Shapers of Worlds Volume II, page 37
“They’re already angry,” Paris said. “Can you summon them, please? It’s time this was over.”
Paris wouldn’t let Penelope or Odysseus attend the summoning. If the goddesses got violent, he didn’t want his friends getting hurt. He tried to prevent Helen from attending as well, but she said, “It’s so cute that you think I’d listen.”
The rite took place at midnight. Herbs were burned and animals sacrificed. Circe danced and chanted for hours . . . until, abruptly, the goddesses appeared: not only Hera and Aphrodite but Athena too.
Oddly enough, it was the first time Paris had seen them. When he was supposed to judge their beauty, none of the three had bothered to talk to him in person. They’d just sent talking birds to offer their bribes: a peacock for Hera, an owl for Athena, a dove for Aphrodite.
But now, Paris could see them all in the flesh: three women who looked no younger than Paris himself. As with Helen, all three women must have been glorious beauties in their youth . . . and as with Helen, they still retained much of their appeal. But the goddesses looked tired, and two of them were furious.
Aphrodite glared at Paris and put up her fists. “You are so going to get it.”
He stared at her in amazement. “You’re going to punch me?”
“You bet!” Aphrodite said. “Ares has taught me a ton of tricks.”
“Use a knife, dear,” Hera told her, handing Aphrodite a dagger.
Helen struggled not to laugh. Athena met Paris’s eyes and merely shrugged.
Paris didn’t have a weapon himself. He’d wanted a peaceful parley; coming armed had seemed unwise. Still, Paris had received Athena’s gift of skill in war. He thought he could knock the knife from the goddess’s hand without much effort.
Instead of that, he knelt before her. He said, “Go ahead, if this is what you want.”
“It absolutely is!” Aphrodite said. “You really hurt my feelings!”
“I’m sorry,” Paris said.
“Well, I’m not hurt in the least,” said Hera. “But I have to protect my reputation. I’m Queen of Olympus. I can’t allow disrespect.”
“I’m sorry,” Paris repeated. He kept his head bent.
“Well, you should be sorry!” Aphrodite said. “I’m the Goddess of Beauty. How do you think I feel, being beaten by a Goddess of Owls?”
“Goddess of Wisdom,” Athena muttered. “And war. And handmade fabrics.”
“I’m prepared to accept your punishment,” Paris said to Aphrodite.
“Fine!” Aphrodite looked triumphant. Then she asked him, “What’s a good punishment?”
Paris looked at Helen. Then back to Aphrodite. “What about this: I shall never again feel the burning inferno of love. Perhaps I might feel fondness . . . affectionate warmth . . . rapport and friendship. But not delirious passion. That’s right out.”
He glanced at Helen. She was smiling. She gave a nod.
Aphrodite said, “Hah! That works. You’re totally cut off!”
“And your punishment, Lady Hera?” Paris asked.
Hera was looking back and forth between Paris and Helen. She put on a careful expression. “Well, I’m the Goddess of Marriage and Childbirth, aren’t I? So, you horrible, wicked man, I sentence you to never getting married again and never fathering another child.”
Paris glanced at Helen. Helen said, “A horrendous curse. But I suppose we’ll have to live with it.”
“Thank you, Lady Hera,” Paris said.
“I’m getting soft in my old age,” Hera said with a grimace. “But I’m sick of being the bad guy in damned near every story. If this is my final myth, let me go out not looking like a bitch.”
Circe said, “You all want to come back to my place? I’ve got a bunch of amphoras of wine I picked up on Crete.”
“Wine!” said Aphrodite. “Oh, yes, please!”
This story started with a party. It ends with a party, too—the last time a god or goddess was seen on Earth. Afterward, Olympus withdrew; the Age of Legends ended. If the gods still live, their lives are only twilight.
As for mortals, none of us lives happily ever after. Paris and Helen and the others . . . they lived, grew old, and eventually died.
