Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (20 page)

“Is that what happened?”

Elsie shrugged. “How should I know? I didn’t do that much research before I gave him the sword. But it’s certainly possible. Sorry, Marla. You’re complaining about my nature. I’m both the ill wind and the good, and even I don’t know which way I’ll blow on any given day. You can accept that, and benefit from my admittedly fickle impulse to help, or you can tell me to piss off, and I’ll find some
other
way to occupy my many empty hours.”

Marla held up her hands. “All right. The partnership holds. What’s that old Bulgarian proverb that FDR quoted at Yalta? ‘It is permitted in times of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge?’”

“Aw, you think I’m the devil? You flatter me!” Elsie beamed. “You do know
you’re
the lord of Hell in this room, though, don’t you? I’m the one holding your hand... but not because I need to cross a bridge. I can fly. I just like holding hands. Figuratively, at least.” She dropped naked onto the couch. “I say we order just an
immensity
of room service breakfast. Pelham, go do that, heavy on the poached everything. While we wait, and eat, and digest, Marla can tell us a story, and after that, we’ll make our preparations to invade Hell, whee.”

“We have more important things to do than tell stories –” Marla said.

Elsie stomped her foot. “You owe me, Marla. Tonight we dine in Hell, and I don’t want your friends here to die without hearing my captivating origin story.” She smiled around at them. “It’s really wonderful, a real rags-to-riches tale of triumph and personal growth.”

Marla sighed. “Do I have to? It... doesn’t really paint me in the best light, Elsie. Which, hearing myself say that, I realize isn’t likely to dissuade you.”

The chaos god batted her eyelashes. “Oh,
please
, dread queen Marla? Regale us with the story of my ascent to goddess-hood? Tell them how I
completely
outsmarted you?”

“I wouldn’t say completely,” she muttered. “All right. Gather round, fellas. This happened in the underworld a while back, during my last stint in Hell before we fought the Outsider, when my
real
husband was still around....”

A Serpent in the Roots of the World

The dread queen of the underworld and her husband the god of death had no need to eat, but since she was still intermittently human, and he’d grown (or rather been adjusted) to admire much about humankind, they sometimes donned human appearances and dined together, speaking with one another as mortals do.

The morning her quest began, the queen sat on one side of an octagonal table made from a single immense piece of shaped obsidian. Made, rather than carved, because no one had actually
carved
it.

She lifted a forkful into her mouth, chewed it, and made a face. “The hollandaise is perfect.”

“The food of the gods,” Death said. “So why do you sound disappointed?”

“You know how I like to complain, and this is so perfect, there’s nothing to complain about. My compliments to the chef. But do we even have a chef, or is this stuff just wished into existence?”

“Technically, the eggs are no more real than this table.” Death thumped his ringed fingers against the stone. “Which is to say, we have willed them into reality, and in this place, our will
is
reality.” He took a bite. “I’ve had eggs benedict in the world above, though, and it didn’t taste notably different from this, except not as good.”

The Bride—as her followers, the cult of the Bride of Death, called her, to her cold and considerable amusement—lifted up her poached egg with her fork and looked underneath. “This isn’t Canadian bacon. It’s regular bacon. So this isn’t eggs benedict, it’s eggs blackstone.”

“As always, I appreciate your tireless efforts to educate me. Blackstone. Like the table. I like that. It wouldn’t be a bad alias for me to use if I have to go to the world above and pretend to be human, sometime.”

“I can see your passport now: Mr. Mortimer Blackstone. There’s a Blackstone in my ancestry, a few generations back. John Henry Blackstone.”

“Did he invent this egg dish?”

She snorted. “I doubt it. Someone would have probably mentioned it if he had. He was a horse thief.”

“You could go downstairs and look him up. See what kind of afterlife he’s conjured for himself—if it’s full of demonic horses because he felt guilty, or if it’s full of happy little ponies frolicking freely. You could even nudge him toward a happier eternity if he’s concocted something really terrible for himself. I know you disapprove of nepotism, but what’s the point of power if you don’t harmlessly abuse it every once in a while?”

