by Matt Turner
He smashed open another crate—this one was so ancient and rotting that he barely had to touch it—and let out a curse as, once again, thousands of spoons spilled out onto the floor. “Damnit!” he swore. The warehouse was the size of a castle, filled with tens of thousands of mysterious packages, each nearly the size of a grown man—and all they contained were spoons, millions upon millions of them. “Why the fuck does the Kingdom need so many goddamn spoons?”
“They don’t,” Manto said. “Look at the crates—these spoons have been here for a century or more.”
“Eh, what?” Simon still found it strange to hear a female voice coming from the bloody bag tied to his sleeping son’s waist. I wonder what she looks like. Was Manto just a severed head? Was there any flesh left on her face, or was she just a skull with a wagging tongue?
“Nearly all work done in the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace is meaningless, meant to keep the masses of Hell busy and distracted,” Manto said. “Those spoons will never be used. They will be stored here until the factories melt them down again or this warehouse is destroyed to make room for another.”
“Capitalist dogs,” Vera muttered, though whether she was responding to a dream or commenting on Manto’s words, Simon couldn’t say.
“That’s very interesting.” Simon rolled his eyes. “Any chance there’s a sword or a weapon in here?”
“No. Those are produced in A District.”
“Has my son ever mentioned how helpful you are?” Simon asked sarcastically.
“Almost daily. I have known him for far longer than you have.” There was a hint of something in Manto’s voice that Simon didn’t quite like, although he was damned if he could put his finger on it.
“And what, pray tell, is that supposed to mean?” he growled at the leather bag.
The folds of the bag slightly shifted, as if the head behind them were twisting its features in thought. “Forgive me,” Manto slowly said. “I meant…Amaury and I spent centuries together in the darkness of Judecca. I know him…well.”
How well? Simon wanted to ask, but he was suddenly afraid of the answer. He tried a different tack. “Have you always been a head in a bag, Manto?”
This time there was a definite hesitation to her voice. “No.”
Simon was mercifully distracted from the uncomfortable implications of that single word as Amaury shifted and muttered something in his sleep. “…ugly old bitch,” he mumbled. “Wrinkly as a goddamn walrus…”
“Is he talking about you?” Simon asked sarcastically.
“No,” Manto said. “He dreams of Eve. She was his caregiver in Judecca.”
“Eve?” Simon blinked. “Not the Eve?”
“The mother of the Master,” Manto confirmed. “She is his right hand.” The oracle sighed. “And there is no love lost between her and Amaury.”
Amaury’s face had more color and was less gaunt than it had been even a few hours ago, but the fastenings of his cloak were still undone, exposing the maze of scars and old wounds left on his body. They were far too straight and carefully drawn to have been inflicted in battle, Simon realized; only the cruel blade of a surgeon or torturer skilled at their craft could have left such a patchwork of pain. “How long was Eve his caretaker, Manto?” Simon asked between gritted teeth.
“The Master summoned Amaury to Judecca long before you and the other Horsemen arrived in Hell,” Manto explained. “I still remember the day Eve brought him down to us, even though it was over eight hundred years ago.”
Eight centuries. For every year he had lived on Earth, his son had spent at least forty years under the care of the monster in Judecca. Simon still did not fully understand the machinations of this “Master” and Eve—God, it still felt strange to be referring to Biblical figures as though they were actual living, breathing people like him!—but he could tell one thing: they had made every single second count. Just from a cursory glance at his sleeping son, he saw the marks left by whips, hot irons, saws, the rack—and over that, a lattice of scarring so intricate it looked as though they had cut every piece of his flesh away, one by one, and then crudely sewed him back together in a hideous approximation of life.
“Eve re-educated him, the same way she re-educated me,” Manto went on. “She showed us the error of our ways, and the eternal love of the Master—she let us peek into the real world from time to time, learn the ways of war—and in the end, the Master gifted Amaury with his Mark! The same way that he has given you his gift too!”
