by T. A. Pratt
“Dude. That is fucked up.” I felt pretty bad about planning to smack Squat in the head with a magical hatchet. Then again, he probably did something really terrible to get hit with such such a nasty curse.
“Eh. It is what it is. All these assholes in Sarlat’s crew hate me. Some of them I literally make vomit – apparently I emit super offensive pheromones only certain supernatural creatures can sense? But I’ve got good qualities. I’m as strong as two Kodiak bears having a hate-fuck, and since nobody likes me anyway, I don’t ever bother holding back my nasty impulses, you know? Sarlat gives me dirty work, even though he says I look a lot like the thing his father turned into after he drank a tainted love potion.”
“There’s something to be said for doing work you enjoy and doing it well,” I said, pretty tactfully, aware of the words tattooed on the inside of my wrist. I might have to kill Squat soon, but I could be polite in the meantime. The guy was miserable enough. Piling more misery one wasn’t necessary.
“Of course, Sarlat always tries to send me into certain death.” Squat’s tone was more philosophical than doleful. “That’s just life when you’re cursed, though.”
I signaled to the other nasties as we approached the rear of Orias’s camp, and we slowed down and stretched out in a loose line, staying close to the ground, watching for sentries.
There was a lot of screaming in the distance – Sarlat’s full-frontal assault had launched, and his goons were presumably walking right into the kill zones and ambush sites and overlapping fields of fire I’d recommended to Orias. Most of Sarlat’s gang would get chewed up, though I’d left a few gaps in my suggestions, places where some of Sarlat’s guys could get a few licks in. I didn’t want this massacre to be entirely one-sided. Most of Orias’s mercenary guards had broken at the sounds of violence, but there were a couple still pacing the perimeter: a guy dressed like a casino pit boss, tuxedo and all, with curling ram’s horns on his head, and a bleached-blonde, ghost-pale woman in a thin tank-top scratching her bare arms so hard she bled. Her wounds smoked like her blood was made of acid, which it probably was.
“Okay. Bambi and The Shadow, you take those guys out,” I whispered. “Mr. Whiskers and Babe Pig in the City, you creep up to the tents and do recon, see if there are any big bad guys lurking around. Kill anybody you see along the way – we’re aiming for the central pavilion, where the remnants of Orias’s leadership are probably managing the battle.” The baddies flowed away across the desert, fanning out to go about their appointed tasks. I love monsters who do what you say.
Squat snickered. “Cute pet names, there. I’d hate to think what you’d call me.”
“’Squat’ pretty much covers it,” I said.
We watched as The Shadow flowed up the acid-blooded woman and smothered her with his noctilescent form, and Bambi actually no-shit impaled the ram’s-headed guy with his antlers, right through the chest, in a shocking piece of horn-on-horn violence. Then they joined the others, peering in between the closely-packed tents of Orias’s camp.
“So what are you, anyway?” Squat said. “Baseline human? Doing shit you learned, not shit that got inflicted on you?”
I glanced at him sidelong, because he wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to look at straight on. “Sarlat didn’t tell you about me?”
“Sarlat’s not big on interoffice communication,” Squat said. “He’s more of an order-giver. Like, he says, ‘Shit,’ and we say, ‘On whom?”’
“Good use of grammar,” I said. “Yeah, I’m just your average ordinary witchy woman. I couldn’t work a curse like the one that got laid on you, though. Who did it – and why? Or is that impolite, like asking somebody in prison what they’re in for?”
I was hoping he’d murdered a bunch of children or something. I had my hand on the handle of my hatchet, and I figured I could bury it in his head pretty quickly, here and now. He was probably the most dangerous of the bunch, so it made sense to take him out first.
“Is that impolite?” he said. “I’ve never been to jail. The curse, well, it was a long time ago, like forty years. I was on the East Coast, in law school, bright future ahead of me. I was driving along, and there was this crazy woman in a convertible, driving like a nutcase on the expressway. She’d slowed down to something like fifteen miles an hour in the passing lane, so I started to go around her, passing on the right.” He sighed. “She turned her head and stared at me and said, ‘That’s rude. I hate rudeness. And so everyone will always hate you.’ I could hear her voice like she was whispering in my ear, even though I passed her in a second, and my windows were rolled up, and then she spat at me, and despite the distance and wind and windows, the spit hit me on the cheek, a big nasty wet glob.”
