Category: Marlaverse

As an enticement to get people to contribute to my Kickstarter for Closing Doors, the last Marla Mason novel, here’s a Marla story that has never appeared online before: “Manic Nixie Dream Girl”. If you like it, you can show your appreciation by hurling money at me or encouraging others to do so, or both.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpratt/closing-doors-the-last-marla-mason-novel

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“We’re looking for a monster,” Marla said. “Except at this point we’re pretty sure it just looks like a person.”

The small, white-whiskered old man sitting in the velvet armchair across from her nodded thoughtfully. “Ah,” he said. “A person. That narrows it down. There are only about eight hundred and twenty-five thousand of those in San Francisco. Closer to seven million if you consider the Bay Area as a whole. Can you be any more specific than ‘a person’?”

Marla shrugged. “We heard it was in a body that appears male, so that cuts the options in half, except it’s clearly a shapeshifter or has the ability to hide itself with illusions, so never mind. It’s not very nice. It seems to literally gain power from killing people and eating them, or consuming them in some way that might as well be eating them.”

Sanford Cole, the legendary and immortal (so far) figure recently awakened (again) from magical slumber to serve as chief sorcerer of San Francisco, stroked his neat little beard. “The city has been troubled by a shapeshifting creature in recent days. I’ve had trouble narrowing down its location through divination – and as you know, that’s one of my strengths – because its form is so malleable. It could be your monster, I suppose. The city is woefully short of battle magicians since our former leader Susan Wellstone’s tragic demise and the defection of many of her people to neighboring organizations, so I haven’t tasked anyone to track the creature down yet.”

Marla smiled. “I’m happy to volunteer my services. Monster hunting is kind of my thing these days.”

“I will give you what information I have on the creature,” Cole said. “But may I have a few moments alone with our mutual apprentice?”

Marla glanced over at Bradley, who was standing in a corner of the suite, in the deepest shadow he could find, as if trying to disappear, or at least go unnoticed. “Sure. But, ah, you know, he’s not exactly our Bradley – ”

“I know,” Cole said. “But he’s close enough.”

#

Marla sat fidgeting in a chair in the hallway outside Cole’s suite, in one of the luxury hotels on Nob Hill, flipping her dagger into the air and catching it by the hilt, over and over. After about fifteen minutes, Bradley – B to his friends – came out, looking visibly pale and shaken, and leaned against the wall beside her. “That was weird,” he said. “Sanford Cole was, like, congratulating me on everything I’ve achieved. Sanford Cole. He was court magician to Emperor Norton! He kept the city from falling into the sea during the 1906 earthquake! And he says he’s proud of me.” B shook his head.

Marla snorted. “B, you’re the defender of the multiverse, a position so badass it even freaks out gods. Of course Cole’s proud of you.”

B winced. “To be fair, I’m just a fragment of a fraction of the defender of the multiverse, an autonomous node budded off from the greater collective over-mind and imbued with all the awesome powers of any ordinary mortal who happens to be a pretty good psychic. This, standing before you, is as human as I get these days, and once we track down the Outsider, I’m not even sure what happens to me – if I get absorbed back into the ur-Bradley or sent to live on a farm upstate or what. It is weird, being locked down in one branch of the multiverse again, in a single isolated version of myself. Like being blind and deaf and tongueless.”

“Yeah, your life is one of interminable suffering, and so on. Let’s maintain focus, B. Did Cole tell you about this shapeshifter thing?”

B nodded. “Something’s going around drowning people in bath tubs, toilets, and swimming pools, mostly young men who just moved to the city. There’s a new tech boom, so lots of new people are moving here, getting high-paying jobs, paying three grand a month for shitty studio apartments, driving up rents, pricing out longtime residents, and so on. Cole figures the shapeshifter is some local sorcerer pissed off about gentrification, striking back at the brogrammers, but maybe it’s our guy.”

“What do you think? Any inspirations fizzing in that psychic brain of yours?”

He shook his head. “The Outsider is almost impossible for me to sense – it’s from outside the multiverse, so it’s not under my jurisdiction, and it’s really good at cloaking itself from conventional divination. Cole says whenever he attempts to narrow down the location of the thing that’s drowning people, he just gets visions of puddles, fountains, the bay, various bodies of water. Not exactly the same failure mode, you know? And the method of killing is totally different, too, from total devouring to drowning and leaving the bodies… But the Outsider did spend a long time buried beneath the desert in Death Valley, so maybe it’s decided to go with a watery-murder theme now that it’s in wetter territory. Who knows how that thing thinks? Getting inside the Outsider’s head is like trying to figure out the inner life of a virus. Or a prion disease.”

“So Cole’s monster might not be our monster at all. Still, it’s worth checking out. If nothing else, killing something would be good for my morale. Do we have any place to start, or are we just supposed to hang around damp places and hope for the best?”

“There’s a survivor,” Bradley said.

#

Erich Shiriam sat in his tiny one-room apartment in the Mission, jittering in a high-end office chair and intermittently gulping at an energy drink. He was bug-eyed and wild-haired and his shirt was turned inside out, but Marla didn’t know if that was typical of his nature or an expression of his trauma. She did know she was sitting on a dirty futon and there were piles of dirty clothes and take-out boxes everywhere and it was pretty gross.

“Sorry to make you come here, I know it’s, uh, but it’s just, I don’t even like leaving the apartment after what happened, I’m afraid to go out and get… I don’t know… my therapist says I have situational agoraphobia so work is letting me telecommute for a while and I’m hoping – ”

“So you met a girl and she tried to drown you?” Marla interrupted.

Erich blinked at her, then looked at B, who shrugged affably. “That’s right, yeah.” Erich spoke slowly, frowning, and he was probably trying to remember why he’d let these people into his place, and why he was talking to them at all, but before he could go too far down that road Bradley must have given him another little psychic nudge, because he snapped back into focus. “Right. So, look, I went to MIT, I’d never been on the West Coast at all, not even to visit, but I’d heard about San Francisco, how cool it was, how hip, how everything was happening here, you know? Also how it never snows, which after all those years in Boston, that’s pretty great by itself.”

Marla liked a good winter storm, herself, but she nodded agreeably. Bradley could have probably just ripped the knowledge they needed out of the guy’s brain without them having to endure a conversation, but he preferred a more delicate approach.

“So I got here,” Erich went on, “and mostly I just worked a lot, you know, sixty-hour weeks, sometimes eighty-hour weeks during crunch time, the start-up standard. Sometimes I’d go out to clubs and bars and I’d see those San Francisco girls, with the piercings and the straight black bangs and the cool tattoos and the motorcycle boots and the heavy eyeliner, and I tried to make it with a few of them, but mostly they seemed to be laughing at me or bored by me, you know? They’d let me buy them drinks all night but then they’d leave with some hipster wearing tiny pants and giant glasses, or else with another girl. The only real date I had was with another programmer, who also went to MIT, and I mean, I could’ve stayed in Boston, right?” He took a breath. “But then one night, I was sitting in this little hole-in-the-wall burrito joint, and I met her. Llyn.” He spelled the name, and Marla grunted. Was she Welsh, or just pretentious?

Erich went on. “She was… she was just this hurricane of a girl, you know? Tiny, maybe five-foot-one, barefoot, wearing a short skirt and a shiny top and about eighteen hundred scarves in all different colors, bangles on her wrists, ankle bracelets, red and green streaks in her hair, ukulele hanging on a strap on her back, purse made out of a plush toy squid. She ordered a big bowl of jalapenos and then just sat down across from me, looking at me with these huge blue eyes, popping peppers into her mouth and grinning. We ended up walking around and talking all night. She told me she was an art-school drop-out who was into doing sculptures with found objects, and that she spent a lot of time busking on her ukulele for the tourists, and that she liked meeting people who were new to the city because they still had a sense of wonder, and did I want to go back to my place, so, ah…” He blushed, and Marla rolled her eyes. B must have given his sense of propriety a little nudge, because he said, all in a rush, “So we could do some molly and she could suck my cock and then make me pancakes.”

“And you said yes,” Marla said. “Hell, who can blame you? A manic pixie dream girl straight out of twentysomething director’s wish-fulfillment indie film offers you a totally San Francisco experience, why wouldn’t you say yes? So what happened?”

He looked down. “This place is pretty tiny, but one of its good qualities where I lucked out is the bathroom.” He rose and went to a door with a crystal knob and opened it up, beckoning them to look inside. The bathroom was almost as big as the rest of the apartment – clearly it had been the master bath, and his “apartment” had been the master bedroom, before this house was chopped up into tiny units. The floor was tiled in honeycombs of white and blue, and there was a pedestal sink and a toilet in a fetching shade of teal porcelain, but the space was dominated by was a huge claw-foot bathtub with a showerhead suspended above it.

“She came in, and we made out for a while, and then she wanted the tour, which was kind a joke, but whatever. She looked at the bathtub and her eyes got real big and she said we had to take a bath together. At that point I still had no idea what she looked like naked, every time I managed to get a scarf off her there were ten more underneath it, so I jumped at the chance. She took my clothes off and put me in the tub and sat on the edge while it filled up, and I mean, she had her hand in the water, and it was pretty nice….” He trailed off. “The tub filled up, and I asked her when she was going to get in with me, and that’s when she pushed me under.”

Marla nodded. Her first thought was: serial killer dresses up like cliché quirky girl to exploit the fantasies of young brogrammers, preying on the tech elite as a symbolic protest against the inevitable horrors of gentrification. But Cole said it was weirder than that, and it got that way.

“She was strong. Crazy strong. Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but pushed me under like it was nothing, one hand on my forehead, one on my chest. I looked up at her through the water, and I guess it was just the drugs, but… her face changed. Her body, too. Rippled like water, became translucent, it was like, she became water, but her hands were still solid. After a couple of minutes she stopped holding me down and left.” He shrugged.

B frowned. “Wait, so how did you survive? Did someone come resuscitate you?”

He shook his head. “I’m good at holding my breath. Have been since I was a kid, when I went swimming lot with my dad, and I just kept at it. Winning breath-holding contests was my party trick in college. I mean, I’m not like those free divers who can stop breathing for twenty minutes, but two or three minutes? Sure. Once I realized she was trying to drown me I thought I’d better just play dead, and it worked. I think I would have freaked out a lot harder if I hadn’t been on drugs, honestly. Molly saved my life.”

“No sign of her when you got out of the tub?” Marla said.

He shook his head. “No, she was just gone. There were lots of puddles, though, all over the hardwood in the main room, like she’d dripped tons of water around. I called the cops, they took her description and told me not to pick up strange women in burrito shops anymore, that was it.”

Marla nodded. Cole said there’d been half a dozen drownings so far, but he’d managed to keep it out of the news, so Erich didn’t realize he’d narrowly avoided joining an ever-growing body count. “Well, thanks for your – ”

“Wait,” B said. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

Erich frowned, and B pushed, and Erich moaned. “Okay, fine, she left one of her scarves, it’s under my pillow. I know it’s stupid, it’s sick, but it still smells a little like her, she was so hot, I can’t help it – ”

“Show us,” Marla said.

Erich went to his futon, lifted up a pillow, and picked up a long piece of ragged seaweed. He rubbed it against his cheek, sighed, and handed it to Marla, who took the slimy thing in her hands. “A… scarf,” she said.

He nodded. “Smells like, I don’t know, vanilla and baby powder and the cherry soda I liked when I was a kid…”

The thing in her hands smelled like salt and rotting fish to Marla. “We’ll have to take this, but on the plus side, we won’t tell the cops you withheld evidence, okay?”

