Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8)

by T. A. Pratt

  The demon wouldn’t have gotten loose on Bradley’s watch, but then, Rondeau didn’t have Bradley’s experience, or even his instinctive grasp of how the secret systems of the world worked. Rondeau was, in a way, crippled by his fundamental optimism: despite the bad stuff that had happened to him, Rondeau was still inclined to believe that, by and large, over a long enough timeline, stuff would work out for the best.

  Bradley, on the other hand, despite being outwardly a cheerful guy, was more doubtful at his core. That probably came from screwing up a movie career, being an addict, losing his lover to an overdose, and being murdered and having his body stolen by a psychic parasite in a countable-but-large number of branches of the multiverse.

  If an oracle had said to Bradley, “Hey, I’ll do you a favor, and tell you what it costs you later,” Bradley wouldn’t have taken the deal – he would have just laughed, because everything always costs more than you thought it would. Some part of Bradley was always waiting for the next blow to fall. He didn’t even feel comfortable in his fully-integrated self as watcher over the multiverse, despite being, in theory, immortal and unassailable. After all, he’d had a predecessor, the Possible Witch, and she wasn’t around anymore. (In her case, the cause of her demise was something like suicide, but still.)

  Bradley figured there was a decent chance the Outsider would kill him and eat him, if he managed to lure it at all. His death wouldn’t be that big a blow to the over-Bradley – not much worse than getting a fingernail torn off, or maybe even a hair yanked out – but that didn’t stop him from feeling a twinge about the potential loss of his own personal perspective. An oracle was his best shot to find out how to summon the Outsider without dying in the process.

  Over the years he’d discerned some patterns in the placement of oracles. They tended to show up in wild places, and even more so in liminal places where the wild and the civilized met, mingled, and overlapped. Old things were more likely to house oracles than new things, but he’d summoned one from a brand new toaster once, so it wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Strolling along the river wasn’t finding him much, though, not a single naiad or kelpie, so when he found a path leading up from the bank back toward downtown, he took it.

  Pacific Avenue that afternoon was bustling with tourists and locals and street performers, and Bradley took a few (slightly guilty) moments to just enjoy the feeling of being a human among other humans, walking past cute shops and cute boys, crusty punk panhandlers, a guy sitting on a plastic milk crate selling bespoke poetry, a man in heavy make-up and a shiny silver track suit shuffling along one mincing step at a time with a parasol over his head (performance artist or local eccentric?), a pretty girl with a tangle of tiny dogs straining at a bundle of leashes while she talked on her phone. Man, humans were great. He could forget that, overseeing the whole multiverse. Maybe he should bud off bits of himself and send them on field trips more often. Or maybe that was just the kind of addle-brained nonsense you got when bits of your godhead started thinking of themselves as individual humans again.

  Bradley wasn’t getting so much as a tingle of supernatural manifestation, and he thought maybe he should go into Bookshop Santa Cruz and ask if they had any copies of Extradimensional Monsters and How to Attract Them, since that could hardly be any less effective than what he was doing now.

  An eerie warbling sound started up behind him, and he turned, looking for the source. There was a statue of an old man in a derby hat sitting on a bench and playing a musical saw, and if he’d been an actual man, that would be a plausible explanation for the sound, but statues of musicians didn’t traditionally make a lot of noise. Bradley grabbed the arm of a bearded man walking by and said, “Hey, do you hear that statue playing music? Or, wait, do you even see a statue there?”

  The man was wearing a t-shirt that said “KEEP SANTA CRUZ WEIRD” but apparently his personal tolerance for weirdness was lower because he widened his eyes, pulled free of Bradley’s grip, and hurried away.

  “Yeah, man, that’s a statue of Tom Scribner.” The speaker, seated on a low stone wall bordering an ornamental flowerbed beside the street, wore a sort of hemp poncho and was openly smoking a joint. “He used to play the musical saw around here back in the ‘70s, my mom used to see him around. He was, like, a street philosopher, you know?”

