The Death of Grace Read online

  The Death of Grace

  Tim Pratt

  My mom was driving me back home from a Magic: The Gathering tournament downtown when a silver stag attacked our minivan at the intersection of Milvia and Blake. When I say silver, I don’t mean it was grayish-white or whatever—it was a statue of a stag, maybe a little bigger than life size (I don’t know, I’ve never seen a stag in person), made of silver, and brought to life. It slammed its rack of antlers into the driver’s side while we sat at a stop sign, smashing the window and showering mom with sprays of glass, then wrenched its head free. It stared into the open window at us, its eyes blank and reflective as mirrors. Probably I was screaming?

  Mom brushed the glass off her lap, rummaged in that huge brown purse she lugs everywhere (I call it her Mary Poppins bag, because it’s always stocked with snacks and collapsible umbrellas and painkillers and band-aids and whatever else). She snatched out a leather cord with some little bauble dangling at the end. She closed the charm in her fist, and I thought I saw a flash of orange light between her fingers.

  Then the stag fell over, and hit the ground with a ringing bang. Mom looked at me, eyes wide and worried. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, silently, because I couldn’t manage to say “How do you define ‘okay’?”

  “It’s all right. You’re safe.” I wished she didn’t sound like she was trying to convince herself. She looked around. It was a sleepy summer Sunday afternoon, and there were no occupied cars or pedestrians in sight. She undid her seat belt and said, “Help me load that thing in the back.”

  I got shakily out of the van. “What—what the fuck—”

  “Language,” she said, but like she wasn’t really paying attention. She bent to pick up the stag, then grunted. “Ugh. It’s made of solid silver. I was hoping it was hollow. This is just like him. Grab my bag?”

  I ducked into the car and got her bag, which felt like it had bricks in it, as always. She rummaged inside and pulled out a pair of fingerless gloves, dark wool, and wiggled her fingers into them. “Okay, pop the back.”

  I opened the back of the van, and goggled as mom lifted the stag in both arms, with no more effort than it would take to carry a little dog. She dumped the stag in the back of the van, and the rear end visibly sank down on the tires. I pushed the stag’s butt with my hand and it didn’t budge a millimeter.

  She started to reach for the rear door, then stripped her gloves off before closing it. “That was close. Wearing these, I might have ripped the door off by accident.”

  I stared at her. My forty-ish Berkeley yoga mom. She liked Japanese food, tropical fish, sea kayaking, old movies with subtitles, and she worked for a non-profit that does literacy programs (I always hated reading, maybe in self-defense). She was a mom, so usually pretty solid in a crisis, but this was more than a crisis—this was impossible shit. She had magic stag-lifting gloves. She got in the driver’s seat, and I got in too, because she had that looking-at-the-future expression that meant she was barely paying attention to the now, and I was afraid she’d leave me. “Mom. What the hell? Don’t language me, please.”

  She sighed. “I was hoping this would happen when you were a toddler and wouldn’t understand it, and then I was hoping it would wait at least four more years for you to go to college, but no, it had to happen now.”

  “You were expecting this? To be attacked by a robot deer?”

  “It’s not a robot, Lee. It’s... Look, a long time ago, I worked for someone. I made him a promise. Now I’ve got to fulfill that promise.”

  “That didn’t explain anything.”

  “Let’s just... I’ll tell you more when we get home. I need to think.”

  She needed to think? I was so stunned I couldn’t think. Except she’d said “It’s not a robot. It’s....” Magic. She was going to say “magic.”

  Hot holy shit. Magic is real. I knew it. “Magic real. I knew it. Your boss was a wizard?”

  “He preferred sorcerer,” she said.

