The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Come, Denis,” Jane said, and stepped over Caroline’s body as if it were no more important than an old shoe. “I won’t tell the goddess you wanted to run. Your fear is understandable. But I’m sure you can contribute to the cause.”

  “The cause of death,” he said.

  She patted his cheek with her slick hand. “Aren’t you clever. The cause of the earth, Denis. Be happy.” She went into the other room, and Denis followed, miserable, resigned. No amount of counting could soothe him now. He was screwed, right down to his boots.

  Denis had spent a lot of time in the shop sculpting, last year, before he became more interested in crystal matrices. He’d briefly enjoyed making smooth metal analogues of biological things—frogs, flowers, crabs—and later had moved into a phase of building large metal models of small things—chrome amoebas that never changed shape, copper fleas. Some of those he’d sold, others were in storage, and those he’d deemed failures had simply been cannibalized for other projects. He was comfortable here in the shop, with the stained concrete floor, the high ceiling, the standing half-shaped stones, the unfinished metal and wood fabrications, the big steel lockers, and the utility room, a Wunderkammer of torches, hammers, masks, and saws.

  “Tell him what I need, Beej,” the godlet said, standing beneath an assemblage of polished wood that resembled a gallows, some student’s work-in-progress. Jane stood beside him, looking like a work-in-progress herself.

  “We have to build a door,” Beej said. “I have the specs written down. Metal is best, something strong—nothing organic, if we can help it, not for the main structure at least. Once the basic framework is done, I’ll do embellishments with wire, spikes, silk flowers, and so forth, but the actual door is your job. We need a freestanding frame, and a hinged door that swings one hundred and eighty degrees, so that it can open completely from either direction.”

  “And a lock,” the godlet said. “A bolt you can close.”

  “Fine,” Denis said. “May I ask why I’m supposed to build this?”

  “It’s a trap,” the godlet said. “You’re building the door to a trap.”

  “I just love these enigmatic half-explanations,” Denis said.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” the godlet said. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  “When do you want this done?”

  “As near to now as possible. It doesn’t have to be pretty—a little roughness around the edges would fit right in—just sturdy. And . . . potent.” The godlet took off his hat and scratched his shiny head. “Make it good. That’s your job. I don’t know much about that part. A door’s a door, as far as I can tell. The only thing that matters to me is which side I’m on, but you can make it into art. Now get your torch and start burning. Beej says there’s enough metal here to do the job.”

  “And if someone should interrupt us?” Denis said, going to the closet to look for an apron and gloves.

  “Oh, Beej will kill them,” the godlet said.

  Denis turned to look at Beej, who winced, but nodded.

  “Me and Jane are off to wreak some havoc. We’ll be back in a few hours, and you’d best be finished by then, understand?”

  “I will be, or I won’t be,” Denis said. “You’ll just have to come and see.”

  The godlet grunted and sauntered out. Jane followed, her gaze fixed worshipfully on the godlet’s back.

  “All right,” Denis said wearily. “Let’s move one of these workbenches in front of the door.”

  “Um. What?”

  Denis sighed. “To keep people out, Beej. Unless you’re really so keen on killing someone?”

  “Oh. No, I guess not. Good idea.”

  “You should probably bring that dead woman in here first, so no one stumbles across her.”

  “I knew her name,” Beej said. “It was Caroline.”

  “I know,” Denis said. He went to the closet, thinking about torches, a face mask, right angles. Anything but Caroline’s messy death. “Bring her. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s that you have to be careful about where you leave your corpses.”

  Outriding

  * * *

  “Say, Marzi,” Lindsay said, “what with your godlike powers and all, do you think you could give me a new outfit?”

  Ray snorted. “She’s the one who gave you that one, whether she meant to or not.”

  Lindsay ran her hands down the front of her bodice. “Hey, it’s not like I don’t love whalebone and red satin; it’s just impractical for a desert trek.”

