Then I’m fucking falling again. But only a few feet this time. I slide through a tight fleshy opening in the roof and down a steep incline, like a garbage chute. Nice touch.
I slip down another level and slam into the ground. At least I’m not moving anymore. I lie on the floor and breathe. My heart is pounding. I know I’m surrounded by souls, but they’re not paying any attention to me. They’re used to hard-luck cases sliding down the poop shoot.
The angel is awestruck by where we are and pissed about being stuck inside me. It never really believed I’d take us this far. The absolute end of the line.
Welcome to Tartarus.
I FELL THROUGH what felt like a mile of blood, but when I get to my feet, there isn’t a drop on me and my clothes are dry.
It’s cold here and dim, like light that can’t decide what it wants to be. Dark. Light. Or some strange wavelength that’s simultaneously the opposite of each.
The walls and floors are dull gray metal. There are gleaming conveyor chains overhead. Souls hang from hooks by their ankles. They’re being taken away, but I can’t see where from here. If we were on earth, I’d swear that I’m in a busy industrial meat locker.
The place is packed shoiv>s packeulder to shoulder with double-dead Hellions, human souls, and Lurker spirits. I can even see Kissi scattered around in the mob. It’s like a strange exodus, frozen just before it got started.
Aside from the overhead conveyor and the distant hiss and bang of machines, the place is almost silent, like the tens of thousands of dead around me and the thousands in the adjoining lockers have sunk so low in their misery that they can’t even acknowledge each other.
I didn’t think seeing Tartarus would get under my skin the way it is. I always imagined it would be Hell cranked up to eleven. Torture, chaos, and cruelty on a planetary scale. Mountains of flensed flesh. Mad bone seas. But this is worse. Tartarus is a dim, crushing despair. Heaven might not have been where you were headed, but now even Hell is a long-gone distant memory. Dante got it wrong when he put the “Abandon All Hope” sign at the entrance to Hell. This is where all hope dies, even for monsters.
I’ve only been here for a few minutes and the place is starting to bring me down like the permanent residents. I think about Candy, but it’s already hard to remember her face. I can make out the ghost of her body, but not her voice or how she felt. When I try to remember our room at the hotel, it feels as dismal and dead as this place. What am I doing getting close to her? Even assuming I get out of here, do I want to drag her into this life? Look what happened to Alice. Look where I am now. I’ve been here ten minutes and I already miss Hell.
Candy is a big girl and can make her own choices, but what if she chooses wrong? Will I be doing this again in a year when someone murders her and steals her soul?
The angel in my head isn’t handling any of this well. Tough shit. I didn’t exactly enjoy the ride when it took over while I was sick with zombie hoodoo. I suffered through its choirboy routine so now it can limp along while I figure a way out of here.
What looks like mist in the distance shifts and parts. It’s steam coming off an enormous old-fashioned open-face furnace beneath a gigantic boiler with transit pipes on top. Like a scene out of Metropolis, blank-faced but efficient workers take souls off the conveyor chains and toss them into the fire. The ones who aren’t frying the double dead are adjusting iron valves and enormous levers. They inspect gauges and bleed off hurricanes of steam to keep the pressure steady.
I push my way through the mob. It’s like walking through a wheat field. They’re so insubstantial that I can barely feel the spirits around me. The meat locker goes on for miles in every direction. I could wander down here for years without ever seeing a familiar face.
I yell, “General Semyazah!”
Heads slowly turn in my direction. The motion ripples out in small waves, like I dropped a rock into a pond of the dead. No one here has paid attention to anything in a long time.
“General Semyazah!”
Nothing. I feel arouic I feelnd in my pocket and pull out Mason’s lighter. I spark it and hold it high like I’m hoping for an encore of “Free Bird.” The room fills with light. Thousands of souls that haven’t made a sound in years suddenly try to speak. It sounds like a wind from the far side of a hill. Some souls rush to me and fall to their knees, holding their hands up in prayer. They think I’m Jesus at the final judgment come down to save them. Sorry, but I don’t think any of you are high on the Rapture list.
