BURN IN HADES (10 page)

The high priest placed his paw on the blade. “No, no. We shall take it.”

The Raven sneaked a wink at Cross. He knew everything would be alright even as the dog-men laid him over their altar. He struggled as believably as he could without actually trying to escape.

“Let me go, you dirty mutts,” he said. “Why don’t you go chase your high priest down the road like the dogs you are? Your high priest is nothing but a bald pussy. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it.”

The Amenthesians prayed over him just like the squals had, but in their own unique, guttural language. Their native tongue sounded as if they were chanting magic spells, even though the only magic in the underworld lay within the objects that special souls brought to their afterlife in their death.

The high priest waved over him a gold object that looked similar to his Latin cross, except it had a loop extending out of the crossbeam. The hairless lion touched Cross’s nose with the object. It sparked and sent a tingle throughout his bones from his head to his toes and then back. The high priest then touched the soft spot on Cross’s forehead with the object and held it there. The skin on Cross’s head tightened and his eyes pinched shut. Upon its removal, his skin relaxed and went back to normal.

“He is ready.” The high priest sat the object down, and then raised the blade to display it for the crowd before speaking a few more words in the harsh but magical sounding language.

With the Raven on his side now, an extra bit of confidence resided within Cross, perhaps more than deserved. But since he was powerless to escape on his own, trusting that the Raven wouldn’t double cross him because she needed him for another con was more respectable than pleading for his afterlife like some yellow belly.

He laid there on the crystal altar waiting patiently for the Raven to strike. Anytime now she would swoop down heroically and rescue him, the damsel in distress. The idea of him being a damsel suddenly felt wrong, but it was better than getting his head chopped off. All he had to do was wait. And wait he did. And he waited some more.

The Raven sure was taking her time to whip out her rope dart. The longer the high priest spoke without any intervention from the Raven the more anxious he grew. Real sweat dripped from his face to his ear. What was taking her so long?

The high priest switched to a language he could understand. “The Man Who Remembers!” The crowd burst into a gleeful yells and hollers at the announcement of his alias. “We condemn him to be beheaded by the blade of the goddess, Sia. May the Great Goddess have mercy on his soul.”

Cross tilted his head up and searched behind the crowd for the Raven. He surveyed the pyramids peak, checked the temple wall, and scanned the crowd. She was nowhere he could see.

If the Raven had decided to end their partnership now, she could have easily ridden off with all those objects and never come back. Had she abandoned him?

He should have never trusted her. No one’s word was their bond anymore. No honor was left in the damned. They had lost all their honor in life. He was a fool, a fool that was going to lose his head because he’d lost his head around the wrong soul. He should’ve known better.

The high priest pressed Cross’s head down flat onto the cold altar. He struggled sincerely.

“Wait! Don’t do this. Please!”

The two dog-men restrained his limbs from either side. The high priest raised the blade and swung down.

Chapter 5 - Diamond Tooth

Diamond Tooth guided her hellhound up the canyon walls
of Viņsaule. She followed the four dead orbs that hung suspended directly over the mesa where Carson’s lonely abode nestled. Two baby barbots strutted around the cliff dwelling. The hellhound barked and the birds flapped away. Barbot soup aroma swam in the air. A head too big for the body it was attached to bobbed away from behind the drought filled well and raced into the isolated house, probably to warn the rest of the family. Diamond Tooth hoped so.

She tied the hellhound to a post and stood in the doorway of the home. She waited at the threshold for a moment and basked in the family’s nervousness, unrest, and uncertainty. Their wave of despondency showered over her and filled her with mirth.

Across the room, Carson wiped the glass cage strapped around his head with a rag. A larger cage wrapped around his waist and surgical sutures ran along his body where the wounded mutt had stitched himself back together. It was homemade patchwork designed to mend the injuries he had sustained in the wars, injuries that would never heal under the medical supervision of the underworld.

It severely irked her that he wasn’t suffering though. Not only had he made amends with his disfigurement, he wasn’t even afraid of her. The rest of the family’s fear caked the air with the same strength as a baking factory. But Carson’s scent painted him as a pillar of intrepidness.

He must’ve known someone was coming for him. He was prepared. And there was nothing remotely intimidating about her appearance. Souls often underestimated her in that regard. Even though her blond hair always remained undone and she didn’t bother painting her face with silly makeup, she was more equipped to seduce a man than frighten him. But seduction was never her style and she never allowed her physical beauty to prevent her from causing physical harm.

The wife exchanged looks with her husband. She bore no arms; a makeshift arm hung around her neck on a string like a necklace. The whole family appeared as if they had been assembled from body pieces they found lying around. Their daughter with the adult sized head glanced up at her mother. The woman’s fake arm caressed the girl and they walked out the rear of the house.

Diamond Tooth stepped inside the man’s home as if she had been invited. Her heeled boots clomped across the tiled, chessboard-colored floor. She passed a tower of boxes that defied the normal laws of gravity. They were stacked from the ceiling down and never reached the floor. Four brooms came alive, and swept up the dirt she had tracked in. She sat down at the dinner table and helped herself to a bowl of barbot soup.

Carson sat across from her. “Rowings sent you.”

She smiled, spooned more soup and ate.

“Tell Rowings I don’t have any new information,” said Carson. “I just want to continue this miserable existence in whatever peace I can grab. Tell him he should do the same. He’s tormenting us both. To go on searching is futile. The last Toran is lost. We’ll never find it again.”

She held the spoon before her lips and lifted her head in attention at the mention of the Toran. Rowings never mentioned anything about a Toran.

“When we found the burial site,” said Carson, “we couldn’t uncover any more without witnesses. So we reburied it. We came back, it was gone. It disappeared. I can’t tell Rowings what happened to the gate. We had our chance. Now it’s moved on to some other soul. We’ve missed our window. Go back and tell him that.”

