Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  Rondeau wandered off to look at ball pythons, and Marla went in search of B. She found him at the counter in the back, talking to the clerk, a stocky man in his twenties, with close-cropped dark hair and what Marla guessed was a semipermanent scowl. “Marla, this is Ray,” B said, and the clerk nodded to her. He wore a navy blue bowling shirt with the name “Butch” embroidered in curving white script over the right breast.

  “I was just saying, I don’t know much about frogs,” Ray said. “Snakes are more my thing. But if you show me what you’ve got, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Marla glanced at B, who nodded. “Ray’s good people,” he said.

  She nodded. She couldn’t see the harm in letting an ordinary see the frog. Opening the side flap of her bag, she removed the plastic bag, unrolling it so the little yellow frog was visible, but still covered in a thin layer of clear plastic. “I wouldn’t recommend touching it,” Marla said. “I don’t know much, but I know it’s poison.”

  Ray hunched over and peered at the frog, then grunted. “Turn it over. Let me see its underside.” Marla did as he asked, and Ray nodded. “Damn. Hold on. Let me get a book.” He headed for the back of the store.

  Marla turned to B. “How do you know him?”

  “He’s a writer, actually, and he interviewed me back in the day, when I was just getting to be famous. We stayed friends after that, used to go out to bars together and stuff. We’re even tighter now, though, since we both stopped drinking. He says the freelance writing market’s shitty right now, so he has to work here.” B shrugged. “He knows a lot about snakes.”

  “Hmm,” Marla said. “So he’s not…like you? Ah, like us?”

  “You mean does he talk to dead people? No. Not that I know of. But he’ll be discreet, mostly because he doesn’t give a shit, and he’s a friend, so it’s okay to talk to him. I wouldn’t have brought you here otherwise. My life sort of depends on you, I think. So don’t worry.”

  “Half my job is worrying. And the other half is making sure I don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Ray returned, holding a coffee-table book with a bright-color cover. He set it on the counter and began flipping through the pages, past pictures of dozens of different frogs—dark green ones, tiny ones with bulging eyes, even a startlingly blue one.

  Then he tapped a page with his forefinger and spun the book around so Marla could see it right-side-up. A golden yellow frog stared, black-eyed, straight at the camera. The image had caught the frog in motion, and it stood as if in a superhero’s crouch, like Spider-Man right after sticking a difficult landing, one front foot resting on the ground, the other held up, toes splayed, wide mouth turned down as if in a frown of concentration. “This is one of only a few photographs in the world of, ah, let’s see, Phyllobates terribilis,” Ray said. “Golden poison dart frog. Mr. Terrible. All the vital stats are there.”

  Marla bent over the book. This was the animal, all right. Ranging in size from one-half to two inches long, uniform metallic yellow in color. Unlike other poison dart frogs, it had “teeth”—really a bony plate in its upper jaw. Marla didn’t like the sound of that. The Aztec frog-monster in that stolen carving had teeth—fangs, in fact. That wasn’t the only way Mr. Terrible differed from other frogs. Unlike most species, these were social animals, congregating with their own kind, and they were fearlessly diurnal, probably because they had little to fear from predators, being almost unbelievably poisonous. Each of these frogs had enough toxin in its skin to kill a hundred adult humans, and poison darts made from their venom remained potent for up to two years. Two-tenths of a microgram of their venom was lethal in the human bloodstream, and each frog contained a hundred micrograms. But even that level of toxicity didn’t explain the instantaneously appearing welts Marla had witnessed on those touched by the frogs. Mutex had somehow magically hot-rodded these frogs, made them even more poisonous than they were in nature, which was a bit like loading an elephant gun with dynamite—just plain overkill. Mr. Terrible didn’t exactly thrive in this environment, though, favoring the tropical rain forests, especially in Colombia, which was where Mutex had supposedly spent some time studying.

