by T. A. Pratt
Nicolette nudged Marla’s head with her toe and rolled it over, so Marla could look up at her. Hardly an improvement. “Oh yeah? Okay, so you’re alive, but you’re headless on my floor. Maybe I’ll put you in a bird cage and keep you in a dark closet, like you did with me when I got press-ganged into service as your bad-magic-sniffing oracle.”
“Hey, now. I let you watch TV.”
“But I couldn’t change the channel, and Pelham always left it on PBS!” Nicolette drew back her leg, as if for another kick, then thought better of it, instead settling the sole of her boot gently on Marla’s cheek. “Maybe I’ll sell you to the highest bidder. Who needs the head of Baphomet or John the Baptist or Orpheus when you can have the head of Marla Mason herself? There are a lot of shady people who’d love to own the talking head of a death god. I’m gonna make some calls.”
Marla sent a brief pulse of will across the room. Her body rose up, without Nicolette noticing, and approached quietly. Controlling the body was a little tricky, like driving a foreign car with the gearshift on the wrong side, but Marla managed it. She had her body grab Nicolette by the throat and throw her on the ground. Nicolette was more stunned than hurt, but she stayed down, staring as Marla’s body picked up her severed head and placed it back on the neck. The fleshy connections re-knit themselves, and Marla experimentally rolled her head on her shoulders. Everything seemed to be in order.
Nicolette rolled over, sprang to her feet, and launched herself at Marla, swinging the hatchet, this time right into Marla’s chest.
Marla sighed. The axe stuck in her torso, right over her heart, and when Nicolette tried to jerk it free, Marla made sure the edges of her bloodless wound gripped the blade tight, making it impossible for Nicolette to free the weapon. “Nicolette. Stop it. You’re shooting at a drone and hoping to kill the operator. You’re beating up a car and hoping that will hurt the driver. You’re punching the monkey, not the organ grinder. Is any of this getting through to you?”
Nicolette groaned. “You’re not even really here? You sent, what, some kind of meat-golem to set me free.”
“This is a highly accurate simulacrum of my mortal form, molded from the stuff of primordial chaos, which can become anything—they’re like stem cells for all matter. So, yeah, basically, a meat-golem. I’m a god. You think I’d go tromping around Felport in my actual divine body? Do you have any idea the kind of chaos that would cause, exposing people to my unalloyed awesomeness? People would be falling over having revelations left and right.” There was no reason to let Nicolette know Marla had been tromping around in her true form recently, before she realized how dangerous that was, and before Pelham suggested this rather elegant solution. Just as Reva conjured human bodies for himself when he needed to interact with humans, Marla could do the same.
The drawback, of course, was that she didn’t have access to her full suite of godly powers in this form. She’d gotten used to the joys of doing magic as a deity: that involved a lot more imposing-your-desires-by-will-alone and fewer fiddly hand gestures and incantations in dead languages and ruining expensive exotic ingredients. This meat-body was human, and so it could do anything she could do as a human sorcerer, with a few nice extras, like transporting through shadows, and total control of her physical form. She could grow extra arms if she needed, heal wounds at will, or even shapeshift into a were-whatever, due to the power of primordial chaos... but it was all still just flesh, ultimately. Still, formidable sorcerous abilities and invulnerability were good enough to deal with most situations. She was unlikely to encounter the kind of insanely high-powered enemy that would require her full divine powers to combat, so when she had to walk the Earth, this was the best way.
“I’m insulted. You’re insulting me.” Nicolette leaned back, trying to pull out the blade with all her might, and Marla let it go. Nicolette didn’t fall over comically when the axe suddenly came loose, unfortunately. When had she gotten so poised? The chaos witch tossed the axe from one hand to the other, clearly weighing whether or not to attack Marla again, probably just for the sheer dickish joy of it.
“Don’t be that way, Nicolette. I’m running this body in real time, using a sizable fraction of my attention. It’s more consideration than most people get. How about you accept my apology and my help and we just stop all this?”