Simon curled his hands into fists so tightly that he could feel the skin starting to break on his knuckles. “Who did it?” His throat was so clenched that his voice was little more than a hiss. “Who put those scars on my son?”
“We all have scars, War,” Manto said sadly. “It is the nature of Hell.”
Simon reached down and tore the bag away from Plague’s belt. Amaury did not so much as twitch. Manto gave a yelp of terror as he hoisted the bag an inch away from his face. “Tell me NOW, you BITCH,” he screamed at it. “Which one of them did it? Who—WHAT—did that”—he pointed a shaking finger at Amaury’s mutilated torso—“to MY SON?”
John jerked up from where he had been dozing against the door. “What’s going on?” he asked in a panic. “Are we under attack?”
“All of you, shut up and go the fuck to sleep!” Vera bellowed.
“He inflicted the tortures on himself!” Manto cried out. “It was the Master—he made him do it!” She let out a gasp of fear as Simon reached into the leather bag and tore her out.
Simon had been expecting a corpse-like skull, with pieces of skin and flesh dangling from its rotten face, but the severed head that he now held was oddly mundane. From her wavy brown hair to her gray eyes to her full lips, Manto had the appearance of a healthy, attractive woman of Mediterranean descent—the only problem was that she had no body from halfway down her neck, only a few loose-hanging veins that dribbled a few drops of blood.
“Ah, so that’s what she looks like,” John mused. “I was picturing more bones, to be honest.”
“Explain,” Simon growled. He cocked his fist back, ready to smash Manto’s severed head to bloody bits. “But do explain quickly. My patience is running thin.”
“Simon, what the hell are you doing?” Vera demanded.
“The Master made Amaury do it all to himself.” Manto’s gray eyes—full of wisdom and cunning—gazed at the three of them hungrily. It was probably the first time the oracle had actually seen them in person, Simon realized. “The rack, the chains, the knives—Eve helped, true, but Cain is the one who invented violence and torture. It is no difficult thing for him to break the will of others.”
“What is she talking about?” Vera asked in a low, dangerous voice.
“You have no idea of the Master’s power,” Manto whispered. “He had Amaury and me for centuries. He will have the rest of you too, willingly or not.”
Then I’ll kill him, Simon thought. It was the easiest decision he had ever made. “I’ve changed my mind, Manto.” He gave her his most menacing grin when her features relaxed in relief. “I’m going to crush you under my heel instead.” He released her hair and raised his boot, ready to turn her skull into pulp the instant she made contact with the floor.
In a sudden flash, a burst of pain stabbed through Simon’s boot, causing him to yelp in surprise. He staggered back, momentarily off-balance, and blinked in shock to see the knife protruding from his foot. “Fuck!” he swore.
Before him stood Amaury, still gaunt, still slightly shaking with exertion, but still standing. With one hand, he had Manto’s head cradled against his chest, and with the other, he had already drawn another knife. “You stay away from Manto, old man,” his son growled, “or I’ll make Judecca look like a fucking picnic.”
“Amaury, I—” Simon tried, but it was no use; he had never mastered the strange art of apology. Instead, he pointed at Amaury’s chest. “Who did that to you?”
“That’s none of your damned business.” Am
aury sneered. “And when did you start caring about others, Simon? I don’t seem to recall you asking after my wounds at Carcassonne…”
The words hurt worse than any blade, because they were true. “I…” But the words died before Simon could say them. Some dust must have drifted into his eyes, for they began to well up, and he had to blink the moisture away.
“It is our business.” Vera pointed an accusing finger at Amaury. “If this Master of yours is as bad as he seems, then why the living fuck are we going to him?”
“Enemies incoming at three o’clock,” Manto tried to say over the din. “They are three hundred meters away.”
No one heard her.
“All you damned Horsemen,” Amaury spat. “All I had to fucking do was round you up and bring you back to Judecca—it was supposed to be easy! But no, with your constant nagging and questioning and bitching—”
“Plague! Death! Please!” John called out. “We have enough problems without fighting like this!”
