King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  Swords and daggers and other weapons jostled in their scabbards and banged his legs as Octavian raced down the stairs, careful to jump over cracks in the stone and to keep as near to the wall as he could manage and keep his speed. He had made it once around Hell's throat when he heard Squire shouting behind him again.

  "Here they come, Pete! Don't you fuckin' leave me up here!"

  Octavian glanced back the way he'd come. Squire had kept up better than he'd thought, now only a dozen or so steps behind him, but the winged things — Hell's blackbirds, he thought — had banked and now dove toward the hobgoblin.

  Damn it, Octavian thought, and he drew the sword Squire had given him and started back up the steps.

  Squire could have escaped by diving into the shadows, but had he done so, there was always the chance that demons would find a way to follow him onto the Shadowpaths, and Octavian knew he would not run the risk.

  Instead, the hobgoblin cursed loudly, reached behind his back and produced a small, double-sided battle axe. As the first of the demon birds came at him, Squire cleaved its skull in half and the thing careened into the cavern wall beneath the hobgoblin's feet, wings slapping wetly before it tumbled all the way down into the flames far below. The second bird slashed Squire's forehead and the hobgoblin roared his displeasure even more loudly and swung the axe in time to slash the two wings on its right side as it flew away. Unable to stay aloft, the thing plummeted, its screeching baby wail even louder than before.

  The third demon bird passed by Squire and the hobgoblin started running.

  "Go!" Squire snapped. "What the hell are you coming this way for?"

  "To help," Octavian said as he halted and reversed direction yet again.

  "Yeah, good job with that. A lotta fuckin' help you —"

  Shrieking, the third bird came at Octavian's back. He ducked, grateful for the warning, and it flew over his head, one talon slashing his scalp. As it went by he thrust out his sword and cut its belly open; stinking viscera spilled out and hung in loops as it hit the stairs and began to roll and bounce with a crack and snap of bones. When he reached the dying, twitching thing on the steps, he kicked it off into the flames.

  "Getting there!" Squire called.

  Another three-quarters of a circuit around and they would be able to leave the throat. But the death screams and the blood of the three hell-birds had drawn the attention of the others. Octavian heard Squire shout and turned — nearly losing his footing on the carved steps — and saw six of the things converging on the hobgoblin. Several others rose up on the thermal drafts and darted toward Octavian. He could feel the magic thrumming inside of him, power begging to be unleashed. It pulsed as his core, a flood pent up behind a dam, and from the way his fingers prickled he knew that its energy had begun to spark and emanate from there.

  No, he thought, tamping it down. With a hack and a slash of the sword, he killed the two that dove at him. The diamond-like side of the blade did the job, but the ebony side cut demon flesh with zero resistance. Of course it did; Squire had made it.

  "Oh, you motherfuckingsonofabitch!" the hobgoblin roared.

  Two of the demon birds that had attacked Squire were dead but the other four were slashing at him and more were circling like vultures, ready to dart down for a strike. Octavian saw several headed toward him and knew he had to go back up again to help Squire. But the moment he had taken his first step in that direction, the hobgoblin shouted at him.

  "Go! Just go! I'll get there!"

  "How —"

  Birds slashed at Octavian's face and he hacked them in two, spattered with their blood.

  "Go!" Squire shouted as he slammed himself against the cavern wall, crushing one or two of the birds, each of which had to be more than half his size. Talons hooked through his coat and in his hair and he thrashed against them as they tried to pick him up. Octavian had an image in his mind of gulls carrying their prey high and dropping it to stones far below in order to break it open and feast on the insides.

  But Squire insisted he had it under control. Hesitating a moment longer, Octavian turned and hurried down the steps. If he had to use magic, he would do it, but it might just save Squire's life for a moment as it brought hundreds of the birds down on them at once.

  Sword in hand, he ran along cracked steps made slippery with the stinking dung of the demon birds. A blast of fire shot up through a crack ahead of him, so close it singed his face as he pulled back. It subsided only slightly and he leaped over it, continuing, only a half-circuit around the throat to go, and he glanced over at Squire just in time to see the hobgoblin hurl his axe out over the bottomless inferno, the weapon turning end over end until it struck the cavern wall just beside the door below, where it cut the stone and stuck fast.

  Octavian stared. Squire had killed a couple more of the birds but now he had no weapon in his hands — they were all sheathed or holstered — how would he . . .

  The hobgoblin jumped from the stairs. Octavian shouted his name, but then he saw that Squire had not jumped alone. He had his left hand around the talons of a demon bird and his right clenched around the throat of another. The one he strangled could only wheeze but the first let out a scream of fury and perhaps embarrassment as Squire jerked at them, diverting and directing them. Others picked at them and he shot out a kick or three to keep them back. The one he strangled began losing altitude but the other fought to stay aloft, rising higher, and with a shock Octavian realized that Squire would beat him to the door.

  "You cunning little —" he began, and then a blast of fire shot from a crack behind him and knocked him headlong down the stairs.

  Octavian rolled, the back of his coat on fire as he slammed into the wall and stairs and nearly went right off the side and into the pit. His fingers scrabbled for purchase and found it and his left arm wrenched in the socket hard enough that he let out a yell and a bit of magic flashed from his eyes, but not a spell or a real summoning of power, and he hoped it would not be enough to send up an alarm.

