Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong)

by Shaun O. McCoy

  The quake had driven the people of Harpsborough into the church. Alice was struggling to see in from where she stood outside the building’s heavy double doors. Nearly all five hundred of the villagers were crammed within that structure’s walls. The rest, save those on guard duty at the village’s entrance, were gathered on the steps, peering over the shoulders of their compatriots and through the doors to try and catch a glimpse of the men inside. The only parts of the church that were not crowded were the first four pews, whose stone benches had been reserved for the Citizens.

  She noticed Kara standing just ahead of her at the doorway.

  “What’s he saying?” Alice asked.

  “That’s Father Klein,” Kara answered, “he’s speaking now. You missed Baker. He says that there’s nothing to worry about. Says it happened a few years ago. Says Hell trembles all the time.”

  “Hush,” said another man on the steps, “I can’t hear.”

  Kara wasn’t the only person silenced by his words, and Alice found that she could now hear the Father speaking, though just barely.

  “You have viewed this as a bad sign. As a bad omen. You feel that the hunger that has come upon us is a punishment. That times are bad and that we are in famine. I tell you that is a lie. We have. . .” the next few words were drowned out by a man’s cough, “that quaking you heard, that glorious thunder, is the benevolence of God. He has turned His eye upon this part of Hell. We have been blessed, truly, for the great society that we have built. For those of us who have honored and feared God even in this distant realm of damnation, I call to you now—”

  “Wish the windbag would speak louder,” Kara muttered.

  “Hush!” several people responded.

  “The devils are few, and you lament. The devils are thick, and you lament. Take the fewer, it is your blessing. There is enough food to feed us. Few of us die on our ranges. Thank God for that! Surely, the weight of God’s eye has driven out our enemies. It has bent the very stones of Hell. The wrath of God will not crush us, the Lord be praised, it will crush them! It will crush the men who follow in Maab’s footsteps. It will crush the men who call the Infidel their man. But it will not crush us.

  “Rather, let us turn to each other. It is a time of great need and great prosperity. Instead of fighting the devils, we must now find accord with ourselves. We must love ourselves. There is enough food to feed us. We must share it, and stop hoarding. We must—”

  “Seems like the Citizens hoard the most!” a man called.

  “Silence.” That was Aaron, and his voice boomed loudly enough to be heard clearly outside the church. “You know full well that there’s a vote to be had in the Fore about that.”

  “For your hunters, not for us.”

  Kara shifted back and forth, trying to see around one man’s head. Alice swore she smelled Massan on her.

  “My hunters hunt for you too,” Aaron was saying. “Now I don’t want that thunder to scare anyone. My men are working with a few of the hermits, Galen included, to search for the damage. Galen’s pretty far out in the direction we think the quake came from, and he said there wasn’t any cracking out their way. I’m told by Father Klein, who’s been here longer than any of us, that if there’s no cracking then there’s no danger.”

  Alice shrugged her shoulders and wandered away from the church, leaving Kara behind. A few of the others followed her.

  “You don’t look worried,” one of the men who had hushed Kara said to Alice.

  She laughed and shook her head. She was worried, but she hadn’t been waiting for the town meeting. No Citizen was going to tell the villagers what was really going on.

  It was the truth she wanted, and she intended to get that from Aaron.

  Arturus was still shaking in the battery room as he removed the black marble brick from his pack. One of his ears was ringing a little from the sound of his gunshot.

  “Galen,” the warrior declared his approach from outside the home.

  Arturus could hear the crunching of the gravel beneath the man’s feet.

  “Arturus,” he responded. “I’m home.”

  After a few more crunches, Galen entered the room and moved towards their provisions closet.

  “I shot a corpse today,” Arturus said.

  Galen stopped rummaging long enough to turn back and flash a smile at him. “Well, good for you. Make sure you visit it again when it turns to dust. Mancini’s brew could use it I’m sure.”

  “It almost surprised me. I was in a room on the end of a long hallway, working on the stone. It covered one hundred or so feet without me noticing it.”

  “That’s not good,” Galen said, his voice echoing out from the supply closet. “Why do you think it got so close to you before you noticed?”

  “I was listening, really hard. I think I was scared by the settling.”

  Galen came out with two pieces of flatbread, some dried dyitzu meat, and a right angle leveler. “You didn’t hear it?”

  “It moved silently. Smoothly too.”

  “The old ones get like that. They start out stiff and uncoordinated, but give them long enough, and they move as smoothly as silk. Did it touch you?”

  Galen was stuffing his food and the leveler into his pack.

  “No, sir,” Arturus answered.

  “You should probably wash your clothes and weapons. And try not to die in the next couple of days, just in case.”

  Arturus laughed. “What are you getting ready for? Are you going out again?”

  “Yes, but not far.” Galen put his Heckler and Koch MP5 upon the marble counter and started to disassemble it. “I’ve been speaking with Harpsborough. I’m going to go out with some of their hunters and make sure there are no settling cracks.”

  “You know Rick hates it when you clean your guns on the cooking counter.”

  Galen nodded. “That’s because he has to clean it up.”

  “Can I go with you?” Arturus asked suddenly.

