Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong) (25 page)

“Oh, I would never be that stupid.”

She could almost see the sad feeling return to Rick. She knew what he meant about it being in his stomach. About waiting for someone to return. “I think I love your son.”

“I know you do, sweetheart. We all do.”

“He doesn’t love me. He wants Alice.”

“Boys are dumb sometimes. He may never turn around, or he might. It’s hard to say.”

“The saddest song.”

The worst of the crawlways was one made of blue crystal. It tore Arturus’ shirt in a couple of places and gave him cuts all along his arms. That passage had been particularly complicated. Each crawlway seemed different, but they all had one thing in common.

They led nowhere.

The main passageways had the same problem. They would dead end at random places, usually into Carrion barriers. At first Turi feared running into those barriers, but they were cooler, and he had to admit that the air was refreshing. Even Fitch got turned around, leading them into the same barrier a few times. After the third time, Duncan demanded they take a break and sat down on the purple stone marker.

Fitch tossed his pack next to the barrier and leaned against the wall. Johnny collapsed into a corner.

“This is the worst area Julian could have got lost in,” Fitch said.

“At least it’s small,” Duncan said, pulling out some devilwheat meal.

The hunter poured the meal into the cap of his canteen and then mixed water into it. He swirled it around in his hand for a moment and then drank it. The other hunters followed suit.

Arturus pulled out some smoked dyitzu. The meat was tough, but he enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than he would have enjoyed the devilwheat meal.

“That’s some fine looking jerky you got there,” Johnny remarked rather suggestively.

Arturus smiled and shared it with the hunters.

“Whew. Anything but spider guts,” Fitch said. “Amazing how quickly you can get sick of that shit.”

“I started off being sick of it,” Johnny said. “You guys are just catching up.”

“Why?” Arturus asked him.

“Michael’s not the first one to kill a giant spider,” Johnny answered. “I was swallowed by one before I made it to Harpsborough. I was so hungry, I ate my way out.”

Arturus fought to keep his laugh quiet.

“No one thinks you’re funny, Johnny.” Fitch said.

“Turi does.”

They ate some more in silence. Arturus’ legs began to cramp, so he stood up and stretched.

Duncan must have felt similarly, because he began pacing. “I don’t know where this kid could be. We’ve been down all these passages.”

Fitch just shrugged his shoulders.

“He’s got to be up or down a level,” Duncan said.

Johnny’s head followed the pacing hunter. “Thank God we’re right up next to the Carrion. Otherwise we’d have a lot more to search.”

Duncan ignored him. “He’s got to be somewhere. It didn’t feel like we were missing any bi
g
. .
.
” He trailed off.

F
itch put a finger to his lips. “Did you hear that?”

Arturus cocked his head to the side and listened. He heard voices.

Aaron. That’s Aaron’s voice.

“Turi,” he announced himself.

“Galen.”

Galen, Aaron, Avery and Patrick came around the bend.

“You find anything?” Aaron asked.

Fitch nodded. “We didn’t find any leads, but we did find a few packs of devilwheat Julian had left in an old hound burrow. We can take ‘em back to town when we’re done, maybe get a hunter’s lot of the wheat. We figured Julian was sleeping there. The burrow was dug into the hellstone, just so you know.”

“That would be a dangerous hound,” Galen said. “Any sign of it?”

“No. Must have left years ago. No blood either, so we don’t think it got Julian. We’ll take you there.”

Fitch moved to stand up but stopped when Aaron raised his hand.

“In a minute,” Aaron said. “We haven’t rested yet. We might as well join you.”

Arturus watched the hunters fan out. He dropped down to his haunches while Galen sat beside him.

“How are you holding up?” his father asked.

“Well, sir.”

“Did you find anything else? Anything in any of the passages?”

Turi shook his head. He watched Aaron pull out a canteen and mix in his own devilwheat meal.

Alice likes him more than me.

“Some of them were very small.” Galen said.

“I almost got stuck,” Arturus admitted.

“Don’t do it. Would be hard to get you out. You keeping up with the hunters?”

It was an odd question. The hunters from Harpsborough were fairly noisy, and their sense of direction seemed poor.

I was born here. And Galen’s been teaching me. If they had been born here, and Galen had taught them, they’d be as good as me. They’re better fighters, I know.

“Yes, sir.”

But I’m a better scout!

“You look a bit cut up.”

“The crystal passage. Very sharp.”

Galen grunted.

“Where could he be?” Arturus asked, surprised to hear the concern in his own voice. “We can’t find a trace.”

Galen shrugged and nodded towards Aaron.