  “I’m still not sure you should go,” Marzi said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “Oh, it’ll be dangerous,” Ray said, sitting on the piano bench, plinking the yellowed keys. “Quite dangerous. You don’t see me volunteering to accompany you. I don’t mess with big spirits, if I can help it—once was enough. This place is safe. It’s an oasis. It used to have palm trees and a clear spring, but lately it’s been a saloon, thanks to Marzi’s psychic radiation.” He hit middle C; it was flat. “I’m not complaining. Whiskey beats date wine every time. I might be piss drunk when you get back. I’ve held off until now, because I thought I might have to deal with the Outlaw, but now that my shiny sheriff’s star has been metaphorically pinned to your succulent breast, I’m ready to adopt the role of lovable town drunk.”

  Marzi didn’t answer him. Her feelings toward Ray were a jumble: respect, annoyance, pity, gratitude. Mostly annoyance, at the moment. She knew she should cut him some slack—he’d been trapped here for a long time—but she had a feeling he’d been like this on the other side of the door, too: arrogant, with a streak of self-pity.

  “Hello, fashion victim here,” Lindsay said. “I’m going to have weird creases in my skin forever if you don’t get this thing off me.”

  “Oh, I’ll help you take it off,” Ray said.

  Lindsay scowled at him. “Modesty forbids.”

  “I was a great lover in my day,” Ray said morosely.

  “So anyway,” Lindsay said, and looked at Marzi brightly. “Let’s go, fairy godmother. Cinderella in reverse. Turn my party gown into tatters, or at least something that doesn’t have stays.”

  Marzi stood from the bar stool, frowning. She looked at her hands, then raised them, like a conductor about to lead an orchestra. She had no idea what to do next.

  “Oh, Christ,” Ray said. “You don’t do it with your hands, you do it with your head. Just imagine it, see it, the way you see a picture before your pen touches the paper. Just see it—”

  Marzi looked at Lindsay. She thought. She saw.

  Lindsay’s Miss Kitty dress disappeared without so much as a puff of smoke. It happened with the speed of a camera trick—in one frame, Lindsay wore a terribly red dress, and in the next, she wore soft breeches, low-heeled black boots, a gray vest over a white shirt, a bowler hat, and two gun belts, crisscrossed low on her hips.

  “Oof!” she said, patting the holsters at her hips. “These things are heavy! No wonder cowboys walk so funny.”

  “I think that has more to do with the endless horseback riding,” Marzi said, pleased with herself.

  “Not that those guns will do you much good,” Ray said. “They’re just made up, no more real than this piano. They won’t hurt any of the things that live out there, if ‘live’ is the right word for mysterious forces of vast power.”

  “Yeah, but will they make a loud bang?” Lindsay asked.

  Marzi laughed. She thought of telling Ray that her gun did have some substance in the real world, but why not keep a few secrets?

  “I s’pose so,” Ray conceded.

  “Then I’m happy,” Lindsay said, and tipped her hat back in a wholly unself-conscious gesture; not for the first time, Marzi marveled at her friend’s ability to adjust to any situation. “So, we’re off to see the wizard.”

  “More of an oracle,” Marzi said.

  “Shit,” Ray said quietly. “I was wondering about that, how you’d see it, what it would be in your worldview
. So it’s an oracle, huh? Why do you say that?”

  “I just . . .” Marzi trailed off, then shrugged uncomfortably. “It seems right, you know? That it will help, but only a little, and only if I ask the right question. There’s a thing in my comic, a rattlesnake sphinx, and it—she, I think it’s a she—reminds me of that: inscrutable, wise, and venomous.” Marzi gnawed on one ragged fingernail, thinking ferociously, trying to pin down her thoughts; she’d always approached her art with faith in her subconscious, in her ability to conjure potent images from her own unexplored depths, but it was a process that needed to be examined, now, because her imaginings were taking on flesh and weight. “Only I think of this new spirit as more of a scorpion. A scorpion oracle.”

  “Okay,” Ray said, nodding. “You’re probably seeing through to the truth at the being’s heart. Scorpions are dangerous, but there’s probably no way you could think of this thing that would make it safe, any more than you could make the Outlaw into an environmentalist, but just . . . be careful.” He pondered the ceiling for a moment. “At least scorpions are small.”

