by Edward Lee
“That’s not possible. It’ll never work.” Cassie felt sure.
“That Hex-Clone is a perfect facsimile, Cassie. It looks exactly like the real Savior. But what’s the difference?”
“It’s not Christ. It’s just animated meat, an elaborate dummy. It can look and sound and act like the real Jesus, but nobody’ll believe it.”
Now the Nectoport assumed a static position in the clouds. When Cassie looked down, she saw that they were hovering a mile over the Mephisto Building.
“No,” she repeated. “Nobody would believe it. It wouldn’t work. It’s not a man, and it’s not the Son of God. It’s a bag of meat that’s alive only because of spells and incantations.”
The angel’s eyes looked terrified. “There’s something you’re forgetting, Cassie. The part of Lucifer’s plan that involves you.”
The comment stunned her. “Me?”
“The whole reason the Morning Star needs you—someone with Ethereal Powers. The reason he tried to capture you during the Merge at the clinic. Same reason he’s trying to capture the Etherean. An Etheress or an Etherean. Either will do. And for all we know, he’s already caught the Etherean and is preparing him.”
“Preparing him for what?”
The inside of the Nectoport turned cold as a mausoleum. “Oh, no,” Angelese sighed, looking behind her. The body of the Nectoport extended into darkness, like a tunnel. Even Cassie could feel it now.
They weren’t alone here.
A sudden flash of light, bright as lightning, blinded Cassie. There was a rushing sound, clatter, movement she could sense but not see. “Angelese!” Cassie shrieked, “What’s happening!” but the angel’s only response was to shriek herself. Large, scaly hands grabbed Cassie, and then something was dragged over her. When her vision returned, she could see what it was: a net.
Reeking of death and corded in muscles, a horned Usher held Cassie within the net, like a bundled package. She couldn’t move. Foul breath gusted into her face as the slug-skinned servant of Lucifer gently traced a talon down her cheek. The knife-gash-like eyes glimmered. The grinning mouth was a hole full of broken glass.
A voice reverberated, like a hopeful minister’s voice in an echoic cathedral: “Cassie. It’s an honor to finally get so close to you—a true Etheress. In the flesh. And what stunning flesh it is.”
Cassie looked right at his face ... but could see nothing.
His body looked angelic; he looked bathed in sunlight. She sensed a smile within the fog-like aura about his head. And as for his voice, she’d heard it before, on the phone at the clinic.
“You let your guard down”—now he was speaking to Angelese, who’d been similarly netted and seized by an Usher—“It wasn’t difficult to locate the operating signature of an unauthorized Nectoport. I apologize for not knocking first.”
More of the haze cleared from Cassie’s eyes. A half-dozen more Ushers stood on watch in the Nectoport, and standing aside was a solemn figure in a black cloak and hood, which Cassie recognized at once as a high-ranking Biowizard. From black fingers, the wizard held a tiny green-glowing stone which swayed back an forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
Then the man of light moved closer. “And I apologize, too, for not properly introducing myself.” The voice fluttered like the wings of a flock of birds. “I am the Light of the Morning. Welcome to my domain of night.” He knelt serenely before Angelese, and whispered, “I’m going to torture you for a hundred years, then I’ll send you back to God, raped, pregnant, and ruined. It’s only fitting. I owe Him a gift or two.” He stroked the angel’s face, tenderly as a mother to a child. “I like this.” Lucifer produced a long awl, long as a knitting needle but much sharper. “Let’s start with this. Oh, how I love to hear angels scream,” and then he gently inserted the awl into Angelese’s chest and pushed it through her heart.
The angel bucked, firing a high-pitched bellow from her throat. Each time the awl was withdrawn and reinserted, she bucked within the net like someone holding a live wire.
“Stop it!” Cassie shouted through the most powerful surge of hatred in her life, but their unglimpsible host just smiled.
“I’m a Fallen Angel, Cassie,” he explained. “Your Etherea has no effect on me. You know that.”