  Grunting, bleeding, he got to his feet just as a demon bird dove at his face. He brought his sword up just in time for the thing to impale itself. More blood splashed him and he would not have minded — the blood of demons would help them pass unnoticed in the bowels of hell — but the stink made him want to vomit.

  He staggered down half a dozen steps as he got his bearings again and then realized he was only ten feet from the crude doorway hewn in the cavern wall. Squire stood waiting for him.

  "You're out of your mind," Octavian said.

  The hobgoblin worked his axe out of the cut it had made in the stone wall and then turned to smile at him.

  "Maybe, but you can't say I don't know how to show a fella a good time."

  Days passed, though in Octavian's world that might have been merely minutes. They took several wrong turns and killed dozens of demons, large and small, and never with magic. Squire's weapons were more than adequate to dispatch the low-level devils that they encountered along their path and those that might have proven a challenge had been thus far easy to circumvent.

  There were nexus points in the infernal lands, spots where the borders of one Demon Lord's territory led to that of another that might not be geographically adjacent. Science might have called these nexus points wormholes, but Octavian felt sure it would be foolish to attempt to apply the physics of the human world in Hell. The infernal lands were inconsistent, constantly in flux, so one realm might be firmly beside another for years and then shift elsewhere in the blink of an eye. There were constants, of course, roots so firmly planted in this dimension that they could not be moved. The nexus points were reliable because they led to their original destinations no matter where those destinations might have moved, but there were other fixed bits of geography as well. Octavian knew most of them, but it had been a long time since he had been in the caverns and plains of Hell and his memory proved imperfect.

  "Where are all the people?" Squire asked.

  "People?"

/>   "The dead. The damned."

  Octavian exhaled. He had been very careful thus far to avoid the fields of the dead as much as possible, and the halls of torment even more so. Squire had accompanied him here but there was no point in putting the hobgoblin through that if it wasn't completely necessary.

  "They're here," was all he said.

  "I can hear them."

  Listening, Octavian discovered that he, too, could hear distant cries of suffering and despair. His heart clenched with sorrow but he forced himself not to slow down.

  "Try not to listen," he said. "There's nothing you can do for them."

  "I could get them out," Squire said. "Some of them, at least."

  Octavian turned to stare at him. "I thought you couldn't travel directly from Hell to the Shadowpaths."

  "You know that's not true. I just . . . don't want to be the one to compromise the paths. But all these people, suffering like that . . . if I could get even some of them out —"

  "Do you even know what you're saying? Trillions of souls, maybe more, into the Shadowpaths, with all the demons of Hell on their trail."

  Squire lowered his gaze. Octavian had never seen him so completely at a loss, so ordinary. So human, though he was not that.

  "Maybe I could —"

  "Squire," Octavian snapped, and the hobgoblin glanced up at him. "This place will destroy you if you let it. Despair will weigh you down until you feel like you can't move another inch, and then they'll get you."

  "They'll . . ."

  "Yes. You'll let them. You'll reach a point where you think you deserve to be here. So listen to me carefully — all of these souls here, they can't leave. They're here because they believe they deserve it, or because they committed such atrocities that they are truly evil, now, and no other dimension would have them. All you'd be doing is flooding the Shadowpaths with demons, just like you feared, and who knows how many other worlds they'd invade because of it?"

  Squire stared at the smooth rock floor underfoot. For several long seconds he seemed to be listening to the distant cries of the damned.

  "I can't not hear them," he said. "I can't not care."

  "Then you have to weigh their suffering against all of the other suffering you would create if you tried to free them."

  The hobgoblin breathed in and out, in and out, then he shuddered a bit, shook his arms and head, and forged ahead. Octavian followed, but he would watch Squire carefully from now on, not only because his plan depended on the ugly little man but because he considered Squire a friend — a friend who had only come to Hell because Octavian had asked him.

  They walked down a long slope inside a canyon whose walls rose up so smoothly that they seemed to be made of metal instead of rock, steel that had been melted down and then painted on. It stretched hundreds of feet on either side of them, but all around this floor of this strange Hellish canyon were crumbled ruins of what must have been structures. They reminded Octavian most of the worst of Pompeii's ruins, eroded to the rudimentary representations of structures until they looked like mere impressionistic suggestions of structures than actual buildings. Once, this had been a legendary city of Hell called Malizia. It had been built in a time when the Demon Lords were united and their relations more civilized, but entropy had taken hold and the natural savagery of demons overcame any attempts at order. This was a place of chaos and disharmony, after all. Malizia had never had a chance at enduring.

  As they continued down the long slope of Malizia's ruins, they passed through the shadows of gigantic bones that jutted from the ground and curved thirty or forty feet into the air. These were the remains of Demon Lords who had gone to war in the time of the city's destruction. The bones were dry and pitted as dead coral, but Octavian still felt an ancient power resonating within them, as if these antediluvian demons were not dead but only inert, and the dust might blow and gather around their bones and return to cruel, raging, primal and infernal life. The dead were not often so full of potential, but evil tended to linger long after the flesh had begun to rot.

