Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  She shook her head mutely.

  I looked at the guy, who’d subsided into whimpering. I thought about giving him a thump on the side of the head with a bat, but that whole knock-someone-unconscious thing mostly only works in the movies. In real life, if you hit somebody hard enough to put them under, you run a real risk of fucking up their brains forever. Instead, I picked up the hammer and used the hook to slice through the fabric of the girl’s dress until I had a few long strips of cloth. She didn’t even try to kick me. These people really were shit at improvising.

  “Ready to get on your belly now, Babe Ruth, or do I need to take a crack at your other knee?”

  He obediently rolled over, prone, but had to bite back a scream when the movement jostled his hurt knee. I hog-tied him with the strips of cloth, wrists to ankle behind his back – but because I am trying to Do Better, I only bent back and tied his uninjured leg. I didn’t see him getting too far by pushing himself along with his busted knee, anyway, and why cause the guy unnecessary pain?

  Once they were secured, I picked up the phone and called Pelly back.

  “Sorry about that,” I said when he answered – more promptly this time. “I had to deal with a couple of goons.”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “I have located a place for you to take sanctuary. Can you make it to a main road? I can have someone pick you up.”

  “You’re a prince, Pelly. Sure, I can get to a road.” Luckily I have a good sense of direction, and figured I could get back to the endless enchanted loop that circled Moros. We discussed the details and timing.

  “I hate to see you cut off from communication, Mrs. Mason, but you should probably dispose of the phone you’re using. Such things can be tracked.”

  I swore. I was used to having phones enchanted to be untraceable. “Crap, right.” I said my farewells, then removed sim card and crunched it under my foot, took out the battery, and flung the pieces of the phone in opposite directions. I picked up the shotgun, leaving the baseball bat, then paused. “Do you guys even know what the Eater did to you?”

  “The Master saved my life,” the man said hoarsely. “I was a drug addict, a gambler, and he set me on the true path.”

  “I ran away from home, and I was living on the street, when he set me on the path,” the girl said. “He shows us the way.”

  “Yeah, he’s a humanitarian all right. The same way a vegetarian is a guy who eats vegetables.” There was no point in talking to these people. They could only do one thing: serve the Eater. Every other option had been flayed away from them.

  I hiked out, keeping a sharp ear and eye out for other patrols, but I didn’t encounter anyone. Since I was so unpredictable, the Eater probably had his people searching the whole town and the surrounding areas, which would spread his flock a little thin. Eventually I emerged by the side of the road and crouched in the undergrowth, waiting for the car Pelham had told me to expect.

  Eventually it came put-putting up, a modified dune buggy painted in blue-and-red tiger stripes, carrying a reek of used french fry oil from its badly-modified biodiesel engine. The guy behind the wheel looked like he’d gone to Burning Man one year and never come entirely back: shirtless and deeply tanned, ropy with muscle, a dozen necklaces of beads and chunky turquoise and carved wood around his neck, face scraggled with beard, hair an explosion of matted braids and dreadlocks woven with bows and ribbons in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of how Nicolette used to wear her hair, thick with charms.

  “Hey, lady,” he said. “You wanted a ride?” His voice was a gulf state drawl, but unquestionably welcoming, so I emerged from the bushes.

  “You’re Riegel?” I said.

  “Your man Pelham sent me. Come on, I don’t like getting this close to the Master’s town.”

  I climbed into the passenger seat, an uncomfortable mass of busted springs and duct-taped vinyl, and he roared away before I could even start fumbling for my seatbelt. It was hard to converse with the wind ripping around my head, but I gave it a try: “You’re a sorcerer?”

  “Psychic.” He tapped his temple. “Ever since I ate the wrong psychedelic mushroom when I was in college. Apparently it was some crazy rare kind of ‘shroom, grew in mystical soil or the shit of a god or from a spore from another dimension or something, who knows – whatever it was, it permanently blew off my doors of perception. So I do work for people every now and then, you know – listen to see if people are telling the truth, stuff like that. I did some work for a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows one of your guys, and here I am. Thanks for the big payday, by the way. Driving around is a lot easier than rooting around in some guy’s head to find out whether or not he stole something, you know?”

