Dust (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 3)

by Shaun O. McCoy

  She finds my reaction just as funny as Keith’s retelling of my joke.

  Well, these guys work with the Order. I can’t expect them to be good people. Still, though, that shit is just wrong.

  The priestess leads us down a tunnel that has been worked over by clay bricks. While not up to the standards of the ancients, Igraine’s people were miles ahead of even the masons in Maylay Beighlay.

  A single indention runs along the right hand side of the tunnel at about head height. I’ve no idea what it’s for, but it’s too small to be a shelf. Maybe they put bullets there or something?

  Other parts of the tunnel’s construction make more sense. We pass by wooden pillars which support large flagstones in the roof. My assumption is that if you knocked the pillars down, the tunnel would collapse.

  Everyone in Hell knows that holing up is a bad idea, that Minotaurs relish finding those places, so I’m guessing this must be a defense for that—but attacks can’t happen too regularly, or these guys would all be dead.

  When the tunnel ends, which Durgan punctuates by knocking my head into the exit archway, we emerge into a place that’s quite beautiful.

  This stuff was definitely built by the ancients.

  The floors are made of polished marble and granite. The marble is laid out like tile, forming smooth paths which run across the enormous chamber. Outside of the paths, the shiny granite stones are fitted together like some sort of giant jigsaw puzzle. The patterns their cracks make in the floor seem haphazard when I look directly at one spot, but their irregularities form geometric shapes when I give the ground a broader glance. Pillars, appearing almost Arabic in the way their bell-like shapes sweep up to the forty foot ceiling, stand decoratively, lining the marble paths, their regular slender forms doing little to obstruct my view of the chamber. Near the base of each pillar, a tiny alcove had been carved out, and inside each one stands a heroic classical-styled figure.

  A squat central pillar, made in a pseudo-Doric style, is obscenely large—perhaps eighty feet in diameter. Unfortunately, some asshole—and I’m betting they’re the current resident—had a gigantic tunnel carved right into the middle of that pillar. They’d done some good work with the arch above it, showing the figure of a man who is slitting the throat of a bull, but the effect of it is, on the whole, somewhat disturbing.

  Steps, carved just a little unevenly, lead down into the breached pillar.

  And who would have guessed, that’s where they’re taking us.

  As we pass more life-sized statues, I whisper into Durgan’s ear, “I bet you’d be fucking awesome at playing hide-and-go-seek in here.”

  As always, he pays me no mind, but I’m convinced it’s a front.

  “Or, if that’s not your game,” I drone on, “maybe a little Ollie-Ollie-Oxen-Free?”

  And for one beautiful moment, his boot scuffs the marble floor. He catches his balance almost perfectly, hardly missing a stride, but I’d done it. I’d opened up a crack in his seemingly invincible suit of emotional armor.

  Give me enough time and I’ll quarry down to his heart.

  I’m not sure if he’d taken much physical damage when I’d left him alone in the rotten streets of Maylay Beighlay, but I bet you he at least lost most of his men. God knows I don’t see any of them here.

  Down the steps we go.

  And down.

  And down.

  Christ Jesus, this place is deep.

  From time to time we pass by landings, and I see into shadow-filled tunnels where men work at the stone. Here and there I see collapses, which makes me think these people must be very brave, or very stupid, or most likely, very desperate.

  Whatever they’re using the stone for must be something damn important or else they wouldn’t risk destabilizing their environment, right?

  The stairs bottom out into a grey room which is lit by burning woodstone torches.

  Serious guards, well armed, well fed and well muscled, stop us.

  Our priestess speaks up. “No weapons in the pit. You’ll all be stripped and cavity searched.”

  Even her men hand over their weapons, which surprises me.

  Fuck, they’re going to have to untie me to get my shirt off, and I’m not sure if I can get away with blading my wrist a second time.

  As a guard steps up to me, I meet his steely gaze. “Bend me over, big boy,” I tell him.

  The Little Lady giggles. “I like him, Sasha,” she tells our priestess.

  “You might be able to have him,” Sasha responds, “if you finish your studies, and if he’s alive when Igraine is through with him.”

