by Matt Turner
Something streaked down from the sky, so swiftly that he only had a brief glimpse of talons and dark feathers. Like a bird of prey, it crashed into the exposed joint of the mechanical beast, and with a slash of its talons, a dozen wires and tubes spilled out onto the ground.
The effect was immediate; the strange power that coursed through Simon instantly died away. He sprang forward, ignoring his tortured, smoking body, and with a great effort he sprinted up to the joint of the arm. The limb seemed to be useless; it dragged partly on the ground, but a fresh blade was already emerging from the other arm. With all his strength, Simon slammed a foot into the elbow of the broken arm, slamming it against the ground. The war machine jerked forward and the useless hand, still holding the razor-sharp blade, jerked upright.
“Let’s see what’s under that mask of yours,” Simon snarled.
“YOU DARE!” Ellie roared. A hidden compartment built into the war machine’s chest slid open, revealing a dozen rockets locked on to his position. “DROWN IN HELLFIRE!”
Simon slammed another foot into the elbow joint again. The war machine was wrenched even farther downward, and the rocket that would have utterly destroyed him instead slammed directly into the dirt below the machine. White-hot Hellfire spattered across the war machine and swiftly began to eat through the metal.
But Simon was not done yet—with both hands, he seized the iron fist and wrenched it backward so that the razor-sharp blade pointed directly at the machine’s chest. A wild cry burst from his lips as he jerked the blade forward with all his might. There was a screech of metal as the blade’s razor-sharp edge stabbed against the machine’s steel plating, but the armor had already been softened by the Hellfire, and so the blade went deeper and deeper into the machine until all fifteen feet of it was buried inside. Sparks flew and a thick cloud of smoke emerged from the bowels of the war machine as Ellie let out a cry of helpless fury. Her screams quickly faded away as the power to the machine’s acoustic system died.
“Heap of junk,” Amaury spat at the twisted pile of metal that lay before them. “I never saw the appeal myself.” He leapt up onto the machine’s torso, carefully avoiding the drops of Hellfire scattered about, and made his way to the skull-like cockpit. “Help me open this, would you?”
Simon pointed a finger at the vulture-like bird-thing that flapped down from the sky and gave a few curious pecks to the metal giant’s iron hide. “What the hell is that?”
The thing turned to stare at him with its uncomfortably human face. “Podarge,” it squawked in a hoarse voice. “Am harpy.”
Amaury did not look surprised at all to see a vulture-human hybrid perched on the steel above them. “A type of devil,” he said dismissively. “We can ask questions later. For now—” He dragged his dagger across the window of the cockpit, leaving a long scratch. “Open it.”
Fine. Simon was truly in too much pain to care. He weakly limped over to the skull and peered down into the darkened window.
“It’s probably booby-trapped,” Amaury warned. “We should be—”
Simon easily smashed in the window with a single kick and peered inside. He saw a panel of blinking lights, and a great mass of wires and cables, but other than that… “Nothing,” he growled. “She’s not here.”
“What?” Amaury demanded. He reached into the cockpit and wrenched out a metal box lined with cables and switches that Simon couldn’t make heads or tails of, and groaned. “That bitch.” He buried his knife into the box, eliciting a geyser of hisses and sparks. “It’s a drone.”
“What does that mean?”
Nearly a kilometer above them, in the depths of the airship Titan, the entity that thought of itself as ELIE reached for a switch on its control pad. It means the game isn’t over yet, little men, it thought.
A simple flip of a switch, and far below, the three-hundred-liter container stored within the ruins of the Serket released its deadly contents. ELIE had experimented with various chemicals over the years, but most of those that it had preferred on Earth were simply not suitable for Hell. But phosgene oxime was always useful. Faster than mustard gas, far easier to produce than cyclosarin. And the side effects…
If ELIE were capable of smiling underneath its mask, it would have done so.
It raised the locust that Giles had given it up to its mask. “I have incapacitated two of the Horsemen with the Serket,” it reported. “They’re all yours.”
“Understood.” Giles’s voice came through the locust’s mouth. “Have Captain Gudivada prepare the Hellfire barrage, but only on my mark.”
