by T. A. Pratt
“A murderer who wears the corpses of her victims.” Marla nodded. “Yeah, that sounds like you, Nicolette.”
The witch queen of Felport gritted her teeth and kept smiling.
Hamil cleared his throat and went on with his explanation. “I had to come up with a way to blanket the whole city at once, to spread out the force of the spell so that it didn’t land on anyone too harshly. The difference, essentially, between lying down on a bed of nails, as opposed to lying on a single nail –”
“You kicked me out because you said it was best for the city.” Marla’s voice wasn’t trembling with rage or anything, but Nicolette was pretty attuned to the woman’s moods, and she could smell the suppressed fury. “Then you turn around and help a chaos witch with a history of doing stupid, dangerous things take over that same city, and endanger every single person who lives here? I’m a little confused, Hamil. Maybe you could explain it to me. You were always good at explaining things. My consigliere.”
“Mine, now,” Nicolette said. “But sure, big man, go ahead and tell her.”
“Letting Nicolette take control was best for the city,” Hamil said. “Because if she couldn’t control it, she was going to destroy it.”
“I realized I could make the whole heads-popping-off thing into a feature, not a bug,” Nicolette said. “Tweak the spell to give it a slightly longer incubation period so the infection had time to spread, right? Then, in a couple of weeks, instead of having a magical link with almost everybody in the city, everybody in the city would be dead.”
“Then we’d just have to track down the shut-ins and loners, like she said before,” Crapsey added from his spot behind Hamil. “And cut off their heads old-school. Nicolette’s a completist.”
“You see my position,” Hamil said. “When presented with those options – to make Nicolette into a Fisher King, or see everyone in the city die – the choice was obvious.”
Marla shook her head. “I see that you had a moment when Nicolette was in a room with you, making her pitch, and in that moment you could have stopped Nicolette, before she unleashed her contagious decapitation plague, and you didn’t. You could have smashed her stupid melon head into pulp. She wouldn’t have died, because I have to let her die, but she would have been in a lot of pain, and she would’ve had trouble casting spells or sweet-talking morons like Squat when she didn’t have a mouth anymore. Why didn’t you do that, Hamil?”
He just shook his head.
Marla nodded. “Yeah. Because you would have died in the process. Squat would have eaten you. But protecting a city is about putting the city’s interests above your own, Hamil. Instead, you put her in charge, a woman who’s just interested in annoying me. She killed how many people, wrecked how many lives, for what? To show me up? And you thought putting her in charge was better than sacrificing your life?”
“I did,” Hamil said quietly. “Because I understood something Nicolette didn’t.”
Nicolette had been on the fence about letting Hamil mention this part. On the one hand, admitting what had happened to her after she went full Fisher King maybe smacked of weakness, or at least a blindness to unintended consequences, but hell, she was a chaos witch by training (even if she’d become something else, now), and dealing with unintended consequences was a big part of that specialty. Ultimately she’d decided hearing the truth would annoy Marla more, so she’d agreed.
“I bet we all understand about a million things each that Nicolette doesn’t,” Marla said, “but which one are you talking about now?”
“The sympathetic connection I created doesn’t just work one way,” Hamil said. “It’s not only that Nicolette has a gun to the head of every person in Felport. It’s... You’re familiar with the Stockholm Syndrome, of course? When hostages begin to sympathize with their captors? There’s another condition, usually called Lima Syndrome, which is the exact opposite: it happens when captors begin to sympathize with their hostages. The moment I connected Nicolette to the people of Felport, that happened to her. They ceased to be simply pawns in her power game. They became real to her. In a magical sense, the people of Felport are part of her, and Nicolette cares about their well-being as much as she cares about her own.”
“I can feel them.” Nicolette couldn’t keep a certain dreamy tone out of her voice. The city and its people thrummed in the back of her head, and through her body, like a second nervous system, lit up with thousands of pleasures and pains. She could focus on individual connections or let the whole pulse through her. “I can feel the whole city. It’s part of me.”
