by T. A. Pratt
“What does that mean?” Marla demanded, but Zufi had already melted.
Marla stepped through a shadow into the throne room. As a god, her memory was perfect, so she said, “It’s miss EMP, twelve years older. What are you doing in my underworld? Come to return the body I made you? It’s not a lease. You can’t trade it in for a newer model.”
Élodie knelt, head bowed. “It’s Hannah. She died. There was—there was a fire in a club, the roof collapsed, and—” She began to sob.
Marla sat down. “Okay. Well, you got an extra dozen years together, so, I’d say, be grateful, and all that. How did you make it down here, anyway?”
“I answered the riddles. I won the debates.”
“Huh. You’re smart.” Zufi kept hiding swords and shields and things along the secret passageways, so Marla had switched the nature of her guardian demons to create more intellectual barriers. Zufi couldn’t soft-heartedly hide extra brains for the petitioners along the way, after all.
“I brought ice cream,” Élodie said. “But I got one of the riddles wrong, because it didn’t make any sense—‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’“
“Nobody reads the classics anymore,” Marla said. “There are like three answers my beast would have accepted. But if you couldn’t come up with one, how are you here?”
Élodie shrugged. “The creature that asked was a giant owl-bear thing, and it said it was hungry, so I fed it the thai coconut ice cream, and it let me by.”
“My guardians are vulnerable to bribery. That’s the problem with creating creatures capable of independent thought. You want me to bring Hannah back to life? After she brought you back to life? Don’t you feel a little unoriginal?”
“The fact that Hannah did it just proves there’s precedent.”
“Ha. Okay. Let’s look.” Marla darkened the room and summoned Hannah’s bubble, which rippled the yellow of flames. Not promising. She poked her head in, leaving Élodie outside, and saw about what she’d expected: fire, devastation, and Hannah stumbling in the smoke, screaming herself hoarse, calling out her lover’s name, forever. Marla withdrew and banished the afterlife. “Most people who aren’t wracked by terrible guilt have pretty nice afterlives. What is it with you two? Are you actually cult murderers who feel bad about your evil?”
“Of course not. We just... need each other. We’ve supported each other through terrible tragedies.” She shrugged. “We’re in love, and we can’t be happy without each other. What can I do to get her back? I can go get you more ice cream.”
“What? No. It has to be harder. This is a resurrected person trying to resurrect another person. It’s not the kind of thing I want to encourage. But my wife says if anyone makes it here, they get a shot. So. How about you sing for me?”
Élodie lifted her gaze. Her eyes were dark, deep, and sad. “I can’t sing. That was Hannah’s thing. I was happy just to listen.”
“So what are you good at?”
“Formulating public health policy for underserved rural areas?”
“Huh. Doesn’t lend itself to a fiddle contest, does it?”
“We could play chess.”
“Take that shit to Sweden and leave it there. Ooh. I know. You can clean the Augean Files.”
“What?”
“It’s our little joke. I used to have a personal secretary, he’s great, but he’s off on an extended mission, and the files are a disaster in his absence. I keep sending demons to work on them, but, well, chaos is their substance, chaos is their nature, and it only gets worse. What do you say?”
“You want me to do filing?”
“Sure. It might take you a while. This is a period-of-service type thing. Come out when the job is done, and you get Hannah back. Come out before it’s done....” Marla shrugged. “Back upstairs.”
“I’ll do it. Of course.”
Marla led her down a corridor and flung open a door. The interior was a vast, dark warehouse, full of filing cabinets stretching fifteen feet high, in rows that seemed infinite. The drawers were mostly half-open, and papers were scattered six inches deep all over the floor. “It’s files on mortal lives, mostly. Some dossiers on supernatural creatures, a few tomes and grimoires. You’re going to see all kinds of forbidden wisdom, but we’ll spritz you with Lethe water when you come out, make you forget it all. About a hundred and fifty thousand people die each day, so, the files are gonna keep piling up.”
