Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (27 page)

Okay. What the fuck. This was more like a model of a town than a real town, like Nicolette said – not a place where real people, with their families and dreams and jobs and adulteries and stupid hobbies, would live, but a place that would pass for a town at first glance, but not much beyond that. A dollhouse sort of place. So were the citizens of Moros the dolls? If so, what was the nature of their particular damage? Hive mind? Kidnapped slaves under mind control? Androids? Just cultists worshipping the Eater the way my own handmaidens (and, I guess, footmen?) of Death tried to worship me? There were various explanations, all terrible. If these
were
real people in some kind of thrall, then maybe killing the Eater would free them. It was a a theory worth testing, anyway.

“Up ahead,” Nicolette said. “There’s something like... a spiderweb made of tumors, it feels like, but there’s this M.C. Escher vibe, impossible shapes, angles that don’t make sense, strands that appear from nowhere and go nowhere...”

We were approaching a beautifully landscape central park with a bandstand, surrounded by civic buildings. The city hall was done in neo-Classical style, columns and marble, and it was
way
too big for a town this size. I had a suspicion that was our ultimate destination. Maybe the Eater was mayor of this place, or god king, or whatever. Beyond the city hall there was a hospital, much more modest in size, and seemingly appropriate for a community of a couple thousand, tops. The hospital didn’t interest me much, then. It would later.

But in order to reach the city hall, we had to ride past an elementary school. I assume it was an elementary school, anyway, because of all the children. There were at least a hundred of them, ranging in age from five to ten years old (as I mentioned, I’m crap at judging stuff like that), standing in front of the school in neat ranks, seemingly ordered by size. They were all dressed in the same school uniform, white shirt and blue pants or skirt, and they were holding... well, all sorts of things. Yardsticks. Hockey sticks. Flutes. Wooden spoons. Brooms. Rakes. Hammers. Clarinets. Some of them had rope, and some had what looked like fishing nets, and one kid, who seemed big for his age and uncomfortable in his body and uniform both, was just holding a large damn jagged rock.

I stopped the motorcycle, and Squat paused beside me.

“Uh, Marla?” he said. “I’m getting a Lord of the Flies feeling here. Or maybe Children of the Corn, minus the corn.”

“Nicolette.” I reached back and tugged her drop cloth off. She didn’t need to be able to see in order to sense things, but I figured she deserved to get a look at what we were facing. “Can you tell if they’re really kids? They’re not, I don’t know – demons, or whatever, in kid form?”

“I don’t consider children human,” she said. “Not technically. But... I’m not sensing anything out of the ordinary, except for a big central focus of power in city hall. The kids are just kids. Except they look like they’re preparing to re-enact some kind of violent peasant uprising.”

“Shit. Squat, don’t hurt them. Let’s just ditch the bikes and run through the park and try to get into city hall. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said.

I reached back and unhooked Nicolette’s cage. I
really
wanted my saddlebags – they were full of goodies – but I could get by the with the dagger and hatchet and a few treats I’d squirreled away in my pockets. We put our kickstands down and climbed off the bikes – and the kids seemed to take that as their signal to launch. No one gave them an order. There were no lurking adults, no gym teachers blowing whistles, no guidance at all – they just
surged
, a wave of humanity that topped out at about four feet high, barreling off the school lawn and down the road toward us.

Squat and I made a run for it. I’m in pretty good shape, and Squat was no slouch, either. But kids... those little bastards are
fast
, and they hunted us like a wolf pack, splitting up to flank and encircle us. We made it about halfway across the park before they reached us. At first it was just little fingers plucking at my pant legs, or ineffectually hitting me in the shins with rulers, but there was a definite cumulative effect. And since I wasn’t willing to straight up murder a bunch of children – I was pretty sure that was contraindicated by my attempts to be a better person – there wasn’t much I could do besides shove them away. I saw Squat disappear under a wave of children. They were literally
climbing
him, the ones with ropes and nets trying to bind him, and I was afraid he’d freak out and snap and start tearing their arms off, but he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t a total monster after all.

