by E. A. Copen
“Aren’t we all though? If we were truly created in God’s image, he isn’t much to look at either.” Josiah kicked off his shoes and pulled off his shirt. Thankfully, he left his pants on.
I looked around. “So, where’s Sybille?”
“Not coming. She said she’d have no further part in my...what was it she called it? Ah, hack magic. I don’t see what she’s got her feathers so ruffled for. Witches call on patron deities all the time to lend their power.” He backed away from his bag gripping a frog in his hands. It croaked loudly as he moved to the center of the room.
“But without Sybille, how are we going to die and come back?” I’d managed it before only because I’d had the sap. Without it, I might be able to thrust my spirit into the After, but I couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to come back.
Josiah spread his stance wide, lifted the tiny frog above his head and began to chant in the same language I’d heard him use before. It wasn’t Latin or any derivative thereof. I knew just enough Latin to be sure of that. Whatever it was, the rhythm was haunting and powerful, both beautiful and terrifying. His voice and enthusiasm built to a crescendo, until he was shouting so loud, I was surprised we didn’t draw the barkeeper back to the room to investigate. Then, without warning, he lowered one hand to draw the knife at his hip and sliced the frog nearly in two.
Big, powerful spells required specific types of energy. As a necromancer, I drew on the power of death to do my dirty work. Normally, that meant I tapped into the power of things already dead and in various stages of decay, but that wasn’t the only source of power. Less scrupulous necromancers harnessed the power released at death for a powerful magical boost. They killed for their power.
Until I was sitting in that room with Josiah when he killed his frog, I’d never understood why. As the fresh, raw power of new death washed over me and bounced off the spells he’d placed on the walls, it suddenly made sense. The magic flowed like thick tar and lit all my senses on fire. Crushing weight settled in my chest and dropped into my gut while the power of the grave caressed my face like a terrible kiss. It would take nothing to reach out and harness it for my own purposes. What I might do with that kind of power, even the minuscule amount of it bouncing around the room...and this was only a frog. What would it be like if the ritual sacrifice had been something bigger? Something more sentient? Something with a human soul? Not even Morningstar would stand a chance. I could crush him with a thought.
I shook the temptation from my mind. Murdering a human being for power was the epitome of evil. There were some lines even I wouldn’t cross.
Still chanting, Josiah drank in the power until it was as much a part of him as his own soul. It flowed out of him and into the golden aura that was his soul, lighting it aflame. Bloodstained hands offered up the frog corpse, a ghastly offering to some profane god. Black power spun in a dark miasma around his feet, crawling up his legs like a living thing.
I backed away, suddenly terrified, not just by what I was seeing, but by what I felt. This power he was calling, it was familiar. It was the same magic I let inside me whenever I walked into a cemetery. Only this was stronger, older, darker.
The dark power left Josiah and swam through the room in a disembodied black ball. My back hit the wall, and I pressed flat as it floated up to me. Deep in the shadows, a dark-haired beauty appeared, in her eyes the promise of a thousand nights of ecstasy. Her image remained only a moment before the beautiful face rotted away with a horrible scream. The darkness slammed into me—no, through me, forcing my soul out of my body.
Chapter Thirty
I tumbled into a colorless world of ash and shadow. Clouds of fine gray dust floated around me, impossible not to breathe in. When I raised my hands in front of my face, they were as ephemeral as the clouds floating in the windless air. I winked in and out of existence, reduced to dust floating in nothing.
And then, suddenly, I stood on a golden stairway in front of a bloodstained gate. The stairway floated in the nothing, suspended from spider web thin threads. A river flowed far beneath the stairs made of gray sludge. Ash rained into it from red flashes of light that woke and died in clouds high above.
I held my hand out in front of me and watched the ash fall through it. Despite the utter gray lifelessness of the realm, there was a certain beauty to it. A simplicity that somehow made sense.
Of course, Josiah showed up to ruin it.