“I don’t even look in on dead relatives I
knew
,” she said. “Let alone ones who died before I was born. I think I’ll pass.” She put her fork down. “Are we done small-talking? Don’t we have any big talk instead? Matters of life and death, or mostly death, that need our attention?”

“Mmm. There are certain situations that would benefit from our presence. There’s an epidemic brewing in southeast Asia, and a chemical spill in North America. I’m giving them a bit of my attention now. I know you don’t like dealing with the human side of things, though—the shepherding, and coordinating the psychopomps, and all that.”

She shrugged. “I just have trouble focusing on individuals from this vantage point. It’s like trying to pick out a particular grain of sand and appreciate it for its unique and winning qualities. The woman with the scythe doesn’t have time to get to know every stalk of wheat she mows down personally—she’s concerned about the state of the whole field. You know I’m better with larger things, like the cycles of the seasons, both terrestrial and metaphysical. I’m bad with people. Even when I’m in human form, with my perceptions curtailed, when it’s easier to tell all the scuttling mortals apart—even
then
I’m bad with people. I’m practically famous for it.”

Death took another bite with obvious relish. “I think you’re too hard on your mortal self.
You
can be perfect, in your way, or at least perfectly suited to your role. You’re a god, so whatever you do is the right thing, almost by definition. During the months when you’re mortal, you’re.... only human. Holding your mortal self to your divine standard is unfair.”

“What’s fair got to do with it? We’re the gods of death. Fair’s got nothing to do with death.”

He held up his hands in a gesture of concession, or conciliation. “I’m happy to let you play to your strengths, darling. As it happens, there have been some troubling occurrences, down below. I sent some autonomous personality fragments to investigate it –”

“Demons.” She grinned, showing pointed teeth.

He sighed. “Yes, demons, if it pleases you. They never came back. They just... vanished. Which makes me think something dangerous is happening down at the bottom of the underworld. Would you care to take a look?”

“What kind of troubling occurrences are we talking about?”

“A few of the dead have disappeared from their afterlives. It happens, occasionally—after a very long time, they lose psychological coherence, or else they grow weary of their torments or delights, and they turn to oblivion. But the rate of attrition has been more frequent lately, and the raw substance of their denatured afterlives isn’t returning to the cauldron of chaos after they disappear. Instead, something is taking the substance of their afterlives and....” He shrugged.

“Stealing it? Using it? Eating it? Are we talking about metaphysical thieves, or the world’s greatest necromancer, or just some kind of underworld rodents getting into the cupboards?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Death said. “It could simply be a malfunction in the system. A leak of some kind. An imbalance. I couldn’t say.”

“‘The system,’” the Bride said. “That’s one way to describe it.” She and her husband were the absolute and undisputed rulers of the underworld, but that was a bit like being the ruler of the sea: their realm was vast, largely unknowable, full of dark places, and populated mostly by creatures with no idea they
had
a ruler, some of whom would try to eat anyone who claimed the title in their presence.

The essence of the underworld was a sea of raw potential. Any creature that could dream or fear an afterlife ended up there after death, and found themselves in a little bubble of potentiality, a formless void to be shaped by their own hopes and worries and expectations. In those pocket realities, the departed souls inhabited the Hell, Heaven, happy hunting ground, Purgatory, Sheol, or Valhalla of their own imagining: some of the afterlives were fantastically baroque, or indescribably cruel, or unspeakable beautiful. Sometimes lovers or friends or families would drift together, their bubbles overlapping into a shared space, but more often any afterlife that demanded dearly departed relatives would be filled merely with simulacrums of the same. Some people truly expected, and thus received, only oblivion, or dissolved into a cloud of ego-less bliss—but most people didn’t really believe, deep down inside, that
they
would ever cease to exist, and lose continuity of identity, and so most went on, in some form or another.

And now some of them were vanishing, and their bubbles of void-to-be-infinitely-shaped disappearing with them. That was interesting.

“Have you ever heard of this sort of thing happening before?” the Bride asked.

