“You are willful and reckless,” El Cid says. “You use your passion and anger to bully others into doing what’s best for you, into accomplishing your desires. You think you know everything, that you have all the answers, but really, your mind is just making things up on the edges of your knowledge. When those falsities are confronted, you don’t give them up easily.”
Something’s wrong.
What she’s saying shouldn’t bother me so much, but I guess the part of my brain which is supposed to protect me from such insults is asleep. I start crying. Infidels don’t cry, but what right do I have to call myself an infidel?
Yet, when I see Cid there, in all her green-eyed glory, I find that I’m not mad at her. I still love her.
“I love you,” I tell her again. “Even if Aiden . . . even if we all die, I wanted to let you know that . . .”
She smiles. “You remind me of the tale about two wolves inside a man. Compassion and Anger. Do you know which one wins?”
I nod. “The one I feed.”
“Fuck no, you dumb ass. There aren’t wolves inside people.”
I smile.
“But I know something about you, Cris. When you’re this tired, you can’t help but be who you really are. All your pretensions fall away. And do you know what I’ve learned about your core?”
I shake my head.
El Cid ducks as a crystal covered stalactite passes by overhead. “I’ve learned you have good taste in women.”
I laugh.
Our boat, unguided, scrapes along one stone bank for a moment before the current catches us again.
The cool air feels good on my face. “You should have seen Aiden’s mother. You might not be very happy to be in that company.”
El Cid smiles and looks at Aiden. “She breeds well, at least.”
I feel a flush on my cheeks. “Do you always insult people right before you compliment them?”
She purses her lips. “I suppose I do.”
My arms start to cramp, so I raise them, trying to loosen them up. “Keeps people off balance, huh?”
“If you’re not used to hearing the truth, Cris, yes.”
She picks the oars back up.
“I’m not,” I tell her.
“I know. That’s what it means to spend time with us infidels. It will start to rub off on you. Then, when you meet the people who live behind walls of white lies, you’ll wonder why they bothered to care if they looked fat in a dress or if their laugh was annoying. Why go to all that effort to protect yourself from bullets which aren’t even aimed at you?”
I scratch my chin. “I’m not sure if I know what you’re talking about.”
Stroke.
And the crystal-filled caverns keep on passing by.
Stroke.
“I’m sorry, Cris.” She pauses as she leans back from her oars, turning her face toward me. Our lips are only inches apart.
“Why?”
“If I had more energy, I’d tell you what I was talking about.” She turns back around.
Stroke.
I watch her as she rows. I try to remember what it was she said, so I can think about what she might have meant, but I can’t seem to get a handle on it. It’s like a word, hovering on the tip of your tongue, waiting for you to say it—only . . .
The even rhythm of her rowing becomes the gentle percussion to the music in my mind. It’s a song, distant, unfamiliar, sung by a feminine voice. It’s wordless, faintly operatic.
I freeze. It’s Myla’s voice.
Fuck.
“Cid!” I warn her. “Cid, Myla’s here.”
She glances at me, her sweaty brow creased with worry. “Who?”
“Myla. My ex.”
“Cris, you killed her.”
I shake my head to clear it. I must be hallucinating.
El Cid puts the oars aside and listens too. “Hellsong,” she whispers. “I recognize it. It’s the song of devils.”
“But it’s her voice!” I insist. “And I don’t know the song of devils. I can’t be mishearing it!”
El Cid looks to Aiden. He’s twitching with pain again.
“Wake everyone,” El Cid says. “We’re near the Erebus.”
My hands shake as I reach for Q. “How do you know?” I ask.
“When the world becomes subjective, you can hear another’s hellsong more clearly. We’re hearing Aiden’s now.”
Neb struggles into consciousness, breathing heavily. Q comes to more gracefully, but even he looks half-dead. The hull of our boat scrapes against the dark, natural rock of the bank. I look around the room, but I’m so tired I can’t make my mind retain its features. I put my hands on the bank and try to push myself up, but my arms are so spent that I have to use my legs to help.
