Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  “Did you say spontaneous combustion?” Rondeau said. “We could use some of that around here.”

  “Hmm?” Hamil said. “No, no – spontaneous decapitation. Four cases so far, none of our people, only the ordinaries. Very mysterious, and I’m tracing the sympathetic linkages and – I’m sorry, I can’t be of any help today. I mean that, under other circumstances I might, but it’s impossible now.”

  “But–”

  “May I offer a bit of advice?” Hamil said. “If you were in Felport during the days of Marla Mason’s reign, and a strange witch arrived and began causing problems, would you call up someone thousands of miles away for help?”

  “Of course not,” Rondeau said. “Marla was the chief sorcerer, so she’d take care – Oh.”

  “Quite,” Hamil said. “I would have to consult the latest edition of Dee’s Peerage to find out who’s currently chief sorcerer of Las Vegas, or head of the local cabal, or however things are organized there, but in a city that ripe with human emotional energy and the power of random chance, I’m sure someone is in charge. Find the local magical authorities and tell them you know who’s causing the cold snap, and you may even be rewarded for your information.”

  “Thanks, Ham–” Rondeau began, but the big man had already hung up. He turned to Pelham. “He makes a good point. I was thinking of this as Marla’s problem, and by extension our problem, but it’s also the city’s problem, so we should go see the chief sorcerer here.”

  “Do you know this person?” Pelham said.

  Rondeau nodded. “If you’re going to do magical business in Las Vegas, the smart way is to get permission from the guy in charge, and make sure it’s a good deal for him, too – which is to say, you make regular payoffs. So we’ve met. Most people call him Mr. Wish. Some people call him the Pit Boss. He holds court in a secret casino underground, accessible from various places around town by a series of hidden tunnels. They play games for creepy stakes down there. Weird, dark stuff, I’m talking Korean-horror-movie dark. But Mr. Wish is the real deal. He might be able to do something about Regina.”

  “Then let us make our way,” Pelham said.

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “It’s almost time to drop off this month’s tribute anyway.”

  “How much do you pay him?” Pelham suspected he had a better sense of the casino’s actual finances than its putative part-owner did, and was curious about this unrecorded monthly expense.

  “I don’t pay him in money,” Rondeau said. “I pay him in luck.”

  They went out into the cold, dressed in bulky ski gear that still failed to protect them entirely from the viciousness of the dry and frigid air. There were portions of the planet Mars that were warmer than Las Vegas that day. The streets were not piled deep with snow, because there wasn’t enough moisture in the air for that, but there was a thin dusting, and lots of patches of ice. They made their way to a trapdoor two blocks from Rondeau’s hotel, in the corner of a trash-strewn parking lot. The trapdoor was frozen shut, of course, and they had to go back and get a tire iron to pry it open before descending down an iron ladder – the rungs so cold Rondeau was sure he could feel the freeze even through his bulky might-as-well-be-astronaut-gloves.

  They walked along an icy brick-lined tunnel to a shining vault door, which stood wide open and unguarded. “That’s bad,” Rondeau said. The leather bag full of luck squirmed in his pocket. He harvested the luck from the losers in his casino, every bad turn of the cards or disastrous roll of the dice a tiny piece of luck sliced away from them without their knowledge, collected in special crystals secreted in the ceiling, used to pay the monthly tribute to Matthew Wishnevsky, Mr. Wish, the Pit Boss, greatest probability-mage and stochastic magician in the western United States.

  Rondeau and Pelham went into the underground casino, which was just as cold as the streets above. The gaming tables (with shackles at the corners, for advanced play) and the wheels of fortune (with their possibilities that ranged from the sadistic to the sublime) and the steel cages where the living collateral were usually housed all dripped with icicles, and the recessed circular pit in the center of the room where Mr. Wish usually sat with his cronies and held audiences was filled with frozen water, like an ice-skating rink.

  Most of Mr. Wish’s upper body was sticking out of the ice, his dark skin tinged blue, his mouth open in surprise, arms lifted up to fend off an attack.

