Veppers exchanged looks with Vatueil. Of course, you never entirely knew what an exchanged look really meant to an alien, pan-human or not, but it felt like somebody had to exercise a little realism here. Maybe even a little healthy cynicism.
On the other hand, they were pretty much agreed. There was little enough left to iron out. They were going to go ahead with this, doubts or not. The rewards were too great not to.
Veppers just smiled. “Your confidence is reassuring,” he told Bettlescroy.
“Thank you! So, we are all agreed, yes?” Bettlescroy said, looking around the table. The alien might as well, Veppers thought, have been asking whether they wanted to order out for sandwiches or dips for lunch. It was almost impressive.
Everybody looked at everybody else. No one raised any objections. Bettlescroy just kept on smiling.
“When do we begin?” Vatueil asked eventually.
“Directly,” Bettlescroy said. “Our little pretend-smatter squib will go off within the next half a day, a little more than an hour after we deliver Mr. Veppers back to Vebezua. We start the fabricaria running immediately we see that the Culture forces are fully engaged with the outbreak.” Bettlescroy sat back, looking very satisfied. “All we need then, of course,” it said thoughtfully, “is the location of the substrates to be targeted. We can’t do anything without that information.” It turned smoothly to Veppers. “Can we, Veppers, old friend?”
They were all looking at him now. Space-Marshal Vatueil was positively staring. For the first time in the meeting Veppers felt he was finally getting the attention and respect he normally took for granted. He smiled slowly. “Let’s get the ships built first, shall we? Then we’ll be ready to target them.”
“Some of us,” Bettlescroy said, glancing around the table before focusing intently on Veppers, “are still a little sceptical about how easy it will be to get to a significant number of Hell-containing substrates in the limited amount of time that will be available.”
Veppers made his face expressionless. “You may be surprised, Bettlescroy,” he said. “Even amused.”
The little alien sat forward, perfectly proportioned arms on the table surface. It looked steadily into Veppers’ eyes for some time. “We are all … very much depending on you here, Joiler,” it said quietly.
Assuming it was a threat, it was rather well delivered, Veppers thought. He’d have been proud of it himself. Despite the apocalyptic nature of everything they’d been discussing, it was the first time – maybe since they’d met – that Veppers thought he might have caught a glimpse of the hardened steel hiding underneath all the alien velouté.
He sat forward too, towards Bettlescroy. “Why, I would have it no other way,” he said smoothly.
She flew above the Hell. It smelled – stank – just as it had. The view, from this high up – just under the dark brown boiling overcast – was of a rolling, sometimes jagged landscape of ash grey and shit brown, splattered with shadowy near-blacks, acidic yellows and bilious greens. Red mostly meant pits of fire. The distant screams, groans and wails sounded no different.
The place she had woken in really had looked like a giant piece of fruit: a bloated purple shape hanging unsupported in the choking air as though dangling from the bruised looking mass of cloud. At least in the immediate area, it appeared to be unique; she could see no other similar giant bulbs hanging from the clouds.
She tried flying up through the clouds, just to see. The clouds were acidic, choking her, making her eyes water. She flew back down, took some clearer air, waited for her eyes to clear, then tried again with lungs full, holding her breath as she beat upwards on her great dark wings. Eventually, just before her lungs felt they might be about to burst, she collided painfully with something hard and rough, slightly granular. She had the air knocked out of her, jarred her head and scraped the ends of both wings. She fell out of the clouds in a small rain of rusting flakes of iron.
She breathed, collected herself, flew on.
In the distance she saw the line of fire that was the very edge of the war within Hell; a crackling stitch of tiny red, orange and yellow bursts of light. Something that was part curiosity and part the strange hunger she had felt earlier made her fly towards it.
She wheeled overhead, watching waves and little rivulets of men make their slow breaking surges across the multiply broken, seared and blasted landscape below. They fought with every edged weapon ever known, and primitive guns and explosives. Some stopped and looked up at her, she thought, though she did not want to approach too closely.
Flying demons whizzed amongst the arcing, fizzing shells and storms of arrows; some came up towards her – she experienced terror, and each time was about to beat madly away – but then they turned and dropped away again.
The hunger nagged at her. Part of her wanted to land; to do … what? Was she to be a demon? Was the need she felt the need to torment? Was she supposed to become one of the torturers? She would starve first, kill herself if she could, simply refuse, if it was possible. Knowing Hell, knowing the way it worked, she doubted that would be possible.
The flying demons who had flown up towards her had been smaller than her. She had cruel hooks midway along the leading edges of her wings, where a biped might have had thumbs on its hands. She had sharp teeth and strong jaws, and tree-trunkcrushing claws. She wondered if she could start killing demons.
The screams from below, the smells of flesh burned by flames and acid sprays and the rising, choking clouds of poison gas all drove her away after a while.
A large black shape flew across the landscape behind her.
She looked back, saw the giant beetle thing following her, catching up, keeping a hundred metres or so off her left side. It drew level, wobbled in the air, then peeled away. She flew on and it came back, repeating the actions. The third time, she followed it.
