by T. A. Pratt
“Too bad there’s nothing to hunt down here,” Marla said, with bravado she didn’t really feel. “Except, what, the ghosts of rats?”
Bethany slithered forward, her mechanical legs pistoning smoothly, and then rose to a great height, looking down on Marla. “Who is the little man? My little appetizer.”
“Don’t touch him—” Marla began, but Bethany spun impossibly fast, swiping out with her spiked tail and smacking Marla across the room. Marla landed hard, groaned, and sat up, then jerked back when she almost stuck her hand into the spinning spiral staircase. If Bethany had smacked her with a little more English on the blow, Marla would have hit the stairs and been transformed herself, into a bloody red cloud of fragments. “You’re still a bitch.” Marla rose, but then she screamed—actually screamed—as Bethany flashed her a grin and proceeded to eat Pelham.
She ate Pelham. Bethany’s jaw unhinged, unfolded, expanded to impossible size, and she snapped downward, Pelham disappearing into her now-vast mouth with only a little squeak. Then Bethany rose up again and Marla’s valet disappeared, feet waving, down her throat. Her jaw folded up to human proportions again. Bethany’s throat was still human-sized, Pelham should never have been able to fit, but…but…
But this was the underworld, where physics were, at best, a convenience. Still, underworld or not, some things were constant.
Marla drew her dagger, and Bethany belched a gout of steam. “You next,” Bethany said. “Shishkebabed.” From somewhere on her body Bethany retrieved a steampunk crossbow, an oversized thing of elaborate flywheels and tiny humming engines, loaded with half a dozen bolts as long as a forearm and thick as the fat end of a pool cue. She fired, the bolts launching with little percussive noises like champagne corks popping, and Marla dodged and dove and rolled, trying to think—how to fight a dragon?
The same way you fight anything. Hit it where it’s sensitive. She rolled again, closer, coming perilously near the metal talons on the ends of Bethany’s mechanical legs, and then lashed up with her dagger, slicing neatly through the overlapping white armored plates of Bethany’s belly. Bethany screamed like a steam whistle and reared up, trying to escape, but that only exposed more of her belly to Marla, and so Marla rose from her crouch and kept cutting, dragging the blade down, parting metal as easily as cloth.
“Ms. Mason!” Pelham said, and yes, he was in there, she could see him through the slash she’d made. He clung to a metal lattice, face sweaty and streaked with soot, eyes wide.
“Get back!” Marla said, and when he retreated as far as he could, she lashed out with her blade, slicing away a dozen plates of armor. Bethany staggered back, and Pelham fell out of the hole Marla had made. Before Bethany got out of range, Marla went for the wires and tubes and hydraulics at the ankles and knees of her front legs, severing connections and spilling hot dark oil all over the station floor.
Marla grabbed Pelham and dragged him away as Bethany fell. The dragon-witch began dragging herself backward with her functional rear legs, eyes fixed on Marla, crossbow forgotten on the floor. “You killed me,” Bethany said, retreating into her train. “You did this.”
“We’ve established that,” Marla said, breathing hard. “Now stop the staircase from spinning, or I’m coming onto the train after you. You remember what happened last time I boarded your train, right? I might not be able to kill you again, but I can force you to spend the rest of your eternity repairing all the damage I’ll do.”
Bethany hissed and vanished into the train. The spiral stair slowed down and finally stopped.
“Okay,” Marla said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” She retrieved her bag, the contents of which hadn’t done her much good, but might serve her better in the future.
“I’ve never been eaten before,” Pelham said, voice trembling. “It was most unpleasant.”
“Just be glad she didn’t have stomach acids. Come on. Upward and outward.” She hoped Bethany wouldn’t start the stair spinning again when they were halfway up. “I’ll lead. Who knows what we’ll find up there.” Marla stepped onto the stair, which, in the real world, led up to one of San Francisco’s rougher neighborhoods. It would lead elsewhere here, she was sure. “Unless it’s somebody else I killed. I hope that isn’t the theme for this visit.” But she knew just thinking that increased the likelihood it would be. They were unlikely to encounter any of Pelham’s personal demons, assuming he had any—he was magically bound to her in a subservient position, and she guessed that her own ghosts would take precedence.