  A subheading labeled “Beneficial Uses” caught Marla’s eye. Apart from helping native hunters poison their prey—the tribespeople heated the frogs over fires, then wiped their darts on the frogs’ sweating backs—Mr. Terrible had other useful qualities. Doctors were working with extracts of their poison, batrachotoxin, to make painkillers that were potentially ten times as effective as morphine, without the nasty, physically addictive side effects. Marla wondered if Mutex had used some sympathetic magic to tap into that quality, too. If so, he could be formidable in battle. People who didn’t feel pain were difficult to fight.

  She turned the page. And there it was: “Predators.”

  Mr. Terrible only had one natural predator. Leimadopis epinephelus. It was a snake, naturally immune to the frog’s poison, and it chowed down on Mr. Terrible and all his brethren at will.

  B and Ray were chatting, and Marla interrupted Ray in mid-sentence. “I want to buy a snake.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ray said. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I can’t pronounce it,” she said. “One of these.” She tapped the name.

  Ray frowned. “I think you’re out of luck. Even if I could get you one—which I can’t—it’d be an illegal exotic pet. Not unlike that frog you’ve got in your plastic bag there, but since it’s dead, that’s probably less of a problem.”

  “Money isn’t an issue,” Marla said. “Neither is legality. Time, however, is. I need one of these snakes, and I need it before morning.”

  Ray looked at B for help, and B cleared his throat. “I don’t think he’s holding out on you, Marla. They don’t have that snake here, and it’s not something he can get.”

  “Truth,” Ray said. “There might be one of these snakes in captivity somewhere in the state, but who knows? It’s a relatively rare snake from the rain forest. I don’t even know what they look like, and I know more about snakes than the average guy.”

  “I need one,” Marla said. “You must have some idea where I can find one.”

  Ray lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Sorry. I’m sure there are dedicated reptile smugglers out there somewhere, but I don’t know them. And even if I did, I doubt old Leimadopis would be a hot seller.”

  Marla swore, then ripped the relevant pages out of the book. Ray started to protest, and Rondeau was there as if by magic, handing him a suspiciously large bill. Ray’s half scowl deepened, but he put the money in his shirt pocket. “Want me to try to reach Langford?” Rondeau said. “He’s got sources. Maybe he could, I don’t know, ship us a snake by special courier.”

  “It might come to that,” Marla said, folding up the pages and walking away. Rondeau followed, as did B, after saying his apologetic farewell to Ray. “But I’m afraid it wouldn’t happen fast enough. He’d have to find a snake first, after all, and that takes time, even for a biomancer.”

  “I guess this explains Mutex’s ugly red-and-green snakeskin short-shorts,” Rondeau said. “He probably didn’t buy those out of a catalog, though.”

  “Probably not,” Marla said.

  “Why do you need that snake anyway?” B said.

  “She needs a little sympathy,” Rondeau said.

  “Exactly,” Marla said.

  “And what does that mean?” B asked.

  “The circumspect nature of the response indicates that sorcerers like to have a few secrets, B,” Rondeau said, putting an arm around his shoulder. “We’re only as good as our mysteries, after all.”

  They walked another dozen or so steps before Marla said “We’re idiots, Rondeau.”

  “I know,” Rondeau said. “It just hit me, too. But, ah, are you sure you want to use that tool for this job?”

  “For now, this is the only job that matters. If I don’t succeed at this one, there won’t be any more jobs.” Marla didn’t like this, either—it se
emed a trivial use of a powerful resource—but anything that might help keep her alive wasn’t truly trivial.

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “I can see that. We need a snake.”

  “Ray already said he can’t get you that snake—” B began.

  “No, no,” Rondeau said. “Not the poison-frog-eating snake. Any snake will do, for now.”

  “B,” Marla said. “Go back and buy me a garter snake or something, would you? Something small.”

  B hesitated. He didn’t like being jerked around. Marla could appreciate that. But she didn’t want to get into the habit of explaining herself to him. If she did, B might expect an explanation when there wasn’t time to give him one, and such a delay could prove fatal. Then again, if he was more than a half-assed seer, if he actually had the power she suspected, she needed him as an ally. She shouldn’t push him too far. So when he hesitated, she said, almost gently, “Don’t forget, your life depends on mine. And bringing me a garter snake right now will help us both.”

