Dead Reign (22 page)

“I can’t wait to hear it,” Beadle said.

M
arla, Pelham, and B drove into downtown Berkeley near midnight and parked on a side street not far from the nearby commuter train station. “Last train arrives pretty soon,” B said. “Then the place closes down, and when it’s deserted…assuming things work like they did last time I did this…the train will come along shortly. I had to slip by the tracks and hide halfway down the tunnel last time, and that was kind of terrifying. That was before I really knew about magic, though.”

“Yeah, a look-away spell should be enough to keep the three of us from getting noticed,” Marla said. “And it’s lots more hospitable than crouching in a tunnel, hoping no late trains come along.”

“May I carry your bag, Ms. Mason?” Pelham said as they got out of the car.

“Nope,” Marla said, pulling the black messenger bag over her shoulder. She missed her battered leather satchel, which she usually filled with nifty ordnance for field operations, but B had loaned her this bag, and she’d raided Cole’s office for a few items infused with magic. Cole was a seer, not a battle-sorcerer, so he didn’t have much in the way of weaponry, but Marla had found a few useful tidbits, and glass and metal and porcelain clanked gently together when she shifted the bag. They walked into the train station, which was pretty much empty, and Marla cast a look-away spell, which was easier than true invisibility and just as effective; it simply kept people from noticing them. They slipped through the gate without buying tickets, then rode down the escalator and had a seat on a long, low, wooden bench. “I like escalators,” Pelham said. “I never rode one until yesterday, at the airport. They’re fun.”

“The world’s full of fun stuff,” Marla said. “Let’s hope we get to come back and experience more of it.” The day had been full of big and little pleasures, and she might even have enjoyed herself, if not for her constant worry about Rondeau, Hamil, and Felport itself. She figured if the city burned to the ground or sank into the bay, that would make the national news, but otherwise, how could she know what was happening there?

“Anything I should know? About the train?”

B nodded. “I did think of one thing—time. When I rode that train before, the trip didn’t seem to take much time, and I didn’t stay down there long at all, but when I came back, it was nearly sixteen hours after I left.”

Marla nodded. “Variable time. Gotcha. Supernatural stuff does weird things to your subjective time sense. Death and his minions can probably bop back and forth in an instant, but for living people, it’s a more momentous trip. Time and space are probably pretty wonky down there.”

“So how long do I wait to panic?” B said.

Marla shook her head. “A few days? Though I’m not sure what good panicking will do you. You can try calling Hamil every day. There’s a spell preventing any news about me from getting into the city, so if you find yourself able to tell him about my plan, you can pretty much guarantee my plan failed, and I’ve gone from a tourist to a permanent resident of the underworld.”

They waited. The last train, a short one of only three cars, pulled in, disgorged its passengers, and left. A transit employee walked through, looking under benches for who-knows-what, and Marla and company had to draw up their feet so he wouldn’t feel them. Finally he left, and gates rattled closed somewhere in the distance, sealing off the station from the world above, and the lights went out.

Marla took her friends’ hands and said,
“Fiat lux,”
and they all blinked at the sudden grainy brightness of their night-vision. “More waiting. I hate waiting.”

“I know,” B said. “I brought a deck of cards.”

They played Oh, Hell for a while, with Pelham keeping score in his head. “What if it doesn’t come?” B said.

“You dreamed about Pelham and a train,” Marla said. “It’ll come.” B was an oracle-generator, a magical catalyst, and maybe the train to the underworld was just a ghost of a potentiality most nights, but B’s presence here would drag it into immanence.

A distant whooshing sound filled the air. Pelham efficiently picked up the cards before the onrushing train-wind could blow them away.

A headlight appeared in the dark, a strange pale light that made Marla squint, and then the train slid to a stop before them—a single car, the front compartment all dark glass, the driver hidden. The train was white, not the usual silver, and it was streamlined, organic, all of a piece, as if carved from the thighbone of a leviathan. The windows on the side were trapezoidal, and the doors, when they slid open, seemed to have tiny triangular interlocking teeth. “All aboard.” Marla impulsively grabbed B and kissed his cheek. She glanced at Pelham. “Last chance to stay behind, Pelly.” He shook his head, though his face was as white as the bone train.

