Dead Reign (13 page)

“Oookay,” the guy said. “It’s sort of on my way. If you can fix my car, sure. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, other than it’s old. I don’t really have tools, though. Maybe, like, a wrench. I mean, don’t get your hopes up.”

“Don’t worry,” Marla said, clapping Pelham on the back. “My man Pelly here is a wizard with automobiles, isn’t that right?”

“I do have some small facility,” Pelham said.

The college boy lifted an eyebrow. He’d be cute, Marla thought, if he hadn’t been born when she was, oh, fifteen. “He’s a mechanic? No offense, guy, but you look like a hobo butler.”

“He gets that a lot,” Marla said. “Let’s check under the hood, shall we, Pelly?”

They went around to the front of the car and bent over, Pelham poking at wires and cables and whistling absentmindedly through his teeth. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Pelham said. “This vehicle hasn’t been maintained at all. The Chamberlain would fire any driver in her fleet who treated her automobiles so shabbily.”

“Wait, you can actually fix cars?” Marla said.

Pelham frowned. “Of course.”

Marla laughed. “You never cease to amaze, Pelly. But don’t worry about it.” She put her hands on the engine block, meditated for a moment, and spoke a phrase Ernesto, the scrapyard sorcerer, had taught her. Her nostrils filled with the scent of burning oil, and she felt her heart—the engine of her body—stutter once or twice before finding its rhythm again. She exhaled, and a thin plume of car exhaust emerged from her mouth, making Pelham cough. She stood up. “Try to get it to start,” she said, and the college boy obligingly climbed in and turned the key. The engine purred beautifully, and the driver gave a cheer. “Just a little magic to give any old beater an extra few months of operation,” Marla said. “I wonder how long it’ll take before this guy realizes the car doesn’t even use up gas anymore?”

She let the hood drop, grinning, and went around to the passenger side, crushing fast-food bags and disposable coffee cups underfoot. Pelham got in the back.

“I’m Roddy,” the driver said, sticking out his hand.

“I’m Marla,” she said. “That’s Pelly. Pelham, I mean.”

“Pelly is fine,” her valet said, with his accustomed dignity, and, perhaps, a hint of pleasure. Maybe all Pelham had needed to help him loosen up was a nickname to call his own. Marla could hope.

“Let’s hit the road, Roddy,” Marla said, and he pulled off the shoulder and drove.

“What was wrong with it?” he said. “It hasn’t sounded this good in years!”

“Loose cables,” Marla said promptly. “Pelly spotted it right away. Nothing big.”

“I don’t know shit about cars,” Roddy said. “I’m a philosophy major.” He glanced Marla’s way. “Not very practical, I know.”

“Hey, philosophy teaches you how to think,” Marla said. “Thinking’s the most versatile tool in the world.”

“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Roddy said, “what are you two doing wandering the back roads outside Felport? I come this way because I like the scenic route, but it’s a long walk to Annemberg.”

Marla considered, then said, “We were banished from Felport by the incarnation of Death, and we’re headed to Annemberg so I can meet up with some allies and set up my government-in-exile.”

“Oookay,” Roddy said.

“Nah, I’m just screwing with you,” Marla said. “We were hitchhiking, but the redneck who was giving us a ride got pissed when I wouldn’t give him a little nookie in a gas station bathroom, and he chucked us out by the side of the road.”

“That sucks,” Roddy said amiably. “Hitching’s dangerous, though. What if the guy hadn’t taken no for an answer?”

“Aw, hell, Pelly’s a master of ninjitsu.”

“No, only judo,” he said, alarmed.

Roddy laughed, and switched on the radio, and they made the rest of the trip to the tunes of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.

Marla sort of wished they’d kept on talking, shooting the shit. With nothing but music and the hum of the road and the passage of fields and cows and trees out the windows, she had way too much time to fret over her desperate situation.

About ten miles from Annemberg, she finally had the bright idea to try calling Leda. Maybe she was only prevented from getting in touch with people in the city. She asked to borrow Roddy’s phone again—if she used hers, he would have wondered why she’d borrowed his earlier, and he already thought she was odd—and dialed Husch’s private line, one of only half a dozen numbers she knew by heart.

Dr. Husch answered promptly. “You have the wrong number.” Marla imagined that was how she answered every call to that line that came from an unknown number.

“It’s me, Marla.”

“Marla,”
Leda said. “Good heavens. Hamil called me an hour ago. He was afraid you were dead, or stuck on the moon or in the caldera of a volcano.”

