I did not take my eyes off the Queen. “I do not,” I said. “There has to be another way.”
There was a tremendous crash from outside the courtroom, followed by a host of terrified screams. “The hellhounds have breached the gate!” yelled the sergeant of the guard. “We cannot hold them off for very long. You must flee, Head Magistrate!”
“Even the Lord of the Underworld cannot interrupt Immortal Divorce Court when it is in session, so I am not fleeing,” the Head Magistrate said. A blast of flame blew the doors of the courtroom open, knocking the sergeant to the ground. He bounced up with a growl, patting out a bit of flame on his shoulder, ignoring the fact that his armor was still smoldering. “But I guess he can try to destroy it altogether, come on, Sirius Sinister, lives are at stake here!” The Head Magistrate pulled a dagger with a gavel handle from beneath her tunic and placed it on the bench. “Make a blasted decision before we all die!”
The Queen had remained silent in the chaos, almost calm. “It can’t work out between us, Sirius,” she said. “You are land. I am water. If we stay married, my people will suffer at the hands of Orcinus. If we divorce, I can have our child and rule over my people with the protection of the royal guard. The high council will never know of Maria’s true lineage.”
“You are the queen. What can they do about it if they did find out?”
“Remember that one woman I told you about who had a child of mixed race?”
“Yes, what of her?”
“No one knew that she was with child. She was just what you would call a scullery maid. When she gave birth, the midwives screamed in horror at what she had birthed. I came running and saw an angelic little cherubim. The high council saw outrage and ordered her and the baby executed according to our laws. She then confessed to the council that she had been taken against her will by an evil, dark monster of the land. I was able to have her merely exiled, and convinced the high council to let me raise the child in the royal house to hide our people’s shame. They agreed on one condition. If the child took on his father’s pedigree and grew into a monster, I would kill him. You can imagine their collective anguish as he grew bigger and bigger. Luckily his facial features favor his mother, or he would be dead a hundred times over!”
“But, he is no monster, is he? It’s Lovely,” I said. “He is half troll, isn’t he? His father was no evil, dark monster. His father is Oliver von Cliffingham!”
The Queen’s eyes grew wide. “Yes,” she exclaimed. “Yes, he is! But how could you know that?”
“Because Oliver told me he fell in love with a mermaid years ago. And we both know that Oliver did not rape her,” I said. “He is anything but evil. Maybe cranky once in a while is the worst you will get with him! He does not know he has a son, does he?”
“No, she was forbidden to tell him, or to ever see him again.”
“But she was exiled, how would they know?”
The Queen looked me in the eyes, and I could feel her pain. “Did I say exiled? Uh, it is probably more accurate to say she is imprisoned.”
Imprisoned? That was news to pass on to my favorite wine-making troll. “But he loved her and she loved him. Doesn’t that count for something with your high council and the ways of your people?”
The Queen sighed deeply. “No, I am afraid not. But scandal was avoided. The honor of our people remained intact. To this day, no one speaks of it. Well, aside from the whispers when Lovely passes. He pretends not to hear, but even though you cannot see it in his face, I know it pains him.”
“His mental strength is a gift from his father.”
The Queen turned away from me. “So you see, if we stay married, you, Maria, and I would be a living, air-breathing insult to our people’s ways.”
“Your ways are old and do not fit in the world today,” I said, coming close to her again.
“Maybe that is true. Yet the high council would seek to have you killed.”
“Well, at this point I guess they can stand in line after Hades. You could live on land with me,” I pleaded, ignoring the howl of the oncoming hellhounds.
“No more than you could live in the water,” the Queen said. “Sirius, even now I yearn for the ocean. I would wither and die.”
“My Queen,” I said, holding her hand and looking into those deep blue eyes for what I feared was the last time. “Is there no other way?”
The Queen did not respond, but began sobbing, shaking her head back and forth. Outside in the hallway, we could hear the faerie legion battling the hellhounds valiantly, but losing a man by the minute. In the courtroom, Hades’s voice echoed, “I make the choices for you.”