  Marzi decided not to mention that she imagined the scorpion oracle as vast, an enormous creature scuttling in cavernous shadows, an entity big enough to fill Neptune’s Kingdom by the boardwalk. Why worry him?

  “We should get going,” Lindsay said. “Time’s wasting, right? I doubt we’re going to get back to Genius Loci in half an hour, like you’d hoped.”

  “It’s hard to say,” Ray said. “Time is funny here, I think. It doesn’t move like time in the real world. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower . . . I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Like I said, I haven’t aged since I’ve been here, I don’t have to eat, I don’t sleep regularly. . . .” He shook his head. “These are the changing lands, but they’re also the changeless lands. Just be careful. Don’t get lost. Come back. I want you to trap the Outlaw again, so I can go back home. I miss the world. But I’ve got no desire to go there with the Outlaw running loose. I just want to retire in peace.”

  “Okay,” Marzi said, hitching up her gun belt. “We’re on our way, then.”

  “Can I ask one last thing?” Ray said.

  “Shoot,” Marzi said.

  “You only get to ask the oracle one question, right?”

  “Right,” Marzi said, nodding.

  Ray sighed. “Three would have been better, or a hundred, but you’ve got to go with your gut, I guess. What question will you ask?”

  Marzi looked at Jonathan. She wanted to know what to do, how to save him. But she also wanted to know how to stop the Outlaw. She knew, intellectually, that saving Jonathan wasn’t important, not compared to besting the Outlaw, but . . . She thought back to their time on the beach, looking into the tide pool; their ride in the sky glider over the boardwalk; how brave he’d been later, on the beach, fighting Jane. There was something wonderful in him, and right now, it was full of dust. She couldn’t bear that. The oracle would know how to save him. It would know how to stop the Outlaw, too. But maybe she could figure that out on her own; in a way, the Outlaw was her creature, subject to rules of her devising. Surely there was a way to exploit that? She was the guardian—didn’t that mean she must have the resources to deal with the Outlaw?

  But then, maybe the resource to deal with the Outlaw was the scorpion oracle, and asking about Jonathan would waste that opportunity.

  Shit. What would Rangergirl do? Was that even the right question to ask herself anymore?

  “I don’t know,” Marzi said. “I’ll figure it out on the way.”

  “Just don’t ask it if you’ll ever find true love,” Ray said. “Or anything like that.”

  Lindsay gave him a withering stare on Marzi’s behalf. “Just take care of Jonathan,” she said, “and try not to get too drunk. We might need your help when you get back.”

  Ray grunted. “I passed my badge on to Marzi. As far as I’m concerned, I’m out of the law-and-order business.”

  “You’re inspirational,” Lindsay said. “C’mon, Marzi. Let’s go. Into the Wild West.”

  They linked arms, and walked through the bat-wing doors, into the dust and the sun.

  Once outside, Lindsay looked at Marzi and said, “So, Sundance, which way do we go?”

  “Well, call it a hunch, Butch, but I’m thinking we should go west.”

  “I’m hardly Butch,” Lindsay demurred. “Maybe we should be Femme and Sundance.”

  Marzi laughed. If she had to be in this place at all, it was good to be here with Lindsay.

  “West is a tricky proposition, though, since it’s always high noon,” Lindsay said. “There’s no moss growing anywhere around here, and I doubt we’ll have a chance to sight on any stars, if I even knew how to do that, which I don’t.”

  Marzi hitched up her gun belt, which was chafing her hips. “I think one of the particular truths of this place,” she said, “is that every direction is west.”

  Lindsay nodded. “We’re into something deep here, aren’t we?”

  “I’m sorry I got you into it,” Marzi said automatically.

  Lindsay shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. This is something worth doing. I’m glad I’m here. There are times when I feel so separated from the world, Marzi, and that’s what I see stretching in front of me for my whole future—that ivory tower of academia they talk about, up above everything. That’s where I’m going to be for the rest of my life, too, unless I end up working in a museum or, God forbid, a gallery somewhere, and even those places are tiny little subcultures. This actually matters. What I do here really means something.”

