Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (24 page)

“I think there is power in some of these objects,” Elsie said, “but the power is specific to
you
. I can’t use it. It’s like a dress that won’t fit. Or maybe like an transplanted organ I rejected.”

“So, not to keep harping on this, but—what now?”

“Oh, I figure I’ll keep you here until Death starts wondering where you went, and then I’ll hold you for ransom and make him
give
me his divine power –”

Marla bent down, picked up a stone, and flung it as hard as she could right at the center of one of Elsie’s immense eyes. The dragon roared and reared back, but by then Marla was already running for the door. If the door didn’t open, she’d have a problem, but it swung open under her hand. Typical. A rational person would have made the cave inescapable, but Elsie wasn’t a fan of locked rooms. She liked leaving the possibility of things going wrong.

Marla stepped out into a marble foyer, like the lobby of a fancy hotel, and an old woman behind a coat-check counter looked at her in alarm. Marla ignored her and started running, and her foot struck something as she ran—a shard of bluish stone about the size of her hand. There were half a dozen other shards of the same stuff. A snatch of a poem by Yeats fluttered through her mind—something about lapis lazuli—and she remembered that Inanna had carried a lapis lazuli measuring rod with her when she descended into the underworld.

Marla bent and picked up the hunk of stone, and felt a
jolt
, like a flicker of lightning passing through her body, and suddenly her senses expanded, and she could
feel
the vastness just beyond the opening on the far side of the room. The stone melted away, dissolving into her hand, but the power it imparted remained.

Ha. She’d snatched up a piece of her surrendered divinity. Not enough to turn her back into the Bride, to get full access to the whole suite of divine powers, but maybe enough to get her out of here. She rushed through the hole where some doors had clearly once been –

– and into a cloudy black nothing, where lightning flashed. Shit shit shit. She gestured instinctively, and a set of rickety wooden stairs assembled themselves from raw chaos, heading upward. Right. The stuff around her was formless void, but it could be shaped by someone with power and will. Marla was a
tiny
bit short of power, but she sure as hell had will.

Fuck the stairs, then. Marla lifted her chin, looked upward, and
flew
.

•

She drifted among bubbles in assorted colors, some beautiful, some just gross. She’d created some clothes for herself from shreds of chaos, briefly considering dragon-slaying armor before settling on her customary garb, loose shirt and pants and big stomping boots. Freedom of movement and the power of kicking: what more did a woman need? After a moment’s thought she made a dagger, too, then decided to go bigger, and turned it into a double-edged sword. She’d wielded a sword forged in Hell in the past, and if this one wasn’t so much
forged
as imagined, well, she still felt better having it. She sheathed the blade on her back and pondered her next move.

Something needed to be done about Elsie. The smart thing would be to keep flying upward until she found Death, fill him in on what had happened, and let him bring his divine wrath down on Elsie. The idea didn’t sit right with her, though. She’d descended into this primordial sea to set things right, and even if she didn’t remember taking on that mission, she didn’t like the idea of admitting defeat. She was no match for Elsie, though, in her current state.

Marla didn’t even know if she was still indestructible. Her mortal body couldn’t die on Earth, but this wasn’t Earth, and she had no idea if this was even her real body. She had some bit of the Bride’s power, and access to buried memories that weren’t available on Earth, so what the hell
was
she? Some kind of Bride-Marla hybrid? A demi-god?

One of the lessons she’d learned in recent years was that she couldn’t do
everything
herself. Sometimes, you had to ask for help. Crawling back to her husband and asking him to save her was an intolerable idea, though. What alternative did she have?

She looked at one of the passing bubbles, the color of mud, and her mind said: That’s Carl Offenson’s afterlife, and it’s mostly a bar situated by a slow-moving river full of trout, where his tab never comes due and the jukebox always plays his favorite Eagles songs. She propelled herself through space—not thinking about
how
she did it, the same way a millipede shouldn’t think about how it moves its individual legs—and looked at more bubbles. A milky-white one full of infinite ice, where a man snowboarded forever. Another was a smoky hell of warehouses and piers. One was just a swimming pool the size of an aircraft carrier, filled with topless mermaids. Another was an entire galaxy, with a spaceship the size of a small planet drifting through the void, piloted by a steely-eyed war hero who’d been an avid computer gamer in his mortal life. Yet another was an endless field of delicious mastodon who lifted their heads and welcomed the spear.

