Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  All that she had to worry about was making Lao and Cain pay as much as possible before then. I’ll break Lao for good this time. She had never known about his unnatural ability to heal, but Salome the Seductress would find a way around it, sooner or later. I’ll make you hurt, and I’ll make it stick.

  She sat in the tank’s cramped compartment and suspiciously eyed the ragtag group before her. Amaury, the laughing one, was busy consulting a handful of maps while his father, Simon, grimly stared off into space. John—whether he was tree or man, she still wasn’t entirely sure—had partly hidden himself in the tiny compartment’s corner and was gamely trying to ignore the harpy-devil that eagerly pecked at the handful of branches that rose like a gnarled crown from his brown hair. Vera and Seth sat closer than the others, though Salome’s perceptive eyes told her that the heaven-man was doing his utmost to keep from accidently brushing his arm against hers.

  The saint and the sinner have a crush. Interesting. If she still had her face, she would have had Seth and every other man in Hell twirled around her finger in an instant…

  No. She forced the bitter, hateful thought away and did her best to focus on the present. Zaqqum. Fuck me, I need some Zaqqum. Before she knew it, her hand was halfway to her breasts, about to pull out her penultimate syringe. It took everything she had to wrench it back down.

  “Where’s Signy?” Vera abruptly asked.

  Salome glanced up and suddenly realized that she had been clenching her fists so tightly that her long nails had drawn blood. “What?”

  “You said you knew Signy,” Vera said impatiently. “‘She’s doing a job for me.’ So where is she?”

  There was no sense in lying; their small army had left Dis long behind, and she truly doubted that any of the Horsemen had the stones to try to betray her. “The Eighteenth Legion’s War Train is on its way to Dis.” Salome shrugged. “An asshole named Sisera took it over. I’m sending Signy to take it back.”

  John whipped his head up. “Sisera? Not the Praetorian?”

  “Sounds like you’ve already met him. You have my sympathies.”

  John furrowed his brow in thought. “I bumped into him during Legion’s attack. He said some strange things—something about serving God.”

  “Sisera was always a crazy nutter.” Amaury shrugged. “Ever since Jael turned his brain into scrambled eggs with that stake.”

  “There was someone with him too,” John said slowly. His eyes slowly widened as the memory returned to him. “A child—”

  “Dead, dead, dead,” Podarge squawked. The harpy seemed to be in fine spirits; it even did a little dance on top of John’s head. He winced as the devil’s talons clawed at his scalp, but made no move to stop it.

  “Don’t say that,” Vera snapped. “If Signy could make it out of C District, she can make it through anything.”

  “Either she’ll catch up with us or she won’t,” Salome interrupted. “But it’s not Signy you should be worried about. We have enough problems to deal with without that crazy bitch.”

  “Don’t call her that,” Vera started to say, and then she caught herself. “You’re probably right,” she halfheartedly mumbled.

  Simon glanced out of one of the small windows that allowed the gunners to properly calibrate the tank’s machine guns. “If this is all the men you have, then we won’t last long. I doubt this lot could have even handled Legion.”

  “We will have the Eighteenth,” Salome said flatly. She neglected to mention that not a single other legion had answered her summons.

  “So where exactly are we going?” Amaury asked. “In case you haven’t noticed, your little convoy is taking us straight toward Judecca at the moment.”

  This one talks too much. His eyes were greedy with pain and madness; she did not trust him one bit. But compared to the threat of Cain, then the heaven-man, he was nothing.

  “Let me show you something.” She pulled out a map of Hell from at her feet. It was difficult to represent the afterlife’s cone shape on a two-dimensional surface, so, as with most of the Kingdom’s official maps, it broke each level down into its own circle. The details were scant: of all the major settlements, only Dis had any significant notation. Lower Hell did not warrant anything more than a few crude scribbles. Had it not been for her rides upon Leviathan’s back, Salome would have known as little about Hell’s geography as the Kingdom wanted her to.

  “Dear God,” John muttered. “I had no idea it was so vast…”

  “And growing bigger every day.” Salome rolled her eyes. “You can save the sermon, Heaven-man.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Seth said defensively.