“Two hundred meters!” Manto practically screamed.
“And if we don’t fight, and keep blindly following this fucking clown, we are fucked!” Vera argued. “The Revolution is all that matters, not this fucking ‘Master’!” She took a step toward the door. “It was fun while it lasted, but I’m not going on this suicide mission of yours, Plague.”
“Take one more step, Vera!” Amaury was nearly incandescent with rage. “One more step, and see what happens!”
Vera gave him a rude hand gesture. “Go fuck yourself.” She began to reach for the doorknob.
“TWENTY METERS!” Manto bellowed. “THREE PROPHETS!”
The four Horsemen suddenly froze at her words.
“Wait, what?” John asked.
And then, the opposite end of the warehouse exploded into a cloud of dust and raining spoons. It was too late; the hunters were there.
7
John had only a split second to react; before he could even think, a cluster of branches exploded from the floor in front of him, just barely catching the brunt of the blast and preventing him from being hurled across the warehouse like a ragdoll. The three others were not so lucky; they went flying from the sheer concussive force, drowning in clouds of spoons and splintered crates.
A thick cloud of smoke rolled in from the opposite side of the warehouse, blotting out the outside light and casting everything in a dark, choking mist. Even sound seemed to be diminished; he could barely make out the groans of his companions. John put a hand over his mouth, trying to stifle a wheezing cough, and peeked through the cracks in his makeshift wooden barricade. He caught only a faint glimpse of movement—a dark shadow scuttling through the smoke toward him—and then his branches shattered as a monstrous thing burst through them.
“Flesssh,” the monstrous abomination shrieked as it rushed for John. He had a glimpse of a long, shuffling body—more the shape of a gigantic centipede than a human—barely contained underneath a massive, fluttering robe, and a single face, hidden beneath a tangle of long, greasy hair. Six pairs of unnaturally long arms reached out for him, tipped with fingernails built like claws.
The sight was so hideous and unexpected that John nearly pissed himself, but some newfound inner strength made him scream out, “NO!” He had a razor-sharp branch burst from his hand and neatly used the creature’s own momentum to impale its own face on the makeshift spear.
The monster barely even slowed down. It continued to charge forward, letting out a mewl of excitement as the spear sank even deeper into its flesh; black blood bubbled from the hole in its face, but it reached out with four of its arms and dragged the spear in deeper, bringing in John with it. “You are one of usss!” its bleeding, toothy mouth shrieked with the voice of hundreds.
“Shit!” John bellowed. He snapped the branch off an instant before the abomination would have pulled his hand into its body. For a moment, it stopped, veiled in the darkness as it pulled the rest of the branch inside itself. He gaped in awestruck horror as the thing’s waxy flesh resealed and resettled, as though it had never been impaled at all.
“We thank you,” the thing whispered. “Too long sssince we had a sssuicide.” It began to scuttle forward again as its mouth snapped open, far wider than John thought possible.
It’s going to eat me, he realized in a moment of horrible clarity. Oh God. He backed away, slashing at it with a tangle of vine whips, but the thing seemed to enjoy his blows; it actively cooed and giggled as the thorns tore at its face and rent open its flesh. With one hand, it tore the vines out of the air and thrust them into its mouth. “We have you!” it said gleefully, and then it dragged John forward to the gaping maw of its black, reeking mouth.
John desperately tried to will the vines he had grown to detach themselves from him, but something was wrong—he could feel his soul being consumed by mindless fear, choking and murdering his will. The thing’s hands grabbed at him—six, now a dozen, now twenty—wrapping around his body in a monstrous lover’s embrace. And still the maw—lined with row after row of human molars—grew bigger, reaching out for him.
“John!” Plague bellowed out. He suddenly appeared at John’s side, a blade in either hand, and slashed down, bisecting a dozen of the pale, grasping arms. The thing hissed angrily and lurched forward, hoping to catch him in its mouth. Plague cursed, stumbled back, and then, just as it was about to consume him, laughed. “Vera, now!”
