by Clive Barker
Felixson stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the gate of the fortress with a message clutched firmly in his recently mangled hand. The epistle he held had been given to him by one of Hell’s messengers, the only objectively beautiful beings in the underworld. They existed for the sole purpose of ensuring that Hell’s dirtiest dealings always came wrapped in a pretty package.
Ahead, he could see Fike’s Trench and, beyond it, the whole of Pyratha. On the road heading toward him marched a small army of Hell’s priests and priestesses, a procession of three dozen of the Order’s most formidable soldiers. Among them, Felixson was proud to say, stood his master.
Felixson took his eyes off the smoking spires of the city and returned his gaze to the approaching procession of Cenobites. A wind had sprung up, or rather the wind, for there was only one: it blew bitterly cold and stirred up the scents of rot and burnt blood that perpetually filled the air. Now, as the acrid wind grew in strength gust by gust, it caught on the black ceremonial robes of the Cenobites and unfurled the thirty-foot flags of oiled human skin that several of the priests and priestesses held so that the flags snaked and snapped high above their heads. The holes in the hides where the eyes and mouths had been looked to Felixson as though the victims were still staring wide-eyed with disbelief at the sight of the flying knives that undid them, forever screaming as their skin was expertly stripped from muscle.
The bell in the fortress tower, which was called Summoner (it was the same bell, in point of fact, those that had opened Lemarchand’s Configuration always heard tolling far off), was now ringing to welcome back the brothers and sisters of the Order to the fortress. Upon seeing his master, Felixson knelt in the mud, head bowed so deferentially that it touched the ground as the procession climbed the steps to the fortress gate. With his head firmly planted in the dirt, Felixson extended his arm, the missive he carried held high in front of him.
His lord stepped out of the procession to speak to Felixson, and the Cenobites continued to make their way past him.
“What is this?” his lord said, snatching the letter from Felixson’s hand.
Felixson turned his muddied and divided head, twisting it to the left so he could study his lord’s reaction with one eye. The Cenobite’s face was inscrutable. Nobody knew how old he was—Felixson was smart enough not to ask—but the weight of his age sat on his countenance, carving it into something that could never be manufactured, only chiseled by the agonies of loss and time. Felixson’s tongue rolled out of his head, landing in the mud and shit–caked street. He didn’t seem to mind. He was in thrall to his master.
“I am called to the Chamber of the Unconsumed,” the Hell Priest said, staring down at the letter in his hand.
Without another word, the Cenobite turned against the tide of the members of his Order and moved toward Pyratha. Felixson followed, naïve to the details but loyal to the end.
2
After the filth of the Trench, the streets of the Hell’s city were comparatively clean. They were wide and, in places, planted with some species of tree that needed no sunlight to survive, their black trunks and branches and even the dark blue leaves that sprang from them gnarled and twisted as though every inch of their growth had been born in convulsion. There were no cars on the streets, but there were bicycles, sedan chairs, and rickshaws—even a few carriages drawn by horses that had almost transparent skin and fleshless heads so flat and wide (their eyes set on either edge of these expanses of bone) that they resembled manta rays stitched upon the bodies of asses.
In the streets, word of the Cenobite’s appearance went out before him, and at each intersection even the busiest traffic was held up by demons in dark purple uniforms (the closest things Pyratha had to a police force) so that the Cenobite could make his way through the city undeterred by a single citizen.
As he passed, most of the citizens either made signs of devotion—touching navel, breastbone, and the middle brow before inclining their heads—or, if officers, went down on their knees to demonstrate their veneration. It wasn’t just hybrids and demons who dropped to the ground—so did many of the damned. The Hell Priest paid them no heed, but Felixson drank it all in.
Up close, the buildings they hurried past seemed even more impressive to Felixson than they had from the hill on which sat the monastery. Their façades were decorated with what looked like intricately rendered scenes of Lucifer’s personal mythologies. The figures were designed to be contained within a rigorous square format, which brought to Felixson’s mind the decorations he’d once seen on the temples of Incas and Aztecs. There was every kind of activity pictured in these decorations: wars, celebrations, and even lovemaking—all very graphically depicted. As he had paced a long period in the hushed and claustrophobic cells of the fortress, only able to see the city for a few stolen minutes now and then, it gave Felixson a sense of something vaguely resembling contentment to be given so much to feast his eyes upon.
“There,” the Hell Priest said, tearing Felixson from his reverie.
Felixson looked up to see the Cenobite pointing at what was easily the tallest building in the city. It rose higher than the eye could see, piercing the pitch-black sky. For all its enormity, the building was entirely void of detail. A windowless, featureless spike, its façade was the very essence of mundanity. The palace was a true work of art, a building so bland it wasn’t even appealing enough to be considered an eyesore. It was a joke, Felixson guessed, its architect found quite amusing.
As they came to within three steps of the summit, a door opened inward, though there was nobody visibly doing the job. Felixson noticed the tiniest tremor in the Hell Priest’s hand. The Cenobite cast his lightless eyes up at the stone spectacle that rose high above them, and then said, “I am here to be judged. If the judgment goes against me, you are to destroy every one of my endeavors. Do you understand?”
