Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  “Huh,” B said. “I was going to ask if he ever dated men, but now I’m not so sure I want to know.”

  Marla waved her hand. “Rondeau’s a good person, even if he’s not exactly a person. And, while I’ve never inquired too deeply into his sexual orientation, I’d characterize him as primarily heterosexual but adventurous.”

  “Are you a real human being?” B asked.

  Marla shrugged. “Born of man and woman, raised by man and woman. Woman anyway. The man was never around much. I grew up in the Midwest, dropped out of high school, and moved to the big city. I worked in strip clubs for a while, mostly as a waitress. That’s where I met Artie Mann, a pretty big-time sorcerer back then. He saw something in me and took me on as his apprentice. I worked for him for a while, then went freelance. Got in good with a man named Sauvage, who ran the city in those days. Then he got murdered, and I tracked down and killed his murderer.” Marla didn’t like to remember that time. She’d almost died at the hands of Sauvage’s killer, Somerset. “Almost by accident, I found myself taking Sauvage’s place. I’ve been in charge of my city ever since.”

  “The way that guy Dalton was in charge of San Francisco?”

  Marla shook her head. “It’s a little different. Here there’s a ruling council of sorcerers, and they pass the highest position around among themselves. Finch was the one in charge yesterday. After him there was a woman in North Beach, and after her, Dalton. After Dalton, Bethany, and after her, it’s the Chinese guy, who’s still alive and at large, and thus, technically, still in charge. Though, really, Mutex is the one running things now, for all intents and purposes.”

  “What does it mean, that you’re in charge?”

  “It’s complicated,” Marla said. “I work with civic authorities to some extent, as necessary, but I rarely take a hand in the city’s mundane, day-to-day operations. I…protect my city, mostly, against outside sorcerers moving in, against magical dangers, against tyrants, monsters, shit like that.”

  “Does that sort of thing come up a lot? Monsters?”

  Marla thought about Todd Sweeney, and the pale dog that had pursued him; about the not-quite-dead sorcerer Somerset and his flocks of pigeons; about the mad chaos magician Elsie Jarrow and her bloody smile; about a dozen other dangers that had appeared during her relatively brief tenure as chief-of-chiefs. “Sure. Monsters, and other things. Other things is why I’m in San Francisco now, actually. There’s someone, another sorcerer, who wants to take my job. And in the pursuit of that goal, she’s going to doom my city. I came here to get something I need to stop her.”

  “The Cornerstone.”

  “That’s right,” Marla said.

  “And Mutex has it.”

  “Right again. It’s a pretty useful thing to have.”

  “So you aren’t really trying to save San Francisco.”

  “It’s not my neighborhood, B,” Marla said. “I mean your city no harm, but—”

  He laughed. “I hate San Francisco. I live in the East Bay now. I haven’t lived in the city for years, since I was in the movies. I have a lot of good memories of this place, but they’re all bad memories, too, if you see what I mean. Because just thinking about those good days reminds me of bad things.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “So neither one of us loves this place, but we’re going to save it anyway.”

  “Well, sure,” Marla said. “It’s not like we have to go out of our way to do it. We’ll save the city as a byproduct of killing Mutex.” She looked at Alcatraz again. It was looming. She could see the dock. “Besides, the place has its charms.”

  “I guess I wouldn’t want to see it fall into the ocean.”

  “And it’s not as if Tlaltecuhtli would just smash San Francisco and then go into retirement. Mutex’s power would spread, and it would get to us eventually, wherever we went.”

  The boat bumped gently up against the pier, and the tourists began rising and milling about.

  “Let’s go see a witch about a frog,” Marla said.

  It was easy enough to slip away from the tour, though Marla was somewhat interested in what the guide was saying, about the brief American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the early ’70s. She had more important things to do now, though, and she could always get Rondeau to fill her in about the history of the place later, since he’d absorbed everything in the guidebooks like a sponge sucking up water. She cast a look-away over herself and B, the effort of casting the spell making her ears ring a little. Maybe she should have snatched some spell components from the Chinese guy’s shop. All these little magics were starting to take something out of her, and it was harder to cast spells this far from Felport and the center of her power. Everything had a price, after all, and she was down to paying with the substance of herself. She should keep something in reserve for the bigger challenges still to come.

