by Bryan Camp
At least she wouldn’t have to use the ghost word to get in.
Cur stood next to her, one hand on his sword’s hilt and his shield already clutched in the other. A row of fur along his head and the back of his neck was standing on end, and he practically vibrated with tension. She wasn’t sure how much of her conversation with Hermes he’d heard, didn’t know how much he knew about what they were facing. But then, the atmosphere made it pretty obvious. Renai reached out to put her hand on his shoulder, and then thought better of it. “You okay?” she asked. “This isn’t your fight. I’ll understand if you don’t want to stay.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I said I’d help and I will. I keep my word.”
She couldn’t tell if Cur meant that to reassure her, or if it was a subtle dig at something she’d done. Probably the first one, she thought, my dude doesn’t seem to do subtle. “Okay, then,” she said, “let’s see who’s home.”
The corridors of Tartarus were a labyrinth. Worse than the strange, eternal hallway she’d walked through to get to the Far Lands, this place was a monotony of stone and flickering lights and right angles. She and Cur had walked for what felt like hours; only the biting chill in the air kept her from sweating through her stupid lace dress, only Cur’s constant assurance that they weren’t going in circles kept her moving forward.
They hadn’t found a single door, not one cell, just endless branch after branch of identical, impossible hallways. At every fork in their path, she’d asked Cur if he smelled anything. The first two times he’d said he didn’t, but she’d known it wasn’t entirely true. The third time he said the only thing he could smell in this place was filth and death.
She’d stopped asking after that.
After so many split corridors that Renai had lost count, always turning in the same direction, like she’d heard you were supposed to do in a labyrinth, Cur stopped and looked down the other path. “What is it?” she asked.
“In that direction. Something”—he paused, as if unsure he should say what he was thinking—“something familiar.” He looked back at her, muzzle hanging half-open. “Show me what you’re carrying,” he said. His voice had taken on that commanding, abrupt tone.
She reached into her pockets—startled at how unwound and unraveled the binding threads on her wrists had gotten—and took out all that was left to her in this or any other world, a single coin that held a human being’s Fortune from cradle to grave and what had once been a seeing stone, cracked right in half. “No,” he said, pointing to the zippered-closed cell phone pocket that she’d just about forgotten. “What’s in there?”
She started to say that it was empty, but even as her mouth formed the words, she realized she was wrong. She unzipped the pocket and took out the little slip of paper that Seth had given her in Pal’s way back when all this started, a tiny scroll with Ramses’ name written on it. Just like the one Cur had used to track her scent in that white nowhere space at the edge of the Far Lands. Cur sniffed at it, turned back down the corridor and sniffed again, and then, without looking back, said, “Follow me.”
She followed.
Cur’s stride quickened, and then after a few turns, it turned into a jog. By the time they reached the dead end and the cell door, they were practically running. It only took a moment for Renai to catch her breath, grateful for all those nights she’d spent running mile after mile to burn off the excess Voice pounding away inside her. She still brimmed with power from the centuries of Elderflower’s Voice she’d consumed, but she wanted to conserve her energy, knowing she was close to finding Ramses, to putting an end to all of this. Knowing she’d need every scrap of power and will at her disposal to make sure it wasn’t her end, as well.
The cell door, an iron gate made entirely of bars, made up most of the wall, and showed only the shadows that hid the depths of the room. The scent of Ramses’ name had led Cur here when before they’d found nothing else but bare walls, but something about this still felt off. Why would Ramses be locked in a cell? Had Cordelia betrayed him, too? Forced him to trade places with Mourning? Had they come this far, just to find out that they’d already lost?
Footsteps shuffled in the darkness, a shape moving among the shadows. And then a pair of hands passed through the bars, forearms leaning against them with years, decades, centuries of familiarity. Hands marked with the simple, sketched designs of prison ink, hands stained the rich dark red of deep soil. Hands that Renai recognized.
It wasn’t Ramses’ scent on the paper that Cur had followed. It was Seth’s.
