Poison Sleep (22 page)

He was in a dark corner of the club, near the stage; this door was probably used to load in the DJ’s gear. The only lights came from the vicinity of the bar, which was invisible from here—the club was in the shape of an L, and the bar was situated along one wall of the short arm, with the main dance floor here before him. Voices came from around that corner, along with the light, and Zealand slipped quiet as a cockroach across the floor, the mold swarming out over his shoes to soften each step. He paused in the shadow of the wall, right around the corner from the bar, and listened.

Marla said, “It’ll all be over tomorrow afternoon, one way or another, unless we fuck things up seriously.”

“You’re going to try to help her, aren’t you?” Rondeau said. “I mean, killing her…that’s a last resort, right?”

Marla sighed. “Ted, when I asked you to tell him what happened, I didn’t ask you to editorialize.”

“Sorry,” said a stranger’s voice—presumably Ted. “It seemed important.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to do to save Felport,” she said. “If that means killing Genevieve, well, that sucks, but better her than everybody and everything else.”

Zealand scowled. He didn’t pretend to understand much about Genevieve, but he had no doubt she was a
victim,
not a villain. He took a dentist’s mirror from his pocket and used it to look around the corner. Marla was at the bar, her back turned, and Rondeau was standing behind the bar, messing around with bottles. Ted was hunched on a bar stool several seats down from Marla, effectively out of the picture. If Zealand timed it right, he could get to Marla before Rondeau knew what was happening. He reached into his pocket for a garrote, but the mold flowed across his hands, forming a tough strand of choking vine. He grinned. This was truly versatile stuff. He crouched, and felt the mold tighten, acting as a second set of muscles. Marla didn’t stand a chance.

A phone rang, then stopped. Marla said, “Yeah, Langford?” Her voice changed, becoming more intense. “You got a fix on him? Well, then narrow it down. Tick-tock, Langford. What do you mean he’s right on top—”

Zealand launched himself around the corner.

Langford, on Marla’s phone, said, “I mean Zealand is right
there,
” and then Rondeau was shouting and pointing, and Ted was turning around on his stool in her peripheral vision, and she started to turn, just fast enough to see Zealand flying through the fucking
air
toward her, his fingers dripping some kind of green shit, more green creeping up his cheeks and neck. He was going to hit her, and there wasn’t time to dive out of the way, there was barely time to flick a dagger out of her sleeve and into her hand, and to raise her hands to meet him, before the impact—

Which never came. Zealand hung still in the air, arms outstretched, ropes of slimy green spiraling out toward her, the nearest one inches from her face. A dozen tendrils, budded from the end, waved impotently, and she knew without a doubt that they were going for her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth, ready to fill her and suffocate her. Marla slid from the bar stool and off to the side, Zealand’s eyes the only mobile thing in his body, tracking her, wide and furious. “What the
hell,
” she said.

Ted held up his hand, which was bleeding, and winced as he picked bits of glass out of his palm. “The glass vial you gave me, with the spider in it,” he said, almost apologetically. “You told me if we saw Genevieve or Zealand, I should crush it—”

Marla grabbed Ted by the shoulders and kissed him on the lips; he was so startled he emitted a little peep. “You get a raise,” she said. “Rondeau! See this man gets a raise! Did you see that?” she said, turning to Rondeau. “He crushed that thing and cast that bug-in-amber spell like
that
.” She snapped her fingers. “Ted caught that motherfucker in
midair
.”

“Good shooting,” Rondeau said. “Do you think we should, I don’t know,
restrain
him before the spell wears off?”

“Oh, sure,” Marla said. “We’ve got a few minutes, though, and he’ll fall straight down like a rock when it gives. All his momentum’s gone.” She walked around Zealand, prodding his body, frowning. She lifted up his coat and tugged his shirt out of his waistband; his skin was swarming with fungus. “You hooked up with some kind of crazy herbomancer?” she said finally. “That’s…weird. I heard you weren’t a big fan of magic.” She circled back around to his front, took out her dagger of office, and cut the vines of vegetation away from his fingers. The severed mold began to turn brown right away, and within seconds it was just flakes of gray dust, impossible even to hold in her hands. She brushed it away, frowning, then met his eyes. “Look, why are you so determined to kill me? How much can they possibly be paying you? I believe in taking pride in your work, but if you keep this up, I’m going to have to execute you, but only after I have my friend Langford put his nasty mind-reading helmet on you. It doesn’t kill you when it sucks out your thoughts, but it makes you
wish
you were dead—it’s like a hangover turned up to eleven.”