“No, no, no!” Cassie shouted. Lucifer just kept reinserting the awl, with tender slowness, into Angelese’s heart. “You can’t die here, can you, Caliginaut? You’re so brave to have ventured to my kingdom. I’ll make sure God is apprized.”
Angelese shuddered at the torture, her blood oozing in tiny, neon threads. Then she gasped, “Cassie, here’s another Rule, another secret I must pay to reveal. If an Etheress dies in Hell, all that energy combusts. A human with Ethereal powers—in Hell—it’s like matter and anti-matter. There’s an explosion of tremendous magnitude,” and then her screams quadrupled as the Umbra-Specter rose, its shadow-claws reaching up and swiping back down across the angel’s chest. In doing so, as it had at the clinic, the Specter’s claws slashed through the net and released her.
She jumped up, grabbed the Light of the Morning about the neck, angelic blood painting his face like red fox fire. She quickly blurted another secret—“It’s not you he wants, it’s just your blood! Your Ethereal blood! It can be used as a Power Transfer!”—and this time, when the Umbra-Specter tried to claw her, Lucifer was in between its talons and Angelese. The result was—
A sound that had never been heard before: Satan screaming in pain.
The talons, aiming for Angelese’s face slashed Lucifer’s instead. The Nectoport rocked, the Morning Star’s howl like a rock slide on a vast mountain range.
Several Ushers broke the angel’s clench at once, pinning her to the Port’s floor with long, iron-bladed pikes.
Eosphoros shivered, hands to his face. The blood that poured between his fingers was black as oil.
After several deep breaths, he recomposed himself and said, “Even bad guys have bad days, yes? Nothing will ruin the jubilation of my victory. Not a lackey angel, nor a useless Etheress.”
Useless? The word spiked her senses—as Angelese remained spiked to the wall, quivering. My powers won’t work on him but they’ll sure as hell work on those Ushers, so she focused all her rage and shouted “Fall apart, you fuckers!”
There was no effect. The Ushers remained unharmed, twisting their pikes in Angelese’s chest.
What’s ... wrong? Cassie wondered.
“See? Useless,” the Morning Star reassured. “To all but me. Your bloody friend is right, Cassie. I don’t need you, I just need your blood.”
The words spun around her mind. She was trying to direct her thoughts, but she was thinking of the other things Angelese had said. If an Etheress dies in Hell, the result is a tremendous explosion. But did she really have the nerve to kill herself? It might destroy the Nectoport, but it would not destroy Lucifer, an immortal. And it wouldn’t even necessarily foil his plan, which she still didn’t understand. My blood? For what?
Then it hit her, so obvious. He’s going to use my blood to—
“Excellent, Etheress,” Iblis read her mind. “That’s my plan. The Hex-Clone you stole a glance at is an exact physical duplicate. I will Retrogate back to Golgotha, to Christ’s tomb, and replace your Savior’s body with my Clone. And on the Third Day, it will rise again from the dead. But before that, I’m going to transfuse your blood into it, and it will have your powers. It will reappear to Mary, and kill her. It will reappear to the Apostles, and murder them. It will kill everything it comes into contact with for the entirety of the Retrogation. And what will that result in?”
Christianity will never exist, Cassie thought. It will never be born ...
(III)
“I don’t know what you mean,” Walter said. “Go out in style?”
“One last ride before the end of it all,” No-name muttered. Her eyes darted. “Oops. Looks like you get to have some more fun first.”
Fun? Walter heard the clatter of armor himself. In
a moment, the empty street wasn’t empty anymore. They were blocked off again, on either side. Not Conscripts, Ushers, or Golems, this time—an entire regiment of Grand Dukes, their great horned heads throwing shadows down the street in a tapestry of sharp points.
They didn’t look happy.
They began to march forward. Some, he saw, even had guns, crude ones—as in the Revolutionary War—but firearms nonetheless. Through the phalanx, their barrels aimed, then jerked as they fired. Plumes of sooty smoke poured forth.
“Miss me,” Walter whispered, unshocked even by the potential, and the atrocious sound. They were clearly aiming low, for his legs, because they needed him alive. This he easily deducted, even though he still wasn’t sure exactly what they needed him for.
