by C L Walker
I sent the tattoos out to confirm what I thought was happening. They came back with the news I’d expected.
There was no settlement here, no people I was meant to lead. All the souls in the hell were thousands of miles away and walking toward the horizon, which they would never reach. When they fell they were devoured by the sand and had to start over. At the end was a final rest, though none had yet made it.
We walked across the cracked, dry ground until I felt the next shortcut. It took us a hundred miles and I turned to take us to another one, which took us a thousand. The gate I wanted waited for us at the end.
Another hell, this time smaller.
A single room a mile across. People were pinned to the walls like hideous trophies. When they saw us they cried out, their voices broken by millennia of dehydration.
“You said they pick their hells,” Roman said. “Why would anyone pick a hell?”
“Guilt, perhaps. Belief, certainly. They knew they were breaking their religious rules in life and so expected to come here. They probably would have been disappointed had they found paradise.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Your time is very different to theirs.” There were no shortcuts necessary here. The next gate was nearby. “In your time you believe in the intrinsic goodness of the universe, or its indifference. Your people are special, comparatively. These people knew the universe hated them and wanted them to suffer, so now they suffer.”
“That’s sick.”
“It’s natural,” I said as we arrived at the next gate. “It’s your people who have the universe all wrong.”
We stepped through, into another hell.
Roman didn’t ask many questions, and when things got gory or the tormented souls were nearby, he closed his eyes. He was taking it better than I’d expected, but he wasn’t taking it well.
We passed through many hells, from the enormous ones catering to strict civilizations to the small ones designed for one person only. As we traveled we found more of the smaller ones than the larger. Something about the cosmology of the afterlives ensured the largest ones lay closer to earth, though I didn’t know why. The heavens worked the same way.
I could feel the hell we were looking for getting closer, though it was probably my imagination. It felt like inevitability racing toward me, like my fate was bearing down on me and I had to turn away before it caught me.
I kept going, grinding my teeth and trying to ignore the anger building inside. I didn’t want to see the old cleric. I didn’t want to hear his voice again after all this time. I wanted to kill him, but even that would be too much for me, I knew.
Standing on the mountaintop would be like standing in my own hell. I’d dreamed of it forever, every time I slept, or so it felt. It was the place I’d sold my life for the chance to save hers. And now she hated me and it had all been for nothing, and I had to face the smiling cleric who’d talked me into it all.
We were no more than a handful of hells away. I stopped beside a burned-out building and leaned against the wall. I closed my eyes and focused on the burning fury within. I had to get control, had to stomp on the anger before it consumed me. I had spent most of my life on the edge of snapping, on the verge of killing everything and everyone around me just to quiet the fire in my chest. Most of my life, and I thought I’d put it behind me in Fairbridge.
But it was still there, and the closer we got the less control I had.
“We need to go,” Roman said.
I opened my eyes to find the hedge-mage staring at the fire-ravaged countryside with terror in his eyes. Something out there was coming and I could feel it too. Something big and hungry.
We stepped through the remaining gates until we stood before the final one. The mountaintop was on the other side, a single step away.
“Are you alright?” Roman said.
My fists were curled so tight my hands were in agony. This was the moment, and it took every ounce of my willpower to keep from turning back and leaving Roman there. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see this again.
“Let’s go,” I said. I took his hand and stepped through the final gate.
My boot landed with a squelch, buried an inch deep in the blood of my wife.
“I thought you’d never come,” the cleric said.
Chapter 24
When Erindis and I had ruled the world the mountaintop had been a peak high above the plains. It was the only thing we allowed to break a great flat land. With the power of an elder-god she had remade the world, forming the land to our liking as we formed the populace.
When the other elder-gods decided she’d done enough they came for her and brought her to the mountain. They blasted the top flat and they killed her body and banished the elder-god within. Her blood covered the flat, blasted area at the top, and that was what the cleric had used to tattoo my skin and bind me to my life.
Seeing it again was a horror. In dreams I could ignore parts of it or imagine it differently. Being there again even if it wasn’t truly the same place, was only a hell created for the old man, was more than I could take.
“I’ve been waiting a long time,” the cleric said. I didn’t know his name, even after all these years, and I didn’t care. “But…your skin?”
“You already did your work, old man,” I said. He’d been waiting for me in the moment before I was bound, unaware that he’d died when the elder-gods undid everything Erindis and I had built.
“Then…” He looked around him, trying to understand what was happening. “I’ve been here a long time.”
He wore a dirty robe, stained by his journey to the mountain and the blood of my wife. He was older than I remembered, frail in a way my memories never allowed him to be. There he was an evil man, always whispering in my ear and threatening me, but here he was revealed for what he truly was; an old man near his end, desperate for achievement.
“Can I talk to him?” Roman said. He seemed to understand the sanctity of this place and he kept his voice low. A wind howled near the base of the mountain but at the top the world was quiet.
