by Matt Turner
Amaury tried to gag out something, but the Master’s pressure on his throat was too tight; his face was starting to turn purple.
“What is it, my child?” Cain gently asked. “Are you going to beg my forgiveness at last?” He loosened his grip on Amaury’s throat, allowing the young man to suck in a few desperate gulps of air.
“Already got a father.” Amaury groaned. “And that asshole’s enough.” A blade flicked out of his sleeve into his remaining hand. “For MANTO,” he snarled as he stabbed the silver sheen of the metal into the base of the Master’s throat.
The edge of the knife shattered like a piece of glass against Cain’s skin. A small smile tugged at the corners of the Master’s mouth as Amaury stared, dumbfounded, at the remnant of the weapon in his hand. “You,” Cain sneered, “will have to do much better than that.”
The roar from the battle between Leviathan and Babylon had died away, but Simon thought he heard a new sound on the horizon. No, he felt it: a tiny rumble in the ground. He eyed the puddle of blood he lay in and nearly wept tears of relief when he saw the tiny vibrations emanating from the fort’s rails.
Cain once again tightened his grip around Amaury’s throat. Bones and tendons twisted underneath his powerful fingers as Amaury let out a painful wheeze. “One last thing,” he hissed out in a voice half-mad with pain. “You brought me down here eight hundred years before the others. Why? WHY?” His face was now the same shade of scarlet as his tangled hair.
The Master shrugged. “Why not?”
“Heh.” Amaury chuckled. His mirth became a guffaw, than a full-on laugh as he tilted his head back and bellowed his madness up at the skies. “You’re a funny one, Cain.”
The Master regarded him coolly. “Your mind is gone.”
“But not my hearing.” Amaury chortled. “Look behind you, by the way.”
Cain hurled the Horseman aside just as the War Train slammed into his back. Steel screeched and warped around him like water as the locomotive compressed and pummeled his body.
Simon had a brief glimpse of a cannon firing point-blank at the Master’s face—and then the entire front of the Eighteenth Legion’s great war machine detonated, toppling away the ruins of the First Blockade’s walls and igniting half the courtyard in a cloud of ash.
The ruins of the hundred-ton locomotive twisted and screamed as Cain seized them with one hand and hurled them headlong against the walls. “Not enough,” the Master boomed. His golden eyes glimmered in the flames that crackled up from his feet. “Not nearly enough, Horsemen.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
The female voice came from beyond the chasm that Babylon’s birth had torn into the ravaged courtyard. Cain turned toward it, just in time for the two arrows that Signy had launched to come within an inch of his eyes. But the Master was faster than even the angels; he slapped the arrows out of the air in the speed of a blink. Tiny shards of steel clattered to the ground at his feet.
Signy stepped out of the shadows and drew another arrow on her bowstring. “You’re a tough one!” she called out, exposing her mouthful of sharpened teeth. “I can already tell we’re going to have a grand old time!” She loosed four more arrows at him in quick succession, laughing as he knocked them out of the air or let them harmlessly splinter against his bare chest.
“Another one,” Cain growled. “How delightful.” He raised the scythe and took a step toward the edge of the chasm.
“Actually, I brought some friends,” Signy crowed. “Better move, ginger!”
Amaury somehow scrabbled up to his feet and leapt away as the shriek of mortars rang overhead. The explosives slammed into the ground around the Master, enveloping his body in dark clouds of rock and shrapnel. A series of secondary explosions rocked the front of the train, further spraying bursts of fire across the First Blockade.
And somehow, the rumbling from the ground hadn’t stopped with the train—it had become even louder.
Simon blinked as the gas that the mortars had been containing gushed outward, enveloping the entire courtyard in a dark fog. He caught a glimpse of Amaury stumbling toward him through the mist and tried to call out a warning to his son to not inhale the deadly fumes. But, to his surprise, when he sucked in a tiny breath of the fog himself, he found that it was nothing more than smoke.
“The darkness cannot hide you,” the Master hissed. The smoke obscured everything within a meter except for his golden eyes. They squirmed about in their sockets, scanning the cloud that engulfed him.
