by Bryan Camp
Before we came from the earth we came from the water, and so it is always water that we must cross from this life into the next.
On the floor of the Mississippi, hidden by the depths of muddy water and almost entirely buried beneath centuries of silt, a ship. Some saw a paddle-wheel steamboat, others a deep-keel ocean vessel. To Renai’s eyes, it always looked like the car-carrying ferries that used to run back and forth across the river, a wide span of concrete and railings and metal walkways: a floating parking lot. She’d been here before, of course, but even as a psychopomp she hadn’t made a habit of it.
Not even Death’s emissaries were eager to meet them.
She had to use the ghost word to get down to the ship—even having passed through all six of the previous Gates, she was still in a living body that needed oxygen—but once she’d descended to the river bottom and climbed far enough down into the belly of the ship, the water receded and she could pull back her hood, some barrier set in place to keep the throne room dry providing her with air to breathe. As soon as Renai stepped into the bubble of frigid air deep in the ship, she felt the tempest’s power slip away from her. She thought at first it was the anxiety and anticipation pushing away the anger that connected her to the spirit’s own rage or some ward the Thrones had put in place to keep hostile powers in check, but after a moment, she realized that it was simply that the storm was a spirit and knew it was in the presence of Death and was afraid.
Me too, she thought to the coiled presence inside of her. Maybe not for the same reasons, but me too.
Partly worried that the cold might damage them, and partly because they were cumbersome in the tight spiraling stairwell that led down into the throne room, Renai folded her wings away, though she couldn’t seem to rid herself of the rigid, flightless versions even here. She blew warm air into her palms and made her way down the stairs. Eventually, the stairwell opened up into a large vacant space, big as a warehouse and just as sparsely decorated. In the center of the room, a column of water descended from the ceiling, a whirling rush like a tornado that vanished into a gaping hole in the concrete floor. Just on the other side of that watery column stood a pair of huge empty chairs, carved from a single piece of wood. They were black, though it was hard to tell from one moment to another whether they were simply carved from dark wood, or if they were covered in soot, or dried blood, or draped with shadow.
Like death itself, the Thrones were many things all at once.
Renai approached, her heart pounding so hard it was difficult to swallow, her hands clenching into fists no matter how many times she noticed and forced herself to relax. It wasn’t just the Thrones themselves that gave her pause, but the ravenous beast that lived at the bottom of that pit, where the Thrones cast any Essence that made it this far but couldn’t earn the right to continue on into the Far Lands. The gaping hole at the bottom of the Underworld was the abyss, and the many-named monster that lived there was usually called—in hushed tones—the Devourer. Oblivion.
The vacancy of the Thrones didn’t concern her. Death was invisible, after all. But she was surprised that she was the only one here. Had Ramses and Cordelia already made their play? Were they even now being chewed into nothing by the Devourer? Was she already too late?
She reached into the nowhere place for her mirror and turned away from the Thrones, angling the polished stone so that she could see the Thrones’ reflection in its surface. In this place, smoke roiled off of her mirror, black as oil and sweet as incense. It took a moment to see the figures seated on the Thrones, their immensity hard to capture, to perceive, especially with her mirror broken and only one handhold to work with. When she saw them, she gasped, the sound quickly swallowed up by the roaring torrent in front of her.
The reflection showed a male god in one seat and a goddess in the other, or one deity that shifted back and forth, as much a congregation as an entity. The man wore thick robes and sandals, held a spear in one hand and a short scepter in the other, his face dominated by a bushy, curled beard, and a withered, puckered hole marked where of one of his eyes should be. A sickly green pallor clung to his skin. The woman wore a long, sleeveless red dress that hugged her body. It was hard to tell whether she had two arms or four, or whether it was shadows or frostbite that stained her legs black. Her cheeks were pale, maybe from the chill of death, maybe from funereal makeup, an animal’s skull atop her head like a helmet.
They were Death, and each of them, both of them, all of them, sagged in their chairs with their chins on their chests.
