“Save your thanks, consort of monstrosities,” came a familiar voice. “For was it not written by the Most Holy Dmitri the Fishmonger, ‘Let not all the demons die, or those they lead astray, so that tomorrow ye may continue to smite them righteously.’”
“Oh, pack that shit in,” I said, helping Meryl up.
Something was very wrong. I could tell, because the priest seemed to be smiling. “Your snake’s tongue will not penetrate me today, Godforsaken wretch,” he said, with relish I found very unsettling. “I have succeeded in the glorious task the LORD has given me, and now His perfect hand has fallen down upon the fortress of devils!” He made an unnecessarily dramatic sweep of the hand, and I took in what was left of Greydoom Valley.
Dreadgrave’s horde was scattered across the plain like cockroaches ousted from beneath a piece of furniture, in various states of flight, terror and undress. They were all desperately trying to get away from Dreadgrave’s doom fortress. I glanced up, and saw why.
“What the hell are those?!” I yelled, pointing.
Four or five glowing white orbs were circling the main tower. Each one was connected to a long, thin tentacle of greenish energy that whipped around the fortress, erasing everything it touched. It was nothing like any demolition I’d ever seen; a better word would have been “deletion.” One by one, walls, beams and gargoyles became outlined in green and vanished into thin air, leaving no trace of dust or rubble.
Large portions of the fortress had already been deleted, causing others to collapse into the space they left behind. The place I had called home, that had seemed so solid and impregnable and reassuring only that morning, was being systematically erased. I could feel milky gray tears brimming in my sunken eyes and oozing down my face.
“Who’s doing this?!” choked Meryl.
“Look closer,” said the priest.
I squinted, trying to make out the shapes of the things bringing down the fortress. When I did, I felt an ice-cold needle of recognition rattle down my spine like a stick along a metal fence.
“The angels,” I whispered.
There were the same faceless heads, the same robes, floating through the air without even flapping their ugly wings. The moment I recognized them I had to fight off an impulse to immediately burrow into the ground like a rodent fleeing from an owl.
They seemed to be saving the main tower for last, and when I looked again, I could see why. There, on the topmost platform—the very one from which I had hurled myself so many times—was a silhouetted figure, wrapped in a magic shield and apparently trying as hard as he could to keep it up.
“Dreadgrave!” I yelled.
The angels were gradually stripping the tower away from around him. I got the very strong impression that Dreadgrave was being toyed with, a mouse against five glowing astral cats. He was sending out magical missiles as fast as he could summon them, each one more powerful than the last. He threw everything from football-sized green fireballs to the gigantic roaring ones with dragon faces on the front, the ones that take years to learn and are banned from everything except the mining industry because they’re used to drill holes in mountains. The angels didn’t even try to dodge, just soaked them all up without so much as a flinch.
After a while, when the floor around Dreadgrave had been mostly picked away and he was trapped on a tiny unstable pedestal about six feet across, the angels lost interest. All five of them focussed their beams on his kneeling form. The shield didn’t stop them for an instant. Within a second, Dreadgrave was gone. Within ten, so was the rest of the fortress. All that remained was a barren plain of flattened rock. It wasn’t even smoking.
“Oh, god,” I moaned.
Meryl patted me on the shoulder with my missing hand. “It’s what he would have wanted.”
“What?!”
“Okay, so maybe it’s not what he would have wanted. I was trying to make you feel better.”
“God’s emissaries have done their work,” said the priest, like a proud father. “The evil one has been vanquished by the eternal power of the LORD.”
“Oh, eat a dick!” I snapped, shoving him. “Shut up about your LORD! The LORD’s got nothing on Dreadgrave! The LORD never puts on musical productions! The LORD never lets us wear casual trousers! All the LORD ever does is get pricks like you to yell at me for not kissing his arse all day!”
“Er, Jim,” said Meryl, pointing upwards with my disembodied arm, which she was getting a bit too attached to. “How worried do we need to be about that?”
