by T. A. Pratt
Rising from the chair, Joshua said, “What’s on the other side of that door?”
“The afterlife,” Death said. “Which, like life, is more or less what you make it.” He took a step toward the glass doors that led to the room’s balcony. “By the way, Joshua. Your sister? She’s in the room next door. I thought you might like to see her.” He stepped outside, closed the glass doors after him, and shattered into a cloud of ravens, streaking off into the sky.
Joshua looked in one of the dozens of mirrors lining the walls. He looked pretty much like shit. Well. Fair enough.
He opened the door to the hallway, and went to say hello to his sister, wondering if she could forgive him, too.
That wouldn’t fix things. It wouldn’t make up for the life he’d led. But it might make a good start to his afterlife.
Ice Murder Safari
This story features a couple of my favorite minor villains from the series: Crapsey, a rather amoral version of Rondeau from a parallel universe, and his friend Squat, cursed by Elsie Jarrow to become repulsive to everyone he encounters. Crapsey has a high tolerance for disgust, though, so the two of them become partners. They’re fun.
Meet Our Heroes
There were two people in the vintage Bentley bombing along over the cracked, icy plain, somewhere so far north that every direction was south, pretty much.
The person—if that’s the right term—in the passenger seat was dressed in layers upon layers of scarves and coats, though not because of the cold; he didn’t even notice the cold. Squat used to be human, but he was cursed by a chaos witch to become repulsive to anyone who grew close to him. Over the years the curse had gradually transformed him from a medium-handsome man into a creature four feet tall (and roughly as wide), with skin like pebbled leather, a mouth full of clashing mandibles, creepy doubled pupils, and other supernatural disfigurements. Recently another sorcerer had managed to arrest the course of the curse, and even do something about the smell, but otherwise, he was stuck. He has exactly the issues with anger, self-esteem, rejection, and abandonment you’d expect. The witch who’d cursed him wanted him to suffer forever, so she’d also made him indestructible, and he’d picked up superhuman strength along the way (because accidentally breaking your girlfriend’s spine when you hug her is a good way to make her hate you), which at least gave him abilities to cope with his problems violently.
The one driving the car was a Hispanic man in a rumpled sharkskin suit, and was fairly attractive, apart from his own disfigurement: in place of a normal human jaw, he had an elaborately-carved wooden prosthesis, inlaid with strange patterns in gold and silver... patterns that seemed to shift and move of their own accord. The sorcerer who’d ripped off his original jaw had crafted the prosthesis for him, and it gave him magical capabilities, even beyond being able to speak and chew food like a normal person. Crapsey was a refugee in our branch of the multiverse, and his home dimension was a nightmarish land where most of the human race was eradicated by a genocidal conqueror from an inimical universe. (Otherwise known as “Crapsey’s ex-boss.”)
Pretty much everyone hated them, but strangely, they got along well. They had that everyone-hates-us thing in common.
They fought crime. Or, at least, they fought criminals. Or, more accurately, other criminals, as they were definitely criminals themselves. They’d been sent on a mission to kill a woman named Regina Queen, a sorcerer whose mastery of cryomancy could plunge the world into another Little Ice Age, if she became sufficiently annoyed.
The people who sent Crapsey and Squat to kill Regina had their reasons, and they were even pretty good reasons, but the two of them didn’t really care. They were just happy someone to have someone tell them what to do, because when left to their own devices, they tended to get into unprofitable trouble.
Wendigo
“We’re going to kill a villain, right?” Squat said. “So that makes us heroes.”
Crapsey squinted through the windshield at the endless plain of permafrost, hoping he wasn’t driving in circles. He hadn’t crossed his own tracks, but he was barely even leaving any tracks. “The part where we’re killing somebody probably keeps us from being classified as ‘heroes,’” Crapsey said. “I think we’re anti-heroes at best.”
Squat grunted. “What’s the difference?”
“Anti-heroes want to kill the bad guys. Heroes want the bad guys to become good guys.” Crapsey’s sense of morality was derived almost entirely from comic books.
