by T. A. Pratt
“Yup. It’s like Bradley said, I guess. Reality gets a little bit soft around me, not all the time, but at times like this, when this door in the wall appears, and the lines between what’s possible and impossible start to fuzz out. The last time my mind got all aggressive with the capitalization, I turned a formless spirit of earthquake and wildfire and mudslides into an Old West gunslinger, and we called him the Outlaw. Which worked out well, in a way, because it’s hard to fight a formless primordial monster, but when it comes to fighting an Outlaw, you can stab him or shoot him or hogtie him and run him out of town on a rail.”
“You turned the earthquake god into something more human,” the Stranger said. “And now you’re turning me into something more than human, the archetype of some kind of Old West avenger?”
Marzi spread her hands. “It’s not like I do it on purpose, but yeah, at a guess. I’m pretty sure you’re about two inches taller than you were when you came into the café, and you might say reckon occasionally, and spit more than you’d like, and generally be kind of laconic. But I bet you’ll also be just about unkillable, and a dead shot with a pistol or long gun. I think the effect will wear off when you’re not right next to me, if it’s any consolation.”
“Reweavers,” the Stranger said. “We’re just putty in your hands, ain’t we? But if your minor transformation gives me an edge I need, I’ll take it. All right, then. Let’s saddle up and ride. Metaphorically. I don’t do horses.”
Marzi put her hand on the doorknob. “I’ve been to this place before. I can be the guide.”
“Marzipan Psychopompos.”
Marzi snorted. “I don’t think it’s exactly the land of the dead over there.”
“Sure ain’t,” the Stranger said. “I mostly just wanted to prove I was still capable of making jokes in mangled Greek, even with this coating of trail dust you’ve laid on me.”
“I think I just highlight what’s already there, inside you. Maybe refract it through a different prism. Run it through a filter.”
“Talk’s cheap, partner.” The Stranger almost seemed to be enjoying herself, but in an undemonstrative – and, yes, laconic – sort of way. “We deal in magic.”
Marzi turned the brass knob, warm as a sun-drenched stone at noon, and opened the door into another place.
They stood for a moment, squinting into the impossible vastness beyond, where white sand dunes rolled endlessly, incongruously topped by cartoonish saguaro cactuses. “It’s the desert that’s all deserts,” Marzi said.
“Should make a fair prison, then.”
“You sure you don’t want Bradley to come with us? He’s a stronger psychic than I am – I’m still getting used to the idea that magic is partly something inside me, and not just something that happens to me.”
“Bradley has a way of exciting supernatural creatures, sort of like you do, but without the touch of reweaving you have to shape them to fit your expectations. Taking him into a place like this? I worry he’d supercharge the horrors. Besides, he passed out last time he moseyed this way. Sometimes he’s too sensitive for his own good. Reckon we’d best go on in.”
Marzi stepped through the door, and the heat hit her like a falling boulder, dry and immense. The place felt absolutely real, the sand gritty under her feet, the breeze hot and arid, the sun – yellow as an egg yolk, seemingly smeared halfway across the crown of the sky – if anything brighter and more vibrant than the one in the real world.
The Stranger followed, looking around. “I thought Arizona in the summer was hot. So this is... what do you call this place, anyway?”
“I’m not really sure,” Marzi said. “I knew a guy who called it the Medicine Lands, but now that I think about it, maybe that’s kind of racist. It’s not like he was a Native American. Isn’t that some kind of magical cultural appropriation?”
“Sure,” the Stranger said. “Lots of practitioners get pissed about people stomping in and laying claim to their traditions, and who can blame them? Back in Hawaii I met this haole dude who tried to use the native magic for his own ends, wanted to be the big white magician and show the locals how it was done. He ended up getting eaten by shark gods, and good riddance. That kind of rudeness isn’t even necessary. You can make golems, or things that might as well be called golems, even if you’re not a rabbinical scholar. You can summon animal spirits without being one of the First People, though I’m not convinced you get the same ones. I’ve discovered over the years that magic is sort of like... a soup in a great big pot. Some people dip into that pot with battered tin ladles, and some use silver spoons, and some use their bare hands, and some use teacups – but whatever tool you use, it’s all the same soup. Those different traditions are just different ways of engaging with the same, what do you call ‘em, fundamental central mysteries. That being the case, there’s no reason to go and piss all over somebody’s sacred rites, is there? Use your own – and if you don’t have your own, make something new up. The guy who popularized modern Wicca was a real low-down scoundrel in a lot of ways, but he said one thing I like: ‘Magic is the art of getting results.’”
