by SM Reine
Shouts echoed from the island he’d left behind. Zettel’s voice was loudest of them, and the angriest. The voice of a man who wanted blood.
He didn’t give them a chance to catch up.
James ignited a tattoo on his hip and pointed at the island.
A blast of air unleashed from his palm—a mighty vortex that could have flattened a building on Earth. In the floating world, it was far more devastating. The island flipped, crashing into another with a sound like a mountain cracking in half.
James didn’t watch the kopides fall.
He had to backtrack to find an island heading toward Nathaniel, and then jumped on a boulder that was rushing toward the heart of the fissure. Every leap made his heart miss a beat. Every time, he thought he was going to fall.
But he finally landed at his son’s side.
They were only a few hundred feet from the beaming golden fissure. The fragments of earth seemed to move in slow motion around it.
Nathaniel shoved his Book of Shadows into his back pocket. “Took you long enough.”
“My apologies,” James said. “Next time, I’ll let the Union kill us both.”
He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, while you were gone, I fixed the fissure.”
“Fixed it?”
“Redirected it,” he amended. “I moved this universe next to Hell so we can walk right into Malebolge.”
James wasn’t sure which was more shocking: that they were about to enter an infernal dimension, or that Nathaniel had shifted an entire universe to accomplish it. A small universe, granted, but still an entire universe.
Nathaniel rolled his eyes again at James’s expression like he had just admonished him. “Whatever. Are you ready?”
No. There was no way for him to be ready for another visit to Hell. Especially not a level so much deeper, so much darker, than any human was intended to visit.
The City of Dis was populated by thousands of humans, and some of them weren’t even slaves; the Council had put a lot of work into making sure that the Palace was seen as a safe zone. It was as secure for mortals as anywhere in Hell possibly could be. They welcomed tourists there.
But living humans didn’t enter Malebolge. Not willingly. And the ones that did never came back out.
“I should have warned you,” James said. “These deeper levels of Hell—they’re going to be much worse than anything you’ve seen before.”
“I’ve been to Dis,” Nathaniel said. “I’m not afraid.”
“This is worse than that. So much worse.”
Nathaniel’s determined expression didn’t change. “I’m going. If you’re too scared, fine. Stay here.”
He jumped into the fissure.
For an instant, he was frozen in midair—suspended in space by the energy. The light grew until it blinded James.
Then he blinked, and Nathaniel was gone.
James ripped off his scarf, took a final deep breath of the Haven’s clean air, and retied the cloth tightly around his face.
If the fissure treated James like an angel and denied his passage, he was in for a very long fall. And if he didn’t fall, then he was going to plunge into the darkest depths of Hell. James wasn’t sure which was worse.
Elise. This is the only way to save Elise.
He took a few steps back, and then launched himself into the air.
XIX
James opened his eyes on total darkness. He tried to stand, and a cool hand touched his arm. “Don’t fall over,” Nathaniel said.
It sounded like his son was speaking from beside him, but he couldn’t see anything. James pulled the scarf off of his face. It hadn’t been covering his eyes, so his vision remained unchanged.
“Why is it so dark?” James asked, reaching out for anything solid to orient himself. His bare fingers brushed something hard and hot—like volcanic rock. He jerked back.
“It’s not all that dark. You just need a second to get used to the lighting after the fissure.”
The fissure. James had been consumed by its light and heat for so long that he thought he would never know darkness again. He only could have been falling for a few seconds, but time felt endless near the juncture between universes.
He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his eyes. The air was hot, dry, and smelled like rusted pennies. “Did we make it to Malebolge?”
“Um,” Nathaniel said. “Yeah. Looks like it.”
James waited until his vision returned. It took several minutes for him to make out Nathaniel’s shape, followed by the black stone wall behind him. There was no fissure on this side.
“Why isn’t there a light here, too?” James asked.
“The landing point’s usually nowhere near the actual fissure,” Nathaniel said. He had his back pressed to the rock, even though it must have been uncomfortably warm. “It’s safer that way.”
James stood again. They were in a shallow cave of igneous rock. Beyond the exit, Malebolge was dark and eerily quiet. He couldn’t see any hints of civilization. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he asked.
Nathaniel jerked his chin toward the mouth of the cave. “See for yourself.”
James leaned out to search for sky and found none.
Malebolge stretched below them, at the bottom of a vast cavern. The roof stretched high above him. The stones glowed with dim, internal fire.
The city itself was unlike any city on Earth. Dis had been, in some ways, a perverse homage to mortal cities—parts of it resembled human landmarks, like Dubai, Chicago, São Paolo. This looked more like a hive built of bone and iron, meant to accommodate creatures that walked on six legs instead of two.
And as James’s eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, he realized that he was seeing bone. Giant black ribs jutted from the yellow wasteland. The streets were built around a spine broader than the freeways in Los Angeles, its base half-buried in the desert. The pelvis was disproportionately huge, almost three times larger than it should have been to match the ribs, and the center of the city was nestled inside its cavity.
Puffs of smoke danced between each of the ribs. They were young nightmares, fresh from the fires.
