by T. A. Pratt
Crapsey scowled. He did look an awful lot like Rondeau, except for being more muscular, and scarred, and careworn, and having a wooden prosthetic jaw inlaid with magical sigils in copper and gold. He had the same atrocious taste in suits Rondeau did, though. He was currently dressed like Miami Vice-era Don Jonson, with the sleeves of his baby-blue sports jacket rolled up to the elbows. “I thought the spell Ronnie put on himself, and me, was supposed to be unbreakable? We’re trapped in a glass bottle so we can’t hurt anybody.” Crapsey snorted. “There are all kinds of ways I can hurt people besides taking over their bodies, but anyway.”
“I’m a god, Crapsey. I’m good at magic. I might be able to save Rondeau, if he can be saved.”
“Why should I help you?”
She frowned. “I could kill your body, and leave you trapped in a glass jar.”
“Then you wouldn’t be able to get any answers from me. If you could communicate with psychic parasites, you’d be asking Rondeau how he was doing, instead of coming to me. Offer me something I can use.”
She considered threatening Squat’s life, but while that might work, it also might not. Crapsey had spent a long time learning not to get attached to anything, because his mistress in that other world destroyed everything he cared about. Marla suddenly felt sorry for Crapsey in a way she never really had before, when she was alive, and had a body and brain that were tuned more for rage than for empathy. “I’ll help you, too, when your time comes, Crapsey. Get you a new body.”
He stared at her. “Are you for real?”
She nodded. “Gods can’t go back on bargains. If you give me information that helps me save Rondeau, I will make sure you get a new body when that one dies. I’ll seal that body, too—I don’t want you running around loose, you’re a pathogen in a blazer—but I’ll keep you going.”
“Forever?”
“For as long as I can. Is it a deal?”
He spat on his hand and extended it.
“Ew,” Marla said. “Just say ‘yes’.”
Crapsey rubbed his hand on his pants. “Hell, yes.”
“So: is it too late for Rondeau? Do you know how long your kind can last without a host?”
Crapsey nodded. “We can last a while. It’s not fun, but we can.”
“You know this for sure? From experience?”
“Yeah. Back in the nightmarish hellscape I called home, when the Mason was first training me to be her personal murder-sidekick, she did a bunch of experiments on me. At first, when I left this body, I just panicked, and grabbed the nearest new host, regardless of who it was. Being out of a body is awful, really disorienting, you can’t imagine—there’s no physical cognate for the experience you’d understand. Eventually, with practice, I learned to chill, and direct myself, so I could choose my next host consciously, which suited the Mason’s need for a targeted assassin. Once I’d mastered that, the Mason wanted to see what kind of range I had: how close did a body need to be for me to grab it? So she’d put me out in the desert with nobody around for miles and miles, except for political prisoners or slaves, potential new host bodies. She never did find any limit to my range, though there may be one—I was able to find and inhabit new bodies even if they were five or ten miles away away. Then one day, the Mason dropped me in the desert with nobody around, ordered me to leave my body, and then sealed my body off, using magic. I couldn’t take her body, because her wards were too strong. I freaked out. I flew all over, looking for a new body, but there was nothing around, and I can’t fly fast, at least not for long—it’s like the speed of a piece of dandelion fluff on a gentle breeze.” He shuddered. “It was terrifying. Eventually, after about six hours of me freaking the hell out while the Mason just sat there cross-legged staring at nothing in that creepy way she had, she undid the wards, and I rushed back into my own body.”
“Dude,” Squat said. “What a bitch.”
Crapsey nodded. “The Mason told me she wanted to see how long I could persist with no host. She promised she’d do more tests, longer than six hours, later, but she never got around to it, and then we fell through a crack in reality and ended up in this place, and.” He shrugged. “So, that’s it. I lived, if you can call it living, for six hours without a host. Maybe I could have gone on for longer. Maybe forever. Or maybe after six hours and one minute, I would’ve lost cohesion and died. No clue. But if your boy Ronnie got killed less than six hours ago, he’s still in there. Good enough?”
