by T. A. Pratt
“Do you need me to do this personally, or can I send some goons?”
“Are they, you know, good goons?”
“Hmm. If you need good, I’ll send lieutenants instead of goons. Okay?”
“As long as they can throw a rock at a couple of people and keep an eye on them until I can scoop them up, that’s fine.”
“They can manage that much, yeah,” Rondeau said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Vinnie Two-Eyes and the Gnashing.”
“The Gnashing? That’s a name?”
“Yeah. She... gnashes.”
“Right. And why Vinnie Two-Eyes?”
“Well, see, he was born with five eyes....”
Marzi opened the cylinder of her toy revolver and stuck the charmed pebble into one of the ammo slots, and even though the stone shouldn’t have fit, it did. She closed the cylinder, gave it a spin, and grinned. “I’ve never been to Australia. Can I hang out after I’m done? Can I take my boyfriend?”
“You don’t want your boyfriend potentially infested with black sand, Marzi.”
“That is true. That would be bad for our relationship. If I do this, when the whole mess is over, you have to send us to Australia on a vacation. Call it a study abroad thing if that makes you feel like a better mentor.”
“Done. You might have to fly commercial, though. I don’t think Pelham is granting me permanent shadow travel power.” He gave her a hug. “Be careful, okay? Don’t get close to the targets before you immobilize them. When the thing goes beep, and you get a lock, drop them.”
“I’m a good shot, Teach. Mostly because my bullets are magical, but I bet I’d be great anyway.”
Bradley summoned a shadow, and Marzi stepped through into the shade of a building in Sydney. Sending his apprentice into danger gave him a pang, but she was careful, she was smart, and he trusted her.
Squat and Crapsey were after the Greek target, Rondeau’s lieutenants—they grew ‘em weird in Vegas—had the states covered, and Marzi was off to the Antipodes, so that just left London. Bradley called up a shadow and stepped across a continent and a sea.
Bradley leaned against the wall of a pub, noisy with people boisterously enjoying the evening. It felt early for drinking to him, but that was one of the joys of instantaneous travel across multiple time zones, he guessed. He looked at the map on his phone. A black dot showed up on the very edge of its range, to the north, heading out of the city. His other hunters had to travel conventionally to home in on their quarry, but Bradley had all that borrowed power, so he just picked a shadow and stepped through closer to his target.
Bradley appeared in the middle of a road bordered by pastures, and dove out of the way as a car bore down on him. He sat up in the dust as the car vanished into the distance, then looked at his phone, where the black dot moved swiftly away. The device beeped rapidly and then more sedately. Crap. His target was in that car.
He shadowstepped again, appearing at the next crossroads a ways down the road. Assuming the car didn’t turn down some dirt lane, it should be along shortly. He didn’t have much time to come up with a spell, and he didn’t want to do anything too destructive in case there were innocent or rather uninfected people in the car, so hurling fireballs and stuff was out of the question. Hmm. But maybe the opposite of a fireball....
Cole had taught him a spell for municipal safety, basically a firefighting spell, that created a sphere sixty feet in diameter, inside of which combustion became impossible. He fished in his pockets and came up with a matchbook, then scuffed a circle in the dirt with his heel. After breaking the matches in half, he dropped them in the circle, then knelt on the ground and spat onto the matches. A circle of salt and a candle and a vial of distilled water were the classical elements to do this spell, but Marla had taught him that the specifics never mattered as much as the will: the point of all rituals was merely to focus and direct that will. He stared down the road and concentrated. Unlike hurling a ball of fire, there was no way to tell if this spell had worked right away.
The car, a black sedan, appeared around a curve and zoomed toward him. About sixty feet away, it started to slow, kept slowing, and then stopped, drifting off to the side of the road some twenty feet from where Bradley crouched by a hedge. The driver got out, walked around the car, then opened the hood—nah, the bonnet, this was England—and stared down at the engine in the dark.