She trod the air, beating her leathery black wings slowly such that she seemed to stand in the air, level with the face of the enormous uber-demon who had taunted and killed her, most of a lifetime ago.
Its gigantic lantern head was lit from within, the pulsing flame-cloud continually taking on the appearance of different tortured faces. The towering candles at each corner of the creature’s squared-off head sputtered and crackled, their gnarled surfaces veined with the nervous systems of the screaming unfortunates embedded within. Below, its vast, amalgamed body of reconstituted bone, pitted, sweating metals, stress-cracked twisted sinew and bubbling, weeping flesh quivered in the heat released from its dull-glowing throne. Wreathed in its hideous fumes and retchingly intense smokes, it created a briefly recognisable face within its glassed-off lantern of a head.
Chay recognised Prin. Her heart, massive in her barrel of a chest, pounded harder. A sort of hopeless pleasure filled her for a moment, then she felt suddenly sick.
Prin smiled at her for a moment, then his face contorted in pain before the image disappeared. A flat, ugly, alien face replaced Prin’s and remained there, pop-eyed and grinning while the thing talked to her.
“Welcome back,” he bellowed. The sound was still ear-splitting, but just about below the level of pain.
“Why am I here?” she asked.
“Why do you think?”
“I will not be one of your demons,” she told it. She thought about flying at him, claws out, trying to damage the thing. She had a brief image of herself caught in one of its colossal hands, crushed like a tiny fluttering bird inside a shrinking cage of girder fingers. Another image showed her trapped inside the creature’s lantern head, beating frantically against the unbreakable glass, wings ragged, jaws broken, eyes gouged out, for ever choking …
“You would be a useless demon, little bitch,” the thing said. “That is not why you are here.”
She beat the air in front of it, of him, waiting.
It tipped its head to one side a little. The four candles roared, screamed. “That hunger you feel …”
“What of it?” Sick again. What would it turn
out to be?
“It is the hunger to kill.”
“Is it indeed?” She would defy, she thought. She would be defiant. For all the good that ever did in Hell. With enough pain, you stopped defying, or simply lost your mind; if you were lucky, maybe. “Death – real death – is a blessing in Hell,” she told him.
“That is precisely the point!” the creature thundered. “You may kill one person per day.”
“May I now?”
“They will die fully. They will not be reincarnated, in this Hell or anywhere else. They will be permanently removed, deleted.”
“Why?”
The thing put back its head and laughed; a thunder spilling over the flames and smokes of the valley below. The candles sputtered furiously, dripped. “To bring hope back into Hell! You will be their angel, whore! They will beseech you to come to them, to deliver them from their torment. They will worship you. They will try to tempt you with supplications, prayers, offerings; any superstitious fuckwittery they’ll think might work. You may choose whom to reward with death. Pander to their idiocies or deliberately ignore them; have the miserable cunts set up fucking committees amongst themselves to decide democratically who should be the lucky little grub-sucker who gets to be relieved of their burden of pain; I don’t give a fuck. Just kill one a day. You can try and kill more but it won’t work; they’ll die all right but they’ll come right back, worse.”
“And if I kill none at all?”
“Then the hunger will grow inside you until it feels like it’s something alive trying to gnaw its way out. It will become unbearable. Also, the wretches will have to do without their chance of release.”
“What is the point of releasing one soul from this infinitude of suffering?”
“It’s not infinite!” the creature screamed. “It’s vast, but it has limits. You have already scraped against the sky, you stupid whore; beat away if you want until you find the iron walls of Hell and then tell me it’s ‘infinite’! Finite; it’s finite. Truly vast, but finite.
With only so many tortured souls.”
“How—?”
“One and a quarter billion! Does that fucking satisfy you? Go and count them if you don’t believe me; I don’t fucking care. You are beginning to bore me. Oh, I didn’t mention: it won’t all be fun for you. With each one you kill you’ll take on a little of their pain. The more you kill the more pain you’ll experience. Eventually the pain of the increasing hunger and the pain you’ve absorbed from those you’ve released should balance out. You might lose your mind again but we’ll deal with that when it happens. I expect I’ll have thought of something even more condign for you by then.” The king of the demons gripped the red-glowing ends of the mountainous seat’s arms and came roaring forward at her, making her beat back through the air. “Now do fuck off, and start killing.” It waved one vast hand at her.
She felt herself swallow, a sickness clutched at her belly and a terrible, aching need to fly away seemed to tug at her wings and the bundled muscles in her chest, but she held where she was, beating steadily.
“Prin!” she shouted. “What happened to Prin?”
“Who? What?”
“Prin! My mate, the one I came in here with! Tell me and I’ll do what you want!”
“You’ll do what I want whether you fucking like it or not, you dumb, wormed cunt!”
“Tell me!”
“Kill me a thousand and I’ll think about it.”
“Promise!” she wailed.
