“Great one, forgive us,” A taller one with skull-like tattoos on its face pushed forward, sheathing its spear and spreading its hands. “We did not receive word of your arrival.”
I grinned under my mask. Score one for cultural misunderstandings. I’d often wondered why Thirteenth Chain and the Grimalkin had caved so easily, back in the quarry. Extensive questioning had finally answered that, and the same answer applied here and now as it did back then.
I could fly without wings, or lift bladders or other visible means.
In Hell, the only things that could do that were the greater demons and the Fallen Angels. Ergo the display of this power indicated that the user was a badass.
Which was true, honestly. But it was nice to have a clear sign of dominance, one that saved me from having to fight off entire flocks full of these poor bastards.
“TAKE HER TO YOUR LORD.” I commanded them.
“Of course, my lord…?”
“DIRE.”
“May we know your titles?”
“NO.”
Silence for a moment. One of them coughed.
“WELL?”
“My apologies, great lord, but we unworthy ones must tell you that our Lord Illwrack, third of his name, eleventhborn of Buer, Slayer of the Beasts of Grond, Destroyer of Fallen Vornia, Eater of the Candles of Woe, Defiler of the Screaming Siren, Thrice-cursed by the Hated Fates...”
He went on for a ways. I tuned out after a few minutes, until he got to the point. “...has decreed that all who visit Caym must enter through the appropriate gate. You, of course, Lord Dire, would be entitled to the Gate of the Guest, below and to your right, third from the river. Allow us to go on ahead and—”
“WAIT. EACH GATE IS DIFFERENT?”
“Well, yes. Everyone who enters must come in through the gate that matches best their station and—”
“NAME THEM.”
“What?”
“NAME THE GATES.”
He rattled through them, and I shook my head. “NONE OF THOSE SUIT HER. SHE SHALL THUS TAKE THE MEANS BEST SUITED. WHICH IS ILLWRACK’S KEEP?”
“That tower of course,” he said, pointing to the largest spire.
“THUS SHE DECIDES HER GATE.” I slammed out of the sky, so fast that my sonic boom rippled the air, scattered the fiends, and made Beaky shriek in rage. Before any of them could react, I slowed, hit the ground in a wide plaza with a sickening crunch of stone, and flipped my cape back, strolling off towards the tower
I kept my sensors dialed way the hell back, down to basic optics. This close to the anomaly, they were far too sensitive to risk maximum activation. That was also my reason for steering clear of the Guest’s Gate; the path from there to the tower would have taken me right past it. I honestly wasn’t sure if my shielding was strong enough to handle the proximity. This? This was stressing my systems, but it was doable.
Leathery flesh fluttered in the air behind me, as the fiends landed and hurried to catch up with me, snarling at gawkers and pushing them aside. I was moving through markets, by the look of it. Demons of all shapes, colors, and sizes, paused in the act of trading goods and services, left off from their haggling and fell silent as I passed.
Our path through the market was three kilometers long, and on that walk I saw more atrocities than I ever had in my time on Earth.
There were cafes of a sort, with cooks hacking hunks of meat from screaming Damned who writhed impaled on meat hooks, eyes wedged open so they could ‘enjoy’ the sight of their own ribs sizzling on grills again and again. Leather workers flensed their Damned stock of living skin, working it into gloves, boots, and coats while they chatted with their neighbors, who were busy pulling teeth from their Damned and grinding them into powder with mortars and pestles.
It was the rendering vats, where people were lowered bodily into bubbling tureens of fat, that finally made me look away, as my stomach did a slow roll.
If there had been some sign of joy at this, I think I would have snapped entirely and just opened fire until the city was dust around my ears. But of the demons I saw, none of them seemed invested in it at all. They seemed not to give it any more thought beyond the barest attention required.
This torment was simply work to them. Nothing more.
I tallied the Damned held here, and made note of their faces. Those that still had them, anyway. Much work to be done, after today’s errand was over. But before that...
“Any better views on the anomaly?” I asked.
