Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (28 page)

“They are not slaves, they are
happy
– but I may as well answer you. What harm can it do? Those who would never become my devotees, in any possible universe, I simply send back out into the world, to live the one possible life left to them in peace. I always choose to leave them a pleasant life, one without undue stress –”

“Except they aren’t really people anymore,” I said. “They’re totally deterministic automatons. They’re philosophical zombies – they
look
human, they
act
human, but there’s nothing inside them. They don’t have any
choices
left, they can only do... whatever it is you decided they could do.”

“They believe themselves to be perfectly real,” the Eater said. “They still
think
they make choices. If they don’t mind, why should you?”

“Them not minding when you steal their possibilities? That’s even more fucked up. What do you do with the energy you get? Consuming those possible futures... you’re getting into some multiverse-level shit, there, shutting down branching timelines before they’re born, harvesting all that potential energy – what do you
do
with it all?”

“I made this town. This society. I keep it perfectly maintained. The weather is ideal, the people are ideal,
everything
is ideal – it is the one perfect place in the world.”

“You’re a selfless cult leader-slash-dictator, that’s for sure. But come on. All that power? What else is it for?”

He pushed his hood back. His head looked like a rotting melon, almost entirely bald, apart from stray tufts of gray hair poking up here and there. His ears were gone entirely, his nose was like a squashed zucchini, his eyes two rat turds stuck in a wad of dough. But as I watched, he raised his hands, and his face gradually transformed. It was a bit like watching a skyscraper demolition in reverse. His skin tightened up, his eyes widened, his ears grew back, and his hair came in, thick and lustrous. Within moments, he had the sort of unremarkable face you’d never glance at twice. “I am four thousand years old,” he said. “Don’t I look good for my age?”

“I’ve seen prettier things stuck on the heel of my boot,” I said. “You have to do that level of plastic surgery every day? Every five minutes? I know it gets harder and harder to maintain your looks as you get older.” He didn’t respond. “So, you steal futures in exchange for crass immortality, great. I’ve got nothing against assholes living forever, but when you start to mess with
people
, that’s when I get –”

“Your friend, Squat,” the Eater said. “I took away his futures, all but one: one in which he serves me, loyally, of course. But also one in which he does something else. It is inevitable. No pleading can change it, no bribery, no sudden violence: I close my eyes, and I
see
the action performed, shining and golden, the one true path. It might as well have happened already.”

Hellfire. Earthquake. I tried my best, I really did, but whatever trick of the mind allowed me to bring down unearthly quantities of violence on a whim wasn’t working today.

“I look forward to seeing what mysteries lurk inside your brain,” he said.

“And I look forward to seeing
your
brain spattered on the –”

That’s when Squat ran at me and twisted my head literally all the way around, my neck snapping with a sound like a branch breaking under a weight of ice. Apart from a moment of blurred motion, it was instant darkness. Again.

SLABS

I woke up in the morgue, presumably at the Moros hospital, on a cold metal autopsy table. I was naked, but covered with a sheet, so that was something. My head was on straight as far as I could tell, and I felt as refreshed as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Death said. “You were very nearly sleepyheadless.” He was laying on his side on the table on the other side of the room, propped up on one elbow, dressed in an immaculate suit, with a lazy smile on his face. But I wasn’t fooled. I could tell by the tap-tap-tap of his many rings against the metal surface of the table that he was anxious or annoyed about something.

I sat up, letting the sheet fall to my waist, and glanced around the room. I’ve been in a few morgues in my day, and this was definitely one of them: lots of closed white cabinets, a wall of square doors for body storage, bottles, scales, and assorted scary-looking tools. This room also featured a doctor in a lab coat slumped (but breathing) in the corner. “Why the divine intervention?” I said. My throat wasn’t even raw. “Are you going to show up
every
time someone kills me? Don’t you to have better things to do?”

