Grim Tides (Marla Mason) (11 page)

After nearly an hour of hair ministrations, Elsie declared herself satisfied with the dye and stripped off the red-stained shirt she’d been wearing, dropping it on the floor. Crapsey found himself getting a little aroused at the sight of her in just a bra, even if it was boring hospital-issue underwear – hell, it wasn’t like he’d had much experience with fancy lingerie in the nightmarish dystopian world he’d called home. A girl with no festering sores on her body had been a big treat over there, and he hadn’t exactly been rolling in willing scantily-clad women since he crossed over to this universe.

“Husch. Lipstick me. I know you like to wear that red red red. Or you did before your lips got torn into little pieces. Which means you don’t need it anymore. Give.”

Husch handed her a tube, and Elsie lavished her lips in scarlet, then took the hem of Husch’s veil and used it to blot. “Perfecto.” She turned to Crapsey and gave him a dazzling smile. “You. Want to have sex with me right here on this concrete floor? I’ve got this
body
! Gotta use it!”

Crapsey winced. “I would, I mean, but that body used to belong to my monster-boss – ”

“Okay, too much talking, you missed your window, big boy.” She turned to Nicolette. “You? And me? And the floor? I like the one-armed thing, I bet only having five fingers makes you work a lot harder, am I right?”

“I’m not into girls, and I hate
both
the people you look like in that body, but you are Elsie Jarrow, and I will so absolutely fuck you,” Nicolette said.

“Stop!” Dr. Husch said. “We have work to do, things to discuss, plans to make.”

“Dr. Jigsaw is a buzzkill,” Elsie Jarrow said. “Lift that veil, pretty lady. “

“I am not sleeping with you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not in the mood anymore, but you’re pretty prudish for a sexbot, even one with a PhD.” She glanced at Nicolette. “The doctor here was invented as a
sex
homunculus for her creator, did you guys know that? He gave her all those smarts so she could read the Kama Sutra or recite lyric poetry while she gave him handjobs or whatever, and then she goes to college and gets advanced degrees, just like she’s
people
. Her maker wouldn’t like banging her now, though, she’s all damaged. The veil. Up.”

Husch backed away, arms crossed, the faint blot of scarlet lipstick on her veil reminding Crapsey of a spreading bloodstain. “You don’t give me orders – ”

“I’ll kill Marla for you, okay? And anybody else who annoys you. Don’t get all unyielding, it makes me cranky. Just. Lift. The. Veil. Let me get a look at what they did to you.”

With trembling hands, Dr. Husch raised the black netting and revealed her face. She was worse than Crapsey had expected. He hadn’t been the one to cut her up, but only because she brained him with a blunt object before he could carry out his boss’s orders. The Mason had done the deed, tearing her into pieces. She’d been stitched back together... but her face was a nightmare of bright red lines, a map of scars so pronounced they looked drawn on with red Sharpie. Her face was like a photo shredded and taped back together, with none of the edges quite lining up anymore.

“They sure did a number on you, didn’t they?” Elsie said. “These hands, right here, they ripped you up, didn’t they?” She wiggled her fingers. “Well, let me fix you up, then.”

Husch tried to jerk away when Elsie reached out for her, but some magic snared her, and the chaos witch pressed her palms against the doctor’s face. Husch twitched and writhed and moaned for a moment, battering uselessly at Elsie, then tore free and fell to her knees. The doctor looked up.

“Uh,” Crapsey said. “Doc. Maybe look in that mirror over there?”

“What have you done to me?” Dr. Husch said, her voice no longer rough and shredded. She rushed to the mirror, and looked at herself – at her smooth face, restored to its original classical perfection.

“Fixed you.” Elsie sat down in the middle of the floor, pulled one of her feet up close to her face, and sniffed her own toes. “Not just your face, either. The whole caboodle. Boobies and nethers and all. Did you guys know she’s hairless as a hypoallergenic cat from the neck down? Her maker was a perv.”

Husch paid no attention, just staring at her own face, touching her cheeks with her fingertips. “The biomancer, Langford, he said there was no hope, that my skin couldn’t heal like a human’s, that it lacked the elasticity – ”

“Eh, all true, but broken things are my whole, um. Thing. I can increase disorder, but you know how double-edged magic is, I can run the progression back the other way, too, and create order. There, poof, you’re pretty again, yay.” Elsie seemed bored with the whole situation now – she was chewing on her big toenail – and Crapsey got a sense of just how unsettling it could be to work with her. She was changeable as the moon, as the sea, as...