“How many people have you killed?” Pelham said from the stairs below her.
“With my own hands? Not that many. I mean, too many, even one is too many, but not as many as most people probably think. There was Bethany. A guy named Joshua, who killed a friend of mine.” And broke my heart. “Somerset, but he was un dead when I killed him, so maybe he doesn’t count. A jungle sorcerer named Mutex who tried to destroy the world, but he was complicated, too—I only killed his body, his mind was somewhere else at the time. Then there was a guy I knocked off a rooftop in my misspent youth—though that was an accident, we were fighting and he fell. I atoned as best I could for that, made offerings at his grave, tried to obviate the bad karma….” She paused. “And, ah, when I was about fourteen, there was this guy, and he…hell. This is going to be hell.”
Rich emerald light burst in, and Marla emerged from the darkness into a new and—thankfully—unfamiliar place, a lush green wet jungle filled with the calling of birds and the screeching of monkeys. The humid air smelled of wet leaves and sickly sweet flowers. The stairway jutted surrealistically up from a tangle of vines and undergrowth.
Pelham came after Marla as she gazed at the canopy of branches above. “If it’s not too forward, may I ask, whom did you kill in a place like this?”
“Nobody. I’ve never been to a spot like this before. I don’t know where—”
“Marla Mason.” Mutex emerged from the trees, hands clasped behind his back. He looked as he had in life, dark skin, dark eyes, bare chest, wearing a short iridescent cape woven of insect wings. “Welcome. I will cut out your living heart.” He smiled, and his teeth were little obsidian chips, and when he showed his hands, his fingers were knives of volcanic glass, the same kind of knives he’d once used to cut out the hearts of half a dozen sorcerers before Marla stopped him.
“I just kicked Bethany’s ass,” Marla said. “Do you think you can—”
The jungle behind Mutex stirred. Something vast and green approached, trees snapping and falling as it came.
Marla’s mouth went dry. “Run.”
But before she could run, Mutex sprouted several long shafts from his chest. He stared down at himself, puzzled, and fell backward. The vast thing behind him paused, then drew back, retreating before it fully showed itself, leaving Marla with the impression of a walking green cliffside.
She turned, to find Pelham holding Bethany’s clockwork crossbow, which now held only two bolts. “I thought the weapon might be useful,” he said, almost apologetically, and Marla hugged him.
“Good man.” She released him. Mutex groaned and began trying to pull one of the crossbow bolts out of his chest, crying out in frustration when his razor-sharp fingers cut right through the shaft. “We’d better go before he gets up again,” Marla said.
“That enormous thing that followed him. What was it?”
Marla brushed hanging vines away and kept her eyes open for snakes and poisonous frogs. “Mutex was a priest of the old Aztec gods. He killed people and cut out their hearts as sacrifices, hoping to bring his gods back to life. Some of those gods are nasty. That thing behind him…I think it was one of those gods. Or at least Mutex’s own personal version of one of those gods. Either way, it could have hurt us badly, but knocking Mutex down was enough to make it pause. I don’t want to give it a chance to catch up, though. Something that big can cover a lot of ground. Thanks for thinking fast. My usual response is more fight than flight, but when I saw that thing coming o
ut of the jungle, buggering off seemed best.”
“That’s two, then,” Pelham said. “Of the people you’ve killed. Do you think we’ll have to face them all?”
Marla sighed. “Yeah. Probably. I mean, I do think so, which means it will almost certainly happen, damn it. I guess deep down I knew I’d have to answer for the things I’ve done, no matter how justified those actions seemed at the time.” And the worst was yet to come, though Marla didn’t want to scare Pelham. Somerset was terrifying. Joshua had been her lover, before she murdered him. And the last one, the boy from her hometown, from before she ran away from home, from before she knew magic…That would be hard. They would all be hard. Cole had told her there was always a cost to visiting the underworld. She hadn’t thought the cost would involve ripping the scabs off her own history of violence.
