by T. A. Pratt
Two of Reave’s giant blackbirds fell dead from the sky, taking their riders with them. Zealand grinned. So this was getting through to Genevieve. “Shall I let him drop, fling him out, and send him down through the clouds, my dear?” he said, and Genevieve clapped her hands again.
Reave jerked at the vines. He was climbing them, even as he swung, even though the vines were wrapped around his own body. With a dismissive sniff, Zealand flicked his fingers, and let the vines fall free.
He expected Reave to plummet, but the man fell at an angle from the pendulum swing, and snatched on to the edge of a balcony on his own tower, a few floors below. He clambered over the rail, shouldered his way past his fighters, and disappeared inside.
“Gone to lick his wounds, I expect,” Zealand said, but a second later Reave was back on the highest balcony, running out, and leaping.
The jump was too far for a normal man. Zealand could have made it, with the help of his mold. Reave apparently had augmentations of his own, because he cleared the gap easily, and landed to perch on the railing. “I will eat your champion’s eyes,” he said. Genevieve fell back with a cry. Zealand shoved at Reave, trying to knock him off the rail, but Reave wouldn’t budge. He’d been a lightweight before, but now he was dense as marble.
“Genevieve, get inside!” Zealand said. If she didn’t see Reave getting stronger, maybe she wouldn’t let him get stronger. Genevieve hurried inside. Zealand’s only weapon was the mold, while Reave had his knives, and they came flashing as Zealand danced away. The blades nicked him lightly here and there, but the mold was ready this time, and it bound up Reave’s wrists, first slowing them and then wrapping them together. The mold crawled up Reave’s face, gagging him, and Reave just chewed methodically and spat the mold out, almost fast enough to keep up. Zealand kicked at Reave’s knee as hard as he could and heard a satisfying snap. The king of nightmares lurched over, unable to support his own weight, and Zealand gathered him in his arms. The man must weigh five hundred pounds now, and it took every ounce of Zealand’s mold-augmented strength to lift him up and dump him over the parapet. Reave fell, shouting as the mold in his mouth turned to dust, and disappeared through the clouds.
Zealand didn’t believe for an instant that he was dead. Genevieve was right. It wasn’t that easy. The black tower disengaged, though, pulling away and bobbing off into the distance. The defenders vanished like dew in the sun. Zealand went inside, but he wasn’t on the top floor anymore, and Genevieve was nowhere to be found. He’d trudged to the library instead, where St. John Austen gave him water.
“You threw him over the side,” Austen said. “Genevieve is very impressed.”
“Mmm,” Zealand said. “How many times will I have to throw him over the side before Genevieve decides he’s really no threat at all, and his power dissipates?”
“Well,” Austen said. “That is the question.”
Joshua and Rondeau sat at the beat-up old table outside Marla’s office, playing War, because that was the only game where “Joshua can’t cheat me blind,” Rondeau had said. “If it’s not pure luck, he can work his wiles. Not that I mind—I like it when his wiles work me over—but it’s more fun this way.” Marla was sitting out the game, waiting impatiently for Langford to call. It wasn’t yet noon, so he wasn’t late, but she was tired of sitting idle. She’d made a few calls, checked on a few business ventures, cast some precautionary auguries, trying to keep up with her other responsibilities, but the whole magical community was focused on the Genevieve problem, so she hadn’t accomplished much.
She paced around, finally ducking her head into her office, where Ted was at her desk, on the phone. “Hey, Ted, I’m going upstairs to take a look at the city. You want to come?”
He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “I do, I really do, but I’m trying to track some things down, and I’m getting close, so next time, okay?”
“Sure,” she said, a little miffed, but not willing to show it. Yesterday he’d been dazzled nearly into speechlessness by the sight of the city spread out below them, but now he’d rather make phone calls. She wondered what he was working on, but she prided herself on not being a micromanager, and he’d already proven himself trustworthy. He was probably just liaising with the sorcerers, making sure all the plans to quarantine the city were going smoothly.
