Diana

by Chloe Garner

  Block, step, block, step. He found a tiny window to pull a bundle of grasses out of his pocket and he threw them on the floor, a drain. Tiber’s magic began to siphon away, torn and destroyed, but still potent.

  Block.

  And then something strange happened.

  There was a noise.

  One Carter didn’t know. He didn’t recognize it.

  And a change in weight, strange and unanticipated.

  And he was standing with just a sword handle in his hand.

  Regend had broken, scattered away on the floor toward the corner.

  He was defenseless.

  The next swing, slowing and weakened as it would be, would go through him. Would find his core.

  Tiber took an instant to appreciate it, Carter standing in front of him, disarmed, but not longer than that. Even without a sword, Carter was powerful, and Tiber didn’t give him any time to come up with a new plan.

  Damn the time plane here. He’d have won, if not for that.

  The sword lifted, high, and then there was the sensation of breaking glass without the noise, the vibration, high above audible range, finally stressing something to the point that it shattered.

  “Eloi Anadidd’na Anu’dd. Eloi’dd sandi’dd lahn. Pall sleftna pall.”

  My name is ‘hello friend’. My sword is Victory. Die, demon.

  In a blink, Tiber was gone.

  “Sit,” Samantha said. She was at his elbow.

  “Waited until the last second to do it, again,” Carter said.

  “Didn’t occur to me until just now,” Samantha said. “Sit.”

  “Not here,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m not carrying your intestines for you,” Samantha said. “Let me look.”

  He tossed the inert handle away. Regent was broken. He’d never known an epic sword to break, but the magic was gone. You couldn’t reforge it.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Carter said.

  “I know,” she answered. “Let me look.”

  He lifted his arms, finally beginning to feel the depth of the wound there. A lesser man would have staggered and sagged against her, but Carter simply held his elbows at shoulder height and watched as she peeled his shirt away from his stomach.

  And revealed his innards.

  Well, that was inconvenient.

  “I’m fine,” he said again. “I don’t know what else he’s got in here. We need to move.”

  “I didn’t bring anything,” she said, holding up Lahn. “This is going to hurt.”

  “Do you know what you’re…” Carter started, then Samantha put Lahn’s flat side against his stomach and murmuring a slurry of trigger words that he missed because of the wave of pain and nausea that hit him as she spoke.

  He stumbled back a step and coughed.

  That was unexpected.

  She grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him back. He realized that the light had vanished from the room and that she was working by the light of the single bulb again.

  And then the bulb burst.

  He could hear her breathe, but there was no other proof that she was even still there.

  “And now we’re done,” she said.

  She put him on the couch, where he stripped his shirt to look at the mess she’d made of his stomach.

  “What did you do?” he asked, looking at the mushy pink flesh where the cut had been.

  “What?” she asked from the kitchen where she was washing something. He wasn’t entirely certain what she was doing, because he was a little preoccupied with how ridiculous his abs looked.

  Like someone had replaced a swath two inches wide of his normally well-toned abs with fluffy pink elephant skin.

  “What did you do?” he asked again. “I’m going to take her back, if you think this is what Lahn is supposed to be for.”

  “Did I or did I not keep your liver from falling on the floor?” Samantha asked, approaching with a bowl.

  “I’m not sure that’s better,” Carter said.

  “You are the most vain man I’ve ever met,” she said.

  “That’s not true. You mangled me.”

  “Lay back,” she said.

  “You scared him off,” Carter said, leaning back against the couch and putting up a leg up. She took his shoulder and pushed him down. He was feeling a bit giddy from blood loss and shock, and he could have shut it off and ignored it, but it was going to catch up with him sometime. Just ignoring inconvenient physical reactions to the world was a good way for things to catch up with you unexpectedly.

  He shifted to lay flat, looking up at the dim ceiling, more than a dozen feet overhead. He put his arm across his forehead.

  “Angeltongue has more of an impact than I thought,” Samantha said. “And it was because we outnumbered him.”

  He blew air through his lips.

  “He’ll know better next time.”

  “Cold,” she said an instant before something gelatinous and freezing hit his stomach. If he hadn’t had all of the muscles there severed in the last hour, he would have leapt out of his skin.

  “More warning next time, maybe?” he asked, sitting up to see what she’d done. She pressed his shoulder back down onto the couch.

  “All Lahn did was close everything down. And probably wipe out any parasites he was carrying, but I’ll check while I’m at it. I need to open you up again though and set everything where it should be to heal.”

  “Wait what?”

  And then she cut him open.

  The cold had been enough to make it so that he didn’t feel it, not as a pain, so much, but he was once again aware that his shoulders were disconnected from his hips and his belly felt all wobbly.

  “Be still,” she ordered.

  “You know you’re going to pay for this,” he said. She turned her head to look at him without changing her posture.

  “For what? Bailing you out when you managed to pick a fight with a demon powerful enough to shatter an epic blade, and then stitching you back together afterwards so that you don’t walk sideways for the rest of your life?” She looked back down at what she was doing. “Ingrate.”

