by T. A. Pratt
“Sit and eat.” Leda pointed them to a small dining table set with silver trays.
Marla dropped into a chair at the head of the table and leaned forward, inhaling the welcome smell of coffee, bacon, eggs, toast, hash browns, and silver-dollar pancakes. “My compliments to the homunculus you stuck a chef’s hat on,” Marla said, and dug in. Pelham made a more formal thank-you and began eating, too.
“So,” Dr. Husch said. “Your plan is…?”
“Government in exile, for now.” Marla snapped a piece of bacon in half. “This is too crispy. Bring me a phone, we’ll call Hamil and tell him how to arrange things. Damned if I’m going to let some uppity death god try to call the shots in my city. We’ll make life so unpleasant for him that he’ll beg to leave.”
“You haven’t called him yet?” Leda snapped her fingers, signaling an orderly. “I just assumed…”
“My phone didn’t work,” Marla said. “Neither did the phone I tried to borrow. I think Mr. Death put some bad mojo on me, made it so I can’t contact my troops. Pelham can’t call them, either, because magically speaking, he’s indistinguishable from me—it’s a long story. What do you know about how things stand in the city? Is Rondeau okay?” She wasn’t too worried—Rondeau was a survivor, but there was a difference between just surviving and being okay.
“He’s in hiding, according to Hamil. He gave Death an earful of Cursing and escaped in the chaos.”
“Nice.” It was good to hear Mr. Death could be harmed, not just by her dagger, but by Curses, too. Those weaknesses gave her hope there might be others. “Look, since I can’t contact them directly, do you mind passing messages for me?”
“I don’t have much choice.” An orderly appeared with a tray holding an old-fashioned rotary phone on a long cord. He set it on the table, and Leda dialed with quick precision. “Hamil,” she said, after a moment. “Marla apple camera scowl.” She frowned. “What do you mean you don’t understand? I said, ‘Marla sandal scissors glass!’”
“Shit,” Marla said softly. “You’re talking gibberish, Leda. Give me the phone.”
Frowning, confused, Leda handed over the phone, but before Marla even got it to her ear she heard the squeal and crack of static and feedback. “Damn it,” she said, and gave back the phone. “Tell him…tell him what the weather’s like.”
“Hamil, the weather here is clear and a little cool, but I suspect it will get hotter as the day goes on.”
“Now tell him what I’m eating,” Marla said.
“Marla panda swamp toilet casket—damn it, stop interrupting!” she said, annoyed.
“It’s weaponized aphasia,” Marla said. She shoved her plate away, her appetite gone. “Tell Hamil you’ll call him back.”
“I…we’ll talk again soon.” Leda hung up. “Aphasia? I wasn’t saying the words I thought I was saying?”
“No. Whenever you tried to say something about me, it just turned to gibberish and nonsense.” She sighed. “I guess we should stay hopeful. Got something to write with?”
Leda called for a notepad and a pen.
“Okay, try to take dictation. ‘Hamil, I need you to get rid of Ayres, because right now he’s the only one providing Death with intelligence about our operations.’ Okay, read that back.”
“Hamil, emu candle tonal hepatitis,” Dr. Husch said miserably. “The words looked right when I wrote them, but now…” She shook her head.
Marla snapped her fingers and gestured, then took the pen and notepad and tried to write her own note. When she lifted pen from paper, there was nothing but gibberish written there, all the wrong words. Death was mucking with their minds, tweaking the language-using centers of their brains and making it impossible for Marla to convey a message to her associates in the city. “Maybe if Hamil came here,” she said thoughtfully. “But then, he probably couldn’t carry messages or orders back, either. Information can get out, to reach me—I’m sure Death wants me to know what’s happening in Felport, that he’s in control—but I can’t send any information in. Death is smarter than I thought.”
“If he’s truly a god, Marla, then the universe…contorts itself to suit him.” Leda shook her head. “I don’t know what you can do to stop him. This is more than the magic mortals do. Have you considered giving in to his request? Just handing over the dagger?”
Marla grunted. “Things aren’t that bad yet, Leda.”
