Pathfinder Tales: The Redemption Engine

by James L. Sutter

  Two hills away, their path met a road, a perfectly manicured track of dirt leading arrow-straight toward the city. Figures moved back and forth along it, passing each other in orderly lines.

  "They look like people," Roshad noted.

  "They are people," said Salim. "Not everyone in Hell is a devil. At least, not right away."

  "So what are they?" Bors asked.

  "Petitioners, mostly—souls like that last one we saw, sent here after they died."

  "They seem to be getting a better deal," Roshad said.

  Salim shrugged. "Maybe they're closer to becoming devils themselves. Or maybe they come from cultures that find traveling like this demeaning." He lifted his chin toward a line of carts being drawn by tall, skeletally thin oxen. "Probably a few cultists and traders mixed in there as well."

  Roshad laughed and shook his head. "Trading with Hell. I've met some merchants who would sell you their own legs if the margin was right, but this..."

  "Some things are universal," Salim agreed. "Where there's a profit to be made, someone will make it."

  They moved down the hill and onto the road, taking up a position well away from other knots of travelers in the winding line. The figures that passed them, wrapped in robes or rags or nothing at all, watched them with expressions ranging from hatred to hunger, yet none disturbed them. Overhead, dark shapes silhouetted against the sunless sky swooped up and down the road, patrolling.

  The slums to either side of the track grew denser, fetid shacks leaning against one another for support even as their humanoid occupants—their skin dribbling pus or fused into terrible scales and spikes—eyed one another with suspicion. A few crept from their doorways toward the caravans and were driven back with stares or gestures toward the guardian devils above.

  The city's wall was more than just visible now—it loomed over the road, huge and predatory. From its direction, a new sound rose. Part howl, part moan, it wormed its way into Salim's marrow and settled there, scratching dirty fingernails against the insides of his bones.

  Roshad winced. "What is that?"

  "The city's welcome," Salim said. "Look closer."

  The road surmounted a final hill and ended at a gate. Nearly as tall as the wall itself, the iron doors could have let a dozen elephants walk through abreast without touching, yet at the moment they were only cracked open wide enough for a few carts. Bearded, red-skinned devils encased in black spiked armor stood to either side holding huge glaives, while above them fluttering imps clung to bladed protrusions in the gates' embossment.

  "Gods," Roshad breathed. He wasn't looking at the gates or the devils, but at the walls themselves. Even from a distance, it had been clear that the walls were more than just stone and iron, yet this close, their organic nature was revealed in all its infernal glory.

  Pressed between stones like mortar, or pierced through by sharpened plates, souls reached and wept, their half-corporeal bodies distorted into barely recognizable shapes. Arms shot through with reinforcing nails stretched ten feet or more to cradle massive stones, while heads crushed to a finger's width by the weight above them still managed to blink weeping eyes. In many places, multiple souls were swirled and squished together into a mercifully blank expanse of flesh that expanded and contracted with jerky aspiration, yet always there were a few recognizable features: a patch of hair, a single nipple, a chap-lipped mouth. It was from these last that the walls' terrible song emanated, the moaning of the great city of the damned.

  Roshad turned away, closing his eyes. "I don't care what they did," he whispered, half to himself. "No one deserves that."

  "You might be surprised," Salim said. "But now you know one of the fundamental truths of Hell: no matter how bad you think something is, there's always something worse."

  "Next!"

  The line advanced, and a fiendish guard gestured at Salim. Up close, Salim could see that the tendrils trailing down the creature's armored chest were less like hair and more like tentacles, their barbed tips writhing.

  "State your business."

  "We seek the Fastness," Salim said, "as emissaries from the Boneyard. We're expected."

  "You are, are you?" The creature looked the three up and down dubiously, then waved them through. "Go."

  They passed through the gates, Roshad averting his eyes from the great muscle fibers webbing the sides of the wall's thick, arching passageway.

  "So that's it?" the sorcerer asked. "They let us through, just like that?"

  "We have legitimate business," Salim said.

