City Infernal

by Edward Lee

  Ezoriel augmented, “You will be reunited with your sister, and we will strike the worst blow yet against Lucifer and his reign of tyranny.”

  Now everyone in the room was looking at Cassie, awaiting her approval.

  “Sounds cool to me,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  (III)

  The Nectoport ride reminded Cassie of seasickness. It was like standing in a long curving tunnel made of dark-green lights. The tunnel swayed back and forth as it invisibly traversed space; Cassie thought of a snake whipping wildly around, and she was in the snake.

  It’s too bad they don’t have vomit bags in these things, she thought as her stomach tossed and turned.

  But Via and Hush seemed to be enjoying the ride. The three of them stood at the rear of the port, behind the battalion of Ezoriel’s heavily armed black knights.

  “Groovy, huh?” Via said.

  “Uh, no. I’m close to barfing.”

  “Save that for later, after Ezoriel’s soldiers turn every demon in the Commission into hash.”

  Can’t wait, Cassie thought. “So when are you going to tell me what good these bones’ll do?” she asked and held up the bag. “What, it produces some kind of energy field?”

  Via and Hush grinned at each other. “Better than that. It’ll be awesome,” Via said. “It’s so cool, you’ll crap.”

  “Via, I think I’ve already crapped,” Cassie said. “I hope you know what we’re doing.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a witch, remember?”

  Fine.

  Soon the throbbing green light began to darken, and the Nectoport swayed so intensely that the inertia pressed Cassie against the soft wall, off her feet. The port seemed to be whipping downward now.

  Then the motion ceased.

  “Battalion!” a knight shouted. “Prepare to attack! Death to Satan and his minions! Glory to St. Cassie, our Savior, our Holy One!”

  Now the troops roared with deadly fervor.

  “Stand safely to our backs,” a knight said to Cassie. “We live to die for you, Holy One.”

  “I don’t want anyone to die for me,” Cassie complained. She wagged her hand. “Just go out there and—and—do whatever it is you do. Make ‘em stop being bad. Chop ’em up. Whatever.”

  Via and Hush laughed.

  “Attack!” someone commanded, and then came the bizarre sound—

  Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!

  —and the Nectoport opened, and the knights charged out.

  A small detachment stayed behind, bidding Cassie and her friends to wait. The Nectoport’s mouth hovered ; Cassie could see that it had opened right in the middle of the Commission’s booking room.

  I guess that means we’re here.

  The first wave of Ushers, Golems, and Conscripts were swiped down in minutes by Ezoriel’s soldiers. When the room was cleared, they began to disperse to various defensive points.

  “Now,” Via said.

  They jogged out of the port, which sucked shut behind them. Suddenly Cassie was stepping over gore, steaming piles of innards, and body parts. When their guards found a clear area, Via up-ended the sack and let the bones clatter to the floor.

  “What now?” Cassie asked.

  “Command it?”

  “What, the bones?”

  “Tell it to stand up.”

  Cassie looked puzzled at the small heap of bones. “You’re kidding me, right? You want me to talk to a pile of friggin’ bones?”

  Via sighed exasperation. “You keep forgetting. You’re not on Primrose Lane any more—you’re in Hell. Things are a little different here.”

  You can say that again....

  “You’re an Etheress. Use the power. Look at the bones and say ‘stand up.’ ”

  Cassie felt foolish. She looked at the bones. “Stand up.”

  Then, the bones ... stood up.

  Now I’ve seen everything.

  Upon her command, the bones assembled themselves, forming a complete skeleton which now stood up straight before her.

  “Get it yet? You become the bones.”

  Cassie’s eyes held wide on the skeleton. The skeleton was alive. I ... become ... this?

  “Now touch it,” Via instructed.

  Cassie looked back, her face pinched. “Oh, I don’t know—”

  “Touch it!” Via exclaimed, and then Hush grabbed Cassie’s hand and urged it forward.

  Her fingers reluctantly reached out—

  Cassie squeezed her eyes shut. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but SOMETHING sure as hell will.

