by T. A. Pratt
So he tried to feel with senses for which he possessed no names, and sensed something down an alley filled with garbage cans and quiet skitterings. Marla followed him silently as he went a little way down the alley, stopping in front of a particular dented trash can, its round metal lid askew. “Hey.” B prodded the trash can with his foot. “I've got some questions.”
The lid stirred, then fell off, and a welter of brown rats came scurrying out. B didn't flinch—the rats were real, ordinary vermin, not what he was looking for. The trash in the can groaned and shifted, garbage welling up into first a vague heap and then a quasi-human shape, a head of melon rind and sodden coffee filters, the blossom end of tomatoes for eyes, mouth of shucked oyster shells, a beard of rotting banana peel.
“Crazy,” Marla said. “Like Oscar the Grouch, if he was actually made of garbage.”
“I am Shakpana, bringer of pox, healer of the sick, maker of madness.” The voice was slithery and squishy and foul. The garbage thing shifted, raising arms of chicken bones with spaghetti-noodle tendons and gripping the edge of the trash can with fingers made from Popsicle sticks. “Who awakens me in this form?”
“My name is Bradley Bowman. I have a question.”
“Ask, and hear an answer, if you can pay the cost.”
“Does Jason Mason mean this woman harm?”
“Ah.” The thing tapped its fingers against the side of the can, making a clattering noise. It looked toward Marla. “Ah. He is your brother. Brothers and sisters should not fight.”
“I don't want to fight him,” Marla said. “I want to know if he means to fight me.”
“I can answer this. But the cost is disposition of these earthly remains. You must swear to make a compost of this body later, and return to the soil whatever the worms and beetles might wish to eat.”
“Agreed.”
“Then know this. Jason—” Shakpana stopped talking, and gagged with the sound of bursting gases. The garbage shifted and sank and became ordinary refuse again, and then the metal can started to shudder on the pavement, vibrating and humming with noises that soon transformed into words, the same words—in the same voice—they'd heard on the car radio: “Darkness, oblivion, the emptiness beyond emptiness, the ceasing of being, the all-swallowing space beyond space—” B covered his ears and crouched, hunching in on himself, and then began keening. The thing speaking to him now filled up his whole head, he heard it in his ears and his mind all at once, and a pulsing welter of darkness pushed itself against his vision.
Marla shouted and kicked over the garbage can, which seemed to break the connection with whatever they'd encountered. B uncovered his ears and struggled to his feet, swaying a little.
“Was that about my brother?” Marla came to B and put her arm around his shoulder, propping him up. “Or something else?”
“I—Shakpana never had a chance to answer my question about Jason. That other voice just forced itself in, overrode everything. I don't know what it means.” He was shaky, sick to his stomach, his thoughts sluggish and scattered. He felt on the verge of blacking out. Something horrible was trying to make itself known, pushing itself through him to get out. Marla came over and put an arm around him, helping hold him up.
“Mystical shit.” Marla sighed. “Let's get you home. I'll explore some other avenues of inquiry If that warning isn't about Jason, I'd like to find out what it is about.”
B went with her, quiet and afraid. Not so much afraid of whatever danger the insistent voice warned about—with Marla at his side, he was fairly confident of their tactical superiority—but afraid of his own powers, and their failure. If he couldn't summon an oracle to answer his questions, and if his only dreams lately were dreams of sinking into pillowy darkness, what good was he to Marla? An oracle generator who produced faulty oracles? A prophetic dreamer who prophesied only the coming of night? What kind of successor could he be for her? He wanted to ask, but he didn't, afraid she would answer with her customary truthful bluntness. He didn't think he could bear that, not with his head pounding so hard.
“It'll be okay, B,” Marla said. She paused. “For some given value of ‘okay’”
The messenger came down from his trip to find himself strung upside down in the high branches of a tree, with mushrooms growing on the back of his neck. “This is fucked up, right here.” He swayed a little as he struggled against the ropes of moss holding him.
