Damir’s ragged laughter stokes Basil’s temper.
“Quiet your trap, hoary fuck!”
Basil bends at the waist, his eyes lost in the clouds of Damir’s cataracts.
Damir claps his stumps together.
“Pip-pip and cheerio,” Damir says. “Be gone with you.”
“I don’t know why I’d expect you to wish me well.”
“Basil …”
“Yes?”
“My gratitude for the soup.”
Damir tosses the empty bowl at Basil’s hooves.
“Don’t forget what you’re leaving behind,” Damir adds. “The beast in the basement, I mean. Whatever you leave behind will be waiting for you when you return. If you return.”
Basil turns, intent on thrashing Damir as penance for his loose tongue. Instead, he takes a deep breath and permits this one last jab. Damir knows too much for his own good, but he’s smart, cagey—knows which secrets to keep to his ragged, old self. How else would a crippled old demon have survived for so long?
Before anyone else can grab his ear, Basil makes a beeline toward the massive door that will grant him his freedom.
“You would leave this place, and leave me, without giving a proper goodbye?”
Kamala.
She leans against the wall of the nursery, the Hardened Womb, where newborn demons coo and howl and draw milk from their mothers.
“You would have noticed my absence eventually,” he tells her.
“I thought you would have made our parting of ways a more formal affair.”
He places his right hand on her shoulder and then pinches her chin between two fingers. He almost leans in to kiss her, for some reason he can’t explain, but kills the urge.
“Do not rule too harshly,” he says. “Or, worse, too kindly.” The Nameless, he reminds her, have limited purpose: to submit, to serve, to obey.
“Of course, my liege,” she says.
“Be wary of those who wish to help you.”
“Travel safely.”
“Will you manage without me?”
“Of course, Lord.”
“I’m afraid there’s no choice anyway,” he adds. “Seek the assent of Calvin and the rest of the Council. They can help you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of taking any other route.”
“Stay clear of the Pool of Infinite Perdition,” he says, nodding toward the bubbling lake of blood. “Beware Cthaal.”
“Always. I’m well aware of his appetite.”
“And please make sure no one troubles Damir.”
“The old killjoy will fare just fine under me. We await your return.”
Basil has been wrestling with whether to share a particularly juicy ort of wisdom with Kamala, and he decides she deserves to know. In fact, she must know if she is to lead in his stead.
“One last order of business,” he says.
He tips his head and snakes a hand behind her neck. He pulls her close and whispers in her ear. A moment passes between them, then two. As expected, she recoils at his words, her face bearing an expression somewhere between awe and horror. The secret affects her so deeply she can barely move her hooves, so he has to cradle her as they amble.
Of Our Fiery Home’s murkiest mysteries, Kamala now knows the most vital. He only hopes she will not need to make use of such privilege.
As they wander, a group of imps follows closely behind, like pigeons eager for dropped crumbs. Basil kneels before them and, extending an index finger, welcomes their approach.
“I have chosen you,” he says in Locuri. He anoints three imps by brushing his thumb across each one’s forehead, blessing them with the halo of his protection. “You are to be my couriers. If I am needed, you are to find me. You have the freedom to roam on the surface, but only to serve me. You are bound to this covenant. Do you understand?”
The imps fidget and jump with nervous excitement. Basil feels reassured by this action, knowing he will have a lifeline to this place, however tenuous. What the imps lack in intelligence they make up for in loyalty, so they will not disappoint as long as they do not get themselves killed. If conditions deteriorate and Kamala’s reign goes horribly, the imps will track him down, and he will then have to return and do something about it. This much he knows. Everything else will be a mystery.
He rises to rejoin Kamala, whose demeanor has shifted to what he would describe as muted joy. She cannot wait for him to leave. He knows he will not be missed. He finds comfort in the fact that the feeling is mutual.
Kamala smiles as they approach a massive door fashioned from fossilized dragon bones, stitched together with wiry roots. She reaches into a stone basin filled with fat-soaked strips of leather. She withdraws a handful of the slippery leathers and drops them one by one into a satchel, which she drapes around Basil’s neck. She then motions three oversized beasts—troglodytes, each standing nearly twenty feet tall—to roll back the door. The lizard-like trogs hiss their compliance. Cool, moist air rushes in, and the sensation chills Basil’s reptilian flesh.
