Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (28 page)

“Oh, they’re over there. I think I shrank them?” Genevieve pointed, and Marla noticed a rising cascade of colored bubbles in the center of the orchard, floating from the ground into the sky. She went closer, and recognized the tiny self-contained worlds of the dead. Peering into a few, she saw some scenes of torment, but also scenes of pleasure, delight, and soft-focus tranquility. For the moment, Genevieve had freed these souls from the pains imposed upon them by the New Death.

That
would piss him off.

“Where to?” Rondeau said.

“Oh, I think we should pick up a couple of assistants.” She watched the rising bubbles carefully until she saw one roiling with flame, then took it in her hands, set it down in the grass, and whispered to it.

The bubble burst, and Jenny Click stood before her, dressed in flames, hair a whirl of fire. Jenny hugged her, hard, and it didn’t burn. “Marla! You’re back! I was a
tree
, it was terrible, birds pooped on me and I couldn’t set them on fire, why was I a tree?”

Marla pulled back and smiled at her old friend, who’d immolated herself so many years ago in the extremity of her grief. “The underworld’s under new management. The new boss has some strange ideas about rehabilitation. We’re here to overthrow him. Want to help?”

“Ooh. Maybe. I had fun last time you brought me along for a conquering.” She looked Rondeau up and down. “Who’s your friend?”

“Rondeau. Uh. He’s gay.”

Jenny grinned. “So? That’s okay. I’m
flaming
.” She turned on Genevieve. “Whoa. What are
you
a goddess of?”

“It varies,” Genevieve said.

Jenny rubbed her hands together. Smoke rose from her palms. “Are we going to go get Daniel now?”

Marla started to say no, they needed to press on and find their friends and assault the palace, but then she paused. Daniel’s ability to affect life force, including the spark of divinity, might be useful... plus, it would be nice to see her dead boyfriend again. “I’d like to, but I’m not sure where he is....”

“What’s he guilty of?” Rondeau said. “We’re in, what, the seventh circle of Hell in this living Dante fanfic here? Jenny committed suicide, and she was right where you’d expect her to be. So what was Daniel’s defining sin?”

“Nothing, he was a sweetheart, he always tried to do the right thing, he even
died
trying to do the right thing.” But to the New Death, everyone was guilty of something, so what would he consider the core of Daniel’s guilt? For some people it was easy to figure out: the old pornomancer Artie Mann, for example, would be in the second circle with the other lustful dead –

Ah. “Oathbreaking,” Marla said. “Daniel was trying to fulfill a vow, to bring our mentor Artie Mann back from the dead, when he died. He didn’t fulfill his promise, so I bet Skully considers him an oathbreaker.”

“That’s, what, lake of ice?” Rondeau said. “Circle nine?”

“I had no idea you read Dante,” she said.

“I figured since my best friend was queen of Hell I should study up,” he said. “So I read a graphic novel, and played a video game. There was this cool photo set online, too, some guy recreated all nine circles of the Inferno with Legos. I got the general outlines.”

“I’ll conjure us a ride.” Marla concentrated, and the first monstrous steed that appeared was a reasonable facsimile of the flying monster Geryon, which had ferried Dante and Virgil across the eighth circle of Hell in
The Inferno
... but that was playing a bit too much into Skully’s iconography, even if it was amusing to hear Rondeau squeak in alarm at Geryon’s monstrous, multiform appearance. Instead she recreated a chimera she’d flown on, once, when Genevieve’s exothermic nightmares were transforming her city: a large creature with the body of a bull and the wings and head of a seagull. Once it had precipitated fully into existence, the chimera turned its black-eyed head to her, then settled down on its forelimbs. Marla remembered her dream. If you squinted, it looked a
little
like a white raven. She climbed on, patting its neck, then looked to the others. “Coming?”

“I’ll fly,” Jenny said, rising up in a hazy nimbus of flame.

“Mmm. Me too.” Genevieve stood on her tiptoes, then levitated further, hovering a few feet off the ground, still holding her tommy gun.

“That looks like advanced class.” Rondeau slung his gun onto his back—it grew a strap, conveniently—and then clambered onto the back of the chimera. “Yip yip,” he said, and the chimera took flight.

