“This is different,” Marla said. “Anyway, it had better be. Because the same-old same-olds won’t help us find out where Mutex is going to be. He moves fast enough that chasing him is pretty much pointless. We need to get ahead of him and set an ambush.” She glanced toward Alcatraz Island, a great rock in the bay topped with boxy buildings. “How long is this ride anyway?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe. I’ve been on the tour once, but it was a long time ago.”
“We’ll be there in ten minutes. Not much time for us to talk. I’ll just say, you’ve been a help. A greater help than I expected. Don’t let it go to your head, but thanks.”
He nodded, then grinned. “So how do we fill the other nine minutes and forty-five seconds?”
“Casual conversation, I guess.”
“Then tell me about Rondeau,” B said.
“Hmm,” Marla said. “Well, he owns a nightclub back home, likes big band music, hates dogs, and has stupid taste in clothes. Also, he’s an inhuman psychic entity that long ago possessed the body of a little homeless boy, which he still inhabits. He’s been living as a human, more or less successfully, though he does have the ability to Curse in the debased tongue of the lesser gods—that’s one theory anyway—and cause localized, random destruction. He’s been working for me for a few years, and we get along well despite the fact that I ripped his jaw off when he was a little kid. That is, the body he possessed was a little kid. At the time. There’s no telling how long the real-true-essential Rondeau has been alive, if ‘alive’ is even the right term.”
“Huh,” B said. “I was going to ask if he ever dated men, but now I’m not so sure I want to know.”
Marla waved her hand. “Rondeau’s a good person, even if he’s not exactly a person. And, while I’ve never inquired too deeply into his sexual orientation, I’d characterize him as primarily heterosexual but adventurous.”
“Are you a real human being?” B asked.
Marla shrugged. “Born of man and woman, raised by man and woman. Woman anyway. The man was never around much. I grew up in the Midwest, dropped out of high school, and moved to the big city. I worked in strip clubs for a while, mostly as a waitress. That’s where I met Artie Mann, a pretty big-time sorcerer back then. He saw something in me and took me on as his apprentice. I worked for him for a while, then went freelance. Got in good with a man named Sauvage, who ran the city in those days. Then he got murdered, and I tracked down and killed his murderer.” Marla didn’t like to remember that time. She’d almost died at the hands of Sauvage’s killer, Somerset. “Almost by accident, I found myself taking Sauvage’s place. I’ve been in charge of my city ever since.”
“The way that guy Dalton was in charge of San Francisco?”
Marla shook her head. “It’s a little different. Here there’s a ruling council of sorcerers, and they pass the highest position around among themselves. Finch was the one in charge yesterday. After him there was a woman in North Beach, and after her, Dalton. After Dalton, Bethany, and after her, it’s the Chinese guy, who’s still alive and at large, and thus, technically, still in charge. Though, really, Mutex is the one running things now, for all intents and purposes.”
“What does it mean, that you’re in charge?”
“It’s complicated,” Marla said. “I work with civic authorities to some extent, as necessary, but I rarely take a hand in the city’s mundane, day-to-day operations. I…protect my city, mostly, against outside sorcerers moving in, against magical dangers, against tyrants, monsters, shit like that.”
“Does that sort of thing come up a lot? Monsters?”
Marla thought about Todd Sweeney, and the pale dog that had pursued him; about the not-quite-dead sorcerer Somerset and his flocks of pigeons; about the mad chaos magician Elsie Jarrow and her bloody smile; about a dozen other dangers that had appeared during her relatively brief tenure as chief-of-chiefs. “Sure. Monsters, and other things. Other things is why I’m in San Francisco now, actually. There’s someone, another sorcerer, who wants to take my job. And in the pursuit of that goal, she’s going to doom my city. I came here to get something I need to stop her.”
“The Cornerstone.”
“That’s right,” Marla said.
“And Mutex has it.”
“Right again. It’s a pretty useful thing to have.”