Shambling behind me. Failure to sneak up on me.
Three kids, street wear. 'Hey man, you got a smoke?'
They don't want a smoke.
Take a step back. They can roll me alright. Seven at night in a bad part of town, guy alone in an alley, who's to stop ‘em? Well, I could. Magic isn't really a weapon in the way a knife or a fist is. I mean, I really want, I can do it.
But I'm outside the lair of the Hollow. Throw around magic, it'll know. Throw around violence, it'll know.
'I like your jacket,' says another. Look at ‘em. Eyes blank and noses runny. Fourteen or fifteen. Seen that before.
Sniffing chemicals. Not good ones. Paint. Turps. Like that. So bored and angry at the world, who can blame them? But that's why they're talking. Should have just snuck up and hit me in the head but they're all unsteady. Talk gives ‘em time to get their shit together.
Then Bettina ghosts up behind them and it's all over. Like a mother cat batting kittens into place.
They're so used to the beating she puts on them they barely even yell out. Just run away.
I turn away, staring back at the manhole cover before she's even finished.
'He down there?'
'He was. Recently.'
She slips off her hoodie. Just wearing a tight sports bra thing under there. Slim as a knife, smooth muscle under her belly. Arms round and thick with more. She throws the top onto the dumpster and takes two gloves out of her shorts. Padded, so if she hits something hard, skull, it minimises damage to her knuckle bones.
Pacing a second. Around the rim. Shine a torch down. Nothing.
Bettina waits. Knows the bravery doesn't come easy to me like it does her.
'Alright.'
Take the rubber boots from my bag. We slide ‘em on. Why am I prepared like this?
Expecting to wade through blood.
'This is not a cool look,' she frowns at me. 'Least not for me.' Then she shrugs.
She goes down first.
The City was built on a swamp. First go at it, local natives didn't care too much for the construction and critiqued it by burning the wooden stockades the fuck down and killing a few hundred.
Then, century or two and a discrete genocide later, they tried again. Till some madman with sword and cannon locked it up, freighted in dead bodies, gave everything in the joint the plague. Burnt it down. Built again but they couldn't open up the plague streets. Built over it. There's still vaults in the old sewers to the second city and that's where we're headed.
Cockroaches, hordes of them, go running at the light. This is a storm drain in summer. Water threatens to spill into our boots and it's foul. There's writing on the walls. Chalked instructions to engineers, drain workers, sanitation inspectors. Scribbled signs for the homeless who live under here, forming their own gangs, getting their signs out, their instructions. Graffiti.
No lights but ours and these torches don't much feel sufficient. Mould all over the walls. The crazed street shamans gather that stuff up and smoke it for metro-totem vision quests. I should have bought something to scrape it myself.
We walk, ten or so minutes. Shiver in the cold.
She walks ahead of me and the temperature never touches her. Then.
'I think we got it.'
There's a semicircle cut into the bottom of one of the walls. We crouch down and the cockroaches dart aside. Look in and there's bars, so it looks like the entryway to a castle.
She takes a hold, lifts it out. It's been sawed away and just wedged back into place. Must weight forty kilograms but you wouldn't know it the way she handles the cold iron. Hands and knees in that foetid water, we crawl through. She doesn't replace it. Raise a brow and she whispers close to my ear.
'In case we run back.'
Dread moves in my belly but I just nod sharply. Fear up in my jaw. Walk through some more brick and darkness corridors but these are much narrower than the storm drain.
She puts her hand up. Sniffs deep. Resist the urge myself as I'm already breathing through my mouth.
Wait till she's done.
She turns back and leans in. 'Blood. Lots. A few days old.' The she points down. Takes me a second to make it out. Dryer down here. Shoeprints. Tracks.
Bloody, running away. Whatever the owner of those shoes ran from, we're walking to.
Right.
Rummage in my bag, find it, whisper a word to unlock the wards on it and take out the rod. Blasting is another term in magic for just fucking with people. You put the blasting conjure on them, you make ‘em infertile. You destroy their crops. Bad dreams get in ‘em. When you deal with spirits, blasting is a special kind of torture for them. Yeah, like when I was gonna try and punish the Devil thing. That was a blasting.
