ALL NOVEL 64. You guys ready to get Legendary? (Anise)
“So we’re gonna run this as a two-step thing.” Thekla tunes up her bright red Alfons HH guitar. “First off, we warm up and jam with you for a bit. I’ll take rhythm so you grab the lead part. Then step two is we’ll give you some chords and run a song a couple times to see how you fit.”
Kell cranks the heater. “I hate drumming in sleeves,” she mutters. “Sooner we port down south, the better.”
The purr of the generator starts up from outside. Evan ducks into the tent. “Sorry that we only have the battery-op practice amp for you.” He pulls his gloves off. “We’ll turn down, make sure you have the volume you need. Any questions?”
“I don’t mean to offend,” Nicholas says. “But why is she here?”
“I’m the manager.” Anise sets her coffee aside to fold her arms. “That means I get a vote, too.”
“Not you, boss.”
“Oh.” She wilts a bit. “My bad, Nick.”
Nicholas points at Dalma. “I mean her.”
“I am going to take photographs of you.” Dalma taps her boxy camera. “In case we need to document your origins within the band. I am also planning to employ photographs of short-haired men in a site-specific installation. If you sign a release.”
“I don’t know if I want to sign a release.” Nicholas flicks his loaner electric’s selector switch.
“Cousin Dalma promises not to distract,” Thekla says. “Don’t you, Dalma?”
“What the amateur calls distraction the auteur may take as inspiration. But okay.”
Evan plucks a low E on his bass and turns the treble down on his amp. “You want to pick our progression, Nick, or go with the flow?”
“Let’s do E minor.” Nicholas stretches his wrist. “1-3-7-1.”
Thekla cuts through the chords quickly and nods her approval.
Kell’s got the big excited grin on that she always gets when she’s locked, loaded, and about to unleash. “A-one, two, three four…”
Anise has become such a fangirl of Legendary that it’s honestly embarrassing. Every time she sits in on a practice or a jam, she feels like she’s in a behind-the-scenes documentary.
Kell gives the newbie a couple bars of restraint before she cuts the thunder loose and enters one-woman wrecking crew mode, both kick drums churning. Evan’s been giving himself more space to show off ever since Legendary downsized. Between the pulsating riffs, he’s throwing out choppy, syncopated melodies and pentatonic runs. Thekla dials up the crunch now that she has a lead guitar to bring the clarity, revving her sound up like a chainsaw.
Anise hasn’t heard Nicholas Voraag with an electric guitar. She ought to be skeptical, to keep the gate, but she’s intrigued.
He shuts his eyes, knits his heavy brows. He looks troubled, in the midst of a disquieting dream, until his tongue pokes between his teeth and the corners of his mouth lift. His hand travels up the guitar’s neck like he’s caressing a lover. He reaches the 12th fret and lets loose.
Nick plays a jangling, manic line over the minor key groove, one that seems too cheerful until it swerves into the demented. He arpeggiates and trills, his guitar on the verge of feeding back, then comes careening down the scale like his melody is throwing itself down the stairs. He’s playing what should be mistakes, chromatic sour notes and arrythmic tangles, but then he repeats them and Anise suddenly sees the way they fit, like a jagged shard slotting perfectly into the broken fresco it came from.
As an audition piece, it’s ballsy as hell. Brazen, almost. Anise can’t help but be impressed.
What does she really know about Nick? He made a mistake. He’s young. That’s what young people do. She feels a pang of guilt for the distance she’s put between them. She ought to lighten up on the guy.
Thekla and Kell exchange a loaded look. The orc brings the song to its outro with a largo lean, then whistles loud as Nick divebombs to a halt. “Okay. That was sick. Nick the Sick.”
“I’m detecting some post-punk in there,” Evan says. “Very textural in places. Kinda gothy.”
“Yessir. Guilty.” Nick gives a self-effacing smile. “If it hadn’t all gotten vaporized on the trip over, you’d see all the black and the piercings.”
“Bro, that’s dedication,” Kell says. “It can’t be easy to be a goth when you’re pink.”
Thekla sidles over to where Anise is sitting. “It’s not exactly how we sounded with Sion.” She keeps it down while her partners talk to their petitioner. “But I’m impressed. What do we think?”
“He’s got talent, but I wanna know if he can tame it,” Anise says. “Maybe let’s hear him on Commodity Credit and put on a metronome. Test his restraint.”
Thekla purses her lips and nods. “Good thinking, Ani.” She turns back to where her husband is comparing bicep tattoos with the half orc. “All right, folks. Part two. Let’s see if Nick the Sick can do tricks on a click.”
