Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  She nodded. In her divine form, she could summon volcanic energies by tapping into the fires of her own godhood, but in this meat body she just had basic magic.

  The sand was creeping toward them up the path, converting the earth as it approached. “Crap. I think we’d better retreat, Jarrell.”

  He stared grimly into the valley. It looked like a pit full of trillions of jumping fleas. “If I let this go unchecked, it will destroy the entire forest.”

  “Right, but before it gets that, it will destroy you. We have to—” Something growled behind her, and she spun. Half a dozen wolves, huge and gray, approached them, spread out in an arc, snarling with their teeth bared.

  “Don’t be afraid.” Jarrell stepped around her. “Wolves almost never attack humans, and anyway, these know me—I’m a friend, and a protector.”

  “Jarrell. These wolves, there’s something wrong with them.” All the other animals had fled from the black sand—he’d said this was a dead zone—so why hadn’t these run away?

  Jarrell yipped, and barked, and moved his shoulders and hands in a way that was probably very expressive in wolf language. Marla didn’t try to translate, but she was a god, and so she understood what he was saying. Wolf language wasn’t big on nuance, but it was big on action items, and he was telling them: terrible danger, worse than fire, worse than men with guns, run, run, run.

  A wolf leapt at him instead, and Marla shouted a bug-in-amber spell, making the wolf hang in mid-air, locked in supernatural stasis. The other wolves backed off a few steps, but didn’t fully retreat. Jarrell stared at them, stunned. “This doesn’t make sense. Something must be compelling them, overriding their natural instincts.”

  Marla put a hand on his shoulder. She glanced back, at the encroaching sand. “I think the sand is controlling them, somehow.” The idea seemed crazy, but the alternative was that the wolves had been sent against them by a black metal necromancer or something by purest coincidence.

  The other wolves spread out again, flanking them, snarling and approaching... trying to herd them toward the sand behind them, Marla suspected. “Damn it. Jarrell, I was going to try to ease you into some big revelations, but I really need to address this situation... and it’s going to take my full attention. Don’t freak out, okay?”

  “What—” he said, and another wolf leapt at him.

  Marla willed a shadow to open beneath Jarrell, and he dropped out of the world. This wasn’t the way she’d envisioned introducing him to her realm. She’d expected to be there to greet him, for one thing.

  The wolf flew through the space where Jarrell had been, landed deftly, and turned on Marla. All the wolves jumped at her, and she let them, because she didn’t need the meat suit she was wearing anymore.

  She was going to come back in the fullness of herself.

  The body in San Francisco, sitting in a chair in Cole’s office, closed her eyes.

  The body in the forest in Finland, being savaged by mind-controlled wolves, closed her eyes.

  The god of Death opened her eyes beside a valley full of black sand, her entire consciousness present in the moment. She released all the wards and bindings that kept her divinity in check. Trees nearby burst into flame because of the reality-warping nature of her presence, but she doused them with a thought. Earthworms in the soil under her feet went mad, insofar as they were able, and began tunneling in the shape of forbidden sigils. Birds took flight all over the forest, and their patterns in the sky would have made experienced ornithomancers scream and tremble and cut out their own eyes in horror at the personal nature of the portents.

  She looked upon the wolves, and sensed the poison inside them. She gestured, and black sand poured out of their eyes, nostrils, and eyes, a cloud of motes that she gathered into a sphere in the air. The ball of writhing sand flashed bright as burning magnesium for a moment, and then a basketball-sized lump of black glass fell to the ground with a thump. The bodies of the wolves, with the animating sand removed from them, collapsed around the remains of Marla’s broken meat puppet. She gestured, and returned the abandoned body to primordial chaos.

  Now was as good a time as any to test her idea. Instead of letting the raw chaos turn into dirt and pine needles and snow, she directed it to flow across the ground and into the valley. The chaos looked like a trickle of luminous honey, and it moved smoothly down the path, where it soon made first contact with the approaching wave of sand.

