"A boon?" His voice was as flat as a cracked bell, dying without echo in this vast dark space. "I know what it is you seek. And you too, my beloved."
Isis stepped forward to tower beside them, as tall as the god she'd come to redeem from death. Her face was as perfect and ageless as ever, but the desperate joy in her eyes made her seem almost human.
"I've come to reunite us, my love," she said. "To bring you back to the living world."
"The living world?" Osiris said, and for a moment the gateway behind him cleared and broadened until Boda could see the entirety of Rome spread out before her. The legion of the dead had swelled, and the streets were thick with corpses, but the living still survived, barricaded inside their houses or fighting in little, desperate clusters in the street.
Narcissus cried out, and after a moment Boda saw why. Claudius had gathered the free people of Rome into the Arena while the dead congregated outside. The Praetorian Guard held the gates, the gladiators she'd trained with beside them, but their defence couldn't last long. They were too few, and too tired. She saw Marcus, the captain of the guard, cut down by the risen body of one of his own men. Adam ben Meir, who once tried to kill her, stepped in to fill the breach.
And then, beyond the walls of Rome, throughout the whole world, she saw worse. There was no greenery anywhere, only the brown of dead grass and wilting leaves, and the same grey nothingness on every face she saw.
"The living world needs you, sister," Osiris said. "It is barren and loveless without you."
"I will return," Isis said, "when you return with me. I've missed you so much. Without you, my life is barren and loveless."
"So you killed the world to give me a place in it."
"It's not quite ready yet," she said. "But soon we can be together again - and for all eternity."
"And that is your wish. You have made your way to me, sister, which grants you the right to ask one gift, if it is within my power to give. But these others have journeyed here too, through obstacles more profound than you have faced, and they also earned that right."
Boda tried to meet Vali's red-brown eyes, but they were veiled beneath his lids, and Osiris's face was lost in shadows. Was he toying with them? Legend said the judge of the dead was fair, but then legend also said that Isis was loving and kind.
Boda didn't understand how she knew it, but she sensed the dead god's attention shifting to Petronius, his regard so heavy that she saw the young man buckle beneath it.
"And you, child of Rome," Osiris said. "You wish to close the gates of death, and condemn me to this realm for ever."
"Well," Petronius said, voice shaking. "Condemning you to this realm is really only a side effect of saving the world. It's nothing personal, if that makes any difference."
She felt a dank wind blow over them as the dead god shook his head. "And would you still wish it, if you knew what closing the gate entailed? For you live, and the woman you love has died, and if the world is restored she may not join you in it. But if you allow my sister to have her way, you and she may remain united for as long as you both desire."
The hope on Petronius's face was so naked that Boda had to look away from it. She understood suddenly that Osiris was both playing entirely fair and cheating horribly.
She tried to tell Petronius not to take the bait, but found her voice sticking in her throat. It seemed this was his decision alone to make, and she wouldn't be allowed to interfere.
The silence stretched on for a long time as he knelt with his head bowed. But when he looked up there were tears in his brown eyes. "The thing is," he said. "If I did that, she couldn't love me - so what would be the point?"
Osiris's laugh was as dry as autumn leaves. "A paradox indeed. And what of you, boy?"
Now Narcissus cringed under his unseen scrutiny. "The dead god must stay dead," he said. "Charon himself told me that, my lord."
"And is the ferryman's power greater than mine? If I go through to the living land, this realm requires a judge to take my place. Would you do it, slave? I could place you above every man and woman on earth. You would have the power to punish those who wronged you."
"Why me?" Narcissus asked, and Boda winced. He was tempted, she could tell.
"Because a ruler should know what it is to be ruled," Osiris said. "And who better to judge the sins of Rome than one who was their victim? Caligula is already in my kingdom, awaiting judgement. Would you like to deliver it? You could give him back a thousandfold the torment he gave you. It is in your power to make him suffer the pain of crucifixion every day for eternity."
Narcissus swallowed. "But not every Roman was cruel. My master..."
The dead god shifted in his throne with a sound like rock crumbling. "Yours would be the power to reward, too. You could bring as much pleasure to the pure as suffering to the guilty. What do you say, Narcissus?"
He stood up, looking as if he had to press against a great weight to do it. "But I'd have to choose, wouldn't I, who suffered and who didn't? I was born poor and powerless. I never had the ability to hurt anyone, so I never did. But how can I be sure that if I'd been raised high, and not low, I'd have been any better than them?"
"Do you not know yourself, boy?" Osiris asked in his strange, flat voice.
Narcissus shrugged, but he didn't drop his gaze. "I don't think anyone can know that. And I won't stand in judgement on people for crimes I might have committed in their place."
There was a moment's frozen stillness, then Boda felt the dead god's attention shifting to her. It pressed against her mind, a power so strange and ancient that she could barely comprehend it. She knew that it was looking inside her, and that it saw everything.
"Woman of the north," Osiris said, "you have made a terrible bargain, but I can spare you its consequences."
Petronius's head swung to face her. "What bargain?"
She didn't reply, but the dead god said: "In exchange for the knowledge to complete her quest, she agreed to suffer for all eternity upon its completion. A vow to a god that may not be broken."
