by C L Walker
This was the part where I terrorized them all for the benefit of the one I would leave as a witness. Make whichever one I chose fear me more than death and then kill the others and deliver my message. That was the plan, but I couldn’t do it.
They were dressed in denim and covered in piercings and tattoos. They each had a metal-studded collar on, and I should have killed them for their outfits alone.
“Why, man?” the one in the middle said. “We done nothing to you.”
“You have a king,” I started, unsure how the next bit was supposed to go without bloodshed. “Artem. It’s time you started talking to him. Work out your differences.”
“He isn’t our king,” the one on the left said. “Jeremiah is our king, murderer.”
He was right, I had murdered the last king. He’d seemed the least likely to cooperate.
“I can kill you all, if you’d like.” My voice was low, calm; it was scarier that way. “I can go find more of you that are happy to talk. It’s your choice. I’ve already killed two of you.”
Just saying the words irritated me, as though there was something wrong with crushing my enemies.
“We’re listening, man,” the middle one said. “We’re on board. You say, we do. Promise.”
The one on the left stood, lowering his hands as his claws came out. I could see what he going to do, the principle he was willing to die for, and I admired him. At least he believed in something.
He jumped at me and I sent a wave of red lightning from my hand. He was blasted across the cubicles in the office and out the window.
I held up my hand to stop them from talking while I waited for any sign of my weakness. I wondered if I would feel sick or sorry for the vampire, but there was nothing. I felt fine taking him out. It was interesting, testing out the bounds of my humanity.
“Meet Artem,” I said. “He will find a neutral place and you can talk. Air out your grievances and sort this out. I’m tired of you people turning up at ACDCs and harassing people. Understand?”
“We’ll let them know,” the middle one said. The one on the right nodded when I looked at him.
“Don’t disappoint me,” I said. They shook their heads.
I stepped back into the elevator shaft and let myself fall most of the way to the ground, stopping a few feet from the bottom and stepping out into the lobby. Chunks of ceiling covered the floor and I kicked them aside as I made my way out.
The vampire was on the street outside, as were a few people looking up at the window I’d thrown him out of. They didn’t see me right away and I turned and walked up the street before they did.
The tattoos didn’t approve of my actions. They wanted blood and they let me know it by tightening around my muscles until it hurt. I ignored them, pondering the new me and whether it was worth it.
Invehl could give me the old power all the time, and all I had to do was follow his lead and be quiet. Do that and I was practically a god myself.
And yet. The look on the dead vampires’ faces as I killed them, and the looks on the faces of the angels I’d killed. They haunted me the way the old gods used to haunt me. Images gathered around the edge of my vision, always just out of sight and always threatening to overwhelm me.
I wished I could go back to feeling nothing but contempt. I wished I could be like Bec and turn it off whenever I wanted.
And yet I didn’t. I didn’t want to turn it off. I knew that, had known that since Bec was my master. I wanted to be more human, after all these years.
The sun was coming up and I had burned though a lot of power. I needed to hurry if I was going to get this done. There would be time in the future to worry about what I was becoming. Or to embrace it.
I lifted off the ground and sped to the waiting heavenly gate.
Chapter 28
“You need to pick a name,” I said to the angel guarding the gate. “All of you do, if you’re going to hang around.”
“One way or another I don’t think it will matter.”
The angel was looking a little the worse for wear. He’d clearly been in a fight, and his long coat had bullet holes in it and looked charred. He had bruising covering most of his face, though it was healing slowly even as I watched.
“What happened?” I asked. I was running low on time but figured this could be important.
“Beings trying to get access. It has been happening constantly since before your return. We expected it.”
“You can fight them off?” I remembered the confidence he’d displayed when I first approached the gate, the way he’d assured me that nobody was going through. He seemed less certain now.
“For now. They are getting stronger.” He reached up to his battered face and pushed on his jaw, as though testing if it was working properly. “You are making them stronger.”
It was Invehl, trying to find a way into the heavens without me. Another reason to hurry and finish with him before I made myself unnecessary.
“Why aren’t the others helping you?” There had been almost a hundred of them there when I defeated Seng. The gate guardian should have had backup.
“They are busy with their own missions, helping where they think they can do the most good.”
“Let me know if I can help.” I said it without thinking, the sort of off-hand comment people made with no expectation of the offer being redeemed. The angel scowled in response, though.
“Stop going through the gate,” he said. He had his arms crossed like he was going to try and stop me. “Stop giving the enemy more power.”
“This should be the last time,” I said. “I have a plan.”
“I don’t think he needs more than that. One more time and I won’t be able to stop him.”
“He won’t be coming back.”
I had nothing to back up the statement but a wish for it to be true. Seeing the hope on the hollow man’s face was crushing. He moved aside and I stepped through the gate.
The plain was warm and the grass was green. In the heaven it was always daytime and always perfect. I closed my eyes and searched for the only gate to the hells that I knew of. It was a mile away and closed, but that wouldn’t stop me from using it.
