Poison Sleep (27 page)

Marla settled back to the roof of the club, and went inside. Ted was at the table now with Rondeau and Joshua, and they were playing Oh, Hell, having tired of playing War. Somebody had picked up a pizza from the little restaurant around the corner, and there was an untouched medium with everything on it, waiting just for her.

“Deal me in,” Marla said, and sat with them to wait.

Langford called at 2:30, which saved them from listening to Rondeau beg them to play strip poker—he just wanted a look at Joshua in the altogether, and while Marla wasn’t opposed to seeing that, Joshua wouldn’t have been the one getting naked; he could bluff every hand and never lose.

Langford said, “Genevieve will be at Fludd Park, near the bandstand, in twenty-three minutes. She’ll be conscious for between five and seven minutes, so you won’t have much of a window before she disappears back to dreamland.” Fludd Park wasn’t far, and with the likely lack of traffic they should get there in ten minutes.

“I owe you a fruit basket for this,” Marla said, and hung up. “Ted, call Hamil and have him send his guys, then call the other sorcerers, let them know what’s happening. Rondeau, get the tranq gun, Joshua, put on your game face. Let’s get going.” She put on her cloak, just in case Reave showed up. She hated wearing it, but it was the most powerful weapon she had. The price it extracted was one she was willing to pay if it would help save her city.

Ten minutes before Langford called Marla, Gregor looked up from the metal bowl of mercury, images shimmering on the surface of the poisonous liquid. An elaborate toothpick model of the Taj Mahal lay in broken shards near the bowl, all the disorder Nicolette had bled off the divination poured into its destruction. “Genevieve will be in Fludd Park, near the bandstand, in about thirty minutes.”

“I can get there in five,” Nicolette said. One of the escape tunnels came out in the park, near the duck pond.

“You have maybe twenty minutes before Marla and her crew arrive,” Gregor said.

Nicolette grinned and heaved a heavy knapsack, bulging with nasty goodies, over her shoulder. “Plenty of time.”

“We should not trust Nicolette,” Reave said from his corner of the shelter. He’d been pissy all morning, though he wouldn’t say why. Nicolette didn’t really care. The king of nightmares might take over the city—she didn’t really believe he could take the
world
—but Nicolette was already thinking about possible palace coups. “I should go collect Genevieve myself.”

“If Genevieve even senses your presence, she’ll run,” Gregor said. He sat with his back against a pile of boxes, emergency rations stockpiled against some possible calamity in the world above. “This prediction isn’t proscriptive, it’s
de
scriptive, it’s a most-likely scenario. It’s so likely that I trust it’s basically a certainty, but your presence could change that. Nicolette is better. Genevieve doesn’t know her, so her presence is unlikely to cause immediate alarm.”

“If she fails, I
will
destroy her,” Reave said.

“You can try, baldie,” Nicolette said.

“We’re wasting time,” Gregor said. “Go. I want this
over,
so I can finally get the fuck out of this building and go
outside.
”

Marla didn’t like it, but she hung back in the tree line with Rondeau, and the rifle. He was a better shot than she was, so she didn’t
need
to be there, but Genevieve didn’t trust her, so it was better if Marla didn’t show her face, or bring her mind too close. Marla looked through a pair of binoculars and saw Joshua making his way toward the bandstand, where Genevieve was supposed to appear. He would call to her, calm her, and then Rondeau would hit her with a tranquilizer dart for good measure. Hamil had half a dozen meat-golems hanging around—dressed in huge winter coats to hide their inhumanity and fooling around in a snowball fight—to deal with any contingencies. “I think this is going to—” Marla began, but then Joshua threw his arms up in the air and fell backwards, vanishing into the snow without so much as a cry. Marla was up and off like a shot toward him, but something clotheslined her, and she went down, hard, staring up at pine needles and gray sky. She sat up, carefully, slowly, and saw a cage of glowing blue lines being woven around her in the air.
Magic.
She looked down at her feet at a scattering of fortune cookies lightly covered with snow. She’d stepped on them, cracking them open. She picked one up, and looked at the fortune, which was in an unfamiliar language—some spell of binding and holding she’d never seen before.

“Rondeau!” she called, pushing against the blue webbing, which was still growing and thickening—the strands yielded under pressure, but they wouldn’t break. “Hold your position!” Rondeau didn’t answer. Was he doing as she said, or had something happened to him?

