The City of Lost Fortunes

by Bryan Camp

  Renai knelt and studied Jude’s face. “I think after this you’ll owe me one,” she said, and pushed her heart into the gaping wound in Jude’s chest. The pain was exquisite, dragging Jude to the floor.

  The obsidian mirror filled Jude’s vision, its darkness the reflection of Death’s single immense eye. He dropped into it, and it swallowed him whole.

  Jude fell through darkness for a tiny piece of forever.

  Of course, words like “fall” and “dark” were constructions of a consciousness still rooted in the flesh, still concerned with bodily motion and the perception of light. Jude began—once he could understand his surroundings past his sublime terror—to experience heat and pressure, as though his soul was being squeezed in a giant hot fist. Tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter, far past what flesh could endure, body crushed and burnt to a fine, dry powder, the dust to which we must all return. Jude fell through darkness and pain, hoping only for oblivion.

  Pieces crumbled, began to burn and flake away. Memories went first, then thoughts. Jude lost bits of personality, the passage of time. Lost desires, first complex ones, like wishing things had turned out differently, that questions had gotten answered before the end, then simpler ones, like wishing for release, then desire itself. Jude no longer questioned fate, no longer had the capacity to hope that the agony would end. Finally, Jude’s sense of self vanished. Nothing separated the observer from the darkness, the pain from the sensation of it. Only the concept of Jude remained, among darkness and pressure, heat and pain.

  Darkness. Pressure. Heat. Pain. And then, for one eternal instant:

  Nothing.

  Part Five

  Chapter Nineteen

  It is divided into: shen, the mind; yi, the intellect; zhi, the will; hun, the essence that leaves the body after death; and po, the essence that remains. Or it’s split into the nephesh, ruach, neshama, chaya, and yechidah: the breath, wind, life, and singularity of a living being. Some see it as anatta, a continuum of changing states, never a single thing, eternal in its constant evolution. Others see it as left and right, one side who speaks, the other who obeys. Yet others believe in the ib and the sheut, the ren and the bâ, the ka and the akh; the heart, shadow, name, essence, and power of a person. We are never a single existence, but a collective. A school, a flock, a pride. An ensemble of voices, sometimes in harmony, sometimes discordant. In life, the many are one; in death, the one becomes many.

  Jude returned to life—to identity, to pain and darkness and heat, to flesh—in an explosive moment of conception.

  A heart seized in a chest, two lungs stretched and burned, joints popped and muscles strained. Jude drew in one ragged breath, hot and thin, and let loose a howl, agony and fear and rage and life pouring out. Wood splintered, and Jude fell, turning sideways, scraping a cheek against rough stone. Jude gasped, and struggled, and realized that the return to life meant a return to a body that was trapped. Entombed. So Jude spit out the word learned from Dodge, the magic that meant open, and was rewarded with light, with cool, fresh air.

  Wriggling headfirst through the door that had opened—arms either pinned or numb but useless either way—soaked and crying, out of heat and darkness and into light, reborn into the world in the middle of a cemetery, pushed out of a womb of marble and granite. Jude lay on the ground, face in the sunlight, arms spread wide, weeping. Gave thanks, not knowing or caring who was thanked, only able to repeat the words over and over again. Eventually, breathing and heartbeat slowed, and the stiffness, the all-body ache settled to a slow throb. Jude laughed and wept a little more, and then a deep and abiding calm set in.

  A shape occluded the sun, too quick and deliberate to be a cloud. Jude squinted against the glare, eyes burning and slow to adjust to the light, and laughed again. Imagined what it must have looked like to whatever tourist or cemetery worker who saw a tomb door swing open and a person come slithering out.

  “I know this looks strange,” Jude said. “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m not a zombie.” Realized even as the words were spoken that they might be lies. Jude’s vision cleared enough to show the stranger, revealed the crisp lines of a well-tailored tuxedo, pristine white gloves, and a floral-painted skull.

  “Don’t be ashamed of it, sweetheart,” Barren said. “Some of my best friends are zombies.”