  The island was a desolate place, fit to be little more than a roost for seabirds, but the views of the city and the Golden Gate (both the bridge and the landform) were stunning, and must have been heartbreaking for the inmates when this was a working prison. B led her up the stairs from the dock to the gatehouse—he’d been here before, and had a sense of where they were supposed to go now. He took her into one of the damp, gray cell-blocks, past rows of windowless cells. “We’re going to one of the solitary-confinement cells,” he said, whispering, and Marla felt his whisper was appropriate. There was a presence here, or just past here, located a short distance away in a dimension she couldn’t quite comprehend. In addition to that there were ghostly fragments of dead prisoners, and somewhere a wailing little-girl ghost that Marla assumed had been one of the Indian occupiers, or else one of the Native Americans from before the Europeans came, or possibly a tourist who’d had a tragic accident of some kind. She wondered if B could hear them, but upon reflection, she supposed he could sense them more clearly than she could herself. He’d shown his great acuity time and again, after all. She admired his calm and his attention to the task at hand all the more after realizing that.

  He led her into a tiny cell with a toilet and a sink, the bunk long since gone. B took her hand, and they shut their eyes, then turned slowly together, three times, all the way around. They took a step forward in unison, then another, then another.

  And another. And five more. The sound of the floor beneath Marla’s boots changed from heavy stone to something creakier. “Can we look yet?” she said.

  “I think so,” B said. “We’ve walked past where the wall should be.”

  Marla opened her eyes. They were in a long, dim corridor with a wooden floor and wooden walls, extending forward into darkness. Marla glanced toward a narrow arrow-slit of a window, and the faint, silvery light that came through it, but she stopped herself from stepping closer and looking through the aperture. She didn’t look behind her, either. It was better, in places like this, to keep your eyes on the path. “Forward?” she said.

  “Onward,” B said. He didn’t let go of her hand as they continued. The corridor turned left at a sharp right angle, then extended forward again for another hundred yards or so. Then another sharp turn, this time to the right. Once, they passed a door, with a brass knob, heavily tarnished. B looked at the door, then shook his head, and led Marla on. She wondered what was behind the door, and realized, not for the first time, that there were mysteries piled upon mysteries, and that even an adept and initiate such as herself only saw a tiny fraction of the deeper world that existed behind and above the known world. The corridor eventually reached an ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase. “We’re supposed to go up there,” B said. The corridor continued on, leading to who-knew-what inner mysteries, but Marla only nodded and followed B up the spiral staircase, which passed through a rough-edged square hewn in the roof of the wooden corridor, into something like an elevator shaft. The walls of the shaft were still dark wood, though, and Marla was comforted that they weren’t ascending through pure formless void.

  The top of the stairca
se ended at a seemingly unsupported pier of wood, a walkway no more than an inch thick and barely two feet across, with darkness on all sides. B stepped onto it, and Marla followed. There was a doorway at the end of the walkway, standing open, and white light beyond.

  B hesitated on the threshold. “I…I don’t know where we are now, Marla, but if we step through this door, we’ll be even farther away from the world we know. We may be miles and miles away now, or whatever the spiritual equivalent of miles are, but once we go into this room, we’re light years away, you know?”

  “Nothing ventured,” Marla said. “I’m not about to turn back. Are you?”

  “I guess not. I just wanted you to know what we’re stepping into.” He went through the door, and Marla followed.

  The room was hexagonal, or so Marla thought at first. She quickly revised her opinion to octagonal, then decagonal, and then she simply gave up, because the walls were changing, too subtly for her to notice the transition. The walls of this faceted room were mirrored one moment, then opaque crystal, then obsidian. The ceiling was so far overhead that it vanished into darkness, and the light seemed to come from the air itself, the brightest portion falling on an empty wooden chair in the center of the room. The chair was as simple as it could be, made of the same dark wood as the corridor walls, with a straight back and narrow arms.

