Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong)

by Shaun O. McCoy

  “And how long does the corpsedust last?”

  “Two months.” That was Mancini’s voice, Aaron realized. “After that it’s not good for making bloodwater.”

  Aaron turned to face the Brewer. Mancini’s beady black eyes were taking in the scene. Aaron wasn’t used to seeing the man outside. He tended to either be in the still, the church, or the Fore.

  “Well, what are we going to do about it?” a villager asked.

  “We should kill him!” said another. “Otherwise he’ll come and take one of us.”

  No one contradicted him. Many were even murmuring in agreement. A few women in the corner of Aaron’s vision were nodding their heads in unison, no doubt imagining Benson as a corpse.

  But Benson was so small, so frail. Aaron couldn’t see how the man could do any harm, even if he were raised. He had to remind himself that these people didn’t brave the wilds as deeply as he did. They weren’t as used to the dangers.

  I bet the Citizens are even more frightened.

  “We’re not killing him,” Aaron said. “Michael Baker makes the decisions of life and death. The most we can do is keep watch over him. I’ll post a hunter.”

  “I’ve got some handcuffs.” That was Massan.

  For some reason Kara hit him for making the suggestion. A few around them chuckled and the Middle-Eastern man looked away, abashed.

  Oh Christ, come on people.

  “Thank you,” Aaron said.

  “And we can wash him out in the river.” That was Molly.

  “Not a bad idea,” Aaron admitted. “Davel, anything else we can do? Anything to make the corpsedust less potent?”

  Davel’s frown left wrinkles on his forehead. “We can feed him some sinfruit juice. Corpsedust tends to get caught up in that. We could flush him with it for a couple of days, but I don’t know who’s going to pay for it.”

  The villagers began to mutter.

  “Well, you would,” Aaron said.

  Mancini shook his head. “I disagree. He should die. If he should kill another, they also would rise. Harpsborough is in great danger.”

  Coward.

  But Aaron knew how to deal with cowards. “Mike decides matters of life or death.”

  “We could put him past the Golden Door,” a villager suggested.

  Neither Aaron nor Mancini responded to the man. As the two stared at each other, Father Klein stepped back into the crowd.

  “If Mike wants to throw him through the Golden door, that’s his decision,” Aaron said. “Until then, we’ll do no such thing.”

  “And if Benson should rise?” Mancini asked.

  The crowd was starting to lean in the Brewer’s direction. They didn’t want to, Aaron could tell, but the man was speaking to their fears.

  “Fine,” Aaron said. “You want him dead, you kill him.”

  Aaron drew his sidearm and passed it over to the Brewer. “Kill him now.”

  Mancini took the gun as if he’d never touched one. Slowly, he turned it around in his hands so that the barrel was facing the right way.

  You ever killed a man?

  Aaron could see Mancini’s hand shaking.

  The Brewer held the gun out to Graham, one of Aaron’s better hunters. “Shoot him.”

  Graham moved as if to take the weapon but looked to Aaron first.

  “No,” Aaron said. “At this I must draw the line. Death comes from the Fore. From the law of this city. Not from the village. Not even from a hunter. If you want him dead, you kill him.”

  The gun in Mancini’s hand began to shake. He raised the weapon, and pointed it at Benson.

  Coward.

  “And remember to shoot twice,” Aaron said.

  The gun’s shaking intensified. Mancini began to fumble for its safety. “Twice?”

  “Twice,” Aaron repeated. “The first time to kill him. And then again when he rises. Only be quick. It is said that men with the stilling rise quickly.”

  Mancini’s aim looked now to be so poor that Aaron thought he might need to clear out the villagers for their safety. The wrinkles of worry on Mancini’s face intensified. He seemed to be sweating. Finally he relented. “You’re right. We should wait for the First Citizen.”

  Aaron breathed a sigh of relief. “Warwick, get a couple of hunters to dunk Benson in the river. Davel will get you some juice to feed him. Massan, you have those cuffs?”