The angels had been hovering over where the fortress had stood, perhaps silently gloating or contemplating a job well done, but now they were spreading out across the valley. The ends of their deletion beams were sniffing around at floor level, hunting for something. It didn’t take long to figure out what. Those members of the horde too dozy or too decayed to get out of the way in time were erased before they could even scream.
“My God is coming to take me!” went the priest, but his voice cracked with uncertainty on the last word.
“Run,” I suggested.
Meryl and I instantly broke into the closest thing we could get to a sprint. So, I noticed, did the priest.
The tendrils could move faster than we could run, but none of them seemed to be specifically chasing us, only sweeping randomly around to catch as many undead as possible. It would only be a matter of time before most of them were gone and the deleters concentrated on the last few stragglers. But one of the few advantages of being dead was never getting tired, presumably because we’d already slept as much as anyone could ever need, and it was an advantage we were making great use of as we made for the path out of Greydoom Valley.
A green line swept past behind us, close enough to peck the backs of our heels. I heard the noise they made, a sort of wavering buzz, like someone grumbling into a kazoo: a deeper, more hostile version of the gibbering I had heard during my visits to the dead world.
I risked a look over my shoulder. The angels were heading in the opposite direction. Most of the horde had been annihilated, and the angels were leisurely picking off the last few desperate sprinters one by one. It seemed we had been the only ones to run in this particular direction, which was probably the only reason we were still on our feet. But there were only a handful of runners left, and once they had been dealt with the angels would come right back for us.
Running didn’t seem to help, so I started looking for somewhere to hide. We were near the edge of the swampy area in the south of the valley, the one from which Dreadgrave used to have us harvest deadly Prawn Frogs for his Doom Pond. More importantly, there were hundreds of stagnant green-brown pools covered by overhanging spiky weeds and misshapen trees. I dived into the nearest one and added swamp slime to the lengthy list of pollutants already in my robe.
I swept pondweed out of my eyes and arranged myself under the roots of a twisted black tree, where I could watch proceedings through a narrow gap in the foliage. A splash of viscous swampwater behind me, and Meryl appeared at my side, swiftly followed by the priest.
“Cowards,” he hissed. “The LORD is calling back his children with the Light Most Holy and you cower in a bog!”
“Hey, after you,” I muttered, in no mood for his crap.
The last zombie straggler—I recognized him as Ted, a bloke from our guard detail who used to rip pages out of mucky magazines and sell them behind the stables—faltered and was torn from existence. That seemed to be the last of them still out in the open; now, the angels turned for one last sweep around the valley. A green glow passed over our tree more than once, and each time we dropped our heads back into the swamp with a trio of plops. Finally it moved on for the last time and faded away. We were safe.
It was clearer than ever that the creatures were angels in appearance alone. “Deleters” seemed like a more appropriate name, or possibly “Bastards.” The Deleters had regrouped in the center of the valley, where only a spattering of shattered black bricks indicated that Dreadgrave’s fortress h
ad ever stood there. Somehow it would have been less horrifying if they’d seemed smug or triumphant, but their body language showed nothing but emotionless professionalism. With military discipline, they arranged themselves into a tight square and disappeared. No flash of light, no fancy effects—they simply winked out.
After that, a thick, cloying silence descended upon Greydoom Valley, far denser and more noticeable than the chatter of minions or the squeals of torture victims had ever been. I carefully climbed out of the swamp, boots squelching unpleasantly, and absent-mindedly dug the prawn frogs out of my pockets.
“They’ll be all right, won’t they?” said Meryl, wringing out her hair. “They’ll just come back like they always did, right?”
“Not without bodies,” I said, gazing out over the valley. “Anyway, something tells me that wasn’t the kind of death you come back from.”
She nodded sadly, hugging herself. An intense feeling of loneliness settled on our shoulders as the panic faded away. She peered at me curiously as I drank in the empty landscape. “Why didn’t you let yourself be taken?”
