Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  They walked past liquor stores with iron grates covering the windows, past peep shows, bail bond emporiums, and pawnshops without number; past vagrants who didn’t even bother panhandling, heaps of reeking trash, broken glass, and cigarette butts, and alleys that smelled of wine and urine. They reached the corner indicated in Dalton’s directions, an intersection dominated by a burned-out building that had once been a residential hotel, to judge from the faded sign. The walls of the building were intact, but the first-floor windows and doors were boarded over, while the second-story windows were broken, and opened onto fire-blackened walls. There were bas-reliefs of mythological creatures on the walls above the highest windows—gryphons, unicorns, and other beasts so faded by weather and vandalism that they could no longer be identified.

  “Nothing here,” Rondeau said. “No train station anyway.”

  “Maybe she’s in the hotel,” Marla said doubtfully. “Maybe there’s a basement?” Some sorcerers thrived on desolation, and pyromancers often favored sites of arson for their lairs. But that didn’t explain the wording of Dalton’s printout, the words in crisp laserjet Helvetica: “Bethany. Tenderloin Station. Underground.”

  “Or maybe the real entrance is down there,” B said, pointing to a bit of the cracked sidewalk to the left of the boarded-over double doors.

  Marla looked, and the opening revealed itself to her like an optical illusion resolving. B’s gifts as a seer were proving more and more valuable. There was a stairway there, leading down into a recessed rectangular opening. The stairs and walls were the same color and texture as the surrounding sidewalk, which explained part of the illusion, but there was clearly a patina of magic laid over the scene to make it truly indistinguishable from the surrounding street. Marla peered down into the subterranean entryway to a concealed door whose outlines were only faintly visible, the delineation of its edges blurring into the form of sidewalk cracks.

  “I think that’s our great ingress,” Rondeau said, and Marla nodded, stepping down the stairs carefully—even staring right at them, they seemed to blur and dissolve beneath her feet. The stairs went down about seven feet below street level.

  “Freaky,” Rondeau said. “It looks like you’re sinking down through the concrete, even though I know the steps are there. As soon as I blink, though, it slips out of focus.”

  “I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be concealed,” B said. “It’s clear as air to me. I wonder how many things I walk past every day that are supposed to be hidden?”

  “There’s no telling,” Marla said, and thought again how hard it must be for B, a being of perpetual twilight, Mr. In-Between, uncomfortable among ordinaries and unknown among sorcerers.

  Marla went to the door, placing her hand against it, cold rough stone against her palm and the equally rough pads of her fingertips. She felt around the outlines of the door, looking for a catch, and found nothing. She stepped back. “B,” she said, “do you see a way into this?”

  B came down the stairs, his brow furrowed, and brushed past her to examine the door. He smelled of damp grass and black tea, a strangely pleasant combination, and for a moment, looking at his face in profile, Marla saw beyond the weight of grief and recent years, past his padded armor of layered thrift-store clothes, to the magnetism he tried so hard to disguise, an attractive quality that had first made him into a minor movie star and that now drew ghosts and visions to him. Marla seldom had time for romance, and even more seldom lamented that fact, but seeing B’s beautiful profile—the corona of his so-much-eclipsed sun—gave her a brief pang of longing.

  And, of course, he was gay. It was just as well. The last thing this trip needed was another complication, even an incidentally pleasant one.

  “Huh,” B said. “There’s, like, a habit hanging in the air here.”

  “Like a nun’s habit?” Rondeau said.

  “No, no, I mean a routine, an action that’s been repeated so often that it’s left an impression in the air. I can feel it, like the memory of a movement, I think it’s…like…this.” He kicked the lower right-hand corner of the door, and as his foot moved Marla noticed the discoloration on that portion of the door, a spot kicked a thousand times, and when B’s foot connected, the door swung inward, revealing a rectangle of darkness that even Marla’s better-than-ordinary eyes could barely penetrate.

  “Stairs,” B said. “Metal, spiraling down.”