Basil produces a torch and steps into the darkened tunnel. His hooves tramp a rune-etched sigil buried in the rock. As he rubs his fingers together, a flame appears, and it sparks the torch to life. He places a meaty hand on Kamala’s shoulder, and she returns the gesture before rising to kiss him dryly on the lips.
A moment later, he is gone.
* * *
The ghost of an icy wind whispers through the tunnel’s mouth, tugging at the carpet of dust coating the cavern floor. The dark hole seems to beg for some sort of attention—to be filled in, plugged up, paned with iron so not one more whiff of air from the outside world can find its way into Our Fiery Home.
A knot of uneasiness tightens in Kamala’s gut as she orders the trogs to seal up the demons’ lair. The door grates along the cavern floor, overwhelmed by its own weight, and clangs shut. For a moment there is silence, save the ever-present crackling and popping of things afire, and she relishes it—the possibility of things to come. With Basil cast out into the cold, dark beyond, she is alone at the proverbial top of the mountain.
Small groups of demons and imps surround her. Many have dropped to their knees. Lubos stands behind them. Arms crossed and grinning, he does not kneel. Beyond, the ancient Calvin lingers at the entrance to the Hall of Ignoble and Prodigious Elders. His arms hang like ropes from nonexistent shoulders. A limp tail dangles between his legs as if it were a dead snake. She nods toward him. He turns his back to her and retreats into his chamber.
“If Lord Basil returns,” she tells the undersized crowd, “destroy him.”
“Should we follow?” the demon named Gideon asks. “He is vulnerable now. We can undo him.”
“Leave him to the cold,” she snarls. “Soon enough he will face a legion of enemies who will stop at nothing to have his head.”
Chapter 2
Cast Out, Into the Dying Light
Freedom is never free, Basil muses. He wonders how heavy the burden of his escape will feel once he has reached the surface, or for how long the price of his exit will haunt him. For the moment, with Our Fiery Home at his back, he has no reason to care.
I am different now. I am different forever.
He wanders, uncertain and cold, through curtains of fire-licked shadow. The tunnel bears teeth of its own, edges of black rock as keen as broken glass, taking small bites of his hooves with each forward step. Out here he is exposed, vulnerable—perilously mortal. He becomes aware of the torch in his right hand, and he wonders if his strength has waned since leaving the womb of his kingdom. He supposes such doubts are acceptable in any act of reinvention.
“I shall emerge from this sac as a beast reborn,” he whispers. The lie slides off his tongue too easily. What horrors and pleasures lie ahead? No one knows, least of all him. He wants only to return to a daydream in which he bathes in the shallows of a freshwater lake, each wave lapping the stink of the ages from his barnacled hide. Alas, the pleasures of exploration in an unknown land
will have to wait. He thinks only of assassins crouching silently in the dark—or, worse, the sins of his past.
The catalog of his misdeeds scrolls across the screen inside his skull: battlefield carcasses arranged in an artful, parasite-ridden pile; rivers bearing tongues of flame, riding a crooked seam toward the distant horizon; crudely made knives in the palms of enthusiastic killers, with dullish blades that tear more than cut, poke more than slice, doing their job—bloodletting, maiming, killing; the Pool of Infinite Perdition, the epithet given to the lake of blood where cautious devils come to drink, eyeing dead things, limp and formless in the bubbling syrup, and knowing that Cthaal, the tentacled behemoth roaming the depths, prefers the sport of claiming live prey over filling its beak with carrion bobbing on the surface; sticky brown hoof prints, baked black, leading away from the lake’s ragged edge, prowling for trouble.
He grasps at other images as they float in and out of his mind, yet he can only touch the edges before they float away like ashes caught in an updraft. The softest of images from his dreams fight for space in his brain. These vivid scenes, plucked from the storybooks of a human world, visit him when he sleeps, backhanded gifts to remind him, in the cruelest of ways, of his many missteps. He knows they will keep his mind in disarray until he figures out a way to change. For years he has wondered who gave him this maze to solve, and always he comes up short. He never told Kamala of his regrets—another regret tallied—as she is the only one who might have cared to listen.
