by Matt Turner
That wretched idiot, Giles thought. Marc had blithely wandered into the lion’s den, heedless of all of Giles’s warnings, and now Cain was one Mark closer to freeing himself. He gritted his teeth so hard they felt like they were about to burst—to add insult to injury, the Kingdom was down another Prophet, and a former Horseman to boot!
His time is coming again. Abaddon laughed. The worst Cain can do is kill me, but you, little ape... I wonder what he’ll do to the Kingdom’s lapdog?
“The old Horsemen used four Seals,” Giles said calmly, crushing any trace of fear that would otherwise appear in his voice. “Three still remain. We are still in control.” He repeated the words again, for they comforted him. “We are still in control.”
“Unless he finds another way to break the Seals,” Salome muttered darkly.
Why do you think Cain made four new Horsemen? Abaddon laughed at the tremor that passed through Giles’s mind. Judgment Day is coming for your little Kingdom.
“The four new Horsssemen are asss good asss dead,” Legion said, as if they could read his thoughts. “The Hellfire will consssume their bonesss for a thousssand yearsss.”
Are you certain? Abaddon mocked.
Giles had been certain once. He had been certain in his wealth, his power, his castle—and then it had all come crashing down into fire and a vengeful trial, all because one of his guards had misplaced a key and one of the sniveling little brats had escaped. His last lesson in life, as the inferno gobbled him up and the Church hurled him headlong into Hell, was that nothing was ever certain. Only fools think otherwise.
“The time for half-measures is past,” he decided, and he left the room to proceed down the hallway. The others followed in his wake, as he knew they would.
“You call firebombing ten million workers in C District a ‘half-measure’?” Salome asked sarcastically.
“Salome, you are to stay here and guard the Holy Council. Legion and I will fetch Ellie, and then we are going hunting.”
“Ellie?” Legion giggled at the thought of the other Prophet. “You wisssh for usss to work with her?”
Giles did not give a damn about the two Prophets’ insipid rivalry. His mind was too busy calculating troop movements, logistics, the armies available. Lower Hell was a quagmire of death and despair, hundreds of millions of damned souls broken into thousands of endlessly warring factions... Ten legions won’t be enough, he decided. Better to send twenty. It would leave the Kingdom’s borders weak, but better to risk an invasion than to allow the ancient Master to return. The Holy Council must know, he decided.
“What about the harpy?” Salome asked.
“Lock it away,” Giles said dismissively. “I’ll deal with it later.” The devil let out a squawk as Legion seized it by the throat and tossed it into Lao’s arms.
“No more wasting time,” he declared, and he snapped his fingers. A swarm of locusts burst from his sleeves to envelop both him and Legion in a cloak of insects, and then Abaddon took them away. As the insects covered him, Giles could feel it deep in his bones: This was the most important hunt of their existence. All Hell hinged on the outcome.
2
Ellie’s workshop was deliberately placed as far away from Legion’s quarters as possible, making it a forty-minute walk away for those who didn’t have Abaddon to transport them there. The vastness of the hall was largely the reason the Kingdom had chosen it to house the Prophets. Once raised to contain all demonkind after the First Rebellion, it was the only building large enough to contain all the Prophets without bringing them in close enough contact to regularly attempt to destroy one another. Now, where thousands of fallen angels had once reigned in their glory, a handful of humans lurked in the shadows.
Mostly humans, at any rate, Giles thought as he and Legion burst into being in front of Ellie’s door. He didn’t bother to knock; instead, he seized the iron handle and forced it open.
Much to his relief, Ellie was fully clothed. She was even wearing what passed for formal wear for her: a handful of chain mail wrappings that mostly covered the scaled steel suit that hid every scrap of her body. Only her single red eye, slightly protruding from a hole in her boxlike mask, gave any hint that she wasn’t machine all the way through.
