by Pratt, T. A.
Rondeau whistled. “You want me to betray my best friend?”
“I suppose you could put it that way,” Death said. “But you’re free to say no. The fact that you’re almost certainly immortal is one of the reasons I’m willing to ask you this – there’s no implied threat, you see, since I can’t take your life. Still, I hope you consider the option. Marla would never know, after all – your failing to act in time to save her would hardly strike her as unbelievable. You often fail to act in a timely fashion, don’t you? It’s not as if dying would be the end of Marla – she’d ascend to her goddesshood, and begin her truly important work.” Death sniffed. “Not that investigating murders isn’t important, I suppose, but from my point of view, one more dead person is hardly anything to get worked up about.”
“Thanks for the offer, really, but I think I have to pass.” Rondeau wanted to go crawl behind the counter and hide. This was Death; he wasn’t human. He didn’t get humans. If you wanted to be technical, Rondeau wasn’t a human, either, but he’d lived as one long enough to get a pretty good handle on the subtleties.
“No, no, don’t decide now, mull it over. Dream about the kind of power I could give you. I’m not asking you to raise a hand against Marla, I’d never ask you that – but not raising a hand? Just... standing by? All I’m asking you to do is... nothing at all, at the right time, if the situation arises.”
“Seriously, I – ”
“Do not answer.” Death’s voice was like an ice gale, freezing Rondeau’s words in his throat. “Just... act, or do not act, as the circumstances warrant.”
“Okay,” he croaked.
Death rose and strode over to Rondeau, putting a hand on his shoulder. It was like being touched by a marble statue: heavy and cold. “I’d appreciate it if you kept this conversation between us. I want what’s best for Marla, that’s all, but I don’t think she would understand. If you saw someone you loved wasting their life on trivialities, when you knew they could be doing much greater things, wouldn’t you want to steer them toward greatness?” His face was long, pale, and earnest; his eyes lively and bright; but all Rondeau could imagine was a void behind those eyes, an everlasting blackness. Eternity was eternity. As far as Death was concerned, everything before eternity was just a waste of time.
“I’m, uh, a pretty big fan of trivialities.” Rondeau resisted the urge to squirm away from Death’s touch. “String together enough trivialities, and you’re talking about something pretty substantial.”
“Disappointing.” Death let go of Rondeau and spun around just as the door to the bookshop opened. “Marla, darling! I come bearing news from the worlds below.”
“Anything useful?” Marla entered, followed by Pelham, and she sat right down in the chair Death had vacated. She looked worried, and thoughtful, which was a nice change from the way she’d mostly looked lately – namely, bored and pissed-off.
“Alas, I have little to report.” Death sat on the arm of the chair, putting his hand on Marla’s shoulder, prompting her to roll her eyes. “Ronin declined to tell me who’d murdered him.”
“What, he doesn’t know?”
“He knows – he just doesn’t want to say. He informed me it was none of my business.”
“But you’re Death,” Rondeau said. “It seems like his murder would fall under your jurisdiction.”
“He disagreed, and politely asked me to leave him to his eternity. So I did.”
“Don’t you have some kind of kill-o-vision you can access to see the dirty deed done?” Marla said. “I thought you were present at the moment of every death.”
“I am present for every death the way a bank is present for every credit card transaction, my love. In a highly-distributed, extremely abstract, and basically impersonal fashion. Oh, I sometimes make a personal appearance, if the deceased interests me particularly, but that’s a rarity. Don’t pout, Marla.”
She shruggled his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t pout. I’m not pouting. I’m fuming. You’re telling me there’s no way you can find out who murdered Ronin?”
“Marla, I’m Death. Of course I could find out, if I expended the effort. But Ronin asked me not to do so, and I am granting his request.”
“You’d favor some dead guy over your own wife?”
“I’m not just the god of Death, Marla – I’m the god of the dead. One of my subjects made a reasonable request, and I see no reason to deny it.”
“You want me to have to do this the hard way, don’t you?”
