That was how the cave seemed at first, black and hellish, but Gabel had enough sight to glide smoothly down and carefully place Rowan on the ground against the edge of the rocky wall. He carefully put her hair away from her eyes, gently lifted her chin with a clawed finger.
‘Rowan?’ he asked quietly.
‘Joseph…?’
‘Wait here,’ he said, but his voice didn’t carry over the roar of the immense machine, and he had to tell her twice. She only nodded, confused, as he stood straight-backed and made a silent examination of this new place, folding back his wings as his eyes adjusted. He still wore fragments of his shirt and trousers, a broken satchel and the heavy black scabbard of Caeles’ wakizashi sword.
The great machine was in the centre of the cave, half-buried in its peaty floor and resting on a dais of earth. It was made up of rings, great coils of metal with little mechanical arms that pulled the coils this way and that. They span around a central dome that rose to a flat snub of steel. Around this, bands of polished glass rotated, and the mirrors reflected the light that poured forth from the snub and amplified it. Tiny jets of steam rose from the dome, lit up by the great ray at its centre so that they seemed like streams of rising fire, all rushing toward the head of this great thing, this creature that rose and fell like some monstrous mechanical abomination, like lungs inflated; a device whose moving parts made up a complicated whole and turned it to something alive and calculating. It oscillated and steamed and roared at Gabel, who stared dumbly.
He heard voices and, after casting a worrisome glance back at Rowan, moved to scrutinize. He saw two people at the back of the cave, underneath a great crowd of dripping stalactites. They were white beside the pillar of fire, bent over a table of computers. They seemed protected from the heat by a patchy, liquescent energy barrier. Around their feet in muddy pools sat a mass of cables and wires.
There was a girl. She was a stranger to adulthood, Gabel saw, but tall and athletic, hair twisted into a long tight ponytail. She stood with an air of confidence, her hands on her slender hips, observing with indifference the work of the other. A long staff weapon was strapped to her back, the ends of which fixed with gleaming scythes.
The other was an old man, with hair like a nest of tiny infuriated snakes. He had a pair of goggles with black lenses, which the girl also wore. He was leaning over a vast workspace of computers, the wires from which trailed into multiple sockets that were attached to the massive machine. He was furiously pushing buttons, typing on a tray of yellowed keys, and watching with excitement the brightening of the light.
‘Do you see?’ he cried. ‘Rosanna, do you see?’
‘I see, father,’ the girl replied. She blinked slowly at the light, distracted, with her brow knotted slightly, the smooth skin there darkened. Her eyes had the shine of restrained tears.
‘You don’t. You’re thinking about him, aren’t you? Forget him. If Johnmal had wanted to be here so badly, he’d be here. Doesn’t matter, he’s safe. He’s one of the few who will survive. And you got out here by yourself, didn’t you?’
She nodded. ‘Is it working properly yet?’
‘The elements are ancient, I think they’ve…’ He trailed off, playing with the machines. ‘The half-life is so short. In a sense that’s why it’s so powerful. It releases all its energy in a very short space of time … but I think it’s lost its radioactivity.’
‘Then it won’t work?’
‘Perhaps not in the way we hoped. It’s there … only it’s weak; it’s all concentrated inside here.’ The man kicked the tables. ‘It’s barely even leaving this cave!’
Gabel had seen enough. He could tell from the girl’s build and posture that she was powerful, and from her scent that she was dangerous.
His thoughts coalesced; he felt himself beat his wings and clench his fists, and the fire that was running through his veins ate into his mind. He felt his consciousness slip into the background and his instincts take over.
He launched, rushing forward with just two beats of his wings, and barrelled into Rosanna. She spun at the last second, hand reaching for her weapon, but she was moving in slow motion. His arms had moved before they were even instructed. He lifted her from the ground with a preternatural screech and turned her body to ribbons, flooding the cave floor with blood, and throwing her remains against the wall.
