by T. A. Pratt
She flipped open her cell phone and dialed. “Rondeau! I sent a guy over to the nightclub. His name’s Ted. He’s my new personal assistant. Get him set up with the Rolodex.”
“The Rolodex,” Rondeau said. “What century do you think it is exactly? We keep all that stuff on computers. Or we should. In practice, you just have a big pile of notes and business cards all over your desk.”
“Whatever,” Marla said. “Just show him where everything is, all right?” She flipped the phone shut. The wind gusted, and she looked up at the buildings around her, half expecting them to flutter in the wind. But, for now, everything was solid, metal and glass and cold concrete, just as it should be. “Fucking reweavers.” She lowered her head and hurried on. “Like dealing with the world as it is isn’t hard enough.”
5
U nless you have Marla’s heart in your coat pocket,” Gregor said, “I’m very disappointed to see you.” He sat in a deep wingback chair behind an ultramodern glass-and-metal desk, its surface as smooth and flawless as Gregor himself. Nicolette sat off to one side, loudly smacking a wad of chewing gum and smirking.
Z stood, hands clasped behind his back, reminding himself this was only a job, just a job. He imagined tossing Gregor out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows to fall screaming thirteen floors to the pavement below, letting some dirty city air into this sterile and climate-controlled space. Everything in Gregor’s presence was simply too neat. Except for Nicolette, who was messy, and—as Z’s mother might have said—no better than she seemed to be.
“Well?” Gregor said. “You used to be a slow assassin—I didn’t realize the word ‘slow’ referred to your mental faculties, or your power of speech. Why are you here?”
Those who knew Z treated him with respect, and those who did not know him could still sense that Zealand was not the sort of person who tolerated rudeness. That was part of the problem with sorcerers—they thought they were better than everyone else. But there was no point in getting worked up over Gregor. This was just a job. “I’m afraid Marla disappeared while I was tracking her. You asked me to come to you in person if anything unusual happened while I watched her.” He shrugged. “I thought vanishing qualified.”
Nicolette snapped her gum, and Gregor winced. Zealand smiled, but only on the inside. She said, “You sure you didn’t just lose track of her? You checked to see if your shoelace was undone, and when you looked up, she was gone? Like that?”
Zealand wasn’t sure what Nicolette’s role was exactly—whether she was Gregor’s bodyguard, private secretary, lover, or something else. She was petite, a little birdlike, with fine bone structure, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous; you could never judge a sorcerer’s capabilities by looking. Her whole personality, and her messy bleached-white hair—festooned with ribbons, tiny plastic monkeys, rubber scorpions, feathers, and other things—injected a wide streak of chaos into Gregor’s domain. Gregor wouldn’t tolerate such disorder if she didn’t have something to offer. Zealand thought it best to tread lightly.
“No,” he said, addressing Gregor. “I did not lose track of her. I followed her to Hamil’s apartment, and waited until she emerged. I trailed her for a few blocks, and then she vanished.”
“You must have spooked her,” Gregor said, dark eyebrows drawn down. “She can fly.”
“She didn’t fly. I was watching her. I would have noticed flight.”
Gregor waved his hand. “Invisibility, then. She probably followed you. She might have followed you here.” He drummed his fingers on the top of his desk. “Nicolette, we’ll need to go downstairs later, and see…what repercussions this has caused. If the prognosis has changed.”
“Yep,” Nicolette said. “We’ll see how bad Mr. Z here has fucked us.”
“I was not followed,” Zealand said, through clenched teeth. “I am a professional. It is possible she saw me—Marla is a professional, too, after all—but she will not connect me with you.” In truth, Zealand didn’t think she’d noticed him at all. Marla’s footprints in the slush on the sidewalk had ended abruptly, so she hadn’t simply turned invisible. Unless she’d turned invisible and flown away, which seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort. Such behavior didn’t suit what he’d observed of Marla’s personality, either. If she thought someone was following her, she’d confront them. But Gregor was a skulker and deceiver by nature—hence his hiring of Zealand to secretly assassinate Marla—so it made sense he’d assume the same of others. “I only told you about Marla’s disappearance because you insisted I notify you of any irregularities. I am accustomed to more autonomy. You’re paying me for my skills—why don’t you try trusting them? Killing people is what I do.”
