Not being a jealous little shit was a difficult task, but Tilla knew that the price had to be paid for the sake of her children.
She knew, in her mind, that the rechristened 'Desdemona' Mitvic was every bit as much of a victim of the circumstances that brought her to this point that Tilla had been, and that Bart was. But still, the critical ember that lodged in her throat was down to the fact that she had won Bart, and Tilla had won nothing.
But not for lack of trying.
Bart, as it turned out, was a middling Thaumaturge at best, someone who's potential plateaued at the level of the boy Uller, whereas Uller was clearly still on his upswing, just as Krieg was. That was another source of sour influence in the room. Krieg had been less than happy to talk to the surviving Crones of Cruac as to being recognized as Ur-Crone. It turned out that there was a critical snag that prevented any such accolades from being handed to her.
By definition, an Ur-Crone had to prove that they could pass bright blood onto a new generation.
By definition, an Ur-crone had to have had a kid, who were themselves a thaumaturge.
And that instantly twigged Krieg, who had absolutely no desire whatsoever to be a teenaged mother as her own mother had been. And while Tilla could understand her frustration at having something that she dearly wanted kept out of her hands, at least she was denied it for reasons that Tilla found utterly sensible. Krieg was unwilling to 'squirt out a spawn' for the recognition she wanted. Which meant that she was already a smarter and more prudent mother than Tilla had had a chance to be.
And as proud as Tilla was at Krieg's prudence, she still found herself occasionally scowling through the wall at where the other teenaged she-imp was now working.
It was a shock that this building had a daycare in the basement. And more a shock that her son had hired that woman to man the reception desk now that Loona only showed up for weekly meetings and when he specifically asked for it. IMP needed a customer-facing service-provider. And Des filled that gap seamlessly. That woman was essentially a beam of sunshine in impish form, endlessly patient and pleasant, and perfect for getting people who otherwise would have stormed out in frustration to actually hand over money in exchange for her Blitz to kill people.
"Then I'll see you again in several months," Krieg's voice began abruptly as the door to her office opened, and the Sinner came back out. Krieg promptly ignored the Sinner woman and turned to Tilla. "Have we any others due?"
"Barring walk-ins, no, that was the last appointment," Tilla said.
"Walk-ins. Bah! Bane of my leisure!" Krieg said. Uller emerged from the 'workshop' which had essentially installed itself when nobody was looking into what had once been IMP's armory, before that company moved to a bigger and more lavish office across the hall. "And what of you? Have you run out of tasks as well?"
"Unless you want to make-work and have me craft reagents that'll go bad before we get a chance to use them, I'd say so, yeah," Uller said.
"Well shit," Krieg said, suddenly looking a bit untethered. She turned a concerned look to her mother. "Should I be worried that I'm disappointed there's not more to do?"
"Not really. You were always driven, twee-cherry," Tilla said evenly.
"It's the heat, I think," Uller said. Her daughter turned a flat look at him. "What? When it's muggy and miserable people lounge instead of ticking things off their to-do lists. Less people doing anything means less people looking for magic."
"A worthwhile theory," Krieg said. She hopped up and sat on the edge of Uller's desk, a piece of furniture he seldom actually used. Tilla, though, rose and moved to her daughter's side. "Yes?"
"You're still disappointed you weren't Recognized, aren't you?" Tilla hazarded.
"It's endlessly frustrating! Why are the criterion so needlessly narrow and focused on pointless miscellany! Who cares if I have children! My knowledge and power should speak for themselves!" Krieg snapped.
"You're arguing against traditions that are a thousand times older than you are," Tilla pointed out.
"Fie on 'tradition'! It's just peer pressure from dead stupid-people," Krieg swing her arm as though wishing she could swat the notion with the back of her hand.
"Eh, they'll be forced to Recognize you eventually," Uller said. "Just on your schedule instead of on theirs."
"Based on what?" Krieg asked of him.
"Well, you're not actually dedicated to celibacy, are you?" Uller asked.
"Of course not. I will have children when I desire them, not when others desire them of me," Krieg said.
"And whenever you make that decision, you'll force them to Recognize you whether they want to or not," Uller said with a nod. Uller certainly had come quite a way from when he first intruded into their lives. No longer a half-literate, half-starved skulking scum, now he was becoming a useful Thaumaturge of his own right, and had the spine and audacity that such a thing demanded of him. He still had his moments of obvious personal doubt, but he was still a boy, no older than Krieg herself. "I heard something interesting through the vine, by the way."
"What would that be?" Krieg asked.
"The new governor of Fort Abandon is looking for mages to perform tests up in Heaven. Decent pay for low-risk work, inside the fort itself."
"Are you asking to practice your thaumaturgies in Heaven to see what becomes of them?" Krieg asked.
"I know your stance on doing imp-magic in Heaven, but considering they're not even asking us to leave the fort…"
Krieg gave it a bit of thought, then shrugged. "Very well. If you wish to take your life in your hands, then go. One of us at least should be earning money today."
"Are the appointments already done?" Uller asked.
"Indeed," Krieg said, then pointed sternly at Uller. "But know this; if there is the slightest hazard to your wellbeing, as your employer I demand that you abandon this folly and survive. I've put far too much work into your education to have you squandered for some Aristocrat's passion-project."
"So touching that you care," Uller said. Krieg gave a chuckle and an eye-roll.
"There are days I wish to strangle you, Uller. Don't make this one of those days," Krieg demanded.
Chapter 34
It's Honest Work
Heaven had been a bit disappointing, frankly.
John Linkletter had always had a fairly simple life. Put the crop in, keep the equipment maintained, pull the crop out, and sell it before it goes bad. It was a cycle which had repeated his entire life, from the age that he'd been old enough to sit in his father's lap in that old, open-top tractor, until he was doing the same with his grandchildren decades and decades later in the latest GPS-connected technological wizardry that honestly he could have done without. And it might have been stressful work, hard on the heart and worrying on the soul during the bad years, but it was hard to be unsatisfied when you were literally feeding the nation.
Then, after a lifetime of running the farm, he dies. And when he comes up here, there's an old guy who looks like his uncle reading off of a stone tablet, and a goddamned Angel waiting for him. That he'd done enough good, and prevented and abstained from enough bad that he got let in. He didn't even know what bad they were talking about. John knew he wasn't a saint by any means, but beyond some youthful recklessness a long, long time ago, he'd never done anything even approaching 'sinful'. Still, they gave him the nod. And then he discovered how much money Heaven put into marketing, versus how much they put into infrastructure.
It was a shithole, to be blunt.
And it was a shithole where everybody was starving and unable to die. And to a farmer, that was utterly fucking unacceptable.
He'd worked with Norman Borlaug, whom had gotten here before him and somehow became an angel (the fuck even was a 'Thirdborn'?) and later the even stranger Gloria Mundi, trying to coax a little bit more nutrition out of the scant farmlands that Heaven had to offer. And it was a failing proposition. There wasn't enough land. There were too many mouths to feed. And there was no way to square the circle.
But now? Now John was getting hauled into that big goddamned fortress that had popped up on the edge of Heaven. A lot of people whispered in fear about it, about Hell's fingernails dug into the skin of Heaven. A lot of people lived in dread of it. That they would be taken in, and never seen again, which was foolishness, Innocent being as they were. People had vanished into Fort Abandon before, only to Respawn (which was a thing that the Good could do, apparently) days later with a shitload more mental trauma then they already had.
There'd been riots.
John stayed out of them, then. So this couldn't be about him slinging bricks at hellspawn. And for all he was now living in a much less ancient body than the one he died in, he knew that he was a fairly average man. Not the kind of person that would have drawn attention for his attributes, either good or bad. So this all confused the hell out of him.
Doubly so, when they 'asked for his presence', they didn't just drag him out of his shoebox of a dwelling and haul him there. Something fishy was going on.
The gates of Fort Abandon were new, still being built up to be secure, but more than that, they were built sized such that a pair of trucks could sit in it, abreast. A ridiculous notion, considering there was essentially nowhere in Heaven that a single truck could reach, but the new gates were telling a story. Just one that John didn't know the meaning of. Further ahead, John could see an older, more inward gate that this one had leapfrogged being torn down; that one was sized so that only a pair of large men could have exited it, side by side. And that was the more common scale of things.