The sunlit lemon grove vanished rapidly behind them, and the sky went black again. They passed over a burning desert populated by roving packs of monstrous dogs pursuing the damned; Genevieve turned the desert into a sunny beach and the dogs into a pack of gamboling puppies playing in the surf.

Soon they passed an imperceptible border, and approached stony ditches spanned by rough-hewn rock bridges, the chasms below full of wailing, miserable souls. Immense centipedes—they seemed somehow more in keeping with Skull Island from
King Kong
than anything from Dante to Marla’s eye—scuttled out of the ditches and rose up as if to attack them. Jenny whooped and blasted the creatures with torrents of fire.

Rondeau shouted, “I’m not going straight or anything, but Jenny’s pretty hot.”

“Puns are forbidden in Hell.” Marla guided the chimera with her thoughts, sending it zooming around a skyscraper-sized centipede with mandibles to match. Genevieve floated along behind them, and in her wake the sky turned blue and flowers bloomed in the ditches. Bubbles ranging in size from ping-pong balls to houses floated up from the ditches as she set the dead free from the constraints of the New Death’s grim worldview.

Soon they left the circle of the fraudulent behind, and landed on the edge of a frozen sea. Marla dismounted and walked to the ice, frowning. There were people trapped beneath the ice, their faces contorted in terror, their eyes moving and alive. Was Daniel here? He’d spent years trapped at the bottom of an
actual
sea after a disastrous magical mission, unable to escape, and he only survived by stealing the life force of passing sea life. He would have remained under the sea forever, barely subsisting, if a geas hadn’t driven him to return to try and raise Artie Mann from the dead. Would being trapped under water again be peaceful for Daniel, or a nightmare?

She gestured with her rod, and the ice began to melt. First there were small cracks, then vast ones, and Jenny joined in, burning away ice with delicate streams of fire, almost laser-like, careful not to cause the dead harm. Genevieve took a more direct approach, causing the ice to turn directly into bubbles, freeing the trapped souls. She could overcome the New Death’s vision of reality here with such apparent ease, and while that wasn’t exactly surprising given how easily she could alter even physical reality, it was still damned impressive.

Rondeau just helped drag people out of the ice when they got sufficiently thawed out, but Marla was sure the people he assisted appreciated it. Each according to his abilities... There was no sign of Daniel, though, even when all the ice was gone and nothing was left but marshy earth drying under Genevieve’s latest sun, and none of the bubbles belonged to him. Marla reached out with her godly senses, trying to find him, but there were whole sections of Hell blocked off to her vision: territory still firmly held by the New Death’s worldview. Daniel must be in one of those areas. She hoped he wasn’t a midnight snack for the devil in the night chair.

“Aw, poop.” Jenny set a random patch of earth on fire. “No Danny-boy.”

“It’s a big underworld,” Marla said. “He must be around here somewhere.”

Rondeau scratched his nose and gazed around thoughtfully. “You know, Marla, Genevieve has thoroughly disrupted four-ninths of the circles of Hell, and the innermost four, at that. Shouldn’t Skully be attacking us with his hellishly host by now?”

“I did figure he’d take more notice of our arrival,” Marla said. “Maybe he’s lying in wait. Setting an ambush.”

“Or the others are keeping him busy,” Genevieve said. “I suspect Elsie can be very... distracting.”

“I wouldn’t wish Elsie Jarrow on my worst enemy,” Rondeau said. “But on Marla’s worse enemy? Yeah. Okay. He deserves her.”

Marla watched the bubbles of afterlives stream into the sky. “If Skully won’t come to us, we’ll find him. Let’s go to my palace.”

Unearthly Delights

Bradley
blipped
out of the suite and found himself standing, understandably a bit disoriented, on a bridge made of flame-blackened stones, with the vague shape of buildings—mills? factories?—off in the distance, either belching out pollution or simply on fire themselves. A tattered flag bearing no sigil flapped in the brutally hot wind, and the creek flowing beneath the bridge wasn’t water at all, but a feculent mixture of animal waste and blood. The stench was ghastly.

He looked to the left, and saw indistinct figures howling, waving weapons, and charging toward the bridge. Bradley opted to run to the right, and once he was off the bridge, decide to run
away
from the smoking, blackened buildings. If they were factories, they were factories generating misery. He looked over his shoulder and saw the eccentrically armored host leading an assault on one of the mills, and knew he’d made the right choice.