But they lived. That’s still something.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
—From Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Chthonic Op
By Tim Pratt
I slithered out from under a pile of split garbage bags into an early morning alleyway. The last thing I remembered was the cool sheets of a room in the Palace Hotel, paid up for the night by a dead man who wouldn’t be causing any more trouble, and settling down to sleep with a bellyful of my victim’s room service. I never woke up in the same place where I went to sleep anymore.
Rats scurried away from me when I rose, which seemed about right. I kicked trash away with my black wingtips, the ones with the intricate stitching around the toes that make mortal eyes water if they look at the designs too closely. The shoes had a little more heel than they had last time. I groaned from the usual aches of instantiation and patted my trench coat. I had tools in my pockets, so this was a work day. No surprise there. I found my phone—a new model, how about that—and squinted at the screen. Assuming the date was right, I’d been down for almost two years, and hadn’t suffered a single nightmare. The Husk must have been happy with my last job. Even I had to catch a lucky break sometime.
There was graffiti on the wall, luminous yellow, so bright the letters seemed to float an inch above the bricks: “Café Tuzan, 8 a.m., blue hair.” The map on the phone told me the café was several blocks and fifteen minutes away. Just enough time. The letters on the wall faded as I strolled out of the alley. I checked my pockets more carefully, hoping to get some sense of the job—if it was all stilettos and garrotes, that told me one thing; if it was skeleton keys and chloroform, that told me something else—but I had a little bit of everything this time, which suggested the Husk didn’t know the exact nature of the job, or that the parameters were highly variable. I decided to be flattered by the idea that I could handle anything the world threw at me, rather than offended that I might be considered disposable if the problem proved beyond my capabilities.
I walked through an East Bay neighbourhood that was only partway gentrified. It was like seeing a werewolf stuck halfway through its transformation: a check-cashing place a block away from a high-end lighting store, a cavern of a dive bar next to new-construction condos, an antique shop next to a junk shop (the difference was all in the window displays and the price tags). I checked myself out, using a plate-glass window for a mirror, and in addition to the shoes and black trench coat, I had a dark-grey suit, tailored to nip in nicely at my waist. My face was on the young side, with expressive eyebrows and a judgmental set to the lips. My hair was blonde, shoulder-length, wavy, and was going to get in my way later—I’d have to find an elastic band. I had a whole Ingrid-Bergman-meets-Veronica-Lake thing going, really; I was trim and athletic but only about five-foot-two, so I hoped I wouldn’t be expected to loom over anyone. Overall I looked like somebody’s gender-flipped fanfic of a film noir private eye, minus the beat-up fedora. I’d looked worse.
Café Tuzan was on a corner next to a new-looking wood-oven pizza place and an upscale sex-toy shop, but opposite a dingy body shop and a convenience store with dusty windows. The café itself could have belonged either to the neighbourhood’s past or its future—probably a longtime fixture with updated signage and some new furniture, trying to ride the wave of change. Good luck. Time rolls over everybody eventually. I was pretty sure even I wasn’t eternal.
Most of the tables were taken, some by crusty old-timers with actually-on-paper-newspapers, others by younger people tapping on laptops or tablets or gazing into their phones like they were hypnotic oracles. When I read “blue hair,” I’d expected an old lady with a bad blue rinse, but I should have remembered how hairstyle fashions had moved on. The only hair in the café that matched the description belonged to a woman who was maybe twenty-five, with a bright-blue undercut and eyes to match. She had a sharp face and dark eye makeup and little silver goat’s-head earrings and a pentagram necklace and black nail polish, and that didn’t make any sense. The Husk didn’t typically send me into the service of amateurs with bad dress sense.
But a job’s a job, so I sat across from her and waited. She leaned forward and said, “Are you . . . the Tonic Op?”
I didn’t laugh in her face because I am a professional. “Chthonic,” I said. Sure, it’s not a word people use a lot these days, but the ones who are capable of contacting the Husk usually know how to pronounce what they’re asking for.