"It's true, Petronius," she said when she saw the denial in his face. "I had no choice."
"But what if your mission is never completed?" Osiris asked. "Then your vow need never be honoured. While the doors of death remain open, you remain free. What say you, daughter of Midgard?"
Now she understood the terrible temptation that had been placed in front of Petronius and Narcissus. The image of that prison hovered in the back of her mind, like a nagging pain that couldn't be ignored. She'd suffered enough in her life to be able to imagine what eternal torment might feel like. She could imagine it all too well.
And now, instead of that, she could be free - without breaking her word. The world would die, but why should she suffer to save it? She hadn't led a blame-free life, but she didn't deserve that. No one did, not even Vali.
She was shaking as she pushed herself to her feet, and she couldn't meet Petronius's eyes. She knew he'd want her to take the dead god's bargain, but the Boda he loved wasn't the woman who could accept what Osiris offered - another of the dead god's twisted paradoxes.
"No," she said. "I will keep my word. Let the gates of death be closed."
"Ah," he said, a bass note she felt in her bones. "Then it seems we have met an impasse, where I cannot grant one wish without frustrating another."
"Wait," Vali said suddenly. "Wait. Let me suffer the punishment, it's not Boda's to endure. The crime wasn't hers."
He crawled forward a little, chains rattling, until his face was in the light. He wasn't smiling now. His red-brown eyes looked wide and shocked, as if he couldn't quite believe his own words.
"Why?" she asked him, a desperate hope blooming inside her.
He shrugged. "Because I let a little girl die, and I can't forget her face. Because I spent too long as a mortal and forgot how to be a god, and if I let you suffer for my sins, your face will haunt me for all eternity and even that prison might be easier to bear."
"Brother, your
bargain is accepted," Osiris said. "The one who is responsible for this shall pay for it, in full."
In front of him, Isis smiled, a chilling expression.
"Sister," Osiris said, "you see that my killer is repentant. Will you forgive him?"
"Forgive him?" she hissed. "Never." While her love had looked human, her hate was larger and more terrible than that.
"Will you not remit one year of his sentence? Not even one day?"
"Not one hour," she said. "Not one second. Let him suffer the way he made me suffer."
"You?" Osiris said. "Yes, I see. It is your suffering you wish to end, not mine. So then beloved, is this your final word? Shall we be reunited at last?"
There was a sound like fingernails grating against glass as he rose to his feet. Vali skittered out of the way, awkward in his chains, and then Osiris stepped into the light.
Isis gasped as she recoiled. Boda shielded her face from the sight but it was seared on her memory. He was hideous, decayed and rotting. He was dead, and more monstrous in death than any mortal man could be.
"What happened to you?" Isis whispered.
"I died, beloved," he said, his shrivelled tongue visible through the holes in his gaunt cheeks.
"But... but you can be whole again! You can live!"
Osiris shook his head. "That can never be. But this world you mean to create, this world of death, there I can have a place and we may be reunited."
He took a step towards her, and she took one back. Boda might almost have pitied the horror in her face.
"No," Isis said. "I want you back as you were. Not this shadow, this mockery!"
Boda thought she read sadness on his rotting face. "The shadow is all that remains." He reached out a hand, swathed in bandages like the Egyptian dead. "Can you not love me as I am?"
She stared at his hand but didn't take it, and after a moment he let it drop.
"Then it has all been for nothing," he said. "And you must reverse what you have done."
Her mouth set in a mulish line. "Why should I? What care I for the world now?"
"The living world is your realm," Osiris said, "and you must return to it. Heal it, sister. It is your duty. Summon back the spirits of the dead to where they belong."
She stared at him a moment longer, but his decaying face was set in a severe frown, and after a moment she raised her hand. "Come then," she said, facing the gate. "It's over. It's all over."
Boda watched the gateway, waiting for the spirits to flood back through, but nothing happened. The green light buzzed at the edges and the dead only passed out.
After a moment, Isis stepped back. "I don't understand. They're not listening to me."
"Because you speak with hate, sister. They must be called with love."
She raised her arm again, then dropped it. "I can't. I don't love them. Now you're dead, I'll never love again."
"Ah," Osiris said, and Boda heard the same finality in his voice that had been in Mimir's when she made her vow to him. The dead god's milky eyes turned to her. "Then you must summon them, daughter of man. Or the world will remain a realm of death and your quest will have been for nothing."
It seemed impossible. How could she do what a goddess couldn't? But Osiris said they needed to be called with love and Boda thought that maybe she understood. When she'd found herself confronted by the spirits of those she'd killed, she'd tried to run from them. It hadn't been because she feared them. She'd run because she understood that all the people she'd killed were people who in another world might have been her friends. Someone had loved them, even if it hadn't been her.
And someone had loved all those spirits out there too. Isis had filled them with hate when she summoned them, with resentment against the living who had carried on when they had stopped. She understood that. Death was hard to accept. It wasn't meant to be easy. But it was necessary, because the living required it, and the dead were all people who had once loved the living.
