Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (29 page)

Bradley nodded. “There’s always a price. What do you want?”

“Tell my dread queen that I served her faithfully, and deserve to be given permanent existence.”

He shook his head. “I can pass on the message, but I can’t make Marla do anything.”

The demon shrugged. “I just want you to put a word in.”

“That I can do.”

The creature frowned. “You agreed too easily. I should’ve asked for more. I want a name, too, my own name, like
you
get.”

Bradley nodded seriously. “What name?”

The demon considered. “Muscles,” it said at last. “I’m Muscles Malone.”

Bradley maintained his solemn expression. “Okay, Muscles. I’ll pass it on.”

Muscles looked around, then leapt into the air, hovering about four feet up. “Mmm. I smell the new boss that way.” He pointed. “Want me to guide you?”

Elsie chuckled. “Sniveling little conniver, trying to trick us into giving you more time in a coherent form.”

“She sounds so
approving
when she says that.” At some point Pelham had picked up a length of bone half as tall as himself, like a stretched-out femur, the color of ancient ivory. He held it like a walkingstick, which, in his hands, was the same as saying he held it like a lethal weapon.

“It’s fine,” Bradley said. “Lead on, Muscles.”

The goatish thing bobbed along like a balloon before them, setting a pace somewhere between a fast walk and a slow run. They left the garden of unearthly torments behind, moving into a wasteland of gravel... except, on closer examination, the gravel was actually millions of human teeth, some trailing bloody roots. “I don’t like this place,” Bradley said.

Elsie kicked up a shower of teeth. “Oh, I don’t know. The New Death has a ridiculous aesthetic, but he really commits to the vision. He –”

“Incoming!” the demon shouted, and floated into the air to a height of about twenty feet. The teeth half a dozen yards away began to shift, move, and scatter, as something began to rise up from the depths: a hulking bear-sized demon with wrinkled elephantine skin, arms as big as telephone poles, and no facial features beyond a maw that gaped like a manhole, its bloody gums studded with hundreds of mismatched teeth, from the needle fangs of snakes to the triangular incisors of sharks to the jagged bladelike teeth of komodo dragons. The thing roared and rushed toward them, and Pelham darted forward, beating it about the head with his walkingstick, surprising it with the ferocity of his assault. It tried to grab Pelham, but the monster was slow, and Pelham was quick—but after several sorties, the treacherous, slippery ground turned under Pelham’s foot, and he stumbled.

Bradley tried to lash out with his psychic powers, but the thing had no mind at all, not even the rudimentary consciousness of a dog, nothing he could send to sleep or daze into confusion.

As the beast hunched over Pelham, opening its mouth impossibly wider, Elsie calmly dropped her trident, took her pickaxe in hand, and drove the point into the back of what, for lack of a better word, Bradley supposed was the monster’s head.

The toothsome demon slouched, and then
kept
slouching, melting into itself like a mound of filthy snow dissolving in the rain. Pelham rolled out of the way and got to his feet, moving away from the spreading puddle of gray ooze. “Thank you for assisting me.” His tone was stiff, formal, and scrupulously polite. Bradley knew that Elsie Jarrow was pretty much an affront to everything Pelham believed in—order, manners, civilization—but he was nothing if not gracious.

Elsie grabbed him in a headlock and gave him a noogie, then released him. “Can’t let anybody hurt old Pelly. Marla would never forgive me, and that girl can hold a
grudge
.” She stowed her pickaxe, but left the trident on the ground. After a moment, Bradley bent and picked it up. He was a thinker, not a fighter, but maybe it was a good time to try being both.

“Get down here, goat!” Elsie hollered.

Muscles drifted down to a height of eight feet or so. “All right, all right. This way.” They set off again, and the toothy plain gave way to a valley of ragged, bloody fingernails, and then a plain of—and this was the worst—great matted wads of human hair in every conceivable color and texture, some cut, some apparently ripped from scalps.

“What vision of Hell did he get
this
from?” Elsie complained.

“Perhaps he decided to draw on images from nightmare,” Pelham said.

“Or maybe we just haven’t read every book or seen every piece of art about the underworld.” Bradley stepped over a particularly bloody patch of blonde hair. “This is like the most horrible barbershop floor in the world.”

