The Way of the Wizard

Mommy Issues of the Dead T.A. Pratt

“It’s not an assassination, precisely.” Viscarro, the subterranean sorcerer who dwelt in the tunnels and vaults beneath the seen-better-days city of Felport, tinkered with an oddly beautiful contraption on his desk, all brass gearwheels and copper spheres on articulated arms, all together no bigger than a football. “It’s more that I want you to physically inconvenience someone by tricking him into putting high explosives inside his chest cavity. But it’s not murder, because Savery Watt is already dead.”

Marla Mason propped her feet up on Viscarro’s desk, because it annoyed him. “I’ve got nothing against the dead. Dead people don’t bother anybody. You, on the other hand… ”

Viscarro bared his hideous teeth at her. “Do you want to engage in pointless banter, or do you want to find out about the job, you insolent child?” He had the patience of a trapdoor spider when it came to plotting, planning, and scheming, but he got irritated quickly when dealing with people who didn’t just nod and say “Yes, master.” He had about fifty apprentices, pale cowed creatures who filed his vast archives, sorted the mountains of junk he bought from auction houses and estate sales in search of magical artifacts for his collection, and — for all Marla knew — competed for the honor of giving him nightly massages complete with happy endings. Of all the sorcerers she’d worked with in Felport, Viscarro was her least favorite — and competition for that spot was fierce—but he paid well for her mercenary services. Marla didn’t ask money for these jobs: she asked for knowledge and power, and Viscarro had promised to teach her a trick and tell her a secret in exchange for this job. She knew what trick she wanted. She was still thinking about the secret.

“Lay it on me, old man.”

Viscarro nodded. “It’s simple. I want you to blow up Watt’s body. But don’t worry — it won’t violate your silly moral code. He can always get another body, you see. Watt is a lich.”

“Which ones are liches again? Do they drink blood or eat corpses? I forget.”

Viscarro sniffed. “Neither. A lich is essentially a corpse animated by its own ghost. For some reason — genetics, a curse, something else — conventional paths to sorcerous immortality were closed to Watt, so in order to cheat death he performed a dark ritual. He put his soul into a phylactery — some small object, traditionally a gem — committed suicide, and awakened as an undead creature. His original body was recently destroyed in an explosion, so he’s building a new one. He thinks he’s buying a power source for his new body — I gather it’s a junkpile robot sort of thing — but he’s actually buying… well. Kaboom.” Viscarro tapped the weird little engine on his desk to set it spinning, and it whirred away, generating a low hum, as its spheres orbited and gears interlocked.

“So that thing’s a bomb?”

“It is both a perpetual motion machine and a bomb.”

“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion.”

“Of course not. This device steals small quantities of velocity and momentum from various other sources — passing cars, grandfather clocks, merry-go-rounds, even the rotation of the Earth. Built by a mad technomancer named Canarsie a century ago. With this, Watt won’t need to recharge his batteries.”

“It’s not your style to blow up some fancy old magical thing. Won’t it leave a hole in your collection?”

Viscarro waved a hand, though it was more shriveled and clawlike than most things people called hands. Marla didn’t know how old he was, but “ancient” was a good guess. “I have two other examples of Canarsie’s engines. Besides, Watt is going to trade me for a certain… item I require.”

“So why the explodey double-cross?”

“Hmm? Oh, because he’s planning to cheat me, of course. He knows I won’t go in person—” Viscarro had agoraphobia, though Marla thought it was weird he found the outside world scary, since most of the outside world would be scared of him—“and he plans to kill my messenger, claim she never arrived, and keep the engine and the snow globe for himself.”

“Snow globe? You’re sending me to bomb a guy and steal his snow globe?”

“It’s a very special snow globe. Nothing you’d want — it’s more cursed than magical. But it has a great deal of sentimental value for me,” Viscarro said, entirely straight-faced. He was about as sentimental as a liver fluke, but as long as he paid her, what did she care? As far as selling her services went, she drew the line at murder, but if Watt was a lich, it wasn’t murder, anyway — it was monster-killing.

“How do you know he’s planning to screw you over?”

Viscarro frowned. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and we are much alike, and it’s what I would do, if our positions were reversed.”