Nicolette dropped the hatchet on the desk, then sat on the edge, scowling down at the floor. Finally she sighed. “I’ve spent so much time defining myself in opposition to you. I don’t know what to do if we’re not enemies. I try to think back to why I hate you, and sure, you killed my mentor, but I probably would have done that myself, eventually.”
“Gregor was a pretty big asshole,” Marla said.
“Gaping. And yeah, when you stuck my severed head in a cage and used me as your magical bloodhound, that was crappy, but I get the feeling you were doing penance by keeping me around. Like, it was even less fun for you than it was for me. Giving you shit was pretty enjoyable at times, and at least I got to see the world, instead of being a corpse in a fish pond. Mostly, I hated you because... you didn’t take me seriously, you know? You were my nemesis, my bête noir, my big bad, and you treated me like a gnat, or an afterthought, barely an annoyance.”
“I’m sure that was very difficult for you.” Nicolette looked at her sharply, and Marla showed her open hands. “No shade. I’m sincere. That must have sucked.”
Nicolette sighed. “But hating you... wanting you to fear me, or at least respect me... it made me push myself, gave me ambitions, made me excel. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here, the freshly unfrozen witch queen of Felport, if I hadn’t wanted to spite you. Competition really does breed excellence. If I step back, get a little perspective, look at the whole of my life... you still suck, but I’m pretty happy with where I ended up.”
“You were a worthy adversary, Nicolette. Sorry if I never said so before. And you could be a great chief sorcerer.”
“Well, fuck it,” Nicolette said. “We’ll never be friends, or even frenemies, but... I can stop trying to murder you all the time. Thanks for letting me stay alive, or undead, or whatever the fuck I am.”
“You’re welcome. I’m also sorry I used you as a prop to work out some of my horrible psychological issues.”
Nicolette shrugged. “It happens. You don’t get into magic because you’re well-adjusted.”
Marla started toward a shadow, then paused. “Is this some kind of long-game revenge thing? Like, you pretend we’re cool and then you spring some attack on me?”
Nicolette shook her head. “I don’t think so. You might actually be right about something for once—the best way to beat you is to stop giving a crap about you. Like, what’s more hurtful than hating somebody? Being indifferent toward them.” She made a shooing motion. “So, get lost. You don’t matter to me anymore. I’m looking forward to never seeing you again for as long as you decide I get to live.”
Marla started to speak, then decided, Nah, let her have the exit line.
She stepped into a shadow in a corner of the office, and emerged from another puddle of darkness, this one next to a pile of splintery crates by the waterfront. The area was deserted, with no workers bustling to-and-fro. Was there some kind of strike or port shutdown, or was it just a slow day? She glanced at the sky, marking the position of the sun (her perceptions were so much more precise now), and saw she was just a little bit later than promised; getting her head cut off had messed up her timetable. There was no sign of the Bay Witch, though. Zufi’s relationship with time had more to do with tides than clocks, and Marla could wait... for a little while. She would have fulfilled her obligation to Zufi anyway, but now that she was a god, it wasn’t a matter of honor: it was a matter of natural law. When gods made bargains, they stuck to them. Sure, they could try to be sneaky and wriggle through loopholes—that was the classic approach, especially for underworld gods—but they couldn’t just blow off the obligations. Owing someone a favor was like an itch deep inside Marla’s brain, a
nd it wouldn’t go away until she fulfilled her end. She hoped whatever Zufi wanted wouldn’t take long. She had consorts to find and seasons to oversee and souls to reap.
Marla walked along the cracked and splintered wooden boards of the pier all the way to the end, leaning over the old-birdshit-and-rust-speckled railing to look into the water below. Felport had a good deep-water port, which was why the first colonists had chosen this spot for their settlement. The water was surprisingly clean, with an abundance of wildlife—she could sense them teeming beneath the rippling surface: cod, jellyfish, turtles, flounder, lobster, even a whale of some kind, far out in the bay. She was the death of every living thing on the planet Earth, and with the barest effort of her mind she could sense all their lives, too.
