by Briana Snow
“Dante Alighieri?” Verity said with a brittle, cold smile. “Well, I won’t lie because I don’t want to endanger my soul any more than it is already, but,” Verity touched her ruined hair in apparent worry, “you could say that we don’t see eye to eye.”
“Good.” The man smiled suddenly. “That disgusting little twerp ruined my life. Ransacked me for information, won my confidences, and then made a mint selling his guidebooks to hell. What a scoundrel. I can’t wait until he gets here.” The candle-seller rubbed his murderous hands in glee.
“Well, you might not have to wait long, the way that the world upstairs is going,” Penelope said.
“Ah, the war?” the old man said. “Come in, come in.” He gestured for them to follow him inside his ramshackle room, workshop and study. Large vats of foul-smelling liquid bubbled and stewed, and complicated pulley systems worked on cog wheels to dip and raise back-thread wicks. There were stubs of candles everywhere, amidst the scattered wooden work tables and three-legged stools. The room smelt like cooking grease, and Penelope didn’t want to ask just where all of the wax and fat came from, seeing as she hadn’t seen any bees or flowers down here in Hell.
“Which war?” Penelope said with a shudder. “I think that there’s probably been an awful lot, you know, since you’ve been gone.”
“The war between Hell and the rest of the world, of course!” Simeon rolled his eyes. “All of the Underworld is amassing, you know. There’s been a summons, and the Princes of Hell are being drawn to the epicenter like fleas to a dog. They are just waiting for the portal to open.”
“We need to get out. Of Hell,” Verity cut in, stepping slightly in front of Penelope (and the grimoires) as she did so.
“You and everyone else, lady,” Simeon chuckled cruelly. “But at least you two can leave. You’re not damned, yet.”
“So, you will take us out?” Penelope said hopefully.
“Take you? I can’t take you anywhere—I’m just as damned as everyone else is down here, I’m afraid. Some silly business to do with conjuring tricks. But I can tell you where some gaps are… There have always been a few gaps between the spiritual realms, you know, despite the best efforts to plug them and ward them. It appears that reality is not a complete science.”
“Paris. We need the Paris one,” Verity said firmly, and Simeon suddenly frowned.
“That, uh… that is trickier than most. There’s a very good opening to Stonehenge I can probably lead you to. Nice and smooth ride,” the man said.
“Paris. It has to be Paris,” Penelope repeated, and Simeon suddenly understood.
“Ah. Oh dear. Oh dear me, indeed,” the damned man said.
“What’s wrong?” Verity said angrily, standing firmly between Simeon and the grimoires. Penelope sensed a change in the man, as he drew himself up to his full height.
“I believe that I have just worked out who you are, and what you are trying to do,” Simeon said severely. “There is only one route through the planes that leads to Paris, and it leads directly to,” his eyes flicked to the two large grimoires that Penelope was holding, “those.” He had a look on his face that was half-wonder, half-hatred.
“Yes, so? Are you going to lead us to it or not?” Verity demanded. “We can pay, if you are looking for the promises of an un-damned soul.”
“Verity, no!” Penelope hissed at her. “You’ve given too much already.”
“Oh, payment is out of the question, my dear young lady,” Simeon said. “I have no wish to further my damnation here anymore than you do, but the problem is entirely a practical one. I am not sure whether I want to spend the rest of my damnation being torn apart inch by inch, by the creature that guards the Paris portal.”
“What is it, an Archon? Because if it is, I’m not afraid of them. We’ve already managed to elude one Prince of Hell, and I am sure that we can manage another,” Verity bartered.
“Oh dear me no, this is no Archon Prince that we are dealing with—although they are bad enough! This is a Flayer. It is a creature with enough barbed tentacles to eviscerate all of us, at the same time. But the problem with the Flayers is that they are purely cruel. They have no care for what crosses their path, only that they will spend years gutting it and skinning it. Years.”
“It must be there on purpose,” Penelope said with a shudder of fear. “To stop anyone getting the last volume.”