“Bitch, I AM the darkness!” Signy screamed back. A series of arrows coursed through the smoke, making the Master hiss in irritation. Within seconds, they were joined by a wall of gunfire and the shouts of soldiers.
Simon leaned back farther into the corner, trying to hide from the storm of bullets that shrieked over his head. It sounded as though an entire legion were firing into the courtyard.
“Amaury,” he gasped out with the last of his strength. His ribs screamed in revolt. “Amaury…”
“Here, Father,” Amaury said as he suddenly emerged from the gloom. His eyes widened as he knelt by Simon and saw the wretched condition that his father was in. “Jesus…”
“Am…aur…y…” Simon whispered. Darkness tugged at the corners of his vision. It took everything he had to resist the pull.
“Yeah, yeah.” Amaury rolled his eyes. With a conniving wink, he showed Simon the severed palm he held in his left hand. A shadow of Cain’s Mark remained on the palm. Amaury pressed the edge of it against his severed wrist and grinned when the flesh began to slightly smoke. “Now, let’s see what I can do about you.”
50
The Master was growing increasingly infuriated. The storm of gunfire posed as little threat to him as the collision with the War Train, but it, along with the smoke that the laughing woman had cast, was dulling his senses and making it difficult to navigate. To make matters worse, the ground was rippling beneath his feet, more and more, as though—
The Earthquake Bomb. In spite of Babylon’s efforts, the Horsemen must have activated the powerful weapon beneath the fortress’s foundations. The machine has failed me. He thought of his mother and his blood ran cold. This battle was not worthy of his time; he needed to—
A rocket screeched through the smog, directly toward the Master’s head. He whipped around in a flash and tore it from the air, crushing it in his fist. All that emerged from the weapon’s explosion were a few trails of black smoke from between his fingers.
“Enough,” the Master snarled—and then his face contorted in surprise. He raised a finger to his upper lip and stared in shock at the droplet of blood that had leaked from his nostril.
“There’s the nerve gas!” Amaury howled, and suddenly he burst from the smoke, a blazing assault rifle cradled in each hand.
The sheer force of the screeching bullets knocked the Master back, ripping tendrils of fire through the smoke. Cain raised up one of his hands before his face—shrapnel flew in every direction as the bullets harmlessly smashed against his skin—and let out a roar as he charged forward, his scythe already swinging to rip Amaury in two.
Simon’s sword caught the edge of the scythe, unleashing a clash of metal that echoed across the entire battlefield. “Miss me, ‘Father’?” he huffed as he strained with all his might against Cain’s blade.
“What?” Cain’s eyes swelled in surprise. “This isn’t possible—”
A nest of vines exploded out of the heaving ground, twisting at the ragged trousers on his muscular legs. The Master lurched backward, off-balance, just as another faint rumble burst from the ground below. The stones in the courtyard trembled and danced upward as the ravine that Babylon had torn exploded outward in every direction, releasing a rush of hot air that tore away the scraps of smoke that lingered within the fortress.
Simon dodged back from Cain’s scythe and made a frantic run for it as the bottomless pit ripped its way toward the remains of the Phlegethon, consuming everything it brushed against in an av
alanche of dust and debris.
“Father!” Amaury called out in alarm. The edge of the exponentially growing ravine had cut him off on the far side of the fortress, leaving him pinned against the rapidly collapsing wall.
Simon turned toward him with a cry, already on his way to make the leap across the yawning chasm. Darkness roiled up from the growing abyss as the Kingdom’s weapons detonated against the very foundations of Hell.
Amaury. Simon gritted his teeth and started to lunge forward, grimly certain that he would be unable to jump across. I’ll be damned if I don’t try. He sprinted for the edge of the abyss, then let out a choked gasp as a torrent of vines seized his ankles and smashed him down to the ground. “John!” he screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving your ass,” John snapped. As Simon flipped himself over to tear at the vines constraining him, he saw that the other Horseman stood on the edge of the wall with the sharp-toothed woman and the mass of newly arrived soldiers. Beads of sweat dripped down his face as he struggled to contain the unnaturally silent Master.
