Grim Tides (Marla Mason)

by Pratt, T. A.

  They finally reached the beach, a strip of off-white sand dotted with palm trees, between the ocean on one side and an old royal fish pond the size of a small lake on the other. Marla broke a carefully rotted egg against a palm tree’s trunk as they arrived, casting a psychically-stinky keep-away spell to make the few tourists on the beach decide something unpleasant had died in the vicinity. Marla hoped the impression wouldn’t turn out to be prophetic. There were a couple of boats in the distance, but they were way out, and, Marla hoped, wouldn’t come drifting into a confrontation.

  Once the place was deserted, Marla shaded her eyes and looked out to sea. A woman on a surfboard a few dozen yards out raised her hand in greeting, and as the waves moved another half-a-dozen figures sitting on boards were revealed – she spotted Reva among them, as well as the kid from Handsome Bob’s who’d taken them to Jaws beach. They were all in place. Marla hoped devoutly she wouldn’t need to use them.

  “Okay, take out her gag,” Marla said. “No reason to make Jarrow think we’re mistreating her protege.”

  “I want my axe back,” Nicolette said sullenly, once Pelham pulled the cloth out of her mouth. “You didn’t have any right to take that, I stole it fair and square.”

  “I gave it to my boyfriend,” Marla lied. “He lives in hell. He’ll keep it safe. You’re not old enough to be trusted with sharp things, Nicolette.”

  “Just because Elsie decided you get to live doesn’t mean I agree,” Nicolette said.

  “Seriously, Nicolette, get a hobby,” Rondeau said. “Take up underwater basket weaving, or start crafting detachable steampunk prosthetic arms. Move on with your life. You’re, like, a b-grade villain. If they made a superhero movie out of Marla’s life, you wouldn’t get a role until the fourth movie, and even then, it would be as part of a team of four other minor bad guys.”

  “Marla’s my nemesis.”

  Marla shook her head. “Not even remotely. I’ve had a few nemeses over the years. They’re all dead now. Why would you want to be one of them?”

  Three figures appeared on the far side of the fish pond, following a path from the beach’s parking area. Elsie Jarrow, unmistakable with her red hair, waved, and then began walking across the surface of the pond. What a cliché. Crapsey walked the long way around with a smaller figure – Pelham! – at his side.

  “Who... who is that with Crapsey?” the faux-Pelham asked, voice strained.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rondeau murmured. “It’s okay.”

  No sign of Jason. Marla couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or glad. He was her brother, but he was also an asshole she barely knew anymore, and what she knew, she didn’t like. Still, she hoped Jarrow hadn’t killed him.

  “Marla!” Jarrow called from halfway across the pond. “I said I’d come, and here I am. I kept an appointment for you! You must know how rare that is.”

  The ring on Marla’s finger seemed suddenly heavier. Marla slipped it off, held it between her thumb and forefinger, and lifted the ring to her right eye, closing her left.

  Through the ring she saw Jarrow, walking across the pond, just a little closer now. Marla let her eye relax, allowing the background to fade out, until she was focused on Jarrow and nothing else. Time around her seemed to slow and flow like cool syrup as Jarrow’s future unspooled in her view, not so much a fast-forward as a series of snapshot impressions: Jarrow in bed with Crapsey, Jarrow on a plane, Jarrow in snowy mountains, Jarrow in a forest, Jarrow on a city street, Jarrow in –

  Wait. She’d recognized a building in that city, the tower of the Whitcroft-Ivory building in downtown Felport. She tried to concentrate her mind and shift her focus, and the view ran backwards, then slowed down. Jarrow standing on a busy sidewalk, face all serenity, with a bundled object under her arm – something wrapped in fur. She unwrapped the object, revealing something like a ram’s horn, but the same red as her hair, and as long as her forearm. Jarrow raised the horn to her mouth and blew. Marla couldn’t hear what it sounded like, of course, but the buildings around Jarrow began to crumble, and the street buckled and cracked. A spidery thing the size of a car pulled itself out of a hole in the street, and dark shapes bigger than any bird swooped across the sky. Something as broad as a garbage truck, but walking on two legs, shouldered its way from an alley, shattering bricks as it came. Jarrow threw back her head, laughing, then brought the horn to her lips again.

  Marla slipped the ring back onto her finger. Elsie was approaching, all smiles. She gestured, and the rope fence erected to keep visitors out of the pond fell over with a snapping of fibers and a rapid rotting of wooden posts. Jarrow stepped onto shore, still beaming. Marla forced herself to smile back. Get Pelham first. Then... think about the future.

