Mommy Issues of the Dead (Marla Mason) (3 page)

She finished brushing her hair and stood up. “All right. I have no intention of being imprisoned again, which means, as much as it pains me, I’ll have to go kill my son Leland.”

“Is that totally necessary?”

“I’m afraid so. You’ll take me to him, of course.”

“That’s maybe not such a good idea.”

“If you aren’t with me, Miss Mason, then you are by definition against me.” She walked over to one of the meth monkeys and kicked his arm, the limb snapping off and shattering into chunks of ice. “Which is it?”
“Right.” Marla had no great love for Viscarro, but he was a ranking sorcerer on Felport’s council, and if some outsider came into the city and murdered him there would be consequences. Chaos, retaliation, all-out magical warfare, and other disruptive, city-wrecking unpleasantness, and if Marla was on
either
side of the conflict, it would be bad for her. Plus, Marla wouldn’t be able to get paid if Regina killed Viscarro. “So, you want revenge against your son, or...?”

“Of course not. I love my boys. They had their reasons for imprisoning me. But once Leland realizes I’m no longer in the snow globe, he’ll come after me, to kill me, or trap me again, and... I can’t abide that. I don’t know for sure if I’ll win a fight against my son, but with the element of surprise on my side, and your help getting in to see him, it’s possible. I’d prefer to go somewhere up north and avoid the whole ordeal, but what choice do I have?”

Marla thought furiously. “What if Viscarro didn’t know you’d escaped?”

“The snow globe is empty, dear. That will be readily apparent when you deliver it. And while we could, I suppose, kidnap some hill person and trap them in the globe, they would soon perish in the snow there, and the ruse would be revealed. Only someone with certain... immortal qualities... can survive inside that sphere.”

“Yeah, okay, but what if we put
him
in the globe?” She pointed to the frozen junk sculpture that was Savery Watt. “Getting your other son out of the way too?”

Regina shook her head. “That’s not my son. That’s just a pile of junk. His soul isn’t in that body, he was just
using
it. His soul resides in some object – probably an egg, or stone, or jewel, but a lich’s phylactery can be almost anything. I grant you, your plan works in theory, but without the phylactery, we
can’t
trap him. No, I’m afraid war is the only solution.”

“Come on,” Marla said. “I know where Savery lives. You’re his mother. Are you saying you don’t know your son well enough to guess where he might have hidden his soul?”

#

Regina shook her head as she surveyed the interior of the cavern. “Savery, you hoarder. You’re almost as bad as your brother. I got them started collecting baseball cards – I love baseball, it’s funny, you’d think I’d prefer winter sports, but I don’t – and from there they both started collecting
everything
.” She walked along the shelves, peering at porcelain dogs, ceramic unicorns, and, of course, the profusion of snow globes.

Marla, meanwhile, found a metal safe, punched it open with her brass knuckles, and scooped out several banded bundles of crumpled cash. She traded her services to sorcerers for knowledge, not money – so she had to make money where she could.

“Oh,” Regina said softly. “I can’t believe he kept this.” Marla walked over as she lifted a metal toy monkey from the shelf. “It’s a tin toy from England. I bought him this, for his collection, the same Christmas he and his brother... Well. They gave me a snow globe that year.” She cocked her head. “This. This is his phylactery.”

“You sure?”

She shrugged. “If I’m wrong, we can just try sticking everything else in this house into the snow globe, until I grow too bored, and decide to go to war instead.”

“Gotcha.” Marla took the two halves of the snow globe from her bag. Regina set the toy monkey on the globe’s base and started screwing on the top. It didn’t look like it should fit – the monkey was too big – but the glass sphere fit over it easily, and when Regina screwed it down, the globe filled with whiteness... and there, in the center, a black shape ran in wild circles.

“That’s it, then,” Regina said. “Seems a shame to trap my son this way, but it’s more merciful than destroying his soul.”

“Just think of it as putting your kid in time out,” Marla said, and Regina looked at her blankly. Right. She came from a time when disciplining your child meant sending him out to cut the switch you intended to beat him with. “Never mind. Can you help me get that frozen junkpile body up here? I need to cover my tracks.”

#

Marla checked her watch, figured the timing was right, and said, “Let’s do it.” She and Regina stood well back and watched as the meth lab exploded, a simple fire spell combining with the chemicals inside to make a big ugly boom that engulfed Savery Watt’s robot body in fire too. Regina whispered down a ring of ice to contain the fire and keep the woods from burning, which was considerate of her, Marla thought.

If Viscarro sent someone to check up on her story, he’d find a smoking ruin and a bunch of scrap metal to support Marla’s version of events. Sure, he might start wondering when he never heard from his brother again, but with luck he’d just assume Savery was in hiding. Viscarro was arrogant. He’d be fine believing he’d utterly overpowered his brother.

“So where are you going now?” Marla asked.

“Better you don’t know, Marla. Thank you for saving me, even if it was unintentional. I’ll find a peaceful place and catch up on everything that’s happened since I was trapped.”