The thing—no, the sorcerer, Bulliard—chuckled in his ear, out of sight, but not out of smell. “The Mycelium says you can be useful to us. You feel the mushrooms there, at the base of your skull? Their roots are in your brain. You can be rewarded with euphoria.
You can be punished with terrible visions. You can be ridden like a horse. You understand?”
“I had a vision,” the messenger said. “I flew up in the sky, and looked down, and the trees all melted away, and the dirt, and I saw this giant thing living under the ground, this… this… it had a face.”
“The Mycelium chose to let you look upon it. You should be honored. You are being allowed to serve.”
“That thing was real? It wasn't just a bad trip?”
A hard shove, and the messenger's face slammed into the tree trunk, banging his nose hard enough to make him see explosions of darkness.
“Do not blaspheme again, or I will hurt you. You can still serve without all your limbs. The Mycelium is real. It is the white rot, the father of foxfire, the mother of will-o’-the-wisps. It has destroyed this forest a dozen times over in the past, and it can destroy you. You will tell us where to find the spores.”
Gasping through his pain, the messenger said, “Man, I don't know. I just get told to go places, and I go. The message I gave you was the whole thing.”
Another shove, gentler this time, enough to send him swaying, which was terrifying enough, this high up. Fuck. Why'd he ever answered that ad in college? Becoming a “courier” for magicians had been a good way to get weed money, but eventually it had turned into a career, and now, apparently, it was rapidly mutating into a death sentence.
“Do not lie to us.”
“Who the hell is ‘us’?”
“The Mycelium,” Bulliard said reasonably. “The Mycelium is listening.”
The certainty in his voice chilled the messenger. The guy was clearly crazy, but was a sentient mushroom god that lived underground really that much weirder than the other shit he'd seen in his time? “I'm not lying.”
“Then tell us who gave you the message, and I will go and ask them.”
The messenger grunted. “I wish I could, but I can't.”
Another shove, and a sickening pendulum swing that made the messenger's guts lurch. “This is not a negotiation.” Bulliard reached out a hand and stopped the swinging. “You will tell.”
“I didn't say I wouldn't, I said I can't. I'm a courier for sorcerers, dude, and that requires strict confidentiality I'm under a geas, is what I'm telling you. I can't reveal my employer, not when they ask for secrecy, and this one did!”
“There are ways to read your mind. They are not pleasant.”
“You're one of them, you know how sorcerers are—there are safeguards. My brain would just melt and run out my fucking ears if you tried to go rifling through it.”
“Hmm.” Bulliard didn't sound pissed, at least, just contemplative. “But the spores are in Felport?”
“That's what the message said, but it's not like I know shit about it. I don't even know what the spores are.”
“They are many things. They are what you make them. They are a path to the total obedience of all mankind to the will of the Mycelium. We would like to have them.”
“Great. Then I suggest you head to Felport and start knocking on doors.”
“I will. I will do just that.” Bulliard patted him on the back. “But I do not drive. You will drive me.”
“That'll take days.”
“Not at all. The Mycelium says perhaps two days. Less. You will not sleep, and you will drive very
fast.”
“And what do I get paid for this?”
“Serving the Mycelium is its own reward,” Bulliard said, almost amiably
ier 14,” Marla said. “Smell that sea air!” She wore a black cloak with silver trim, and it flapped around her dramatically as she stood near the end of the concrete tongue protruding into the water. “Hardly even a whiff of sewage.”
B had only his old camouflage army coat as a defense against the wind whipping in off the water, and probably didn't cut nearly as striking a figure as Marla did. Maybe I should invest in a cape or something. Marla says style counts. “So you're taking me fishing now? As part of our master-apprentice bonding?”
Marla snorted. “I wouldn't fish this close to the docks, any more than I'd go swimming in the Balsamo River. We've got the pollution pretty well under control, thanks to Ernesto's cleanup efforts, but you can't completely sanitize a port this heavily trafficked. Give these fish a tox screen and you'd never want to touch seafood again.”
