Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  Rondeau sat in the blood, put his head in his hands, and sobbed. Bradley embraced him, pressing his face into Rondeau’s shoulder, but from the way his shoulders shook, he was crying too.

  “He was a sweet little guy,” Elsie said. “But we don’t have time to mourn so much just now. We’ve got to save the underworld.”

  “Shit.” Rondeau’s voice was muffled by emotion and, probably, snot. “Pelly was my best friend, Marla. You used to be, and probably if somebody had asked me yesterday I still would’ve said it was you, but you haven’t been around so much lately, and he... he was there. He was better than me, Marla. Made me try to be better, too, on my best days. Ah, fuck.”

  “The afterlife isn’t so bad.” Tiny flames still flickered around Jenny’s head, but she looked more human and less elemental now, her face shadowed by grief. She hadn’t known Pelham before today... but seeing his loss had probably reminded her of her own fallen friends. “At least, when the New Death isn’t making it bad.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t get to enjoy the afterlife.” Rondeau shook off Bradley and got to his feet. “I’m stuck with plain old life. Mutex didn’t kill Pelham. He didn’t even know Pelham. Mutex was just the weapon the New Death used. Let’s go, Marla. Let’s fucking tear that skull-faced shitlord to pieces.”

  “Mmm, vengeance is my favorite motivation,” Elsie said.

  Bradley rose, too. “For Pelham.”

  Marla nodded. “For Pelham.”

  “Would you... I could clean you up.” Genevieve’s voice was shy.

  Rondeau shook his head. “Not me. I’ll wash Pelham’s blood off when Skully is dead.”

  “Okay then,” Marla said. She looked at Pelham’s body, and the scene flickered. A marble bier appeared, his body resting on the stone, the spreading pool of blood gone. His suit was impeccable again, and his wounds invisible. He’d always hated to be messy. “We’ll see to a proper burial, a memorial, and everything... after all this.”

  She turned toward the doorway. No more monsters appeared. Whatever the New Death had been buying time for, he must have finished it. There was no telling what they were walking into.

  “Remember what I told you, Genevieve?” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. Be ready.”

  “Ooh, is there a secret plan?” Elsie clapped her hands together. “I hope I’m a crucial part of it!”

  “Yeah, you’ve got a role to play.” She walked toward the doorway. “Let’s end this. Let’s take back Hell for the good guys.”

  The New Death and the Old

  The others all followed Marla into the corridor... except Jenny. She hit an invisible wall that Marla couldn’t knock down. Where they were going, apparently, the dead couldn’t go... or, at least, not any of the dead on Marla’s side.

  “I’ll stay here and watch over Pelham.” She embraced Marla, and kissed her cheek. “Thanks for letting me out of the bubble. Go in there and win, okay?”

  Marla returned to the others, and they were a solemn and serious crew, even Elsie—though the solemnity looked false on her face. The corridor twisted and doglegged and finally led to a dank cavern lit by smoky torches on the wall. The surroundings stubbornly refused to give in to Marla’s will. The rest of the underworld was open to her alterations, now, she could sense. The New Death had consolidated his attention and power in this particular place, and so focused, it was more than she could overcome.

  Her husband stood in the back of the cave, arms crossed over his chest. He’d acquired a new head, the oversized skull of a viper, with curving fangs as long as knives.

  “A venomous snake?” she said. “You really have no imagination at all, do you?”

  “Did you enjoy meeting your old friends?” he said. “Would you like to see a few more?” He gestured, and suddenly figures appeared before him, kneeling in a row, arms bound behind them, heads bowed.

  Marla hissed in a breath. Daniel was there, front and center. That’s why she hadn’t been able to find him. Skully was using him... and others. She recognized all the captives but one, a young woman on the end. At least Pelham wasn’t among the captives. She’d made a point of lending some of her attention to his soul, to keep him out of the New Death’s grasp, but she hadn’t possessed the foresight or energy to protect everyone.

  “Oh, no,” Bradley whispered. “Henry.” His dead boyfriend was kneeling beside Daniel.

