“That’s assuming, of course,” Graham went on, “that he hasn’t found it already.”
Arturus’ shoulders were hunched from fatigue. His steps were slow and deliberate, and he favored his right foot heavily. He didn’t even bother to look through the black crystal as he passed them. He should have been more careful, but he couldn’t find the energy to do much more than walk.
He was not surprised when he heard the growl of the hound behind him. The hound was a four footer and broader than it was tall. Arturus was too tired to feel much fear.
If it kills me, it kills me.
He clutched at one of the grey bags he’d made from his cloak and emptied its contents on the floor. The bent silver legs sounded like pins as they scattered about.
“You want me?” he asked the beast.
It moved forward, sniffing at the objects. Arturus could see it measuring the distance. Perhaps it could jump far enough to clear the makeshift caltrops. Maybe it couldn’t. It tested the ground with one paw before yelping and pulling back. Arturus raised his pistol and took aim. The thing turned and ran.
It might find a way around.
He continued walking. At times he almost felt as if he was wandering, but the many of the Carrion rooms looked familiar. Galen had taken him to the ritual along this route. As long as he could follow it backwards, he would be able to find the hunters.
If they haven’t moved.
The corridors blended together. Sometimes he wondered if he was just tricking himself into thinking that he knew where he was. Maybe all of the rooms of the Carrion looked similar. Maybe he was wandering deeper into the wilds, farther and farther away from his friends. Farther and farther away from Harpsborough, and Alice, and Ellen. . . and Rick.
The thought of his other father brought a catch to his throat.
Would they have filled in the wall yet? Would they make Rick do the building? What a cruel thing that would be.
What he wanted right now more than anything else in the entirety of damnation was a piece of Rick’s burnt flatbread.
The next room gave him pause.
Is this it? Have I finally made it?
He cleared his throat. “It’s Turi,” he reported.
He entered the passageway slowly and followed its turn. They were all there.
I’m safe.
He felt as if he had been struck dumb.
“Turi!” Aaron shouted.
Johnny Huang caught him up in a hug that was so tight that it hurt. Avery’s laughter was as loud as Aaron’s shout, and Duncan had to shush them before they made enough noise to draw demons.
“I knew you’d make it back!” Avery said, grabbing at Arturus shoulder.
He saw Kyle, leaning up against a stone wall. He looked pale, but he was awake. The man gave him a wan smile and a thumbs up. Aaron reached over and tousled Arturus’ hair.
Arturus sighed and laughed.
I’m safe.
He could breathe easily for the first time since he had entered the Carrion. Aaron was beaming, and when Johnny finally released him, Aaron hugged him as well.
They were all around him, struggling to keep their voices down. He saw his father, asleep in one corner. In another, he saw the captured priestess.
“Don’t worry about her,” Aaron said as Arturus looked at her. “We captured her to try and find you. She’s no trouble.”
“You made it!” Avery congratulated him, “Galen told us you’d been captured! You gave them the slip, huh?”
“Yeah,” Arturus laughed. “I gave them the slip.”
Arturus had no idea that they would have been so happy to see him. He hadn’t really thought that he was that important to them at all. But they did care. They loved him as if he was one of their own. As if he was one of the villagers of Harpsborough.
And I love them right back, as if they slept in the chamber next to mine. As if they ate in the battery room with me each morning.
Still, for all their celebration, a part of Arturus felt empty. He looked over towards Galen, who was now eying him from where he lay near the wall.
“He was looking for you all day yesterday,” Aaron said, whispering into his ear. “Man hadn’t slept for more than an hour since we’d entered the Carrion, but he still went out looking for you. He finally had to come back.”
He’s disappointed in me. I was supposed to stay still. I was supposed to keep my head on. But I was sure they wouldn’t pick me, and I saw Julian. I thought it was the right thing to do.
Fatigue swept over Arturus. He moved beside Galen and lay down.
Galen looked at him through squinted eyes. His father smiled, grunted, and then rolled back over to sleep.
Arturus’ heart swelled in his chest.
“I’m proud of you boy,” Galen said, his voice sounding muffled since he was speaking towards the wall. “Would have taken a lot of skill to escape from them and make it all the way here. I’m proud of you.”
“I thought maybe they had caught you,” Arturus said.
But Galen had already fallen asleep. Arturus shrugged, fatigue was also taking him. He placed his remaining pouch of silverlegs down carefully. He spotted his clothes lying next to Galen. Arturus took them and bundled them up to use as a pillow. When he laid his head down, however, he felt something metal in one of the pockets. He reached in to find out what it was.
It was his razor.
He smiled.
His eyes closed, almost of their own accord. It was not long until he was dreaming peacefully of the battery room, and of Rick, who had burned his flatbread.
Galen stood guard while Arturus knelt by the river.
“Is this safe?” Arturus asked.
“As safe as anywhere in the Carrion. There’s only this entrance, and a dyitzu would have to climb to make it.”
Arturus eagerly took off the blood-soaked grey pants and torn shirt he’d been wearing. He dipped himself quickly into the river. The water carried away the blood and sweat which had clung to his skin.
