by T. A. Pratt
“Would you like to go to San Francisco, where Bradley is?”
Rondeau shook his head. “Send me back to Vegas. With the Pit Boss gone, it’s going to get messy, war of succession type stuff, and I should step in. I knew a lot about his business. I might be able to smooth the transition.”
“That’s... almost responsible of you,” Marla said.
“I just want to make sure nobody burns down my hotel and casino. That’s where I keep my drugs and money, respectively. I’ll call B though, don’t worry.”
Pelham did more mystical passes—he loved that stuff—and summoned an archway of flickering fire that opened onto the Pit Boss’s dining room. Rondeau gave them a wave and stepped through, and the door flickered out.
Marla summoned a chair and slumped down in it. “I feel like I should be tired. Why am I not tired?”
“You are a deity.”
“A deity who had thirty-some years experience of sleeping every night.” She yawned. “Well, every other night, anyway, for a few hours at least. It always feels weird, not resting. Then again, I used to resent the hell out of sleep. I guess I’m just hard to please. I’m going to tend the garden a bit until I have to meet Zufi. We’ll meet with Bradley after that, all right? Try to sort that shit out, or delicately disentangle myself from the business of sorting it out. I guess the latter is more responsible.”
“You have another date, too, tomorrow evening.”
She groaned. “Can’t I just have Lauren?”
“If you wish, though I suppose she has some say in the matter.”
“Yeah. I guess I should consider other applicants. Lauren is pretty great, though. Fill me in on the new prospect later, though. I need to do some godly stuff right now. I can’t be thinking about small talk and how my ass looks when I wear heels.”
“Yes, Majesty.”
Marla closed her eyes, and the world blurred. She floated in a great void dotted with lights of varying colors and magnitudes, less like stars than candle flames. From here she could see all the lives on Earth, sentient and otherwise, in their trillions, one per flame. Only the ones with a sense of self got afterlives—many of the primates did, and some octopods, and cetaceans—but all of their lives were hers to oversee, and she lost herself in the contemplation of their ebb and flow.
Beyond those small lives, there were great slow pulses of light that indicated larger cycles that were also her responsibilities: tides, harvests, seasons, migrations. The god of Death was also the god of birth, and rebirth, and cycles. The Fisher King of the world, the Earth’s motions and movements tied inextricably to her own. Sometimes energies slowed, or spiked, or spiraled. Sometimes magics deliberate or accidental interfered with the natural processes. She had much to do.
Marla made a point of personally overseeing a few deaths every day, mostly human ones: easing the passage of the sick and old, or the young and frightened, stroking a brow, cooing a soft word, appearing in a form no one but the dying could see, and giving comfort. Then, sometimes, she appeared as an apparition of stern judgment to frighten those who died after a life of unrepentant evil. She generally had a non-intervention policy when it came to afterlives: if a vile murderer imagined a paradise for himself in the underworld, well, so be it. He wouldn’t be hurting anyone else ever again, after all, so it didn’t much matter how he spent eternity. But it irked her a bit, to imagine monsters frolicking joyfully amid dark delights, so occasionally she indulged herself, and showed the dying a terrifying vision in the moments before their deaths. That would plant the idea in their minds that there could be judgment for them in the afterlife... and their imaginings would make that judgment come true.
Doing that sort of thing was a little petty, and she should probably stop now that she’d given up her mortality, but decades of living as a human had imprinted certain patterns of thought that persisted. She knew those patterns would fade in time, though. In another few hundred years, she might be unrecognizable to her current self, utterly detached from interest in individual mortal lives, and concerned only with the larger patterns. That was part of why she’d made Pelham’s soul her valet: so that something she remembered from her human life would be with her always. That was the same reason the god of Death was dualistic, with one half drawn from the world of mortals: so Death would always remember what it meant to be alive, to shine brightly, to struggle, and to ultimately go out. It was important to keep it all from becoming too abstract. To keep an element of compassion.
So Marla tended her garden of lights, and tried to remember she’d been human, once upon a time.
Things In Common
Bradley emerged from a shadow in the hallway, and went looking for his friends. He didn’t find Cole or Marzi in the morgue, so he texted his apprentice: Where u?
She replied, Dude we thought you were dead Cole said you vanished from reality
Ah right no I was just in Hell
Oh is that all. Meet at Cole’s office at the bookshop?