  “But bringing a statue to life is transmutation, so maybe he’s a transmuter, except those gloves, that’s definitely enchantment—”

  Mom pulled into the driveway and put her head on the steering wheel. I’d been trying to figure out what kind of magic her old boss did, asking where he got his power, whether it was demons or alien radiation or drawing on the strength natural world; asking about the limits of his abilities, and what she’d seen him do; whether he needed to recharge; whether he needed special components to cast his spells. The whole time she’d just shaken her head and shrugged. She spoke now, without lifting her head. “It’s not like that, Lee. It’s not like your card game, your, what, fire and blood deck—”

  “Flame and plague deck, mom, red and black.” I’d come in third in the tournament. I devastated early on but I needed to adjust the mana curve to improve my late game.

  “Right. Your card game, your roleplaying games, those have rules, and everyone playing knows what they are, and agrees to them. What my old boss, Mr. Grace, did... there were no rules that clear. He could enchant, he could transform, he could speak to the dead, he could travel across the world in an instant, turn invisible, fly, erase memories. That’s just what I saw him do. I asked how, sometimes, and the answers were all different. He studied, he stole, he copied, he experimented, he innovated, he captured magical creatures and ate their hearts, he tricked gods, he sacrificed parts of himself, inside and out, for wisdom. There is magic in the world, but it’s wild, and confusing, and has a hundred thousand different sources, big and small, all with their own different rules. I can’t explain it to you, because I don’t understand it, but Mr. Grace used to say almost anything was possible, if you could do it right... but it’s really hard to do anything right. That’s everything I know about magic.” She got out of the car.

  In the living room, all the fish were all dead. Mom had a huge tank, and every creature that lived in it was floating on the surface: lionfish, black ghost knifefish, leafy seadragon, butterflyfish, all the rest. (Looking back, I don’t think all those fish could have survived in the same tank, with the same temperature and salt level and everything, but it never struck me as strange when they were alive, probably because of magic.)

  She stood over the tank and sighed. “That explains it. I was supposed to get eight hours’ notice, but I was up at seven to run errands and then I had lunch with Lisa and then I took you to the game store and got a haircut and never came home, and all that time, the fish were dead.”

  “The fish dying is your... notice?”

  She sat down on the couch. “This was all years before you were born. I became Mr. Grace’s personal assistant right after college, and I only worked for him for about eighteen months. He was a big donor to various charitable organizations, and he introduced me to a lot of people, including the ones I work for now. He also paid me ridiculously well, and wiped out my student loans for me. He was... eccentric, but not unkind. After I’d worked for him for about a year, he told me he was a sorcerer... and then he proved it.”

  I’d grown up on a steady diet of movies and games about magic—I always loved that stuff—and my mind was ready. “Are we talking Gandalf or Voldemort?”

  “Do you mean, was he a good wizard or a bad wizard? I don’t know, Lee. He was a person. He did a lot of good things, but he wasn’t always nice or kind, and mostly I think he just did whatever he felt like at the time.”

  “Were you his apprentice?”

  She snorted. “You wish. I was his executive assistant. I handled his schedule and made calls and ran errands. Kind of like being a professional mom, except imagine if you could fire me if you didn’t like the lunch I made for you.”

  “You would have been fired years ago.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “But you did magic,” I insisted. “I saw it. Turning the stag into a statue, those gloves—”

  She shook her head. “I used magic. I can drive a car, but I couldn’t design one. I can switch on a light, but I couldn’t build an electrical grid from scratch. Mr. Grace gave me that bag, the one you love teasing me about, and told me that if I reached into it, I’d always find whatever I needed. Not wanted, unfortunately, or it would have a lot more free tickets to Hamilton and the phone numbers of my celebrity crushes, but needed. Mostly, that’s been coins for parking meters when my pockets were empty, and band-aids for when you scraped your knee, and once an inhaler for a kid who was having an asthma attack when we were on the playground. Today... it was more.”

  Apprentice mom would have been cooler, but a magic bag was still pretty cool. “So why’d you stop working for him?”