The engine was fine, though. The problem was that gasoline wasn’t combustible at the moment, which meant the cylinders weren’t firing, so the pistons weren’t moving, so the crankshaft wasn’t turning, so the wheels couldn’t move. The gas tank might as well have been full of oatmeal. Bradley cast a look-away spell on himself and slipped an earbud into place, plugging the headphone jack into his phone. He approached the car slowly, looking down at the screen, where a black dot drew steadily closer. There didn’t seem to be any other people around, and no one else in the car, and the earbud was going “beep... beep... beep” at an accelerating rate. When Bradley got within five feet of the car, the beep became a steady, shrill whine. Assuming Cole’s detector worked right, this was the sand’s emissary in England.
She was an old gray-haired woman, short and roundish, wearing a green rain slicker, and she tutted to herself as she looked at the engine and wiggled the occasional hose or cable. Bradley slipped a hand into his pocket and closed his fingers over one of his pebbles. They were enchanted with a harmless paralytic, and a backup force field: they would immobilize an ordinary person, and if they hit a person full of black sand, they would immobilize and contain, if the sand tried to escape. He just had to throw the stone at her: he had the clearest imaginable shot.
But he hesitated. Would a black sand zombie grumble to herself that way? What if the detector was flawed, and this was a false positive? He’d be kidnapping some nice English lady for no reason.
Bradley was psychic, and he could spare a minute to confirm. He just had to reach out to her mind, not even a real delve, just enough to find out if there was a person in there or not—
She spun, swinging a tire iron hard into his gut.
Bradley doubled over, gasping for breath and shocked with pain, and she reared back to crack him over the head. He instinctively reached out to shut down her conscious mind and make her go to sleep, but it was like trying to grab smoke: there was no mind in there for him to mess with, just like the shark assassin.
Bradley twisted around quickly enough to catch the next blow on his shoulder instead of the top of his head, but she struck him hard enough to make him howl with pain. “Too late,” the woman said, her voice all mushy, the words malformed: it sounded almost like shoe lathe. “You were supposed to die. You can’t go around knowing things.”
Bradley’s right arm was numb from the impact, and naturally, the right-hand pocket was the one that held the pebble. He scurried backward, half hunched over, and reached across to the pocket with his left hand. His only advantage was that the black sand had chosen a fairly elderly and slow-moving vessel, though she’d hit him hard enough to suggest the sand was okay with pushing her to her physical limits.
She swung at his head again, and the only way he could think to avoid it was to fall backward onto his ass. Even so, he felt the wind from the swinging metal, inches from his face. But his fingers closed on the pebble, and he pulled his hand out and flung the stone into her face before she could strike again.
She froze, an unbalanced statue, and then toppled forward on top of him. He scrambled out from under her weight, then sat on the edge of the road, rubbing his shoulder and wincing. At least Marla hadn’t been here to see this. Her attempts to teach Bradley the rudiments of physical combat had seen mixed results at best. He tended to rely too much on his ability to incapacitate his opponents with mental attacks. Maybe he’d start taking krav maga or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or something. “Okay, ma’am. Let’s get you back to San Francisco.” He waved his hand, opening up a shadow portal, and swept both of them away to Cole’s lab.
Within several hours, all B
radley’s hunters had found their targets. He spent the afternoon—evening—night—stupid time zones. He spent the interval zipping from one continent to another and retrieving the paralyzed infected. A young, sneering punk from Greece, only roughed up a little at Squat and Crapsey’s hands. A wide-eyed ingénue type from Los Angeles, and a gnarled apple farmer from Vermont, courtesy of Rondeau’s lieutenants. Marzi shot a paralyzing stone at a dentist-slash-scuba-diver in Sydney. Bradley’s woman from London completed the crowd. The infected were all held together in Cole’s “lab,” a magically hidden suite of rooms in a local university hospital where medical sorcerers who owed Cole their fealty did experimental research.
The prisoners paced or rocked or whimpered on the far end of a white-tiled room, each one in a small cell made of faintly glowing lines of force, the same magic Cole had used to isolate the black sand before. Some of the prisoners howled in outrage, and some of them pled and begged, and they were all convincing enough in their assertions of innocence that doubt crept into Bradley’s mind again. It was entirely possible that Rondeau’s thugs had made a mistake, after all, or that Squat and Crapsey had just grabbed the first person they saw in Greece, being motivated mostly by laziness and avarice. Bradley reached out to the minds of the prisoners, and even though he found only void and emptiness where their psyches should have been, he still wasn’t completely reassured: there were other ways to block a mind from his powers, and some people were natural psychics who could protect themselves without even realizing that’s what they were doing.