  “Hello, boys,” Regina Queen said, spinning around on a bar stool in the lounge. A frozen statue of a bartender stood on the other side, holding a by now very chilled martini shaker. “Is Marla home yet?”

  “Not as such, ma’am,” Pelham began.

  “Ah. You came here hoping to get help, didn’t you? Some of Mr. Wish’s men tracked me down and brought me here to meet with him. First he tried to threaten me. Then he tried to pay me off. Then I got bored and killed them all.” She cocked her head. “How is it you still don’t take me seriously? I supposed I’d better kill one of you, too, to drive the point home.” She lifted one long-fingered hand, almost lazily.

  Rondeau pulled out the squirming bag and threw it to the ground between Pelham and himself, where it fell open and spilled forth an aromatic smoke of concentrated luck. (It smelled a bit like smoky poker rooms, a bit like horse shit, a bit like the gasoline stink of a racetrack.) Regina’s aim was off, thanks to their good luck, and a potted palm two feet to Rondeau’s right turned to ice and shattered. They ran for the exit, gaming tables and chandeliers turning to ice and shattering in their wake, and scuttled up the ladder.

  Regina didn’t follow, but they didn’t dare return to the suite, just in case. They found a bar, one of the few that was still open, half the tables given over to whirring space heaters, a handful of dedicated drunks at the bar wrapped in down jackets and, in one case, a stinking old horse blanket. The guy under the blanket was muttering about how this was wrong, all wrong, Las Vegas was Hell, and Hell wasn’t supposed to freeze over.

  Pelham and Rondeau ordered hot toddies and sat in a corner, sipping, close to a heater.

  “We have to kill her now,” Rondeau said. “I mean, I’m as civic-minded as the next guy, save the people of Las Vegas, for sure, but – she’ll kill us. It’s personal now.” He sighed. “I was hoping to make this someone else’s problem, but we’d better find an oracle and ask it how we can stop Regina.”

  Pelham nodded. “It seems the only sensible path.”

  “No, getting in a car and driving until we’re south of the equator is also sensible, but I like it here, at least when the city’s not frozen over, so let’s try this other thing first.”

  They lingered over their drinks, though. Oracle-hunting was cold work.

  “There’s one here,” Rondeau said at last, his voice muffled by the scarf wrapped around his face, despite the heater in the car running full blast. Pelham doubted the car would have even started if it hadn’t been enchanted to run with magical efficiency.

  Finding oracles was always a tricky proposition. Rondeau could sense likely locations, but only in a hot-and-cold sort of way, so they’d driven around for a while on the deserted streets. Now they were parked in front of Bally’s Las Vegas, one of the most decidedly un-magical places Pelham could imagine, especially on this icy night, with only a few of the windows in its hotel towers lit. Everyone who could get out of Vegas had done so by now. “Why here?”

  “Fire,” Rondeau said. “This used to be the MGM Grand. Terrible fire there back in 1980, killed 85 people, injured close to a thousand. The oracle... it likes fire.”

  “Seems promising, given the nature of our adversary,” Pelham said.

  They got out of the car, stepped into the brutal moonscape, and walked slowly toward the covered moving sidewalk that ferried tourists from the street to the casino entrance... except the sidewalks weren’t moving, and the neon lighting was shattered, and there was no music playing.

  Rondeau paused in the entryway and grunted. “It’s... this is a big one...”

  A
sheet of flame erupted from the ground, a curtain four feet wide and eight feet high, and that curtain parted to reveal a...

  “Demon” was the only word Pelham could think of. Roughly human in shape, over seven feet tall, skin like flowing magma, eyes black and shiny, maw full of glittering obsidian shards. “Speak,” it said, in a voice of crackling flames.

  Rondeau’s voice was strained. Summoning oracles always took something out of him... even before the time came to pay the individual oracle’s idiosyncratic price. “How much to answer a question?”

  “Mmm. Burn something you love here, so I can smell the smoke.”

  “An object or a person?”

  It chuckled. “Just for a question? An object is fine.”

  Rondeau nodded. “Okay. How do we kill Regina Queen?”

  The demon shrugged. “Easy. Throw her in a volcano.”

