by S. M. Reine
Nathaniel led James down a narrow path through the bushes. The city wall lay beyond. It was only waist-high, and obviously not intended to keep anything in or out—the deep trench on the other side did a better job of that.
James peered down into the chasm beyond the wall. It was as wide as a river, and he couldn’t see the bottom.
“So all we have to do is get over that,” Nathaniel said. “And then…smooth sailing?”
Smooth sailing across a wasteland in Hell.
“There must be a way across. We just need to find it,” James said, and he thought it was fairly miraculous that he didn’t sound as terrified as he felt.
They continued to walk, keeping the wall to their left and the long bones of the corpse’s leg to their right. The knee was lifted, creating a hollow space underneath. It smelled like centuries of rot below Malebolge, and despite James’s scarf, it quickly grew overwhelming. He sucked in shallow breaths through his mouth.
The ground turned from stone to mud. No, not mud—James lifted a foot out of the mire to look at his shoe, and realized that it was a mixture of effluence and rotting food. The demons must have simply thrown their waste underneath the body. James and Nathaniel were walking in it.
He tightened the scarf around his face and stopped looking down.
But as they skirted the city, no obvious route across the trench appeared. They were trapped under the pelvis now. The only ways out were to go back…or enter the city.
James had been trying not to look at the city cradled within the pelvis over their heads, but now he had no choice. The buildings looked more like a mixture of mold and calcified flesh, and the demons within were maggots—maggots that would kill two wandering humans without a second thought.
“All we have to do is get into Malebolge,” James muttered, pacing beside the wall. His feet slurped in and out of the waste. “Then we can walk down into Coccytus, across Limbo, and save the fucking princess. So simple. What a great idea.”
“What did you say?” Nathaniel asked.
“Nothing.” He heaved a sigh, and then regretted it when the moist stench of rot rolled into his lungs.
James still had another glamor tattooed on his body, but it wasn’t the same as the spell that had made him look like Anthony. This one made the wearer impossible to look at. Not invisible, strictly speaking, but utterly unnoticeable. The spell was priceless, too good for him to use against the Union, but he could think of no situation better for it than now. It could allow one of them safe passage through Malebolge.
He activated the spell and directed the flare of power at Nathaniel. James could tell when it took effect by the fact that he suddenly didn’t see his son. He could focus on the wall behind him, the mire beneath their feet, or the pelvic bone dripping ichor on them—but he couldn’t focus on his son’s face.
“What did you do?” Nathaniel asked. Even when he was talking, James couldn’t quite see him. He barely glimpsed Nathaniel’s motion out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re invisible,” James said.
“Yeah? How many fingers am I holding up?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Invisible, Nathaniel. That means I can’t see you.”
“Three,” Nathaniel said. “The answer is three.” He sounded far too delighted, considering that they were both knee-deep in effluence.
That was the end of the spells James could use to disguise an individual, but he couldn’t walk into Hell looking like he did now. He pulled his shirt off. The tattoos and burns seemed inhuman enough; he might be able to pass for a vrykolakas if nobody looked closely enough to realize that the marks were ethereal.
He scooped some of the effluence off of the ground and covered his jeans with it, striping his arms with what remained on his hands afterward.
“That is disgusting,” Nathaniel said.
“But I won’t smell human. As long as neither of us speak, perhaps we won’t get recognized.” Or eaten, he added silently.
It was unsettling to search for a path up to the city streets, unable to be certain that his son was following him. He could feel the faint pulse of magic and hear footsteps echoing his own. Aside from that, Nathaniel was no more than a ghost.
He found stairs that led into the pelvic cavity. They climbed.
James and Nathaniel entered urban Malebolge near the market. It was nothing like the market in Dis. The shops were more like open pits, with tables covered in severed limbs, bones, and shredded flesh. Others sold leather, some sold stone tools.
The streets were crowded with spirits. Shadows flashed past James, some of them no more than wisps of smoke, but some were beginning to take human form. Masses of black flesh oozed ichor onto the tables as they shopped.
There were so many demons that James had never heard of in a single glimpse of the street—and he didn’t look directly at a single one of them. But they didn’t need to catch his eye to have his complete attention. Fear built within James no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. Surrounded by nightmares, he had no other choice.
He walked briskly down the street, trusting that Nathaniel would follow, and tried not to look like his heart was about to pound out of his chest.
When James passed a butcher shop, he realized that he wasn’t being followed anymore. He could no longer feel the invisibility spell. “Nathaniel?” he whispered, turning back.
The butcher shop was an open fire pit next to a metal rack. Several humans hung from the hooks in preparation of processing; most of them were even dead. One of them was being transferred to a hook over the butcher’s block as James watched. Underneath all of the blood, he had sharp features, narrow shoulders, and red-blond hair—a salt-of-the-earth man that wouldn’t have been out of place singing hymns at church.
But he was dead, dripping blood from his fingertips, and sliced open from pubis to chin. The butcher peeled the edge of his skin back to saw at the connective tissue underneath.
