Technically, they were shooting at him, but Hephaestion wasn’t wasting the opportunity. His feet plunged through the shallow water as he raced for the treeline. Yitz’s limp body acted as a meat shield, absorbing the impact of the bullets.
Like a lumbering drunkard, Hephaestion bumbled onto the shore and into the trees. Hiding in the deep wood, he crouched low as the ornithopter unloaded its weapons into the surrounding trees before banking and buzzing away.
Chapter 33
Once under cover, Hephaestion sliced Yitz’s body free and slung him over his shoulders like a hunted deer. Hepahestion had hoped to rest after clearing the river, but a flock of flying gunships made him anxious to relocate.
Gnarled roots tangled over the ground, anchoring tall, deep scarlet trees. Some were mightier than others, their canopy reaching beyond eyesight above and overshadowing the others. Most tragic of all were the saplings. Were they children? People of minor impact on the world? Was the tree’s size a gradient of either age or level of sin?
Hephaestion couldn’t place the source, but he felt the presence of each soul.
“Perhaps Hell is a place where you’re surrounded with thousands of others that feel as lost as you do, but nobody speaks of it,” he muttered to the dead Yitz on his back, then grunted at the irony.
As he navigated the roots, Hephaestion found himself eager to steady himself on any nearby tree he could touch. He didn’t pry the bark or scratch the surface, but instead placed his hand on each timber hide as he balanced Yitz on his shoulders. Maybe, deep in the core of the tree, the warmth of a human hand would provide comfort.
Supposedly, a human that committed suicide circumvented Minos and would crash from the living Earth directly into the ground in a spectacular and messy crunch. Perhaps since the person judged and killed themselves, Minos’s court was unnecessary? If a person ended their humanity, then they become something as far from human as possible: a tree.
He considered Thebes again, and that temple filled with the dead. Boudica had given him a lot to think about when she suggested that to kill oneself isn’t necessarily suicide, but Hephaestion still didn’t know the boundaries of the system.
Worse still, those that had flocked to the temples in Thebes had died, one way or another, tragic and terrified.
Hephaestion tried to step even lighter than before, careful not to let his heel scrape on any roots.
A shout echoed among the trees. He couldn’t make out the language or intentions, but he was not alone in the wood. Reluctant to drop Yitz, he slid to his haunches to listen.
Several voices erupted.
“This one’s good!”
“Got one here.”
“Working…”
“Watch it.”
Each voice spoke a different language, but they seemed coordinated. Were they searching for him? Why would they be so loud? The men sounded too gruff to be disciplined like the samurai.
Then he heard the sawing. Metal teeth chewing back and forth into wood. Soon the sharp crack of a buckling trunk rang out. Shouts followed as length crashed down.
Loggers. The men who cut down and planked the suicides so that people could walk on them and sit on them and burn them. They carelessly tormented the tormented.
Hephaestion was enraged.
A felled tree provided him ample concealment, the leaves and branches sheltering him as he combined his shield and planned his approach.
With rue, Hephaestion thought of how he had chastised Yitz for lending his ear to the glutton and for freeing the jarred hearts. The impulse to save as many of the trees as possible made his heart race. As he crept closer, Hephaestion saw that the men were unarmored and easy targets. He could cut half of them down before they could mount a defense.
But such a tactic would risk Yitz—would risk everything. Furious, he glared at the loggers.
Drenched in dried blood, they held a two-man crosscut saw that they aimed against the bark of their next victim. One heaved and one pulled, and as the teeth tore into the bark, blood erupted instead of sap.
One day this would stop. Perhaps through Yitz’s wealth or some other influence, Hephaestion would stop this. If even a single tree in this wood was from Thebes, he would protect it. His only consolation was that a dozen loggers couldn’t cut down trees very quickly.
As if to add more insult, a long, motorized flatbed with treads on either side climbed over the uneven ground, snapping the tender saplings into fountains of red. As long as a schooner, the machine carried stacks of felled and stripped trunks. Several tall pipes rose from the sides, spewing black smoke as the fire-fueled hauler crept no more than a league an hour. Large mechanical claws on each side clamped around timber and dumped the seeping logs onto the rear.