Bradley thought longingly of Marla’s ability to travel anywhere in the world instantaneously through shadows, and then swiped through his phone until he found his favorite ridesharing app.
When he entered the secret office behind the bookshelves, Marzi and Cole were poring over some enormous tome full of botanical illustrations. “Hey, boss,” Marzi said. “Cole was just teaching me how to make hallucinogenic tea that gives you visions.”
“Corrupting the youth?” Bradley sat in one of the leather armchairs on the far side of Cole’s desk and then stared off into space.
“Marzi said you were in hell. You spoke to Marla, then?” Cole said, after a moment.
Bradley snapped himself out of it, or did his best. “Ah. Yeah. Someone killed Rondeau. Marla needed me to communicate with him, and then she made a new body for him to inhabit... that was the idea, anyway. I didn’t see how it turned out. Probably it’s fine.”
“Wait,” Marzi said. “Someone tried to kill you, and someone tried to kill your buddy Rondeau? Like on the same day?”
Bradley yawned hugely and rubbed his eyes. “Quite possibly at the same time.”
“It seems unlikely to be a coincidence,” Cole said. “Were there other similarities in the crimes?”
“Rondeau got stabbed in the neck by a waitress, and she got dropped into a volcano in a pocket dimension before anyone could check out her body, so we don’t know if she was crammed full of black sand or not.”
Cole grunted. “I don’t know if magma would harm the black sand, but if it’s in a pinched-off cul-de-sac of reality, I suppose it isn’t likely to do us much harm here. Did you consult with your... greater self... before Marla swept you off to hell?”
“I did, but all Big B did was confirm this isn’t a multiverse-threatening situation. He says it’s serious and lethal, though. Me and Marzi are dead in a whole lot of parallel universes.”
Marzi shook her head. “You guys are so blasé about all this stuff. Death gods and resurrections and black goo and pocket volcanoes and alternate dimensions! Christ. Maybe I should’ve stuck to making espresso and drawing webcomics for a living.”
“I’m not blasé. I’m exhausted.” B slumped a little lower in the chair. “I’m gobsmacked by wonder and terror and awe. You just can’t tell, because I can barely keep my eyes open. Talking to Rondeau mind-to-mind took a lot out of me. There are things about all this I need to think about, but I can’t think, so what I’m going to do is, I’m going to sleep, and then we’ll figure stuff out tomorrow morning, yeah? Marla said she’d get in touch, too, after she takes a meeting.”
“I will find out what I can about the attack on Rondeau,” Cole said. “San Francisco has a good diplomatic relationship with Las Vegas, so I’ll reach out to the Pit Boss—”
“Dead.” Bradley didn’t bother to open his eyes. “Died when Rondeau died. Because Rondeau invented him, or whatever?”
“Naturally.” Marzi’s voice was bleakly amused.
Cole tutted. “Oh dear, that’s goin
g to destabilize power significantly in the West, I should make some calls.... Marzi, can you see Bradley gets home safe?”
Bradley opened his eyes enough to let Marzi drag him out of the chair and steer him through the bookshop and out onto the street, where one of Cole’s people waited in a dark sedan to take him to his apartment in the Mission. He fell asleep in the car.
He dreamed. One of those dreams. The dreams had been one of the earliest manifestations of his power, his supercharged intuition leaking through to his sleeping mind, offering psychic glimmerings and giving him hints of probable futures. He could always tell those dreams from the ordinary nightly vomitus of his subconscious mind, but it wasn’t always easy to interpret the visions—at least, not until after the fact. Prophecies were such a pain in the ass that way.
In this dream, he was in the bathroom at the hospital again, looking into the mirror, but instead of seeing himself, or Big B, he was looking into Rondeau’s dead and rotting face, aping Bradley’s own expression of horror and surprise. Ghosts coalesced from the darkness all around, and things stranger than mere ghosts: immense turtles, sharks, and eels; jinn made of flickering fire; giants; goblins; demons. All the strange supernatural creatures leaned in close, whispering into Rondeau’s ears, and Bradley’s, too.
The mirror fogged over, and B reached out and wiped it away, revealing another scene: a half-hemisphere of some obsidian-like rock in a desert, a faceted dome that glittered darkly. At first the stone seemed immense, but then the perspective shifted in some way he couldn’t comprehend, and it seemed small, no bigger than a human head, or a soccer ball, half-buried in the sand.
