Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  It occurred to her that someone would probably try to kill her at Finch’s party. She’d pissed off the biggest sorcerer in Chinatown (maybe—it was always possible that was self-aggrandizement), who now knew where Marla was going tonight. That gave the night a little extra sparkle, at least. At home, people were always trying to kill her. It helped her keep her edge.

  Something fluttered in her peripheral vision. “What’s that?” she said, and Rondeau said, “Hmm?”

  Marla stepped closer to the giant metal chair, eyes scanning the dark. Something swift, flying, darting randomly up, down, and sideways in the air.

  “Hummingbird,” Rondeau said.

  Marla nodded. The bird was ruby-throated, wings an invisible blur. Marla frowned. Hummingbirds in January? They never appeared until spring back home, but there was snow there—maybe the appearance of a hummingbird in January at night was perfectly seasonable here, in this strange land where the trees had green leaves in winter. Marla flapped her hand toward the bird, and it zoomed straight backwards, then zoomed toward her. Marla and Rondeau walked on. They crossed the street and headed in the direction of the closed Museum of Modern Art, but when Marla glanced back, the hummingbird was still hovering nearby. She took a long step sideways, and the bird shifted with her, long beak pointing unerringly toward her face. Marla stepped back the other way, and the bird followed.

  “Fuck,” she said thoughtfully.

  “That’s weird,” Rondeau said. “Maybe it thinks you’re a flower.” A second hummingbird buzzed up and began hovering over Rondeau.

  “You’ve got one, too, Rondeau.”

  Rondeau looked around. “Huh. Familiars, you think?”

  “Seems likely,” she said. “Birds are tricky, but not unheard of.”

  “That was Somerset’s thing, right? Birds?”

  Marla nodded, remembering. Somerset had been the chief sorcerer of her city once, a brutal, cheerfully vicious man, and even after his death he’d been reluctant to relinquish power. He’d come closer to killing Marla than anyone else ever had. Somerset favored pigeons for his familiars—a flock of pigeons trying to hurt someone could do real damage. But a flock—hell, a swarm—of hummingbirds wouldn’t be much good in battle, would they? Too fragile. But they were certainly fast. Marla jumped and snatched for her bird, and it avoided her easily, hovering just out of reach. Watching.

  “We have to get rid of them,” Marla said, “and then get lost. These birds probably have to return to their master to deliver whatever intelligence they’ve gathered—I doubt they’re telepathic, or that they’re rigged with surveillance equipment. Even the smallest microphones and cameras would be a burden for birds this small, so it has to be a magical transference, and that’s easier with physical contact.”

  “Who do you think they belong to?”

  Marla shrugged. “The Chinese guy? Finch? Maybe he heard we were coming to his party. I don’t trust the Chinese guy to keep a secret. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t like being watched. When I want to know something about someone, I go ask. Spying is low-class.”

  “You know, Hamil and I do keep our ears open for you, though.”

  “Well, sure. That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this time, someone’s spying on me.” She looked around. “Let’s find a parking garage. Someplace with low ceilings. Or, better yet, an elevator.”

  “There’s a parking garage by that convention center,” Rondeau said, pointing. Marla set off in that direction, trailed by Rondeau and the hummingbirds. “You know, ‘Finch’ is kind of a birdy name,” Rondeau said.

  Marla nodded. “Already crossed my mind. Could be coincidence, but it could be sympathetic magic, too, or a nickname he got for being a bird-man.” Marla shook her head. “This is like when I was first learning back home, before I knew who everyone was, what the surface and secret allegiances were, before I even knew people’s names. I thought I was through being ignorant and pushy—I like being well informed and pushy much better.”

  “Welcome to a whole new pond, little fish,” Rondeau said.

  She snorted. “I’m always a big fish. Sometimes I have to hang out in the shallows first for a while, is all.”

  Marla opened a metal door on the side of the parking garage, intending to hold it open gallantly for the hummingbirds, but they zipped down close to the smalls of her and Rondeau’s backs so they could follow. She swatted at her back, fast, but the hummingbird buzzed out of reach.

  “Little bastards can fly backward, you know that?” Rondeau said. “Everybody knows they’re the only bird that can hover, but they can actually go in reverse.”