  For some reason, this infuriates my guard.

  “Easy with my ankle,” I warn him.

  He does no such thing, and is extraordinarily rough in tugging my pants off my wounded leg. The pain brings tears to my eyes—but that gives me an idea.

  “And with the shirt, too,” I say. “It’s pretty tattered, I wouldn’t want it to get ripped any.”

  Obligingly, he rips my shirt off.

  Well ain’t you just the brightest little knife in the cowshed. Now they aren’t going to have to retie my hands, so I get to keep my good circulation.

  Of course, as I see even Durgan bend over in the nude to accept a cavity search, I realize my guard is going to have the last laugh.

  We descend into the pit via a long circular staircase. One wall along the stairs is crystal, so as Durgan carries my ass down, I can see a hazy and distorted view of the room we’re entering. It’s large, certainly, and it looks like it has cages honeycombed along its circular walls. As fucked up as this place must be to have raised this hellion they call the Little Lady, I’ve got to give Igraine credit for keeping so many people alive in the Carrion. I mean, sure, most of them are slaves, and that can’t be the most effective way to organize a workforce, but from a numbers standpoint, it surely is impressive.

  I wonder if any of the slaves are philosophical enough to thank their lucky stars they aren’t at the maw of a hound every morning. I doubt it because I wouldn’t be either. I’d rather the demons than the cage, I think.

  I think.

  The spiral stairway bottoms out onto the pit floor, and I get a better view of the room as Durgan carries me out. There is a landing, perhaps half the size of a football field, filled with darkly-dressed Carrion soldiers. They clump together, speaking quietly amongst themselves. Are these the Carrion born Keith had alluded to earlier? None of them, of course, have any weapons, but their uniforms are well made.

  Rising upward and outward from the floor of the pit are the same kinds of arches I saw in the stadium chamber, except this time the steps are far steeper. Each tier is perhaps twelve feet above the next, but their landings are only a foot wide or so. Each arched room is about ten feet deep, and covered at the front with a set of iron bars. Each set of bars has a locked door and a prisoner. The prisoners cling to the bars and look down at us with a sort of sadistic voyeurism which bothers me. These were the cages I’d thought were hexagonal when looking through the crystal.

  I look up to see where the cages end, but after a quarter of a mile or so they disappear into the darkness. Somewhere above that must loom our distant ceiling.

  A din fills the chamber as the prisoners begin speaking, I assume to each other, and I assume about us.

  On the far side of the pit, the perfect circle of cages is interrupted by a huge stage which appears Mayan in the way each step is its own level. Like all of the stone in this deep cavern, the stage is carved out of the same deep and dark grey hellstone that the mines above were quarried from. On the wall behind the stage is a tremendous tapestry made of red cloth. And when I say tremendous, I mean it. It’s perhaps forty yards wide and thirty yards tall, and a golden man is emblazoned upon it, straddling a tremendous golden bull while yanking its head back by the horns, his golden dagger drawing golden blood from the beast’s golden throat.

  In front of that tapestry is a polished, black marble throne, its lavender and vermilli
on veins matching its crimson embroidered purple cushions. The crowd of soldiers parts for us as Keith and the priestess lead us to the throne.

  The woman on the throne is as elegant a creature as I have seen in either of the worlds I have lived in. Her lightly tanned limbs—the devil knows what she did to get that tan—are long, shapely, and graceful. Her smooth-shaven calves reflect the light of the burning braziers which flank the stage.

  Chained about her are two dozen naked men, and I can see she clearly has a type. She likes well-muscled slaves with dark hair and light eyes—men like Keith. There are a few blondes, an Asian of some flavor, a black man and two Hispanic fellows, but other than that, they are all Clark Kent looking motherfuckers.

  Other soldiers, their dark shirts lined with purple, stand guard around her throne. With no weapons here, the ability to fight with fists must be at a premium. I’m guessing these are her best fighters. An interesting strategy to survive in a kingdom where you mistreat all your subjects to the point where they’d shoot you.

