Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (23 page)

The dragon rested its immense chin on the stone ledge where Marla stood and regarded her with eyes the diameter of carousels. “You know, Marla, not
many
things surprise me, but you? You really consistently do.”

“His name was Daniel.” Marla tasted his name in her mouth. “Oh, damn. I
killed
him.”

“Huh. Well, sure. That’s how most of my relationships end, too.”

A wave of shame, dismay, and grief rolled over Marla, and she lowered herself to the ground, settling onto her back and staring upward. Tears trickled from her eyes and ran down her face and got into her ears. That first memory of Daniel’s face led to other memories: Driving along a coast road with Daniel beside her, laughing. Skimming over the ocean in a boat with their mentor Artie Mann and their fellow apprentice Jenny Click. The first time she and Daniel had fucked—no, damn it, the ridiculous phrase “made love” was more accurate—in Daniel’s room. The day he’d bought her the cursed purple-and-white cloak that had so defined her early magical career, and given her a silver stag beetle-shaped pin to hold it closed. Their missions, breaking into the mansions of rival sorcerers together. Daniel’s disappearance on a mission with Jenny, and Jenny’s subsequent self-immolation.

She’d remembered all of those
events
before, but the existence of Daniel had been neatly edited out of all of them. Now he was back, a core figure of her formative years. Gods. How badly had she screwed herself up, stunted herself emotionally, by magically forgetting the one time she’d actually really truly been in
love
?

But then she remembered Daniel’s return, years after his disappearance, driven mad by seven years spent trapped on the bottom of the sea, subsisting by draining the life force of creatures down there with him. She recalled her joy at his return, and how it had transformed into horror when he insisted he had to bring their dead mentor back to life, and tried to drain
her
life force when she attempted to stop him. She’d been forced to kill Daniel to save herself. She shivered, all over, and not just because the stone beneath her was cold. She took in a deep, shuddering breath, and gasped, and sucked in another, and realized she was sobbing.

Yes. She could see why she’d cut Daniel out of her mind. How could you go
on
with grief like this?

“I can see you’re going through some stuff,” the dragon said. “I hate to interrupt, but I sort of had this idea that I was going to reveal my identity right about now –”

Marla sat up, wiping her tears away, marshaling years of iron-willed self-control and pushing her feelings down. “I know who you are, Elsie. It’s not like your voice is any different.”

Elsie Jarrow was a legendary figure in the magical world, the most powerful chaos witch in history, so potent that just being in her presence tended to give people cancer, as random mutations cascaded through their cells. Elsie had led a group of sorcerers on a mission to assassinate Marla a while back, and Marla had defeated her. Not
killed
her—killing Elsie Jarrow had been beyond her abilities back then—but she’d cast Elsie’s mind out of her body and dissolved the witch’s essence into the sea, spreading the particles of her being far and wide, with the hope that she’d lose all intellectual coherence in the process.

Apparently it hadn’t worked, or anyway, not permanently. But Marla had more resources now.

“Do you like my new body?” Elsie said. She stretched her vast neck and took a bite out of one of the dangling roots, chewing it and swallowing.

“You haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic. Wasn’t there a dragon in Norse mythology that gnawed on the roots of the great world tree?”

“Very good! The dragon Nidhogg. Well, its name was a bit different in Old Norse, but that’s as good a transliteration as any. That’s what I’m doing down here, Marla: gnawing at the roots of the world. Have you figured out where we are yet?”

Marla looked around carefully. She licked her fingertip and held it up to the wind. She knelt and thumped the stone with her first. She pressed her ear against the cold stone. She picked up a loose stone and tossed it off the ledge, where it fell down into the cavern that Elsie’s draconic body more-or-less filled, and nodded to herself when she heard it hit ottom.

“Looks like we’re in some kind of big stupid cave, Elsie,” she said.

Elsie laughed, and the cavern trembled. “You don’t even
smell
afraid. How is that possible?”

Marla shrugged. “Last time I faced you, I was still mortal. I’ve had an upgrade since then. I can’t die anymore, which makes me a lot less inclined to worry. I’m immortal, by marriage.”