James’s first impression had been wrong. This wasn’t a hive. This was the rotting body of a giant, filled with festering holes, dark places, and screams. This was where nightmares were born.
The acrid air stung his lungs. “How do we get to Coccytus?” James asked, tying the scarf around his face again.
Nathaniel pointed at the other side of the chasm. The structure that looked like a spine was twisted in a curve, and the skull was embedded deep in the earth. “It’s down there, with the head,” he said.
James forced himself to stop staring at all of the crawling, writhing, squirming shapes among the city, and searched for the path down. A narrow winding staircase had been built into the cliff below him, although it was extremely generous to call the steps “stairs.” They were shallow ledges barely a foot wide, with no railing. They looked like they had been chiseled by hand.
“Can you get us down?” he asked.
“I could get myself down.” Nathaniel licked his lips, trying to wet them. But the saliva seemed to evaporate instantly from his skin. “I can’t take you.”
What would be more dangerous: forcing Nathaniel to climb down the stairs with him, or allowing him to wait at the bottom, alone and unprotected? James’s eyes tracked over the writhing corpse of a city.
“We’ll climb, then,” James said.
“Okay. See you at the bottom.”
Nathaniel pulled a page out of his Book of Shadows and vanished.
Damn. James was alone at the top of the stairs.
He leaned out over them, tracking the length with his eyes to the place where it terminated near the corpse’s knee. He had never considered himself to be afraid of heights, but he was prepared to amend that opinion.
James couldn’t leave Nathaniel alone at the bottom. He had to get down there.
Sliding onto the ledge, James kep
t his back flat to the wall, palms sliding beside him. The stone was almost too hot to touch, like pressing himself against dried-out sauna rocks. He kept his eyes lifted to the smoky ceiling of the cavern as he edged along the wall.
The stairs were steeper than he had first thought, each step almost two feet high. He underestimated the drop and nearly slipped on the first step. James shut his eyes, chest heaving.
James kept inching along, not daring to look, and he lost himself in the rhythm of sliding, stepping, sliding.
Ribs slid into his view as he reached the uppermost levels of the body. Newborn nightmares slithered around his legs, tickled his flesh, and dispersed again. There were faces in that smoke, leering and inhuman.
As he descended, he began to hear voices speaking in vo-ani, the language of Hell. The shuffle of bodies moving along streets of bone. Shouts, screams, whispers.
James spoke some vo-ani, but he couldn’t make out the meaning of the words, and he didn’t want to.
He just kept sliding.
Then his foot didn’t find another ledge. He opened his eyes again.
He had reached the bottom of the stairs and stood on a street of burned dirt. Iron bushes surrounded him, thorny and black, and the lane twisted at the end to disappear behind Malebolge’s oversized tibia. The smoky air stung his eyes, obscuring his view of the city beyond.
“Nathaniel?” James whispered, stepping into the center of the street.
His son emerged from behind a dry fountain. “I was looking around,” Nathaniel said. “I think we can avoid the city and cut across the wasteland between the hip and the neck if we can get across this…well, let me show you.”
Nathaniel led James down a narrow path through the bushes. The city wall lay beyond. It was only waist-high, and obviously not intended to keep anything in or out—the deep trench on the other side did a better job of that.
James peered down into the chasm beyond the wall. It was as wide as a river, and he couldn’t see the bottom.
“So all we have to do is get over that,” Nathaniel said. “And then…smooth sailing?”
Smooth sailing across a wasteland in Hell.
“There must be a way across. We just need to find it,” James said, and he thought it was fairly miraculous that he didn’t sound as terrified as he felt.
They continued to walk, keeping the wall to their left and the long bones of the corpse’s leg to their right. The knee was lifted, creating a hollow space underneath. It smelled like centuries of rot below Malebolge, and despite James’s scarf, it quickly grew overwhelming. He sucked in shallow breaths through his mouth.
The ground turned from stone to mud. No, not mud—James lifted a foot out of the mire to look at his shoe, and realized that it was a mixture of effluence and rotting food. The demons must have simply thrown their waste underneath the body. James and Nathaniel were walking in it.
He tightened the scarf around his face and stopped looking down.
But as they skirted the city, no obvious route across the trench appeared. They were trapped under the pelvis now. The only ways out were to go back…or enter the city.
James had been trying not to look at the city cradled within the pelvis over their heads, but now he had no choice. The buildings looked more like a mixture of mold and calcified flesh, and the demons within were maggots—maggots that would kill two wandering humans without a second thought.
“All we have to do is get into Malebolge,” James muttered, pacing beside the wall. His feet slurped in and out of the waste. “Then we can walk down into Coccytus, across Limbo, and save the fucking princess. So simple. What a great idea.”
“What did you say?” Nathaniel asked.
“Nothing.” He heaved a sigh, and then regretted it when the moist stench of rot rolled into his lungs.
James still had another glamor tattooed on his body, but it wasn’t the same as the spell that had made him look like Anthony. This one made the wearer impossible to look at. Not invisible, strictly speaking, but utterly unnoticeable. The spell was priceless, too good for him to use against the Union, but he could think of no situation better for it than now. It could allow one of them safe passage through Malebolge.
