Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  Who? “Sure, I made myself forget what it was like to sleep with Joshua, because otherwise no sexual experience I ever had after that would measure up, and I didn’t want to sigh and pine away like victims of lovetalkers usually do when they stop getting supernaturally fucked. That was just good sense. But who the fuck is Daniel?” I’d known a Dan or two, but none that mattered all that much to me. I should’ve started writing down my life a long time ago, apparently.

  “Exactly,” the Bride said. “You don’t remember him, because the pain of his absence was too debilitating, and you chose to take it away. The way I’ve suppressed your memories is another case of you sparing yourself pain. I only remember those things you chose to forget in life because I can’t not remember. My understanding is necessarily more vast and complete than yours, because being a god is all about knowing things that are perhaps best forgotten –”

  “Just tell me!” I said. “Give me back my memories! Why not?”

  “Because if I do,” she said, “Your friend Squat will not be saved. Nicolette will not be saved. The Eater will not be stopped.”

  I stared at her. “But... what... why? You said I could get the power to stop them even without having all my memories back, so...”

  “Because if I let you remember all the things you know as a goddess,” the Bride replied, “then you won’t care about any of the pointless to-ing and fro-ing of these mortals. Shakespeare wrote, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’ Death and I lack the cruelty Shakespeare ascribes to the gods... but I can’t deny that when you can see all the teeming billions of human lives at once, plus all the countless trillions and trillions of other lives on this planet, each one a spark of greater or lesser brightness... they might as well be flies. Or specks of dust in a sunbeam. It becomes impossible to differentiate them. They blur together into a single faintly-glowing mass. Death and I deal with the gestalt, the ebb and flow of life on Earth as a whole, the cycles of the seasons and the ages and the epochs. It’s not that we don’t care about humanity, but we care about humanity as a whole – and much less about the individual parts. We tend vast fields, and when you do that, you simply can’t spend time worrying about each individual blade of grass. From the point of view of the grass, that might make us monsters, and rightly so. But it’s the truth. If I let you have the fullness of your memories, of even that fraction of my awareness available to you with a brain made of electrified meat, you wouldn’t bother with your rescue plan. You’d just open a door and return to the underworld, where the work of the world awaits.”

  She might as well have punched me in the head. I leaned back, trying to work it out, trying to make sense of everything. “But... all this stuff, about ‘doing better,’ the tattoo on my wrist, the mission to kill the killers and hunt the hunters – I thought I was doing that because as a goddess I was more enlightened. Because you thought I needed to learn a lesson about treating people better, about doing good and making up for my crimes...”

  “Death and I were trying to honor your wishes,” the Bride said. “That’s all. The bargain you struck, to remain mortal for half the year – it was so important to you to be a person, to not ascend entirely to godhood. To be half earth and half air, half gold and half clay. But once you became me, you stopped caring about being mortal at all. I – we – told Death to just forget about the bargain, to let me be a goddess forever, but he said that wasn’t fair to the person I used to be – to the person you are. So we agreed the only way to let you be yourself was to remove the part of you that yearned to be something more.”

  “I don’t believe this.” I was apparently going for some kind of gold medal in stubbornness. “How could I stop caring about Rondeau? About Pelham?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that you – that I – don’t care about them, exactly, but... it’s like they’re people you knew in elementary school. Your best friends from first grade, say. Maybe you have a few fond memories, scraps of moments that occasionally flutter through your mind, but you never really think about them, and why should you? It’s unlikely you have anything in common with them anymore. The people they are have nothing to do with the person you are, and you haven’t been close to them in a very long time. It’s not exactly like that, but I think that’s the best way I can explain it. Or... you know how you don’t have many friends who aren’t sorcerers?”

  “I don’t have many friends at all, but... sure. Ordinaries can’t possibly understand my life. The same way cops are mostly friends with other cops, and criminals with other criminals. Sometimes you need to be with someone who understands.”

  “Exactly. And when you’re a god, humans can’t possibly understand.”

  If she’d looked smug then, I might have punched her, even if she was just the manifestation of a repressed part of my psyche, but instead she looked serious, and maybe even a little sad.

  “But it does matter.” I spoke with great ferocity, leaning forward, wanting to jump up out of the chair and shout at her. “Individual people do matter, every one of them is a world unto themselves, center of their own universe, they contain multitudes, they’re not just interchangeable parts –”

  “Beetles can probably tell each other apart, too.” She shrugged. “But to us, they’re all just beetles. I’m not saying your perspective is wrong... just that, from my perspective, it’s simply incomprehensible. Even when Death first meddled in your life, when you first met him, he found you interesting only because you defied him – the way you’d notice the individual insect that bites you, at least long enough to swat it. And that was before he’d ascended into his full power, when he was more human-scale. But even then, you saw the way he took lives indiscriminately – individuals didn’t mean anything to him, not really. You’ve tempered him, taken the cruelty out of him, made him a better man and arguably a better god, but there is still a fundamental disconnect between his kind and yours. Your desire to meddle directly in human affairs is baffling to him, but he loves you, so he respects it because it’s important to you, the way you might tolerate a spouse who tinkered with toy trains or collects stamps, even if the hobby makes no sense to you.”