“Oh,
really
? If I eat you, digest you, and turn you into dragon shit, you won’t be dead?”

“I doubt I’d enjoy the experience, but no—I’d be whole and healthy again pretty soon. There’s a good chance I’d come back to life inside your stomach, actually, and you know what I’d do
then
?” Marla grinned up into a face as broad as a football stadium. “I’d kick my way
out
. So, no, you don’t scare me. What do you want?”

Elsie rested her chin on the ledge again and gave a happy sigh that felt like a gale-force wind to Marla. At least it was warm. “You know, I’ve missed you, Marla. I always liked talking to you.”

“You tried to kill me.”

The dragon rolled her eyes. “Oh, well, that was just, you know. A thing. Besides, didn’t we go so deep into being enemies that we practically came out the other side as friends?”

Marla frowned. “I must have missed that particular transition.”

Elsie ignored her. “And now that you’re a god, we can basically converse as equals!”

Marla snorted. “Good to know your opinion of yourself hasn’t suffered. I defeated you just fine when I was your inferior, you know.”

Another warm sigh. “That’s not really something to be proud of. A prion, which is a thing that isn’t even
alive
, can get into a person’s brain and reproduce itself until the gray matter looks like a sponge, reducing the greatest mind in the multiverse to lumpy porridge. The inferior can
often
defeat the superior. That’s what makes life so deliciously unpredictable.” Elsie flickered out her tongue, and Marla leapt aside to avoid being struck by the forked muscle, which was as a big as an ocean pier. “Normally, Marla, I enjoy the confusion of my enemies
and
my friends
and
also strangers, but since you seem to be constitutionally immune to suffering uncertainty, I’m going to tell you a few things. First of all: we aren’t on Earth.”

Marla nodded. “The presence of the giant tree roots sort of tipped me off. This is one of those mythic sorts of things, I figure.”

“You’re righter than you know. Where we are, Marla, is in the land of the
dead
. You know, your home away from home?”

A little trickle of worry flowed down Marla’s spine. She’d been to the underworld as a mortal, more than once, but she wasn’t supposed to do that anymore. She spent half her
life
in the underworld—but when she was here, she wasn’t just Marla Mason. She was the Bride of Death, co-regent of the land of the dead, and her conscious mortal mind was dormant or expanded or incorporated into her god-self, which was vaster, more merciless, and even bitchier than Marla herself at her worst. She definitely wasn’t feeling particularly god-like right now. When she was the Bride, she knew, the travails and torments of individual humans didn’t matter to her, any more than one broken stalk of wheat would matter to a farmer striding into a field with a scythe. The Bride certainly wouldn’t cry about
Daniel
, or anyone else.

“You brought me to Hell?” Marla said.

“Oh, sweetie. You were already
here
. This isn’t your month of mortality. You’re only partway through your month of being divine. Death and his Bride must have noticed me down here at the bottom of the sea of chaos, eating up the souls of the dead for sustenance, building my own little kingdom. You—the Bride—came down to investigate, and I tricked her—tricking people is one of my favorite things—into giving up her divine power before she could face me.”

Marla made a face. “The descent of Inanna trick.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Marla. But, yes. When you strip the
goddess
away from the Bride of Death, what’s left... is you.”

Marla thought about that for a moment. “Death is going to notice, Elsie. He’s awfully fond of me, in both my forms. And since you’re a soul in his domain, under his control –”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not dead. I came to this place alive, Marla. I was just a million loose particles of incoherence spread throughout the sea, driving the occasional squid insane just in passing, but then a little bit of me collected around a... vent, sort of. A hole. A portal. There was magic, there, and something in me responded to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.”

Marla nodded. There were a few places where you could reach the underworld from the world above—the heart of the odd volcano, the deepest chasm of the occasional sea. There was a long tradition of giving humans a chance to enter the underworld and win back their loved ones, but Death said there was no reason to make it
too
easy.

