Scorn of Angels (14 page)

“Can we fly fast now?”
asked Persephone.
“Please?”

“Fuck, yes,”
replied Nyx. She shot forward through the length of the long, dark cavern, dodging gouts of acid from the many mouths below, and flying a narrow, dizzying path that kept her off of the roiling floor and far enough away from the walls and ceilings that the creatures there didn’t notice her. Persephone followed right on her heels, swearing silently to herself the entire way.

The screams of Angels, shrieks and howls of the creatures, and the horrible sounds of blades, teeth, tentacles, and mouths ripping through flesh fell behind.

“There!”
Nyx’s voice rang in Persephone’s head.
“To the right, fly
there.”

Persephone looked and saw nothing but more ceiling, more walls, and more agitated, hissing and twitching demons. “
Where?”

Nyx, already banking to the right, didn’t answer. Instead, she flapped her wings even faster and headed straight for the wall and the tentacled, acid-mouthed creatures that lived there.

“You’re insane!”
Persephone sent, but she followed, her own wings moving twice as fast as Nyx’s just to keep up. The creatures on the wall began to stir, eyeless heads turning, and wide, toothless mouths opening. Tentacles began to unroll, as if they could feel the movement of the air on Nyx’s and Persephone’s wings, but couldn’t tell if it was worth reaching out.

Nyx’s wings vanished, and she dove forward and down through the air and
into
the wall. Persephone’s eyes went wide with fear and amazement but, with no other choice, she did the same.

The tunnel that Nyx had taken them into was neither wide nor particularly straight. It went down fast and deep, a long drop even farther into the darkness beneath Hell. And like all of Hell save what the Angels themselves had crafted, there were no smooth edges here, no gentle curves or soft landings. Instead, there was only razor-edged stone on unforgiving, unyielding ground.

After they had rolled far enough to be out of the reach of the grasping tentacles, Nyx drew her sword and, with a thought, turned it into a spiked hammer which she rammed into the ground, arresting her movement. Persephone rolled over her a moment later. Nyx reached out and caught her ankle as it went by. Persephone was moving with enough force that, even for an Angel as powerful as Nyx, it nearly pulled her arm from her socket to stop Persephone’s motion. Both lay still for a time before Persephone drew her own blade, still in the shape of the Roman gladius, and drove it into the ground. Nyx let Persephone’s ankle go, and the other slid until her feet were beneath her and she, too, was hanging from her arm.

Persephone looked up at Nyx and grinned. “If we ever do this again, I want to be the one that stabs you and gets tortured by Lucifer for eternity instead of Ishtar, all right?”

Nyx grinned back. “If we ever end up doing this again, I’ll let you!”

Persephone looked down the long, black tunnel below them. “So what made this?”

“Same thing that made the other big tunnels,” said Nyx. “Big ugly demon, chisel blades for teeth. Acid for spit. Eats the rocks.”

“Whee,” said Persephone. “And I take it this is our only way to go?”

“Yes.”

Persephone sighed. “Climbing or sliding?”

“I recommend climbing,” said Nyx. “Since there’s another pit of demons at the bottom.”

“You really know how to pick your escape routes.”

Persephone raised one hand, her fingernails extending into four-inch talons. She drove it into the ground, then did the same with her toenails. Nyx smiled in spite of the mess they were in, and followed her. “Don’t worry. It gets worse.”

Persephone’s reply contained profanity in sixteen different languages.

The climb down was long and slow. Each step had to be carefully chosen. There was no room to spread wings in the tunnel, and the possibility of falling into the pit of demons Nyx knew was below kept them cautious despite Nyx’s near-overwhelming urge to get out of Hell as fast as possible, and the chance that some of the 666th might still be coming after them.

Extremely unlikely,
Nyx thought.
They’ll only survive if they go back the way they came. And won’t Lucifer be pleased at that?

“Nyx?” called Persephone when they were halfway down. “The ground’s vibrating.”

Nyx had felt it at the same moment. She stopped climbing and drew her sword again. “It’s coming.”

“What’s coming?”

“The tunnel builder.”

“Shit. Should we drop and take our chances in the pit?”

“No,” said Nyx. “What’s down there is worse.”

“And why are we going down there again?”

“You can always go back…”

“No,” said Persephone, drawing her own sword. “That’s fine, thanks.”

The vibrating became more and more pronounced, and soon the tunnel was shaking badly enough that splits appeared in the walls. Rocks broke off from the sides and rolled down on Nyx and Persephone, making them have to dodge back and forth. Below, several large sections of the tunnel began collapsing.

“I’m not going to be happy if we get stuck in here!” shouted Persephone just as the tunneler broke through the wall beneath Persephone’s feet.

“Oh, fuck!”

It was monstrous. Its mouth, a huge thing filled with chisel-like rock-cutting teeth, undulated in size, growing bigger or smaller every few seconds. Its body was segmented like an earthworm but covered in spiked scales. It had no eyes, no nose, and thin, whip-like tentacles that sprouted around its mouth the moment it broke free of the rock. Persephone scrambled up, trying to get out of its way, but one of the tentacles tapped against her ankle.

A hundred more tentacles grew from its mouth in an instant and whipped out toward Persephone. She hacked up and then down, severing twenty of them in the first strike and thirty more on the second. It wasn’t enough. The other wrapped tight around her, pinning legs, arms, wings and body.

Nyx let go of the wall and dropped straight down toward the monster’s mouth, hacking off half the tentacles on her way past. She landed on two of the thing’s chisel teeth, then pushed off as the monster’s mouth snapped shut with a reverberating crash that shook more stone free from the chute. Nyx flipped in the air and hacked down again, her sword cutting through monstrous flesh, bone and teeth in a single strike. Above her, Persephone cut through the last of the tentacles and then, following Nyx’s example, dove down sword first to impale the thing through the space between the first and second segments of its body.

