Charlie just stared at the bunch of them in her lobby, who were currently being dressed in better clothes than the rags they'd come in with, were being given a proper meal, and in many cases, were being given a shoulder to cling to and cry on. A day away rummaging through the Dealmaker's Conference and she came back to this. She'd expected to come home and greet one new Sinner. Not an entire truckload. "Rachel? Explain," she said.
Rachel had a blanket wrapped around her too, where she'd been standing by the doors, ushering the others in. Apparently all of this happened over the course of an hour as she was driving back. And now there was probably going to be another siege of her hotel. This time, unlike last time, she had an army to man her walls. "Recruitment," Rachel answered.
"Why are you dressed like that?" Charlie asked. She was dressed very atypically for herself, in far less than she usually did. When the last of the people, from deepest in the pile of crates, was brought in, it was a skeletal looking man... with a Gapped Halo above his head. Once he was inside, Rachel closed the doors and stopped letting the cold in.
"I had to get a couple of perverts to think I wasn't a threat," she said. "Apropos of nothing, today I have killed people for the first time. I thought it would be more upsetting than it was."
"Wh... what? Who?"
"You are aware of a flesh-peddler named Siegel?" Rachel asked, guiding the skeletal Betrayed to the Recovery Couch, and pushing some food into his hands.
"No. Why would I know those kinds of people?"
"Because they're the kind of people that your Purgatory Project is going to have to evict en masse," Rachel said. Charlie grabbed Rachel's shoulder and forced her to face Charlie properly, her jaw set with annoyance.
"How," she said, mustering her patience, and pointing at the people triaged in the lobby before they could be assigned rooms in the hotel, "is that what you would call recruiting?"
"Today, for the low cost of four thousand Souls in Seraphic Steel bullets, I have mustered two dozen people who owe me their safety, their bodily sanctity, and in one case, her mortal life. These are twenty three people who will now protect me, because they are beholden to."
"You're not a very nice person," the newly-arrived Betrayed on the couch said.
"I don't need to be nice to save people. It's all transactional. Everything is," Rachel said. "Eat. It's actually very good."
Husk, who'd gone to the desk and was now drinking heavily – even for him – looked different, again. While he still had a cat's eyes, his feline features were fading, replaced by ones more human. For one thing, he didn't have paws anymore, but actual hands. "I want to forbid you to leave the Hotel again, but that's not going to work is it?" Charlie asked.
"Why are you upset about this? Today your hotel has gained new patrons who will protect it at all costs, because they see it as their life-line," Rachel said, moving away from the recovery couch. The sole human, a modestly pretty girl of not more than twenty years, was huddled on the floor muttering what seemed to be religious litany under her breath and crying. "It's a shame we couldn't get all of them out. Then we wouldn't just have a battalion, we'd have an army."
"These people," Charlie cast her arm wide, at the madness that she'd come home to, "are not your army! They're victims of a cruel system that has exchanged their previous cruel master, for you!"
Rachel blinked at her, not betraying any annoyance at the claim. "What makes me a cruel mistress? They have autonomy. I'm not going to sell them, or extract value from them. They're going to do it voluntarily."
"That's worse! Can't you see that that's worse?" Charlie stressed.
"I'm failing to, because I struggle to see how saving them from a fate worse than death, or actual death in Lisa's case, could be considered cruel," Rachel said. She then tilted her head. "Because by your own logic, if what I'm doing is cruel? Then what you've been doing to Angel Dust, Husk, and myself has been crueler, and longer."
"That doesn't track," Charlie said.
"I knew you were a bright one; you always did manage to bring home fascinating presents," Alastor's voice as usual preceded him into the room, materializing out of thin air between the two women. He turned a glance at Rachel. "Could you do us all a favor and cover up properly. That's a bit obscene."
"I'll get to it," Rachel said. "Cain! See to him?"
Cain, who had been just watching the whole undertaking with a sort of bemused detachment, shrugged and went to the side of the new Betrayed that somehow got thrown out of Heaven at some point. "What do you want, Alastor?" Charlie asked. The Radio Demon grinned, as he always did, and gestured toward the back. Charlie muttered something only partly articulated but thoroughly angry under her voice and followed as he led them.
"When I said that you bring me fascinating presents, I was speaking of one in particular. Oh, had I the fortune to find her first, things might have been much smoother, but alas. This one," he gestured toward Rachel, who was quickly grabbing a sweater from the peg just inside the hall and pulling it on, quickly resolving her near nudity, and essentially jumping into a pair of blue-jeans, "has claimed her for herself. Pity, pity."
"You're damned right, pity," Rachel said, looking much her usual self again. "The one in question is named Rozarin Ahmadi, a Kurd who died a few days ago on the Turkish Border Region. Husk swears up and down that she's the one with the 'Gift', but I can't really tell either way. Maybe he just has a thing for women with abs."
"Husk has an appropriate desire for the physical these days," Alastor said, idly swirling his cane as he walked amidst them. "Which is to say, none at all. No, he noticed the array of her horns, which I'm sure you'll find familiar my dear when you see it."
"Wait, she has horns like Sam?"
"Only in the looser sense of the term; she has horns that form a proxy-halo. Which I'm beginning to think was always the signifier of a smuggled Gift," Alastor said. He flicked his fingers and a daguerrotype photograph appeared between them, displaying an amazon of a woman with abnormal skin rendered in greyscale, standing beside the Goat of the Apocalypse on the wastelands of Wrath.
"Where did you get this?" Charlie asked, looking at the woman with the many horns, which did indeed form something of an ersatz halo above the crown of her head. It also made her more than a little annoyed at the now posthumous Goat of the Apocalypse. For all he'd been the reason she was now a trillionaire, it seemed he'd been playing a more cunning and exploitative game than even she had known.
"Stole it from the last story, they don't need it anymore," Alastor said with a chuckle. Oh not this again... "Don't worry, I can't make a habit of it now that there's a Time Lock over all Creation."
"Who are these people?" Rachel asked, having to crane herself up awkwardly to see what the much taller people she was walking with were looking at. She made an odd expression when she saw the picture.
"The Goat of the Apocalypse was one of Samuel's benefactors here in Hell. I'm fairly certain he also knew that your boy was the Demiurge long before we did, and did everything in his reach to make sure that Samuel could awaken to his power. Then Lucifer killed him, for that same reason."
"A fallen ally, then. And the woman?"
"Another failure of a Gifted called Celeste Wormwood, bearer of the stolen Gift of Tears, of the Angel Dumah, and the enduring Gift of Punishment, granted by Kushiel," Alastor said. He then leaned in toward Rachel, stage whispering. "The moment that she got greedy with her power and made overtures toward Lucifer, our friend the Goat killed her."
"And how does this relate to Rose?" Charlie asked, stopping before the door that had been given to Rozarin when she came in. As she was ambulatory of her own power, she didn't bother with triage. She just went directly in and then Charlie's attention had been pulled to others. Now, though, Charlie knocked sternly on the door. The door swung in with it, revealing that there was a pile of tatters near the bathroom, which was releasing a fair amount of steam around the edges of its door. "We should wait," Charlie said, taking a step back. Alastor, though, strode in as blithely as you please. "Alastor that is unacceptable!"
"I don't care," Alastor said. "Oh newcomer? Have you managed to wash the worst of that filth off of you? I would very much like to get an assay of you."
"And who the fuck are you to ask that of me?" Rose's voice came from the bathroom.
"Somebody who has answers to questions you've been pondering since you've landed here," Alastor offered. "And who is willing to part with them more readily than most."
That seemed to have bribed Rose pretty effectively, because a few seconds later, the rushing water noise ended. About a minute after that, the door to the bathroom unlocked and opened, showing Rose now wearing a bathrobe which wasn't sized properly for her. She was a bit taller than Charlie, so that wasn't the problem; the problem was her very long legs, which reached the ground digitigrade with red toes capped with claws. Her eyes slid past Charlie at the door, then paused on Rachel, who'd slipped just into the room while Charlie wasn't paying attention. Rachel got a nod from Rose, before she secured the belt holding her robe closed and faced the taller Sinner who shared the room with her. "What are you smiling about?" she demanded of the Radio Demon.
"I thought it'd be years before I saw another one of your kind down here," he said. "The last one I got ahold of was a bit... hmm... abstemious for my liking. He didn't like to push the envelope to see what he was capable of. I'm hoping you're somewhat more ambitious than he was."
"Ambitious in what regard?" she asked.
"Alastor, no, you're not getting to use her as a Guinea Pig," Charlie countered over-top of her. Alastor turned a smirk past his shoulder to her.
"That's between she and I, I'm afraid," he said with another droll chuckle. "Do you mind if I get a closer look at you."
"I'd prefer you didn't," Rose said.
"Keep your robe on, I don't need your skin. I'm looking at your magic, my dear! To see what kind of monster you could become down here."
"I still don't know what the sweet shit is going on. One minute I'm playing catch with hand-grenades with the fucking Turks, and the next I'm getting shackled and shoved through some fucking... I don't even know what!" Rose said.
"The Pride Wall, end of the line for Sinners like myself. But not you. Not you, with your gestating Angel within you," he held his fingers up in a framing gesture, looking through them as though lining up a photograph. Charlie couldn't see what he was looking at, because that was likely for his eyes only. But when he looked at her abdomen, his smile shrunk, and he released a mildly confused 'Hmm', before lifting that frame upward and staring through his fingers at her breasts. Well, not at her breasts per se; Alastor was about as sexual as a doorstop and had no time in his hellish existence for even the concept of lust. After a second or so, his brows lofted, and he snapped the fingers of one hand before bringing that fingertip to his lips, turning and pacing away for a moment, with a look of excitement blooming on his face.
