by T. A. Pratt
“You do the honors, Marla,” Sauvage said, offering her a ceremonial silver knife with a hilt wrapped in red electrical tape. “Slice him, get a glimpse of your future. You earned it.”
Marla hesitated, then shook her head. Sauvage looked at her patiently, his reptilian eyes awaiting an explanation.
“I saw, in one of your bodyguard’s entrails, that this man will be important to you someday. I’m not sure why, but killing him could have terrible consequences for you.” The lie came easily. Marla’d had enough killing for a while, and the Belly Killer didn’t deserve to die. The Thrones, maybe, but who could punish them? Only their master, whoever that might be.
Sauvage tucked the knife back into his suit and leaned the ball bat against the wall. Rondeau watched them, his eyes betraying nothing. Sauvage frowned, suspicious but unable to see why Marla might lie to him. “Why didn’t you mention that earlier? When you told me your plan, you said we’d kill him.”
Marla did her best to look ashamed and uncomfortable. “I didn’t care. I just wanted him dead. Now I think having you alive, and grateful, could be worth more to me.” She shrugged.
Sauvage nodded, satisfied by the self-serving nature of her explanation. “Oh, I’m grateful. You’ll be rewarded.” He nudged the killer’s hip with his toe. “He’ll still be able to read the future, though his powers are gone?”
“I think so. That’s not really power, not like the rest, it’s just knowledge. Anyone can read the patterns, if they know how.”
“Maybe he’ll tell me something I need to know someday,” Sauvage said thoughtfully. “I might put him on the payroll.” Sauvage picked the Belly Killer up and draped him over his shoulder without so much as a grunt of exertion. The Belly Killer groaned softly, his Throne-power sucked out of him. “Take care, folks.” Sauvage saluted with his free hand and ducked through the curtain.
“Artie’s ghost is going to plague you,” Rondeau said, after a moment. Marla just nodded. “There are charms to alleviate that... but they don’t do much good.” She nodded again. “If you ever can’t take it, you can use the eighth room, free of charge. He can’t bother you here.”
Marla smiled. She put her hand on his shoulder. She didn’t kiss him, but she thought about it.
“I’ll help put your jaw back on if you like,” he said, looking away. For once, he looked as good in person as he did in her memory.
“I’ll take you up on that.” She left the room, limping a little from her injuries. As soon as she cleared the doorway, Artie Mann’s voice hit her like a hammer, making her wince. “—bitch, you swore, you promised to avenge me, you’ll never sleep again, you’ll suffer—” His voice stopped abruptly, with a click like a deadbolt turning. She heard a many-throated hum, an irritatingly dramatic celestial chorus, which quickly faded.
Absolution, she thought. The Thrones came through after all. She’d accumulate new sins soon enough, she knew, but in the meantime she’d enjoy the unaccustomed lightness of grace. Maybe even add to it, a little, by giving Rondeau his jaw back. If she needed to get information from him in the future, she could just ask, couldn’t she?
Pride Is an Engine
I decided to write a story about how Marla became chief sorcerer. This is it. It is not very good, and as a result was never published by anyone other than me. It does reveal some things, even if I can’t vouch for it being entirely canonical.
Marla found the sorcerer’s corpse in a junkyard, lying in the scuffed dirt near a puddle of motor oil that reflected moonlight. Wind whipped through the wrecked-metal alleys, making the piled metal shift and creak. She approached the body warily, knowing that others would arrive soon, some of them probably unfriendly.
When she saw the dead man’s face, she actually gasped.
Sauvage. The city’s most prominent sorcerer, the chief of chiefs. He stared blankly skyward, his throat raggedly opened, his face covered in dozens of small punctures. His ribcage had been pried apart and his heart removed—a vicious defacement, since he could not be resurrected without a heart, no matter how strong his will or how talented the necromancer. A long knife lay in the dirt beside him.
Marla hadn’t been friendly with Sauvage, she didn’t operate in his league, but she’d worked for him in the past, and respected him. Who could have possibly killed him? Someone powerful, but she knew that anyway—the magical energies they’d unleashed during their fight had resounded throughout the city, waking Marla with a ringing in her ears and a vicious tingling in her extremities, like fire ants crawling and biting. Everyone in the city who dabbled in magic would have been similarly awakened, most just as curious about the cause as Marla had been.