  “I don’t know,” Marzi said. “Academia can mean something. The teaching part, anyway—I had some teachers who changed my life. And if you teach, the kids will love you.”

  Lindsay waved her hand dismissively. “Possibly. But teaching seems like small potatoes compared to stopping an ancient primal force of destruction from leveling the West Coast.”

  “Sure,” Marzi said. “But after that, what do you do for an encore? You need something to fall back on.” Marzi looked around at the yellow dust, the fading-almost-to-white blue sky, and said, “For me, I don’t think I’ll be drawing Rangergirl anymore.”

  “I guess I can see why,” Lindsay said. “Though it’s a shame.” She hitched up her belts. “Shall we?”

  “Off we go,” Marzi said, and started walking purposefully forward. It didn’t take long to get outside of town, where they settled into an easy walking pace. Once the town was behind them, there was just desert.

  But that term, “just desert,” was misleading, Marzi realized. Right now they were walking on hardpan, but off to the left she could see rolling Saharan dunes, and on the right, far in the distance, there were sharp high outcroppings of rock. There were patches of scrub, stands of saguaro cactus, prickly pears, arroyos, canyons, and what looked—somewhat disturbingly—like Pueblo-style cliff dwellings far ahead. It was a collision of geographies. There was no archetypal desert, Marzi realized; all deserts were different, wildly so in some ways. But wastelands . . . all wastelands were essentially similar. Only the color of the rocks varied.

  “It’s like a desert sampler platter out here,” Lindsay said. “I thought it would be a boring slog through a metaphysical dust bowl, but it’s not, is it?”

  “Part of it is the nature of this place,” Marzi said. “It’s inclusive. And part of it’s me, I think. We’re walking through my comic book now, for better or worse. I have some idea what to expect, and maybe I have some control, but there’s nasty stuff in my comic, too.”

  “I know. I’ve read them.” Lindsay pointed at the sky. “What’s that? Never mind, stupid question. I know what. What I’m really wondering is what they’re circling over.”

  Marzi looked. There were four vultures circling up on the high thermals, and though at this distance they were little more than black shapes with wings, Marzi knew they would be shedding feathers, scaly-headed, and starving. Lindsay was right—what were they circling? What wa
s out there, far in the desert, about to die?

  Or maybe it wasn’t about to die. Maybe the vultures were desperate enough to watch anything that moved. “I don’t know,” Marzi said. “But how about we don’t go that way?”

  “Agreed. How far do you think we have to go? How long will it take?”

  Marzi shook her head. “Couldn’t say. Maybe distance is variable here. This isn’t the territory, it’s the map, and you can fold and crumple a map pretty much any way you want, you know? And time doesn’t work the way we’re used to either, like Ray said.”

  “In the old stories about the land of Faerie, time moves differently. Rip Van Winkle and all that.”

  “True. But I thought Faerie was supposed to be green.”

  “The fields beyond the fields, sure,” Lindsay said. “But maybe there are different kinds of fairyland.”

  “Medicine lands. The Outlaw called this place the ’lands beyond the lands.’ It’s spirit country.”

  “And we’re going to meet a spirit.” Lindsay shook her head. “So Jane was right about all that goddess of the earth stuff?”

  Marzi shrugged. “I don’t know. There are forces, beings, obviously, but I don’t think they usually take a direct interest in humanity. They’ve got lives of their own, right? I doubt they’re looking out for us.”

  “I can’t decide whether or not that’s comforting.”

  “I think it is. So far, direct supernatural intervention has done nothing but bad things for me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lindsay said. “You used to worry that you were crazy, right? At least that’s cleared up.”

  “I’m past the point of thinking that this is all one big hallucination, sure.” Marzi hadn’t thought about that, but Lindsay had a point. “I’d been thinking of myself as this fragile thing, trying to keep from getting stressed out, because that’s what the doctors said I should do. But you’re right, it wasn’t me that was nuts; it was the world.”

  “See? What this is, is a crucial part of the healing process.”