The doctor raised one perfect eyebrow. “You’ve been banished from your city. You can’t get back in, and you can’t give orders to your lieutenants. Your home is occupied by an ancient and formidable power. How could it be worse?”
“The difference between you and me is, I’ve got a lot more imagination,” Marla said. “I need to grab a shower. I think best in the shower. You mind?”
“Of course not. You know where the bathroom is.”
“Thanks.” Marla tossed her napkin onto her plate and left the room, trying not to show how tired and dirty and beaten-down she felt.
Standing under the steady pounding stream of hot water, Marla tried to relax her bunched-up muscles, but her body was just as tense as her mind. She closed her eyes and stood in steam and wetness, poking and prodding at her problem with all her strategic and tactical know-how, but every stratagem struck one unavoidable problem: she couldn’t get into the city. How could she wage a battle when the battleground was so far away? She wasn’t just defeated, she was irrelevant. Death was in her home. It wasn’t enough for him to rule the underworld—oh, no, he had to go walking in the world at large and take over her city, to leave behind his land of the dead and fuck with her city of the living…
She opened her eyes. She had an idea. It was a big idea. Possibly a stupid idea. But it was certainly the last thing in the world Death would expect her to do.
Marla got out of the shower, toweled off, and put on one of Leda’s oversized terry-cloth robes. By the time she went into the living room, where Pelham and Dr. Husch were comparing techniques for polishing silverware, Marla was grinning.
“Hey, Leda,” she said. “Let me borrow your phone again.”
“Who can you possibly call?”
“Just a friend of mine who can help me with my new plan.”
“And what plan is that?”
“I’m going to invade the underworld,” Marla said.
7
B y noon the day after Marla’s banishment, Rondeau had a base of operations in the Wolf Bay Café, a funky little place by the beach with a kitschy Native American theme, decorated with airbrushed posters of translucent wolves superimposed over the moon and befeathered dream-catchers dangling from the roof beams like outré spiderwebs. The café was frequented mostly by ordinaries, but the owner was a minor sorcerer and a Marla Mason loyalist, so she gave Rondeau use of the back room, which appeared to be a storage space for extra tables and chairs. Still, he was in no position to be picky. At least he had a place to rest his weary ass, and a protocol for secretly contacting Hamil and Ernesto, his agents on the inside. What he didn’t have was any earthly idea at all what he should be doing.
Rondeau sat at a table, sipping a large strong coffee, pondering his options. The apprentices in the city were abuzz, and Rondeau was good at picking out bits of choice information, though most of what he heard was doubtful or just outright wrong—Marla was dead, Marla had abdicated, Marla’s closest advisors had sold her out; the Walking Death was the angel Lucifer, he was the secret leader of the Slow Assassins, he was Marla’s brother; Rondeau had mortally wounded Death, he had taken a bullet meant for Marla, he was hiding in the sewer wearing Marla’s cloak. Ha. He wished.
He wasn’t sure how to lead a resistance in a city where only one in a thousand people even knew there was a hostile occupation going on. It wasn’t like he could bomb Death’s offices, or poison the food of the god’s troops, or try to rally the citizens in a popular uprising. Marla’s was a shadow government, a secret empire of magic and criminality. Marla and her kind protected the city from interdimensional i
nvasions and hostile spirits and evil wizards, and in exchange, the mayor and police chief cheerfully let them have illegal gambling operations, run unregulated import-export businesses, and make unhindered real estate deals. It was symbiosis. But now Death had taken Marla’s place, and the civilian government wouldn’t care, as long as he kept the werewolves from the door. And while other sorcerers would surely chafe at being under the thumb of a god, they wouldn’t necessarily struggle too much as long as their business and studies could continue. Rondeau began to wish he’d asked for a giant slug of whiskey in his coffee, just to make his uselessness more bearable for himself.
“Rondeau? I’m here to help you however I can.”
