by T. A. Pratt
Her pace slowed considerably when she passed the edge of the “Welcome to Felport” sign, fell to her knees, and began vomiting. Pelham hurried to help her, but he started puking, too, though he still tried to crawl toward her. Marla attempted to move forward, but with every inch she moved into Felport, her convulsions became more severe. It was hard to think about anything while noisily voiding her stomach contents, but she had little doubt this was Death’s doing—he’d banished her, after all, and he’d apparently chosen a very visceral way to keep her out of the city. Cursing—not magical Curses like Rondeau’s, but mundane, if vociferous, ones—as she heaved, she lurched and dragged herself back beyond the perimeter of Felport, followed by Pelham. The nausea and pain stopped immediately, but the aftereffects lingered. They both lay shuddering on the shoulder for a while, and finally Pelham spoke up. “That was most unpleasant.”
“Yeah.” Marla wiped her mouth with a handful of pulled grass. She didn’t even have any water to wash her mouth out. “I guess you are linked to me, the way you were hurling there. Death probably didn’t realize you’d get dragged along, but if I get banished, you get banished.” She sat up. “Let’s inventory. No phone. Can’t get into the city. Boots and nothing to kick. A knife and nothing to cut. I’ve got this bell Death gave me, and maybe Hamil could do something nasty with it, but I don’t have his expertise with sympathetic and contagious magic.” She considered ringing it and trying to attack Death again when he appeared, but one definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result, and Marla may have had her issues, but she wasn’t insane. “Altogether? Not so good.”
“Just let me know what I can do to help.”
She laughed. “I’m at a bit of a loss myself. Maybe if a car comes by we can hop in and ride into Felport, but I think we’d just hurt worse the farther in we got. I’ve got a few talents, Pelham, but kicking ass while puking my guts out isn’t one of them. Whatever this magic is, I doubt I can beat it. Death must really be a god. Such powers are…resistant to intervention. I think the only reason he couldn’t just take my dagger is because one of his ancestors, or incarnations, or whatever, made the thing, and lost it fairly. The gods have to keep their promises and follow certain rules, the same way you and I have to breathe and eat and sleep, and there might be a way to beat Death if I can figure out what rules govern his actions. But gods don’t like telling you what those rules are, unfortunately. Have you ever played the card game Mao, where the other players don’t tell you the rules, and you have to figure them out as you go along? I hate that game.”
“I see,” Pelham said, not very helpfully.
“Sitting still bugs me.” She stood up, wrapping her grass-stained cloak around her body. She wished, fleetingly, that she’d been wearing her lethal purple-and-white cloak when Death barged in on her. She would have kicked the asshole up one side of the world and down the other if she’d been wearing the artifact, though using it again might have driven her permanently insane. Small price to pay to be spared this embarrassment, she thought sourly. “Can you walk, Pelham?”
“Yes, Ms. Mason.” He rose, too.
“Don’t you want to know where we’re walking to?”
“I will follow wherever you go, of course.”
She sighed. “I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Do you have any allies outside the city?” Pelham asked. “Who might be able to get a message back to your associates?”
“I had the same thought. Dr. Leda Husch, head of the Blackwing Institute. She can help. Blackwing’s like an hour drive outside of the city, it’ll take forever on foot. But I don’t even know where exactly we are, so I’m not sure which way to start the forced march.” It was frustrating. In the city she always knew her location, but out here…she was in the wilderness.
“We’re on Asleid Road, on the north side of the city, Ms. Mason,” Pelham said.
Marla blinked. “How do you know that?”
“I have examined all the maps, Ms. Mason.”
“Yeah, but I mean, maps don’t show, what, trees? What’s your landmark?”
“There are very fine satellite maps that contain a great deal of detail. And my sense of direction is very good.” He pointed. “That sign indicates sharp curves for the next eight miles, which is consistent only with Asleid Road. I can lead us to the Blackwing Institute—though, as you’ve said, it is approximately fifty miles away, which is, hmm, about twelve hours of walking time?”