The man looked at him in shock. His face was as white as foam. He staggered backward, took a leather pouch from the table and cast it forward. Gabel hit it with the back of his hand and knocked the pouch away, but it spilled its dusty contents and he felt them fall against him like knives. He shook the sand from his toughened flesh and roared.
‘You can’t take me yet!’ the man cried. ‘I’ll not go so easily. Does your father know you’re here? Does it know you’ve come for me?’
Gabel advanced, clawed feet stepping into the girl’s spongy flesh and squeezing blood from it. The wings on his back blew the blood into rivers that trailed before him, as if his very presence commanded it.
‘That sound!’ the man cried. ‘I knew I felt the wind blowing tonight. The beating of vast wings!’
He fell and scrabbled on the ground. ‘Where are my creatures?’ he said. ‘You, your father will tear you to pieces when he comes, you should know your place … Only Erebis decides who shall go and when – you are not needed here, Charos…’
‘You call me Charos?’ Gabel’s body roared.
‘Where are my creatures?’ the man cried, and just as he said it there was an unholy shriek, and then another, and from around the back of the machine stepped two creatures, large and black, with hunched oily shells and wide hoof-like feet. Their faces were almost man-like, black lips stretched between giant mandibles, glistening and serrated.
The two things stalked around the man on the floor and snarled at Gabel, and he saw that they were almost as tall as he.
‘My children!’ the man screamed at his creatures. ‘The intruder: can you taste the air around him? Can you taste yourselves on him?’
Gabel let loose a raging cry and dove at the first of the creatures, but they were both on him in a second. They snarled and tore at him. He knew what it was that infuriated them: the pouch of powder that Cleric had thrown at him, which contained the grounded chitin of the creatures’ siblings. It had fallen over him like powdered snow, and now they could taste that he was a killer of their kind, and they were frenzied by it.
‘You’re not the same,’ Cleric was screaming at him, ‘you aren’t the same as Charos! You’re different, aren’t you, you have man in you … You poor thing, you must feel like only half a creature, with that much human in you!’
Gabel slashed at the great animals, but they were powerful and dominating and he felt their hot breaths and their screeches, like crying insects, cut into him just as their claw-like mandibles did. He struggled and summoned all his strength, calling on his seemingly endless reserves. How far can I go? he wondered, looking out from within his raging, transformed physicality. How long will this last?
Cleric was scrambling around the tables, taking pouches and satchels and spilling their contents onto the floor. He shaped the powder and crushed stones into patterns, forming words, all the time giving a manic, didactic speech:
‘Watch what I do; see what I am drawing here? See what I do. Understand it. Iberitum chamme ist, lacum lacurae sibrium. See, look, watch, understand…’ He made stars and crosses in the dusty cave floor, ignoring the battle going on so close by, and eventually got on his knees and wrote with his finger into the peat. ‘Cubrum sate ist.’ Then he stood, as if hit by a bolt of lightning, and raised a pointed finger, screaming, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it…’ He ran to the console and pulled levers, turned dials. The light from the great machine intensified. ‘Burn, my love, my Hahnium, make my fire and leave no ashes behind you.’
Let these wretched souls free.
Gabel remembered something through the haze of his anger. Reddish colours flickered in the back
of his mind. Words, or rather the memory of words, moved through the colours like a reflection of light on a wall.
One of the creatures had its dripping claw-teeth around his wrist, their fleshy palps beating against him. Extending a claw he gouged out one of its eyes, and then the other; it screeched and oozed dark, oily blood, but it didn’t release its bite.
The other was on him suddenly, clouting him with an elephantine foot and knocking him to the ground, twisting one of his wings. It clamped its mandibles around his skull and he felt like his head was in a vice. He couldn’t move. His arms were pinned to the floor, and his leg felt broken. He couldn’t turn his head. He couldn’t see Rowan.