Several men flanked the vehicle. The machine’s crew wore heavy armor that seemed as poorly stitched together as the cannibals’ coverings from the glutton’s circle. What was their connection?
His mind whirled with missing pieces and conspiracies, but Yitz’s weight reminded him of his already overtaxed mission.
One of the men tumbled onto his back, like an invisible force had hit him. The loggers froze.
“Tower!” Their frantic cries muffled as they dove to the ground, wedging themselves between the roots.
A gunshot ruptured through the trees.
Hephaestion dropped to the earth, then followed the panicked gazes of the loggers. A massive tower peeked through the tree canopy. The foundation must have been built in the river Styx because the tall structure followed the rotation of the previous circle, at odds with the suicide wood’s direction.
The flatbed driver slumped at the wheel, a telling gunshot echoing a moment afterward. Hephaestion scrambled across the roots and gnarled knots toward the tower. Gunshot after gunshot rang out, occasionally zipping so close to Hephaestion that he heard the bullet snap through the air past him.
At the edge of the wood, while the sniper continued to pick off loggers, Hephaestion waved his free hand, frantic to capture the shooter’s attention. Despite Yitz’s doubts, an enemy of an enemy…
A quarter league from the shore, on a tiny island of stone, the tower extended into the sky. Constructed of what looked like soapstone blocks, a few high windows broke the unyielding façade, and at its base, a steel door had been sealed tight against the water lapping its threshold.
A metal walkway bubbled through the surface of Styx, the drowned damned screeching as they swarmed and clawed at the edges. Sparks hissed and flew, driving them away in mournful groans as the metal fried them.
Once the damned were clear, the electric bursts ceased. Hephaestion stepped cautiously, easing a toe onto the grate.
The steel doors swung open, revealing a man in a duster and cowboy hat. Hephaestion raised his hand in relieved greeting.
Then his head exploded in pain as a bullet smacked him between the eyes.
Chapter 34
When air flooded into Hephaestion’s lungs, the first thing he noticed was a pleasant whistling. His eyes adjusted to the fluttering gas lamps, but his head raged with an ache he’d never experienced.
He lay on a cot, pressed against a circular wall chiseled of ancient stone. Small shelves crowded the tight, curved space, holding a menagerie of tiny sculptures. Soldiers, horse, farm animals, buildings, and even a nativity with a manger adorned the room, all intricately carved from bone.
An arm’s length away, a man sat on a stool, his back to Hephaestion. The primary gaslight highlighted the oily sheen of dark, slicked-back hair, and his shoulders rolled in time with his tune. Splayed out on a stone slab was Yitz, naked and still very much dead. A small glass jar, half filled with smashed and mangled bullets, tinkled as the man dropped another fragment in.
Experienced fingers maneuvered pliers over Yitz’s body, pulling out another round of spent ammunition. The man’s whistling
was punctuated with admiration.
“Yer friend is a magnet.” He chuckled gruffly. “As fer you, you done been shot in the head. Here.” A large hand plopped the twisted bullet fragment on Hephaestion’s chest. “Keepsake!”
His tongue felt too thick for his mouth, but he had a suspicion as to who had been killing loggers. And shot him point-blank. “Emmett….L-Land….Lan—”
“Emmett Landis at yer service!”
“Queen…”
“Ah, yessir, that lovely lady. A true queen through an’ through. She give you this?” Emmett raised the astrolabe into the light.
“Why did you s-shoot me in the h-head?” Hephaestion snapped as his wits returned faster than his speech.
“Oh, that’s just how I greet everybody. I take no chances. Figured we’d talk after. If you’d been bad, I’d just toss you into the river with all them crazies. If you good, you git to wake up.”
“Those loggers wear metal because of you?”
“Hells yeah. But enough with that. Rest up and we’ll chat in a bit.” Emmett refilled his tin cup of coffee, left Yitz’s naked body on the stone slab, and limped to a small chair suspended from the ceiling. Humming to himself, he fiddled with what looked like a telescope that extended from the wall. The optics appeared complicated beyond Hephaestion’s comprehension, various scopes and eyepieces rotating into position for the chair’s occupant.
