Dead Reign

by T. A. Pratt

  “Don’t worry about the money. Money, we got. So you could do something fast if we threw enough cash at it?”

  “Of course,” Pelham said. “From your conversation with Dr. Husch, I assumed…never mind. It’s not my place.”

  “What? You thought I was broke because Leda complains I don’t give her enough money? Listen, Pelham, the budget for the Blackwing Institute every year would easily fund a real hospital—the kind with hundreds of patients—with money left over to buy all the doctors gold rims for their car tires. Leda just wants more because when she has extra money, she pours it into research projects, paying shamanistic healers and biomancers and aura-manipulators to come work on her craziest, most dangerous inmates. She thinks she can rehabilitate Elsie Jarrow given enough time.” Marla shook her head. “I admire Leda’s dedication, don’t get me wrong, but giving her money is like chucking cash into a black hole, and I could beggar myself and tax the other sorcerers until they were ready to overthrow me, all without making her happy. So we make sure she has enough for basic operations, and a bit more for her research projects, and that’s it. But, no, we’re okay financially.”

  “Ah,” Pelham said. “I misunderstood. Your office is in Rondeau’s apartment, and I understand your home is rather…unprepossessing, so I assumed you were under a financial strain.”

  “I don’t live as extravagantly as the Chamberlain does, it’s true, but that’s just not the kind of life I come from, you know? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in a big old mansion. I don’t look at the money stuff too closely, but being chief sorcerer of Felport is a sweet gig. It’s like being a crime boss and a feudal lord all rolled into one.”

  At the “feudal lord” bit, Pelham’s eyes lit up, and Marla sighed and went back to her magazine.

  Eventually they landed in Chicago, and that’s when Pelham started getting twitchy.

  “Damn it, Pelly, run!” Marla said. They had a tight connection, and their flight was all the way across the airport, naturally. Chicago O’Hare was a huge complex of misery, absolutely thronged with people, and Pelham was trying to walk with care and dignity, apologizing to everyone he jostled.

  “Surely they’ll hold the plane for us,” Pelham said, and then apologized to a fat businessman who ran over Pelham’s foot with a giant rolling suitcase.

  “Surely they won’t!”

  “Oh, dear. But…forgive me, I need to take a personal moment, ah…”

  Marla stopped by the departures screen, glancing at their flight, which was on time, and, godsdamn it, already boarding. “What are you on about?”

  Pelham blushed scarlet. “I need to adjourn to the gentlemen’s facilities, Ms. Mason.”

  “Why didn’t you piss on the plane!” She shouted loud enough to make people edge out of her way.

  “I—I did not realize there were facilities available, and—”

  “Just go, then!” Marla started physically shoving him toward the nearby men’s room.

  “I beg your pardon?” Pelham said. “I don’t mean to slow us down, but I’m unsure—”

  “There! Where all those guys are going! With the little sign with a picture of a little guy on it! Go in there and piss, would you?”

  “A public restroom?” he said, the way someone else might say, “A dead body?”

  “Yes, damn it! What, you think they have special slow-ass valet bathrooms? Go! We need to run!”

  Pelham gingerly stepped into the steady line of men going to the bathroom, and Marla tapped her foot, waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

  Finally she couldn’t wait anymore, and she barged into the bathroom, where Pelham was muttering to himself and scrubbing his hands at the sink.

  “Whoa, it must be ladies’ night!” a grungy guy with a giant backpack said. “The line for the girls’ room too long?” Men at the urinals glanced at her and made various rude or scandalized remarks. Pelham didn’t appear to notice.

  “What the hell are you doing?” She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. His eyes were wide and wild, his thin hair mussed, his lips twitching.

  “He’s been washing his hands for, like, ever,” said the guy with the backpack. “He’s got that obsessive-compulsive disorder, I bet.”

  “It’s so…filthy,” Pelham whispered. “A man urinated on the floor. I had to relieve myself into a basin fixed to the wall, and it flushed with a horrible loud sound as soon as I turned away.”

  “Yeah, it’s a motion sensor,” backpack guy volunteered.

