by Ari Marmell
But not by War.
The first sweep of Chaoseater shattered one axe and knocked three others aside. The second gutted all four of the Phantom Guard demons who had held them. Then, his blade and his soul equally empowered, War knelt and drove Chaoseater into the stone.
As in the White City, blades similar to Chaoseater itself burst upward in a thicket of deadly steel. Demons fell or retreated, screaming obscenities. The blades vanished as swiftly as they’d appeared, and Death had the space he’d requested.
Death snapped the duskwing’s neck and dropped down beside his brother. And he, too, began to draw on the power he’d drawn from the defeated foe.
Unlike War, the elder Horseman did not require any specific weapon to feed on the strength of the fallen. It came to him naturally, bits of energy sloughing from the departing souls and dispersing essence. But that meant that, for him, the chaos that fed War was insufficient. It was the deaths themselves that mattered.
Against the automatons on the fields of Kothysos or in the Crowfather’s domain, he hadn’t bothered. Though technically living, such lesser constructs, being soulless, granted him only a fraction of the power he could gain from other creatures.
Demons, though? Demons were vile engines of destruction, utterly irredeemable—but they were alive.
And Death grew strong as they fell.
He raised his arms, and a cloud of bone fragments sprang from the floor, precisely as they’d done outside. Again they whirled, a semi-solid cyclone with Death and War at the center.
This time, however, it was not several feet of solid stone at which the Horseman threw them.
Demons disintegrated into flapping fronds of shredded meat. So loud was the whirlwind, the Horsemen couldn’t even hear the enemies’ screams. When Death allowed the bone storm to disperse, more than two-thirds of the demons in the chamber were dead or dying.
Of course, the downside to this was that the survivors consisted almost entirely of those demons tough enough to withstand such an assault.
Again the horde’s leader barked his orders, and this time Death could see who—or rather what—that leader might be.
After a good long look, he still wasn’t sure.
The creature was enormous; not the largest demon Death had ever seen, by any means, but certainly one of the largest humanoids he’d encountered. Better than twice War’s height, it was … fat.
Not as a descriptor; this was no humanoid creature that happened to be obese. It literally was fat. Ripples, rolls, bulges, and slabs of fat formed something vaguely the shape of a torso, with smaller columns or protrusions that might be arms and legs. It seemed to have no structure, no bones; it bent where it needed to bend, compressed where it needed to compress. The demon walked with a horrid, lurching gait, pointed with thick, gummy fingers.
And the head … Nearly as broad as the creature’s shoulders, it sat on a short stump of a neck, and it, too, was fat. No hair, no features, just more folds, stacked and rumpling where the face should have been. Only when the thing screamed its orders could Death see that one of those folds concealed a mouth. Ringed with jagged teeth—the only visible part of the demon with any rigidity—it proved nearly as wide as the head itself.
Death knew a great deal about demon taxonomy, but this monstrosity was new to him. He was about to ask his brother if he’d seen such a creature before, when War asked, “Do you suppose that thing has internal organs?”
I’d guess that means he doesn’t know any more about it than I.
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
The Horsemen moved, and the remaining demons—as well as fresh reinforcements, dashing through the hanging portal and flinging themselves to the walls and balconies—roared as one.
“You go high this time.” Death’s burning eyes flickered meaningfully across the demons massing on the floor, then upward. War followed that gaze, nodded, and jumped for the nearest balcony.
Death waded into the horde, Harvester split, one scythe in each hand. Primarily more Phantom Guards, these, but accompanied by squat, powerful beasts whose stone claws crackled and smoked with undying flame. Even from halfway across the room, he could feel the heat on his skin. Those, the Horseman decided, I think I’ll handle at a distance.
A wise tactic, perhaps, but insufficient. Death was in the midst of a veritable ring of Phantom Guards when one of the flame-clawed demons dug its talons into the wall, ripped loose a chunk of stone twice its own size, and hurled it.
