by T. A. Pratt
“I thought I had more time,” Marla said, almost to herself. “You said you had things to set in order before you dealt with me—rain forests were being chopped down, whole species of snakes going extinct. Last I heard, all that was still going on.”
Another minuscule nod. “Yes. Those problems have proven more difficult than I expected. To be honest, I despair a bit of ever solving them. Some things cannot be corrected by growing to enormous size and crushing them to death. But I think killing you will help restore my confidence, and energize me again to enter the fight.”
“That’s... a hell of a thing to die for.”
“I would not wish you to think you were important,” the god said. “Sometimes, when one has a long list of tasks to accomplish, one chooses to do the simpler ones first, for the pleasure of marking something off the list, before turning to more difficult matters.”
“I’ve killed gods before,” she said.
“I am aware. If you recall, I was the weapon you used to kill one of those gods. You need not enumerate all your evil acts now. Your death will serve as punishment for all your many crimes. You have two days.”
With that, he was gone, without even the courtesy of a spectacular exit—he didn’t explode into a cloud of colorful serpents, or even vanish in the traditional puff of smoke. He just ceased to be.
Ceased to be.
“Fuck,” Marla said, with great conviction.
“So that’s it,” Marla said. “I can’t beat him in a fair fight, and I don’t stand much of a chance in an unfair one, either. And the other problem is... he’s kinda right. I fucked him over. He’s got a legitimate grievance. I’d make it right, if he’d let me, but... I’m not willing to die in the service of saying I’m sorry. I don’t want to kill him either, though, if I can avoid it. I knew he’d come for me eventually, and I’ve thought about how I’d react, but the thing is, he’s got basically no weaknesses—apart from being honorable, and I don’t see how I can turn that against him in this situation.”
“Use Lupo,” the person on her right said. Marla forced herself to turn and look at him.
He was a middle-aged man, with a very ordinary face, his expression a bit sardonic. “What do you mean, Zealand?”
Mr. Zealand shrugged. “Gustavus Lupo, this skinshifter you captured. He can turn himself into anyone else, yes? A perfect imitation, so accurate even Lupo himself believes he’s the person he’s impersonating? So force Lupo to take on your shape. Use magic to hide your true self from divination. Ch’ang Hao can overcome such defenses, I’m sure, but when he goes looking for you, he’ll find Lupo instead, and believe it’s you, so he won’t be on the lookout for trickery. Ch’ang Hao will kill Lupo, believe his debt is paid, and go on his way. You’ll have to go underground, of course, take on an assumed name, conceal your identity with sorcery, and so on, but you were planning to leave the island and start a new life anyway, weren’t you? It will just have to be a slightly different new life.”
Marla nodded, trying to keep her face blank. “I’m not sure sacrificing Lupo is an option, though.”
“This Lupo is a dangerous lunatic, as I understand it. A curse on the world, possessed of terrible magics.”
“True, but Lupo’s insane, he’s not entirely responsible...” She trailed off. The skinshifter’s original identity hadn’t surfaced in years, possibly decades, and when not impersonating someone else, Lupo appeared as an undifferentiated blur in the vague shape of a man. He was a creature of pure appetite, hungering only to take on the identity of others—and to kill the original bearer of that identity, if he ever encountered them, like some doppelganger out of legend. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s be honest. If it were a sure thing, I’d probably do it. There’s an argument to be made that letting Lupo die would be kind, even. But to sacrifice the poor thing, without knowing for sure if the ruse would fool Ch’ang Hao... I mean, who knows what kind of senses he has? Maybe he can smell my life force, taste it on the air with his tongue.”
“Try it and see,” Zealand said. “Worst case, it at least buys you some time.”
“Who is this man who counsels such casual murder?” Arachne said, not looking up from the blur of her knitting needles.
“His name is Mr. Zealand,” Marla said. “He used to belong to the order of the slow assassins. He has... some expertise... in killing supernatural creatures. Immortals. Things like that. I thought he might have some good ideas.”
“I am but a humble thug,” Zealand said, smiling. “Marla flatters me. But she has done me a few good turns, and I’d like to return the favor, if I can. Unfortunately, if she refuses my suggestion...” He shrugged. “It’s a question of how badly you want to live, Marla, and what you’re willing to give up to save your life.”