“Or to be the first one out of Hell when the gates are opened, perhaps,” Simeon said darkly. “No. There is nothing that you can say that would make me want to take you there. It is madness. The Flayer will kill us all, and then Hell will have two of the Luminaire Minus Clavems: The Key’s Without Light!” Simeon said.
“Hell is going to have them anyway, if we don’t’ do anything,” Penelope said. “Please, Simeon. Think about your own damnation, your own salvation even. If you help us, then that has got to reduce your time in hell, right? What would such a good deed do for you?”
“I’m not entirely sure it works like that down here,” Simeon muttered.
“Then never mind your salvation then!” Penelope almost shouted in frustration. “If all we do is stay here, then sooner or later the demons will sniff us out, and they will have two of the grimoires. All they will have to do is to open the third one, the one in the Paris National Library, and that is it. The world is over.” Penelope looked pleadingly at him.
“You forget that, for some of us, the world is already over.” Simeon shook his head. “You will have to choose another portal. Stone-Henge must be very nice this time of the year.”
“Stone-Henge will be freezing at this time of the year,” Verity countered. “Come on, Penny. It looks like we’re on our own. We’ll just have to find our own way to Paris.” She turned to take Penelope by the shoulder, dragging her behind her.
“But—wait…” Simeon muttered angrily. “You can’t find your own way, of course not. You’ll get caught.”
“We’ll just have to take our chances, Simeon,” Verity said darkly.
“But—but you have no chances!” the infernal candle maker said.
“So, everyone keeps telling us.” Verity opened the door to the shop, and stepped out, taking the Special Collections Librarian with her as she did so.
“Fine!” Simeon said from behind her. “Fine! I will help you. But don’t blame me when we all die in a messy, horrible fashion.”
“Everyone keeps warning us of that, too,” Penelope said, as they both turned back into the shop to find the route out of hell.
Chapter XXXII
For some reason the creature kept its mortal skinsuit as it walked through the tunnels of Hell. The Archon marched, unceasingly and unerring, following an invisible trail that only it could sense. This was one of the purposes that the Princes of Hell had, after all, been designed for—to unceasingly find the portals and entrances into the world of men, as well as to lead the legions of hell into battle.
The Archon’s dedication was total, and fixed.
It was just the Special Consul’s mind that wavered.
The brain that the Archon was inhabiting should be dead, for all intents and purposes. If any other human had suffered the days of malnutrition, the battles, the fatigue and the injuries that the FBI Agent Special Consul Maximus had, then they would have died a long time ago. But this one was inhabited by a Prince of Hell, and that meant that the Archon had to, occasionally, keep at least the body alive (if not the soul—which it had eaten when it first possessed him).
The heart pumped, once or twice, every now and again, sending just enough nutrients to keep the muscles and all of the bones operating in the way that they should. Some of this blood even reached the brain, and the cerebral cortex, flooding into the spaces between nerves and synaptic pathways, and reactivating electrical signals by mere hydrostatic charge.
No, the Special Agent was not alive in any way. The body had no human soul. It had no personality, no thoughts, and no feelings—but its memories were still locked away insid
e the inert neurochemicals of the brain, inside the hormones and the nerve connections. The memories were encoded into the chemicals, and with the flush of the occasional blood-wave, they were re-activated, and released.
The Archon remembered times before, when a part of it had been a human who had sworn to protect against every foul creature. Weak, the Archon dismissed such events. But other memories also rose: the joy of sparring, and winning, the physical endorphins and secret victories that the Special Consul had felt when he had trained, had run, had swam. Other, purely emotional memories started to surface. Shame. Fear. Joy. Hatred. Fervent and fierce loyalty to his order, to the idea that the world could be saved, could be made pure, and safe for all eternity.
The Archon started to feel at home in the body for some reason. Almost—as if it liked to have the physical body for a while. Perhaps it would even, after all of this is said and done, return to the world of the living and rule there as a King in his own right. Enjoy being a human. It became an idea that started to haunt the infernal creature, and one that it could not quite shake. It was a new sensation for the ancient evil from before time, and one that made it feel worried.
