by Matt Turner
“Then we lay a trap of our own,” Vera suggested.
“You mean an ambush?” Plague asked. “The entire Fourth Legion is behind us. We can’t afford to get bogged down in a fight with them.”
“Aye.” John coughed. “It’s hard enough walking at the moment.”
They were both right; the mad pace of their retreat had cost them all dearly, and Vera still felt a deep-rooted pain from her newly healed body. We wouldn’t last a minute in a fight. “That’s not the kind of trap I was thinking about. Do you have any explosives in those bags of yours, Plague?”
He gave her a look that said I still don’t quite trust you. “How much do you need?”
Vera smiled. “How much you got?”
Five minutes later, someone brushed up against the tripwire that Vera had laid across a rubble-strewn street. The very pavement quaked with the force of the dynamite Plague had given her. And then, just as the last reverberations echoed away into the emptiness of the air, the two warehouses overlooking either side of the trap slowly fell forward like drunken giants, completely burying the street beneath them. The soldiers following them barely had any time to even cry out.
“Congratulations, Death.” Manto’s voice came from the bag. “You have just gained half an hour on your pursuers.”
“Hell yeah.” Plague grinned.
“Well done,” Simon growled.
“Does this mean we can take another break?” John begged.
Vera said nothing, only allowing a fierce smile to cross her face. I’m not done, she vowed as they continued on their way to the wall of fire. Meanwhile, the Fourth Circle burned around them.
35
A single trickle of blood ran down Cenodoxa’s pierced ankle, down her thigh, over her heaving chest, and into the crevices of her twisted neck. It hesitated for just a moment at the bottom of her right eyelid, as if making up its mind, and then settled directly over her pupil. The world turned a hazy red, but she barely noticed—the unbearable agony in her ankles and wrists was just too much to bear.
Fritz yawned and placed his feet up on a boulder torn from the wall of the demolished factory, giving himself a chance to lay back and stretch. “Why do you always do it upside down?” he asked.
“Because I feel like it,” Longinus growled. “Now shut your mouth.” He knelt so that Cenodoxa could see every millimeter of his upside-down features. “Now you may talk, Doctor.”
“Why?” Cenodoxa sobbed between her gasps for air. “I have served the Kingdom loyally for years. I have never once…”
Longinus nodded in agreement. He had the eyes of a reptile: beady, sunken, and devoid of any light whatsoever. “I know. That is why I only used three nails.”
“You and your crucifixions.” Fritz rolled his eyes and tossed a piece of rubble at the group of soldiers setting up the Fourth Legion’s command tent over the ruins of Factory C-112. “Hurry up, lads, this district won’t exterminate itself.”
“Shut. Up,” Longinus snarled. The anger in his voice did not reach his eyes, which remained as dead as ever. “You have failed the Kingdom, Doctor.”
“It’s not my fault,” Cenodoxa begged. “T-the w-woman, she had the Mark. There was nothing we could do…”
“She had the Mark,” Fritz mocked in a high-pitched squeal. “There was nothing we could do… Did you ever consider simply not allowing one of the Four Horsemen to trigger an uprising?”
“In your stupidity, you underestimated her and allowed the first slave rebellion in decades,” Longinus said coldly. “You overestimate your importance to the Kingdom, Doctor. That hubris of yours will be your end.”
“N-no, we recovered all the workers!” Cenodoxa pleaded. “Even before the Fourth Legion arrived, I had my guards round them up—there’s only three who we lost in the sewers—”
“Four nails.” Something flashed in Longinus’s hand and Cenodoxa howled as another nail impaled her right bicep to the ruined stone wall. “Three escapees—one of whom was a goddamned Horseman—does not sound like ‘all’ to me, Doctor.”
Fritz stretched his neck and winced as something popped. “That means there’s at least one, possibly three, maybe even all four Horsemen trapped here in C District. Let’s go hunt them down, L—time’s a-wasting.”
“Just the American native, the Frenchwoman, and the Russian!” Cenodoxa screeched. “We nearly have them, I swear to God!”