“Okay. The price is right. I’m up for it. Where am I going?” Her mercenary gigs had taken her to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago so far, and she hoped this one was somewhere closer, Boston or Pittsburgh, so she wouldn’t have to spend much time out of Felport. She hated traveling. This city was her home.

“Just outside a wide place in the road called Sweetwater, in the North Carolina mountains. Beautiful, especially in autumn. The colors of the leaves, you know. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I can remember.”

“What’s a sorcerer doing there? Aren’t the southern Appalachians all… ” She waved her hands vaguely. “I don’t know. Black bears and straw hats and moonshine and inbreeding?”

“Provincial little bigot,” Viscarro said. “I was born in the South. I remember Lexington-style barbecue quite fondly, though no one makes it right up here. And, no, Mr. Watt does not make moonshine.” Viscarro paused. “He makes methamphetamine these days, mostly.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring.”

Viscarro finished tinkering with the engine and passed it over. “One other thing. You can’t take your cloak with you on this trip.”

Marla touched the silver stag beetle pin that held her white-and-purple cloak around her shoulders. “What are you, my mother? Why should you get a say in my fashion decisions?”

Viscarro bared his teeth. “That cloak isn’t an item of fashion, it’s a weapon.”

“Okay, fine — then why should I let you dictate which weapons I bring with me?” Marla was not a big fan of stipulations and limitations. Her life wasn’t a sonnet; it didn’t benefit from the rigors of a restrictive form. She liked having lots of options on a mission, and the cloak she’d found hanging in a thrift store on her twentieth birthday was her ultimate option: while wearing it, any wounds she received healed rapidly, and if she needed to, she could unleash the cloak’s destructive powers, and become a one-woman massacre.

Viscarro shook his head. “The cloak reeks of magic. I want Watt to think you’re merely a messenger. If he sees you arrive in that thing, he’ll know you’re a true operative. Besides, I want to see how you handle a situation without that advantage. A lot of people say you’re a talentless little hack, you know, who just lucked into finding a potent magical weapon. Sometimes when people want to hire you, they don’t say, ‘I should hire Marla,’ they say, ‘I should hire the girl with the cloak.’ How does that make you feel?”

She snorted. “Feelings are stupid. But I don’t need the cloak. I can bust heads just fine on my own.” And maybe she was too dependent on her artifact. She didn’t like the way using the cloak made her feel, anyway — it was much older than her, and quite possibly smarter, and absolutely more malevolent, and sometimes when she was wearing it, she felt almost like the cloak was wearing her instead.

“If you’d like to leave it with me, in, ah, storage—” Viscarro began.

“What, so you can lock it in a vault and give me back a duplicate cloak with some shitty temporary enchantments and hope I don’t notice?” Viscarro’s covetousness in regard to magical artifacts was legendary, and he didn’t scruple when it came to acquiring new toys for his vast collection. Obsession like that wasn’t healthy. Doubtless indicative of some deeper psychological flaw. Probably something to do with his upbringing. “I’ll make my own arrangements.”

Marla caught a pre-dawn flight to the airport in Greensboro North Carolina, and one of Viscarro’s local contacts drove her the two hours or so into the mountains near Sweetwater. The driver was a fairly attractive guy with short blond hair, about Marla’s age, but he had his jaw wired shut, so his conversation was limited mostly to grunts. Marla wondered if the wiring was due to an injury or if Viscarro was just worried about the guy saying things he shouldn’t.

She’d never been to the mountains before, and she had to admit, the drive had some beautiful moments — the side of the road dropping away to reveal vast chasms of green, with hazy blue mountains in the distance — but for the most part it just made her uncomfortable, especially when hillsides hemmed the road in tight on both sides, exposed rock faces looking like avalanches waiting to happen, and even the scenic lookouts grew disturbing as she contemplated all that… nature—just sitting there, empty and waiting. Marla lived in the heart of a city and loved it, and the only green she saw on a regular basis these days was the occasional windowsill garden and grass growing up through cracks in the asphalt. She felt a little better when they passed antique malls and Christmas tree farms — crass humanity and consumerism made her feel more at home.

