Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (13 page)

“Nice of them to let us share a cell.” Pelham sniffed at some kind of thin, bone-dry wheat cracker before putting it back down on the tray uneaten. Their evening meal was hard sumptuous.

“Stupid of them, you mean.” Rondeau paced back in forth in front of the large (but barred on the outside and covered with a metal grate on the inside) window.

“Oh?” The room where they were being held in was in some respects quite nice, an airy bedroom with high ceilings and its own ancient but serviceable toilet, pedestal sink, and clawfoot bathtub in the attached bathroom, but as a whole it was rather dusty and Spartan. Pelham sat on a battered green velvet armchair, probably dragged up from the great old house’s basement storage. The only other furniture in the room was a milk crate for a table, a set of wood-framed bunk beds, and a vinyl chaise longue, the kind where the back and foot portions could be folded up and down and locked in place, like you might find next to a swimming pool at a motel. There were rather more prisoners in the house right now than ever before, and the furnishings were becoming a bit haphazard as a result. “Do you have some plan to use our combined powers to escape?”

Rondeau stopped pacing and looked out the window. Pelham knew that vantage provided a view of grass and, in exciting moments, the occasional cow. The Blackwing Institute was in the middle of nowhere, and for good reason. Rondeau sighed. “No, it just sounded like a defiant thing to say. Get a little bravado going, you know.”

“It’s a shame you can’t summon an oracle,” Pelham said.

“Leaving aside how well that worked the
last
time, I do keep trying, but no dice. There’s nothing
here
. I’ve never been someplace so absolutely neutral, magically speaking.”

“I suppose that’s considered a feature in a place like this,” Pelham said.

“Keeping people like
me
locked up is the Blackwing Institute’s whole reason for being. They managed to keep Elsie Jarrow confined until Dr. Husch went crazy and let her out, so preventing me from getting overly psychic is easy enough for them, I guess. I had some hope when they first locked us up here, knowing how Jarrow destroyed all the magical binding spells in the mansion, but that just left a clean slate when the new boss came in, so he could put his own security protocols in place.”

“I thought Dr. Langford was a friend of yours?”

Rondeau flopped down on the chaise longue. “He never used to call himself ‘doctor,’ he was just Langford, the bio-mancer, mad-scientist-for-hire. I think the ‘doctor’ thing is an affectation, or maybe he figures since he’s technically running a hospital for criminally insane sorcerers, the title comes with the job, the way all you gotta do to be a captain is own your own
boat
. And, sure, me and him were friendly, as friendly as you can be with a guy who looks at everybody in the world like they’re something smeared on a slide and put under a microscope. But at the same time, I always kinda felt like he wanted to vivisect me to find out how I work. He used to talk about how I was unprecedented and one-of-a-kind and stuff, a rare psychic parasite, a mystery of science and magic. I think the only reason I’ve been spared a turn on his lab table is because Nicolette wants us alive for some reason.”

“Mrs. Mason is awake by now,” Pelham said.

Rondeau nodded. The two of them hadn’t talked about Marla much. Rondeau seemed reluctant to talk about it now.

“She will come for us, don’t you think?” Pelham said.

“Probably? Eventually? But there’s that thing that escaped from Death Valley and killed all her cultists... she might be more concerned about dealing with that than dealing with Nicolette. You know how she is when it comes to priorities, and she’s been a lot less... personable... since she became a goddess.”

“She does have a great many responsibilities now,” Pelham said loyally. “Perhaps she expects us to save ourselves.”

“It’s a good idea,” Rondeau said. “Hey, I’ve got a brilliant idea, can’t miss. How about the next time a homunculus orderly comes in to bring us our food, we hit him with something heavy and steal his keys and run away?”

Pelham suppressed a sigh. That had been his suggestion, two days previous. When they tried it, the homunculus had just looked at them, put down their dinner tray, and walked away. Artificial life forms were, apparently, impervious to being rendered unconscious by blows to the head. “There’s no reason to be nasty, Rondeau.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m just getting a little stir-crazy. Being locked up isn’t really my thing. I’m more of the free and uninhibited type.”