“Five nails.” Another nail flashed in Longinus’s hand.
Cenodoxa screamed in anticipation of the blow—and then blinked in astonishment. In a blur of motion, Fritz had leapt to his feet and lunged for Longinus’s forearm. The fifth nail trembled in the air, less than a centimeter away from Cenodoxa’s thigh.
“Did you say Russian?” Fritz breathed excitedly.
“Y-yes,” Cenodoxa gasped. “The one with the Mark. She called herself Vera Figner.”
“Vera,” Fritz whispered to himself. “Vera, Vera, Vera. I like it. What year is she from?” The look of raw excitement on his face was oddly repellent.
“Late nineteenth century.” Cenodoxa groaned through gritted teeth. Wrong answer, she immediately realized as Fritz’s handsome face briefly darkened.
“Not perfect.” He sighed, but his features quickly lit up again. “But it’ll have to do. Imagine that, Longinus! One of the Horsemen is an Ivan!” He released the other Prophet’s forearm to do a merry little dance amid the wreckage of the factory. “Please, dear God, let her be a Bolshevik!”
“Idiot,” Longinus muttered. He turned his attention back to Cenodoxa. “This conversation has been illuminating, Doctor. When I have captured the Horsemen and finished laying waste to this district, I will have the Titan wipe it clean with Hellfire. You will spend the next thousand years drowning in it. I suggest you use that time to reflect on your failure.”
And with that, he slammed the fifth nail home.
“Lord Prophet!” a messenger called out as Longinus and Fritz strode away from the whimpering Cenodoxa. She was the last in a long line of workers and guards who Longinus had impaled to the broken walls of the factory with the very nails that they had produced. Yet somehow that hadn’t distracted Longinus from his duties as imperator of the Fourth Legion—he had given orders, studied troop movements, and made last-minute adjustments to extermination quotas and prisoner captures even as he had punched nails through bone and brick with his bare hands.
Fritz couldn’t help but be impressed; the Roman was in rare form today.
“Report,” Longinus said curtly. He did not bother to turn to the messenger, but continued on his way to the command tent as he used a towel to wipe his hands clean of the blood.
“The Ninety-Second Cohort has encountered the Horsemen,” the messenger breathlessly panted. “We have visual confirmation on three, possibly four.”
“Their Marks?” Fritz asked.
“Yes, Lord Prophet. The commander reports that they’ve started laying down traps—he’s down to half strength already.”
“The Ninety-Second Cohort.” For a moment, Longinus closed his eyes as he visualized the battlefield. “Have the Ninety-First adjust course ten degrees north and the Ninety-Third adjust course ten degrees south. The other cohorts are to continue the sweep as planned.”
“Yes, Lord Prophet. What of the Ninety-Second?”
“Have them continue pursuit regardless of casualties. We’ll pin the Horsemen against the Hellfire wall.” Longinus’s eyes snapped open and he clenched his fist. “And then I will see to them personally.”
“You really think the two of us can handle four Horsemen?” Fritz asked as soon as the messenger scampered out of earshot. “I’m good, L, but I’m not that good.”
“You flatter yourself,” Longinus said coldly. “I have faced far worse opponents in my time.”
Still can’t resist sucking his own dick, Fritz thought. “Makes no difference.” He rolled his eyes. “They’ll be nearly a hundred kilometers away by the time the Fourth catches up with them. You planning o
n walking there, Lord Prophet?”
“Fool.” Longinus pointed with a single finger at the billowing clouds of smoke that blanketed the sky above them. The only evidence that the Titan was up there were its faint searchlights that barely pierced the darkness. “Why walk when we can fly?”
36
Tituba was here. Tituba was here. The witch had sworn with her dying words to hunt him down through the very depths of Hell, and now it seemed that that promise was terrifyingly close to becoming true. The only thing that kept John from seizing up in a ball of fear was the frantic pace of their flight. Running through ruins, through fires, through forests of trash heaps that stretched far over his head, through streets already soaked red with the blood of terrified mobs—and all without so much as a scrap of food or a drop of water.
