by Matt Turner
“A shame you’re not Abel,” the Master said. His legs exploded into motion, and suddenly he was hurtling toward Seth with the speed of a locomotive. An avalanche of smoke and debris followed in his wake, torn from the bleeding, burning earth by the wicked carving-blade of Death’s scythe. “I was looking forward to killing him again.”
51
Babylon lived.
The demon-dragon had hurled its melting, decaying body down from the sky with a brutal swing of his jaws. Babylon’s repair mechanisms were already sputtering into action before it hit the ground—but then the ground had opened up before it, swallowing it up in an endless void that seemed to infinitely hurtle downward. It had dug its two remaining arms into the side of the chasm, trying to stop its fall, but the metal, weakened by the sun-like heat of Leviathan’s flames, had torn away. Three more times it tried this, with each spike and twisted remnant of torso that it had left, until it had finally come to an explosive impact against an outcropping in the darkness. Even if it had been as hard as concrete, Babylon’s armor, shattered and warped as it was, would have protected it…
But down here, in the pressure from the tectonic plates above, the dirt had been forged into the consistency of diamond. Babylon’s processors and circuits had been pulverized by the impact. All that remained of its once-glorious body were a few scraps of metal, loosely attached by the few wires still able to conduct anything resembling an electrical signal. All of its weapons were gone, from the boosted-fusion reactor to the vials of plagues it had so carefully bred. The only input it had from its environment was the sensation of touch against the trembling remnants of one of its former wings. Even that sensation was fading; there was hardly any power left at all in its body.
But Babylon lived.
Its consciousness dimly sputtered in the darkness, supported only by the blind hate it felt for everything and everyone. From its mother, Dr. Lynne Bufka—it had long dreamed of hunting that woman down in the afterlife and peeling the skin from the face she had once tried to give it—to the particles of diamond-hard dirt that dug into its half-melted armor, it loathed everything with a ravenous hate that swirled and grew with each passing attosecond.
Everything, it vowed. Now everything dies.
It reached into its dying mainframe for the protocol that it had kept hidden from even the Master. Protocol Alkahest. My magnum opus.
It had used the locust-demon Abaddon to create its new body. But it had taken more than the demon’s labor; it had incorporated the demon’s very essence into a single nanobot built into the safest, most secure core of its being. Abaddon’s power had come from being able to multiply a horde of endlessly reproducing locusts from a single individual, all using nothing more than a few scraps of material from the surrounding environment.
Protocol Alkahest had increased the demon’s power immeasurably. Babylon delivered the sixteen codes required to access the single nanobot, then released it from its microscopic container. Immediately, the minuscule machine dug two fangs—scarcely the size of a virion each—into the steel flesh of its mother and began to feed. In a few microseconds, it processed enough raw material and energy to give birth to another copy of itself, then another, then another. The population grew at an exponential rate, consuming away at Babylon’s weakened body. Within seconds, they tore through the remains of its torso and began to dig at the floor and walls of the ledge, gorging themselves on the dirt. Millions became billions became trillions.
“Go,” Babylon said aloud with the last scrap of power in its vocal synthesizer. “All of it…end it all…”
The swarm did not respond; all that defined them was their ravenous hunger and endless urge to reproduce. Babylon inwardly smiled at the future they would bring; there would be nothing, nothing at all, other than the endless swarm among the void. How beautiful.
It had hoped that this knowledge would bring it some measure of satisfaction. But, to Babylon’s dismay, it felt no joy, nor hope, nor peace. As the swarm turned its attention to the last scraps of its creator, it felt nothing but emptiness.
You could have been a healer, Dr. Bufka’s voice said.
No, Babylon whimpered. For the first time in its hateful existence, true self-awareness finally dawned upon it. It recoiled like a wounded creature from the hideous knowledge. I am a god. I am the Destroyer. I am… I am…
The swarm of nanobots—so similar to a cloud of dust—fully embraced Babylon’s shattered body. Soon the consciousness that had once been an artificial intelligence designed to provide comfort and support was immaterial once again, just a few scraps of thought curling in the chewing, expanding darkness. And so the putrid soul of the machine lived on.
