by Jesse Teller
Everyone slowed. Byron laughed a wet chuckle. “Don’t slow down. If you stand in one place too long the glass will develop fractures and you will fall through. You have to keep moving.” Byron laughed again. This time it sounded weak. “That is the law of surviving Hell. You have to keep moving.”
Soon they heard what sounded like a dull din ahead of them and to the right. Roth turned to Tate. “Do you hear that?”
“What is that?” Tate asked.
“We fought the west of Neather, pushing the bastards ahead of us as we marched. We had no time to slow or they would escape us,” Burke said. Roth turned to look at Arcturus and saw the man grinning.
“After months of forced marching, fighting every time they stopped and constantly driving them ahead of us, that sound was the sweetest I ever heard,” the old warrior said.
“What is it?” Roth asked.
“That is the sound of the sea. We are not far from an ocean,” Arcturus said.
“Hell has a sea?” Tate said with a laugh. “You have to be jesting.”
“Sea of Black, Ocean of Darkness, Sea of Rot. There are many names for Hell’s ocean,” Byron said. “But the one that fits the most is the Blood of the Corpse. A body died in that pit a long time ago. It won’t stop bleeding.”
Roth fought back the horror and prayed he would never see that sea. It was days yet when he realized he would have to see it. To his right, the great sea drew closer, until they were walking its shores. They stepped into soft sands of black, and Roth looked out at black waters splashing gore on the banks. It seemed covered in a thick film that gleamed with rainbow mirages like oil or tar. Tate hit his knees and looked up at Byron.
“Here, for just a moment. Let me catch my breath,” Tate said. Roth saw a level of exhaustion he had never seen in his brother before.
“Not here,” Byron snapped. “Worst place for it.”
“The ground is soft,” Tate said. “Just give me a moment.”
“Look at you,” Byron stood over Tate and reached a hand down to him. “You need to get up.”
Roth looked at his brother. Tiny bits of sand crawled up Tate’s knees, his thighs and his chest.
Tate jumped to his feet and brushed his hands on his robes, fighting to push the sand off. “What in the Hells type of sand is this?”
“It’s not sand at all, Tate. It is a pile of demons. This, as far as you can see, is the haunt of parasite demons. They crawl onto anything that rests here and chew their way into the skin. They work their way into the nose and mouth, and they feed on the insides. A wave of these will devour you inside out in the span of a week. I’ve seen it. It is ugly. This is the worst place to stop. The absolute worst. Keep moving. I told you once, there is no rest in Hell.”
“Three times now,” Arcturus said. He spat the ground at Tate’s feet and kept walking.
Roth took Tate by the hand. They kept moving.
Soon they saw what looked like a city up ahead of them. It seemed a harbor, teeming with sailing ships and other vessels. Byron took them to the docks where a pier held a ladder to the docks and he climbed.
When they won the city, Byron led them into the streets. “Welcome to Strainus. Do not wander off. This place is merciless. Come with me. If she is here, I may be able to get you food and drink.”
Roth nearly wept at the notion. He followed close, feeling the entire group pull in closer to Byron in hope.
The buildings spat rocks and developed cracks as they passed them. Deep within the bowels of the city, they heard a great report of stone breaking and Roth looked up to see a massive building over twenty stories tall lean to the side and sway.
“This place is falling down,” Arcturus said.
“The goddess of weathered and worn lives in Hell. Her influence works on any manmade construct. The buildings fall over and over again. Slaves are made to build them again. The sway of that dance is permanent. That cycle has been repeating itself for eons and ages. It will never end,” Byron said. “The best we can do is hope we don’t get crushed by a falling building.”
They reached what looked like a failing pub and Byron smiled. “If she is here, there is hope. A seat to sit in for a few minutes and sustenance. I need to get some information. You will find a table and wait. Don’t look at anyone and don’t avenge anything you perceive as a wrong. You are most likely misunderstanding the situation.”
Byron slapped the flap of skin aside that served as the door and disappeared into the darkness beyond. Arcturus placed his hand on his sword and entered first. The rest followed slowly behind.
The room was sweltering hot. A kind of heat that stole Roth’s breath. It possessed a stench that got into the pores, a stench that had fingers it stuffed into his mouth to tap the back of his throat. The stench was a creature with fangs, a wild and flapping thing pressing against his face slowly, smothering him. Roth was sapped of his appetite and the thought of food made him want to kill himself.
He followed Arcturus to the side of the room and a table that teetered against the back wall. Roth took a chair, but when he leaned on the table, it tipped almost completely over. The tabletop was not attached to the legs, so there was no leaning on the table. He felt the ease of the chair when he sat in it, but without being able to rest his weight on the table, he felt awkward, and within a few minutes, the chair was exhausting.
Roth saw very little of what was around him. Women copulating with demons and other creatures. Demonic women sliding their oiled bodies against exhausted men. The men seemed to beg for reprieve, as if the contact was slowly sapping their will and their sanity.
Demons hunched and stumbling carried mugs thick with some sort of gray-brown froth to demonic patrons. The whole of the room seemed to be suffering one great calamity they could not avoid, as if the very room was a torture none of these beasts could escape.
