Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  But Susan would try again. Because, in truth, Susan’s will was not a weak thing, and once the inevitable bout of self-doubt had passed, she could gather her strength and cast the spell against Marla again. Marla had another day, perhaps, to secure the Cornerstone, her only hope to thwart Susan permanently.

  “My rival, Susan, tried to cast a spell last night,” Marla said.

  “The spell to depose you, which will lead to the downfall of your city? That spell?”

  “Ah, right, I told you about that on the ferry yesterday.”

  “True. Though Rondeau told me most of it before then, actually, while we were on Bethany’s train, before we found the freezer full of hearts.”

  “I can’t leave that boy alone for five minutes,” she said, and then came a pang, because Rondeau was probably being tortured right now, and she couldn’t save him. She couldn’t. Like she’d told him before, if it were within her power to save both Rondeau and herself, she would. But if she had to choose between them, she would choose to save herself. Killing Mutex and retrieving the Cornerstone were the only ways to do that. Saving Rondeau from the Celestial instead would only be putting off his death anyway, since once Mutex raised Tlaltecuhtli, they would all die. Gods, this city. It had killed Lao Tsung, and now it threatened to kill Rondeau. She would destroy the Celestial when this was done, make him suffer a thousand times whatever he inflicted on Rondeau, but that thought was no comfort at all; it was just what she owed Rondeau for his friendship and service, and it wouldn’t bring him back to her.

  “So Susan’s spell didn’t work?” B said.

  Marla blinked. “No. I doubt the spell failed. Susan is a craftsman, and anal-retentive as hell. She wouldn’t try to cast a spell without making a list and checking it twice, dotting her i’s and crossing her t’s and other such metaphors. She’s a perfectionist, in the truest sense of that word—she does things perfectly. No, the spell worked, only it didn’t work, because I wasn’t here for it to work on.” Marla began to do a simple knife kata with her dagger, working out the kinks from a night of sleeping rough in a score of different worlds.

  B’s eyes widened, even as he stepped back, well away from her flashing knife. “She cast the spell while we were in another universe,” B said. “So it didn’t affect you!”

  “Oh, it gets better,” Marla said, producing another dagger (this one was simple steel and wood, but weighted to match her dagger of office) and beginning a more complex two-knife kata, weaving a net of glittering steel. “Did Rondeau mention what Susan’s spell was supposed to do to me?”

  “No.”

  “Because he didn’t know. I keep secrets. It’s a habit. Sorcerers need secrets the way fishmongers need fish. But there’s no good reason not to tell you, and it’s funny, so: Susan’s spell is supposed to delete me from this universe.” That phrase—“delete me”—was the one her consiglieri, Hamil, had used when warning Marla of Susan’s plot, but now it reminded Marla of mad Dalton’s notion of the world as computer simulation. Maybe the other worlds they’d traveled to were other simulations, running on vastly powerful networked computers. After a moment, Marla decided that the idea wasn’t really all that interesting. Whether the universe was a computer simulation or not, it was still a world of concrete, sewage, and unexpected moments of grace—debating the nature of reality didn’t change the fact that she had to live in it.

  “Delete you?” B said.

  “Erase me,” Marla said, tossing her knives up and catching them before starting another routine. “Snip me out of the tapestry of reality like a snagged thread. See, even if she killed me—assuming she could, which she couldn’t—that wouldn’t necessarily help her take over the city, even though she’s the strongest sorcerer there, apart from me. She’d have to deal with my vengeful associates, and possibly my very psychotic ghost, so instead she wants to cast a spell to cut me out of the world entirely. It’s big bad magic, subtle and strange. First, the real, physical me will vanish, poof. Then, slowly, the other proofs of my existence will fade away. Within two weeks my friends will forget about me; within three weeks my enemies will. The things I’ve done in my life won’t be undone, but every record and memory of who did those things will grow vague and eventually disappear. Soon I’ll even drift out of people’s dreams. And I won’t even have a ghost, because I won’t die, I’ll just stop being alive. And if, gods forbid, there’s an afterlife, I won’t see it. I’ll just be gone.”

