by T. A. Pratt
B clapped Rondeau on the shoulder. “I think that’s a good idea. But, ah…isn’t there a chance it’ll drive her insane?”
Rondeau nodded. “Yeah. There is. She knows that. But she wants us to do it. I think being in that dried-up old body is driving her crazy anyway.”
The apprentice returned with a steaming cup of something, and paused long enough to look at Rondeau. He nodded at her. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re going to get you your body back.”
The apprentice smiled. It was the first recognizable expression she’d made since B arrived. He went to help her tip the sleeping potion down her former master’s throat.
19
M arla parked the van just inside one of the southern entrances to Golden Gate Park. “Snake time,” she said, and climbed into the backseat next to Ch’ang Hao, then clambered over that seat into the rear compartment, where the steamer trunk rested. Marla flipped open the latches and opened the lid. The trunk was filled with green leaves, and smelled strongly of humidity and black earth. A long snake lay atop the leaves, green banded with red, a color scheme Marla recognized from Mutex’s shorts. She’d settle for something a little less tailored. She glanced at Ch’ang Hao, who was pointedly not looking at her. She muttered a brief, nonspecific prayer of thanks, and then snapped the snake’s spine. It didn’t even wake up. She drew her dagger of office and slit the snake open along its belly, then peeled off its skin as deftly as she would peel a banana. “Hand me my bag, would you, Ch’ang Hao?”
Without turning, he passed her leather bag back. Marla opened a side pocket and retrieved a bone needle and black thread. She folded the snakeskin along its length, so that the moist inside didn’t show at all, and quickly sewed it up. Then she sewed the ends together, making a loop like a snakeskin belt. She pressed the snakeskin against her face, letting the scales touch her open eyes, and whispered an incantation. Then she tasted the snakeskin with the tip of her tongue, leaving a generous dollop of saliva on the skin. She slipped the loop of snakeskin over her arms and her head, twisting awkwardly in the low space at the back of the van, until it rested around her waist like a belt. Marla pulled up her shirt and let the snakeskin touch the skin of her belly and hips, then put her shirt back down over it. “There,” she said. “Now I’ve got nothing to fear from frogs.”
“Not little poison ones anyway,” Cole said from the front seat. “Giant monstrous frogs from Aztec mythology might still prove difficult.”
“I’m not worried,” Marla said, climbing back to the driver’s seat, feeling the snakeskin shift against her body as she moved. “I’ve got a lot of rage I need to work off, and I’ve got the help of the greatest sorcerer since Merlin, right?”
“Hmm,” Cole said. “As to that, I have been sleeping for the better part of a century, Marla. And while I am not wholly defenseless, do not expect much from me in the way of offensive capability. I have always been a cautious sorcerer, and while I will admit without false modesty that I have achieved great things, those feats always required careful preparations. I have never been much good in the heat of battle—at least, not unless I had ample time to lay a suitably ingenious ambush first. I am at your service, but there is a good reason that I sought you out, rather than going to dispose of Mutex myself.”
“Oh,” Marla said, feeling her furious courage abate slightly. She’d expected this to be an easy op, with Cole giving her support, but if he didn’t have much to offer in the way of firepower…She looked at Ch’ang Hao. “So, big guy. Any chance you’d be willing to help me in the havoc to come?”
“I do not shy away from battle,” Ch’ang Hao said, “but I have had my fill of fighting for others. My former masters often used me so.”
“And let’s not forget who liberated you from your former masters,” Marla said. She regretted it as soon as the words were spoken. It was a stupid, insulting thing to say, and she never would have slipped like that if she’d been well rested, if she’d been back home, if she wasn’t thinking about B and Rondeau dead at the Celestial’s hands, if…
“That debt has been discharged,” Ch’ang Hao said coldly. “I fulfilled my duty. Do not think to—”
“You’re right, I’m sorry, it was a shitty thing to say,” Marla said, holding up her hands. “Mea culpa. Look, if I cut your harness now…will you forget about killing me? Call it even?”
“You would cut me free now only to save yourself. I am disgusted by the suggestion, and I am finished making bargains with you. I reject your offer.” He looked briefly upward, then back down at her. “Nevertheless, I will fight by your side.”
