by Cate Rowan
Val seemed to as well, for he patted the rug almost sympathetically before getting back to his feet.
“That brought you here?” Her disbelief was audible.
“It looked much better this morning,” Val said in meager defense. “It’s a flying carpet, and it flew well before we, uh, broke it.” He stared down mournfully at the frayed corner where the tassel had been ripped off.
“And who gave this flying carpet to you?”
Jasper had been dreading this moment, but Darius stepped forward first as if to take any punishment upon himself. “A friend of yours, we were told.”
“A friend? I have none. What would the Queen of the Dead do with a friend?” Ereshkigal’s expression was steely, but Jasper couldn’t help but wonder whether her words were true.
Darius spoke again. “She told us her name is Ina,”
“Ina,” Ereshkigal repeated, letting the name roll around on her tongue as if probing it. Then her exotic blue gaze punched into Dar’s. “Inanna?”
Jasper’s heart, already speeding along since the beginning of their audience with the Queen of Hell, hurled itself against his ribs. Their situation was terrifyingly risky, and he couldn’t let Darius do it alone. He raised a placating hand. “Please, we knew her only as Ina.” Which was true enough, even if his answer left out what they had pieced together about her in the windstorm.
“Inanna is no friend of mine. She is my sister.” The final word was nearly hissed, an epithet. A slur.
Jasper couldn’t fathom that. His brothers were his best friends; he would do anything for them and knew they would do the same for him. Three against the world.
“Why,” Ereshkigal said, staring straight at Jasper, “did Ina give you a flying carpet and send you here?”
Jasper had been weighing a decision about this moment in the back of his mind since the Gatekeeper had appeared, and the choices looked no better now than they had then.
If they followed Ina’s original plan, they’d be doing her bidding and become accessories to whatever she had planned — which he suspected would be regime change over Hell.
They’d also be very disposable witnesses once Ina gained control.
If they instead told Ereshkigal the truth, the Queen of Hell might still kill them — and if she didn’t, Ina likely would when she found out they’d betrayed her.
He saw only one way.
“I’ll show you.” He reached into his pack for the box of perfumes.
“Jasper,” Darius said urgently to his middle brother. He laced his voice with caution and used Jas’s full name for effect.
Jas tossed him a pacifying glance, but Darius’s pulse refused to take the hint. He and his brothers been sent by Ina to harm her sister, so how could it be wise to show that sister the weapon? Damn it, he should have taken the box of “perfumes” from Jasper for safekeeping. He stepped toward Jas, one hand out to stop this before his brother put himself or any of them in danger —
Jas held up a warning palm, and a cryptic message in his eyes finally made Darius pause in his tracks even while his heart pounded. Jas pulled out the gift box, stared at it, and flicked something from it. When it clinked onto the stone floor, Darius realized it was a fragment of Jasper’s broken mirror.
Were their lives about to shatter the same way?
Jasper held the box in his hands and, without opening it, began. “Ina gave — ”
A whirl of black and a frigid gust of wind blew past the brothers. Darius looked down at Jasper’s hands, but the box was gone.
“Looking for this?” The disembodied voice of the God of Plague, Pestilence, and Death boomed from thirty feet to the side, and then Nirgal’s horned face and body reappeared. He held the box carefully in his meaty hands while his red gaze looked hot enough to sear Jasper’s skin.
“Wait!” Darius said, and Jas and Val said it simultaneously. Val added a headshake for emphasis.
“My lord, there are two sealed perfume bottles inside,” Jas said, “and we think they must contain poison, or something equally noxious.”
If Darius thought the world could be quiet before, it was nothing to the hush that befell the earth in that moment.
“You admit you came here to kill me?” Ereshkigal said, her voice cracking through the gloom like a wild streak of lightning.
Darius’s knees gave way as if they’d been hit by a club; he landed on hands and knees on the stone, with what seemed to be the weight of boulders on his back. The same had happened to his brothers.
It took every ounce of Darius’s will to speak. “We took a job to deliver gifts, only that. We realized along the way who Ina was, and what she meant to do.”
