by T. A. Pratt
“Cole, all I want—”
“Promise.” His eyes were suddenly fiery. “You are a human. You should not have the power of a god. You are not bound by the rules they are bound by, and to have such power without such rules would be disastrous.”
Marla swallowed. “Okay. Whatever you say. I don’t want to rule Hell, Cole. I just want Felport back.”
“Then I wish you well,” Cole said. “Be careful in the underworld, Marla. I’ve heard stories. The dead…they can be dangerous to the living. They may not be rational, reasonable. Some may even be mad.”
“You’re telling me that dying makes you go bat-shit crazy?”
“Dead people aren’t insane,” Cole said. “Ghosts are, often, because they are lost, confused fragments stuck in the wrong place. But the dead, when they’re in the underworld, are no madder than you or I. However, when faced with a living person, the dead can become insane, as the touch of water can send a hydrophobe into a rage. Others may become delusional, lost in time and space, forgetful of whether they’re alive or dead. And that confusion can be contagious. Be on your guard. The dead may not be able to kill you—I’ve heard conflicting reports—but they can confuse you, enchant you, wrap you in illusions that prey on your insecurity and guilt, leave you lost and wandering.” Cole yawned enormously. “Forgive me. I think I need a nap.” He leaned his head back, and just like that, he was asleep.
“That was more informative than I’d expected.” Marla went to sit with B and Pelham on the deck, leaving Cole to his sleep, not that their conversation was likely to disturb him. “That old guy just settled what are, as far as I can tell, millennia-old questions about the nature of death gods and the afterlife. I mean, assuming he’s right.”
B rolled his eyes. “Cole is always right. It’s annoying.”
“I’m always right, too.” Marla took the cup that Pelham patiently proffered. “Do you find me annoying?”
B said, “I keep asking how old he is, and he won’t tell me. I made a joke that I thought he was actually Merlin, and he said Merlin wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. And now he can’t even stay awake.”
“He’s had a long life. It’s no surprise he’s tired,” Pelham said, and Marla looked at him quizzically. Pelham came out with the funniest things sometimes, things that hinted at depths Marla couldn’t imagine. Literally couldn’t imagine—how much wisdom or experience or insight could Pelly have possibly developed as a ward of the Chamberlain’s estate?
They looked out at the city. Marla was unwinding, almost against her will, as she sipped from her cup. Twenty-three hours before she could make her rush for the underworld. She’d have to spend the time preparing herself…somehow. Cole probably had quite a magical library. Maybe she’d study up. Cole had talked about how Death’s dagger had formidable powers in the right hands, and she was curious about that, but she doubted he would wake up anytime soon. Maybe his journals would have the answer, if they weren’t enciphered.
“So,” B said after a while, “did you two decide my fate?”
“Oh,” Marla said. “Sure. You can come back with me, assuming we return from the underworld in one piece.”
“Marla, that’s amazing,” B said. “I can’t thank you enough. I’ll miss the West Coast, but it’ll be good to spend time with you and Rondeau.”
“I’m going to bust your ass, Bowman. And not in a good way. It’s going to be hard work, being my apprentice. Lots of on-the-job training, if you know what I mean. Starting tomorrow. You’ve been to the underworld before, so I’ll need your help.”
“About that,” B said.
“You’ve been to the afterlife?” Pelham said, awed. “Truly?”
B squirmed a little, and even in the darkness he looked uncomfortable. “Before I really knew about magic, I had these dreams, and sometimes spirits talked to me, or monsters. Once I realized I wasn’t going crazy—or at least that the source of my craziness was external, not internal—I started trying to help the people I dreamed about. One guy wanted me to help him find the underworld, so he could bring back his girlfriend, who’d died from a bee sting.”
“Did it work?” Pelham asked.
B shook his head. “I don’t know. I never saw him again.”
“What was it like down there?” Marla said. “You never told me.”
“For me, there were monitor lizards, and trees made of stone, and a cavern so big it had its own night sky, and a woman who had a beehive in her chest. So, basically, it was like one of my prophetic dreams. I think Cole’s probably right—it’s an individual experience.”