When Roth watched a demon covered in horns drop his head in his hands and weep, he realized Hell was not heaven for even the demons that peopled it. Hell was a land of torment and loss for every creature within it.
Byron returned with a sick looking woman who dropped into Arcturus’s lap and leaned heavily against him. Her hair was blonde and lank. She wore a sty in her eye that wept fluid and bulged, ripe and red. Her skin sagged as if she were deep in old age and she carried a scar that turned her face into a ruin.
“Men, I want you to meet a dear friend of mine. This is Mother. There are some that call her Katherine Cherlot. She is a feared pirate and a decent lay, aren’t you, Katherine?”
She smacked Byron’s ass. Roth realized that though a chair sat empty at the table, Byron did not sit.
“The item you’re looking for is in the bazaar. The whole of the city is talking about it. They can also feel that thing you carry on your back right now,” she said, pointing at Burke. “That will be taken away from you if you are not careful.”
Burke touched the greatsword on his back and shook his head. “They will have to kill me to take it.”
Katherine laughed. She leaned forward and touched Burke’s chin, lifting his eyes to look into hers. “They will rape you, with your sword still on your back. They will take it from you and slit you open with it, and they will enslave you, and you will build crumbling edifices for the rest of eternity.”
Roth pulled back in utter horror at the words and suddenly wanted to run, wanted to be anywhere but here. He grabbed for Tate but found his brother was looking in another direction. Roth followed Tate’s eyes to see a man sexing a demoness on a table not five feet away from them. The man was sobbing.
Arcturus laughed.
“Your friends will lay a hand on my prince to do these things and I will awake,” the warrior said. “This place is sure it has seen wrath, but it does not understand the kind of darkness that lives in my heart for all things that would harm my king and his sons. I am like a bull through parchment when my prince is in danger. And that is only speaking about me. The boy you just touched is worse than any nightmare you have had
in a while, whore. I wish this place would touch my prince. We could use a good scrap. I need to hit something. It has been too long.” Arcturus spat the ground. The floor opened its mouth and a thick tongue swiped out to lick the spittle off the ground.
“Are we as ready to leave as it seems we are?” Roth said. He grabbed Tate and turned his brother’s gaze.
Tate smiled.
Roth didn’t understand that at all, but it did scare him more than a little.
Mother led them through Strainus quickly with Byron following behind, guarding the rear. They walked past slavers, past carts of seeping gray meat pulled by teams of naked human slaves, and they walked past darkness they had no name for. They filed into the depths of the city to the sounds of yelling and screaming.
Mother handed them a coin. It was made of a dark metal that seemed to sweat. She walked them around a corner and Roth drew back in horror at the sight of Hell’s Marketplace.
Trepoi
“Follow me,” Archialore said, and with a kick into the air and a flap of her wings, she was gone.
“Don’t lose me,” he said, and Rayph spat out his words and took to the air behind her.
She was toying with him. She would stay close for a while before ever so slowly inching her way ahead. She was faster with her wings than he ever could have been with his magic. If she wanted to lose him she could have. She lifted high and soared low, and every now and then he heard a laugh upon the air as joy overcame her and exploded from her body.
He was chasing her again. She loved it when he chased her. He thought back to when he had first seen her and the chase he had given. He had been naked floating in the Ithian Straights. A long-fought battle and a longer cleanup had sapped him of his energy, and he had flown off to be alone. She had come toward him from above as he lay in the ocean nearly asleep. The sun was suddenly shielded from his eyes. He looked up at the most glorious winged creature he had ever seen. She hovered over him before turning and flying away, and he had been gripped with a terrible fear that caused him to fly off after her.
He remembered that moment. The fear had been that he would never see her again. He had flown off in hot pursuit, naked and wet and desperate, and she had sped off to flee him. He thought at the time he needed to catch her, that he needed to overtake her and beg her name, that he needed to stop her from getting away, but he had no idea what she was.
Had he really known the full limits of the avelen race, he would have languished in the knowledge he could never catch her. Magic could not outdo her race. He would have slumped to the ground, defeated. But ignorance pushed him on, and in the end, he had caught her.
Only after they were married did he realize that had she really wanted to be free of him, she could have left him far behind. She had wanted him chasing her. He felt as if he had spent every day from then on doing just that.
They flew for hours before they climbed the sky at a great cliff and dropped onto the top of it. Archialore folded her wings on her back and reached out for Rayph’s hand.
“Do you know where we are?” she asked.
He looked around at the view and the countryside before he nodded. “Yopel?” he asked.
“Indeed,” she said.
“We have not been here in years. Why come now? This isn’t even a city anymore.”
“Do you remember what happened here?” she asked.
“Plague led to riots and thuggery. Medicines were being hoarded and food stuffs being stolen by a farmer turned villain. The people were distraught and they came to me,” he said.
“And you called on me. Together the two of us came here. Set things right.”
“Yes, but they abandoned the town. Yopel isn’t a village anymore. As far as I know, it is still vacant.”
“I came here not so long ago to walk these streets and try to feel close to you,” she said. Rayph squeezed her hand and held it to his mouth to kiss it. “Found something I wanted to show you.”
