Dust (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 3) Read online

I look to the slave man, the one who asked me to spare his life.

  “Pomegranate,” I whisper.

  “Quiet,” Fellman hushes me.

  “Domina,” I say just loud enough for her to hear.

  Fellman turns his head, his nose touching my cheek, as he issues a harsh whisper, “I said quiet.”

  “What is it?” Domina asks.

  “These harpies, they use pomegranate to mask themselves. We discovered it with Keith and his men. The hound is right.”

  Domina and Din share a look.

  She sniffs the air.

  “I can’t smell shit,” Fellman says.

  Domina cocks her head to one side. “But I can. We go around.”

  She reaches out with one hand and touches my cheek. “You were a very good boy, just now. A very good boy.”

  My body shakes with the pleasure of hearing her words.

  I’m going to have to hang on. If I can get her a wight and show Domina Blood Pass, it might redeem me in her eyes. She might see me as capable. As worth having. As something other than a receptacle for Fellman’s lust and jism.

  We lay down in the bones that night, in one of the enclaves of the catacombs, and Fellman takes me. He’s not gentle, his thrusts knocking my face against the wall repeatedly and cracking some of the dried ribs we lie in.

  I look at the dead and pretend I’m a skeleton too, shifting with them, just empty bones, no flesh, no soul, no feelings.

  I catch Domina’s eye. Her look of disgust cuts me to the quick.

  I’ll be useless in her world. These slaves, they have to fight for their food. They have to assert their dominance to win every bite. I doubt I’ll be any good at that.

  Fellman shifts, and my head is no longer being rammed into the wall. That’s something.

  I catch a glimpse of a skull, dark eyeless sockets staring at me. There is a very distant possibility that this head belongs to the ribcage I found myself holding the last time I slept in one of these rooms. I’m rocked back and forth toward the sockets. I close my eyes and pretend I’m somewhere else.

  Fellman finishes.

  His breathing becomes a constant on my neck. The gentle rhythm of the rise and fall of his chest lulls me into the embrace of sweet, sweet nightmares. On Earth, they’d said a man who died in his dreams would die in reality. Wouldn’t that be nice.

  I try not to jerk in my sleep because that would disturb Fellman and make him angry.

  He begins to snore.

  They must think these catacombs are pretty safe because no one wakes him. I know I dare not.

  I feel strangely secure—as if Fellman will protect me.

  And that disgusts me.

  But what choice do I have?

  It’s impossible to sleep like this, in the arms of an enemy, surrounded by evil soldiers and owned by a woman who barely protects me. Owned by a woman who shouldn’t even want to protect me.

  And the hours pass and pass.

  And pass.

  And pass.

  The hound’s head perks up, sniffing the air. Its eyes look more cogent than usual, and I realize it’s been several hours since its last dose. I feel a low rumble which, for a second, I think is Fellman snoring, but it’s the dog’s growl. Then it emits a short whine.

  Din sits straight up, awakened from his slumber. He looks around and quietly shakes the trio of Carrion born awake. Both the little lady and Domina already have their eyes open.

  Din stands, his chainmail chinking softly, his pistol drawn at the darkness beyond our chamber. Fellman stirs, and the breathing on my neck stops. He clutches me tighter to him.

  Domina, silent amidst her flowing black robes, rises, a Beretta pistol in her hand. Her preternaturally beautiful face is half covered in shadow, and I feel my soul stir. That woman is my protector. I must have faith in her.

  Domina points at one soldier and then to the hallway. He crawls over the bones, which crunch and crackle, and then he steps up onto the three foot wall that divides our enclave from the hallway. He looks left, then right, then turns back to us and shrugs.

  “It’s not there now,” Din says, studying his hound, “I doubt it passed us in the night, or the dog would have awakened. I bet it got close though, perhaps a chamber or two over.”

  Domina’s eyes are fixed on the hallway. “Can you tell from the hound if it was human or devil?”

  Din frowns. “No, but I think the hound’s smelling something new. I’ve never seen him like this.”

  The Little Lady squeaks, “Should we scatter the slaves?”