I roll onto the ground, ending up on my back. Q passes my pack to me. I reach out and grab it with one wet-noodle arm. The effort of climbing onto the bank has me winded. I let my head fall to one side as I wait to catch my breath.
Neb is bending the pole against the stones, leaning his weight against it. It cracks. He picks up the bigger end and swings it in the air. I’m sure it will make a good club for him.
I see faint blue flashes from a chamber ahead. The light seems to come and go along with Myla’s song.
“Lights,” I say.
Q is standing over me. “That’s the Erebus, Cris.” He reaches down, offering me a hand. “Now for the hard part.”
“We’re maybe a half mile downstream from Soulfall,” Cid says as Q lugs me to my feet. “Go ahead and feed a wrap to Aiden. We’ll need him as mobile as we can make him.”
Q produces one of the wraps and offers it to my son. Thankfully, my boy is awake. He gags on it, and then stands on shaky legs. I think he’s still alive, and not a wight, but it’s hard as hell to tell.
“You okay?” I ask him.
His nearly black eyes focus on me. “I’ll keep up.”
“It’ll be a few minutes before that kicks in all the way,” Q says. “We’ll put you on your father’s back, then take you down when we reach Soulfall.”
Q picks up Aiden and straps him on me. My son’s even breathing tells me that he’s fallen back asleep already.
“Don’t worry,” Q says, sensing my concern, “he’ll wake back up in a few.”
“Everyone got everything from the boat?” Neb asks.
“Yeah.” The word barely leaves my lips.
Silently, we stand there on the bank. The gondola drifts along.
Nebuchadnezzar looks after it wistfully. “They used to bury kings like this. They’d put them in a boat and send them down the river. Then an archer would shoot a flaming arrow after it, to issue the king into the next world.”
It strikes me as fitting because, if what the infidels say is right, this boat is about to go off the edge of Gehenna.
“Then who are we burying?” I ask.
Neb swallows. “Ourselves.”
And then, as if to make his statement true, dyitzu pour into our room.
“Run!” Cid yells.
I sprint for an exit.
“We don’t have time to stop!” Cid screams.
Nebuchadnezzar leads the way, his grey overcoat flapping behind him, swirling mist trailing in his wake. The natural ceiling hangs low over my head. I worry about hitting Aiden on some of the lower juts of rock. While there are no stalactites or stalagmites, azure veins tear through the stone, lighting up the crystalline structures embedded in the cave walls.
El Cid and Q trail behind us, running on the balls of their feet, swords held at the ready.
For my part, I keep the Old Lady clutched to my chest.
Red fireballs form in the chamber ahead.
Jesus, they’ve cut us off.
Only now do I realize they are the reason El Cid said we couldn’t stop. Nebuchadnezzar and I barrel forward. He thrusts at a dyitzu with his broken pole. It ducks, but Neb just runs on by. I take a whack at it with the butt of the Old Lady and slip behind it, it’s half-cons
cious body acting as a shield from the fire of the second dyitzu.
I look back as I race out of the room. El Cid and Q, dodging a set of fireballs, strike at the dyitzu, each slash sending lines of blood across the room.
I trip over a rock and fall, throwing my arms up in front of my face. Aiden grunts as I land, and I feel his carrier shift to the right with his weight. My arms shake as I try to push myself up. I get my torso just high enough to post one of my legs.
Blue flashing lights touch my eyes.
The Erebus.
To my left, a tunnel runs about fifty feet before opening up to a section of the most alien hellscape I’ve ever seen. A rushing wall of tainted black air passes over that cave opening. Streaking blue threads of slow lightning stream through the dark colored air, illuminating us and the cave with their intensity. And then the lightning is gone, and the tunnel leads only to darkness.
A hand jams itself into my armpit.
“Move!” El Cid screams. “God dammit.”
Her strength and will force me to my feet. She drags me away from the cave, away from the river of darkness.
Aiden feels like he weighs a thousand pounds.
Fire whips by my head and splatters across the wall in front of me. I don’t dare turn back, but the purple light of Q’s sword flickers across the rocks, so I know he’s protecting me.