He seeks a legacy beyond the dubious title he has earned: caretaker of a stinking, murderous cesspool, however well run.
His kinder memories, which he attempts to replay now, date back to his life before he became someone. Even as an insignificant brute fresh from the nest, he dwarfed his peers in size and strength, and as he neared adulthood, he grew tall and sturdy, uncomfortably so, yet he had gentleness to his credit. Other demons challenged him, pushed him, sought to hurt him, but he turned the other cheek until he no longer could.
Until circumstances forced his hand.
Even now, Basil cannot fathom his luck. Or lack thereof. He did not crave ascendance or the role of a leader, but power found him amid the bloodiest insurrection of his time. Ten thousand demons died in the chaos if it had been one.
Nothing in particular brought on the so-called “Last Purge”—last as in most recent, not as in final. A disagreement between two rival bands of demons had escalated into a full-scale war with no discernible sides. Amid the chaos, Basil found himself face to face with an old, one-eyed demon named Byron—his predecessor and, lamentably, his first kill. Without much effort, Basil tore out Byron’s throat and watched him die at his hooves. He then removed Byron’s head and painted his chest with his predecessor’s blood to assume the throne as ruler of Our Fiery Home. It was that simple.
War ravaged his newly inherited kingdom for a short while longer, with Basil eviscerating any creature daring to stand in his shadow.
Or so he was told, for he recalls none of it.
Even now he knows the bloodshed was worthwhile, as the war brought about an era of fragile peace to Our Fiery Home. Apart from the occasional revolt, no wars had erupted since he came to power. Why? He chalks it up to freedom. Whereas Byron had a thousand rules, Basil had next to none.
When Basil assumed the throne, no one was more surprised. To be in charge of something, anything, let alone an entire subterranean kingdom with its own ecosystem, its own social structure … the idea bordered on the absurd, but he made it work. He found a way to lead. If he had ignored his fate and let some other demon take the reins in his stead, Our Fiery Home likely would not have survived—and, by definition, neither would he. No matter how bad things got, and no matter how many horrors he effected, he never wanted his life to end. He never once craved the nothingness of the dreamless sleep.
Now he merely wants to exist, unburdened and alone.
He considers his plight as he follows the seemingly unending tunnel, and he knows he must busy his mind to keep the bad voices silent.
“Failure,” they tell him.
“Pathetic.”
“Worthless.”
Where the tunnel’s throat constricts, he squeezes through sideways. He suddenly realizes the folly of his venture, unsure if the tunnel will go up, up, up and out into the world, or farther down, leading him into Earth’s heart, the molten core, where not even he will be able to withstand the nuclear blast furnace. The glare of firelight illuminates the ceiling to show three crudely painted circles of increasing circumference—small, medium and large—that serve as guideposts marking his route to the surface.
“Just follow the runes,” Lubos told him before he left. “If the light loses you, just follow the air. The smell will tell you the way. Stay right if you want the Americas, left for the Dark Continent.”
None of Lubos’s verbiage made sense at the time. Still his words do not register.
Basil feels the cool air licking the flesh of his bare stomach. He wishes for a map, a compass, a charred leg of beef—something to motivate him beyond the sole torch whose flame seems to wither with each step. If the fat-soaked leathers burn up and the torch goes out … he doesn’t want to think about it, as he has no fondness for the dark. Too many surprises lurking, too many nooks in which hunters can wait patiently for their take. Here, in this tunnel, he sees the perfect setting for a murder—or, better put, an assassination. His ears perk up, listening for hoofbeats, for words whispered from wicked lips, for the sound of an ax blade chewing the air. He winds another leather strip around the head of the torch. It sparks.
More unsettling thoughts creep in, the fact that here, out in the open, beyond the walls of his kingdom, he has no power. “Abandonment bears a heavy debt,” one of the Elders remarked. Calvin. True to the codger’s word, Basil felt his weaknesses multiply the moment he stepped across Our Fiery Home’s runeetched threshold.