It was an attack he’d never anticipated, and for all his agility, the press of Phantom Guards meant that the Horseman couldn’t evade its flight.
Neither could at least three of the demons surrounding him, but that would prove little consolation in the moments to come.
The slab of rock—which seemed, impossibly, to have ignited beneath the demon’s flaming claws—slammed Death to the unyielding floor. Several of his attackers were pulped or incinerated, and it was only the Horseman’s greater resilience and swift reflexes that partially saved him. He lay pinned, his left side in flaring agony, fire licking at his arm, his shoulder, his neck. He could actually hear the sizzling as some of his hair, and bits of his skin, boiled away.
He did not scream—that would be a satisfaction Death would never offer any foe—but it was a near thing.
The remaining Phantom Guards clustered around him, striking with their brutal axes, and though the stone itself limited their angle of attack, it also prevented Death from dodging or rolling aside. Steel cut through flesh, severed muscles, cracked bones. Nothing he couldn’t recover from, and swiftly, but only if he had the time.
Death lashed out once with the scythe in his free hand, just enough to make the demons jump back, and then threw all his focus into a single instant’s concentration.
Harvester flowed, becoming a single weapon once more. The scythe in Death’s free hand disappeared; the weapon in his left, pinned beneath the rock, became an ugly, thick-bladed knife.
The demons closed in once more, axes raised high. Straining every muscle, ignoring the searing pain shooting through those already torn and bleeding, the Horseman turned his wrist so that the blade pointed more or less upright, taking a small fraction of the stone’s weight.
Then, at Death’s silent command, Harvester again resumed its natural shape.
The scythe expanded instantly upward and outward, flinging the flaming rock aside. Death rolled, smothering the worst of the flames that had caught across his body, and then, he, too, was upright once more. The Phantom Guards howling on his heels, he bounded forward, limping but still swift. Above, his brother seemed to be faring somewhat better; Death caught War’s eye, tilted his head, and then dashed in the direction he’d just indicated. He ran until he stood in the shadow of one of the lower balconies, his back to a wall of stone.
They could not come at him from behind, and the overhang prevented the squat beast with the flaming claws from chucking more rocks his way. Tactically sound, but it also meant he was backed into a corner. Once the demons had surrounded him on all three open sides—which, indeed, they did almost instantly—Death had no room to maneuver.
The Phantom Guards and their clawed leader advanced, grinning and growling until their lips and teeth glistened with unshed drool. Death retreated a step farther, his back now pressed tight against the wall …
And shouted, “Now!”
Above, War broke away from his own foes and leapt off the side of the gantry on which he’d been fighting. He plummeted, swiftly but surely, to land on the balcony directly above his brother. He spun, putting his own back to the wall, bellowed a fearsome cry, and slammed Chaoseater point-first into the stone by his feet.
Again. And again.
Stone splintered, cracks shooting swiftly across the balcony as though literally fleeing the black blade. Dust flew, and gravity reached greedily for a prize long denied.
The entire balcony—save for a nub about a pace across, on which War stood—collapsed.
It passed only an arm’s length before Death’s face, a blinding cloud and deafening clamor, but the Horseman didn’t flinch. He might not always trust his brother’s judgment, but of War’s accuracy he harbored no doubt at all.
His wounds already beginning to close, Death broke into a run before the dust had settled. Most of the demons he’d lured beneath the balcony had been well and truly macerated, or at least pinned, but those at the very edges might yet have strength to haul themselves free.
Harvester flying, Death raced around all four sides of the fallen slab, trimming whatever demonic parts and limbs still jutted from beneath as though removing the crust from a trencher of bread. Blood and oozes spurted, screams rose and fell, and the balcony settled more firmly into place as those who had still struggled beneath it ceased their efforts.