Renai only had a few heartbeats of confused, frustrated panic, and then the red-handed god pressed his ugly face against the bars and gave her a gap-toothed grin. “Guess you come to collect your favor, then?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t look like you’re in much of a position to help anybody.”
He glanced down at the bars of his cage and chuckled. “No, I suppose not,” he said. “But appearances can be deceiving.”
“Like you appearing to be locked up? Because last I saw, you were free as a bird and playing cards with a bunch of other shady-ass tricks. Where they at, the next cell over?”
Seth shook his head. “I don’t know what game you’re talking about.” He waved that away as if it didn’t matter. “But you did help the boy, didn’t you? That’s why you’re here? To tell me it’s done, at last?” Seth’s demeanor was so trusting, so eager for information that Renai felt off balance. It just didn’t make sense. He’d been helping Ramses, which meant he’d been helping Cordelia. Why, then, didn’t he seem to see her as an adversary? If Cordelia had needed the caduceus or the cursed gun to release Mourning from Tartarus, how had Seth escaped? Why was he back here?
Seth was waiting for an answer, and all she could do was tell the truth and shame the devil. “Actually,” she said, “I came here to find him. To stop whatever he and Cordelia are planning and take his life if I have to.”
A complex series of emotions shifted across Seth’s ugly features, confusion and disappointment and weariness and desperation all at once. “Stop him?” he asked, his voice nearly a whisper. “Why would you stop him?”
“He’s got Hermes’ caduceus and a gun that can kill a god. Whatever they’re planning can’t be good.” Cur—standing with his back to them and staring back the way they’d come—growled when she said that, a low, dangerous rumble deep in his chest. Obviously some of that had been new information for him.
“But—” He stopped, his eyes narrowing. “Why would you think he’s here? What do you think they’re going to do?”
“They’re going to release Mourning.” Seth dropped his head to the bars with a thump that had to be painful, and let out a low moan. “What? What did I miss?”
He looked up at her with his goat-slitted eyes full of pity. “That’s not what’s happening at all, Renaissance. Cordelia is Mourning.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Mourning, Seth told her, was just a name for a fundamental aspect of reality: conflict, strife, discord. When Jude had sent the part of discord that had been Loki, Raven, and Lucifer to this place, he’d inadvertently released the part that had been Eris, Inanna, and Lilith. Cordelia was Mourning’s Shadow, his Petwo half, like Cross was the other half of Legba. The difference between Cross and Legba was that Cordelia and Mourning worked together, complemented each other even as they balanced each other.
Strife loved nothing so much as more strife.
When Cordelia had found Seth in his cell, she’d told him what she’d been planning down through the centuries that she’d been here. She’d heard rumors of a weapon with the power to kill a god, and she wanted to use it to do what Seth had been unable to do in all his time.
“Which was what?” Renai had asked.
“Kill Apep. The embodiment of evil destruction.”
Seth, unlike most of the other gods, had never hidden his identity behind a false name. Set, pronounced Seth, was the Egyptian god of the chaos of the deep desert. H
is job was to protect the barge of the sun as it passed through the Underworld each night from the giant malevolent serpent Apep, who wanted to devour it. Without the sun, all life would end. Seth admitted that he’d been wild and destructive as a deity, a god of change and endings, but never, he swore, evil.
“Well,” he said, staring down at his hands, “maybe once. I killed my brother. Scattered his pieces across the whole of Egypt.” His grin, when it came, was feral and brief, and changed the tone of his voice. “Tossed his dick to some fish in the Nile.” He shrugged, grew somber again. “Maybe that was evil. But maybe it’s evil to fuck your brother’s wife. Maybe we were both wrong, in the end.” He shook his head, his weird, elongated ears dangling back and forth. “But that’s all water through the reeds. The point is, I know I’ve done wrong in my life, but the world is different than it used to be. Now you’re either orderly and rule-abiding, and thus good, a saint, like your boy there”—he nodded at Cur—“or you’re a deviant, a problem, and you’re evil. And they stick you here.”
