The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  There were people inside the chasm.

  Nathaniel must have heard it, too. He moved to step out of the temple, but Elise stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Get rid of the jacket,” she said. “And the jumper. We need to find a way across the desert, and you’ll want to be comfortable.”

  He pulled off his jacket as Elise attempted to mentally calculate the distance. Anthony had complained that he couldn’t breathe when she carried him through shadow. If Elise tried to jump Nathaniel all the way across the desert, she might suffocate him.

  “How are we going to do it?” he asked, folding his jacket neatly over one of the railings. He definitely shared James’s tidy genes. “Are we going to walk?”

  Elise opened her mouth to respond.

  Something whistled through the air and struck her in the shoulder.

  The force of the impact made her stagger. She craned her neck around to see her back. A long, slender bone jutted out of her shirt, and she reached around to wrench it free. The tip was sharpened to a point—an arrow.

  Dark shapes were advancing on the temple on the opposite side of the desert at a flat-out run. They were fast. Much faster than any human would have been able to move in the heavy air.

  And they were all armed.

  “Get down!” she shouted, shoving Nathaniel behind the altar.

  He dropped to the floor just in time for another two arrows to whizz through the temple. The first one missed her. The second glanced off of her bicep, leaving a burning stripe that faded instantly.

  Elise drew her swords and leaped out of the temple.

  The wave of demons crashed into her. They were as varied as all the stones in the earth—some short, some tall, some humanoid, some four-legged and furred. Elise didn’t waste any time identifying them.

  She whirled and sliced with her falchions, moving entirely on instinct.

  They had seemed to be approaching quickly, but now everything was slow—she could see the hand reaching for her face extend as if it floated through sludge. It was easy to knock the clawed arm aside and drive her blade into the attacker’s gut. Its twisted, ugly face went slack. She kicked it and sent it to the dirt.

  Another arrow. Elise flashed out of its path with a thought, and it buried in the throat of the nightmare behind her instead.

  The archer was an incubus, and he was carrying a crossbow with mechanisms of brass. He didn’t have to manually reload. Another bone whirred into place, and he lifted it to fire again.

  With another thought, Elise appeared behind the incubus, wrenched the automatic crossbow out of his hands, and kicked him in the back.

  They were all too slow. It was much too easy.

  Slow as the attackers were, they were also numerous. A few of them slipped around her and fell upon the temple.

  Nathaniel’s cry broke over the desert.

  She whipped through the air to the temple. A brute had Nathaniel by the arms and was lifting his slender body into the air as he kicked and hollered.

  Elise plowed into the brute’s gut. All three of them fell.

  The brute’s fist connected with her face. Even though it didn’t hurt, his weight was still enough to pin her, and she couldn’t melt away from the knee in her gut when he flashed a brilliant light in her face. It flared for only a dizzying instant, but it left green shapes floating in her vision.

  When she could see again, the incubus archer was reaching for Nathaniel.

  She shoved the brute away.

  “Don’t you fucking touch him!” Her voice hit a screaming pitch on the last word, and she came completely undone.

  Elise’s skin, her hair, her bones—it all whipped away from her. She was a million shards of glass shattering in the void. She was the darkness between the stars. She was the heat of the fire, and the shadow in the pit.

  She felt infinite.

  The incubus dropped Nathaniel, and he spilled to the floor.

  “Get behind me, kid,” she said, though she wasn’t sure how she had spoken words with no mouth, no teeth, and no tongue.

  After a heartbeat’s hesitation, he scrambled towards her as Elise drew back into herself. Collapsing was so much harder than exploding—it took all of her concentration to reform her bones, her organs, her muscles, and contain it within her skin.

  For a moment, she thought that it wasn’t going to hold. That she was going to fly away into the eternity of the moonless night.

  But her skin did solidify. Nathaniel was touching her elbow.

  She was whole again.

