Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8)

by T. A. Pratt

  Bradley pushed himself upright, the ground gritty beneath his palms. The heat of the sun was implacable, though it still looked unreal, canary-yellow, and he could gaze at it directly without his vision blurring or burning. The landscape continued to shift, and at first, all the variations seemed equally lifeless, but then flashes of movement caught his eye: a snake sidewinding away, something small and furry scuttling under a rock, a scorpion moving in a stately march, pincers raised almost daintily. There was life here: quick, stealthy, possibly toxic, but alive. He turned in a slow circle, and directly behind him, found a door: painted a faded yellow, with a brass knob mottled with age. He put his hand on the doorknob –

  And blinked up at Marzi, who had his head in her lap, and looked down at him with something between annoyance and concern. “Ugh.” He sat up and got his bearings. They were in the little kitchen, the door to the storage room closed again. “That was... wow. That desert. Have you been to that desert?”

  “Once or twice.” Her voice was as dry as the place he’d just left. “You know, the first time I went into that room and got a glimpse of that desert, I repressed the memory and basically had a nervous breakdown. You just go ‘Ugh.’ Are you that much more badass than I am?”

  Bradley got to his feet, swaying unsteadily. “I doubt it. Maybe slightly more experienced at having the supernatural dropped on my head. The first time I encountered some impossible shit I ran right out and started doing drugs and didn’t really stop for a few years. You just had a nervous breakdown? You’re made of tougher stuff than me. So, uh... what was I looking at in there?”

  She shrugged. “This guy I knew called it the Medicine Lands, but who knows? It’s a place where gods, or things that we might as well call gods, live. There was one little god, a spirit of wildfire and earthquake and mudslide, that came stomping out and caused trouble until my friends and I killed it, or at least made it go away for a while. There’s another thing living in there, too, a thing I’ve only seen in dreams, where it appears like an immense scorpion. I think it’s the god of... I don’t know. Spiders, snakes, things that can survive in the desert, but maybe it’s not as literal as that. More like a spirit of survival despite horrible adversity, a god of life in the face of terrible odds.”

  Bradley grunted. “Sounds like I’ve got a new patron saint. While we were in there, did you happen to notice – was the impossible door back?”

  “Oh, yeah. Same old wood, same brass knob. I didn’t try to open it, though. It blasted you pretty good right through the closed door.”

  “You, uh, might want to throw a padlock on that thing.”

  “You think?” Her amusement was palpable.

  “Every once in a while I do. So this thing I’m chasing, this Outsider, do you think it might be drawn to that room – or to the place that’s accessible through that room, through that new door of yours?”

  “It’s not my door. I don’t know, man. You have a better handle on this stuff than I do. But if that shadow monster is hanging around here, I doubt it’s because of how much it loves my lattes. And that door being back... it means something. So what do we do?”

  “I’m going to make some calls,” Bradley said. “Consult some experts. Can I get your number? I’ll be in touch.”

  •

  Bradley sat on a bench in a little park overlooking the trickle of the San Lorenzo River and burned through the afternoon making phone calls. He had to go through a lot of underlings before he reached Sanford Cole, and it took some convincing to make Cole believe his identity – Bradley had to submit to a lot of personal questions, but fortunately, his home reality had been identical to this one until after he left Cole’s service, so all the answers lined up.

  Cole was the rather reluctant ruler of San Francisco, a wizard from the Victorian era who’d been awakened from magical sleep a while back when his beloved home city was under threat. Bradley had served as his apprentice for a while before taking up with Marla Mason – which, of course, had led to his death in this branch of the multiverse.

  “Bradley! What brings you to our humble plane of existence?” His voice was cheerful and bright, which was a relief. Cole’s long sleep had left him with a case of magical narcolepsy, and Bradley had been half afraid the old wizard would be in hibernation.

  “Would you believe I’m a tourist?”

  “Not for a moment. The overseer of the multiverse doesn’t send a fragment of his attention to one lonesome branch of his domain for rest and recreation – at least, the bits of him I had a hand in teaching wouldn’t. I assume this is something important? No, I’m dissembling – I assume it’s something disastrous.”

