Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8)

by T. A. Pratt

  “You suck.” Marzi got to her feet. “So... is that it? I mean...”

  Marla shrugged. “The scorpion oracle said she wasn’t going to open the door from her side, and if there’s no door here for anybody to open on this side... I’ll still cast some bindings and a keep-away spell on the storage room, to be safe, but I think the Outsider is imprisoned again.”

  “High fives all around,” Bradley said, holding up a hand. “Huzzah for not dying.” She smacked her palm against his while Marla rolled her eyes and turned toward the door to the kitchen, muttering about runes and lines of force.

  Marzi felt... weird. Anticlimactic. If she’d written this in her comic, there would have been more derring-do, more hairsbreadth escapes, more dire injuries. Wow, how dumb was that? They’d gotten off easy. She should be glad. Still, killing the thing would have given her a more elemental sort of satisfaction. Just locking it up felt like simply postponing the problem. After all, it had been locked up before, under Death Valley, and it had gotten out eventually. Would it escape again in some later year, decade, century, to trouble someone else? Better if they’d killed it.

  She wasn’t going to offer to go through the door and try to kill it herself, though, so this would have to do.

  •

  The three of them sat around a table in the Teatime Room, sipping hot drinks. Jonathan hadn’t gotten back from running his errands yet, which was just as well. Marzi wasn’t sure how she was going to explain the events of the day to him. Probably she would downplay how close she’d come to death, and how often. “So what are you guys doing now?”

  “Well, having neutralized the truly terrible cosmic threat facing us, I’ve got to go deal with more of a nuisance now,” Marla said. “How about you, B? Are you returning to the collective overmind?”

  “Whatever that means,” Marzi said.

  Bradley shrugged. “I haven’t received a summons to return home, so I guess I’ll tag along with you a while, if you’ll have me.”

  “I can always use someone to carry heavy boxes,” Marla said. She stood up, offering her hand to Marzi, shaking with a firm grip. “Listen, if you ever decide you’d like to learn more about magic... well, don’t call me, I’m a shitty teacher –”

  “This I can confirm,” Bradley said.

  “—and don’t call him, because he’s terrible about answering his phone and also he doesn’t technically live on this planet. But take this number.” She handed Marzi a slip of paper. “That’s the direct line to a mage named Sanford Cole who lives up in San Francisco. He owes me more favors than there are stars in the sky, and he’ll help you out, answer any questions, stuff like that. That second number is mine. Call me if any weird supernatural shit starts to go down here again, but if you can’t reach me – because sometimes I am way unreachable – try Cole instead, he’ll mobilize the troops. All right?”

  “Yeah, for sure. I hope nothing does happen, though. Maybe it’s not adventurous of me, but I just want to do my art and eat eggs and bacon on the weekends and have good sex, you know? If I never have to face another horrible creature from beyond, that’ll be okay with me.”

  “Ah, well,” Marla said. “One woman’s dream is another woman’s nightmare, I guess. Take care of yourself, Marzipan. Stay sweet.”

  Bradley on the Road Again

  They hitched Marla’s motorcycle to the trailer in the back of the RV, then sat down inside, Marla in the passenger seat, Bradley behind the wheel. “It’ll take, what, two days of driving straight through to get to Felport?” he said.

  Marla snorted. “In this dinosaur? I don’t see you hitting 80 on those nice middle-of-the-night empty freeway stretches, not in this bot. The trip will take longer than that.”

  “Mmm. Drive up to San Jose, then, and catch the next flight? I’m a little embarrassed in the ID department just now, but between the two of us I bet we could mindfuck our way onto a flight.”

  “Hmm. I am a goddess now, so first class seems reasonable. Are you sure you don’t need to get back to the gazebo at the end of the universe?” She shifted in the seat, slumping down, hat half covering her eyes. “For that matter, did we make everything right here? Has our lonely little branch been reintegrated into the multiverse yet?”

