“Where do you suppose they came up with their new supply of Ravaiim blood?” Death asked, apparently having missed—or chosen to ignore—War’s own question.
“You … I haven’t the first idea.”
“I have.”
Again the conversation lagged; Death appeared lost in thought, and War stubbornly refused to give in and again be the one to speak first.
“I wondered,” the older brother finally said, “what sort of source would be plentiful enough for Hadrimon to waste the time and effort obliterating a minor outpost, yet questionable enough that they’d feel the need to test the blood and make certain it would function.”
“And …?” War prompted.
“And I do not believe that Earth Reaver’s absence was due to its ponderous nature.”
War sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. “You think they opened up one Abomination to feed the other!”
The mask bobbed in a shallow nod. “It makes sense. The Grand Abominations are constructed partly of Ravaiim remains. They’re old, desiccated, preserved—but if you squeeze even the driest fruit hard enough …”
“They’d eventually destroy the entire lot of them that way.”
“True. But not for some time, especially if they continually use the larger, such as Earth Reaver, to power the smaller.”
“Such as Black Mercy.”
A second nod. “They’ll run through the Vault eventually, but not before they’ve done more than enough irreparable damage.
“And that, War, means that they’ll be coming for the Vault itself, and the rest of the Grand Abominations, soon enough. Now that they know they can dismantle one to awaken others, it’s their only viable move.”
A grin of brilliant white split the shadows beneath the crimson hood. “You mean they’ll be coming to us.”
“Precisely.”
The grin faded. “Assuming they locate the Abomination Vault before Fury and Strife hunt them down.”
“Oh, they know where the Vault is. I think I told you, they’ve known that since the moment they learned of the Ravaiim blood.”
War’s jaw moved, but whatever protest he’d formed died before passing through his lips. “And you knew they’d make for the Ravaiim homeworld first,” he said instead, “because there was no point in facing your defenses and trying to break into the Vault if you got to the blood before they did.”
“Very good, brother. I knew you’d get there. Of course, that was before they—or I—had thought about tearing apart Earth Reaver to get at the blood within. But I suppose one cannot expect everything to go as anticipated.”
“So you’ll finally be showing me where you’ve hidden your precious Vault?”
“Not quite yet. It’ll have to be quick, since we’ve no idea when Hadrimon and Belisatra might move, but if we’re going to end this for good and all, we have a few stops that we must make first.”
THE ASHES SEEMED TO GO ON FOREVER.
A light carpeting of fine particles over a thicker, more calcified sludge; a constant swirling in the air, biting at eyes and nose and throat, tossed and teased by perpetual winds; and always, at the edge of hearing, the tolling of a forgotten bell. A dead world; a murdered world.
All just as Death remembered it, as he’d left it only … Oblivion and Abyss, had it been so recently? Even for an immortal, it felt a lot longer.
“Something …” War raised a hand, partially shielding his face, and tried to peer through the drifts of ash. “There’s something naggingly familiar about this realm.”
“You’ve been here before,” Death confirmed. “It didn’t look quite like this then, though we left it in an ugly enough state.”
“We?”
“Well, the Nephilim.” The Horsemen had turned aside from the others by that point, but as they spent much of their time trying to curtail the race’s rampage, they’d traveled to most of the worlds the Nephilim attacked. “This was the last world they ravaged before …”
“Before Eden,” War finished for him.
“Yes.”
They trudged through the drifts of ash. Despair seemed able to stride atop most of it, but Ruin grew ever more irritated as the powdery stuff sucked at his hooves. Once again, had any observers been present—and had they been able to spot such a minor detail through the impeding soot—they might have noticed the conspicuous absence of a certain crow. Wherever the Horsemen had gone between the domain of the Charred Council and here, Dust had apparently not accompanied them all the way.
“This is not a good plan,” War groused.
“So you’ve said. A lot.”
“Then why do you insist on following it?”