“We’ll see how it looks tomorrow night, then,” she said.
“Marla, I can’t go,” B said. “The driver of the train was very specific about that. It’s a one-time trip—at least, while you’re alive. Next time I take that train, I won’t be breathing.”
Marla frowned. “I could use your help, B. You have a way of communing with the spirits that could be very helpful in a place that’s full of them. How about you just get on the train with us, and see what happens?”
“I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t.”
“Why, because of the rules? Screw the rules. Rules are for other people.”
B shook his head, clearly uncomfortable with disagreeing with her, which was a reaction Marla supported. “It’s not a rule like ‘don’t step on the grass,’ it’s a rule like ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction.’ A rule of nature.”
“Magic is all about breaking the rules of nature. Bending them anyway.”
“Marla, the train isn’t really a train,” B said, exasperated. “It’s an event, a trauma, a transposition. It’s a magic so big and delicate that it turns your brain inside out and shows you images drawn from your dreams just so you can cope with it, so you can comprehend it. It’s mystery with a capital ‘M.’ Do you remember the oracle we consulted, the Possible Witch, how otherworldly she was, how alien? Or your purple-and-white cloak, the way you feel its mind poking at your brain with tiny little wiry fingers? These are things from outside the Earth, they were around before people were, they’ll be around when people are gone. Just because they look like witches or cloaks or trains doesn’t mean that’s what they are, it’s a disguise they wear, it’s your brain doing you a favor and draping the transcendent in something opaque, because looking at it directly would burn out your mind and your soul and your humanity.” He was almost shouting by the end, his voice loud and booming, a well-trained actor’s voice, though he wasn’t pretending, just projecting.
“Huh,” Marla said. “I guess Cole has been training you well. Okay, you can’t go; I understand. I’m just pissed about it, is all. I really could use your help.”
B laughed, a little nervous, a little relieved.
“I will join you, Ms. Mason,” Pelham said.
Marla patted his shoulder. “I know you will, Pelham. I’m counting on you, too.” In truth, she wondered how Pelham would cope. He’d freaked out in a crowded airport terminal. How would he react in the throng of the dead who surely inhabited the underworld? Then again, maybe Hell was an empty place. She could imagine it both ways.
“Guess I’d better get some sleep,” B said. “Big night tomorrow, huh?”
“Can you point me toward Cole’s books?” Marla said. “I think I should do some reading. I slept on the plane.”
“What shall I do, Ms. Mason?” Pelham said.
“You’ll have to entertain yourself, Pelham. I’m all out of projects for the moment.” He was a needy little valet. He’d been helpful, too, sure, but he was not so much out of his depth as utterly out of his element. Taking him to the underworld…gods. She only hoped she could bring him back alive. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, and followed B to the library downstairs.
“It’s a squalid, fetid pit,” Death said, kicking aside an old footstool in Marla’s living room. He’d gotten past her formidable defenses by simply pushing open her
door—all the runes hacked around the door frame had glowed blue and then sparked and gone dark, shorted out by his godhood.
“There’s aluminum foil on the rabbit ears of the television,” Ayres said, half-awed, half-disgusted. Both Death and Booth looked at him with bewilderment. Neither one of them understood how old and chintzy and ridiculous that was, and Ayres knew if he tried to explain, they’d look at him like he was doddering and irrelevant. “Perhaps her bedroom will be more interesting.” Ayres led the way, pushing her bedroom door open with his walking stick in case there were booby traps. There were none.
The room was messy, the bed unmade, the closet door open and spilling mounded clothes. While Death examined the closet, Booth went to her bedside table and picked up a book, then laughed. “Look at this,” he said. “It says it’s an ‘alternate history’ of the Civil War, with the South triumphant.” He put it in his jacket pocket. “I’ll enjoy that.”
“I rather doubt it will put the slave-owners in a good light, Booth,” Ayres said. “You’ll be disappointed.”
“It may not be Shakespeare, but I’m sure it will be diverting, all the same.” Booth picked up another object from the table. “What’s this?” he said. “Some kind of woman’s hygiene implement?”