He activated the spell and directed the flare of power at Nathaniel. James could tell when it took effect by the fact that he suddenly didn’t see his son. He could focus on the wall behind him, the mire beneath their feet, or the pelvic bone dripping ichor on them—but he couldn’t focus on his son’s face.
“What did you do?” Nathaniel asked. Even when he was talking, James couldn’t quite see him. He barely glimpsed Nathaniel’s motion out of the corner of his eye.
“You’re invisible,” James said.
“Yeah? How many fingers am I holding up?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Invisible, Nathaniel. That means I can’t see you.”
“Three,” Nathaniel said. “The answer is three.” He sounded far too delighted, considering that they were both knee-deep in effluence.
That was the end of the spells James could use to disguise an individual, but he couldn’t walk into Hell looking like he did now. He pulled his shirt off. The tattoos and burns seemed inhuman enough; he might be able to pass for a vrykolakas if nobody looked closely enough to realize that the marks were ethereal.
He scooped some of the effluence off of the ground and covered his jeans with it, striping his arms with what remained on his hands afterward.
“That is disgusting,” Nathaniel said.
“But I won’t smell human. As long as neither of us speak, perhaps we won’t get recognized.” Or eaten, he added silently.
It was unsettling to search for a path up to the city streets, unable to be certain that his son was following him. He could feel the faint pulse of magic and hear footsteps echoing his own. Aside from that, Nathaniel was no more than a ghost.
He found stairs that led into the pelvic cavity. They climbed.
James and Nathaniel entered urban Malebolge near the market. It was nothing like the market in Dis. The shops were more like open pits, with tables covered in severed limbs, bones, and shredded flesh. Others sold leather, some sold stone tools.
The streets were crowded with spirits. Shadows flashed past James, some of them no more than wisps of smoke, but some were beginning to take human form. Masses of black flesh oozed ichor onto the tables as they shopped.
There were so many demons that James had never heard of in a single glimpse of the street—and he didn’t look directly at a single one of them. But they didn’t need to catch his eye to have his complete attention. Fear built within James no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. Surrounded by nightmares, he had no other choice.
He walked briskly down the street, trusting that Nathaniel would follow, and tried not to look like his heart was about to pound out of his chest.
When James passed a butcher shop, he realized that he wasn’t being followed anymore. He could no longer feel the invisibility spell. “Nathaniel?” he whispered, turning back.
The butcher shop was an open fire pit next to a metal rack. Several humans hung from the hooks in preparation of processing; most of them were even dead. One of them was being transferred to a hook over the butcher’s block as James watched. Underneath all of the blood, he had sharp features, narrow shoulders, and red-blond hair—a salt-of-the-earth man that wouldn’t have been out of place singing hymns at church.
But he was dead, dripping blood from his fingertips, and sliced open from pubis to chin. The butcher peeled the edge of his skin back to saw at the connective tissue underneath.
James glimpsed his son staring out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t watch,” he whispered. Nathaniel didn’t reply.
The demon set down his knife and got a good grip on the edges of the skin.
In a single, smooth gesture, the butcher ripped the skin off of the man’s ribs.
Nathaniel threw up. James could only tell because he saw the bile slap onto the street. He found his
son’s arm and hauled him to his feet. “I told you not to look,” he muttered.
The butcher glanced at James. With its missing jaw and neckless body, it was obviously a brute—a type of demon native to Dis. “Do you want some?” it asked in vo-ani, picking up the bloody cleaver.
James rushed on without responding.
The streets spiraled around spikes of bone, leading to higher levels. James headed straight for the top of the pelvis without stopping or releasing Nathaniel.
His son slipped from his grasp when they reached the apex.
“Nathaniel?” James asked in a low voice.
He was shocked to hear the response right in front of him. “I’m here. Do you see the bridge?”
James turned, searching for a path across the chasm. Malebolge’s arm was draped over the wall, forming a bridge of bone. They only had to get across the chest to reach it.
“Perfect,” James said.
He moved to step down the pelvis, but Nathaniel stopped him.
“Wait. Is that who I think it is? Down in the markets.”
James had been trying not to look into the markets again, but he dropped his gaze. It was easy to make out what Nathaniel had seen, even hundreds of feet below—there was only one human loose on the street.
Commander Gary Zettel had somehow survived the Haven.
He was slinking behind the booths in the market, staying in the shadows. From the street level, he would be invisible in his black clothes, but from above, the pale skin of his face was like a beacon in Hell.
“Damn it all,” James muttered. He just didn’t give up, did he?
Considering the other dangers surrounding them, James wasn’t worried about what one human could do to them. But if Zettel got caught and told someone that he was chasing other humans through the city…
“Should we save him?” Nathaniel asked.
There was a time that James would have said “yes.” It was the job of a kopis to protect humans, and being an aspis meant that it was his job, too. They had to protect all humans—even the ones they didn’t like. Even the ones that might want to kill them.