“Because, brother, you have yet to offer up a better one.” Then, at the continued chorus of somewhat less articulate grumbles, “Some faith, War. Everyone knows his part.”
“If your timing is off by so much as—”
“Then our timing had best not be off.”
More grumbling, which lasted until they drew near enough their destination to see that the low structure was formed of old bone. Dried blood mortared the gaps solid, and most of those bones appeared to have been sculpted and warped, rather than carved, into shape.
It could be the work of only one particular architect.
“This is your home!” It sounded almost accusatory.
“Be it ever so humble,” Death said.
War gawped a moment, and laughed softly. “Only you would lay your bed beside something like the door of the Abomination Vault, brother.”
“What better way to keep an eye on it?”
“And when you told me your home hadn’t drifted off to the Abyss because it was anchored …”
“Precisely. The Vault again. Worked out for everyone.”
“Until a crazed angel and his construct army invade your bedchamber in search of the damn thing.”
“As I’ve said before, War, you can’t have everything. Enough of this. Step inside, out of the soot, and make yourself comfortable. Unless my timing is, indeed, off, we shouldn’t have terribly long to wait.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
INDEED, THEY DID NOT WAIT LONG AT ALL.
Their first warning was a dreadful keening, louder than the phantasmal bell, sharper than the constant winds. Death shot to his feet from the bare floor of the equally bare chamber. He slid Mortis over his left hand and made for the door, Harvester flying to his side. War followed only two steps behind, cloak billowing.
They stepped out into the swirling ash and, at Death’s lead, scrambled to the top of the squat edifice. “We can see farther from up here,” he explained as he climbed. “Albeit not much.”
Both Ruin and Despair watched them ascend, snorting and pawing at the soot, ears tilted toward the ongoing shrieks.
“What is that sound?” War demanded, kneeling on the roof and squinting into the distance. “That’s no construct I’ve ever heard.”
“No. Those would be the phantoms bound to the perimeter. Enjoy the show while you can. We’ll have to go on stage ourselves soon enough.”
Death leaned back, bracing himself on Harvester, and dropped his head in concentration. The wind whistled around him, adding a second mask of stringy hair atop the one that normally concealed his features. He’d done this before, and easily enough—but never across such thick boundaries, separated by so many realms.
The bone surface below him rippled, faded to a roughly contoured black. Brilliant as a lightning strike, and equally as fleeting, he saw the craggy visage of the Crowfather, expression sagging in one of his traditional scowls.
“Honestly, the two of you need to learn to damn well do this yourselves. I’ve got better things to occupy my time than play courier whenever you get lonesome …”
And he was gone. A sinuous conduit of pure thought stretched through the non-space his image had occupied, linking two distant minds, one great, one feral.
As War leaned over the roof’s edge, studying the first of the distant shapes eme
rging from the ashen flurries, Death’s attentions were worlds away, delivering the simplest, yet the most urgent, of signals.
THE CHAMBER’S WALLS WERE CONSTRUCTED OF OLD, pockmarked bricks; less stone, to all appearances, than tightly compressed filth. Mold flourished between them, having not only covered but utterly consumed whatever mortar might once have been there. A sticky film of condensation coated it all, as if the room itself were sweating.
Given the sweltering, feverish warmth of Hell—the hot breath of a leprous loved one sifting across one’s skin, one’s soul—perhaps it was.
For its single inhabitant, however, the chamber held no discomfort. It wore only portions of its chipped and corroded armor—from the waist down, gauntlets, helm. The remainder lay in a heap in the corner, awaiting the demon’s attention. The skin of its exposed torso was softly chitinous, like the underside of a roach, and riddled with cracks like old parchment. Those fissures glowed a grotesque blue, occasionally emitting tiny fingers of what might or might not have been flames.
