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28: The Body Itself Balks Account

A fairy with a funny face whispered in her ear: You can't fight them! There's something way worse, way more evil. A monster that gobbles Magical Girls for breakfast. We gotta fight that monster, not these guys. Please?

Same words since she entered the city. Same fairy. Same shrug—Clownmuffle acted alone.

Artillery flashed from one end of the Capitol patio to the other. A transept of lawn exploded but neither flames nor shrapnel nor debris touched her. But they did create thick pillars of smoke.

Through which dropped a lime-green spotlight. A limelight. It bleached her skin and clothes, but lacked other obvious effects.

From the smoke burst a gold soldier. The black billow parted lengthwise to allow the swing of a gargantuan sword. Clownmuffle kicked up her legs, landed upon the blade, and traveled its arc until she reached her attacker's back. She rammed the butt of her baton between the shoulders and the soldier pitched forward.

The ephemeral limelight remained. Some magic—she understood now. The light illuminated her despite the smoke, so her enemies could see her but she could not see her enemies. Hm. She parried two incoming fighters and hopped the ankle-height swing of the recovering sword soldier.

"Remember me?" the soldier said.

"Yes." Clownmuffle flicked the 7 of Hearts into her eyeball. She had met the golden soldiers many times. If she had forgotten them, she would not have come.

Four girls rushed, four directions at once, four weapons falling by the time they broke the smokescreen. Clownmuffle's baton misdirected one while out her sleeve shot fifty-two cards into the face of another which meant nobody was looking at her vest from which she produced a bundled white curtain that one flick fanned into a tent around her. Several weapons gored this tent except the tent was now empty and Clownmuffle stepped from behind the falling fifty-two cards to rip the curtain away and flick it over bloody-face girl, who promptly disappeared. Except she, unlike Clownmuffle, did not reappear.

[56/57]

The limelight, which left Clownmuffle when she performed her teleportation trick, found her again. No matter how hard they watched her, they would not detect her sleight of hand. She hurled her baton skyward and from her collar withdrew a multicolored ribbon that a magic tap straightened to sever the neck of the next soldier. She danced back, deflected the giant sword, disemboweled a soldier who snuck up behind. Under, across, over she weaved through bolts and bullets, hurled her ribbon as a javelin, felled a new target. Her other hand whipped her curtain toward the giant-sword soldier but the curtain came apart in eighths and Clownmuffle's arm came apart too. She stuck the stump inside her tuxedo jacket and retrieved a new arm.

Three other soldiers dropped in gory chunks at the end of the sword soldier's backswing, and a follow-up swing bifurcated a fourth who could not jump as fast as Clownmuffle. Telepathic communication buzzed, a mix of annoyance and approbation toward the sword soldier.

"I'll handle this alone." The swordswoman shifted her stance and watched Clownmuffle for motion.

Centurion Cicero lets you fight like this? The plan was—

"Damn the plan." She ripped off her helmet and hurled it aside. Bounce, bounce it went. One toss of her head swept the bangs from smoky eyes. "Come on, Clownmuffle. I'm not Murrieta-Temecula anymore. See what I've learned."

Murrieta... Temecula. That was—that was—she remembered—a little bend. This wasn't that girl. But this face, uncovered, Clownmuffle remembered it, but she could not remember who...

She made McHenry disappear and we still don't know where she is, stop fooling around—

Captain Darien can handle her, she—

"Captain" isn't even a rank, I thought Cicero's platoon was better than this—

The turf bubbled. A thin layer of water crept between the grass. It rose as the swordswoman rushed to provide a convenient stepping stone before Clownmuffle's shoes became wet. Atop the swordswoman's sword, as the smoke subsided and the lime-green glow reflected, it became clear the entire quadrant of lawn from one bland white building to the next had become a plane of shallow water. The six hacked bodies bobbed and their blood spread in blooms.

"Ahhhhh, perfect, please don't move, Miss Darien." From the sidewalk nearest the Capitol a golden astronaut waved. Or maybe her costume evoked a Jules Verne diver. The gold plating and sleek edges added to the ensemble obscured the theme, 2 out of 10. At her back a squad of eight soldiers waited. "Clownmuffle? I believe you made one of my soldiers vanish, a certain McHenry? Please return her."

The order not to move had transfixed the swordswoman, although she quivered under Clownmuffle's shoes, especially the arm that gripped her sword. Clownmuffle considered her terrain.

"Some sort of pocket dimension? Or did you warp her somewhere?" said the diver. "Please. A favor for an old friend? We're friends, right?"

Clownmuffle said, "I'm friends with," and shut her mouth. With every Magical Girl flashed through her mind, words she had spoken before. She shook her head. "No."

"Ohhhhh, you don't remember? I was Aurora back then? Remember?"

"I uh, Lady Cook uh," said a soldier at the diver's side, "kinda doubt she'll have too fond memories of back then? Considering you uh, kinda...?"

"Ahhhhh, well, worth a shot?"