“You can’t kill her,” he said, speaking through his involuntarily clenched teeth. “I won’t
let
you kill her.”

“Kill
who
?” Marla said. “What are you—” She stopped. “Shit.”

“The green knight,” Ted said.

“You’re the green knight,” Marla said, cocking her head. “You work for Genevieve? Why would she hire you to kill me? I only decided I might have to kill her a few hours ago!”

“She didn’t hire him,” Rondeau said, and Marla turned, because this was information from a quarter she had
not
expected. “Not at first. I didn’t recognize him right away with that green crap crawling up his face, but this guy was at Gregor’s today, when Nicolette had me tied up. She brought him in to torture me, or at least to scare me into
thinking
he would.”

“Now,
that’s
interesting. You work for
Gregor
?”

“Once,” he said. His lips moved a little more now, which meant the spell was fading. “No more. He’s working with Reave, and I won’t let them hurt Genevieve, either.”

“I’ll be godsdamned,” she said. She’d been suspicious of Gregor, but he was an expert in divination, a jumped-up fortune-teller who’d gotten rich by abusing the stock market. She’d never taken him for a thronetoppler. “What’s gotten into him? He’s allying himself with my enemies, trying to kill me? No wonder he hasn’t been returning my calls—though if he had any sense, he’d be pretending everything was normal. Hell. This is a whole new wrinkle. Look, Mr. Z, me and you shouldn’t be enemies, all right? We have some common ground here—we both want to stop this Reave guy.”

Uncertainty flickered in his eyes, but only for a moment. The green on his hands was beginning to move by itself again, just a little. “You lie. You want to kill Genevieve.”

She sighed. “I’ve been
willing
to kill Genevieve, because she’s the root of all the crazy shit happening out there. Look at you, Zealand—you’re covered in magical
mold,
and I’m guessing that’s her doing. There are towers appearing and disappearing on the streets. There are monsters running loose, people dropping unconscious on the street and disappearing and reappearing, bringing bits of Genevieve’s nightmares back with them. From an urban management standpoint, it’s a bad situation! But I don’t
want
to kill Genevieve. I want to
help
her.” She sighed, rubbed her forehead, and said, “Look. Will you help me if I promise not to kill Genevieve?”

“How can I believe you?” The spell slipped another notch, and he dropped an inch, but still hovered some height above the floor.

“I’ll swear it on the name of my city,” she said. “I’m a
sorcerer,
Zealand—we don’t go around breaking oaths. We do our best to never make them, but our word is all we have. You must know that.”

“Oaths are nice, but hardly unbreakable. You may even be sincere now, but circumstances could change your dedication.”

She sighed. “Okay. We’ll draw a binding circle—I’ll swear not to kill Genevieve, or cause her to be killed by my actions or orders, or allow her to be killed by my willful negligence, and you’ll swear not to kill
me
or cause my death, etc. And if either of us breaks our word, poof, it means
we
die. Big magic. Okay?”

He considered. “That is acceptable. Why the change of heart?”

She shook her head. “Well, for one thing, I can’t get much done with you constantly trying to kill me! You’re pretty badass, and an alliance with you could do both of us a lot of good. For another, these two have been giving me shit for the whole killing Genevieve thing, too, and I’m starting to think maybe all of you have a point. My first loyalty is to Felport, but if I start committing atrocities to keep the city safe…that’s a pretty slippery slope. You think I don’t feel for her? Hell, I wish I had the time to track down Terry Reeves and punch his face into a crater, just for the principle of the thing.”

“Terry who?” Zealand said.

“Reeves. He’s the, what would you call it,
inspiration
for Reave, Mr. King of Nightmares. He raped Genevieve, and she’s such a powerful psychic that his traumatic memory became a living thing with its own nasty hopes and dreams. Reave is like a monster-movie exaggeration of this genuine asshole Terry Reeves.” She shook her head. “Reave is the dangerous one. Help me find a way to stop him. And maybe let Genevieve know that I’m
not
planning to kill her?”

