Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (15 page)

“Sorry,” Marzi said. “Blame my subconscious.”

“Before you can have an audience with
her
,” the sphinx said, “you must get past
me
.”

“Move aside, then,” the Stranger said. “Much obliged.”

“Alas, it is not so simple. You have three choices. You may answer my riddle correctly, and be allowed to pass. You may answer it incorrectly, and be devoured. Or you may leave now.”

“Reckon there’s a third option. Dead sphinges don’t ask riddles.”

The sphinx purred, a sound a bit like a passing locomotive. “You got the plural right. No one ever gets the plural right anymore.”

“What, they say sphinxes? Hell. It’s just like ‘phalanx’ and ‘phalanges,’” the Stranger said. “I hope my display of grammatical prowess didn’t cause you to overlook the threat I was making, though.”

“I heard it. I just wasn’t threatened. Are you ready for the riddle?”

“Why not?” Marzi said. “Maybe we’ll know the answer. And if we don’t, there’s always... the other way.”

“I don’t believe in letting cats set the terms of any situation, even if they do have the heads of giant babies, but fine, we’ll try it.”

“How marvelous.” The sphinx smiled without opening its lips. “Here’s the riddle: At night they come without being fetched, and by day they are lost without being stolen. What are they?”

“No clue,” the Stranger said. “Stupidest damn question I’ve heard in all my born days.”

“How delightful! You look delicious.” The sphinx opened its mouth, and its teeth weren’t human at all, or catlike, either: just row upon row of sharklike fangs.

The Stranger drew her dagger and flung it directly at the sphinx’s face, and Marzi gasped. The throw looked unerringly true, aimed to take the monster right in the left eye, and the woman had made some big boasts about the power of her blade.

But the sphinx twitched aside at just the right moment, and swallowed the dagger whole instead. Then it smiled, open-mouthed, showing closed ranks of fangs. “What an unusual amuse bouche. Now for the first course.”

Bradley in Trouble

Bradley didn’t have a lot of formal training in magic. He’d fumbled along, coping with his psychic powers as best he could, doing things by instinct, trying to help people, with results that ranged from mixed to disastrous. Later he’d worked for Sanford Cole, learning the arts of divination and some protective magic, and finally he’d served a brief (and lethal, in most timelines) apprenticeship under Marla Mason, where he’d mostly learned that stubbornness was practically a magical specialty on its own.

When Marla said he was supposed to figure out how the lure the Outsider into a trap, he couldn’t bring himself to say, “I have no idea how to do that.” He would have been more comfortable going into the land beyond the door, even though mere proximity to that soft spot in the skin of reality had knocked him unconscious not so long ago. Catching monsters was more Marla’s sort of thing. There were versions of Bradley who’d been more attuned to violence and treachery and hunting things that howled in the night, but not this one, and he didn’t have access to his whole panoply of memories from the multiverse just now.

So he did what he usually did when he couldn’t figure out what the hell to do: he went looking for an oracle to summon. He’d called up a few oracles to try to locate the Outsider during his quest, without much luck – it seemed to frustrate divination spells somehow. Asking how to
lure
the thing was a different question, though, and might lead to a better answer.

Bradley didn’t want to hunt oracles so close to the café, though, because who knew what kind of weird interference effects summoning magic could have in the vicinity of that impossible door, even if there was an oracle handy? What if he summoned the very creature Marla and Marzi had gone through the door to call up themselves? Better to wander a bit father afield.

As he walked along the banks of the San Lorenzo river where it cut through downtown, looking for that tingle that indicated the presence of the supernatural (or a place that boosted his latent psychic powers, or
whatever
happened when he called up an oracle), he thought about Rondeau’s disastrous oracle mishap with the Pit Boss. He’d called up something weird and then let it
out
, allowed it to have real agency. How did that even work? What kept the Pit Boss alive? Was it feeding, to some extent, on Rondeau’s psychic energy even now – a parasite on a parasite? Or had the Pit Boss attained full independence?

The demon wouldn’t have gotten loose on Bradley’s watch, but then, Rondeau didn’t have Bradley’s experience, or even his instinctive grasp of how the secret systems of the world worked. Rondeau was, in a way, crippled by his fundamental optimism: despite the bad stuff that had happened to him, Rondeau was still inclined to believe that, by and large, over a long enough timeline, stuff would work out for the best.

Bradley, on the other hand, despite being outwardly a cheerful guy, was more doubtful at his core. That probably came from screwing up a movie career, being an addict, losing his lover to an overdose, and being murdered and having his body stolen by a psychic parasite in a countable-but-large number of branches of the multiverse.

If an oracle had said to Bradley, “Hey, I’ll do you a favor, and tell you what it costs you later,” Bradley wouldn’t have taken the deal – he would have just laughed, because everything
always
costs more than you thought it would. Some part of Bradley was always waiting for the next blow to fall. He didn’t even feel comfortable in his fully-integrated self as watcher over the multiverse, despite being, in theory, immortal and unassailable. After all, he’d had a predecessor, the Possible Witch, and she wasn’t around anymore. (In her case, the cause of her demise was something like suicide, but still.)

Bradley figured there was a decent chance the Outsider would kill him and eat him, if he managed to lure it at all. His death wouldn’t be that big a blow to the over-Bradley – not much worse than getting a fingernail torn off, or maybe even a hair yanked out – but that didn’t stop him from feeling a twinge about the potential loss of his own personal perspective. An oracle was his best shot to find out how to summon the Outsider without dying in the process.

Over the years he’d discerned
some
patterns in the placement of oracles. They tended to show up in wild places, and even more so in liminal places where the wild and the civilized met, mingled, and overlapped. Old things were more likely to house oracles than new things, but he’d summoned one from a brand new toaster once, so it wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Strolling along the river wasn’t finding him much, though, not a single naiad or kelpie, so when he found a path leading up from the bank back toward downtown, he took it.

