Hell On Wheels

by Rhyll Biest

Lymenia yawned. ‘All this talk is boring. We’re here to help you serve Cadere’s arse to her on a plate. Let’s get to it.’

  Lore’s milky gaze shifted to Lymenia. ‘Is this the bloodthirsty one you told me about?’

  Valeda nodded. ‘Not very bright but a fearless and untiring fighter.’

  ‘Yes, even warriors, like spitting spiders, have their uses.’

  Lymenia frowned as she looked between the two of them. ‘What did you just compare me to?’

  Lore stood, her feet making no sound as she walked an inch above the rotting carpet and floorboards. She took Valeda’s hands. ‘I didn’t want this for you—war. You’re too good to waste on a piddling territorial squabble. I can hear the knowledge in your bones, smell the thousands of books you’ve read, and war between archdemons can be dangerous for the newly evolved.’

  Was that what she was? ‘We can’t back away from this.’

  ‘No. My enemy is yours now. All the dark stars are aligned, so to speak.’ Lore’s white eyes roamed over her. ‘Have you taken the extra maleficence yet?’

  ‘Not yet, soon.’

  Lore nodded. ‘Yes, it’ll have to be soon.’

  ***

  As they followed the road of bones, Valeda scanned her surroundings and shivered. Veiled by a light mist, a twisting calcium orchard flourished on both sides of the path, white fingers spearing the sky as far as the eye could see. Thousands of white owls perched in the forest of bone, a forest of curling whale rib cages, square squat skulls with horns, beaked skulls, fanged skulls, and trailing vertebrae. In between larger bones, fine femurs and tiny spines formed a white carpet. Every living thing claimed by death met its final resting place here.

  Which meant, somewhere, Marasat’s bones lay among the collection. She grimaced.

  Cinna paused at the edge of the forest, the branches, vines and bones sutured so tightly together that the only way through was the stone path built between the tangled web of bone and plant.

  Tangled, like Valeda’s thoughts about what to do next.

  When should she tell Lore to destroy her heart? Before or after she told Adriel? He would only try to fight her on it. But she wanted to see him again before the thing was done. She wanted to be with him one last time.

  The bare trees, bowed as if to hold in their entrails, provided no answer as she passed them.

  Under her boots crunched bones that had drifted onto the stepping stones. Cadere had designed her lair cleverly, making it difficult for visitors to arrive unannounced.

  Somewhere in the distance, obscured by the mist, a tide sloshed against a berm but it was impossible to say where. No moon, sun or stars shone above; rather, an unpleasantly bright light permeated the mist, annihilating shadows and confusing any sense of direction.

  Here and there rocks hovered a good metre above the ground. In Cadere’s plane, even the normal laws of physics did not apply. A way of flaunting her power.

  Valeda passed long-dead trees as white as the bone they twined around, some creepers hanging like ropy intestine from megafauna-sized ribs, the melting snow on the stems gleaming as bright as viscera. In some places it was difficult to tell where a trunk or a branch ended and bone began, in the seamless, bleached grey.

  Cinna paused, screwing up her nose. ‘Lilith’s tits, I’m all for tying things together with a unifying theme but all this bone is a bit fucking over the top, isn’t it?’

  ‘Shhh.’ Lore frowned, raising a finger to her lips.

  Valeda halted at a thorny tangle of vine in her path, the thorns dripping white milk. Her guess was that the pearly drops were not a friendly secretion. She detoured the venomous clump. Wincing at the crunch of a broken jaw under her boots, she scanned the white landscape. Nothing but stones, bones and curling creepers. The mist shifted, unveiling a simple building with a domed roof, the mortar set with greying skulls and the rounded ends of femurs.

  Cadere’s lair.

  Valeda tapped Cinna on the shoulder and pointed at it.

  Lore nodded. ‘That’s it, I can feel her inside.’

  Valeda’s new imaginary friends felt it too. Cadere, Cadere, Cadere, they whispered. Watch out for the bony thrust of her pelvis.

  A raised entrance stood guarded by the skeletons of two scurtbeasts, between them a doorway fringed with millions of gleaming fine hairs—gut fibre, possibly whale. Valeda parted the once-living curtain and stepped inside.