Ayres came closer to look, then made a face of disgust. The object was long, cylindrical, vaguely phallic, and bright purple. “It’s—”
The thing began buzzing in Booth’s hand, and he swore and dropped it. “It’s full of bees!” he shouted, and Ayres laughed.
“Simpleton,” he said. “It’s made for—”
“What is this,” Death said, voice oddly flat and menacing. Ayres turned to him, pausing only to switch off the noisily buzzy vibrator, and wiped his hand on Marla’s bedspread.
“Ah, that is something,” Ayres said. A large wooden wardrobe stood in the corner, covered in hanging bits of clothing, but there were runes and markings and spirals of binding drawn all over it, copper nails driven into the wood, bits of crystal and leather and feathers and insect chitin dangling from wires wrapped around the nail heads. “That’s a vault, sir. Doubtless where Marla keeps her most prized possessions.”
“It’s not a throne, but it will do.” Death reached for the doors. He whistled. “Well. Those are some impressive spells of protection. I even feel a little tingling in my fingertips, when most mortal magic touches me not at all.” He wrapped his hands around the knobs on the wardrobe doors and tugged them open.
Suddenly Death staggered back, gagging, and fell over the bed, landing on Marla’s vibrator and jostling it into the “On” position again. He scrambled across the bed and crouched on the far side, beside Booth, who looked at Ayres in confusion; a look Ayres gave him in return. Ayres peered into the wardrobe, where Marla’s greatest artifact hung. It was pure white, so white it hurt the eyes to look upon, and the lining was the purple of crushed flowers and certain bruises. A silver pin in the shape of a stag beetle held it together at the throat, and it hung on a hanger carved of some deep dark wood, also marked all over with fiercely glowing runes. “It’s only her cloak, sir,” Ayres said.
Death laughed, but the laugh was half a gag. “A cloak. It looks like a cloak to you. I have never before wished for the blindness of a mortal. To be spared this vision. That…thing…I can’t…it’s alive, but not from this world, not within my power…. Close the doors. Close them!”
“Sir, by the look of those runes, if either Booth or I touch the wardrobe, we will be killed instantly. That is, I would be killed, and he would likely burn, again.”
“I should prefer not to burn again,” Booth said.
“Give me your stick,” Death said, and Ayres handed over his walking stick. Without rising from his crouch behind the bed, never taking his eyes from the thing inside the wardrobe—and what did that cloak look like to a god’s eyes?—Death smacked the wardrobe doors with the walking stick, and they swung shut, clicking closed with a sound like bones clacking together. The stick smoldered, and crumbled to dust, scattering the bed with ashes. Ayres sighed. That was a good stick. It had inertial enchantments that helped him to swing it with far more force than his muscles could generate on their own. He’d have to get a new one now.
Death turned his head away from Booth and noisily vomited. Wearing a body clearly had its disadvantages.
“The smell…how can you bear the smell?” he said.
“I smell nothing, sir,” Ayres said, and Booth concurred.
“Stupid useless humans,” Death said. He fled the room.
“A craven and a villain else,” Booth murmured.
“He sees things we cannot,” Ayres said. “The cloak is old and powerful. Perhaps more than anyone suspected.”
“Still, to run from a woman’s garment,” Booth said. “Well, he’s very young, for a god.”
Ayres felt a fleeting moment of fellowship, then he remembered that Booth was a racist egomaniac, and a disobedient servant as well. “Come, let’s attend to him,” Ayres said, and Booth followed.
Death seemed a bit more in control now, sitting in the living room on Marla’s futon, a drink in his hand from her bar; there were bits of broken glass and spilled alcohol all over the place. “I won’t have that thing in my city,” he said.
“The cloak, sir? Ah, what is it, exactly—”
“Don’t question me!” Death roared, and he crackled with that dark aura again, skeins of night unspooling from his body and darkening the air. “Damn you both for a pair of nattering old women! Just obey!”
“What shall we do with it, sir?” Ayres said. Locking it in one of Viscarro’s vaults might be an option—that was in the city, true, but very secure. Unfortunately, Viscarro had so far refused to answer any summons sent by Death’s “loyal” followers, and Death had been more interested in having sex in his new body than in kicking in the doors of the subterranean sorcerer’s fortress.
