by Rick Shelley
Silvas scarcely had time to note that the storm had ended before he was caught up in something new. The silence was a tube that surrounded him and held him as tightly as the noose holds a hanging man. It was a drain that seemed to suck him through the floor of the stable. The cylinder held Silvas too tightly for him to move. Utter darkness folded in around him. He tried to spread his arms out to the sides, both to learn the extent of his prison and to try to slow the pace of his fall, but he could not move his arms away from his sides. Nor could he move his legs. The tube seemed to do more than restrict his movements. His mind seemed almost paralyzed by it as well. He could think, but he could not reach for power. In the eternity of his descent, he was no more than any mortal-helpless, hopeless, able to do nothing more than mark the fact of his rapid fall.
He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. Yet his mind lived, and Silvas knew that as long as he could hold on to that awareness, he would be able to reclaim his body, wherever this fall might take him. As long as both body and mind survived, Silvas would survive. In some fashion.
When it ends, I had best be in command of my faculties, Silvas decided.
He willed himself to blink, though he could see no visual confirmation of that fact. The darkness surrounding him was more complete than any he had ever experienced. The keenness of his wizard's eyesight was no help. Not even his new divinity gave form to this darkness. But he felt his eyes blinking, knew that his body was still under his command.
Next he turned his attention to his heart, setting a beat in his mind and imposing it on the other organ, caressing it until he could see his own heart beating as clearly as he had seen that other human heart beat as it lay on the forest road, before Mikel stomped it to nothingness. Breathing was even simpler, once Silvas focused his mind on it.
And still he fell.
How far have I fallen? quickly gave way to Where am I falling to? He could imagine only one destination for a fall that continued so long.
Silvas started to gather himself for whatever he might face when the fall finally ended-if it ended. He prepared the considerable weapons of his mind and will, ready to call for whatever might be needed. Then he willed his fall to slow, and-very gradually-he was finally able to impose his will on the descent.
Or so it seemed.
Once more he tried to extend his arms, but the dark pipe still held them motionless. He could scarcely wiggle his fingers at his sides. He could tilt his feet up and down, but could not move his legs, to the sides or back and forth. His head did move freely. He could turn it. He could tilt it to either side. He could even, within close limits, move it backward and forward before he reached the limits of his confinement.
Since I can see nothing, I suppose it matters very little, he told himself.
Maria, can you hear me? Do you know what is happening to me? He could not feel her presence tightly linked to his own, as he had already grown accustomed to. He strained to catch her response, to feel her mind united with his, but there was only a ghostly echo of a reply, one he feared he was imagining.
Silvas was unprepared for the end of the fall. Without warning, his feet struck a hard surface. He buckled at the knees and waist and fell forward, heavily, with an instant of sharp pain. There were no longer walls holding him in position. The ground he fell against was extremely hot to the touch, hot enough that he picked himself up quickly. He did not remain down to check for injuries.
At first, the darkness appeared to remain total. Silvas extended a foot out in front of him, sliding it along the ground, feeling for a return pressure. Then he brought the foot back and extended it in a different direction. Slowly, he discovered that the patch of ground, or whatever it was, that he stood on was at least two full paces in diameter.
He kept returning to his original position, unwilling to stray far from that spot until he had some better idea of what he might find. Only gradually did the blackness of his surroundings moderate, whether in response to his powerful commands for light or not, he could not say. Some traces of vision returned. He could see the merest hints of shape in the dark, but always as if at the end of long tunnels, strangely compressed on all sides, as a man who was nearly blind might see them.
Silvas sniffed at the air and caught a vague whiff of an odor not unlike that given off by the lava flow he had stopped at Mecq.
"If this is Hell," he whispered, relieved to hear his own voice, "then I must be only in its outermost precincts."
He strained the senses of his body, and the greater senses of his spirit, seeking any additional clues to his location, and the reason for his being there. But in those first moments, there seemed to be no sound not of his own making, and the sights were still only of vague form to the blackness, even when he exerted his augmented gift of telesight. When he looked down, he could not see his own body. The pains he had felt on landing evaporated, as if they had been no more than a response remembered from his mortal past.
The senses of his wizard's mind, and the senses of the divine power he had inherited, proved to be no more effective in discovering new information about his surroundings than his purely physical senses. For a time that seemed as eternal as his fall, he could see and hear nothing more than vague shapes in the blackness and echoes of emptiness.
When that blackness started to abate, it was so gradual that Silvas was slow to notice. Slowly, the place in which he stood took on form and apparent substance-a vast chamber of some deep cavern. The walls and ceiling were distant, the floor stretched away until it blended into the walls. The boundaries were as indistinct as those that bordered the ethereal chamber of his Wizard's Council.
Silvas turned slowly through a circle, careful to remain standing in the same place. His eyes searched out the limits of this place. When he looked upward, he could see no trace of the tube through which he had fallen. There was no hole visible to indicate where he had come from.
"I stand here almost naked," he said, looking down at himself again. He wore only what he customarily wore, a long, loose shirt over baggy trousers-the style of the eastern nomads. The belt around his waist held only his dagger with its ornately decorated hilt. He wore soft boots on his feet, and the heat of the ground was already penetrating them. The heat was not painful, but it was apparent and might soon grow to be a nuisance.
