DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6)

by Andrew Seiple

  His eyes narrowed, his ears went flat, but he did that head-lowering-butt-raising thing again. Adorable, really. I scratched behind his ears, ruffling his fur, and his eyes went wide in shock. “BESIDES, ALL SHE NEEDS FROM YOU IS KNOWLEDGE. SIT TIGHT, STAY SMART, AND YOU MAY SURVIVE THIS JOURNEY.” I said that in English, for Thirteenth Chain’s benefit as well.

  “Lady!” Juno called, alarmed. “One of the Striges comes!”

  I looked around, to where Beaky’s blob was growing larger on the horizon. “AH YES. HERE COMES OUR RIDE.”

  They didn’t believe me, up until the point I got on the radio and had Vector poke its brain to wave a tentacle in my direction, its motions synchronizing with my own waves. Finally the massive beast juddered to a stop overhanging the camp. The lizards were going nuts; I let Thirteenth Chain go and quell them as best he could.

  Then the androids, minus Epsilon, came sliding down a set of lowered tentacles. Vector followed, surprisingly. “AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE FLYING BEAKY?”

  “Epsilon’s taking over for me. It was actually pretty easy once we located the equivalent to the amygdala. Besides, I had to come and see the new specimens.”

  The cat started backing away. Thirteenth Chain froze, looking from me to Vector.

  “THEY GET TO LIVE. FOR NOW.”

  “Oh, I just need some samples. Nothing they can’t regrow.”

  I turned to look at the demons, letting golden light play around my fist, particles snapping in the air as the charging arrays fluttered at less than a tenth of a percent. “WELL THEN! STAND FORTH AND BE BRAVE OR RUN AND DIE TIRED. WHICH SHALL IT BE?”

  They stood. Khalid and Vector took blood samples and afterwards the biologist examined them carefully, taking notes on a beat-up old wad of paper that could have been a notebook at some point.

  “Another mortal man,” the cat whispered, turning its unsettling eyes back to me. “Those are worth a fortune in Hell, two fortunes, and yet you waste your time with Damned? I do not understand, Master.”

  “ARE THE LIVING THEN SUCH A COMMODITY DOWN HERE?”

  “Yes! Rare as Lucifer’s mercy. With potent seed for breeding and succulent flesh that puts the foul ashen meat of the Damned to shame.”

  “You might find my flesh less to your liking,” Vector said, frowning at it sternly. “I’ve got a few upgrades.”

  “I would not eat my Master’s property.”

  “GOOD.” I forestalled Vector, before he could say something that put him at risk. “PROFESSOR, WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THESE RIDING LIZARD THINGS?”

  He looked them over. “I could use one to study.”

  “ONLY ONE?”

  “I estimate them at about a ton each. One we could handle without trouble. Five would slow Beaky’s airspeed down a bit.”

  “BEAKY’S HUGE.”

  “Huge and light. Think of him like an airship.”

  I gnawed my lip. That boded ill for some of the tools I wanted to construct. Well, Vector could possibly do something about Beaky’s carrying capacity given time and enough chemicals. “ALL RIGHT. HEY JUNO, CASSIUS, WHEN’S THE LAST TIME YOU HAD A GOOD MEAL?”

  They looked at me like I’d gone mad. I shrugged and turned to Thirteenth Chain. “WHAT ARE THESE BEASTS CALLED AND WHICH ONE IS YOURS?”

  “They hight burren,” He raised a long clawed finger and pointed. “Is mine. That un.”

  I nodded, then I charged the cluster of burren, slamming one off the cliff. The remainder started, scattered in all directions, and I mowed down all but Thirteenth Chain’s with focused particle beams. The fourth one took three shots... I’d been drilling them through their heads, but evidently managed to miss anything important on that last one.

  Thirteenth Chain’s burren backed up, hissing, glanced around, then its pea brain somehow decided that the best option for survival was to charge me.

  I locked my gravitics.

  CLANG!

  When the dust cleared, it was crumpled in a quivering heap twenty feet from me. I stood uncaring, with my arms folded. I checked the readouts, winced, and unlocked my gravitics.

  That had actually stressed the stabilizers a bit, but it was worth it to look cool in front of an audience that I desperately needed to impress. And indeed, the gasps and oaths coming up from my Damned were music to my ears.

  Which is why I was pretty much flat-footed when Thirteenth Chain attacked me.

  I’d taken my eyes off of him for a second, and there was no yelling, no strategy, nothing in his charge but simple brute force: a mirror of the tactic I’d used to wipe out the burren a few seconds ago, really. He picked up a rock, ran at me, and tried to bash my helmet in.

