by T. A. Pratt
“Lay it on me, old man.”
Viscarro nodded. “It’s simple. I want you to blow up Watt’s body. But don’t worry—it won’t violate your silly moral code. He can always get another body, you see. Watt is a lich.”
“Which ones are liches again? Do they drink blood or eat corpses? I forget.”
Viscarro sniffed. “Neither. A lich is essentially a corpse animated by its own ghost. For some reason—genetics, a curse, something else—conventional paths to sorcerous immortality were closed to Watt, so in order to cheat death he performed a dark ritual. He put his soul into a phylactery—some small object, traditionally a gem—committed suicide, and awakened as an undead creature. His original body was recently destroyed in an explosion, so he’s building a new one. He thinks he’s buying a power source for his new body—I gather it’s a junkpile robot sort of thing—but he’s actually buying... well. Kaboom.” Viscarro tapped the weird little engine on his desk to set it spinning, and it whirred away, generating a low hum, as its spheres orbited and gears interlocked.
“So that thing’s a bomb?”
“It is both a perpetual motion machine and a bomb.”
“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion.”
“Of course not. This device steals small quantities of velocity and momentum from various other sources—passing cars, grandfather clocks, merry-go-rounds, even the rotation of the Earth. Built by a mad technomancer named Canarsie a century ago. With this, Watt won’t need to recharge his batteries.”
“It’s not your style to blow up some fancy old magical thing. Won’t it leave a hole in your collection?”
Viscarro waved a hand, though it was more shriveled and clawlike than most things people called hands. Marla didn’t know how old he was, but “ancient” was a good guess. “I have two other examples of Canarsie’s engines. Besides, Watt is going to trade me for a certain... item I require.”
“So why the explodey double-cross?”
“Hmm? Oh, because he’s planning to cheat me, of course. He knows I won’t go in person—” Viscarro had agoraphobia, though Marla thought it was weird he found the outside world scary, since most of the outside world would be scared of him—”and he plans to kill my messenger, claim she never arrived, and keep the engine and the snow globe for himself.”
“Snow globe? You’re sending me to bomb a guy and steal his snow globe?”
“It’s a very special snow globe. Nothing you’d want—it’s more cursed than magical. But it has a great deal of sentimental value for me,” Viscarro said, entirely straight-faced. He was about as sentimental as a liver fluke, but as long as he paid her, what did she care? As far as selling her services went, she drew the line at murder, but if Watt was a lich, it wasn’t murder, anyway—it was monster-killing.
“How do you know he’s planning to screw you over?”
Viscarro frowned. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and we are much alike, and it’s what I would do, if our positions were reversed.”
“Okay. The price is right. I’m up for it. Where am I going?” Her mercenary gigs had taken her to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago so far, and she hoped this one was somewhere closer, Boston or Pittsburgh, so she wouldn’t have to spend much time out of Felport. She hated traveling. This city was her home.
“Just outside a wide place in the road called Sweetwater, in the North Carolina mountains. Beautiful, especially in autumn. The colors of the leaves, you know. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I can remember.”
“What’s a sorcerer doing there? Aren’t the southern Appalachians all...” She waved her hands vaguely. “I don’t know. Black bears and straw hats and moonshine and inbreeding?”
“Provincial little bigot,” Viscarro said. “I was born in the South. I remember Lexington-style barbecue quite fondly, though no one makes it right up here. And, no, Mr. Watt does not make moonshine.” Viscarro paused. “He makes methamphetamine these days, mostly.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring.”
Viscarro finished tinkering with the engine and passed it over. “One other thing. You can’t take your cloak with you on this trip.”
Marla touched the silver stag beetle pin that held her white-and-purple cloak around her shoulders. “What are you, my mother? Why should you get a say in my fashion decisions?”
Viscarro bared his teeth. “That cloak isn’t an item of fashion, it’s a weapon.”
“Okay, fine—then why should I let you dictate which weapons I bring with me?” Marla was not a big fan of stipulations and limitations. Her life wasn’t a sonnet; it didn’t benefit from the rigors of a restrictive form. She liked having lots of options on a mission, and the cloak she’d found hanging in a thrift store on her twentieth birthday was her ultimate option: while wearing it, any wounds she received healed rapidly, and if she needed to, she could unleash the cloak’s destructive powers, and become a one-woman massacre.
Viscarro shook his head. “The cloak reeks of magic. I want Watt to think you’re merely a messenger. If he sees you arrive in that thing, he’ll know you’re a true operative. Besides, I want to see how you handle a situation without that advantage. A lot of people say you’re a talentless little hack, you know, who just lucked into finding a potent magical weapon. Sometimes when people want to hire you, they don’t say, ‘I should hire Marla,’ they say, ‘I should hire the girl with the cloak.’ How does that make you feel?”
She snorted. “Feelings are stupid. But I don’t need the cloak. I can bust heads just fine on my own.” And maybe she was too dependent on her artifact. She didn’t like the way using the cloak made her feel, anyway—it was much older than her, and quite possibly smarter, and absolutely more malevolent, and sometimes when she was wearing it, she felt almost like the cloak was wearing her instead.
