by T. A. Pratt
“It was a nightmare, Langford. At least the last part was.”
Langford nodded. “I am, actually, reassured to hear that she touched you. That could be the vector of contagion.”
“So you think if she touches people, they get sucked into her dream world?”
Langford shrugged. “It’s just a hypothesis, but it’s possible. You haven’t received widespread reports of people popping into her world, which means you may be an isolated case, and since you had direct contact with Genevieve, it seems reasonable to assume, for now, that direct contact is a prerequisite. Of course, the question then is whether it’s black plague or bird flu.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Contagion models,” Langford said. “People initially catch black plague from rat fleas, but once they’ve caught the plague, it can pass from human to human. With bird flu—at least, the unmutated strain—you can only catch the disease directly from a bird. A human with bird flu can’t pass the disease on to other humans. The question is, can you catch this dreamsickness from Genevieve alone, or can it be caught from another person who is already infected?”
“Like…me,” Marla said. “Shit.”
“Who have you touched since this happened?”
Marla thought. She’d touched Hamil’s shoulder. She’d shaken Joshua Kindler’s hand. She hadn’t touched Rondeau. She had touched Ted. She hadn’t touched Langford. “A few people.”
Langford nodded. “Observe them. If they have…experiences…you can assume you are contagious. Until then, limit your contact with new people. As for people you’ve already touched…well, it’s probably too late for them. And if she’s a reweaver, and her world starts intruding into our reality, any random passerby in the vicinity could be swept up into her world, too, I suppose.”
“Great. Do you think my trip to dreamland was a onetime thing, or will I get sucked back in again?”
“I have no idea,” Langford said. “I assume you’d like me to help you find our patient zero?”
Marla pushed the shoebox of Genevieve’s things toward him. “Here are a few of her belongings. Can you use them to get a fix on her?”
“Certainly,” Langford said. “I’ll call you. But it could take a couple of days, if she’s popping in and out of our reality.”
Marla scowled. “Can’t you just, like, dangle a weight over a map or something?”
“I’m not a dowser, Marla,” Langford said, affronted. “I’m a scientist. I have some techniques that might work to connect these items to their owner, using spooky action at a distance and principles of quantum entanglement—”
“Don’t care,” Marla said, holding up her hands. “Just get it done. And call me as soon as you know anything. The sooner we get Genevieve settled back in Blackwing, the happier I’ll be.”
“She’s awake now, Marla, at least sometimes. She may not be willing to go to sleep again.”
Marla smiled. “That’s what sedatives are for.”
Ted drove Marla back to the club, where Rondeau was talking to the bouncer and the bartender, getting ready for the evening ahead. His club, Juliana’s, was currently pretty popular with kids from Adler College looking to dance all night, and Marla’s operation was making good money selling them tabs of ecstasy, though she’d nixed Rondeau’s plan to charge dehydrated customers $10 each for bottled water. She sent Ted upstairs with instructions to call in an order for lemon chicken and some egg rolls, then beckoned Rondeau over to the DJ booth to talk privately. “So, this Genevieve Kelley we’re looking for, if you see her, don’t let her touch you. She’s contagious. If you touch her, there’s a good chance you’ll get pulled into a fucked-up dream world full of buildings made of bones and bald guys with daggers.”
“Sometimes I hate my job,” Rondeau said. “I assume you contracted this little malady? But didn’t manage to catch the lady in question?”
“Yeah. And it’s possible I’m contagious, too, since she touched me. So keep your hands to yourself, all right? I haven’t touched you since then.”
“But you’ve touched Ted?” Rondeau said.
Marla nodded.
“And I touched him, when he got here. I shook his hand. So…”
Marla sighed. “Good point. At least if you find yourself in a place that smells like oranges, you’ll know what’s going on. Just hunker down and wait it out. I didn’t stay in the dream world for long.”
“That’s a comfort.” He rolled his eyes. “But for now, I should get back to work. The DJ’s late, and we open in an hour.”
