Spell Games

by T. A. Pratt

  “Nope.” Marla levered the pry bar into one of the slots around the metal disc covering the manhole. “The hazing ritual's not until tonight, after the kegger, and before the circle jerk. You should've read your program.” She muscled the cover out of the way and glanced around. They were on a backstreet, and nobody was currently loading or unloading at any of the businesses, so they had the place to themselves. “Lucky there's nobody around,” she said. “I can cast a spell and make any cops or nosy neighbors think we're from the sanitation department, but I'm always happier to avoid conflict.”

  “Right. That sounds like you.” B looked down the shaft, at a metal ladder and darkness beyond. “Me first?”

  “Of course. You're the apprentice, so you always go first into the unknown. If anyone's going to be eaten by a grue, it should be you.”

  “Tough job. But at least the hours are terrible.” He descended the ladder, Marla following close after him, until they both stood in the low-ceilinged space below. B glanced upward. “Shouldn't we have put out some orange cones or something? What if someone falls down?”

  Marla whistled, and the manhole rolled smartly back into place, covering them with darkness. “How's that?”

  “If you could just whistle it around with magic, why did you lever it up with a pry bar?”

  “I'm missing a lot of my regular workouts, what with dragging you around town. Why miss a chance at a little exercise?” Marla snapped her fingers and a ball of floating light appeared over their heads, illuminating a brick-lined tunnel.

  “I thought you disdained the whole fairy-lights thing.”

  Marla shrugged. “I could just give us night-eyes, so we could see in the dark, but Viscarro is a paranoid fuck. I don't want him to think I'm sneaking up on him with murder in mind.”

  “I thought he was your ally?”

  “He is.”

  “But he's afraid you'll try to kill him?”

  “Sure. He's been a sorcerer for a long time. Sorcerers kill one another, even when they're friends.”

  “Ah, so it's a generalized, healthy sort of paranoia.”

  Marla seesawed her hand in a so-so gesture. “No, to be fair, he's got specific reasons to worry about me. I've threatened to kill him before.”

  “Why's that? Is he dangerous?”

  “Of course. He's a sorcerer. As to why I've considered offing him…you'll see. I think you'll see. We'll see if you see.”

  “Okay. That's fine. Don't tell me. I'm good with the suspense.” Marla set off down the corridor, taking the light with her, and B followed. After a moment he heard a disheartening squishing noise under her boots, and then under his own sneakers. “If I'd known we were going spelunking for poop, I would have worn my nice shoes.”

  “It's okay, Hollywood. A little crap on your shoes will improve your street cred.”

  “This reminds me of a low-budget horror movie I did when I was first starting out as an actor. We filmed in some sewers without a permit. It was almost enough to make me want to give up movies for the stage, where I was told you never had to deliver lines while standing in feces.” He considered. “Unless it was some avant-garde experimental show.”

  “I wonder how much of the poop down here comes from Viscarro's other visitors shitting themselves with fear? This beautiful stretch of squish leads to a secret access tunnel to his underground lair.”

  “Cool! Why don't you have a secret underground lair?”

  “Like I need that kind of vitamin D deficiency. Come on, through here.” She pushed open a distinctly medieval-looking iron grate and led B down a brick hallway that was only a few inches wider than his shoulders—a bigger man, like Hamil, would have been unable to come this way. They arrived at a featureless steel door with a cracked white plastic intercom set into the wall beside it, and Marla reached toward the buzzer, then paused. “Oh, B, there's one more thing.”

  “What's that?”

  “On all these little visits I'm arranging for you… keep your eyes open. And keep your third eye open.” She tapped the center of her forehead. “I pretty much always assume everybody else in town is plotting against me—it's safer to expect the worst—and this is an unprecedented opportunity for me to gain some valuable intel.”

  “So…you want me to spy on the other sorcerers?”