“Amaury!” Simon let out a howl of anguish as the chasm engulfed the far edge of the fortress, consuming the crumbling wall like a ravenous beast. The shattered remains of the War Train tottered on the edge, but the chasm abruptly changed course for the river. There was no trace of his son as the blackness snaked across the beach into the depths of the endless horde, wiping away everything—the remnants of the vast tree, the charred glass that marked Leviathan’s rage, and the howling, disease-ridden servants of the Master. It split and multiplied like a spider’s web, taking them all. There were no sounds of impact or collision from the network of canyons; only a gradual fading of the screams as millions were dragged out of earshot.
The darkness slowed as it reached the opposite bank of the river. The bottoms of the rifts, once near-infinitely dark, shallowed as they rumbled up out of the tectonic divide, briefly revealing the spiked, glittering bedrock that had once existed beneath the river. For an instant, the silent watchers caught a glimpse of a universe’s worth of gold, rubies, and sapphires glittering against the hellish light—and then the rifts finally brushed against the vast tower of humanity that Eve had built for herself. It fell apart like a rotten log, bursting out spews of vermin and filth as it collapsed onto the endless riches below. At last, the forward motion of the Kingdom’s Earthquake Bomb finally came to a shuddering stop, though lances of darkness split out to the horizon in either direction, following the course of the riverbed.
“Jesus Christ,” Signy said in disbelief. The army of soldiers around her nervously pulled back from the edge of the chasm, but she slowly came forward, bow in hand, heedless of the silently struggling Master. “Where’d they go?”
“The Bottom of Hell,” Amaury croaked.
Simon spun his head around and felt a rush of joy to see that his son sat on the very edge of the abyss, grimly staring down into it. The reason for his salvation was obvious: Seth stood next to him, his free hand tightly wrapped around Amaury’s arm.
“If there is such a thing,” Seth muttered. He gently pulled Amaury back from the brink and guided him away. “Vera must have been able to activate it. Have any of you…” His words died away when he saw the looks on their faces.
“Where is he?” a voice croaked out. “Where is the bastard?” Salome staggered through the rubble, half the bandages gone, exposing the flayed face that bled and leaked black ichor. “Where’s the fucking Master?” she cried out, raising two burnt and broken arms. “I’ll kill him myself!”
Signy rushed forward and offered Salome her shoulder. “He’s right here,” she said soothingly. The soldiers she had brought slowly began to emerge from the rubble in which they had been sheltering, as the survivors formed a rough semi-circle around Cain.
“Let’s fucking crucify him,” Salome pulled aside one of her bandages to spit out a chunk of something on the ash-covered cobblestones. “Or blind him. Or rip off his cock.”
“Hell, let’s do all three.” Signy grinned.
“No,” Seth said sharply. He ignored the icy glares of the gathered crowd as he turned to face the Master. There was nothing in his voice but sadness. “Brother.”
“Heh.” Cain chuckled. “Ha. HA! HAHAHAHA!” John’s vines, now completely encasing every inch of the Master’s body but his face, slithered upward, trying to choke out the insane mocking laughter that drifted up to the heavens. The Master tore at them with his teeth, ripping away flecks of barbed vegetation. “You did it, Horsemen,” he gasped out when the bout of madness subsided. “I had an army of fifty million, and you beat them all!”
“God is on our side,” Seth said.
“Isn’t He always,” Cain sneered. “Because of your actions, those fifty million have been cast into a Hell deeper and darker than any that has ever existed before. You just damned millions to a worse punishment than even I received. And there they’ll stay. For all eternity. Did your God do that, little brother?”
“You brought them here,” Seth said defensively. “It was a choice that—”
“Choice?” Cain snapped. “There is no choice. There never was and there never will be.”
“Enough of the small talk,” Signy growled. She strung an arrow to her bow and took aim at the Master’s golden eyes. “Let’s skip to the punishment part.”
Simon glanced over to Amaury. His son was uncharacteristically quiet, but the scars on his chest said more than enough. “Couldn’t agree more,” the Horseman growled. “Give him a little squeeze, John.”
“Please stop distracting me,” John said between gritted teeth. His vines contorted even more tightly around Cain’s body.
