by T. A. Pratt
“I did it the old-fashioned way,” Marla said. “Sauvage was in charge, until Somerset killed him, taking his position. Then I killed Somerset, so I got to run the city. I am, by definition, the strongest.”
Susan laughed. “We’ll soon find out, won’t we? You never fought me.”
“Please. It would hardly be a fight. This spell you’re planning, it’s craven, and you know it. You’re afraid to face me head-on. I’ll never abdicate to you. I love Felport. I live in its streets. I believe in protecting it. You never even come out of your climate-controlled skyscraper. Why do you deserve to run the city?”
“Felport is a shithole,” Susan said. “Just another rapidly oxidizing chunk of the rust belt. But it’s a stepping-stone to bigger and better things, more power, more control. That’s all.”
“And that’s why you don’t deserve to run the city,” Marla said, throwing her blankets off and getting out of bed, letting her fury mask her true intention. “You can’t even see why you’re unfit. Being chief sorcerer is a responsibility. It’s—”
“Consider my offer retracted,” Susan said. “You’re too stupid to live.”
Marla snatched her dagger from the nightstand and leapt across the room, slashing out for Susan’s astral cord, but by the time she landed and struck, Susan was gone, slipped entirely into psychic space, on the way back to her body.
“Bitch,” Marla said, kneeling there in the dark, alone. But if Susan had come here, that meant she wasn’t deep in her preparatory meditations, and that meant Marla had a little time yet before she cast the spell, after all.
She went back to bed, and this time she kept her dagger under her pillow.
8
F inch drove through the city in his silver Mercedes SUV, Marla sitting uncomfortably in the passenger seat. She had an irrational dislike for riding in cars. She’d inherited a vintage Bentley back home, but she only used it when she had no choice. Rondeau slid from one side of the backseat to the other, peering out the windows on either side, taking in the scenery, which was mostly hills, Victorians, and Asian eateries, as far as Marla could see. “So where are we going?” Rondeau said.
“Golden Gate Park,” Finch said. “It’s an interesting place, historically and in terms of magical opportunity, Marla.” He had an armchair lecturer’s voice, and Marla suspected he liked to hold forth.
“How interesting,” she said, though she couldn’t have cared less about any aspect of San Francisco’s history. Rondeau, however, was leaning forward to hear.
Finch said, “In the late 1800s, when the area was dedicated as park land, it was nothing but sand dunes—that whole part of the peninsula was dunes, called the Outside Lands, well beyond the limits of the city proper at the time. In 1868 a surveyor named William Hammond Hall was given the job of turning that wasteland into a great urban park. The first step, of course, was to plant grasses to hold the sand in place and keep it from shifting constantly. After the grasses took root, they could plant bushes, trees, flowers, and so forth. Hall tried planting some of the sturdier native grasses, but none of them survived—they were utterly smothered by the sand. After many failed experiments with different grasses, Hall despaired. One day he was out camping near the Chain of Lakes—well, where the Chain of Lakes is now, the western part of the park. He had some barley to feed his horse, but the sand, which got in everywhere, wound up in the feed bag, and the horse wouldn’t eat the grain when it was so mixed in with sand. Disgusted, Hammond threw the barley down on the ground. When he passed back that way a few days later, he saw that the barley had taken root. From that point, it was easy—first he planted barley, then grasses, and so on up to flowers, bushes, and trees.”
“When does this become interesting?” Marla asked.
Finch sighed. “Do you know why the barley took root? Most people don’t. It was the Cornerstone, Marla. Some sorcerer—we don’t know which one for sure, but it was probably Sanford Cole, who later became the secret court magician to Emperor Joshua Norton—wanted the park to succeed, and he sank the Cornerstone down in the sand in the desert that would become the park. Then he spoke a simple binding spell—a spell made incredibly effective and permanent by the Cornerstone—and the next thing that got planted on the dunes took root. That just happened to be Hall’s barley. Cole was an interesting fellow. You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure,” Marla said. “He’s the Ben Franklin of sorcerers. He’s responsible for our foothold in America, according to some people.”