  “Well... it’s something potentially disastrous, let’s say. An incursion from another universe. It’s just a nuisance right now.” Gods. The thing had killed between thirty and fifty people, as far as Bradley could tell, and he called it a nuisance. But when the potential death toll included every living thing in this reality, fifty dead was.... It was all a matter of perspective. “I’m down in Santa Cruz trying to get a handle on the situation.”

  “Do you need help? I can have specialists in various disciplines there in an hour and a half – and that’s if they don’t hurry.”

  “It might come to that,” Bradley said. “Though at this point, I wouldn’t know what kind of help to ask for. I hope I’m here early enough to stop this incursion without too much difficulty. I mostly need information – I don’t want to step on any magical toes here, or have someone jump on me with both feet if I start doing big magic in town. Normally I’d pay my respects to the local bosses and let them know about the monster hunting within their borders, try to coordinate with the local talent, but does Santa Cruz even have a chief sorcerer, or a council, or a protector, or anything? Because they seem to leave jobs like fighting earthquake gods to twenty-something baristas around here.”

  “Mmm, I seem to recall hearing something...” The sound of flipping pages crackled through the phone. Cole was not a technology kind of guy. He was probably talking on an antique candlestick phone magically hooked into the cellular grid. “Ah. Yes. There is a chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz and surrounding areas, though he’s never attended any of the statewide councils, as far as I can determine. He keeps to himself. I’ll give you his contact information, if you’d like.”

  “Sure, I’ll take phone, email, whatever.”

  Cole cleared his throat. “Ah. No. I mean, I can tell you where you might find him squatting at this time of year.”

  •

  The occult ruler of Santa Cruz looked like an aging hippie, and when he grinned, he showed off brown gapped teeth. Bradley felt a moment’s doubt – this guy? Why would any halfway decent sorcerer let his teeth go rotten? Then again, there were sorcerers who embraced madness, or cut their own limbs off, or their own tongues out; one of Marla Mason’s teachers had ritually castrated himself for magical purposes, so maybe there was some benefit in having a mouth full of fuzzy tombstones. The man gestured to a stained Mexican blanket spread out beside him on the beach, displaying a hodgepodge of wares: old engine parts, loose tarot cards, mason jars full of seashells and marbles, a leather rose, a toy switchblade, and a lone plastic scorpion, unevenly painted red.

  The scorpion, the switchblade, and some of the engine parts sparkled in Bradley’s peripheral vision if he didn’t look at them directly: there was something magical about them, some quality inherent or imbued that tickled his psychic senses.

  “Is your name, uh, ‘The Bammer’?” Bradley asked.

  The old man squinted at him for a moment, then threw his head back and laughed a laugh with a lot of wheeze in it. When his hilarity had subsided, he leveled his gaze at Bradley, and his eyes were as dark and watchful as a falcon’s. “Is that anybody’s name? But it’s one of the names I give, sure, and if that’s the name you heard, you’re hooked into that whole wizardly bureaucracy business.” He shook his head, as if in patient bafflement at the folly of humankind. “What are you doing here? Is ther
e some kind of big conclave you want to invite me to? Because if it’s not held on this beach, or downtown, or on the boardwalk, or up in a redwood cathedral, you can count the Bammer out.”

  “No, I’m not here on any kind of official business.” Bradley sat down cross-legged on the sand. “But I hear you’re the guy who runs this town.”

  “Chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz.” He nodded, then took a glass pipe from his satchel and began to pack it with weed. Bradley, being in recovery – he wasn’t an addict in every universe, just the ones where he’d ever tried any drugs at all – watched him with a mixture of fascination and dread. The Bammer lit the pipe took a deep hit, started to pass the pipe to Bradley, then gave a sad smile and put it down in the sand, on the side farthest from Bradley. He exhaled. “Also chief sorcerer of Soquel and Capitola-by-the-Sea, by the way. Not Ben Lomond, though. There’s a woman up there, lives in a redwood tree, she’s got that covered.”