  B stared at her as she spoke. “Marla,” he said. “You really deal with hard people, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, thinking, And I’m the hardest one of all. “So Susan tried to wipe me away, break my ties to the world, but since I’d already left this world, there was nothing for the spell to work on, so it just…fizzled.”

  “Has anyone ever done this spell before? No, never mind—you don’t know, right? How could you know?” He laughed, harshly. “That’s the whole point.”

  Marla wondered what would happen to B’s movies if someone cast an erasure on him. Would they be unchanged? Would he be replaced in all footage by a star of a similar age, or some forgettable character actor?

  More pointless mental meandering. She usually kept her thoughts in better order than that, especially in times of crisis, but she supposed she was just trying to avoid thinking about Rondeau being tied up somewhere—though not at the sorcerer’s shop, not yet. Nowhere Marla would be able to find him. She returned her attention to B. “We assume the spell has been done before. It’s tough to perform, but no harder than half a dozen other spells of such magnitude. It takes about a year of steady prep work—I’m talking hours of meditation every day—which is why my spies had time to discover that Susan was planning it. Even so, I cut it close.”

  “Will it be another year before Susan can try again?”

  Marla flipped a dagger in the air and caught it. “I wish. No, she can do it again in a day or so, once she replaces the spell components that were consumed in the casting, and gives herself over to more meditation.” So that was what the Possible Witch had meant. If Susan had eaten a bit of bad fish, spent the night puking, and delayed her spell until this morning, Marla would have been back in this world, and the spell would have worked on her. “So I’ve got to move fast to get the Cornerstone.”

  “And the Cornerstone is useful because…?”

  “Good to see Rondeau exercised some discretion. The stone is an artifact, a sort of…magnifying glass and industrial-strength fixative for spells. It makes magic stronger, and it’s especially useful for binding spells, and making things last forever. It’s also handy for overcoming the inertia of reality.”

  B looked at her blankly.

  Marla made a vague hand motion. “Reality is pretty resilient. You can bend it, but it always snaps back into shape. That’s why magical gold turns back into leaves and cow patties after a while—magic bends the rules of the world, but it can’t break them. With the Cornerstone, you can bend reality to the breaking point, and do all sorts of things. Like make yourself live forever. Really forever, not just a long time, like my friend Lao Tsung lived. Fortunately, most people who are powerful enough to brew up magic like that are smart enough not to try it. The ones who do go for eternal life usually get about a century past their normal life span and then go bat-shit crazy. They’ll still be floating around in space when all the stars have burned out, poor bastards. You can do other things with a Cornerstone, in theory.”

  “Like bring a god back to life?”

  Marla nodded. “Unfortunately. You have to bend reality a lot to get it to accept a giant frog-monster whose mouth opens onto the Land of the Dead. But Mutex can push things that far, with the Cornerstone.”

  “So what are you planning to do with it?”

  “I’m going to use the Cornerstone to bind myself to this world, and I mean bind. Hell, after I cast the binding, I doubt even a visit to the Possible Witch would be able to shift me. I probably couldn’t even get to her temple, since it’s outside o
f this reality—so yeah, there are drawbacks. It’s a hell of a sacrifice, actually. I won’t be able to enter folded space anymore, like the Chinese guy’s shop. But I’ll be erasure-proof, so it’ll be worth it. And then I’ll deal with Susan.”

  “Wait,” B said. “Didn’t you say that if Susan succeeded in casting her spell, it would doom your city to destruction? But it sounds like it would only doom you.”

  Marla tucked her daggers away. She was sweating now, and her head felt clearer. “It would bring doom down on Felport. Because I’m the only one qualified to look after my city. All the other sorcerers, those bitches and sons of same, are incompetent or power-hungry or paranoid to one degree or another, and if any one of them—Susan included—took over, the whole damn place would fall apart. No one else can strike the perfect balance of fear, loyalty, obligations, and threats that I do to keep business and magic running smoothly. Most other chief sorcerers can’t even leave their cities without risking a coup, but look at me—I can go away for a few days, and the only thing I have to worry about is being edited out of existence. Most of the other sorcerers hate me, but they know I’m the one who keeps things running smoothly, and they accept it. Except for Susan. She was always too ambitious for her own good.”

