by Bryan Camp
“St. Cyr,” Howl said, some emotion flickering across her face that was too fast for Renai to read. “I know.”
“How do you know that?” Sal asked, the words hissing out of him.
Howl waved Sal’s tone away, splaying her toes and extending her claws in a slow, playful gesture. “Because I peeked, you silly thing, how else?” She leaned down and lapped briefly at the wine in her glass. “One can learn so many interesting little tidbits from Plumaj’s book.”
“And here I thought curiosity killed the cat,” Renai said.
“Do me a fuckin’ favor,” Sal muttered, and Renai had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. If Howl had heard them, she was pretending not to, hadn’t even stopped talking.
“. . . and that’s when Plumaj caught me looking,” she said. “They tried to close the book, but it was already too late. I saw it all.” Her eyelids pulled back, her pupils expanding until her eyes were almost entirely black. “Oh,” she said. “I understand now. You didn’t read Ramses’ entry.” She bent down and lapped noisily at the wine in her glass. When she spoke again, it was in a singsongy gloat. “I know something you don’t know,” she sang.
Sal growled deep in his chest, but Renai had a feeling that Howl would respond to aggression by hissing and vanishing, and they needed to know what she did. Needed to know what the Gatekeeper had hidden from them. Renai kissed her teeth. “Quit being a cliché and tell us what you want,” Renai said. Sal shot her a questioning look, but Howl just sat up straighter on the bar, the tip of her tail swinging back and forth contentedly.
“Simple. I want to come with you,” she said, purring.
“Come with us where?” Renai asked, at the same time that Sal blurted out, “The fuck you will.”
“The three of us are going to have to go all the way to the top with this one,” Howl said, speaking first to Renai and then down to Sal, “which, for the likes of us, means going all the way to the bottom.”
“The Thrones?” Renai asked.
Howl glanced back at her and flicked her ears in a cat’s version of shaking her head no, the gesture so slight that Renai almost missed it. “The very bottom,” she said.
Beside her, Sal barked out a bitter laugh. “Fuck you, kitty,” he said. “Maybe you got nine lives, but I ain’t got but the one, and I ain’t throwin’ it away fuckin’ around with no Fortune Tellers.”
“Oh, but you will,” Howl said, smiling her wicked cat’s grin, “because what I learned from Plumaj’s book is this: this wasn’t the first time Ramses St. Cyr was supposed to die.”
Chapter Twenty
One spins the thread. One takes its measure. One cuts it clean. And they do it all sharing a single eye between them. They are sisters identical and united, they are a single face seen in three mirrors, they are three photographs of a woman taken throughout her life. They are all of these at once. When the path before you is wide and clear and easy, bless the names of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; of Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. When the burdens on your back are more than you can bear, send your curses to Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati; to Badb, Macha, and Nemain. Seek them—should you be so desperate or foolish or brave—in the cave beneath the World Tree or on the field of battle or just behind the throne. When they carry vengeance in their talons, we call them Erinyes. When they hold back the end of all things within the stars, we call them Auroras. When they speak the truth to Macbeth, we call them the Weird. The Morrígna and the Moirai, the Norns and the Charites, the Tridevi. The highest of gods and the smallest of spirits must bow to their will. One spins, one measures, one cuts.
The power to create, and to preserve, and to destroy.
“I don’t understand,” Renai said, following Sal and Howl out of The Last Stop. “How could Ramses have avoided his own death more than once? How could he have more than one death?” She was, of course, intimately familiar with reincarnation, both in her own experience and in many of the dead she guided through the Gates: Buddhists and adherents of Wicca, Hindus and Voodousants, she’d led them all down through the Gates, knowing that their turn at the scales would likely return them to the world of the living instead of sending them through into the Far Lands.
Renai didn’t think Howl meant that Ramses was part of a cycle of death and rebirth—and judging by his reaction, neither did Sal. Howl seemed to be implying that, not only had Ramses somehow managed to sidestep the moment he’d been destined to die—which shouldn’t be possible—he’d done it more than once.
