“The great trick of civilization,” said Pelethor, turning back to Wodan, “is that it allows for the passing of information from one generation to the next. Efficiently, from master, to student. Wodan, you have already started on this path. That is why you were made to leave the land that should have called you king. But you came upon the path accidentally, by happenstance, and could have been killed at a hundred points along the way. You need a master. I can… teach you things, Wodan.”
Pelethor paused. His eyes were like lasers and Jens took to watching the guards, the paintings, the table cloth – anything but those eyes.
“You could teach me things?”
“Things passed down to me through my family. I...”
“And Scorpio?”
Pelethor paused.
“I understand,” said Wodan. “These are the kind of things that you would rather spare your son.”
Pelethor nodded slowly.
“I would have you spare your son those things, too,” Wodan said quietly.
“Wodan, this city is ripe for us. This garbage heap, this empty throne - all of it, is ready to be transmuted into something tremendous and powerful. The great Coil beneath the city is ready to rise, if only we have the strength to summon it and make it obey our will. We can conjure it in a grand ceremony of revelation. Wodan... you alone are worthy to accept me as your master and the responsibility that will come with the power I will teach you. Wodan, will you accept?”
Jens stared at his friend. Wodan looked at Pelethor for a long time, then lowered his eyes. Jens was sure that his friend was about to go to a place where he could not follow. He was leaving. Jens realized that Wodan was staring at his own palms. Each was lined with a long, thin scar.
“No,” Wodan said finally. “I… can’t do it.”
Jens breathed an audible sigh of relief. Pelethor dropped his gaze. For a long time they sat in silence, then Pelethor raised his head and said quietly, “I understand. You have to find your own way.”
Wodan nodded, then smiled.
Pelethor smiled too, but there was sadness in him. Jens was surprised that the man was capable of emotion after all. Pelethor signaled to a guard, then took his radio. “Kitchen,” he said.
A pause, then, “Yeah.”
“Serve dinner for my friends,” Pelethor said, then handed the radio back to his Soldier.
Pelethor sat in silence. Wodan looked at Jens, smiling, and while Jens was confused about why Wodan had turned the man down, he was greatly relieved that he finally recognized his friend once again. Eventually a call came from the kitchen, then one of the guards left and returned with a large tray. He set a covered dish in front of Wodan, Jens, and Pelethor, then filled a wineglass for each of them and placed it in the upper right hand corner of each sitting area, according to custom. When he was done, the Coilman returned to his corner of the room.
The radio squawked again. “Status?”
A Coilman picked up his radio and answered, “Green.”
Jens was completely famished and could even smell the food underneath its fine silver cover. He picked the cover up and laid it aside. He saw hot buttered rolls, carrots, peas, and best of all – pork chops cut into thin strips. He bent over to smell the steaming meal, then noticed that the strips of meat were arranged into some kind of strange pattern. He rotated his plate around, then his jaw dropped in shock. The strips of meat were arranged into letters, and they spelled out the word
P O I S O N
An arrow at the end of the word pointed up and to the right, directly to his wineglass. Jens started back, glanced at Pelethor, then quickly shifted the meat around with his hand so that Pelethor would not see. Full of white-hot panic, he looked at Wodan’s plate, saw that the meat was not arranged in any pattern, then glanced at Wodan’s face and saw that he was smiling and completely oblivious. Having no idea what to do, he pushed the wineglass away from himself, then glanced at Pelethor and moved the wineglass back before himself. He watched in mute horror as Wodan raised his wineglass, then Pelethor raised his own - the wine was poisoned and Wodan was going to die and he had no idea what he could do when the room was covered by four gunmen and a psychotic freak sitting at the dinner table.
Jens didn’t want to give himself away, so he lifted his wineglass as well. His hand shook. As Wodan moved the glass to his mouth, Jens said loudly, “Hey Wodi - uh, d-d-don’t you think it’s t-time we stopped drinking?!”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” said Wodan. “We haven’t had a drink together in a long time!”