Death took a sip of blood orange juice, which his wife was convinced he drank mostly because of the name. If there were something called “murderfruit” he would have sipped its juice instead. “There’s nothing in the memory of any of my predecessors that seems entirely similar, no.”

“It could be a monster,” she said. “Down there, underneath the everything, there’s just the raw stuff of creation, and who knows what dwells there?”

“A monster? Well, it’s possible. You know how these mythic situations can be. Even if it’s just a malfunction, it could
present
as a monster. If you go down, just be careful, all right?”

“I’m a god of death,” she said. “What could possibly happen to me?”

“You’re not the first god of death,” he pointed out. “And neither am I. Some of us retired gracefully, or dried up like dew in the sun, or switched off like lights. Others of us came to bad ends. There aren’t many things that can harm gods, but there are a few.”

“If anything like that threatens me,” the Bride said, “there’s going to be one
less
of them.”

•

Before the Bride began her descent, she dressed herself in divine raiment, which in her case meant loose-fitting white linen pants and a snug white sleeveless blouse, with golden slippers that provided better footing than the best work boots she’d ever had. (“Linen” and “blouse” and “golden” and “footing” were all as unnecessary as eating eggs blackstone here, but she was a corona of divine fire flickering around a core of mortal woman, and so she still enjoyed the trappings of the physical.) She took up a rod of lapis lazuli, a scepter three feet long with a pleasing weight, because there was something down below that was killing their demons, and it would be pleasant to hit it with a stick. She wore a heavy golden necklace, and, golden bracelets, and, of course, her wedding ring on the appropriate finger of the appropriate hand. The Bride was not vain, but she might encounter some of the dead, and if they looked upon their queen, they should see
some
glamour.

The Bride set out from the palace, which wasn’t really a palace, except sometimes. When she stepped outside—if you could call the interior of an immense cavern “outside”—she looked back to see what shape the residence had taken today. The obsidian theme had continued, and it seemed she currently lived in a mountain of glittering black glass, with no openings at all but the arched front entrance. Wasn’t there a reference in some poem or story to Lucifer living in a palace of mirrors? This was undeniably more stylish. She wondered if the shape of the place was based on a passing fancy of hers or her husband’s. They could shape things consciously, but if they didn’t bother, the subconscious did the job well enough.

She tilted her head back to look up at what, for want of a better word, she thought of as the sky. There were things that looked like falling stars above her, a constant meteor shower, with new streaks of light appearing at the rate of about two lights per second, though there were occasional stretches with fewer and occasional bursts of more—sometimes many more. Those lights were the souls of the newly dead, streaking down to their afterlives. Sparrows, ravens, owls, winged human figures, and even the occasional spectral dog or horse occasionally flew or ran alongside a particular falling speck, but not many people believed in the necessity of psychopomps to escort their souls to the afterlife anymore, so such creatures were rare, and in any case evaporated in the atmosphere. Not many people paid the ferryman’s toll to cross by water anymore, as far as that went. Most of the falling dead were just unaccompanied lights streaking through the dark.

The Bride walked along a path of stones the color of yellowed skulls until she reached a river, which ran swift and black and straight, twenty yards wide. Far away from here the famed River Styx ran, a useful barrier for keeping out mortals who managed to wander in through some forgotten portal or dread spell. (There was a train tunnel running under the river for those in the know, though. Progress marches relentlessly onward, Death said, even in the underworld.)
This
river, though, was almost as famous as the Styx: the Lethe, a river whose waters granted forgetfulness. Lethe water was highly sought-after by mortal sorcerers, since it could be used to wipe whole minds clean, or selectively edit specific memories. Under the regimes of previous gods of death, necromancers had been able to induce spirits and demons to bring small quantities of the stuff to the world above, and the Bride and her husband tolerated the practice under her reign, too.

Mostly because, as the mortal Marla Mason, the Bride had taken Lethe water twice herself. The second time, she’d used it to remove the memory of sex with a lovetalker, since those who were touched once by such supernaturally gifted lovers could never thereafter be satisfied by the touch of an ordinary human, and she’d hoped to have enjoyable sex again sometime.