Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  “I am Manto, daughter of Tiresias, the Oracle of Thebes,” she said coldly.

  “An ancient oracle?” Giles chuckled. “It seems your fortune-telling needs work, Manto.”

  A sorceress from the Eighth Circle, Abaddon warned him. I remember her from the Second Rebellion. She is more powerful than she appears.

  “I have seen your past, Giles de Rais,” Manto warned. “There is nothing there but the pain of others. But I have also seen your future, and there”—she lowered her voice into a hateful hiss—“there is only your pain.”

  A sorceress, eh? She could be useful. “You are in luck, Manto the Oracle,” Giles gently told her. “I am searching for new Prophets. Your talents make you a prime candidate for the Trials—how would you like to join us?” He snapped his fingers, scattering locusts in every direction. “Serve the Kingdom, and nothing is impossible. We can even restore your body.”

  She said nothing, but her eyes flickered back to the unconscious redhead’s body.

  “All of your past misdeeds would be forgiven,” Abaddon said through one of his locusts. “The Holy Council will wipe the slate clean.”

  “I refuse,” Manto said in a voice that was oddly serene. “Do what you will with me, but I will not abandon—”

  Her words were drowned out as a cloud of locusts billowed over her, and then she was gone.

  Giles shrugged. “That works too. You sent her to the same cell as Lamech, yes?”

  “Aye,” Abaddon growled. “Beneath Pandemonium.”

  “Good, good.” Giles rubbed his hands together. He was looking forward to the interrogations; there was so much that he could learn from all these strange characters. But first… “Send word to Dis. Inform the Holy Council that the Four Horsemen have been captured.”

  “Do not give me orders,” one of the locusts complained, but it obediently vanished in a flash of light to report to the Holy Council.

  “ELIE, Legion, load the others on the Hellhound,” Giles ordered. He clicked his heels together, and a swarm of locusts began to descend on every centimeter of his body. “I have business to attend to.”

  “What sssort of busssinesss?” Legion demanded.

  “A victory celebration, of course,” Giles said. “To mark the end of the Fourth Rebellion.” His vision faded away to blackness as Abaddon’s locusts covered his face, and then he was gone.

  The hunt was over. The wolves had been slaughtered, and the hunters were once again victorious. All that remained was to make trophies of their prey.

  12

  “Victory! Victory! Victory!” Even in the stone labyrinth of the Hall of Mammon, the mad screams of Dis could be heard. “Victory!”

  Salome mashed her pillow against her head, unsuccessfully trying to drown out the growing din. “So goddamn LOUD,” she bitched. “The fucking Holy Council makes the city go wild like this every damn time!”

  “I like the Triumphs,” Lao said defensively. “That’s how we met, remember?” He gently brushed his hand through her long, flowing hair. “When you crushed Crecy’s revolt in the Sixth Circle and led the Triumph around the city a dozen times…”

  “I remember.” Salome grinned. “You kept throwing rocks to get my attention until Leviathan grabbed you.”

  “The demon would’ve ripped me apart if it weren’t for you.” Lao chuckled. “But love makes men do mad things.”

  Salome laughed and flicked his nose. “It wasn’t love, you bastard. It was lust, pure and simple. How many women have you tried that line on?”

  It had been a long, long time since Lao had felt even a hint of desire for anyone, let alone love. I feel nothing for you, Lady Prophet, he thought. You could grovel for help at my feet and I wouldn’t lift a finger. “Not just women,” he flirted. “I can be very persuasive when it comes to matters of the heart. That reminds me, is Giles single?”

  “Giles?” Salome pretended to gag. “The man looks like a depressed scarecrow. And those locusts, ugh. I’d rather fuck Ellie. At least she’d keep her face hidden under that mask.”

  “What about Legion,” Lao started to ask, and then a familiar pain suddenly stabbed into his eye. He let out a yelp and nearly tumbled out of the bed. Not now!

  “There’s your answer,” Salome said sarcastically. “Even Fritz the Nazi would be better than that fucking creep.”

