Chapter 31 The Last Resort

In Just Desserts she does not find her quarry, but she finds, at last, one who knows, or who says he knows. She eavesdrops on fourteen billion conversations, her hands itching, before she hears the one that matters: one god sharing a memory of another's charming brag, of how he put one over on you-know-who with a nod and head-waggle to the up and out, not knowing that you-know-who herself is sitting on, as it were, his left shoulder, swinging her invisible legs. The one she is hunting was here, many eons ago as Just Desserts measures time, but—she calculates quickly—only seconds ago in the outside world. He is not here now; she has already tested the haecceity of all forty-seven godly guests and the once-divine demon servitor who is the designated driver of this haven, and none of them are a match. She stalks the demon servitor until his consciousness slips into a private space to organize some new pleasure for the guests, and she slips into it behind him, riding his slipstream.

She allows herself to become visible as she locks the door behind her; she takes her terrible aspect, red and skinless, garlanded by skulls representing the gods she has slain, the flaying knife in her hand, the skull-cup overflowing in her other hand, her staff across her shoulder, her feet bare, her ankles jewelled, her corona a halo of wind and flame in which her long black hair streams and burns. The demon servitor shrieks and skitters, but she takes him by his chained throat and swings him to the floor. His diaphanous floating gowns become spiky armour in terror, and the smooth polished surface becomes rough stone; she slaps him with another hand and he puts them back, apologizing.

—No protean wriggling, she says sternly, and he squiggles briefly before stabilizing.

—Yes, yes, definitely not, he says, meek and mild.—It was just a reflex.

—Where are your records? She shakes him.—I want to see all your guest records. Everyone who has been and gone since the founding of Just Desserts.

—I will fetch them for you, the demon servitor says.

She shakes him again.—I don't trust you not to try and wipe them, she says.—Since your city prides itself on security and discretion, you would be compelled to protect your guests no matter how afraid you are of me. Tell me where they are and I'll fetch them myself.

—I can't wipe them, the demon servitor says, smiling and weeping. He opens a book, as it were, and she looks, as it were; then she barks out a laugh so loud the world shivers and forty-seven gods look over their shoulders in sudden terror. The last resort of the gods is using the akashic record for paperwork.—It's the very latest technology, the demon servitor says, as if compelled to deliver a sales pitch.—We store our guest records in the universe's memory of itself, which is completely discreet because memory is infinitely vast, and completely secure because nobody can find it unless they already know that we exist and where we are, which they totally do not.

She lets him go. He scrabbles to the door but can't crack the lock she placed on the room. She ignores him while she reviews the akashic record. He's not wrong. She would never have found this if she hadn't been shown. The problem with the akashic record is that there is so much of it, not just the material universe but also every imagined world, every dream, every half-assed wish; it's impossibly difficult to find anything in that immensity without an anchor point for it. Now that she does, it's easy. The guest records are perfect, complete, pristine; it's as if she was there herself when five gods tormented and bound a sixth, forced him to create and maintain a haven, to dedicate his entire being and creative powers to them rather than, as he would by natural inclination, himself. Since then those founders have come to and gone from Just Desserts a million times, bringing their friends and guests, the number of those in the know slowly growing until it reached its present state of near-overpopulation. The founders have become bored with it; none of them have visited in a while, leaving the demon servitor in bondage. And here is the one she seeks; he first came here five minutes ago, in real time; unutterable eons ago, in the subjective time of the city. Since then he has visited several times, without schedule or pattern.

—All right, she says, turning back to the demon. She does not put her knife to his throat; it is unnecessary.—Here is my offer. I will ask of you one thing; do it perfectly, and I will free you from your bondage and allow you to be a god again. You will remain bound by the forbiddings and will serve out your sentence, but you may do so in godhood.

The demon agrees so quickly that she can't help but laugh again.

Only a fraction of a second has elapsed in real time—in earth's frame of reference at pre-Diaspora standard; she is reminded again of how parochial that frame is, how old-fashioned—between her entry into Just Desserts and the moment the demon servitor sends out his targeted spam. A unique opportunity in all of history, the demon gushes. Crafted especially for yourpleasure and delectation as a repeat guest of high standing; an experience never to be repeated, and so on, and so on, a message of wheedling and coaxing and tempting, entangled with her target's haecceities to find him wherever he is.

—Come to my spear, little king, Viramunda says. She knows now to hide its sharp point beneath the water. She is coiled, almost trembling with the effort of suppressing her energy.

And he comes, happy and eager.