  There could be another explanation. They had mentioned a person named Maab was capable of performing a coup. Maybe someone is stirring up undue resentment, and this weaponless hole is her justified reaction.

  Maybe.

  But looking at the broken-souled hunks which line her stage . . . and oh God, has she even broken their . . . that bitch. At least half of them have suffered some kind of damage to their genitals.

  Keith is becoming a more and more attractive captor every damn second.

  Movement beneath the twenty foot raised stage catches my attention. There is a larger cage beneath her, and in it I see only blackness thanks to the angle of the braziers on her stage—but there is something moving down there.

  I catch sight of the head of a bull and the torso of a man.

  “Keith,” I say from Durgan’s back as the wight’s even gait rocks me back and forth, “is there a Minotaur below that stage?”

  Keith does not turn around, but his head nods.

  Dear fucking God.

  Above Igraine, hanging in a gilt cage to stage left, is a woman. Not a woman.

  Oh no. Not a woman.

  She too is slender and elegant, but so much more slender than a human should be. Her skin is bleached with sorrow, and her tear-touched eyes are wide, innocent, and tortured. White-feathered wings emerge from her shoulders before sweeping around her cage and ending with their tips nearly touching in front of her feet. A few of her feathers seem too short, as if they were sheared off—and of course they were, because Igraine wouldn’t want an Angel who could fly. That bitch had clipped the Angel’s wings.

  Her face is a wonder to behold, just alien enough to be exotic, just Caucasian enough to be familiar, and just holy enough to break my heart.

  I realize now that Igraine is as dangerous and as powerful as Xyn, and judging from the prisoners she keeps, twice as evil.

  We stop before the stage. A silence envelops us as Igraine shifts slightly in her chair. I can hear the snorting of the Minotaur now that the din has died away.

  This woman has captured an Angel and a Minotaur. A devil is beneath her, an Angel above her, and she sits between them, the ruler of all that she sees.

  But I have to focus. I tear my eyes away from Igraine and the Angel and the Minotaur and look at the others on the stage. There is a man dressed in a grey-skin armor, except the color of the grey gives way to purple now and again as the light shifts on it. He is broad, and his face is full of a self-assured cruelty I don’t quite know how to describe. Behind him, kneeling, are a few gaunt-faced slaves dressed in light brown robes. They look particularly malnourished, gaunt shoulders and bony knees jutting up under the drab fabric.

  I look back up to the cage and see that the Angel’s eyes are on me. Her sadness is existential and brutal to behold. That sort of malaise should never strike a creature so pure. I try to smile at her, but I too am in pain. I too am injured.

  And then with horror I see she has a swollen belly.

  Please tell me, oh God, if you can hear me, please tell me she is not pregnant. Please.

  Igraine probably had her raped just to see what would come out.

  The priestess steps forward and speaks. “Lady Igraine, though I personally do not think it likely, your asset Keith has brought us a man he claims is Cris.”

  Igraine’s eyes narrow for a brief moment.

  “The boyfriend of Myla, my Queen,” the Little Lady clarifies. “The one who might know how to get to Blood Pass.”

  Igraine’s brilliant blue eyes find me, and her thin pink lips part just slightly.

  “I’d bow to you, my Queen,” I say, and then Durgan drops me unceremoniously to the floor, “but I just got body slammed by a wight.”

  “Rise,” her clear voice orders.

  Who am I to disobey?

  I stand as best I can on one foot, and then gingerly lean just a smidgen of weight onto my wounded ankle.

  Yup, still hurts, but I bet it would bear my weight if I asked it to.

  I’m not going to ask, though.

  Balancing on one foot with your hands tied is no easy thing, but I try.

  “Step forward, Keith,” she says.

  I have to look up to see the faces of the slaves in their cages. They are so quiet, it’s hard to imagine they’re there. I can hear the Angel sadly weeping, and the Minotaur’s short snorts, but from the men in the cages, I hear nothing.

  Keith takes two steps toward the stage.

  The eyes of the cruel man behind the throne bear into my current captor. Jealousy, perhaps? Something I can use? Maybe, or maybe it’s just the attention of a professional bodyguard.