“No, I’m alive and…well, alive anyway. Look, I’m about ten miles from your place; I found a nice kid to give us a ride. Just wanted you to know I was on the way.”

“Ah, you can’t speak freely,” Leda said. “Of course. But I take your visit to mean you can’t get back into the city?”

“True enough.”

“And…you have a plan to rectify this?”

“Always. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

“I’ll have an extra breakfast sent up to my rooms for you.”

“Make it two. Pelham’s with me.”

“Who’s Pelham?”

“All will be revealed.” Marla flipped the phone shut and passed it back to Roddy. Leda’s number wouldn’t be stored in the phone’s memory—neither people nor computers could remember that number without Leda’s permission—so she didn’t have to “accidentally” drop his phone out the window to keep him from having embargoed contact information.

“Here’s fine,” she said, and he slowed the car at the crossroads.

“Here? There’s no here here! It’s a stoplight in the middle of nothing.”

“I know where we’re going,” Marla said. “Thanks, Roddy. Good luck with the philosophizing.”

“Good luck with the, ah, incarnation of death.” Marla thanked him, sincerely, and hopped out of the car, Pelham following. They waved as Roddy drove off, then Marla set off across a field that wasn’t much different from any other field. Once she’d gone a few yards, the illusory camouflage shimmered, the Blackwing Institute’s long tree-lined driveway was revealed, and the mammoth bulk of the hospital appeared in the distance. A golf cart was approaching them at a good speed, doubtless piloted by one of the many cheerful, mindlessly obedient homunculi who served as cooks, orderlies, and general assistants at the Institute. Dr. Husch was the only person on staff with a mind of her own, but that was okay. She had only about a dozen patients—fewer, now that Ayres was out—and some of them didn’t even require therapy, only containment, like Elsie Jarrow, the insane chaos magician, or Norma Nilson, the nihilomancer, who had an aura of despair so palpable it could make rattlesnakes commit suicide.

The golf cart pulled up alongside them, and Marla and Pelham hopped on. The scrub-clad homunculus driving turned the cart around and drove them to the house, without a word.

Dr. Husch was waiting on the steps for them, wearing a severe black dress that somehow only made her seem sexier, in an untouchable vintage blond movie star sort of way. She kissed Marla’s cheek, which was an overwhelming display of affection for her; she must be really worried about all this. She stepped back and regarded Marla and Pelham. “You’re both bedraggled. Come in. There’s coffee.”

Marla followed her through the imposing front doors, into a marble-floored foyer, and up a grand staircase. “This is the hospital?” Pelham said, looking around. “It rivals the Chamberlain’s house in splendor.”

“It’s a nuthatch, yeah,” Marla said. “But it used to be a mansion, built by Mr. Annemann, an old-school sorcerer. He was a master of creating artificial life—homunculi. There’s a whole army of his homunculi here, dressed like orderlies. They work at whatever you dress them as, and they eat lavender seeds and earthworms. It’s messed up.”

“With the kind of money Marla provides to fund the facility, I can only afford staff who don’t need to be paid.” Dr. Husch paused in her ascent of the stairs to scowl down.

“What happened to Mr. Annemann? His name sounds familiar,” Pelham said.

“Oh, he’s still around,” Marla said. “He’s in a hospital bed, in a coma. Dr. Husch takes good care of him.” She glanced up. Leda was walking stiffly, but she usually did, so it was hard to tell if she was made nervous by the line of Marla’s conversation. Probably not. Leda knew Marla well enough to know she would be discreet. “She was his apprentice, and after he went to Comaville, she kindly offered her services as a therapist and jailer and zookeeper for sorcerers who go cuckoo and become a danger to themselves and others and me.”

That was mostly the truth. Annemann
was
in a coma, though Leda was the one who’d put him there, shooting him in the head with a little pistol years ago. Though she looked like a normal human woman, Leda was actually one of Annemann’s homunculi, an imitation of humanity created to be a sex toy—dolled up properly, she’d look like a nineteen-year-old sex kitten, which was why she affected more severe dress these days, trying to hide her light under a tight librarian’s bun and business suits. Annemann had made her too well, though, and unlike his other creations, she’d had a mind and motives of her own, and despite her creator’s aloofness and occasional cruelty, she grew to care for him deeply.

Naturally, she assumed he’d secretly cast a love spell on her.

