Blood Engines Read online

  “What, they bite? I didn’t even know frogs had teeth.”

  “No, they are just filled with poison, and sometimes their bodies sweat poison. The natives use frog venom to poison their spears, and have done so for centuries. But to find so many frogs, so virulently poisonous, here, in this climate, where it is far too cold and dry for them to live long…” The apprentice shook her head. “It is a mystery.” She finished counting the money, and swept all the cash into a single pile and put it under the counter. “My master is an expert on toxicology, among other things, and we have been commissioned by certain parties to determine the nature of Lao Tsung’s death, and to discover if it was the work of another sorcerer or simply a strange happening.”

  “I want to see his body,” Marla said. If Lao Tsung’s body was here, haruspexy wouldn’t have worked—places like this, in folded space, tended to scramble the effectiveness of divination. Which made her wonder what her divination had been pointing toward. There must be something else, or someone else, with big magic nearby.

  The master spoke briefly in Chinese, and the apprentice nodded. “I will show you his body,” she said.

  Marla chewed her lip. The master seemed cowed, but he could still be dangerous. It couldn’t hurt to separate him from his apprentice. “Rondeau, keep an eye on the old guy. And I mean it. Watch him.”

  Rondeau sighed and nodded. “Listen, sir, I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ve got this knife, and if it comes down to it, I have other resources, too. But I’d rather we just chatted while they’re in the back, you know? I’ve never been here before, so I want to know about good restaurants and sightseeing, stuff like that. And if you decide you don’t want to speak English anymore, we can take turns making comical animal noises at each other.”

  The old man just stared, expressionless.

  Marla let the apprentice lead the way into the back room, where the dead body that used to be her friend Lao Tsung lay on a table. He didn’t look any older than forty, his black hair in a long ponytail, his body lean and sinewy. Killed by a swarm of frogs. Swarm? Herd? “What do you call a bunch of frogs?” Marla asked. “It’s a murder of crows, a pod of whales, like that, so what are frogs?”

  “A colony,” the apprentice said. “Sometimes a knot. Sometimes an army. I think, in this case, an army. You may examine the body—you may do anything you wish, you’ve made that clear—but I would advise you not to touch it with your bare hands. We do not know the exact nature or the extent of the poison.”

  Marla nodded and stepped closer to Lao Tsung. What a way to die. At least it was unusual.

  Then Lao Tsung’s mouth opened.

  A tiny golden frog, no more than an inch and a half long, hopped out of Lao Tsung’s mouth, and sat on his chest. It was a beautiful little frog—black eyes, skin almost shiny. Lao Tsung’s flesh began to turn red, until the place where the frog sat sported a welt as big as the others on his body.

  Then the frog jumped.

  After standing in silence for a while, and not hearing anything much from the back room, Rondeau said, “So is the Alcatraz tour worth doing? Marla says it’s probably ghost-choked and psychically unsettling, but I think it’d be interesting. You ever been there? Or are you like those New Yorkers who’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty, you don’t do the tourist thing?”

  The master turned, slightly, and glanced toward the door to the back room. Rondeau waved his knife around a bit. “Hey, eyes front.”

  “Help me,” the master whispered. “Please.”

  Rondeau narrowed his eyes. “There’s no point in trying to mind-fuck me. I don’t have any authority. I’m just here to carry stuff around, run errands, and keep Marla company.”

  “I am not the master,” the master said. He trembled. “I am the apprentice. My master told me I would be his successor, heir to all his treasures, but it was a cruel joke. He stole my body, and trapped my mind in his own. In this.” He raised his arms in disgust, then let them drop.

  “Ah, shit,” Rondeau said. “He pulled a Thing on the Doorstep trick on you, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  Rondeau flipped his knife open and closed, thinking. If this was true, Marla was in the back with a real sorcerer, one who was skilled and nasty enough to switch bodies with someone. Something like that, a meta-rape, incurred a serious karmic debt, but sorcerers powerful and unscrupulous enough to achieve the trick usually had ways to avoid paying the price for such monstrous acts. But if Rondeau went rushing back there to warn Marla, then the real master might do something bad, which Marla wouldn’t be prepared for. And if this old guy was lying, Rondeau would have turned his back on the sorcerer Marla had told him to watch. “Shit,” he said. No course of action seemed like a good one. “Okay, I’ve got this knife ready to slip under your breastbone, so just start backing up. We’re going to ease into the back room and you can tell your story to Marla.”

