by James Hunter
“Still,” I said, “I’d feel a lot better if you gave it the good ol’ college try.”
He shrugged his shoulders but kept walking. “Golem,” he said flatly. “A MudMan. Built during World War Two as a vessel for a demonic murder god. Things didn’t go according to plan”—he spread his hands—“and here we are.”
I was quiet for a spell, letting the sound of our feet carry on the unnaturally hot air. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Golem? MudMan? Demonic murder god? His answer left me even more confused. Finally, I cleared my throat and tried to come at it from a different angle.
“You said you wanted to kill Hogg?” I asked. “Why?”
“What do you know about him?” Levi countered, glancing over his shoulder, his steps faltering for a second.
I hitched a shoulder and frowned. “Not much. Roly-poly looking bastard. Got that mad-scientist vibe going on in spades. Other than that?” I shrugged and shook my head. “So why you after him?” I asked again.
Levi was silent for a time, head bowed, eyes locked on the ground. “It’s complicated,” he offered begrudgingly. “Personal. I’d rather not talk about it if it’s all the same to you. Ask a different question.”
“Nope,” I said, cocking back the hammer on my pistol with an audible click. “It’s not all the same to me, and that’s not how this works. I ask questions, you give me answers. Now, who’s Hogg to you?”
Levi spun, face rippling and contorting in hate, murder burning in his eyes like a smoldering tire fire. “Shoot me, then. Be done with it or respect my decision. My connection to Hogg is personal. I’m after him for my own reasons, and I’m willing to help you to get him. That should be enough.” His voice changed as he spoke, growing deeper, raspier, more primal with every word. “Now ask another question or pull the trigger,” he growled.
I cleared my throat, then glanced at the gun. Shit. “Fine, fine,” I said, de-cocking and stowing the hand cannon. “You called my bluff. I wasn’t really gonna shoot you.”
“Think I don’t know that?” he asked through clenched teeth. “I’m not the brightest bulb”—he tapped at his forehead—“but I’m not stupid. You’re lost, you have no memory, and you’re the most wanted man in the Second Circle. Without me, you wouldn’t last fifteen minutes.” He turned and resumed his trek down the twisting alley. “Now, ask a different question or keep quiet. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.”
We trudged on for a bit in silence, Levi disgruntled, me thinking. The problem wasn’t finding a question, it was finding the right one. There were so many things I was confused about, and I honestly didn’t know where to start—this whole shitstorm was like a giant knot with a thousand loose ends poking out from the center. “Okay, so I’m in Hell,” I finally said, owning the situation. “Let’s talk about how I got here and why someone is trying to murder me, then maybe you can explain how you fit into the story. Who hired you and why.”
He slowed his pace and waved me over to his side as we continued our trek. “During your fight with Ong,” he said, “you let loose Azazel the Purros, the Horseman of War. I don’t know how it happened. Whether he escaped. Whether you freed him willingly. Guess the how doesn’t matter.” He absently dry washed his hands. That’s all behind us, the gesture said. “All that matters is what happened next. Somehow, you killed Ong and took the Fourth Seal, and with it the demonic power of Buné, the Horseman of Death. Then, Azazel went home. Right back to the Pit.” He swept out a pudgy hand.
Once more I caught a flash of Ong’s serpentine body looming atop a huge pyramid. An old, old temple. Primal, even. Then came that glimpse of a dark spike-lined gullet swallowing me, drawing me toward Ong’s stomach—except I wasn’t bound for his belly … I could almost taste the hot, metallic blood in my mouth, could feel the fibrous meat of his thudding heart rip between my teeth. Except they weren’t really my teeth, they were pointed and sharp like jagged pieces of broken glass.
A new memory came next, kicking its way into my conscious mind an inch at a time.
I lay atop that ancient pyramid. Beaten. Broken. A shard of white bone jabbed through my jeans: my left shin, folded in half. Ong raged above, battling the Savage Prophet—a monstrous flock of Garuda circling the snake-god like buzzards—while Ferraro, Darlene, and the cold hearted Arch-Mage fought fruitlessly against Black Jack and his crew of Brown-Robes below. A wave of soul-crushing hopelessness flooded through me with the images. We’d lost. Epically lost. I was going to die. My friends were going to die. And the Prophet was going to win. To kill Ong, claim the Fourth Seal, and end the world.