  “Mr. Grace was planning to go abroad on a long trip, and I didn’t want to follow him around Europe and Asia—part of me was like, ‘Free trip’, but I knew I wouldn’t get to enjoy it since he’d have me working all the time. He was crap at work-life balance because there was no difference, to him. We agreed my job would end in six months when he left, and that he’d give me a good recommendation. He said he’d grown to like and trust me, and asked if he could pay me a generous retainer in exchange for future services, with further payments when the work began and when it concluded. I asked what kind of work. He said, ‘I want you to be my executor.’”

  “Like... the person who reads the will after someone dies?”

  “The person obliged to make sure the terms of a last will and testament are fulfilled, yeah.” She gestured at the fish. “He imbued the fish with his life force. If they’re dead, that means he’s dead. He said he’
d send a messenger to give me instructions and to deliver payment. I think the silver stag is both. How I’m going to sell, what, half a ton of silver, I have no idea, but that’s not the kind of thing Mr. Grace ever worried about. I’m sorry you had to see this, Lee. I half thought he’d outlive me. I think he was hundreds of years old already, though his mind seemed to be going at the end.”

  “This is so cool, mom.”

  She smiled. “I guess it’s exciting, anyway. Makes a change from writing grant applications and running bake sales. I’d better see what this stag has to say.” She reached into her bag and removed another leather cord—or the same one?—with a sparkling charm hanging from the end. She squeezed the charm in her hand, and there was definitely a flash of light, this time blue.

  The stag opened its mouth, and began to speak, and I blacked out.

  I woke on the couch, with a cool cloth on my forehead, which sent me instantly back to childhood, when I’d had terrible headaches and the only treatment that helped was laying still in a dark room and a wet washcloth over my eyes. I sat up, slowly, expecting pain, but there wasn’t any—just a sense of absence. My thoughts felt the way your tongue does when you poke at the place where a tooth is missing, except this hole was in my mind.

  I thought maybe everything was a dream, and then I saw the stag motionless in the corner, and the floating fish.

  “I’m so sorry, Lee.” Mom sat down beside me and took my hand. “Mr. Grace was always particular about his privacy. I guess that was for my ears only. Are you okay?”

  “What happened?”

  “Magic. Making people fall asleep... for Mr. Grace, that’s about as complicated as picking up your socks off the floor is for me.”

  “So the stag, what, gave you instructions?”

  “It did.”

  I sat up, the cloth falling into my lap. “What do you have to do?”

  She laughed, but it was her laugh-or-else-you-cry laugh. “Ah. Well. Some of it’s simple. Mr. Grace had a lot of children, but most of them, he made provisions for before he died.”

  “Like, he set up trust funds?”

  “More like he gave them the ability to shapeshift or open magic doors or endowed them with physical invulnerability.”

  “Oh. Whoa. Good dad.” I didn’t have any kind of dad. Certainly not one who gave me magic powers. We didn’t really talk about him. When pressed, mom said she didn’t even know his last name and had no idea how to contact him.

  “Good?” She made a face like she’d bitten into an orange and realized it was a lemon. “No. Not really. Not by any reasonable standard. Mostly Mr. Grace ignored his children, and even if he gave them some advantages, it’s not like he was there to raise them or support them or even help them learn to use whatever abilities he gave them. I don’t think he had the healthiest childhood himself.” She shook her head. “Anyway. I have to send some letters—he left a house and most of his worldly possessions to a daughter who doesn’t even know he exists, so I have to get all that in order, and there’s some paperwork related to charitable endowments he left behind, and other odds and ends. But some of it is more... hands on... and the first part is time-sensitive.”

  “Can I come?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d been prepared to beg, argue, and demand. I hadn’t been prepared for her to say yes. “Well, okay. Where are we going?”

  “To a castle tower, apparently.”

  She drove us over to the Albany Bulb, and stopped the van in the vast deserted parking lot behind the racetrack, Golden Gate Fields. (She never takes me in there. She thinks horse racing is cruel.) There’s a little beach behind the track, though, with views of San Francisco across the bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and Marin. Next to the beach is the Bulb, this weird bulbous spit of land that sticks out into the water, made of landfill I guess, and people walk their dogs and hike and stuff. There’s a lot of graffiti and some cool sculptures, and there was a little library some squatters made, but it burned a few months ago, and the thirty or so homeless people who lived there all got buyouts in exchange for moving on, except for a couple who were arrested this spring because they wouldn’t leave. It’s kind of sad.

