Blood Engines(102)

 

“And you’re just going to…rush in?”

 

“You know another way to get where we’re going?”

 

“It might be worthwhile to observe our enemy’s position from a distance, don’t you think?”

 

Marla shook her head. “I wish. Mutex has hidden himself well. That’s part of why he kept getting the drop on the other sorcerers—they couldn’t tell when he was coming or where he was coming from. Once he got the Cornerstone, he made it so clairvoyance, divination, clairaudience, everything fails when it comes to him.”

 

“Ah, but we know where he is now,” Cole said. “The Japanese Tea Garden, yes?”

 

“So?” Marla said. “How does that help it?”

 

“This is my city, Marla,” Cole said mildly, and Marla felt a sudden fierce kinship with him—this was his city, just as Marla’s city was her own. Those other sorcerers, with their ruling council, had just been acting as Cole’s regents, though they hadn’t realized it. “Nothing can be hidden from me here,” Cole said. “I can look upon any part of my city, and no power on this Earth or under it can prevent me from doing so. Do you have a mirror?”

 

Marla opened her bag and lifted out a wad of Styrofoam, bubble wrap, and clear packaging tape. Some sorcerers—Susan, for instance—had ornate hand-mirrors with mother-of-pearl backs inlaid with jewels, but Marla’s scrying mirror was just a shard from a shaving mirror that had belonged to Sauvage, the sorcerer who’d ruled her city before Marla’s tenure. She unwrapped the packaging and revealed the long, triangular sliver of reflective glass.

 

“This has passed through powerful hands,” Cole said approvingly, lifting the glass gently and letting it rest on the upturned palms of his hands. He looked into the glass. “See,” he said, and Marla looked.

 

The glass showed the walled Japanese Tea Garden from above, an image that grew larger when Cole murmured over it, the view zooming past pagodas, stone bridges, paths, and trees. There were bodies, too—dead tourists, dead staff, all with their chests cut open and their hearts removed. The blood still glistened. They’d died recently.

 

Then Mutex appeared in the glass. He held a heart in each hand and squeezed them, blood running out of his fists and spattering the earth around the base of a bigger-than-life-sized bronze Buddha. A pile of blood-speckled fruit—peaches, oranges, strawberries, lemons, and more—lay near the statue. Mutex’s wicker basket was on the ground, open, and yellow frogs carpeted the ground around him, hopping from place to place. A gauzy charm of hummingbirds hovered above him like the roof of a ruby-colored tent.

 

“That statue of the Buddha was not here the last time I saw the park,” Cole said. “What is that near its feet?”

 

The image enlarged, revealing a hole at the Buddha’s feet, a hole that was filling with blood. “There’s something buried in the hole,” Cole said.

 

“A statue,” Marla said, remembering the statue of Tlaltecuhtli that had been stolen from the gallery. “It’s the image of the god he’s trying to raise. He’s feeding it blood.”

 

“He’s dripping blood over the Buddha, too,” Cole said. They both looked into the glass, captivated, as Mutex smeared handfuls of blood and soil over the bronze Buddha’s belly.

 

“Most of the Buddhists I know are fairly easygoing people,” Marla said. “But I think this level of blasphemy would annoy even them.”

 

“The small statue is an offering,” Cole said. “Perhaps a remembrance—something to awaken the spirit of Tlaltecuhtli and help it recall its true form. But the Buddha is the seed crystal. You see? The god can’t appear without a body, it needs some physical form at its center. It’s the same way an oyster needs a bit of grit inside it to form the center of a pearl. The Buddha is made of forged metal, a substance drawn up from the treasury of the Earth, which is appropriate for the god Mutex hopes to raise.”

 

“And from a distance, if the light isn’t good, a Buddha in the lotus position is shaped sort of like a sitting frog,” Marla said.

 

“It takes a certain amount of imagination to see that,” Cole said, “but I suspect you’re right. We’re looking at the inner core of a god.”

 

“But where’s the Cornerstone?” Marla said. “I don’t see it.”

 

“There,” Cole said, and the view moved beneath a long bridge. The Cornerstone sat beneath the bridge, warping the light around it, surrounded by a ruby mist of hummingbirds.