Damnation

by Peter McLean

  “My thanks, magus,” Trixie said, inclining her head.

  A door opened and several young serving boys filed in, carrying platters of bread and meat and a great flagon of red wine. The lads laid out the food and drink on the table, never speaking. It took me a moment to realize that none of them had a mouth.

  I blinked in revulsion and looked again. They looked like normal boys otherwise, maybe ten to twelve years old and dressed in old fashioned page’s outfits, but beneath the nose each one was just smooth skin down to his beardless chin. I swallowed. That was beyond nasty, in ways I was struggling to even think about.

  Even Trixie looked slightly queasy at the sight of the boys, but she managed to ignore them.

  “Sit,” Davey said, waving us to the table as he settled himself down into his throne.

  I took the chair at his right hand and Trixie sat across from me at his left. She averted her eyes as one of the awful boys poured wine for her into a plain silver goblet. I could tell they were creeping her out and I really didn’t care for them either, but I couldn’t be worrying about the likes of them now.

  Davey noticed her reaction and smiled.

  “Children should be seen and not heard, Angelus,” he said.

  Oh wasn’t he just a fucking delight? Trixie’s eyes flashed with anger, and I interrupted before she picked a fight with him over it.

  “How do I find Adam?” I asked him.

  “My guess is he’ll be waiting for you at the mouth of Hell,” Davey said. “At his postern gate, as you called it. Where the La’hah strikes.”

  “The what?”

  He kept using that word, and I hadn’t got a fucking clue what it meant.

  “It translates roughly as Guardian Lightning,” Trixie said.

  “Aye, it does, although that’s an old tongue indeed,” Davey said. “The La’hah is a living thing, so it is, not so very different to the Veils. It’s supposed to keep the abyss closed, so nothing can crawl up out of Hell and into this plane. It seems that the Fallen One has tamed it.”

  Oh wasn’t that a joyous thought.

  I sipped my wine and looked at him.

  “This won’t keep, Davey,” I said. “Thanks for the drink and all that, but we need to get after Olivia as soon as we can.”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not stopping you, Donny boy.”

  “So when are we going?”

  “You can go when you like,” he said. “Me, I’m going nowhere.”

  Trixie looked up sharply at that.

  “The matter of the abducted child is–” she started.

  “Aye,” Davey interrupted her. He chased the boys away with a wave of his hand. “That’s your affair, Angelus, not mine. The way out is that way.”

  He waved at the far wall and a pair of huge oak double doors swung silently open, showing us a long stone corridor lit with smoking torches.

  “I…” I started, “I, um…”

  Fuck, that really hadn’t been the answer I was looking for.

  Davey poured himself a cup of wine from the flagon and sat back with a contented sigh.

  “Off you jolly well fuck, then,” he said. “I’ve done my bit, the rest is up to you. Head towards the lightning. Towards the La’hah, where angels fear to tread.”

  “Oh, I assure you there’s nowhere I fear to tread,” Trixie snapped. She got up and strode into the corridor without a backward glance. “Come on, Don.”

  I swallowed. Right. Right, that was fucking marvellous that was. Davey had brought us to Purgatory but it seemed that was all the help we were going to get out of him. Miserable old git. I followed in Trixie’s wake, unable to keep from wincing as the doors to Davey’s hall swung shut behind us with a dull thud. The corridor ended in another pair of heavy doors which opened at our approach. We stepped outside into a courtyard under a threatening grey sky. The great stone mass of the keep loomed behind us and a moss-covered curtain wall extended around the castle yard. The gatehouse was before us, the way barred by a mighty portcullis.

  In the yard stood Davey’s wheel.

  I’ve dealt with ruder pricks than you over the years, and broken them on my wheel, he had said.

  It was fully twelve feet high, a great construction of ancient, weathered wood like the paddle wheel of a watermill but rimmed with ridged iron that looked designed to break bones and rend flesh. There were old, dark stains on the wood, and more on the stone flags of the courtyard beneath it. I felt sick just looking at it.

