The Scarlet Gospels (33 page)

“Yes … yes…” the crowd said.

“Then I will tell you, because in the end, like all conspiracies, the answer comes down to one.”

The word ran murmuring through the huge interior. “One? One. One!”

“Yes, one. One criminal who is at the heart of your miseries. All your suffering. One fiend who passed himself off as a minor tempter of souls, all the while laying his plans against the serenity of the state. The chaos in your streets? He put it there. Is there nothing to buy at your butchers' but bone and gristle? That's because he sells all the finest meat to humankind, who have a taste for themselves that he has nurtured over the years. You will know his face when you lay eyes upon him!”

“Show us!” came a call from somewhere near the door. It was instantly taken up on all sides.

“Show us!”
they were demanding over and over again.
“Show us! Show us! Show us!”

The Unconsumed sent up a plume of flame, its color venomous, the light it shed on the upturned forces of the demons illuminating in each evidence of their worst attributes. Their mouths too wide, their eyes tiny darts of malice or simply offering up wide, idiot stares. There were no two faces the same in the many thousands that were illuminated. Each was grotesquely perfected by their revealing light, their ambitions gorged with their joyless faces and burning in their crazed eyes.

The flame the Unconsumed had sent up had virtually silenced the mob
inside
the cathedral, though those outside the entrance continued to bellow and howl.

“Forget them,” the Unconsumed said. “They'll have their moment, when I choose and not before. But now, you have asked me to show you the felon who masterminded the many crimes against you. And so you shall see him. This villain had murdered his entire Order. Left a high priest in ruin. He will elude us no more.” He threw another flame into the air above his head, where it hung for a moment before plunging back past him, past the platform on which he stood, and down through the gasping marble slabs and onto the secret space below.

Taking his time, so as to squeeze as much drama as possible from the situation, he turned and took a step back from the edge of his platform.

“In here, comrades, is the felon. The thief. The destroyer. His head will roll before this day is done.”

“It isn't my time,” the Hell Priest said from the gaping hole in the floor.

It was at this moment the Hell Priest rose out of the cracked floor, adorned in Lucifer's armor. Despite the incredible density of the bodies, the crowd still managed to clear a space around the Hell Priest as he made his ascent. When he had fully emerged from the space, he turned to face his supposed executioner.

Without a moment's hesitation the Unconsumed carved a sword of fire and swung it at the Hell Priest, who raised his armored hand and grasped the burning blade. Sparks of white flame spurted from between the Hell Priest's fingers, and he laughed, as though this were the finest sport he'd had in a long time. And while he laughed, and held the blazing sword in his grip, he took time to cast gestures out toward the demon soldiers who stood and watched.

Serpentine chains, hook headed, came weaving between the feet of the spectators, striking with razor edge anyone fool enough to block their way. The condemned knew with the appearance of the first hook what horrors would inevitably follow, and each attempted to outrun the judgment. But the Hell Priest knew his game better than breathing.

Whether his victims fell to their knees and begged salvation, as one did, or tried to outrun the pursuing hooks, as did two more, or simply attempted to go against his enemy as he would any other, with sword and dagger, as did the many, all were lost. The hooks found their eyes, their mouths, their asses, their bellies; and finding them, the hooks dug deep and tore hard, reducing their victims in a matter of seconds into thrashing, incomprehensible knots of twitching muscle.

They made their sounds still, protesting their suffering state, but anything remotely resembling words was beyond them now. The stomach of one had been hooked and hauled up through his throat; the face of another was emerging from his butt hole like a prodigious bowel movement. Their anatomies could not sustain such violent disfigurements. The demons tore, their bodies opening like overripe fruit, spilling their contents as they did so.

Harry had seen this before, but never on so massive a scale. This was full-blown war, all of Hell on one side and a single armored priest on the other. Harry wondered at the ramifications of the chaos that played out before him. If the priest won, would he then take his battle to Earth and the heavens beyond? When would his thirst be slaked? Harry never imagined he'd be on the side of the infernal, watching and even praying for Hell's victory—powerless to do anything else.