And as he walked, he noted that the path he was escorted along had been set with rough cut, but essentially smooth-topped, square flagstones, unlike the rest of the land of Fort Abandon which was naked to the Cloud it sat atop.
Even as John moved inward, there was a whistling sound, and then a strange musical bang, as though somebody smashed a bunch of random piano-keys at the same time. He half flinched, as a magical barrier prevented a stray mortar-shot from coming anywhere close to hitting the Fort, followed seconds later by a bunch of artillery roars from nearby, answering that assault with vengeance. It seemed that Heaven hadn't given up on cutting Fort Abandon loose as yet.
Now, John may have been a farmer all his life, but that didn't make him an ignorant yokel. He wasn't a dirt-scrabbling sustenance farmer. He was a modern, industrial farmer. He read. And the soldiers at the next set of gates could have come straight out of Heinlein or Haldeman, hulking and only vaguely humanoid shapes in metal that moved in shockingly human ways. That was confusion itself to John. Unlike most people up here, John had kept a tally of how long he'd been here. And though he knew his count wasn't perfect, he knew that it couldn't have been more than eighteen hundred sunrises since he'd been deposited here. Five years, from 2018, did not make sense for one side to suddenly have power armor.
And again, he had the feeling that something fishy was going on.
The outer guards roughly shoved John into the care of the power-armored soldiers, who rather than grab and drag him, simply motioned for him to walk ahead of them. And John, unsure of what these things were capable of but having an active imagination, did so. "Are you gonna tell me what all this is about? Those ones didn't say a thing," he finally asked of his captors.
"Just bringing you to the Duchess," one of them said, a woman's voice coming from the armor, but one that was husky and smokey, like she belonged in a Noir novel. "Don't know why she wanted you, so I couldn't tell you."
"Fan-goddamned-tastic," John muttered. The trio of them moved deeper, past where soldiers were being last-minute briefed before heading to either the walls or out the gates, and toward a building which was nearby the squat bunker around which the whole Fort was built. It wasn't tall or glamorous, all built in something that looked like concrete, but he somehow felt wasn't, but looked if nothing else like it could take more than a couple of shells before it started to crumble. There wasn't a lot of call for decoration in a warzone.
One of his newest batch of captors skirted him and led as their path became narrower, passing through checkpoints manned by all manner of strange looking Hellspawn, and a few other power-armored soldiers, until they were at the foot of the squat tower. There, waiting, was a man with the head of an eagle, his armor having a distinctly Roman look to it, a dossier in his hands.
"We got him, boss," the leading escort said. It was male, unlike the one trailing John.
The eagle-man glared at the soldier. "This is Linkletter, the master of the Latifundia?"
"I don't know what that is, but you asked for a farmer? Here he fuckin' is," the leading escort said. The eagle-man snapped the dossier shut and looked like he wanted to shout at the power-armored soldier, if not slap him.
"Report to me at 1800. We must have a word about your appalling lack of professionalism," he said.
"But I didn't…" the soldier said.
"Let it lie Brazzen," the woman behind John cut in, harshly. "You know how he is, it'll just get worse."
"Fuckin… fine," the soldier 'Brazzen' said, before turning and marching away. The eagle-man gave the woman behind him a minute nod, then stood before John. Despite the fact that this 'Sinner' was supposed to be a dangerous and violent monster, according to the common party-line that Heaven repeated, John was tall enough to look him in the eye. And John was not a particularly tall man.
"You have knowledge in modern agricultural practices, involving mechanized harvest and planting, correct?"
"Why do you even care?" he asked.
"Please answer the question, Master Linkletter," he said.
"I ran a farm, yes. What does it matter?"
"How many people did you direct?"
"Depended on the year. Fifteen to twenty five directly. A dozen more indirectly," John said.
"And how many acres of land?"
"Most years were 800. Back in '99 I got ambitious and tried for twelve hundred. Learned not to do that again," John said. Why was this talking about his job when he was alive?
"And tonnage produced?" the eagle man asked.
"About eight thousand tonnes on a real bad year, sixteen thousand on a good one," he said.
The eagle-man stared at him for a moment, then nodded. "Please attend me. You must speak to the Duchess."
"For what?"
"That is between you and she, Master Linkletter," the eagle-man said.
"What is your name, even?" John asked, as he began to follow after the roman eagle (which only at that particular moment did he grasp the appropriateness of).
"I am Agrippa, Dux Bellorim of Hell; if you wish to refer to me, I will allow to be called 'Master Agrippa' as an informality," Agrippa said.
"Do you know what this is about, Agrippa?" he immediately dropped the 'Master', because damn it all, John was a farmer.
"As I said. It is the Duchess's plan, not my own," Agrippa said. He then gave a shrug. "Though I think I can see the shape of it. Perhaps."
The building they were passing through was in the process of being decorated, its internals playing host to portraits of weird demons and vistas of gardens and starfields in an attempt to make the inside of this unassuming bunker more glamorous than its outside; considering how stark the outside was, not a difficult proposition. There were a bunch of small, red demons doing most of the work, wearing dresses or tunics marked with shooting stars over a cog-wheel. He could sense that any attempt at small-talk with Agrippa would be rebuffed, so he kept his fool mouth shut. No reason to dig himself a grave before even meeting this 'Duchess' that he was being hauled toward.
The path to the Duchess didn't head up the tower, as he might have expected, but into its centermost core, to a room which was being made lavish just like the halls leading up to it. The room still had most of its wall and floor space stark and unadorned, but there were people setting up a portrait on a wall nearby. John blinked at it for a moment that he could see it though the doorway at the angle of the room. It showed a pleased, owl-demon thing with a top-hat, and a gleeful child-demon likewise grinning as much as an owl could.
"My Domina? The master of the Latifundia has come," Agrippa said, pausing in the doorway.
John looked past Agrippa, and saw the one he was referring to.
It was an owl-demon, like in the portrait. But this one wasn't a stately and well-heeled demon. This one seemed frazzled and run-roughshod, wearing dark colors and the down she had for hair stuck out as though she'd slept face-upon-desk, and when awoken didn't bother trying to comb down her bed-head. Her eyes were red, but had a glow in them, one that waxed and waned like stars twinkling after a dusty day.
"The what?" the Duchess asked. Her voice sounded… young. Refined, but inexperienced. And the look on her face was the look of a wild-woman, someone operating off of two hours of sleep and a gallon of coffee and raw, naked spite. She gave her head a shake, either dismissing her own question or trying to wake up a bit. John wasn't sure which. "Is he or is he not a farmer?"
"The overwhelming majority of all souls in Heaven are farmers, my Domina," Agrippa said.
"Right. Demographics," the owl-demon said with a lace of bile to her. She snapped those glowing eyes at John. "You know how to run a modern farm, don't you?"
"How modern are we talking about? I retired in '08," John admitted. There was probably no point in lying to these demons. They probably had ways of finding out if he was spewing bullshit.
"Ambrosius, please tell me that was 2008, and not 1908…" the owl-demon tweezed her eyes with a frustrated tone in her voice.
"Master Linkletter ran a farm of some near-thousand acres with a scant few dozen. He is a modern farmer, as you requested," Agrippa said.
"I thought you meant modern as in the last decade," John said.
"You were dead most of the last decade," the owl-demon said. She sighed, then sat up straight. "What produce crops do you have experience with the planting and harvesting of?"
"Potatoes, corn, barley and I even have a bit of know-how about canola," John said.
"Rapeseed, he means," Agrippa said.
"I think 'canola's a better name for it," the owl-demon said idly. She stared at something on her desk for a moment, scanning a page, then looked back at him. "Do you know how to organize tractor-labor?"
"That was most of my job," he said. "Um… Miss, why am I here?"
"The correct form of address is Duchess Octavia, Master Linkletter," Agrippa said sternly, but not harshly.
"We don't do 'duchesses' where I'm from," John said. That was the kind of thing his nation left behind two centuries ago.
"Then perhaps 'Governor Octavia' would be more suitable to your liking," Agrippa now sounded like his patience was being strained. John decided not to push that.
"Right. Governor, I have no idea why I'm standing here, or what you people want from me. I've got a tiny patch of undernourished potatoes growing in a sun-gully seven buildings that way," he pointed vaguely toward the northeast, "that people are going to need so that they aren't quite as starving as they could be."