See, sometimes the magic works and they're bound but they hide. Just vanish. Still there though. Fake out, make it seem you got it wrong. You blast them, it hurts, they want the pain to stop, they appear.
Some old magicians, they also reckon God used a rod to fuck with the weather over paradise, mess up old Adam and Eve.
It's a drumstick I capped off with some neodymium magnets. A blasting rod. Clever name, right?
Take a long feather between my fingers as well and whisper a word to it. Might need to record what's going down.
Won't stop the Hollow but it won't be nothing either.
Nod to Bettina and off we go.
Bricks change texture and colour and we come to a dead end. Except, prints we're following seem to have started from here. I shake my head at her. Hold my palm an inch over my eyes. She nods.
Hitch the rod into my jeans and hit the Gnosis. It's a simple spell. Just an illusion. Just a thing to fool the sight. In fact -
I look around
Yeah. It's just a copy of the bricks on my left hand side. My finger slowly pulls through the air from illusion to real thing. Bettina frowns then nods when she gets it.
I could break it but why bother. She just walks through it and I go to follow when -
There's a cough. I whirl suddenly, reaching for the wand.
Nothing there.
Except.
On the stone ground.
Burning. Smelling of gone bad eggs.
A hoofprint.
Fuck.
Fuck!
Slowly, silently, I say the prayer again I said before, the incantation. Michael, Lord of Flame, lion of the south. Everlasting law. That one. I spin a web of golden light in my imagination, cords of fire.
Nothing. He's the fucking Prince of Darkness. He could be in front of me, giving me the two fingers and I couldn't see. But if he's here, if he comes through the wards, I'll know. If he tears ‘em down, I'll feel.
Step after Bettina through the illusion.
Jon's waiting.
Nine
i
An old wine cellar. There's still bottles in some of those special, diamond-shape cases they keep wine in. Curving entrances. Rats. Roots from trees long dead have forced their way into the bricked ceiling and hang down like beards or fingers.
I can hear music.
Pass through. Here's the blood. Dead guys in full on voodoo outfits. Black long coats. Diamond tipped canes. Stacked up in here like sandbags. Those rats have had a good time on ‘em. Don't linger. Don't breathe.
One more room ahead of us. Fifteen by fifteen, with two gas lamps keeping it from darkness, like you take camping, hanging overhead. Dim though. Shadowy. There's an old card table, cheap stereo on it. The music playing is some weak-ass Euro techno stuff. Jon's favourite club jams. He still listens to that stuff. Never stopped teasing him and he listened to it all his life.
Even under that mask...
Wonder how much a heart can take before it breaks for good.
Then I notice Jon, so still, in a shadow, sitting at the table. He's staring at us, under that mask.
I start.
'The man. Lark. We know you.'
He stands up and it's like darkness flowing. He's dressed in one of the long coats the voodoo hit squ
ad was wearing. It's buttoned. Naked underneath. Jon's voice, a little echoey but recognisable beneath the mask though something's mixed in too.
'Doesn't that fucking thing even let you wear clothes, Jon? You so far gone you don't even wear clothes like a man?'
He twists his head to look at me like he's figuring me out. It does that a lot, the Hollow. Like it's genuinely baffled by something foolish in front of it.
'We have decided, down here, we must forget all human affectations. The Learning Darkness has no need of men's weakness. We wear this only as trophy'
Bettina is in great shape but Jon is something else. Under his skin, four different shades marking his ancestry, there's no fat at all. He's blasted down to tendon. He was always fit. Worked out like a fiend. Trained at his dojo four or five times a week. Ate good. Never smoked. Barely drank. Top it all off, he liked to dance every chance he could, impressing the guys he liked with his moves and the cut of his chest and the hardness of his abdominals.
That's gone. There's no fat at all. He breathes and the skin looks to get trapped in between the definition of his musculature. Hands like claws. Ribs visible. The long lean muscles he had are replaced by ropey knots.