#

Once they were outside, Marla handed the seaweed to Bradley. “Well?” she said. “Does this look like a scarf to you?”

“Seaweed. But I looked into Erich’s mind and I could see the psychic tampering. I fixed it while I was in there. Took care of his agoraphobia, too. But I left his caution about picking up ukulele girls in bars.”

“You’re such a humanitarian, B. Can you use this scrap of slime to track down our mystery woman?”

“Pretty sure she’s not actually a woman,” Bradley said, “but I’ll do the psychic bloodhound thing, sure.”

“It’s not the Outsider, is it?”

B shook his head. “I don’t think so. We don’t know what forms this nixie or kelpie or whatever has taken in other attacks, but in this one, it showed a pretty sophisticated understanding of human psychology and expectations – more than that, it seems to have a sense of humor, which isn’t a quality we’ve noted in the Outsider. I mean, the ukulele? Infinite scarves? That’s comedy, right?”

“Manic nixie dream girl,” Marla said. “That is pretty funny, except for the death by drowning. Okay, do your thing, and let’s find our monster.”

#

They wound up on the western edge of the city, down by the ruins of the Sutro Baths, the once-vast swimming pool complex on the beach that had been reduced by demolition and fire to concrete foundations and a few vestigial fragments of the old buildings. The place was usually popular with tourists who came to hike, take in the shattered grandeur, and look out at the ocean and the nearby Seal Rocks, but today it reeked of rotting fish, and the wind from the sea was salty and stingy, and it was just generally vile and unpleasant. “This place is awful, let’s go somewhere else,” Marla said, but B grabbed her arm.

“Somebody cast a keep-away spell over here,” B said. “A strong one. Of course, I’m immune, but your puny mortal mind is no match for the magic.”

“Who’re you calling mortal,” Marla muttered, shaking his hand off.

“Well, you’re mortal at the moment. Here, let me clear your head.”

“No thanks.” She ducked her head and stomped down the path toward the ruins, the stink making her eyes water, the wind battering her, the fear that she would slip and fall and be swept away and die (even though lately she couldn’t die) growing ever stronger until –

– she broke through the bubble of the spell and blinked at the calm sea, breathed in the brisk salt air, and didn’t worry about death a bit, as usual. B stepped up beside her. He pressed the rag of seaweed to his face, sniffed, then pointed. “Down there, by the waterline, there’s a cave. I’m pretty sure there’s not supposed to be a cave, but somebody made one.”

“Let’s have ourselves a cave invasion, then.” They picked their way down the rocks to the beach, and Marla saw the shadow in the cliff wall where the cave must be. She drew her dagger – the only possession of value she had at this point, apart from her motorcycle – and stepped carefully, boots sinking into the soft sand, toward the darkness. “Fiat lux,” she muttered, activating her enhanced night vision, but she didn’t need it: the blackness of the cave was an illusion, and once she stepped inside, it was lit by battery-powered camping lanterns resting on rocks and hanging from pitons hammered into the cave walls.

An old man wearing a pair of black swim trunks and nothing else was sleeping in a brightly-colored hammock swaying in a metal stand, next to an iron cauldron that would have done the witches from Macbeth proud.

Marla exchanged a glance with B, who shrugged and leaned against the damp wall of the cave. He generally left the heavy stuff to her, which was the way she liked it.

Marla walked over, put her boot on the hammock, and dumped the old guy out.

He sprang up, sputtering. “What the shit?” His eyes – they were red-rimmed, matching the burst veins in his nose – went wide and he shouted “Llyn!”

The contents of the cauldron bubbled up into a fountain, which turned into the watery semblance of a girl, translucent except for a few scraps of seaweed that sort of looked like hair, and teeth made of shards of shell. The nixie hissed, the water around her mouth boiling in the process, and started to climb out of the cauldron.

Marla lashed out with her dagger, right at the thing’s face. It screamed and fell back when the blade cut across the indentations it had for eyes. Marla slashed down in a looping s-curve through the nixie’s body, and water splashed everywhere, seaweed and shells splattering back down into the cauldron. The old man gaped. “What – what did you do?”

“This knife was made for me by the god of Death,” Marla said. “Forged in an awfully hot hell, a lake of fire conjured by the imagination of a dead guy with a lot of guilt but not much imagination. This blade can cut through anything I want it to. Stone, steel, astral tethers. Water molecules. Don’t worry, your nixie will get her shit back together eventually, but right now a large portion of her anatomy has been reduced to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and it takes a girl a little time to recover from that.” She held up the knife. “Now, what should I cut you up into?”

“I won’t fight.” He held up his hands. “Did Sanford Cole send you? I – I don’t recognize his authority, you know. I’m a sea witch, my people have been here since the Egg Wars, and – ”

“Hush. The structural hierarchy of the city’s magical community could not interest me less. You were murdering innocent people with your little water goblin there. Why?”

He hugged his arms around his pale pigeon chest. “These new people. They’re destroying the whole culture of the city. Altering the place’s personality. Driving out the artists, the creative people, the ones who make it a world-class place to live. Soon it’s going to be nothing but young technocrats, consuming without creating.”

Marla snorted. “This new wave of people moving in isn’t any different from the old waves of people moving in. The hippies pouring in here in the Sixties changed the whole nature of the city, too. The Beats changed things before that, in the Fifties. The people who came for the gold rush in the 1850s – I assume those were your people, Mr. Egg War – changed the hell out of the place too. Unless you’re Ohlone, bitching about the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the Eighteenth century, I don’t really want to hear it. Some of these new tech people are assholes, I’m sure, but some of them are perfectly nice people who heard San Francisco was a great place to live, and wanted to move here, so they did. Didn’t you just have a tech boom like ten years ago? Gods. You should be used to this. Stop bitching and move to Oakland until the next inevitable bust in the economy drives the technorats out of San Francisco again if you hate it so much. Seriously, it’s gotta be more than that. What made you start murdering people? Did you get kicked out of your apartment so some douche-bros could move in?”

The old man lifted his chin. “I am a sorcerer. I can live wherever I choose.” He sighed. “But my favorite bar, where I went every day for decades, was closed and replaced by an artisanal toast restaurant.”

B whistled. “Damn, dude,” he said. “That is rough. I mean, murder’s still wrong and everything, but… damn.”

“Call Sanford Cole and tell him we caught his murderer,” Marla said. “Tell him if he wants to reward us with riches and resources they’d be welcome.”

#

Marla and Bradley sat on the steps leading down to the beach at Aquatic Park in North Beach, watching the sailboats cruise around the bay, and looking at the fog-shrouded towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. They were eating double-doubles, animal style, they’d picked up from the In-N-Out Burger a few blocks away.

“Wow, I missed cheeseburgers,” B said. “Being an omnicognizant super-god living in a pocket watchtower dimension overseeing the complexity of the multiverse is great, but there’s a real dearth of local restaurants. I should do something about that.”

“Just visit us mortals, and part-time mortals, more often,” Marla said.

“Should’ve gotten sodas,” B said. He reached toward her bag. “Let me get a drink of–”

She slapped his hand away. “That’s not water for drinking.” He raised an eyebrow, so she picked up the plastic liter water bottle and shook it up, stirring the sand, flecks of seaweed, and jagged shards of seashell at the bottom around. “While you were talking to Cole’s people about securing Mr. Sea Witch, I was having a chat in the cave with Llyn, who’d mostly reconstituted herself, and she’s agreed to go traveling with us.”

B laughed. “You’ve got a nixie in a bottle?”

“Well, I’ll have to dump her in a pond, or at least a full bathtub, if I want her to appear in human-sized body again – she needs more volume for that kind of thing – but, yeah.”

“You haven’t had the best luck in the past, taking on murderers as allies. Squat, Nicolette, your brother…”

“Oh, Llyn’s not a murderer, she was a murder weapon. She was under a compulsion to serve old what’s-his-egg. I broke the chains of his spell with my dagger, and she’s promised to repay me with a month of service, then she’ll go jump in a lake somewhere.”

“Mmm. Don’t nixies historically drown people just for fun?”

Marla stashed the bottle back in her bag. “She assures me she’s entirely harmless. You know I’ve got a trusting nature. Besides, some creatures need to be drowned. We need all the allies we can get if we’re going to face the Outsider and deal with my other problems. Me, you, a magical knife, and a motorcycle aren’t going to get the job done.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Marla’s phone rang. Cole. She handed it to her former apprentice. “You talk to him. I’ve been thanked enough.” She hated talking on the phone, and it was fun to boss her occasionally all-powerful friend around again.

Bradley spoke, listened, grinned, and then handed the phone back to Marla. “Cole gave us a line of credit, so we can afford to sleep in the kind of motels that don’t have bedbugs without having to steal or mind-control people first.”

“Good. Being a wealthy patron is more fun than having one, but I’ll take what I can get.”

“Better news,” Bradley said. “Cole tasked his whole psychic corps over to me, the ones he uses to detect threats to the city, impending earthquakes, stuff like that. I got their brains networked together and made them look for dead spots, places they couldn’t see.”

Marla whistled. “The Outsider blocks divination, but if you can find those blank spaces on the psychic landscape…”

“Yep. They’re pretty sure the Outsider left the city this morning, headed east. Their network only covers part of California, and they lost the bubble of nothing around Lake Tahoe, but…” B shrugged. “It gives us a direction, at least.”

She stood up. “To the Marla-cycle, young Bradley.”

He groaned. “We’ve gotta get a sidecar or something.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “A sidecar is so much cooler than riding bitch.”

“That’s offensive,” Bradley said. “You’re offensive. I’m offended.”

“I do my best,” she said.

 

I am currently running a kickstarter campaign to fund the tenth and final full-length Marla Mason urban fantasy novel, Closing Doors.

Marla’s story is coming to an end; help me send her off with style. Check out the campaign page and see how you can get an exclusive coffee mug and other goodies. Also there’s a video with lots of pretty art and, at the end, me wearing a purple-and-white velvet cloak. You know you don’t wanna miss that.

 

As springtime grows near, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of… Kickstarting another Marla Mason fantasy novel.

I just launched the campaign to fund Queen of Nothing, which will be the ninth full-length book in the series (tenth if you count short prequel novel Bone Shop). (At this point, I’ve crowdfunded more of these novels than I published traditionally, which is frankly mind-blowing to me. My readers are amazing.)

If you want to contribute, or learn more, you can check it out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpratt/queen-of-nothing-a-marla-mason-novel

It’s going to be a grand blend of mythic fiction and contemporary fantasy, with a lot of evil-god-punching, and all the usual snark and jokes and moral ambiguity and ass-kicking and calamitous mistakes that characterize the rest of the series.

Want to read about Marla? Here are links to some free stories set in her world.

Thanks, as always, for your support.

 

Each Tuesday for the month of February I’m going to post a different story about my character Marla Mason. This week we have “Little Better than a Beast.” It first appeared in anthology Those Who Fight Monsters in 2011, and is available in audio form at Podcastle.

(This is a transparent attempt to tempt people into supporting my Kickstarter for the new Marla novel Bride of Death.)

Here’s the story! (Some people don’t like this one because they find Marla too vicious and mean and unsympathetic. Which is… exactly the reason I like it.)

 

LITTLE BETTER THAN A BEAST

“This is for you, Miss Mason.” Granger, the idiot hereditary magician of Fludd Park, handed a crumpled envelope across her desk.