“True enough. By all accounts, he was a good man. Can you imagine? A sorcerer that powerful, being described as good? That’s not the way you or I will be remembered, I suspect. Perhaps it was a different time.”
Marla kept silent, watching buildings slide past outside the window. People who thought things were fundamentally better or kinder in earlier times were clearly not true students of history.
“There’s a legend that Cole will return in the hour of San Francisco’s greatest need, you know,” Finch said.
“Huh. Like Merlin, the way he’s supposed to return to England?”
“In a few hundred years, Cole might be remembered the way Merlin is, at least among our people.”
“You believe that story?” Marla said. “That he’ll come back?”
Finch shrugged. “Not really. Some do, of course. Some of the techno-mages thought he would return when the dot-com bubble burst, but he failed to arrive, not surprisingly. I suspect Cole is gone forever. Though if he had constant access to the Cornerstone, I suppose anything’s possible. Even returning from the dead.”
“So this Cornerstone,” Rondeau said, “it makes spells last forever?”
“Among other things,” Finch said. “There are four known Cornerstones in the world—”
“Three, since Ballard ate one,” Marla said.
“Yes, three in the world, and their origins are unknown. They’re good for binding spells, for making things last, for making improbable things likely, for anchoring things. We’ve got the Golden Gate Bridge bound to the Cornerstone, so it won’t fall down in the event of a catastrophic earthquake. Of course, the ordinaries don’t know that, and they’re still retrofitting the bridge to make it earthquake-proof by more mechanical means. But that’s all right. It keeps people busy. Fortunately, most sorcerers only have a vague notion of what the Cornerstones are, and most of those don’t know where to find them. The one under the British Museum was relatively common knowledge, and look what happened to it. I don’t actually know where the other two are.”
“Neither do I,” Marla said. “I wouldn’t know about the one here if not for Lao Tsung. But that other guy, Mutex, he heard about the Cornerstone in San Francisco somehow. Did he say why he wanted it?”
Finch waved his hand dismissively. “Mutex came to me raving about old gods, the universe running down like an unwound watch, blood sacrifices, and so forth. He said if people didn’t start making offerings to his gods, the sun and stars and planetary bodies would stop moving in their appointed grooves.” Finch shrugged. “I politely refused to help him, he became belligerent, and I had him escorted out. I sent out some inquiries about him following Lao Tsung’s death, and heard back early this morning, though there wasn’t much to tell. Mutex used to be a talented young man, apprenticed to a shaman west of the Andes in Colombia, but he abandoned his studies and spent some years traveling through the Americas, much of it in the jungle, doubtless licking the wrong sort of toad. The years of isolation seem to have affected his judgment.”
“When you spend a long time away from people, sometimes you forget how to behave,” Marla said.
“Persistent little bastard, though,” Finch said. “I found out he’d secured appointments with most of the major sorcerers in the city—as I said, he used to be a promising sort, so most were willing to see him—and told them all the same thing, that he needed the Cornerstone, or the world would fall to pieces. Everyone turned him away. I imagine he slunk off to seek his fortune elsewhere.”
“Huh,” Marla said. She thought that sounded like either wishful thinking or stupidity. “After making appointments with a dozen sorcerers, putting up with all their bullshit, pressing his case, and then killing Lao Tsung, you think he just gave up and skipped town?”
After a moment of frosty silence, Finch said, “We are investigating Lao Tsung’s death, as I said. He was a valued member of our community, and we will find out who, if anyone, is responsible for his death. There is no indication that a renegade jungle practitioner like Mutex could even hope to harm a sorcerer of Lao Tsung’s caliber. He was your friend—surely you know how formidable he was.”
Marla knew Lao Tsung was tough in a street fight, and he was no slouch at magical battles, either—but nobody expects to be killed by an army of frogs.