  “Upstart,” he answered, putting his arm over his forehead again and closing his eyes.

  He tried to imagine a time that he would have let anyone do this, at any point since he’d lost himself hellside, and he couldn’t. He’d had a few major injuries - none quite so bad as this one, but ones that required medical help to put him back together - but he’d always had an airtight contract with someone, or a lot of leverage, before he’d have let them lay a finger on him. And he wasn’t armed.

  Damn. He wasn’t even armed. How bad was he losing his edge?

  “Don’t get any blood on the couch,” he said.

  “Too late,” Samantha answered. He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on or not.

  He didn’t care.

  He woke her up in the middle of the night. There had been a lock on the door, but it had blown to smithereens when he’d touched the handle.

  Cute, but no.

  His bandages itched, but he was too tired to take them off and provoke a fight with her. With the number of magics he’d added over top of hers, he should be on the top of his game again in less than a day. Maybe two, if he decided to sleep.

  “How close are you to having the hellsgate done?” he asked. She sat up and looked at him, bleary-eyed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she answered.

  “Tell me,” he said. “How close?”

  “The post toppers are done. I’ll pick them up when I get to it. The posts are formed and here. If you had a giant bucket of pigs blood, you could open it tomorrow.”

  “Make it so,” he said, scratching under the bandages and trudging away toward his bed.

  He hurt more than he’d expected, the next morning. He went to shower, stripping the bandages and going to stand in the hot water for maybe a minute before he real
ized that the wound from the day before wasn’t going to tolerate that much heat.

  Samantha scurried by at one point, and he ignored her, not even rising to the bait to mock her for how prudish she was about nudity.

  Torture involved a lot of nudity. Eventually you just got over it.

  He leaned his back against the wall of the shower, facing the rest of the bathroom. He didn’t like being unarmed in an enclosed space with bare feet on a slick floor, so he made the best of it, designing the shower with only two half walls and a drain. He’d had the decency to put the half walls perpendicular to the bathroom door, so she only saw him waist up as she went by, and she’d seen that much of him yesterday, up close and personal as she’d picked through his tissues to reconnect things, some with magic, some with glue, and some with a needle and strands of her own hair.

  Hair she’d kept from before she’d dyed it.

  She was a resourceful young woman, Samantha was.

  He was willing to bet she’d plucked them from her head live, rather than letting them fall out naturally, because they were more potent like that, and that she’d preserved them using some precise and archaic method to make them as condensed a magical tool as possible.

  He poked at the two raw edges of his own flesh, where she’d used a hybrid bonding glue and magical poultice to hold them against each other. There was only a little bit of redness at one end, where she’d used a metal dongle of some kind as an anchor for the stitches, and the rest of it was clean, like someone had just put it there.

  He’d seen his own insides before, hellside. More than once, just in that first cycle while he’d still had them. But that had been a long time ago, and it was a bit surreal that it had happened again.

  He would have been fine on his own.

  He’d gone through comparable things and made it work.

  It almost bothered him more that she had been there and taken care of him. Presumed that he needed her.

  Okay, sure, Tiber would have killed him. He wasn’t going to argue that part. Bastard had a sword that was better than his, and Carter had a new plan on fixing that. But the injury, he could have managed. He had the skillset of a powerful possessing demon, and he’d seen them survive much worse. Decapitation, once, even. He would have been fine.

  He didn’t like that Samantha though he needed her. Even if that was the whole theme of her mission from God. Saving him.

  Maybe she’d figure she’d done it and let it drop. She sewed up his stomach. Mission accomplished.

  He could sell that.

  He washed his hair and then wandered into the apartment naked, going for the stash of magic ingredients he had under the sink. A random thought caused him to look up at the ceiling and acknowledge Abby, but she’d watched his shower the same as she was watching now.

  And the naked thing hadn’t bothered him in a long time.

  He mixed up a paste of some pretty intense stimulants and applied it to his stomach, then dipped a granola bar into it and ate the rest of it. He was going to feel buzzy and off-kilter for the rest of the day, but it was better than gimpy and incompetent.

  He went to get dressed, putting on the various harnesses that held knives, bottles, powders, and everything else that he discretely carried with him everywhere he went, then going and finding a duplicate of the suit that he’d wrecked yesterday and putting that on. When Samantha got back with a heavy-looking cardboard box, he was tweaking his cuffs and drinking a glass of orange juice.

  “You should be in bed,” she said. “You need rest.”

  “You should be somewhere else,” he answered, “and yet, you’re here building me a hellsgate. So let’s get on with it.”

  She sighed.

  “I don’t want to unpack these up here,” she said. “I’m just going to have to carry them all downstairs again and do it there. So I’ll let you come with me, as long as you promise to take it easy.”

  “I’m not sure where you get the idea that what you think matters,” he said, finishing his orange juice and standing. “I want to see what you’ve done.”