  Jude groaned and rose, staggering, to stand, and in doing so noticed something. Bright red canvas sneakers. A white frilly thing of a dress. A body not Jude’s own. A woman’s body. Reaching out with proprioception—one’s awareness of one’s own body, a word this mind knew but Jude had never heard before—Jude considered herself. She felt healthy and strong, quickly shaking off the shock of waking up in a hot tomb and falling three feet to the concrete with a vitality Jude hadn’t felt in years. In truth, the sudden return of youth was a more profound change for Jude than waking up a woman. Jude still had memories of being a man, but felt no discomfort or strangeness in her current body. When Jude recognized the shoes, a terrible thought occurred to her.

  “What did you do with Renai?” she asked Barren.

  “Nothing,” Barren said. “She’s in there with you. Or more accurately, you’re in there with her. Her body, her mind, her soul. Little bit of Jude tagging along for the ride.”

  “How little a bit?”

  Barren chuckled. “The essential bits. Thoughts and personality and memories. Think of it like a computer. Renai’s the hardware and the operating system and the hard drive. You’re just a flash drive with some Jude software.” He looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Hey, Sal! Found ’em!”

  I’m in her mind, Jude thought. That’s how I knew about proprioception.

  We did a project in school, Renai thought, her mental voice like someone half awake.

  “Is she in any pain?” Jude asked.

  “If I know my trade—and I do—then she is currently experiencing a state of constant but mild euphoria, observing a series of unusual, disconnected events that nevertheless seem to have attained a powerful resonance and are imposing upon her a message of cosmic significance and awe. Which is how she’ll stay, if you don’t shake her around too much.”

  “So, the good news is, I’m not dead. Bad news is, I’m possessing an epically stoned teenager watching The Wizard of Oz synced to Dark Side of the Moon.”

  Barren leaned against a nearby tomb. “Only technically,” he said. “I’m pretty sure she’s nineteen.”

  As Jude opened her mouth to reply, a shadow swooped overhead, accompanied by the rustling of wings. The image on Jude’s mother’s paintings flashed in front of her eyes, the darkness that had stolen the lives of Tommy and Thoth, Dodge and Renai. Her stomach tightened and her fists clenched, the word for burn rising in place of her answer to Barren. But before she could articulate the magic, she saw that it was not an angel but a black bird the size of a cat that fluttered down and perched on the skull-headed god’s shoulder.

  Jude gagged on the power rising from her belly. She turned and spat the taste of cayenne pepper and crème brûlée onto the gravel, a thin curl of smoke rising from her mouth.

  “Kinda twitchy, aren’t they?” the bird said.

  Barren sighed and tilted his hand back and forth. “Little bit,” he said. “All we got, though.” He tilted his jawbone in Jude’s direction. “You got any clue what’s going on?”

  The bird spoke first. “Fuck no they don’t. I heard they were in front of the Thrones. I forget my thrice-be-damned name down there, and I belong there. Smart money says they’re all tangled up hell to breakfast in that brain of theirs. I bet it’ll be at least a day before she can walk and talk at the same time without shitting herself.”

  “I’ll take that bet, little raven,” Barren said. “Jude’s only about half as clever as I’d like, but they’re both of ’em hard as coffin nails.”

  Despite the crystalline blue sky above and the solid ground under her feet; despite the pleasure of breathing in the familiar, humid air of New Orleans, thick with
the scents of growth and bloom; despite her deep and complex joy at simply being alive, so unlike the numb sterility of death; despite all of that, the skeleton and the raven talking about her like she wasn’t there began to piss Jude off. A flush rose across her skin, a heat that had nothing to do with the summer’s humidity. “Standing right here,” she said. This protest went ignored, even after she repeated it. They hashed out the details of their wager, gambling on whether Jude’s resurrection would grant her anything other than a second, messier, death.

  Jude didn’t know if Renai had been capable of magic in her previous life, or if returning from the dead or having Jude riding along inside her had granted her the ability, but she felt the magic raging within, the arrested spell still burning at the back of her throat, an explosion building in her stomach. Before, she would have pushed the magic and the rage down, would have forced herself to be calm and patient. But she stood next to the tomb she’d been buried in. What did she really have to lose?