  “Not yet, you’re probably a mite bit too young.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “Keep on making those squares, of course.”

  “Like nothing happened?”

  Galen held up the disassembled barrel from his gun and peered along its sights. “What are you going to do, stop Hell from collapsing? Hidalgo, on the far side of Harpsborough didn’t even hear it. And we’re by the river. The settling’s thunder travels well down the river. Like as not, we won’t find a thing. If the settling keeps coming, then we have a problem.”

  Galen dipped a small piece of cloth in his homemade cleaning solution. He then threaded it through the end of his cleaning rod.

  “Will it?” Arturus asked.

  Galen looked up from his work. “Will it what?”

  “Keep coming?”

  “You cannot judge what you do not know. Let me know how you do with those sample squares.”

  “I’ll show them to you when they’re done.”

  Galen finished cleaning his rifle and reassembled it while Arturus watched. Arturus, who had been disassembling and reassembling weapons his entire life, could do so very quickly. He was even faster than Rick, but Galen was something else entirely. He put his rifle back together like most people breathed.

  Packed and prepared, Galen pushed a clip into his gun and headed out of the battery room. He paused at the entrance to the gravel hallway. “A word with you boy.”

  “What is it?”

  “You learned a lesson today, when the corpse got close to you. It’s like in wrestling, when we talk about the principle of two weaknesses. You feared the danger of the settling, and didn’t have enough presence of mind to defend against the corpse.”

  “I know. It scared me. I won’t be as careless next time.”

  Galen nodded.

  “But consider this also your first chess lesson.”

  “I don’t even know how the pieces move.”

  “Maybe you will, if I ever have time to teach you. Chess players also
use the theory of two weaknesses. You can defeat a novice if he doesn’t know to protect both. You can defeat a master if he cannot protect both.”

  “I was a novice today,” Arturus admitted.

  “But don’t be tomorrow. Rick cares for you a great deal, Turi. And I’ve put no small amount of investment into you either. Don’t go dying on us.”

  Arturus nodded his head. “I won’t.”

  He expected Galen to leave, but the warrior remained in the doorway.

  “Promise me,” Galen said.

  “But you said not to promise things that are out of my control.”

  “Make an exception,” Galen ordered.

  “I promise. I won’t die.”

  Galen nodded and left. Arturus listened to the crunch of the man’s footsteps on the gravel. The crunches turned into thuds, letting Arturus know that he had made it to the bridge.

  After that, nothing.

  “I love you too,” Arturus said.

  “Alice, are you awake? It’s Molly.”

  Alice gathered herself, sitting up from her bed of blankets and dyitzu hide. She could see Molly’s eye peeking in around the door blanket.

  “Yeah,” she half-mumbled, “one sec.”

  She looked about her squat, dark, one roomed home and found her favorite shirt in the light let in from the crack between her ceiling’s blanket and the wall. She had meant to fix that. She came up to a crouch, waited for the blood to return to her head, and struggled into her shirt. Then she pushed through the curtain to speak to Molly, jingling the beads that hung from her dreamcatcher as she did so.

  “What were you dreaming about?” Molly said with a sly smile.

  Alice wasn’t sure what Molly was joking about. The woman’s curly brown hair was tousled badly, so Alice figured she must have just come back from the wilds. Molly’s grin revealed her one crooked front tooth.

  “Huh?” Alice asked.

  Molly raised her eyebrows, then reached out and touched one of Alice’s nipples.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Alice said, and bent back into her hovel to find a bra.

  She only had two. She decided on the pink flowery one since she didn’t have anyone to impress today—at least not until Aaron got back later on that night.

  Is it still daytime? How long was I sleeping?

  Molly was snickering outside, and Alice could feel the woman’s gaze on her back.

  Alice snapped the bra on around her waist and then pulled her shirt over it.

  “A little maturity would be nice,” she called back over her shoulder as she slid one arm back under the bra strap and into her sleeve.

  “So would a little modesty,” Molly said, holding open her door curtain. “I mean, it’s not polite to point.”

  Alice finished getting the bra over her other shoulder, adjusted it and straightened her shirt. Molly was kind enough to hold open her door curtain as she re-emerged.

  “Better?” Alice asked imperiously.

  “I bet Aaron would have messed his pants if he saw what I’ve just seen,” Molly said, and then, as if this had just crossed her mind and surely wasn’t the entire purpose of her visit, she asked, “Speaking of, didn’t you eat with him the other day?”

  Alice nodded. “I’d almost forgotten with the settling.”

  “Settling schmettling. We’ll be fine,” Molly went on, touching Alice’s shoulder. “So, how was the dinner?”

  “It was perfect,” Alice admitted, grinning.

  “You’re crushing hard,” Molly placed her hand over her heart. “He’s a good guy. Trust me, better than Baker. I’d know.”

  You would, slut.

  “They eat so well up there. And the bloodwater and the meat. Makes me so sleepy.”

  Molly fingered the yarn web of the dreamcatcher. She ran her hands across a thread until she came to a pebble.

  “So is this Aaron, trapped in your web?” she was trying to sound like she was still joking, but her tone had turned serious. “Or are you trapped in his?”

  “Jesus, Molly.”