  Pelham winced, and Rondeau sighed. “Right. Okay. Helpful. Thanks.” He started to turn away.

  “Wait,” the demon said. “I’ll do it for you, if you’re willing to pay a little more.”

  Rondeau and Pelham exchanged glances. “That’s... not usually how this works,” Rondeau said. “Usually you oracle types just tell me stuff, and make me do stuff. I mean... can you even do anything by yourselves, without me summoning you up?”

  “My understanding regarding the prevailing theory is that you oracles don’t have any independent existence or agency,” Pelham said, trying to ignore the fact that he was talking to a seven-foot-high magma monster. “That you are essentially externalized manifestations of Rondeau’s mind, projections he creates, which allow him to receive psychic insights that are too profound for him to access in a more straightforward way, such as through dreams or meditation. That there are locations of inherent latent power, or places infected with ghost-residue, which serve to boost his psychic abilities and give a particular shape to a given oracle’s appearance and manner, but that you are ultimately just aspects of Rondeau himself.”

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said, voice weak with the strain of calling the oracle. “What he said. Though some of the things I’ve talked to, I have trouble believing they came out of my own head.”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” the demon said. “I’d sure like to kill somebody though. Say the word, and I’ll help you get rid of your witch.”

  “Uh,” Rondeau said.

  “Perhaps it would become like a tulpa,” Pelham said. “A living thought-form, a projection of the mind that manifests in a physical body?”

  “Whatever,” the demon said. “Do we have a deal, or what?”

  “Maybe,” Rondeau said. “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “More than burning your favorite baby blanket, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m not burning a person.”

  “Understood,” the demon said. “How about you just... owe me a favor.”

  “That’s not how this works. I don’t do this open-ended shit.”

  “Your call,” the demon said. “I can’t force you to take the deal.”

  “Shit. Okay. A favor. But look, I’m not murdering anybody. And I’m not doing anything that violates my, like, personal moral code.”

  The demon laughed. It was a pretty normal laugh, considering the mouth it emerged from. “That should be fine, given the state of your morals.” It rubbed its hands together. Sparks flew. “Here’s what we do.”

  The Mirage Hotel was just as deserted as Bally’s, and the fake volcano out front wasn’t doing its hourly eruptions. Rondeau had spent enough time in Hawaii, close to real volcanoes, to find the fake rock structure totally unimpressive, more like a pile of cobblestones than a real cinder cone.

  But here they were, dressed in bulky coats, standing on top of the damn thing, waiting for Regina Queen. Rondeau was terrified some automatic switch would click over and make the fake volcano start barfing jets of flame.

  Regina appeared without making a grand entrance, standing with her arms crossed, frowning, on the volcano’s edge. Rondeau and Pelham had been forced to find the route the maintenance guys used to get on top of the volcano, but Regina had floated up on a cloud of snow or some shit, probably.

  “Where is Marla?” She said. “Wanting to meet at midnight, on a fake volcano, I can appreciate the showmanship, but I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “About that,” Rondeau said, and then grabbed Pelham and jumped off the volcano, down to the pool of frozen water surrounding its base. They landed hard and rolled, flopping onto their backs and looking up at the volcano looming above them.

  “What was that in aid of?” Regina peered over the edge at them. “If you’re wasting my time – ”

  The demon loomed up behind her, wrapped her in its arms, and then pulled her backward. The volcano flickered. For a moment, it wasn’t a hokey collection of fake stones and pipes and gas and hidden speakers with an ornamental lava flow down the side. It became the cone of an active volcano, dribbling molten rock, rumbling, spitting cinders and acid smoke, its heat so tremendous that Rondeau was afraid his coat would burst into flame.

  Then, in an instant, the volcano was just fake rocks again, and the demon and Regina were gone.

  “Is it getting warmer?” Rondeau asked.

  “I think these things take time,” Pelham said.

  They high-fived, weakly, though it didn’t make a sound because of their gloves.

  The air was definitely warmer by the time they got back to the hotel – still a cold desert night, but no longer killing weather. They went upstairs, both too exhausted to celebrate, and collapsed into their respective beds.