“C-come on, man,” said Jens, glancing uneasily at Pelethor. He saw that the man had moved his wineglass to his lips, but then set it down and had only given the impression of taking a drink. “Uh, well, we’ve been drinking a lot in the past few weeks, and, you know, uh, man, I’ve been givin’ it some thought a-a-a-and I think, it’s like, well, you know, we probably need to quit. You’ve totally developed b-bags under your eyes, and I know I’m not getting any younger.”
“But this is a celebration!” Wodan said, laughing. He looked toward Pelethor, who smiled politely. “Besides, this is fine wine, not that speakeasy rotgut we’ve gotten used to!”
“Uh, thing is, I’ve heard that wine, uh, can give you gallstones. And impotence.” Jens looked back and forth between the two.
“Well, I’ve heard it doesn’t,” said Wodan. “So… bottom’s up!” With that, Wodan turned up his wineglass and Jens shrieked in alarm. Wodan set the glass down, then wiped his mouth and smiled at his friend. “Tastes fine to me.”
“Oh gods,” Jens muttered. He turned to Pelethor. The man glared at Jens with the eyes of a snake. Both of them knew that they were playing a game of death.
“Be still, young man,” said Pelethor. Jens’s heart froze. He turned to one of the gunmen, who stared back at him with an evil smile. After a moment the guard looked away as if bored. Jens’s mind ran in circles of panic. There was no escape.
Wodan lurched in his seat. Jens could not turn away as Wodan’s eyes went wide, then his head bobbed back and forth and his mouth turned down strangely. He leaned back, then held the edge of the table as if he were about to fall.
“Wodan!” Jens shrieked.
Wodan gasped, then relaxed suddenly. His hands fell limp at his sides and his head fell down onto his chest. He sat still.
Jens stared at his friend for a long time, then slowly turned toward Pelethor, who stared back at him. “Was it so obvious to you?” he said. “Perhaps I underestimated you, Soldier.”
A hand clutched at Jens and he jerked in alarm. “I’ll take that for you, sir,” said one of the guards, smiling as he reached toward Jens’s side and removed his gun from its holster. The guard moved toward Wodan. Wodan’s head tossed sideways as the guard roughly jerked his sidearm from its holster, smiling all the while.
Jens stared at Wodan’s lifeless body. The guards seemed to wait for some signal from Pelethor, who only sat and stared at his wineglass. Eventually a radio chimed and, once again, a voice said, “Status?” One of the Coilmen lifted a radio and replied, “Green, man, totally green. Just tell team four to sit tight. We’ll find somethin’ for them to do.”
“This is the night of my greatest victory,” said Pelethor. The man seemed worn out. The fire that burned in his eyes earlier was now gone. “Tonight, perhaps tomorrow morning... all of my enemies will be dead. My revenge will be complete. But him...” and Pelethor raised his eyes to Wodan’s body, and said, “Revenge is not enough, really. We could have ruled, Wodan and I... we could have ruled this pathetic shit-heap. All of my enemies had to die, you see, and he would have only become one of them. The Businessmen and that man Virgil, they would have manipulated him, would have turned his gifts against me. Wodan’s something special, isn’t he?” Pelethor sat in silence for a long time, then finally said, “He’s made me feel guilt... for the first time in my life. I was raised by killers who taught me to kill with poison. They never taught me how to feel guilt. But that boy… he su
rely did.”
Jens felt trapped in an unreal nightmare. He was powerless, and could only listen.
Pelethor rubbed his forehead, then moved his hair back into place. “One person can only do so much. That which is allotted to one person was never enough for me. So I… I had to become many.” He stared into his wineglass once more. “If only I could have killed Boris myself. But he…”
Pelethor gripped his stomach, then swallowed with some difficulty. Jens wondered if he was going to throw up.
“The programming was just too strong,” Pelethor finally said. “That night, I had hoped that he would be weak. If he’d panicked, perhaps even begged for his life, then I could have killed him. Easily. But… but in his last moment, he looked as if he could have carried the entire city on his shoulders. I dare not even imagine what I would have done if Wodan had not been there to kill him for me. I… I would have done anything that Boris told me, in that moment. Even with my son there, in pain. The god damned programming… even when the other Hand tried to bow to me, I was nearly overcome with sickness. We were taught to never work together. If only Boris had shown some weakness. Some, only a little. But he stayed powerful, and if he had survived the battle, then we would have gone back to work for him, the both of us, without any sort of regret, for he would have proven himself a worthy Head to serve.”