  “Such are the wonders of nature,” Marla muttered, and went into the garage. She felt instantly at home, with the low ceilings and exposed pipes, the piss-stained corners, the oil spots. This was the essence of the home of her heart, dark and somehow fundamentally illicit—why else did so many secret meetings take place in parking garages? The parking garage smelled like car exhaust and cold concrete. She followed the signs to an elevator and pressed the “Up” button. The scarred steel doors slid open. Marla and Rondeau got in, and the hummingbirds followed.

  The doors slid shut, and Marla grinned. The hummingbirds were hovering in the corners of the ceiling, but the elevator was only about seven and a half feet high, and they couldn’t get that far away.

  Marla opened her leather bag and rooted around inside for a moment, then pulled out a towel she’d stolen from the hotel. She put down her bag and twisted the towel, as if she were wringing it out, and tied a fat knot at one end. “Step back, Rondeau,” she said, and he pressed himself against the elevator wall. Marla swung the towel in a short arc, experimentally.

  The hummingbirds instantly moved to hover right in front of Rondeau’s face.

  Marla lowered the towel. “Huh,” she said. “Smarter than your average bird, aren’t they? I guess we need magic. What do you think, Rondeau—want to Curse at them?”

  “In an elevator?” Rondeau said. “Isn’t that sort of dangerous for us?”

  “We’re not moving, and we’re on the ground floor. Even if the cables snapped or something, we aren’t going anywhere, and if the doors get jammed, I can get them open.”

  Rondeau nodded, the birds still hovering before his face. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “They’re right in front of me, so I guess the sound of the Curse will hit them first anyway.” Rondeau spoke briefly, three guttural syllables, and the air in the elevator car suddenly grew very hot and uncomfortable, the walls around them and the cables above groaning.

  The two hummingbirds burst brightly, whitely, into flame, and fell to the floor of the elevator, their furiously beating wings throwing off streamers of smoke and shedding sparks. Marla and Rondeau jumped away from the flames, and Marla hit the “Door Open” button on the elevator. The doors slid apart slowly, creaking—Rondeau’s primordial Curse had twisted something in the mechanism out of true. They exited the elevator, stepping over the flash-charred bird bodies.

  Rondeau spat onto the concrete. “Gah, I hate doing that, speaking that language always makes my mouth taste like cat shit.”

  “You know this from personal experience?”

  “When I was young, and I’d just taken over this body, I didn’t know what was good to eat and what wasn’t. Let’s not get into that.” He looked around nervously. “I always expect some sort of cosmic retribution for Cursing in the language of the gods, too.”

  “Maybe that bad taste is the retribution,” Marla said. Rondeau had the gift of tongues, but only in a limited way. Hamil believed that when Rondeau capital-“C”-Cursed, he was mispronouncing the first Word that had created the universe. The results were always unpredictably destructive, though Marla couldn’t recall them ever involving white-hot fire before. Marla suspected there was no such divine association—she believed in gods, plural, or at least in supernatural beings with powers far beyond those of even magic-savvy humans like herself, but she didn’t bel
ieve in one creator-god who’d made the universe by speaking a series of well-formed sentences. It seemed more likely to her that Rondeau had lucked into some set of primal incantations, the language of demons, perhaps the language of whatever kind of creature Rondeau really was, inside that stolen body. Either way, the Curses were handy, though often more trouble than they were worth, and occasionally prone to backfiring in unpleasant ways, though never on Rondeau himself—just on innocent bystanders. Marla had once suffered a minor concussion as a result of one of Rondeau’s Curses.

  “Maybe we should head over to Finch’s party,” Marla said. “It’s getting to be that time.”

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “Let’s hope we don’t run into any more birds along the way.”

  As they walked through the parking garage, Marla saw a shadow near one of the ramps to an upper level. She stopped, blinked, whispered a spell to turn on her night-eyes, and looked again. There was a man, not very tall, slim, holding a cane. He wore something like a top hat, but it was vaguely furry, and he was looking straight at her, probably thinking himself safely hidden in shadow. “Beaver hat,” she muttered. “Who was it who said something about a beaver hat?”

  “What are you talking about?” Rondeau said, stepping toward her, briefly passing between her and the man. When his next step carried him out of her line of sight, the man was gone. Marla cursed—though her profanities were less destructive than Rondeau’s, they were more heartfelt.