  She barked the word that meant close, the sound of it concussing the air like a thunderclap. Barren’s teeth and the raven’s beak both clicked as they snapped shut. Her pulse still throbbing in her head, Jude closed her eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the momentary silence. Even as it occurred to her that she had used magic on a god, it also occurred to her that it had worked.

  From the back of her mind, Renai thought, That was sick.

  Jude smiled and opened her eyes.

  Somehow, Barren’s fleshless skull managed to convey amazement. Jude ignored him, and the raven as well, deciding to see how far she could play out this trick. She brushed the dirt away from her clothes as best she could, cursing the dress for its lack of pockets, though it’s not like Renai’s folks would have buried her with a cell phone. She knelt and tied her sneakers, and then decided she’d stalled long enough to make her point.

  She turned her attention back to the silent god and the raven. “So,” she said, “here’s the deal. Now we all know that I don’t like being ignored, and we all know that I can do what I just did. That’s new information for the both of you. In the interest of sharing, I’d appreciate it if you two told me some things that I don’t know. Just so we’re even. That sound good to you?”

  The bird bobbed his head, a quick, nervous gesture. Jude was surprised at how easy it was to read the animal’s body language. Barren tilted his forehead down, the barest impression of a nod. It would have to do. Jude spoke their mouths open.

  Barren stretched his mouth in a wide yawn, the joints cracking. “Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.” He reached up and poked the raven. “You lose.”

  The bird hopped from his shoulder, gliding to the outstretched hand of a stone angel. “Yeah, yeah, bite me,” he said as he settled his weight on the carved finger. He dug his beak between his feathers, the motion somehow as rude as a middle finger. He aimed his sharp face in Jude’s direction. “My name’s Salvatore. Go ahead and call me Sal, everybody does.”

  “Okay, Sal, tell me about yourself.” Jude wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Somewhere in the cemetery, a jazz band played, slow and solemn. Jude wondered what they had played at Renai’s funeral.

  “I’m a raven, for now.”

  “No, shit. I mean what are you doing here?”

  “I’m supposed to keep an eye on you.”

  Not, Jude noticed, to protect or guide. To watch. Jude leaned against the hot granite of a tomb and toyed with the end of one of her dreads. Hunger rumbled, a loud and shifting thing, in her stomach. Barren lit a cigar, smoke making a thin haze around his floral-painted skull.

  Things always had to be difficult with the gods, evasions and word games and pissing contests. Since Jude had received the invitation to Dodge’s card game, she’d felt like the whole world was fucking with her, playing games with her life. If that was the way it was going to be, then let the games begin. Jude launched herself at the bird, her hands closing on feathers and fragile bones; with him in her grasp, she could feel the beating of his fluttering, delicate heart.

  Sal’s needle-sharp beak darted at her, stabbed Jude’s hands and wrists three times, four, in the instant it took to snatch the raven from his perch and throw him into the tomb Jude had crawled from when she awoke. Jude slammed the door shut and held her weight against it, fueled by frustration and a kind of terrible joy.

  A small riot came from within the stone box, scratching and curses and flapping wings. Jude looked at the cuts on her hands, stinging but minor. Barren had dropped his cigar, was bent over, shaking with laughter. Through the granite door, Jude heard shifting, claws scratching, and then something much heavier than a bird threw its weight against the door, nearly pushing it open. Jude shoved back, then spoke the word that meant close, shutting the lock with a sharp click. Whatever Sal had become howled, hurled itself against the door over and over again, and then, panting, fell silent.

  “Hey, Barren,” Jude said, nearly shouting so she could be certain Sal would hear. “You wanna hear a joke?” The skull-headed god was nodding, still laughing, holding up a hand for Jude to stop. Jude banged her hand on the door of the tomb twice, hard enough to bruise, yelled, “Knock, knock!” When there was no answer, she did it again.

  Sal grunted. “Fine, fine, who’s there?”