Rondeau looked up from his cup. An Asian man with round rimless glasses and a damp-looking complexion stood before him. “You’re Mr. Beadle,” Rondeau said. He was good with names and faces, which was one reason Marla liked having him around. “You work for Hamil, right?” Beadle bowed. Rondeau tried to remember his specialty. “You’re, like the opposite of a chaos magician, right?”
“I prefer order to entropy, yes,” Beadle said. “I was distressed when this Walking Death character appeared. The city was finally approaching a stable equilibrium, and now, well…” He twisted his mouth in distaste. “May I sit?”
“Sure, sure,” Rondeau said. “So. You’re my resistance, huh?”
“Oh, there are others. Langford, of course, is eager to join us, though he’ll expect to be paid—Hamil will take care of that. And Ernesto is lending us the use of Partridge.”
“Now we’re cooking.” Langford was an independent contractor, and a biomancer—a sort of cross between a sorcerer and a scientist. He’d done a lot of work for Marla, and was knowledgeable and capable of cool shit. As for Partridge…well, Partridge just burned things. Sometimes burning things was what you needed. “I think we can scare up some help from the Honeyed Knots and the Four Tree Gang if we need more hands, too,” Rondeau said. The gangs were made up of disgraced apprentices, alley-wizards, and minor magicians who lacked the discipline or inclination to become real sorcerers, but they could be useful—most knew just enough to be dangerous.
“Yes, we have personnel,” Beadle said. “And I can help with the logistics of any operations. But, if I may ask…what are we doing, precisely? My instructions were brief and somewhat cryptic.”
“We’re the resistance.” Rondeau shrugged. “We’re supposed to get Death to leave Felport.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We make sure he doesn’t have any fun. We make his life miserable. This isn’t like some political occupation, you know? Death could have just killed Marla, but he wants to play at being king up here where the breathing people hang out. So we’ll make sure it sucks for him. I get the feeling he’s not used to a lot of backtalk where he’s from. The dead are probably easy subjects to lord over. Let’s show him how living people resist.”
“Thank you,” Beadle said, apparently with real sincerity. “That’s exactly what I was hoping for. A mission statement. A vision. I’m no good at those, you see—setting policy isn’t my gift.”
“So what is your gift?”
“Implementing policy,” Beadle said. “Tell me: how do you feel about bombs?”
“I feel pretty good about them.”
“This will do.” The Walking Death looked down from the windows of the penthouse on the sunny summertime glory of Felport’s gleaming financial district and, in the distance, the bay. He held a fine cigar he’d found in the apartment.
“It’s a lovely place, sir.” Ayres joined him on the balcony. “This was the sorcerer Sauvage’s apartment, and before him, it belonged to Somerset. Both great men, though the latter was greater than the former. Marla inherited this place when she took over as chief sorcerer, but…” He shook his head. “She chose to preserve it as a memorial to Sauvage, and to go on living in some horrible fleapit of a place near the docks. I can’t understand her at all.”
“She does seem a bit inscrutable.” Death leaned on the balcony. “I love the air and the view here, Ayres. The air and the view in my realm? Not so pleasant, I assure you.” He took a drag on his cigar, then blew a few smoke rings into the wind. “You living people certainly know how to live. Where’s Booth?”
“Tracking down the last of your appointments, my lord.”
“Mmm. I have to talk to more of them, do I?”
“It’s best, my lord.” Death had gone around and visited a few of the city’s leading sorcerers—Granger, and Nicolette, and Ernesto, and Hamil—who had all reacted as Ayres had predicted. Their misgivings were ultimately irrelevant, of course. Once Death proved his power by neutralizing their sad attempts to attack and fight him, they all bowed their heads. Death hadn’t forced any of them to swear loyalty in circles of binding, however, which meant they could betray him. Ayres had asked why he took no precautions against treachery, and Death laughed. “Any feeble attempts at resistance will be more amusing than annoying, I’m sure. Besides, I’m a god, and we always keep our promises, which is why we make so few of them. Any circle of binding requires a certain degree of reciprocity, you see, for the magic to balance—I’d be forced to promise something in exchange for their promises, and I’d just as soon avoid the bother. If you knew you were going to exist for as long as I am, you’d be less promiscuous with your own promises.”