Which was why Cordelia wanted to kill Apep. She’d convinced Seth that the reason the world thought they were evil is because when they saw chaos, they saw only the kind of destruction that was the end of the world. Not the kind of destruction that swept away stagnant rules or oppressive regimes. And so he’d agreed to help her. Cordelia had let him out of his cage, and he’d delivered his message to Renai, to ensure that Ramses—or more specifically, the djinn, the creature of holy fire Seth believed was inside of Ramses—would be free to end the cycle of Apep’s evil once and for all.
“But you’re wrong,” Renai said, “you’re so, so wrong.”
“About what?”
“Cordelia. Ramses. All of it. But that damned gun, most of all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t work the way you think it does. It isn’t powerful. It doesn’t kill gods with bullets. It’s cursed, so it can never be used. It pulls the sin of anyone who touches it into itself, draining them of the desire to use the weapon at all. When it’s touched by a god or a spirit who has perverted their whole reason for being, who has become nothing but evil intent, like a fallen angel, it ‘kills’ them by drawing their evil into it. I’ve seen it happen.” Even there, standing outside a prison cell that held a chaos god in literal Hell, Renai shuddered at the thought of that night, of being held in a fallen angel’s clutches and praying to any god who would listen that Jude Dubuisson’s plan would work. “Whatever Cordelia plans to do with that gun, it can’t be what she told you. You can’t fight evil with more evil.”
She was trying to recall the MLK quote about a night devoid of stars when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of thunder, by a hissing noise that she first thought was rain, but when she realized it was coming from Seth, recognized as the whisper of desert dunes rushing away from an oncoming simoom. Seth stood in the center of his cell, wreathed by lightning and fury, his hands clenched into fists. Her own storm shrank away from the chaos god’s tempest. Seth’s storm was a chaotic beast, a maelstrom so many orders of magnitude more powerful than the spirit living inside of Renai that it was hard to believe that they served the same purpose, the difference between a hand grenade and an atom bomb.
And she’d gone and pissed him off.
Just when she thought he had built to a crescendo, bracing herself for the explosion that would follow, Seth swallowed it—all of it—with a breath. He opened his goat-slitted eyes, and Renai saw only pain and sorrow and rage reflected back at her. One prison-inked fist reached through the bars of his cell. When he opened it, a single glittering grain of sand rested on his calloused, red-stained palm. “I can’t escape this cage on my own,” he said. “It was built to hold me. But I can give you my power. My strength. You’ll need it to strike down Cordelia.”
Renai reached for it, instinctively, hungrily, but when she grasped it, it hurt. A line of fire raced across her body, the bindings stretching harder now than ever. Only half of her wanted this power, she realized. The killing half. If she took it, if she accepted that role, then that’s all she’d ever be. The kind of bringer of destruction that took lives, that tore down. The other part of her, the Underworld half that retained compassion, that destroyed only to change, that broke down only that which couldn’t be repaired, that part of her would die.
But maybe that was a sacrifice she needed to make. Maybe compassion was holding her back, making her weak. If she added Seth’s power to her own, she wouldn’t be a fractured, pitiful excuse of a psychopomp anymore; she’d be a god.
The moment seemed to stretch out, and though she knew her thoughts were racing, she felt perfectly calm. She thought about Jude and what he’d said godhood was like, and Elderflower, and the things he’d sacrificed for immortality. She tried to imagine what Celeste would tell her in this moment, or Sal, or her mother, or her grandmother. She remembered what it was like to be half of herself, to be a task and not a person. She saw the smile of every god she’d ever met and couldn’t be sure a single one of them had actually been happy.
She pulled her hand back, and the pain eased, though it didn’t retreat completely. She ached all over and knew that the decision to turn away from Seth’s offer had cost her almost as much as embracing it would have. “No,” she said. “What I need from you isn’t power, it’s knowledge. Information.”
