by Tim Pratt
“Shit,” Marzi said. She hadn’t written this, or even thought about it, though it was a hell of an idea. So who had come up with it? The Outlaw didn’t have an imagination, so—
Marzi didn’t have time to think about it, because Anubis was standing in the doorway, still holding a delicate teacup full of blood. Ra and Osiris stood behind him, and Sekhmet loomed in the deeper shadows, carrying a tea press with a heart inside. The murals were coming to life.
“Marzi,” Ray said, “it’s a neat idea, but stop it.”
“I didn’t start it,” Marzi said. “Someone else is in here, changing things.” She backed away, but the mural-gods seemed incapable of leaving the borders of their room. The Cloud Room was growing mistier by the moment, and Marzi could hear the distant wailing of ghosts. “Let’s get out of here. Strategic retreat.”
“The Space Room is . . . space, Marzi,” Jonathan said. Marzi turned around, and saw a void of glittering stars and a hovering probe, armed with vicious pincers. She knew there would be no air beyond the doorway. Even if they made it across, there was the Ocean Room next, crush-depth blue water with a huge green serpent sliding endlessly past, and beyond that was the Circus Room, with Harlequin . . . No. They were better off here, in the mist, with the ghosts.
But how could they kill ghosts, how could they fight mist?
“We have to get outside,” Marzi said. She looked at the windows, picked up a chair, and hurled it at the glass.
The chair just bounced off.
Lindsay fired her tommy gun at the glass, but her bullets were absorbed, as if she were firing into water. She shrugged, then glared at Ray. “Why’d you have to paint such nasty shit?”
“I should have painted puppies and flowers? Excuse me for not realizing my paintings would someday come to life and try to kill me!”
“Hey, that’s enough. Focus, guys,” Marzi said. The room became more misty, and the ghostly wailing increased in volume. “Try shooting the gods in the Teatime Room.” She lifted her own pistol and took aim at Anubis’s slavering head. She fired.
Anubis turned, and suddenly disappeared; the other gods did likewise. Marzi’s bullet whizzed harmlessly by, and then Anubis was there again, grinning.
“They’re two-dimensional,” Jonathan said. “Look, they turned sideways, and it was like they disappeared! They’re flat.”
Marzi looked, and even through the thickening mist she could see what Jonathan meant: The gods weren’t solid figures, more like sheets of paper cut into humanoid shapes, with images projected on them. “We’re not going to be able to shoot them,” Marzi said. She could barely see her friends, now, and she began to wonder what would happen when the mist completely filled the room—would they be lost in limbo, or fall through endless space?
“Ease up, Marzi!” Ray shouted. “Damn it, stop thinking for a minute!”
Startled, Marzi looked at him—and he flickered. His serape vanished, replaced by a Bedouin’s flowing white robes and head scarf. The rifle slung over his back was gone, and he reached back and drew a wickedly curving scimitar. With a shout, he lunged for the doorway to the Teatime Room, and slashed at Anubis.
The jackal-headed god’s face took on a comically shocked expression, and then the upper half of its body floated, like a sheet of paper, to land facedown on the floor. The lower half curled over and fell, too. Whooping, Ray went into the Teatime Room, slashing with his sword, cutting the gods down.
The floor beneath Marzi’s feet became spongy and soft. Everything was turning to mist. “Come on!” she shouted, and grabbed for Lindsay’s hand; she didn’t see Jonathan, and feared he would get lost again, but there was nothing she could do about that, now. Marzi ran for the Teatime Room, where Ray stood grinning, chomping on a cigar that had appeared in his mouth without Marzi willing it. He did have the same powers she did, just not as strongly. She hadn’t thought about him using his powers, but it made sense: Any artist, anyone with a well-trained imagination, could shape things to some extent in a place like this. Marzi was the strongest, so her vision overrode the others, but that didn’t mean hers was the only voice.
