Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  “You’re nothing if not inconsistent. So. Greece. My usual method of long-distance travel is no good right now. I can’t just take a shortcut through Hell, like I used to. There’s teleporting, but... is it safer to travel that way for gods than it is for mortals?”

  “Heavens, no. More dangerous, actually. The things that dwell in the spaces in-between are drawn to life force, and you and I are practically brimming over with life force, we’re supercharged. Humans are kerosene and we’re rocket fuel. Your boy Bradley has been dabbling with mirror travel, as I understand, but that’s also more dangerous for the likes of us. We can make unreal things really real.”

  “So, what? Do we steal a plane?”

  Elsie waved her hand. “Back when I was mortal a Sufi mystic taught me the secret of Tayy al-Ard, ‘the folding of the Earth.’ It’s a way to travel without actually going anywhere. You stay in one place, and the Earth moves under you, and stops once your destination is beneath your feet. If you do it wrong, you get smashed against a wall or a mountain along the way, but we’ll do it right instead. I’ll teach you.”

  “I’ve never been the quickest study with magic, Elsie. I’ve always gotten along through sheer stubborn refusal to quit.”

  “Oh, I know, you’re notorious, all grit and no sparkle. But I think you’ll find certain things come more easily now that you’re fully in touch with your goddess-hood, darling.”

  •

  An hour later, Elsie and Marla crouched behind an immense anvil and watched a dog-sized bronze mechanical spider pick its way across the relic-strewn floor. They were in a stone-walled workshop, lit only by low-banked forge fires. They’d traveled to Greece using Elsie’s method of folding the Earth—it was disorienting, but also beautiful, seeing a whole hemisphere whip past at high speed—and they’d landed on a rocky island overlooking a night-time sea that was, in fact, fairly wine-dark. From there, they’d descended into a crack in the ground, leaving behind the ordinary world, at some point, and entering the palace of a god. Marla had paused to marvel at the decorative urns and the oversized statues of majestic figures (though it was creepy how all their facial features were smashed off, like someone had gotten drunk and angry with a hammer), but Elsie had called her a tourist and dragged her down a set of stairs into this sweltering basement workshop.

  Marla elbowed her fellow god as the spider scuttled around a corner and out of sight. “Elsie. This doesn’t feel like a visit.”

  “When I said ‘visit,’ I thought it was clear I meant ‘burglarize,’” Elsie said. “My apologies if I was imprecise.”

  “Who even worships Hephaestus anymore?” Marla demanded.

  “A few neo-pagans, probably. But he still has a lot of juice in popular culture. Wasn’t he in a Disney movie or something? He slumbers, though, mostly. Not a lot of demand for his wares anymore, I gather, and his hot wife never visits. He won’t notice if we nick a few things from his workshop. Probably. He never has before.” Elsie lifted her head, peeking over the anvil. “All right, I don’t see any more guardians. I’m sure they’re very lazy and unobservant anyway.”

  “Can god-made automatons even be lazy?”

  “Anything can be anything, Marla. They just have to believe in themselves.”

  “Every time I think I can’t hate you any more, I hate you a little more.”

  “Shush. Hephaestus makes the most darling little helmets.” Elsie scurried from cover toward a doorway, and Marla followed, trying to curse only to herself. Beyond the door was a room of seemingly infinite length, filled with gleaming racks of weapons and dark armor.

  “The armory of the gods,” Elsie said. “Do you like it?”

  She picked up a dagger with a blade that shimmered with dark swirls of color, like oil on water. “It’s starting to win me over.”

  “I’m going to get a helmet with wings on the side,” Elsie said. “Like the imaginary Vikings used to wear. I am going to be adorable. Hmm. We’re going to need, let’s see, six of them.”

  “There are only five of us, Elsie. Me, you, Rondeau, Pelly, and B.”

  “So far. It’s always good to have an extra. You never know when you’ll pick up a tagalong.”

  “What are these helmets supposed to do for us, anyway?”

  “Oh, things.” Elsie wandered off down an aisle and disappeared around a corner. Marla gritted her teeth and followed. Being annoyed with her was pointless. Elsie lived to irritate people.