  Her fingers rubbed against the skeleton’s rib cage.

  sssssssssssssssssssssssssst!

  Cassie looked around, dumbfounded. Her angle of vision was suddenly different. When she looked at her hanas-they were the skeleton’s hands.

  “Believe me now?” Via asked.

  Cassie’s physical body stood upright, blank-eyed. It was as if her body were in a trance.

  But now she knew what had taken place.

  Her spirit now occupied the body of the skeleton.

  When she talked, it wasn’t her physical mouth that moved, it was the jaw on the skull.

  “You gotta be shitting me!” she swore. “I’m a friggin’ skeleton!”

  “You’re not just a skeleton, Cassie. You’re an invincible skeleton. Nothing can hurt you. If a demon stuck a sword through your ribs, you wouldn’t even feel it. If somebody dropped a fucking cement truck on your head, nothing would happen. And now your Ethereal Powers are a hundred times stronger than when you were in your own body.”

  Cassie looked down at her body of bones. The bones were glowing. Somehow, she could see through two empty eye sockets.

  She could think ... with a dry, brainless skull.

  The few knights that remained with them raised their visors in astonishment.

  “We’ll stay back here with these guys,” Via told her, “to protect your physical body.”

  “But what am I supposed to do?” Cassie’s bone jaw quivered.

  Via pointed outward, toward the sounds of battle.

  “Go break bad,” she said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  (I)

  Cassie broke some serious bad.

  The only thing she couldn’t quite get used to was the annoying clinking sound her skeletal feet made when she walked forward across the stone floor, that and the sight of her fleshless arms moving back and forth.

  Everything else was a breeze.

  A squad of black knights led her down a service corridor. Flamma-Troopers at the corridor’s end immediately ejected plumes of flame at them, but all Cassie need do was look at the flame and it bounced straight back to its source.

  The Flamma-Troopers exploded like sticks of dynamite in gasoline drums.

  Up ahead, a knight was having a hard time hacking at a pair of tall Golems, but when Cassie turned her gaze to the Golems, they immediately melted to pools of bubbling clay.

  “Ushers!” someone shouted.

  Around another corner, a pack of at least twenty fanged and taloned Ushers rushed forward. The knights raised their weapons, were about to charge, but Cassie said, “Stand back.”

  . She glared at the approaching pack, and as she did so she could actually see the violent thought forming before her eyes. The thought fired down the hall like a white-hot blade.

  It cut the pack of Ushers in half at their waistlines, gore flying.

  This ROCKS! Cassie thought.

  But on to business.

  “We’ve got to find the room they’re holding my sister in,” she said to one of her guards.

  “It’s the central Torture Cell,” she was told. “This way! ”

  As Cassie followed the detachment in her body of bones, her thoughts effortlessly cut down anything in their way. More Ushers, more Golems, more charging Conscripts and a variety of demonic hybrids that had been manufactured for Satan’s military—they all fell butchered. At one point she felt a modest force of pressure push against her, the
n saw a queue of cloaked Bio-Wizards attempting a hex.

  Cassie’s thoughts immediately turned them into worms.

  Next, they rushed past an intersecting stone corridor a bit too quickly; Cassie’s guards were ahead of her, but suddenly she was being attacked from behind. She turned and nearly laughed at the Conscripts bearing down at her. When their swords and halberds struck her bones, the metal shattered. When they grabbed at her skeleton, their hands burned off.

  Then she looked at them and simply thought: Mush.

  A second later, the Conscripts had corroded to something like goulash on the floor.

  Open, she thought when they encountered a high security door of heavy iron grate. The grate flew apart. Further down, an immense door of tremendous stone blocks was being wheeled shut, but then Cassie thought, Rubble, and the door exploded, falling to pieces.

  Before the door, though, was a security moat full of acidic bilge. Cassie thought, Bridge, and at once the great stone blocks of the fallen door tumbled out of the chamber and filled the moat. Cassie and her guards easily walked across.

  The sounds of battle could be heard rumbling from all corners of the facility. The walls quaked. What they stood in now was a wider corridor with a tall iron door at the end.