Marla took the envelope, which was smudged from Granger’s mud-streaked hands, and hefted it. It was age-browned and soft, made of some heavy paper with a lot of cloth mixed into the fibers. “And what’s this?”

“It’s been in our house underneath the trees,” Granger said, smiling affably, face as broad and unsubtle as a snowplow blade. “In the safe, with a note, that said, give to the chief sorcerer of Felport on such and such a date.”

Marla frowned. There was nothing written on the envelope, and it was sealed with several blobby hunks of wax. She could make out the barest shape of an impression in the central blob, maybe some kind of bird, a hawk or a crow, like a signet ring had been pressed into the wax when it was soft, a million years ago. “This has been in your family, like for safekeeping? For how long?”

Granger looked at the ceiling and hummed and drummed his blunt fingers on the desk, which was how you could tell he was thinking. Marla didn’t have much use for nature magicians in general, and inbred nature magicians with an inviolate hereditary line of succession and a seat on her highest councils were even worse. “A long time. As many springs as there are days in a year, maybe much.”

Three-hundred-sixty-five years or so, then? That would date this letter from the earliest days of Felport’s founding in the 17th century, back when it was nothing but a few settlers clinging to life. In those days Granger’s great-great-great-great-whatever-grandfather was just the sorcerer in charge of keeping the town commons and farmland healthy and green, long before the village became a thriving shipping and industrial center, and even longer before its recent somewhat rusty decline, an economic slowdown Marla was doing her best to reverse in her capacity as chief sorcerer and protector of the city. None of the city’s population of ordinaries, oblivious to the magic in their midst, would know the new biotech companies and urban renewal projects were Marla’s doing, but that was okay; she wasn’t in this job for the glory. She just loved her city, and wanted it to thrive.

“Any idea what the letter says?” Marla didn’t want to open the thing, particularly. She’d had a bad winter, combating a plague of nightmares, and the interdimensional invaders old Tom O’Bedbug still insisted were fairies from Faeryland, and she’d been hoping for a quiet spring. She didn’t think a letter from the early days of the city would be likely to contain good news.

“No ma’am, we were told to hold it, not read it, just keep it until such and such a date.” His beaming face suddenly closed down, smile gone like the sun slipping behind a mountain. “But I got distracted, spring is coming and times are so busy busy in the park, so such and such a date accidentally passed, some days ago, only as many days as I have fingers, about, not so many as could be, not too late, right?”

Marla picked up a letter opener shaped like the grim reaper’s scythe. “So I was supposed to get this a week or ten days ago?”

“Thereabouts,” Granger said, head bobbing, happy they were in agreement.

If I could fire him, or have him committed… But Granger was a powerful magician, in his way, and even if he wasn’t much use to the city’s secret shadow government of sorcerers, he mostly stayed out of the way in the park, and his elementals had been formidable warriors in last winter’s battle against the nightmare-things. She considered reprimanding him for not bringing the letter on time, but it would be like hitting a puppy fifteen minutes after it pissed on the carpet — the poor thing wouldn’t even understand what it was being disciplined foor.

Marla used the letter opener to pry up the wax blobs and unfolded the envelope, which wasn’t an envelope at all, but just a sheet of paper folded in on itself. The message wasn’t very long, but it said everything it needed to.

She came around the desk, shouting “Rondeau! I need you!” and clutching her dagger of office. This was going to be a bloody afternoon.

“Is everything okay?” Granger said, bewildered by her sudden action.

“Everything’s just beastly,” Marla said.

#

“The mother-effing beast of Felport,” Rondeau said, long strides matching Marla’s own as they hurried along the sidewalk toward the center of the old city, north of the river. This was a neighborhood of cobblestone streets and quaint crammed-together shops (many spelled “shoppe” on the signs, with the odd “ye olde” as a modifier), a touristy district where you could buy hunks of fudge as big as pillows and stay in a bed-and-breakfast where an early president slept, once, allegedly.

“That’s what the letter says.” Marla frowned at the compass-charm in her hand, ducking into an alleyway that led, she hoped, to the tiny square that was the site of Felport’s founding. There was a fancier more obvious Founder’s Square a few blocks away, with a monument, but she was dealing with magical rather the municipal history, and looking for the spot where Felport’s first chief sorcerer, Everett Malkin, spoke the spells of binding that tied each successive chief sorcerer to the city, ritually entangling the strengths, weaknesses, and interests of Felport itself with its protectors.

“So, uh, what exactly is the beast of Felport? Werewolf, demon, undead mutant water buffalo? My grasp of local history is a little shaky.” Rondeau shifted the heavy shoulder bag Marla’d given him to carry, and things inside clinked ominously.

“Probably because you never went to school,” Marla said. Rondeau was her closest friend and business associate — he owned the nightclub where she kept her office, and they’d saved one another’s lives far more often than they’d endangered them — but he’d had a non-traditional childhood and never saw the inside of a classroom. “Nobody seems to know exactly what the beast was. In the early 17th century, Felport was just a trading post with a nice bit of coastline, good for loading up and emptying boats. People kept trying to settle here in greater numbers… and something kept killing them, even worse than the usual New World problems of defensive natives and disease and bad winters and starvation. Bodies would be found chewed up, missing certain necessary organs, like that, killed by something worse than bears, nobody knew what — some kind of beast. People started calling the place ‘the fell port’ — ‘fell’ as in dangerous, bad, scary — which is where the city got its name. Eventually a sorcerer named Everett Malkin came along, really liked the location, and convinced some settlers to join him, despite the region’s nasty reputation. He said he’d keep the beast of Felport, whatever it was, away. And he did. He was the city’s first chief sorcerer.”

Rondeau yawned. “I’m glad I missed school. That was boring, except for the bit about dead bodies. So if Everett whatever killed the beast hundreds of years ago, how is it supposed to bother us today?”

“I didn’t say he killed it — he kept it away.” Marla stopped walking, looked at her compass charm, which was spinning wildly, and nodded. “This is the spot.” They were in a tiny cobblestoned courtyard, a pocket of forgotten space with only one alley leading in and out, surrounded by the windowless portions of various old brick buildings. A droopy tree grew in an unfenced square of grayish dirt, and a storm drain waited patiently to collect the next spring thunderstorm’s rain, but otherwise, the courtyard was bare.

“So what now?” Rondeau said, flipping open his butterfly knife.

Marla shaded her eyes and looked at the square of sky above. Very nearly noon. “Well, if I’d gotten the letter a week ago like I was supposed to, I’d have this place surrounded with containment teams and every contingency plan imaginable, and I’d feel pretty well prepared after spending a few days reading Malkin’s old enciphered journals, and researching every conceivable theory on the beast of Felport, but since Granger is an idiot and I had no advance notice, we wait for midday, and if something appears, we beat the shit out of it.”

Rondeau put down the shoulder bag and Marla sorted through it, taking out charmed stones, knives crackling with imbued energies, and even an aluminum baseball bat ensorcelled with inertial magic to give it an extra bone-shattering wallop. Finally, she removed her white cloak lined inside with purple, her most potent and dangerous magic, which exacted a terrible price every time she used it. She put on the cloak, fastening it at the throat with a silver pin in the shape of a stag beetle, telling herself she probably wouldn’t need its power. After all, how bad could the beast be? It was a beast. Sure, the stories said it was all kinds of unstoppable, but tales tended to grow in the telling, and four hundred years offered lots of time for embellishment.

After hefting the bat, Rondeau flipped his knife closed and put it away, choosing the blunt object over the razor’s edge. “Okay, you got a letter from Everett whatever saying he sent the beast of Felport umpty-hundred years into the future, and you might want to keep your eyes out for it. This raises a couple of questions for me.”

“Oh, good. I love your questions. They’re always so insightful.” Marla did a few stretches, her joints popping, then checked the knives up her sleeves.

“Number one: I thought time travel was impossible?”

“Traveling backwards in time is. Or, at least, no sorcerer I’ve heard of has ever cracked it. Some people say they figured out how to move forward in time, though it’s more like putting yourself off to the side in an extra-dimensional stasis, set to re-enter normal space-time at a later date, unaffected by the passing time. But not many people try to do it, since there’s no way you can go back again after seeing the wondrous future.” She took a leather pouch toward the alleyway and emptied it, dumping a dozen thumbtacks and pushpins — all augmented with charms of snaring and paralysis — across the courtyard’s only exit, just in case.

“Seems like it could be a good trick for waiting out the statute of limitations,” Rondeau said, in the tone of voice that meant he was contemplating casino robberies.

Marla snorted. “Any sorcerer capable of going forward in time would have more elegant ways to avoid being arrested for something, Rondeau. It’s bigtime mojo. I couldn’t do it, and I can do damn near anything I set my mind to.”

“Too bad. It’d be nice to skip the occasional boring weekend. Okay, so my second question: isn’t sending the beast of Felport to the future kind of a dick move? Getting rid of your current problems and leaving it for your descendants to deal with?”

“Yep,” Marla said. “Everett Malkin was, by most accounts, a nasty piece of work. A badass sorcerer with a knack for violence and the interpersonal warmth of a komodo dragon — ”

“Doesn’t sound like anybody I know,” Rondeau murmured.

” — but, to be fair, the guy was in kind of a bind. The story goes he used charms and protective circles and various kinds of exorcism and banishment and eventually even tried appeasement, by which I mean human sacrifice, to keep the beast of Felport at bay, but it was all just temporary. The thing kept coming back. He couldn’t kill it, couldn’t drive it away, just failed and failed, and his little settlement was on the verge of permanent disintegration. So one day he sucked it up, gave his dagger of office to his apprentice and chosen successor, and went out into the woods to finish things once and for all. And, apparently, left this letter explaining his plan to send the beast into the future, to be delivered to whatever poor sucker happened to be in charge four centuries later.” Marla shrugged. “Malkin never came back, and the beast never troubled anyone again, and now we’re waiting for… whatever.”

“Maybe he didn’t send the beast into the future at all,” Rondeau said. “Maybe they just, like, killed each other.”

“We can hope, Marla said, and then the courtyard got a lot more crowded.

A hard wind blew, making Marla squint, and a brown hairy thing the size of two gorillas fighting over a tractor tire appeared about three feet off the ground, slamming to the ground hard enough to crack the stones. There was an impression of tusks, snout, and hard black eyes, but it was hunched and crouched and twisting and moving too fast for her eyes to encompass it. It stank like the sewers under a slaughterhouse. Marla began speaking words of binding and tossed a handful of charmed stones, but the rocks just bounced off the thing’s matted hide — disappointing, since they should have respectively burned, frozen, and turned it to stone — and then an arm swung out, long as an extension ladder, and knocked Marla against a brick wall. Rondeau went in manfully, baseball bat cocked, but the thing plucked the weapon away and swatted Rondeau aside too.

Marla stood up, about to reverse her cloak, to make the soothing white exterior switch places with the bruise-purple lining and unleash her most deadly battle magic — when the beast flung something slightly larger than Marla herself through the air, straight at her.

That’s a person, Marla realized, and then about two hundred pounds of human body — dead or alive, she wasn’t sure yet — hit her square in the chest and drove her back. She grunted, shoved the guy off her body, and struggled to her feet, all the wind knocked out of her.

The beast of Felport took a moment to consider its handiwork, and Marla thought, Run for the alley, fucker, get caught in my bear traps, and then the beast crouched, leapt about fifteen feet in the air, grabbed a jutting chunk of brick wall, and went up the side of a building and over the rooftop like a gecko climbing a garden wall.

“That’s bad,” Rondeau said, picking himself up and taking out his cell phone. “Guess I should call the Chamberlain.”