  “And then the sink would not give sufficient water,” Pelham said. “There are no knobs, and it seems to spray forth capriciously, with no rhyme or reason—”

  “Dude, the sinks have motion sensors, too,” backpack guy said, and Marla whirled on him, snarled, and he left with great speed. Marla reined in her anger and patted Pelham gently on the shoulder.

  “Come on, Pelly. Stiff upper lip. We must carry on. Okay? We’ve got a plane to catch. Can you hurry for me?”

  “But…my hands…the conditions here, so unhygienic, I fear—”

  “It’ll be okay.” Marla leaned in close. “I’ll sterilize your hands with magic, okay? Whisper a little death word to kill every microbe. Okay?”

  Pelham looked at her like a starving man at a doughnut. “Yes, Ms. Mason.”

  Just then a security guard came in. “Lady, you have to—”

  “We’re leaving,” she said, and started to go.

  The guard stepped into her way, and Marla checked her desire to fling him against the wall. That would not help them catch their plane. “Look, miss, really—”

  “This is my mentally challenged cousin,” Marla said. “Ask any of those idiots snickering by the urinals—he was in here freaking out over germs, and I just came to get him.”

  “It’s true,” someone volunteered. “Dude was trippin’.”

  “You really want to give this place a reputation for hassling retarded guys?” Marla said, and the guard frowned and stepped aside. “Thank you.” Marla pulled Pelham out after her.

  Pelham didn’t speak, but he did sprint, so Marla was content. They got to the gate just as the attendant was closing the doors. “Two passengers here!” Marla bellowed.

  The attendant turned on her with a frozen smile and shook her head. “Too late. I’m sorry,” she began, and Marla stepped up to her and grabbed her hands.

  “Please,” Marla said, and threw her mind at the attendant’s, an overriding plea, a request that didn’t appeal to the conscious mind at all but to some deeper, fundamentally human part.

  “Ah, of course,” the attendant said, and made a call, and opened the gate.

  Marla leaned on Pelham a little as they went down the jetway. “Shit,” she muttered. “Blunt-force mind control is a bitch.” She just barely made it to their seats. They had two together, miraculously, on a very full flight, and the overhead bins were all full, so it was a good thing they had no baggage besides her rolled-up cloak—she didn’t want to call attention to herself in an airport, and a woman in a black-and-silver cloak got noticed. She balled up the cloak into a makeshift pillow, strapped herself in, and passed out. She woke up three hours later with a pounding headache, to darkness outside the plane’s windows. She slurred “Water.” Pelham had gotten a bottle of water from somewhere, and he passed it to her. She chugged it noisily and moaned. “That sucked. I usually carry some little stones enchanted with one-shot compulsions—they don’t hit me so hard. But I don’t have any charms with me, and doing it direct mind-to-mind like that, oof, I don’t recommend it.”

  “Ms. Mason, I can’t apologize enough,” Pelham said. “I lost control, and forced you to strain yourself. I am humiliated.”

  “Well, yeah,” Marla said. “What happened to you back there?”

  “Too many people,” Pelham said, shaking his head. “In the nightclub, it wasn’t so overwhelming. I had something to do, serving drinks, and I hardly stopped to notice the crowds, the sheer number of people—and when I did, I told myself it w
asn’t many more than had attended the last Founders’ Ball, though it was, really. In the airport, surrounded by all those strangers, the press of people…” He shuddered. “I’d never seen so many people together all at once, going about their own business. I think, somehow, I didn’t realize there were so many people in the world. Oh, I know, there are six billion people on Earth, but that is only a number, and this…this was fact, and flesh.”

  “Wow,” Marla said. “So you get anxiety attacks when there are too many people around. Kind of makes sense. No offense, Pelly, but you’ve led kind of a sheltered life. And you’ve had a bit of upheaval lately. Yesterday you were in the place you’d lived all your life, and today you’ve been banished from the whole city. No wonder you freaked a little. It’s okay. I hate crowds, too. I don’t ever like to be in a group that’s bigger than I can incapacitate single-handedly if they get possessed by a malign intelligence. You know. Contingencies.”

  Pelham almost smiled. “Thank you, Ms. Mason, for being understanding.”

  “Hell, I’m glad to know you have a weakness. You were getting a little spookily omnicompetent there for a while.”