Pacific Avenue that afternoon was bustling with tourists and locals and street performers, and Bradley took a few (slightly guilty) moments to just enjoy the feeling of being a human among other humans, walking past cute shops and cute boys, crusty punk panhandlers, a guy sitting on a plastic milk crate selling bespoke poetry, a man in heavy make-up and a shiny silver track suit shuffling along one mincing step at a time with a parasol over his head (performance artist or local eccentric?), a pretty girl with a tangle of tiny dogs straining at a bundle of leashes while she talked on her phone. Man, humans were great. He could forget that, overseeing the whole multiverse. Maybe he should bud off bits of himself and send them on field trips more often. Or maybe that was just the kind of addle-brained nonsense you got when bits of your godhead started thinking of themselves as individual humans again.

Bradley wasn’t getting so much as a tingle of supernatural manifestation, and he thought maybe he should go into Bookshop Santa Cruz and ask if they had any copies of
Extradimensional Monsters and How to Attract Them
, since that could hardly be any
less
effective than what he was doing now.

An eerie warbling sound started up behind him, and he turned, looking for the source. There was a statue of an old man in a derby hat sitting on a bench and playing a musical saw, and if he’d been an
actual
man, that would be a plausible explanation for the sound, but statues of musicians didn’t traditionally make a lot of noise. Bradley grabbed the arm of a bearded man walking by and said, “Hey, do you hear that statue playing music? Or, wait, do you even
see
a statue there?”

The man was wearing a t-shirt that said “KEEP SANTA CRUZ WEIRD” but apparently his personal tolerance for weirdness was lower because he widened his eyes, pulled free of Bradley’s grip, and hurried away.

“Yeah, man, that’s a statue of Tom Scribner.” The speaker, seated on a low stone wall bordering an ornamental flowerbed beside the street, wore a sort of hemp poncho and was openly smoking a joint. “He used to play the musical saw around here back in the ‘70s, my mom used to see him around. He was, like, a street philosopher, you know?”

The man scratched his head. “You hear him playing the saw
right now
?”

Bradley listened, and it was still there, a mournful, every-shifting tonal drone. “I think so.”

“Did you get whatever you’re on locally? I’ve been looking for a new connect, it’s hard to find psychedelics other than molly lately.”

“I’m not on drugs,” Bradley said apologetically.

“So this is more of a psychotic break sort of thing.” The guy nodded, wet his fingers, pinched the end of the joint, tucked it away in a pocket, and stood up. “Take care of yourself.” He walked away, only slightly less hurriedly than the bearded guy.

Bradley sat down next to the life-sized statue of Tom Scribner. He had the urge to put a companionable arm around old Tom’s shoulders. This would be
two
oracles that had taken the form of ghosts since he’d arrived on Earth. He wondered if that meant something? He glanced around, wondering if the sight of a man talking to a statue would be strange enough to warrant a second glance from passers-by. Probably not, if he refrained from grabbing people as they went past.

“So... Mr. Scribner? Can you help me out?”

The voice that answered was not human, but made words out of the warbling of the saw.
I am not Tom Scribner... but the spirit of his saw....

Bradley blinked. That was a new one. In Japanese mythology there were stories of objects attaining life and sentience, usually after they’d been around for a century or so, but if Scribner had played the saw here in the ‘70s, it probably wasn’t
that
old. What were the odds that he’d only had one saw he played out here, anyway? And what did that matter when this was a
statue
of a saw anyway?

Like logic had anything to do with it. “Ah. Nice to meet you. I have a question.”

I know
.

Hearing words emerge from the constant warbling was strange, and it was frankly starting to give him a headache, but at least the oracle seemed friendly. “What will it cost me to get an answer from you?”

Sit here for an hour... talk to people... tell them stories... guide them....

Bradley winced. How time-sensitive was this monster-summoning assignment? There was no telling how long M and M would be in the land beyond the door, really. Or maybe they were back already. Then again, going looking for
another
oracle would be time-consuming and possibly fruitless – the few times he’d passed up an oracle, he’d often been unable to find another one anywhere in the vicinity. “All right. I don’t know if anyone will want to talk to me, but sure, I’ll do my best. So: how do I attract the Outsider?”

It is attracted to power. As your power is great, to call the beast you need only be yourself... but amplified. Draw a symbol of attraction on the floor. Sit in its center. Light four candles, and place them at the cardinal points of the compass. Drone this note. And let yourself
shine
. The Outsider will be drawn to you
.
But it will arrive
hungry
.

The saw played a note, then, and though Bradley had never been much of a singer, he suddenly had perfect pitch, for a moment, and knew he could reproduce the tone at will. A symbol appeared in his mind, too, as if drawn in lines of fire: something like the veve of the loa Papa Legba, but with an angular symbol that looked sort of like an uppercase “P” incorporated into the center.

“Thanks,” Bradley said. “So, that hour of service, it’s going to have to start like right
now
. I’ll have to go when the time’s up, even if nobody –”

The saw’s tone changed, and it was no longer headache-inducing: instead, it seemed a song of pure longing, and need, but with a hopeful intonation, too. A twenty-something girl dressed all in black, with her hair in an asymmetrical bob and a lot of sterling silver jewelry in her ears, nose, and lip, sat down beside him. “Okay, so, the thing is, I love my girlfriend, but she is
so
clingy...”

As Bradley listened to her lament and tried to think of something useful to say, he noticed people lining up behind her, drawn by the saw, waiting their turn to sit and listen to his wisdom, such as it was.