by T. A. Pratt
“Kind of a presumptuous name for a haole like you. No offense.”
He scowled. “My ancestors may not have come from this island, but I am Hawai’ian in my soul. I have lived for years, and planning, and consolidating my power. I will restore these islands to their ancient glory, and restore honor to the Hawai’ian people. My plan is well underway, and soon, all will hail me as the greatest of ali’i in the islands.” He patted the dead shark absentmindedly.
“That restoring honor thing, that’s maybe not a bad idea,” Marla said. “I’ve read some of the history, and the Hawai’ans got a raw deal when the US took over. The separatist types have a point, but I don’t think they’d welcome the leadership of a pasty white guy from... let’s see, I’m crap at accents... Pittsburgh?”
“Sheboygan,” he said, with a little shudder.
“Right. Seems like a kind of cultural appropriation thing you’re up to, my fellow haole. Not that I blame you. I imagine there’s not a ton of good culture to call your own in Sheboygan. But, still, it rubs me the wrong way, so I won’t be calling you Kahuna Mo’i. I’m going to call you greaseface instead, okay, greaseface? Or would you prefer featherbrain? I’m good either way.” She walked off a little to the side, so she wouldn’t have to jump over the desk if she needed to attack him.
“If this is a job interview,” he said, “you’re doing a spectacularly poor job as an applicant.”
“Oops, I let my subterfuge drop. I’m no good at deception.”
“Then why are you really here?”
“Let me answer your question with a question,” she said. “Why’d you rip out the shark god’s teeth?”
“Who are you?” he said, sounding more bemused than worried, which annoyed her.
“I’m the person who’s going to beat you over the head and dump you in the ocean if you don’t answer my questions. Why tear out the shark god’s teeth? I see they turned back into shark’s teeth, and you made them into a little toy club there. So what’s it good for?”
“This,” he said, snatching the club from his belt and launching himself at her.
Marla grinned. She loved a good fight. He swung the club at her, and she raised her arm to ward off the blow, whispering a spell that gave her flesh the approximate consistency of kevlar—having her skin pierced by the tooth of a shark god couldn’t be good for her.
But when the club struck her, it brought with it a wave of transformative magic that drove Marla to her knees. She grunted as her body tried to change, and gritted her teeth—teeth that wanted desperately to elongate and sharpen—as she fought the magic.
Marla was crap at transformations. She wasn’t much good at remote viewing, either, or astral projection, or body-switching, or anything that required her to give up her iron grip on her self-image. She didn’t have many assets left. The other sorcerers back home had taken her city away, and her weapons, her resources, most of her allies, her money, her apartment, her influence, her minions, her purpose.
But they could never take away her will. Or her sense of self. Nobody could make Marla become something other than what she was. That was her greatest asset as a sorcerer, now that all else was gone.
Still, this magic, once unleashed, had to go somewhere. Preferably into something alive, or that had once been alive, and since greaseface had danced out of reach, she grabbed the leg of a wooden chair near the desk, and let the magic flow through her.
The desk transformed into a rather small, and very dead, whitetip reef shark.
Marla stood up. She felt a little sharky, but in this case, that meant she felt like doing violence and moving fast, as if she’d die if she stopped. She stepped toward greaseface, who was staring open-mouthed at the shark (née chair), grabbed his wrist, pulled him toward her as she stepped past him, and tossed him onto the floorboards behind her, neatly plucking the club from his hand as she went by. Aikido was usually too non-brutal for her taste, but sometimes a little elegance was called for.
“Turning people into sharks?” she said, looking down at the club in her hand. “That is a stupid way to kill somebody. Unnecessarily elaborate. Why is this better than a knife in the eye?”
Greaseface groaned and tried to get up. “The symbolism,” he said, levering himself up on his elbow. “I have taken the power of a god as my own. That act proves my worth as the ruler of these islands.” He paused. “Also, it’s a lot more interesting than a knife in the eye. But when all else fails, a knife will suffice.” He made it to his feet and attempted to rush her—and, yes, there was a knife in his hand, he’d certainly telegraphed that intention clearly enough—but before he took his second step, Rondeau smacked him on the back of the head with a very large book bound in what appeared to be wood wrapped in leather.
