“I notice he’s not here with us. Someone is going to have to talk about that. But right now I have to kill another angel. See if it brings back any fond memories.”
I look around for Beelzebub, but he’s long gone. Just as well. His armor is as ghostly as he is, so I can’t steal it off him and use it to see Chernovog.
“General Semyazah, come with me but don’t get too close. The rest of you can follow or you can stand here and generally fuck off. I don’t care. But if you get in my way, I’ll put you in the oven myself, feetfirst.”
It’s a long way to the front of the chamber. Tartarus would be a lot more fun with Segways.
Christ. Look at the shit I do. How can I drag anyone into a life like this?
D;I’ve never tried to kill a God before, but if Neshamah has put a scratch on Alice, I’m going to try. The front of the crowd is exactly what I thought it would be. Hellion garbage collectors, street sweepers, and small-time merchants. The officers and Hellion elites are all bunched at the far end of the place, leaving mortal souls, Lurkers, and working-class Hellion slobs to be fed into the furnace first. I bet some of those Hellion heavyweights have been hiding at the ass end of Tartarus for centuries. You’d think one of the drones would break up the tedium and take souls from the back of the room once in a while. I’d volunteer to sharpen the hooks for them.
The crowd gives me a wide berth when I make it to the furnace. I walk up to the machine slowly, waiting for the Gobah to react. I don’t think they even see me. They’re drones that service the dead. I bet they can’t even see the living. They don’t even twitch when I stroll past them. I jump up, grab a valve, and pull myself onto the machine, heading to where I saw Chernovog working. I whisper some simple hoodoo as I go.
Steam bleeding from pipes rolls down and wraps the upper boiler in a hurricane of opaque heat. I reach Chernovog’s platform and hoist myself over. A few feet over my head I see him. Chernovog is a negative space in the steam. An angel-shaped ghost enveloped in burning mist. It’s goddamn hot up here. If I’d thought about it, I’d have gone for him Greco-Roman style. Oil up and take him down naked instead of wrapped in a wool coat and heavy boots. I’ll put that in my memory book for the next time I destroy one of God’s perfect creations.
Chernovog is banging on the furnace controls with a monkey wrench, trying to stop whatever is causing the boiler to bleed so much steam. I manifest the Gladius and take a swing at his leg. He screams as I burn off part of his left foot, then does his spider-monkey thing up into the mist. I go to the middle of the platform, looking for any odd movement in the steam. Listening for movement overhead and feeling for weight shifting on the platform. Chernovog drops down behind me. I pretend I don’t notice. When he’s close I drop to one knee, spin, and swing at his legs. I catch the edge of one. He screams again. But even with a leg wound, he jumps straight over my head and onto the boiler before disappearing.
Chernovog is somewhere overhead. I catch glimpses of empty spots in the steam. Sweat is rolling into my eyes. I have to keep rubbing it away with my coat sleeve just to see. The hissing of the steam makes it hard to hear his movements.
Something smashes into my left arm. Chernovog swings his heavy wrench. I dodge it and he disappears. I look at my robo arm. Not a scratch on it. I admire it just a little too long. Chernovog slips up from behind and gets a better shot at my right shoulder. The pain blinds me for a second. I fall forward and almost burn a hole in my own leg with the Gladius.
I look up in time to see Chernovog scrambling up and away on all fours. I get to my feet, trying to see where he went, when he jumps onto my back from behind. I spin and push back, driving him into the hot metal on the front of the boiler. Chernovog squirms a little, bites down, and tries to take a piece of my ear. When I shake h toen I shim off, he disappears.
I don’t even get a chance to look for him this time. He rolls past me and hits my leg with the wrench. I slash down with the Gladius but miss him by an inch. Then he’s on my back again. Then gone. He hits my arm with the wrench. Slams into my chest and drives me down on my back. Gone again. The prick’s actually getting faster. I get to my knees and use the railing to pull myself to my feet. Between the steam and the sweat in my eyes, I can’t see a thing. I turn in circles, swinging the Gladius randomly at the steam just trying to keep him off. The angel in my head says something terrible and I want to shove him back into the dark, but I’m afraid he might be right.
I’m playing Chernovog’s game. And I can’t beat him.
I slash the bars off the side of the platform with the Gladius. I’m exhausted. The steam makes it almost impossible to breathe. I catch glimpses of Chernovog shooting back and forth on the face of the boiler. I let the Gladius go out. Is it technically playing possum when you’re about to do something that might amount to suicide?
I know what he’s going to do and I wait until I see him do it. An empty spot in the steam streaks toward me as Chernovog leaps from high up, hoping to land on me and crush my chest. I bark some arena fighting hoodoo, holding off on the last syllable until Chernovog is a foot above me. Then I say it and roll off the platform as the air turns to fire.
Who needs Mason? It feels like I just blew up the universe myself. I’ve never done the air-burst hex inside before. I figured it might work since the only things not ghosts already are Chernovog, Semyazah, and me. After you set off a hex like that, the trick is to stay out of its way. Falling from the furnace, I stay just ahead of the blast. I chant one more arena hex and make an air pocket to cushion my fall. It isn’t exactly like landing on a feather bed, but it keeps my bones from turning to butterscotch pudding.
I still can’t see a thing. Steam is everywhere and the heat from the furnace feels as hot as ever. Souls howl and scramble away from the explosion. In a few minutes, the steam drifts away and the temperature cools. Like a magic trick, the boiler emerges from the mist. It’s caved in on itself, the bottom twisting as the face and overhead pipes came down. The bottom is twisted slag and the transit pipes droop from the ceiling like metal stalactites. Chernovog and his drones are gone daddy gone.
Cold air and a white celestial light streams down one of the pipes and lights up Tartarus for miles. I don’t even bother checking what’s on the other end of that one. I hope they have electric blankets in Heaven because it’s going to get cold tonight.
The light from the second pipe is bright, but flickers and is colder than Heaven’s glow. That’s the way to the stars and earth. I hope Neshamah, Muninn, and Ruach up in Heaven and the other two brothers heard what just happened here. Cleanup on aisle two, boys.
Nothing comes out of the third pipe. No light. No air. No nothing. I crawl up into the bottom. There’s a breeze, but it flows almost imperceptiblyer.mpercep upward. The angel feels it long before I do. But I know what’s important. Overhead, the ground is blown open. Beyond it are rolling black clouds lit underneath by fires in the hills. Hell’s half acre never looked so good.
I yell, “Semyazah!”
He stands under the pipe and peers into the sky.
“I never thought I’d see the sky again.”
“You can write a sonnet about it later. Get up here and get climbing.”
I manifest the Gladius, shove it into the pipe, and pull it out quickly. I do it again at an angle to the other hole and again a few feet higher. I put my foot into the first hole and my hand in the second, pulling myself up. I punch climbing holes all the way to the top.
When I get out I can see the Fourth Street Bridge. Sweet. It’s close enough that Medea Bava had to feel the explosion. I hope the falling sparks kill her pretty lawn.
Semyazah yells down the pipe for the others to start up. Lurkers are scrambling up the sides of the pipe, holding on like geckos. They reach the top and run into the gloom, whooping as they go.
Scrub trees and dry weeds growing along the sides of the railroad tracks are burning. A pile of abandoned railroad ties makes a pretty bonfire. Too bad there aren’t any marshmallows in Hell.
“Come on, General. Let’s get you to Pandemonium.”