The driver stopped the car in the middle of a curving road crowded by pine trees and pointed at a nearly-hidden steep driveway that wound up the side of a wooded hill. “Bet that driveway’s a bitch to get up in the winter,” she said. “My guy’s up there?”

The driver nodded and held up two stopwatches, each set for one hour. He pressed their start buttons simultaneously.

“You’ll be back for me here in an hour, when this runs out?” Marla said.

Another nod.

“And if I’m not here, you’ll come back every hour after that until I am here.”

He couldn’t frown, exactly, but he tried to, winced at however it felt, and shook his head.

Marla grinned, reached into her knapsack, and withdrew her favorite dagger. The blade was old, but she kept it sharp. “That wasn’t a question, Jaws. You will be here every hour, or I will come find you after I’m forced to make my own way out of this place. I know all kinds of magic — how to start fires with a word, how to insinuate myself into dreams, how to make myself unseen — but I won’t bother with any of that stuff. I’ll just cut your balls off with this knife. After I do some whittling first to make the blade duller. Understood?”

Wide-eyed, he nodded, rather more vigorously this time.

“Excellent. Maybe pick up some doughnuts or something for the drive back, too, huh?” She slipped out of the car and headed up the driveway, and though she was in good shape, she soon felt a burn in muscles she didn’t often use. She’d have to start running up and down stadium bleachers or something — just traveling the relatively flat streets of Felport wasn’t sufficient conditioning, obviously.

Birds sang, a cool breeze blew — that first nip of autumn in the air — and she had to admit, the fall foliage was pretty, where it peeked out from the zillions of evergreens that mostly surrounded her. The driveway petered out next to a low cinderblock foundation that had probably once supported a mobile home, and she sighed, looked around, and followed what might have been a deer path deeper into the woods. The perpetual motion machine in her bag was heavy as hell, and every time it bumped and shifted she got more anxious, even knowing the ball of plastic explosive at its heart wouldn’t explode until she pressed the button on the garage door opener in her jacket pocket.

The trail opened into a clearing with two structures: an old-school vaguely oval-shaped silver RV, and a cozy little log cabin, some serious Abe Lincoln shit. The door of the RV banged open and two simian-looking skinheads in denim overalls bounded out, followed by an invisible cloud of chemical stink. The men held new-looking black scatterguns at ready position. They were both potential medalists in the Olympics of Ugliness, but the one on the right showed him her teeth, and they were green where they weren’t yellow, and yellow where they weren’t black, and black where they weren’t entirely absent, so he won the gold medal by the skin of his nasty teeth. “She don’t look like the law,” Silver Medal Ugly said.

“Looks like a college girl who got lost,” Gold Medal said.

“I’m here to see Mr. Watt. I’ve got a delivery for him from Felport.”

Silver grunted. “Go on in then.” He gestured at the cabin’s front door.

“Just like that? You don’t want to search me for weapons or anything?”

Gold laughed. “You pull a weapon on Mr. Watt and he’ll take it away from you and stick it where God split you.”

“The ladies must love you guys,” Marla said, and went for the front steps. She wondered if she’d have to fight those two after she blew up their boss, or if the confusion would cover her escape. Maybe the explosion would make the silver trailer, which doubtless held a meth lab full of assorted inflammables, go up in flames too. She didn’t murder people, but if they turned out to be collateral damage, well, they were in a dangerous line of work, and she wouldn’t feel guilty.

She knocked, and a voice that sounded like air whistling through pipes and blowing over bottle tops, and puffing out of a bellows said, “Come.”

Marla opened the door and stepped inside, but she didn’t see anybody, just a bunch of junk. The cabin was small, crowded with shelves that held a godawful profusion of knick-knacks and gimcrackery, including — she was dismayed to note — at least forty or fifty snow globes lined up on several shelves. A table made out of a big cable spool held a half-dissected car engine, and a low workbench along one wall was scattered with bits of metal shavings and fragments of wire, various tools hanging on the wall above it. And right in the middle of the floor there was a heap of junk almost as tall as her, car grilles and a refrigerator door and shiny hubcaps and long hinged metal bars and fist-sized glass fuses and rubber hoses and—

The top of the junk pile turned toward her, two amber lights glowing, and that fluting voice emerged in a puff of diesel-scented air, saying, “You brought me the engine?”