  Massan passed him the handcuffs.

  Benson’s wrists were so slight that Aaron figured it would be safest to put the cuffs around the still man’s ankles. He rolled up Benson’s pants to do so. The man’s legs were thinner than Aaron’s wrists.

  He better not die now.

  Aaron stood after having secured the man.

  Martin had picked two hunters to help him. “Alright boys, let’s get this guy to the river. Watch his teeth because if he dies on you, he’s liable to be one hungry corpse.” Then, more disturbingly, Martin started speaking directly to Benson. “You lucked out, ole Bense. I thought Mancini was going to shoot you for sure. Looks like you’re going to live another day.”

  Aaron watched the hunters carry Benson towards the exit.

  “Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Father Klein said.

  “What? I can just have him guarded. No trouble there.”

  “Yes, but you’ve got to find out who did this, don’t you? Whoever it was, it is not likely they are a villager.”

  Aaron nodded.

  Yeah, well secrets are Davel’s game. We’ll let him play that one.

  “His legs were so thin,” Aaron murmured. “I couldn’t believe it. Have you ever seen anyone survive the stilling sickness?”

  Father Klein shook his head. “There’s a first time for everything.”

  “You think we should have killed him?”

  “No. No, you are a merciful man, Aaron. You wouldn’t have fared any better than Davel.”

  Yeah, well maybe I’m a God damned coward too.

  Aaron found Mancini in the parlor room. The Brewer had seated himself on the Persian pillow covered stone chair which Michael preferred. He had covered the light orbs with so many blankets that the room was nearly black. A thin line of light cut through the darkness, coming from an imperfectly drawn door blanket and stopping just inches in front of Aaron’s feet. He almost tripped over a foot stool as he walked around the couch.

  “You made a fool of me down there,” Mancini said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you, hunter.”

  If he thinks I’m insulted because he forgot to call me Citizen. . .

  Aaron took a seat on the edge of the couch. He reached over and removed one of the blankets from the light orb.

  Mancini’s forehead was still creased with lines of worry. “They’ll be saying I never braved the wilds. I’ll hear for weeks about how I can’t even fire a gun.”

  “You can always try and pass it off as compassion,” Aaron suggested.

  “Why are you bothering me, hunter?”

  Mancini was shielding his eyes from the light with his hand. Aaron picked the blanket back up and threw it over the light orb.

  “I’m here because I need your help,” Aaron admitted.

  He saw the shadow that was Davel Mancini lean forward at his words. “You want to make some kind of peace, is that it?”

  Aaron tried to make out Mancini’s features in the dark. It was taking a while for his eyes to adjust.

  “Somebody put that corpsedust in Benson’s mouth, Davel. I don’t know who or how. Maybe it’s just some villager gone flat crazy. Maybe it was somebody’s sick idea of a joke. I mean, I figure we’re all in Hell for a reason, right? Even if it is just a joke, even if there isn’t anybody like Maab or the Infidel’s men trying to get us, we still need to find out who it is.”

  Aaron still couldn’t see Mancini’s facial features, but he noticed the man straighten.

  He’s probably wondering why he wasn’t thinking about that. He was
so busy being the fool he forgot to worry about his own skin.

  “Okay,” Mancini said, his head bobbing in the dark, “you’re right. We need to find out who did it.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s any of us. The Harpsborough people, I mean. We would just be endangering ourselves.”

  “What hermits have been in the city lately?” Mancini asked.

  “Hidalgo. Turi and some new girl, but they were here just for Michael’s leaving. Someone would have seen them if they did it. There was the man with the burnt face and a couple of visitors from the Pole a few days ago.”

  “Hidalgo is crazy, but he’s the wrong kind of crazy for this. Kara came to me to trade corpsedust, though. I have too much already, so I turned her away. We should check to make sure she still has it.”

  “That’s a good point,” Aaron said. “I’ll ask around to find out who had any corpsedust during the last few days. Did you say you had too much?”