“We’re nearly to the palace,” the goat-demon said.

“I do so love palaces.” Elsie gave a little shiver of anticipation. “They make such interesting sounds when they implode.”

The sky, which had hardly been bright before, darkened further, and the wads of hair gradually thinned out, revealing gray stone underneath. In the distance, jagged mountains loomed, but a tall mount stood much closer, all alone, a cave mouth the size of an airplane hangar door yawning in its side. Reddish light flickered from the interior. “That’s the palace.” The goat demon drifted higher, as if edging toward an escape.

“That is a
cave
.” Elsie shook her head. “The New Death lives in a
cave
?”

“Marla said he was kind of... austere,” Bradley said.

“It does seem a poor habitation for a god, however,” Pelham said.

“The first gods lived in caves.” The voice seemed to whisper intimately into Bradley’s ear, and from the way Pelham jerked and stared around, he’d heard it the same way. “Because the first humans capable of
believing
in gods sheltered in those caves, and the gods lived among the people, then. Gods have often dwelt on mountain tops, and in high lonely places, and in dark caverns beneath the Earth.”

Elsie clucked her tongue. “I prefer to dwell in places with swim-up bars. What’s the point of being immortal if you don’t
live
a little?”

A figure appeared in the cave opening, the silhouette of a stocky, broad-shouldered man, with a misshapen head. Bradley fought off an urge to avert his eyes, or to fall prostrate. The New Death radiated power, and Bradley could feel him
pushing
, trying to do... something. Overpower Bradley’s mind, or change his body, or transform his surroundings. His scalp began to tingle. Maybe Elsie’s invisible helmets really did something after
all.

The landscape blurred, and suddenly the three of them were no longer a hundred yards away from the mountain, but directly in front of it, standing mere feet away from the New Death. He had the skull of some horned creature that wasn’t quite a bull; maybe an aurochs. “How dare you invade my domain, newborn god?”

Elsie laughed her outsized laugh. “You call
me
newborn? I’m older than you by months, at least. Respect your elders, sonny, and your betters, too. Either way, respect
me
.”

“I am of an ancient lineage, and pure.” Skully clenched and unclenched his fists. “
You
are tainted by humanity, and of an upstart line.”

Elsie drew herself up, and for the first time, Bradley felt something like awe in
her
presence, too: she was turning up her god-wattage, and it shone. “I may not be from a line as old as Death, but
nearly
, because as soon as people realized there was such a thing as death, they started figuring out ways to
cheat
death. I’m a god of hairsbreadth escapes and sudden reversals. You’re the stone wall, and I’m the dynamite. You’re the coyote, and I’m the roadrunner.” She paused. “I know traditionally coyotes are seen as tricksters, but there’s this classic cartoon, you’ve probably never seen it because you’re literally an infant, where this coyote chases a roadrunner, and never catches it, and in some ways it’s a reversal of the traditional iconography –”

“Cease your prattle!” Skully lashed out with one hand, clearly intending to slap Elsie across the face

But Pelham moved in a flash, and smacked the New Death’s hand aside with his bone walkingstick. The god turned, roaring, and Bradley thought
oh fuck oh fuck of fuckity fuck
and tried to stab Skully with his trident. The spikes bent like wire on impact, the skin of the New Death’s abdomen not even dented. Skully tore the trident away anyway, hurling it into the cave behind him, then snatched the walkingstick from Pelly’s grasp, snapping it in two as easily as Bradley would break a twig.

Then the New Death groaned and fell to his knees. Elsie stood behind him, both hands wrapped around the haft of her pickaxe Trepanner. The point of the axe was buried right in the top of Skully’s head. The god coughed, and burning embers floated from his bony mouth. His hands clenched and twitched and spasmed.

“Good work distracting him there, boys.” Elsie beamed at them. “Who even
needs
Marla, right? Maybe I should seize the throne myself, huh? I’d be a great dread queen. The dreadliest.”

Skully slowly lifted his hands. He didn’t reach for Bradley or Pelham, or try to wrench out the pickaxe. Instead, he lifted his aurochs’s skull from his shoulders, axe and all, twisting the skull with a sound of tearing cartilage and flesh. He tossed the skull and axe aside and rose to his feet, stumbling, headless, into the cave.

