Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  “Calm, little one!” Kamala yells, and then realizes she should lower her voice. “Calm.”

  She hums to the imp and, slowly, it quiets. The imp then squeezes its girth through a gap in the candelabra and inches toward Basil’s slack body. It nuzzles him, and when he doesn’t respond, the imp pokes him in his open eye, urging its master to show life. The body refuses. So the imp stands there, arms at its sides, sighing and staring at the floor. It curls into the space beneath Basil’s scabbed chin.

  “He’s gone, little one,” she tells the imp. “He’s gone.”

  Or is he? Only then does she consider the possibility: the Locuri reanimation grammar. She heard Basil whisper it a hundred times—to reanimate a bat that had fallen from the ceiling or, just for kicks, to give life to a turd—and it almost always worked. She then stops to consider whether she should bring him back—and if she even can, considering the viciousness and precision of the blow that felled him—or if he should remain dead, as punishment for his cruelty, including the miseries she had to endure, either under his thumb or because of his absence. Her memory returns to glimpses of the kinder soul within him.

  This, somehow, is enough.

  “Come to me, little one,” she tells the imp. “Come quickly.”

  The imp doesn’t move from its bed beneath Basil’s chin.

  “There may be time,” she insists. “Come. Release me.”

  Instead the imp laps at the dried blood on Basil’s chin. It sobs after each flicker of its bifurcated tongue.

  “Little one,” she says calmly. “You can save him. Now come to me.”

  The imp finds its three-toed feet and waddles over.

  “Break my bonds.”

  The imp eyes her tethered wrists and goes to work, gnawing the toughened leather. For an imp, brainless as most imps tend to be, it has a delicate touch, careful not to take any flesh. Soon her left wrist breaks free. She peels herself off the stone, leaving some of her belly’s flesh on the clammy surface. Her lower half still numb, she topples to the floor. The column of hardened semen collapses, and it shatters against the floor in greenish-white chunks. Her legs useless, she drags herself to Basil’s side. Now, up so close, she sees the extent of the wounds marring his body.

  “You were dead before Lubos’s ax fell,” she tells Basil’s corpse. “What kind of trouble did you get into up there?”

  Her fingertips touch the cold skin of his cheek, tacky with fresh blood. She grasps the ax handle and gives a yank. Basil’s head jerks forward, and something in his neck voices a distressing creak, but the blade stays put. She gets to her knees and, taking the handle firmly in both hands, pulls upward. Iron grates against bone until the blade releases its grip with a moist pop. She eases the ax to the floor and moves in close, her lips millimeters from Basil’s right ear.

  She takes a moment to recall the Locuri grammar needed to reanimate him. It comes to her in pieces, syllables, until she believes she has pieced the puzzle together. The first few whispers come slowly, until she finds her confidence. She pauses after the last wisp of a syllable, and presses her lips to his, inflating his lungs with the air from her own. Nothing happens. Again, she repeats the cycle, each word hissing from the space between her fangs. Again, she presses her lips to his, biting this time to taste his blood, and air spills down his throat. She pulls back at the slightest movement, the subtlest noise—only to realize it’s her own breath passing over his lips, her efforts fruitless.

  His body remains an inert heap. His skin seems to have lost some of its sheen, like the dusty gray of charcoal rather than its usual tar black.

  “Once more,” she tells the imp.

  Then the thought occurs to her: Even if she works the grammar a third time and it somehow takes hold, will Basil return as a shadow of his former self, a crippled and mindless gimp drooling into his own lap, suitable only for sitting in a corner and waiting for death to find him again? Perhaps she should let his pulse remain still so she can wander as a solitary figure for as long as Our Fiery Home’s fires burn.

  Rage boils in her gut. Lubos. The mere thought of him conjures the all-too-recent memory of the torture and gang rape—her sentence for opposing him, for wanting to remake Our Fiery Home. She grabs Basil by the horns, one of them missing its curved tip, and pulls him toward her.

  “Come back, you useless sack of waste,” she yells. “Come back before it’s too late.”

