by T. A. Pratt
He brightened. “Yes, that’s it exactly! I’ve got neuropathy in the middle toe of my left foot right now.”
“Ha, really? A numb toe? That’s your warning sign?”
“Oh, yes. It’s the sort of thing I’d ascribe to a forest fire, normally, but there’s no fire, and no smoke. There’s a patch of deadness, though, where there used to be living trees and wildlife. I’m not sure what’s happened. Even illegal lumber operations wouldn’t displace all the animals or kill all the trees.”
Marla thought of the black bottom of the sea. “How big is this dead spot?”
“Mmm, not that large, I don’t think. Less than a square kilometer.”
“Do you think it could be supernatural?”
“I suppose it’s possible. There are some dark magicians in my country, who draw power from death, decay, and devastation.”
“Well, sure,” Marla said. “I’ve heard Finnish black metal. I know how it is.”
He laughed out loud. “I met a young necromancer two years ago who called himself Vajra of the Shadows, after the Rahu album. He wore a cloak made of untanned reindeer hide. Gods, he stank.”
Marla grinned. Jarrell was all right. So far Cole’s algorithm was pretty good. She didn’t feel the same attraction to this man that she had to Lauren, but that might have been the whole furs-and-woodland vibe. Being in a forest was inherently a lot less sexy, for her, than being in a wine bar in a city. She’d give it a chance. Funny how her attraction to Lauren had made the sexiness of her potential consorts switch from an irrelevant factor to an important one. She’d glimpsed a more frolicsome eternity, it seemed, and liked what she saw. “How far are we from the land of numb toes?”
“Not far.” They reached a stream, fast-flowing and wide, and he stepped onto the air and walked over the water, a few inches above the surface. Marla followed suit, thickening the air beneath her boots.
She decided to keep probing the situation. “You live out here by yourself? No life partner? Seems like a tough place to find dates.”
“Oh, a certain she-wolf and I have an understanding.” He looked at her sidelong, then snorted. “I’m sorry, I’m joking. People get strange ideas about nature magicians, that’s all. No, no life partner. For a while I was involved with an ice witch from the Russian taiga, but a few years ago she went back home to serve a ten-year term as Baba Yaga. Romance isn’t compatible with the mythic resonances of that role, so.” He shrugged. “It was a good opportunity for her, though. I can’t blame her. How about you?”
“I was married once.” Marla touched the chain around her throat, where her wedding ring dangled, tucked away under her shirt. “Just for a couple of years, but they were good years. He was a good man. He died.” He’d been murdered, but that was, perhaps, a little too heavy for a first date, especially when the other person didn’t even realize it was a date.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Marla.”
She waved that away, uncomfortable as always with being pitied, or even receiving sympathy. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, it sucks, but it is what it is. Life goes on. It’s snow of the past winter.”
He nodded. “Your Finnish is excellent, you know—you even have a grasp of our idioms.”
Ha. She’d wondered where that turn of phrase came from. She’d been thinking “It’s water under the bridge.” “I’m not good with languages at all, but I’m good with linguistic magic, which works out the same.”
“I’ve never studied those spells much. Non-human communication, yes, but—” He cocked his head. “Now I can’t feel two of my toes. We’re getting close to whatever’s wrong.” They pushed through a thick stand of trees, branches overlapping so heavily that even Jarrell’s magic couldn’t make them all move out of the way, and stepped out onto an outcropping that looked over a ragged valley: some gouge in the ground scraped long ago by the movement of glaciers.
The valley floor was all black sand, and more black sand came crawling up the sides. Jarrell stared.
“Oh, no,” Marla murmured. Jarrell started toward a path that wound down to the valley floor. “Wait,” she said. “I’ve seen this stuff before. Be careful.”
Jarrell stopped and turned toward her. “What? Where? What is it?”
She heard the word “black sand” in the back of her mind, from a conversation involving the other half of her consciousness on Earth, and her attention snapped inward to listen.
That was the reason she was distracted when a long tentacle of black sand lashed out for Jarrell.