  “I try to give satisfaction.” He definitely smiled that time.

  “What’s the movie?” Marla said, glancing at the pretty people on the tiny screen over their seat.

  “Something about someone falling in love with someone, but they are currently angry at each other over a simple misunderstanding that could be solved with the briefest of explanations. I…do not watch many films. I fail to see the appeal here.”

  “Wake me when we land,” Marla said, and went back to sleep.

  “Death is at a brothel,” Beadle said, entering the back room of the Wolf Bay Café.

  Rondeau whistled. “One of the Chamberlain’s fancy houses, or…?”

  Beadle shook his head. “One of Ernesto’s clubs, not far from the old air force base.”

  “Rough trade,” Rondeau said thoughtfully, and began flipping his butterfly knife open and closed and open again, thinking. “He’s secured the loyalty, however temporary, of every major sorcerer in the city, and now he’s off having sex?”

  “For free,” Beadle said. “Naturally, as he is king of the sorcerers now. The girls don’t know who they work for, but they understand the meaning of ‘VIP.’”

  “He’s probably the kind of guy who leaves dead hookers by the side of the road,” Rondeau said.

  “I doubt that,” Langford said, looking up from his clipboard, which bulged with papers of various sizes. He was thin, bookish, intense, wearing a disturbingly stained white lab coat. “He was probably a virgin not long ago. I suspect he is only recently incarnated. Gods don’t normally wear flesh, you see, though sometimes the human mind chooses to see them in human forms, as comprehending their true nature is difficult. But if Death bled from Marla’s knife, it seems reasonable to assume he’s in a physical body, albeit a magically augmented one. There is some mythological precedent for Death coming to Earth in human form. I suspect that, having a body for the first time, he is attempting to explore the joys of that body. Pleasures of the flesh may divert him for a while.”

  “Hmm,” Rondeau said. “So if he’s in a body, could we…blow him up?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Partridge said from his table in the far corner. He kept to the shadows—he was scarred all over, and sensitive about it—burning matches and snuffing them between his callused fingertips, until the whole back room smelled of sulfur. “Let’s blow something up.”

  “He could conceivably be damaged, if caught by surprise, though he would simply repair his body,” Langford said.

  “I know we can’t kill him, but if he goes someplace expecting a super awesome time and he gets exploded instead, that’ll put some piss in his peaches and cream, won’t it?” Rondeau said. “Nobody likes pain, and people who’ve basically never felt pain before especially hate it. So let’s say he heard there was a powerful sex magician around, maybe Mary Madeline Monroe, eager to show her devotion to the new boss…. I know for a fact she’s in Thailand right now, but that’s not common knowledge, so…”

  “A decent-enough plan,” Beadle said. “I can put it into operation, send certain messages through certain untraceable channels. Death is vain, and an appeal to his vanity may work. I’ll try to set up a meeting for tomorrow, in a place we can…damage extensively…without harming any ordinaries in the process. But it would be more efficient if we can combine this with some other objective. After all, if we know where Death will be, we will have freer access to places where he won’t be.”

  “Well,” Rondeau said. “I had this idea. Kind of crazy, but, well…You know Marla’s cloak. Maybe we could get that. And I could put it on.”

  “Now that’s a way to do some damage,” Partridge said, in his smoke-shattered voice.

  “I don’t like her cloak,” Langford said. “She allowed me to study it once. It…resists analysis. There is a certain logic to most magic, however hidden, but the cloak defies understanding.”

  “It would be a great asset,” Beadle mused. “I calculate that its advantage to our cause would outweigh the dangers inherent in its use. It would give us the potential to strike directly at Death, and allow us to do more than merely annoy him.”

  “The thing is, it’s in her apartment, in a heavily fortified wardrobe.”

  “Hmm,” Beadle said. “There is an order to binding spells. Given time, I could undo them.”

  “How much time?”

  Beadle shrugged. “A couple of days, at a guess, though I’d have to see the spells to be sure.”

  “So we grab the wardrobe and take it someplace secure,” Rondeau said. “And you crack it open. With luck, Mr. Death won’t even know something’s missing.”

