Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  “Yeah, Felport, back east,” Marla said. “It was pretty much built before I got there, but I’ve been trying to help it along the way to becoming something better. Which is why I don’t appreciate Susan trying to cut me out of existence.” She’d explained the particulars of her mission to Cole earlier in the drive, and he’d assured her that the Cornerstone could help protect her in the way she’d hoped. Marla hadn’t really doubted that, but it was nice to have confirmation.

  “I hope she doesn’t try to cast the spell again while you’re driving,” Cole said. “If you disappear, I don’t think I’d have much hope of getting this vehicle under control.”

  Marla nodded. “I hope she doesn’t try to cast it again, too, but for somewhat different reasons.”

  “Mother of God,” Cole said, staring out the windshield.

  Marla looked. A jetliner was rising into the sky at a steep angle. “Oh, right,” she said. “No commercial air travel when you were last up and about, huh?”

  “Those things are common?” Cole said, craning his neck to watch the plane ascend.

  “Oh, yeah. Hundreds of flights every day. Maybe thousands.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Safer than driving, from what I understand,” Marla said, and whipped the car over into the lane marked “Arrivals,” forcing a BMW into scraping the guardrails in the process.

  “Indeed,” Cole said. “Do we know where we’re going?”

  “Right there,” Marla said, spotting Ch’ang Hao at the curb. He was dressed in a shapeless brown overcoat, and he sat on what appeared to be an antique steamer trunk, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands.

  Marla parked the stolen minivan at the curb and climbed out. “Ch’ang Hao!” she said. “Sorry you had to wait. Rondeau got kidnapped, and I was in another universe.”

  Ch’ang Hao stood up and nodded. “Normally I would doubt such excuses, but I trust you would not lie to me. There need be no lies between us. I would have made my way to you on foot, but…” He looked around, at the parking garage, the spiraling concrete ramps, and shrugged. “I could not get my bearings. I do not like being surrounded by so much concrete. And I did not enjoy flying.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Marla said. “Still, better than centuries of bondage at the hands of the Celestial, right?”

  “Ultimately,” Ch’ang Hao said. “Though there were moments, jammed into the tiny seats, when I thought back fondly on the spaciousness of my prison. The spell you cast enabled me to pass through security unmolested, though I had none of these passports they desired, and their machines beeped at the nails on my harness.”

  “Did you…have any trouble? Once you arrived?”

  “I found the serpent,” Ch’ang Hao said. He shook his head. “The jungles are being cut and burned. It is shameful.” He looked her in the eye. “It makes me look forward to the extinction of man.”

  “I don’t blame you. And you brought the snake back?”

  “I did. It is in this trunk, sleeping, dreaming of food and warmth. I did not wish it to be afraid in its last hours of life.”

  “Thank you, Ch’ang Hao,” she said. “Your debt to me is fulfilled.”

  “I am aware of that. I do not need you to tell me the nature of my obligations. May I trouble you for transport away from this place?”

  “Sure thing, if you promise not to kill me while I’m driving. Let’s get this trunk into the van.”

  Ch’ang Hao helped her lift the steamer trunk in, and then he climbed into the backseat. Marla got into the driver’s seat in time to hear Cole introduce himself. Ch’ang Hao introduced himself with his customary courtesy.

  “Are you going after the Chinese guy again?” Marla asked, pulling away from the curb and driving toward the freeway.

  “I owe him a debt of pain,” Ch’ang Hao said. “A far greater one than I owe you.”

  “I should tell you,” Marla said, “your former master is the one who kidnapped Rondeau. He demanded that I bring you back to him in exchange for Rondeau’s life.”

  Ch’ang Hao considered that. “Do you intend to do as he asks?”

  “No. I doubt I could take you against your will even if I wanted to. I just wanted you to know, your old master might be dead. I had to come get you, and now I’ve got to go deal with Mutex posthaste, so I sent a friend to rescue Rondeau. Assuming things went well, he probably had to kill the Chinese guy.”

  “No,” Ch’ang Hao said. “My old captor still lives. I would know if he died.”

