by Matt Turner
“We killed God,” Longinus repeated. He reached into his robes and withdrew a short sword—a gladius, Simon thought. The other four men imitated his motion with a diverse array of weapons—a flail that dripped fire, a trident, an axe, and nothing for Judas other than his bare hands. “Now we kill you.”
46
John thought he had seen far too much shit to truly be surprised by anything in Hell anymore, but the sight of what looked like four undead corpses emerging from a cloud of locusts was enough to even give him pause. Plague should be able to explain this, he thought, but the young man looked just as confused as him—until the one called Caiaphas rushed him and stabbed a razor-tipped trident at his gut. Plague tried to halt the stab with his twin knives, but the sheer force of the attack shattered his weapons in half.
They’re all as strong as Longinus, John realized in horror as Caiaphas lifted the now-impaled Plague high above his head with the trident as though he were some ghoulish trophy. With a cry of rage, Simon and Vera rushed him from either side, but the man did not even take notice of them, for Annas and Pontius leapt forward to intercept the two Horsemen. Pontius’s fiery flail nearly took Simon’s head off, and Annas slammed the butt of his axe into Vera’s chest, knocking the wind out of her. She fell to the ground and Annas raised his axe for the killing blow.
Not today, John silently swore. He was utterly exhausted, barely able to stand, and still in constant pain from the wounds that Fritz had inflicted on him, but somehow he managed to create a vine that ripped up from the ground and wrapped around Annas’s arms, wrenching him back.
“Thanks,” Vera called out to him. She quickly touched Annas’s leg and bolted away. “They’re not there!” she called out to the other Horsemen, and pointed to Longinus. “It’s all him!”
“Little whore,” Longinus spat. He moved his hands in a strange gesture and suddenly Pontius and Judas sprinted at her from two separate directions, weapons raised over their heads. Annas started to tear himself free of the vines, just as Simon wrenched the axe away from his grasp.
“I’m fucking tired of goddamn Prophets,” Simon roared. He swung the axe perpendicular to Annas’s torso with so much force that it split the man in two.
Vera was having less luck. John had barely enough energy to summon any more vegetation to protect her. He made one vine wrap around Pontius’s ankles, briefly slowing him, but Judas nimbly leapt over the vine meant for him and savagely backhanded Vera across the face. She let out a scream of horror as the ancient traitor opened his jaws wide, tearing apart the decayed scar tissue of his lips, and sank his teeth into her throat. In just an instant, they were both soaked by her lifeblood.
“That’s two,” Longinus and the four other men simultaneously said in a shared voice. Even Annas called it out from where his upper torso lay on the bloody ground.
Simon rushed at Pontius, swinging the axe, but behind him, Caiaphas buried the end of the trident bearing the unconscious Plague in the ground, then attacked Simon with his bare hands. Judas let Vera’s body drop to the ground as he joined the fray, but it was over nearly before it had begun; Simon lay in a weak heap at their feet.
The Five Wounds of Christ all turned to stare at John. They made a terrifying sight: covered in blood, all glaring at him with the same cold, dead eyes.
“Only one Horseman left,” Annas and Longinus said.
“The Suicide,” Judas and Longinus sneered.
“We will make him want to die again,” Caiaphas, Pontius, and Longinus promised.
The four men who Longinus had summoned began to stride toward him—even Annas, who’d been cut in half, began to drag himself along the ground, leaving a slippery slime trail of blood and innards. Raw terror rose in John’s throat as they drew closer and closer—he was absolutely no match for them and they all knew it; this was the end —
No, a strong, but quiet voice in the back of his mind said. After everything he had been through, this was not going to be the end, it insisted. He still had a few seconds to come up with a plan, some way to escape—no, he was done with constantly escaping. It was time to defeat them, goddammit!
“You’re not even going to put up a fight?” Longinus called out from his position behind the four other men. “And you call yourself a Horseman?” His cold eyes narrowed as he twitched his fingers. The other Wounds began to sprint forward. “Pathetic.”
