Dead Reign (25 page)

Pelham whimpered. Marla couldn’t blame him.

Bethany’s bodily modifications had continued after death, and she’d transformed herself—or been transformed—into a monster. Her stubby horns had grown, bursting from her bloody forehead as great curling pointed horns, and she had wings now, of leather and wire and gleaming bolts. Her upper body was much the same, though she was bare-chested, her nipple rings glinting, the tattoos on her chest revealed as elaborate abstract designs. But her lower body was no longer human at all. She was like a centaur now, but with the elongated body of a clockwork lizard, all scales of hammered brass and spines of wickedly sharp volcanic glass, metal seams releasing little puffs of steam when her tail twitched. Her face was different, too, her jaw a hinged thing of blue glass and silver joints, her teeth stainless steel triangles, but her eyes were the same, yellow with horizontal slits.
“Marla. You did this to me. But I am a greater predator now than ever before.”

“Too bad there’s nothing to hunt down here,” Marla said, with bravado she didn’t really feel. “Except, what, the ghosts of rats?”

Bethany slithered forward, her mechanical legs pistoning smoothly, and then rose to a great height, looking down on Marla.
“Who is the little man? My little appetizer.”

“Don’t touch him—” Marla began, but Bethany spun impossibly fast, swiping out with her spiked tail and smacking Marla across the room. Marla landed hard, groaned, and sat up, then jerked back when she almost stuck her hand into the spinning spiral staircase. If Bethany had smacked her with a little more English on the blow, Marla would have hit the stairs and been transformed herself, into a bloody red cloud of fragments. “You’re still a bitch.” Marla rose, but then she screamed—actually screamed—as Bethany flashed her a grin and proceeded to eat Pelham.

She
ate Pelham.
Bethany’s jaw unhinged, unfolded, expanded to impossible size, and she snapped downward, Pelham disappearing into her now-vast mouth with only a little squeak. Then Bethany rose up again and Marla’s valet disappeared, feet waving, down her throat. Her jaw folded up to human proportions again. Bethany’s throat was still human-sized, Pelham should never have been able to fit, but…but…

But this was the underworld, where physics were, at best, a convenience. Still, underworld or not, some things were constant.

Marla drew her dagger, and Bethany belched a gout of steam.
“You next,”
Bethany said.
“Shishkebabed.”
From somewhere on her body Bethany retrieved a steampunk crossbow, an oversized thing of elaborate flywheels and tiny humming engines, loaded with half a dozen bolts as long as a forearm and thick as the fat end of a pool cue. She fired, the bolts launching with little percussive noises like champagne corks popping, and Marla dodged and dove and rolled, trying to think—how to fight a dragon?

The same way you fight anything. Hit it where it’s sensitive.
She rolled again, closer, coming perilously near the metal talons on the ends of Bethany’s mechanical legs, and then lashed up with her dagger, slicing neatly through the overlapping white armored plates of Bethany’s belly. Bethany screamed like a steam whistle and reared up, trying to escape, but that only exposed more of her belly to Marla, and so Marla rose from her crouch and kept cutting, dragging the blade down, parting metal as easily as cloth.

“Ms. Mason!” Pelham said, and yes, he was in there, she could see him through the slash she’d made. He clung to a metal lattice, face sweaty and streaked with soot, eyes wide.

“Get back!” Marla said, and when he retreated as far as he could, she lashed out with her blade, slicing away a dozen plates of armor. Bethany staggered back, and Pelham fell out of the hole Marla had made. Before Bethany got out of range, Marla went for the wires and tubes and hydraulics at the ankles and knees of her front legs, severing connections and spilling hot dark oil all over the station floor.

Marla grabbed Pelham and dragged him away as Bethany fell. The dragon-witch began dragging herself backward with her functional rear legs, eyes fixed on Marla, crossbow forgotten on the floor.
“You killed me,”
Bethany said, retreating into her train.
“You did this.”

“We’ve established that,” Marla said, breathing hard. “Now stop the staircase from spinning, or I’m coming onto the train after you. You remember what happened last time I boarded your train, right? I might not be able to kill you again, but I can force you to spend the rest of your eternity repairing all the damage I’ll do.”

Bethany hissed and vanished into the train. The spiral stair slowed down and finally stopped.