The memory of a whispered voice echoed in my ears. Azazel’s voice, of course. A broken leg is nothing to me. Nothing, he said. I could give you the power you need to win, to save your friends. Such terrible power, the likes of which you’ve never dreamed. Of all my brothers and sisters, bound to the Seals, there is none more terrible than I …
And that’s when it hit me like a baseball bat to the kneecaps.
I’d cut a deal with that asshole. I didn’t remember a damned thing after slipping down Ong’s massive throat, but I remembered giving up. Giving in. Letting Azazel free from the shoddy prison I’d stuck him in. Suddenly, I felt numb and cold despite the heat. I’d murdered Black Jack: crushed his head and turned his skull into a friggin’ pancake. Then, I’d killed Ong and claimed the Fourth Seal. I wanted to sit, to puke my guts out in revulsion, but instead, I kept walking, the wheels in my head cranking away.
“That still doesn’t explain why someone’s trying to kill me,” I replied, the words distant and half-hearted.
We walked on for a few more steps, then Levi stopped; a cherry-red neon sign illuminated a rough door set into twisting black stone. The script was harsh and foreign, but my mind translated it with ease. Southside Blood Pit. Something, it looked like a rough sheet of paper, was pinned to the door.
“This is us,” Levi said with a nod. Before pulling open the door, however, he carefully removed the poster, peeling up each corner in turn, then freeing it with a gentle tug. “And this,” he said, handing me the paper, “is the reason Asmodeus wants you dead. Like I said before, you’re the most wanted man in Pandæmonium—maybe the most wanted man in all Nine Circles. Congratulations.”
I would’ve said he was being sarcastic, but he spoke with all earnestness. I’m pretty sure he was actually congratulating me on being the most wanted man in the Inferno. The guy was obviously a nutjob.
I flicked my wrist and held up the poster.
My face—well, a version of it with blister-red skin and jutting ram’s horns protruding from my skull—took up half the page. Across the top ran one word, all in caps: WANTED. Azazel’s name was below, followed by a laundry list of offenses: Treason. Criminal conspiracy. Sedition. Murder. Lots of murder. A phonebook worth of murder. Marquis Aamon, Duchess Dantalian, Marquis Leraje, Duke Eligos, and Earl Malthus. Apparently, I’d been busy since shoving ol’ Ong off the mortal coil.
At the bottom was a stern warning: Anyone caught assisting this man will suffer the unending wrath of King Asmodeus.
SIX:
Infernal Politics
I folded the sheet and slipped it into my pocket as I followed Levi inside, letting the door creak shut behind me. The building’s interior was murky and uninviting, illuminated only by a handful of flickering torches and beer signs. The weathered stone floors were covered with a loose gray sand, and vaguely Roman columns littered the room. The tables—wooden things, rough and poorly made—were filled with Hellions of every shape and sort, each more twisted and disturbing than the last, no two exactly alike.
There was also a pit in the center of the room: a hulking cavity carved into the ground, a good thirty or forty feet in diameter and ten feet deep, with a stone retaining wall around the top. It looked like an oversized well. Its walls were slick black, its floor covered with more of the coarse gray sand, though heavily stained with suspicious patches of dried gore. Likely blood, though most of
the colors were all wrong. A splotch of piss yellow here and metallic silver there. A splash of tar black and a spattering of rusty red.
Based on that crude fighting ring and the name of the establishment, The Blood Pit¸ it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what they used that thing for.
Levi ignored the pit, hardly offering it a glance, and led us to an empty wooden table in the corner. He eased his weight down onto a rickety wooden stool with a soft sigh.
“Why would I kill all those people?” I hissed as I took a stool of my own, glancing around nervously to make sure no one was close enough to hear.
“Not people,” Levi replied, thrusting up a hand and waving someone down. “Demons. And not just run-of-the-mill demons. Esteemed members of Asmodeus’ court. Earls. Duchesses. Counts. You shouldn’t feel guilty about them,” he said abruptly. Defensively, even. “They were all monsters. Vile, vile monsters. I know a thing or two about killing, and everyone on that list deserved a death sentence a thousand times over.”