“Evry tings?” Felixson said.
“Don’t succumb to sentiment. I have all I need here.” He tapped his temple with the broken and poorly reset forefinger of his right hand. “Nothing will be lost.”
“I do, Master. I do can.”
The Cenobite offered a subtle approving nod, and together they stepped inside.
3
The Palace of the Unconsumed was as devoid of features inside as it was outside. The foyer was thick with infernal bureaucrats in gray suits, tailored to accommodate whatever physical defect afflicted the damned. One, with a ring of football-sized tumors growing out of his back, had his suit neatly encircling each of the pulsing protuberances. Some wore fabric hoods that reduced their expressions to two small eyeholes and a horizontal rectangle for their mouths. There were sigils sewn into the fabric, their significance outside Felixson’s field of knowledge.
The drab passages were lit with large bare bulbs, the light they gave off never entirely solid but flickering—no, fluttering—as though the source of light was alive inside. After turning the corners of the passageways six times—every one of them committed to memory by Felixson—they came out into a place of startling splendor. Felixson had assumed the entire building was a hive of featureless corridors, but he was wrong. This area was an open space, bathed in light, and consisting only of a single, reflective metal tube, perhaps ten feet wide, that ran all the way up from the floor to the ceiling, which was set so far above their heads it remained unseen.
The Cenobite pointed to the darkness above them and said a single word:
“There.”
Their ascent was accomplished via a wide spiral staircase that sat within the reflective tube. Each of the metal steps were welded to its core. But even here in this elegant construct, the infernal touch hadn’t been neglected. Each of the steps was set not at ninety degrees to the core, but at ninety-seven, or a hundred, or a hundred and five, each one different from the one before but all sending out the same message: nothing was certain here; nothing was safe. There was no railing to break the slide should someone lose their footing, only step after disquieti
ng step designed to make the ascent as vertiginous as possible.
The Cenobite, however, was defiant. Rather than climb the stair close to the column where he could at least enjoy the illusion of safety, he ascended hewing always to the open end of the step, as if daring fate to take its due. Sometimes the preceding step had been crafted so as to incline more precipitously and ascending to the next step took a considerable length of stride, yet somehow the Hell Priest managed to make the climb with effortless dignity, leaving Felixson to follow behind, clinging desperately to the core. Halfway into their journey, he started to count the stairs. Felixson got to three hundred and eighty-nine before the Hell Priest disappeared from sight.
Nearly breathless, Felixson continued his ascent and found an archway, more than twice his height, at the top of the stairs. The Cenobite had already stepped through it and was surprised to find that there was no guard—at least none visible—at the threshold. Felixson went on after his master, keeping his head declined so far that he couldn’t see anything of the chamber into which his master had led him. Felixson saw that they were in a large dome, which was surely two hundred feet high at its apex, though with his head bowed it was difficult to judge accurately. The entire chamber seemed to be carved from white marble, including the floor, which was icy cold beneath the soles of his feet, and though he did his best to keep from making a sound, the dome picked up every tiny hint and lobbed its echoes back and forth before adding them to the reservoir of murmurs and steps and quiet weepings that ran like a gutter around the farthest edge of the floor.
“Far enough,” somebody said, their command folding into a thousand tapering echoes.
A breath-cremating heat came at Felixson and the Priest from the center of the dome. The only object in the circular room was a throne so far beyond the dimensions of a piece of ordinary furniture that it deserved a better, as yet uninvented word. The thing was made of solid blocks of metal, nine or ten inches thick: one slab for the high back, one for each arm, one for the seat, and a fifth running parallel with the arm slabs but set beneath the seat.
Flammable gases blazed from six long, wide vents, one on every side of the throne and two directly beneath it. They burned with sapphire flames, which intensified to an aching white, flecked with red motes at their cores. The gases rose high above the back of the flame, which was itself easily ten feet tall, and drew together, braiding themselves into a single blazing column. The heat inside the dome would have been lethal had the dome not been pierced with several concentric rings of holes, housing powerful fans to extract excess heat. Directly above the throne, the chamber’s spotless white marble was scorched black.
As for the throne itself, it was virtually white-hot, and sitting in it, his pose formal, was the creature whose indifference to the blaze had given him his apt moniker: the Unconsumed. Felixson had heard of him in whispers. Whatever color his skin had originally been, his body was now blackened by heat. His vestments and his shoes (if ever he’d worn them) and his staff of office (if ever he’d carried one) had burned away. So too all the hair from his head, face, and body. Yet somehow, the rest of him—his skin, flesh, and bone—was unaffected by the volcanic heat in which he sat.
The Hell Priest stopped in his tracks. Felixson did the same, and even though he had been given no order, he went down on his knees.
“Cenobite. Do you know why you have been summoned?”
“No.”
“Come closer. Let me better see your face.”
The Cenobite approached within perhaps six strides of the throne, showing no concern for the incredible heat that emanated from the spot. If he felt it, he showed no sign.