The spell died out, and Zealand fell to the floor, but he didn’t sprawl inelegantly as Marla had expected; the mold must have helped him somehow, because he landed in a graceful crouch, then rose and nodded. “Very well. But Reave is with Gregor. How will you reach him? Gregor’s building is a fortress. I know—they were hiding me there, to keep you from finding me, and I only escaped through Genevieve’s intervention.”

“Oh, we can get in,” Marla said, grinning. “We’re having a meeting there in about forty-five minutes. But first, Ted, bring me the red chalk and the jar of black sand from my office. I need to draw a binding charm here, so Zealand and I can cross our hearts and hope to die.”

W
hen Joshua slid into the back of the Bentley, it took all Marla’s willpower not to jump him. He settled in beside her and gave her one of his dazzling smiles. “I missed you,” he said.

“Good. It’s good to be missed.”

“You lovebirds behave back there,” Rondeau shouted from the driver’s seat. “This isn’t some kind of taxicab-confessions mobile hedonism unit!” Ted, riding up front beside him, paid no attention, but just murmured into his phone, probably taking care of problems Marla hadn’t even noticed yet.

“So what’s the plan, my liege?” Joshua asked. “Hamil told me this is a big meeting of all the sorcerers. I thought that wasn’t scheduled for a couple more days.”

“This is something different. An emergency-session sort of thing to deal with the whole people-getting-sucked-into-dreamland thing.”

“I assumed such were the natural hazards of working in a city full of sorcerers.”

Marla snorted. “
Most
cities of any size are full of sorcerers. But we usually do a good job at keeping the magical disruptions to a minimum, and try to hide our actions from ordinary people. One of my main jobs is keeping a lid on things like mysterious disappearances and spontaneously appearing orange trees. Things are getting out of hand. There’s an end in sight—I hope—but it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and I need some damage control. In times of crisis, the chief sorcerer can compel the assistance of other sorcerers in the city. Think of us as a bunch of crime families, with alliances and allegiances to make it easier to do business. I’m going to call on the other big noises in town so we can lock things down before they get worse. What I need
you
to do is smooth the passage. Nod when I say something, frown and shake your head whenever anyone disagrees with me—nothing too overt, just enough to show that your support is unconditionally with me—and it should have a dampening effect on the usual explosive bullshit that happens anytime more than two sorcerers get together in a room.”

“Understood. Anything else I should know?”

She considered telling him about Zealand, who was even now approaching Gregor’s building from a different direction, and about Gregor’s alliance with Reave, but they were pulling up to the building, and there wasn’t time to get into everything—especially when it came to explaining that she was now allied with the assassin who’d tried to murder them the night before. “Just trust me, and if something unexpected happens, roll with it. And if something
violent
happens, get yourself out of the way. You’re not a fighter, and you’re no good to me dead. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and she couldn’t help herself—she leaned over and kissed his delicious lips.
For luck,
she told herself. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the cold.

Zealand broke into Gregor’s building without much difficulty, thanks to a combination of his natural skills and the ever-increasing genius of the mold, which managed to slip through a crack in the service entrance and crawl several meters down a hallway to disable the security system through the simple expedient of choking the wiring with vegetation; the mold wasn’t smart enough to crack keypad codes yet, it seemed. Getting back up to the higher floors was more difficult, since the elevators were monitored, and the stairwells, too. Zealand called his mold back until all that remained was a spot on each hand and a fuzzy cummerbund against his skin, hidden by his clothes. He made his way to the building’s kitchen and began rummaging through the big industrial refrigerators, finding a platter of roast turkey covered in Saran wrap, a commercial tub of mayonnaise, and a loaf of bread. He made himself a little feast at one of the big prep tables and waited.

He was halfway through his second sandwich when Nicolette appeared with a clatter of braids. She’d added several objects to those previously tangled in her hair—glass beads in the shape of tiny white skulls, knots of thorns wired together, coins with holes punched in their centers, a cat’s-eye marble bigger than a grape in a wire cage.