"The fact that you can grow crops at all up here is why you're standing there," the Governor said. "I'm starting a pilot program here in Heaven. To employ the manpower of Heaven for the good of Hell and the Occupied Zone, both."
"Well, that'd require about nine thousand tonnes of food per day, Ma'am," John said.
"That's the point of all this," the Governor said, rising to her feet and towering over both John and Agrippa. She snapped her fingers and a projection rose into the air, something obviously magical because John couldn't see the tech that would do it (yeah, magic was apparently a thing up here). It showed a pair of graphs, labeled 'manpower estimates, Wrath Ring', and 'Expected Wrath Yield Q2 2023'. "Wrath, the breadbasket of Hell, is currently down a million sets of hands. Hands that should be harvesting the Early Crop of Wrath right goddamned now," she said, pointing harshly at the floor to mark her point.
"I don't see how that involves me," John said cautiously.
"There are millions of people in the Occupied Zone. If a fraction of them, even a hundred thousand, can be mobilized, we can get that crop out of the ground before it rots, at the very least," the Governor said.
"You're gonna have a hard time getting that many people working for nothing," John pointed out. He knew that death was temporary up here. There was nothing they could to to really terrify him.
"You won't be doing it for nothing. You'll be doing it for a portion of the harvest you pull up," she said.
John stared at her. "Are you asking us to share-crop for you?"
The Governor turned to Agrippa. "An arrangement by which land-owners extract a set amount of the land's value each year from the indentured workers who actually perform the labor," Agrippa said.
"That… is roughly what I had in mind," the Governor said, nodding. "If you want your ten-thousand tonnes a day, you're going to have to pull out forty."
"Even the Natives got 50%. They won't take a quarter," John pointed out.
"I wasn't aware that this was a negotiation," Agrippa lofted his brow, a sharp look in his eye.
"No, Agrippa, he raises a good point. Considering that Hell got itself into the position where its fields are in the state they are, his labor has a strong position," the Governor was rubbing at her brow, eyes pressed shut in annoyance. "Alright. Fine. Two to one."
"Three to two," John tried.
"Two to one and be glad you're getting it," Agrippa said, not having it.
John gave a nod. It had been optimistic to hope he could do better than the government did to their own poor, but for that kind of thing, he could get a couple of people to pull some product out of the ground. But he couldn't do it alone. "I'll need some more, though. I can't do… shit are those numbers real?"
"They are based on last year's harvest," the Governor said.
"That's a lot of acreage. A lot," John mused. "How much is spuds and how much is grains?" to answer him, she flicked a finger, and a pie-chart showed the relative amounts of the various crops, along with helpful lines leading to the equipment that harvested them. All of them looked familiar. Familiar, but lacking even the most basic of safety considerations, with naked PTOs and pipes and live wires all over the place.
"I'll need some people," he said. He glanced and spotted a pad on a nearby table. "Could you…?"
Agrippa waited until his mistress' nod to hand the pad and a pen over to John. He started to write down names. "Are these subordinates of yours you'll require?"
"Other farmers who should be up here," he said, as he continued to scribe down names of past and 'present' fellow workers who had preceded him up here. "Frankly, I'm pretty sure I could get, like, 50% of the work done with just Garth and Syd, and their people, but I can't be choosy. And I don't know how many you'll be able to get."
"You are naming other farmer-logisticians, such as yourself?" Agrippa asked.
"Farm runners, yeah," John answered. "Any idiot can drive a truck or a tractor. It takes somebody with know-how to direct them."
"Agrippa, find however many of them you can in the Occupied Zone," the Governor said with a nod, and Agrippa took the list that John offered. She then tilted her head. "You know what, send out feelers into the neutral zone as well; maybe one or two of them could be there as well."
"I will do so, my Domina," the eagle-man thumped his fist to his heart in salute, but didn't leave the room.
The Governor returned to her desk, dropping into her chair with the fatigue of long restless days, the like of having to pull at midnight because that was when the ground finally firmed after a week of rain. She turned a look to John. "If this works? Maybe there's even other things that can happen."
"I don't quite understand, Ma'am," John said.
"No. And you don't need to. Go on, then. I'll send somebody to escort you as you hire your idiot truck-drivers and tractor pilots," the Governor said.
"We will also need to provide protective escorts to Wrath Ring," Agrippa said. "It would not do to have the pilot project interrupted by outsiders, either out of malice or out of ignorance."
"Fuck, you're right. See to it," the owl demon slumping in the chair as though she'd at least gone somewhat boneless. John was guided rather gently toward the doors he'd come in through. "Do you think this'll work, Ambrosius?"
"It will work, because it must work," Agrippa said. And then he followed John out of the meeting room.
Well, today certainly took an odd turn.
"Is it just me, or does the Human World seem shittier than usual?" Blitz asked, as a building a few doors down from them was firebombed by humans wearing black bandannas.
"It's the Human World. It does what it wants to," Maelstrom said. He still looked scared shitless most of the time, but kept his nerve well enough to keep up with Blitz. It wasn't quite as good as having Millie on deck, but ever since that scare that M&M had, one or the other of them were always within arm's reach of the kid. Moxxie was here, which meant Millie wasn't. And given the particulars of the job, maybe not ideal. But since when does Hell care about ideal when imps were involved?
"We should stay out of their way, if nothing else," Moxx cautioned. The mob, who were now cheering as a building that had something do with parents now blazed in the afternoon, had a surly look about them. One that Blitz knew better than to cross. Well, leave them to be assholes. It'd just lead to more vendettas, and more targets for him to come back and kill later.
The job today was poised to be a messy one. The client wanted an entire bloodline wiped out, from rocking chair to cradle. Moxx had bitched about that one, not liking the indiscriminate nature of it. Blitz tried shutting him up with money, which failed. The client managed to turn Moxxie around by mentioning that the family were cultists to some weirdo Outsider thing. As soon as Moxxie heard those words, he was practically first one through the portal.
Blitz was on edge.
Not because of the circumstances of the Human-World town which was merrily burning down a portion of itself, and the scattered crowds of gun-toting humans. No, he navigated through the swarm of angry schmucks with only half a mind. Well, a quarter of a mind at best; all the rest of his attention was on the fact that things were going too good for him.
He'd been staying over at Stolas' palace, as a 'guest of honor' (which was a fancy way of telling his servants to not interrupt when either of the two of them got randy at random hours), with a demon prince who claimed, with some intensity and enthusiasm, to love him. And that just didn't fit neatly into Blitz's worldview. Sure, he knew his Mamma loved him, but that's what Mammas did. They loved their kids. She didn't have much of a choice in that matter.
Stolas had chosen to love him.
And that just felt like somebody was playing a very slow, very long, very cruel prank on Blitz.
"Sir," Moxxie chirped, and the three of them went still. The town was a weird little sad-sack, a shitty Pride Wall town somehow rendered on the human world, where poverty was less of a threat and more of a constant. The whole place was in rough shape, as it was clear that a lot of nasty shit had happened to it. That nastiness was currently taking the form of roving bands of shouting humans. It seemed like a very lazy riot that passed in front of the three, disguised Hellspawn, filled with people shouting how they were going to do nasty things to what Blitz believed were slurs referring to people they didn't like. It didn't bother that they were chanting 'death to fags'. If they fucked around with Blitz, they would most certainly find out.
"There's more that happened here. I can smell it," Maelstrom said, glancing to the disused and ill-maintained buildings that made up this town called 'Evergreen' in the middle of fucking nowhere.
"Ain't our problem," Blitz said. "Moxx?"
"They are… that way," Moxxie said. It was a pity that Millie didn't trust a sitter, but this job actually required Moxxie to even find the fuckers. And while Maelstrom was a decent stand in, Blitz still would have preferred to have the OG3 on the case. Moxxie was needed because of magical shit. Blitz was in the position he was specifically because he wasn't great at magical shit.
Maelstrom was the first to move, as he had the most to lose if he were spotted. They'd already gotten noticed once by the bands of raging, idiot humans before; Maelstrom was called a slur that Blitz didn't recognize, and they tried to grab him to do some nasty shit to him. Maelstrom made it it clear he wasn't coming along by folding all the attackers' clothing while they were still wearing it.