  “Ah,” B said. “So it’s more of an indirect sort of certain doom that faces your city in your absence.”

  Marla shrugged. “Destruction is destruction. Believe me, I know.” She sat on the bed, stretching, working the last of the knots out of her shoulders and neck.

  After a few moments of silence, B said, “You’re not going to rescue Rondeau, are you?”

  “I can’t. If I do, Mutex gets away, and I don’t get the Cornerstone, and I disappear. Which will be lucky for me, what with a raging frog-monster and resurrected warriors destroying everything in my absence.”

  “Rondeau is your friend.”

  “Best one I’ve ever had,” she said. “My brother in arms.” I’m the hardest one of all.

  “I’m going to save him, then,” B said.

  Marla considered possible responses to that. “Oh, good,” she said at last. “That way two of my friends will die.”

  “I’m your friend?”

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth. Which, as you know now, isn’t much, at least not under these circumstances.”

  “It’s a lot better than being your enemy,” B said. “I have to go save him.”

  “I’ll bring flowers to your funeral.” B didn’t answer. “Why do you have to save him? I admire your—I don’t know, your pluck—but why do you have to?”

  “Because I saw Rondeau in a dream, too,” B said quietly. “And if he dies, you fail, and Mutex succeeds, and this city, and then the rest of the world, falls.”

  “Oh,” Marla said. “You might have mentioned this before.”

  He shrugged. “It was just last night. It was one of those dreams, and I haven’t found a ghost to interpret it, but it was pretty clear. Rondeau dying, and then you dying, and me, and everybody.”

  “So the fate of the world depends on Rondeau? It just seems so…unlikely.” And maybe it was a lie. B was an actor, and they were, by nature, convincing liars. Maybe B was just trying to convince her to save Rondeau. Then again, he hadn’t given her cause to mistrust him yet, and it wasn’t hard to envision a situation when a quick Curse or a knife-thrust from Rondeau could affect things significantly.

  But how could she save him? Who could she bring in? There was no time to fly anyone into the city, not even time to find local talent, assuming Mutex hadn’t killed or frightened off all the sorcerers in the Bay Area. B was willing to try to save Rondeau, but he was a seer, not a soldier. How could he possibly—

  Marla thought of a way. A dangerous, stupid, terrible way. The only way.

  She unclipped the silver stag beetle pin from her throat, and removed her white-and-purple cloak. “Put this on,” she said. “You won’t be able to use it very well, no more than you could use a katana properly if a samurai handed the sword over to you, but I can teach you enough to keep you from chopping off your feet. And, in truth, it’s more like a machine gun than a katana. If you aim it with a little care, the weapon will do most of the work.”

  B didn’t move to touch the cloak. “I saw what you became when you wore that,” he said. “You became a…thing. Like a jaguar made of darkness. Like a bruise with teeth.”

  “Only while the purple is showing,” Marla said. “The white makes you an angel, heals you, keeps you strong. The purple…” She shrugged. “Darkness. Teeth. Yes. All the ugly things you have to be, sometimes, to defeat things that are even uglier. Like I said on Bethany’s train, we’re past simple things like good and bad, and into the realm of the practical. There’s more to it than that. After you use the cloak, a little bit of what makes you human is pushed down, suppressed—it might even wear a little bit of your humanity away permanently. I’ve used the cloak dozens of times over the years, often enough to be frightened of using it more, but if you use it once or twice, it shouldn’t damage you forever.” At least, I don’t think so.

  B took the cloak and let it drape over his arm, the white showing, the purple lining only visible in glimpses. “Teach me,” he said.

  “Okay,” Marla said. “Only we’d better do this on the roof. I don’t want to have to pay for damage to the room.”

