The Scarlet Gospels (34 page)

In taking those few moments to expose the extent of his weakness, the Unconsumed had left himself open to attack from the rest of the army. And they took the opportunity, in a rushed and panicky fashion, eager to get the job done as quickly as possible. The Unconsumed had four blades in his back by the time he turned to face his betrayers, and twice that number of wounds—the most severe a strike at the back of the neck, which had clearly been intended to take off his head and might have done so had he not retaliated by reaching over with his remaining hand and seizing the blade as it cut into his flaming flesh, melting it in an instant.

“Assassins!”
he roared, the flame from his severed arm taking the form of a monstrous scythe. It was every bit as powerful as its iron equivalent. It took the legs out from seven of his enemies and bisected an eighth at his waist.

While the Unconsumed used his scythe to deface and butcher the men whose legs he'd sliced off, one who'd so far survived this massacre came at him from behind and with one clean stroke sheared off the scythe arm at the shoulder. The Unconsumed reeled around to face his mutilator, only to meet a hundred more living assassins who came at him without restraint—slicing, hacking, gutting, piercing—their assaults so rapid that the lethal conflagrations stoked in the Unconsumed's marrow, fires that would have made ash of his assassins in a heartbeat, were never unleashed.

The rest was just a graceless, joyless unmaking, the thing on its knees, the thing dropping onto one surviving arm, and then down onto its elbow, and then down onto its side, barely distinguishable from the furnace litter of burning legs, and two pieces of his own arm, also burning, and from everything now a greasy black smoke rising up, which smelled to Harry, when the smoke reached him, like a burning heap of trash.

“And so it ends,” the Hell Priest said. “I have had a vision these many years, that when I had readied myself in every way I knew how, I would lead an army out of this abyss which we have suffered for the sins of the Fallen One.”

He tapped his brow. “In here are all the great workings that once belonged to the magicians of the Overworld. They did not surrender them lightly. Many fought me bitterly. I was not impatient. I knew this day would come in the fullness of time, and my duty was to come to you on that day with every power our adversaries had ever owned in my head. With the knowledge I own I could kill the world ten thousand times and raise it again ten thousand more and never once repeat the same trick. So now, the road divides. I have pieces of this magic to give to those who will come with me. Who will join me as we lead the lambs to their slaughter?”

The response from the crowd was like the sound of some vast animal, roaring as it woke. As the army unleashed its primal cry, a veil of shadow rose up from the hole in the cathedral floor and the fractured ground beyond it. It rose into the air behind the Hell Priest, some portions of it climbing faster than others, shedding a darkening dust as they did so.

The sight had not been missed by the demons in the cathedral. At first they had assumed it to be another conjuration of their new and glorious leader. But the confident shouts of their assumption soon gave way to superstitious murmurs as the shadow curtain continued to climb, its shed dust spreading the message as every one of the flames atop the torches gathered was extinguished, the smoke of their dying adding to the sum of shadows that thickened the air.

“
What impotent magic is this?” the Hell Priest said.

The shadows were overtaking the cathedral. They rose all the way to the ceiling and spread to either wall until there was nothing to illuminate the interior except for the last embers of the dying fire.

And then even they were gone, and the cathedral was a night within a night from end to end. The demons began to voice their doubts.

“Lord, speak to us!” one called.

And another: “Is this a test of our faith?”

“I have faith, Lord.”

A thousand murmured, “Yes!”

“We all have faith.”

“Take it away, Lord. It blinds us!”

The cries from the crowd stopped suddenly when a flicker of lightning came in the darkness behind the platform, and with it a voice, great and resonant.

“
Who has defiled my sanctuary?”
said the voice, and the veil of darkness was lifted.

 

8

The illuminated figure of Lucifer stood naked in the air. It was an extraordinary sight. Harry was astonished to see, now that the King of Hell no longer sat bowed and broken, he stood easily eight feet tall.