“That’s just the city sense.” Marla’s scorn was open, now. “It comes with being chief sorcerer. I had it, too. You can get a feel for the general health of the city, it’s economy, it’s environment, all that. It’s diagnostic magic. Feeling it doesn’t make Nicolette a better person.”
Hamil coughed into his hand and shook his head. “No, Marla, what Nicolette has is a much more profound connection than the city sense. She can focus her attention on individual citizens. Indeed, she’s taken steps to help the lives of some of those individuals with personal attention, in addition to instituting reforms – with my guidance – that can benefit the city as a whole.”
“Me and Crapsey spent all day yesterday delivering hot meals to shut-ins,” Squat said.
“We didn’t even decapitate any of them,” Crapsey said. “We’re the good guys now. Feels weird, but the pay’s good, and it’s less strenuous than genocide, so whatever.”
“I think it’s bullshit.” Marla crossed her arms and scowled. “It’s just the city sense, and you’re telling yourself it’s something more to make yourself feel better, Hamil, about the shitty decision you made.”
“I don’t know, Marla.” Bradley was looking around the room, presumably at the invisible silver threads he saw extending from Nicolette’s head.
Marla glared at him. Nicolette wanted to clap her hands. “Even if it is true,” Marla said, “and Nicolette cares as much about the city as herself, what good does that do? She’s a chaos witch. The fundamental fact of dealing with chaos magicians is that they can never be counted on to do anything, not even to act in their own self-interest. They get their power from uncertainty and unpredictability. Sure, she’s helping people now, but tomorrow she might decide to douse the city in napalm instead.”
“I’m not a chaos witch anymore, Marla,” Nicolette said. “I switched specialties. I’m a Fisher King now. A ruler connected to her people. I prosper, and they prosper, and vice-versa.”
“It’s true,” Hamil said. “She is the city, in a way no other chief sorcerer has ever been. The methods that brought her here were... unorthodox... but she is not, precisely, the Nicolette you’ve known all these years. She’s something more.”
“I haven’t changed entirely,” Nicolette said. “I still hate your guts, for one thing, and I’m really happy I get to rub your face in my success. I’m going to run Felport so much better than you ever did.”
“You’ve been in charge for all of five minutes,” Marla said. “Wait until a real challenge –”
A phone rang, loud, one of the annoying default ringtones that came with cheapo pay-as-you-go phones.
Bradley coughed. “Ah, that’s me. Do you mind if I answer it?”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely, go ahead, you’re not interrupting anything important here.” Nicolette thought the sarcasm was unmistakable, but Bradley just nodded and took out his phone. She opened her mouth to object but he held up a finger and put the phone to his ear.
“Sorry,” he said, “This isn’t a good – Ah. Wow. That’s... wow.” He frowned, listening intently, for a couple of minutes, how rude, then said, “Okay. We’re on our way.” He put the phone away, shot an apologetic look at Nicolette, then turned to Marla, who was still staring straight at Nicolette with that disconcertingly direct gaze. Trying to find a chink in her armor. Ha. Nicolette was all the way bulletproof this time.
Bradley said, “Marla. That was our friend, the
one with the coffee shop? You know that thing she was holding for us? It kind of... got loose.”
Now Marla turned her head and sighed. “Damn it. Never trust a giant scorpion. Is our friend okay?”
“She’s all right. For now. Shaken up. But... you know.”
“Yeah. I know. Well. Okay then.” Marla shrugged. “Sorry, Nicolette. We’ll have to postpone our ultimate reckoning thing for a little while.”
“Are you shitting me?” Nicolette said.
Marla rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you’re new to the whole chief-sorcerer gig, so I’ll cut you some slack, but let me give you a little thought experiment. Let’s say there’s an upstanding businessperson downtown who’s got a serious problem with vandals and general assholes breaking her windows, spray-painting her signs, things like that. It’s a problem, right? You should probably do something about, make sure a cop gets assigned to patrol the area, maybe arrange for somebody to get punched. But let’s say at the same time a giant rock from space is streaking through the air headed straight for your city, ready to turn the whole place into a crater full of extraterrestrial pathogens. Which one do you deal with first? City-destroying space rock, or broken windows?”