But despite all of these strange new mortal feelings that the Archon was being subjected to, it still marched ever deeper into Hell, following the trail that led to the two volumes of the Luminaire Minus Clavem.
***
Pandemonium, the ever-moving, every-anguished city, trudged. Every hour there were hundreds of its bearers that cried out in their torment, but they could not quite die—no matter how gruesome their injuries became—not until their allotted sentence of damnation was up, at least.
The city continued to trudge, and it was easy for the singular figure of the Archon to catch up with it, to wait for the metal ladder to swing around which the two intruders into its realm had taken, and to step easily up to haul itself into the streets.
The Archon walked the narrow avenues and alleyways of the city of Pandemonium, following a route that took it deeper, higher, and further into the city. The other damned souls seemed to register that there was something other about this newly cursed shade, and they avoided him. The damned spread out from around the marching Archon like the way interacting substances will flee. The damned didn’t even know why they reacted in this way, but any that peered into the shades of the wandering Maximus would feel suddenly cold, and doomed.
The steps of the Archon took him into the markets of the city of the lost, where every type of sin and extravagance was on offer, It took him through the crowd (not having to jostle, shove, or push) as they fell back from him. His steps took him to a smaller stone alleyway on the far side, where there lurked a woman with an elaborate headdress made out of blackened twigs like a halo of thorns, and from each branch there hung a small glass bottle, and inside of which were scraps of paper, secrets, gossips, and rumors.
“I’m not working!” The woman hadn’t seen who—or what—was coming for her services, as she was still huddled on the floor, going through her takings for this eternally hot day.
The Archon stood in front of her, and said nothing. It could smell the Luminaire near, as near as just a few hours perhaps. There were two now, two Luminaire volumes, and all he had to do was to get to them and open them.
“Look, clear off, because I already told you that I’m not…” the woman scowled, standing up to give the annoying customer a shove, but stopped suddenly when something in her felt the doom and the evil emanating from the creature.
“I, uh, I don’t know what you want,” she said lamely.
The Archon looked at the secret seller silently, before opening a mouth over broken teeth. “Yes, you do,” it said, through the cracked and rasping broken vocal chords of the Special Consul.
The secret seller thought about arguing with the thing, about trying to find a way to hide perhaps, or to lie, but knew that she couldn’t. Her head kept on ringing with the recent sight of the two unsullied souls just a little while earlier, the woman that she had taken hair from, and the woman with the two grimoires. The secret seller did not know quite who or what this man was—perhaps he was a powerful evil sorcerer, or a lesser demon in human form—but whatever he was, she could not disobey him. She nodded, producing from her pocket the locket of Verity Vorja’s hair, and holding it between them.
“This, this is all the payment I got,” she lied, and the Archon could see the lie on the woman’s lips, but it did not care for such petty sins. It snatched the lock of hair from the secret seller, and sniffed it appreciatively. It smelled of the human soul, and it only increased the thing’s rage and hunger to find the women who had escaped it.
“They went, they went to the candle-maker’s. The Lighter,” the woman stammered, nodding her head in obeisance.
The Archon looked up, and very slowly twitched that awful and fierce leering grin at the woman. It seemed to be the thing that he should do, a more human part of it was feeling. “Thank you,” it said, for the first time, and walked away.
On the route to the candle-maker’s, the Archon took a detour. This was highly unusual for any Archon on the hunt for what it was tied to. But this was a very unusual Archon. It had started to devise for itself a plan, and the locket of hair would be its guarantee.
After the Archon had finished its work, it emerged into the uncomfortably warm streets once more, and continued on its hunt for the Luminaire Minus Clavem, still with the rictus grin upon its face. If anything, the Archon felt cheerful.
Chapter XXXIII
“Do we have to wear these?” Verity said in disgust. She was holding up the gray mortuary rags that Simeon had presented to the two women just a moment before. Penelope could only wrinkle her nose and agree with her friend.
