by T. A. Pratt
“Fire,” B said. “Got it. And the hairspray and lighters are the classic ingredients for a homemade B-movie flamethrower that’s as likely to explode in your face as anything else.”
“You see?” Rondeau said. “Maybe I’m going to be indispensable to the fate of the world after all.”
Moments later they reached the park. Rondeau double-parked just inside the gate—it was easy to do that, B reflected, when you didn’t have to worry about getting a parking ticket—and started running flat-out in the direction of the Tea Garden.
B hurried after him. Rondeau didn’t strike him as the running type. He seemed better suited to sauntering, strolling, or possibly swaggering. Since he was running, B figured it was a good idea for him to run, too, even if he did feel a little ridiculous with Marla’s cloak flapping out behind him.
“Marlita!”
Marla turned, and there beyond the half-open gate was Rondeau, grinning, running, and carrying (rather improbably) a couple of aerosol cans. B was behind him, puffing as he ran.
“Rondeau,” she said. “Rondeau! Why aren’t you dead?”
“B played the cavalry,” he said, and winked. “Because I’m so crucial to the fate of the world, you know.”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she said. “Is the Celestial dead?”
“No,” Ch’ang Hao and Rondeau said, simultaneously.
B approached Marla, looking sidelong at the wall of birds. He unhooked her cloak and handed it over. “I didn’t even get blood on it,” he said. “I, ah, dealt with things another way.”
“You’ll have to tell me about that, if we survive the afternoon,” she said, wrapping the cloak around her shoulders. “Right now we’ve got a wall of birds between us and our target, Tlaltecuhtli is stirring, and I think Cole was just about to tell me some more bad news.”
“Cole?” Rondeau said. “I wondered who the old guy was. Nice to meet you. You’re shit at following people discreetly, though, I gotta say.”
“Yes,” Cole said, “I suppose so. Formal introductions can wait. Listen to me. Mutex is raising the frog-monster, yes, but he’s prepared another spell as well. He’s going to cast a spell of psychic transposition.”
B and Rondeau looked at him blankly, and Ch’ang Hao looked at him with the disinterest of a snake watching the strange capering of mammals it wasn’t quite ready to eat. But Marla understood. “The Thing on the Doorstep trick.”
“What?” Rondeau said. “Who’s he going to switch brains with?”
“Tlaltecuhtli,” Marla said, coldness spreading inside her, making her feel like a sort of animate statue of herself. “Mutex isn’t just raising the god. He’s going to become the god. He’s going to take control of the god’s body, and leave the god’s mind in his human one.”
“And because he’s using the Cornerstone, he won’t go insane, and the switch will be permanent,” Cole said.
“Fuck,” Rondeau said. “We can’t have that.” He handed an aerosol can to B, and holding the other in his left hand, marched up to the wall of hummingbirds. He flicked on the lighter and depressed the button on the can, moving the flame into the spray. A modest gout of fire shot forth from the can, but the effect was dramatic—the birds touched by the flame fell, smoking and flapping, and while other birds moved in to fill the vacant positions, Rondeau kept sweeping the flame over them, and the fence grew thin. B stepped up at a different place on the fence and lit his own homemade flamethrower, turning his face away and wincing—sensibly, Marla thought, since there was a good chance that the flame would travel back up the spray and the can would explode in his hand.
“Rondeau, that’s perfect!” B was right—Rondeau was crucial here. Fire had killed the birds before, and it would kill them again. “But I can do better than white-trash flamethrowers.” Marla had just done this spell yesterday, so it was easier to do it now, with the mental patterns fresh in her memory. She sucked the remaining heat from the dead bodies inside the garden, but that wasn’t enough to do anything noticeable with—and then she thought to steal heat directly from the hummingbirds. They were small, but there were lots of them, so maybe there’d be enough heat.
Once she tapped into the hummingbirds, she gasped. It was like she’d tried to draw heat from a campfire and found a volcano instead—the birds contained astonishing amounts of energy, heat bound up in their ruby breasts. She felt her temperature rapidly rising into the danger zone, and she flung heat back at the birds.
Rondeau and B shouted and dove out of the way as the hummingbirds all burst simultaneously into flame, showering onto the ground in smoking ruin.