The Master hardly seemed to notice. “From birth to death to afterlife, the Creator has spat upon me,” he hissed into Seth’s face. “He always loved Abel more than me. You don’t think I tried? I did everything to earn His love. But it was never enough.” His voice took on a hollow, mocking bitterness. “I even sent my brother to dwell with the God that loved him so much.”
“You murdered our brother in the fields with a rock,” Seth shouted. “Do you know who found him, Cain? I was a child, and you left Abel out there—in a pool of his own blood, already buzzing with flies—”
“And you think I don’t regret that,” the Master’s voice exploded. “For two hundred thousand years, I’ve paid in blood and pain for ONE DAY.” The cords of wood that enveloped him began to bulge outward and spray out showers of splinters.
“I can’t hold him!” John shouted. “I CAN’T HOLD HIM!”
“Get back!” Amaury shouted at the soldiers. “Get fucking back!”
Signy loosed her bow, planting three steel-tipped arrows against the pupil of each of Cain’s eyes. The arrows splintered into pieces. The Master blinked.
“BUT TODAY IT ENDS,” the Master bellowed. “NO MORE INFINITE PAIN FOR FINITE SIN.”
An avalanche of spiked wood, so condensed that it was harder than steel, crashed into him, hurled from every direction as John hit the Master with everything that he had left. Thousands of bullets, mortar shells, beam-cannons, spikes, and every other weapon the Eighteenth Legion had joined in, smashing against the Master’s body.
“TODAY I KILL, I BURN, I RAVAGE,” Cain snarled. He tore his arms free and slashed his scythe at the opposite wall of the fortress. Hellish energies exploded from the weapon of Death itself, splintering the wall—and the soldiers upon it—into a whirlwind of fragmented men and stone. “UNTIL GOD’S WRATH FALLS UPON ME!”
Seth lunged forward, catching the scythe on his flaming sword, and stopping the hellish attack halfway. Cain laughed and tore both feet free from the remnants of John’s vines. He slashed and stabbed at Seth like a madman, and let out a crow of triumph when his younger brother suddenly leapt backward.
“You want God’s wrath?” Salome shouted. “HERE IT IS!”
Barely a hundred meters away, the War Train opened up with its artillery at point-blank range. Man-sized shells howled throug
h the air, striking the Master dead-center in the chest. The sheer force of the explosions rippled the ground like water beneath his feet. The edge of the ravine melted away into a waterfall of liquefied concrete.
“USELESS!” Cain howled at the firestorm that engulfed him. “THIS ENDS ONLY ONE WAY, HORSEMEN—”
The scythe flickered in his hands—there was a crash of it slamming into metal, then a blur of motion as he tore the artillery shell out of the air, spun it around, and batted it back into the War Train. The shell slammed dead-center into one of the remaining compartments, wiping it clean from the face of Hell.
Cain let out a manic laugh as he slowly emerged from the wall of flames, the deadly scythe swinging in one hand. He neatly placed the tip of it against the ground and strode forward, leaving a sliver of flame in his wake. “Either God kills me,” he grinned, “or I kill God.”
The Eighteenth Legion’s morale finally broke. To a man, they fled through the ruins, leaving their useless weapons behind.
“Get back here, you cowards!” Salome bellowed after them. “God damnit!”
“He always does.” The Master grinned. His eyes locked with Seth’s.
Seth tightened his grip on his heavenly blade and sent up a silent prayer. “It doesn’t have to be like this, brother,” he said quietly. “We can still stop this.”
“Stop this?” Cain’s golden eyes shone brightly. “Little brother, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
He took a step forward. The scythe squealed and glimmered as it carved a path into the blood-soaked ground. “I’m glad you arrived, truly. It means that someone up there is paying attention.” His pace quickened. Seth matched it, so that they were now coming toward each other at a walking pace. “And it is good to see your face again, little brother. Reminds me of better times.”
“Abel and I miss you,” Seth said truthfully. “We miss Mother and Father too.”
Something flickered in Cain’s eyes for a moment, then it was gone. “I doubt that,” he said. “Mother birthed sin, Father delivered it, and I…well, I raised it.” He dug his scythe deeper into the ground, now ripping out a cavernous trench behind him. A few rivulets of spilled blood trickled into it, slowly filling it up.