“We can make it in ten,” she said. “It’s—gods, it’s almost four in the morning, and I haven’t slept and neither have you. Well. I’ve got spells that can keep you going even when you think you’re going to collapse. We’ll have to eat like pigs when we get to Blackwing to recover the calories. It’s mostly hospital food, but it’ll do. And maybe we’ll get cell coverage on the way.” Marla doubted the last, assuming Death had somehow put the kibosh on her phone, but figured voicing some optimism wouldn’t hurt Pelham’s morale. Not that his morale seemed even slightly dented. He was proving pretty stalwart so far.
“If I may lead, then?” he said, and she nodded, and fell into step behind him.
After a few miles, the sun began to touch the edge of the sky, and Marla finally got her sense of direction decently oriented. They’d seen a couple of cars, but none were going the right direction; all were headed toward Felport, not away from it. Marla considered a carjacking, but she didn’t think she’d fallen quite that far yet. They were sure to hit a little gas station or something soon, and maybe she’d have more luck with a pay phone than her cell.
“Look, a motorist in distress,” Pelham said, and up ahead there was indeed a little sedan with its hood up and the flashers on, a guy sitting on the back, smoking a cigarette and looking at them with interest. “Do you need assistance?” Pelham shouted.
The man was young and tired-looking, dressed in a T-shirt that said “Allison Wonderland” over a stylized picture of a guitar. He tossed his cigarette onto the pavement. “You look like you need assistance, guys,” he said. “Like you slept in a field last night. I’ve just got a broken-down car.” He looked Marla up and down. “Cool cloak. Do you work at a Renaissance fair or something?”
“Or something. So is help on the way?”
He nodded glumly. “Called for a tow truck twenty minutes ago. They weren’t sure when they’d get somebody out here. I’m at Adler, taking summer classes, trying to graduate, and I got an early start today to go see my parents for the weekend. I thought my car would make it one more round-trip, but no such luck.”
“Bad luck,” Marla said. “Hey, can I borrow your phone?”
He passed over his cell, and Marla tried to call Hamil, but she got squeals and pops and static again. “No answer,” she said, shrugging, and gave the phone back. Damn it. Death was thorough.
“Tell you what,” Marla said. “We’ll get you on your way and save you the cost of a tow truck, if you’re willing to give us a ride to Annemberg.”
“Annemberg? Isn’t that, like, one stoplight and some cows?”
“Yeah,” Marla said. It was also the home of the Blackwing Institute. “I’ve got a friend there.”
“Oookay,” the guy said. “It’s sort of on my way. If you can fix my car, sure. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, other than it’s old. I don’t really have tools, though. Maybe, like, a wrench. I mean, don’t get your hopes up.”
“Don’t worry,” Marla said, clapping Pelham on the back. “My man Pelly here is a wizard with automobiles, isn’t that right?”
“I do have some small facility,” Pelham said.
The college boy lifted an eyebrow. He’d be cute, Marla thought, if he hadn’t been born when she was, oh, fifteen. “He’s a mechanic? No offense, guy, but you look like a hobo butler.”
“He gets that a lot,” Marla said. “Let’s check under the hood, shall we, Pelly?”
They went around to the front of the car and bent over, Pelham poking at wi
res and cables and whistling absentmindedly through his teeth. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Pelham said. “This vehicle hasn’t been maintained at all. The Chamberlain would fire any driver in her fleet who treated her automobiles so shabbily.”
“Wait, you can actually fix cars?” Marla said.
Pelham frowned. “Of course.”
Marla laughed. “You never cease to amaze, Pelly. But don’t worry about it.” She put her hands on the engine block, meditated for a moment, and spoke a phrase Ernesto, the scrapyard sorcerer, had taught her. Her nostrils filled with the scent of burning oil, and she felt her heart—the engine of her body—stutter once or twice before finding its rhythm again. She exhaled, and a thin plume of car exhaust emerged from her mouth, making Pelham cough. She stood up. “Try to get it to start,” she said, and the college boy obligingly climbed in and turned the key. The engine purred beautifully, and the driver gave a cheer. “Just a little magic to give any old beater an extra few months of operation,” Marla said. “I wonder how long it’ll take before this guy realizes the car doesn’t even use up gas anymore?”