  The god watched the consequences with interest. At first the black sand rapidly converted the primordial chaos into more of itself, but chaos was adaptable stuff, and at the direction of her thoughts, that raw stuff of creation changed back... and began transforming the black sand into chaos instead. The transformed sand, overwritten by a template of quiescent matter under Marla’s control this time, began to spread out through the valley, and everywhere, the black sand yielded to the luminous honey.

  She made the chaos on the edge of the expanding pool closest to her transform into the soil of a Finnish forest, using the surrounding dirt as a source to copy, and soon she watched a spreading wave in three parts: brown earth near her, honey-colored chaos in the middle, and black sand, now piling itself up, trying to form towers and bridges, attempting desperately to escape the valley before the chaos assimilated and converted it all.

  Some of the sand seemed close to making it over the steep sides of the valley, so Marla raised her arms, performing a modified and controlled version of Cambere’s Cataclysm: the sides of the valley rose up into formidable walls of earth and rock, cutting off the sand’s escape. There was a war of conversion happening before her, but the rates of progression were on her side: the chaos transformed the black sand just a bit more quickly than the black sand could transform the soil. After a few minutes, the black sand was entirely gone, and the valley was... well, an inelegant heap of muddled dirt surrounded by lumpy earthen walls and full of insane earthworms, but at least the place was no longer full of alien poisons.

  “That’s why you don’t mess with Death,” she said, and took herself away to hell.

  Suitors

  Marla appeared in the throne room, where Pelham stood, dry-washing his hands like an anxious raccoon. She looked around. “Where’s Jarrell?”

  Pelham gesture toward the throne. She walked around her chair (it was mostly made of fire and knives, today), and found Jarrell sitting on the floor behind the dais, his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth, staring at a wall. “Dead,” he was saying. “This place is dead, it’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead.”

  Oh, shit. “Hey. Hey, there. Are you okay?”

  Jarrell looked at her, then shrank away, pressing himself against a wall. “Who are you? What is this place? Why aren’t you alive, why isn’t anything here alive?”

  “Who am I? I’m—oh.” She realized she didn’t have the same face she’d worn to meet him above ground. Her default death-god complexion was a kind of icy whitish-blue, and she tended to have black eyes and pointy teeth and lips red as blood, not to mention the black tongue. She didn’t mean to look that way, but she’d read the wrong comics or looked at the wrong illustrated books of mythology or something as a kid, and her subconscious thought the queen of the dead should be a kind of cross between Hel and Kali. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and when she removed them, she looked like the Marla he’d met before, complete with the braid. “Sorry about that. I forgot to put my face on.”

  He screamed, which was understandable but unpleasant, and then he stood up and tried to run away, which was annoying. She made the corridor he ran off into form a closed curve so he wouldn’t wander off anywhere too dangerous. Maybe he’d tire himself out and come back. She turned to Pelham. “Did he say anything, or did he just go tharn straightaway?”

  “He became immediately agitated upon his arrival, I’m afraid, and proved inconsolable thereafter. He said he could no longer sense the Earth, that he could not sense nature, and that he was in a place entirely dead. I attem
pted to explain the situation, but he did not welcome my conversational openings.”

  She patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Pelly. You did everything you could. Sorry I had to drop him on top of you unannounced. There was a pressing matter to deal with upstairs, and I had to send him someplace where he wouldn’t die or go crazy.” She looked toward the corridor he’d bolted down. “I got the first one right, at least.”

  “He is, I assume, your latest suitor?”

  “Oh, right. I guess he wouldn’t have introduced himself. Yeah. That’s Jarrell. Nature magic guy.”

  “I am not sure if he is entirely temperamentally suited to life in the underworld.”