  She ignored him. “We have some time. Why don’t I give you a little history lesson?”

  It was easy enough for her to explain. By the time Salome, daughter of Herodias, had been cast down into Hell, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace had already been founded. For decades, she had been a silent participant, one of the Kingdom’s countless slaves…until that miraculous day when she found Leviathan. No, she corrected herself. When the devil found me.

  Before the destruction of Dis and the horrifying fate of the bickering Holy Council, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace was regarded far and wide, both by the millions under its direct control and the hundreds of millions who trembled at the sound of its approaching legions, to be the single mightiest faction in the hellish afterlife. It was not a foolish perception; the Kingdom commanded the greater part of the old Master’s short-lived empire, and with its deathlock on Upper Hell, had a nearly endless source of manpower and resources to fuel the endless war machine that was the sole purpose of its existence. The few devils that had survived the Second Rebellion, the warlords of Lower Hell, the millions of denizens who had killed or raped or thieved their way into Hell—none could stand before the Kingdom’s armies, or its awe-inspiring enforcers, the Prophets. Every damned human who existed was a slave of the Kingdom, a soldier of the Kingdom, or an enemy of the Kingdom. And sooner or later, every last one of the Kingdom’s enemies was forced to taste of the nightmarish Seven Sinful Tortures…

  Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. The ever-swelling population of Hell, fed by the exponential growth of the world of the living, was not the Kingdom’s strength. It was its greatest weakness. The legions could only grow so vast; the factories could not be raised swiftly enough. The Kingdom burnt the new arrivals to ash with Hellfire, they ground them to pulp beneath the treads of their war machines, all for nothing. Even the vast pits that buried a hundred thousand sinners at a time could not be blasted out of the ground quickly enough. In the space of three centuries, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace fell into the same trap that had led to the Second Rebellion: drowning in a sea of humanity.

  And so the Kingdom had retreated inward. Its grip loosened on the upper levels of Hell—Limbo, the First Circle, held nearly as many damned as the rest of Hell combined—and Lower Hell, once considered a target ripe for conquest, was completely abandoned. The warlords were allowed to roam free, and the Holy Council’s attention turned upon one another as they plotted for entire lifetimes, driving one another out in coup after bloody coup.

  The machinery of their Kingdom ran on auto-pilot, gathering slaves to churn out the weaponry and war machines to support the legions which, in turn, gathered up more slaves. The Prophets, a crude imitation of Cain’s Four Horsemen, destroyed the enemies that the army couldn’t handle, and so the Kingdom clumsily plodded along for two thousand years.

  It was at this point in Salome’s expositional onslaught that Simon had loudly demanded what the fuck all this drivel had to do with defeating Cain.

  “It’s because—” Salome cast a withering glance at him through her mask of bandages. Much to the surprise of the others, Simon actually winced and glanced away after a moment. “Every level the Kingdom controlled was a world unto itself. There was only one way the Kingdom ruled so much territory and so many souls.”

  “By keeping them as isolated
from one another as possible.” Amaury spoke up. “All roads lead to Dis.”

  Salome tapped a finger on the blood-red line that represented the River Phlegethon. The River of Violence. “And you only do that with enough fortifications to make Satan himself think twice.”

  Podarge suddenly sneezed all over John’s hair. “Stop that,” he muttered up at the harpy, although he still did not dare try to move her.

  “Since the Master’s fall, there hasn’t been a single major incursion from Lower Hell across the Kingdom’s borders. Know why that is?”

  “The legions and the Prophets?” John wondered.

  “My kind of man,” Salome cooed. “But that’s not all of it. The Phlegethon has enough mines, forts, and traps to hold back every demon in Hell. Half the builders for it worked on the Atlantic Wall, and the other half built the DMZ.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Amaury yawned. “Most of those fortresses have been empty for centuries, and you barely have enough men to man one.”

  “Think you know everything, don’t you?” Salome indicated a single black dot on the map. “We only need one. The First Blockade.”

