by Ari Marmell
War sneered in contempt. The great general wouldn’t be making that error again!
As he neared the end of the passageway, he spotted a door at the far end, larger and—at least by appearance—sturdier than the others.
And the angels very clearly did not want him passing through.
Several soldiers leaned abruptly out of the last two doorways on either side of the hall, sending a barrage of halberd- and cannon-fire in War’s direction. The Horseman threw himself to the left, his grip on the reins and the saddle sufficient to topple Ruin along with him. The deadly bombardment whisked overhead, near enough to singe. War allowed the fall to throw him clear of the saddle and into the nearest of the empty rooms. He reached out and literally dragged his mount after him, barely wincing as the wall and floor around him shuddered with new impacts.
Once inside the room, Ruin clambered to his feet and snorted indignantly.
“I’ll just permit them to shoot you next time, then, shall I?”
The horse tilted his muzzle away, the very image of wounded dignity.
“I thought not.”
A quick glance was enough to tell War that the room in which he’d sheltered was bare of anything even remotely useful. It had apparently been a study of some sort. The shots he’d pumped through the door as he passed had pretty well obliterated the desk, but the legs were still recognizable at the edges of a smoking hole in the floor.
If he stepped out into the line of fire, his armor and his own innate resilience would probably allow him to survive whatever the angels threw his way, at least long enough to reach them—but he couldn’t be certain that he’d be strong enough to continue the mission afterward.
“I’d been hoping,” he grumbled to Ruin, “to hold this in reserve for later, but …”
Carefully, he laid the cannon on the floor and drew his sword. He inhaled deeply, once, twice; his skin began to tingle and burn with power.
It was appropriately named, was Chaoseater. The havoc and carnage of battle fed the weapon, and what strength it gained, it passed to its wielder. War allowed that strength to settle in him, suffuse him—and then he called upon the magics that were his by right, as Nephilim and as a Rider of the Apocalypse.
Crouched low, War bolted into the hall. He moved fast, incredibly so, his hair and cloak streaming out behind him, twin banners of war. Again the enemy opened fire, but for a few precious seconds the Horseman was swift enough to weave through the fusillade.
He dived forward into a roll, coming up in a crouch directly between the four occupied doorways. The angels within hesitated, holding their fire lest they overshoot their target and wind up striking one of their fellows instead. And that moment of hesitation was all War required.
With a fearsome cry, he drove Chaoseater point-first into the floor, channeling a surge of magics through the blade. The hallway rippled for an instant, and then a forest of blades—each similar to Chaoseater itself—burst from the floor in all directions. The steel thicket occupied several paces around the Horseman, more than enough to catch the angels gathered in the nearby doorways.
Only one died instantly, but the others suffered wounds grievous enough that they could do nothing but cry out as War approached. They did not suffer long.
This close to the corridor’s end, War could make out further details of the larger room before him. The door seemed sturdy enough, but nothing he and Ruin couldn’t manage. A window near that door had been largely bricked over, but it was still sufficient for him to judge the thickness of the wall—far less than the building’s exterior, but sturdier than any other internal wall he’d seen thus far.
As fiercely as the angels had fought to keep him from this room, War couldn’t imagine it would be unguarded within. So …
“Ready to go again?” he asked Ruin as he returned to fetch his mount and retrieve the Redemption cannon. He could have sworn that the horse actually glared at him. He chuckled and leapt into the saddle.
As soon as they were back in the hallway, War pointed at the far door. “Hit it low,” he whispered. Ruin tossed his mane in acknowledgment.
Again the great beast charged, and again War rose. Without the first hint of difficulty or imbalance, he slid his right foot from the stirrup and placed it upon the saddle, so that he rode in a one-legged crouch. Then, as the wall drew near, he jumped.
Ruin dropped his front legs as he hit the door, smashing it open with his head rather than his hooves. As for War, a single blast of the cannon opened the wall above the door. The momentum of his leap carried him through as though he had an angel’s wings himself.
