Dark Gods Rising

by Mark Eller

  Chapter 12— Voice Over

  Maggie watched Jolson paw through the unwanted refuse of a city’s leavings. He dug past discarded bowls and cracked cups. He tossed aside a broken knife, scooped away a stinking pile of moldy clothes, and finally found the treasure for which he had been searching. With a clumsy hand, he grabbed the chunk of discarded meat and fat. Even from ten feet away, Maggie could see at least a quarter pound of rancid flesh was still attached to the pig fat, maybe more when the weight of the clinging maggots was added in.

  Without showing a single sign of distaste, Jolson sank his teeth into the rotting mass. Viln, a filthy young boy whose only clothing was a rag wrapped around his loins, stared at Jolson with disgust. Gagging, he turned away to join the other lost children who would spend a few years living on Yylse’ garbage before they faded and died.

  Arching her aged and aching back to loosen its knotted muscles, Maggie stared at Jolson with understanding eyes while he ate the meat, fat, and maggots. The food in Hell, she knew, was much worse than what Jolson held in his single hand.

  “It’s a difficult path you chose,” she said once Jolson finished chewing and began sucking fat residue from his fingers. Her voice cracked and broke from the effort of speaking, and that was a hard thing for her. There had been a time when she had been fêted for her voice. Just five years earlier she had sung before crowds and kings. She had been showered with jewels and courted by suitors until Krastos, a minor demon, had broken into her home one evening, killed her lover, and delivered her to Hell to sing for Athos, the lesser god of Hell. For three years she had remained in Athos’s halls before she was finally allowed to leave due to the god’s whim. By that time, her thirty-year-old mind was housed in an old woman’s arthritic body. Hell, she had learned, was not kind to mortals. Apparently, the seven heavenly gods had never intended for Hell to be inhabited by ephemeral beings when they designed Anothosia’s pocket realm, her miniature universe, to house their wayward brethren thousands of years earlier. The unholy miasma required to feed the hellborn took a heavy toll on mortals.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go back?” she asked.

  After spending a few moments peering toward a sun riding high in the sky, Jolson shook himself, groaned, and looked back to Maggie. She watched his struggle while he fought to bring out the intellect buried deep within his damaged mind. Lights of knowledge, of understanding, flickered within his dark orbs, faded, and returned once more. His slack and pallid face firmed, and Maggie knew she saw a brief glimpse of the driven being who had escaped Hell.

  He gestured to the sun. “Look. Yellow and white, it hides amid the gray wisps of those clouds. It reigns above the blue sky. The sight of the sun, of the sky and clouds, of grass and trees and buildings, and everything else existing in the upper world are a wonder. Everywhere I look I see patterns. I see lines and squares. I see circles and cylinders and delicate lacings radiating beauty because they follow the rules of law. There are no surging waves of changing chaos. There are no nebulous, formless beings capable of taking real shape only when they seep into the upper world. No demons, devils, wyverns, or any of the other hellkind I have always known.”

  Sighing, he ran a hand through his filthy hair. “Sometimes, when I first wake after a long hour of sleep, my mind looks upon this new reality and tries to pull it back into something more chaotically familiar. Distant grass warps into gray and black and muddy brown wavelets which swirl and seep to no particular pattern. This pure garbage heap we live on becomes a putrid, shifting mass which resembles a knuckle on Athos’s hand. My mind twists and tries to bring me the comfort of familiarity, but I refuse to give in to comfort’s allure. I’ve worked for too many years at unthreading the dull complacency Athos gave me for a mind. I’ve sweated and bled, been cursed and flogged too many times to willingly relinquish the little bit of sleepy intelligence I have won for myself.”

  With a slight shudder, his features slackened, and the lights in his eyes began to fade. “It’s hard, Maggie. It’s hard to hold together enough will to–to— but I won’t go back. I won’t–only will is the hardest of all.”

