by Matt Turner
At long last, his feet brushed against the floor below him. Ignoring the exhaustion in his muscles, he leapt back from the wall and immediately drew his gladius as the torch cast a dim circle of light about him. Now I come alone, Marc Antony silently vowed. As a —
“My child.” The voice whispered across his face like a lover’s caress.
Marc instinctively leapt back, placing his back against the wall as he crouched into a defensive posture, raising his blade high for any attack. With one hand, he seized the torch attached to his pack and tossed it several meters before him. Any attacker would have to cross the flames and so lose any advantage of the darkness. Podarge leapt from his back and shot up into the air, waiting to dive-bomb any attacker. “Show yourself,” Marc growled.
Somewhere ahead of him, something shifted and rustled in the darkness. “You wouldn’t like that,” the whisperer breathed, and let out a thin rasp of a chuckle that echoed from the walls. Podarge let out a squawk of fear at the memory of his voice. “Come to visit me, my son?”
“Give her to me,” Marc snarled. Only a mocking silence greeted his words. “Cain.”
“That name…” the voice mused.
It was Cain, there was no question about it, but he sounded different to Marc’s ears. Crueler...
“... I don’t like it. It seems so… Small.” On the last word, the whisper abruptly shifted into a mighty roar that nearly deafened Marc and reduced his torch to little more than a guttering candle.
In the dying light, Marc caught a glimpse of a hunched figure scurrying forward toward him. “Enough of this,” he spat. “Give her to me!” He lunged forward with his gladius, ready to gut the loathsome creature where it stood—
STOP. The single word echoed through his entire body, brutally clenching his muscles as though a great hand were crushing his entire body in a mighty steel fist. Marc gasped in utter shock as the tip of his sword trembled half an inch away from the sunken eyes of the most aged woman he had seen in all his existence. What is this?
Above him, Podarge’s wings beat frantically in the cold air. He tried to open his mouth to tell her to flee, to get as far away as she could, but no matter how hard he tried, the words simply would not come.
The wizened old crone’s shrunken features contorted into a hideous approximation of a smile at the look of shock on his face. “Long live God,” she said in mushy, barely intelligible speech. “Long live God!” She took him by the hand and once again his body did not obey its master as it obediently shuffled with her into the darkness, leaving the dying torch behind. “Long live God!” Her voice began to echo as they entered what Marc sensed to be a great underground cavern. The freezing darkness was suffocating.
They finally stopped, and the hag released him. “Long live God!” she cried out ecstatically as she slipped away into the darkness. Somewhere to his right, another voice took up the cry, then one to his left did as well, then more, until he was surrounded by a ring of the hoarse, mad chanting. “Long live God!” An insane energy seemed to seize the ragged choir in the darkness as their voices rose, louder and louder, more and more persistent, burrowing their way into his soul—
“ENOUGH!” Marc bellowed into the void. “Where is Cleo, you miserable creatures? WHERE IS SHE?”
Still the chanting continued on, louder and louder. If his legs had been able to move, he would have charged into the unseen choir and torn them apart with his bare hands. As it was, he still had control over his arms, and in order to silence them and quell the mad panic rising in his throat, he drew his dagger and blindly threw the blade into the crushing cacophony of darkness. There was a distant shriek of pain, and then utter silence.
“I’ll tear you all to bloody pieces,” Marc swore. “I’ll cripple you, I’ll blind you, I’ll fucking crucify you with your own fucking bones if you don’t give me Cleo right fucking now.” He could hear Podarge flapping in the darkness behind him—it was only a matter of time until they took notice of her. “Podarge! Leave, NOW!” he bellowed at the harpy.
He had no time to know what happened to the devil, for two pinpricks of light flickered into being just out of Marc’s reach. He jerked in surprise at the two lights that were eye-level with him—and then cursed in horror when he realized what the luminous golden orbs really were.
“You dare speak against your God,” Cain’s voice whispered—only now it was not a mysterious echo bouncing off the walls; it was directly in front of him, underneath the two golden and sunken eyes that hated and hated and hated. “How far you have fallen, Traitor.”