  “Keith,” she says, rolling his name across her tongue like a dark chocolate truffle, “Keith, Keith, Keith. My prodigal son. You always bring me such strange gifts.”

  Keith bows his head for a second. “My Queen, I do not deserve your for—”

  “You do not,” she says.

  His head jerks back up as if he’d been struck. “I know you think Lucreas Crassus has returned to the City of Blood and Stone. I know you wish you had a way to spy on him.”

  There are grunts amongst the slaves, but none of surprise.

  Igraine’s face is slightly amused. “You’ve a fertile mind, but I might be interested in finding Blood Pass, yes.”

  I realize this is actually happening. They’re going to make me show them the way back to the City of Blood and Stone. Good God. I might be able to backtrack. Maybe the rooms would jog my memory, but I feel a clenching in my heart as I remember the oppressive mines and the angry black-eyed dyitzu who beat us until we gave every ounce of energy our bodies and souls could muster. And I remember the ones with red eyes, and the hounds at the Minotaur’s beck and call. And I remember the six-armed monstrosity that flew above the ravines at night.

  It’s where I found Myla.

  I can’t go back there.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  I’d rather die.

  If I see one of those places along the way, where Ares dragged us to safety, maybe that place where Myla and I held hands under the light of the crystal while Q stood guard . . . I’d . . . I’d . . .

  Myla, I miss you.

  Why? Why’d you have to take our son?

  They’re talking and I need to pay attention. How could I be so stupid as to miss this—

  “That’s quite a bargain.” Igraine’s voice is slightly amused. “What would you ask the Angel about?”

  Keith looks up at the lovely caged creature. “I need to ask her about God.”

  Igraine’s amusement grows. “She’s never met him, nor met any Angel who has, but if you want to know about God, Keith, all you need do is ask me.”

  Keith nods. “Of course, my Queen. I don’t want to ask for myself. I am doing the work of the Order here.”

  She leans back from her crossed legs and bounces her top foot. I notice for the first time her golden high heeled shoes and am struck by how attr
active the lacing, which comes up the first half of her calf, makes her look.

  “What do I care of the Order,” she says, and her face goes into a mock pout, “except that they stole you away from me?”

  And then there is a ruckus from the slaves above. They are laughing, laughing with their queen. They’re laughing at Keith.

  Those fucked up people, they’re identifying with their captor. They’re enjoying watching her do in miniature the damage which she has so massively done to them.

  Keith shrinks from her, but then regains his backbone. “I cannot speak for you, my Queen, but I wouldn’t guess you cared about the Order at all. I thought you cared about Blood Pass. That’s the reason why I brought you this man.”

  He motions to me.

  Igraine’s eyes again find me. “Do you know the way to Blood Pass?”

  I shrug, as honest an answer as I know, and the intake of breath from the surrounding cages, and the horrid look of empathy coming from the Angel tells me my response had better be a specific one.

  “I have traveled it, Queen,” I say. “It is my belief that I can find it again, given a little time.”

  She leans forward. “If you are Cris,” her thin lips smile, “and you told me with surety you knew the way, I’d know you were lying. But are you Cris?”

  “I am. No ‘h’ to avoid confusion.”

  Her smile widens, and I see her perfectly white teeth. “Prove to me that you are the man who Myla once loved.”

  My heart beats in the sense of quiet expectation hanging in the room. Again I look to the cage, and there is my Angel, looking at me, her eyes supportive. She believes me.

  But how can I prove this to Igraine? Wait, they spent two nights together. Was it really sexual? Was Xyn there?

  “He is, I can verify,” Durgan says. “He killed my master.”

  Igraine sneers and shakes her head. “Your words are worthless to me, wight.” She returns her attention to me. “Cris, I asked you a question.”

  I raise my chin and speak up loudly. “Myla had inverted nipples. And for the first few days of Aiden’s life . . .” I have to pause to avoid crying, “his jaw was slightly offset. He could not suckle. We had no pumps or anything, so I drew the milk into my mouth and put it into his.”