“City-destroying space rock, duh,” Nicolette said.
“Right,” Marla said. “That’s what I’m going to deal now. You... you’re just a broken window. B, let’s get out of here.”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” Nicolette said, but that was demonstrably untrue.
Bradley in the Park with Marla
A goon tried to grab her, but Marla kicked out his knee and ran for the door, Bradley following as fast as he could. Nicolette shouted “Stop them!”, and Crapsey and Squat did their best to obey. Marla spun and tossed a handful of pebbles behind her, and the rocks exploded into stalagmites, sharp shards of stone bursting up to block off pursuit. They made it out the front door and Marla rushed down one side street, then another, muttering spells of illusion and concealment as she went.
They paused a few streets later, Bradley breathing hard because he didn’t get as much exercise as he should in his position as defender of the multiverse.
“Oof. That was fun,” Marla said. “So. What did Marzi say exactly?”
“That the Outsider busted out around midnight last night, after eating everything behind the door, including the scorpion oracle.”
Marla sucked in air through her teeth. “Damn it. I didn’t see that coming. Why the hell didn’t Marzi reach out sooner?”
“She got hurt. Knocked out, or else she passed out from using her reality-messing-with powers too much. Her man took her to the hospital, and she’s fine, they said she was really dehydrated, that’s all, though they want to run a bunch of tests on her brain. She called as soon as she had a moment’s privacy.”
“I really wanted to spare her this kind of shit,” Marla said. “Did she give you any more details?”
“She said the Outsider appeared in human form, sat Marzi down for a little chat, and said it was going to devour her, but she drove it off with her magical cap gun – wounded it badly, she thinks, but who knows how fast that thing heals?”
Marla grunted. “She’s got steel in her spine, doesn’t she? Marzi’s a champion whether she likes it or not, I guess. Damn. That scorpion oracle was a tough god. I liked her. Well, vengeance it is, then. Locking up the Outsider failed, so now we hunt it down and figure out a way to kill it.”
“Now that’s it’s presumably a lot stronger, having eaten a god?”
“Exactly,” Marla said. “Finally, a challenge worthy of my talents.”
“So, what do we do? Take another plane trip? Nicolette’s probably watching the airport. I don’t think she was happy with us leaving.”
“Fuck her, and fuck her gloating. Fuck the airport, too. We need to move faster than that. We can teleport, but... well. The things that dwell between branches of the universe don’t like any living creature too much, but they’re especially drawn to beings of power. You aren’t technically a meta-god right now, and I’m not officially a death god at the moment, but we both know we’ve got some residual-energy-by-association that might make us light up brighter than most if we pass through those in-between places. Do we risk teleporting anyway, or do you have a better idea?”
“You don’t know that folding-of-the-Earth trick Elsie Jarrow used to do?”
Marla shook her head. “She studied – or ate the brains of – some weird deep desert witches to get that skill. Spinning the globe under your feet is a nice trick if you can do it, but it’s beyond me. I can call on my husband and take a shortcut through the underworld, but I hate asking him for favors – it upsets the whole balance of power in the relationship.”
Bradley laughed. “Giving your husband some power is more distasteful to you than potentially being ripped to pieces by many-angled monsters who dwell between realities?”
“Obviously. I’m surprised you don’t understand that. I thought you and Henry were married.” She sighed. “I mean, yes, I’ll call up Death and ask him to make a door for us, if that’s the only way, I’m not crazy.”
Bradley scrubbed a hand through his hair. “There might be another way, though. Let’s go to Fludd Park.”