  “Uh huh. So maybe you didn’t notice, but you’ve got a pretty major extra-dimensional incursion here.”

  The Bammer nodded. “Not so major yet. It doesn’t even have enough meat on its bones to pass for human in a dark alley. Give it time, though.” He clucked his tongue. “Nasty business.”

  “Okay, so... chief sorcerer of Santa Cruz... what are you going to do about it?”

  The Bammer gazed out at the bay for a long while, toward the bobbing boats and the surfers and the distant curves of land on either side. “Murderville USA,” he said. “Murder Capital of the World. That’s what they called my city back in the ‘70s. October 1970 to April 1973, there were three active serial killers who hunted around here. Twenty-six dead.”

  “I remember reading about that. Was it, like, a dark magic thing?”

  The Bammer shook his head. “Just an evil human thing. I was an apprentice back then. The chief sorcerer here was a wave mage. He was good when it came to surfing, but pretty crap when it came to anything else. I’m into nature magic myself, I don’t specialize quite as much as he did, but mostly what I’m good at is enchanting. When all that ugliness went down, my old boss, he realized he wasn’t up for the job anymore, you know? He couldn’t protect this place, or not well enough. I was the most qualified, the most talented, the best choice for a replacement, so I took the job, and he paddled off into the sunset, like literally, and nobody ever heard from him again. His failure... it’s never far from my mind.”

  “Which explains why you’re so eager to deal with this new murder problem – oh, wait.”

  “You’re judgmental,” The Bammer said. “Strange. Psychics are usually more forgiving of human foibles, because they know everybody’s got them.” He took another hit, and the breeze wafted sweet smoke Bradley’s way. He tried to concentrate on the smell of rotting kelp instead. “Anyway, the thing is, I know my limitations. A few years back we had a big nasty problem, this spirit of earthquake, wildfire, and mudslide came marching out of... a place beyond this world, where things are more malleable and unreal, where gods are born. The Dreamtime, the Medicine Lands, the crawlspace of the world. I knew I couldn’t stop something like that. So I appointed a champion. She did a great job.”

  Bradley didn’t gape, but it was a near thing. “Marzi? You made her the city’s champion?”

  “I gave her an enchanted toy pistol, but to be honest I think a stick shaped vaguely like a gun would have gotten the job done. She’s got some of the same kind of power I sense in you, that openness to dreams and visions – I don’t have that ability at all, I have to do rituals to see anything like you two see when your heads hit your pillows at night – but she’s got other powers, too. A touch of the reweaver’s gift, I think. Not enough to be dangerous, she’s not going to sneeze and accidentally transform a building into a giant watermelon or anything, but in a place where reality is thin anyway, or when dealing with supernatural creatures who can change their form, she can exert some control over them, even if it’s not totally conscious.”

  “Uh huh. Right. Well, it’s definitely not totally conscious, because she has no goddamn idea you’ve made her the champion of Santa Cruz.”

  He shuddered dramatically. “Of course not. What’s she ever done to me, that I’d put that kind of pressure on her? She just does what comes naturally, and she does fine. Word got around when she beat the Outlaw. People heard we had somebody here who turned a great big spirit of primal destruction into a damn near human little man obsessed with revenge, turned a small god into a guy who got stabbed in the back by a moron. All the big uglies started steering clear of Santa Cruz after that.”

  “It’s not right.” Bradley remembered well his own years of confusion and misery, having prophetic dreams, seeing impossible monsters, with no one to teach him how to use his gifts, no one welcoming him into the community of sorcerers, at least not until first Marla Mason and later Sanford Cole embraced him. “She’s wandering in the wilderness! Why not apprentice her?”

  “I ask you again – what’s she ever done to me to deserve such a thing? Marzi doesn’t want that life, as far as I can tell, and I’ve paid attention. You know what she wants to do? She wants to draw her comics. She wants to laze around on Sunday mornings with that man of hers. She wants to run the café – and I made sure she got the loan she needed to buy it, too, a few years ago, and put a little come-along spell on the front steps to encourage the passing trade, not that she needs it – she does fine on her own. You want me to throw a hand grenade into the middle of her life like that, show up and say, ‘Hey, there’s a whole secret society of sorcerers, mostly psychotics, assholes, or thieves – wanna join?’ You want me to apprentice her, and groom her to take over from me, line her up for the kind of worry and guilt I have to carry?” He shook his head. “No sir. She did her service. Her reward is a good life in this city as long as she wants it.”