It’s all him, Vera had said. Suddenly, John knew what he had to do. With his last vestige of strength, he slammed his hands together and willed a vine to tear out of the ground at Longinus’s feet. The Prophet let out a cry of triumph as he cut it in half with his sword—and then the vine branched into a thousand more, wrapping around his legs, his arms, and completely covering his face in thorns and leaves.
Annas, Caiaphas, Pontius, and Judas all came to an abrupt stop just five feet away from John. They may as well have been statues, staring blankly ahead with empty eyes. “They only see what you see, isn’t that right, Prophet?” John called out. “Take away the puppet master and all the puppets are just dead pieces of wood.”
“Bastard!” Longinus cursed. Through the vines, John could feel him trying to move his fingers. Beside him, Judas slowly began to reach out a hand. I don’t think so, John thought, and so he tightened the vegetation’s grip on Longinus. Within seconds, it was as if the Prophet were encased in green stone—he could not so much as twitch his little finger without John’s permission. “Fucking Suicide!”
John pushed his way past the now-useless Wounds of Christ. “My name is John Hale,” he corrected the Prophet, and just to prove his point, he gave the vines around Longinus a little squeeze. “You should remember it.”
He made his way to the trident where Plague was still impaled and shoved it, knocking it and the young man to the ground. “Oh God,” Plague muttered as John knelt and wrenched the trident out of his stomach. “That’s going to leave a mark.” Nevertheless, the gaping holes in his abdomen slowly began to heal and re-form in front of John’s eyes.
“Can you heal the others?” John asked. Vera and Simon, who were both unconscious and lying in pools of their respective blood, looked even worse off than Plague did.
“Yeah, give me a minute.” Plague grunted. He closed his eyes and swore under his breath. “Jesus, that hurts.”
“You’ve been through worse,” Manto’s soft voice corrected him.
“Don’t remind me.” Plague groaned. He opened his eyes again and scanned the pillar of vines that Longinus was embedded in. “Nice work, John.” He lowered his voice in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell the others, but you just might be the most useful Horseman of us all.”
John smiled at that—the first genuine smile he had had for a long time, even before he had died. “Thank you.”
“You think this is over?” Longinus’s muffled voice called out from the vines. “You think you’ve won? I serve the Kingdom, and the Kingdom will have you—one way or another!”
Far above, John heard the sound of a massive bulk shifting through the clouds. He looked up and saw it—a monstrous thing slowly descending through the fire and smoke. Its skin—stretching across an area that had to be the size of a small town—was the color and texture of toughened leather, and decorated with dozens of metal pipes that protruded in every direction; they looked something like cannons protruding from a man-of-war.
“The locust he swallowed—” Plague’s eyes bugged out in shock. “He’s still in communication with Giles!”
“What—”
“It means he can order the Titan to fire on us!” Plague suddenly wrenched his cloak open, exposing his bare chest.
John couldn’t help but feel sickened at the sight—where Plague’s skin wasn’t coated in hideous scars and discolorations, it had a thick layer of what looked like runes tattooed on. Plague ripped a knife out and held it over one of the strange symbols; this one was tattooed directly over his heart.
“Don’t do it!” Manto’s voice begged. “Amaury, please
—you don’t want the Master inside you!”
“The Master is the only one who can save us now,” Plague said sadly. His hands slightly shook as he drew the knife back, ready to stab it into his chest. “Manto, if this doesn’t work—”
“This is Prophet Cassius Longinus of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace,” Longinus bellowed into the skies—it was unclear whether he was talking to himself, the leviathan overhead, or Heaven itself. “Drown this entire district! I give you permission to FIRE!”
The distant bulk overhead began to glow as fire blossomed and grew in its gun batteries. Plague began to chant indistinguishable words underneath his breath as he drew the knife closer.
“Now be consumed by the fires of Hell!” Longinus laughed. “In the end, all us damned burn together!”
Plague buried the knife into his heart and let out a scream of pain as, above, an ocean of flame shot down at them. The last thing that John saw before the Hellfire drowned everything was Plague’s eyes shift from blue to a tarnished gold.