Lucifer's anatomy was human, but there were subtle changes to his proportions that lent it an extreme eloquence entirely its own. His limbs were long, as were his neck and nose, his brow uncommonly broad and untouched by a single groove of doubt. His genitals were of uncommon size, his eyes of uncommon blue, his skin of uncommon paleness. His hair was cropped so close to his skull it was barely visible, but it seemed to have a luminescence, as did the faint growth of hair on his face and neck and the hair that spread over his chest and belly and grew lushly at his groin.

Not a soul dared speak. This time, it seemed, even the flames burning within the cathedral stood in silent attendance waiting for Lucifer to utter his next words. When he finally did, light emerged from his throat and illuminated the cloud of fog on which his words were carried.

“I was the best beloved of the Lord God Jehovah,”
he said, spreading his arms out to his sides to present himself.
“But I was thrown down out of the loving presence of my father because I was too proud and too ambitious. He meant to punish me with His absence, which was so great a punishment my soul could not endure it. Though I tried, the grief was too great. I wanted an end to the life my Maker had given me. I wanted to be gone forever from being and knowing, which are the pieces of suffering. So I died from this life. I was free. Laid to rest by my own hand in a tomb beneath a cathedral I had built at the edge of Hell…”
His voice softened as he spoke about his freedom, dying away until it was barely audible. And then, rising steeply out of that hush, a roar of fury:

“BUT DEATH IS DENIED ME! I WAKE NAKED, IN THE SQUALOR OF MY RUINED CRYPT! AND IN MY SANCTUARY, WHERE I WAS TO PASS AWAY THE AGES IN THE ARMS OF SILENCE, I FIND A MASS, STINKING OF MADNESS AND MURDER, WALLOWING IN BLOOD RAGE—DESPOILING MY PLACE OF OBLIVION.”

He was still for a moment, letting the echoes of his outcry, which seemed to last minutes, die away. When he spoke again his voice was not loud, but the syllables resonated in the skulls of everyone in attendance.

“Why
am I naked?”
the Fallen One said, turning instantly to face the Hell Priest, who stood donning the Devil's armor. The Cenobite said nothing. The Devil smiled. Again, he asked the question, his tone taking on a sickly seduction.
“Why am I naked?”

Harry watched from the safety of his hideout, refusing the urge to blink.

“Come on,” he whispered so quietly that not even Norma, who stood by his side, clutching his arm, could hear. “Kill the bastard!”

The Priest spoke.

“You were dead, my King,” the Hell Priest said. “I came for you. My entire life was—”

“
—a preparation for the moment we would meet,
” Lucifer said.

“Yes.”

“
Not even death can save me from this torture of repetition.”

“
My lord?”

“
I have heard this story. I have seen you. I have seen all of you! In countless incarnations!”
the Devil shouted to the crowd who attentively watched his every move. When he spoke again, it was slow and deliberate. “
I do not want this anymore
.”

He stepped into the air as he spoke, reaching for the Hell Priest as he did so. But the armor that he'd once worn had new allegiances now, and it responded to Lucifer's approach by unleashing defensive cords of light that unwove themselves as they struck the newfound enemy.

In an instant the Cenobite's fear evaporated. The suit had accepted him as its owner, his magic was infinitely stronger than it had ever been, and the Devil stood before him, naked and wan. The war was not over. The victor had not yet been decided. The Hell Priest took a deep breath and then uttered the fatal summoning syllables of the Eighth Engine:

Uz … Yah … I … Al … Ak … Ki … Ut … Tu … Ut … Tu … Jeh … Maz … Az … A … Yah … Neh … Ark … Bej … Ee … Ut … Tu.”

Barely had the flow of sounds come to a halt than the power in the words rose up, creating a stench, the stink of life and death rolled into one monstrous river of sentient grease, where the secrets of the world's beginning and, no doubt, the secrets of its end were circling together in the same irresistible liqueur. All planet-killing plagues were here, circling in the air around his head—so too their antidotes, were anyone patient enough to track them down in the toxic populace of insanities and sicknesses. This was what the Hell Priest wanted and he sank his hands wrist deep into the Other Muck.