“It is lovely to see you interested in something again, I admit. Be honest. Did you take this case because you have a burning desire to see justice done, or because you thought investigating a supernatural murder would be interesting?”
“You know me well enough to know the answer to that one.”
Death spread his hands. “Then where’s the fun if I just tell you who killed Ronin?”
“What, it’ll mean more to me if I earn it? That what you’re trying to say?”
“Hmm. I suppose so.”
Marla sighed. “I prefer to be the one teaching people lessons, Mr. Mason. You’d do well to remember that in the future. But, fine, point taken. If you’re not going to help me, beat it. I’ll see you at my funeral. Which won’t be for a long time, so don’t get excited.”
Death stood. “Before I go, I wanted to give you this.” He slipped the silver ring off his right hand and held it up. “You lost your cloak – and good riddance to the vile thing – but I hate to think of you with only one artifact in your possession.”
Marla grunted. She still had a magical dagger that could cut through anything physical and many things that weren’t, including ghosts and astral bodies; it was an exact replica of the dagger of office she’d had as chief sorcerer of Felport, and it was also a gift from Death. Being married to a god had advantages, Rondeau had to admit.
“What is it?”
“A wedding band.”
“Well, yeah. What’s it do?”
“Again – where’s the fun if I just tell you?”
Marla actually smiled. “Ha. Fine. I never read instruction manuals anyway. It won’t kill anyone it touches, will it? Give me that much of a heads-up.”
“No touch of death,” he said. “I have to reserve some of my powers for myself.” He kissed Marla on the forehead – if Rondeau had ever tried doing that, Marla would have kicked his balls up through his ribcage – and then left, this time walking out the actual front door.
Marla squinted at the ring, shrugged, and slipped it into her pocket.
“Are you going to wear that?” Rondeau said.
“I put on a wearable artifact once before without knowing what the hell it did,” Marla said. “And that cloak eventually dumped an ocean of shit on my head. That’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.” She shook her head. “Never get married, gentlemen. It’s a peculiar institution.”
“So what now, Poirot?” Rondeau said. “Since the shortcuts failed us, what? We take the long way around?”
“I guess we go investigate.” She began pacing up and down the room and talking to herself while Rondeau lounged and Pelham worked on reorganizing the bookshelves according to some arcane system of his own. “So,” she said. “Let’s look at the evidence. I haven’t made plaster casts of any footprints or taken any fingerprints, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any clues. The murderer is someone powerful enough to deploy supernatural forensic countermeasures, to shroud their identity even from one of Rondeau’s oracles. Ronin doesn’t want to give up the killer, which maybe means it’s someone he wants to protect, for whatever reason. So what’s that tell us?”
“You need a violin to play or some cocaine to inject or something,” Rondeau said. “Your pacing around is making me tired.”
“It’s obviously someone in the magical community,” Pelham said, without looking away from his work. Rondeau wanted to ask if he was sorting by the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress system, but since he didn’t actually
know what the difference was, he didn’t bother. “Any murder investigation would start with the victim’s closest associates, wouldn’t it? If a woman dies, you look at the husband. If a child dies, consider the parents.”
“You mean he might have been killed by one of the other surfers? Huh, maybe, but I get the feeling they’re pretty closely bound-up together – it’s hard to imagine one of them could do the dirty deed without the others finding out. Still, it’s worth looking into.”
“We could see if there are any ex-surfers, too,” Rondeau said, getting into it now. “After all, where there’s a group, there’s usually an outcast.”
“Ha.” Marla paused for a moment, then tromped on, up and down. She was going to wear a groove in the hardwood if she made a habit out of this. “Speaking as an outcast, I can sympathize with murderous impulses. So that’s a good idea. We’ll ask our clients a few questions. Not that I can necessarily believe anything they say – for all I know they’re a cult worshipping dark sea gods and practicing human sacrifice...” She snapped her fingers. “Rondeau. Get in touch with the Bay Witch, would you? Call Hamil, he can reach her. She knows these guys, but she’s not of them anymore, so maybe she’ll have some insight.”
