Dante Valentine

by Lilith Saintcrow

  The sunlight dimmed even further, and I heard something else: a rushing crackle, flame devouring something. The smell of burned paper and another deeper stench turned the air orange, and I whirled, my hair fanning out as I—

  —was underground. The lack of psychic “static” told me I was underground. It was dark until I opened my eyes, and candlelight flowed like gelid gold into my brain. The spurred, twisting heaviness was gone, but I felt tender and savagely stretched all over.

  “You will live.” The white-haired demon bent over me, claws pricking my wrist as he felt for my pulse.

  What the hell?

  A rock wall rose up to my right. I lay on something unforgivingly hard, cold seeping into my skin. The weight of my rig was gone, and my clothes were stiff with the decaying-fruit stench of my own blood. My shoulder pulsed reassuringly, another bath of Power sliding down my skin.

  I wet my lips. The demon’s face was inches from mine. Long thin nose, long thin mouth, cheeks scraped down parchment-thin over high cheekbones, and those suffering, suffering eyes like shots to the gut. A fat white snake of his hair slid over his shoulder, dropping down to brush my cheek and slide off the edge of whatever hard surface I rested on.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I screamed like an unregistered hooker caught holding out on her pimp. I also surged up and tried to hit him in the face.

  He avoided the strike gracefully, dropping my wrist and stepping aside. I scrambled away along the platform, my back hitting a hard pebbled wall. I clutched the ragged edges of my shirt together and realized my jeans were unbuttoned and stiff with dried blood all the way down to my ankles. The scream died on a sucked-in gasp as my head cleared.

  “I had forgotten how fragile they are,” the white-haired demon said, meditatively. “Avayin, hedaira. You are well and whole.”

  He was right. Thin traceries of scar crisscrossed the bowl of my belly, golden skin marred with threadlike white. It looked like my guts had been run through a badly set laseslicer. I flattened my hand over warm flesh and realized my breasts were hanging out, clutched the shirt closed over my front, and stared gape-mouthed at him.

  What the hell? One second my innards are falling out, and now… what?

  “Do you know who I am?” He didn’t retreat, pitched forward at the edge of the rough stone rectangle I braced myself on. The walls crawled with color—little bits and chips of stone, plasteel, plasilica, and other hard shattered things, in every conceivable shade. Figures whirled and swam in the mosaic, a wash of screaming art covering the dome above dark wooden bookshelves stacked with scrolls that smelled like rotting animal skins, stuffed in no apparent order. The only space not taken up by the shelves was broken by a low wooden door and the stone I perched on.

  The dome itself was no slouch, a ribbed chamber easily thirty feet high. At its apex, a mellow sphere of something that looked like gold glowed, flickering. It had the breath of alienness that meant something demon-made, as did the arches of the vaulting.

  My breath hitched in again. I searched for something to say. What ended up coming out of my mouth was almost as mortifying as it was comforting, because it sounded just like me.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re not Father Egyptos, sunshine. You look like a sk8 with a bad hair fetish.” The words hit the mosaics, my voice a thin husk of its former throaty self, and I glanced frantically around for Japhrimel. He was nowhere in sight.

  I was alone, underground, with a dreadlocked demon.

  You should have known you’d end up like this, Danny. I mean, you really should have known. This is par for the course.

  My sword was nowhere in sight either. But my bag, faithful companion that it was, lay at the end of the stone rectangle. It was open, and my rings spat an angry shower of gold sparks. Someone else had been going through my goddamn messenger bag. Would it ever end?

  As if he’d read my mind, the demon held up a book-shaped object. I knew what it was as soon as my eyes lighted on it. Hedairae Occasus Demonae, the ancient demon-written book given to me by Selene, consort of the Prime of Saint City. I hadn’t had a quiet moment to look at the goddamn thing since she’d handed it over, being busy hunting down a conspiracy that killed my best friend.

  Funny how that works out.

  “You are too young to understand this.” His mouth turned down for a moment, as if he tasted something so bitter his entire body revolted against it. “You are too young to even begin. I will explain to you, in detail, what it means. If you will do me a service.”

  Just like a demon. Quid pro quo. My right hand curled into a knot, looking for a vanished swordhilt. No rig, no weapons, no Japhrimel.

