by Matt Turner
“The only thing I’m changing is this shit world,” Vera snapped. “And the only way to do that is through the Revolution.” She wondered whether she could reach into his mind and alter it to suit her purposes; it was worth a try, at any rate. She extended her hand out to him. “Come with me, John. Now.”
He did not take the hand she offered. “Was that uprising you caused part of your Revolution?” he softly asked. “All it accomplished was scorching ten million souls, Vera.”
Now that stung, far more than she cared to admit. “You bastard,” she spat, and she slashed her hand upward, intending to slap him across the face. John flinched, but he made no move to intercept the blow. Instead, another hand jerked out and seized Vera’s wrist.
“We’ve had enough fighting for today, wouldn’t you agree?” Simon snarled.
Vera wrenched her wrist out of his powerful grasp, ignoring the imagery that flashed through his mind—scenes of burning villages and slaughtered heretics, the thousands he had put to death. He’s killed more than the rest of us combined. “Fine,” she snapped. “But if we stay here, they’ll find us again.”
“I know,” Simon growled. “This isn’t my first war, girl.”
“We can’t have anything slowing us down,” Vera warned. Simon’s eyes narrowed; they both knew who she was really talking about.
“I will take care of my son,” he snapped. “You should take care that you—”
“We should wait here a day at least,” John interrupted. “The Kingdom likely thinks us dead. We should take this opportunity to rest.”
Vera and Simon glared at each other for a moment, but at last the two of them nodded.
“We rest,” Simon grunted. “Then we decide what happens next.”
Vera wasn’t going to let him have the last word. “Agreed.” She pulled off the dark cloak that Plague had given her and used it as a makeshift pillow. Exhaustion hit her like an anvil the instant her head touched the fabric; it took her less than a minute to be taken by the darkness of sleep.
The very last thing she noticed, before she lost consciousness, was the Mark on her ankle pulsing and twitching. Deep in her bones, she feared that it was a sign. Do we really have any choice at all?
4
Lao Ai frowned at his extensive closet and furrowed his brow in concentration. Out of the thousands of options available, he had somehow narrowed it down to twenty or so, but the final decision still eluded him. “Toga, changshan, or suit?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I don’t care,” Salome replied. She wore what she always did: a series of translucent silks that simultaneously covered and hinted at every curve of her body. Formal occasions were easy for her; she was always dressed for them.
“But I do,” Lao complained. He wanted to use the changshan, for it was the apparel of his homeland, but he had always been fascinated by the strange fashions of the West, and so the European-style suit was also appealing…
Salome rolled her eyes. “Then pick the damn toga. It’s the Holy Council, after all; they haven’t changed a bit in the last two thousand years.”
“What color?”
“I don’t care—purple! Now hurry up, we’re going to be late!”
Twenty minutes later, Lao finally succeeded in putting on the toga with just the proper amount of folds and curves to show off a bit of his chest. Sexy, but still classy. He winked at himself in the mirror as he carefully ran a brush through his thick hair. “Do you think I could borrow some of your jewelry, Lord Prophet?” he asked in the sexy-but-dumb voice he liked to use around his mistress. “That diamond necklace of yours would just be—”
Salome forcibly wrenched him away from the mirror and led him out of their bedroom. “Christ, and to think that Herod called me high maintenance,” she grumbled. “If we’re late, your ass is mine, Lao.”
He gave her a wink. “Oh, mistress, you’re making me blush!”
A hint of red rose on her cheeks. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Now hurry up.” With that, she pulled him out of her chambers and they descended down several flights of stairs to where a carriage awaited them on the streets of Dis.
“Lord Prophet,” the driver muttered with a slight bow of his head to Salome. “Lao.”
“How are you, Orr?” Lao merrily asked. “Is the wife treating you well?”
“I thought death would finally separate us forever,” Orr, the driver, flatly replied. “But now I’m in Hell, sir.”
