The Scarlet Gospels

  “That hurts.”

  “Good. It’s supposed to. Now listen to me: I don’t know you from a warm hole in a cold corpse, but there’s been enough bloodshed already without adding your body to the heap. Wherever he’s taking us, he knows what he’s doing.”

  “If it were possible, I would be humbled,” the Hell Priest remarked from quite a distance ahead. It was obvious he’d heard every word Norma and the soldier had shared. “You’re right, of course. I haven’t come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.”

  The words cut through Knotchee’s panic. His heartbeat ebbed, his skin dried, and he picked up his stride once more. And it was just as the Hell Priest had promised. After thirty or forty yards, the passageway and its confines opened up.

  “What do you see?” Norma asked.

  There was a long pause. Finally, Knotchee said, “It’s so big I’m not sure—”

  “Set her down,” the Hell Priest said.

  Knotchee did as instructed. The pebbles were extremely uncomfortable beneath Norma’s bony behind. But within a few minutes of sitting down there was a sound of running feet, off to her right, and shouts of what surely was adoration from those who were approaching.

  Knotchee had walked off, leaving Norma to interpret what happened next by the sound alone, which she was used to doing. She guessed that perhaps a dozen or so creatures had come along the beach to pay their respects to the Hell Priest. She heard several dropping down onto the pebbles, whether kneeling or lying she couldn’t tell, to demonstrate their reverence, their shouts subdued now to sibilant whispers. Only one voice rose above the worshipful mutterings, that of an aged female who addressed the Hell Priest in a language Norma had no knowledge of.

  “Avocitar? Lazle. Lazle matta zu?”

  “Ether psiatyr,” the Hell Priest replied.

  “Summatum solt, Avocitar,” the woman said. And then, apparently addressing the others, “Pattu! Pattu!”

  “Pick up your baggage, soldier,” the Hell Priest said. “The Azeel are prepared for our arrival. They’ve readied our vessels.”

  As soon as Knotchee hoisted Norma onto his back he said, “I’ll be glad to leave this place.” Then more quietly, “And gladder to leave these freaks.”

  Norma waited until the trek along the beach was under way and she heard the sound of feet on the pebbles to cover her questions before she dared ask her question “What do you mean by ‘freaks’?”

  “They’re inbred,” Knotchee said. “Can’t you smell them? They’re disgusting. When this is over, I’m going to bring a squad out here and clean this filth up.”

  “But they’re demons, like you, aren’t they?”

  “Not like me. They’re misshapen. Heads too big, bodies too small. All of them naked. It’s an insult to their heritage. It makes me sick. They must be stomped out.”

  “What heritage?”

  “The Azeel were the first generation of angels after the fall, the sons and daughters of those who had been cast down with our lord Lucifer. Theirs were the hands that built Pyratha. And then, when it was finished, and our lord Lucifer pronounced it good, they went with him to their own land, which he had made for them as reward for their labors. And having gone into their secret country, they were never seen again. Now I know why.”

  “And where is Lucifer? Does he have his own secret country?”

  “He’s been gone many, many generations. As for where he is now, it isn’t my place to ask, nor is it my right to know. The Lord of Lords is with us every moment, and in every place.”

  “Even now?”

  “In every moment. In every place,” the soldier replied. “Now unless you want to walk from here, let this subject sleep.”

  Norma and the soldier continued in silence, walking along the beach as the Azeel led the Hell Priest and his entourage to their boats.

  The Azeel had started chanting now, the chant’s rhythmic power, building phrase upon phrase, changed with obsessive devotion. The chant turned Norma’s thoughts to pulp; she couldn’t hold two notions together.

  “They need you to go to the boat, Norma,” Knotchee said. “Can I go with her?” he asked somebody, and was given the answer he wanted. “I’ll sit in front of you.”

  Knotchee lifted Norma up off his shoulders and gently deposited her on her wooden seat. She reached out to the left and right of her, running her fingers over the carved beams. The boat did not feel particularly stable. Even though they were in the shallows, it rolled alarmingly whenever someone climbed aboard.

  “Where is he?” she asked Knotchee.

  “In the first boat,” he replied. “They carved him a kind of throne.”

  “How many boats are there?” Norma asked.

  “Three,” answered Knotchee. “All carved with angels’ wings running the length of each side of each boat. Every barb and vein of every feather, perfectly carved. I never saw anything so beautiful in my life. Truly we are blessed to bear witness to such events.”

  “Funny,” said Norma. “I’ve never been happier to be blind.”

  The old demon woman who had first addressed them spoke once again:

  “When you go, I start big chanting, to conceal any noise you make from Quo’oto.”

  The name brought barely audible rumblings from the Azeel who were in the boats, desperate little prayers, Norma guessed, to keep Quo’oto away, whatever it was.

  “All of you,” the demon went on, “not to say a word until you getting to Last Place. Quo’oto hears well.”

  The observation was echoed in whispers by the entire assembly.

