Little Gods (28 page)

Marla set the last jar on the counter, the one holding Bainbridge's kidney stones. Another jar held the toenail clippings of a man with amazing regenerative properties. A third (and this jar was made of cobalt glass, to mute the brightness) held a dram of the shining lymph of Mother Abbot. The remaining jar contained a goiter cut from the throat of a sacred cow.

“That stuff's nasty,” Rondeau said, wrinkling his nose at the jars. He twiddled with the radio on the counter until he found some big band music. Marla didn't like that kind of music, but it was an improvement over the hard-driving dance-music Rondeau usually preferred. He hummed along with the radio for a moment, then took a sip of his gin and tonic and grimaced. “This drink is nasty, too. How can you stand this stuff? Tastes like pine needles."

“I like the taste of pine needles.” Marla checked the seals on the jars. “That's it, we're set. Now we go to see Langford."

“Why can't you do a divination on your own? Why go to all this trouble?"

“The only divination I'm any good at is reading entrails, and I don't have the stomach for that anymore."

Rondeau swirled the ice in his glass. “You don't have the stomach. For reading entrails. Marla, have you just made your first joke?"

“It's my second joke at least. Don't you remember that knock-knock joke?"

“Ah, yes. I must have repressed the memory. But really, why are we going to see Langford? There are other methods."

She waved at the jars. “This is specialized stuff, to answer a specialized question, and for that, we need a specialist. Hence, Langford. Most of the Seers in this city are cryptic and obscure. They can't help it—that's just the way the information comes to them, the way it gets filtered through their minds. I don't have time to puzzle out secret meanings, though, and Langford can give me clear, unambiguous answers."

“He's creepy,” Rondeau complained.

“This from the man with the haunted zoot suit?"

Rondeau looked at his sleeves worriedly. “Shh. You'll wake him up."

“I thought the dead didn't sleep?” She put the jars into a satchel. “Or else they don't do anything
but
sleep."

“Yeah, well, he's quiet sometimes, at least.” Rondeau smoothed his lapels.

“Let's go. We have to catch the 7:35 train."

“Why do we ride the subway, when we could take the Bentley? We never take the car.” His eyes became dreamy, faraway. “I like cars. I want a big one, like you see in old movies, all chrome and curves, like a torpedo, a rolling bomb..."

Marla frowned at him. He'd never rhapsodized about cars before. “Cars are for ordinaries, Rondeau. We're underground people."

“Goddamn shortcuts."

Langford owned big property, and kept his headquarters beneath one of the city's largest medical testing facilities. The place was like a hospital, without the inconvenience of actual patients. Marla and Rondeau walked down white hallways, past gray doors. People in lab coats passed by and gave them quizzical looks—Marla in her milk-white cloak with the silver clasp in the shape of a stag beetle, Rondeau in his gold-and-purple zoot suit. The two of them looked disreputable, fundamentally out-of-place, but people who worked for Langford doubtless became accustomed to the occasional odd coming-and-going.

Marla led Rondeau down a dim stairway to a steel door with no discernible seams or apertures. A red button set into the wall glowed faintly. Marla pushed it.

“Yes?” Langford's voice came crisp and digitally clear from a concealed speaker

“It's Marla and Rondeau."

The door buzzed and swung inward. Marla and Rondeau stepped inside. Marla had been to Langford's lab before, so she knew to breathe through her mouth. Rondeau, however, was a newcomer, and he gagged. “It smells like a barnyard in here!"

“I always thought it smelled like a yeast infection,” Marla said, her voice nasal. “But I've never smelled a barnyard.” They stood in a small, featureless room, with another door at the other end. “This is the anteroom, too. It
really
stinks in the main area. Langford says you get used to it. I never have."

The inner door opened, and Langford smiled and beckoned them in. He wore a lab coat, too, but his was spattered with strange stains, yellow and green and red. His round rimless glasses seemed on the point of sliding off his nose, and his brown hair was cut short. He might have been a cute young medical student, but Marla knew he was fifty years old at least, his youthful looks just one of the consequences of his dabbling in biological esoterica. Langford was commonly known as a Biomancer, and his early studies had, indeed, been almost exclusively concerned with the effect of magic on living organisms (his menagerie of “transformed” creatures was supposed to be astonishing, though Marla had never spoken to anyone who claimed to have seen it firsthand). In recent years he'd expanded his field of inquiry, however, dabbling in quantum mechanics, superconducting technology, and other endeavors, applying the torque wrench of magic whenever traditional scientific approaches proved too slow or ineffective.

