The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 18
His shirt swells with entrails until the weight of them undoes the fabric from the clinch of his belt, and they splatter, steaming, over polished brogues, liver and yards of intestine, more heft to them than you’d think from looking at their gelatine shine. But there you go, there you go.
“Messy,” chirps one of them, face a halo of radioactive light. The headdress and the raptorial beak give him away.
Marduk twitches a shoulder indifferently.
“Ra,” Fitz whispers, pained, already beginning to bleed again.
The demiurges watch without interest as Coyote crumples onto his side, one arm flung out, the other curled, as though to his entrails were children to shelter in an embrace. A foot twitches. His trousers stain with a growing bloom of shadow, the sudden ammonia in the air shocking not because it is present, but because it has been allowed to exist. The death of a god is supposed to be beautiful.
All at once, I’m furious. That they couldn’t conceive a way to spare him the humiliation of dying like roadkill. That he is there. Without his patter, his grace, his protean wardrobe, his conman charm. The road runs long and black behind his executioners, flecked with diamonds.
“Go home,” Marduk flutes. “See what was wrought when one would not listen to us. He was told to heel, but he did not.”
“The fuck are you doing, talking like a bunch of Ren-faire assholes?” I don’t realize until the words are out that I’m the one screaming, that I’m already moving, that there’s nothing on me but rage, nothing but a vision of a coyote with his head smashed open, wearing a veil of little black ants like he was wedded to death at last.
None of it matters.
I barrel down on the lords of creation, the highest of high, the sovereigns of their pantheons, the patron gods of dead cities once great, ululating at a falsetto that would have cracked glass, and I swear—just a fraction of a moment, the heartbeat before cartilage snaps—that I see them flinch.
Then, that ceases to matter too.
Wires lasso my wrists, my knees, my ankles, the flesh between my fingers, every joint on my body, no matter how inconsequential. Even my jaw, threading through the insides of my mouth so my tongue can bleed. I have a second to breathe before they raise me into the air, spread-eagled for their inspection, my restraints constricting as the gods drift closer.
“Fucking hell, Rupert, do you ever think—?” Tanis snaps from somewhere behind me. My bonds tighten further, slice deeper, my pulse a hundred hummingbirds embedded in my skin.
“No,” I manage to wheeze. “Never.”
Ra motions with a hand.
The barrier comes up so close to the back of my head that I can feel my scalp bubble, smell the acrid reek as my hair cooks. The flesh peels along the nape of my neck and I scream. I still can hear Tanis, still can hear Fitz, but their voices are distorted by whatever it is that Ra has conjured. I’m alone with the father gods.
This is definitely going to end well.
“Noisy,” the bird-god says.
Slowly, I begin to discern shapes within that unending glare: close-cut curls and lush beards on aquiline faces, togas; a glass eye set within a wise mien; antlers, rising from a fur-shrouded thing that’d be double my height if we stood toe to toe.
“Hey, hey.” I kick a foot feebly for attention. “Is this where you do the exposition thing?”
Surprise and syrupy curiosity prickles through the group.
“You know what I’m talking about, right? That’s how this works. You capture the opposition and then you tell them your whole plan, down to all the little details. Because otherwise, what’s the point? You need someone to show off to, to show you’re the smartest dog in the room.”
They exchange looks. I’m entranced by their eyes. There’s something bovine about those limpid stares, and not only because there are no whites, no sclera, nothing but cozy darkness, like winter nights outside a log cabin.
“No,” Marduk says.
And I die.
IN THE BEGINNING of this memoir, I said it happened twenty-six times.
I wasn’t lying.
I didn’t say how, though.
Once was to a crocodile god bloated with larvae divinity, its insides eaten away until it lay hollow like a cicada shell, marionnetted by its parasites.
The other twenty-five times, it was to these assholes.
SEVENTEEN
I COUNT EVERY death.