He walked past me on the stairs, his form made of crumbling ash caught in a windstorm. “My son, about the journey which you wish to make,” he said, halting in front of the gate. “Follow these instructions from the moment you arrive, and they bring a chair to you. If they bring to you a chair, do not sit in it. If the baker brings you bread, do not eat it. Should the butcher bring you meat, or the brewer bring you beer, you must not devour it. Do not wash the dust from your feet. And when the Lady of the Great Earth draws her bath and sheds her fine robes, allowing you to glimpse her body...” He paused to sigh. “You must not do that which men and women do.”
“Good advice.” I pushed on ahead, moving one stair further than he dared. “What’s it from?”
“Cuneiform tablets dated to about two thousand years before Christ.” He smiled. “You’d like it. It’s a love story. Nergal, a sun god, goes to the underworld and seduces the Queen of Hell. I expect we’ll meet the happy couple before this expedition is over.”
Josiah pushed past me and rapped on the gate. Each strike echoed through the huge, hollow chamber. We waited, but no one came.
“Looks like no one’s home,” I said.
“It’s the bloody underworld. They can’t be not home.” He lifted a fist to pound on the gate again but stopped when the gates creaked open.
A stern-faced man in a long white tunic stepped through, giving us an appraising look. “Who comes to the first gate?”
I pushed Josiah aside. “I do. My name is Lazarus Kerrigan, Pale Horseman.”
He raised his pointed nose. “There are no titles in Irkalla. Gods and men walk the same path here.”
“Whatever, pal. Just let us through.” I tried to sidestep him, but he dropped an arm in front of me.
“All who would pass through the gate must first shed one of his possessions.”
I looked down at myself. “I don’t exactly have anything left to give up.”
“Oh, but you do.” The man thrust his hand into my chest. Icy fingers closed around my soul and squeezed.
I thought only Horsemen could do that trick. Instead of pulling out my soul, however, he only took the tiniest pinch.
It didn’t feel tiny. I sank to my knees, gasping and shaking as a weight lifted from my shoulders. In a vain attempt to see what was happening to me on a metaphysical level, I tried to activate my Soul Vision and found it didn’t work. But my hands...They were suddenly solid again and no longer made of dust.
The stern-faced guard dropped the tiny nugget of my soul into his pocket. “From this gate forward, you shall be the Pale Horseman no longer.” He’d taken the mantle from me, and it had happened so quick.
I flipped my hands over, just to make sure they were mine. With a grunt, I rose and met his eyes. “I’m going to want that back when I leave.”
“If the Lady grants you leave, all that is lost will be restored.” His bemused smile deepened, and he gestured for me to pass through the gate.
I crossed over the gate’s threshold. The golden stairs stretched down in front of me for as far as I could see.
“All right then. Let’s get this over with.” Josiah rolled his sleeves up and approached the gate. “What’ll it be, mate?”
Without so much as a word, the guard thrust his hand into Josiah’s chest, drawing a grunt from him. When he withdrew his hand, he held the tiniest golden spark between two fingers.
“That’s it?” Josiah patted his shifting form down. “I don’t feel any different.”
“You should feel better.” The gatekeeper stepped aside. “Nicotine is a nasty drug.”
>
Josiah’s lip twitched. He stared down at his hands as they came into existence. “Fuck me. You took that? Of all things? I suppose I’ve always been meaning to quit.”
He strolled through the gate after me, and we started down the stairs.
“Just how many of these gates are there?” I asked him. He clearly knew more about this place than I did. I’d meant to do some research, but I’d spent my afternoon at the hospital instead.
“Seven, if the myth is true, and we’ll likely have to give something up at each of them. This is going to cost.”
Seven gates in Irkalla, just like there were seven doors to open and seven days to do it in. Again, a sense of connection gripped me. It was as if I had stumbled on a loose thread in the universe, and if only I could unravel it, I might find the answer to everything.