"What did you see, Alastor?" Rachel asked, as for all she was fairly magically insensitive, she wasn't stupid nor blind to context.
"Oh, I was wrong. I'm so delighted to be incorrect. I thought that she was like Sam. And she's not!" he said with a broad grin. Rose turned a confused look at the two women and the one monster that shared the room with her. He started to laugh for a moment before he mastered himself. "Sam, you must understand; he didn't have a whole Gift. Just the parasitic remnants of one. But that was enough for him to carve the path of the Demiurge, to declare his vendetta against God, to claim the power of the Equal And Opposite, and shatter the walls of Heaven. But her? She's not like him. She's got something he didn't. Would you all like to see?"
"See what?"
"This might sting for a moment, newcomer," Alastor said. Then with a snap of his fingers, a wet, beating human heart appeared above his hand. With a messy, lurching beat it spat a heart's worth of blood onto the floor whilst simultaneously, near the bathroom door, Rose began to pound at her chest with a fist, a look of confusion and alarm on her face. Charlie was about to shout at him to put that back, but he silenced her with a look that had almost ballistic force, raising a finger which suddenly grew a long, razor sharp claw. A claw he used to cut a wedge out of the now faltering heart. When the meat flopped open, she could see inside the organ.
There was cold white fire inside of the heart.
Alastor snapped his fingers again, and the heart disappeared from his keeping, and Rose, who had almost fallen to a knee, gave her chest one final pound, coughed dryly, and shuddered.
"Rozarin Ahmadi, Kurdish soldier, turned martyr, turned fallen failed Angel, may only have one of her Gifts," said the Radio demon, with a showman's stance and a superior grin. "but she, unlike Sam... was not Judged before being cast into hell. So she still has the Gift of Might in full."
Chapter 19
Little Bitch Energy
Blitz had imagined that M&M would hide the fact that she was pregnant until she was far enough along that even he would have noticed, and then started locking the doors to keep the likes of him away. That certainly would have been in keeping with the way they'd been acting around him before everything went tits up in the best possible way at the end of the previous year. Now, though, they actually seemed eager to share the moment with him.
Life was better than it had any right to be. A sack of shit like him didn't deserve this degree and frequency of happiness. And yet life continued to throw nice shit at him. It was off-putting. He had decades of experience with how to deal with life's various varietals of bullshit. Dealing with good shit? That was foreign to him.
The elevator landed with a muted thunk, opening to the gloomy light of Sloth. There were few in the lift today, because nobody ever actually wanted to go to Sloth. The lowest Ring of Hell felt as it always did, oppressive, heavy, and draining. Moxxie, who came with, didn't seem to show any sign of it, but Maelstrom, who opted to come in Millie's place, seemed to notice. "Wow. This place is terrible," Maelstrom noted.
"Welcome to Sloth. The shittiest Ring of Hell," Blitz said. They had a job to do here, which ordinarily would have likely been sent to Killer And Sons but IMP's reputation seemed to have eclipsed that old butchers'-clearinghouse in recent months. Yay for that, Blitz figured. More jobs close to home meant more money. More money meant more horse memorabilia. And if he ever broke free of his blinkered view on financial boundaries, he might just outright buy a horse.
And shortly after, learn that he had to have a place to put it.
But whatever the case, the job was here in Sloth. The last time he'd been here was that stupidity with those spa-ensconced nobles, and before that it was right after he got out of fucking Germany during that big war of bullshit that he'd gotten stuck on Earth through. And little had changed in the weeks and months since then. Of course it didn't. This was Sloth. Who in the fuck would actually raise a finger to do anything around here when they didn't have to?
"Why do I feel so tired?" Maelstrom asked.
"That's because you're barefoot," Moxxie said. "I warned you to wear boots."
"I don't understand," Maelstrom said.
"You have physical contact with the roots of the Qliphoth. It's sapping your vitality and slowly consuming you," Moxxie said. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of boots sized for Maelstrom. "I thought you might need these."
"Thank you," Maelstrom said, putting the things on and taking a few awkward steps to get used to them. He seemed to be somebody mostly used to bare feet. "So... what's the Qliphoth? And why is it trying to eat me?"
"That," Moxxie pointed to a point in the sky which managed to be darker than the gloom around it, "is the trunk of the Qliphoth, the Tree of Death, which got smuggled here when Heaven cut theirs down."
"Why would a tree want to eat me?" he asked.
"That's... a bit complicated," Moxxie continued to explain as they passed through the gray haze that outright erased the naturally pink hue of the skies of the Ring, and returned to pavement which had a taxi-stand. They opted for a van, because Maelstrom at least was kinda big. "The short answer is that every tree tries to eat you, but the Qliphoth is just a lot better at it. It pretty much overran the entire Ring, and turned everything into an extension of it. Which I'm told is actually an improvement over how it was back in the old days before Lucifer!"
Blitzo opened the door and pulled himself into the foremost seats. "Stem seven, bucko," Blitz said, handing some money foward. He was a bit surprised to see a beefy Sloth-Imp sitting there, looking jacked as all hell barely contained within a shirt.
"Whatever you say, bub," he said, his voice practically rumbling Blitz's seat under him. Oh, now that was a voice!
"Why does that matter?" Maelstrom said, buckling in as he always did. Come on, pup, live a little! That he was silently espousing living a little by putting himself at risk of dying was lost on Blitz.
"The Qliphoth is rumored to be the backbone of Prophecy, planted at the moment of the creation of... well, Creation, and rumored to only bloom once, ever, before bearing a new seed. And the Qlipoth, in all the years it spent in Heaven and the time its cutting endured in Hell, has never done that."
"That's interesting and all... but it still doesn't explain why a tree tried to gently eat me," Maelstrom gently pushed Moxxie back onto the proper trail.
"Oh right," Moxxie looked embarrassed for a moment, before regaining himself. "The reason why it's trying to eat you, is because it tries to eat everything. Light, life, matter, Abyssmatter, even time; the Qliphoth consumes them all, and grows taller every year, to the point where technically it should be reaching the level of Greed by now."
"So why do people put up with it? Trees can be cut down," Maelstrom said.
"We use it to get rid of our garbage, for one," Moxxie said.
"The reality-consuming demon-tree is our garbage disposal?" Maelstrom asked flatly.
"It also is host to the False Worlds of Sloth," Moxxie said.
"Oh yeah. Those things, the little bitch grapes filled with little bitch bitches who can't handle reality," Blitz said. "I figure I should probably talk about the job. Buddy, do you want in on this? 'Cause there's a non-zero chance we'll need a getaway-driver."
"Nope," the sloth-imp said, and kept driving.
"Anyway, like Mox said, the False Worlds are weird fruit-things clinging to the big ole fuckin' tree that nails this Ring in place. You step into one'a those bitches, and you get sucked into a fantasy land where anything's possible and reality can eat shit," Blitz added to Moxxie's description, since he seemed to be missing the fucking point.
"That sounds... a bit horrifying, actually," Maelstrom said. Moxxie nodded at that statement.
"I know! Can you imagine bein' such a little bitch that you have to give up and go into fantasy land to be a bad motherfucker?" Blitz agreed. Considering how much Blitz had achieved out here in the 'shitty real world', he definitely had a run of prideful stubbornness that precluded such 'little bitch' behavior. Maybe if he failed a lot more than even he had, then sure. But not now. "So our target's exactly that kind of little bitch. Heir to such and such a family or some bullshit. Well, turns out his parents they went and had more than one kid, so the one next in line is getting sick of being 'the spare' and wants the heir offed."
"And again we stick our necks into dynastic politics," Moxxie muttered.
"Hey, dynastic politics pays a fucking mint, and we get to be the sneaky fucks who can walk away from it when we're done," Blitz pointed out.
"This isn't the kind of work you used to do, I take it?" Maelstrom asked.
"Nobody thought we were capable of it," Moxxie intimated. "Why not just leave him? Once people go in they don't tend to come out."
Blitz shook his head. "No can do. Client wants his brother and all the little bitch energy he's stored up offed so that there's no dynastic bullshit or whatever. So we're killin' a dude."
Moxxie shook his head for a moment. Nothing was ever easy. "So he's a Fugue-junkie. Do you think it's wise to go into those things after him? We might not be able to come out and... sir... I have a child on the way."
"Who said anything about going inside those bitch-ass False Worlds?" Blitz said. "Fuck naw, we're going to trap him in one, permanently!"
"Is that acceptable by the contract?" Maelstrom asked, brow furrowed. Moxxie raised a confused finger.
"It will be when we roll that fucker over the edge into Abyss, with him still inside it!" Blitz said, as the driver took them off of the highway, and began to drive up the mountain that was made by the rupturing of the Qliphoth's roots, toward the gray that manifested where the Qliphoth was supreme, and away from the pink where Old Sloth still tried to claim it was still alive.
"How exactly do you intend to unseat a False World? It's never been done!" Moxxie said.
"Oh that's where you're wrong, fucko! It's been done, on purpose, exactly once! By a crazy pyromaniac!" Blitz said.
Moxxie stared at him, then looked to Maelstrom, then back to Blitz. "Are you serious sir? Are you seriously entertaining the concept of attempting to burn the hostile, parasitic vines that feed off of the hostile, parasitic tree, and make it drop one of its magically hyper-dense fruit?"
"Yup!" Blitz said.
