Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (23 page)

“Pretty lousy way to begin a reign, making people’s heads fall off,” Marla said.

“We were all quite baffled.” Hamil steered his little scooter over beside Nicolette, almost running over Crapsey’s foot until he scowled and stepped out of the way. Hamil parked beside the throne and regarded Marla for a moment before speaking. “People would simply walk along, minding their own business, and then...” He drew a shaky finger across his throat. “Their heads would fall off as if severed by an invisible sword. The condition seemed to be contagious, too. We lost half a dozen in a day.”

“My magic was just too heavy,” Nicolette said. “But Hamil here fixed the problem for me, and made the connection work right.”

“Did he now.” Marla’s tone was flat, but flat in that barely contained, pissed-off way Nicolette had heard so many times before. Oh, how gratifying it was, to make her take that tone.

“I had no choice.” Hamil’s voice was calm, too, all “just the facts.” “Nicolette’s consolidation of power was swift and expert. Her friend Squat was a great help in her campaign. None of us were prepared to deal with... something like him.”

On Nicolette’s right, Squat preened, which pleased her. Poor guy didn’t get much in the way of compliments, because of his magical medical condition.

Hamil went on. “When Nicolette came to me with her problem, I was outmatched, and helping her seemed better than the alternative. It
was
quite an interesting challenge, too. The force of the sympathetic connection was so immense that when cast on just one person it was overwhelming – they essentially
became
Nicolette, magically speaking, at least for the few moments before their heads fell off.”

“The failed experiments became my spare bodies,” Nicolette said. “I’ve got ‘em, enchanted to stay fresh, in a walk-in closet with the rest of my wardrobe. This one’s nice, huh? There’s no issue with my brain running their bodies, no organ rejection or anything, because like Hamil said, they pretty much
are
me, now.”

“A murderer who wears the corpses of her victims.” Marla nodded. “Yeah, that sounds like you, Nicolette.”

The witch queen of Felport gritted her teeth and kept smiling.

Hamil cleared his throat and went on with his explanation. “I had to come up with a way to blanket the whole city at once, to spread out the force of the spell so that it didn’t land on anyone too harshly. The difference, essentially, between lying down on a bed of nails, as opposed to lying on a
single
nail –”

“You kicked me out because you said it was best for the city.” Marla’s voice wasn’t trembling with rage or anything, but Nicolette was pretty attuned to the woman’s moods, and she could smell the suppressed fury. “Then you turn around and help a chaos witch with a history of doing stupid, dangerous things take over that same city, and endanger every single person who lives here? I’m a little confused, Hamil. Maybe you could explain it to me. You were always good at explaining things. My consigliere.”

“Mine, now,” Nicolette said. “But sure, big man, go ahead and tell her.”

“Letting Nicolette take control was best for the city,” Hamil said. “Because if she couldn’t control it, she was going to
destroy
it.”

“I realized I could make the whole heads-popping-off thing into a feature, not a bug,” Nicolette said. “Tweak the spell to give it a slightly longer incubation period so the infection had time to spread, right? Then, in a couple of weeks, instead of having a magical link with almost everybody in the city, everybody in the city would be
dead
.”

“Then we’d just have to track down the shut-ins and loners, like she said before,” Crapsey added from his spot behind Hamil. “And cut off their heads old-school. Nicolette’s a completist.”

“You see my position,” Hamil said. “When presented with those options – to make Nicolette into a Fisher King, or see everyone in the city die – the choice was obvious.”

Marla shook her head. “I see that you had a moment when Nicolette was in a room with you, making her pitch, and in that moment you could have stopped Nicolette, before she unleashed her contagious decapitation plague, and you
didn’t
. You could have smashed her stupid melon head into pulp. She wouldn’t have
died
, because I have to let her die, but she would have been in a lot of pain, and she would’ve had trouble casting spells or sweet-talking morons like Squat when she didn’t have a
mouth
anymore. Why didn’t you do that, Hamil?”

He just shook his head.

Marla nodded. “Yeah. Because you would have died in the process. Squat would have eaten you. But protecting a city is about putting the city’s interests
above
your own, Hamil. Instead, you put
her
in charge, a woman who’s just interested in annoying
me. She killed how many people, wrecked how many lives, for what? To show me up? And you thought putting her in charge was better than sacrificing your life?”

