by Ramy Vance
“For you ask the wrong question,” he said.
GoneGod damn it! So much for good things and all that crap.
“The dead gods will return soon,” the angel continued. “Even now I feel them gathering their strength as they approach. They seek to stop you and deny your claim to your soul. But they do not know how to stop your claim, and they fear killing you here will only strengthen that claim.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do they want my soul so badly?”
“Because human souls power this place. And it is with human souls that they can raise themselves once again. If you don’t regain your soul and end their bid for resurrection, they will return and enslave the world. They only need time—seven days, by human measurement. Then they will be at full strength and unstoppable.”
“Seven days, eh? Plenty of time to slay a god or two.” I laced my words with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
If he caught my sarcasm, he made no indication of it. “You can end them today—this hour, even. Reclaim your soul and slay them one by one.”
“Well, it is my soul,” I said, a bit more childlike than I meant to sound. “And I do want it back.”
“Indeed it is. That is why I asked the EverPresents to do what they must to aid you in your journey here. They, like me, traverse the world of the living and the dead. We are always linked in that way. And even though they are of another … religion, when I told them of your mission they were eager to help.”
“EverPresents?” Why couldn’t Others use simple names? Everything had to be so damn cryptic with these guys. Still, the word “EverPresents” did give me a clue as to what he meant. “Do you mean the yokai that have been following me everywhere? The woman on the plane? The three ghost-kids in the parking garage on Okinawa? Do they have something to do with these symbols—which are Morrigan’s runes, aren’t they? You’ve been using the Red Queen’s magic to bring the Others back to life. Well, half-life.” I pointed at his cross.
Gabriel nodded. “It was the only way for me to help you. You needed to come here and claim your soul before …”—he let the word hang, and then sighed—“before the gods use it to regain themselves,” he said, like that explained everything.
“You mean like coming back from the dead?”
“That is exactly what I mean.”
I wanted to probe more, ask more questions, get more insight into how this whole damn universe was built, but if he was right, we were running out of time and they would be back any second. “OK, then what can I do?”
“Your soul … it is a source of great power, especially here. And because you live, you have a claim to it, but not necessarily control over it. You must make them acknowledge your claim before they gather further strength.”
“Fine,” I said, “I want my soul back, too. I really do. But I can’t see it anywhere. I can’t even sense it. How do I get it back?”
“Izanami carries the Soul Jar around her neck,” he said, and I thought back to how she’d jealously gripped her necklace. Made sense she’d want to keep me away from that. “And the three gods share your soul and one other’s … harnessing its power to control this domain. You have claim over your soul and only your soul. And your claim is greater than theirs. Retrieve your soul and destroy them.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Retrieve your soul. Do it now, before their strength grows greater.”
“OK,” I said, flying backward in a loop—the floater’s equivalent of nervous pacing. “Let me get this straight. You want me to cut out my soul that has been consumed by three separate and very dead gods?”
Gabriel winced as he nodded.
“Not to curse in front of an angel or anything, but the expression, ‘There isn’t a hope in Hell’ comes to mind.”
The archangel curled his lips slightly. “Actually, Hell is built on hope. For torment can only work when there is hope. And there is hope, Katrina Darling.”
“How do you figure?”
“Despite everything that has happened to you, you are here, ready to do what is right. Therein lies the hope.”
I groaned. “You’re going to need more than that.”
“I know,” he said. “That is why I asked the EverPresent to deliver you the spearhead.”
“Spearhead?” I said, thinking back to when I was attacked by the strange yokai who’d stabbed me with a spearhead on the plane. When the blade pierced my being, I’d thought I was done. As in game over, the end, walk into the light, done. But it turned out that both the yokai and the spearhead were ghosts, because as soon as the damn thing went into me, both the spearhead and the yokai had disappeared.
I nodded. “I don’t know if I’d say she ‘delivered’ it. It was more like a stabbing motion. She did call it a ‘gift’, but in my experience gifts tend to be wrapped in boxes, not inserted in bodies. Besides, as soon as she drove it into my gut, both she and the spearhead disappeared.”
“Excellent, then you have the Lance of Longinus with you now?” He looked visibly relieved.
“Sorry, did you say the Lance of Longinus? As in, the spear that pierced the side of Jesus?”
“Yes, it is the only thing that can kill a god and—”
But before Gabriel could finish, the three dead gods appeared before me.
These Gods Ain’t So Tough
The gods had abandoned their I’m-bigger-than-Godzilla intimidation tactics for something smaller. All three were now my size, which is to say, five-foot-nothing and a hundred and one pounds of fun. That in and of itself was a bit odd, because you’d think they’d go for something a little bigger than me. But even Baldr, with his massive beer belly, had shrunk to a my-size level.
“You,” Quetzalcoatl echoed, “dared.” He lifted his hand up and several ravens manifested before him, darting out at me. The carrion scavengers dove at me, using their powerful talons and sharp beaks as slashing and piercing weapons.
If they hadn’t been trying to kill me before, they certainly weren’t following the same tactic now.