The ceiling was covered in gears, gauges, and dials that ticked and grinded with Emmett’s tinkering, and the tower appeared to have been built around the mechanism.
Mounted on the sill of a single window was the barrel of a long rifle, the butt designed to curve around the operator’s neck. While the heft and size would render the weapon too difficult to aim at close range, the gun became a precision instrument a league or more away.
“I call it ‘the middle finger of God.’” Emmett beamed. “Could light a cigarette from a mile out. Each cartridge is a work of artistic chemistry, refined with perfect patch and sculptin’.”
Hephaestion glanced again at the shelves along the wall. A few depicted dioramas of battle scenes or monuments. One low shelf was covered with tiny carved cows, some deformed or unfinished, suggesting that Emmett had most likely been practicing.
“Ah, admire all you like. Yessir, I am an artiste. I’m working on a scene depicting the siege of Ft. Sumter. I just need to keep workin’ on them walls, but I gotta wait until my tibia grows back!” Emmett rapped a knuckle against his wooden leg.
“Wait. You carve all of these things out of your own bones?”
“Boredom gits the best of you! Besides, an artiste don’t work with no junk.”
Thinking back on the chess set in Queen Sungbon’s study, Hephaestion realized that Emmett Landis had been using himself as his artistic medium of choice for some time.
“The little soldiers are all finger bones,” Emmett said, raising his left hand sporting only two full fingers. “But the fort’s walls need sumethin’ bigger. After you rest up, look around. Check out my stuffs.” With that, the man stood, coffee sloshing onto his stained plaid shirt, and wandered passed Yitz to a floor hatch.
“He’ll be up in a bit. I got the bullet from his heart first. But I wasn’t keen on dressing ‘em, though so that’s on you.” Descending a ladder, he disappeared below.
Hephaestion was safe for now. Queen Sungbon had said this man would protect him, and her word had proven ironclad thus far. The roar of his headache made keeping his eyes open difficult, but he was too wired by how far he’d come and at how near to Alexander he was. Too much thought and worry clouded his thoughts, and within a few minutes, Hephaestion sat up, the cot creaking under his weight. Taking inventory, he found that his boots were missing, and he wore only his kameez.
A few things didn’t make sense, and now that he had a few quiet moments, the puzzle splayed across his mind. Were the Jesuits really that threatened by him descending? Had they taken on the role of prison wardens, or did Sun Tzu assign it to them? Were the Buddhists, Euclid, and other explorers in equal danger?
His head pounded with confusion, and he dry heaved, having nothing in his stomach to vomit. Flopping back into his cot, he allowed himself rest.
Wandering memories eased him into sleep. He and Alex had been together… less than thirty years. Hephaestion had been in the afterlife for over two thousand years. Entire empires and civilizations had risen, crumbled, and been completely swept away in that time. Yet thirty years had impacted Hephaestion long after death. His first and only love.
Hephaestion felt as though he’d been asleep mere seconds, rather than hours, when he jolted away, but as his eyes blinked open, he discovered Yitz sitting on the edge of his cot, fully clothed.
“You snore.” Yitz smiled, and then sipped from his mug.
The scent of freshly brewed coffee reached Hephaestion. “Alex had the same complaint.”
“Adina makes me sleep on my side.”
“Alex did, too.”
“Adina?” Emmett’s suspended chair vibrated as he hopped down. “Wait. I got a note. For you, I bet. Here yeou go, heeb!” Ruffling though some papers and parchments spread over the stone floor, Emmett produced an opened letter and a postcard. Yitz took them cautiously as Hephaestion sat up to get a better view.
The postcard displayed a painting of New Dis with the words “Wish You Were Here” on one side, and blank space for writing on the other. Yitz then turned his attention to the letter.
“This letter is opened,” Yitz scolded Emmett.
“Yeah, I know. I’m the one who opened it.”
“This is a private letter, cow-goy.”