She blushed. “Right, sorry, I . . . I guess I wasn’t expecting a woman.”
“I never know what to expect myself.” I was trying to be blandly non-threatening, but since I’m neither, it didn’t work too well. She was bearing up better in my presence than most humans do, though. Being near me tends to make their back teeth ache and headaches blossom between their eyes, and most of them shuffle away without even thinking about it.
She fidgeted with a cup of espresso. “Right. Do you know, ah . . . why you’re here?”
“The Husk didn’t brief me, I’m afraid.”
“Who?”
“You might know him by another name. My supervisor.” The Husk used to be a person, I think—in fact, I think he used to be me, or at least perform my role, before something hollowed him out, and everything human was tossed on the fire, leaving behind a shell that talks and schemes and amuses itself.
“Oh. Right. That voice, the one that came from the hearth . . . it was a little . . . husky, now that you mention it.” She tried out a tentative smile on me, and I rewarded it by giving her a bigger one in return. Most people can’t manage even bad wordplay in my presence. She was tougher than she looked, though I still couldn’t figure how she’d managed to call the Husk, let alone commission my services.
“How can I help you, Ms . . . ?”
“Oh! I’m Gabi, Gabi Addison. My problem is a little hard to explain, but . . . a family heirloom was stolen from me, and I need you to bring it back. It’s an antique chalice.”
“Really?” I’d traced stolen property before, but they were usually artifacts of power, not old cups. “And you called for me? Seems like something a more . . . mundane operative could handle.”
“The thing is, my great-uncle Hubert is the one who stole it.”
I leaned back. “This sounds like a family squabble. Even more outside my usual purview.”
“Well, the other thing is, I inherited the chalice from Uncle Hubert.” Gabi rolled the empty espresso cup back and forth between her hands. “Last week. When he died. And then, last night . . . he came back. His ghost stole the chalice.”
Ah. There we go.
“Definitely an inside job.” I walked around the secret vault beneath her grand inherited house and considered the many locked cabinets and the one broken one. “The thief popped open the one cabinet they wanted and ignored the rest, which means they knew what they were looking for.”
She didn’t get what I was driving at. “Well, yes, this was Uncle Hubert’s house before it was mine. We’ve lived here together since I was a girl, after my parents died. This vault was his—naturally, he knew where the chalice was kept.”
I shook my head. “A ghost didn’t do this. Ghosts aren’t very good at picking things up and carrying them off. They can just about manage to fling a plate across the room or slam a door if they’re mad enough. The more coherent phantoms can sometimes possess people and use their bodies, but then they lose the ability to pass through walls. If this vault of yours was secured like you said, with a blood-lock as well as a passphrase, then possession wouldn’t work, either.”
“So, it’s a locked-room mystery, then?” She sounded more amused than annoyed. Gabi was a lot less nervous now that we were on her home turf. Addison House was tucked away in the hills, with views of the bay and the bridges and San Francisco, but this room was below ground and windowless. My sight isn’t like other people’s, and I could see all the nasty threads of magic meant to keep strangers out, hidden in the floor and ceiling and walls. At least now I had some idea how Gabi had gotten in touch with the Husk. Her family was clearly an old and powerful one, and there were all sorts of conduits and connections and artifacts here that even an amateur could fumble their way through.
“Your uncle Hubert didn’t tell you what the chalice does?” I asked, ignoring her question.
She shrugged. “He never wanted to teach me anything. After my parents died in the . . . accident . . . he was the only family I had left, and he took me in. He said it was dangerous to leave unprotected Addison blood loose in the world. I gradually realized what my family was—the sort of work they did and the way they secured their wealth—but figuring out what that meant or how to make use of it was a different story. I don’t know what most of the things locked away in here are for. But the cup must be important if my uncle defied death to take it.”