Marla caught Rondeau’s eye, and he looked away. He wasn’t comfortable with this, either. She couldn’t blame him.
The real Mr. Zealand was dead—he’d died fighting one of Marla’s enemies. The person seated to her right was actually Gustavus Lupo, taking on Zealand’s shape, unaware he was playing the part of a dead man. Which made his suggestion to sacrifice Lupo even more awkward.
“I’ll keep it in the back of my mind as an option of last resort,” she said. “Any other suggestions?”
“We all attack this snake god at once?” Leis said. “You’ve got a shark god on your side, a bunch of wave mages, a slow assassin—”
Marla shook her head. “I saw Ch’ang Hao tear apart a chthonic god of death with his bare hands once. He just grows, there’s no limit to how much, and he’d become a giant and stomp us flat. Our magic would just bounce off. He’d brush us away like ants.”
Arachne sighed, loud enough to be audible over the clatter of her needles. “You say he’s a snake god?”
Marla nodded.
“Then find a manakuke,” she said.
“Um,” Marla said. “Could you clarify that?”
The sorcerer paused her knitting long enough to look Marla in the eye. “You’re an outsider in the islands, Marla Mason. I’ve called you an invasive species before. There are other invasive species here—animals and plants that are not native to these islands, but were brought along with various invaders. In the 1800s, when our islands were taken over for use as sugar plantations, there was a problem with rats destroying the crops. In 1872, plantation owners brought seventy-two manakuke—mongooses, you would say in English—to the islands, with the idea that they would kill the rats.” She shook her head. “Fools. The mongoose population exploded, spreading far and wide across the islands, carrying disease, attacking pets, sometimes even attacking infants and toddlers. And they didn’t do much about the rats, since rats come out at night, when mongooses sleep. The little beasts eat anything—insects, fruit, geckos, even turtle eggs. They’re a menace.”
“Mongooses—mongeese?—hate snakes, right?” Rondeau said. “That old story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose, killing the cobras in the garden to protect the human family that lives there? They’re natural enemies. Some kinds of mongooses are immune to the venom of snakes, even. So...”
“What?” Marla said. “A mongoose charm? I know a spell that uses mongoose blood, it makes you move incredibly fast, but that’s not enough to fight Ch’ang Hao—”
“A mongoose can fight a snake,” Mr. Zealand said. “But to fight a snake god...”
“Crap,” Marla said. “More gods.” She turned to Ka’ohu. “I know there’s an eel god in the islands, and a turtle god...”
“When species invade,” the shark god said, “they bring their gods with them.”
“Road trip,” Rondeau said glumly.
Rondeau sat down on a rock, and after a moment, Marla joined him. Mr. Zealand stayed on his feet, eyes scanning the ground, the treetops, the sky. They were out in the woods, beside at an ugly stretch of humped, uneven ground. “Mongoose burrow,” Rondeau said, voice strained. “And there’s... definitely something here.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Marla said.
A weaselly creature, like an elongated squirrel, poked its head out of a hole near Rondeau’s feet, looked at them fearlessly for a moment, then disappeared back into the ground.
“Where’s your other associate, Pelham?” Zealand said.
Marla twisted on the rock to look at the assassin, frowning. “He’s back at the hotel, watching over Lupo.” That was the story, anyway—in reality Pelham was probably just polishing Marla’s boots or tidying up after the resort’s maids, who never cleaned the suite to his satisfaction. She didn’t want anyone to know she was using Lupo for her own purposes, so she’d detailed a guard to keep up the pretense that the skinshifter was being held prisoner.
“Mmm,” Zealand said. “So how do we summon the god? Sacrifice a goat? Or a cobra?”
“Not necessary,” Rondeau said, voice trembling, eyes closed. His whole body quivered, as if he were wracked with fever.
“Rondeau’s picked up a few tricks since you last saw him, Zealand,” Marla said, resisting the urge to add, since you died. “He’s an oracle-generator now. He can call up ghosts and minor spirits without breaking a sweat, and when it’s necessary, he can summon... bigger things.”
