Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Jerica was a recently corporeal nightmare, not even ten years old, though she looked like she was at least twenty years old. The lopsided, angular haircut helped make her look youthful, despite her sunken cheeks and shadowed eyes. It was easy to tell young nightmares apart from the humans they mimicked. Their mouths were lipless gashes, and their eyes didn’t quite track right. It looked like she was a hollow shell still filled with the smoke that used to form her body.

  She wasn’t strong, but she was a good fighter, and loyal to Neuma—who was, in turn, loyal to Elise. Right now, Elise needed all the loyalty she could get.

  “Thanks,” she said, stepping over the fiend toward the right-hand row of cages.

  Jerica went to the left, jamming one of her knives back into her thigh holster. “None of them are locked,” the nightmare said, lifting a strip of leather wrapped around the wire mesh of the cage door. It was loosely knotted, dangling between her fingers. “The cages are tied shut. Why don’t the slaves escape on their own?”

  “Belphegor,” Elise said. His name was explanation enough.

  As Elise began picking at the knot on the first cage, Jerica slashed hers open and moved on. The cages swung open one by one, dry hinges groaning.

  No slaves emerged.

  Elise bent over the first door she had opened, hands on her knees, to look inside at the inhabitants. There were two men inside. One was fat and white; the other was skinny and black. It was impossible to tell more detail underneath the layer of orange dust that had already begun to cover them since the morning’s baths. They seemed to be struggling to see who could get closer to the wall, clawing at one another to retreat to the rear of the cage.

  A pang of familiarity struck her at the sight of the cage. It wasn’t because she had just enjoyed an entire day in a cell of her own. It was another memory, more distant than this one, of being confined with dirty, stinking slaves, and the desperate need to find someone.

  She blinked away the moment of disorientation. That memory didn’t belong to her. She didn’t want to acknowledge that it had found its way into her skull anyway.

  “Come out,” Elise said.

  Much like the fiend, they didn’t respond. They had been in Hell too long. The fear of Belphegor—and everything beyond him—had broken them.

  Elise straightened, fists clenched hard enough that her nails dug into her palms.

  Jerica didn’t seem to be having any more luck. She had cut through half of the bindings on her row of cages, but even though the doors stood ajar, nobody had emerged.

  “We could get Neuma,” Jerica suggested, gesturing toward the door with her blade. “She can do her…thing.”

  As a half-succubus, Neuma could evoke arousal in humans. Elise doubted it would be strong enough to override the fear. And even if it were, she wasn’t sure that having a kennel full of horny, terrified slaves would be any improvement.

  “Just keep opening the doors,” Elise said.

  She pulled the second open, and the third, all the way down the line. Some of the cages weren’t occupied at all—some of the humans must have still been in the canteen for breakfast. Others had two slaves, and a few only had one lucky mortal, which would have afforded them just enough room to stretch out flat, had they not been cowering in the corner.

  Elise stopped trying to ask them to emerge and started walking away as soon as she untied the leather cords.

  The slaves seemed to have no urge to escape, to a kind of ridiculous extent. There had to be someone that clung to the determination to live—a slave that hadn’t had her sanity decimated by the sight of human meat butcher shops, the slave auction, and being forced to shit in front of hundreds of others for the amusement of Belphegor.

  She followed Jerica downstairs to the first level of the basement and took the first cage that hadn’t been opened yet. Its inhabitant was a man, maybe fifty years old, whose arms were covered in faded blue tattoos from shoulder to wrist. It looked like he had been plucking out chunks of skin with his fingernails. His eyes brightened at the sight of Elise—probably because she was anyone but Belphegor—yet he still didn’t move.

  He was the first that had actually seemed to see her. Elise reached a hand into the cage. “Come on.”

  The man jerked as if struck.

  Fuck this bullshit. Elise hadn’t had high expectations for the gratitude of the slaves she was rescuing, but she had at least expected them to allow themselves to be rescued.