Khalid responded. “I have emerged onto Beaky’s back, and I am surveying it with a telescope. It is definitely a mechanism of some sort, but I am unclear as to its purpose. After the blood passes the crushing cylinders and the wheel, it flows unimpeded to the edge of the cliff and the spillgate that opens onto the great falls.”
I gnawed my lip. “Matters are in hand down here, for the minute. But it’s going to get hectic shortly. Look, do you have a means of getting a photograph of the mechanism?”
“I could rig up a pinhole camera. But that would take a few hours to craft.”
“Not good enough. Ah, how good are you at drawing?”
“Decent, perhaps. I have not an artist’s eye.”
“Do a drawing, run it down to Epsilon and the rest of the Chorus. Explain what you know, see if they can noodle out some possibilities.”
As I passed between the tower’s gates, the floor wailed below me. It took quite a bit of self-control to keep from jumping back in surprise. Instead I looked down, down into the face of some poor man, embedded into the floor with only his face protruding.
And then I noticed the rest of the tiles. Every three feet, another face poked out. The entire floor was coated in faces. And so were the tiles in the winding staircase, big enough for a horde of ogres. I’d just crushed the head I’d stepped on.
“DISTASTEFUL,” I commented. “LET DIRE GUESS, IT’S FACES ALL THE WAY UP?”
The fiend nearest me coughed. “Er. Yes, Lord.”
“LADY,” I clarified. I contemplated kicking in the gravitics, but the anomaly was too close. I’d risk damaging the flight system if I did that, and I couldn’t give up that advantage right now. Or maybe ever, until I got the materials and tools I needed to fix it.
I ground my teeth, steeled my resolve, and trod on the faces without care of my feet. They were Damned. They would heal. I kept telling myself that, as teeth snapped, cartilage gave, and wails fell into bubbling silence.
As I walked, I weighed my various plans, and discarded A through N. No, as fun as L might be, for this guy it was going to be O at the very least.
The stairs wound up, the blood dripped down, and accompanied by my escort of fiends I came to a throne room of purest obsidian. It stood open to the air on six sides, with a massive throne just a bit north of the stairs.
On the throne, surrounded by courtiers, sat the largest and ugliest looking demon I’d seen on my merry trip through Hell thus far.
He had the head of a boar, stretched out on a long, thick neck that fed back into a squat, round body. Six limbs splayed out around him, like legs that ended in hands, multiply-jointed and straining under the skin from ropes upon ropes of thick muscle. He wore black chain vestments that ended in a sort of skirt/kilt thing, and a crown set with rubies, placed to look like falling sprays of blood.
And right there, in the center of the crown, was a fucking Roja-Cola can. Weathered, crumpled, and with the color bleeding away around the logo, the little aluminum can jutted from the center of his crown, while rubies millions of times its worth spiraled down around it.
It took an effort of will to avoid bursting out with laughter. Then the thought occurred to me; how had that thing gotten here?
Suddenly it was a lot less funny and a lot more intriguing. And then, the reasons for its symbolism, for his display of the item, came to me. My heart filled with a fierce joy, and I felt my lips curve into a toothy smile.
“A PRICELESS ARTIFACT ADORNS YOUR BROW, LORD ILLWRACK. DIRE WOULD KNOW
HOW YOU CAME BY SUCH A THING.”
His eyes bulged, and he snorted. The courtiers around him gasped and muttered in fear and shock. Two stepped forward; a masked, robed form with chains extruding from his eyeholes, and a flawlessly beautiful woman wearing a metal bikini, easily mistaken for human save for the bat wings on her back and her black, pupil-less eyes.
The masked one wheezed, in a voice as tortured as the faces I’d trampled to get here. “You stand before Illwrack, Third of his name—”
“SKIP IT. SHE HAS HEARD THE LITANY BEFORE.”
The beautiful woman flared her wings. “You do Lord Illwrack much disrespect. Apologize now, guest.”
“YOU ARE INCORRECT. SHE DID NOT ENTER BY THE GATE OF GUESTS.”
They looked startled, and the leader of the flying fiends hurried forward, pulling them into a huddle. The rest of the courtiers snapped open spiky black iron fans, and whispered and muttered as they considered me through mismatched eyes.