You know what they say about the first time? How it’s always the hardest? Maybe that’s the crux of the old Biblical story, where murder came to be because a man named Caine killed his brother Abel. After that first infraction, humanity becomes proficient at every gradient of slaughter you could pin a name to, whether fratricide or first-degree selfishness, stabbing or drowning or death by drunken blowjob.
I guess it’s true for gods too.
The first time they kill me, it’s without preamble. My restraints became garrottes, compressing until they cut clean through each joint: phalanges, knees, ankles, wrists, pelvis, individual vertebrae. That I fall to pieces onto the asphalt like so many slices of cured meats is irrelevant; it is a stunningly efficient execution. If I wasn’t so busy dying, my decapitated head turning to receive the rain of effluvia, I’d offer compliments to the murderer.
Ordinarily, I’d then segue into processing into Diyu, where I’m reprimanded and reminded of my duties, before resurrection into the same shell.
Not this time.
Instead, I wink back into being, whole and in view of the father gods, who are, I think, as mystified by my restoration as I am. I stare at them, apologetic.
“This doesn’t normally happen.”
They confer in a tongue like the itching of the lizard brain, a primordial dialect. Then Odin comes up to bat. This second time round, I guess the gods have become curious. From the All-Father, I would have expected incineration, to be rendered down into so much charcoal, but I die perforated by corvids, his ravens too big to peck out my eyes so they just jackhammer my skull to rubble.
Another flash. Another Rupert, ostensibly whole but exponentially more traumatised.
“What the fuck?”
My third death. Now they choose fire.
For my fourth, a low-grade electrocution that leaves my organs just so. I die as they pry open the lid of my belly, steam wafting upwards, salt and that distinctive barbecued sweetness.
For the fifth, it’s lions. They’re traditionalists.
It keeps going.
I want to say it gets easier, but with every iteration, the gods become more inventive, stretching their toolset. The lions become maggots, become rats, become locusts kept starved for millenia. The torments stretch. I became their Vitruvian man and the gods are children, delighting in the puzzlebox of my longevity, adapting from one death to the next. On one occasion, they make it last for a decade. On the next, I detonate, a firework demise so exquisitely agonizing I wake up still choking.
Twenty-five times, until at last something takes pity and the lights don’t come back on.
I WAKE TO Meng Po’s face, staring upside-down at mine, her dark eyes brimming with worry.
“What have you done to yourself?”
I try to sit up, but it doesn’t work. Pain strobes across the length of my prone body, tracing the topography of the gods’ experimentation, where they broke, where they cut, where they scooped out marrow to taste. “I am offended that you’d suggest it’s my fault.”
“It is usually your fault, Rupert.”
“I still feel like it’s an unjust critique.”
She sighs. “Enough.”
The ceiling is raftered with strings of dried herbs, a few ropes of sausage; a domestic inventory, unlike what you’d expect of a divine abode. “Am I dead for good?”
“If you wish to be, yes. There is only so much damage that the soul is allowed before it comes apart.”
“What if I don’t wish to be?”
“Then I would send you back.” Her voice is even, her expression guarded.
“And let’s say, let’s just say, that there is a pack of gods waiting for me on the other side, and a group of friends—” I pause, repeat the words, let the reverb settle in my head. Friends. Who would have thought? “Friends they might kill, if nothing is done. Because frankly, I have no idea what can be done. What would you advise?”
“To remember that we are each of us doors and every god is tethered to the fates as much as you and any other mortal.” Meng Po ladles tea into a small saucer, lowers it to where my head lies on her lap. “And more than anything else, it’s the ones in power who areafraid.”
“I want to point out that I just had the fantastic fortune of dying”—I pause to enumerate my deaths; personal distance is invaluable in these situations—“twenty-four, twenty-five times? I don’t know if the rats count; it was the same method twice.”
“You’re babbling.”
With effort, I heave myself upright again. The room is small and spare as a nun’s boudoir which, upon reflection, isn’t an inaccurate description. To my surprise, it’s not Diyu outside of her windows but something more pastoral: meadows and mountains that remind me of the Rockies, snow coroneting their spires. A family of plump bunnies explore the grass.