Greaseface hit the floor like a coconut dropping from a palm tree, and Rondeau began tying the sorcerer’s hands and ankles together using lengths of cotton clothesline he pulled from his pockets. Marla knew better than to ask why he was carrying lengths of rope around; the things he did for fun with his resort friends were always consensual, even if part of the pleasure was pretending they weren’t.
“This must be the guy,” Rondeau said. “The sharknapper.”
Marla frowned. “You lost me.”
“You don’t read the papers?”
Marla shrugged. Back home, sure, she’d read the papers. But here... how to explain that places besides her city never felt entirely real to her? And now that her city was forbidden, no place felt entirely real? So she just said, “I guess not.”
“People have been disappearing. Like, five of them this week.” Rondeau finished the last knot and rose to his feet. “Disappeared without a trace... except in all their places? Someone left behind sharks. Big sharks, recently dead. In people’s beds, under their desks, whatever. The cops are totally baffled. Who kidnaps people and, instead of leaving a ransom note, leaves a dead shark? And how do you move big sharks around without anybody noticing? Now we know.” Rondeau prodded greaseface with his foot.
“He’s been using the transformative magic he stole from Ka’ohu and turning people into sharks,” Marla said, “and just letting them die, drowning in air. The victims are probably sorcerers, or rivals of other kinds. I wonder who the one on the desk used to be?” She shook her head. “I’m glad he did something so incontrovertibly evil. I mean, stealing teeth from a god, it’s not like I wouldn’t do exactly the same thing, if the circumstances were right. But grisly murder to further your own whacked-out agenda... that kind of crime justifies what I’m going to do to him.”
“Which is?” Rondeau said.
She hefted the magical shark’s-tooth club. “Simple. Tonight, he sleeps with the fishes.”
“You can’t do this to me,” greaseface said, struggling against Marla’s hold as she marched him toward the waterline. “It’s murder!”
“You’d know all about murder,” she said. “You know the old saying: if you can’t take the teeth, you shouldn’t swim with the sharks.” Marla threw him face-down into the sand. The moon was high in a cloudless sky, and the stretch of lonely beach was deserted.
“Marla,” Rondeau said. “The water is full of sharks. Only... most of them aren’t really sharks. They’re ghosts shaped like sharks. Or... other things... that just sort of look like sharks from the angle of mortal perception.”
“Good,” Marla said, and knelt, and struck the whimpering would-be King of Hawai’i on the back with the shark’s-tooth club.
He transformed instantly into a shark. The bonds tying him fell away, since he no longer had limbs, and when he wriggled out of the feathered cloak to swim into the surf—toward probable, if not certain, death at the hands of the shark spirits—she saw he was only about five feet long.
“Dogfish shark,” Ka’ohu said, emerging from nowhere in particular in that disconcerting way that gods have—even gods with a little of their magic stolen away. “Venomous. Fins covered in toxins.”
“Appropriate for him,” Marla said. �
�What kind of shark do you think I’d turn into? If I was the sort of person who let herself be turned into a shark?”
“Leviathan melvillei,” Ka’ohu said, without hesitation. “Fifty feet long. Fourteen inch teeth. Ate whales. Extinct twelve millions years.”
“The good always die young,” Marla said. The water began to froth and churn, and she noticed that Rondeau was very deliberately gazing up at the moon, and not at the terror under the waves.
She held out the club. “I think this is yours.”
Ka’ohu nodded. “I thank you for recovering this.” He took the weapon and began to pluck the teeth from around its edges. They sort of... disappeared into his hand... which was, on the whole, nicer than watching him shove them back into his gums, especially since he was in a human shape and his teeth weren’t. He plucked the last tooth free and held it out to Marla. “For you,” he said.
“Magic?” she said, taking it.
He shrugged. “If you ever need me, and you hold it, and you call my name...” Another shrug. “I owe you a debt of honor.”
