by Vance, Ramy
“Thrones of Heaven? Which heaven?”
“Heaven, Heaven. The one shared by Yahweh, Allah and God.”
“As in, capital g?” I gave her my best East Coast gang sign, which given my addiction to cocktails with tiny umbrellas, didn’t really come off very gangsta.
Not that Deirdre even noticed my wee joke. “Before the gods left, when an Other died they ceased to be, but their essence remained behind like a hibernating bear in an eternal winter. Only great magic could wake such a slumber.”
“Resurrection magic?” I asked.
Deirdre nodded. “Back when the Morrigan walked amongst us, we could be brought back to life if she ordained us worthy of a second life. Not that the Great Queen restored many of us—she saw our deaths as failure and the Great Queen was not one for second chances. But should we be deemed worthy or possess knowledge or power needed for her many conquests, she would find our essence and imbue it once more with life.
“But of all the Death gods, the Morrigan was the only one who possessed such power. A power that she—wisely—used sparingly. Until the great war, when the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl died. His brothers and sisters came to the Morrigan, requesting she use her resurrection magic to bring the Aztec god back to life. My queen refused.”
“Why?” I asked.
Deirdre shook her head. “It was not the place of a changeling warrior to question the decisions of her gods. We only served in their army. And for the next thousand years I served, fighting off the hordes of Aztec beasts, repelling them from our lands. A thousand years until the Under Heaven Accords were held.
“It was then that the Angels of God negotiated peace between our domains and one stipulation was set in place: no more resurrections of gods or Others.”
“What about Jesus?” Egya asked.
“The Accords were thirty years after his resurrection and he was the last divine being to ever breathe life again after it was taken away.”
“So gods can die, huh?” I said. “What does that have to do with our Other ghost?”
“An Other who was a ghost could not come back unless the Morrigan granted them life again. But when she did, the half-raised often carried an item with those two symbols on it.” She pointed at the shell.
“So that shell was the futakuchi-onna’s essence?”
“These runes give me cause to believe so,” Deirdre said.
“And I killed her … again?”
Deirdre nodded.
I thought about what Deirdre had said. If she was right—and I had no way to know one way or another if she was—then some ancient power was being used to bring dead Others back to life. Well, to half-life, at least.
“Deirdre,” I said, “you refer to the Morrigan as the Other capable of resurrecting an Other. The Morrigan, the Great Queen—as in a ‘she.’ But the futakuchi-onna kept talking about a ‘he.’ Any idea who that ‘he’ might be?”
“No milady, I do not.”
“OK,” I said, not sharing my own theory that this “he” might actually be the Raspy Man. My creepy stalker was the one who had told me that my soul was missing in the first place. He’d told me about the amulet and had been pulling strings along the way to get me to go after it. He knew things. Enough to bring a futakuchi-onna back to life? I doubted it, but then again, I wasn’t sure what he was capable of.
Not that I mentioned him to either Deirdre or Egya. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them—I trusted both of them with my life—but somehow every time I tried to bring him up, the words wouldn’t come. Maybe I was afraid they’d make me stop talking to him and … well, he was the only person who truly understood what it meant to lose a soul, and part of me needed to speak to him.
But just because I doubted the Raspy Man had the power to ghost-ify an Other didn’t mean that he was off the betrayal hook. After all, the futakuchi-onna’s ghost had been waiting for me. Someone had to have told her where I’d be, and since I was pretty sure the Raspy Man had me under surveillance, that made him suspect numero uno.
I shook away those thoughts and turned to Deirdre. “Do you really think the Morrigan has returned?”
Deirdre shrugged. “I do not think so. She was a god and must have left with the other gods during the GrandExodus. She must have, for the Morrigan was not one to hide in shadows.”
“But someone else could be using her trick, right?”
Deirdre raised a hand. “Perhaps, but such power is magnificent and I have not known the other gods to show restraint when it comes to exercising such power. If another god had the knowledge, then another god would have surely used it before now.”
I had to hand it to the changeling: she made an excellent point. Gods weren’t exactly the “holding back” type. If they had access to power, they’d use it.
And then there was one more thing to consider: what Ankou, a fae reaper, had told me three days earlier. Long story short, I had helped Ankou undo a great wrong and as a “reward,” he warned me that powerful Others would want to claim my lost soul.
Why? Because apparently human souls were what powered divine domains. Think of them as the nuclear power plants to Heaven’s streetlights. Without an active, fully operational plant, there’d be no lights in Heaven.
Seemed that Ankou was right about peeps wanting my soul. The only thing he got wrong was that those peeps just might be some god who forgot to get on the departing bus with the rest of them.
Oh hell, I thought, shaking my head as the idea of being in the crosshairs of a divine being dawned on me.
“Precisely. If the Morrigan has returned, then Hell is exactly what she seeks. She will try to reopen her domain.”
“Oh girl,” Egya said with a sneer, “nothing is ever easy with you, is it?”
No, nothing ever is.
Costumes, Taxis and Japanese Malls
As we landed at Okinawa’s Naha Airport, I tried to put what Deirdre had said out of my mind. We had no idea whether she was right. She was, after all, basing her entire theory on a seashell.