He pulled himself back out quickly and began dressing his wounds. His right foot didn’t look any better than it had before he and Galen had gone to the ritual, but his left had almost healed completely. Neither foot stung when he wrapped them with fresh bandages. He walked about for a moment, feeling the cool Carrion air on his skin, waiting to dry a little.
His old clothes felt so much more comfortable than the serf’s garb, even the newer black shirt, and he felt much more like himself when he put them on. It was as if all those things that had happened to him, watching the Minotaur and kissing Maab, had happened to some other boy. Some poor boy who wore a grey robe.
He smiled at the idea of it.
“You have a whetstone?” Arturus asked, his voice sounding quiet above the rushing of the water.
Galen searched through his pack with his hands, his eyes still on the exit. He tossed a small stone over to Arturus.
This is the same water that flows through the Thames. Rick might have watched it flow by.
Arturus knelt by the river. He felt the vibrations of the bone-handled straight razor as he ran it over the whetstone. After a few quick strokes he tested the blade’s edge on the hairs of his chin. Satisfied with the result, he tossed the whetstone back to Galen.
The man caught it with his left hand without breaking his vigil and put it back in his pack.
Arturus began by shaving down on the right side of his face with quick and even strokes.
Galen moved closer to him and spoke while he shaved. “I made a successful meeting with my old friend.” Galen’s voice was just loud enough to be heard over the river. “We’re waiting another day or so, letting all of Maab’s priestesses clear out before we meet. He’s agreed to try and lead us back to Harpsborough.”
Arturus nodded, dipping the razor into the river. The room was too dark for him to have a proper reflection, but he could see a shadow on the water where his head was. He was careful to place the blade to the right of it so that he didn’
t feel like he was stabbing himself.
“Maab’s people are being pushed by something, he told me,” Galen went on. “The devils are thick here, terribly so, but they’re even thicker as you get deeper into the Carrion. Maab’s people have many devilwheat troves like the one Julian found, but now they’re not able to get to the farthest of them. That’s probably why they kidnapped Julian when they did. They didn’t mind losing a little grain in the beginning, but it became more precious to them when they stopped being able to get to their other sources.”
Arturus started shaving his neck, paying special attention to where it met his jaw.
“At first I thought that the Minotaur she used in the ritual was the cause of all her woes, but my friend let me know that she’s had that thing captured for years. There’s something else out there, deep in the Carrion, gathering strength. If he’s right, then it’s not just a Minotaur. Maybe it’s a few Minotaurs together, or a council of Nephilim. Who knows?”
Arturus tested his jaw with his thumb. He seemed to have gotten everything. He washed off the blade one last time, again careful not to disturb the shadow of his face, and dried the straight razor on his pants before folding it into its bone handle.
“We’ll have to pay careful attention,” Galen was saying. “If we’re able to get back home, that is. As the pressure builds, Maab’s people might try to cross over. They may want to take Harpsborough. Of course, whatever devils dwell deep in the Carrion won’t be far behind them.”
“If?” Arturus asked.
“If,” Galen said. “I’m not sure how well versed our guide will be with the area. We may have to just gather enough woodstone torches to make it back through the silverlegs.”
Arturus frowned when he thought of the spiders. “Unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant indeed. More than that, I’m not entirely sure that my old friend is still loyal. He may try to lead us astray.”
“They have control of hounds,” Arturus said. “They used one to chase me. I had no gun, just a torch, so I led them towards the silverlegs. I used the torch to drive the spiders into Maab’s hunters.”
“Smart move.” Galen approved.
“They had a little girl with them. I recognized her, I think. One of Maab’s. I don’t want to leave without Julian.”
“Unwise.”
“They are doing terrible things to him.”
“I am aware. Do you know where they are keeping him?”
“With Selena.”
“We could, if we planned it well, raid Selena’s clan. If we rescue Julian, it will take us some time to get him back to Harpsborough. However, the war we start between Harpsborough and Maab’s clans would be immediate. It would be improper to start that war without letting Harpsborough decide for themselves if that was what they wanted. In all likelihood, we’d return to find the village destroyed.”
“I understand.”
Galen nodded and moved back towards their chamber. Arturus stood, but remained by the river, watching it flow by. Galen stopped and waited.
I’ve learned something. Something important. Something to do with myself. I need to talk this out.
“You were here, years ago,” Arturus said.
“I was.”
“Was I born here?”
“Yes, Turi. Yes you were.”
“So in a way, I’ve come home.”
“In a way.”
“My blood mother and blood father, are they still here?”
“No.”
“The Carrion makes Maab evil, doesn’t it.”
“Partly. In Hell, as it was on Earth, the only things of any real value are the ones we’ve fought for and won on our own. Both places are so inhospitable to us, so inamicable to our condition, that we have to twist those creations against themselves to find enough time and space to breathe and love. Dyitzu or polio. Hounds or cancer. Minotaurs and droughts and earthquakes and settlings and small pox. It’s all the same. Perhaps Maab would have been a nicer woman if she had been faced with a less formidable adversary than the Carrion.”
“What am I, then, if I was born of such a place?”
“Whatever you make yourself.”
