Dead Reign (7 page)

“Is this a joke? This guy’s been a prisoner?”

“Never that. Pelham’s people have been servants of the founding families for generations. As you know, some years ago, the last scions of those families chose to leave the city to seek their fortunes elsewhere, much to the delight of myself and the ghosts I serve.”

Marla grunted. Those spoiled rich brats had done nothing except party and dishonor their family names, and the Chamberlain had made life unpleasant for them. They all lived abroad on their trust funds now, and didn’t even visit anymore. “Yeah, so?”

“They all took their personal servants with them. Pelham’s family has…certain symbiotic tendencies. Through training and temperament and long tradition, they’re only happy when they have someone to personally tend to. The relationships can grow quite close. But Pelham, poor Pelham, was the odd man out. He had too many brothers and sisters. When the heirs to the founding families chose their valets and lady’s maids, Pelham was left unchosen. He’s been at the house ever since, seeing no reason to leave, utterly unfulfilled, and I’ve been wondering for years how to settle him properly in an outside position. When I realized you had the makings of real aristocracy—the kind won by strength of arms and strategy, not accident of birth—I realized you’d be perfect.”

“Me? Why not
you
? Gods, you’ve got dozens of servants already!”

“Nonsense. I
am
a servant, Marla. Head of the servants, yes, and often the public face of the founding families, which requires me to affect a certain regal bearing on their behalf, but I never forget my true position. Besides, Pelham is more than a hired man. His connection to the one he serves is profound. He’s bonding to you even now. You’ll never find a more loyal or trustworthy employee. And, yes, he may need to adjust to the realities of the world outside a bit, but he’s been trained to cope with the unexpected, and he doesn’t bat an eyelash at magic. I’m sure he’ll work out fine.”

“Look, you said we could break this arrangement anytime, and now you’re telling me he’s a parasite?”

“Symbiote,” the Chamberlain said sternly. “And, yes, you could send him away, though it would tear him apart to be rejected, and I suspect he’d wind up utterly despondent, sleeping under a bridge somewhere. And he’s certainly free to leave your service whenever he chooses; it’s just highly unlikely he would ever so choose.”

“Wonderful. I won’t forget this.”

“It
is
a boon, Marla, not a treacherous gift, I assure you. You’ll see. Pelham will make your life easier in a thousand little ways. You’ll have cause to thank me.”

“Right. I’m sure.” Marla flipped the phone closed and drummed her fingers on the dashboard.

“Hey, Marla,” Rondeau said quietly. “The guy’s back there crying.”

Marla sank lower in her seat. She felt like shit, but she hadn’t asked for this responsibility. Then again, she was no stranger to unwanted responsibility. She took a breath. The world was what it was. “Hey, Pelham. Sorry about all that…parasite business. I was just taken by surprise.”

“You need never apologize to me, Ms. Mason.”

She turned around in her seat again. “Hey. I don’t apologize all that often. Just when I actually make mistakes, which Rondeau can tell you is pretty much never.”

“To hear her tell it anyway,” Rondeau said.

“If you’re going to work for me, you can’t be afraid to speak up. I’m not saying I won’t smack you down occasionally, but don’t let that discourage you. I realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know. But you can learn. And there’s plenty of stuff you do know that
I
need to learn. Like how to throw a party for a hundred or so of Felport’s best and brightest and meanest and most dangerous. Think you can help me do that?”

“Of course,” Pelham said. “I live to serve, Ms. Mason.”

“Well, we’ll see if we can find something better for you to live for, but I guess it’s a start.”

“Say,” Rondeau said. “Do you know anything about the care and feeding of baby goats?”

