De’zeel stopped thrashing at De’eniroth, and both demons turned their attention upon the intruders.
‘We are guardians of this ’ole flank of ’Ell,’ said De’zeel, gesturing grandly over the glittering dunes. ‘Hidennfy yerselves, or we are hempowered by the Prince of ’Ell’—here he turned a jaundiced eye upon the party, jaundiced, sclerotic, bloodshot, and home to several bacterial conditions of which conjunctivitis was the very least—‘to do yer.’
‘Do our what?’ asked Zarenyia with professional interest.
‘Kill us,’ said Miss Smith.
Zarenyia wilted, this being the latest of her recent disappointments. Then she perked up. ‘Oh, wait. You’re threatening us?’ Her smile returned, a delightful expression filled with spring sunshine, heartfelt joy, and the imminence of wholesale slaughter.
‘Control yourself, madam,’ said Cabal. He turned to the demons, aware of and ignoring Zarenyia mimicking him behind his back. ‘You are to conduct us to the presence of His Infernal Majesty.’ He said it as if arranging an appointment to have the carpet shampooed. ‘What we have to discuss is for the ears of Satan only.’
De’eniroth gave the impression of blinking stupidly, despite the absence of obvious eyes. ‘’Oo?’
‘Satan,’ repeated Cabal, the word slowed with caution. ‘The Prince of Hell you just mentioned. He’s called Satan. That’s what he’s called.’ He looked from one idiot demon to the other and back again. ‘Lucifer? He’s called that sometimes. The Prince of Lies?’ Still no response. ‘What sort of demons are you if you don’t even know the name of your employer?’
‘Lucy-furr…’ The sound of De’zeel’s thought processes were almost audible, and would have seemed much like fracturing ice and old clockwork if they were. ‘I know that name.’ Suddenly he clicked his fingers, making a noise like crushing a louse the size of a tangerine in the process. ‘I do! That was the old boss.’ He grinned, and several tooth splinters oozed out on a string of drool. ‘’E’s gorn now. We’ve got a new bloke.’
‘What? How can there be a “new bloke”?’ demanded Cabal. ‘This isn’t some sort of corporation, subject to hostile takeovers. Even Hell isn’t that evil. The whole point of Hell is that it is and has always been Lucifer’s domain! What exactly is supposed to have happened to him? Revolution? Coup? An assassin angel came down from on high with a blessed elephant rifle? What?’
‘He retired.’ This said the lizard demon, and no more.
Cabal gawped, not something he was inclined towards in the usual run of things. ‘He did what?’
‘Retired. Said ’e’d ’ad enough, an’ chucked it in.’ De’zeel regarded the dumbstruck expressions of the humans (well, two out of three wasn’t bad) with pleasure. ‘Said the joke wos over an’ ’e wos done. Orft he went. Prob’ly got a cottage now. Cottages is nice.’
‘The joke?’ Cabal thought back, and then wondered how close an analogue this place was to the reality. Was this an echo of the true current state of Hell? If so had he, Cabal, inadvertently been instrumental in causing the greatest theological upset in … well … ever? It was a matter of the most monumental import. The opportunities were immense. New alliances could be forged, new paths opened. The vistas of potential research blooming before him, no matter what the outcome of the current expedition, were breathtaking. With Satan off looking after the roses around the door of his retirement cottage (Cabal guessed it would be in either Dis, Tartarus, or Essex; probably Essex), Cabal would be free to make overtures to the new management.
‘So,’ he said, ‘who is the new Prince of Hell?’
De’zeel and De’eniroth both huffed out their chests, made complex yet underwhelming salutes of obeisance to their ruler, and chorused, ‘His Infernal Majesty, Ratuth Slabuth!’
‘Shit,’ said Cabal.
‘Not a friend, darling?’ said Zarenyia. ‘Really, you should try being nice sometimes. I gather we’re back to Plan A?’ Without waiting for a reply she turned her attention to the demons and managed a smile no human could have managed in the face of the worst that both the vertebrate and invertebrate worlds could produce. ‘Hello, you sweet things. Quick question—do you both have anything that might equate to sexual organs?’ They seemed surprised by this tack and looked foolishly at her, a look much practised. ‘I mean, more or less. Just enough for a girl to…’ They still seemed very blank. She sighed. ‘You know what? Never mind answering. I’ll conduct an examination of my own. You just lie back and think of Gehenna.’
