Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong) Read online

  PRAISE FOR SHAUN O. MCCOY AND

  EVEN HELL HAS KNIGHTS

  “I read McCoy and enjoy him. If you have an ounce of imagination, so will you. He takes you places you can't go by yourself.”

  —McKendree Long, Author of Dog Soldier Moon

  “McCoy has a queer ability to highlight the most delightfully horrific details imaginable. I grimace, suck air through my teeth and squeeze shut my eyes. Then I open just one so I can keep on reading.”

  —Fred Fields, Author

  “In Even Hell Has Knights, McCoy depicts dark landscapes filled with fiery fury. His characters are soulful, at times wonderfully craven, surprising us with their humanity and evoking our laughter in unexpected ways.”

  —Chris Mathews, Author of GARGOYLES

  “In preparing for this book, McCoy rampaged across three continents in an indiscriminant pillage of mythology, history and religion. The booty he gained has made for one of the most unique settings in the Fantasy Genre.”

  —Monet Jones, Author of Rehoboth

  “McCoy’s world-building is impeccable.”

  —Ginny Padgett, President of SCWW

  “McCoy writes with a passion for action. He introduces us to graphic characters and takes us on a hair-raising journey through crumbling underground landscapes where battles rage to protect a magical child. This is a borderlands for where the quest for survival has never been so grueling.”

  —Bonnie Stanard, Author of Master of Westfall Plantation

  OTHER WORKS BY SHAUN O. MCCOY

  HELLSONG SERIES

  Even Hell Has Knights

  Knight of Gehenna

  Hellsong Book III (May, 2014)

  NOVELLAS

  Electric Blues

  BOOK I

  SHAUN O. MCCOY

  SISYPHEAN PUBLISHING

  For Cory Wenzel

  An Airman, Fighter, and Friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book has many heroes, but my real life hero is my sister. She fights leukemia with more bravery than any fictional character I could imagine.

  I appreciate the wonderful help of those who have made the exciting journey of writing this novel with me. In addition, I’m insanely thankful to my father for telling me his multi-epic “bedtime” stories from the moment I was old enough to comprehend the English language—and quite possibly before that; and to my mother for patiently reading to me countless young adult fantasy novels—although for some reason she waited until I was old enough to know what a sentence was before doing so.

  Also, Professor Ben Greer, you happen to be the man, and there is very little in this novel which cannot somehow be attributed to your teachings. Mike Long and Bonnie Stanard have been marvelous mentors for me in the field of writing. Also in that regard, there is no one who can replace Walt Oliver—who gave me pink lemonade in my childhood and writing advice in my adulthood.

  I can’t fail to mention the Mason brothers, Scott and Jeremy, and their enthusiastic willingness to answer my firearm questions over plates full of General Tso’s chicken. Narayan Boston, thank you for your support!

  Lastly, I’d like to thank the Sisyphean Publications production team. The bevy of editors: Gabe, Justin, Jody, B-ri, James, Nichole, Amanda, and Leigh. Also, media arts moguls Kirill Simin and Erica Morgan. Without all these excellently talented people, life would be meaningless, and all would be lost. Enjoy!

  This is a work of fiction. The damnation portrayed in this novel is fictitious, and similarities between it and any actual damnation are strictly coincidental.

  EVEN HELL HAS KNIGHTS

  Copyright 2012 © by Shaun McCoy

  All rights reserved.

  Editor-in-Chief: Gabrielle Olexa

  Associate Editors: Justin Williams; Jody Wenzel; Brian “B-ri” Jeffcoat; James Mobley; Nichole Breton

  Consulting Editors: Amanda Simays; Leigh Thomas

  Title art: Thomas the Younger

  Title Layout: Kirill Simin

  A Sisyphean Publishing Book

  www.ehhknovel.com

  ISBN: 978-0615716541

  First Edition October 2012

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART II

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  PART III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Carlisle lay dying on the cold stones of Hell. He watched his black blood as it crept across the floor, a muddy river fed by the wellspring in his side. The half-congealed liquid was marked with his own footprints, his lifeblood depressed in the pattern of his treaded boots. On Earth, having suffered such a wound, a man could expect to die after an hour or so of slow bleeding. Here, in the labyrinth, the timing was less certain.

  He could suffer for days.

  It hadn’t always been this way. He hadn’t always been damned. He’d lain like this, once, in an Alabama cornfield, counting his blessings. For each of those blessings, his grandmother had taught him, there was an angel flying over his head. There had been so many angels then. They’d started to leave him, one by one, on the day he’d betrayed himself with Anna McNamara.

  Certainly there were none above him now.

  The Infidel was coming. The Infidel was going to kill him.

  Rolling over was torture. He clutched at the floor with his blood covered hands, trying to drag himself forward. He failed. The grain of the stone felt slick beneath his fingertips.