“Aren’t we all.” Salome nimbly leapt up into the carriage, ignoring the offered hand from the guard riding along with them. “Take us to Pandemonium, Orr.”
“Right-o, Lord Prophet,” Orr replied as Lao clumsily pulled himself up into the depths of the carriage. With a single slash of his whip, the driver urged the score of slaves chained to the front of the carriage onward. “To Pandemonium, you gross fucks!” he called out.
“Couldn’t you just fly there?” Lao complained as the carriage jerked forward and the iron wheels clattered and jerked over the uneven cobblestone.
Salome looked at him as though he were mad. “And use Leviathan for something so trivial?” she demanded. “You think I should use one of Satan’s old lieutenants to save a ten-minute commute?”
He shrugged. “It would impress the Holy Council.”
“I don’t need to impress the Holy Council,” the Prophet said scornfully. “I don’t need to impress anyone. Just look at me, Lao.”
“I always am,” he said flirtatiously, but in truth, his eyes were fixed on the world outside the carriage. The city of Dis, built by demons and now ruled over by man, capital of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace—even after all the centuries he had lived in it, it never ceased to take his breath away.
If every city of man that had ever been built—from the Pharaohs to the Qing, from the Yangtze River to the Congo—had been taken and mashed together by the Creator’s hands, it would not have equaled a tenth of the fallen glory of Dis. The Hall of Mammon where the Prophets dwelt was near the center of the city, but even from where they were, he could see the kilometer-high walls stretching across the horizon; their ramparts and fortifications were so complex that it took no less than four of the Kingdom’s legions to properly man them, and the honeycomb of shops, houses, temples, brothels, and ten thousand other structures that dotted the interior of the walls were a city in their own right. Within the walls stretched entire nations of towers, bridges, monuments, and structures built by millennia of human habitation, from countless nations and cultures, punctuated by great sprawling buildings of demon design that glittered and twinkled with unnatural light.
This is true beauty, Lao thought. Even the massive swaths of the city that had been reduced to ash and rubble in the terror of the Second and Third Rebellions had a sort of bleak charm to them; he smiled to see the layer of new buildings emerging from the still-visible scars. The demons are gone, but their city still lives.
“Damn Flagellants,” Orr cursed as a frenzied mob of them, wielding swords and machetes, burst into the street ahead of the carriage. Their quarry, a handful of men and women, tried to lose themselves in the crowded streets, but the Flagellants—despite their multiple amputations—quickly cut off their escape and dragged their screaming captives back into an alley. Aside from a few quizzical glances and sighs of irritation, the bystanders paid no attention.
“The Church of the Fallen Father has gotten bolder,” Lao noted. “Used to be they only got their meat from outside the city.”
“It’s Ellie.” Salome wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “She practically runs that pathetic cult now… I hear that freak has lit a fire under the churchmen’s asses.”
“She may be trouble for the Kingdom one day,” Lao warned. He pretended to rub his chin in deep thought. “If only there were another Prophet to take care of her…”
“The less I have to do with that lisping bitch, the better.” Salome grimaced. “Always wearing that stupid metal mask—she creeps me out even more than Legion.”
“Giles has a gift for recruiting the weird ones,” Lao agreed. He smiled at Salome. “As well as the most beautiful.”
“And you have a gift for saying the obvious,” she said sarcastically.
“Repent!” a voice shrieked in the crowds outside the carriage. “Repent, for the Day of Judgment is at hand!”
“Those fucking Flagellants are getting damned annoying,” Salome said between gritted teeth. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a preacher.”
Lao glanced out the window and raised an eyebrow. “That’s not a Flagellant, mistress.”
A crazed-looking man with wild eyes and tattered rags had stood upon a piece of rubble and screamed obscenities at the passing crowds. “He is coming!” he screeched, spraying bits of spittle from his beard. “I have seen it in my dreams! The Master returns!” No one paid him any attention; there were ten thousand cults in Dis; you couldn’t walk a block without bumping into a mad prophet or two. “Cain is coming!”
