The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (29 page)

“That can’t be good,” Wal says, less than helpfully.

All I can do is try and climb faster.

The wind is picking up: salt driven on the air. A storm rushes along the surface of the sea, pelting toward the city. I grin into the wind, feeling somehow recharged by it. Out there beyond the edge of the city the great dark sea is crashing against the shore. Even here things rage and swell and live a kind of life, and my cares fall away from me all at once.

I’m wearing that smile on my face when I see her, but it doesn’t last.

The One Tree has bound itself around her with rough fingers of bark. Lissa’s eyes are milky with death. There is no recognition there. I might already be too late.

One of her fingers wiggles.

I touch it, and feel the slightest warmth, just the barest hint of life.

I don’t want to be here and, above all, I don’t want her to be here. If I could tear down the Underworld I would. But I don’t have that power, just my love and my will. I’m terrified of failing, I’m terrified of succeeding. The only thing I don’t doubt are my feelings for her.

The branch fights me all the way. It grows thorns. It snaps at my fingers with little teeth. I bleed pulling the bark off her, and maybe that’s what does it, because the tree gives her up at last. I lay her gently onto the branch.

I touch her face. There’s a flat warmth to her flesh that is almost worse than the cold I was expecting. Her eyes are dull, barely green at all, and nowhere near the startling, quick to fire color that I remember.

I hold her in my arms. She is still. I can’t feel any more warmth. I lower my lips to hers and a force, a presence, a fire passes through me in a brief, agonizing flash. The tree shakes. Something howls, the light dims and I get a vague sense that the whole Underworld has paused. Even the storm seems to be waiting.

Then Lissa coughs and shudders. Her eyes widen. “Steven?”

“Lissa.”
My darling Lissa.

Her face wrinkles. “Steven, this isn’t some sort of cruel joke, is it?”

“It better not be.” I’m grinning again, a smile so wide that it hurts. My hand rests on her cheek; her skin is warming. And her eyes, they’re no longer as flat, as lifeless. Shit, of course that could just be wishful thinking—that’s gotten me here as much as anything else, even if Wal doesn’t believe it.

“So how do we do this?” I ask her, and she frowns.

“Do what?”

“I’m taking you back.”

“There’s no … You can’t. Not an Orpheus Maneuver,” Lissa says. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

“That’s been on the cards for about a week now,” I say.

“No, you have to leave me here. You can’t.”

“Another bloody optimist,” Wal says. “How do you two get out of bed in the morning?”

Lissa’s eyes regain some of their gleam. “Who’s your little friend?” she asks.

“Little friend!” Wal snorts. “This woman lacks sensitivity. Throw her back, Steve. There’s more fish in the sea.”

“Hmm, I don’t like him either,” Lissa says. “He’s much better as a tatt.”

Introductions are quickly made above the increasingly vocal wind. The dark clouds bunching up near the horizon are sliding toward us fast.

“I’m getting you out of here,” I say.

“But the thing is that Orpheus Maneuvers always fail.”

“Paradigm shift,” I say, then kiss her.

She kisses me back. Her flesh warms, then burns. I feel her excitement. Her hands are getting busy at the back of my head, pulling me in closer, and I’m holding her face. When we finally pull away she looks into my eyes.

“I love you, Steven. Find me,” she says.

There is a sudden blinding brightness.

I’m on the One Tree alone. Lissa’s gone. I’m not sure where, the Deepest Dark or back to the land of the living. I stand there looking out at the Underworld, and stare at all those bodies closest to me, wrapped in tree. Most of them are Pomps. The nearest one is Don.

“How about a kiss then,” he says and grins lasciviously.

I roll my eyes.

“Good to see you, de Selby,” he says, though he’s already slipping into that post-caring dead state. “Morrigan. Did he send you here?”

“No, Mr. D, after he died. Morrigan tried though, and he’s going to pay.”

“You make sure he does. I’d just paid off the place in Bulimba and Sam had moved in. Not bad, eh? I spent my childhood in a bloody caravan in Caboolture, and there I was with a classy lady like Sam. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I haven’t felt her here.”