More fog, another wipe, and he looked upon oceanic dimness, schools of silver fish darting like living clouds, until suddenly the fish began to dissolve and turn into flecks of black sand, floating in the water and then sinking down, until all the fish were gone.
Fog, wipe, and he was looking down on some icy place, a whiteness so bright it was almost blue, except for an ugly gash of expanding darkness, like a spreading infection, near the center. More black sand, and spreading.
Fog, wipe, and he looked upon a dark place, perhaps a cave, because he could hear running water... and the susurration of sand sliding across sand.
Fog, wipe, and the view became a forest of birch trees, all white, until one by one they darkened and fell, a spreading blight of black motes like swarming ants.
Fog, wipe, and then he stumbled backward with a gasp from an immense eye, staring at him, and then it blinked, and when it opened again the white and iris were gone, replaced by a night sky full of green and red stars.
Fog again, another wipe, and this time the mirror revealed a city dissolving in a wave of black sand: his city. The TransAmerica pyramid sank slowly and fell over, smashing into disintegrating buildings as it came down. Black motes swarmed up Coit Tower, melting the firehose-shaped spire into flecks of night. The Golden Gate Bridge turned black and showered down into the dark mirror of the bay.
Then Bradley wasn’t in the bathroom anymore, and the mirror wasn’t showing him visions, but simply the reflection of what happened behind him. The mirror itself began to turn black, and Bradley spun around. He was on the Embarcadero, by the piers in San Francisco, and everything in sight was being transformed into black sand. He looked across the water to Berkeley and Emeryville and Oakland, but it wasn’t water anymore, just sand, and it wasn’t Berkeley and Emeryville and Oakland anymore, just more sand.
Then the sand reached him, and began to climb up his legs, changing him, and at the last moment before his consciousness was consumed, a voice in his head said, Got you.
Bradley sat up with a gasp in bed. Somehow he’d made it through the night and on to the next morning. Cole’s driver must have carried him up from the car yesterday, or else Marzi had, by magic. The dream hadn’t come with a key to its symbolism, and sometimes there were associations in the visions he didn’t understand until it was too late, but he understood the essentials, he thought.
For one thing, the black sand was a major existential threat, and not just to him personally, but to the world.
For another, he understood what he and Rondeau had in common, and why someone—or something—was trying to kill them both.
When the time came, Marla stood in the center of her garden (the flowers were all silver and red, today) and closed her eyes. She opened them again in glaring sunlight, standing on the surface of the still ocean. There was nothing but open water as far as she could see (and she could see farther than most), and the sky was entirely cloudless. Blue above, reflected below. She strolled around on the water, bouncing a bit on her heels and toes, the ocean’s surface not quite as springy as a trampoline. Walking on water was one of the fun parts about being a god. Selective density control in general was pretty sweet. She could put her hand through stone walls like she was brushing away spiderwebs, or she could stand on clouds without falling through. What was the point of having powers if you didn’t enjoy them a little bit? If people weren’t trying to kill her friends, she’d be in a pretty good mood.
She sensed the Zufi coming, so she wasn’t startled when the Bay Witch’s head broke the surface of the water and gazed up at her.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Marla said. “The north Atlantic isn’t famed for its balmy waters.”
“My wetsuit is enchanted. You will need to be in the water instead of on the water, to see what I need you to see.”
“Just so you know, Zufi, the reason I sent a meat puppet to talk to you yesterday wasn’t rudeness or disrespect, but because when a god walks around in the material world, stuff gets weird. I have powerful reality-warping effects, you know? If I go down there, fish could die, or start to glow, or turn inside out, and I could accidentally spawn all new octopus religions.”
Zufi hauled herself up and onto the surface of the water like she was climbing out of a lake onto a floating platform. She sat on the surface, her legs still submerged like she was seated on the edge of a pool, and looked down. Her legs moved back and forth in a lazy motion, making ripples. It was a good reminder that this was her element, and the heart of her magic. “I am less big worried about what will happen if you go down there and more big worried about what will happen if you don’t go down. I asked for you in the fullness of your power because this is something that is too much for my power and my power is vast but yours is vastly vaster.”
Marla started to feel the first tingle of alarm. Maybe this was about more than cleaning up an oil spill or a vortex of floating plastic bottles. “What’s going on, Zufi?”
