Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  Hummingbirds swooped down to block her blow. When her blade hit the birds there should have been blood, and feathers, and the sudden cessation of swiftly humming wings, but instead her dagger spun out of her grip as if she’d tried to stab some viciously whirling piece of heavy machinery. She looked at the birds, which looked back at her with a thousand pairs of tiny black eyes, then went for her blade, which was now lying in the dirt by the tree line.

  “Shit,” Rondeau said. “They’re tough little mothers, aren’t they?”

  Finch, meanwhile, had transformed into a bear. He looked wholly natural among the trees, with Mutex as the obvious interloper—and obvious prey. Finch had two feet of height on the skinny magician as he stood upright and roaring, his fur bristling and matted. He dropped to all fours and advanced on Mutex, ready to maul him, or eat his entrails, or do whatever it was angry bears did to the objects of their anger. Marla had never observed a grizzly up close, only behind bars at the zoo, where they had a fat old one that mostly slept. She was curious to see what sort of damage Finch would do when he killed Mutex. Marla hoped that once the skinny sorcerer was dead, the hummingbirds would revert to more natural behavior, and either drop the Cornerstone or be dragged down by its weight—at the very least, whatever protective spell Mutex had cast on them would be broken, and she could dispose of the birds in a straightforward fashion.

  Mutex smirked as he watched Finch approach. It was an expression Marla would be glad to see clawed off his face, though it worried her. Mutex clearly thought he had some trick in reserve, but Finch as a bear was more formidable than either a sorcerer or a wild animal. He had all his magical abilities—at least, those that didn’t require good pronunciation—in addition to claws, teeth, and a physical constitution unmatched in nature. Bears were symbols of tremendous strength and ferocity, and Finch now embodied that symbol.

  Mutex lifted the lid from his wicker basket and, in an almost casual gesture, tipped its contents out on the ground.

  At first, Marla thought he was dumping out gold nuggets, a cascade of small, shining yellow objects, but then she saw them moving, and recognized them for what they were—tiny yellow frogs, like the one that had hopped out of Lao Tsung’s mouth.

  Well. That question was settled. Unless there was another sorcerer running a frog show in town, which seemed unlikely, Mutex was the one who’d killed Lao Tsung—doubtless after torturing him to find out the location of the Cornerstone. Hardly surprising, but it was nice to have confirmation.

  The frogs did not attack Finch; they did not appear to take any notice of him at all. They simply spread out on the ground, hopping about randomly, bumping into one another, still disoriented by being dumped from the basket. The basket, Marla noted, was still full to the brim with squirming frogs, which meant there was some topological crumpling going on inside there, too; it was possible Mutex had a whole miniature ecosystem inside, filled with poisonous frogs.

  Finch, still on four legs, tried to retreat from the frogs, clearly recognizing them for what they were—tiny hopping biohazards. Deadly poison with legs.

  “Look out!” Rondeau called, but it was too late. Finch’s rear left leg came down on top of a frog, and he roared, lifting his paw and shaking it, stumbling in the process and brushing against several more of the frogs. He gave a nearly human scream, and did an ineffectual hop of his own, as if trying to jump clear of the widening pool of frogs, but he only landed on more of them.

  Rondeau started forward, but Marla laid a restraining hand on his arm. The frogs were spreading out throughout the whole clearing now, scores of them, spotting the grass and churned dirt like yellow wildflowers, and Finch was surrounded. Rondeau and Marla couldn’t help him. The frogs were like mobile land mines. Finch stumbled about, swiping at the frogs, but his strikes grew slower and slower, his movements more sluggish. Even his magically enhanced bear’s constitution failed to stand up to the frogs for more than a few seconds, and Marla thought about the welts that had risen up on Lao Tsung’s dead body—just how poisonous were these creatures? Marla felt a pang for Finch—he’d been a bastard, true, but she’d respected his power, and, ultimately, he’d acknowledged hers. That was as close to friendship as most sorcerers could afford to come.