The sun was just rising in the bay, making the shapes of cranes on the other piers stand out starkly against in the sky There was plenty of bustle up and down the docks, but Pier 14 was oddly deserted. “Why no ships here?”
“This pier is reserved for special business, B. What if Naglfr should come steaming into port? If a ship of dead men's nails rides into town, you'd better have a berth for it.”
B couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. “Are we taking a boat trip, then?”
“Not exactly We're meeting someone. And here she is now. Come take a look.” B joined her at the end of the pier, and the water rippled and bubbled and rolled. A woman shot out of the water, rising into the air in a burst of spray like the birth of Venus on fast-forward, and landed nimbly on the pier beside them. She straightened and shook out her long blond hair, splattering B and Marla with droplets. The woman was gorgeous, in a surfer-girl way, dressed in a dark blue wetsuit. “Marla. New person. Hello.”
“Bradley Bowman, allow me to introduce you to the Bay Witch, mistress of the watery realm and the islands therein and etc. Zufi, this is my new apprentice, B.”
“Yes,” the Bay Witch said. There was something profoundly weird about her, something that B couldn't pin down. She didn't quite look at either of them, and her vocal inflections were odd. “I will teach him a trick. A good trick. And then no pearls for you this month.”
“That's the deal,” Marla said.
“Okay.” The Bay Witch stepped up to B, gripped both his forearms, and kissed him. Startled, he tried to pull away, but she was incredibly strong, and her insistent tongue forced his mouth open. Her breath was salt, and storm, and perhaps a hint of fish, but more fresh salmon sashimi than stinking mackerel. After a moment, the Bay Witch stepped away. “There. Done.”
“What's done?” Marla said, frowning. “Besides the molestation of my apprentice?”
“The gift of endless breath. He can swim underwater forever now, with no need to breathe.” She paused. “Also: he cannot suffocate.”
“Ah. Forever?” B said.
The Bay Witch nodded. “That's what makes it a good trick.”
Marla laughed. “Well, hell, that is handy—even I can't do that—but I'd figured on leaving B with you all day to learn things. Guess I'll have to find something else for him to do.”
The Bay Witch cocked her head and, for the first time, looked at B directly. “He is very attractive. Would he like to copulate for recreational purposes?” She unzipped the front of her wetsuit, revealing the side swells of her breasts, which B could appreciate only on a purely aesthetic level.
Marla seemed to be stifling a guffaw. “That's up to him, Zuf.”
“Ah, thanks, but I'm gay,” B said, a lot more apologetically than he usually did. “That was actually the first time since high school that I've had a girl's tongue in my mouth.”
“Oh. Sad.”
B was gay, but he was still a guy, so he put in a word for a friend: “I bet Rondeau would be happy to come down here for, um, recreation, though.”
The Bay Witch shook her head. “He cannot breathe underwater. He would drown. Marla would be angry.” With that, she dove cleanly back into the bay
“Ha!” Marla said. “Even Zufi can't resist you, pretty boy”
“That woman is deeply strange.”
“What do you expect? She spends all her time with fish. She forgets how to talk to people sometimes. We're lucky we got full sentences out of her today. Then again, on some days, if she's had human company recently, she could pass for an ordinary weirdo. She's got absolutely no guile at all, though, no matter what. It's a good thing her only political rivals are lobsters.”
B nodded. “I definitely didn't get any sense of hostility or incipient betrayal off her.” He pinched his nose closed with his thumb and forefinger and held his breath, but just for a few seconds. It was too bizarre. “So I'm amphibious now?”
“That's what the lady said, and she doesn't tend to lie. Why don't you jump in the bay and try it out?”
“Leap into the sea and try not to breathe? Hmm. I think I'll hold off and try it in Rondeau's bathtub tonight instead.”
“Huh.” Marla's face took on a speculative expression. “You know, I've only just now realized the sexual possibilities open to a guy who doesn't need to breathe—”
“Stop, please.” B held up his hands. “Way ahead of you, don't need to go there.”
“On the other hand, I hope you aren't into erotic asphyxiation, because I bet you can't do that anymore.”
