Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (21 page)

The
first
time she drank Lethe water, though she’d used a lot more, and erased great swaths of memory—including the memory of drinking the water in the first place. But no corner of her own mind was closed to her god-self, and while she dwelt in the underworld in the fullness of her power, the Bride could look over the course of her entire life, just as she could look over any other mortal timeline. The reason for her first taste of Lethe water was just one of the
many
secrets the Bride knew, that her mortal self did not, and never would.

The Bride thought about that boy she walked along the riverbank. His name was—had been—Daniel. He’d been Marla Mason’s first love. Her fellow apprentice, under the tutelage of the sorcerer Artie Mann, learning alongside Marla and their friend Jenny Click. All three of them were dead, now. Artie murdered by a serial killer on a mission given to him by things that called themselves angels. Jenny self-immolated in the extremity of her grief. And Daniel.... Daniel had died at Marla’s hands, when a terrible compulsion forced him to dark acts, and made him raise his hand against her.

The guilt and loss over Daniel’s death had so consumed her that taking Lethe water to erase all memory of her love, to erase the fact that she’d ever loved
anyone
, had seemed the only way forward. The Bride wondered how her mortal life would have been different, if she’d held on to that memory of young love. The sense of loss was a distant and unimportant thing, in her current form, when all mortal concerns seemed basically trivial. Thinking of Daniel’s death while she was a god was like looking at a distant star. Thinking of it during her mortal life had been like being plunged into the
heart
of that star.

The detachment of being a god was almost as good as Lethe water, anyway.

She walked along the river, and whenever the course of the water began to meander, she straightened it out, because she had places to go. The presence of rivers in Hell was well attested to in the literature, so their existence was no surprise, but what people seldom stopped to think about was that rivers, by and large, ran down to the
sea
. And what kind of sea would you find in Hell?

The Bride stopped at the mouth of the river, where it emptied into a vast subterranean ocean that extended far beyond the limits of even her considerable vision. The sea shimmered in the light of the falling souls above, all of which struck the water in their turn, and vanished. There didn’t need to be an ocean, or a river, or a shore (the sand was black, and under a microscope, would doubtless turn out to be composed of millions of tiny grinning skulls, or something similarly macabre). All this was just metaphor. But as her husband said, everything had to look like
something
: it would be boring and confusing to deal with pure abstractions all the time.

She walked along the stony shore, picking up the pebbles that made up the beach, and filling her pockets—she had pockets, now that she needed them—with smooth clicking stones. Once she felt sufficiently weighted, she took a last look at the flickering sky, and then walked into the sea.

The sea wasn’t really a sea, of course, but a vast reservoir of chaos, the raw stuff of reality, in a form capable of being shaped by the minds of the dead. Occasionally, in the world above, there arose powerful psychics called reweavers, who could force the shape of reality itself to change according to their whims or their unconscious desires. In the afterlife, everyone was a reweaver, creating their own vividly realized worlds, from nightmares to paradises to everything in between.

But they were creating those worlds in the Bride’s realm, and unlike most of the dead souls in this sea, she knew how to consciously manipulate the primordial chaos. Besides, this was
her
world. As such, she had the power to influence the afterlives of the dead, or even entirely override them, if she saw fit. She seldom bothered to do so, though occasionally she indulged the impulses for justice or revenge that bubbled up from the core of her mortal self. She’d look in on people she’d loved or admired in life, and if she thought they were being too hard on themselves, tweak the parameters to make their afterlives a bit more pleasant. Or she’d look in on old enemies and villains, and if their lack of guilt or remorse had led them to create afterlives that were too pleasant, she’d inject a bit of tribulation into their eternities.

Now she sank beneath the waves, through murky waters, and exhaled a cascade of bubbles that flew up and obscured her vision... and when the vision cleared, she floated in a vast black space occupied by billions of bubbles as small as apples and as large as suns, colored in shades ranging from pale gold to dark violet. The stones in her pockets evaporated, as she no longer needed them to pull her down. She was weightless, here.