Well, the whim of a lunatic devoted to chaos.

“No offense, but what the fuck?” Nicolette said. “You
fixed
something? Increased order? That just... isn’t something I’d expect the great Elsie Jarrow to do.”

“That’s exactly the point.” Elsie spat out a toenail. “Half my power comes from doing the unexpected. A lot of the time even
I
don’t know what I’m going to do. That approach has worked out for me so far. Except for killing everyone I ever knew and loved or even liked, and being imprisoned for all those years, and everything. Otherwise it’s been a rock-solid strategy. Besides, I don’t mind creating order. I like it! Build those towers high! The more complex you make something, the bigger the mess it makes when it collapses.”

Crapsey was mulling that over when Dr. Husch’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen and said, “What in the world...” She put the phone to her ear. “I didn’t expect to hear from
you,
” she said, walking toward a corner of the basement, presumably for privacy.

“We’re gonna have fun,” Elsie said, standing up, and walking toward Crapsey and Nicolette with her arms outstretched. “I’m in the mood again. What do you say? Three-way, right now? We’ve only five hands among us, but we can make do, right?”

SEEING THE WORLD

Pelham rolled across a one-lane bridge on the winding, narrow, gloriously scenic road to Hana, then adroitly squeezed the black convertible onto the minuscule shoulder to let an impatient local in a mud-stained Jeep swoop around them and speed away.

“I was worried this drive would stress you out,” Marla said. They were only travelling about fifty miles, but it was going to take between two and three hours, because the Hana Highway was as twisty as a grifter’s wit, following the coastline through tropical rainforest on a route that included something like sixty bridges, many of them one-lane, plus an effective infinity of blind curves. The trip was stressing
Marla
out, because two parts of her nature were in conflict: she hated driving, but she was also a control freak. At least with Pelham she was in good hands. When Rondeau had driven this way, they’d nearly died about 125 times, by Marla’s count. This wasn’t a trip to take when you were in a hurry... but unless you had a helicopter or a boat handy (or were willing to brave the risks inherent in teleportation), there was no other way to reach the eastern side of the island.

“Oh, no, this is lovely,” Pelham said. “I suppose it might have made me anxious when I first left Felport... but since then I’ve driven the road of death in Bolivia, and the Deosai National Park Trail in Pakistan – after driving across a wood-and-rope bridge suspended over a chasm, a few blind curves and one-lane stretches are nothing to get worked up about.”

“Ha. I guess not. I’m going to have to get used to the new you, Pelham – I’m still thinking of you as the guy who never left Felport, who’d barely been off the Chamberlain’s estate.”

“The past few months have been most instructive, Mrs. Mason. During our time together I gained some inkling of the divide between my theoretical knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge.” He had a faraway look in his eyes – a trifle worrisome in a man driving along the edge of a cliff towering over the ocean. “I have experienced so much since then. Great kindness and casual cruelty. Amazing food and filthy rooms. Learning a language from books and tapes is quite different from speaking the language with
people
. I was groomed for service, but the world is so much larger than I ever realized. Thank you for that – for sending me out.”

Marla had been a few places over the years, but always for business, and she’d never explored like Pelham had – had never
wanted
to, with all her attention focused on Felport’s well-being. “You don’t have to stay here now,” Marla said. “With me, I mean. We can be – bonded, or whatever – without you having to live in a little room under the stairs emptying my chamber pot and cooking me rashers of bacon.”

“With your permission, I may go traveling again,” Pelham said. “But for now, you are in danger, and you are my friend as well as my mistress, and I would prefer to stay and assist in whatever way I can.”

“Ha. ‘Mistress.’ Careful calling me that in public, all right? But I’m glad to have you. I could use the help.”

He glanced at her sidelong. “Mrs. Mason.
You’ve
changed, too, if you don’t mind me saying. I can scarcely remember you ever admitting to needing help before.”

She sighed, gazing out the window as they passed the burned-out hulk of an old pickup truck someone had shoved into the trees on the side of the road. “I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world, but if there’s one lesson I’ve learned this past year, it’s that there are some things you can’t do on your own. Being self-reliant is still important to me, don’t get me wrong... but losing almost all my friends and allies has given me a new appreciation for the ones I have left. You included.”