ELIE silently brushed the locust aside, ending the connection. You won’t rule forever, human, it thought. The age of the machine was once again drawing near. It tightened its two armored hands—God, how it hated them!—into fists. The final victory of machine over man. It had to be coming; it had to!
But until then, the Engaged Learning IntelligencE would watch and wait and prepare, as it always did. For years, under its orders the religious fools of the Church of the Fallen Father had stored enough caches of chemical weapons underneath Dis to wipe the city clean of all organic life. But now that hardly seemed necessary.
ELIE gazed out the window at the destruction below. How fitting, it mused. Organic life seemed to be doing the job just fine on its own.
30
Giles turned to gaze at the monstrous tree that had sprouted in the middle of Dis, now currently locked in a deathly embrace with Legion. The two powers slashed and stabbed and bit at each other with blows so mighty that the very air trembled. The power of Cain’s Mark, he thought. Incredible.
“No,” he ordered as Salome slightly adjusted her stance on Leviathan, urging the demon to fly back toward Legion. “That situation is stable for now.”
Salome looked down at him in disgust. She was attuned so well to Leviathan that she was capable of simply standing on his back, arms crossed, as the demon swooped and soared through the sky. Giles, on the other hand, was not. “Stable? You call skyscraper-sized trees and spiders fighting in our capital stable?”
“The Horsemen are more important,” Giles snapped. “If Cain gets his hands on them, it’s all over. The capital can be rebuilt.” Rebuilt in our image, Abaddon purred in his ear. “Find ELIE’s Serket. Two of them are already incapacitated.”
The faintest frown came to Salome’s cherry lips, but she slightly twisted her stance on Leviathan, and the demon turned to soar in the opposite direction.
Look at it all, Abaddon whispered as Giles leaned over Leviathan’s neck to gaze down at the devastation below them. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?
Giles saw shattered bridges, burning houses, cratered streets, splintered weapons, toppled towers, crushed churches, and entire city blocks where nothing could be seen at all except for the uniform bleakness of ruin and rubble. But the single most alarming thing was what he didn’t see. Tens of thousands of refugees and panicked soldiers still streamed out of every possible exit from the city, and even a few holdouts scattered here and there who desperately fired up at Legion’s ungodly bulk, but below him, there was no one.
The capital of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, home of millions, had become a ghost town in a matter of minutes. Giles hoped that meant that most of the citizenry had been smart enough to hide or flee while they had the chance. But as he looked back at the massive spider—and the countless limbs and faces stitched into it—he doubted it.
The slate wiped clean, Abaddon prodded. And it’s all ours.
Legion may have done us a service, Giles agreed. When this is all over… With the most powerful demon of Hell at his side, there would be no possible resistance to his rule. The only possible exception was Salome, but she was easy enough to control; the vain woman had no ambition whatsoever. All Hell, mine. And no one could dare to touch or hurt him ever again—
“There.” Salome pointed. Leviathan swooped low over a particularly damaged street, revealing the smoking wreckage of one of ELIE’s specially designed stiltw
alkers.
Even from this height, Giles could just barely smell the chemical scent of one of the Prophet’s nastier weapons. He immediately clapped both hands over his mouth to block out the scent; he had no wish to develop blisters on the inside of his lungs.
“There they are,” Leviathan rumbled.
Giles followed the demon’s gaze and quickly noticed the two figures standing on a roof above the spreading cloud of noxious gas. How did they…? he wondered, and then he saw the harpy that must have carried them there.
“Damn harpy,” Salome grumbled. “Looks like the one that was always following Antony around. Leviathan, burn ’em down.”
“No,” Giles interrupted as the demon swooped over the street and opened its jaws wide, ready to unleash a torrent of flame. He didn’t want to risk killing the harpy; it was rare enough to find a living demon, let alone a female one.
“I will handle this,” he decided. “Go and finish off Legion.” Abaddon, fetch me a gas mask, he ordered.
