BURN IN HADES (13 page)

Fortunately, not all the souls attacked him. Most were just normal people who had simply gathered for the show. He squeezed through the ones who didn’t make a hole for him to race through, and he bowled some innocent folks over who shouldn’t have stood in his way like idiots.

Most of the crowd reacted as though they were just as afraid of him as he was terrified of them. They lurched backward in fear and allowed him to pass. The lion women hissed in fright and yanked their cubs away from him as if
he
were the crazy one trying to chop off someone’s head.

The Raven rode toward him on Gimlet’s back, and when she reached him, Cross swiped at her with the blade. She leaned her head out of the way.

“Such gratitude,” she said.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” he said.

She helped lift him up as he climbed onto Gimlet. Her rope dart attacked every soul that came close to them.

They kept a southward heading, and immediately outside of Amenthes they met a river. Even though it reached up to Gimlet’s neck, they crossed it easily. It was one of the most normal rivers he had ever come across in the underworld, although the mysterious blue substance that flowed through it wasn’t water.

After passing through a field of wandering shadows who were more eerie looking than they were bothersome, a silver river, more chaotic than the last one, blocked their path. Spirits swam in it, moaning and whispering, and seemed as if they were trapped within the metallic liquid. Gimlet hissed and bucked backwards.

“I think I’m with Gimlet this time,” said Cross. “I don’t think we should go in there.”

“This is the River Nun,” said the Raven. “There’s no way around it without going back the way we came.”

“Well, before we go in cut these ropes off.” Cross held out his bound wrists.

“Not yet.”

“We’re doing another con?”

“Just sit back.” The Raven rubbed Gimlet’s horn, imitating the technique she must’ve remembered Cross using, but he knew it wouldn’t work from her hands. The cornurus ignored her gesture and grew more agitated, grunting and backing away.

Cross laughed at the Raven’s inadequacy. “It’s alright, Gimlet.” He leaned forward and caressed her horn as only he could. The cornurus calmed.

No one else had his magic touch. He never understood how the ability worked himself. His connection to animals came to him as natural as breathing. The magic was just always there all his life. More puzzling to him was the fact that magic like his wasn’t supposed to exist in the underworld. That’s why collecting objects of the dead was so important to spirits. Objects were the only source of magic.

He probably retained his ability to communicate with animals because he still remembered his past life, and maybe once he drank from the River Lethe and wiped his memory, he would lose that valuable skill. That made him a little reluctant to go through with his quest.

Gimlet plunged them into the river of chaos, and they waded through the watery waste. It smelled of a mixture of rotting meat and that cheap perfume his old friend Kate used to wear. Spirits swam around them and through them, but never left the comfort of their river bed. Several slipped through one of his ears, whispering nonsense. So many voices jumbled all around them that hearing one voice was impossible.

Arms pulled them under the surface of the silver liquid. The Raven vanished from in front of him, Gimlet disappeared from under him. Suddenly he was alone with the surface of the water over his head. If his wrists weren’t tied, he could have swam.

He sank. A sudden weight fell upon his neck, pushing him down further. The silver liquid didn’t choke him like water would have, but he held his breath anyway, not wanting those spooky specters to enter his body.

Legs dangled at his chest wearing the Raven’s boots. He gaped upward. She was sitting on his neck looking just as confused as he felt. Meanwhile, Gimlet—a bullhead lizard the size of a carriage—as now riding on the Raven’s neck.

Cross parted his lips to speak and could only grunt like a cornurus. The words he wanted to say came from the Raven’s mouth but with his voice.

“What the hell is going on?” she said—or rather he said.

“I don’t know,” said Gimlet using the Raven’s voice. “Just hold on.”

Cross’s fingers tingled. The binds still around his wrists were too tight. He raised his hands to his face to bite the ropes off and found juicy sausages protruding from his hand. He knew it would be the wrong thing to do, but he couldn’t fight the urge to bite into the juicy sausages. His stomach gurgled and mouth watered. He hadn’t had any sausages since he was alive. He chomped on them.