  Great. Just when I could really use him.

  “I don’t bargain with demons.” I felt faintly ridiculous saying that, with my shirt torn open and my weapons gone. “I’m not a Magi.”

  “You are hedaira, beloved of a Lord of Hell, and under sentence of death wherever you roam.” The demon’s gaunt face twisted in on itself, then smoothed. “I am Sephrimel.” Of all things, he held out his skinny hand, like we were at a dinner party.

  I eyed his fingers like they might bite me. You never know, with demons.

  After a few long moments he dropped his hand back to his side. His frayed robe whispered. “I am also called accursed, Fallen, A’nankhimel. I did what no demon dares to do.”

  My mouth had no trouble keeping up, even while the rest of me frantically tried to figure out what the hell was going on. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.” I began to feel even more ridiculous, which was a stretch. What was I doing with my clothes all opened up?

  That question sent a bolt of sheer panicked nausea through my abused stomach. “What did you do to me?” And where’s my sword?

  His mouth compressed itself even thinner, his scraped-down face pulling itself into a parody of distaste. “I rid you of an unwelcome guest.”

  It is so easy to break a human— Memory rose inside my head, was pushed away, retreated snarling. I grabbed for the only thing I could. “Where’s Japh?”

  “Your Fallen is above, holding the temple against any intrusion.” Sephrimel’s eyes flicked down my body, once, and away. The book dangled in his other hand, tempting. Everyone seemed so damn interested in the thing. “I could, possibly, stay you here until the Prince’s dogs—or some other of my kind, with a grudge—arrive. The Kinslayer will fight to his last breath, but the Prince’s minions are numberless even when weakened, and even a killer such as yours may eventually fall. When he does, you may find yourself without protection.”

  A thin thread of panic wormed its way through me. He looked like he meant it. My sense of direction didn’t work so well underground. Where the hell was I?

  I decided to start with the most important questions first. “Who are you really? And what the fuck do you want?”

  His shoulders dropped, and he opened the book with spidery dry-claw hands. The paper rustled thickly against cavernous silence broken otherwise only by my increasingly harsh breathing. Finding the page he wanted, he offered it to me with both hands and a slight bow, as if presenting a gift to royalty.

  “You cannot read this, of course. But the picture is clear enough.”

  I glanced down, meaning only to take a tiny sip of the pages. But my eyes locked themselves to an illustration, as finely colored as a holostill, with snakelike demonic glyphs on the page facing.

  In the picture, a slim golden-skinned woman with a glory of long blood-colored hair held her hands up in supplication, her white robes cut like a holomag film star’s to show a twisting mark painted into the right side of her belly. She wasn’t screaming, but the lines of her face expressed horror and pleading, mixed with terrible resignation. She had no weapons, and her back was to a white wall.

  Filling a third of the page in front of her was a demon with a long narrow nose and thin lips, winged eyebrows, and laser-green eyes under short military-cut dark hair lying like ink against his skull. His clothing was a long cassock-coat wit
h a high collar, feathered as it flared behind him and dripping with something dark. The glyph over his head was familiar, because it was scored into my own skin. His hand was raised, a slim curved blade rising in a wicked slash that had just finished, because the arc of the blade’s passing was shown with a swipe of bloodspray.

  The lower right quadrant of the picture held a demon curled into a ball and flying backward from a terrific blow, fat white snakes of his hair writhing in agony no less than his face. The glyph over his head, announcing his name, was the same as the symbol on the hapless woman’s belly.

  Just the three of them in this picture, and the white wall behind the woman. The breath left me in a rush. My gaze stuttered back up to Sephrimel.

  He nodded, the dark grieving holes of his eyes gathering the soft luminescence and turning it into pain. His hair slithered against itself as he moved. “Her name was Inhana.” All the insectile rage had left his voice, and it held the same weary kindness I’d heard before. His lips shaped the name lingeringly. “She was my hedaira, and the Kinslayer slew her in the White-Walled City on a day of blood and lamentation. I have been bleeding from the wound ever since, diminished and alone.” The book shut with a convulsive snap, dust puffing from the pages. “I have spent longer than you can imagine wishing for his screaming death, with all the torments Hell could possibly offer. And yet, he brings his beloved to me, and he asks for my help.”