Marla left Pelham and Rondeau at the club and went to take a walk. The goat was locked in the men’s room eating a potted plant and drinking from the toilets. Pelham had been reluctant to leave her side, but she convinced him that Rondeau would teach him the ropes—answering phones, the ins-and-outs of Marla’s rather free-form filing system, which people she was willing to take phone calls from, and which she’d just as soon avoid. She set off toward the esplanade, wanting to hit the center of Felport’s tourism and get a sense of the summertime commerce, and as the Market Street Market wound down in the afternoon, the esplanade was the next best thing. Fiduciary magic wasn’t her specialty—her consiglieri, Hamil, was the one who kept his finger on the pulse of the city’s economics, with a little help from the chaos magician Nicolette—but she could get a crude sense of the health of a particular sector by quietly sitting and letting the city flow through her. She’d been chief sorcerer for nearly five years, and was finally beginning to develop what her predecessor Sauvage had called city sense, the ability to expand her consciousness until the city became almost part of her own body. With some effort, she could feel spikes in crime rates like sharp pains, taste pollution like morning breath, experience economic downturns like fatigue and bad traffic like clogged sinuses. Apparently the city sense became second nature after enough years, but Marla wanted to practice, and she found positioning herself with some physical analog of the quality she wanted to explore helped her focus.

The day was warm and lovely, and the esplanade was hopping. Most of the little shops had their doors open for the breeze, and people strolled in and out at a good pace. Marla sat down on a stone bench with a good view of the water and watched people in shorts and T-shirts stream by, kids clutching ice-cream cones, young women Rollerblading, lovers strolling arm in arm. Felport wasn’t a real hub of tourism, but it was the biggest city in this part of the state, and so a lot of people from the sticks and suburbs came to see the occasional show, eat in good restaurants, take the kids to museums or the zoo or the little amusement park and boardwalk down by the bay. Marla closed her eyes and let the shape of the city coalesce in her mind, from Ernesto’s vast junkyard in the south, then north to the green expanse of Fludd Park—gods, she hated that place, all bugs and dirt and ducks and trees—in the city’s center and up to the rabble of student housing, on past the river to Adler College with its weird sculpture garden, and then east to the Heights where the Chamberlain lived, on to the old city with its cobblestoned narrow streets and historic buildings, over to the fancy houses with bay views, then down to the south side of the river again, to the clutch of skyscrapers and high-rises downtown, over toward the old industrial sector by the docks, down to the esplanade again, where Marla sat. The city felt whole and relatively safe, no pin-pricks of interdimensional invaders, no waves of rage from some passing monster, most of the ordinaries going about their lives with the usual mixture of hope, anxiety, sadness, and joy, unaware of Marla or her kind looking out for them (and, admittedly, sometimes making a living off of them). Marla shivered with pleasure, a sensation like eating a perfect meal and being absolutely satisfied, neither under-nor overfull. Felport in early summer, before the intense heat and humidity really set in, was a wonderful place. So what if she had a party to plan? So what if she’d acquired a valet against her will? These were minor concerns. Her city was healthy. Life was good.

“Hello, Marla. I like your knife.” The voice was right next to her, closer than should have been possible—she hadn’t sensed anyone sitting next to her, and even immersed in her city sense, she shouldn’t have been
that
lax.

“Do I know you?” Marla opened her eyes and gave the stranger a deep look. He was young, handsome, dirty-blond, with that just-out-of-bed messy hairstyle that probably took way more work than Marla’s own ragged shag did. He was dressed in a nice dark suit and blue shirt, classy and not flashy, but he had on a gaudy array of rings, one on each finger, each with a different gleaming gemstone. He smelled like nothing at all, which was part of how he’d managed to sneak up on her.

“Not intimately,” he said. “Not yet. But you know my work. I’m Death. You can call me
Mr.
Death.”

“I used to know a goth kid back in Indiana who called himself Death,” Marla said. “He got run over by a semi. That’s what you’d call a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might want to reconsider your nickname.”

“Mmm. Why don’t you spare yourself grief and give me your pretty little knife?”

“Why don’t you take a flying leap off a cliff? Piss off. You’re crowding my space.”

He put his hand on her wrist. Well, that was that. Touching her was a no-no. She grabbed his hand, intending to put him in a vicious twisting joint-lock that would have him on his knees before her, crying.

Instead, to her surprise, everything whooshed, and people yelled, and she was looking up at the sky, and she
hurt.
She sat up—pretty fast, all things considered, thanks to her old friend adrenaline—and realized she’d been
thrown
from the bench, and crashed into the low wall on the far side of the walkway. How had he thrown her? How had he gotten any leverage, sitting beside her? He was still lounging on the bench, cool as you please, and most of the passersby had taken off running, which was a reasonable response to sudden violence.
Guess he’s a sorcerer.
Why couldn’t new guys in town ever just introduce themselves? They all had something to prove. Marla stood up. “Bad move, out-of-towner,” she said. “I turn people like you into compost.” She launched herself toward him, spitting out a spell of deflection as she went, so if he cast another spell, it would bounce off her and back to him. He didn’t move, and she leapt, ready to deliver a kick—with her magically reinforced steel-toed boots, no less—to his face.