“No,” I said, looking all around. “No, you don’t. You aren’t coming for me, Hades—it is I that is coming for you!”
The Immortal Divorce Court was now on fire, and smoke billowed into the courtroom. A terrified clerk who had been hiding under the Head Magistrate’s bench ran screaming down the aisle and was snapped up in one crunchy bite by a hellhound as he reached the door. I put my left hand on the Queen’s belly and closed my eyes, sending love to my unborn child. “Until we meet again, sweet Maria,” I said. I kissed the Queen softly on the lips and wiped a tear from her cheek with my thumb. “Goodbye, my Queen. Do not cry for me for we shall meet again. Promise that you will tell Maria about me, and that you will make sure she knows her sisters.”
“I promise,” said the Queen. “Do it now, Sirius Sinister! Now!”
Holding the Blade of Truth high in the air with my right hand, I turned to the Head Magistrate. “Make it happen, Your Honor.”
“Can you breathe water?” the Head Magistrate asked me.
“I cannot,” I answered.
The Head Magistrate ducked down behind her bench as the courtroom doors buckled and collapsed, leaving just the sergeant between us and more hellhounds than I could count. “All right, all right,” the Head Magistrate shouted to the Lord of the Underworld. “I am getting to it. You had better not get remarried and divorced this millennium, Hades! Now then, Sirius Sinister, I grant you this divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, taking a spot next to the sergeant. “This fight is mine,” I said to him. “You do not have to stand with me.”
“Nonsense,” the sergeant said. “I am just doing my job.”
“And I’m going to do mine,” the Head Magistrate said. “Sirius Sinister, for the destruction of this courtroom, courthouse, village, and immeasurable loss of life and property, I hereby find you in contempt and sentence you to one hundred years in the tenth level of Hell.”
The hellhounds suddenly stopped their incessant baying and sat on their haunches quietly. The steady stream of smoke stopped billowing into the courtroom and dissipated. I nodded solemnly, and looked to the Queen for one final, torturous time. We locked eyes, and though I was headed to certain doom, I did so with my head held high.
I bared my fangs at the hellhounds. I was not afraid of their master, and buoyed with the love of my child, I had a feeling the Lord of the Underworld knew that.
As the sergeant and I walked out of the courtroom, demonic fires that a moment before had been gnawing hungrily at the floor and walls just faded away into nothingness. Indeed, by the time we exited the courthouse, even the gates to Immortal Divorce Court had somehow managed to reposition themselves on the wall. But that was not the way we were going.
The sergeant looked to the back gate and grabbed his mask, pulling it down over his face as we walked in that direction. He looked around to see if any of the other faerie guardsmen were around to join him, and saw none. “I guess it is just me,” he said.
“You do not have to do this,” I said, stopping so suddenly that a hellhound nearly walked into me. I bared my fangs at it and brandished the Blade of Truth, sending the beast skittering out of reach. “He knows I am coming, and it’s not like I c
an go anywhere else, what with these demonic tail draggers following me.”
The sergeant drew his own blade. “I will escort you, Sirius Sinister, because you are doing the honorable thing. That is true courage. I heard what you said to your unborn child. That is true love.” He clasped my arm. “I am called Honeysuckle, and should you survive this journey, you are welcome in the faerie guardhouse any time.”
“Thanks, Honeysuckle,” I said. “I will do the best I can to take you up on that offer.”
But as we came through the back gate of the IDC, there lay the Gates to Hell, and all the disembodied skulls that made up the gate were not screaming, crying, yelling, or anything of the sort. Every single skull was laughing at me in perfectly synchronized maniacal laughter.
But this was no joke.
Chapter 17
The gate creaked open, and I coughed heavily as the stink of brimstone and clouds of smoke assaulted my lungs. I gladly took the mask proffered by Honeysuckle, and instantly could breathe a whole lot easier. I wondered if he had anything that was a little more fireproof—like tenth level of Hell fireproof, ideally. Once past the gate, the smoke faded away, and I found myself on the same accursed granite spit leading deeper into Hell. Ah, Limbo, I thought. Desolate, hot, and eerily abandoned—lost souls, anybody, lost souls?