“Is there a test we can do, to be one hundred percent totally sure they’re infected?” Bradley said.
Cole looked up from a table scattered with crystals, small brass tools, and electronic components. “Certainly! Look here. A sample of the sand.” He lifted up an apple-sized sphere of force, with a few grains of black sand floating in the center. “The sympathetic connection I used to create the tracking devices can be... heightened. Like calling to like. Shall I do so now?”
Bradley nodded, gazing at the prisoners. “Go for it, if it’s safe.”
“Dealing with this sand is hardly ever safe, but I have faith in my containment protocols.” Cole scribbled on a pad of paper, hummed to himself, then picked up a tuning fork, struck it against the table, and held it over the orb of force that contained his black sand sample. “First, we set up a sympathetic resonance, and then....”
Cole swung the tuning fork swiftly away from the table, and all the prisoners in their cells simultaneously jerked forward in the same direction. Black sand shot out of their noses, mouths, and even their eyes, and their human forms—now simply corpses—collapsed. The sand roiled and twisted in the air above the bodies, forming softball-sized spheroids with a few lazily-drifting tentacles attached. They looked almost like monochromatic pointillist drawings of jellyfish.
Bradley bent over, put his hands on his knees, and took a few deep breaths. He’d almost thrown up himself at the sight of all that sand ripping out of their bodies. “That’s... gods. Those poor people.” He stood up. “Have the other scanners you made turned up anything else?”
Cole shook his head. “I’ve sent people with my tracking devices on flights all over the country, and have called in some significant favors to do similar searches elsewhere. We haven’t covered the entire planet yet, but we’ve checked around all the infection sites the oracle told you about, and so far, we haven’t found any more victims. The infection sites, too, are all gone—Marla took care of that part, I assume.”
Bradley sat on a tall stool by a lab table. “So... this black sand in here is all that’s left in the world?”
“There are grains in my detectors, of necessity, but they’re closely monitored, and those will be destroyed soon.”
“What do we do with this stuff then?” He gestured toward the floating sand.
“Ah. Marla sent help for that matter. A pair of hellhounds.” Cole chuckled, then whistled.
Two dogs—at least, they looked like dogs—came running in from an adjacent room. One was a black-and-white newfoundland, while the other was an unidentifiable mongrel of similar size. They raced around Cole’s feet, barking merrily, and the old man clucked at them in a friendly way. He caught Bradley’s quizzical look and said, “These hounds are the very images of Bummer and Lazarus, the stray dogs that often accompanied my late liege lord, Emperor Joshua Norton. The dogs were almost as well known as the emperor, and when Lazarus died in 1863, the Daily Evening Bulletin ran a long obituary for him. Bummer died two years later, after being kicked by a drunk, and the police had to arrest the man who kicked him for his own protection—the people of the city were outraged by his heinous act. It’s lovely to see the pups again, even if only in the form of demonic simulacrums.”
“They’re cute—well, not cute, but I get why you’re happy to see them—but how do they help us?”
“Marla dispatched similar creatures, formed of primordial chaos, to destroy the infection sites. Watch. First, we’ll set up a sort of airlock force-field....” Cole gestured, and more shimmering lines of force appeared between them and the “cells.” The dogs looked at one another, then raced forward, and the bubble of force closed firmly behind them. “Now we’ll open the cell doors....” The lines of force separating the infected prisoners from one another vanished, and now the sand and the dogs were all together in the same area of containment. Cole gestured with one hand, dispelling the force that held the sand up in the air. Black sand showered onto the floor (which was, itself, covered with a layer of energy—otherwise the sand could have started converting the tile into more of itself and burrowed away through the ground). The grains rapidly slid together, joining into a heap, and surged toward the dogs.