The hand-poured, iron-ball bullets all missed. Those fired from the left cut down the first line of Grand Dukes on the right, and vice-versa. Walter was bored. The things were ten-feet tall, hundreds of them, and more terrifying than anything he’d seen here.
But he was purely and simply bored.
“Go away,” he said to each phalanx. The words from his mouth plowed both regiments away until they could no longer be seen, as effectively as bulldozers against piles of autumn leaves. In only a second, the street was vacant again. Silent. Calm.
“That was a piece of cake, No-name,” Walter said.
“Don’t get cocky!”
She’s right, he considered. Something serious is going on here. I’m part of it. I better not let this Etherean stuff go to my head.
“What now?” he asked.
Her head sighed under his arm and her eyes flicked up to the shining black edifice. “Look at the Bastille, Walter. I’ve told you what it is. If it’s destroyed, then all the souls who’ve been condemned will be released.”
Souls that otherwise wouldn’t be here. Walter looked at the indestructible pyramid. “I can’t destroy that.”
“Are you sure there’s not a way?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Be deductive. Be the mathematician. If an otherwise good person could destroy that place by a suicidal act, would that person’s immortal soul be condemned to Hell?”
No, Walter deduced. No. So what is it, exactly, that she’s trying to tell me?
Then he thought back to what she’d previously said, something about going out in style ...
(IV)
The revelation was clear now: the plans he had for the Hex-Clone. Angelese remained staked to the floor by the pikes piercing her chest. And Cassic ...
Cassie was, indeed, useless.
My powers don’t work against the Ushers. She shot a thought of death at the Biowizard, too. Nothing. The net abraded her face, incising her frustration. I can’t do anything. And even if I had the courage to kill myself, what good would that do? And I CAN’T kill myself because I’m tied up in this friggin’ net!
“And look who we’ve brought to see you.”
The Morning Star’s voice was all over the Nectoport, his glee perhaps, in spite of the slashes across the unfathomable face.
“Look, look,” he whispered.
Cassie screamed. Something was dragged forward by one of the Ushers. At first Cassie thought it was a sack drawn by a rope.
But it wasn’t.
It was Lissa, or what was left of her, drawn by her hair. Her arms and legs had been removed, and in their place were just her hands and feet surgically reconnected at the shoulder and hip joints.
“This is how she will spend eternity. I’ll see to it. She’ll be on display like this at the zoo. And she’ll drown in sewage every day, but won’t die.”
Lissa’s head lolled on the floor. Her eyes beseeched her sister. “Please help me ...”
More uselessness. Cassie sobbed against the net. That was all she could do.
“Ah,” the aduw Allah intoned. “Such lovely regret. It’s so sweet. But I guess it’s time now, isn’t it? Time to return to my mansion, and fill my Clone with your blood.”
Angelese ground her teeth. Her violet eyes, rimmed by beige, were wide open on Cassie, when she said, “Cassie, look at the Biowizard ...”
What? But she did as was told, and her own eyes swerved toward the squat cloaked figure standing just behind Lucifer. From his fingers, the pendant still dangled, the pendant with the tiny stone on the end of it, glowing like a green ember.
“Now look at your arm,” Angelese said.
My... arm. Cassie turned her head in the net, still not understanding. Her arm. She could see the small line of stitches that R.J. had applied at the clinic when she’d been cut. The wound was swollen now, flecked with dried blood, and now she could see something else.
Something embedded in the wound, showing through the stitches.
Something glowing.
(V)
No-name’s words echoed in Walter’s: If it’s destroyed, then all the souls who’ve been condemned will be released.
He looked at the arcane structure, shouted every idea of destruction he could think of at it, but nothing happened. “I can’t destroy it! I can’t even scratch it!”
“There. Is. A way,” No-name stuttered. She sighed again, wearied. She even sounded forlorn. “I have to go now, Walter. It’s time for me to destroy myself.”
“No! I don’t want you to go!”