She knew the names of everyone in every bubble around her, and what their afterlives contained. She thought,
Daniel
?

A grayish sphere rushed through the void and hovered before her. The interior was heartbreaking.

She stepped into it, and found herself on a rainy street in the city of Felport, where she’d lived, and where Daniel had died. He’d been a formidable sorcerer, with a power she’d never encountered in exactly that form since: the ability to manipulate the life forces of everything around him. He could animate unliving things, and he could drain life from those around him. He liked a good meal, but he didn’t need to eat, since he could subsist on tiny bits of life force drawn from flowers, trees, animals, anything around him, taking quantities small enough that they were never missed, but that, combined, sustained him. That’s how he’d lived in the aftermath of that terrible mission with Jenny Click, lost on the bottom of the sea, in a sort of coma, leeching just enough energy to survive from the life around him. When their mentor Artie Mann had died, a geas laid on Daniel had spurred him to return to the world. Artie had wanted Daniel to bring him back to life, but by the time Daniel made it to Felport, their teacher had been dead for a long time, and if that rotting corpse had been animated, it would have come back as a horror. Something with Artie’s memories, maybe, but souls weren’t meant to be snatched out of hell and restored to their bodies, and he would have come back
wrong
.

Marla had tried to explain the dangers, but Daniel hadn’t been able to see reason, and he’d attacked her... and she’d fought back.

She found him now, a mewling wreck of a broken body, and knelt, putting her hand on what had once been his back. She closed her eyes, sought the little spark of divinity within her, and exerted her will.

When she opened her eyes, Daniel was whole again, heartbreakingly beautiful, long lashes and baffled eyes. “Marla?” he said. “What—what happened?”

“You had a terrible accident, baby.” She touched his face.

“I—you—you got older.”

She snorted. “Just what a woman wants to hear. I can’t help it. You died young, and I was stuck living on without you.”

He looked around at the shadowy, half-formed cityscape. “Oh. This... Isn’t really Felport.” His hand reached out, as if of its own volition, and took hers.

She squeezed his fingers in her own. Oh, Daniel. Her Daniel. “It’s the underworld, hon. Your very own bit of the afterlife. You didn’t make a very pleasant eternity for yourself, but I can see why. You had a rough life, there at the end.”

“I don’t... really remember.”

“That’s probably for the best.” She considered how much to tell him, and decided to err on the side of simplicity. “I had to come down here because there’s a bad thing rising in the depths. It’s a woman that looks like a dragon and wants to be a god. I have to stop her. I was wondering—do you want to help?”

“I—what? How can I help? I’m dead.”

“In the underworld, that’s not necessarily a disadvantage. You’re a soul: pure intention, unencumbered by biology. Lucky bastard. Here, you can shape reality. Give it a try.”

He frowned, and the rain clouds above them parted, sunlight streaming down. “Huh,” he said. “That’s... wow.”

“Nicely done,” she said. “You can make whatever kind of world here you
want
. The afterlife isn’t something imposed on you, and it’s not punishment. It’s what you make it.” She laughed, only a little harshly. “It’s sort of like
actual
life, that way. I want you to know you have that power, that you can make existence here sweet, if you like. If you want to stay and play around with your new mastery of reality, that’s fine. But if you’d like to come on one last mission with me first, and help me slay a dragon....”

“I’m already dead, right? So... I can’t die?”

“I’ll be honest with you. The dragon has been eating the souls of the dead. I think when she does that, what happens to them is just... oblivion. So there’s some danger here.”

Daniel scratched his chin. “Not much point in playing a game if there are no stakes, huh?” He suddenly grabbed her, pulled her close, and kissed her, and the sweetness took her breath away.

I’m a married woman
, she thought. Oh well. This hardly seemed the time to bring that up. Death would understand. Probably. Or maybe he wouldn’t. He didn’t exactly have any old girlfriends, after all.

“You’ve aged well,” he said after he pulled away.

“You could stand to work on your flattery skills.” He was too young for her anyway, now. She wasn’t the woman who’d loved him, even if he was still exactly the man she’d loved. “So you’re game?”