I closed my eyes. “This woman. Did she have red hair?”
“You’ve heard of her, huh? Once I started running in sorcerous circles, I found out I’d been cursed by a famous crazy witch. Elsie Jarrow. I heard she was locked up in a loony bin, but then I also heard somebody killed her, not long ago.”
“I heard that, too.” I gritted my teeth, but loosened my grip on my hatchet. Okay. So what if Squat and I had a tormentor in common? He was still a killer and a thug, right? But then, what the hell was I? In theory, I was trying to kill in order to save innocent lives, but Squat was living the only life he could. Elsie’s curse hadn’t left him with a lot of options. “Too bad her dying didn’t break the curse.”
“Those chaos witches build spells to last, except when they don’t,” he said. The other baddies gestured to us that they were planning to advance, and then they faded into the tents. “Shall we?” he said. “Otherwise they won’t leave anyone for us to kill.”
“Sure.” I could always cut Squat down later. Might as well let him do some work for me first.
When we got into camp proper, I was glad I’d kept him with me. The ground was littered with the dead, mostly Orias’s defenders who’d been taken by surprise from behind – they’d been entirely focused on breaking the front line of Sarlat’s attack, which I’d told them to expect. Tents were slumped and tangled, and the whole place stank of blood and fire and monstrous fluids, the grisly scene lit by moonlight and torchlight and the odd bioluminescent corpse. But Sarlat’s A-team hadn’t fared all that well: Bambi’s head was resting on the ground some distance from his body, The Shadow had been reduced to several weakly-pulsing puddles, the cougar was moaning and holding its guts in with a clawed hand and lots of confused mewling, and the boar-faced man had taken a spear through the chest and been transformed back into a pigeon-chested twenty-something wearing a filthy pig-skin cape.
Only a handful of Orias’s people were still standing, but they were formidable: a teen in a pleated skirt with a scarred face who I took for a poltergeister, especially when a cloud of broken glass and nails began swirling around her. A purple-skinned woman with three faces and fanged mouths all over her body. Another woman with iridescent wings and arms that ended in preying-mantis claws, like something out of a China Miéville novel. They surrounded Orias’s white pavilion like an honor guard.
“Kill ‘em all?” Squat said.
“Sure.” I activated all my polaroids at once, so that high-resolution copies of myself popped up all through the camp, all drawing a knife with one hand and an axe with the other, all converging on our enemies. Only the original me could actually hurt anybody, but the others added to the general confusion.
We waded in. I got my axe into the mantis-girl, but only sheared off her scythelike-forearm. Then Squat was there, pulling her head off just like I’d tug a ripe lemon off a branch, then tossing it aside. I looked around for another target and saw he’d already killed the other two. In, like, a second.
“Squat. What the hell? You’re like a murder virtuoso.”
“I’m short,” he said. “So I try harder.”
Damn it. I was starting to like the repulsive little monster.
The sounds of fighting in the camp had pretty much ceased – the people I could see who we
re still moving were racing off into the night at great speed. It was a shame I didn’t actually have an a death-wall erected around Tolerance, or I could have made sure all the pests got exterminated – but most of these were hired goons anyway, who wouldn’t cause much trouble without central leadership.
Which meant I just had to finish taking care of the central leadership.
“Let’s see if there’s anyone left in the big tent,” Squat said, and rushed the white pavilion.
I went in after him, and found him gaping at Orias, who was surrounded by a shimmering sphere of light, rainbow-colored like an oil slick, her eyes closed, in some kind of deep magical trance.
“She’s alive.” Squat looked at me. “They said you brought Sarlat her head...” He grimaced. “So it’s a double-cross.”
