by T. A. Pratt
The messenger blinked. “Why aren't you locked up in a cell with us?”
“Marla believed she cut all the mushrooms out of me, that I was free from Bulliard's influence. And she did cut them all out… at least, the ones in my neck. The ones at the base of my spine, however, she was unaware of, and I found myself inexplicably unable to tell her.”
“The Mycelium believes you gave a message to Marla Mason, warning her of our presence,” Bulliard said. “The Mycelium advocated tighter control of your words after that. I did as my god bade me.”
“Fine. I trust this fulfills my obligations to you? Can I be free now?”
“I prefer to keep you in reserve, though I don't care how you occupy yourself, as long as you remain here, and do not attempt to hinder me.”
“So noted. How do you intend to find Marla Mason's brother? I didn't even know he existed until recently. His haunts are unknown to me.”
Bulliard tapped the side of his pig's snout. “When I know what I am looking for, I can always root it out.”
ondeau's phone rang. Marla, calling from her office. “I gotta take this, guys, it's the boss.” “Give her my regards,” Cam-Cam said, cool as you please, and Jason said, “Send my love.” They went back to their discussion of the next day's plan, a road trip to meet with the Aeromancer's representatives. In reality, Danny Two Saints would be lying in wait to ambush them again on the way, spoiling the deal and freaking out Cam-Cam, who would be led to believe his life was in danger, and that they needed to lay low for a while to keep the heat off and so forth. But if Cam-Cam could put up the capital to hire some particularly vicious mercenary vampire hunters as protection—actually other confederates of Jason and Danny's—they might be able to try again in a week or two… It was all part of the plan to keep stringing Cam-Cam along and bleeding him for more money Rondeau was sort of dizzied by the scale of the operation, which was really only beginning, but like Jason said, this was no three-minute pop song of a con they were writing here—it was more like an opera on the scale of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Before it was over, they'd have Cam-Cam terrified he'd been turned into a vampire, paying serious money for a miracle cure; they'd send him on a trip to South America to meet with a legendary (and entirely invented) vampire king-in-exile, who would demand tribute before discussing the weaknesses of his brethren; they'd have him paying a rogue priest to turn his whole estate into sanctified ground, and the water in his pipes to holy water. Jason said it could go on indefinitely Jason had ideas.
“Hey, Marla.” Rondeau walked into the formal dining room, well out of earshot of Jason and their mark. “We're over at Cam-Cam's.”
“I figured. Look, tell Jason he's got to wrap this up quick, and do the blow-off.”
Rondeau blinked. “What? We're just getting started!”
“Take what you've got now and end it. I know that's not what Jason has planned, but my brother can improvise with the best of them.”
“Okay.” Rondeau pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. “Okay, boss.” He knew she had a good reason. She wouldn't ask him to do this otherwise. But… “Mind if I ask why?”
“B and I—mostly B—just killed a sorcerer named Bulliard who came to town looking for the spores, that's why. Somehow word got out, and serious people are taking my brother's bullshit seriously. There could be more bad guys coming, and I don't want Jason to get hurt—I kind of like having the guy around.”
“Hell. I like him, too. I didn't say a word to anybody, Marla, I swear. Maybe it was Cam-Cam, I don't know—”
“No, it wasn't Cam-Cam, or Jason or his crew, either. Whoever sent Bulliard the message used a special cou rier, the kind only sorcerers use. It wasn't me, and it wasn't you—I'm not even asking, I know it wasn't you—so I don't know who the fuck it was. Jason and I talked about it a couple of times in public, so somebody must have overheard. I'm going to find out who it was and have a talk with them, too. The kind of talk you do by punching.”
“Do you need my help?” Rondeau said. “With anything?” Working with Jason to scam Cam-Cam was a hoot and a half, but it looked like that fun-time train was pulling into the last station anyway, and Marla had just reminded him he had real responsibilities. “I should've been there with you and B, fighting this guy. I'm sorry Shit.”
“Hey, I gave you permission to moonlight. I'm not pissed at you—if we'd needed you, you better believe I'd have called. Right now what I need you to do is keep my brother from getting killed. Tell him to blow Cam-Cam off. You got a big chunk of money already, right?”