Harry remained fixed on the warring figures at the center of this battle. The Hell Priest, content to let his chains dispatch the horde, still had hold of the Unconsumed's fire-edged sword and was bending it back toward its wielder, a trial of strength in which he was steadily gaining the upper hand. He suddenly put all his weight behind the moment, and with a quick twist he had freed the blade from the Unconsumed's grip.

The Hell Priest rose up, the armor feeling good around his body, not like a carapace—hard and brittle—but flowing with him and through him, its power given over to him, wed to him. He was a force unto himself, beyond the reach of any living thing, and though the years that had brought him to this moment had been filled with the most intense personal suffering, it had been worth the agony in order to bring him to this glorious, heart-leaping moment, when Lucifer's armor shot strength into every place where the monkish life he'd lived had left weakness and bliss into the muscles he'd hacked at in order to mold his body to fit the royal armor.

Lords Below and Above, what joy!
He'd never felt his flesh and mind and soul in one world like this, a single system, scoured of contradiction. He hadn't lived until this moment.

He saw the Unconsumed from the corner of his eye, his arms raised above his head. Two more swords were being etched out of the incandescent air above the demon's fists, streams of raw lava stuff dropping from their blazing lengths and spreading over the fractured marble floor. The Hell Priest had no fear of walking on liquid fire, not adorned in the full armor of the King of Hell.

He moved toward the Unconsumed and was in front of his enemy in three fire-splattering strides, aiming a sideswipe at his belly. The Unconsumed came back at the Hell Priest with his swords slicing the air like twin threshers. But the Hell Priest was in no mood to retreat; he stood his ground, striking at each of the enemy's swords in turn, the force of his blows enough to slow his adversary's approach a little. But the gusts of wind raised by the threshing swords suddenly caused the flames between the opponents to rise up like a blazing wall, and the Unconsumed came through the fire with his swords spinning.

The Hell Priest raised his own blade to protect his head, and the Unconsumed's left-handed sword struck it, the impact spitting out serpentine lightning bolts that flew out across the heads of the assembled demons, striking stone dead those stupid enough to reach up and try to grab them. With the Hell Priest's blade locked against one of his own the Unconsumed used the other to strike at his adversary's exposed chest. Surges of power broke over the Hell Priest's armor from the point of impact, their brightness melting into the armor, stealing the energy of the Unconsumed's blow and adding to the armor's power.

The Hell Priest felt the increase of his strength and instantly acted on the knowledge; he took his sword in a two-fisted grip and raced at the Unconsumed, loosing a roar of pleasure. The Unconsumed again raised his left-handed blade to ward off the Priest's attack, but his sword shattered as soon as it was struck, the metal shards going to flakes of fire as they were strewn. The blow was deafening. Every creature in the foyer who had not met an untimely death watched the Unconsumed as he staggered back and gaped at the Cenobite who stood before him.

“What is this magic?” the Unconsumed asked, his voice quivering with cowardice at the prospect of an unfair fight.

“The Crown Jewels of Hell,” the Cenobite said.

“It can't be.”

“Oh, but it is.”

The Unconsumed took several backward steps away from the Cenobite. Quickly he turned to his soldiers and, showering his lips with spittle, howled: “This is the enemy of Hell! He will bring you all to dust if you do not act against him now. I have seen visions. Save Hell before he unmakes us all!”

His words died into darkness, leaving the air empty.

“Visions?” said the Hell Priest as he approached the Unconsumed.

“I've seen your ambitions, Priest,” the Unconsumed said, staggering back.

“You couldn't possibly,” the Cenobite said. Then, turning to the soldiers, he gestured to his suit of arms. “The armor I wear is a gift from Lucifer, who is reborn in me. My authority is now absolute. My word is now law.”