The spore-lord was in one corner, muttering and fuming – really fuming, puffs of black mold rising from his body like smoke. “You!” he shouted. “This ambush was a disaster, Sarlat sent some of his people to circle around from behind and take us hard in the rear –”
I really missed Rondeau right then. He would have gotten a kick out of all this talk about people taking it in the rear.
“Not so much a double-cross,” I said to Squat. “More of a triple-cross, really.”
The spore-lord realized I wasn’t actually his ally pretty quickly, and raised his hands to enact some nasty magic. I didn’t give him the chance. I knew my blades were useless against his faux-body, and blunt-force-trauma, though satisfying viscerally, was also ineffective against his sort of distributed biology.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to fight things like him. You just kill them with fire. I took an enchanted Zippo from my coat pocket, flipped it open, and blew on the flame.
A cone of fire billowed out and consumed the spore-lord. The fire passed over Orias’s shimmering sphere – her Hamster Ball of Invincibility – too, without causing any notable effect, but I hadn’t expected it to hurt her. The fire was a lot hotter than your average butane flame when it hit the spore-lord, and he collapsed in on himself with a noise like burning styrofoam, a sort of shriveling squeak. His spores tries to escape but flared into orange sparks as the heat ignited them. When the flames subsided, there wasn’t much left but ashes and the half-melted buttons from his shirt.
“I know it’s a cliché,” I said. “But I never did like lawyers.”
“I, myself, never even took the bar exam.” Squat backed up, putting some space between us, but not running away, which was either threatening or interesting or both.
I drew my dagger – the one my dear husband gave me – and began carving through the shield of magical force surrounding Orias. The compulsive murder-itch got really bad now that I was so close to her, and I admit I went into something of a frenzy, slashing at the magical wards as fast as she could erect them. But my dagger was forged in the underworld by the god of death. It can cut through flesh, and bone, and steel, and lies, and light, and ghosts, and magic. (It can cut through nearly anything, except all the bullshit. There’s no reliable way to cut through all the bullshit.)
I could tell Orias wanted to talk to me or claw my eyes out or something, so I just gritted my teeth and gave into the geas and let my dagger take her head off, messy and awful as that was. When she gasped her last breath, the murder-itch subsided instantly, and my mind once more felt entirely like my own. (As much as it ever does, especially lately, with big hunks of memory torn out.)
I turned to Squat. I was covered in Orias’s blood and assorted muds and dust and other foulness, but I was still nowhere near as ugly as him.
He raised his hands. “Hey. I’ve got no loyalty to Sarlat, okay? He’s just the only one who’ll give me work anymore, and a guy like me needs work. I’ll keep your secret, I’ll say Orias was dead all along –”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and it didn’t. Sarlat was bound now that I’d fulfilled our bargain by slaying his enemy. He didn’t have to like me, but he couldn’t harm me, or cause me to be harmed – he even had to do favors for me. Favor one would be telling me about the Eater, because I am the curious type. “Here’s the thing, Squat. It’s not your fault, not entirely, but... you’re a fucking monster. You’ve killed innocent people, right? You’ve done terrible things?”
“True, but –”
But nothing. I brought out my silver axe and buried it in the center of his hideous head, then twisted the blade and wrenched it out. Squat sat down hard on his unsightly ass. I’d left a giant split that ran between his eyes and met up with his sideways mouth. I turned away, feeling vaguely ashamed of myself. He’d been a monster, but maybe not such a bad guy –
“That hurt,” he said, and I turned, chilled. The wound in his head was sealing as I watched, and I was reminded of the way I’d taken an axe to the head myself not so long ago, and to similarly little effect. “The thing is, I can’t die. It’s part of why I’m valuable to people – or things – like Sarlat. That’s part of the curse, too. No one will ever like me – and that means I have to be around forever, so I can be forever unloved.”
“Shit, Squat,” I said. “I like you. At least so far. You’re gross, but so’s almost everything.”
“Huh.” He rubbed the place on his face where a gaping whole had been. “So, what now?”
“Well, I could put you in a hole and fill the hole with concrete and leave you down there for a million years. But I got into the monster-slaying business, not the prison-industrial-complex business. The problem is, I don’t feel good about letting you run around loose doing more murder for whoever – sorry, whomever – cuts you a check or gives you a bag of cheeseburgers or whatever it is you take in payment.”