  “I think we have to wait for DNS propagation to fully complete.” Marla lifted her chin and looked at him blankly, and he sighed. “Sorry. Computer science joke. I went to the bathroom before we left the café partly to see if I could reach myself in the mirror, but I didn’t get an answer. I don’t know what’s up.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of in the dark myself,” Bradley’s voice said from the radio.

  “Is that you, super-Bradley?” Marla said. “Bradley Prime? Bradley Alpha-and-the-Omega?”

  “Lord Bradley, King of the Multiverse will do,” the radio said, followed by a staticky blare of polka music that quickly subsided.

  “That is weird, man,” Bradley said. “Taking over the radio? Our voice doesn’t sound right through those speakers.”

  “Come on,” the radio said. “You were an actor. You should be used to listening to yourself talk out of various electronic orifices. Anyway, I just wanted to say, you guys did good. I perceive no more existential threat to the integrity of the multiverse. The Outsider is still on my grid, still in your reality, but he’s like a black fly buzzing inside a bottle. My hope is that, with no people to eat, he’ll go dormant again soon, like he was all those centuries under Death Valley.”

  “So we’re back online?” Marla said. “No danger of this branch of reality getting gangrene and falling off?”

  “Well, see, there’s my problem.” The radio voice sounded apologetic, which couldn’t be a good sign. “I can’t actually see the future. I’m omniscient and omnicognizant, but not precognitive.”

  “Bullshit,” Marla said. “I dealt with your predecessor the Possible Witch, and she absolutely told me what was going to happen in the future – or what was most likely to happen, anyway.”

  “Not exactly,” Bradley said. “She told you what would happen if you didn’t stop Mutex from raising a dark god – and she knew, because in a lot of other universes, Mutex had already done it. In those universes he got started days or weeks or months earlier, and he worked faster, and he didn’t hit any snags – whatever. She wasn’t seeing the future, she was just figuring percentages. I can look through all the adjacent branches of the multiverse, and see what happens most often, and consider the trends, you know? Like, I can say, ‘In seventy percent of universes polled, your dumb plan actually works,’ or, ‘ninety-nine percent of the time, your ass does not look good in those pants.’ Those little variations are just as good as seeing the future, for practical purposes. But since I froze your thread – there’s another Internet joke for you, Little B, I’ve got your back – it’s limited my predictive powers. There’s only one branch where the Outsider got loose, only one branch where it got imprisoned behind the door in the desert world, so I can’t really tell if your plan worked or not, because I don’t have any similar realities to check against. My feeling is, you made a good plan, and it’s probably all right, but what if this is the one crazy outlier reality where stuff goes way wrong and the Outsider escapes again? There’s no way for me to know, so I’m going to keep you sequestered for a little longer.”

  “I thought we had a ticking time bomb situation here?” Marla said, voice dangerously calm. “Like, if we stay cut off too long, there’s permanent damage to the structure of reality? My reality, where all my friends live, remember?”

  “That’s true,” the radio conceded. “I’m not planning to cut it that close, though. You’ve got some time. I’m going to give it another week. If I see the Outsider getting weak and fading out, I’ll graft you back onto the tree of life. If something else happens... we’ll figure out how to deal with it.”

  “That sucks,” Marla said.

  “If you were still running Felport, and a monster was eating everybody in an apartment building, and you locked
the monster up in an empty apartment, would you tell everybody else to move back in, or wait a little bit to make sure the locks held?”

  “Yeah, fine,” Marla said. “I get it. That means I get to keep Little B here to help me out on this other thing?”

  “I do not consent to being called Little B,” Little B said.

  “Sure. Enjoy your vacation on Earth, kid,” the radio said. “We’ll just keep doing the heavy lifting of making the universe run smoothly up here while you laze around.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Little B said. “At least you get laid.”

  “I bet I can convince Henry to give you a travel pass, if you see somebody you’re interested in,” the radio said. “Maybe if you break Rondeau out of Nicolette’s jail he’ll be so grateful he’ll sleep with you again. It was pretty fun, when we hooked up during that thing in San Francisco.”