Only a few Phantom Guards remained on the ground, a smattering of bat-like duskwings hovered uneasily in the air. It shouldn’t prove difficult to—
A low shout echoed from above. Death beheld the demons’ leader, that creature of fat and fang, dangling from a gantry. Its mouth had stretched open, unhinging wider than its own body, to clamp down on War from above. The younger Horseman now hung from that loathsome maw, his entire left arm and shoulder having disappeared into the demon’s gullet. The high squeal of rending metal suggested that those teeth hadn’t yet punctured War’s armor, but it was only a matter of seconds.
Death slapped a bare hand against the stone wall and whispered his necromantic rites. Skeletal hands erupted, not from the floor around him but from the gantry above. The Horseman had no doubt that they could do little to the flabby demon, but then, he wasn’t trying to hold or injure the thing.
Instead, at Death’s orchestration, the entire swarm of bony digits shoved.
Demon and Rider toppled from the gantry and struck the floor with a loud clang and a sodden splat. The impact threw War free and he scrambled upright, Chaoseater raised, jaw trembling in anger.
The demon, too, seemed no worse for wear as it rolled and bubbled and flopped to its feet. This close, the creature reeked of sweat and mildew and gangrenous sores.
Ebony sword and jagged scythe swept in and out; flesh and fat split, spilling gouts of blubbery, mustard-hued tallow. But no matter how broad or how deep, the wounds seemed to cause the demon no great inconvenience. It never slowed, never staggered. If it did, indeed, have organs, as War had wondered, they were buried too deep for even the Horsemen’s potent weapons to easily reach; and each time they tried, they brought themselves uncomfortably near that impossibly wide, impossibly flexible jaw.
Until, finally, War and Death had both grown heartily sick of the whole thing. A quick whispered exchange and they darted forward, approaching the demon from either side.
The maw stretched wide once more, the entire head flopping to and fro as the beast decided which of them to bite. Death lashed out with an empty hand and grabbed the thing’s upper jaw, his fingers slotted in between the razor-edged teeth. War did the same, snagging the lower.
And then both, with a strenuous heave, yanked the gaping, unhinged mouth down past the demon’s shoulders, literally turning it partway inside out.
Blubber folded, viscous fat fountained up in an oily geyser, and a sound that might or might not have been something akin to a scream burst from the newly exposed and glistening mass. The demon spasmed once, twice, and collapsed to leak slowly away across the floor.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MOST OF THE SURVIVING DEMONS FLED SCREAMING back through the portal, which slipped shut behind them with an almost obscene slurping. The few who remained—either too stupid, too arrogant, or simply too slow to escape with the others—fell swiftly and without much difficulty to Harvester and Chaoseater.
Spattered with gore, their boots squelching wetly with every step, the Horsemen examined the carnage. Neither could help but notice, almost immediately, which particular bodies were not present.
“Belisatra?” War asked. “Hadrimon?”
“Lost track of them in the battle,” Death admitted disgustedly. “You?”
“The same. I imagine they ran as soon as our backs were turned.”
Death proceeded slowly to the chamber’s center and leaned heavily over the worktable, his weight resting on his knuckles. Had any enemies still been present, they’d have died swiftly, painfully, bloodily in that moment. There were none, however, and smashing the furniture, though perhaps satisfying, wasn’t his style.
“All right,” he said finally, drawing a ragged breath. “They’ve escaped us. We’ve wasted an opportunity, but it won’t be our last.”
War grunted something noncommittal, then said, “Hadrimon and Belisatra seemed just as surprised by the demons as we were. It would appear that word of the Abomination Vault is starting to spread.”
The older brother ran his hand through a bit of the gore that had sprayed across the table, examined it between his forefinger and thumb. “It was inevitable, I suppose. And there’ll just be more of them, the longer this takes us.” He shook the goo from his hand with a flick of the wrist. “So which lord of Hell did they serve? I’d have thought that Samael was the most likely to figure out what we were doing, but this was awfully overt for one of his—”
“Don’t assume,” War interrupted, “that our new enemy is necessarily a demon.”