Out of the water's edges shot four triangular walls of ice that converged toward the center to create a pyramid. The undersides of the ice, half-melted, drizzled water in long lines that froze into ice of its own. The pyramid was sealing fast, and too high for Clownmuffle to jump. Instead, she seized her top hat by the brim and hurled it skyward the same moment the swordswoman broke her stillness and swung. The broad blade served Clownmuffle's exact purposes, she dropped behind it, for the briefest moment it blocked her from view, and in that moment she crawled out of her twirling top hat just as it cleared the closing tip of the pyramid.

As she descended toward one of the pyramid's slopes, the whole structure became water again, ready to swallow her. She flicked a new deck out her sleeve and danced upon the slowly fluttering cards while along arches of ice sprinted the diver's animatronic subordinates lashing fire whips and yo-yos and fishing poles. The fisher's line coiled to snag Clownmuffle, she weaved to evade it, it redirected in midair, she batted with her baton, but only slowed it. Finally she threw cards to sever the line, but the line reformed or else the cards passed through to no effect. The hook latched to her bowtie and an immediate, irresistible force dragged her off her perch toward the water.

The water reached out to grab her. Ice tendrils and jets of superheated steam lanced from every direction. Twenty-seven bullets, three arrows, and two cannonball bombs rained.

She caught the baton she thrown skyward at the beginning of the fight, deflected the bullets, caught an arrow between her teeth, kicked the first bomb into the other. The detonation blasted a hole in the water instants before the line carried her through it. This was the critical point. In that instant, the frothy spray encircled her and occluded the eyes of everyone watching, even the limelight. So while they watched the interior of the pyramid for her to hurtle inside and be sealed, they did not see her and they did not see the fluttering spray of cards she had previously tossed and it was behind these cards she appeared.

Out her sleeves she produced three chainsaws for juggling and with one stroke sawed off the heads of two soldiers still watching the spray. She hurled the chainsaws like missiles at three other soldiers, including the one with the fishing rod, who dodged in time. But Clownmuffle's tuxedo coat flapped open and from it flew seventy-seven white doves who alighted upon the angler soldier, enveloped her entirely in their feathers, and took off again leaving no trace behind.

[55/57]

One annoyance dispatched, she seized a parasol weapon from one of the decapitated soldiers and launched herself from her shaky perch of playing cards down the slope of the pyramid toward the diver and a meager number of attendants. Someone shouted: "Keep her surrounded, don't take your eyes off her," but even when performing to a theater of thousands a true practitioner of magic could still confound. The parasol moderated her descent, jerked her left and right to evade the fifty things flung her way, projectiles and ice and steam and whips and javelins and blades, while the diver stepped back and allowed one of her attendants, a soldier made distinctive solely by the long ponytail that swished about her back, to step forward. This soldier held empty hands outward, arms slightly bent as though holding something, one eye squinted as though aiming. Clownmuffle recognized this girl, not by appearance for she wore the same armor as the others, but from the distinctive bent of her magic—Denver's mime.

The mime jerked back her hands and trembled all over, she mimicked the firing of an automatic weapon and Clownmuffle could not see the bullets. Instead she pointed her parasol forward and swayed her body to dodge based on where holes opened upon the parasol's surface. Clownmuffle shut the parasol around herself and everyone immediately looked to the fluttering flock of doves she had previously unleashed in anticipation of her manifestation but instead she simply reopened the parasol and crashed into the mime. The mime rolled back to avoid a sharp umbrella-tip to her sternum and sprayed an arc of invisible bullets that Clownmuffle danced within. Another soldier sped from the side and took the parasol to the throat while the pyramid twisted into a sky-blotting wave of water crashing toward them. Where did that diver go? Clownmuffle dragged the body at the tip of her parasol across the ground to wipe it off like a crushed insect and opened the parasol, newly repaired of its bullet holes, to shield her from the wave. The mime ceased attacking to seal herself in an invisible box, but the other six soldiers nearby were trapped as the water came down and became ice.

At the last moment, Clownmuffle closed the parasol around herself and reappeared from her flock of doves. She dropped on a safe spot of pavement and surveyed the destruction in her wake, a broad grin cracked, it felt so good after so long to use her body in such a way again, extend it to its utmost potential, harness total control over its motions, a body solely to herself. She inhaled deep. The cool air refreshed her coursing lungs. Her hands tingled with the blows she had dealt, the heads caved, the necks severed, the blood dashed—bodies, bodies, bodies...

Behind. Patter patter barumph barumble. A soldier on a horse.

The soldier came fast but the halberd she swung lacked precision and Clownmuffle sidestepped it sans difficulty. Only the halberd turned out more explosive in force and the ground in a dome under Clownmuffle cratered and Clownmuffle herself went flying, flying into a second seismic strike that forced her to grab her hat to protect her Soul Gem and which juggled her higher into the air. She hurtled, flipping, turning, swirling, over ice and lawn, until she slammed against a hard and straight surface of white marble bricks illuminated from below by floodlights. A ring of blood burst out her mouth, her bones shattered, had she not shielded her gem it might have shattered too. She had essentially zero time to recover because the rumble of horse hooves shook whatever wall she had landed against and the glint of gold flashed in the lower periphery of her vision.