The world-weary groan that Moxxie released was nice and familiar to Blitz, as he'd heard its like many times during the first year of IMP. But he'd come around. This wasn't going to be an easy job, really – Blitz had learned not to tug on that particular tit of fate – but what it lacked in easiness it made up for in simplicity. Just get the stuff. Then set a fire. Then start shoving. Simple money.
The Kurd had settled in well enough. All things considered, it was a small miracle that she hadn't lost her mind. Cain knew how badly it went for those who had thought themselves legitimately righteous to find themselves in hell. They tended to either fall into a fugue of ennui, or lash out violently at all around them. And Ahmadi was doing neither.
She sat in a chair in the lobby, watching things going on, with a mildly baffled look on her face. She was a fetching woman, certainly, built powerfully and tall of stature, but he knew better than to even think of attempting a pursuit on her. She had been treated with great unkindness since her arrival in Hell. He was not content with his women being 'willing'. He needed them eager. It's why Niffty was so valued by him. She poured him another coup of tea, which he thanked her for by giving her a little goose as she walked by. She tittered with joy at the attention and zipped away before she did something that would mark her a loser of the little game the two of them played. She wasn't very skilled at it, but she did try.
"Have you had time enough to adapt, my friend?" Cain asked, taking the seat next to hers against the back wall. The hubbub was constant in the lobby of the Happy Hotel of late. Between the soldiers rotating through, doing patrols, and safeguarding the exits, the programmed-guests meeting with Rachel or now strangely Addam, whom Rachel had seconded, and the others who were just trying to enjoy Princess Charlotte's protections and stay out from underfoot, it now looked much the portrait of the metropolitan hotel. Rozarin turned a glance to him, at his horns and his queer eyes, then gave a sigh and a shrug.
"I don't think I will be 'adapted' for quite some time. Where are you from? You have a similar accent to some people I know... knew."
"I imagine that mine has been supplanted half a hundred times in the ages since my birth outside of the Garden of Eden. I am Cain, son of Adam by Eve."
"You sound somewhat... Iraqi," she said.
"That is the rough vicinity of where the Garden had been set," Cain said. He took a sip of his tea – produced to perfection, which was a point to Niffty's favor again – and reminisced. "You should have seen it in the century after our expulsion. Arabia was still grasslands and hills, all manner of beast loose in the world, a crossroads of the planet and the humans upon it – not that there were so very many of them. Just us, a distant corner of what I believe is now called Oman, and a long walk to the lands which would become Babylon."
"Omani... but you have Iraqi inflections," she said.
"Ah, no I do not," Cain countered, raising a finger. "I was there first. Iraqis have my inflections. So do you, in fact. You were a daughter of the speakers of Kurmanji, Sorani, and Xwarin. There are no languages on the living Earth that my now argot tongue has not influenced, save perhaps a few uncontacted tribes in South America and that delightfully violent group on North Sentinel."
"And here I thought that Cain was just a biblical story," Ahmadi muttered.
"God does not care as to your theism before letting you into Heaven, or excluding you from it. It is one of the few virtues that the silent Pantokrator could be said to have," Cain agreed. "Tell me something of your life. I hear that you were a soldier?"
"I was," she said.
"Forgive my old-fashioned ways, but I find that somewhat difficult to grasp; women being soldiers amongst the living. Amongst the dead, certainly! There is nothing to lose for a dead woman to bear arms and spill blood, but amongst the living, to lose a woman is not just a corpse on the battlefield, but an entire dead bloodline of the children she could have had."
"When we're fighting for the existence of our bloodline, so that any can pass on, every person is a soldier," she countered. He paused, giving that some thought. If they were going to kill you anyway, there was a certain draw toward such total mobilization. "We were betrayed and left to be massacred by the fucking Turks, so yes, I fought. I fought harder than men twice my size. It didn't save me."
"Everybody dies, miss Ahmadi," Cain said with a shrug. "It took me seven hundred years to die. Adam outlived me by five centuries! Truly we were an unusual batch to have lived so long. I'm told that my grandchildren barely reached two hundred, let alone their lack of certain features. I even hear that people have only crested ten decades of life expectancy again in the last fifty years!"
"You are a strange one, Cain," she said with a laugh.
"And you are no longer looking despondent, so I will take your mild insult with aplomb," Cain said.
"I just thought... that I'd lived a good life, you know?" Rose said.
"And whatever could have transpired that would see you damned to Hell, you therefor ask?" Cain said. He sighed, shaking his head. "I have spoken to Husk, who spoke to this 'Samuel', whom you are purported to resemble on some magical level. And as I hear it told, the number of people who have been granted entry to Heaven has been decreasing logarithmicly since God fell silent on His throne. To the point where last year, a percent of a percent were granted entry into Heaven. And it seems with the War now come to Heaven's shores, that number has reached a nice, flat zero."
"So it didn't matter what I did, or who I did it to, I was just going to be sent here anyway because of things entirely outside of my control," Rozerin said.
"I am sorry that it is so," Cain said. He shook his head. "In my days, it took a true sin to get you sent here. To insult God to his face, or as I did, to be the first murderer. The majority were sent upward."
"Well aren't I lucky?"
"Oh but you are," Cain said. He reached toward her for a moment, then paused. "Will you grant permission that I lay hands upon you?"
"That would depend on where," she said, brow raised in suspicion.
"Your back, of course," he said. She shrugged and half-turned so that he could flatten his palm against her spine. And through the thudding of her heart that he could feel with every pulse it sent through her arteries, he could also feel an unusual coldness in it. Every pulse the blood drew her skin cold, before her flesh warmed back up again a fraction later. "Remarkable. I never thought that I would feel its like."
"That 'Gift' of mine?" she asked. Cain nodded, retracting his hand and rubbing his fingers. The tips of them nearly tingled for the sensation of so much power, so much of the Word of God so close at hand. The last time that he felt that tingle in his skin, was when he clutched at the hand of his father and begged for forgiveness, which Adam would not give. Adam was not Gifted, as Gifts did not exist in that time, but he was installed with God's Word in a manner quite similar. To touch the scarlet skin of Rozerin was to remember, for just a moment, the touch of his parents. "You look saddened by something," she cut in on his introspection.
"I have not had a happy life. There are many sad memories that I can inflict upon myself if I'm less than careful," Cain said.
"So what's my prognosis, in your eyes?" she asked.
"I don't know. I've never seen your like. But I have a feeling that I will be seeing many more like you in the coming years. Gabriel was so blind as to let you fall past his grasp, I can only imagine that other Angels, with less clout and time at the Judging Place, would be forced to let their 'children' descend also.
"So I'm a freak down here," she said. "A freak who can go anywhere. Leave all these Sinners behind."
"Not quite all, mistress," Cain said with an easy shrug. "I could likewise travel to any place under the shade of Heaven. So you'd not need to travel alone."
"I don't think I'm going to travel quite yet," Rozarin said. Cain spotted Niffty peeking from the gap in the dining area doors, so flamboyantly snapped his fingers, which drew her out of her hiding place and left her skidding to a halt next to the pair of dead humans, new and old.
"My dearest Niffty, could you please get us some cold refreshments. I am going to be speaking to this woman regarding esoteric matters."
"Just esoteric matters?" she asked.
"Niffty..." he said with a mildly chiding tone. She was disappointed, but turned and went to get something cold and refreshing to drink. Hmm. He'd lost that one, he sensed. Still, the game was still in motion and there were more rounds for either of them to gain or lose advantage. When she pushed the doors open, the resident dragon came through them in the other direction, almost colliding with Niffty as she darted toward the kitchens. O'Daire was much improved over the state she'd been in when Cain had first arrived and looked upon her. While she had an almost human pallor, the fact that her hair was red like brick-clay and her fingers still ended in claw-like nails belied that whatever subtle transformations she'd undertaken in this Hotel, she was still a dragon. She walked now with a cane, careful not to move her hips too much as she walked. "O'Daire! You're looking well this afternoon."
"I feel like shit and my legs hurt," she groused as she moved her way over, lifting one of the other, heavy chairs with one handless arm and continuing to hobble her way over, before setting the chair down and sitting in it, the landing announced by a mildly pained grunt much akin to a middle aged man declaring war against the universe for the injustice of having to get up from a comfortable place. After a moment to catch her breath, she looked from Cain to the woman seated across from him. "Who is this again?"
"Rozarin Ahmadi. Former soldier, bearer of the Gift of Might," Cain said. He then turned to Rose. "And this is Fiona O'Daire, a companion of mine of many centuries. She is much improved now over how she was when I first met her. I hope you don't mind my saying, Fiona, that you were a much more difficult person to know long ago ago than you have become in the modern day."
"How long have you been down here?" Rose asked.
"Around nine hundred years," Fiona answered.
"So you came down when things upstairs still... worked," she grasped for a more eloquent way of putting it and apparently failed. Still, good on her for trying. Fiona nodded. "So what did it take for you to get sent here?"
"A lot of people dead by my hand, a number of seductions, an overwhelming surplus of theft. I desecrated a few monasteries and stole their gold. Also I ate somebody once. I think I might be forgiven for that, because we were all starving at the time. Didn't make a habit of it," she said and puffed out a breath. "D'you know what I've realized, Cain?"
"What is it, Fiona?" he asked.
"I had so many chances to just... stop," she said. She seemed to deflate a bit, slumping in her chair and staring a thousand miles away. "I could have stopped the first time I reached Constantinople. Just left the ship and the crew to Treffi and... stopped. I could have stopped in Corinth, after the Pepper ship. Sold what I got instead of eating it all. Settled down with Andreas. For a pirate, he was a good man, Andreas. And instead I got him killed. And more than all of that, I realize I could have stopped when I reached Genoa."
