by Tim Pratt
“We have to ask it how to defeat the Outlaw,” Lindsay said.
“No,” Marzi said, looking back at the dark rock walls of the prison, the palace. “We have to ask it how to save Jonathan. To bring him all the way back to life. That’s what this creature is, after all—the spirit of the living desert, of dangerous life lived in the moments of grace between dying of thirst and dying of the heat.” She caressed the gun at her hip. “I’ll take care of the Outlaw myself. I know how to do that now. I just figured it out.”
Marzi set off down the hill toward the prison’s monolithic front gates, and Lindsay followed.
“It’s good,” Denis said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Beej said. He extended his hand to Denis, and Denis shook it, solemnly. Normally Denis was reluctant to touch Beej, who probably had several unusual skin diseases, but it was the right thing to do. They’d partnered, and worked together, and made something good.
They’d made a door.
It stood seven feet high and three feet wide. The corners of the frame were joined with fat ugly welds, which was inevitable given the speed with which Denis had been forced to work, but it didn’t detract from the piece; in fact, it added to the door’s sense of menace. The hinges were mismatched, one black iron, one tarnished bronze. The door itself was barred, made of crisscrossed lengths of metal welded hastily together. There was no knob—you opened the door by pulling on the bars; there were plenty of handholds—but there was a lock, a tube of metal that slid into a bolt and locked with a twist. Of course, anyone on the inside could reach through the bars and undo the bolt, but Beej said that wouldn’t be a problem. That was the basic form, what Denis had made, a freestanding dungeon door.
Beej had embellished it.
He had a locker in the studio, and it was full of his magpie acquisitions. Beej made collage out of trash and photographs, and he had a lot of trash. He’d glued rhinestones around the door frame, then painted them glossy black; they sparkled like the eyes of spiders. He’d wrapped barbed wire around the bars in the door, and smeared glue randomly on the door and tossed handfuls of sand at it, giving the sculpture a scabrous, mangy aspect. He had a bag full of shark’s teeth, and he painted them all black and glued them to the door frame and the door itself, so the teeth interlaced when the door closed, making it resemble a ravenous mouth. The door was a gateway to desolation, and it seemed just on the verge of becoming animate, of lurching across the concrete floor, snapping its hinged jaws like something out of an early Stephen King story.
“And yet . . .” Denis said.
“It needs something,” Beej agreed.
“Something . . . over the door. Like a horseshoe.”
“But not.”
“No,” Denis said. “Of course not actually a horseshoe.”
They gazed together at the door for a while. “I know just the thing,” Denis said. “I’ll go and get it.”
“I can’t let you leave,” Beej said. “If you try to run, to get away . . .”
Denis stared at him. “I’m not going to leave before it’s finished,” he said.
Beej ducked his head, then nodded. “Okay. But hurry. If the earthquake god comes back, and you’re gone—”
“What? He’ll kill us? I suspect he’ll do that anyway eventually, but for the moment, he needs us. Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”
Denis returned fifteen minutes later, carrying a buffalo skull carefully, in both arms. “From the anthropology department,” he said, ignoring Beej’s look of stupid relief that he’d returned at all. “Part of some Native American collection. I tore off the leather thongs and feathers they had dangling from its horns.” Denis had considered running away, of course, but the problem with that was the old familiar one: Jane. She could be an ardent pursuer, he suspected, and he preferred standing in the long shadow of imminent danger to a likely short lifetime of running and fear. Besides, there might still be a chance to strike against the godlet for the pain and humiliation he’d suffered.
Most importantly, though, he needed to finish the sculpture.
Denis bound the skull on top of the door frame, using epoxy to hold it in place. Beej wound wire through its eye sockets and nostrils, binding it to the door. They stepped back, and Denis nodded in satisfaction. The skull added a whole new dimension, a further hint of sentience, to the object. “It’s like the door is the skull’s mouth, a giant metal prosthetic jaw,” Denis said.
“It’s perfect,” Beej said simply, and though Denis had a number of objections to that word on principle, he nodded.
“I don’t think our patron is an art lover, though,” Denis said. “So why did he have us make this? What is it for?”
“It’s going to swallow Marzi,” Beej said, and took a rolled-up, tattered comic book from his pocket. He tossed it to Denis, who flipped through it, first disdainfully, then incredulously.
“Oh, please. That’s ridiculous. It will never work.”
Beej looked at the door, as if he were looking into a mirror. “It will work,” he said, “because I believe it will work.”
Denis shivered, and felt briefly as if he were in the presence of something greater and more awful than himself. Then he remembered it was only Beej. “I see,” he said. “Good for you. I never liked Marzi much anyway. She got me banned from Genius Loci for life. I love that place.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Beej said. “Genius Loci is the next place we’re going.”