Marla sank down in the seat and put her feet on the dashboard, wrapping her arms under and around her legs. She felt very aggressive right now, and it might be best to present a meeker front—Finch was more than usually into dominance behavior, and while she’d enjoyed getting in his face last night, and while it had probably won her some measure of respect, she thought the present situtation demanded a bit more finesse. “But Lao Tsung was the guardian of the Cornerstone. Don’t you think Mutex might have found that out during all that time bothering the other sorcerers? Seems like a potential motive for murder to me.”
“We are considering the possibility,” Finch said. “Does that satisfy you? But I think you give Mutex too much credit. He is simply a madman, whatever his earlier promise.”
“And madmen never kill anybody,” Rondeau said from the backseat.
Finch glanced into the rearview mirror, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“Careful, Rondeau,” Marla said. “He’ll sodomize your ghost if you keep up that sass.”
“Consider me chastised,” Rondeau said.
“This is close enough,” Finch said, and parked the SUV next to a fire hydrant.
Parking is probably easier in San Francisco when you don’t have to worry about getting tickets, Marla thought.
“The entrance we want is just a couple of blocks north.” They all got out of the car and walked down the sidewalk, Finch in the lead. The morning was cool, with a stiff breeze from the direction of the bay. “We’ll reach the Cornerstone soon. You have the materials you need? You’ve made your preparations?”
Marla patted her leather shoulder bag. “It’s all here.” The spell wasn’t complicated—just a simple binding spell, but with the augmentation and permanence provided by the Cornerstone, it should be enough to thwart Susan’s plan to take over Marla’s city.
“And there’s the park,” Finch said, nodding, as if Marla wouldn’t have noticed the expanse of trees and green ahead, as improbable a sight as any large park in the midst of a big city. They passed through the gates into a place of green trees and grass, the roofs of distant buildings poking up over the trees in the distance. “Strawberry Hill isn’t far,” Finch said, and strode off past people sprawled on blankets, young hippies playing hacky sack, and people reading.
“What kind of park is this?” Rondeau said. “Where are the garbage cans chained to concrete pylons? Where are the drug dealers? Why is there grass instead of asphalt? I don’t see a broken merry-go-round anywhere.”
“You should get out of your neighborhood more often, Rondeau,” Marla said. “There are nice parks in our city, you know, too. Out in the suburbs anyway.” Looking around, she grudgingly added, “Not so big as this, and they aren’t safe after dark, mostly, but still.”
After a while, Finch stopped walking, and pointed. “This is Strawberry Hill.”
Marla looked. Strawberry Hill was a high, rounded lump of land in the middle of a small lake. “That’s a lot of island for such a little pond,” Marla said.
“Strawberry Hill has been described as a watermelon with a wet string tied around it,” Finch said. “But you know as well as I do that even a token moat can have a significant protective power.”
“True,” Marla said. “The Cornerstone is there?”
“Among the trees.”
“How do we get to the island? I could probably leap over the water in a couple of the thinner places, but I assume you have another way?”
“There are two bridges,” Finch said. “The rustic and the roman. But we’re not going to take either of them. Because there’s a third bridge.” Finch glanced around, then waved his hand, casting a curtain of obscurement over the three of them—now the eyes of any observers would just…slide away from them. He made another gesture. “There.”
A gently arcing footbridge was revealed, made of rough timbers tied with twine, and with handrails of gleaming copper, stretching from the bank before them to the slope of Strawberry Hill. “After you,” Marla said, and Finch crossed the bridge, his feet not making any sound at all on the splintery wooden boards.
The island hill was heavily wooded at that point, though it appeared more sparse elsewhere, and Marla stayed close to Finch as he went into the trees. They trudged up the steep slope for what seemed to Marla a very long time, especially since it was such a small island. “Are you screwing around with Euclidean norms?” she asked, kicking a low branch out of her way, making it snap under her boot.
“There’s a certain amount of topological crumpling going on, yes,” Finch said. “We don’t want people tripping over the Cornerstone by accident, so the hill is folded in on itself a bit, with the stone tucked away within.”
