Yitz gave his best shrug.
Hephaestion studied the material, and Yitz pondered the contents. It was suspected Gil was frozen in the ice, up to his neck or face as is customary in the Lake Cocytus, somewhere near the seat of Lucifer. To use faith as a tool to steal and betray was the chiefest of crimes, and worthy of elbowroom with Little Horn himself. Such a place was farthest from Heaven’s light, and many claimed the space was so cold, a man could freeze solid instantly, his lungs shattering into chunks the moment he breathed in.
Hephaestion paused at the sketch of Gil, his fingers tracing the lines before running lightly over the author’s scribble at the bottom. Hephaestion admired that the young man had the best features of both his parents, and it was clear that his good looks and charisma helped him drain an entire town to death. In the corner of the sketch was Yitz’s name scribbled in a frantic pen stroke.
“You drew this?” Hephaestion asked, clearly impressed.
“I also painted one. A larger one. For Adina. We have it in the bedroom.”
With wonder, Hephaestion’s eyes followed each expressive line. “Can a father remember his son’s face perfectly for hundreds of years? Did Adina help recall each detail?” Hephaestion didn’t envision Yitz as an artist, but he also never envisioned him as a violinist either, yet Gottbert sincerely invited him to perform as a healing measure for those in need.” Are you as good with the violin as you are with art?”
“Well, that is a funny story. Adina always had a thing for the violin. Our romantic life took a rapid dive in the afterlife, and when we moved to New Dis I figured drastic measures were in order.”
Hephaestion laughed. “So you learned something new? Perish the thought!”
“She always loved the sound of the violin. There was an old man who would play in our village during our courtship. I was always a bit jealous of how she looked at him when he played.”
“So…did the violin work?” Hephaestion asked with mischief in his face.
“Dear boy, when you hear me fiddling, do not knock on our door.”
Both men shared a belly laugh, its warmth thawing Hephaestion completely. Yitz learned to play the violin in his afterlife? What else did he now know how to do? Hephaestion had spent hundreds of years searching the rocky cliffs of Purgatory for Alexander, pulling head after head out of the water by their hair to see if his love had arrived yet. Could he have also learned the violin in that time?
When Ulfric had taken him in, he became part of Ulfric’s mission to help others ascend. For centuries, Hephaestion assisted Ulfric in helping people make sense of their lives, their choices, and their deaths. When not training with sword and shield and spear, Hephaestion aided Ulfric in the simple daily matters of running a ranch filled with the sullen and lost.
He never learned to play a flute, or read another language, or build a machine. Thousands of souls glided through Ulfric’s camp like rich silt pouring down from a mountain by river, but Hephaestion had remained as static as a jagged rock in the water’s center. He was as unchanging as the many statues of him that Alexander had commissioned.
Hephaestion had waited in Purgatory, for eons for Alexander to come. But he hadn’t. And Hephaestion could wait no longer. When World War I broke out, and the gates of Hell were flooded nearly to breaking, he made his move. Placing demands on everyone around him, especially Ulfric, they commissioned The Bonny Sweetheart.
Thus here he was, sitting on the lip of a giant, sloping chasm and closer to his goal than ever.
But he felt even further away.
Legs adequately rested, Hephaestion packed up and stood, stretching. “Are you good to go? That cloak will come in use again, so definitely hang onto it.”
Yitz obeyed, bundling and tying its sleeves together adeptly, turning it into a bandoleer satchel. His arms now free, Yitz strolled ahead as if on a lazy afternoon, his gaze drifting about side to side as he took in the world around him.
They tread down the steep decline. Minu’s marvelous kameez was thin enough to allow Hephaestion’s body to breathe under his armor while still being soft enough to avoid chaffing, making his descent easy. The view was so enormous in scope that he had to look at his feet on occasion to make sure he wouldn’t simply walk off the edge of the precipice and tumble into the obscured chasms below.