Asleep.
She’d missed it.
The understanding shifted around inside her like a physical thing, like the sensation in the gut and in the inner ears on a swiftly plummeting elevator, only it wasn’t a metal box that moved but the whole of creation. The Thrones were the pivot on which the entire Underworld spun, the power that gave psychopomps like her their authority, the judges who defined the afterlife. They’d exerted a gravitational pull on her thoughts from the beginning. She’d thought they were responsible for her missing memories, for the Gates being locked, for Ramses’ disappearance, and that they were the target behind Cordelia’s plot. The only thing she hadn’t been able to decide was whether the cursed revolver was meant to be an offering to beg a favor, or a weapon turned against the very person of Death.
As it turned out, they’d just been another set of Gatekeepers to be slipped past.
The Final Gate stood between the Thrones: the shape of a door frame carved in the wood, twisting and doubling back on itself like a Möbius strip, or a deep shadow that stretched farther back into a long hallway that was longer than the room that held it, or just a trick of the wood grain, a pattern the mind saw where none really existed. Death was a guide and death was an arbiter of justice and death was a journey but death was also this, the guardian of the Final Gate between Earth and the Worlds to Come. That Gate hung open wide just like the previous six, which meant that whatever Cordelia was planning, wherever she’d sent Ramses St. Cyr, it lay beyond death.
In the Far Lands.
With a grim smile that would have made Salvatore proud, Renai followed.
At first, she was just a woman in a hallway. It felt like a hotel late at night, that weird uniformity, that eerie silence, that aggressively sterile cleanliness. The carpets were a soft ivory that only someone who would never have to clean them would have chosen, the walls a rich dark blue. There were no doors, no light fixtures—though the hallway itself was flooded with illumination—nothing to show that there had ever been anyone else in the hallway but her, and it stretched as far as she could see in either direction, with nothing to show that she had ever been anywhere else than this place.
Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe everything she’d known or experienced had just been a dream, one of many she’d had and woken from and had again as she walked down this immense, eternal path from everywhere to nowhere. Or from nowhere to everywhere. Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two.
Sometimes, as she walked, the hallway seemed curved, as if she were constantly about to discover something, anything different.
Sometimes, as she walked, she was certain that the floor was made of cloud and the walls were simply sky and that she was spiraling ever higher, but she never dared reach out to find out for sure.
Sometimes, as she walked, she was certain that she was deep beneath the earth and burrowing deeper, a hollow cave at its center her destination.
Sometimes, as she walked, she felt that she traveled not across miles but through time, through history, wending her way to the only true end of time: its beginning.
Sometimes, as she walked, she was just a woman in a hallway.
And then, without any preamble, rhyme, or reason, the hallway came to an end. She stood before a simple wooden red door. Its color made her think, as she reached for the handle, that this whole thing was some trick of Jude Dubuisson’s, that he’d been behind it all along, but then she saw that it was the wrong shade of red. This w
as more of a fiery orange red. Crepuscular, like the sight of a bright noon sky viewed through the skin and veins of your own closed eyelids. And then she realized that it wasn’t like that color, it was that color, because she wasn’t opening a door at all, she was opening her eyes and the light was so bright and pure and clear that all she could see was white.
It didn’t hurt, this blinding glare; if anything it soothed her, eased the tiny twinges of pain from her bindings, hushed the storm’s whirling, calmed her constant struggle against herself. She waited there, basking in the light, for her eyes to adjust to its intensity. She waited and waited, and eventually she looked down at herself and saw that her eyes had adjusted long ago, that she wasn’t blinded so much as there was nothing to see. Just pure, empty white space that stretched into eternity in every direction. She stood on nothing, turned in a circle, and saw that she’d come from nothing, moved a single hesitant step in a direction chosen at random and saw that she moved toward nothing.
