Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (22 page)

“Go back down and see what’s beyond the doors. Just
look
, mind you. Come back and tell me.”

The demon sighed the sigh of put-upon underlings everywhere and dove back into the darkness.

After a few minutes, the hair the Bride clutched in her hand unraveled back into pure chaos again. Something had killed the demon. “Killed” wasn’t quite the right word for such constructs, but it conveyed the essential idea.

“Hmm.” The Bride tapped her rod of lapis lazuli against her palm. She was uneasy—an unfamiliar sensation, and not one she enjoyed. There shouldn’t be anything down there that could destroy something
she’d
created. In point of fact, there shouldn’t be anything down there but more
nothing
.

Nobody discorporated her demons but
her
. Whatever was down there, it was going to get hit.

As the Bride descended, she swept chaos out of her way, but it was like baling a boat with a colander, and the clouds kept oozing back. Soon she gave up and just fell through the murk. The chaos caressed her, velvety one moment, cold and damp as fog the next. She descended until she felt something solid under her feet, where there should have been nothing substantial at all. She took a double handful of chaos and shaped it into a torch, flaming end blazing as she swept it around, clearing away the clouds long enough to make out that she was standing on top of an immense dome of red-veined black marble. She walked along, her golden slippers giving her sure footing, until she reached the hole the demon had mentioned, about the size of a manhole, at the apex of the dome. Without hesitation she stepped into the hole, drifting down as slowly as a leaf, for what seemed to be a hundred yards or so. She landed on a floor made of the same stone, in a circular room. Frowning, she lengthened the lapis lazuli rod in her hand into a staff six feet long, and brought it down sharply on the floor.

The stone zigzagged and cracked, and the walls around her and the dome above her puffed into undifferentiated chaos again. As she walked across the floor, she let it crumble into nothing behind her, until she reached the stairs leading down. She’d expected something suitable for descent into a crypt or a dungeon, but the broad stairs were just dirty black, with walls of dingy brown tile on either side. The steps resembled nothing so much as the entry to a subway station, and there was a row of four closed gray metal doors at the bottom. She went down the steps, letting each riser dissolve after her foot left it, and when she reached the doors, she smashed two of them open with her lapis lazuli staff. The metal shrieked and tore as the doors flew inward, puffing into nothingness before the shards could land.

The Bride strode through the opening, into a small anteroom, this time with a floor of red marble with black veins. There was a counter on one side of the room, and behind it sat a bored-looking old woman with iron-gray hair, dressed like a waiter in an old-fashioned bistro, with a vest and bow tie. A single door of dark wood, beveled in a vaguely art deco design, stood closed in the far wall.

“Welcome to the roots of the world.” The woman’s voice was that of a thousand-pack-a-year smoker, with a lot of years piled up behind her. “Before you enter, you’ll need to check your personal items.”

The Bride looked at the woman, and saw no soul inside her, and no history of life. She was a construct, like the demons, whether she knew it herself or not. The Bride gestured with her rod—but the woman didn’t disappear, or even seem aware that a god had just tried to dissolve her.

The Bride almost smiled for the second time in one day, a nearly unprecedented occurrence. She’d been afraid this would be easy. Instead, it grew more interesting. “Did you eat my demon?” she asked.

The coat-check woman shook her head. “That goat-headed thing? It ignored me and tried to go through the door. But unreal things can’t go through the door at
all
. They just go back to being unreal again. Are you real? You seem like you might be real, under all that.” Her hand-flapping gesture took in the Bride’s clothes, her slippers, her lapis lazuli rod, her jewelry.

“I am a god of death, sometimes called the Bride of Death, and this is my realm.”

The woman shook her head. “No, ma’am. Out there, it might be your realm. But not here. This was nobody’s realm,
nothing’s
realm, but now it belongs to someone else.”

“Who?”

“
My
god,” she said. “Some people have crises of faith, or so I hear. I don’t. I have total faith. I know who made me, and what she made me for. My mistress told me herself.”