“I... it’s impossible. No one could do all that.”
Marla shrugged. “So you give up?”
Élodie glared at her. “I didn’t say that.”
Marla shut the door on her. She locked the file room in a bubble of dilated and diluted time, an “eternity in an hour” type of thing. A few moments later the door opened and Élodie emerged. She was older, by at least a few years, and she was wearing different clothes, which was strange. She gestured. “I am finished.” Marla looked. The filing cabinets were all neat, with no paper on the floor. “I set up a system for filing new information when it arrives, too.”
“How did you manage all that?”
“I looked for the tomes and grimoires first. Learned to manipulate chaos, first well enough to make food and clothing, then enough to conjure simple servitors.”
“You made your own demons?”
“They don’t have minds like yours do... or the tendency toward chaos and independent thought. They’re more like robotic vacuum cleaners than living things. But they can alphabetize.”
Marla whistled. “Okay. Damn. Let’s get your Hannah.”
Not long after, Marla rolled over in their ridiculous bed (it was the size and shape of an ancient Egyptian pleasure barge, because it was Zufi’s turn) and gave Zufi a shake. “Mmmm?” Marla’s wife said.
“Did you give that petitioner help in the file room?”
“I hid in the ceiling and dropped a better book on the conjuration of simple spirits on her head, yes, but I made her work for lots of subjective months first.”
“You used to spend all your time with fish and wet rocks. How did you turn into such a romantic?”
“You must have done it to me,” Zufi said, and then did things to Marla for a while.
3
Nearly fifty years passed, as humans reckoned time, before Zufi rose up and broke the surface of the hot spring where Marla soaked, in a tributary of the river Plegethon. The sky—really just the overhead space inside the vast metaphysical cavern of the underworld—was full of streaking stars, far more souls plunging toward their afterlives in the primordial sea than was typical in a usual day. Must be a war happening, or some kind of bad natural disaster. Her and Zufi hadn’t been fighting, but sometimes bad things happened up there anyway: their relationship was just one factor, and mostly impacted the weather. Maybe Marla would send a demon or one of the souls she had working off a debt of evil to look into current affairs. She tried not to meddle in mortal business, but sometimes, if the world was getting off track, she gave things a nudge. She told herself it was pragmatism. If humans destroyed themselves utterly, after all, she’d be out of a job.
“This water stinks like rotten eggs,” Zufi said. “Also it’s made of fire which is not how I think water should be made.”
“Don’t you dare change it. It’s my turn.”
“All right. You have a visitor. An old friend.”
“Who? All my friends are happily dead, except the immortal ones, and they’re elsewhere.”
“Someone you’ve known a long time anyway and shared important importances with if not a friend then. Her name is Hannah.”
Marla groaned, and sank down into the water, and bubbled up through the briefly liquid floor of her throne room.
Hannah was there, much older now, and she didn’t kneel, instead leaning on a cane. “Catch,” she said, and tossed a small carton of ice cream at Marla, who snatched it out of the air.
“Not Cloud City,” Marla said. “But I guess that rupture on the Cascadia subduction zone put them out of business
. We held it off as long as we could.”
“You... No. It’s homemade.” Hannah’s face was lined, but her voice was still as young and melodious as ever. “Plain vanilla, but good, made with real vanilla beans. Those are hard to get lately.”
“How’d you make it down here? Those passageways are supposed to be almost impossible these days. We haven’t had a petitioner in a dozen years.”
“I hired a bunch of trivia experts, philosophers, and martial artists to escort me,” Hannah said. “I left them back on the other side of the river.”
Marla snorted. “Right. Let me guess. A piano fell on Élodie.”
“No. Cancer. In her bones. Why did you give her a body that could get cancer?”
“I removed her scorpion allergy. What did you expect, eternal youth and immorality? For a pint of ice cream with pepper in it? Come on.”
Hannah sighed, leaning on her cane. “I get it. I miss her.”