Big Augur
* * *
Marzi and Lindsay passed through the wide-open gates, Lindsay craning her head to look at the tops of the brutally thick walls, the gun turrets, the crenellations. Marzi walked on, seemingly oblivious to the grandeur—but then, it had come from her imagination, hadn’t it? “Aren’t prison doors normally shut?” Lindsay asked.
“This isn’t a prison anymore,” Marzi said. “It’s a den.” She walked across the courtyard toward the immense main building, a block of solid stone with high thin windows.
“I don’t understand why a spirit of life would want to live in a place that’s all granite and sand and iron bars.” Lindsay was whispering, the immensity of the courtyard too much like being in a church, in the presence of something divine and disapproving.
“You misunderstand her nature,” Marzi said, not whispering, clearly preoccupied. “She’s more the spirit of perseverance, of life in extreme circumstances. She doesn’t have anything to do with jungles or forests. Maybe individual lives are difficult in those places, but life as a whole thrives in them easily. She’s only interested in lives struggling to survive in the desert, or the deepest part of the ocean, or the frozen wastes.” Briefly, the landscape flickered, the prison becoming a humped turtle shape, covered in white snow, and the land around them a freezing Siberian plain. Lindsay barely had time to gasp and shiver at the numbing cold that washed over her before the landscape changed again, became the desert and the prison. Marzi didn’t seem to notice the change, any more than she would notice a brief digression in the course of her thoughts, Lindsay supposed. Maybe Marzi was the dangerous and divine spirit Lindsay sensed here. That was a sobering idea. “So in a way,” Marzi went on, “a prison is the perfect den for her. People live in prisons, but it’s hard living. Especially in this prison.”
They went into the building, into darkness crisscrossed by shafts of light coming in through the arrow-slit windows. It smelled of dust and something Lindsay couldn’t identify, something acrid. There were no interior walls here, just piles of rubble with bits of iron sticking out, fragments of chains and bars and gates. All the walls had been knocked down to make a vast cavern. Lindsay’s eyes adjusted, but she couldn’t see the ceiling, or even the far walls, and she was reminded of those stories about places that were bigger on the inside than they were on the outside—those stories had always seemed, to her, to be metaphors for the imagination, the heart, the mind, all the spaces inside people that were larger than the walls of bone and skin that circumscribed them.
“The snake pit,” Marzi said. “The scorpion pit. That’s where she lives. That’s where we have to go.”
Lindsay cleared her throat, the sound echoing tremendously in the space. “Oh,” she said. “Down there?”
“To the edge, at least,” Marzi said, and calmly unholstered her gun. For a moment Lindsay thought she meant to charge the hole, shooting into the darkness, but she just set the gun carefully on a rock. She looked at Lindsay and gave her a smile, though it was distant, almost perfunctory—Marzi’s mind was operating on some other plane entirely, most of her attention given to things Lindsay could not sense or see. “I don’t want her to think I’m coming as an emissary of death.”
“Should I put down my guns, too?” Lindsay said.
“Already did,” Marzi said, and Lindsay looked down, seeing that she was right—her guns were gone. Marzi must have spirited them away.
“My gun’s the only real one, anyway,” Marzi said. “The only one with enough substance to kill anything here. But still, no reason to appear threatening. We’re here as penitents.”
“I don’t get it,” Lindsay said. “She invited us, so why all the hoodoo? Why the walk across the desert? Why couldn’t she just answer our questions at The Oasis?”
“I needed to learn,” Marzi said. “Learn how I could shape this place, and I couldn’t do that sitting in Garamond Ray’s Oasis. He never struck out into the deep places; he never tried to learn the extent of his abilities. He was content with trapping the djinn and using his own life for the cork in the bottle.” She shook her head. “That’s not good enough for me. Sometimes you have to wander in the desert to learn, Lindsay. And anyway, things mean more if you have to work for them.”
“That’s what my mother told me when I was sixteen and she wouldn’t buy me a car,” Lindsay muttered.
Marzi didn’t laugh, didn’t even seem to hear. She went to the edge of the pit and knelt among the rough stones, her head bowed. Lindsay stood back, unsure what to do—kneel, or just stay out of the way? Sisterhood and solidarity, she thought, and went to kneel beside her friend. It was uncomfortable, and the only sound was Marzi’s regular, measured breath, and Lindsay began to wonder why they were sitting beside a hole in the ground.
“Enter,” said a voice like the crackling of dry leaves, and then the rocks inside the pit changed—or else, Lindsay’s vision changed—and there was a rough-hewn stairway, leading down into the impenetrable dark.
Marzi stood without hesitation and started down the steps. Lindsay followed, wishing absurdly that she still had the guns at her waist. At first, they walked down a gentle slope into the vast hole, but later they passed through a smaller opening, and the walls closed in around them. Lindsay expected total darkness, but instead the walls began to glow, lines of pale green fire twisting sinuously on the walls. Some of the glowing lines were moving, very slowly. Lindsay paused to examine the wall—Marzi kept walking—and saw that the light came from bioluminescent fungi, and thumbnail-sized glowing beetles. The beetles constantly shifted their configurations, but the patterns they made didn’t seem random, more like letters in a language somewhere between Arabic and Sanskrit.