Marla knelt and picked up Sauvage’s ceremonial dagger, a foot of silvery steel and a long hilt wrapped in red electrical tape. She frowned. The dagger wasn’t meant as a weapon; it symbolized Sauvage’s position as the city’s chief sorcerer. Why had he brought it with him? If this had been a ritual battle for prominence, the winner would have taken the dagger to prove his new status as the biggest, baddest sorcerer in town.
Someone sucked in a ragged breath behind her, and by the time Marla turned around the boy had already come close enough to see her face. He was one of Hamil’s brats, recognizable as such by the bright blue rags tied around his wrists and ankles, signifying his bond of service to the fat wizard. The boy recognized her. All the brats knew Marla, the purple-lady, the savage shadow.
The boy turned and ran flat-out around a pile of wreckage, and Marla’s stomach knotted. He’d seen her holding the dagger, and he’d tell Hamil, who would reach the reasonable conclusion: Marla had challenged Sauvage and won, making a successful bid for the big leagues. She cursed and almost threw the blade away, but instead she tucked it into her belt. Why should someone else have it? She didn’t know what she planned to do with the dagger, maybe track down the rightful owner, but she wouldn’t feel right leaving it in the dirt. As for Hamil and his assumptions... she’d explain things to him later, if necessary.
A few blackbirds flew down, one perching on Sauvage’s leg. Marla turned away. She didn’t want to watch the crows eat Sauvage’s eyes. As she departed, the birds cawed raucously, almost as if they were laughing at her.
Marla went back to bed as dawn broke. She slipped the dagger under her pillow, and she slept in her cloak, wrapped in protective white, the purple lining warm against her. The sunlight filtering through the blinds infiltrated her dreams, filling them with yellow skeletons, yellow pools, yellow birds of fire.
A tentative knock at the door woke her. She rose and looked through the peephole. A boy with bright blue scarves tied around his wrists fidgeted nervously in the hallway. She put on a pair of boots, then opened the door.
“Hamil wants to see you,” the boy said, not looking at her.
“Of course,” she said, and let him lead the way.
Hamil lived in a penthouse uptown, and the boy set a brisk pace. Hamil rescued the brats from life on the streets and made them his errand boys and assassins, binding them to his service and giving them small powers beyond the ordinary. The inevitable rumors flew that Hamil molested the children, but Marla didn’t believe that. The fat wizard was no altruist, but he saw in the children an underutilized resource, not sex objects.
A block from Hamil’s building, as they cut through an alley, the birds attacked.
Mostly pigeons, but blackbirds, too, spiraling out of the sky like gray and black confetti. The birds blotted out the thin strip of sky and piled atop the boy, obscuring him in a frenzy of flapping wings. He screamed, but the sound quickly stopped, and Marla knew without being able to see that a bird had shoved itself into his mouth.
The birds didn’t try to attack Marla, but she reversed her cloak with a mental command anyway, the purple lining switching to the outside, the white against her body. She attacked.
While wrapped in the purple she could think only of herself, and act only with violence. The cloak gave her ferocious power, but at the cost of her conscious
mind. She tore at the birds, her fingers sharp as razors, her teeth snapping at tiny feathered throats. The birds lifted away from the boy’s body and came for her, clutching at her cloak, hair, arms, and shoulders.
Her feet lifted an inch off the ground as the grasping birds tried to fly.
She snarled, her mind a faraway observer seeing through a violet curtain. She fought under the weight of the birds, ripping them away and hurling them. She scissored her legs wildly, seeking purchase. Her feet touched the ground, and the surviving birds flew away, bumping into one another in their haste. She jumped for them, catching one in each hand and one in her teeth, then crouched, snarling and spitting feathers, waiting for the next attack.
She breathed heavily among the dead, and her mind struggled for control. Since the danger had passed, the purple rage receded enough for Marla to reverse her cloak. With the benevolent white side showing, her numerous tiny wounds began to heal immediately.