  A bone chandelier hung from a dizzyingly high, domed ceiling, admired from below by endless piles of skulls artistically arranged to form vases, shelves, walls and pillars. All polished with wax. A thousand candles shone among the marble and Valeda had to shade her eyes to make the daggers of reflected light bearable. She didn’t know how Cadere could stand it.

  Some invisible tide shuffled the thousands of tiny bones forming a thick carpet beneath their feet. As Valeda crunched her way across them, a dark, familiar voice, both beloved and hated, sliced through the musty air.

  ‘Sister.’

  Both she and Lore stiffened as a figure pushed through the curtain of whale gut. The shark-grey hair was Paimon’s, but his face was masked in black cloth, only his eyes visible. A handful of soldiers flanked him.

  She ducked behind a pillar.

  ‘Wise move.’ A voice she didn’t recognise.

  ‘Do you think she remembers us?’ Another asked.

  A spider with feet of ice crept down Valeda’s spine as she placed the voices. One had jeered as she’d been forced to eat her dead lover’s heart, and the other had asked her how she liked it.

  Those voices had scratched a thousand times a day at the wall in her mind.

  And yet she couldn’t put a name to them.

  She was dragged away from the morass of memories by the groan of bones shifting and snapping by her side.

  Lore’s body was growing and expanding rapidly. Her head skewed at an odd angle, Lore grew until the tip of her white beehive brushed the domed ceiling.

  ‘Don’t move, ladies.’ Paimon’s gaze rested on them. He raised his voice. ‘Cadere has a message for you all—she’ll allow you to live if you leave now.’

  Lore hissed and several extra black tongues appeared in her mouth. ‘You are naught but a stain, how dare you presume to give me orders.’

  A lash of frozen fury whipped out of her hair to strike at Paimon’s guards, the air crackling with its power. Three of the demons scattered, diving for cover, but Paimon stood his ground and merely laughed. ‘How predictable.’

  Snow drifted from Lore’s head and her eyes took on an eerie, silver glow as she glared at Paimon from her great height.

  With a flick of her trunk-sized wrist, Lore generated a dry whispery wind. Valeda frowned. What had Lore done? Summoned a storm? Poisoned the air? Called for reinforcements?

  It became clear as a roar shook the room. The skeletons of the scurtbeasts that had guarded the entry prowled with stilted gait through the gut curtain, the fibres caressing each exposed vertebra as they stalked into the room.

  Lymenia squealed with excitement and drew both her broadswords in a single, fluid movement. ‘Happy birthday, me!’

  Circling Paimon and his guards, the scurtbeasts snarled in pain as flesh started to clothe their bones. It grew in layers of raw, pink muscle, twining and wrapping around their bones like vines. They shook their heads and rocked with pain as skin bloomed over their backs, across their ribs and down their legs. And when their claws, horns and scales sprouted, they roared loud enough to rattle every bone in the chamber.

  ‘Holy snapping scurt scat,’ Cinna whispered. ‘Never seen that before.’

  When, at last, eyeballs filled their eye sockets with wet, popping noises, their yellow eyes rolled in their heads before their gazes rested on Lore. She pointed at Paimon and their eyes rolled his way before they leapt as one.

  He retreated behind his guards and the scurtbeasts fell upon them.

  Valeda despised the hot relief that bloomed in her breast as her brother fled the chamber, a g
iant Lore in pursuit. How was it possible that a part of her still wanted to spare him? Stupid, grubby, sibling nostalgia.

  Throwing a dead guard aside with a toss of its long horns, one scurtbeast turned on Lymenia who crowned the snapping beast with enough fire to fuse its bones to the floor.

  Four more scurtbeasts came galloping through the doorway, fully fleshed. Valeda frowned. More of them? What was happening? Were the creatures Lore’s or Cadere’s?

  ‘Come on,’ she shouted to Semya and Lymenia. ‘We need to find Cadere.’

  ‘Can’t I have a little fun first?’ Lymenia ran her sword through a guard, dry bones catching fire under the red-hot heels of her boots.

  ‘Should we split up?’ Semya stared at the multiple doors leading from the chamber as she absent-mindedly wrapped a tendril of poison around a scurtbeast’s throat and strangled it.

  What could it hurt? Valeda nodded.

  Semya sashayed out, tendrils of poison trailing in her wake.

  Scurtbeast corpses littered the room yet two still ran amok, crazed, attacking everything, even one another, without Lore’s direction. Valeda dodged one as it tore past, horns afire, but another bowled her over, sending her sprawling in a pile of bones.