  “I really did forget about him,” Jarrow said. “I know it sounds like a lie, but why would I lie? It’s the truth. Pelham had some fun, too – did you know his little Nuno infestation had a flare-up? That’s why Crapsey’s face is all scratched up.” She stage-whispered, “Don’t say anything about it, he’s sensitive.”

  “Elsie!” Nicolette called. “You came back for me?”

  “I know! I’m surprised too! But you know what they say about chaos witches – we can’t even be guaranteed to act in our own best interests.”

  Crapsey made it around the pond, leading Pelham with a rope tied to the valet’s wrists. “Here you go,” he said, studiously ignoring Rondeau. “Safe and sound.”

  “Shall we trade?” Jarrow said.

  The faux-Pelham stared open-mouthed at his double, who looked at his own doppelganger with an expression of bemusement. “But... but this... Marla, I don’t understand...” Lupo trailed off.

  Jarrow clucked her tongue. “You didn’t tell him, Marla? So cruel! You’re not Pelham, my boy, you’re Lupo, my dear Lupo, here.” She snapped her fingers, and the fake Pelham sort of... blurred out, becoming a human-shaped beige smear, jittering and twitching on the sand, emitting a constant high-frequency mewling sound. “There, he’s in neutral now. Crapsey, let Pelham go to his friends.”

  “We should get Nicolette first – ”

  “Marla’s honorable,” Jarrow said firmly. “She adheres to her agreements. Doesn’t she?”

  “Unless there’s a compelling reason not to,” Marla said.

  Crapsey sighed and untied Pelham’s wrists. The valet looked at his captor, sniffed once pointedly, and joined Marla and Rondeau. “I’m pleased to be back, ma’am,” he said.

  “Did they hurt you, Pelham?”

  “Only incidentally, in the course of apprehending me after my attempted escape.”

  “Don’t you want to know if they hurt me?” Nicolette said. “They kept me in a shit-filled bathtub and didn’t feed me and – ”

  Rondeau shoved Nicolette toward Jarrow. “Thank you for choosing Hawai’i,” Rondeau said. “We know you have a choice of vacation destinations, and we appreciate your visit.”

  “So, Marla,” Jarrow said. “I know I told you we could drug them and put them on a boat – ”

  “What?” Crapsey said, alarmed.

  Jarrow ignored him. “ – but I’m fond of Crapsey. If I keep him on a leash and make sure he doesn’t bother you or your friends, can I keep him?”

  Marla looked at Rondeau, who shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But what about Nicolette?”

  “Ah, yes.” Jarrow looked Nicolette up and down, then beckoned. Nicolette approached her, eyes downcast like a penitent. “For all the grief I give you, Nicolette, you really are a fairly promising witch. You have the right instinct for mischievous mayhem, but if you could get over your petty vendettas, you’d go a lot farther – don’t you understand, seeking revenge on someone who’s wronged you is so expected. It’s much better to visit harm on those who have no connection to you. Think random, reject causality, do you understand?”

  “So... if I stop trying to go after Marla... you’d respect me more?”

  “I think you’d respect yourself more,” Jarrow said. “What do you say?�
��

  Nicolette shot Marla a venomous glare, then shrugged. “Whatever. I’m really a lot more interested in you than I am in Marla – ”

  “Good girl.” Jarrow seized Nicolette’s head in both hands and twisted it off. There was some magic in the act, as the head separated cleanly from the neck, with only a little blood, and Nicolette’s eyes rolled in confusion and terror for a moment. Her body fell to the sand, and then Jarrow tossed the head over her shoulder, where it disappeared into the depths of the fish pond. “That’s what we do with Nicolette!” Jarrow said. “Consider that my apology for the misunderstanding with Pelham. I know my girl’s been a thorn in your side, and now she’s gone, with no blood on your hands. Yay!”

  “Shit on a biscuit,” Crapsey muttered, staring at the pond, where bubbles rose among the ripples.

  “She’ll lose consciousness and truly die in ten or fifteen minutes, don’t worry,” Jarrow said. “I don’t want her to suffer unduly.”

  WELCOME TO DEATH

  “I can’t say I’m sorry to see her go,” Rondeau said, staring at the water with his doppelganer. “But: that is kinda murder. It seems more evil than chaotic.”