The floor became more insubstantial, and Marzi jumped, dragging Lindsay with her. They passed the threshold into the Teatime Room. Jonathan came flying out of the mist a moment later, but he didn’t quite make it—he fell, the Cloud Room having lost all physical substance. He grabbed onto the edge of the Teatime Room’s floor, body dangling in the ghost-ridden mist. Lindsay and Marzi grabbed him by the wrists and hauled him up, so pumped with adrenaline that they lifted him with little effort. Jonathan lay for a moment on the floor, panting, then shook his head. “I’m okay. For a given value of ‘okay.’ Thanks.”
“We all need to be rescued sometimes,” Ray said. His Bedouin gear was gone now, replaced by the serape and rifle—but the scimitar still hung over his back, too, Marzi noticed. The Teatime Room was an island of calm, the gods nothing but strips of rough paper on the floor, the mural now depicting only chairs, tables, cups and saucers.
“There’s someone here, controlling things,” Marzi said. “At first I thought it was just a box trap we’d walked into, you know? But there’s someone reacting to us. Making the murals come to life—that wasn’t my idea. I didn’t think of that at all, and I don’t think Ray did, either.”
“Nope,” he agreed. “But it can’t be the Outlaw. That guy’s got all the imagination of a fence post.”
“It’s Beej,” Lindsay said. She sighed and sat down in a chair. “Who else? It’s not Jane; she doesn’t have that turn of mind. But Beej . . .” She gestured at the murals. “He’s always been interested in bringing two-dimensional images into a third dimension, with his photo collage and stuff. This is his kind of thing, and we know he works for the Outlaw. Or worships it, or whatever.”
Marzi nodded. “Yeah. You could be right.” She looked around. “Beej!” she shouted. “Come here! We need to talk!”
There was nothing, silence. Marzi frowned. “Listen, Beej, this is important, okay?”
“I’m supposed to kill you,” Beej said from a dark corner of the room. He was sitting in the shadows now, but he hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s what I’m good for, it’s how I can serve my god.” He sounded even more unsure than usual. “But . . . things don’t make as much sense, now that I’m here. Without the god’s voice, I feel lost. Like I always used to feel.”
“What happens if I cut your head off?” Ray said.
Beej looked startled. “Um. Everything here disappears, I guess. It’s all mine.”
“Not exactly,” Marzi said. “It’s a box canyon, right? Like from my comic.”
Beej nodded. “I love that issue.”
“But it’s actually a little pocket of space, a bit of the medi-cine lands pinched off, a bubble. It’s raw material. You were here first, you set it up, you controlled the parameters, but if you were gone, I think Ray and I would be able to create something new.”
“Oh,” Beej said. “I don’t really know how all this stuff works. I didn’t think you’d have swords and guns and stuff. I don’t want to hurt you, Marzi. I was trying to help, even.”
“With the floors turning to mist, and the killer space probe, and the dog-headed monster?” Lindsay said. “That was help?”
Beej ignored her, still speaking to Marzi. “I knew I couldn’t kill you, Marzi. Your friends, maybe, but you . . . I knew I’d never be able to harm you. So I thought I’d do the next best thing, and keep you trapped here, where you couldn’t bother my god anymore. That seemed like a good compromise. None of the things here actually hurt you, you know. I just wanted to keep you from leaving the Cloud Room. I was going to let you . . . float, in the mist. Sleep. Rest. See, you’re safe in here, Marzi, that was the thing I finally figured out. I wanted the earthquake god to triumph, I wanted to serve a victorious master, but I didn’t want you to die in the rubble and the fires. I . . . I like you. You’ve always been good to me. Sometimes, when it’s all screaming and bright lights in
my head, thinking about you is the only thing that calms me down. If you were out there, in Santa Cruz, you’d die. But in here, you’re safe.”
“In here I’m trapped, Beej. And you’re not in charge of keeping me safe.” She was having a hard time being angry with Beej. How could this be one of the faces of her enemy, this confused boy who just wanted to feel important, who thought he loved her and wanted to be in charge of the prison where she was locked away? “And your god . . . he’s not nice, Beej.”
“Oh, I know. But he’s important. And he lets me be important, too.”
“He’s using you.”
“I don’t mind being used. It’s better than being nothing at all. I made this place, me and Denis together—”
“Denis is involved in this, too? Why am I not surprised?”