  “Come on, Rondeau,” Marla said. “I’ll lead, B in the middle, Rondeau gets the rear guard.” She sighed. “I wish there was an intercom or something. I don’t mind barging into sorcerers’ lairs, but I hope she doesn’t think I’m coming in heavy for war or something.”

  “You could take her,” Rondeau said loyally.

  “I don’t want to,” Marla said. “I want her to help me take Mutex.”

  “Oh,” Rondeau said. “Right. Lead on, fearless diplomat.”

  “Fiat lux,” Marla said, pausing to pass her hand over Rondeau’s and B’s eyes. Now she could see into the dark, though the view was grainy and oddly saturated, like a digital photograph given too much contrast. B and Rondeau could see better, too (though B probably didn’t need it), but there was no external light source, no hovering ball of light to reveal their position or create deeper shadows around them. Marla’s light spell only affected the vision of the chosen recipients, stepping up the receptivity of the light-sensing apparatus in the eye, tweaking the brain’s ability to interpret visual information. Langford the biomancer had helped her devise this spell. Marla hated the tinkerbell lights, floating balls of fire, illuminated auras, and all the other conventional light-producing magics most sorcerers used. This was a bit like having night-vision goggles on inside her eyes, but without the greenish tinge.

  “Wicked,” Rondeau said, peering around.

  “Huh,” B said. “Very nice.”

  Marla started down the tight spiral stairs, which descended through a space the size of an elevator shaft. The stairs were metal—copper, actually—and had almost certainly been specially made, probably as a sort of magical nightingale floor, the metal conducting physical information about the intruders down into the sorcerer’s lair below. So much for worrying about showing up unannounced. If Bethany was down there, she was probably aware that she had visitors. Marla admired the craftsmanship, the nautilus whorl of the stairs spiraling down, the railing of delicately curved copper pipe, the steps embossed with raised starburst shapes to provide a surer tread. Marla didn’t know any details about Bethany, but she could infer a few things. Bethany’s magic would likely be chthonic, aligned with dark places underground, and thus entangled with the treasures of the Earth, metals and jewels. Judging by the stairs, she was probably a hands-on practitioner, a fabricator or artificer.

  Or maybe she just had a lot of money to hire fabricators, and liked underground housing because it was cheap. Marla couldn’t be sure. Being a stranger in this city was a constant disadvantage. She needed some kind of scorecard to keep up with the prominent personalities, though there were fewer of them with each passing hour, it seemed.

  The stairs went down a hundred yards, two hundred, the spiral tight enough to make her a little dizzy, which was also probably an intentional effect, making visitors more off balance. Marla finally sensed an opening in space, a widening of the elevator shaft into the contours of a larger room, though even her enhanced eyes didn’t penetrate very far into the darkness.

  When she stepped off the last stair and her foot touched the concrete floor, floodlights burst on, dazzling her painfully, overwhelming the enhanced light-receptors in her eyes. “Nix lux!” she shouted, canceling the light spell and restoring all their eyesight to normal. B and Rondeau were cursing and rubbing their eyes.

  That’s a drawback of the spell she’d never considered. Tinkerbell lights would have been better. She squinted, purple blots hanging in her vision as she scanned the area around them for threats. There were none, fortunately. The moment of visual overload had left them vulnerable to a sur
prise attack, but that didn’t seem to be Bethany’s intention.

  “I don’t believe it,” B said, stepping off the stairs, still rubbing one of his eyes. “It’s a BART station.”

  A blue-and-white sign on the white-tiled wall read “Tenderloin.” They were, unmistakably, on a subway platform, a long stretch of concrete bordered by tracks. The wall beyond the tracks lacked the ubiquitous advertising Marla had seen at other stations, and there was no bright yellow-and-black stripe painted on the edge of the platform to warn the clueless or visually impaired that there was a short trip to an electrified rail just beyond, but otherwise, it could have been any of the train stations Marla had seen since she got to the city.

  “There’s even a map of the train system,” B said. “Just like the ones in all the other stations. Except this one includes Tenderloin Station.”