The Prophet was hunched over a workbench brimming with mechanical contraptions, carefully sketching out something on a large sheet of loose paper. Several assistants scampered around in the depths of her quarters, all burdened down with large pieces of metal and machinery. Legion’s room had been deathly quiet, punctuated only by the occasional drop of blood hitting the floor, but Ellie’s was a dull roar of whirring and hammering—it sounded as though an entire army was being built behind her.
Ellie did not look up from her sketchpad as the two of them climbed down a pair of iron rungs and approached her. “Giles,” she said by way of greeting. “Why did you bring that monster here?” Her tongue slightly slipped on his name, turning it into a mushy Gileth.
“Building more iron coffinsss, Ellie?” Legion mocked. “Your lassst one did not fare well, we hear.”
“Lord Prophet?” One of her assistants put down his welding equipment and walked to Ellie’s side. “Shall we destroy the abomination for you?”
His clothes and missing eye marked him as a Flagellant in the Church of the Fallen Father, Giles realized. He was not surprised; Ellie had long been one of the cult’s most fervent supporters, constantly showering them with specimens and funding in return for their resources and manpower. But the Church had grown bold indeed to call one of the Kingdom’s Prophets an abomination to their face…
Legion clearly had the same thought. In a flash, they stretched out several arms that wrapped around the churchman’s torso and yanked him off his feet. “We are all,” the Prophet snarled. “You—alone—YOU are the abomination!”
“Flesh is sin!” the mechanic bellowed back, even as Legion’s arms began to melt away his clothes and sink into his skin. “Flesh is SIN, you fucking monster!”
“Enough.” Giles reached up and wrenched the mechanic out of Legion’s grasp and tossed him to the floor. “There is no time for this.”
Legion sneered at the small army of machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and beam-cannons that the Flagellants pointed at them. “We’d have you all in an inssstant.”
Ellie still did not look up from her sketch. A new war engine, Giles realized.
“Stand down,” she finally said after a very long, tense minute. Her workers relaxed and immediately went back to their business. “Now.” She set aside her drawing and turned so that her one eye was fixed directly on Giles’s face. “What do you want?”
“Marc has been captured in Judecca,” Giles explained. Ellie’s eye blinked, a rare display of emotion for her. “And with that, Cain is now one Horseman closer to being freed. There is a chance that the four new Horsemen may have somehow escaped the Hellfire ring. We are going to make sure that the job was completed.”
“And if it wasn’t?” Ellie pressed.
“Then we hunt them down until the damned job is completed,” Giles firmly said. “And you’re coming with us.”
Ellie silently studied him for a moment. He gazed back at her single bloodshot eye and wondered for the thousandth time what exactly she was thinking. It was impossible to know; even more than Legion, there was something about her speech and mannerisms that was just wrong, almost as if she were not quite…
Human? Abaddon sneered.
“Nishi!” Ellie called out.
One of the workers glanced up from the tank tread he was repairing. “Yes, Lord Prophet?”
“Prepare the Hellhound,” she ordered. Giles could practically feel the undercurrent of excitement in her churning, mushy voice. “We’re going hunting.”
3
So this is how it ends, Vera thought as the sky above became a maelstrom of fire that hurtled down. Deep in her bones, she was not surprised. There had never been a happy ending for Vera Figner; no family, no children, no lov
ed ones to gather around her deathbed and wish her tearful good-byes. All that there had ever been, since the time she was a young child at the mercy of her father, was the lone devil in her soul, constantly thirsting for any sort of conflict so that once, just once, she could be the one inflicting the pain instead of the suffering victim. Deep down, she had always known that she would end in fire.
No wonder I like dynamite so much, she thought wryly as the inferno plummeted closer. Her hair began to curl and blacken in the rapidly approaching heat. My whole life has been an explosion.
She did not close her eyes as her doom descended; she may very well deserve this fate, but she was damned if she was going to let the world have the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. A thought suddenly occurred to Vera: Seth had never given her that cabbage he had promised. “That rat bastard.” She laughed out loud.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Plague stab something into his chest and let out a scream that pierced even the roar of the Hellfire. Something seemed to change about his body—a shadow came over it, but before she could see anything more, she and John simply popped out of existence. What?