Time passed, and Hephaestion gradually heard a rumbling. It was low, dull and filled with voices and shouts, but the dust clouds ahead obscured the cause.
As they descended, however, they discovered the source: this was the circle for those who’d wasted their lives and the time and efforts of others in fruitless and empty pursuits. And here they continued their foolishness infinitely.
The slope turned into a stone bridge, carrying them over a pit as deep as a ship’s mast, crammed with the naked condemned. Grunting, heaving, and frantically avoiding each other, they kicked up a constant cloud of dust as they each rolled a giant marble ball before them.
Each ball was almost ten hands in diameter and so perfectly smooth and weighted that it could easily spin upon the polished ground with little more than a shove. Every soul had one, either white or black, depending on the direction they were rolling the ball, and each pit was a flurry of conflict as the giant marble spheres smacked and bounced off each other.
People shouted and cursed, smacking and pushing, the black marble spheres heading toward the opposite side while the white marble spheres rolled in the same direction as Hephaestion and Yitz.
The rumbling produced from each sphere colliding with another was a deafening din. Hephaestion felt the impacts through his boots and into his knees. He craned his head over the side, looking into their desperate and determined faces. Some would glare at others while cursing the inconvenience they suffered. Others merely toiled with their own spheres. Some intentionally directed theirs into another’s to slow them down.
“Reminds me of life,” Yitz said dully.
One woman, slender with deep eyes, gazed up at them. Her sphere slowed, and her lips formed a call for help. She seemed afraid to speak however, but was unwilling to return to her sphere. Yitz raised a hand in sympathetic greeting.
Before she could return the gesture, another marble ball smacked into hers, crushing her hand. She howled in pain, cradling the injury. Another sphere plowed into her from behind, collapsing her hips, and soon, she was trampled underfoot beneath the wave of incessant motion.
A white marble ball, now streaked with a red smear, slipped in its owner’s hands, complicating his task as it rolled by where she once stood.
“They could all just stop, all at once,” Hephaestion said through his teeth. “They could all stop and move their spheres in an orderly fashion to avoid the grinding and conflict. Perhaps they could use each ball to build a means to climb out, even. Why don’t they?”
“If one person is set on barreling through the crowd heartlessly, the rest are validated in doing the same,” Yitz observed. “And people are people. They obsess over their burden the same way I obsess over Gil, or you, Alexander. We just don’t learn.”
Whereas the previous circle of Hell was the absence of motion and change, this circle held nothing but. All motion and noise and frustration toward a futile and meaningless goal. Once each marble sphere travelled many leagues to the far end of the pit, it would change color: black to white or white to black. Then the journey would begin anew in the opposite direction; each sphere handler convinced that accomplishing this would gradually earn their way out. Each sphere handler convinced that everyone else was working against them.
Hephaestion wondered if the woman, foolish enough to stop and look up, was the closest to moving on.
Without looking down again, Hephaestion continued across the bridge with Yitz close behind. League after league, they finally came to a stone wall that rotated left. From either age or disrepair, several cracks and holes in the stone passed by, some
breaks large enough for Hephaestion to peek through. Catching glimpses of empty cobbled streets and storehouses, he knew they’d arrived at the abandoned city of Dis.
Yitz nodded that he was ready to leap.
Finally, through a large chunk of missing wall, they stepped in without looking back.
Chapter 29
The cacophony of boulders and hectic motion vanished the instant they stepped into the old city of Dis. They had entered a building, shafts of light stabbing through holes in the ceiling, illuminating the grim remains of a tavern. Each rotted piece of furniture was covered in a gray layer of ash and the floor was piled with detritus consisting of broken ceiling tiles, sticks of red wood, and mounds of incinerated materials that had hardened over the centuries.
Like snowflakes, ash drifted through the piercing brightness. Hephaestion gave up any attempt at stealth, so he walked ahead at a normal pace, gripping brick piles and twisted metal frames to steady himself. Yitz followed in suit, his smaller footprints falling into Hephaestion’s.