The only thing here was what she’d carried with her: her clothes, the medal around her neck, the coin of Fortune and Elderflower’s cash in her pockets. She thought about reaching for the mirror or her blade, but the thought of reaching into nowhere from nowhere made her a little nauseated, and the thought of vomiting at her feet only to have her bodily fluids fall away from her forever made her heart do an alarming, anxious flutter in her chest.
She worried at the medal around her neck, closed her eyes, and did her best not to panic. “You think this is intimidating?” she asked the emptiness. She had no idea if anyone had actually heard her, but it felt good to break the silence, so she kept talking. “I been through death and resurrection already. Endured everything life as a black woman had to throw at me, and an afterlife as a collector of souls besides. I’ve stared down fallen angels and Trickster gods, a gang of the undead and a straight-up cockroach monster. I’m here and I’m whole, but it was a damn hard road to get here. So help me or don’t. But if I got to do this on my own, whoever you are, you’d best stay the hell out my way.”
“If you been through all that, ma’am,” drawled a voice from behind her, a voice she thought she recognized, “I figure I’d best go on and lend you a hand.”
Renai whirled around and saw a hulking brute of a white man—at least, the skin of his hands and arms and legs were the ruddy, dark beige of a white man who spent almost all of his time in the sun—with the furred head and neck of a brown mongrel dog. He wore a dented, battle-scarred steel breastplate, a leather skirt, and sandals that were worn down to strips of leather. He had a short, thick-bladed sword on his belt and what looked like a shield strapped to his back. He had the same down-the-road Chalmette accent as the psychopomp who had been her mentor, her friend. Between the voice and the canine features, Renai’s eyes misted with tears at the sight of him.
“Salvatore?” she asked, knowing as soon as she spoke his name that she was wrong, that Sal hadn’t disappeared but had been destroyed. She’d held what was left of him in her hands.
“Sal-wa-tore-ay,” the soldier said, correcting her pronunciation. “But no, ma’am. I got no claim to go callin’ myself nobody’s savior.” He gave her a doggie grin that was so like Sal’s that it made her heart ache. “Friend of mine sorta got that particular title all locked up, if you catch my meaning.” He stuck out a massive, calloused bear claw of a hand, so like a dog who had “learned to shake” that Renai felt herself grinning in spite of the nagging suspicion in the back of her mind. She told herself that just because Cordelia had betrayed her, not everyone would.
And then, in her grandmother’s voice she heard, Fool me once, child. Fool me once. When she reached out to shake the giant’s hand, expecting either the limp-fingered soft touch most big men gave her—as if afraid they would overwhelm her delicate feminine bones—or the crushing clutch of men who defined themselves by strength and domination. To her surprise, he gave her a firm, concise tug, like they were equals, and then let go.
“Name’s Menas,” he said, shifting his considerable weight so that he stood with his legs in a wide, confident stance, “but folks call me Cur.” He pointed to his dog muzzle of a face. “This bother you? It causes some folk conniptions, but this nose makes tracking so gosh-darn easy that I leave it on most of the time. That’s how I found you.” He looked around at the white expanse of nothing around them. “We ain’t had nobody come in this way in longer’n I care to say.”
The moment he said “gosh-darn,” Renai finally accepted that—despite his accent and the dog’s head and her almost instantaneous liking of him—whoever Cur really was, he wasn’t her Salvatore. “The dog head is fine,” Renai said. “Comforting, really. You remind me of someone. And my name is Renaissance, but all my friends call me Renai.”
Cur’s ears flicked and lay almost flat against his skull. “May I call you Renai, ma’am?”
She laughed and nodded. “Sure can.”
“Great!” His doggie grin stretched so wide that his tongue lolled out. Then, all at once, his ears came up, alert, and his expression became some canine emotion she couldn’t read. “But now I got to ask you some questions, ma . . . uh, Renai.” His voice shifted from amiable, almost apologetic, to stern and commanding so fast that Renai would have thought it a joke if his hand hadn’t gone to grip the pommel of his sword with all the practiced ease of a cop’s hand gliding immediately to the grip of their gun. “Why did you come this-a-way, instead of going straight to where you belong? And you better tell the truth. I can smell a lie. No foolin’ around.” He sniffed at the air, a rough, panting sound. “No, wait. You still got a living body, and you brought a coin full of Luck here. That’s bad and worse. Are you even supposed to be here?”
