“Quiet,” I say, and work a simple spell to heal her face. “You ever think of giving this up, Red?”
“What?” she says. “And leave show business?”
More and more drunks on the street now, stumbling and staggering this way and that, thrown out of the clubs and bars once they run out of money. I work simple spells, from a safe distance. To sober them up, or help them find a safe taxi, or the nearest Underground station. I work other protections too, that they never know of. Quietly removing weapons from the pockets of would-be muggers, driving off mini-cab drivers with bad intent by giving them the runs, or breaking up the bigger street gangs with basic paranoia spells, so they turn on each other instead. Always better to defuse a situation than risk it all going bad, with blood and teeth on the pavement. A push here and a prod there, a subtle influence and a crafty bit of misdirection, and most of the night’s trouble is over before it’s even started.
I make a stop at the biggest Chinese Christian Church in London, and chat with the invisible Chinese demon that guards the place from trouble-makers and unbelievers. It enjoys the irony of protecting a Church that officially doesn’t believe in it. And since it gets to eat anyone who tries to break in, it’s quite happy. The Chinese have always been a very practical people.
Just down the street is an Indian restaurant once suspected of being a front for Kali worshippers on the grounds that not everyone who went in came back out again. Turned out to be an underground railroad, where people oppressed because of their religious beliefs could pass quietly from this dimension to another. There’s an Earth out there for everyone, if you only know where to look. I helped the restaurant put up an avoidance spell, so only the right kind of people would go in.
I check out the dumpsters round the back, while I’m there. We’ve been having increasing problems with feral pixies, just likely. Like foxes, they come in from the countryside to the town, except foxes can’t blast the aura right off you with a hard look. Pixies like dumpsters; they can play happily in them for hours. And they’ll eat pretty much anything, so mostly I just leave them to get on with it. Though if the numbers start getting too high, I’ll have to organize another cull.
I knock the side of the dumpster, but nothing knocks back. Nobody home.
After that, it’s in and out of all the pokey little bars in the back streets, checking for the kind of leeches that specialize in grubby little gin joints. They look human enough, especially in a dimly-lit room. You know the kind of strangers, the ones who belly up to the bar next to you with an ingratiating smile, talking about nothing in particular, but you just can’t seem to get rid of them. It’s not your company, or even your money, they’re after. Leeches want other things. Some can suck the booze right out of you, leaving you nothing but the hangover. Others can drain off your life energy, your luck, even your hope.
They usually run when they see me coming. They know I’ll make them give it all back, with interest. I love to squeeze those suckers dry.
Personal demons are the worst. They come in with the night, swooping and roiling down the narrow streets like leaves tossed on the breeze, snapping their teeth and flexing their barbed fingers. Looking to fasten on to any tourist whose psychic defenses aren’t everything they should be. They wriggle in, under the mental barricades, snuggle onto your back and ride you like a mule. They encourage all their host’s worst weaknesses—greed or lust or violence, all the worst sins and temptations they ever dreamed of. The tourists go wild, drowning themselves in sensation—and the demons soak it all up. When they’ve had enough they let go, and slip away into the night, fat and engorged, leaving the tourists to figure out where all their money and self respect went. Why they’ve done so many things they swore they’d never do. Why there’s a dead body at their feet, and blood on their hands.
I can See the demons, but they never see me coming. I can sneak up behind them and rip them right off a tourist’s back. I use special gloves that I call my emotional baggage handlers. A bunch of local nuns make them for us, blessed with special prayers, every thread soaked in holy water, and backed up with nasty silver spurs in the fingertips. Personal demons aren’t really alive, as such, but I still love the way they scream as their flimsy bodies burst in my hands.
Of course, some tourists bring their own personal demons in with them, and then I just make a note of their names, to pass on to the Big Boys. Symbiosis is more than I can handle.