“Semyazah!”
Someone yells back at me. The voice is faint at first, but it gets louder as the crowd shifts, parting for someone muscling his way through. I can’t tell much about him except that he’s wearing the filthy remains of a Hellion officer’s uniform. I head toward him with the lighter over my head.
It takes about twenty minutes for us to meet in the middle.
“General Semyazah?”
He hesitates, not sure if he should admit it.
“Yes,” he says.
“I’m here to get you out of here.”
“Are you? And why would the Father send an angel for me, one of his most devoted betrayers?”
“God wouldn’t send you a pizza even if it was your birthday. And I’m no angel. I’m Sandman Slim.”
Semyazah is thin but moves gracefully, like he was built to always be in motion. His face is almost as scarred as mine. When he smiles half of it doesn’t move.
“Another one? I’ve met a hundred Sandman Slims down here. You’re not any more impressive than any of them. Less, in fact, in those filthy rags. Besides, Sandman Slim is mortal. You’re Hellion.”
“No. He’s not. It’s him,” another voice says.
I close the lighter and turn. The crowd sighs and groans when the light disappears.
It’s Mammon.
“Enjoying my face, are you?”
Where his face should be is all raw red pork roast.
“Hi, General. How’s the neck feeling?”
Semyazah looks at me but talks to Mammon.
“This is who butchered you?”
Mammon nods.
“I’m afraid so.”
I hold out my hand to Semyazah.
“Shake my hand, General,” I say.
He looks at me like it’s the last thing he wants to do.
“I’m not asking you to be roommates, but I’ve come a long way to see you. It’s the least you could do.”
He lifts his hand slowly and puts it in mine. It has weight and mass. I can feel it.
“Mammon was telling the truth. They stuck you in here alive.”
“And they took great delight in watching me go.”
“I know the feeling.”
We’re both looking at Mammon, who looks right back at us.
“Rumor is you’re not a fan of Mason Faim. How would you like your legions back and a chance to stop Mason’s war from destroying your world?”
He straightens and squares his shoulders.
“Our war with Heaven was just. It was for the worthy cause of releasing angels from our existence as slaves. Mason Faim’s war is pure vanity. He’s used that and fear to gather the generals who’ve fallen in with him. I want no part of it and I believe that other generals agree with me but are too frightened to say so. As you see from my circumstances, public disagreement has a high price.”
“So you’d like to stop him.”
“Very much.”
“Good. Then let’s get you out of here.”
I didn’t realize how hard I’d been concentrating on Semyazah until the conversation stopped. Talking to another living being was like being sucked into a different whirlpool of light down here. When I look around we’re surrounded by souls. I recognize a lot of them. Most at the front are military men and women I killed. Azazel, my old slave master, the Hellion who made me into a killer, is there. Beelzebub. Amon. Marchosias. Valefor. Maybe a dozen others. There are members of Hell’s nouveau riche in ghost furs and jewels. Beyond them are rows and rows of other Hellions and human souls. More than a hundred. I’ve never seen them in one place before. I had no idea I’d killed so many down here. They press in from all sides, trying to crush me. But Tartarus has reduced them to empty spirits with no substance. Shadows on panes of glass. I manifest the Gladius for a second and they stumble back, leaving a no-man’s-land around me.
“What a lovely trick. If I’d known you could do that, I wouldnheiI would019;t have bothered giving you the key,” says Azazel.
“How’s retirement treating you, boss?”
Azazel is the Hellion general who put the key to the Room of Thirteen Doors in my chest. I used it to move around Hell and kill for him. I slit his throat before he had a chance to ask for it back.
“I wondered if I’d ever see you down here someday, and here we are. Reunited at last.”
“Don’t get too choked up. I walked in on my own.”