“Madness!” said the Unconsumed. “Soldiers! This is your hour! I have brought you to your enemy. Now it falls to you! You must take him out of this sacred place, and tear him to pieces! Don't listen to his lies. He's afraid of you! Don't you see that? You have righteousness on your side and he has nothing.
Nothing!!
He came here only to steal from our lord Lucifer—hallowed be his name—in his place of meditation. He's admitted to it! The armor belongs to the Morning Star! And I believe our lord would be bountiful in his thankfulness were you to tear it from this vile thief's back.”

The Unconsumed's speech worked. The crowd roared an immediate “Aye!” and as they did so the Unconsumed drove the point of his blade into the conflagration above his head. It instantly refracted the light in a blazing show that spat incandescence out across the length and breadth of the cathedral's foyer.

The single, booming “Aye!” became stronger as the beams exploded against the stone walls, blowing ragged holes in them, none of them less than ten feet across, many twice that.

“Enter all!”
the Unconsumed yelled, his voice possessed of a magnitude that carried his words to the hordes cramming the beach around the building. “And destroy!”

Harry and his friends retreated farther into the shadows as tens of thousands of demons who'd been denied access seethed in through the ruptured walls, their bony backs all pressed together resembling a stream of cockroaches bubbling as they climbed over one another and dropped into the morass of those who'd climbed onto the ledge and fallen over the other side ahead of them.

This mad flood of invading demons filled up a space that was not meant to hold more than a fraction of the crowd, their rage fueled by a visionary hunger to be at the heart of the baptism that they had glimpsed in their dreams all their lives. “Aye!” they had screamed. “Aye!” to the blood and light and “Aye!” to martyrdom, if that was to be the price of their presence here.

The Hell Priest knew that he had a chamber the size of a small nation to witness to, and he knew there was a sight that would bring an end to the spiraling insanity that had been set in motion by the Unconsumed. Let them have proof that the great lord was not mediating from below; let them see for themselves.

“Gaze upon the fallen fruit!” the Cenobite shouted. “Your glorious leader talks of Lucifer's eternal meditation on the nature of sin. Your glorious leader has deceived you. I shall show you the angel Lucifer. In all his soiled glory.”

He threw a gesture of force on the ground, which opened beneath him, taking out a hundred or so soldiers with it; then he descended for no more than a few seconds and rose again into view again with Lucifer's corpse held, limp, in one hand. It was a pitiful sight, hanging from the Hell Priest's grip, a sack of broken bones, with a grainy gray face clipped from the book of atrocities, eyes sunk in, mouth gaping, nose crushed against his face so it was little more than two holes.

“This—” the Hell Priest said, his voice once again the raw, intimate whisper that was audible to who were assembled there “—is the lord for whom you fight.” He rose as he spoke, climbing effortlessly through the thickening soup of stale and sour that was the air until he was perhaps twenty feet above the crowd. There he turned and let go of the corpse, which tumbled back down the flame-licked dais, through the hole the Hell Priest had used for his descent, and out of sight.

 

7

An intense hush had grown over the army so that the only sound audible was the steady lapping caress of the flames. The Unconsumed, clearly as surprised to see his fallen lord as the rest of his army, struggled to maintain his rapidly crestfallen soldiers.

“The fiend has murdered our King!” the Unconsumed shrieked. “He must be destroyed! Advance!”

But they did not. Slowly, but in steady droves, the Unconsumed's minions were turning inward to face the Unconsumed, until his entire army faced him, looks of betrayal and condemnation on their faces.

“Have you lost your minds?” the Unconsumed shouted.

“Most likely,” the Hell Priest answered. “They see their reflections stripped of lies. The burden of truth is too great, Your Lordship. It is my pleasure to introduce you to
my
army. It is the last thing you will ever see.”

The Priest then loosed a war cry that echoed off the walls of the cathedral, repeating in the ears of every being present. He raised his arms and came at the Unconsumed, conjuring a sword in his right hand. In the blink of an eye the Priest took off the Unconsumed's arm just above the elbow and drove his sword through it for good measure. This was the first injury the Unconsumed had sustained in centuries. The shock of the trauma caused him to vomit up a series of flames and he began to babble an incoherent glossolalia.