  She rolled her eyes, but followed him out into the hallway and waited with him for the elevator, boarding and riding down to the bottom floor. He waited for her, letting her walk her way out to the back lot where he found she had poured a metal frame in the ground for the hellsgate. He poked at it with his toe and found it didn’t shift at all. Well-founded. He was happy with that.

  She retrieved a bunch of metal stands, elegantly curved such that they would have formed a torch shape, if she’d put the bases of them all together in one place, and then she opened the box, laying an iron sculpture at the top of each post on the ground.

  He inspected all of them, then picked up the gateway post icon.

  “Is this who I think it is?” he asked.

  “Didn’t think you’d recognize him,” she answered.

  “Seen him around,” Carter said, turning the figure of the angel of death in his hands. She’d was friends with the angel; he’d even turned up once to protest a truth collar that Carter had put on Samantha at one point. Carter thought that being friends with the angel of death was about the most messed-up thing he’d ever heard of, but he kept it to himself because if he was going to pass judgment on all of her friends, the angel of death was hardly the place he’d start.

  “Interesting tribute,” he said, tossing the figure back on the ground. “How do you think he’d feel about being the gateway icon to a hellsgate?”

  “I thought it was poetic,” she said. “Considering his job.”

  Carter frowned. He couldn’t argue with that.

  “You approve?” she asked. He nodded.

  “It’s good work. You know how to open it?”

  She gave him a quick frown.

  “I think so, but I need a barrel of pigs’ blood to shut it after, and a demon on the other side to help opening it.”

  He nodded.

  “The blood,” he said, pointing - he loved it when a plan came together, “is over there, and I’m about to take care of the rest of it.”

  She turned to watch as two of Nuri’s minions started hauling a metal cask across the back lot, and Carter dropped across the boundary to the hellplane.

  There are numerous notable features about the hellplane that other visitors tend to remark on. Its strange geometry. The ring of human figures that formed its entire visible landscape from anywhere on the plane, the fact that it was as small as it was.

  A visitor, healthy and well-hydrated, will never notice how hot it is, nor how it smells. They, wearing shoes and being adequately insulated from the more abrasive features of the plane, won’t notice how hard the ground is, nor how sandy the rock, nor how it is scattered everywhere with loose debris. The won’t notice the wind, either, and how it picks up that rock sand and uses it to chafe every surface.

  Carter knew these things about the hellplane, so it was impossible for him to not notice them. The place had destroyed his humanity, wearing it and eating it and cooking it away, and leaving a burnt husk without feeling. That was the creature that lived in his body.

  He had rehydrated, he had slept and eaten and taken care of himself, mostly out of habit and vanity, but there was nothing you could do to erase ten thousand years’ worth of soul burn. You just couldn’t do it.

  There were demons, though, who refused to leave. They had the power to cross to the earth plane, but they stayed here because they were top demons, powerful and well-situated, and because it was familiar. For a thousand years, Carter had mentally railed against them, every moment spent looking for the chance that was going to put him back across the plane, human again and in his own body.

  After another thousand years, he was beginning to see their point.

  He’d never forgotten what he wanted, never abandoned the quest to be human again, to live on the earth plane, but he could see why so many demons never crossed, why a human who got stuck here would never consider go
ing to the lengths he had to get out.

  You got used to it.

  Not in a sense that it wasn’t so bad. It was. Every day, it was that bad.

  But you got to be afraid of what it would be like, to leave. What you would be like, on the other side.

  He’d had no idea the power he’d bring back with him, and the profound nature of the knowledge he’d collected didn’t manifest to him meaningfully for at least a couple of days after he’d repossessed his body and began walking around in it again. Once more, he remembered the feeling of being a puppeteer inside his own body.

  It had taken so long to get past that.

  He traveled the hellplane like a native, without noticing that he was taking the correct angles to get where he wanted to go, without realizing that he was spotting off of the range of human figures around him. He wanted to approach hellcity from a specific side, and he wanted to avoid scouts that tended to be thickest in the regions with the highest ore concentrations - you have to get your metal from somewhere, and demons dug it out of the ground just like everyone else - so he went around the city until he hit the approach he wanted. Two full revolutions, and then another twenty-eight degrees.

  Hellcity was constantly reinventing itself. As demons rose and fell from power, they built and rebuilt everything, and with the concept of iteratively embedded space, along with doors that could travel from one level of embedded space to any other embedded space, so long as you could find a designer to implement it for you, the outside appearance of hellcity was only a tiny fragment of what was actually there.

  The bowl that hellcity existed in was barely the size of a small town, and every demon and every soul in history that hadn’t gotten the golden ticket to the paradise plane lived down there, save the few who spent their days digging for ore out in the wider plane.

  Suffice to say that his approach was at best a good guess.

  But it was a very, very informed guess, and when he crested the edge of the bowl and started down the loose red sand, he recognized landmarks. They weren’t landmarks in the sense that they were always there. They were landmarks in the sense that someone had marked the land to tell insightful people like himself where he was.