by Matt Turner
“No,” Cain snarled. His fingers tightened over his face, digging into the skin and drawing blood. “He has not abandoned me again. He is here! I know it!” His voice rose into a scream of rage. “Find the Creator and bring him to me!”
“It’s OVER, you fool,” Edith spat. She pointed an accusing finger at Cain. “Everything we’ve built is in ruins! Not because of Him, but because of you! Your weapons, your armies, your disgusting Marks!” She wrenched down the collar of her tunic to reveal the pulsing bit of red flesh around her neck. “The devils were one thing, but declaring war on God? You damned fool!”
Cain tore his hands away from his bleeding face, and the other Horsemen gasped at what they saw. His handsome, dark visage was gone, replaced by a snarl of pure animalistic hate. “I am the Master,” he said in a low voice that thrummed with rage and madness. “Do not forget that, little children.”
“You’ve become what we fought for so long,” the Horseman who Vera remembered to be called Antony said accusingly. A strange bird-like creature that sat on his shoulder let out a squawk of agreement with his words. “Just another demon.”
Longinus drew his lance and pointed it at the throne upon which Cain sat. “Cain the Murderer,” he declared, “you are relieved of your command.”
“I made you,” Cain sneered. “I was your friend, your father, your commander. Little damned traitors.” He began to rise from the throne, but every one of his movements was tortured and slow; he let out a little gasp of pain as he finally stood. Vera could see a pool of blood where he had been sitting. “I will have you thrown into the deepest pit of Judecca,” he threatened as his golden eyes gleamed with hate.
“Take him,” Edith ordered.
Longinus hurled his lance directly at Cain’s chest, just as a dozen tendrils of flesh spat out from Jezebel’s mid-section and wrapped around the madman’s legs and arms. Edith slammed a hand on the tiled floor, and a translucent spike tore out of the ground at Cain’s feet, extending barbs in every direction that impaled his calves, thighs, and stomach. Meanwhile, Antony rushed forward with a gladius in his hand, the blade raised to smash down into Cain’s skull.
Pinned down by both spikes and flesh, facing two separate attacks, Cain did not even hesitate. He wrenched one of his arms up, dragging Jezebel along with it, to intercept Antony’s blow. The gladius sheared into Cain’s arm, chopping in half the tendril of flesh that Jezebel had seized him with—but not before Cain brushed his hand against the hilt of Longinus’s Lance, and stopped it mid-air.
Antony tore his gladius out of Cain’s partially severed arm and raised it for another blow. “Don’t make this harder than this has to be—” he warned, just before Cain head-butted him, knocking him flat on his ass.
“Jezebel, hold him!” Edith bellowed, and more barbs came out of her spikes, stabbing into Cain a hundred more times. Jezebel yelled something inarticulate and tried to wrap more of her flesh around Cain’s unrestrained head, but he opened his mouth wide and easily bit the tendril in half. Blood spattered across his face as he leaned forward and chomped another few of the tendrils into pieces.
Longinus rushed forward to assist Antony, but the Horseman made one crucial mistake—he leaned forward to seize his lance, gambling that Cain was too restrained to reach him.
Longinus was wrong. Cain’s teeth wrapped around his throat and the Horseman’s stony face became a grimace of pain. Cain wrenched his head to the side, throwing Longinus against the wall in an explosion of dust.
“I thought that I could rely on others,” Cain said as he spat a mouthful of meat and gristle onto the floor. With his nearly severed arm, he reached down and picked the lance off the floor. “But you four have taught me a valuable lesson. For that, the Master thanks you.” He hurled the lance at Edith.
“No!” Edith called out. A dozen more translucent spikes ripped from the floor, ceiling, and even the throne itself, stabbing Cain over and over and over—but it was too late, for the lance was already in the air.
“The Lance of Longinus,” Seth said as it whizzed between him and Vera. “It guarantees a fate worse than death. You’ve encountered it before.”
The lancehead stabbed directly into Edith’s heart. She toppled backward onto the floor and stared at the weapon emerging from her chest in horror. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
“Edith!” Antony cried out in horror. “Take it out, now!”