“If Longinus were around, that man would have already been crucified,” Salome sneered, but there was a hint of worry in her eyes. “Cain coming back? The thought is as ridiculous as it is treasonous.”
“Of course, Lord Prophet.” Lao beamed. “I’m sure that the Holy Council will protect the Kingdom as efficiently and bravely as they always have.” He was secretly pleased to see that now Salome looked really worried.
“Shut up, Lao,” she snapped.
They spent the rest of the short trip in silence, passing beside jails, the local district’s Punishment Field (long since overflowing with the recipients of the Seven Sinful Tortures: the chained, the impaled, the crucified, the burnt, the drowned, the buried, and the destroyed), forums filled with markets, monuments to various members of the Holy Council, barracks, marching soldiers, and even the compound where the Titan was refueling.
At last they arrived at Pandemonium, the vast palace that marked the beating heart of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. Salome and Lao descended from the carriage, brushed their way past the small army of guards monitoring the barbed-wire fence, and were given an escort of the Praetorian Guard as they made their way up the vast marble steps of the palace.
Imperator Sisera awaited them at the top of the steps. “You are late, Lord Prophet,” he announced softly as the two of them approached. “Whore.” He deliberately kept his eyes fixed between the two of them to make it unclear which of them he had insulted.
Lao didn’t care; as far as he was concerned, the Praetorians were a bunch of self-pleasuring morons forever trapped in the palace with the Holy Council that they were sworn to serve. “You seem to be in a bad mood, Sisera,” he said pleasantly. “Has Caligula been making you suck his—”
Salome gripped his hand so hard he nearly screamed out in pain. “We apologize for the inconvenience, Praetorian,” she said between gritted teeth. “Please, take us to the Holy Council.”
“Unless you’d like to pat us down fir—AGH,” Lao cried as Salome twisted his fingers to the point of breaking them.
Sisera gave them both his most menacing glare. One did not rise to be the imperator of the Praetorian Guard by suffering fools lightly. A tiny trickle of blood crept down his forehead, staining his grayed hair.
“Follow me,” the Praetorian ordered, and he turned and led them into the darkness of Pandemonium.
The entire palace—which stretched kilometers in diameter, and reached so far up into the sky that it could be seen from every point in the Sixth Circle—consisted of a single, massive antechamber. It was closer to a stadium, Lao thought; hundreds of thousands of cracked stone chairs (the gold and rubies that had once studded them had been long stolen) arranged in hundreds of levels, all facing a single massive throne that, built upon a great expanse of rock, loomed over them all. The stories all said that the fallen angels had constructed Pandemonium for a Great Council upon arriving in Hell. For an entire day, all of demonkind had existed within this room as they debated and plotted their next move, until at last Satan had revealed his knowledge of a realm distinct from Heaven and Hell: a new world called Earth.
This is where it all began, Lao thought in awe as Sisera led them through row after row of crumbling, abandoned masonry. Everything that ever mattered started in this very room.
But Pandemonium, much like the city it ruled over, had seen better days. The great chamber where gods with names like Moloch, Beelzebub, Abaddon, and Leviathan had held their infernal court was little more than a stone skeleton of its former glory. Most of the massive chandeliers had collapsed millennia earlier during the chaos of the Second Rebellion and the Harrowing, the vaulted roof far overhead was dangerously sagging in several places, and the colossus-like statues of the fallen angels had long since been dragged away and melted down into currency for the Kingdom.
And where an army of godlike beings had infamously sworn that it was far better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, the Holy Council of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace now sat, locked in the middle of a sixteen-hour debate about raising a tax on the city’s wood imports.
Sisera motioned for Lao and Salome to come to a stop several meters away from the small section of occupied chairs. None of them paid the three newcomers any attention at all; the sixty-six councilors were far too wrapped up in their own squabble.
