“Yes,” Marla said. “I mean, pretty much. I thought it would do you good, I guess.”
“You are also profoundly uncomfortable with the very idea of having a lady’s personal gentleman in your employ.” Pelham sniffed. “I am confident you will overcome that reticence in time. May I stay with you now, then, or do you prefer me to continue the pantomime of looking for a safe place to hide your cloak?”
“No need for pretense anymore. The cloak is
really
gone now. Once I met the Mason, and saw what the cloak wanted to do to the world, what it hoped to use me for, what it
had
used me for in another dimension... I didn’t have any qualms about getting rid of it, permanently, even if it did mean giving up my best weapon.”
“I hope you buried it deeply,” Pelham said. “Such things have a way of rising to the surface.”
“Ha,” Rondeau said. “Remember Bradley Bowman? How trying to bring him back to life caused all this trouble? Well, he didn’t come back to life, exactly, but he ended up ascending beyond the mortal plane and whatnot. Now he’s, like... the guy in charge of maintaining the structural integrity of the multiverse. Immortal, and existing simultaneously in every possible reality and in
none
of them, which is a nifty trick. We gave him the cloaks, both Marla’s and the Mason’s, and he put them both at the North Pole in a parallel universe where life never even developed on Earth. They are
gone
.”
Pelham exhaled. “That is a relief. Then... may I stay here?”
Marla reached out and touched his shoulder. “Of course. It’s good to have you back, Pelham. You’ll be a great help.”
“Marla’s a detective now,” Rondeau said. “Solving mysteries. Or, ah, failing to solve mysteries, mostly, but it’s a start.”
“A... detective?” Pelham said, in the tone of voice someone else might say, “A... rat turd?” “Is such an occupation truly suitable for your station?”
“What station is that?” Rondeau said. “Poverty stricken ex-chief-sorcerer? No offense, you know I love Marla to pieces, but she’s not exactly an aristo, Pelly.”
“Mrs. Mason.” Pelham’s voice was stern. “How can you expect Rondeau to give you the respect you deserve if he does not
know
you are due such respect?”
“Why do you keep calling her ‘Mrs.’?” Rondeau said. “You always used to call her ‘Miss Mason,’ and even that was weird, but – ”
Marla closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands, and groaned. “I hate you both. Take me back to the hotel.”
“You got
married
,” Rondeau said for the third time, sipping a rum-and-pineapple juice on his balcony. They had a great view of the ocean up here, but Rondeau was staring at her instead.
Marla sank down further in the padded chaise longue, looking up at the underside of the balcony attached to the room above them. “Okay, yes, but see – ”
“To a god,” Rondeau said. “To the god of Death. You’re the bride of Death. You’re a
goddess
.”
“Only by marriage. And it’s not like it was a love match. Pelham and I were in the underworld, and, well... it was a marriage of convenience. I needed to use the god of Death’s sword, and in order to do that, I had to take certain aspects of his power as my own – had to become a member of the family, a god by association. Don’t think of it as a marriage, it was just... a ritual.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t consummate?” Rondeau waggled his eyebrows.
Marla made a face. “That incarnation of Death was pretty much falling apart when I met him, hanging on way past the end of his natural span. He was a wreck, and he should have made way for the new incarnation of Death years before. He wasn’t exactly alluring. He couldn’t even stand up from his divine throne – he was holding onto his office by pure force of will and butt-in-chairness.”
“You missed out on throne sex?” Rondeau said. “I bet that thing was all encrusted with jewels, too.” He paused. “And I’m not talking about the chair.”
“Mrs. Mason was widowed soon after the wedding.” Pelham appeared with a silver tray and placed a drink – more juice than rum – on the small round table beside Marla.
Where had he found that tray? Did he have some kind of emergency valet-kit in his backpack?
“When the old god of Death was replaced by his newer incarnation.”
“Oh, I remember
him
,” Rondeau said. “The Walking Death. Now
he
was yummy, even if he was kind of a dick. Shame you couldn’t have married him instead of his dad. Or predecessor. Or whatever.”