  Domina’s eyes narrow. She is breathtaking. She must be a match for whatever devil is out there, particularly with the Carrion born and Din at her side.

  “No,” she says. “Quickly, move.”

  Fellman comes to his feet, scattering bones with a clatter. He gets the harness ready, and for the first time, I help him put it on me. He nods approvingly, and I feel some kind of bond with him. In this one thing, we are allied. The devils, they would do worse to me than he.

  Wouldn’t they?

  Maybe not.

  The slaves form up around Domina, handing her their leashes. The soldiers move gingerly out into the hallway, two going right and the third going left to guard our backs. Slowly Fellman, with me on his back, crawls out.

  He comes to his feet, and I try to stay tight to him so he can keep his balance. Din and the slaves come out next, followed by Domina and the Little Lady. I turn back and forth, looking ahead and behind us into the darkness.

  I see nothing.

  Maybe the dog is crazy.

  I hear the whistles of infidel fire behind us.

  “Down!” I shout.

  But Fellman turns around instead, looking back toward the whistling. A series of explosions goes off, their blasts echoing incessantly in the bone filled chambers. The effect is disorienting, and a sudden gust of air and gravel drives Fellman to his knees.

  Infidels. There are infidels here?

  Din and the rearguard Carrion born loose a few bullets toward the billowing dust which is heading right toward us.

  But how are they here? Could this be Q and Cid? Domina took us down roughly the same route Durgan had taken. If Q had managed to follow Durgan to the stadium chamber, he would have lost our trail there. Is it possible they’d been waiting all this time?

  “Hold your fire!” The Little Lady’s high pitched voice is strangely audible against the reports of the gunfire and the settling of dust and stone.

  Domina had not fallen to her knees. She hands her leashes to the Little Lady and walks back into the smoke, heedless of any danger.

  “Turn around and face forward,” the Little Lady orders. “They won’t come through from behind with all that dust in the air.”

  Fellman obeys her, turning around, but I don’t. I crane my neck so I can see Domina disappear into the cloud.

  Slowly the dust around us thickens, and our visibility becomes very limited, not that we could see shit in the darkness anyway.

  Domina’s silhouette appears, picking its way back to us through the corridor, the dim light of an enclave projecting her shadow toward us through the clouded air. She clears the haze, a haughty expression etched onto her exquisite features.

  “A collapse bars our retreat,” she says. “I’m guessing our enemies meant to do that.”

  Fellman turns, making it easier for me to stare at her.

  “We’ve only one way to go,” she says. “Serfs first.”

  The four men line up, shoulder to shoulder in the cramped hall. They are fodder in the truest military sense, existing only so their deaths can grant the Carrion soldiers a few extra seconds to live. Together, almost in lockstep, they march forward.

  We follow, Fellman’s boots crunching in the gravel.

  “I need to drug the hound,” Din says.

  “It can wait,” the Little Lady whispers harshly.

  “Not long,” Din insists.

  “Put it down if you have to,” Domina says. “We’r
e nearly out of the Carrion.”

  Din gives out a low, rumbling growl surprisingly similar to his hound. “But we’ll be going right back in.”

  “I told you, baptisms can be undone.”

  This silences him.

  As we move, we clear the haze, and I see the archway where our hallway opens up to the stadium chamber. With all those thousands of entrances and hundreds of levels, that’s got to be a great place for an ambush.

  Domina’s voice halts us at the entrance. “Stop.”

  And we do.

  I can’t see past their bodies, so I do my best to imagine the room beyond. Only, I don’t know what floor we’re on. Could this be the same path Keith took us down? The odds of that would be very, very low.

  Domina speaks loudly, her voice echoing back along the hallway’s enclaves and, I assume, out into the stadium chamber. “We’re not coming out.”

  “It’s okay,” Cid’s voice calls to us from beyond. “We have no intention of killing you. Leave our man by those two purple stones, and you can all walk away from this with your lives.”

  At hearing Cid’s voice, I start to shake. I don’t know why, but the sound hurts me for some reason. I think I want to cry.

  “Not a chance, sweetheart,” Domina calls back.

  “We’re infidels, we’ll honor our word.”