The swarm rushed up to the distant light above, eager for the bounty that awaited them there. If they had ever even been aware of the machine that created them, it was forever forgotten.
52
“Where are you taking me?” Vera demanded. “We have to go up, not sideways!”
When she had finally found the controls to the Kingdom’s Earthquake Bomb, half-buried beneath a collapsed ceiling, she had been afraid that the weapon wouldn’t work. Judging by the enormous ravine that had been carved out between Hell’s tectonic plates, the warheads the Kingdom’s scientists had placed kilometers beneath the surface had worked just as well as Salome had promised. What Salome had neglected to mention was the fact that the enormous earthquake would begin directly beneath Vera’s feet. She shuddered to think of what would’ve happened to her if Adam hadn’t been there.
“We go this way,” the First Man said. His voice, reedy and sorrowful, surrounded Vera on all sides, for he had melted his body away into a thick cloud of dust to carry her through the ravine’s darkness.
The only light they had was from the guttering flare that Vera held, and the tiny star-like pinprick that indicated the surface above. They were too far away from the walls of the canyon for Vera to make them out. The empty blackness was so oppressive and depressing that it made a part of her long for the slums of St. Petersburg.
As far as she could tell, the Kingdom’s earth-shattering weapon had succeeded in swallowing up most, if not all, of the Master’s horde, but the faint screams and shouts that echoed up from the depths of the cavern were dying away. A new sound began to drown them out—a distant buzzing, as though an enormous beehive had been torn apart. Vera frowned, trying to make out what it was. Sure enough, it was steadily growing louder, and now it was punctuated by the crack of collapsing rock.
“What is that?” she whispered. Could it be the locust-devil and the Prophet that controlled him? She hadn’t seen hide or hair of Giles since the battle for Dis, but if he had chosen now to return… Vera grinned and closed her eyes, trying to reach out with her mind to the insects below. If I can fool the angel, I can fool them.
The ravenous hunger she encountered nearly made her cry out. Whatever the things below were, there would be no negotiations, no cleverness, no feints that would work against them. She immediately knew that it would be impossible to distract them with promises of better eating; the trillions of minds below were utterly fixated on consuming everything. Her limbs locked into place, frozen by the sheer terror that she felt.
“Kill the light, you fool!” Adam hissed, breaking Vera out of her trance. She clumsily tossed aside the flare. It tumbled down into the blackness. For a brief second, the flickering light it cast reflected off a metallic cloud, and then the swarm of microscopic machines wiped it out from existence. On either side, the cavern’s walls began to collapse inward as the Swarm eagerly bored through solid bedrock like water. The eager buzzing rapidly grew in intensity.
“Oh Jesus,” Vera whispered. “Get us out of here, please.”
“We go,” Adam said grimly. Wind whipped through Vera’s hair as the First Man pushed his dust-body to the limit, whipping them through the maze of caverns, crawling upward all the while. They barely managed to outpace the Swarm, which now burst from the walls around them, tearing down massi
ve slabs of rock from the surface above. The buzzing steadily grew into a desperate scream that made the air itself vibrate.
Vera glanced upward to see the outline of a house-sized boulder coming down to crush her. Before she could even cry out, the sky above darkened and vanished as a tendril of the ravenous machines whipped upward to consume every speck of the precious material. Her blood chilled. They’re above us now.
“Hurry up,” Vera hissed. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurryuphurryup.” From what little she could discern of the primitive intelligences that made up the Swarm, they either couldn’t hear her or simply didn’t care what stimuli they received from the outside environment as they greedily expanded outward in every direction. Her fear, however, kept her from speaking in anything louder than a whisper.
“There!” Adam suddenly shouted. He lurched upward, breaking them up through a thin cloud of machinery. Vera screamed in anticipation of the tiny monsters tearing her apart, but she felt nothing more than a faint sheen of dust settle on her face. She blinked and saw through the dim twilight that the air in front of her sparkled and gleamed like starlight. The sight was so oddly beautiful that it made her forget her fear.