Marla instantiated in Cole’s office, this half of her terrestrial attention focused on the question of who’d tried to murder Bradley and Rondeau, and why. Cole was there at his desk, scribbling in a ledger, and he held up a finger. “Just a moment, Marla.”
She perused his shelves, trying not to be impatient. She didn’t have all the time in the world, but at least she could be in two places at once, which gave her a little more time than most people had. She idly wondered how many versions of herself she could run in parallel. Depends on what they were doing, really. She could probably run a dozen instantiations if they were doing something simple, like washing dishes or going for a run, but if she actually had to pay attention, the limits were probably much lower. She was essentially running copies of her consciousness in parallel, but there were links between the minds and sensoriums. She could hear her other self murmuring in the back of her head, at the level of background noise, like the hum of a refrigerator in another room of a house. If there were dozens of other selves murmuring, though, the white noise would become an overwhelming roar. This was pretty much like sitting at a piano and playing a different song with each hand, or doing that Leonardo da Vinci thing of writing totally different sentences with each hand simultaneously. She could do that sort of thing, because she was a god, which was even better than being a super-genius, but even she had her limits.
After a few minutes, Cole put his pen down and frowned sternly. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a date now? The attempt on Bradley’s life is of grave importance, but your need for a consort is—”
“Yes, don’t worry, I’m also on a date right now. Bilocation. I’m fancy. My other half left a little while ago.” She cocked her head. “The other me is... walking in the woods with Jarrell now. Ugh. Worst date ever, I assume. So tree-filled.” She sat in the chair across from Cole. “How’s Bradley holding up?”
A bell rang in the distance: the front door chime of Singer’s Books. “I believe that’s him now, so he can tell you himself.”
She twisted around in the chair and watched the wall of bookshelves slide aside. Bradley slipped in, his brow beetled, troubles clearly weighing on him. “Oh, wow,” Marla said. “That’s quite a face.”
“Good to see you, too. I didn’t expect you so soon. I thought you had a date?”
“Everyone’s so concerned about my love life. It’s handled, don’t worry about it. I want to get into this whole assassination thing. Nobody tries to kill the god of Death’s friends and gets away with it. Did you guys have a chance to do any investigating?”
Bradley nodded. “Our working theory is that whoever tried to kill Rondeau—did kill Rondeau—also tried to kill me. The coincidence is just too weird otherwise.”
“Right. So the question is, who’d want you both dead, and why.”
“I got some supernatural insight last night,” Bradley said. “I had one of those dreams. I won’t recount the whole thing—it was the usual image salad—but there was one bit where I was looking in a mirror and Rondeau was my reflection, and we were both surrounded by gods and monsters and spirits. Rondeau and I have a lot in common—our friendship with you, our membership in the magical community, and we even had the same body, technically. But the dream revealed the point of commonality that matters: we’re both oracle generators, capable of calling creatures of immense power to us, and making them answer our questions. Or we both were, until Rondeau lost the body with the brain with the power. Before that, the
two of us were probably, not to brag, the most powerful oracle generators in the world. Now... it’s just me, lonely at the top.”
Marla nodded. “So that means your power to summon up oracles is somehow a threat to... whatever or whoever tried to kill you. I guess that makes sense? You can find out what we’re dealing with that way.”
“I mean, it sort of makes sense, but it also sort of doesn’t. That’s what’s bugging me. Like, I can find out just about anything that can be found out, but only if I have a reason to ask the question, you know? So now I’m suddenly very motivated to find an oracle and ask it who tried to kill me. But if nobody had tried to kill me and Rondeau, I wouldn’t have any reason to ask.”
“Huh,” Marla said. “So whoever is behind this thought you’d have a reason to investigate them at some point. Or that Rondeau would. Or that I would, and would subsequently ask one of you for information....”
“Which means something bad must be coming, because Rondeau had sworn off summoning oracles completely, and I try to avoid it, too, because it strikes me as problematic to have too many entanglements with supernatural entities.”