James glimpsed his son staring out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t watch,” he whispered. Nathaniel didn’t reply.
The demon set down his knife and got a good grip on the edges of the skin.
In a single, smooth gesture, the butcher ripped the skin off of the man’s ribs.
Nathaniel threw up. James could only tell because he saw the bile slap onto the street. He found his son’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “I told you not to look,” he muttered.
The butcher glanced at James. With its missing jaw and neckless body, it was obviously a brute—a type of demon native to Dis. “Do you want some?” it asked in vo-ani , picking up the bloody cleaver.
James rushed on without responding.
The streets spiraled around spikes of bone, leading to higher levels. James headed straight for the top of the pelvis without stopping or releasing Nathaniel.
His son slipped from his grasp when they reached the apex.
“Nathaniel?” James asked in a low voice.
He was shocked to hear the response right in front of him. “I’m here. Do you see the bridge?”
James turned, searching for a path across the chasm. Malebolge’s arm was draped over the wall, forming a bridge of bone. They only had to get across the chest to reach it.
“Perfect,” James said.
He moved to step down the pelvis, but Nathaniel stopped him.
“Wait. Is that who I think it is? Down in the markets.”
James had been trying not to look into the markets again, but he dropped his gaze. It was easy to make out what Nathaniel had seen, even hundreds of feet below—there was only one human loose on the street.
Commander Gary Zettel had somehow survived the Haven.
He was slinking behind the booths in the market, staying in the shadows. From the street level, he would be invisible in his black clothes, but from above, the pale skin of his face was like a beacon in Hell.
“Damn it all,” James muttered. He just didn’t give up, did he?
Considering the other dangers surr
ounding them, James wasn’t worried about what one human could do to them. But if Zettel got caught and told someone that he was chasing other humans through the city…
“Should we save him?” Nathaniel asked.
There was a time that James would have said “yes.” It was the job of a kopis to protect humans, and being an aspis meant that it was his job, too. They had to protect all humans—even the ones they didn’t like. Even the ones that might want to kill them.
But as James watched Zettel slipping behind the booths unseen, he felt no sympathy.
“No,” James said. “We should hurry.”
He climbed down the spine. A platform had been built over the vertebrae so that they could be used as a path between the pelvis and ribcage, and James didn’t look down as he walked briskly along it. Shadows writhed around the spine in the corners of his vision.
The ribcage was filled with what looked like homes, if rotten pits inside of stone slabs could be considered homes. James avoided them and climbed down to the arm stretching over the chasm. A dusty wind whistled around their legs as they hurried down the humerus.
James jumped off of the wrist bones and heard Nathaniel hit the dirt next to him.
“Smooth sailing, right?” Nathaniel said. “Can you get this spell off? It’s weird how you won’t look at me.”
“It will fade on its own soon,” James said, shielding his eyes from the dust as he searched for the sunken head that would lead into Coccytus. There was a dark shape on the far end of the desert. “I think it’s over there.”
They walked across the wasteland. After the claustrophobic brambles growing among the bones of the city, it felt unsettlingly empty, much like the desert outside the City of Dis.
The distances were longer than he expected, and it felt even longer after all of the running he had done in the last few hours. Their escape in Reno, being chased through Zebul, the flight through Haven, climbing over Malebolge’s bones—even walking across a flat plane of empty land made James feel as though his feet weighed a thousand pounds.
“Could you summon more water?” he asked, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth.
“I didn’t tag anything else,” Nathaniel said from behind him. His voice was ragged. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” James said. “Not much farther.”
That was probably a lie, but he needed to say it.
As they approached the dark shape in the desert, James realized that it wasn’t Malebolge’s skull. It was another half-wall surrounding a small settlement.
“Is that a village?” Nathaniel asked.
James crouched behind the wall. The clay buildings inside were much more ordinary than those in Malebolge. Creatures walked the streets between them. Even though they had physical forms, unlike the demons within Malebolge, it was too dark to see them well. He could only tell that they were humanoid.
“What is this?” James breathed, squinting into the smoke.
A light appeared in the settlement.
An angel walked among the squat structures, so much brighter than his surroundings. His wings were exposed. He vibrated with cool energy that was totally foreign to Hell.
It was Metaraon.
James held his breath, waiting for the angel to see them. But Metaraon stepped around a building again, oblivious to their presence.
“Are those angels?” Nathaniel asked.
His son wasn’t looking at the place that Metaraon had disappeared. He was staring at a line of the other creatures as they passed nearby.
Up close, what James had assumed to be demons looked much more like angels, but with a few wrong details. They had red skin, black hair, black eyes, and massive wings. And they were carrying swords. Why would Metaraon be visiting a hidden outpost in Hell occupied by these strange creatures?
Almost as soon as James thought the question, he knew the answer with absolute certainty: this was not a settlement, but a base. Metaraon was building an army.