  “Saving people is a hobby now?”

  “When you put it that way,” the Bride said, “I guess it does sound better than stamp collecting. At least you get to kill stuff. So, what will it be, Marla? Your full memories, as much as you can handle, anyway? Or just enough access to power to get the job done?”

  HELL HATH

  I’ve said it before. I’m sure I’ll say it again. There’s nothing we aren’t meant to know – but there are, maybe, things we’d be happier not knowing.

  “Fuck it,” I told myself. “I’ll be a goddess again in a few weeks anyway. I guess I’ll stick with being a woman for the time being.”

  She put her hands together, palm against palm, then drew them apart, revealing inch-by-inch a wand of pale polished bone, with rings of silver and gold and platinum and copper set along the shaft at irregular intervals. “Here,” she said. “It’s not a magic wand – it won’t do anything for anyone else – but it is an external focus of power, to help you gather and direct your resources. Do you want physical invulnerability?”

  I blinked. “Don’t I already have that?”

  She shook her head. “No, you have immortality and regeneration, but we – you – believed it was important to still be able to feel pain, both because you have this notion that you have crimes to atone for, and because you believed that pain is part of being alive, a necessary part of the human condition, at least for you. So you could still be hurt. But since the Eater has shown a tendency to blitz attack you, perhaps making you a bit more hardy would be a good idea?”

  “I don’t want to be numb,” I said, “but I’d take some temporary indestructibility. Not always, because I think it would become a crutch and get me into bad habits – I already do shit that’s way too foolhardy because I know I can’t die, like strolling right up to the House of
the Eater – but for a few hours... sure.”

  She handed over the wand, and I took it. “We’re done here,” she said. “See you – or, rather, be you – in a few weeks.” The Bride rose, and a door opened beside her, and she stepped through, returning to the depths of my mind.

  I closed my imaginary eyes, and a moment later, opened my real eyes, and I was back in the tent, sunlight filtering in through the mesh, my body stiff as hell because apparently I’d sat cross-legged for an entire night. Dreams seem to last a long time and last only moments in clock-time, but apparently communing with your inner goddess works the opposite way, and minutes become hours.

  The wand was in my left hand, pressed between my palm and my knee, solid as anything. I groaned, guzzled water, stretched out and tried to un-cramp my legs, then crawled into the cot and slept, blessedly without dreams. (At least without any I know about. Maybe I dreamed about Daniel, whoever that is, and just can’t remember it. I’m tempted to investigate that name, but maybe it’s one of those better-off-without-knowing things again.)

  I woke up in mid-afternoon and got moving and brought hell along with me.

  •

  I walked back to Moros, and it was many miles over occasionally rough terrain, but my muscles didn’t so much as twinge. (Indestructability was not as good as, say, the power of flight would have been, but I’ll take what I can get.) I considered experimenting with the wand... but I didn’t feel like I needed to, somehow. I kind of knew what I could do, and I was ready to do it.

  I walked right down the main road toward Moros, with no more subterfuge than I’d used the last time. I saw a figure far up ahead, holding something long and greenish-gray, like a length of pipe, and I couldn’t help but smile. Fuck yeah. Bring it.

  There was a flash of light, a popping sound, and something streaking toward me at high speed. I wasn’t even going to break stride, but it became clear the rocket wasn’t actually going to hit me – somehow it was trivial to calculate trajectories all the sudden – so I moved to one side with as much speed as my invulnerable physical body could sustain, and caught the rocket square in the chest.

  I won’t say I didn’t feel anything. It felt sort of like someone tapping me on the breastbone with a spoon. The explosion didn’t even hurt my clothes, and I wasted a good microsecond wondering if I was wrapped in some kind of forcefield or something, then remembered that Death had given me these threads. They were probably just woven from the shadows of the underworld, or something, and thus indestructible – only the best for his bride.

  I kicked the scrap metal remnants of the rocket aside and kept on walking. Suddenly there were a lot more figures milling in the distance, and the sound of small arms fire, though frankly I didn’t even see any of the bullets, let alone feel them. A woman could get used to this. I could have rushed them – I was capable of quite ridiculous speeds – but I was sort of curious about that they’d do if I just kept coming at my leisurely walk.

  By the time I reached the town there was quite a turnout, maybe the whole population, kids and old people and everything in between, all in massed ranks, forming a sort of human wall across the whole road. They were all armed, though not with bazookas and pistols now – with knives, mostly, that looked like they’d been liberated from kitchens.

  Squat was there, and he stepped out to the front, and cleared his throat. “Marla. You should leave. We don’t want you here. We’re happy here.”

  I walked right up to him, stopping when I was less than a foot away. He started to stink immediately, a smell like rotten eggs and sliced raw onions, and my eyes began to water. “That’s fine. After I kill the Eater, you’re all welcome to stay here.”

  He flinched like I’d threatened his mother. “We... we’ll kill ourselves if you don’t leave.” He raised a knife, and all the others did, too, scores of them, hundreds, holding the blades to their throats.