To a silent and dead building, they must have been extraordinarily loud, but something in Hephaestion did not care. Once outside of the building, they stood on the street’s cobblestone. They appeared to be in a town square, complete with a dormant fountain at the center mounted by a statue of a winged warrior angel, sword to the heavens.
Each building facing the square was tall and proud, the signs out front depicting their purpose through pictograms. An architect’s guild, several inns, even a cobbler.
“Not bad,” Yitz said in approval until his eyes landed on a sign suspended over the stall of a slaver’s market. It depicted a pictogram of two crossed wrists chained. “Well, maybe a bit bad.”
Hephaestion knew from his research that before Dis’s collapse into ruin, those who’d ascended from the lower circles of Hell may have wandered into the city, bare and vulnerable, only to be snatched up and sold as slaves.
Greece had always had slaves. When Alexander rode into Persia, he was stunned that the Zoroastrians had abolished slavery long ago, considering the practice an affront to humanity. While Hephaestion and Alexander marveled at such concepts, every time they tried to end slavery in Greece, they were met with severe resistance and sometimes violence.
Some of the men on their campaign soured at Alexander’s adoration of Persian customs, accusing him of being enthralled by the conquered.
Hephaestion removed those men from active combat, even executing them if necessary. He’d given many death orders personally, including Parmenion’s.
A bold general with a boisterous laugh, Parmenion always maintained eye contact as he bowed to his superiors. His son, Philotas, attempted to assassinate Alexander, deeming the conqueror too Persian to lead the superior Greek army. Hephaestion ended the ambitious boy with his own blade, but pleaded for the life of Parmenion.
“He’s the father. He’s been nothing but loyal and noble. At least talk to him, he’s hundreds of leagues away—”
“Commanding a large garrison on our supply chain, Patty!” Alexander yelled. “I hate it. I hate it. But we can’t risk it. The moment he finds out you killed his boy—”
“For treason.”
“—for treason, which his father may very well be in coordination with. He’ll break our line!”
“Assuming he’d do such a thing, it would be a disruption at best. His garrison isn’t that large, and our reserve would shore up inst—”
“You aren’t thinking large enough, Patty. The troops shoring up such a supply line would mean we can’t advance east this autumn. We might not lose territory, but we won’t gain ground either, which might as well be the same thing.”
Hephaestion and Alexander glared at each other. Alexander yielded first, heaving a mournful sigh.
Seeing his opportunity, Hephaestion resisted launching into a lecture. “You are condemning a man to death half a world away because of something his son did. You won’t even give Parmenion a chance to defend himself regarding his boy’s actions?”
“No, I won’t. The east campaign can survive a dead general to the far west. It can’t survive a disruption to the supply line. Order men by racing camel to Parmenion. Kill him as quickly and painlessly as possible before he receives news of his son’s treachery and death.” Alexander’s command settled the matter, his eyes focused on the distance.
Hephaestion had sent slaves to do it. They assassinated Parmenion with daggers as he ate dinner. Later, Hephaestion learned that Alexander had subsequently put the slaves to death. Soon after, Alexander declared the only slaves permissible within the forward campaign divisions were those working off a debt or crime.
One human owning another human felt wrong to him, especially here in Dis. To ascend from the pit of Hell, to settle one’s sins and folly and evil only to be snatched up by his fellow man soon after? Yitz and Albrecht could have made a slave of Hephaestion if they had chosen to. While the people of Dis had climbed to the rim of the pit to settle a new city, perhaps their geographical location wasn’t the only thing to have elevated.
As he and Yitz delved deeper into the city, mounds of bones littered the corners of rooms and alleyways. The occasional decorative pile of skulls suggested that not only had Dis experienced a mass exodus, a purging might have also emptied its streets.
The various scorch marks and rusted, broken blades bore witness to the city’s violent end. Did Thebes look like this for decades after it was razed? Centuries?