The trio stood in what looked like an old covered warehouse or stone market which had long since been abandoned by the bureaucracy of Hell (although Penelope dreaded to think just what the market could have been selling, or what it would have accepted as payment), and, to her surprise, there was also gathered in the same room a number of other damned souls.
“Yes, you do have to wear them. If you want to travel with me, that is,” the old man snapped back at her. Penelope was starting to see an especial contempt between the two, as Verity questioned and bickered at the old magician’s every action and decision.
It must be professional rivalry, the Special Collections librarian thought, as she threw the long gray rags over her body and pulled the hood over her head to conceal her hair. At least she could hide the two volumes of the Luminaire under the robes.
“Who are they?” Penelope asked, nodding towards the other assembled, shroud-wearing souls. They can’t all be un-damned souls, can they? She studied the small group. If they were un-damned, then it seems as though the underworld must be a much busier place than she had previously thought. Either that, or eternal damnation just wasn’t so eternal after all.
There were about five of them altogether, of varying heights and builds, and a pretty even mixture of men and women. Penelope had to wait for their shuffling steps to reveal their faces, and apart from the pale, tired, and clearly ill looks on some of them, she couldn’t particularly tell if they were damned or merely lost down here in Hell.
“They’re glimpsers, we call them,” Simeon said. “Usually the newly damned, or those with such a strong connection to their old lives that they can’t forget what they had, up there in the normal world.” The old man’s voice went quiet for a moment, and his eyes roamed far away as if searching his own memories too.
“Are they going to cross over, like us?” Penelope asked.
“There seems an awful lot of them, if you want to keep this all a secret,” Verity muttered disparagingly from the depths of her own hood and cloak.
“Well, that’s the beauty of this plan, you see…” Simeon gave a shake of his head, returning to the present from some secret reverie. “We’re not going to be secret at all.”
“What? Are you mad?” Verity said, horrified, clea
rly thinking that the candlemaker was about to sell them out to the princes of hell.
“No, well yes, in all probability. But no—we’re not going to be secret because there is no law in hell against glimpsing. In fact, it is positively encouraged, as long as you can get past the Flayer that is.”
“Okay… So I think that you need to tell us just what this ‘glimpsing’ thing is, and why you think that it is going to help us get back up to the living world?” Verity said heavily. “Or we won’t be going anywhere with you at all.”
Simeon scowled at her. “If this is the route that you are determined to take, and not go to Stonehenge like a normal spirit, then you will have to start listening to me, young lady,” the man snapped. “And trust the fact that I know just what I am doing. Glimpsing is an open secret in Hell. All of the authorities turn a blind eye to it, and none of the demons stop you on your way up. There are places like the portal to Paris that are natural weak spots in the veils. Through which the strong and dedicated spirit can glimpse a bit of the living world, and perhaps even exit hell for a short while, to wander the world as a ghost…”
“Wait. A ghost?” Penelope said, suddenly alarmed. “I really don’t want to become a ghost. I want my body and everything.”
“Hold your horses, young lady,” Simeon snapped. “You two will, as neither of you two are damned, but the rest of those over there? They have no body to carry with them or return to. If they managed to get past the Flayer, and if they are strong enough to push through the veils, then they’ll turn up as spirits and poltergeists in the world.”
“Just what the Knights are trying to keep out,” Penelope muttered.
“Yes. It all seems so terribly sad now, doesn’t it? The fact that the Knights Templar—one of the largest magical organizations in the mortal world, is busy trying to strengthen the walls between the realms that will keep these poor and lost people out of it.” Simeon shook his head. “That is why so many spirits turn bad, in the end. Why they end up trying to hurt the living. How many times do you think that they have made that journey, banished back to hell and then clawing their way out again, facing innumerable challenges on their way to their loved ones, only to find that their loved ones died centuries ago?” Simeon shook his head. “The injustice of it almost makes you want to side with the devils.”