“Good.”

“He’ll pay, I promise.” I feel that sense of urgency winding up in me again. I need to find Lissa again. And then we’ll make Morrigan pay for what he’s done.

“Good on you, kid,” he says. “Now get going, there isn’t much time.”

There are cries in the distance. Stirrers. I walk to the edge of the tree. Peering over it, I can see dozens of them rushing up the stairs. Bodies tumble everywhere as the Stirrers push them out of the way.

“I’m not sure how I get out of here.”

“There’s really only one way,” Derek says. He’s standing behind me. The tree has yet to take him. “Make sure you get Morrigan.” The bastard has his hand in the small of my back. He hardly has to push at all.

I tumble off the tree. There are cries, I hear gunshots, but they can’t hurt me now. I’m moving too fast. I spin in slow circles as the ground rushes up. It’s terrifying, my stomach is a dozen flips behind me, and I think it’s so unfair that, even here, my body holds on tight to vertigo.

“Sorry,” Wal says, “sometimes this doesn’t work.”

“Now you tell me.”

The ground beneath me opens its great earthy maw and I’m enveloped in loamy darkness, and then I’m out, and once more in the whispering Deepest Dark.

Lissa’s soul is a brilliance in the dark. It coruscates, and I recognize it immediately with a certainty that only years of pomping, and true love, can provide. Oh, how I love her. She’s my Lissa, and I’d go through Hell a thousand, thousand times to find her. And if I lost her I would do it again.

I reach for her soul and it bites me, bites and scratches in a way that no light should. I yowl into the void, but I hold on. The soul is chaos in brilliant form. It is all that is love and hate, it is all that is passion and hopelessness, and madness. It is so definitely madness. But so is what I’m doing.

I am holding her essence.

I bring it to my chest and Lissa’s soul passes through me. It’s a fierce liquid pain, and one I’ve never known before, but there’s also a rightness to it and an intimacy that goes far deeper than what we shared when we made love. It spreads through my flesh, seeps into my bones.

A Pomp is a gateway, a conduit, and that doorway can extend back to the living world. I don’t fight it, just let it happen. Until it’s over.

At last, I release my breath.

She’s gone. Again. I look up into the sky, where all the souls are flickering like stars, shining and waiting, waiting perhaps for the love that is life to call them back again. And I realize that this is what we’re fighting for, this aching brilliance. This is what the Stirrers want to destroy.

And suddenly I’m scared, because it seems so fragile. I felt the essence of Lissa, held it in my hands, though already the clear memory of it is fading. My flesh cannot hold it, shouldn’t hold it. Life is longing, it isn’t certainty. That is what is most wonderful, and awful, about it.

I take a deep breath in the cold. It’s time I went home. Time I faced Morrigan.

D
o you think that did it?” I take a few jumping steps, to try and get the blood flowing. Dust lifts in a fine silvery cloud into the air.

Wal sighs. “Hard to say. You’re mixing up the natural order of things, and while I’d be the first to say that nature and supernature could do with a kick in the teeth sometimes, it can be difficult.”

“You’re saying that after everything I’ve done—after being macheted at, shot at, pushed off the branches of the One Tree and falling, falling, falling—that I still may not get home?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Dorothy,” Wal says. “You’re not even wearing any slippers, and if I remember correctly there is no place like your home, because it blew up. As I said, it can be difficult.”

“Sure is,” whispers a dry old voice. I turn toward the sound and there is Charon. At last.

He’s the tallest—why is everybody so tall in the Underworld?—gauntest man I have ever seen. Bones are barely contained by his skin and jut like bruised wings from his hollow cheeks. His fingers and wrists seem to contain a fraction too little flesh to enclose the meat and skeleton beneath.

“Been waiting for you,” I say. You can’t pull an Orpheus Maneuver and not expect to talk to the Old Man. “Where’s the boat?”