  Their attackers hadn’t moved since dropping Nathaniel. But once she stood in front of them, wearing James’s jeans and with the falchions on her back, they began to stir.

  “Father,” said the nearest creature. He dropped to his knees and lowered his forehead to touch the ground.

  The entire mob fell one by one, murmuring the same thing: Father. Father. Father…

  Elise ran her hands over her own face. It felt the same as it had since she had been reborn, and she was fairly certain that she didn’t look like a man.

  “What’s going on?” Nathaniel asked, hugging close to her back.

  Realization dawned on her, as bright as the fire in the pits. Her black hair and eyes, her white skin, the bleed of her energy.

  They thought that she was Yatam, the father of all demons.

  “It’s okay,” Elise said. “They’re not going to hurt us.” She addressed them. “Are you?”

  No response. It sounded like they were muttering prayers.

  Elise stepped toward the nearest demon. He drew a knife and she froze—but he didn’t move to attack. He held it out to her in both of his clawed hands like an offering.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she took it. The demon lifted his chin to expose his throat. “It would bring me such pleasure to bleed for you,” it said. It was speaking the infernal tongue. There was no way she should have understood it so easily.

  “Why do you think I’m Yatam?” she asked, fingers clenched around the dagger.

  “You appeared in your temple. It’s been centuries since you visited us. We thought that no love remained for your children.” She could see the pulse throbbing in his neck and tried not to stare.

  “But how did you identify me? I don’t look like Yatam.”

  “We know the smell of your blood, Father. It runs through all of us.”

  Elise stepped back without cutting.

  Was that what had happened to her? She had exchanged blood with Yatam once. He had drunk deep from her femoral artery and consummated the exchange before the goddess who birthed him. Elise had stabbed him during the act, and their blood had mingled on their flesh. It had been intended to make Yatam mortal, and it had succeeded. It shouldn’t have done anything to her at all.

  But now she had his powers. More than that: she seemed to have his blood.

  “Stand up,” Elise said, and the demon obeyed her instantly. She gave the knife back to him. “I’m not going to kill you. But I need your help. I need to get into the Palace of Dis.”

  “You can walk upon the city and flatten it beneath your feet. Why do you need us?”

  She frowned. “Because I’m only going in to bring two people out, and I don’t need to kill everyone in the process.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t question me,” Elise snapped. “What are all of you doing in the desert, anyway? Why did you attack us?”

  “We thought that you were touchstones arriving for the trial. We pulled you out of the portal so that we could seize you.” After a nervous pause, the demon added, “We didn’t intend to kill you. Only capture.”

  Elise picked up one of the bone arrows. The tip was barbed. For an attack that wasn’t meant to kill, it was a hell of a weapon. She tossed it aside. “Everyone—get up. You weren’t wandering around the desert for fun, so you’ve got to have a way to move fast. Right?”

  They moved slowly, as if reluctant to stand around her. Nathaniel tugged on her arm.

&nb
sp; “What’s going on?” he whispered. “Who’s Yatam?”

  “I’ll explain later. Are you okay?”

  He shut his mouth and nodded. No complaints from him. Stubbornness sparked behind his brown puppy eyes—tough little bastard.

  “Can we trust these people?” he asked.

  Elise barked a laugh. “No.”

  The incubus sauntered up to her, narrow hips swaying as he walked, almost as though he were a woman. “They will want to see you at the Nether Palace. You’re exactly the kind of help we need.”

  “Nether Palace?”

  “The center of the rebellion.” He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you know about the rebellion?”

  “I don’t have time to screw around.”

  “Well enough.” The incubus turned, put his fingers to his lips, and blasted an eardrum-shattering whistle. Nathaniel clapped his hands over his ears. “Transportation will be here soon,” he said, and he drifted away to collect his arrows.

  But the demons weren’t done with her yet. “You’re not our Father,” said a squat little demon that Elise didn’t recall seeing in the attack. He was draped in folds of leather and his head looked like it had been smashed between two rocks.