How was this going to go bad, Blitz found himself thinking? Not the job, he had utter faith that he could pull this off without a drop of meaningful blood lost. He was thinking about the sitch with Stolas. Hell didn't like when imps were happy, and it certainly fucking didn't like when Blitz was happy. He could feel some sort of calamity getting closer with every passing hour, but he didn't know what it was. Only that it'd be bad when it arrived.
And given his recent shining moment of self-awareness (a rare thing for Blitz Miller), he was fucking terrified that whatever calamity was coming was going to be his own fucking fault.
It wasn't fair, he thought, as they slipped along the cracked and crumbling sidewalks and then ducked into a pharmacy on Maelstrom's metaphorical tail as another mob appeared an intersection ahead. The shelves were mostly empty of medicine, but there were still racks along one wall selling some varmint rifles; the meatier rifles and shotguns looked like they'd been snapped up by bands of inbred hillbillies.
"This is interminable," Moxxie muttered. "There's magic poisoning the air here. Something really, really bad happened in this town not too long ago."
"Does that matter for the job?" Blitz asked, his tone sharper than he'd like, but the shit with Stolas was still clouding around him like a rancid fart on a windless day.
"It might. There's so much… I don't know. Chaos, maybe," Moxxie said, rubbing at his brow as though the mere action of keeping his eyes open was doing him pain. "The sooner we get out of this town, the better."
"What about you, bucko?" Blitz asked of the Hellhound, who was looking up at the taxidermy birds hanging from the ceiling. Maelstrom puffed out a breath.
"Get the job done, get away from the humans. It sounds great to me," he said.
"Good. Y'all still got your heads in the game. Which way, Moxx?" Blitz said. Moxxie turned on the spot, his human-looking Disguise being a lanky and short human with freckles and pale hair. He paused, looking toward the back of the store they were in.
"I think that's the fastest way."
"Then let's get moving," Blitz said.
"What about the workers?" Maelstrom asked, holding an arm ahead of him but not trying to block him.
"Well they'd better get the fuck out'the way, now shouldn't they?" Blitz asked, finally pulling his Convertible Rifle out of his jacket and letting it ride a strap across his chest. Moxxie sighed, and did likewise with his Blessing Tip. Maelstrom, though, looked unconvinced. "I ain't wasting time on these jack-offs getting between us and the target."
"Just… give me a minute, first," Maelstrom asked.
And he had the puppy-eyes going.
Fuck.
"You've got a minute, then we start shooting," Blitz agreed. One of the other patrons, who was looking for hemorrhoid cream next to them all, promptly stood up, rounded the corner of the aisle, and got out of sight. Smart human.
Was it going to be Blitz fucking some rando and breaking Stolas' heart? Because Blitz knew that he had a hypnotizing dick and he couldn't be held accountable for the holes that it got into. Or would he say something really fucking mean-spirited as well as stupid to Stolas when the Prince needed him to be… well, not that? The choices bombarded Blitz, a constant cavalcade of shitty decisions that he could see himself doing which would scupper one of the best things he'd ever had out of stupidity, selfishness, inattention, or stupidity.
Yeah, he was distracted.
It was gonna happen. He didn't know how or why or when. But he'd open his mouth or unzip his fly and he'd shit all over what some unexpected miracle had dumped into his lap. That was how Hell played with the imp. That was how Hell played with Blitz Miller.
"Sir? The door," Moxxie broke into Blitz's distraction, pulling him toward the fact that Maelstrom was currently giving the only pharmacist on duty a blood-choke and opening the path through the back of the building in such a way as it wouldn't leave a mangled corpse. Moxx and Maelstrom were a lot alike. They both had soft hearts, and didn't like dropping needless bodies, which Millie and Blitz did with delight. Still, the path forward was open. He'd have to be a real dumb bitch not to take it.
Apparently, the same shit that was happening to Evergreen was happening all over this shit-hole nation in the Human World. Everybody got a hair up their ass and decided to get violent and stupid, all in little pockets all over the place, causing pain and misery for everybody, including themselves. And while Blitz could understand the draw of vindictiveness, it didn't make a lick of sense that there'd be this many people willing to shoot off their own legs just so people they don't like get spattered by the blood.
Humans. What a weird fucking breed.
The alley wasn't much of one, compared to the more populated places the humans made, bright in the sunshine and not very encroached upon at all. It was practically a rear-parking lot. Actually strike that, it was a loading area. There was a mustachioed older human who was sitting on the side of his truck-seat with the driver's door open, with a pump-action shotgun resting across his knees. He watched as they moved away from the pharmacy, not even bothering to threaten them. Maybe he knew that they weren't here for him. Smarter human than most, that one.
Maybe Blitz would be lucky. Maybe the shit that was inevitably flying in his direction wasn't going to absolutely clobber Loona or M&M, or Mom, or Stolas, but instead land directly on him. That, he figured, wouldn't hurt nearly as much. Not because he believed he innately deserved punishment – Blitz Miller was many types of idiot, but he wasn't that type – but because he trusted that even Hell and the Universe being its most petty and bitchy was a thing that he could survive. It'd suck, make no mistake, but healing up after killing Birch sucked, too. And if it hit him, and he didn't survive it? Well, then it wouldn't be his problem anymore, now would it?
A gunshot burst a brick near Blitz's head, which dragged his attention out of his own stupid bullshit and back to the fact that they sneaking around in the middle of a violent, lunatic insurgency where it seemed everybody was using the madness of the moment to call in all of their grudges on each other. Blitz looked to the source of the bullet that almost offed him in his distraction.
"Try again! I wanna see you smear some queers!" a lankey, meth-head looking motherfucker said to his fat, squat counterpart who was, according to the rumors of this place, likely his cousin, his brother, and his step-father all at the same time. The fat one worked the bolt of his rifle, and Moxxie sighed deeply, not even looking in the human's direction before drawing his pistol and firing in a single motion. A hole appeared in the narrow gap between the fatass's eyes, and he crumpled to the ground like a sack of shit. Before the skinny meth-head could even react, Moxxie flicked his gun, again unseen and unglanced, to punch another hole in another head. The meth-head collapsed into a pile atop the fatass.
"Sir, we're wasting time," Moxxie sounded incredibly annoyed by all of this. Well, considering he spent time actually learning about the 'location' and 'whereabouts' of his target, he probably knew a lot of annoying shit, which was all stacking up to annoy him further. That was why Blitz loved the purity of this job when the jobs were simple. You know the guy. Go to the guy. Kill the guy. Fuck off back to Hell and get paid. Maelstrom rubbed at his ear, then pointed down a side-street that didn't seem to be host to any mobs of murderous humans at the moment.
"That way," Maelstrom said. Then he turned back to the imps. "What was that about smearing?"
"Humans in this part of the world are violently opposed to the existence of sexualities beyond the most basic-bitch of them," Moxxie said, cribbing from Blitz's code book, so that probably told just how done with all of this that he was. "He probably saw the fact that you weren't dressed in coveralls and that weird red hat they like and decided you were homosexual."
"...I'm not," Maelstrom said.
"Do you think those dumb fucks care?" Blitz asked, as Maelstrom gave a shrug, then continued guiding them through the town which was in the process of tearing itself apart. There was a duplex not too distant from the stroad that the pharmacy was facing. Considering that they'd already checked the house out on the outskirts of buttfuck-nowhere that the target was supposed to be living at, that left this shithole. The duplex wasn't on fire, like quite a few of the buildings in Evergreen, but the number of blown-out and boarded-up windows told that this house hadn't escaped scot-free.
He would have preferred if it was Loonie here, running point. But she had her own shit to do. He wanted badly not to be bitter that she was spending so little time with him. To be proud that she had her own business that was making money. But sadly Blitz's heart might have been a hard, hard thing, but there were many little cracks for bitterness and bitchiness to sneak in. And yeah, he was bitter that she was out there being special. And yeah, he did feel like an absolute shitheel for being bitter about that.
Still, things were… he didn't even want to think that. That things were good. As though that would be the trigger that released the hammer and sent the bullet of the Universe's contrarian bullshit flying. So instead he focused on the fact that Momma was alright, that his nibblings/half-siblings were growing up strong and smart, and that the people in his life actually wanted him to be in theirs. It was such a weird thought, that the so-often-excluded, so-often-reviled Blitzø would now be Blitz Miller, Proxy of Lucifer, multimillionaire with a demon-prince fuck-buddy.
