Blood Engines(87)
B nodded. By then it was dark, and the nearly full moon and the stars in the sky were the only constants. City lights twinkled on, and off. The night went on, and they slept in shifts, through the changing of worlds. Once there were submarine periscopes rising from the waters in such profusion that it looked like a gray metal forest. Once there were sea-monsters, prehistoric creatures that still lived, their graceful necks rising from the waves, their football-shaped heads looking lazily about, mouths full of knife-blade teeth, opening and closing. Once passenger pigeons blackened the sky above. Once Marla could have sworn she saw the lights of a sprawling city on the moon, but B was asleep, so she couldn’t ask him, and she wasn’t sure, once that world slid into another. For a while a giant statue loomed on the Marin Headlands, depicting a smiling young man wearing a top hat and an early-20th-century-style suit with a watch chain. After a moment Marla recognized him from pictures in her inherited library of the secret history of magic—it was Sanford Cole, the presiding secret genius of early San Francisco, court magician to Emperor Norton, and, according to Finch, the one who’d made Golden Gate Park blossom. She recalled Finch’s story about how Cole would return in the hour of the city’s greatest need, and wondered where he was now, when his city most assuredly needed him. Apparently he’d done great things in this variation of the world, at least. If they were going to be here for more than five or ten minutes, she might have made the effort to track him down and ask for his advice.
Finally dawn came, in a world where great bonfires roared on every high hill within sight, and by the time the sun was visible in the eastern sky, they were shivering in the cold, and there was a glacier visible to the north. “When will this end?” B asked through chattering teeth.
“Soon,” Marla said, and it was half a prayer, because they only had hours now, before Mutex would be in the park. They had to meet Ch’ang Hao, assuming he’d made it back from Colombia with the snake, and Marla had to cast a spell, and then she had to actually deal with Mutex. None of which was possible while they flipped through this selection of alternate realities.
The cold vanished, and the sudden shift in temperature made Marla shiver even harder. B, who was looking toward the city, gasped, and then whimpered. “Marla,” he said.
Dreading what she would see, her intuition giving her some hint of what it would be, Marla turned her head.
The city was no different than the one they came from, with Coit Tower and the TransAmerica Pyramid the most obvious landmarks. But there was smoke rising, and something the rich green color of jungle leaves moving beyond the buildings, visible only in brief flashes. There was a smell in the air, too, of turned earth, and rotten vegetation, and warm blood. That green something was almost as high as the tallest skyscrapers, and with a shuddering crash an apartment building tumbled over in an avalanche of concrete and glass.
Tlaltecuhtli shouldered its way through the gap in the skyline. Marla’s eyes could scarcely comprehend its immensity. Nothing so large should be able to move on land. It was like a dark green mountain, its eyes yards across, perfectly black. It stood up on its rear legs, rising above the nearest skyscraper, and Marla’s mental sense of scale gave way; it was as if she were looking at a model of the city that some child had dropped his pet frog into. Then Tlaltecuhtli opened its vast mouth, revealing fangs the size of buildings, and in the endless darkness of its maw there were red flutterings. Tlaltecuhtli vomited forth a torrent of hummingbirds. A flock of them—no, a hover of them, a charm of them, a troubling. The hummingbirds settled over the buildings like a ruby-red mist of blood, and in the fluttering they transformed into men, warriors wearing bright feathers and golden jewels, armed with swords. The warriors poured down into the streets, on their way to harvest hearts for their gods.
“Her mouth opens on the Land of the Dead,” Marla whispered, and knew they were too late, that they’d come back home, to the world of the third possibility. Mutex had succeeded, and his monstrous god was risen. The world was lost. She’d be better off throwing herself into the sea now, probably, because the alternative was to give up her heart on an altar of Mutex’s devising, in the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps, or on the steps of City Hall, or atop Strawberry Hill. Whatever place he’d chosen for his temple. But Marla wouldn’t throw herself into the sea. She’d fight, and gather the surviving sorcerers, even if they were only apprentices and alley wizards and cantrippers, and make them fight in unison, though that was easier to say than to do. It didn’t matter. Mutex wouldn’t beat her. Not without suffering some himself in the process.