  Mutex watched Finch lurch about and die by degrees. The skinny sorcerer nodded thoughtfully, as if he were attending a lecture on fiscal policy or civic planning. Marla drew her non-magical, workaday dagger and held it by the blade between her thumb and forefinger. The knife wasn’t weighted for throwing, but at this distance, with sufficient force, she could probably wound Mutex grievously in the throat. She drew back her arm and, in a smooth motion that would have pleased Lao Tsung, let the dagger fly.

  Before the knife went a foot, it struck a hummingbird. The animal had intercepted the blade in a blur of ruby wings, moving faster than Marla’s eyes could follow. The knife bounced back and gouged a divot in the ground at Marla’s feet. The bird hovered for a moment, unharmed, and looked at her with tiny black eyes, then flashed away to rejoin the flock that was slowly but steadily carrying the Cornerstone away.

  Marla looked to Mutex, who waved farewell and turned away. Finch was now an unmoving heap of brown fur, sprawled on his side among the frogs. The Cornerstone drifted after Mutex, into the trees.

  “Want me to Curse?” Rondeau said, but Marla shook her head. It was too dangerous, too unpredictable, especially with so many lethal creatures nearby. The frogs still hopped, some of them jumping on Finch’s dead bear-body. Marla looked after Mutex, but he’d vanished. The birds were gone, too, and the stone with them, all hidden by the folded space around the island. She couldn’t follow them, either. The frogs made the clearing impassable, and if she went into the trees to skirt around them, she’d just be wrapped up in folded space herself, and might even wind up farther away from Mutex than she was now. When things got non-Euclidean, there was little hope of hot pursuit.

  “We should leave,” she said, but she stood still for a moment anyway. Because where would she go once she left this island? How would she track down Mutex and the Cornerstone? In her own city, she had access to innumerable contacts and wielded considerable influence. She had seers, sibyls, and oracles, and while their information might be obscure and cryptic, she could usually glean something useful from it, especially when she sought more than one reading, engaging in a sort of psychic triangulation. But here in San Francisco…the only person she could ask for help now was a snake god who hated her guts, and besides, he didn’t know how this city worked, who the players were, or how to find the sort of people who were good at finding people. Sure, she could tell Ch’ang Hao to find and kill Mutex, and he’d do it eventually, but gods worked on their own timetable, and he wouldn’t do it fast enough.

  Marla would have to wander around, try to sniff out magic, try to find other sorcerers and tell them about Mutex, and convince them he was a real threat. But she didn’t have time. Susan wouldn’t wait. She was putting her spell together, making the proper arrangements, and preparing to loosen the couplings of reality and seize control of Felport. Marla had to find the Cornerstone, and soon.

  “Um, frogs, Marla,” Rondeau said, and, indeed, they were still there, still spreading, hopping incuriously in their direction.

  “Shit,” Marla said. Because, yes, the frogs—even if she did manage to track down Mutex, she had to contend with his toxic menagerie, didn’t she? Tiny killer frogs were rather outside her realm of expertise. Still, Mutex didn’t fear them, which meant there had to be some antidote, or antivenom, or charm—something. If she could find out how to protect herself from the frogs, she would at least stand a chance when she went up against him. Maybe if she wore her cloak with the white side out, its healing powers surrounding her, then the frogs wouldn’t hurt her…but one look at Finch, turned into a feast for flies, convinced her otherwise. The cloak’s healing powers wouldn’t make her any tougher than a sorcerer with the totemic power of a bear, and Finch hadn’t lasted long.

&nb
sp; “Let’s go,” Marla said. She still had the frog she’d found by the gallery, safely wrapped in a plastic bag. The frogs probably couldn’t survive for long outside the steamy, magically balanced environment inside Mutex’s wicker basket. If she could just find someone knowledgeable, get some information…maybe she could get Langford to fly out here. Though without access to his lab and library, she wasn’t sure the biomancer would be able to tell her anything. She couldn’t think of anything else, though. She didn’t know any San Francisco area frog-experts.

  “That sucks about Finch,” Rondeau said, subdued. “He should have climbed a tree or something.”

  “I think that’s only black bears,” Marla said, recalling a special she’d seen on television.

  “Sucks,” Rondeau repeated. They went down the hill in silence. “So I guess we have to go after this Mutex guy now,” he said.

  “Looks like it.”