“A little of both,” Marla said. In reality, she
was
still married to Death – it turned out the marriage ceremony had wedded her to the
office
of the god of Death, not to any particular incarnation, and the being known as the Walking Death was now her husband. Which was sort of like marrying a father, getting widowed, and marrying his son, but, hell, mythology was full of weirder sorts of incest. She hadn’t consummated her marriage to the Walking Death, either, though the idea wasn’t entirely unappealing, and he certainly wanted to. Her wifely duties – ha – were supposed to wait until after she died, when she’d take up the mantle of her goddesshood and sit on her own throne deep under the ground. (Well, metaphorically, and metaphysically. You couldn’t actually dig a hole and get to the underworld, but it definitely had a subterranean quality.) She wouldn’t really be the bride of Death until her
own
death... unless she figured out a way to wriggle out of the obligation first. Not that spending her afterlife as a terrifying goddess sounded so bad, but she was opposed to destiny in principle.
“It is a shame,” Pelham mused. “If your husband still existed, you could simply
ask
him who murdered this Ronin person. Solving murders would be much simpler with the god of Death at your beck and call.”
Marla stared at him. The idea had never occurred to her. She pretty much hated to ask for assistance with anything, but it wasn’t like she’d be asking the Walking Death to fight her battles for her – she’d just ask him to answer a question. Surely that wouldn’t shift the balance of power in their relationship too much? Though worrying about that was probably asinine. He was a god, tasked with overseeing the end-of-life and afterlife of every living thing in the universe. The “person” called the Walking Death that she interacted with occasionally was just an insignificant splinter of the god’s true vastness, an externalized physical presence created to interact with humans and other lesser beings. He probably had all the power in the relationship anyway, by definition. Still, no reason to give him more. But maybe if she spun it the right way...
She cleared her throat. “Um. Maybe I’m not so widowed after all. See...”
Rondeau insisted on accompanying her back to the bookstore, and Pelham murmured that he’d be happy to join them, if she had no objection, so she just gave in. They were both giving her a lot of crap about how she shouldn’t have lied to them, Rondeau gleefully, Pelham morosely. But, damn it, a woman’s marriage to a chthonic deity was nobody’s business but her own, and she refused to apologize.
In the back room of the bookshop, she opened up her safe, revealing the silver bell inside. It was a perfectly ordinary bell, not magical in the slightest... but Death was always listening for it.
She rang the bell.
The Walking Death never appeared before her in a puff of black smoke, or descended from the heavens like a sinking balloon. True to his name, he always just walked in, though strictly speaking, it wasn’t always clear where he walked in
from
.
He walked in now, emerging from a black door in the exterior wall (which was, usually, utterly doorless.) The Walking Death stood well over six feet tall, his long brown hair falling just past the shoulders of his impeccably tailored midnight blue suit, no tie. Marla knew next to nothing about menswear, but his dress always struck her as vaguely European and timelessly fashionable. His face was pale, narrow, and aristocratic-looking, his lips curved almost perpetually into the hint of a smirk. The look should have been maddening, and it was, a little, but it was also cute. He had rings on each of his fingers, as usual, eight glittering gemstones in different colors – but, no, now he had an extra ring on the third finger of each hand, just simple silver bands.
“Darling.” He kissed Marla on the cheek and took her hand in his own – cold, no surprise – before turning to look at Pelham and Rondeau. “The servant and the sidekick. How pleasant to see you both.” They stared at him, apparently more overawed by the company of a god than Marla was... or at least more than she allowed herself to appear to be.
Marla pulled her hand away from his. “Sorry to call you here. I was hoping you could help me out with this... murder investigation I’m doing.”
He raised one elegantly arched eyebrow. “Really? I’m to be your informant, am I? I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense. I do have access to the material witnesses in any suspicious death. I am not unwilling to assist you, if you choose to indulge in such trivialities. But I was actually planning to come see you anyway. I have something to tell you. It’s wonderful news, actually.”
She frowned. “What’s that?”
“A number of your enemies are conspiring to kill you.” The Walking Death broke into a wide smile, and swept Marla into a tight embrace. “Isn’t it
wonderful
?” he breathed into her ear. “You’ll be dead soon, my darling!”
THE BAD DOCTOR
Let’s leave Marla and her friends for now, and take a few moments to talk about Dr. Leda Husch.
