The Scarlet Gospels (28 page)

He only repeated himself: “This is not right.…”

 

20

Harry and his friends had left behind them the kind of sights that a thousand lifetimes could not have prepared them for—Pyratha's violent insanities, the plague fog off the wastelands, the secrets and horrors of the Bastion—and had been led into a mystery within a mystery. There was no sound of weeping here—or shrieks, or pleas for mercy for that matter—only the sound of small waves breaking on stones though there was not a body of water to be seen.

Upon leaving the tower and fleeing the city built upon the hills, they had entered a wasteland littered with what looked to be abandoned machinery to the left and right of them. Vast wheels and mammoth coils of chain; toppled structures that had certainly been many stories high, their purpose impossible to fathom. With increasing frequency, lightning struck downward and danced an incandescent tarantella over the metal structures, throwing off showers of sparks in places that in turn started fires among some of the wooden portions of the devices. Many of these conflagrations raged, the smoke they sent up ever thickening the air. As they pressed on, it grew increasingly difficult to see the sky through the brilliance of the lightning, as its shuttering blazes never broke through but only intensified the turmoil.

Finally, the sky, having been unleashing its lightning in silence for three or four minutes, spoke out its thunder, peal upon peal, each roll rising to drown out the one before. The reverberations made the ground shake, and that motion in turn caused several of the pieces of machinery to topple, their massive remains breaking into bits, the smallest of which was still the size of a house.

The group had picked up their speed as the scale of the event continued to escalate around them. Though they were twice obliged to make a detour to avoid pieces of wreckage that came down upon their path, throwing off massive pieces of timber and sheared metal as they did so, the Harrowers quickly reoriented themselves on the other side and picked up the pace again within a few strides.

Harry, forcing himself to maintain the front position, was finding it harder and harder to keep his bearings: his lungs blazed in his chest; his head thumped to the crazed speed of his heart; his feet were a fool's feet, threatening to throw him down in the dirt with every other step.

Lana was several strides behind him, the gap between them steadily closing, but Harry focused his attention as best he could on the road ahead when he thought he saw another archway, much like the one they'd left behind at the top of the Bastion. Harry was certain that his mind was playing tricks on itself and, in his moment of doubt, his body capitulated. He suddenly knew that he wasn't going to make it.

His legs were so weak that they couldn't carry him any farther; he wasn't even sure he wanted them to try. He was only going to slow the rest of them down and put them in harm's way. But he couldn't just stop. He needed to turn to his friends to tell them to go on without him. He'd catch up later, when he'd recovered his strength and put out the blaze in his lungs.

At the threshold of the hallucinated archway, Harry bullied his body into turning around with the intent of addressing his friends. As he spun, his body propelled itself forward, and then the lights went out. The roar and the blaze and the motion of the ground beneath his stumbling feet were a single unendurable assault, and drained of strength, he had stumbled and relinquished himself to gravity. He fell into the gray dirt, and his consciousness seemed to flicker out, taking with it the noise of fire and thunder.

“Watch,”
ordered a voice in the darkness. Harry didn't want to watch. He'd seen enough. But he knew that voice. It didn't belong to a face, but rather a feeling and a smell. The air was thick with sulfur, and shame washed over him and dragged him down to a place he thought he might never leave. Then he heard a different voice—one containing a different set of associations—and Harry stirred.

“Harold?”

It was Caz. Harry heard him quite clearly. He opened his eyes. Caz was crouching beside him.

“You picked a fine time to fall on your ass, man,” Caz said. He spoke quietly, almost a whisper.

Harry pushed himself up out of the dirt and turned to eye the firmaments.

“How long was I out? Where'd the lightning go?”

“A minute, maybe less. One second we could barely see one another, and then there was another archway—like in the middle of fucking nowhere. Look.” Caz pointed back toward the top of an incline where there was a fracture in the air. “That's what we came through.” There were flickers of lightning at the far end of the passageway between the two landscapes. “And we stepped into this.”

