The Scarlet Gospels (15 page)

“Oh Lord. I was afraid of that. That's the other reason I'm holed up in this filthy place. I think they wanted to split us up. As soon as you left, my apartment was compromised. I felt the bad juju coming and I got the fuck out of there, but quick! There's roads open, Harry. Roads that should be closed, and there's something coming down one of those roads—or maybe all of them—that means me and you and a whole lot of other people harm.”

“I believe it, but that doesn't change the fact that you can't stay here. This place is disgusting. We have to relocate you to some place where you won't be sleeping on a damp floor with rats running over your feet. Not to mention what's been done on that mattress. You can't see the stains, Norma, but there's a lot of them, in a variety of colors.”

“You got a place in mind?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I'm going to get everything ready, and then I'm coming back for you, all right?”

“If you say so.”

“I do. I'll see you soon. We're gonna make it out of this thing. I promise.”

As he gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek she caught hold of his hand.

“Why are you so good to me?” she said.

“As if you didn't know.”

“Indulge me.”

“Because there is nobody in the world who means more to me than you. And that's no indulgence. It's the plain truth.”

She smiled against his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

Harry regarded her affectionately for a moment, then without saying a word turned and went in search of a safer haven.

 

BOOK TWO

Into the Breach

The ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.

—Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

 

1

The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement. It could only be entered by one route, a narrow stairway that was carefully watched by the monastery guards. It had been built during a time of imminent civil war, with factions of demons in constant skirmishes. The head of the Cenobitical Order, his identity known only to the eight who had raised him from their number into that High Office, had decided that for the greater good of the Order he would use a tiny part of the vast wealth they had accrued to build a fortress-sanctuary where his priests and priestesses would be safe from the volatile politics of Hell. The fortress had been built to the most rigorous of standards, its polished gray walls unscalable.

As the years had passed and the Cenobites were less and less in the streets of the city that Lucifer had designed and built (a city called, by some, Pandemonium but named Pyratha by its architect), the stories about what went on behind the sleek black walls of the Cenobitical fortress proliferated and the countless demons and damned alike who glanced its way all had favorite stories about the excesses of its occupants.

Between the monastery and Hell's great city, Pyratha, sat the vast shantytown called Fike's Trench, where the damned who did service in the mansions, temples, and streets retired to sleep, and eat, and, yes, copulate (and, if they were lucky, produce an infant or two who could be sold at the abattoir, no questions asked).

The stories of the fortress and the monstrous things that went on behind its walls were exchanged like currency, growing ever more elaborate. It was an understandable comfort to the damned, who lived with so much terror and atrocity in their daily lives, that there be a place where things were even worse—where they could look and tell themselves that their situation could be worse. And so each man, woman, and child nurtured acknowledgments that they were not among the victims of the fortress where the unspeakable devices of the Order would scour even the most treasured of memories. And in this fashion, the damned existed within the framework of something approximating a life; living in excrement and exhaustion, their bodies barely nourished, their spirits unfed, they indulged in the almost happy thought that at least a few others suffered more than they.

All this had come as a shock to Theodore Felixson. In life he'd spent much of the fortune his workings in magic had earned him (what he'd liked to refer to as his
will
-gotten gains) on art, always buying privately because the paintings he collected moved, when they moved at all, outside the sniffing range of the museum hounds. All the pictures he'd owned had related in some way to Hell: a Tintoretto of Lucifer falling, his wings torn from his body, trailing after him into the abyss; a sheaf of preparatory studies by Lucca Signorelli for his fresco of the damned in Hell; a book of horrors that Felixson had purchased in Damascus because its unknown creator had found a way to make the meditations of each hour turn on sin and punishment. These had been the most horrific pieces in his rather sizable collection on the subject of the infernal, and not one of them even remotely resembled the truth.

There was an elegant symmetry to Pyratha, with its eight hills (“one better than Rome,” its architect boasted), which were crammed with buildings of countless styles and sizes. Felixson knew nothing of the city's rules, if it had any. The Hell Priest had referred to it in passing on one occasion only and spoke of it with the contempt of a creature who thought of every occupant of Pyratha as a subspecies, their mindless hedonism matched only by their lavish stupidity. The city that Lucifer had built to outdo Rome had fallen, as Rome had fallen, into decadence and self-indulgence, its regime too concerned with its own internal struggles to cleanse the city of its filth and return it to the disciplined state it had been in before Lucifer's disappearance.

Yes, surprising as the architecture of Hell was to Felixson, finding out that the angel who had been cast down from Heaven for his rebellious ways was absent from his throne defied all expectations, even if it did make a certain amount of sense. As above, so below, Felixson thought.

There were countless theories concerning Lucifer's disappearance and Felixson had heard them all. Depending on which story you chose to believe, Lucifer either had gone mad and perished in the wastelands, escaping Hell entirely, or was walking the streets of Pyratha disguised as a commoner. Felixson didn't believe any of it. He kept his opinions on the subject, and all other opinions for that matter, to himself. He was lucky to be alive, he knew, and though the torturous surgeries had destroyed his abilities to form an intelligible sentence, he was still fully capable of thinking clearly. If he bided his time and played his cards right, sooner or later, he knew, an escape route would present itself, and when it did he'd take it and be gone. He'd return to Earth, change his name and his face, and renounce magic for the rest of his days.

That had been the plan right up until he realized that living without power wasn't the nightmare he'd envisioned it to be. He had been among the most accomplished and ambitious magicians in the world, but holding on to that position had taken staggering amounts of energy, will, and time. When he finally allowed himself to learn from the Cenobites, he discovered that the matters of his soul, the complex business of which had first drawn him into the mysteries of his craft, had been neglected entirely. It was only now, as a slave to a demon, that Felixson was again free to begin the long journey of self-within-self, the journey from which the getting of magic had distracted him. Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he'd never felt more alive.

