Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  Yatam slid into the grave with Anat, and they rested in cool silence, fingers tangled and foreheads pressed together.

  After sunset, Anat watched the triremes arriving on the coast with a thrill of worry. Their lights seemed so distant, yet she felt as if they were somehow too close. She could have spent a few more days with Yatam. Weeks. Months. Yet she knew an end when she saw one, and it looked very much like triremes on the coast.

  It took an hour more for the Greeks to arrive in the village. King Teleklos was easy to distinguish from his company of soldiers, though they were all armed with matching kopides and aspides, and their dress was similar in style. His chlamys was pinned at the shoulder with a bejeweled fibula much finer than those his men wore, and his cloak was dyed vibrant red. He was tall with intelligent eyes and a strong pulse beating through his veins. A fine example of a man, if not for the disgusted gaze he cast over Anat. He knew what her crimson eyes and pale flesh meant.

  There was little conversation before they walked up the mountain. All of them: Teleklos, Yatam, and the newly returned Metaraon, along with their respective entourages. They represented the pinch points of war. Their silence was the only reason they could coexist peacefully on that hike.

  The fissure to the City of Dis was slashed between a pair of stony pillars jutting toward the storm clouds. It looked like a lightning strike frozen in midair, a tear in the cloth of the island. The sky on the other side was red as fresh blood and smelled like burned flesh. The mere glimpse of the infernal plane stung Anat’s eyes.

  “Just before the sun rises, we will reunite here,” Metaraon said. “My scribes have produced copies of the Treaty’s first draft so you may prepare before our meeting in Dis. I will see you all again here when the sun touches the sky.”

  They nodded. They retreated to their separate camps.

  Anat read the draft of the Treaty first. She’d had ample time in the last few centuries to learn to read, and now could read all three languages that the Treaty had been copied into. It strictly divided angels and demons. No more would the infernal and ethereal planes be able to leak into each other. The only common ground would be Earth—a far more peaceful place once the Treaty obliterated all gaean preternaturals.

  It was a tidy world scrubbed clean. “It’s chilling, but balanced enough,” Anat said. “Angels and demons will sacrifice their access to magic. Human witches will remain. I saw that Teleklos created some warrior-human class as well—the kopides.”

  “Yes. They asked for advance input,” Yatam said. “Teleklos is the one who asked to rid the world of anyone but witches and mundanes. I insisted upon the caveat that vampires be left alive.” His fingers were gentle upon her neck, his lips light over her temple.

  She warmed to know that he had ensured she would be protected. Even now, rewriting the world the end all wars, Yatam made space for Anat. “So many others will die.”

  “Humans are being slaughtered in huge quantities. Without them, we will all starve. We must thin the populations of predators in order to preserve the food source.”

  “Human beings,” Anat said softly, reminding him of what they were discussing. People. Individuals with thoughts and loves and souls. It had been a long time since Anat and Yatam had been human, but there was no forgetting their humble roots.

  Yatam’s lips thinned in a mirthless smirk. “I’m speaking Metaraon’s language. Teleklos cares only for his people as a reflection upon his legacy, and the angel only sees humans as loaves of bread. I’ll make no headway with them if I’m sentimental.”

  “You’ll make no headway with me if you’re not,” she murmured, twining her finger in his hair, so sleek.

  He looked sad as he stroked her face. “Negotiations may take time,” Yatam said. “Time flows differently in Dis. A year for me may be ten for you.”

  “I would wait another thousand,” Anat said. She had nothing but time.

  Yatam always felt like the sun for her, but he made that final night seem endless. He bowed over her body as the sky bowed over the desert at midnight. His breath was a warm wind over the dunes of her ribcage, bringing her nipples to peaks that yearned for his mouth. She flooded between her thighs, as the Nile flooded, and Yatam drank from her as civilization did the river.

  A thousand years and the sex remained perfect—an oft-wordless transaction wherein they reacquainted themselves with each other, again and again. Where they traced their lips over delicate flesh to make each other gasp as if they’d never been touched before. When finally Yatam collapsed within her, uniting them, she clung to her husband as if she could bring their flesh together.