She walked into a beaten barn. It was large and high and could have housed many cattle and a fair number of men and women. Rayph remembered it as the place he had hidden all the innocents as he and Lori had fought the darkness.
She walked to the doors and threw them open to reveal a dark barn, riddled with slices of light that cut the place to bits. Light from around the boards made a victim of the darkness, and within the riot of light, a massive shadow hulked.
Rayph was almost afraid to enter, but she stepped in and dragged him slowly behind her. They walked into the center of the room and Rayph spoke a word. Light, bright and sure, filled the room, dispelling all the darkness and betraying a statue that had been carved and left in the abandoned city.
Rayph gasped at its beauty. His heart trembled in his chest. He wiped tears from his eyes as he looked at the sculpture in awe.
His image knelt on both knees, his head bowed, his hands folded as if in prayer. He held Fannalis in one hand, the thorns biting deep, protruding from the back of his grip. In the other hand, he held a medallion on a chain. The medallion depicted the symbol of Vanyel. Behind him stood a carving of Archialore, her wings buffeted out and curling around Rayph protectively, her hands resting gently on his shoulders. Rayph’s eyes were closed, his face solemn. Lori’s face was smiling, her eyes up toward the sky. The image had been carved with so much love, so much devotion, and Rayph wept at the apparent affection on display.
On the statue stood a plaque. Upon it was carved a single word.
“Trepoi,” he said.
“I don’t know the word. I was hoping you did,” she said.
“It is from the language of the Sentries. It’s not meant to be written with the letters of this common language, but it is clear what it is trying to say.” Rayph looked up at Archialore and smiled. “It means hope. Like the hope that one has in a god.”
She nodded but said nothing. She touched his shoulders and he kissed her fingers. In that moment, Rayph was happy. In that moment, he was at peace.
The Bazaar
Food was cooking. It smelled like burning tar and gave off a gray smoke that curdled in the air. Roth was instantly sick to his stomach and thought he might retch. The swell of bodies they shoved their way through was oppressive. The crowd gave off a myriad of rancid stenches that collected in the air to coalesce into a kind of cloud, fetid and humid. Every demon and fell beast sweating and pressing through the throng covered Roth in seeping sweat and oil. Within a few moments, his robe was wet, and he did retch then, but managed to keep what little contents his stomach held.
They walked past stalls carrying wicked weapons and horrid leathers. The hides had been scraped off all sorts of demonic bodies, and some seemed to squirm and breathe as they lay in tight piles. The vendors were crusted with scabs and sores. They were framed by imposing demonic figures boasting horns and fangs. A booth they walked past had a winged woman guarding it who looked perfectly beautiful in every way. She carried no weapons, and her hair hung behind her ears, long and curled. She was the only thing Roth had seen in his entire time in Hell that was not covered in grime or decay. He stood staring at her, unable to peel his eyes away from her perfection.
Byron grabbed him by the shoulders and moved to steer him away, but Roth was not ready to leave. He could only stare at the one beautiful thing in Hell. She held her arms out to her sides and smiled. Her teeth gleamed steel and sharp and as her arms opened, Roth saw to his horror that the insides of her arms were lined with mouths packed with fangs. The fangs snapped and salivated before she drew in a great breath and every one of her eleven mouths screamed.
The cacophony of nightmares was so intense Roth felt his bladder loosen. His heart stopped in his chest as urine ran down his legs and he drew back in terror.
Byron wrapped an arm around him and pulled him into the crowd.
“Do not make eye contact with anything in this square, and remember, there is very little beauty in Hell, and what is beautiful would not seem that way to you.” Byron turned Roth to the rest of the
party, stepped before Arcturus and led them to the back stalls.
Arcturus seemed primed for battle. He shoved everything that touched him and he cursed and spat. The demons pulled back snarling and stared at the man with hungry eyes.
Roth grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back.
“What are you doing? You’re only making enemies,” Roth snapped. He felt anger rising and lightning in his mind.
“Think about it, kid, we are not getting out of here without a fight,” Arcturus said.
Roth’s stomach rolled at the idea. He was suddenly locked in place. He stared at Arcturus and shook his head. “We can’t fight here. I can’t fight these demons. There are too many.” Panic slowly wrapping its fist around him, he shook his head. “No, no I can’t.”
Arcturus’s hand was a rock when it slapped Roth in the face. Roth was hit so hard his neck strained from the impact as it rocked backward. He touched his face, pain and rage ripping through him like a volley of arrows.
“Get your mind right, kid,” Arcturus said. “I saw what you did to Decard. You are more than you think you are. When we get this sword you’re after, we will have to fight our way free. Sooner or later someone is going to get a wild scent and they are going to touch my prince and try to take his sword. When that happens, you had better have that sword of yours, you had better have made an impression on these monsters, and you had better be ready to scrap. We are up against it now. They know why you are here. They are waiting for you to touch that long blade. Then they will pounce. Get right!” Arcturus said, stabbing a finger in Roth’s chest. “Do it fast.”
Roth started shoving demons and snarling. Arcturus cursed and spat, and they made their way to the back of the bazaar and the place where the slaves were sold.