  He looked about for the Infidel, who he knew must be somewhere in this mile high chamber. With his sight fading, however, he could not find the man. He tried again to move farther forward but managed only to roll back over. Blood matted the hair on the right side of his head, soaking through his shirt at his shoulder and through his pants at his hip. He felt winded and struggled for air with each breath.

  He heard his murderer’s approach; the man’s boots clopping at first against the stone floor and then slapping in the blood. Dark red droplets splattered into Carlisle’s face.

  “You’ll fail,” Carlisle said. “You’ll see. I’m not the only one who protects the angel’s get. We love that boy.”

  No answer.

  The Infidel’s expressionless face filled his vision.

  “It’s a liver wound,” Carlisle whispered. “Christ, too, was stabbed in the side.”

  He was vaguely aware of the Infidel’s hand as it came to rest on his shoulder. Carlisle might have found the gesture comforting had it come from someone else.

&n
bsp; “You’re lucky we didn’t fight on Earth, Infidel.” Carlisle’s anger helped him find his breath. “God wouldn’t have let you win. The angels, they would have helped me.”

  The Infidel remained impassive.

  Carlisle wiped at the blood around his eyes. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? I’m telling you there were angels. Angels! You wouldn’t have noticed. They wouldn’t have come to you. They sang to me.”

  The hand on his shoulder pulled away, but the Infidel remained kneeling beside him. The pain became intense for a moment, and Carlisle gritted his teeth, squeezing shut his eyes until it passed. “I hate you,” he managed. “You think we’re the same? We’re nothing alike. Nothing.”

  Tears came to his eyes, summoned there from his agony. “You think because God damned us both we’re equal? At least I tried. I tried!” Carlisle’s body shook with his words, hurting him enough to make him sob, but he could not stop himself from speaking. “While you were up there, fucking, loving, gluttonizing, I was praying. I was fighting myself. I failed. But I tried. You just turned your back. . .”

  Fatigue forced him to stop and catch his breath.

  He noticed the Infidel was no longer kneeling. Carlisle attempted to look up at the man, but he couldn’t focus. He settled for looking at the Infidel’s booted feet. The feet began walking. At first Carlisle feared that he would be abandoned, but he was comforted when he saw that the Infidel was circling him.

  “You think you’re better than us?” Carlisle continued. “Because you didn’t deal with demons? Maab had no choice. We had to.”

  He could no longer see the Infidel, but he could hear the man’s footsteps in the blood behind him. Carlisle put a finger to his lips and tasted his own blood. It tasted rotten somehow, polluted—like he remembered menstrual blood tasting.

  “I admit it, Infidel. Raping the women was wrong. Horribly wrong. We couldn’t control ourselves. It was the demons. They made us do it. Listen. You’re no better. Our people are good people. You should have helped us. Even Maab would have loved you. Pyle would have helped you.”

  The boots reappeared.

  “I’m dying again, Infidel. My people need you. They’re asking for you. Be our friend.”

  The Infidel turned and walked towards the wilds of Hell.

  Carlisle reached out after him, but his hand touched nothing. “Don’t leave me. Don’t abandon me like you abandoned God.”

  The Infidel paused at the edge of his vision, looking at something, perhaps on one of the chamber’s highest walls. Carlisle tried to see what the man was staring at, but his eyesight was too far gone. Slowly, surely, his world was shrinking in around him.

  “It doesn’t matter if I die. I’m not alone,” he said.

  Carlisle’s eyesight dimmed further. The Infidel seemed like some distant shadow.

  “I would have beaten you,” Carlisle said. “On Earth I would have defeated you. God would have helped me kill you.”

  After a moment, the Infidel spoke. “God let His only Son be tortured and crucified. Why would He treat you any differently?”

  Carlisle could no longer see the Infidel. He was sure the man was still out there, though, past the edge of his vision.

  “Because God loves me!” Carlisle shouted as the black wings of damnation closed in around his soul. “God loves me!”

  “The Strong may choose Pacifism, the Weak are condemned to it.”

  —The Infidel

  “I climbed the highest mountain in hopes of finding a wise man, but when I reached its summit I found it empty. Tired from my travails, I paused to rest for a few moments—but no sooner had I sat down than I heard a noise behind me. I turned and saw another climber. . . he was asking me a question.”

  —Endymion

  I wonder if Alice thinks I’m handsome.

  The river his fathers Rick and Galen affectionately called the “Mighty Thames” was a slow and gentle stream, hardly worthy of a name, that meandered softly through the underground labyrinth of Hell without much of a fuss. Its waters were cool and crisp, and Arturus had grown up almost happily on its stone banks. In this chamber the Thames was so smooth that he had taken to using it as a mirror for his morning shaves. He would kneel on the dark red hellstone by its bank and gauge the stubble which covered his face’s reflection in the flowing water. The air over the river was cooler than it was in his own room, and he always found the chill invigorating.