“Are you ready for the divination?” he asked.

Marla nodded, holding out the satchel.

“Oh, good,” Langford said, grinning. His glee for the work he did never seemed to fade; he was the most consistently happy person Marla had ever met. She wondered if he'd done something to step up endorphin production in his brain.

Langford took the satchel and preceded them into his workshop. In contrast to the gleaming, humming sterility of the labs upstairs, Langford's personal workshop was a riotous mess, part junk-shop, part science lab, part
brujo's
hut. One wall was covered with a particularly virulent green mold, and the last time Marla had visited, Langford had introduced her to the mold, and told her he was experimenting with “aggregate sentience.” Innumerable shelves held pickled oddities, as well as terrariums filled with all manner of live creatures, from hissing roaches to fire newts to water dragons.

Rondeau was clearly spooked by the towering proximity of so many nasty, chitinous, slithering things, but Marla chose to ignore his discomfort, and Langford was wholly oblivious. The scientist led them to a lab table (its surface remarkably clear of clutter) and put the jars down beside a large metal mixing bowl filled with a viscous black substance.

“I've been thinking about scrying bowls,” Langford said. “And quantum computers. The difference, really, is only one of perspective and application—"

“I don't need to know the details,” Marla interrupted. “You know this stuff is beyond me."

“Oh, only the math,” Langford said. “You could understand the outlines, if you wanted."

“I'm not interested in how you get the answers, just in the answers themselves."

“Of course,” he said, and started taking the jars out of the bag. “The goiter isn't bad. I'd have preferred a goiter from a white buffalo, but this will do."

Marla laughed. “If I had a white buffalo, I could work up a magic big enough to get rid Sweeney of forever, and I wouldn't need this divination."

“I can make a white buffalo, of course,” Langford said, gnawing his lip. “But the naturally occurring ones are so much more effective."

“Sweeney?” Rondeau said. “You're here to ask a question about Todd Sweeney? But he's
dead
."

Marla shrugged. “He's supposed to be dead. Everyone said he was dead. But one of Hamil's spies saw him in the lobby of the Whitcroft-Ivory building, alive and well. I'm here to figure out how that happened."

“Shit,” Rondeau said, with no little awe. “Todd Sweeney's alive. That's impressive. If as many people wanted me dead as want
him
dead ... Well. I'd be dead."

Todd Sweeney (and the name was a pretentious affectation, one of many the man entertained) had come to town the year before. It was obvious to everyone that he was a player, and he claimed connections to heavy operators in Thailand and French Guyana. He wanted what everyone wanted—money and power—and he was charming enough to get both.

But Sweeney had no qualms, no scruples, and no manners. He'd connived, cheated, and screwed-over everyone in the city to get what he wanted.
Everyone
, even hardcases like Gregor and Hamil. Marla was the only one who hadn't done any business with him. When the council of sorcerers decided something had to be done about Sweeney, that a message had to be sent, Marla was the obvious choice to carry out the sentence. She was the only one who didn't have a personal stake in Sweeney's downfall.

But now, somehow, Sweeney had survived Marla's efforts.

That was a mistake on Sweeney's part. His survival made things between him and Marla a personal matter. “Yeah,” Marla said. “I take his continued life as a personal affront. He tricked us somehow, or else tricked death itself. Langford's going to tell me what's what."

“Wow.” Rondeau said, shaking his head. He walked over to one of the shelves, scowling at insects in a terrarium, then wandered toward a shelf of books.

“You have the question all worked out?” Langford said, opening the jars. “My, this is exceptional lymph!"

“Yes,” Marla said. “Nailed-down and unambiguous. I went over the wording about a hundred times. It's airtight."

“Good. Because you only get one chance to ask, and—"

“I know, Langford,” she said, not without affection. She liked the Biomancer. His ambitions were incomprehensible to her, but they were also completely tangential to her own. That meant he was no threat. That meant they could be friends.