“We did.”
“Tell Jason that'll have to do for now. We'll find him another pigeon.”
“I'll do my best.” Marla hung up on him. Only after she was off the line did he realize he had no idea what to say to Jason. He couldn't say, “Sorry, there are bad magic-wielding murderers coming for us,” because Jason didn't believe in magic. Which meant Rondeau was going to have to come up with a lie that Jason would believe.
He put his phone away, took a deep breath, and went into the living room. “Hey, Jason? Can we talk in private?”
Marla caught a bus to the financial district and went into the lobby of a skyscraper with darkly mirrored glass walls. The security guard at the front desk saw her coming and immediately picked up a phone and whispered into it. He rose, smiling, and extended his hand to Marla. “Ms. Mason, such a pleasure to see you, can I get you anything to—”
“I'm going up to see Nicolette.” Marla went around him toward the elevator.
He sidestepped into her way. “Ah, Ms. Jordan is otherwise engaged at the moment, but if you'd be willing to—”
“Move or lose a foot.” She was still wearing the green gecko boots, not her nasty enchanted steel-toed boots, but she could shatter an instep without magic. She stomped forward, and he danced back.
“You can go right up,” he said quickly, and hurried back to his phone as she stepped into the elevator.
Marla eyed the mirrored walls as she rose. Turning an elevator into a deathtrap would be a pretty good way to assassinate her, she supposed. She'd better think about some contingency plans against that eventuality. Nicolette was a chaos magician, drawing power from uncertainty and disorder, and as such, she couldn't be trusted to do anything—not even to act in her own best interest. Marla never dropped her guard around the woman, and did her best to avoid her, but she had need of her assets now.
The top floor of the skyscraper was a penthouse apartment, and the elevator doors slid open onto a locked door. Marla hit the intercom button and said, “It's Marla. I need you.”
Nicolette's voice, without a hint of static on the intercom, said, “I thought you were bringing your apprentice the day after tomorrow?”
“No apprentice, just me. I need your services. Or the services of someone in your service.”
“Is this one of those ‘for the good of the city’ things again? It's been a bad year for that.”
“Just open the fucking door, Nicolette, or I'll have to open it myself, and then you'll have to buy a replacement.”
“Come on in, I'm in my office.”
The door clicked open, and Marla stepped through, into a jumbled disaster of a living room. This apartment had once belonged to Nicolette's old mentor, a diviner named Gregor, who'd been executed for his crimes against Felport a few months previous. Nicolette had inherited his estate, and it had been a very tidy estate indeed, since Gregor was a notorious minimalist perfectionist control freak. His apartment had been spare to the point of Spartan, but Nicolette had… done some redecorating. The place was wrecked. Marla couldn't even identify any furniture, though there were certain lumps suggestive of couches and armchairs. The place was full of stuffed animal heads, dusty empty picture frames, hideous kitschy lamps, bolts of mildewed fabric, and what appeared to be the engine block from a bus. The beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows, which looked out on the city and the bay beyond—one just lighting up and the other becoming a void of rumbling darkness as
night fell—were defaced with spray-painted markings that looked like graffiti tags merged with runes. Marla's apartment was no showpiece, but it was just messy with neglect, not actively trashed.
Oh, well. Necromancers tended to include skulls in their décor, and pyromancers were partial to flambeaux, so it made sense that a chaos magician would decorate with wreckage. Too bad the place smelled like fish sauce and burned wiring and industrial astringents.
Marla carefully navigated the trash heaps, wary of tetanus, down the hallway to what had been Gregor's office. This room was relatively neat—just an armless dressmaker's dummy lying in the middle of the floor, and ragged strips of wallpaper dangling from the walls—and Nicolette was inside, sitting at her computer, blue light reflecting on her narrow birdlike face. “Be with you in a minute,” she said. “I'm transferring cash from one of my offshore casinos. This online gambling stuff is the shit. Suckers roll in from all over the world, and you don't even have to cheat them, just trust in their basic inability to do math.”
