The Heart of Hell Read online

  Boudica, her packs and bags at her feet, leaned against a new stone pillar, watching as the heavy silver-red creatures were laden with supplies. Since the Rebellion, she had learned, the demons had been actively rounding up and breeding Abyssals, using them in all the many ways that they had once used souls. The demon cavalry had needed to completely retrain with fast-running Skin-skippers, a difficult and dangerous animal, yet an animal otherwise ideally suited to their needs. The draft creatures Boudica now stood before, bul-ata, as the Salamandrines called them, were now fairly ubiquitous, as they had proved to be hardy and strong, perfect for the lengthy journeys outside the city. Each animal was nearly twenty feet high, with thick-carapaced, blunt-spined bodies and numerous jointed legs covered in horny plates. As with most Abyssals, the creatures bore an erectile spine, in this case dorsally located and surmounted by an elaborate natural light-producing lantern. She could see that the bul-ata were capable of carrying massive amounts of cargo hanging from their rows of spines and she knew that they would need to. Apart from the Library, once it was recovered, they would be carrying provisions for the long march, as little forage for demons and beasts alike was readily accessible on the march. The demon drovers, their club-like guiding sticks in hand, were holding the shifting animals’ thick bridles, keeping them in line as they were packed. The clatter and jostle of provisions being loaded, the noisy, shrill calls of the animals, the muffled words of the demons chatting among themselves, all filled her ears, just as the pungent sweet-smoke aroma of the bul-ata filled her nose. There was a simple pleasure in watching all of the frenetic final preparations, especially since she had to do nothing. Her only concern was her complete unfamiliarity with the animals and her lack of experience riding them. But that, she knew, would take care of itself with time.

  She saw Eligor before he saw her. Taller than most of the worker demons, she spotted him quickly, recognized his color, the way he carried his wings, the purposeful stride, and finally his glyph. He paused to give some instructions to one of the drovers and then, spotting her, he made his way past the baggage to her side. She saw that he carried a few bundles and somehow knew they were meant for her.

  “Greetings, Boudica. And are you ready to leave our great capital?”

  She looked up at him, straight into his burning face, and said plainly, “I can’t leave here quickly enough.”

  “Only so that you can then return just as quickly?”

  “Only so that I might find my daughters, Eligor.”

  The demon nodded. “I know.” A thin smile played upon his bony lips. “Lord Satanachia gave me a few things to give you for your journey. To aid you in finding them.” And with that Eligor untied the skin from the long bundle he had been carrying. The skin fell away and the hilt of a sword was revealed, a sword scaled to the hand of a female soul.

  “I asked Lord Satanachia to have this forged for you. He obliged by having his own sword maker produce it. It was crafted after the kind of weapon you were familiar with in your Life. But it is made of metals and techniques not known in your world.”

  She took the weapon, regarding its finely made handle and blade, and resisted the overwhelming urge to heft it in her hand, to hold it overhead, and to swing it with all the pent-up fury she had contained for eons. Instead, she smiled coolly at Eligor. She bore him no grievance and was, she knew, in fact, in his debt. He had done everything possible to free her of her past existence in Hell and she would not forget that.

  Before she could thank him, a piercing cry interrupted them and Boudica saw a half-dozen especially large, recalcitrant bul-ata, being brought up to the others and tied to the laden creatures’ harnesses. Each bore intricately worked trappings that looked decidedly non-demon. She turned back to Eligor with a quizzical look upon her face.

  “Those beasts are for barter. They are bred for their size and strength. Safe passage through the Wastes is not always assured and the Salamandrines are notoriously difficult.”

  Eligor opened another satchel and withdrew a small, round item fashioned of bone and some golden metal. It looked very old and heavily used, its surface details darkened and rubbed smooth from handling. Small glyphs, inlaid in metals, decorated its sides. He handed it to her. It was large for her hands and she found it lighter than she had expected.

  “That is an ancient Finder set to guide you to this city from anywhere in Hell. Press all of the glyphs at once and you will see.”

