by T. A. Pratt
“Humane mousetrap,” Rondeau said.
“Exactly. Except no one’s going to repatriate us to a distant grassy meadow.”
“Can’t you throw a fireball at the wall or something?” B said.
Marla raised an eyebrow. “I could, though to get the energy I’d have to suck away most of yours and Rondeau’s body heat. If I did that, I wouldn’t accomplish much more than setting this place on fire.”
“No one wants to be trapped in a burning box,” Rondeau said.
“So…we’re fucked?” B said.
“Hey, it could be worse,” Rondeau said. “There’s plenty of stuff to eat here.” He prodded a jar on a nearby shelf, then squinted at it. “Okay, this is dried sea-horses, bad example. But there’s plenty of, ah, ginger and ginseng and mandrake and lots and lots of tea. Think of this place like a bomb shelter. When Mutex raises a giant Aztec frog-monster and ravages the city, we’ll be safe here.”
“Except that stuff can still get in,” Marla said. “And anything bad that comes in here can’t get out again, and we’ll be stuck with it. So it’s not much of a bomb shelter, really.”
“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Okay, point. How do we get out?”
“There might not be a way,” she said. “Let me think.” She sat cross-legged on the floor and put her chin in her hands, staring at the wall. What would the Chinese guy have done? He was a sneaky bastard, fond of traps and hidden things. Also, he was greedy as hell—she remembered the way the apprentice (who was, almost certainly, actually the master in the apprentice’s body) had counted the cash, smoothing the bills out on the counter. This room was still full of magical objects, and probably lots of money, since it was more secure than any bank. The Chinese guy probably hadn’t had time to get even half his valuables before fleeing Ch’ang Hao’s ever-expanding fury. Would he really have cut himself off from this place, leaving his fortune behind?
Of course not. Which was further proven by the fact that he hadn’t severed the ties between this place and the ordinary world entirely. He could still get back in. And he would want to, since so much of his wealth was here. There was no point in his being able to get in, though, if he couldn’t get back out. Which meant there was some way to open this place from the inside. The Chinese guy would come back at some point, probably with some kind of serious magical firepower to subdue Ch’ang Hao. They could just wait for him to return. He probably wouldn’t expect Marla and Rondeau to be here, and they might be able to get the drop on him, especially since they now knew for sure that the one they had to fear was the young Chinese woman in boy-drag. Marla was reasonably confident she could beat the Celestial into revealing the way out.
But that was the brute-force approach, and despite prevailing opinion, Marla did have strengths other than, well, simple strength. The Celestial had fled in a hurry, so he couldn’t have done anything too complicated. The entrance was, in all likelihood, simply hidden. A briefly muttered spell showed her that there was no simple light-bending illusion hiding the entrance, the way there was on the other side. Which meant it was hidden somewhere else. “Okay,” she said aloud. “The door is hidden here, somewhere. This isn’t exactly a literal space—it’s as magical as it is physical, and its physicality is entirely dependent on magic—so the door could be hidden in anything, disguised as anything.”
“So it could be inside this jar of dried starfish,” Rondeau said, picking up a wide-mouthed mason jar.
“Yes,” Marla said. “So smash it open already.”
Rondeau heaved the jar against a far wall. It broke open, and starfish arms showered out. “Nope,” he said. “That’s not it.”
“Good start, though,” Marla said, grinning. This was it, she was sure—pretty sure anyway. The Chinese guy had hidden the entrance, which was really just a spell that had previously been made to look like a door. Now it had been made to look like something else. Smashing whatever it looked like would have the same effect as kicking down the door. It would open the way out. Ch’ang Hao had actually been on the right track with his furious breakage. “Ch’ang Hao!” she called. “Get out here! We’re going to bust out of this place!”