13
M arla and Pelham trudged through the sticky jungle, alert to every rustle and roar and screech in the distance, afraid Mutex and his pet god would catch up to them. Eventually they emerged into a clearing, where they were confronted by a crumbling step pyramid, all dark vine-crusted stone, with a human-scaled stairway leading to the top. Long gutters ran down either side of the stairway, stained the dark reddish-brown of old dried blood.
“Do we go up?” Pelham said.
Marla nodded. “We climbed stairs to get out of the last place. Going up seems counterintuitive in a place like this, but like Cole said, direction is more a courtesy than a fact down here.”
“Who do you think we’ll see next?” Pelham puffed a bit as they began the long climb. The distances they were crossing might be imaginary on some level, but the energy Pelham and Marla were expending was real.
“Hopefully nobody. An empty throne room. But if we’re not that lucky, I don’t know. I killed Bethany before I killed Mutex, so we’re not going in reverse chronological order. If there’s a pattern, I’m not privy to it.” They paused halfway up the pyramid to rest, and Marla took a bottle of water from her bag and shared it with Pelham. A millipede scurried up the face of the pyramid, pursued by tiny green lizards, and Marla wondered if they were the ghosts of an entomologist and a herpetologist in their ideal forms, or if they were just part of the scenery, the illusion of jungle and pyramids that Mutex had made. The air smelled wet, and faintly of coppery blood and sweet flowers. “All right. Up we go.”
They reached the top of the pyramid, where Marla had expected to find a slab of stone for human sacrifices. Instead, there was a metal door, like the access to an interior stairway from a rooftop. Marla turned and looked back the way they’d come, shading her eyes against the sun, and there was nothing but jungle as far as she could see, except for one green hill—
—which began moving toward her, knocking down trees as it came. She swore. Not a hill. “Time to go.” She tugged on the handle of the door.
It didn’t open. Marla kicked at the door, but even with her magically reinforced boots, it wouldn’t budge. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” She looked behind her, and the green hill was still approaching, a creature bigger than the pyramid they stood upon, and hungry, surely hungry.
“Allow me to try.” Pelham drew a thin leather case from the inside of his dirty suit jacket. He opened it, revealing a row of thin metal devices.
“Lockpicks? You’re a lockpick?”
“There are 145 different types of locks in the Chamberlain’s mansion, Ms. Mason, and I was trained to open them all. This resembles the door to the pantry. I often helped myself to midnight snacks there, I confess, and opened it more often than the others.”
“You seem remarkably calm, considering,” she said, as Pelham bent and began working on the lock, fiddling little bits of metal into the door handle.
“I don’t know what you saw, Ms. Mason. I chose not to look. I further choose to believe I will open this door before whatever you saw reaches us.”
“That’s the spirit.” The green thing was closer now, and she could see Mutex on top of it, like a man standing on the deck of a rocking ship. She could also see the green thing’s eyes. They were as big as the Ferris wheel down by Felport’s esplanade.
“There.” The door clicked open and swung inward.
Marla looked through the door at a dark street, surrounded by tall buildings. Far behind them, something roared, a sound like the Earth cracking apart, and Pelham rushed through the door, taking the lead for once, and Marla followed, kicking the door shut behind her, suddenly glad that she hadn’t been able to break the lock. Because now the door latched and locked securely, whereas, if she’d broken it down, a passageway between this place and that place might have remained open.
Pelham gestured at the buildings, the rain-slicked streets, the dirty alleyway off to the right. “Is this—”
“Felport. Yeah.” Marla’s voice was steady. It took some effort to keep it that way. “But not exactly the one we left. See there?” She pointed to the distant spire of the Whitcroft-Ivory building, the tallest skyscraper in the city, which was all girders and scaffolding for the top few floors. “That building is still being constructed. Back home, it’s finished.”
“So, then, when are we?” Pelham said.
Marla shook her head. “Work on the building was stalled for a couple years. But that was at least five or six years ago, back when I was a freelancer. And this isn’t time travel. There are no people here, no cars, no traffic sounds, no radios, nothing.” This felt less like Marla’s city and more like the set of a postapocalyptic movie. “I bet it’s Somerset. We fought on a night like this. Though I’d expect great clouds of pigeons in that case. He was a vermomancer, among other things. Let’s keep moving.”