“He did kill Archibald Grace,” Nicolette said, kicking her heels against her stool. “I mean, that old guy was twice the badass Marla is.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, and then fell silent. After a moment, he sighed. “All right. Do proceed. I apologize for my…what do you call it, Nicolette?”
“Being a tight-assed control freak?” Nicolette said. She winked at Zealand, a friendly gesture which, coming from her, he found repellant. “Gregor’s heavily into precision, and that works for him, most of the time. But messy things have value, too.” She shook her mane of clinking, clattering hair. “So when are you going to take Marla out?”
“Tonight. Or tomorrow. Or two days from now. Better if no one knows for sure, not even me. You predict probable futures—surely you know the value of discretion.”
“Sooner is better,” Gregor said.
“It’s best if I know her patterns and routines, when she’s alone, when she’s at her most unguarded. She isn’t an ordinary target, after all. I don’t intend to become a victim myself. I’ve only been watching her for a week, but fear not, she seems remarkably consistent so far.”
“I’ve heard a rumor,” Gregor said. “Some of your old associates are in town looking for you?”
“Yes,” Zealand said. “It won’t interfere with our business.”
“See that it doesn’t.” Gregor dismissed him with a gesture.
Zealand left the office, scanning the hallway in both directions before hurrying to the elevators. Gregor’s security was formidable, but nothing a slow assassin couldn’t overcome. That was another reason to get this assignment over with quickly. The slow assassins were closing in on him. They’d been tacitly ignoring Zealand for years, but some recent business in Dublin had stirred them up again. He’d killed one of their operatives, and even though the murder had occurred in the course of other business, they were furious, and now he had to be more vigilant than usual.
As he rode down in the elevator, he wondered if he’d chosen to kill one of the slow assassins because, on some level, he liked having them on his trail, for the excitement. He was getting older, after all, and his life and work increasingly failed to entertain him. Zealand chose not to examine his motivations too closely. A man needed some secrets, even from himself.
Nicolette sat down on the edge of Gregor’s desk. “Think we should have killed him?”
Gregor sighed. “I feel like a man in a shark cage, Nicolette. I’m afraid to reach my arms outside for fear they’ll be bitten off. I thought perhaps I could undercut the probability of the Giggler’s predictions by having Marla killed, but it’s all gone wrong.”
“Zealand is supposed to be the best. Maybe he’ll kill her tonight, or tomorrow.”
“If Marla thinks she’s being followed, she’ll change her patterns.” He put his elbows on the desk and held his head in his hands. “I was perfectly happy with my position. What do I care if Marla runs the city? I don’t want to be a kingslayer.”
“Fate leads him who will, and him who won’t it drags. You were always destined for greater things.” She smacked her gum, and Gregor shuddered. He liked Nicolette. He’d guided her from her days as a street child, and helped nurture her great talent. He just wished she hadn’t shown such an aptitude for chaos magic. It was so messy.
Gregor sigh
ed. “There’s no such thing as fate. Just likelihoods, and situations where there’s no right move, only moves of varying degrees of wrongness. It’s a case of zugzwang.”
“Zugzwang? Is that a dirty word for something interesting?”
“It’s a term from game theory,” Gregor said. Most games involved matters of probability, and scrying probability was the closest you could come to telling the future, which was Gregor’s specialty. “‘Zugzwang’ means being put in a position where you have to make a bad move. It would be better to stay still, because any move exposes some weakness or creates disadvantage, but staying still is made impossible by the rules of the game.”
“That about sums it up,” Nicolette said. “But, hey, boss—there are paths out of this that don’t wind up…you know…”
“With me dead in the snow? Oh, I know. But walking those paths will not be pleasant. Sometimes I think it would be better not to know what’s coming.”