Marla shooed him away and went upstairs. There wasn’t much she could do now—wandering the city aimlessly looking for Genevieve wouldn’t do much good. If Langford got a fix on her, Marla would call Dr. Husch and they’d figure out a containment plan. Maybe something as simple as shooting Genevieve with a tranquilizer dart, maybe some kind of big constrictive magic, whatever seemed warranted. She paused on the stairs and called Hamil to fill him in on the potential for contagion, and he groaned. “Shall I let Joshua know? I assume you did touch him?”
Marla hesitated, then sighed. “Hell. Yeah. Go ahead. I hope he doesn’t get pissed off and quit.” She hung up. She thought about telling Ted, but how could she explain to an ordinary that he might get sucked into a surreal dream world? She couldn’t, not yet. She’d just have to keep him close, and hope for the best.
She went into the office. Ted was looking at her antique chess set, with its inlaid board and weird pieces carved from stone. “You like it?” Marla said.
“It’s a chatrang board,” he said. “It’s remarkable.”
“That’s a chess set, Ted.”
He shook his head. “Chatrang is a precursor to chess. The pieces must be very old, though the board is newer.”
“Huh,” Marla said. “I got the set from an old friend. I don’t know its history. I just thought it was chess with funny pieces, you know, like the boards that have Civil War soldiers or whatever instead of normal chessmen.” She’d inherited the board, along with most of her other worldly possessions, from Sauvage, her predecessor as chief sorcerer. Her possessions would, in turn, pass on to the next sorcerer to take over Felport, though if she retired, she’d get to keep enough money to be comfortable. Retirement was unlikely, though. Most chief sorcerers didn’t retire to anyplace but the grave.
“You can play it like chess,” Ted said, setting up the pieces. “The chariots are rooks, the elephants are bishops, the vizier is a queen, the soldiers are pawns, the horses are knights. The rules of chatrang are different, but not as much fun, honestly. Would you like to play?”
“I do like the game,” Marla admitted. “But I’m not very good. I don’t get to practice much.” Rondeau didn’t have the attention span to play without getting bored and wandering off halfway through, and Hamil refused to play chess. His powers of sympathetic magic made it dangerous for him to play games. If he started to lose at a chess game, his real-life fortunes might fall in tandem. Marla’s old mentor, Artie Mann, had taught her the game, but he hadn’t been very good, either. He used to tell Marla it didn’t matter—“Even Napoleon Bonaparte was a lousy chess player!” he’d exclaim each time she toppled his king, as if by losing at chess he was practically imperial himself.
“I used to teach chess club at a high school before my…fortunes fell,” Ted said. “But a lot of the kids were better than me, so don’t worry.”
“All right, we can play while we wait for the food to get here,” Marla said. Why not? Maybe it would distract her from thoughts of Genevieve. And the impending division of Susan Wellstone’s property. And her inappropriate and magically motivated attraction to Joshua Kindler. And rogue slow assassins wandering her city. And all the other bullshit.
Marla played white, in her usual aggressive, hack-and-slash style, but before long she found herself pinned down across the board by a fence of Ted’s pawns, all backed up with other pieces and limiting her movements, pushing her into a corner of the board, sniping at her pieces and
whittling down her defense steadily. As they played, Ted told her a little about the history of the game; annoyingly, his little history lesson didn’t seem to impede him when it came to kicking her ass. He checkmated her, and she scowled. “Another game,” she said, and he agreed. This time she started killing his pawns right away, and when the food came, Marla paid the delivery guy impatiently.
She was so into the game that she almost forgot about the vial Langford had given her. She took a moment to open up the boxes and pour the cancer cure into Ted’s food, knocking a few drops into her own as well—it couldn’t hurt. Then she hurried back to the board, eating while Ted concentrated on his moves. He didn’t seem to notice any odd taste in his own food, which was good. No need to tell him he was sick. It would require too much effort to explain at this point—better if he just started to feel better, and never knew why.