When the gate had been opening the grass around it had been scorched and the ground cracked. Blood was spilled and the heaven had changed. Now there was nothing to see, and I waited while an occupant of the heaven strolled directly through the place where the gate was waiting, oblivious to its presence.
I checked the seal I’d placed there to keep Seng in and then stepped through. A cold wind hit me as I put my feet down on slush and ice.
“Welcome back, Agmundr,” Seng said. He sounded the same, arrogant and amused, if quieter. His voice was formed of the myriad sounds of the winter hell: ice cracking, winds tearing over the landscape, people screaming in the distance.
“Seng,” I said. I sent the tattoos to search the area for more gates and looked up to check that the demons were still chained to the rocky roof far overhead.
“Have I been gifted with reprieve?”
“No. I’m here on other business.”
I wondered what would happen if I took the heartstone from this hell. It would fade away and the gate would vanish. I’d lose access to the other hells until I found another gate, but Seng would be lost in the void.
“Ruining someone else’s life, I assume.”
There were gates all over, still as sealed as I had left them thousands of years before. Whatever force had begun to open the other gates hadn’t bothered with these.
“I’m leaving now,” I said, feeling obliged to tell the dead god for some reason.
“You’ll be back,” he replied, and I thought I could hear a smile in his spectral voice. “I have seen it.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but he was gone or disinclined to speak to me anymore.
I lifted off the ground and sped to the nearest gate. It was physical, unlike the gates in the heavens; an arch of red-streaked stone. Thousands of hands h
ad tried to open it over the millennia and there were chips and scrapes in the rock. Nobody had succeeded, though.
I closed my eyes and stepped through the solid barrier and into another hell, as easily as changing heavens.
This was a tropical paradise, with crashing waves and blue skies, and the smell of smoke in the air. I heard yelling from nearby, a woman screaming, the sound of flesh being torn by blunt blades.
The tattoos told me the hell was huge, with hundreds of thousands of people.
I sped to the next gate, looking for a different hell, a smaller one. With Roman I’d used the argument that the people living in these places weren’t enjoying the experience, but it was still their afterlives. I needed to find something big enough to satisfy Invehl but small enough that my conscience could survive the act.
Another hell: a quiet neighborhood with a storm raging that lit up the sky with its fury. Something stalked the darkness nearby, a being of immense power and purpose that made the tattoos squirm in anticipation. An angel, perhaps. The hell was too big and I proceeded to the next gate in the neighborhood next door.
Another hell, smaller this time: fire and brimstone everywhere. Vats of fire with people screaming, men and women holding tight to their children as their flesh cooked. They were the angels, though, and the beasts stirring the vats and keeping the prisoners within were the souls in agony.
The hell was still too big. I moved to the next.
They flashed past me now as I ran through them. Screams cut off as soon as I heard them, fire, ice, sand, open air and I was falling, water and I was drowning. There was no consistency the way there was in the heavens, no central theme to the chaos. And every hell was filled to the brim, hundreds of thousands of people all with the same terrors finding a place together.
I began moving to the smaller hells, the more personal spaces with fewer and fewer people. A countryside with militia everywhere, always hunting and killing until nobody was left, only to start over as the sun rose. A city with endless traffic, carts and horses stuck behind each other for eons, each second an eternity with loved ones always too far away.
There were simple hells, too. A large world with a million farms and a million souls working them endlessly, never seeing the result of their labor. A plain similar to the heaven I’d entered through, with statues of fish-people stretching to the horizon. Every so often one of the statues would reach out and grab an unfortunate and devour them, and the other souls would scream in terror before continuing their shuffling, trying desperately to be worthy of reincarnation.
I found another hell, one I hadn’t been expecting. It was the top of a mountain, blasting flat by heavenly fire. Blood pooled across the surface and an old man sat waiting for an occupant that had never arrived. I steered clear of it, knowing it would drive me mad if I went there.
Eventually I came to what I was looking for. It was a country of ten thousand souls, spread over idyllic rolling green hills. The people there were miserable, all desperate for something else and unable to achieve it. They worked and strived the way the million farmers had, only they achieved things and saw the result of their work. But it never led them to a way out and that was enough to make the place unbearable.
I searched for the heartstone and found it in a town hall in the middle of a small wood. It had been abandoned a long time ago and the forest had grown through it. I kicked open the door and entered, ducking under a tree.
“Welcome, Agmundr.”
The demon sat beside a scroll on an altar. He looked like everyone else in this world, with well-worn, patched clothes and a peasant’s rough, sun-burnt skin.
“You know why I’ve come,” I said as I approached. I didn’t know if he’d fight me as the heavenly angels had, but I was prepared if he did.
“I do.”
“Are you going to try and stop me?”
“Nope,” he said. He stood and groaned as he stretched his muscles. “I think I’m going to find someplace a little better than this.”
“I don’t understand. I expected you to fight for your charges.”