Ah, and there was a human, approaching with unnatural speed through the water, moving more like an eel than a swimmer, undulating with aquatic magics. Marla took a few steps back and watched with appreciation as the Bay Witch burst up out of the waves, leaping several feet from the water to seize the rail and pull herself over the edge. The Bay Witch was statuesque, dressed in a dark blue wetsuit that covered her from ankles to neck. She wrung out her long blonde hair, spattering water all over Marla’s shoes, then looked into Marla’s eyes with her disconcertingly direct gaze. “Oh,” she said. “I am wasting my time. No. Wait. You are wasting my time.” She made a shooing motion. “Go away, little puppet. I need the bright spark, not the dim reflection.”
Marla scowled. “It’s good to see you, too, Zufi—”
“I did not wish to speak on the phone. I need to see you in person, to show you something, to call in my favor.” She sniffed. “It is a very good copy, this body, almost just like your old body, but you do not have your old body anymore, you are a god now, you are all different, so really this is a very bad copy of what you really are, which cannot be copied, yes?”
“Okay, yes, this is sort of a... remote-controlled drone, but listen, Zufi, I’m a god now, I can’t just go wandering around the world in the... divine not-flesh... without weird stuff happening. Psychics freak out, probability gets all skewed, meat rots, flowers blossom, it’s a whole thing. You wouldn’t want the real me this close to your bay. You’ve got it all cleaned up, no pollution, a really finely tuned ecosystem humming away down there. If I showed up, there’d be, I don’t know, algae blooms, or the water would turn to wine, or who knows what. This is better, believe me. Just tell me what you want me to do. What’s the favor?”
Zufi tapped her front teeth with one fingernail and stared at a spot somewhere above Marla’s head. Probably she was thinking, but it was hard to tell. “All right,” she said at last. “But not all right. We will meet, the real me and the real you, but we will meet somewhere else, in a place where you cannot do any great damage because there is already so much damage done, in the place I wanted to show you anyway. You need to be the real you because the mannequin you will not be any help, yes okay?”
“I...” Marla wanted to refuse. She wanted to tend to the important business of finding a consort and getting hell’s affairs in order. But she was bound... and anyway, she owed Zufi a lot. She wouldn’t be here now without the help the Bay Witch had given her in the past. “Okay. When and where?”
Zufi rattled off a string of coordinates, and after a moment’s squinting thought, Marla said, “That’s in the north Atlantic?”
“Tomorrow,” Zufi said. “In the very middle of the middle of the daytime of the day.”
“So... noon, local time?”
“That is what I said yes.”
“Can you give me a hint about what this is all about?”
“You are Death.” Zufi shrugged. “It is about death. That is why I thought you could help.”
“Could you be a little more—”
The Bay Witch ignored her and leapt over the railing, disappearing beneath the water with a splash. That was kind of disrespectful, really, but then, Marla hadn’t come in person, so maybe Zufi felt disrespected, too.
Marla let her body turn back into primordial nothing, leaving the raw materials on the dock. It wouldn’t turn into a puddle of glistening sludge, though. When not compelled into a particular shape by Marla’s will, the stuff of chaos simply adapted to local circumstances, like a stem cell taking on the form of those cells around it. In this case, her body would turn into salt water, and sand, and bird shit, and mist, and other unnoticed and unnoticeable things.
Marla opened her eyes in her true form, in the throne room of hell, on a throne of bone and crystals and ice. Pelham stood before her, beaming with undisguised happiness, which immediately made her suspicious. “What is it?”
“Mr. Cole sent a message soon after you departed this morning. He’s found the first likely match for your consort.”
Marla whistled. “That was quick. Cole knows his business.”
“I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a first date.” Pelham consulted his pocket watch. “It begins in half an hour, in Amsterdam.”
Black Sand
Cole, who was usually the definition of dapper and invariably wore old-fashioned suits, was now dressed in a black rubber apron and black nitrile gloves as he bustled around a gleaming metal table, with a fishbelly-pale corpse laid out before him. “I have, in fact, done autopsies before,” he said. Bradley and Marzi stood off to one side, with Marzi looking distinctly creeped out at being in a morgue. Bradley couldn’t blame her. The last time he’d come to a place like this was when he had to identify his boyfriend Henry’s body after his overdose, a long time ago, and this was bringing back unpleasant memories. The quiet and lack of any other people around made it even eerier. When the chief sorcerer of San Francisco needed a place to examine a corpse in private, he got one, and the hospital staff had all cleared out.