“To be honest, I’m not even sure where here is,” Renai said. “I’m a psychopomp, and I’m trying to find someone. A boy named Ramses St. Cyr.”
She told him everything then, or at least all the details she thought he’d need. How Ramses was supposed to die and had made a deal to prolong his life, how he’d taken something important and gotten mixed up with a bad crowd, and how she had to find him before things got so bad he couldn’t be helped. She kept it simple and to the point, getting the impression that Cur would get confused if the narrative got too complicated. “So that’s my story,” she said, hoping that telling the SparkNotes version of events didn’t have the same smell as a lie. “Do you think you can help me?”
“I sure wish I could, ma’am,” Cur said, his ears drooping and his eyes liquid and sad. “If you had something of his I could catch a scent from, there wouldn’t be nowhere I couldn’t track him down. But without it”—he shrugged—“I won’t be no good to you.”
Something about that itched at Renai’s brain, at something he’d said earlier. “Wait,” she said. “You said you found me because of my scent. Did someone send you to find me?”
“Yeah,” he said, wiggling a hand under his breastplate like a man in a suit reaching for something in his coat pocket. He pulled out a thin scroll of paper and held it out to her. It was the piece of paper she’d given Elderflower, the one she’d signed with her true name and sealed with a drop of her blood.
A chill ran down Renai’s spine, when she realized the only person who could have given this to Cur.
He continued: “She said I was s’posed to rough you up if you showed up on our side of things. Said you was bad news. But she’s mean. You know how some people sound nice, but they’re really making fun of you?” Renai nodded to show that she did, indeed, know what that was like. “She’s like that. I only came to find you in case you were even worse than she is, but don’t worry, I won’t kick you out. In fact, I’ll help you however I can, just to make her mad. Just ’cause she says something doesn’t mean I got to listen. She’s not in charge of me.”
Renai felt a flicker of hope. “Do you think you could find the woman who gave you this? She’s one of the bad ones trying to get my friend in trouble.”
Cur reached up and scratched behind
an ear. “I could try,” he said, “but it would take me a while, and you sound like you’re in a hurry.” He shrugged an apology. “She’s one of the shifty ones,” he said. “Always changin’ shapes and whatnot. That makes her scent get all tangled up and confusing.”
Of course it couldn’t be that easy. Renai’s mind spun, trying to put together what she suspected Cordelia might be planning, and the little she knew of the Far Lands. She needed help. She needed a guide. She needed, she realized, “one of the shifty ones.” “Cur, do you know a god named Hermes?”
“Sure,” he said, “what about him?”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
“That I can do, ma’am.” He drew his sword—a short, wide blade that looked heavy enough that she’d need two hands to even lift it, its edge as sharp and as polished as Cur was disheveled and worn—and used it to cut a rough doorway in the empty air, one continuous swipe that peeled away and left a gaping hole in the white blankness of this place. She’d have been happy to see anywhere through that hole, but a street corner of downtown New Orleans was a welcome—if surprising—sight. “We can’t,” Cur said, “go straight to Olympus, I’m afraid. But I got us as close as I could.” He sheathed his sword and held out a hand toward the door in the air.
“After you, ma’am.”
Renai knew from the moment she stepped through the doorway that she wasn’t in either the living world or the Underworld.
It was definitely New Orleans, the corner of Poydras and St. Charles, according to the blue signs that shared the poles stretching over the street with stoplights and dangling Mardi Gras beads, but no version of the city that she’d ever seen. She could smell it, a sweet, heady fragrance like a magnolia tree after a hard rain, could actually feel it in the air, a tingle of anticipation, like waiting for a parade to start.