  Boy, bad luck for you, sunshine. Only a sheer effort of will stopped the words in my throat. His eyes met mine, like a knife to the gut. I couldn’t shrink back against the wall any harder, chips of color pressing into my back and touching my tangled hair.

  “I will grant you what I can of the means to kill Lucifer, hedaira. But in return you will perform me a service, and if you do not I will strike you down to revenge myself on your lover.” His thin lips stretched in a death’s-head grin, showing old, strong, discolored teeth getting longer by the second. “That is our bargain. I suggest you accede.”

  I was fairly sure we were still below Sofya, since the Power throbbing in the stone was soaked with belief and pain. I hadn’t known the temple was built on a honeycomb of passages in dank crumbling stone, somehow kept free of the water table but musty all the same. It smelled of demon. No—it reeked of demon, the fragrance of one of Hell’s children rising through tunnels with curved roofs, their walls decked with mosaic. Repeating geometric patterns wove borders between scenes of gardens and blue skies; the sun repeated over and over in a strange golden metal giving out a pulsing of spiced musk, lighting the passageways.

  The style of the art was odd, an echo of Egyptianica in the way figures were stylized, a touch of the Byzantin in the placement of the chips. Fantastical birds straight from Sudro Merican folk art mixed uneasily with Renascence lions and Assyriano griffins, gamboling on sealike lawns of green plasilica.

  The woman with blood-colored hair was everywhere. She peered from behind trees in the gardens, stood with her face lifted to the sun, gazed inscrutably at the tunnels with sad dark eyes lovingly made of obsidian chips. It must have taken unimaginable years to cover all these walls with such tiny little pieces, each arranged for maximum effect.

  It was obsessive, and just a bit frightening.

  I’d buttoned up my jeans and edged behind Sephrimel, wincing each time my eyes found the woman again. She was everywhere, in the same white robe. It was like being stalked by a ghost, and after a while I began to feel dizzy as he led me down, and down, through a tangle of tunnels that messed up my internal navigation even more.

  How long had he been here? Because it just didn’t seem likely that anyone else had done all this.

  No time like the present to ask. “How long have you been down here?” Since I might as well get some information out of you.

  His shoulders hunched, but his even tread didn’t falter. “A short while. Before that was a city they called eternal, but no city of mortals is. I was in Babylon once, too.” He paused, before choosing a right-hand fork that led us even further down. The woman—Inhana—peered from behind a fig tree with a shy smile, the twisting mark I’d bet was her Fallen’s name worked in lapis down the sweet curve of her hip.

  Japhrimel killed her. I’m looking at pictures of a woman he killed. Sekhmet sa’es, how many people has he killed? Do the other demons count?

  I’d never thought of it quite this way before. But her smile, replicated endlessly through these tangled passages, was like a padded sledgehammer blow each time. “So you… she died. And you survived.” Great, Danny. Remind him of what has to be the happiest event in his widdle demon life.

  “You call this survival?” Sephrimel’s sarcasm bounced off tiled walls, fractured like the small pieces clinging to stone. “I bleed out through the wound left by her death, hedaira. I wander through a darkening world, falling toward a mortal death. Lucifer left me alive as a warning, and to punish me all the more.”

  “I thought there hadn’t been any Fallen for—”

  “I was the third.” Sephrimel reached out one thin hand, brushed the wall the same way he’d touch a lover’s breast. I had to look down, heat rising abruptly in my cheeks. “Certainly not the last, and I was counted not the least among us. I helped in the making of the Knife, and thought my theft had gone unnoticed. How much has the Kinslayer told you?”

  Knife? I shifted the strap of my messenger bag uncomfortably on my shoulder. I’d finally settled on pulling up the shreds of my shirt and tying them like Gypsy Roen’s midriff-baring hoochie costume. Every few steps I’d start and nervously rub at my belly, feeling the thin white raised scars. Told me? He’s told me damn near nothing, and right now I’m starting to think I should thank him for it. I’m starting to think I should buy him a holocard.