“This is too much like really being in the woods,” Marla said, gritting her teeth. Every brush of a leaf against the skin of her forearms felt like the skittering of insects, and didn’t they have poison oak out here? She was an urban creature, and her years as chief sorcerer of Felport had intensified that intrinsic sympathy—in a way, she was her city, and she did not feel at home in even so circumscribed a piece of wilderness as this. She glanced behind her, where Rondeau was walking placidly along, hands in his pockets, knees going steadily up and down like he was on a StairMaster or something. Looking past him, Marla saw nothing but blue sky, no skyscrapers. The folded space had obscured any view of buildings. Marla clamped down on her rising panic, annoyed at her own reactions. She hadn’t been in among the trees like this since she was a kid in Indiana, and she was distressed to find herself so discomforted by the experience—it seemed like a dangerous chink in her armor.
“The clearing is just up ahead,” Finch said, puffing a little, and Marla felt a little glee over that, at least—she was in better shape than he was. She walked in her city every day, but she suspected that Finch did most of his business in the same aerie where he fucked the ghosts of his enemies.
Marla hurried forward, walking beside Finch, and they passed from the trees into the clearing together.
“What the living fuck,” Finch said, and Marla stood speechless, taking in the scene before her with her typical threat-assessment glance, but unsure of what she was seeing, exactly, and certainly unsure of how to proceed.
First she saw the man, because men and monsters were usually the most dangerous things in any given situation. He was dark-skinned and bare-chested, so thin that his ribs protruded, and he wore brief shorts that appeared to be made of green-and-red snakeskin. Heavy gold bracelets adorned his wrists, and his short cape, tied around his neck and hanging to just above the back of his knees, shimmered, strangely iridescent, like imperfect jewels transformed into cloth; prismatic, organic, and oddly disgusting. He held a large, round wicker basket tucked awkwardly under one arm. Marla sensed a strange power in him—spiritual gravity, heavy madness, something that tickled her well-tuned senses but did not fully reveal itself. Something new in her experience. He did not attack them—did not even look at them. He was looking at the other thing in the clearing. The far more improbable thing.
Marla recognized the Cornerstone instantly, a large chunk of blue-gray rock, easily two feet to a side, cut into a weathered cube, with a magical density so great that it actually warped the ligh
t within an inch of its surface, making its smooth faces seem slightly convex. The stone had been ripped from the earth at the center of the clearing, leaving a raw hole of black dirt behind, and soil still clung to the lower two-thirds of the stone.
The Cornerstone hung in the air a few feet above the ground, supported by a profusion of thin silver chains. The upper ends of the chains were attached to hundreds—perhaps thousands—of hummingbirds, individually tiny, but so massed that they formed a shimmering ruby-colored cloud.
“Hummingbirds again,” Rondeau said, and Marla nodded, thinking of the same thing he probably was—the birds that Rondeau had Cursed in the elevator. Cursing was too dangerous here—too many living things, too many trees, too many ways for a sudden, nasty shift in the fabric of creation to backfire and hurt something or someone valuable. They’d found their bird-wizard, though—Mutex, the freak in the shimmering cape, who apparently had designs on the Cornerstone, and was making off with it. Well, fuck that. Marla hadn’t come this far to let some bird-watcher steal her artifact out from under her.
Before she could make a move, however, Finch was roaring. “Mutex!”
The caped man bowed, slightly. “I did not think you would remember my name, sir,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly crazy. “Not when you treated me so badly before. I did not expect to see you today. I had hoped to see you later, when I would have a better use for your blood. I am saddened that your teyolia will be wasted on this hidden ground.”
“I’m going to eat you,” Finch said, rage coupled with anticipation, “and then I’m going to ass-fuck your little spic ghost.”
“Hey, watch the racial slurs,” Rondeau said. “You fat bastard.” That was the effect of the Cornerstone, Marla thought—people saying what they meant. She held her own tongue.
Mutex still didn’t move. Neither did Marla. Finch was formidable—he could deal with the bird-man. Marla had her eyes on the Cornerstone, and the birds that were slowly carrying it away. She ran for the Cornerstone, leaping, her dagger of office in her hand, slashing out for the silver chains.