“That woman who dripped,” Death said. “The one who asked me to kill all those shellfish and said she owed me a favor. Bring her here.”
Ayres took out his cell phone, but it was dead. He wasn’t in the habit of keeping the things charged—any device invented in the last few decades of his life tended to slip from his mind when he wasn’t forcibly reminded. “Booth, go fetch Hamil, or find one of his little urchins to send a message.”
“I believe I have asked you not to give me orders, sir,” Booth said. “I am a patient man, but—”
“Shut up!” Ayres shouted. “You are an undead slave, a thing I brought back to life to serve me, and by all the gods, you will carry me on your back as if you were a horse if that is my desire, else I shall rip your spirit from your body and operate your mummified carcass as a puppet! I grow tired of your endless bitching and moaning, you mad vain monster! Now go! Or would you test me?”
“I will go,” Booth said, surprisingly calm, and left the room.
“She doesn’t exactly have a cell phone,” Hamil said, while Death paced and seethed. “I’ve sent out all the appropriate messages, and she’ll come when she comes, but the only timetable she follows is the tides.” Hamil was dressed in an enormous robe and silk pajamas, and he yawned behind his hand. Booth had dragged him out of bed and brought him over in a gypsy cab, and now the assassin lounged by a window, watching the conversation with a look of distant boredom. Hamil cleared his throat and said, “May I ask what this is regarding? The Bay Witch is formidable in her way, but perhaps I could be of more immediate assistance, as I’m already here?”
Death punched a wall, and it cratered, leaving a hole twice the size of his fist. He stared into the hole for a while, took a deep breath, and said, “Ayres, I’m going to distract myself with drugs and fucking. Here.” He tossed a bell to Ayres, and the old man managed to catch it without fumbling. “Ring this when the drippy witch arrives. In the meantime, stay here, and just…be watchful.” He stormed out and away.
Hamil sighed and looked Ayres up and down. “You’ve certainly hitched your wagon to a star, haven’
t you? We’ll all remember your part in this, Ayres. Death will get bored eventually, and when he leaves you behind, well…As I said, we’ll remember.”
“You allow a colored man to talk to you that way?” Booth said. Hamil turned slowly toward the dead man, fixing him with a look of deep concentration. Booth returned the glare frankly for a moment, but then he started to shift and squirm a bit under Hamil’s unblinking stare, finally turning aside and muttering something about manners and civilization and everything his fellow Southerners had fought and died for. Ayres started laughing, and Booth hunched his shoulders and retreated into the bedroom.
“He’s a reprehensible thing,” Ayres said. “I only wanted his body, you know, to fetch and carry things for me. Pulling his mind out of the underworld was a mistake I think more and more about rectifying.”
“You are a fool, Ayres,” Hamil said quietly. “You’ve brought Death himself up into the world, into our midst, into our city. Do you not realize the damage he could do?”
“Your mistress, Marla, gave me no choice,” Ayres said. “If she’d just let me work, let me ply my trade, I could have been an asset. I could have advised her, even, as I advised Sauvage and Somerset before her—”
Now Hamil laughed. “You advised them? I knew them both, Ayres, intimately, and they did not consider you a confidante. Sauvage found you strange and off-putting, but useful enough to keep on hand until you went mad. And Somerset…if he thought of you at all, he thought of you the way a mechanic thinks of a wrench. As a tool to use when the job calls for it, and utterly unconsidered at all other times.”
“You do not know of our secret counsels.” Ayres’s voice trembled, from anger, he told himself, only from anger.
“Oh, yes,” Hamil said. “I’m sure they were very meaningful. But you think Death considers you an advisor, too, don’t you? A confidante?” Hamil smiled broadly. “Why, I thought this was pure tragedy, but there is comedy in it as well. Ayres, poor Ayres—Death considers you a slave, exactly the sort of slave you meant the mummy of John Wilkes Booth to be, only Death was far more successful. If you died tomorrow, Death might frown for an instant, but then he would find someone else to fetch and carry for him, and forget you forever.”