  “Let me see,” Jerica said. She stooped to look into the cage. The lifeless pits of her eyes widened, and her mouth stretched into a broad smile. “Hey! It’s Second and Sierra!”

  “The intersection in Reno?” Elise asked.

  “Remember the homeless guy with the guitar?” Jerica made a strumming motion with her right hand. “I had to kick him off of the street in front of Craven’s a couple of times once Second and Sierra collapsed.”

  Elise didn’t remember him, though she used to spend many long hours jogging downtown in Reno and remembered being surrounded by buskers and vagrants—faceless, nameless features of the city. Her best friend had thought she was crazy for running alone by the river in the middle of the night, but none of the homeless people had ever bothered her. They had bothered her so little, in fact, that she couldn’t remember a single one of them. Even a trespassing busker with spider web tattooed on his left elbow.

  A croaking voice rose from within the kennel. “You bitch.” It was the slave speaking.

  Jerica rounded on him. “Excuse me?”

  “They picked me up when you chased me off your sidewalk,” he said in a quavering voice, lifting a knobby finger to point at her.

  “Abraxas?” Elise asked.

  “The Union,” he said. His voice broke on the last syllable. His tongue slithered out of his mouth, tracing around his cracked lips, trying to wet them though there was no moisture in his mouth. “They were doing the sweeps down by the river, looking for people like me.”

  “What were we supposed to do?” Jerica asked. “Let you guys stink up our sidewalk and bring the Union down on us instead?”

  Elise put a hand on her shoulder to silence her. “Wait. The Union was picking up men around the river? To evacuate you?” She had been through the same apocalypse as Jerica and the busker, but her memories of it involved facing down the Union as an enemy on the front lines, dodging their tanks, and eventually being taken to their facility. That was when she had been more human and more vulnerable. And she had died after that—she had never heard what happened to most of Reno’s citizens aside from an evacuation.

  “To test us,” he said.

  She frowned deeply, looking askance at Jerica.

  “They’ve been doing experiments in Reno,” the nightmare explained. She rolled her eyes and looked into the cage again. “If I say sorry, you gonna come out?”

  His eyes flicked around the entrance of the cage. “Belphegor?”

  “Under control,” Elise said.

  He seemed to conduct a silent argument with himself for a few seconds, brow furrowed and mouth twitching.

  “I’m sorry,” Jerica said with an exaggerated sigh. “I had no idea what was going to happen, and there’s no way I could be responsible for your current incarceration, but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. So I’m sorry. Okay?”

  He crawled out. “I’m Gerard,” he said, holding out a hand. His nails were caked in blood, and his entire body was covered in dust. He had been in the cage for so long that he had developed a hunch. Standing made him grimace.

  Elise shook his hand. “Elise Kavanagh.”

  He wobbled on his legs, smacking his dry lips again, glancing around the cages. He seemed tempted to go back.

  But he was out. One slave freed, only a few hundred to go.

  “The others all dead?” Gerard asked. He tried to take a step, and one knee buckled. Elise caught him.

  “No,” she said. “Recalcitrant.”

  “Suggestions for evicting them would be apprecia
ted,” Jerica added.

  He didn’t even have to think before responding. “Water,” he said. “Water will bring them out.”

  Elise had only stolen enough water to keep Ace hydrated for a few days. She didn’t have enough to take care of one human, much less hundreds of them. But Abraxas had been keeping slaves for years—he must have had some supply to ration out.

  “Water,” she said. “Okay.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  Elise stood on the roof of the House of Abraxas and stared into the cerulean depths of the fissure, like a razor had bisected the sky of Dis.

  It was difficult to see through the smoky haze, but she thought that it might be a cloudy day on whichever part of Earth was exposed above the Tanners’ District. Not the kind of clouds that preceded a storm—the kind of fluffy clouds that looked like cotton balls drifting across the expanse of pale blue. It had been so many years since Elise had been able to enjoy days like that and embrace the sunlight.