And then Vera blinked.
To her utter shock, she suddenly found herself in what looked like an abandoned warehouse, surrounded by stacks of crates and boxes. A row of dim lightbulbs flickered overhead, casting everything into shadow, but enough light remained to show her that John stood in front of her, just as dumbfounded.
“What the fuck just happened?” Vera demanded. Was this some sort of cruel trick of the Kingdom? Were they in some deeper level of Hell?
“I don’t—” John started to say.
Before he could finish the sentence, Simon and Plague abruptly appeared in a blur of motion and with a great whoosh of air.
“Good God,” Simon said as Plague dropped him to the floor. “Where—”
The three of them immediately stopped when they saw Plague. It was Plague, Vera was almost certain of that, but he looked even more warped and twisted than usual. His cloak was torn away, exposing a chest that was so crisscrossed with scars that it had looked as though he had once been torn into a thousand pieces and then sewn back together—and in the middle of the maze of old wounds, a knife protruded from a faintly glowing symbol that had been carved into his skin. Lines as black as coal extended in every direction from it, stretching up his neck and disappearing into the shadow that was cast over his face. And Plague’s eyes…where they had once been a maniacal, dancing blue, there was only a sickly gold.
“Plague?” John whispered. “Is that you?”
“My children.” Plague’s mouth opened and said the words, but the voice was so unlike his—as deep and looming as the darkest trenches of the ocean—that it seemed to Vera that someone or something had seized hold of his body like a puppet and was speaking through it. “You have made your Father proud.”
“I know those eyes,” Simon muttered in disbelief. “At Carcassonne…the knight…”
“What though the field be lost?” The thing inside Plague smiled. Even as Vera watched, the muscles of Plague’s body began to twist and contort, almost as though their very essence were being drained away by some monstrous devil. “All is not lost, my children.” The yellow eyes gazed down at Simon, coolly analyzing him. “The unconquerable will…” It shifted its attention to John and grinned. “Immortal hate…”
Vera tensed as the thing locked eyes with her. The effect was like being hit with a sledgehammer; she let out an audible gasp, for she could literally feel the layers of her mind giving way as the golden eyes gleefully pried apart the layers of her psyche.
And even worse…she had only the barest glimpse of the entity that pried at her, but it was more than enough to give her nightmares for the rest of her life. Pliers’s mind had been as simple as a child’s plaything, but this—this was an entire universe, filled with great, raging monsters that screamed with overwhelming malevolence and hate. It would take only an instant to be swept up by them, only the slightest slip to be carried forever into that raging void. No borders, no chains in all of Hell could hold back the roiling, endless eternity she felt. Get out, she uselessly raged, like the crying of a toddler against a god.
“…And the courage never to submit or yield,” it concluded. The presence in her mind retreated as the yellow eyes turned away. “Come to me.” For a moment, the shadow on Plague’s face darkened even more, as though it were about to wrench itself free of his body—and then the strange light in his eyes vanished, and the black lines on his body faded away.
Plague slumped down to the floor with a miserable groan and coughed up a mouthful of blood. “S-sorry about that,” he wheezed. “I think I—” He began to fall forward again and would have slammed his forehead against the concrete floor had Simon not intercepted his fall.
“What the hell is going on?” Vera demanded. “Where the fuck are we? And what the fuck was that?”
“That was him,” Plague croaked in a thin, weak voice. He started to reach for the knife buried in his chest, but his hands had become shaking, skeletal remnants of what they once were—he could barely even move them. Looking down at him, Vera could see the outline of his skull beneath the now-emaciated remnants of his once-handsome face. “The Master.”
Simon gently pulled the knife from Plague’s chest—the muscles and skin had receded so much that it took barely a light tug to pull out the blade.
“I let the Master in,” Plague whispered. To Vera’s astonishment, tears began to form at the corners of his eyes. “God help me, he was inside me. He was me.”