“It’s her neighborhood,” Marla said, “and I left her a message before we left telling her there might be some shit hitting her fan this afternoon. Damn it.”

Rondeau looked toward the roof where the beast had escaped. “Yeah. Who knew that thing could jump?”

“I did,” said the body the beast had thrown at Marla, sitting up and rubbing his head. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with a nose like a cowcatcher and bushy eyebrows, dressed in the filthy ragged remains of what might once have been nice old-fashioned clothes. He rose and stalked toward Rondeau. “And so would you if you had read the journals I left behind, detailing everything I knew about the beast! You came here utterly unprepared. What kind of chief sorcerer are you?”

“He’s no kind of chief sorcerer at all,” Marla said, already seeing where this was going. “I’m the chief sorcerer here.”

The man whirled to face her, frowning. “You?” He gestured to Rondeau. “This one is a swarthy immigrant of some kind, that is troubling enough, but you — you are a woman.”

“Yes,” Marla agreed. “That’s true. And you’re Everett Malkin, I presume.”

#

“Incredible,” Malkin said, staring at the cars going past.

“Yup,” Marla said. “I guess it would be.” The three of them sat on a bus stop bench, waiting for the Chamberlain’s limo to arrive.

“The city itself, though I’m pleased to see its growth, is less astonishing. I have spent time in the capitals of Europe, after all.”

Wait until you see the skyscrapers in the Financial District, Marla thought. Or the clubs and quickie check-cashing joints and bars in my neighborhood. They were still in the old city, which made an attempt to keep a certain vintage feel, but culture shock would hit him eventually.

“You’re calling together the whole council?” Malkin asked. He gnawed at an apple Marla’d bought for him. Rondeau’s joke about how he must be hungry, seeing as how he hadn’t eaten in 400 years, had fallen flat, though, and Rondeau had been quiet and sulky ever since.

“Just the Chamberlain for now. This is her neighborhood, and from what you said you don’t think the beast will go too far. If it’s in her bailiwick, the Chamberlain will find it.”

Malkin grunted. “Another ‘her.’ You’re the chief sorcerer, or so you tell me — shouldn’t the heart of the city be your ‘neighborhood,’ as you say?”

Marla snorted. “This? This is toy-town. A tourist trap. Old-fashioned stuff for history buffs and tourists scared to stay in the real city. The heart of the city nowadays, where the action is, that’s south of the river. That’s where I live.”

Malkin mulled that over, and finally said, “You have told me about the Chamberlain, and the current Granger — sad to hear his lineage has decayed, I would not have entrusted him with the letter had I known his offspring would be ruined — but who are the other sorcerers of note? In my day it was only myself, Granger, and my apprentice, Corbin.”

“There’s a chaos magician named Nicolette, she looks after the financial district. The Bay Witch watches the water and the port. A sympathetic magician named Hamil over by the university. Viscarro, who lives in catacombs beneath the city. A junkyard wizard named Ernesto out in the industrial section. That’s about it for the council, but there are lots of talented apprentices and freelancers in town, too — a mad-scientist technomancer type named Langford, an order-magician named Mr. Beadle — not to mention the usual wannabes and alley wizards.”

“I will need to meet all of them as soon as possible,” Malkin said.

“Oh yeah?” It was rare for all the sorcerers to get together — they usually only had councils when some dire threat menaced the city, something Marla couldn’t handle herself, and she wasn’t sure yet the beast of Felport qualified. “Why’s that?”

“They must meet their new chief sorcerer,” Malkin said. “I will be taking over your position, of course.”

Before Marla could respond to that bit of apocalyptic nonsense, a long black limousine slid along the curb before them, and the back door swung open. The Chamberlain was inside, dressed in her usual impeccable evening-wear finery, this time a silvery-shimmering dress. She beckoned with her elegant hand. “Come on, then. Let’s hear about the latest disaster.”

Malkin leaned forward, squinting. “Is this woman… a Spaniard?”

“I’m black, dear,” she said. “Of West African descent, though my people are from Felport for many generations.”

“This future is a peculiar place,” Malkin said, but he climbed into the limousine after Rondeau, settling himself down on the dark leather seats across from the Chamberlain and Marla. Despite his ragged appearance — and the fact that this was his first time in a car — he looked at ease. “Your carriage is… most pleasant.”

“I understand you brought a monster to my community,” the Chamberlain said, smiling a smile that was not friendly at all.

Malkin frowned. “I expected sorcerous techniques to improve in the intervening centuries, so the current rulers could defeat the beast with ease.”

“Ah, I get it. Like people who die of brain cancer and have their heads frozen so they can be thawed out in the future when there’s a cure for tumors and decapitation,” Rondeau said, apparently trying to be helpful.

Malkin just looked at him blankly and continued. “Instead I find unprepared women playing at sorcery, who let the beast escape.”

“You might want to watch it with the sexist shit,” Marla said. “You’re kind of outnumbered here.”

“Women can excel at erotic magic, and herbwifery, and certain nature magics, but the more intellectual rigors of advanced sorceries are not suitable for the weaker sex.” Malkin shrugged. “I mean no offense. These are merely facts.”

“Are you sure we can’t send him back in time?” the Chamberlain said.

“I don’t even know what he’s doing forward in time,” Marla said. “Your letter said you were setting a time-trap for the beast. Why the hell did you hitch a ride?”

“The beast seized me,” Malkin said, shifting uncomfortably. “We struggled. The beast stepped into the circle of power. We were transported. I… did not intend to join him. I am surprised Felport survived with Corbin as chief sorcerer.”

“Well, now you’re here, and so’s the beast, so tell us what we’re dealing with,” Marla said.

“Obviously you don’t know how to stop it, but you can tell us what we’re dealing with,” the Chamberlain agreed.

Malkin nodded. “The natives said the beast was a dark god, and had roamed the land since the beginning of time. The beast cannot be harmed by iron, or fire, or blades, or charms. Even my dagger of office, which can cut through all things, only scratched the beast, and the wound closed instantly.”

Marla touched the dagger at her waist — it had been Malkin’s dagger, passed down from chief sorcerer to chief sorcerer over the centuries, and it was one of her most potent weapons, capable of slicing through everything from steel cables to ghosts.

“Some magics worked,” Malkin said. “A spell to make it sleep for a thousand years succeeded in making it slumber for half a dozen seasons. Spells of disorientation made it wander, lost, for another year. But it fights, and once it overcomes a particular spell, the spell loses all efficacy. I do not know if it is a demon, a sorcerer from long ago who attained immortality, or, indeed, an ancient god.”

“Okay, but what does it want?” Marla said.

“Want? It is a beast. It wants to kill all who encroach on its territory. It wants to rend flesh. It prefers to sleep in the day, and emerge at night, wandering and howling. Its motives are no more comprehensible than those of any other beasts. I am sure it is disoriented by the changes here, and it will go to ground somewhere, hiding, and wait until dark to emerge. And then…” He shook his head. “The beast will not stop until the city is scoured to dirt. It is clever. It will set fires, build traps. Your people will die.”

Setting arson and building booby traps didn’t sound very beast-like to Marla, but then, Malkin was from another time — he considered Marla and the Chamberlain and even Rondeau, who was Hispanic, basically beasts, too, didn’t he?

“Call together a council,” Malkin said. “I will announce my return to the position of chief sorcerer, and formulate a strategy.”

The Chamberlain looked at Marla, raising an eyebrow, and Marla sighed. “I’m not stepping down, Captain Retro. I’m still in charge here. We honor your past service and all that jazz, but you can’t just come back and — ”

“Silence, woman. Give me my dagger of office, and let me begin my work. Sorcery is no business for you. Despite your mannish affect you are not unattractive, so perhaps you can serve me in some other — ”

Marla punched him in the throat. Malkin gagged, grabbing at his windpipe — Marla hadn’t hit him hard enough to do permanent damage, but he wouldn’t be speaking any spells — and fished a sachet of sleep potion out of her pocket. The Chamberlain and Rondeau both grabbed their noses as Marla slapped the cloth pouch of lavender and stranger herbs into Malkin’s open mouth. He gagged, gasped, and then dropped into a deep supernatural slumber.

“This guy,” Marla said. “This guy is going to be trouble. I don’t think I’ll be able to sucker-charm him again, either.”

“He does need to confront certain new realities,” the Chamberlain said. “But, Marla, that’s Everett Malkin. He’s legendary.” The Chamberlain had a certain reverence for the past — much of her power came from her relationship with the ghosts of Felport’s founding families, including the persistent spirits of many former sorcerers from the early days.

“I liked him better when he was just a legend,” Marla said. “He’ll be asleep for a while, you mind watching him for me?”

“I — I suppose. And if he wakes up, he can speak with the ghosts, his apprentice Corbin is among the residents on my estate. But, Marla, what of the beast?”

“Yeah,” Marla said. “The beast is another problem. I’m gonna have to go see a guy about that.”

#

Marla wore black, loose-fitting pants and a snug top that kept her arms free, and held a specially modified sniper rifle. Rondeau was dressed like an extra in a movie about a special forces operation, all black padded vest and a helmet and night-vision goggles (which he found more fun than Marla’s more practical magical night vision). He persistently referred to their operation as “playing dress-up,” which was annoying, but Marla knew she could rely on him in a pinch, and he had a backup rifle, albeit less fancy. They were on the dark balcony of a charming little pied-a-terre a few blocks from the place where the beast and Malkin had appeared. The apartment’s rightful residents were off in Aspen or something, wherever rich ordinaries spent early spring.

“What if the dart doesn’t work?” Rondeau said. “We got a plan B?”

“I throw you to the beast, and while he’s dismembering you, I sneak around and hit him on the back of the head with the rifle butt.”

“That’s always your plan B.”

They were watching another uninhabited apartment across the quiet upscale residential street. The Chamberlain’s diviners had tracked the beast to that location, where their best remote-viewer said it was sleeping heavily on a mound of blankets and the shredded remains of a mattress. The beast hadn’t torn the door off its hinges to get inside — it had unobtrusively jimmied a side door with its claws. Smart beast, laying low. Marla wondered if it would be possible to communicate with it… but communication wasn’t part of the plan.

“Something moved there,” Rondeau said, pointing to the front window, where a shadow had shifted. “Poor thing must be scared to death. One minute you’re fighting your mortal enemy in the woods, and the next, poof, you’re in the future and there’s not a tree in sight.”

“Let’s hope it’s still disoriented,” Marla said. She watched through the scope as the side door opened and the beast slouched out, its physiognomy still a mysterious jumble of apelike and boarlike and manlike and, well, beastlike.

She pulled the trigger three times, and three darts flew through the air and struck the beast’s flesh. The darts were each charmed with a different armor-piercing and true-aim spell, and she hoped at least one of them would hit — worst case, all three would hit, and the beast would overdose and die, and wait, that was kind of the best case, too.

The beast lifted its shaggy head, looked straight at Marla, and rushed toward them, loping and leaping and snarling.

“Oh this is fucked,” Rondeau said, and lifted his air rifle, firing another dart at the approaching furry projectile. The beast jumped for the balcony —

— and bounced off the railing, landing on the street, sprawled on its back, unconscious. Maybe it was immune to Malkin’s sleep spells, but times had changed, and Marla had mixed up a potent cocktail of chemical and magical tranq-juice, concentrated enough to make a blue whale yawn. Still, who knew how much time they had to finish the plan?

