Night and Silence

One

December 22nd, 2013

Night and silence - who is here?
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

You can say what you like about San Francisco, but one thing is eternally clear: it’s a city that could only have been built by human hands.

The fae, faced with a landscape made almost entirely of hills and dells, with very little flat, arable land between natural obstacles, would have shrugged their shoulders, waved their hands, and either turned the entire thing into a range of beautiful crystalline spires, accessible only by twisting spiral stairways, or flattened it into a perfect pastoral meadow, ready to be planted with whatever their homesteader’s hearts desired. In other words, extremes. The fae like to traffic in absolutes, not this mucky, glorious middle ground.

San Francisco is a city of hills and valleys, impossible slopes and ridiculous workarounds, with residential streets so narrow that trying to park becomes an eternal game of slow-motion chicken interspersed with wide tourist boulevards designed to present everything in the best possible light. It doesn’t help that so much of San Francisco burned down in 1906, allowing city planners to design half of the metro area according to a reasonable, sensible grid system, while the remaining slices of old San Francisco . . . weren’t. And still aren’t, and never will be, since the odds of the city burning down again are, thankfully, pretty slim.

This does make San Francisco a challenging place to do my job, since the terrain is frequently working against me. My name is October Daye. I’m a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills and, by extension, in service to the Kingdom in the Mists. Worse, I’m a named and recognized hero of the realm. All this is a fancy way of saying that when fae problems impinge on the mortal world, it’s on me to take care of them before they accidentally reveal the existence of Faerie to the mortal world. We’ve been in hiding for a long time. “A flying hedgehog slammed into my front window” is not how we want to be discovered.

Hence my evening. Quentin, Danny, and I had been running around a residential neighborhood for more than two hours, moving as quietly as we could in an effort not to wake the neighbors. They weren’t our neighbors, thankfully. If one of us did make too much noise and wake them up, we could make an excuse about a lost dog or something and run, secure in the knowledge that we’d never see them again.

Humans are good at sleeping through ordinary night noises. Blame it on centuries of diurnal living. They tend to write off things that go bump in the night as overenthusiastic raccoons rummaging in their trash. The noises we were apt to make weren’t quite as ordinary, and humans are substantially less inclined to ignore pointy-eared strangers running around outside their kitchen windows. Especially when those strangers are waving butterfly nets over their heads like a bunch of weirdoes.

To be fair, we are a bunch of weirdoes. It’s just that we were a bunch of weirdoes on a mission, and I didn’t want that mission to involve yet another run?in with the local police. I think they’re getting tired of my face. I know I’ve long since gotten tired of theirs. And, really, waking the neighbors was less of a concern than what would happen if we were still outside when the sun came up and burned away all our illusions. That would be when we declared ourselves officially screwed.