“Why? They’re doomed anyway. At some point they’ll give up and drift off into the void. Sooner or later, it’s going to happen.”
“What’s on the scroll?”
He looked at it like he’d forgotten it was there. He picked it up and tossed it to me.
“It’s the story of the one man that got out of here. Hard work and dedication, and finally enough to leave this place.”
“Is it true?”
He laughed. “Of course not. If they wanted to leave they could just leave, but these people have been here for so long I think we can safely say they’re not going anywhere.”
“Where will you go?” I asked. I checked the scroll and wasn’t surprised to find I couldn’t read it.
“I don’t know. A nice cave, or a tropical paradise, perhaps? Somewhere I can really stretch my wings, so to speak. Maybe that place with the vat of boiling demons. That looked fun, didn’t it? Or the fish place; yeah, I could get into eating people randomly.”
He’d been watching me. Somehow he’d followed my journey through the hells in a way the angels hadn’t.
“You know which one really gets to me though,” he said as he approached me. “That mountaintop. That one looks interesting. Just one guy, all to myself. All that blood.”
He stood before me, taller than he’d appeared when I entered. His lopsided grin was inches from my face.
“Maybe you should check that one out next. I bet you’d really like it.”
I reached for him but he vanished before my hand could close on him. I quickly sent the tattoos searching but they turned up nothing.
The hell was fading away around me and I had to run. The mystery of how he’d known what I’d seen, and why he would care, would have to wait for another day.
I sped to the gate and paused, taking a last look at the hills and houses of this hell. For other people it would have been a heaven, without needing to change one detail. And yet for these people it was the worst thing they could imagine, and there were enough of them to populate an entire afterlife.
I stepped through the gate and began the race back to earth.
Chapter 29
I took a cab back to the building, spending the time thinking about what was coming next. The sun was high in the sky, and I realized I had been gone for most of the day.
There was a chance this would be the end of it. There was a chance this would be the end of my curse, as well. Erindis held the locket and she would live as long as I did, which meant we could be together forever. I would protect her from the things that had hurt her over the millennia and she would ensure nobody else used me to further their schemes.
I didn’t know what would happen when Invehl took the heartstone; would it affect him immediately or was there something he had to do before somehow absorbing the faith contained within? If it killed him, how long would I have to wait?
I was getting ahead of myself; the hell heartstone might do nothing to him. It might be as though he’d eaten a bad oyster, making him sick for a little while and then he’d be fine, and angry. Anything might happen.
But I had hope, and that was more than I’d had before speaking to Roman. That was more than I’d had in a long time.
The street outside Invehl’s building was strangely empty. Midday traffic streamed down the streets to either side but before his building it was empty. The taxi dropped me off and I spent a moment checking the area, sending the tattoos out to see if there was something out of the ordinary.
I was being paranoid. Invehl didn’t know what I was doing and had no reason to suspect. Even if he did, why would he empty the street before seeing me?
Paranoid, and delaying the moment when I’d find out what the heartstone did to him. I shook my head and entered the building, walking quickly through the lobby and pressing the button for the elevator.
“You’re being a good boy, aren’t you?” Bannon said, taking u
p position beside me. “Are you doing what you’re told, making sure the colonel is happy with your performance?”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew what I wanted to do and the tattoos let me know how badly they wanted to help me. Bannon was an insect and he needed to be crushed, but it wasn’t the right time. Depending on what happened to Invehl the time might be coming soon, though.
“What, you’re not talking to me?” He was facing me now, challenging me, and it took an effort of will not to take him up on it.
The elevator arrived and I stepped inside. I expected him to enter with me but he stayed in the lobby, glaring at me as the doors closed.
Invehl was in his office, the young man with the suit standing outside and waiting to be summoned.
“The colonel is in a meeting,” the man said. I ignored him and walked in.
“I’ll be watching,” Invehl said to someone through the gadget attached to his ear. “You’ve got my support, you know that. But don’t mess this up. You get one chance at this; make it count.”
He hung up on whoever it was and dropped the earpiece onto his desk.
“Plotting a war somewhere?” I said. I took up my position opposite his desk and put my hands behind my back. I liked the way his eyes danced anxiously when I hid my hands from him.
“Always, Agmundr, always. I wish you would sit down.”
“I would like to spend as little time in your presence as possible. Sitting down might give the wrong idea.”
I was antagonizing him and it probably wasn’t a good idea, but we were almost done and what happened next was probably going to annoy him no matter what.
“Did you get another one?” He sounded like a kid about to get a present, a little boy excited for his new toy.
I tossed the scroll on the table and tried not to show how nervous I was. Would he be able to see it was different, or smell, or something? Or did it seem the same? I’d tried to pick a hell that wasn’t too obvious, that might have been confused with a heaven if viewed unawares. With the first heartstone he’d known about the old man and the single angel, which meant he had some awareness of the places I’d taken them from. I didn’t know how far that awareness went, however.