Langford added the contents of the jars, one by one, to the bowl of blackness on the table, stirring with a wooden spoon. The toenail clippings swirled away, as did the kidney stones, and the goiter appeared to actually
dissolve
. “It's like programming a computer,” Langford said. “Inputting the parameters. If you assume that everything physical has a spiritual analogue—” He glanced at Marla, who had her arms crossed with impatience. “Ah. Sorry.” He held the blue jar of lymph in his hand, light shining from the jar's open mouth. “After I add this, ask the question. Don't take any unnaturally long pauses, or the scrying bowl will think—well, not
think
, I don't mean
think
exactly—that you've finished. It's fascinating, really—as near as I can tell, the vibrations your voice cause in the air are transmitted to the scrying fluid, which then performs some operation which is at bottom mysterious to me, and the answer
emerges
... I don't think the bowl is at all concerned with the
content
, it's like the thought experiment about the Chinese-language-translating machine...” He glanced at Marla. “Well. Anyway. Onward."

He tipped the jar of shining lymph into the bowl, where it disappeared, not even changing the substance's color.

Marla drew breath to ask her question.

“What the hell is this dog doing here?” Rondeau shouted.

Marla's mouth fell open in shock and dismay. She looked at Langford, who was staring fixedly at the bowl. “That's it,” Langford said. “That's the question it's going to answer. I'm sorry, Marla.” He slumped his shoulders for a moment, then stiffened. “
What
dog?"

Rondeau hurried back to the table ... followed by the white dog they'd seen in the alleyway. “Marla, it's that dog again, I don't know what—"

“Rondeau,” she said, her voice full of ice and spines. “You ruined the divination. Why can't you keep your mouth shut?"

“It's impossible,” Langford said. “How did this dog—nice doggie—get in here? There's no possible entrance, no conceivable way, unless it came in with you two, but it couldn't have—oh, good dog!—it couldn't have, because I let you out of the anteroom myself...” He frowned. “Why do I want to name this animal ‘Snowflake’ and take it home with me?"

The scrying bowl spoke, then, in Rondeau's voice:

“The dog is here to guide the undying spirit to its final rest,” it said.

Marla, Rondeau, and Langford all looked at the bowl.

Then they looked at the dog. Which was wagging its tail.

“So,” Marla said, feeding the dog a huge hunk of rare steak. “Do you think it's come to get Sweeney? That he managed to fool death somehow, and now the dog is on his trail?” The dog sat on a chair beside her, eating happily off his own china plate.

“It's possible,” Hamil said, looking at the animal thoughtfully. Hamil was Marla's consiglieri. An older sorcerer, and a man of considerable
gravitas
(as well as considerable physical bulk), he had the experience to temper Marla's sheer-power approach to problem-solving.

“Then why's it keep following us?” Rondeau asked from the other side of Hamil's table. He'd been sitting beside the dog at first, but it kept sniffing at his armpits, which made Rondeau nervous, mostly because he found the dog's behavior adorable, which was a wholly unnatural response for him.

“Perhaps it recognizes you as allies. It is surely a creature of great wisdom and perception...” Hamil trailed off as the dog began licking its own testicles, with evident pleasure.

“That's so cute,” Marla said, and then scowled.

“That dog is too creepy,” Rondeau said. “Mostly because I don't find it creepy at
all
, when I know I should. What do we do now?"

“We go see Todd Sweeney, and let the dog get a whiff of him, and drag his ass to hell.” Marla patted the dog. “I always thought hellhounds were black and breathed fire and such."

“Death rides a pale horse,” Rondeau said. “Maybe this is Death's pale best friend."

Hamil chuckled. “Psychopomps—beings that guide the dead from earth to the afterlife—come in a number of guises. They appear as birds, quite often. Why not a dog?” Hamil took a bite of a chicken leg, then offered the drumstick to the dog.

Rondeau reached across the table and slapped Hamil's hand away, though under normal circumstances he never would have struck a sorcerer of such power. Rondeau's only strength lay in his ownership of Juliana's Bar and his friendship with Marla, and those could only offer so much protection.

Hamil looked at Rondeau with the implacable patience of a glacier.