“I’m just fucking full of stupid today,” I shout. I turn back to the man. “You’re a father, so you understand me. Your daughter’s gone, but my son is still alive . . .”
He draws his pistol and points it at me. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“Q!” I yell, my voice sounding hoarse. “Get my son.”
There’s silence.
“Q, I told you to get my fucking son.” I hear the last of my echo. Q’s tall black figure stands up from behind his stalagmite.
The poor father across from me holsters his pistol. I watch Q walk with that infidel grace across the ice. He disappears into the passageway. For some reason I start tearing up when he emerges, my son limp in his arms. I hold the tears back.
Infidels don’t cry.
“Come on,” I offer the father. “Come on around. Let me show you why a good human being like Q will work with a man like Nebuchadnezzar.”
He stands in indecision for a moment. I can tell that this man, only twenty feet or so away from me, is in turmoil. The steam of his breath fills the air and dies away. Fills the air and dies away. Finally, he nods.
He turns around, walks back up the bank, and scoops up his rifle.
Q and I wait with my unconscious son. The man wanders along the river a ways and jumps over the water where it narrows.
“You are very brave,” Q tells me as we wait.
I shake my head. “I’m glad you approve.”
“Don’t be too glad,” Q says. “I’ll take it back if you get shot.”
Aiden is so pale in his arms, as white as this cave. His blond hair is sticking up in the cold. I reach out and smooth it with my numb fingers.
“I’m going to kill Nebuchadnezzar when this is done,” I mutter.
Q shakes his head. “You made a deal.”
“With a corpsefucker.”
“Indeed.”
The father walks up to us, his rifle held across his chest. His eyes are on Aiden.
“Is he . . . a wight?”
I shake my head. “Halfway. On edge, they call it. And there is a chance we can save him, a small one, but a real one. We need Nebuchadnezzar to do it.”
The man stares at Aiden. He looks to the ceiling and lets out a deep breath. The air fogs with his exhalation, billowing upward toward the stalactites above. He covers his eyes for a second. Then, with that hand, he reaches out and grabs me by the shoulder.
“You have no idea,” he says through clenched teeth, “no idea how much I want to kill him.”
I nod, and then check back over my shoulder toward Nebuchadnezzar. “Maybe not. But I’m starting to get an idea.”
“I don’t want your boy to die,” he says. “Is there no other way?”
Q shakes his head. “Trust me, if there was, we wouldn’t be working with a man like that. El Cid, back there, she ordered me not to do this. It’s the love that Cris holds for his son that has made us compromise ourselves so.”
The father takes another deep breath, sending more fog into the air.
“Well, he’ll be out,” I say. “You could raid his keep while we’re gone. Save your daughter from undeath.”
“Is he taking that monster wight with you?”
I grimace. “No.”
He covers his face with his hands.
“If you fear you cannot beat the Creature,” Q says, “then you should know that if we leave, Nebuchadnezzar will send it against you. It does not matter, logically, whether Nebuchadnezzar is with us or not.”
Sometimes Q’s straightforward thinking just doesn’t help.
“This isn’t a logic question, Q,” I say. “Some things you fight for, win or lose. Children are one of them.” Now I put my hand on the father’s shoulder. “Which is stronger with you, your pain at losing your daughter, or your empathy for the hope I have of saving my son? You give the word, and I’ll stay out of the way. But if you let me go, this much I promise you, I’ll make sure Nebuchadnezzar makes it back here so you can have a chance to kill him.”
He shakes off my hand and turns his back to me. He walks over to the river and kicks a chunk of ice into it. The current drags it swiftly along, knocking it against the bank a couple of times before I lose sight of it.
He turns back and looks at Aiden. Q shifts, adjusting my boy in his arms.
Another breath.
“Save your son, Infidel Friend,” he says, and walks away.
“Thank you,” I answer.
I’m not sure how long I slept, but the awkward position I did it in—one side propped up against the gondola and my head bent all the way back—left me with a sore side and a neck so tight I can’t turn it all the way to the right. That, and I have a monstrous headache.