  “I just want to know if you slept with him. I happen to be an interested party.”

  Alice shook her head and began to run her hands through her hair to loosen the tangles it had gathered during her sleep. “I didn’t fuck him.”

  Molly looked at her suspiciously.

  “We just kissed,” Alice said.

  “Well, that’s smart of you,” Molly said. “You’ll never get a nomination if you sleep with him too early. If I had known that a year ago, I’d be in the Fore and Chelsea would be out here bustin’ her ass.”

  Maybe.

  “I’ll be smart about it,” Alice assured her.

  “How’s he doing?”

  Alice sat down against the outside wall of her hovel. Molly remained standing, toying with the dreamcatcher.

  “He’s worried about the food of his hunters,” Alice said.

  “Oh,” Molly said, her face suddenly becoming a caricature of worry. “You better get in his ear about that soon. He’s been letting his hunters eat some of the dyitzu they kill without reporting them.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Alice said.

  God, I hope he wouldn’t. The Fore would kill him. Or send his ass through the Golden Door.

  “That’s one of the reasons we’re so hungry,” Molly went on. “Everyone knows there’s enough food for all of us. And he’s trying to get special rations for his people. The Fore will never go for it. By the time you get him, he may not even be a Citizen at all.”

  “They say there’s enough food for everybody because the Citizens eat so much, Molly, not because there’s enough dyitzu.”

  Molly shrugged her shoulders. “Thank God for Julian,” she said, and then pointed to another stone in Alice’s dreamcatcher. “And what about this stone, should we call it Turi?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alice said. “He’s just a boy.”

  “Sure.” Molly feigned doe eyes. “But his shoulders are looking pretty broad these days. He’s growing up fast.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Maybe I should check out his goods for you? I could let you know if they’re any good.”

  Alice was assaulted by the image of big busted Molly riding the poor boy. “Leave him alone.”

  Molly sat down next to Alice and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m serious about Aaron stealing the dyitzu. The word is all over town. One of his hunters is talking. Or maybe that hunter’s smuggling some of the meat and sharing it with his friends.”

  “Those are just rumors, Molly,” Alice said. “Don’t take that seriously. He would never do something so stupid.”

  “He could lose his position. And I mean it. They might even kill him.”

  “Rumors.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Molly said. “Maybe I shouldn’t believe all I hear. Aaron’s not really a rebel, no matter what his reputation is. He wouldn’t let his hunters steal any dyitzu.”

  Alice nodded.

  “You hungry?” Molly asked her.

  “Yeah, famished. I’m always famished the day after eating at the Fore.”

  Molly was usually stingy in the best of times, so Alice was grateful and a little surprised that the woman was in a giving mood.

  “Tell me about it,” Molly said, fishing about in her satchel. “I used to eat in the Fore every day when I was with Baker. It’s like it expands your stomach or something. Loved it though, made my tits as big as trucks.”

  She held out her food offering.

  “Here you go, Alice.”

  Alice felt a chill run down her spine.

  Oh, Aaron.

  In Molly’s hand was a strip of dyitzu meat.

  Rick and Galen had agreed to let him use up most of the battery for his project. Arturus intended to leave enough for a hot meal, though. He set his gun down on the cooking counter and used a thin charcoal pencil and a stone ruler to mark off the squares. He thought he’d start with the woodstone, because it was the easiest. The black marble, wh
ich was the hardest to gather, would be the last test square he made.

  I could probably stand to find a better room to get it from, though.

  He rummaged around the supply closet until he found a glass mask which would protect his eyes. Then he chipped away at the woodstone with his chisel, getting close to the charcoal markings. There was no point in getting the squares to be perfect yet, because he intended to use the battery powered grinder to touch them up.

  He stopped working after he had shaped a square. His chisel mark had ruined the material beneath, but for right now, he had what he needed.

  The grinder had three settings, run by three different gears, each using more of the battery’s kinetic energy than the last. For woodstone, the softest rock in his bunch, he could use the lowest setting.

  With a wide handled set of tongs he gripped the square and then wrapped some twine around the handles to keep it steady. He flipped the lever that switched the power of the battery to the grinder, and then let the battery run. The grinder spun into life and he began shaping the stone.

  The piece snapped out from his tongs and went clattering across the floor.

  “Damn,” he said aloud, turning off the battery.

  He checked the square for damage. Fortunately, it was fine.

  He rummaged around further in the supply closet, but didn’t find anything that would serve him any better. He wandered back through the gravel hallway and searched in the forge. There he found some tongs with a clamp on the end.

  He returned to the battery room and clamped in the stone, using two pieces of Rick’s cleaning cloth to keep the clamp from scuffing the piece. With his square hopefully secured, he turned the grinder back on. This time the stone did not escape him, and he was able to try and grind it into the correct shape. Woodstone sawdust sprayed all about him.

  I’m going to have to sweep all that up.

  He paused from time to time to inspect his work. After he’d finished, he looked critically at the piece.

  “Well,” he told himself, “it looks kind of okay.”

  And to think, woodstone is the easiest.

  He moved back to his original set of bricks, took a section of white marble, and marked it off carefully with charcoal.