“Be quick about it,” I replied.
“We’re here to learn,” Roman said. He approached the cleric and tried to find a dry space to sit with him, but when the elder-gods murdered my wife they did a thorough job. Her blood was everywhere.
I stood before the gate, unwilling to move. I remembered being less affected by the sight when I’d first been there, but I now realized that was a false memory. This place had haunted me for thousands of years for a reason.
“If you have already received your gift,” the cleric said as his eyes searched my skin for more tattoos, “then I’ve completed my task. Why am I still here?”
“You are in hell, old man.” I needed to be quiet or the roiling rage within was going to come out. I hated him more than anything I’d ever known, more than I could control.
“This isn’t hell,” he said, his voice trailing off as he reexamined his tiny, blood-drenched world.
“I’d like to know how to work your arts,” Roman said, trying to get things back on track. “I’d like to take your gifts out into the world.”
“You can’t,” the cleric said. “Only I can. Only I ever will.”
“You are special,” Roman said. He was working the man, I saw, coaxing him to share his secrets rather than forcing them from him. I would have gone a different way.
“All my life I’ve worked on this one binding.” He was slowly shaking his head as he came to grips with what he now knew. I was pleased despite my new humanity that I had made his hell worse by letting him know that’s where he was.
“I only need to understand the foundation,” Roman said. “I don’t want to take away your mighty achievement. I want to build my own pale shadow.”
“Ha,” the old man said. “It is all or nothing; you complete the bind or it fails. That’s the secret I will share.”
“It isn’t true, though,” I said. “Another has started on your
path and his binding is incomplete.”
The cleric’s eyes returned to me; they were soft, and I noticed he had white splotches covering most of his sight. I’d always remembered his gaze as strong and fearsome.
“Then this person will die, in time. What we will work here is too powerful.”
“We already finished the work here,” I said.
“Yes, of course. This is hell.” He was getting more used to the idea, accepting it in spite of himself. “But, if this is hell then why are you here? And why is everything still so real?”
“We are here to learn,” Roman began, but the old man cut him off.
“No, why is he here? How long has it been?”
“Many thousands of years,” I replied.
“Then it worked? I helped you save our lady?”
There was a vulnerability to his voice that I hadn’t expected. He deeply wanted to know that he had succeeded, and it seemed he was more interested in Erindis’s well-being than in my imprisonment. I didn’t know why he was lying, but it made the fire inside burn hotter.
“We need your help to save her again,” Roman said, reacting to the old man’s words and changing tactics. “She is threatened by a man who has completed part of the binding. I need to know the basics of the process so I can destroy it. It is the only way to save the lady.”
“You have lived all these years?” the cleric asked me, ignoring Roman.
“I have.”
“Has your service been remarkable?”
“It has, old man.” I couldn’t lie to him; my life had been one of the most remarkable lives, even if I hated it.
“Then we succeeded. She lives and you have achieved what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” I took a step forward without thinking. Fresh blood marked my shoes. “I never wanted this. I had to do it, for her. But even she was a lie, one I told myself. None of this was worth it.”
He recoiled from my words, visibly sickened by my rejection of his dogma. “You asked for this, Agmundr. This is what you wanted. This is what you begged for. I didn’t want to do this to you. I would never want this for anyone.”
“I remember it differently,” I said.
“Then perhaps this is your hell, not mine.”
Silence reigned for minutes while the cleric and I seethed. Roman gave it time for things to settle down before trying again.
“You can still help the lady,” Roman said eventually. He put his hand on the rock the cleric sat on, ignoring the blood there. “But you cannot leave here so I need to do it for you.”
“This isn’t an afterlife,” the cleric said, as though he hadn’t heard Roman’s words. “I remember now.”
“What are you prattling about, old man?”
“I remember, when we were done and she was saved. The elder gods came to undo what she had done, but they saved this place. They saved me.”
He looked up at me with the first glimmer of hope I’d seen since we arrived.
“I didn’t die. This is all real.”
I reached out with the tattoos instinctively, searching the tiny world for the truth. What I found had me stumbling back toward the gate without thinking.
It was true. He wasn’t lying. The blood on the ground was hers. He wasn’t a soul trapped in hell, he was an old man granted immortality to watch the final resting place of an elder-god.
I saw the blood around me again, and realized what it meant. This was her blood, the blood of my wife. Not some imagined version of it, but the real thing. One touch and I would be reborn as I had been before the end of days stripped me of my power. There was enough blood there to power me for centuries, millennia.
I felt nauseous, furious, frightened. I wasn’t seeing the recreation of the worst moment in my life, I was standing on the same ground.
“Why?” I said softly, barely able to force the words for fear of the answer.
“I don’t know,” the cleric said. “I don’t remember. They saved this, and me.”
I had to leave, before I killed the old man and Roman and destroyed the mountaintop. I wanted to see it all end, to see everything end. The red mist was falling over my eyes and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it. I didn’t want to stop it.