“Ain’t nothin’ to understand,” Sal said, snapping the words over his shoulder at her. “This ’pomp don’t know what she’s saying.” When Howl chuckled in response, he said, “She don’t,” again, but quieter, like he wasn’t entirely sure.
“No?” Howl asked. “Then why are we walking in the same direction?” That direction was vaguely toward the Quarter, unless Renai had gotten more turned around than she thought in all the trips back and forth across the Underworld that she and Sal had made.
“So’s I can show your smug ass just how wrong you are.”
Oh no, Renai thought, Mommy and Daddy are fighting. She had to stifle a laugh, knowing that her confused nerves would spit it out as a giggle, a panicked one she’d find it hard to stop. Choking back her humor turned it into a cough.
“You okay?” Sal asked.
“I will be soon as you tell me where we’re going. Who we’re going to see.”
He didn’t turn around, but Renai saw Sal’s sides expand and swell as he pulled in a deep breath and held it, then shrank as he sighed. “You know how you’re always askin’ me what happens to the coin of a person’s Fortune after their Essence moves on?” Renai hummed an affirmative. “Well, you’re about to see for yourself.”
As they walked, Renai could feel their descent in her belly, like a shift of inertia in a moving elevator, even though the New Orleans on this side of things was as flat as it was in the living world. The psychopomps were leading her down through the levels of the Underworld without needing to pass through the Gates themselves, a trick that she’d never been able to pull off. She could ascend just fine on her own, but if she wanted to go deeper, she always had to go the long way.
“What are you getting out of this?” Renai asked Howl, more to distract herself from the unsettling sensation of the ground falling away beneath her feet and the abrupt changes in her surroundings—now fog, now smoke, now deep, dark night.
“I’ve never met the Sisters,” she said. “I hate being bored, and doing this is the least boring thing I can imagine.”
“If you want to see them so bad,” Renai asked “why do you need us? Are they hard to find?”
Sal laughed. “What she needs is an excuse! You don’t go interrupting the Weird Ones at their work, no, ma’am. Not unless you got a good goddamn reason.”
“They are . . . important,” Howl said, a hushed awe in her voice. “Powerful.”
“Scary is what she means,” Sal said. “They’re powerful fuckin’ scary.”
A minute or so of walking had carried them all the way to the Quarter, to Jackson Square, or at least, the poor facsimile of it that existed this deep in the Underworld, the black iron lampposts made of plywood, the cathedral itself nothing but a half-sized facade duct-taped to some rickety scaffolding. And then, strangely, impossibly, between one step and the next, they delved even deeper, beneath the Underworld somehow, a thought that made Renai a little queasy, even as the grass beneath her feet and the buildings around her, fake as they’d been, became nothing but ash and shadows. Sal and Howl had led her to a place where only the three of them existed, a nothing place, a nowhere.
So why did she hear ringing bells?
Renai turned in a slow circle, and there it was, a low brick building with three entrances, a brown-shingled roof with a pair of windows slanting out, and smoke coming from the slender chimney in the center of the building. Since its architecture was unique among buildings in the Quarter, most of which had the second-floor balconies fav
ored by the Spanish who’d built it, she recognized it at once as Lafitte’s, an old bar, one of the oldest structures in the city, one of the few that had survived both of the great fires that had destroyed almost the entire original Quarter between them.
This had to be where Sal and Howl were leading her, since it was the only thing she could see in this nowhere place, the only thing that existed aside from her two companions, the soft, orange glow coming from inside the only source of light that she could see.
Lafitte’s hadn’t always been a bar, she knew. In its earliest days, it had housed a blacksmith’s shop. And that’s when she realized that the rhythmic TING-ting-ting she heard wasn’t a ringing bell, but the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer pounding on metal.
Focusing her attention on the occupant of Lafitte’s filled Renai with a sudden, intense dread. Not that she could see more than soft firelight from where she stood, or even had an inkling of who might be inside—but just wondering seemed to be enough to pin her in place. Only a few feet separated her from the entrance right in front of her and literally nothing stood in her way, and yet Renai found it impossible to move closer. In fact, the only comforting thought was one of escape, her back muscles twitching with the wings’ eagerness to unfurl and carry her away from this place.
