by Matt Turner
And then the harpy dropped him. Marc had barely a second to react before he tumbled into the sand, head over heels. A thick layer of the irritating stuff immediately slipped into the crevices beneath his leather armor and undershirt. But there was no time for even a second’s respite—he was still far too close to the fiery inferno of the lake, and so he rolled to his feet and clumsily ran forward.
“Horseman!” Ellie called out after him. He turned to see that she had fallen in the sand just on the edge of the lake. She lay in the dirt, weakly calling out, as the Ashmedai continued to trudge into the depths of the Hellfire. One of its steel legs melted away in a splash of molten steel, spraying bits of burning liquid in every direction. A single drop landed on Ellie, and she began screaming.
Damnit, Marc cursed. There was no time to think; he turned about mid-sprint and bolted for Ellie’s body. He immediately realized what had happened to her as he approached. As long as he had known her, the madwoman had always covered every centimeter of her skin in a protective steel suit, leaving only her left eye exposed. Marc had always questioned the sanity of that, but now, as he watched the Prophet’s armor start to melt as the Hellfire flame spread, he realized just how stupid an idea it had really been.
“You idiot,” he cursed when he reached her. He tore the back of her thin armor away, exposing a further layer of boiled leather, and hurled it into the flames of the lake. The heat nearly made him pass out, but he managed to pick up the small woman under one arm and rush forward a few more meters until the danger of spontaneously bursting into flame had passed.
“The things I do,” he groaned as he dumped her body onto the sand. She let out a gurgle of pain as her remaining pieces of steel armor hissed, and so he began to tear them away too—legs, boots, arms, torso. The thick layer of boiled leather covered up everything, even her fingers. Where the Hellfire flame had scorched her back, there was a slight tear in the leather, but even then, all it exposed was a thick linen shirt. She must be hot as hell, wearing all those layers all the damn time, Marc thought.
Podarge swooped down from the sky to land back on his shoulder. “Fun watching you run.” She chuckled.
“Why the hell did you drop me?” Marc demanded furiously.
“Too heavy. You’ve gotten fat since last war.”
That insult rang just a little bit too true. Marc jostled his shoulder up and down, making the devil land on Ellie’s back with a caw of irritation. He gazed down at her with interest; he hadn’t seen Podarge in nearly two millennia.
The harpy looked just as he remembered her from the days of the Third Rebellion: standing half a meter tall, her body resembled that of a vulture—long, ragged wings and hideous scaled legs that ended in sharp talons. But where a crow’s head would be, there was only the face of a young maiden with long, flowing hair. By the standards of most demons, harpies like Podarge were insignificant things that barely warranted attention, but the sight of the strange hybrid of woman and bird still brought a vague sense of disquiet to Marc’s heart.
“You’ve gotten even uglier, Podarge.” He sighed. “I didn’t think that was possible.” And it was true—he hadn’t remembered her face being so pale and gaunt from hunger, or her feathers being quite so ragged and torn.
The harpy poked at Ellie’s body with a single talon. “Roman still thinks he is funny,” she cackled. “Roman has no gratitude.”
She was right; without her, he would likely be nothing but liquid fire right now. “Thank you, Podarge,” he said, and he genuinely meant it. “It took me back to the old days, flying with you.”
“Old days good,” Podarge agreed. She shuffled over to Ellie’s head and clacked her talons against the red-hot metal. The heat did not seem to bother her in the slightest. “But new days bad.”
“I thought you were dead.” Marc’s rage at that had been great; she had fought by his side in the Second and Third Rebellions. She had earned her place in Hell, but in the chaotic aftermath of Cain’s imprisonment, the handful of remaining demons like her had been exterminated. Only the ones powerful enough to bind themselves to a human host—like Abaddon and Leviathan—had survived.
“Hiding,” Podarge said. “In Suicide Forest. Good eating there, only humans are trees.”
“And then they burnt it down,” he realized.
