Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  “What’s fair got to do with it? We’re the gods of death. Fair’s got nothing to do with death.”

  He held up his hands in a gesture of concession, or conciliation. “I’m happy to let you play to your strengths, darling. As it happens, there have been some troubling occurrences, down below. I sent some autonomous personality fragments to investigate it –”

  “Demons.” She grinned, showing pointed teeth.

  He sighed. “Yes, demons, if it pleases you. They never came back. They just... vanished. Which makes me think something dangerous is happening down at the bottom of the underworld. Would you care to take a look?”

  “What kind of troubling occurrences are we talking about?”

  “A few of the dead have disappeared from their afterlives. It happens, occasionally—after a very long time, they lose psychological coherence, or else they grow weary of their torments or delights, and they turn to oblivion. But the rate of attrition has been more frequent lately, and the raw substance of their denatured afterlives isn’t returning to the cauldron of chaos after they disappear. Instead, something is taking the substance of their afterlives and....” He shrugged.

  “Stealing it? Using it? Eating it? Are we talking about metaphysical thieves, or the world’s greatest necromancer, or just some kind of underworld rodents getting into the cupboards?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Death said. “It could simply be a malfunction in the system. A leak of some kind. An imbalance. I couldn’t say.”

  “‘The system,’” the Bride said. “That’s one way to describe it.” She and her husband were the absolute and undisputed rulers of the underworld, but that was a bit like being the ruler of the sea: their realm was vast, largely unknowable, full of dark places, and populated mostly by creatures with no idea they had a ruler, some of whom would try to eat anyone who claimed the title in their presence.

  The essence of the underworld was a sea of raw potential. Any creature that could dream or fear an afterlife ended up there after death, and found themselves in a little bubble of potentiality, a formless void to be shaped by their own hopes and worries and expectations. In those pocket realities, the departed souls inhabited the Hell, Heaven, happy hunting ground, Purgatory, Sheol, or Valhalla of their own imagining: some of the afterlives were fantastically baroque, or indescribably cruel, or unspeakable beautiful. Sometimes lovers or friends or families would drift together, their bubbles overlapping into a shared space, but more often any afterlife that demanded dearly departed relatives would be filled merely with simulacrums of the same. Some people truly expected, and thus received, only oblivion, or dissolved into a cloud of ego-less bliss—but most people didn’t really believe, deep down inside, that they would ever cease to exist, and lose continuity of identity, and so most went on, in some form or another.

  And now some of them were vanishing, and their bubbles of void-to-be-infinitely-shaped disappearing with them. That was interesting.

  “Have you ever heard of this sort of thing happening before?” the Bride asked.

  Death took a sip of blood orange juice, which his wife was convinced he drank mostly because of the name. If there were something called “murderfruit” he would have sipped its juice instead. “There’s nothing in the memory of any of my predecessors that seems entirely similar, no.”

  “It could be a monster,” she said. “Down there, underneath the everything, there’s just the raw stuff of creation, and who knows what dwells there?”

  “A monster? Well, it’s possible. You know how these mythic situations can be. Even if it’s just a malfunction, it could present as a monster. If you go down, just be careful, all right?”

  “I’m a god of death,” she said. “What could possibly happen to me?”

  “You’re not the first god of death,” he pointed out. “And neither am I. Some of us retired gracefully, or dried up like dew in the sun, or switched off like lights. Others of us came to bad ends. There aren’t many things that can harm gods, but there are a few.”

  “If anything like that threatens me,” the Bride said, “there’s going to be one less of them.”

  •

  Before the Bride began her descent, she dressed herself in divine raiment, which in her case meant loose-fitting white linen pants and a snug white sleeveless blouse, with golden slippers that provided better footing than the best work boots she’d ever had. (“Linen” and “blouse” and “golden” and “footing” were all as unnecessary as eating eggs blackstone here, but she was a corona of divine fire flickering around a core of mortal woman, and so she still enjoyed the trappings of the physical.) She took up a rod of lapis lazuli, a scepter three feet long with a pleasing weight, because there was something down below that was killing their demons, and it would be pleasant to hit it with a stick. She wore a heavy golden necklace, and, golden bracelets, and, of course, her wedding ring on the appropriate finger of the appropriate hand. The Bride was not vain, but she might encounter some of the dead, and if they looked upon their queen, they should see some glamour.

