17.
Nathaniel lay amidst the fires of Hell. From beyond its limits, he could hear the Devil shouting furiously at him.
“You idiot!” The Devil’s voice snarled with rage. “Did you think a simple trick like that would stop me from getting what I want?”
I don’t know, thought Nathaniel. It didn’t seem to matter now.
He placed his palms on the rock at his sides and pushed himself up into a sitting position. Enough of his powers still remained to cool the jagged stones. But that still left him trapped in Hell.
When the Devil had thrown him through the gap in the chamber’s wall, he’d landed in a small space between the flaming pits, with their gouts of molten magma leaping up toward craggy ceilings writhing with fire, then falling back with a splash of sizzling white sparks. Waves of heat rolled over him, shimmering his vision, as though he had been on the surface of the sun—yet he wasn’t consumed, reduced to a flake of black ash. He’s not done with me—that dreadful realization formed solid at the center of his slowly reassembling thoughts. There’s more to come.
“Oh, yes…” The Devil easily discerned what he was thinking. The clubfooted figure stood before the wall’s opening. “There’s so much more for you to learn.” The scowl on the Devil’s face twisted harder. “You can’t beat me with Time, you fool. I was there when Time was created. It was my own stars and sun that made Time possible, by creating the first night and day. I am not subject to its laws, like humans are. Time is in me, not outside.”
Nathaniel tried not to listen. Pull yourself together, he commanded. He concentrated on gathering what little remained of his strength, so he would be able to stand and fight again—
It was already too late. He was unable to move from the spot; all he could do was watch, gaze uplifted, as the Devil stepped through the opening into Hell, and strode toward him, the misshapen foot striking heavier than the other.
The Devil reached down and gathered Nathaniel up by the front of his singed leather jacket. Holding him in midair, the Devil brought his cruelly smiling face close to his, then tossed him farther into Hell’s confines.
Nathaniel landed sprawling in one of the pits, the impact enough to pulverize the flaming bones of the sinners whose prison it had been. He rolled over onto his knees, the white shards crackling under his hands.
“Hurt me all you like, it still won’t save you—” Against the roar of the fiery winds, Nathaniel heard his own voice as he looked up at the Devil. Blood hissed into red steam as it trickled down his face. “Your reign is over,” he gasped aloud. “No matter what you do to me—”
“Why? Because of the prophecy?” The Devil sneered down at him, his eyes aflame. “In case you hadn’t noticed, apprentice, that fairy tale is over. There is no prophecy anymore. It’s dead.”
“I’m not talking about the prophecy—” Nathaniel left one hand against the rocks, pressing the other against the ache in his ribs. “I’m talking about what I’ve seen with my own eyes.” Behind him, the scattered bone fragments slowly began to reassemble into human form, so the eternal torment of the charred sinners could resume.
“Seen?” A frown formed on the Devil’s face. “Seen where?”
“On the Chart of Deaths,” said Nathaniel. “I didn’t know what the symbols meant at first, but I do now. The smaller ones, they’re your demons. All marked down for annihilation. And the large one in the middle … that one’s you.”
“Enough!” The Devil’s rage still seethed as he looked down at Nathaniel. “I fear no scrap of paper from your master’s closet—no matter how many symbols rise up in its ink. The only ones who are going to die today are you and your friends. Or have you forgotten that you still need an army to bring about my downfall? But you have no army. The human crowd holding its vigil up there is already being slaughtered. And as far as I can see, there is no other army.”
Nathaniel looked into the flames above him. He was able to sense those human deaths as well. His master would be up there, too, he realized. Collecting the souls from that slaughter.
How do I stop it? The words weighed dismally inside his mind. I saw the scroll … I know how it should end … But without an army, how can I make it happen?
“I don’t know…” Nathaniel struggled to his feet, swaying unsteadily. “How you’ll die … but you’ll be defeated. Even if I have to do it myself.”