  “It’s the new brew,” Mancini said. “It’s made smoother. And while the devils have been thinning out, the corpses are just as thick.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “Has anyone else tried to sell you corpsedust recently?”

  “Ryan and Julian. I can’t imagine Julian would do a thing like this.”

  “He wouldn’t—”

  Aaron was about to say more when he was interrupted by some shouting outside.

  “The guards,” he said, leaping up from his chair, banging his foot against a table in the dark.

  Mancini swept the blankets off of one of the light orbs and the pair rushed out onto the balcony.

  Aaron could hear the shouts more clearly now. “Wait. They’re celebrating.”

  “He’s back! He’s back!”

  For the second time that night, the villagers exited their hovels and the Citizens lined the roof of the Fore.

  Michael Baker had come home. Slung over his shoulder like a log was a hairy, six-foot section of a giant spider’s leg.

  He’s been wounded.

  But the wound must not have been great, or Michael wouldn’t have been strutting so. Duncan, Fitch, and Avery came in after him. Their packs were full, and they also carried sections of giant spider leg.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Aaron heard Michael Baker say. “If we’d brought an entire hunting party, we’d have been back in time. Too much to carry. We’ll have to get some hunters and villagers together to go get the rest. There are enough spider eggs to fill a hovel. My friends, we’ll be eating for weeks. This food isn’t for the Fore. It’s for you.”

  The villagers were cheering, some were even jumping up and down. Aaron knew how starved they were and how much this would mean to them. He saw many of his hunters down there, looking up at him. They had expected Michael to fail. They had expected to get better rations.

  That son of a bitch.

  “Turi! Turi!” Ellen’s voice came from outside his sleeping chambers. “It’s Ellen. Are Rick or Galen here?”

  Arturus reached for his pistol as he sat up from his sheets.

  “No, they’re hunting.”

  If you thought they were here, why didn’t you call them?

  “Turi, I need your help.”

  Begrudgingly, Arturus stood up and pulled on a shirt. “I’ll be right—” He almost shot her as she burst into his room. “out.”

  “There’s a corpse by the knowledge fruit. I was trying to gather them, but it’s wandering around in there.”

  Arturus wiped some of the sleep out of his eyes. “Well, did you shoot it?”

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Galen said that if I was in any trouble I should come straight here.”

  She seemed very distraught.

  I’m not sure Galen would classify this as trouble.

  “Was it armed?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Arturus gave her a flat look.

  “Will you come kill it for me?” she asked.

  “You need to learn to handle these things yourself.”

  “Please?” She was in earnest.

  “Alright. Take me to the thing.”

  He kicked some of the gravel she’d brought in his room back into the hallway and followed after her.

  “Hold on,” Arturus told her as he stopped by the battery room. “I’ve got to let Rick and Galen know where I’m going.”

  He found a woodstone block and carved Ellen’s name into it. He placed it by the entrance on their way out.

  She led him down the river, past the sloshing of the woodstone water wheel, and through the chambers which led to where she slept. He saw the warning stone Rick had placed to advise visitors from Harpsborough that someone lived here. The stone was a red cube about one foot in height. Arturus had been this way many times to gather the knowledge fruit, so he took the lead.

  Ellen followed behind him.

  His sense of danger overpowered his tiredness. He checked each room carefully before he entered, not wanting to be caught unawares.

  “How can you be so calm?” she asked him.

  Do I look calm? How can you be so noisy?

  “You sure it’s not armed?”

  “Pretty sure,” she said.

  Arturus smelled it before he saw it. He stopped Ellen, and they waited patiently by the entrance to the next room.

  It shambled into their chamber.

  This one was particularly horrific. Some hound had taken its face off, leaving only rotted muscle and bone behind. Whoever had become this corpse had almost certainly died by being mauled. There was a knife on its belt. A lot of the corpses never even drew their weapons. Galen warned that he should never count on them failing to. Who knew what instincts their bodies kept after death?