“If you’d like to leave it with me, in, ah, storage—” Viscarro began.
“What, so you can lock it in a vault and give me back a duplicate cloak with some shitty temporary enchantments and hope I don’t notice?” Viscarro’s covetousness in regard to magical artifacts was legendary, and he didn’t scruple when it came to acquiring new toys for his vast collection. Obsession like that wasn’t healthy. Doubtless indicative of some deeper psychological flaw. Probably something to do with his upbringing. “I’ll make my own arrangements.”
Marla caught a pre-dawn flight to the airport in Greensboro North Carolina, and one of Viscarro’s local contacts drove her the two hours or so into the mountains near Sweetwater. The driver was a fairly attractive guy with short blond hair, about Marla’s age, but he had his jaw wired shut, so his conversation was limited mostly to grunts. Marla wondered if the wiring was due to an injury or if Viscarro was just worried about the guy saying things he shouldn’t.
She’d never been to the mountains before, and she had to admit, the drive had some beautiful moments—the side of the road dropping away to reveal vast chasms of green, with hazy blue mountains in the distance—but for the most part it just made her uncomfortable, especially when hillsides hemmed the road in tight on both sides, exposed rock faces looking like avalanches waiting to happen, and even the scenic lookouts grew disturbing as she contemplated all that... nature—just sitting there, empty and waiting. Marla lived in the heart of a city and loved it, and the only green she saw on a regular basis these days was the occasional windowsill garden and grass growing up through cracks in the asphalt. She felt a little better when they passed antique malls and Christmas tree farms—crass humanity and consumerism made her feel more at home.
The driver stopped the car in the middle of a curving road crowded by pine trees and pointed at a nearly-hidden steep driveway that wound up the side of a wooded hill. “Bet that driveway’s a bitch to get up in the winter,” she said. “My guy’s up there?”
The driver nodded and held up two stopwatches, each set for one hour. He pressed their start buttons simultaneously.
“You’ll be back for me here in an hour, when this runs out?” Ma
rla said.
Another nod.
“And if I’m not here, you’ll come back every hour after that until I am here.”
He couldn’t frown, exactly, but he tried to, winced at however it felt, and shook his head.
Marla grinned, reached into her knapsack, and withdrew her favorite dagger. The blade was old, but she kept it sharp. “That wasn’t a question, Jaws. You will be here every hour, or I will come find you after I’m forced to make my own way out of this place. I know all kinds of magic—how to start fires with a word, how to insinuate myself into dreams, how to make myself unseen—but I won’t bother with any of that stuff. I’ll just cut your balls off with this knife. After I do some whittling first to make the blade duller. Understood?”
Wide-eyed, he nodded, rather more vigorously this time.
“Excellent. Maybe pick up some doughnuts or something for the drive back, too, huh?” She slipped out of the car and headed up the driveway, and though she was in good shape, she soon felt a burn in muscles she didn’t often use. She’d have to start running up and down stadium bleachers or something—just traveling the relatively flat streets of Felport wasn’t sufficient conditioning, obviously.
Birds sang, a cool breeze blew—that first nip of autumn in the air—and she had to admit, the fall foliage was pretty, where it peeked out from the zillions of evergreens that mostly surrounded her. The driveway petered out next to a low cinderblock foundation that had probably once supported a mobile home, and she sighed, looked around, and followed what might have been a deer path deeper into the woods. The perpetual motion machine in her bag was heavy as hell, and every time it bumped and shifted she got more anxious, even knowing the ball of plastic explosive at its heart wouldn’t explode until she pressed the button on the garage door opener in her jacket pocket.
The trail opened into a clearing with two structures: an old-school vaguely oval-shaped silver RV, and a cozy little log cabin, some serious Abe Lincoln shit. The door of the RV banged open and two simian-looking skinheads in denim overalls bounded out, followed by an invisible cloud of chemical stink. The men held new-looking black scatterguns at ready position. They were both potential medalists in the Olympics of Ugliness, but the one on the right showed him her teeth, and they were green where they weren’t yellow, and yellow where they weren’t black, and black where they weren’t entirely absent, so he won the gold medal by the skin of his nasty teeth. “She don’t look like the law,” Silver Medal Ugly said.
“Looks like a college girl who got lost,” Gold Medal said.
“I’m here to see Mr. Watt. I’ve got a delivery for him from Felport.”
Silver grunted. “Go on in then.” He gestured at the cabin’s front door.
“Just like that? You don’t want to search me for weapons or anything?”
Gold laughed. “You pull a weapon on Mr. Watt and he’ll take it away from you and stick it where God split you.”
“The ladies must love you guys,” Marla said, and went for the front steps. She wondered if she’d have to fight those two after she blew up their boss, or if the confusion would cover her escape. Maybe the explosion would make the silver trailer, which doubtless held a meth lab full of assorted inflammables, go up in flames too. She didn’t murder people, but if they turned out to be collateral damage, well, they were in a dangerous line of work, and she wouldn’t feel guilty.
She knocked, and a voice that sounded like air whistling through pipes and blowing over bottle tops, puffing out of a bellows said, “Come.”