* * *
Their next show is in Reiara, which Dee derisively refers to as “Slickerville.” Anise thought, before crossing over, that all Old World orcs were pack nomads, but it’s only about a third of them. The rest live as most Earthlings and fairfolk do, in towns and cities. They’re great big walled cities with rolling pastures and wide streets, but after the vast wilderness of the Packlands it’s a balm to see bustling crowds and tall buildings again.
Legendary’s playing a palatial dome of geometrical sandstone, called the Kronovor, which was originally built for chariot races. Anise has been assured many times that orcs dig Earth rock in general, and Legendary’s sound in particular, and she’s counting on that plus the novelty factor to draw a sizeable crowd.
The booker certainly seems to think so. Orphus is a broad orange orc with an enormous belly and a roaring laugh. “First time I heard the LP, I just about wore the tape out,” he told her this morning, after a bruising handshake. “Ended up buying me an Earth stereo with the whatchacallem, CD player stuck into it. I tell ya. It’s a seller’s market on Earth imports, but everyone’s talking fridges and microwaves and TVs. Me, I’m all in on CDs.”
Anise extracted her hand eventually. “That’s very, uh, ambitious of you.”
Every time, it’s the same thing. The pit of dread as the early birds file in, orcs in finely cut and colorful tapestry tabards or fur-lined tunics that ape the wildland packs. Back on Earth the old world styles are infiltrating fashion, faux-fur trims and decorative leather embosses spreading out from New Laytham’s ground zero to infect runways all over. Anise notes with satisfaction that it’s a two-way street. Earth’s influence here is growing; in the tusked ones it’s presenting as a particular affection for denim.
They’re making brisk sales in merch, too; they planned on selling through a mountain of L to XXL shirts and sweats as they plowed through the orc-majority spots, and they’re just about on track to get out the other side with their stock properly depleted. But you can’t sell merch without crowds, and as the minutes creep closer to showtime, Anise’s anxiety headache grows.
And then, of course, there’s the surge before showtime, and the Kronovor fills. By the time Legendary take their places behind the curtain, an ocean of people waits for them. Mostly orcs, but with a healthy smattering of other fairfolk represented, and even a clutch of humans.
That was a surprise, humanity’s spread on the Old World side of the Door. Back in the 1800s, when the first crossover occurred, and a million-odd fairfolk were dumped into an English field, a few hundred thousand English yokels made the opposite journey. When first contact was made, Earth’s army of battle-ready translators were shocked to find that they’d proliferated, and English was already a common language of the O-dub.
Anise would love a chance to have a conversation with one of these Old World-born humans. According to Dee, they’re thought of as quite pretty and exotic, which is a funny about-face from her own experience any time her job’s taken her out of New Laytham. The average Earth human outside of the fairfolk population centers thinks of them as a novelty or a danger. But sometimes it seems like half of the small-town human dudes she’s ever met have it on their bucket list to bag an elf.
She doesn’t get it. She’ll be the first to admit that back when she was young, she was a prize. Skinny and shiny and nubile as hell. But that was decades ago. Now she’s got nieces and nephews and this annoying skunk stripe, and crow’s feet and eyebags and laugh lines, and the calories that were so effortless to burn off in her youth have come home to roost in her butt. Last time she wore a short skirt, her daughter giggled and said the cougar enclosure was on the other side of the zoo. She used to wear mom jeans as a joke back in the 80s. Now she wears them because she’s a mom. Everyone’s so jealous of an elf’s longevity that they forget it means you spend most of your life middle-aged.
The background susurrus increases to a fever-pitched roar of applause as the curtain rises. “Reiara!” Thekla’s urgent voice resounds through the arena. “You guys ready to get Legendary?”
Anise pumps her fist and silently exults with the crowd. Next to her, Nick grins. “You’re a fan, huh, boss?” Legendary’s probationary lead guitarist is confined to this side of the stage for now while his trial assessment continues.
“I have to be,” she says. “I couldn’t do this job for someone I only kind of like.”
“So if I get in, you’re gonna be a fan of me, too?”
She chuckles despite herself. “Don’t push your luck, Voraag.”
He limbers up, stretches his knuckles out as Thekla introduces the first song. “Kind of weird playing for an audience I can’t see.”
“You really need someone to peacock for, I’m back here.” She sits on a storage trunk. “Just don’t look for panties to get thrown at you.”
“No problem.” Kell’s drums start their barrage. Nick adjusts his in-ears. “O-Dub orc panties probably have spikes and shit on them.”
Legendary starts strong, with their first single and biggest hit: Fossil Fuel, a real blitzkrieg and the exact kind of song that an orcish crowd would dig. Anise plays one-woman audience to Nicholas Voraag.