She spat on Ellie’s mask, drawing up a wisp of smoke. “Not all, but most. Then more humans come, searching the trees. I leave. I go to Roman. Nowhere else for a demon in Hell.”
“I’m going to Judecca,” he warned. “Cain is holding Cleo captive down there. It won’t be easy.”
“Cleo?” Podarge said in distress. She and Marc’s love had been oddly close—the former Queen of the Nile had always smiled when the harpy swooped and cork-screwed through the air above them. “I go for her. And for eating. Always good eating with you, Roman.”
Marc smiled. “You haven’t aged a day, Podarge.”
“Can I eat this one?” Podarge asked eagerly. She jumped up and down on Ellie’s helmet, drawing a groan of pain from the Prophet.
“My face,” Ellie moaned. “My face…”
“No eating this one,” Marc said sternly. “She’s too important to the Kingdom.”
“No fun,” Podarge complained.
Marc gazed down at Ellie’s body. The expressionless steel mask wrapped around her head was still red-hot. Have to take it off or it’ll blind her, Marc decided. But that was a lie, and he knew it; in reality, he was curious about what Prophet Ellie looked like underneath all that armor. He wrapped his hands around the bottom of the helmet and began to pull.
“No!” Ellie screeched. She blindly thrashed about, knocking a foot into his bleeding legs and making him grit his teeth in pain. One of her arms nearly hit Podarge, making the harpy hiss in irritation and waddle away. “My face!”
“Remember how you just tried to drown me in Hellfire?” Marc demanded. “This is fair game, you mad bitch.”
With a gentle tug, he pulled the helmet from her head and hurled it into the depths of the desert. He silently gazed down at her face, examining it from every angle.
Podarge barely gave the unmasked Prophet a second glance. “All humans ugly,” she declared.
“Jesus,” Marc said. “I thought Legion and Giles were bad, but…you’re the most broken out of all of us, Ellie.”
“My name is ELIE!” she howled up at him. “Don’t call me that filth, that trash! I am above your species! I am ABOVE you wretched animals—”
“The Kingdom still needs you.” Marc jerked a thumb over his shoulder to where the war machine was steadily melting into the lake—it had already lost most of its form, and resembled little more than a hill of half-melted iron. “That’s the only reason you’re not swimming in that right now.”
“Mercy is a human concept,” she sneered. “A relic of tribalism, long made obsolete by—”
He thought about taking away one of her eyes to show he meant business, but decided against it. “Tell Giles that I’ll be coming back,” he promised. “Once my job is done.” He turned to leave. Podarge scampered across the sand and leapt up onto his back, more like a cat than a bird.
“You fool,” the Prophet spat at his back. “You’re walking to your doom. Giles has foreseen it. This is all a trap set by your old master.”
For a moment, Marc paused. “Until we meet again.”
“Next time, I eat you.” Podarge grinned.
And with that, he continued on his way.
ELIE spent the next day of its existence combing the desert for its true face, all the while raining down curses and threats of vengeance on the puny human who had dared defy it. But, by the time it had found the steel mask and slid it back on, reducing the world to a small comforting circle, Marc Antony and the strange creature were long gone.
ELIE reached into the boiled leathers that covered its torso, taking care not to accidently brush up against any of the disgusting flesh that lined its body. The locust it retrieved from its hidden pocke
t was scarcely any better, although ELIE could somewhat appreciate the elegance of its armored design.
“Prophet ELIE here,” it said to the locust with a voice raw from cursing.
“ELIE.” Giles’s smooth voice came through the locust’s pincers. “Did you intercept the target?”
“Yes,” ELIE said.
Giles paused. “He escaped, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Return to Dis at once. You are needed here.”
“And what of Antony?” ELIE demanded. “I have more bodies. I can resume the chase—”
“We have more important matters to deal with. It is a waste of time and resources to pursue the damned.” For an instant, something in his voice strangely softened. “We shall not see Antony again.”