Marla nudged one of the hummingbirds with her foot. She looked around at her companions, and showed her teeth. This was it. This was the kind of shit she lived for, what she got out of bed in the morning hoping for and went to bed at night dreaming of. “Onward and inward,” she said. “And keep clear of the frogs, if you’re not a snake god like Ch’ang Hao or wearing a magical snake-belt like me.”
Since they’d already blown the element of surprise, Marla went straight up the path that led to Mutex. In seconds the Buddha was in sight, but it was no longer even remotely Buddha-like. It had grown to twice its former size and now towered nearly twenty feet high. Its features had softened and run, and it was no longer recognizably anything, just a squat, bulging bronze shape, vaguely froglike in its proportions. It did have a mouth, though, gaping big enough to swallow a bread box, with darkness inside. Mutex stood before it, surrounded by yellow frogs, his body streaked with blood. His back was arched, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of worship, his arms raised high. A flock of hummingbirds floated over the changing statue. They now carried the Cornerstone suspended from silver chains, just as they had on Strawberry Hill, but they hovered above the newborn frog god.
The smell of rotting vegetation was overwhelming.
Still running, Marla cried, “Mutex! This is for Lao Tsung!”
Mutex made no indication that he’d heard her, but he did sweep his arms down in a grand, maestrolike gesture.
When he did, the hovering hummingbirds flew off in a dozen different directions at once, severing the ties that held the Cornerstone. The stone—Marla’s one hope for survival, the reason she’d gotten mixed up in all this madness anyway, the ultimate goal of this entire ordeal—fell straight into the ur-Tlaltecuhtli’s vast, moaning mouth.
The frog-statue closed its mouth, and visibly swallowed.
The Cornerstone was gone.
Without breaking stride, Marla reversed her cloak.
With his superior vision, B could see right away that it wasn’t Mutex anymore, that his genius had left his loci and successfully switched bodies with the ever-expanding Tlaltecuhtli at the exact moment that the Cornerstone fell into the monster’s open mouth. But Marla didn’t notice. She transformed into a beast, a jaguar of deep purple shadows, and in half a bound she’d crushed a dozen frogs underfoot, and in another leap she was on top of what had been Mutex.
B tried to imagine what Tlaltecuhtli must be experiencing—to have returned to consciousness after so long, to have felt burgeoning strength, and then to suddenly be confined in a small body, and, mere seconds later, to be torn to pieces by an enraged woman who’d just watched her only hope for ongoing life fall into a monster’s mouth.
The purple shadow-beast abruptly disappeared, replaced by Marla cloaked in white, crouching amid the remains of Mutex’s body. Small golden frogs jumped all around her, but she paid them no mind. Marla looked up at Tlaltecuhtli, who was now close to thirty feet high and spreading in every direction, crushing bushes and bridges and statues as he expanded. The bronze of the Buddha had changed to something closer to green flesh, and distinct limbs were forming, expanding out from the central mass. There was no sign yet of Mutex’s consciousness, but he was in there, B knew, and once the monster was fully formed, he would strike with zeal and calculation, as Mutex had in his smaller form. B could already see the vague outlines of the gargantuan monster he and
Marla had seen after their visit to the Possible Witch. Marla backed away, staring up at the frog-monster, her face empty of emotion, but B could see that she knew, that she understood that Mutex’s mind still lived on. But he didn’t know what, if anything, she could do about it.
“I wish…” Cole said, looking down at the golden frogs that covered the ground between them and Marla. He clenched his hands into fists. “I wish I could do something.”
Rondeau gazed up at the frog-monster, and for once, he didn’t look bored at all. He looked terrified.
Ch’ang Hao was methodically stomping on the poison dart frogs and kicking their remains aside. He went to stand beside Marla, and the two of them studied the swelling frog-monster like surveyors looking over a bit of rocky landscape. Marla spoke to Ch’ang Hao—B couldn’t hear the words—and the snake god shook his head, grinding another frog under his foot as he did so.