“Yes. If Rondeau lives, you’ll get to live on, too. One more thing.” She stepped toward him and reached out with supernatural speed, plucking a hair from his head.
“What the hell did you do that for?”
“God stuff. Reasons. Shut up.” She glanced at Squat, and felt a stab of empathy for him, too. Both of them. Friendless, despised, broken, working for Perren River, who couldn’t even stand to have them in her city. Damn it. Why hadn’t giving up her mortality spared her all these stupid human feelings? “Hey. Have you two idiots heard from Nicolette?”
“You mean, since you froze her in a block of ice?”
Marla shook her head. “She’s out. I thawed her. She’s probably negotiating to take over Felport again as we speak.” Gods, had that visit with Nicolette only been this morning? You could do a lot in a day when you could travel anywhere instantaneously. Being a god had its benefits. She wasn’t even all that exhausted. “Maybe give her a call, if you kept her number. I’m sure she could find a use for you. She did last time.”
“Nicolette’s back. Huh. It would be nice to have a patron who didn’t hate and fear us,” Crapsey said.
“Nicolette was always really mean to us, though,” Squat said.
“That’s how she shows affection,” Marla said. “Of course, it’s also how she shows derision. She’s pretty confusing that way. Try not to kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it, okay, you monsters?”
“Sure, your, uh, goddessness,” Squat said.
Marla stepped into a shadow and returned to Rondeau. Pelham was standing vigil over him, which was to say, he was polishing the crystal coffin with a handkerchief. “Rondeau’s still in there,” she said. “Now we just need a way to talk to him.” She willed a phone into existence and had it dial Bradley’s number. When he answered, she said, “I need you. Want to come to hell for a few minutes?”
Underworlding
“Marla! I was about to call you. Or have Cole ring your little bell. I have to tell you about this thing that happened—”
“Does your thing involve one of our friends being dead?”
“No?”
“Then I get to go first. Look behind you.”
He decided not to worry about what she was talking about. Not until he had to. Bradley turned around, and didn’t see anything amiss... until he realized the shadow at the end of the hallway was unnatural and, given the fluorescent lights overhead in the corridor, shouldn’t have been nearly so dark. “Aren’t people supposed to go toward the light, not into the darkness?”
“There is no light. Seeing the light is just a thing that happens to dying brains. Now get your ass through that shadow.”
“Already walking. Hey, whatever happened to the thing with the doors? You used to just open doors, poof, magic doors, right? I liked that.” He paused on the edge of the shadow, which seemed to possess mass and viscosity. He wondered if it would feel sticky.
“The doors were my late husband’s thing, and when I travel through doors, it makes me sad, and I miss him. You don’t want me to be sad, because when I cry, there are floods and thunderstorms. The pathetic fallacy has never been so pathetic. Get. In, The. Shadow.”
Bradley closed his eyes and stepped through. It was like walking through a fog made of cotton candy, then it was bracingly cold, and then it was over. He opened his eyes and saw Marla’s throne room, with Marla and Pelham standing side by side, in front of a table or platform or altar. He put his phone away and walked toward them, his footsteps echoing in the vast space, which looked like an art deco
mausoleum designed by someone who’d gotten a bulk deal on black marble. “Isn’t there a rule that you can only go to the underworld once while you’re alive? I’ve been here... way more times than that.”
Marla shook her head. “That rule is a good way to keep out the riff raff. Heroes are constantly trying to come down here on quests, playing lutes at me or challenging me to games of chess. If they do it once, that’s okay. I can appreciate the classics. But without that rule, they’d get their lover back, then break up, then get a new lover, then that lover would die, and the hero would think, ‘Well, cheating death worked last time, let’s do it again.’ I can’t have all those heroes underfoot. They’d get everywhere. Worse than roaches.” She opened her arms for a hug, and it was just like being hugged by Marla when she was mortal, except, come to think of it, she’d never been much of a hugger. Becoming the incarnation of Death itself had actually softened Marla in some ways. That kind of made sense. She had so much power now that she didn’t need to make such a big production out of being the most badass person in the room. She just self-evidently was, and she didn’t even need to wear a belt of skulls to demonstrate it. (She was wearing loose white pants and a white blouse with black shiny buttons, which wasn’t much different from the sort of things she’d worn in life, except presumably she’d just... conjured these clothes into existence instead of shoplifting them.)