  After the third bash, when I’d recovered from the surprise, I knocked it from his hands, grabbed him by the front of his jacket, and hauled him up again. He scraped and grabbed at my mask with his claws, rasping uselessly at my empty eye sockets.

  And unlike the last time I’d hauled him up one-handed, this time he wasn’t stopping.

  Why? I’d just killed his friends in front of him, less than five minutes ago, and he had kept control then.

  I looked into his eyes, looked for answers.

  And I found pain. Rage, yes, anger hot enough to eclipse a star, burning in its purity... but also pain.

  I looked away, to the burren I’d slain. They twitched in their death throes. His burren was clambering to its feet, bleating at me and lowering its head for another charge.

  Those other demons I’d killed, had they been his friends at all? Did he care more for the riding beasts?

  Time to test that theory. I leveled my free palm at his burren. “YOUR ATTACK IS FUTILE. CEASE, GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, AND CALM YOUR BURREN, OR SHE SHALL DESTROY IT LIKE THE OTHERS.”

  Thirteenth Chain’s claws paused, shaking on my mask. Then he pulled them back, and I saw his mouth moving below his scarf as he tried to speak, couldn’t. Finally he gave a simple nod, a jerk of his skull, and I tossed him in the general direction of his burren.

  I turned my back on them both, crossing my arms... and surreptitiously locking my gravitics once more. I watched him through the rear cameras and he did nothing beyond calm his animal, as instructed. A second passed. Then five. Then ten. I unlocked my gravitics.

  “You are a merciful Lady,” the cat observed, in the silence.

  “WHY? NO HARM WAS DONE. WHAT DOES A MOUNTAIN CARE FOR THE STING OF A BEE?”

  I gestured to my Damned. “NOW WE HAVE FRESH MEAT. CLEAN AND HARVEST THE KILLS, IF YOU WANT DINNER TONIGHT.”

  They looked to each other, pulled out their spikes, and set to the task.

  I pulled my Chorus into a huddle, beckoned Khalid and Vector over.

  “First off, I’m sorry we didn’t intervene,” Alpha said. “We didn’t expect hell cowboy over there to lose his shit. Then you had matters in hand, and we didn’t want to make you look weak.”

  “IT’S ALL RIGHT. NO HARM DONE.” I frowned under my mask. “HE HAD EMPATHY FOR THOSE BURREN.”

  “I would be surprised if that were true.” Khalid asked. “Loyalty is not rewarded in Hell.”

  “Perhaps empathy with humans is not rewarded,” Beta offered, “but we are dealing with an alien society and culture. There may be striations that we are currently unaware of.”

  “Demons are demons,” Khalid said, folding his arms. “I have never before encountered one who acted with any sort of virtue.”

  “Yeah, but what kind of demons do you normally run into, Mr. Stabby?” Delta asked. “The kind evil shits summon up to go murder busloads of nuns, right?”

  “Greater demons, yes. These are lesser. Far lesser.”

  “So maybe they don’t get held to the same standards of vileness as the big guys? I mean shit, someone’s got to haul the trash and groom the hellhounds, and that doesn’t get done so effectively if every hellish dog groomer is always like ‘muahahha, now I shall betray you, my master!’ I’m just saying that some of them might be punch-clock demons.”

  “PUNCH-CLOC
K DEMONS?”

  “Y’know, demon Steve wakes up in the morning and it’s like “morning Damned souls,” and they’re like “Morning, Steve!” Then Steve puts his time card in the hole punch and pulls his eight hour shift of defenestrating dudes. And afterwards he goes and has a few hellbeers or whatever and unwinds with the Stygia bowl on hell-o-vision.”

  “DIRE IS REASONABLY SURE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HELL-O-VISION.”

  “It’s an allegory.”

  Khalid shook his head. “The second you believe that any of these creatures can be sympathetic, is the moment they will turn that against you. Hell is evil. Demons are evil. That is their purpose in existence, and they do it well.”

  “THAT IS WHAT FAITH WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE, HMMM?”

  “It is what my centuries of experience and common sense would have you believe. Though my faith does support it, yes.”

  “AND YET EVERY FALLEN ANGEL ONCE STOOD IN GOD’S HOST, YES?”

  “There can be no forgiveness for treason.”

  “WELL. WHAT FAITH CLAIMS, LET SCIENCE TEST. WE SHALL HAVE AMPLE OPPORTUNITY TO OBSERVE OVER THE MONTHS TO COME.”

  “Months?” Vector asked.