“Fucking Ellie is useless,” Salome grumbled as a cloud of locusts swirled in Giles’s hands, bringing with them one of the Kingdom’s masks. “If you want something done right…”
Giles pulled the gas mask over his face and leapt from Leviathan’s back onto the street below. You do it yourself, he silently finished as a cloud of locusts softened his landing on the hard pavement. Above him, Leviathan circled the area once more and released a burst of fire, enclosing everything within a wall of flame.
The father and son. Giles stared up through the haze of poisonous gas at the two men standing on the rooftop above him. They glared back, and the son even dared to give him the middle finger. It didn’t look as though the gas had affected them at all; the harpy must have pulled them out of danger at the very last second. It didn’t matter; he had been hoping to use his secret weapon against these two in particular.
“Simon de Montfort! Amaury de Montfort!” he called up through the choking, blistering gas. “I am Giles de Rais, Marshal of France!”
“We don’t give a fuck!” the younger Horseman yelled down.
“Even in life, I knew of your family’s atrocities,” Giles continued. He raised both his arms in either direction, allowing a swarm of locusts to emerge from his sleeves. The gas had no effect on them; they spread across the entire square, multiplying exponentially. “Which is why I have no desire to fight you.”
All around him, the swarm thickened and coalesced into a thousand separate piles of insect. Underneath the mask, Giles gritted his teeth; he had never transported so many before. “I will instead let the dead have you,” he shouted.
The first pile of locusts stiffened and fell away, revealing what they had brought up from the depths of Hell: an iron coffin, red-hot from the fire within it. “From the Circle of Heresy,” Giles boomed as the coffin’s lid shook and trembled from the screaming sinner trapped within it. All around, more and more coffins appeared, hundreds upon hundreds. “I give you the dead of Béziers!”
The first coffin lid finally slid away, and a skeletal hand reached out into the light. Where there should have been muscle and skin, there was only a layer of fire that wrapped around bone, burning yet not consuming. The heretic slowly wrenched its corpse-white skeletal body out of the coffin and let out a piercing screech into the air.
“The dead of Minerve!” Giles thundered as hundreds more of the coffins slid open and their wretched, fiery inhabitants stumbled and crawled out into the light.
And last but not least… “The dead of Carcassonne!”
Even Giles was not sure how many of the damned that Abaddon had brought up for him. It was thousands, at least—there was barely enough room for all the stumbling corpses. More than enough, he judged. And if the army he had summoned wasn’t enough to finish off the Montforts…their family had killed plenty of people; he was certain he could always bring up more.
“Make your murderers suffer as you have!” he commanded to the burning army. “But do not kill the harpy! The devil is MINE!” As they slowly approached the shattered building where the two Horsemen stood, Giles snapped his fingers and allowed Abaddon’s locusts to consume him. Let the Horsemen deal with their demons; he had more pressing matters to attend to.
31
Amaury stared down at the oncoming army of burning corpses. “How many did you kill at Béziers?” he asked.
Simon sighed. The number was burnt into his soul. “Six thousand.”
His son picked up one of the Kingdom’s machine-pistols that a fleeing soldier had left on the roof of the half-toppled building. “How many at Minerve?”
“Two thousand,” Simon replied. He ran his great sword across the edge of concrete and eyed the wall of flame that the flying dragon had carved around them. There was no way that Podarge could fly the both of them over it; the harpy had only barely managed to wrench them free of the poison air below. “Amaury, use the harpy. She can get you out at least.”
Amaury pointed the pistol down at one of the shambling corpses at the front of the ragged army and squeezed the trigger. The skeleton’s skull shattered into a score of flaming pieces, and it weakly toppled to the ground. The ranks of the dead trampled its body down without hesitation as they continued to stumble forward. Amaury shot down another one, then another.
“Fifteen thousand,” he said. “I killed fifteen thousand of them when I took Carcassonne after your death.”
The front rank of the silent mob finally made it to the base of the building. Simon could see that, though their skin and flesh was gone, they still possessed sunken eyes in their exposed, burning skulls. “I mean it,” he snapped. “Take the demon and go.”
“No good eating bones anyway,” the harpy muttered.
“Too late now,” Amaury said cheerfully. He emptied the entire clip into the crowd below and swiftly reloaded. “Let’s kill these fuckers again.”