  Beadle nodded. “Shall I implement this plan?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rondeau said, thinking: Being a leader is pretty sweet. You just say “Do this,” and motherfuckers do it.

  Beadle got Langford and Partridge together and talked to them about building bombs, the more magically potent the better—like fragmentation weapons filled with charmed shrapnel, shit like that. Between Partridge’s skill for destruction and Langford’s technical know-how, Rondeau had hope they’d put together something good. He sat back, grinning. He had a good crew. They had a plan. This was going to work.

  “That was fun. Now I’d like to see where Marla lives,” Death said, emerging from a shoddy room in Ernesto’s brothel. “I can’t believe she doesn’t have a throne somewhere.” Ayres sat out front with the madam. They’d been discussing the good old days when Felport was still an industrial juggernaut and there was a thriving air force base bringing in lots of business for the girls. Booth was pacing out front in the evening air, frustrated that he couldn’t have sex, that he didn’t even want to have sex, though he’d been quite the ladies’ man in life—he had an illusory human form, but underneath, he was all mummy.

  “Of course,” Ayres said, stifling a yawn. Death didn’t sleep. “It’s near the waterfront. Though I doubt she has a throne, my lord.”

  “Ah, well,” Death said, cheerful, his assignation having put him in a good mood. “Too bad. Maybe she has something good, though.”

  B was waiting for them at the airport, standing beside a vintage roadster parked in the white zone. He looked scruffily handsome, as always, but a lot less tired than the last time Marla had seen him. Marla embraced him, and he hugged her hard.

  Stepping back, she said, “B, this is Pelham; Pelham, this is Bradley Bowman.” She looked his car over. “Nice wheels.”

  “It belongs to Cole,” B said. “I can’t believe it still runs, but that’s magic for you.” He glanced around. “Listen, we should probably get out of here and haul ass for the East Bay, okay? Susan Wellstone won’t be happy if she finds out you’re here.”

  Marla snorted. Susan had been her biggest rival in Felport, before she came out west to take control of San Francisco. “My visit doesn’t have shit to do with her. Thinks the wor
ld revolves around her.”

  “Yeah, well, nevertheless,” B said. “I know you like looking for trouble, but I get the feeling you must have trouble enough already, yeah?”

  “I guess I’m pretty well stocked trouble-wise just now. Let’s ride.” Marla hopped in the passenger seat, and Pelham squeezed into the backseat, which was just about big enough for him.

  “I’m gonna head south,” B said. “Then cut back across to the East Bay. It’s a longer trip, but it gets us out of the city faster.”

  “San Francisco is hostile territory?” Pelham said. “Oh, dear.”

  “Susan doesn’t have a compelling reason to assassinate me anymore,” Marla said, “but I imagine she might give it a try for old times’ sake. So, are we going straight to the train? I need to get moving.”

  “We won’t make it tonight,” B said, driving away from the airport, past a vast dark expanse of water, onto a freeway with only sparse traffic.

  “What the hell? You’ve got a timetable for the mystery train?”

  “It came a little after midnight last time,” B said, shrugging. “After the train station was closed. I’ve got a feeling it’ll come at the same time tonight.”

  “Local time is a bit after 12 A.M.,” Pelham said, and yawned, as if realizing how late it was made him tired.

  “And we’re a long way out from the train station we need,” B said. “I mean, maybe any train station will work, maybe it’s about who’s waiting, and not where, but I figure our best shot is to replicate my last experience, right?”

  “Right,” Marla said, leaning back. “Damn it. Twenty-four hours lost? I can’t afford that kind of time.”

  “I kind of wanted to talk to you about Cole anyway,” B said. “And about me, for that matter.”

  “Problems with Cole?” B’s teacher, Sanford Cole, was a legendary sorcerer who’d been present for the founding of San Francisco and served as court magician for the Emperor Norton in the late 1800s. He’d put himself into a state of suspended animation, vowing to return to consciousness only when San Francisco was threatened. Last year, when Marla was in town on unrelated business, San Francisco had very nearly been destroyed, and Cole had awakened and come to her for help in saving his city. He’d decided to stay awake afterward in order to teach B how to use his powers, and help him become a full-fledged sorcerer, instead of just a guy who had prophetic dreams and waking nightmares.