  He’s not kidding about his wheel, I remembered the Burned Man telling me. No, no it didn’t look like he had been. Fucking hell, this was Merlin?

  Really?

  I supposed by then it shouldn’t have surprised me. If there’s one thing in life that you can rely on, it’s disappointment.

  I looked around me with a shudder. The sky overhead was the thick, textured grey of overlapping cloudbanks, and the light was dim and utterly without warmth. I was bloody glad of my coat, I had to admit. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Come on,” Trixie said again, walking towards the portcullis. “I don’t like this place.”

  I had to agree with her on that one. Kelmeth castle was a fucking shithole, as far as I was concerned. The huge iron portcullis rumbled up into the gatehouse as we approached, and we passed through a wall so thick it almost made a tunnel over our heads. As soon as we were outside, the portcullis slammed down behind us with an awful finality that made the ground shake underfoot. I swallowed. It didn’t look like we were going to be welcomed back any time soon.

  We were in a country of low, rolling hills, covered in dead looking greyish grass. The few trees were leafless and bent, as though twisted by a wind that I couldn’t feel. There was no castle town, no road or farms or villages as far as the eye could see, and no indication of where the food or the wine or the ghastly mute boys had come from. There was nothing at all, in fact, but the endless deadlands. It seemed that Kelmeth ran on pure magic.

  I looked at the parched, lifeless ground and wondered where that magic had come from. Again I thought about the Hermit, the card that Davey had drawn as his trump when we had played Fates together. In some interpretations of the card, the Hermit stands not on the mountain peak of knowledge but at the edge of a vast wasteland. Like this one. Lightning flashed in the distance, colourless and painfully bright against the brooding sky. Thunder rolled in its wake. No, I had to admit I really didn’t like this place either.

  Not even a little bit.

  “Head towards the lightning,” Trixie said, and set off marching in that direction.

  I followed her, sparing a brief glance behind me at the forbidding walls of Merlin’s castle. The battlements were topped with iron spikes, I noticed, the sort of spikes that might have had severed heads stuck on them. There were no heads today, but old rusty stains on the stone told me that there might have been once. I swallowed bile and turned my back on the place.

  We walked in silence for maybe a mile, towards the growing fury of the storm. At last I plucked up the courage to ask.

  “Trixie,” I said, “how are we going to get back home?”

  She gave me a bleak look.

  “I have been trying to get back home for two thousand years,” she said. “I have no idea.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I pushed my hands back through my hair and sighed. That wasn’t quite what I had meant but… yeah, I supposed I could see her point.

  Davey had brought us here through a portal, and once we had rescued Olivia I had no idea how to open another one to get us all back to London. My warpstone was still on the floor of my workroom, after all. I turned and looked back the way we had come once more, and saw that Kelmeth castle looked much further away than it should have done. It was little more than a shadow on the horizon now, for all that we had only been walking for twenty minutes or so. Was Davey likely to let us back in, or help us to get home again? I thought about that portcullis crashing down behind us and had to admit that he probably
wasn’t.

  It took me a moment to realize that Trixie was crying.

  I reached out and took her hand. She turned to face me with tears glistening on her cheeks. She looked utterly lost.

  “I’m never going home, am I?” she said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “This is Purgatory!” she screamed at me, suddenly furious. “It’s supposed to be a place of cleansing and purification prior to entry to Heaven. Look at it, Don!”

  I winced. I had to admit I could see her point. If this had once been the beautiful Summerland she had been thinking of then Davey had leached every drop of life out of it over the millennia to feed his magic, hadn’t he?

  Fuck.

  Of course he had, I realized. All that “I’m still alive because I’m clever and I’m cruel” bullshit had been just that – bullshit. Davey, Merlin, was still alive because he had eaten the life force of a whole other fucking dimension to keep himself that way, the horrible old bastard.