Harry hauled his aching body into a sitting position and surveyed the surrounding landscape. The vast machines had gone, as had the gray dust in which they had lain, replaced by a gentle incline of pebbles, reedy trees, and small brush, all of which bounded a body of pristine water. Lana was sitting a few yards from Dale, staring out toward the impossibly clear body of water. Dale had ventured closer to shore, no doubt debating the water's drinkability.

“I don't get it.” Harry said. “Where's Pinfuck? We weren't very far behind him and now he's—”

“Bathate ka jisisimo!” shrieked a gravel-laden female voice interrupting Harry's question.

“The fuck?” said Caz.

“I think we'll find out whether we want to or not,” said Harry.

The Harrowers barely had time to unsheathe their weapons when a creature came into view from around the bend of the beach. She looked like a misshapen demon; she was squat, no more than three and a half feet tall, and her bald head virtually fetal in its shape and relative proportion to her body. She was naked but caked from head to foot with grime. She stopped as soon as she saw the Harrowers, and despite their defensive stances, a wide smile spread across her face.

“Bathate ka jisisimo?” she said again. Nobody said a word, so she repeated the last word once more, enunciating it as though Harry and company were slow to learn.

“Ji si si mo?”

“Anybody catch that?” Harry asked, getting to his feet, his hand close to the place where his knife was hidden.

“Definitely not,” said Lana.

“Negative,” said Caz.

There was a fresh patter of pebbles from behind the demon, and a warm brightness spilled down the beach. Several large balls of what looked like braided fire moved into view, hovering two or three feet above the beach and then, as they came abreast of the demon woman, rising up together in one sweeping motion and hanging in a loose circle above the beach.

An entourage appeared—a company of perhaps thirty male and female demons, all of whom were as strangely proportioned as the demon woman. Each of them was naked, except for the same caked-on grime that they had slathered on their bodies and dreadlocked hair so that the locks were now semi-solid.

Harry loosened the grip he had on his weapon and sighed.

“If this is a trap, I'm too tired to give a shit,” he said.

The tribe advanced. As they did, another female demon emerged from within the circle. She was old, her breasts hanging completely flat against her body, her dreadlocks long enough to graze the ground.

“Harry D'amour,” said the elderly demon woman. “The witness.”

“What?” Harry asked. “Who told you that?”

“The Black Inside,” said a male demon, standing toward the back of the company, his voice as clear and confident as the others in the tribe. The creature continued speaking: “He coming before. He having blind woman. He said you did coming after. To witnessing.”

“Well, he's wrong,” Harry said.

“Two hundred and one and thirty demons you have put down,” remarked yet another member of the tribe, a younger creature who for no apparent reason boasted a noteworthy erection, which he casually toyed with as he spoke. “Slaughterer of the demonation, Harry D'Amour.”

“I don't keep track of those things,” Harry said. “But if you're right, and you keep playing with your dick like that, very soon it'll be two hundred thirty-two.”

The remark received a current of disapproving murmurs from the assembly.

“This cannot happen,” one of them said. “We are too close to the one who sleeps. Is holy ground.”

“The one who sleeps?” Dale said under his breath. “I've met drag queens with scarier names.”

“Who is the one who sleeps?” Harry asked, tossing Dale a reproving glance.

“He is she is it is everything,”

The phrase earned a round of appreciative whoops from the crowd and was here and there shouted out again:
“He is she is it is everything!”

“I didn't know Hell was polytheistic,” Harry said.

“You find true soon, Harry D'Amour,” the old demon woman said. “We, the Azeel, make sailing for you.”

She pointed her gnarled finger toward a spot farther down the shore. There a crew of yet more strangely proportioned demons were pulling ashore three beautifully crafted boats.

“Boats?” Harry said. “And those are for us?”

“Azeel help witness to witness. Black Inside commands.”

“This fucking day gets weirder and weirder.”

 

21

The Azeel brought the Harrowers down from the top of the beach toward the boats. Each boat, Harry saw, was big enough to carry at least ten people. Harry and his friends huddled close and, as the old demon woman spoke, Harry found himself increasingly perturbed by Earth's idioms concerning the nether realm.
Why would anyone ever want ice water in Hell?
he wondered to himself. The place was fucking freezing.