The guards within were, of course, ready and waiting for the intruder to come bursting through the door. When Ruin came in beneath their anticipated line of fire, however, and War above it, it took them an instant to reorient themselves.
War’s stolen cannon, and Ruin’s thrashing hooves, denied them that instant. Half the guards were dead before the Horseman’s feet had touched the floor.
A storm of vicious cuts with the fearsome black blade, a few blows that glanced harmlessly from War’s armor, and the other half followed. War stepped over the fallen bodies, the rent armor, the limp wings, to study his prize.
He found nothing.
No superweapon of any sort, nor even any obvious components thereof. A few scratch-covered anvils and steel work-tables encircled a central forge, but it looked as though few of them had been employed in recent memory. Only a single table showed any sign of use, and it held nothing but ammunition clips for Redemption cannons and small arms.
It would have been too easy, War supposed, to have found the main workshop in the first hallway of the second floor; the structure boasted scores of levels and literally miles of corridor. But then why had the angels been so determined to keep him out of …?
Ah.
“I’m a fool,” he said gruffly, laying a hand on Ruin’s neck. “We’ll need to rethink our—”
Horseman and horse cocked their heads as one, listening intently to the faint clatter of running footsteps and heavy equipment moving about on the floor above. Clearly, they were going to have to fight hard for every step they advanced above this level, and with so much of the building remaining to search, the odds of success—even survival—appeared abysmally low.
Despite his prior self-assessment, however, War was not such a fool as to fall for the same trick twice. The angels had fought so hard to keep him from this room precisely because it contained nothing of value, and the same was almost certainly true of the many floors above. They wanted him wasting time and effort battling impossible odds in a game he could never win.
Time, then, to change the game.
His entire face seeming to burn with a sudden inner light, War scooped up the ammunition clips and jammed them into his belt. He hefted the Redemption cannon inelegantly with one arm, then knelt beside each of the fallen angels collecting yet more of the clips. Ordering Ruin to follow behind, he strode out into the hallway, listening carefully until he felt he’d located the largest concentration of guards on the floor above. The cannon alone wasn’t powerful enough for what he had in mind, but then, he wasn’t using the cannon alone.
Standing some few paces back, he tossed one of the clips in a gentle arc and, just as it hung in the air directly beneath the enemy, opened fire.
FROM THAT POINT ON, it was more a massacre than a battle.
On each floor, War blasted through the ceiling above, taking the enemy by surprise and, as often as not, killing a great many in the initial explosion. On occasion, the thick stone prevented him from hearing the footsteps on the next level, but Ruin’s more sensitive ears never failed him.
The building did not boast all that many guards. Still, had every angel in the building converged on him at once, they might have stood a chance. Most were determined to stand fast at their posts, however, so that was where they died.
By the time War found what he sought, roughly two-thirds of the way through the building’s ma
ny floors, the structure’s outer walls contained as much debris as they did intact rooms and halls. War stalked down a wobbling corridor, stepping over chunks of stone and chunks of angel, his armor scratched and smoking from those few shots he hadn’t managed to avoid. Acrid smoke swirled in his wake, leaving trails of soot where it passed.
The door, when he finally reached it, didn’t stand out at all from any of the others. Indeed, the Horseman very nearly passed it by, until he noticed one tiny discrepancy. All the other doors were scarred and singed from the explosion that had obliterated whole swaths of the hallway. This one, other than a few ash-blacked blotches, was undamaged.
A blast from the Redemption cannon confirmed his initial assessment: The portal was definitely reinforced, perhaps mystically bolstered, to withstand attack. So much so, in fact, that it took three distinct blows from Chaoseater before it split down the middle. War stepped through the jagged gap, cannon held (albeit awkwardly) in one fist, sword in the other.
A peculiar hum, irritating as a mosquito trapped in the ear canal, permeated the room. War had no doubt that it came from the device that dominated the back half of the chamber.
