Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (16 page)

•

The saw stopped its droning of attraction promptly at the one-hour mark, and the people still waiting for Bradley’s counsel looked around themselves, mildly confused, and drifted off. He got up, stretched, and started walking back the few blocks toward the coffee shop. Bradley felt wrung-out. To his surprise, he
had
been able to give pretty good advice to most of those people – his memories (however vague at this point) of being a multiverse-spanning consciousness gave him a sense of perspective that was probably tough to attain for those who’d only ever had one mind at a time to inhabit. He’d spent so long concerned with cosmic problems that it was refreshing to turn his attention to more personal, human-scale problems. Maybe if this whole overseer-of-the-multiverse gig didn’t work out, he could come back to Earth, stage a dramatic return from the dead, and get a job doing a talk radio call-in show.

For now, though, he had a monster to attract.

He walked west along Pacific Avenue, then took a couple of turns until he hit Ash Street, just a few blocks east of the Genius Loci café.

Something made his flesh crawl: that cliché of scary stories, the hair on the back of his neck rising up. Horripilation. A remnant reaction from way back in the human experience, from the days when big cats crouched atop boulders waiting to leap out on you from the dark. (Up in the redwood-dotted hills by the university, people still occasionally got attacked by mountain lions dropping from tree branches; some days, no matter how hard you tried, you were still just an animal among animals.) That raising of the hackles was your body warning you about something your senses had picked up but your conscious mind hadn’t processed, foregoing the higher-mind interventions, and just making you
look behind you
.

Bradley looked, and didn’t see anything. Then, probably because he was more psychic than most, he looked
up
, and there was something after all: a ribbon of blackness, like a sheer scarf blowing on the wind, if scarves were twenty feet long and capable of hovering on the currents of the air while they undulated.

Shit shit shit
. The Outsider. No need to summon the thing – there it was, and rather ahead of schedule. What had the oracle said? The Outsider was drawn to exhibitions of power. Well, Bradley had certainly exhibited some of that by summoning an oracle in the first place. He’d come to believe the creature had a mind, too, or something like one. The Outsider had at least rudimentary hunting skills, and had shown discretion and caution in its attacks, leaving very little in the way of survivors. The creature liked to wait until it could strike unobserved – it had probably stalked him from the crowded downtown to this street, which was entirely deserted except for a passing housecat. The creature’s caution was heartening, in a way: why would it bother to be careful unless it could be
hurt
? Something had imprisoned it in a vault below Death Valley, after all. The memory of failure probably contributed to its caution now.

Then again, lions stalked antelope from the shadows, but not because they were particularly afraid of antelopes: they just didn’t want to spook the prey, because then they’d have to go through the whole tedious process of acquiring a new target.

Bradley noticed the Outsider, and it noticed him noticing it, and the ribbon of blackness swam through the air toward him, undulating with the grace of a moray eel.

Marzi in the Oracle’s Lair

“Well aren’t you the cat that got the cream,” the Stranger said. Marzi thought the woman seemed remarkably calm for someone who was about to be swallowed. “Or the knife. My dagger’s going to be rough on your digestion, and it’ll hurt like hell coming out. Or are you one of those mythological monsters that doesn’t have to shit?”

“Oh, don’t worry.” The sphinx stretched, extending its paws, and curved talons the length of butcher knives popped out and furrowed the sand. “Gobbling you up will settle my stomach. Do you have any other silverware you’d like to throw at me first? I don’t wish to interfere with your prandial customs.”

“Talks real fancy, don’t he?” the Stranger said. “Me, I can’t abide fancy talk. All wind and no rain, all thunder and no lightning.”

“I have found that the coarse and unmannered are no different in flavor from the sophisticated and refined, though the latter tend to smell better.” The sphinx yawned again. “This pre-dinner conversation is a delight, but I think I’ll eat you now. Then we’ll see if your friend can answer a riddle, or if she’ll be my digestif.”

Marzi put her hand on the butt of her gun. Could she shoot this thing? She had a sudden image of shooting off its nose, making it look like the Great Sphinx of Giza, and could barely suppress a giggle. Ah, there it was. Overwhelming terror messing up her brain, pushing her into irrational emotional reactions. Right on schedule.