Yup. Still couldn't call Stolas a lover. Not even in his own head.
The procession of mobs continued down the stroad, but didn't trouble them anymore as the three of them approached the building itself. Instantly, Maelstrom's brow drew down and the nose of his disguise crinkled. It took another few steps and a shifting of the breeze for Blitz to smell it himself. It was the smell of putrid rot.
"Sir…" Moxxie said.
"Hush, something's fucky," Blitz said, shifting his Convertible Rifle into his hands. The front doors were boarded up solid, and all the windows on the front of the building likewise. And while an imp like Moxxie could easily scale the wall and go in through the shot-out second storey, he had his instincts tell him that was a losing move. So instead he followed the fence-line that separated one property from another. As he went into the back-yard, the stink of meat gone rancid grew stronger. And then when they rounded the building itself, they saw its source.
There were rotting humans nailed to wooden posts.
Considering the most decrepit and decayed one looked vaguely like the client that demanded this job, that certainly answered one question.
"Sir… why were these left up here?" Moxxie asked.
"He's a psycho, that's why," Blitz said. Aha! The back-door hadn't gotten boarded up.
"No, that's not what I mean," Moxxie said, pulling Blitz to a halt before he could stride toward the back door. "Humans don't react well to people nailing their neighbors to crosses and leaving them propped up in the back yard. The Earthly Authorities should have responded to this weeks ago!"
"Maybe that's them up on the posts," Blitz offered.
"And that's not even talking about the magic I feel everywhere," Moxxie said.
"Then maybe there's some wizard bullshit going on. I don't fuckin' know I'm just here to kill a guy and his family!" Blitz snapped.
"Um, Blitz?" Maelstrom cut in.
"What'd'you want now?" Blitz turned to him, not even trying to control his tone.
"There's a landmine hooked to the door," Maelstrom pointed out the moderately well-hidden booby-trap that Blitz would have likely stumbled into if he hadn't been informed. Which would have sucked (though not as much as he was thinking, as his particular Remit would have protected him entirely from the effects of the blast).
"See? At least one of you is giving me useful, usable information!" Blitz shouted.
"Sir!" Moxxie hissed. Oh, right. Yeah, stealth was probably a useful thing. Moxxie didn't take long disarming the trap – even managing to disable the mine and shove it into his magical pouch, now up one additional landmine to their armory. Hey, score! The door wasn't even locked, which given the landmine made sense, and opening it had all three of them recoil from the particular stench.
It wasn't just rot.
It was as if wrongness was condensed into a perfume, and then painted onto the walls.
The kitchen which they were entering into was covered in blood, great smears of it along the walls, spatter on the ceiling and a wash across the floor. The dirty dishes in the sink merely added a different sub-scent to the bouquet of bullshit that they were walking into. The kitchen appliances were all torn apart, with the fridge and the oven both piles of scrap in their places, coated in blood. There was a metal tube extending away from the oven's spot, running along the floor having been spliced first into garden-hose and then into another metal hose.
Following that, ignoring the door which was choked with garbage to their left, they entered the front room which had all of its furniture stacked precariously in a far corner. It was the largest room of this duplex unit, which ordinarily would face the street and had a staircase along one side, with an overlook from the higher floor. All eyes were dragged to the thing in the middle of the room, though.
Blitz wasn't soft-hearted by any stretch of imagination, nor squeamish in the least. But even he felt just a little bit sickened by the horrible miscreation that was mounting up in the middle of the living room. Moxxie turned and began to wretch, whereas Maelstrom was so shocked that his glamour broke, revealing his nature to the Human world until he could get his shit together and reactivate it. It wasn't horror and disgust on the Hellhound's face, though. It was fear. Fear and recognition.
The thing was seven and a half feet tall, about a human body's width and depth, but that last measurement changed by the moment, as the whole thing pulsed and bloated and contracted, filling the air with wet, digestive noises. And it was made out of meat. The meat was red and slick and stank, white sinews straining to hold cords of musculature without any real purpose into places that, if you were somebody less artistically dead, could claim to be there for aesthetic effect.
Then there was a vurp-sound, and flames burned from various points along this meat pillar, causing a stink of burned, rotten meat. But worse than that was the sound. The instant the flames began, the whole pillar began to moan. It moaned with at least four different voices, all of them in perfect anguish, but too exhausted and beaten to be able to turn that moan into a scream. Moxxie continued uneating his breakfast, and Maelstrom fumbled blindly back to Blitz until he found the imp's horn and gently pulled him backward, a step away from this disgusting, horrifying bullshit.
"What the fuck is this?" Blitz asked.
"No...longer...perfect…"
"Who the fuck said that?" Blitz demanded, holding his gun out. Moxxie finally managed to empty his stomach and regain his wits, scooting backward until he was level with the others who'd come here. His eyes were pressed shut as hard as he could make them, but he still held his holy rifle.
"No...longer...perfect…"
Blitz scowled, then twisted the knob on his ears all the way up. Instantly he could hear the hammering of Maelstrom and Moxxie's hearts, the wet sloshing that ran through that whatever the fuck, and a faint hissing of gas bubbling through liquid. And the he heard the words again.
They came from the fucking meat weirdness thing.
"Sir… I think we have a problem," Moxxie said biting off a sleeve and blindfolding himself it.
"Yeah, I can't find the fuckin' target or his family!" Blitz was able to hold the horror at bay, at least that long.
"I think that is the family," Moxxie said.
"An Icon of Denial," Maelstrom said. "That crazy fucker made an Icon of Denial."
John felt like a hundred grand, having stuffed eight hot-dogs and seven burgers down his gullet in the amount of time it took for he and the cluster of other farmers that had been recruited according to his word to be assembled on the entirely massive elevator that apparently plunged through the levels of Hell. The people he'd recruited on the lower end were mostly barely educated, people who knew how to operate a truck but not much else, or else people with a lick of sense who at least might be trusted with a tractor, if under close supervision. He couldn't find his father's old workers who'd died decades ago, who'd be perfect for this. Heaven, as it turned out, was rather big.
The others, the people who'd run farms in their time, joined him at the windows, because they unlike the rest of the thousand people with gapped haloes who were escorted into Hell were more curious than they were desperate. It was good to see Garth again, now returned to his early middle age and his hair back to its brown. Sydney, likewise restored to youth, was even younger, barely out of his teens, his dark eyes not showing even a fraction of torment that a lot of people up in Heaven had been subjected to. Syd, as it turned out, died very recently. He hadn't had enough time to starve. "That's a lot of land out there," Garth said, as they descended through the Rings.
"And we're not even to the right 'Ring' yet," John said.
"They've got to be really hard-up, to be calling in the likes of us," Garth mused.
"They absolutely are. Talked to the Governor and everything. She was pulling her feathers out, it seems like," John said.
"How long do you figure she'll be in that chair?" Syd asked with a chuckle.
"Can't do worse than the guy who came before her," John answered. That guy'd had riots every day since the one after he arrived. The new chick (heh, chick) went silent and hadn't offered a peep in her first week. What was it with the bird puns he was making in his head? Maybe they just came too easy. Well, whatever the case, Cloud One, or the portion of it under Hell's control, held its breath for some sort of bullshit to start, like a lottery to see who'd be sold into Hellish slavery instead of just being scooped up as convenient. Instead, she mobilized a thousand tonnes of rice, a thousand tonnes of flour, two thousand tonnes of beans, and almost as much in yams, rutabagas, a parsnips (or what Hell had of those things), and just started a dole. That quieted the Innocent up real fast. And it made John's recruitment a fucking breeze.
"I'm serious," Syd said, his dark, incisive eyes drilled into John's. "We've worked together in the past, back when we were alive. I've got more trust for you and Garth than most. You've looked this woman in the eye. What does she want out of us?"
"You want my opinion, Syd? I think she's completely out of her depth and she's flailing for any solution that might work," John said. Syd's mouth pursed, and he began to chew on his thumbnail, facing out the window, which went black as they descended through the plate of the Ring, descending into another realm. "I figure, and hear me out on this… she might have a head on her shoulders. Seems young to me, but that just means she can be moulded."
"Are you seriously thinking about trying to take the reins on a demon?" Garth asked, his brow loft behind his spectacles.
"I'm saying that those of us that did the right thing have to try something, otherwise we'll just get pinballed between worse and worse options," John muttered.