“I showed you your power. I made you what you are,” he says. “You could show a little gratitude.”
“I could have tortured you to death, but I killed you quick.”
Semyazah’s eyes narrow.
“You came into Tartarus voluntarily. Why?”
“To get you.” I glance at the crowd. It’s still packed with dead generals. I speak louder so they can all hear. “I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that you won’t have to suffer down here much longer. The bad news is that Mason Faim is going to burn the universe to the ground. He doesn’t care about Heaven. He just wants the high ground for his attack. And he’s probably going to do it in the next few hours.”
That gets their attention. I hear whispers and then actual voices from the crowd.
Semyazah says, “You intend to take me out of here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s absurd. Tartarus has been here for hundreds of thousands of years. If it was possible to escape, someone would have done it by now.”
“That’s the great part. Who do you think Hell’s armies would rather follow, a mortal who made a lot of promises but hasn’t delivered on anything or the biggest baddest general ever? The only Hellion who ever walked out of Tartarus.”
That starts the chatter again. Generals lean together like they’re forming battle plans.
“So how can we do it?” I ask.
“You can’t,” says Azazel. He looks at Semyazah. “You can’t trust this creature.”
“Why should they trust you?” I ask. “They all know you sent me to kill them. Now you want to keep them in Tartarus just because you can’t get out?”
“How does this place work? Is this meat locker Tartarus or is the machine?”
Semyazah says, “The place and the furnace are parts of a single punishment device. Tartarus is the machine that runs the universe. It provides heat and energy to light the stars, Heaven and Hell, and every place where mortal and celestial life dwell. And we’re the fuel.”
Mammon gives a mad, gleeful little nod. He says, “We’re the souls judged so worthless or relentlessly vile that the universe has no more use for us. All we’re good for is fuel for the fire.”
Did Muninn, Neshamah, and his brothers think up Tartarus on a particularly good day or a bad one? Did they mean to create this place or is it another one of their mistakes? I’m going to have to reconsider whether the demiurge is evil or not because this place is on a whole new scale of evil.
I watch the Metropolis proles working away at the furnace and boiler. Gears and pipes and valves stretch from the floor, spread to the three enormous pipes that disappear into the ceiling.
This is it. God’s ultimate revenge for his kids letting him down. Eventually we’ll all end up down here. Right now it’s only the most monstrous souls, but Muninn and his brothers will get tired of watching humanity fuck up and we’ll end up cordwood, too. So will the rest of the angels. Even Humanity 2.0, 3.0, and 100.0 will eventually disappoint them. When there’s no one left to punish, why would they keep Hellions around? We’ll all end up in the furnace, warming the brothers’ palace, a tiny dot in an empty universe, while they sit around arguing like old biddies for the next trillion years. Or until one of them gets fed up enough to crack open the Big Bang crystal and put them out of their misery, too.
The furnace workers cut down more souls from the conveyor and toss them in the fire.
“We can’t get out the way we came in, but what about up there?” I point to the machine. “Are there any maintenance areas or access tunnels? Someone built this place. Someone has to maintain it.”
“No. God in his infinite wisdom built the furnace well,” says Semyazah. “It might be his greatest achievement. His perfect creation.”
Even Mammon doesn’t argue with him.
When I think about leaving Alice with Neshamah, I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. He knew what I’d find down here. Wouldn’t it be the biggest joke in history to have survived Hell, Lucifer’s games, and Mason’s bullshit just to have God murder Alice while my back is turned? I can’t even go back and check on her. All I know is that they’re in a paroo.;re in king lot in Eleusis. In L.A., gosh, there can’t be more than fifty of those in the area.
“Has anyone tried attacking the workers?”
Some of the generals nod.
“The furnace has divine protections against that. We have some of the most powerful witches, warlocks, necromancers, and djinn in existence here. They’ve tried every imaginable type of magic to destroy the furnace or break down the walls. They’ve even combined their powers. Nothing has worked.”