Chapter 6
The tunnel was dark and close, too narrow for more than one Angel at a time to run through, and far too narrow for any to fly. Persephone grabbed Nyx and shoved her ahead. Nyx went without protesting. Persephone was the stronger of them at this instant, and having her fighting rearguard was as good a guarantee that they would not be overrun as any.
Surviving what was ahead of them, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.
Nyx stumbled as fast as she could through the darkness. The tunnel’s floor was all jagged edges and spikes that would have cut bare flesh to ribbons. Every now and then it would give way, opening into pits that threatened to engulf her legs and, once, her entire body, had she not gone over them. The walls had thin, jagged-edged rocks sticking out like spikes on a cactus, making any attempt to lean or catch one’s balance on them nearly impossible.
The worst of Nyx’s pain began to fade as her body healed, and she was able to pay attention to more than just where she was stepping. She could hear the shouts of the Angels in pursuit and their running footsteps in the tunnel. She could also hear Persephone swearing in every language ever spoken, punctuated on regular occasions with, “Stupid, stupid bitch!”
That was pretty much the same way Nyx was feeling about Ishtar at that moment.
The chain of cursing stopped, and Persephone said, “They’re nearly caught up. How are you doing?”
“Healing,” grunted Nyx.
“Have you been down here before?”
“Eons ago,” said Nyx. She gasped as a rib, dislodged by Ishtar’s blade, snapped back into place. “There are things in here you don’t see on the surface, so be careful. And don’t fall into any of the pits.”
“Why not?”
Before Nyx could answer the first Angel from the 666th ran up behind them.
Persephone changed her blade to resemble a Roman gladius—short, wide, with sharp edges and a wickedly pointed tip. The first Angel hadn’t thought of doing the same, and his attempts to use his whip and blade were immediately hampered by the narrowness of the corridor. Persephone grinned, parried his blade, and with a pair of quick cuts, gutted him and split his skull in two. The Angel right behind him shoved his body down and charged forward, his own blade changing to resemble Persephone’s as he came. The two of them clashed briefly before Persephone cut off his hand and ran her sword through his head. He dropped like a rock, and the next Angel came after.
Nyx’s pain receded even more, and she began to move faster. The tunnels wound farther and farther downward, sometimes widening enough that they could run unhindered, other times narrowing so they had to turn sideways and shuffle their way forward.
Persephone kept up with Nyx every step of the way, though she was running backward and fighting. Two more Angels fell to her blade, and a third one stepped on a thin piece of the floor and went right through up to his knee. He had his leg pulled halfway out when something yanked him back in. There was a cracking of bone, then the Angel began screaming.
“What the fuck?” said Persephone, momentarily stunned into stopping.
“Tunnel crawlers,” said Nyx, grabbing Persephone and pulling her along. “They’ll strip the flesh off your bones so fast you won’t even have a chance to see them before they’re finished.”
“Fuck,” said Persephone. “Are they going to come up into this tunnel?”
“No,” said Nyx. “The thing that carved these tunnels eats those like candy. And anything else it finds.”
“Including us?”
“Yes.”
“Go faster.”
“Doing my best,” grunted Nyx.
The tunnel divided once, then again, then a third time, before Nyx had regained her full strength. Persephone cut down a dozen more pursuers, leaving a trail of silver ichor, limbs, guts, heads, and broken bodies to be trampled by the five thousand Angels following.
At the fourth divide, Nyx looked over her shoulder. “Get ready to fly.”
“Fly? Down here?”
“Faster than you’ve ever flown before.”
Persephone clashed blades with another Angel, and for a moment there was only the sound of struggle. Then the Angel shrieked as Persephone’s blade flipped neatly around his, cut open his arm, then ripped across his belly. “Flying fast underground doesn’t sound good,” said Persephone.
“It isn’t,” said Nyx, “but it’s our only way out of here. Now!”
The tunnel floor gave way and the walls spread wide out of sight. Nyx launched herself into the darkness. Directly into Persephone’s mind, she sent, “Sheath your sword.”
