Knight of Gehenna (Hellsong Book 2)

by Shaun O. McCoy

He felt a hand touch him.

  “Sorry,” Avery said.

  Arturus guided him to the wall.

  “Thanks,” Avery whispered.

  “Wait here,” Calimay’s priestess ordered. “I’ll be back for you.”

  Arturus listened to her and her warriors’ footsteps as they left. He breathed out a sigh of relief.

  “Are they gone?” Aaron asked.

  “For the moment,” Galen answered.

  There was still some noise in the chamber, however. It sounded like someone was breathing rather hard, but perhaps was trying to keep it quiet. Arturus cocked his head to one side and focused on the sound.

  Kelly was crying.

  Arturus had hoped that this room was not cloaked in total darkness, and that his eyes might begin to adjust after a few minutes—but it had been a few minutes, and the blackness remained.

  Avery was sitting so close to him that he could feel the hunter’s shoulder against his own. For some reason this gave Arturus a certain amount of comfort.

  “This ain’t good, Turi,” Avery whispered.

  “I know.”

  “I think they probably still have slaves, is what I’m saying.”

  Slavery was a terrifying proposition in and of itself, but Arturus knew that if Calimay were anything like Maab, Avery’s life was about to be far worse than he was imagining. For some reason, he thought of Kyle.

  We shouldn’t have let you die.

  Kelly’s show of weakness had shaken him deeply.

  This is what Hell is. It keeps you alive until it’s broken you. Only then does it take you.

  “I want to tell you something,” Arturus whispered back, “something that Julian told me when I spoke to him.”

  “What?”

  “Even if they don’t kill us outright, bad things are going to happen to us. Very bad things. Things you haven’t even imagined yet. Punishments that the Fore would never think of doing, not even to a murderer. Not even to an infidel. When it gets bad enough, the stilling will take you. You have to fight that, no matter what. Don’t give in to it. When it gets that bad, when all of your dignity has been taken from you and you are left broken in ways I don’t even want to tell you about, just try to remember. Remember something. Anything. From your life. From Harpsborough. Something you’ve imagined. Think of that one thing that makes you happy, and don’t let go because if you do, the darkness will take you. The stilling will take you.”

  He heard Avery swallow. “I’ll try. I’ll try to fight the stilling.”

  “But there’s something worse than the stilling, Avery. Something that Julian was so afraid of he could barely even talk to me about it.”

  “Worse than the stilling?”

  “Yes. They can hurt you so bad that you’ll start to like it. Then it’ll be worse than the stilling.”

  “Why? Why would that be worse?”

  “Because then you’ll be one of them.”

  Michael had hoped that the addition of the actual king pieces, previously represented by wine glasses, would make it more obvious when Davel Mancini was about to check him. It hadn’t. He felt like Mancini had him good and trapped. He didn’t see how he could move a piece without inviting disaster. He moved a pawn instead, almost out of frustration.

  Mancini leaned forward and took a long look at the board, pursing his lips as he did so. It was an expression that Michael knew well. Mancini only made that face when he had many good moves available but couldn’t figure out which one was the absolute best. As Michael’s eyes roved the board, he began to see what moves Mancini might be considering. This was a lost game, he figured, and it wasn’t going to last much longer.

  Michael felt his frustration boil over. “I’m going to feed the people, Davel.”

  Mancini’s gaze snapped up at him.

  That had gotten his attention. The dimness of the parlor room wasn’t very flattering to Mancini’s face, adding depth to the dark circles under his eyes and to the ridges on his brow. The man’s brown eyes looked even more beady this way—but dim what Mancini preferred, so dim it was.

  “You aren’t serious,” Mancini tried.

  Michael massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I am.”

  “It won’t work how you think it will,” Mancini warned. “There are almost five hundred of them. It may seem like we have a lot of food here, but it won’t look that way after you start trying to be noble. Particularly now that we’re feeding the hunters.”

  “How long has it been since you started a brew?” Michael asked.