“Insight? From Zufi? Maybe if her brain worked even remotely like a normal person’s...”
“It can’t hurt to ask,” Marla said. “Come on, we’re working our contacts here, this is good. Probably worth asking some of the other magic types in the area about Ronin and the rest of the wave-mages, too – try to get an objective sense of the group.”
“Do you know many people in the local magical community?” Pelham asked. “Is there a chief sorcerer here?”
Marla shook her head. “I don’t know if they were ever all that hierarchical, but things are extra messy around here now – we told you about that lunatic hunting and killing other sorcerers not too long ago, turning them into sharks and letting them drown in the air? He left a lot of holes in the local scene, or so I understand. I only really know one of the kahunas.” She sighed. “Guess we’d better go see her. Arachne. She lives way the hell on the other side of the island, just off the road to Hana. I’m not up for that shit tonight. What do you say, Pelham – how about tomorrow morning we go for a drive?”
Pelham, of course, felt like doing whatever Marla wanted – and people thought Rondeau let Marla push him around. At least he wasn’t, like, genetically engineered to be enthusiastically obedient. “That’s enough work for one day,” Marla said. “I’m going to take Pelham to get some seafood, Rondeau. You coming?”
“I’ll catch up with you,” Rondeau said. “I should call Hamil about the Bay Witch before it gets too late in Felport.” After they left, Rondeau went into the office and sat down behind the desk. He took out his phone and dialed Hamil, Marla’s old consigliere back in Felport, and asked him to pass on a message to Zufi.
Hamil agreed without asking too many questions, then said, “How’s Marla doing?” in his bass rumble.
“She’s staying alive,” Rondeau said. He asked after a few of his acquaintances in Felport, trying to sound casual, hoping Hamil wouldn’t realize there was only one name on the list he really cared about. After he hung up, he sat for a few minutes looking at the scythe-shaped letter opener on Marla’s desk, sighed, and then dialed another number. It rang half-a-dozen times before being picked up.
The voice said, “I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“Yeah,” Rondeau said. “Hamil told me you were, you know, all recovered. After everything that happened.”
A chuckle. “I’m good as new.”
“I’m glad to hear it. The reason I called is... you know that counseling you gave me when I was all broken up after Bradley Bowman died? You really helped me out a lot, gave me some great advice. Some pretty heavy shit is going on here, and I don’t really have anyone I can talk to about it, so I was wondering... does that doctor-patient confidentiality thing we had still apply?”
“Of course, Rondeau,” Dr. Husch replied. “Tell me your troubles.”
MEET ELSIE JARROW
“You can’t be serious.” Nicolette stared at the immense cube of granite, twenty feet to a side, decorated with inlaid gold in eye-watering patterns and etched with strange runes that seemed to shift and writhe without every losing their essential symmetry. “You’re really going to let her out? I thought you were just screwing with me.”
Dr. Husch walked around the cube, her long black dress rustling. Crapsey wasn’t sure what was going on, but from the way Nicolette was acting, it was pretty major. They stood in a large gray room in the basement of the Blackwing Institute, lit by harsh white overhead lights, looking at the world’s most boring sculpture, as far as he could tell. They were attended by at least a dozen orderlies – a whole harmony of human-looking homunculi – arrayed and waiting in the room’s shadowy corners.
“You don’t think I should release her?” Dr. Husch said.
“No, I think you definitely should. I just can’t believe you will.”
Oh, Crapsey thought. It’s a box. “Who’s in the box? Or, what?”
“Her name is Elsie Jarrow,” Dr. Husch said. “She is easily my most troubled patient.”
Nicolette gave a long raspberry, spraying spittle. “Please. She’s so far beyond ordinary notions of sanity that calling her ‘troubled’ is like calling cancer psychopathic.”