“Got it. If you want to discharge the debt, you can do me a favor. Tell your friends, and the other gods, and ghosts, and any sorcerers you know, that if they have a problem, and need some help, they can find me in an old bookstore in a pocket of folded space on Front Street.”
“I will do as you ask, but just talking to people... the task is too simple to cancel so great an obligation.”
“Good. I’m sure I’ll need bigger and better favors in the future.”
Ka’ohu nodded and strolled into the waves, and when he got up to his knees in the water, transformed into a tiger shark nearly twenty feet long and swam off into the depths.
Marla picked up the feathered cloak from the sand and arranged it over her shoulders. She found it surprisingly comfortable. “What do you think?” she said, doing a little twirl in the sand. “Is it me?”
Rondeau tilted his head and looked at her thoughtfully. “Depends. Are you some kind of crazy chicken-lady now?”
“I’ll save it for special occasions.” She linked arms with Rondeau and began walking away from the water, toward the rental car parked up on the shoulder.
“So that thing you asked the shark god to do back there,” Rondeau said. “Spreading the word. Does that mean you’re going to open up an occult detective agency like I suggested?”
“I did luck into some primo office space, rent free,” Marla said. “It’d be a shame not to use it, and living over a bookstore would suit my temperament better than living in a hotel. My pride doesn’t like living off your bankroll, either. I’m not going to work for ordinaries—I don’t want random people asking me to track down runaways or spy on their cheating spouses—but if other sorcerers need help... Well. Sorcerers have interesting problems. And they can pay well, often with things better than money.”
“And you hope,” Rondeau said, “That if you go publicly freelance, eventually someone back home in our former fair city will have a major magical problem, and will have no choice but to hire you, and then you’ll be able to show them how stupid they were to get rid of you.”
“No fair being psychic at me,” Marla said.
“That’s the kind of psychic that just comes from knowing you for years and years. Kind of a longshot though, isn’t it?”
She shrugged, hoping she did so as expressively as Ka’ohu. “You know I like contingency plans. Take me back to my office, would you? I want to see if greaseface left any fun toys behind, and get a look at that book collection. And I guess we need to clean the dead shark off my new desk.”
As Rondeau drove toward Lahaina, Marla looked out the window at the moon shining on the water. It’s not the life I wanted, she thought. But at least it’s a living.
Snake and Mongoose
While she was exiled in Hawaii, some of Marla’s enemies decided to take advantage of her weakened state to murder her: that’s the plot of Grim Tides, featuring a team of magical assassins led by the chaos witch Elsie Jarrow and including a rather addled shapeshifter named Gustavus Lupo. Marla manages to survive the book, neutralizing her enemies... but in this story, set right after Grim Tides, she’s visited by another old foe, a magical being she treated badly.
Because she wasn’t ready to die, Marla Mason called a council of war.
Once upon a time, when she’d been chief sorcerer of an entire city, she’d had cause to call such councils from time to time, summoning the other major powers in Felport to fulfill their pledge to defend the city, with her as commander-in-chief. Whole hosts of psychics, diviners, poltergeisters, pyromancers, and assorted inflicters of controlled violence had been at her disposal, and her foes had rightly trembled in the face of such might.
Now her war council consisted of people who ranged from personally devoted to uncomfortably indebted to vaguely friendly to unhappily compelled to serve her, and they gathered not in a war room but around a big wooden table at an outdoor restaurant near Lahaina, Maui that specialized in coconut beer-battered shrimp and happy hour mai tais.
These people (and, in some cases, things) didn’t have armies at their backs. Few of them had a personal stake in Marla’s death or survival, and there certainly wasn’t the fate of a shared city to compel them to service or action. But they had a wide range of expertise, and weren’t actively hostile toward her, and all were survivors one way or another, so they were the best she could do on such short notice.
Arachne, the only sorcerer on Maui that Marla considered even remotely an ally, looked up from the intricate knitting in her lap for a moment, sniffed, and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t an entire group of sorcerers try and fail to kill you just a few weeks ago? You didn’t ask for my help fighting them. Why ask me here now?”