“One boat is being for Rescuers,” the demon woman said, “in case boat does overturning in the lake's fury, yes?”

“It doesn't look very furious,” Lana said.

“Quo'oto,” was the Demon Woman's one-word response.

“Geseundheit,” said Dale.

“Fine. Then what are the other boats for?” Harry asked, nodding toward the second boat, which was being loaded up with no fewer than nine passengers. All demons. Four of them were young, barely adolescents. They knelt in two rows of two at the front of the boat, their heads down. Behind them was a much older Azeel, a male who looked to be older than the demon woman. He too knelt, his head inclined. Four strong young demons took up the oars.

“Ah,” said the demon woman, the end of her tail flicking back and forth like a cat's. “We are having not hopeless. But if bleeding is to be, then they will do bleeding.”

“Is she talking about sacrifice?” Lana said. “Because I am not okay with that.”

“Harry D'Amour. Witness. Azeel help. Please. If Harry D'Amour is to coming back alive, Azeel will leading to holes of wyrms.”

“Not hopeless?” Harry said. “Holes of wyrms? Bleeding? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Black Inside waits.”

Murmurs of reverence spread through the demon gathering.

“Yes, yes, the Black Inside. That's the only thing you keep saying that makes any goddamn sense. Did he have Norma with him?”

The Azeel fell silent. Harry looked at his friends, then back to the demons, and asked again.

“Norma? Human? Blind? Woman? Old?”

Again, his queries were met with confused silence.

“Harry,” Lana said, touching his arm. “Let's keep going. They don't know anything.”

Harry pressed them one last time.

“The Black Inside. Did he say anything else about me, other than the fact that I'm his witness? Was there a message?”

“Ah,” the old demon woman said, excitement in her voice. “Message. Yes! Yes! Black Inside says message. Black Inside says. ‘Harry D'Amour to boating'”—as she spoke, the woman pointed to the boats with one gnarled finger—“‘or else No Eyes goes to forever sleep.'”

That was all Harry needed to hear.

“Well then,” Harry said, heading to the boat, “let's not keep him waiting.”

“Are you sure about this, Harold?” Caz asked.

“You heard the crone. No Eyes. That's Norma. And forever sleep?” Harry said as he climbed aboard the boat. “I don't think I need to explain that to you.”

At that, the remaining Harrowers climbed aboard the middle vessel with Harry, and in a matter of just a few rhythmical strokes of the oars the three boats were out in the vast darkness of the lake. When Harry glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that the beach was already little more than a sliver of flickering light, diminishing further with every stroke. Harry watched as the old demon woman, who had stayed onshore, was swallowed up by the horizon, leaving him and his friends in the middle of the vast, preternaturally still waters of Lake Hell.

There followed a period of curious peacefulness; the only sound that could be heard came from the oars dipping into the water and lifting again—dipping, lifting, dipping, lifting—and the soft hiss of boats cutting through the crystal waters. Harry studied intently the darkness into which they were heading, looking for their place of destination. There were immense thunderheads over the lake, or so his eyes seemed to tell him one moment, and the next they didn't seem to be clouds at all, but rather a structure that rose up with such ambition that its topmost spires could only be inches from the stony sky. But no sooner had his eyes grasped the solid structure than that too melted away into nothing. Finally he turned to his friends and spoke.

“So what's at the end of the rainbow? Any guesses?”

“Sanctuary,” replied one of the oarsmen.

“For who?”

A second oarsman, urgency in his movements, suddenly raised a finger to his lips and said, “Shhh.”

The four oarsmen immediately plucked their oars from the water. The boat glided across the placid body soundlessly, and in the hush Harry understood the demon's warning: he heard a slow, aching grind of vast wheels, as though some mechanism, not used in many hundreds of years, was lifting its gears from some great sleep and proceeding to move an ancient body. The source of the din was impossible to locate; it seemed to be coming from everywhere.