Poison Sleep (29 page)

“Here goes,” she said, and bent down to dip her blooded fingertip into the cold bay. The water began to roil, and she stepped back to the shore, afraid that if she stumbled into the heaving water, she would become entangled in the birth of a demigod.

It took a surprisingly long time. Marla had always imagined Pegasus springing full-blown from a drop of blood, bursting into life. This was different. They all stood on the snowy sand, watching as the water bulged and bubbled for two minutes, three minutes, four. Finally something came shoving up from under the water, bursting out into the air as if it was being born. “Zealand, now!” she shouted, and he flung out his hands, vines springing forth and hitting the water, binding up the thing in the waves.

Zealand grunted and dug his feet into the sand. “It’s strong!” he shouted. Marla snatched the bridle from Ernesto and waded back into the water. The creature was big, larger than a horse and white as salt, and it did have wings, though the details were hard to see in its thrashing. The head was beaked—was it a gryphon? The beak whipped down toward her, and Marla leaned aside and grabbed for its neck, wrapping her arms around it. The thing lifted its head and Marla rose almost entirely out of the water before being slammed back down into the waves, but she didn’t release her grip. Zealand got another vine around its head and held it steady, so Marla could get her feet under her. She clipped the leather strap around its neck, and managed to get the bit into its beak without losing any fingers. Once she’d cinched up the harness, she grabbed on to the reins, which were wrapped with silver wire.

An electric jolt passed through her, and then it was like she had a whole extra set of limbs. “Whoa,” she said, and climbed onto the thing’s back, which felt a little like climbing onto her
own
back, and settled against its feathered neck, her legs straddling its body in front of the wings. When Zealand saw she had it under control, he let his binding vines fall away. Marla walked the creature forward, out of the waves, onto the sand. She saw double, through her own eyes and through the beast’s, and she felt the sand crunching under her…hooves? But lions didn’t have hooves. What was this thing?

Perhaps noting her disorientation, Ernesto said, “It has the body of a white bull, and the head of a seagull.”

Marla had to concentrate to answer, and before managing to speak, she made the chimera squawk harshly, a gull’s cry amplified by enormous size. “Makes sense,” she managed finally. “Bulls were associated with the god of the sea, just like horses. And seagulls fit, too, as much as anything.”

“Our good luck it’s a seagull,” Ernesto said, in a tone that suggested he was trying to joke. “We’re going to my junkyard, and seagulls love that place, so it shouldn’t have any trouble finding the way.”

Marla let go of the bridle and slid off the beast, which was just a beast again, and not an extension of herself. It stood docilely, the bridle making it into a sort of switched-off robot, and Marla felt a stab of guilt. Was it just an animal? Or was it sentient? Confused, or terrified, or furious? It was the child of a long-dead monster and a long-vanished god. Who knew what its capabilities were? She walked around the chimera, patting its wide flank, squatting down to see if it was, ah, anatomically correct—yes, it was a bull all right, and bigger than most. Great size aside, the body wasn’t too shocking, but that head—glassy black eyes, yellow beak with a darker hook at the end, smooth white feathers—it was bigger than a horse’s head, and terrifying, even if it was a scavenger bird and not a predator like a hawk.

“If we need the element of surprise, I’d say we’ve got it,” Ernesto said. “Reave won’t expect us to come flying in on a white bull. Should we…ah, how do we get on?”

“Can you fashion some kind of harness for us, Zealand? Something we can grab on to?”

“Gladly,” he said, and his mold crawled from his outstretched hand to the beast and began weaving a net around its body, keeping well away from the wings. Strands of the mold ran back to Zealand’s body—if he broke contact, the mold would dry up and blow away. Marla climbed on first, settling herself behind the beast’s neck again. She wanted to whisper in its ear, tell it she was sorry and that she’d set it free soon, but she wasn’t even sure where a bird’s ears were located. She wasn’t going to let Langford dissect it when the job was done, though. The chimera was too strange and beautiful. She’d find a home for it somehow, maybe on the grounds of Blackwing. For now, Marla settled for stroking its feathers. Zealand got on behind her, and Ernesto at the back.

“Everyone got a good grip?” she said. They did, so she put the goggles over her eyes, gripped the chimera’s reins, and learned how to fly.