  Marla drove in silence for a while. “Shit,” she said at last. “Shit. That means B failed. Which means both he and Rondeau are most likely dead.”

  “I am sorry for your loss, Marla,” Cole said.

  “Rondeau seemed an honorable man,” Ch’ang Hao murmured.

  “Yeah,” Marla said. This was more than a personal loss, though. B had told her that Rondeau was crucial to her success, and that without him, defeat was assured. If there was ever a time to give up, this was it.

  But no. The future wasn’t fixed. There were strong possibilities, yes, and maybe the odds were astronomically against her without Rondeau, but that didn’t mean she should give up. When there was only one game in town, that was the game you played, even if the odds were against you. “I’m sorry, too. But you know who’s going to be really sorry? Mutex. If I hadn’t had to deal with him, I could have gone to save Rondeau. And once I turn Mutex into a splatter on the ground, I’m going to help you out, Ch’ang Hao, and we’re going to kill the Chinese guy together. If that’s all right with you.”

  “I respect your wish for vengeance,” Ch’ang Hao said, “and you are welcome to join me. He is our common enemy. Any outstanding business between us will be dealt with later. I have many things to attend to before I settle my business with you. I wish to visit the jungles to the south, where my children die with the forests. I hope I can remedy that situation. I may be gone for years, and perhaps you will die while I am otherwise occupied. But if you live…I will not forget about you. We will meet again, when all this is over.”

  “I’ll count the days,” Marla said. “But right now, I’ve got to stop Mutex. I don’t have time to drop you off anywhere, Ch’ang Hao, so you’ll have to come along. I don’t expect you to fight with me, though if you want to work off some frustration doing so, you’re welcome.”

  “Perhaps,” Ch’ang Hao said. “Where are we going?”

  “For a walk in the park,” Cole said.

  B found the entrance to the Celestial’s shop easily, and also saw the golden threads shimmering at chest-height across the doorway. He figured they were meant to be invisible. But B could see through things like that, more and more—apparently his spirit-eyes benefited from all the exercise he’d been giving them, as they seemed to grow more acute with each passing hour. It was disconcerting; the corners and shadows of the world increasingly teemed with potential and present spirits, and B could see them all, beating their ragged wings against the membrane that separated this reality from whatever strange lands lay beyond. He could blind himself to the creatures to an extent, let them fade into the background of his awareness, but they never went away completely. His whole life was beginning to resemble one of those dreams, full of just-glimpsed mysteries and portentous commonplaces. In a way, it was a relief to be so fully immersed in this uncanny world—he no longer felt on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. He almost felt as if he belonged. None of which made him more comfortable about the prospect of entering a sorcerer’s workshop with murder in mind.

  Ducking beneath the golden threads to avoid setting off any traps or tattletales, he crept into the shop as quietly as possible. The wreckage from earlier remained, but there were no people inside, at least not in the front room. B stepped carefully through the broken bottles, crushed canisters, and scattered herbs, striving for the stealth and grace he’d often playacted in his movies.

  Voices emanated from beyond the twisted, blackened metal counter at the rear of the shop
. The concealed door was slightly ajar. B couldn’t make out the words coming from behind the door—his extraordinary senses didn’t extend into the auditory realm, apparently—but he thought the language might be some sort of Chinese. B crept forward and pushed open the door to the back room a bare quarter of an inch more and peered inside. The room was lit by lanterns with red shades, reminding him uncomfortably of the emergency lights on Bethany’s train. In the flickering light, the shadows seemed to squirm. Rondeau was there, past the surgical table, bound to a chair with duct tape, his mouth sealed over. He looked incredibly bored. The Celestial was there, too, along with the apprentice, and seeing how fiercely the younger one gesticulated and spoke, and how submissively the older one nodded and stared down, B had no doubt that Rondeau was right about the older sorcerer stealing the younger one’s body. The younger one was really the Celestial, so she was the one B had to destroy. That meant the apprentice would never get her real body back, and that was sad, but B didn’t have much choice.