“I did,” Hamil said quietly. “Because I understood something Nicolette didn’t.”

Nicolette had been on the fence about letting Hamil mention this part. On the one hand, admitting what had happened to her after she went full Fisher King maybe smacked of weakness, or at least a blindness to unintended consequences, but hell, she was a chaos witch by training (even if she’d become something
else
, now), and dealing with unintended consequences was a big part of that specialty. Ultimately she’d decided hearing the truth would annoy Marla more, so she’d agreed.

“I bet we all understand about a million things each that Nicolette doesn’t,” Marla said, “but which one are you talking about now?”

“The sympathetic connection I created doesn’t just work one way,” Hamil said. “It’s not
only
that Nicolette has a gun to the head of every person in Felport. It’s... You’re familiar with the Stockholm Syndrome, of course? When hostages begin to sympathize with their captors? There’s another condition, usually called Lima Syndrome, which is the exact opposite: it happens when captors begin to sympathize with their
hostages
. The moment I connected Nicolette to the people of Felport, that happened to her. They ceased to be simply pawns in her power game. They became
real
to her. In a magical sense, the people of Felport are part of her, and Nicolette cares about their well-being as much as she cares about her own.”

“I can feel them.” Nicolette couldn’t keep a certain dreamy tone out of her voice. The city and its people thrummed in the back of her head, and through her body, like a second nervous system, lit up with thousands of pleasures and pains. She could focus on individual connections or let the whole pulse through her. “I can feel the whole city. It’s part of me.”

“That’s just the city sense.” Marla’s scorn was open, now. “It comes with being chief sorcerer. I had it, too. You can get a feel for the general health of the city, it’s economy, it’s environment, all that. It’s diagnostic magic. Feeling it doesn’t make Nicolette a better person.”

Hamil coughed into his hand and shook his head. “No, Marla, what Nicolette has is a much more profound connection than the city sense. She can focus her attention on individual citizens. Indeed, she’s taken steps to help the lives of some of those individuals with personal attention, in addition to instituting reforms – with my guidance – that can benefit the city as a whole.”

“Me and Crapsey spent all day yesterday delivering hot meals to shut-ins,” Squat said.

“We didn’t even decapitate any of them,” Crapsey said. “We’re the good guys now. Feels weird, but the pay’s good, and it’s less strenuous than genocide, so whatever.”

“I think it’s bullshit.” Marla crossed her arms and scowled. “It’s just the city sense, and you’re telling yourself it’s something more to make yourself feel better, Hamil, about the shitty decision you made.”

“I don’t know, Marla.” Bradley was looking around the room, presumably at the invisible silver threads he saw extending from Nicolette’s head.

Marla glared at him. Nicolette wanted to clap her hands. “Even if it
is
true,” Marla said, “and Nicolette cares as much about the city as herself, what good does
that
do? She’s a chaos witch. The fundamental fact of dealing with chaos magicians is that they can never be counted on to do
anything
, not even to act in their own self-interest. They get their power from uncertainty and unpredictability. Sure, she’s helping people now, but tomorrow she might decide to douse the city in napalm instead.”

“I’m not a chaos witch anymore, Marla,” Nicolette said. “I switched specialties. I’m a Fisher King now. A ruler connected to her people. I prosper, and they prosper, and vice-versa.”

“It’s true,” Hamil said. “She
is
the city, in a way no other chief sorcerer has ever been. The methods that brought her here were... unorthodox... but she is not, precisely, the Nicolette you’ve known all these years. She’s something more.”

“I haven’t changed
entirely
,” Nicolette said. “I still hate your guts, for one thing, and I’m really happy I get to rub your face in my success. I’m going to run Felport
so
much better than you ever did.”

“You’ve been in charge for all of five minutes,” Marla said. “Wait until a
real
challenge –”

A phone rang, loud, one of the annoying default ringtones that came with cheapo pay-as-you-go phones.

Bradley coughed. “Ah, that’s me. Do you mind if I answer it?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely, go ahead, you’re not interrupting anything important here.” Nicolette thought the sarcasm was unmistakable, but Bradley just nodded and took out his phone. She opened her mouth to object but he held up a finger and put the phone to his ear.