“Be careful!” B said, but Marla didn’t answer him, as it was hardly a promise she could make in good conscience. Marla and Pelham stepped onto the train. There were no seats, just gently curving walls, and instead of metal handrails, there were hooks of bone hanging from the ceiling. Marla and Pelham grabbed on, and a cold dry voice over the loudspeaker said, “Doors are closing.” B waved at them as the doors hissed shut, and the train lurched and began to move forward. Marla and Pelham swayed for a moment, then Marla said, “I’m going to go talk to the driver.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“Probably not. But as you get to know me better, you’ll realize it’s kind of a bad habit of mine.” She walked toward the front of the train, where only a crack in the wall indicated the presence of what might be a door. She knocked. “Hey,” she said. “I’m Marla Mason. Mind if I come in?”

The loudspeaker clicked on, but there was only silence for a moment, a blank hiss. Finally the voice said, “Door is opening,” and the entryway to the compartment clicked open with a hiss, swinging inward half an inch. Marla glanced back at Pelham, gave him a nod she meant to be reassuring, and pushed through the door.

“Psst,” Rondeau said from his chair in the corner. “Heh. I’ve always wanted to lurk in the dark and go ‘Psst.’”

“You shouldn’t be here, Rondeau.” Hamil looked around the darkness of his bedroom. “How did you get in here?”

Rondeau shrugged. “For the security system, Marla gave me the code. For the dumb locks—hell, Hamil, I’ve been breaking into places since I got this body. Don’t worry, I wasn’t seen, I crept like a mouse. Been waiting for freaking ever for you, though.”

Hamil sighed. “Yes, well, Death is howling for blood. Someone—I won’t speculate—tried to blow him up today. Nice effort, by the way. He seems to be blaming Viscarro, which is good for our purposes.”

Rondeau grunted. Part of him was glad his little group was still secret for the moment, of course, but another part of him wanted the credit. “Well, see, the big boom was mainly a distraction. We were planning to get Marla’s cloak.”

Hamil whistled and settled onto the edge of his bed. “That might be powerful enough to actually damage him. It’s dangerous, though, that cloak—too many uses and you begin to go mad.”

“I wasn’t planning on wearing it every day,” Rondeau said. “I’ve seen what it does to Marla—when I was a little kid, she ripped off my jaw while she was wearing that cloak. It made her so cold and crazy, she didn’t see a little kid, she just saw a potential object of power, a jawbone she could use as an oracle. I’ve got no fondness for the cloak.”

“Even with its healing powers, it might not be able to keep you alive if Death decides to stop your heart. He can kill any of us with a thought.”

Rondeau shrugged. “I’ve seen Marla catch fire, take damage that should have reduced her to ash, and the cloak healed her. But yeah, he
might
kill my body, but not before I get a few licks in, and anyway, what’s a body? I’m fond of this one, but push comes to shove…”

“If your mind goes looking for a new host, you’ll oust someone else’s mind,” Hamil said. “That’s murder.”

Rondeau nodded seriously. “I’d accept the karmic debt. Besides, if I get killed, I’ll try to take over Death’s body—I know it’s not his real form, that ultimately he doesn’t have a body, but he’s walking around in flesh-and-blood up here, and if he has a brain, I might be able to seize control of it. Wouldn’t that piss him off? Makes me wish I could jump bodies at will, but I’m stuck in this one until it stops operating. If that doesn’t work, if he’s got some kind of god-condom on to keep me from stealing his body, Ayres is usually with him, so I’ll take over
his
body.”

“A good plan. When will you strike?”

“Ah. That’s the thing. We went to Marla’s tonight, and her wardrobe was gone. We heard Death summoned you last night, and we were wondering…”

“He called me to Marla’s apartment,” Hamil said. “Perhaps he saw the cloak, and recognized it as a threat? But it’s not something you can burn or destroy, so he’d have to dispose of it some other way. He asked me to arrange a meeting with the Bay Witch.”

“Crap. So you think, what, Marla’s cloak’s on the bottom of the bay?”

“It seems plausible, but I can’t be sure.”

“Can I talk to the Bay Witch? Is she with us?”

“I wouldn’t count on it. She likes Marla, but she asked Death to kill off some invasive species that was taking over the bay, and he did so. I’m afraid he may have her loyalty now.”

“Damn it.” Rondeau stood up and paced a bit. “Hmm. Down by the docks, that’s Honeyed Knots territory. Maybe they saw something, saw the wardrobe get transported? I’ll put the word out. And if the Bay Witch did take the wardrobe away and hide it, well, a big fucking magical thing on the bottom of the bay, there must be a way to track that.”