  For some reason he was suddenly struck with the idea that this had been another human being. That this person’s soul was in a deeper level of Hell, facing an even more terrifying world than this one.

  It’s because of her. She’s seeing everything for the first time, so I am seeing it with her.

  It took a step closer.

  “Is this what will happen to me, when I die?” Ellen asked.

  “Sometimes. If another one’s touched you. Or if you ate something polluted with it.”

  “Is there any way to stop it?”

  “If you burn someone, they won’t come back like this.”

  Arturus raised his gun and pointed it at the corpse.

  “Will you burn me when I die?” She asked.

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “Promise me.”

  “Okay, I’ll burn you.”

  “Promise me all the way,” she said.

  “Okay. I promise. If you die, I’ll burn you. Now cover your ears. Gunshots are loud.”

  She did so, and he fired.

  His aim was perfect.

  Mancini sat down upon his mattress and leaned back against the wall. His bed smelled of his own sweat, though the aroma was too familiar to be off-putting. His room was dark, kept so by a thick window tapestry. It didn’t help as much as he’d like.

  In his hands he held a colorless Rubik’s cube. The person who gave it to him had said it was an old world joke, an “idiot’s cube,” because no matter which way someone turned it, the puzzle had still been solved. At first Mancini had meant to add colors to it, to make it a proper cube, but in the end he found something much more challenging.

  He’d imagine the colors.

  He painted one side red with his mind, the others orange, green, yellow, white and blue. He’d twist the cube around and try to remember which colors went where. Then he’d reverse his motions and try to align the colors together. After a year of this, he no longer even needed the cube itself. He loved it when he’d forgotten which moves he’d made to tangle the colors up, yet was still somehow able to solve it again.

  But now he was having trouble keeping the colors straight in his head. Now his thoughts were interrupted by the startling image of Benson’s bloodshot eye
s. Now the jubilant shouts of the villagers, who were celebrating the First Citizen’s victory, were distracting him.

  What are the odds that Michael would find a spider? What are the odds he’d survive?

  Mancini closed his eyes and ran one hand through his thick, black hair.

  What are the odds that Aaron would come to me for help with Benson?

  His room was on the first story of the Fore, and the hunters often leaned upon his wall to speak and gamble. Mancini guessed they had no idea how often it was that he eavesdropped.

  It was Martin and Duncan who were speaking now.

  Mancini tossed the cube across his bed and listened.

  “He was amazing,” Duncan was saying. “We were just out, wandering like normal down some corridors I hadn’t been down in months.”

  “Which ones?”

  “By the Canyon, all the way out to the Pole road.”

  “That place has been dry for months,” Martin said.

  “I know, right? At first I thought he was crazy. Admittedly, he hadn’t been out in the wilds for years or whatnot. About midway through the day he must have smelled something. Heard something. Sensed something. I don’t know what, but he knew it was bad. He motioned us back, told us to keep a good distance. Avery was worried, but he remembered how good Michael was. We didn’t know. We’d never seen him hunt. He found this crawlway that went down. I don’t know how the hell he spotted it. Even Aaron wouldn’t have seen that shit.

  “He goes down, and then there’s some gunfire. It’s a good thing he brought that monster Winchester. Avery goes rushing in. Fitch didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t let them be down there all alone. Shouldn’t have worried. By the time we got there it was all over. Spider guts everywhere, man. Michael had to take a dip in the river to get that shit off of him.”

  “How much food is there?”

  “That’s the crazy part. That spider was huge. Michael’s not exaggerating when he said that the eggs could fill a hovel. More than that. The spider’s body itself could fill a hovel. It was hell carrying that leg back. Its leg hairs kept getting caught in my hair. Juices dripping down the back of my pants leg.

  “I’m telling you, Martin, there’s a reason Michael’s First Citizen. He didn’t get it just sitting on his ass, that’s for sure. That man can hunt.”