"I might find myself opposed by all the legions of Hell," he said. A memory came to him. Before the final battle of Mecq, Mikel had armed and armored his warriors.
Silvas saw the armor and the weapons in his mind, as if on display. He called the armor to him and felt its weight. When he looked down again, his body was clad in plate armor, down to his feet. There was a sturdy helmet on his head, a shield on his left arm. In his right hand he carried a sword.
The shining armor seemed to add light to Silvas's surroundings. There were deep, dull shades of red among the black now, like embers that had nearly died. They reflected off of the polished steel plate and seemed to grow in strength. Silvas turned through a circle again, looking to see if the added light would show him more.
As he looked, one lane seemed to grow a trifle brighter than its surroundings. It led from Silvas's feet off to one side of the cavern, in a straight line. With a shrug, Silvas started to walk along the lane. "As if I have a choice," he mumbled.
For twenty paces, the lane seemed to be the only change to his surroundings. Then the nature of the ground at either side of the lane seemed to alter. Silvas looked to be walking along a causeway across a black lake. The black and dark red became mottled and seemed almost to churn within solid form. There were small points of brighter reds and dull oranges, as if of fires that burned hotter. A dull hum started to grow around Silvas, without discernible form at first, but gradually resolving into the labored pleas of many weak throats.
"Help me, O Lord." "Save me, for I am a sinner." "I repent my sins." "The burning; the burning. Will it never end?"
The calls became more numerous. Silvas looked down at his right side and saw visions o
f dead sinners reaching out to him with both hands raised in entreaty, looks of ultimate horror on faces that seemed strangely elongated, as if stretched on a rack. For a moment, Silvas's footsteps faltered. He felt the pain and terror of damned souls. He even knew their sins: this man killed his brother to take his wife; that one stole from the church and then bore witness against another whose mind was too feeble to defend himself. As each pair of eyes met Silvas's, he knew their crimes. Some were minor. Others seemed to be almost beyond belief in their vileness: this one ordered the slaying of hundreds of innocent children under the guise of Crusade. Scores, hundreds, thousands of pleas-and crimes. Silvas soon felt swamped by the overwhelming weight of their sins.
I would stop and help, but I don't know how to help, or even if it is within my power.
"This is not why I was brought here," he said aloud. "These are but distractions." He strode forward with new purpose. I am not here for the redemption of sinners, he told himself. That is the job of another.
"Will you, too, abandon us?" the voices in the ground demanded. Their earlier cries were abandoned as the burning souls screamed at him in unison. It became a chant, repeated endlessly, louder with each verse.
"I do not hold the keys to Hell!" Silvas finally shouted. "You held your own keys in life and chose not to use them."
Slowly, the chanting faded, but the faces of the condemned grew clearer. They still seemed to be impossibly distant, beneath the black and red and orange that was solid and opaque-yet impossibly transparent, and as turbulent as water beneath a high dam.
Silvas stopped again and looked around as carefully as he had before. There was no trace of the dull glow of a lane behind him. The path still seemed to begin where he stood and continued on in the same direction as before. The walls seemed to remain equally distant from him, as if he truly had not moved a single step in all of the endless time of his walk.
He raised his sword and looked at his reflection in the brightly polished steel. The face was the face he remembered, what little of it he could see beneath the half visor of his helmet. He took several slow, deep breaths.
"Is this only a fancy of my mind, or have I truly fallen into Hell?" he asked his reflection. "Is this a ghastly nightmare, or some attack whose nature is not yet clear?"
"You've heard the prayers of the living and the pleas of the dead."
That came as a clear voice in his mind, but it came not from within his mind, nor from Maria's. There was nothing familiar to the voice, yet Silvas thought that he should know it.
"Who are you?" he asked. "Why am I here?"
There was no answer, though Silvas waited through many heartbeats. He searched through his mind without finding any clear indication.
Eventually, Silvas resumed his walk along the marked path, more slowly than before. He continued to watch the faces in the ground, but he managed to shut off their insistent petitions for help. He gave more of his attention to the lane ahead of him, looking toward the wall of the cavern, trying to see some measure of progress to match the steps he was taking. But no matter how closely he focused, he could detect no progress. The wall seemed to remain as distant as it had been when he could first see it.
"Is this to be my eternity?" he asked the emptiness.
As if in answer, the reds and oranges of the hidden fires grew brighter, and finally licked the air above the ground at either side of the path, and behind Silvas, where the path continued to disappear after each step he took. Demons appeared and glided on the surface of the fires, laughing and taunting. These were not the minimal spectral creatures that Silvas had encountered as a wizard. The anatomy of these demons was complete, and gross, exaggerated wildly from human norms. They had large, hulking forms, with deeply sloping shoulders that accentuated immense, misshapen heads. The ears were large and pointed, sticking well out to the sides. The bodies were widest at the shoulders and narrowed down through the middle, which made broad hips seem even bulkier than they were. Their legs were short and bowed, as if unable to bear the weight. Their tails divided near the end to show triple points. In color, the demons had the same ember red hues of the cavern floor, only less reflective.