  I hear the howling winds pick up in the stadium chamber.

  “We’ve got food and time,” Domina answers, “so you better be well-fed infidels.”

  Din chuckles at this.

  Our soldiers are twitchy, though. I don’t think they expected to be fighting a crew of infidels—but there isn’t a crew, not really. Just Q and Cid.

  One turns to Domina, his shoulders hunched with worry, and his mouth opens—

  The Little Lady points her pistol at his face. “Do as you’re told.”

  He shuts his mouth, and shaking with fear, turns back around.

  “Neb,” I hear Cid’s voice say, “flush ‘em out.”

  “Guten Abend.” Neb’s voice is harsh and low.

  A second series of explosions goes off, but this time with less effect. A loose cloud of dust settles all around us. It smells like something darkly familiar. Corpsedust? No. Wightdust? Definitely not.

  It smells like moldy books—like the bottom floor of an old and leaky library.

  We wait for more explosions, but none come.

  Din starts chuckling, a high-pitched, foreign laugh. “I do hope you brought good provisions,” he shouts, “or at least some working explosives.”

  Had their infidel fire failed them? An entire set at the same time? It could happen. If you get corpsedust on your weapons, it can certainly cause misfires—and that would explain the odd smell. Jesus Christ, my luck’s turned bad.

  Maybe the infidels aren’t as good as I thought. Igraine hadn’t seemed afraid of them. Maybe, just maybe, she was right about what it took to survive in the Carrion.

  I let myself consider, for the first time, that the crew I’m with might be superior to Cid and Q. Certainly Q is quieter and a better tracker, but that hound has abilities to match his. And even if Cid is a better shot, would it matter since the slaves will allow Domina and Din extra time to aim their weapons?

  But then Neb starts singing, and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise as his voice, pure and deep and blessed with a surprising vibrato, sounds out like hellsong down our halls.

  “Guten Abend, gute Nacht,”

  The German words are foreign to me, but the melody is that most classic of all lullabies.

  “mit Rosen bedacht,

  “mit Näglein besteckt,”

  There is some clicking around us, from the bones. Fleshless skeletons cannot become corpses, so perhaps the explosion has disturbed something in these chambers. Spiders maybe, or some sort of rodent horde.

  “Vermin!” Din shouts.

  The soldiers unload a few rounds of buckshot into the catacomb chambers to our left and right. White puffs of bone dust plume up from each blast as shattered pieces of skeleton ricochet about the hallway. A dry, musty smell joins the mildewy odor of the last explosion.

  All is still.

  “Schlupf’ unter die Deck!” Neb’s singing continues as the dust keeps settling.

  There is more twitching in the beds of bones, and whatever is crawling beneath the dead is disturbing a skeletal arm so that it looks like it’s reaching for us.

  More shotgun blasts ring out.

  “Morgen früh, wenn Gott will,”

  The arm keeps moving back and forth along the bones . . . oh God. Oh God. The bone hand lifts itself on the end of its skeletal arm, rising up out of the morass.

  Oh good God almighty.

  The arm bends, and the hand touches down onto the mass of bones. It shakes and rattles as its torso rises from the sea of the dead. A skull, attached to the end of that skeletal torso, turns to look at us.

  “Wirst du wieder geweckt.”

  “They’re rising,” Din shouts, pointing into the right catacomb chamber.

  “Skeletons don’t rise.” Domina’s voice corrects him.

  And I thought she was right. I really did. But apparently Neb knows better than she or I.

  The dead are slow and clumsy, falling over themselves as jumbles of bones which combine and recombine, sometimes taking on different parts from other bodies.

  “Domina!” the Little Lady screeches.

  “We’ve got to move!” I tell Fellman.

  Fellman begins to shake, almost violently. A skeletal hand reaches out over the squat wall divide and grabs at his thigh. He kicks at it, but as a slave, he has no weapons.

  “Guten Abend, gute Nacht,”

  “Fend them off!” Domina’s voice is shrill, lacking any of its normal composure.

  The soldiers try more buckshot, but that doesn’t do shit. Din’s rapier is all but useless, so he resorts to smashing at them with the hilt.