Felixson stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the gate of the fortress with a message clutched firmly in his recently mangled hand. The epistle he held had been given to him by one of Hell's messengers, the only objectively beautiful beings in the underworld. They existed for the sole purpose of ensuring that Hell's dirtiest dealings always came wrapped in a pretty package.

Ahead, he could see Fike's Trench and, beyond it, the whole of Pyratha. On the road heading toward him marched a small army of Hell's priests and priestesses, a procession of three dozen of the Order's most formidable soldiers. Among them, Felixson was proud to say, stood his master.

Felixson took his eyes off the smoking spires of the city and returned his gaze to the approaching procession of Cenobites. A wind had sprung up, or rather
the
wind, for there was only one: it blew bitterly cold and stirred up the scents of rot and burnt blood that perpetually filled the air. Now, as the acrid wind grew in strength gust by gust, it caught on the black ceremonial robes of the Cenobites and unfurled the thirty-foot flags of oiled human skin that several of the priests and priestesses held so that the flags snaked and snapped high above their heads. The holes in the hides where the eyes and mouths had been looked to Felixson as though the victims were still staring wide-eyed with disbelief at the sight of the flying knives that undid them, forever screaming as their skin was expertly stripped from muscle.

The bell in the fortress tower, which was called Summoner (it was the same bell, in point of fact, those that had opened Lemarchand's Configuration always heard tolling far off), was now ringing to welcome back the brothers and sisters of the Order to the fortress. Upon seeing his master, Felixson knelt in the mud, head bowed so deferentially that it touched the ground as the procession climbed the steps to the fortress gate. With his head firmly planted in the dirt, Felixson extended his arm, the missive he carried held high in front of him.

His lord stepped out of the procession to speak to Felixson, and the Cenobites continued to make their way past him.

“What is this?” his lord said, snatching the letter from Felixson's hand.

Felixson turned his muddied and divided head, twisting it to the left so he could study his lord's reaction with one eye. The Cenobite's face was inscrutable. Nobody knew how old he was—Felixson was smart enough not to ask—but the weight of his age sat on his countenance, carving it into something that could never be manufactured, only chiseled by the agonies of loss and time. Felixson's tongue rolled out of his head, landing in the mud and shit–caked street. He didn't seem to mind. He was in thrall to his master.

“I am called to the Chamber of the Unconsumed,” the Hell Priest said, staring down at the letter in his hand.

Without another word, the Cenobite turned against the tide of the members of his Order and moved toward Pyratha. Felixson followed, na
ï
ve to the details but loyal to the end.

 

2

After the filth of the Trench, the streets of the Hell's city were comparatively clean. They were wide and, in places, planted with some species of tree that needed no sunlight to survive, their black trunks and branches and even the dark blue leaves that sprang from them gnarled and twisted as though every inch of their growth had been born in convulsion. There were no cars on the streets, but there were bicycles, sedan chairs, and rickshaws—even a few carriages drawn by horses that had almost transparent skin and fleshless heads so flat and wide (their eyes set on either edge of these expanses of bone) that they resembled manta rays stitched upon the bodies of asses.

In the streets, word of the Cenobite's appearance went out before him, and at each intersection even the busiest traffic was held up by demons in dark purple uniforms (the closest things Pyratha had to a police force) so that the Cenobite could make his way through the city undeterred by a single citizen.

As he passed, most of the citizens either made signs of devotion—touching navel, breastbone, and the middle brow before inclining their heads—or, if officers, went down on their knees to demonstrate their veneration. It wasn't just hybrids and demons who dropped to the ground—so did many of the damned. The Hell Priest paid them no heed, but Felixson drank it all in.

Up close, the buildings they hurried past seemed even more impressive to Felixson than they had from the hill on which sat the monastery. Their fa
ç
ades were decorated with what looked like intricately rendered scenes of Lucifer's personal mythologies. The figures were designed to be contained within a rigorous square format, which brought to Felixson's mind the decorations he'd once seen on the temples of Incas and Aztecs. There was every kind of activity pictured in these decorations: wars, celebrations, and even lovemaking—all very graphically depicted. As he had paced a long period in the hushed and claustrophobic cells of the fortress, only able to see the city for a few stolen minutes now and then, it gave Felixson a sense of something vaguely resembling contentment to be given so much to feast his eyes upon.

“
There
,” the Hell Priest said, tearing Felixson from his reverie.

Felixson looked up to see the Cenobite pointing at what was easily the tallest building in the city. It rose higher than the eye could see, piercing the pitch-black sky. For all its enormity, the building was entirely void of detail. A windowless, featureless spike, its fa
ç
ade was the very essence of mundanity. The palace was a true work of art, a building so bland it wasn't even appealing enough to be considered an eyesore. It was a joke, Felixson guessed, its architect found quite amusing.

As they came to within three steps of the summit, a door opened inward, though there was nobody visibly doing the job. Felixson noticed the tiniest tremor in the Hell Priest's hand. The Cenobite cast his lightless eyes up at the stone spectacle that rose high above them, and then said, “I am here to be judged. If the judgment goes against me, you are to destroy every one of my endeavors. Do you understand?”

“Evry tings?” Felixson said.

“
Don't succumb to sentiment. I have all I need here.” He tapped his temple with the broken and poorly reset forefinger of his right hand. “Nothing will be lost.”

“I do, Master. I do can.”