We gave up our magic at the next gate. The guard took it from each of us in turn just as the first one had. The process left me feeling weightless, but Josiah struggled to stay upright after that. He went to the third gate hunched over where we surrendered our names. Once those were gone, I could still remember who we were supposed to be, but the words no longer held any meaning or power over me.
With each sacrifice, we gained a part of ourselves back, becoming less like dust and more like men again. Yet the more of my physical body I reclaimed, the lighter I felt. It seemed to have the opposite effect on Josiah whose steps grew heavier and slower. By the time we reached the fourth gate, I had to stop and wait on him.
He trudged up to the gate, gripping his newly reformed stomach. “What is it this time? Tell me it’s pain. I’m ready for that to go.”
“No,” said the guardian, who looked exactly like the first three. “Here, you surrender vendettas.”
I hesitated. If I gave that up, would I still want to go forward? I’d been saying I was doing all this to save Emma, but what if my real reason was vengeance against Morningstar? I had to be sure.
“Vengeance is all I’ve got to look forward to,” Josiah growled. “Piss off.”
The guard thrust his hand into Josiah’s chest anyway. “It was not a request.”
As Josiah doubled over, I glanced at the golden stairs behind me. If I turned back now, would I be able to reclaim everything I’d already given up?
“Your turn.” Before I could object, the gatekeeper repeated the action with me.
I grimaced. For once, I agreed with Josiah. I’d have preferred he take physical pain. With more of my body intact, it hurt even worse every time.
The guard exacted his toll and moved aside to let me stumble to the next stair. I paused and righted myself, searching. Did I still want to go forward?
Emma’s smile flashed through my memory, the way she wrinkled her nose when she laughed deep and hard. I thought of the pressure of her arms around me in a hug and wondered what it would be like to punctuate that hug with a kiss.
Maybe it was selfish, but I wanted her back. If that meant I had to walk away from Morningstar and leave her death unavenged, I could do it. Having her was more important to me than revenge. It always had been.
I moved forward.
At the fifth gate, we surrendered sorrow. Everything that held me down left my body with that tiny sliver of soul. I could’ve danced to the next gate. Whatever I had to give up at the last two gates didn’t matter.
Lucky for Josiah, the sixth gatekeeper finally took all physical pain. The last of my body was restored, leaving me to wonder what I had left to give at the seventh.
The gatekeeper stepped out from the gate and extended his hands, palms up. “At the seventh gate, you will surrender your physical forms. Here, you will be reduced to your true self, that of your soul. Stripped of all power, identity, and pain, you can rejoin the cycle and move on to be reborn.”
It sounded great. A new chance at life? Who wouldn’t want that? Maybe I’d get it right this time around.
I stepped forward only to have someone grab my shoulder and hold me back. I looked at the stranger next to me, barely recognizing him. He was in Josiah’s body, but it wasn’t Josiah. He’d already surrendered that name, his power, his pain. So why did he look so upset?
Josiah shook his head.
A gong sounded somewhere below. Whispers echoed from the deep in an otherworldly voice. Cyclones of dust and fire stabbed down from the sky, swirling on either side of the stairway, spitting blue lightning in every direction.
The gatekeeper’s face changed, growing fearful. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, “there’s been a mistake.”
He lunged, shoving his hand into my chest. Power pumped from him into me. Pain flooded my limbs, and weighed me down, setting every nerve ending on fire. Anger sparked and the desire to skin Morningstar alive returned stronger than ever. Everything that I had given up flowed back into me in a matter of seconds. Suddenly, I remembered why going with the gatekeeper and giving up my body to be reborn was a bad idea. I wasn’t in Irkalla because I was dead. I was there because I needed the key to the next gate so I could free Emma.
The gatekeeper withdrew his hand, and I sank to my knees. Josiah went down next to me, and both of us stayed there a moment, gasping and retching. The sudden return of all that had to be hell on our dust bodies.
The wind and lightning finally died down, though the dust remained floating in the air all around.
“What gives?” I choked out.