Marla went to the roof—fuck, it was cold, but that was the point, wasn’t it?—and worked the spell. The roof dropped off below her, and she hovered above Felport, the illusion refreshing constantly, giving her a true view of events in the city with only a millisecond of lag between her vision and reality. It wasn’t snowing much in the city proper, but the snow was a solid curtain all around the perimeter, sealing the place off. Repair crews couldn’t get out to fix the phone lines, and the mayor was urging everyone to stay home and wait it out. Amazingly, power hadn’t failed in the city—Marla had made sure of that. She didn’t need people freezing to death or hospitals shutting down. With luck, the state of emergency would be over by this evening. Still, there were kids out sledding in Fludd Park, and a few pedestrians walking around. There were patrols of apprentices and cantrip-throwers and press-ganged alley witches out there trying to keep people safe. She saw a few scurrying things in side streets, and down by the waterfront, but whenever she zoomed in for a closer look they were gone. Reave’s nightmares weren’t getting stronger in the city yet. Good.
She zoomed in on Ernesto’s junkyard, a vast hell’s acre of crushed cars and scrap metal, which shimmered a little in her vision—he had non-Euclidean stuff going on in there, folded space and hidden pockets of choked-off reality, and it was hard to look at the place directly. As Marla watched, Reave’s black tower flickered and disappeared between two stacks of crushed cars. Ernesto said the tower had been appearing there pretty often. It had popped up other places in the city, too, but most often in the junkyard, so she wanted to keep an eye on the spot. She checked out Gregor’s building, and Hamil’s meat-golem guards were still there, watching the entrances. Gregor was safe inside—deep in subbasements too well defended to breach easily—but he couldn’t leave.
Except he probably had escape tunnels. Marla certainly did. But, hell, she couldn’t cover every contingency. Once Genevieve was safely ensconced in the Blackwing Institute, Marla would smoke Gregor out and banish him. Then she could divide up his holdings and Susan Wellstone’s, and enrich all the sorcerers who’d remained loyal. It wasn’t so different from being a medieval warlord. You rewarded the retainers who served you well, and stripped the assets from those who didn’t. It wasn’t a particularly enlightened or progressive form of government, but so much of being a sorcerer was about personal power, and benign dictatorship was the best you could hope for.
There were still weird sinkholes in Fludd Park, but Granger had them cordoned off, so the kids playing there were probably safe, unless shit started to come crawling out of the holes, but there were people watching for that. While she looked down, no more buildings appeared or disappeared. Reave was still out there, but he hadn’t gotten his hands on Genevieve. If he did, Marla thought the face of the city would begin to change rapidly. Genevieve was the ultimate power source for Reave, and Marla had to keep her away from him.
Marla settled back to the roof of the club, and went inside. Ted was at the table now with Rondeau and Joshua, and they were playing Oh, Hell, having tired of playing War. Somebody had picked up a pizza from the little restaurant around the corner, and there was an untouched medium with everything on it, waiting just for her.
“Deal me in,” Marla said, and sat with them to wait.
Langford called at 2:30, which saved them from listening to Rondeau beg them to play strip poker—he just wanted a look at Joshua in the altogether, and while Marla wasn’t opposed to seeing that, Joshua wouldn’t have been the one getting naked; he could bluff every hand and never lose.
Langford said, “Genevieve will be at Fludd Park, near the bandstand, in twenty-three minutes. She’ll be conscious for betw
een five and seven minutes, so you won’t have much of a window before she disappears back to dreamland.” Fludd Park wasn’t far, and with the likely lack of traffic they should get there in ten minutes.
“I owe you a fruit basket for this,” Marla said, and hung up. “Ted, call Hamil and have him send his guys, then call the other sorcerers, let them know what’s happening. Rondeau, get the tranq gun, Joshua, put on your game face. Let’s get going.” She put on her cloak, just in case Reave showed up. She hated wearing it, but it was the most powerful weapon she had. The price it extracted was one she was willing to pay if it would help save her city.
Ten minutes before Langford called Marla, Gregor looked up from the metal bowl of mercury, images shimmering on the surface of the poisonous liquid. An elaborate toothpick model of the Taj Mahal lay in broken shards near the bowl, all the disorder Nicolette had bled off the divination poured into its destruction. “Genevieve will be in Fludd Park, near the bandstand, in about thirty minutes.”