At least it’s not cold anymore.
Q stands in the back of the boat, his alert eyes darting from right to left. Even as he does so, he moves the pole in the water, guiding us with peripheral vision, I suppose, down the waterway.
The river itself now has a regular stone bank, worked over by Hell’s architect into the shape of bricks. The rock above us is similar, forming vaulted ceilings of dark red and black stone. Sometimes that ceiling is so low that Q has to be careful not to hit it with his pole. I even see him duck under one arched overhang.
I work at my neck with my fingers, but they hurt like hell, too. Maybe I’ve got a bit of frostbite or something. Hell, I might have just slept on them.
El Cid is sleeping somewhat more gracefully than I’d managed. Her knees are tucked up to her chest, her chin resting between them. Nebuchadnezzar and my son are in the front of the boat. Aiden is mercifully unconscious, and the necromancer seems to be sleeping as well.
“How long was I asleep?” I whisper to Q.
“Two hours,” Q says, guiding us around a Doric pillar which rises out of the water, stopping just short of the ceiling. “Maybe three.”
I yawn and try turning my head to the right again. No luck—pain shoots from my eyeball to my neck and then down to my ass. I redouble my massaging efforts, kneading deep into my shoulder muscles with my aching fingers before working my way up to my neck.
“And how long until Dendra?” I ask.
“Two days,” Q says, “assuming we sleep in shifts.”
I haven’t had a good night’s rest since Maylay Beighlay. I probably won’t until after Aiden is cured.
“Devilsign?” I ask.
“Thankfully not,” Q says. “Not yet. This river is far from tame, though. We’ll face some dyitzu, no doubt, before you sleep again.” He poles us gently forward. “I should warn you about Aiden.”
Damn. “What?”
“As dangerous as this is, it’s nothing compared to the Erebus. We’ll be north of the Carrion, and that’s good, but we’ll need to be quiet. We’ve lessened your son’s dosage of the ferment so that we can keep him sedated later. Besides, Neb over there says he needs to coach your boy, so . . .”
So, in the short term, he’s going to be in pain.
“Okay,” I say.
It’s Aiden’s voice that wakes me.
Somehow I’d managed to fall asleep in exactly the wrong position again. Jesus, and I thought I was sore before. I’m pretty sure I have a gondola shaped bruise starting on my buttocks and running up the left side of my body.
“But I like black,” Aiden is saying.
This is as cogent as I’ve heard him in some time.
It’s Nebuchadnezzar’s accentless 1940s movie voice which responds. “But blue is the most beautiful color an eye can be. They used to give me lots of money to make sure that brown eyes could be turned to blue. You’re lucky, to have been born this way. It shows you’re an Übermensch.”
Fuck. Well, I guess after spending time with his mother and an Archdevil, a little Nazi guidance can’t do too much damage.
Aiden says something, but I can’t quite make out his tiny voice.
“Don’t say that,” Nebuchadnezzar responds. “Your father loves you very much.”
“Cris doesn’
t love me.” Aiden’s voice seems so terribly small, so terribly lost. “It’s hurting.”
“The powder I gave you will only last a little while longer, so you’ve got to concentrate while you can.” Nebuchadnezzar says.
He gave my son what? I feel my blood heating up.
“I want to go back to sleep,” Aiden says.
“You need to be strong,” Neb replies, “for your father, like we discussed. We’re taking you to a place which can heal you. You just have to concentrate on yourself. You won’t be able to feel it here, but at the Erebus, when you let your mind wander, oh—the power you’ll feel.”
“Will it take away the pain?”
“Oh yes,” the necromancer answers. “All your pain will melt off you. You’ll feel strong, like you haven’t felt in weeks. And you’ve grown up, boy. You might feel stronger than you ever have before. I need to teach you, to teach you how to heal yourself.”
Aiden’s next words seem forced. “I don’t want to learn from you.”
I sit up, startling Nebuchadnezzar. Waves of pain crash through my body, stemming from my ridiculously stiff neck.
“You do want to,” I say.