The birds ripped through my flesh and it hurt. But the thing about me and pain: I’d been stabbed and shot enough times as a vampire to know what kind of threat I was under. I’d also done enough of my own slashing and piercing to know when a wound was fatal. And as painful as these attacks were, none of the ravens actually did that much damage. Certainly not as much as they should have been doing, given how many they were.
But the strangest part was that with every attack, my wounds healed almost instantly. It seemed in this plane of existence, I was a less-hairy Wolverine.
As fun as it was to watch deep cuts stitch up in a matter of seconds, there were bigger gods to fry. I reached out and plucked one of the ravens out of the ether, ripping it apart before grabbing another. Picking them off one by one was going too slow and just as I was wishing I had a giant net to catch them all with, I felt a large wooden handle manifest in my hands.
I looked at what I was holding and realized that some wishes do come true; I had a giant butterfly net. With a twist of my wrist, I caught the flock with an ease that simply shouldn’t have been possible.
Not that I had much time to revel in my victory, because Baldr, seeing me unimpeded by the ravens, manifested two throwing daggers and chucked them at me. I managed to twirl Gabriel round so that the daggers stuck into the back of the cross.
Using Gabriel as a human—or rather, angelic—shield, I cowered behind his cross as I considered my next move. “This is going way too easily,” I remarked to the pinned archangel.
“They do not have the power to end you in this domain,” Gabriel said, “but that will not always be the case. Should they actually rise, they will be undefeatable. Please, Ms. Darling, end them now. This day. This battle.”
I peered over Gabriel’s cross and saw that the three gods had huddled together. From the panic in their eyes and the way they rapidly spoke to each other, I could tell they were worried.
Frightened, even.
�
�OK,” I said, “how?”
“The spearhead. Conjure it and end them. Then, before they can raise themselves again, carve out your soul from their carcasses and end them once more by severing their heads from their bodies. Once that is done, be sure to draw and quarter them, sending their body parts to opposite ends of this world and any other world you have access to.”
“That was … specific,” I said, blinking twice as I stared at the suffering archangel. “But I already told you: I don’t have the spearhead.”
“You do—it is within you. Draw it forth and—”
But before he could finish advising me on how to summon a god-killing spearhead that was apparently inside me, a shadow somehow loomed over us in a lightless room. I looked up to see a massive paper fan coming down at us.
I knew enough of Izanami’s legend to know this was the fan she had used to vanquish demons before she died. Gabriel and I may not have been demons, but we were still vanquishable.
Izanami brought down the giant paper fan (I wish I was kidding) and swatted us like flies. Since there was no ground to be swatted against, we wound up tumbling down to nothing.
I guessed that meant they were done with the “Will you be my minion?” strategy.
↔
A new flock of birds flew from the void below, but instead of physical representations that pierced and cut, these guys flew through us. Sort of. Because as each one entered our beings and flew out the other side, they seemed to take with them a wee bit of us.
It felt as though I was being carried away, bit by bit.
Gabriel’s words confirmed this when he cried out, “They’re trying to weaken you piece by piece.”
“In other words, they’re doing unto us what you told me to do unto them.” I hit the “untos” hard in hopes the archangel appreciated my biblical vernacular.
But all the archangel did was nod. So much for trying to speak the lingo.
I wasn’t sure how to stop them, and I thought about how this was a lot of trouble for a soul. But it was more than my soul, wasn’t it? This was about me being whole again, and these guys were literally causing the opposite of what I had come here to achieve.
This shouldn’t have been happening. Not here, and not with the kind of power this place granted me. Remembering who I was—the complete, unabridged version of myself—I imagined my body as a magnet, drawing into it all the pieces that were being cut away.
I will never doubt the power of imagination again—not after what happened next. The pieces of me that had been ripped away weren’t just returned to me … they came barreling out of the birds like lead balls being ripped straight from their insides.
The birds died by the hundreds, but because this place had no gravity, they just hung in the sky like dead, hole-filled carcasses.
Quetzalcoatl screamed in pain as his birds died, and from the way he screamed, I guessed they weren’t just constructs, but actual pieces of him.
Seeing the god writhe in pain, I suddenly knew two things.
I was going to win.
And they weren’t.
Who’s Saving Who?
Gabriel must have sensed the same thing, because he cried out, “Finish them here and now. Finish them before they have a chance to manifest themselves and throw the world into darkness. Finish them and reclaim what is rightfully yours!”
“Hell yeah!” I screamed.
The archangel winced.
“Ahh, sorry. I meant, Heaven yeah! Now what did you say I needed again?” I snapped my fingers as if trying to remember something. “Oh yeah, the god-killing spearhead of the Lance of Longinus. Now where could that be hiding?”
“It is within you.”
“I know,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I was being rhetorical.”
Placing a hand over my chest, I imagined where the futakuchi-onna had stabbed me. I imagined the spearhead within me and that all I needed to do was draw it out. And as I formed the imagine of the spear that stabbed Jesus, I felt a warm glow inside me.