Still, the changeling was privy to ancient knowledge, and who knows what was in the plans of the gods.
We stood in line with multiple welcome and New Year’s signs in just about every living language around us, including Elvish and Angelic. The immigration line had more Others than humans (which was unusual, even for a place as tolerant as Japan). So much so that I wondered if there was a Groupon for Others or something.
We were standing behind a large yeti—as in, the abominable snowman—wearing what can only be described as a baby blue, king-sized blanket with the logo of the Toronto Blue Jays printed all over it. I guessed he was trying to fit in by wearing an impromptu muumuu.
There were two things strange about that. One, yetis generally walked around naked, their fur hiding the places Adam covered with a fig leaf. And two, they didn’t usually travel, instead spending their time in the forested regions of northern Canada.
To see one so far away from home was unusual. And if wearing a bed sheet wasn’t strange enough, the yeti also wore a silver hoop around his neck that looked like a loop with several evenly spaced spheres around it. Each sphere was silver except for the bottommost, which was red, larger than the rest and had three Japanese kanji etched on it: Sun, Heaven and Fields.
I must have been staring too long because the yeti turned around and looked directly down at me. I’m five feet plus a hair. The yeti would have been my height if there had been a second me sitting on my shoulders.
“Go Blue Jays?” I said.
For a moment I thought he was going to bite my head off with his bear-like mouth, but instead he gave me a wide grin, revealing two rows of serrated teeth. “Sadly this is not their season—not that many seasons are these days.”
I nodded in agreement, but the truth was, I had no idea. Baseball had always seemed impossibly slow to me, even when I was immortal and had all the time in the world to waste. “Nice necklace,” I said.
He touched the hoop. “In this plane of
existence, the planets rotate around the sun, never touching it, never getting closer to it. But the celestial bodies are different, for each one takes its turn touching their sun.”
“And by celestial bodies, you mean the heavens and hells?”
The yeti nodded. “The gods’ domains never stayed in one place, always moving along their own orbital path. But they did intersect in one place. Here.” He touched the red sphere. Holding it still, he rotated the hoop so that another silver sphere entered into the red one. “They took turns residing in the sun.”
“Humph,” I said. “Thank the GoneGods our orbital path doesn’t do that, or we’d all be one sunburn away from oblivion.”
The yeti smiled. “In the world of the divine, a sun isn’t always a sun.”
“OK, now you’re just getting weird.”
“I’m a mythical creature of the forest. Weird is what I do.” He stuck out his hand. “The name’s Harry.”
“As in Harry and the Hendersons?”
He nodded. “My yeti name is seventy-three letters long and difficult for my own people to pronounce. Besides, I love John Lithgow.”
“Me too,” I said taking Harry’s hand. “Kat. Kat Darling.”
↔
We passed through Japanese customs without incident, despite Egya’s constant bowing, ear-to-ear grinning and general annoyingness. Collecting our bags from the conveyor belts, I exchanged email addresses with Harry, who said he had a tour to catch and that we’d speak when we both got back to Canada.
With that done, we jumped into a taxi and got to the hotel without any more spear-wielding ghosts trying to kill us. Well, kill me. The futakuchi-onna really didn’t seem interested in Egya or Deirdre. Lucky me.
We arrived at the Naha Terrace in downtown Naha—Okinawa’s capital city—and once I was alone in my room, I looked at my arm again. The map was still zoomed out, showing me the whole island and its southern islands.
Damn it, I thought. I had hoped now that we were closer it would give me a few more details about where to look.
But just because I had an uncooperative magical map didn’t mean I was out of options. This was an old stomping ground of mine (the stomping part being more literal than I would have liked) and I knew a couple folks who might be of use.
↔
I have an eidetic memory and contrary to what most believe, that doesn’t mean I remember everything perfectly. What I can actually do is project images of what I’ve seen or experienced and replay that memory with near perfect recollection. It takes a few seconds to do, sometimes longer, and can be disorientating.
So when we went to the heart of Naha’s downtown, Kokusai Dori, I was immediately thrown off by all the changes that came with modernization. I mean, when I first visited this place decades ago, not only was it during an era predating tall, concrete buildings and neon lights, but it was also during the middle of a war and the city had been razed to the ground by a typhoon of steel.
The U.S. military had bombarded this place with missiles shot from the safety of their ships, literally showering the land with so many shells that unexploded bombs were frequently found on the island to this day.
That and all the ridiculous streamers and paper lamps and signs celebrating New Year’s threw me way off. As I tried to overlay my memory of this place, I found that almost nothing of what I remembered remained.
But “almost nothing” isn’t nothing and after wandering up and down the streets, I saw a stone marker no longer than a pack of cards hidden at the corner of an alley. On it, a symbol that looked like a capital t with a line jutting out of its right side that pointed to the ground.
Shi Ta.
That meant “under.”
↔
Downtown had paved roads with standard, concrete, block-like buildings, neon signs and a Starbucks. In other words, it was modern. But the alley wasn’t … but rather was a place seemly frozen in the past. Single-story buildings with straw-thatched roofs lined both sides of the road, their edges hung with kanji-etched shingles that declared what awaited visitors inside.