She let the hood drop, grinning, and went around to the passenger side, crushing fast-food bags and disposable coffee cups underfoot. Pelham got in the back.
“I’m Roddy,” the driver said, sticking out his hand.
“I’m Marla,” she said. “That’s Pelly. Pelham, I mean.”
“Pelly is fine,” her valet said, with his accustomed dignity, and, perhaps, a hint of pleasure. Maybe all Pelham had needed to help him loosen up was a nickname to call his own. Marla could hope.
“Let’s hit the road, Roddy,” Marla said, and he pulled off the shoulder and drove.
“What was wrong with it?” he said. “It hasn’t sounded this good in years!”
“Loose cables,” Marla said promptly. “Pelly spotted it right away. Nothing big.”
“I don’t know shit about cars,” Roddy said. “I’m a philosophy major.” He glanced Marla’s way. “Not very practical, I know.”
“Hey, philosophy teaches you how to think,” Marla said. “Thinking’s the most versatile tool in the world.”
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Roddy said, “what are you two doing wandering the back roads outside Felport? I come this way because I like the scenic route, but it’s a long walk to Annemberg.”
Marla considered, then said, “We were banished from Felport by the incarnation of Death, and we’re headed to Annemberg so I can meet up with some allies and set up my government-in-exile.”
“Oookay,” Roddy said.
“Nah, I’m just screwing with you,” Marla said. “We were hitchhiking, but the redneck who was giving us a ride got pissed when I wouldn’t give him a little nookie in a gas station bathroom, and he chucked us out by the side of the road.”
“That sucks,” Roddy said amiably. “Hitching’s dangerous, though. What if the guy hadn’t taken no for an answer?”
“Aw, hell, Pelly’s a master of ninjitsu.”
“No, only judo,” he said, alarmed.
Roddy laughed, and switched on the radio, and they made the rest of the trip to the tunes of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.
Marla sort of wished they’d kept on talking, shooting the shit. With nothing but music and the hum of the road and the passage of fields and cows and trees out the windows, she had way too much time to fret over her desperate situation.
About ten miles from Annemberg, she finally had the bright idea to try calling Leda. Maybe she was only prevented from getting in touch with people in the city. She asked to borrow Roddy’s phone again—if she used hers, he would have wondered why she’d borrowed his earlier, and he already thought she was odd—and dialed Husch’s private line, one of only half a dozen numbers she knew by heart.
Dr. Husch answered promptly. “You have the wrong number.” Marla imagined that was how she answered every call to that line that came from an unknown number.
“It’s me, Marla.”
“Marla,” Leda said. “Good heavens. Hamil called me an hour ago. He was afraid you were dead, or stuck on the moon or in the caldera of a volcano.”
“No, I’m alive and…well, alive anyway. Look, I’m about ten miles from your place; I found a nice kid to give us a ride. Just wanted you to know I was on the way.”
“Ah, you can’t speak freely,” Leda said. “Of course. But I take your visit to mean you can’t get back into the city?”
“True enough.”
“And…you have a plan to rectify this?”
“Always. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”
“I’ll have an extra breakfast sent up to my rooms for you.”
“Make it two. Pelham’s with me.”
“Who’s Pelham?”
“All will be revealed.” Marla flipped the phone shut and passed it back to Roddy. Leda’s number wouldn’t be stored in the phone’s memory—neither people nor computers could remember that number without Leda’s permission—so she didn’t have to “accidentally” drop his phone out the window to keep him from having embargoed contact information.
“Here’s fine,” she said, and he slowed the car at the crossroads.
“Here? There’s no here here! It’s a stoplight in the middle of nothing.”
“I know where we’re going,” Marla said. “Thanks, Roddy. Good luck with the philosophizing.”