“That metaphor really isn’t appropriate anymore. Besides, I’ve got staff. They drive the hydrofoils, the UnderCityCats, for me.”

“So how do I get back?”

“My, you are a tubby bugger,” he says, swinging his hand faster than my eye can follow. He pinches my stomach with fingers hard as stone.

“I’m not fat,” I say.

“You’re a regular bloody buddha.” Charon shakes his head, and lifts up one of his wrists. “This, my matey, is size zero. You don’t get any leaner. Well, perhaps there are a few fashion models who do, but they’re on a fast track to this place. The world’s gone to fat, particularly the bits of it that exist on the back of the other bits. When did you last go hungry, Mr. de Selby?”

I shrug. I’m starving now, in fact. I can’t remember the last time I ate.

Charon isn’t one for silence, I suppose he gets plenty of it. “Yes, well, you’d know if you ever really had—”

“So how do I get back?” This could go on for a while.

“Hmm, it was
you
who interrupted me.” He frowns. “I had a peek at your dossier. It’s highly unusual for you, but these are highly unusual times. The Negotiation is going to be very interesting, I think, more interesting than any of those dickheads upstairs expect.” He pulls a packet of Winnie Blues from his pocket and picks out a cigarette. “Want one?”

“I don’t smoke. Not when I’m sober, anyway.”

The Boatman grimaces. “C’mon, this is the Deepest Dark. Indulge yourself.”

I shake my head, and he puts them away. “Let me tell you though, you will—and sober too, that’s a total one hundred percent prophecy—or maybe you won’t. Now, back to the question. You don’t leave—”

“I have to. I have to get out of here, there’s unfinished business.”

“Funny, I meet a lot of people who say that here. It’s as though life owes you a neat ending,” Charon says flatly. “And once again you
interrupt. You don’t leave, not all of you. You have to leave something of yourself behind.”

“I’d not heard of that condition.”

“Probably forgotten. It’s been a while since anyone’s done this—kudos to you on that, too, boyo. Think about it, even The Orpheus left something of himself when he tried to escape the Underworld.”

“Eurydice,” says Wal somewhat irrelevantly.

“Yes, your little arm face is right. Though obviously back in the day, Hell was all about cruel and unusual punishment. The Orpheus left his heart behind and so do you.”

The Boatman coughs, and thumps his chest with a bony hand. The sound echoes loudly in every direction, booming back at us. I imagine that whatever beats beneath those ribs, if it beats at all, is dusty and ancient and probably needs the occasional jolt.

“Well, not exactly your heart,” he says, once he gets his breath back. “I’m obviously getting metaphorical, you know, figuratively speaking. The Orpheus looked back. It saved his life though, because I can tell you if he hadn’t left Eurydice behind he wouldn’t have gotten back himself. The fellow was far too cocky.”

“Cold comfort though, isn’t it?” I say.

“This is Hell, this is the flaming capital of cold comfort, mate.” The Boatman looks down at his feet. He’s wearing rubber thongs. They’re huge, but his feet overhang them by a good three or so inches, and his long toes end in nails painted black. He crouches, picks at something beneath a toenail. “Besides, if you go back, what are you going back into? That blocked artery is still going to be there, or that embolism. It’s a revolving door for most people. Even Deaths aren’t afforded the privilege of immortality, just a very, very long existence. Until Schism time, that is. That’s how Deaths work.”

I’m not in the mood for a long lecture. “Can I nominate what stays behind?”

“No.” Charon lifts from the crouch and looms over me, bending down to regard me with eyes dark and dangerous. “Crikey, that’s just being cheeky.”

I hold his bleak gaze. “So it can be anything?”

“Yes.”

“Like, say, the left ventricle of my heart?”

“Always getting back to the heart. You’re heart-centric. There are a lot of other organs that are essential now, aren’t there? And, each of them, including the heart, would be covered under the word ‘anything,’ though it would hardly be in the spirit of the deal. Look, it’s a risk. But we can’t have the living, not even Pomps, coming here and expecting it to be easy.”