  The old man whimpered. “If my master finds out that I told you, he will kill this body. He has only left me alive to keep up appearances until he is ready to announce himself as his own successor. What he has done is a crime, and the council of sorcerers would not allow him to go unpunished.”

  Rondeau hesitated. But his loyalty had to be to Marla. “Sorry,” he said. “If you’re telling the truth, we’ll try to help you.” Maybe that was going too far, since Marla probably wouldn’t give a shit about the hijacked apprentice, but Rondeau would help, if he could. “I have to protect Marla, and that means letting her know what she might be dealing with.”

  The master bowed his head and began to shuffle backwards toward the door.

  The frog jumped straight for the apprentice, who threw up her hands and spoke a stream of slippery words. The frog stopped in midair, dangling at roughly shoulder-level, kicking its legs.

  “Nice bug-in-amber spell,” Marla said. “I don’t know many apprentices who can do that to anything bigger than a mosquito.”

  “Thank you,” the apprentice said. “Your compliment honors me.” She went to a shelf and took down a small glass jar, then put on a pair of heavy rubber gloves. She slipped the jar over the hanging frog and screwed the top on.

  “You’d better poke some air holes in the lid if you don’t want the frog to die,” Marla said.

  “I do not object to the frog’s death.”

  The tiny frog hopped around inside the jar, trying to scrabble up the sides of the glass. Marla peered in at the little poison beast. It was a golden, almost metallic, yellow, without any markings at all. “So that’s what killed Lao Tsung, huh? With a little help from his friends. Do you have any idea who might have unleashed the frogs?”

  The apprentice frowned. “Our investigation is ongoing—”

  “Please. We’re all friends. I’m not here to be a vigilante, or get revenge. I’m just…curious.”

  The apprentice nodded, curtly. “Lao Tsung was seen yesterday in a conversation with a man who is unknown to us, an…eccentric stranger. The conversation apparently became quite heated. The man appeared to be Central or South American, and was clothed only in his underwear and some sort of cape. It is possible that he was simply an insane person, shouting as the deranged sometimes do. There have always been mad people in this city, even before you arrived.”

  “Stop, you’ll hurt my feelings,” Marla said. Even if she had time for vigilantism, that description wasn’t much to go on. She looked down at Lao Tsung’s body. She might have touched his cheek with her fingers, but she couldn’t, because of the poison. There was no time to deal with these emotions. Her life, and the safety of her city, were on the line now. Without Lao Tsung to tell her the location of the Cornerstone, she had no idea where to go from here. She didn’t have any other contacts in this city. She sighed. “When in doubt, start at the top.”

  “I beg your pardon?” the apprentice said.

  “I need to talk to the person who runs San Francisco.”

  The apprentice sniffed. “That is not the way we do things here. My master is the m
ost senior sorcerer in Chinatown. North Beach is run by a strega named Umbaldo. Russian Hill, the Haight, the Financial District, the Mission, the Tenderloin, they all have their own leaders.”

  “No shit,” Marla said. “Imagine that. You think the city I come from is one homogenous mass? I bet you guys have some sort of council, right, some way to resolve disputes?”

  “Of course,” the apprentice said.

  “And that means somebody has supreme authority, right?”

  The apprentice pinched her lips together. “Yes. But it is an office, not an individual. The strongest sorcerers pass the duties from one to another, each serving for a few years.”

  “What a fascinating civics lesson. Who’s in charge now?” The apprentice frowned and didn’t answer. “The sooner you tell me,” Marla said, “the sooner I leave you alone, and get my business done, and get off this coast entirely. Okay?”

  “His name is Finch,” she said. “He runs the Castro.”

  “How do I find him?”