And so saying, Zarenyia shed her earthly form. Her extra legs erupted from her lower torso as she reared up, suddenly towering over the startled demons. Her abdomen seemed to swell out of nowhere, her clothes shredded into mist, and she stood triumphant and clearly outclassing De’zeel and De’eniroth in every conceivable category, a queen in chitin and angora.
Her smile was ravenous and vicious, the smile of a shark. ‘I am Zarenyia! Devil of the outer darkness where even demons fear to tread! I am the smiling death, the final embrace, the killing kiss! I bring the shuddering finality to my enemies! Unbeholden to the thrones of Hell, you have no defence from me, pit spawn!’ Her smile became a little more Women’s Institute. ‘So, I’d just pucker up and enjoy it, if I were you.’ She pointed at De’zeel, who stood rooted to the spot, his unlovely eyes wide with awe. ‘You first, poppet. You probably have more to work with. As for you’—she turned her attention to De’eniroth—‘just stay put until it’s your turn. No running away, or I’ll just have to run after you, and that will make me grumpy.’ Her smile hardened. ‘You don’t want to see me grumpy, believe you me.’
The demons looked at her in silence and then, very unexpectedly, fell to their knees. Or at least De’zeel fell to his knees. The situation was less clear-cut with De’eniroth, but he seemed to sink a little lower, and he curled his body around a little more so there was more on the lower side of the S of his body.
‘Mistress Zarenyia!’ they cried. ‘We must take you to the prince immediat’ly!’
‘Eh?’ said Zarenyia. ‘What?’
‘Your comin’ ’as been foretold, it ’as!’ said De’zeel. ‘You are most respectfully invited to the court of the new Great Satan his own self, Ratuth Slabuth!’
Zarenyia rested back on her haunches slightly in the manner of a toast rack being gently bent back, the better to regard the grovelling demons. Her brow harboured much in the way of suspicions. ‘Johannes, are these fellows committing some heinous and cunning ruse upon me?’
Cabal was as taken aback as she. ‘If they are anything like their mundane counterparts, they are severely lacking the wit for any scheme much more complicated than putting on their shoes.’
‘They’re not wearing shoes. The maggoty one would need several dozen little baby pairs, by the looks of him.’
‘I was talking metaphorically, madam. My point is, no, I doubt this is a scheme. Or, at least, not one they have evolved.’
Zarenyia digested this, then addressed the demons. ‘If I go with you, what happens to my travelling companions?’
De’eniroth and De’zeel looked at one another. ‘Dunno,’ said De’zeel after a short, wordless conversation with his colleague that largely consisted of shrugs. Maggots do not shrug convincingly. ‘But it’s really important you come wiv us, Mistress Zarenyia. ’Is Infernal Majesty is really, really keen to see you.’
‘What do you think, darlings?’ asked Zarenyia of her companions. ‘I mean, when all is said and done, this isn’t Hell. It’s more like improvisational theatre.’
‘That is no improvement,’ said Cabal.
‘Philistine. You know what I mean.’
Cabal nodded. ‘I do. There is a story to work out here, and running away from it will not resolve matters. Very well; we shall act in this play, though no one has seen fit to offer us a script.’
‘That’s the spirit! I’m rather enjoying all this, to be honest. We’re having fun, and I’ve met some of your friends and your brother, all of whom seem absolutely deli
cious.’ Here she favoured Miss Smith with a smile that left the necromantrix slightly breathless.
Zarenyia turned back to the demons, her smile now a beacon of complaisance. ‘Lead on, my sweets.’ They started to do so, but she stopped them. ‘One tiny proviso. Should it transpire that this is all some overture to a tedious trap of one sort or another…’ In a movement so rapid it blurred the thick air, she flipped De’eniroth onto his side and trapped one of his multitude of legs in a joint close to the end of her right foreleg. With no discernible effort and ignoring the agonised squeals of the demon, she scissored the limb off. She raised the miserable piece of flesh, speared on the leg’s tip. She was not smiling at all now. ‘I shall destroy you both in ways your fetid little minds could not conceive if you were a thousand times cleverer than you are. Which is to say, of roughly average intelligence. Johannes, tell them; do I follow through with my warnings?’
‘She does,’ he replied, a witness to one such event.