Her bones were inside her. Nobody could see them. So there was no reason why they shouldn't be fixed, and they were, instantly. She kicked off from the side of the edifice as the halberd came down and sent waves of solid rock rumbling in all directions. She hurtled through open air and the horsewoman with one bound followed, as they swirled away from it she realized they were hurtling from the obelisk monument she had passed on her way in, now cracking apart and crumbling under the force of one strike.

Ahhhhh! Cicero! That's an American landmark? You can't just smash it?

Buttresses of ice shot upward to prop the obelisk and keep its side from caving. Meanwhile Clownmuffle and the horsewoman tumbled, Clownmuffle needed options or else she would suffer another blow the moment her back hit the ground, a stream of cards shot out each cuff, doves from her jacket, petals from her lapel, smoke from her open mouth. The horsewoman swung against the air before the collection could envelop her, the cards ripped to confetti, the doves crushed to feathers, and all in a cyclonic swirl to either side of her. That was enough. From the tattered debris shot seventeen chains on all sides of the horsewoman, chains that clamped against her with shackles, against her neck, against her raised arms, against her axe's shaft, against her horse's hooves. She staggered suspended in midair the moment Clownmuffle hit the ground on her back and somersaulted to her feet, whirling around to ram a clawhammer into a soldier's brain jelly and fire a nailgun into the heart of another. An entire platoon had gathered at her landing spot in a quadrant of lawn untouched by the ice.

Clownmuffle reached into her collar just under the jugular notch and produced a napkin with which she wiped off the face of the soldier with the clawhammer. She turned in anticipation of another attack but instead rammed directly into an invisible wall. She bounced off, ricocheted half-floating a few feet back, struck a second wall, and flipped upward to find an invisible ceiling above her too.

"Got her, holy wow," said Denver's mime, who knelt by Clownmuffle's side, holding up her palms and gliding them across the unseen surface. The mime inspected her, tilted her head, and tapped the nonexistent glass. "Gotcha."

"Someone get Centurion Cicero down," said the swordswoman.

"What happened to Bellwood's face?" said another. A small crowd had gathered around the faceless soldier. Someone helpfully wrenched the clawhammer from her skull, which only caused a gush of blood to splatter down her armor.

"Same thing that happened to McHenry and Zion, probably," said a soldier. "She must have them in a pocket dimension."

The last few chains snapped and the horsewoman stuck her landing. "Lieutenant Kenosha. You're certain she is in a secure barrier?"

"Yup-yep, check it." Denver's mime danced around Clownmuffle's tiny confines and patted her hands to demonstrate its dimensions. "I knew our resident fashion critic was one uh, one tough son-of-a-gun, but that was wow."

"Can she teleport out of that box?" said the horsewoman.

"Course she can, want me to squeeze it so she's uh, crushed into a little cube?"

"Not until we know where she's concealed McHenry and Zion. River Forest, employ your ability."

A soldier holding a tome stepped forward. She opened her book to the middle and a sudden wind whipped the browned parchment pages one after another. A purple aura exuded and inky black words seeped onto the ground. Clownmuffle could only lean against her prison and grin. They had gathered, so many, to defeat her. Their identical faces in their identical armor swarmed her cell. They stripped away everything about them to band together, but that whole was less than the sum of its parts. If this soldier wore blackened robes, draped in sinister profusions, a slight hunch in her stature, a grimace in her bearing, how much more effective would become the eldritch magic seeping from her book? How much stronger the words transmitted: YOU WILL OBEY. YOU WILL BECOME PLACID. Words weakened and watered by the placid obeisance of their wielder, stripped bare by her nonentity, a worthless, wasteful carcass, something deserving a strong staff to the skull, the fracture of so many bones, blood splashed upon the soil, annihilation of her being, utter erasure, and these same words echoing: YOU WILL OBEY. YOU WILL BECOME PLACID. YOU WILL ANSWER THE LADY'S QUESTIONS. And hypnosis, persuasion, such tools ripe for harvest by practitioners of magic, but whatever had once been had drained to a sham, and all Clownmuffle could do was laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

"No effect," said a soldier. The one with the book frowned.

"Can't lower the judgment of uh, of someone with no judgment to lower," said the mime. "Like a dog. Can't make a dog stupider right?"

The soldier with the book slammed it shut. "She must already be foolish enough for taking us on. Lady Cicero, I apologize, but—"

"The only fools," said Clownmuffle, "are you." For all boxes have a false wall...

"Crush her," said the horsewoman.

The mime flourished and clapped her hands against the sides of the confine until they pressed against a Clownmuffle whose shape bent and twisted inward, bent and twisted, bent and twisted—then snap! collapsed in a glittering shower of shards each of which caught the green light still beamed from afar until they clattered against the ground showing nothing but the golden faces peering down at them.

"A mirror—"

"We had her surrounded, we had people looking from every angle, when—?"

A shimmer appeared three feet off the ground and only the fastest reacted in time before an almost invisible wire sliced through their collective midsections. Six fell severed including the one whose face she stole and the one who wielded the book, and before the book soldier fell Clownmuffle dropped upon her with a dagger plunged into the soft flesh of her throat and dragged down to the split in her belly, she seized the collected innards and hurled them into the face of the horsewoman upon whom the wire had snapped harmlessly then front-flipped past an imaginary rocket fired from the mime's imaginary rocket launcher and allowed the propulsion of its imaginary explosion to launch her toward another whose head she kicked off like a soccer ball before flashing her sleeve toward the mime and sending at her a five hundred pound stripeless white tiger to tackle her to the ground and rip out her throat with its fangs.