The door swung open, and Pelham and Rondeau exchanged a glance, because they’d already gotten their meal trays, and they weren’t exactly getting visitors on a regular basis. Squat walked in first, dressed in layers of scarves and coats, looking like some kind of thrift-store-golem. Crapsey sauntered in after him, wearing an impeccable dark blue suit with a red tie and pocket square. Crapsey kicked the door shut behind him and beamed, hands shoved deep in his pocket, the copper inlays on his wooden prosthetic jaw gleaming in the light. “Hey, fellas. Just thought we’d drop by and see how you’re holding up.”

“We’ve got the Stockholm Syndrome real bad,” Rondeau said. “I’m coming to identify way too much with my captors. Just looking at you, Crapsey, I swear, sometimes it’s like looking in a mirror.”

“You guys know I saw your girl, right?” Crapsey said. “Yesterday. I just flew into town this morning, actually – Marla’s hell on a guy’s travel plans. She was pretty foul, crawling out of the ground like that. I told her Nicolette had you guys all trussed up, that she probably torturing you and stuff, and Marla just said, ‘Who cares, they’re morons, fuck ‘em.’”

“Yeah, that sounds like Marla,” Rondeau said blandly. “What’s up, Squat?”

The immense toadlike figure shrugged beneath his layers.

Pelham chose to ignore them both, though the breach of etiquette pained him. There was no point being polite, though. Crapsey was an unhinged lunatic, but Squat was worse. He had once been loyal to Mrs. Mason, and betrayed her, and disloyalty was one thing Pelham couldn’t stand.

Squat looked at him and sighed. “Hey, Pelly. I’m sorry about... all this. You guys, you’re okay. You’re just on the wrong side this time.”

“Yeah, Pelham’s all right,” Crapsey said. “Rondeau can eat dogshit and die for all I care, but I’ve got nothing against Pelham. Which is why he gets to leave the room for a while. You wanna take him, Squat?”

“Sure thing.” Squat beckoned, and Pelham hesitated only a moment before nodding and following him toward the door. The man possessed inhuman strength and durability, had a tendency to sweat neurotoxins, and sometimes literally ate his enemies, but who knows? Perhaps Pelham would find an opportunity to escape.

“Where are we going?” Pelham said, as they walked down the hallway. He glanced at the closed doors they passed, wondering who was locked up behind them. The Blackwing Institute had once held only a few profoundly damaged souls, sorcerers who had gone mad and become a danger to themselves, and others, and the fabric of reality, but Pelham had the impression it was more of a prison for Nicolette’s enemies and political prisoners, now.

“An old friend of yours heard you were locked up here and asked if you could sit down for a visit. Me and Crapsey said you could, if she’d do us a favor or two, and she agreed. She held up her end, so here we are.”

Squat took an elaborate key ring from his pocket, opened up a door, and ushered Pelham inside.

This room was rather more lushly appointed than his own, with a four-poster bed, an elaborately carved wooden wardrobe, a vanity dresser, and other amenities of the antique furniture variety. A woman dressed in a shimmering gown of golden silk sat at the vanity, gazing into the mirror. She turned and smiled, and Pelham’s insides wobbled. She was as beautiful as ever, her skin dark brown and perfectly smooth, her eyes large and compassionate, her lips touched with the barest suggestion of a smile. She inclined her head toward Squat. “Leave us, please.”

“Ten minutes, yer majesty,” Squat said, and shut the door behind him when he went.

“Chamberlain,” Pelham said. “I did not realize you were here. Though I should have assumed you would be imprisoned, or else dead.”

“I’ve never been a great believer in the efficacy of dying for a cause,” she said. “Much better to live for it. Nicolette may have deposed me as chief sorcerer of Felport, but she is a chaos witch – her destruction and downfall are inevitable, built into the very nature of her power. She can’t rule a city any more than someone could build a tower on quicksand.”

“How did she manage to take over?” Pelham said. “And so quickly?”

“The element of surprise helped. As did her apparent invulnerability – she simply won’t
die
. Her new lieutenant, Squat, seems to be similarly indestructible, and quite content to murder whomever Nicolette requires. By the time we realized what a threat she was, it was difficult to mount an effective defense, especially since many had sided with her.” She sneered. “Sorcerers are too often pragmatists, concerned more with being on the winning side than the right one.” She beckoned to Pelham. “We don’t have much time – I need your help.”

Pelham had grown up under the Chamberlain’s tutelage, his family having served the founding families of Felport for generations, with the Chamberlain as the steward of those powerful ghosts. Though Pelham served Marla Mason, now, the habit of obedience toward this woman was long ingrained. “What can I do for you? I fear I am as much a prisoner as you are.”