47
Half a kilometer away from the battle, Fritz staggered against a half-destroyed warehouse to catch his breath and smile. His left arm was gone, true, but he had known far worse pain during his time in Hell, and he had a trophy that more than made up for it: the Lance of Longinus, the Spear of Destiny, the Holy Lance! He examined it more closely in his trembling hand. It was no Mark of Cain, true, but the ancient artifact was a supremely powerful weapon in its own right.
“Just a scratch,” he whispered to himself in astonishment as he examined the Lance. Just a single scratch and—unless his enemies had the strength to immediately amputate themselves, as he did—a soul would be forever ripped from its body. There was no possible escape that he knew of—nor did he know what those trapped within the Lance experienced. Was it an empty void? A lake of fire? A torture chamber? Or something even darker? But whatever the reality within the Lance was like, one thing was clear: Fritz now had his own private Hell, a tiny universe that he was God over.
And I can be the God of all Hell if I play this right, he mused. With this weapon in hand, his enemies would fall before him, one by one, sucked into the Holy Spear. It would take him a long, long time, but he was willing to bet that eventually he could have millions in there—no, billions!
“They’ll all be mine.” He laughed like a child. “Mine, mine, mine!” He could see it all: one by one, he’d crush the other Prophets, the wretched fools who had constantly mocked and underestimated him. Salome, Legion, Giles, Ellie—he could almost reach out and touch their battered, weeping faces. Especially Salome—how he would make that bitch beg! And then he would tear down the gates of Dis, cutting down all who opposed him as he made his way to the seat of the Holy Council—
The roar of engines in the sky above abruptly cut through his fantasy. What? Fritz raised his eyes to see that the Titan had descended unusually close to the battlefield. Maybe Longinus has captured the Horsemen after all. If so, this was his perfect chance to destroy the other Prophet and gain the four weakened Horsemen in the bargain. He let out a grim chuckle and massaged the stump of his left arm as he shuffled back to his feet. It would be difficult, but this was his best possible chance.
His confidence suddenly turned to horror as the gun batteries on the Titan’s underbelly began to glow a reddish hue. “They can’t be,” Fritz said in astonishment, just before the Hellfire barrage shot down from the skies, flooding entire blocks in a tsunami of liquid fire. “NO—”
All around him, there were screams of panic as soldiers and surviving workers blindly fled the approaching deluge. They had no chance of escape—they were already trapped in a circle of Hellfire; now the Titan was just filling in the gaps.
Fritz stared in dumbstruck horror at the approaching wave. Brick turned to dust before it, steel melted, and flesh evaporated. To be caught in the grip of Hellfire was to be chained to fire and pain for a thousand years, his terrified brain screamed at his frozen body. It was a fate far worse than simple death.
But he had an escape—the Lance in his hand. For a heart-stopping moment, he gazed down at it, trying to make up his mind. The Hellfire or the hell I don’t know? But there was no time—his clothes began to burn away as the Hellfire swiftly approached, and so Fritz made up his mind.
“This isn’t over!” he screamed in defiance as he slammed the Lance into his chest. Almost immediately, he felt the pull of the Lance on his consciousness, tearing it away from his body a mere instant before his bones and flesh melted into the lake of fire.
I did it, he thought in triumph—he felt no pain, no fire tearing at his body. I did it!
In fact, he felt nothing at all. There was no light, no darkness, no heat, no cold. Within the Lance, all that existed was the mind of Fritz Rybka.
It took the Prophet several lifetimes to finally realize that he had chosen the worst hell of all.
48
It was over then. Seth watched from his hidden place in one of the Titan’s gun batteries as the lake of Hellfire spread across the remnants of C District, filling in the great circle of flame that the Kingdom had drawn. No one could stand before it; not the hundreds of thousands who served in the Fourth Legion, not the millions of workers still trapped, not two Prophets, and certainly not four Horsemen.