  She did as he instructed and a fiery and pointed glyph sprang up and hovered a foot above the device.

  “It follows the magnetic fields, growing in size until you are here. It was created long ago when we first founded this city. Lord Sargatanas had a number of them made for those flying demons who were ordered to explore the far-flung Wastes and they served their purpose well. But now, with the city’s geomantic place in our world and minds firmly established, we demons have little use for them. That said, it is a rare piece.” Eligor paused and turned his head. “Ah, Metaphrax approaches.”

  She heard nothing. And then, after a few moments, just above the sounds of the animals and drovers, Boudica could make out the low tramp of countless feet accompanied by the slow, rhythmic striking of weapons upon armor of the approaching centuries of the newly renamed Argastos’ Archers. Metaphrax Argastos was nearly Eligor’s height, winged like him, battle scarred, and crusted in the circular phalera-disks Boudica knew to be trophies. He had a hardened, efficient look about him that she remembered from her own warriors. There were some who took to the art of war as if it were that for which they had been created, and this demon had that look. He turned his fierce gaze upon her and, despite herself, she was impressed by his obvious intensity. A glowing serpent of interconnected glyphs wended its way around him, moving ceaselessly and illuminating his body and face with a random fiery light. It was a mesmerizing effect and Boudica found it hard not to stare.

  “So, this is the female soul who is to accompany us, yes? Armed and ready for the Wastes, I can see.” Boudica heard the slight tone of something bordering on mockery.

  “More than ready. She spent quite a long time waiting for just such a chance to get away, Metaphrax. And she has good reason to journey out.”

  “The caravan seems ready, as well,” Metaphrax said, looking away and peering up and down the jostling line of pack animals. The archers were already taking up positions on either side along the flanks of the creatures. Boudica saw that each carried an odd bow that appeared as if it could also be broken apart and used as a pair of curved swords if need be. She suspected they were formidable weapons.

  Metaphrax extended his hand to Eligor and the two demons clasped each other’s forearms.

  “I will bring the Books back to Adamantinarx or be destroyed trying.”

  Eligor nodded and said, “May Sargatanas’ spirit be with you.”

  “And may he guide and guard you.”

  Boudica heard the exchange and was surprised by the two demons’ apparent reverence; Sargatanas had, indeed, changed things in Hell.

  Eligor clapped his junior officer on the arm and then turned away. She watched him depart, an odd mixture of emotions playing upon her mind. He had given her the freedom she had craved, had shown her more kindness than any other demon. And, yet, he was still one of them.

  “Come, Boudica. You will ride at the front with me and my lieutenant, Styjimar,” Metaphrax said. He was walking slowly in an effort, she guessed, to allow her to keep up, and she picked up her belongings and followed him. When she reached the head of the column she saw a handler offer him the reins of his mount. She carefully watched him insert his foot into a toehold carved into one of creature’s armored plates and climb upon the lead bul-ata’s back. A second creature, only slightly smaller, stood adjacent and he indicated with a flick of his head that it was her mount. She eyed it suspiciously, walked to its side, and raised her hand overhead to grab the soul-scaled stirrup. Without asking, the demon leaned down from his creature, firmly grasped her hand, and lightly
tossed her onto her saddle. She settled easily into the smaller, padded saddle the demons had crafted for her and unsheathed and grasped the short, spiked guiding stick as she had been shown.

  Almost immediately Metaphrax gave the signal and the column began to move forward. The shuffling of the many Abyssals’ countless legs created a susurration that, while loud, Boudica found surprisingly relaxing. Any of the fears she might have had regarding riding them soon vanished altogether. Slowly, they trudged past the many grand buildings with their freshly gilt domes, the myriad new dwellings built now of stone, over the newly cobbled avenues, and down toward the massive rebuilt pylon once known as the Gate of a Million Hearts that led to the bridge across the milky River of Tears. Now its newly carved talatat depicted the Ascended Sargatanas, a familiar motif on walls and buildings.