Rondeau was on his cell calling in Langford and the rest of the team while Marla looked down at the beast. Something about its shape made comprehending its form difficult, as if it had joints and limbs that weren’t entirely in this dimension. Whatever it was, demon or god or refugee from another plane of existence, it didn’t belong here. Maybe it had once, when Felport was just trees and dirt and hills, but this was a human place, now. The beast couldn’t stay, even if it had a prior claim on this land as a home.

“Let’s get it on the truck,” Marla said. “And then go see Malkin.”

#

“You fool,” Malkin said, stalking into one of the Chamberlain’s many parlors. He was dressed in period finery doubtless dug out of mothballs in some deep basement in the Chamberlain’s estate, and he smelled faintly dusty. “You dare to attack me, and leave the city vulnerable to the beast’s — ”

“Gods, shut up, the beast is taken care of,” Marla said. “Come on, I’ll show you. You coming, Chamberlain?”

“Oh, indeed,” she said brightly. “I haven’t begun to tire of Mr. Malkin’s company at all.”

Malkin didn’t shut up. “You will be flogged in the town square,” he said, following Marla, Rondeau, and the Chamberlain out of the mansion, toward the truck parked in the driveway. “You will be stripped of whatever authority you think you have and banished. I am the chief sorcerer here, and I will not be — ”

Marla pulled open the back of the truck, and Malkin shut up when he saw the beast bound with ‘chanted chains in the back, watched over by the technomancer Langford, who had a tranquilizer pistol in one hand and an overcomplicated cell phone in the other.

“So you rendered it unconscious,” Malkin said. “Very well, but what happens when it wakes?”

“I don’t imagine it will wish to wake,” Langford said mildly. He beckoned, and the others climbed into the back of the truck. “Though I do wish I could be allowed to vivisect it. I’m not fond of mysteries, and this creature is unprecedented in my experience.”

“I’ve got nothing against scientific curiosity,” Marla said, “But I’m a pragmatist, and studying it is too dangerous.”

“Standing here while it slumbers is too dangerous,” Malkin snapped. “You are unfit to lead, and your folly is too great to be borne — ”

“The beast is harmless,” Langford said. He pointed to a silvery mesh net that covered the beast’s lumpy skull. “This device controls the electrical impulses within the beast’s brain. It’s a beautiful place, in there. If you’re a monster.”

“I don’t understand,” Malkin said. “This… hat… does what?”

“We couldn’t beat the thing,” Marla said. “You told us yourself, it’s immune to everything, and what it’s not immune to, it gets immune to. So, if we can’t defeat it, I figured, why not give it what it wants?”

“Think of it like an illusion,” the Chamberlain said, having been briefed on the plan — the whole plan — in a phone call earlier. “The beast believes it is back in Felport in the early days, before there were settlers, alone in the woods.”

“The simulation was easy enough to create,” Langford said. “There are geographical surveys, so reconstructing the landscape wasn’t difficult. Likewise the weather. Woodland creatures are simple to emulate, too, and there are hardly any humans, just the occasional native for the beast to dismember.”

“The beast has been enchanted to believe it dwells in the past?” Malkin blinked, clearly wrongfooted by the whole situation.

“Well, it’s at least a third technology,” Langford said. “Creating false experiences by manipulating electrical impulses in the brain is within the grasp of science, though outside the bounds of most ethical systems. I did use magic to bridge the impossible bits, admittedly.”

“But the beast fights enchantments,” Malkin said. “And when it wakes — ”

“Why would it fight?” Marla said. “It’s got what it wants. If this thing is capable of being happy, it’s going to be happy. But don’t worry. We’re taking it to a little place outside the city, called the Blackwing Institute. It’s where we keep sorcerers who go crazy and pose a danger to themselves, and others, and the substance of reality.”

“And the sorcerer who runs it, Dr. Husch, is totally hot,” Rondeau said.

Marla rolled her eyes. “We’ll keep the beast in a cell deep in the basement, with every kind of technological and magical countermeasure we can think of, in case it ever wakes up. Don’t worry. It’s a secure site.”

“We’re sure you’ll like it there,” Langford said, and shot Malkin with the tranquilizer pistol.

#

“We could have given Malkin a perfect fantasy life, too,” Langford said. “It would have to be far more complex than the one I created for the beast, but it’s certainly possible.”

“Fuck that,” Marla said. “Why would I want to make him happy? He called me the weaker sex.”

“Carry on, then,” Langford said, and waved as Rondeau drove the truck off into the night.

#

“His real name is Barry Schmidt,” Marla said, sitting with Dr. Husch before the security monitors. Malkin was on screen, sleeping on a bed in a pleasantly-appointed — but impenetrable — apartment in the Institute’s east wing. “An apprentice from out west. Poor bastard actually thinks he’s Everett Malkin, the first sorcerer of Felport, you believe that? He came to the city and started talking about how he was the rightful ruler, demanding I give him my dagger, crazy stuff like that.”

“Hmm,” Husch said, a vertical worry line marring her smooth pale forehead.

“And then he summoned the beast of Felport from, you know, the primordial whatever,” Rondeau chimed in. “So he’s got some magical chops, no doubt about that. Better to keep him in maximum super-isolation, we figure, with every magic-nullifying countermeasure you’ve got.”

“Heck, keep him sedated forever,” Marla said. “That’d be fine with me.”

“You know I believe in therapy, not mere containment,” Husch said. She looked at the Chamberlain. “Tell me, Chamberlain — do you think there’s any chance he is Everett Malkin? The beast of Felport is bound, dreaming peacefully, in my basement, and if one creature can come from the past, can’t another?”

Marla tried not to tense up. The Chamberlain was the key here. Rondeau was trustworthy, and Langford was both uninterested and trustworthy, but the Chamberlain could change her mind. She had a potent connection to the early days of Felport through her relationship with the ghosts, and she didn’t really like Marla all that much. But, on the other hand, Malkin had ordered her around like a servant, and the Chamberlain said the ghosts who’d known Malkin — especially his apprentice Corbin — had really hated the guy, so maybe she’d stick to the plan.

“Oh, no,” the Chamberlain said, smooth as her own silk gown. “That man is not Everett Malkin. I checked with the ghosts, and they say he’s nothing like Malkin was. He is merely a madman, I’m afraid, a troubled soul who read too many histories. But his delusion is very fixed. He’s clever, too — he might pretend to be cured, even if he isn’t. Be careful.”

“The poor dear. It’s good you brought him to me. At the very least, I’ll make him comfortable.” Husch raised one perfect eyebrow. “He really demanded you relinquish your dagger of office, Marla, and said he was going to take over the city?”

“He did.”

“I suppose he’s lucky you left his head attached, then.”

“Hey,” Marla said. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you I’m not a benevolent and enlightened ruler.”

Each Tuesday for the next month I’m going to post a different story about my character Marla Mason. This week we have “Ill Met in Ulthar,” my personal favorite of all the Marla stories (so far). It first appeared in anthology Witches in Spring 2012.

(This is a transparent attempt to tempt people into supporting my Kickstarter for the new Marla novel Bride of Death.) Here’s the story (and an author’s note at the end)!

ILL MET IN ULTHAR

“His name is Roderick Barrow,” Dr. Husch said. “He’s what we call ‘exothermically delusional.’”

Marla Mason, twenty-two years old and by her own reckoning the deadliest mercenary sorcerer on the east coast, propped her feet up on the doctor’s desk. “Good thing he’s locked up in the nut hutch, then.”

Dr. Husch made a small expression of distaste and shoved Marla’s boots off the desk. The doctor looked like a sculpture of a classical nymph that had been brought to life, her hair bound up in a tight bun, and the whole dressed in an impeccably tailored gray suit: lushness tightly contained. “Alas, that’s where the ‘exothermic’ part comes in — his delusions are becoming more and more… aggressive.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what that means.”

“I’ll show you.” Dr. Husch rose from her desk and led Marla out of the room, down a hospital-clean hallway — which made sense, as they were in a hospital, of sorts. The Blackwing Institute didn’t treat diseases of the body, but it contained the diseased in mind — specifically wielders of magic who became a danger to themselves, and others, and occasionally reality. The Institute was funded by prominent sorcerers, who recognized madness as an occupational hazard, and knew they might find themselves in need of treatment some day too.

The corridor was lined with iron doors, some acid-etched with runes of calming or containment. Dr. Husch stopped about halfway down the passage and slid aside a metal panel covering a square eye-level window in one of the barred doors. Light flared out, like someone had lit a strip of magnesium, and Dr. Husch wordlessly handed Marla a pair of sunglasses. Squinting and cursing, Marla pulled on the shades, then looked into the room.

A shape writhed in the air, sinuous and sparking, like a boa constrictor made of lightning instead of flesh. The serpent hovered in the air, and as its jaws snapped open and shut, Marla tried to count its fangs; she gave up after a dozen. The only part of the serpent that wasn’t made of pure white light was its eyes — they were black pits of absence, but strangely aware. The serpent noticed them, and smashed itself against the door, sparks showering up around it. Marla jumped back, drawing her magical cloak around her. The cloak showed its white side, now, and protected her with healing magics, but with a thought she could reverse it, and make the bruise-purple inner lining switch to the outside. When clothed in the purple, Marla was possessed by vicious battle magics that made her essentially unstoppable — though at the cost of losing some self-control. There were those who said Marla was an amateur, and that only the cloak made her dangerous. The people stupid enough to say that in Marla’s presence got their asses kicked, but only after she removed the cloak first, just to prove them wrong. But she was glad to have the cloak on now; there was no such thing as an unfair advantage when you were dealing with flying electric hover-snakes.

Dr. Husch slid the panel over the window shut as the beast continued battering against the door. “Don’t worry, it can’t get out. The interior of the room is lined with rubber, reinforced by magic. We used to keep a paranoid electrothaumaturge locked up there. There are no electrical outlets or light fixtures, either — when we found the creature in Barrow’s room, it had smashed the light bulbs, and was suckling at the outlets like a hamster at a water bottle.”

Marla took off the glasses and rubbed her eyes. “What is that thing?”

“Barrow calls it an arc-drake. They live in the haunted mountains known as the Lightning Peaks, north of the Sea of Surcease, a vast lake of liquid suffering.”

“You sound like the trailer for a bad fantasy movie,” Marla said.

“Appropriate, as Barrow was a fantasy writer. Though he wasn’t a particularly bad one, especially by the standards of his time. He was a pulp writer, mostly, published alongside the likes of Clifford Simak, Doc Smith, Sprague de Camp, Marsham Craswell — did you ever read much science fiction and fantasy, Marla?”

“Not really. I was too busy smoking and having sex with boys. I was always more interested in this world than in imaginary ones.”

Husch sniffed. “As a sorcerer, you should be ashamed. Magic is the act of imposing your will on reality. But without imagination, what good is even the strongest will? So what if you can do anything, if you can’t think of anything interesting to do?”

“I manage to keep myself entertained,” Marla said. “But I gotta say, I’m getting a little bored right now. So this Barrow, what, wrote about the arc-drakes in a fantasy story, and then somehow brought one to life?”

“Oh, it’s so much worse than that,” Dr. Husch said.

#

“We have won through, Lector,” Barrow muttered, his eyelids twitching rapidly. “Though our allies and retainers fell, you and I have reached this cursed plain, and now we need only — ”

Dr. Husch thumbed off the intercom switch, and Barrow’s voice cut off abruptly. Marla leaned against the window, taking in the view on the other side. Barrow’s room was small, furnished with a hospital bed and not much else, but it didn’t lack for items of interest: A pile of weirdly ridged skulls heaped in one corner. What looked like a lion pelt draped over a chair. Scorch marks on one wall and part of the ceiling. Barrow himself was a white-haired old gent with a wild beard, dressed in a hospital gown, lips moving as he muttered, hands occasionally clenching and unclenching.