Nicolette didn’t like Reave’s tower. It was dark and cold, and the corridors were designed to be claustrophobic and disorienting, with spikes protruding at odd angles. The whole place was just
stupid,
not a functional living space at all. Dream architecture wasn’t meant to exist in the real world. She made her way to Reave’s throne room, a hall of polished obsidian floors, with chandeliers made of rib cages. He sat on a throne made of
skulls
—how cliché was that? It looked like the cover to a pulp paperback novel from the ’70s. At least there weren’t beautiful female guards in chain-mail bikinis, and he didn’t have Genevieve chained up in a golden collar at his feet. Not yet anyway.

“Bow before me,” he said when she reached him.

“Suck my ass,” she replied, and grinned when he snarled. “Gregor sent me with a message. You know we have a spy in Marla’s camp?”

“Her new employee, yes? I saw him with her at the meeting last night.”

“Right. He called with some info. You know how all the sorcerers are getting their shit together and taking the battle to the streets?”

“Oh, yes,” Reave said, leaning forward. “They’re fighting my warriors most bravely, trying to hide the battles from the ordinary humans by attacking under cover of night. They cheer when they vanquish a group of my fighters. Fools. They might as well try to soak up the sea with a sponge.”

“Well, all that crap is just a distraction. Our source says Marla has assembled a small team to attack the tower directly, and rescue Genevieve. They should be along anytime now.”

“Mmmm,” Reave said. “That’s a drawback to being so settled in this world now. I can’t just take my tower away on a whim. We’re more or less rooted here, so I suppose she knows where to find us.”

“Yeah, I love the locale, by the way. The junkyard is very postapocalyptic.” She wondered if Reave was even capable of recognizing sarcasm. If so, he didn’t show it. “We should expect Marla, and that turncoat Zealand, and one of the city’s big sorcerers, Ernesto.”

“Thank your master for the information,” Reave said. “And tell him I will have Marla’s head on a spike in my front entryway soon.”

“Second verse, same as the first,” Nicolette said. “We’ll believe it when we see it. You want me to hang around and give you some help repelling the invaders?”

“I do
not,
” he said, and Nicolette shrugged and blew him a kiss. He flinched as if she’d slapped him, and she laughed and turned to leave. Reave would kill her, she knew, if he ever decided he didn’t need Gregor’s help anymore. But Nicolette wasn’t too worried. She was bursting with power now, and she had ideas for all kinds of contingencies. Just because she loved chaos didn’t mean she never made plans.

Now,
this
was flying. No nausea, no risk of permanently pissing off one of the fundamental forces of the universe, no sense of lost control. After a shaky start, Marla got the hang of handling the chimera. She’d never ridden a horse, unless you counted a pony ride when she was six, but it must be very different, trying to
convince
an animal to do your bidding. The chimera was an extension of her own body, and she felt the air pass over her powerful wings, the strength in her shoulders, the thrill of momentum.

The lights of Felport below were intermittent, some areas having lost power, and she glimpsed moments of battle. Her dual vision meant she could look ahead of her and down at the same time. She saw the Chamberlain’s ghosts insinuating their way into a group of shadow-faced men, possessing them, and exploding their bodies in puffs of ash and smoke; Viscarro’s silver-and-gold clockwork automata dispatching a huddled cluster of squid-crab-spider creatures; Granger summoning the spirits of old-growth trees from the park to stride through the streets and smash Reave’s crawling, needle-teethed baby-things into paste. The walking nightmares were no match for Felport’s most powerful sorcerers, but they had the unstoppable advantage of numbers. Marla had to cut Reave’s power off at the head, or her people would win every battle but still lose the war.

They approached Ernesto’s junkyard, giant towers of junked cars surrounded by fences of boards and barbed wire and iron. The spire of Reave’s black tower rose above the massed scrap metal, its ramparts haloed by a dozen of the giant blackbirds Zealand had told Marla about. She banked the chimera lower and swung around to approach the tower from an oblique underside angle, in hopes of startling the blackbirds from underneath. Zealand had one of his pistols out, and he fired neatly into one of the bird’s heads as they approached, causing the thing to squawk and fall a hundred stories to the ground. Amazingly, there was no alarm raised, even when they killed four more of the birds and flew in close to the tower; Marla had worried that the chimera’s white fur and feathers would make it stand out in the dark. Zealand tapped her shoulder and pointed to the balcony at the top of the tower, so that must be where Reave’s rooms were. She arrowed there, and the chimera landed on the balcony with a hard jolt. They waited for a moment outside the high archway that led into the tower’s darkness, but no one came running. “We’re doing good,” Ernesto said, and climbed down. Zealand followed. Marla hesitated—she didn’t want to give up the chimera’s strength, but riding it inside the tower was impractical. She wished there was a way to make it fight for her, since the creature’s beak was formidable, but Langford’s bridle didn’t come with remote control. She made the chimera lay down against the balcony’s outer wall, so it could be hidden from patrolling blackbirds, and then climbed off.