Jasper spoke, his voice as weighed down as Darius’s limbs. “We tried to turn back, but by then, we’d already flown past the gates.”
“All but the Seventh,” Val added heavily. “The river. I miscounted. Your Gatekeeper himself can confirm we wanted to leave.”
From the edges of his sight, Darius saw the queen looking at the Gatekeeper, and his nod of acknowledgment.
The brutal weight upon their backs lightened by half.
Still struggling, Darius eased back on his heels and looked up at the queen. “Ina directed us to give the perfume bottles to each of you at the same time. Yours was lapis blue.” He turned to Nirgal. “And yours Carnelian red.”
“She said the bottles were sealed,” Val added, “for your hands only.”
Another silence.
The Queen of Hell spoke at last. “My love,” she said to Nirgal, “open the lid.”
Nirgal did so, and even in the low light, the two bottles sparkled.
Just then, something on the floor flashed as well, catching Darius’s eye. He glanced down and spotted a glint from the small fragment of Jasper’s mirror. He stared harder. Colors shifted within it in a way that didn’t make sense. Nothing in the air around them matched those colors, so how could the mirror be reflecting them?
The color blue came to the fore. A lapis blue like Queen Ereshkigal’s perfume bottle, and her eyes.
And also Ina’s eyes.
Long, dark lashes blinked across the eye visible in the mirror fragment.
“Ina?” Darius said in shock.
The Queen’s head swung around; it took her only a split second to spot the eye. She flicked her hand at the fragment, and the eye remained open, as if frozen. “Well, well,” Ereshkigal said. “You just couldn’t help yourself, could you, Sister?” And then, to Darius, “Is there more of this mirror?”
“Yes. It was Ina’s gift to Jasper, but broke when we landed.” He nodded at Jasper.
Jas retrieved the frame and three large chunks from his pack. The fragment with Ina’s frozen eye was the tiny, missing piece, and now the mirror displayed Inanna’s entire face, albeit with the cracks in the glass crisscrossing it.
Ereshkigal rose, tall and pale and deadly. She stepped down from her throne and advanced toward the mirror, pulse-stoppingly majestic in the swirling infinite darkness of her garments. She stopped just in front of the mirror, held her fingers out toward it, and then flicked one hand again. Inanna’s eyes blinked, several times rapidly, and then her head jerked back as if she were trying to flee. Ereshkigal’s fingers tensed, and after a struggle, Inanna grimaced and stopped struggling. Her lovely eyes stared into her sister’s — eyes so like her own — with a bitter hate.
“Inanna,” said Ereshkigal, “You tried again, sending these brothers to Hell for you, to risk what you would not.”
“Humans were created to serve the gods.” Inanna shrugged, her silken shoulders glimmering in the mirror. “Besides, all mortals come to your kingdom, eventually.”
“You threw their lives away before they were ready. How very like you.”
“They took a risk, an adventure, as the young one wanted.”
Darius glanced over and saw Val blanch.
Inanna continued. “Why do you care what happens to them, anyway? You only sit on your Underworld throne desiccati
ng, like the bodies of the dead who fill your realm.”
A snort left Ereshkigal’s nostrils. “All who live, seek. All who die, let the seeking go.” She raised a brow. “Maybe it’s time for you to die again. There is a peace to death, one you’ll never realize until you accept the cycle.”
Darius, in the quiet of the innermost part of his mind, could only disagree about whether his parents had looked peaceful.
Inanna’s smirk spread through the fractured mirror. “You can’t kill me again. I’m not bodily there, after all. And you, dear sister, can’t leave the Underworld. So the only ones dying will be those who’ve failed . . . and thereby made themselves my enemies.” Her voice darkened at the last.
Darius suspected the warning was, at least in part, directed at him and his brothers.
It was Ereshkigal’s turn to shrug. “Fill my realm with those you kill. In doing so, you’ll be giving them the peace you deny yourself.”
Inanna’s eyes blazed past the cracks. “I deny myself nothing! I’m unconquerable. Not even death has stopped me. My seeking will burn the earth if it must. And your throne will be mine one day.”