  “Well. Passively. Don't go unlocking any locked doors. Just see if you get any psychic twinges. If any of these folks start popping up in your dreams. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so. Any particular reason? Do you suspect something?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. It's a gut thing, and I have to trust my gut. In the past six months, I've had one leading sorcerer try to erase me from existence, and another hire an assassin to kill me the old-fashioned way I'm supposed to protect the city from outside threats, but it seems like most of my biggest problems have been inside jobs. My entirely irrational and superstitious feeling is that shit like this comes in threes, which means I've got one more betrayal to look out for. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. You can convince me I'm wrong.”

  B mulled that over. Marla's instincts were probably not to be dismissed. “Do you have any particular people in mind for the role of betrayer of the week?”

  “Sure, there are guys I trust more or less than others. But I don't want to prejudice your observations. You're going to meet every sorcerer who matters in town over the next couple of weeks, and I look forward to hearing your judgments.”

  “Couldn't I just scare up an oracle and ask it… well… whatever?”

  “Nah, my concerns are too vague. You know how oracles are. If you don't have exactly the right question, they'll go all cryptic on you.”

  “True. But if I find something out, sense anything suspicious …”

  “Then we might know enough to ask the right questions. Now you get it.” She pushed the buzzer.

  “Yes?” a tinny voice replied.

  “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” Marla rolled her eyes. The door buzzed open.

  “What, is that like a spy code phrase?” B said.

  “Yep. Viscarro says it's one he used during the ’50s when he was involved with international espionage, but I looked it up, and it's from a spy novel. This guy is more full of crap than your sneakers. He knows his artifacts, though.”

  The door swung open with a click, and Marla led Rondeau into Viscarro's high-ceilinged lair, which seemed like a three-way collision of a bank vault, a library, and a museum of historical oddities. A bleary-eyed guy in office-drone-wear hurried forward to meet them. “The master will see you,” he said, and led them past dozens of people scurrying purposefully around, arms loaded with files and boxes, or else pushing shopping carts heaped with the contents of every rummage and white elephant sale held in the past decade.

  “These are Viscarro's apprentices,” Marla said.

  “All of them?”

  “Sure. You know how most mammals have only a small number of offspring, but nurture them very carefully to adulthood? Whereas spiders have a crapload of babies and don't pay any attention to whether their offspring live or die? My approach to having an apprentice is more mammalian. But Viscarro is definitely a spider.”

  Finally they were ushered into an office, which was messy and paper-filled and reminded B of the domain of a daily city paper's editor-in-chief, as seen in a ’40s screwball comedy. Viscarro himself, seated behind the desk, was not at all what B had expected. He wasn't surprised by the gold-rimmed monocle, or the beaklike nose, or the baldness, or the body, which was like something made of white leather stretched over a framework of coat hangers. B was surprised by the sudden and unmistakable knowledge that the subterranean sorcerer was dead.

  He sidled over to Marla's side, half hiding behind her, and said, “Nosferatu.” His head was full of black-and-white images, a bald pointy-eared creature with clawlike fingernails that seemed, in and of themselves, utterly psychotic. When Marla didn't reply right away, he tugged her sleeve. “Marla. Nosferatu.”
<
br />   “Technically, I am a lich.” Viscarro didn't look pissed-off or amused or anything else B could easily name. He looked like a corpse with indigestion. “Your apprentice is perceptive, Marla. It took you years to realize my true nature.”

  “Perceptive is what B does.” Marla gestured for B to sit in one of the chairs on the visitors’ side of the desk, and he did. He couldn't take his eyes off Viscarro, captivated by the novel vision of an animate corpse. Marla dropped into a chair and propped her feet on Viscarro's desk, her boots shoving aside the wired-together skeleton of some enormous rodent. To B she said, “Viscarro here voluntarily killed himself, then arranged to have his own ghost haunt his earthly remains. His life-force is hidden in some pretty jewel, and as long as that object is safe, he's immortal.” She shook her head. “He's an abomination and an unclean thing and all that, but he's our abomination, so I try not to let my personal feelings get in the way He's no vampire, B, and for the moment anyway we're allies. No leading a band of merry monster-hunters down here with torches and stuff, okay?”

  “So this is what I've always heard about politics and strange bedfellows,” B said.