  Anat wept without tears and he kissed her. She tasted herself on his lips.

  The primary figures on the new Council of Dis—Metaraon, Teleklos, and Yatam—gathered at the first peek of false dawn. Anat watched from the fringes, where she could quickly retreat once the Council entered Hell. From her angle, she could barely see the searing red scar of the fissure thrashing in midair. It had too little substance, as thin as a feather. It belched smoke onto the mountain.

  The men greeted each other. They approached the fissure.

  Before Yatam stepped in, his eyes connected with Anat’s one more time.

  She knew, even then, that it would be the last time.

  Anat had promised to wait, and so she waited. She returned to the cottage so that she could slither into the womblike embrace of the earth. She pulled the trap door shut over her head. She closed her eyes. She slumbered.

  Sleeping as a vampire was not exactly sleep. It was somewhere between the oblivion of death and dreams more vivid than reality, as if she were side-stepping into another world every time she rested. This time, she did not dream. She remembered.

  Anat was Inanna, a warrior god who liberated Irkalla.

  She was Anat, a little human girl growing up among shepherds and tents.

  She was a dead thing, a sliver of darkness upon the world, luring away men who Inanna didn’t mind killing.

  When she roused, she felt a hostile presence in the cottage above. Anat was not surprised to arise from her grave and come face-to-face with her beloved’s feminine twin, cloaked in the serpentine mask of Ereshkigal’s memory.

  “At last, we are alone,” said Yatai. “I have longed for time with my sister.”

  Until Waset, it had been a thousand years since their last face-to-face encounter. And they had never been alone, allowed to focus upon one another, and converse. It was strange to know somebody so well—to have her name whispered by the nightmares that assailed Anat’s buried daytimes—and yet not know her at all.

  Inanna was within Anat, still. The spirit no longer needed to urge Anat to draw her sickle-sword; it was a decision that they arrived at simultaneously. The blade reflected Dis’s flame flickering through the fissure. “We both know we are neither family nor friends. Tell me why you’re here and what you want.”

  “It’s never been a mystery to me why he loves you,” Yatai said. “It’s hardly his fault that he listens to Utu, and that Utu demands the company of an Inanna. I fear that the sensibilities of our god-souls froze upon death, rendering Utu’s forgiveness permanent.”

  “As well as Ereshkigal’s grudge,” Anat said.

  “Ereshkigal never would have found peace without Inanna’s obliteration,” Yatai said. She flitted toward Anat.

  There was no point in running. Anat was a vampire—sometimes quick as a chariot, never faster than shadows. She braced herself for an impact that did not come. Yatai had less interest in passing for human than Yatam; she was so ephemeral that she may as well have been moonbeams shining behind Anat.

  “What will killing me accomplish?” Anat asked. “Do you think that Yatam will love you again if you destroy his wife?”

  “The opportunity for my brother and I to live in harmony vanished the moment that he let Utu take the reins of his heart,” Yatai said. “I’m at peace with losing him. I’ve sated my thirst for Ereshkigal’s vengeance by killing you.”
/>
  “Then you’d better be faster about this.” Anat’s fist was so tight on her sickle-sword, waiting for Yatai to come closer. “If you don’t kill me before Yatam comes back from negotiating the Treaty of Dis, he will stop you.”

  Yatai seized Anat, pinching the vampire’s cheeks between her finger and thumb hard enough to bruise. “You’re already dead,” she said, her lips hovering over Anat’s. The succubus’s breath was cold. “I poisoned my brother and hid his unconscious body in the dungeons of the Palace of Dis. Wearing his face, I attended the meeting to seal the Treaty. And I made one change to the Treaty before adding Yatam’s name to the bottommost line.”

  Anat began to tremble. “They wouldn’t have allowed any significant alterations that late in the process.”

  “I didn’t need a significant alteration,” Yatai said. “The clause sparing vampires from the gaean decimation is such a small note in the greater Treaty. Nobody breathed a word of protest when I changed ‘vampires’ to ‘werewolves.’”