Viscarro had told her Watt was a “a junkpile robot,” but she’d expected something more robot and less junkpile. “Yes, sir. You have the snow globe?”

A few puffs of high-pitched air emerged, and Marla assumed it was his version of evil laughter, because evil sorcerers enjoyed their evil laughter. “I do have it. But first let me inspect your merchandise.”

Marla shrugged, removed the engine from her knapsack, and held it out to him. Watt extended a multi-hinged arm that terminated in a profusion of crazily jointed fingers and grasped the engine, flicked it into motion, and watched as it spun. “Marvelous.” He reached into his… chest — Marla guessed — and opened what appeared to be a circuit breaker panel. While he was absorbed in putting the engine into his chest and attaching it to various cables, Marla eyeballed the snow globes. Typical souvenir junk: snowman, Santa Claus, Eiffel Tower, Hollywood sign — like it ever snowed there—clowns, polar bears, Christmas tree, a menorah, mountains, a pyramid, sailing ships…

But they were all currently snow-free, since no one had shaken them up recently. All but one. One snow globe on the top shelf — about the size of a baseball mounted on a round black base — was full of swirling snow, nothing in view but churning whiteness. Now, maybe it was some fancy wind-up or battery-powered snow globe or something — Marla didn’t keep up with the cutting edge in snow globe technology — but so far it was the likeliest one to be magic. She stepped closer, peered in at the glass, and saw what looked to be a tiny shapeless black figure moving in among the whiteness, disappearing and reappearing in swirls of snow.

“I’ll be taking this.” She stood on tiptoe and snatched the snow globe down.

“No, you won’t.” Savery Watt’s eyes began to glow more intensely. “I think I’ll wipe your mind and sell you to some gentlemen I know in the next valley instead.”

“Praesidium,” Marla said, though she thought using incantatory trigger words in Latin was dumb — why couldn’t she just say “protection” or “force field” or something? But Viscarro had woven the spell, so she was stuck with his technique. She felt the spell click into place, the room around her becoming faintly shimmery as if seen through warped glass, and then triggered the garage door opener in her pocket.

No explosion. She jammed the button harder, to similar lack of effect. Shit. Was it a double cross? No, Viscarro wanted the snow globe, she believed that, and the spell he’d designed to protect her from the explosion was working, after all. He’d probably just had one of his idiot apprentices put the bomb together and not bothered to double-check the work.

Fortunately the magical shell protected her just fine against the jagged lances of lightning that sprayed from Watt’s body. Marla ran as fast as she could—“run like your ass is on fire and your head is catching,” her mother used to say — and the force field bobbed around her like an impregnable soap bubble. Which was fine as far as that went, but the bubble wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes. Watt bellowed behind her — high pitched bellowing, yes, but still loud — and Gold and Silver Ugly popped out and started firing at her, shots bouncing harmlessly off her shield… for the moment.

She pulled the stopwatch out of her pocket. The whole thing, walk and all, had taken only twenty-eight minutes, so even if she hauled ass down the driveway, Jaws wouldn’t be there waiting to pick her up yet. She had to lose her pursuit first, so Marla veered into the trees and started looking for a place to go to ground. For the first minute her force field snapped tree branches all around her, leaving a clear trail, no doubt, but then the field sputtered out and she started stepping more carefully, trying to cover her tracks, though she was crap as a woodsman.

The noise of Watt crashing around behind her was still audible, but getting quieter. She was about to cast a look-away spell to make herself less noticeable — it probably wouldn’t fool Watt, but it might work for his meth monkeys — when she jumped over a big log and found a steep drop-off on the other side. Her mom always said “Look before you leap,” which invariably pissed Marla off, both because it was a stupid cliché and because her mother liked having one-night-stands with abusive rednecks and was thus hardly qualified to counsel caution, but this was a situation where the advice could have helped.