“I can get there in five,” Nicolette said. One of the escape tunnels came out in the park, near the duck pond.
“You have maybe twenty minutes before Marla and her crew arrive,” Gregor said.
Nicolette grinned and heaved a heavy knapsack, bulging with nasty goodies, over her shoulder. “Plenty of time.”
“We should not trust Nicolette,” Reave said from his corner of the shelter. He’d been pissy all morning, though he wouldn’t say why. Nicolette didn’t really care. The king of nightmares might take over the city—she didn’t really believe he could take the world—but Nicolette was already thinking about possible palace coups. “I should go collect Genevieve myself.”
“If Genevieve even senses your presence, she’ll run,” Gregor said. He sat with his back against a pile of boxes, emergency rations stockpiled against some possible calamity in the world above. “This prediction isn’t proscriptive, it’s descriptive, it’s a most-likely scenario. It’s so likely that I trust it’s basically a certainty, but your presence could change that. Nicolette is better. Genevieve doesn’t know her, so her presence is unlikely to cause immediate alarm.”
“If she fails, I will destroy her,” Reave said.
“You can try, baldie,” Nicolette said.
“We’re wasting time,” Gregor said. “Go. I want this over, so I can finally get the fuck out of this building and go outside.”
Marla didn’t like it, but she hung back in the tree line with Rondeau, and the rifle. He was a better shot than she was, so she didn’t need to be there, but Genevieve didn’t trust her, so it was better if Marla didn’t show her face, or bring her mind too close. Marla looked through a pair of binoculars and saw Joshua making his way toward the bandstand, where Genevieve was supposed to appear. He would call to her, calm her, and then Rondeau would hit her with a tranquilizer dart for good measure. Hamil had half a dozen meat-golems hanging around—dressed in huge winter coats to hide their inhumanity and fooling around in a snowball fight—to deal with any contingencies. “I think this is going to—” Marla began, but then Joshua threw his arms up in the air and fell backwards, vanishing into the snow without so much as a cry. Marla was up and off like a shot toward him, but something clotheslined her, and she went down, hard, staring up at pine needles and gray sky. She sat up, carefully, slowly, and saw a cage of glowing blue lines being woven around her in the air. Magic. She looked down at her feet at a scattering of fortune cookies lightly covered with snow. She’d stepped on them, cracking them open. She picked one up, and looked at the fortune, which was in an unfamiliar language—some spell of binding and holding she’d never seen before.
“Rondeau!” she called, pushing against the blue webbing, which was still growing and thickening—the strands yielded under pressure, but they wouldn’t break. “Hold your position!” Rondeau didn’t answer. Was he doing as she said, or had something happened to him?
The meat-golems were still throwing snowballs, and one of them hurled a snowball at one of his fellows—and blew his head off in a shower of red and gray. The snowball had become a lethal projectile at some point in midair. The meat-golems just stared, then started walking, but they must have triggered some hidden trap, too, for they all went down in different ways—one’s legs disappeared from the knees down, and another bent all the way backward, like a yoga practitioner in bridge pose, then went farther until his spine cracked. Three of them began mindlessly tearing at one another, driven into a frenzy by some hidden magic. What had happened to Joshua? Was it as lethal as those traps?
Marla finally thought to draw her dagger of office, which could cut through anything, material or magical, and cursed herself for being taken by surprise—she’d wasted seconds by not thinking to use the dagger right away, but she’d been so stunned by seeing Joshua go down that she wasn’t thinking straight. The dagger sliced through the blue webs easily—and just in time, since they were drawing tighter, to mummify or crush her. She forced herself to make her way carefully toward Joshua, avoiding the little traps she now knew to look for, a few marbles in the snow here, a trip wire there, a row of thumbtacks glowing faintly yellow here. She finally reached Joshua, who was knocked out cold, his legs tangled in a chain of rubber bands that were climbing his body, pinning him, trying to choke him.