  “Whatever we paid you, you earned it,” I said. “So you know about that town back there?”

  “I know about all kinds of stuff I’m not supposed to. I can tell there are illusions wrapped around the place, and I can see through them, but I don’t go poking around in places like that. I’ve heard the thoughts of some of the, I don’t know – disciples? Students?”

  “Cultists,” I said.

  “Right. Their thoughts are all full of worship for the Master, or the Opener, or the Pathfinder, all kinds of names, but I get that it’s the same guy, some heavy magic dude.” He shook his head. “Their minds have a really creepy feel.”

  “You reading my mind right now?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Sure, man, of course. But you’ve got some kind of good shield going. Your thoughts are all about super boring shit – getting your nails done, picking up dry cleaning, going grocery shopping. Which I’m pretty sure you’re not actually thinking about, but any psychic dipping into your stream of thought just for a second under normal circumstances would believe it, and go looking for something more interesting. How’d you do that, anyway? Usually people who are psychically shielded, it’s just like you hit a wall, or maybe hear a snatch of nursery rhyme over and over and over – I’ve never seen a mind that was, like, camouflaged this way.”

  “I’m a woman of many talents.” In truth I had no idea how I did it. Probably more goddess shit.

  Me and myself really needed to have that talk.

  “Your guy Pelham said you needed a safe place to hole up for a while, so you could do some kind of ritual?”

  “Yeah. I might only need a few hours, but it’s probably best to assume I’ll need all night.”

  “I’ve got a place,” he said, and abruptly turned off-road, the dune buggy bumping down a gentle slope, following a twisting track I could barely perceive that allowed passage through the trees. Either he’d done this before, or he had a bit of basic precognitive ability that allowed him to see far enough ahead to avoid crashing into things.

  We proceeded that way for a while, then stopped by a stand of trees, near a trickling creek. “Here you go,” he said.

  I squinted. “Is that a tent?” There was a sort of pavilion or something in camo colors, browns and greens, draped among the trees.

  “Yup. Camouflaged. But the outer tent is made of enchanted metal mesh, so the whole thing is a Faraday cage, it’ll shield you from various kinds of detection. And there’s a circle of warding around that, to add an extra level of protection from divination. If somebody wanders into the place in person, they’ll find you, but otherwise you should be all right. And if somebody does show up, you’ve got a shotgun.”

  “What do you use this place for?” I said.

  “Sometimes things just get too noisy.” He tapped his temple again. “Up in here, I mean. So a sorcerer I did work for made this place for me, a quiet room. I go in there, and I don’t hear any thoughts but my own, and shit, is that a relief. There are some snacks and water and stuff inside if you need them, and there’s a composting toilet back there – outside the Faraday cage, but inside the warding circle, so it’s still pretty safe. You can find your own way out when you’re done?”

  I climbed out of the dune buggy. “I can. Thanks, Riegel.”

&nbs
p; “No problem.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, then back at me. “So, this master-opener-pathfinder guy... you’ve got some kind of beef with him?”

  “He’s got a couple of my friends brainwashed.” That was close enough to the truth. “I want to get them out.”

  He nodded. “In that case, I might head over to Arizona for a few days. I don’t know much about this guy, but I get the sense he’s not somebody to mess with.”

  “True. But it turns out, neither am I. It couldn’t hurt to stay out of the neighborhood for a little while, though, Riegel – you’re right about that. And maybe don’t drive back past the hidden town. They have people out looking for me, and they might snag anyone they see passing by, for questioning and who knows what else.”

  He winced. “Gotcha. Good luck.” He got back in the buggy and drove off, and after the roar of his engine diminished, I was left alone, in silence. With no thoughts but my own, like he’d said.

  Except not exactly just my own thoughts. Someone else’s thoughts were in there, too, buried deep, and it was time I heard what she had to say.