  “Is that... St. John?” Genevieve took a step forward, then a step back, and whimpered. Her old mentor was there, too.

  “Hey. Juliana?” Rondeau frowned at Skully. “Dude, that was the best you could do? My old bartender? I mean, we were friends, she left me her club after she died, but really?”

  “Rondeau?” Juliana looked up, her eyes still heavily shadowed, as they had been in life, when she was subject to strange and debilitating addictions. “What happened to my club?”

  “Oh. Well, I mean... I ran it for a while, but then I had to leave the city, and I sold it to Hamil, he’s taking good care of it though.”

  “You ass,” she said.

  “Silence!” the New Death shouted. His terrible sword appeared in his hand, its hilt made of bone, its blade made of shadows and starlight. “Do you recognize this sword, woman?”

  “I’ve held it more often than you have, so yeah.”

  Death swung the sword in a flat arc over the heads of his kneeling captives, close enough to ruffle Daniel’s hair. “Then you know it can destroy almost anything. It can certainly consign these souls to oblivion. They have died once. Would you have them die forever?” The skull couldn’t smirk, of course, but his voice managed it just fine.

  “Okay.” He could send Daniel and the others to oblivion as easily as Elsie had dispatched Christian, but she refused to let her nervousness show. “What’s your offer?”

  “I want you to do as you’re told!” he bellowed. “Leave this place to me, and return to Earth. The fact that you care for these pitiful shades proves you’re unfit to rule here. Your mortality is a weakness.”

  “If I leave, you’ll subject them all to an eternity of horrible torment anyway, bonehead. Oblivion is a better deal for them than endless agony.”

  “I am... not unwilling to negotiate. These few could be given more pleasant afterlives. Left to their own devices, to do what they will with eternity.”

  “If you’re willing to go that far, why not make more concessions? Like doing away with all the eternal torments?”

  “I could be persuaded to create a system that is more... merit based. To torture only those who committed torture, to give pain to those who caused pain. Lesser offenses could receive lesser punishments. A sliding scale of misery.”

  Marla thought about it. The idea of negotiating with Skully was repulsive to her... but was that just a vestige of her old pig-headed stubbornness, her unwillingness to give an inch?

  No. The New Death was holding the souls of her friends hostage, and he was a sadist. Gods were bound by the bargains they made, yes, but they were also adept at finding loopholes and edges and places where they could wriggle out of them. Any agreement they made would still end with billions of people suffering needlessly, and for eternity. “You’re only willing to negotiate with me because you know you might lose,” Marla said.

  “Of course.” He swung the sword again. “But you can’t beat me without suffering considerable losses of your own.”

  “Holy shit, is that my kid?” Elsie said abruptly. “Ha, I was thinking, ‘Why don’t I get emotionally blackmailed, I hate being left out,’ but there she is!”

  The kneeling girl, the one Marla hadn’t recognized, flinched at Elsie’s voice.

  “What did I name you, anyway? Vanessa?”

  “Clarissa,” the girl whispered.

  “Hmm, if you say so. What even happened to you? I mean, what’s a nice girl like you doing in an afterlife like this?”

  “Cuh... car accident. In college.”

  “How about that. I always meant to look you
up and see how you were doing.” Elsie lunged forward, swinging Trepanner in an overhand arc, and slammed the point into her daughter’s head. The girl vanished.

  Even Skully was taken aback by the sudden attack, his attention wavering, his sword dropping, and Marla pushed as hard as she could, taking advantage of her husband’s distraction to send the other hostages into the primal sea of chaos.

  Skully howled and lifted his sword when his hostages vanished, apparently willing to find out what would happen if he killed her after all.

  “Gen, now!” Marla shouted.

  Bradley and Rondeau vanished, transported by Genevieve’s will to a safer location, back to the foyer of the palace. Elsie’s godhood made her impossible for Gen to banish, but a human-sized cage of golden bars appeared around her, trapping her, still holding the weapon she’d used to consign her own daughter to oblivion. A horrific act, morally indefensible... but utterly unexpected, which was just what Marla had come to expect from Elsie.