Squat grunted again. He was good at grunting. He grunted like an immense bionic warthog probably would. “Regina Queen’s not gonna become good. She is not interested in being rehabilitated.”
“That’s something we have in common with her,” Crapsey said.
“I don’t need to be rehabilitated. I’ve done bad stuff, but not because I’m bad—it’s just that my situation is bad. I’m cursed to drive away anyone who cares about me, and I’m invulnerable, and crazy strong. What am I supposed to do, except for bad stuff? It’s not like I have a whole lot of employment options.”
“I hear you,” Crapsey said. “I was raised by an alien conqueror in a nightmare universe. Trained to kill on command, and I took so many lives it didn’t even feel like anything eventually. If I killed five guys and ate a sandwich on any particular day, eating the sandwich was the more memorable part, you know? Like I was gonna turn out nice? But see, Regina Queen, she’s got power, she’s beautiful, smart—what’s her excuse?”
“She’s just bad for badness’ sake. And we’re bad because of our circumstances.”
“Sounds right.”
“Like I said, then.” Squat nodded, as much as he could, given how little neck he possessed. “We’re heroes.”
That’s when the wendigo leapt onto the hood. Its body was almost skeletally thin, covered in fine white hair, and its head was mostly mouth, with so many needle teeth Crapsey wondered how it chewed without cutting itself in the process. The creature slammed a fist into the glass of the Bentley’s windshield, but the car was so ensorcelled with protective magics that it might as well have punched concrete.
Crapsey stopped the car and engaged the parking brake. He looked at Squat. “You want to rock-paper-scissors for it?”
“Nah, I’ll take this one,” Squat said. “You got next?”
“Sure.” Crapsey fiddled with the radio, but didn’t get anything but static. They were even beyond the reach of satellites here. Somewhere in Canada they’d crossed a border marked on no map, and entered Regina Queen’s private realm, which was adjacent to, but not complicit with, conventional reality. Sorcerers and their pocket-dimensions. A good deal if you valued your privacy, or were exceptionally misanthropic.
Squat opened the door, climbed out, and shut it after him. The wendigo launched itself from the hood, claws extended.
Crapsey didn’t know a lot about wendigo. They were, what, cannibals who were so vile they became supernatural monsters? They were man-eaters, anyway. Too bad Squat wasn’t exactly a man anymore.
Crapsey watched the fight for a while but it was too gross, even for him. When Squat finally got back into the car, he’d left one of his coats and one of his scarves behind, having used them to wipe off the worst of the gore. “Something that skinny, you wouldn’t expect it to have so much blood in it,” he said.
“I can’t believe you ate it.”
“That’s my thing. It really terrifies your enemy when you eat a few of them. Anyway, it was, I dunno, ironic or whatever: devour the thing that was going to devour me.” He belched, and it smelled like graveyard earth. “It was hard to get it down, though. I’ve had fresh-caught salmon that were less full of bones.”
Yeti
“When Perren sent us on this mission, she could’ve mentioned that Regina lives in a magical wilderness preserve full of cryptids,” Crapsey said. He and Squat crouched in the blistering cold against the overturned Bentley, sharing a cigarette, which Crapsey liked mostly for the brief warmth it brought into his lungs. Th
e front grille of the car was covered in blood and white fur.
“Maybe she wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Or she didn’t know.”
“Oh, good,” Squat said. “That’s comforting. I like the idea that our boss and handler has no idea what kind of shit she’s sending us into.”
Crapsey tossed the cigarette butt away. Where he came from, people didn’t worry about littering. Who cared about trash in the street when there were all those corpses scattered there already? “Probably she figures we can handle ourselves.”
“We can, but damn, an abominable snowman?” Squat stood up, stretched a little, and then reached down, grabbed hold of the Bentley’s frame, and lifted the car up and over, making it bounce on its tires. Crapsey admired his partner’s strength without exactly envying it. Super strength, good. Being super disgusting, not so good.