  The man scratched his head. “You hear him playing the saw right now?”

  Bradley listened, and it was still there, a mournful, every-shifting tonal drone. “I think so.”

  “Did you get whatever you’re on locally? I’ve been looking for a new connect, it’s hard to find psychedelics other than molly lately.”

  “I’m not on drugs,” Bradley said apologetically.

  “So this is more of a psychotic break sort of thing.” The guy nodded, wet his fingers, pinched the end of the joint, tucked it away in a pocket, and stood up. “Take care of yourself.” He walked away, only slightly less hurriedly than the bearded guy.

  Bradley sat down next to the life-sized statue of Tom Scribner. He had the urge to put a companionable arm around old Tom’s shoulders. This would be two oracles that had taken the form of ghosts since he’d arrived on Earth. He wondered if that meant something? He glanced around, wondering if the sight of a man talking to a statue would be strange enough to warrant a second glance from passers-by. Probably not, if he refrained from grabbing people as they went past.

  “So... Mr. Scribner? Can you help me out?”

  The voice that answered was not human, but made words out of the warbling of the saw. I am not Tom Scribner... but the spirit of his saw....

  Bradley blinked. That was a new one. In Japanese mythology there were stories of objects attaining life and sentience, usually after they’d been around for a century or so, but if Scribner had played the saw here in the ‘70s, it probably wasn’t that old. What were the odds that he’d only had one saw he played out here, anyway? And what did that matter when this was a statue of a saw anyway?

  Like logic had anything to do with it. “Ah. Nice to meet you. I have a question.”

  I know.

  Hearing words emerge from the constant warbling was strange, and it was frankly starting to give him a headache, but at least the oracle seemed friendly. “What will it cost me to get an answer from you?”

  Sit here for an hour... talk to people... tell them stories... guide them....

  Bradley winced. How time-sensitive was this monster-summoning assignment? There was no telling how long M and M would be in the land beyond the door, really. Or maybe they were back already. Then again, going looking for another oracle would be time-consuming and possibly fruitless – the few times he’d passed up an oracle, he’d often been unable to find another one anywhere in the vicinity. “All right. I don’t know if anyone will want to talk to me, but sure, I’ll do my best. So: how do I attract the Outsider?”

  It is attracted to power. As your power is great, to call the beast you need only be yourself... but amplified. Draw a symbol of attraction on the floor. Sit in its center. Light four candles, and place them at the cardinal points of the compass. Drone this note. And let yourself shine. The Outsider will be drawn to you. But it will arrive hungry.

  The saw played a note, then, and though Bradley had never been much of a singer, he suddenly had perfect pitch, for a moment, and knew he could reproduce the tone at will. A symbol appeared in his mind, too, as if drawn in lines of fire: something like the veve of the loa Papa Legba, but with an angular symbol that looked sort of like an uppercase “P” incorporated into the center.

  “Thanks,” Bradley said. “So, that hour of service, it’s going to have to start like right now. I’ll have to go when the time’s up, even if nobody –”

  The saw’s tone changed, and it was no longer headache-inducing: instead, it seemed a song of pure longing, and need, but with a hopeful intonation, too. A twenty-something girl dressed all in black, with her hair in an asymmetrical bob and a lot of sterling silver jewelry in her ears, nose, and lip, sat
down beside him. “Okay, so, the thing is, I love my girlfriend, but she is so clingy...”

  As Bradley listened to her lament and tried to think of something useful to say, he noticed people lining up behind her, drawn by the saw, waiting their turn to sit and listen to his wisdom, such as it was.

  •

  The saw stopped its droning of attraction promptly at the one-hour mark, and the people still waiting for Bradley’s counsel looked around themselves, mildly confused, and drifted off. He got up, stretched, and started walking back the few blocks toward the coffee shop. Bradley felt wrung-out. To his surprise, he had been able to give pretty good advice to most of those people – his memories (however vague at this point) of being a multiverse-spanning consciousness gave him a sense of perspective that was probably tough to attain for those who’d only ever had one mind at a time to inhabit. He’d spent so long concerned with cosmic problems that it was refreshing to turn his attention to more personal, human-scale problems. Maybe if this whole overseer-of-the-multiverse gig didn’t work out, he could come back to Earth, stage a dramatic return from the dead, and get a job doing a talk radio call-in show.