  A sign read: CENTRAL TORTURE UNIT. RESTRICTED !

  One of the guards gestured at a television mounted on the wall.

  “Ezoriel’s attack has begun!”

  On the screen she could see a city block ablaze and columns of Ezoriel’s troops rushing out of multiple Nectoports.

  “... unprecedented in the history of Hell,” the same newswoman’s voice could be heard. “The Mephisto Building’s strongest line of defense—the Flesh Warrens—are being stormed by Ezoriel and his Satan Park Contumacy. The massive attack began shortly after a vicous assault on the Commission of Judicial Torture, and intelligence reports are already telling us that wanted criminal, the Etheress Cassie Heydon, is behind the assault.”

  A cut showed the Commission’s front gate, and the buildings behind it in flames.

  Yeah! Cassie thought.

  “The Etheress and the traitorous Fallen Angel Ezoriel seem to be involved in a blasphemous conspiracy,” the newswoman said. The next clip cut back to the woman’s turtle-like face in front of the camera. “But Lord Lucifer himself has assured us that reinforcements are already arriving at both sites, and that Ezoriel’s barbaric troops are already in retreat.” But then the anchorwoman went bug-eyed. “What!” she exclaimed. She jumped up from behind her news desk but wasn’t even standing for a second before a sword swooshed down and shore her in half from head to crotch.

  Black knights were rushing into the newsroom, destroying everything in their sight.

  Finally, one knight stared into the camera.

  Then the screen turned to fuzz.

  Kicking ass and not taking names, Cassie rejoiced. Her skeletal finger pointed to the huge iron door. “That’s it, right?”

  “Yes, Holy One! That’s where your sister is being held. We await your command.”

  Cassie chuckled at the RESTRICTED warning on the sign. Restricted, huh? Then her thoughts blew the entire door out of its hinges.

  A great roar exploded from within.

  Even Cassie, in her invulnerable state, had to gasp at what she saw.

  With swords, axes, and claws held high, hundreds of demons charged out of the chamber—

  (II)

  Deep in the most remote chamber of the dungeon, Grand Duke Fenton Blackwell-all ten feet of him—tensed against the heavy iron chains that girded him from his neck to his ankles. He’d been propped back on a stone slab, a humiliating display. For good measure, they’d blinded him with red-hot stokers, and they’d sawed off his great horns—the worst insult that could be paid to a Hierarchal Grand Duke.

  “I don’t know why we don’t just chop the unholy thing into pieces,” said the black-armored Lance Corporal Flavius. “Let me chop its evil head into chunks and dig its heart out with a trowel. The thing offends all that is righteous, just being allowed to live. It’s just another of Lucifer’s obscenities.”

  But Flavius was young and hasty. His hatred for the Morning Star made him brash. It was General Galland who commanded Ezoriel’s dungeon, and in his vast experience he knew well the effect of imprisonment. “It is much more a slight to Lucifer to keep the beast humiliated in chains than it is to slay it,” Galland said. “Ezoriel’s wisdom is our law. We shall not forget that.”

  The two guards eyed the Grand Duke with satisfaction. With equal satisfaction they monitored Ezoriel’s two-pronged attack on the oval television by the sentry desk. Glorious, Galland thought. Not only were his Master’s troops effectively penetrating the Flesh Warrens, the Etheress was routing the Commission of Judicial Torture and leaving only rubble and death in her holy wake.

  “It’s a wondrous day in Hell,” he whispered to his aide.

  “Glory be to St. Cassie and Ezoriel!”

  But their glances shot immediately to their charge; the blasphemous Grand Duke Blackwell ... began to laugh.

  “Silence, you vile thing!” Flavius approached the prisoner and yelled. He raised his sword.

  But Blackwell just continued to laugh, his broad chest heaving against the strapping chains.

  Galland walked up closer, raising his visor. “You laugh? As Satan’s stronghold is on the verge of destruction?”

  The laughter boomed like cannon fire. The walls of the cell shook till mortar dust sifted from the seams of each stone.