She gestured around the desert. “So whether you call this the Medicine Lands, or the Dreamtime, or the Unformed Lands, or the Fields Beyond the Fields, or the crawlspace of the world, it’s all the same place... just seen through different filters. And being the kind of place it is, shaped a bit by expectations, the thing you call it probably affects the way it appears.” She shrugged. “Nobody never said magic was simple. The numinous don’t give itself up easy.”
The Stranger turned and looked at the door. “Like this thing, for instance.” She walked around the free-standing door frame. Marzi’s brain expected to see her appear on the other side of the open door, but of course, she didn’t.
The Stranger reappeared. “Pitch black, on the other side, and when I say pitch, I mean it’s tarry, like blackstrap molasses, something you could get stuck in. That sticky void makes me a mite uncomfortable. Any reason we shouldn’t close this door?”
“Apart from the stark existential terror of being cut off from reality as we know it? I don’t think so. Even if we can’t get the door open for some reason, Bradley’s on the other side to let us out. Assuming he doesn’t faint again.”
The Stranger pulled the door closed, then went back around to the far side. “Huh. Just wood now. Looks like just the other side of the door. Wonder what happens if I open it from this side? Wonder where it goes then? Back home – or elsewhere?”
“Let’s save the metaphysical exploration for another day, maybe?” Marzi put her hand on the knob – on the right side of the door – and twisted, and was gratified when the door opened for her easily. She pulled it closed again. There were things wandering the desert, and while she was pretty sure they couldn’t open the door as easily as she did, leaving a portal to her reality standing wide open was a whole different thing. No telling what might saunter through.
“Hmm,” the Stranger said. “No big angry bug waiting just inside the door this time.”
“We’ve come as penitents, seeking a boon, so we’ve got to walk a bit before we get anywhere, I guess,” Marzi said.
“Suits me fine.” The Stranger sauntered in the direction of the nearest dune.
Marzi hurried to keep up with her long-legged strides. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“Don’t imagine it matters much. Nothing ‘round here has any true physical position anyway. This isn’t a real geography, with tectonic plates and geological strata and glacier-scraped valleys. It’s more like a mindscape. Whichever direction we pick will be the right one – or the wrong one, if whatever’s in charge over here doesn’t want to see us. But I imagine it’s curious. I would be.”
They crested a dune, and down below them stretched a sandy valley. Half-submerged pyramids dotted the valley floor, their pointed peaks rising from drifts of blowing sand. Black dots began to pour forth from the base of the largest pyramid, looking like ants, at first, until the sense of pe
rspective shifted for Marzi and she realized they were human-sized.
“Those look like cynocephalics,” the Stranger said. She spat into the sand. “Fellas with the heads of dogs, I mean.”
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Marzi said. “But if they look like they have dog heads... they’re probably jackal-men. Like the Egyptian god of death. I’ve seen things like them before. They’re not nice.” Her hand went to the cap pistol at her belt. Even if the gun shot something like real bullets here, would it shoot enough of them, and was she quick enough on the draw?
“Ha. I’m’a have a parley.” Before Marzi could object, the Stranger was skidding down the side of the dune on her heels, somehow not losing her balance. She slid to a stop at the bottom and walked toward the approaching jackal-men, waving her hat over her head to get their attention, as if they weren’t already keenly aware of the intruders.
Half a dozen of the jackal-men dropped to all fours and began to lope toward the Stranger, snarling.
The Stranger shouted “Bad doggies!” and the jackals slowed, exchanging glances, before approaching more slowly, spreading out to flank her. Marzi raised her gun, prepared to pick off any who came for her or tried to take the Stranger from behind.