  A MEETING OF MINDS

  The tent was big enough to stand up in, and had more of a dorm room feel than a camping one. A ratty patterned rug covered the ground tarp, and paper snowflakes dangled from the support poles at just the right height to hit me in the face. There was a sizable bong, a cooler full of bottled fruit-infused tea, and stacked milked crates jammed with unlabeled jerky, bags of homemade trail mix, and potato-chip-analogues made of flax seed and kale and other virtuous foods. The seating options were a cot and a beanbag chair, so I sat down on the latter. Night was falling, and my gut was grumbling, so I ate granola and drank a little water, just enough to make my body stop complaining, then turned on the battery-powered lantern on top of the milk crates. I considered hitting the bong – that little wooden box beside it almost certainly held some weed – but decided to save chemical aids for a last resort. Maybe I could get where I needed to go purely on my own.

  I am not what you’d call a recreational meditator. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, thinking about nothing or red triangles or whatever, isn’t really my idea of a good time. I am a do-er, a think-er, maybe an over-doer and over-thinker, even. But I do a fair bit of enchanting, and when you do enchanting you spend a lot of time sitting alone and concentrating very hard, so hard that time disappears and you cease to feel any connection to anything but the work, in that state some people call “flow,” so I certainly had some idea of what to do.

  I slid off the beanbag, sat down cross-legged on the rug, rested my hands palm-down on my knees, and closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, then let it out, then another breath, imagining the flow of air as a wheel turning inside me, through me, letting the world become my breath –

  The Bride of Death was clearly just waiting for an opening, because she more than met me halfway. I imagined her as a leviathan lurking in the deep waters of my subconscious, and now she was rising up to the surface as I was sinking into the depths. The darkness behind my eyes became the darkness of a cavern, then the darkness of space, with twinkling distant lights, and then the dark fell away and I was sitting on a smooth black stone that just happened to be shaped like a chair, under that sky. Water chuckled nearby, a dark river running down to a sunless sea, and trees the color and approximate shape of skeletal fingers stood all around me. The air smelled of night-blooming jasmine and wet clay, and now and again the skies above were occluded as diaphanous but vast things flew across the sky with a swiftness that could scarcely be believed.

  A door creaked, and I looked toward the sound in time to see the Bride emerge from a freestanding door that closed and promptly vanished. She looked at me for a moment, and hers was the face I’d seen in the mirror: skin whitish-blue like sea ice, eyes black, delicate pointed teeth in her smile. She wore a simple white robe made of some incredibly fine silk, and her hair was pulled back in a bun. (My hair, in my mortal form, is kept fairly short, so people can’t grab it in a fight, but apparently in the underworld I had different fashion priorities.) A circlet of pale flowers rested on her brow, like she was some sort of Goth May Queen.

  The Bride sat on a stone across from mine – I couldn’t help noticing her rock chair was a little bigger, a little more chair-shaped, a little more like a high-backed throne. She crossed her legs, revealing bare feet, the toenails painted a black that was somehow also luminous.

  “Hello, me,” she said.

  “Hello, you,” I replied. “What’s with the Kali face?”

  She shrugged. “Goes with the job. Death isn’t just death, you know – it’s more than that. The entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth, rot and fertility, wildfire and new growth. The flowers die, the flowers come back, time and tide and seasons progress through their paths. I’m not a free agent, not like you – I am part of the machinery of time.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the cannibal teeth and the black tongue. Been eating too much licorice?”

  She leaned forward, showing her teeth, licking her lips with that pointed tongue. “Death and I... share responsibilities, according to our own individual strengths. He handles most of the fertility-god stuff, while I represent death in its more destructive aspect, mostly. Come on. I didn’t even wear a necklace of skulls. I’m practically being demure here.”

  “This is weird. I have seen some weird shit, but none weirder than this.” I shifted on my stone chair. “How can you be me? No offense, but you seem like a totally different person.”