I bump into my first group of Grey aliens of the night, and make a point of stopping to check their permits are in order. They look like ordinary people to everyone else, until they get up close, and then they hypnotize you with those big black eyes, like a snake with a mouse, and you might as well bend over and smile for the probe. Up close, they smell of sour milk, and their movements are just wrong. Their dull grey flesh slides this way and that, even when they’re standing still, as though it isn’t properly attached to the bones beneath.
I’ve never let them abduct anyone on my watch. I’m always very firm; no proper paperwork, no abduction. They never argue. Never even react. It’s hard to tell what a Grey is thinking, what with that long flat face and those unblinking eyes. I wish they’d wear some kind of clothes, though. You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got instead of genitals.
Even when their paperwork is in order, I always find or pretend to find something wrong, and send them on their way, out of my area. Just doing my bit, to protect humanity from alien intervention. The Government can stuff their quotas.
Round about two or three a.m., I run across a Street Preacher, having a quiet smoke of a hand-rolled in a back alley. She’s new, Tamsin MacReady. Looks about fifteen, but she must be hard as nails or they’d never have given her this patch. Street Preachers deal with the more spiritual problems, which is why few of them last long. Soon enough they realize reason and compassion aren’t enough, and that’s when the smiting starts, and the rest of us run for cover. Tamsin’s a decent enough sort, disturbed that she can’t do more to help.
“People come here to satisfy the needs of the flesh, not the spirit,” I say, handing her back the hand-rolled. “And we’re here to help, not meddle.”
“Oh, blow it out your ear,” she says, and we both laugh.
It’s not long after that I run into some real trouble; someone from the Jewish Defense League has unleashed a Golem on a march by British Nazi skinheads. The Golem is picking them up and throwing them about, and the ones who aren’t busy bleeding or crying or wetting themselves are legging it for the horizon. I feel like standing back and applauding, but I can’t let this go on. Someone might notice. So I wade in, ducking under the Golem’s flailing arms, until I can wipe the activating word off its forehead. It goes still then, nothing more than lifeless clay, and I put in a call for it to be towed away. Someone higher up will have words with someone else, and hopefully I won’t have to do this again. For a while.
I take some hard knocks and a bloody nose before I can shut the Golem down, so I take time out to lean against a stone wall and feel sorry for myself: My healing spells only work on other people. The few skinheads picking themselves up off the pavement aren’t sympathetic. They know where my sympathies lie. Some of them make aggressive noises, until I give them a hard look, and then they remember they’re needed somewhere else.
I could always turn the Golem back on, and they know it.
I head off on my beat again, picking them up and slapping them down, aching quietly here and there. Demons and pixies and golems, oh my. Just another night, in Soho.
Keep walking, keep walking. Protect the ones you can, and try not to dwell on the ones you can’t. Sweep up the mess, drive off the predators, and keep the world from ever finding out. That’s the job. Lots of responsibility, hardly any authority, and the pay sucks. I say as much to Red, when we bump into each other at the end of our shifts. She clucks over my bruises, and offers me a nip from her hip flask. It’s surprisingly good stuff.
“Why do you do it, Charlie boy? Hard wor
k and harder luck, with nothing to show but bruises and bad language from the very people you’re here to help? It can’t be the money; I probably make more than you do.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not the money.”
I think of all the things I See every night that most of the world never knows exists. The marvelous and the fantastic, the strange creatures and stranger people, gods and monsters and all the wonders of the hidden world. I walk in magic and work miracles, and the night is full of glory. How could I ever turn my back on all that?
“You ever think of giving this up, Charlie boy?” says Red.
“What?” I say. “And leave show business?”
T.A. Pratt (also known as Tim Pratt) is the Hugo Award-winning author of several novels featuring the sorcerer Marla Mason: Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, and Spell Games. Additionally, two Marla Mason novels, Bone Shop and Broken Mirrors are available as online serials on Pratt’s website, timpratt.org. Another novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, is a standalone, “cowpunk” fantasy. Pratt is also the author of many short stories, which have appeared in such venues as Subterranean, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, and reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best SF, and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. His short work has been collected in Little Gods and Hart & Boot & Other Stories.