  Marla put a hand on Elsie’s shoulder before she could turn another corner. “I have gone along with you, with hardly any complaint, because I am an enlightened being with a widened perspective, now. But there are limits even to my cosmic patience. What. Are. The. Helmets. For.”

  Elsie reached out and picked up a green gladiator’s helmet decorated with a motif of vines and flowers: oddly pretty, for something designed to be hit with a club. She blew a layer of dust off the helm. “The gods used to pit their champions against one another, for the proverbial shits and giggles, and these were designed to give certain mortals an edge. They make the wearer... not god-proof, certainly, but let’s say god-resistant. If your mortal sidekicks wear these, the New Death won’t be able to simply stop their hearts with a glance. He’ll have to kill them more conventionally. I’m also fairly sure he won’t be able to trap them in bubbles of hostile reality and wipe out their minds, though only time will tell for sure. If your new husband conjures a giant man-or-woman-eating demon, the demon could still eat them, of course. But, still, the helmets might shift this from an absurdly unfair fight to a merely horribly unbalanced fight. Wearing them will improve our own natural resistance to the New Death’s interference, too. We’ve both got mortal cores that makes us a little less agile when it comes to shaping reality than those who are all the way god.” She gave Marla a significant look. “Though I like to think we’re stronger for our mortality, the way an alloy is better than pure metal.”

  “That was impressively lucid.” Marla took the helmet from her hands. It felt light as an eggshell, but she suspected hitting it with an industrial trip hammer wouldn’t even dent the crown.

  Elsie beamed. “I know! My mind can line up the little box-cars of thought and send them chug-chug-chugging along the rails so much better since I became a deity.” She took another helmet, which did, indeed, have little silver wings protruding from the sides, and slid it over her head. The helmet gleamed for a moment, as if illuminated by torchlight, then faded to transparency and finally seemed to disappear all together. Elsie thumped her knuckles against the side of her head. “There, now my skull has a skull. Try yours.”

  Marla hesitated. “If this thing is cursed....”

  “Ooh, that’s an interesting idea. I wonder if any of these helmets are cursed? I’ve had a little fun handing out magical weapons to people, just to see what would happen, but cursed armor, even better.”

  “What? Why have you been giving people weapons?”

  Elsie cocked her head. “I was almost positive I said that out loud: just to see what would happen.”

  “Even now that you’re a god, you don’t have any better reason for the things you do? You used to create chaos because it gave you power –”

  “Which I used to create more chaos, to get more power, and so on. My behavior was always a closed self-referential loop, Marla. Now that I’m a trickster god... I do have a higher purpose, but my approach hasn’t really changed. I’m here to shake things up. Complacency is death. Somebody has to go around kicking over anthills, or else how do you find out what happens when you kick over an anthill?”

  “I... yeah. Okay. We’re never going to be friends, Elsie.”

  “Oh, you never know. You have more in common with me than you do with the mayfly mortals you consider your family.”

  Marla pulled on her helmet. It was like having her head doused with cool water. The helmet faded and vanished, and she didn’t feel anything at all, except, in some peculiar way, protected. “I have one question, Elsie. It’s important. If I
take you with me to the underworld, are you going to actually help me, or fuck things up just to see what happens?”

  “What did I say about how it’s more fun when you don’t know everything?” Elsie looked around, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “I’ll scoop a few more helmets into a sack, after I steal a sack, but everything else here is a bit shit. Hephaestus never did have much of an imagination. Did you want to go find him? Maybe we could heal his bad leg, that would be pretty hilarious. It would mess with his whole mythic self-image.”

  “We should let sleeping gods lie.”

  Elsie groaned, long and loud. “Marla. I am so angry that you made that pun and I didn’t.”

  “Even gods can’t have everything. Are we done here? Where do we go now?”

  “We’re just going to visit one of my old neighbors.”

  •

  Marla frowned at the imposing brick hulk of the mansion in the distance. Even in bright sunlight, the structure was imposingly Gothic, and the bars on all the windows didn’t help. Going from morning in Las Vegas to night in Greece to afternoon on the outskirts of Felport in the space of a couple of hours should have played havoc with Marla’s body clock, but apparently gods in full possession of their abilities were immune to jetlag’s nastier cousin, teleport-lag. “What are we doing here? You’re saying there’s a god in the Blackwing Institute?”