“What?”
“You were always so obsessed with killing yourself, looking for a proper way to die. I was expecting you to run out and let them do it.” She smiled shyly. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”
I stared at her for a moment. Then I smacked myself in the forehead so hard that my eyeballs rattled. “Oh, SHIT!” I smacked my head a few more times and jumped up and down for good measure. “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!”
I ran out into the empty plain, waving what was left of my arms. “COME BACK, YOU BASTARDS!!” I screamed. “You missed a spot! Look! OVER HERE! UNDEAD MINION RUNNING FREE! Get off!” By now, Meryl and the priest had grabbed me under my armpits and were running towards the valley exit. “I’M OVER HERE AND I’M BIG AND FAT AND JUICY AND NOT DELETED COME BACK AND DELETE ME YOU PRICKS DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME . . . ”
PART TWO
ONE
We’d barely walked for half a day before the influence of Dreadgrave’s doom fortress started to dissipate. It was as if all the color and vitality that Greydoom Valley had once drawn from the surrounding countryside was now rushing back. As we made our way along the path through the forest the sun was shining through gaps in the clouds, some of the flowers were tentatively opening their buds to check if it was safe to bloom, and the birds were making the first strangled attempts at singing again.
It was all rather ghastly. I’d been stuck in an impenetrable sulk all day, only half-aware of my trudging feet as they carried me along the road. The birdsong sounded like smug, twittery laughter, mocking my fall from grace. Barely hours ago I’d been secure, respected, with good prospects for senior rat pit management, and conveniently close to a nice high tower to regularly throw myself off. Now, everything was gone. Destroyed. Deleted.
I thought of that mysterious conspiracy of faceless apparitions in the dead world that refused to let me die, but who were apparently considerably more obliging when they appeared in the land of the living. There was no doubt in my mind that the dickheads that appeared in the astral realm were the very same dickheads who had destroyed my home. But why?
“How’s the arm?” asked Meryl.
She had sewn it back on after we had escaped the valley, the first time we had made camp. Actually, “made camp” is too grand a term for it; we didn’t need to rest or eat, so we had just sat on a log for an hour, thinking about things. I flexed my newly-repaired elbow and felt the stitches creak. “Angle might be off a quarter inch.”
“Enjoy your good health while you can, spawn. Even the worst of the earthly maladies will seem like paradise after thy return to the blaze of the Inferno.”
What patience I had had for the priest had evaporated with Dreadgrave. “Why are you still following us?”
“That I may smite you with righteous vengeance and rid the world of your putrescence.”
“Well, go on, then,” I said. I advanced until he and I were nose to nose, then pulled my robe and undershirt apart to reveal my scarred chest. “Right in the scar. Half the work’s already done for you.”
He hesitated for a moment. The lower half of his face was still scowling hatefully but the rest of it was being very careful to not look me in the eye. “No,” he said, eventually.
“Oh, leave him alone,” scolded Meryl. “You know full well he just doesn’t want to admit that we’re his only friends and he’s got nowhere else to go.”
The priest’s nostrils flared so widely I fancied I caught a glimpse of his brain somewhere in there. “I am awaiting my next divine assignment from the LORD.” He didn’t deny anything, though.
We continued walking, and before long, the trees thinned out to reveal a small brick building in the middle of a fenced-off clearing. It was only when I spotted some crumbling gravestones peering out of the grass that I realized aloud what we had stumbled upon. “A church. Let’s take a look inside.”
Meryl tutted. “Are you going to convert yourself again?”
“Slippery John said that when people die, they get new bodies at churches. I just want to see if that’s true.”
I could think of nicer places to come back to life. It had probably once been a pleasant little country church, one of those undersized and quaint chapels where the actual religiosity is secondary to the jumble sales and the summer potlucks and letting the local scout troop use the hall on Thursdays. It had evidently gone through some trying times since those days. Some of the windows were smashed, and large portions of the brickwork were scorched or held together by makeshift wooden scaffolding. I was trying to remember if I’d ever come here with the rest of the horde.