Fuck guardian angels. I’ll take an infidel any day.
“Move!” El Cid’s voice cuts through my fatigue.
My feet obey her. I see Neb ahead, looking back at me, illuminated by the quick flashes of blue light coming down the corridor.
“We’re almost there!” His eyes are wide, an insane grin across his face.
I’m pretty sure I can’t follow him anymore.
“Aiden,” I shout after the necromancer as I stumble on. “I can’t . . . carry.”
Nebuchadnezzar won’t slow down. I turn a corner, and though I can’t see the Nazi’s overcoat, I see the path he’d cut into the mist. I follow.
If I can just catch up with him, I can make him carry Aiden. He has to. My legs are about as weak as my arms. I have nearly no control over my forward momentum. I trip and run into a wall, but the pain means nothing. There is no choice but to keep going.
The purple and white colored lights of their swords are close behind me again. I have to go faster. I have to.
But I don’t think I can.
Then I turn a corner and run into Nebuchadnezzar nearly forcing him into the largest canyon I’ve ever seen.
They were right to call the Erebus a river, but it is no waterway. The air ahead of me is thick with some black, smoke-like substance—only it doesn’t rise through the air like smoke does. Rather, it flows. It ripples in places and makes waves in others. The smoke is thinnest near us. I look below the precipice on which we stand and the cliff races downward, straight downward, into the abyss below. When I look up, it’s the same. Infinite depths and infinite heights.
Chains of slow lightning weave their way through the flow of the river of darkness. Their brightness cuts through the opacity of the river, making small pockets of visibility and coloring them with the blue of the unchecked electricity. The lightning bolts waver back and forth in front of me, wider than the trees of Dendra, and long enough so that I cannot see their beginnings or endings. They intersect with each other, forming a tremendous tapestry of energy. Loose strands of that energy occasionally brush against the rocks of the cavern sending showers of blue sparks down like tiny rainstorms.
Neb points down. “Soulfall!” He shouts.
The man looks mad.
I look to where he’s pointing and see it, an island rising out of the depths of the river.
It’s an island of two peaks. The first, closest to us, is below. It looks like there was once a city built into the labyrinth of that first mountain. In places, worked stone creeps along its surface, and broken marble pillars point at where ceilings must have been. In other places, erosion or chance lightning strikes had torn away the worked rock altogether, leaving only a stone so dark it almost looks like obsidian.
As a curtain of lightning passes, I can see the valley beyond this first peak. It’s a wasteland of rubble and toppled buildings. The second peak rises beyond that, cutting up through the flow of darkness and the sheets of lightning, rising higher than even where we stand. I know not what is atop it because its distance is too great, and I cannot see through the black current.
“The river!” Nebuchadnezzar shouts over the rush of the Erebus and the periodic booms created by the lightning streams as they touch down on the rock walls. “It has carved out this space here! The city was built of whetstone, which repels the electricity. That’s what made Soulfall.”
I collapse to my knees.
Nebuchadnezzar unstraps Aiden. The boy manages to keep his feet, which is more than I can do.
“We’ve got to go back!” Nebuchadnezzar’s voice is as mad as his eyes.
I look along the cliff wall and see what has alarmed him. The dyitzu are leaning out from the caves which pockmark the cliffs. There is a curve in the Erebus ahead, and that gives them a direct line of fire to us.
“Forward!” El Cid yells.
She bursts around the corner, Q in tow. Q doesn’t stop, but increases speed. He plants one foot on the edge of the precipice and leaps out into the abyss. His body falls down into the river, just barely missing a cord of lightning. He lands on some of Soulfall’s natural rock. El Cid picks up Aiden, and then, with a couple of steps, launches him with all her body weight out into the river.
“No!” I shout.
Dyitzu fire cuts through the river’s darkness. Q ducks low under one missile before standing tall and catching Aiden.
El Cid shakes her head. “It’s safe!” .
Neb, eyes wide with ecstasy, leaps.