After the alien intelligence receded, and Marla was no longer occupied by trying to figure out the best way to kill Ch’ang Hao for his earlier threats, she said, “I’m fucked.” She had to shout over the sounds coming from Tlaltecuhtli, the occasional moans and the constant low sounds of meat stretching.
“I see toes,” Ch’ang Hao said, his deep voice carrying easily over the noise. “And the beginning of fingers. There are mouths appearing on the elbows and knees. Once this creature assumes its form, it will begin killing. And once it kills, it will grow larger. That is the way of such gods.” He sounded completely indifferent, and she supposed he was—he didn’t care if humankind and all its works were destroyed. He likely hoped they would be.
“I can’t fight this thing,” Marla said. “I can’t attack it any more than I could attack the Golden Gate Bridge, any more than I could kill the moon. In a few more minutes, we’re going to get crushed just from the way this motherfucker is expanding. It’s Mutex in there, too. I just ripped apart the real Tlaltecuhtli. I saw it in its eyes. Poor thing was confused—didn’t understand what the hell was going on. I actually felt sorry for it.” She did now anyway—she hadn’t felt much of anything when she’d killed it, or for a little while afterward, until the cloak’s effect wore off.
“There are few humans who can claim to have killed a god,” Ch’ang Hao said. “Even by accident. You continue to accumulate distinctions.” The flatness of his tone did more to advertise his hatred for her than any amount of anger would have.
“I know your opinion of me isn’t as high as it could be,” Marla said. “I wish I could do something about that.” She backed away from the creature’s expanding girth, and Ch’ang Hao moved with her.
“I comprehend fully what you are, Marla. I understand the reasons behind your actions. But they earn you no love from me, and I will kill you, if I can. I am saddened at the prospect of this frog-monster killing you first.”
Marla nodded. She considered her options. There was really only one.
The weapon is not responsible for the action of its wielder, Marla thought. Like she’d told B on the hotel roof earlier—it is not the sword that kills, but the wielder.
And now Ch’ang Hao was her only sword, albeit a sword that would try to cut its wielder, in time. Even if she managed to stop Susan from deleting her from reality—and with the Cornerstone swallowed up like an after-dinner mint, how could she ever do that?—she’d have to contend with Ch’ang Hao’s eventual attack. If she used him as a weapon now, he would not love her for it, and he would be a far more formidable foe later, too.
“Ah, well,” Marla said. “Dead now or dead later, the only difference is the fate of the whole goddamned world. Fuck it.” She drew her dagger of office and slid the blade between Ch’ang Hao’s shoulder blade and the nail-studded harness the Celestial had bound him in. With a flick of her wrist, Marla cut the strap, and then repeated the motion at the other shoulder.
Ch’ang Hao looked down at her. “I hope you do not expect thanks.”
“I think we both know why I just did that,” Marla said.
“I could kill you now,” he said. “You could not stand against me.”
“But you gave me your word you wouldn’t kill me today. And you won’t. Because you’re honorable. And even though I’m not honorable in your eyes, you’ll keep your word. And while I certainly can’t compel you to fight this giant monster, I will point out that if you don’t kill Tlaltecuhtli, he’ll kill me, and then you won’t get the opportunity.”
“Your words are, as always, true and perceptive.” Ch’ang Hao tore off the harness, copper nails popping out of his flesh, yellowish blood briefly welling from dozens of small punctures before they healed over. And then, finally unbound, Ch’ang Hao did what he had not done for centuries. He began to grow.
“My God,” Cole said, when Marla reached him. “He—he—he’s a giant.”
“It’s his thing,” Rondeau said. “He gets bigger. He says he can grow just big enough to defeat whoever he’s fighting.”
“I suggest we retreat,” Marla said. “Because to beat Mutex, aka Mr. Toad, Ch’ang Hao will have to get plenty big. Let’s go.” She began running for the gate, and the others followed after her.
Marla had just dealt Mutex his death blow. It was all over now but the drama. She’d fired the gun; Ch’ang Hao was nothing but the bullet. Normally, this moment would have filled Marla with the exhilaration of watching a victory unfold, but her joy was tempered by the fact that, in a day or two at most, Susan was going to edit her right out of existence.
Still. As she’d said to Ch’ang Hao—fuck it. Even if she was going to disappear in a few hours, it felt good to run now.