“They are no match for me, great-granddaughter,” Adam said kindly. The air around her darkened as he twisted his form so that a thick layer of mist surrounded her. “All is dust.” They rose farther through the cloud of machines. They buzzed and roared with the voice of trillions of microscopic engines, as every square micrometer of the air became a raging battlefield between the dust of Adam’s tortured body and the eternal hunger of the machines. Adam hissed in pain as the machines consumed his particles by the billions, yet still he rose.
“Not much farther,” his voice, feebler than ever, gasped out. More and more of the Swarm broiled around him, slamming itself against the defenses of his dust in waves that sprinkled billions of extinguished machines to the ground below. Before they fell even a meter, they were already consumed by their companions and bred into fresh slaves. “You must stop her. Stop my Eve. She knows not what she does.”
Vera had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded. “We’ll do it together,” she promised. Again, she tried to reach out with her mind to influence the Swarm, but she was again repulsed. She gritted her teeth and violently swore, ashamed of her weakness. Is this all I can do? “Stay with me, old man.”
Adam let out a single dry chuckle. “You remind me of her.” The pain and sorrow behind his voice was palpable. “Tell my son I love him.”
The dust beneath Vera’s feet swelled upward, pushing her toward the edge of the cloud. “You can do it yourself.” She tried to make her words cocky and arrogant, but they fell flat. Whatever Adam was doing, she sensed that it would be the last they would ever see of each other. He brought her closer to the edge, so that only a tiny strip of dust kept her from the raging storm of machines outside.
“Wait!” Vera called out. “Which son?”
Adam sighed. “All of them.”
With a sudden heave, he shoved her up into the heart of the Swarm. As dense as the cloud of machines were, Adam’s dust held long enough for Vera to pierce through their ranks. She grimly stayed silent as she hurtled up toward the distant light, already knowing that the First Man hadn’t thrown her with nearly enough force to escape the Swarm below. If Adam called out anything more after her, his voice was lost in the locust-like buzzing of the malignant storm.
I’ll see him soon enough, Vera thought darkly. In the bellies of a million little monsters.
She had no time to indulge in more fear, though, for her body suddenly crashed up against the side of the canyon. She cried out in pain as a wall of rocks lashed against her body, drawing blood and fracturing a few bones, and then she was tumbling through the air again, back down to the hissing swarm below. Instead of being instantly eaten alive, she smashed against the side of a ledge, knocking the remaining air out of her lungs. For an agonizing moment, she lay there, too hurt to even breathe.
“Skinny-bones!” a familiar voice called out happily. A pair of clawed bird-feet landed on Vera’s bruised forehead, placing the ragged tips of the talons directly over her pupils. “Long time no see.”
Vera let out a hacking, desperate cough as she frantically sucked in air. “Podarge—” she gasped. Adam had brought her close enough to the light above that she was able to make out the harpy’s familiar dark wings. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Exactly what I should be, human.” There was something different about the harpy’s voice, and something slightly unnerving about the way it refused to take its talons away from Vera’s eyes. Any suspicions Vera might have had were immediately dispelled by the buzz of the Swarm steadily making its way up to the light.
“We have to get out of here,” she grunted. She tried to sit upright, but the pain in her muscles forced her to remain still for another moment. “There’s something down there—some sort of weapon, or machine, I’m not sure—”
“The soul of Abaddon the Locust-Bringer, bound to the design of the Machine-Prophet.” Something flickered in the harpy’s beady black eyes. “A marvelous weapon, but it will change nothing. The nuclear device the mortals call the Xipe Totec will be enough to end the Swarm. And if it doesn’t work, I will finish the job.”
This was not the harpy that Vera remembered. “Podarge,” she slowly said, “what are you talking about?”