  Marla examined the map, which used color-coded lines to indicate the routes. Tenderloin Station was marked with a circle, but none of the usual lines touched it. It had its own short line, delineated in black, running a short distance and then looping in on itself. Marla ran her finger down the map, to the bottom, where the train schedules were usually posted, but that section was blank.

  Rondeau stood on the edge of the platform, peering one way and then the other. “Do we go in on foot?” he asked.

  “Only if I get really impatient,” Marla said. “Otherwise, I’d just as soon do without the risk of getting flattened. Assuming Bethany is home, she knows we’re here, and if she’s curious—which she must be, sorcerers are an inquisitive sort—she’ll send a train. Or else she’ll come here herself, though I doubt that. Making people come to you is the stronger position.”

  They waited, Marla doing a simple series of martial arts exercises to keep her body occupied, nothing too advanced; if they were being observed, it wouldn’t hurt to seem less skilled than she was. Rondeau sat on the floor, staring at the far wall, singing Beatles songs badly. B was jittery, sitting down for a few moments, then rising to pace the length of the platform, stopping occasionally to peer into the tunnel.

  “What’s on your mind, B?” Marla asked.

  “Ah,” he said, “I’ve had weird experiences with trains. Not in secret stations, but that doesn’t exactly detract from the likelihood of weirdness.”

  “What’s your train story?” Rondeau said. “I could use some entertainment. I’ve gone through the whole White Album already, and Marla gets pissed when I sing anything from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

  “Do tell,” Marla said.

  “It happened about a year ago,” B said. “I met this guy, Jay…his girlfriend had just died, and he had this idea that he could go to the land of the dead and bring her back. And I had to help him, I knew it, because I’d had this dream about him before I even met him—”

  “The way you dreamed about me,” Marla said.

  “Yeah. One of those dreams. I knew there was no use trying to avoid him—I’d tried to get out of stuff like this in the past, and it never worked—so I agreed to help. We hid in a BART station until after they closed. Late that night, a train came. It wasn’t a normal train. It looked like a thighbone with windows, and there were bone hooks on the ceiling for handrails. We got on, and it took us way down deep, to some place….” He shook his head. “I don’t know where exactly. Thinking back, it’s fuzzy, misty, just images—trees, shapes in the shadows, bees, maybe lizards, and a cave, except it couldn’t have been a cave, because there were stars overhead. I don’t know what happened to us down there—it’s like I’m forgetting it even more now that I’m trying to think about it. But whatever happened, I made my way back to the train, and I came back up, alone. I don’t know if Jay found what he was looking for, or if he ever made it out….” B looked bewildered now, and maybe a little scared.

  Marla found herself approximately a million times more impressed by B than she had been a moment before. “You touched something old and powerful,” she said. “The stuff that myths are made of. Don’t worry about the way your memories are wobbling on you—the numinous is like that, it resists accurate reportage. You could embellish it, make up details, throw in a love story or a little suspense, make yourself a hero—that’s how myths get made—but giving a true and accurate accounting is just this side of impossible, even for someone who can see as clearly as you do.” Marla was increasingly sure that B was something more, perhaps much more, than a man unfortunate enough to be born a seer. She couldn’t be sure he had other powers—some people just happened to encounter the numinous, that was the nature of the truly unknowable. But other people, a few so rare as to be statistically nonexistent, drew the numinous to themselves, or, as some sorcerers speculated, actually generated such fundamentally unknowable Mysteries by their very acts and movements, the way you could build up a charge of static electricity by shuffling across a shag carpet in your stocking feet. If B was one of those, an oracle-generator, he was lucky to still be alive, and as relatively sane as he seemed. Big magic affected people, and B’s relative ignorance could only protect him for so long.

  “Yeah,” B said. “That makes sense to me. If I just think about it, it’s clear, but as soon as I try to put it into words, it goes all hazy. Anyway, I guess I’m just worried that I’m going to see that bone train again. I get the feeling I was only supposed to ride on it once, and if I got on board again, I don’t know what would happen. Nothing good, I don’t think.”