Marla was concentrating on setting up a sweet fork with her knight, hoping to make Ted sacrifice his rook to save his queen, but somehow he wiggled a bishop down the far side of the board and got her in check. In two more moves she was doomed. She tipped her king over to concede defeat and started in on an egg roll. “You’re good at this, Ted.”
“You’re a very romantic player.”
She lifted her eyebrow. “I’ve been called a lot of things, Ted, but ‘romantic’ isn’t usually one of them.”
“I mean the romantic school of chess. The earliest grandmasters played in the romantic style. They set traps, used pieces cleverly in combination to attack, and made bold sacrifices to gain advantage. They valued beautiful moves over winning. If you were playing in the nineteenth century, you’d be considered very good, I think. But that style was supplanted by positional chess, where control of the board is more important. It’s a slower, less dramatic way to play, but a positional player can almost always beat a romantic. That’s the only reason I won. I don’t claim to have a deep understanding of the game, but I’ve read enough to know a few techniques.” He shrugged. “Romantic players have good tactics, but tactics are no defense against strategy.”
“I don’t know about that,” Marla said, spearing a chunk of lemon chicken. “I’ve always defined strategy as a long-term plan that goes wrong at some point. It’s too easy to lose track of today when you’re focused on your five-year plan or whatever.”
“Tactics are fine for the short term,” Ted said. “But they’re vulnerable in the long term.”
“Life is nothing but a series of short terms. One short term after another. And if you can control each of those short terms, you can keep control for a long time.”
“Well,” Ted said, glancing down at the chessboard, where Marla’s king lay on its side. “I guess life and chess aren’t the same, though you can learn something about each from the other, I think.”
Marla opened her mouth to argue—after all, she considered herself a skilled tactician, and Ted was implicitly criticizing the way she lived her life, ran her businesses, and defeated her enemies—but then someone knocked at her door. She narrowed her eyes. It wasn’t Rondeau—he would’ve just barged in—and it always paid to be wary of surprises. “Who’s there?” she called.
“Joshua,” a beautiful voice replied, and Marla’s heart fluttered a little.
7
C rap, Marla thought. “Hey, Ted, you like booze?”
“Sometimes,” Ted said. “I—”
“So go downstairs, get a drink, start to form a bond of manly friendship with Rondeau. Okay?”
“Whatever you say,” Ted said slowly, rising from his seat.
“You can send Joshua in.” Marla resisted the urge to touch her hair. She kept it cut short so she didn’t have to worry about it, damn it. She scowled, and Ted hurried away, opening the door.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Ms. Mason’s assistant. She says you can go in.”
“Thank you,” Joshua said, entering. He moved like a snowflake falls, and wore white to match. Ted lingered in the doorway for a moment, looking after Joshua, his lips slightly parted, until Marla said, “Shut the door on your way out, Ted.” Her assistant shook his head rapidly, then pulled the door closed.
Joshua stood in the center of the room, the focal point of Marla’s attention shifting to him instantly. He looked around, a half smile on his lips, then cocked his head at Marla.
Marla found herself trying to sit up straight and keep her legs crossed, and very consciously leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the low table that held the chessboard. “I said come at midnight. You’re early. That’s almost as bad as being late. I’m not a big fan of the drop-in.” Of course, in truth, she was intensely happy to see him. His magic made him the most desirable thing in any situation. “Call first in the future. You do work for me now, right?”
“I suppose,” Joshua said, taking Ted’s chair and looking thoughtfully at the chessboard. “I’ve never liked this game.”
“Ted was telling me that some people say chess is all about free will and independence, a game where luck has no bearing. You win or lose entirely on your own merits. According to some legends, the creator of chess intended it as a refutation of the idea of destiny. His rival created a dice game, where the winner was determined by chance and fate. You like dice better, Joshua?”
“I like video games. Especially car racing games. Though I like driving real fast cars better.”
Marla started to say something about her Bentley—Ooh, we’ll have to go for a drive sometime, you’d love my car, and clamped down on the impulse. “Well, to each his own. What can I do for you, Josh?”