  “Fine,” Galland decided. “See how hard you laugh when we rivet your evil mouth shut. Lance Corporal! Heat up some rivets for our jovial friend here.”

  “It would be a pleasure, sir!”

  But Flavius would have no time to prepare any rivets, because—

  CHINK!

  Blackwell’s next burst of laughter expanded his chest to the extent that the widest length of chain snapped.

  “Call for reinforcements!” Galland ordered. “And fetch a halberd shaft!”

  Now the dungeon walls tremored as if an earthquake were rocking the entire fortress. Galland stepped back when another length of chain broke.

  CHINK!

  Then another, and another—

  CHINK! CHINK!

  Galland drew his sword.

  It’s impossible! The chain could bind a Caco-Dragon!

  The laughter roared, then—

  CLACK!

  —the remaining chains exploded off the Grand Duke’s body.

  Now Galland was scared....

  “Bring that halberd!” he shouted. “The beast is escaping!”

  Galland expected the dehorned thing to get up off the slab and attack. Grand Dukes could be destroyed but it took the greatest might—such a monster’s heart must be cleaved from its chest, and then its head must be severed and pulped—and Galland knew that it would take many soldiers to achieve that feat.

  He and Flavius alone didn’t stand a chance.

  The alarm was blaring in the compound now, and Flavius rushed back, the blade of his halberd high in the air.

  But Grand Duke Blackwell did not rise from the slab. Instead, he just lay there, laughing so hard and loud that Galland was deafened.

  “Why isn’t it attacking us!” Flavius shouted.

  I don’t know, Galland thought.

  And then he leapt up onto the creature and rammed the point of his sword directly into the thing’s heart.

  “God save us,” Flavius muttered and dropped his halberd in the limpest surrender to terror.

  The laughter abated when Galland’s sword sunk. Lucifer has tricked us, he realized in a despairing surprise.

  The thing on the slab deflated as a pestiferous effluence gushed from the wound Galland had inflicted.

  “It’s a Hex-Clone,” Flavius croaked.

  Yes, Galland knew in total disgrace. He threw his sword down. “We’ve been wretchedly deceived. Summon some messengers posthaste. We must notify Ezoriel at once an
d tell him to retreat. And we must get word to the Etheress also—if she’s not been captured , already....”

  For it was clear. This sack of putrid meat was not who they believed it was, and there was only one place that the real Grand Duke Blackwell could be....

  (III)

  —and as hundreds of demons charged out of the Commission’s best-guarded chamber, it was hundreds of demons that lay slaughtered before them a few minutes later. Cassie was now harnessing her Ethereal skills to a terrifying exactitude, and the amplification of those skills via the Power Relic made her pause to wonder if any force in all of Hell could stop her.

  As a skeleton charged by the Power Relic, she might even be able to penetrate the Mephisto Building itself, and throw Lucifer out of his 666-floor penthouse window.

  But that was for later. Now her duty was at hand.

  Rescue Lissa, get her out of here.

  The last defender of the chamber—Cassie was happy to see—was Commissioner Himmler himself. The little man cowered before her, his narrow face agape. His monocle popped out of his eye, and then he was on his knees before the raging skeleton.

  “Spare me, please. I’ll do anything you command,” he sobbed.

  God, I can’t stand to see a grown man cry, she thought, and then—splat!

  —her returning glance flattened the Commissioner to a smear of gore on the stone floor as effectively as if a steam-roller had driven over him.

  Her feet of bones began to climb over the mounds of bodies before her. I’m glad I’m not the janitor here. Her squad of knights followed, but when she stepped finally into the central chamber—

  No!

  Lissa was nowhere to be seen.

  Instead, all that occupied the chamber was the vat of Razor-Leeches, and suspended upside-down above the vat was a familiar face.

  The body squirming there had been skinned from the feet to the neck, but the intact face wailed at her—

  “Cassie! Help me! For God’s sake please HELP me!”

  It was Radu, her sister’s boyfriend.

  The man who had seduced Cassie the night that Lissa had committed suicide at the club.