  “WE’VE GOT ENOUGH METALS DOWN HERE FOR THE NEXT STAGE OF THE PLAN. WITH THE CHORUS AND THE DAMNED MINING AND SMELTING, AND ENOUGH FOOD FOR ALL OF US BETWEEN BEAKY AND THE FOUR TONS OF MEAT DIRE JUST KILLED, WE’LL HAVE TIME TO GET THE HARDWARE BUILT. OH, WE’LL NEED WATER. LOTS OF IT.”

  Vector nodded. “If my theory about the local flora is correct, they see storms every week or so. Beaky’s built to collect water from rainfall as well, so it’ll be easy enough to tap his reservoirs, especially if you can smelt some pipes or a funnel as well as a few holding tanks. If that doesn’t work we can always hit up the river of blood and set up some purification works. There’s enough water in blood that it should serve our needs if we’re talking a scale of months.”

  “I’d wondered why you weren’t overly concerned with water,” Khalid rubbed his chin. “Let me get a head start on taking water from the blood. Alchemy is probably better suited to it than your methods, given the paucity of tools at the minute.”

  I nodded to Vector. “THAT LEAVES YOU TO FURTHER REFINE BEAKY, AND WHIP UP LIVING QUARTERS FOR OUR ENTOURAGE.”

  “We’re taking them aboard?” Khalid asked.

  “OH YES. DAMNED AND DEMONS ALIKE.” I turned my gaze on Thirteenth Chain who was actually cuddling his stunned burren, and at the Grimalkin, who was washing itself and utterly failing to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping on us. “WE HAVE SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW THEM!”

  CHAPTER 4: SATAN’S GAME

  “And she forged the alliance, forged the pact. Both man and demon would work side by side and share the truth that was the lie.”

  --Excerpt from the second chapter of the first book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie

  I gazed down from on high, looking down into the quarry that we’d claimed as our own. Once, it had been mined out of iron and coal, raw material stripped away to forge the tortuous blood spires to the south. But they’d left many other metals, many other resources behind.

  Those were now ours, taken bit by bit by the work crews that scurried like ants below Beaky.

  “There you are!” Vector called, from back towards the carved-out hatch we’d put in the massive creature’s upper hide. “What are you doing?”

  “WAITING. THE LAST SECTION OF PIPE SHOULD BE CLEARED IN FIVE... FOUR... THREE...”

  The ground rumbled, audible even from my current perch. Beaky shifted and squawked, clearly unhappy with the noise. Then water poured from the side of the quarry, streaming out from the brass nozzle that five of my Damned crew were busy manipulating. Brass like the rest of the pipes, bronze because we had plenty of it lying around and it was a shame to waste steel. The only source for good quality steel was the spires, and if we did too much damage to those somebody might notice.

  “THERE WE GO.” I watched it splash down into the channels we’d carved for it over the last few weeks. “THIS WILL MAKE REFINING THE ORE MUCH, MUCH EASIER.”

  “I’m still concerned about the organisms on the edge of the river,” Vector scratched one stubbled cheek, staying well back from the edge. “There’s only so much I could do to conceal them. And if Thirteenth Chain’s being honest, the river will see traffic sooner or later. If they’re spotted...”

  “IF THEY’RE SPOTTED THEY’LL LOOK LIKE SOME FORM OF HORRIBLE, UNPREDICTABLE WILDLIFE. LIKE OUR STRIX FRIEND HERE.” I thumped Beaky’s hide. The Romans called him and his kindred Striges, after some form of local legend back in the Empire. For lack of anything better, the name had stuck. “SPEAKING OF THAT, DID YOU EVER FIGURE OUT WHAT MADE HIM SCURRY OFF LAST WEEK?”

  “Ah, that.” Vector chuckled and mopped his spectacles. “I’ve figured out his part in the local ecosystem.”

  “OH?”

  “Shit.”

  “WHAT’S WRONG?”

  “No, he produces massive amounts of shit. It’s why he scurried off. It was to go take a big dump in the spot the local demons have trained him to. It evidently helps grow their crops much faster than any other type of fertilizer they can get their hands on.”

  “THIRTEENTH CHAIN CONFIRMED THAT?”

  “No, the Grimalkin did.” Three months of living with the thing around, underfoot, lurking its heart out at every opportunity and we still hadn’t learned its name. I supposed I could force the issue, but it was simpler to call it ‘The Cat’, or ‘The Grimalkin’. To me the demons were pretty much prisoners of war, and I would not mistreat or extort non-vital information from them without a good reason. If The Cat had a reason for remaining nameless, I would respect that.