Marla managed to snag the stem of a bush as she fell instead of rolling down the hill. As far as upsides went, she’d had better. And to make matters worse, as Marla clung halfway down a muddy hillside in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother. She hadn’t seen the woman in almost seven years, since running away at fifteen, and she didn’t miss her much at all, but she had to admit, life with her was better than waiting for a junkyard robot to come kill you. Marla’s mom had been most tolerable during her occasional forays into 12-step programs, though she usually hit a wall right around step 4: making a searching and fearless moral inventory. Marla’s mom wasn’t much for introspection. In that respect, mother and daughter had something in common.

Marla decided to do a fearless personal inventory of her own, though — not of her morals, but of her resources.

In the hand not clutching the bush, she held a battered leather knapsack, which had slid off her shoulder and nearly tumbled down the hill — it seemed a lot more like a mountainside than a hillside to her, but she was from Felport by way of Indiana, so what did she know from mountains? — which would have been bad, since the bag contained various valuable things, fragile and otherwise, including:

A pair of knives: an antique dagger her mentor had given her, and another balanced for throwing that she’d purchased herself;

A coil of thin, strong line fifty feet long, attached to a clever collapsible grappling hook;

A pair of brass knuckles with a wicked inertial enchantment worked into the metal, perfect for face-punching;

Spare socks;

A rain poncho;

A slightly-rusty Altoids tin that contained a survival kit in miniature, consisting of a small signal mirror, waterproof matches, flint and a little hacksaw blade, cotton balls, a tiny (non-magical) compass, a brass wire small animal snare, a twist of nylon fishing line with fishhooks, a bit of candle, a flashlight the size of a lipstick, a plastic bag for carrying water, and iodine tablets;

And, of course, a cursed snow globe. Everything else would be more or less useful if she had to hide out in the woods overnight — hideous thought — but she wasn’t sure what good the snow globe could possibly do her.

For now, if she could get the grappling hook out and snag it on the bush she was clinging to, then she could lower herself down this slope, hoping it didn’t end in a river or leg-breaking deadfall or something, and from there maybe hike to high ground, climb a tree, figure out which way the road was, hike that way, and maybe possibly get to her extraction point before—

“She’s down there!” shouted a voice up on the ridgeline. Sounded like one of the meth-lab-monkeys.

“So go down and get her,” Watt said, his voice weirdly high and fluting and artificial, but his annoyance and impatience still coming through loud and clear.

Oh well, Marla thought. Let’s go, gravity. She relinquished her grip on the bush. Marla bumped and slid and rolled along, collecting a full suite of bruises. Damn I wish I had my cloak, she thought, and then she rolled over an especially big rock and went airborne.

Marla sailed through the air, though not far, since falling human bodies are not especially aerodynamic. She landed in a mound of damp leaves at the base of the hill and sat up groaning, but nothing was broken, just generally battered. Marla tore open her knapsack, slipped on her brass knuckles, considered her knives, and finally just lifted out the snow globe. Running away hadn’t worked so well, and from the sound of things Watt and his imps were coming down the hill in a more controlled way than she had, so it was time to make some kind of stand.

The scatterguns came sliding down the hill first, no doubt lost in transit, and Marla grinned. That was a bit of luck. She snatched up one gun and chucked the other behind her into the trees. The meth monkeys landed a moment later, covered in mud and not too happy about it, and they looked less happy when Marla pointed the gun at them, low, and fired. They both collapsed, their legs riddled with shot, howling. They’d live, but their injuries probably hurt badly enough they wished they wouldn’t.

Marla tossed the gun down. Shooting the junkyard golem where Savery Watt’s spirit resided wouldn’t even piss him off. It’d be like tossing snowballs at the sun.

Watt trundled down the hill on a combination of tanklike treads and spidery articulated multi-jointed legs. “College girl. Give me the snow globe, and I’ll kill you fast.”

“How about you let me go, or I smash the globe?”

“It’s magical, fool. You can’t just crack the glass.”

Marla lifted her metal-wrapped hand. “Not even with brass knuckles enchanted for extra smashy-ness? I can punch through a bank vault with these.”

“Try it.”