Elsie stood, apparently dumbfounded. She picked up the axe, the aurochs skull still stuck on the end. She lifted the axe high, staring at it blankly, then began to giggle. “It’s like a candy apple on a stick, isn’t it?” She pointed the axe downward, put her foot on the skull, and stomped, knocking the skull loose, leaving a neat star-shaped hole in the bone. “I bet I could sell one gently-used death god skull on the supernatural black market for
crazy
money. It’s a shame I’ve transcended any need for material wealth, huh? That’s always the way it goes.”

“The New Death is wounded,” Pelham said. “How shall we proceed?”

Elsie swung the pickaxe in a casual arc. “We
could
charge in there and try to kill him again. But I’m starting to think the whole ‘murder Death itself’ thing might suffer from certain logistical difficulties. Like, maybe we’re trying to burn the sun or freeze ice or drown water or something, you see what I’m saying?”

Bradley let out a low whistle. “You think we can’t kill him?”

“I thought the chances were fifty-fifty with Trepanner here. Looks like we got the wrong fifty though. So, at this point, we can go all suicide-mission, with the consequences for suicide being eternal torment with a
personal
touch for you two, and I don’t even
know
what kind of horror for me. What do gods do to other gods who try and fail to kill them? I mean, I can imagine what
I
would do, and I don’t want to be on the receiving end of anything in that conceptual vicinity.”

“Mrs. Mason suggested that she had plans beyond a simple brute force attack,” Pelham said.

Elsie nodded. “Yeah. I know her endgame, I think, because I know
her
, and how she thinks, but I’m not sure how she expects to get to that point.”

“We could ask her,” Muscles called. “My queen approaches!”

“Always fashionably late,” Elsie said.

The Palace of Death

Three figures stood before the mountain the New Death had in lieu of a palace, and Marla’s heart rose. Bradley and Pelham were okay. Also Elsie was there, which didn’t make her happy, exactly, but by and large it was better to have the chaos god where you could see her.

“Marla!” Elsie said. “And your merry band of miscreants, plus that friend of yours who tried to set me on fire last time we met. Welcome, welcome. We confronted your enemy and I axed him in the head. I was
majestic
.” She gestured grandly. “The boys helped. Oh, and a sort of goat-demon thing, too, named Muscles Malone, that wants you to make it a real boy. I think it flew away, or maybe it just quit existing for a minute. It’s so hard to find good –”

“Wait, you killed Death?” Marla stared at the skull on the ground at Elsie’s feet. She hadn’t sensed when the old Death died, so the New Death could certainly die without her sensing it, she supposed... but if so, it was oddly anticlimactic. The good part was that she could throw the thing in her shoulder bag into a deep pit instead of using it.

But Bradley shook his head. “The New Death just, uh, tore his skull off and stumbled into the cave. He’s hurt, maybe? But I don’t know how badly.”

“He’s got a whole interchangeable head thing going,” Marla said. “I thought it was purely cosmetic, but I guess it’s got its practical side too.” She climbed off the chimera and patted its flank, then let if fly away, though it wouldn’t last long without her attention. She tilted her head back and looked up at the mountain. “This is
all
wrong.”

“Would you like me to redecorate?” Genevieve said.

Marla shook her head. “No, I can feel my power waxing. We’ve broken the New Death’s absolute control of this realm, and the balance is shifting.” She cocked her head, and the mountain transformed into a palace of white marble, akin to an elaborate tomb but scaled up to make a suitable habitation for giants. “There. Much better.” Her clothing changed, too, the armor of bones and ice and metal appearing when she willed it.

“Whoa. Full Valkyrie.”

“Thanks, Rondeau. But I’m more like the one who employs the Valkyries.” She tried to summon Death’s terrible sword to her hand—possessing that blade was crucial to her ultimate success—but it wouldn’t come. The New Death must be wielding it, then.

That was okay. She’d just need to take it away from him. “Is everyone ready? Same plan as before: help me clear a path to Skully.”

Pelham stretched out his hand, and a walkingstick with a brass ball on one end appeared in his hand. Rondeau hefted his gun, and Elsie spun Trepanner around in her hands with a grin. Bradley and Genevieve were empty-handed, but they had other resources.