Marla grunted. She wondered if Jason would like running a site like that, and seeing money run in like water rushing downhill, or if he needed the element of the grift to keep himself interested. “Don't see how it helps the local economy so much.”
“You get your cut, boss lady, and I trust you roll it back into the community and all that.” She leaned back and cocked her head. “What can I do for you?”
“Monster came to town. I killed him. But I have some follow-up questions, and he's in no state to answer them.”
Nicolette hmmed. “Monster, huh? Those are usually ‘its,’ not ‘hims.’”
“One of those fiend-in-human-flesh type situations.” She shrugged. “It's not important—he's been contained. But I need some extra-sensory perception to clear up a few nagging little questions.”
Nicolette shook her head, the charms woven into her bleached-white dreadlocks bouncing and jiggling. “I may be living in a seer's tower, but you know I'm not a seer myself. Hell, I get my buzz from uncertainty. Not sure why you came here. Isn't Bradley Bowman supposed to be a psychic?”
“B overexerted himself today He's resting. But my errand can't wait. You have something I need, Nicolette.”
“What, did you hear about my divining spiders? I'm working on them, getting them into shape, but they're more for pattern-matching than actually answering questions, and they're a long way from being ready to—”
“I need to see the Giggler, Nicolette.” Marla watched the chaos magician's face closely. She was a student of faces, and knew the truth of a person's feelings often flashed, involuntarily, across their expressions, for as little as a fraction of a second. There were forty-four facial muscles related to fear, uncertainty, anger, and mistrust, and Nicolette moved a large percentage of them in very telling configurations, for just an instant. Then all was smooth again.
“The Giggler? I don't—”
“Sure you do.” Marla unsheathed her dagger of office and cut a loose thread dangling from the hem of her shirt. She didn't put the knife away when she was done. “The Giggler. Crazy motherfucker with a gift for telling the future. Went on a rampage years ago, cut the guts out of a bunch of sorcerers to read his fate in their entrails. People called him the Belly Killer. This ringing a bell? I knew Sauvage kept the guy alive to use as a little pet oracle. Your late and unlamented boss stole him away after Sauvage died—didn't think I knew that, did you?—and you, my dear, inherited him.”
Nicolette didn't bother to hide her expression now. Her eyes were flat slits of hate.
“I know.” Marla tried to put the semblance of genuine commiseration into her voice, though she was loving this. “It's a bitch to find out one of your secrets isn't so secret after all. What good is a hole card when everybody knows what you're holding? Don't worry, I'm not enacting any eminent-domain bullshit, you're welcome to keep the Giggler. I don't want responsibility for his upkeep anyway, the guy eats like a legion of pigs. I just need access to him right now.”
“You won't tell anyone else I've got him here?”
“Nah, we're good.”
“All right.” Nicolette rose, beckoning Marla. “Guess I don't have a lot of options.” They went back to the elevator. “Not much good having a fucking oracle if he can't tell me stuff like this is coming,” she complained.
“That's the problem with oracles. You have to know what questions to ask, and how to ask them, and how to interpret the answers. My new apprentice is a hell of a seer, but it's still no good if you don't know exactly what you're trying to find out. Vague questions get vague responses. So what do you use the Giggler for?”
She shrugged. “I don't consult him as much as Gregor used to—you know I like surfing the uncertainties. But he's good for alerting me to upcoming stock market fluctuations.”
“Oh? Is that all?” Marla was amused. The elevator arrived and they boarded.
Nicolette inserted her penthouse key, turned it, then pressed the basement button twice. “Well, he also gets me blackmail material for people I need to lean on.”
“That's more like it.” Marla grinned.
“What do you need to ask him anyway?”
“I'm not a big fan of repeating myself. You can hang out while I question him if you don't have anything better to do; you'll hear it then.”
They rode to one of the building's secret subbase-ments in silence. The elevator doors opened onto a dim concrete hallway festooned with graffiti that seemed to squirm and writhe away from the eye.
Nicolette preceded Marla down the hall, and Marla wrinkled her nose. She had a high tolerance for stench, but it was pretty rank down here. “Giggler!” Nicolette said. “We've got a visitor!” They went through an open door into the Giggler's chamber.