“This time is different,” Marla said.
“How so?” Leis asked. She was the redheaded, damp representative of a tribe of wave-mages who owed Marla a debt—mostly paid off at this point, but they were still grateful enough to send an envoy.
“This time,” Marla said, “I probably deserve to get killed. But I’d like to avoid dying anyway.”
“Explain,” rumbled the shark god who called himself Ka’ohu. She watched the others crowded around the table nod, except for Rondeau, who already knew the situation—and one other person, seated to her right. Marla couldn’t tell if he’d nodded or not. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at him directly, but she was glad he was here.
“Yesterday I had a visitor,” she began.
After the fugitive skinshifter Gustavus Lupo was safely locked up in a hotel room at Rondeau’s luxury resort, Marla returned to the used and rare bookstore in Lahaina that she used as an office. She paused by the front door, her nostrils filling with the scent of burning copper, her mouth flooding with the taste of cinnamon. She grunted. Those sensations meant someone had breached her magical wards.
Marla drew her dagger and gently pushed open the door.
“Hello, Marla,” a low voice rumbled from the book-lined space inside.
She clutched her knife more tightly, took a deep breath, and stepped into the bookshop. A man dressed in a black robe sat in one of the shop’s leather armchairs, hands clasped in his lap. He was bald, and shorter than she was, but twice as broad across the shoulders. “Please, sit,” he said.
Marla sat down in the other armchair, which he’d arranged to face his own. They were seated just far enough away that he couldn’t reach her if he lunged—and vice-versa. “Well,” she said. “Ch’ang Hao. It’s... interesting to see you again. What do you want? Looking for something to read?” She gestured with her blade at the shelves crammed with yellowing paperbacks. “I think I’ve got a copy of Marzditz’s Are Snakes Necessary? in here somewhere.”
“I have come to settle our debt,” the old god rumbled.
“You mean you’re here to kill me.” Marla tried to sound nonchalant.
Ch’ang Hao dipped his head in acknowledgment.
She sighed. “Y
our timing is terrible. A few weeks ago, a whole crowd of people came to the islands to try to kill me. You could have joined up with them.”
He shook his head, a twisting gesture that made his neck seem curiously boneless. “They sought vengeance. I seek justice.”
Marla grunted. Fair enough. “And if I’m not inclined to submit myself to your justice?”
He shrugged. “You know my power. I grow as large as I need to, in order to defeat my enemies. You cannot stand against me.”
“The undefeatable act doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny,” she pointed out. “When I met you, you were another sorcerer’s servant, bound up with magic.”
“In that case I was not bested in combat. I was tricked, and enslaved. But centuries of captivity have made me far more suspicious. I will not be deceived so easily again.”
Marla drummed the fingers of her free hand—the one not holding her dagger—on the arm of the chair. “This is bullshit, you know. I’m the one who set you free. You’d still be a slave if it weren’t for me, trapped in a box, only taken out to do your master’s dirty work—”
“You also held me in captivity, Marla Mason,” he said mildly. “You used me just as vilely as my old captor did. The difference is only of degree, not kind.”
“That’s not fair. I just asked you to do a little job for me, before I broke your chains—”
“Yes. Had you simply struck away my chains, I would have been a friend to you forever. Indeed, honor would have compelled me to grant you a favor of equal magnitude. But instead you extorted my assistance. You coerced, and forced, instead of acting as a friend. You know all this. You enslaved me, Marla Mason, however briefly, and for that crime, you will die.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “So I can’t talk you out of it. When do you want to have this fight?”
“There will be no fight. Only an execution. You will not suffer, unless you struggle.” He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then met her eyes. There was nothing human in his gaze. Ch’ang Hao looked like a man, more or less, but he was a god of serpents, and his stare was unblinking and reptilian. “I am not cruel. I will give you two days to set your affairs in order. Then I will come to you, wherever you may be, and finish this.”