“Sorry,” he said, “This isn’t a good – Ah. Wow. That’s... wow.” He frowned, listening intently, for a couple of
minutes
, how rude, then said, “Okay. We’re on our way.” He put the phone away, shot an apologetic look at Nicolette, then turned to Marla, who was still staring straight at Nicolette with that disconcertingly direct gaze. Trying to find a chink in her armor. Ha. Nicolette was all the way bulletproof this time.

Bradley said, “Marla. That was our friend, the one with the coffee shop? You know that thing she was holding for us? It kind of... got loose.”

Now Marla turned her head and sighed. “Damn it. Never trust a giant scorpion. Is our friend okay?”

“She’s all right. For now. Shaken up. But... you know.”

“Yeah. I know. Well. Okay then.” Marla shrugged. “Sorry, Nicolette. We’ll have to postpone our ultimate reckoning thing for a little while.”

“Are you
shitting
me?” Nicolette said.

Marla rolled her eyes. “Look, I know you’re new to the whole chief-sorcerer gig, so I’ll cut you some slack, but let me give you a little thought experiment. Let’s say there’s an upstanding businessperson downtown who’s got a serious problem with vandals and general assholes breaking her windows, spray-painting her signs, things like that. It’s a problem, right? You should probably do something about, make sure a cop gets assigned to patrol the area, maybe arrange for somebody to get punched. But let’s say at the
same time
a giant rock from space is streaking through the air headed straight for your city, ready to turn the whole place into a crater full of extraterrestrial pathogens. Which one do you deal with first? City-destroying space rock, or broken windows?”

“City-destroying space rock, duh,” Nicolette said.

“Right,” Marla said. “That’s what I’m going to deal now. You... you’re just a broken window. B, let’s get out of here.”

“You aren’t going
anywhere
,” Nicolette said, but that was demonstrably untrue.

Bradley in the Park with Marla

A goon tried to grab her, but Marla kicked out his knee and ran for the door, Bradley following as fast as he could. Nicolette shouted “Stop them!”, and Crapsey and Squat did their best to obey. Marla spun and tossed a handful of pebbles behind her, and the rocks exploded into stalagmites, sharp shards of stone bursting up to block off pursuit. They made it out the front door and Marla rushed down one side street, then another, muttering spells of illusion and concealment as she went.

They paused a few streets later, Bradley breathing hard because he didn’t get as much exercise as he should in his position as defender of the multiverse.

“Oof. That was fun,” Marla said. “So. What did Marzi say exactly?”

“That the Outsider busted out around midnight last night, after eating everything behind the door, including the scorpion oracle.”

Marla sucked in air through her teeth. “Damn it. I didn’t see that coming. Why the hell didn’t Marzi reach out sooner?”

“She got hurt. Knocked out, or else she passed out from using her reality-messing-with powers too much. Her man took her to the hospital, and she’s fine, they said she was really dehydrated, that’s all, though they want to run a bunch of tests on her brain. She called as soon as she had a moment’s privacy.”

“I really wanted to spare her this kind of shit,” Marla said. “Did she give you any more details?”

“She said the Outsider appeared in human form, sat Marzi down for a little chat, and said it was going to devour her, but she drove it off with her magical cap gun – wounded it badly, she thinks, but who knows how fast that thing heals?”

Marla grunted. “She’s got steel in her spine, doesn’t she? Marzi’s a champion whether she likes it or not, I guess. Damn. That scorpion oracle was a tough god. I liked her. Well, vengeance it is, then. Locking up the Outsider failed, so now we hunt it down and figure out a way to kill it.”

“Now that’s it’s presumably a lot stronger, having eaten a god?”

“Exactly,” Marla said. “Finally, a challenge worthy of my talents.”

“So, what do we do? Take another plane trip? Nicolette’s probably watching the airport. I don’t think she was happy with us leaving.”

“Fuck her, and fuck her gloating. Fuck the airport, too. We need to move faster than that. We can teleport, but... well. The things that dwell between branches of the universe don’t like
any
living creature too much, but they’re especially drawn to beings of power. You aren’t technically a meta-god right now, and I’m not officially a death god at the moment, but we both know we’ve got some residual-energy-by-association that might make us light up brighter than most if we pass through those in-between places. Do we risk teleporting anyway, or do you have a better idea?”