But the Stranger was talking, voice low, just murmurs reaching Marzi’s ears, fragments of sound without substance. Was that something about “Hell?” And about “barks” and “bites” and “dog food?”
After a few moments, the jackal-men slunk away, tails literally between their legs, rejoining the others at the base of the pyramid. A few of them cast looks toward the Stranger, but eventually they all filed back into the pyramid buried in the sand.
The Stranger called, “Are you comin’? The place we want is the next valley over, supposedly.”
Marzi made her way down the dune more slowly than the Stranger had, but even so she slipped halfway down and ended up sledding on her butt through soft sand the rest of the way. She stood up, brushing burning grains from her ass, and joined the Stranger. “What the hell did you say to them?”
“Jackals are pack animals. They respect hierarchies. I just let them understand I was at the top of theirs, and that you were under my protection. Once I made it clear they couldn’t eat our flesh or harry our souls into the darkness, they were happy to give me directions. Or, if not happy, happier than they would have been if’n they’d refused me.”
Marzi shook her head. “I thought they were going to tear you to pieces.”
“Oh, they might’ve tried, but I’ve kicked hellhounds before. They don’t scare me much. This way.” She walked across the impossible valley toward another dune, which shifted as they watched and transformed into a rocky ridge, dotted with low brush. The Stranger didn’t even blink. Was her unflappability a quality Marzi’s presence was bestowing on her, or was the woman always this confident? From what Bradley had said about her, it might just be the latter.
They climbed up the rocks, scree shifting under their boots, but Marzi didn’t lose her footing this time, and of course the Stranger might as well have been walking on a paved street. They topped the rise, and instead of another valley, they beheld a plateau: a high-desert steppe scattered with house-sized boulders. One of those boulders, in the distance, was more palace-sized, and appeared to have doors, windows, and pillars, all worn by the passage of time, but still recognizable. “Reckon that’s the place,” the Stranger said. “The high and mighty do like to put on airs.”
“If we’re going to see the scorpion oracle, that makes sense. When I talked to her before, in my dreams, she had a decaying palace for her lair. I think it’s a ‘look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair’ sort of vibe – life continuing in a place that’s been abandoned.”
“I can’t criticize. I’ve got a throne room, myself, back home. Sometimes it just goes with the job.”
Why do you have a throne room? Marzi wanted to ask, but before she could, the Stranger pointed. “Shitfire. Look. A sphinx.”
Something the size of an elephant, but with the contours of a lion, emerged from the shadow of a boulder halfway between them and the palace. The beast had a human head, bald and gleaming, its placid and unremarkable face nonetheless horrible because it was so huge, and because of the body it was attached to.
“Androsphinx,” Marla said. “Shame. I like criosphinxes better. They don’t talk as much.”
“Doesn’t anything surprise you?” Marzi asked.
“I reckon a few things might. Certain fools I know not acting like fools for once, maybe. But, no, not many things. Live long enough and you’ll see most everything at least once. A sphinx is usually a guardian. Probably a trial we have to pass before we can talk to your big mama scorpion. Boring, but there it is.”
“You can’t just scare it off, like you did the jackals?” Marzi said.
“Never met a sphinx that scared easy. They’re too sure they’re the very tippy-top of the food chain to get scared. Overburdened with confidence, that’s your average sphinx.”
They walked toward the beast, Marzi happy to let the Stranger take the lead. As they approached, the air wafted the scent of the creature toward her, a bizarre mélange: part the cat-piss-and-blood smell of the lion pit at a cheap zoo, part the dust of ancient books.
“Welcome, visitors.” The sphinx’s voice was smooth and cultured, and Marzi thought automatically of a city-slicker dandy in a saloon, all impeccable black suit with silver buttons, an oiled mustache, and a gold watch chain across his vest. For an instant an oversized mustache flickered on the sphinx’s face, but it disappeared and didn’t return. Marzi was fighting someone else’s conception of what this creature should be – probably the scorpion oracle who ruled this place.
“What business have you here?” The sphinx settled down on its immense front paws to look them level in their faces.