  On the roof of the hotel, B was magnificent, except he wasn’t; the cloak was magnificent. Anyone wearing the purple would become a minor god of death and movement, a flitting dark shadow with the sinuous lines of a jungle cat, blurred by a soft-focus nimbus of shadow, and so it was with B, attacking the light-ghosts Marla conjured for him to practice against, dancing figures that resembled Marla herself, but drawn with strokes of lemony light. Marla had only once seen another wear the cloak, when the undying bird-mage Somerset took it from her briefly, but now that she wasn’t in particular fear for her life, she could admire the artifact’s terrible beauty.

  B learned the rudiments of control easily, how to reverse the cloak from white to purple with a single focused thought. Marla could clothe herself in the purple without the intervention of her conscious mind, as an instantaneous reaction to dangers ascertained by the workings of her subconscious alone, but B would not wear the cloak long enough to develop such an affinity, nor would he learn the many subtle techniques for directing the ruthless, murderous efficiency of the cloak’s effects. Marla had practiced long enough, grown into the cloak thoroughly enough, that while wearing the purple she could actually stop herself from killing someone who had threatened her life. B would have no such control—whatever enemy crossed his path while he wore the purple would be shredded beyond repair, and B’s body would be used roughly in the process, his joints twisting, muscles twanging under incredible pressure, tissue ripping. The first time Marla had used the cloak, she’d dislocated both shoulders and one kneecap, and cracked her collarbone, experiencing several long moments of nauseating agony before the healing properties of the cloak’s white side took effect, soothing her pains and straightening her disarranged limbs.

  That was the cloak’s perfection—to transform its wearer into a killing machine, using the body’s resources up nearly to the point of the wearer’s death, and then, in the aftermath, healing the wearer. The power was awesome, the loss of self-will terrifying, and that combination of awe and terror had led Marla to gradually give up using the cloak, though she’d found its use both intoxicating and comforting for many years, and she had some sense of the thrill B must be feeling now, as he leapt about on the hotel’s black roof, shredding Marla’s barely material doppelgangers into wisps of dissipating light. When B landed (on all fours, scarcely recognizable as a human, more a twilight-colored catlike thing with golden eyes), no longer confronted with obvious enemies, he caught a glimpse of Marla, and turned toward her, tensing to leap.

  Marla prepared herself, whispering an opening invocation, preparatory to a nasty spell that she hoped she wouldn’t have to use. She could sto
p him from hurting her if he tried, but it would take an effort, and it would probably be noisy, and might even leave them both unconscious for an hour or so. But she had to test this—to see whether, in the full heat of frenzy, B could recognize her as an ally, and prevent himself from attacking her. Marla herself had occasionally had trouble with that distinction, but she suspected the tendency to attack her friends while wearing the cloak had something to do with her own deep and fundamental mistrust of everything outside herself. B was a more trusting person—oddly, since he saw more clearly than most—and she had reason to hope that he would make the adjustment more quickly than she had.

  B didn’t attack her. Instead, the purple shimmered, becoming opalescent, then fading to the soft snow-bank whiteness of the cloak’s benevolent side. B lay sprawled on the rooftop, wrapped up in white, his hair mussed. He grunted, and Marla saw his twisted shoulder move back into place seemingly of its own volition. He looked up at her, and it wasn’t B behind those startling blue eyes, not now—it was something cold and inhuman, sizing her up, perhaps wondering how she would taste, wondering if there was any advantage in killing her. He started to get up, and Marla pressed down on his shoulders. “Shh,” she said, and after a moment he stopped pushing against her, and the coldness in his eyes receded.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “That was like being some kind of psychotic superhero. I felt like Spider-Man on angel dust.”

  Marla crouched beside him so they could talk more easily—he wouldn’t be able to stand up for another few minutes, probably. She understood his enjoyment—there were few things more intoxicating than physical power. Because she knew the thrill he was feeling, and because she knew he was a good listener and would understand the importance of this without having the words shouted into him, she spoke gently: “Yes, but Spider-Man just ties up the bad guys and leaves them for the police. You’re not going to do that, B. Mercy and restraint won’t even be an option. Do you understand?”

  There was a pop as his elbow straightened itself, but he didn’t wince, only nodded. “Right,” he said, subdued. “I’m going to kill someone, aren’t I?”