Senrien woke laughing on the fortieth day of her afterlife. No one had warned her that eternity was a sick cosmic joke but they had come quite close; she should have seen that there was no outsmarting the system, that good intentions and a bit of self-sacrifice couldn’t cause this all to mean something meaningful. Tossing back the sheet upon her pallet, she sat up.
The former human she spoke to before she made the rash decision to try to game the system hadn’t told her how this would go down, but the hints had been there. She should have grasped that, in the Afterlife, you were only worth what value the gods were willing to assign to you. Her god had spent his last wealth getting her here; he’d had none left to carve a place for her. Mortals only wound up in the city of gods when the gods desperately wanted them here and had the power to accommodate them: if you found yourself here by other means, without an influential patron already in place, you were fair game.
This was how she found herself where she was: she had fled a life of servitude headlong into an eternity of it. She had her dark days but mostly it was funny to her. When the worst had already happened, there was little left to fear. She could still remember her final moments; her courageous, foolhardy decision; the act of self-murder in every gruesome detail. Compared to all of that, the Afterlife was like being stuck waiting in a long line.
When she heard that there was to be a ball in the residence that night, she bowed her head and went on with her afterlife. Her role in this household was humble; she was a nonentity in this place. Her suicide had struck people as mildly interesting, which was why someone had purchased her. In a world where nearly everyone had conquered empires or murdered hundreds of innocents as part of some deluded, self-centered campaign, though, or created art that still pierced hearts centuries later, her empty act of aborted heroism barely registered. She might as well have died by tripping on a slick bar of soap in her bath, for all the attention she received.
Senrien was a distant understudy to an assistant cook; she did little but fetch raw ingredients and stand around observing pointlessly. It was all rather silly, since these people didn’t need to eat, but they could still take pleasure in it. She wasn’t sure where the food came from, if not the mortal world. She didn’t know who had the privilege to stray beneath the sky and feel the sun’s kiss while they purchased victuals. Not her, that was for sure.
She donned her uniform, purple on blue, a simple velvet vest atop a flowing long-sleeved robe such as everyone in the household wore. The costume made her look like an elderly man, in her opinion, but it could have been worse. They could have forced her to go about in a state of demeaning undress or put her in garments that caused her physical discomfort.
She could have been a demon.
Cenuwa had done that much for her, although he had cheated her just as he cheated the once-humans who were raking him across the coals. He had removed Senrien from the wheel as requested; he had brought her to the Afterlife still in her original form. He hadn’t warned her that she needed a patron to take her in, though, someone with the influence to keep her off the auction block. He had understood that, if Senrien knew, she might not push forward with the plan.
Her room was small but private, neither lavish nor barren. A wafer of a chamber, in which she had a bed not suited to sleep more than one, a chest of drawers for her possessions, of which there were still few. A shelf above the bed where she might place art or books, when she came to acquire them. A scrap of rug to hold back the chill of this dingy place. Her shoes were slippers, appropriate since she never went out of doors and there was no weather anyway.
Once she had snatched her knives off the shelf, she quit his room. The knives were hers, lovingly polished and tucked neatly into pockets on a roll of sturdy cloth that could be folded up and tied. Of knives, there were three; the heaviest had a square blade, good for butchering. The knife of intermediate size fit snugly in her hand and she had watched the more experienced chefs wield the things as if they were a part of them. The smallest was long and thin, awkwardly so, handy for boning fish and slicing the thinnest filets. She had hardly had a chance to use them: training her didn’t appear to be a priority.
The corridors beyond her room were busy without being packed, everyone moving at a slightly faster pace in anticipation of the night’s event. Her master was quite powerful—for the time being—and ran a busy household in order to show off his success. There were many more demons than people like Senrien, which told you everything about the gods you had yet to figure out.
Her superior was already at his post when Senrien arrived and chose to greet her with the taciturn nod that was usual to him. He was a large man, skin as dark as good soil. Even under the modest, shapeless garb, you could see that his arms were massive, but his hairline was receding, his midriff running to fat. He had passed his prime before his story was cut short. He had never explained what life he led before the Afterlife reached out to him, but Senrien was guessing he was a conqueror, at the very least a king: he carried himself with the confidence of a man who had once brought the world to its knees. Now here he was, chopping fruit so a god could play at eating it.