It was a sphere of brass, so large that it would have required a score of angels, stretched fingertip-to-fingertip, to surround the thing. It was not, however, of a single piece; rather, the apparatus consisted of thousands upon thousands of tiny hexagons. These were not in any way sealed together, but simply hovered in their spherical configuration. At seemingly random intervals, a number of the hexagons would flip suddenly on one of their three axes. In that brief instant of rotation, War could catch the swiftest glimpse of the sphere’s interior. It seemed full of an amorphous whiteness, less than a mist, more than a dream; similar, but not quite identical, to the void-stuff between realms.
This, then, was the sacrament bomb.
Standing between him and the weapon was a single angel, her face a mask of determination. She held a blade nearly the size of Chaoseater in both hands, and her armor gleamed in the light.
She was also the youngest angel War had ever seen, barely out of adolescence.
“Does Abaddon employ children as sentinels now?” the Horseman asked.
Her features, if anything, grew harsher still. “I am not a child. I am Ghauniel’s finest student!”
“And Ghauniel is …?”
“Guarding the corridor.” Her voice shook, despite her obvious efforts against it.
“Ah. And he never expected you to actually see battle on this assignment, did he? That’s why he stuck you here, in the safest room.”
“Maybe, but I know my duty. And you will not pass while I live.”
War found himself smiling, though he struggled to hide it—for the sake of the young angel’s pride, more than anything else. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Uriel.”
“Well, Uriel, I’ve no interest in killing children, and you have to know you’ve no chance. Stand down, and let me do what I must. Nobody will blame you.”
“I know my duty,” she repeated stubbornly.
“So be it.”
Uriel hurled herself across the room with a fearsome cry, wings propelling her like a living missile.
War knocked her sword aside with Chaoseater, then blasted it from her hand with a point-blank shot across the blade from the Redemption cannon. Uriel staggered, half blinded and buffeted by the detonation. She was completely open, and War was never one to let an opportunity pass him by.
Yet, at the last instant, he turned Chaoseater on edge, so that it was the flat of the blade that cracked across Uriel’s temple. She dropped in a heap, but she breathed still. War could almost hear the weapon wailing its disappointment.
“You have spirit, girl. Given a few centuries of experience, I’d be honored to face you in real combat.”
As for his purpose in coming here, disposing of a weapon that harmed only demons, while it sat in the middle of the White City, was simplicity itself. A few moments of study, and War located the hidden controls: a sequence of those spinning hexagons of slightly darker hue, each sporting a faint angelic glyph.
No expert in the language of Heaven, even War knew the numbers well enough. A bit of fiddling and poking, and finally they began flipping, one after the other, in a very specific order.
The flash, when it came, was blinding, clearly visible across the breadth of the White City. It was all the more disturbing for its utter silence, and for only the faintest rush of air, barely even felt.
The sacrament bomb was gone, and so, too, were War and Ruin, having stepped once more through the membrane between worlds. The Horseman’s last thoughts, before he once more found himself in the void, were that he would do well to avoid Heaven for some time …
And that this, hopefully, was the last time one of Creation’s major factions would devote its attention to any sort of doomsday weapon.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ABOMINATION VAULT,” DEATH SAID AS HE FINALLY concluded his recounting of recent events, “is one of the greatest surviving secrets of the Nephilim. And also one of the most vile.” His voice was oddly distant, almost unfocused. “I’d hoped never to hear or speak of it ever again.”
He stood, back straight and head unbowed despite his obvious discomfort with the topic, before the triple-idols of the Charred Council. His normally cadaverous skin glowed ruddy in the flickering, infernal light.
Although he faced the great visages of fire and stone, his voice was pitched so that everyone present, even those behind him, might hear. And a good thing they did, for they each, with various expressions of fascination or simmering resentment, hung on his every word.