The enormous demon laughed again. “‘Promise’? You’re in Hell, you cysted cretin! Why the fuck would I make a promise but for the joy of breaking it? Go, before I change my mind and break your semen-encrusted wings just for fun. Come back when you’ve sent ten times a hundred to their undeserved ends and I’ll think about telling you what happened to your precious ‘Prin’. Now fuck off!” It brought its vast arms sweeping up towards her, one winging in from each side, hands as big as her entire body splayed out, clawed and clutching, as though trying to catch and crush her.
She beat back, fell away, swooped and zoomed, glancing fearfully back as the great demon sat back in his great glowing chair, wreathes of smoke from his recent movements pulsing through the air around him.
She killed her first that evening, as the already dull light deepened to a ruddy, sunless gloaming. It was a young female, caught on the rusted spikes of a cheval de frise on a cold hillside above a mean trickle of an acid stream, moaning almost continually except when she had banked enough breath to scream.
Chay landed, listened to the female trying to speak, but got no sense from the piteous creature. She hesitated, looking around, in case anything appearred familiar, but it was not the same hillside she and Prin had sheltered on.
She was crying as she folded her great dark wings round the female, trying not to tear the thin leathery membranes of her wings on the cruel spikes. Chay felt the female’s being move out of her broken, twisted body and into her own before dissipating entirely, just evaporating away like a little cloud on a warm, dry day.
She felt a different kind of hunger, and ate some of the body, tearing through the tough hide to get into the juicy buttock muscles.
As she flew back to her distant roost, she wondered how much pain would accrue as a result of what she had done.
She hung there, digesting.
Later, she was left with a sore tooth.
She had become an angel in Hell.
Twenty-one
When the adults were away sometimes they could play in the places where the adults played. She had a group of friends who were all about the same age and they played together a lot when they weren’t being taught in the little school room on the top floor of the big estate house.
The others could still be cruel to her now and again, when they wanted to get back at her for something or when she had won something and they wanted to remind her that it didn’t matter if she came first in a race or got better marks then anybody else in an exam, because in the end she was just a servant really – in fact worse than a servant because at least a servant could just leave if they wanted to but she couldn’t. She was like a mount or a hunt chaser or a game-hound; she belonged to the estate, she belonged to Veppers.
Lededje had learned not to pretend that she didn’t care when the other children were like this. It had taken her a while to work out how best to handle this sort of teasing. Crying a lot and running to her mother made it too easy for the children to use her like a toy when they were bored; press Lededje’s button and off she’d race. So that was no good. Not reacting at all, going all stony-faced; that just made them say even worse things until it ended in a fight and she – it always seemed to be her fault – got them all punished. So that didn’t work either. The best thing to do was to cry a little and let them know that she’d been hurt, then just get on with things.
Sometimes when she did this she got the impression some of the other children thought she hadn’t seemed hurt enough, and they tried to hurt her some more, but then she would just tell them they were being immature. Leave it behind; move on; learn and progress. They were just about at the age when this sort of adult talk could be successfully used.
They played in the places they were supposed to play, places where nobody had said they couldn’t, and – best of all – in the places where they definitely weren’t supposed to play at all.
Of the latter, her favourite had always been the water maze: the complex of shallow channels, ponds and lakes where the adults played with big toy battleships and where they watched the mini -ature sea battles take place from all the big towers and soaring arches and canals in the air.
She had been allowed to watch one of the battles once with her mother, though it had taken a lot of nagging and her mother had had to ask it as a big favour and even then it wasn’t one of the really important battles with lots of rich and famous people watching, it was just a sort of trying out and testing sort of battle that people from the estate could watch sometim
es if they didn’t have other duties. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed it because she didn’t like heights; she kept her eyes closed most of the time, her hands grasping the sides of the little flat-bottomed boat they rode around in on the canals in the sky.
Lededje had liked it at first but eventually got bored. She thought it would be more interesting if she could be inside one of the battleships herself rather than have to watch other people working them. Her mother, still without opening her eyes, told her that was a stupid idea. For one thing she was too small. And anyway, only men were stupid and aggressive enough to want to get inside those floating death-traps and be shot at with live ammunition for the entertainment of the spoiled rich.
In the distance, Lededje had seen one of the old dome plinths, busy with people. Teams of workmen with cranes and big vehicles full of electronics were dismantling all the sat domes, two dozen of which had surrounded the mansion house in a ring a couple of kilometres across for as long as she could remember. The first time she had run away, it had been at the foot of one of those stone-clad plinths she had been caught. That had been years and years and years ago; maybe half her life. Now the gleaming white satellite domes were useless and outdated and being dismantled.
Right there and then, for the first time, she felt herself growing old.
They had to wait to be allowed to dock at the little pier on one of the towers, then go down in the coffin-like elevator and through the tunnel that led safely away from the lake and the towers and the channels and the ships. You could hear the guns firing even from the house.
She and the other children – well, most of them; two were too frightened – used to sneak under the fence that went all the way round the water maze. They kept well away from the miniature docks where the ships were maintained and repaired. The docks were usually only busy for the few days around one of the big proper battles, but even on the quietest days there would be one or two grown-ups working there.
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