Ereshkigal wore a nonchalant smile. “Sister, you’ve fooled yourself for so long.” She glanced over at Nirgal and beckoned him closer with a tilt of her head. Then she leaned toward the fractured mirror and locked eyes with her sister. “All to soothe yourself over what you lost so long ago. Tell me, Inanna, what would happen if Gilgamesh himself came back for you now, wanting you? Would his love fill up the ache in your heart?”
Wherever Inanna’s body was at that moment, her breath chilled the air around her and frosted the other side of the pieces of the mirror.
Gilgamesh? Darius thought. An old name, he felt, a name from epics, but he struggled to recall the particular stories. And then, oddly, a memory flashed into his head of the mosaic face of the man in Ina’s hallway. The one she had made sure to grind under her heel.
Ereshkigal swiveled toward Darius. “You saw your dead, did you not?”
Only barely did he stop himself from shifting back under her intense gaze. He nodded, his lips thinning at the memory. “Our parents came to us when we crossed the river.”
“Just as your dead knew you, Darius, I know all who come to my realm,” Ereshkigal continued, her voice as cold as sleet. “I know their blood. One man would have sufficed to bring Inanna’s deadly ‘gift’ to me. Do you not realize why my sister chose not just one man, but you three, of all living humans?”
“Right place, right time?” Jasper murmured with his usual dark sarcasm.
Darius, his heart pumping, shook his head. “We’re just . . . normal brothers.”
“With certain skills,” Val added under his breath.
Trust Val to be thinking of bedplay at a time like this. Darius gritted his teeth and wished he could throttle both his brothers for their untimely irreverence.
Ereshkigal’s eyes glittered. “Long ago, Gilgamesh was the King of Uruk. He was also the only man to turn down my sister’s bed. In fact, he laughed at her. Then he brought up all the previous lovers she had betrayed in one way or another when she’d tired of them.”
As one of those Inanna had betrayed, Darius felt his face going warm. Jas and Val seemed just as discomfited. And in the mirror on the floor, Inanna smirked.
“I gather she hasn’t broken that habit,” Ereshkigal drawled, and tossed Nirgal, who’d come up beside her, a sardonic glance. The God of Plague, Pestilence, and Death snorted in reply, and Darius wished, not for the first or last time, that he’d kept his hands off of Inanna. Women were either crazy or trouble. Or both.
“When my sister descended into Hell,” Ereshkigal continued, “to try to take my throne for the first time, I killed her. She knew the law of the Underworld — that once here, neither man nor woman can exit. Just as death comes to all mortals, the dead come here to the Underworld, the Great Below, and cannot leave.”
Darius shivered. It was true, then. He and his brothers were living men, but as good as dead.
“Inanna had planned and schemed before her descent,” Ereshkigal said, “and had directed her servant to seek the help of other gods to bring her back to life. But even revived from death and removed from the hook on which I hung her, she could not leave my realm without a substitute. In the end, she traded her consort’s freedom to gain her own and leave Hell.”
“Dumuzi was disloyal,” Inanna interjected. “He was feasting and celebrating despite my death!”
“That,” Ereshkigal said, “is between the two of you. His elder sister’s love for him was stronger than your bond with him; she chose to take his place half of each year.”
“Because she is a fool.”
Ereshkigal looked at the brothers gathered around the mirror. “Inanna chose to send you to the Underworld, you three of all the living men in the world, because then you would be trapped here. Because you are the last of Gilgamesh’s line, a line of kings brought low. She has tried to finish off your blood for a very long time. In case you didn’t already know, you come from a long line of unhappiness, much of which she caused.”
“We’re descendants of a king?” Jasper asked.
He would ask that, Darius thought, remembering the throne in Jas’s room at Ina’s castle.
Ereshkigal looked Jasper up and down, practically clucking in sarcastic pity at how far the family had fallen.
Val, rather than being offended, seemed fascinated by the discovery of their royal heritage. “Sounds legendary.”