She sighed, shaking her head. "I made so many bad choices. They seemed so obvious back then, but now that I can look at them with a working brain and clear eyes, I can just see madness accelerating madness. But Genoa was a tipping point. Until then, I'd hit slave-ships of the vile Barbary, robbing the captains of their blood-earnings and selling their ships to the Spanish for prize. I was something like a privateer then. If I had been able to think, or been able to plan, I could have made a life out of that. A Spanish taker of enemy ships. I could have been a legend. I could have been a better person. Maybe it wouldn't have been enough to undo the murder that started all of it, to buy away the murder of a nun. But maybe if I'd stayed there, in the Gulf of Lion and the Balearic... I could have maybe come to some kind of redemption. But instead, I needed more. And I fell on Genoa like locusts."
"This is a degree of introspection that I've never seen from you before. It seems that my patron Charlie truly has done you a service to the sanctity of your mind," Cain said. Niffty had during the tail of her musings deposited two cold drinks on the table, having not brought one for Fiona for obvious reasons. She now regarded the dragon that was nearly four times her size with suspicion and jealousy. Well Cain would need to be doubly sweet to earn his way back to neutral it seemed. When it came to broken minds, of the four that briefly shared that space, Niffty won that race in street-shoes. "So tell me this, O'Daire, are you actually going to involve yourself in the program that she's made? After all, as long as you don't completely degrade into madness again, the infirmity of your brain can always be reset."
"I don't know," Fiona said. "I just don't know. I've made so many bad choices that I don't even know what a good one is supposed to look like. And even if I did start 'being good'... would it be enough? Cain... I once skinned a man and made his crew eat his flesh!" she said, thumping the table with its drinks with a fingernail.
"He did keel-haul that lover of yours, Andreas. That is not a clean or gentle way to murder a man," Cain said, having heard that story before. But last time she related it, it was with grim satisfaction, rather than teetering hopelessness. "Your deed was only evil by its extremity, not by its underpinnings. He had wronged you in a very primal way. And you responded with primal anger."
"That doesn't absolve me," she said.
"Absolution is a process," Rozarin said, nodding as though she could understand O'Daire's pain and process perfectly. Perhaps she even could. "It's setting out to do the difficult work day after day, until you no longer recognize the person you used to be. Where the decisions you made then would be unthinkable to you. And even still, you can at any point stop and turn back, looking at the path your life has led you, and never see a shattering point, where one incarnation of yourself became another. It's just a shift as gradual as the foothills that hem the mountains. You never grasp how far you are from where you've started until you compare them, point to point."
"You sound like you've had to do some introspection yourself," Cain noted.
"Everybody does, sooner or later," Rose said. "Just because we were right in what we were doing didn't make it any easier to do what we did. Fighting against extinction still has moral costs. And I would hope that I didn't cross the line. Now, though, I'll never know. I'll never know if the final Judgment of... whoever it is that does that sort of thing would say 'you've gone too far' in my endeavors. I just have to muddle through, hoping against hope that I did what I could, when I could, and not too much more."
"Then you are like most down here, O'Daire included," Cain said. "Never knowing what we missed, what we could have changed. Genoa may have been a turning point toward final damnation, Fiona, but Hell is a thing of infinite graduations, and no single action short of pissing directly into the eye of God Himself truly deserving of unremitting damnation. You may indeed never know if you would have been Judged by Saint Peter and whichever Angel stood at his shoulder as being good or foul. We can never know how much we would need to do to ever earn the good graces of Heaven," he motioned between himself and Fiona. "But if there is one avenue which we all must deny till our lungs are ragged and our throats bleed it is the call of despair and inertia. We can go no further and achieve nothing if we surrender to a thoughtless oblivion, of surrendering to hopelessness. I did once. It cost me centuries. And I will never make that mistake again."
"You make it sound remarkably easy to change the path you walk," Rose said.
"Contrary to the popular idiom, a journey does not truly begin with a first, single step. It begins when you have reached a resolution to make the final one," he said.
"So where does that leave all of us?" Fiona asked.
Cain chuckled, and took a sip of his cool, sweet drink. "What else? It leaves us as a bunch of dead, damned fools in a Hell that could only care less about us if it were forced to. And while absolution is denied to me, personally, for you two? Perhaps there is much more hope there to be plumbed. And you'll never know the ends of your paths if you refuse to walk them. So if I could offer you one piece of advice, as a human who has been in Hell longer than most: Start walking, friends. Start walking, and keep walking, past pain and trial and adversity. And in the end... who knows what you may find?"
Of the people who had become embroiled in the Hotel project since Rachel took an ever increasing chunk of the responsibility of running it, there was one who bothered Charlie more than most. And that was the one who hadn't died yet. 'Lisa Nowak' had essentially shuttered herself in the hotel room that'd been provided for her, after a bit of magic to assay the damage done to her in Triage. She then spent the next day or so hysterically crying.
Charlie knocked on the door. "Lisa? Can you hear me? You haven't eaten in a day and humans need to do that!" she said from the frame of the door.
"She likely ain't eaten in longer than that," Husk said as he walked past on his way to wherever he went when he decided to stop being at his job.
"That's... even worse actually," she muttered.
"Hon, if we don't do something she's going to starve in there," Vaggie said, at Charlie's side.
"If she doesn't want us to help her, we can't..." Charlie began, but Vaggie took her hand and turned her to face Vaggie flush instead of the door.
"Sweetheart, I know you think you're doing the right thing, but as somebody who used to be human and has been in that awful of a state before, it won't work. She will starve herself to death in there if it means that she doesn't have to think about what's happened to her. You. Have. To. Act," Vaggie said in no uncertain terms.
Charlie moaned for a moment, but nodded. This went against her every instinct to help people. Rachel was right in that you head to meet people where they were, not drag them to where you wanted them. And here Vaggie was saying the exact opposite, and Charlie couldn't find fault with her reasoning either. Why did things have to be so Goddamned complicated all the time? Why couldn't there just be a right way of doing things? Because reality was hard and didn't care about people in either general or specific, was the answer that her two centuries of life had told her.
"Lisa, I'm coming in," she said, manifesting the master key to the door with a subvocalized hum of her Song. Vaggie, seeing that Charlie was heeding her advice, quickly scarpered over to a food tray that had been left in the hallway, opening the little fridge on it and extracting a pair of sandwiches wrapped in plastic. It might not be much, but it was food. The door opened to a dark room and sniffling sounds. Charlie's eyes adapted quickly, and spotted Lisa huddled in a corner well away from the door to either the hallway or bathroom, swaddled in the blankets of the bed, shuddering.
Lisa looked kind of like Charlie herself, being blonde and rather tall for a woman, but was pure human rather than a half and had blue eyes rather than red. And right now she showcased none of the supernal might that something a Nephilim would hold. She was just a terrified human retreated into a near-fugue to protect what remained of her mind from the horror of where she was and what she'd been through. Vaggie squatted down in front of her, and Lisa didn't react, as though Vaggie were a ghost. "She seems physically alright. The brand didn't go away, but of course it wouldn't."
The brand, as it were, was the signet that she'd been sold to one of Mammon's underlings. A human sold to Greed was actually the least worst fate that such a human could have, in that they tended to survive for quite a while. But just because it was least worst, didn't make it in any way good. The cruelty and horror of a truncated lifetime in the hands of the Consumers was as erosive to the soul as the sexual savagery of being cast into Lust's brothels was to the mind, or the more immediate butchery of being handed to the consuming maw of the Devourers of Gluttony was to the flesh. The brand had been burned in with red-hot Seraphic Steel. Nothing would remove that except for time, or another, more disfiguring brand.
Looked like it was turtle-necks for the rest of her life, then.
"You need to eat so you can get your strength up so we can get you back to the Human World," Charlie said. Lisa just tried to crush a sob. "That's the end goal for you. Get you back to your home. Can you tell me where your home is?"
Lisa shook her heads, red and puffy eyes pressed shut. "I don't have one," she said, which sounded very odd to Charlie's ears because she wasn't speaking After like all of the denizens of Hell. She was speaking one of the many, many human languages which she understood anyway because Charlie was Hellborn.
"Well there has to be a place you'd like to go. I promise it'll be better than... well... what happened here," Charlie said. "Vaggie, go get the book."
"You can't promise that," Lisa said, her face scrunched as he hunched forward and managed to leak more tears without actually sobbing. And that made Charlie profoundly sad. People only learned how to cry silently if terrible things happened to them if they were overheard. She saw, a day ago, when she'd been brought in, that Rachel sometimes watched this girl, a look of uncommonly human rage in her eyes as she beheld a girl trying not to make a spectacle of herself as her world collapsed. For all Rachel could be robotic in the face of most of Hell's worst appetites, there were some things that got under her proverbial armor plating and reminded her of the human that cruelty had all but murdered. And if they were bad enough to make Rachel Scailes angry, then they made Charlie quietly furious.
Vaggie didn't take long to get Charlie's Grimoire, but when she returned, it was trailing dust and cobwebs, so that when she handed it off Charlie grimaced as an annoyed spider ran away from her fingertips, and she quickly reached over to wipe off the grime with the doily on the nearby table. She flipped it open to the section near the beginning about portals, and turned it around to Lisa. "See? I can literally send you anywhere on the Human World. It'll be safer than here. This is Hell, Lisa. Hell! And while I'm doing my best to change that, the Human World will be better!"