“Have you told Marla about the black sand?” Cole said.
Bradley shook his head. “I started to in the underworld, but she was busy saving Rondeau’s life, which: fair.”
Marla’s mortal body got a shiver down its spine. “Black sand?”
“The shark-guy who tried to kill me. When we cut open his head....” Bradley and Cole filled her in on their attempted autopsy, and on the self-replicating black sand they’d discovered, and attempted to contain.
“Aw, hell,” Marla said. “Zufi told me the stuff seemed to have consciousness, but I thought she was just anthropomorphizing. I mean, she thinks bivalves have rich inner lives.”
Cole leaned across the desk. “Wait. The Bay Witch wanted to talk to you about the black sand?”
Marla nodded, and told them what she’d seen, and how she’d fused the sand into glass. “So this sand doesn’t just turn passing sea creatures into versions of itself, it can infect them, eat their brains, and control their bodies?”
“The sand can do magic, too,” Bradley said. “Or, at least, alter matter, which fits in with its skill set. It combined some poor human, maybe a diver or a fisherman or something, with a shark and a ray, and somehow got the chimera into Lake Merritt.”
Marla stood up and began pacing. “I figured this was some sorcerous experiment gone out of control, or some elder god or deep one crap, and maybe it still is, but if this stuff is planning assassinations and trying to stop us from learning about it, then it has an agenda.”
Cole said hmm. “It’s hard to imagine how an entity in the north Atlantic managed to send an assassin all the way to the Pacific Ocean, into San Francisco Bay, and subsequently into a lake in Oakland.”
“Yeah, no, Zufi says there are other patches of this stuff in other seas. The patch in the Pacific probably sent that assassin. Presumably it’s responsible for sending whoever tried to kill Rondeau, too. I wish I’d had a chance to peek into that waitress’s head to confirm, but it’s a fair bet she was full of black sand, too. Where did the sand source the pelesit parasite though?” She cocked her head. Were those... wolves snarling, in the presence of her other body? What was going on in Finland? Definitely the worst date ever.
“Maybe the black sand doesn’t just run its victims like puppets,” Bradley said. “Maybe it has access to their minds and memories, too. Absorbs them, somehow, in the course of the... conversion. The waitress worked for the Pit Boss, so the sand could have used her knowledge and experience to find the pelesit. They’re not that uncommon among unscrupulous practitioners.”
Marla turned on her heel and walked back the length of the room, thinking hard. “Your guy was a weird monster hybrid, but the waitress was totally normal-looking, apparently. Probably no one looked at her too closely, service workers in a casino full of drunk and high and gamble-happy people are pretty close to invisible, but she was human enough to pass. She had to fake her way through her work day until she sprang the pelesit on Rondeau, which suggests a pretty sophisticated impersonation. This black sand stuff could be in anybody, and we wouldn’t know. Like body-snatcher style.”
“Do you think we’re dealing with separate entities? Are the various patches of sand members of the same... species, for want of a better term?” Cole said. “Or are we dealing with a singular creature that can be in more than one place at a time?”
“Or maybe they’re connected underground, like that mushroom entity the Mycelium up in the Pacific Northwest.” Marla made a disgusted face. “Ugh. Okay. Cole, you’ve got jellyfish witches and stuff on the payroll. Rondeau still keeps in touch with the wave mages we met in Hawaii. We’ll mobilize everybody, let them know we’ve got an existential threat on our hands, scour the seas, and trap all this black sand inside force fields until I can melt it into glass. If there are a bunch of people walking around with heads full of sand, we need to figure out how to find them, too. Can you work up some kind of divination, Cole? A black-sand-detector?”
“I do have a sample of the sand to work with.” Cole stroked his whiskers. “Perhaps I could do something with sympathetic magic, like calls to like, you know, and create a kind of compass that would point toward the sand....”
“That’s the stuff. Okay. If the sand is concentrated in the oceans—”
“But maybe it’s not,” Bradley said. “Sure, if spreading patches of monster sand started appearing in the middle of cities, we’d hear about it, but there’s a whole lot of empty space unobserved out there in the world, even on land. Deserts, tundra, wastelands, there could be black sand in any of those.”