“He’s right,” Nebuchadnezzar says.
Aiden shakes his head and his nostrils flare. “I don’t have to get healed. If I get sick all the way, that’ll end the pain too.”
Nebuchadnezzar nods. “You’re right, but you won’t be able to do either for some time. This thing I’m about to teach you, it will help with the pain. It will help you with the pain now.”
“I don’t need you!” Aiden shouts at the necromancer.
I shush him.
“It’s not from me,” Nebuchadnezzar says. “The most evil man I know taught me this.”
Aiden’s darkened eyes narrow in suspicion. “Then why did he teach you, if he was so evil.”
Nebuchadnezzar smiles. “You’ll have to learn to find out.”
El Cid’s green eyes pop open. For a second I’m afraid she was awakened by the distant sound of some devil I could not hear, but she seems unworried. I feel along the side of my pack until I find the Old Lady. The grain of its smooth wooden stock makes me feel safer.
The river has grown wider and shallower. It might only be five feet deep in places, and in the lighter rooms I can see the smooth granite stone floor beneath it. The chambers still have those odd arched roofs, but they are broader now, and lower. Doric pillars stand in places, rising up out of the river, some reaching the ceiling while others stop short of it. As we move from room to room, we find pillars on the shoreline too, and at times they spring up all over like an odd sort of stone forest.
Nebuchadnezzar’s voice, the one I think of as honest because it has a bit of a German accent, drones on in an even, hypnotic monotone that blends into the background white noises of the rush of the water and the gentle sound of Q’s poling. “Worry not about each thought. Don’t try not to think them, but categorize them as thoughts. Put them in a little bubble, recognize them, and move on. And if the pain distracts you, this is no worry. The pain itself is just another thought, in another bubble.”
The exits to these rooms, all arches, are numerous and dark. For all I know, there’s an army of devils waiting under those granite keystones. The idea causes the hair on the back of my neck to bristle.
“Now think of what you feel. Think of how you sense your entire body. The sensations, all of them, running up into your mind. Let’s center your attention, for a moment, on your hand. Try, if you will, to lose any preconceived notion of its shape. Right now, you think you feel your five fingers, but this is an image which you have mapped onto the sensations. Try to feel, really feel, what your nerves are reporting.”
I see scratch and burn marks along one of the pillars. There is some oily residue on the ceiling, too, as if a dyitzu’s fireball had struck there and died out.
Devilsign.
I hear Q suck in air through his teeth as he sees it. El Cid sits up a little straighter.
The river leads us gently through another low arch and into a short tunnel before bringing us into the next room. It’s broader than the last, with a thicker forest of pillars than we saw before. Some of the archways have a second level of entrances above, leading to even more tunnels—each as black as the eye of a wight.
Nebuchadnezzar’s even voice does not stop. “It doesn’t feel like five fingers, does it? Not if you really concentrate on what you feel. The sensations are almost like a nebulous cloud, about where your hand is. Focus on that. Now, when we’re at the Erebus, you will feel that cloud connect with something, a mist in the air of a sort that you can’t see, or smell, or touch. It’s all around us, now, as we speak, but at the moment it is beyond your senses. When we’re at the Erebus, you will feel it.”
The next chamber is even taller. There’s houndsign, too, I’m noticing. I see some of their burrows in a woodstone wall toward the back. It looks like the woodstone has healed a little, so I’m hoping these are the abandoned homes of hellhounds who left years ago.
“You will feel the mist even as you feel your hand,” Nebuchadnezzar is saying. “But don’t follow it outward, follow it inward. You’ll see the mist is something that occupies the same space as yourself. As you move through it, you bring your soul with you. That soul now is made of two things. One killed by fire, the other by ice. When you get to the precipice, when you look out across that evil river, you’ll feel the burning begin. It will race through your body and come up your spine with more power than even the pain you feel now. That burning will encompass you, but it will not consume you, and it won’t seem quite like agony. It will seem like something else, like . . . convalescence.”