I rolled and dodged and shook and dove, trying to hold on to Nicolette and get away, but eventually one of the kids tripped me up, forcing me to take a knee, and then they were just
on
me, a wave of them hitting me in the back and driving me down.

Then the big kid with a rock saw his chance, and hit me on the head, and I was done.

But not dead yet. That came later. After I met the Eater.

•

I woke up in chains, which is never fun unless you’ve negotiated it with your lover first, and even then I usually prefer to be the one holding the keys instead. My shoulders were screaming from holding up my weight, and when I tried to put my feet down, I could only touch the floor with the toes of my bare feet – enough to take some of the pressure off my arms and keep me from dislocating my shoulders, but only barely. I lifted my head – which hurt like I’d just been hit with a rock, aptly enough – and took in my surroundings.

They were not very comforting.

I was strung up in a spiderweb of chains, bound at ankles and wrists, arms and legs at full extension, with a few chains looped around my waist and in an X across my chest for good measure. At least I wasn’t naked or dressed in a slave Leia outfit. I seemed to be in some sort of ballroom (or throne room), presumably in city hall – my chains were attached to stone columns, and the floor was buffed marble, and the ceilings were high and vaulted. There was nothing in front of me except an empty chair, but it was a hell of a chair: clearly handmade, of polished dark wood, and the back was made in the shape of that Y-branching symbol I’d seen on the sort-of-church roof.

People were standing around
just
on the edge of my peripheral vision, where I couldn’t quite see them clearly no matter how much I turned my bashed-up head. The place was silent except for the whisper of cloth as the barely-glimpsed people moved.

“Nice town you’ve got here,” I said, going for a tone of cocky confidence, and was thus disappointed when my voice emerged as a broken croak. I soldiered on, though. “Not too welcoming to outsiders, obviously, but clean streets and neat lawns count for plenty.”

Squat walked out of my peripheral vision, holding Nicolette’s cage in his hand, but her head wasn’t in it. “Marla, this place is amazing.” He spread his arms wide and spun around like a little kid twirling in a field. “My whole life I’ve been so confused, especially since the curse and everything, but even before that, really. But now, here, in the kingdom of the Eater, it’s all so
clear
, there’s one true path laid out before me –”

I didn’t bother arguing with him. When a friend has been mind-controlled there’s not usually a lot of point in saying, “You’ve been mind-controlled! Look deep inside yourself and see the truth!” Exceptionally strong-willed people can resist such compulsions, sometimes – but the Eater was apparently powerful enough to take over a whole town full of people, so I would imagine he could tear through most wills like tissue paper. Which made me wonder why
I
hadn’t been turned into a mind-slave. Probably more wonderful side effects of goddesshood. Not that having a free mind was a lot of good when my body was bound this way.

“There’s a saying,” I said, talking over Squat’s joyful babblings. “Something like: I want to talk to the organ grinder, not to the monkey. No offense, Squat. But where’s the guy holding your leash?”

“You bewilder me, Marla Mason.” An immensely tall and broad figure wearing a brown robe with a hood glided into my field of vision. Squat shut up and walked away, leaving me alone with the new guy. He looked like he should be singing the bass part in a Gregorian chants choir.

“You’re the Eater? What’s with the Friar Tuck get-up? I was expecting, I don’t know, a stained apron and a barbecue fork.”

“Some call me the Eater. I encourage that nomenclature among those who help keep me... supplied... because it makes for an intimidating persona, and inspires obedience even in those I do not take into my service. Most of my procurers think me a cannibal, but they misunderstand my nature.” He stood before me, hands tucked away in his sleeves, face in shadow. The voice sounded human, but he could have been anything under those robes – snake monster, three were-rats standing on each other’s shoulders, sentient cancer, whatever.

“Oh yeah? You’re not a cannibal because you’re not a human, is that it?”