  She screams the grammar a third time, directly into his face, and slams his head to the floor. His body flops over, from stacked on its side to supine, and his massive back slaps flatly to the dusty stone floor. She blows air into the tunnel behind his icy lips, seemingly to no effect. She lies on top of the body and sobs as she realizes he is gone, the grammar having failed.

  Our Fiery Home is lost, and she along with it.

  Again, the breath leaks from his mouth, but this time she feels air being pulled past her cheek, into his nostrils. His chest rises and then falls, rises and then falls.

  “He breathes again,” she says, astonished, as she backs away from him.

  She has never before used the grammar with effect, so she knows not what to expect of her leader, brought back from the dead. Basil breathes deeply, his exhalations fuller, and she can smell death leaving his body. She kneads the muscle of his left shoulder so he can feel the warmth of another as he rouses.

  “Am I dead?” he says, eyes still closed. “If I am, blind my eyes so I cannot see what’s come to greet me.”

  “No, you fool. I brought you back.”

  The imp emerges from behind the stone slab. It chirps in Basil’s ear.

  “You should thank this little one,” she says.

  Basil opens one eye and sees the imp waddling toward him.

  “Boothe.” He coughs as the imp nuzzles. “His name is Boothe.”

  He sits up, wincing.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I’m sore,” he says. “And stiff. And I have a splitting headache.”

  He reaches up and touches the crease in his forehead, still tacky with blood.

  “Lubos,” he says, as if remembering. “Am I too late?”

  “His departure is imminent, and he aims to lead Cthaal before him. Toward the surface.”

  “How many have joined his army?”

  “Nearly all in Our Fiery Home, from what I gather—a bottomless sea. And Cthaal, of course.”

  “We must act.”

  “The Elders are gone. Slaughtered.”

  “Of course. I would have done the same.”

  Her eyes become glassy. She shifts her weight, the ache in her belly another reminder of the trauma Lubos inflicted on her. Her insides feel hollow. Tears streak her cheeks as she sobs.

  “Where do we go now?” she asks.

  “Go?”

  “We can’t stay here—not now. Lubos will make Our Fiery Home uninhabitable. We’ll be nomads roaming the ashes left in his wake. We’ll wander in darkness forever.”

  “No. We stay and fight. This is our home, and we have pledged to defend it.”

  He moves to her, cradles her in his arms, soothes her. She slaps his chest with an open palm, and the sound echoes in the close chamber.

  “So what must we do?” she asks. “Lubos would be shocked to find you alive. So would every other demon following him.”

  “Surprise fades quickly. Lubos is cunning, adaptable.”

  “Those loyal to you, those who would obey you, no doubt they remain among his ranks.”

  “They have no reason to do so now,” he says. “He’ll have poisoned their minds with promises of glory and plunder, of conquering sunlit lands their hooves were not meant to touch.”

  “How was it? Up there, I mean.”

  “Indescribable. I saw beauties my eyes could not grasp, and horrors my mind still struggles to parse. I drank from unpolluted streams, befriended humans and indulged in a new breed of art, called adver—”

  He pauses as his mind grasps for the edges of an impossible id
ea.

  “I know what we must do.”

  He gets to his hooves, unstable, working the stiffness from his body. He clops around the room, searching. He feels along the walls with his flattened palms until his fingertips find what they seek: the edges of a doorway, well camouflaged.

  “I must get to the Hall of Ignoble and Prodigious Elders,” he says. “It’s the only way to save Our Fiery Home from destruction.”

  “I told you, the Elders are gone. Dead. Decapitated. Digested at this point. They can’t help you now.”

  The hidden doorway groans open. Stone grinds against stone. “It’s not the Elders I seek. I seek what lies beneath their chamber.”

  “Tell me,” she insists.

  “We must free him,” he says.

  And then it occurs to her. The secret—the horrible, wonderful, unfathomable secret Basil shared before leaving Our Fiery Home in her care. Her eyes grow wide.

  “Basil, you can’t—”

  “Consider it our only hope. We must unleash Lucifer.”