Though the demons bore a wide assortment of weapons, the favorite appeared to be the trident, a three-pointed spear with barbed points. The demons danced around the cavern, taunting Silvas while they stayed well out of his reach.
"Bastard get of a nameless whore" became a chant, echoed by dozens of demons. The refrain seemed to reverberate, growing with each repetition until it seemed that thousands of voices were screaming the words.
Silvas kept a tight grip on his sword, and a tighter grip on his growing anger. He could not shut away the voices of the demons as he had the voices of the dead. He dared not stop walking for a second now, but he occasionally glanced down. There was no path back in the direction from which he had come. He had to keep moving forward, following what remained of the path, though he still seemed no closer to the wall of the chamber than he had been when the path first appeared.
Without warning, the path became a treadmill under his feet, almost a living creature, a flat snake that moved against his steps. Silvas had to walk faster, and faster, to keep from losing ground and falling backward off of the moving belt. With the ground racing under his feet, the wall of the cavern suddenly started to approach at speed. Silvas's steps appeared to be dragging the path, and the wall, toward him. The demons increased the volume and tempo of their catcalls and curses, but at the same time they seemed to fade farther into the distance.
Silvas tried to slow his progress, but could not. When he walked slower, he tottered backward, as if he were about to fall, and he dared not risk that, though he could not fathom why he dared not.
The wall ahead seemed unbroken, and the pace of Silvas's rush became almost a run. His breath came faster, though shallower, as he fought for air to power his legs. It seemed certain to him that he would collide with the wall. But at the last possible instant, a black tunnel, just barely large enough to accommodate Silvas's striding form, opened up, and he passed into a tunnel as dark and featureless as the tube that had hemmed in his fall from the world above.
This time, he still had room to move. Once beyond the large chamber, the path stopped its own motion. Silvas was able to slow his pace, even halt for a moment. The path was once more inert, nothing more than a way from where he stood to he knew not what. Silvas looked back, but could see no trace of the cavern he had left. There were no glowing reds and oranges, no flames licking the air, no dancing demons. He continued to move forward, very slowly now, holding his sword in front of him to feel for obstructions, sliding his feet along the unseen path-carefully, to avoid the possibility of stepping off into an abyss.
The darkness persisted only briefly this time before Silvas emerged into another large cavern. This, too, was filled with the look of glowing embers and tongues of fire, but it was different from the first chamber. There were many levels to this room, large slabs of rock stacked to different heights. With effort, a man might reach a platform along the far wall that was a hundred feet above the point where Silvas entered the chamber. The colors were brighter as well, as if the glow came from hotter fires. The reds and oranges were clearer, and there were even bright yellow flames, making the chamber much easier to observe.
The room was also hotter. Silvas felt certain that he could not be so hot were he to embrace a burning log. The temperature oppressed but did not consume. The shining armor he wore seemed to reflect the greatest portion of the heat, though he could feel himself sweating profusely within that armor.
Silvas blinked away beads of sweat that were dripping from his eyelashes, and when the blink had ended, Satan was standing in front of him, no more than thirty feet away.
Silvas entertained not the slightest doubt that it was the Devil himself he faced. Satan appeared to be no more than a man, though larger and more grossly formed than most, with an unusually ruddy cast to his complexion. There were no horns on his
head. No tail dragged behind. His hair was a particularly dark red, a wine red. In size, Satan might have passed without notice among Mikel and his brothers. He was dressed in red armor, without a helmet, and carried a two-handed sword. The six-foot blade did not leave a hand free for a shield.
"You've heard the prayers of the living and the recriminations of the damned," Satan said. His voice was a rumbling basso that recalled Bay's voice to Silvas's mind. "Do you see that there is no difference? You've been to the land of the gods, and now you are come to my land. You see the differences, no doubt with great clarity."
"To what point?" Silvas asked. The scene before his eyes met a scene in memory, of the black knight he had fought and destroyed-in thought, at least. But Satan was in red armor and wore no helmet. The sword was also different. Was it indeed an omen of this encounter? Silvas asked himself. But he was unsure of the answer.
"Point? Who needs a point? Perhaps this is for nothing more than my own amusement." The Devil laughed. "Or perhaps it is to show that you fear those puling children in the Shining City too much. Their power is nothing compared to mine, and your power is even less. I am the one you need to fear."
"I need fear you only if I lose faith in what I believe," Silvas said. "That is true no matter what happens in other lands."
"Deceive yourself while you may. I tire of this game. When mortals worry about what passes among such minor powers, they lose sight of my greatness. I will deal with the others at my convenience. I will deal with you now."
With that, Satan raised his claymore and quickly advanced at Silvas. Silvas firmed his grip on his shield and brought his sword up as he silently recited chants of power. Then he, too, advanced, unwilling to concede all of the momentum of attack to any opponent, even the Devil.
From the first clash of blades, Silvas knew that he could not hope to prevail. Satan's strength was greater than anything he could hope to attain, even as a god. The two-handed sword came down, and Silvas could scarcely deflect its course enough to keep it from crashing through his armor and body. At least his own blade did not shatter at the impact.