“It’s funny that no one ever talks about it,” she commented at one point.
Her superior grunted.
“What brought them here. I get why no one wants to know about me, but no one tells their own story, either.”
“Ah, well.” He had stepped back from the counter while Senrien scraped all the apple slices into a bowl and cleaned the counter off for him. Senrien had thought it was all he meant to say and was startled when the man elaborated. “You try at first.”
He had turned away to retrieve a number of items from the pantry beside their workspace, and spoke as he ferried a series of crocks onto the countertop Senrien was wiping off. “You feel like it must matter, right? What you did with your life. And maybe it does, back there, for a while, but that’s not your world anymore.
“People come here caring, convinced they’re the next big thing. No one wants to listen, though, and after a while, it gets easier not to try to convince them to. Hurts less if you don’t pick at it. That’s when you hit the stage where you save your story up like gold, ready to make use of it. When you find the right god to fix your afterlife, give you something meaningful to do, that’s when you’ll spill that story. Lay down your coin.”
“It doesn’t work?” Senrien suggested when he fell silent.
“Oh, sure. Sometimes. By the time you hit your third, fourth master, that’s when you get to see they’re all the same. They’re not giving you anything, not anything worth having. You want for this to mean something, you’ve got to find the way yourself.”
“How do you do that?”
The man shrugged as he chopped butter into the pile of flour he had measured out. “Guess that’s a question we have to answer for ourselves. Find a craft and learn it, learn all there is to know, and if that don’t suit, move on.”
“What about the people like us who are free?”
That got her superior’s eyes off his dough, but his expression was inscrutable. “Heard about them, did you? Pass me the salt, lad.”
“I have, yes,” she admitted cautiously, as she handed the salt to him.
“It’s dicey, being free. You’re only as ‘free’ as the gods will let you be. Nothing’s to stop them changing their minds tomorrow, eh? It’s mostly something they let ‘em do because it’s novel, watching mortals run around, let’s ‘em feel like they’re part of real life in the real world.
“But they aren’t and this isn’t, and what’s the point once you know? Eh,” he shrugged his own words off suddenly, “but what do I know? I’m an old man, I’d left my mark before the raven came for me. It’s harder for the ones who wind up here before they’d got the chance to do much of anything.” He took his gaze off the dough in order to squint at Senrien in a speculative manner. “How old were you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“You want to tell me?” Although she knew he wasn’t interested, you couldn’t hear it in his voice.
“Oh, I don’t think my story’s interesting.” Her shoulders twitched self-consciously. “I mean objectively, I don’t think I have much to tell. I was a queen, promised to my people by the priests thanks to visions they received from the god, but my god told me it just hoped I would look the part. I never really did anything.”
“So how’d you wind up here?”
“You don’t have to humor me.”
“Might as well tell it once.”
“My god lost the kingdom to debt collectors. I killed myself because I thought I could come here and make a difference in my people’s fate. My god chose not to warn me about,” she gestured at the kitchen around them, filled with bustling servants, the souls of men and women who had once been free or believed themselves to be.
It made her mentor smile, which she hadn’t expected. “I don’t know, lad,” he mused as he formed his dough into a ball. “Might be you had less time to make a mark back home, but that’s one interesting twist. I’ve met a fair few who came here on purpose because they were convinced it was some special shade of Afterlife, spending the rest of eternity rubbing elbows with the gods. Never heard of anyone who got tricked.”
She spent the rest of the morning assembling a vast litany of pies alongside her superior and they didn’t speak again of topics not pie-related. When it was ended, though, and she had been dismissed to her noon-meal, the man held her back. “But here now,” he said, taking Senrien by the sleeve. “You’re not free, but I think you may be more free than you think. You can leave the house if you want. Get out and poke around, satisfy your curiosity.”
“I can?” She was amazed.
“Sure. Just tell the castellan, so she knows what happened to you. She’ll probably want to send a couple demons with you, make sure no harm comes to you, and you’d do well to keep ‘em by.”