  As she lay on her back, winded, her gaze alighted on the dried vines curled among the bones of the ceiling. They were moving. No … they were writhing.

  Javolian mud snakes. Hell’s most venomous vipers.

  She hollered. ‘Semya, get your well-fucked, meaty green backside back in here!’

  Cinna paused, mid-incantation, to look at Lymenia. ‘I know you said her language was getting earthier by the day, but I had no idea.’

  Lymenia finished garrotting a guard with a whip of flame. As his body dropped with a crash she frowned. ‘I know. Mother’s going to shit brimstone next time we sit down for family dinner.’

  Semya rushed back into the room, glaring at Valeda. ‘What did you just say about my backside?’

  Valeda pointed at the ceiling and Semya glanced up. ‘Oh, shit balls.’

  ‘Can you take care of them?’ If she used her power to freeze them she would have less energy to take on Cadere.

  Semya raised a green mist above her head. As it rose to the ceiling, writhing snakes dropped, a rain of deadly, fat threads.

  Cinna squealed while Lymenia, wide-eyed, crisped each twitching body that fell, then started to fry the ones still coiled in the dead creepers matting the ceiling. The dried creepers entwined around the beams combusted, filling the room with smoke.

  Valeda waved her hands. ‘Stop!’

  But Lymenia kept blasting away at the ceiling.

  Plumes of smoke and choking fumes filled the room and only Semya, who thrived on poison and was immune to toxins, remained unaffected. She squinted at the ceiling crackling with fire and grimaced. ‘Ah, Ly, I think you need to rein it in a bit, love.’

  Valeda removed the hand she’d been using to cover her face and used the front of her tunic as a breathing mask as she looked upwards. One glance at the blackened ceiling told her all she needed to know. It would collapse at any moment. ‘Lymenia, you twat, STOP.’

  Lymenia, eyes wide and glowing like heated coals, turned her head and Valeda raised a futile hand, expecting to be cremated on the spot. A trail of heat weaved a path up her leg but was abruptly cut off as, with a crash, the ceiling collapsed and buried Lymenia where she stood.

  Valeda stood blinking at the pile of bones, charred beams and ceiling plaster covering her sister. Did that just really happen?

  As Valeda considered how best to dig her sister out, the pile of debris erupted in a plume of dust. Lymenia emerged, her plaster-powdered face resembling a geisha.

  Valeda bit her lip. ‘You okay, Ly?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lymenia’s tone was petulant.

  Before Valeda could laugh, Cinna staggered to her feet, coughing. Her eyes widened as she looked beyond Valeda. ‘Valeda, duck!’

  A guard stood behind her, sword raised, and she dropped to one knee as she’d been taught in derby. A ball of fire whizzed overhead, thrown by Lymenia, while at the same time Semya extended a long, trailing tentacle of green death, wrapping it around the guard’s ankles. He welcomed it with a scream and Valeda waited for his body to drop.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  It took her several more breaths to realise that not only was the guard’s body not dropping but that everything had stopped. Even the smoke in the room had stopped swirling and rising in the eerie silence. Not a single thing moved.

  From where she kneeled, Valeda could see her sisters, also frozen.

  A new figure stepped into the room, her aura as black as Adriel’s but ten times larger and ten times more sinister.

  Cadere. The archdemon of Decay and Pestilence. Paimon’s ally.

  ‘Now that I have everyone’s attention.’ Cadere cocked her unnaturally bony hip as she studied the room.

  Valeda stared. With a mottled, clay-coloured hand, Cadere stroked the long whip hitched to her belt, the one she used to strike out with pestilence, or to fish bodies out of the dead pool for reanimation. Chestnut hair hanging loose to the waist, while she wore a patchwork smock the colour of autumn leaves, the barefoot archdemon could have been mistaken for a hippie. Yet her shadow was death, only her acolytes able to stand in its shade—all others fell dead at the very touch of it.

  Cadere flicked her wrist and the room unfroze.

  Lymenia, her red skin shifting and cracking like slowly cooling molten lava, coughed.