“Sure you do. You were together a long time. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m a widow, too. And unlike you, I’m cursed with a perfect memory. You’ve got it easy. Grieve a while, and the pain will fade.”
Hannah shook her head. “You found someone else to love. I won’t. I need her. We need each other.”
Marla rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “Listen, there’s some mythic precedent for bringing back people who died young in stupid accidental circumstances. I’m okay with that, every once in a while, it’s a nice thing. But Élodie died of getting old and running down. If I put her in a fresh version of her body, she’d just get cancer again anyway. I’m not going to put her in a young and forever perfect form, because then she wouldn’t be human anymore. Death is a part of life. I can be persuaded to delay it, but not to stop it. I’d put myself out of business.”
“You misunderstand, majesty.” Hannah dropped her cane and struggled down to her knees. “I don’t want you to bring her back to life. I want to die, too.”
Marla frowned. “Not an unprecedented choice in your circumstances, but you didn’t need to come all the way down here for that. You can die just fine upstairs. Plenty of people do it every day.”
“I’ve seen what the afterlife is like,” she said. “I saw Élodie’s, and she saw mine. They’re bubbles. Each one separate. Right?”
Marla shrugged. “Every soul gets their own little island of chaos to shape as they see fit, or as their subconscious dictates. It can be hell or paradise or an imitation of life or anything in between. It’s an elegant system, nicely self-regulating, for the most part.”
Hannah shook her head. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to be separated from Élodie for all eternity.”
“Look, in your bubble, you can create a version of her, a perfect version, one that never has bad breath or farts in bed or....” Marla trailed off under Hannah’s stare. She sighed. “Yes, I get it. But what do you want from me?”
“Put us in the same bubble.”
Marla stared at her. She sensed Zufi’s arrival, and turned. “Did you hear this?”
Zufi nodded. “I did.”
“I mean... could we?”
“We are queens. We can do whatever exists within our duty. Perhaps not one bubble. That would be tricky. But two, with a point of overlap in the middle, so they could have their own spaces, with together space between.”
Marla imagined a Venn diagram: two circles, merged, with independent space on either side, but a shared space in the middle. “I mean....” She glanced at the carton. “I do like vanilla bean ice cream.”
“Will you do it?” Hannah said.
“You’re sure you want to die?”
“I’ve had a good life, and without Élodie, I know my best days are behind me.” She coughed. “I’m sick anyway. Not as bad as she was, but it’s a matter of time, and not that much of it.”
“I don’t approve of this. I like self-reliance. But you don’t have to be like me. So okay.” Marla took a sudden step forward, seized Hannah’s head, and twisted it hard.
The old woman’s body fell to the floor of the throne room. Marla looked at Zufi. “I haven’t killed anyone in ages. Not with my own hands, I mean. I don’t really like doing it anymore.”
“In a way that was as romantic as rose petals and Eiffel towers and candy hearts,” Zufi said.
Marla gestured, the space went dark, and two bubbles floated in, each about six feet across: one was bright blue, the other dark brown, and they floated slowly together, bumped into each other, and then merged, about halfway. The result was oddly beautiful, a double-domed shape that floated and spun. Marla ducked her head inside, and Zufi did the same, alongside her.
No fire. No scorpions. No screaming. Gardens, and music, and shouts of joyful reunion.
They pulled back, and with a flick of her hand, Marla sent the conjoined afterlives spinning into the primordial depths with all the other afterlives.
“Those two. They’re co-dependent, is what they are.”
“We were married in a magical ritual that bound us together for as much of eternity as we can get,” Zufi pointed out. “Maybe we are co-dependent. They are I think in love.”
Marla reached over and took her wife’s hand. “We could make ourselves separate palaces, maybe, instead of taking turns decorating this one and arguing about it all the time.”
“And a third palace where we could be together in together times?”
“That would be nice.”
“Can this time be together times?”
Marla pulled her close. “Yes. Bring the ice cream.”