“What?” said Persephone out loud, disbelief on her face.
“Do it! And shut up!”
Persephone did it and shut up. They raced forward into the enormous cavern. It was so large and so dark that even their Angel eyesight could only barely make out the dimensions.
“Oh fuck,” Persephone’s voice came into Nyx’s head. “It’s all moving!”
An enormous hand reached down, grabbed Ishtar’s hair, and ripped her face off the blades. Then the clawed hand shoved itself through the skin and bone of her skull and used its grip to rip the rest of her body off. Ishtar screamed.
She was flown up out of the pit and dropped unceremoniously onto the jagged rock of the ground. She closed her eyes, willing everything else to go away while her body healed itself.
A cloven-shaped boot drove into her midsection. “Where is she going, bitch?”
Ishtar gasped, and her eyes popped open. Lucifer stood over her, fury on his face. “We blocked the gate to Earth so where the fuck is she going?”
Ishtar pushed at the ground until she was sitting up. “Fucked if I know.”
Lucifer’s boot connected again, sending Ishtar flying a hundred yards before she bounced and skidded to the jagged, rocky ground. “There’s nothing under there but demons and rock!” Lucifer shouted. “So where is she going?”
“I. Don’t. Fucking. Know. I didn’t know there was an exit here until Nyx told me. And she sure as fuck didn’t tell me anything else.”
Lucifer closed the distance between then so fast that Ishtar didn’t have time to react before his cloven boot rammed once more into her body. Again she went flying.
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll put you in the box I put Nyx in and dump you at the bottom of the lake.”
Ishtar lay on the ground a moment, then ignored all the pain in her body and, with a slow flapping of her wings, brought herself up to her feet. “I did what I said I would do. I turned my back on Nyx. I shoved a sword in her guts and ripped her open so that your fucking Legions could take her and imprison her. The fact that they’re slow and stupid is not my fault, so stop blaming me!”
Lucifer looked up at the cloud of Angels above him. “Five hundredth! Take this thing back to Nyx’s palace. Put her in the blade room. If she gets flushed out the tunnel, put her back.” His eyes went back to Ishtar. “And when I am done here, I will come for you, and we will have a discussion about your attitude.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Ishtar as the Angels above used their whips to wrap her arms, legs and wings, leaving her immobile. One of the Angels above shouted a command and the entire group launched itself upward, dragging Ishtar along with it.
“Bitch,” was Lucifer’s last word to Ishtar before the Angels flew her away. Lucifer watched them go, then glared up at the others. “All of you! Spread out and find demon holes. She has to come up from one of them!”
Five hundred thousand wings flapped above him, and the Angels disbursed through Hell.
Lucifer glared down the pit. “Where are you, Nyx?”
“Fly in the middle of the room,” Nyx said in Persephone’s mind. The walls, floors, and ceiling around them were a roiling mass of shapes. The lighting was too dim to make out the shape of any one of the forms, but all were in constant movement. “And get ready to go really, really fast.”
“Why not go fast now?” asked Persephone, her nervousness
clear in her voice “What the fuck are those things?”
“Demons,” said Nyx in Persephone’s mind. “Lots and lots of demons.”
“I’ve never seen demons like that before.”
“They don’t like the surface.”
“How did you find this place?”
“During the wars with Lucifer, I was looking for something I could use as an edge.”
“I’m guessing this wasn’t it.”
“Lost two Angels and I haven’t seen them since. I’m thinking they’ve been absorbed into the digestion cycle in this place.”
Persephone shuddered. “That’s fucking horrible.”
“I tried burning it out with Hellfire, but they all just vanished and came back when I left.”
“Here comes the 666th.”
The legion of Angels poured like angry hornets out of the hole in the wall. They spread wide as they went, the Hellfire on the edges of their swords and whips glowing in the darkness. The full five thousand of them would easily fit into the cavern, and that was exactly what Nyx was hoping.
The creatures on the ceiling attacked first.