"Honey, a moment?" Vaggie asked, her hand on Charlie's shoulder, while Lisa rocked back and forth in her cocoon. Charlie turned to her. "I think she's been through the ringer on Earth, too," Vaggie said. "The Medicae said that she had extensive bone-fusion in her ribs, hand-bones, and a bunch of teeth missing near a jaw-break. Somebody up there beat the fuck out of her, repeatedly, and let her heal the old fashioned way. Remember that they as a rule don't have magic up there. That damage just adds up."
"What are you saying?" Charlie asked, brow furrowing.
"I'm saying that this isn't the first time this girl got trafficked. And I doubt that Lisa is even her name," Vaggie said.
"Wait..." Charlie said.
"She looks Eastern European, so she might have been Polish like the card said, but she probably hasn't been there for years, if not decades," Vaggie said. And from the dark expression on the woman's face, it was one that told Charlie that she would do well to listen, because this was something of which Vaggie knew all-too-well. Vaggie squatted down about a meter away from Maybe-Lisa and gently reached up, pulling off her eye-patch, and showing the brand-scar that had evicted her eye. "What you've been through? I know. Look at me; I. Know."
Maybe-Lisa looked at the ruin of Vaggie's eye, looked at the old scar-tissue that no amount of Charlie's money or influence or magic could heal or make whole, and she shuddered one final time, stilling her rocking. Maybe believing for the first time that she was in actual company. Of people who could understand her. "My name is Eliza. They just call me Nowak 'cause it's a common name," she said, her voice still quavering.
"My name when I was alive was Agata Vialpando. Now I go by Vaggie," came Vaggie's answer. "How long have you been passed along?"
"Since I was a child," she said.
"Fucking hell," Vaggie muttered. And Charlie felt a desire to agree with her in vulgarity. She shook her head and then faced Eliza again. "How did you get taken to Hell? You're not dead, so... that's kinda weird."
"Zbyshek lost his money when Russia went crazy. He had to sell everything. Even me," she said, a sneer coming to her face. "At least he got dragged down here with me. Fuck you, Zbyshek! Your dick never got more than half way hard no matter how many pills you took!"
"Yeah, fuck that guy!" Vaggie agreed, despite not knowing anything about him.
"Wait, he's in Hell, too?"
"He got sold to somebody else. They put a different brand on him. On his chest," she tapped near the center of her sternum, above the level of her breasts. Ooooh, Charlie knew what that meant. A brand there meant that he'd gotten sold to Gluttony. Which meant he was likely being spit-roasted in the most literal sense of the word right now. If it'd been on his pubic mound, that'd have meant he was being sent to Lust. Which was too good for the likes of him, in Charlie's opinion. "Never saw him after they brought us down here. They didn't even touch me that much. Besides that pig man, but he was distracted."
"Piggot," Vaggie said. "I owe Rachel a favor for killing him. Frankly, every woman and about a tenth of the men in Pride Ring do, too."
"And I hear gunshots, the truck I'm on starts driving like a lunatic... and I come here," she said.
"Nobody should go through what you've been through," Charlie swore. "And I can't undo everything. I wish I could, but I can't. But there are things I can fix."
"What?" she asked.
"Your teeth? Your bones? That severed tendon in your foot that makes you limp? I can fix those. But I can't erase what you saw. I'm sorry, Eliza. There's nothing I can do to about that," Charlie said.
"And then we can send you anywhere you want to go. On Earth, I mean. We can even give you some cash so that you won't be destitute again," Vaggie added.
"We don't have human money, Vaggie," Charlie pointed out.
"That is made of solid gold, Charlie," Vaggie pointed at one of the buttons on Charlie's dress. "Gold is worth thousands of dollars an ounce. We've got a fucking vault of gold we can pull from."
"Gold can't be worth that much. It's everywhere!" Charlie said. Both of the women just stared at her like she was the most out of touch person in all of Creation, managing to look equally baffled despite the very different courses that they'd taken to get to this point. When Vaggie let out a chuckle and put her eyepatch back into place, she turned to Eliza again.
"Forgive her. She grew up with money," Vaggie said.
"What's wrong with that?" Charlie muttered, while Vaggie continued talking.
"But that means she's a lot more willing to give it away than you or I would be. So tell me this, Eliza. If you could go anywhere on earth with, say... ten million dollars, where would you go?"
Eliza turned confused looks at the founder of the feast, Charlie, and the one doing the talking, Vaggie, before she sat back and seemed to give it some thought. Then she looked up with an almost shameful glance.
"I would go to Disney Land," she said.
"I thought we were sending her to Earth," Charlie said.
"Oh... God I love you sometimes," Vaggie said giving Charlie's cheek a pat, which made Charlie only more baffled. "Disney Land is in California. North America. We can do that. Right? We can do that, Charlie."
Charlie nodded, then cracked open her long-neglected Grimoire, throwing a thin spray of dust as she did, and read the section on what was known by Hell of Raphael's Miracle of Healing. It wasn't much, and much of it was sourced apparently from Purson and Cain working in tandem in ages long past to recreate even a Partial Miracle of Healing. But considering that Eliza of no last name was not already on the precipice of death, the Partial Miracle was more than enough. She spoke words of power, feeling the power surge in her blood as there was a flare of cold white light in the room, one that illuminated Eliza as though lighting her from within.
When it pulsed down to normal lighting again, she flexed her hands and saw that her fingers weren't crooked anymore, and then she reached into her mouth, no doubt questing out the teeth that had miraculously grown back into place. It had also fixed all of her dental anguish that she'd not complained about, fixed the partially detached retina in her left eye, straightened and un-pigged her nose, erased several scars on her scalp that had pulled her hair in unglamorous directions and undid the divot in her jawline that left her face uncannily lopsided. The brand, of course, remained, livid and fresh.
The horror of her life melted away in its most physical expressions, leaving her actually moderately pretty. Maybe .8 of a Charlie, in Charlie's reckoning. It didn't even occur to her that such a ranking scale was born of a place of unplumbed arrogance that even she wasn't consciously aware of. "See? Try walking! You should have no problems now," she said. Eliza pushed herself slowly up the wall, shifting her bundle around her, and took a step. Then a second, and almost fell. "Oh no, did I not do it right?"
"You did it right. She's just fighting her own muscle memory, aren't you?" Vaggie said.
"This feels so strange," Eliza said.
"So now I'll just open you a portal and..." Charlie said, but Vaggie planted her hand onto the pages of the book before she could flip.
"How exactly are we going to get that money into her hands legally?" Vaggie asked.
"What? I'm giving her the gold. It can't be worth that much," Charlie asked.
"Do you exist as a corporate entity on Earth?" Vaggie asked flatly.
"A wh... no. No I don't," Charlie said.
"We need Husk," Vaggie said.
"The sad looking cat-man?" Eliza asked.
"Yeah, that one," Vaggie said. She grabbed Charlie's chin and turned it toward her gently but insistently. "Do not, and I repeat, do not, make a portal until we get this done. The last thing I want is for her to go top side just to get killed while trying to deposit a dragon-hoard of gold into a bank in America of all fucking places."
It was said that the Rings of hell were suffused with the essence of the sin that they represented. In Moxxie's experience, that was a pretty hit-or-miss proposition, since Lust was too miserable to be horny in unless you had robust air conditioning, Wrath didn't make you any more likely to slug somebody than Pride did (and in many cases made you less so) and Greed was only what it was because it was a tax haven. But just as some stereotypes were stereotypes for a reason, Sloth did all it needed to to 'prove' that for all the other Rings all together.
To stand in Sloth was to be fatigued. Your muscles went limp, your breathing became shallow, and your concentration waned. Whatever the Rotten Kings of Sloth had done in this Ring seemed to echo still, even against the parasitic infestation that was the Qliphoth, which now reached toward the sky with a giant's ambition and a Sinner's restraint. The Worst Ring of Hell, now the Lowest with the destruction of Betrayal, at least played host to some very nice spas. It was relaxing to the extreme to be lazy in a place which catered to such laziness. A few days in a Sloth spa was said to be as restorative as a decade of relaxation elsewhere. And while Moxxie was mostly sure that was hyperbole, it was only a matter of extent, rather than whether it were true at all or not.
The taxi had puttered to a halt, and the driver was sitting with his driver door open, his feet on the ground, and was doing squats trying to lift the taxi's wheel off of the ground. Whatever made him happy, Moxxie figured. There was a reason why Sloth imps were so... big. The sheer proximity to the Abyss which birthed them seemed to inure imps to the fatigue of Sloth, leaving them hyper and energetic, needing to bleed off nervous energy any way they could. And most did it through physical labor or exercise.
"That... is a big tree," Maelstrom said, somewhat pointlessly, because of course the Qliphoth was big. A life-form who's roots dipped into the Abyss and only existed in the form it did because Sloth was a good bedrock Ring even failing all else, the thing was far, far, far taller than physics and biology said that such a plant should be able to grow. Moxxie didn't look at it too long, though, because the density of the power in it was hypnotizing. Maybe because it was the Tree of Death. Maybe because he had replaced his eyes. Whatever the reason, it was an uncomfortable thing to view. "I can't even see its canopy. Does it even have a canopy?"