  "But he doesn't know that."

  They emerged from between the gates at the other side of the killing field, and Salim stopped to get his bearings. "That doesn't matter. Hell is an authoritarian society—maybe the original authoritarian society. If we were lying and he killed us, he'd just be doing his job—no special rewards. But if we were telling the truth, and he delayed us in any way, he might have pissed off the devils we're here to meet. If said devils were high enough in the hierarchy, they could have him ground into mortar for the walls, and no one would bat an eye."

  "So we're safe?" Bors asked.

  "No one is safe here." Salim finished triangulating their position and pointed. "The Fallen Fastness is that way."

  Creatures of all sizes and shapes clogged the streets. Most were devils of various sorts—some blatantly monstrous, others denoted only by hooves or horns on otherwise humanoid frames. Mixed among these were all manner of planar traders, their carts hauled by bound creatures or zombie servants, as well as robed and branded cultists of a dozen humanoid races. A few of the folk they passed looked like perfectly normal humans, and Salim pulled Roshad and Bors out of these last individuals' way. "Watch out for those particularly."

  Roshad turned to look at the woman disappearing into the crowd. "Her? Why?"

  Salim indicated a horned behemoth stomping past, a spiked chain dangling from its claws. "That thing? It's a product of this place. It's big and scary-looking, and nobody's going to mess with it." He nodded back in the direction the woman had gone. "Now imagine you're her. What sort of person walks through the Oppidian Maze of Dis as if she's at the Sunday market, without so much as a visible weapon?"

  "A crazy one," Roshad said.

  But Bors was nodding. "One who knows she's more dangerous than anything she might encounter."

  "Exactly." Salim got them moving again.

  The streets of Dis were themselves an expression of Hell's perfect order, each avenue and alley spotlessly clean and turning at angles so sharp that the buildings' edges could draw blood. They were also, Salim knew, an outgrowth of the devils' megalomania: shaped like a wheel, the city centered on its lord, Dispater, with all major streets eventually making their way to the city's heart. To either side of their current boulevard, towers rose up in onyx monoliths and golden minarets, a thousand different architectural styles crammed together in precise grids. Not all of them touched the ground—in places the streets passed beneath foundations floating unsupported in the air, or under the arching bridges connecting buildings in complex webs.

  Salim's party emerged into a square sporting huge stone fountains in the shapes of tortured humanoids, their red-tinged waters leaking from eyes and wounds. Salim led the Iridian Fold men across the square, toward a street marked by a fountain of an old man wrapped in tight coils of razor-studded wire.

  "How do you know where you're going?" Roshad asked, as they turned yet another corner. Above them, the sky was a narrow band between the oppressive towers. "I lost track of our direction three turns out from the gate."

  "That's why they call this part of the city the Oppidian Maze," Salim said. "There's an order to it—to everything in Hell—it's just too complex for most mortals to understand."

  "But you understand it."

  Salim shook his head. "No. But that's not really how the city works. You can't actually walk across Dis—the scale here is different from anything you've seen on Golarion. I have business with the Fastness, so
I'm trusting the city to guide us there."

  "So it's alive? Like Heaven?"

  Salim smiled. "I doubt many residents of either plane would appreciate the comparison, but yes. More or less."

  "So we're wandering and trusting a city of devils to give us what we need." The sorcerer harrumphed. "Great plan."

  "And yet it's working. Look."

  The urban canyon opened up, revealing a system of short bridges arching over two intersecting canals. One was filled with dark water, the other with brilliant red and yellow flames. Rather than canceling out into steam, the two met and flowed through each other without so much as disrupting their currents.

  Salim led his companions up to the top of the tallest bridge's arc. From there, the city spread out in rings around them, its spires the thousand teeth of a great lamprey.

  "We're near the Iron Heart now," Salim said. "The center of the city. You could have walked your whole life and never made it here." He pointed to the cathedral-spire they'd seen from outside the walls, its bulk dwarfing the other buildings and a second set of city walls that encircled it. "That's the Iron Scepter, home of Dispater's court."