The initial sensation was like having her arms and legs cut off, and she stumbled, feeling several feet shorter than she should have been, but after a few moments of kneeling and taking deep breaths and reacquainting herself with her own standard-issue limbs, she felt better. “Okay,” she whispered. “Genevieve is in here somewhere, I
hope
through that doorway, so let’s go get her.” They crept through a stone archway into the tower.

Zealand was unsurprised to find Reave’s personal chambers devoid of personality. There was a chair, and a hook with a long black coat hanging on it, and a table holding a wide array of long knives. Otherwise it was all bare black stone, with no bathroom, no bed, nothing to suggest that Reave had anything like normal human needs. There were two doors in the room. One had a doorknob. The other had a barred grate and a sliding bolt. “There,” he said, pointing to the cell door.

“Ernesto, guard the other door,” Marla said. He went, carrying the trident from Langford’s lab. She slipped up to the cell door and stole a glimpse into the grate. “She’s in here,” she whispered, and beckoned Zealand.

He began to hope they might pull this off. Zealand looked through the grate, and there she was, his poor Genevieve, slumped in a hard chair in a bare cell. Her head hung to her chest, her hair a tangled mass hiding her face, her yellow blouse stained with dark splotches, her black scarf trailing the floor. A steel bucket rested by her feet, and Zealand felt a surge of profound hatred for Reave—he’d given Genevieve, his creator, a
bucket
to piss and shit in.

Zealand would take her out of here. She would rebuild her palace, and mass an army, and Zealand would lead her host of dreams against Reave’s nightmares, and smash the king of bad dreams to nothingness forever. There was no lock on the door, just the sliding bolt, which Zealand pulled open. The door swung wide with a drawn-out creak, but Genevieve didn’t move.

He hurried to her, reached out, and touched her shoulder.

Genevieve lifted her head—and it wasn’t Genevieve at all, but a shadow-faced man dressed in her clothes and a wig. He scooped up the bucket and flung its contents at Zealand’s face. Zealand lifted his hands instinctively. The contents of the bucket sizzled when they hit, and Zealand screamed. His skin was boiling off. No, not his skin—the mold. The contents of the bucket were killing the mold, and a pain in his back struck so suddenly that he fell to the ground. The mold writhed and tried to abandon his poisoned body, and he saw it crawling across the floor, only to sizzle and smoke and turn brown and die. His back ached, and something wet ran out of him from the place where Reave had stabbed him. When the shadow-faced man rose and stepped over him, Zealand knew it was over—he was no longer a threat. Zealand’s eyes slid closed, and he left the world with nothing but his hundred thousand personal regrets.

The thing that wasn’t Genevieve threw something at Zealand, and the assassin fell. Marla drew her dagger, horrified that she’d been taken in by such a simple ruse, and then she heard a curse and the sound of smashing glass from the main chamber, followed by a stink of raw sewage. She couldn’t worry about that now, and when the shadow-faced man stepped over Zealand, Marla lashed out with her dagger of office, tearing through his face like it was cloth, and he dropped. She was about to check on Zealand when Ernesto cried out for help. Marla spun and went back into Reave’s chamber, where Ernesto stood shoulder to shoulder with a roiling thing of black smoke and dripping sludge—his pollution-golem, released and fighting. A crowd of shadow-faced men pushed through the door, and the golem and Ernesto fell back before them.

“Reave!” Marla shouted. “Why are you hiding behind your goons? Too scared of getting your ass kicked by a girl? Trying to wear me out a little so I won’t spank you quite so hard?” She was
damned
if she was going to face his mindless shadow-killers—she wanted another shot at the man himself, and hoped his pride and misogyny would make it impossible for him to ignore a challenge from a woman.