The Four Horsepersons of the Eucatasrophe
This is the second new story written for the collection. I’ve wanted to write about Elsie Jarrow and Marla going on a road trip and annoying each other for ages. If you like Elsie, there’s a lot more of her in Part Two. She began as a chaos witch, but at this point, she’s a trickster god, and her and Marla have developed a complicated relationship.
Elsie
Marla Mason, ruler of the underworld and god of death, entered her throne room, a cavernous space decorated in ice and razors, and said, “Oh, crap, not you again. How did you even get in here? I sealed up all the cracks!”
“That’s the thing about cracks.” The woman—who wasn’t a woman, or not just a woman, not for a long time now—sat sideways in Marla’s throne of obsidian and onyx. She had an open, pretty face, eyes that glittered with mischief, and hair the color of arterial blood. She wore a dress of appallingly bright yellow, and the leg thrown over the armrest was clad in a rainbow knee-high sock. (The other leg sported a pink legwarmer.) “New ones open up all the time.” She wriggled around as if trying to get comfortable, and sighed theatrically. “Have you considered maybe a cushion? I know it doesn’t go with the whole necklace-of-skulls aesthetic you’ve got going on, but—”
Marla grew in stature as she approached the throne, gaining a foot in height with each step, and a black cloak of shadow unfurled down from her shoulders, the darkness dotted by the cold light of distant stars. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question. How did you get in here?”
The woman hopped down from the throne and dipped a curtsy. “Forgive me, your majesty. I got in here because I am the god of chaos, and entropy gets in everywhere.”
Marla massaged her temples. She shouldn’t be able to get headaches, because gods didn’t get headaches (except maybe Zeus, that time with Athena, assuming they’d ever really existed), but she’d begun life as a mortal, and apparently her head still remembered how. “All right, Elsie. Let’s move past the question of your entrance. Let’s focus instead on your exit.”
“Marla.” Elsie opened her arms. “What kind of welcome is that for your best friend?”
Marla snorted. “I don’t even like you.”
Elsie pouted. “You’re always so focused on trivialities. You should know I wouldn’t come here without a good reason.” She paused. “That’s not true. I might very well show up for no reason at all, now that I think about it. But in
this case I do have a reason.”
“I don’t care.”
“The reason is, I did a thing. With some stuff. And some people. And then it went, well, I won’t say ‘not according to plan’ because I didn’t have a plan beyond ‘let’s see what will happen,’ and I did see what happened, and what happened was, mmm, let’s say ‘bad’.”
Marla let her stature shrink a little. Elsie Jarrow had come to ask her for help? At least turning her down would be enjoyable. “You’re completely amoral. The word ‘bad’ only means ‘not good for Elsie’ to you.”
“In this case, it’s also not good for you. So, you know how I like to make handmaidens and footmen and helpmeets?”
“No.”
“Oh. It’s a whole thing I do, imbuing mortals with just a smidge of my divine power and sending them forth as a divine emissaries. Of my divinity.”
Marla’s headache got worse. “You give people supernatural powers and then let them loose in the world to stir shit up so you can feed on the resulting chaos, you mean?”
“You make it sound so sordid. You’re the one who feeds on death. My disruptions can be positive just as often as they’re negative. Theoretically. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make four disrupting angels, so I did, and... they ran away and started bothering entities that shouldn’t be bothered.”
“Four. Like the four horsemen—”
“Horsepersons, please,” Elsie murmured.
“—of the apocalypse?” Marla finished.
“Not exactly. They’re the four horsepersons of the eucatastrophe.”
“Eucatastrophe.”
“You know, the sudden and favorable resolution of a story—it’s a fancy way to say a happy ending, only its more complicated than that, it relates to whether or not there’s an essentially optimistic worldview embedded in a narrative. Tolkien coined the word and wrote about the idea. Never mind, it’s a literary reference, I wouldn’t expect you to get it—”
“I read,” Marla said.