Arturus knelt again, looking at his shadow in the water. He had the sudden urge to stab it.
“But how can I know how to make myself?” he asked. “Maybe Maab has the right of it? Didn’t the Devil make Hell? Doesn’t He decide what is right and wrong?”
“Morality is very different for you and me than it is for a dyitzu. Different for a lion than it is for a gazelle. Satan, the Fore, God, at some point they made all their rules up. You can too. I choose, because of who I am, to spend my life fighting Hell, fighting for people, fighting to raise you the best that I can. I made those rules up, made up that morality. Others—Satan, the Fore, Maab, God—make up different ones, and it makes no difference to me. I get along with them when I can and defeat them when I can’t.”
“But couldn’t I just decide that my rules are only for me? Couldn’t I hurt everyone but me?”
“You could. The way you asked that question, though, seems to belie the fact that you don’t want to make that rule up for yourself. You might find that by following that type of rule you will tear apart the groups of people who support you. You might find that you hate the man you create by following it. Like Maab hates herself, and in some way, like Michael hates himself.”
“But, still, I can’t just decide what I think is right?” Arturus said. “Satan’s going to judge me, won’t he? When I die here, won’t there be a Reckoning? Won’t he decide if he likes what I’ve done, or hates it?”
“You really give a damn what that bloke thinks?”
Arturus considered the question. His shadow rippled with the water. He imagined the different faces that he could put there.
I am my own Reckoning.
“No,” Arturus said, standing. “No I suppose I don’t.”
He found that he liked that shadow, oscillating with the water beneath him, and as he thought about it, he found that he liked the person who was casting it, too.
Carlisle lay dying on the cold stones of Hell. He watched his black blood as it crept across the floor, a muddy river fed by the wellspring in his side. The half-congealed liquid was marked with his own footprints, his lifeblood depressed in the pattern of his treaded boots. He felt a malevolence closing in on him—black wings on the edge of his vision. He half sat up from the blood he was lying in and looked all about himself. He couldn’t see very far, but he knew it was out there. A devil, a sentience, a thing that hated him even more than he hated himself. A thing that was coming to kill him.
“Infidel!” Carlisle called.
The evil seemed to recede as if forced away by the word.
How many times has this happened?
“You found me, Carlisle,” Lilith said.
God let his only begotten son be tortured and crucified.
“Save me,” He begged.
“Oh, it’s far too late for that.”
“The Infidel, he’s coming for me.”
The black wings pulled back again, even farther.
“Who?” her voice sounded playful.
“The Infidel.”
She bent down beside him. He remembered her from before, except last time she’d been little more than a shadow. Now she seemed real. “Oh,” her low voice crooned, “say that name again. I love it when you say it.”
“Infidel.”
“Yes, do you see him, standing there? He keeps the devils at bay, my sweet.”
The devils at bay? A blessing.
It hadn’t always been like this.
He crawled up to his hands and knees. He saw the Infidel, silent, only a shade, but oh so very real. While he was near, the black wings could close no farther.
“Save me!” The pain blurred Carlisle’s vision, and he had to fight to breathe.
“The best I can do is give you ways to fight the Devil,” Lilith said.
“I don’t want the Devil,
I want the boy.”
“Tsk, tsk. You want the angel’s get, I know. But you’re not headed that way. You have to take a look at the big picture. Do you remember why you were looking for him?”
Because Maab said so. Because. . . I hate Maab. She took my cock. I hate her. I hate her. Why did I want to do anything for her?
“I’ve forgotten,” he admitted.
“Redemption, wasn’t it, my sweet?”
Yes. Redemption. I failed God. I was sent to Hell for my sins. I wanted to help God. So I had to serve Maab. I had to save the one thing that was pure in this entire place. The child of the angel.
“I remember. I needed to do good.”
“That’s very noble of you, my sweet. You’re making the devil who calls himself Mephistopheles angry, though. Can you feel him, the blackness clawing to get in?”
“I feel him.”
“Roll on your back.”
Carlisle did as he was told. Lilith descended upon him, straddling him. Her shoulders and arms were strong. Too strong to look feminine. Her face had a sharp angle to it. A girl’s face, certainly, but her jaw was very muscular.
“So we need to fight the Devil, don’t we?” Lilith asked.
“Yes! I hate Him.”
He felt his own sick blood soaking through his clothes. He felt almost like he was drowning in it. “Tell me how to fight Him!” He shouted the words too strongly, and the pain became more than he could bear.
The dark circle was closing quickly around him. Lilith seemed to lose some of her substance. He could almost see through her.
“Who killed you?” she asked.
She’s trying to make me say his name. I won’t do it. Benson warned me. He told me not to say his name.
“No, witch! I’ll not fall for your tricks.” He sat up suddenly and reached out, taking hold of her neck. “Tell me! How do I fight the Devil?”
He was grabbing her throat as hard as he could. Her eyes looked sad. She leaned forward and held him as if he were her very own son. His grip about her throat slackened, and she lowered him into the blood. She kissed him gently on the lips.
Tears welled up in his eyes.
“Faith, child,” she said. “You must give up your Faith.”
Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong) Page 43