“Why?”
“I will try to keep you alive, so that when I have fulfilled my other responsibilities, I may return, and take your life myself.”
“How do I know you won’t try to kill me while I’m distracted with Mutex?”
“You have my word that I will not attempt to take your life on this day,” he said solemnly. “On another day, yes. But not this one.”
“I’d hoped we could get past this,” Marla said. “That I could make you understand why I’ve done the things I’ve done. That we could be…friends.”
“The moment you used me as a tool, you closed off any possibility of the two of us becoming friends. Did you never think that, had you set me free out of kindness, I would have counted you a friend, and helped you out of kindness in return? Instead, you bought me. And now you’ve killed one of my children, and ornamented yourself with his skin. Imagine if I had killed Rondeau before your eyes, and dressed myself in the torn remnants of his flesh. That is what I have just watched you do. I know you had your reasons, but that does not change my response. No, Marla. We will not be friends.” He shifted his huge bulk on the seat. “This space is confining. I will be outside.” He opened the van door and stepped out, into the afternoon sun.
Marla looked out the windshield. “This is no kind of January,” she said. “There should be wind, snow, ice. Look how clear it is.”
“I grew up in the woods of Canada,” Cole said. “I cannot say I mind the lack of snow here.” He glanced out the passenger-side window, to where Ch’ang Hao stood impassively near some bushes, on the edge of the vastness that was Golden Gate Park. “You are a brave woman, to make a god your enemy.”
“I didn’t mean to make him my enemy. But I guess I didn’t come close to doing enough to make him my friend.”
“Regret is a heavy burden,” Cole said.
“If I feel regret, that means I’m still alive, so I’m all for it. We should get going. The Tea Garden’s that way, according to the map.” Rondeau had circled the Tea Garden on the map—it was one of the places he’d wanted to visit. I should have let him come, Marla thought. I shouldn’t have given him such a hard time. And that was the closest she would let herself come to mourning for now.
“And you’re just going to…rush in?”
“You know another way to get where we’re going?”
“It might be worthwhile to observe our enemy’s position from a distance, don’t you think?”
Marla shook her head. “I wish. Mutex has hidden himself well. That’s part of why he kept getting the drop on the other sorcerers—they couldn’t tell when he was coming or where he was coming from. Once he got the Cornerstone, he made it so clairvoyance, divination, clairaudience, everything fails when it comes to him.”
“Ah, but we know where he is now,” Cole said. “The Japanese Tea Garden, yes?”
“So?” Marla said. “How does that help it?”
“This is my city, Marla,” Cole said mildly, and Marla felt a sudden fierce kinship with him—this was his city, just as Marla’s city was her own. Those other sorcerers, with their ruling council, had just been acting as Cole’s regents, though they hadn’t realized it. “Nothing can be hidden from me here,” Cole said. “I can look upon any part of my city, and no power on this Earth or under it can prevent me from doing so. Do you have a mirror?”
Marla opened her bag and lifted out a wad of Styro
foam, bubble wrap, and clear packaging tape. Some sorcerers—Susan, for instance—had ornate hand-mirrors with mother-of-pearl backs inlaid with jewels, but Marla’s scrying mirror was just a shard from a shaving mirror that had belonged to Sauvage, the sorcerer who’d ruled her city before Marla’s tenure. She unwrapped the packaging and revealed the long, triangular sliver of reflective glass.
“This has passed through powerful hands,” Cole said approvingly, lifting the glass gently and letting it rest on the upturned palms of his hands. He looked into the glass. “See,” he said, and Marla looked.
The glass showed the walled Japanese Tea Garden from above, an image that grew larger when Cole murmured over it, the view zooming past pagodas, stone bridges, paths, and trees. There were bodies, too—dead tourists, dead staff, all with their chests cut open and their hearts removed. The blood still glistened. They’d died recently.