  “Quo’oto hears well. Quo’oto hears well. Quo’oto hears well.”

  The old demon woman said, “Be wise. Be silent. Be safe. We staying here and making like a noise that will drive Quo’oto deeper.”

  The boats were pushed off from the shore, their hulls scraping on stones for a few seconds before they floated free. Then those who had the oars, one of whom was Knotchee, began to paddle, and if the strength of the wind against Norma’s face was anything to judge by, they were skimming through the water at a tremendous pace.

  Norma could hear the bow of the boat behind them cutting the water and very occasionally the sound of one of the oars striking one of the waves from the boat in front, but otherwise the first portion of the journey, which took perhaps half an hour, went without incident.

  Soon after, however, Norma felt a sudden drop in temperature, and her skin began to crawl with gooseflesh. She could feel it pressing against her face, and chilling her lungs when she next drew breath. Despite this, the boats continued on their expeditious paths through the water, sometimes coming out of a patch of mist for a few teasing moments of warmth, only to plunge back into the bitter air before Norma could even stop her teeth from chattering. The noise she was making was loud enough for one of her fellow passengers to pass forward a piece of canvas that Knotchee placed between her teeth to silence her.

  Finally the mist began to thin a little, and then, as the boats came to shore, suddenly it was gone. That’s when Knotchee spoke:

  “Oh demonation,” said Knotchee. “It’s beautiful.”

  “What is?” said Norma, leaning closer to Knotchee, but he gave no reply. “Tell me!” Norma said. “What? What do you see?”

  * * *

  In the span of his life, which had been, to date, far longer than any human life, the Hell Priest had witnessed a great deal that would have cracked lesser minds wide open like fumbled eggs. He once visited a continent in a remote dimension that had contained a single species of mottle-shelled creatures the size of roadkill mongrels, their only food one another or, if pressed to it, their excremental remains. Truly, the Hell Priest was no stranger to the abhorrent. And yet, now that he was in the place where he’d longed to be for many years—the place that had conjured in his mind’s eye waking dream upon waking dream—why, he wondered, did he find himself nostalgic for th
e presence of those corrupted beasts who had only earned his contempt in earlier times?

  As soon as he begged the question, he knew the answer, though there wasn’t a living soul in Hell (or out of it, for that matter) to whom he would have confessed the truth, which was simply this: now that he was finally here in the Unholy of Unholies, where he had ached for too long to be, he was afraid. He had good reason.

  His boat had come ashore, and, fixing his eyes only on the structure, he went to it, like a moth to flame. And now he stood, buried in the oppressive shadow of an edifice so secret, so vast, so complex, that there was nothing in Hell or on Earth (even in those most guarded of chambers in the Vatican, which had been built by men of such genius the chambers defied the laws of physics and were vastly larger on the inside than on the out) that had any hope of comparison with the place where the Hell Priest now stood. The island upon which the structure had been built was called Yapora Yariziac (literally, the Last of All Possibilities), and the name was no lie.

  The Hell Priest was finally here, at the end of his journey, with so many betrayals and bloodlettings marking his path, and he actually found himself assailed with doubts. Suppose all his hopes of revelation were confounded? Suppose the Archfiend’s majesty had not left any mark on this place for the Cenobite to draw power and understanding from? The sole reason the Hell Priest had come here was to stand in the last testament to Lucifer’s genius.

  He had expected to feel Lucifer’s presence in him, filling up the void in him and, in so doing, showing him the secret shape of his soul. But as it stood, he felt nothing. He’d read somewhere that the makers of Chartres Cathedral, the masons and the carvers of the great façade, had not chiseled their names onto the finished work as an act of humility for the Creator in Whose name the cathedral had been raised.

  Was it possible, he wondered now, that Lucifer had done something similar? Actively erasing the echoes of his presence in the name of a higher power? He was suddenly agonizingly aware of the nails that had been hammered into his skull, their points pressing into the clotted jelly of his brain. He had always understood that this portion of his anatomy, being nerveless, could not give him pain. But he felt pain now: bleak, meaningless, stupefying pain.

  “This is not right…” he said.

  There was no echo off the walls of the edifice; they had consumed his words just as they had his hope. He felt something stirring in his belly, then rising through his tormented body, growing in force as it ascended. He had cultivated a distance from his own despair over the years, but it met him at this place and would never again be put out of his sight.

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

  20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Harold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “The fuck?” said Caz.

  “I think we’ll find out whether we want to or not,” said Harry.
r />   The Harrowers barely had time to unsheathe their weapons when a creature came into view from around the bend of the beach. She looked like a misshapen demon; she was squat, no more than three and a half feet tall, and her bald head virtually fetal in its shape and relative proportion to her body. She was naked but caked from head to foot with grime. She stopped as soon as she saw the Harrowers, and despite their defensive stances, a wide smile spread across her face.

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

  “Ji si si mo?”

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

  “Definitely not,” said Lana.

  “Negative,” said Caz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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