  Mancini’s jaw clamped shut.

  “How long?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  Michael stood up and walked across the plush dyitzu carpet. He stopped before a glass decanter that was half-filled with bloodwater. “See, I’m helping you out,” he joked as he poured himself a glass. He sipped the red concoction, feeling the burn in his mouth. “If we feed the village, you may have customers again.”

  Mancini’s beady eyes returned to the board. “How long would we last? A month? Then what would the villagers do? Would they even believe us when we told them we’d run out? Would they not come looting?”

  Michael let his eyes wander to the dimmed light orbs. “We wouldn’t have run out, then, would we?”

  “Of course we would have.”

  “If they looted the Fore, they’d find all our personal stashes.”

  “Those are our property,” Mancini said, “not the Fore’s and not the village’s. Ours. We earned it. You can’t suggest that anyone, even you, has the right to take that away from us.”

  Michael slammed his glass down a little harder than he’d meant to, causing a bit of bloodwater to splash onto his fingers. “I don’t have the right. I don’t even have a way I could make you all do that. But just because I can’t make you do it,” Michael walked back across the carpets and pointed his finger towards one of the drawn window curtains, “doesn’t mean that they can’t. Open that curtain, Davel. Open it and look. They’re out there, sitting in the village. Not hunting, not doing anything. They’re just looking for an excuse.”

  Mancini’s eyes left the chess game for a second time.

  “You know they will come, Davel. They almost mugged Rick. People have been leaving.”

  “Let them leave.”

  “But they don’t really leave, do they? They just haunt the same wilds and stop paying taxes. They compete with our hunters. We’ve got to adapt to this new Hell, or they’re going to come in here and make us adapt.”

  Mancini leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “I need you, Davel. You think I’ve gone soft, that I’ve lost my loyalty to the Fore, but you’ve got it wrong this time, and you know it. I’ve just been seeing what was coming all along, and you’re just now getting it. I need you, Davel. I need that brain of yours. You’ve got to whip something up. You’ve got to start some tap dancing. You figure it out, and I’ll support you when it comes to the votes.”

  Mancini kept his eyes closed as he leaned forward. He put his elbows on the table that supported the chess board and rested his head in his hands. Michael knew what this gesticulation meant as well because he had seen it many times while playing the man in chess. Sometimes even the crafty Mancini would suddenly find himself in a dangerous position. Most men might give up and admit a loss. Not Mancini. He’d rest his head in his hands, just like this, and think his way out.

  Sure, the Fore seemed doomed. Michael certainly couldn’t think of a way to save it. But with Mancini, there was hope. He’d played the man dozens of times over the course of the last few weeks, and Mancini had never lost.

  Ellen awoke gently from her sleep. The canoe rocked, ever so slightly, back and forth. Rick, who sat high on the back of the canoe, propelled and steered the craft all at the same time with his strong, even strokes. The rest were asleep, Massan the most noticeably so. His snoring was as even and as peaceful as the canoe’s movement.

  Rick noticed she was awake a
nd gave her a smile. His smile filled her with warmth.

  Mist clung to the river. Islands came out from the fog like shadows, coalescing into stone as they passed before returning into the mists to become shadows again. Her thoughts did the same.

  “Where does the river go?” she asked Rick softly.

  Rick smiled, his eyes narrowing on something in the river that he carefully maneuvered them around. “To Macon’s Bend.”

  “No, I mean, where does it go, really? Where does it end?”

  Rick paddled a few more times, not answering. Ellen didn’t mind. She let her head rest on the side of the boat and looked up towards the ceiling. She couldn’t see it at all in most places, but here and there the brick stonework was visible through the haze. She had almost forgotten that she’d asked a question when Rick responded.

  “I don’t know. Some say that Hell is infinite and that the river flows forever. Others say that the end of Hell is also its beginning and that the rivers are like this too. They say that they flow into themselves, feeding themselves, like serpents eating their own tails. Others say that they begin and end like any river might on earth.”