“Nobody getting letters down here but me!” Emmett defended. “Sides, all in gibberish Jew-scratch anyhow.”
Yitz ignored Emmett while his eyes devoured Adina’s handwriting. Hephaestion soon realized he was reading the letter over again.
“Dirty? Wanna share?” Emmett asked with raw curiosity.
“Oh, my roguish gentile, it is indeed wonderful. But only for me.”
Emmett frowned. “Don’t be getten’ mail often. Comes in tiny spinning parachutes that Songhai launches once a cycle. They aim it an’ time it so it lands right on the roof, here. Mathematical geniuses, them. Want more coffee?”
“Actually,” Yitz said distantly, still lost in his letter. “I’d hate some.”
“Suit yourself.” Emmett smiled, setting up two wooden folding chairs next to his own. “Come sit a spell, then. Hephaestion, nab some coffee while you’re at it.”
Hephaestion had never had coffee before, and as he stared into the black sludge, he debated the wisdom of trusting Emmitt. Nothing a person ever drinks should be completely black.
“Smells awful,” Hephaestion mumbled.
“Oh, don’t worry. It is. Leave it for me if you’d rather. I’m almost out anyhow. Keep sendin’ up them balloons with messages askin’ for more coffee and bullets, and all I get is a letter for ‘nother man. Thinking someone is shootin’ my balloons down. Been weird here lately. Way more loggers than normal and strange noises echo through the wood.”
“It’s possible your correspondence is intercepted. I’ve encountered some flying machines that were unfriendly.” Hephaestion eased into his own chair. “You just stay here, and, as the tower rotates around the wood, you try and keep it clear of loggers?”
“Yep. Two birds with one stone. I snipe ‘em out there while protectin’ the trees for the Queen. And at the same time, I house the monks when they pass on by. Strange fellas, them.”
Yitz cried out in alarm. “Wait, what? The Monks come here—across the river?”
“Sure ‘nuff.”
“How?”
“I just raise the other bridge and jolt it.”
Yitz glared at Hephaestion with all the ire he could muster, which was substantial for a recently dead man.
“Oh,” Yitz feigned sympathy, “you poor, wee little lamb.” Yitz leapt to his feet and produced the jar half-filled with bullets. “These came from me!”
Emmett giggled with delight. Hephaestion mimicked one of Yitz’s shrugs.
“Hey, weren’t you suppose’ to be with dem Buddhist boys, anyhow, Hephaestion? That was the last message I got.”
“I was supposed to be with them, yes. But things didn’t work out. What are they like, the Buddhists?”
“Bald,” Emmett said. His fingers stroked the stubble on his chin while Yitz refilled his coffee. “They a good sort. One time they came here with a ‘tard. Big, dumb oaf of a tard. I figured since souls cross to the afterworld, they have their spines straightened and their sight and hearing restored, why was the ‘tard still a ‘tard? I asked ‘em. I asked why God didn’t un-‘tard the ‘tard, and the Monk looks at me an’ says ‘God only lays the crooked straight. There was nothin’ wrong with this man to begin with.” Emmett fell silent, seeming baffled by his own story. “I still don’t understand that. I don’t get what use or place a ‘tard has in the world. Which is probably why I’ll never see Heaven.”
The men sat in silence, pondering the gravity of the parable.
“So, you are Purgatorian?” Hephaestion finally asked.
“Heh, barely. Technicality, really.”
“Do tell,” Yitz said.
“I’m from America. A war broke out there between some rich folk to the south and some rich folk to the north. And poor fellers like me got the honor and privilege to fight it for ‘em. So, the side I’m on has lotsa slaves. Tall, dark folk that work and sing and whatnot. I was given the job of watchin’ the pickaninnies because the South was hurting in the war. So they pressed the slaves into uniform and combat service. Let that sink in a moment, you get yer slaves to carry weapons and fight alongside you.”
“That isn’t strange. In Greece, we did the same thing,” Hephaestion said as he worked up the strength to try another sip of coffee.
Trampling in the Land of Woe: Book One of Three (Hellbound 1) Page 20