Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  “So we’re just going to let her hold us at gun point?” Marzi said. “That’s a thing we’re letting happen?”

  “I’m trying not to spook her,” Bradley said.

  “The things I know, the things I can do... I must have been some kind of spy.” Marla didn’t sound like she was asking; more like she was musing aloud. “Maybe even an assassin.”

  “You’ve killed a few people,” Bradley said. “But always in self defense, or in defense of others, as far as I know.” Sure, in her position as a god of the underworld Marla been involved in countless other deaths, in an official capacity, but it hardly seemed like the time to go into all that.

  “How can you know that about me, unless you’re spies, too? But you’re terrible at being spies. You couldn’t even watch or follow me properly.”

  “In our defense, we were expecting more of a reunion with a friend, and less of a hostile operative situation.” He coughed. “Anyway, you’re not a spy. Not exactly. Though you are good with secrets. You’ve had lots of jobs, and ‘mercenary’ was one of them, but that was a long time ago. Lately you’ve been more of a... freelance do-gooder.” That sounded more plausible than “monster hunter,” but only just.

  “Do you know what happened to me?” she said. “To my memories? Was I drugged? Operated on? Or did I just hit my head like in some stupid movie?”

  “We’re not sure. You disappeared. Your friends have been trying to track you down. But we think we know who did this to you. You were in charge of.... what’s the best way to put it....”

  “An underworld organization,” Marzi said.

  Bradley nodded. “Yes! Exactly. But your partner got killed, and then a rival came in and took over your business while you were distracted. He decided to get rid of you, but for whatever reason, he didn’t want to kill you. Instead, he wiped out your memories, and dropped you in the desert.”

  “That should be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Marla said.

  “Do you believe us?” Bradley said.

  “Her, I don’t really know.” She gestured at Marzi with the gun. “But something about you... I don’t know what it is... I feel relaxed around you.”

  “We’re old friends, Marla. We’ve been through the wars together.”

  “Marla. Marla Mason.” She shook her head. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. What are you here for?”

  “We were just trying to find you, but now that I know why you haven’t been in touch... I think we can help you recover your memories. We can try, anyway.”

  She nodded. “Can you do it at gunpoint?”

  Bradley sighed. “Marla, if we wanted to hurt you, we would have done it already.”

  She snorted. “You’re amateurs. You couldn’t take me on my worst day and your best one.”

  “Not if you were in full possession of your faculties, no, but... Can I show you something? Promise you won’t freak out?”

  “I don’t know much about myself, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the freaking-out type.”

  “Marzi? Do you mind?”

  She nodded. “Hmm. Banana?”

  “Banana is traditional, yes. Or snake, but banana is less startling.”

  Marzi stared hard at Marla, then muttered to herself and made a gesture.

  Marla swore. “What the hell?”

  “She turned your gun into a banana,” Bradley said. “You weren’t a spy, Marla. You were a sorcerer. So are we. In a fair fight, with all your resources, you’d turn both of us into tatters of meat confetti, but since you can’t remember anything....” He waved his hand, casting a bug-in-amber spell, and Marla grunted, held in place, the air around her from the neck down transforming into a transparent solid. Bradley walked toward her, then waved again, releasing her.

  She rolled her neck on her shoulders, scowling at him. “I want to kick you in the knee, and then knee you in the face as you fall down, but that’s just the impotent rage talking. Magic? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Bradley shrugged. “The world is strange. It wasn’t drugs or surgery that messed with your mind—it was sorcery. But I’m good with minds. Let us try to fix you?”

  She looked at the banana in her hand, then peeled it, and took a bite. She chewed thoughtfully, then swallowed. “Pretty good. All right. Let’s go to my trailer.”

  •

  Bradley sent Marzi back to the car, so Sierra wouldn’t worry and come roaring through the trailer park, smashing into things. He accompanied Marla to her place, which was all ancient faux-wood paneling inside, and as Spartan as her usual living accommodations. She sat on the edge of the small bed in the back of the trailer and looked at him frankly. “Hey. Bradley, right? Let me ask you something: do I want to get my memory back? Or would I be happier if I never remembered?”