Our next tale concerns Pratt’s above-mentioned series character Marla Mason, the tough, no-nonsense sorcerer who presides over the fictional city of Felport. (Each city needs a wizard to keep it safe, and the wizards of each city are constantly vying for the top spot.) In this universe, every sort of magic you’ve ever heard of (and many you haven’t) is real—sympathetic magic, necromancy, pyromancy, etc. (Not to mention—memorably—“pornomancy.”)
When it comes to magic, Marla is a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, which makes her supremely adaptable but also means she’s often outclassed in the magic department—forcing her to scrape by with guile and a little help from her ultra-powerful cloak, which can turn her into an unstoppable killing machine (but it grows in power with each use and is always angling to overthrow her mind and take over her body).
Marla has already had to deal with an Aztec god, a woman whose dreams become reality, and an army of zombies. This next story is another action-packed tale in which Marla, early in her career, faces off against several colorful foes.
Mommy Issues of the Dead
T.A. Pratt
“It’s not an assassination, precisely.” Viscarro, the subterranean sorcerer who dwelt in the tunnels and vaults beneath the seen-better-days city of Felport, tinkered with an oddly beautiful contraption on his desk, all brass gearwheels and copper spheres on articulated arms, all together no bigger than a football. “It’s more that I want you to physically inconvenience someone by tricking him into putting high explosives inside his chest cavity. But it’s not murder, because Savery Watt is already dead.”
Marla Mason propped her feet up on Viscarro’s desk, because it annoyed him. “I’ve got nothing against the dead. Dead people don’t bother anybody. You, on the other hand . . . ”
Viscarro bared his hideous teeth at her. “Do you want to engage in pointless banter, or do you want to find out about the job, you insolent child?” He had the patience of a trapdoor spider when it came to plotting, planning, and scheming, but he got irritated quickly when dealing with people who didn’t just nod and say “Yes, master.” He had about fifty apprentices, pale cowed creatures who filed his vast archives, sorted the mountains of junk he bought from auction houses and estate sales in search of magical artifacts for his collection, and—for all Marla knew—competed for the honor of giving him nightly massages complete with happy endings. Of all the sorcerers she’d worked with in Felport, Viscarro was her least favorite—and competition for that spot was fierce—but he paid well for her mercenary services. Marla didn’t ask money for these jobs: she asked for knowledge and power, and Viscarro had promised to teach her a trick and tell her a secret in exchange for this job. She knew what trick she wanted. She was still thinking about the secret.
“Lay it on me, old man.”
Viscarro nodded. “It’s simple. I want you to blow up Watt’s body. But don’t worry—it won’t violate your silly moral code. He can always get another body, you see. Watt is a lich.”
“Which ones are liches again? Do they drink blood or eat corpses? I forget.”
Viscarro sniffed. “Neither. A lich is essentially a corpse animated by its own ghost. For some reason—genetics, a curse, something else—conventional paths to sorcerous immortality were closed to Watt, so in order to cheat death he performed a dark ritual. He put his soul into a phylactery—some small object, traditionally a gem—committed suicide, and awakened as an undead creature. His original body was recently destroyed in an explosion, so he’s building a new one. He thinks he’s buying a power source for his new body—I gather it’s a junkpile robot sort of thing—but he’s actually buying . . . well. Kaboom.” Viscarro tapped the weird little engine on his desk to set it spinning, and it whirred away, generating a low hum, as its spheres orbited and gears interlocked.
“So that thing’s a bomb?”
“It is both a perpetual motion machine and a bomb.”
“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion.”
“Of course not. This device steals small quantities of velocity and momentum from various other sources—passing cars, grandfather clocks, merry-go-rounds, even the rotation of the Earth. Built by a mad technomancer named Canarsie a century ago. With this, Watt won’t need to recharge his batteries.”