He’s changed, Marc thought in horror as the dim outline of the monstrous creature before him slowly came into focus. Kill him NOW, some part of his mind screamed at him, but it was hopeless; the gladius had already fallen from his trembling fingers. “Wh-what are you?” he asked in a voice that was barely a squeak.
The floor shifted and stirred just behind Marc as something massive slowly lumbered into the circle behind him. A blast of rancid air engulfed him as above, the thing exhaled. No outside power compelled Marc to remain still anymore; blind, utter terror had seized every inch of his body. Oh God oh God oh God, his thoughts screamed in panic.
“I AM MAN.” Cain’s eyes flickered upward, as, in the darkness, he extended his arms to either side.
“Long live God, long live God, long live God,” the chant began again, softly at first.
God help me, God help me, Marc begged. He could feel the tears start to run down his face as something cold and wet brushed up against his scalp.
“Marc…?” A tiny breath hissed out just above him.
His heart leapt in his chest as the heart-aching scent of myrrh filled his nostrils. Cleo.
“I AM GOD.” Chains rattled and bones cracked as Cain’s form twisted and contorted in the howling darkness.
Foul-tasting blood spattered across Marc’s face as something ruptured under the pressure.
“LONG LIVE GOD, LONG LIVE GOD, LONG LIVE GOD,” the choir screeched.
“Cleo!” Marc screamed. Somehow he tore himself from the hideous spell and spun about, ready to greet the hideous being behind him. He thanked the darkness that cloaked its massive form and leapt up, hands outstretched to where he was certain that he had heard his love’s voice. His hands brushed up against thick, bristly hair, the shape of teeth as long as his forearm, and past that, an open space where there was moisture—no, something familiar was brushing up against his hand—
“I AM LOVE.”
Gibbering insanity clawed at Marc’s soul, warring for his mind, but he shoved it aside, shoved it all aside, because at last his fingertips brushed up against that familiar raven hair and those beautiful lips in the darkness. He sobbed in relief, because at last he had found her, at last they were together again; they could escape and be free, and be whole—
Inside of the hellish maw, she recoiled from his touch.
“No!” Marc screamed. “I can save you, I CAN SAVE YOU!” But it was no use, for his love was pulling away from his grasp even more now, and his words became a wordless howl as the bloody teeth came down on his arms, ripping apart bone and sinew with their serrated edges.
“I AM HATE.”
The monster’s head jerked upward, carrying Marc off his feet, high into the darkness of the cavern. A massive claw slashed at his guts, tearing open his armor and spilling his intestines out onto the madly howling crowd below. Marc screamed over them all as the maw ripped the remains of his arms off and opened wide, ready to swallow him whole.
“WORSHIP,” the mighty voice commanded, and the choir went silent to hear the song of Marc’s screams—on and on they went, until his lungs were torn scraps of tissue and his throat little more than a bloody ruin, and still they continued as the Beast swallowed him down. At last, all that remained of Marc Antony were the faint echoes of his song and a few scraps of flesh upon the floor.
The gathered choir knelt to the floor for a moment of silent respect in awe of his masterful performance. The voice
was coarse and the singer solitary, but the hymn was still worthy of the god that had commanded it, they agreed with each other as they later dispersed to their other duties. In the darkness that they left, there was a muted silence as only the old woman remained to blindly scrabble about on the floor. A smile crossed her face as her hands brushed up against the remains of a human arm—and the small piece of raised circular flesh she knew would be upon it.
“For you, son.” She bowed as she knelt and raised the Mark above her.
“Thank you, Mother,” Cain whispered. The piece of flesh she bore him was lifted from her hand, and in the darkness, a metallic click sounded as something heavy and metal crashed into the floor. “That’s much better.”
“How…how many Seals remain?” She instinctively cringed to the floor—no one else could dare ask the Master that, and even with her position, she knew the taste of his rage.