  B nodded, and headed back to the Vivarium.

  Marla and Rondeau sat on a low concrete wall that marked the edge of a strip-mall parking lot. “So after we get one of those frog-eating snakes, what then?” Rondeau said.

  “We find Mutex, and I rip his extremities off until I get the Cornerstone back.”

  “And how do we find Mutex?”

  “Have you ever heard of that band ‘…And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Dead’?”

  “Ah,” Rondeau said. “Got it. We follow the bodies.”

  “Maybe,” Marla said. “That’s the worst-case scenario. There’s a small chance that we might be able to find a shortcut.” That small chance was B, if he turned out to be what Marla barely dared hope he was.

  “All hail the great god Shortcut,” Rondeau said, a little glumly.

  “Say hallelujah,” Marla agreed.

  10

  B returned with the garter snake, a long, dark green curl of life in a small white cardboard box. “You’re not going to sacrifice this or anything, are you?” B said, as Marla peered into the box.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t imagine that sacrificing eight inches of snake would get me much in the way of favors anyway.” She cleared her throat, put her face close to the box, and said, “Ch’ang Hao, this is Marla. I need to call in that favor now.” She lifted her face away, and they all watched the snake, which lifted its head up above the sides of the box and swayed a little.

  “Ah,” Rondeau said. “So what now?”

  “Apparently nothing instantaneous,” Marla said.

  The snake crawled over the edge of the box, flowing like living green water, and fell the short distance to the ground, where it continued slithering away, roughly westward.

  “Think the little snake’s going to deliver the message in person?” Rondeau said.

  “Anything’s possible.” Marla sighed. “I’m not good at being patient. I say we head back into the city, grab some food, and see what else we can find out about Mutex. I wish I knew where to find the other sorcerers in this city. If Mutex really did go around accosting all the big noises in the city, maybe he let something useful slip to one of them.”

  They went back to the commuter train station and boarded an empty car on a San Francisco–bound BART train. Rondeau and B talked about restaurants, while Marla thought about where to start in her search for other sorcerers in the city.

  The door at the far end of the car opened, and two men entered. Marla looked at them, frowning. They were identical twins, in their twenties, with buzzed-short black hair and glasses with chunky black frames, and they wore matching clothing—red T-shirts, khaki cargo pants, black hiking boots. They each had mobile phones, PDAs, pagers, and other devices clipped to their belts, and carried matching black laptop bags over their shoulders. Marla figured they had more computational power hanging on their bodies than had existed in the entire world circa 1950. They stopped in the aisle beside Marla’s seat, each gripping the overhead rail left-handed, leaning slightly toward her at precisely the same angle. “You’re Marla,” one of them said.

  “You have to come with us,” said the other. Their voices were exactly the same.

  “We’re all on the same train,” Marla said. “Going the same way. So for the time being, I don’t have any objection to that.”

  They looked at each other with eerie simultaneity, then back down at Marla. “We’ll get off the train at Civic Center,” one said. “and you’ll come with us. Someone wants to meet you.”

  Marla crossed her legs, bumping one of the men gently in the knee with her foot in the process. He stepped backwards, out of her way—and so did the other guy, though she hadn’t touched him. She glanced at Rondeau, who raised an eyebrow, and Marla shook her head fractionally. B looked a little frightened, which just went to prove that he didn’t know much about Marla at all, since these were clearly people of the henchman variety, and Marla had never met a henchman yet that she couldn’t fillet one-handed if the need arose.

  “Who wants to meet me?” Marla said.

  “Mr. Dalton,” one of them said.

  “Let me guess,” Marla said. “He’s the new pro-tem chief sorcerer, since Finch’s untimely demise?”

  “You’ll find out who he is when he decides to tell you,” the other one said, clearly trying to be menacing.

  Marla rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s another twenty minutes before we get back to the city, so why don’t you two sit down?”