  She only had a moment to see it before the factories belched more smoke and concealed the fissure again.

  Elise turned back to look over the property that was now hers. The House of Abraxas.

  The compound was more like a self-contained village than a manor. There was a square with shops where the fiends could trade their wages for the usual disgusting things that fiends enjoyed, a butcher and a tanner for processing slaves that fell during service, a blacksmith to produce tools. There was even a mine set into the cliffs of Mount Anathema. The House had its own economy and was largely self-sustaining. At least, it had been self-sustaining before Abraxas took every one of his demons that was smarter or stronger than a fiend to pursue his dreams of war on Earth, leaving nothing but the morons behind to run the show.

  The ultimate goal was to conquer the Palace of Dis, but Elise had envisioned the House of Abraxas as a stepping stone. A couple centuriae of fiends wasn’t a lot, but it might be the army she needed to take the Palace.

  Except that the fiends quailed and wouldn’t function as soon as she looked at them, rendering the lot useless. And the humans that she had thought she could eventually shuttle to safety back on Earth wouldn’t even leave their damn cages.

  What did that leave her with? Not with a stepping stone to the Palace, but an empty House and a bunch of humans that needed a drink of fucking water.

  She suppressed her frustration and climbed into Belphegor’s office once more.

  Elise had wrapped almost every one of his chains around his limbs to contain him. He could break through most bindings by growing out of them; the only way to keep him from swelling was to make sure that he’d cut himself in half if he tried. Now he hung in the corner of his office like an ugly Christmas decoration, surrounded by all of the warding runes that Elise had sneaked into the House under her bandages, and he did not look happy about it. His long, skeletal face was twisted into a severe frown.

  “I need your keys and directions to storage,” Elise said.

  Belphegor’s voice was deep and resonant, as though he spoke from the bottom of a hollow barrel. “I have no reason to comply with you.”

  He was right. She couldn’t cross the line of wards that she had placed any more than he could—not unless she wanted to be trapped, permanently and embarrassingly, in the circle with him—which meant that she couldn’t beat information out of him. And since the only thing he wanted was escape, Elise couldn’t barter with Belphegor; they both knew that there was no chance she would ever consider releasing him.

  Elise pulled open the drawers on his desk and searched through them. There was little to find. He had the slaves’ maintenance schedules written out in ledgers. Apparently, he had been contemplating making changes to their routines, because there was a rough draft of a new schedule at the bottom of the stack. In another drawer, he had a database of slaves catalogued by number that recorded the date they were bought and the date they were “repurposed.” He also had schedules for other household maintenance tasks, records of mining output, and reports on export trends.

  It was mostly a lot of paperwork. There were no keys.

  She lingered over the reports summarizing inner-city trade. If someone had been giving Belphegor summaries, then that meant there was staff more sentient than the fiends in the House. They had either escaped or gone into hiding, and she’d need to find them before they made trouble.

  The rattling of chains was Elise’s only warning that Neuma and Ace were about to enter. Neuma never knocked. She strode in, dog trailing behind her, looking as comfortable in the leather body armor as she had been in metal bikinis. Her long, dark hair, nearly identical to Elise’s, swung behind her in a ponytail.

  “I thought you wanted me to bring the slaves into the house for safekeeping,” Neuma said. “I don’t see any slaves.”

  “Minor setback,” Elise said, digging through the drawers of Belphegor’s toy cabinet. She had to be very careful with her fingers as she rummaged—everything was razor-sharp, from the blades to the spurs and studs, and her blood was too dangerous to spill in Hell. “The slaves aren’t emerging from the cages. They need water.”

  “Think you’re going to find it in here?” Neuma asked, reaching around Elise to grab the studded phallus. She grinned at it.

  “Apparently not.” Elise slammed the drawers shut.

  Neuma wiggled the phallus. “Can I keep this?”

  Elise rolled her eyes and didn’t dignify that with a response.

  Ace was pawing at his basket muzzle and whining. Elise looped his chain over a hook on the wall before removing it. He snapped at her hands as she pulled the muzzle off.