  “It could be an adjustment for him, yeah. He was a lot more impressive when he was in his element. I could have smoothed the path for him a little better, though, to be fair. I’d better see if he’s calmed himself down.” She changed the path of Jarrell’s corridor to give it a destination, then stepped through a shadow and emerged into the garden behind the palace. The plants were all silvery white today, so she concentrated for a moment and transformed the garden into a grove of trees, some with black bark, some with white, some with needles, some with leaves. Jarrell came bursting out of a door in the palace wall and then stopped, gaping at the grove.

  “Hi again.” She waved. This time he didn’t run away. He didn’t approach her, but he did sidle closer to one of the trees, and began to touch the bark, frowning. She took that as an invitation to keep talking. “So, I didn’t get to explain my situation before that whole thing with the sand and the wolves, which is why things were so... abrupt. I’m still Marla Mason, but I’m also the god of Death. This is the underworld. Specifically my palace garden.” She paused. “Do you like it?”

  “These trees aren’t right.” He shook his head. “The branches, the bark, the leaves, the trunks, everything about them is wrong. They’re tree-shaped, but they’re like a child’s drawing of trees, rendered real.”

  “Child’s drawing, huh? Ouch. Okay, give me a second, let me consult some botanists.” She reached out with her mind to find souls with deep knowledge of trees, and there were millions to choose from, of course. She picked one particular soul who lived in a beautiful forested afterlife and borrowed her knowledge, shaping the chaos around them to reflect that of her personal world, and transformed the garden into a glorious cloud forest, with treehouses and wooden walkways suspended high up in the branches.

  Jarrell gasped, falling to his knees. “These trees... they’re alive. The others weren’t. They were sculptures of trees, but these... these are real.”

  Marla nodded. “They’re made of primordial chaos, which can turn into anything, including life. Everything’s made of that chaos, originally. I’ve got an ocean full of the stuff. The primordial sea is where souls are born, and where souls return....” She drifted off, unsure if he was paying attention.

  He sat with his back against a broad brown trunk and took deep, slow breaths. After a few moments he looked at her. “This is better. I’m sorry I screamed before, and ran away. I just... I’ve never been anywhere I couldn’t sense any life, any particle of nature. Even in the coldest, most desolate places, there’s something, even if it’s only the distant hum of microorganisms. Down here, there was nothing alive but me, and it was terrifying. I thought I’d lost my mind. I thought I’d died.” He looked at her in alarm. “Oh, gods. Did I die? Is that why you came for me?”

  “You are very much alive. That’s not why I came to you.” She sat down near him, but not too near. Like trying to approach a feral cat. “I didn’t intend to drop you into this place without consent or conversation, but I was afraid the wolves and the sand would kill you back there. I took care of all that, by the way. Turned the valley back into a valley, cleaned up all the sand. I’m not saying the place couldn’t use a good landscaper, but it’s no longer under alien threat.”

  “And the wolves?”

  “I’m sorry, Jarrell. They were dead when they attacked us. Their heads were full of sand.”

  He looked around. “This is really the underworld? The land of the dead?”

  She nodded.

  “The wolves, then... are they here?”

  Uh oh. How did you tell someone all dogs don’t go to heaven? “Their life force returns here when they die, and their souls, for want of a better word, join the great sea, but I’ve never met a wolf with a concept of the afterlife, so they don’t... persist here... in any conscious way.”

  “You need a concept of the afterlife to have one?” he asked.

  “Oh. Right. Yeah, here, have a great big secret of the universe: people get the afterlife they expect to get. It is mostly people down here. Also some dolphins, whales, cephalopods, and every once in a while an especially self-reflective pig or goat. Consider that bit of cosmic knowledge a partial apology for dragging you here against your will.”

  He laughed, but it didn’t sound like an I’m-going-insane laugh. “You’re really a god?”

  “Tremble before me, puny mortal, etc. Yeah.” She scooted a little closer to him.

  Jarrell gazed up into the misty branches overhead. “I have met forest deities, or things that claimed to be such, but... they didn’t have their own worlds. They couldn’t conjure a forest with a thought.”