  “They don’t stay down!” a soldier shouts.

  Fellman jerks away, ripping his pant leg out of the grip of a skeletal hand.

  “von Englein bewacht,

  “die zeigen im Traum . . .”

  Farther back along the hallway, fully formed skeletons tumble over the waist-high walls and land in the chambers. On shaky legs they stand like newborn deer, and then, each jerky step uneven, they begin to shamble toward us. Their progress is terribly slow, but they’re filling the hallway, so there won’t be a lot Domina will be able to do about them when they get here.

  “If you kill Cris, you all die,” Q says. “But I’ll only shoot your legs. The dead will be the ones that take you.”

  “Damn it,” Domina says, and then she shouts louder. “We’re coming out! Don’t shoot!”

  The Little Lady’s head whips around. “You can’t!”

  “Hush,” Domina says, turning to Fellman. “There are tons of passages like this in the next chamber. When you get out, head toward the purple stones as if we’re doing as they say, but—” her voice is drowned out by the panicked shouts of her Carrion born and a pair of shotgun blasts. “—and then hug the left wall. Do you understand me? Hug the left wall. Then I want you to sprint back down the next passage over. Do you understand?”

  Fellman is nodding.

  “Move!” Domina shouts.

  We rush out into the stadium chamber, our soldiers releasing volleys of useless buckshot back at the undead. The whipping wind catches us, drowning out the clicking sound of bone on rock.

  “There!” Domina points to a cluster of cubic purple stones. “Put his body there!”

  Fellman rushes left, but stays close to the wall. I can’t see any of my friends, but I realize that if they rescue me, they’ll find everything out. They’ll know what’s happened.

  Shame, deep and abiding, wells up from within me and suddenly I’m terrified of facing my friends. I’m afraid in a way I’ve never been before.

  “Run!” Domina releases her leashes. “Now, Fellman!”

&n
bsp; Fellman turns on his heel.

  The slaves break in all directions, but there isn’t a whole lot of room on this tier. One drops over the ledge, two are heading for the stairs on the left, the other for the stairs on the right. Cid and Q don’t shoot them, though I wish they would.

  The Carrion born loose some buckshot, firing helter-skelter around the tremendous chamber.

  One drops, his head jerking backward in the opposite direction of his body. Fellman races back into a hallway with Din hot on our heels. Domina comes in next, a single Carrion born behind her.

  “Fire a few more rounds,” she orders the soldier, her composure regained. “Quickly, Din. We need to get down this passage and lose them in the lower levels.”

  She leads us at a jogging pace down this new corridor. Again, enclaves full of the dead flank us on the left and right. This time, thank God, they’re not moving.

  Domina’s mask cracks again when her final Carrion born is shot down.

  “Clear!” I hear Q’s surprisingly close voice shout.

  Behind us the infidel fire whistles.

  “Down!” I yell at Fellman.

  Again, he’s too stupid to listen, and instead turns around. The blast isn’t so bad, but the shaking after the explosion is enough to send Fellman and I to the floor.

  Dust covers us over and fills the air.

  I watch it swirl as I consider whether to attempt choking Fellman unconscious. If I succeed, then Domina will kill me. If I fail, then Fellman will hate me.

  Maybe I shouldn’t do anything.

  Din’s dark figure cuts through the dusty air, and the man helps Fellman—and me by proxy—to his feet.

  “We need to run!” the Little Lady screeches. “They’ll cut us off.”

  Domina turns as if she’s about to follow the Little Lady’s advice, but Din reaches out with one hand and grabs her wrist.

  “We can’t outrun them while carrying Cris,” he says.

  He and Domina’s eyes meet.

  A few of his dreadlocks have come loose, and he brushes them away from his face. “We need to surrender.”

  “No!” the Little Lady yells. “Igraine wants the pass. There can be no surrender. We can fight them off. Igraine will kill us if we lose him.”

  Domina doesn’t look at her.

  “Guten Abend, gute Nacht,” Neb’s baritone returns, not from the stadium chamber behind us, but from the catacombs ahead.