But Illwrack narrowed his own eyes and watched me carefully, something like a smile creeping up his lips. Old, this one. Dangerous. He knew the score; he knew what I was going for. This could only end one way.
“May we ask your name, then, rude visitor?” the winged woman asked.
“SHE IS DIRE, FIRST OF HER NAME, MORTAL AND MIGHTY.”
All whispers ceased. Silence filled the room, interrupted only by the faint noise of the city below.
“You didn’t come in from the Slave’s gate,” Illwrack rasped, his voice impossibly deep and resounding. “Or the Bargainer’s gate. Or the Sorcerer's gate.”
“NO.”
“Nor did you enter by the Servant’s gate, or even the Traveler’s gate, which would seem to fit you, woman most mortal.”
“THAT IS CORRECT.”
Illwrack fell silent, smiling.
“Then you entered the city illegally, since you did not choose your gate.” The masked demon said, pulling a book with rusted-iron covers from his robes. The chains from his eyes fed into it, and pulled bloody links from his head as he snapped the book open. “I fear, that you are subject now to the full force of the law—”
“You are wrong, First Manifesto. She has chosen her gate.”
More silence, as the courtiers looked to each other. I smiled under my mask.
“I am currently without a bride,” Illwrack stated, rubbing his chin. “Would you care to be my queen?”
“NO. WOULD YOU CARE TO EXPLAIN WHERE THAT ORNAMENT ON YOUR CROWN CAME FROM AND HOW IT GOT HERE?”
“No.”
I nodded. “SO BE IT.”
“Lord, please, I do not understand,” the bat-winged woman turned to him, somehow managing to turn both her ass and the side of her barely-bikini’d tits to me as she did so. “Which gate did she choose?”
Illwrack looked to me, and gestured lazily with one hand. I took the cue.
“DIRE ENTERED CAYM THROUGH THE CONQUEROR’S GATE.”
Oh that caused a stir. Half the court laughed, the other half started talking at once, and First Manifesto started shouting. Through it all, Illwrack studied me. He was no longer smiling.
“Do you come to challenge me to single combat, then?”
“FUCK NO.”
Small gasps, and the court decided to fall into shocked silence again. Ironic, that, demons taking offense at harsh language. Guess the Catholics were wrong about all that swearing. “SHE BROUGHT AN ARMY, SO SHE’S BLOODY WELL GOING TO USE IT. SHE ONLY CAME TO FORMALLY DECLARE WAR AGAINST YOU.”
Now the demon lord smiled. “My army within this city numbers three million hellions. How many do you have?”
“FORTY-TWO. AND A BEAKY.”
Now he laughed, great wheezing laughs, that shook his gut and rattled his chainmail. “You would conquer my city with an army of forty-two?”
“SHE WOULD CONQUER YOUR CITY ALONE. BUT THE EXERCISE WILL DO THE POOR DEARS GOOD.”
He laughed all the harder. So I simply nodded, turned, and left.
Illwrack’s laughter cut out. “I did not give you leave to go.”
“NO. YOU DID NOT.” I watched him through the rear view camera as I went. This was the point where he’d try something, if I’d misjudged him. In the event that I had, and he decided to take his shot at my back, I’d go straight to plan R-2, with extreme prejudice. It’d be a pain to ride the remnants of the collapsing stair down before the tower fell entirely, but so long as I managed the dismount, I thought my chances were good.
He didn’t attack. I retraced my steps, this time letting my feet only fall on the faces of those I’d already slain, albeit temporarily.
The fliers followed me as I went, their wings folded, but their hands near their spears. I walked as if they weren’t there, studying their stances, watching their body language, trying to read them.
The streets ahead of me had emptied.... imagine that. We walked alone, the only noise the thumping of my metal boots on the cobblestones. It’d take a few minutes to get out of the danger-radius of the anomaly, so I activated the vox. “Khalid? Vector?”
“We’re here,” Vector replied. “Still trying to muddle through that puzzle you posed the Chorus.”
“It’s a puzzle for you, too. What are we looking at?”
“The only reason I can think of for those rollers is that they’re crushing the blood so thoroughly that they’re rupturing cell walls,” Vector mused. “They’re breaking it down to the finest of elements.”