  “I am you, or rather, who you are informs who I am.... think of goddesshood as a vessel. A bottle. Your... spirit, for want of a better word... fills that vessel – but the vessel imposes a particular shape on the contents. I am you, and I am more than you. I am you when you become a goddess. Imagine an ant’s consciousness suddenly given the resources of a human brain. Or a human suddenly developing the range of color vision available to a butterfly or a manta shrimp. Everything would look so different, and it would change the way you perceive the world, and, thus, the way you react to the world.”

  “So I’m an ant now. Thanks.”

  She shrugged but didn’t bother to apologize, or even look abashed. So maybe she was me.

  “I was worried it was a trick, this loss of memory, that Death was fucking with me – I mean, we’re married, we had a honeymoon, but it’s not like I know the guy all that well. I can’t know him all that well.”

  The Bride shook her head. Then she looked annoyed. “I wish you’d stop thinking of me as ‘the bride,’ it’s not like you to define yourself based on your relationship with a man – or a man-shaped fundamental force of nature, for that matter.”

  “Sorry, that’s what the cultists call me, except it’s really what they’re calling you. It got stuck in my head.”

  “I guess it’ll do for now. But, no, no trick by Death, and no brain damage from going into the underworld and back again – or rather, if there is brain damage, it gets repaired, so I haven’t bothered to worry about it.”

  “I’ve been writing things down, in case I forgot them later. Guess I don’t need to do that, huh?”

  “No. You can stop writing.”

  (Obviously I haven’t stopped writing. I don’t know why. I got into the habit, is all, and found out I liked it. And even without my memory being magically erased, I can still forget things, just like anybody does, so maybe it’s good to write them down. Notes for my future memoirs. Won’t that be a bestseller.)

  “Great. I did it to myself. Mea culpa. But the thing is – I think I need access to that stuff I forgot, now. The occasional handwave inferno or mass grave by accident isn’t enough. I need to be able to do stuff if I’m going to stop the Eater.”

  “I understand. I can open things up, just a little. I can give you access to the few powers you’re capable of wielding without destroying your physical body, or shattering your mind. In truth you’ve always had access, you just didn’t remember, which is why some of your capabilities hav
e slipped out at unexpected moments. I think I can open the vault of memories just a crack, to let you access what you need –”

  “Wait,” I said. “Why just a crack? Why not give me my memories back? I still haven’t gotten a satisfying answer about why. Because there are things woman is not meant to know? Really? Will my brain actually melt from the unbearable hotness of true knowledge? Tell me it’s a matter of preserving my life, because otherwise, I don’t see the fucking point of locking up large swaths of my own mind from me.”

  She sighed. “No. Your brain wouldn’t melt. Some things you wouldn’t be able to comprehend, or hold in your head, but the knowledge wouldn’t disable you – you just wouldn’t notice them, the same way you can’t directly detect magnetic fields or perceive ultraviolet light. But there are good reasons to hide the knowledge from you. I can’t lie to myself, so all I can do is ask you – not to ask.”

  “Fuck you.” I knew how ridiculous I was being, telling myself to fuck myself, but I was annoyed, and I said so. “I am the keeper of secrets, the holder of mysteries, so spill. Give me my fucking memories back.”

  “Are you sure you want that, Marla? We can deal with what needs to be dealt with, give you the capability to get revenge on the Eater and free the people of Moros and save Squat and Nicolette, without going into... all this.”

  “I always want to know everything,” I said. “You know that.”

  “I do, but... This isn’t someone else keeping a secret from you. This is you keeping a secret from you.” I noticed she wasn’t fidgeting or shifting on her chair at all. Apart from her lips moving, she might have been a statue – and I knew my cultists would fall down to worship such an idol. “And hiding things from yourself... well, it’s hardly unprecedented. You have a history of choosing to forget things because they’re too painful, or distracting, or because they do you no good, you know – you drank Lethe water and forget-me-lots potions to erase the memory of sex with the lovetalker Joshua Kindler, and the pain of losing Daniel –”