“Talks real fancy,” the Stranger repeated. “But I bet he can’t whistle as good as me.” She stuck two fingers in her mouth and shrilled a long, high, harsh note, loud enough to make Marzi wince and flinch away.

The sphinx licked its immense lips. “What was the point of that demonstration? Perhaps you’d like to do a bit of yodeling too –”

The creature’s eyes widened as its throat ripped open, the Stranger’s dagger tearing its way out of its own volition. The weapon didn’t come out smoothly, but spun and whirled as it emerged, shredding the great beast’s neck and throat so savagely that the sphinx was nearly decapitated in the process. Once the dagger was entirely free, it returned, hilt first, to the Stranger’s hand. She wiped it absently on her sleeve and watched the sphinx gurgle and go cross-eyed.

Instead of blood, copious quantities of sand poured from the monster’s wounds, and the sphinx’s dangling head and body seemed to
deflate
, like a pool float punctured by a nail. Its tawny fur shimmered and became sand, and within seconds, its body had become just a small dune heaped on the plateau.

“What’s the difference between my dagger and a housecat?” the Stranger drawled.

“What?” Marzi stared at the pile of sand.

“My dagger comes when it’s called. If that was a test, I reckon we either passed it, or showed we don’t want to take tests.”

A flash of movement caught Marzi’s eyes, and she looked up. “Crap, there’s another sphinx. Three more.” Marzi pointed toward the left-hand side of the plateau, where a trio of leonine figures had emerged from the heat haze. Had they climbed up onto the plateau? Emerged from burrows in the ground? Or just risen up from the sand? “Maybe more, maybe a whole herd.” Her brain was still whirling wildly, and the gears were slipping a bit. “Or is it a pride, like lions?”
“In his treatise on supernatural collective nouns, David Malki asserts that it should be a ‘finery of sphinxes,’” the Stranger said calmly. “I’ve never considered Malki to be definitive, though, and he doesn’t use my preferred plural, either. I think it should be a ‘riddle of sphinges.’ Shouldn’t matter, anyhow – they’re solitary creatures, as a rule. Don’t like the company of their own kind, or any other kind. They sure are making common cause today, though, and I fear that cause is you and me. We’d best get moving. I’ve only got one knife for them to swallow, and I’m not sure we can count on them to wait in line and take turns.”

The Stranger set off running toward the palace, and Marzi went after her, casting glances back to the approaching shapes. The three sphinxes bounded toward them – one could have been the twin of the one they’d killed, another had long flowing hair and bare breasts, and a third seemed to have the head of a goat – but they stopped at the pile of sand the first sphinx had left in lieu of a corpse, pawing and sniffing at the ground. Maybe they were going to consume the power of their fallen comrade. Or maybe they were just going to use it as a litter box.

The air shimmered with heat and suddenly the palace was not hundreds of yards away but mere feet, and the Stranger and Marzi both slowed as they entered the shadows between the pillars. The temperature dropped so suddenly and significantly that pretty much Marzi’s whole body jumped into gooseflesh as her sweat cooled.

“Should’ve brought a lantern,” the Stranger said. “It’s always the little things.”

Flickering lights appeared, revealing a cavernous room dotted by pillars of rough-hewn stone, each holding a torch burning with greasy yellow flame. The vast room was filled halfway to the far-off ceiling with drifts of sand, a sort of indoor dune.

“Anybody home?” the Stranger called, and Marzi thought of people in snowy mountains shouting and setting off avalanches. That dune looked like it could bury them both if it shifted the wrong way. “Sorry we killed your housecat.” She paused. “Hello? We’re here to see the boss lady.” She took off her hat, mopped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, and put the hat back on. Then looked at Marzi and shrugged. “Oh well. Nobody’s home. Let’s go on back to the other side of the door and figure out a backup plan.”

“You may not leave unless I allow it.” The voice spoke inside Marzi’s mind without bothering to go in through her ears. It was familiar, cold and emotionless. “None may open it from this side, without my leave.”

“Thanks for taking our call,” the Stranger said. “Are you the big scorpion I saw when I looked through the door earlier today?”