•
Bradley hadn’t spent much time in the park since he did his apprentice training with the nature magician Granger, a wizard of slow wit but immense power. Bradley had been awfully fond of the big man. He stood for a while looking at the mound of lush grass that marked the place where Granger had died during the Mason’s Massacre, in this reality at least. Marla seemed to sense his need to take now a moment, because she didn’t cajole or rush him, and after a couple of minutes of contemplation, he linked arms with her and began walking toward the white-painted gazebo. It didn’t look like much, just a white wooden construction, but there were no beer cans, no graffiti, no cigarette butts, no used condoms. On some level, people could sense that this was a sacred place, and treated it accordingly. “Ready to see wonders beyond human understanding?”
“Just like I do every Tuesday?” Marla said. “Sure.”
They went up the steps into the gazebo, and stood in the center.
Nothing happened. Bradley cleared his throat. “Sorry, I’m not in full possession of my powers, gotta get the collective overmind’s attention.”
“Sure, that’s fine. No hurry or anything.”
Bradley concentrated on opening a conduit, then had the strangest feeling he was being stared at. He tipped his head back, looking up at the gazebo’s ceiling.
An immense eye, the blue of tropical waters, gazed down at them.
Marla looked up, too, and barked a laugh. “Behold the Eye of Bowman, huh?”
The eye blinked, and everything went black and bodiless. Sparkles, fireflies, and golden glitter spun through the darkness, whirling and then stopping, an incomprehensible constellation. Other colors appeared, green and red and blue and white and yellow, and gradually an image resolved, built up one pixel at a time as the blackness was filled by dots of illumination. They stood – except they had no bodies, so they more simply floated – before a painting of a garden, with a farmhouse just beyond, and the railing of a white gazebo before them.
Weight returned all at once, and the painting became a three-dimensional reality: they stood in a double of the gazebo from Fludd Park, in the place at the still center of the multiverse that Bradley called home. Henry was in the garden, trimming rose bushes with a pair of clippers, and he raised one hand in a wave. Bradley felt a surging tug of longing in his chest so powerful it almost made him gasp out loud. Henry had died in his branch of the multiverse, too.
“Huh,” Marla said. “Very homey.” She leaned on the railing and waved at Henry, who smiled and then went back to pruning bushes. “The old Possible Witch, we just had to climb a ladder, walk down some hallways, like that. What’s with the pixelated fade-in?”
A voice behind them said, “Turns out, when the entry to your realm involves ladder
s and hallways, motherfuckers can just walk in. It’s a little harder to get to me.”
They turned, and the over-Bradley was there, sitting on one of the benches built into the gazebo, behind a small round wrought-iron table that held a full French press and two coffee cups. There was one empty chair, also wrought iron, with a cushion. He frowned, and another chair and cup appeared. “Sorry, damn, it’s hard to think of you as a separate person, Little B.”
“Don’t you start with that ‘Little B’ shit.”
Marla kicked one of the chairs, making it wobble. “I’d love to sit and sip and chat with you, oh overseer of all reality, but we’ve got a monster to chase.”
“I slowed down subjective time here, we’ve got a few minutes. Sit.”
They took their seats, and Little B poured them coffee, since in this company he was pretty obviously the low man.
“Good coffee,” Marla said. “Kona?”
“Nah, from one of the coffee plantations on the moon,” Bradley said. “In one of the weirder realities.”
“I’ll have to take a tour of those realities sometime. I’d be nice to feel less weird by comparison.”
They drank coffee in silence for a moment. “It was a good idea,” the over-Bradley said. “Trying to lock the Outsider up. It worked once before, after all – somebody stuffed it in a hole and covered up the hole, centuries ago. I wish I could see into the past, let me tell you. I’d love to know what they did. It’s pretty clear our mistake was locking it up in a place full of stuff it could eat.”
“Well, you live and learn. Any idea where the Outsider is now?” Marla said.
“I don’t want to look at it too closely, because it’s powerful enough now to look back,” Bradley said. “After eating a god, it seems to have developed a sense for them – and for meta-gods like me, too, probably. If it saw me, and figured out a way to get here, it could get everywhere, especially if it ate me first and took on some of my power. But I can figure out where it is anyway, even without direct observation. It wants to eat more gods, so I think it’s going to head for the nearest one it can find.”