  “He is…not so easy to find. But he has parties, every Friday. They begin at nine or ten, though he is not always there in the beginning. I am told he usually arrives by midnight, when things are at their busiest.”

  “That’s tonight,” Marla said. “Great. Show me where he lives.” She grabbed a pen and folded map of San Francisco from her bag. The apprentice peered at the map for a moment, then said, “On this street.” Marla wrote down the street name and the number.

  “Will you be at the party?” Marla said.

  The apprentice shook her head. “My master does not approve of such activities. They are beneath his dignity.”

  Marla nodded. “Listen, I’m not here to piss anyone off. I just want to do my business and get out of town. Let your master know that. Tell him he never has to see me again, and that I appreciate the help.”

  “My master respects strength,” she said. “But, as you dislike being made to wait, he dislikes being bullied. It would be best for you to complete your business and leave the city as soon as possible, or my master may feel it necessary to take action against you.”

  “I always did have a knack for making enemies,” Marla said. “I’ll be leaving now.”

  The door opened, and the master backed in, Rondeau guiding him. “Hey, Marla,” he said.

  “You can let our gracious host go, Rondeau. We’ve got what we need.”

  Rondeau blinked. “Um, well, but—”

  “Save it. We’re going.” She took his arm and tugged him through the door after her. “Pull the door closed. I don’t want to turn my back on them.”

  Rondeau did as she said, and then Marla ran for the exit, Rondeau following close behind.

  When they got outside—almost knocking down a few pedestrians in their headlong rush out of thin air—Marla hurried along the street, putting distance between the shop and herself. She glanced back, feeling distinctly that she was being followed, but the apprentice and her master were nowhere to be seen. Probably just nerves. Who else besides those two would want to follow her here?

  “Marla, I’m trying to tell you something,” Rondeau said.

  “Tell me over dinner,” she said. “We’ve got a few hours to kill, and I think I saw an Italian restaurant earlier.”

  “Well. Yes. I imagine you did. We were in North Beach, after all. Don’t you know anything about San Francisco?”

  “Cable cars. Golden Gate Bridge. Fog. Hills. Gay pride. If you’re coming here, wear some flowers in your hair. That’s the gist, right?”

  “You do have a way of stripping things down to their essentials,” Rondeau said. “But, seriously—listen.”

  Across the bay, in Oakland, San Francisco’s looked-down-upon stepsister, a former movie actor named Bradley Bowman—or just “B” to his friends, most of whom were dead or had conveniently lost touch with him—sat in a trash-strewn, weed-choked vacant lot, dropping Valiums into a sewer grate, one pill at a time. “I had one of those dreams,” he said. “I was standing under an overpass. Frogs rained from the sky, and some of them hopped under the overpass with me. A man in an old-fashioned beaver hat stood half in shadow by a pillar, watching me, and when I waved at him, he nodded. There were hummingbirds flying around my head, moving almost too fast to see. A woman in a purple cloak came out of the shadows, stepping on frogs as she walked, and then she tried to kiss me. When her lips touched mine, I found myself wrapped up in a cocoon, and I didn’t know what I was going to transform into. What does it mean?”

  After a moment, something spoke from beneath the sewer grate. It talked for a long time, its voice lazy and relaxed.

  “Shit,” B said. “Is there anything I can do to prevent it?”

  The voice spoke again, more briefly this time.

  B sighed. “Guess I have to, then. Damn. I hate going into the city.”

  The voice from below murmured.

  “Don’t,” B said. “Please. Coming here, talking to you…this is hard enough without stirring up all those old memories.” He stood, slung his battered knapsack over his shoulder, and trudged toward home, lost in the fog of the past.

  2

  I ’m impressed, Marla. I was sure you’d check us into some fleabag in the Tenderloin.”

  Marla glanced over. Rondeau stood on the balcony of their suite in a posh hotel near Union Square, beneath the darkening sky. He seemed happy and relaxed, and for an irrational instant, she was furious with him—didn’t he understand how serious things were? But of course he didn’t, not really. Because she hadn’t told him. Marla’s life was threatened on a regular basis, and he probably thought this was just more of the same, an ordinary assassination plot. She hadn’t elaborated, because she was ashamed of the position she’d let Susan put her in. Marla had never thought the woman was a real threat, and was paying the price for her carelessness now. She forced herself to answer him calmly. “The Tenderloin? Is that the meatpacking district?” She emptied her capacious leather bag onto the bed and started spreading things out.