“I was perfectly content to let your natural immortality take care of itself, darling, but this person was going to take out your brain, cut it up, and take a close look at the slices.” He gestured toward the doctor. “Your body is capable of growing you a new heart and liver and kidneys, all new and even better than your old ones, and I have every reason to believe you’d grow a new brain, too – but I don’t think you’d like that. A new brain wouldn’t have all the old wrinkles and folds and neural connections, so in a very real sense it wouldn’t be
you
, despite being made of your own genetic material. While I could have let your old brain be removed without violating the
letter
of our agreement, I thought allowing your mortal body to be reduced to the intellectual level of a newborn would be a violation of our bargain’s spirit. You get to be mortal for half the year, and I’m interpreting ‘you’ to mean something more than ‘someone with Marla Mason’s DNA.”’

I whistled. “I hadn’t thought about that. I took an axe to the brain, and I was okay afterward, I was still me – but that was the original organ.”

“The difference between a repair and a replacement, yes,” Death said.

“Still, you didn’t have to come yourself. Don’t we have underlings to do this sort of thing?”

“I’m plenipotentiary and omnipresent, love. You and I can be our own underlings. This form you see here before you... think of it as a finger poking through a knothole. Just a piece of me, not the thing entire.”

I grunted. “Is it the same for me? Is my goddess-self hanging out somewhere, and I’m just, like, a walking, talking fingernail?”

“Not at all. You wanted to be human – it’s a bit silly to say you’re ‘mortal,’ really – for half the year, and so you are. The Marla Mason in the room before me, looking so fetching in autopsy-table chic, is all the Marla Mason there is.”

“That means all the goddess stuff is
in
me somewhere, then,” I said. “Which explains why I keep getting little... glimpses. I have powers I didn’t used to, and sometimes I have... call them insights, I guess, intuitions that are more reliable than usual.”

“That makes sense. Your memories and self-knowledge were suppressed, but it’s all still inside you. Or folded up in adjacent dimensions. It’s complicated.”

I mulled that over. It was giving me ideas. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my clothes?”

“Sliced off you,” he said. “In a plastic bag over there, though they won’t do you much good in so many pieces. I took the liberty of bringing you some clothing.” He pointed to the floor, at a paper bag I hadn’t noticed before, possibly because it had just appeared. Who the fuck knows what gods can do?

“It better not be anything slutty,” I said. “I know you enjoy roleplaying, pretending to be a human who gets off on human things.”

He snorted. “While a black leather corset and stockings are perfectly suitable attire for an avatar of death – at least in some of the comic books I’ve seen – I went a more practical route. I know better than to offer you any help –”

“This is enough deus ex machina for one day,” I interrupted. “What I’m doing is important – but it’s just as important that
I’m
the one doing it.”

“Of course,” he said, entirely too soothingly. “Allow me to give you some information, at least: Your wedding ring, dagger, and axe are with the Eater, I’m afraid – he could sense the magic radiating off the objects. The ring is my gift to you and you alone, and no use to him – though since it only shows possible futures, he hardly needs it.”

“Tell me the dagger sliced off his fingers, at least.” It had nasty effects on people who picked it up without my permission.

Death shook his head. “Alas, he must have seen that outcome was likely, because he picked the dagger up with tongs and put it inside a metal box. That blade is worthless to him as well, of course. The ring and the dagger are from
our
realm... but the axe is an artifact of some other origin, and he may be able to wield its power.”

“Oh, good, because he didn’t have
enough
of an advantage.”

“You have an advantage, too. The Eater is used to seeing the future with trivial ease, and he
can’t see you
, not in any useful way. You defy cause-and-effect. Someone who becomes that accustomed to knowing the future –”

“Is probably shit when it comes to improvising and dealing with surprises.”

“Which are two of your strengths,” he said. “I fear your cursed friend Squat is lost to you, at least for the moment, but I think Nicolette is giving the Eater trouble – she is resistant to his control, for some of the same reasons you are. He can’t cut away and feast on her possible futures, because her future is
spoken
for – we have decreed that she will serve you for as long as you see fit, and since her futures are tangled with yours, he has difficulty penetrating them as well.”