She felt her mind, pressing outwards, expanding in ways she didn't understand. It travelled through the gate and into the outside world. Out there she could sense them, all the lost dead spirits, and she called their names. She knew them all, though there were a million of them. She knew them all individually, and though some of them had been terrible people, she found something in them that had loved or been loved, and she used it to call them back.
It was Petronius's voice which summoned her back to her body, crying out in fear as the spirits of the dead howled through the gateway, returning from the land of the living. A blue fire flickered around their peaceful faces as they flew past.
Beside him, Isis screamed. "No! What have you done? You've given her my power!"
Surrounded by the ghosts of the dead, Osiris shook his head. "I did not take it, you gave it up. You renounced it, and your right to it, when you sacrificed the world for yourself. But the world needs a goddess of love and life, and my brother has found a replacement."
"What?" Boda said. She shook her head, but the denial was pointless. She could feel the power inside her, too large for her small mortal frame. She felt it burning the mortality out of her, until she was something very different from what she'd always been. "But I'm a warrior," she said. "I know duty, and honour and war - not love."
"There is duty in love," Osiris said, "and honour too. Or there should be. Now -" He looked down at Vali, and the chains fell from him. Boda heard his joints pop as he straightened and when he had, he'd grown to the size of Osiris. She realised that she had too. But Isis had shrunk. She shivered beside Petronius. She looked human now because she was, everything godly stripped from her.
"Please, beloved," she said.
Boda did pity her then, but she could see in his face that the dead god felt nothing. There was only a cold, unyielding judgment in his eyes. "There must be a goddess of love," he said, "but it need not be you. And there must be someone to suffer in Vali's prison, but it need not be him. You said that the one responsible for this should be punished eternally, and so it shall be, not one day, not one second of the sentence remitted."
Isis screamed as the floor opened beneath her. The distance below seemed to stretch into infinity, but Boda knew what prison lay at the bottom, and she closed her eyes against it.
When she opened them again she found herself looking at Vali. "You knew," she said. "When you offered to take my punishment, you knew you wouldn't have to do it. You planned this all along."
His crooked smile was exactly the same whether he was a man or a god. "And if I did, you lived up to my expectations admirably. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps it was my brother's scheming which lay behind all this. Maybe he planned everything, even his own death, because he knew that perfect order has no place in the living world, but the afterlife needs a judge who is fair and final."
She looked at Osiris, but his rotting face was unreadable, and Vali was never to be trusted.
"And the living world is the place for the chaos you bring, brother," Osiris said. "You must return to it now."
Vali bowed, seeming to shrink as he did. He sauntered to the gateway, but turned round to face them before he entered it, and his gaze found Petronius. "A word to the wise. If you value the new life you've been given, leave the child behind." Then he stepped through the gate.
"What?" Petronius said. He turned to Boda, craning his neck to look up at her, but the sight of her face seemed to pain him and he looked away.
"He speaks the truth," Osiris said. "This child is one of his, an agent of chaos. If he returns to the living world, he will grow to be the man who kills you. You may leave him in death if you choose, and I will not punish you for it. The world will be more orderly without him."
Nero seemed to understand something of what this meant. He looked up at Petronius with trusting eyes, and Petronius rested a gentle hand against his head. Then he looked at Osiris and shrugged. "I've still got time to change his mind, haven't I?"
Osiris didn't say anything, and Petronius se
emed to take that as an affirmative. He smiled at Nero, then hoisted him onto his hip.
"And what of me?" Narcissus asked. "I'm dead. I belong here."
"It lies in my power to grant you reprieve, since you have earned it by voyaging to me," the dead god said. "Do you wish to live again? There is always more pain in life than the dead remember."
"I do remember," Narcissus said. "But yes, I want it. There's more I want to do, no matter what it costs me."
"Go then," Osiris said. "All of you. And Boda will close the gates of death behind you." He sank down into his throne, hiding his face in shadows once again, so that his last words floated out of darkness. "Farewell, sister. We shall not meet again until the final battle, when all the gods will fall."
Boda nodded, but didn't say anything. She knew that in that battle, Osiris and Vali would fight on different sides, and she wondered now whose she'd choose.
Then the gate stood before her and she realised that she was the size of a mortal woman again, though her skin contained a thousand times what it once had.
Petronius stood to one side of her, and she smiled when she looked at him. "So," she said, "we're not to be parted after all."
"Not by the gates of death," he whispered, then followed her into life.
They'd arrived back where they started, in the Temple of Isis. The moment the gate snapped shut, the marble beneath them shook and tore. For a moment Boda was just a woman, and then she felt her power stirring within her and flung it outward. The temple roof shattered and fell and she lifted her hands and brushed it aside, keeping the two men and the small boy by her side safe.
A cloud of white dust floated down around them, and when it had settled she saw that the sky was pale blue with the start of a new day. Around them, the streets of Rome were littered with corpses, but the corpses didn't move. And as Boda felt the world with senses she didn't used to possess, and the world felt her, the brown grass poking through a crack in the wall turned green, and everywhere people remembered what it was to love, and some of them screamed when they saw what they'd done in the hours her power had been gone from the land of the living.
Anno Mortis Page 29