“I will not enter,” said the priest, stopping dead at the churchyard entrance and folding his arms.
“Why not?” asked Meryl.
“I am a priest of the Seventh Day Advent Hedge Devolutionist Castlebridge Reformists,” he said, with reverent pride. “This is a church of the Seventh Day Advent Hedge Devolutionist Castlebridge Classicists. I will not set one foot within this den of heresy.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. I’m going in. Feel free to go off and get on with your life while you’re waiting.”
“You will not be free of me so easily, fiend,” he called after me. I let him have his precious last word and continued towards the church.
The cemetery surrounding the church was half overgrown and half ruined by the hooves of the large number of bored horses that were parked on the grass. The most recent tombstone was from two decades ago, which supported Slippery John’s story. Mourning the dead was probably a rather futile process if they’d be right back the next day complaining about their eulogy.
I paused at the church door with my hand upon the polished oak. There was a fresh piece of paper pinned up at eye level. No pets / familiars, it said. No pipe smoking. No spellcasting. Any business other than that related to the resurrection of self or colleagues is not permitted. Patrons are not required to say thank you, but it is always appreciated!!!
I quietly pushed my way in, Meryl nimbly slipping in after me just before the door drifted shut.
It didn’t take long to see that there were a lot of things wrong with this church. Most of the pews had been cleared away, and the few that remained were arranged at 90 degrees to the norm, giving the chapel more the impression of a waiting room than a place of worship. This ended up being quite appropriate, because the room was full of—
“Crap,” I muttered, dragging Meryl behind a pillar.
Adventurers. And not just any adventurers, but adventurers I clearly remembered torturing and murdering in Dreadgrave’s staff entertainment center. The long-haired barbarians who had besieged the fortress that morning. The elves I’d last seen nailed to the trees in the orchard with bunches of dead flowers lodged in their throats. The dwarves I, personally, had been feeding into the furnace conveyor just yesterday. For some reason, several of them were wearing identical white bathrobes.
Fortunately, none
of them had noticed our entrance. They were all sitting rather tensely on the pews, with their eyes fixed on the pulpit. The atmosphere reminded me strongly of the examination room at my old college.
Standing in the pulpit was a man in the garb of a country vicar. He was surprisingly young for his position, in that he still possessed most of his own tightly-curled hair and it was only just beginning to gray. A pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses sat upon his nose and he was holding open a generic-looking leatherbound copy of the local bible.
“Verse seven. ‘And Craig did scatter his seeds randomly upon the ground,’” he read aloud, with subdued passion. “‘And his attitude did displease the LORD, and nothing did rise in the flowerbeds of Craig but weeds and forget-me-nots.’” He delicately dabbed his thumb and forefinger to his tongue and turned the page. “Verse eight. ‘But Daniel sowed his seeds carefully, in a neat row, and the LORD did smile upon his labor, and there sprang forth a beautiful leylandii that did compliment the pond verily.’ Now, can anyone tell me what these verses teach us?”
All the adventurers suddenly took a great interest in their showily impractical boots.
“Come on!” barked the vicar. “I run this service out of the goodness of my heart, and the least you can do is pay attention. It tells us that order must always defeat chaos. Order is what puts us above the beasts and the monsters. There must always be rules, and there will always be a just reward for those who keep order.” He waited for a moment for it to sink in, then sighed and turned to a smaller ledger to his left. “And of course, things must always be done in order. Number 107.” He turned his eyes heavenwards. “Number 107. If you are with us, please move to the front of the altar. Beware that if you fail to do so you forfeit your place in the astral queue.”
He muttered some priestly doggerel under his breath, flicked his fingers as if there were something nasty on them, and a few magic sparkles fluttered out.
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