“Any idea where she is?”

“In the Eater’s office, at the moment,” Death said. “In what we might as well call City Hall, though locally I gather it’s called the House of the Eater. They use the same name for the church where they worship him.”

I grunted. “How’d we miss this guy? Living for four thousand years? Aren’t we supposed to pay attention to unnatural lifespans?”

Death chuckled. “He has not lived for four thousand years. He exaggerates for effect. More like a thousand.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is
that
all.”

“Anyway, we don’t police immortals,” Death said. “For one thing, no one’s definitively immortal – time has not ended, after all, and they could still die
sometime
, so that’s all right. It’s not as if we have a shortage of the dead back home. So what if someone defies death for a while? It would be like worrying about a single salt molecule missing from the whole ocean.”

“Fine, but if it’s not our department, shouldn’t it be
somebody
’s? This guy is stealing possible futures, cutting off whole branching
universes
from being born, right?”

“Indeed. And feasting on the energy from those aborted timelines.”

“Well? I’ve dealt with this multiverse crap before, I’ve even
been
to worlds where other choices were made and new timelines formed, and I know there are people in charge of that stuff. Except not people – gods. Except not
gods
. Things that are to you and me – well, you, at the moment – as we are to ordinary mortals.”

“Meta-gods, you might say, yes. Very scary. Well above my pay grade. Comparatively, we are mere custodians. They are architects.”

“So shouldn’t the architect in charge of maintaining the integrity of reality and the safety of the multiverse be pissed about the Eater devouring possible timelines? That seems like a pretty major violation to me.” I was particularly pissed because I
knew
the guy who watched to make sure the fabric of reality didn’t get ripped up. Once upon a time he’d been human, and for a brief period, my apprentice. Talk about surpassing the master.

“I think it’s the drop-in-the-ocean problem again,” Death said. “With every moment, with every decision made, new universes are born, trillions per second, no doubt – why would the guardian of the multiverse notice a few hundred universes that never came into being in the first place? Universes that
don’t
happen can hardly threaten the integrity of the multiverse. In a field growing full of wheat, the farmer doesn’t pay much attention to the seeds that
don’t
sprout.”

“So I’m the only one who cares about the
people
, then. Great.”

He shrugged. “You’re human. At least part-time. It’s right that you should care about individual humans. And I’m proud to see you meddling. I think it’s what you were born to do.”

“Come on. To you, I’m panicking about mayflies, right? Why bother going to all this effort to save people, when they’ll be dead in the blink of an eye anyway? I bet your clocks measure in centuries instead of seconds.”

“It’s true I have a different perspective than you do. Though with our month-on, month-off schedule, I spend rather a lot of time engaging with the world on the level of human time. But all that aside – even I find the Eater’s actions abhorrent. I don’t think death is so bad, really. The underworld is no more terrible than those who die believe it to be. Sometimes it’s quite lovely. But these poor people aren’t being allowed to die – they are being turned into objects. Machines. Death is my domain, but there is no death without life, and so I believe life is precious. Give them back their lives, Marla. And if that’s not possible, keep the Eater from taking anyone else’s life.”

He slid off the table, stepped lightly toward me, kissed me on the lips, then strolled away, as always, opening a door that didn’t exist and stepping through.

This time, though, I caught a glimpse of the place beyond the door. You’re probably thinking fire, or dank caverns, or something like that, but no – it was a perfectly ordinary foyer, maybe a little posh, walls paneled in dark wood, with a little table that held a vase full of pale flowers. And above the table there hung a mirror. I saw my reflection in the mirror, or something like my reflection. It was my face, except paler, and the eyes were dark, as if they were all pupil, no iris or whites. My reflection opened her mouth – even though I didn’t – and revealed a mouth full of pearl-white canines and a black tongue. She mouthed, “We should talk,” just before the door closed (and then ceased to exist).