“He’s been like this for, oh, twenty years,” Dr. Husch said. “He suffered a nervous breakdown thirty years ago, was comatose for a decade, and then… he began to speak. Since then, he doesn’t eat, drink, or eliminate waste, and he doesn’t age — as best I can tell, he’s sustained by psychic energy. That’s when his regular family doctor made some inquiries and had him transferred here, since we’re better able to care for… unusual cases.”

“So he wasn’t a sorcerer? Just a writer?”

“As far as we know, he was unaware of his own latent psychic abilities, though the uncontrollable power of his mind may have caused his breakdown. His chronic alcoholism might also have been a factor.”

“What’s he babbling about?”

“That’s dialogue,” Dr. Husch said. “He seems to be inhabiting an epic fantasy story of his own creation. The only glimpse we used to have of that story was the bits of dialogue spoken by his — narrator? Character? Avatar? Barrow is playing the part, living the part, of a mighty hero, on a quest to win a great mystical treasure. Delusions of grandeur. But recently he’s been… exothermically delusional. His hallucinations are starting to break through to this world. The skulls of slain goblins, the skinned hide of a manticore — those apports were certainly of clinical interest. But when a live arc-drake appeared in his room yesterday… I grew more concerned. His dialogue indicates that the goal of his quest is to win a magical Key that will allow him to move between worlds at will.”

Marla whistled. “So you think he’s in a real place?”

Dr. Husch shook her head. “I think he’s in an imaginary place, which his psychically powerful mind is making real. And if he completes his quest, and breaches the division between reality and the contents of his own mind…” Dr. Husch shrugged. “Giants. Demons. Monsters. All of them could come pouring through my Institute. What if the triple suns of his fantasy world appeared in our sky? The gravitational consequences alone would be unfathomable.”

“Gotcha,” Marla said. “So you want me to kill him?”

“I am a doctor,” Husch said severely. “I want to cure him. Bring him back to reality.”

“I’m not much good at talk therapy,” Marla said. “I’m more of a punch-therapy girl.”

“My orderlies are capable of checking Mr. Barrow’s vital signs,” Husch said, choosing to ignore Marla. “As you may know, they are not human, but homunculi, artificial beings of limited intelligence.”

“I bet the poor bastards don’t even make minimum wage,” Marla said.

“The sorcerers who fund the Institute don’t pay me enough to hire human employees,” Husch said. “So I have to grow my staff in the basement, in vats. But they get all the lavender seeds and earthworms they can eat. At any rate, the orderlies can go into the room and check on Barrow, being mindless, but no human can go near him, not safely. Anyone who enters that room — who comes into contact with the author’s psychic field — is pulled into Barrow’s delusional world. His brother visited once, and we had to bury the poor man out back. Barrow attempts to incorporate anyone who enters his world into his storyline, and let’s just say he enjoys slaying the villains they become.”

Marla stared at her. “So you want me to go in that room, and get sucked into his fantasy world, and… cure him? Like, make him realize his world is imaginary?”

Husch shook her head. “I doubt you could convince him. He’s been the hero of that world for years. It’s more real to him than this world ever was. No, I want you to go into his fantasy world, and make sure his quest fails. I want you to be a villain he can’t defeat. One theme recurs constantly in his speech — his destiny. He is destined to win the Key of Totality, it seems. His fate has been ordained. He’s been chosen by the gods. He thinks he’s invincible, unstoppable, and right. If you defeat him, I think it might be the shock his system needs — a failure, after years of nothing but success, could force him to question his awful certainty. If you can jostle him out of his comfortable place in that world, I might be able to reach him, and bring him back to this reality.”

“Huh,” Marla said. “Why me, though? Why not one of the bigtime psychics?”

“I only know of one psychic more powerful than Barrow,” Husch said. “And she’s comatose, too, mentally traumatized and locked up in another room at the Institute. I don’t need a psychic, I need a pragmatist, a tactician, a fighter — someone who never backs down, never gives up, and never stops. You have a reputation among the sorcerers who fund this Institute. They say you are a formidable operative, and you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘failure.’”

“Yeah, I must’ve skipped school the day they taught us that one. It probably doesn’t hurt that I’m an independent operator, and nobody will get too upset if you have to bury me out back, too, huh?”

“It was a factor,” Husch said. “And the fact that you possess a cloak enchanted with battle magics also helps. But mostly, it’s because of your will. Everyone says you’re pigheaded in the extreme — that an almost complete lack of magical aptitude hasn’t stopped you from becoming a formidable sorcerer, because you want it badly enough. That gives me hope that you might be able to stand up to the force of Barrow’s vision.”

“And if I can’t — what, do I get stuck there, in half-assed Narnia?”

“If you have not accomplished your goal by morning, or if you show any signs of distress, I will have one of the orderlies drag you out of Barrow’s sphere of influence. Just be sure to mention if you’re about to be murdered, hmm? I should hear your ‘dialogue’ as well as Barrow’s.”

“All right,” Marla said. “It’s a deal. Assuming you can pay my price?”

“I was told you don’t want money…”

“Don’t need money. My price is you telling me a secret, and teaching me a trick.”

“That is acceptable,” Dr. Husch said.

“All right,” Marla said, and grinned. “I always wanted to be a villain.”

#

Barrow of Ulthar wedged the butt of his great spear Ghostreaper into the stony soil of the Plains of Lengue and peered up at the towering heights of the Citadel of Bleeding Glass. He had been born only two leagues from this place, in the kingless kingdom of Ulthar, and his life’s journey had taken him across the great seas of the world, through the haunted forests, beneath the stony earth, only to return him here, to the Citadel that had shadowed his boyhood village — the dread fortress he was finally hero enough to brave. The cyclical nature of his journey was further proof he was walking the inescapable path of fate. “My destiny awaits within, Lector,” Ulthar rumbled. “Do you have any final advice? What dangers will we face within?”

Lector, the Living Book, was bound onto Barrow’s back by chains of silver, iron, and bronze. The mouth gouged into the book’s wooden cover spoke in a voice of riffling pages: “There are three Gates: a Gate of Knives, a Gate of Light, and a Gate of Wind. Pass through those, and you will confront the dread Chasm of Flies, which no living man or woman has ever crossed. The Key of Totality awaits, but first you must confront the guardian — ”

“What, you’re not going to mention me? I’m not enough of a danger for you?”

Barrow crouched, readying his spear. A woman sauntered around one of the skull-shaped boulders — the fossilized remains of giants who’d fallen to the Lengue Fever millennia before — and grinned. She was young, though not especially pretty, and she wore a cloak of rich purple, which shifted like a living shadow around her, as if possessed by its own dark intelligence. “Lector, is this one of the dread witches of the North?”

Before the book could speak, the woman laughed — not a girlish laugh, but a harsh and grating sound. “Nah, I’m from the east coast, Barrow.”

The east coast of the Sea of Surcease was home only to the wretched Mirror City, populated by the living reflections of those poor unfortunates who died and subsequently had their mortal remains reflected in glass, their souls reversed into evil and decadence, trapped in mirrored form on this mortal plane. “Mirror witch,” Barrow said, raising his spear.

“She is no reflected spirit,” Lector said. “She is mortal, but… I do not… she is not in my index. I do not see her among my manifests. I do not understand — ”

“Do you mean to hinder my quest, witch?” Barrow bellowed.

She clapped her hands. “You got it in one, Barrow-boy! Hindering’s my business. Right up there with usurping and frustrating. I have to tell you, you look a lot better on this side. A little rugged for my taste, I mean, your muscles have muscles, and personally, I like my boys a little leaner — but you’re not the dried-up white-haired husk you should be. That’s some sweet black magic you’ve got going on.”

Barrow frowned. “I — I have sipped of the waters of the Vital Sea, but not from vanity. Only to restore my strength. My quest has taken longer than the three score years allotted to every man, but it was no foul magic — the Green Goddess herself blessed my undertaking — ”

“I can hear you capitalizing things. It’s really irritating. So this Key we’re looking for is up there in that ugly castle, huh? Who’d build a fortress out of volcanic glass? I mean, it’s impressive, but it’s not practical. See you inside?”

“The Key is mine to win,” Barrow said. “Be you Mirror Witch or Northern Witch or Graveworm Witch — ”

“Always some kind of witch with you, isn’t it? Maybe I’m a barbarian warrior like you.”

“I am not a barbarian,” Barrow said, with great dignity, “though some call me such. It is only that the customs of my village differ from those elsewhere in the world — ”

“Those fur boots and the snakeskin pants tell a different story, but whatever. There’s a Chasm and a Key and all that good shit waiting for us. Race you.”

“No,” Barrow said. “We will finish this here. I wield the enchanted spear Ghostreaper. It is a fell instrument, but if you do not stand aside, I will have no choice but to turn its dark magics against you.”

“Knock yourself out,” the witch said.

“Tell her what fate awaits her, Lector,” Barrow said. “I do not believe she understands what I hold in my hands.”

“The spear Ghostreaper is tipped with the fang from a murdered god of death,” the book said, voice carrying over the cool stillness of the plain, despite the whispered timbre. “When the spear strikes its victim, it does not pierce flesh — it snags the soul, tearing the spirit loose while leaving the body a mindless, empty husk. The soul dissolves like fog in the sun, denied any afterlife. This spear brings the death of all deaths, and the empty bodies left behind are pressed into service to follow the spear’s wielder, an army of the walking dead.”

“I don’t see any zombie horde here,” the witch said. “Are they hiding behind one of these head-bones?” She kicked the gray stone skull of a giant.

“They were all lost in the crossing through the Lightning Peaks,” Barrow said. “And I was not sorry to see them go — their silent shuffling is a grim reminder of the dark acts even a hero must undertake to meet his destiny. I would not add your body, however comely it might be, to my retinue. Please, stand aside, or I will have no choice but to thrust my spear at you.”

“Ha. Thrust away, then. Good luck ripping out my soul. I think mind-body dualism is bullshit.”

Barrow lowered his head briefly, sorrowful but determined, then stepped forward, driving the hungering spear before him.

The witch moved one way — and her cloak moved the other, lifting from her shoulders and taking wing. It was no cloak at all, but a living thing, a creature of hungry shadow, and from within its shroudlike form a dozen red eyes blinked. The cloak flew at Barrow’s face, and he gasped, trying to turn his spear thrust against it. The witch stepped in close to him and chopped at his arm with her hand, an expert blow that struck his nerves and made the arm go limp. The point of the spear dropped to the ground, and the witch —

The witch stomped on the spear’s shaft, snapping it cleanly down close to the spearhead. The hero stood, stunned, looking at the shattered weapon. “The point might be a god’s tooth,” she whispered in Barrow’s ear, “but the shaft’s just a piece of wood. Shoddy work.”

Barrow knelt to grab the spearhead, but the cloak wrapped its tendrils around his arms and dragged him back. While he struggled against the cloak’s soft but unyielding grip, the witch picked up the spearhead, plucked a feather from a pouch at her belt, and swiftly tied the feather around the spear point with a strand of her own hair. She murmured a brief spell of some kind, opened her hand, and the spearhead rose up, up, up into the sky. “Bye, bye, birdie,” she said. “That’ll just keep flying until it hits the — well, one of the three suns up there. Excessive. You’d think with three suns it’d be warmer.”