  “Cream.”

  “Cream who?”

  “Crematorium, you dick. That’s what you’re locked inside. You don’t want to talk now, but I bet you’ll be amiable as hell if I let you slow-cook a couple of days.”

  Another round of pounding against the door. “Or I could let you out now, so long as you give me some straight goddamn answers.”

  Moments ticked by as Sal tried to call Jude’s bluff. Then, after giving one last halfhearted thump against the door, he whined, low and whistling, like a dog. “Fine,” Sal said. “I’ll play it straight, okay? Just let me out.”

  Jude spoke the word open and a long, lean shape slipped to the ground, a sandy-coated mutt of a dog with his tail tucked between his legs, ears flat against his head, tongue lolling from his muzzle. In this form he looked familiar in some inarticulable way, but to Jude, one dog looked pretty much the same as another.

  “Told you,” Barren said, “tough as a coffin nail.”

  “Go blow a corpse,” Sal said, settling back on his haunches. “Seriously.”

  Jude gave him a minute to recover, remembering exactly how hot the inside of that tomb was, and then she cleared her throat to get Sal’s attention. “Sent by whom, to keep an eye on me how?”

  “I’m supposed to make sure you don’t just take the resurrection and run,” he said. “That you keep your side of the bargain.” Jude pressed a hand against her own chest, felt the heart beating there. The bargain. Renai had given up her heart. But what did that mean for her?

  “What’s my side of it?” she asked.

  “You gotta go back,” Sal said. “Once you find your heart, you gotta put it on the scales.”

  Jude swallowed. There was no way to ask this that didn’t sound bad, but she had to know. “What happens to her if I fail?”

  Sal’s muscles twitched, his back shaking from his neck to his haunches, a gesture Jude saw as a shrug. “Depends on what mood the boss is in. Maybe she gets tossed to the Devourer. Maybe she gets pumped full of angry mojo and gets sent after you as an avenging spirit. Maybe she sticks around and becomes a psychopomp, like me.”

  Psychopomps guide the dead to the Underworld, Renai thought.

  Thanks, Jude thought, that one I knew. “How long do I have?” she asked.

  Sal looked up at her with liquid black eyes, then dropped his head to stare at his paws. “You have as long as you were on the other side,” he said. “That’s how these things work, you know? It has to balance. However long you were dead, that’s how long you have to live.”

  “How long, Sal?”

  “Two days,” he said. “You got until midnight tomorrow night.”

  Jude slid right past the revelation that
she’d been dead for two days and into accusatory rage. “You,” she said, turning on Barren. “You did this.”

  Barren spread his hands wide, spoke around the cigar clamped between his teeth. “You could say that. No need to thank me.”

  “Thank you? Thank you? I ought to shove that cigar up your bony ass!”

  “Easy there, tiger.” He took his cigar from his mouth, tapped some ash from the tip. “You see how you’re standing here tossing around meanness instead of being nothin’ at all? That’s ’cause me and mine done you a favor.” He shook his head. “That was a neat trick, shuttin’ me up. Impressive, even. But don’t confuse yourself. Don’t think for a second it means we’re equals. You got no idea.” He leaned in close to Jude, smoke filling the slits of his nose, his cavernous mouth. Something immense lurked in the absences of his eyes. “You think we helped you out ’cause of you? It’s all part of the game, Jude. Fuck or be fucked. I lay with the boys and I lay with the ladies, but gettin’ laid is a world away from gettin’ fucked, you feel me?” Barren stepped back, took a couple of puffs from his cigar. “You wanna stay friends with the ones you got, times like these. We clear?”

  Jude swallowed against the constriction of her throat. She nodded. “Yeah. We’re clear.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now. I ain’t usually on the side of law and order, but I’m guessing the next step is to check out the murder scene.”

  The hair on the back of Jude’s neck stood up. She’d already seen where Renai was killed. Had someone else died? “What? Whose?”

  There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Sal lifted one of his back legs and scratched at his ear. “Yours,” he said, then muttered, “dumbass.”