Nicolette was silent for a moment. Then she said, “No you don’t. I know you. You’d always rather know.”
“Hmm. I suppose you’re right. Let’s go see the Giggler.”
Nicolette groaned. “You’re not gonna get all pissed off again, are you?”
“No promises.”
After a short walk down a broad, climate-controlled hallway, Gregor and Nicolette boarded the elevator and descended wordlessly to the basement. On the seldom-visited bottom floor, after the doors had whuffed open and then closed again without either of them getting out, Gregor fitted his penthouse key into the appropriate slot. He turned it and pressed the “B” button again, twice.
Nicolette took a handkerchief from a pocket of her paint-spattered cargo pants and handed it to Gregor on the way down. Gregor nodded thanks and pressed the cloth to his nose before the doors opened.
Nicolette had tried scenting the cloth with different things—expensive colognes, rubbing alcohol, juniper extract—but nothing worked as well as industrial antiseptic. It didn’t disguise the odor as well as some of the other substances did, but it soothed Gregor in the same way his clean building did, even if the fumes did make his head spin a little.
Nicolette showed no reaction to the stink when the doors opened, except perhaps a slight flaring around the nostrils. Nicolette didn’t get bothered by the same things Gregor did. That’s why it was good to have an assistant, to be strong where you were weak.
“He’s broken the lights again,” Gregor said. The dim concrete hallway before them should have been lit by halogen bulbs in cages on the ceiling, but the Giggler didn’t like such brightness.
Nicolette took a penlight from her pocket and shined it into the darkness, sweeping it across the floor. The Giggler wouldn’t attack them, but sometimes he left things before the doors, like a worshipper offering sacrifices at a temple gate, or a pet bringing kills to the door. Gregor had stepped in a dead cat once, and been forced to return upstairs in his stocking feet. He couldn’t bear to wear the shoes after that, and Nicolette had burned them.
“All clear,” Nicolette said, and led the way. Gregor followed, and the elevator whispered shut behind them. “He’s quiet tonight.”
“As long as he isn’t dead,” Gregor said.
“Nah, he’ll live forever.” Nicolette seemed amused by the idea. “He told us so himself, right?” She pushed open the flimsy door at the end of the corridor with her foot. It squeaked on its hinges. Gregor winced. “Hey, laughing boy! Chow time!”
Gregor looked at her questioningly.
“He likes those oatmeal cookies,” Nicolette said, patting yet another pocket. “I got him a couple.”
“I didn’t realize you two were so close,” Gregor said.
“I had a dog for a while, when I was on the street. The Giggler reminds me of that dog—dumb, but kind of loyal, you know? My dog wasn’t as creepy, of course.”
“Of course.” Gregor inhaled from the handkerchief deeply, then stepped into the dark room to confront the Giggler. They’d tried locking him up, keeping him in cells or in bare white rooms where he couldn’t make a mess or a stink, but the measures always failed. The Giggler couldn’t be held. He had resources Gregor didn’t understand, capabilities beyond anything Gregor had studied. They would lock him away, only to find him outside the cell the next morning, drawing cartoon animals with his feces, using frothy spittle for the highlights, the door still locked behind him. Giggling, of course. Surveillance equipment malfunctioned when trained on him, and guards fell asleep when assigned his watch. Some strange power had touched the Giggler, and while that touch had damaged and twisted him, it had given him talents as well.
The Giggler had to live in the midst of mess and profusion. His previous owner had understood that, and after a time, Gregor had accepted it, too. The Giggler needed disorder for his fragile mental well-being, and more important, he needed it for his work. Where Gregor saw clutter, the Giggler saw the secret traceries of the universe.
Nicolette flipped a switch, and cold fluorescent light flooded the room. “He didn’t break this light yet, at least.” The Giggler’s living quarters were revealed, a pile of blankets, a jug of water, and a bag of salty pretzels beside the pillow. The Giggler himself was nowhere in evidence.