Even John’s thoughts only seemed to echo the pounding of his feet against the ground. Run run run, his delirious brain chanted. It’s all you’re good for, John. He tried to ignore the torturous thought and let out a yelp as a stabbing pain shot through his side.
“Another goddamned cramp?” Simon asked over his shoulder in disgust. “Good God, man.”
“S-sorry,” John panted. He touched a hand to his side and was surprised to see that it was slick with blood. “Uh, Horsemen?”
“Thirty meters above, two o’clock,” Manto calmly said.
Plague immediately slammed a shoulder into Vera and brought her down to the cobblestone street just as something traced through the air directly where she would have been.
“The fuck—” Vera spat.
Plague rolled over in the street and took cover behind the hulking wreck of a long-destroyed machine. “War, two o’clock! No, not there—up there, you idiot!”
The sniper’s third shot passed through the air as soft as a lover’s whisper, neatly brushing Simon’s hair to the side. He didn’t even flinch. “What’s two o’clock?” he demanded.
Plague pointed. “That direction, goddammit!”
“Watch your mouth,” Simon growled. Without pausing a moment, he reached over to John’s shoulder and wrenched off one of the larger branches protruding from his torn robes. In one smooth motion, he turned and hurled the bloody tree limb like a javelin in the direction that Plague was frantically pointing at. There were a few seconds of silence, then a thud as a limp body fell from a window to explode against the street.
“Jesus,” John cried out. He gingerly touched the stump where the branch had been and felt tears come to his eyes. “That bloody hurt.” As if in response, he felt the bark on his torso slightly twist and thicken to cover his newfound wounds—it didn’t stop them from hurting like hell, though.
“I broke my fucking nose again,” Vera cursed as she pressed the front of her torn blouse against her face in an effort to stem the fountain of blood spraying from it. “Plague, you rat bastard.”
Plague stood back up and rubbed his temples in frustration. Vera gave him the middle finger when he did not bother to help her back up. “In the future, if I or Manto randomly shout out something like two o’clock or thirty meters, you should all assume that something is either taking aim at us or on its way to crush us. So if you hear—”
“Two stiltwalkers, twenty meters, five o’clock,” Manto interrupted.
“Fuck!” Plague swore just as the front of one of the factories behind them exploded outward in a cloud of brick and ash.
John had never seen one of the Kingdom’s stiltwalkers before—he stared in awe at the gleaming mechanical limbs, the iron cage of its man-sized torso that strode nearly fifteen feet above the ground, and the rack of weaponry strapped to its arms. The one in front stopped to face him, and the barrels of its weapons began to spin, faster and faster. But the fear the unnatural machine provoked in John’s heart was nothing compared to Tituba. Without even thinking, he slammed one of his hands down onto the pavement and laughed as vines tore out of the street, wrapping around the stiltwalker’s legs and yanking it off-balance. The flurry of bullets that would have torn his body to shreds instead spat at the buildings around him, ripping chunks of masonry and steel down.
In a flash, Simon was there at the ensnarled legs of the stiltwalker. “Got you,” he roared as he slammed a shoulder into one of its thin steel limbs. It buckled from the force of his blow and the machine lurched forward like a drunk, smashing against the far end of the street. Its companion opened fire on the Horseman still standing at its feet, further tearing the machine apart.
Of their own accord, John’s vines shot forward and twisted themselves in a wall-like structure in front of Simon, shielding him from the sudden barrage. “War, again!” John called out as the second stiltwalker strode forward, seeking a better angle on its target. He could feel the spear-like branch sprouting from the wall of vines, and winced in pain when Simon tore it off and leapt back from the wall, the makeshift javelin in his hand.
“This area has been declared rebellious by the Holy Council,” the stiltwalker blared as it smashed an iron foot down into the small wall that John had built, tearing it to bits. “Your bodies are forfeit. Surrender now—”
The mechanical voice turned into a shrill squawk as Simon hurled the wooden spear at its torso with the force of a cannon. The stiltwalker’s shell was easily ruptured by the projectile, and for an instant it lazily swayed in place. “Fucking FUCK, that hurts,” the human operator within it screamed through its microphone, and then the machine collapsed into the street on top of the other.