“Do you want to eat that, too?” The yeti was a mound of white fur about the size of a polar bear. The impact of the car had knocked it down, and Crapsey had done the rest, mostly with a tire iron.
“Nah, I’m still full of wendigo. Besides, I gotta save room for Regina.”
“Is this one of those things where you think if you eat her, you’ll gain her power?”
Squat blinked at him, then grinned. “Damn. I never even thought about that!”
Troll
Crapsey lay flat on his belly the roof of the Bentley, arms and legs outstretched to the four corners, while Squat waited inside. Crapsey repeated the word “borborygm” quietly over and over, the runes in his wooden jaw glowing. The sorcerer who’d imbued him with various magics had amused herself by making the activation words for his powers as obscure and ridiculous as possible, and “borborygm” was the one that turned on his stealth ability, which shrouded him and anything he happened to be touching with light-bending magic. Anyone who glanced his way would just see more ice.
A bipedal creature roughly the size of a four-story building paused nearby, swinging its great head to and fro. It had a single enormous eye, and was covered in so much lichen it looked like a mobile cliffside. The spell Crapsey was using didn’t mask anything but vision, so if the troll had a particularly good sense of smell....
The beast walked on, leaving cratered footsteps in its wake, and after about forty minutes it shrank enough with distance that Crapsey relaxed and let the spell go and rolled off the roof. He lay sprawled on the white ice, looking at the white sky. Regina was a terrible decorator.
Squat opened the car door and looked down at him. “I still say we should’ve —”
“No.”
“It would have been a challenge, is all —”
“No. You’re immortal and invulnerable, and I’m neither. Tough to kill, yes, but something the size of a building could get the job done. I’m not cut out to be a troll-hunter.”
“Oh well,” Squat said. He held up his phone. “I got a pretty good picture of it though.”
Crapsey got up and walked to the nearest crater the troll had left. “Take only pictures, leave only footprints. We should get going.” He squinted. “Either I’m hallucinating, or there’s some kind of structure up ahead.”
“Cool. What’s that word you were saying mean, anyway?”
“Uh—‘the rumbling of the stomach,’ I think.”
“Ha. We could’ve been in that troll’s stomach. I bet it’s big enough we could have lived there pretty comfortably.”
“For you maybe. I would’ve had to get past the teeth first. Remember: not indestructible.”
“Oh, yeah,” Squat said. “It probably would’ve smelled terrible in there anyway.”
Margygr
They had to leave the Bentley behind, because even its magics weren’t sufficient to let it drive through a forest of frozen trees. The two of them walked for a while through the silent icy wood, Crapsey muttering “gardyloo” to keep himself warm by magic, until the trees abruptly ended and they looked upon Regina’s home.
“It’s a replica of the Winter Palace, made of ice,” Squat said. “Damn.”
Crapsey had no idea what the Winter Palace was, but it made sense Regina would live in something with that kind of name. The building was big enough to house a whole family of trolls. They walked toward it, and stopped when they reached the moat.
“How the hell is there liquid water here?” Squat said. “It should be frozen solid.”
“I’m gonna guess the answer is magic.” Crapsey pointed. “What are those?”
There were a dozen creatures in the water, like mermaids—but not the sort of sexy mermaids you saw in tattoo form. These were hideous, flat-faced, murder-eyed mermaids with scraggly hair and bluish skin and fangs like broken bits of oyster shells.
They looked around. No bridge. The moat was about twenty feet wide, and entirely encircled the palace, as far as they could tell.
They played rock-paper-scissors and Crapsey won, because he knew Squat pretty much always threw rock.
Squat stripped naked, a sight Crapsey could have done without seeing; the guy was a dermatological nightmare. Squat waded into the moat, and soon disappeared underneath, because for him, breathing was fairly optional. Crapsey watched the water froth, boil, and turn red, and then Squat came out again, dripping. “Grab my clothes, will you?”
Crapsey bundled up all the coats and scarves until he had something about the size of a beach-ball he could hold in his arms. Squat picked Crapsey up with both hands, held him aloft as easily as a father might lift a baby, and walked back into the moat and across. Crapsey didn’t even get his feet wet.
