Damnation

by Peter McLean

  “I see,” Trixie said.

  “I bloody don’t,” I said, keeping my voice low. “She’s a fucking goddess. If she wants to finish the Dominion off, why hasn’t she?”

  “Ah,” Trixie said. “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”

  No, no, I didn’t think it would be. Nothing ever bloody is, is it?

  “Enlighten me,” I said.

  Trixie sighed. “You see, you’re right,” she said. “Menhit is a god, and that’s the whole problem. A god cannot fall, Don. As such, I’m afraid a god cannot enter Hell.”

  “Right,” I said, although that was news to me. “So?”

  “So,” she said, and paused. She looked at me for a moment. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up.”

  Uh oh.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I went to see Adam in London, before we came back,” she reminded me. “Well, I haven’t had the chance to mention that Menhit had also been in touch with him.”

  “No, no you didn’t mention that,” I said.

  I was starting to get a bit of a bad feeling about this, to put it bloody mildly.

  “Yes well, there we are. Heinrich is choosing his words very carefully,” Trixie said, meaning the bloke was spinning us a yarn. “Menhit and Adam have already made common cause in the matter of the Dominion.”

  “That’s nice for them,” I said.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t nice for us,” Trixie said. “Adam wants the Dominion ended every bit as much as Menhit does, possibly more. He’s still very concerned about the prospect of war in Heaven, Don. The Dominion wasn’t working alone. In fact, Adam fears… well, Adam fears that it may have simply been a pawn of a higher power. A Throne.”

  I looked up sharply at her. “The throne is burning,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I was afraid of, when you told me what Janice said. If a Throne is behind the rebellion, then it’s vitally important that it doesn’t get that Dominion back. It’s far too powerful for us to risk that happening.”

  “But–”

  “No,” she said, “I know what you’re going to say and I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. A Throne is… oh I have no idea how to explain it to you. It isn’t like a Dominion but bigger, if that’s what you were thinking. A Throne is a different thing altogether, more pure intellect than physical power. It won’t fight by itself, that’s what it has Dominions for. And angels, for that matter. It needs weapons, Don. That’s why it wanted Menhit in the first place.”

  I drained my glass of wine and poured another. Heavenly politics were a bit beyond me, I have to admit, and their power structure seemed to be arcane beyond belief. I didn’t think I’d ever get my head all the way around it.

  “Is this our problem?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” Trixie said. “Adam is a duke, in Hell, and it seems he can come and go as he pleases. All that show he made about having escaped again after the Dominion cast him down into Hell was, well, more of his theatre I suppose you’d say. You know what he’s like.”

  Don’t I fucking just? He’s like a prick, is what he’s like.

  “Right,” I said again. “So he’s got the keys to the back door, has he?”

  “Effectively, yes,” Trixie said.

  That explained something that had been bothering me for a while, actually. As I’ve said before, you can’t summon something that’s already on Earth. It’s flat out impossible, but last year I had summoned Adam. I’d been so fucking surprised that it had worked at all that I hadn’t given a thought to how it had worked, at the time. All the same it had been on my mind off and on ever since. If he could return to Hell on a whim though, then maybe he hadn’t been on Earth when I forced him to come to me against his will. That was an interesting thought in itself.

  “He used his way out then,” Trixie went on, “for all that he came to us burned and ragged and pretending to have fought his way out. No, I’m afraid he just slipped out, and he can slip back in the same way. And we’re supposed to go with him this time.”

  I choked on my wine. Fucking what?

  “That’s not funny, Trixie.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Trixie said, “but it’s where we are.”

  Oh fucking is it? I glared at her as she went on.

  “Adam isn’t strong enough to end the Dominion all by himself, even in its fallen state, and Menhit cannot enter Hell. But Adam can get us in. Between him and me and… and you,” she said pointedly, and I knew she meant the Burned Man, “we should be able to finish it off once and for all.”

  “And why exactly the fuck would we want to do that?” I said.