“You’re not wrong, but let’s focus on the known knowns first—” She heard a shout of alarm in the back of her head, and shut out Cole and Bradley to focus on her other body.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “There’s definitely black sand on land in at least one place. My other self just ran into some of it. That’s... a pretty insane coincidence.”
Cole frowned. “It may not be coincidence. My algorithm was meant to find potential consorts who could be helpful to you, Marla. I set the initial parameters, but after that, the algorithm became self-tuning and self-altering. It’s not a consciousness, exactly, but it is powered in part by the network of psychics I employ. The algorithm may have realized that Jarrell could be helpful to you as more than just a potential consort, and given him a higher priority for that reason.”
“You do good magic, Cole. Crap, crap, crap.” She ran her fingers through her hair as she paced. “Okay. Other-me can take care of herself. Myself. Ourself.” She glanced at Bradley. “How do you handle this whole collective-self thing?”
“I can’t remember,” Bradley said. “I have only the vaguest recollection of being part of the over-mind. Probably because my singular mind can’t handle the strain of even remembering what it was like. So this black sand is in, what, Finland? And the oceans. It could be anywhere.” He sighed. “I can summon up an oracle and ask it where the black sand is, but I don’t know how much it would help in the long run, if there are people walking around with skulls full of it. Even if some weird godlet drew me a map with locations marked, those locations could change. I guess it’s a start, though. We could at least find out the locations of the major deposits and deal with those.”
Marla nodded. “Yeah. Let’s summon up an oracle and find out what we’re dealing with. If the black sand tried to kill you in order to keep you from using your power, maybe using your power will get it to leave you alone. Like, there’s no point in killing a witness after he’s already testified.”
“Apart from vengeance, and sending a message to other potential witnesses, but yeah, I take your point. You’re coming with me to find an oracle?”
“Sure. Might as well walk around with you for a bit. I made this perfectly good body out of primordial chaos—huh.”
“What is it?” Cole said. “I know that look.
You just had an idea.”
She grinned. “I do that, don’t I? I might be able to do better than just melting this sand or trapping it in a ball of force. I’m going to think through some implications, but... I could have a plan forming. Cole, see if you can make us a sand detector. B... let’s go oracle hunting.” She got suddenly dizzy, and grunted. “Wait. I need to sit down. Something needs my full attention.”
Marla readied herself to leap between Jarrell and the approaching tentacle, because who cared if one of her meat puppets got converted into black sand? She could always make a new one.
She didn’t need to sacrifice her temporary self, though, because Jarrell had other protectors. A towering fir tree spontaneously fell, smashing into the rising pseudopod of sand and sending its black motes showering back down into the valley. Sand began swarming over the tree, though, converting its needles and branches and trunk into specks of blackness.
Marla shouted “Timber!” and pushed a spell of telekinetic force at the tree, sending it spinning through the air and down into the valley, so the sand wouldn’t have such a direct bridge to their position.
Jarrell moved back up the path quickly, but without panic, to rejoin her. “Gods. What is that stuff?”
“Alien murder powder, basically,” she said. “Do you have any spells that can contain it?”
“Well, there’s Cambere’s Cataclysm, that would make the Earth fold in on itself and bury the valley, but the sand seems to transform any matter it touches, so burying it wouldn’t do much but buy us some time.”
Cambere’s Cataclysm was big earth magic, like, “redraw the maps” big, and she revised upward her assumptions about his strength. If he could talk about casting that spell so matter-of-factly, he was an order of magnitude stronger than she’d been as a mortal sorcerer. “I think the sand can be stopped with heat—melted and fused—but we’re talking big fire. Is that sort of thing in your repertoire?”
He shook his head. “In theory, sure. If we were in Yellowstone, I could tap into the dormant supervolcano there and produce serious heat, but I don’t have an energy reservoir like that to reach into and redirect here.”