  "And we have to go there?" Roshad asked.

  Salim chuckled. "If we do, we're in trouble. The Lord of the First City is a god in his own right, or close enough. He has no fear of the Lady of Graves. But the Scepter is the center of Dis, which makes it an easy landmark." He pointed left, toward a blackened structure like an anthill that floated above another open square. "That's the Tower of Pitch and Tongues, and its walls are made of precisely what you'd expect. At its top is the Market of Breaths, where hooded merchants buy and sell years of mortal lives." He leaned on the rail and pointed the other direction, toward a distended mound of flesh. At the apex of its blistered dome, a massive bloodshot eyeball twitched and rolled in its fleshy socket. "That's the Demagogue, the museum where the souls of the worst mortal tyrants sit on display, bound into the walls themselves."

  "What's the eye for?" Roshad asked.

  "Nobody knows. It opened millennia ago, without any explanation. They say that once a century, it sheds a single bloody tear."

  He turned and found Roshad and Bors staring at him, expressions unreadable. "What?"

  Roshad waved a hand toward the city. "We're in the middle of Hell, about to make demands of a bunch of devils, and you're giving us a walking tour."

  Salim straightened and crossed his arms. "You asked how I knew where we were, and I told you."

  "Of course." Roshad made an after you motion. "Please, lead on."

  Salim did so. At the end of the bridge, instead of following the main avenue toward the Iron Scepter, he turned right through a stretch of parkland. Leafless trees clawed the sky with skeletal, calligraphic fingers, and thorn vines writhed across black grass and up chalk-white stones. The paths here were as geometrical as everything else in Hell, the plants seemingly afraid to even lean over their borders. Halfway through, the men passed a small stone amphitheater where two twelve-foot-tall devils like blue-gray mantises stood in conference, drawing in a flat plane of sand with ice-crusted spears. Multifaceted eyes looked up, evaluating the mortals with cold, insectile intelligence, then returned to their strategizing.

  At last they came to the end of the park. Before them, steps bordered by arch-connected pillars ascended at a steep angle, terminating in a set of tall iron doors. Above, the tower's featureless gray stone tapered to a knife point hundreds of feet tall, yet at the building's foot the normally precise lines of Hell seemed to break down. Instead of a foundation, the walls of the tower extended unbroken down into the ground, the pavement around it buckling and tearing, giving the impression of a splinter jabbing into the flesh of the city itself.

  "The Fallen Fastness," Salim said, starting up the staircase. "Where the sins of all men are cataloged."

  "All men?" Roshad tried to look casual and failed. He and Bors lagged a few steps behind.

  Salim smiled. "Curious what they have on you two? I'm sure the devils would be happy to show you." He reached the landing at the stairs' top and pounded on the doors. "Let's see who's home, shall we?"

  paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas , Aug 10, 2014

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Fallen Fastness

  The boom of Salim's fist on the metal echoed against the stone pillars. Then the huge doors swung silently open.

  The creature that met them filled the doorway. Easily ten feet tall, she was equally wide, and floated another five feet above the floor in a vast throne of welded iron skulls. Where Caramine the bloatmage had been an attractive woman swollen by the strange demands of her magic, this thing was stretched beyond all human proportions. Breasts like tan slugs draped over waves of rolling flesh that drooped out over the edges of the chair and down past elephantine knees, dripping clear slime. Beady black eyes peered through a narrow slit in her folds of face-fat, and hands turned to worthless clubs of meat waggled like maggots, directing the floating scrolls and tomes that orbited slowly around her chair. As she looked down at Salim, her chins stretched in what must have been a grin.

  "You're no petitioners." The voice was a wet, genderless wheeze. "Have you come to record your sins in person, then? How thoughtful."

  "We come on behalf of Pharasma's Court," Salim said, "and on the authority of Heaven's Vault of Correction. We invoke your treaty with them, and ask to examine your collection."

  A hairless inchworm of an eyebrow arched its back. "I see." The huge throne floated silently to one side. "Enter."