  The Bride set out from the palace, which wasn’t really a palace, except sometimes. When she stepped outside—if you could call the interior of an immense cavern “outside”—she looked back to see what shape the residence had taken today. The obsidian theme had continued, and it seemed she currently lived in a mountain of glittering black glass, with no openings at all but the arched front entrance. Wasn’t there a reference in some poem or story to Lucifer living in a palace of mirrors? This was undeniably more stylish. She wondered if the shape of the place was based on a passing fancy of hers or her husband’s. They could shape things consciously, but if they didn’t bother, the subconscious did the job well enough.

  She tilted her head back to look up at what, for want of a better word, she thought of as the sky. There were things that looked like falling stars above her, a constant meteor shower, with new streaks of light appearing at the rate of about two lights per second, though there were occasional stretches with fewer and occasional bursts of more—sometimes many more. Those lights were the souls of the newly dead, streaking down to their afterlives. Sparrows, ravens, owls, winged human figures, and even the occasional spectral dog or horse occasionally flew or ran alongside a particular falling speck, but not many people believed in the necessity of psychopomps to escort their souls to the afterlife anymore, so such creatures were rare, and in any case evaporated in the atmosphere. Not many people paid the ferryman’s toll to cross by water anymore, as far as that went. Most of the falling dead were just unaccompanied lights streaking through the dark.

  The Bride walked along a path of stones the color of yellowed skulls until she reached a river, which ran swift and black and straight, twenty yards wide. Far away from here the famed River Styx ran, a useful barrier for keeping out mortals who managed to wander in through some forgotten portal or dread spell. (There was a train tunnel running under the river for those in the know, though. Progress marches relentlessly onward, Death said, even in the underworld.) This river, though, was almost as famous as the Styx: the Lethe, a river whose waters granted forgetfulness. Lethe water was highly sought-after by mortal sorcerers, since it could be used to wipe whole minds clean, or selectively edit specific memories. Under the regimes of previous gods of death, necromancers had been able to induce spirits and demons to bring small quantities of the stuff to the world above, and the Bride and her husband tolerated the practice under her reign, too.

  Mostly because, as the mortal Marla Mason, the Bride had taken Lethe water twice herself. The second time, she’d used it to remove the memory of sex with a lovetalker, since those who were touched once by such supernaturally gifted lovers could never thereafter be satisfied by the touch of an ordinary human, and she’d hoped to have enjoyable sex again sometime.

  The first time she drank Lethe water, though she’d used a lot more, and erased great swaths of memory—including the memory of drinking the water in the first place. But no corner of her own mind
was closed to her god-self, and while she dwelt in the underworld in the fullness of her power, the Bride could look over the course of her entire life, just as she could look over any other mortal timeline. The reason for her first taste of Lethe water was just one of the many secrets the Bride knew, that her mortal self did not, and never would.

  The Bride thought about that boy she walked along the riverbank. His name was—had been—Daniel. He’d been Marla Mason’s first love. Her fellow apprentice, under the tutelage of the sorcerer Artie Mann, learning alongside Marla and their friend Jenny Click. All three of them were dead, now. Artie murdered by a serial killer on a mission given to him by things that called themselves angels. Jenny self-immolated in the extremity of her grief. And Daniel.... Daniel had died at Marla’s hands, when a terrible compulsion forced him to dark acts, and made him raise his hand against her.

  The guilt and loss over Daniel’s death had so consumed her that taking Lethe water to erase all memory of her love, to erase the fact that she’d ever loved anyone, had seemed the only way forward. The Bride wondered how her mortal life would have been different, if she’d held on to that memory of young love. The sense of loss was a distant and unimportant thing, in her current form, when all mortal concerns seemed basically trivial. Thinking of Daniel’s death while she was a god was like looking at a distant star. Thinking of it during her mortal life had been like being plunged into the heart of that star.