Which left only the horsewoman who plowed her earthquake axe into a mirror on which Clownmuffle's image had reflected and sent the shards of glass into the still-falling bodies of her ostensible allies, but for all this horsewoman's imperial bluster her fighting style was one best fought alone. Delicious irony that of all the soldiers dispatched at least half had been dispatched by their own hands, collateral of their strongest fighters, the swordswoman or the diver or this one, and as Clownmuffle spiraled out of control spewing her playing cards and doves and hatchets and knives and shiny silver discs every which way she laughed without cease. The horsewoman charged to crush her but faced mirrors at every turn, mirrors and smoke, smoke and mirrors, the ice was a mirror too, and the limelight reflected and reflected and became useless, nobody could see her, nobody could see except what she wished them to see, the air so clogged of her distractions and misdirections.

A radio somewhere on the horsewoman buzzed: "Milady, we are running low on soldiers, shall I petition Centurion Aurora for reinforcement?"

"That woman's useless Berwyn."

"Aye. Then shall I and the ranged fighters assist? In your current position behind Lady Cook's ice—"

"Stay exactly where you are. I shall finish this fight."

"Aye, milady..."

Clownmuffle descended on the horsewoman from above, whipping a wide curtain to whisk her away into blessed nonexistence. The horsewoman saw at the last possible moment, too late to swing her axe, but instead she dropped it and held one hand out and rammed her fist into its open palm, the force created by which propelling the curtain upward and Clownmuffle gripping its tails with it.

Cook stop fooling with that monument and assist.

That same moment the quadrant of lawn rose with water and from the darkness overhead broke clouds that poured rain across everything. Did this matter? No. They had warmed her up, the shackles in her mind had come off, the rust broken and the joints oiled, what was no longer possible? Kwekwekwe. Deeper her audience dropped, into her world of illusion, every previous bafflement compounding until their minds became mush and they would accept any finale presented. Even as the water crashed from above and below the arena was of her making. The waves crystallized over cards and mirrors, the rain fizzled like acid through curtains and feathers, but the wires streamed in zigzag diagonals to cleave sheer these sheets while Clownmuffle slipped between the apertures. The shed blood boiled and the steam ran thick and the shadows stretched long and what could be seen but was not reflected fifteen times along the melting crystal shards and the jagged stalactites of ice? She swirled skyward or outward, directions no longer mattered much, flipping over her legs and laughing as she waved her top hat through the air at the watery visage rising before her of a dragon, long-fanged and spanning the breadth of the lawn, eyes aflame and its long undulating body stretching from the ice edifice propping the side of the obelisk, the diver-chef a gilded blot atop its head flapping hands together to pantomime the closing of jaws as the jaws closed to gnash.

Clownmuffle coiled her back outward and flashed her arms forward and from her sleeves shot two squealing cruise missiles that spiraled in aberrant patterns around and around one another toward the face of that liquid dragon, smoky jetstreams coiled behind them, K-K-K-K they went as they plowed into its face and erupted broad enough to disfigure its visage and send its slopping remains to ground while she laughed so hard she inverted and her feet kicked the air above and the force of her momentum bounced her against the floor and span her back up, there was no end to her possibilities, the keys inside her mind had all clicked open their locks in unison, limits broken, decay reversed, indeed beyond reversal, for her state of decrepitude had shaken the binds of complacency that had clamped around her long before the crack in her soul and her slack mind and body had strung taut as any trick wire, any tendon sharp enough to cut all flesh save her own.

We can wear her down, she can't maintain this level of magical expenditure long.

Ahhhhh, but can she...?

Somewhere an alarm pealed, something distant and low yet loud enough to detect above the roar of the dying dragon in its thrashing headless death throes, above the T-I-N-T-I-N-N-A-B-U-L-A-T-I-O-N of the rockets' eruption still ringing the ears off the vibrations of so many mirrors. The humans, even in their sleepy state something must have triggered an automated response, the humans were rousing although they would be sleepwalkers. Humans were not even fit to be her audience, they could see neither what she wanted them to see nor what she didn't.

So she ought to bring her performance to its crescendo.

She snapped her fingers. All her curtains dropped, all her mirrors slid away, and along the vast stretch of lawn between these hollow husks of empire and manifest destiny appeared a vast parade of elephants, their bodies bleached white and their legs as long and thin and omnijointed as insects, their backs laden with pyramids and obelisks like the one that impaled the indeterminate horizon, and the waters washed ruddy orange around them, and they proceeded on their caravan hazily swaying their bodies.

Wnnnnnnnnnnnh, whhhhhhhhhhhh, went the sirens.

The diver, risen upon a pillar of ice, flicked flurries of rain into the faces of her parade, their skin sizzled away, their skulls shone in the limelight that now reflected in every direction, and before she could raise a wall of water they crashed through her perch and hurtled her amidst their stampede. The ground quaked, fissures split through the caked-on layers of ice and the loam of the lawn.