  Vera blinked. “That’s what was in that machine-bitch’s mind. There’s a whole nation’s worth of firepower there.”

  “You have no idea, Horseman.” Salome cackled. “The Kingdom built it, but us Prophets made some modifications that the Holy Council never knew about.”

  “What exactly is there?” Vera asked eagerly. “Another Xipe Totec?”

  “Is one nuclear bomb not enough for you?” Seth asked in disbelief.

  “Not quite.” Salome grinned. “Suffice to say, a three hundred-megaton nuclear weapon is only half of my plan.”

  “Jesus,” Amaury exclaimed. It was difficult to tell whether his words were of disgust or admiration. “Is there anything you people won’t do?”

  “Wait,” Simon interrupted. “That machine-prophet—she helped build this place?”

  “It did. Why do you think we’re moving so fast?”

  “They’re trying to cut us off,” Seth said matter-of-factly.

  “Are they all as wise as you in Paradise, Heaven-man?” Salome sneered.

  “There’s a devil half a mile above us,” Seth said calmly. “You should alert your men.”

  “Above us? Then that’s—” Oh shit. Salome’s eyes widened, and she suddenly lunged for the tank hatch. “Out of my way,” she hissed as something slammed against her boot and John let out a cry of pain. “Have to—” She desperately fumbled with the hatch, cursing under her breath, for she had a few seconds at most. God, I need some Zaqqum.

  The hatch finally came open, and she wrenched herself out into the hot, dusty air of the Burning Desert. “BREAK FORMATION,” she bellowed in her mightiest voice. “BREAK FORMATION NOW!” All around her, the convoy slowly began to scatter across the sands. She turned halfway in the turret and barked out final orders to the Horsemen. “Take this,” she snapped at Vera, and yanked a key out from one of her pockets. “Now read my mind.”

  “What?” Vera asked dumbly.

  “You can read minds, can’t you, Horseman? Now look into mine! I’ve got no more time to explain this shit to you!” She reached out and seized Vera’s hand with her own. For a brief moment, a strange sensation overcame her, as though she were being painlessly peeled from the inside out. She took no time to try to understand what was happening, for her time was short. She shoved Vera away and continued to clamber out of the turret. Her silks twisted crazily in the rushing desert air.

  “Get to the fort, Horsemen,” she shouted. A stiltwalker rushed forward, spraying up sand with every mechanical step, and gracefully scooped up the Prophet with a minigun-laden hand.

  Come on. Salome kept her eyes peeled to the red sky above, but the air was cloudy and strewn with ash—she could see no trace of the devil high above. Come on, Leviathan, she prayed as the mechanical hand lifted her to the stiltwalker’s cockpit. She clambered to the controls and pushed the driver aside.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Where are you, where—”

  It was one thing to ride on the back of a dragon-devil, raining fire down on her enemies; it was quite another to suddenly hear the rush of beating wings and to catch a brief glimpse of a gray blur hurtling toward the ground. One second, there was a tank grinding up the side of a dune, just fifty meters away from her. The next second, the only thing that remained of it were its tread marks on the sand.

  A bead of sweat crept down her temple, dampening the bandages about her face. Was he always this fast?

  Before she could finish the thought, the shredded remnants of a hundred-ton war machine crashed into the sand just in front of her. The tank’s ammunition stores detonated, enveloping the entire area in a storm of dust and smoke. Even through the stiltwalker’s bulletproof glass, Salome coughed and hacked from the great cloud. Another tank exploded somewhere behind her—this one was so close that she could feel the ground vibrate beneath the stiltwalker’s feet.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Salome muttered. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to pick out what direction the devil was going to come from next. She could just barely hear the pattering of his feet kicking up sand; on the ground, he was closer to a scampering lizard than a dragon. “Where are you?”

  She turned just in time to see two mismatched lights glaring at her from the darkness of the smog. Salome let out a cry and raised the stiltwalker’s weapons, ready to fire, but Leviathan was much too fast for her. The devil was on her in an instant.