  The detachment of being a god was almost as good as Lethe water, anyway.

  She walked along the river, and whenever the course of the water began to meander, she straightened it out, because she had places to go. The presence of rivers in Hell was well attested to in the literature, so their existence was no surprise, but what people seldom stopped to think about was that rivers, by and large, ran down to the sea. And what kind of sea would you find in Hell?

  The Bride stopped at the mouth of the river, where it emptied into a vast subterranean ocean that extended far beyond the limits of even her considerable vision. The sea shimmered in the light of the falling souls above, all of which struck the water in their turn, and vanished. There didn’t need to be an ocean, or a river, or a shore (the sand was black, and under a microscope, would doubtless turn out to be composed of millions of tiny grinning skulls, or something similarly macabre). All this was just metaphor. But as her husband said, everything had to look like something: it would be boring and confusing to deal with pure abstractions all the time.

  She walked along the stony shore, picking up the pebbles that made up the beach, and filling her pockets—she had pockets, now that she needed them—with smooth clicking stones. Once she felt sufficiently weighted, she took a last look at the flickering sky, and then walked into the sea.

  The sea wasn’t really a sea, of course, but a vast reservoir of chaos, the raw stuff of reality, in a form capable of being shaped by the minds of the dead. Occasionally, in the world above, there arose powerful psychics called reweavers, who could force the shape of reality itself to change according to their whims or their unconscious desires. In the afterlife, everyone was a reweaver, creating their own vividly realized worlds, from nightmares to paradises to everything in between.

  But they were creating those worlds in the Bride’s realm, and unlike most of the dead souls in this sea, she knew how to consciously manipulate the primordial chaos. Besides, this was her world. As such, she had the power to influence the afterlives of the dead, or even entirely override them, if she saw fit. She seldom bothered to do so, though occasionally she indulged the impulses for justice or revenge that bubbled up from the core of her mortal self. She’d look in on people she’d loved or admired in life, and if she thought they were being too hard on themselves, tweak the parameters to make their afterlives a bit more pleasant. Or she’d look in on old enemies and villains, and if their lack of guilt or remorse had led them to create afterlives that were too pleasant, she’d inject a bit of tribulation into their eternities.

  Now she sank beneath the waves, through murky waters, and exhaled a cascade of bubbles that flew up and obscured her vision... and when the vision cleared, she floated in a vast black space occupied by billions of bubbles as small as apples and as large as suns, colored in shades ranging from pale gold to dark violet. The stones in her pockets evaporated, as she no longer needed them to pull her down. She was weightless, here.

  The Bride drifted close to one sphere, a lurid magenta in color, and peered inside, seeing a plain of cracked black earth, dotted by ivory towers with a disturbingly organic quality. A human form raced along the ground, pursued by monsters that shifted through forms as she watched, but that mostly involved toothy jaws and waving pseudopods. The nightmare world of someone not terribly creative, with symbols even Freud would have found a bit too crude and obvious.

  The Bride willed herself downward, past other spheroid afterlives, pausing at one that shimmered, prismatic. She looked into that one, and saw the final panel of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” down to every last detail, including the curiously affectless demons and surreal monsters tormenting equally blank-faced humans... except for one woman, who howled as the devil on the night-chair consumed her.

  People talked about the “screams of the dying” but in her experience they weren’t half as disturbing as the screams of the dead.

  The Bride wrinkled her nose and checked the manifest that fluttered inside her mind. No, this wasn’t Hieronymous Bosch’s personal Hell, but one that belonged to a professor of art history who carried a lot of guilt for her dalliance with a fetching blonde undergrad. The Bride waved her hand and the edges of the Boschian hellscape shimmered into the blurry peace of a watercolor by Monet, which began to spread inward. The Bosch would reassert itself, eventually—you couldn’t save someone from herself—but the Bride wanted to be able to tell her husband, “See, I’m capable of acts of pointless generosity, just like you.”