They went into the palace, where Regina was waiting.
The Snow Queen
“So, then.” The woman appeared to be in late middle age, but mostly she looked regal. She wore a long black coat with a fur collar, and diamonds glittered at her throat, in her earlobes, and on her fingers. Regina stood in the center of a vast foyer, flanked by curving staircases. The room, and everything in it, was carved of ice, from the chandelier hanging above them to the vase full of sunflowers on the table. She looked at them without fear, but with considerable disdain. “They sent assassins after me, then?”
“We’re heroes,” Squat said.
“Anti-heroes,” Crapsey corrected.
“So that makes me the villain, does it? The wicked queen?” Regina smiled, and raised her hands. “Very well then. I will be wicked.” The temperature, already incredibly low, dropped a sizeable percentage of the way toward absolute zero.
Squat raced forward, and Crapsey shouted “Mollycoddle!” like a war-cry.
Scenic Route
“Remember when I ate Regina Queen?” Squat said from the passenger seat. He was making a horrible face, as far as Crapsey could tell, though it was a fairly subtle difference.
“You mean, an hour ago? Yes. Vividly.”
“She was pretty crunchy. Icicles in her bones. I got brain freeze. Ever since then, I’ve felt kind of funny.”
“Eating ice witches is probably hell on the digestion,” Crapsey said.
“Yeah, but this is... I don’t know... it feels like when my curse would change me. Like when I got the super-strength, or the glands that produced poison gas, or the venomous saliva. But I thought the curse wasn’t getting any worse. Do I seem any more repulsive to you?”
Crapsey considered his words carefully. “I can say with confidence that you are exactly as repulsive to me now as you were before you ate Regina Queen.”
“Huh. Maybe eating her did give me some of her power. Maybe I can charm yetis now.”
“It would take pretty big magic to make you charming to anybody.”
“Ha.” Squat peered through the windshield. “I think we’re back in conventional reality now. The sky isn’t pure white any more, at least.”
“Try to give the boss a call,” Crapsey said. He messed with the GPS, to see if it could find a route home. Or at the very least find a road.
Squat put the phone on speaker, and their employer, Perren River, chief so
rcerer of the city of Felport, spoke: “Is it done?”
“Regina Queen is not going to bother anybody anymore,” Squat said. “Except maybe my digestion.”
There was a long pause. “You—you really did it? You beat Regina?”
“Oh,” Crapsey said, figuring something out.
“Well, uh... good job.” Perren’s voice became less uncertain as she said, “I’ll have payment wired immediately.”
“You can just pay us when we come home.” Crapsey wanted to test his hypothesis.
“Ah. About that. You two are valuable members of my organization, and I mean that sincerely, but maybe you should think of yourselves as... the away team.”
“So you want us to live on the road now,” Crapsey said.
“That would be the ‘away’ part, yes,” Perren said.
“You’d better come up with another mission for us, soon,” Crapsey said. “Otherwise, we might get bored. When we get bored.” He just clucked his tongue.
“I’m, ah, sure I can. I’ll be in touch.” She hung up.
“She expected us to die,” Crapsey said. “Or at least get frozen into icebergs for eternity. We surprised her by winning, and now she doesn’t know what to do with us.”
“Oh, she knows,” Squat said. “Pay us, and give us work to keep us occupied, or risk us showing up on her doorstep.”
Crapsey sighed. “I kinda thought, doing a job for the good guys—or at least the less-bad guys—would earn us some points. That maybe we could find a place to call home.”
“Hey, don’t be sad. Wherever we lay our collection of severed heads is home.”
“Speaking of, did you have to bring all those heads?” Crapsey said, thinking of the grotesque collection in the trunk.
“Do you have any idea how much a stuffed and mounted yeti is worth?” Squat said.
“No.”
“Me, neither. But it’ll be fun to find out.” Squat belched. “Where are we going now?”
“I have no idea.”
Squat rolled his head on his shoulders. “Okay then. In that case, we’d better take the scenic route.”