“Wait’ll you hear about global warming,” Marla said. “You’re going to hate it.” She waved goodbye and went down the hill, and the car pulled up soon after she reached the bottom. The driver was a full two minutes late, which spoiled the perfectly-timed arrival she’d envisioned, but she was feeling magnanimous, so she didn’t even threaten him, just said, “Home, Jaws.”

They passed a fire engine and two cop cars on the way, and the scream of sirens made Marla homesick.

#

“Fine, fine,” Viscarro said when Marla finished her tale, in which things went much as planned, unlike in real life. He held up the snow globe to the light, grunted, and placed it on a shelf behind his desk. “You did well. I suppose you’d like to be paid. What trick did you want me to teach you?”

“I thought it would be cool to learn to summon an incubus,” she said.

Viscarro shuddered. “Youth is repulsive. The young and their urges and fluids repulse me. Fine. Return to me on the next new moon and I’ll show you the ritual. Are we done?”

“Ah, ah.” Marla waved her forefinger at him. “You still owe me a secret.”

“Yes,
fine
. Do you want to know the true identity of Kaspar Hauser? Where Ambrose Bierce ended up? What happened to the Lost Colony?”

“I was thinking more, I want you to tell me who’s trapped inside that snow globe, and why.”

Viscarro’s hands curled into configurations even more clawlike than usual. “Those are secrets that touch on me, Marla.”

She shrugged. “You didn’t say no personal questions. I like to know about the people I work for.” She knew Viscarro would keep his promise. Sorcerers would twist, lie, and deceive all day and all night, but if they said they’d do something, they did it – a sorcerer’s word was one of his most valuable currencies.

“Fine.” He spun in his desk chair, looking at the snow globe, which stood between a blue glass bottle and a Faberge egg, on a shelf full of similarly dissimilar bric-a-brac. “If you must know, my mother, Regina Viscarro Watt, is trapped inside the snow globe. As for why? Because she’s incredibly dangerous.”

“How so?”

“I’m sure your sense of history is as stunted as those of every other person in their twenties, but perhaps you’ve heard of the Blizzard of 1899? No? Well. It snowed in the South, that year. It snowed in Florida – the only time in recorded history Florida has ever experienced sub-zero weather. It snowed in Louisiana. There were ice floes in the gulf of Mexico. Where we lived, in Erasmus Tennessee, the temperature dropped to 30 below zero. And do you know what caused that cold? My mother did. She was a weather witch with ice water in her veins. And do you know
why
she froze the South? Because my stepfather wouldn’t take her on vacation. She was angry, and she threw a fit, and the world paid the price. It was not the first time she did something like that, nor the last.” He shook his head, and swiveled his chair back to her. “The man you took the snow globe from is my half-brother, and he has been... unreliable since his body was destroyed. The ordeal drove him a bit mad. I felt I would be a better choice for custodianship of our mother. He disagreed. So I sent you to press the issue. I am a dangerous person, Marla, as you well know, but I am nothing – nothing – compared to my mother. The world is a better place with her on this shelf. “

“Wow,” Marla said. “That’s, uh... Wow.” What had she set free? Hell. It wasn’t
her
fault. Viscarro should have given her a bomb that worked.

“Leave me now,” Viscarro said, and turned in his chair to stare at the snow globe some more.

Marla walked out of Viscarro’s catacombs, past hurrying apprentices, down narrow corridors, through brick-lined tunnels, and climbed a ladder to emerge from a manhole not far from her apartment. Autumn was getting a grip on Felport, and there was a definite nip in the air. Winters here were always hard, but did it seem... colder than usual, for October?

“Ice will suffice,” she muttered, and wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself, and set off for home. Maybe this year she’d send her mother a Christmas card. All things considered, maybe the old lady wasn’t so bad.

STORY NOTES

It's always nice to go back and tell stories from Marla's mercenary days. Even if I kill her in a novel someday (which is a distinct possibility), there are countless interstitial stories I can tell from earlier in her life. The villain, Regina Queen, is one of my favorites, and I may return to her someday. She's still out there, after all, working her cold ways. I also like this story because it gives a small glimpse into Viscarro's inner life. He's one of the more cold and unsympathetic characters I've ever written, but I've always had a fondness for his undisguised avarice, and I suspect Marla learned a thing or two about being an arrogant jerk from him.

This story first appeared in an anthology called
The Way of the Wizard
, edited by John Joseph Adams and published by the good people at Prime Books. It's a great anthology. You should track down a copy.

I must thank Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese, and Greg van Eekhout for reading an early version of this story and convincing me to do away with the pointlessly non-linear structure I had at the beginning, which essentially read like I'd chopped up the scenes and put them in random order. (I was trying to be fancy, but sometimes, you don't need to be fancy.)

I would also like to note that I have no mommy issues. My mom is awesome.

If you like this story, you can learn more about Marla at
www.MarlaMason.net
.

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Mommy Issues of the Dead

Story Notes