Was Marzi making them do this? Or did these creatures belong to the scorpion oracle?
Lindsay hurried down the steps, following the gentle curve of the stairway. It no longer looked like artlessly tumbled rocks, more like a secret passage in an old horror film.
When Lindsay reached the bottom of the stairs, she found Marzi waiting, looking down a short hallway that ended in an arch-shaped wooden door with iron hinges. The walls here were alive with fungi and bugs, all glowing, and Lindsay could see the fixed look of concentration on Marzi’s face, her expression made eerie by witchlight. “When we pass through that door, we’ll find the oracle,” she said. “The physical mani-festation of . . . for want of a better word . . . a god. We will ask a question, and it will answer.” Marzi glanced at Lindsay. “You were always smarter than me. So listen closely when the oracle answers. I might need your help figuring out what it means.”
“Glad to be of service,” Lindsay said, and it was true; she’d felt essentially useless so far.
Marzi gave her a brief, summer-lightning smile, and went to the door. There was no knob, just a big iron ring, and Marzi closed her fingers around it. “Fucking doors,” she said, without rancor, and pulled on the ring. The door opened, scraping loudly against the stone floor. I hope we weren’t counting on the element of surprise, Lindsay thought. Firelight flickered beyond the door, and Marzi strode in, Lindsay following. The room was big—Lindsay could sense that—but poorly lit by a pair of torches in sconces nearby.
Something crunched under Lindsay’s boots.
“Gross!” Lindsay cried. The floor was alive with crawling things—scorpions, their tails little upraised question marks, and sleek black spiders, and long centipedes. They scurried away from Marzi and Lindsay, creating a little semicircle of bare stone around them, except for the ones Lindsay had crushed. “It was an accident,” Lindsay said nervously. “I didn’t mean—”
“Shh,” Marzi said. “No harm done. The scorpion oracle can be hard on her creatures. She doesn’t mind if a few of them get crushed.”
Hardly reassured, Lindsay tried to scrape her boot off on the rough stone floor. Maybe the scorpion oracle wouldn’t care if she and Marzi got crushed a little, too—had Marzi considered that?
Suddenly the room filled with light, flames bursting into life all around them. Once Lindsay’s eyes adjusted to the dazzle, she saw more of that twisting, sinuous language on the walls, carved into the rock, but still shifting, defying the stone. The light came from pedestals set at irregular intervals throughout the room, each topped with an ornate iron cage. Inside each cage, fierce white-hot flames burned. The room was suddenly as bright as an operating room, though infinitely more filthy. The flames in the cages moved strangely, seeming almost alive—and Lindsay gasped when she made out a head, and feathered wings, and claws in one of the cages. “Marzi,” she said. “Are those . . . phoenixes?”
Marzi nodded, seemingly unsurprised. And why should she be surprised? She’d created this place, right? Or, at least, her perceptions had shaped it; she was clothing the god of perseverance in a costume she could comprehend. Lindsay looked around the room, and realized it was like something Marzi would draw—maybe it even existed already, in sketches for the next comic, the one where Rangergirl would finally meet the rattlesnake sphinx. There were stone statues of scorpions here, much bigger than life-sized, including one on a platform in the center of the room that was bigger than a car, its pincers monumental, its eyes dully glowing rubies. This place had a certain lost-temple grandeur, a slightly ironic pulp-adventure sensibility; it was, in other words, pure Marzi.
“All this is just . . . anteroom,” Marzi said. “All this stuff, the statues, it’s the sort of thing penitents and worshippers bring. This isn’t what oracles are about—this is just the sort of thing that gets built up around oracles. Let’s go to the heart of the place.” She set off across the room, not even looking down, and the carpet of insects made way for her, scurrying aside as Marzi wove her way among the phoenix-filled cages toward the back of the cave.
There was a hole in the wall, like a cartoon mousehole in a baseboard, but rougher around the edges, and big as a garage door. It was simple, and dark, and no light came from inside. Lindsay knew there was no going into that place, not if you ever wanted to come out again. This other room was a temple, but that place—that was a den, where something frightening lived.
“I come as a penitent,” Marzi said, speaking loudly. “I come to ask your aid.”
There was a rustling in the cavern.
“Ask,” a voice said, the same voice that had said “Enter” above.
“I want to
know how to heal my friend Jonathan,” Marzi said.
Lindsay suppressed a groan. Sure, Marzi had said she wasn’t going to ask about the Outlaw, but Lindsay had held out hope that good sense would triumph. Yes, she wanted Jonathan to get better, too, very much, but wasn’t it more important for there to be a place for him to get better in? If the Outlaw had his way, the whole West Coast would be a smoking ruin.