George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

She snorted. “Feelings are stupid. But I don’t need the cloak. I can bust heads just fine on my own.” And maybe she was too dependent on her artifact. She didn’t like the way using the cloak made her feel, anyway — it was much older than her, and quite possibly smarter, and absolutely more malevolent, and sometimes when she was wearing it, she felt almost like the cloak was wearing her instead.

“If you’d like to leave it with me, in, ah, storage—” Viscarro began.

“What, so you can lock it in a vault and give me back a duplicate cloak with some shitty temporary enchantments and hope I don’t notice?” Viscarro’s covetousness in regard to magical artifacts was legendary, and he didn’t scruple when it came to acquiring new toys for his vast collection. Obsession like that wasn’t healthy. Doubtless indicative of some deeper psychological flaw. Probably something to do with his upbringing. “I’ll make my own arrangements.”

Marla caught a pre-dawn flight to the airport in Greensboro North Carolina, and one of Viscarro’s local contacts drove her the two hours or so into the mountains near Sweetwater. The driver was a fairly attractive guy with short blond hair, about Marla’s age, but he had his jaw wired shut, so his conversation was limited mostly to grunts. Marla wondered if the wiring was due to an injury or if Viscarro was just worried about the guy saying things he shouldn’t.

She’d never been to the mountains before, and she had to admit, the drive had some beautiful moments — the side of the road dropping away to reveal vast chasms of green, with hazy blue mountains in the distance — but for the most part it just made her uncomfortable, especially when hillsides hemmed the road in tight on both sides, exposed rock faces looking like avalanches waiting to happen, and even the scenic lookouts grew disturbing as she contemplated all that… nature —just sitting there, empty and waiting. Marla lived in the heart of a city and loved it, and the only green she saw on a regular basis these days was the occasional windowsill garden and grass growing up through cracks in the asphalt. She felt a little better when they passed antique malls and Christmas tree farms — crass humanity and consumerism made her feel more at home.

The driver stopped the car in the middle of a curving road crowded by pine trees and pointed at a nearly-hidden steep driveway that wound up the side of a wooded hill. “Bet that driveway’s a bitch to get up in the winter,” she said. “My guy’s up there?”

The driver nodded and held up two stopwatches, each set for one hour. He pressed their start buttons simultaneously.

“You’ll be back for me here in an hour, when this runs out?” Marla said.

Another nod.

“And if I’m not here, you’ll come back every hour after that until I am here.”

He couldn’t frown, exactly, but he tried to, winced at however it felt, and shook his head.

Marla grinned, reached into her knapsack, and withdrew her favorite dagger. The blade was old, but she kept it sharp. “That wasn’t a question, Jaws. You will be here every hour, or I will come find you after I’m forced to make my own way out of this place. I know all kinds of magic — how to start fires with a word, how to insinuate myself into dreams, how to make myself unseen — but I won’t bother with any of that stuff. I’ll just cut your balls off with this knife. After I do some whittling first to make the blade duller. Understood?”

Wide-eyed, he nodded, rather more vigorously this time.

“Excellent. Maybe pick up some doughnuts or something for the drive back, too, huh?” She slipped out of the car and headed up the driveway, and though she was in good shape, she soon felt a burn in muscles she didn’t often use. She’d have to start running up and down stadium bleachers or something — just traveling the relatively flat streets of Felport wasn’t sufficient conditioning, obviously.

Birds sang, a cool breeze blew — that first nip of autumn in the air — and she had to admit, the fall foliage was pretty, where it peeked out from the zillions of evergreens that mostly surrounded her. The driveway petered out next to a low cinderblock foundation that had probably once supported a mobile home, and she sighed, looked around, and followed what might have been a deer path deeper into the woods. The perpetual motion machine in her bag was heavy as hell, and every time it bumped and shifted she got more anxious, even knowing the ball of plastic explosive at its heart wouldn’t explode until she pressed the button on the garage door opener in her jacket pocket.

The trail opened into a clearing with two structures: an old-school vaguely oval-shaped silver RV, and a cozy little log cabin, some serious Abe Lincoln shit. The door of the RV banged open and two simian-looking skinheads in denim overalls bounded out, followed by an invisible cloud of chemical stink. The men held new-looking black scatterguns at ready position. They were both potential medalists in the Olympics of Ugliness, but the one on the right showed him her teeth, and they were green where they weren’t yellow, and yellow where they weren’t black, and black where they weren’t entirely absent, so he won the gold medal by the skin of his nasty teeth. “She don’t look like the law,” Silver Medal Ugly said.

“Looks like a college girl who got lost,” Gold Medal said.

“I’m here to see Mr. Watt. I’ve got a delivery for him from Felport.”

Silver grunted. “Go on in then.” He gestured at the cabin’s front door.

“Just like that? You don’t want to search me for weapons or anything?”

Gold laughed. “You pull a weapon on Mr. Watt and he’ll take it away from you and stick it where God split you.”

“The ladies must love you guys,” Marla said, and went for the front steps. She wondered if she’d have to fight those two after she blew up their boss, or if the confusion would cover her escape. Maybe the explosion would make the silver trailer, which doubtless held a meth lab full of assorted inflammables, go up in flames too. She didn’t murder people, but if they turned out to be collateral damage, well, they were in a dangerous line of work, and she wouldn’t feel guilty.

She knocked, and a voice that sounded like air whistling through pipes and blowing over bottle tops, and puffing out of a bellows said, “Come.”

Marla opened the door and stepped inside, but she didn’t see anybody, just a bunch of junk. The cabin was small, crowded with shelves that held a godawful profusion of knick-knacks and gimcrackery, including — she was dismayed to note — at least forty or fifty snow globes lined up on several shelves. A table made out of a big cable spool held a half-dissected car engine, and a low workbench along one wall was scattered with bits of metal shavings and fragments of wire, various tools hanging on the wall above it. And right in the middle of the floor there was a heap of junk almost as tall as her, car grilles and a refrigerator door and shiny hubcaps and long hinged metal bars and fist-sized glass fuses and rubber hoses and—

The top of the junk pile turned toward her, two amber lights glowing, and that fluting voice emerged in a puff of diesel-scented air, saying, “You brought me the engine?”

Viscarro had told her Watt was a “a junkpile robot,” but she’d expected something more robot and less junkpile. “Yes, sir. You have the snow globe?”

A few puffs of high-pitched air emerged, and Marla assumed it was his version of evil laughter, because evil sorcerers enjoyed their evil laughter. “I do have it. But first let me inspect your merchandise.”

Marla shrugged, removed the engine from her knapsack, and held it out to him. Watt extended a multi-hinged arm that terminated in a profusion of crazily jointed fingers and grasped the engine, flicked it into motion, and watched as it spun. “Marvelous.” He reached into his… chest — Marla guessed — and opened what appeared to be a circuit breaker panel. While he was absorbed in putting the engine into his chest and attaching it to various cables, Marla eyeballed the snow globes. Typical souvenir junk: snowman, Santa Claus, Eiffel Tower, Hollywood sign — like it ever snowed there —clowns, polar bears, Christmas tree, a menorah, mountains, a pyramid, sailing ships…