  As a puppy, Ace had been beaten by a cult and fed human flesh. It had made him vicious, despite the deceptively adorable floppy ears and pink nose. He was as good in a fight as any of Elise’s mortal allies. He also liked her about as much as most people did, too.

  “Easy, boy,” Elise said, stepping away from Ace to give him space. His ears were flattened, eyes wide, a low growl rumbling in his chest. “Keep an eye on Belphegor for me, will you?”

  With dog and demon chained, Elise headed out of Belphegor’s office.

  Neuma followed. “So we just gonna keep the slaves in the kennels?”

  “For the moment. Did you find any storage rooms while searching for somewhere that the slaves could sleep?”

  “No, but I only checked the east wing.” She shuddered and rubbed her arms, leather creaking. “Lots of staff quarters we can use. But we’ll need to clear ‘em out before we can move any human slaves in there.”

  “Why? Still occupied?”

  “No,” Neuma said, “but we can’t put a bunch of victims in rooms full of chains and lashes and shit. Belphegor’s not the only one with a playroom.”

  No wonder the slaves were all so broken.

  Elise’s head throbbed with a growing headache. She hadn’t wanted to assume the care and feeding of a bunch of useless humans during her army acquisition. If she had known they would be so much trouble…

  “Let’s check the west wing,” she said.

  The west wing was as pleasant as any living space in Hell could be. The dining hall was crafted from obsidian, sanded and polished until it reflected Elise’s face back at her from every angle. The table and benches were attached to the floor as if they had been cut from one big piece of rock, and the crystal windows had an unobstructed view of the mountain behind them. All of it looked like it had been designed to impress. Like Abraxas had been taking frequent visitors and wanted them to know how wealthy and important he was.

  Elise couldn’t wrap her mind around what it might be like to entertain guests in Dis. She had always thought of it from the human perspective. Being sold at auction, beaten or eaten, living a life that was both miserable and short.

  Wandering through the halls of the House, she could imagine it from the other side. Slaves laid out on the tables to be eaten. The parade of human flesh. Party music mingling with the sweet screams of the dying.<
br />
  “You okay?” Neuma asked, snapping Elise from her reverie. She had stopped walking near the head table, where Abraxas would have watched the decadence, and Neuma had moved to the door without her.

  She picked up her pace without responding.

  Elise tried not to dwell upon the size of the pots in the kitchens—big enough to blanch human limbs—or the fact that the spit was caked in something that smelled like burnt hair and fat.

  There was no major storage on the bottom floor of the west wing. But on the second floor, they found another bedroom. It had a sitting room decorated by Earth imports: an actual wood desk, wooden shelves, and a leather-backed chair with claw feet that had been carved to look like a bear’s. The bed itself had pillows stuffed with feathers.

  They had found Abraxas’s room.

  “Nice,” Neuma said, leaping onto the bed and flopping in the middle with her arms spread wide. “All the other beds are slabs. I call dibs on this.”

  Elise lifted an eyebrow, but she said, “Fine.” She didn’t sleep anyway.

  Abraxas’s wardrobe was sparse. He had a few articles of leather body armor that wouldn’t fit her; he had been short and hunched and too narrow in the chest. He also, somewhat amusingly, had a set of scale mail that looked like it belonged in a medieval history text book—also too small.

  But he hadn’t worn armor in his day-to-day life. He had worn robes. She pulled a pile of heavy linen off of the shelf and held it in front of her. The hem fell just beneath her knees, but it was soft and finely woven. Probably harpy wool. Better than running around as naked as the slaves.

  Elise wrapped the robes around her body, belting them at her waist.

  “Looks like shit. I like you better in your skin,” Neuma said. She was toying with the buckles on her jacket, long fingernails tracing the belts, and even those tiny gestures made it look like she was about to break into a striptease. She may have become the first half-demon overlord in known history, but she was still every inch the stripping bartender she had started out as.