  “Don’t give us any trouble,” one said, as they both sat down on the seat opposite.

  “Do I look like a troublemaker?” Marla said. “You two just saved me a lot of walking around and asking questions. Hell, I’m thankful. I want to meet your boss.”

  “How’d you find us, though?” Rondeau said. “When we didn’t even know where we were going?”

  The henchmen smirked. “We have our ways,” one said.

  Marla snorted. “Sure you do. There’s a pair of you on every train, and probably on every street in the city, right? They’re homunculi, Rondeau, or heavy astral projections, or some shit like that. Just duplicates. Dupe One and Dupe Two here happened to be the ones who bumped into us.”

  They weren’t smirking anymore. They were scowling instead.

  “Ah,” Rondeau said. “I thought they were twins with that whole psychic-linkage thing going on.”

  “That would explain the way they move in tandem, maybe, but it doesn’t explain the identical oozing pimple they’ve each got just to the left of their noses.” Marla tapped the side of her nose, and the henchmen reached up simultaneously and touched the spots on their own faces.

  “This is the weirdest day of my life,” B said. “And that’s saying something.”

  The henchmen squinted at B. “Hey,” one said. And the other continued, “Aren’t you Bradley Bowman?”

  “Um,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “I read a rumor online that you might get cast as the lead in an American movie version of Dr. Who. Any truth to that?”

  “It’s news to me,” B said.

  “I knew it was bullshit,” one said, taking out his laptop and opening it on his knees, presumably to spread the truth among the infidels online.

  “Tell me about your boss,” Marla said, to the henchman who wasn’t tapping away at a keyboard.

  He shrugged. “You’ll find out all you need to know soon enough. I’ll tell you, though—you should be more scared than you look. You’re in deep shit, from what I hear. Mr. Dalton isn’t the only one looking for you.”

  “I’ve always had a gift for making friends easily,” Marla said. She had an idea of the accusations she was going to face soon, and tried to decide whether she should bother going through the tedium of explaining things, or just break Mr. Dalton’s kneecaps and extract the information she needed. Ah, well. No need to decide now. She could play it by ear when they arrived.

  They rode the escalator up to street level, one henchman in the lead, the other b
ringing up the rear. They were in the heart of downtown San Francisco (or, rather, one of the hearts), right on Market Street, with gleaming office buildings rising on all sides. Marla felt instantly more at ease here—it was almost as good as being home. A few rusting iron bridges and an oil refinery or two, and she would have felt completely at peace. They walked along Market to an apartment building, down a short flight of stone steps to a bare metal door, painted green, just below street level. Marla took note of the location. Some sorcerers liked to get high above the ground, in penthouses and aeries. Others preferred more subterranean dwellings. There were crucial differences between those two sorts. Those who lived underground were usually more willing to get their hands dirty and deal with things personally.

  The henchmen ushered them into a low-ceilinged room with bare concrete floors. Rondeau, looking around, said, “Wow. Modern Geek Eclectic.” There were three battered couches in various colors, a steel bookshelf overspilling with paperbacks, an enormous rear-projection television screen against one wall, huge speakers in the corners, a DJ booth with multiple turntables on a raised platform, and a bar along another wall, done up in full bamboo-and-fringe tiki-bar style. Various movie posters, mostly for vintage sci-fi and horror movies, were thumbtacked to the plaster walls. There were also five or six computers and monitors scattered around the room at untidy workstations, and miscellaneous piles of cable and computer components heaped here and there on the floor.

  “Back here,” a henchman said, and led them through a door into another low room, this one filled with several rows of lab tables, each with flat-screen monitors and humming computer hard drives. They passed through that room and into another, this one a sprawling office with dark blue carpeting, a foosball table, a pinball machine, and a huge oaken L-shaped desk with its own complement of oversized black flat-screen computer monitors. The back of a leather captain’s chair faced them from behind the desk, and Marla rolled her eyes again. What a James-Bond-villain gesture this was going to be.