  Elsie looked at a cow a few yards away in the field where they stood and whispered “Moo.” Then she turned to Marla. “Well, why not? I was locked up there for ages, and I’m a god.”

  “Yes, but you weren’t a god at the time.”

  “Pish. Time is an illusion. You should know that. Shall we go in? I just love coming back to visit. They’re always so glad to see me.”

  Marla grabbed Elsie’s arm before she could flit across the field. “Elsie, there are people in there. Sick people, and mortal staff. Sure, most of the orderlies are just homunculi grown in the basement, but since Langford took over running the place, he’s brought in some of his apprentices-slash-research-assistants, and they aren’t flesh golems who live on lavender and earthworms. I don’t want any innocent people getting killed.” She paused. “Or any guilty people, either. Basically any people. No killing.”

  Elsie shook off her hand. “The god of death is telling me not to take lives? That’s like me telling you to be sure and use a coaster so you don’t leave a ring on the table. Marla, really, you need to get past this black-and-white morality thing. Be like me, and embrace blue-and-orange morality.” At her blank look, Elsie sighed. “Don’t you ever read the TV Tropes website? It’s great, everything you need to know about life is contained therein. Blue-and-orange morality, sweet Marla, is morality that is alien to your good-and-evil framework, a moral system that’s totally perpendicular, or maybe orthogonal, or is it catty-corner? One of those. I’m not a human. I’m a trickster god, and I play according to rules that don’t necessarily make any sense from a point of view that’s not my own. So what if I kill some people? What does that have to do with anything that has anything to do with anything?”

  “As usual, Elsie, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter, so let me put this more plainly: if you kill anybody, you and me are going to have a fight. I know exactly how powerful you are, and you know it. I was there when you were born into godhood, and I can be there when you die out of it. You don’t want me on your ass.”

  Elsie rolled her eyes. “Fine. We’ll play tennis with the net up, then. Can I at least turn people into beetles?”

  “As long as they get turned back to people again at the end, and have as many body parts as they started with—no fewer and no more.... then I guess that’s okay.”

  “I’m Mozart, and you’ve taken away my piano and given me a toy xylophone, but that’s fine. I can still make beautiful music. Genius flourishes under restraint, just like a middle-aged divorcee getting into kinky sex for the first time.”

  “Your metaphors don’t even metaphor right.”

  “Sometimes they get away from me, but I stand by that one. Shall we just walk in through the front door? That would be pretty funny.”

  “Your amusement is my only goal, Elsie.”

  In addition to the long-distance folding of the Earth, Elsie had also shown Marla a nifty little line-of-sight variation, allowing for short hop teleports without any nasty side effects. They flittered across the cow field to the front doors of the institute, which were warded and guarded in a dozen different ways, magical and technological. Elsie smiled at the security camera and said “Oops, everything glitches.” Marla had no trouble unweaving the magical protections and putting them aside for the time it took to open the big double doors and step inside.

  Marla was a little alarmed by the extent of her own power; she could so easily change so many things, now. Magic that had been almost impossible for her in the past was now trivial, and she could do things she could have only imagined before. No wonder her god-self had worked to limit her understanding of her capabilities during her months in the mortal realm. A few years ago, a less emotionally banged-up, more pathologically self-confident Marla would have taken that power and set about reshaping the world to redress wrongs real, imagined, and trivial... without giving nearly enough thought to the long-term consequences of her actions. Her now-perfect memory and her expanded perceptions gave her the discretion necessary to wield that new power without causing untold disasters... so far. It was still basically like juggling hand grenades with loose pins, though.

  Especially since she was running around with Elsie Jarrow, who had broadly similar powers, and used them to court disaster. Ah, well. Mortal life was all about compromises. Why should godhood be any different?

  Elsie strolled into the marble-floored lobby and walked up to the dark wood reception desk, currently unattended. “There’s no little bell to ring,” she said. “I love those little bells. Oh well. I’ll have to make do.” Elsie took a deep breath and shouted “Ding ding ding ding ding!”