But the hymn had put her son in a good mood, it seemed. “Not too many, Mother.” Cain hurled the useless chain against the far side of the cavern and chuckled as the massive steel links shattered like glass. “Not too many at all.”
SECOND DEATH
“But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that brims with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”
- Revelation 21:8
1
In the final moments of his earthly life, Giles de Rais had been burnt at the stake. Even now, all these centuries later, he sometimes woke up in a cold sweat, remembering the fire licking at his legs, cooking him alive…and oh, how the crowd had jeered and laughed at his screams. Their faces, blurred by smoke and flames, still haunted him. After he had found Abaddon, he had tracked a few of them down, but there was ultimately no gratification to be found in their torture. We are still all in Hell together.
Nevertheless, the experience gave him a special empathy for the cruel fate that Longinus and Fritz had received. It would be centuries until the Hellfire died down enough for their bodies to begin the healing process, and centuries more until they were fit to serve the Kingdom again.
A locust wiggled out of Giles’s mouth and landed on his knee to gaze up at him disapprovingly. “You pity them,” Abaddon said.
“Of course not,” Giles denied. “They were useful tools to the Kingdom, nothing more.” Fritz had always been the most expendable of the Prophets—there were thousands of killers just as ruthless and cunning as him—but the loss of Longinus, one of Cain’s original Horsemen, was a significant blow.
“One Horseman lost,” Abaddon mused. “The Prince of Darkness would have given half his armies to destroy them in the Second Rebellion.”
“Five Horsemen were lost,” Giles corrected the demon. “Longinus and the four newcomers.” That defeat still rankled—he would have loved to capture the four new Horsemen. Their powers would have made them superb Prophets; at the very least, he could have stripped them away and given them to individuals less difficult to control.
The locust gave him a cunning look. For centuries, the two of them had been bound together, depending upon each other for survival, yet Giles still occasionally felt a vague sense of disquiet when he gazed down at the unholy thing that he had let into his body. “One Horseman was lost,” Abaddon slowly repeated. “Do you really think that Cain would allow his gambit to fail so easily?”
“His time is past,” Giles snapped. “The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace does not fear the machinations of a single old man imprisoned forever in the darkest depths of Judecca.”
Abaddon chuckled. “His time was before yours…and it will be after yours, too.”
Giles had no time to respond to that, for Salome suddenly burst into the Hall of Mammon.
“Giles!” the Prophet called out, a panicked expression on her lovely face. Lao Ai, her concubine, nervously followed in her wake—an enormous breach of protocol.
“What is he doing here?” Giles demanded. He slid his sleeves back, allowing a host of Abaddon’s locusts to threateningly swarm out into the air. “Only Prophets are allowed in the Hall of Mammon, Salome.”
“My apologies, Lord Prophet—” Lao began.
Salome quickly cut him off. “Giles, this is important. A harpy just showed up—it says it came directly from Marc!”
A harpy? They’re all dead. But he had long since learned to react to impossible situations; they were more often than not the norm in the life of a Prophet. He immediately followed the two others down the labyrinth of stairs to Legion’s quarters.
It was an unspoken rule among the Prophets that they had unlimited access to one another’s quarters and private supplies; the lack of privacy theoretically discouraged them from the unending circle of back-stabbing and treachery that marked the upper levels of the Kingdom. In Giles’s opinion, it was one of the more foolish rules that the Prophets adhered to. Longinus, Fritz, and Marc were rarely ever in Dis long enough to even take advantage of their rooms, Salome merely used hers as a storage space for her rotating roster of lovers, Ellie’s was a factory in its own right, and Legion’s... Even when he still drew breath, Giles had been a master of the human body, had explored its depths far more than any surgeon or butcher, but the charnel house that Legion dwelt in still made him faintly sick to his stomach.
He felt that familiar sense of nausea just from looking at the bloodstained iron door that led to Legion’s quarters. Someone—probably Lao—had set up nearly half a hundred candles in the alcoves of the hallway, but the flames and melting fat did little to conceal the stench of rotting meat.