ELIE felt an unusual sensation at that. A lost opportunity for more data. It dismissed the emotion. But the information from this battle had been quite enlightening, it decided, as it spread its arms and let the locusts multiply over its body. Mercifully, none of their legs brushed up against its skin—it had experienced that once before, and found the sensation to be utterly repulsive.
My next body will be even stronger, it promised itself. In time, nothing would be able to stand against it—after all, the Empathetic Learning IntelligencE, US Department of Defense Project #2961, had been built to adapt and overcome. It is in my nature.
29
“The prodigal son returns,” Plague sneered. “It’s been a long time, Father.” A burst of laughter came from his lips as the older man’s eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped forward. Plague made no move to catch him; it was up to John to extend a vine from his hand to stop his fall.
“He’s bleeding badly,” John said urgently. A memory came back to him: Plague healing his wounds after he had cut him free in the Forest of Suicides. “Can you heal him?”
“Yes,” Plague said simply. Without another word, he picked up one of the steel links from the shattered whip-like weapon the other man had left behind and examined it with interest. “You ever see a weapon like this before, Famine?” he asked in the same casual tone someone might use to talk about the weather.
“His intestines are leaking out,” John snapped. “Hurry up and heal him. If he really is your father—”
Plague suddenly hurled the steel link to the ground. “First, there’s no time,” he snarled in a voice black with fury. “Second, this is Hell—it’s not like he’s about to die on us. Third, I don’t care what the Master says—this bastard deserves to feel a little pain.” He stormed directly toward John and shoved him aside as he began to make his way through the rubble. “The rest of the Fourth Legion is on the way. We need to get moving now.”
John looked down at the half-collapsed unconscious man. His features were stained by blood and dust, but the resemblance he had to Plague was uncanny: the same hawkish eyes, the same ginger hair; they even had the same hint of a perpetual sneer about their lips… He was Plague’s father, absolutely no doubt about it.
“You want me to carry him?” he called out after Plague. The only response he received was a single bitter bark of a laugh.
Of course. John internally sighed. “The things I do,” he grunted as he pulled the older man in closer with the vine. The Mark on his right shoulder—visible through the tears in his shredded, useless armor—gazed up at John. He shuddered at the sight of the red, pulsing mass; it looked just as hideous as the one on Plague’s palm. I wonder if Death has one. He slung the older man over his shoulder. It would have been a difficult feat to perform when he was alive, but he was starting to discover that the branches and bark seemed to instinctively strengthen his body whenever he needed them to.
Tituba had once told him how the women of her tribe carried their babies on slings on their backs. He felt the old pang of guilt and terror at her name, and had to take a moment to force it aside. Even if she is in Hell, she’ll never find me.
But that was beside the point; the idea was a sound one. He focused on his back, willing the image in his mind to appear. Almost immediately, a dozen branches tore out of his skin. He gasped at the sharp pain, but it quickly faded away, allowing him to awkwardly shift the older man’s body over his shoulder. The branches grabbed at it, pulling the man down from his shoulder, and wrapped around his body, forming a makeshift cage against John’s back that completely supported the wounded man’s weight and gave John full use of both of his arms.
He couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as he ran after Plague, the wounded man bouncing and jostling among the branches on his back. “So we found War,” he said as they scrambled over a pile of smoldering rubble. “Where’s Death?”
“This is the C District.” Plague’s tone was distant and melancholic, a far cry from what it had been before. “Manto says Death is having her little rebellion in Factory 112.” A hand reached out from the rubble and grabbed at his boot, but he kicked it aside. “Shouldn’t be too far now. Is she still there, Manto?”
“Death is currently one hundred and thirty meters underground beneath Factory C-112,” the bag at his side said crisply. “Now one hundred and thirty-four meters. One hundred and thirty-six meters. One hundred and forty—”
“That’s enough. We get it.” Plague rubbed his temples in exasperation. “You damn Horsemen. It was not supposed to be this hard gathering you all up. Christ.”