“Yourself?” The Devil laughed. “With what, your bare hands?” He sneered at him. “Forget it, boy. Whatever power you have is fading in these flames.”
“But not my will,” said Nathaniel. “And as long as I have that, I can still resist you.”
The Devil shook his head. “But the problem is that you don’t have your will. Not anymore.” He pointed to Nathaniel’s heart. “Your willpower became mine the moment you crossed over the threshold of my realm.”
The Devil spoke no more. He crouched down, then leapt across the space between them, his straining hands outstretched like a tiger’s claws. His force struck Nathaniel’s shoulders and bore him helpless to the ground. In a moment, he was flat on his back, the Devil kneeling on top of him.
“It’s useless to struggle—” The Devil’s hand moved down to Nathaniel’s chest, then clenched into a fist, as though seizing upon something deep within him. He managed to raise his head, and saw the Devil drawing out a vaporous substance, glimmering as if studded with points of diamonds. The Devil lifted the vapor, displaying it before Nathaniel’s eyes. He felt emptier than ever before, like his body had been hollowed of its organs. “This is your willpower. All of it. But not for long…”
The Devil stood up, sneering as he regarded the translucent substance in his hand.
“Mine to keep—or destroy.” He spread apart his fingers, letting Nathaniel’s will rest in his open palm. “Without this, what are you?” The Devil smiled. “What is anyone?”
Unable to move or speak, Nathaniel watched as the Devil threw the glittering vapor into the nearest pit. It sparked, then burst into blue flames, like an igniting gas—
At the same time, a fiery, annihilating wind seemed to scour through all the chambers of Nathaniel’s mind. Within the limits of his skull, there was no escape from what was happening to him. He felt something inside, the core of his being, dwindle and weaken, as though bits of his flesh were being carved away by the point of a scalpel-like blade.
His gaze turned toward his own hand, lying flaccid upon the ashen rock. He tried to lift it, merely bring it up an inch into the air—nothing more than that. As he watched, he saw his fingers tremble, as though straining against unseen wisps of spider silk strong enough to bind them in place. He summoned all his determination into the tendons of his hand, ordering them to curl the pale flesh into a fist, fingertips scrabbling through the dust and cinders …
Nothing happened. He might as well have been looking at a corpse’s hand. A thing that life and desire had abandoned.
The Devil bent down and searched Nathaniel’s eyes, then straightened again.
“There, that’s better.” He nodded, turned, and strode away among the fiery pits.
I can’t stay here … Nathaniel’s will might have been extinguished, but his thoughts continued. He could picture the world above, the storm clouds rolling above the city’s darkened streets. That’s where I should be. With them … the others … fighting …
But it was no use. Words and images flitted by, with no connection to each other, like moths captured inside his emptied skull. He knew what he should do, but could no more accomplish it than he could move his limbs. As though he were an unstrung marionette, he sprawled on the ground, motionless.
This is eternity, he realized. Fear gripped him, though it couldn’t move him. I’ll be here like this, forever …
Something moved, at the limit of his vision. A human form, crawling through the flames toward him.
One of the sinners, thought Nathaniel. Another poor bastard trapped here. But what could it want from him?
He couldn’
t raise his head to look. All he could do was wait until the burning, blistered figure was directly above him, its reddened eyes gazing down into his.
The sinner’s eyes widened in amazement, as though it were somehow able to recognize Nathaniel from that other world, the one above. In which, long ago, it had been a living thing, a human being like others, not yet damned to eternal pain.
“Nat…” The sinner’s voice was a harsh, parched croak. “Nat … is that you?”
It can’t be, thought Nathaniel. It’s impossible.
One of the sinner’s hands, a shriveled relic of blackened bone and skin, trembled as it reached toward Nathaniel’s face, stopping a few inches away from touching him. He wanted to close his eyes, to block out the sight of the charred creature above him, but couldn’t.