  For now, though, he had a monster to attract.

  He walked west along Pacific Avenue, then took a couple of turns until he hit Ash Street, just a few blocks east of the Genius Loci café.

  Something made his flesh crawl: that cliché of scary stories, the hair on the back of his neck rising up. Horripilation. A remnant reaction from way back in the human experience, from the days when big cats crouched atop boulders waiting to leap out on you from the dark. (Up in the redwood-dotted hills by the university, people still occasionally got attacked by mountain lions dropping from tree branches; some days, no matter how hard you tried, you were still just an animal among animals.) That raising of the hackles was your body warning you about something your senses had picked up but your conscious mind hadn’t processed, foregoing the higher-mind interventions, and just making you look behind you.

  Bradley looked, and didn’t see anything. Then, probably because he was more psychic than most, he looked up, and there was something after all: a ribbon of blackness, like a sheer scarf blowing on the wind, if scarves were twenty feet long and capable of hovering on the currents of the air while they undulated.

  Shit shit shit. The Outsider. No need to summon the thing – there it was, and rather ahead of schedule. What had the oracle said? The Outsider was drawn to exhibitions of power. Well, Bradley had certainly exhibited some of that by summoning an oracle in the first place. He’d come to believe the creature had a mind, too, or something like one. The Outsider had at least rudimentary hunting skills, and had shown discretion and caution in its attacks, leaving very little in the way of survivors. The creature liked to wait until it could strike unobserved – it had probably stalked him from the crowded downtown to this street, which was entirely deserted except for a passing housecat. The creature’s caution was heartening, in a way: why would it bother to be careful unless it could be hurt? Something had imprisoned it in a vault below Death Valley, after all. The memory of failure probably contributed to its caution now.

  Then again, lions stalked antelope from the shadows, but not because they were particularly afraid of antelopes: they just didn’t want to spook the prey, because then they’d have to go through the whole tedious process of acquiring a new target.

  Bradley noticed the Outsider, and it noticed him noticing it, and the ribbon of blackness swam through the air toward him, undulating with the grace of a moray eel.

  Marzi in the Oracle’s Lair

  “Well aren’t you the cat that got the cream,” the Stranger said. Marzi thought the woman seemed remarkably calm for someone who was about to be swallowed. “Or the knife. My dagger’s going to be rough on your digestion, and it’ll hurt like hell coming out. Or are you one of those mythological monsters that doesn’t have to shit?”

  “Oh, don’t worry.” The sphinx stretched, extending its paws, and curved talons the length of butcher knives popped out and furrowed the sand. “Gobbling you up will settle my stomach. Do you have any other silverware you’d like to throw at me first? I don’t wish to interfere with your prandial customs.”

  “Talks real fancy, don’t he?” the Stranger said. “Me, I can’t abide fancy talk. All wind and no rain, all thunder and no lightning.”

  “I have found that the coarse and unmannered are no different in flavor from the sophisticated and refined, though the latter tend to smell better.” The sphinx yawned again. “This pre-dinner conversation is a delight, but I think I’ll eat you now. Then we’ll see if your friend can answer a riddle, or if she’ll be my digestif.”

  Marzi put her hand on the butt of her gun. Could she shoot this thing? She had a sudden image of shooting off its nose, making it look like the Great Sphinx of Giza, and could barely suppress a giggle. Ah, there it was. Overwhelming terror messing up her brain, pushing her into irrational emotional reactions. Right on schedule.

  “Talks real fancy,” the Stranger repeated. “But I bet he can’t whistle as good as me.” She stuck two fingers in her mouth and shrilled a long, high, harsh note, loud enough to make Marzi wince and flinch away.