Senrien was so astonished that she almost forgot to thank the man. Then she was hurtling away, making for the castellan’s office with such haste that she forgot to return her pouch of knives to her room. By the time she realized she was still carrying them, she couldn’t stand to turn around and tucked them into one armpit
The castellan was a graying woman who always gave the impression that she had another fifty things to do, all of them more important than dealing with you. It was probably true but didn’t make interacting with her enjoyable. She dismissed Senrien with nothing more than a hasty reminder that she be back in time to help with the feast. No mention was made of chaperones and she left before that changed.
She quit the manor through the postern gate where deliveries were made and her heart was pounding at her own audacity, even though she knew she wasn’t actually breaking any rules. It felt like it; it felt like an adventure. She wasn’t sure what harm might come to her in this place, but she had been released without minders, it might be that she would find out. The prospect was thrilling as well as alarming: she had spent her entire life locked up indoors under constant supervision, too precious to be allowed to run free lest she scrape her knees. She felt more alive than she ever had before and didn’t mind the irony.
The god who purchased her was exceptionally powerful, as Senrien had already intuited; his home lay in one of the nicer neighborhoods. Every dwelling in this district was a castle, stone walls tall, watched at all times by scores of armored guards. Looking around, you might get the sense that the Afterlife was in a perpetual state of war, but the truth was quite the opposite: gods were cowards one and all, paralyzed by the mere concept of risk. Doubtless all of them would like to be the only god, in possession of all mortal souls, but it wasn’t worth the danger of making a significant move. In the mortal world, they might pit their followers against each other, but here in their homes, they hid behind moats with the blankets pulled over their heads.
The land beneath her feet was sloped and she chose to walk downhill for no particular reason. The grand, gated mansions gave way after several blocks to smaller dwellings, just as fortified. Bars in the windows, tall iron fences around the yards. Trash began appearing on the streets, mortar flaking from the walls, cracks in the paving stones. Senrien studied this, wondering what it meant.
There were other people out on the streets, all of them former mortals. Senrien had been warned, when they brought her home from the auction house, that she could be dismissed if she displeased her new master. She had been too busy adjusting to all the ways in which her life had changed to want for it to change again and hadn’t invested much thought in the threat. She could see for herself why servitude was considered by many to be the better alternative: these people were unkempt and mean, having a hungry look to them. They watched her pass with regards hostile or speculative.
She had decided to call it a day and go home, and took the first left she came to. It led into a narrower way than most, dark here where the streetlights were few and far between. She squinted in the gloom, trying to decide whether the way ahead was simply obscured or a dead end. She gasped in relief when she saw movement passing by perpendicular to her.
She hadn’t reached the intersection when she heard the commotion. There was a crash of wood, several explosive grunts. Cries of anger or alarm, cut off swiftly, a sound of motion. Hurrying footsteps, a quiet thump, then nothing. Interested, she moved forward to the place where her narrow alley ended and peeped around the corner into the equally narrow passing way.
On the cobbles just beyond the intersection lay a litter, broken where it had been dropped. Several bodies bled onto the dirty stones and Senrien made a sign to avert evil as it struck her that they had died here, which meant they had died forevermore. Only after she did this did she recollect that all the habits of faith and prayer she had ever learned were a joke, at which point she pushed herself off the wall. She took a single step toward the remnants of the palanquin before she noticed the device on its tattered red drapes and rocked to a halt.
Shaking off her surprise, she approached the bleeding demons. She had thought that all of them were dead, but one of them heard her and gasped. Its skin was black and cracked like a charred old log but its grip was strong when it latched onto her lower leg. “Save him!”
That should have given Senrien pause, but then, she should never have honed in on the commotion in the first place. She felt herself in the clutches of some overpowering instinct she had never known before, some fearsome fiery need that had invaded her mind and senses as totally as wine. She was hot as with drink, unable to control herself. Crouching down, she whispered, “Which way did they go?”
It released her, trembling hand pointing toward the door opposite them.
“How badly are you hurt?”
When she took the burnt-looking demon by the arms, it allowed her to help it sit. Its blood looked like tar but its eyes were steady on her. “I’ll live.”
“Do you think you can make it home?”
It swallowed bravely, dragging itself to its feet as if Senrien was a ladder. “I will.”
“Then go.”