  Thinking of one demon put me in mind of the other. I strode to the other side of Beaky, evading the glaring, fidgeting heads that studded him like eyes on a potato. They weren’t supposed to attack me, thanks to Vector’s tinkering, but the poor dear still had instincts, and I didn’t want to push the bird-beast too far out of his comfort zone. I got to the edge, enabled my tracking software, and scanned around until I found a black, moving dot in the distance. Zooming in three times revealed the familiar form of the burren, with Thirteenth Chain on its back. Still riding his patrol, still keeping to the circuit we’d agreed upon.

  “Everything all right?” Vector couldn’t see what I could, of course. His augmentations were good, but not enough to compete with my engineering expertise.

  Just as I thought that, my vision glitched, and my HUD flickered, a troublesome bug rearing its head once more. I needed to clean the contacts and replace some of the wiring in the upper portion of the mask, and I couldn’t do that without the proper components.

  Vector’s enhancements weren’t as powerful as my devices, but without the tools and materials to do maintenance, they’d outlast me.

  We were working on that, but I could see the time coming when I’d have to start looking at gearing down.

  “I said, is everything all right?” Vector tapped at my elbow.

  “FOR NOW.” A thought struck me. “THE FERTILIZER. IT’S BASICALLY DIGESTED PEOPLE.”

  “Parts of it. And that’s the reason for the centralized shit-piles. The demons on shit farming duty pull out the re-forming Damned and send them out with crews who put them back up on the spires before they awaken. So it’s a renewable cycle. Every few weeks the Striges get a yen to eat, then a few weeks after that they crap them out and go feed again.”

  “AND PEOPLE GET DEVOURED OVER AND OVER AGAIN FOR ALL ETERNITY.”

  “You’re missing the deeper connotations, here. The full possibilities...” his eyes fairly glowed as he smiled. “This is only one cycle, one ecosystem. You’ve got a biological resource here that never runs out, doesn’t need food or water, and revives pretty much no matter what happens to it. The demons have harnessed the Damned to grow their crops. So that makes me wonder, just what is that river of blood for? Just what greater purpose does it serve?”

  “THOSE BIOLOGICAL RESOU
RCES HAVE FACES. AND NAMES.”

  “I know. I know. But I’m starting to wonder if Khalid’s aloofness isn’t more the way to go, here. The demons we captured... sure, the Grimalkin makes no bones about being an evil cat, but Thirteenth Chain, well, he’s decent enough for a prisoner-of-war. A little standoffish, but functionally he’s not too far from human. I should know, I’ve put him through every test I can think of that wouldn’t violate the Geneva convention.”

  I nodded. “AND THEY HAVE CROPS. THEY NEED TO EAT. THEY NEED TO DRINK, EVEN IF ONLY BLOOD. AND THEY STAY DEAD, TOO.” I turned my head, to survey the graves we’d dug for the other Chains, now mostly-obscured by blown dust.

  I remembered when I had first emerged from the surgical chair, to face a brand-new world head on. Learning bit by bit, with every interaction and observation.

  This was the collegiate-level version of that. I did not yet understand Hell, and here I had been thrown directly into it. Even more so than my initial foray into a strange world, misunderstanding something fundamental here meant that I stood the very real chance of getting myself and all my friends dead.

  I shook off the morbid thought. “COME ON, IT’S ALMOST PAYCHECK TIME. YOU CAN HELP DISTRIBUTE OBOLS.”

  At Vector’s nod, I grabbed him and descended from on high. Easier than traversing Beaky’s innards and using the tentacle-lift. Less slimy, too.

  Khalid met us on the ground, eyes keen and glittering above the pulsating flesh of his symbiote. A new one, since the old one had succumbed to silicosis a few days ago. “HOW GOES IT?”

  He pulled back his mantle to show me an assortment of vials. “Better. We found numerous crystals of antimony, allowing me to craft several reagents I have been long without.”

  “Antimony? Toxic stuff, that,” Vector remarked.

  “When it is not properly purified and run through the philosopher’s stone, it is. But these concoctions are quite survivable. For humans, at any rate.” He fell in with us, one hand on his sword’s hilt as we picked our way down onto the quarry’s floor, over the slabs of stone we’d cut into loose paths, and past the newly-created stream of water that spilled from the cliff side. The caves yawned to our left and right, about half of them covered with the dustcovered membranes that Vector had grown as air filters. Those were used for storage and living quarters. No need to seal off the active mines, the dust raised from the inside of them was nasty enough; barring the outside dust would do little good.