“Vermomancer?” Pelham followed her down the sidewalk, in the direction of the Whitcroft-Ivory building. “I’m unfamiliar with the term. A sorcerer of…worms?”
“Vermin. Somerset used rats and roaches, but he especially liked pigeons. Rock doves are all over cities, you know, and nobody takes notice of them, but send five hundred pigeons after somebody, each one weighing about a pound, with talons out and beaks stabbing and wings flapping, and when they’re done, you’ll find nothing left but a bloody pecked-up mess.” She stepped around a pile of rags and garbage on the sidewalk. “He was a nasty guy, Somerset. Besides his magical ambitions, he was a slumlord, and he used to drive out tenants with swarms of roaches and rats, then raise the rents before new people moved in. The city was a polluted, unpleasant mess under his leadership, at least for a lot of people, but he made the sorcerers under him rich, so there was a lot of loyalty there.” She looked skyward. “But I don’t see any pigeons.”
“Watch out,” Pelham said, and she stopped short, realizing she’d almost stepped right on another pile of refuse, this one bigger than the last, and more fragrant. Marla started to go around it, and then the pile of garbage reached out a hand, grasped her ankle, and moaned her name.
Marla jerked back, drawing her knife, but the thing on the street didn’t attack her, it merely shifted and half rolled over. She could make it out now, just, as a human being wrapped in torn rags, body broken, folded, spindled, dampened, splattered. A rather beautiful green eye rolled into sight and gazed at her.
Pelham vomited.
“I didn’t die for two days,” the thing on the sidewalk said, and Marla’s own stomach rolled over. “After you threw me from the roof.”
“I’m sorry,” Marla whispered. “It was nothing personal. I was working for someone. You were working for someone else. They should have fought each other. We fought instead.” She didn’t even know this dead man’s name. He’d been an apprentice, Marla a mercenary in someone’s temporary employ, and they’d fought on a rooftop for possession of a deck of cards wrapped in a silk scarf that their respective masters both wanted very badly.
“I suffer for the things I did.” The thing on the sidewalk coughed wetly. “You will suffer, too, when you are like me.” It tried to drag itself toward her. “I will make you like me. I will pull you down here with me, and we w
ill run into the gutters together when it rains.”
“I’m sorry,” Marla said again, meaning it, but knowing it was empty. “Can I—could I—put you out of your misery? A knife in your brain, would that give you peace, even here, for a little while?”
“Die with me. That’s all I need.” It inched itself forward again, the remnants of its fingernails breaking off on the pavement.
“Ms. Mason,” Pelham said. “We should go. Forward, remember? Ever forward.”
“He was like me.” Marla stared down at the dead man. “Just doing his job, trying to take something from me, but I fought him off, I knocked him over, he fell.”
“You threw me.” The thing’s voice was more ragged now from its efforts at locomotion. Marla knew she would dream of its pursuit forever, that her occasional nightmares of being chased would change to nightmares of this thing—this man—pulling himself along after her, endlessly, implacably, tirelessly.
“Ms. Mason,” Pelham said again, and then, more loudly, “Marla!” She heard him, distantly, but mostly she looked at the streak of red left in the wake of the man she’d killed, the blood left behind as he dragged himself after her, and wasn’t that just like her life, too? She moved forward, and left a trail of the dead behind her? A streak of blood on the pavement of her past?
Pelham slapped her face, and the shock made Marla gasp. He reared back to slap her again, and she grabbed his wrist, twisting it and dropping him to his knees.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Mason, I was losing you, you haven’t moved in nearly ten minutes, that thing wouldn’t stop whispering…”
Marla released his hand abruptly. “Pelham, I didn’t know, I…it’s fine. You did right.” She looked down again at the broken man on the pavement. If Pelham hadn’t been here, would she have been mesmerized, trapped here until the thing reached her and pulled her down? “I left flowers. I poured whiskey on the grave. I tried.”
“Not for years. You have not left those offerings for many seasons.”