“Wow, he's got the same interior decorator you do.” Marla looked around at the concrete cell, which looked like a collision between a garbage truck and a white elephant sale.
“He finds patterns in trash—he started out reading entrails, after all, so this is a step up in the hygiene department. Gregor used to try to keep the place cleaner, but I just go with the flow.” She leaned against the doorjamb. “He's in there… somewhere. Go ask your question.”
“Did you bring presents?” The Giggler emerged from beneath a pile of cheap Mexican blankets smeared with peanut butter and—Marla hoped—chocolate. The seer had greasy black hair, snot caked on his upper lip, and eyes like a couple of holes punched in nothing.
“No presents.” Marla crouched to look him in the eye, from a judicious distance. “Just my presence. You remember me?”
“You saved my life.” The Giggler tittered, a high-pitched, irritating noise that made Marla's back-brain shudder.
“Insofar as I didn't kill you when I had the chance, I guess I did. Want to return the favor?”
“Your life doesn't need saving.” The Giggler had a sly look on his face.
“That's good to know. I need some questions answered.”
“Yes, you do.” The Giggler slithered the rest of the way out of the covers and onto a chair-sized heap of garbage bags and Bubble Wrap, which popped and squeaked under his weight. He settled into it like a king on his throne, his pink bathrobe rumpling around him. “Personal first, or business? Your brother, or the beast?”
Marla blinked. “Ah. You're such a good seer you saw what my questions were going to be?”
The Giggler tittered again. “Which, which, which?” he said. Or maybe “Which, which, witch?” It was hard to tell.
“Felport comes first.” She did want to ask about her brother, though she'd just about decided to trust him, at least as far as she could throw him. She wouldn't mind a little outside confirmation of her instincts, but finding out who had brought Bulliard to town—and if there were likely to be more outside intrusions—was the more pressing issue.
“Your brother is no danger to the city,” the Giggler said.
“Also good to know. A sorcerer named Bulliard came to my city, late last night
or early this morning, looking for something—but you know that.”
The Giggler nodded sagely—or as sagely as possible, given the dried booger dangling from his chin. “I know everything, but you still need to ask.”
“Right. Someone told Bulliard to come here, sent him an anonymous message. I need to know—who did it?”
“She's right behind you,” the Giggler said. “She has a hammer.”
Marla didn't think, just dove and rolled, scattering empty cracker boxes and old shoes as she did. She popped back up as Nicolette's sledgehammer struck the concrete floor where Marla had been.
“See? Your life isn't in danger.” The Giggler giggled.
“You sent the message to Bulliard?” Marla drew her dagger again, with rather more purpose this time. She should have been gratified to know her suspicions about another traitor in her midst had been correct, but it was cold comfort. Maybe if she'd brought Bradley to Nicolette first, he would have sensed something, and this could have been avoided. Just bad luck. “What the fuck? How did you even hear about the spores?”
“Spies everywhere, boss. Eyes everywhere. You know how it is.” She glanced at the Giggler. “Ingrate. After all I've done for you.”
The Giggler showed his stubby yellow teeth. “I will always have a pot to piss in and a seat to sit on, for so long as I live, so help me gods.”
“Didn't see this coming, did you?” Nicolette snatched a charm from her hair and tossed it toward the Giggler.
Before the charm—it looked like a tiny yellow glass pineapple—hit him, the Giggler let loose a deep and weary sigh. “Of course I did,” he said.
Then the pineapple expanded and exploded into a thousand needle-thin spines, piercing the Giggler's face, chest, arms, and hands, and deflating the Bubble-Wrap throne. As he sagged and sank, the Giggler said, “Took you long enough,” and closed his otherworldly eyes.
“Now, that's just wasteful. He was a good seer.” Marla kept her eye on Nicolette's hands. The charms in the chaos magician's hair represented hours of dedicated enchanting, each one a nasty spell, though it was hard to tell what any of them did—porcelain skulls, a glass eye in a wire cage, a jade frog, a wisdom tooth trailing roots.