  B took a slow breath, preparing himself to reverse the cloak. In that moment, he saw something glimmering in the room beyond, tiny filaments like the ones spread across the door, but while those had been golden, these were red. In the red light they were nearly invisible, even to his eyes, which meant anyone else would have likely walked straight into them. The filaments crisscrossed the front half of the room thoroughly, from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, forming a somewhat messy grid that cut B off from Rondeau and the others as surely as a wire fence would have. He didn’t know what they did, but he suspected it was nothing good. If the golden wires at the front door had been meant merely to notify the Celestial of Marla’s arrival, then these red wires were likely meant for uglier purposes.

  What was B supposed to do now? The cloak gave him great power, but of a strictly physical nature. If he couldn’t get to the sorcerer, he couldn’t hurt him, and that meant he didn’t have any edge at all.

  “Marla!” the Celestial shouted. “I hear you breathing, you sneaking creeping bitch. You’ve come early. Enter, and bring Ch’ang Hao so that I may leash him.”

  There wasn’t much point in trying to run away, and B at least had the element of surprise—or, at least, bewildering inexplicability—on his side. He pushed open the door and stepped in, careful to keep far back from the red filaments.

  “You are not Marla,” the Celestial said. “But you are wearing her clothes. Don’t tell me she sent an apprentice to deal with me.”

  “Why not?” B said. “You’re talking to me through your apprentice, aren’t you?” He looked toward the old man. There was no reason to let the Celestial know that B was aware of his body-swapping tendencies. Marla hadn’t told him much about the ways of sorcerers, but she had made it clear that a secret was something to be held and valued.

  “My master does not wish to sully his lips by speaking the foul bitch’s name,” the Celestial said smoothly. “Come closer, apprentice, so that I may give you a message to take to your bitch mistress.”

  “I’m okay standing here, thanks,” B said. It occurred to him, distantly, that he was terrified. His stomach fluttered with something like stage fright, which he hadn’t experienced on an actual stage in many years. But he kept his posture relaxed, his voice clear and firm, using the tools of acting that he’d put away but never forgotten. Rondeau’s eyes were wide, doubtless trying to convey to B that there was a trap here, don’t come any closer, but B had already figured that out, so he nodded to Rondeau in a friendly way. “Anyway,” B said. “Marla had some business to take care of, so she sent me to chat with you.”

  “I will bear no further insults,” the Celestial said, eyes narrowing, small pale hands curled into fists. B wondered if the old sorcerer had always been so prone to rages, or if switching bodies had made his mind fracture. When Rondeau had told B about the Thing on the Doorstep trick, he said that could happen, that the trauma of moving the psyche to a new body could create anything from hairline fractures to great gaping chasms in the mental landscape. “She cannot trifle with me. She will come, she will bring back Ch’ang Hao, whom she stole from me, she will come now.”

  B’s eyes were adjusted to the dimness now, but the shadows continued their squirming, and he frowned, because the shadowy movements didn’t seem related to the flickering of the lamplight. He squinted, and suddenly the movements took on sense. There were spirits here, dozens of them, possibly more, twisting and writhing. There were creatures with fangs and night-blue faces, sinuous dragon-shapes, coiled serpents, a one-legged bird, a stag with a huge rack of antlers, a grotesque toad—but the majority were human, wearing robes, faces twisted in a range of expressions that seemed to run from disappointment to fury.

  And every one of them was turned toward the Celestial, who was still shouting about Marla’s injustices. A crackling field of energy was forming around the Celestial, especially the hands and forearms, and B realized with surprise that he could actually see the sorcerer gathering energy. He’d seen something similar with Marla on Bethany’s train, a whitish mist forming around her as she’d prepared to freeze the poison frogs solid, but he hadn’t really understood. The Celestial was about to do something, cast some spell, and B had to stop him.

  “Hey!” he shouted, speaking not to Rondeau, or the Celestial, or the elderly apprentice, but to the spirits who churned just beneath the skin of existence. Every one of them snapped to attention and looked at B, most of them exhibiting shock, a few smiling bitterly. “You can come out,” B said. “I’ll help you.”