  Bradley opened his mouth to answer, then paused, thinking the question over. The Marla he knew had never worried much at all about happiness; she’d worried about duty, and about ensuring the happiness of others—in the sense that people were happier when there weren’t monsters trying to eat them or steal their life energies, anyway. She’d taken satisfaction in doing important work. Possibly she would be happier, for some values of “happy,” if she stayed a waitress at a diner in the middle of nowhere instead... but assuming her essential self was unchanged, she would never be satisfied with that kind of life. Finally he said, “The Marla I knew would want to take back anything that was stolen stolen from her, including her memories. But I won’t lie to you: your life is going to get exponentially more complicated if I can help you remember. You won’t want to work at the diner anymore, I’m guessing.”

  She nodded. “I’m sick of my hair smelling like bacon grease anyway. Let’s do it.”

  He sat cross-legged on the floor, on the thin and scraggly no-color carpet. “Okay. Just lay back and relax.”

  “Was I the relaxing type, in my old life?”

  “Well, no. But it’s never too late to try new things.”

  Marla lowered herself back on the bed, arms crossed over her chest, feet dangling off the end of the mattress. Bradley decided that was as mellow as she was likely to become, and closed his eyes, reaching out for her mind, projecting himself into her mental landscape. There was a bright, crystalline kernel of consciousness there, like a lattice of white light, surrounded by mist and thickened shadows.

  “I’m going to help you sleep, now,” he said.

  “You’re the psychic surgeon. Do what you do. You’ve already proven I can’t stop you anyway.”

  He reached out with his conceptual hands and caressed her consciousness, soothing it, and heard her breath change, becoming slow and regular. Now she wouldn’t be as likely to unconsciously fight his psychic prodding. First, he blew away the mist and illuminated the shadows in her mind, revealing her constrained inner world. The courtyard that held her consciousness was small, and surrounded completely by towering walls, pocked and pitted, the color and texture of ancient bones. Knocking the walls down one at a time would be exhausting and piecemeal. They hadn’t been erected that way, surely, bit by bit, so maybe they could be taken down more efficiently, too. Perhaps there was a keystone, a load-bearing wall, one spot he could knock down to cause the rest of the walls to tumble in turn....

  He let his psychic body rise over her inner landscape, hoping for an overview of the terrain, and gasped (or did the purely psychic equivalent). The walls surrounding her spark of consciousness weren’t walls at all, but dikes. The rest of her mind was submerged in dark water, a vast sea of oblivion, brackish and bleak. If he’d knocked down a single wall, the waters would have rushed into the protected courtyard, dousing Marla’s last spark of consciousness entirely. She would have become an emptiness, still breathing, but bereft of anything resembling a human mind. If he’d been less careful, Bradley could have rendered his friend brain dead. This was a nasty trap, set to erase Marla entirely if anyone tried to restore her memory.

  Bradley gritted his imaginary teeth. He was the greatest psych
ic in this reality, probably, or at least the greatest one who wasn’t hopelessly insane. Mental landscapes were malleable, expandable, manipulable, and he gestured, opening a sinkhole beneath the stillness. The dark waters roiled, and then swirled, and a whirlpool began to twist. He gestured again, and opened another hole, and again, until three maelstroms swirled, and the level of water began to recede all over Marla’s mind.

  As the waters fell, shapes were revealed. A mountain of gold. A mountain of ice. A mountain of glass. The Whitcroft-Ivory building, a landmark in Marla’s former home city of Felport. A castle carved in obsidian, with jagged towers brushing the belly of the sky. The waters continued to swirl away, and smaller structures were revealed: a tree house, a train car, a trailer (even more dilapidated than the one she currently inhabited), a bookshop, the forbidding walls of the Blackwing Institute, a forest, a pier, Marla’s old apartment building. Her inundated mental landscape gradually became the city it should have been all along, a hodgepodge of places metaphorical and remembered. Figures flitted and dashed and moved in that landscape, and fires burned, and armies clashed, and candles glowed, and musicians played, and porch swings swayed. Some of the images he recognized from experiences he’d had with Marla, or stories she’d told, but most things, he didn’t. In fact, he began to feel like an invader, and so as the last of the waters trickled away, he closed up the sinkholes (he’d drained the waters to sunless reservoirs in the depths of her mind). He took the gleaming core of her consciousness and set it in the sky, making it a sun to dry the last of the puddles and illuminate the memories below. He could sense her mental imbalance shift into accord.