  The pain in Lao’s eyeball grew, and he caught a brief image of Eve glaring expectantly at him. “One minute,” he gasped. He could feel the blood vessels swelling, about to explode from the pressure. “Fuck!”

  “Where the hell are you going?” Salome demanded as he staggered out of the bed and rushed outside her room. “At least put some damn clothes on!”

  “One second,” Lao growled as he found one of the Prophet’s empty closets and locked himself in it. “One second—damn it!”

  “Do not try the Master’s patience.” A translucent image of Eve appeared before him, as shrunken and hideous as ever. “When He calls, you answer.”

  “I was busy,” Lao whined. “At least give me some warning—FUCK!” His vision briefly turned red as the invisible hand on his eyeball twisted.

  “The new Horsemen have been captured,” Eve said.

  “So I heard,” Lao muttered. “Is that it then? Is it all over?”

  “Of course not. The Master sees all and knows all. Those four are nothing but mere playthings meant to distract the Kingdom. His mission falls to you. Now execute it.”

  “I need more time,” Lao pleaded. “Please, this is too soon—”

  He howled in pain as both of his eyes exploded into pulp. Eve and everything else vanished from his vision, casting him into darkness. “Please, no,” he sobbed. “Please, I’ll do anything—”

  “I HAVE WAITED TWO THOUSAND YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT,” the Master’s voice boomed. Any scrap of resistance, any hint of will that Lao could muster, turned to dust at the almighty words. “DO NOT SPEAK TO ME OF TIME, LOWLY WORM.” A heavy weight crashed around Lao’s neck, slamming him to the tiled floor in a splatter of blood as every one of his teeth shattered from the collision. “FAIL ME, AND I WILL MAKE YOU THE LOWEST OF THE LOW,” Cain raged. “YOU ARE NOTHING. I WILL MAKE YOU WORSE THAN NOTHING. NOT EVEN THE CREATOR WILL SHARE YOUR FATE.”

  Lao could not even speak; every syllable of the infinite Voice reached within his soul and tore another piece of it to bloody scraps. All he could do was whimper and grovel on the ground like a blind worm.

  “YOU HAVE YOUR ORDERS, LITTLE WORM. NOW FOLLOW THEM.” With that, the Master’s voice vanished, leaving only a few faint echoes that Lao shuddered to hear.

  “Long live God,” Eve whispered.

  Lao blinked and found that both of his eyes had been restored. He touched his teeth in wonderment; they were just as perfect and pristine as they always had been. “Long live God,” he sobbed in relief. “Long live God!”

  A knock came at the closet door. “Lao?” Salome’s muffled voice asked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Lao wiped the tears away from his cheeks and stood up to open the door. “Nothing.” He beamed at Salome’s concerned expression. “Everything is just fine.”

  Salome raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

  Lao reached out and took her by the hand. “Let’s go watch the Triumph, darling.” He smiled. “All of a sudden I feel like celebrating.”

  Her eyes glimmered mischievously. “I think I feel like celebrating too, Lao. Let’s have some fun.” She squeezed his hand and led him back to her bedroom.

  Their celebration distracted them so much that they ended up not attending the Triumph after all.

  13

  It was the drums that John was aware of first. Doom, doom, doom, they pounded to the beat of his frantic pulse. The roar of some massive beast greeted them, and with that, John’s eyes flickered open. He screamed in horror and awe at what he saw.

  All around him, a city of the damned screamed and cheered. His delirious brain, dazed by pain and a cocktail of whatever they had
forced down his throat, was only able to process it in a blur of hellish, confusing scenes. Above him, a vast crowd—millions upon millions of gleaming, hateful faces—screamed down at him in ten thousand tongues. Thousands of bonfires stretched in every direction, lit by the wood of what he knew to be suicides, their flames licking downward toward him—and then John realized that it was he who was upside-down, for the Kingdom had crucified him, his ankles above his head.