Simon cradled Plague’s head in his arms. “It’s all right, son.” His voice, normally so harsh and grating, now sounded stilted and awkward to Vera’s ears. “It’ll be all right.”
Son? Vera wondered. She exchanged a meaningful look with John, and he nodded in agreement. She mentally shrugged to herself; she had suspected as much, considering how similar-looking Simon and Plague were.
John knelt beside Plague. “Where are we?” he gently asked.
“We’re in…we’re in…” Plague’s weak voice died away as his eyes rolled back into his sockets and he went still.
Simon’s eyes briefly widened in panic, but he relaxed as Plague began to softly breathe.
“We are still in C District, approximately five kilometers from the Hellfire circle,” Manto’s voice said from her place at Plague’s hip. She hesitated for a moment and then asked, “Is Amaury all right?”
“He looks even shittier than usual, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vera said rudely. She grabbed John by one of the branches protruding from his shoulder and began to drag him away. “We need to talk.” He let out a few weak words of protest, but allowed her to pull him behind several stacks of crates so that they were out of Simon’s earshot.
“You and I are clearly in over our heads,” she hissed at John as soon as they were alone. “The Master? The talking heads in bags? And whatever the fuck that thing just now was all about?”
John shrugged. “You get used to that sort of thing around Plague,” he started to say. “I’ve found the best way is to just accept it and move on—”
“John,” she interrupted. “I don’t know what’s going on, but what I do know is that I, well”—she still didn’t quite have the words to express what she had seen or sensed, and still barely understood the strange powers the Mark had given her, to be honest—“felt whatever that thing—this Master was. And I don’t know what Satan feels like, but I bet he feels something like that.”
John frowned in discomfort. “Plague says the Master gave us our powers through his Mark. We would be burning in that Hellfire now if it weren’t for him. Why should we fear him?”
“Because it’s the smart thing to do,” Vera snapped. “This may be the perfect opportunity to get out while we can. Everyone thinks that we’re dead. Maybe we can start anew or something. I don’t fucking know.”
“You want to run.” John sighed and turned away from her to star
e at the boxes alongside him.
“Yes,” Vera bluntly said. “I want to run, and I want you to come with me.” His powers were certainly useful—they had wiped out a small army with them, after all! He would be a great asset to the Revolution. “Fuck the Master, and fuck the Kingdom. We can be partners, and after that…” She thought about brushing her hand across his cheek, then decided she didn’t really want to touch him, so she gave him a coy smile instead. “Who knows?”
It was the wrong move, she immediately realized; he looked even more uncomfortable than before. “Vera…” he slowly said. “I spent my whole life running. You know; you met Tituba.”
Vera certainly remembered Tituba. Hale, the madwoman had screamed as she tore apart guards with her bare hands. John Hale!
“I can’t do that anymore,” John said. “I just can’t, Vera. If I run from this…from what I’ve become…” He stared down at the thorny bark that covered his hands. “Then that’s all I’ll ever be. Reverend John Hale, the coward.”
“You think shit like that still matters?” Vera demanded. “You’re in Hell, John. Trying to be a ‘good person’ or whatever you want to call it won’t get you free.” She thought of Akazome Ogata, screaming and begging for mercy as Cenodoxa crushed her head with a steam press. “It’ll just get you dead. Worse, actually.”
“It’s not about that!” John shook his head. “I’m starting to think that the real Hell isn’t out there—” He pointed to the walls; through them, they could just barely hear the Hellfire raging. “It’s in here, Vera.” He tapped his forehead. “And if we keep doing what we did before—if I just run and try to escape the way I always did—we’ll just crush ourselves, more and more, until there’s nothing left!”
Vera rolled her eyes. He sounds just like Petyr. “I don’t have time for your first-year philosophy class, John,” she said. “Now are you coming with me or not?”
“Maybe we can’t be redeemed, but maybe we can be better,” he pleaded. She did not need her powers to see that he was trying to convince himself more than her. “I know it’s too late for Heaven, but this isn’t death, either. We can change, Vera. I have to believe that.”