“Well, he doesn’t want to be,” Beej said. “He hates our master, I think, he’d run away if he could, but he’s scared, so he helped. We built a door . . .” Beej’s voice was dreamy.
“A door, Beej? Can you show it to me?”
“If I showed it to you, you could walk through it,” he said.
Marzi went to him. She knelt by his chair, and took his hand. “You’ve done a bad thing, Beej. I think you know that.”
He nodded. “I always knew it. But it’s an important thing, and that matters more.”
Marzi nodded. “Well, now you’ve got the chance to do another important thing. Me, my friends, we want to stop your master. We want to save all those people he’s going to kill. You can help us do that. You can do something that’s good and important.”
Beej looked at her, his eyes bloodshot and watery. “You can really beat the earthquake god?”
“I think I can, yes.”
“But you can only do it if I help?”
Marzi nodded.
“Okay,” Beej said, and just like that, there was a door, standing in the center of the room, all black iron and spikes, pasted-on photographs, and a buffalo skull on top.
“Oh, Beej,” Lindsay said. “That’s beautiful.” There was genuine reverence in her voice.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Ray said. “And I’d know. I’m a master.”
“It belongs in a gallery,” Jonathan said.
Marzi squeezed his hand. “You do good work, Beej.” She stood up. “Come with us? Help us fight?”
Beej shook his head. “This is where I want to be. I’m the most important thing, here. I’ve never been any good at sculpture, but in this place . . . I can make anything.”
He could, Marzi knew, but it wouldn’t mean anything; there’d be no one real to share it with. But Beej had never been good at dealing with real people, anyway. Even now, he wasn’t talking to Marzi. He was talking to his imagined, idealized version of her, same as always.
“Besides,” Beej went on, “I did bad things over there, like you said. I’m happy here. I’d just get all twisted up again if I went back, I think.”
“Whatever you did there, you’ve done us a great service here,” she said.
“Go, then,” Beej said. “Save the world or whatever.”
The black metal door opened, and beyond it, Marzi could see the dusty Desert Room. Ray, Jonathan, and Lindsay passed through, their guns vanishing, their clothes changing from Western garb to their ordinary outfits again—Ray wore a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. Marzi lingered at the door for a moment, looking at Beej, sitting in his dark corner. “Maybe you’ll come out, someday, and visit us?”
“Maybe,” he said, and he sounded saner than he ever had before. “But I think I like this world better.”
Breaking the Medicine
* * *
“I like it up here,” the godlet said. “I can see everything.”
Denis sat huddled miserably in the dirt. His clothes reeked of gasoline, and his hair smelled of smoke. They’d been setting things on fire all morning, throwing Molotov cocktails from overpasses, causing car accidents, attacking a strip mall, burning down beach houses. Jane had torn down the surfer statue on West Cliff Drive, and done serious damage to the lighthouse by Steamer Lane. They’d abandoned Denis’s car near the wharf when they started to hear sirens. The cops the godlet hadn’t killed were going crazy trying to respond to their activities, but the three of them moved too fast overground to be trapped—the godlet could run flat-out without getting tired, as could Jane, and she carried Denis. The cops couldn’t follow them when they lit out on foot. Denis was exhausted. Destruction was incredibly tiring, and very messy, and not at all satisfying. He could still see the old woman, burning, in his mind.
They were up in the hills now, near campus, at a point where you could see the bay and much of the town. It was a gorgeous view, Denis supposed, if you liked landscapes, which he didn’t. Smoke rose here and there from the town below, and the godlet looked at it, nodding in satisfaction. “That’s a damn good start,” he said. “From up here, it’s easy to see the progress we’ve made. While we’re up here, we’ll burn down the redwoods and the university and all. Denis can siphon us some gas to splash around. We’ll leave the hills on fire behind us when we go back to town.”
Jane made a sound of agreement. She was barely recognizable as her old self, now. She had six arms, and she was nearly seven feet tall—she looked more and more like an ani-mate statue of a Hindu goddess of destruction. The godlet, however, now looked almost human. His metal body had acquired a patina of flesh, though the chrome still showed through ragged patches here and there. He had eyes, too—black ones, without whites or irises, but still, they were recognizably eyes. Denis was reassured by these changes; the godlet was becoming less alien. If Beej succeeded in his task, however, and killed Marzi, that would change. The godlet would become something different. Wholly inhuman. Elemental, but still sentient. An earthquake with a mind. A process that could think.