The Bride drifted close to one sphere, a lurid magenta in color, and peered inside, seeing a plain of cracked black earth, dotted by ivory towers with a disturbingly organic quality. A human form raced along the ground, pursued by monsters that shifted through forms as she watched, but that mostly involved toothy jaws and waving pseudopods. The nightmare world of someone not terribly creative, with symbols even Freud would have found a bit too crude and obvious.

The Bride willed herself downward, past other spheroid afterlives, pausing at one that shimmered, prismatic. She looked into that one, and saw the final panel of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” down to every last detail, including the curiously affectless demons and surreal monsters tormenting equally blank-faced humans... except for one woman, who howled as the devil on the night-chair consumed her.

People talked about the “screams of the dying” but in her experience they weren’t half as disturbing as the screams of the dead.

The Bride wrinkled her nose and checked the manifest that fluttered inside her mind. No, this wasn’t Hieronymous Bosch’s personal Hell, but one that belonged to a professor of art history who carried a lot of guilt for her dalliance with a fetching blonde undergrad. The Bride waved her hand and the edges of the Boschian hellscape shimmered into the blurry peace of a watercolor by Monet, which began to spread inward. The Bosch would reassert itself, eventually—you couldn’t save someone from
herself
—but the Bride wanted to be able to tell her husband, “See, I’m capable of acts of pointless generosity, just like
you
.”

She drifted downward again, pausing by a mottled gray sphere with an almost fungal aspect. Ah, yes, this world was familiar. Her mortal core had a particular antipathy for the soul who lived in
this
afterlife—he’d died long before her birth, but a necromancer had returned him to life some years back, and he’d caused Marla personal difficulties during his time above. The Bride decided to do her other self a favor and make the man’s unpleasant eternity even worse. She didn’t just peer into this bubble, but stepped inside, letting the locality drape her in appropriate attire, in this case a modest, dark gray dress and a hat that she could only think to describe as “stupid.”

She stood on a rainy street—had it really been raining that day?—before Ford’s Theater. She went inside, clucking her tongue at the sketchy quality of the setting. The employees and theater-goers in the lobby were faceless automatons, the carpet so threadbare in places you could see the pure chaos peeking through underneath. The theater itself was full of twittering shadows, but up in balcony, things clarified: there sat president Abraham Lincoln, beside his wife Mary Todd, though her face was blurry. The Bride stood on her tiptoes, and then kept rising, drifting toward the ceiling, so she could get a good view of the action.

Assassin, actor, and former revivified mummy John Wilkes Booth stepped into the box, a pistol in his hand, and said “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” as he pointed it at Lincoln’s head.

The Bride
almost
smiled as she waved her hand, and the pistol flew from Booth’s hand, unfired. He gaped and stumbled backward. Well, why not? He’d experienced this—assassination, flight, days on the run, death in a fire—thousands and thousands of times, without anything other than minor variations in the ordeal. Booth was a sufficiently arrogant and vile man that his afterlife hadn’t been unpleasant at all, until Death stepped in and made it nastier on Marla’s behalf, trapping him in a loop reliving his crime and downfall.

Another wiggle of her fingers, and Lincoln rose up, enraged, holding a bare cavalry saber in his hand. People thought of Lincoln as a dignified man in a beard and stovepipe hat, but he’d been a rail-splitter, and had attended at least one duel armed with a sword—though his opponent had seen reason and called things off before steel clashed with steel.

Lincoln opened his mouth and
roared
, swinging the sword in an arc over his wife’s head. (She paid no mind at all, her eyes fixed on the stage, where shadowy actors milled around to no effect, doubtless saying the Civil War-era-actor’s equivalent of “rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb” and “peas and carrots” at one another.) Booth leapt back in terror, then returned to his usual script by jumping from the balcony and landing on the stage below. He’d done that in real life, too, and made his escape from there.

This time Lincoln jumped after him, and when the president landed on the stage, the whole
theater
shook, and the president howled again, racing backstage after Booth, sword upraised.