Levi fell silent as a hulking creature, nine feet tall and half as wide, his skin a pasty green and covered copiously with swollen warts, lumbered over to us. Our server looked almost like a troll. If a troll died and then caught a case of full-body genital warts. He stopped at the edge of our table and crossed tank-cannon arms, resting his flabby biceps on a protruding gut the size of a large kettle, and regarded us suspiciously with rheumy, cataract-covered eyes.
“What ya want?” he growled, the sound of a burbling sinkhole.
“Loyalist?” Levi growled back, hunching forward and baring his teeth. Suddenly he looked like a rabid pit bull, ready to attack at the slightest provocation.
The Wart-Troll turned his head and spit a wad of ropy green phlegm onto the floor. “That’s for Asmodeus. For him and all of his. Now, order or go.”
“A pitcher of your finest,” Levi said solemnly, laying out a handful of strange brass coins with square holes in the center.
“And cigarettes,” I pitched in. “You got cigarettes, right?”
The Hellion grumbled inarticulately, scooped the coins off the table with one grubby oversized mitt, then shuffled off.
“What was that?” I asked, nodding toward the troll. “The loyalist thing, I mean.”
Levi waved away the question. “You’ll see soon enough.”
“Another thing, just out of curiosity,” I said, leaning in, resting my elbows on the table. “Why can I understand everyone? None of the signs around here are in English. None of these assholes speak English, but it all makes sense in my head. Is it something to do with …” I paused and leaned in a little farther, pitching my voice low. “Azazel?”
“What?” Levi offered me a sidelong glance. “Oh, the language. No. Just the nature of Gehenna. In the beginning,” he said offhandedly, eyes scanning the room, lingering on the door, “God separated the languages of man. Confused their understanding. But not here. In Hell, all languages become one by divine decree. Every soul is understood, regardless of their tongue.”
The troll waiter came back a moment later, a pitcher of something dark and sludgy in one hand, and a couple of glasses and a pack of Marlboro Reds in the other. How ’bout that shit? Reds in Hell. The place wasn’t all bad, I guess. Levi didn’t bother to pour us drinks, which was fine by me since I didn’t intend to sample the crap in the pitcher. It smelled like bad mushrooms and would almost certainly give me hepatitis. All strains of hepatitis. Plus, rabies.
Hell rabies.
I did, however, slip a cigarette from the pack, setting it between my lips as I summoned a minute amount of Vis and conjured a weak flame. Cigarette lit, I immediately dismissed my power. The tobacco was stale and dry, but beggars can’t be choosers, and boy did the nicotine taste good going down. “You said you came here specifically for me? Why?” I asked. “Someone hire you? You some kind of bounty hunter?”
He seesawed his head. “No.” He paused. “Not really. Kind of. The Resistance, they found me a couple of months ago while I was searching for leads on Hogg. They promised to help me kill him. But only if I could bust you out of here.”
That sure got my attention. “The Resistance? What’s the Resistance?”
Levi drummed his fingers on the table, tat-tat-tat. “That’s right, you wouldn’t know about that. Well, after you killed Ong and skipped town, things went downhill up there.” He pointed skyward. “The Guild of the Staff is broken and under new management—run by this fella they call the Savage Prophet. Another Seal Bearer like you. And they’ve been busy, the New Wave. That’s what they call themselves now. They murdered a bunch of Judges and Guild intel officers, imprisoned a bunch more in the Tullianum. Them and about half the members of the Elder Council.”
Well, shit. That was bad news. The Tullianum was a prison. No, worse than a prison.
It was a dank, dusty hole in the earth, situated in the heart of the sprawling red dunes of the Australian Outback, where they dropped a host of supernatural criminals and left them more or less for dead. The Tullianum was like the unholy love child of Mad Max’s Thunder Dome and a Game of Thrones episode: all rusted iron, spiked armor, creepy incest, and cannibal kings running amok. And a strange confluence of ley lines and telluric currents made it one of the few places on Earth where magi couldn’t touch the Vis.
“Since then, this Savage Prophet’s been making waves. Setting up alliances with other supernatural nations. The Fae Courts.” He paused, staring at me long and hard. “He’s also working with a woman. The Morrigan. Everyone says she’s the shot caller, and the Prophet’s the muscle.”
Icy cold washed through me. The Morrigan again. Of course it would come back to her.
