Untitled

where he was coming from. Once he got the Cornerstone, he made it so clairvoyance,
divination, clairaudience, everything fails when it comes to him.”
“Ah, but we know where he is now,” Cole said. “The Japanese Tea Garden, yes?”
“So?” Marla said. “How does that help it?”
“This is my city, Marla,” Cole said mildly, and Marla felt a sudden fierce kinship with
him—this was his city, just as Marla’s city was her own. Those other sorcerers, with
their ruling council, had just been acting as Cole’s regents, though they hadn’t realized
it. “Nothing can be hidden from me here,” Cole said. “I can look upon any part of my
city, and no power on this Earth or under it can prevent me from doing so. Do you have
a mirror?”
Marla opened her bag and lifted out a wad of Styrofoam, bubble wrap, and clear
packaging tape. Some sorcerers—Susan, for instance—had ornate hand-mirrors with
mother-of-pearl backs inlaid with jewels, but Marla’s scrying mirror was just a shard
from a shaving mirror that had belonged to Sauvage, the sorcerer who’d ruled her city
before Marla’s tenure. She unwrapped the packaging and revealed the long, triangular
sliver of reflective glass.
“This has passed through powerful hands,” Cole said approvingly, lifting the glass
gently and letting it rest on the upturned palms of his hands. He looked into the glass.
“See,” he said, and Marla looked.
The glass showed the walled Japanese Tea Garden from above, an image that grew
larger when Cole murmured over it, the view zooming past pagodas, stone bridges,
paths, and trees. There were bodies, too—dead tourists, dead staff, all with their chests
cut open and their hearts removed. The blood still glistened. They’d died recently.
Then Mutex appeared in the glass. He held a heart in each hand and squeezed them,
blood running out of his fists and spattering the earth around the base of a bigger-thanlife-sized
bronze Buddha. A pile of blood-speckled fruit—peaches, oranges,
strawberries, lemons, and more—lay near the statue. Mutex’s wicker basket was on the
ground, open, and yellow frogs carpeted the ground around him, hopping from place to
place. A gauzy charm of hummingbirds hovered above him like the roof of a rubycolored
tent.
“That statue of the Buddha was not here the last time I saw the park,” Cole said. “What
is that near its feet?”
The image enlarged, revealing a hole at the Buddha’s feet, a hole that was filling with
blood. “There’s something buried in the hole,” Cole said.
“A statue,” Marla said, remembering the statue of Tlaltecuhtli that had been stolen from
the gallery. “It’s the image of the god he’s trying to raise. He’s feeding it blood.”
“He’s dripping blood over the Buddha, too,” Cole said. They both looked into the glass,
captivated, as Mutex smeared handfuls of blood and soil over the bronze Buddha’s
belly.