Before the Knight of Perdition, atop a “table” that was really little more than a flat-topped mound of hardened mucus, lay his sword. The hideous blade—jagged, serrated, rust-pitted, and barbed—was so thickly encrusted with dried blood as to render it almost a blunt instrument. With careful, even loving attention, the Knight was slowly sanding and polishing the blade with what appeared to be someone’s severed tongue.
His meticulous and rather wet-sounding ministrations ceased abruptly, however, as one of the chamber’s doors crashed open. Made of the same dried demonic excretions as the table, it actually chipped flakes from the brick as it struck the adjoining wall. Through the doorway, winding so as to practically tie itself in knots, came the four-armed serpentine form of a shadowcaster.
“The mistress!” it hissed. Its voice was the crinkle of discarded snakeskin, flowing around a forked and flickering tongue. “I must be permitted to address the mistress! At once!”
Slowly, the Knight of Perdition lay the tongue upon the table and hefted its sword in gauntleted fingers. Its own words, emerging from within the helm, were hollow echoes. “Mistress Raciel has not called. We do not suffer her to be disturbed by the likes of you.”
“Even,” the lesser demon cooed, “when the likes of me have knowledge she craves? You underestimate our magics, sir knight. We have located the Abomination Vault! Even now, the forces of the mad one move to claim its wonders!”
“Wait here.” The half-armored rider strode from the chamber at a stiff-legged pace suggesting he very much wanted to run.
The supposedly blind shadowcaster craned its neck so that it could peer down at its own chest. Something seemed to be making the faintest rustling sound within its flesh.
“I do hope,” said the demon that was not truly a demon, “that you really were giving me Death’s signal. If you were just going on a sudden rant regarding the quality of the local carrion or whatnot, this is not going to turn out well.”
Squawk! answered Dust.
THE FIRST LINE of Belisatra’s myrmidons came spinning through the ash, slowed only slightly by the particulate, and died as rapidly as they appeared. Inky shadow spread over them, poured from some unseen well, and the life, artificial as it may have been, simply fled their bodies. Even inertia seemed sucked from them, for they ceased spinning instantly and toppled, some tripping the next rank following behind.
Cyclones of bone, not unlike the storms Death had earlier unleashed upon the demonic hordes, rose from the ash, chewing through metal that might just as well have been children’s candy. Forks of black lightning seared the drifting soot, blasting holes through constructs and craters into the ground—and from those craters leapt slavering ghouls to fall upon the enemy with ripping fang and rending claw.
“I’m impressed,” War admitted, admiration for the unfolding mayhem rolling off him in an almost visible aura.
“I should hope so,” Death said. “You’d never believe how difficult and time consuming it was setting those wards in the first place. I’ll be fortunate if I can even muster the patience to re-create them after all this.”
“If you survive this at all.”
“And here everyone says I’m the gloomy one.”
On and on, Death’s necromantic defenses raged; and on and on, Belisatra’s army of constructs advanced, a rising tide of brass and rock. The Horseman, for all his power, never had the slightest doubt which would fail first. His home had never been intended to stand up to a genuine siege.
The black lightning, the swirling bones, the inky pockets all slowed. Fewer constructs triggered the wards, and those wards they did trigger killed fewer constructs. And still the soldiers came, as if the ash itself gave birth to them.
“I wonder,” Death mused idly, “where they found that much brass?”
The last of the pre-prepared necromancies flickered and died. On that cue, the Horsemen dropped from the roof to land in the waiting saddles. The mounts charged, powerful enough that the churning ash posed only a minimal impediment. Before they knew what had happened, the automatons were falling to the twin edges of Harvester and Chaoseater.
War plowed through the center of the army, letting blades careen harmlessly from his armor. He swung Chaoseater in broad strokes, rending myrmidons half a dozen or more at a time. Ruin reared, hooves crushing anything foolish enough to stand too close.