  “Some gods are more godly than others. There’s not a hierarchy or anything, not in that Mount Olympus or Valhalla way, but there are big gods and little gods and medium-sized gods. As far as deities of the Earth go, there aren’t any bigger than me. I’m not bragging. It’s just, you know. Death. I get in everywhere. I’m an ongoing preoccupation. It’s a big job.”

  “I... don’t know how to talk to a god, what to say, what the forms are....”

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t stand much on ceremony, unless I need to impress someone, and who would I ever need to impress? Anyway, I was born a person just like you. I started out an ordinary mortal and stumbled into this job.”

  “How does an ordinary mortal become the god of Death?”

  “Maybe I was a little extraordinary. So Death is a dualistic god, ideally—it’s a team thing, a partnership. One of the rulers of the underworld is pure god: they rise up out of the primordial sea, fully formed, wholly divine. But that god can’t work alone, and they have a compulsion to choose a mortal consort. I think it’s because at least one of the people who rules the land of the dead should know what it means to be mortal, so they can better understand the lives they oversee. That human consort is imbued with a ton of godly powers, but they also possess their original soul, and when they eventually cease to exist, they move on to an afterlife here, just like everyone else: eventually, they get to retire. When the wholly divine half of Team Death ceases to exist, though... nobody knows what happens to them. Some mysteries even I can’t penetrate. My assumption is they melt back into primordial chaos and become raw material for the next god.”

  “Perhaps they get an afterlife of their own,” Jarrell said. “Somewhere else.”

  “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so. A whole other universe apart from this whole other universe.” She touched the wedding ring dangling at her throat. “Anyway. I married the god of Death a while back, and became his mortal consort. He was a good guy.”

  “Your husband,” Jarrell said. “The one you said died.”

  She nodded. “That’s the one. He got eaten by a monster from another universe, so that sucked. Then the primordial sea birthed a new god of death, and guess what—I was married to him, too, because you marry the office, not a particular incarnation. Except the New Death... was not a good guy. He thought everyone should burn in hellfire forever, on the theory that anyone who’d lived on Earth probably deserved eternal punishment for one reason or another. I thought that was cruel and monstrous and no way to run an afterlife, so I, uh... overthrew him. Deposed him. Disposed of him.”

  “You... wait. You killed him? You killed Death?”

  “What can I say? We live in strange aeons. After
I got rid of the New Death, I knew it was only a matter of time before the primordial sea barfed up another god-husband for me. What if it turned out to be a guy in a black cloak with a neck tattoo that said ‘MURDER’ in gothic script, or a superhero serial killer type, or a skeleton with buzz-saws for hands and eye sockets full of radioactive fire? I couldn’t risk drawing another bad god. So I took my terrible sword in hand, and cut out my own mortality.” She shrugged. “I became wholly divine, thus filling the power vacuum, and the primordial sea didn’t need to produce another death god: it already had one. Ta-da.”

  “When you say you cut our your mortality... you gave up your immortal soul? Your own hope for an afterlife? And you did this to spare the souls in your care possible suffering?”

  “When you put it that way you make me sound all altruistic. I just didn’t want to have to commit holy mariticide again.”

  “Marla, that’s... it’s amazing. But if I understand correctly, once you became a god, you still needed a mortal consort, yes? Who did you choose?”

  She cleared her throat. She looked at him. Pointedly.

  Jarrell blinked. “Whoa. Wait. Whoa.”

  “Yes. Hi there. I’m your blind date. Except I don’t think it counts as a blind date if you didn’t know it was a date. Or if it counts as a job interview if you didn’t know you were being interviewed.”

  “But, of all the people in the world, why would you be interested in me?”

  “I got a divination wizard I know to construct a spell to find potential consorts, and you popped up as one of the most likely matches. That means you can do the work. Beyond that, it’s just a question of whether we could work together.”

  “Marla, I’m flattered. I don’t know what to say. But I’ve devoted myself to life, to nature, to the Earth. I’m not sure I’m meant to be a, a harvester of souls, a grim reaper—”