“It’s my destiny. And it’s no fun being a severed head.” Walter couldn’t manage the idea. “If you’re destroyed, what will happen to you?”
“This head is all that remains of my Spirit Body. If it’s destroyed, my soul will be transferred to some other life form in Hell. It’s potluck; I don’t get to choose. I could be transferred to a demon’s body, a Troll‘s, a Griffin’s, a Caco-Tick, or even a Bapho-Flea that spends its entire existence living on a rat’s ass. But it’s a chance I have to take. I have to take the risk.”
She’s lying, Walter thought, so not to break her oath. She already knows what will happen to her.
“I understand,” he said, teary eyed. She’s got to do what she’s got to do. She knows the future. He took her head out from under his arm, held it up and looked at her face. “Would you like me to destroy your head for you? I’ll look for a mallet or a brick or something. Or I’ll use my powers.”
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. There’s a way for me to do it myself, and I’m going to do it now. But remember what I said earlier. Be deductive.”
Walter nodded, wiped his eyes. He’d already figured it out.
“I’ve already told you, I’m cursed to never reveal a cabalistic secret. If I challenge the curse, I smolder to nothing-ness. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“If an angel commits suicide in the Living World, the resultant flux of released etheric energy becomes fissionable. You know what fissionable means.”
“Yes. But I’m not an angel, and this isn’t the Living World.”
Smoke was leaking from No-name’s ears. “If an Etherean commits suicide in Hell ... it’s the same thing, the same result.”
Walter’s eyes went wide.
Now smoke was pouring off the head, the hair burning off. Smoke poured out of her mouth as she spoke her last words: “My name is a preternatural secret too, Walter. I can never reveal it without the consequences.”
“I understand,” Walter sobbed.
“Goodbye, Walter.” No-name smiled through the crackling and smoke. “My name is Afet.”
The head hissed away in his hands and disappeared as a stream of fine ash.
“Goodbye, Afet,” Walter said, choking. I’ll miss you ...
His hands held nothing now. Walter was alone. But he understood everything now, everything she’d implied. Deduction came easily to geniuses.
He scratched his head. Hmm.
Down the street a lone Grand Duke staggered toward him. On a chain-mail belt was a crude pistol, which the Duke was drawing.
“You!” Walter shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
The Grand Duke fr
oze, his great horns poised.
Walter jogged up to the creature. It simply stared down at him, covering him with its broad shadow.
“Gimme that gun.”
The Grand Duke handed it to him.
Walter looked at it, confused. It wasn’t like a modern pistol, just a metal tube on a shaped piece of wood that served as a grip. There was a trigger, and on top, a hammer that vised a piece of flint.
“Is this thing loaded?” Walter asked.
The Grand Duke nodded.
“How does it work?”
The Duke took the pistol, cocked it, then returned it to Walter’s hands.
I guess that’s it. “Thanks,” he said. “Now pretend you’re on a pogo stick and pogo your ugly ass out of here.”
The Grand Duke hopped away.
Walter wasn’t afraid. Hefting the pistol, he walked leisurely into the obsidian doorway of the Bastille of Otherwise Souls.
(VI)
Something glowing, beneath the stitches. The same emerald-green.
“That’s right,” Lucifer confirmed. “Stealthy, yes? It was planted on you, by my confidant. It’s a chip from the Rock of Boolya. Sorcery is science here, Etheress. What’s in your flesh is the same as what hangs from my Wizard’s pendant. It damps your powers.”
“Cassie, get that chip out of your arm!” Angelese shouted, then groaned as the pikes were twisted deeper into her chest.
Eosphoros smiled. “Yes. Please do.”
Cassie tried to drag her hand up against the net. She would tear the emerald chip from her flesh. But it was impossible. The Usher behind her was twisting the net so tightly, she was cocooned. She couldn’t move.
I’ve got to get this son of a bitch OFF ME! she screamed at herself, but there was no way.
Then Angelese said, “Think. Remember.”
Satan held his impossible-to-see grin. “Think what, Caliginaut? Remember what?”