Poison Sleep (6 page)

Several long strips of canvas tore loose from the buildings and whirled toward her. One struck her in the face, stinging her eyes and driving her back a step. Blind and in danger of suffocation, she tore at the fabric.

As she pulled the canvas away from her face, the wind died. Marla stood holding the shred of rough fabric, then almost tumbled forward as the earth tilted beneath her.

Everything changed again. No square, no skeleton buildings, no leafless trees, certainly no black-clad mushroom men or wailing psychic fugitives. She was back in her own icy city, standing next to a monolithic bank on a deserted street. But she still had the bit of fabric, heavy and painted to look like red brick, in her hand. She’d lost her coat, too, and she shivered.

Marla dropped the fabric to the sidewalk and took deep breaths. She reoriented herself and realized she was not far from Rondeau’s club. Two dozen blocks away from the place where she’d first shifted into the orange-scented nightmare, a distance she’d somehow traveled without crossing the intervening space.

Or maybe in that other place, the distances were shorter. When things got hyperspatial, Marla sometimes became disoriented. She didn’t like folded space, and found scallops in the fabric of reality unnerving. All that space had to come from
somewhere.
There were consequences to screwing around with reality so blatantly. That’s why reweavers were so dangerous. They were like genies with limitless wishes, but every wish had unforeseen consequences. The ripples could take years to show themselves, like earthquake compression waves that started out small but had the potential to become enormous and destructive over time and distance.

She hurried on to the club, her mind already spinning through contingencies. She had to put a lid on this Genevieve situation. It was more dire than she’d realized. Having a crazy psychic on the loose was not an acceptable situation, especially when Marla had to meet with the assembled sorcerers of Felport in a few days. She’d call Langford, and they’d track down the poor lady. Maybe get him to scry for Zealand while he was at it. And if Langford’s arts couldn’t cut it, she’d grit her teeth and ask Gregor for help. Nobody was better than him when it came to nailing down the flapping gauze of future possibilities and identifying the clearest likelihoods—and if that talent made him into an arrogant bastard who always acted like he knew more than anybody else, well, that didn’t mean Marla couldn’t use him. He did owe his fealty to her, whether he liked it or not—she ran Felport, and if he didn’t like dealing with her, he was welcome to leave town, or try to overthrow her. The latter wasn’t likely. Gregor was a seer, not a fighter. He’d gotten very rich off divination—futures trading was a snap when you could
predict the future,
even somewhat imperfectly—and most of the heavy hitters in town owed him favors because of information he’d provided over the years. Gregor was a lurker in shadows, basically Marla’s polar opposite. They couldn’t stand each other, but she’d use him if he was the right tool for the job.

She flipped open her cell phone and dialed. “Rondeau! I sent a guy over to the nightclub. His name’s Ted. He’s my new personal assistant. Get him set up with the Rolodex.”

“The Rolodex,” Rondeau said. “What century do you think it is exactly? We keep all that stuff on computers. Or we
should.
In practice, you just have a big pile of notes and business cards all over your desk.”

“Whatever,” Marla said. “Just show him where everything is, all right?” She flipped the phone shut. The wind gusted, and she looked up at the buildings around her, half expecting them to flutter in the wind. But, for now, everything was solid, metal and glass and cold concrete, just as it should be. “Fucking reweavers.” She lowered her head and hurried on. “Like dealing with the world as it
is
isn’t hard enough.”

“U
nless you have Marla’s heart in your coat pocket,” Gregor said, “I’m very disappointed to see you.” He sat in a deep wingback chair behind an ultramodern glass-and-metal desk, its surface as smooth and flawless as Gregor himself. Nicolette sat off to one side, loudly smacking a wad of chewing gum and smirking.

Z stood, hands clasped behind his back, reminding himself this was only a job, just a job. He imagined tossing Gregor out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows to fall screaming thirteen floors to the pavement below, letting some dirty city air into this sterile and climate-controlled space. Everything in Gregor’s presence was simply too neat. Except for Nicolette, who was messy, and—as Z’s mother might have said—no better than she seemed to be.

“Well?” Gregor said. “You used to be a slow assassin—I didn’t realize the word ‘slow’ referred to your mental faculties, or your power of speech. Why are you here?”