  Hot metal pressed against the barky remnants of his back, filling his nostrils with the stench of burnt wood and searing hair. Doom, doom, doom, went the drums, and he jerked forward as the scrap of metal he was nailed to suddenly hurtled downward. For an instant, the crowd engulfed him, and he saw Tituba’s snarling face an inch from his own—but no, it wasn’t Tituba, he realized as the woman spat in his face and a laughing man dumped a bucket of piss on his head. The mob began to viciously fight and strike one another as they rushed at him, tearing at his body, eager for a scrap of bark or flesh to keep as a trophy—and then the mechanical contraption lurched him back up into the air again, as high as the vaulting, burning towers of the city.

  Out of the corner of his eye, John caught a glimpse of what he thought was Vera. Just like him, they had nailed her to a great mechanical arm attached to a massive stiltwalker that lurched and bobbed through the streets like a drunken monster, crushing dozens beneath each step. The frenzied mob below did not care; they surged forward in spite of the column of steel-clad soldiers who ferociously beat them back.

  “WITNESS THE HORSEMEN!” an amplified voice echoed from the dizzying array of blackened, twisting architecture. The crowd roared its approval so loudly that John could feel the wind from their exultations on his face. Darkness pulled at his consciousness, and he tried to welcome it, but the steel cross he was impaled to suddenly turned red-hot, bringing him back to dim awareness.

  The stiltwalker dropped him into the crowd again. He had a glimpse of Simon’s charred body falling along with him an instant before they slammed into the mob. Their faces swam before him in a blur; he saw members of his old congregation, the lieutenant governor, his parents, his siblings, his grandparents, even a smoky image that might have been the unborn child he had killed. And before he had time to process whether the faces were real or just products of his delusional mind, they wrenched him back up again from the laughing, jeering crowd.

  Even high up, there was no relief from their hateful taunts, for the massive buildings that the parade trundled by were overflowing with people on every level, leaning out of windows and balconies just to get a glimpse of the hated Horsemen. They spat at him, cursed him, and leapt at him, still mocking and jeering as their bodies spattered on the crowded streets below.

  Doom, doom, doom, the drums continued, and it seemed to John that the crowds below were no longer human. His feverish brain concocted new features for them; horns, tails, tongues that spat venom and bile, bat-wings…an army of devils laughed at him, stabbed at his soul, tore everything that he had ever loved to bits.

  Hell is inside, he had told Vera, and now he realized the true meaning of the words as his world morphed into a nightmare. A steel bar was lodged in his mouth, preventing him from forming any true words, but it was enough that he could scream. His shrieks echoed across the entire city, amplified by the electronic system he was attached to, and the mad crowds laughed even harder.

  The rest of the hellish parade was a blur. He was dimly aware of the other Horsemen—though whether they were real or not, he could never say—but, despite their presence, he was alone. Utterly, inconsolably alone, in spite of the millions who watched and mocked him. That torturous thought was a blade in his heart that hurt far worse than his cooking flesh or the rebar spikes impaled through his limbs.

  Time slipped away, and he found himself and the other three knelt in a courtroom before a great council. They glowered down at him, and he saw in their number kings, queens, tyrants—all with the same unending hate in their hearts. Their words were meaningless sound; he was so far gone that he could barely understand them. “—treachery—” Yes, that was right; he had betrayed Tituba. “—blasphemy—” Yes, he had blasphemed and mocked God.

  “—the Seven Sinful Tortures—” John had no idea what those were, but he had no doubt in his heart that he deserved them. There was more to the Holy Council’s sentence, far more, but he deserved every last drop of pain they could inflict upon him, and then some more.

  I’m home, his half-crazed brain thought as the Praetorian Guard dragged him away from the courtroom. Somehow he managed to mumble the words in spite of the bar jammed in his mouth. “I’m home! I’m home!”

  All of Dis heard his words, and all of Dis screamed its agreement.

  14

  Vera was unsure of how much of her body remained. She quickly learned that her ears and vocal cords were still intact during Giles’s interrogation, as he probed into her past with question after question. She answered them all truthfully, desperate for the pain to stop, but the Prophet continued on and on, asking of things she hadn’t thought of in years: the appearance of her parents, her childhood home, even the teachings of Marx. With each pause as she blindly gasped for breath or hesitated, struggling to come up with an answer, the pain—it was so nebulous and difficult to grasp that she imagined it as a thick fog enveloping her tattered body—increased, until at last she passed out.