“Tell me of magic, Cenobite,” the Unconsumed said. His voice sounded like the flame: steady and clean but for those flickering motes of scarlet.
“A human artifice, my Sovereign. Yet another of man’s inventions designed to grasp divinity.”
“Then why should it concern you?”
It wasn’t the Unconsumed who spoke but a fourth presence in the chamber. An Abbot of the Cenobitical Order made his presence known as he emerged from the shadows behind the Unconsumed’s throne and made his way at processional speed across the chamber. He carried the staff of the High Union, which was fashioned after a shepherd’s crook, shouting condemnations as he approached. Behind his back, the Abbot had commonly been called the Lizard, a nickname he’d earned from the countless scales of polished silver, each set with a jewel, that had been hammered into every visible inch of his flesh, assumed to cover his entire body.
“We have found your books, Priest. Obscene volumes of the desperate workings of men. It’s heresy. You are part of an Order,” the Abbot continued. “Answerable to its laws only. Why have you been keeping secrets?”
“I know—”
“You know nothing!” the Abbot said, slamming his rod against the cold marble, punishing the Cenobite’s ears with its din. “A Cenobite is to work within the system. You seem content to work outside that system. As of this moment, you are exiled from the Order.”
“Very well.”
“And personally,” the Abbot continued, “I would have you executed. But the final judgment lies with the Unconsumed—”
“—and I see no punishment in execution,” said the Unconsumed. “You are never again to set foot in the monastery. Your belongings have been confiscated. You are banished to the Trench. What happens to you there is not my concern.”
“Thank you,” said the Hell Priest.
He bowed, then turned and headed for the archway. Wordlessly, he and his servant exited the chamber and began the long descent.
4
Caz kept odd hours, but there was an emergency buzzer hidden in a niche in the brickwork beside the front door, which only a select group of people knew about. Harry used it now. There was some static on the intercom and then:
“Caz isn’t home right now.”
“It’s D’Amour. Let me in.”
“Who?”
“Harry. D’Amour.”
“Who?”
Harry sighed. “Harold.”
Sixty seconds later Harry was sitting on Caz’s overstuffed sofa, which occupied fully a quarter of his living room. Another significant fragment was taken up by books, his places in them marked. His subjects of interest could scarcely have been more eclectic: forensic pathology, the life of Herman Melville, the Franco-Prussian war, Mexican folklore, Pasolini’s murder, Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits, the prisons of Louisiana, Serbo-Croatian Puppeteers—and on and on, the towers of books looking like a bird’s-eye view of a major metropolitan city. Harry knew the etiquette of the books. You could pick something out of the stacks and flip through it, but it had to go back in the same place. You could even borrow them, but the price of a late return was always something disgusting.
Of all the men Harry had ever called his friend, Caz was easily the most intimidating. He stood six feet six inches tall, his body a mass of lean, tattooed muscle, a good portion of it done in Japan by the master who’d taught Caz the skill. Caz wore a coat of ink and color that stopped only at his neck, wrists, and ankles, its designs a compendium of classic Japanese subjects: on his back was a samurai in close combat with a demon in a rain-lashed bamboo grove; two dragons ascended his legs, their tongues interwoven as they wrapped around the length of his dick. He was bald and clean shaven, and had anyone caught sight of him coming out of a bar at two in the morning, shirtless and sweaty, they would have stepped out onto the street rather than get in his way on the sidewalk.
He cut an intimidating figure, to be sure. But one glance at his face and it was a very different story. Caz found some source of delight in everything, and as a result he had an unmatched kindness in his eyes. There was scarcely a time when Caz wasn’t smiling or laughing out loud, the one significant exception being that portion of his day he spent drilling pictures and words on other people’s bodies.
“Harold, my man, you look serious,” Caz said to Harry, using a nickname Harry a
llowed him and only him to use. “What’s troubling you?”
“If I’m going to answer that question, I need a drink first.”
Caz prepared his specialty (Bénédictine with a pinch of cocaine) in the little office behind the store, and Harry told him everything that had happened so far, every damn bit of it, sometimes reaching back to his earliest encounters.
“… and then this thing with Norma,” he said to Caz. “I mean, they got us both, y’know? How could we both have been fooled? I rarely see her frightened, Caz, maybe twice in my life, but never like this. Never hiding in some shit hole because she’s afraid of what’s going to come for her.”
“Well, we can get her out of there tonight, if you’d like, my man. We can bring her here. Make her feel comfy. She’ll be safe.”
“No. I know they’re watching.”
“They must be keeping their distance then,” Caz said, “’cause I haven’t had a twinge.”
He turned his palms over, where two of his synthesized alarm sigils had been inked by an ex-lover of his in Baltimore.
“I haven’t felt anything either,” said Harry. “But that might mean they’re getting smarter. Maybe they’re running some interference signal, y’know, to block our alarms. They’re not stupid.”
“And neither are we,” Caz said. “We’ll get her somewhere safe. Somewhere…”—he trailed off and a Cazian grin appeared on his face—“… in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Trust me, I know just the person. I’m going to go over there now. You go back to Norma. I’ll call you when everything’s ready.”