  31

  “You heard her,” Vera snapped at their driver. “Step on it.” She gently pushed Seth aside and made her way to the turret mounted to the tank’s side. “We’ve got company.”

  “Vera,” Seth started to say.

  “What did she say?” Podarge suddenly squawked. “What did she say?”

  Vera gave the harpy an odd look; she didn’t think she had ever heard the devil say so many words at a time. “It’s—”

  Even through the six inches of steel that surrounded them, they could hear the sudden shriek of animal fury. The tank slightly vibrated as a mighty forced rocked it back and forth on its treads.

  “Speak of the devil.” Vera chuckled. “Er, no offense, Podarge.” The harpy rewarded her with a hoarse caw. “According to our friendly Prophet, there’s something called a tectonic bomb at the First Blockade.”

  “Don’t tell me…” Seth groaned.

  “Earthquake bomb.” Amaury laughed. “Leave it to the fucking Kingdom.”

  “Devils, locusts, war machines, sun bombs, earthquakes… I miss it when fighting was just your fists and a sword,” Simon grumbled. “What’s next? Fire raining down from Heaven? A black hole sucking up Limbo? Angels invading Hell?”

  “Never say never,” Podarge cackled.

  32

  The ashen remnants of the Forest of Suicides stretched to the north, but the Master had a different goal in mind. The Beast growled and snapped as he guided it lower and lower, toward the foul-smelling swamps that lined what had once been the Forest’s border. The Kingdom’s lumberjacks, when they had still been able to chop down the pitiful damned of the Forest, had always given the swamps a wide berth. Nothing lived in that murky, fog-ridden quagmire but death.

  “You thought I didn’t know about them?” Cain whispered into the Beast’s ear. “You little fool. I’ve always known about your children.”

  For the first time in millennia, the Beast dared to raise a hand against its Master. One of its clawed hands shot up, grasping for the man on its back.

  In spite of his shock, Cain immediately ducked away from the blow and rewarded the Beast with a vicious kick in the back of one of its heads.

  “Do that again,” he hissed, “and I’ll take more than your tongues this time, creature.”

  The Beast’s red eyes rolled back in their sunken sockets and fixed him with a hateful glare.

  Cain sneered back; he feared no angel, fallen or not.

  And then the
Beast opened one of its mouths and spoke. Its voice was horrible and gnashing, dim from centuries of disuse, and nowhere near the well-toned splendor that it had once been.

  “Our cure…to be no more…”

  And then it smiled at him, exposing every single one of its rotten, yellowed teeth. The horrible stench washed over Cain, but he barely noticed, for the strange words still echoed in his soul. It can’t know, he thought. He had told no one of his true plans, not even his mother, yet somehow—

  “What did you say?” he hissed. “What did you say to me?”

  The Beast flapped its wings once and said no more as it glided down toward the ground.

  Impossible, Cain thought. It couldn’t possibly know. Even if it really is Luc— He didn’t even finish the thought; whatever it had been before, the Beast was just the Beast, a common pack-animal for the Master. Men and angels were all the same to him: slaves.

  Still, this sudden burst of petulance did not sit well with the Master. When this is over, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands, Cain decided. You deserve that much. He should have done the job at the end of the Second Rebellion, but some instinct had stayed his hand. The Beast could be useful, he had decided, and so he had settled for slashing away one of its heads instead. It had made a fine trophy, still screaming out its promises and offers even when his soldiers had stabbed it on a pike and left it to rot.

  When they had thrown him into the darkness of Judecca after the Third Rebellion, the Beast had been waiting for him. The two mouths that it still had had told such wheedling lies, especially as he lay, defeated and hateful, in the emptiness beneath his kingdom. He had finally taken its tongues away. For such a long time, it had just been him and the Beast, sealed away in the silent, empty darkness…

  And then Mother came. She dug through a kilometer of bedrock for me.

  Even if everything failed, even if the heavens cracked open and he was hurled by the Creator Himself into the most unfathomable nightmare beyond imagination, even if he was reduced to a screaming, howling lunatic, Cain would never forget that.