  Throat almost too tight to breathe, Valeda faced Cadere, ready to fight for her life, when a buzzing set up in her ears. It had to be delayed shock of some kind. The buzzing intensified and she frowned. That wasn’t her ears …

  The room filled with a swarm of bees, their flight agitated yet focused, the cloud coalescing into a tree-shaped mass that paled and then solidified into a tall woman in armour made of ice, a helmet of ice, and eyes milk white and yet all-seeing.

  Lore in battle dress.

  Cadere directed a baleful glare her way. ‘Remove your vile self from my home, book troll.’

  Lore’s eyes narrowed and she emphasised the full depth of her displeasure by forcing the temperature to take a nosedive, the sub-zero freeze burning even Valeda’s skin.

  Wiping frost from her lips Cadere chided Lore. ‘Why do you interfere in my business? This war between the Ronoves does not concern you.’

  Lore’s fingers twitched in her gauntlets of ice. ‘I’m making it my business.’

  While Semya, Cinna and Lymenia looked on with interest, Lore ran a hand through her long white hair and when she raised a hand, a small pile of glittering snowflakes rested on her palm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Cinna whispered. ‘Hell’s most deadly dandruff?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Valeda frowned.

  The snowflakes in Lore’s palm solidified to form a long scythe. Valeda’s eyes widened. Interesting as it would be to see what happened when Lore’s blade of knowledge met Cadere’s whip of decay, she doubted anyone in the room would survive the encounter.

  ‘Go,’ she shouted at her sisters, but only Semya and Lymenia obeyed; Cinna remained transfixed.

  Cadere unhitched her whip from her belt while eyeing Lore with longing. ‘I’ve been looking for an excuse to kill you for centuries.’

  Lore hefted her scythe. ‘Who needs an excuse?’

  Cadere swung her whip at Lore’s helmet, which shattered, the smashed pieces falling to the bone carpet.

  ‘Gee, that hurt.’ Lore swung her scythe and buried it in Cadere’s chest with a thud. Brown blood as thick as syrup dripped onto the archdemon’s bare feet. Valeda blinked. So, this was how archdemons fought, with no concern for their physical forms. It was ugly to watch.

  ‘You always held such a high opinion of yourself.’ Cadere’s lip curled as her chest dripped muddy blood. ‘Just why is that, sister?’

  Sister? Valeda’s gaze shifted to her own sisters. Cinna mou
thed ‘what the fuck?’

  ‘Because our parents always preferred me, I guess.’ Lore blew a kiss on her hand and froze the dripping gore from Cadere’s chest into blood icicles. ‘I don’t understand why you have to be so petty about it.’ She swung her scythe to shatter the blood icicles.

  Cadere struck, lashing her whip around Lore’s neck and pulling the tail tight to drag Lore towards her.

  Valeda moved to help her mentor though she knew a single touch of the whip would be deadly. Where its black length had curled around her throat, Lore’s skin turned a greenish black, and green veins spread out in a radial pattern. Valeda took a step towards Cadere, her dagger raised, ready to take down the archdemon.

  Cadere’s mottled eyes turned upon her. ‘Don’t even think about it, small potatoes.’

  Valeda’s blood turned as thick as caviar and her heart stuttered. For a second, darkness painted the room before a hand covered hers and a swiftly spoken necromantic incantation by Cinna kept her from dropping on the spot.

  Her house guests hissed in fury. Let us at her.

  With Cadere’s attention on Valeda, Lore yanked her scythe from the goddess’s chest and swung it at her neck. But Cadere caught the scythe handle on its downward swing, the wood slapping hard against her palm. She sneered at Lore as she wrestled with the scythe. ‘You never were much in a physical fight, were you, sister?’ She spat in Lore’s face, and where the black spittle hit Lore’s alabaster skin it sizzled, burning through flesh to expose bone.

  With a scream Lore dropped to her knees, the carpet of tiny bones crunching under her weight as she clutched at her face. Cadere’s whip of decay dug deeper into her neck and thick, malignant green forks branched from her throat down to her chest. Her features warped and shifted as the acid-laced whip burned. Corrosive white and silver tears leaked from her eyes.

  Afraid and hating herself for it, Valeda did what she could from a distance—she bound the whip in deep layers of frost to protect Lore from its acid.

  But it was too late. Each breath Lore took rattled her pale chest, and the veins in her closed lids were disturbingly prominent. She lay close to death, entirely vulnerable and at Cadere’s mercy, with only one being willing or able to protect her—Valeda.