Men shouldn't look like that. It's a kind of physical perfection that no healthy person could enjoy but the Hollow doesn't care. NOS kits rip hell out of your ride but, for a while you'll get some speed.
'Sit. Talk. We remember you. We are aware you are no threat.'
'That's as might be.'
Take a seat and the damn thing, rotting through wood, threatens to buckle. My eyes adjust to the dim, look around the room, which was probably a restaurant. One far corner, I can see a kitchen, the plaster wall that separated it from here long rotted through.
On each inch of the walls, weapons. Cutting weapons. Knifes and swords of every kind. Dirks, anlaces, rapiers and sabres and khopeshes, spathas, those cool Chinese sprout-swords and claymores and more things besides. Kamas, scissors, straight razors, saws, wire garrottes, pinking shears. You get the drift.
'This one,' however, he gestures to Bettina. 'This one we do not know. We see her only dimly.'
'Her name is Bettina. She works with me. She's a friend and protector.'
'Why can we see her only dimly?'
I don't know. Surely is interesting though.
'I don't know.'
The Hollow reaches out to touch her but she takes a sudden step back, a breathy growl that is not goddamn sexy from her throat.
'Hollow, Jon, whoever, I haven't come here to fight. I haven't come here to die. I came here to talk.'
'The only discussions this one has are about death. Have you come to request a murder? The man in this one thinks that unlikely but perhaps you have changed. Do you think you can pay the prices we require for a life? Or lives?'
'Death. No. No death. You had it figured.'
'Then why have you disturbed us? The man is deep in tutorial with the Teaching Darkness. The man has learnt many lessons but is only truly ready to begin his studies.'
That's no good. That's no damn good at all. We've left this so long, sounds of it, possession is getting worse and worse. Still can't resist asking -
'What lessons?'
'Kill the man, put on the mask, you can learn. It would make no sense otherwise. You have not been Hollowed. But they are lessons in how to make things die.'
I shrug. 'Pick up a brick you're a killer, always seemed to me.'
'We do not discuss murder. We discuss how to make a thing die. Murder is a tawdry ambition and limited. And even then, the Teaching Darkness very much doubts your definition of death matches its own.'
'What's that then? The definition.'
Bettina clicks her fingers. Stay on track.
'No, wait. Another time. I came with a warning.'
Yeah. I did. But that feather keeps doing its work. It's an old quill I pulled apart, just took the pretty bit. Symbol of writing. Recording. It's magicked up with spells to scan and analyse everything it can about the Hollow. Takes dictation, magical-like, you know?
'The Library. Do you remember that?'
'No.'
'We worked it together for ten years.'
'The man performed service it for it. The mask needs no recollection of the man's servility.'
'Then let the man remember it.'
There's a catch in its voice. 'Are you commanding? Are you laying devoirs?'
Bettina steps in closer to me. Do not wave her back.
'No. Regardless. Look - I just came here to warn. No throw downs needed. Powerful types are looking for you. I expect to kill you. Capture you. I don't know why.'
'Others have tried.' It points to the dead men behind us. 'Go look for them now.'
Can't get sidetracked by that.
'I have no idea why but these are initiated men. These are adepts. This isn't about doubting you. Nothing is - no one is, is immune to everything. Magic, enough of it, can - Jon. I'm concerned. Enough magic. Enough firepower can bring down anything. '
'Oh,' says a smooth voice, 'I'm not certain about that.'
I look across the card table. It's the Devil.
He's wearing a see through mesh shirt, a black fur coat, eye-liner and black lipstick.
The Hollow doesn't even move, it seems. Just hits. Fingers extending, aiming for the Devil's throat.
One finger, delicate, like someone correcting a mistake, the Devil's fingertip intercepts it.
'You're a Hollow,' says the Devil.
'I've not seen one of you for a very long time. And, oh, perfect, you're wearing this man's friend! How wonderful, Lark. You lead me to your only friend and he's a slave! Do you know what would happen to your bum chum here if I tore that mask from his face? Ruination like you cannot conceive.'
