coffee maker, a large bed and a leather couch, a full-length mirror, bad wallpaper, and a television that only turned to dead channels.

When they realized they couldn’t escape, the two of them settled down to wait. Walker made some coffee, and Adrienne lay back on the couch.

“So tell me a story, old man,” she said, when the silence had extended for too long.

Walker poured her a cup of coffee and put the pot back on the burner. “I’m thirty-five. That’s not old.”

Light glinted off the spikes on her black leather bracelet as she accepted the cup and raised it to her smiling lips.

“What kind of story do you want to hear?” he said.

“A true story, about what’s going on outside.”

“I don’t think it works that way. I’m a writer, not a prophet. And I don’t even write very good books.”

She looked over at him. Her blue eyes were lined in black, and stray strands of white hair fell across her face. “I don’t see any prophets here. If all I’ve got is an old writer who makes bad coffee, then that’s all I’ve got.”

He harrumphed into his beard. “All right then, little girl. I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”

“Just because I’m patronizing doesn’t mean you get to be.”

He sat down in a chair next to the couch and tried not to look at her. “This story isn’t any less true than any other. It happened not too long ago, and it happened everywhere at once. Gods are as large as our dreams, and as small as our jealousies. It’s important to remember that.”

“Just tell the story already.”

“Stop being a brat, and listen.”

#

It wasn’t Heaven, Olympos or Elysium, or the root of the World-Ash Tree.

Of course, it wasn’t a pleasantly breezy and blue summer mid-afternoon on a hilltop in middle Tennessee, either, but it was something like that, at least as far as the two individuals drinking tea were concerned.

The man – or so we’ll call him, for he looked and operated very much like a man – was a little over six feet tall, most of his frame shrouded in a beige trench coat. He had short, bristly black hair and a little trace of stubble. Beneath the trench coat he was dressed formally, as if for a business meeting, which this was, in a sense.

The man’s name was Matthew, as far as any human ear could hear it or human tongue could pronounce it.

He sipped his tea.

“Good afternoon, Grandmother Spider,” Matthew said.

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“I need to ask you a question, Mallory.”

I’ll give you what answers I can, she said. I don’t know if you’ll like them. And we can’t talk here.

Umber looked left, looked right. “We’re being watched.”

Always.

“So, where do you want to go?”

Follow me.

She stood with a creaking of joints, and walked, with the slow step of one in pain, to a door at the rear of the room, a door that had not been there before. As she stood, the noise of the bar stopped – beer froze in midair as it drained into the patrons’ mouths, feet stuck in the act of being put down. Nothing moved. They were between moments now.

She opened the door with a brush of her steel hand. Beyond, there was only darkness. She stepped through it, and he followed her. The door did not close behind them, but once Umber passed through it, it was no longer there.

Nothing stretched around on all sides, formless and void.

Something glowed. “There’s light now,” he said.

“Maybe its just your eyes getting used to the dark,” she said from behind him, though she had passed through the door first.

“I don’t have eyes.” He paused. “And you don’t have a voice.”

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