Gregor had inherited the Giggler from the city’s former chief sorcerer, Sauvage, although “stolen” might have been a more accurate word. But Sauvage had been past caring, and the Giggler didn’t care where he went, as long as he got pillows to sit on and food to eat and things to play with. Little animals to disembowel. Tea leaves to stir with his finger. Yarrow stalks. Ancient coins. Small bones, from the feet of children and the limbs of lizards. He even possessed a dirty, well-thumbed deck of Tarot cards, though he never laid them out in any pattern Gregor had heard of. He kept big sheets of posterboard to wipe his boogers on, and often propped the sheets against the wall and gestured to them when talking to Gregor, like a marketing executive noting pertinent points on a graph at a meeting. Gregor stood in the middle of the room, away from the moldering cat pelt nailed to the wall, away from the shelves with their algae-infested aquariums, away from the wooden boxes full of different kinds of mushrooms, some of which the Giggler ingested, some of which he studied for omens.
The frayed black drape at the back of the room fluttered and parted, and the Giggler emerged, pulling his stained corduroy pants up. He wore a surprisingly clean white undershirt with round eyes drawn all over it with a black laundry marker. He tugged the drawstring in his pants tight and smirked at his visitors. His black hair was greasy as always, and his clogged pores looked big enough to drive trucks through. Wiping his perpetually runny nose with one hand, he waved shyly at Nicolette with the other. “Feed me.”
Nicolette tossed him a cookie, and the Giggler caught it one-handed, still rubbing away at his nose. He tore the plastic wrapper open with his teeth and ate the cookie in two bites. He smiled, belched, and sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged.
Then he tittered, an eerie high-pitched sound, like a schoolgirl’s ghost might make.
“What have you divined this day, oh Seer?” Gregor asked formally.
The Giggler touched the eyes on his undershirt, caressing them and the skin beneath. He reached for a plastic bag and dumped out a pile of bottle-caps and pop-tabs from aluminum cans, fingering them. “There’s a man in black,” the Giggler said, staring at the bits of metal. “He’ll help you, for a price.”
“You mean Zealand?” Gregor asked, frowning. The assassin had been wearing black, this last time.
“No, no, not an assassin. This man is mean. He has a mushroom head. White like a snake belly, skin like something growing under an old log.”
“You’re one to talk,” Nicolette said. Gregor glared at her, and Nicolette shrugged.
“Not the assassin, then. Someone else.”
“The enemy of your friend is your enemy, yes?” the Seer said.
Gregor digested that. “Possibly.”
“You’ve got another enemy, then, if you make
the mushroom man in black your friend. His enemy.”
“Do you think he’d be less obscure if we shot him in the kneecap?” Gregor mused.
“Pain is a great clarifier,” Nicolette said.
The Giggler just giggled. “Do you ever dream when you’re awake?”
“I barely dream when I’m asleep,” Gregor said. Once upon a time that had been true, though it wasn’t anymore, not lately.
The Giggler nodded. “The woman who saved my life is still your downfall,” he said. “Many things have changed, but not that.”
The Giggler meant Marla. Once upon a time, she’d held the Giggler’s life in her hands, and she’d chosen to spare it. He always spoke of her in faintly awestruck tones, which annoyed Gregor. Marla had stumbled into a position far above her proper place. She was qualified to be muscle, absolutely, perhaps even a minister of war, but running the city? It didn’t suit her. Not that Gregor wanted the job, either. It was thankless, and the advantages wouldn’t outweigh the inconveniences. “But she can only hurt me if I go outside,” Gregor prompted. “I’m safe from Marla as long as I stay here, inside the building, correct?”
“I want a puppy,” the Giggler said, smiling, showing mossy teeth.
“That hasn’t changed, has it, in light of these other developments?” Gregor insisted. “You said if I stayed out of the weather, I’d be fine, that she couldn’t kill me. That if I didn’t go into the elements, I’d weather the storm.” He took a step forward, no longer bothering with the handkerchief, intent on the Giggler.