  Chapter 35

  Meat to Tempt a Starved God

  Fire-licked walls light Basil’s path. He inches through the passage connecting the Room of Contrition to the Hall of Ignoble and Prodigious Elders, made tight by boulders liberated from the ceiling. At the passage’s slimmest junctures, he must squeeze through fissures in the fallen rock. Prior to his resurrection, the movement would have sent waves of agony through his bullet-and blade-shredded body. Now, he’s the same demon in virgin form—whole, healed, strong enough to overwhelm death itself.

  He owes Kamala his beating heart, and he hopes he has the opportunity to show his gratitude when the time is right—when Our Fiery Home has been saved or, he realizes, completely upended. In either outcome, he will have time to spare.

  His mind races, his eyes tracing every corner and every moving shadow. Soon enough he reaches the passage’s end in the form of a massive stone. As his talons find the edges, he heaves the stone to the left, and the stone moves easily along the arc of a primitive wheel, sunken into the rock. Besides Kamala, he owes a debt to whichever of his predecessors had the forethought to create these covert passageways.

  Basil steps into the dimly lit Hall of Ignoble and Prodigious Elders. Stains darken the floor. The smell of offal hangs in the dead air. He moves to the center of the room and rests his knuckles on the stone table where the Elders once sat. He permits himself a moment to mourn their absence. How many times had he stood behind them, looking over their frail shoulders, seeking their measured counsel?

  The dulled chink of clashing iron, the thump of flesh pounding flesh, filters through the thick rock. He recognizes the clamor as demons in the main cavern preparing for war, just beyond the hall’s sealed door. He’ll have to keep quiet.

  Basil sweeps his palm across the table and wipes away the sheen of chalk. The table measures more than thirty feet long, must weigh far more than a ton. He tests the stone slab, trying to pry it off its legs, but it doesn’t budge. Death stole much from him, and his strength has not yet fully returned. He knows he can move the slab with some doing, but it won’t be quiet work. He prays the demons on the other side of the door are too focused on spilling blood to notice the ruckus he’s about to make.

  He crouches and grips the table’s edge. Talons bite into stone. He steadies himself, each thigh flexing, and counts down from three. As he arrives at one, he jerks upward, and the stone peels away from its legs. Particles of stone dust fill the air. The muscles in his upper body bulge, forcing every vein to the surface. Teeth grind, jaws clench. Something tears as his abdominal muscles strain. His legs tremble, approaching the point of failure.

  Slowly, the slab slides off its moorings and thunders to the floor. The slab lands on its side and cracks in two. Each half falls flat with a deafening boom.

  The dust cloud dissipates all too slowly. Basil struggles to catch his breath, tasting stone dust on his tongue. He winces, in part from the spent energy, but more so from the uproar. One eye open, fixed on the closed door, he half-expects the walls to come down under the weight of a thousand heavily armed demons.

  No one comes.

  He wastes no time. He studies the floor, searching for the edges of the hidden door, then drops to his knees and blows dust from the edges to fully expose the frame. He digs the talon of his index finger into the seam to claw out years of grime. He’s found the lock. Now he just needs the key. More than a dozen weapons line a rack on the far wall: a spear, a few swords, a cudgel, a trio of thorny clubs. He finds a flat iron bar and sinks one end into the inch-wide seam between the hidden door and its frame. He pries up the door, drags the slab out of the way and braces for what’s to come.

  The foul stink assaults his nostrils, turns his stomach—the stench of decay and death and wickedness. He fights the urge to vomit. A faint greenish light reflects up from below.

  He steps onto the stone staircase winding down.

  A distant memory charms his mind. He has tramped these steps before, at the beginning of his tenure as liege of Our Fiery Home, after Calvin the Elder gave an oral history of Basil’s kingdom. For reasons they never articulated, the Elders forbade writing down anything of significance, though Basil now knows it was likely out of fear that history could somehow be used against them.

  “It is your right to know,” Calvin told him, “but no one else must.”

  Calvin told the story of a mystical being named Lucifer from a time when man and demon walked the same earth, side by side. Lucifer’s lust and appetite led to his expulsion from a great kingdom, since gone extinct. If he had chosen to walk into the horizon alone, Lucifer’s punishment would have ended there. Instead, he abducted a number of humans to take along with him—a dozen fecund females for breeding, a few males for amusement—so he became a target, the enemy, hunted. His only option was to leave the sunlight at his back and crawl through a seam in the earth, doomed to live in darkness.