James flashed back to the Palace of Dis, when the Council had been slaughtered at high trial. Metaraon had brought cherubim to seize Elise, but there had been one other creature there—a monstrous breed of angel that James had never seen before. It had been brutal and deadly. These creatures looked just like that monster.
They were hybrids, but not Gray. Instead, these were a crossbreed of angel…with demon.
The implications of it were dizzying.
In order to have adult hybrids, Metaraon must have begun dismantling the Treaty of Dis years before James suspected anything was happening—maybe even decades. And if there had been nothing to prevent angels and demons from interbreeding, then what other laws had been long since shattered? How much damage could Metaraon have done?
And what was he going to do with such an army?
They had to warn someone.
“No,” James said slowly. “They’re not angels.”
“What are those?” Nathaniel asked.
“I don’t think there’s a word for them anymore. There haven’t been hybrids like these for—for over two thousand years.”
“Hybrids? ”
“Hybrids,” he confirmed. “Could you take yourself back to Earth from here?”
“Yeah, but I’m not—”
“Shut up and listen to me.” He reached out to seize his son’s shoulders and found them more by luck than design. “This is bigger than us. Bigger than Elise. Someone needs to know that there’s an army of crossbreeds before it’s too late.”
“Who?” Nathaniel asked.
James’s mind raced. Who could he trust to take action on such a thing?
“Lucas McIntyre,” he decided. “You’ll have to start with him. He’s the kopis in Las Vegas, and he knows most kopides in active service. Tell him what you’ve seen. If Elise and I don’t come back, he’ll figure out what to do.”
“I’m not going to leave,” Nathaniel said.
“The Treaty of Dis was formed explicitly to prevent creatures like those.” He jabbed a finger toward the wall, and the army beyond. “Without the treaty, they could scour the face of the Earth. They could kill every single human. They could—”
As soon as James realized what he had been about to say, he stopped speaking.
“What?” Nathaniel asked.
They could kill God.
Was that the purpose of the army? Did Metaraon plan to march on Araboth and use them to assassinate Him if Elise failed? Or had she already failed? Was she even alive anymore?
“We need to warn someone,” James said. There was no hiding the desperation in his voice. “I know you’re angry, Nathaniel, and I know you hate me, but I need you to do this. Please.”
The long silence that responded worried James. But eventually, Nathaniel spoke.
“I don’t hate you,” he said.
“Will you do it?”
“Okay. But I’m going to get you into the garden first. You won’t find the fissure out of Limbo without me. Deal?”
“Deal,” James said.
20
James and Nathaniel skirted around the settlement without being seen. The pit leading into Coccytus lay just beyond. Cold air hissed out of it. All of the moisture evaporated the instant it touched the dry air of Malebolge.
The shoulders were so far in the distance that James could barely see them, and the disproportionately long neck bowed into the earth. There was no path on this portion of the spine. James and Nathaniel had to climb down the vertebrae, each as large as a house.
Coccytus was a second cavern, smaller than the one above it, and James immediately regretted leaving his shirt behind. He shivered as they descended toward the cold blue flames at the bottom of the pit.
The skull itself, half-submerged in a frozen lake, was grotesquely huge. Light smoldered inside the ice like fires in the deep, and James could make out the hazy silhouettes of fangs. The skull had three faces—and two of them were frozen. “Ba’al,” he said softly.
Nathaniel flickered in the edges of
James’s vision. The spell was beginning to wear off. “What?”
“This body must have belonged to Ba’al,” James said. “He was one of the earliest demons, and he had three faces. He was known for his hatred of traitors.” In fact, he had devoured several of his legion that had betrayed him in ancient wars. Some of those shattered bodies may have even still been frozen in the two mouths on either side.
“Traitors like you,” Nathaniel said, putting voice to what James had been trying not to think.
James jumped to the next vertebra. “So where’s the fissure to Limbo?” he asked, clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.
Nathaniel spoke from ahead of him. It was still hard to focus on him, but James could see his hazy outline against the glow that came from Ba’al’s skull. “I think it’s inside the mouth.”
The idea of jumping into a mouth that had once devoured traitorous legions was not appealing, but there was nowhere left to go but forward.
They clambered onto the skull’s chin. It was warmer closer to the fissure. Flames licked the edges of the fangs, leaving them glossy after centuries of being baked. James peered carefully over the edge. This fissure looked less like sunlight and more like the surface of the sun itself.
“So there it is. All we’ve got to do is jump,” Nathaniel said. As if it were simple, inconsequential, to willingly plunge into the deepest fires of Hell.
“And then what?”
“Then we walk to the other fissure. Don’t worry. I’ll jump back to Earth before you go through.” Nathaniel sounded so reassuring, like he was the adult and James was the one who needed guidance.
Yes, all they had to do was jump, and take a walk across a wasteland outside of time. But then they would be in Araboth. What had seemed like a distant “maybe” that James could worry about later had become an impending, ominous “soon.”
He would walk in the shade of the Tree again. He would tear Elise free.
And they would have to kill God—together.