  Bradley departed her mind, opening his eyes, and fell over on the carpet. He was so thoroughly drenched with sweat he might have been submerged in those dark waters himself.

  Marla groaned and sat up on the bed. She looked down at him, then nudged him with her foot. “Shit. Bradley. Shit. Shit. You gave me back all my memories.”

  “Good,” he croaked.

  “Yeah. Good. Great. Except there were a couple of memories I’d deliberately sealed off myself, years and years ago, and now I’m having to cope with those, too, damn it. And I remember things about being a goddess, things that were always closed to my mortal mind before. Holy Hell, Bradley. I remember everything. I remember every... little... thing.”

  “What can I say,” he said. “I’m the best I am at what I do.”

  “You’re too good. I remember every conversation I’ve ever had. Every line of every book. Every scrap of knowledge, every overheard snatch of song, every whisper, and when you can see everything, the connections are so clear. Just a second.” She leaned over the bed and vomited on the carpet, then just held herself still, her hair a lank curtain hiding her face. “Okay. I think that’s all the barfing I’ve got in me right now. Did you know I killed my one true love when I was a young mercenary sorcerer? I didn’t, either, until you uncovered the memory. Ha. I hung out with his eternal spirit just a few months back in the underworld, too. Daniel. The god part of me hid that from the mortal part. I’m all intermingled now.”

  Bradley watched the puddle of her vomit spread. It was getting too close to him, so he sat up, though it took an effort. “Sounds like we have some catching up to do.”

  “First, tell me this—how did you find me?” Marla said.

  “Well, it was complicated, but –”

  “Did Elsie Jarrow help you?”

  “Uh. Yeah. Wow. How’d you make that leap?”

  “She visited me in the diner a while back. I didn’t recognize her at the time, of course, but in retrospect.... I’m not one hundred percent sure why she wanted you to find me, though I have some ideas.” She sighed and stood up. “We’d better get going. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  “We do?”

  “Sure. You knew if you gave me back my memories, life would get complicated.” She held out a hand and helped him to his feet.

  “Oh, good. Complicated. Where do you want to go?”

  “Is Rondeau settled back in Vegas? That’s as good a home base as any. I’ve got some preparations to make... and a story to tell, I guess. Maybe two.”

  “Rondeau and Pelly are on their way here, actually, but I’ll tell them to re-route.”

  She nodded, then surprised Bradley by embracing him. Marla was never much of a hugger. Trust her to get all touchy-feely when her breath smelled like sour vomit. “Hey. Thanks, B. I owe you, and I already owed you anyway.”

  “We’re friends. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Doesn’t mean I won’t repay you, though.” She paused. “Assuming we all survive the next week, anyway, which is maybe not super likely.”

  The River Lethe

  The next night Rondeau, Bradley, and Pelham sat on couches in the conversation pit in Rondeau’s suite in Las Vegas, watching Marla, waiting for her to spin a tale. She wasn’t quite sure how to begin.

  Marla hadn’t talked much on the drive from Arizona to Vegas, busy collating her own thoughts, putting things together, feeling out the possible paths to the future. Her goals were clear. How to achieve them less so. The consequences of achieving them were pretty clear to her, too; she just didn’t like thinking about them. In some ways, the only thing worse than failure would be success.

  “You sure you don’t want Cole here?” Bradley said. “And Marzi. She’s still an apprentice, figuring her shit out, but she could be helpful, too—she held her own against the Outsider when the time came.”