The clop of hooves cut across. Weaving between the stilt-legs of the elephants, smashing her axe against their underbellies to split them open and cascade their melting clockwork innards across the stage, came the final charge of the gilded brigade. The horsewoman howled some horrendous roar and slashed one monstrous blast to wipe away the smoke and mirrors and reveal Clownmuffle in her entirety hovering above the ground.

Darien, your sword.

The swordswoman had half-extricated herself from the ice, the only one of the soldiers buried in it to have managed to do so, and she chipped at what remained welded to her leg with her sword, a maneuver made awkward by the sword's length. She flashed eyes at the horsewoman, an instant of intense hatred in those dark features, but only an instant—she drew back her hand and hurled her blade skyward. The horsewoman, dismounting her horse to leap over Clownmuffle, caught the blade and came down with both it and the halberd. The vortex of her first strike still swirled and Clownmuffle span weightless on its winds while from her collar she produced a pomegranate from which emerged a fish from which emerged a tiger from which emerged a rifle and bayonet which fired in the horsewoman's face and puffed gunsmoke laterally around her.

A white arc cut through the smoke as the giant blade whipped and a circle appeared around Clownmuffle in the dirt. The circle dropped as the surge of air rushing into the vacated space of the ground forced Clownmuffle down and the horsewoman hurtling after her. Walls of dirt rose around them as deeper and deeper they fell and all the while the axe and the sword swinging, cutting, collapsing everything upon them, into the sediment, past the layers of history and the bones of creatures long extinct which at Clownmuffle's bidding stirred from their antediluvian graves and snapped their fangs harmlessly against the horsewoman.

Clownmuffle extended her hands but before anything could be created the sword lashed out and both hands detached. The flying hands seized the horsewoman's helm and the fingers twisted to plug the slats but before they could the axe whipped back and cracked the air and the force propelled the horsewoman faster and she seized Clownmuffle around the torso even as Clownmuffle tried to stream out in the form of doves and together they grappled as the crust around them ended and they plunged into the open air of the National Mall inverted. They hung, suspended, until the horsewoman slammed her head against Clownmuffle's and erased Clownmuffle's head in a spray of gore that carried her top hat away. Out the exposed interior of her neck sprouted a giant carnation to swallow the horsewoman in the petals but successive swipes of the sword hewed it all to pieces while from her hat emerged the real Clownmuffle to pull herself away moments before a lance of solid ice launched from the sky and missed her by millimeters.

"I cannot die," said Clownmuffle, "unless I choose it."

"That's never how it works." The horsewoman encircled her.

"Ahhhhh, except the Empress." The diver appeared on the opposite side.

"You careless—Focus."

It would take only a single maneuver. She visualized it in her mind and anything she could visualize she could make a reality. She was only a little winded. The breath ran ragged out her throat but she could tilt back her head and drink in the crisp night air to revivify. Sweat poured down her body, it stained her tuxedo vest and jacket, hot with the pulse of her blood, hot with the pulse of her soul. Pristine, spotless soul, unblemished and pure. The threads of her clothes had frayed. One button torn, a rip along her pants leg. She flicked her bowtie idly and it span a full revolution. The alarm murmured distant. But her skin was so smooth, and her body whole, her nails as white as her gem, and her heart swollen with love.

Love...

Somebody once said something to her about love.

When was it?

She did not want to remember, something about this memory tasted bitter, so she drew back before she plunged too deeply into it, and that feeling of love pounding inside her chest became bitter too.

At that moment her opponents attacked. They must have coordinated through some sort of gesture, for the facial expressions of neither were visible, or else they simply relied on the same instincts and something in Clownmuffle's demeanor at that moment of bitterness belied a weakness they could otherwise not possibly fathom. Regardless the reason, they attacked. The horsewoman's axe fell from above while her sword swept sideways, the diver's water sprouted from all sides. The diver put especial focus on Clownmuffle's Soul Gem, for the lances of ice sprung toward it, while the horsewoman either refused even now to strike with lethality or believed the explosive force of her strikes to compensate for lack of precision. In this moment, Clownmuffle blinked and realized all her mirrors had broken, all her smoke had subsided, although she did not know when or why. The omnipresent limelight found her again and her glow became sickly.

It was that woman... It was her...

How could she forget so easily everyone else but not that woman underground? It was no longer love in her heart, the taste was too foul, and her face scrunched, and the pretense dropped. The attacks of her attackers seemed to approach as though in slow motion, elongated, tortured. She clamped her hands on the broad side of the giant blade and jerked it forward. The horsewoman's footing gave the least degree. This slight displacement altered the swing of her axe so it swept down Clownmuffle's side, removed one of her legs, pummeled her with its force. But it also blasted a misaimed hole that collapsed the dirt under the diver.

From afar Clownmuffle had not noticed but up close the lack of gloves on the diver's costume became apparent. It was hideous. What deep-sea diver would lack gloves? The exposed hands would be crushed instantaneously by the pressure of so much liquid. And it looked abominable, too, how could someone possess a costume so hideous? This woman needed to be wadded paper tossed into the garbage bin.