“Really?” Bradley kept his tone light, hoping to banish his anxiety, or at least mask it. “Were you a medical examiner in an earlier life?”
“Hardly.” Cole frowned down at the corpse of the aquatic assassin. “During a period of great unrest on the Barbary Coast, the leader of one gang of toughs dropped dead without warning, despite being in apparently good health. His loyal associates declared that he’d been struck down by sorcery, and pledged to take revenge against the members of the most likely rival gang. I had only recently brokered a peace between the adversarial parties, at the behest of Emperor Norton, and was alarmed at the prospect of a return to the violence we had so recently quelled. I stepped in and offered to examine the fallen leader, and conducted an autopsy in a room far filthier than this. His heart and lungs and bowel and so on were in marvelous shape, lending credence to the idea that his heart had been stopped by magic... until I opened up his skull and examined his brain.” Cole shook his head at the memory. “A great tumor, all black and red and shining, had extended tendrils throughout his brain. It was amazing he survived as long as he did... though it did explain his tendency toward ecstatic visions, which his followers had taken as a sign of his great magical prowess.”
“Gross,” Marzi said. “So you stopped the gang war? Go science.”
Cole shook his head. “His followers decided their rivals had caused the tumor to grow, by magic, despite my testimony that I found no such signs of magical tampering. Sometimes people just want a reason to fight. Ah, well. It was a long time ago, and they would all be dead now regardless, though perhaps they would have gone more peacefully. On to more current matters.”
“Are you going to cut him open?” Bradley asked. “Because, uh, I could do without smelling his insides. His outsides are all bad enough.” The stink was part rotting fish, part rotting kelp, and part brine.
“I will want to take a look at his innards, yes, but not right away.” Cole removed his spectacles and donned a set of jeweler’s optics, with various lenses on movable arms. He adjusted the lenses until he had the arrangement he wished, peered down at the transformed corpse, and prodded the slits in its neck with one gloved hand. “Subject is an altered human, male, approximatel
y twenty years old, with blue-gray skin, gills, webbed fingers, and other signs of aquatic magic.” Cole lifted up the man’s lips. “I count... three rows of teeth.”
“Like a shark,” Bradley said.
“Most sharks have five rows of teeth, and some as many as fifty, but there are limits to how many can fit in a human jaw.” Cole wiggled one of the long, serrated teeth, and it came loose. He looked at it for a moment, then dropped it into a metal tray with a clang. “Some alteration to the subject’s jaw, I see. Trauma, too. When it opened wide to bite you, it did damage to the muscle and bone.” Cole pulled back the eyelids, looked at the man’s now cloudy eyes, then examined the webbing in the hands. “This is very strange magic,” he said at last. “This man was literally combined with a shark and a ray, not merely transformed. The human and the sea creatures were merged. If Marzi hadn’t killed him with her spectral pistol, he would have died soon, anyway, because the bodily systems simply aren’t compatible. There are signs of rejection from both sides. This is a bizarre, inelegant, and cruel way to achieve the desired result.”
“Like that movie The Fly,” Bradley said. “A matter-transporter accident, merging man and animal.”
“This was no accident. It was very deliberate. But you said this creature came at you with purpose?” Cole frowned. “I fail to understand how it could have done so. The animal natures and human nature should have been in great conflict, multiple consciousnesses at war, and the pain... this poor creature should have been writhing in agony, both physical and psychological, not swimming at you with deliberate malice.”
“So someone was puppeting it around?” Bradley said. “Mind control, telepresence, something like that? When I reached out to its mind, trying to put it to sleep, I couldn’t find anything, and I can get through most wards.”
Cole adjusted his lenses again. “I see no signs of psychic entanglement, no astral threads, no residue of aura manipulation, nothing I’d expect in the aftermath of that kind of magic. Mundane techniques like brainwashing or deep hypnosis would be useless on a creature this damaged, and in such agony. I can’t see how anyone could have... hmm. There could have been some direct manipulation of the brain.”