I grunted. “That’s the other thing. People like your uncle don’t usually get to be ghosts. They live long and pleasant lives by running up debt on a sort of cosmic credit card, and when they die? That’s when the bill comes due. His soul should be in the care of my employers by now.” I considered. “You actually saw him take the cup?
She nodded, goat’s-head earrings swaying. “I heard a commotion and came downstairs to find Uncle Hubert fleeing through the front door, carrying something. It was definitely him—he was wearing his funeral robes, the ones with all the little eyes around the hem. I was so startled, I didn’t think to chase him, and he got away. Then I checked the vault, and the inventory list told me the chalice was the only item missing.”
I made a note to look at that list later. For now, I just slashed out with Occam’s Razor. “Are you certain he’s really dead? There are drugs and other techniques that can simulate death temporarily.”
She widened her eyes. “Of course I am! His heart gave out. He was embalmed, and we had a memorial service. There’s no doubt.”
Oh, well. “Was he cremated or buried?”
“Neither,” she said. “He was immured in the family crypt.”
“I’m guessing that’s on the property somewhere? We should take a look.”
The grounds of Addison House were more expansive than they should have been, based on the available geography. There are entities who distort space for purposes of torment, forcing their victims to wander endless forests, or extending hallways and basements into infinite realms, or sending the poor suckers back to the entrance when they finally pass through an exit. Those same beings can be persuaded to expand space in beneficial ways for those who make the proper arrangements. I assumed that was how the Addisons had the equivalent of an English country estate in the Oakland hills. We walked through a formal garden that was going to seed, then through a poison garden (gated, and much better tended), then along a meandering path through a copse of non-native plants, and finally reached a little chapel.
From Gabi’s goat’s heads and pentagrams, I’d expected one of those tedious modern churches, all inverted crosses and desecrated altars and torn-out Bible pages with obscene marginalia. Those techniques work—it’s the intention and the will that counts, after all—but the Husk, and certainly his superiors, are a lot older than that nice Jewish carpenter everyone makes such a fuss about nowadays. I always feel a little embarrassed around the adherents who don’t understand that Hell is just an aspect of a far more ancient underworld. I am an agent of the silent and the deep, the vast and the buried, the hidden and the shamed—the chasm that waits, and the dark that swallows. My kind appear in as many forms as the human mind can correlate, and all of them are illusory, and yet all of them are also real, for our essential nature is that of the fear of the shadowed.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find a shrine in an old style, based on that of an ancient Greek temple—in fact, their church looked like a scale model of the Necromanteion of Acheron, though the tower wasn’t quite right. The statues were appropriately weathered, their features blurred into nubs. The important part of the temple must be below ground, in what would have been the chamber of Hades in the original—the ritual entrance to the underworld. As good a place as any for a family crypt.
We descended past another locked portal. This one didn’t just sense the blood inside the person seeking to gain entry—Gabi had to actually cut the side of her finger and smear a drop on a particular stone and then whisper a password to it. (Of course, I heard the password clearly. Hearing whispers is one of my skills.) The wall slid open, and I followed her inside, tucking my handkerchief discreetly back into my pocket.
We went down a flight of steps and into a long hallway. Torches burst into smokeless flame as we approached, revealing niches in the walls, each holding a stone box. The corridor smelled of dust and, just faintly, formaldehyde. Hmm. She led me to a small circular room, where another stone box rested on a raised platform, in a place of honour. There were dead flowers on the lid and scattered on the floor around the pedestal. Gabi put a hand on the box, gazing down at it solemnly. “The head of the family is immured here until they’re supplanted by the death of the next. Then we move their bones into one of the wall niches. Generations of my family rest here.”
The words Mors Omnibus Communis were carved into the lid. Well, yeah. Everything dies. It’s what comes after that this family should worry about.
“May I?” Without waiting for an answer, I pushed the lid of the stone coffin aside, revealing an empty space inside.
She gasped, and from the spike in her pulse, I judged her reaction was genuine. “He—Hubert came back to life? How?”