You don’t know her? There’s no reason you should; she’s not alive, exactly, and will never die, though she often wishes she had. For many years now Dr. Husch has run the Blackwing Institute, a hospital of sorts for mentally ill sorcerers, located a bit outside the city of Felport, Marla Mason’s old holdfast. Marla and Dr. Husch have had their disagreements, but they were essentially allies, and business associates, and occasionally even friends – as two strong women with difficult jobs, they had certain things in common, after all. But shortly before Marla’s exile, something very bad happened to Dr. Husch. Her assailant was a woman from another universe – a woman who was only in
this
universe because of something Marla did, a certain selfish act that ripped a hole in the fabric of reality and let bad things cross over, specifically a bad thing called the Mason. But you know about
her
. She sent a lot of people your way, didn’t she?
The Mason did a great deal of damage on her rampage through this reality before Marla stopped her, but the only damage that concerns us just now is what happened to Dr. Husch:
The Mason tore her to pieces. Literally. Small pieces. Hundreds of them.
For most people, being dismembered so thoroughly is fatal, but as I mentioned, Dr. Husch isn’t exactly alive – she’s a fully sentient and self-aware homunculus, created long ago by a powerful sorcerer, and as such, she cannot die. Though she was ripped to shreds, she retained awareness throughout her ordeal and the aftermath. She was later reassembled by a biomancer named Langford, and she – oh, but listen to me, going on and on. Better to show you.
While Marla is investigating a murder in Maui, back on the mainland a pair of people are on their way to meet Dr. Husch, and they should suffice for our introduction to the other side of this story. These two people were
never
friends of Marla: the first is a one-armed chaos witch named Nicolette, who holds a longstanding grudge against Marla, and the other is Crapsey, the Mason’s old lackey and the dark doppelganger to Rondeau. Crapsey was stranded in this world when Marla killed his mistress the Mason, and after that he began clinging to Nicolette’s coattails, because some people are only happy when they’re being told what to do. Let’s see how things look through Crapsey’s eyes...
“Aren’t you even a little bit afraid Dr. Husch is going to throw you in a cell again?” Crapsey said. “The Mason and I just broke you
out
of this place not so long ago.”
“I’ve got you to protect me, big boy.” Nicolette kicked at the massive oak doors of the Blackwing Institute, her boot thumping with the regularity of a metronome.
Crapsey winced. “Dr. Husch isn’t going to be too happy to see
me
, either – I was just following orders, but I did some not-so-nice stuff to her myself, the morning she got all torn up.”
“The divinations say this is the place to begin our campaign,” Nicolette said. “My dice and mouse bones and toad stones don’t lie.”
“I still say we could’ve just done some recruiting,” Crapsey said. “We should be looking for Marla’s
enemies
, not her allies.”
“There aren’t that many enemies left, ugly. Even though she doesn’t usually kill them herself, Marla’s rivals have pretty lousy life expectancies. There’s me, and there’s you, and maybe her brother, but even though he’s a hell of a con man, he’s not much of a fighter. Mutex is dead, Todd Sweeney is dead, Ayres is dead, Joshua Kindler is dead, Reave might as well be dead. The Mason was exiled from this reality, and you two idiots killed Susan Wellstone and Viscarro on your little cross-country rampage. My old boss Gregor is dead, Bulliard and Marla reached an understanding, I don’t exactly have a phone number for the so-called King of the Fairies, and – ”
“All right, all right!” Crapsey touched the butterfly knife in his pocket. It had seemed so simple, when Nicolette first brought up the idea – Marla was in exile, stripped of her powers, all but friendless. What better time to try and kill her? They’d join forces with some other people who hated Marla, fly down to Hawai’i, and unleash murder most foul. Except they’d had trouble finding anybody to fill out their team, which led Nicolette to cast a divination spell to suggest a course of action, and now, here they were, on the doorstep of one of Marla’s old allies. Maybe not a suicide mission, but probably an
imprisonment
mission, which was better, but not by much.
The door swung open, and Nicolette squinted inside. “What are you, a beekeeper in mourning now? Part of a Goth hazmat squad?”