George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

When it comes to magic, Marla is a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, which makes her supremely adaptable but also means she’s often outclassed in the magic department — forcing her to scrape by with guile and a little help from her ultra-powerful cloak, which can turn her into an unstoppable killing machine (but it grows in power with each use and is always angling to overthrow her mind and take over her body).

Marla has already had to deal with an Aztec god, a woman whose dreams become reality, and an army of zombies. This next story is another action-packed tale in which Marla, early in her career, faces off against several colorful foes.

“It’s not an assassination, precisely.” Viscarro, the subterranean sorcerer who dwelt in the tunnels and vaults beneath the seen-better-days city of Felport, tinkered with an oddly beautiful contraption on his desk, all brass gearwheels and copper spheres on articulated arms, all together no bigger than a football. “It’s more that I want you to physically inconvenience someone by tricking him into putting high explosives inside his chest cavity. But it’s not murder, because Savery Watt is already dead.”

Marla Mason propped her feet up on Viscarro’s desk, because it annoyed him. “I’ve got nothing against the dead. Dead people don’t bother anybody. You, on the other hand… ”

Viscarro bared his hideous teeth at her. “Do you want to engage in pointless banter, or do you want to find out about the job, you insolent child?” He had the patience of a trapdoor spider when it came to plotting, planning, and scheming, but he got irritated quickly when dealing with people who didn’t just nod and say “Yes, master.” He had about fifty apprentices, pale cowed creatures who filed his vast archives, sorted the mountains of junk he bought from auction houses and estate sales in search of magical artifacts for his collection, and — for all Marla knew — competed for the honor of giving him nightly massages complete with happy endings. Of all the sorcerers she’d worked with in Felport, Viscarro was her least favorite — and competition for that spot was fierce —but he paid well for her mercenary services. Marla didn’t ask money for these jobs: she asked for knowledge and power, and Viscarro had promised to teach her a trick and tell her a secret in exchange for this job. She knew what trick she wanted. She was still thinking about the secret.

“Lay it on me, old man.”

Viscarro nodded. “It’s simple. I want you to blow up Watt’s body. But don’t worry — it won’t violate your silly moral code. He can always get another body, you see. Watt is a lich.”

“Which ones are liches again? Do they drink blood or eat corpses? I forget.”

Viscarro sniffed. “Neither. A lich is essentially a corpse animated by its own ghost. For some reason — genetics, a curse, something else — conventional paths to sorcerous immortality were closed to Watt, so in order to cheat death he performed a dark ritual. He put his soul into a phylactery — some small object, traditionally a gem — committed suicide, and awakened as an undead creature. His original body was recently destroyed in an explosion, so he’s building a new one. He thinks he’s buying a power source for his new body — I gather it’s a junkpile robot sort of thing — but he’s actually buying… well. Kaboom.” Viscarro tapped the weird little engine on his desk to set it spinning, and it whirred away, generating a low hum, as its spheres orbited and gears interlocked.

“So that thing’s a bomb?”

“It is both a perpetual motion machine and a bomb.”

“There’s no such thing as perpetual motion.”

“Of course not. This device steals small quantities of velocity and momentum from various other sources — passing cars, grandfather clocks, merry-go-rounds, even the rotation of the Earth. Built by a mad technomancer named Canarsie a century ago. With this, Watt won’t need to recharge his batteries.”

“It’s not your style to blow up some fancy old magical thing. Won’t it leave a hole in your collection?”

Viscarro waved a hand, though it was more shriveled and clawlike than most things people called hands. Marla didn’t know how old he was, but “ancient” was a good guess. “I have two other examples of Canarsie’s engines. Besides, Watt is going to trade me for a certain… item I require.”

“So why the explodey double-cross?”

“Hmm? Oh, because he’s planning to cheat me, of course. He knows I won’t go in person—” Viscarro had agoraphobia, though Marla thought it was weird he found the outside world scary, since most of the outside world would be scared of him—“and he plans to kill my messenger, claim she never arrived, and keep the engine and the snow globe for himself.”

“Snow globe? You’re sending me to bomb a guy and steal his snow globe?”

“It’s a very special snow globe. Nothing you’d want — it’s more cursed than magical. But it has a great deal of sentimental value for me,” Viscarro said, entirely straight-faced. He was about as sentimental as a liver fluke, but as long as he paid her, what did she care? As far as selling her services went, she drew the line at murder, but if Watt was a lich, it wasn’t murder, anyway — it was monster-killing.

“How do you know he’s planning to screw you over?”

Viscarro frowned. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and we are much alike, and it’s what I would do, if our positions were reversed.”

“Okay. The price is right. I’m up for it. Where am I going?” Her mercenary gigs had taken her to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago so far, and she hoped this one was somewhere closer, Boston or Pittsburgh, so she wouldn’t have to spend much time out of Felport. She hated traveling. This city was her home.

“Just outside a wide place in the road called Sweetwater, in the North Carolina mountains. Beautiful, especially in autumn. The colors of the leaves, you know. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I can remember.”

“What’s a sorcerer doing there? Aren’t the southern Appalachians all… ” She waved her hands vaguely. “I don’t know. Black bears and straw hats and moonshine and inbreeding?”

“Provincial little bigot,” Viscarro said. “I was born in the South. I remember Lexington-style barbecue quite fondly, though no one makes it right up here. And, no, Mr. Watt does not make moonshine.” Viscarro paused. “He makes methamphetamine these days, mostly.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring.”

Viscarro finished tinkering with the engine and passed it over. “One other thing. You can’t take your cloak with you on this trip.”

Marla touched the silver stag beetle pin that held her white-and-purple cloak around her shoulders. “What are you, my mother? Why should you get a say in my fashion decisions?”

Viscarro bared his teeth. “That cloak isn’t an item of fashion, it’s a weapon .”

“Okay, fine — then why should I let you dictate which weapons I bring with me?” Marla was not a big fan of stipulations and limitations. Her life wasn’t a sonnet; it didn’t benefit from the rigors of a restrictive form. She liked having lots of options on a mission, and the cloak she’d found hanging in a thrift store on her twentieth birthday was her ultimate option: while wearing it, any wounds she received healed rapidly, and if she needed to, she could unleash the cloak’s destructive powers, and become a one-woman massacre.

Viscarro shook his head. “The cloak reeks of magic. I want Watt to think you’re merely a messenger. If he sees you arrive in that thing, he’ll know you’re a true operative. Besides, I want to see how you handle a situation without that advantage. A lot of people say you’re a talentless little hack, you know, who just lucked into finding a potent magical weapon. Sometimes when people want to hire you, they don’t say, ‘I should hire Marla,’ they say, ‘I should hire the girl with the cloak.’ How does that make you feel?”