  “I don’t think San Francisco has a meatpacking district. But it’s the seedy part of town, lots of strip clubs, bars, stuff like that. Seems like more of your kind of place.”

  “I don’t like going into strange dark alleys any more than you do, Rondeau. Back home, I know the dark alleys, and I know I’m the most dangerous thing that’s likely to be walking up and down in them. Now that I’ve pissed off one of the big local sorcerers—who’s maybe a body-jumper, if what the old man told you is true—I plan to stay out of the shadows as much as possible. But you’re right, I wouldn’t have picked this hotel. I let Hamil make reservations for me. He thinks room service is humanity’s greatest achievement.”

  Rondeau wandered in from the balcony. “Do you think Hamil can keep a lid on things back home, keep Susan from casting her spell right away?”

  “I hope so. They used to be friends, though she doesn’t completely trust him since he became my consiglieri. But I’ve got one advantage. Susan thinks she’s still acting in secret. She doesn’t know that I know her plans—I’ve got an informant on her staff—so maybe Hamil can stall her until I find the Cornerstone. I told him to do whatever’s necessary to distract her.”

  Rondeau frowned. “What, you mean, like, sleep with her?”

  “Conspire with her to overthrow me was more what I had in mind.” She shrugged. “Everybody knows I’m tough to work for, so maybe she’ll believe he’s willing to betray me.”

  “Are you worried about her, Marla?” Rondeau said, pointedly not looking at her, riffling through a neighborhood dining guide that came with the room. “Susan, I mean. How bad is this, on a scale of pretty bad to catastrophe?”

  Marla thought about how to answer that. She was doing her best not to dwell on the threat that hung over her, just to deal with it, but the fact was, she was frightened. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been frightened when she wasn’t in actual physical danger. “If I can’t stop Susan from casting the spell she has planned, it’s going
to be beyond catastrophe. Her plans are dangerous enough that I’d just assassinate her, if I could, and you know I don’t like messing with the balance of power that openly.”

  “So why don’t you?” Rondeau said. “Maybe coming here and finding the Cornerstone seemed like an elegant solution this morning, but since it’s turned out to be more complicated than expected, maybe we should fly back home and gear up for battle.”

  “I wish I could. Susan has defenses. At the first sign of danger, she’d go deep into the basement of that skyscraper she owns—and the basement goes down even farther than the building goes up, from what I’ve heard—and fill every doorway and passage with traps, mercenaries, and thugs. It would take days to break through, and by then, it’ll be too late. I just found out this morning about the spell Susan has in mind, and she’s going to cast it in a day or two. I can’t kill her in time to stop it. She knows she can’t take me out head-on, so she’s spent the past year preparing a big magic to wipe me out for good. I can’t combat her spell, not on such short notice, unless I find the Cornerstone—I can use its powers to protect myself. But after I find the Cornerstone, yeah, we’ll go back home and wipe out Susan. She’s gone too far this time. I have better things to do than engage in all-out war, but she’s left me no choice.”

  Rondeau sat in the swivel office chair by the desk and began spinning around. “So now that Lao Tsung is dead, you’re planning on asking San Francisco’s big boss where to find the Cornerstone?”

  “Sure. Might as well start at the top.”

  “If some hotshot out-of-towners came to our city, and came up to you, and started asking about some big magical artifact, would you help them?”

  “Doubtful,” Marla said. “I don’t think they’d be as persuasive as I can be.” She took a long, ornately carved teak box from the bottom of her bag and set it on the bed. She touched several particular places on the intricate carving, and the lid popped open, revealing the carefully folded piece of fabric resting inside. Marla removed it and shook out the wrinkles. It was a cloak, dazzlingly white on one side and bruise-dark purple on the other. A cloak pin in the shape of a stag beetle was attached to the collar.