“Magic is at a premium around here,” the Chamberlain said. “Strictly controlled and hard to come by. I need some of your blood.”

Pelham blinked at her. “Ah?”

The Chamberlain drew a long pin from her hair. “Just hold out your fingertip. Your childhood among the ghosts of Felport’s founders, and the binding spells that joined your family line to theirs, imbued you with a certain amount of their magic. My connection with the ghosts has been severed, and with it most of my power, but I can use a bit of your blood, with its whisper of associations, to power a small spell or two. I need to see what my enemy is doing. If I can divine something of Nicolette’s plans, perhaps I can take steps, even from here, to hasten her inevitable downfall.”

Pelham obediently held out his finger, and the Chamberlain pricked it with the needle, then grasped his wrist and pulled him toward the vanity. She pressed his bleeding finger against the glass and dragged it down, drawing a ragged oval around the circumference of the mirror’s surface. Once the circle was closed, Pelham felt a jolt, like he’d bitten down on tinfoil, and she released his hand. He sucked on the wound and watched as the glass inside the line of blood darkened, changed texture to something like velvet, and then revealed a scene:

Nicolette was there, no longer just a head in a cage, but attached to a woman’s body, rather taller and more statuesque than her original form had been. Pelham wondered who’d died to provide her with new flesh. Hamil was there, too, looking exhausted, slumped over a table where a vast map of Felport was unrolled.

Nicolette spoke, but there was no sound from the mirror. “I wonder what she’s saying?” Pelham said.

“Shh, I’m reading her lips,” the Chamberlain said.

A moment later, in the most unladlylike act Pelham had ever seen from his old employer, the Chamberlain shouted. “
Shit fuck no
!” and punched the mirror, shattering the image into shards.

“Oh dear.” Pelham started picking up the bits of broken glass. “I assume she was saying something bothersome, then?”

Marzi in the Medicine Lands

The storage room still smelled of mold and dust, which wasn’t pleasant, but at least it didn’t smell of rattlesnake skin and burning sand. Marzi wore a broad-brimmed sunhat, a tank top, jeans, and hiking boots, and she’d slathered herself with sunscreen, because who knew what kind of carcinogenic rays an imaginary sun in an impossible desert pumped out? She also had her toy cap pistol tucked into her belt, feeling a bit silly about it, but The Stranger just nodded approvingly. “It’s good to go armed.”

“Sure, but you’ve got a magical dagger. I’ve got a plastic revolver.”

“So maybe stand behind me, then,” the Stranger said. She wore her long buffalo leather coat and a beat-up, soft brown cowboy hat Bradley had fetched from a thrift store. Her cowboy boots were elaborately patterned with skulls and crossbones and wings and scythes. The Stranger nodded her head toward Marzi’s weapon. “Anyway, I hear that gun of yours is real enough when it needs to be. That’s how magic is, sometimes. The metaphorical becomes literal. Just recently I heard about a woman who got shoved into an imaginary volcano that turned into a real one for a while.”

Marzi blinked. “That’s awful.”

“Eh. She was a narcissistic mass murderer, so I don’t mind. Shame she didn’t die, though.” The Stranger turned her head and spat onto the floorboards, and a look of utter shock flashed across her features. “I – whoa. I’m sorry. I don’t usually go around spitting inside people’s workplaces, at least, not unless I’m trying to prove a point. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Oh,” Marzi said. “I think, ah... that’s probably my fault.”

The Stranger seemed to mull that over. “Explain.”

“Well, see, I know your name is Marla Mason, but that’s now how I’m
thinking
of you, if that makes sense. In my head, I keep thinking of you as the Stranger.”

“That sounds... capitalized,” the Stranger said.

“Oh, yeah. My brain is working in full-on archetype mode. You came in with that long coat and the shades and the blade and the boots, and Bradley was talking about how badass you are, and I got to thinking about who you’d be if I put you in my comic,
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl
. You’d be the Stranger, the woman with no name, who rides into town to clean up the place, lays down a hellstorm of lead and thunder, and then rides out again.”

Marla grunted. “I reckon that’s a fair approximation of my modus operandi.” She wrinkled her nose. “Did I just say ‘reckon’?”