“Good luck with the, ah, incarnation of death.” Marla thanked him, sincerely, and hopped out of the car, Pelham following. They waved as Roddy drove off, then Marla set off across a field that wasn’t much different from any other field. Once she’d gone a few yards, the illusory camouflage shimmered, the Blackwing Institute’s long tree-lined driveway was revealed, and the mammoth bulk of the hospital appeared in the distance. A golf cart was approaching them at a good speed, doubtless piloted by one of the many cheerful, mindlessly obedient homunculi who served as cooks, orderlies, and general assistants at the Institute. Dr. Husch was the only person on staff with a mind of her own, but that was okay. She had only about a dozen patients—fewer, now that Ayres was out—and some of them didn’t even require therapy, only containment, like Elsie Jarrow, the insane chaos magician, or Norma Nilson, the nihilomancer, who had an aura of despair so palpable it could make rattlesnakes commit suicide.
The golf cart pulled up alongside them, and Marla and Pelham hopped on. The scrub-clad homunculus driving turned the cart around and drove them to the house, without a word.
Dr. Husch was waiting on the steps for them, wearing a severe black dress that somehow only made her seem sexier, in an untouchable vintage blond movie star sort of way. She kissed Marla’s cheek, which was an overwhelming display of affection for her; she must be really worried about all this. She stepped back and regarded Marla and Pelham. “You’re both bedraggled. Come in. There’s coffee.”
Marla followed her through the imposing front doors, into a marble-floored foyer, and up a grand staircase. “This is the hospital?” Pelham said, looking around. “It rivals the Chamberlain’s house in splendor.”
“It’s a nuthatch, yeah,” Marla said. “But it used to be a mansion, built by Mr. Annemann, an old-school sorcerer. He was a master of creating artificial life—homunculi. There’s a whole army of his homunculi here, dressed like orderlies. They work at whatever you dress them as, and they eat lavender seeds and earthworms. It’s messed up.”
“With the kind of money Marla provides to fund the facility, I can only afford staff who don’t need to be paid.” Dr. Husch paused in her ascent of the stairs to scowl down.
“What happened to Mr. Annemann? His name sounds familiar,” Pelham said.
“Oh, he’s still around,” Marla said. “He’s in a hospital bed, in a coma. Dr. Husch takes good care of him.” She glanced up. Leda was walking stiffly, but she usually did, so it was hard to tell if she was made nervous by the line of Marla’s conversation. Probably not. Leda knew Marla well enough to know she would be discreet. “She was his apprentice, and after he
went to Comaville, she kindly offered her services as a therapist and jailer and zookeeper for sorcerers who go cuckoo and become a danger to themselves and others and me.”
That was mostly the truth. Annemann was in a coma, though Leda was the one who’d put him there, shooting him in the head with a little pistol years ago. Though she looked like a normal human woman, Leda was actually one of Annemann’s homunculi, an imitation of humanity created to be a sex toy—dolled up properly, she’d look like a nineteen-year-old sex kitten, which was why she affected more severe dress these days, trying to hide her light under a tight librarian’s bun and business suits. Annemann had made her too well, though, and unlike his other creations, she’d had a mind and motives of her own, and despite her creator’s aloofness and occasional cruelty, she grew to care for him deeply.
Naturally, she assumed he’d secretly cast a love spell on her.
Over time, she came to resent the spell, the way it made her feel, the way he treated her like an object, and so she shot him, hoping to kill him and break the spell. Marla imagined that she’d wept when she pulled the trigger. The bullet had ravaged Mr. Annemann’s brain, and any spell he’d cast would have dissolved when his consciousness did…but Leda had gone on loving him, which suggested he’d never cast a spell on her at all. She’d been laid low by grief and guilt, and as a result, she’d chosen to dedicate her life to helping sorcerers who’d lost their minds. Lots of sorcerers called themselves “Dr. This-and-that,” but Leda was rare in that she actually had a couple of doctorates, having gone to grad school with false papers. She was good at her job, and Marla admired her toughness, though they got on each other’s nerves if they spent too much time together.
Leda showed them into her modest apartments, which were perfectly homey aside from the wall of high-tech surveillance equipment that allowed her to monitor her patients twenty-four hours a day. Leda didn’t sleep. Some of her patients didn’t, either. A homunculus in a lab coat watched the screens, wearing a pair of oversized headphones, and he paid them no attention at all, focused on his charges.