  There was no way I could tell Trixie that, though. That would break her completely, I knew it would. The only thing that kept her going was the thought that one day, somehow, she might be able to go home.

  “You told me yourself that Purgatory is whatever you think it is,” I reminded her. “I mean, I didn’t know what to think it was but maybe… I dunno. You’re not at peace with yourself, Trixie. Maybe this is just what you were expecting to see?”

  She sighed and sank into a crouch, her head in her hands.

  “Maybe it’s what I deserve,” she said. “Maybe I knew that, all along. I have… slipped, after all.”

  Slipped, yeah.

  She had done that all right. Not fallen, not quite anyway, but she had most definitely slipped a bit. To put it fucking mildly.

  But then so had I, hadn’t I?

  “Yeah but you can always get back on your feet after a slip, can’t you?” I said, trying to sound encouraging when I felt anything but. “Come on, come here. It’ll be all right. Trust me.”

  Trust you? the Burned Man sniggered. I wouldn’t trust you to–

  Shut the fuck up, I snapped at it. Not now, all right?

  I held out my hand and she got to her feet and let me give her an awkward hug. The only way to hug someone wearing armour is awkwardly, I’m afraid. Still, she mustered a weak smile after that.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got a job to do. We can worry about afterwards, well, afterwards.”

  I nodded and followed her towards the lightning.

  * * *

  Distances were deceptive in that awful place. It seemed to be getting colder and colder as we drew nearer to the storm, and the hills were getting steeper. We hadn’t seen a tree for what seemed like hours, although with no visible source of light there was no real way to measure the passing of time. I don’t wear a watch, and even if I had done I suspected it would have stopped the moment we went through the Veil. The grass underfoot now was as grey and dead as the rushes on the floor of Davey’s hall had been, and it crunched under our feet as we walked. It was as though all the life had simply been sucked out of the ground. Which I was pretty sure was exactly what had happened.

  Eventually we crested a hill and stopped dead in our tracks. There was an army below us.

  “Oh cocking fuck,” I said.

  There must have been the best part of two hundred of them, spread out around a standard planted in the ground. Behind them the plain dropped away into a great abyss that seemed to be full of boiling fog. The fog glowed with a flickering ruddy light, as though lit from below by terrible fires somewhere in the deep. The lightning raged overhead, stabbing down into that abyss again and again. The thunder was still impossibly distant, as though miles away. The standard showed a complicated sigil that I recognized from my books.

  That was Lucifer’s sigil. The mark of the Fallen One.

  That was Adam’s banner, and these were his soldiers. They were Soulless, every one of them. I could see their auras quite clearly in the unearthly light, making the entire mob seem to glow with a dull reddish light.

  “Bloody hell, what do we do now?” I asked her.

  Trixie turned and gave me a fierce look.

  “The only thing we can do,” she said. “We go on.”

  We walked down the hill together, to the plain where the army of Soulless awaited us. The thunder was constant now, rumbling in the distance even as the lightning flashed like a strobe lamp overhead and the glowing fog heaved and boiled in the depths.

  The Soulless moved apart and a tall, handsome man walked through them with his hands held out beside him like Moses parting the Red Sea in some awful ancient film. He was wearing a black overcoat over a very expensive looking suit.

  This was Adam, at last. This was Lucifer himself.

  “Donald Drake, Meselandrarasatrixiel, I bid you welcome,” Adam said. “Welcome to the postern gate of Hell.”

  Trixie had been right, I realized. The smug bastard did have a back door he could sneak in and out of. I glared at him.

  “Where’s my fucking daughter?” I demanded.

  “She is safe, for now,” he said. “Do this one small task for me and she will be returned to you, Don. All I ask is for the Burned Man to fight at my side.”

  “How about you just fucking give her back right now, you smarmy wanker?” I snarled at him. “I’m not your fucking errand boy, and I can take you down if I have to.”