  “Silly,” Jarrow said. “I’m beyond good and evil. Nietzsche wrote a book about me! You should read it.”

  “Okay.” Marla looked at the headless not-quite-a-corpse. “Leaving aside the whole fact that you just beheaded Nicolette... do you happen to have a blood-red ram’s horn?”

  Jarrow cocked her head. “How did you know about that?”

  “You said yourself I have unexpected resources. Tell me about it.”

  Jarrow hmmmed. “It’s not a ram’s horn, first of all. It’s the horn of an animal called a slimestrider, actually. Stupid name, I know. I picked it up in a little imaginary fantasy universe I know. The horn was a gift from a certain Dark Lord Barrow – I think you’ve met him?”

  “That comatose writer in the Blackwing Institute?” Marla said. That was unexpected, but with Jarrow, that was kind of the point. “You went into his hallucinated fantasy world and brought something out?”

  “Oh yes. A great artifact. With another dumb name – the HellHorn, two capital ‘H’s – but Barrow has to name a lot of things, so it’s understandable that he’d run out of ideas. But seriously, how did you know about the horn? I’ve got it all packed up, and I was planning on using it against you if necessary, but, well, it wasn’t.”

  “What does it do?” Marla said.

  Jarrow grinned. “It’s lovely, actually. Barrow came up with a whole mythology for the horn. It’s a weapon, used by countless gods, monsters, heroes, and villains in his fantasy world. Whoever blows the horn summons up the ferocious spirits of everyone else who’s ever blown the horn, on down through the centuries. It must have been disappointing for the first guy to use it, huh? But at this point, it’s got loads of souls attached to it, demons and giants and war-witches and all manner of nasty things. Nothing without lungs or mouths, of course, because they have to be able to blow the horn to get bound to it. That’s a shame, because Barrow has some beaky tentacled things in the oceans of his world that are really marvelous – ”

  “I saw you,” Marla said. “In a vision. Blowing that horn in Felport.”

  Jarrow scratched under her armpit and hummed for a moment. Everyone else – well, except Lupo – stood absolutely still, sensing the tension. After a moment, Jarrow said, “So what if I did? Didn’t they fire you? Kick you out? Send you to this hellish – oh, wait, paradisical – island?”

  “If someone you love stops loving you,” Marla said, “that doesn’t mean you stop loving them back.”

  “A city is not a boyfriend,” Jarrow said. “Are you a crazy stalker?”

  “Love is just another kind of obsession. I can accept that.”

  Jarrow sighed. “What if I promise, double-dog-swear, not to blow the horn in Felport?”

  “You’d just use it somewhere else,” Marla said. “You say your reason for living is to have fun, but you consider destroying people’s lives fun. You’ll unleash hell and laugh. Won’t you?”

  “I’m a very naughty girl,” Jarrow said. “I don’t think I ever claimed otherwise. I can see your sense of righteous indignation has been activated. Fine. What are you going to do about it? Sic Pelham on me? Get your little crew of wave-mages out there on the ocean – hi there, I see you! – to summon a blue whale to crush me? I smell that little god of homesickness out there, too, how pitiful. Are you really so lost without a place to call your own? Me, I’m comfortable in any place at all – wherever I hang my severed head is home. Reva can’t get to me. So tell me, then, what can you do? Ultimately, the answer is nothing – ”

  Marla pulled out Nicolette’s hatchet from where it was tucked into her waistband and swung it in a flat arc at Jarrow’s face. The blade struck hard enough that it should have lopped off the top of Jarrow’s head, but it barely brushed her cheek, drawing a tiny speck of blood, before it rebounded hard and bounced out of Marla’s hand. Oh well. Marla hadn’t expected it to work, but the axe was an artifact, so it had been worth a try. If it had belonged to the great god of order Urizen or something it might have made more of a dent. At least the axe hadn’t melted or burst into flames – she’d refrained from using her own dagger for fear an attack on Jarrow might destroy the weapon.

  Marla’s own cheek stung, of course, but she didn’t let that distract her, or give her pause. She crouched and kicked, sweeping Jarrow’s legs from beneath her, and dropping the witch to the sand. “Rondeau, Pelham, get out of here!” she shouted, and then began running south herself.