“What did you need, Marla? I’m kind of in the shit right now.”
“Not like we are down here.” She and Pelham moved apart as smoothly as if they’d practiced the choreography, and when Bradley saw Rondeau rotting in a glass casket behind them, he wobbled and actually went down on one knee before he caught himself. The illusions making the body look like Rondeau had failed, and they’d only worked on Bradley when he chose to let them work, anyway. As a result, he was looking at his own corpse in that coffin, and that, combined with the knowledge that his friend Rondeau had died, was a colossal mental and emotional blow. Pelham hurried toward him, but Bradley waved him away. “Oh, no. No, no, no. What happened?”
“Rondeau was assassinated in Vegas,” Marla said. “Possibly by someone who was mind controlled. We’re not sure who’s behind it, or why he was targeted. Rondeau’s not exactly harmless, but he doesn’t have that many enemies anymore. Not ones who could get past the Pit Boss’s security that way, anyway.”
Bradley rose to his feet. “I... Marla, someone tried to kill me, too, earlier today. The assassin who got Rondeau, was there anything... weird about them? Were they part animal? Or did they have like this black—”
Marla shook her head. “I didn’t have a chance to examine the killer. No one mentioned any chimera shit, but there was only one witness for me to interview, and he wasn’t around for every long. The assassin was killed and her body was disposed of before I got there, so she’s largely a mystery, but she was just a waitress with a cricket-demon and a knife. I looked around for her soul in the underworld, so I could question her post-mortem, but she’s not here, which either means she was a non-believer who got oblivion when she died, or her soul was destroyed somehow.” Marla put her hand on the coffin and looked down at Rondeau. “We’ll talk about your thing later. Someone trying to kill you, that’s definitely high on my list of action items, but, this first... someone actually did kill Rondeau. Except I think he’s still in there.”
Bradley smacked himself in the forehead. “Right, yes, of course, that spell, his voluntary locked-in syndrome. You think he’s in there? You’re not sure?”
She shrugged. “Whatever Rondeau is, he’s outside my domain of control, so I can’t communicate with him. Becoming a god hasn’t made me all that much more psychic than I used to be.”
“You were always about as psychic as a claw hammer.”
“Nah. Claw hammers are way better at penetrating people’s skulls than I am. Can you... do your thing? Try to reach Rondeau?”
“I mean, I can do telepathy, but that wouldn’t help.” Bradley approached the coffin and put his hands on the glass. “There’s not a working brain in there, so I can’t talk brain-to-brain. It would have to be more like talking to a ghost, say, but maybe.... Can I get this glass off him?”
“Sure. He smells, though. I stopped his decay from progressing, but it was pretty far along already, and there’s some kind of weird toxin in his body from the demon that bit him.” She waved her hand, and the glass vanished.
The smell was indeed eye-wateringly awful, pungent and nauseating, with that sickly, almost fruity sweet undertone that came along with human decomposition. It was kind of disturbing that he’d encountered enough dead bodies to recognize it. He tried breathing through his mouth, which helped, but was also super gross. He started to reach out, then paused. “Should I wear gloves or something?”
“No. I rendered everything in him inert, the poison included.”
Bradley put one hand on Rondeau’s forehead, looking at his own ruined face on the slab. The skin of his face was loose and, while it wasn’t slimy, it slid under the pressure of his fingers like it was slimy underneath. The bone showed through in places, yellowish white. Bradley closed his eyes, both to concentrate and so he wouldn’t have to look at his own rotten visage, and reached out.
There was something there, a lattice of light, or a jellyfish luminous in a dark sea, or a glowing spiderweb, but it was obscured, blurred as if behind glass. “There’s something blocking me,” he muttered. “Can we get rid of that?”