Water drips from tears in the ceiling. It smells metallic, elemental, of the earth. He imagines its origins, seeping through cracks beneath layers of muck at the bottom of a cold, dark lake, trickling through a maze of rock and root and the fossilized bones of ancient beasts before finding an exit to bless the scales of his forehead. The idea of things older than him, beyond him, makes him want to weep. He steps into a puddle, and his hoof slips on the slick rock. He stumbles forward, and the torch goes flying. It falls into a shallow pool, extinguishing the flame on one side.
“Rascal!” he roars. He plucks the torch from the puddle and deftly rewraps the head with a fresh strip of fat-soaked leather. He knows the light will last only so long, and he may be no closer to seeing sun-kissed earth than he was the moment he left Our Fiery Home. He could starve by then. He won’t, he assures himself, but he could, and the mere possibility quickens his pace. His breath becomes labored. His calves ache. Soon he reaches an impasse, where the tunnel has collapsed. Lukewarm air leaches through the cracks, and it smells different, somehow fresher, somehow alive, the promise of newness just beyond. Removing the obstacle takes some doing—too much, in fact. His arms struggle against the weight, but soon enough he rolls the last boulder off the side. Pebbles drop from the ceiling and bounce off his hairless head. Panting, he laments the absence of the magic that supposedly blesses each sinewy thread in his body.
He winces at the smell of something else—a stink he has grown used to.
He is not alone.
Others approach. His confidence flagging, his brain convinces him to take cover. He folds his body into a pocket where the rock recedes. As he extinguishes the torch, the darkness pounces. Panic grips him immediately. His throat tightens. He remembers why he slept so restlessly for so long. Whispers bounce off the walls of the tunnel. He cannot be sure as to which direction the attack might come.
An unfamiliar voice: “Smell that maggoty stink.”
Another: “Like the inside of your father’s pussy.”
They cackle in unison.
The moist rock glows with f
resh firelight.
Three figures pass, one by one, heading for the surface—minor fiends, hunched as if weighed down. One rakes the wall with a free hand, the talons nearly skimming Basil’s distended belly. Their hooves sink into inch-deep puddles, and with each step he hears the telltale clank of iron against rock. They come with spears, he realizes, likely hunting for him. Or they could simply belong to one of Lubos’s roving patrols. Should they try to end him, they will fail. He ponders an attack to remove the threat but decides he will act only in defense. The appetite for murder has left him. Instead, he will follow the trio at a distance, using their torchlight as a beacon. He pushes his fear of the inky darkness out of his mind.
By the time he reaches a junction, with as many as a dozen tunnels branching out like the spokes of a wheel, he no longer sees any sign of the fiends’ torchlight. He reaches blindly for clues to safe passage. His fingertips brush something unexpected.
Runes.
He cannot decipher their meaning, as the runes do not seem to be of demonic origin. He pauses at the entrance to one tunnel and inhales deeply. It smells sour, like demon piss, so he moves to the next, which smells no better.
He thinks of a time, years from now, when some lesser being will find his skeleton down here, stuck between worlds, a victim of indecision.
“Useless,” a voice tells him. “Foolish. Pitiful.”
Despite its berating tone, the voice in his head makes him feel less alone. The presence comforts him.
“I’m leaving you here to die,” he tells the voice in response. He waits to see if the voice goes silent. A trickle of fresh water adds depth, drop by drop, to shallow puddles at his hooves. Blip-blip-blip.
He chooses the third tunnel, despite the fact that it too reeks of a piss pot. Soon he feels the shift. Even in pure darkness he can see signs of light—and, by necessity, terrestrial life—nearby. Doubt paralyzes him as he reaches a fork in the tunnel. A wrong turn will lead him away from the surface and return him to the nothingness below. Finally, something within triggers a decision, and he takes the right branch. All traces of light disappear within a few steps, suggesting he has erred. He retraces his steps and takes a left this time. The path leads up, then down, then up, up, up—toward an alien smell. He slips through a narrow fissure, where he sees it for the first time: a soft light painting a slab of dust-colored rock. He follows the rocky path to the mouth of a cave.
Burn, Beautiful Soul Page 3