“Okay,” Marla said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” She retrieved her bag, the contents of which hadn’t done her much good, but might serve her better in the future.

“I’ve never been eaten before,” Pelham said, voice trembling. “It was most unpleasant.”

“Just be glad she didn’t have stomach acids. Come on. Upward and outward.” She hoped Bethany wouldn’t start the stair spinning again when they were halfway up. “I’ll lead. Who knows what we’ll find up there.” Marla stepped onto the stair, which, in the real world, led up to one of San Francisco’s rougher neighborhoods. It would lead elsewhere here, she was sure. “Unless it’s somebody else I killed. I hope that isn’t the theme for this visit.” But she knew just
thinking
that increased the likelihood it would be. They were unlikely to encounter any of Pelham’s personal demons, assuming he had any—he was magically bound to her in a subservient position, and she guessed that her own ghosts would take precedence.

“How many people
have
you killed?” Pelham said from the stairs below her.

“With my own hands? Not that many. I mean, too many, even one is too many, but not as many as most people probably think. There was Bethany. A guy named Joshua, who killed a friend of mine.”
And broke my heart.
“Somerset, but he was
un
dead when I killed him, so maybe he doesn’t count. A jungle sorcerer named Mutex who tried to destroy the world, but he was complicated, too—I only killed his body, his mind was somewhere else at the time. Then there was a guy I knocked off a rooftop in my misspent youth—though that was an accident, we were fighting and he fell. I atoned as best I could for that, made offerings at his grave, tried to obviate the bad karma….” She paused. “And, ah, when I was about fourteen, there was this guy, and he…hell. This is going to be hell.”

Rich emerald light burst in, and Marla emerged from the darkness into a new and—thankfully—unfamiliar place, a lush green wet jungle filled with the calling of birds and the screeching of monkeys. The humid air smelled of wet leaves and sickly sweet flowers. The stairway jutted surrealistically up from a tangle of vines and undergrowth.

Pelham came after Marla as she gazed at the canopy of branches above. “If it’s not too forward, may I ask, whom did you kill in a place like this?”

“Nobody. I’ve never been to a spot like this before. I don’t know where—”

“Marla Mason.” Mutex emerged from the trees, hands clasped behind his back. He looked as he had in life, dark skin, dark eyes, bare chest, wearing a short iridescent cape woven of insect wings. “Welcome. I will cut out your living heart.” He smiled, and his teeth were little obsidian chips, and when he showed his hands, his fingers were knives of volcanic glass, the same kind of knives he’d once used to cut out the hearts of half a dozen sorcerers before Marla stopped him.

“I just kicked Bethany’s ass,” Marla said. “Do you think you can—”

The jungle behind Mutex stirred. Something vast and green approached, trees snapping and falling as it came.

Marla’s mouth went dry.
“Run.”

But before she could run, Mutex sprouted several long shafts from his chest. He stared down at himself, puzzled, and fell backward. The vast thing behind him paused, then drew back, retreating before it fully showed itself, leaving Marla with the impression of a walking green cliffside.

She turned, to find Pelham holding Bethany’s clockwork crossbow, which now held only two bolts. “I thought the weapon might be useful,” he said, almost apologetically, and Marla hugged him.

“Good man.” She released him. Mutex groaned and began trying to pull one of the crossbow bolts out of his chest, crying out in frustration when his razor-sharp fingers cut right through the shaft. “We’d better go before he gets up again,” Marla said.

“That enormous thing that followed him. What was it?”

Marla brushed hanging vines away and kept her eyes open for snakes and poisonous frogs. “Mutex was a priest of the old Aztec gods. He killed people and cut out their hearts as sacrifices, hoping to bring his gods back to life. Some of those gods are
nasty.
That thing behind him…I think it was one of those gods. Or at least Mutex’s own personal version of one of those gods. Either way, it could have hurt us badly, but knocking Mutex down was enough to make it pause. I don’t want to give it a chance to catch up, though. Something that big can cover a lot of ground. Thanks for thinking fast. My usual response is more fight than flight, but when I saw that thing coming out of the jungle, buggering off seemed best.”

“That’s two, then,” Pelham said. “Of the people you’ve killed. Do you think we’ll have to face them all?”