“Too late,” Cain gurgled in triumph. Blood poured from his eyes, his mouth, and his ears, but a cruel smile crossed his lips. “The rest of you are next.”
A change came over Edith’s face—from fear to grim determination. “Jezebel!” she called out, ignoring the Lance still buried in her chest. “You know what to do!” A black rot quickly began to spread across the exposed skin of her arms and legs—Vera could see it starting to creep up her neck, too.
Jezebel turned away from Cain and rushed to Edith’s side. “No,” she urged. “There must be another way—”
Edith seized her by the collar and wrenched her closer. “We need four Marks for the Seals! Now do it!”
Before Jezebel even had time to form a reply, Edith’s fingers died and rotted away, leaving nothing but a few scraps of bone and dust that still clung to the queen’s clothes. “All right,” Jezebel whispered. “All right.”
The muscles in Cain’s arms flexed, and cracks began to form in the forest of crystalized spikes emerging from his body. “Everything changes now,” he snarled. “Everything. I will make this world anew! I will make a Heaven of this Hell!” He let out a scream of agony as his body ever-so-slowly twisted and broke free of the spikes.
“Jezebel, now,” Edith urged. The Lance had rotted away most of her body; hardly anything remained.
Jezebel closed her eyes and laid both of her hands upon Edith’s head. A burst of tendrils emerged from her fingers, wrapping around Edith’s throat, digging into her scalp, and draping themselves over Edith’s face. Edith’s scream joined Cain’s as the flesh-tendrils tightened their grip.
“What’s happening?” Vera asked in horror.
“Birth,” Seth said grimly.
The pressure from the tendrils was too much for Edith’s neck to bear—her head was suddenly wrenched away in a burst of blood, just before the lines of rot from the lancehead would have reached her face. For an instant, Edith’s severed head lay in Jezebel’s hands the same way Amaury carried Manto. And then the flesh-tendrils of Jezebel’s hands retracted, dragging Edith’s face along with them.
“Just a vision, just a vision,” Seth said hurriedly as Vera gagged and turned away from the disgusting image. When she glanced back, Edith was gone. All that remained was Jezebel.
Only the Horseman was no longer Jezebel. Saliva dripped from her open mouth, and her dark hair now glistened with sweat and grease. The outline of a human face protruded from between her shoulder blades, giving her a hunchbacked appearance that the queen had not had before.
“So good,” the thing said in a voice that was both Edith’s and Jezebel’s. Vera could make out the outline of the lips of the face attached to its back moving in unison to the words. “We want more!”
Longinus managed to wrench himself out of the hole he had been embedded in and rushed forward to Antony’s side. “Jezebel, the Seal,” he called out urgently.
The creature lurched to all fours and scurried forward so that the three of them—Longinus, Antony, and itself—were arranged in a crude triangle around Cain. “We are not Jezebel,” the thing said. “We are Legion.”
“We don’t care!” Antony practically screamed as Cain let out another roar of rage and smashed more of Edith’s spikes into oblivion. “The Seal! Do it!”
A torrent of strange polysyllabic sounds poured out of Legion’s mouth as the monster bit into its own hand and used the dripping blood to draw a series of bizarre symbols on the floor. Longinus and Antony imitated the motions.
“What’s happening?” Vera demanded of Seth.
“They’re using t
he power of Cain’s Mark to imprison him,” Seth explained.
Cain let out a bloodcurdling scream as a chain of black steel sprouted from the markings and wrapped around him, pinning his shredded, bleeding limbs to his torso. Still he fought, as another emerged, then another, then another. They wrapped around him as tightly as a second skin; Vera could hear his bones crunching and grating under the sheer pressure of the steel links. He continued to curse and struggle against the seal for a solid minute more, pushing the steel links to their limit, before he weakly collapsed from exhaustion.
Cain had time for one last scream of defiance before the sprouting steel consumed him for good. “This isn’t over!” he promised. One of the chains buried itself into his mouth and down his throat, and with that, he lost all speech. Only his hateful eyes remained, glaring sheer malice at the sweating, gasping Horsemen who had somehow imprisoned him.
