by Brian Hodge
He heard an impact and a burst of breath, caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. He glanced around, saw that one of the group from behind had gotten through, close enough to take Liz down with a flying tackle. She was trying to stiff-arm him up and away, the top of her pistol wedged lengthwise across his open mouth, the way you'd block an epileptic from biting his tongue.
He reached in opposite directions--fired at his nearest attacker while crushing the neck of Liz's assailant, then wrenching him off her, hurling him at two more to send them sprawling with knees shattered backwards.
"Let's get moving!" he shouted, and made sure Liz and Abe were both upright and ready to go before rushing forward. Except for a few stragglers and wounded, the path ahead was clear, if littered with bodies and parts, strewn about like the aftermath of a bombing. Step light enough, fast enough, and you could almost fool yourself into thinking they were something else underfoot.
They sprinted past black walls scored with filigree and rivets, and openings into corridors as dim as sewers. Once they'd run far enough to put these behind them, they came to a kind of open plaza, with long views all around. Back the way they'd come, the last of their pursuers had given up the chase, still milling about the middle of the street the equivalent of a block away or more, not even showing an inclination to take cover as they were picked off one by one, at leisure. Aim, fire, watch them drop. There was no triumph in it, and it had even gone beyond the point at which Hellboy could think of them as mercy killings.
Liz fired until empty and the slide of her pistol locked open, then she hunched forward with both hands braced on her knees.
"What was the point of all that?" she said. "It was nothing but a slaughter, and they just kept coming."
"The way you're looking right now--that was the point of it," he told her softly. "Just to get under your skin."
"Well, it worked," she said.
He knew how she felt, had hated every moment, being forced to render so many bodies into pulp and kindling. The kids were the worst. And there was no way to hold accountable the ones responsible for it.
But in lieu of anything better, Matthias Herzog would suffice.
They found him on a throne in a hall fit for mad kings.
If they'd wanted, they could have spent weeks in this section of Tartarus alone, exploring and mapping and charting the apparent purposes of each edifice. Most seemed made for worship--their version of it, at least--topped with bell towers that soared from the sanctuary roofs on piers of malignant blue-black stone.
But to Hellboy's eye, one building looked different from the others, as if made to serve other needs. Its appearance was more primeval, its base flowing outward like slag, and into its outer walls they'd cut niches for statues, hundreds of them in apparent homage to their rulers or to themselves. The steps were fractured slabs, as if to test the mettle of all who dared to ascend them, and over the doors was a hollow in which burned a sulphuric yellow flame.
"You think it's here?" Abe said. "The scroll?"
"You think this place needs bank vaults?" Hellboy said. "If they brought it down here at all, they brought it down to wait for something. And this is a place for planning wars. Not praying for the outcome." He looked back at Liz, who'd gone very quiet since finding the dead French girl, and almost totally silent after they'd been forced to gun down so many attackers. "You doing okay?"
"I don't know what I am, H.B.," she said. "I just know I'll be better when I'm out of here."
He shoved the doors wide and in they went.
There were no bodies here but one, and he waited for them at the far end of the hall. Half the length of a football field to reach a throne built for something that had never occupied it. The man in it now was a poor substitute, mortal flesh and bone, and withered almost beyond recognition, although he carried one last great joke played upon him. His left arm, lost on a battlefield long ago and far away, then slowly restored from infancy to manhood as a promise of power, had continued to grow. It hung from his misshapen shoulder like a knotty club, tipping him forever to one side--not so large he would be anchored to one spot, but a grotesque weight he would have to drag behind him. He had the festering scrapes and sores to prove it.
Hellboy, still many paces away, lifted his right hand and made a fist. "Get past a certain size, they start to turn impractical, don't they?"
Matthias Herzog said nothing. The only way Hellboy knew he was still alive was the reverberant sound of his breath, like a whisper of wind forced through dried corn-husks.
Abe, he'd noticed, had drifted toward the right side of the hall, taking Liz with him. The same yellow fires as over the entrance burned in a row along the walls as well, but smaller, in receptacles like oil lamps. Abe seemed drawn to something above them--carvings, they looked like, panels of them, but in the dancing light and shadows Hellboy couldn't make out the details.
He slowed, though, as he approached the throne, inspecting the floor ahead with care, and the ceiling too. He doubted there were traps--couldn't imagine the builders anything but secure in their invincibility--but sometimes caution was a virtue, a hard-earned lesson he still forgot sometimes.
"Hellboy," Abe said quietly, urgently, and Liz came running back over to him.
She put her hand on his shoulder and pulled, made him stoop so she could put her mouth to his ear. "Take off your coat," she whispered. "Belt too. Everything."
"How come?"
"Because if Herzog's as half-blind as the rest of the old ones, he can't see you yet. I don't know what he can hear, or understand of English, but I don't think he's seen you yet. You can use that..."
As he left them on the floor behind him, the outer trappings of his life, Hellboy began to understand. The clothes make the man, and unmake the demon--he'd known this for as long as he could remember. It had been his tactic, however feeble, for reassuring those who might be prone to fear him.
But here it would be a liability. Here it was better to be feared.