Ch’ang Hao lumbered out of the back room, and she briefly explained. He nodded, looking almost hopeful, and began methodically smashing jars and wrenching open tins. Rondeau was whistling and slicing up a dried alligator mummy with his butterfly knife, and B was gently pushing over long-necked jars of oil and letting them break on the floor. Marla found a jo staff propped in a corner, and though it was an inch too long to be the perfect size for her, it was good enough for her to assault some shelves and apothecary cabinets on the macro level, knocking them over and hammering them to splinters with the age-hardened wooden staff. After half an hour of continual smashing, Marla leaned on her staff and surveyed the wreckage. B was down to ripping open plastic bags of herbs and powders. Ch’ang Hao had thoroughly destroyed the back room, and was now in the process of removing the pendulum-blade from the ceiling and snapping it in half. Rondeau, whose attention had predictably wandered, sat in a corner, apparently reading a newspaper printed in Chinese. Maybe Marla was wrong. Maybe the door wasn’t hidden, after all.
“What about that vase?” B said.
“What?” Marla said.
B pointed toward a corner by the back wall, where a pile of wreckage formed a little mountain. Everything had already been smashed to bits over there.
“What—” Marla repeated, irritated, and then she saw it, a beautiful blue-and-white porcelain vase with a fluted mouth, standing on an unobtrusive blackstone pedestal. “I didn’t see that,” she said.
“I still don’t see anything,” Rondeau said, and Ch’ang Hao shrugged and shook his head. “What’re you going on about?”
“You’re worth your weight in eye of newt, Bowman,” she said, and picked her way through the smashed glass. She had to glance away from the vase to negotiate her way around a puddle of bubbling red sludge, and when she looked back, she didn’t see the vase. Marla swore under her breath. The Chinese guy had put a seriously strong look-away on that vase, the kind of magic only a big-mojo sorcerer could throw, but B had seen right through it. He was a far better seer than she’d originally supposed. “You’d better break the vase, B. It keeps slipping out of my vision.”
“Sure thing,” B said. He picked up a chunk of rough black rock—probably a meteorite, Marla thought—and threw it overhand at the vase from across the room, a distance of some twenty feet. The vase shattered, and light poured out, forming into a ragged oval that showed the streets of Chinatown beyond.
“Good hit!” she crowed. “We’re out!”
Despite the fact that the door was in the back wall now, it still opened onto the same place outside. Consistent spatial relationships were nothing more than a courtesy in this place. Someone familiar hurried past the oval opening on the street beyond, a slim man with a fur hat and a cane. Who was he, Marla wondered. Some henchman of the Celestial’s, off to tell his master she’d escaped? How had he managed to follow her today, from Dalton’s to Bethany’s to Chinatown? Before she could point him out to the others, the old man was out of sight, and Rondeau and B were pressing past her to look through the opening. Based on the way the man had eluded her earlier, chasing him wouldn’t do much good now, and she had other priorities.
“Damn, B, you’re an action hero,” Rondeau said.
“You did well,” Ch’ang Hao said, and Marla wondered if B understood enough to be impressed at such praise from a being as old and powerful as Ch’ang Hao. Thinking of which…
“Ch’ang Hao,” she said. “Now that we can get out of here, I need to ask you about that favor.” She explained, briefly, about the frog-eating Colombian snake. “Can you give it to me?”
“I can bring you any snake that lives in the world,” Ch’ang Hao said. “But it will take some time.”
Marla frowned. “Time? You can’t just…manifest one? The way you did with the asps, and those snakes that made the truth-circl
e, and the glowing ones in the back room?”
Ch’ang Hao shook his head. “I fear not. Those are mystical serpents. They do not eat, or breathe, or breed. You need a real, living, particular sort of snake. I can find it, unerringly, but it will take me…at least three days. One and a half to go to the jungle and find the snake, and as much again to come back.”
Marla wondered if the city would even be standing in two days. “I guess that’ll have to do,” she said, though she suspected it would be too late.
“Wait,” Rondeau said. “You can walk to a South American jungle and back in two days?”
“I have my own ways of traveling,” Ch’ang Hao said. “Walking is part of it.”
“Well, yeah,” B said. “But is it faster than hopping on an airplane to get you most of the way? Say, from San Francisco to Bogotá?”
“What is an airplane?” Ch’ang Hao said.
“Ah,” Marla said, rubbing her hands together. “This might work out after all. Rondeau, you’re going to get Ch’ang Hao some proper traveling clothes, take him to the airport, explain to him how everything works, see him on his way, and all that.”