"Still. A demon, though," Garth muttered.
"Demons aren't as dangerous as people think," Syd said. Both turned to him. He flashed a bit of almost mischief bordering on cruelty. "I'm just saying, if they get stabbed in the right spot, they don't get back up. That makes them a lot more vulnerable than us."
"Did you stab a demon, Syd?"
"Noooo. I would never," Syd said.
The two other farmers stared at him.
"Fine, I tripped him so the bunch of guys chasing him could stab him," Syd said.
"Why'd you do that, now, Syd?" Garth asked. John, though gave his head a shake, and the blackness parted showing the rosy-golden skies of Wrath Ring, dominated by the Wrath Suns that leaked magma onto the ground. And despite the sudden warmth spreading along his skin from the glare of the suns, it was clear that this ground was good. The soil was dark. Up on the mesas, where it was at its worst, it was still a particular red that Syd, upon seeing, nodded as though recognizing a diamond in the rough. There were few clouds in the sky, but the whole scene nevertheless didn't seem 'arid', per se.
"And here it is. Wrath Ring. Our big damned commission," John said.
"I'd have to check the drainage, but that looks like good spud-land," Syd gave a nod. Garth pointed out a spot in particular, and Syd cracked a smirk. Of the three of them, Garth knew by far the most about spuds, but Syd came a near enough second. John himself was looking at the other land, particularly the strips of green that ran along the river that wound its way through the canyons and mesas of this new, alien-yet-familiar land. They had irrigation equipment. And there were enough bogs that if you held a gun to John's head, he could grow some swamp-rice in there. Sweet hell, this place was promising.
"You've got that look in your eye," Garth said quietly, having broken of from the other farmer and gravitated to John.
"I was just thinking about contracts," John said. There'd been a pretty involved one that he'd had to sign to take on this 'pilot project'.
"Figure they've put something in there to fuck us over, do you?" Garth asked. He scowled, rubbing his glasses on the corner of his sleeve. "If she did, I can't for the life of me see where. If McLain offered me half as good a contract I'd probably have half the heart trouble, a quarter the stress, and might still be alive right now."
"It's not just the contract," John said. "There's something else going on. We're not just a pilot project. We're a Hail-Mary."
"And you figure that if we don't measure up, they're going to cut us and let us bleed?" Garth asked.
"It's what McLain would do," John said.
"Bunch of assholes," Garth muttered, putting his specs back on with a discomfited expression. "So how do we hedge this?"
"Same thing we do every year; underpromise and overdeliver," John said.
"You underpromised. I just overdelivered," Garth said with a chuckle.
"Not all of us can be as lucky as you, Garth," John said with a shake of his head. "Keep your ears open for opportunities. Watch for windows opening."
"While pulling 20 hour days harvesting food already too long in the ground. Easy as pie," Garth said with a humorless laugh.
"If these demons are anything like The Book says, they're probably looking for ways to fuck us over, and thinking we're doing likewise. It's just smart to make sure they're not underestimating us," John said. There was an angle he could use down here. And he had to find it, while also doing an impossible amount of digging and reaping.
As the elevator slowed, then settled into the floor of Wrath, John found himself wishing that he'd retired earlier. That way he could have gotten a few more years of doing nothing before dying and being thrown right back into the churn. But such dreams were idle things, and John Linkletter was not an idle man. He turned to the laborers who'd been picked out to make this lunacy happen.
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen! Pick your truck! We've got rain coming in two days and hundreds of acres of wheat to cut!" John shouted. Back to business.
The sensation was familiar.
Maelstrom had been here before. Not in this town. Not exactly. He'd never been to this muggy, humid armpit of the Human World before, but the sensation of uncomfortable familiarity was running screaming up and down his spine, ringing every alarm bell he had and digging ice-picks of panic into him.
Considering he was just picking up a prescription, the spike of terror that laced into his brain pulled him out of what he was doing. He blinked, and then he thought.
Where have I felt this before?
The pharmacy was a quiet place, music playing so quietly that it was more an impression of music, wafting down from the speakers that were nestled up above a bunch of taxidermied birds. Why did that bother him so much? That sight, of hanging birds, frozen in their flight, above the pharmacy shelves. It bothered him, it vexed him. And with every tilt of his head, the alarm grew stronger.
"Something isn't right," he said, looking down at the basket in one arm and the bottle of anti-nausea pills in the other. His skin was dark, smooth, his nails short as though bitten to the quick. No. No this wasn't right at all. He set the basket down, and ran his fingertips over the forearm he saw. He felt gooseflesh and only fine, almost invisible hairs.
That disturbed him.
And it also angered him.
He wasn't sure why, but the anger was important, so he followed it. He left the basket on the floor and rounded the shelves. Racks of guns on a wall, for sale in the same place people bought medicine. How very hellish. And there, an errant thought. Or perhaps not errant. The sensation was stronger, now, as though responding to his mere thinking, as though reinforcing against his moment of perception.
Why was his name Maelstrom? That wasn't a human name.
And there was a pulse in the world, all of the big guns vanishing from the rack before him. "Because Maelstrom shouldn't have a human name," Maelstrom said. He looked at his arm again, and out of an instinct he didn't even know he had, he willed something end. And there came a crackling, as a field of magical disguise faded from him, revealing black-and-tan fur, a hand with thick, strong fingers, and a forearm like the cords of crane-cables.
He turned. There was another shudder. The street outside wasn't clear and clean in the daylight. There was blood marching down its length to the gentle slope until it vanished into a storm grate, red and thick and sticky. Red footprints moved away from that stain in the world. That sensation was so damned familiar, and caused such panic. He'd felt this before.
He turned again.
He was staring up at a human with a mustache, who was putting his shotgun into his passenger seat and starting to make to leave. The human looked back at him. "Don't look at me like that. I've seen enough to know when to leave," the human said.
"When to leave," Maelstrom said. The panic was strong. He felt something on his feet. He looked down. There were stains of red leading here. The last one was a few paces back from where he stood now.
The truck driver didn't offer any more sage advice, merely driving his decoupled truck away from the trailer, abandoning cargo in favor of his life. A prudent choice. Where was… For just a moment, Maelstrom could have sworn he felt a sword at his hip. But he saw there was nothing there. Just a belt holding his pants up. Think, Maelstrom, think. Where did you feel this before.
He closed his eyes, and focused.
He focused, and he had a memory of feeling fatigued, drained even. And having to do labor despite that fact. Of pushing.
His eyes snapped open.
"The False World," Maelstrom said.
And as he came to that realization, he could only watch as the trucker, cutting like a blade through reality, sheered through all of the lies his eyes were telling him, and showed him the true state of Evergreen Alabama. The streets that he'd walked before were illusions, even the riots and bloodletting were spectres. When he turned slowly, he could see that the entire town was utterly laid to waste. Gutted buildings stood under haze of smoke in all directions, the streets choked with rubble and burned out cars. He then looked to the pharmacy once more. It stood. Not burned out, unlike most of the town. But even from this vantage, he could see that the people who had been 'lazily unloading' the truck were in fact butchered carcasses, savaged as though wild animals were trying to pull them apart.
This was a realer shape of Evergreen. What he'd seen before, from the moment they stepped out of the Portal, that was something like a False World writ large and more permeable. A denial of basic reality in favor of something 'better'. And that bloodshed and lunacy was considered 'better' now made abundant sense. Maelstrom started to jog back toward the house, which was half-collapsed like most of its dead brothers.
He didn't know the names of these horrors, but he knew that they were beguiling things, things that offered you something impossible if you just… picked them up. Carried them. Took them out of the Bleeding Pit. And once somebody took up those offers, suddenly a fellow-combatant in the Pits became in an instant a furious and deadly enemy, empowered by a Creature From Outside, who could only be set free through murder.
It had beguiled a human here in their world. And then everything went to shit around it, as things always do around Things From Outside.
The front door was still boarded up, but the mere fact that Maelstrom couldn't see the imps he'd arrived here with told him that speed was imperative over stealth. He grabbed the board and heaved, ripping them from their bolted moorings, snapping many of them free instead of unseating them so that the bolts still held flinders to their purchase. The door was probably locked, but Maelstrom wasn't even going to bother waiting long enough to see if that was true. He hauled back and kicked right beside the door-knob. The door burst open then fell off its upper hinge, landing in a pile at the foot of the upward stairway.