“Listen, you talking mannequin.” The Bride leveled her staff at the woman’s face. “Your mistress may be able to turn my demons back into primordial nothing, but I’m not made of chaos. I’m the
mistress
of chaos.”

The woman’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth, and then, to the Bride’s surprise—and something like horror—she began to laugh. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, that’s funny, that’s
so
funny. Just you wait and see. You’ll think it’s funny too. If you go to meet her, anyway. But first, like I said: you have to leave your personal items.”

“You want me to give up my rod? My jewelry?”

“And your garments. Everything.” She gestured to the empty cubbyholes and clothes hangers in the space behind her. “You must go into the presence of my mistress stripped of all your fineries.”

“You’re seriously trying to pull the Descent of Inanna trick on
me
?” Inanna’s descent was an ancient Sumerian myth, one of the oldest stories humans remembered. Inanna, the goddess of fertility and war, wanted to go to the realm of the dead to attend the funeral of a god. Before she was allowed to enter that dread domain, she was stripped of her fine garments and jewelry and her
own
lapis lazuli rod—symbolically giving up her divine power. She went naked into the presence of the god of death, who was her sister. There was a definite component of sibling rivalry involved.

Things didn’t work out well for Inanna in the underworld, when she gave up her godhood, though she came back to life eventually.

“Inanna?” the coat-check woman said. “Never heard of her.”

“No one’s educated in the classics anymore—except I think your mistress must be. Who is she?” The Bride reached out with her additional senses, but could tell nothing at all about what waited beyond the door. She sensed not even chaos: just a blank space, unknowable, impenetrable.

“She is the serpent who gnaws at the roots of the world. I don’t know who she
used
to be.”

The Bride turned to the door and banged her lapis lazuli rod against the wood.

The rod shattered, breaking into seven fragments that fell to the floor, and when the Bride tried to will them back together, nothing happened: they just glittered, blue and shining and ruined.

The woman sniffed. “You can break your things and rend your garments instead, if you like. But if you leave your belongings with me, you can have them when you come back.
If
you come back.”

The Bride kicked the door, and wrenched on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, even when she put the full force of her power behind it. She might as well have been an ant assailing a mountain. Someone with a
very
strong will, or a very deep understanding of the primordial magic of creation, was behind that door, imposing her own vision of reality so firmly that the Bride couldn’t break it. Was it another god? Maybe an
old
god? There had been other gods of death—the Bride had even met one who, for want of a better term, could be considered her husband’s father. Those old gods had died, because even death dies eventually, but did
they
have an afterlife, too, somewhere deep in the primordial sea? Had one of them rested uneasily and decided to carve out a little fiefdom in the lightning-filled shadows?

The coat-check woman sighed. “Look, lady, you can strip and walk through the door, or you can turn around and go back wherever you came from. I don’t
care
. Just stop loitering. I was going to go on break in a minute. I need a cigarette.”

The Bride had two choices: retreat, or go forward. The first was antithetical to her nature. She wasn’t thrilled about the conditions attached to going forward, but who cared about her jewels and her clothing, anyway? She’d conjured almost all of it from airy nothing this morning, and would return it to airy nothing when she tired of them. Giving them up was no loss.

So she removed her necklace, and her bracelets, and her blouse, and her pants, and her slippers, and piled them all on the counter. The coat-check woman folded them neatly and put them all away, not commenting on the Bride’s pale body or her many carefully chosen scars. She just clucked her tongue. “
Everything
,” she said.

The Bride twisted the wedding ring from her finger, and put it gently on the counter. The ring
was
real—so real her mortal counterpart wore it on a necklace in the world above during the months she spent pretending she was still part of mundane reality. The ring was only a symbol, though. She’d been married to Death before he ever gave her that bit of gold, no matter how wrapped up the ring was in magics both protective and predictive. She didn’t feel at
all
different when she took it off. She told herself that firmly.