The radio chirped and a Coilman held it close. “Can’t hear you, team two. What? Wait a sec.” He left the room, playing with the antenna.
“But Boris did not count on my multitude of personas,” said Pelethor. “A house divided against itself cannot stand, and I simply could not bear the sight of what he had done to my child. I was divided, and fell, and personas disloyal to Boris rose to the fore. I did not want to pass such a curse on to Scorpio… I could not bear the thought of it. Wodan... oh, Wodan, you fool!” Pelethor shut his eyes, then shouted, “What a wonderful and terrible Hand I would have made of you!”
Just then there was a terrible blast and Pelethor’s neck exploded in an incredible spray of meat and a gallon of blood poured out onto the table before him. Jens turned and saw Wodan holding a massive smoking revolver, the magnum of the dead Captain Jerry, kept hidden in a holster strapped to his back.
For a fraction of a second, Jens and the three guards stared at the scene while the fourth remained in the hallway, messing with his radio and wondering what the hell had just happened – then the room exploded with kinetic fury. Wodan kicked off from the table and fell backwards in his chair, Jens dived across the table toward Pelethor’s corpse, and one guard fumbled for his gun while the guns he’d taken from the boys slipped out of his pants and clattered on the floor. Bullets slammed into the table behind Jens, then the top of Wodan’s high chair shattered into splinters as another guard fired at him. As Wodan fell in his chair he leaned to the side and fired and the nearest guard flew from his feet and slammed into the wall with a giant hole in his torso. Jens slid across a tray of food, then flopped into Pelethor’s lap and grasped the gun holstered at his chest. Before Wodan’s chair hit the ground he turned once again and fired on his other side; with expert aim, another Coil guard’s arm twisted about on his shoulder, then flopped on the floor, still firing his handgun as the man stood and looked down at it. Wodan’s chair smacked into the ground and he dropped his gun, but as the third guard finally pulled his gun free and aimed, Jens held both his legs in the air awkwardly and fired round after round while still sitting in Pelethor’s lap. The wall around the guard was blasted full of holes, but one bullet must have struck home for the guard toppled forward and crashed into the ground.
Jens was covered in blood as he tried to extricate himself from the dead Captain’s lap. The armless guard watched him for a moment, his face pale and sickly, then he looked at his arm once more before he leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.
“BACKUP! BACKUP!” the fourth guard screamed from the distant hallway. “OH FUCK ME, I NEED EVERYONE IN THE DINING ROOM NOW NOW NOW!”
Wodan raced past Jens, who shouted, “Careful, Wodi, careful!”
“He’s running!” Wodan shouted. “I can hear him!”
Jens watched, heart blasting out of control, as Wodan rounded the corner and fired into the distance. Wodan lowered the gun, then nodded to Jens. How Wodan could possibly hear that the man was running, and thus had his back turned, seemed impossible to Jens – his ears were ruined by the gunfire, and he couldn’t hear anything unless it was happening directly in front of him.
He killed one guy with each shot, Jens thought. Wodan’s turning into something… something beyond the norm.
Wodan approached and the two looked at one another for a moment, shaking uncontrollably, then they leaned on the table, and on one another, for support.
“This is beyond screwed up,” said Jens, trying not to puke. “You know there’s guards outside who heard the whole damn thing!”
“I know!” said Wodan, gathering up several guns. “If we run outside we’re just gonna get blasted. Let’s look around in here and see if we can find, uh, another way out-”
“That’s stupid too, man, because this place is gonna get overrun any minute!”
“Shit,” said Wodan, kneeling down over a body and catching his wind. “How’d you know the wine was poisoned?”
“You’ll never believe it!” Jens shrieked. “Some crazy bastard arranged the meat on my plate into the word “poison” - but hell, man, why aren’t you dead right now?”