  “And so began the kingdom we know as Our Fiery Home,” Calvin said. “Lucifer always intended to return to the surface some day, to reclaim his place in a world ruled by men, these sheep who worship something they cannot see, who kill and die for an idea. Until that day, he would devote each breath to haunting and taunting the creatures he blamed for casting him out. Humans.”

  Impossibly cruel and wickedly inventive, Lucifer created the lake of blood by emptying the arteries of those who opposed him into a crevasse. His cruelty spawned an epoch of endless rebellion until the moment he was beaten and chained and dragged away to live out his days, feebly, in a hole beneath the floor of Our Fiery Home.

  “He is singular, this Lucifer, different than you and me,” Calvin told Basil. “His hatred will keep him alive until the world reaches its end, and even then, I believe he will find a way to live on.”

  With Lucifer deposed, the strongest demons vied for power. Some reigns lasted an age, while others ended in a blink. Each successor earned a nickname, posthumously, to characterize his rule—to honor, to vilify or to mock. First came Jakob the Butcher, named for the blood he spilled in his quest to tranquilize Our Fiery Home after the vanquishing of its founder. Then came Frederick the Cruel, though the epithet dripped with irony; his mild manner led to his swift evisceration and beheading, well before he had the chance to claim any notable accomplishment. Then came Panzu the Explorer, a demon plagued by an intense wanderlust that drew him to the farthest reaches of the underworld. His urge to expand Our Fiery Home’s borders hastened his demise, when a two-ton boulder dropped from the ceiling of a new tunnel he had commissioned, remaking him as a paste of blood and shattered bone. Then came Tor the Weary and Khan the Suicide, whose respective reigns began and ended in the time it takes to move one’s bowels. After Khan bested Tor in a duel of axes, he purposefully impaled himself on a pike—no one professed to know why, exactly, but Basil has some inkling—Byron stepped in to fill the void. The Elders gushed over Byron and his rule, allegedly the longest and most fruitful of Lucifer’s succe
ssors, in part because of his remarkable threshold for pain. Byron earned his sobriquet—the Scarred Back—for a peculiar fetish: encouraging his minions to whip him with a thorn-tipped cudgel, suggesting to anyone who dared to grip the cudgel’s handle that he would forfeit the crown if the lashings drew a single tear from his eye. Byron remained in power until the last revolt, when chaos once again gripped Our Fiery Home and he stood hoof to hoof with a young and foolish brute named Basil.

  As the tale goes, Basil outmuscled Byron, pried the sacred spear from the ruler’s hands and ran him through. Even now Basil has no memory of the skirmish, or of the decapitation that formally ended his predecessor’s reign. Without knowing, without trying, Basil became the seventh successor of Lucifer the Eternal One.

  After Basil cycles through the list of Our Fiery Home’s deposed rulers, he considers the lore of humans—demons, devils and the tiresome list of aliases for the individual who supposedly spawned them all: Abaddon, Apophis, Apollyon, Azazel, Beelzebub, Belial, Diabolos, Iblis, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Nidhogg, Satan, The Enemy. Did all of these individuals once exist, or were they merely mankind’s fabrications to explain the world, giving names to the monsters man could not see or touch? If each name did have a basis in reality, did each one refer to the same principal being? Had the Eternal One, the creature Basil is about to set free, once belonged to a race of supernatural beings known as angels, only to be cast out and relegated to a subterranean existence? Had Lucifer once tempted and taunted a holy man rumored to be the Son of God? Had he laid waste to ancient civilizations? Is he responsible for every evil impulse and every tragedy that has ever befallen humanity?

  Likely not, Basil knows, because humans, despite their many endearing attributes, have a fondness for exaggerations in their storytelling.

  He has no good way of distinguishing truth from fiction, in part because of Our Fiery Home’s undocumented history. Even if his people had taken the time to etch words in stone or put them down on a page to mark past events, who can say what is “truth”? History, after all, bears the fingerprints of the historian.