“If cancer were sentient,” Dr. Husch said, “it would be psychopathic. Speaking of cancer... I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Jarrow’s body died some months ago. She was absolutely riddled with tumors – she had been more cancer than clean flesh for years, of course, but her own mastery of chaos magic kept her physical form in more-or-less working order. Unfortunately... she tried to escape, as I think you know, this past winter, and she expended the last reserves of her power when she attempted to break through the wards on the Institute’s walls. She had precious little strength left for life support, and couldn’t control her own decay. I was unable save her physical form.”
Nicolette whistled. “She transcended completely? I mean, I knew she could leave her body behind to cause trouble in disembodied form, but she doesn’t even have a home base made of skin and bone and meat anymore? She must be like a wind made of fire now.”
“The death of her physical form doesn’t seem to have diminished her presence at all, no,” Dr. Husch said. “She had been experimenting with astral projection anyway – she tried to get out of the Institute via the phone lines once, and it almost worked. She’s still trapped in the cube, now, though the bed and the chairs and tables inside don’t do her much good anymore. She is wholly bodiless, and... she doesn’t like it much. She says the pain of the cancer made her crazy, and now that she has no body, and thus no pain, she’s thinking more clearly. It could even be true, I suppose – she was never capable of a ruse before, being far too irrational for deception. But she seems lucid, and wants a new body, and she’s willing to do almost anything if I can get her one.”
“What, you want an organ donation? And my whole body’s the organ? Elsie’s my hero, but I’m not willing to die so that she might live.” She glanced at Crapsey, who swallowed hard.
Shit. How many bodies had he stolen over the years, at the Mason’s orders, or – be honest – at his own whim? How many souls had he consigned to infinite oblivion, how many bodies had he used like puppets? Letting Elsie have his body would probably count as justice. “Fuck that,” he said. “Nobody’s taking my body, you got it?”
“Both your vessels are too weak.” Husch stood staring at a spiral of gold twelve feet high. “When she was free, in those last days before her capture, anyone who came within a dozen yards of her developed tumors. She was chaos walking, and cancer is nothing but cells who have lost all sense of order – she became a living carcinogen, and that poisonous aura was a side effect of her power that she couldn’t turn off. She caused bone marrow cancer, mostly. That’s why some people called her Marrowbones.” Dr. Husch pa
used. “That, and because in a moment of... I won’t call it clarity, but, maybe, misguided compassion? She had the idea that she could save the people she’d poisoned with her presence by magically removing all their diseased marrow.”
“Human osso bucco,” Nicolette said. “Yum.”
Husch’s dress rustled as she turned toward Crapsey, though with the veil it was impossible to tell if she were really looking at him. “Do you know what happens to a person when all the marrow in their bones instantly vanishes?”
“Uh. No.”
“Bone marrow produces red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells, and regulates the lymphatic system. Let’s just say the people she ‘cured’ would have preferred the cancer. They at least had a chance of short-term survival with treatment.”
Crapsey furrowed his brow. “So she’s a, what... disease sorcerer? A cancer-mancer?”
“Cancer-mancer!” Nicolette said, and guffawed, actually bending over and slapping her knees. “That’s a little rhymey-wimey, there, Crapsey-wapsey.”
“What would it be called?” Dr. Husch mused. “An... oncomancer? No, ‘mancer’ is Greek and ‘onco’ is Latin, not that a little thing like that ever stopped people from talking about ‘polyamory’ or ‘genocide’ – ”
“Okay, professor boring,” Nicolette said. She turned to Crapsey. “Nah, cancer’s not Elsie’s thing. I mean, it’s one of her things, but it’s just a side effect. The purpose of a tea kettle isn’t to whistle, that’s just something it does in addition to its purpose. See, Elsie Jarrow is just like me.”
“Elsie Jarrow is to you as the sun is to a forty-watt lightbulb,” Dr. Husch said. “She is a force of unstoppable entropy with a will. But, yes, she is a chaos magician. She gets her power from disorder, and she is excellent at generating disorder as well. So powerful that, after she lost her mind and her self-control, her mere proximity was enough to drive cell division mad in the bodies of any creatures unlucky enough to come within range. And her mortal form was never much good at containing such a force of disaster.”
