“Ah,” B said. “So it’s more of an indirect sort of certain doom that faces your city in your absence.”
Marla shrugged. “Destruction is destruction. Believe me, I know.” She sat on the bed, stretching, working the last of the knots out of her shoulders and neck.
After a few moments of silence, B said, “You’re not going to rescue Rondeau, are you?”
“I can’t. If I do, Mutex gets away, and I don’t get the Cornerstone, and I disappear. Which will be lucky for me, what with a raging frog-monster and resurrected warriors destroying everything in my absence.”
“Rondeau is your friend.”
“Best one I’ve ever had,” she said. “My brother in arms.” I’m the hardest one of all.
“I’m going to save him, then,” B said.
Marla considered possible responses to that. “Oh, good,” she said at last. “That way two of my friends will die.”
“I’m your friend?”
“Yeah. For what it’s worth. Which, as you know now, isn’t much, at least not under these circumstances.”
“It’s a lot better than being your enemy,” B said. “I have to go save him.”
“I’ll bring flowers to your funeral.” B didn’t answer. “Why do you have to save him? I admire your—I don’t know, your pluck—but why do you have to?”
“Because I saw Rondeau in a dream, too,” B said quietly. “And if he dies, you fail, and Mutex succeeds, and this city, and then the rest of the world, falls.”
“Oh,” Marla said. “You might have mentioned this before.”
He shrugged. “It was just last night. It was one of those dreams, and I haven’t found a ghost to interpret it, but it was pretty clear. Rondeau dying, and then you dying, and me, and everybody.”
“So the fate of the world depends on Rondeau? It just seems so…unlikely.” And maybe it was a lie. B was an actor, and they were, by nature, convincing liars. Maybe B was just trying to convince her to save Rondeau. Then again, he hadn’t given her cause to mistrust him yet, and it wasn’t hard to envision a situation when a quick Curse or a knife-thrust from Rondeau could affect things significantly.
But how could she save him? Who could she bring in? There was no time to fly anyone into the city, not even time to find local talent, assuming Mutex hadn’t killed or frightened off all the sorcerers in the Bay Area. B was willing to try to save Rondeau, but he was a seer, not a soldier. How could he possibly—
Marla thought of a way. A dangerous, stupid, terrible way. The only way.
She unclipped the silver stag beetle pin from her throat, and removed her white-and-purple cloak. “Put this on,” she said. “You won’t be able to use it very well, no more than you could use a katana properly if a samurai handed the sword over to you, but I can teach you enough to keep you from chopping off your feet. And, in truth, it’s more like a machine gun than a katana. If you aim it with a little care, the weapon will do most of the work.”
B didn’t move to touch the cloak. “I saw what you became when you wore that,” he said. “You became a…thing. Like a jaguar made of darkness. Like a bruise with teeth.”
“Only while the purple is showing,” Marla said. “The white makes you an angel, heals you, keeps you strong. The purple…” She shrugged. “Darkness. Teeth. Yes. All the ugly things you have to be, sometimes, to defeat things that are even uglier. Like I said on Bethany’s train, we’re past simple things like good and bad, and into the realm of the practical. There’s more to it than that. After you use the cloak, a little bit of what makes you human is pushed down, suppressed—it might even wear a little bit of your humanity away permanently. I’ve used the cloak dozens of times over the years, often enough to be frightened of using it more, but if you use it once or twice, it shouldn’t damage you forever.” At least, I don’t think so.
B took the cloak and let it drape over his arm, the white showing, the purple lining only visible in glimpses. “Teach me,” he said.
“Okay,” Marla said. “Only we’d better do this on the roof. I don’t want to have to pay for damage to the room.”
On the roof of the hotel, B was magnificent, except he wasn’t; the cloak was magnificent. Anyone wearing the purple would become a minor god of death and movement, a flitting dark shadow with the sinuous lines of a jungle cat, blurred by a soft-focus nimbus of shadow, and so it was with B, attacking the light-ghosts Marla conjured for him to practice against, dancing figures that resembled Marla herself, but drawn with strokes of lemony light. Marla had only once seen another wear the cloak, when the undying bird-mage Somerset took it from her briefly, but now that she wasn’t in particular fear for her life, she could admire the artifact’s terrible beauty.