Uh oh. Marla smashed her fist into the top of the snow globe, and, predictably, nothing happened except the tink of metal tapping glass. “Huh.” So that was no good. But now that she looked closer, this was clearly not a mass-produced snow globe, with the glass top glued on — it was more homemade looking, and the base appeared to just be a jar lid painted black, which meant maybe…

Marla twisted the glass top one way, and the base the other way, and at first it didn’t want to give, but she was a champion opener of pickle jars, so she strained, and then—

“No!” Watt screamed, and the woods filled with swirling whiteness, deadening sound and reducing visibility to no more than a foot or two at most.

“You rescued me,” came a voice from within the whiteness.

A woman dressed in ragged black furs stood before Marla, who still held both pieces of the now-empty snowglobe in her hands. She was tall, black-haired, black-eyed, still strikingly beautiful despite being at least twice Marla’s age, and when she spoke, arctic puffs of air emerged from her mouth. She shivered. “I’ve been walking in that snowstorm for… how long? Time is strange in there. What year is it?”

Marla told her. The woman’s lips quirked in a half-smile. “That means I missed the 1936 World Series then. I don’t suppose you know who won?”

“Uh. I don’t really follow sports.”

“No matter. I can look it up.” She waved a hand in front of her face, and the snow that filled the air sizzled and turned to steam, replacing the opaque whiteness with merely misty vapor… allowing them to see Savery Watt, who was trying without much success to trundle his way back up the hill.

“Son,” the woman said, and Watt stopped, then slowly rolled backwards and rotated on his treads to face her.

“Mother,” he fluted.

“Oh hell,” Marla said. “Did I step into a family thing?”

The woman approached her son and touched his robot face. “Oh, Savery, you naughty boy. What have you done with your body?”

“I… it was destroyed in a fire, Mother. An explosion in a, uh, factory I owned.”

“That breaks my heart, baby. I carried that body in my own body, I gave birth to it, and you let it be destroyed? In a fire, no less? I take that as a personal insult.”

“It was an accident.”

“How about trapping me in a jar for all those decades? Was that an accident?”

“I didn’t do that! It was Leland! I just held onto—”

“Do you remember the Robert Frost poem I read to you when you were a boy?” she said. “The one that starts ‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice’? Do you recall how it ends?”

“No, Mother.”

“It ends, ‘I think I know enough of hate / To know that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

“Please, Mother,” Watt said.

She shook her head, sadly. “You had your fire already, my darling. And now… ” Ice flowed from her fingers, covering him in a frosty shell, and his amber lights dimmed. She glanced at the two terrified meth monkeys, waved her hand casually, and they froze in place, transformed into ice sculptures of themselves.

She turned to look at Marla, smiling. “Now, dear, what’s your name?”

“Uh. Marla Mason. And you are…?”

“I call myself Regina Queen.”

Marla blinked. “Doesn’t that mean, like, ‘Queen Queen’?”

She smiled indulgently. “Some people need to be told things twice before they understand them, dear. I’ve been married to two men — bore them both sons — but I didn’t want to keep either of their last names, so I made up my own, suitable to my station. Some called me the Snow Queen, though I’m not from a fairy tale.” She stretched her arms overhead, turning her face up to the sun. “Oh, it’s so nice to be out and about. I love the winter, but that was too much of a good thing. Now. Why did you set me free?”

Marla considered lying, but who knew which lie would keep her from being turned into an icicle? “I was sent to, ah, blow that guy up. Your son. No offense.”

“Of course, of course.”

“And to steal the snow globe, though I didn’t know there was anybody in it.”

“Mmm.” Regina sat cross-legged on the dirt, produced a hairbrush from somewhere not entirely obvious, and began brushing out her long black hair. “Who hired you?”

“A sorcerer in Felport, named Viscarro.”

“I see. I mentioned I was married twice. My second husband was the Reverend Reginald Watt, poor Savery’s father. My first husband, father of my firstborn, was Captain Antonio Viscarro. So I assume your employer is my son Leland? And that my boys had some sort of falling out?”

Viscarro’s name was Leland? He didn’t look like a Leland, but then, he didn’t look like anything except maybe Methuselah. “He didn’t tell me his family history. Ma’am. Just sent me with a dud bomb and orders to steal a snow globe.”

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. 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 disgusting. 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 thirty 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.

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.