“Ow!” The Raven used his voice and shook her own hand as if it hurt. “Don’t do that, you idiot!”

Hearing himself call himself an idiot from someone else’s mouth was beyond disconcerting. His head flooded with madness. Poisonous thoughts pervaded his mind. Cutting out his own tongue and sticking it in his ear just to see how it would sound was a stupid idea, but the urge to actually do it was overpowering. He slapped himself.

He had an odd sense that the Raven’s head was filled with apple butter. Bashing her skull to drink the apple butter crossed his mind.

The Raven was a decent enough angel, but if he cracked open her skull, he could keep all the objects for himself and get more objects by selling her apple butter. Souls would pay many objects for apple butter. It didn’t exist anywhere in the underworld, the same as sausages.

The Raven removed his blade from his holster and held it under her own neck. His arms leapt upward and snatched for the blade without his control.

Finally, Gimlet carried them out the other side of the river, snapping them all back to reality. The spiritual sludge that was clinging to their clothes slipped back into the river, wailing.

The Raven slid his obsidian blade back into his holster for him, and they continued their journey in silence. Neither he nor she spoke of what they saw or thought while in the River Nun. They seemed to mutually agree that it was too weird to bring it up.

The ridiculous notion of squeezing apple butter out of her skull was no longer a realistic idea to him, but he still wanted those objects. He contemplated how he could steal them from her. His easiest option would have been to slit her throat. If only he could reach his obsidian blade. His bound wrists made grabbing it out of its holster difficult, and with gimlet bouncing up and down as she galloped, both his hands were busy holding on to the Raven so he didn’t fall off the cornurus.

Hours later, the Raven pulled back on Gimlet’s reins on the outskirts of Duat, near the city of Neter-Khertet and on the edge of the desert realm of Sheol. Miles long strips of rubble, left over from the fall of the gates that used to section off each realm from each other stretched out before them.

The Raven turned her ear back toward Amenthes. This was his chance. Cross raised his fists high above her head figuring he could knock her out, take the objects and leave her in the desert.

“We’re still being followed,” she said.

Quickly, he lowered his fists and turned around to see who was following them. “I don’t see anyone.”

“They stopped when we stopped,” she said. “They’ve been following us ever since Xibalbá. At least five of them. I tried to catch them when we were in the Viņsaule canyons, but they kept escaping. I think they’re following you, but oddly enough I don’t suspect that they want your head like all the others.”

“Oh, that must be the draggles,” said Cross. “Don’t worry about them.”

“Draggles? I never heard of them.”

“That’s because I made up that name. I don’t really know what they are. I’ve actually never seen them. But they won’t bother us. They’ve been following me for a very long time. I think they’re just really shy.”

He reached inside the saddlebag and grabbed a strip of leftover barbot meat. The saddlebag didn’t do as good a job as an icebox would have, but it kept the meat fresh long enough before it became too rotten to eat.

He tossed the meat to the ground for the draggles to get later. “But you my friend, you and Ropey. I have a bone to pick with you two. I wanna know what happened back there in Amenthes. I was this close from losing my head to my own blade.”

“Last time with the squals,” said the Raven, “I had to wait for you to get close enough to me so I could toss you the blade for you to protect yourself. This time I figured I’d put the blade a bit closer to you early on. It worked.”

“I don’t care about that. I wanna know what took you so long.”

“Oh, I ran into an old friend and lost track of time. You’re still all in one piece.”

He gripped a handful of her justaucorps. “Nobody’s late when my neck’s on the line! I felt the Nothing crawling up my back. You know what that’s like?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure,” she said.

“You better hope you never do. When the Nothing bites your ass, it really sinks its fangs.”

“You’re right,” said the Raven. “Thirteen is a sacred number.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t think you’ll ever be worth more than thirteen objects. And too many spirits know about you now. More and more of them will be coming for your head, and one of these days they’re gonna get it, even if they have to go through me.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, let’s not both lose our heads.” Her wings flapped and slapped him off his cornurus into the sand.

“I’ll hold on to my objects,” she said, “and you can keep whatever it is you already got, even that holey blade in case you decide to fall on it.”