The earth beneath his feet was reddish-brown, like the soil was made of scabs, and when he crested a hill, he looked down on a dizzyingly surreal vista. There were ambulatory, gargantuan body parts—a set of ears the size of monster truck tires with a blade protruding between them, a heart bristling with javelin-sized spines, and skulls the size of buildings, the latter seemingly remnants of malformed giant cattle or horses. There were musical instruments, too, but of ridiculous size, and transformed into instruments of torture: harps with screaming people tangled in their strings, an immense lute with writhing figures bound to its neck, people impaled on flutes sticking up from the ground. There were more human figures than he could count, naked and terrified, some running from spotted catlike beasts, some trying to climb over one another in an effort to escape smoldering pits. He tried not to think of them as
people
, because if he did, the magnitude of their suffering made him too dizzy to function.

Some of the bizarre elements, at least, he recognized. He didn’t remember the bridge or the Satanic mills, but maybe they were in the background of the image, overshadowed by the more bizarre foreground. The rest of these horrors were drawn from the right-hand panel of Bosch’s triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights,” depicting twisted symbolic torments of the damn. Far off the distance, he could even make out the figure of a beaked monstrosity perched on a high seat: the devil in the night chair.

“I had to go and mention Bosch,” he muttered. Though he didn’t think this landscape was his fault. Marla said this place could be shaped according to thoughts, but his vague memory of the painting surely hadn’t been powerful enough to bring about all
this
. The New Death was just leaning on the old classics, as promised.

“The strange thing is, Hieronymous Bosch is doubtless
in
this underworld somewhere.” Pelham emerged from beneath a huge, dusty skull, wiping dust from his suit. “Do you think he’s here, now, horrified by his prescience?”

“If he is, he’s probably screaming, ‘But it’s an
allegory
,’” Bradley said. “It’s good to see you. I was afraid I was here all alone.”

“As was I. I do not know what has become of the others.”

Bradley looked around, and Elsie was
right there
, not even ten feet away, with a pickaxe slung across her back on a strap, and a trident with overcomplicated barbs on its tines in her hand. “Gentlemen!” she called. “The unpredictable nature of the terrain in the underworld seems to have separated us from Marla. But, you’re in luck, you’re still in the company of a god, so you
might
not die immediately.” She sighed. “No offense, but I wish I’d stumbled across the reweaver instead of the actor and the butler. She can probably paint over this old artwork with something all bright and shiny with a wave of her hand, but we’ll have to settle for my personal forte, creative disruption.”

Elsie gestured with the trident, and a wave of changes rippled across the field. Some of the humans grew to immense size, and some of the lumbering giant monstrosities shrank. The newly empowered humans struck back at their tormentors, or began to tear apart the engines of their agonies. The devil on the night chair unfurled wings and tried to fly away, but a giant woman swatted it out of the sky, and began to stomp on its body. The scene was no more
pleasant
than before, and if anything it was more chaotic, but at least now the tormented had a chance to take revenge.

“Mmm, lovely, lovely,” Elsie said. “Let’s go look for the big bastard boss in charge and step on his neck, what do you say?”

“Sure.” Bradley frowned. “But which way do we
go
?”

“Call up an oracle and see, silly! We’re in
Hell
, there should be a spirit or two you can summon.”

“Uh....” Bradley reached out with his senses, and yes, there was a
clamor
of supernatural forces, all eager to be brought into immanence. He’d never encountered such a crowded field before, but it made sense. He drew on residual supernatural energies, and this place was
all
supernatural energy. He chose a spirit that seemed small and manageable, and called it up.

The air thickened and became a goat-headed demon the size of a small child, with the malformed body of a monkey. It looked around. “Huh. I didn’t think I’d ever exist again.”

Elsie frowned. “Didn’t I eat you?”

The demon looked up at her, picking its nose unselfconsciously. “Did you used to be a dragon? You
bit
me, and dissolved me back into chaos, yeah.”

“Lovely to see you again,” she said. “Where’s the new lord of Hell?”

“I’ll tell you, but he needs to make me a promise first.” He jabbed his thumb in Bradley’s direction.