Death still needed to see the other sorcerers, though, so Nicolette and Booth had gone to fetch them. The apartment door opened, and Booth came in, scowling, followed by the Chamberlain, who was as elegant as always.
“The black bitch is here,” Booth said, and Ayres quickly crossed the room and struck him across the face, hard enough to rock his illusory head back on his illusory shoulders.
“Do not insult your betters,” Ayres said. “Or I will make your bones lie down again.”
“She’s no better of mine.” Booth rubbed his cheek, expression strangely thoughtful. “She’s pretty for a colored, I’ll grant you, but she’s uppity.”
“You’ll have to forgive Booth.” Death strolled in from the balcony. “He’s the product of another era, and he was rather unreconstructed even then. Still, for as long as he’s been dead, you’d think he’d realize you’re all the same color underneath.”
“I have other people to track down for you, sir.” Booth bowed to Death.
“Yes, shoo,” Death said, and Booth left, without glancing at either Ayres or the Chamberlain.
For her part, the Chamberlain only looked at Death. “Should I judge you by the company you keep?”
“I don’t care how you judge me. Booth hates black people, and also Yankees, and uppity women, and it’s all very tedious. I don’t know how he musters the enthusiasm, honestly. I don’t care enough to hate any of you.”
“You only exist because of us,” the Chamberlain said. “You are defined by us, by our cessation. When the last human dies, you will die with her.”
“Oh, no, no. I’m the death of all living things, from cockroaches to whales to kudzu to yogurt. Humans are just the most entertaining, because you worry about death so much, and think so hard about the aftermath. There is no afterlife for a field of corn, you know, when it’s mown down. But you humans, you just have to go somewhere, and you all come to me.”
“And yet, here you are, come to us. Are you going to offer me a seat?”
“Common courtesy is for those who care,” Death said. “Listen, swear your loyalty to me, would you? I’d like to sample some of the scotch in that cabinet.”
The Chamberlain crossed her arms. “I am willing to accept your rule in this city, for now, but you should know—the Founders’ Ball is this weekend, and if you rule the city, you must host the party.”
“Do not give the lord of death an ultimatum,” Ayres said. “How dare you?”
The Chamberlain ignored him, as she always, always had when she’d met him in the past, and it made Ayres’s blood boil for the hundredth time.
“A ball, hmm? Fo
r whom?” Death seemed mildly curious.
“The ghosts of the founding families of Felport demand tribute every five years. An elaborate party, honoring their efforts to create this city. If the party is not held…” She shook her head. “They’ll destroy it all. You won’t have a city to run by morning.”
Death laughed. “You think I’m afraid of ghosts? They’re just refugees from my realm! If they fuss, I’ll toss them into the deepest Hell I have. They won’t dare bother me.”
The Chamberlain stiffened and gained an inch in height, which was impressive, given how tall she already held herself. “The ghosts of the founding families deserve more—”
“Settle down,” Death said. “It’s fine. I love a good party. We never have parties in my realm. How about this: we’ll have a grand masque. Everyone will come in costume. I’ll drag up some of the greatest musicians in my realm for the night, I’ll use all my glamours to make the ballroom into a pleasure palace to rival Xanadu, and I’ll pull subjective time like warm taffy and make the night seem to go on for days. Will that be acceptable? I bet it will outclass whatever Marla had planned.”
The Chamberlain curtsied formally. “Indeed, my lord.”
Death waved her away, and she swiftly departed. “Who’s next?”
“Only Viscarro and the Bay Witch,” Ayres said. He wondered if Viscarro would come out of his hole, or if they’d have to go into the vaults after him. Death and Ayres returned to the balcony, this time with drinks in hand, and took in the view for a few moments, until the doorbell sounded.
“I’ve got the Bay Witch,” Nicolette said, barging in, white overalls spattered with paint, charms dangling from her dreadlocks. She was a chaos magician, a relatively new addition to the top of Felport’s magical hierarchy, and had never liked Marla much anyway. She’d become an eager ally of Death. “Come on in, hon.”