“I didn’t drink it, of course! I just kind of touched it on my lips.”
“But how did you know it was poisoned?”
“I didn’t know, I just suspected. There were a lot of little clues.”
“Besides the fact that Pelethor was acting like a freaking lunatic?”
“Yes, besides that. I knew that most likely both of the Hands survived the battle. If either one of them was dead, the Coil would have advertised it openly. Instead, the matter was hushed up. There have been so many Coil killings lately, and Pelethor’s been so confident, that it made me wonder if at least one of the Hands was working for him, if not both. Otherwise, he’s a smart man, and I’m sure he would have gone underground if the Hands had him in their sights. Instead, he was flaunting his power - and Captains who stood against him were dying left and right.”
“That’s nothing very solid,” said Jens, peering out a window.
“No, but there were other things. He mentioned a left-hand path, and that’s an occult term. It has to do with someone who walks their own path and finds their own truth, as opposed to the right-hand path, where you already have all your rules established and plenty of establishment-types who can help you along the way. I know about that stuff because some of the men who founded my homeland were occultists, but there’s no reason why a Coil Captain or a Businessman would ever care about something like that, or even know that those ideas exist in the first place. I knew there had to be more to Pelethor. Of course, the Ugly have an occult background; their founders, the rulers of Vatica, were religious dogmatists by day and hardcore occultists by night. Pelethor was probably using a term that he had drilled into him, when he…” Wodan paused, then said, “He knew his way around the Ugly fortress. I would have gotten lost in there, if it wasn’t for him. Also, do you remember that Utrecht Sera died of poison right after Pelethor’s son was kidnapped?”
“You… you think that Pelethor was one of the Hands?”
Wodan smiled with half of his mouth, then turned away.
“But, wait a minute,” said Jens. “The Coil had plenty of spies in the Ugly. He could have gotten maps of the fortress from them, and even used spies to poison Sera. You… you had nothing solid, did you?”
“Okay, no, I didn’t. But I had enough to suspect something like that. And I figured that if Pelethor was going to poison us, it would be then, and so I... I just decided to play dead!”
“Why didn’t you let me in on this little plan? I nearly had a heart attack!”
“It wa
sn’t something I planned out. You kidding, man? It was just some crazy shit that popped into my head.”
“And then he confessed,” said Jens, laughing.
“And then he confessed,” said Wodan. “Anyway, let’s find the kitchen. I want to see who put that message on your plate before we get overrun.”
They wandered around the mansion for a long time, creeping around corners with guns held ready. They passed numerous pitch-black hallways that intersected at odd angles. Doorways of differing heights led to darkened rooms; sometimes two or three entrances led to small rooms, while larger rooms had only a single small entrance. The windows in one room were entirely bricked over. Another room was occupied only by three simple iron chairs that faced the entrance. Wodan had the distinct impression that even though Pelethor’s force of will was admirable, his family was haunted by shadows, and had been cursed for many generations.
Finally they came to a well-lit doorway. Jens placed a finger to his lips, then swung out with his gun held before him. Wodan heard a high-pitched scream, then Jens immediately threw his hands up and said, “Woah woah woah, it’s okay, it’s okay!”
Wodan entered and saw Hari standing in the middle of the kitchen surrounded by nearly a dozen dead men. The old man wailed piteously as Jens shook him, smiling and laughing.
“Relax, old timer!” said Wodan. “It’s just us!”
Hari wailed once more, then covered his face.
Wodan looked around. He saw no blood, but many of the dead men were sitting at a small table, sprawled over upturned bowls and spilled drinks.
“You poisoned all these men?” said Wodan, incredulously.
Hari nodded slowly, eyes wide and mouth hanging slack.
“Why?” said Wodan.
“I... the master didn’t say it would be y-y-you... but I heard the men talking... I knew from their description that it must be you. Oh, gods, I k-killed so many... and not just tonight! That monster... he had me prepare meals like this before! You don’t know how many other gangsters he’s killed, son!”
“He let you in on his little secret?”
Demonworld Book 3: The Floyd Street Massacre Page 28