  As the meaning sank into Anat, so did the calm.

  I’m about to die.

  “Is Yatam well?” she asked. “Will he recover?”

  “Quickly, but not quickly enough to see you before you turn to ash.” Yatai released Anat’s jaw and pushed her away.

  The memories of tears plucked at Anat’s eyes. She wouldn’t cry. She hadn’t shed a tear since her death. “We don’t need time to say goodbye. I’ll just be waiting for him again in the Field of Reeds, for the moment I can embrace him in his death.”

  “Isn’t that the sting of it?” Yatai asked through her fangs. “My brother is immortal. Nügua ensured he will never die, and you will never be reunited with him. There are no more Remnants of Inanna. There will be no Remnants of Anat. Your story ends when the moon crests Mount Exomvourgo, and I will sleep as I’ve never slept before.”

  She vanished, and Anat stood alone in the cabin.

  The moon was already high when Anat had felt Yatai’s presence and risen from the grave. It was not much later at night that Anat felt the Treaty of Dis becoming ratified. It sank upon the world like a web of silent lightning. She sat by the window, watching the shivering grass and the shimmering ring of the juncture, and she meditated upon Maat.

  Her relationship with Maat had deepened over the last millennium, while she had melded with Inanna. There was no way to know if a woman like Maat reigned in the temples of man, overseeing the world’s justice. For all that Anat had seen after dying, she had seen no proof of Kemet’s gods, nor had she seen any disproof. She had witnessed wonders. She had witnessed horrors. She had participated in acts so unnatural that she’d never imagined them possible as a mortal.

  In the end, she could rule nothing out. The strange chill that crept over her flesh told her she would soon have answers. Soon, she would leave this world—and her husband.

  She was almost grateful that he did not recover in time to see her crumbling.

  Anat watched it touch her fingertips. She felt it on the tip of her tongue. Every little rub made more of her crumble, and she supposed it was a mercy that nothing hurt. She felt less by the moment. The world was quickly growing dim, and Anat surrendered to inevitability.

  “Anat! No!”

  She turned to the window again. Her husband had leaped through the fissure from Dis, his hair and cloak streaming behind him as he raced across the pasture. Surely the poison had only just worn off. How fast must he have run to get there in time? He looked depleted by his flight through Hell. His skin barely shined with its usual moonlight.

  Anat’s knees weakened. She imagined the joints turning to sand within her, draining to her feet as in an hourglass.

  She’d had lonely minutes to consider what she would like to say to Yatam, had she an opportunity to speak. Now he was here. Her body chafed within her linens and her skin flaked to dust, but she still stepped toward the door, closing the distance to her husband. Anat wanted to be sure he would hear her.

  Before she could cross the threshold, an ankle gave way. She fell.

  Yatam caught her by the waist. She couldn’t feel her hands splayed over his chest anymore, but her body remembered the feeling of his sunshine upon her skin even as her bones became dust. She even smiled when her dimming gaze fell upon his face.

  “I have loved every moment with you,” Anat whispered.

  Her lips and teeth were on the breeze. Her vision was gone.

  She was gone.

  Many years later found Yatam returned to Kemet. He was months into his reign as pharaoh—a title he had won by mobilizing a Kushite army and conquering the last dynasty. It hadn’t been as difficult as he’d expected. Yatam had little love for the men in his armies, mortals and half-demons alike, and he’d absorbed thousands of losses to claim the throne.

  He seldom took visitors in the palace. Yatam hadn’t become pharaoh to let it pass within the blink of a mortal life span. The longer he stayed out of the public’s eye, the longer he could keep Kemet in his chokehold. Yet on that day, he was to be visited by an old acquaintance who could not be refused. Yatam dressed himself in the finery of a king and received his visitor in the throne room.

  The man strode into the room wearing plain linens and the arrogance of an angel. He was handsome enough in the sterile flawless way of the ethereal. They kept all of their broken pieces inside, where they could not be easily seen.

  Metaraon looked like a visiting noble rather than a warrior. He surveyed the throne room disdainfully. Whatever he was accustomed to seeing in Heaven must have been far superior to the palaces of man.