Marla cut his bonds away with her dagger and patted his cheek, but he wouldn’t wake up. She threw him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry and retraced her footprints back the way she’d come, toward the relative safety—she hoped—of the trees. In her mind, a mental clock tick, tick, ticked. Genevieve would be appearing in less than a minute. If Rondeau was still there, still looking through the rifle’s scope, they could still get her.
But Rondeau was facedown in the snow and groaning, his rifle gone. Marla put Joshua down, and touched Rondeau’s shoulder. He rolled over halfway. “Nicolette,” he said. “She hit me in the head with something. I saw her take the gun. Couldn’t stop her. She…” He trailed off.
Marla slapped his face, and he gasped. “Stay awake, you might have a concussion, damn it.” She took a handful of snow and shoved it down the front of his pants, and Rondeau gasped, eyes wide; that would keep him awake for a minute, at least. She stood up and looked toward the bandstand, and there was Genevieve, her caramel-colored hair, her pale yellow blouse, her black scarf. The snow was melting all around her feet as she stared blankly around. Marla hesitated—should she run down there, shouting, and risk scaring Genevieve away? If she could get close enough she could manage a bug-in-amber spell, not as powerful as the one Ted had used when he trapped Zealand in mid-leap back at the bar, but good enough to hold Genevieve for a few moments. She started down the hill, trying to simultaneously hurry and keep her eye open for Nicolette’s booby traps. Fuck, she’d been outplayed here. This was beyond bad. But it was still salvageable.
Until Nicolette stepped from the trees behind Genevieve, lifted the tranquilizer gun to her shoulder, and fired. Genevieve started to spin around and then fell to the snow. Marla hoped against hope that Genevieve would disappear, even though Dr. Husch said that, while sedated, Genevieve seemed to stay in this world—under the influence of such drugs, Genevieve simply didn’t dream.
Nicolette waved to Marla, then dropped the rifle and picked up Genevieve. Marla snarled and put on an extra burst of speed. She considered reversing her cloak, letting the cloak’s violent magics seize her and make her into a living weapon, impervious to pain or mercy. She’d rip Nicolette to shreds, and she only hesitated because she might kill Genevieve, too, and she was bound not to do that. Then Marla stepped on something that cracked like dry twigs, and she was immediately engulfed in fire.
“I lit that bitch up,” Nicolette crowed, back in the basement. “You should have seen it, Marla went up like a roman candle soaked in rocket fuel.”
“Is she dead?” Gregor said. “Please, tell me she’s dead.”
“She had on that cloak,” Nicolette said, shaking her head. “For a minute I thought I was screwed, t
hat she would reverse it and let the purple side show, and tear me apart.” Marla’s cloak was legendary. Some whispered that the only reason she’d managed to become chief sorcerer was because she’d lucked into an artifact of such power. Nicolette thought that was uncharitable. Marla hardly ever used the cloak, and anyway, it took a skilled wielder to use a weapon like that. Nicolette had nothing against Marla; she even admired her a little. They just currently had incompatible agendas. “But even with the white side showing, the cloak’s powerful, and it will heal her burns.” Being set on fire while wearing the cloak would slow Marla down and cause her a lot of pain, but it wouldn’t kill her. “Still, we got Genevieve, so I call this a win.” Nicolette said. Gregor nodded, but didn’t seem happy about it. “I’ll check with the Giggler and see if this changes things,” she said. “Maybe now Marla’s no danger to you, and you’ll be able to leave the building without worrying about dying.”
“Perhaps,” Gregor said. “But I thought the same thing when Reave showed up in my office, and the Giggler still affirmed the prophecy—if I leave this building, Marla will kill me.”
“Marla will be dead by morning,” Reave said. Genevieve was sprawled beside him, faintly moaning. “Tonight, everything changes.”
“When Genevieve wakes up—or goes to sleep, or whatever,” Nicolette said, “why won’t she just, like, flit away to her palace again? It’s a dream, right? She can do anything.”
“She will regain her senses and find herself in my power. She will believe she is in my power, that she is helpless, that she cannot be saved. And so it will be true.” Reave sounded utterly confident. Which was part of the point, Nicolette supposed.