“It’s not your style to blow up some fancy old magical thing. Won’t it leave a hole in your collection?”
Viscarro waved a hand, though it was more shriveled and clawlike than most things people called hands. Marla didn’t know how old he was, but “ancient” was a good guess. “I have two other examples of Canarsie’s engines. Besides, Watt is going to trade me for a certain . . . item I require.”
“So why the explodey double-cross?”
“Hmm? Oh, because he’s planning to cheat me, of course. He knows I won’t go in person—” Viscarro had agoraphobia, though Marla thought it was weird he found the outside world scary, since most of the outside world would be scared of him—“and he plans to kill my messenger, claim she never arrived, and keep the engine and the snow globe for himself.”
“Snow globe? You’re sending me to bomb a guy and steal his snow globe?”
“It’s a very special snow globe. Nothing you’d want—it’s more cursed than magical. But it has a great deal of sentimental value for me,” Viscarro said, entirely straight-faced. He was about as sentimental as a liver fluke, but as long as he paid her, what did she care? As far as selling her services went, she drew the line at murder, but if Watt was a lich, it wasn’t murder, anyway—it was monster-killing.
“How do you know he’s planning to screw you over?”
Viscarro frowned. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and we are much alike, and it’s what I would do, if our positions were reversed.”
“Okay. The price is right. I’m up for it. Where am I going?” Her mercenary gigs had taken her to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago so far, and she hoped this one was somewhere closer, Boston or Pittsburgh, so she wouldn’t have to spend much time out of Felport. She hated traveling. This city was her home.
“Just outside a wide place in the road called Sweetwater, in the North Carolina mountains. Beautiful, especially in autumn. The colors of the leaves, you know. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I can remember.”
“What’s a sorcerer doing there? Aren’t the southern Appalachians all . . . ” She waved her hands vaguely. “I don’t know. Black bears and straw hats and moonshine and inbreeding?”
“Provincial little bigot,” Viscarro said. “I was born in the South. I remember Lexington-style barbecue quite fondly, though no one makes it right up here. And, no, Mr. Watt
does not make moonshine.” Viscarro paused. “He makes methamphetamine these days, mostly.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring.”
Viscarro finished tinkering with the engine and passed it over. “One other thing. You can’t take your cloak with you on this trip.”
Marla touched the silver stag beetle pin that held her white-and-purple cloak around her shoulders. “What are you, my mother? Why should you get a say in my fashion decisions?”
Viscarro bared his teeth. “That cloak isn’t an item of fashion, it’s a weapon.”
“Okay, fine—then why should I let you dictate which weapons I bring with me?” Marla was not a big fan of stipulations and limitations. Her life wasn’t a sonnet; it didn’t benefit from the rigors of a restrictive form. She liked having lots of options on a mission, and the cloak she’d found hanging in a thrift store on her twentieth birthday was her ultimate option: while wearing it, any wounds she received healed rapidly, and if she needed to, she could unleash the cloak’s destructive powers, and become a one-woman massacre.
Viscarro shook his head. “The cloak reeks of magic. I want Watt to think you’re merely a messenger. If he sees you arrive in that thing, he’ll know you’re a true operative. Besides, I want to see how you handle a situation without that advantage. A lot of people say you’re a talentless little hack, you know, who just lucked into finding a potent magical weapon. Sometimes when people want to hire you, they don’t say, ‘I should hire Marla,’ they say, ‘I should hire the girl with the cloak.’ How does that make you feel?”
She snorted. “Feelings are stupid. But I don’t need the cloak. I can bust heads just fine on my own.” And maybe she was too dependent on her artifact. She didn’t like the way using the cloak made her feel, anyway—it was much older than her, and quite possibly smarter, and absolutely more malevolent, and sometimes when she was wearing it, she felt almost like the cloak was wearing her instead.
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