“Hamil told me there’s a chance I might…disappear?”
“I doubt he told you that. You might possibly get sucked into the dream world of an escaped mental patient. Though to an outside observer it could look like you disappeared, I guess.” She grinned. “Hell, I promised you excitement, didn’t I?”
“Is this dream world dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous.”
“You know, I could stop working for you. I haven’t even properly started.” He picked up a pawn and began tossing it from one hand to the other. “It’s not as if you’ve placed me under a geas. If associating with you proves too dangerous, I might have to consider such action.”
Marla shrugged. “Lovetalkers aren’t exactly common, but I can find another one. Besides, you wouldn’t be any safer if you quit. Did you come here to threaten me? Because that’s the sort of thing you can do in a phone call from now on, or even a postcard. I won’t be offended, I promise, and you’ll save both of us some time.”
“No, that’s not…no. I was just worried. I told you, I’m new to all this. Magic.”
His vulnerability and uncertainty were adorable. “Sure, I get that. But magical sleeping sickness? That’s nothing. You have to embrace the weird shit, Joshua. It only gets weirder. If you can’t roll with it, you’d better not hang around.” She checked the clock on her desk. She wanted to ask Joshua if he felt like making out for a couple of hours, but that wouldn’t do. Pretty or not, magically attractive or not, he was a stranger. What if he was a flake, a coward, a boor? She didn’t believe in being coy, but it was too soon to act on her attraction. Though after she got to know him…“Look, go downstairs, enjoy the club, come back up here at midnight, like I told you. Or don’t come back, and I’ll know you can’t hack it.”
“I’ll see you at midnight,” he said, rising with the grace of a plume of pale smoke.
“I’m not sure I should park here,” Joshua said, peering out the windshield of the Bentley at the dark shadows of warehouses all around. Off in the distance, a car alarm wailed. “It doesn’t seem safe.”
“Magic, Joshua, remember?” Marla opened the passenger door, letting in a draft of frigid post-midnight winter. “I’ll cast a look-away spell on the car, and ordinary thieves won’t even see it. And any thieves who can sense magic should know better than to touch my car.” She got out, and Joshua followed, buttoning up his long pale overcoat. “This way.�
� She kicked empty plastic bottles and the eviscerated remains of old newspapers out of the way and headed down the sidewalk. “We’re going to broker a peace between the Four Tree Gang and the Honeyed Knots. They’ve been scuffling over this territory for weeks, and the ordinaries are starting to notice. I’m here to put a stop to it. The leaders of both gangs are waiting up ahead in a warehouse.”
“These are…magical street gangs?”
Marla nodded and cut down an alleyway between two buildings. “Mostly made up of apprentices who washed out, or who pissed off their masters, or who got orphaned when their masters died. Quite a few of those last, actually, and they form the cores of the two gangs. A few years ago there was a serial killer hunting down the city’s most prominent sorcerers. He even killed my old teacher, Artie Mann. A lot of apprentices were left at loose ends after that, and when they couldn’t find other placements, they went feral.”
Unable to resist bragging a little, Marla said, “I stopped the killer, by the way.”
“Impressive. But you let these gangs remain?”
Marla shrugged. “They aren’t especially loyal, but they can be bought. It’s handy having a mercenary force with some magical ability at my disposal when shit gets out of hand. We even give their leaders nonvoting seats in our councils, so they can feel like they’re part of the process. Sort of like they’re Puerto Rico. Keeps them from going totally rogue. Best of all, they’re territorial, so they keep ordinary street gangs from getting out of control. This area, down by the docks, is a pretty shitty part of town, and without the gangs doing a little de facto police work, things would be a lot worse.”
“You can’t just clean up the area?”
“Every city has places like this, Joshua. Places where you can get drugs, or stolen goods, or your baser desires satisfied. Try to suppress such things completely, and pressure builds up in other parts of the city. Better to keep it contained here, though I do keep a lid on the worst of it, and try to keep the predators from preying on innocents. I don’t much care if the wolves eat one another.”