  The cavern disappeared, Genevieve and Marla’s wills combined to create a hall of mirrors. She’d gotten the idea from Bradley and Pelham’s tale of traversing the mirror world. Her plan depended on Skully being frustrated, impatient, hasty, and confused, and what better milieu for that than a hall of mirrors?

  Marla stood alone in a hallway, listening hard, and was rewarded with a howl of outrage and the sound of breaking glass off on one side.

  “Come and get me!” She raced down a mirrored corridor, then another, taking turns at random, vanishing deeper into the maze.

  “Woman!” Skully bellowed. He wasn’t following passageways: he was smashing the mirrors, moving in a straight line.

  She opened her shoulder bag and removed an artifact of her own design. It was a clay pot, bulbous and hand-made, covered in sinuous scribbles. An order mage named Mr. Beadle had helped her make it—very reluctantly—when she took her solo trip to Felport. The pot was a scale model of its much larger counterpart, buried beneath Fludd Park. The original was the sort of pot used to capture genies, though wrapped in more formidable magics than anything Solomon had ever mastered.

  They’d used that pot months earlier to capture and imprison the Outsider, a being from another universe. A being capable of devouring gods.

  Marla set her miniature pot on the ground and stared at it for a long moment. It swelled, and grew, and altered, taking on the form of a woman, first shaped of clay, and then gradually developing skin tone, hair, facial features, and armor. Marla breathed onto the figure, and the clay imitation of herself blinked its eyes, cocked its head, and looked at its outstretched hands. Just as she could conjure demons from chaos, she’d cloaked the pot in a body made of the same raw stuff of creation. If Skully really looked at it, with his full attention, he’d realize it was a simulacrum, but if he was angry enough, blinded by his rage....

  A mirror crashed, very close by.

  Marla turned, stepped toward an intact mirror in the hallway, and then stepped into it, sliding behind the glass, disguising herself as an illusion: she looked like a reflection of the clay Marla she’d just made.

  Skully stepped into the corridor and faced the doppelganger, sword in hand. “You,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen if I kill you. Perhaps such a transgression will lead to my own oblivion, but I would gladly pay that price to spare this realm from your human sentimentality.”

  Get on with it, Marla thought. Her clay double wasn’t really capable of snappy repartee.

  Fortunately, Skully wasn’t the type to wait and see what a woman had to say. He roared and swung his sword, a blow meant to cut Marla in half at the waist.

  When the blade struck her double, the false Marla shattered, and transformed into fragments of a clay pot. Skully stared down at the wreckage dumbly... and then screamed when a sucking black spiral of void opened on the floor amid the shards, pulling him toward it with a terrible, inescapable gravity.

  Marla stepped out of the mirror and slapped the sword out of the New Death’s hands, because she didn’t want to lose that—and if he had it with him, he might even manage to survive where he was going, and escape.

  Skully stared at her with his streaming-ember eyes, and tried to grab her, but his body was already elongating, being drawn into the black spiral, and she avoided him easily.

  “I couldn’t kill you.” She bent and picked up the sword. “Just like you said: who knows what the consequences would be?”

  “You think you can trap me? Contain me?” His lower body had almost entirely disappeared into the darkness, but he was still scrabbling at the floor, trying to drag himself out. “Put me in a bottle like one of those spirits of fire from the desert? I am a god.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I might be able to hold you. That pot you broke was magically linked to a much bigger version of itself, a prison made to hold a being of incredible power, and that’s where you’re going. Except... you aren’t the being of incredible power I’m talking about. This isn’t a jar to hold you, Skully. This prison is already occupied. Now it’s a killing jar.”

  The New Death howled, fingernails clawing deep scratches into the floor. Marla stood at a respectful distance. The trap should only work to pull in the one who’d broken the jar—which was why Marla had padded it very carefully—but better safe than eaten by an extradimensional nightmare beast.

  Her husband lost his grip, and vanished into the dark maelstrom, screaming defiance as he went. The void stopped swirling, then, and Marla moved a little closer, looking into the black circle, no bigger than a manhole. Skully was way down there, stomping around, peering into the darkness on all sides... and then tendrils of shadow grew toward him.