She didn’t watch it leave, making immediately for the door it had indicated. As her hand reached for the knob, she realized her folly. Taking her pouch from under her arm, she loosed the cleaver and chef’s knife, one for each hand. Then she turned the knob and dealt the door a push, her heart was singing. She was too elated to wonder at it.
There were no sentries in the hallway and she felt a flash of disappointment. This wasn’t a neighborhood where bystanders would come rushing to someone’s defense and her enemies had acted accordingly, but that meant she had no idea what she was up against. Hopefully there weren’t a dozen of them, all standing around in a single room.
She could hear the thuds and groans of someone being beaten, a sound she had never heard before but had no difficulty identifying. She followed it, and although she did ask herself why she was bothering, she didn’t search hard for an answer. The only thing of import that she had done in the whole of her life had been to end it and suddenly it struck her as not enough. The short and silly life she’d led, the vanity of her destiny. The new job making food for beings who didn’t eat under the supervision of a man who had never bothered to tell her his name.
Ahead, a door opened, flooding the darkened corridor with light. Senrien threw herself into the open doorway at her side, lurking in the shadows while what sounded like two pairs of feet went past. “—immediately,” one of their owners was saying, “we can’t be linked to this. Once we know—”
Then they were gone and she slipped back into the hall, continuing on in the way she’d been going. They had left the door gaping open behind them and she wasn’t sure what that meant. If her quarry was already dead, did it really make this more insane than it had been when she started it?
She rocked to a halt in the doorway, startled to discover that they had left a guard. The demon was reptilian in appearance, skin rough and knobbed, gray in color. The other person hung from the ceiling by his wrists and his back was to the door, but Senrien recognized his moon-pale skin and night-dark hair. The way he sagged against his bindings made it look like he’d lost consciousness.
“Wake up, friend,” the lizard said suddenly. Unlike the demons Senrien had grown accustomed to seeing, all done up in neat uniforms in their household colors, its clothing was colorless and worn. It didn’t look like it was armed beyond a knife that was smaller than either of hers. Grabbing the shoulder of the man dangling from a ceiling beam, it shook him. “Senuchir says, once we get what we need from you, we can all have a turn. Cut you up or touch you if we want. What should I do? What do you say? What would you rather, you high and mighty piece of shit?”
Senrien did what felt to her like the obvious thing in the circumstances: she took three steps forward and stabbed her pointed knife into the lizard’s neck as it was still becoming aware of her. It dropped to the floor and she hacked through the rope looped over the ceiling beam with the cleaver. The prisoner collapsed onto the dying demon and that threw her, she hadn’t thought so far in advance. Attacking the monster had felt natural to her; what to do about the suffering of its prisoner was more complicated.
By the time she set her knives down and crouched, the man had come to his senses and was trying to get away from her. She sat back slightly, watching as he scrambled with hands still bound into the corner, where he turned at bay. She tried and failed to remember his name. His face was bloodied, already starting to swell, and she registered the interesting fact that he was afraid of her. He was really quite handsome in spite of the mess, although perhaps it was no wonder she hadn’t noticed last they met.
“Hello,” she said carefully.
It seemed to take the lender a moment to place her. “You!”
“Funny running into you here.”
“So this was your doing. This demon coup.”
“Is that what’s happening? Is that even possible?”
His only reaction was to squint at her suspiciously.
“Who’s Senuchir? Someone who has it in for you, sounds like.”
“None of your business!”
An incredibly informative response in a backhanded way: whatever the truth, it embarrassed him, he didn’t want for her to know. “Your sister said you had a lover and they died. I’ve wondered about that a few times. Demons may be stuck at the bottom of the pile but their souls are human: they can be unhappy about their lot. They can want more freedom, more respect, and gods would never give it to them, we’re nothing but commodities. A fellow formal-mortal, though…”
Her eyes moved onto the dead lizard-like being she had killed, which might have been a mass-murderer reaping his just desserts or the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived, twisted by completely justified bitterness. “How grateful any one of them might feel toward a fellow formal-mortal willing to treat them like the people they already are in spite of this bullshit system we’re all trapped within would depend on the individual. If you too a fancy to one of them, they might or might not be appreciative. They can’t kill the gods who did this to them, but you…”
“For someone as ignorant as you claim to be, you seem to know a lot.”