He gazed up into the sinner’s ruined face—
And recognized it. Even through all the charnel years that had passed, something remained there. A dark, golden fleck at the pupil of one eye that he remembered from when he had been a child. A child looking up into the face of a drunk who gripped him in his trembling hands—
A flood of memories surged through his brain.
He could see a man, a living one, sending out a boy to buy his booze. He knew the boy he saw was himself—and the man was his father.
As was the burning sinner here, reaching down to stroke his hair—but stopping an inch away from that faint contact. What was left of his father pulled his hand away, knowing that he could no longer even touch his son. The son he had sold to Death, to buy himself a few more years on the surface of the earth. And who, by that cold transaction, had condemned his soul to eternal torment in the fires of Hell.
18.
The smoke hung low over the garden square, thick and choking.
Blake gazed across the mounds of demon corpses. The only thing recognizable from before the battle had begun was the peach tree in the center of the garden, the space around it transformed into a hilly deathscape of fanged and clawed creatures, stacked one on top of another, all dead or expiring in their broken armor. But even now, more were coming to the battle, their cries ringing as they climbed out of the abandoned town house’s wreckage. The night sky thickened with the tumult of their batlike wings, bright glints flashing from the blades of their weapons, just like on the mural in the labyrinth below.
He looked over to where the giant hit man Hank was visible, towering over the bodies heaped around him. The two of them had been separated during the fight, each slashing and hacking at the demons who came surging straight into their faces, backing up to draw one into a position where its head could be lopped off, diving to the side to avoid a battle-axe swinging down like a crescent guillotine, then lunging upward to spear the attacker through its guts. The action had grown so furious that there’d been no way that either man could keep track of the other; all they could do was keep fighting, trusting that his companion was doing the same somewhere else.
Catching his breath, Blake watched as Hank twisted a demon’s head from its neck, tossing the armored head to the side while it still grimaced and snarled at him. If anything, the big guy had an even harder job: his size made him a more obvious target for the demons to attack, plus he had to fight while shielding the infant strapped to his chest. Blake wondered what Ren-Lei’s reaction was to all the mayhem happening around her. Snugged inside the helmet they had strapped over her, she might well have simply curled up and gone to sleep, secure in the warmth from her protector’s laboring heart.
Blake’s exhausted thoughts were interrupted by another shape swooping over his head. Without even seeing what it was, he jabbed up into the air the point of one of the spear’s blades, sheathed in white-hot flames. A shrieking curse struck his ear as a many-armed demon dodged the weapon. A half-dozen scimitars, one in each of the creature’s fists, swept windmill-like at his head. He managed to parry them with quick, darting thrusts of the spear, but there were too many, coming too fast, for him to get a shot at the breastplate behind them. Blake found himself retreating step-by-step, the spear’s staff growing slick with the sweat of his palms.
He heard the heavy impact of Hank’s boots through the ground before he glimpsed the other man running toward him, flaming axe upraised. But before Hank could reach the spot, a knot of demons swarmed around him. The foul odor emanating from the exposed intestines that linked all five together, each one’s innards looping into the next one’s gaping abdomen, filled Blake’s nostrils. Through the scimitars that he continued blocking, he could see the demons circling around Hank, the wet mesh of their guts forming a tangled net on all sides.
The demons tightened upon their prey, intestines binding around Hank’s ribs. One of them scented more tender prey under the magnesium helmet on the human’s chest. The points of its dagger teeth snapped off as it futilely tried to gnaw through the metal.
The damp fecal contents of the demon’s guts sizzled as Hank’s white-hot axe sliced through them. Each swipe of his weapon left more writhing lengths upon the ground. With the demons now separated from each other, Hank was able to bring the axe straight down upon their heads, splitting each in half, one after the other. In less than a minute, ten bifurcated forms sprawled before him, their guts the only parts still moving, whipping back and forth like blinded worms.
One of the scimitars wielded by Blake’s assailant dug its edge into the stone bank at the garden square’s edge. He dove on his side to escape the other blades, completing the roll and springing to his feet, out of the demon’s reach. Snarling, it struggled to free the caught scimitar; that gave Blake a moment to catch his breath, pulse hammering inside his chest.