The meat-golems were still throwing snowballs, and one of them hurled a snowball at one of his fellows—and blew his head off in a shower of red and gray. The snowball had become a lethal projectile at some point in midair. The meat-golems just stared, then started walking, but they must have triggered some hidden trap, too, for they all went down in different ways—one’s legs disappeared from the knees down, and another bent all the way backward, like a yoga practitioner in bridge pose, then went farther until his spine cracked. Three of them began mindlessly tearing at one another, driven into a frenzy by some hidden magic. What had happened to Joshua? Was it as lethal as those traps?

Marla finally thought to draw her dagger of office, which could cut through anything, material or magical, and cursed herself for being taken by surprise—she’d wasted seconds by not thinking to use the dagger right away, but she’d been so stunned by seeing Joshua go down that she wasn’t thinking straight. The dagger sliced through the blue webs easily—and just in time, since they were drawing tighter, to mummify or crush her. She forced herself to make her way carefully toward Joshua, avoiding the little traps she now knew to look for, a few marbles in the snow here, a trip wire there, a row of thumbtacks glowing faintly yellow here. She finally reached Joshua, who was knocked out cold, his legs tangled in a chain of rubber bands that were climbing his body, pinning him, trying to choke him.

Marla cut his bonds away with her dagger and patted his cheek, but he wouldn’t wake up. She threw him over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry and retraced her footprints back the way she’d come, toward the relative safety—she hoped—of the trees. In her mind, a mental clock tick, tick, ticked. Genevieve would be appearing in less than a minute. If Rondeau was still there, still looking through the rifle’s scope, they could still get her.

But Rondeau was facedown in the snow and groaning, his rifle gone. Marla put Joshua down, and touched Rondeau’s shoulder. He rolled over halfway. “Nicolette,” he said. “She hit me in the head with something. I saw her take the gun. Couldn’t stop her. She…” He trailed off.

Marla slapped his face, and he gasped. “Stay awake, you might have a concussion, damn it.” She took a handful of snow and shoved it down the front of his pants, and Rondeau gasped, eyes wide; that would keep him awake for a minute, at least. She stood up and looked toward the bandstand, and there was Genevieve, her caramel-colored hair, her pale yellow blouse, her black scarf. The snow was melting all around her feet as she stared blankly around. Marla hesitated—should she run down there, shouting, and risk scaring Genevieve away? If she could get close enough she could manage a bug-in-amber spell, not as powerful as the one Ted had used when he trapped Zealand in mid-leap back at the bar, but good enough to hold Genevieve for a few moments. She started down the hill, trying to simultaneously hurry and keep her eye open for Nicolette’s booby traps. Fuck, she’d been outplayed here. This was beyond bad. But it was still salvageable.

Until Nicolette stepped from the trees behind Genevieve, lifted the tranquilizer gun to her shoulder, and fired. Genevieve started to spin around and then fell to the snow. Marla hoped against hope that Genevieve would disappear, even though Dr. Husch said that, while sedated, Genevieve seemed to stay in this world—under the influence of such drugs, Genevieve simply didn’t dream.

Nicolette waved to Marla, then dropped the rifle and picked up Genevieve. Marla snarled and put on an extra burst of speed. She considered reversing her cloak, letting the cloak’s violent magics seize her and make her into a living weapon, impervious to pain or mercy. She’d rip Nicolette to shreds, and she only hesitated because she might kill Genevieve, too, and she was bound not to do that. Then Marla stepped on something that cracked like dry twigs, and she was immediately engulfed in fire.

“I lit that bitch
up,
” Nicolette crowed, back in the basement. “You should have seen it, Marla went up like a roman candle soaked in rocket fuel.”

“Is she dead?” Gregor said. “Please, tell me she’s dead.”

“She had on that cloak,” Nicolette said, shaking her head. “For a minute I thought I was screwed, that she would reverse it and let the purple side show, and tear me apart.” Marla’s cloak was legendary. Some whispered that the only reason she’d managed to become chief sorcerer was because she’d lucked into an artifact of such power. Nicolette thought that was uncharitable. Marla hardly ever used the cloak, and anyway, it took a skilled wielder to use a weapon like that. Nicolette had nothing against Marla; she even admired her a little. They just currently had incompatible agendas. “But even with the white side showing, the cloak’s powerful, and it will heal her burns.” Being set on fire while wearing the cloak would slow Marla down and cause her a lot of pain, but it wouldn’t kill her. “Still, we got Genevieve, so I call this a win.” Nicolette said. Gregor nodded, but didn’t seem happy about it. “I’ll check with the Giggler and see if this changes things,” she said. “Maybe now Marla’s no danger to you, and you’ll be able to leave the building without worrying about dying.”