  Diabolists go to Hell, Don.

  I’m sorry but I had absolutely no desire to go to Hell. Aside from the obvious, Hell was the Burned Man’s home turf. Hell was the one place where the Burned Man wasn’t even bound, for fucksake. If I walked in there with the bound version of the Burned Man inside me I had no idea what would happen, but I couldn’t see that it would be anything good. And then there was Trixie herself, of course. She wasn’t a fallen angel, not quite anyway, but by her own admission she had most definitely slipped a bit. A trip to Hell might just be enough to shove her over the edge and into Adam’s open arms. And I’d have bet good money the smarmy bastard knew that.

  “We haven’t got any choice,” Trixie said. “We swore to serve Menhit.”

  Well we’d have to fucking see about that. However scared I was of Menhit, this was worse. Much, much worse.

  “I’m not doing it,” I said.

  Trixie gave me a level look.

  “We have to,” she said.

  “No, we fucking don’t.”

  Trixie’s mouth tightened in a furious line for a moment and I suddenly realized that Adam’s henchman, this Heinrich geezer, was quietly sitting there listening to us argue. She glanced at him.

  “Thank you Heinrich,” she said. “You may go.”

  If he took any offence at being so offhandedly dismissed he gave no sign of it. This bloke was obviously a fair bit cleverer than Mikael had been, that was for sure. He knew who and what Trixie was, all right, and he knew that what she said went.

  “I bid you a good evening, Angelus,” he said as he rose. “Don.”

  I nodded at him as he turned on his heel and left the restaurant.

  “We must not argue in front of the Soulless,” Trixie hissed. “Every word they hear is a word Adam hears, don’t you understand that?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose so,” I said, “but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not going to fucking Hell, Trixie.”

  “Menhit will make us,” she said, and there was a hint of a tremor in her voice.

  I looked at her, and I remembered Menhit knocking her to the floor back in Edinburgh. It suddenly dawned on me that she was every bit as scared of Menhit as I was. I mean of course I was scared of Menhit, but then I’m scared of a lot of things. Trixie wasn’t.

  “How?” I asked. “How can she make us?”

  Trixie’s eyes flashed with frustration. “You said it yourself Don, she is a goddess. She can do anything.”

  “Well she obviously can’t, can she?” I countered. “Otherwise she’d be doing this, not plotting with the likes of Adam and having to bully us into doing it for her.”

  Trixie blinked at me. It looked like she hadn’t thought of it quite like that.

  “Well not anything, perhaps,” she said. “But you know what I mean.”

  I did, but all the same something was nagging at me. Something Davey had said… no, it was no good, it was gone. I knew there was something though, something I was missing.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “For now I’m saying ‘no’, and unless she puts a fucking gun to my head it’s staying ‘no’. Besides which, she hasn’t even fucking asked.”

  “Ah,” Trixie said. “I’m afraid that’s another thing I’ve been meaning to bring up.”

  I stared at her.

  “Fucking reall
y?”

  Trixie at least had the good grace to blush.

  “There was never really a good time,” she said.

  “We’ve been in the back of a car together for eight sodding hours today, bored out of our skulls,” I said. “That might have been a great time, Trixie.”

  She cleared her throat and took a long swallow of wine. Her hand was trembling as she put the glass down, I noticed.

  “I don’t want to go to Hell, Don,” she said quietly.

  Oh dear God, bless her. Of course she didn’t. Trixie knew all too damn well how close she had come to falling before, and she of all people should know how close she still was. She was terrified of Hell, I realized. Of course she was, but she was apparently terrified of Menhit too. Jesus, what sort of fucking corner had we painted ourselves into when we took up with her? I reached out and put my hand over Trixie’s.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said. “I know it will. There’s something in my mind that I can’t quite catch, but I know it’s important. Look, let me talk it out with Papa Armand, I’m sure we can figure it out between us.”

  Trixie swallowed and nodded.