It wasn’t malevolence she sensed, wasn’t fear that poured into her, but something more primal. A presence of immense and overwhelming will was aware of her, and some part of her mind—the oldest part—knew it was better not to be seen. Howl and Sal had tried to warn her, but nothing could have prepared her for this. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Tears threatened to leak from her eyes. Even when standing in front of the Thrones, Renai hadn’t felt this small.
Which meant whatever dwelt in this small cottage at the empty bottom of the Underworld was more powerful than Death.
And after a time—if time even existed in this place—this impossible regard ebbed away from her. She found herself able to think, to breathe without effort. Her wings still wanted to flee, but she shrugged them back down. She hadn’t come this far just to run away now.
“Christ on a cracker, this was a bad idea,” Sal said. But he followed anyway, so close to her that they brushed against each other every time they moved.
Renai kept her eyes fixed on the entrance and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. That—and not pissing herself—took all of her focus, so she didn’t know if Howl was following them inside, or if she’d fled, or if she’d simply ceased to exist when faced with the power before them. In this place, any of those possibilities seemed equally plausible.
Each step was easier than the last, as if Renai had passed through some gauntlet. Each motion toward to the entrance made the tidal, irrepressible potency of the being inside recede just a bit more. By the time Renai slipped inside, her surroundings felt almost normal.
Within, she found a low ceiling held up by simple brick columns, racks of metalworking tools meticulously aligned and hung on the walls, an uneven floor of dirt or dust or ash, and a forge—an anvil of some glittering black metal and brass bellows churning and churning without cease and a circular, arched hearth made of ancient gray stone, its bricks fitted seamlessly without mortar—dominating the center of the room.
Though heat crackled against Renai’s face and roared in her ears, she saw no flames in the hearth, no source of light other than the white woman pounding her massive hammer against the anvil.
The woman had long dark-with-sweat hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore a leather apron over a pair of basketball shorts and a black sports bra. A shadow obscured half of her face, but the rest of her burned bright, an incandescent glow emanating from her. Everything about the blacksmith exuded power, from the bulging musculature of her arms and shoulders, to the fluid sway of her thick hips and legs, to the sharp, focused barks of exertion that squeezed past her lips each time she heaved the hammer—a maul that the blacksmith wielded one-handed, its worn head as big as an engine block—in a smooth, precise arc, to the way Renai felt the impact in her bones when the hammer came hurtling down to meet the anvil.
Even though that terrible pressure had left her, Renai couldn’t bring herself to speak, to interrupt the woman’s stride, her process. Even the thought felt wrong, like stopping Serena Williams mid-serve to ask for an autograph. The blacksmith, whoever and whatever she was, just took far too much joy in her work, her teeth bared in a smile focused and joyous and fierce all at once.
Instead, Renai took a closer look at her labors.
In the hand that wasn’t busy with the hammer, the blacksmith held a pair of tongs, which she used to grip a coin of Fortune, heated to a white-hot sheen. The coin withstood blow after crushing blow without bending or changing at all, without even throwing any sparks.
Renai thought it strange that something so malleable in her own hands could be so rigid under such an onslaught from the blacksmith’s. The rhythm of the hammer’s strikes was seductive, hypnotic, and Renai felt her vision relax, like she was just at the edge of sleep. Instead of seeing coin and anvil, hammer and hearth, she looked through the forge and saw something . . . more.
The glittery black metal of the anvil spread and stretched until it filled her vision—like the night sky, like a sprawl of diamonds on black velvet, like a glimpse of heavens she’d only seen in pictures, having lived her entire life in the shroud of New Orleans’s light pollution: the sprawling, flowing liquor of the Milky Way. At its center, instead of a fireless forge, Renai saw the massive absence at the center of the galaxy, a furnace that burned hotter than thousands of suns which shed not a single photon of light. A nothing whose rage not even destiny could deny.