Marla, B, Cole, and Rondeau sat beneath a tree and watched Ch’ang Hao battle Mutex in the light of the afternoon sun. Rondeau had acquired an apple from somewhere, and he sliced off pieces with his butterfly knife. “It’s like the best Godzilla movie ever,” Rondeau said. “Hey, B, you must still know people in Hollywood, you’ve got to get this turned into a movie.”
Ch’ang Hao, who stood quite a bit taller than the trees around him, pummeled Mutex, who was still not fully formed. His halo of hummingbirds tried to strike Ch’ang Hao, but the snake god threw mystical asps at them. Ch’ang Hao ripped off one of Mutex’s arms and flung it onto the ground, where it transformed into a pile of mud and moss.
“I wonder how the civic authorities are going to explain this?” B said. “It looks like most of the people in the park have taken off, but I’m sure there are still dozens of people watching this.”
“Beings such as these cannot be photographed,” Cole said. “And most of the ordinaries won’t remember this very well. Those that do won’t be able to report it accurately, and all their stories will conflict with one another. The dead in the Tea Garden will be put down to mass murder. Some of the watchers will go mad.” He shrugged. “It is a steep price, but better than the alternative.”
Ch’ang Hao flung the one-armed Mutex to the ground, and the Earth shook.
“Earthquake,” B said. “Only a little one, though.”
“Ch’ang is fighting a primordial earth-monster,” Marla said. “Even if it’s only a baby one.”
“Mr. Toad is kind of a shitty fighter,” Rondeau said.
“That’s the problem with taking over someone else’s body,” Marla said. “People are used to their own bodies. It’s tough adjusting to a new one, I bet. Especially when your old body was human and your new body is a rapidly growing frog with too many mouths. I’m surprised he can control the body well enough to stumble around at all.”
“Mutex could have been immortal,” Cole said. “If he’d been allowed to take on his full size, he would have been unimaginably formidable. Mutex’s plan was a good one. An evil one, of course, yes, but a good one.”
“He shouldn’t have taken something I needed,” Marla said. “I would have left him alone if he hadn’t taken the Cornerstone. Until he tried to expand his theocracy too far east anyway.”
Ch’ang Hao twisted off Mutex’s head and flung it to the gro
und, where it exploded in a geyser of vegetation, creeping vines and big, waxy, white flowers. The frog-body shuddered, slumped, and became a mound of dirt. Ch’ang Hao looked at the remains of his vanquished foe for a moment, then began shrinking. He was soon out of sight below the tree line.
“Think the collapsing god managed to smother all the poison dart frogs?” Marla asked.
“I will find out,” Cole said. “Perhaps I can enlist Ch’ang Hao to crush any that remain. And I will find that odd basket Mutex had as well. It may simply be enchanted, but it could also be an artifact, and those are always useful.”
Marla took off the snakeskin belt and laid it on the grass. “Cole, could you give this to Ch’ang Hao? So he can, I don’t know, give it a proper burial or whatever?”
“I don’t think the gesture will make him forgive you,” Cole said.
“Yeah,” Marla said. “I don’t expect it to. How many mortal enemies does this make now, Rondeau?”
Rondeau hummed and counted off on his fingers. “Do we count the Rummage twins as one mortal enemy or two?”
“Two, I guess. They’ve got separate issues with me.”
“I count thirty-five, then,” Rondeau said. “But most of them are shit. Not like Ch’ang Hao. And he’s a god; gods are patient. So you probably don’t have to worry about him for a while.”
Marla didn’t answer. The Cornerstone was gone. She didn’t have to worry about any of her enemies, really, except for Susan. Soon enough, Susan would cast her spell, and that would be the end of Marla. At least when she was erased from the world she would have no regrets. There wouldn’t be anything left of Marla to do the regretting, not even a ghost.
“Those two pretty much wrecked the Tea Garden,” B said after a while. “That’s too bad. It was a really nice place.”
“They’ll rebuild it,” Cole said. “That’s the nature of San Francisco. Earthquake, fire, economic depression, titanic battles between gods, no matter what, it rises from the wreckage and lives on.”