"It did a long time ago. Now nobody's sure," Moxxie said. Stem Seven was an industrial town, what would usually be called a lumber-town, but unlike what such an image would usually evoke – rolling hills benuded of trees and pockmarked with decaying stumps – there was no such eyesore here. The grey-pink grasses bent with the breeze, until they were overtaken by concrete, and buildings. The largest structure by far in the town was the Root Drill, a factory-sized machine that scraped, cut, and scooped out industrial quantities of wood from the root, often in the hundreds of tonnes a day. Essentially all of the paper used in magical tomes was purified Qliphoth pulp. Larger chunks of prime cuttings would be sold as lumber to the splitting facility over yonder. And the Knots would be given to the local Presbyter's Guild, to be crafted into magical objects, fetishes, and trinkets of intense power. The rest, the dross, got thrown in with the rest of Hell's lumber industry to pad out its paper production, to cut two-by-fours, or the like.
And the next day, they would shift the entire building two dozen feet to the left along the rails, and start digging again, until they reached the edge of the Drill, where they cycled back to the first spot, which by then would have regrown in its entirety.
"This place reeks," Blitz held his nostrils shut.
"I like the smell," Maelstrom said.
"Paper making can be pungent," Moxxie said. He'd smelled worse growing up in that miserable manor in Greed. This didn't faze him. "What exactly are we doing here for?"
He pointed to a convenience store two lots away from the gas-station that they'd pulled over at. It looked run down – as many buildings of Sloth would – but the lights were on, which meant it was more welcoming than a lot of this town. "We gotta pick up a special tool to do our job today," Blitz said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a diamond that was almost as big as his fist, buffing it with his sleeve for a moment then tucking it back into a pocket. Why did that diamond have High Central resonance? Eh, probably not important.
"You still haven't explained how you intend to burn a False World free of its mooring," Moxxie pointed out.
"Like I said, special tool," Blitz said. "Heyyyy buddy! You got that shit I want!"
The imp that came out was a big one, painfully handsome, and awkwardly familiar to Moxxie. He swept his gaze along those approaching him, but did a double-take to look back to Moxxie. "Mox? Is that you?" Myron asked.
"Hey, Ron," Moxxie said, wishing he could melt into the floor without being eaten by a tree. Myron Blix was about the perfect example of what a physical specimen a Sloth imp could be. His jaw was all angles, his eyes sharp and almost black. His muscle definition had muscle definition, and he had hands that could crush the head of a Sinner. In Moxxie's bisexual little heart he still found Myron really fucking hot. He'd always thought that Ron would be out of his league. Learning that Ron had been after him of all imps during that brief window between getting out of prison and getting married to Millie was a true shock. "Been a while, huh."
"You could say that," he said, popping his toothpick into place and sauntering over. Oh, don't do that walk. It was fucking lucky that Millie hadn't come with them. If she'd have seen the spectacle that Moxxie was unwittingly putting on, she'd have never forgiven him. But in Moxxie's defense; DAYUM. Ron leaned against a light post, looking down a couple of inches at Moxxie's much smaller body. "You still shacked up with that crazy bitch from Wrath?"
That did a lot to break the spell. With a shake of Moxxie's head, he evicted the lust-slap from his face and put a proper annoyance in its place. "Her name is Millie, and not only have we been married for two years now, we're having a child."
"Didn't take you for a breeder, Mox," Ron said with a roll of his eyes.
"You didn't know me at all, Ron," Moxxie said. "Which hurts, because I thought we were friends."
Ron looked appropriately chagrined at that. "Yeah well, you missed a chance to be something more," he muttered.
"Look can we stop bein' a bunch of love-sick cunts for one fucking minute and get this deal done?" Blitz somehow, against all the common sense in all Creation, managed to be the voice of reason. All turned to him. "You got that shit we talked about?"
"Fucking right I do," Ron said. He quickly trotted over to his muscle-car – Ron had a muscle-everything, it seemed like – and popped the trunk. Revealed within was a pretty standard looking military flamethrower on one end, but the tank was very, very odd. "Latest bit of alchemical fuckery out of Glowtown. Finally got containment working so that it doesn't explode for no damned reason."
Moxxie's head tilted, trying to figure what he meant by that, but given the context clues and his own mental velocity it didn't take long to piece it together. And when he did, he took a looong step back. "Are you absolutely fucking insane?" Moxxie yelped. Maelstrom, who had been beside him, glanced back to where Moxxie had evacuated to, and decided that Moxxie probably had a good idea, retreating to stand beside him.
"What is it?" Maelstrom asked.
"Are you seriously selling us a tank full of INFERNAL FUCKING TALC?" Moxxie pointed at the object-of-lunacy-in-being that now menaced the gathering of them. Ron and Blitz didn't seem to grasp just how dangerous that shit was. Or if they did, they didn't care. Or, as Moxxie intuited, they did care, but they trusted something that Moxxie didn't know.
"Yeah, ain't it great?" Ron answered the question. "Want to see it go?"
"I don't want to see anything about it," Moxxie said, but Ron picked the thing up and slung the tank over one shoulder, walking over to the nearest streetlight. The nozzle of this flamethrower didn't have a pilot light at the end of it, because it wouldn't require one. There was a sickening, terrifying vuurp of noise as the thing let out a tiny belch of unreal green flames that bit into the metal of the pole and started to eat it, not even burning so much as erasing. Moxxie felt sick as his mind now struggled to juggle two timelines, one where he'd watched Ron let out a pulse of Infernal Talc at the standing pole and see it brought low, and another one where so much of the pole was never there to begin with that it had always just been lying on the ground, a curious and inexplicable piece of local trivia that nobody would until this moment even question.
Ron then did something even more insane, and reached up and slapped the tank to a fairly solid sounding thunk. "See? I'm not even dead."
"My brain feels fucky, which means that's exactly what I wanted. Come on, let's get you paid," Blitz beckoned back toward their own taxi.
"I've seen things that can do that," Maelstrom said, very quietly.
"In the Bleeding Pits?" Moxxie asked. Maelstrom nodded mutely. "Uncomfortable, isn't it?"
"I don't like it," he said.
"Nobody sane would. Blitz must be overjoyed," Moxxie pointed out. Maelstrom was silent for a moment, as the two of them watched the last of the unnatural green fire die, and leave the area partially unconstructed, a curious hole in an otherwise overbuilt neighborhood. Infernal Talc would definitely do the job of unseating a False World, though. Pushing the thing into the Abyss would be time consuming depending on where the nearest rift was, but it was certainly safer than the Talc was. The fact that somebody who wasn't him came up with a way to contain that infamously dangerous substance was a mild surprise to Moxxie. It seemed that there might be other titanic intellects out there. And if Hell now had a lock on a substance that could not even so much kill a man as un-exist him, that meant that things in the War For Heaven were going to be shifting into Hell's favor.
Moxxie might not have a lot of nationalistic pride, but the thought of not being utterly behind the curve against Heaven did inspire a certain joy in Moxxie, if even in an esoteric sense.
"What's that thing?" Maelstrom asked. Moxxie paused in his ponderings and turned to the Hellhound. Maelstrom was squinting at something in the distance, pointing down the road and out of the town that they were at the edge of. Moxxie turned to look out with his incredible eyes at what Maelstrom had spotted. He saw concrete, and brass and pulsating meat and at about that point Moxxie hit some sort of internal killswitch and turned his eyes off.
He stumbled for a moment, blinded by his own proverbial hand, making sure that he was focusing down at his own feet, and reached out toward Maelstrom until he grabbed the Hellhound by his shirt, and dragged him down. Then and only then did Moxxie 'turn his eyes back on'. It took a while for focus to return, as they'd strayed to pointing in different directions, but when he had Maelstrom in his sights, he snapped up at him. "Look at me, Maelstrom," he demanded. And then he tugged down with all of the might his body had, finally pulling Maelstrom's attention to the imp and not to... that thing. "LOOK. AT. ME."
"Okay, I'm looking," the worry returning to Maelstrom's expression. "What is that..."
"The less you know about that thing, the safer you are from it. I will not tell you what it is. Or what it can do. Or why it's here. Every notion about it you have puts you in further danger of it. If you think you ever see it down here, you look away and you pretend so hard that you didn't that you even fool yourself. Am I being clear?"
There was a nervous shifting of Maelstrom's eyes, in the vague direction he'd been looking, but Moxxie gave him a shake and shook his own head slowly. "I understand. I think. It's a danger to know about."
"Exactly," Moxxie said. It was bad luck that the Delirium Engine would turn up here and now of all places and times. But considering that even Belphegor didn't have a sturdy leash on that thing, such ill-luck was inevitable. And Moxxie was happy to say that he knew almost nothing more about it than what he'd said to Maelstrom. He'd only in his life seen it once in his dreams. That once was enough, thank you very much. It wasn't that Moxxie didn't nor couldn't understand what the Delirium Engine was, with his now superlative intellect; it was that he actively chose not to understand.
Blitz let out a whistle, and beckoned them back toward the taxi, now with an idiotically dangerous flamethrower strapped to his back. Myron was walking back to his muscle car, looking at Sloth through a diamond the size of Blitz's fist. With that to focus on, it was easy for the two of them to make their way back to the job without having to look upon or think about the Delirium Engine. As Moxxie reached the door to the taxi, though, Blitz seemed to have a notion. He leaned out of his window, and shouted across the parking lot. "Hey big boy! You ever think about tag-teaming a Demon Prince some time?"
Ron stopped, turning and giving a mildly baffled look at Blitz. Then a look that was almost... regret... at Moxxie, before returning his attention to Blitz. "You know what? I could be convinced."
"You got my number. Let me know when you wanna clap some bird cheeks."
"As long as he knows that I don't bottom," Ron said with a shrug.