Then Mutex appeared in the glass. He held a heart in each hand and squeezed them, blood running out of his fists and spattering the earth around the base of a bigger-than-life-sized bronze Buddha. A pile of blood-speckled fruit—peaches, oranges, strawberries, lemons, and more—lay near the statue. Mutex’s wicker basket was on the ground, open, and yellow frogs carpeted the ground around him, hopping from place to place. A gauzy charm of hummingbirds hovered above him like the roof of a ruby-colored tent.
“That statue of the Buddha was not here the last time I saw the park,” Cole said. “What is that near its feet?”
The image enlarged, revealing a hole at the Buddha’s feet, a hole that was filling with blood. “There’s something buried in the hole,” Cole said.
“A statue,” Marla said, remembering the statue of Tlaltecuhtli that had been stolen from the gallery. “It’s the image of the god he’s trying to raise. He’s feeding it blood.”
“He’s dripping blood over the Buddha, too,” Cole said. They both looked into the glass, captivated, as Mutex smeared handfuls of blood and soil over the bronze Buddha’s belly.
“Most of the Buddhists I know are fairly easygoing people,” Marla said. “But I think this level of blasphemy would annoy even them.”
“The small statue is an offering,” Cole said. “Perhaps a remembrance—something to awaken the spirit of Tlaltecuhtli and help it recall its true form. But the Buddha is the seed crystal. You see? The god can’t appear without a body, it needs some physical form at its center. It’s the same way an oyster needs a bit of grit inside it to form the center of a pearl. The Buddha is made of forged metal, a substance drawn up from the treasury of the Earth, which is appropriate for the god Mutex hopes to raise.”
“And from a distance, if the light isn’t good, a Buddha in the lotus position is shaped sort of like a sitting frog,” Marla said.
“It takes a certain amount of imagination to see that,” Cole said, “but I suspect you’re right. We’re looking at the inner core of a god.”
“But where’s the Cornerstone?” Marla said. “I don’t see it.”
“There,” Cole said, and the view moved beneath a long bridge. The Cornerstone sat beneath the bridge, warping the light around it, surrounded by a ruby mist of hummingbirds.
Ch’ang Hao knocked on the passenger window, startling both of them. “Will we be going soon?” he asked.
Cole looked at Marla. She nodded, and they both got out of the van.
“You took the bus here?” Rondeau said, standing outside the Celestial’s shop, still looking around for the car that didn’t exist.
“I don’t own a car,” B said.
Rondeau shook his head. “I’m sitting there being tortured—well, I wasn’t, but I could have been—and you don’t even steal a car?”
“I could maybe just manage to steal a car if it still had the keys in it,” B said. “But unless the door was unlocked, I’d probably hurt my elbow busting in the window. I’m not actually skilled in the criminal arts.”
“Fine, sure,” Rondeau said. “Let’s find a car. That one’ll do.” He hurried over to a blue two-door coupe. B followed, wondering if Rondeau was really about to rip off a car in broad daylight.
Rondeau grabbed the driver’s-side handle and tugged. The door popped open, and Rondeau grinned. He slipped in and unlocked the passenger door for B, who got in with him. “I don’t know much magic,” Rondeau said. “Just the Cursing, which is more a natural talent, like being able to burp the alphabet or turn your eyelids inside out. But I do know how to open shit. I learned how to do it with picks and jimmys and everything first, because Marla’s a big believer in self-sufficiency without spells, but once I had that down, she taught me the shortcuts.” As he spoke, he pulled out the ashtray and tossed it in the backseat, then reached into the cavity revealed and did something with the wires inside. The engine roared to life. Rondeau sat up, threw the car into gear, and drove.
“Don’t you feel guilty about stealing a car?” B said.
“Nah,” Rondeau said. “Especially not when it’s a rental.” He tapped a sheaf of papers clipped to the visor. “And especially especially not when I’m on a mission to help save the world. Even if I’m not actually crucial to that mission.”
“I didn’t have a vision about you,” B said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a role to play. We can both help Marla.”
“Doomed to be a best supporting actor,” Rondeau said. “It’s a hell of a life. Where are we going?”
“Oh, right, the Japanese Tea Garden, in the park. I don’t drive much, but I think I can figure it out—”
“I got it,” Rondeau said, expertly piloting the car through the maze of one-way streets and double-parked obstacles that filled this part of the city. “I was excited about coming to San Francisco. I memorized all the maps.”