  “Yeah, but he’s inhabiting a copy of my own body now,” Little B said. “I’m pretty sure sleeping with him would be some kind of deeply messed-up paraphilia.”

  “I read some fanfic about that kind of thing once,” the radio said. “They called it ‘incesturbation’ – where you sleep with your clone or magical double or doppelganger or other self from another dimension.”

  “You spend way too much time on the Internet, Bradleys,” Marla said. “Look, keep me posted, okay? I want to know when my universe is off double-secret-probation. Keep us cut off too long and psychics and sensitives and gurus and sibyls are going to start to sense something wrong with the nature of the universe and freak the fuck out. As the object of worship of a currently defunct death cult, I can tell you the last thing we need is a whole bunch of doomsday sects springing up. They’re nothing but trouble.”

  “Roger that, over and out.” The radio went quiet.

  “Well, all right, then,” Little B – damn it, he was thinking of himself that way now – said. “Off to the airport?”

  “Stop by that beach first,” Marla said. “I need to talk to the chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz.”

  •

  Marla told Bradley to wait in the car while she went down the hill to the beach to talk to the Bammer. Bradley sat and watched the sun sink toward the waves for a while, listening to the breeze blowing past the windows and the cries of seagulls and the susurrating crash of the surf. It was all very restful, and after the day he’d had, with the near-death experiences and all, it was nice to rest. He wondered what Marla was saying to the Bammer. He wondered if she was kicking his ass. She had strong feelings about how chief sorcerers should run things.

  After about half an hour she came climbing up the hill and back into the RV. “We’re all set.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Threw him on the ground and sat on him and made him eat sand.”

  He stared at her. “Really?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Gods, Little B, I’m not a bully. I beat up bullies. We sat down and had a reasonable discussion about his responsibilities, and about my views regarding the unfairness of his pressing Marzi into the role of champion without her consent, informed or otherwise. I discussed possible consequences of putting my girl into that kind of impossible situation again. I made it clear that he can tend to his city himself, or he can suffer the consequences of failure. I also told him that I would take a keen interest in Marzi’s mental, physical, and financial well-being going forward, and that he should do his best to ensure she was healthy along all axes.”

  “Ah,” Bradley said. “And he agreed?”

  “He did,” she said. “After I threw him on the ground and sat on him and made him eat sand. Come on, let’s get to the airport. If I can kick Nicolette’s ass as fast as we locked up the Outsider, maybe you and me can have a little fun before you have to go back to your magic space gazebo.”

  “You mean we aren’t having fun now?”

  “That’s my Little B,” she said fondly.

  •

  They left the RV and the motorcycle in a corner of the airport’s long-term lot that was marked as a no-parking zone, but that was okay, because the vehicles were enchanted so no one but a sorcerer or psychic would notice them anyway, and if any such clued-in types tried to touch their rides, the busybodies would lose a limb or two.

  The first available flight out of San Jose was a redeye with a connection through New York that would get them into Felport International Airport around 8 a.m. the next morning. That wasn’t ideal, but while it was possible to expend enough magic to take over another flight and send it where they wanted, that was the sort of thing that would doubtless draw the attention of whatever magician ran the city of San Jose, and they could end up being shouted at by angry mages in a small room, which would waste even more time.

  They bought tickets with cash and checked no bags without raising any particular alarm, breezed through security (Bradley used a dog-eared jack of hearts from a deck of cards as his ID, with his psychic powers making it look legit, and Marla didn’t even have to take her cowboy boots off), and settled into a booth in the first class lounge. Marla spilled some salt on the table and drew a rune of privacy so they could talk without people overhearing and thinking they were insane.

  “Is it too much to hope that you have a plan?” Bradley slumped on his side of the booth, half asleep, unshaven, sweaty, and generally not feeling his best.

  “I was going to take advantage of the shower they’ve got in here, and I would urge you to do the same. I’ve got an Elmore Leonard paperback I got the take-a-book, leave-a-book shelf at Genius Loci. A Western, natch. I figured I’d read that. Then, sleep on the plane.”