“Mmm,” Zealand said again, a sound that was more maddening in its ambiguity than simple silence would have been.
The ground began to shake—the trembling exactly in sympathy with Rondeau’s own shivering body. The soil of the burrow before them fell inward, a sinkhole that extended almost to the toes of Rondeau’s shoes, forming a pit some dozen feet in diameter. A horde of dirty brown mongooses streamed out in all directions, but instead of fleeing, they formed a circle around the pit, rising up on their hind legs, tails twitching, noses quivering, as they stared down into the darkness, where their god dwelt.
“Why have you summoned me?” a voice said from within the pit—except Marla would have bet it didn’t actually speak, exactly, but just tickled the auditory centers of her brain.
Before Marla could answer, Mr. Zealand spoke up. “I require a boon.”
Marla stared at him. Rondeau grunted, but didn’t open his eyes. “Zealand, you—” Marla said.
“Silence,” the voice in the pit said. “This does not concern you, woman.” Marla wanted to argue, but there was no point—Zealand had seized control of this transaction.
And then she heard nothing else from the pit, no more voice of god, just Zealand saying, “I need the power to defeat a god of serpents,” and a moment later, “Of course,” and a moment later, “Not at all,” and three moments later, “Those terms are acceptable.”
Rondeau fell backward on the rock, gasping like a man who’d just swum the English Channel while being pursued by misplaced sharks, sweat streaming down his face and staining his shirt. The refugees from the collapsed mongoose colony chittered and hissed and scampered away into the forest.
“There,” Mr. Zealand said, smiling. “We’re ready.”
Marla stomped toward him. “Zealand, what the hell? I was going to make the deal, I was going to take on the debt—”
“Nonsense,” the assassin said briskly. “How many worthy foes have you killed, Marla? I don’t mean how many deaths have you engineered, or caused to happen—how many sentient beings have you killed, personally? A dozen?”
“Are we counting monsters?” she said, scowling. “Because, if so... yeah, I guess that’s about right.”
Zealand clucked his tongue. “You’re dear to me, Marla, but you’re an amateur. Leave it to the professionals, hmm?”
“You took on a personal debt to a god,” Marla said. “That’s heavy business—”
“Oh, it’s quite all right.”
“Shut up,” she said, seething. “You took on that debt, on my behalf, which means I owe you a debt of equal magnitude, and, damn it, I don’t like being in debt—”
“It hardly matters,” Zealand said. “I’m not the real Mr. Zealand, anyway. He’s already dead.”
“Oh, hell,” Rondeau murmured, but he still didn’t open his eyes.
“Uh,” Marla said. “What do you, uh...”
“I suppose I could be some kind of clone,” Zealand said, looking up at the tree branches. “Or a homunculus somehow implanted with the real Mr. Zealand’s memories. On balance, though, it seems most likely that I’m actually Gustavus Lupo. I remember dying, you see, Marla. Perhaps when Lupo impersonates other dead people, they don’t believe the memories of their demise, or think there was some miraculous reprieve or recovery, but I am a maker of death. Death is my business. I was killed by a nightmare king, my kidneys slashed to bits with knives, and the magics that sustained me stripped away.” He shrugged. “There’s no harm in my pledging my soul, devotion, and life to a frankly dim-witted mongoose god. I’m already dead.”
Marla closed her eyes. “Lupo. Zealand. I’m sorry—”
“Nonsense. It’s pleasant to be conscious, to breathe air, to eat coconut beer-battered shrimp and drink mai tais. And I’m flattered you brought me back for this, to help you kill a god. It’s pleasant, to have one final commission. I always enjoyed my work.”
“I miss you, Zealand,” she said. “You were a good friend, and... it’s hard to look at you now. I couldn’t save you.”
“True. But I can save you. So let me.”
Rondeau sat up. “It’s a shame Ch’ang Hao has to get murdered though,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, Marla, if it’s him or you, I’m really glad it’s him, but... he saved our asses when he killed that frog-monster in San Francisco. He’s a good guy. You just got on the wrong side of him.”