The coat check girl put the ring in a cubby, too. “Okay. Go on in. You’re expected.”

The Bride frowned. “How am I possibly
expected
?”

“Maybe not you, in particular,” the woman conceded. “But my mistress said someone would come down eventually.”

“Enjoy your break. You’re going to cease to exist shortly.”

The Bride got only a fatalistic shrug in return. “Easy come, easy go.” The woman gestured, and the brown door swung open. The Bride ground her teeth and stepped through the door.

The space beyond was a cave. There was no mistaking it for anything else: the walls were rough stone, there were stalactites above and stalagmites below, and the distant
plink plink plink
of the dripping water that had carved out this space over millennia, or would have, if this cave had existed in a place with actual geology. There were roots dangling from the ceiling, immense dangling things as thick as the trunks of thousand-year oaks, but pale as parsnips. An immense pile of red earth lay in the center of the cavern –

The heap moved, lifting its head, and suddenly its shape resolved in the Bride’s vision. Not a pile of dirt, or a pile of anything at all, but a
dragon
, with scales in shades of red clay, Martian sand, and old rust. The beast was the size of an ocean liner.

Monster
, the Bride thought.

The dragon lifted its immense head, looked at the Bride, and said: “Marla? Is that
you
?”

Then the wooden door slammed shut behind her, and the Bride of Death ceased to exist.

•

Marla Mason opened her eyes, but that didn’t help much. After a moment, she realized she was staring at dark stone. The reason being, she was face
down
on damp stone. She rolled over on her back and looked up at more dark stone, far overhead. She was in a cave. The stone was cold on her body, and equally cold on every
part
of her body, which meant she was
naked
in a cave.

That part was actually fine. She was used to it. She’d done it a few times before. Her life followed a particular pattern. She spent a month doing whatever it was she did as co-god of the underworld –maybe opening chthonic shopping malls, or plucking coins off the eyes of corpses and putting them in a goat-shaped piggy bank, or walking a three-headed dog and picking up its infernal poop, or making sure the seasons happened on time, or fending off assaults from other more evil gods, or holding the structure of reality together—and then she got to spend a month as a
real
person, on Earth, doing real person things, like eating sandwiches and punching morons. She never remembered what happened during her month in Hell, and for her, the passing of the time in between her mortal months felt like a single night of dreamless sleep. When it was time to bounce back onto the mortal coil, she
always
woke up naked, in a cave.

But she usually woke up submerged in dirt, because her husband (or her god-self) thought it was amusing to make her sit up in her own shallow grave when she came back to life. She also usually woke up in a cave in Death Valley, which looked
nothing
like this cave. The rocks were all wrong. So where was she? Had someone changed her supernatural travel itinerary without informing her? Gods could be inconsiderate that way.

“Oh, Marla, are you all right? I think you fainted.” The voice was
immense
, but not like it was amplified electronically: like it came by that boom honestly.

Marla sprang to her feet, wishing very much for a knife or, at least, some pants.

“Of course, having your divinity stripped from you probably
is
something of a shock.”

The voice seemed to emerge from a big... red... mountain? Was it a mountain? You didn’t often get mountains in caverns, but what else could that thing under those dangling roots
be
?

“You gave up your divinity willingly, too! Although you didn’t realize it at the time. Hilarious. You always were arrogant. I mean, I am
too
, I can relate, but still. I bet you thought to yourself, ‘Oh, the ring and the scepter and all that, they’re just
symbols
.’ But we’re in a place of pure formless void, to be shaped by whoever has the strongest will—
everything
here is a symbol, and when you stepped into my parlor, I decided those symbols of your divinity were as real as anything.”

The big red thing lifted its head and Marla realized it was a dragon. That was alarming. But not as alarming as something else. A memory had appeared in her head, quite prominently, just lodged there, taking up great acres of mental space, and it was a memory that she
remembered entirely forgetting
. “Holy shit,” she said. “When I was a teenager I had a
boyfriend
?”