“And there you have it.” Seth turned to Vera as the vision again faded away into darkness. “My brother was imprisoned by the power of his own Horsemen. So what did he do?” He pointed at Vera’s exposed ankle, and the Mark upon it. “He made four more to unbind the Seals and free him.”
“That’s it?” Vera felt strangely disappointed; it wasn’t every day that you found your sole reason for existence was to be a glorified locksmith for a sadistic madman. “Everything we went through…was all to free him?”
“Yes. My brother views you four as tools for a singular purpose, nothing more. He believes that he has learned from the betrayal of the first Horsemen. If he is freed, he will likely dispose of you…or grant you an even worse fate, depending on his mood.” Seth clapped his hands once, and they abruptly returned to the dimness of the cell. “Now do you see why I tried to make you lie low? Between the Kingdom and Cain, you four new Horsemen have no hope in Hell.”
“It’s a little late to ‘lie low,’ Seth,” Vera said sarcastically. As if to prove her point, a distant explosion made the low-hanging ceiling above them slightly rattle. “Why don’t you just get me out of here and we’ll call it even?”
He shook his head. “No matter where in Hell I take you, our enemies will track you down. I had hoped I wouldn’t have to do this, but…there’s only one place where you’ll be safe, Vera.”
She said nothing and waited expectantly.
“The Void. The emptiness between Earth and Hell…it is unreachable to all but the mightiest of angels and God Himself. I should have taken you and the other Horsemen there to begin with, but I was weak. I thought there might have been a better way…”
“So let me understand,” Vera slowly said. “After showing me all that, your master plan is to throw me into nothingness for all eternity to ‘protect’ me?”
“We have no choice in the matter,” he said sadly. “Not you, not I. This is the only option left. Now, Vera—” He extended his gentle hands to her. “It is time we go.”
She looked into his melancholy, handsome face, brimming with compassion and sweetness. The only good man in all of Hell, maybe the only truly good person she had ever met… With a sigh, Vera reached for his hand.
“I’m sorry, Vera,” Seth whispered. A faint blush came to his cheeks. “Maybe if things were different…”
Vera smiled back. “Seth…” She stroked his hair with her free hand. “I’m not sorry at all.”
“Wha—” Seth’s quizzical expression became one of pain as she took hold of his mind in an iron vise and squeezed. “Vera!” He struggled mightily, but he was no match for the forest of shackles and pain she sprouted in his brain—in seconds, his legs gave out and he limply slumped to the floor in front of her.
“I didn’t want it to be like this, Seth,” Vera mocked him. “But we have no choice in the matter. Not you, not I. This is the only option left.”
“Vera…” Seth choked out between gritted teeth. His face turned purple from the exertion—it was all he could do to mumble out the words in the face of her induced paralysis. “Why?”
“I was hoping you’d come for me.” Vera grinned. “You’ve been thinking a lot about pretty Vera Figner, haven’t you, Seth?”
“You…you…”
“Remember how I touched you, allll the way back in that factory?” Vera sensed that he was gathering his strength, so she dug her grasp into his mind even tighter, eliciting a grunt of pain from the enslaved man. “A strange man who could get past guards unseen? I had a hunch that you would come in handy one day. And when I glanced into your soul, there was so much love, so much naivety, that it was easy to leave a little seed of my own in that brain of yours.”
Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined that that one impulse would have turned out so well. Seth was a man drowning in love; the seed had become a mighty oak faster than she had dared hope.
“What did you do to me?” Seth tried to stand, but her grip on his mind was too strong; his muscles twitched and shook, unable to move an inch.
“Remember Lieutenant Krakowsky?” Vera asked. “The man whose throat I slit the very last day I was alive? I just did the same thing to you I did to him.” She had never had such a level of control over someone else before; curious, she twisted her grip, making him gasp and jerk upright to attention. “Albeit much more efficiently.”
“You enslaved me,” Seth managed to wheeze. “Let go, Vera. Please.”
“I did something even better,” Vera gloated. She made him lean forward and gave him a kiss on the lips. “I made you fall in love with me, you stupid bastard.”