They weren’t like the gliding lizards that Nyx and Persephone had imitated. These things had leather bat wings on short, fat, spiked bodies like sea urchins. The difference was that sea urchins didn’t have mouths that opened up half the size of their bodies, with row on row of jagged, deadly teeth that bit deep through Angelic armor and flesh.
The Angels of the 666th began screaming. Blades and whips flashed out, cutting through the darkness as Angels dodged one way and another, trying to avoid the creatures that descended in the hundreds of thousands to feast on the Angels’ flesh.
The creatures on the walls attacked next.
Unlike their ceiling brethren, these had no wings. Instead, they had many long, thin, whip-like tentacles tipped with a dozen foot-long spikes on each. They hooked onto the Angels and ceiling creatures alike, dragging them to the walls where huge, toothless maws dripping with acid awaited their arrival. The Angels fought harder, blades and whips flashing with Hellfire as they hacked and tore through their attackers. Creatures shrieked and hissed. Several winged creatures spun down to the ground on only one wing.
“Looks pretty even,” said Persephone in Nyx’s head.
“It isn’t,” said Nyx, looking back over her shoulder. “It gets worse.”
The first bloodied, battered creature touched the floor of the cave.
“Holy fuck!” said Persephone.
The floor was not covered with a multitude of creatures. The floor was a creature. It had a hundred thousand small, jagged-toothed mouths that covered the quivering mountain of near-gelatinous black flesh that was its body. It didn’t fly or grab or chase. Instead, it roiled. Its body moved in ever-increasing waves until it reached halfway up the height of the cavern. Each mouth began spurting gouts of acid as the thing moved, dousing the walls and ceiling and all the Angels and creatures fighting in between.
“Can we fly fast now?” asked Persephone. “Please?”
“Fuck, yes,” replied Nyx. She shot forward through the length of the long, dark cavern, dodging gouts of acid from the many mouths below, and flying a narrow, dizzying path that kept her off of the roiling floor and far enough away from the walls and ceilings that the creatures there didn’t notice her. Persephone followed right on her heels, swearing silently to herself the entire way.
The screams of Angels, shrieks and howls of the creatures, and the horrible sounds of blades, teeth, tentacles, and mouths ripping through flesh fell behind.
“There!” Nyx’s voice rang in Persephone’s head. “To the right, fly there.”
Persephone looked and saw nothing but more ceiling, more walls, and more agitated, hissing and twitching demons. “Where?”
Nyx, already banking to the right, didn’t answer. Instead, she flapped her wings even faster and headed straight for the wall and the tentacled, acid-mouthed creatures that lived there.
“You’re insane!” Persephone sent, but she followed, her own wings moving twice as fast as Nyx’s just to keep up. The creatures on the wall began to stir, eyeless heads turning, and wide, toothless mouths opening. Tentacles began to unroll, as if they could feel the movement of the air on Nyx’s and Persephone’s wings, but couldn’t tell if it was worth reaching out.
Nyx’s wings vanished, and she dove forward and down through the air and into the wall. Persephone’s eyes went wide with fear and amazement but, with no other choice, she did the same.
The tunnel that Nyx had taken them into was neither wide nor particularly straight. It went down fast and deep, a long drop even farther into the darkness beneath Hell. And like all of Hell save what the Angels themselves had crafted, there were no smooth edges here, no gentle curves or soft landings. Instead, there was only razor-edged stone on unforgiving, unyielding ground.
After they had rolled far enough to be out of the reach of the grasping tentacles, Nyx drew her sword and, with a thought, turned it into a spiked hammer which she rammed into the ground, arresting her movement. Persephone rolled over her a moment later. Nyx reached out and caught her ankle as it went by. Persephone was moving with enough force that, even for an Angel as powerful as Nyx, it nearly pulled her arm from her socket to stop Persephone’s motion. Both lay still for a time before Persephone drew her own blade, still in the shape of the Roman gladius, and drove it into the ground. Nyx let Persephone’s ankle go, and the other slid until her feet were beneath her and she, too, was hanging from her arm.