“Oh, of course. How foolish of me. What evidence could I possibly have based that on?”
War’s smile was utterly lacking in mirth. “You’ve been gone a long time, Death.”
“So everyone keeps reminding me. What of it?”
“So a few things have changed in those centuries. One of which was, people took notice of the fact that the Nephilim’s greatest defeat—before Eden, of course—was at Kothysos.”
Death began to speak, paused, began once more. “The demons only agreed to fight for the Old Ones at Kothysos because they believed that we were a common enemy.”
“Since then, a number of Hell’s smaller factions have hired themselves out to anyone who can offer them sufficient payment—in weapons, souls, slaves, what have you.”
“Demonic mercenaries? Who’s foolish enough to trust demons?”
War shrugged. “I don’t imagine anyone really trusts them, but when all they need are soldiers …”
“In essence, then, you’re suggesting that these demons could be working for anyone or anything.” Death shook his head. “And here I’d just been thinking that this whole affair had been far too simple and straightforward up until now.”
“Can you question any of them, brother?”
Death nodded slowly. “Not immediately. I need some time to gather my strength and to heal. Soon, though. In the interim, a bit of searching wouldn’t be wasted time, I think. We might just turn up some hint of where Hadrimon and Belisatra have gone. And by the way …” He’d raised his voice, clearly no longer addressing his brother. “… you can come out now.”
Dust plunged from the highest passageway to alight upon Harvester, feathers puffed proudly erect and head held high, as though he himself had repulsed the demon horde.
War chuckled softly. “Don’t encourage him,” Death demanded.
Their first discovery was interesting, though not immediately helpful. Various deep gouges on the floor and the walls—older and of a very different texture from those caused by Death’s storm of bones—suggested that something of truly prodigious size had recently occupied the workshop. In fact, considering the marks on all sides of the room and on gantries and bridges of various heights, it might actually have taken up almost the entirety of the workshop.
“One of the Grand Abominations?” War asked.
“I certainly hope not. I remember a few of the devices that were that big, and I dislike the idea of Belisatra and Hadrimon having access to any of them. Either way, we can be sure of one thing.”
“Hmm?”
“Belisatra has the means to create some truly gargantuan portals.” Death waved vaguely at the various
passageways. “There’s no door here large enough for something that size to pass through.”
Then, after briefly tapping a finger against a blank expanse of mask, he continued, “We need to speed this up. You keep searching here. I’m going to take a look at the side chambers.”
Death’s examinations carried him through myriad winding corridors. All were carved through the living rock; a few had been further reinforced with iron bands and bracings. The rooms to which they led varied in size, though none was nearly so large as the central laboratory. Some were simple storerooms, containing tools or raw materials: mostly stone and brass. Mostly, but not all. Some held, instead, the remains of bodies—strips of flesh, cords of muscle, ropes of sinew, piles of bone. All were notched, torn, or misshapen, as though someone had been attempting to construct something out of them. Most, to judge by the damage and the patterns of stained blood, had been removed while their prior owners were still alive.
A couple of the other rooms were austere sleeping chambers, boasting only bedrolls and a few simple amenities. One—the largest of these side chambers—contained a machine of dark steel with dozens of rotating gears, sliding shelves, pistons, and tubes. Death couldn’t begin to guess at its purpose, until he finally found a few scraps of brass lying atop a conveyer belt. He theorized, then, that this was a device designed to accelerate Belisatra’s work, enabling her to create her constructs far more rapidly than she might with only hand tools and a forge.
If so, it explained how she’d created such vast armies of artificial soldiers, but it still didn’t bring Death any nearer to determining where they might have gone.
He was struggling ever more fiercely to keep his frustration in check as he grudgingly made his way back toward the central chamber. If War hadn’t found something, anything, their search might just have come to an abrupt dead end after all.
He needn’t have worried. Entering the laboratory, Death saw something lying atop the worktable, something coated in blood and gore, something that most assuredly had not been there when he’d departed.