"You should try it sometimes. The fun button's up there. Ask Mox, he knows," Blitz said, casting a thumb at Moxxie, who again wished he could melt through the floor. God-damn it, Blitz... Ron let out a laugh, and Moxxie slunk into the car. Maelstrom sat down beside him, shaking his head at the insanity he'd gotten wrapped up in. Then he paused, brow furrowing, as the taxi driver stopped trying to squat-lift his own car and began to drive again.
"...fun button?" he asked.
Moxxie turned a look at him. If Maelstrom hadn't looked so genuinely confused, he would have said that the Hellhound was mocking him. But Moxxie had to remind himself that in a surprising number of ways, and for all his incredibly violent history, Maelstrom could be shockingly innocent in some respects. "I'll tell you later," Moxxie said.
"Let's go burn a fuckin' tree! WOOOO!" Blitz shouted as they started to drive away from Stem Seven, and toward the fields of False Worlds that grew in the eternal shadow of the Qliphoth.
The clashing of metal was something Maelstrom was inured to. The battlefield was strewn with the dead, as was always the case in the Forever War. There was no battlefield anymore, just a pile of corpses reaching down to bedrock, sucked to various degrees into the muck. In some places, like here, they were high enough to form something of an island of the dead. The insane, red-twisted sky mocked them with eternal sunlight here, the red and bleeding eye of light static near the horizon in perpetual sunset.
"The Iron Guard is coming out of reserves. They know that we're bleeding," the Hauptmann said, pointing with his sabre at the map that had been stretched across the back of a dead Sinner. He couldn't point with his other arm because he didn't have one. "They're going to hit us on our left. Can you steady the men long enough?"
"Against the Iron Guard? That's like asking if a fingertip can hold against a meat-grinder," Maelstrom answered.
"Well nevertheless, I ask you to hold it anyway. They might be trying to use Bewegungskrieg against us, but God damn it all, we invented it, and we're fucking better at it!" the Hauptmann took a moment to lean and spit onto the dead in disdain.
"A counterflank," Maelstrom understood. "To stymie their advance and force them to try the Mire."
"Exactly, boy. Now jump to! We've got a war to win!" the Hauptmann said with a booming laugh, while Maelstrom grabbed his sword and pulled his helmet back over his ears. He could barely hear in this thing, but that was something of a mercy in the Forever War. Double timing saw him have his soldiers spot him and quickly lope into pace with him.
"What's our play, boss?" an underling asked of him.
"We need to hit the Iron Guard while they're wheeling to hit us. Just enough to drive them east," he said. The lines of this battle were starting to contract, with so many soldiers dead. Soldiers could die until the end of days, though. The Legions were themselves eternal, as there would always be more soldiers. There was no end to people like Maelstrom, born into the army, given arms when he proved that he had enough of a brain to use weapons beyond his teeth, and pointed at the enemy until one of them got lucky and killed him. He didn't get to choose how he was born. He didn't get to choose when he would die. So he had to make the best of the bits in the middle.
Maelstrom had a moment of confusion that stole his stride and almost dumped him into the muck as he tripped over a rogue knee that peeked above the grey slime the carcasses were cemented into. The underling leaned over, giving his arm a shake. "You alright, boss? You look like you just took a bolt to the back of your head."
"I just... had an odd thought," Maelstrom said. Who had told him that? He felt it was important, but couldn't for the life of him remember where he'd heard it.
He gave his head a shake. The slime was giving way to rocks, now, and the tide of corpses that they had to surf and stride across abated. A gap in those rocks would be all the defensive terrain that he needed. Just dig in like a porcupine shaking its quilled ass at its attackers, and force Stella Goetia's forces to swing wide to not have to deal with him. Right into the Mire. "Set up! Pike and shot!" he said, pointing at the cranny that would be used to his advantage. It gave him an overview of the area, and the ability to pepper that area with shot and quarrels if they didn't go well wide of him.
Wait a minute. Porcupine? What was a porcupine?
"canyoucanyoucanyouCan you hear me now?" a voice drew Maelstrom out of his confusion, and he started as he felt a presence near him, somebody proximate but not physically there. "Yeah, no shit, bud, I'm in your mind."
"What sorcery is this?" Maelstrom asked.
"Holy shit, you actually fought in a real battle before. That's wild," the voice continued. It was undoubtedly feminine, but not the sort of ragged, fried voice he heard from his fellow soldiers. This sounded more civilian. "Look. I just got a call from Tubby and Dad that you fucked up and got sucked into a False World."
"Noooo, I'm pretty sure I'm about to fight for my life," Maelstrom said.
"Really, we're doing this now?" the voice seemed preeminently annoyed. "Alright. Uhhhh, one second, I'm looping in Fatty."
"What the fuck!" another voice, this one more nasal and masculine joined the parliament inside Maelstrom's brain.
"Sir, have you been hexed?" one of the underlings asked. Maelstrom wanted to answer, but there was a yelp of alarm from the masculine voice.
"How is this possible! Loona, did you just telepatically connect us to the inside of a False World? Don't you know how dangerous that is?" the man demanded.
"Yeah, well it can't be more dangerous than losing Maelstrom while that bitch rolls off the edge," the one now called Loona said. That name made Maelstrom's heart lurch, but he didn't know why. "Mox, he thinks that shit is real. I need a way to convince him it ain't."
"The... right. Let met think," the voice said, and then the world around Maelstrom stopped. He couldn't move, even to twitch his eyes. He could not so much as blink. If his eyes were drying out, that would become very painful very soon, but that didn't come. Instead he felt a thunderous intellect working at terrifying speed, tearing through the stories of Fugue and reclamation, things that Maelstrom had gained exactly no training in and shouldn't have even known about. "Dream logic! Since Maelstrom isn't the first one to go into the False World, it's not centered around him. So it's feeding him dream logic to keep him placated. Attack that, and he'll break loose."
"Alright. Maelstrom," Loona said. Even disembodied, he could sense that she was steepling her fingers in front of her as she cleared her voice. "You were never trained in the use of weapons."
"And?" he asked.
"What does your sword look like?" she asked. Maelstrom frowned, then looked at his sword. It was a sword. He then told her as much. "I didn't ask what it was, Maelstrom. I asked what it looked like."
"It's got a blade. A handle. Those bits on the sides," he said.
"Uh huh. Describe it," she demanded.
"Somebody fetch a Mage! I think somebody's cursed the Oberleutnant," a voice called out, but it was not one of the two in his head.
"It's ah..." Maelstrom said.
"Straight or curved?" Loona asked. It was a sword.
"Slashing or piercing," the man asked.
"Ornate or plain?" Loona piled on. It was a sword.
"Sized for you, or for somebody else? Where's its balance point? Near the hilt or further up?" The man continued to press. And it was a sword. Until Maelstrom dropped it. And it vanished. Because it wasn't a sword. It wasn't anything. "I think we're getting somewhere. The men with you. What do they look like?"
"They're soldiers," Maelstrom said.
"Imps, Sinners or fiends?" Loona asked. Maelstrom recoiled. As the artifice began to crumble. And the real memories surged into the holes that the artifice left gaping. A horrifying fire, some small but safe distance away. A cracking sound. Advance. Orders to advance. No, not to advance; he had only been in one battle, and they didn't trust late-popping Maelstrom with weapons. No, it wasn't advance at all. No, the order had been 'start pushing'
A memory of cool plant-flesh under his palms.
"I can almost see him!" the man's voice called.
"Keep remembering, Maelstrom, You didn't go deep in there but there's a hill, and we're kinda on the clock!" Loona shouted. He didn't need to hear the urgency in her voice. He could feel hers as though it was his own.
"Boss?" the crumbling underling asked, not even paying attention how it was stopping existing, as real memories took its place. It was a massive orb, four meters tall. Colored like sky on the Human World at noon, shining from within but growing opaque as one went further from the edge of the flesh. There was an old, scabbed over lesion in its surface, where the target went in. Target! Right! He wasn't a soldier. He was an assassin!
They'd had to get it out of the little ditch it was in. Then push it down the hill to the rift that lead to the Abyss. And though the imps were stronger than they looked, it was Maelstrom who had done most of the shifting. Until the rolling of the massive fruiting body managed to catch him just unawares enough that he planted his shoulder against a part that was oozing Delirium Dye, a weak-point in the flesh. And then with a sickening sound, he fell into fantasy. He turned, the sky having gone dark in all directions but one. And there was a rotating hand extended toward him. He walked toward it, as feeling like he was treading through tar. He grasped that hand.
Another hand raced from the light beyond and clapped onto his wrist, followed by a third. All of them imps. And then with a wet tearing sensation, he was being pulled.
Reality crashed into Maelstrom's mind once and for all when three imps pulled him out of the flesh of the still-rolling False World, dumping him onto the grass on the side of the decline that they had intended to push this thing down. Moxxie and Blitz had just saved his life again. And the taxi-driver had, too.
"Alright, bud, that was clutch as fuck," Blitz said. He offered a whoop of joy, then stood, before turning and handing the taxi driver a fistful of probably-stolen jewelry. Maelstrom looked from that, to the False World which continued to glow blue as it rolled down the hill, bouncing over a little raise, before rebounding against the descent again and continuing down, picking up speed and inevitability as it accelerated toward the crack in Sloth through which Maelstrom could see the grim tides of the Abyss.
"Nice doin' business with ya," the taxi-driver said, pocketing the baubles, keeping one bangle which he wore as a bicep-band, and then casually sauntering toward where he'd parked his taxi-van.
"That could have gone a lot worse," Loona's voice in Maelstrom's head said.