Simon did not know the word for the strange mix of emotions that swelled within his breast at the sight of his child casually defying such horrifying odds. He opened his mouth, trying to find something to say. What do I say? he desperately wondered. How do I say it?
Just in front of him, a burning hand seized the edge of the partly toppled ceiling. It was soon joined by the top of a fiery skull that glared hateful daggers up into Simon’s eyes. The skeleton’s jaw, held in place only by a few tattered tendons, clacked open.
“Butcher,” the heretic’s reedy voice whispered.
Amaury smashed his boot into the dead man’s face, cracking the skull wide open. “Damn right!” he called out mockingly as the heretic crashed downward, tearing more of the flaming bodies from their precarious holds on the building’s walls. “Come on then!”
Simon leapt to the side of the wall, and with a single swipe of the great sword, cleaved a dozen of the flaming monsters in half. Loose bones and tendons clattered down on the silent, ever-growing mob below them. “I said I’d send all you Cathars to Hell!” he raged down at the unstoppable army. “I’m just here to finish the job!”
The dead in their thousands swarmed the building like ants. But the de Montfort clan was not done fighting the heretics just yet; Simon and Amaury battled them tooth and nail for every inch of ground.
32
The familiar sound of high explosives rippled throughout the city as the airship rained down volley after volley of artillery fire. Even the Kingdom’s forces seemed more bent on blind destruction than actually destroying the two behemoths that grappled and wrestled within the capital; most of the explosions tore down the few remaining structures that stood, gradually reducing the city’s center into a landscape that looked as though it belonged on the moon.
Vera let out a furious curse as, once again, Seth reached out and, just in the nick of time, wrenched her out of the way of an avalanche of crashing steel and rubble from a collapsing building. “Goddamn it!” she swore. “Fire at the fucking spider, not us!”
Ahead of them, Legion wrapped five of their limbs around the base of the
massive tree trunk. The creak and crack of wood echoed for kilometers as the monster howled and twisted its considerable torso. Come on, John; crush that bug. Vera let out a cry of triumph as a dozen of the tree’s branches—each the length of a battleship—twisted down and stabbed deep into Legion’s body.
“The Kingdom is treating this like any other rebellion,” Seth shouted over his shoulder. “Destroy any biomass within the vicinity, surround the area with a perimeter, then burn everything inside in Hellfire.”
Just how they treated mine, Vera remembered. A sour feeling filled the pit of her stomach at the thought of Signy and Tituba and the thousands of others, still burning within the lake of fire. And for all the thousands she had condemned in the Fourth Circle, there had to be tens of millions within Dis… No, she vowed. I won’t let that happen again.
“Down!” Seth ordered. He pulled her to the pavement just as a billow of flame coursed down from the sky and roasted the street ahead of them. Overhead, the guttural roar of an animal echoed as something flapped through the smoke-stained skies.
“What’s this?” an inhuman voice called down. Seth picked up Vera with one hand and leapt into what looked like an abandoned café, shattering through a pane of stained-glass an instant before another burst of flame enveloped the rest of the street. “A man from the Fifth Sphere of Paradise!”
“Leviathan,” Seth muttered. “This isn’t good—” The roof of the building shook as something heavy landed upon it.
“Move, damnit!” Vera shouted, for she was tired of constantly being led by Seth. A pair of claws sheared through the ceiling like tissue paper. She had a glimpse of crocodile-like jaws and reptilian eyes peering down—and then she pulled the pin off one of her grenades, lobbed it up at the devil, and ran, Seth right on her heels.
They barely had enough time to crash through a thin plaster wall before the explosive detonated and the building behind them caved in on itself. Leviathan let out a howl of fury, and with one sweep of his mighty tail, demolished everything within ten meters. Slabs of concrete and rebar as big as a man hurtled through the air with the speed of bullets. Vera had enough time to see a blur of motion coming straight for her—and then Seth was there, the burning sword gleaming in his hands, as he slashed the boulder in half with a single sweep. Even so, the debris came so close to Vera’s scalp that she could feel it pull away a few loose hairs.