  He was preparing to shave even now.

  He felt the vibrations of the bone-handled straight razor as he drew the blade across his leather strop. He did so in short, even strokes, listening to the gentle flow of the water. In the next room the river narrowed slightly as its grade increased. It was there that the Thames powered their woodstone waterwheel. He sharpened his blade to the watery beat of the turning structure and then tested the razor on the hairs of his chin. Satisfied with the result, he laid the blade and strop down so he could wash his face.

  The pristine water was cool on his skin. He could smell it, even.

  With a steady hand he took to his ritual. A clean shave, Rick had told him, was a sign of a survivor. An unshaven and unkempt man, however, might well be weak, unpredictable or dangerous.

  That wasn’t why Arturus shaved, of course. He shaved because Alice had pointed out that his chin hairs were closer to peach fuzz than they were to a beard.

  Arturus shaved down first, on his right side, with quick, even strokes. Then he covered that same area with up-strokes. Galen had seen him do this once and called him a “brave lad.”

  For a moment Arturus paused, his razor held motionless above the water. He didn’t want to place the blade into his reflection. It would feel almost as if he were stabbing himself. Instead he placed the razor in the water just a bit downstream. Above and around his own head, he saw the ceiling of this chamber. The whole of it was a soft, deep red. The stones interlocked in the arched roofing with a bricklike pattern. As a child, he had thought that those stones might fall down on him. The foolishness of his childhood fear brought a smile to his face. He watched the smile appear. After a few more minutes, he finished and inspected his work.

  Not even a nick.

  He decided that he must be handsome.

  He hoped Alice thought so at any rate.

  Again careful not to disturb his reflection, he washed off his blade, drying the razor on his pants before folding it into its bone handle. He stretched, yawned, and then walked back towards his dwelling. The hallways that led from the river room to his home were covered in gravel, and the loose rock crunched beneath his boots. Galen had laid down the stones so that the footsteps of an intruder could be heard more easily. He brushed through his door blanket to enter his sleeping chamber and placed his razor reverently next to the pile of blankets on which he slept.

  The ritual finished, his face as smooth as a marble pillar, he wandered off to the battery room in hopes of finding a good breakfast, his eager footsteps crunching gravel as he went.

  Galen had installed a small lip in the doorway of the battery room as a barrier to keep out the hallway’s loose stones. Arturus stumbled over it in his haste, sending gravel scattering across the floor. He kicked some of the stones back over the lip, grimacing, knowing that he would probably be the one who would have to sweep it all up.

  “Well, you’re up early!” Rick hadn’t yet shaved, and his brown stubble was almost as long as his close cropped hair. “I’ve not even started the plates.”

  Arturus shrugged. There were no time pieces here, save the one that Galen kept in his pack, so it could just as easily be that Rick had risen late.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Arturus asked him.

  “Hound liver and flat bread.”

  “Sounds okay.” Actually it sounded delicious, but Arturus knew that if he let his father know such a thing, the man might never get around to making his devilwheat wraps or dyitzu meat pies.

  Rick began to hum to himself as he prepared some unleavened flatbread, his practi
ced fingers kneading the dough against the granite counter.

  Arturus seated himself on one of the chairs that Rick had fashioned out of an old wooden barrel. Their table was made from a woodstone door that was now turned horizontal and propped up by four rectangular granite bricks. Arturus remembered playing with the hinges on it when he was younger. The hinges had eventually come off, but he could still see the depressions and the lighter colored woodstone where they had been attached.

  “Do I have a purpose?” Arturus asked.

  Rick flashed him a playful smile as he worked the dough. “What made you ask that?”

  “Father Klein. He said that all of God’s children were made to do a specific thing. But I’m not God’s child, am I? Because I was born here?”

  “No, Turi, I suppose you’re not.”

  Arturus idly ran his finger over one of the door hinge depressions while he thought about this. “Does that make me evil, because I’m not God’s child?”

  Rick laughed. “No, doing evil things makes you evil.”

  There was the sound of stone grinding on stone as Rick switched on the battery. Julian of Harpsborough said that the battery wasn’t really a battery at all since it didn’t have any electricity. Julian had said it was just a big rock. But it was a very big rock, and the waterwheel would help lift it into the chamber’s ceiling. Its descent was slow, but its weight would power any number of devices in the battery room through a series of gears, pulleys and belts. Rick had the battery connected to the heating plates, which were made of copper colored stones. As Arturus watched, they began to rub against each other. Soon they had developed enough heat to cook the food and toast the flatbread.

  “Well, what’s my purpose then, if God didn’t give me one?” Arturus asked.