  Inside, the entryway was just as blank as the building's fortresslike facade. Though it was wide enough to accommodate several of the grotesque librarians, and tall enough that even the great Exscinders from the Vault of Correction wouldn't have to duck, there was no particular artistry, just dark stone and shadows cast by flickering torches in wall sconces.

  The doors thundered closed behind them, and Salim turned to face the librarian. "I'm afraid we won't be telling you our names."

  "Naturally," the librarian said. "Nevertheless, you may call me Apulminas, of the third tier of ayngavhauls."

  "What's an ayngavhaul?" Roshad asked.

  "Heresy devils," Salim answered. "Blasphemy specialists. The great scholars of Hell."

  "Indeed," Apulminas replied. "We seek the truths that weaker races turn from. Yet you didn't come all the way down here to speak of us. What do you seek, Emissary? And what do you offer?"

  "We offer nothing." Salim strove to make his voice a guillotine, sharp and final. "We're not here to bargain. You've already made your arrangements with Heaven, and we call upon that standing agreement."

  A stubby arm twitched, and droplets of slime pattered to the floor. "Fairly struck. The initial question stands: what does Heaven want so badly?"

  "Diagrams," Salim said. "Schematics for a magical machine capable of sending mortal souls directly to a specific plane for metamorphosis, circumventing Pharasma's judgment."

  The books floating around Apulminas's chair paused in their orbits, then began whizzing faster. The devil chuckled. "Oh, that is good. And the angels think we're stealing souls, do they?"

  "Actually, there's some evidence that the thief may be a rogue angel."

  A stunned silence. Then Apulminas exploded into laughter, her vast bulk jiggling with each heaving gasp. The floating throne wavered, threatening to spill her out.

  "Even if we didn't have a bargain," she said when her spasms had subsided, "that would be enough to buy you entrance." She floated past Salim and the others, waving for them to follow. "Come. We'll see what we see."

  At the end of the hall, the corridor split into five more, each of equal size and with a glowing rune on the floor before it. Apulminas chose the leftmost one, which led them on into another branching, then down a long, wide stairwell that circled a central shaft, her throne gliding effortlessly across the uneven surface. More metal doors studded the hallways, each emblazoned with infernal script declaring its con
tents. A few stood open, revealing towering columns of freestanding bookshelves, the walls around them hung with tapestries and manuscripts. Others showed recessed pits like amphitheaters with bookshelves lining each tier.

  They were not alone in these passages. Other ayngavhauls, their thrones identical to Apulminas's, passed them in the halls, distinguishable only by the different documents circling them and the rune-embroidered wrappings some wore across their brows or draped across their loins. Against his will, Salim saw enough of one to verify that there were males among the group, but the sagging flesh of their chests made the genders look startling similar.

  Other devils traversed the library as well, each accompanied by a librarian. Down one corridor, a leech-bodied devil many times larger than a man slithered along in conference with its ayngavhaul, its three humanoid heads bent to study a document floating before it. Through another door, Salim glimpsed half a dozen devils combining the bodies of black flies with the plump heads and torsos of cherubic infants. The fly-children buzzed around a librarian at a writing desk, chittering maniacally as the librarian took notes.

  At last they came to a hall that dead-ended at a single door. Apulminas gestured, and the portal opened. "Here we are."

  The grand room beyond had a polished stone floor and a domed ceiling frescoed with an image of Asmodeus, god of all devils, seated on his throne and gazing down into the room as if about to pronounce judgment. Friezes around the upper edge of the walls showed him creating Hell and imposing his iron law upon the varied residents of the multiverse.

  A single figure stood in the chamber's center. He turned as Salim and the others entered, hands clasped behind his back.

  "Hezechor?" Salim asked, startled.

  The contract devil smiled. "I was curious how long it would take you to make your way down here." He turned to the librarian. "Thank you, Apulminas. You may go."

  The librarian bobbed her head in obeisance and drifted back out the door, closing it behind her.