Arturus listened in on the Lead Hunter’s conversation with Duncan.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’m not sure how many passageways we’ve got left.”

“We should go home,” Duncan said, “maybe try another day.”

“Not for some time yet,” Aaron said. “And it wouldn’t help us anyway. You know Mike wants us in these tunnels until we find that devilwheat store.”

“But how? He had so much wheat. How could we not find it?”

“Probably—”

“Shh!”
Galen quieted them harshly.

The conversation died away, and Arturus tried to listen to what Galen may have heard. Galen could pick out one noise from another with an ease that amazed him, but if all was quiet, Arturus knew he could hear the fainter sounds.

He heard Johnny shifting from foot to foot. He heard one of Avery’s knuckles crack as the man gripped his holstered pistol. Arturus even heard his own breathing, which he struggled to keep soft.

Nothing.

Galen heard it. Maybe it’s gone, or maybe I’m just listening to the wrong thing.

He tried to ignore the hunters. To ignore himself. He cocked his head to one side and closed his eyes.

A girl’s voice? Am I imagining it?

It was so faint that Arturus had no idea if the voice was real, or if it was just the musings of his own mind. Whenever he tried to concentrate on her tone, the sound seemed to disappear. Even worse, at times it seemed to meld into whatever sound he thought it might become. If he imagined the pitch higher, it would become higher. If he thought it might be lower, it became lower.

Is she singing?

He tried his best to clear his mind, to not guess what her next sound would be. He tried to listen without expectation. It was one of the hardest things he had ever attempted to do in his life.

Galen stood slowly, so slowly, as if he were afraid that any noise would scare the sound away. He waved them back. As quietly and as quickly as he dared, Arturus obeyed. Step by step, he made his way back down the corridor.

He could hear her voice clearly now, a long, lonely single note.

The hunters followed suit, their eyes fixed on Galen’s statue still figure. With the greatest of care they retreated down the corridor, moving past Arturus. Galen raised a hand and stopped them. He knelt, as quietly and as slowly as he had stood, and opened his pack. Arturus watched Galen while the man reached in and pulled out a small piece of folded cloth. He unfolded it and produced a single pure white feather.

Galen stood again and moved next to the barrier.

He held the feather in the air, stepping to one side. Gingerly, he let the feather go. At first it descended gently, swaying back and forth in the still air—but then it took flight, swirling about in the corridor, dancing.

Wind.

Arturus watched, hypnotized with the rest of the hunters, as the feather finally alighted to the floor.

Her voice
is the wind.

Arturus and the hunters came forward quickly. Galen ran his fingers along the barrier, grasping at the stones, the feather lying abandoned on the floor. He found the passageway near the base of the barrier. A rock there, which seemed as secure as the rest, gave some when Galen pulled on it. It was shaped like a flagstone, large but flat. Galen kept tugging, and the rock came out from the barrier like a door, hinged on one side. Now that Arturus knew what to look for, he could see where it had scraped along the floor. Another hint was on the purple marker stone. The flagstone had run into it several times, and was marked with an indentation where it had collided with the other rock’s corner.

Behind the flagstone was another crawlway, but this one was hollowed out not by Hell’s architect, but by the careful and diligent work of a human being. The barrier had been breached.

“He wouldn’t have,” Aaron said aloud.

“He did,” Galen whispered. “Julian found a way into the Carrion.”

“God damn!” Michael lost his temper.

He swung his arms about, scattering chess pieces across the table. Some bounced off of the carpet and onto the floor. Aaron stepped back. Even when hunting in the wilds, he had never seen Michael lose his temper.

“Did he have any idea how much effort it took to build those walls?” Michael asked, “How many men we lost?”

Aaron looked behind him towards the exit. He didn’t like the prospect of being alone with this man. Then his stomach growled. “We need the food, sir. Julian fed almost one hundred
of our people. Without it, you’ll have to change things. A lot.”

“Fuck food. Can’t you keep your head on straight for a second? Food is nothing, Aaron. Nothing. Do you understand me? You weren’t here when Pyle led the demons to us. You weren’t with us before we fled the Carrion and settled down. We used to scurry from room to room like roaches. When the Minotaur came we had to leave. There was no village, you get me? No home. You never lived with that kind of fear over your head.”

Aaron waited for the man to calm. Michael’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flared. His breath came in heavy gasps. He swung out again as his rage boiled over, knocking the blankets off of one of the light orbs. Rarely were all the blankets removed. The light was harsh, so bright that Aaron had to shy away from it. He could see every pore in the First Citizen’s face.