“Look, I’m not ideologically committed to working for evil people,” Squat said. “They’re just usually the ones who have suitable job openings. So, I mean, what I’m saying is...”
I groaned. I wanted to tell him to fuck off before I really tested his immortality. I’m pretty good at killing things that are conventionally considered unkillable. But I thought of my tattoo: Do Better. I deserved a chance to redeem myself, right? Would I deny this guy that same chance?
“Fine,” I said. “Consider yourself an unpaid intern. Come with me to deal with Sarlat. And don’t think about doing any treacherous shit – I know you think you’re hard to kill, but you’re an amateur next to me.” I started to walk out of the tent, then paused. “I am not getting a sidecar on my motorcycle for you to ride around in.”
“You’re the boss,” he said. “So... are we going to kill my old boss now?”
“No need for murder in this case,” I said. “Sarlat works for me now.”
A PLAN IS A THING THAT FAILS
The street was filled with the dead, mostly Sarlat’s people, cut down by Orias’s crew. Nothing was moving, not even scavenger birds, though I imagined the buzzards would be along in time to eat whatever corpses proved edible – many of the dead were so inhuman their flesh probably wouldn’t be compatible with a vulture’s stomach. We picked our way among the fallen, Squat pausing occasionally to mercifully dispatch the not-quite-dead-yet from both gangs.
Tolerance was a ghost town again, pretty much. I kept expecting Sarlat to emerge from the jail, transforming into a wolf as he came – and I gave it even odds that Squat would turn on me to help his old boss, in that case. He wasn’t bound to me, and I didn’t have time to put him in a circle just then.
But the loup-garou didn’t come out, which was odd. He didn’t strike me as the lying-in-wait type. More the fools-rush-in type.
“So Sarlat can’t kill you?” Squat said, standing beside me just a dozen yards from the yawning-open door of the jail. “Maybe that’s why he’s holding back, hoping you’ll just go away?”
“I’ve heard crazier ideas.” I crept up to the door, trying to think of loopholes in the geas that prevented him from acting against me. Could he set a booby trap? Not if he had any expectation that I’d be the one to trigger it, not without dying himsel
f in agony for breaking the deal. But maybe he’d tried to do it anyway, pain of painful death be damned? He seemed too conceited to give up his own life just to kill me, but it wasn’t like I knew him all that well.
“Marla,” Nicolette shouted. “If that’s you, get me the fuck out of here. I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate you any more, but I hate you so fucking much right now –”
I stepped into the jail. The only light in the room came from a lantern inside the cell, but I could see well enough. Nicolette, still disguised as Orias, was on the floor, resting on one cheek. Sarlat was also on the floor, in a pool of blood, very much dead.
“Gods damn it.” I’d had such a clever plan. Trap Sarlat in the geas, force him to tell me about the Eater, and then force him to help me take out the Eater, assuming the Eater was someone that needed to be taken out. Gloat a little and rub it in his face that I’d outsmarted him – petty, sure, but I didn’t think it was a failure of character to act like a jerk to someone who sold virgins to cults for ritual sacrifice. But Sarlat was dead. So much for being clever. “What happened here, Nicolette? Did one of Orias’s people get in and kill him?”
“I killed him!” she said – or screamed, and for the first time, I realized she was really upset, not just being ill-tempered or pretending outrage to amuse herself. “Do you know what that sick fucker tried to do to me? I don’t know who this chick you made me look like was, but her and Sarlat had some kind of messed-up relationship. He kept talking to me, telling me I should have loved him the way he needed to be loved, that I brought this on myself. Creepy as fuck, but I went along with things, I played dead, because I’m your goddamn slave oracle bloodhound and that’s the task you gave me. But then. Then he kissed me, Marla, he thought I was dead, and he still stuck his tongue in so deep I almost gagged on it. I could have stood that, but I could tell he was getting excited, and I was pretty sure he was about to move on from kissing to something a lot worse, so...”