His eyes widened in horror. “So that’s why…you lying, manipulative fool. I gave you a second chance, Vera! We could have—”
She clamped his mouth shut. “And I do appreciate you freeing me,” she confessed. “I admit, it was a long shot, and I never thought it’d actually work, but I am glad you finally showed up, Seth—even though you waited until after they tortured me. Thanks for that.”
Just for that, she made him head-butt the cell wall. The bricks shook with the impact, and there was a satisfying crack as his nose broke.
“And now, you want me to move to another hell where I’ll be safe,” she sneered. “I don’t think so, Seth. See, I’m not finished with this Hell quite yet. I wonder how far I’ll get with a servant of Heaven as my pet?”
Somehow he managed to break through her control and open his mouth; the sheer amount of willpower he possessed was incredible, but still not nearly enough. “Don’t go down this path,” he begged. “There is only darkness and despair on this road.”
Vera laughed. “For a man in love with me, you don’t know me very well, Seth. I was in Hell long before I ever died. Darkness is my fucking element. Now, be a gentleman and open the door for me.”
It was as if he were a puppet dancing on her strings; all she had to do was slightly flex her grip on his mind, and he silently stood and shattered the iron door with a single punch of his fist. He’s as strong as Simon, she realized in glee. What fun she could have with him under her control!
She stepped over the crushed door and into the dark hallway, which was deserted aside from a dozen sleeping guards scattered over the floor. As Seth stood in miserable silence, watching over her, she knelt to one of the sleeping men and pressed a finger against his forehead. She quickly processed the information: Frans van Anraat. Second Cohort, Eighth Legion. They were in a dungeon beneath the same tower that Seth had shown her in the vision: Pandemonium. She found Frans’s mental map of the dungeon’s layout, tore it away, and stored it in her own mind for safekeeping. Vera briefly considered trying to enslave the soldier the same way that she had done with Seth, but she dismissed the idea for the moment. For now, her objective was merely to escape. Conquest could come later.
“You would make an army of slaves to rule over this?” Seth managed to hiss out. “For the love of Heaven, why?”
“What’s the saying, Seth?” Vera wondered as she dug into the soldier’s pockets and fished out their supplies of grenades and firearms. Frans the soldier started to come awake, so sh
e tapped his forehead again and made him slide into blissful unconsciousness. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, isn’t that it?”
“Thy self not free, but to thy self enthrall’d,” Seth said sadly. “Chains in Hell, not Realms, expect.”
Vera’s filthy tunic was little more than a ragged pillowcase held together by dirt and dried blood. More to the point, it had no pockets. She quickly stripped off her clothes and put on the soldier’s outfit, all while giving Seth a lecherous grin that he did not reciprocate. “Pretty words, Seth! I bet the sheep in Heaven love them, don’t they?” She slung a bandolier of grenades and a machine gun over her shoulder. They were more advanced models than those she had used in Cenodoxa’s factory, but it didn’t matter; she had gained the instructions to use both from the soldier’s mind. “But Hell belongs to the fucking wolves.”
Seth tried to jerk away from her control again, so suddenly that he nearly shattered the iron grip she had on his mind. “Something’s coming,” he hissed.
Shit. She could hear the sound of pounding footsteps on the floor too, and past that, something else…the vaguely squishing, slapping sound of dozens of bare feet against stone. There was no time to hide; she barely had enough time to raise the machine gun.
A single Oriental-looking man emerged from the darkness of the hallway. He stopped a moment to suck in several deep breaths and sling the small leather bag he held in one hand over his shoulder. “Wait,” he panted as he stared at Vera and the dozen unconscious guards laid out on the floor. He seemed to take no notice of Seth. “Did you—” His eyes flickered over to the shattered iron door and his mouth began to form an o of surprise.
Vera would have shot him down then and there, but a great torrent of fear and revulsion suddenly exploded into her mind, so strongly that for a brief moment she was paralyzed. What? But the fear wasn’t coming from herself—it came from Seth’s soul as he stared into the darkness behind the Oriental man.
“Vera,” Seth said slowly. “Run.”