The godlet grunted, stumbling, and fell to his knees. “Ah, fuck,” he said, and when he turned his head, Denis saw that he had normal eyes, now, and he was all skin, no metal. “That little shit!” he shouted. “He let Marzi get out! And her stupid friends, her posse, too!”
Denis looked at the sky. It was almost noon. Only almost noon. What a day.
“We’ll kill her,” Jane said, her voice scarcely human.
“Oh, yes,” the godlet said disdainfully. “Why didn’t I think of that? It’s not so easy, you know, especially now that Marzi’s started to figure things out. Still . . . that’s what you two are for. Killing on my behalf.” He looked at the sky. “Hmm. You know, this might not be so bad. In fact, even if we can’t kill her, I have an idea for how we can . . . keep her at bay.” He frowned. “Then again, it’s not exactly my idea—it’s from her comic book, it’s the way one of the bad guys saved himself from the good guy. . . .”
“This isn’t a comic book,” Denis said. “In case you hadn’t noticed. There are more than four colors, here.”
“You’re right. And I bet Marzi knows it’s not a comic book, too,” the godlet said. “Huh. You know, this could work out well for us. See, she made me what I am, sort of, and part of what I am is cunning. And now I’ve got a cunning backup plan.”
“How nice,” Denis said. “Cunning backup plans always work.”
“Let’s go someplace where we can make a last stand,” the godlet said. “I know just the place.” He winked at Denis. “It’s time we had a proper showdown, Old West style.”
Just my luck, Denis thought, to get stuck in a melodrama.
They found Hendrix’s body, shot through the heart, and Marzi understood the bad thing Beej had done. She’d assumed he was speaking generally of his association with the Outlaw, but apparently not. Marzi wondered if there was even a real bullet in Hendrix’s wound, or if an illusion with the velocity of total belief had blown his chest apart. Hendrix was the first visible proof of Marzi’s failure to keep the Outlaw locked away, and she cried a little, looking down on him. None of them went too close to his body, though; if the Outlaw didn’t destroy Santa Cruz, the cops wou
ld be investigating Hendrix’s death. “They just killed him,” Marzi said. “For no reason.”
“It’s what the Outlaw does,” Ray said. “That’s why we have to stop him.”
Marzi nodded. They all went outside. There were sirens in the distance, and smoke rising over the trees in the direction of downtown. Marzi swore.
“So where do we go?” Lindsay said, looking toward the rising plume of smoke. Ray squinted around at everything, and Jonathan leaned on a parking meter, his eyes half closed, his breathing shallow. Marzi wondered when he’d eaten last, and that reminded her that she was hungry, too. She hadn’t felt the need to eat, piss, or even rest in the West beyond the West, but now that they’d returned, natural order was back in force.
“Where the smoke is, that’s where the Outlaw has already been,” she said. “He’s had enough time to do some damage, but he knows I’m free, now, and he’s waiting for me. I say we head for the hills. After all, that’s where you run, if you’re a bad guy, and you’re scared.”
“Drop the pretense at logic, Marzi,” Ray said. He turned away from her, toward Lindsay. “Marzi and I can feel the Outlaw, Lindsay. He’s like a rotten tooth, throbbing, but in my skull instead of my mouth. I can only imagine it’s stronger for Marzi.”
Marzi nodded. “Sort of, but not so unpleasant. In my comic, Rangergirl and the Outlaw are destined enemies, locked together in antagonism. She always knows which direction he’s in, like a magnet knows north. She never knows how close he is, unfortunately. . . .” Marzi shrugged. “But I know he’s up near campus, and I bet he’s in the hills, someplace with lots of mud and rocks to pull down on top of us, lots of trees to burn.”
“Do you really think you can face him, head-on like this?” Ray said.
“I didn’t say I was going to face him head-on. I said I had a plan. And I do.” Marzi didn’t like the plan, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. It was either that or let the West Coast be razed. She didn’t need to hesitate long over a question like that.