But although the exposed hands were the obvious weakpoint, Clownmuffle did not reach for them as she and the diver collapsed together. The diver's bare hands clamped around Clownmuffle's waist and ice spread from them to lock her hips into place. At the same time Clownmuffle placed her palm upon the inky window on the diver's helmet, a perfectly round circle of black glass, thronged by a metal strip that bolted it shut.

She saw a trick once. Dark weekend night, everyone else asleep and she bathed in the pale television hooded by a blanket while a cop car's siren careened in the distance. A magician on the screen, a man named seraphically, who could light himself aflame, who could hover over a pyramid, who could walk on water—and who could pass through solid objects as though they did not exist. Clownmuffle had observed that nothing seemed to harm these two commanders, not razor wires or rampaging elephants. Nothing dented their armor. But to pass through, like the angel magician on the television all those years ago...

Her hand pressed. Her torso was both freezing and melting simultaneously, the feeling so intense that the extremes at either end of the spectrum had become indistinguishable, like the bitterness of the love she tasted in that dungeon. And it spread, dissolving and encasing her, while all Clownmuffle had to do was press her palm against this glass window on the diver's helmet and...

And, as the man on TV had demonstrated, with the power of your mind you can accomplish anything. She had always known this, it had always been true, and as her hand passed to the other side and clutched the face inside her fingers needed only to clench to crumple it. The bones powderized, the teeth and gums and eyeball jelly, her hand pressed deeper and tore through the brain and grasped the stem and one twist snapped it.

The body fell. Clownmuffle's hand came away with it. When the body hit the ground the helmet was untouched as though nothing had changed, but the body made only a spasmodic series of twitching motions and a few aimless attempts by mindless limbs to scuffle into a semblance of coordinate motion.

Clownmuffle had been encased in the ice, her entire body up to her shoulders, and even the arm that had performed the trick was half-frozen. Her eyes flicked and the horsewoman was at her side—likewise covered in the clear cold crystal. It had surrounded them both, so thick that even for all its clarity the outer world became distorted and murky, and the only bubble of freedom that remained was focused around the diver's now-mindless body.

Cook. Cook. Get up Cook. Get up and get rid of this ice. Cook. The horsewoman kept struggling, kept trying to move her arms, but no matter her strength she could not struggle against so much tonnage without a millimeter's space to move. Cook you need to get up. Cook. You cannot be this irresponsible. Cook. You've—bah. Berwyn.

Aye, milady. What is the status? We cannot—

Cook is down. I'm stuck. But the target is stuck too. I require your immediate assistance.

Ah, and Clownmuffle was stuck too. Nor was she sure how much of her body remained to be stuck. She had a handless half an arm unfrozen and her neck and her head. She could not reach into her collar, her sleeve sopped with blood. Her hat perched but she could not upturn it to reveal some device hidden inside.

She still had her mouth.

Her head tipped back as far as the ice allowed and her jaw unhinged. Her tongue pushed out a parasol like the one she had used earlier and a click of a secret button caused it to snap open. Its spokes scraped against the edges of the cavity before the fabric gently fluttered down... down...

And over Clownmuffle.

She reemerged under a bundle of playing cards she had thrown some time long before, first a stir, then a swell in the pile before the cards fell away and she crawled along the sidewalk on her hands and knees until she gathered enough strength to drop a baton out her jacket and use it to prop herself upright. Most of her tuxedo had been eaten away, tatters remained upon her, and she staggered woozy despite the crispness of this clean air, but she had restored her body, and that body would never fail her. The sirens whirled their red and blue lights, on either side car doors opened and officials stepped out unsure what exactly had sparked the alarm and why exactly they had come. The lawn had transformed into a waste of ice, a glacier immobile on the Mall, jagged peaks having formed at the apex of waves. But they saw none of that, they saw a lawn pristine and unbroken, an obelisk uncracked, the lights as they should be and a night where all was well. They did not believe in magic. They could not grasp it.

Clownmuffle, supported on her baton-cane, progressed toward the Capitol. Her lungs rasped. Her body lived.

Atop the glacier stood only a single figure, the swordswoman from before, wrenching the ice from her leg with her fingers, prying it off bit by bit. She had removed almost all of her gold armor to assist the process, so when she lurched back with a final tug and stood free she wore only a blank white shirt and blank white pants like the blank slate she had become. She had even removed her boots, and where she stepped left bloody footprints as the ice had removed the skin on the soles of her feet. Her Soul Gem shone, no longer concealed behind the plates.

The constant stream of telepathic invective sputtered by the glacier-bound horsewoman turned the swordswoman's head and she saw Clownmuffle.

The swordswoman screamed pure fury and sprinted. She did not summon anew her sword, perhaps she had too little magic to do so. She came with her hands straightened and slid the last few meters on the bloody wetness of her feet, a slippery motion Clownmuffle had not anticipated, and when Clownmuffle raised her arm to block because she did not feel like dodging, the chop that struck her bone snapped it clean in half.

Clownmuffle replied by bringing down her cane and cleaving away half the swordless swordswoman's body. For an instant she had considered bringing it down on the exposed gem, but—

But decided not to. She left it glittering among the wreckage of the torso.