What’s more, Others of questionable repute stood outside many of the doors. And by questionable repute, I didn’t mean that the rokuro kubi, azuki arai and shirime were questionable because of what they were, but rather because of what they did.
“Woah,” Egya said, smiling at an azuki arai who pulled at her shirt’s hem to reveal a bit more skin, “it is like we’ve traveled back in time.”
“We have. Sort of,” I said as a Japanese human stumbled out of a bar wearing a huge smile, obviously satisfied by the special Other attention he’d just gotten. “Before the gods left, this was ‘Shita no Kami’ … Under the Gods. It was a hidden red-light district of sorts, and where I hung out between hunts.”
“Hunts?”
I gave Egya a look.
Egya nodded cautiously. “Hunts. Got it.”
We walked through the darkened alleys of Okinawa’s Other world, passing by izakayas and snack bars. Despite this obviously being a poorer area, I was amazed by how clean it was. No litter or passed out vagrants or random streams of questionable liquids.
Very different indeed.
“Anyway,” I said, pointing at three businessmen as they walked in our direction, “seems that when the gods left, this place ceased being hidden, but didn’t cease being red-light.”
“Milady,” Deirdre said, “what are we doing here? Certainly this place is beneath you.”
Which was ironic given Deirdre’s liberal attitude toward clothing and, well … naughtiness. In fact, just a few weeks ago she’d made a strange and quickly declined offer to “aid” Justin and me in bed.
And now I was thinking about Justin again, which would have sent a pang through my heart if I still felt things deeply. And the knowledge that I should feel a pang but didn’t was even worse.
I shook my head to clear it. Back to the more urgent issue: feeling things and the necessity of regaining that ability.
“Thank you for saying so,” I said, “but this place is exactly where I belonged back when I was—you know.” I put two fingers where my fangs had once been. “Anyway, we’re here because we’re looking for an old … ahh … friend. If anyone knows where this map is pointing, it’ll be him,” I said as we made our way deeper into Under the Gods.
We walked for another few minutes until we found a building with a picture of a mouth on both sides of the door. “Good,” I said, “it’s still here, which means Kenji’s still here.”
“Who?” Egya asked.
“Kenji—my friend who’s a wall,” I said.
Egya cocked his head to one side, confused.
“Don’t ask,” I said, putting my hand on the door. “And remember, we’re trying to be inconspicuous. Stealth is the word of the day.”
↔
We walked in and the first thing I saw was a large, blown-up, black and white photograph of … well, me.
You May Be a No One, but Here You’re Famous
Here I was trying to fly under the radar, hide in the shadows, go unnoticed, and the first thing I see is a super huge photograph of moi right in the entrance for all to see.
Granted, the photo was old and in out-of-focus shades of gray, but it was clearly me. And not only was it me, I was standing in a field, holding the hand of a little girl whom I hadn’t thought of for years. We were standing next to a wall about two meters high by one-and-a-half meters wide. That doesn’t sound like a strange detail, except we were on a beach. As in, feet wet, sand and a beach at low tide. The wall stood out like a sore thumb … or sore wall?
But that was Kenji; the nurikabe was always doing stuff like that.
In the picture, Blue was holding my hand in the way little kids do when scared: with their chins tucked into their shoulder, as close as they can get to their caretaker, no smile.
And of course it was at night. I was still a vampire, so long walks at sunset weren’t really my thing.
I stepped closer to the photo to
get a better look at the child. Even with its grainy finish, I could still see the features of the child, the only human who had ever made me feel anything as a vampire. And even now, with my soul gone and my feeling dampened by it not being around, I felt something stir deep inside me. That was what Blue did to you: she made you feel alive.
She was the little girl I’d saved all those years ago—the one good thing I did during my entire life as a vampire. The one act I could point to on Judgement Day (should it ever come) and say, “Hey, I wasn’t all bad.”
I stared at the picture, humbled that Kenji would hang such a memento for all these years and wondering where Blue was now. She was eight in the picture, but that was decades ago. Given that she was human, and as far as I knew had remained human throughout her life, that would put her somewhere in her eighties.
Deirdre set a hand on my shoulder. “Is that you?”
“Of course it is,” Egya said. “Who else but our Katrina Darling would wear stilettos on a battlefield?”
I shook my head, turning to face them. “Look, mum’s the word, OK?”
“I think our sneaky ninja plans may have been short-lived,” Egya said, pointing behind me.
An onryo and ittan momen stared at me with wide, shocked eyes.
The onryo bowed several times in an overtly excited manner as she scurried past us like she needed to be somewhere else fast.
As for the ittan momen, he bowed before saying, “Katu Darulingu, you honor us with your presence. I shall summon Kenji-sama at once. The Obstructer of Ways will be so happy you are here. Please, please.” He pointed into the izakaya, which the three of us entered.
↔
The izakaya was exactly as I remembered it: tatami mats and low tables. Exactly what you’d expect from a place like this, and I realized that Kenji kept this place as normal as possible (well, normal for the GoneGod world that is; there were several tengues drinking saki through their long red noses).