  The Outsider had given up its semblance of a human form and reverted to its truer shape, a kind of hungering, ambulatory darkness. Skully thrashed as the dark tendrils wrapped around his limbs, his waist, his chest, and Marla closed her eyes and stepped away, waving a hand to close the opening of the trap. The Outsider had eaten a god before. She had no doubt it would consume Skully with the same ease. Mr. Beadle had assured her the prison was strong enough to hold the Outsider even if it devoured half a dozen gods and took on their power, and when it came to knowing tolerances, she trusted the order mage implicitly.

  The new Death was dead. Long live the old.

  Cutting Out the Core

  Marla let the hall of mirrors vanish and returned to her lost throne room, with the walls of obsidian and the jeweled thrones. Genevieve was sitting on the floor, humming to herself, making a cat’s cradle with a piece of purple string. She looked up. “Everything okay?”

  “I’m now a deicide. Again. And also a mariticide. But since I didn’t technically kill my husband, just put him in a room with a monster, I think I get to dodge any mythic blowback.”

  “Oh, good.” Genevieve stood, the string vanishing from her hands. “Can I go home? I... seeing my attacker, and then St. John again, it was hard on me. I can feel myself starting to fray.”

  “I’m so sorry I brought you into this, Genevieve.”

  “Don’t be. I’m glad I could help. I don’t often feel useful. Mostly I have to be happy with the fact that I’m not making the world worse, so it’s nice to be able to say, this time, that I made it better.”

  “Can I hug you?”

  Genevieve consented, and Marla kissed her cheek, too, before sending her back to Earth. Genevieve could make her own way to her personal bubble universe from there.

  Marla sat on the throne of emerald and put her chin in her hands. Now that the immediate threat had been dealt with, she had a moment to brood a little about the future. Maybe she was being childish... but if so, it was nice to be able to be childish, sometimes, and soon she would have to put away all those childish things.

  “Ahem. Ahem ahem ahem.”

  Sighing, Marla waved a hand, and the golden cage that held Elsie disappeared.

  Elsie came out dancing. “You slurped the New Death into the same pot where you kept the Outsider, didn’t you?”


  Marla nodded. “It seemed like the best way to get rid of him without bloodying my own hands.”

  A pirouette, on point. “I thought that’s what you were doing when you insisted on spending time alone in Felport. You could have told me. I might have helped.”

  “Sure, if the coin flip showed heads. If it showed tails, you might have warned the New Death, or shoved me into the evil genie’s bottle instead.”

  Elsie stopped twirling and said, “Ahhhhh. Is that why you had Genevieve lock me up in a cage?”

  Marla shrugged. “I thought there was a good chance that at the moment of victory you’d hit me in the head with your pickaxe, yes. You know, pull off a last-minute betrayal. That’s the sort of thing you’d do. We both know it.”

  Elsie started to sit on the sapphire throne, then clearly thought better of it, and conjured herself a three-legged stool made of diamonds to perch on instead. “Yes, but the idea of me betraying you is so obvious that it’s not actually unpredictable. In fact, it’s the opposite of predictable, it’s practically inevitable, so of course, I couldn’t do it.” She sniffed. “Still, it’s good to see you still have the sort of mind that plans for contingencies. I don’t like being put in a cage, though. It’s possible I’ll hold a grudge, assuming I remember to.” She shifted a little on the stool. “Congratulations, your majesty. You’re the one and only reigning monarch of the underworld now.”

  “Hurray for me.”

  “Of course, you’re still just the second fiddle. Or banana. Banana fiddle. In another week or two or three, the primordial womb will barf up another principal god of death.”

  “Wombs don’t barf. You should’ve said stomach. Or birthed. Either one.”

  “I do so love your literary critiques, Mrs. Mason. But my point stands.”

  “Except it doesn’t stand. You know that. You figured out what I had in mind ages ago.”

  “I am very astute. But I wasn’t sure you’d have the guts, or, forgive me, the heart, to go through with it. Who knows, maybe the next god of death will be a benevolent philosopher king.”