  “Do you like my humble home?” Yatam asked.

  Metaraon huffed out his nose. “No. It sickens me to think of you so deeply enmeshed in the affairs of mortals.”

  “I am wounded by failing to meet your approval. Truly.” Yatam had become so much more caustic than their previous meetings, and Metaraon’s face darkened at the sarcasm. “What brings you here, my friend?”

  “An utter lack of remaining alternatives, believe me,” Metaraon said. “We’re lost as to what comes next.”

  Yatam’s lips spread in a lazy grin, crueler twin to his previous smiles. “And so you desire my counsel? The angels attempting to appeal to the better nature of a demon. I am charmed.”

  “I don’t need your counsel. I need a favor.” Metaraon paced the room. He took long strides with long legs, like a heron wading through reeds. “You must know by now that He’s gone mad. The things He’s done—it’s sheer insanity. He has no regard for the Treaty. His interference worsens by the day.”

  Yatam could only imagine. Adam had lost his Eve, and he had the devastating grief of a god. It was a trajectory that Yatam had been following on a smaller scale since losing his wife. He had murdered and fucked his way to become pharaoh rather than declaring war on his own people, but the pain came from the same place.

  “I would take care speaking of your Heavenly Father in such a fashion,” Yatam said.

  “He is no father of mine!” Metaraon stopped, slamming one fist into the opposite palm. “It doesn’t matter. He’s not even listening. That’s part of the problem!”

  “Then perhaps you should pray.”

  “We need to kill Him,” Metaraon said.

  Silence fell heavy on the room. Hot wind blew through the curtains, sending them fluttering.

  Killing Adam for his grief seemed like one more insult atop the injury, and Yatam was jealous for it. Why should the man who’d killed his wife get respite from living with the grief while Yatam survived?

  “My brothers and I are helpless against him,” the angel went on, “but we can’t allow His behavior to continue unchecked. You are the most powerful that Hell has to offer now. Rally your children. March upon the garden and take what remains of His sanity and life!”

  “You want me to commit an act of deicide.”

  “Essentially, yes. What else are we to do? No angel or mortal can harm Him.”

  Yatam stood, rolling his wand between his
fingertips as he mused Metaraon before him. The Voice of God may have passed for nobility, but he was still a battle-thirsty savage deep within. “I find it fascinating that the first solution that comes to your mind is one involving bloodshed, Metaraon.”

  They stood at the edge of the throne room, looking down at the palace estate. It looked like a small town on the edge of desert, complete with a granary, a pen of well-fed cattle, and scribes hurrying between buildings. “It’s not our first solution. It’s far from our first, but it’s our best.”

  “Pathetic,” Yatam said.

  “And you have a better suggestion?”

  “Indeed, I do.” The same bloody balm that he had been using to soothe his soul since Anat’s passing. “The solution is simple. You must fascinate Him. Give Him reason to live and live well.” He snapped his fingers, and one of his servants rushed over. “Bring the women.”

  Metaraon watched the mortal scurry away with open disdain. “What in the world could fascinate someone as mad as He has become?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Yatam asked. “Give Him a wife.”

  “A wife?”

  “Indeed. How long has it been since Eve died?” It had been seventy-nine years since Anat had turned to ash.

  Metaraon flicked a dismissive hand. “Thousands of years. Millions. Damnation if anyone knows—I can never be certain of how time flows on the planes of Earth.” For all that angels were brilliant creatures, they could be such vacant fools. Mortal measures of time were irrelevant to them. They couldn’t imagine how each moment would be paining an ascended man like Adam.

  “A mortal mind in an immortal body is unprepared to accept the rigors of eternity. A man needs love to survive.” Yatam’s lips curled, catlike and smug. “Angels are born immortal—cold and without mercy—so you will have to take my word on that.”

  The servant returned leading a line of women. Concubines. Yatam had captured three of them while clashing with rebels who resented Kushite rule. Two of them were Assyrian captives. They were the lucky ones, chosen from all the spoils of war to be dressed in finery and allowed to pleasure the pharaoh.