Suddenly, out from behind a rock jumped a familiar creature, but while last time all his organs dotted the outside of his skin like tattoos, this time they were all piled on top of his head, except for his nose and eyeballs, which were located where his private parts should have been hanging. Then I looked to his head and saw his private parts sticking out from its left side. “Nice look, you poor excuse for a demon!” I said, rolling my eyes.
“I am a troll,” it screamed. “I will crush your bones and suck the marrow out of them for breakfast. Flee, lost souls, flee!”
Honeysuckle grimaced and swung his sword at the creature’s head, and it backpedaled more quickly than his spindly legs would allow, and he collapsed in a heap of legs and bouncing organs. “Whoa, whoa,” shouted the creature. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“Yes, that is the general idea,” said Honeysuckle. “I most assuredly am. I am not a lost soul. I am one angry faerie guardsman.”
“But I am a troll,” it said. “Why are you not running, screaming in fear to pound your fists hopelessly against the Gates of Hell, and begging for mercy?”
I sighed. Not this guy again. “You are not a troll.”
“I am too.”
“Listen, I know trolls,” I said. “They like fine wine not bones.”
“I like wine.”
I grimaced as he rose to his feet, his manhood smacking against the side of his cranium. “My dear phallus head,” I said, “a troll has his manhood in his pants, not beating against the side of his brain. Or is your brain in your ass again?”
Honeysuckle raised his mask and laughed out loud. The creature thrust out his pelvis aiming his glassy, bloodshot eyes in Honeysuckle’s direction so he could see who was laughing at him. “Oh,” he said. “You are with the IDC. Where are the rest of your kind?”
“It’s just me,” Honeysuckle said. “The rest of us are wounded, or perhaps in the first level of Hell. It is no matter to you, so stand aside while I escort Sirius Sinister properly to the first gate of Hell.”
The creature screamed and retreated, falling over awkwardly and slowly, painfully, rolling out of sight. “It is Sirius Sinister. He comes. Master, he comes!” it shrieked at the top of its lungs, wherever they were hidden.
Behind us on the spit of granite, maintaining proper following distance, was a line of hellhounds. They began howling in anticipation of my entrance to Hell. “I think he has already figured that out, my good assface,” I called. “But thanks, and carry on the good work!”
Honeysuckle and I walked on without saying a word, our momentary joy quickly sapped by the heat that grew more oppressive with every step. I ignored the sweat that dropped from my brow and kept my head down as I scanned the desolate landscape, occasionally kicking an unidentified skull off the granite spit. Once, I stopped to see if I could hear one particularly large skull land below, but I heard nothing. Limbo was appropriately a bottomless pit.
Before I knew it, Honeysuckle and I came to the moving mass of black tar that was the gate to the first level of Hell. But this time there were no disembodied limbs trying to poke through, just a single word embossed on it in the King’s English. “Fear,” said Honeysuckle. “No doubt of the message being sent to you there, my friend.”
“Never one for making you guess is the Lord of the Underworld,” I said. “Your journey ends here, yes?”
“Indeed,” said Honeysuckle. “Best of luck, and just remember you are a man who has known love, and fear cannot beat that.”
I nodded. “Until we meet again.” I clasped his hand warmly. You don’t know fear, Hades shouted, fully inside my head now. But you are about to. A huge mouth formed in the center of the gate, opening wide to reveal huge fangs and a forked flickering tongue. Come to me.
I drew my sword, which now shone with a bright white light, and advanced on the gate. I thought of all my girls and the love I felt for them in my heart. There was nothing I had not successfully faced in my life. Oh, and I had two ex-wives that were completely evil. The Lord of the Underworld was a man, and his marriage had not worked out so well, so surely we could commiserate over some common ground, right? I shrugged my shoulders and stepped on the flickering tongue, which became solid stone. Of course, Hades would have probably been a little more receptive to me, but for that little issue with Persephone. What man wouldn’t have done that? Like Hades hadn’t sowed his godly oats? I had a feeling I would not be seeing unicorns and rainbows when I passed through the gate this time!