  As idiotic as it sounds, I was feeling better. The sick pulsing in the middle of my head had faded a bit, locked behind iron doors and safely held at arm’s length. I had more important things to concentrate on. I could almost forget the aching nakedness of my left cheek, where my emerald should have been spitting and sizzling, alive with the double gift of my god’s presence and my faith—instead of merely glowing numbly. I should have been two steps away from screaming and beating my head against the walls until my skull split and released me.

  Instead, I felt lighter. Cleansed. As if something unholy had been ripped out of me, and I was no longer tainted.

  The scars on my belly twinged, a heatless reminder. I almost faltered, but the demon in front of me stopped, his dreadlocks dragging on the worn stone floor. I wondered if there were parts of this labyrinth where the floor wasn’t scraped smooth.

  How long had he been recreating her in little bits of broken things? If something happened to me, what would Japhrimel do? The thought of him reduced to something like this gaunt shuffling creature was…

  Terrifying. That’s the word you’re looking for, Danny. You’ve spent all this time doubting him, accusing him at every goddamn turn. My heart lodged in my throat, bitter and pulsing.

  Sephrimel put his wasted hand up. His claws clicked as he trailed them lightly, lovingly, over a door made of old, dark stained wood. The metal holding it together was corroded bright green, and the wood was scored with angular crosshatch strokes that looked intentional, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out if I’d ever seen them before.

  “Child. I asked you a question.” He sounded like my old sensei, Jado, whenever I was being particularly dense. “What has your cursed A’nankhimel told you?”

  My right hand curled into a fist, aching for a swordhilt. “Nothing. I mean, very little. What’s this about a knife?” It would really help if you gave me a clue here. Just one, that’s all I’m asking for.

  “I do not blame him.” Thin fingers tightened on the door’s creaking wood, glassine claws easing free of his fingertips. I watched, fascinated, as they made fresh scars in the door’s surface. “I would not tell you either.”

  Well, that’s a vote of confidence, isn’t it. I kept sarcasm bac
k by sheer force of will. Huzzah for me.

  “Let me teach you a few things, before we open this door.” His claws slid free, and he turned to face me. I backed up four nervous steps, ending up bumping into a wall made of shattered edges, pressing myself back as if it could hide me.

  The Fallen demon advanced, step by slow step, his horror-stricken eyes great holes above his starved cheekbones and twisting mouth. He looked like a vox sniffer approaching his next high, face contorting as the nerves fired randomly, twisting and bunching muscles in ways no face should. I had no weapon but the blessed items in my bag, and they weren’t clinking and shifting.

  Of course, I was no longer sacred, was I? My faith had broken. There was no longer a god living in my bones and breath. I was wholly a demon’s creature now.

  Should I have been so grateful that Japhrimel’s mark on my shoulder turned tense and hot, Power straining against the surface of my skin and shields? And why, when I felt so utterly alone, did the emerald on my cheek spit a white-hot spark of defiance?

  Sephrimel stopped. His hand shot over my shoulder, claws sinking into solid rock with a screech like a hover slamming through a fiberoptic relay tower. For all the lunacy of his dark-burning eyes, his tone was cool and pedantic.

  “Why does a demon Fall, beautiful one? Answer me.” Hot cinnamon breath touched my cheek. The prickle of my accreditation tat writhing under the skin intensified.

  I braced myself, weight settling into the balls of my feet. He could rip my throat out in a millisecond, and his teeth looked just strong and yellow enough to do it.

  “I d-don’t really know.” For someone with a possibly insane Fallen demon breathing right in her face, I sounded almost calm.

  Sephrimal gave a short galling laugh. His eyes didn’t blink. They just stared, and each moment his gaze threaded itself though mine was another fresh burst of grief so intense I wanted to crawl away from it.

  “For only the simplest of reasons, child. In Hell there is power, and primacy, and glory. There is pain and vassalage and exacting obedience. But when humanity crawled up out of the mire—and despite what Lucifer says, he did not extend a helping hand—we found there was one thing we did not have, a thing mortal creatures are blessed with.” His eyes narrowed, their force undiluted, pinning me to the wall. The scar on my shoulder writhed against my skin, turning hot, a mass of warning spikes spreading from its twisting black-diamond fire marring my aura.