‘There.’ She flung the wiggling limb off into the distance, and she smiled brightly. ‘Now, let’s go and see the new boss, shall we?’
* * *
As they progressed in the wake of the demons De’eniroth and De’zeel—poor additions to an already displeasing vista—there was a muttered conference between the members of the mismatched little expedition.
‘Awful mess, isn’t it?’ Zarenyia indicated with a nod a palace that seemed to be in the progress of rotting. Tubules dangled haplessly in the fevered air, and ichor oozed from spiracles running in vague lines along the building—if building it truly was, and growth if it was not—pooling in lazy grey-green rivulets of filth. ‘That’s Beelzebub’s place.’
Miss Smith followed the nod. ‘Horrendous.’
Zarenyia cocked her head, considering the architecture. ‘Actually, that’s an improvement. But it’s still not supposed to look like that. What has happened here? It looks like a battlefield.’
‘You!’ said Cabal of the demons. The misshapen lizard looked back over its shoulder. ‘Why are the mansions of the princes in ruins? What has happened in Hell?’
‘Lucifer’s doin’, ain’t it?’ rasped De’zeel. ‘When ’e pigged off to take up watercolours or whatever ’e ’ad planned, ’e didn’t say ’oo was to take over, did ’e? Only left a constitutional crisis in ’is wake, selfish bugger. Owin’ to us not ’avin’ a constitution, ’part from the Abandon ’Ope thing, and that’s more like a advisory.’
‘No succession? What happened then?’
De’zeel pointed at the ruination of Hell. ‘Civil war, innit? “By the sword divided.” In ta lots of lickle bits, often as not.’
‘And, of all the Princes of Hell, Ratuth Slabuth came out on top?’ Cabal was having trouble with this idea. ‘Beelzebub, Lilith, Asmodeus, they ended up as also-rans, their mansions and palaces in ruins, and a ridiculous non-entity like Ratuth Slabuth gets the basalt throne?’ He shook his head. ‘He wasn’t even a prince! The last time I saw him, he was a corporal.’
De’zeel shrugged, an action that made his head bob upon the line of his shoulders like a dead pig in a cesspool. ‘Politics, innit? S’always politics.’ It was an analysis both cynical and sadly irrefutable.
Cabal gave up; these demons were clearly next to useless as sources of information, or most things. Instead he expressed his exasperation to Zarenyia and Smith. ‘Ridiculous. How could Lucifer just leave things in such a state?’ But his mind was already moving ahead and, if he was right about Lucifer, this had never been more than a sideshow to him in any case. He could have abandoned Hell just as easily as he abandoned any of his multitude of faces.
‘Who is Ratuth Slabuth?’ asked Miss Smith. ‘You seem to know a lot about him. I’ve never heard of him before.’
‘Used to be one of Lucifer’s generals,’ supplied Zarenyia, pleased to gossip. ‘For reasons I could never understand. Good at the bureaucracy, I suppose, and there was a period when Lucifer was very bureaucratically inclined. Pettifogging little brute, dotting and crossing his way up the ranks. I recall talk of him even being raised to a princedom.’
‘What happened?’
‘Blessed if I know, and as I find being blessed uncomfortable you may be sure I don’t. All of a sudden he was spectacularly out of favour and all his generalship and hopes of becoming an infernal prince up in smoke, which is a cleverer way of putting it than I realised when I started the sentence. As to why, it’s a bit of a mystery.’
Cabal could have explained the primary reason for Ratuth Slabuth’s fall from—and one uses the term advisedly—grace with great clarity, but it seemed a little like boasting, so he did not. Besides, if he was going to be making the new Satan’s reacquaintance shortly, he was sure Ratuth would be unlikely to have forgotten him and there would probably be some gloating.
* * *
The structure of Hell seemed to have changed somewhat in Cabal’s absence, but then he reminded himself—as he forced himself to do every few minutes—that this was not actually Hell exactly, the demons were not exactly demons, and the Ratuth Slabuth they would soon encounter was not exactly Ratuth Slabuth, former general of Hell, patronising snob, and proud tenant of the upper cantons of the enormous population spread across multiple realities, all of whom counted Johannes Cabal as an enemy.
