The King snapped his fingers and they were down upon the plain, under the sunless silver sky. The pyramid they’d been at the top of a moment before now stood tall on the dark horizon behind them.
It was a pretty nifty trick, Graves thought, in spite of himself.
Miguel Caradura turned to the soul at his side. “You should know, Dexter Graves, that I am a powerful king,” he said. “My reign extends even beyond the boundaries of my native Mictlan. The territories of my weaker brethren have also become my own as their rulers have lost coherence and their worshippers have died out.”
Hardface sounded exactly like a salesman, in Graves’ opinion. Not one he’d buy a bridge from, either.
Mickey Caradura raised his arms, and rank after rank of his conscripted troops appeared from out of the smoke when he spoke of them. They stood at attention, silent and still, awaiting their orders. They were creatures out of myths and dreams, a few of which Graves recognized from stories (such as dragons, centaurs, and what he thought might’ve been a gryphon), although there were many more he could not identify. So many that it boggled his mind to look at them. They became little more than a mass of vaporous, insubstantial sketches as their ranks faded back into the gray distance.
“The domains of Olympus and Luxor have long been under my control,” said the King. “As have the spheres of the Kami, the Fair Folk, and the Shemhamephorash. All of those our brothers whose ties to the realworld have slipped away are now my conquered minions to command. My Army of Imaginals. I am Mictlantecuhtli, King of the Forgotten, Lord of the Shades, Emperor of the Archaic and the Arcane-and you can be too, Dexter Graves.”
“Hey, that all sounds swell, it really does,” Graves said, cocking a ghostly hat back on his transparent head. “But I just know there’s gotta be a catch.”
He was getting bored with the hard sell already.
Caradura lowered his arms and let his armies fade until he and his guest were all alone again upon a rolling, empty plain that never seemed to end. “But a small one, Dexter Graves, so hear me out,” the King said. “I, you see, am possessed of ambitions beyond the ordinary dreams of my kind. I would have what no nonbody is ever given to have. Sensation. Experience. The World. Your world. I will walk it, I will conquer it, and it will be mine, the crowning glory of my vast empire!”
Caradura shouted this mission statement up into the gray sky.
“But to achieve this,” he said, turning back to Graves, “I will need a body. I need your body, Dexter Graves. I therefore propose that we effect a trade. I will walk the actual in your flesh and with your bones, while you remain here and reign in my stead as Lord of all Mictlan.”
The King raised his hand and a dozen podiums emblazoned with treble clefs sprang up from the soil like a row of improbable crops. Tuxedoed skeletons coalesced out of the mists to stand behind them, and musical instruments appeared in their hands.
“Everything that memory contains is available to enjoy,” Caradura assured Graves, raising his voice over the big bony band when they launched into a lively swing number. More skeletons appeared around them, dancers hopping eagerly to the beat. Flesh and clothing swirled together to cover their bones by the time the band had played three or four bars, and then the gray plain looked like one of the USO shows Graves remembered from the war. Sailors in their whites spun and shimmied with pinup girls who might’ve stepped right down from the nosecones of airplanes and into three glorious dimensions. Their lips were as red as exotic fruits and their legs went on for miles.
“You will want for nothing in this place,” Caradura promised. “The totality of experience will be yours to recreate.”
“You really tellin’ me you’d trade in all this fine and shiny kingliness for the chance to catch a cold or stub your toe or get shot to death for no good reason in some idiotic war?”
“I would, Dexter Graves, I would,” Caradura said. He made a slashing gesture across his throat and the band went silent on the very next note. The dancers stopped and turned to look at them from where they stood, waiting in expectant silence. “All such experiences would shine as jewels in the dark depths of my long memory.”
Graves laughed at that, one terse bark that had no trace of humor in it. “Spoken like a man who’s never had much shrapnel impacted between his ribs,” he said.
Caradura frowned, and the party he’d conjured to tempt his guest with dispersed back into smoke. Only the distant pyramid remained. It seemed to be the one landmark that never changed within this realm that could become a copy of any time or any place, according to its ruler’s will.
Graves paused, soaking in the immense, empty landscape before him as he considered the King’s words, and considered them carefully.
“So,” he said, grabbing the conversational reins when he sensed that Hardface was about to launch back into his sales rap. “Say I actually bit on this line of shit. How would we arrange the trade?”
“Therein, Dexter Graves, lies your ‘catch.’”
“It’s Lia, right?” Graves asked, although he didn’t really need a confirmation by now. “Ingrid wanted outta your deal, so you made her scare up Miss Lia as a replacement.”
“Their homegrown brand of witchwork is rather rare, Dexter Graves,” Caradura said. “Such women are as strange flowers grown up in the cracks between worlds.”
“But helpin’ us to swap would grind her into mulch, wouldn’t it? That’s why Ingrid wouldn’t do it, in the end.”
“You are correct, Dexter Graves. Acting as our bridge will cost the witch her life. At which point she will become your servant here in the kingdom of Mictlan, and subject to your every whim. Think about it. I believe this is what you incarnations call a ‘win-win situation,’ is it not?”
Caradura’s grin as he delivered this last line was as wide and bright as any politician’s.