  The mist-laden air became clammy and not a little oppressive and she and the others grew silent, the well-known dispiriting effect of the waters settling upon them. Neither demon nor soul was spared and each grew quiet and descended into a somber reverie.

  As the caravan made its way across the statue-lined bridge, Boudica peered down into the river she had reflected upon from a distance of time and status for so many centuries. Its thickly rippling surface seemed only barely translucent, almost viscous, and she had the impression of tiny creatures schooling about in infinite numbers in the slow whirlpools, purposeless and desperate. Some of the souls believed that they were the tears of the despairing, rendered somehow to life, each one a pained or sorrowful thought.

  The great river’s breadth surprised Boudica. Perhaps it was the malaise the Acheron engendered, but it seemed to take longer to traverse than she would have imagined. Once they had crossed the bridge the air remained thick and it was some time before the river’s effect wore off. The road, vestige of a wide and spear-straight avenue emanating from the city’s heart, began to fade away into the creased and pocked ground-skin until finally, even with Adamantinarx’s distant palace still visible in the miasma, it vanished altogether.

  The bul-ata were in their element and Boudica now saw the obvious advantage to the creatures’ many legs. The wrinkled ground, for all of its low unevenness, was no challenge whatsoever to them and she relaxed with the gently swaying motion of her mount. With a new sword upon her back and the city that had kept her prisoner for so long fading into the ashy sky, Boudica, for once in her existence in Hell, felt contentment.

  * * *

  With the caravan’s steady progress into the region between the cities, Algol’s position in the sky became Boudica’s sole measure of time. When she had been a worker in the time before the Rebellion, the labor-gangs had been worked in regularly timed shifts and these had, to all the souls, been a means whereby time had been calculated. According to Metaphrax, Algol was an excellent if difficult navigational aid, and he took pains to show her how, with the use of a simple cord with odd knots and little carved weights, the star’s seemingly erratic risings and fallings were made predictable. So great, Boudica thought, is the need for rational creatures to measure time that even in the timeless realm of Hell, a realm of perpetual gloom, a method had been created. It took her some time to be able to manipulate the device, fashioned as it was for demons’ larger hands and seated, as she was, upon a moving beast’s back. But eventually she could follow the star’s subtle movements just enough to calculate the passage of time.

  The terrain between Adamantinarx and the smaller cities of its outlying wards varied little. Boudica saw low, sharp-ridged hillocks as far as the horizon, thin rivers of lava zigzagging through them, and the occasional stands of arterial trees swaying where there was no wind. As she peered down at the ground she saw it move of its own accord, slight ripples, barely perceptible tremors, a twitch and a wince as they passed over it. She found it ironic that in a place of such sublime suffering, a place regarded as that of the dead, this land was so alive. But she knew that it was alive in a way that was terrible, alive but less than alive.

  “It is something between Life and Death,” Metaphrax explained when Boudica inquired about the nature of the land. “We had nothing like this in the Above. Our world was beautiful and the Life that permeated it emanated, by its grace, from the Throne. This ‘life’ comes from something, something … foul. Beelzebub mandated it. It was his idea, born of nothing but perversity. The Fly and his court wanted to put their corrupt mark upon this world when they arrived. This is their doing. All of this was born of a single dark invocation. Once started, it spread like a plague very quickly. And changed the world we found when we Fell.”

  “And the Salamandrines? What of them?”

  “The Fly wanted them exterminated. Only they are not easy to exterminate. We found that out the hard way … over millennia. They became, in our minds, the Men of Wrath. The hated Others. At least that was what the Fly wanted us to think.”

  She thought about that as they progressed toward the true Wastes, spoken, as it was, by a demon. She thought about what she guessed he had lost or given up and then what she had, as well. They shared lost worlds and lost dreams and that made her feel a strange kinship with this taciturn Demon Minor. But he was a demon, nonetheless, and she found it hard to remain anything but wary of his motives and his intentions.