‘My life,’ Cleric was saying, ‘has been a miracle. The journeys I’ve taken. I’ve tasted both victory and defeat. I have been sailing a vast ocean in a battered, decaying vessel and I am about to hit the other shore, finally, just as I did so long ago … and I have my manufactured children with me, I have called them here with the Hahnium’s light, compelled them to be born, almatori kinest fiori, moths to the flame! Have you seen them fly? Did you see them circling? They have laid their eggs, they have spread their plagues, and they are being born all around. Did you see? Have you seen one being born? From the empty skulls of those soulless shells my offspring have arrived. And I am making a new world for them now. A world without man. The special, the individual, are all that will remain; I only want to purge this dead globe of all the tiresome and plain, the weak and evolutionarily unworthy. I want a world of errants, of cyborgs, of my creatures, my aliens; what can be more individual, more disparate, than an alien? I take them and change them. The religion of science has given me faith. I am pious. And I do this now, I call the Daemon, so that it may help me, and now that I have fed it the poisoned souls of Shianti it will come. I make a new existence for you now. I bring you piety. I bring you hope. I bring you love in the form of all-caressing tongues of flame!’
The pillar of fire was churning a deep red, a squall of powered scabs. There was a storm brewing inside it, and like an arrow through water the tendrils of light and smoke parted, and from it was spewed a man-form that landed roughly on its knees and crouched there, hair singed and black, portions of exposed spine burnt black.
It looked up, and at first Gabel thought he was seeing some kind of distorted reflection, but he saw that it was a creature he never again expected to see, a man named Teague restored to his theriope form, who stood and staggered, flesh burned, arms raised to shield itself from the light.
He has regressed, Gabel thought, and as soon as he did the ruined figure lurched forward. With powerful black talons pulled back one of the creatures, tore its throat and opened its mouth to its blood, then, with a hissing snarl, cried, ‘I owe … you a life…’ He toppled backward, still clinging to the creature, into the radioactive pillar. They writhed for just a second, and then they were gone.
Rebekah, Gabel thought.
Bethany, Samuel.
With a new injection of strength, he roared and knocked away the creature that was on top of him, toppling it onto its back. He then lifted one muscley thigh and placed a clawed foot upon its chitinous belly. With a gnarled hand tore the front of its skull from the rest. Gabel took one of the creature’s legs and broke it loose, tossing it into the light, where it charred and split. He bared his fingernails, sharp as daggers, and split its stomach, then scooped up its innards in a hollowed palm and filled his cheeks with them.
I will not stay here and feast on these any longer.
Let these wretched souls free.
Father, let them be loosed. Let them ascend. Let me leave.
I will not.
Let me leave.
I will not. You are mine. You are my blood. You are my spirit. I will not.
Gabel raised his head to the cave roof and screamed. Looking down he saw Cleric, black against the light, sprinkling the last of his powders onto the ground.
‘With this,’ he said, no longer talking to Gabel but to another absent soul, ‘I call thee … Cubrum sate ist. With this I am suppliant.’
I am leaving. I have no more to give. My stomach can hold no more. I will not eat.
Eat.
I will not eat! I will sail these rivers no more. I will walk these castle walls no more.
Father, let me leave.
You are my spirit.
I am a prisoner. I am fettered. Loose them, loose my bonds and loose these wretched souls!
Let me leave!
I am not your blood. I can make my own blood. I can make my own flesh. See my blood, see my flesh. I can be human. You have Charos. He will serve you in my stead.
Let me leave.
Let me leave!
‘Lacum lacurae sibrium,’ Cleric hissed, standing in the centre of his mad pictures, taking his shirt from his back. He poured over himself a vial of black liquid that filled in his eye sockets, his mouth, and trickled down his chin, between his clavicles and down his chest. ‘With this I am suppliant. I am your vessel. I am your river. Mirae begast lacae tu. Licum clarat thurnist tawak. Lacum lacurae sibrium.’