  “Did you leave a book? When you took one?”

  “No, but I saved the world, which I think entitles me to a free book.”

  “Figures. No such thing as a free lunch.” The shower was very tempting, but he wanted to make his point first. “But when I asked about your plan, I meant, is there a plan for what to do in Felport?”

  She shrugged. “Depends on what Nicolette’s got going on. She seems to think she’s got some clever shit going on, but then, she always does. I’ll see to what extent and in what specific way she’s fucked things up, and act accordingly.”

  “Any temptation to kick her off the throne and take it back yourself? Run Felport again?”

  “Oh, the thought crossed. But I’m busy with my whole dread-queen-Persephone gig half the year, and my city deserves better than a part-time leader. I might find myself in a position to elevate a new chief sorcerer, though. Not sure who I’d put in the job. Someone other than the Chamberlain, though. Almost anyone would be better. Nicolette excepted.”

  “I didn’t get to know the Chamberlain well, but she seemed to know her shit,” Bradley said.

  “Yeah, she’s good at that bullshit ghost-magic she does, but I hate her, so she’s obviously unfit for leadership. There’s Hamil, I guess – he was my number two, so he’s the obvious choice.”

  “Marla, he voted to kick you out of the job and exile you.”

  Marla nodded. “Sure. And he betrayed our friendship in the process, potentially making me a terrible enemy, etc. But he did that terrible because he thought getting rid of me was best for the city, see? The fact that he made that hard decision tells me he’s qualified to run things. The problem is, he doesn’t want the job. He’s too smart to want to sit on the throne. Who else is even halfway qualified? Langford’s a sociopath, which I’ll grant you isn’t necessarily a flaw in a leader in some situations, but he’s happy running the Blackwing Institute and running experiments I’d rather not run about – he never even really wanted to sit on the council. The Bay Witch is strong enough to run a city, but she’s only halfway in our reality most of the time, and it’s hard to imagine she’d pay attention to anything beyond the waterfront.” She sighed. “The other obvious choices are all dead. Maybe there’s somebody on the council who has chops, I don’t know. I could set up a ruling triumvirate or something. Or a rotating leadership thing like they had in San Francisco before mos
t of their sorcerers got killed.”

  “So you don’t have any doubt you’ll be able to knock Nicolette off her perch?”

  Marla actually laughed. “Bradley. My superpower is I don’t lose. No matter what it costs me. I win, or I die. And just lately, I can’t die.” She shrugged. “That’s nothing but math, Little B.” She yawned behind her hand. “Besides. It’s just Nicolette. She ain’t shit. I’m taking a shower.” She rose from her seat and ambled toward the restrooms.

  Bradley sat and brooded. In this particular skin he hadn’t known Nicolette well, but in some other realities, now only vaguely recalled, he’d known her better – in at least a couple they’d been lovers, despite his total lack of sexual interest in women, due to some love-spell shenanigans. In still others they’d been devoted allies. In most realities he was aware of, Nicolette was a bad person, selfish and violent and spiteful, and she had a tendency to fixate obsessively on people as mentors or enemies, contorting her life around theirs as acolyte or adversary. But in a few timelines, she’d fixated on someone more noble than her mentors in this world, and devoted herself to doing good, or at least not to doing bad.

  In some realities, Nicolette had even been an ally of Marla Mason, both of them fighting in resistance forces against supernatural despots and interdimensional conquerors – enemies bad enough to make them join forces despite the inevitable clash of their wills. In those worlds, Nicolette often looked up to Marla with something that could only be called love, and she’d lived or died inside based on Marla’s opinion of her.

  Bradley wondered how much of that applied to the Nicolette here. In this world, Nicolette was Marla’s implacable but inconsequential enemy, a gadfly who wanted to be a monster. How much of her villainy over the years was just down to her wanting Marla’s respect? Crapsey had made the same argument, and while the murderous parasite wasn’t famed for his understanding of psychology, Bradley thought he might be on to something in this case.