“You filthy, double-crossing bitch!” Cross reached for the obsidian blade tied around his back, but his bound wrists prevented him from grabbing it. The Raven’s rope dart snaked its head up and challenged him. It bobbed its head from side to side and stared him down as if it had eyes.

“Paradise is that way.” She pointed east. “But you’ll have to walk through Sheol. If you’re lucky, it’ll be about nine periods of sleep.”

“Get off my cornurus, you coward. I tamed her. You walk.”

“They say people with fair skin can’t take too much heat. So, you’d do a lot better than me in a desert.”

“You best watch your back,” said Cross. “I’ll be seeing you and Ropey soon. Very soon, you filthy split!”

The Raven tied a bandana over top of her hat and under her chin, and she prodded Gimlet into a fierce run. They galloped away in a cloud of dust.

“You soiled dove!” he called after her. “If I ever catch you, I’ll pluck all your filthy feathers off and skin you alive, you rotten snatch! I’ll rip your wings off, fry them in the pits of Hell, and feed them to the hellhounds!”

Cross marched through the desert of Sheol under the tormented red sky. Although heat was nothing new in the underworld, compared to every other realm he had ever set foot in, Sheol was the hottest. It was hot as a whorehouse on nickel night. He gasped for every breath, and the humidity stole it away each time.

Something as simple as trying to reach his blade so that he could cut the ropes from his wrist became too much of an exertion in the heat. The reaching and stretching exhausted him. After several tries, he finally swung it around to his wrists. He stuck the blade between his knees, sawed his bindings and plopped down on his back, drained and wearied.

Sometimes the smoldering skies would crackle gently like a kindling fireplace on Christmas. Other times it would explode with the fury of dynamite. That day, it emitted a chiming noise. Bursts of light flashed within the flaring sky like exploding bulbs. The dead sun, the only dark spot in the sky, peered down at him, never blinking, never sleeping, defying the logic of time.

He prayed that the Great Goddess would help him make it out and trusted that she would stick with him like she always had. She wouldn’t have placed him in such a circumstance unless he could handle it.

His old friend Sinuhe always said that the underworld had a way of tormenting a soul, not just physically but mentally, and only got rid of you when it was done with you. If it didn’t want to let you go, you didn’t go, and if it wanted you out, you were out.

Cross declared his own terms, though. If the underworld never rested, then neither would he. If the underworld never cooled down, then neither would he. He was going to beat it at its own game.

He staggered to his feet and trudged over dune after dune, only to meet more of the endless ocean of dust. Nothing else lay in sight in all directions. Not a soul. Not a landmark.

Legend had it that spirits had wandered the desert of Sheol for all eternity without ever happening upon another soul. But not, Cross. He would be the exception. Even if it took him a thousand years, his stubborn feet would keep moving. One foot at a time. Left, right, march, like the soldiers. He had always endured when others gave up. He had survived while everyone around him succumbed. That would never change.

He sang “Motherless Child” to himself as he put one determined foot in front of the other. Without the old spirituals he had learned from the slaves back at the plantation, his afterlife wouldn’t have lasted so long. The hymns kept his spirit up, kept him moving forward.

Heat sat on his neck like a devil jamming its claws into his back. He dropped to a knee and cursed at the skies. It showered him with the warm, red blood of the living as if to tease him with what he used to be and emphasize the reality of his death. He stretched out his arms at his sides, stuck out his tongue and tasted the crimson, copper-tinged drops, drinking them in defiance.

“Keep it coming,” he said to the sky and laughed. “You ain’t so tough.”

Adding to the madness, details of his days among the living zoomed in and out of his mind as he trudged through the red-soaked sand. If only he had made it to the River Lethe, he could have erased all his memories and continued his miserable existence in ignorant bliss. The souls without memories were the lucky ones. His memory was a gift, but also a curse. It was his main advantage to surviving the dangers of the underworld, but also the reason every soul wanted him to burn.

His mother appeared before him, just popped into existence. Her dark, immaculate skin glowed unlike any spirit he had ever seen in the underworld.