At the same moment, he spotted another a pair of winged demons swooping down at Hank. Before they could even swing the swords in their fists, the hit man had scrambled on top of the demons he had just killed. Added to his own height, it gave him the reach he needed to take off the heads of the ones attacking from above, the axe cutting through their necks in one flashing arc.
“Look!” Blake caught the other man’s eye. He pointed through the smoke filling the square. “There, behind you!”
Chest spattered with the flying demons’ gore, Hank turned and looked over his shoulder. The battle-axe slowly lowered in his grip as he spotted the next apparition to join battle with them.
Striding past the smoke-shrouded branches of the peach tree came the Devil.
The earth shook with each strike of his cloven hoof, now exposed. Its crescent edge shattered the skulls of his fallen soldiers as he strode, heedless of their prostrate forms beneath him. His forelegs were drenched to the knees with their blood. His nails had sharpened to talons as they dug into the front of his shirt. He tore open the white cloth, throwing the tattered rags to either side. Seared across his bared chest, back, and arms were the same emblems that had seethed alight from the desk in his private office, in the tower looming far above the square. The symbols protruded from his skin, like the welts singed in place by a white-hot branding iron. Largest of all was the eight-pointed star in the middle of his chest, above his heart.
The sight so transfixed Blake that the six-armed demon was almost driven from his thoughts. He suddenly heard the whisper of a scimitar blade slicing through the air; he dove to one side, the blade missing his head by a fraction of an inch. Jabbing one of the glaive’s points toward the demon, he drove it back.
A light fiercer and harsher than a noonday sun flooded the garden square. Hard-edged shadows sprang around the corpses where they lay. Turning his gaze from his attacker, Blake saw that the Devil had halted in the middle of the square, scanning about for his enemies. It should have been easy for him to spot Hank’s massive figure, but his furiously slitted gaze had fallen upon Blake instead. Unable to move, he watched as the Devil gathered a sphere of fiery plasma between his outstretched hands. A single thrusting motion and the fireball shot toward Blake, a glowing trail stretching behind it to the Devil’s fingertips.
Hank was able to react. He snatched
up one of the creatures he had just killed, and threw the corpse straight at Blake. Its impact knocked him to the ground; sprawled on his back, he saw the fireball streak directly above him, hitting the scimitar-bearing demon instead. Its torso vaporized in a blinding flash of light, the six arms spiraling loose across the corpses mounded nearby.
More demons, weapons clashing overhead, were already rushing toward the spot, as though their commander’s appearance in their midst had reignited their fury. Blake got to his feet; dazed, he leaned his weight on the staff of the spear and gazed at the onslaught. They would be on top of him in seconds.
“There’s too many of them!” he managed to shout across the corpses to Hank. “We can’t fight them all—”
The hit man glanced over at him for only a moment, then turned and braced himself, one hand laid on top of the helmet strapped to his chest, the other raising the axe back behind his shoulder. Ready to swing and slash apart the first demon to reach him, and the one after that, and all the others, for as long as he could. Until he would be buried beneath the mass of their stabbing, clawing fury.
Blake turned away from the grim sight. There was only one person he could think of, one who might be able to save them. A last ally they could call upon. If Death’s apprentice was even still alive …
19.
“There’s so much … I need … to tell you…”
The red eyes gazing down at Nathaniel looked as if they had been boiled in pitch. The fires of Hell had charred away the face’s skin, leaving a few black, ribbonlike scraps dangling from the exposed muscles and tendons.
“I’m sorry,” continued Nathaniel’s father. The words came haltingly, past the dry, swollen tongue in what had been his mouth and what was now a cracked, lipless wound. “That’s what … I wanted to tell you.” A tear mingled with the blood seeping from the raw flesh. “I always … wanted to tell you.”
Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel Page 17