  “I might have to invest in some of those rubber hip-waders, then. It didn’t look like those frogs could jump very high.”

  “That’s a good idea, until they get down in your boots and you can’t get them out.”

  “You make a good point,” Rondeau said.

  The trip back through folded space was quicker than the trip in, as was often the case. She and Rondeau passed over the bridge, which was flickering and fading from view, but still solid underfoot. They stepped out of the shimmer of obscurement, into ordinary air.

  Bradley Bowman was there, sitting on a white-and-red checked blanket in the grass just ten feet away, reading a yellowed paperback with the cover torn off. He looked up, shaded his eyes, and nodded.

  “Hi there,” he said. “I hear you need to see a man about a frog.”

  Marla stared at him, this ignorant seer with his fuzzy dreams and annoying persistence, and then began to laugh. “Yes,” she said, eventually, when she was done laughing. “I do.”

  Bradley stood up, bundling his blanket into a wad under one arm. “Come on, then,” he said. “We have to go across the bay.”

  9

  B radley and Rondeau sat slumped in the train car, while Marla stood holding a handrail. “How did you know where to find us this morning?” she asked. “Another dream?”

  B shook his head. “I consulted a—I think it was the ghost of a demon—that I found in a Dumpster, and it told me to find you at a sweet red hill in a lake—Strawberry Hill. I had another dream, too, but this time it was about you, looking at a dead frog through a magnifying glass, then smashing the glass in frustration. So I had some idea of what you needed help with.” He shrugged. “I know where you can find out about frogs, so I thought I’d better come find you.”

  Marla nodded. “These dreams—you interpret them yourself?”

  He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Not always. There’s a…spirit I consult.”

  “The one in the Dumpster?”

  “No, a different one. Lives in a sewer grate. Except it doesn’t ‘live’ exactly. ‘Haunts’ might be a better term.”

  “I see.” She considered her next question carefully. “Exactly how many ghosts, demons, and spirits do you know?”

  B shrugged. “It’s not like I’m friendly with them. But when I need to know something, I can usually find someone—some thing—to ask. So lots, I guess.”

  Marla crossed her legs at the ankle and leaned away from him, her arms still holding the grab-rail overhead. She looked at B, trying to activate her spirit eyes, but a headache blossomed just behind her forehead right away—she’d been peering too closely at too many improbable things lately. It was unlikely she’d see anything in him anyway. He really was just a low-grade seer…but maybe he was something more, too. It was possible that B had a kind of power she’d only heard about secondhand, something her spirit eyes wouldn’t be able to discern anyway. If she was right, Bowman could be very useful to her. But that could wait. The first thing she needed to do was find out about the frogs.

  After several stops, and a dark journey through the tunnel under the bay, B stood up and said, “This is it.” They stepped off the train and took an escalator up a level, into a domed area, and then exited the train station. As always when Marla emerged from an underground place into the light, she felt a sense of new possibilities, as if she’d returned from the underworld and brought back secrets. There was power even in symbolic journeys.

  B led them outside, to a paved parking lot bordered at the far end by a busy street. “Welcome to Berkeley.”

  “Huh,” Rondeau said, making a great show of looking around. “Where are the hippies?”

  “On Telegraph Avenue, up by the university,” B said. “Nowhere near here. This is North Berkeley. And we’re headed to West Berkeley, so I hope you like walking.”

  “I do,” Marla said. “And Rondeau will do it anyway.”

  “Don’t you people believe in cabs?” Rondeau said.

  “Anybody could be driving a cab,” Marla said, and Rondeau sighed; it was a very old argument between them. They walked in silence, Marla falling into pace with B’s easy gait. He was a good walker. Marla decided to pry a little. “When did you start hearing things, seeing things, having dreams?”

  “After I quit working in the movies.” He laughed. “When I stopped making illusions, I started to see the truth. I thought I was crazy at first, but eventually I got tired of thinking I was crazy. It seemed like insanity should be more…volatile. Mostly I just wandered around, seeing stuff, talking to things. It freaked me out, but it’s not like aliens were telling me to kill politicians or kidnap children, you know? The things I talked to just answered my questions. So I decided I wasn’t crazy.”