“I assume you’re referring to the shield that’s preventing Rondeau from jumping out of that body and seizing on the nearest available living human host, which, around here? Would be you. He stole one Bradley Bowman’s body already. You want to give him another one? I mean, maybe he could control himself, but if he leaps out in a blind panic....”
“Okay, point taken. I’ll just try to boost the signal.” He closed his eyes, concentrated, and focused on the shield. He couldn’t penetrate it, but maybe if he jumped up and down and waved his arms on the other side of the frosted glass—psychically, of course—Rondeau would take notice.
Rondeau. It’s B. Are you in there?
The voice that replied was recognizably Rondeau’s—most people sounded in their heads more or less like they sounded in the flesh, because those associations were imprinted deeply—but the voice was scattered, depressed, and wasn’t even answering him, exactly. Oh, great, now I’m hearing B’s voice. Nice job, shattered psyche, just what I need, the guilt trip hit parade.
No, Rondeau, it’s me, it’s really me.
I’m not falling for that again, disembodied voice.
Can’t you see me? B didn’t know a lot about Rondeau’s true nature, but he knew as much as anyone did, having some personal interest in the subject. Rondeau had always been able to see and hear what was happening around him during his past bodiless intervals.
I can’t see anything, you sexy hallucination, because I’m locked in. I am sealed into this brain, and this brain is no longer receiving any useful input, and you know what else? This brain is rotting around me. When it rots all the way, what happens to me? Do I die? I gotta say, that doesn’t sound bad right now. I don’t know if I’ve been locked in here for an hour or a year, I am going insane.
“Can you reach him?” Marla said.
“Yeah, I hear him, and he hears me, but he thinks I’m a hallucination. He can’t see or hear. He’s really stuck in this body. I guess in the past he’s, like... floated out of the corpse.”
Marla nodded. “Keep trying to convince him you’re real. Tell him I’m going to get him a new body, okay? When the new host is ready, I’m going to shatter the wards holding him in, and there’s going to be exactly one living breathing human host for him to enter, so he can feel free. All right?”
Bradley nodded, and conveyed the message.
We’re back on the hope thing? Rondeau’s inner voice was incredulous. I thought I’d moved past the denial stage, I was just starting to settle into despair. I can’t believe I’m backp
edaling. I’m even bad at dying.
“I worry about him, Marla. This is... I mean, Rondeau’s resilient, but this is some trauma. Whatever you’re planning, it should happen fast.”
Marla nodded briskly. “Okay. I’m going to source him a new host.”
“Are you going to find some coma victim, someone who’s brain dead or something?” B asked.
“That was my first idea, yeah. Then I had a way better one. Pelly, stay here, and keep an eye on things.”
“Where are you going, Majesty?”
“Down to the bottom,” she said.
The Primordial
Marla went to the shores of the great sea and looked upon the waters, which weren’t waters at all, and shimmered silver and green and blue. Shooting stars streaked down from the black skies above, many of them escorted by psychopomps in the form of birds, serpents, women on horseback, and every other thing humans had ever imagined guiding them from light to darkness. The falling stars all landed in the sea, and on impact their escorts peeled away, flying back up into the darkness. Each star was a soul (for want of a better word): a persistent imprint of consciousness, memory, and personality. The stars fell into the sea... and then their afterlives began.
This was the primordial ocean, the wellspring of chaos, the churning source from which all matter in the world had sprung... or at least, that’s what her late husband told her. She had some trouble reconciling that assertion with what she knew of cosmology and the structure and history of the universe, but mythic things didn’t follow conventional logic. The metaphorical could become literal, sometimes, and the actual figurative. Those souls that landed in the sea were surrounded by bubbles of primordial chaos, and lived in their own self-contained worlds, miniature universes with their own rules. Some of those inner worlds were as small as a squalid room or a coffin, and some as vast as galaxies, with the nature of the surrounding dictated by the subconscious fears, desires, and expectations of the dead who dwelt therein. There were hells and heavens and purgatories and all manner of dreamworlds. The primordial sea was the place the gods came from, too. The place where everything came from, maybe.