“All the maps?”
“You’re not the only one with natural talents,” said Rondeau.
Marla and Cole crept toward the closed gates of the Japanese Tea Garden, and Ch’ang Hao walked softly a short distance behind them. A painted sign hanging on the gate read “Closed for Maintenance,” probably something Mutex had found tucked in a shed somewhere. Marla closed her eyes, trying to visualize the layout of the garden as she’d seen it from above in the glass. “Mutex is toward the northwest, near the center of the gardens. We can go northeast and slip around past the actual tea house—there’s lots of cover there, hedges, and the gift shop—and get pretty close to him without being seen, I bet.”
“It’s as good a plan as any,” Cole said.
“Watch out for frogs,” she said.
“I shall.”
“Are the frogs going to be a problem for you, Ch’ang Hao?” she asked.
Hao sniffed. “Frogs. No. I have nothing to fear from frogs. My kind eat them.”
Marla pushed on the gate. It was locked. She pressed her hand against the wood, concentrated, and was rewarded a moment later with the snap of a lock and latch giving way on the other side. She pushed open the gate, just wide enough to admit her, and looked inside.
The Tea Garden was beautiful, and cultivated enough that it didn’t discomfort Marla the way nature usually did. There were pebbled paths, graceful bridges, running water, creeks, and statuary, all visible from where Marla stood. There was also a dead tourist in khaki shorts lying in one of the pathways, but that only detracted slightly from the beauty. She beckoned Cole and Ch’ang Hao, then slipped inside.
The atmosphere inside the gate struck her instantly—heavy, electric, crackling, roiling. There was deep magic happening here, or about to happen. Cole sensed it, too. “There’s more to this than raising a god,” he said. “That’s the weight in the air, but I smell something else, another spell. Mutex is trying to do something more.”
Before he could elaborate, the hummingbirds came. Perhaps Mutex had seen them and sent the birds, or perhaps the birds acted autonomously. They descended from the sky and hung before Marla and her allies, forming a ruby fence eight feet high, their bodies and invisibly thrumming wings fitted as neatly together as i
f they were an Escher print of interlocking birds. Marla tried to move around them, but the birds moved with her, staying in front of her, keeping her from moving forward. “Flank them,” she said, and Cole and Ch’ang Hao moved off to either side.
More hummingbirds descended, and now they arrayed themselves in a semicircle, hemming in Marla, Cole, and Ch’ang Hao.
“Birds,” Hao said contemptuously, and struck them with his fist.
He gasped and pulled his hand back, eyes wide. His knuckles were torn, leaking a yellowish substance. Snake god’s blood.
“They’re not just birds,” Marla said. “They’re the spirits of dead warriors, and they’re the next best thing to indestructible. Rondeau managed to kill some, by Cursing at them, but I don’t know how we can.” She shook her head. “We’ve got to get around them.” The birds hung before her, a multitude of tiny black eyes fixed on her face.
“Marla,” Cole said, and when she looked at him, she was deeply unnerved to see naked fear in his expression. “I’ve figured out what the other spell is. I know what else Mutex is trying to do.”
Beyond the nearly opaque wall of hummingbirds, something gave a throaty roar.
“Hold up,” Rondeau said. “Gas station. Give me a minute.” He pulled into the lot and parked the car at an inconsiderate angle across two spaces, and ran into the convenience store before B could protest. He returned a moment later carrying two cans of hairspray and a handful of cheap, translucent lighters.
“Planning to do your hair and smoke some cigarettes?” B said when Rondeau jumped back in.
“Nah,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about Mutex and his menagerie. He’s got frogs, yeah, they get all the hype, but he’s also got hummingbirds, and those little bastards are all but unkillable. I Cursed a couple of them, and that killed them, but I was thinking about what happened when I Cursed them—they burst into flame. And Hamil told us that the hummingbirds were warriors for the sun god. So I’m thinking, blades don’t kill them, beating the shit out of them doesn’t kill them, but maybe…”