  “I hope you can,” she said.

  I fucking well hoped so too.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I phoned Papa Armand the next morning.

  “Don-boy Drake,” he said, and I could hear his warm smile down the phone. “I startin’ think you dead!”

  I grimaced, but I knew Papa meant well.

  “No, not quite Papa,” I said. “Almost, perhaps, but not quite. Look, can I come and see you? I need some advice.”

  “Of course, Don-boy,” he said. “You always welcome come Papa. That what I here for.”

  Papa Armand was there for himself of course, I knew that damn well. All the same the old Houngan had taken me under his wing of his own accord, and I respected him immensely. He was such a cool old guy for one thing, and I couldn’t help but feel like he was almost the dad I’d always wished I’d had. Not quite, perhaps, but almost. He would have been a damn sight better than the dad that I had had, that was for sure.

  I took a taxi to his building in Knightsbridge and stood self-consciously in the private elevator as it wafted me up to his penthouse apartment. Papa Armand was seriously rich. He opened the door wearing black linen slacks and a big, baggy white shirt, untucked so that the long tails hung almost to his knees. His big black feet were bare on the thick white carpet in his hall.

  “Don boy, come in,” he said with a wide grin.

  He led me inside and I kicked my shoes off and followed him into his enormous living room. I padded across an acre of pristine white carpet towards the huge smoked glass windows that stood open to lead out onto the balcony. The view from up here was breathtaking, a multi-million pound vista of Kensington Gardens and across to Hyde Park and the Serpentine. Papa led me outside and waved me into an antique wrought-iron chair between heavy planters full of mature shrubs. There was already a glass of eyewateringly expensive single-malt whisky on the table waiting for me, the bottle standing invitingly beside it.

  Papa sat down opposite me and picked up his own drink, a dark rum that I could smell even from where I was sitting. He raised it in salute.

  “Your health,” he said.

  We drank together, and he lit a cigar with a slim gold lighter.

  “God but it’s good to see you, Papa,” I admitted.

  He smiled and nodded, letting me take my time. That was one of the things I loved about Papa Armand. He always seemed to know when I had something on my mind, and he knew I would tell him at my own pace so long as he didn’t interrupt. I stared out at the view for a moment, listening to the muted noise of the traffic far below.

  I started to talk, and I told him everything.

  The whole business with the Blade of Unmaking had been Papa’s idea in the first place, of making a talisman to carry the Burned Man down to the warrens to face Bianakith. An Ouanga, he had called that. I had never told him just how badly wrong that had gone. He knew what I had done, but not that I had managed to get myself possessed by the Burned Man in the process. I still wondered if he might have at least suspected it, but he hadn’t known for sure. Until now.

  “Heroin,” he said when I was done. His voice was uncharacteristically hard. “Perhaps it a good thing Menhit found you before I did.”

  I looked at him, and realized he was completely serious.

  “I’m sorry, Papa,” I said.

  “You know what that shit has done to my country?”

  I didn’t, but I doubted it was anything good. I hung my head in shame.

  “I just…” I said. “Oh fuck Papa, I’m sorry, you know? I just… I didn’t know how else to hide.”

  “Bondye’s balls, Don-boy,” he said, and now his expression was one of pity.

  Pity. I think that was worse than his anger had been. I could cope with his anger. I could stand there and take my bollocking like a man, but his pity? No, I couldn’t live with that. I felt six inches tall all of a sudden, and I felt a desperate need to try and excuse myself.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I… I can’t explain it really. Sometimes I’m not even myself. This thing inside me, the–”

  “Shhhhh!” Papa interrupted me urgently. “It quiet now, yes? Don’ disturb it. You think I don’ know about spirits in the head? I’m a Houngan, Don-boy. I’m a Horse of the Barons. I know all the fuck about wild spirits in the head.”