The Bride sank down to the floor, then on through the floor, then out the bottom of Booth’s festering bubble of misery and back into the blackness of the primordial sea. She accelerated her descent, the bubbles flickering past her so quickly now that she seemed to move through a sort of liquid rainbow. Despite the speed, she recognized a few of the bubbles as they went past. The afterlives of enemies her mortal self had contended with—the mad priest Mutex, the cannibal witch Bethany, and even a recent arrival, the cult leader and devourer of lives called the Eater. (She peeked into his afterlife, and saw he’d exactly recreated the small town where he’d ruled when he was alive. The banality of the place, she decided, was punishment enough.)

The orbs of dead friends caught her attention, too. A sphere of glittering chrome where Ernesto the junkyard mage dwelt among contraptions of infinite intricacy. The burning sphere where Jenny Click scourged all her personal demons with fire. A verdant green sphere where Lao Tsung, the man who’d taught her to fight, ruled as a philosopher king in a vast city of step pyramids. And a bubble the color of wet pavement, where Marla’s first love Daniel suffered in eternal misery. Marla had never asked Death to make Daniel’s afterlife more pleasant, because she didn’t
remember
Daniel. As far as Marla Mason was concerned, she’d never loved anyone before the god of Death.

She glanced into the bubble as she went by. Daniel didn’t even look human—he’d died after a fall from the top of a high building, and he looked as he had after the impact... except he was awake, aware, and mewling.

The Bride decided she’d indulged enough sentimentality today, and left the bubble behind, sinking toward the depths. She had a mystery to solve, and, if she was lucky, a monster to slay. What mattered the suffering of one mortal among billions?

After a long time, the bubbles thinned out, and the darkness thickened. She’d reached the bottom of the sea, where there was
another
sea, this one a shadowy, roiling black cloud illuminated by flickers of something that superficially resembled lightning.

She hovered, looking down into the primordial chaos from which her entire realm was built, the seemingly infinite supply of raw material that could be shaped by the unconscious minds of the dead, or by the whim of the gods of death. As she watched, new bubbles rose from the clouded chaos and drifted up to join the galaxies of spheres above, as the recently dead began their fresh new afterlives.

Suddenly, not far from her, a bubble the
exact
color of a dragonfly’s wings... popped, and its iridescent substance rained down into the chaos, the droplets vanishing into the dark.
That
wasn’t supposed to happen. She gestured, and drew up a few filaments of chaos, shaping them loosely with her mind and giving them just enough independent spin that she wouldn’t have to do
all
the work of controlling the subsequent creation’s actions.

The resulting demon was roughly the size of a six-year-old child, and had the head of a goat. Almost all her demons had goat heads, unless she consciously willed them to look otherwise—she had no idea why. Something lodged in her mortal core’s subconscious mind, probably. The ungulates
were
associated with the devil in some cultures, and she’d always found the horizontal slit pupils disconcerting. This demon had the body of a monkey, more or less, though its knees were on backwards, and it was covered in reddish fur. The demon knuckled its forehead, right between the stubby horns, and said, “Mistress?”

She reached out and plucked a hair from its head, holding it in her clenched fist. “Be a darling and descend into the cloud down there, then come back and tell me if you see anything unusual.”

The demon cocked its head. “So... anything that’s not primordial nothingness, then?”

“You understand me perfectly.”

The demon shrugged and dove into the black clouds with the form of a high-diver, which was unnecessarily theatrical, but that was demons for you. She waited a while, the hair in her fist inert, and soon the demon leapt up out of the cloud and floated before her. “It’s
very
odd, mistress. There’s a sort of... carved-out space down there? As if someone dug a hole in the chaos and kept digging until they’d excavated a chamber.”

The Bride frowned. “What kind of shovel would you use to dig up chaos? And how do you keep the chaos from rushing
in
again?”

“It’s magic beyond my understanding, mistress, but I was only born a few minutes ago. Perhaps it would make more sense to you. There’s a hole in the ceiling of the chamber, and I clambered inside. There’s not much to see, really. Just an empty space. Except... there’s a hole in the floor, and stairs leading down, and then a set of doors. I didn’t try to open them. I thought I’d best report back.”