He ignored me. “You disrupted those supply chains, you know. Killing Sarlat was rude of you. He was a very reliable business associate, despite his dramatic trappings. I would take vengeance for that alone, purely as a practical consideration – no one can slay my allies with impunity. But I have more personal reasons to want you punished. The so-called beast of Sunlight Shores was an old friend – we came to this continent together. He was foolish in those days, too hungry to exercise caution, and as a result he was imprisoned for centuries. I’d hoped it would be a learning experience for him.”

“You knew he was imprisoned in a hole and you just left him there? Wow, you’re the best friend ever.”

Still nothing. I wasn’t getting a rise out of him. But it was early yet. “You killed the ebast. That is impressive, in a way. But I am not so easily slain. My protections are vast. Understand, though, that I don’t actually
want
to kill you. I would rather have you serve me. And yet... you are strangely intransigent. My devotees call me the Guide, or the Way, or the Path, or the Opener. But you... you seem resistant to my guidance.”

“I’ve never been good at group activities,” I said. “I sucked at intramural soccer, too. I see you’ve recruited my buddy Squat to your team. That’s too bad. But what about Nicolette?”

“That severed head you traveled with? I have put it aside to study more closely. I have never seen death defied in precisely that way before. It’s very curious.”

“I hope you have more fun with her than I usually do. So what’s the deal here? Psychic domination? Brain parasites? How do you do it?”

“You persist in misunderstanding my nature. I do not control these people. I simply show them their ideal path, and they choose, willingly, to follow it – having been shown truth and perfection, they can do nothing else, for perfection contains its own compulsion.” He turned and gestured toward the throne. I saw his hand for a moment, and it looked human, though the skin was unhealthy-looking, the color of dirty dishwater. “Do you see my sigil? At the top, there are many paths, all divergent, and they gradually come together, as tributaries flow to a single river, and in time they become the
true
path: my path. I am gifted at looking into the future, you see, Marla Mason, into seeing what
might
happen.... but you confound me. I begin to peer into your probabilities, and at first all is blurs and shadows, as if
anything
could happen, which is patently nonsense – and after a few weeks, I see nothing at all, as if you’ve vanished. I have seen this before, of course: that is the future of one who is almost certainly going to die. And yet this darkness is
absolute, as if you
must
die, as if there are no other possibilities open to you, no matter what – I have seldom encountered such a thing in someone who is not obviously terminally ill. But that is not the strangest thing. The strangest thing is, that if I peer a
bit
farther – you appear again, still shrouded, but present. And then you vanish again. And appear again. I confess, I have never anything like it.”

“What the fuck do you
eat
?” I said, but I was half thinking out loud, because I already had a decent idea. Any decent sorcerer could see the future – hell, I could look through my wedding ring and do that. Mostly ‘the future’ just looks like a kaleidoscope in a blender, though, because the future isn’t
fixed
– all you can ever see are possibilities, and it takes a lot of practice or natural skill to discern the likely futures from the whole whirling mass of possibilities. Every life is full of a finite-but-vast number of possible choices, which can lead to wildly divergent worlds. This guy, apparently, could look ahead more clearly than most, and see futures out to an almost unfathomable distance... but his power didn’t work on me, because I would vanish from Earth every month and go to the underworld and cease to be human for a while, only to return later. My future was full of possibilities, too, of course, but it was rare in that it was also full of some rock-hard
certainties
.

“What I eat is none of your concern –”

“You eat their futures, don’t you?” I said, gazing into the darkness in his hood. I saw him flinch, slightly, but definitely. “Or, I guess, just
most
of their futures. You eat all their choices, subtracting all the decisions they might make, narrowing their possibilities to a single line and forcing them onto one path: where they’re devoted to you, cultists and willing slaves. You feed on all that potential energy. But there must be some victims who won’t serve you in any possible future – what do you do with those?”

“You... I am impressed.”

“I’m good at intuitive leaps,” I said, but in truth, I wasn’t sure
how
I’d locked onto the idea so quickly, and with such certainty. There were all sorts of things happening deep in my mind, way below the level of consciousness, and this revelation felt like a bubble rising up from those goddess-haunted depths. “Answer me. What do you do with the ones who won’t be your slaves?”