"Boss? Moxxie?" Maelstrom asked as he moved into the dark.
Then there was a hiss and a flash. And flames sprouted from the meat pillar, the Icon of Denial, that pushed another pulse of ignorant miasma at him. Trying to grab his brain and make him falter. It failed.
Blitz was sitting on the rotten, gory floor with his face in his hands, weeping quietly. It still had him. Moxxie, though, seemed blinded, his eyes black beyond even when he used his magic, as though something had rendered them dead orbs. He was pressed against the wall, fighting to breathe. As though something were holding him by the throat.
The Icon of Denial was still hiding things. While reading through the parts of that book the imps were obsessed with not dedicated to magic (because Loona had a translated copy and Maelstrom needed something tough to continue improving his reading comprehension), he found mentions of some sort of boogeyman to the imps, some Outsider thing which targeted them ruthlessly and specifically, opting to kill swathes of imps over any other goal for reasons that the old women who wrote the book could never discover. And it mentioned a handful of 'Icons', cursed objects with incredible and terrifying power.
The most powerful of them was the Icon of Annihilation. If they'd walked in on that, it would have blasted them to atoms in a heartbeat. But the Icon of Denial was almost as bad, only in more esoteric ways. The fact that it almost caught all three of them exactly as a False World had to Maelstrom was proof to that. So given that the layers of 'false'hood were emanating from this thing, he flexed his hands, causing his nails to mount on their beds into somewhat blunt but still ripping claws, and took a full armed, full powered swipe at the meat of the Icon.
There were four weak, agonized screams that came, and there was a pulse of darkness.
For just a moment, Maelstrom thought he was under the chain again.
Blind, he swung again, ignoring the dread and terror. Again, he felt meat tearing under his hands. Another pulse of darkness. This time, he was lying in bed. And he could smell somebody nearby. Somebody dear.
No, focus.
He could see the Icon again. Though it was bleeding, it still leaked flames and moaned and belched out unreality. What was it that the book said about them? And what about…
"Right; Moxxie's the key to this," Maelstrom said. He turned to Moxxie and grabbed at the air in front of him. His first grasp found nothing, but his second, closer to the imp found something like a belt, tight and rough, that seemed to loop through the wall and hold Moxxie by his neck off of the ground. His eyes told him nothing was there. He didn't trust his eyes. Moxxie was getting black in the face, running out of time to suck in air before he lost consciousness.
Maelstrom planted his foot on the wall, then moved it when it put a hole through the drywall so that it was up against a stud. Then, with a heave that he could swear he felt tearing and painful in his back-muscles, he ripped.
Moxxie fell to the ground, gasping. His eyes were still blind. "Moxxie, can you hear me?"
"I can't see," Moxxie croaked.
"He's somewhere nearby, but the Icon is hiding him," Maelstrom helped the imp to his feet. Blitz was leaning forward on his feet and vomiting hard.
"Where's the Icon?" Moxxie asked. Maelstrom pointed, but then realized his idiocy. Instead, he took Moxxie's arm and pointed that, directly at the groaning, wheezing, occasionally burning totem of flesh and falsehood. Moxxie snarled, and the fur on Maelstrom's body began to stand on end. He let go of Moxxie and stepped about half a step back before there was a ripping in the air, a terrible silence lashing out and darkness cutting the light, a bolt of Darkning, the impish lightning bolt, struck the Icon.
And the Icon screamed.
The building rippled and shifted, showing something that clearly wasn't Evergreen. Moxxie took a deep breath, summoned from the pit of his guts, and then lashed out again. This one almost missed the Icon, as Moxxie was still blind. But the stream of lightning found the icon, and the screaming began again. This time, the building melted away entirely, revealing a sandy dune, upon which the Icon was starting to sag and bend. Blitz finally stopped puking. One of Moxxie's eyes burst, and after a shout of pain, he focused and had it regrow in seconds. When regrown, it was the glowing yellow that Maelstrom was used to.
And there was another person here, on this dune, surrounded by barren wasteland as far as any direction could see.
"It's not perfect anymore," said the target. The human, named Jace Beatty, was knelt in front of the now slumping icon, which no longer emitted bursts of flame. "God's world was perfect. No choice. No freedom. Just the path and the way and perfection. Now it's all gone. The world is poison. I have to make it right. I have to make it perfect again."
"What the fuck happened?" Blitz asked, wiping his face of both vomit and tears.
"Outsider bullshit," Moxxie rasped, his voice ragged. Beatty was ragged, his body stripped to the waist and his flesh covered in raw, new ritual scarification that leaked blood around his knees where he knelt. His eyes were gaping holes into his head, blood and strange ichor leaking down his face in a mockery of weeping.
"Fuck me; was this like that Sloth bullshit you went through?" Blitz asked.
"Remarkably similar," Maelstrom said. Blitz tried to rise, but stumbled, obviously made weak by the presence of even a dying Icon. Maelstrom squatted in front of Beatty.
"Help me. Help us all. Restore God's Path. Restore God's Order. Make us slaves again. Take our choice away and make the world perfect," Beatty begged.
Maelstrom felt a very petty, very hot, and very Hellhound kind of anger blossom in in his heart at hearing that. How dare this deluded fuck demand that everybody be enslaved again?
The hellhound could have demanded answers, as to why this town was in this shape, or why he turned his family members into an Icon of Denial. But in this furious moment, he didn't care. He simply thrust his hands into the mouth of the still rambling Beatty, and then he rent.
He tore the mandible off of the man, but then kept going, tearing skin and ripping off a flag of flesh almost deep as the bone all the way to his sternum. The muttering and madness of Beatty became wet, gagging noises, which Maelstrom silenced by grabbing the now exposed arteries and windpipe of his throat, and tearing them out entirely.
Maelstrom was sprayed with blood that smelled of rot and worse things.
As he turned, Moxxie lashed out with a final bolt of Darkning at the Icon, and then there was a final snap.
Evergreen once more. The duplex was a ruins, its upper story gone and all of the Hellspawn able to see the red-tinted sky. The air was silent, not a whisper of wind. Not a buzz of insects. Just quiet and dread as the grave.
"What the fuck happened?" Blitz asked.
"Target's dead," Maelstrom said.
"Yeah, I get that, and you definitely earned your paycheck today, bucko, but… what the fuck happened?" Blitz asked, holding his head and turning down his ears.
"What did you see?" Maelstrom asked, while Moxxie rubbed at his throat which turned from strangulated black to its more usual red in a matter of some seconds.
"I… Don't wanna talk about it," Blitz said.
"That bad, huh?" Maelstrom said. He felt… good, about this. He felt clean, even though he was covered in gore. He felt righteous. "The job's done. Let's go back."
"Yeah. That sounds like a good fuckin' idea," Blitz muttered. He pulled out his Hellphone and made a call. Moxxie, obviously still trying to pull himself back together, prodded at the remains of the Icon, which now was inanimate loose piles of random man-muscle and sinew. Blitz perked up for a second. "How did you know how to kill that thing?" Blitz asked, while Moxxie called their pleasant new receptionist to bring them back to Hell.
"I read it in a book," Maelstrom said.
He wanted to know more about these things. And he wanted to know how to kill them.
For the first time in Maelstrom's life, he felt like he could choose his path. And killing monsters was as good a path as he could imagine.
It wasn't clean, but it was good work. Honest work. And Maelstrom deeply enjoyed honest work.
The rumor mills in Hell were abuzz with a lot of things; that was what rumor mills did. Come up with spins on reality, or outright fabricating an interesting hypothesis out of nothing and then chasing it like it was valid or true. The mills ground the grist of truth and sprinkled out mentions of the sheer state of Heaven, that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. That it was crueler and hungrier than Hell. Uller knew, now, standing here, that the rumor mills for a change had failed to do the situation of Heaven justice.
Heaven was worse than the rumors said.
"Such a disappointing venue, isn't it?" the aged Presbyter Mage near him said, having seen the look on Uller's face at the towers of garbage that people somehow lived in.
"I'm used to living in shitholes. But this puts those to shame," Uller mentioned. The Presbyter was a Geminon Consumer, but there was a divide down half of his face and body where his pallor faded to grey. His other body had died, and a long time ago from the looks of it. Most Geminons up and died when one of them died before half of remaining one could bleach, so that made this one an unusual specimen. The Mage gave a shrug, then finished swirling a rune into the air, whereupon it sparked into flame which burned briefly white like magnesium fire.