  She came back to consciousness with a gasp. It was impossible to tell how much time she had been locked in the cell (she was fairly sure she was in some sort of underground dungeon, judging by the echoing nature of the distant screams); she had lost all sense of time and space. All that existed was the blackness of her blinded vision, and the sensation of shackles about her throat.

  Through her perfectly untouched ears, she heard something rustle. “Who’s there?” Vera croaked out. The noise came closer and she let out a slight whimper, cringing as far back as her chains would allow.

  “Do not be afraid,” a familiar voice sadly answered. “It’s me, Seth.”

  “S-Seth?” Vera squinted at the blackness, trying to make some sense of it, but it was an exercise in futility; her eyes were long gone. “W-wha—” Something in her tattered lungs gave way, and she violently shuddered and coughed.

  “Don’t speak,” Seth said gently. “Just drink.” A bottle brushed up against her lips, and a cool liquid ran down into her throat.

  Vera greedily gulped the precious water down—she had never imagined anything could taste so good—and groaned in relief as the pain slowly began to fade away.

  “I know you asked for a cabbage,” Seth chuckled, “but this is the best I could do given the circumstances. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Oh God,” Vera muttered as she drank the bottle dry. He lifted another one to her lips and she sucked it down like a starving babe. She could feel sensation returning to her toes and fingertips, and the dim fog that had pressed against her brain began to retreat. “Oh Jesus Christ, thank you, Seth.”

  “You shouldn’t take His name in vain.” Seth sighed, but he continued to let her drink the second bottle and held the third one up to her lips when she eagerly called out for it. “You are the first human to drink the Water of Life in a very, very long time,” he said. “How does it taste?”

  “Lovely,” Vera mumbled between gulps. The third bottle ran dry, and she eagerly opened her mouth for another.

  “That is all I have,” Seth apologized. “I didn’t think you’d go through those three that fast, to be honest…”

  Even her spirits seemed to have been lifted by the wonderful drink. “If you think I’m good at drinking that,” Vera joked, “you should see me with vodka.”

  “And you should see me,” Seth said. “Open your eyes, Vera.”

  What? She blinked, and suddenly tears came to her eyes at the sight of the handsome man opposite her. “My eyes,” she said in amazement. “How?”

  Seth seemed embarrassed. “I have a small talent with miracles,” he sa
id sheepishly. He reached forward and tapped the chain around her neck. It disintegrated away into dust, and she found that she was able to look down at the rest of her body. It was completely healed; she could not make out so much as a single scratch or torn-away fingernail. Even the memory of the tortures was fading away. I’ve been reborn.

  “Why?” Vera wondered as he melted away the rest of her chains. “What have I ever done for you?”

  “The truth is, I owe this to you, Vera,” Seth said. “Whoa, whoa—don’t move!” He quickly grabbed hold of her as she slumped forward from the cement wall, and eased her toward the dirty floor. “Your body still needs time to rest.”

  A wave of nausea suddenly overcame Vera, and she leaned forward and vomited the contents of her stomach onto the floor.

  Seth gently patted her on the back when she was finished. “There, there,” he said gently. “It’s all right.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘owe me’?” Vera leaned back against the wall, now so tired that she could barely even move.

  “I am sworn to harm no human,” Seth said, a faraway look in his eyes. “But in my foolishness, I allowed all this to come to you and your fellow Horsemen. I thought I could intervene as little as possible, and still prevent both the Kingdom and my brother from gaining control of you. I see now that I was wrong.”

  “Your…brother?”

  He locked eyes with her. “Hell knows him as the Master, but I knew him in life by a different name. You see, Vera, I am Seth, the thirdborn son of Adam and Eve. Cain is my older brother.”

  She stared at him, her mouth agape.

  “Why do you think Heaven sent me?” Seth asked. “The only other man who knows my brother better than I is Abel, and, well, that could make things a little awkward.”