She approached the boy. She couldn’t do anything for him. Even a necromancer could have only revived his body, making him a mindless, still-dead slave. Only great sorcerers had the strength of will to be revived with their minds intact. Tiny puncture wounds covered the boy’s flesh like exotic acne. She’d seen such wounds before, on Sauvage’s corpse.
She walked on, but not to Hamil’s. He could wait. She went to Sauvage’s club.
The doors were locked, the club closed, but Marla broke in easily. The club smelled of cigarettes and antiseptic. She crept through the dark bar, past chairs turned upside-down on tables, past the unplugged jukebox, to the back room. After a moment’s hesitation, she pushed open the wooden door.
The smell of old cigar smoke and fresh urine struck her. Her night-eyes penetrated the shadows, and she saw Sauvage’s seer snoring in a corner, sitting cross-legged on a dirty blanket, his head resting against the wall. He wore only a pair of soiled underwear, and dandruff dusted his greasy black hair.
Marla nudged him with her foot. He stirred, squinted, and smiled. “Feed me,” he said.
“In a minute. I have a question.”
“I can tell the future,” he said.
“I don’t need to know the future.” The seer always spoke so cryptically that his pronouncements would have been little use to her anyway. “I need to know what happened to Sauvage.”
The seer flinched at his master’s name. “He met a challenger, but he didn’t meet the challenge.” He giggled. “I read the signs for him, the entrails and the water-spots, I told him no living hand would harm him.”
Marla frowned. “You lied?”
He cringed away, hugging himself, and Marla smelled urine more strongly. The thought of lying to Sauvage made him wet himself in fear. Sauvage had trained him well. “I don’t lie,” he whispered.
“Who challenged Sauvage? Who did he fight?”
The seer just looked at her. “Feed me,” he said hoarsely.
She found a bag of pretzels and a jug of water behind the bar. She left them with the seer, who stared at her with shiny, empty eyes. As she turned to leave he said “You’re up so high.”
She paused. “What?”
“You climb among the ribs of the sky,” he said dreamily, not looking at her, but into some far-away distance only he could perceive.
“Thanks,” Marla said. She went.
Marla walked to the Whitcroft-Ivory building, the highest skyscraper in the city. She wore her gray duster over her cloak, and while the combination was too hot for early autumn, it made her unremarkable. She didn’t want the ordinaries to look at her twice. She didn’t like moving around in the daytime, when the streets belonged to the uninformed masses.
She looked up at the building, a mirrored tower gleaming in the sun. Marla knew several of the upper floors were for rent, and a well-to-do magician from out of town might have a place there. But the seer had said only “You’re so high,” and that didn’t necessarily mean the highest place in the city. He’d also said “You climb among the ribs of the sky...”
Marla went downtown, the day fading at her back.
Several years earlier a developer had poured money into a renewal project, planning to erect new office buildings in the city’s decaying core. The money ran out abruptly, something to do with a Savings and Loan scandal, leaving a few bulldozed lots and the half-finished McCandless building.
Marla sat on a weedy stack of girders and considered the rusting framework of the abandoned skyscraper. Dusk had arrived, the sun long gone behind the smokestacks to the west. Hundreds of birds circled counterclockwise over the McCandless building’s jagged heights.
The exposed girders might look like the ribs of the sky, she supposed, if you were half-mad and viewing them through a vision.
Marla slipped out of her duster and began to climb, jumping from one girder to the next, scaling up the metal poles when necessary. She found beer bottles perched on the girders up to a remarkable height, but by the fifth floor she found only rust and birdshit. She took a break on the tenth floor, squinting up into the gloom. The birds still circled—a little faster now? She could have flown to the top, but she didn’t want to miss any important signs on the way. In her younger days Marla had relied on ferocity and ruthlessness to guide her, but in recent years she’d come to value caution and observation almost as much.
She climbed, and on the eighteenth floor she could make out a broad platform somehow lashed to the girders above. A sorcerer’s workspace? Some magics benefited from altitude, and while most sorcerers would choose a more accessible place for such work, Marla could believe a wizard waited above. Some magics benefited from desolation and things left unfinished, too, after all.