Marla sighed. “Yeah. Probably. I mean, I do think so, which means it will almost certainly happen, damn it. I guess deep down I knew I’d have to answer for the things I’ve done, no matter how justified those actions seemed at the time.” And the worst was yet to come, though Marla didn’t want to scare Pelham. Somerset was terrifying. Joshua had been her lover, before she murdered him. And the last one, the boy from her hometown, from before she ran away from home, from before she knew magic…That would be hard. They would all be hard. Cole had told her there was always a cost to visiting the underworld. She hadn’t thought the cost would involve ripping the scabs off her own history of violence.

M
arla and Pelham trudged through the sticky jungle, alert to every rustle and roar and screech in the distance, afraid Mutex and his pet god would catch up to them. Eventually they emerged into a clearing, where they were confronted by a crumbling step pyramid, all dark vine-crusted stone, with a human-scaled stairway leading to the top. Long gutters ran down either side of the stairway, stained the dark reddish-brown of old dried blood.

“Do we go up?” Pelham said.

Marla nodded. “We climbed stairs to get out of the last place. Going up seems counterintuitive in a place like this, but like Cole said, direction is more a courtesy than a fact down here.”

“Who do you think we’ll see next?” Pelham puffed a bit as they began the long climb. The distances they were crossing might be imaginary on some level, but the energy Pelham and Marla were expending was real.

“Hopefully nobody. An empty throne room. But if we’re not that lucky, I don’t know. I killed Bethany before I killed Mutex, so we’re not going in reverse chronological order. If there’s a pattern, I’m not privy to it.” They paused halfway up the pyramid to rest, and Marla took a bottle of water from her bag and shared it with Pelham. A millipede scurried up the face of the pyramid, pursued by tiny green lizards, and Marla wondered if they were the ghosts of an entomologist and a herpetologist in their ideal forms, or if they were just part of the scenery, the illusion of jungle and pyramids that Mutex had made. The air smelled wet, and faintly of coppery blood and sweet flowers. “All right. Up we go.”

They reached the top of the pyramid, where Marla had expected to find a slab of stone for human sacrifices. Instead, there was a metal door, like the access to an interior stairway from a rooftop. Marla turned and looked back the way they’d come, shading her eyes against the sun, and there was nothing but jungle as far as she could see, except for one green hill—

—which began moving toward her, knocking down trees as it came. She swore. Not a hill. “Time to go.” She tugged on the handle of the door.

It didn’t open. Marla kicked at the door, but even with her magically reinforced boots, it wouldn’t budge. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” She looked behind her, and the green hill was still approaching, a creature bigger than the pyramid they stood upon, and hungry, surely hungry.

“Allow me to try.” Pelham drew a thin leather case from the inside of his dirty suit jacket. He opened it, revealing a row of thin metal devices.

“Lockpicks? You’re a lockpick?”

“There are 145 different types of locks in the Chamberlain’s mansion, Ms. Mason, and I was trained to open them all. This resembles the door to the pantry. I often helped myself to midnight snacks there, I confess, and opened it more often than the others.”

“You seem remarkably calm, considering,” she said, as Pelham bent and began working on the lock, fiddling little bits of metal into the door handle.

“I don’t know what you saw, Ms. Mason. I chose not to look. I further choose to believe I will open this door before whatever you saw reaches us.”

“That’s the spirit.” The green thing was closer now, and she could see Mutex on top of it, like a man standing on the deck of a rocking ship. She could also see the green thing’s eyes. They were as big as the Ferris wheel down by Felport’s esplanade.

“There.” The door clicked open and swung inward.

Marla looked through the door at a dark street, surrounded by tall buildings. Far behind them, something roared, a sound like the Earth cracking apart, and Pelham rushed through the door, taking the lead for once, and Marla followed, kicking the door shut behind her, suddenly glad that she hadn’t been able to break the lock. Because now the door latched and locked securely, whereas, if she’d broken it down, a passageway between
this
place and
that
place might have remained open.

Pelham gestured at the buildings, the rain-slicked streets, the dirty alleyway off to the right. “Is this—”

“Felport. Yeah.” Marla’s voice was steady. It took some effort to keep it that way. “But not exactly the one we left. See there?” She pointed to the distant spire of the Whitcroft-Ivory building, the tallest skyscraper in the city, which was all girders and scaffolding for the top few floors. “That building is still being constructed. Back home, it’s finished.”