“We’re here to speak to the creature denned up in yonder palace.” The Stranger made a face. “Yonder? Really?”
“Sorry,” Marzi said. “Blame my subconscious.”
“Before you can have an audience with her,” the sphinx said, “you must get past me.”
“Move aside, then,” the Stranger said. “Much obliged.”
“Alas, it is not so simple. You have three choices. You may answer my riddle correctly, and be allowed to pass. You may answer it incorrectly, and be devoured. Or you may leave now.”
“Reckon there’s a third option. Dead sphinges don’t ask riddles.”
The sphinx purred, a sound a bit like a passing locomotive. “You got the plural right. No one ever gets the plural right anymore.”
“What, they say sphinxes? Hell. It’s just like ‘phalanx’ and ‘phalanges,’” the Stranger said. “I hope my display of grammatical prowess didn’t cause you to overlook the threat I was making, though.”
“I heard it. I just wasn’t threatened. Are you ready for the riddle?”
“Why not?” Marzi said. “Maybe we’ll know the answer. And if we don’t, there’s always... the other way.”
“I don’t believe in letting cats set the terms of any situation, even if they do have the heads of giant babies, but fine, we’ll try it.”
“How marvelous.” The sphinx smiled without opening its lips. “Here’s the riddle: At night they come without being fetched, and by day they are lost without being stolen. What are they?”
“No clue,” the Stranger said. “Stupidest damn question I’ve heard in all my born days.”
“How delightful! You look delicious.” The sphinx opened its mouth, and its teeth weren’t human at all, or catlike, either: just row upon row of sharklike fangs.
The Stranger drew her dagger and flung it directly at the sphinx’s face, and Marzi gasped. The throw looked unerringly true, aimed to take the monster right in the left eye, and the woman had made some big boasts about the power of her blade.
But the sphinx twitched aside at just the right moment, and swallowed the dagger whole instead. Then it smiled, open-mouthed, showing cl
osed ranks of fangs. “What an unusual amuse bouche. Now for the first course.”
Bradley in Trouble
Bradley didn’t have a lot of formal training in magic. He’d fumbled along, coping with his psychic powers as best he could, doing things by instinct, trying to help people, with results that ranged from mixed to disastrous. Later he’d worked for Sanford Cole, learning the arts of divination and some protective magic, and finally he’d served a brief (and lethal, in most timelines) apprenticeship under Marla Mason, where he’d mostly learned that stubbornness was practically a magical specialty on its own.
When Marla said he was supposed to figure out how the lure the Outsider into a trap, he couldn’t bring himself to say, “I have no idea how to do that.” He would have been more comfortable going into the land beyond the door, even though mere proximity to that soft spot in the skin of reality had knocked him unconscious not so long ago. Catching monsters was more Marla’s sort of thing. There were versions of Bradley who’d been more attuned to violence and treachery and hunting things that howled in the night, but not this one, and he didn’t have access to his whole panoply of memories from the multiverse just now.
So he did what he usually did when he couldn’t figure out what the hell to do: he went looking for an oracle to summon. He’d called up a few oracles to try to locate the Outsider during his quest, without much luck – it seemed to frustrate divination spells somehow. Asking how to lure the thing was a different question, though, and might lead to a better answer.
Bradley didn’t want to hunt oracles so close to the café, though, because who knew what kind of weird interference effects summoning magic could have in the vicinity of that impossible door, even if there was an oracle handy? What if he summoned the very creature Marla and Marzi had gone through the door to call up themselves? Better to wander a bit father afield.
As he walked along the banks of the San Lorenzo river where it cut through downtown, looking for that tingle that indicated the presence of the supernatural (or a place that boosted his latent psychic powers, or whatever happened when he called up an oracle), he thought about Rondeau’s disastrous oracle mishap with the Pit Boss. He’d called up something weird and then let it out, allowed it to have real agency. How did that even work? What kept the Pit Boss alive? Was it feeding, to some extent, on Rondeau’s psychic energy even now – a parasite on a parasite? Or had the Pit Boss attained full independence?