I feel something—something in the air. Anticipation? Fear? I can’t quite describe it, but it’s powerful. The bristling hairs on the back of my neck settle down because the waiting is over. I know what’s coming. I glance at El Cid. Q’s looking at her too. She nods.
“Nebuchadnezzar,” Q says. “Come take the pole.”
“I’m—”
“Now,” Q’s voice is calm.
I draw the Old Lady even as El Cid shoulders her M-16.
“Get Aiden down,” she whispers.
It’s their breathing, I realize. I can hear the breathing of devils, just barely, echoing throughout the chambers over the sound of the river.
Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes grow wide and he moves quickly to the back.
“It’s okay, Aiden,” I whisper as I ease him down to the bottom of the gondola. “It’s okay. We’ve got infidels on our side. We’ll be fine.”
The room erupts with fire.
Fireballs stream in at us.
Our boat rocks as Nebuchadnezzar poles us to one side.
The dozen hunched dyitzu who threw them scatter behind their missiles, clawed feet clicking against the stone as their strangely humanesque strides carry them across the chamber. Their ruddy skin helps them blend in against the red and black background.
El Cid and Q’s M-16s fire off three-round bursts in quick succession.
One dyitzu pivots, its clawed arm readied for another throw. It forms its fireball as I line up the Old Lady. The trusty shotgun booms and the buckshot catches the beast in the shoulder, sending it spinning to the ground. It starts to rise. I cock the shotgun, a spent shell whirling away, bouncing off the edge of the boat. My next blast is a slug. It blows the wounded dyitzu’s head open, sending up a spray of blood, brains and bone.
The smells of gunpowder and hot copper fill the air as the last trio of Cid’s spent .223 shells tinkle along the wooden floor of the boat. One of the dyitzu is twitching, but none seem alive. Jesus, those Infidel Friend are efficient—but they’ve still got their guard up.
My ears ring in the sudden silence.
“There’s more,” Q warns.
“Many more,” Cid clarifies.
Our gondola drifts over to the stone bank and collides with it. Our wake washes up against the rock, spilling water over the edges of the sto
nes. Nebuchadnezzar begins poling us forward again, slowly, tentatively, his blue eyes darting left and right.
I load two more shells into the Old Lady.
There are perhaps two or three hundred shadow-filled archways set in two levels along the back of the room. I peer into those dark passages, fearing how many might contain dyitzu. I see one, its deep red humanoid torso just barely visible in a second story arch. Its legs and arms are hidden in the darkness.
“I see one,” I report, raising the Old Lady to my shoulder.
“Hold,” Cid orders.
The dyitzu I spotted was on the left, but Q is looking to our right.
“Is it clear?” Cid asks him.
“I don’t know.”
“I need to know, Q.”
“I said I don’t know.”
“Then fucking guess!” she orders.
“Clear.”
I see movement down a second archway. “Another,” I say.
“The hell are they waiting for?” Cid asks as Q turns around and levels his M-16 to the left.
Nebuchadnezzar’s poling keeps us away from the banks. I look down into the water as the granite riverbed passes below, but I don’t see any devils lurking beneath the current.
We’re about one hundred yards into the chamber, and we have about two hundred left to go. There’s a small turn in the river near the end of the room that might prove to be difficult.
Jesus fucking Christ, this is weird. Dyitzu aren’t known for their restraint. If something is organizing them, we could be in some serious shit. It’s not like the river leaves us a whole lot of ways to avoid an ambush.
“The hell are they waiting for?” Cid asks again.
“I don’t know.” Q’s voice is unsure.
“Hounds?” I ask.
Q nods. “I think I can smell them.”
Fuck, smell them from the boat? Maybe. It’s Q, so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
El Cid shakes her head. “Stop the boat, Neb.”
The pole scrapes along the bottom, slowing us, but we’re still moving.
“Push us to the side,” Q orders.
Nebuchadnezzar follows Q’s instructions. The boat, still drifting toward the center of the chamber, bumps against the granite bank with a thud. I reach out and put a hand on the slick stones to help hold us. Finally we stop.
Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2) Page 5