Molly had warned him that Baker got like this. She said that he had never really recovered from the Minotaur, from when he’d been gored by the Kingsriver. She had claimed that he came too close to death. That he had seen a bit of the world beyond and that it had lodged in his soul.

She also said that he would go mad and beat her. But who the hell would listen to Molly? The Michael Baker he had known would never do such a thing, but who knew what the man in front of him now was capable of.

“Aaron. Aaron,” the First Citizen was mumbling.

Post Trauma. Like a soldier having returned from one of the old world’s wars.

“Michael. No devils have come through. Julian went through that door regularly for the last year.”

“This isn’t how Hell is supposed to be. You get me? We’re not supposed to be holed up all safe and sound behind these stone walls. We built this village to hide from our damnation, Aaron. We built it because we couldn’t stand Hell. Before this, before we walled off the Carrion, it really
was
Hell. Your every moment was filled with fear. We can’t go back to that. I know Harpsborough seems safe to you. Maybe it is. But you have no idea what’s in that place. You have no idea what devils we left alive behind those walls.”

He doesn’t want us to go through.

“You’re right about one thing, sir,” Aaron said. “This is Hell. We are damned, and there’s no way around it. Julian tapped a resource that was feeding nearly one in five people in Harpsborough. Shit’s different now. It’s a different Hell than the one you knew. We need to go in there, sir. We’ve got to find that devilwheat. You’ve got everyone in this place riding on your shoulders, so you better fucking face this.”

Michael picked up some of the blankets and covered the orb. The light dimmed to normal. “Send in Mancini.” He collapsed into his chair. “I’ll consider what you said. Send him in.”

Michael took the steps to the church three at a time. He ripped open the right of the church’s huge double doors and entered. He stopped between the back pews, his feet spread apart, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

Father Klein looked up from where he sat near the front of the church. The three women he had been speaking to were staring at the First Citizen.

“I need to talk to you,” Michael said.

Klein stood. The women didn’t move.

“Alone,” Michael clarified.

“Go on,” Klein told the women. “We’ll speak of this later.”

Michael did not move until the last woman left and then it was only to slam the door. The thud of woodstone on hellstone echoed through the church.

“You know why I’m here?” Michael all but shouted.

Father Klein nodded and walked towards the pulpit. He had a stone chalice in his hands. The man had been giving communion, Michael realized. It was an empty ritual here, where Christ’s body and blood could not be.

“Aaron told me,” Klein said.

“Aaron wants to go in after him,” Michael said, staring at the Father.

Klein picked up a white cloth from the pulpit and used it to clean around the mouth of the stone chalice. Then he drank its remaining contents.

“It’s an empty ritual, Father,” Michael told him.

“It’s not. It’s comforting.”

“It was comforting on Earth. Here it’s blasphemy. Pretending God would send his essence into Hell to bless Mancini’s bloodwater. It’s an empty ritual. And if it wasn’t, what right have you to pull Christ back into Hell?”

“He was here for three days, Mike. He may come again.”

“Fool.”

“So what if I am? So what if I preach false hope? Who cares if I just make it up? No one has a full copy of the Bible down here. No one knows. What’s wrong with giving someone just an inch of hope? Huh, Michael? Or is that your job.”

Michael bit his lip. “Lies, Father. You’re sinning.”

“We’ve already sinned. It’s done for us. We’re just shadows, waiting to be swallowed by darkness as the last of God’s light fades around us. Who gives a damn if this fucking cup has no blood in it?”

They stayed silent
awhile. It was Klein who finally broke it. “Besides, even if it is an empty ritual, the cup still has Mancini’s brew in it. That’d make almost anyone feel better.”

Michael shook his head and forced himself to laugh.

Klein nodded and sat down in a pew. Michael followed suit, sitting beside the Father.

“I won’t let them go back in there,” Michael said. “Aaron is an idiot. He’s never been in the Carrion.”

“Mike, at this point, very few of the Citizens ever have. All those people are dead. Hell’s been picking us off, one by one.”

Michael frowned, and looked up to the cross that hung on the far wall, then above the crucifix to the church’s ceiling. He imagined looking even higher than that. Through the millions of tons of stone that separated him from Earth. And then through all that air between Earth and Heaven. He thought he would look all the way up until he saw God.

“I don’t deserve this, Father.”

“Of course you deserve it,” Klein whispered. “Never doubt that. Never start doubting that. It’s a terrible place to let your mind go. It comes with pride, Mike. I don’t know what you did in your life. I can’t tell you. But I do deserve this. I did something so despicable, well, I would have sent myself here. I don’t know how I tricked myself into thinking I wouldn’t be damned. I told myself that I had asked for forgiveness and that that had to be enough. But I do deserve this. God’s a fair God, Mike. He’s the ultimate Justice. And if He judged that we belong here, then here we belong. Don’t let pride tell you otherwise. Self-delusion is what got us here. The one thing we can do is use this last chance at existence to accomplish this second time what we were supposed to do in the first.”