“And then what? You go down to get it with scuba gear?”

“I was thinking of making Langford infuse me with selkie blood or give me gills or something,” Rondeau said. “But your idea is way simpler.”

“Good luck. I’ll try to keep Death from suspecting anything, though that probably means blaming things on Viscarro.”

“I never liked that moldy old troglodyte anyway,” Rondeau said. “And he’s not loyal to the cause. I say give him hell.”

Rondeau crouched beneath an overpass near the docks and shared a few tokes on a pipe with a handful of Honeyed Knots. He didn’t even know what he was smoking, but he’d smoked just about everything in the past, so it didn’t much matter. “So, fellas,” he said, “did you see anything like that lately?”

The Honeyed Knots were a more stylish bunch than the Four Tree Gang, most wearing beads and charms and fetishes, many with extensive facial piercings that reminded Rondeau uncomfortably of a cannibal witch named Bethany he’d had the displeasure to meet a while back. Though the Four Tree Gang outnumbered the Honeyed Knots by about three to one, the Honeyed Knots had a much higher magical skill level, consisting mostly of disgraced apprentices who’d been bounced out of their positions, though every one had a sob story about how they’d been unjustly persecuted. The Four Tree Gang was good if you needed somebody beat up, or a lot of equipment stolen out of the back of a warehouse, but the Honeyed Knots were better for more delicate work. One of Marla’s most significant moves as chief sorcerer had been mediating a peace between the two gangs, and giving them a sort of quasi-official status in the city’s magical underworld, retaining the leaders of both gangs as “consultants” and occasionally employing them in operations that needed warm bodies who wouldn’t be totally confused if impossible things started happening. They were in awe of Marla, who’d kicked the asses of the best fighters in both gangs—her way of mediating a peace was, of course, somewhat violent—and Rondeau trusted the loyalty of the gangs, in the aggregate if not necessarily in the case of each individual member.

One of the Honeyed Knots, a guy named Mondrian with an elaborate abstract face tattoo and enormous pegs in his earlobes, nodded. “I was down by pier 14 yesterday morning, early, and saw some old guy leading a group of five or six people carrying a big bulky thing, it could have been a wardrobe. It was wrapped all over with chains. They went to the end of the dock, and the old guy said something, I couldn’t hear what. Then the guys with him tossed the wardrobe, if that’s what it was, into the water, and they all walked off.”

Rondeau nodded. “That all?”

Mondrian grinned, showing sharpened teeth. “Nah. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right? The water’s not real deep there that time of morning, so I figured I’d see if the package was anything worth salvaging. I went down to the water, and was just about to jump in when the Bay Witch popped out of the waves.” He shook his head. “I always heard she was out there, but I’ve never seen her before, hot blonde in a tight wetsuit, pure surfer-girl, I couldn’t believe it. I bet she’s really a hundred years old and has seawater for blood. She looked at me like I was, I don’t know, some kind of weird bug, and then she dove down. I couldn’t see much under the water, it was sort of churned up and it was only just dawn, but I think she took off with the box, yeah. There was nothing there when I poked around anyway, and there were so many chains on it, the thing would’ve dropped straight to the bottom.”

Rondeau clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, bro. That helps.”

Mondrian nodded, sucked on the pipe for a moment, then said, “So, Marla. Is she, you know. Coming back?”

“We’re working on that,” Rondeau said. “And you just went a long way toward making it happen.” He said his farewells and headed toward his current safe house, a utility shed near the little amusement park down by the esplanade. Being a revolutionary ringleader had its good points, but sleeping on cots next to old paint cans and broken carousel horses wasn’t one of them. Not that he had much night left to sleep in. He opened his cell phone and made a call. “Hey, Beadle. We’re going to need a boat, and some diving gear, and somebody who can do a little divination.”

In the first glow of dawn, Ayres led a score of his newly exhumed zombies down the street, Booth walking stiffly at his side. Ayres had draped the zombies in illusions to make them look alive, and he’d made them all black, just to mess with Booth—except for one, which Ayres had decided to disguise as a young Abraham Lincoln, acromegaly and all. “It’s this way,” Ayres said, for Booth’s benefit, and led his little army down the steps to the rocky strand of stinking beach, toward the entry to Viscarro’s tunnels.