"I don't see many imp mages. I'd thought they had retreated, one and all, into the bogs of Lust. But then you're not a Lustling, are you?" the Mage said.
"The cowards hid," Uller said. He wasn't sure why this old guy was talking to him. And he still had measurements to make. While Thaumaturgy worked up here, it was harder, requiring more effort and more mental clarity. It was easy to imagine that cocksure Wonderworkers would come up here, and in a tizzy of bad circumstances have their wyrds unravel in their hands out of lack of focus at the worst possible moment.
"Sometimes cowardice is the only sane option," the Mage gave a nod. "You work for the Pride Crone, then?"
"What about it?" he asked.
"The one that the Radio Demon allowed to remain," the Mage pressed.
"Yeah, so?" Uller asked.
"Why?" Mage asked.
"Because she taught me," Uller said, as he felt the Darkning fizzle in his hands. He could have completed it, but that would just caused some minor panic, and might have gotten the wards on this part of the fortress to slap back at him. The faded Geminon gave a shake of his head.
"No, that's not what I meant," he said, even as Uller started to write down something onto his clip-board. "I was asking why the Radio Demon allows her in his realm."
"Alastor doesn't own all of Pride Ring," Uller said.
"Yes he does," the old Mage said with a sage expression. "The only person with more authority over it than he, is Lucifer himself, and Lucifer doesn't bother reining in the Radio Demon, so for all intents it is the Radio Demon's ring."
"That sounds a bit like bullshit to me. That's like saying because Beelzebub crashes Hound Parties that she's a Hellhound. It's non-sequitur," Uller said, making notes of his own.
"Less than you think. Why is it, you think, that the Queen of Gluttony always chooses her face to blend with those she cavorts? It is an expression of soft-power. And Alastor, for all his hard power is not completely ignorant to the use of soft. His reputation stretches from the Pride Wall to the Edge. To walk in Pride, particularly as a thaumaturge – a group whom he was famously at war with – is to place your life in his hands, and to avail yourself of his mercies. Mercies which I'm sure you're aware are scant."
"I don't know what to tell you. Maybe he knows she's not the same as the people he massacred," Uller said, then started to work on the wyrd which tore energy out of the universe and caused temperatures to plummet.
"But she is, isn't she?" the Mage pressed. "The same bloodline, asking after the same families. She is a Crone of Cruac, despite her age. So why does he let her live?"
Uller set his jaw and narrowed his eyes. "Maybe that's none of your fucking business," he said to the Mage.
The Mage blinked and recoiled at Uller's sudden heat.
"Maybe you should just keep your eyes on your own fucking spells and let me deal with mine instead of digging into shit that isn't yours to fuck with? Does that sound better?"
"I will have you know I am the Demiarch Magos of…"
"You could be the Grand Poobah of Who Gives A Shit for all I care. Shut the fuck up and let me do my job," Uller snapped. The Mage seethed with outrage at that, at being told to STFU by a teenager. Uller didn't care. He wasn't up here to be friendly, and he certainly wasn't here to talk about the personal life of his teacher.
"Well, I never," the Mage said.
"You shouldn't have," Uller agreed, as the old mage flounced off in a huff. He left behind his acolyte, who was an imp like Uller, down to being an Envyling. The imp, who was likely five years older than Uller, looked between the two of them, and picked at his star-spangled cloak and robe.
"You realize he's gonna cause trouble for you because of this, cousin?" the imp acolyte said.
"Fuck 'im. And why are you even working for the Presbyters in the first place? Most of their magic is shit that imps can't even do."
"Well, there's a minority of it that we can. And I'm not going to go back to the cave I was born and doomed to die in if I have a choice in the matter," the acolyte said. Uller gave a distant nod. He could understand that kind of motivation if nothing else.
"Uller Cruikshank," said the younger wonderworker.
"Wait, no kidding? You're a Cruikshank? Whose kid?" the acolyte asked.
"Dismas, why?" Uller said.
"Dismas, who was son of Degore, who was daughter of Le'garde, who was father of Bedusse, who was mother of my father Kirk. You're an actual cousin!" he said.
"Yeah, a second cousin," Uller said.
"Is it true you're of The Bard's line?" the acolyte asked.
"What?" Uller asked, putting the pen down.
"Everybody says that Dismas was visited by The Lyrebird and that when she moved on she left a child with him. Was that you?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Uller asked. "Who the fuck is 'The Lyrebird'?"
"The Bard's granddaughter," the Acolyte said.
"I don't fucking know, I never met my mother. And who the hell are you?" Uller finally asked.
"Hastur Cruikshank," he said, then waved that away like it wasn't important. "What about your brothers or sisters, then?"
"What about them?"
"Could one of them be the Bard's Issue?" Hastur asked, intruding on Uller's personal space.
Uller remedied that by pulling out his gun. He didn't point it at the Presbyter Acolyte, but just having it in his hand cooled the situation dramatically.
"Go follow your master, acolyte," Uller said. Hastur looked flabbergasted that things would stop now, of all times, but from the look in Uller's eye and the finger tapping against the trigger-guard, the other imp had no choice but to obey. He turned without another word said and followed in the wake of his now well-departed master.
So much for this being a simple job. Still, he had a few more spells to test, and then he could leave. Still, it lingered in Uller's mind, that somebody could give an answer to a question he'd never thought to ask. He'd just presumed that his mother was some careless fool who didn't bother having an abortion and then dropped her kid on the first man stupid enough to care for it. Dismas' other sons were by another imp that he'd met when Uller was growing up. They were still kids.
But the concept of being related to The Bard?
Ludicrous.
Uller was just another Envy Imp, one who had the supreme fortune of finding a fantastic teacher. The Bard was a legend. Uller was entirely too mundane to have that kind of destiny floating around him. So he didn't let it. He could understand why Krieg was so fixated on becoming Ur-crone, to be recognized on her own merits, as opposed to those of the Lineage Nuckelavee. He felt a smirk coming to his face, as he pondered that he'd put a lot of effort doing the same. So he didn't bother wondering whether that theory was true. If he was some distant relation of the Bard, well, the Bard would have many 'distant relations', especially if his 'mother' did with others what she had with Uller. It wouldn't cost him any sleep to be one of a scad of people descended from an old Legend. And it wouldn't get in the way of him making his own.
Maybe he'd live in the shadow of Krieg Miller, with thinking like that, but the shade was the perfect place for somebody to live a clean and happy life. It certainly beat being staked out for the sun.
At least, that's what he wanted to believe.
If only his pride would let him.
"No, I'm not going to apologize to you or anybody else about how I spend my free time. Human, I have spent the last ten thousand years working eighty- to hundred-hour weeks trying to better my Ring. And guess what! I succeeded! The only other fucker down here who's managed that is Satan! Belphegor certainly didn't improve her realm before she fucked off to wherever it is she went.
Fuck you, Belphegor is too a woman.
Okay, fine. Nobody knows what the fuck Belphegor was, and if gender even applied to them. But the point is that they ditched and left Sloth to rot. I stood my ground. I built Gluttony, honey. And I don't care what Satan says about me. He's got the Paradox King of Gluttony fixated in his head as a pillar of virtue, and me as just another Traitor King. Well news flash! I was born during the Paradox Kings Era! And the guy before me was a fucking tool!
I didn't take over Gluttony because I thought Lucifer would be a good king. I knew from the jump that he was a psychopath! I took over Gluttony because the 'vaunted Paradox King of Gluttony' was doing fucking nothing and letting Gluttony go to weeds when it should have been becoming something spectacular. So yeah, I offed that mutant Devourer.
Small 'm' mutant. Like how I'm a small 'm' mutant Drone. No I don't give a shit bitch, do you think I'm that touchy after ten fucking millennia and change? I'm just hoping that one day I'll be able to party with whoever the fuck I feel like and not have you nosy jackasses saying shit about me to my back.
I'm serious. You should try having sex with a Hellhound sometime. Those fuzzy bastards can go~!
What was your question again? Oh, Belphegor and that stunt she/he pulled. Don't get me started on that bullshit..."
– Princess Beelzebub, Gluttony Incarnate and Deadly Sin of Gluttony