Michael looked to the Father. His eyes were closed, tightly, as if he was engaged in his own terrible battle inside his own head. And of course he was. The Carrion brought that to people. It was their shared past. The Egypt of their own exodus.

“They should listen to me, Father. They never were in the Carrion. All they know is the hunger of the villagers. They think I don’t know that, too? Why can’t they listen to me since I’ve been through it?”

“Skepticism. It’s rampant on Earth. It sends us here. They’ll have to see it for themselves. It’s a useful weapon against the Devil but too often we use it against ourselves. That’s what makes the infidels, Mike. They take it one step further. They use skepticism against God. But they’re fools. This place is death incarnate. By the time they learn that they’re wrong, it’ll already be too late.”

Michael could feel the weight of the stone above him. It was blocking his sight. There was just too much Hell between himself and God.

“What should I do?” Michael asked.

“Follow your heart,” Klein said. “It’s the only thing here that wasn’t made by Satan.”

“My heart is a mystery.”

“There’s no Holy Spirit to guide it here. You’ll have to make this decision on your own. We’re in a place with no shepherds. Some of the sheep have to lead.”

“What would the villagers do, if Julian’s food stopped coming.”

“They’d starve.”

“Would they come after us, in the Fore?”

“Yes. You’d have to do something terrible. Fight them off. Send some of them away. Grant them food from your stores. The balance of power would never be the same. Even I can’t protect you from that, Mike. I can preach to them all day long, but they won’t be able to hear me when they’re hungry.”

Mike grabbed Klein around the wrist and locked eyes with the Father. “If you tell me, I’ll do it. You were in the Carrion. You know what it was like. You know far better than I. You were the slave of that blonde haired bitch woman who lived there. I never was. I never even saw her. If you tell me that the food is worth it, I’ll send them.”

Klein didn’t blink. “I can’t Mike. I just can’t. No one can make that decision for you. This is a devil you must wrestle yourself.”

Aaron watched his door blanket fall closed behind Chelsea. She was wearing a red robe, the same color as the braid of her hair whose end she was fiddling with. Her eyes were on him, astonishingly blue, interested—and anything but vulnerable.

“Who’d you tell?” Aaron asked.

Chelsea cocked her head, unfazed. “No one. Believe me—”

“Well somebody told her.”

“Aaron, sweetheart, this is the Fore. There aren’t any secrets.”

“You think I wanted this? You knew for months that I wanted Alice, and you kept fucking me!” Aaron pointed a finger towards her chest. “I didn’t want this relationship, but you kept pushing it—”

Chelsea stepped forward, forcing him to pull his finger back to avoid touching her. “Aaron, baby, hold out your hands.”

“What?”

“Hold out your hands.”

The hell is this about?

But he held out his hands anyway, palms up.

She took another step forward and put her hands in his. “Now look into my eyes.”

Aaron looked away.

“Look, Aaron.”

Her blue eyes were almost entirely drowned out by her black pupils. A sad smile came to her lips. He could not help but imagine kissing them. For some reason, the fact that he was about to deny her made her charms all the more powerful.

She chewed her lip thoughtfully. Then she whispered, “Aaron, I know that you are used to fighting when you break it off with a girl. It’s natural. I’m sure it helps enforce a separation you and that girl might sorely need. But we can’t separate. We’re stuck here together in the Fore. I like you. You’re a wonderful man, and you’re a really great fuck, but I don’t love you. Not like Alice loves you, and not like you love her. I’m still your friend, and I’d be a shitty one if I didn’t step out of the way. It’s okay, Aaron. You don’t have to fight with me. We can just stop sleeping together.”

“Oh no you don’t. You can’t just pretend we did nothing wrong.”

“We didn’t.”

“Yeah? Well you may not understand this, but there’s something sacred about the relationship between a man and a woman, and we abused it, Chelsea. We did.”

“Nothing’s sacred in Hell.”

“Don’t spit blaspheme—”

“Who made it sacred?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s still a sacred thing. We weren’t—”

She would not relent. “Who made it sacred, Aaron?”

“God did. But it’s still a sacred thing. We can’
t
. .
.
”

Her gaze was too much. Aaron looked down. But she did not let him, reaching out and touching his chin. “Who makes it sacred now?”

“I don’t know.” Aaron wanted to shake her.

“Who?”