I had to leave, before I touched the lifeblood of the woman I had loved for all of history and became the man I had always been.
“We’re leaving,” I said. I fixed my gaze on Roman, willing him to stand and come to me. I wanted to leave him and forget this place, but he was my friend and some small part of my humanity was still hanging on in the face of my revelation.
“We haven’t done what we came here to do,” the hedge-mage said.
“Take me with you,” the cleric said at the same time. “I can leave. I can return to the world.”
I stepped forward and grabbed Roman, ignoring the splashes as I moved through puddles of red. I lifted him and carried him back to the gate, and stepped through.
I wanted to run back to the land of the living, wanted to carry Roman and not care about the harm I would do him with the speed I would use. I wanted to smash everything on the way, to destroy the afterlives of humanity just to release my anger.
I walked instead, keeping my pace quick without risking leaving the hedge-mage behind. He spoke to me, saying words I didn’t understand and couldn’t care about. When we reached the gate I took his hand and stepped through, then discarded it as we moved on to the next gate.
Gate after gate, hell after hell, moving as far from the mountaintop as possible.
Chapter 25
We walked the hells and Roman made notes. He muttered to himself as he scribbled in his notepad, having long conversations with nobody.
I didn’t know what he was recording and I didn’t care. The cleric had given us nothing and I wanted nothing from him. I wanted nothing from that place at all. I discarded my blood-stained shoes in one of the hells, kicking them off so I wouldn’t be tempted to touch the blood and let the tattoos feed. I made Roman take off his shoes and forced him to walk barefoot through a dozen hells.
They had saved the place of her death. The elder-gods had memorialized it, making it a shrine to their murderous act. And I could go there whenever I wanted and take her power as my own whenever I needed to.
I still felt sick even as the hunger for it grew inside me. I was a drug addict desperate for his high, and I couldn’t control the emotions. I didn’t want to go back there, but knowing how easy it would be, how quickly I could be standing there again, haunted me.
I would return, I knew. When things got difficult and I needed the power, or when things were too easy and I got bored. I would stand beside the cleric and I would let the tattoos feed, and I would be reborn.
We reached the heaven of the fish-people and Roman was still making notes.
“What are you writing, hedge-mage?”
“You didn’t let him tell us much, but there are still clues to see.” He seemed cagey, like he was hiding something from me. I could think of a dozen things he might have seen that I avoided, and I understood why he wouldn’t want to risk telling me them.
At the edge of the gate to earth I paused, took a deep breath, and held it for a minute. I was calming down, regaining my composure. I needed to, or I was risking anyone I ran into on the other side of the gate. I was risking lives because I could barely control my rage.
We stepped through and immediately came under fire.
I dragged Roman behind one of the cars that was still there from the first time Chaos attacked me. Three large, black SUVs were waiting for us. Chaos members stood with their guns held ready, blocked from the street by the large wall.
The car keeping them at bay was being eaten by the bullets. The wheels on the far side burst, and the only sound in the world was the constant barrage of metal being torn apart.
“Stay here,” I said, not waiting to make sure he understood my words. He was afraid, though, and I knew he wouldn’t move.
I had some power left in th
e tattoos, enough to give me an edge in the fight. I poked my head out for a moment, a shield coming into being to protect me while I counted enemies.
Twelve, unless more were waiting in the cars with the darkened windows. Twelve, all armed with automatic weapons and all trying to kill me.
I tore the door of the car we were hiding behind and stepped into the open. I threw the door at the nearest young people. They scattered as I made my assault, giving me the moment I needed to close the distance.
I tore the head from the first and used his gun to kill the second, turning her body into little more than meat. The third fired on me and hit another one, but it didn’t matter at that point. I was among them and they were doomed.
A punch to a man’s chest and his ribs shattered inward, killing him slowly. A kick to another man’s leg to destroy it before lifting him by his head and throwing him at the next. On and on, I was carnage made flesh.
The red mist had me, the madness that controlled me in battle. These weren’t people, they were enemies. These weren’t men and women who worshipped Bannon as a god; they were fodder for my fury.
The power of the tattoos failed me quickly, running low and turning them dormant. It didn’t matter either. I was better than the enemies arrayed before me, better than anyone. This was who I was, and who I had always been.
They fell screaming, crying, begging for life. They fell as they attacked and, near the end, they fell as they fled. I was just a man by the end, but I was more than all of them combined.
I stood for a moment in the stillness of the empty lot, surrounded by the groaning of the near-dead, and I realized I was smiling. I realized I’d been laughing madly the entire time. I’d taken my rage out on them because I could, because I had to take it out on someone and they had deserved it.
I was calm again, my mind no longer roiling with thoughts of the mountaintop and the need to destroy it all. I looked around me one last time to make sure there were no further threats, and then I returned to Roman to make sure he hadn’t been hit.