  “Are you going to attack me?”

  “No. It would be too easy for you to end my life.” A sly smile crossed his frog-like mouth. “But you don’t know that, do you? My name is Hyzakis. Nobody important. But perhaps we can help each other, you and I.”

  Before she could respond, something darker than the night loomed overhead. It was bigger than an airplane, and swollen like a tick filled with blood. Its semi-translucent skin danced with reflected gold and crimson. A hundred writhing legs, like worms that terminated in hooked claws, dangled from its underbelly.

  “What is that?” Elise asked, grabbing Nathaniel’s arm as its wriggling legs descended towards them.

  Hyzakis grinned. “Transportation.”

  7

  Isaac knew that his wife would be expecting him at their quarters soon. She would have heard of the trial and expected news. But he didn’t want to deal with her—not with his blood boiling and his fists still aching from James Faulkner’s face.

  Isaac detoured at the library instead. He sat at a desk and folded his hands on top of the wooden surface. A knife concealed underneath one sleeve pressed hard into his forearm.

  The thing on the opposite side of the table was barely recognizable as a sentient creature, much less a librarian. A head similar to a goat’s protruded from the shadowed depths of her orange hood, and she had a feathered chest and goat’s legs underneath.

  “Onoskelis,” Isaac began.

  She held up one dainty finger to silence him as she finished writing on a piece of paper. Her hand wouldn’t have been out of place on a small human child, aside from the black fingernails and leathery skin.

  “I have a question,” he went on.

  She whispered, “A moment.”

  He gritted his teeth and watched the surrounding desks as he waited. Onoskelis wasn’t the only one busy in the library. The dozens of tables were occupied by dozens more demons, all of them writing, all of them wearing the orange robes of scribes. Thick hoods draped over their twisted, inhuman heads, making each of them indistinguishable from the next.

  The library was in the east tower, and it took up the entire lower half of the building. The roof vanished into darkness overhead. The walls were covered in impossibly tall shelves, which were occupied by row upon row of documents. Beneath Isaac’s feet, the floor was frosted glass, and he could make out the blurred shape of more shelves below. He had always wondered what the demons kept in the basement of the library, but he wasn’t allowed down there—and the librarians weren’t talking.

  Onoskelis was writing in one of the ledgers. Her pen scratched on paper that wasn’t made from trees. It was a peachy-gray color, and shone strangely in the light. Wood was scarce in Dis, so they made paper out of the flesh of fiends.

  Isaac bounced his knee, drummed his fingers on the desk, and tried to be patient. But the thought of James Faulkner in one of his cells made it impossible to wait. “Onoskelis, I need to ask you something,” he said, doing his very best to wrap his mouth around the infernal tongue.

  Again, she held up one finger.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “A moment.”

  “I don’t have a moment. Why was there a secret bounty placed on James Faulkner? What’s his crime?”

  Onoskelis continued to write.

  He angled his head to try to read the runes she etched on the page. He only got through one line, which said something about ethereal influences and apotheosis, before she turned the page.

  She wrote three more lines, signed the page with a flourish, and blew on it. The ink flared with flame.

  “When a bounty isn’t public, it’s for a reason, Isaac Kavanagh,” Onoskelis said. Her voice was low, throaty, and strangely human, considering that it came out of a goat’s muzzle. Her mouth barely moved.

  “I’m a touchstone and the Inquisitor. I handle prisoners. I’m not the public.”

  “Then you should ask yourself who would place a bounty without telling you, and why. And you should ask yourself if the answers to your questions are worth the cost of learning them.” Onoskelis carefully folded the paper and shut the leather cover.

  “So you know why he was arrested,” Isaac said.

  “Of course,” she said, and she leaned back to sift through her desk drawer. She came up with a rubber stamp and licked it. Her tongue was thin and purple. “I know everything that happens in this Palace, Isaac Kavanagh. I would be of no use as a record-keeper if I didn’t.”