  “There’s no one here,” Marla said.

  “There will be,” B said.

  For an instant, something white flickered in the chair, a shape filling it, and then the chair was empty again. Marla heard a distant crackle, like static on a radio between stations.

  Suddenly, in the kind of insightful flash that made her such a capable sorcerer, she understood. This wasn’t the Portable Witch, or the Biddable Witch, or the Pebbled Witch. It was—

  “The Possible Witch,” B said. “That’s what she is. She deals in the possible.”

  Marla nodded, impressed. He’d figured it out as quickly as she had.

  Then the witch was there, dressed all in white, sitting in the chair. She—it, really, but for convenience, she—was immaterial at first, then gradually attained opacity and solidity.

  “I’d expected three,” she said irritably. The possible witch was an old woman, dressed in a white gown like a choral robe, and she sat stiffly (there wasn’t really any other way to sit in such an uncomfortable chair, Marla supposed) with her fingers gripping the ends of the armrests hard, as if she were holding on to keep from flying away, which could be possible, for all Marla knew. Her face was pale, her hair mostly gray with streaks of black. Her eyes weren’t human, and they weren’t exactly insectile, though they were nearer the latter, faceted clusters of black glass with occasional flashes of pure crystal or mirrored silver. “Sometimes there are four of you, the fourth one a god, and on rare occasions there are five, the fifth a very old mortal man, but there are almost always three. Two of you narrows it down anyway, quite a lot, makes it easier, but it’s not what I’d expected, not what was most likely.”

  “You know who we are, of course,” Marla said. “And I think we know what you are. The Possible Witch, yes?”

  “I stand at the center of things,” she said. “Though I don’t just stand. I orbit, I oscillate, I vibrate. Every possible world passes through my sight. Some are more possible than others. Sometimes I’m dead. Mostly, these days, I’m dead. That’s why it took me so long to find you. There are so many possible worlds, and locking in on one in particular is hard, when I exist in so few of them now. But here I am. And it’s the two of you who’ve come, and it’s now, at this particular time, that you’ve come. Which means you’re not trying to undo damage, but prevent it.”

  Marla nodded. “We need to stop Mutex. We need to know where he’ll be tomorrow, when I’ll be in a position to stop him.” Assuming Ch’ang Hao came through with the snake anyway. Ch’ang Hao was clearly the fourth one that the Possible Witch had mentioned, but she had no idea who the “very old mortal man” was. Probably a potential ally who’d died before Marla even met him.

  “But you don’t want to know if you’ll stop him?” The witch’s inhuman eyes glittered.

  “Of course I do, if you know that,” Marla said.

  “Too close to call,” she said promptly. “I see just as many paths one way as the other. Everything branches, you know. Every decision, every option. The universe doesn’t make choices. It does everything, even very unlikely things, somewhere. There are some unlikely places in the universe. In this branch, in this world, it could go either way. You might win, you might lose. Doesn’t much matter, really. Lose here, win somewhere else. So why worry? That’s what I tell everyone who comes to see me, which is lots of people, when you take into account all the different worlds.”

  “It matters to me,” Marla said firmly. Many-worlds theory was as irrelevant to her as Dalton’s prattling about the world being a computer simulation. Maybe it was true—standing here, she had to believe that many-worlds theory was true, that a new universe budded for every decision that was made, from the atomic level on up. But she lived in one world, and that was what mattered. Anything else was irrelevant for any purpose apart from after-dinner philosophizing.

  “Yes, I know. Narrow is the vision.” The witch was grumpy, Marla thought, but that was reasonable, since she was mostly dead. “I can’t tell you anything for sure. The present is finite-but-vast, the future finite-but-even-more-vast. The future is approaching the infinite, actually, almost, if that statement has any relevance, which is arguable. Still, I can narrow it down, narrow to the marrow, yes, I can. There are two of you. Finch is dead? Umbaldo? Dalton?”