  Maggie reflected on how even his spawn body had suffered in Hell’s chaos. His movements were crippled and slow. Any element of grace he might once have owned was missing, and the intellect which sometimes showed behind his eyes was an elusive wisp he could only occasionally capture. Fortunately, even at his most stupid he had enough brains to follow her suggestions and orders very well. For this she was grateful. His continued obedience was integral to her plans.

  She waved a hand toward where Yylse lay several miles away. “Athos’s hunters will come from there. They will take you back.”

  “Why?” Jolson asked. “I am no threat to him.”

  She gestured toward the jade green hook decorating the end of his left wrist. “Athos is a grasping god. You are his spawn, and you have stolen his hook.”

  After wiping his greasy hand on the thin hair covering his bare belly, Jolson clumsily moved closer until he stood only four feet away. He looked at her with confused eyes and a worried frown, but he showed no fear, and Maggie found this surprising. Spawn were created and trained to fear.

  “I won’t–s–s–stay,” he said slowly. “I will escape again.”

  Sadly shaking her head, she set the first snare to her trap. “You told me a dead woman helped you escape the first time. I’d like to help you, too— I’d like to show you how to navigate these shoals and elude capture, but I’m just an old and stove-in singing whore, too useless to do much more than show you how to scavenge from this garbage pile. No, my friend, I’m too useless to be of much help to you, and I‘m afraid it won‘t be long before you’re taken. Within a few months our two shades will meet in Athos’s Hall.”

  Leaning forward, she peered at a face that had lost part of its animation and nodded to herself. Jolson’s mind was caught in a state halfway between brilliance and muddled confusion. Of late, his sessions of full cognizance seemed to be growing shorter and fewer. It wouldn’t be long before there was so little left to him he would be unable to recall how to use the wonderful instrument hanging on the end of his arm. Days, maybe, or a couple of weeks.

  Scuttling forward, she whispered in his ear.

  “Listen to me, Jolson.” She ran a gnarled hand lovingly over his hook’s sweet curve. It felt smooth, blood warm, and not metal. Against her touch she felt a pulsing thrum which would have been a reflection of Jolson’s heartbeat if the pulse had been quicker. Evil lived within the hook. It was a fell dark thing, and it was alive.

  “Think of what it would be like to own grace,” she whispered. “You would walk instead of stumble. You could run from your hunters or maybe even fight them to their deaths. I can give this to you, Jolson. I can make you more whole than you have ever been before. I’ll take care of you. I’ll see to it you remain free.” She ran her bent hand up the length of the hook before resting it on his wrist. “All you have to do is listen to me.”

  Shaking his head, he studied her with not quite dull eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

  Not too far away children scrabbled in the refuse looking for a scrap of decent food or for the small nothings many of the rich considered worthless. Because she scared the hell out of the younger children, many of those items found their way into her hands. Occasionally, a few small trinkets brought her one or two copper coins. Reaching her crab-fingered hand into a torn pocket, she brought out one of those coins.

  “Viln,” she called, holding out her hand for the boy to see what she offered.

  Viln gaped stupidly for several moments before scrambling her way. Mocking his efforts, the other children looked on, but jealousy leaked out of their voices.

  Pleased, Maggie watched Viln hurry toward her. She peered at Jolson and frowned. She could almost see his mind fading away. Hopefully, he would manage to hold the remaining parts of his intellect together for a while longer. P
ast experience had shown her it took a few hours for Jolson to drag himself back out of the dark morass after his will wavered and his intellect failed. She didn’t want to wait those hours. She was determined to use him now, because, unlike Jolson’s, her will was iron.

  Panting from his run, Viln arrived wearing a lack-wit’s excited expression. Smiling, Maggie dropped the quarter rugdle coin at his feet. When Viln bent to retrieve it, she clubbed him over his head with a piece of scrap iron.

  A few moments of checking proved Viln still lived, fortunate but unsurprising. She was no longer strong enough to cause him serious harm, but she soon would be with Jolson’s compliance.

  Touching Jolson’s hook with two fingers, Maggie pushed it toward Viln.

  “Make me young,” she ordered.