“What is an airplane?” Ch’ang Hao repeated, patiently.
“A way of traveling great distances at relatively high speed and in considerable discomfort. All will be revealed,” Rondeau said. “Just come with me.” He turned to Marla. “Where do I meet you guys when I get back?”
“Just wait for us at the hotel room,” she said. “B and I have some errands to run.”
“We do?” B said.
“Yeah,” Marla said. “We do. I’m tired of chasing Mutex around town, and now that Ch’ang Hao is going to get a snake for me, we’ve got other options. I’d rather get ahead of Mutex for once. It’s time I found out just what, exactly, you can do, B.”
15
F ind me an oracle,” Marla said, and crossed her arms.
B frowned. “Right now?” He looked around. They were just outside the limits of Chinatown, near the City Lights Bookstore, where Marla had cast her first divination to try to find Lao Tsung—yesterday afternoon, and a subjective hundred years ago. “Right here?”
“I need to know where to find Mutex,” she said. “I need to know where he’s going to be tomorrow.” That would give Ch’ang Hao time to return with the snake. It might also give Mutex time to kill every sorcerer in the city, but that was a chance she had to take. More importantly, it might give Susan time to act against her, but there was nothing Marla could do about that, not now. The spell Susan planned to cast was complex, and Marla just had to hope it wouldn’t be ready today. She knew Hamil was doing his best to stall things.
“Okay,” B said. “I’ll do my best.” He went toward Jack Kerouac Alley, between Vesuvio and City Lights. He stopped near a pile of stacked pallets, and put the palm of his hand against the wall of Vesuvio. “Hey,” he said. “Anyone here? I could use some help.”
Marla had her spirit-eyes on, and she didn’t see anything, not so much as a shade or a specter, let alone the concentrated power of an oracle.
Suddenly something rose from behind the pallets, a mist that took the shape of a man with ash-gray skin and monochrome clothing. Its skin—or its semblance of skin—was slack and wrinkled, and it mumbled something incomprehensible. B mumbled something back, then gestured to Marla. “Come on,” he said. “Ask him what you need to know.”
Marla nodded, and started forward calmly enough, but inside she was caught between shock and elation. B had conjured this oracle, drawn it up out of the stones and memory of the city. This being was, in truth, nothing but a semi-physical manifestation of B’s own incredible perceptive powers. He was no mere seer, but something far more rare and valuable. Some of his visions were so powerful that he couldn’t experience them via direct perception, and so he had to manifest outside sources to present the information. Marla had heard of such individuals, oracle-generating seers, but they were as legendary in their way as Merlin or Sanford Cole. Bowman thought he was summoning an oracle, and there was probably some sort of supernatural entity here—a ghost fragment of a dead Beat poet, perhaps—but that merely provided a focus and form for the expression of B’s power. She turned toward the oracle. “I need to know where Mutex will be tomorrow afternoon,” she said.
The oracle didn’t look at her, but stared into space beyond her shoulder. Finally it mumbled, and B sighed. “He doesn’t know,” B said. “He says that is hidden from him.”
Marla had expected Mutex to hide himself and his movements, but oracles were normally adept at penetrating such veils, and this was a true oracle, despite being generated by B’s own psychic powers. If B’s oracle couldn’t find Mutex, then that meant…shit. It meant Mutex had cast his spell with the help of the Cornerstone, and it would take seriously big magic to peer into the future through a curtain that thick. Marla considered the unwelcome possibility that she might have to fall back on her other plan, seeking out the surviving sorcerers in the city and trying to find Mutex that way. She’d hoped for a more elegant, direct solution.
And maybe there was one. “All right,” she said. “Then we need to find a better oracle. Where can we find the biggest, strongest, most powerful, all-seeing oracle in the vicinity?”
“Ah, shit,” B said, clutching his head. “I got a headache all of a sudden.”
But the monochrome oracle was mumbling, and gesturing with its paper-white hands, and B nodded, wincing as he did so. This question was taking something out of B to answer, even by projected proxy. Finally the oracle stopped talking, and sagged against the wall, like a half-deflated balloon version of itself. “Okay,” B said. “I know. But we have to pay for this, first, before I can tell you.”