A massive blast of heat greeted me as I came through the gate and entered the first level of Hell. I stood on a narrow stone bridge that stretched out into oblivion as a molten river of fire raged and hissed far below. Ahead in the distance was the gate to the second level, and unless my eyes deceived me, it appeared to be moving closer to me. Creatures that looked to be a mad cross of vulture and bat swooped about on the currents of fire-blasted air, adding their own heat to it with blasts of flame shooting out from their toothed jaws as they shrieked, scanning all the while for prey. One bird-bat thing swooped in close to me in challenge, and I lopped off its right wing, sending a message to the others, and smiled as it careened down toward the fiery river, its left wing still flapping furiously. Its brethren dove after it, catching it in midair, and ripping it to shreds in a viciously coordinated concert of talons and teeth. But they bothered me no more, keeping their distance, content to wait for someone or something to even the odds.
They didn’t have to wait long. As I neared the second gate, I heard a bloodcurdling scream of rage, and bursting through the black tar of the first gate was a golden dragon, heading straight for me. The second gate was close now, and I did not want to tangle with the dragon on the bridge, as it would assuredly send me to my doom below. I sprinted toward the second gate, which before my eyes changed from hard, cold, black iron into countless scuttling spiders each the size of a small dog—a small dog with eight sharp pinchers and glowing green venom dripping from its fangs. I skidded to a sudden halt, and for a brief moment knew the fear that Angus Blackheart had felt. I was caught on the bridge between death by dragoncide or arachnacide. You could always jump and save us the trouble, the voice in my head snickered.
“Not going to happen,” I answered. “This little quandary is nothing to me. Did you forget about the ex-wives? Bloodsucker Number One makes that dragon look like a sweet little poodle!” I switched the Blade of Truth back and forth in my hands as the dragon and spiders rushed toward me. I positioned myself facing the spiders, who I judged would get to me a few moments before the dragon. I racked my brain for a grand plan of escape. But I had nothing.
Nothing, that is, until I saw that reflected in my enchanted blade was not a hard charging dragon. I turned so I could see the spiders approaching in the blade, and my suspicion about this level of Hell was confirmed. I whirled on my heel and raced toward the dragon, ignoring the heat of its fire building for one fatal blast. Smoke curled from its nostrils, and I swore I could smell carrion on its breath. It reared back its claws, rending the air beside me, and I dodged inside its grasp, and swung my sword in a mighty arc, ripping through wood, cloth, and paper, all of which dropped to the bridge with a clatter. I walked back to the second gate, casually stepping on the little black beans in my path, quite enjoying the crunch they made underneath my boots.
The gate to the second level was cold, hard, black iron once more, and as I approached it, the gate swung open, and out stepped a hooded figure bent forward so I could not see its face. I raised my sword cautiously and quickly took stock of my opponent. Skinny and weaponless—this surely was not the Lord of the Underworld. The cowl flipped back and staring at me with a goofy smile on his face was the Bogeyman himself.
“Well, well,” I said, sheathing my sword exuberantly. “If I don’t see standing before me, it is the one and only Lord Warlock Jova of Hopkinshire.”
Jova laughed as we clasped hands. “I guess you are always going to be the one and only Sirius Sinister,” he said. “Actually, that is a pretty fitting name, considering our venue at the moment.”
“That begs the question,” I said. “What are you doing in Hell? You and Cornelia didn’t get divorced, did you? You weren’t found in contempt?”
Jova’s eyes went wide with real horror, since being divorced from Cornelia would clearly be hell for him. “No, no,” he exclaimed. “It is nothing of the sort. I am here doing a study on fear. And you were the first one to pass the test—with a little help from that blade of yours.”
My Ex-Wife Said Go to Hell Page 37