Barrow cried out, and called on the might of his totems — the bear who’d given its fur for his boots, the great serpent who’d given him the skin for his leggings, the wolf who’d provided the leather for his chest-harness. The power of the animals surged through him, and he tore the cloak, ripping great shreds in its fabric. The cloak fluttered away from him, the rends in its body healing instantly as it lowered back onto the witch’s shoulders.

“Huh,” she said. “I always thought this cloak had a mind of its own.”

“You consort with demons!” Barrow shouted, still thrumming with animal energies.

“What, you heard about the incubus? I wouldn’t call it ‘consorting,’ exactly, it was one of those things where we were kind of using each other for sex — ”

Barrow roared and lunged for her, but she somersaulted away from him. Such acrobatics should have been impossible in a long trailing cloak, but her demonic garment moved out of her way as she rolled. Instead of turning to face him in battle, she ran, covering ground in great strides, without even looking back.

“Coward!” he bellowed. “Face me!”

“She’s going to the Citadel,” Lector whispered from his back. “She’s going to get there first.”

“Fuck me,” Barrow of Ulthar said, and ran after her.

The highest towers of the Citadel of Bleeding Glass were jagged onyx, their spires piercing the soft blue belly of the great slumbering sky-goddess, her divine blood running down the fortress’s walls to pool on the ground, where malign flowers sprang from the combination of cursed soil watered by divine essence. Barrow thundered up the hill toward the gate, the tall red-petaled flowers turning their heads to watch his approach. Lector jostled hard against his back, and the hero felt every ache and pain of his long journey. The spear Ghostreaper must have lent him magical strength, or else the effects of his last visit to the Vital Sea were beginning to fade — he felt tired, at a time when he should be thrumming with power on the cusp of triumph.

The witch was dozens of yards ahead, and the flowers lifted their viney tendrils to block her approach. She shouted out a strange word, presumably an incantation of power — “Deadhead!” — and fireballs bloomed from her outstretched hands, searing the plants and making them scream. The unique stink of charred goddess blood filled the air: the mingled scents of burning sugar and opened entrails. The witch ran through the arching gateway and into the darkness within. No gate or guards prevented entry to the Citadel, for this place did not discourage visitors: it welcomed them, as the lion welcomes its prey.

Barrow hesitated on the threshold, even his legendarily keen eyes unable to pierce the darkness within. “Lector, you must give me counsel. Who is this new foe, and how may I defeat her?”

The Living Book was Barrow’s greatest weapon, for it knew all the secrets of the world, and would reveal any mystery… if Barrow could only compose the proper question.

“The woman is not mentioned in my codexes or concordances,” Lector said. “I cannot tell you how to defeat her.”

The hero’s heart lurched in his chest. Lector knew the weaknesses of every man and god and beast that had ever lived, or had a semblance of life, and that wisdom had aided most of Barrow’s triumphs. “But… you know all the truths of the world…” Barrow paused. “Do you mean she is… from outside this world? From another place, some realm of demons? That would explain why she, too, seeks the Key of Totality — perhaps she wants only to return to her rightful home. Witch!” he shouted. “We need not fight! I will gladly open the door to your homeworld, once I have recovered the key!”

She did not answer. Barrow steeled himself for further battle, and stepped through the towering arch.

The darkness within the gate was actually solid, a membrane like the scum on pond water, clammy and vile, but he was through in a moment, wiping ectoplasmic residue from his eyes and looking around for the next inevitable threat. He stood in a vast and gloomy hall filled with jagged columns, not unlike the Temple of the Bile-God in far Paradyll, but vaster by magnitudes. The columns glowed with a reddish inner light.

Something fluttered down from the ceiling toward him, and Barrow drew his hand axe. This was no magical weapon — but well-honed steel and a comfortable grip had a magic of its own. The fluttering thing was the witch’s cloak, its red eyes gleaming, its purple-shadowed tendrils reaching out for him. He danced back as it tried to strike him, his axe flashing and tearing a long rent in the cloak’s body. But where was the witch —

Something wrenched at his back, and he howled as the fine chains cut into his flesh, and the weight of Lector left his back. He spun, but the cloak tried to strangle him, and by the time he’d hacked its tendrils free and sent it fluttering back toward the ceiling, the witch was halfway up a column, perched on an outcropping as casually as Barrow might sit on a fallen log, Lector held open in her lap as she flipped the pages. “So what’s the deal with the bleeding sky?” she said.

Before Barrow could curse her, Lector answered — as he would answer any question posed by his holder. “The Citadel is made of eldritch glass, sharp enough to cut even the divine, and so it pierces the belly of the great sky goddess.”

“Wait. The sky is somebody’s stomach? That’s… it’s… what?”

“Everyone knows of the goddess,” Barrow shouted. “The triple suns are the jewels in her navel! The rains are her sweat! She lays close to her lover, the goddess of the Earth, but they can never touch, for the sins of man keep them forever separated!”

“Sorry, I’m not from around here.”

“I know that,” Barrow said, and held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Witch — no, warrior — you have proven yourself my equal.”

“Equal? Don’t flatter yourself. The clothes off my back can kick your ass.”

Barrow pushed down the rage the seethed within him. “Though you cast away my spear, and stole my book and bosom companion, I would still be your friend. We stand a better chance of winning our way through the Citadel together — ”

“You don’t get it, Barrel-of-laughs,” she said. “You’re done. Your part of this story is over. Do I have to take away your snake pants next? Leave you naked and tied up for the flowers outside to eat?”

“I have a destiny,” Barrow began.

“Well I don’t. But I have a job to do, and that job is keeping you from getting the Key. You’re not the hero here. Let me show you something, this chasm thing.”

“The Chasm of Flies? But before we can reach that, there are three gates — ”

“The Gates are no more,” Lector said. “The outsider witch has destroyed them.”

Barrow shook his head. “The Gate of Knives? The Gate of Wind? The Gate of Light?”
“Sure,” the witch said. “Charm of rust, spell of stillness, tincture of darkness. It’s taken me longer to get through airport security than it did for me to rip through those gates. The magic here, seriously, it’s weakass shit, and I beat things up for a living. But, anyway, this chasm.” She dropped from the column, and Barrow roared and lunged at her, axe in hand.

She stepped around him, graceful as a dancer, and hooked her ankle around his foot as he went by, sending him sprawling, his axe skittering across the smooth black floor.

“Are you done?” she said. Her cloak drifted from the ceiling and settled down around her shoulders again. His face burning in shame, Barrow got to his feet. He left his axe on the floor, afraid of what she might do if he tried to retrieve it. If she attacked, he would fight ferociously, but she was just standing there, looking a little impatient, and even a little bored. Barrow had never before doubted his fate — he was a hero, and though the way was long and full of trials, he would win the Key, the greatest magical item in a world full of magic, the item of power no human hand had ever touched before. His allies respected him, and so did his enemies — but this witch from Outside toyed with him and taunted him, and he could not fathom how to strike her down.

So he followed her, through the hall and down a series of winding corridors, past the shattered remnants of the three great Gates, deeper into the red-black heart of the Citadel. Perhaps this is the part of my journey where I am humbled, he mused. Mayhap this witch will show me something important about myself, something to aid me in —

“The Chasm of Flies,” the witch said, shouting to be heard over the horrible buzzing that filled the Citadel, and gesturing at the vast space yawning before them. As wide as the Citadel itself, stretching as far as he could see, the Chasm was a great pit seething and alive with millions upon millions of churning insects, black flies and richly green flies and even the snow-pale flies who carried the Unsleeping Sickness. “Lector,” the witch said, patting the Living Book tucked under her arm. “What are those flies feeding on?”

“Heroes,” Lector replied, and the witch laughed and laughed.

“I had no idea that’s what fly shit smelled like,” she said. “But when you multiply one speck of bug poop by about a trillion, I guess it gets noticeable. Whoo. Anyway, check out this spell. I learned it off a bruja when I was living in a really nasty squat last year, there were bugs everywhere. Normally it just clears a room, but I’m pretty sure I can amplify it…” She took a deep breath, then shouted, “SHOO, FLIES!”

The insects rose up in their millions, a black and green and white cloud, and revealed below them… a mass grave. A great tangle of men and women and the other races capable of heroism — the Grievous Ones with their spiny flesh, the Original Men with their snake’s eyes, the amorphous Unshaped — all broken and bloodied and rotting and emptied of their souls, made into nothing but a feast for flies. “See there?” the witch said. “That’s what happens to heroes. It’s nothing personal. That’s what happens to everyone — no one lives forever, and even the gods can bleed. But heroes tend to die unpleasantly, far from home, without any friends.”

She slid close to Barrow as he gazed at the bodies, wondering how many of them had famous names, how many had been sung about in stories every bit as loudly as Barrow had heard his own name sung — and, worse, how many of them were not remembered in song or story at all anymore. “But you thought you were special?” she said. “You were going to be the one who really made a difference? In your heart of hearts, you thought you were going to be the one that lived forever, didn’t you? You’re all excited about having a destiny. Big deal. So did they. There are enough magical weapons down there to fill a war god’s armory, and enough heroic stories to fill even this weird talking infinite book I stole from you. I’m not saying there’s never a good reason to do great things, Barrow. But doing it for the sake of being a hero is bullshit. I mean, I have just one question — ”

The buzzing of the flies suddenly went silent, though the insects themselves continued to bob in the air, and a new voice spoke: “I will ask the questions here.” That voice was beautiful, cool, and serene, as was the speaker. She walked across the Chasm on the floating cloud of flies as if their hovering bodies were paving stones, a perfect blonde dressed in little more than three clusters of diamonds that did the minimum necessary to protect her modesty, with a diadem of white gold upon her brow.

Barrow’s heart grew lighter when he saw the witch narrow her eyes, her demonic cloak writhing around her body. She didn’t like the look of this woman, which meant Barrow did.

“I am the Mistress of the Key,” the blond enchantress said, standing just a few feet away on a platform of white flies. “You have breached the Gates, and come to the edge of the Chasm, and now, you have the chance to win the Key.” She glanced down at the open grave beneath her feet. “Or to join the others who have tried in the past.”

Barrow went down on one knee and bowed his head in respect. “Mistress,” he said. “I am eager to meet any challenge you care to set.”

“So Keymistress,” the witch said. “You look a lot like this woman I know. Any chance your last name is ‘Husch’? You could be her twin sister.”

“I was not of woman born,” the Mistress said, her voice as clear as fine crystal. “I have no sister, or mother, or father, or daughters. Do you, too, come to try and win the key?”

“Sure,” the witch replied. “So what’s the challenge? Mortal combat with Barrow the Barbarian? Staring competition? Or should I just guess what you have in your pocketses?”

“You need only answer my question,” the Mistress said. “And if your answer satisfies me, the Key is yours.”

The witch snorted. “Let Barrow go first. He’s been waiting for this a long time.”

The Mistress turned her head to Barrow, and bade him rise. He stood perfectly straight. He had supped with kings, seduced queens, and counted gods among his close friends and dire enemies — but the Mistress seemed like something else again, something greater than the gods, or perhaps merely apart from them. “Barrow of Ulthar,” she said, “Tell me: why do you desire the Key?”