The Hollow leaps to his feet, grabs a cavalry sabre from the wall and strikes but the Devil is gone. The sabre hits the wall and strikes sparks. Jon's movements are incredible. There's no martial artist in the world moves like this. None who can. He's gone off the scales of how human excellence is measured.
'You brought that!'
He turns to face me and Jon's dark eyes are gone.
Flashing, green. Like fangs. Razor sadistic.
'Arrogant. This man is arrogant beyond measure. You bought Sutekh story to my dwelling! Abomination!'
That last. He talking about the Devil or is he talking about me?
Figure I'm about to die like I always suspected I would, with an unanswered question bugging me.
It's true, you know. Time slows down a time like this. The sword is coming at me. Collision course with my eye, hard and fast enough there's no way it doesn't puncture my skull like it's not even there and pierce to the meat and sallowness I call a brain.
Till Bettina snatches the blade in her hand.
Blood spurts. Covers me. Gets in my mouth.
Bettina's blood is cold.
She flexes her fist.
The blade snaps.
Then she swings that lead pipe straight at the side of Jon's head. He flows out of the way, grabs a saw-tooth knife from the wall.
Bettina drops the pipe. Stance wide. Wants to get a grip on him. Pretty clear he's got the speed, she's got the strength.
Not time to even be frightened.
It's on.
ii
Battle like this - not many get a chance to see. Too fucking scared to take it in now but later, find it there in my head, like a movie I can play forward, backward, freeze.
Goes like this.
Hollows moves in close, blade slashing, coat flapping. She's not quick enough to avoid all the slices and pretty soon there's, ribbons-like, of blood splashing out of her. She doesn't care. Hollow can't perceive her right Why can we see her only dimly? and she's counting on that.
She rabbits him, right under the small ribs. But that's only the set up to the combo. Hollow sways backwards as she throws a few jabs. Idea is, he wants to take less of the impact while looking for an opening. But pulling his torso
, his guard, back - that's what she's waiting for. Her left comes around in a cross that, no lie, would take another man's head off.
It stuns the Hollow and she moves in, working his body like you do the heavy bag. She's like a machine. Her feet are quick, shifting to maximise her weight. Bettina knows how to fight.
Her move pays off as physics helps her out. The Hollow falls, moving too quick, eager to keep his ribs unpowdered and stumbling. Taking one in the face for his troubles. But he knows how to do it to and on his back, he sweeps the leg.
Bettina on one knee.
The Hollow throws that heavy sawtooth knife and it takes her in the throat. He disengages, moving to one wall.
Gives her time to get to her feet but he's got himself a scimitar. She reaches back, grabs the chair I'm (somehow still) sitting on and pulls it out from under me. Arse over tit for me and she takes the blade on it. It cuts through. With her free hand, she grabs the Hollow's sword arm. As she rises, she pulls him down, all the weight on her side, keeps the move going so he slides across her shoulders. His head hits the floor with a huge sound.
The Devil is back the way we came, watching with a grin on his face. Sees me seeing, winks.
Turn back to the fight. Bettina comes down hard, rams a knee into the small of his back. Uses the rest of her momentum to push her palm into the back of his head. Force like that, break nose. Break fucking teeth.
He's still for a moment.
She grabs the back of his head, which isn't covered by the mask. Takes a fistful of his hair. Works the face again. Bam, bam, punch to the spine, bam, bam.
Jon.
I want to tell her to stop but don't even know how to talk anymore.
Doesn't matter anyway. She's focussed on trying to break his face. She's on his back, kneeing his ribs, still just slamming, fucking slamming his face into the ground over and over, never sees him dislocates his arm from his shoulder. He brings it around so it's facing up like a flagpole, even though he's flat on his belly.
Fingers form like a bird's beak.
So quick. The hand darts forth so quick.
She screams.
Her eye is gone. She staggers back, not so much as pain as shock. He carefully reaches for his scimitar and stands.
Devil City Page 9