  Marla grunted. Most seers were crazy, by any conventional standard, and B was something both more and less than a seer. “There wasn’t any trauma that might have triggered your powers? Something physical, or emotional, some upheaval?”

  In her short time with B, Marla had grown used to his natural warmth. His charisma had doubtless helped him in his career as an actor, and his descent into half-magical dereliction had not made him any less sympathetic and approachable. Now he closed up, his face becoming stony, a nearly physical wave of cold radiating from him.

  “You should read the tabloids, Marla,” Rondeau said. “Is…ah, B, do you mind if I…?”

  “Whatever,” B said. “The whole world knows.” He walked faster, putting some distance between them, enough that he didn’t have to listen.

  Marla fell into step beside Rondeau. “Well?”

  “B had a lover,” Rondeau said. “I forget his name. He wasn’t an actor or anything, just some guy. Anyway, they used to party a lot together, get drunk, go out, do drugs. But one night, in some empty lot, B’s lover overdosed on something and died right there in front of him, puking up blood and everything. That’s when B’s career went to hell. After a pretty serious binge, he went into rehab for a while, and when he came out, people thought his career would get back on track. Not long after that he tried to strangle the director on his new movie, and that was it for his career. That was six or seven years ago, I think.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Rondeau shrugged. “When you’re a kid living on the streets, the sordid lives of celebrities have an unusual allure. And I sometimes read those shitty newspapers I used for bedding.”

  B slowed down and resumed walking with them. “I didn’t try to strangle the director,” he said, in a resigned tone. “He was hag-ridden. There was this monster clinging to his neck, like a lamprey, and it was sucking out his blood or his mental emanations or something and filling him with poison, making him mean, turning him into a monster himself. Nobody else could see the monster, but after H—that was my lover, I called him H—died, I could see all sorts of shit. H—or his ghost—told me how to kill the monster, so that’s what I did, I soaked my hands in a potion of ditch water and belladonna that enabled me to touch insubstantial things, and I choked the monster to death. Everybody thought I was trying to kill the director. I didn�
��t care, though. Nobody pressed charges—I think on some level the director knew I’d saved him, but it must have been deep in his subconscious, because he sure screamed when he fired me—and I didn’t want to be an actor anymore anyway.” He shrugged.

  “So all this started after H died,” Marla said.

  B nodded.

  “And you still talk to him? To H?”

  B shook his head sharply. “Fuck, no. I talk to his ghost, an echo, an afterimage. It’s not the real H.”

  “Good,” Marla said, relieved. “I just wanted to make sure you understood the difference.” Just as she now had a better understanding of what had happened to him. The shock of seeing his lover die had knocked something loose in B’s head. It happened that way sometimes—when old worlds fell apart, new worlds opened up. But in B’s case, it was possible that something more profound had happened. It wasn’t just his perception that had changed. The way he affected the world changed. Now where Bradley Bowman went, wonders and terrors followed. Maybe.

  And if “maybe” turned into “definitely,” Marla was sure she could come up with some use for those powers.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence, past houses crowded shoulder to shoulder, with tiny lawns and neat fences, until they reached a commercial district. “There,” B said, and pointed to a sign that read “East Bay Vivarium.”

  “Ah,” Marla said. “I see.”

  They went into a spacious, cluttered store. Glass terrariums on metal shelves lined the dark walls, and the sound of bubbling humidifiers registered faintly in Marla’s hearing. B led them around several freestanding shelves, past tanks full of turtles, lazy snakes, huge scorpions, and lizards.

  “God, this is like Langford’s lab,” Rondeau said. “Creepy-crawlies everywhere. Is this some kind of zoo annex?”

  “It’s a pet store,” Marla said. She peered into a large tank inhabited by half a dozen water dragons, leaping from artificial tree branches to the walls of the tank and back again. Another held a huge iguana, the size of a small dog, resting on a rock, its tongue flicking slowly in and out. She moved on to an open-topped tank filled with water and rocks. Tiny pinkish lizards with slick skin sat on the rocks, staring up at her. Another tank held small frogs. Not like the one in her bag—these were green, with bulging eyes, and toes with round suckers on the ends, and they clung to a branch in the tank. Still, she supposed they’d come to the right place.