Barrow blinked. He wanted the Key because that was his quest; because the swamp witch in his childhood village had seen a vision that he would someday seize it; because the diviner-in-chief for the great Stone King of the Inverted Mountains had declared that Barrow was destined to wield it; because his own dreams were almost nothing anymore but endless wanderings through black hallways filled with locked doors he could not open. He considered coming up with some more elaborate answer, something about breaking the shackles of tyrants, or opening new pathways of opportunity, but he feared the Mistress would sense dissembling or exaggeration. Truth had always served him well, and he would continue to serve truth. “Because it is my destiny,” he said. “Because I am the one who has been fated to win the Key, where all others have failed.”

The Mistress inclined her head. “And you, Marla Mason of Felport? Why do you desire the key?”

“Where I come from, there’s a saying,” Marla said. “Anyone who wants to be president should be disqualified.” She nodded at Barrow. “Anyone who thinks he deserves to have the most powerful magical artifact in the world just because it’s his destiny should never be allowed to get his hands on it. I want it to keep it away from him, and people like him, who want power for its own sake.”

Barrow took a step back from the edge of the chasm, suddenly dizzy. “But I don’t — I don’t want it for anything bad, it’s just — ”

“It’s just your MacGuffin,” Marla said, not unkindly. “You didn’t think it through well enough, is all. It’s not your fault. You’ve been telling this story for decades. It’s no wonder it’s starting to run a little thin. That’s always a problem with an ongoing series.”

“You have answered well, Marla Mason,” the Mistress said. “You may have me.”

“What do you mean I may — ”

The Mistress leapt up from the flies, and floated toward them. She began to glow, first faintly, then as brightly as the brightest of the triple suns, and then —

She vanished, and a key of shining diamond fell to the floor. Marla Mason knelt and picked it up. “That wasn’t so hard,” she said. “Then again, I got to skip to the last chapter, which is hardly fair to you.”

Barrow licked his lips, eyes fixed on the key. “What will you do with it?”

Marla shrugged. “Open a door.” She squinted, then stabbed the key at the air, and gave it a twist. A rectangle outlined in white light appeared in the air, and she tugged the door open. Barrow expected to see something amazing — a heavenly universe, perhaps, or whatever dark pit her demonic cloak hailed from.

Instead, the door just showed a room, with an old white-haired man sleeping in a bed. A woman who looked a bit like the witch Marla Mason was stretched out on the floor in one corner, and through a window, another woman was watching — she wore spectacles, and had a tight blond bun, but she looked so much like the Mistress of the Key, who really was the Key —

“Want to come in?” Marla said. “See the world?”

Barrow recoiled. What trickery was this? The witch had stolen his destiny, and now she offered him a dirty room, an ugly bed, a smeared window, a living artifact transformed into a nurse —

“Never!” he shouted, and leapt into the Chasm, to join the other fallen ones. He might die, but he would die a hero, which was better than living as nothing but a man.

#

Marla stepped through the door, and immediately rolled over on her side and vomited, which was weird, because she hadn’t been lying on her side, she’d been walking through a door, except now she was on the floor, and —

“Oh,” she croaked. “I woke up in my own body, huh?”

Dr. Husch opened the door, and a doughy orderly hurried in and helped Marla to her feet, then pulled her outside, to the safety of the observation room. “In your hand,” Dr. Husch said. “What is that?”

Marla looked down at the crystal key she was holding. “Oh, this, it’s — you, I think, he must have seen you at some point, because he sure as hell fantasized about you, or… wait.” She shook her head. Marla knew she’d just done something, gone into a weird fantasy world and said some cold-hearted shit to a crazy man’s mental barbarian avatar, but the details were fading fast. “Why can’t I remember?”

“It can be difficult to remember dreams,” Husch said, plucking the key from Marla’s hand. “How much more difficult must it be to remember someone else’s dream? But you did what you were sent to do. You showed Barrow he is no hero of destiny. You broke the spine of his story, and you took away this key, which is, I think, a rather potent artifact — either great magic he willed into creation, or some existing magic he managed to grasp with his psychic abilities.”

“Artifact, huh?” Marla said, plucking at her cloak, which was also an artifact — an object of unknowable age and great magic. An object with motivations, however inscrutable they might be to their wielders. For some reason, wearing the cloak was making her skin crawl even more than usual today. Its malign intelligence, always a presence deep in the back of her mind, seemed more active and agitated, now, like a cat who’d spent hours watching squirrels frolic safely behind a pane of glass. “Think we can sell it?”

“I believe I will hold onto this key,” Dr. Husch said. “For the very reasons you so neatly articulated while you were unconscious.”

Marla waved her hand. “I don’t need to know what I say in my sleep. I’m sure it’s embarrassing. But… why isn’t Barrow waking up? Wasn’t busting up his delusion supposed to cure him?”

“I don’t know,” Husch said. “I’d hoped, of course, that he would become lucid when you proved his delusions of grandeur were false — I didn’t expect him to be cured, but if he could hear me, then therapy might be possible. He’s not speaking, though, so I don’t know what he’s experiencing now…”

#

Barrow did not die in the pit. He lay among the filth for a while, then began to search the corpses. As the witch said, there were magic weapons there, countless ones, and he chose some of the most deadly for himself. He climbed out of the pit, hauling himself and his implements of war to the Citadel’s floor. Lector, the Living Book, rested on the stone, left behind when the witch departed.

“Lector,” Barrow croaked. “Old friend. Tell me. Do you know spells to raise the dead, and send this pit of fallen corpses into battle?”

“I do,” Lector said.

“This Citadel,” Barrow said, licking his lips. “Has it ever been held by a mortal before?”

“It has not,” Lector said. “Only by gods.”

“Ah,” Barrow said, flexing his fingers. “Then I will have to become a god, then.”

Lector seldom spoke unprompted, generally limiting himself to answering questions. But he spoke now. “Barrow of Ulthar… what are your plans?”

“If I am not a hero,” Barrow said, “Then I must be… something else. If I do not have a destiny, then I must make a destiny of my own. If I cannot unlock all the doors in all the worlds… Then I must tear holes in the walls. If I cannot save the world — ”

#

“Then I must conquer it,” the old writer shouted beyond the glass, and Marla winced. “I will have my revenge!”

“He’s gone all Dark Lord on us, hasn’t he?” Marla said.

Dr. Husch sighed. “It seems so. His story is taking a darker turn. He’s making himself into an anti-hero.”

“I can’t imagine there’s much of a market for stories about those,” Marla said. “So… did we make things worse? Is he going to start trying to reach this world now? Are there going to be, I don’t know, hordes of orcs and black dragons who breathe napalm and dust storms of living anthrax popping randomly into existence? Aren’t you afraid he’s going to find another way in, and that he might bring an army next time?”

“Possibly,” Dr. Husch said. “Loathe as I am to admit defeat, I think it’s time to take extreme measures. When therapy fails, sometimes the only solution… is isolation. Fortunately, you brought me a key, and keys aren’t just used for opening doors — they’re also used for locking them.” She cocked her head, considered the door before her, and slipped the crystal key into the lock. Which was quite a trick, since the key was way too big. Nevertheless, it fit, and Dr. Husch twisted it, resulting in a click as loud as a thundercrack. The door began to change, transforming from beaten-up metal into black volcanic glass. The change crawled up the wall and across the window until the entire room was an unbroken sheet of stone. “There,” Husch said. “Locked away.” She tucked the key into the pocket of her suit.

Marla whistled. “When you do solitary confinement, you don’t fuck around.”

“Your payment is due,” Dr. Husch said. “A trick and a secret, you said?”

Marla, who’d been staring at her reflection in the black glass, blinked. “Uh, yeah, right. The trick — I wanted to know how you managed to bind up some of the most powerful people you’ve got here. Agnes Nilsson, Elsie Jarrow, that caliber. From my researches, they should be impossible to hold. Then again, that was before I saw you do this.”

“It’s a rare patient who provides the key to his own security,” Husch said. “Barrow is a special case. The bindings on Jarrow and Nilsson are a bit involved, and I’ve had a trying day, but come back next week, and I’ll take you through the sigils and incantations.”

“Fair enough. As for the secret — I hear you’ve been running this place for decades, and you don’t look a day over twenty-five, no matter how you try to old yourself up with the dowdy hair and clothes and bondage hair. Even if you have one of those spells where you don’t age when you’re sleeping, that wouldn’t account for this kind of youth. So what’s the deal?”

Dr. Husch patted Marla on the shoulder. “Oh, Marla. Your mistake is in assuming I’m human.”

Marla frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re… an artifact in human form?”

“Of course not,” Dr. Husch said. “I’m a homunculus, just like the orderlies. Except my creator — he’s gone now — made me much smarter than they are, and my tastes go beyond meals of lavender seeds and earthworms. If I were human, I would have been able to go into Barrow’s dreams myself, and seen to his therapy directly. Of course I’m not human. Why else would I have hired you, dear?”

Marla frowned. She had a memory of Husch, telling her this already — “I am not of woman born” — but, no, that wasn’t really her, it was Barrow’s version of her. The old writer was psychic, so maybe he’d seen into Husch’s mind and found her secret, incorporating her true nature as a magical inhuman thing into his fantasy world. If he could see into Husch’s mind, then…

“Next time, hire someone else,” Marla said. “Barrow’s bad for my mental health.”

#

That night, Marla stopped by a used book store and pawed through a crate of yellowing old magazines. After half an hour of searching she finally found one with a story by Roderick Barrow, called “Shadow of the Conqueror!” — complete with exclamation point. She paid for the magazine with pocket change.

She read it in her tiny studio apartment south of the river. Barrow wrote a lot like he talked. The last two pages were torn out, but it was pretty clear what was going to happen: the hero would thwart the villain, free the slaves, and get the girl, who was dressed in golden chains and not much else. Nothing in the story really rang any bells, and her memories of the experience in Barrow’s mind didn’t come any clearer, the details turning to mist whenever she tried to focus on them. Ah, well, screw it. She tossed the magazine into a corner. Who needed fantasy stories, when she had asses to kick and secrets to learn?

#

That night, Marla dreamed of a house of endless black hallways. Every corridor was lined by dozens of doors, some marked with numbers, some with letters, some with runes or mystic sigils. She tried all the doorknobs, but none of them opened — none of them so much as turned — and though she pressed her ears to the door, she couldn’t hear anything. She just kept walking, until she reached a door made of black volcanic glass, with no knob at all, but something on the other side was pounding, and pounding, and pounding, as if trying to break through —

Marla woke, sweating, and scrambled to the enchanted wardrobe where she kept her white-and-purple cloak. She pulled the garment down and wrapped it around herself, crawling back into bed. Marla didn’t like wearing the cloak when she slept — she felt like it tried to communicate with her in her dreams — but even the dark whispers of her artifact would be better than the risk of falling prey to Barrow’s psychic grasping. She could all too easily imagine her body left breathing in her bed, but her mind torn out of her body, wriggling on the end of a spear, trapped in a Dark Lord’s realm…

Her dreams that night were horrible, but they were her own.

END

Note: “Ill Met in Ulthar” is directly inspired by the story “Dreams Are Sacred” by the great (and sadly late) Peter Phillips, about a reporter who goes into the fantasy dreamworld of a pulp writer — though for different reasons, and with radically different results. I made the connection semi-explicit by mentioning the name of the writer from the Phillips story, Marsham Craswell, here. Of course there are homages to Fritz Leiber and even a dash of H.P. Lovecraft in this, too.

I’d like to write more stories set in the fantasy world Barrow inhabits. I recently wrote a story featuring the spear Ghostreaper — transported to our world, and falling into the wrong hands — which I just sold to a publication this morning.

(If you liked this, consider donating to my next crowdfunded Marla novel, Bride of Death.)