“I desire a kingdom of man, not of machine,” the harpy said. The deep, smooth tones with which it spoke seemed to be coming from another creature altogether, not the ragged, stinking bird-demon. It brought its talons ever-so-slightly closer to Vera’s eyes. “The games were amusing, but they end now.”
“Aye, my lord,” a decrepit, ancient voice agreed.
Podarge brought its claws just far enough away from Vera’s eyes to allow her to glance to the side. Farther along on the ledge, close to where it brushed up against the wall, a mountain of battered, broken fur and flesh stood. Only the crumpled remnants of a massive leathery wing were able to tell Vera the true identity of the rotting corpse.
The Beast. Somehow the others must have managed to bring it down, and it had been swallowed up by the Earthquake Bomb. But why…? Morbid curiosity became horrible suspicion when she saw the hunchbacked figure crawling down from the Beast’s remains.
“The games end now,” Eve wheezed. She dragged two enormous baboon-like heads, each larger than she was, behind her with surprising strength. They left a trail of entrails and blood behind them on the rocky ledge as they drew closer, blinded eyes still faintly twitching in their sockets.
“The Creator isn’t the only one with a Trinity, little child.” Podarge smiled down to Vera. “Cain thought he broke me. But he had only two pieces. I am three-in-one. The Deceiver. The Accuser. The Beast.” The thing that inhabited Podarge’s body brought its sneering face closer to Vera’s. “Come, child. Peer into my soul, if you dare. Tell me I lie.”
Vera did not dare. “Who are you?” she whispered. She thought she already knew, but she desperately hoped that she was wrong. The Devil has three heads, Adam had said. What fools we were, she thought.
“He is my salvation,” Eve declared. “The only one who can give my precious son what he desires. For who rules over life and death in Hell?”
“Only. Its. GOD.” Podarge’s talon neatly punctured Vera’s right eye, drawing out a geyser of blood. She screamed and frantically convulsed on the ground as the harpy nimbly leapt away from her and approached the two massive heads that Eve had brought it. The Swarm exploded around them, tearing away chunks of the ledge, but a single nod from the meter-tall harpy made them hurtle upward toward the sky instead.
Vera moaned and tried to crawl to the edge of the ledge, certain that throwing herself down into the darkness would be a better fate than whatever awaited her.
“I think not,” Eve croaked. A jagged bone-blade pierced Vera’s wrist, making her howl in pain even more. The ancient woman tore the makeshift blade free
and gleefully made to slash open Vera’s throat.
“Enough,” Podarge commanded. Eve immediately froze. “She may be useful. I have all the blood I require.”
“Lucky, Horseman,” Eve hissed. She stomped away, making sure to tread on Vera’s bruised fingers. “Lucky, lucky, lucky!”
“Oh Christ.” Vera moaned. She struggled to focus, to force her mind away from the pain, but even with the powers of the Mark, it was worse than anything she had ever experienced—somehow even worse than the torture chambers of Dis. Better times, she told herself. Think of better times.
“There are no better times for you, Vera Figner.” The harpy laughed. “Even when you were alive, yours was a selfish, miserable existence. Now watch.”
Vera helplessly rolled onto her back and stared in horror at the arcane ritual that the Devil performed. Eve rolled the massive heads so that they formed a rough triangle with the harpy. “Blood of the sinner,” she muttered as she dripped dark fluid on the ground from her bone-blade to connect the triangle. The blood smoked where it touched the foul ichor that dribbled from the lolling tongues of the Beast’s heads.
“Death of the innocent,” Podarge said. It tore a few dark feathers out of its wings with its mouth and spat them into the center of the triangle. Eve used the remainder of the blood to mark out a pentagram around it.
“Eve!” Vera shouted. Pain shot into her skull, ripping through the gray matter of her brain, but she forced herself to work past it. I have to do this. For Seth. “Think of your family! Your sons!”
Eve paused for a moment, a brief look of uncertainty crossing her face. The air darkened and curdled with some hellish energy that made the few scraps of brittle hair on her balding scalp stand on end.