  Viscarro turned to him. “Don't judge me. I was, for genetic reasons, unable to extend my life by the usual magical means—I would have been dead in the early years of this century had I not chosen this… venerable, if unorthodox, form of immortality I'm sad to see you share your master's prejudice. I've always found Marla's hatred for the undead unfair and unreasoning. She despises me because I am a spirit possessing a body through magical means. Yet her dearest friend, Rondeau, is himself a strange psychic entity, also possessing a body through supernatural means we do not fully understand. Why hate me and embrace him?”

  “Because you're dead,” Marla said. “Rondeau's heart pumps, his lungs inflate, his synapses snap and crackle. If the body he's wearing dies, his essential nature will jump ship and find a new, living host. Like every other sensible semisentient creature, he finds dead things abhorrent. But you, you're a ghost haunting a corpse, and that's just nasty”

  “A body is a body” Viscarro shrugged his bony shoulders. “Dead, alive, alive, dead. I fail to see the importance of the distinction.”

  “Yeah? So you'd just as soon fuck a living person as a dead one? What's the point of the distinction? Oh, right—one's normal, and one's called necrophilia.”

  Viscarro sighed. “Touché, I suppose. We shall, as always, agree to disagree. As to your point, sex has not held interest for me in some time.”

  “Thank the gods for small favors. This is a teachable moment here, B. Sometimes, as chief sorcerer, you have to work with people that, in normal circumstances, you'd set on fire. Viscarro has put his ass on the line—or anyway, his property, which is more important to Viscarro than his ass, frankly—to protect the city, and he's been down here longer than anybody, so I don't have a quarrel with him. But dead things have a tendency to find their hold on humanity slippery, and if I ever get the feeling he's become more monster than man, well… Pitchforks. Torches. The whole deal.”

  B nodded, not sure how to react to this. He knew sorcerers were a morally relativistic bunch, and Viscarro certainly seemed like a textbook definition of that-which-should-not-be, but who was B to judge? Maybe assuming Viscarro was one step away from a flesh-eating night-monster was pure prejudice, the magical equivalent of thinking women belonged in the kitchen or that all gay men liked show tunes. He'd try to judge the guy on his own merits, though Viscarro's whole nature screamed wrongness at B's psychic receivers. How was he supposed to give Marla useful intel when he couldn't even sort out his psychic twinges from his personal squick-triggers? He'd just have to try harder.

  Viscarro rose from his place behind the desk. He was shrunken, like a drying husk, barely any taller upright than he'd been seated. “Now that the usual threats of murder and theft are out of the way, Marla, perhaps we can get on with this? I'm a busy man, and I'd just as soon discharge my obligation now.”

  “Sure thing. B, go with Viscarro. He's going to take you to the antique roadshow, underground sorcerer style.”

  Rondeau sat in a neighborhood dive bar a few miles away from his neighborhood, a smoky joint occupied at the moment by tired-looking old men and three idle youths lounging around the cluster of pool tables at the back, looking for suckers. He drank a gin and tonic slowly, trying to maintain the cloak of gently buzzing numbness that isolated him from the sour feelings about Lorelei. Why did he keep drifting in and out of that woman's orbit? It never worked out, and he wasn't even sure he wanted it to work out, if “worked out” meant getting into a serious relationship. That way lurked madness. He'd only tried to be honest with her, but apparently, there was a time and a place for that, and he'd misjudged both.

  A guy slid onto the bar stool next to his, though there were empty ones all along the rail, and Rondeau wondered if he was about to get cruised. It was noon on a weekday, and this was a far cry from a gay bar, but stranger things had happened. Maybe if the guy was cute, Rondeau would cruise him, for the distraction of the sex or an offended fistfight, both of which usually went well with being drunk. He glanced over.

  The guy was Marla's brother, Jason. “Whoa,” Rondeau said. “Small world.”

  “Hey, you're Randy, right?” Jason slapped him com-panionably on the shoulder.

  “Rondeau, actually.”

  “What's that, French?”

  Rondeau shrugged, his brain churning sluggishly through the lower gears. Jason was here. Was that coincidence? Marla didn't believe in coincidence. She believed in the mindless clattering of a blindly mechanistic universe, or, alternately, in conspiracies. She always said he wasn't paranoid enough. “French, yeah. I saw it in a book when I was a kid and kind of liked the sound of it, thought it would be a good name. It's a kind of poem.”