“Anyway,” Levi said after a moment, “all that’s left is a little group of rebels. The Arch-Mage, Judge Drukiski, Ferraro, Greg Chandler, a couple of other folks, and a pair of Sasquatches—Chief Chankoowashtay and his daughter, Winona. And Lady Luck, of course. Can’t forget about her.”
“Wait, that’s it?” I asked, feeling a bit dumbstruck. “Everything else is gone?”
He nodded, face solemn. “Yep. They’re small now. Outnumbered. They recruited me about five months ago after they found me running down leads on Hogg. Once they figured out what I was, and what I could do, they found me a contact here in Hell and shipped me out to collect you.”
Holy shit.
I’d suspected things must’ve been pretty bad topside, but Levi had just dropped a bomb on me. The Guild of the Staff, broken? The Savage Prophet leading what was left and openly working with the Morrigan? The most powerful magi on the planet locked up in the Tullianum? Crap, that was bad. The worst. At least Ferraro and Darlene were safe and sound—though too bad about the Arch-Mage. A stint in the Tullianum probably would’ve done her ego some good. It also made my heart glad to know whoever was running that show had recruited Kong and Winona.
They were damned good people for being Sasquatches.
“That who we waiting for?” I asked, puffing at the cigarette, feeling numb and strangely detached as I mulled things over. “Your contact down here?”
“No.”
“No?” I squinted at him, then ashed my smoke with a flick of my fingers. “Well, then who are we waiting for?”
The door creaked open fast on the heels of my question, and a pack of Flesh Eaters strode in, black tongues lashing and whipping at the air.
“We’re waiting for them,” Levi replied, flexing his fingers, then cracking thick knuckles.
The bar-goers froze as the Flesh Eaters poured in. Just a few of the black-clad assholes at first, but more with every passing second. Bodies pressed inward. The number swelled—seven, eight, nine—before finally stopping at a nice, even ten, ’cause I’d sure hate it if things were ever easy. Finally, the door swung shut, blocking out the creeping darkness of the cramped alley beyond.
“Did you sell me out?” I snarled at Levi in a whisper, preparing to stand. To fight. To kill.
Levi’s hand clamped down over my
forearm, pinning me in place. “Keep your head,” he said, offering me a tiny, reassuring nod. “We’ll work this out. Trust me.”
“We’re hunting fugitives,” said one of the Flesh Eaters, his voice like a file sliding over steel. “Two men. Enemies of His Majesty, Asmodeus.” The speaker was squat compared to the rest of his kin, his body covered in tight latex, his scalp flayed, turning the dome of his bald head into a fleshy red melon. The other Flesh Eaters spread out, slowly moving through the crowd, goggle-covered eyes scanning faces, noting every patron, every detail.
On instinct, I dropped my head, pretending to be invisible—just another downcast Hellion pining away in this back-alley dive.
“That so,” replied the bartending troll, a scowl turning his already disgusting face into a masterwork of horror. “And what makes you think they’re here?” he asked, cocking his head to the side, the sneer stretching his lips tight. “And even if they are,” he continued, “what makes you think your kind is welcome here, loyalist cocksucker?” He reached beneath the bar proper and pulled out a pitted battle-axe, a heavy ol’ son of a bitch glowing with swirls of cancerous jade light. He held the beefy weapon up, twisting it this way then that so it caught the ambient neon glow from the bar signs.
He nodded in satisfaction, then shuffled over to the door, blocking the exit with his tremendous bulk.
“We are welcome anywhere in Pandæmonium, cock-whore,” Melon-Head replied, eyeing the weapon with contempt. “I know you,” it said after a beat. “You’re Quintus Ambustus.” The Flesh Eater slipped forward, squaring up with the Hellion-Troll, who loomed over him. Despite the obvious size difference, Melon-Head didn’t seem daunted in the least. “Your treasonous name has been circulating our halls for some time. I’m sure the Grand Inquisitors could make room for you, Quintus.”
The rest of the bar-goers stood—wooden stools creaking, the scuff of chair legs over stone floating through the stillness. True, there were a metric ass-load of Flesh Eaters, but there were more bar patrons. Double, maybe triple their number, and most of ’em looked like hard-eyed badasses who’d be more than happy to smash out a few teeth or cleave off a few unnecessary limbs. A really friendly, good-natured crowd.