She scaled the mountain of ice.

As she did, the façade of the Capitol appeared. The remaining soldiers, gathered on its patio with all manner of ranged weapons, opened fire. She swung her baton and deflected the bullets and arrows et cetera and the line of soldiers dropped in puffs of blood. See, on the TV, that trick would be accomplished by... by blanks... and then at the moment of firing, an unseen line of snipers would shoot dead all the original marksmen to achieve the illusion that the bullets had been deflected. That would be TV. This world was not TV. It was her, her world. Haa.

The telepathic voices buzzed back and forth. She no longer listened. Whatever their words said, they did not matter. She walked atop the water of the reflecting pool and up the lower wall of the Capitol until she reached the banister that lined the patio. Seven tricked bodies lay stretched out, heads obliterated by their own perfect accuracy reflected. Only four remained standing, one who held a ghastly-green lantern that issued the limelight and who swiftly scampered behind a column, and three lined in front of the doors. Clownmuffle could not discern the true purpose of the lantern and the limelight. They had used it to improve their visibility while reducing hers with smoke, but that was only something that mattered in a coordinated attack. No Magical Girl's power could not be used to serve solely herself, but what the lantern was supposed to accomplish were this girl solo eluded her. It did no damage, it caused no adverse effects. Perhaps this Empire had spayed her to the point of inutility, and shining a light was all now she could do.

Oh well. She did not matter. Three more opposed her. Two crouched on the side of the other, who stood. The crouching ones aimed a large arquebus and a large blunderbuss, respectively, while the one in the center had drawn back the clothing around her wrist to inject herself with a syringe.

"Not another step, poppet." She already had four syringes jammed in her vein, she added a fifth. Something pained her, she swayed, her face was discolored.

One of the ones crouching visibly trembled. Lady Cicero, she's on the patio.

Get around her. You must free me from this ice. Do you understand?

"At this range," said the one with the blunderbuss.

Lombard. Elmhurst. Berwyn.

"If we let her pass, we endanger, hssssh, the Empress," said the one with the syringes.

Clownmuffle continued to walk.

"Not a step more!"

Berwyn.

"I am, I am telling you," another syringe plunged, "not a single step." She folded, her center twisted, a grimace withheld, her eyes went glassy, the blood bubbled where the syringes had entered.

"She's exhausted, you can see it how she walks," said the one with the blunderbuss. "She's pushed her magic to the brink. She can be defeated."

Berwyn!

Clownmuffle took her next step.

The blunderbuss fired. Clownmuffle flashed her baton at the bombshell, it ricocheted and exploded against the shaking arquebus soldier, and the perfect fan of blood which was all that remained of her above the knees splattered the pure white walls and pure white columns of the Capitol.

[54/57]

The blunderbuss clattered to the floor. "Elmhurst!" The soldier skittered to the poor legs that remained, sifted the pieces. "Elmhurst!"

Berwyn.

The syringe soldier stooped and vomited. She convulsed. A change overtook her, her body rippled and the armor fell away.

"A, reserve force..." Another trickle of bile down her lips. "Kept until the end... Enemy forces at their limit..." Her fingernails split through her gloves, they became claws.

Berwyn, what is going on. Berwyn. Have faith that Aurora can defend the Empress long enough, get me out of here.

Clownmuffle continued to walk. The one soldier, mired in blood, sobbed. The other, growing, transforming, flashed bright yellow eyes at Clownmuffle and a snarl of curved fangs. Clownmuffle span her baton around her hand, around her hand.

Lady Cicero, believe in me. I've stuck by you since the beginning, Lady Cicero, so believe in me now. You know what I can do.

I know you can't do what I couldn't. Berwyn. Berwyn if you fall—

I've been your lieutenant this entire time, Lady Cicero, I could have been a governor or maybe even taken Aurora's spot as Centurion. I could have. You know—

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE POINT OF THIS SOCIETY, BERWYN? THE POINT? IT'S SO MAGICAL GIRLS COME TOGETHER AND BUILD SOMETHING, COOPERATE, IT'S SO THEY DON'T RUN OFF LIKE LONE RANGERS AND DIE LIKE DOGS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? DON'T YOU DARE DISOBEY MY ORDER, BERWYN. DON'T YOU DARE.

The bristling brimming rippling thing growing growling in the center of the Capitol patio scraped and shifted and its claws dug into the marble and gouged deep cuts within it as it started to rise. Drool or else the dregs of vomit seeped onto the ground and sizzled it.

BERWYN.

A beast. Alright. Something somewhat intriguing at least. It seethed all over, its long body coiled, uncoiled, its sour breath heated her face and ruffled the shreds of Clownmuffle's tuxedo. She pinched the brim of her top hat between two fingers to prevent it from flying.

The yellow bloodshot eye flicked to the stooped form of the soldier wallowing in the gore of her fellow. The word BERWYN reverberated in the mental space. The head of the soldier with the lantern peeked from behind the pillar.

The beast blitzed. One single screech of nail against marble and it bounded. For a single instant its bristling fur itched against Clownmuffle's bare arm—then it bounded over the edge of the patio. It landed on the glacier and scrabbling barking it clawed footholds for itself before it streaked off in the direction of the frozen horsewoman.