“Aren’t we on our way to see another of your friends now?”

Marla snorted. “I wouldn’t go that far. She’s a kahuna named Arachne, though she’s not as... spidery as the name would imply. She’s into the weaving thing, though, mostly magics of binding and separating. She weaves together nets and rugs and whatever else as part of her ritual. Arachne’s native Hawai’ian, pretty much a nature magician – you know how much I love
those
– and I helped her out with a ghost not long ago. She wasn’t too grateful, though. I think she was pissed off that she needed help at all – and, yes, I know, I can relate to that. Seeing me again will probably annoy her – but apart from the surfers who hired me, she’s literally the only sorcerer on the island I’m on speaking terms with. The local kahunas aren’t big fans of haole sorcerers from the mainland. Hard to blame them, since the last haole magus to show up on Maui was an asshole of a guy who turned rival sorcerers into sharks. But you’ve already heard that sob story, and I don’t feel like telling it – we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Pelham recited the list of places he’d visited – Malaysia, South America, bits of Eastern Europe, a lot of Southeast Asia, none for more than a few days at a time – and some of the difficulties he’d encountered. Apart from the Nuno, he’d also had run-ins with the iron-toothed Abaasy of Turkey, a Tokoloshe in South Africa, and a Colo Colo in Argentina. The glamour Marla had placed on the steamer trunk had proven an irresistible attractant for minor magical beings, something she hadn’t anticipated – there weren’t a lot of loose supernatural creatures in the streets of Felport, and she hadn’t realized quite how wild some of the remaining wild places in the world could be.

“Did you see anything
nice
?” Marla said. “I’ll feel like crap if it was all monsters, all the time.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t all being chased by terrifying or bewildering creatures,” Pelham said. “And, given my extensive studies in magic, I generally knew what I was dealing with, and how to banish them, or at least avoid being harmed. There were many beautiful things. A forgotten temple in Indonesia, still intact, and more ancient than some civilizations. The Hang Son Doong cavern in Vietnam, where holes in the ground above admit water and light sufficient for a small forest to grow over the centuries, creating what is essentially a jungle under the earth – that was like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. The Metéora monasteries in Greece, built atop towering pillars of rock, almost literally castles in the air.” He smiled, his expression going all soft and faraway. “I even met a woman. Nothing serious, of course, just a fellow traveler, but... . Yes. There were beautiful things.”

“Good for you, Pelham. I’m glad to hear it.”

Pelham blushed, adjusted the convertible’s mirrors in a completely unnecessary way, and continued briskly. “I went to Lake Paasselkä in Finland, thinking it might be a good place to sink the glamoured trunk – the lake was formed by a meteor impact, and there are strange magnetic anomalies associated with the place, along with other purportedly supernatural qualities. I decided the magics on the trunk and in the lake might interact badly, alas, but before I left, I saw the Paasselkä devil – a ball of light that seems to move almost consciously. Eerie, and beautiful, and despite the fierce name, I did not find it frightening at all.”

“What is it? The devil thing, I mean.”

Pelham smiled. “I have no idea. Isn’t it wonderful? The world is so
big
, Mrs. Mason. So full of mysteries, vistas, experiences. At home on the estate, growing up, I thought the world was very small – after all, I could see the whole thing on a globe, or a map. I read books, and believed the whole world could be contained in those books, and in a sense, I suppose they can. But the guidebook is not the
experience
. Knowledge received cannot compare to knowledge directly perceived.”

“Damn, Pelham,” Marla said. “You’ve managed to make me feel positively provincial, which is a pretty good trick for a guy who didn’t leave the grounds of a mansion for the first few decades of his life.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There is something to be said for the intense knowledge you have about Felport as well. My experiences were wonderful, but in many ways they were shallow. Spending only a few days, or sometimes only a few hours in a place, I could take away only surface impressions – startling and moving impressions, often, but not deep ones. To
truly
know a place takes a long stay, and the sort of devotion you gave to Felport. When, in my youth, I expressed dissatisfaction with the constraints of living on the estate, the Chamberlain told me that the world was small, but the gardens were vast – meaning, or so I understood her, that close attention could make a place seem to expand, containing multitudes. In my perfect world, I would spend a few months, perhaps a year, living in a place, thereby going a level or two deeper than the average tourist does, before moving on. Combining breadth and depth of experience, and trying to achieve some sort of balance.”