They slipped from the hills of rubble and fire into a cobblestone street that seemed to have not been affected by the destruction of the Fourth Legion’s War Train. The buildings, although twisted and foreign to John’s eye, were still standing, and he even caught a glimpse of a handful of people fleeing into doorways and alleyways. A banner hung over the street just above them, emblazoned with a red background and nine golden stars. But before John could investigate it further, a scrap of fire gently descended from the sky and set it aflame. He looked up to see that the smoke from the fires of the destroyed city block was drifting overhead, bringing a column of fire with it.
“The fires are coming this way,” he muttered. “But where are the fire brigades? The people?”
“A fire brigade? In Hell?” Plague laughed the most sincere chuckle John had ever heard from him. “This is just the C District, where they throw all the refuse and trash. The Kingdom has a firestorm or a hellquake here nearly every other day. All the workers and guards are hiding because the real disaster is still coming.”
He slipped across the street and into an alleyway overflowing with sewage. A blind man crawling on all fours let out a cry of despair at the sound of their feet splashing through the filth and scampered into a dark opening in the street before them. “The sewers,” Plague muttered to himself. “Perfect.”
“These sewers connect to Death’s current position,” Manto confirmed. “Although I do recommend that you hurry.”
“What’s still coming?” John asked.
“That army over there,” Plague said laconically.
John turned to the side and felt himself nearly go faint. Far through the maze of streets and chthonic architecture, an army was indeed approaching. They were far too distant to make out anything other than a faceless dark swarm that spewed fire and death, but the damage they were inflicting was already far worse than that of the train crash. A building toppled to the ground, wracked by explosions; then another, wrenched down by a horde of men who crawled over it like ants. Above the marching army, a dozen strange contraptions lurched forward, combing over the wreckage of the factories. The struggling figures that they picked up from the smoking rubble they dashed against the ground, again and again.
“What are they doing?” John asked in horror.
“It’s standard Kingdom procedure,” Plague said. “Exterminate everything within twenty or so kilometers of any rebellions. Salt the earth, burn the factories, pulp the workers… They’ll probably douse this whole place in Hellfire once they find out a Horseman led this rebellion. They’ll probably make the radius even bigger, too—could be fifty kilom
eters.”
Fire shrieked down from the sky, toppling a dozen more buildings. Figures fled, screaming, from them, and were immediately cut down by the cheering army. “The Kingdom hasn’t had to do something this big in a long, long time.” Plague grinned. “We’ve got ’em scared.”
“But those are their own people…their own factories…”
“They’ll have those losses replenished in a month.” Plague sighed. He slipped his feet into the dark hole and crinkled his nose at the awful smell that emanated from it. “Besides, it’s C District. No one in Hell cares about the C District.”
A ray of light pierced through the growing cloud of smoke and flame and began to run a pool of light up and down the streets. “Now that seems like overkill,” Plague said nervously. He ran his tongue over his dry lips as he gazed up at the sky. “Looks like losing that train pissed the Kingdom off more than I thought it would. We better get underground, Famine.”
“What is it?” John craned his neck up to look at the skies. The growing columns of smoke obscured everything, and made the dim day even darker, but far above, it seemed that there was something… He squinted at it, trying to make out its form.
Plague seized him by the arm and dragged him down into the sewer. “Underground, right fucking now,” he barked. The urgency in his voice was so strong that John offered no protest as they slipped away into the darkness of the sewer.
Far, far above, Legion gazed down at the mechanical landscape of the C District. They would have vastly preferred to be on the ground, in close proximity to all that terrified, pulsing flesh—so succulent to bite into, so delightful to feel the fluids running down their chins! But orders were orders, and the Holy Council had given theirs.
“One hundred kilometer radiusss,” they ordered. “Perimeter only.”
“One hundred kilometer radius,” Captain Gudivada bellowed into the depths of the Titan. “Perimeter only!”
The engineers shouted back their confirmation. Captain Gudivada turned to Legion. “We are ready, Lord Prophet.” He had to angle his head slightly downward due to the hunchbacked appearance of Legion’s body underneath their massive cloak.