Better to approach the throne not as something pretending to be a man, but in the body he was born in, the fury of his color undiminished.
His hooves clicked upon the brittle floor. He squared his shoulders and let his breath rumble deep in his chest, and with every step let himself grow back into the demon.
The throne. It could've been his if he'd wanted it. He could cast off this pitiful pretender, tear apart the fragile body and decorate the hall with the pieces, then wait for the doors between worlds to open.
But that was not his nature.
Although Herzog didn't need to know this.
He shot his left hand forward and seized the wattled throat; thrust his huge right hand out flat, demanding what was his with a wordless roar. He leaned in close, almost nose to nose, eye to milky, opaque eye. Under hair like sparse gray weeds, Matthias Herzog's scalp was as yellowed as tallow, and looked just as likely to melt. Behind a beard as patchy as what remained on his skull, his mouth smelled of rot.
If he let himself, if he looked at Herzog as a man rather than a monster, Hellboy could almost feel sympathy for him, as he would for anyone in this state. But all that went away as soon as he reminded himself of what Herzog was: He'd bred babies for the fire. He'd give the whole world over to the fire. He'd led hundreds, maybe thousands, down his path.
And he smiled. Into a pitiless red face, Herzog smiled.
"Ist es Zeit?" he wheezed. Is it time?
"Ja," Hellboy answered. "Jawohl."
Herzog sighed with satisfaction, the pleasure of a job well done, and in a display as humanly painful as anything Hellboy had seen in years, let his ugly tree branch of an arm tumble to the floor, then dragged himself off the throne after it. He turned then, back to the throne, grunting as he heaved a section of its seat upward on unseen hinges.
In the hollow lay the titanium case, stolen from Hellboy's wrist almost a week ago. He could have grabbed it, but why bother--every movement Herzog made looked to be an excruciating effort. Let him
finish what he started, even if it ground his bones to splinters.
Hellboy took the case when offered; found it unlocked but undamaged, the scroll inside looking no worse for its detours.
Leaving Herzog gasping on the floor for now, he joined Abe and Liz at the wall.
"What's over here?" he asked.
"Past and present, some of it," Abe said. "And one possible future."
In the jaundiced flickering of the flames beneath each one, he began to see the carvings for what they were. Scenes and tableaus cut into rock, they served the same purpose as stained glass windows and cave art: telling a story that must be preserved, depicting events to come so they'll be that much more likely to happen.
Such plans they'd had for the scroll.
The first scene in which Hellboy spotted it, it was in the possession of a horned figure shown giving it to some sort of holy man who looked a bit like a pope, and then again he didn't. False pope, anti-pope, rival pope, none of the above. Maybe some figure yet to emerge, still biding his time in obscurity. His power was evident enough, if not his identity or position. Other panels followed, other holy men--by their headgear you shall know them. In their raised hands they clenched the scroll, but he couldn't tell who spoke in endorsement of it and who spoke in denunciation. Each looked as furious as the one before.
The armies came next, the rallied faithful, although it wasn't clear what they were faithful to, or if they even knew for sure. Pogroms and persecutions, jihads and crusades. The dead piled up like mountains and blood poured from the sky and the door to Hell burst its locks.
He'd heard it said before that its hinges turned most easily on hatred.
Plenty of that out there already, just waiting for a cause.
Its power doesn't reside in whose hand really put the ink to it, Father Simon had told him. Its true power lies in what human beings--and other beings--choose to make of it.
True enough.
But the devils could never pull it off without the help of all the goddamn hateful men.
He gathered up his gear and put it back on, chained the giant cuff to his wrist. And just before they left, he paid one last visit to Matthias Herzog, who lay in a rasping heap at the foot of the throne. Hellboy glared down at the man and didn't care if he could understand his words or not, just knew he could never walk out of here before delivering the worst curse he could think of.
"I hope you live another thousand years."
Chapter 30
They were back on the cavern floor, the houses of the unholy far behind, when they began to voice what Liz knew each of them had to have been thinking for almost the entire time they'd been here: What should they do now that they knew of this place? It was all well and good to have recovered the scroll, for whatever brownie points that would earn in the long run, but it didn't change the fact that Tartarus existed. Such a realm, once made, could never be safely unmade.
On the one hand, there was so much to explore here, so many secrets it might reveal to those who could stomach the place. But would this even matter? Expeditions might be conducted safely, but in the meantime, and maybe ever after, Tartarus would lie there like a bomb waiting to go off. It existed solely as a shortcut between worlds, and she feared that one day it would fulfill its purpose.
As well, it might continue to swallow innocents who blundered into it in those places where the barriers were thin.
Noemi Kivits--that was the name on the student ID. Liz reached one hand around to her backpack, felt the bulge of the girl's belongings, recovered for...well, she couldn't say why right now, only that it felt like something that had to be done.
Next to them, she felt a harder lump, the gift--if it could be called that--that she'd accepted yesterday in the middle of the blaze at the house near the Tiber. She'd brought it for no other reason than knowing from the first moment she'd touched it that she would have to carry it everywhere, until there was a reason to be rid of it.
Better sooner than later.
"We need to go back to the left hand," she said, and if Abe or Hellboy doubted this, they kept it to themselves.