Those who knew Z treated him with respect, and those who did not know him could still sense that Zealand was not the sort of person who tolerated rudeness. That was part of the problem with sorcerers—they thought they were better than everyone else. But there was no point in getting worked up over Gregor. This was just a job. “I’m afraid Marla disappeared while I was tracking her. You asked me to come to you in person if anything unusual happened while I watched her.” He shrugged. “I thought vanishing qualified.”

Nicolette snapped her gum, and Gregor winced. Zealand smiled, but only on the inside. She said, “You sure you didn’t just lose track of her? You checked to see if your shoelace was undone, and when you looked up, she was gone? Like that?”

Zealand wasn’t sure what Nicolette’s role was exactly—whether she was Gregor’s bodyguard, private secretary, lover, or something else. She was petite, a little birdlike, with fine bone structure, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous; you could never judge a sorcerer’s capabilities by looking. Her whole personality, and her messy bleached-white hair—festooned with ribbons, tiny plastic monkeys, rubber scorpions, feathers, and other things—injected a wide streak of chaos into Gregor’s domain. Gregor wouldn’t tolerate such disorder if she didn’t have
something
to offer. Zealand thought it best to tread lightly.

“No,” he said, addressing Gregor. “I did not lose track of her. I followed her to Hamil’s apartment, and waited until she emerged. I trailed her for a few blocks, and then she vanished.”

“You must have spooked her,” Gregor said, dark eyebrows drawn down. “She
can
fly.”

“She didn’t fly. I was
watching
her. I would have noticed flight.”

Gregor waved his hand. “Invisibility, then. She probably followed
you
. She might have followed you here.” He drummed his fingers on the top of his desk. “Nicolette, we’ll need to go downstairs later, and see…what repercussions this has caused. If the prognosis has changed.”

“Yep,” Nicolette said. “We’ll see how bad Mr. Z here has fucked us.”

“I was
not
followed,” Zealand said, through clenched teeth. “I am a professional. It is possible she saw me—Marla is a professional, too, after all—but she will not connect me with you.” In truth, Zealand didn’t think she’d noticed him at all. Marla’s footprints in the slush on the sidewalk had ended abruptly, so she hadn’t simply turned invisible. Unless she’d turned invisible
and
flown away, which seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort. Such behavior didn’t suit what he’d observed of Marla’s personality, either. If she thought someone was following her, she’d confront them. But Gregor was a skulker and deceiver by nature—hence his hiring of Zealand to secretly assassinate Marla—so it made sense he’d assume the same of others. “I only told you about Marla’s disappearance because you insisted I notify you of any irregularities. I am accustomed to more autonomy. You’re paying me for my skills—why don’t you try trusting them? Killing people is what I
do
.”

“He did kill Archibald Grace,” Nicolette said, kicking her heels against her stool. “I mean, that old guy was
twice
the badass Marla is.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, and then fell silent. After a moment, he sighed. “All right. Do proceed. I apologize for my…what do you call it, Nicolette?”

“Being a tight-assed control freak?” Nicolette said. She winked at Zealand, a friendly gesture which, coming from her, he found repellant. “Gregor’s heavily into precision, and that works for him, most of the time. But messy things have value, too.” She shook her mane of clinking, clattering hair. “So when are you going to take Marla out?”

“Tonight. Or tomorrow. Or two days from now. Better if no one knows for sure, not even me. You predict probable futures—surely you know the value of discretion.”

“Sooner is better,” Gregor said.

“It’s best if I know her patterns and routines, when she’s alone, when she’s at her most unguarded. She isn’t an ordinary target, after all. I don’t intend to become a victim myself. I’ve only been watching her for a week, but fear not, she seems remarkably consistent so far.”

“I’ve heard a rumor,” Gregor said. “Some of your old associates are in town looking for you?”

“Yes,” Zealand said. “It won’t interfere with our business.”

“See that it doesn’t.” Gregor dismissed him with a gesture.