Senrien grunted. “Maybe I’m more astute than I realized back when I might have done anything with it. Anyway. I was just taking a walk and heard a scuffle. I recognized your trappings on the litter, I thought I’d see what I could do.”
“Why?”
She never answered; both of them went still, listening to the sound of approaching boots. Several people were coming closer and their pace meant business. “Is there another way out of here? Or am I fighting?”
“Do you know how?”
“Nope.”
“The mortal world. It’s the only way. They can’t follow, demons don’t have the capacity.”
First, she picked up her knives and transferred them both into one hand. Then she went to the man crouching in the corner, ignoring the way he shied away from her. She took the fellow by the upper arm, intending to assist him to his feet, but then everything was happening too swifly. A demon burst through the door to the hall, part-woman, part-tiger, hissing in rage as it closed. The room was spinning around them with violent speed and the man attached to her hand was shouting, “Like this! Somewhere you feel safe!”
They fell through a hole back into the world, landing in a tangle on thick meadow grasses. Senrien had only been gone for a period of weeks and couldn’t understand how she could have forgotten s how good it felt, the sensation of sunshine on the skin. She had brought them to a mountain glade bathed by light where wildflowers provided bursts of color, the air redolent of herbs when the wind fell still, ice and evergreens when it was blowing. Blotting out much of the eastern sky above the trees that hemmed them in closer-to: the vast ever-white prow of the mountain her people knew as Mother.
To be back in this place was more than startling: her senses were nearly overwhelmed by pleasure, by the truth reinforced with every breath she drew, with every scene that met her roving eyes, with the noises in her ears. Unlike the Afterlife, everything here was alive. Humming with vitality. By the time she pushed herself erect, the soul-lender had already taken all the necessary steps to shut them away from the demons who might have killed them with permanence.
“My sister…”
She twisted to regard the man whose bloody, purpling injuries looked even worse in the sunshine than they had that crumbling abandoned room in the estate of some god who hadn’t been able to hang on. “She can come here too, can’t she?”
He was wrestling with the length of rope about his wrists and didn’t answer.
“As can demons, provided you do the work,” Senrien added, speaking slowly as her eyes bounced between him and that stunning mountain peak. Behind it, the sky was an impossible shade of blue, deeper than the limitless darkness that surrounded the Afterlife.
Pregnant with potential in a way the place that was supposedly the outer edge of all things hadn’t been.
“Well.” She pushed herself up. Stooping, she retrieved her knives, which had already proved invaluable.
“Where are you going?”
“To find out.”
“Find out what?”
“Where I’m going.”
“You make no sense.”
A part of her wanted to leave him here, but he was still wrestling with the bindings he was too proud to ask for help removing. Going to one knee, she set the cleaver down and reached out to him. It was another minute before he relented and let her take his hands. While she sawed gingerly at the twisted hemp, she told him, “I’m going to find out where I’m going. You and everyone in that miserable place tell me it’s the ultimate end, but all I saw was a dead end. If we don’t have to stay there, why do we?”
“You can’t just leave!”
She had finished cutting away the rope and let it fall. “Watch me,” she responded.
When she stood, he scrambled to his feet as well. “This isn’t how it works.”
“How can you know how something works when it’s obviously broken? That Afterlife you brought me to was a scam and you’re the one who taught me to be skeptical about my destiny. Whether or not you intended to. My god was a liar and a fool, why should I accept he knew the truth?”
She made to turn away but then something wouldn’t let her. “You’re welcome to come. If you want. Your sister, your people.”
The man seemed flabbergasted almost beyond the power of speech. His name, she finally remembered, was Gerubem. “Your inviting us to accompany you on this nonsensical pilgrimage?”
“Why not? If shit’s catching up with you back in the dark, it seems like you could all use a change in scenery. There was this burnt-log guy, he seemed pretty nice, and he got hurt in your service. It would be miserable to leave him behind.”
For a long time, they stared at each other as the sun pricked their skin with perspiration, gusts of wind teasing gooseflesh on their arms before falling still again. A songbird trilled from the branches of a nearby tree and she saw the sound go through him like a dart. Like it had struck something. His eyes moved off hers suddenly, and he called, “Bialla? We need to talk.”
Senrien smiled as she bent to retrieve her other knife.
THE END
Comments are closed