Seth nodded, sad but not terribly surprised. When he closed his fist over the grain of sand, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d made the right choice. “Apep sleeps at the foot of the eternal tree,” he said, since there was only one question left for her to ask. “In the Garden of Eden.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Cur led her out through the corridors of Tartarus, some magic of the place keeping him from simply cutting a hole to Eden from within its walls. He hadn’t said a word since she’d spoken to Seth, and she couldn’t tell if it was focus or anger or if he was just the strong, silent type. After a while, though, she couldn’t take the uncomfortable silence any longer, and if he was going to betray her, she’d rather he did it now than when she was face-to-face with Cordelia.
“Why are you really helping me?” she asked. “And don’t say it’s because Cordelia was mean to you. I can smell a lie.”
His wide doggie grin was a comfort, and not just because it looked just like Sal’s. He hesitated for a moment before answering, not like he was searching for the words, but more like he was embarrassed by the truth. Finally, without breaking his stride, he reached up and tapped his chest, the hollow at the base of his throat. “You’ve been asking for my help your whole life, ma’am. I’m just finally in the right place to do you some good.”
Renai reached up to her own throat, right where he’d indicated, and found the medal her mother had given her, the one her Aunt Celeste had blessed. The medallion that depicted St. Christopher, the patron of travelers, ferrymen, and storms. She smiled, and a comforting warmth filled her that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She felt protected. Righteous, in the sense that she was following the path that she was meant to be on, that she was fulfilling her purpose. She’d been resurrected five years ago, but this was the first time since her murder that she’d really felt alive.
She’d guided hundreds of souls to their just reward, but this was the first time in what felt like forever that she didn’t feel lost.
By the time Renai and Cur made it out of the gates of Tartarus, it was well after midnight, according to her cheap cartoon watch. Even though they were two worlds away from where the thing might have any relevance, by one way of reckoning things, by another, she hadn’t ever left New Orleans. Given the way her bindings ached and stung whenever she moved, though, she had a feeling the watch was right: It was the Feast of All Souls. The last day of the Hallows.
And her last chance to set things right.
Chapter Thirty-five
The world is a tree. It might be an ash, an oak, a fig, an iroko, a ceiba, or a fantastic many-hued tree that no morta
l eyes have seen. Yggdrasil and Ashvattha, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Dawn and the Tree of Humanity.
Vast and eternal, sheltering and nourishing, vulnerable and unmoving and unknowable. Whether we poison its air or nourish its roots, we and our children and our children’s children must share it, because in the great wide universe, only this one is ours.
The world is a tree.
Cur cut a hole in the world, and Renai stepped through into pristine, idyllic daylight, surprised at their destination. When Seth had told her that Apep slept beneath an eternal tree in a garden, her first thought had been the famous ancient oak in Audubon Park that locals called the Tree of Life. Instead, Cur had brought her to the traffic circle on Wisner Boulevard, facing the long paved road that led to the New Orleans Museum of Art.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” she asked.
She had no idea how a dog’s face managed to look indignant, but the expression on Cur’s face was exactly that. He gestured with his muzzle to look behind her. She turned, expecting to see the racist-ass statue of racist-ass Beauregard on his—in all likelihood—racist-ass horse, but instead, there was an empty stone plinth. She started to ask what she was supposed to be seeing, when she realized that she heard snoring.
On the far side of the pedestal, she found an angel sprawled out on her back in the grass, sleeping the enchanted slumber of the caduceus, a sword with a burning blade lying on the strip of sidewalk next to her outstretched hand.
Guess we’re in the right place after all, she thought.
Beside her, Cur said, “After he had expelled the man, the Lord God placed winged angels at the eastern end of the Garden of Eden, along with a fiery whirling sword, to prevent access to the Tree of Life.” He pointed toward the road that led into City Park; the columns standing on either side seemed grander than Renai remembered, more like barriers than markers. Like a massive gate that now stood open. “Eden,” he said, and then, aiming his finger somewhere deep within the acres and acres of City Park, added, “The Tree of Life.”