The hounds didn’t flinch or flee. The sand struck them and swarmed across their bodies, and Bradley moaned—but then the sand suddenly seemed to think better of the attack, and tried to pull away. The dogs weren’t dogs anymore, though: they were melting, like wax sculptures of animals, their flesh turning honey-colored and luminous and running fluidly down and across the floor. The sand tried to retreat, and the honeyed ooze pursued, flowing over the sand, and spreading out to encircle it.
Bradley watched, fascinated: seeing the sand struggle was like watching ants try to fight a flood. The sand formed itself into a tower, probably trying to reach the ceiling, but the primordial chaos pursued, climbing the tower faster than the sand could build it. Within seconds, there was no sign of black sand: it had all been transformed into primordial ooze.
Then the chaos drew together, and in another moment, the dogs were back—but much bigger than before, proportioned more like Bradley imagined hellhounds should be. They’d converted a lot of black sand into themselves, after all, and that mass had to go somewhere.
Cole dropped the forcefield, and the hounds settled down on the floor, yawning, and both appeared to fall asleep, heads resting on paws. “The dogs will stay here until I have all the detectors back in hand, and then they’ll dispose of the remaining sand from those. I asked if I could keep a sample of the sand in containment for further study, and Marla, ah... rather strenuously declined.”
Bradley chuckled. “Yeah, I can see that. She’s a ‘burn the enemy and salt the earth’ type. You did it, Cole. You saved the world.”
“One does what one can,” he said modestly.
Human Nature
Marla felt more than a little ridiculous going on another date while her demons and Bradley’s human agents dealt with the existential threat to the world... but one of the hardest lessons she’d learned about leadership was that you couldn’t do everything personally. Sometimes you had to delegate, and the important thing was finding people you trusted to execute your vision. Bradley and Cole were the most reliable and capable allies she’d ever had, and the demons were just living extensions of her will, so she didn’t have anything to worry about, right?
She instantiated on a humid beach in Bali in the very early morning, dressed in a long, f
lowing white cover-up over a bikini. Ugh. On those rare occasions she’d had to wear a swimsuit, she’d favored functional swimmer’s one-pieces. She pulled away the cover-up so she could see underneath. The bikini was black with jaunty white skulls printed on it, and she couldn’t help but snort laughter.
Marla walked along the beach, and had to admit she did match the local aesthetic: there were plenty of other bikini-clad people strolling around, and nobody looked at her twice, or at least, not because she didn’t fit in. She did get an admiring glance or two. Dating brought out a latent vanity in Marla she hadn’t often acknowledged in the past, and she had to admit, she’d made a fetching body.
The woman she’d come to meet sat cross-legged in the sand, gazing into the gently lapping sea. She wore a flowing white garment similar to Marla’s own, and great masses of red hair spilled over her shoulders. Her expression was one of infinite serenity.
Marla dropped down onto the sand beside her. “Hi. Cinnamon?”
The woman turned her head and beamed at Marla. She was around forty, her face marked by sun and laugh lines, but not unappealingly. She looked like someone who relished life well. Her eyes were a shockingly light blue. “You must be Marla. It’s always nice to meet another seeker.”
“Uh. Right.” According to Cole, Cinnamon hadn’t been open to romantic avenues of approach, and since she wasn’t a part of the magical community, they couldn’t engineer a meeting that way, either. Marla had therefore been presented as a fellow traveler on the quest for meaningful spiritual practice. Which, given that Marla was literally a god, was pretty funny, but whatever worked. “Are you here on vacation?”
Cinnamon shook her head. “I came to visit the temples, and to volunteer with a poverty project.”
“That’s nice—” Marla began, and Cinnamon suddenly seized her face and gazed into her eyes.
“You have such a fascinating aura,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Marla resisted the urge to break the woman’s wrists; she’d always been touchy about personal space, and face-grabbing was a no-no. Instead she gently moved Cinnamon’s hands away. “Really. No one has ever told me that before.” On the one hand, the whole aura thing was bullshit, but on the other hand, some psychics did interpret the information they received visually, perceiving it in the form of auras or lights or whatever. Cole said Cinnamon was a powerful natural magical adept who’d simply never had any training. Her powers and perceptions had given her enough “spiritual experiences” over the years that Cole thought she’d be receptive to discovering that magic—and gods—were real.