  I supposed that he did, thinking about it. He was a Vodou priest, after all, and the invocation of the loa was a big part of his religious practice. All the same, that was a different relationship to the one I had with the Burned Man, I knew that much. Even Baron La Croix went away again eventually. The Burned Man didn’t.

  “Of course, Papa,” I said. “Look, now you’re up to date I need to ask you about something.”

  Papa refilled our drinks from the bottles on the table and tapped ash from his cigar.

  “You can ask me anything,” he said. “I your Papa, that how this works.”

  “Yeah well, thanks and all that,” I said, “but this might be a bit, um, delicate. I need to ask you about Menhit.”

  Papa snorted.

  “Very strong lady,” he said, which considering she was a goddess was probably a bit of a fucking understatement as far as I could see.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Too strong for me,” he said, and laughed. “Two months she stay here, two months she fuck me raw and spend my money. She nearly get me banned from Wormwood’s place. Then, her people come and they say ‘your house is ready, Mother’ and off she fucked, with never a look behind her.”

  I gave him a wry smile. I had a feeling he wasn’t exactly telling me the whole story, based on what Trixie had said.

  Even Armand was at the end of his tether before she left him, she had told me, or something like that anyway.

  He obviously wasn’t going to bring up the little matter of that poor bloody waiter Menhit had torn in half with her bare hands. God, I wished Trixie hadn’t told me about that. That was the last thing I wanted on my mind while I was working my way around to saying “no” to her about this proposed fucking mission to Hell. There had to be a way to get out of it without having my own spine ripped out. Could the Burned Man really stand up to her, if it came to it?

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Look, Papa, how powerful is she? Really, I mean.”

  “Really? Not so powerful as she pretend, I’m thinking,” he said. “Not any more. Oh, when she first arrive she was terrible, make no mistake. You could feel the power coming off her like lightning.”

  He was right, I knew. I remembered how she had been after she had fought the Dominion, how I had knelt at her feet and accepted the mantle of Keeper with never a second thought. Her power had been overwhelming, how you might expect a living goddess to be. I had honestly feared for the world, with her walking the Earth in physical form. But… nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

  “Yeah, I reme
mber,” I said.

  “That her old power, brought through with her from her endless sands,” Papa said. “Here though… I dunno Don-boy, truth be told. She has… diminished, the Mère de la guerre. No one worship Menhit, these days.”

  That was it, that was what I had been grasping for in the restaurant last night. That thing Davey had said – There are computer game characters with more worshipers than Menhit these days. Ridiculous as it sounded he was probably right, at that.

  “And that makes a difference to a god, does it?” I asked him. “Worshipers, I mean?”

  Papa shrugged. “It seem to,” he said. “Oh she still a god, don’t forget that, and only a god can create energy from nothing. How much energy though, well, that seem to depend.”

  I felt a slow smile cross my face.

  I knew it!

  Menhit fucking well couldn’t do anything she wanted, could she? Not these days she couldn’t, not when only Egyptologists and occultists had even bloody heard of her and only a handful of headcases actually still worshipped her.

  I grinned at Papa Armand.

  “Papa, you’ve made my fucking day,” I said.

  “I don’ want you to get carried away, Don-boy,” he said. “You serve her, diminished or not, and she won’t forget that. You can’t disrespect a goddess.”

  “Maybe not, but I can fucking well refuse to walk into Hell for her,” I shot back.

  Papa blinked at me.

  “To do what now?” he said.

  So I told him about that, too. I told him about the Dominion, and about how Adam and Menhit had made common cause together to see it destroyed once and for all. Papa Armand nodded slowly.

  “No, no that sound like the mother of all bad fucking ideas,” he agreed. “That thing you carry in your head, you don’ want to be carrying that back home. And Madam Zanj Bèl… no, Don-boy. Hell is not a good place for her to be going, I don’t think.”

  I didn’t think it was a good place for anyone to be going, but I knew what he meant. Trixie, Madam Zanj Bèl as he called her, was particularly vulnerable in that aspect.