  High above them, holes in the ceiling let in a strange, pale light whose source he had never been able to discover. It fell in shafts like sunlight through breaks in the clouds, but this illumination did not come from any star or sun, nor did it have the familiar orange glow of hellfire. Regardless, it lit their path and caused the ruins and the bones of giants to cast great shadows across the canyon floor.

  As they crossed the ruin of Malizia, Squire surprised Octavian by remaining almost completely silent. Whether happy or angry or terrified, the hobgoblin always seemed to have a great deal to say. Words were just as much his stock in trade as weapons. But somehow those enormous bones and the hushed aura of evil around them caused Squire to hold his tongue, and perhaps even his breath. Only when they had reached the far end of the canyon, where the walls came together to form a single, narrow ravine, did Squire exhale.

  "You're awfully quiet," Octavian said as they entered the ravine, which became a low-ceilinged, claustrophobic tunnel within a dozen paces.

  Squire glanced back the way they'd come. Instead of being troubled by the fact that they were now closed in — the walls and ceiling narrowing further with each step — he seemed relieved.

  "Damn right, I'm quiet," Squire said. "Good thing you were, too."

  "I don't understand."

  Squire shot him a dark look. "Don't bullshit me. It's the giants, Pete."

  Octavian wondered if this was some ancient enmity between hobgoblins and giants, some ancestral memory haunting the Squire.

  "Honestly, I don't —"

  "I was afraid to wake them, all right? And so were you, the way you tiptoed around the joint."

  Wake them? Octavian frowned as they kept moving through the narrow space. He wondered if Squire had seen something he had not, if his human eyes — regardless of his sorcery — had been blind to some truth that the hobgoblin had no difficulty seeing. He nearly asked, but Squire still seemed spooked and so he thought better of it. A conversation for another day.

  If there is another day.

  They came to a place where the tunnel had narrowed so much that they could barely slip through. Most of the larger demons would be unable to pass this way, and certainly that had been intentional. Whatever dark power had built this nexus had wished to control how and when it could be utilized, but they had never counted on a human mage and a hobgoblin surviving in Hell long enough to pass this way.

  "No screaming in here," Squire said. "Nice."

  Octavian led the way and they passed through the gap and found themselves inside a circular room, standing on the rim of the bowl-like floor. The air inside the round room shifted, strange lights undulating and floating. Octavian thought of the aurora borealis, but these were not the icy hues that drifted in the sky in the far north of his homeworld, they were the colors of hell — of stone and fire and blood.

  "So this is going to take us to the dungeon you were talking about? To the City of Dis?"

  "The City of Dis is a myth. Or a euphemism, really. Think of Hell as a tree with its branches moving in the wind. The trunk is stationary but even that can bend. The only things that never change are the roots. But at the deepest part of Hell there's only one root, and that's the dungeon. Dis."

  "Sounds like fuckin' paradise. You think that's where your friends are being kept?"

  "Maybe," Octavian said, staring at the shifting colors of the nexus. "In my time here, intruders would often be taken there. It's where they first took me when I found myself on the wrong side of a portal. So it makes sense that we make that our first stop . . ."

  Squire studied him. "But it isn't, is it?"

  "No, it's not. Do you remember I told you about seeing that wraith with Cortez down in South America, when Gaea was expelling all of the vampires from my dimension?"

  "Yeah. Not a wraith, though. You said it was the, whaddayacallit, the shade of Lazarus. The one who came to Hell to rescue you and you fucked him over and left him behind.
"

  Octavian felt anger and humiliation burning in him. He turned to glare at Squire. "It wasn't like that."

  "Well," Squire said, cocking his head, "it was a little like that."

  "The point is this: Cortez killed the woman I loved, but there was more to it than that, someone or something pulling his strings. If it really was Lazarus's shade I saw, then the human Lazarus might still be here in Hell. I left him behind once; I'm not going to do it again."

  "And the fact that seeing his shade makes you think he might know who was behind what Cortez did has nothing to do with your sudden urgent need to find him?"

  Octavian did not reply. Instead, he drew the sword that Squire had given him — best to be prepared — and slid down the side of the bowl into the center of the room. The swirling lights of the nexus made his skin prickle and the hair stand up on the back of his neck, quite like the magic he was so used to commanding. He heard a grunt and looked up to see Squire sliding down to join him.

  "Grab my coat," Octavian told him, and he felt the tug of the hobgoblin's grip.

  He stepped out of the swirling light, bent into the climb, and opened his eyes as he scaled the bowl back to the rim. Squire followed on his heels but Octavian heard the hobgoblin muttering under his breath as they entered the narrow gap again.

  "What's that?" Octavian asked.

  "I don't get it. What was the whole point of —"

  They had stepped through the passage to find the tunnel gone. There was no canyon, no Malizia, no bones of the ancients. Instead, they found themselves on a broad, dusty plain with a nighttime sky stretching out in every direction overhead, its darkness broken by the light from bright fires that shot from the earth like geysers all around them. Burning embers drifted on the searing wind that buffeted them. Rock formations rose all around them, some natural and others very clearly constructed.