“By Lucifer’s ballsack.” Salome gagged. “That fucking reeks.”
Abaddon moved one of his locusts to block off Giles’s nasal cavity, but the smell still somehow permeated through. Good God, he could taste it. But weakness was something that one should always conceal, so he gritted his teeth and pounded his fist on the door. “Legion, open up.”
“Of courssse, Gilesss,” they said. There was a grate of steel as the Prophet unfastened the locking mechanisms. Ironically, it had been the other Prophets who had insisted that Legion install a lock on their door—far too often in the past, some of its experiments had managed to escape. The door swung open to reveal Legion’s bulk.
They were naked.
This time Salome actually choked up a mouthful of bile, and even Giles had to close his eyes at the hideous sight. And to think you humans call us demons ugly, Abaddon sarcastically whispered in his ear.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Salome spat. She immediately turned around so that she faced the wall. “For God’s sake, Legion, even Hell has standards. Cover yourself, please.”
Legion’s faces grinned. “All your lussstsss and yet you ssstill fear our flesssh, child.” Nevertheless, the monstrosity lumbered across the gore-covered room and pulled a tent-sized crimson cloak across their back.
“Never gonna happen, Lord Prophet.” Lao smiled. Out of all of them, he seemed to be the only one unaffected by the sight of Legion. “My mistress and I are exclusive.”
“Lao, shut up,” Salome snapped. “Where’s the harpy, Legion?”
“Here,” Legion said. They shifted their robe so that only one of their heads was now visible, the one that they seemed to prefer, with long greasy hair that shielded most of its features from view.
Giles could make out the outlines of the others moving underneath the cloak—and below them, the centipede’s worth of limbs...
“I am Podarge,” a parrot-like voice squawked, and something flew down from the blood-soaked rafters of Legion’s room to perch on the Prophet’s back. “I am harpy.”
“I don’t believe it,” Giles muttered to himself.
It really was true; somehow a harpy still lived in Hell, and it had flown right into Dis. Giles had arrived in Hell nearly a millennium and half after the Second Rebellion. The only demon other than Abaddon he had ever seen was Salome’s Leviathan. He gazed at the harpy with such interest tha
t he stepped over the threshold into Legion’s room.
“I’m NOT going in there,” Salome loudly protested over his shoulder, but he ignored her.
Not even the hanging corpses, the rows of dissection tables, and the piles of old meat scattered about could distract Giles from the harpy. It looked just as the stories said—the wings and legs of a hawk or vulture, but with the torso and face of a human woman in miniature!
Fascinating. Giles had always secretly mourned the loss of the demons of old—to have a new one in front of him, even if it was a relative weak harpy, was still incredible. An intriguing idea began to dawn on him. If this creature is female, and Abaddon is male...
Don’t even think about it, little ape, Abaddon snarled.
“An old companion of Antony’sss,” Legion whispered. “Sssome of usss remember her well.”
“You smell different, hungry-lady,” Podarge croaked. “Smell like salt-lady too.”
“Sssilence,” Legion snapped, a hint of anger in their voices. “Tell them what you told usss.”
Through one of the locusts in his hair, Giles saw Salome raise an eyebrow in interest behind him. Clearly the harpy and Legion shared more history than the Prophet was willing to share. He made a mental note to investigate this further as soon as he was able; it was his business to know every facet of his comrades’ sordid pasts.
“Roman take me down to Judecca to save Cleo,” the demon explained. “Fight metal monster. Go to Ninth Circle. Lots of good eating. Then Judecca—” She spat out a gob of phlegm, an oddly human gesture, that landed on the side of Legion’s back. Before it could slide down to the floor, Legion extended one of their tongues and lapped it up. “Roman was taken. I fly.”
“Taken by who?” Salome demanded, even though they already knew the answer.
The harpy’s black eyes burned with a very human hate. “Taken by yellow-eyes. Devil-killer. Cain.”