“I’ve been suffering, splattered on a sidewalk, for I don’t know how long. Going out and fighting something sounds
great
.” He rose. “So where’s Jenny?”

Marla opened her mouth to say “She died” but then realized
that
was hardly a problem. “Let’s go get her,” she said instead.

•

Jenny’s world was all fire, but Daniel had the hang of altering reality down already. He’d always been a fast learner, and naturally gifted, unlike Marla, who’d had to claw and struggle her way toward a mastery of magic. They floated in the upper atmosphere of the burning world, and Daniel kept them safe in a bubble of air. They flew through the smokeless flames, flickering in every shade of orange, yellow, and red, until a figure rose up and hovered before them. Marla recognized her old friend Jenny, but she was something more, here: a goddess of flame, with hair made of fire, and a dress made of fire, and really everything made of fire. She smiled, and her teeth were burning coals. “
Marla
?” she said. “And
Daniel
?”

“Hey, J,” Daniel said. “How’d you like to try your flames against a dragon?”

Jenny laughed, and a column of fire burst from her throat, spraying droplets of plasma. “I think I’d like that.”

•

“No fucking way.” Artie Mann spat on the grass, then shifted his position on the wrought-iron park bench and let out a ripsaw fart. “I’ve got a cushy situation here. Why should I risk getting eaten up by
Elsie Fucking Jarrow
? I was scared of her when I was alive, and back then, I had nothing to lose but my
life
.”

Jenny was a flying bird of flame, zipping around the baroque towers of Artie’s London, and Daniel was making every plant and tree underneath the glass panels of the Crystal Palace grow and swell and flourish with life. Leaving Marla to negotiate.

“Are you sure?” she said. “The old team, back together, it doesn’t appeal to you at all?”

“Hey, fuck you, Marla Mason,” Artie said. “You were supposed to avenge me when I died, and instead you let the murderer live, and used some magical bullshit to escape the compulsion!”

“He died
eventually
,” she said. “And his life wasn’t so great in the meantime.”

“Whatever. Daniel was supposed to bring me back to life, and he failed, too. What’s even the
point
of laying a magical compulsion on your apprentices if they can just slither out of it?” Artie gnawed an unlit cigar and scowled. Death hadn’t made him any less fat, dumpy, or generally objectionable.

“Daniel didn’t so much slither out of anything as get killed.” She sighed. “I figured you’d take it like this, but I wanted to try.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Artie waved a hand. “I’m not as mad I should be. I twigged pretty early on that I must be dead, but this is a pretty good heaven, you know? Like that little pocket reality I made back on Earth, but so much
bigger
.”

“You know, all this shit got real popular after you died.” She gestured toward the cyborg governesses walking through the park, and the genetically-engineered gorilla wearing a tuxedo, and the zeppelins drifting overhead. “People dress up in top hats with gears on them and wear brass monocles and shit. There are about a million novels and comic books about it, Victorian England with weird tech. They call it ‘steampunk.’ You were ahead of your time.”

“Fucking K.W. Jeter called it steampunk in the ‘80s. Fucking
Infernal Devices
. Goddamn Moorcock’s
Warlord of the Air
. That was the real shit. You say steampunk got trendy? Glad I died before I saw
that
.”

“Death hasn’t changed you, Artie. You’re sure you don’t want to pilot an armored zeppelin and drop bombs on a dragon?”

“Fuck. You. In. The. Ear.”

Marla kissed his cheek. He still smelled like cigars and body odor. Good old Artie.

•

Daniel, Jenny, and Marla descended to the lowest reaches of the primordial chaos. Jenny kept sending fireballs spiraling through the darkness, but it didn’t seem to hurt anything. Jenny was an uncomplicated creature, but when it came to pure gleeful destructive ability, she was to beat. Daniel was a subtler thinker, but just as powerful. With them, Marla thought she had a shot at taking Elsie down, or at least hurting her badly enough to make her flee the underworld. She could have gathered more dead allies, and it had crossed her mind—Lao Tsung, Mr. Zealand, Ernesto—but somehow going in with her oldest friends felt right. There were also limits on how long she could stand spend to-ing and fro-ing. Elsie was doubtless plotting her plots, and eventually, Death
would
come down here looking for her. She wanted to settle all this before that happened.