The dune shifted, as if something immense was burrowed beneath the sand. “Some see me as such a creature.”

“She’s a god,” Marzi said, surprised at how calm she felt. The adrenaline spike of fleeing the sphinxes – or sphinges, whatever – had passed, and anyway she was on more familiar ground, now; if not necessarily safer. “She’s the god of life in adversity. The god of small poisonous scuttling things. The god of surviving against all odds. I call her the scorpion oracle.”

“Sounds like a practical, pragmatic sort of god.” The Stranger hitched up her jeans and swaggered a couple of steps toward the dune. “I’m that kind of god myself, I think.”

“You are... something,” the scorpion oracle said, and was that a hint of perplexity? “Touched by divinity, but not divine. Yet you don’t seem like one of the unfortunate offspring of a mortal and a god or monster, either.”

“I’m just your average ordinary mortal, right now,” the Stranger said. “Except not
mortal
mortal, since I can’t die.”

“You can’t
die
?” Marzi said. How powerful a sorcerer
was
she?

“I cannot. And may I say, immortality is a considerable advantage when it comes to fighting monsters.”

“Have you come to fight me, half a god?” the oracle whispered. “I am a
whole
god. You will not find me as easily defeated as a sphinx. Or as given to pointless conversation.”

The Stranger displayed open hands. “No ma’am. I hope you’ll forgive me the coarseness of my speech, as I realize it might seem a mite hostile. Some of that crudeness I come by honest, and some of it’s a condition of my current circumstances.” She didn’t so much as a glance at Marzi. “Let me say clearly that I mean you no harm at all. In fact, I think we’re a lot alike. I hear once upon a time you had a sort of opposite number, a fella devoted to scouring life from the Earth, who lived in here with you? The Outlaw, Marzi called him.”

“I kept the god of earthquakes captive,” the oracle said. “My old enemy was no more a
he
than I am a
she
, not really.”

“Sure. How’d you like to play jailer again? We’ve got a prisoner you could watch over, or we will once my posse hunts him down. This particular miscreant is on a murder-spree that shows no sign of stopping, eating people whole, and I mean
whole
.”

“Life is hard,” the oracle said. “As it should be. Challenges refine us. The predator elevates the prey. Those who survive are stronger for it, and their descendants more likely to live on.”

“I believe I may have read a book that espoused a similar theory once,” Marzi said. “But this thing... it’s
bad
.”

“This
thing
is nothing to do with me. My relationship with the one you call the Outlaw was... personal. We were adversaries for a long time. I had reason to frustrate its plans. Why should I interfere with this other creature?”

“This beast is nastier than you know,” the Stranger said. “It won’t stop at killing people. It comes from
outside
our universe, and it wants to kill everything we’ve got here, from beetles to whales. Anything that has a soul, it’ll eat that, too, and keep them from ever finding peace in whatever precinct of the afterlife might await them otherwise. This Outsider will use their life energy to make itself strong, so it can gobble up even bigger things. Won’t stop until all life in the universe is extinguished, and to be honest, it’ll probably keep on going until all the chemical processes are used up, too, and then it’ll see if it can’t break into the universe next door and eat that one, too. It’s starting with people, but it’ll end with the stars. What I’m saying is, if you’re the god of some subset of things that are alive, you’re not going to have anything
left
to be the god of, soon.”

The sand shifted. “How can you hope to capture something so powerful?”

“It’s just a baby right now,” Marzi offered. “We want to trap it someplace where it can’t get out, and can’t do any harm, before it gets any bigger. It’s drawn to this place, to the door that
leads
to this place, we think. It senses the magic, it’s attracted to it, to the power, and we believe we can use that attraction to lure the Outsider through the door. If we do, can you keep it here?”

“I held the Outlaw,” the oracle said. “This door does not open unless I permit it, not from this side. The Outlaw only escaped when it found
you
, Marzi – someone with the power to make the door manifest in the physical world, someone it could trick into opening the way. If I hold this Outsider of yours here, what will stop someone from opening it on the
other
side?”

“I will,” Marzi said. “And my friend here has promised to pile on hexes and bindings and all manner of magic to keep that doorway sealed up.”