He was up and out of the way faster than she could see, and before she even landed she reached into her pocket for the little vial of hummingbird blood she’d kept there. She crushed the vial, blood and glass stinging her hand, and all the light around her subtly blue-shifted as her metabolism and subjective time sense sped up a hundredfold. She couldn’t spend too much time in this state—the crash after extended use made coming off crystal meth seem gentle—but for now, it should make her an unstoppable fighting machine, faster than any other primate alive. She spun, and Mr. Death was lounging by the low wall behind her. Fast, but she was certainly faster. She raced toward him, ready to deliver a punch that, at this speed, would probably cave in several of his ribs, but he moved out of the way, which really shouldn’t have been possible. Marla nearly flew off the edge of the esplanade, which would’ve meant a long drop into the cold bay, but she corrected her course, landed in a crouch on the wall, and sprang back after him.

He swatted her out of the air nonchalantly, and she hit the ground hard enough to bounce. “This is silly.” His voice wasn’t the slowed-down drone it should have been; he’d somehow accelerated himself to match her. “Just give me the knife and I’ll be on my way.”

“You want the knife?” Marla drew her dagger of office and held it in a reverse grip, blade tucked up against her forearm. “You get the knife.” Fighting an unarmed man with a knife wasn’t sporting, but Marla was past the point of caring about sport. She wanted to kill this guy. If she needed to find out who he was later, maybe she’d bring Ayres out of retirement and get him to interrogate the guy’s corpse. She came at him, ready to flick out her blade and finish this, but he moved, still faster than her eye could comprehend, twisted her wrist so hard she cried out and dropped the blade, and tossed her off to one side like an empty beer bottle. The dagger fell in slow motion at first, then clattered to the pavement as normal time reasserted itself. Marla groaned. She hadn’t been tossed around like this in a while. She mumbled a little analgesic spell to numb the pain in her wrist, and watched while grinning Mr. Death bent down to pick up her dagger.

His scream, though not unexpected, was quite gratifying. His right hand was a spurting bloody mess, with most of his fingers dropping, severed, to the ground.

“My dagger,” Marla said. “It doesn’t like strangers.” She whistled, two low notes, and the dagger skittered along the ground and flew into her hand, hilt-first. After giving the blade a shake to cast off the stranger’s blood—every drop left the blade, which was part of the weapon’s magic—she tucked it into the sheath at her waist. Mr. Death whimpered and cradled his devastated hand. Sirens wailed, approaching fast. Somebody had seen the fight and called the cops. Marla wasn’t worried about the cops—she knew the mayor and the chief of police, and more important, they knew
her,
and what she really did for Felport—but she preferred to avoid the hassle. She considered trying again to kill him, now that he was wounded, but her time in the graveyard yesterday and the memories it prompted made her inclined to alternatives, like mercy. “You’re a good fighter,” she said. “That was a nice workout, and some of those tricks I’ve never seen before, but you better believe I’ll learn them soon. This isn’t the place to make a name for yourself, though. Leave town. If I hear you’re still hanging around later, I’ll make the loss of a few fingers seem like a pleasant morning.”

He didn’t answer, just stared at her and bled.

“You take care now.” She walked away, leaving Mr. Death to gather up his fingers. A good magical surgeon could reattach them like new. Maybe he knew somebody who could do that back where he’d come from. Wherever the hell that was. She’d make some inquiries.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so,” Booth drawled, “but this place has the distinct odor of age and staleness.”

“The dead man complains to me of odors?” Ayres said from his folding chair by the window. “Make yourself useful by cleaning the place, then. I didn’t bring you back to life so you could bitch and moan.”

“Men of quality don’t clean.” Booth was looking at himself in a full-length mirror. He’d been doing that ever since Ayres cast a glamour to cover his hideousness. “This really isn’t a very good likeness, Ayres. The tattoo on my hand is absent, for one, and I think my cheekbones should be higher.”