“Bits of me collected there,” Elsie said, “until enough of me came together that I could
think
again, and then, because I’m a curious sort, I went exploring, and I found this place. The land of the dead, billions of sentient souls, all in their own little bubbles of existence, creating their own afterlives.”

“So you’re alive. Do you think that
helps
you?” Marla shook her head. “This is Death’s domain. He can boot you out. He can kill you for real. You’d better clear out, Elsie.”

“Do you realize what the underworld is made of, Marla? It’s made of chaos. The formless nothing of pure potential. The basic state from which all order arises. The dividing line between order and disorder, and the shift between the two, that’s where I live! The first thing I did when I came down here was turn myself into a dragon, just to see if I could. That’s not all I can do. I can be a god here. I can create anything I want, and unlike those poor dumb dead souls up there, I can do it
consciously
.”

Marla nodded. “Okay. So... do that, then. I think we have enough chaos to go around. You can be the big bad monster lurking at the bottom of the primordial sea. Create your own perfect paradise. I don’t mind. Death might get territorial about it, but I’ll talk him down. How about it? We’ll be benevolently negligent landlords.”

Another sigh, this one like a summer breeze. “You know, I tried that. I made a mansion on the moon and filled it with harem boys and girls and others. I conjured armies of monsters clashing on fields of flame. I made skyscrapers fall into each other like dominos. I bred contagious lunacies. But none of it
satisfied
me, because there’s one way the dead people in this place have it better than me: they think their worlds are real. But, me, I know better. I know I made it all up. It’s impossible for me to be
surprised
.”

“It’s a pretty sweet situation, though, still. Lots of people would love to live in a fantasy world of their own creation.”

“I am not most people, Marla. This play-pretend world simply isn’t as good as real life. It’s like punching a pillow instead of a face. It’s like eating
carob
. I need real people to mess around with.”

“Okay,” Marla said. “So, what, you want me to show you the door? I can probably do that, and get you back to the world above.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a
body
to go back to. You know that. Out there in the world, I grew
too
powerful, became too much the embodiment of chaos, and even if I stole someone else’s body, it would just rot around me. Besides, the inside of other people’s heads always smell terrible.”

“I’m at a loss, then, Elsie. What’s your plan here? I know you
like
having plans, the more elaborate the better, because that way you can gain power when they inevitably go wrong. For you, every lose-lose situation is a win-win.”

“I’ve given this a lot of thought, Marla, and to be honest, it was
your
example that gave me the idea. I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve transcended what it conventionally means to be ‘human.’ There are people who’ve called me a demi-god, even—an avatar of disorder. But since I don’t believe in doing things halfway... I’ve decided I’d like to become a god. For real. For really real.”

“Huh. How do you intend to go about doing that? I only managed it by marriage, and sorry, Death’s not polyamorous.”

“I thought maybe if I ate some souls, that would help, so I’ve been doing that—snacking on the immortal sparks of any afterlife-bubble that drifts too close to me. They were delicious, very refreshing, and frankly some of them make pretty decent hallucinogenic drugs, but if eating them has made me more like a god, I haven’t noticed. Still, the devouring served a dual purpose: to get the
attention
of a god.”

“Ah. So the plan is, eat me, then?”

“The
plan
was to strip you of your divinity and cloak myself in that raiment instead. Except most of the things you stripped off just returned to nothingness when I touched them. The only things that stayed real were some broken bits of stone, and this ring.” A huge claw rose up, and there was her wedding band, pinched between two enormous claws that narrowed to the sharpness of needles. “I tried putting it on, but—nothing.”

“Well, sure. The ring’s an artifact, but it’s not like whatever wears the ring is married to Death. That would be a really stupid way to arrange things. Can I have it back?”

Elsie shrugged—Marla could now cross “see a dragon shrug” off her life list—and flicked the ring through the air. Marla snatched it as it fell. She’d had some vague hope that it would flood her with divine power, but no dice, not even when she put it on her finger. Oh well. It had never given her any godlike powers when she wore it in the mortal world, either. She felt good having it back, though.