In any case, his experiences of Hell’s physical organisation to date did not tally at all with the scenery through which they now travelled. Previously it had all been tunnels and chambers, lava outfalls, stalactites, and stalagmites. The open red desert beneath the light of a burning, curdled moon that could be no true satellite was all new to him, nor did he recall this particular manifestation in any of his reading. The gibbous, flaming moon in particular gave him some grounds for concern, an echo of events that sounded loud and insistent and that boded no good if his fears were in any wise grounded. Unable to do very much about it, he contented himself with pointedly ignoring it on the off chance it was possible in this place to ‘cut’ supernatural astronomical bodies, and thereby send them home in high dudgeon to sob their hearts out in a suitably vast boudoir.
The experiment didn’t seem to be working thus far, but that was little enough reason to give it up just yet. Or ever.
The plain littered with the ruins of former diabolical grandeur gave way to a slow rocky incline that abruptly gave way to reveal that they were on the edge of a vast shallow crater as if torn out by a large though insubstantial asteroid, perhaps made of marshmallow, the wreckage of which was subsequently devoured by many ants over an extended period. It could just as easily have been an ancient volcanic caldera, but that offered fewer possibilities for marshmallow-orientated simile.
In the centre of the crater—whatever its origin—the land rose again as a spike of dark rock. The three of them paused in their progress to look at that wondrous structure. Striking thousands of feet up from the base of the crater stood the needle worked at every point into colonnades and balconies, arches and embrasures, and an embarrassment of columns, with finials and plinths of all manner of design where columns might reasonably go and pilasters where they couldn’t.
‘That,’ said Miss Smith, ‘is the stupidest wedding cake I have ever seen.’
In the red-hued shadows cast by the burning moon and its lazy glow that licked across the vault of what passed for Hell’s sky, a city had gathered around the base of the needle, a humdrum ramshackle sort of place made from abrogated sins and cardboard boxes, corrugated iron and obsolescent dread.
‘Your new Satan’s building efforts seem very polarised,’ said Cabal. ‘Who lives in the needle? Where “live” is a very relative term.’
‘That’s ’is Infernal Majesty’s palace.’
‘All of it?’
The demon De’zeel nodded.
‘What has become of the princes?’ demanded Zarenyia. ‘Where are Asmodeus and his crowd? They can’t be living in those ruins we passed, can they?’
‘’Is ’Igh Sataness says pride is what put us down ’ere, so n
obody gets nuffink wivout working for it. ’E gets the big ’ouse ’cos ’e worked ’ardest. Obvious, innit? He came up from the ranks, got busted down, came up again. So…’ The lizard pointed at the needle, so impressive in some ways, so utterly ludicrous in others.
‘Why all the columns?’ asked Miss Smith.
‘’E likes columns.’
* * *
’E did indeed. Cabal once more had the impression that this slippery realm that used the legend of Prester John as its shingle was trying to say something again, but he was not sure what it was. Perhaps it did not matter. It seemed to Cabal that, unappealing an idea that it was, he would perhaps be wisest not to treat these experiences as a puzzle box, or at least not quite yet. Surely, he thought, not all the pieces were yet in play, and what of Horst and Miss Barrow? Might they have made discoveries of their own? All the points of data—or at least a decent majority of them—were required before he might bring himself to profitably theorise. In the meantime …
‘Is that Leviathan?’ said Zarenyia suddenly.
What had at first appeared to be a municipal hall covered with broken-down cardboard packing boxes joined with wire was now revealed to be a huge creature under a blanket of broken-down cardboard packing boxes joined with wire. The entity’s vast cetaceous face looked mournfully down at them as they passed. By its front left flipper and hopelessly dwarfed by its bulk was a small sign, also written on rough brown cardboard. Please Help, it read. Unable to Work Due to a Persistent Medical Condition.
‘Don’t look at ’im!’ protested De’zeel when he noticed where their attention lay. ‘You’ll only encourage ’im.’
‘’E’s a mangledinker, in’t ’e, De’zeel?’ said De’eniroth, spending long seconds over each syllable and still getting them wrong.
‘A malingerer! Yus! That ’e is!’
Filled with righteous indignation, the demons marched (we must assume De’eniroth was marching, but really it was very hard to tell; certainly his many leg-like undulipodia assumed quite a martial rhythm in their movement) past the redundant Prince of Hell. Miss Smith looked back, and saw a tear sufficient to fill a pond run down Leviathan’s cheek.
The Fall of the House of Cabal Page 16