Out of the corner of his eye, John saw Vera rush forward, a strange device in her hands. With a lazy throw, she lobbed it directly into the monster’s open mouth. “Fuck you!” she called out merrily.
John immediately understood. Somehow, in spite of the arms grabbing at him, he managed to slam his hand against the dirty concrete floor. In just a few seconds, a massive tree—the largest he had ever grown—burst through the cement, spraying all of them with dust and smoke and black blood as it impaled the monster in a dozen places, wrenching it away from John as it was carried up into the darkness of the rafters. It had a moment to let out a final piercing shriek, and then the dynamite Vera had thrown in its guts detonated.
The explosion ripped the monster into a thousand bloody pieces and shredded the top of the tree in a haze of smoke and splinters. John groaned in disgust as a mass of meat and gore fell from the rafters and slapped him across the face. The others looked just as miserable, covered in pieces of the monster.
Only Vera laughed. “Fuck, I love dynamite!” She chuckled.
“What in the blazes was that?” Simon demanded as he pulled an eyeball out of his scarlet hair and smashed it against the ground.
“One of the Prophets.” Plague gently picked up Manto’s head and put her back in the leather bag attached to his hip. “That one was Legion—by far the most disgusting. Christ.”
“We are all in agreement there,” a voice called out. John and the other Horsemen spun about to see that a new figure was approaching them, cloaked in the darkness and smoke of the warehouse. “I told them to wait.” The man sighed. As he came closer, more of his features became visible: a beak-like nose, a thick mustache over a pair of thin lips, and eyes that overflowed with blackness. “But Legion is always so eager.”
“Shit,” Plague hissed. He nervously took a step back and motioned for the others to do the same.
The newcomer’s crimson cloak marked him as one of the Kingdom’s Prophets, but John could immediately tell that there was something different about him…he possessed an aura of raw power like nothing they had encountered before. Even his dark hair seemed to rustle and crackle with energy—and then John noticed the ring of locusts weaving and dancing through the Prophet’s scalp like an insectoid crown. “What is he?” he hissed to Plague.
“Out of our league,” Plague muttered. He knocked his fist against one of the bags at his waist. “Lamech, if you could transport us out of here and be useful for once, that’d be great…”
“I live to serve,” Lamech’s sarcastic voice said from the belt. “One moment—”
; Thank God, John thought. He remembered the strange tunnel that Lamech had created; it had allowed him and Plague to travel thousands of miles in an instant. We’re saved.
“I think not.” The dark Prophet smiled. “Legion, if you’d be so kind…”
Before any of them could react, a severed arm lurched up from the warehouse floor, and, with lightning speed, tore the bag containing Lamech’s head away from Plague’s waist. With the speed of a cockroach, it scuttled back to the Prophet and handed him the bloody bag.
“What the fuck?” Plague exploded.
“So that’s how you’ve been able to move so quickly through the different Circles,” the Prophet mused as he stared at the leather bag. “And to think, I thought that I was the only one with such an ability. You have piqued my interest, Horsemen.”
He snapped his fingers and one of the locusts in his hair landed on the bag with a hideous buzz. The insect let out a nearly human cry of pain as another one, fully grown, burst from its skin—and then another burst from the newcomer’s skin, and then another, and so on until the bag containing Lamech was completely covered in locusts. The ball of insects swarmed and hissed—and, without any warning, the locusts suddenly stiffened and died. Lamech’s bag was not among the ball of dead creatures that spattered across the floor.
“It was you,” Simon said in amazement. “You’re the one who sent Fritz and me to the Fourth Circle…”
“You’re the one who brought in those ‘Wounds of Christ’ things for Longinus,” Vera realized at the same moment.
The Prophet’s lips turned downward. “Traitors and fools, the both of them,” he said disapprovingly. “You will find that I am not such a weak opponent, Horsemen. Now, Legion, it’s time you joined us again.”