Instantly the Muck responded, not only snaking up over him but also narrowing its painless way into his flesh and bone and marrow so that its swampy substance took possession of him. It was only when it rose up his spine and started to pump its potent stuff into his head that he felt a spasm of unease. To have this primal power in his limbs and heart and belly was one thing; to have it in his mind, where he had always ruled unchallenged, refusing to indulge in even the most modest of mind-altering stuffs in order to keep his thoughts untainted, was not so welcome. The fluid seemed to sense his momentary resistance and, before he could protest any further, it flooded his head completely.

He let out a single grunt, and his body—still held aloft by his elite armor—stiffened. Then the Hell Priest started to slowly rise up into the horizontal position. As he did so the perfect symmetry of his scarified face was destroyed by the creation of new veins clawing their way across his pierced visage, the magic he summoned carving levels of power his anatomy had not been designed to contain on to his body. It not only forged new veins for his face, but it surged through the muscles underneath Lucifer's armor, making them swell until the angelic shell creaked with the pressure from his burgeoning body beneath.

All of this—from the speaking of the syllables to his new position, standing in the air—had taken mere seconds, during which time the Priest's eyes remained closed. When the display came to its end, Lucifer spoke.

“Have you anything else to say?”

“Only this,” said the Hell Priest as he opened his eyes, and into his vein-laced hands sprang two curved blades—tricks of his newborn will. The Priest then pitched himself at the onetime King of Hell, and both titans gave free rein to their unrepentant furies.

 

9

The battlefield inside the cathedral had changed in nature several times. The fight, at first waged by demons who seemingly neither knew nor cared whose side they were on, now transformed into a bloodletting that had entered what was surely the final phase, in which the two central figures circled each other high above the heads of a mass of mutant demons, each collision of their weapons throwing off layers of blazing air.

It was still an astonishment to Harry, seeing the creature—one he'd assumed was a minor tempter in the infernal pantheon—so transformed by the fruit of his crimes (his murders, his thefts, et cetera) that now he was meeting in battle Lucifer himself as though they might be equals. The two forces of nature exchanged no words; they simply clashed and circled and clashed and circled again, each possessed, it seemed, of an unequivocal desire to eradicate the other, to hack from that other life with such ferocity it would be as though the other never existed.

As a result, the clamor of war cries died away; the only sounds audible were the din of Cenobite and the Prince of Darkness delivering their rage-fueled blows. The Priest's newly recruited army had pared down to a core of maybe a thousand demons who silently watched and championed the cause; the rest were gone, because they'd either sustained from Lucifer a fatal blow or simply lost the stomach for the battle and fled the arena. Even the complaints and entreaties of the dying (the demons, like humankind, more often than not called for their mothers in the end) had diminished.

The reason for all this was not hard to fathom; the waves of energy released from the clash of Lucifer and the Hell Priest was one blow more than most of them could take. Now there were just a few survivors at far corners of the cathedral, where the euthanizing waves did not break, and even they were growing steadily weaker as their blood and breath trickled out of their pierced bodies. The immense space, which had but a few hours before been empty and pristine, was now a crumbling slaughterhouse with two forces of immeasurable power battling above the corpse-strewn ground below.

Harry doubted very much that the Hell Priest cared about or even remembered him or his Harrowers at this point. The battle against Lucifer consumed the Hell Priest's attentions entirely. The swords they wielded were not the only weapons at their disposal, of course. Lucifer's eyes, skin, breath, and sweat were all instruments of power in their own right, while the Hell Priest's syllable-summoned energies continued their expansion, surging through the design of the armor, spitting thorny cords of black lightning that wrapped around Lucifer's limbs, tearing open grievous wounds.

There were enough felled bodies now for their departure to go unnoticed. And with the Hell Priest and the Fallen One still engaged in their furies, there would not be a better time to slip away with their lives intact.

“All right. Time to move,” Harry said. “We gotta get the fuck out of here before they're done comparing dick sizes. Is everyone ready for this?”