  Well, shit. I’d foolishly thought that being invulnerable and armed with a wand of death would make this into a cakewalk, but if all these people offed themselves, killing the Eater would be sort of a hollow victory. I was fast, but not fast enough to disarm more than a few of them, and my instinctive knowledge of my powers knew that it didn’t extend to stopping time. Too bad. I always liked seeing that power in video games and movies.

  I tried to keep my tone light, because when threatened with mass suicide, what else are you going to do? “Squat, come on, you can’t even die –”

  He shook his head, not even stubbornly, just dismissively. “The rest of us can, and we’ll start taking ourselves out, right down the line, unless you leave.”

  “Guys, obviously the Eater isn’t infallible, because he didn’t see me coming –” I shut up both because it was obvious I was wasting my voice and because one of the cultists stepped forward and put the knife against her throat.

  It’s not actually all that easy to cut a throat, at least not with a knife you picked up in your kitchen. That whole area is full of tough tendons and muscles, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll probably just make a bloody mess to little effect, besides giving yourself some nasty scars and maybe fucking up your voicebox. But this little old gray-haired lady was sawing away with a will, using a long serrated bread knife, and it was clear she was going to keep on hacking even as blood fountained out and drenched her sweatshirt with the applique jewels. Half a dozen cultists in the front rank lifted their knives, like violinists raising their bows and waiting for their part in the symphony to start.

  I took a step back, but it was too late, because they started hacking away at themselves, too, one of them even shoving the blade in point-first and wiggling it around, a meditative expression on his face. “No!” I shouted, and reached out with the wand in my hand –

  And withdrew death from them. From all of them. The kept stabbing and sawing, but the blood didn’t flow anymore, and their wounds began closing as soon as they opened. Withdrawing death, and letting life flow – I was showing them the kinder side of my true nature. I grinned, and my teeth felt strange, pointed, and my tongue did, too. They began to drop the knives, some of them sobbing, some howling, all baffled and confused, kids let down by their parent – and Squat just stood there, gaping at me, and said, “Your eyes...”

  They couldn’t be hurt, for the moment, any of them, so I gestured with the wand, and the earth beneath them erupted in two diverging waves, sweeping half of them off to the left, half off to the right, and leaving a path of churned soil and shattered asphalt two yards wide stretching out directly in front of me. Parting the human sea.

  I walked – slow and stately as a bride down the aisle – toward the center of town, gesturing here and there as I went. I pointed at his church – it was empty of life, I could sense, not so much as a mouse – and it collapsed in on itself, dropping into a sinkhole of my own invention. I pointed the wand at the stoplight and it exploded, gestured at the closed bank and watched it implode like a giant had squeezed the building in its fist.

  Making the Eater tremble in fear probably wouldn’t occur to my goddess-self, but I was human, and petty, and I wanted revenge. I wanted him to know I was coming.

  When I walked through the park, the grass blackened, and new green shoots rose up in their place, budding into snow-pale flowers. My motorcycle, still parked on the street where I’d left it, roared into life, motor revving as if cheering me on. I considered riding it up the steps and inside the building and right over the Eater, but there’s such a thing as being too theatrical.

  The doors of city hall – the House of the Eater, rather – were closed, locked, and warded by considerable magics. I lifted my foot and kicked the doors off their hinges.

  I couldn’t see through walls, precisely, but I could apprehend the whole of the place, and I knew the Eater in the main room where I’d been chained, at the end of this rather boring hall. There was other life, too. Half a dozen of the crab-squid-octopus guys, like the one I’d killed in the motel, none of them bothering with dis
guises this time. A couple of shapeshifters, growling and beginning to transform into part-wolverines or whatever. A man with his eyes and lips sewn shut, his body surrounded by swarms of biting flies, their aura of life force intermingled with his own. The Eater’s heavy hitters, his unstoppable honor guard, the last resort in case someone with a mind of their own wandered in with a shotgun and mayhem in mind.

  I just waved my wand and they all burned, bright as magnesium, winking out in an instant, leaving only a thin dusting of ash behind.

  I continued down the corridor, dragging the end of my wand along the wall like a kid running a stick along a picket fence, leaving a line of dry rot and charred wood.

  The doors to the main hall flew open when I approached, and the Eater waited inside, dressed in the same brown robes, looking not quite as young as he had after his dramatic transformation, but not quite as ancient and withered as he had when he first lowered his hood.

  “Let them all go, and I’ll let you live out what’s left of your natural span,” I said, surprised at myself for offering mercy.

  “What are you?” he demanded. He held the moon-colored axe in one hand, but his grip was trembling.

  “Yeah, what the fuck are you?” Nicolette called, and I realized she was there, too, her head resting on the throne. “I’ve been telling Emperor Palpatine here all kinds of tricks for killing you, but the magic coming off you is insane right now, I can’t even tell what the hell I’m looking at.”

  “Hell is pretty close,” I said. “What’ll it be, Eater?”

  “His real name is Garcia,” Nicolette said. “He was actually Monseigneur Garcia, for a while, weirdly enough. Interesting guy.”

  “Shut up, Nicolette. I came to save you, you know.”

  “Who needs saving? At least this guy put me down on a nice throne. I’m not even in a cage.”

  “Silence!” the Eater shouted.