Zealand left the office, scanning the hallway in both directions before hurrying to the elevators. Gregor’s security was formidable, but nothing a slow assassin couldn’t overcome. That was another reason to get this assignment over with quickly. The slow assassins were closing in on him. They’d been tacitly ignoring Zealand for years, but some recent business in Dublin had stirred them up again. He’d killed one of their operatives, and even though the murder had occurred in the course of other business, they were furious, and now he had to be more vigilant than usual.

As he rode down in the elevator, he wondered if he’d chosen to kill one of the slow assassins because, on some level, he
liked
having them on his trail, for the excitement. He was getting older, after all, and his life and work increasingly failed to entertain him. Zealand chose not to examine his motivations too closely. A man needed some secrets, even from himself.

Nicolette sat down on the edge of Gregor’s desk. “Think we should have killed him?”

Gregor sighed. “I feel like a man in a shark cage, Nicolette. I’m afraid to reach my arms outside for fear they’ll be bitten off. I thought perhaps I could undercut the probability of the Giggler’s predictions by having Marla killed, but it’s all gone wrong.”

“Zealand is supposed to be the best. Maybe he’ll kill her tonight, or tomorrow.”

“If Marla thinks she’s being followed, she’ll change her patterns.” He put his elbows on the desk and held his head in his hands. “I was perfectly happy with my position. What do I care if Marla runs the city? I don’t want to be a kingslayer.”

“Fate leads him who will, and him who won’t it drags. You were always destined for greater things.” She smacked her gum, and Gregor shuddered. He liked Nicolette. He’d guided her from her days as a street child, and helped nurture her great talent. He just wished she hadn’t shown such an aptitude for chaos magic. It was so
messy
.

Gregor sighed. “There’s no such thing as fate. Just likelihoods, and situations where there’s no right move, only moves of varying degrees of wrongness. It’s a case of zugzwang.”

“Zugzwang? Is that a dirty word for something interesting?”

“It’s a term from game theory,” Gregor said. Most games involved matters of probability, and scrying probability was the closest you could come to telling the future, which was Gregor’s specialty. “‘Zugzwang’ means being put in a position where you have to make a bad move. It would be better to stay still, because any move exposes some weakness or creates disadvantage, but staying still is made impossible by the rules of the game.”

“That about sums it up,” Nicolette said. “But, hey, boss—there are paths out of this that don’t wind up…you know…”

“With me dead in the snow? Oh, I know. But walking those paths will not be pleasant. Sometimes I think it would be better
not
to know what’s coming.”

Nicolette was silent for a moment. Then she said, “No you don’t. I know you. You’d
always
rather know.”

“Hmm. I suppose you’re right. Let’s go see the Giggler.”

Nicolette groaned. “You’re not gonna get all pissed off again, are you?”

“No promises.”

After a short walk down a broad, climate-controlled hallway, Gregor and Nicolette boarded the elevator and descended wordlessly to the basement. On the seldom-visited bottom floor, after the doors had whuffed open and then closed again without either of them getting out, Gregor fitted his penthouse key into the appropriate slot. He turned it and pressed the “B” button again, twice.

Nicolette took a handkerchief from a pocket of her paint-spattered cargo pants and handed it to Gregor on the way down. Gregor nodded thanks and pressed the cloth to his nose before the doors opened.

Nicolette had tried scenting the cloth with different things—expensive colognes, rubbing alcohol, juniper extract—but nothing worked as well as industrial antiseptic. It didn’t disguise the odor as well as some of the other substances did, but it soothed Gregor in the same way his clean building did, even if the fumes did make his head spin a little.

Nicolette showed no reaction to the stink when the doors opened, except perhaps a slight flaring around the nostrils. Nicolette didn’t get bothered by the same things Gregor did. That’s why it was good to have an assistant, to be strong where you were weak.

“He’s broken the lights again,” Gregor said. The dim concrete hallway before them should have been lit by halogen bulbs in cages on the ceiling, but the Giggler didn’t like such brightness.

Nicolette took a penlight from her pocket and shined it into the darkness, sweeping it across the floor. The Giggler wouldn’t attack them, but sometimes he left things before the doors, like a worshipper offering sacrifices at a temple gate, or a pet bringing kills to the door. Gregor had stepped in a dead cat once, and been forced to return upstairs in his stocking feet. He couldn’t bear to wear the shoes after that, and Nicolette had burned them.