I sip the tea. “I think I’m allowed.”
Meng Po shrugs a delicate shoulder. A vase of fresh flowers—extinct blossoms, I imagine, dead for a thousand years and forgotten save for an ox-headed demon in love with the saint of new starts—sits on a well-worn table.
“I’m not saying you’re not.” She sips primly from her own cup.
“I still don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me, though.”
“I occasionally wonder if you’re intentionally obtuse or just stupid.” Meng Po says it without rancour, quietly pensive. “Rupert, you’ve spent your whole life looking for short cuts, cheats, backstage passes, if you will.”
“You’re hipper than you look.”
Meng Po shakes her head carefully. “Pay attention.”
“I’m paying attention. I think. This is about as close to ‘attention’ as I ever get. The father gods, there’s no way to kill them—”
“No,” says Meng Po. “But that does not mean they are without fears.”
“What the hell would people like that be afraid of?” I drain my tea, abruptly furious; every nerve feels like a guitar string stretched too tight. I’m not angry for me; I’m angry for everyone who has been born, who has had to live—knowing or unknowing—through the petty games of the divine, who has been a chess piece: a pawn, a knight sworn to a lord with no love for anyone but his next distraction. What is this world, that it has a God of Missing People and a God of Being Missing? What is the point of the pantheons if we’re all just dying here?
Okay, so I am angry for me too. But that’s beside the point.
“What could gods be afraid of? Father gods. They’re the fucking foundations of heaven. They fucking shit out creation. There’s nothing we can do, nothing we can do—”
The saucer shatters in my hand. Porcelain shrapnel cuts new lines through my palm, marking out new fortunes. I clench my fingers around the shards but there is no pain, Meng Po’s tea is smoky in my mouth. No blood either. Not a drop. I open my hand again to stare at the scored, torn skin. No blood at all; nothing but a strange effervescence, like the ghost of champagne weeping over the dermis.
“—except die. Over and over and over again. As many times as it suits their damned pleasure.” My voice dries away. “What the fuck do we have that we can use against them? We’re just meat.”
“And what do you think they fear more than anything else, Rupert? What punishment do they give their own?”
“You’re a terrible goddamned quest giver, Meng Po.”
To my vicious delight, her expression finally splinters. Her brow creases, the corners of her mouth wrinkle as her lips pinch. “Humour me.”
“Okay. Fine. Let’s see.” I gaze out of the window again. The sky, on second examination, is wrong: wine-dark between the saccading of my eyes, the sun like a hole gouged through the strange fabric. “Let’s see. Okay, so there are stories of Zeus turning Apollo into a mortal because he pissed off his old man. And Zhu Bajie, and what’s the other one’s name—?”
The switch flips.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Meng Po stares placidly at me. “What do you think I’m saying?”
“I think you’re—you know what? Never mind. We’re not doing that. I can control myself.” I point at her. “I think you’re telling me that they’re afraid of being meat. Is that right? Is that the big secret that they’ve been hiding? But that’s so stupid.”
The goddess shrugs delicately.
“Imagine being immortal—”
“I know what being immortal is like. It’s fucking terrible.”
“No, not how you understand it. That isn’t immortality. That is a function of office and a cruelty that no one deserves.”
“You know I’m still in the same room, right?”
“Being a god, Rupert, means knowing with certainty that there will be a tomorrow, that the future will be sweet with pleasures, that those pleasures are limited only by the span of your imagination, and that all this will be true… up till the end.” Meng Po takes my hand in hers, cool and smooth as ceramic. With care, she picks my palm clean of crockery and closes her fist around the detritus. When she spreads her fingers, there’s the saucer again, whole and clean. She nods to herself and pours us both a fresh serving of tea. “That is the big secret. All gods know, without question, that there is an end to paradise, that Ragnarök always comes, that the end times are inescapable.”
I trap my hand around the proffered crockery, gleaming with that strange effervescence that oozed from me when I should have bled. “Great. So, they know we can’t beat them.”