Over time, she came to resent the spell, the way it made her feel, the way he treated her like an object, and so she shot him, hoping to kill him and break the spell. Marla imagined that she’d wept when she pulled the trigger. The bullet had ravaged Mr. Annemann’s brain, and any spell he’d cast would have dissolved when his consciousness did…but Leda had gone on loving him, which suggested he’d never cast a spell on her at all. She’d been laid low by grief and guilt, and as a result, she’d chosen to dedicate her life to helping sorcerers who’d lost their minds. Lots of sorcerers called themselves “Dr. This-and-that,” but Leda was rare in that she actually had a couple of doctorates, having gone to grad school with false papers. She was good at her job, and Marla admired her toughness, though they got on each other’s nerves if they spent too much time together.

Leda showed them into her modest apartments, which were perfectly homey aside from the wall of high-tech surveillance equipment that allowed her to monitor her patients twenty-four hours a day. Leda didn’t sleep. Some of her patients didn’t, either. A homunculus in a lab coat watched the screens, wearing a pair of oversized headphones, and he paid them no attention at all, focused on his charges.

“Sit and eat.” Leda pointed them to a small dining table set with silver trays.

Marla dropped into a chair at the head of the table and leaned forward, inhaling the welcome smell of coffee, bacon, eggs, toast, hash browns, and silver-dollar pancakes. “My compliments to the homunculus you stuck a chef’s hat on,” Marla said, and dug in. Pelham made a more formal thank-you and began eating, too.

“So,” Dr. Husch said. “Your plan is…?”

“Government in exile, for now.” Marla snapped a piece of bacon in half. “This is too crispy. Bring me a phone, we’ll call Hamil and tell him how to arrange things. Damned if I’m going to let some uppity death god try to call the shots in my city. We’ll make life so unpleasant for him that he’ll beg to leave.”

“You haven’t called him yet?” Leda snapped her fingers, signaling an orderly. “I just assumed…”

“My phone didn’t work,” Marla said. “Neither did the phone I tried to borrow. I think Mr. Death put some bad mojo on me, made it so I can’t contact my troops. Pelham can’t call them, either, because magically speaking, he’s indistinguishable from me—it’s a long story. What do you know about how things stand in the city? Is Rondeau okay?” She wasn’t too worried—Rondeau was a survivor, but there was a difference between just surviving and being okay.

“He’s in hiding, according to Hamil. He gave Death an earful of Cursing and escaped in the chaos.”

“Nice.” It was good to hear Mr. Death could be harmed, not just by her dagger, but by Curses, too. Those weaknesses gave her hope there might be others. “Look, since I can’t contact them directly, do you mind passing messages for me?”

“I don’t have much choice.” An orderly appeared with a tray holding an old-fashioned rotary phone on a long cord. He set it on the table, and Leda dialed with quick precision. “Hamil,” she said, after a moment. “Marla apple camera scowl.” She frowned. “What do you mean you don’t understand? I
said,
‘Marla sandal scissors glass!’”

“Shit,” Marla said softly. “You’re talking gibberish, Leda. Give me the phone.”

Frowning, confused, Leda handed over the phone, but before Marla even got it to her ear she heard the squeal and crack of static and feedback. “Damn it,” she said, and gave back the phone. “Tell him…tell him what the weather’s like.”

“Hamil, the weather here is clear and a little cool, but I suspect it will get hotter as the day goes on.”

“Now tell him what I’m eating,” Marla said.

“Marla panda swamp toilet casket—damn it, stop interrupting!” she said, annoyed.

“It’s weaponized aphasia,” Marla said. She shoved her plate away, her appetite gone. “Tell Hamil you’ll call him back.”

“I…we’ll talk again soon.” Leda hung up. “Aphasia? I wasn’t saying the words I thought I was saying?”

“No. Whenever you tried to say something about me, it just turned to gibberish and nonsense.” She sighed. “I guess we should stay hopeful. Got something to write with?”

Leda called for a notepad and a pen.

“Okay, try to take dictation. ‘Hamil, I need you to get rid of Ayres, because right now he’s the only one providing Death with intelligence about our operations.’ Okay, read that back.”

“Hamil, emu candle tonal hepatitis,” Dr. Husch said miserably. “The words looked right when I
wrote
them, but now…” She shook her head.

Marla snapped her fingers and gestured, then took the pen and notepad and tried to write her own note. When she lifted pen from paper, there was nothing but gibberish written there, all the wrong words. Death was mucking with their minds, tweaking the language-using centers of their brains and making it impossible for Marla to convey a message to her associates in the city. “Maybe if Hamil came here,” she said thoughtfully. “But then, he probably couldn’t carry messages or orders back, either. Information can get out, to reach me—I’m sure Death wants me to know what’s happening in Felport, that he’s in control—but I can’t send any information in. Death is smarter than I thought.”