  The sphinx licked its immense lips. “What was the point of that demonstration? Perhaps you’d like to do a bit of yodeling too –”

  The creature’s eyes widened as its throat ripped open, the Stranger’s dagger tearing its way out of its own volition. The weapon didn’t come out smoothly, but spun and whirled as it emerged, shredding the great beast’s neck and throat so savagely that the sphinx was nearly decapitated in the process. Once the dagger was entirely free, it returned, hilt first, to the Stranger’s hand. She wiped it absently on her sleeve and watched the sphinx gurgle and go cross-eyed.

  Instead of blood, copious quantities of sand poured from the monster’s wounds, and the sphinx’s dangling head and body seemed to deflate, like a pool float punctured by a nail. Its tawny fur shimmered and became sand, and within seconds, its body had become just a small dune heaped on the plateau.

  “What’s the difference between my dagger and a housecat?” the Stranger drawled.

  “What?” Marzi stared at the pile of sand.

  “My dagger comes when it’s called. If that was a test, I reckon we either passed it, or showed we don’t want to take tests.”

  A flash of movement caught Marzi’s eyes, and she looked up. “Crap, there’s another sphinx. Three more.” Marzi pointed toward the left-hand side of the plateau, where a trio of leonine figures had emerged from the heat haze. Had they climbed up onto the plateau? Emerged from burrows in the ground? Or just risen up from the sand? “Maybe more, maybe a whole herd.” Her brain was still whirling wildly, and the gears were slipping a bit. “Or is it a pride, like lions?”

  “In his treatise on supernatural collective nouns, David Malki asserts that it should be a ‘finery of sphinxes,’” the Stranger said calmly. “I’ve never considered Malki to be definitive, though, and he doesn’t use my preferred plural, either. I think it should be a ‘riddle of sphinges.’ Shouldn’t matter, anyhow – they’re solitary creatures, as a rule. Don’t like the company of their own kind, or any other kind. They sure are making common cause today, though, and I fear that cause is you and me. We’d best get moving. I’ve only got one knife for them to swallow, and I’m not sure we can count on them to wait in line and take turns.”

  The Stranger set off running toward the palace, and Marzi went after her, casting glances back to the approaching shapes. The three sphinxes bounded toward them – one could have been the twin of the one they’d killed, another had long flowing hair and bare breasts, and a third seemed to have the head of a goat – but they stopped at the pile of sand the first sphinx had left in lieu of a corpse, pawing and sniffing at the ground. Maybe they were going to consume the power of their fallen comrade. Or maybe they were just going to use it as a litter box.

  The air shimmered with heat and suddenly the palace w
as not hundreds of yards away but mere feet, and the Stranger and Marzi both slowed as they entered the shadows between the pillars. The temperature dropped so suddenly and significantly that pretty much Marzi’s whole body jumped into gooseflesh as her sweat cooled.

  “Should’ve brought a lantern,” the Stranger said. “It’s always the little things.”

  Flickering lights appeared, revealing a cavernous room dotted by pillars of rough-hewn stone, each holding a torch burning with greasy yellow flame. The vast room was filled halfway to the far-off ceiling with drifts of sand, a sort of indoor dune.

  “Anybody home?” the Stranger called, and Marzi thought of people in snowy mountains shouting and setting off avalanches. That dune looked like it could bury them both if it shifted the wrong way. “Sorry we killed your housecat.” She paused. “Hello? We’re here to see the boss lady.” She took off her hat, mopped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, and put the hat back on. Then looked at Marzi and shrugged. “Oh well. Nobody’s home. Let’s go on back to the other side of the door and figure out a backup plan.”

  “You may not leave unless I allow it.” The voice spoke inside Marzi’s mind without bothering to go in through her ears. It was familiar, cold and emotionless. “None may open it from this side, without my leave.”

  “Thanks for taking our call,” the Stranger said. “Are you the big scorpion I saw when I looked through the door earlier today?”

  The dune shifted, as if something immense was burrowed beneath the sand. “Some see me as such a creature.”