I’m incredulous, but the dyitzu are on us. El Cid slashes one’s throat open.
“Jump!” she insists, “for fuck’s sake!”
She opens a gash on another’s torso, her white blade parting its dark skin to reveal blood and pink muscle beneath. Her next thrust slices across a dyitzu’s outstretched arm, cutting into the flesh of its bicep. The muscle, perhaps cut loose from its tendon, springs back under its skin and bunches up near its shoulder.
I can hear the clicking claws of more dyitzu echoing in from the chamber beyond. I turn and jump into the Erebus.
I land amidst the rubble of a ruined temple whose broken marble walls cling to the side of Soulfall.
Safe? The fuck? No. Cid lied to me.
Cid never lies, but then I realize why. Here, in the Erebus, reality bends to match our minds, to match our subconscious expectations. Here lying can be the same as telling the truth.
I look up through the debris and along the steep slope to see Q and my son picking their way forward amongst the broken stones. El Cid lands, and rolls to one side. Dyitzu fire touches down behind her, splattering across the rocks.
“To Q!” she yells. “Climb to Q.”
I look back to the cliffs behind us. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny caves which open up to the Erebus. The dyitzu are filling them up. A wave of their fire comes at us.
I am beyond tired, and I can’t seem to keep enough breath in my lungs. The black air of the Erebus causes me to wheeze and cough, but I struggle forward and duck behind a pillar. Then I dare a backward glance. The thousand tiny burning orbs of dyitzu fire make a wall, a tsunami, as they approach us. A slow bolt of lightning flows through the wave, bursting some of the missiles, lighting up the sky with the rain of liquid fire—but that hardly makes a dent.
I cower behind a pillar as the wave sweeps across the side of Soulfall.
At first, it’s just one dyitzu which follows us, leaping down from the cliff and landing with a thud far below. Then come its brothers. I see one get caught up in a chord, its body exploding into a burst of blood as the white-blue energy tears it apart. The rest are landing amidst the ruins.
He stands up amidst the chest high series of dyitzu fires that surround him and points to a dark tunnel, one of the many which lead into Soulfall. I charge at it, heedless of the second barrage the dyitzu must even now be hurling at us.
I don’t stop until I enter the cave. Q is there waiting for me, Aiden in his arms. Nebuchadnezzar and El Cid come in after me. I can hear the tiny rumbles of the fireballs as they strike the stones outside. Red light pours in from the cave mouth behind us.
“The passages might have collapsed deeper in,” El Cid says.
“No chance out there,” Q yells. “And no time. They’re coming!”
El Cid shakes her head, her lips curling into a sneer. “Come on then, after me.”
We follow her into Soulfall.
It’s dark. So dark that the only illumination I see is coming from the light of El Cid and Q’s swords. I hear the clawed footsteps of the dyitzu behind us, following us through the tangled mess of halls and collapsed corridors. I’d give anything for one of those azure lightrock veins about now, just so we could see.
The next room has that at least, a perfect azure vein, running across the low arch of the ceiling. That might be the only lucky break we’ve had. The stones here have been worked over by human hands, but they must have had a cruel aesthetic. The corner stones are shaped just enough like skulls, with pits and pebbles for a toothy smile, to set me on edge. It’s as if they had somehow managed to make the room oppressive—and alive, those boney heads willing the walls to close in on us.
It could only be worse if we ran into one of those ruby veins. Then the walls would look like blood.
Aiden is walking on his own. That’s something good. For a moment, he turns and looks at me. I try to see some hint of blue in his eyes. He’s in pain, severe pain, but it’s hard to judge how far gone he is in the azure light the vein provides us with. Even so, I think I can see the hint of his iris. That’s something.
“Soon,” he says, his voice shaking.
Red light interrupts the soothing glow of the next room. A dyitzu has come in from behind us. I fall to the ground, the fireball sails over my head. Nebuchadnezzar decks the thing with his pole. I fight my way to my feet—reaching out to my fallen son—but Q is there, stabbing his thin purple sword through the thing’s black eyeball.
Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2) Page 10