  The branches of a tree she did not recognize passed over her. Its bark was white in places, and grey where the top layer bark had peeled away. Its branches were full of leaves so small they looked almost like needles.

  She wondered if it was her imagination, or if the mist was getting thicker.

  “Which do you believe?” she asked.

  “I believe none, until I have reason to. There could be many other ways, as well, which rivers run.”

  “Surely you must believe one. It’d be silly not to!”

  Rick chuckled. “Galen would set you straight on that one, dear. He’d tell you it was silly to believe something with no reason. He’d tell you that the default position is to believe no claim until it has evidence, and then to give it only a provisional acceptance.”

  “Do you think he’s right?”

  “Well, that method certainly does cut out a lot of bullshit, doesn’t it?”

  Ellen laughed. “But the river running into itself, it’s such a beautiful idea. I wish it were true.”

  “Then I’ll wish that with you—”

  There was a loud thud and the boat shifted suddenly. Ellen sat up straight. The others were startled awake.

  “What was that?” Molly asked.

  A black substance was trailing out from behind their canoe.

  “Is that blood?” Alice asked.

  “Too dark,” Massan said.

  “A corpse’s blood,” Rick warned.

  Ellen turned and looked at the river before them. Hands, bloated grey and rotten, were rising up from the misty waters.

  She screamed.

  The lavender robed priestess returned carrying a single flickering candle. Its burning produced the smell of dyitzu fat, reminding Arturus of Maab’s bathing chambers. He stood slowly.

  “I have spoken with Calimay.” The candle wavered in her hands. “You are to be imprisoned. She will sentence you at her convenience.”

  Avery rose to stand beside Arturus. He looked like he was about to speak but Aaron got there first.

  “We understand. We look forward to bartering with her.”

  The woman laughed. “You have nothing we want.”

  “We represent a city, Harpsborough.” Aaron said. “You’d be a fool to refuse our extended hand of friendship.”

  “There can be no friendship between wolves and lambs.”

  Galen stood. “That, most honored priestess, is something that Calimay must decide herself. Unless, of course, you presume to speak for her?”

  “I speak for myself. Now follow me.”

  She led them through dark purple corridors that spiraled inward towards some central point. They were built in much the same way as the tunnels Arturus remembered surrounding Maab’s ritual chamber. Still, the area must not have been completely safe because the Carrion born that flanked her kept their shotguns at the ready.

  Men, not Hell’s Architect, had laid the bricks of these walls—though they’d done so in a cunning way in order to make them blend in with the surroundings. Two hints let Arturus know of the corridors’ human origins. For one, the smaller and elongated grey stones, evenly spaced, did not look like skulls when they were on the edges of his vision. Secondly, in many places the stones were trying to heal, some dripping down across the rocks as if they were melting, others growing odd, almost crystalline structures.

  As the priestess led them farther in, Arturus began to see places where the pretense of camouflage had been abandoned altogether, and sandbags had been used to bolster some of the construction.

  They need rustrock to make their illusions last. They must not have enough.

  Arturus felt a small hand enter his. He looked down to see Kelly. She gave him a reassuring smile. He gripped her hand tightly.

  They were led to a wall that showed no signs of healing. Arturus turned to one side to see if the illusions of skulls appeared. They did not. Calimay’s priestess walked up to the wall and rapped on it twelve times. The wall rose, and a blue undulating light poured out from behind it, washing over them all. The chamber beyond was more beautiful than the parlor room of the Fore. It was more beautiful than even Maab’s bathing chamber.

  Its ceiling was twenty feet tall and made of some sort of clear glass. Or perhaps there was no glass at all, and the people who fashioned this chamber had simply managed to make a lake float in the air. The wavy water above them was illuminated with that blue light, oscillating smoothly as Arturus watched. The chamber beneath the water was fifty feet wide, over a hundred feet long, and its masonry took full advantage of the space. Stone statues, carved out of a white marble that shone sky blue in this environment, marked off a walkway in the center of the chamber. The statues themselves were the size of fully grown persons, men and women frozen in varying poses. Here a man was bent back to throw a javelin, and there another was poised to hurl a discus. There was a woman with a jug in one arm, pouring crystal water into the open mouths of the knee high children clinging to her legs.