Opening my eyes, I looked down and saw the spearhead slowly draw out of me. It was weird-looking: the bronze tip exited my body from a wound that did not bleed and, lifting up my shirt, I saw that my flesh hugging its sharp edges like sand filling the empty space of a hole.
Within seconds, the spearhead was withdrawn. Brandishing it at the dead gods, I mused, “This won’t do, will it?” And I imagined a long wooden shaft on which I could mount it.
And you guessed it: a perfectly whittled, splinter-free shaft grew out of the spearhead right into my grip.
“Ahh,” I said, “now that’s much better.”
↔
What do dead gods and cornered animals have in common? More than you’d think. These dead gods were screwed and they knew it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised by what happened next.
The second the spear manifested in my hands, the three gods threw everything they had at me. I mean everything.
Bolts of lightning and flashes of daggers flew from Baldr’s hands as thousands of flesh-eating birds flocked toward me in a torrent of desperate squawks. Izanami conjured a dozen raijin and shikome—the same monsters she’d used to chase her husband Izanagi-no-Mikoto the day he tried to escape her tomb.
I was being bombarded by every ounce of power these guys had to muster and I swatted aside what they threw at me like a bug zapper in a swarm of mosquitoes. Between the spear and my heightened abilities deflecting everything, I’d never had an easier fight.
And still they continued their onslaught.
“End them now, Katrina,” Gabriel shouted over the chorus of chaos in the void. “End them. Reclaim your soul. Save your world from the end of everything.”
Ignoring the dead angel’s commands, I focused on my soul, willing it to show itself. Sure enough, I saw three warm spots glowing within their chests and I knew Gabriel’s words to be true: they really had divided up my soul, consuming a piece of it each.
Izanami, with her devil raijin, hovered closest. She would be the first to fall, the first to return to me what she had denied me. Pointing the Lance of Longinus at her heart, I charged forward. Another few feet and I would be upon her.
Another few feet and a piece of my soul would be returned.
But before the spear’s tip could pierce her body, I felt something latch onto my back, pull me out of the void and back through the open doorway that led into Kami Subete Hakubutsukan’s halls.
End of Part 1
Part II
Charon
Cometh the Ferryman
NEW YEAR’S EVE—
Most psychopomps can be anywhere in the known universes in an instant.
For most psychopomps, such travel is not conscious, but rather guided by the needs of the souls they must usher from the world of the living to that of the dead. And even stranger still, most psychopomps can be in many places at once, for death is great and the dying are many, and the lost souls’ need for guidance is relentless.
Such is the power of psychopomps, the creatures whose sole purpose is to guide the dead. Certainly this is true of shinigami, epona, yama, xolotl, the Grim Reaper and the many, many other Others who reigned over the in-between places where the living had to traverse toward the Land of the Dead.
Such is the lot of psychopomps, the gods’ death guides. But despite all that power, despite all that ability to traverse domains which even the gods were oft forbidden to enter, despite all the knowledge they possess, Charon still finds himself sitting in Vancouver Airport, waiting to board one of the humans’ flying contraptions toward an island that divides the Pacific Ocean to the east from the China Sea to the west.
↔
“Do you have to go?” asks Larry as he carries Charon’s luggage through the terminal. Not that Charon has “luggage”—his single possession is a lamp that Larry, using his mortal knowledge, carefully enveloped in a substance called bubble wrap and placed inside a sturdy cardboard box.
Besides his lamp, Charon only carries his wal
king stick, which grants him handicapped status in this GoneGod World and thus affords him preferred parking and shorter lines.
“I mean, it’s New Year’s Eve. Can’t this wait until, I don’t know, the New Year?” Larry’s eyes tell the psychopomp that his question is not rhetorical. That, and the AlwaysMortal is willing to wait a long, long time for an answer.
But Charon does not understand the question. He is the guide whose boat carried the souls of Heracles, Aeneas, Hermes, Odysseus, Theseus, Sisyphus, and perhaps most famously, Virgil and Dante. But these are just a few; Charon has ferried countless others. And in each case, he only goes where he must.
Still, this AlwaysMortal was kind enough to usher him to the airport, kind enough to lend him use of his credit card (the mortal’s equivalent of two copper pieces placed over one’s eyes) and now carries his lamp.
“The dead do not care what festival Father Time has ordained the hour to be. This soul needs me now, so it is now that I must go,” he says simply.
“And again: why?”
Charon lifts a confused eyebrow—a gesture he has picked up from his human friend. “A soul needs my guidance.”
Larry considers his next words carefully. “But there is nowhere for the souls to go. I mean, didn’t you tell me that they just kind of float off to …”—the human pauses as the thought catches in his throat—“Well, to nowhere?”
“True for most,” Charon says. “But this particular soul languishes in Oblivion under special circumstances.”
“And by ‘Oblivion,’ you mean the Land of the Dead?”
Charon nods. “Yes—in one of them, at least.”
↔
Larry leaves him at the end of a fast-moving line called Immigration. There, several AlwaysMortals dressed in black question fellow travelers with the same vigor that St. Peter once did those who wished to enter Heaven’s pearly gates.