  The infernal landscape provided Boudica with one disturbing revelation after another. Fascinated and repulsed, she watched as seemingly flat ground would suddenly sprout foot-high writhing carpets of fingers disquietingly human in appearance, or massive pale, dead eyes that would roll toward the caravan beneath blinking, sticky lids. Or slices of skin-like terrain that would peel off and float bizarrely before them only to corkscrew back into the ground. Or smooth-sided hills that were quiescent until they passed, only to split at any random point and grin at her with their shredded clay-hued mouths, spewing sounds and odors from deep within that made her shudder. Metaphrax barely took notice of them, save to spit upon the more egregious of them as he rode past. Boudica saw him do it, and saw, too, how his hot sputum caused reactions. The dark smile that crossed his bony face almost amused her.

  Behind her the lengthy caravan traveled in relative silence. While a constant array of squeaky sounds emanated from the tireless bul-ata and their bulky harnessed goods, the drovers and the centuries of archers remained quiet; the steady tramp of their feet was accompanied only by the jangling of equipment and weapons.

  As the travelers left far behind the environs of their city, Boudica watched Algol carefully, frequently using the corded calculator and trying, with some difficulty, to measure what would seem to her to be a day. The abstraction of it made her grow weary and she soon found herself staring into the low, dark clouds that moved raggedly over the landscape. As a worker, she had, during the infrequent rest periods, stared into the sky as respite from the realities of the city around her. She was quite familiar with the variety of ember-flecked clouds that passed over the city, with their dense appearance and the strangely formed symbols that swirled within them. Here, out of the confines of the city, she saw them for what they were—huge rafts of darkness, split by flickering red lightning and amorphous flocks of fiery embers that raked through the sky. And when the clouds seemed to touch the ground she thought she saw huge, lumbering forms moving within the shifting veil as if they were taking advantage of the concealing curtains of gloom to move about. She did not ask Metaphrax about them, each time suspecting that it was simply a fabrication of her tired mind. But every time she peered into the distant clouds something seemed to be stirring and it made her uneasy.

  Metaphrax sent aloft a glyph that halted the column and ordered a general dismount. As she swung her leg over the broad back of the bul-ata, Boudica found that she was, in fact, more tired than she had realized. Her tingling toes found the foothold with some difficulty and she landed harder on the ground than she had intended. She saw Metaphrax turn his head at the sound and then turn away and she felt a slight surge of embarrassment. Brushing the ash from herself, she looked about, feel
ing rather diminutive amidst the much larger demons and beasts. Presently, the three centuries of archers broke out broad, square flensing axes and began to carve out a campsite perimeter from the fleshy ground as the beasts behind them were formed up into a rough square. The heavier packs were removed.

  Boudica stood by her mount, resting her tired legs by holding on to the harness, and took in all of the activity, perplexed by what seemed to be serious precautions.

  “When the Rebellion ended,” Metaphrax said, “souls were free to go out and leave the cities. They did this in great numbers, but once they found themselves away from our protection they banded together in large communities. Sometimes this helped fend off Abyssals and the Salamandrines. Sometimes it did not. The Wastes are littered with the sundered still-living remnants of those failures. Since then, small, heavily armed hordes of souls have begun to roam the Wastes near the cities, preying upon wayward caravans and solitary travelers.”

  “And yet you do nothing about them?”

  “Nothing. Other than fend them off when it is necessary. That was the outcome of the Rebellion. They—you—are now a People of Hell.”

  Boudica watched as great rectangular chunks of ground-flesh were stacked and put heavily in place to form walls half again the height of the demons. The work went rapidly. The demons were powerful and well trained. Once the wall was completed, she saw most of the archers stow their axes and take up a relaxed watch, sitting at the edge of the ditch they had created. Metaphrax, for his part, looked satisfied with his well-disciplined demons, and Boudica watched him set off to walk the perimeter, more out of duty than any real necessity.