Simon strode back through the destruction to the others, a cruel smirk—his resemblance to Plague really was unnatural—on his face. “Normally I kill heretics, not dragons.” He grinned. “I think I prefer these.”
“Healing, strength—why do you two get all the nice shit?” Vera demanded as she tore off two small pieces of cloth and jammed them up her bleeding nose.
John couldn’t help but notice that her question wasn’t directed at him.
Plague opened his mouth to say something that John was sure would be vague and mocking, then stopped. “Hear that?” he asked. Sure enough, they could make out the distant sound of voices and clashing machinery in the distance. “They’re catching up. C’mon.”
Over the next hour, the same situation repeated itself over and over. The front-runners of the army behind them would get close—sometimes with stiltwalkers, sometimes with a patrol armed with strange mixtures of guns and more ancient weaponry—and the Horsemen would have no choice but to deal with their pursuers or be gunned down. A handful of times, they even encountered groups of workers fleeing in the same direction that they were, but they inevitably left those groups in the dust, and the army behind quickly caught up with them.
Soon enough, their pursuers became so numerous that they had no possible chance of holding them off, so they simply ran as bullets and arrows sprinkled the ground beside them. Most were aimed at John, who weakly staggered behind at the back of the group.
“How many behind?” Vera gasped.
A shell shrieked down from the sky and burst the street in front of them into flame, so Plague leapt into an alleyway and they began sprinting through that.
John glanced back over his shoulder as they leapt into the alleyway. He made out a blur of running soldiers, two or three giants that could have only been stiltwalkers, and a dim shadow in the dark sky—and then an arrow slammed into his cheek and became embedded in the bark. “Too many, damnit,” he cursed as he wrenched the arrow out. He brushed his hand against the side of the alleyway as they continued to jog. Grow, he thought, and a twisted nest of barbs and brambles began to spring into being in their footsteps.
“Plague, any more dynamite?” Vera asked as they emerged out into an unusually open city square.
But their self-appointed leader was silent. His pace slowed, and then stopped, at the sight before them.
They had reached the edge of the circle that the Kingdom had drawn. A hundred meters away, the wall of Hellfire loomed. Its flames stretched higher than the buildings it h
ad long since consumed, above a pool of liquid fire that bubbled and screamed for miles in every direction. The Hellfire had obviously cut down an entire row of factories, judging by the layout of the square, but no evidence existed of them—not a single burning wreckage, not a scrap of charred brick. Where the wall had touched, there was nothing, other than the flames and the river of inferno. The heat from it was so intense that John could feel his hair start to twist and curl.
Three streets led into the square. A small army poured out of each one—stiltwalkers, soldiers armed with machine guns and spears, with flamethrowers and swords. The only sound other than the crackling of the flames was the marching of their feet as they fanned out, forming a giant semi-circle of death around the four lonely companions. The Hellfire was at their back, the army at their front. There was no escape.
“Looks like we’re fucked,” Vera announced.
One of the stiltwalkers reached into its torso and withdrew a horse-sized weapon that it deposited on the ground. A team of soldiers swiftly set it into position, turning it so that its massive barrel pointed directly at the four Horsemen. Around them, the army shuffled as ten thousand guns took aim.
“Amaury, do you know how to cross that fire-wall yet?” Simon asked in a voice raw with tension.
“Of course,” Plague whispered under his breath. “Lamech, any chance of a portal right fucking now?”
“No,” Lamech said from his place in Plague’s bag. There seemed to be a trace of glee in his stern voice. “I have not yet regained my strength.”
“Shit,” Plague muttered. “I’m still working on it.”
And then, the ranks of the army parted before them. Two robed men strode through—one with a full head of blond hair and a happy grin on his face, and the other with an expression of cold stone. They confidently walked forward and stopped just at the edge of the Kingdom’s army.
“I am the Prophet Cassius Longinus, of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace,” the shorter one announced in a low voice that somehow cut across the entire square with its power.