  There’s this one shelter that’s also a work of art, called Mad Marc’s Castle, after the guy who built it—it’s made of concrete and rebar and shopping carts, painted all over with colorful graffiti, with an arched window like something from a fairy castle in the front. It’s really cool, but mom never let me go inside because she thought it might be dangerous or people might be living in there or whatever.

  This time, we hiked out on the Bulb, around to the castle, now deserted, and she gestured. “In there.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a flashlight. Did she put the flashlight in the bag at home, I wondered, or did the bag know she needed a light, and provided it?

  We walked inside, into the “great hall,” and mom gestured to the turret steps. I started climbing up... and up, and up, spiraling along, without reaching the little tower on top. After a while, these arrowslit windows started to appear in the walls, and when I looked out one, I didn’t see the bay, or the scrubby vegetation of the Bulb: I saw clouds, below me, and got hit with this wave of vertigo that made me lean against the wall gasping for air. “Don’t look,” mom said behind me. “Just keep climbing, baby.”

  I kept my eyes on my feet, but when I passed another window, I couldn’t help but look out, because the light was funny, and I saw a night sky, with a full moon, and the dark shapes of mountains. The tower felt thin and narrow and I could swear it was swaying. “Mom, I don’t like this, I want to go back.”

  “We can’t go back, Lee. The only way out is through.”

  Mom joked once that if we had a family crest, that would be the motto. She’d always taught me to face the hard thing, to do the necessary thing you feared sooner rather than later, because waiting only made it worse.

  I said, “When you’re going through Hell, keep going?” Another of her sayings.

  “This isn’t Hell,” she said. “I hope that’s not where we’re going, either.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Mr. Grace’s vault.”

  I took a breath, and another step. One step at a time. I could lift my foot, put it down, lift my other foot. I could do that. “What, like, his treasure?” Visions of magical artifacts and wondrous statues and chests of gold spun through my mind.

  “His weapons.”

  I missed a step, stumbled, put my hand out on the wall, and mom grabbed me around the waist to steady me. “I’m okay. Weapons?”

  “Apparently. Mr. Grace had even more enemies than he had children. One of the ways he kept them from killing him was by having... do you know what a dead man’s switch is?”

  “Sort of?”

  “Or, in a movie, when someone says, ‘If I die, my friends will release the blackmail files,’ or, ‘If I don’t hit this button every fifteen minutes, this spaceship will blow up,’ that sort of thing? It’s like that. A failsafe. A vault full of bad things that will happen if Mr. Grace gets murdered, and we need to make sure those bad things don’t happen, because he didn’t get murdered.”

  “How do you know?”

  “If he’d been murdered, the fish wouldn’t have died, and the stag would have given me different instructions. Mr. Grace was very old, and very powerful. I’m pretty sure he chose to die. I doubt he could have, otherwise.”

  “If he had been murdered, would you still be his executor?”

  “Executioner, more like. Avenger. I’d be opening the vault, and unleashing the contents. I don’t like to think about it.”

  I stopped and looked back at her, a few steps below me. There was a funny bluish light shining out of the next narrow window, and it made her look like she was underwater. “Mom, why did you make this deal in the first place? For money?”

  “I didn’t... I mean, it was a lot of money. But I didn’t entirely understand what I was agreeing to. And there was the bag, so I thought—never mind. It was all a long time ago.”

  Mom didn’t care about money. She said you only needed enough to be secure, because other things were way more important. She’d always talked to me about finding my thing, my purpose, because if you have a purpose, it’s easy to decide what to do in your life—just ask, does it further my purpose, or not? I remember when I asked her what her purpose was, and she just laughed and said, “You, kid. And making the world a better place, but even that’s because I want it to be better for you.”