  “Who are you talking to, lickspittle?” the Celestial said, and the crackling black energy hid his hands completely now.

  “Them,” B said, and spread his arms in a gesture of welcome. He reached out to these ghosts and fragments, the way he reached for spirits and oracles, and he felt them respond.

  The spirits burst into greater visibility, and though they were still insubstantial, still flickering on the edges, everyone could see them now. They strode out of the corners toward the Celestial, and where their bodies touched the red filaments the wires snapped harmlessly and disappeared. The Celestial backed away, his gathered magic forgotten and dissipating, his eyes wide. “Ancestors,” he said. “Honored ancestors, you misunderstand, these things I’ve done, I had no choice, I meant no harm to you or your memories….”

  The spirits didn’t speak. They just pressed in, squeezing in a tight knot around the Celestial, who shrank away, hunching onto the ground and covering his head. They did not strike him—B doubted that they could—but they hissed, barely audible, and they looked, and they whispered, and whatever they said made the Celestial shake his head and moan. The apprentice in the old man’s body stood back, looking at the creature, expression completely unreadable.

  B wondered what the spirits were. The Celestial’s actual ancestors? Or phantasms of guilt or madness that B had given a sort of temporary life? Whatever they were, they seemed to have the Celestial occupied, and so B hurried to Rondeau and began stripping the tape away. When he tore off the duct tape from Rondeau’s mouth, Rondeau said, “Is Marla dead?”

  “Not last time I saw her,” B said, unbinding Rondeau’s ankles. “She wanted to come herself, but we got the word from an oracle about when Mutex was going to make his move, and it’s soon, so she had to go deal with that.”

  “She gave you her cloak?” Rondeau said, stunned. “So you could come save me?”

  “Yeah. Not that the cloak turned out to do much good.”

  “I think you did all right on your own,” Rondeau said, looking toward the Celestial, who was dimly visible through the translucent mass of angry ancestors berating him for his crimes. “But we need to find her and give her back this cloak. She’s a badass even without it, and normally she doesn’t wear it, but this is some serious high-stakes shit we’re in.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe she gave you her cloak.”

  “Well, I told her I’d had a vision about you, and that if you died, we wouldn’t possibly be able
to defeat Mutex.”

  “Damn it,” Rondeau said. “I wish you hadn’t told me that, B. I don’t need that kind of pressure. I got kidnapped last night, and it’s been a long-ass day.”

  “Don’t worry,” B said. “I didn’t have a vision about you. I lied. I just wanted Marla to send me to rescue you.”

  “B,” Rondeau said, with real admiration. “You must be one stone-cold liar, to fool Marla.”

  “I did used to be an actor,” he said.

  “And here I thought you got all your roles because of your good looks.”

  “The good looks didn’t hurt,” B said. “But I’m a man of many talents.”

  “Right. Speaking of your many talents…Are those ghosts and ghost-monsters and whatnot going to kill the Chinese guy?”

  “I think they’d like to, but I don’t think they can.” In fact, the spirits were fading away, though the Celestial was still curled on the floor, apparently frightened into catatonia. Without his conscious attention, the spirits seemed to have difficulty holding their shape, even with B’s help.

  “In that case,” Rondeau said. “Hey, apprentice!”

  The apprentice looked at Rondeau.

  “You’ve got every herb known to man and a few that aren’t in this place, right?” Rondeau said.

  The apprentice nodded.

  “Then go, quick, and mix up something that’ll put your master to sleep for a good long while. I don’t trust him to stay curled up for long.” The apprentice nodded again and hurried toward the front room, as well as she could in the old man’s body.

  Rondeau stood up and stretched, the bones in his spine cracking audibly. “I’ve been tied to this chair for fucking hours,” Rondeau said, glaring at the prone Celestial. “If I weren’t afraid of waking him up, I’d go give that bastard a kick.” He grinned. “Assuming we don’t get killed by Mutex and the golden frog all-stars, I’m going to make Marla help me, and we’re going to do the Thing on the Doorstep trick again, and put things right. We’re going to give the apprentice her body back.”