It’s over then, he thought. Somehow, the Kingdom had accomplished his mission for him. There would be no more Horsemen. There would be no Fourth Rebellion. Through the sacrifice of millions, disaster had been averted.
Then why did he have such a cold sense of dread?
49
JUDECCA
The dark chasm grinned upward at Marc. For a moment, he stood there, gazing into the empty void. The chill he felt had nothing to do with the icy wind that rustled his hair and stabbed freezing daggers into his skin. It was the third time he had stood at the very center of the Ninth Circle, at the edge of the darkness of Judecca. Before he had come with entire armies at his back, but now, on this grim errand, he stood alone—the way he always did, in the end.
“Too cold here,” Podarge squawked miserably. The harpy shuddered and pressed itself against his neck for warmth.
Well, maybe not completely alone. Marc couldn’t help but smile at the thought. It was good to have a companion, even if one’s companion was a half-vulture she-devil.
“Cleo,” he murmured to himself, and with that single word burning in his heart, he began the descent. Whatever relief the chasm offered from the shrieking wind was immediately offset by the unbearable cold that quickly engulfed his body.
“Was it this cold the last time?” he asked Podarge as he reached for an ancient iron spike—one of the ones that they had driven in the walls in the Second Rebellion to better secure the ladders.
“Cold is cold,” Podarge groaned in reply. The rusted steel easily tore his palm open, but such pain was trivial anyway. He continued to clamber down as the light above him slowly shrunk down to a dim pinprick.
Surely it was warmer here in the time of the devils, he told himself as his wounded hand brushed up against the bones of one of the miserable creatures, still impaled to the wall by the dozen broken spears penetrating its rib cage.
“That harpy too slow.” Podarge sniffed.
Only a harpy, he thought as his wet blood smoked and sizzled against its grinning skull. Those things were barely the size of children, and had swarmed like pigeons in the last battle to protect their master. Only the handful like Podarge that had been clever enough to switch sides had managed to survive. The Nephilim had been the real bastards, but by the time the Second Rebellion’s armies had swarmed into Judecca, there were less of them than the fingers on his hands.
Speaking of which… He found a small outcrop of rock jutting out from the wall and took a moment to sit upon it. There was no point in even breathing on his hands; he was sure the moisture in his breath would just make them colder. Instead, he busied himself with the flint and tinder from his pack, and clumsily managed to set a small scrap of s
pare fabric from his pocket aflame. He gently fed the flame and used it to set two of his torches alight. He tossed the spare torch over the outcrop and, against his better judgment, leaned out to mark its progress. It fell down, down, down, deeper into the void…until at last it faintly guttered out against the bedrock at the bottom.
“This would be easier if you just flew down yourself, you know,” he told Podarge.
She said nothing, only pressing herself closer to the warmth of his neck.
He rolled his eyes. Were all devils so damned lazy?
Marc frowned as he studied the depths before him. He had had only a tiny glimpse of the bottom, but it did not square with his memory. Where are the boulders? On his second visit to this place at the end of the Third Rebellion, the newly formed Kingdom had emptied an entire mountain’s worth of debris into the depths of Judecca to better bury Cain’s prison. He had anticipated spending days or even weeks having to tunnel through the stuff. Too convenient.
With that comforting thought, he tied the remaining torch to his pack and resumed his climb down. I’m coming, Cleo. He gritted his teeth as the sweat immediately froze on his brow and then evaporated into steam against the heat of his skin. A faint mist began to cloud his vision, though whether it was from his exertions or the nature of the deepest pit of Hell, he could not say. It was easier when there were thousands of us. Damn his weakness, he could not help but think of the past as Judecca swallowed him whole. That first time, they had been laughing—him and Legion and even Longinus—as they had hacked their way past the last demonic defenses; hell, even Cain had been smiling! We were liberators, freedom fighters.
And then the Harrowing had happened, and the Third Rebellion. No one had been laughing on that descent, least of all the chained man who had silently stared at them with eyes so overflowing with hate the memory still made Marc shiver. We came as wardens.