Diamond Tooth carved a piece of bread using the tiger claws protruding from the bagh nakhs at her knuckles. It would have felt nice to elicit a sense of dread within Carson, but the idiot remained resolute in her continuous silence. She would have to resort to another tactic.

“Rowings knows you’ve met with Tivoli.” She slurped a spoonfull of soup. “He might also be interested in this Toran business, but I’m only here to get one name: Tivoli’s pseudonym.”

“Why do you think Tivoli’s using a fictitious name?”

She lifted her eyes to Carson. Everyone’s true name had a unique scent. No two names smelled alike in all the underworld. But she couldn’t track a name that wasn’t in use. Unused names existed less than false ones which all smelled exactly the same: artificial and bland. If Tivoli had been using his true name she would have found him already.

She spotted a child’s drawing on the wall. It depicted Carson, his wife and two oblong headed children; one a girl, the other a boy. The drawing of the boy stood out, not only because his arms looked as if they were made of barbed wire, but because he was colored darker than the rest of the family as though he were special.

“I’ve never seen a soul stitch together a whole family,” she said. “Beautiful work. Must’ve been tough fitting all those pieces together.” Diamond Tooth dropped her spoon in the bowl.

Carson’s glass helmet fogged up and sweet anxiety spilled from his pores. She had found her angle. Sometimes the obvious method isn’t always obvious at first.

Carson cleared the steam from the glass with a rag. “Balfour. Clem Balfour. That’s his new alias.” He rose from the table and reached into a cabinet. Diamond Tooth aimed her bagh nakhs from under the table and prepared to shoot.

“I’ll do you better than the three objects Rowings is paying you to burn me.” Carson returned holding an object by its cord: a brass disk with thin brass plates inside it. Engravings marked a ring around the outside of the disk. Another brass piece sat fixed on top and cutaway into an ecliptic circle.

“This is the key to the gate,” said Carson. “Only the wearer of this astrolabe can pass through the Toran.”

He sat it on the table. The clock-like hand on the object swiveled, the ecliptic circle shifted and the plates spun all on their own accord.

“That’s a useful object,” she said. “But if it does what you say, why don’t you use it?”

Carson dropped his gaze to his glass incased body. “I’ve made peace with my death. There’s nothing out there for me. Now go! Leave me be.”

“I would. But the thing is, I need something from you. And the only way for me to get it is to burn you.”

Carson excreted a pheromone of panic, not over his own miserable life, but for his family. She’d smelled that salty scent many times to know it.

His eyes widened and his chest expanded. He drew for a weapon inside the glass box at his waist. Diamond Tooth was way ahead of him. She had only waited that long to soak up all his fright.

From her seated position, she shot four of her tiger claws out like darts.
sish.
The claws leapt off her gloves all at once, sliced through the table, shattered the glass around the Carson’s waist and penetrated the flesh of his exposed torso. Another set of tiger claws grew into her bagh nakhs, replacing the ones that had fired.

Carson desperately tried to hold himself up and remain standing, but it was futile. His spirit burned and shriveled to Nothing. His entire afterlife sucked out of him, frozen stiff in place. What was left of him tipped backward and fell upward, collapsing to the ceiling as though it were the floor. In a splintering crash, the shell of his hollow spirit broke a part on the ceiling, spilling the moist dark insides and painting that section of the ceiling the blackest of blacks. The saluting brooms leapt up to the ceiling and swept the ash into a pile.

Diamond Tooth grabbed the astrolabe off the table and hung it around her neck. Footsteps rushed toward her. She turned and discharged tiger claws into the oblong head of the Carson’s golden-haired daughter.

The little girl withered to nothing like her father and collapsed from the ceiling to the floor. Her ash spread along the chessboard-colored tiles. Diamond Tooth stepped over the Nothing and walked out.

After she straddled her hellhound, she waited and listened for the pleasuring screams of a newly widowed woman and bastard son. That’s why she burned Carson.

She closed her eyes and submerged herself in the shattered family’s pain and suffering. Soothing bells jingled in her head. Beautiful rainbows flooded her vision. The flaring underworld sky forced its way back into her consciousness abruptly.

It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. She snapped the reins on the hellhound and trotted off to Amenthes to meet a rouge squal.

After her pit stop in Amenthes, Diamond Tooth headed to paradise, the only place she dreaded in the entire underworld. She yanked on her hellhound’s reins a few yards away from the A’raf that sectioned paradise off from the rest of the underworld.

The great wall ran from the northernmost tip of the underworld to the southernmost tip, as far as the eye could see and as far as any known spirit had ever ventured. There was no going around it, under it or over it.

The ancients had fooled the righteous souls on the other side into thinking that the wall kept evil at bay. The security was certainly deadly when needed—the good guys of paradise had likely burned more souls than she had. She personally witnessed them annihilate foolish spirits who’d tried to break into paradise. Even those souls with wings would be shot down before they could fly halfway up the wall, and beyond that, only a barbot could get close enough to the scorching sky to completely scale the wall, but if she could get in, anyone could get in.

Their great wall was less a security measure than a means to obscure their awareness of the real world—the underworld. No matter how many positive mind tricks or denial acrobatics they performed, they were in the underworld just like everyone else. She’d be delighted to reveal the harsh reality to them and watch the shock grace their eyes. She’d devour their dismay.

From her perspective, the A’raf was a shiny prison gate. They could polish it up however they wished, but a cage is a cage. They had signed up for voluntary incarceration. It was as if the deities built the A’raf so many years ago simply to boost morale and force the righteous to feel grateful for what puny afterlives they all had. That way none of them would begin to think of their deficiencies, because they didn’t really have anything to begin with. Paradise was just a small area of the underworld, and the righteous were locked in and protecting nothing special.