  “Somebody was watching us, a little guy with a cane, wearing a fur hat.”

  “Huh,” Rondeau said. “Should we worry?”

  “I don’t have time to worry about crap like this,” Marla said. “I’ve got enough problems already.”

  “Probably just another spy,” Rondeau said. “If he gets close again, we grab him. Otherwise, as long as he just watches, who cares? It’s not like you’re planning to be stealthy, right?”

  “Yeah. It just irks me, being followed.”

  “Every time a strange sorcerer passes through Felport, you have them followed,” Rondeau pointed out.

  Marla glared at him for a moment, then strode off, out of the parking garage.

  As they were walking back across the park, Rondeau’s phone rang. Marla took it out of her bag, flipped it open, and put it to her ear. “Speak.”

  “I found out about your frog-monster,” Hamil said. “An Aztec deity, though ‘primordial earth-monster’ might be a better term, called Tlaltecuhtli.”

  “I won’t be able to pronounce that without practice,” Marla said. “I’ll just call him Mr. Toad if I run into him.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t,” Hamil said. “I hope it’s just a monster from myth, without any basis in reality.”

  “Give me the vitals,” Marla said, pausing in the shadow of the giant chair.

  “Often described as female, though that’s not entirely consistent, she was one of the first gods, a giant froglike creature with mouths on her elbows, knees, and—ominously—‘other joints.’ She had a taste for meat of all kinds. While the other gods were trying to create the world, Tlaltecuhtli was merrily devouring what they made, which finally drove Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl to kill her. They ripped her in two, and her upper body became the Earth, while her lower half became the heavens.”

  “Big girl,” Marla said.

  “Some of the myth is quite poetic,” Hamil said. “Tlaltecuhtli’s body became the basis for most geography and all plant life—trees and flowers come from her hair and skin, the contours of mountain ranges follow the shape of her face, her eyes are the source of wells and springs, while her mouth is the beginning of all the great rivers. All the deepest caverns of the world lead inside her body.”

  “Pretty,” Marla said.

  “Except for the part where she still craves meat and sacrificial blood, or else she withholds the fruits of the Earth, causes natural disasters, etc.,” Hamil said. “You know how the Aztecs were—any excuse to spill blood. They used to offer Tlaltecuhtli fruit sprinkled with the stuff. She was the dark side of an Earth goddess—her image was usually carved on the bottom of statues, where the carving could make contact with soil. She has other qualities, more ambiguous. Her mouth is sometimes described as the gateway to the underworld, and I found one depiction of her disgorging the souls of dead warriors in the shape of butterflies and hummingbirds.”

  Everything went crystalline in Marla’s mind. “Hummingbirds?”

  “Yes. I don’t know how much you know about Aztecs—”

  “Just what I’ve read in bad horror novels,” Marla said. That wasn’t quite true—she knew a bit about some of their artifacts, and had a general impression of them as bloody-minded heart-eaters, at least among the ruling class—but their myths were more or less unfamiliar to her.

  “Ah. Well, apart from the fact that they sacrificed something on the order of twenty thousand people a year, with the limbs and hearts of victims providing the main source of meat for the ruling class, they had quite a sophisticated theology. They believed that blood was the true source of life, and that only blood sacrifices could appease the gods and, thus, keep the universe running smoothly. They called the life force teyolia, and thought it most potent when extracted from those whose hearts were filled with fear.”

  “Get to the part about the hummingbirds,” Marla said.

  “It’s almost whimsical, really, when contrasted with the amount of blood they spilled.” Hamil said, “But the Aztecs believed that the souls of dead warriors could return to Earth in the form of hummingbirds, and occasionally butterflies.”

  “Shit,” Marla said. “There were some hummingbirds spying on us earlier today.”

  Hamil grunted. “Do you really think there’s a connection? It’s more likely they’re just someone’s familiars, yes?”

  “Of course,” Marla said. “But…it’s intriguing. Little yellow frogs, hummingbird spies, stolen statues…”

  “Little yellow frogs?” Hamil said.

  “Never mind. Or, rather, I’ll tell you later.”