And then, with a clang as sudden and as discordant as the Big Bang, Renai returned to herself as the coin of Fortune shattered.
The blacksmith turned to the three psychopomps who had crept into her forge while she worked, her chest heaving in time with her bellows, and grinned at them with the gleeful abandon of youth. What Renai had taken for a shadow across the young woman’s face, she could see now was a headscarf pulled so low that it covered one of the blacksmith’s eyes. The other, gray and piercing and knowing, didn’t match the rest of her. From head to toe the blacksmith was young, barely out of adolescence, but that eye was ancient. That eye had literally seen it all before.
“Renaissance Dantor Raines,” the woman said, in a voice that was almost disappointingly normal. Renai had half expected her ears to bleed when the blacksmith spoke. Thankfully, though, her tone said she was both happy to see Renai and unsurprised at her presence. That ancient eye moved slightly. “She Who Howls With Lament. He Who Liberates From Peril.” She winked, and even though she only had a single eye, the wry twist of her mouth and the crinkle of her cheek made her gesture clear. “Be right with you.”
The blacksmith turned back to her anvil and scooped up the still-glowing shards of Fortune from the coin she’d destroyed—all but one tiny sliver that got left behind—sweeping them right into her cupped palm. She dumped them into an unpainted ceramic bowl filled with other broken bits of Fortune, and then reached down for her hammer, only when she picked up the same instrument, it was now a long iron pole. She set the bowl into her forge, which—changing as abruptly and as silently as the hammer—was now a kiln, and waited for the Fortune to melt into a single orange-golden mass.
The goddess—for what else could she be—stirred the puddle of molten Fortune with the pole, gathering a glowing, viscous lump of it, raised the pole to her lips, and blew. The shimmering, coppery knob of Fortune bulged and grew into a wide bulb. When she was satisfied, the glassblower—for that was what she’d become—shifted her grip on the pipe and snatched a tool off the wall with the other hand, a wicked-looking pair of forceps. Easing down onto a stool with the pipe across her thighs, she spun the bulb with one hand while she shaped and pinched it with the forceps. After a moment, it went into the kiln again to heat back up, while she selected another tool, a flat stone paddle. It
went on like this for a while, shaping and heating and shaping again.
When Renai pulled her attention away from the glassblower’s work to study the artisan herself, Renai found that the goddess had aged decades between one moment and the next. Her skin had tightened, her muscles shrinking and hardening like a gnarled old tree. Hair turned a steely-gray, corners of the lips and eye pinched with laugh and frown lines, knuckles swollen into knobs and her posture slightly stooped. Her single eye, if anything, now appeared even more ancient.
Her movements were no less confident, her presence no less commanding. Her joy at her work no less a thing of beauty. She twirled and stretched and clipped and smoothed the pliant lump of Fortune with a surety that came from experience and skill, unlike the blacksmith, who had relied purely on strength. With a simple tool, like a chisel as small as an ink pen, she pressed a handful of characters into the surface of the Fortune. It looked to Renai like cuneiform writing on clay tablets at first. It was only when the glassblower finished—mashing the Fortune flat and smoothing its rounded edges into the shape of a coin—that Renai recognized the glyphs.
It was the same as the indecipherable writing that she’d seen in Plumaj’s book.
Because she was looking for it this time, Renai saw when the elderly goddess changed—a sudden, seamless transition between one blink and the next—into a middle-aged version of herself, cheeks plump and brown hair just slightly touched with salt, breasts heavy and belly gravid with pregnancy. She groaned to her feet, one hand holding the handle of a precision tool that had been a long and hollow iron pipe a moment before, the other knuckling the small of her back.
Shuffling over to her anvil—which was now a workbench holding sheaf after sheaf of blueprints—the architect peered through the now-transparent piece of Fortune as though it were a magnifying glass, studying the topmost of the drawings, which seemed to be either a constellation or a schematic for an intricate clock or the building plans for a massive cathedral, measuring with a pair of calipers and muttering to herself. She stopped, and smiled, and—pulling a stub of pencil from behind her ear—made a single deft mark on the paper.