Rondeau flipped his knife open and closed, thinking. If this was true, Marla was in the back with a real sorcerer, one who was skilled and nasty enough to switch bodies with someone. Something like that, a meta-rape, incurred a serious karmic debt, but sorcerers powerful and unscrupulous enough to achieve the trick usually had ways to avoid paying the price for such monstrous acts. But if Rondeau went rushing back there to warn Marla, then the real master might do something bad, which Marla wouldn’t be prepared for. And if this old guy was lying, Rondeau would have turned his back on the sorcerer Marla had told him to watch. “Shit,” he said. No course of action seemed like a good one. “Okay, I’ve got this knife ready to slip under your breastbone, so just start backing up. We’re going to ease into the back room and you can tell your story to Marla.”
The old man whimpered. “If my master finds out that I told you, he will kill this body. He has only left me alive to keep up appearances until he is ready to announce himself as his own successor. What he has done is a crime, and the council of sorcerers would not allow him to go unpunished.”
Rondeau hesitated. But his loyalty had to be to Marla. “Sorry,” he said. “If you’re telling the truth, we’ll try to help you.” Maybe that was going too far, since Marla probably wouldn’t give a shit about the hijacked apprentice, but Rondeau would help, if he could. “I have to protect Marla, and that means letting her know what she might be dealing with.”
The master bowed his head and began to shuffle backwards toward the door.
The frog jumped straight for the apprentice, who threw up her hands and spoke a stream of slippery words. The frog stopped in midair, dangling at roughly shoulder-level, kicking its legs.
“Nice bug-in-amber spell,” Marla said. “I don’t know many apprentices who can do that to anything bigger than a mosquito.”
“Thank you,” the apprentice said. “Your compliment honors me.” She went to a shelf and took down a small glass jar, then put on a pair of heavy rubber gloves. She slipped the jar over the hanging frog and screwed the top on.
“You’d better poke some air holes in the lid if you don’t want the frog to die,” Marla said.
“I do not object to the frog’s death.”
The tiny frog hopped around inside the jar, trying to scrabble up the sides of the glass. Marla peered in at the little poison beast. It was a golden, almost metallic, yellow, without any markings at all. “So that’s what killed Lao Tsung, huh? With a little help from his friends. Do you have any idea who might have unleashed the frogs?”
The apprentice frowned. “Our investigation is ongoing—”
“Please. We’re all friends. I’m not here to be a vigilante, or get revenge. I’m just…curious.”
The apprentice nodded, curtly. “Lao Tsung was seen yesterday in a conversation with a man who is unknown to us, an…eccentric stranger. The conversation apparently became quite heated. The man appeared to be Central or South American, and was clothed only in his underwear and some sort of cape. It is possible that he was simply an insane person, shouting as the deranged sometimes do. There have always been mad people in this city, even before you arrived.”
“Stop, you’ll hurt my feelings,” Marla said. Even if she had time for vigilantism, that description wasn’t much to go on. She looked down at Lao Tsung’s body. She might have touched his cheek with her fingers, but she couldn’t, because of the poison. There was no time to deal with these emotions. Her life, and the safety of her city, were on the line now. Without Lao Tsung to tell her the location of the Cornerstone, she had no idea where to go from here. She didn’t have any other contacts in this city. She sighed. “When in doubt, start at the top.”
“I beg your pardon?” the apprentice said.
“I need to talk to the person who runs San Francisco.”
The apprentice sniffed. “That is not the way we do things here. My master is the most senior sorcerer in Chinatown. North Beach is run by a strega named Umbaldo. Russian Hill, the Haight, the Financial District, the Mission, the Tenderloin, they all have their own leaders.”
“No shit,” Marla said. “Imagine that. You think the city I come from is one homogenous mass? I bet you guys have some sort of council, right, some way to resolve disputes?”
“Of course,” the apprentice said.
“And that means somebody has supreme authority, right?”