Feeling like a ghost haunting the skeleton of an unwelcoming civilization, Hephaestion kept his eyes wide as they trudged further into the shadows of the empty, dead city.
Chapter 30
As Hephaestion seemed lost in his thoughts, Yitz hung back, unable to stifle his impulse to explore despite possible dangers.
Dis looked nothing like the rich mishmash of culture and technology of its reincarnation. Conservative and less flamboyant, every few buildings appeared to be places of either worship or torture, and, on occasion, Yitz found altars dedicated to both. If they made it back alive, he resolved to visit Baron Bo and share all he’d seen.
The bones of the city had been picked clean over the centuries, but Yitz stepped into any door that drew his attention, one of which was an apothecary.
Empty vials littered the floor, prompting Yitz to tiptoe about like a goose. He made his way to the store’s counter, upon which he set his bundled cloak, and then stretched with deep grunt.
He opened the cabinets, gaze scouting for anything left behind. He pulled a rusted, half-decayed padlock from a high cabinet door and tugged the cupboard open. A round jar rolled out. Catching the glass just before it shattered on the counter, Yitz cradled the vessel in his arms. The dark lump inside offered few clues, but based on its weight and size, he suspected he’d just rescued someone’s heart from an endless solitude.
Climbing on top of the counter, Yitz discovered the cabinet was filled with jars, eight in all. Eight souls deemed unworthy of consciousness and condemned to a cold, black hell within Hell.
Maybe they were people waiting to be smuggled somewhere, or perhaps slaves had been sold more conveniently this way? Whether they were prisoners or innocents, he couldn’t leave them here. What if Gil had been captured in such a manner and forgotten, lost for all time?
The lids held tight with a glue-like substance, and they were too heavy to carry in their glass containers. Unfolding the cloak, Yitz buried a jar inside. Knowing that he was being foolish, he hoisted the cloak over his shoulder and then swung the contents down hard against the counter. The cloth muffled the breaking glass, and he rummaged through the shards until he found a papery lump, dry and pruned like a raisin.
“What are you doing?” Hephaestion chastised from the doorway.
Yitz laid the heart on the counter before breaking the next container. “Freeing hearts.”
“But why?”
“Explaining ‘why’ is like explaining that water is wet.”
“I heard something fly overhead, and you are making noise,” Hephaestion snapped as he crossed the dilapidated store.
“Then help me do this more quietly.”
Hephaestion rested a surprisingly gentle hand on Yitz’s shoulder. “We can’t save everyone. It’s like war down here. We have to keep moving and stay focused on what matters: Gil and Alexander.”
Yitz sighed, rolling one of the jars between his hands. “We can’t save everyone, but I can save this one,” he said, holding the jar up.
“How many are there?”
“I counted eight. Two are already free.”
Hephaestion’s expression softened. “At least break them under the counter. Wrap them up, and I’ll use my shield piston. That should make less noise, at least.”
Soon, eight hearts lined the counter, pathetic and shriveled. Would one regenerate faster than the others and devour or burn the other hearts? Yitz had never considered how the reanimation process worked. Should he separate them just in case? Wrestling with the thought, he decided to leave the hearts together for the simplest reason he could think of: they were in Hell, but at least they wouldn’t be alone.
“Why, oh, why would you two go and do something like that?” A man’s voice whispered from above, filtering through the floorboards.
A metallic snick signaled Hephaestion’s reaction, the bright heat of his naked sword illuminating the hearts in sanguine light.
“And what exactly are you going to do with that weapon?” the voice taunted, its British accent crisp with that familiar lilt.
Neither man spoke. Hephaestion cocked his ear towards the ceiling as Yitz sunk down behind the counter.
A floorboard above creaked. Then another, at the far side of the room.
Minutes passed, but only silence filled the dank air. Had they been stalked this entire time? How many were there? And why would a stalker give away their presence by speaking?
Trampling in the Land of Woe: Book One of Three (Hellbound 1) Page 17