  “Except now you want her to fight this new monster,” Bradley said.

  The Bammer scowled. “I do not. I’d just as soon leave her out of it. But the thing is drawn to the café, is all – there’s a thin place, there. A point of access to the crawlspace of the world, to an imaginary desert full of real scorpions. This shadow thing senses it, somehow. Maybe it thinks it’s a way to get back to whatever universe shat it out in the first place. Or maybe it’s just drawn there the way trees reach out for the sun, or, if you don’t mind me getting all cliché, moths to a flame. Nah, I don’t want Marzi to have to fight that thing.” He picked up the toy switchblade and threw it into the sand in front of Bradley. “There you go. You fight it instead. That’s what you’re here for, right?”

  “Gods damn it,” Bradley said. “Yes. It is.” He picked up the switchblade, a cracked plastic hilt wrapped with black electrical tape, and a chipped, silver-painted plastic blade that popped out at the push of a button. He tested the edge with his thumb. Duller than pop music. “So what’s this thing do?”

  “It’s a knife. You stab stuff with it.” The Bammer took another puff of his pipe, then knocked the ashes out onto the sand. “I don’t know if you can keep Marzi out of this mess entirely, though. I halfway chose her, and she halfway chose herself. She’s got a lot of hero in her, and she might want to get involved. You could do worse than her for a partner if this turns into a shooting war.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. But I was planning to bring in some heavier artillery anyway. I’m going to see a friend of mine in the morning, and bring her back with me.”

  “Huh. Must be a tough friend, if she’s not scared of getting eaten by a monster made of shadows.”

  “Scared of what? Death?” Bradley clicked the switchblade open, then pushed it close again. “No, she’s not scared of death. She married him.”

  Rondeau in a Dirty RV Somewhere in Death Valley

  “But we’re motherfucking wizards,” Rondeau said, some time after they’d been ousted from Las Vegas. “Right? There’s gotta be a way we can make some money.”

  Pelham shrugged. “I am not especially adept at the magical arts. I have other
skills, as you know. Certainly I am qualified to be an executive assistant, or butler, or valet, or even, dare I say, to provide personal security. But I have had only two employers. One of them, I am loath to trouble for a reference. The other is presently ruling the realm of death. I fear I would have difficulty obtaining such a position, even if I desired to undertake such work.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest honest employment.” Rondeau rubbed his stubbly chin and peered through the dirt-smeared windshield of Pelham’s RV. They weren’t entirely broke. They’d been robbed and driven from Las Vegas, but the Pit Boss had left them a few grand so, he said, they could get established somewhere else. They’d tried to reach some friends in Felport, hoping for a loan, but hadn’t been able to reach Hamil or the Bay Witch or anyone else they knew – maybe the spontaneous decapitation business was keeping the grand high-and-mighties there occupied.

  At a loss for how to proceed, they’d bought gas and food and trucked out to the desert to wait for Marla to wake up, hoping maybe more would-be cultists of the Bride of Death had drifted in – cultists were always eager to give up their worldly possessions to some high priest or another, and Rondeau figured, if the black robe fit, he’d wear it. But the place was deserted. Maybe word had gotten around in the lunatic community that serving a death god had a high mortality rate.

  “When Mrs. Mason awakens in a few days, we will have direction again,” Pelham said. “She will show us the proper way forward.”

  Rondeau snorted. “Marla was living off my generosity, you know. But you’re right – she’s a legit wizard, and she always says sorcerers don’t have to worry about money, because they have scarier things to worry about. She’s going to yell at us and call us idiots before she gets around to helping us, but I’ve been through that before, and it’ll do you good to get the rough side of her tongue for once, help toughen you up.”