“Elements.”
“Whatever they’re after, it’s not biological. Unless we’re talking prions or viruses, and even then there’s far better ways to harvest those then pressurization—”
The words left my mind as quickly as they arrived. “Whoa, stop, bad at biology, remember? So if it’s not organic, then what?”
“Epsilon has an idea,” Khalid said. “Although I do not see the sense in it. Blood contains iron. Very small amounts of iron.”
“Iron?” I frowned. “Why would they want that? They have plenty of veins in the quarries upriver.”
“Perhaps, but none around here. Yet where did these walls come from? And the cannon? And the armor and weapons they bear?”
“There has to be a better way to get iron,” I said, taking a look back at the fiends behind me again. They were conferring now, and some sort of bat-thing was riding on the leader’s shoulder, whispering in his ear. When had that arrived? I replayed the visual record, caught it showing up a minute ago. I was getting too far into my thoughts, getting sloppy.
“So they want iron,” I spoke my thoughts aloud, walking through them. “Then the crushers are part of a refining process. Makes sense that they put the smelters and the rest of the foundry right there, it’s not just for hydraulic power, it’s closest to the raw material. Those sacks they’ve got, they’re storing the iron harvested from the blood. But how are they pulling it out of the flow?”
A long pause. Then Khalid spoke, low, his voice filled with wonder. “I think I might know.”
Movement all around me, and I groaned. “Give her a second.”
I paused, mid-step, and craned my mask around to stare at the fliers. They surrounded me, flicker-fast, wings taut with tension, faces masks of coldness. Their spears were out now, and their spiky knuckles whitened as they gripped them.
“YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY?” I asked, flicking my cloak aside. The ones nearest my moving hand flinched, expecting a sucker punch.
“You entered Caym through the Conqueror’s Gate, Lady Dire,” The leader who’d spoken to me before intoned.
“YES.”
“You may not leave through that gate, Lady Dire.”
“TRY TO STOP HER.”
They did.
After the last of them was ash on a shattered pavement, I took to the sky, my outermost layer of armor scratched a bit. They’d tried. They’d died. I put them from my mind as I returned to Beaky and the first volleys of arrows started to fly up from the walls.
I stood on the edge of my demonic steed/lair combo
and glared down at the city below, hands on my hips. With a grin on my face and a realization that none of my foes had any chance of getting the reference, I gleefully quoted Bugs Bunny; “OF COURSE YOU REALIZE, THIS MEANS WAR!”
CHAPTER 6: THE FALL OF CAYM
“The battle that ensued is still replayed to this day. The City of Caym, as it was, has been turned into countless maps and acts as the introductory module to the mass
battle system.”
--Excerpt from the third book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie: Kingdom Management
One of the keystone cities in the great ring that encompasses the punishment for the sins of sloth and wrath, Caym had long stood the test of centuries. Conquered many times but never sacked, it was a prime piece of real estate, famous for its foundries and steel. Its walls stood high, clawing into the sky, studded with archery slits, murder holes... and cannons. Great cannons, fully capable of pounding Beaky into paste with a couple of direct hits.
But they’d made a classic mistake with the cannons, one perfect for our assets and strategy: they could only elevate the guns up to a certain point. We were well above that point, and the great cannons which had served Caym so well over so many wars could no more track up to fire at us than they could grow wings and fly up into the sky.
Speaking of that, I watched great swarms of flying hellions rise up around the tower, boiling out of barracks, heading up into the smoky clouds. Smart of them, they could use the clouds as concealment to approach without risking return fire from any archers we might have.
It was a good thing I hadn’t brought archers to this fight.
I clicked through HUD options until I got to the underslung cameras. The arrows from below weren’t having much effect on Beaky. The range was bad, even with the elevation of the towers, and the shafts had little chance of penetrating his hide. With his mouths shut and tentacles safely inside, there weren’t too many sensitive bits to tickle. No, the arrows were little threat. They would have been better used against light fliers, like the ones we were about to get jumped by.
Speaking of that...
DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6) Page 8