The moment he manifests in range—that nameless god of the gullet, still wearing Lambakanna's skin at some level, because he can never take it off, can he—she moves. She recognises him so clearly; she feels him recognise her, too, no matter how much she has changed. It's not only the god of the gullet recognizing his old mark, that old devil that's gone around and come around; it's Lambakanna, the lost lamb, whatever is left of him.

She spears him through the shoulder. The blow knocks him right out of the pocket universe of Just Desserts and she follows hot on his heels, but she remembers to snap the demon servitor's chain before she goes. His shout of joy echoes as she leaves the city, which collapses into frenzy in her wake. She has half a thought of wondering what he will do to the former guests who placed themselves in his power, but then he and they are all in her past, because her future is haloed in flame, her vision narrowing as she reaches for her spear, gripping it tight, driving it and the god transfixed upon it through world and world, through dream-wisps and virtue-halls and echologies and the myriad spheres of the invisible world until they finally break out, explode out, into the real, the god of the gullet forcibly enfleshed. She gives him the skin he took from her, so that she can make him give it back. Human and small, and bearded, even. They crash into a dry and burning mountain, high up in the peaks, hard enough to crack and crater stone. The god of the gullet squirms, but he is pinned to the rock face behind him, the bone spear a little longer than he is tall, buried deep. He does not bleed; she didn't enflesh him that thoroughly.

He is screaming, shouting, begging, negotiating, but she's not listening. She squats on his chest, probing his face with her fingers. It's not the god of the gullet she's here for, though revenge is certainly part of it. She looks for her daughter. She is there—she can feel her, see her—but her daughter and the god are so entangled. They are not like two serpents winding together but as if one serpent had crawled into another's shed skin. She wants to weep, but she won't give him the satisfaction.

"You'll never get me out," the god spits and promises. "It's too late, too little. I won and I spoiled."

She claws at his insides, trying to free her daughter, the gestalt of herself and her other, their synthesis, but the god whines and screams and the twist within him roils. She cannot separate them.

She keeps him there for a year, pinned in place to the mountain under the great red sun. She comes back, day after day, to tear at him while his howls reverberate across the dry earth and into its deepest dreams. The invisible world shudders.

At the end of the year, Viramunda looks around the empty world and dimly realizes that the two of them are alone. The last of the children have left; the other old ones have moved on, too, wherever they go. There is no material life on earth, save for the enfleshed god of the gullet and she herself. She could leave, too; she has never been forbidden. She always meant to leave, to move on, after she did this one last thing, after she took back what was lost. She never wanted to move on alone. Sometimes, when she despaired of finding him, when she had almost convinced herself that he had escaped, she considered leaving anyway, and lifted the trembling weight of the boulder on her heart; what if she left, what if she gave up, what if? But now she's stuck worse than ever, because her daughter is right there and she can't scrape the parasite off. It's been too long, and he's threaded in so tight. Earth is beginning to abrade under the giant red sun. It won't be long now before the mountains melt, before the crust boils away.

She has to take him, in the end. That's what it means: a price that's already been paid.

She flays him and wraps that comforting old skin around herself, reconstituted from the akashic record from the subatomics on up, with every scar and bruise intact. Her garland of skulls rattles. She leaves the bone staff where it is, in spear-form, stuck in a mountain with fragments of skin and meat searing onto it. The spear is blessed by her rage; that's something she can leave behind. The bones it is made from are her own and will not dissolve even in the heart of a red giant. Someday a white dwarf will vomit it out again. Her memorial to earth, or perhaps her spit in its eye.

Reuniting with all her selves and others is a balm, even if there is a thready flowering of poison in it. She greets her daughter as she becomes her at world's end; she folds Lambakanna full of rue into her arms, and so many others behind him: the Lamb, closing her case (inconclusive, and the past another country with its own jurisdiction); Vidyucchika ready to face the golden city again, with unspeaking Lambajihva as her skin and shield; the Heron, poised to fly at last; Leveret dying again to get through one more world into the next; Annelid, laughing. The long line of grandmothers forms a thin red wheel around the party, a perimeter, before they mingle with lines of grandfathers and grandothers, kin by intention and commitment to the art, not blood or soul or lineage. Chandranakha herself stalks in like she's expecting to be bowed to, blowing on her nails. Randos wander in, too, because the borders of self are deeply porous: a guard who was bad at ladders; a ragged man wearing a devil mask; a woman who is two women, her faces looking away from each other; a plague-masked call centre operator from the Disaster Management Centre for Safer Communities and Sustainable Development in Sri Lanka. Skulking in the back of the crowd is a nameless god waving a golden ticket. GET OUT OF JAIL, it says, FREE. He's the only one who looks back at earth when they leave it.