  “Well?” he asked.

  She wrapped a cord around the ledger and stamped its cover. “That answer isn’t worth my life. Is it worth yours, I wonder?” Onoskelis didn’t wait for an answer. She rose from the desk. “Follow me. I have some filing to do.”

  “Now, listen to me—”

  The demon cut him off with a guttural bleat. It was loud enough to draw the attention of the other scribes, but as soon as they saw Isaac, they quickly returned to their work.

  Onoskelis repeated herself, carefully enunciating each word with her furred lips. “Follow me. I have some filing to do.”

  She swept off to the spiral stairs, leaving Isaac no choice but to follow.

  Every level of the library’s catwalks was lit by standing lamps, and no two of them matched. It was as though the decorator had picked them up at rummage sales on Earth. One had a brass stand with a shade that looked like turtle shell; another was a white, modern torchiere. Onoskelis turned them on as she passed, marking her trail.

  Isaac followed her to a quiet level two hundred feet above the floor of the library before she stopped climbing. She limped toward a stack at the end of the row. “James Faulkner is on high trial,” he said, staying far enough back that he wouldn’t step on her snakelike tail. “Humans never go on high trial.”

  Onoskelis snuffled, nostrils flaring. “Martin Beaumont was on high trial in 1932. He took an ethereal artifact to the Coccytus and destroyed the Maw. His sentence was eternity in Hellfire, where he waits to this day. Genevieve Teufel was on high trial in 1765 for casting arcane ethereal magic—impressive for a human, and also worth Hellfire. Aksinya Samov—”

  “So there’s a precedent,” Isaac said.

  “But it’s rare. Mortals go on high trial for the most catastrophic of reasons, and none that have gone before the entire Council have faced a punishment less than Hellfire.” Onoskelis handed him the ledger. “Your reach is better than mine. Put this on the shelf over your head, beside the blue book.”

  He stretched onto his toes to file it where she ordered. “You’re telling me that Faulkner must have nearly destroyed the world to earn high trial, but that’s not the accusation. They said that he’s changed species and become a demon. It’s impossible. That man’s as much of a demon as I am.”

  Onoskelis swept up the next set of stairs as if
she hadn’t heard him. She was fast when she wanted to be. He had to hurry to keep up with the beating of her hooves against the catwalk.

  The librarian took him to the highest level of books, and kept going. The east tower held the offices of lesser infernal nobility, and none of them would meet eyes with Isaac as he passed their doors. Everyone enjoyed watching him practice his arts in the courtyard, but nobody wanted to deal with him outside of the torture room. Or inside of it, for that matter. Too many of their friends had passed through the Inquisitor’s office.

  Onoskelis moved onto the open walkway that led to the grand tower. The winds were strong that high off of the ground, and even the dust storm wasn’t enough to spare Isaac’s skin from the harsh air. He felt the bridge of his nose immediately begin to burn. He flipped his hood over his head, tugged his sleeves down to the knuckles, and followed her across the black bridge.

  “Not all of our records are kept in the library anymore,” Onoskelis said, her voice soft underneath the whipping wind. She moved as confidently and smoothly as though there was no wind at all, even though the cloak beat at her furred legs and Isaac had to grip the bone railings. “There are more secrets in Dis than there used to be, and they have never been in short supply.”

  “If they aren’t being kept in the library, where are they?” Isaac asked, words raspy.

  “Localized regions around the palace. Private offices or what have you. I would retrieve them if I knew.” She vibrated with barely-controlled fury. “Withholding records from the librarians is criminal. Perverse.”

  The admission that there might have been something that escaped Onoskelis stunned him. He stopped walking halfway across the bridge.

  He stared down at the city spread around him, far below the walkway between towers. The streets looked like a spider’s web spread over offal. Isaac never went into the city if he could avoid it; it wasn’t safe for humans, even ones employed by the Council.

  But if records were being hidden from the librarians…