Darius, however, was thinking of relatives much more recent than Gilgamesh. A long line of unhappiness, much of which she caused . . . He remembered the bitterness of his parents’ faces around the dinner table, and wondered how much of that had been Inanna’s doing.
“Gilgamesh,” Inanna said spitefully from the mirror, “only turned me down because he couldn’t get it up.”
“Odd, since he left plenty of seed behind elsewhere,” Ereshkigal said, indicating the brothers.
“They are finally getting what they deserve,” Inanna spat.
“Perhaps so. But with them in mind . . . ” Ereshkigal looked over at Nirgal; they nodded at each other. Each reached into the perfume box Nirgal held, seized the bottle that was keyed to their hand, and threw it down at the mirror.
Alarmed, Darius reached out, despite the weight of Ereshkigal’s spell upon his back; he grabbed his brothers’ arms and jerked back, yanking them away from the mirror and any splash of perfume.
But whatever magic had let Inanna’s image through to the Underworld let the perfume bottles go to the Other Side, where they exploded in her face. Her head rocked back and she slumped out of sight.
In the Great Below, nothing moved. A cold breath whistled down Darius’s throat.
“Is . . . she dead?” Val asked, shattering the silence. He, like Darius and Jasper, stared down at the broken mirror in wide-eyed shock.
Ereshkigal’s lips curled up. “I doubt it. I’m sure part of her wanted to kill us in retaliation for what happened the last time she was here — but she would want even more to take my throne, humiliate me, and watch me suffer for it. Therefore it’s unlikely the contents were lethal. Which, in turn, means she spared herself from death.” She chuckled, a terribly unsettling sound. “But I do think it hurt.”
Then the Queen of Hell pivoted away, ascended her obsidian throne, and sat upon it while staring down at the brothers. “Now it’s your turn.”
15
Darius had led his brothers into many scrapes in their lives, but only calculated ones, and they had always survived. Until now.
He wished desperately that the rug, the mirror, and the lamp were still working, that they could escape Hell and return to their old lives — without magic, or sorceresses, or goddesses. Forget wealth; he’d gladly live a do-over as mercenaries, or as thieves. Or even beggars. Life in the normal world in any form was worth more than eternity in Hell.
He should have turned Jas and Val away from Inanna’s c
astle, even if it had meant beating them both bloody to do it. That fight would have saved all their lives while they still had some to live.
He’d failed his brothers.
Darius looked upon the dark queen on her throne. Silently she removed the rest of the weight upon their backs, but still his head bent low and his knees buckled beneath him. His heart tore and bled upon his tongue. “Goddess of the Dead and Queen of the Underworld, I beg your mercy upon us. Could you not keep me here and let my brothers go?”
“No,” Jasper and Valerian protested in unison.
The Queen answered. “And keep only one, though three are here in my realm? No, I cannot.” She spoke slowly, as if savoring it all. “Is there anyone on the Other Side who would agree to take your place here in Hell?”
Just as he would gladly take his brothers’ place, Darius knew they would do the same for him. But they were all three here in the land of the Dead already, tricked and imprisoned.
Darius raised his chin and held her gaze, even as the truth stabbed at him. “No one Out There would come to Hell in our stead. Long ago, our aunt and uncle left us to starve. Our parents are here, dead, and they would not have agreed to trade in any case. We are alone.”
“I know,” Ereshkigal said, gravely.
He knew then that she had posed the question merely to make him admit it.
“And yet,” she continued, “I’ve seen you and your brothers protect each other,” she said, “How very unlike my sister and I.” Her smile was chilling.
Darius blinked, heart pounding, uncertain and sickened by what might come.
“Inanna yearns.” Ereshkigal continued. “She craves to fill the hole inside her. That is why she cannot be content. Why she covets what is mine. Inanna desires, but does not love.” Ereshkigal turned her striking lapis gaze to the side, to the horned figure in darkness standing next to the dais. “I remember such a hole within me. It is closed now. I am not my sister.” But then her gaze turned cold again and returned to Darius and his brothers.