So in the end, even that creature could not disobey its owner. They clamped the collars too tight.

Shameful.

The entrance to the Capitol stood undefended. Clownmuffle walked past the sobbing soldier and said, "Don't worry. When the Handmaiden is destroyed, all will be restored." Then she entered the doors. The moment she passed into a security checkpoint, several suited guards strode forward to accost her. "Ma'am," they said, "ma'am." They muttered something about authorization, badges, whatnot. She flicked her wrists and launched them into the walls. She did not know whether she used enough force to kill, but they did not rise to impede her.

She walked through a metal detector and it went off. Red lights bathed her. She proceeded through another set of doors.

No further soldiers came to fight her. She walked without difficulty toward the Capitol's center, where she had been told she would find the Handmaiden. The alarms brayed.

She breathed.

She entered the rotunda. A perfect circle that extended upward into a vast dome. Paintings and statues and columns and candles thronged it.

At the opposite end, straight and arms folded behind her back, stood that woman: the Handmaiden. A room otherwise devoid of life.

"Hello, Flossmoor," said the Handmaiden.

"You're who I've come for," said Clownmuffle.

The Handmaiden's face remained unchanged. "I am flattered that the object of your destruction is one so irrelevant as myself."

Clownmuffle looked at her for a long time. Her appearance lacked anything distinctive whatsoever, so much so that it transcended the merely generic and became a conscious decision to reduce herself. She had rendered herself forgettable, indistinct, nebulous, a perfect facsimile of this sham Empire, with few descriptive notes even when Clownmuffle thought hard about how to describe her. She was the key to everything. If she broke, the Empire would break. All that armor, all that gold. It would shatter.

The Handmaiden stood beside a painting. The painting. Of the Empress. The one that before had stirred certain feelings inside Clownmuffle, but by now it was easy to disregard it.

"This works for a final battle," said Clownmuffle, and she walked toward the Handmaiden.

The Handmaiden did not move. Clownmuffle's footsteps echoed up the void. Her baton swished the stale air. Her breathing had returned to normal. Her strength regained. Final confrontation...

She stepped into the center of the rotunda. The exact midpoint beneath the dome. At that moment something flashed. A bolt of electricity. Lightning. As fast as lightning. She twisted her body but she did not even have time to think and even if she did she could not have thought an escape. Lightning moved two hundred thousand miles per hour. Compared to bullets, bombs, raindrops—no comparison.

The bolt struck her. Her body jerked once and she hit the ground. She convulsed, lost control of herself, her limbs lurched against the floor. Lightning... the Handmaiden could... she had that power...?

Her body, unbidden by her, rolled onto its back as a numbness enveloped her, her brain retreated into a hidden spot where it could only watch out the windows of her eyes but alter nothing, horrendous fear gripped her, this immobility, this loss of self-mastery, and how, the Handmaiden, how could she, how could she—

Above, where once seemed nothing but air, the rotunda at the end of her vision, a painting of assumption watching her back, in this above, this emptiness, as though invisible paint flecked away, came into view, a cloud, a little cloud floating, a little cloud... a little cloud... it wore a smiley face.

Smiley face cloud. She remembered...

"Thank you, Midlothian," said the Handmaiden's stainless voice as her footsteps crossed the rotunda. She loomed into Clownmuffle's view, stooped, picked up the top hat that had fallen in all the thrashing. Clownmuffle became dimly aware of foam that ran down her chin, and something fouler, more hideous, around her thighs—no, no, no, no, no, no. No. NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO

The Handmaiden plucked the gem from the band of the top hat and cast the top hat aside.

"Y-yes, Lady Handmaiden," said a familiar voice. A tiny girl tottered into view. She held an empty jar into which the smiling cloud flowed.

The Handmaiden gazed upon Clownmuffle. "I understand now. You didn't override my enchantment at all. That's not a magic tuxedo, it's a real one. Interesting. Administrator Hegewisch, will you be able to keep Flossmoor's Soul Gem secure?"

"Yes," said another familiar voice.

The Handmaiden tossed the Soul Gem across the room. It struck something soft, like a palm, but Clownmuffle could only hear it. She had to move, even only a finger—a twitch—this paralysis—

"I would personally vouch for the immediate destruction of Flossmoor's gem, but I doubt Her Munificence would agree to such wanton slaughter."

"Yes," said the voice out of view.

The Handmaiden shook her head. "And so many forces squandered when only a touch of ingenuity might prevail. Those fools. No, I ought to have conceived this plan sooner. The fault is, above all, mine. Administrator, report to Her Munificence the situation."

"Yes."

Clownmuffle's vision faded. The more she struggled, the less she moved. The foam on her chin might have been vomit. And lower—she couldn't think about it, she wanted to grab her face and hide, she couldn't even do that, she couldn't even blink, no, nonono, not this, not again, not after before, her body—she needed control—

But she had none. Her vision was fading but she could not even sense her eyelids drooping. The small girl holding her corked jar of cloud looked down sadly and mouthed something, she did not say it aloud, or else hearing had died too, but the lips seemed to say "I'm sorry" and that was the last Clownmuffle saw before all blackened.