"If the wound hadn't been on the axis of rotation? Yeah. We would have had to find a way to stop that thing," Moxxie agreed.
"The fuck are you talking about?" Blitz asked.
"Did you not... right. Sorry, sir. Its your daughter using her Purgatory magic on us," Moxxie said, motioning between he and Maelstrom.
"Wait, she can do that from six Rings up?" Blitz asked, with a gesture in her general direction.
"She could do it from here to Heaven, I wager," Moxxie said. Maelstrom watched as with a final bounce off of a big rock, the False World almost deflected itself to safety, but slowly came to a halt, then reversed, descending into the crack and out of Hell. Blitz had been recording the whole thing with his Hellphone, and when it fell past the point of no return, he let the recording stop.
"I'm referring to the fact that the False World didn't try doing that other thing," Loona said.
"Coauthoring? It takes longer for the fruit to do that than Maelstrom was in there," Moxxie disregarded the notion.
"Knowing our luck, though?" Loona pointed out. Moxxie wilted a bit.
"You know, I'll take the luck we got," Moxxie said. Then he turned to Blitz. "I think that's all we need to do here. I want to get out of this awful, awful Ring."
"I ain't gonna keep you waiting," Blitz said, starting toward the van, heedless of the handful of spectators who had just watched an assassination of an aristocrat take place in plain view.
"...that could have gotten a lot worse, couldn't it?" Maelstrom asked.
"Unbelievably," Moxxie agreed. He idly gestured toward the uniform that Maelstrom was still wearing. Which struck him as odd, because he'd gone in wearing normal clothes. Instead, he was now sitting on the grass in an infantry surcoat festooned with brocade and decorative toggles. "You're probably going to want to sell that at some point. People are willing to pay a lot for material recovered from a False World."
"Probably shouldn't have dropped my sword then," Maelstrom said.
"Hindsight," Moxxie shrugged, then started toward the taxi van. Maelstrom just stared at the flattened grass that described the path of the False World into the Abyss.
"You can't sit there forever, Maelstrom," Loona said in his head.
"How did you even know I was in trouble?" Maelstrom asked. There was a pause, as though she was trying to figure out an answer for her own sake.
"I think I just... always know... when people I care about are in trouble. And now, since that Purgatory bullshit, I can actually do something about it," Loona said.
She cared about him?
No, just a turn of phrase. She was a coworker and maybe even a burgeoning friend.
"One of these days you're going to have to explain to me what exactly happened in Purgatory, because I just got a look inside Moxxie's head and that was... frankly, a bit humbling," Maelstrom said.
"Yeah, Fatty was always smart. Since Purgatory, he's probably the smartest thing under Heaven. Same with Millie. Now she could take on an armored division naked using only a rock," Loona said, giving the impression of a shrug. "And not even a big rock!"
"And you can share things," Maelstrom said, recalling her claim on that fateful day when his destiny took an abrupt and well-welcomed left-turn. "I owe you again."
"You don't owe me shit, Mal. And you'd better get up, because I think Dad's getting impatient."
"Just one question, first," Maelstrom said.
"Shoot," was her answer.
"Why is your blood black and red?" Maelstrom asked. He hadn't brought it up since he saw it during the fight against the Adjacent, but he had seen it.
"I honestly can't give you an answer to that... but it I think it might be because I told Creation that Blitzø was my father," she admitted, sounding very tentative about it.
"You've had a very strange life," Maelstrom noted as he got to his feet.
"Says the man who ripped Nathan Birch's face off," she responded. Well, that felt off-kilter and abrupt, but the job was done. And he made a vow to himself to never go anywhere near those things again if he could help it. As bad as it was when he was stuck with Dream Logic, he could only scarcely fathom how much more constrictive, how insideous and how inescapable that Authorship would be.
Maelstrom's world may be hard, painful, and very very strange, but it was real. And it was worth a lot more than any glorious fantasy.
"So that's yer guy?" Husk asked, nodding toward the one that Arackniss had brought back from the Presbyter's Guild. As a Caprican Consumer Demon, he gravitated to a more goat-like appearance, with curled horns, eyes with rectangular pupils, and a long strand of grey beard that reached down from his chin reaching almost as low as his navel. He wore robes marked with celestial bodies of omen and import on Earth, or some shit. Angel didn't dig into what the Presbyters were about. Only that they did magic, and were willing to accept money.
"Yeah. That's everybody, right? Can we shift this shit up? I don't wanna think about Molly bein' stuck up there any longer than she has to, alright?" Angel pressured.
"You still ain't picked out a pointman," Husk said. "We're waiting till then."
"Fuck a pointman! We got what we need, let's go!" Angel Dust threw his arm wide at the group that was ensconced in the sitting room over there.
"You're bein' hasty. Haste has a way of killing people," Husk said, lighting a new cigar off of the dying stub of an old one.
"Look, if you don't keep your end, I'll just go to the first muthafucka' I find that'll portal us topside and I'll do it myself!" Angel Dust said.
"If you do that, you're gonna be coming back in a garbage bag, not in victory," Husk said, he stabbed the bar-top with a fingertip. "You ain't got the gear to make this work. You ain't got the intelligence. You ain't got..."
"You callin' me stupid now?" Angel Dust demanded.
"Military fuckin' intelligence goddamnit!" Husk now pounded the bar-top with a fist. The wood creaked under the treatment, one of the nails emerging a fraction of an inch from the pressures involved. "You're lettin' your eagerness blind you and it's gonna get the lot 'a you erased. Late. Spring. If you go faster than that, there ain't any winning in yer future, I can tell you that."
"Fuck your slow-as-shit planning and wheelin' and dealing and while we're at it, fuck you too! I got a sista' up there who's hurting and you just expect me to sit on my hands down here, waitin' till you says I'm ready to go up and get her?" Angel Dust demanded.
"If you was smart, you would," Husk agreed. Then he puffed out a breath of smoke, pooling around his head. "Look. I get it. You wanna do right by your sister. But you can't do it if you get massacred on Cloud One. You gotta trust me on this one."
"Maybe my trust is runnin' out exactly as fast as my patience," Angel Dust said, turning away from the bartender and stalking toward the room where the rest of his crew were sitting and discussing shit. He pushed the doors open and stormed in, no doubt an expression of frustration on his face.
"Hey, Angie, you alright there buddy?" Cherri asked, getting out of his chair to adhere to his side.
"How fast do you think we could get all'a this shit to that portal out on The Edge?" Angel Dust asked.
"Hold on," Arackniss said. "We're not waiting on Husk's shit?"
"I'm startin' to think he's not intending to actually do any of that shit. Just string me along."
"Bro, come on," Arackniss said. "I get it. I wanna help Molly too. And I get the frustration 'a working with somebody who just can't keep up wit' you. But.."
"But nothin'! You worked under Pops for seventy fuckin' years!" Angel Dust pointed out.
"And now I'm getting really, really fuckin' annoyed at the dumbass decisions he's makin'," Arackniss muttered.
"Rachel ain't gonna agree to this shit, and the cooks don't want none of it," Angel Dust said. "There ain't a pointman to get. I says we goes up there right now before things go even more to shit."
"That ain't gonna end well," Husk opined.
"It won't do nothing unless we get started. I say we start now," Angel Dust said. He turned and stormed out of the lobby, leaving Husk to sigh behind his back, and turn a look to Striker, who had been quietly sipping rotgut the whole time.
"You're still in this?" Husk asked.
"I got backups, and backups for those," Striker said.
"You'd better. 'Cause that," he motioned after whence Angel Dust had departed, "is gonna be a goddamned mess."
"The main feeling of the first year of the War was fear. Fear born of uncertainty, mostly. It was something that had never been seen in Hell, and certainly on a scale not known in living memory. Hell was used to formalized slaughter, not industrialized slaughter. Champions fighting it out for the victory of a set-piece battle, not a meat-grinder where ten thousand men and women are slaughtered between sunrise and sunset for the fate of an inch of land. It's ironic, considering the Forever War that they'd been fighting since Lucifer invaded Hell way back when, that they never got around to emulating the Great War in all of its horror. What they found unsporting and boring would have prepared them for the slog through the Rat Towers, and the war for the Lower Clouds.
Don't just take my word for it. Machiavelli and Agrippa both agree with me. And if you get three soldiers from three very different generations of warfare agreeing on strategy, you know something's gone very fucking wrong. But the Queen down here saw the way the wind was blowing and instead of hiding from it, built against it. Keep Heaven on the back foot. Keep fighting in ways they don't think of. Machiavelli was good. He was damned good. But he had to fight against his own institution that refused to listen to the likes of a former mortal about where the weapons came from, who was using them, and what actually mattered. Heaven kept lionizing their champions. Hell created fire teams to kill them at range.
I could talk about this shit all day. The whole reason why the war went as poorly as it did under the previous administration was that Lucifer... well, the guy was a bit of a shitter. I know, I know, you're not s'posed to say bad things about the dead. But that means I can't say one fucking thing about Lucifer. He fought Heaven the way that Heaven fought, which was stupid and wrong. Frankly, if he hadn't have gotten rubbed out, Hell would be a much emptier place, and I'd have been dead, instead of what I am now. He was impatient. He was foolhardy. And it cost him everything. It almost cost Hell everything, too. Lucky we managed to get some competent leadership in the end.
The Queen of All Hell doesn't sit the throne because she was the greatest warrior or most powerful mage. She got the job because she was the best at burying our dead."
-Vacuole the Unstoppable, Redemptor.