  She glanced back. Pelham and Rondeau weren’t running – they’d been drawn into the fight. Damn it. She’d wanted them to get away. But Lupo had transformed into Dr. Husch, and she was attacking Rondeau, while Pelham was crouched on top of Crapsey, squeezing his throat as the bigger man scrabbled at him ineffectually. Jarrow just stood up, head cocked, frowning, then touched her cheek and began walking slowly after Marla.

  The ground underneath her moved, rising up in answer to some spell of Jarrow’s, and Marla was knocked off her feet. She managed to turn her fall into a roll, not quite crashing into a palm tree. She got to her knees and glanced toward the sea. The wave-mages were there, still bobbing. They knew the time had almost come. Marla just hoped they could do their part.

  Marla knelt in the shade of the palm tree and drew her magical dagger. She gently placed the blade, so sharp it could cut through hopes and dreams, a millimeter from her throat. If a powerful artifact like the axe hadn’t hurt Jarrow, there was no reason to think her dagger would, either. But there were other ways to injure the witch.

  “I didn’t peg you for the melodramatic teenager type, Marla.” Jarrow approached, moving slowly, like someone trying to avoid startling a deer. “You know I have to kill you, now. Or, I don’t have to – but I’m going to. That axe might have hurt me, if someone stronger had been wielding it. Not very nice. And they say I’m a betrayer! So... what’s the plan? You’ll stop me from killing you, by killing yourself? A ‘you can’t fire me, I quit,’ sort of thing?”

  “Not exactly.” Marla shrugged, the blade of her magical knife just kissing the flesh of her throat. “You are wearing my body, you know – or at least, a perfect duplicate of my body from a parallel universe. You put a new roof on it and did a little remodeling – though why you’d choose that nose over mine is beyond me – but the genes don’t lie. I’ve spent the morning setting up a sympathetic magic link between us. We’re identical and entangled, now, magically speaking. If I die, you die.”

  Jarrow shook her head. “Bluff, bluff, bluffity bluff. You’re just trying to buy some time, I don’t even know why. Just natural desperation, I guess. You could have done this trick to stop the last person who wore this body, after all, and you didn’t. You let the Mason kill half the sorcerers in your city instead, you were that attached to living. So, no, bzzt, try again.”

  “I had a lot more to live for then.” What would it
be like, Marla thought, to cut her own throat? She’d been wounded plenty of times, but never in the throat, and never by her own hand. The blade Death had forged for her was so sharp she might not even feel the slice. She couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. “I had a city to protect. I had a reason to live. Now, I’ve got nothing. But killing Elsie Jarrow – that would give my stupid fucked-up life meaning again.”

  “Oh, Marla. This is depressing. I thought I was locked in a battle of wills, facing one of the most pigheadedly tough sorcerers of the new generation, but you... you brought a spoon to a gunfight.” Jarrow began piling up sand, the grains heaped and shaped by her hands and her magic into the smooth-sided walls of a sand castle that was more like a squat sand fortress. “They told me you were smart. We considered the suicide-murder-voodoo-hoodoo angle, of course, I mean, we looked at all the contingencies. But when I brought it up, Dr. Husch said, ‘No, of course not, Marla wouldn’t do that, she’s too smart.’ The Doc overestimated you as much as she underestimated me.” Jarrow cupped more sand and let it trickle through her fingers, and it cascaded down to land on top of her squat castle and began to spontaneously form a tall, narrow spire. “Because if you kill this body, Marla, you won’t kill me. You’ll just free me from the bonds of the flesh. Now, it so happens I like the bonds of the flesh, because flesh is full of wonderful nerve endings and exciting hormone-dispensers, and it would be hard for me to replace this body, since most vessels are too weak to contain my awesomeness... but while I’d be sad to lose this body, I’d also be disembodied. And if that happened, oh, I have to tell you, I think I’d probably start going crazy again, and underneath the crazy, there’d be this solid core of pissed-off. This thing, with the knife and the magical link between us and all that, it’s not a viable solution to your problems. Kill my body and I’ll just turn into a whirlwind of black acid and maim everything and everyone you love, or once loved, or might have loved someday. I’d probably destroy a lot of other stuff in the process, too. Have you ever tried to aim a whirlwind of black acid? It’s not a precision instrument.” Jarrow shook her head. “This is the wrong approach. It’s like strapping yourself into a catapult and flinging yourself against a fortress. It squashes you flat, and it doesn’t much bother the fortress.” She picked up a fist-sized stone from the sand and hurled it at her sandcastle, and the stone bounced harmlessly away, without dislodging so much as a single grain of sand.