  Just then the unmistakable sound of an approaching train—the rumble, the whine, the sound of air in the tunnel being shoved along by the approaching mass—began. Rondeau stood by B, giving him some support just by his proximity. Marla took up a similar position on his other side.

  “If it’s your train, you don’t have to get on,” Marla said. “I wouldn’t ask that of you. But I don’t think it’s going to be the bone train. If Bethany had a train to the underworld—any underworld—at her command, she wouldn’t be waiting her turn to run San Francisco. If she had easy access to the Land of the Dead, she’d have much more power than that.”

  “Hope you’re right,” B said, almost inaudibly.

  The train barreled out of the tunnel, and at a glance B visibly relaxed. This was no giant’s thighbone, but a high-tech train worthy of a technofetishist’s fantasy, gleaming black metal with accents of sterling silver and surgical steel, with an engine, and several passenger cars, of smoked glass and reflective gleam. Marla thought again that Bethany must be a fabricator. Marla herself had never given a damn about appearances, happy to live in a crumbling brownstone or ride on a filthy city bus so long as all her needs were served. But Bethany clearly reveled in the glamour of surfaces, and so might be good at illusions, and, of course, telling lies.

  “All aboard,” Rondeau said, as a shining black door in the first passenger car slid open with a whuff of compressed air. Marla got on the train first. The interior matched the outside, black leather seats, and silver handrails overhead, and Marla sat down and crossed her legs. B and Rondeau sat as well.

  “This is a lot nicer than the train I took to Hell,” B said.

  “High praise,” Rondeau said. “I wonder who’s driving this thing?”

  “Probably no one,” Marla said. “It’s probably automated. I bet there’s a little model train in Bethany’s lair, and a bit of sympathetic magic to make the big train follow the path of the little one.”

  “That would be one way to do it,” said a voice from the far end of the car, closest to the engine. “But actually I just piggyback on the city’s electrical system and run my train the old-fashioned way.”

  Marla stood and faced the woman who’d emerged from the engine car. “Bethany, I presume,” she said.

  “And you must be Marla Mason. Trouble follows you. And, lucky me, here you are.”

  12

  B ethany slid the door shut behind her. She smiled, and made an odd clicking sound—after a moment Marla realized it was the sound of Bethany tapping her teeth against the ring in
her lower lip. Bethany had no shortage of piercings, along with more extreme body modifications. She was pale, tall, and slender, with black hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail. Her eyes were yellow, and had horizontal slits, like a goat’s—either she’d undergone a transplant to give herself permanent bruja eyes or she was wearing novelty contact lenses. Short horns emerged from her forehead, just above her eyes, wholly subcutaneous implants, probably metal, that added to her devilish appearance. A large silver ring hung from her nose, like a bull ring, and smaller rings adorned her eyebrows and lower lip. Her earlobes had stretchers in place, though the lobes weren’t very big yet, merely the size of quarters. Light scarification decorated her cheeks—what looked like Maori designs, though Marla didn’t know enough about such things to determine their significance, if any. Bethany had brands on her bare upper arms, and a choker of thorns was tattooed around her throat. Small metal implants—ball bearings, horseshoe shapes, and blunt spikes—dotted her forearms and the backs of her hands. She wore leather pants and a leather halter-top that, Marla assumed, covered other bodily embellishments. “Come into the engine car, and we’ll talk,” Bethany said, and Marla noticed that her tongue was split for part of its length, and that the underside was not connected to the bottom of her mouth, which created an illusion of extraordinary length that accentuated the forked tongue’s serpentlike quality. Bethany turned to lead them into the engine car, revealing a crisscross of leather cords running up her back, threaded through hooks implanted into the skin on either side of her spine.

  There were magical advantages to such extreme bodily modifications, Marla knew, especially in the realms of transformative magic. Bethany had altered her body’s original definitions significantly, which would make it easier to shift into other forms. Based on the design of her train, however, Marla suspected that Bethany’s principal motivations for her bodily ornamentation were cosmetic.