Something began to happen. Gabel was moving forward, but he was not fast enough; he was catching up with the wind from his own wing-beats, yet be wasn’t fast enough. The light was hot. He couldn’t breathe; the pillar of light was sucking up the air and burning it. He couldn’t move; he was frozen mid-air. The air stopped moving. The light hesitated in the back of his eyes, and everything took on a greyish hue. But he saw the darkness.
It appeared like tendrils of black smoke out of the air, an infectious miasma that twisted and spiralled around Cleric’s body, encasing him and moving into him; through his eyes first, then his mouth and nose, and his ears, and then through his pores, his skin. His eyes turned to liquid and in their place darkness coalesced, and formed black eyes, with stars in the very centre. His hair turned to ink, and twisted horns protruded and curled. His skin darkened and sprouted black fur and feathers. His shoulders exploded and wings came forth from fonts of blood. The wings had eyes; they all blinked and opened and stayed open, and in each shone eternity, the Universe. The blueprints of life and death. The secrets of the framework of existence.
Gabel fell backward with the force of the Daemon’s gaze.
Son, it said.
~
‘No,’ he hissed, getting to his feet. He felt the weight of his life on his shoulders. He sensed the presence of Rowan, and heard the battle cries of the people outside. Moving like shadow-lightning, Isaac was tearing Cleric’s army of mutated men open. The magus was ablaze with green fire, turning the attackers to ashes. He stood atop a pile of soot and remains and spewed a swirling thunderstorm from his fingertips, clearing the air of the frantic, ravenous creatures.
Gabel shouldered all this, and yet stood straight.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not my father. I am not your son.’
The Daemon moved its wings and surrounded him with darkness, all the eyes watching him, scrutinizing, penetrating, and the voice belched, Yes you are.
As it forced back its pinions, Gabel spread his own, and in them blinked an eye each, burning red and stark. ‘I am not!’
He rushed forward and lifted the Thing in his hands, pushing his talons through the black flesh, saying, ‘And you, you are not really here; you are a lodger, you are a cuckoo chick; you are a prisoner here, and if I break this body, you will leave.’
If you break this body I will find another.
‘I will make you leave here. You will go back.’
Perhaps you can make me. For certain you will come back with me. Know your place. Recognise your blood.
‘My blood is my own!’ Gabel lifted the black, fetid, hairy body and with the strength of his wings pushed both of them toward the machine and its great column of light. ‘This body is mine. This strength is mine.’
You will return to Hadentes and you will take your brother’s place. You shall guide the fresh souls, and you shall punish those who need to be pun
ished. There is a home for your there.
My home, he replied, is here!
Gabel forced his fists through its chest and lifted it up by them. He slammed the body against the curved silver dome of the machine. The Thing tried to break free, but Gabel had already drawn Caeles’ wakizashi. He plunged it through the Daemon’s torso and deep into the innards of the machine, pinning it. That was mine, said a voice within the Daemon’s voice.
The Daemon’s wings caught in the rotating arms. The mirrors juddered and one cracked. The light and glass began to spill outward from their intended shapes, the contours of the pillar distorting.
You deserve Hell!
‘Remember your sins,’ Gabel said, as the Daemon’s wings were torn from its back and its hair began to burn, ‘and be penitent!’
Gabel hauled the thing into the air, and with a mighty release of bunched muscles sent them both cascading into the light.
Inside was hot, and he felt his skin peel and his insides boil. As they both blistered and melted Erebis rammed its fist through Gabel’s chest and said:
I gave you your strength, son…
…and I shall reclaim it.
Gabel felt his blood reverse its flow and his armoured shell return to flesh. The fiery bird inside was caged in the Daemon’s dark fist and its wings were crushed; it was pulled from him, and in every vein and artery Gabel felt a ghastly wrenching. His claws turned to hands. His black skin turned red and peeled; he felt something like a planet colliding with his chest and he was knocked backward, out of the fiery light and against the cave wall. He felt bones break with the impact, and again when he hit the floor. The strength had been taken from him, and he was only a man again.
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