  She drifted downward again, pausing by a mottled gray sphere with an almost fungal aspect. Ah, yes, this world was familiar. Her mortal core had a particular antipathy for the soul who lived in this afterlife—he’d died long before her birth, but a necromancer had returned him to life some years back, and he’d caused Marla personal difficulties during his time above. The Bride decided to do her other self a favor and make the man’s unpleasant eternity even worse. She didn’t just peer into this bubble, but stepped inside, letting the locality drape her in appropriate attire, in this case a modest, dark gray dress and a hat that she could only think to describe as “stupid.”

  She stood on a rainy street—had it really been raining that day?—before Ford’s Theater. She went inside, clucking her tongue at the sketchy quality of the setting. The employees and theater-goers in the lobby were faceless automatons, the carpet so threadbare in places you could see the pure chaos peeking through underneath. The theater itself was full of twittering shadows, but up in balcony, things clarified: there sat president Abraham Lincoln, beside his wife Mary Todd, though her face was blurry. The Bride stood on her tiptoes, and then kept rising, drifting toward the ceiling, so she could get a good view of the action.

  Assassin, actor, and former revivified mummy John Wilkes Booth stepped into the box, a pistol in his hand, and said “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” as he pointed it at Lincoln’s head.

  The Bride almost smiled as she waved her hand, and the pistol flew from Booth’s hand, unfired. He gaped and stumbled backward. Well, why not? He’d experienced this—assassination, flight, days on the run, death in a fire—thousands and thousands of times, without anything other than minor variations in the ordeal. Booth was a sufficiently arrogant and vile man that his afterlife hadn’t been unpleasant at all, until Death stepped in and made it nastier on Marla’s behalf, trapping him in a loop reliving his crime and downfall.

  Another wiggle of her fingers, and Lincoln rose up, enraged, holding a bare cavalry saber in his hand. People thought of Lincoln as a dignified man in a beard and stovepipe hat, but he’
d been a rail-splitter, and had attended at least one duel armed with a sword—though his opponent had seen reason and called things off before steel clashed with steel.

  Lincoln opened his mouth and roared, swinging the sword in an arc over his wife’s head. (She paid no mind at all, her eyes fixed on the stage, where shadowy actors milled around to no effect, doubtless saying the Civil War-era-actor’s equivalent of “rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb” and “peas and carrots” at one another.) Booth leapt back in terror, then returned to his usual script by jumping from the balcony and landing on the stage below. He’d done that in real life, too, and made his escape from there.

  This time Lincoln jumped after him, and when the president landed on the stage, the whole theater shook, and the president howled again, racing backstage after Booth, sword upraised.

  The Bride sank down to the floor, then on through the floor, then out the bottom of Booth’s festering bubble of misery and back into the blackness of the primordial sea. She accelerated her descent, the bubbles flickering past her so quickly now that she seemed to move through a sort of liquid rainbow. Despite the speed, she recognized a few of the bubbles as they went past. The afterlives of enemies her mortal self had contended with—the mad priest Mutex, the cannibal witch Bethany, and even a recent arrival, the cult leader and devourer of lives called the Eater. (She peeked into his afterlife, and saw he’d exactly recreated the small town where he’d ruled when he was alive. The banality of the place, she decided, was punishment enough.)

  The orbs of dead friends caught her attention, too. A sphere of glittering chrome where Ernesto the junkyard mage dwelt among contraptions of infinite intricacy. The burning sphere where Jenny Click scourged all her personal demons with fire. A verdant green sphere where Lao Tsung, the man who’d taught her to fight, ruled as a philosopher king in a vast city of step pyramids. And a bubble the color of wet pavement, where Marla’s first love Daniel suffered in eternal misery. Marla had never asked Death to make Daniel’s afterlife more pleasant, because she didn’t remember Daniel. As far as Marla Mason was concerned, she’d never loved anyone before the god of Death.