  A single carpet made of some cloth that Arturus couldn’t recognize traveled between those statues, leading towards an arched exit that was closed off by a drawn, red curtain. Embroidered on the curtain with gold thread was the likeness of a supine Minotaur, its head pulled back by an angry hero, its belly slit open and spouting golden blood. To the right and left of the carpet and the statues were long wading pools, each about ten feet wide and nearly eighty feet long. Each pool was only a foot or so deep, but they were filled with waters so smooth that they appeared to be solid glass.

  Two fountains stood out in each wading pool. The fountains’ bases were carved to look like groups of men, each wearing the armor of a bygone age, each carrying a body shield in one hand and a short sword on the other. On the shoulders of these men were women whose toga draped bodies wound together into each other until their outstretched hands became one with a jar. Arturus expected that water would issue forth from those jars if the fountains were turned on.

  He looked back towards the lavender robed priestess. There was a smirk on her face, and she was staring intently at Galen.

  “Not bad,” his father said.

  Arturus felt drawn towards the carpet, towards the curtain with the bull, but Calimay’s priestess had different plans. Her men pushed them with leveled shotguns to the right side of the chamber and out of the small exit there.

  The room they entered was lit by brilliant spherical lightstones. They were exactly like the ones the Citizen’s kept in the Fore’s parlor room. There were more of Calimay’s Carrion born waiting there. A gate closed behind them, sliding down from the ceiling. The iron slammed into the stone with a thud. They’d been locked in with the lavender robed priestess and five of her men.

  There was another exit from this room, Arturus noticed, but it was gated as well.

  “Now strip,” Calimay’s priestess ordered.
“We’re to make sure you have no weapons on you.”

  Arturus did as he was told, taking off his sewn-together boots first. The lavender robed priestess smiled at the modesty of the Harpsborough hunters who were covering their nakedness with their hands. Galen would give her no such pleasure. He stripped without shame. Arturus didn’t care what any of the others thought of him, except for Kelly. He looked to her. She, like Galen, had no fear of her own nudity. Her body was slender and much better muscled than Arturus had imagined. Her breasts were nothing like Maab’s. They were spare where Maab’s were over proportioned.

  He looked up into her eyes. She was staring back at him and only him. Abashed, he looked away.

  The other hunters had just finished getting their boots off. Calimay’s priestess was admiring Galen’s form. Arturus pulled off his black t-shirt, which obstructed his view for a second. When he could see again, he saw the lavender clad woman had moved to stand in front of his father.

  “You,” she was saying, “you I’m going to enjoy tonight.”

  If the threat meant anything to Galen, he wasn’t showing it.

  Her robes swirled around her as she turned towards the Harpsborough hunters.

  They had all been stripped now. Johnny and Aaron were still covering themselves with their hands. Avery was doing his best to pretend he didn’t care. The soldiers searched them thoroughly, inspecting every orifice. Arturus did his best to remain as stoic as his father while they checked him.

  The soldier next to Arturus gasped and grabbed his arm. “You’d better take a look at this, milady.”

  Oh shit.

  Calimay’s priestess turned towards him suddenly. “What is it?”

  “He’s been marked. He’s one of Maab’s chosen.”

  The lavender robed woman’s lips parted. She rushed forward, grabbing his arm and inspecting the tattoo. “And you, my little duckling,” she whispered into his ear, “you are a long way from home. You’re the stranger boy who escaped Pyle.”

  She knocked twice against the iron bars in front of them. They opened, revealing a dark hallway.

  “Lock them up,” the lavender priestess ordered. “And send someone to Calimay. Tell her we have one of Maab’s. Tell her we have the angel’s get.”