They retraced their steps from the earlier crossing, ascending the rounded stairs at the tip of the nearest finger, and once they'd mounted the platform, continued toward the ring of suffering and the turbulent well it surrounded.
The closer they drew to the area where they'd last been before setting off for the statue's other hand, the more apparent it became that something was different this time. Liz knew it even before she was close enough to see the small, subtle movements, the parody of life. She knew it the same way someone walks into a room and notices the chair that's out of place, the hallway door standing open that should have been closed.
That's not the way we left her, Liz thought. We left her lying down...
And so they had. But now Noemi was sitting upright with her back against the flat edge of a girder supporting one of the infernal machines.
"Oh, that's wrong," Liz murmured to no one in particular. "That is so wrong."
It was the French girl's body, obviously, but Hellboy knew she was no longer the one behind those eyes. When he was close enough, he looked deeply into them and saw the same simmering magma of malevolence and scorn that he'd last seen in a basement flat in Scotland. The same midnight sneer of junkies and cutthroats.
On the one hand, Moloch had not worn her skin long enough to truly make it his own. On the other, he was halfway to home turf here, and would be all the stronger for it, that much more present. Hellboy could feel it, a crawling sensation in his gut, the involuntary disgust most people felt when they switched on a kitchen light and saw the floor alive with roaches.
Noemi's hands toyed with the nylon strap that they'd removed from around her throat. It was back in place, a noose again, and her hands slid the slipknot up and down...tightening, loosening, tightening again.
Hellboy reached back to touch Liz's hand; felt her trembling with anger that she'd been able to suppress until now. He gave her palm a slow, reassuring squeeze.
Noemi's eyes lit on the case shackled once more to his wrist. Seeming to concede the loss with the merest tic of indifference.
"Do you know why you'll still lose, in the end? Why you have to?" The voice was a skinned-raw croak. "It's because what you count as victories are such small things."
Hellboy hoisted the case, made it impossible to ignore. "Small victory, big ripples, the way I read it back in your war room."
"Big ripples, vast ocean." The Moloch cocked its head, taunting. "You should know. You were hauled through enough of it. At my behest."
For all it would accomplish--nothing--he still wanted to smash its face in. But to do so would only play to the demon's sense of amusement. It was already defiling the girl's body by its presence. He refused to make it worse, to let himself be drawn into that game. Moloch's kind had already had their fun and the streets of Tartarus were slick with blood because of it. No more.
He could feel Liz pressed against his shoulder. "I'm going to go ahead and do what I came back here to do in the first place," she said. "I think you'll like it."
She stepped around him, stared down at Moloch inside his puppet.
"You won't."
She left their company for now, the good and the evil alike, needed to get off by herself for the next few minutes. This was going to be one of those things best done alone, without others, even your best friends, looking over your shoulder.
Hellboy had no choice but to stay behind, still engaged with the vile thing whose likeness loomed above them. But Abe wanted to follow, clearly uneasy with the idea of her straying too far, and she loved him for it because so few loved her the same way, like family...but still, she had to tell Abe to let her be. And he did, but he was such a guy about it, you know, shuffling where he stood and scowling in that baffled way of warriors who've been sidelined before everything's been killed or laid waste.
Liz walked along the outer ring of the abattoir, closer to the machines th
an she really wanted to be--not close enough to touch them but still close enough to feel their presence, barbed with vicious potential, aware of that cold metallic smell coming off them. When she decided she'd gone far enough, for privacy's sake, she turned to put them at her back--no need to see them, anyway.
She shrugged out of her pack and set it on the stone; opened it and dug past the MRE food packets, the water bottles, the ammunition, the last worldly possessions of Noemi Kivits. From the bottom she withdrew the hard, cloth-wrapped bundle, a third again the size of her fist; unwrapped it and held the ash-streaked seraph's heart.
They would never have given it to her as a trophy, she was sure. They had no need of trophies, probably didn't even understand the concept.
But why did they have hearts at all, why bodies that could be destroyed, she had asked Father Laurenti during those long hours they'd talked, as she'd felt burdened by the weight of having killed one.
He told her he didn't know, just his own conclusions: that where they came from they may have been creatures of spirit, but when they came here as slayers, avengers, destroyers...this was brute work, for a world of fists and blades and searing flames. The world of flesh and bone. They had to descend to the level of their work.
He couldn't have missed how she'd taken no consolation in this, and tried to soften it for her, relating something he'd been told by the captive Father Verdi: They are the perfect manifestation of His wrath, and nothing more. And for so long, they have had nothing to do.
In other words, they were obsolete, Laurenti said. And wasn't it interesting, wasn't it comforting, he asked, to recognize how this paralleled the Bible, and the way it showed God's evolution from a god of jealousy and wrath to one of love?
Well, okay. Maybe. But not as comforting as it could be, as long as the wrath was still lingering in some form, waiting to be tapped.
She held the heart in her hand, touched her lips to its greased and sooty crust. Were they hers to call now, free of rites and blood and symbols...because was she one of them, in their view? She couldn't think of a single other reason why they would have given this to her, then bowed, if they hadn't expected to see her again.