“There are no guarantees in this world, Rupert. You of all people should know that. No promises, no certainties, no signature that cannot be forged, no document that cannot be altered. It is all lies.” Her fingers close around her own cup and she lifts it to her lips, staring at me over the rim. “Imagine spending an eternity with that knowledge. It can make some people so afraid.”
“So, you want us to kill them. I mean, that isn’t bad advice, but at the same time, it isn’t useful advice. The problem is actually getting there. Killing a father god is tough business. Just because they’re going to die—”
“Time is space,” Meng Po interrupts, a smile blooming.
“Are you high? Just tell me what you want us to do. Like, within the context of the prophecy or whatever. There’s the Road, the Lamp, the Knife, the Door, the Noun. Explain this to me like it’s a video game walkthrough.” I puff out my cheeks and sigh, my hands shaking so hard I have to put the cup down. “Just… tell me what to do.”
“What’s a door sometimes, but the means to join two places?”
“Can we just stop with the—” The light flicks on. “Oh. Really? It’s that easy? Just like that?”
I don’t hear Meng Po’s answer, only see the old woman’s shoulders shake with laughter, her head thrown back, teeth gleaming white in that false sunlight. I feel the pull of the father gods, a fishhook sunk deep—but this time, I’m not scared.
“HEY, MOTHERFUCKERS.”
I wake up, already flayed: butterflied, skin petalled and pinned to the wall. The pain spasms my belly, spreads in bright wailing colours through my vision. I stare through the flowers of pain, out and over the heads of the father gods. Once again, the scenery feels improbably alien: a desert cauled in ice and extraterrestrial terrain.
“Hey.” They’ve done something to my entrails. Gravity hasn’t yet made a pool of them at my feet. “Motherfuckers. I’m talking to you.”
“Still noisy,” chirrups Ra.
“It’s called a conversation.” There’s an unexpected benefit to unspeakable pain becoming the status quo. The sensation never goes away, but the body learns to acclimatise, allowing for speech and last-ditch bravado. I clench my teeth, all the while thinking, We did this before, sixteen deaths ago. “Interaction, give and take, like equals. You ever heard of that, asshole?”
The plumage around Ra’s throat tufts and swells. “Noisy.”
“A god cannot be equal to a worm,” rumbles Odin. You’d think he’d look good, that one. What with the worship of the big screen, the endless rehashing of his myth, the neo-vikings tweeting for his blessings. But this Odin, he’s the God of Gallows, the Hanged One: a sun-dried cyclopean corpse, draped in leathers, antlered and stinking of shadow. “A god is no equal of worms.”
I remember Marduk. The father gods, for all their antediluvian power, the largesse of their status, are so divorced from the world they can barely speak its languages anymore. No wonder they fled. They’re old men shouting down from a sky once unknowable and now mapped by a thousand thousand data points. No safe place for them anymore, not with secularism giving a name to every miracle.
“Not a worm.” I spit out a tooth I hadn’t known I’d broken. “Human.”
“Noisy.” Light bleeds through Ra’s pinfeathers, pours from his eyes. I’ve got one shot before they take me apart again. I test my restraints: restrictive, but not prohibitive. Like all sensible creatures, the father gods assume I wouldn’t tear myself apart for no reason.
“Yeah. Well.” I sort through my vocabulary for a pithy phrase. “Fuck you.”
Good enough.
Blood gouts as I wrench myself loose of my fetters, bringing my forearms together. Flesh and pain are the oldest currency, older even than despair. If it’s as easy as Meng Po claims, this is where it ends.
If it isn’t, I’m clinically fucked.
I let the pain billow and wander down its tributaries. Past the doors to the outside of reality, the gateways to hell, past where Nyarlathotep and its siblings spin in the aether, waltzing to the music of the blind idiot god. I take a right at the edge of natural law, detour through time, down through the ebb and glow of my torture, following my soul to where it sleets hopefully towards destruction.