“You are not dead.” That didn’t sound like the gatekeeper. The deeper voice belonged to a man standing just beyond the last gate dressed in black leather. His long coat had a studded hood but no sleeves. Combat boots, long black hair, black eyeliner, more chains than a bicycle shop. He looked like he’d just walked out from a vampire movie casting call.
I staggered to my feet. “The late-nineties called. They want their goth fashion back.”
Goth Boy smirked. “Sarcasm. How original.”
“I’m not the one who showed up in Hell wearing rejected threads from a Blade movie.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “A vampire, am I? Well, you’re no Wesley Snipes.”
I blinked and exchanged a look with Josiah who shrugged. “They must get HBO in Hell.”
“I am Nergal.” He dismissed the gatekeeper with a wave of two fingers. “God of the noontime sun, and Erra, god of war and pestilence, king of the sunset, and dry seasons of fertile ground.”
I figured I’d better not offend someone with so many names, so I gave a little bow. “Lazarus Kerrigan, necromancer and Pale Horseman.”
His eyes slid to Josiah, expecting an introduction.
Josiah was too busy shoving a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it with a spell to answer right away. When he finished, he shrugged. “Just Josiah’ll do.”
Nergal narrowed his eyes and curled his lip. Apparently, he was big on formalities.
“I’m here for the key,” I explained. “I’m on my way to—”
Nergal cut me off with a glare. “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. I also don’t care. If it were up to me, I would split you chin to balls and pull out your insides to display on the castle walls as a warning for anyone else who thought they could walk uninvited into my land.”
I swallowed. “Don’t like visitors?”
“On the contrary. I love having visitors for dinner.” He grinned, showing sharpened teeth. “Luckily for you, it’s not up to me. My queen has commanded me to bring you to her, and what my queen commands, I do. I could deny her nothing.”
I couldn’t decide if Nergal was just messing with me or if he was just that creepy. Something about him set off all the supernatural alarm bells in my brain, telling me to turn and run the other way. Cheesy goth attire aside, the guy was still a god.
“Come.” He gestured with his head and turned, descending the stairs.
I glanced over at Josiah.
He plucked the cigarette from his lips and gestured for me to follow. “Don’t look at me, mate. This is your descent into the underworld, not mine. I’
m just here for the finale.”
We followed Nergal down what felt like miles of golden stairs. Despite only appearing wide enough for one foot to fit, Josiah and I walked side by side. At times, more stairs appeared above us heading in impossible directions, though I was sure I’d never seen any below us. I felt like I was in that painting with the stairs that defied gravity.
Ruddy, clay-colored ground appeared on either side of us. One step, there was nothing but the same gray dust we’d encountered all over Irkalla, and the next we were walking on the surface of Mars, or at least someplace that looked like it. The landscape was flat and desolate except for a fortress built of the same red clay.
The fortress’ gates opened on our approach on a castle courtyard manned by dustmen like us. They watched us with dead eyes as we followed Nergal up a set of wide stairs and into an elaborately decorated hall. Diamond chandeliers hung from silver chains, their lights reflecting off the glass floor. The palace must’ve been built right over the river of souls because it flowed in a mass of writhing sludge directly under the glass. Pools of red wine surrounded fountains spouting more of the same.
Josiah leaned close to me. “Remember the warning from earlier. Sit in no offered chair. Eat and drink nothing they offer, and whatever you do, don’t let her tempt you.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Isn’t this guy her husband? You’d think she’d behave.”
Nergal chuckled. The sound was dark and crackly, like leaves rustling in a graveyard. “Ereshkigal behave? Now that would be boring.”
Chapter Thirty-One
He opened a set of double doors that led into what would’ve passed for Hell’s version of the Sistine Chapel if you replaced all the heavenly art with images of war and suffering. Detailed frescoes told the stories of flayed men, burning witches, men on the rack, women on the wheel, the aftermath of those drawn and quartered. Black chains hung from the ceiling attached to nothing. Candelabras sat on strategically placed shelves next to large, leather-bound tomes and carved human skulls.