  Marla nodded.

  “Narrowing down,” the witch muttered. “Bethany?”

  “Dead,” Marla said.

  “Your hand, or another’s?”

  “Mine.”

  “You killed the Celestial?”

  “No,” Marla said.

  The Possible Witch whistled. “You’ve got more problems ahead than you know, then, but no matter, no matter. Hmm. Who won the World Series last year?”

  Marla looked at her blankly, but B spoke up, naming a team Marla had heard of, vaguely. She didn’t follow sports.

  “They win often,” the witch said. “That’s not a lot of help. I know who’s president, more’s the pity, lots of burned-out cinders in those futures. Moving on, let’s see. Which Cliff House is standing now? The second or third?”

  “Third,” B said.

  “Did the second fall in fire or earthquake?”

  “Um…fire, I think,” B said.

  “Sutro baths are gone?”

  “Yes,” B said.

  “Alcatraz is a tourist attraction? Treasure Island exists?”

  “Yes, and yes.”

  “Beautiful City or grid?”

  “I don’t understand the question,” B said.

  “San Francisco!” the witch said, leaning forward in her chair, still clutching the arms. “After the fire of 1906, was the city rebuilt according to the Burnham Plan, with streets and avenues following the curves of the hills, the ridges topped with lovely towers, and neoclassical public buildings placed artfully throughout the peninsula? Or was it rebuilt hurriedly, with streets thrown down across the hills in a grid, just like before?”

  “The latter, I’m sure,” B said. “There’s nothing graceful about the streets downtown.”

  “Are passenger pigeons entirely, or only mostly, extinct?”

  “Entirely,” Marla said.

  “Only four possibilities now,” the witch said. “And nothing much to distinguish among them, at least no differences you’d be likely to know about, down to the level of whether a particular dog in India is alive or dead, whether a priest in Romania has syphilis or not. But four is good, and two of them are close together for your purposes, so I can give you a probably, a good stiff probably, but that’s the best you’re going to get from me today, understand?”

  “Yes,” Marla said. “Where will Mutex be?”


  “Golden Gate Park. The Japanese Tea Garden. Tomorrow, late afternoon, or evening. A difference of two or three hours, maybe, so go at the earliest, say three o’clock. You’ll probably get there in time, though as for what you’ll do with that time, well, it branches a hundred different ways, and there’s too many maybes between today and tomorrow, too many minor and major variations, for me to say for sure.”

  “You said that’s two of four possibilities. What are the others?”

  “In one of them, you’re too late. Mutex’s spell is done in the middle of the night, and destruction reigns, and you can’t stop it.”

  Marla nodded. She’d suspected as much. “And in the last possibility?”

  The Possible Witch’s eyes moved independently of her face, a few tiny lenses telescoping forward in a manner that seemed caught between the technology of a zoom lens and the biology of a snail’s eyestalk. “In that possibility, you’ll never get there at all, Marla. You know why. Your enemy in Felport, mumbling over her spell. It’s a question of whether she gets indigestion or not. She probably doesn’t, her spell probably isn’t delayed, so you’ll probably live. But if she eats the wrong bite of salmon, she’ll heave over the toilet, and the spell will be delayed, and you will be doomed.”

  Marla frowned. “Wait, if the spell is delayed, I’m doomed? That doesn’t make any sense! Delays are good, I’m desperate for her to be delayed!”

  The witch waved her hand. “You’ll understand soon enough. Just be prepared for the possibility of utter failure.”

  Marla nodded glumly.

  “Mutex is like a bulldozer,” the Possible Witch said. “He doesn’t let himself be deflected, and his course is remarkably straight and true, he moves right along in many a world. He’s got the dedication of true religion. I know where he’ll be anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose…is he right?” Marla asked. “About the old gods needing blood to keep the universe spinning?”