The Bay Witch cocked her head. “I think the world is ending? Wait. Not ending. Changing.”
“The world is always—”
“No no. Changing in a way that will make many endings for things like I am and like you used to be. Also other things, too. Everything alive on Earth now will stop being alive, you see?” She turned her face up to the sun, eyes closed, for a moment, then looked at Marla. Her eyes were gray like stormy seas. Had they always been that color? Or did they change? “When the last thing dies, the last little thing, the last amoeba or fairy shrimp or Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium, what happens to you, Marla? When there is no more death, does the god of Death die, too?”
Marla frowned. “I mean, there are seasons and things, so it’s possible I’d have a role even if all life were extinguished, but there’s a chance I’d go totally non-anthropomorphic, maybe even non-sentient. There’s a certain reflective quality when it comes to my form—”
Zufi shook her head. “No seasons. No weather. No tides. All those things will be gone if the wave propagates fully. Earth will be an oblate spheroid of seething nothing.”
“Zufi, what are you talking about?”
“There is something down there, at the bottom of the sea. It is killing everything that comes close, and I cannot stop it.” She took a deep breath. “My favor is: I want you to stop it. If you stop it, your obligation to me is done.”
Marla fel
t the geas settle over her like a sudden cold rain. She was compelled, now. Whatever Zufi was worried about—even afraid of?—Marla couldn’t stop until it was no longer a threat. “So is this is a giant-monster scenario? You want me to go down there and punch Cthulhu or something?”
Zufi chewed her lower lip and blinked. “Wait. Yes. No. From the stories? The squid-faced monster thing? If it were real, could you kill it? Because it is from elsewhere, from another place. From—”
“Beyond the back of the stars,” Marla said. “Right. Like the Outsider. Like my cloak. Those are the only things I’ve ever seen frighten or hurt a god of Death, because creatures like that... they aren’t under my control. They aren’t from this world, so I can’t make them die. Is this thing you’re talking about... it’s like them?” Marla sort of missed fighting monsters. You knew where you stood, fighting some devouring rapacious tentacle-beasty.
“Hmm. Cthulhu was indifferent to humans, yes? Dangerous, but only because humans were nothing to it, they did not matter, they were like buzzing flies, to be swatted away, or not?”
“I think that was the general idea, yeah. Symbolic of the great uncaring cosmos, the indifferent depths of the sea, exposing the insignificance of human life, blah blah blah.”
Zufi nodded. “Ah. Hmm. Yes. No. Then this thing, it is not like Cthulhu. It may think of us like flies... but if so, it enjoys pulling the wings off of flies. It is not indifferent. It is sadistic. I have seen it toy with creatures: grab them, release them, grab them again. Remove their fins and watch them writhe and twist. That is not indifference.”
“Huh, okay. So are we talking, like, a big octopus-y sort of deal—”
“Come and see.” Zufi dove down below the water.
Marla sighed. She made herself grow heavy and dense and sank down into the cold sea, her divine powers allowing her sight even as visibility rapidly diminished. To her, the ocean was a vast, transparent aquarium.
She considered just floating down like she was riding in an invisible elevator, but decided that went beyond dignified and into ridiculous. Instead she rolled forward, pointing her head downward, and swam after Zufi, who stroked smoothly and cleanly as she arrowed downward. Marla didn’t bother with waving her arms around or kicking her feet. She still sometimes physically performed certain activities she’d enjoyed as a mortal, but she’d never been a fan of swimming as anything other than a means to keep in shape, so she just plummeted downward like a skydiver falling through the air instead. The waters around her teemed with life, a constellation of lights in her supernatural awareness: fish of various sizes, assorted sharks, lampreys, hagfish. They stopped and stared at her, every one, and then flitted or darted away rapidly. More complex minds had all sorts of methods for coping with the sight of the divine, mostly related to disbelief, compartmentalization, rationalization, and disassociation, but animal minds tended to be simpler, and in the god of Death they saw an absolute apex predator and understandably fled. It was sad, in a way, but if they’d hung around her reality-warping presence they would have probably sprouted arms or developed sentience or turned into mermen or something, so it was for the best really. She was worried enough about what her company was doing to Zufi. Even with all her wards turned up to eleven, she was doubtless leaking radioactive divinity.