  Marla shook her head. “I can’t ask them to help me with this. Cole’s a friend. Marzi’s an acquaintance. You’re....” She scowled. “Are you going to make me say it?”

  “You’re my family, too,” Rondeau said. “Anything you need, always.”

  “That was uncharacteristically earnest and sincere,” Marla said.

  He shrugged. “I thought you were lost forever. Turns out that’s the way to make me miss you.”

  “Even so, guys... you should know my ultimate goal here. I want to overthrow the new god of Death and take his kingdom away from him. You’re family, okay, but I can’t even ask you to do that. Which isn’t to say I won’t take volunteers.”

  “I have followed you to Hell before, Mrs. Mason,” Pelham said. “I will do so again.”

  “I’m not sure the ‘Mrs.’ applies anymore, since my husband died.”

  “Widows are addressed by the same title they used when their husbands were alive, Mrs. Mason.”

  “Suit yourself.” She relaxed into the couch, or tried to. Her muscles still ached from the months of working in a diner, being on her feet day after day, and even a long session in Rondeau’s palatial shower this morning hadn’t washed all the kinks away. She could have used magic to soothe the hurt, but she wanted the reminder of all the time she’d lost. She tried not to think of the collective hours of suffering her period of amnesia had caused the denizens of the underworld.

  “I’ll go, too,” Bradley said. “I’ve only really been to the underworld once, and I didn’t get to see much of the place.”

  “You know I hate to be left out,” Rondeau said. “Count me in.”

  Marla smiled. She’d expected them all to say yes, but it was gratifying to be right. “Thanks. With your help, I’m only facing almost certain defeat, instead of absolutely certain defeat. I should tell you what happened, after I saw you all last. How I went from the reigning monarch of the land of the dead to the queen of nothing. After that business with the Outsider in Felport, I was supposed to meet Bradley and Marzi at their hotel. I decided to take a shortcut through Hell, because it’s safer than teleporting and faster than walking or taking a cab. But when I opened the door to the underworld...”

  •

  Marla stepped through the office door, leaving her angry friends behind. They disapproved of how she’d dealt with Nicolette, freezing the witch into a lump of magical ice, keeping her in stasis forever—they thought Nicolette deserved her chance at redemption, but Marla had made the hard decisio
n, and done what she thought was best, just like she always did. If they didn’t like it, they could fuck off.

  Her mind was a seething mass of misgivings, doubts, and even a treacherous thread of something that might have been regret –

  But when she stepped through the door, cool serenity descended as always, and the part of her that fretted about the opinions of mortals receded into a tiny unilluminated portion of her mind. Her intellect became cool, vast, and not even remotely amused. Marla Mason was no more: she was the dread queen of the underworld now, the Bride of Death, and it was just a shame there was still time left on her mortal month in the world, because there was so much work to be done here below. Still, a bargain was a bargain, and had to be upheld.

  The queen paused in the foyer that wasn’t really a foyer at all. The walls were cracked, the ceiling a moldy ruin, the floor pitted and splintered. She’d noticed the disarray the last time she passed through the underworld, but hadn’t thought much of it—the underworld’s appearance was just a convenience, after all, because it had to look like something. Now, though, she could sense a deeper wrongness. Something about her realm was... broken.

  She looked around, and the walls dissolved, shimmered, and became her throne room, a cavern of obsidian, onyx, and black marble. There were two chairs there, carved of sapphire and emerald. Once upon a time, one chair had been smaller than the other—the smaller chair belonged to Death’s consort, a mortal raised to godhood to rule beside a creature more purely divine, to temper the cold reign of death with a spark of human warmth—but the queen had put a stop to that nonsense. She and her husband were co-regents, equal halves of a whole....

  But Death wasn’t here, now, and his emerald chair lay toppled on its side. She reached out for him, tried to sense him, which was normally as easy as sensing the position of her own left arm.

  Nothing. Where could he be? Was he out, walking the Earth, for some reason? He’d come to Earth to help her, during the battle with the Outsider, but what other business did he have among the living?