  I realized that the Burned Man and I were speaking with one voice now, one set of thoughts, one purpose. The hairs on my arms rose in cold chills even as my hands grew hot with the need to release the flames of my anger.

  Adam ignored me, and turned his attention on Trixie instead.

  “Come to me, Meselandrarasatrixiel,” he said.

  “Answer his question,” Trixie said. “Where is the child?”

  “She is safe, as I said. Come aid me in this battle. A battle you were born to fight. Do you not want revenge on the Dominion who betrayed you? Do you not wish to end it every bit as much as I do? As much as Menhit does?”

  I saw confusion cross Trixie’s face. She had been utterly betrayed by the Dominion who had been her father and her king, and quite possibly her lover too. Of course she wanted revenge, I realized that. All the same, I also knew she didn’t like being manipulated and ordered around by Adam one little bit.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “I’m not one of your soldiers, Adam.”

  “But you are a soldier,” he countered. “A soldier without a general, without a purpose. You have nothing in your life now but a forgotten goddess and this one stubborn human man.”

  “I serve Menhit now,” she said. “And I stand with Don.”

  He snorted.

  “I’m tired of playing these stupid games with you,” Adam said. “Once Menhit has her revenge she will grow bored of her Earthly posturing and return home, and then where will you be? Adrift without a patron. Heaven will never have you back now, but I will. I will welcome you at my right hand, as the sword of my word. I will welcome you, but if Don Drake will not also stand with me then you must choose between us.”

  He fixed me with a smug sneer that said he knew damn well she would choose him. I hated to admit it but I knew she would, too.

  But she didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “I choose Don.”

  She came and stood beside me, and slipped her hard, calloused hand into mine.

  I almost fainted.

  “How dare you?” he demanded.

  “Adam, I…” she said.

  “I command you, Meselandrarasatrixiel!” he snarled.

  Oh fuck.

  Do not ask, command. That is the true way to power.

  Oh dear me no, not with Trixie it isn’t, mate.

  “No!” she shouted at him, her grip on my hand tightening until it was almost painful. “No Adam, you do not command me! Not any more. Not ever again!”

  I don’t think I had ever loved her as much as I did
at that moment.

  All the same, her rage was cataclysmic. If she could have torn Adam limb from limb right then, she would have done. She let go of me and then her sword was in her hands, blazing with heavenly fury. She was a hair’s breadth from charging the lot of them, I realized.

  Everything changed with a dull shimmer of reality that made my head hurt.

  We were suddenly closer, and Adam was standing almost near enough to touch. His army of Soulless were behind us now, spread out in a crescent that stretched from the edge of the abyss at either end and encircled us completely, with that terrible drop the only way clear. Adam turned to face the great open gulf of boiling fog, and an inferno of flames roared up out of it to touch the clouds above like a blast furnace of curiously cold fire. This was his postern gate. This was the mouth of Hell itself, yawning open in front of me.

  This was where I had been headed for a long time now.

  He turned to us once more, a mocking smile on his thin lips.

  He had Olivia in his arms.

  She was wrapped in the same pink blanket with the bunnies on it that I had seen her in that first time at Debbie’s house. She seemed to be asleep. Adam took a step backwards until he stood smiling on the very edge of the abyss, the flames racing up behind him and the baby in his arms.

  My baby. My little daughter.

  I will do anything in my power to protect you, I had promised her. Anything at all.

  There were almost two hundred of the Soulless massed around us, all of them armed and dangerous looking.

  Soldiers of the Fallen, they call themselves, Trixie had told me. They’re not much to worry about unless there are an awful lot of them.

  There were an awful fucking lot of them right now, as far as I could see.

  “I will not be denied, Donald Drake,” Adam said. “Not by you and most definitely not by her. You are coming with me. The Throne is burning, and your destiny lies below. You and the Burned Man will fight for me whether you like it or not. My kingdom come, my Will be done, on Earth as it is in Hell.”