B covered his eyes. “Please, I beg you, stop.”
“Heh. So modest. Okay, Captain Breathless, you'll have to come with me on my errands today.”
“What's on the agenda? Any exposure to hard vacuum? Because I'm totally ready for that.”
“Maybe if we have time in the afternoon we'll shoot you into space. I gotta visit the Chamberlain and talk about some hideous golf courses she wants to build. I want to put low-income housing there instead. We'll argue, and she'll insult my wardrobe. It should be a hoot. Then I was thinking I might pester my brother.”
B thought of their failed attempts to consult an oracle the night before, and suppressed a shudder. Marla hadn't found any explanations for the oblivion voice in her studies the night before, but she said she had other possibilities to run down, and that he shouldn't worry yet—noise and random static and crossed connections were occupational hazards for psychics. “It'll be good to meet him.”
“Maybe not good exactly. But it should at least be interesting.”
Jason picked up Rondeau in a black Mercedes that was so comfortable and climate-controlled it was like a rolling living room. “Two stops today, Ronnie,” Jason said. “Welcome to the crew.”
Rondeau resisted his urge to fiddle with the radio, open the glove compartment, mess with the seat controls. He wanted to play the game, so he needed to play it cool. He couldn't quite manage silence, though, so he said, “What was it like, growing up with Marla?”
“She was a pistol. Too big for that little town. Just like me. Indiana, Ronnie, was not the right place for us. You know, in the old days, lots of the best grifters came from Indiana?”
“Oh? Why's that?”
“It was a crossroads for a lot of carnivals, and traveling carnivals, especially back in the day, were pretty much just roving grift machines with popcorn on the side. The carnival would come to town, hire some of the local mud-farmer kids to scoop shit and pitch tents, and along the way those kids would pick up a few little tricks. Some of them would decide they didn't want to stare at the ass end of a plow horse for the rest of their lives, and they'd go with the carnies when the troupe left town, and from there, on into a life on the grift.”
“You've really made your living all these years by ripping people off?”
Jason spun the wheel smoothly, and the car zoomed around a curve and rolled with barely a bump over some old railroad tracks. “Never did an honest day of work in my life. Grifting is the m
ost gentlemanly of the criminal trades. We don't hit people with iron pipes and steal their wallets. We get them to give us the cash, of their own free will. Hell, they beg to write us checks and wire us money, if we do our jobs right. I get the feeling Marla's business is a bit more, ah, thuggish. She always did have a violent streak, even when she was young.”
Rondeau squirmed a little. “I'm not privy to much of her business. I just run the nightclub where she keeps her office.”
“Really? I heard you were her right-hand man.”
Rondeau shrugged. “We're old friends. She takes care of me, and I'm there for her when she needs me. I, uh, do get the impression her business used to involve a fair amount of hitting people. She's at the top now, though, and she's not as hands-on anymore, I don't think.”
“Just sits on top of the mountain, letting money roll uphill, huh? Sweet gig, though I imagine there's still a lot of pipe-swinging down in the trenches. It's not the life for me, but to be honest, I admire her willingness to do whatever's necessary to take care of herself. I always have. And I'm glad she got famous enough in certain circles for me to find her. I didn't realize how much I missed her until we had dinner the other night. We've got the kind of connection that a few years apart can't destroy We've changed, sure, but she's still my little sister.”
Except for the whole bit where she's been practicing magic for more than a decade, Rondeau thought, but the presence of the magical in Marla's life didn't necessarily change who she was—it just changed the way she did the things she was always going to do anyway
“Here we go.” Jason parked in front of a long low building with a rusting sign that declared it a metal shop, though judging by the boarded-up windows, it wasn't one of those anymore, and hadn't been anything at all for a long time. They got out and walked up the steps to the door, avoiding the rotted-through riser in the middle, and Jason knocked three times.
After a moment a bolt snicked loudly inside, and the door swung open, revealing a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man with sweat on his forehead and a grin on his face. “Jason, you bastard, it's about time somebody showed up to do the heavy lifting.”