Marla nodded. There was always a price to pay for help of this nature. The better the oracle, the bigger the price. It turned out that the price for this one was minimal. Marla went into Vesuvio and ordered a red eye to go. She carried the cup of espresso and coffee out into the alley, and gave it to B. He solemnly, almost ritually, poured it out at the oracle’s feet. Steam rose up from the ground, and the oracle turned into steam itself, satisfied with a drink of hot life.
“We have to go to Alcatraz,” B said. “That’s where the big oracle is.”
Marla nodded. This would be something different. Not a projection of B’s psychic prowess, not one of his convenient oracles-on-demand, but an ancient, strange, inhuman thing. “Does it have a name?”
“The Portable Witch?” B said. “The Pebbled Witch? The Potable Witch? I’m not sure. Something like that. The oracle mumbled.” B rubbed his temple. “My headache’s going away, at least.”
“That’s good,” Marla said. “So how do we get to Alcatraz? Steal a boat?”
“I hope not,” B said. “But we might have to. The tours are usually sold out weeks in advance.”
They made it to Pier 41 just in time to take the last ferry to Alcatraz, at 2:15. Marla would have just sneaked onto the ferry, but B went to try to buy tickets before she could stop him. The ticket sellers just laughed when B asked if there were any late cancellations. Marla couldn’t cast a look-away spell, not while the ticket sellers were so conscious of their presence. So she cast a nasty but ultimately not debilitating nausea spell on a couple of tourists, who sold Marla their tickets at a generous markup; she felt they deserved a little extra money, since they’d be puking for most of the afternoon. Marla had to lean over the side of the ferry to vomit herself before long. The nausea spell was based on sympathetic magic, and she had to make herself at least a little sick in order for it to have any effect. Such were the sacrifices that sorcery demanded. At least Marla was willing to make the sacrifices herself. Mutex, by contrast, wanted everyone else to be sacrificed.
“So do we know what to expect when we get to the island?” Marla asked, sitting next to B on a bench. There was no one nearby, so Marla didn’t bother to cast a quiet spell. And if anyone heard them talking, they’d just assume Marla and B were insane. No harm there.
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br /> “Not really,” B said. “We’re supposed to go to a particular cell—not one of the famous ones—and step inside, face the back wall, close our eyes, turn around three times, and walk forward, with our eyes still closed. Which, logically, would make us bump into the far wall, but I assume that won’t happen. After that, we’ll find the Parable Witch, or whatever her name is.”
“If it’s even a her. Or, rather, if it even appears to be a her. Because, honestly, it’s going to be an ‘it.’”
“This feels different,” B said. “I talk to supernatural creatures all the time, but this…”
“This is different,” Marla said. “Anyway, it had better be. Because the same-old same-olds won’t help us find out where Mutex is going to be. He moves fast enough that chasing him is pretty much pointless. We need to get ahead of him and set an ambush.” She glanced toward Alcatraz Island, a great rock in the bay topped with boxy buildings. “How long is this ride anyway?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. I’ve been on the tour once, but it was a long time ago.”
“We’ll be there in ten minutes. Not much time for us to talk. I’ll just say, you’ve been a help. A greater help than I expected. Don’t let it go to your head, but thanks.”
He nodded, then grinned. “So how do we fill the other nine minutes and forty-five seconds?”
“Casual conversation, I guess.”
“Then tell me about Rondeau,” B said.
“Hmm,” Marla said. “Well, he owns a nightclub back home, likes big band music, hates dogs, and has stupid taste in clothes. Also, he’s an inhuman psychic entity that long ago possessed the body of a little homeless boy, which he still inhabits. He’s been living as a human, more or less successfully, though he does have the ability to Curse in the debased tongue of the lesser gods—that’s one theory anyway—and cause localized, random destruction. He’s been working for me for a few years, and we get along well despite the fact that I ripped his jaw off when he was a little kid. That is, the body he possessed was a little kid. At the time. There’s no telling how long the real-true-essential Rondeau has been alive, if ‘alive’ is even the right term.”