  A young woman with flyaway hair and glasses appeared through a side door. “What—what are you doing here, can I help you, who are you?”

  “Visiting a patient, I doubt it, and we are Elsie Jarrow and Marla Mason, former inmate and former patron—or, wait, matron?—of this facility, respectively. We’re going to see Roderick Barrow.”

  The woman shook her head. “You can’t just come visit patients, that’s not how it’s done here, you have to contact Doctor Langford –”

  “Is my name no longer a name to conjure fear?” Elsie said. “What are they teaching you apprentices nowadays? What’s your name, dear?”

  “I’m Colette. I’m in charge of operations today while the doctor’s off site.”

  “Does Langford really have a doctorate, or is this like a guy who buys a canoe and calls himself captain?” Marla said.

  “It’s probably an honorary doctorate bestowed for excellence in psychopathy and humorlessness,” Elsie said. “I’m so glad Langford wasn’t in charge of things when I was locked up here. I bet he would have bothered me all the time, with the pokings and the proddings and the evaluatings.” She pointed to the apprentice. “Can I turn her into beetles?”

  “Not necessary.” Marla walked up to Colette and put her hand on her shoulder. “We’re very dangerous people, but I’m pretty sure we don’t mean any harm. When Langford comes back, tell him we visited—he won’t be angry that you couldn’t stop us.”

  The woman’s hair began to rise into the air, crackling with electricity as she gathered magic for some strike. Marla sighed. “You really should sit down with the latest edition of Dee’s Peerage and look up our names when you get a chance.” Marla reached into the woman’s mind with a soothing psychic touch and then caught her when she slumped, her small electrical burst of power discharging harmlessly into the air. Marla lowered the woman to the floor behind the desk. “You know, I used to be about as psychic as your average cantaloupe. Godhood is weird. I can see why so many go
ds are giant assholes. So much power.”

  “It’s a good thing we can be trusted with it.”

  “Ha. Okay, you had your fun, you got to freak out a mortal. Let’s be discreet now.” Marla cast a look-away spell so no one else they encountered would notice them. “Where are we going?”

  “To one of the locked basement wards, unless they’ve moved him.” She set off toward a door and on down a corridor. Elsie knew the layout of the Institute well. This was a hospital for criminally insane sorcerers, and she’d been locked up here for ages, throughout multiple escape attempts.

  Marla had been running through her mental list of inmates, trying to figure out who they might be here to visit, and she was unsurprised when Elsie led her to a basement wall made of volcanic black glass. “I used to need a special magical key to open this,” Elsie said, “but, well...” She touched the wall, and a section of stone slid away. “Ooh, I love godhood.” She led Marla inside, to an incongruously ordinary-looking hallway that would have been at home in any hospital, complete with flickering fluorescent lights overhead. They walked to a window that looked in on a hospital bed, where an old man rested, unconscious, hooked up to monitors and tubes. His room wasn’t entirely antiseptic, though. The skin of some brightly-striped animal, transformed into a blanket or rug, was puddled at the foot of the bed, a dented wooden shield leaned in a corner, and a scattering of gold coins and precious gems littered the floor.

  “This guy isn’t a god.” Marla looked through the bulletproof glass and shook her head. “That’s Roderick Barrow. The exothermic dreamer. How is he even still alive? I don’t think he’s changed a bit, physically, in all these years.”

  “He’s in eternal stasis coma-sleep, with fancy dreams,” Elsie said. “Why do you say he isn’t a god? He is a lord of his own creation. You’ve entered his dreamworld. From the inside, didn’t it seem just as real as this world? Maybe realer?”

  “I went into his dreamworld a long time ago, when I was a dumb young mercenary and didn’t know any better. Those memories had pretty much faded to nothing, the way dreams do, but since Bradley cleaned out all my mental blocks... yeah, I remember. Barrow saw me as an evil witch, and I stormed a haunted citadel. Being in his dream was like living in a bad movie with good special effects. What do we want with him? We’re supposed to be visiting gods, not bothering insane psychic fantasy novelists.”