“Perhaps,” Gregor said. “But I thought the same thing when Reave showed up in my office, and the Giggler still affirmed the prophecy—if I leave this building, Marla will kill me.”

“Marla will be dead by morning,” Reave said. Genevieve was sprawled beside him, faintly moaning. “Tonight, everything changes.”

“When Genevieve wakes up—or goes to sleep, or whatever,” Nicolette said, “why won’t she just, like, flit away to her palace again? It’s a dream, right? She can do anything.”

“She will regain her senses and find herself in my power. She will
believe
she is in my power, that she is helpless, that she cannot be saved. And so it will be true.” Reave sounded utterly confident. Which was part of the point, Nicolette supposed.

“So what’s the next step?” Gregor said.

“I take Genevieve to my tower. She wakes and sees where she is. She submits to my power. Then? Conquest. Subjugation.” He grinned, showing his hideous teeth. “I’ve been looking forward to this all my life.”

“S
he’s gone,” Austen said, materializing from wherever he was when he wasn’t in the library. “I think something’s happened.”

“Maybe Marla found her,” Zealand said. “She was going to sedate her. Genevieve may wake in the hospital, safe.”

“I suppose,” Austen said, though he paced around and wouldn’t relax. As the minutes stretched into hours, Zealand worried, too. He tried to read, but the books in the library were incomplete, making sense for only a few pages at most before trailing into gibberish or blank pages. Austen said the books were made up of whatever Genevieve could remember from things she’d read, so nothing was wholly there, and even the fragments were inaccurate and misremembered as often as not. He couldn’t find his lost
The Art of War
anywhere, and Genevieve’s version turned into limericks three pages in.

A great rumble shook the palace, and Zealand went to the balcony. There was nothing around them but clouds—until a chunk of masonry fell from the top of the palace and whistled past him, plummeting through the cloudbank. More chunks followed, and soon Zealand retreated inside to keep from being smashed. “Austen, it’s all coming apart!”

“She’s been captured, then,” Austen said, shaking his head. “By Reave. He always said the first thing he would do was tear down her palace, to show her there were no more safe places in all the world. We’re doomed.”

“The hell we are,” Zealand said. “How do we get out of here, back to the real world?”

Austen shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never left. I’m not sure, even now, that I could leave, that I’m…cohesive enough…to survive out there.”

“It’s leave, or have this place come down around us.” Zealand grabbed Austen by the shoulders and shook him. “Come
on.
”

Austen nodded. “We can jump down, through the cloudbank. Marla fell through the clouds that way, and she landed all right.”

Now Zealand hesitated. “Just…jump?” As if responding to the word, the books began leaping from the shelves and falling on the floor. The whole palace was vibrating now.

“Unless you can think of a better option,” Austen said.

“Nothing ventured,” Zealand said, and took Austen’s hand. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you, sir.”

“Same to you. Once upon a time, I was a probability-shifter, and even though this body is just borrowed from Genevieve’s mind…well, I’ll exert myself as much as possible to give us good luck. It’s possible to survive falling out of an airplane, if you land just right.”

“Assuming we don’t just fall forever through dreamspace,” Zealand said.

“Assuming that.”

They made their way to the balcony—the tower was listing hard to that side anyway, so gravity helped. Zealand looked down, and couldn’t see anything but white clouds. He took a breath, then let it out. “Over the side,” he said, and jumped, followed a moment later by Austen.

They fell through the clouds, and the Earth—only it wasn’t the Earth—was far below, a vast expanse of ivory-yellow dotted with bits of green. Tears flew from Zealand’s eyes as he slitted them against the wind, and he turned to look at St. John Austen, who was falling alongside. But something was happening to Austen, bits of him tearing away, turning to dust and gossamer. He dissolved like sugar, feet vanishing, legs vanishing, hands and forearms and elbows and biceps unspooling and trailing away like smoke. He turned his head to Zealand, and opened his mouth as if to make some final apology or promise, but his head disappeared, and his body, and then Zealand was falling alone. He shouted, “No!” but the wind stole his words away. Austen was right. He hadn’t possessed enough personal substance to survive beyond the boundaries of Genevieve’s palace.