The noise that came from the creature was near indescribable—something between a howl of pain and a roar of frustration, but so loud, so low, and so powerful that it was as much a shockwave as a sound.

“Don’t cut its head off!”
screamed Nyx in Persephone’s mind, knowing her voice couldn’t be heard over the roaring creature.
“That just makes two of
them!”

“You have got to be kidding me!”
Persephone shot back as she pulled her blade out of its mouth.
“How the Hell do we kill
it?”

“We don’t. We get past
it!”

“How?”

Nyx pushed off the wall and hacked another chunk out of the creature’s mouth. More tentacles grew from it in an eye blink. She spun in the air, severing them all, and once more bounced off the thing’s remaining teeth.
“Make a big enough hole that we can squeeze
by!”

Persephone growled and dove down, hacking through another pair of teeth and part of the tunneler’s jaw. More tentacles sprouted and Persephone followed Nyx’s example, spinning and cutting her way through them all. The creature’s howling grew louder, threatening to take down the tunnel with the strength of the vibrations it created.

“Is there any way to shut this thing up?”
demanded Persephone as she bounced off the beast’s head and scored another hit on its body with her blade.

“None that I’ve found. Get ready!”
Nyx’s sword slashed out once more, into a space where they’d cut all the teeth away. The flesh was soft enough that with a single swipe, she could carve a space sufficient for her body to drop through. As black ichor sprayed, and the creature howled, Nyx dropped through the space and let herself fall, turning it into a skidding slide down the length of the chute. She glanced up and saw the hole she’d cut grow even bigger as Persephone dropped through the chute behind her.

“I thought you said we wanted to go slowly down this chute,”
sent Persephone. “
To avoid the pit of demons at the
bottom.
”

“That was before we had something to feed them!”
sent Nyx as she skidded downward.
“When you hit the bottom, jump and grab the ceiling as fast as you
can!”

The two skidded down the remains of the rock slope, debris and dirt from above raining down on them and the tunneler’s noise drowning out everything else. Nyx risked another glance upward and saw the thing chasing them. More than fifty yards of long, segmented body had already squirmed out of the hole, and it was still coming. Worse, it was moving faster than they were.

Nyx turned her eyes back down the chute. The bottom was racing up at them. It was going to be a near thing, but…

They slid out of the tunnel and into a high-ceilinged cavern. The floor below immediately fell away into a yawning black pit that was filled with millions of foot-long, millipede-like demons.

“Now! JUMP!”
screamed Nyx in Persephone’s brain as Nyx pushed off the ground with all her strength and flew upward toward the ceiling. The cavern was huge, and it should have been a simple matter of spreading her wings and flying up, save that every few feet stalactites hung down from the ceiling. Unlike the stalactites of Earth, formed by thousands of years of water carrying limestone and minerals, these ones were the excrescence of thousands of tiny demons that crawled over the roof of the cavern, chewing the rock and shitting it out. They had no desire for flesh, however, and ran from the sound and vibration of Nyx’s clawed fingers digging into the rock. Persephone ricocheted off one of the stalactites, dug her fingers into another, and hurled herself to the ceiling beside Nyx through sheer brute force.

The tunneler came out of the chute, the speed and force of its movement propelling it over the pit below. The demon millipedes swarmed upward, faster than seemed possible. The first ones dug into the flesh they had found with razor-tipped claws and began feasting. The ones behind swarmed over them, moving up the length of the creature’s body. More and more of them kept coming out of the pit, scuttling higher and higher. The tunneler’s noise grew even louder.

“What the Hell do they eat when they don’t have one of those?
” asked Persephone in Nyx’s head.

“Each other, as near as I can tell. This way.”

Swinging from stalactite to stalactite like a pair of black, short-armed monkeys, the two Angels traversed the length of the cavern while the demon millipedes continued to swarm out of the hole. Nyx found the tunnel she was looking for on the other side of the cavern. It began as a hole in the ceiling, and she and Persephone crawled up into it. The noise from the tunneler and the feasting demon millipedes immediately faded.

“That was….” Persephone shook her head. “I don’t have words for what that was.”

“I know,” said Nyx.

“At least we don’t have that thing to worry about anymore,” said Persephone.

“We don’t have that
one
to worry about,” corrected Nyx. “There are others.”

“After this is all done, can I take an extended trip to Earth?” asked Persephone. “Say, in the Greek Islands with pretty boys and girls and no fucking demons?”

“Granted,” said Nyx. “Assuming we survive.”

“Thank you. Where next?”

“One more place to go through,” said Nyx. “Then we can get to the other exit. Assuming we don’t get attacked along the way again.”

“And the chances of not getting attacked?”

“Are very slim,” said Nyx. “If you want to feel better, think about what’s going to happen to whatever’s left of the 666th once Lucifer gets hold of them.”

When Morrigan, Lieutenant of the 666th, emerged from the tunnel in the pit, she sent the Angel watching to entrance to tell Lucifer they had failed, then worked on pulling out the rest of the survivors.

Not one of them came out unscathed. Some emerged as merely heads, carried by their comrades. Even so, they had all come out, and they had managed to inflict enough damage that the creatures had fled from them. Morrigan was pissed off beyond all singing of it.

“Well,” said Mantus, looking at his missing arm. “We’re fucked.”

“Temporarily,” said Morrigan. “Everyone who is able! Get to your fucking feet!”

Three thousand Angels struggled upright.

“Dig me a pit that opens onto that tunnel, then dig a trench to the nearest Hellfire river. I want the place flooded before those bitches escape! Now move it!”