Marla opened the door and stepped inside, but she didn’t see anybody, just a bunch of junk. The cabin was small, crowded with shelves that held a godawful profusion of knick-knacks and gimcrackery, including—she was dismayed to note—at least forty or fifty snow globes lined up on several shelves. A table made out of a big cable spool held a half-dissected car engine, and a low workbench along one wall was scattered in bits of metal shavings and fragments of wire, various tools hanging on the wall above it. And right in the middle of the floor there was a heap of junk almost as tall as her, car grilles and a refrigerator door and shiny hubcaps and long hinged metal bars and fist-sized glass fuses and rubber hoses and—
The top of the junk pile turned toward her, two amber lights glowing, and that fluting voice emerged in a puff of diesel-scented air, saying, “You brought me the engine?”
Viscarro had told her Watt was a “a junkpile robot,” but she’d expected something more robot and less junkpile. “Yes, sir. You have the snow globe?”
A few puffs of high-pitched air emerged, and Marla assumed it was his version of evil laughter, because evil sorcerers enjoyed their evil laughter. “I do have it. But first let me inspect your merchandise.”
Marla shrugged, removed the engine from her knapsack, and held it out to him. Watt extended a multi-hinged arm that terminated in a profusion of crazily jointed fingers and grasped the engine, flicked it into motion, and watched as it spun. “Marvelous.” He reached into his… chest—Marla guessed—and opened what appeared to be a circuit breaker panel. While he was absorbed in putting the engine into his chest and attaching it to various cables, Marla eyeballed the snow globes. Typical souvenir junk: snowman, Santa Claus, Eiffel Tower, Hollywood sign—like it ever snowed there—clowns, polar bears, Christmas tree, a menorah, mountains, a pyramid, sailing ships...
But they were all currently snow-free, since no one had shaken them up recently. All but one. One snow globe on the top shelf—about the size of a baseball mounted on a round black base—was full of swirling snow, nothing in view but churning whiteness. Now, maybe it was some fancy wind-up or battery-powered snow globe or something—Marla didn’t keep up with the cutting edge in snow globe technology—but so far it was the likeliest one to be magic. She stepped closer, peered in at the glass, and saw what looked to be a tiny shapeless black figure moving in among the whiteness, disappearing and reappearing in swirls of snow.
“I’ll be taking this.” She stood on tiptoe and snatched the snow globe down.
“No, you won’t.” Savery Watt’s eyes began to glow more intensely. “I think I’ll wipe your mind and sell you to some gentlemen I know in the next valley instead.”
“Praesidium,” Marla said, though she thought using incantatory trigger words in Latin was dumb—why couldn’t she just say “protection” or “force field” or something? But Viscarro had woven the spell, so she was stuck with his technique. She felt the spell click into place, the room around her becoming faintly shimmery as if seen through warped glass, and then triggered the garage door opener in her pocket.
No explosion. She jammed the button harder, to similar lack of effect. Shit. Was it a double cross? No, Viscarro wanted the snow globe, she believed that, and the spell he’d designed to protect her from the explosion was working, after all. He’d probably just had one of his idiot apprentices put the bomb together and not bothered to double-check the work.
Fortunately the magical shell protected her just fine against the jagged lances of lightning that sprayed from Watt’s body. Marla ran as fast as she could—“run like your ass is on fire and your head is catching,” her mother used to say—and the force field bobbed around her like an impregnable soap bubble. Which was fine as far as that went, but the bubble wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes. Watt bellowed behind her—high pitched bellowing, yes, but still loud—and Gold and Silver Ugly popped out and started firing at her, shots bouncing harmlessly off her shield... for the moment.
She pulled the stopwatch out of her pocket. The whole thing, walk and all, had taken only twenty-eight minutes, so even if she hauled ass down the driveway, Jaws wouldn’t be there waiting to pick her up yet. She had to lose her pursuit first, so Marla veered into the trees and started looking for a place to go to ground. For the first minute her force field snapped tree branches all around her, leaving a clear trail, no doubt, but then the field sputtered out and she started stepping more carefully, trying to cover her tracks, though she was cr
ap as a woodsman.
The noise of Watt crashing around behind her was still audible, but getting quieter. She was about to cast a look-away spell to make herself less noticeable—it probably wouldn’t fool Watt, but it might work for his meth monkeys—when she jumped over a big log and found a steep drop-off on the other side. Her mom always said “Look before you leap,” which invariably pissed Marla off, both because it was a stupid cliché and because her mother liked having one-night-stands with abusive rednecks and was thus hardly qualified to counsel caution, but this was a situation where the advice could have helped.
Marla managed to snag the stem of a bush as she fell instead of rolling down the hill. As far as upsides went, she’d had better. And to make matters worse, as Marla clung halfway down a muddy hillside in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother. She hadn’t seen the woman in almost seven years, since running away at fifteen, and she didn’t miss her much at all, but she had to admit, life with her was better than waiting for a junkyard robot to come kill you. Marla’s mom had been most tolerable during her occasional forays into 12-step programs, though she usually hit a wall right around step 4: making a searching and fearless moral inventory. Marla’s mom wasn’t much for introspection. In that respect, mother and daughter had something in common.