  “I did see something more about the hummingbirds,” Hamil said. There was the sound of flipping pages. “Yes. Hummingbirds are warriors for the sun god, whose name you would find even more unpronounceable than Tlaltecuhtli’s.”

  “Huh,” Marla said, and there was a world of interested speculation in that single syllable.

  “Marla,” Hamil said, “I’m sure you’ve stumbled into something fascinating, but remember—”

  “I know. I’m not here to get mixed up in local politics, I’m just here to find that certain something we need. But somebody killed Lao Tsung, and I have good reason to think that same somebody also stole a statue of Ms. Toad.”

  “Oh, dear,” Hamil said. “I should have known this wouldn’t be a simple shopping trip.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m following a lead, and I might be able to get…that item we’re looking for…tonight. If I can, I’ll forget all this other stuff and come home right away.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Hamil said. “Let the West Coast take care of itself, hmm? It’s not like they don’t have sorcerers of their own—silicon mages, geomancers, tidal shamans, jellyfish-witches, I’m sure they can handle whatever’s going on. You just stumbled into someone else’s fight.”

  “Sure,” Marla said. “But it looks like Lao Tsung stumbled into it, too, and if I have the chance to stomp whoever killed him…”

  “Understood,” Hamil said.

  “Where do things stand with Susan?”

  “Ah,” Hamil said. “Unchanged. I tried to arrange a meeting with her, but she isn’t taking any visitors, especially not any who are connected with you. I’m afraid she knows you’re aware of her plans—the way you left town so quickly, it’s a natural supposition for her to make. And our source in Susan’s organization was found crawling in the street this afternoon with his hands and feet cut off and his tongue and eyes removed. We tried to put him out of his misery, but Susan had cast a protective spell on him, an
d we can’t hurt him physically at all now. He’ll live for another six months, at least. I think it’s safe to assume that she discovered he was giving us information.”

  “Shit,” Marla said. “Give the guy a lot of morphine, would you? If needles won’t break his skin, pour laudanum down his throat. Keep him comfortable. You know, when I find out one of my employees has betrayed me, I just kill them. Simple, direct, effective. Why does Susan have to be so fucking dramatic?”

  “I’m sure it points to a fundamental sense of insecurity on her part,” Hamil said. “Be safe, and hurry back.”

  “Will do,” Marla said, and flipped her phone shut. Frogs, hummingbirds, angry body-switching Chinese sorcerers, little guys in 19th-century hats, and now primordial earth-monsters. This trip was not going as smoothly as she’d hoped.

  4

  M arla hammered on the bathroom door. “Rondeau! It’s time to go!” It was nine o’clock already, and even if Finch didn’t show up until later, Marla wanted to get the lay of the land before she faced him. They’d stopped by the hotel so Rondeau could change, and then he’d insisted on taking a shower.

  Rondeau yelled something unintelligible from the bathroom. He’d been in there for half an hour, enjoying the endless stream of hot water. Marla couldn’t really blame him—she’d indulged in a long shower herself during the dull afternoon. She’d almost forgotten what real water pressure felt like. Taking a shower at her apartment was like being spat on by an irate camel.

  A few minutes later Rondeau emerged, dressed in his usual vintage-store finery—a powder-blue ’50s-prom-style tuxedo. He looked at Marla critically. “You’re wearing that?”

  Marla considered her outfit. Black cotton pants, loose, so she could run or kick easily. Black boots with reinforced steel toes. Gray long-sleeved T-shirt. Her cloak, white side showing, of course. She was nervous about wearing the cloak, but if Finch got nasty she might need it. As long as she didn’t reverse the cloak and let the purple side show, there was no danger. It was a peculiarity of the cloak that it was not reversible in the usual sense—no matter how hard she tried, she would never be able to put it on with the white inside and the purple showing. The colors simply didn’t cooperate, as if the cloak were made of moebius cloth. If the need arose, however, a simple mental command would reverse the cloak, and the purple would show…but she hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Things would have to get pretty bad before such steps became necessary. Her dagger was tucked away safely in the magically protected teak box, under the bed. The cloak was enough for tonight, and it wasn’t obviously a weapon, so it stood a better chance of getting through whatever security Finch might have set up. “Yeah, I’m wearing this. Why?”