Marla made her way to a girder adjacent to the platform and found a man dressed in black lying face-down amid a mess of small bones, dried flowers, toppled blue bottles, and sticks of colored chalk. The birds circled placidly, not so far away now, making no move toward her. She sensed the man’s deadness—indeed, her extraordinary senses could feel nothing living here except herself and the birds.
She jumped to the platform and turned the dead man over. His chest had been messily opened, his heart removed, just like Sauvage’s. Marla recognized this man, too. He was a necromancer named Upchurch. She’d heard rumors about him lately, that he got drunk and bellowed about doing great magic, about some wondrous find, shouting secrets where even ordinaries could overhear. What had he been doing up here, working with his salves, his chalked véve, wearing his ceremonial suit with the tiny silver skulls for buttons? What did he have to do with Sauvage’s death?
“You came,” a voice said from somewhere on the right, rattling like autumn leaves crushed underfoot.
Marla tensed, prepared to reverse her cloak, and threw out mental feelers. She still sensed nothing alive. Upchurch might have raised some dead body, but it couldn’t speak to her, unless—
Unless the dead body belonged to a sorcerer, someone of uncommon will who could be fully resurrected, and Upchurch had gathered the body parts to make that someone whole again. Who could it be? Artie Mann? That idiot Granger?
“I’m here,” Marla said evenly. “Who speaks?”
“Somerset.” The voice came from above and to the left this time.
Marla swore softly. Somerset. The legendary bird-wizard, the eclipse-bringer, the throat-ripper, the long-dead sorcerer-king from the city’s darkest years, before Marla’s time. When Somerset had finally died of extreme old age, the city’s sorcerers had dismembered him, scattering his limbs and organs far and wide. Upchurch must have collected Somerset’s remains and raised him, expecting a reward, receiving death instead. Somerset had some connection to Sauvage, she couldn’t quite recall—
Upchurch’s empty chest reminded her. After Somerset’s death, Sauvage had eaten the dead sorcerer’s heart, to symbolically assume his power, to practically assure that Somerset could never be brought back to life.
Which, somehow, he had been.
“I’m a little surprised to hear from you,�
�� Marla said.
Somerset dropped from above. At the sight of him, Marla thought of a mobile she’d once seen hanging in an occult bookstore, a rattling construction of shells and animal bones. Somerset was coathanger thin, spidery and strung-together, his skin pink and newly grown.
She’d half-expected an impostor, but his famous eyes proved his identity. Bright blue and flecked with orange, his irises rotated like slow pinwheels.
Blood dripped from a gaping hole in his chest. The ragged ends of ribs poked out into the cavity. He crouched like a gargoyle when he landed and licked his thin lips with a black tongue.
Revolted, Marla reversed her cloak. This was an abomination, an unfinished zombie without a heart that somehow retained a mind. She would destroy him so thoroughly that he could never be repaired.
Her mind dissolved into purple hatred and rage, but before she could strike, Somerset lashed out with a hand fast as lightning and tore the stag-beetle-shaped cloak pin from her throat. Her ferocity vanished as her cloak fell to the platform. Marla gasped and reached for it, her natural muscles now feeling pitifully slow. Somerset whipped one long leg past her and grasped the cloak with his toes, drawing it back.
“Bad girl.” He draped the cloak over his arm. “We need to speak. Then you can have your toy back.”
Though far from helpless without her cloak, Marla knew she had little hope of besting Somerset. Hiding her unease, she said “I’m listening.”
“This man revived me.” Somerset gestured at Upchurch’s body. “He reminded me of an old enemy, so I broke his neck. I stretched out on the platform to rest and let my body heal.” He touched the edge of his empty heartspace. “I did not have this wound then, and didn’t realize my... lack. Before long a fierce hunger overcame me, and I tore open this man’s chest, eager to eat his heart. The organ tasted foul, too long dead. This wound began to open in my chest, and I descended long enough to find a man alone on the street. I killed him, and ate his heart, and that gave me strength. The wound closed.”