“I don’t want it to go down this way, either,” Marla said. “But I’m boxed in. If there was some other way—”
“Like some way to use Ch’ang Hao’s sense of honor against him,” Zealand said, and looked at her pointedly.
Marla stared at him for a long moment. “Wait,” she said. “But. No. Zealand. If I do that, then you’ll—”
“Yes, of course,” he said, nodding. “But I don’t have anything to lose, and you have everything to lose, so why not?” The assassin smiled wider than a skull.
“I don’t know what the fuck either of you are talking about,” Rondeau said. “Just like old times.”
To be on the safe side, Marla made sure she was at an isolated spot on Maui’s east coast. No need to inflict any collateral damage on the island or its people—Arachne would never let her hear the end of it.
She sat cross-legged on an empty stretch of beach, looking out at the heaving blue-gray ocean. Some thousands of miles in that direction lay the west coast of Mexico. Maybe she’d go there first, when all this was over. She had to go somewhere.
At the appointed moment—two days to the second after Ch’ang Hao left her in the bookshop—the snake god walked up out of the ocean. Marla flowed smoothly to her feet to greet him. Even though she saw him emerge from the waves, she was unsurprised that he was entirely dry, his black robe unstained by salt or sea.
“Marla,” he said, nodding his head.
“Ch’ang Hao. Listen, I know you’re here to kill me, but I thought I should let you know, it might not be safe for you here right now. The rumor is there’s a local god that’s not too fond of snake deities, and—”
Ch’ang Hao swelled in size, his body seeming to inflate like a balloon. New muscles appeared in his biceps, and he rose two feet taller than before, now looming over Marla. He reached out with one vast hand and clutched her by the throat, squeezing gently but implacably, cutting off her air.
Marla instinctively struggled, trying to kick at him, and Ch’ang Hao just sighed and lifted her off the ground, holding her out at arm’s length.
Black dots began to swarm in the edges of her vision—like the flies that would inevitably come to harry her corpse. Any time now, Zealand, she thought.
A blur flashed in the corner of her vision, and Marla was flung to the sand. She struggled up on her elbows and watched as Ch’ang Hao roared and flailed, spinning on the sand like a drunk trying to do pirouett
es. A figure, moving so fast the eye couldn’t follow him, buzzed around the god, occasionally lashing out with vicious strikes, its blurring hands full of knives. Ch’ang Hao grew even larger, towering twelve feet high now, but that didn’t deter his attacker, who simply clambered up the snake god’s back like a man scaling a boulder. Mr. Zealand, given incredible speed and resilience by the mongoose god, clung to Ch’ang Hao’s back, stabbing down in a flurry.
Ch’ang Hao fell forward onto his knees, hissing, his arms elongating and changing color, transforming into two long brown serpents, which twined around and struck at Zealand. Marla thought of the villainous cobras from Kipling’s story “Rikki-Tiki-Tavi,” Nag and Nagaina. Ch’ang Hao’s serpents didn’t fare any better than those cobras had, with Zealand shrugging off their venom and casually lopping off their heads before returning his attention to trying to decapitate Ch’ang Hao one slash at a time. The snake god swelled even larger, growing as big as a car, then a fishing boat, falling forward on his now-mutilated hands and knees, barely able to lift his huge head. Blood and black slime and pearly drops of venom flew from his neck in a fine mist.
“The great god Manakuke sends her regards, snake-man,” Zealand said, and that was Marla’s cue.
She struggled to her feet, abraded throat burning with every breath, and drew her magical dagger. Marla walked around Ch’ang Hao and scrambled up his calf muscle, then ascended the back of his thigh, pulled herself up past his ass, and stood on the broad plain at the base of his spine.
Marla walked up to Zealand, who still knelt on the back of the god’s neck, resolutely slashing away. She didn’t dare say anything to him, for fear Ch’ang Hao might overhear.
Instead she plunged her dagger—the one truly powerful weapon she had, apart from her will, and the contents of her mind—into Zealand’s back, first into one kidney, and then into the other.
He’d been killed the first time by stab wounds to the kidneys, so he was familiar with that pain, and Marla had no desire to make him suffer new agonies on her behalf.