War stood farthest from him, near the stairs that led back to the cracked earth below, arms crossed over his chest. The same illumination that granted a false vitality to Death’s pale flesh also reddened War’s white hair until it blended with his enveloping hood. He had grumbled, initially, at being summoned back so soon after completing his prior mission—a task whose details Death had not yet heard, and wasn’t certain he cared about—but his eldest brother’s tale had swiftly captured his full attentions.
Between those two, her eldest brother and her youngest, Fury stood with left hand on hip. Her eyes, gleaming bright but framed in black tattooing, were narrowed in contemplation. Skin of near ivory white, paler even than Death’s but also far healthier, stood in sharp contrast with hair almost the color of wine, and to high-collared leather armor and a slit kilt of a violet darker still. Beyond these, the only other hues to stand out were the gold trim and piping along her armor’s edges, and the sharp, almost blinding crackle of the whip—made, apparently, of something that could only be described as a distant and unloved cousin of the lightning family—hanging coiled at her waist.
And speaking of black sheep, the last of the quartet leaned almost indolently against the ring of jagged rocks marking the edge of the Council’s platform. Armor of formfitting, gleaming steel encased him entirely, its sleek lines broken only by the heavy cloak that came very near to matching his sister’s hair. His own hair, black and haphazardly shorn, framed a cold-eyed face that seemed capable of few expressions that were not some variant of a sneer. He wore a pair of pistols, and under his left arm he carried a grim helm, its full-face visor sinister, predatory, almost insectile in aspect if not in detail. True to his name, Strife appeared irritated by all Death had said, though whether this was a genuine reaction or merely his typical contemptuous demeanor remained unclear.
Above them, his presence condoned and even insisted upon by the Council despite Death’s strenuous objections, Panoptos flitted side to side like a child listening to an exciting campfire tale.
“Funny that we’ve never heard of it,” Strife said. “Can’t have been all that important, can it?”
“Just the opposite, brother,” Death retorted. “You’ve never heard of it because we kept its existence hidden even from most of our own. Only the Firstborn generation of the Nephilim were aware.�
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Three frowns greeted that pronouncement. “And after the Nephilim fell?” Fury asked him. “Why not tell us then?”
“Because there was no need. The Vault was hidden away, and I wanted it to remain that way.”
“But why would—”
“Enough!” The flames roared high, as though to emphasize the demands of the Council—or at least, its leftmost visage. “You waste time bickering over the unimportant! Speak, Death.”
The eldest of the Horsemen nodded. “It was at the beginning, brothers. The early years of the Nephilim’s ride across Creation, in search of a realm to call our own, long before the four of us split from our people to serve the Council. It started, in fact, on the very first of the worlds we destroyed.
“I doubt you recall much of it. To most of us, it held little importance or meaning, save that it was the first. What the Firstborn never told you is that we chose that particular realm as our opening gambit for a reason.”
Death, normally so impassive, so unshakable, began to pace.
“They were called the Ravaiim, that people. Never a numerous race, they were some of the eldest of the Old Ones. Related to Makers, but they were not Makers. They were … something different. Something more primal.”
“Dramatic,” Strife muttered.
“The Ravaiim,” Death continued, undaunted, “hailed from an epoch so early in Creation that life itself was more fluid than it is today. The lines between craftsman and craft were blurry. The Ravaiim didn’t create tools the way the Makers do; they sculpted them of their own flesh and bone. It was a process of months, even years, but with proper training and focus, one of the Ravaiim could remold a hand into an osseous blade, or weave a sculpture from shed strips of his own sinew and skin.
“Perhaps because of their, shall we say, personal bond with their creations, the Ravaiim weren’t just powerful, but imaginative. Many Makers had shaped portions of their realms around them, creating life and sculpting geography to their whim. But the Ravaiim were the first to attempt to shape an entire world for themselves. The first to develop a true society beyond a few small villages. Eons before the Makers’ Realm became what it is, before the White City, in a very real sense they birthed the concept of civilization.”