Death and Despair swept around the edges of the mass, occasionally darting in and out to prove that even those farther from the borders were not safe. Against them he wielded scythes, knives, hammers, spears—all of them Harvester, all of them lethal. Few of the myrmidons came anywhere near to hitting him, and those who got close found their most precise strikes parried. Only when he had no other choice did Death rely on Mortis to stop an incoming stroke; he could not be certain how much power, how much life, the half-dead Abomination might retain, and he wasn’t about to waste its remaining utility on these creatures.
Not when the true enemies had yet to appear.
Even now, not quite fully recovered from their recent travails, the Horsemen had nothing to fear from the whirling myrmidons. Had it been only a question of attrition, with no concern for time, they could eventually have whittled down even so large an army as this.
Unfortunately, slaying the two Riders was not the foes’ only course to victory.
The constructs began to disperse, streaming around the edges of the conflict and making for Death’s abode. And here, out in the open, even the vaunted Horsemen could do nothing to restrain the tide.
“Fall back to the door!”
War wheeled at his brother’s call and sent Ruin plunging back the way they’d come. Death and Despair appeared beside them, and the horses swiftly outpaced the myrmidons.
“You’ll do us no good standing with us,” Death told the steeds as he and War dismounted. “Despair!” He pointed off toward the left. “Harry the flank.”
War matched the gesture, indicating right, and barked a similar command at Ruin. A pair of snorts, one brutish and one spectral, expressed the horses’ dissatisfaction with the arrangement, but both obeyed. Death and War stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the only door to the small structure.
And to the Abomination Vault.
Again Chaoseater and Harvester flew, again the constructs fell. On rare occasion, when the sheer press of numbers threatened to force the Horsemen through the doorway, Death unleashed a storm of bones or War called a copse of otherworldly blades from the ash, driving back all who approached. Heaps of shredded metal expanded into hedges, hedges into walls, until the myrmidons could hardly even approach without first digging through multiple layers of their own dead.
The first shot rang through the sky, piercing the chaos of battle. Death cried out to his brother—his precise words lost in the tumult—and dived forward, Mortis raised high.
The impact was enough to stagger him, even through the ancient shield. Mortis howled, lashing out to obliterate one of the nearby con
structs, but Death scarcely noticed.
Hadrimon had arrived, and Black Mercy with him.
The Grand Abomination spat, over and over, raining a hailstorm of teeth across the doorway. Several constructs fell to misaimed shots, but clearly the maddened angel couldn’t have cared less. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware. Other shots pinged off the solid bone of Death’s abode, but they left deep gouges and spreading pockets of dry rot behind.
The angel was slowly getting his eye in, even through the ashen clouds, and Mortis was far too small a barrier to rely on. Still reluctant, for all he’d known the moment would come, the elder Horseman ordered the younger deeper into the structure.
“Still not comfortable with this,” War huffed between heavy breaths. “Not a lot of room to maneuver in there.”
“For them, either. Besides, I told you, I can get us out if I need to.”
Within the walls, the building opened up into a single broad room, just as austere as it appeared from without. The ghouls that Death had left here so long ago had finished their work, but it amounted to precious little. On one wall hung a variety of scythes—weaker and less versatile predecessors to Harvester, built while Death was still mastering his talents. Opposite the door, a slab of bone—a primitive cot, essentially—jutted into the room.
And that was it. Death was clearly a homeowner of few needs. If the portal to the Abomination Vault was indeed here, it certainly wasn’t making itself obvious.
“We ought to have a few moments,” War said, taking a quick peek past the doorjamb and then jerking back as Black Mercy pumped several teeth through the opening. “Just digging through the sprawl of shredded metal we left behind should take them at least—”
A rapid fusillade of muffled thumps, like a full battery of Redemption cannons firing at once, reverberated through the walls. The entire structure shook as a series of concussive blasts ripped across the battlefield outside, shock waves hurling earth and dead constructs this way and that, white-hot flame melting into slag anything those shock waves missed.
“Unless,” the Horseman finished lamely, “Belisatra shows up with some new toy.”