“—a tariff would be economically infeasible,” one of the councilors, an ancient king whose name Lao could only guess at, argued. The golden crown on his head had caused his neck and spine to buckle forward over the millennia like a withered hunchback; yet, even now, when his face was nearly level with his waist, he still refused to take it off. “Our supply is already far too low for comfort—”
“Economically infeasible?” The heaviest man Lao had ever seen cut the other councilor off. His stomach was so massive that it had long since burst through his leathery skin, but he had accommodated his spilled intestines and organs by simply loading them onto a trolley largely hidden underneath his countless layers of skin and fat. A nervous-looking slave girl held up a tray of steaks that the councilor drowned in a single swallow. Lao could see his guts twist and churn as the unchewed food slid down his throat and into them. “Burning down a fifth of C District was economically infeasible, too, but I heard no protests from you, Ahab.”
Several other councilors—all ancient and reeking of piss and sweat underneath their golden crowns and robes—lurched out of their chairs to raise their voices in protest. “That was a matter of rebellion!” one of them shrieked out. “Tear out the roots and salt the earth!”
It had been several decades since Lao last saw the Holy Council in the flesh, but it was immediately obvious to him that they had not changed one bit. He saw the same wrinkled, decaying bodies—though whether they were hidden under a layer of fabric, ceremonial armor, or simply encased in gold depended on the individual councilor—the same warped faces, the same unconquerable egos. There were no new members; ever since the Harrowing and subsequent Third Rebellion, those in the Holy Council had guarded their positions like rabid dogs. The only thing they hated more than one another was newcomers.
Salome coughed. “Councilors, I come to speak—”
“Assassin!” the fat man bellowed. He pointed a sluggish hand directly at the Prophet. “You dare come here to betray us, whore? Sisera, take them!”
“Councilor Caligula, this is the Lady Prophet Salome,” Sisera reluctantly said, though there was probably nothing the Praetorian would have liked better than to run Salome through. There was no love lost between the Prophets and the Praetorian Guards. “She is here in place of Lord Prophet Giles.”
“I come to speak of a possible rebellion,” Salome said between gritted teeth.
“It’s a trick,” one of the other councilors—a woman who had encased all of her limbs in an ill-fitting suit of tarnished gold—shrieked. “Destroy this rebellion! Rain Hellfire on them!”
“It’s not my rebellion, you f—” Salome started to snap, but she immediately caught herself. “—f
antastic leaders of our wondrous Kingdom. Lord Prophet Giles believes that he has uncovered a plot against the Kingdom. A new rebellion may be brewing.”
The Holy Council collectively groaned.
“Let the legions handle it,” Ahab bitched to the fat man. “The Holy Council has more important matters to deal with.”
“What sort of rebellion?” one of the old emperors asked, easily distinguished by his toga, patchy beard, and lyre that he lazily plucked at. “A worker’s uprising? Mutinous troops? Just say the word, Lady Prophet, and one of our legions will lay waste to the offenders.”
“One legion won’t be enough, Councilor Nero,” Salome grimly said. “Giles recommends the use of twenty.”
One of the strings on Nero’s lyre snapped. “Twenty legions?” he demanded, and then he burst out laughing. Most of the other councilors joined along in a cacophony of wheezing chuckles. “What sort of rebellion requires ten million soldiers?”
“The sort that originates in Judecca,” Salome softly said. “The Fourth Rebellion.”
She had said the words with deadly seriousness, but they had the opposite effect: the Holy Council only laughed harder.
“So allow me to understand.” The woman clad in gold grinned. “You wish for us to send twenty legions—all of whom are already busy maintaining our control over Upper Hell, and dealing with tens of thousands of cases of treason, insubordination, and blasphemy every day—down to Judecca, through three levels of Lower Hell, because a new rebellion might be brewing?”
“Please,” Ahab said between his shallow, wheezing breaths as he dabbed at his perspiring forehead, “if you wish to weaken the Kingdom that much, at least be more subtle about it.”
“The Prophets always were slinking little cowards.” The fat man grunted. “Never did trust them.”
“You already know of the new Horsemen,” Salome tried.