  Some time later, the demon appeared by Rondeau’s bed, emerging from a wall turned into a curtain of flame. “I want that favor now.”

  Rondeau groaned. “Can you turn down your fiery glow? I’m trying to get some sleep here.”

  “It’s time to get up. And get out. I want your share of the hotel. And I want all your money. Well, no, keep ten grand, I’m not a monster. Seed money for your new life someplace else.”

  Rondeau sat up slowly. Maybe this was a nightmare. “I don’t think giving you all my money counts as a favor, exactly.”

  The demon growled. “It’s not killing anyone. Or violating your moral code. A young thought-construct like me has to look out for himself. There’s a power vacuum in this city. I’ve got the right look to be the new Pit Boss of Las Vegas – I just need the resources to grease a few wheels. That’s where you come in.”

  “Look, I’m kinda like your... creator, or father, or something, right, so maybe we can work something out.”

  “You are like my father. I want my inheritance early. And I want you to move far away. Because who wants to live in the same town as their dad? I talked to Pelham, he’s already getting packed. He says you can live with him in his RV. Nice, huh? You’ve got a good friend there.”

  “I did not think this through clearly,” Rondeau put his face in his hands. The 24-hour-concierge service. The hot and cold running cute boys. The good booze. The not ever having to actually do any work. Oh, gods. He’d have to do work again. “There’s a reason I don’t get put in charge of killing ice witches.”

  “Who said Regina’s dead? She’s in a fiery little pocket dimension I made. She’s not happy in there, either. Fulfill your end of the bargain...” The demon leaned forward and exhaled sulfurous breath on Rondeau’s face. “Or I’ll let her out.”

  “Is a cashier’s check okay?” Rondeau said.

  Life in Stone

  The assassin Mr. Zealand appeared in the novel Poison Sleep, sent to kill Marla, but ended up becoming her ally, and getting himself killed in the process—if you read “Snake and Mongoose” you got a little of that backstory. This tale takes place before he met Marla, and concerns another job, involving the sorcerer Archibald Grace, whom you heard about in “The Doorman.”

  After ascending 72 flights of iron stairs, creeping past tentacled sentinels lurking in pools filled with black water, and silently dispat
ching wizened old warriors armed with glaives and morningstars that proved a close match for his pistols and poisoned glass knives, Mr. Zealand at last stumbled into the uppermost room of Archibald Grace’s invisible tower. All Zealand’s earlier murders were mere journeyman work compared to this final assassination, the murder of a man who’d lived for untold centuries, who’d come to America and enslaved buffalo spirits, who’d built this tower of ice and iron on the far side of the Rockies as a sanctuary and stronghold for his own precious life.

  Zealand rested for a moment, catching his breath. He got winded so much more easily now than he had as a young man, and he didn’t sleep well anymore, which made him jangly all day, most days. He leaned against a filigreed pillar of white ivory, a tusk or bone cut from some prehistoric—possibly even ahistorical—leviathan. Archibald Grace had doubtless slain whatever monster this ivory came from. He was a killer of such stature that even Zealand found himself humbled. Grace had murdered monsters, while Zealand had seldom killed anything but men. He ran his hand along the spiraled carving on the pillar, one of a dozen in the round tower room, and then he walked to the arched, open window. He looked down from the tower’s lunatic height onto the small town of Cincaguas, just another little place in the valley, whose inhabitants were unaware of the magical edifice rising on the outskirts of town, an invisible spire so high that Zealand could look down on a slowly gliding California condor.

  Having regained his breath, Zealand turned to face the center of the room. He unzipped his black canvas shoulder bag and reached inside to touch the haft of a stone-headed axe, an ancient implement fitted onto an unbreakable carbon-steel handle. Zealand approached the center of the room, passing the pillars, and saw what he’d been led to expect—a square box, two feet to a side, resting on an ivory pedestal. The box was a simple thing, made of aged wood worn so smooth that the grain was nearly invisible. Zealand drew one of his remaining knives, this one made of ceramic, and used the blade to pry open and lift the lid.