Persephone looked up at Nyx and grinned. “If we ever do this again, I want to be the one that stabs you and gets tortured by Lucifer for eternity instead of Ishtar, all right?”
Nyx grinned back. “If we ever end up doing this again, I’ll let you!”
Persephone looked down the long, black tunnel below them. “So what made this?”
“Same thing that made the other big tunnels,” said Nyx. “Big ugly demon, chisel blades for teeth. Acid for spit. Eats the rocks.”
“Whee,” said Persephone. “And I take it this is our only way to go?”
“Yes.”
Persephone sighed. “Climbing or sliding?”
“I recommend climbing,” said Nyx. “Since there’s another pit of demons at the bottom.”
“You really know how to pick your escape routes.”
Persephone raised one hand, her fingernails extending into four-inch talons. She drove it into the ground, then did the same with her toenails. Nyx smiled in spite of the mess they were in, and followed her. “Don’t worry. It gets worse.”
Persephone’s reply contained profanity in sixteen different languages.
The climb down was long and slow. Each step had to be carefully chosen. There was no room to spread wings in the tunnel, and the possibility of falling into the pit of demons Nyx knew was below kept them cautious despite Nyx’s near-overwhelming urge to get out of Hell as fast as possible, and the chance that some of the 666th might still be coming after them.
Extremely unlikely, Nyx thought. They’ll only survive if they go back the way they came. And won’t Lucifer be pleased at that?
“Nyx?” called Persephone when they were halfway down. “The ground’s vibrating.”
Nyx had felt it at the same moment. She stopped climbing and drew her sword again. “It’s coming.”
“What’s coming?”
“The tunnel builder.”
“Shit. Should we drop and take our chances in the pit?”
“No,” said Nyx. “What’s down there is worse.”
“And why are we going down there again?”
“You can always go back…”
“No,” said Persephone, drawing her own sword. “That’s fine, thanks.”
The vibrating became more and more pronounced, and soon the tunnel was shaking badly enough that splits appeared in the walls. Rocks broke off from the sides and rolled down on Nyx and Persephone, making them have to dodge back and forth. Below, several
large sections of the tunnel began collapsing.
“I’m not going to be happy if we get stuck in here!” shouted Persephone just as the tunneler broke through the wall beneath Persephone’s feet.
“Oh, fuck!”
It was monstrous. Its mouth, a huge thing filled with chisel-like rock-cutting teeth, undulated in size, growing bigger or smaller every few seconds. Its body was segmented like an earthworm but covered in spiked scales. It had no eyes, no nose, and thin, whip-like tentacles that sprouted around its mouth the moment it broke free of the rock. Persephone scrambled up, trying to get out of its way, but one of the tentacles tapped against her ankle.
A hundred more tentacles grew from its mouth in an instant and whipped out toward Persephone. She hacked up and then down, severing twenty of them in the first strike and thirty more on the second. It wasn’t enough. The other wrapped tight around her, pinning legs, arms, wings and body.
Nyx let go of the wall and dropped straight down toward the monster’s mouth, hacking off half the tentacles on her way past. She landed on two of the thing’s chisel teeth, then pushed off as the monster’s mouth snapped shut with a reverberating crash that shook more stone free from the chute. Nyx flipped in the air and hacked down again, her sword cutting through monstrous flesh, bone and teeth in a single strike. Above her, Persephone cut through the last of the tentacles and then, following Nyx’s example, dove down sword first to impale the thing through the space between the first and second segments of its body.
The noise that came from the creature was near indescribable—something between a howl of pain and a roar of frustration, but so loud, so low, and so powerful that it was as much a shockwave as a sound.
“Don’t cut its head off!” screamed Nyx in Persephone’s mind, knowing her voice couldn’t be heard over the roaring creature. “That just makes two of them!”
“You have got to be kidding me!” Persephone shot back as she pulled her blade out of its mouth. “How the Hell do we kill it?”
“We don’t. We get past it!”