  “A self-made man, and a self-named one. I like that. And don't get me started on poetry. My mom stuck me with ‘Jason Mason.’ She was the kind of trailer park poet who dreamed of writing for Hallmark someday. Marla got the alliteration, but me, I'm a walking talking couplet here.”

  “My sympathies.” Rondeau peered into his inexplicably empty glass.

  “So, out of all the bars in all the world, why walk into this one?” Jason asked. “Don't you have a nightclub full of booze you could be drinking for free?”

  “Had to run an errand for Marla, stayed to have a drink. No. Four drinks.”

  “That's a hell of a lunch. What kind of errand was it?”

  Rondeau made a throat-cutting gesture. “If I told you that, she'd take my head off.” In truth, he'd just been dropping off a bribe for the leader of the Honeyed Knots, a gang that did some occasional work for Marla, but Rondeau was feeling buzzed and overdramatic.

  “My sister's one tough lady, huh?”

  “I never met tougher, and I grew up around people who'd steal your shoes with the feet still inside if you gave 'em a hacksaw and half a chance.” Rondeau straightened, squinted at Jason, and poked him in the arm. “Why are you here? You following me?”

  “No. You're not my type.” Jason grinned. “I'm staying a couple of blocks away. This was the first bar I passed. Just trying to kill some time.” He lowered his voice. “And maybe make a few bucks. You want to help me run a little game on those would-be hustlers back by the pool tables?”

  “I'm not much of a player, even when I haven't had four drinks. Since I got here. Forty minutes ago.”

  “Nah, I don't mean shooting pool. First rule of dealing with a grifter, you never let them pick the game. But guys like that can't resist easy money, especially when they think it's a sure thing. Want to play along? If we get some dough, I'll kick some back to you for being a good sport.”

  Jason's proposal spoke to the native larceny in Rondeau's heart. “Why not?” A vestigial sense of self-preservation stirred in him. “I'm not putting up any of my own money, though. Marla said I shouldn't gamble with you.”

  “Now, that's just unkind. I bet if you think back, yo
u'll realize she probably said you shouldn't gamble against me. If you gamble with me, Ronnie, you can't lose. I'm going into the bathroom. Wait a couple minutes, then come in, and I'll tell you what to do.”

  “Got it?” Jason said.

  “I think so,” Rondeau said.

  “Good. Remember, don't try to convince them. You let them convince you, and only reluctantly. Okay. I'm on. Wait about five minutes, then come out. I should be gone by then, but if I'm still around, just keep yourself busy by the jukebox or something until I'm out the door.”

  After Jason left the bathroom, Rondeau leaned against the wall of the toilet stall, took a compact makeup case from his inner jacket pocket, and flipped open the lid. He wasn't much of a sorcerer, but his friend Langford—who was kind of a mad scientist type—had enchanted the little mirror with a short-range clairvoyance spell. He and Rondeau shared a love of spying on people. Rondeau muttered the words of activation, and the round mirror became a tiny viewscreen, albeit more like a window than a television in terms of resolution.

  Jason left the bathroom, walked toward the bar, then paused halfway, frowning and looking at his hands. He patted his jacket, reached into all his pockets, and muttered a bit. Cursing—but not loudly—he knelt and began looking underneath tables, crawling around on all fours like a man who'd lost a contact lens, finally moving toward the pool tables, where a couple of the twenty-somethings smoking and holding pool cues finally deigned to notice him. “Lose something?”

  “Ah, just—it's nothing.” Jason looked up at them, smiled weakly, and went back to his search.

  “Come on. Maybe we've seen it.”

  Jason paused and rose to his knees, looking oddly penitent. “It's just my wedding ring. It slipped off somewhere, I think, maybe it wasn't even here, I don't know…. It's been loose ever since I went on a low-carb diet last year, supposedly it's hard to resize because of all the diamonds—shit, my wife is going to kill me.”

  “Tough break, pal.” One of the guys lined up a shot and cracked his stick against the cue ball.