Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2) Read online

  He raises both of his hands, his light brown palms held out to us as if in apology. “Nebuchadnezzar.”

  El Cid stands up. “Fuck.”

  “He works with undead,” Q says. “He may not know as much about Hell as Muninn or Endymion, or even Ares, but he’ll know all there is to know about half-turned wights.”

  Ares, there was a name I knew. I’d met him when I first came to Hell, when I was looking for Myla in the City of Blood and Stone. He’s the one who introduced me to Q.

  El Cid covers her mouth. She doesn’t like the idea, but she hasn’t ruled it out.

  Jesus Christ, Q wants to take my son to a necromancer.

  “I’d rather gamble on Endymion,” Jessica says. “Hell, it’d be safer to root out Ares.”

  “Iffin’ my memory any good, Nebuchadnezzar lives by the Pole. We get there mighty fast by my reckonin’. Beside, headin’ to that beau will keep us clear of Keith and his wight.”

  Eagan is shaking his head, but he doesn’t say anything.

  I look to Cid.

  She meets my gaze. “No, Cris. I won’t do this. It’s not worth risking my people. If more than one person dies trying to save your son, we will have made the wrong decision.”

  “Nebuchadnezzar isn’t an infidel?” I ask.

  Q shakes his head. “He knows the Infidel, but he’s not one of us.”

  “The Pole is close, Cid,” Jessica says.

  El Cid puts her hands on her hips. “I’m aware that it’s an optimal solution for saving Aiden, but I won’t risk my people.”

  I stand up, too. “Fine, I’ll go alone. Just like I did in Maylay Beighlay.”

  Everyone stands up now, except for Mason.

  El Cid steps toward me. “Yeah? You fuckin’ know how to get there?”

  “I can find the Pole,” I say. “I’ve been near there before. It’s not so far from Maylay Beighlay, and I know which vein to follow.”

  “No,” Q says. “Swinging by Maylay Beighlay would take too much time.”

  The frown lines on Cid’s forehead disappear. “Okay. Cris, you and I will go. I won’t risk anyone else.”

  “You’re going to have to,” Q says. “I’m going.”

  I love that man.

  El Cid’s green eyes narrow. “You are not.”

  Q smiles. “You going to have Cris carry Aiden the whole way? Boy weighs almost as much as you. You feel comfortable carrying Cris’ pack too? And taking point?”

  “I do,” she answers, “and he will. You’re staying. That’s an order.”

  Q bares his white teeth for a second. “I choose how I live, and how I die. Not you, not anyone else.”

  El Cid turns to her group. “Well the rest of you fuckers are staying out of this, or I’m taking us to Endymion.”

  “Ain’t got to tell me twice,” Mason says. “‘Sides, give us a chance to kill Keith.”

  Eagan and Jessica nod.

  I feel weak all of a sudden. My hands are shaking. I didn’t understand half of what they said, but the important parts I have down. This Nebuchadnezzar guy is a necromancer, and because of that, he should know how to heal my son. So we’re going to go to him and make him cure Aiden.

  That’s it, then. Me, Q and El Cid are going to save my boy.

  Cid walks back into Aiden’s room. I can hear her shuffling with her pack, getting ready to leave.

  “Aiden lives,” Q says.

  I look at my best friend—my only friend. “Damn right.”

  Jessica had fashioned me some damn nice shoes—damn nice. Their soles, made of hardened hound hide, were not much different than the hiking boots I wore in the old world, and the cut of their tread gave me a similar amount of traction. The dyitzu leather she used is dark, the red color of the devil dyed away. She even fastened some small metal rings to the holes through which the silk laces were threaded. I really can’t fault her for anything about the footwear’s quality—only that they were fucking miserable in the snow.

  That snow crunches under my steps. Flakes of it melt, soaking through my socks and assaulting my feet with a toe-aching cold. I find myself hoping my feet go numb, but sadly, the hike is keeping just enough blood flowing to prevent that from happening.

  I look out across the frozen icescape they call the Pole. It seems for all the world like an arctic wasteland. I cannot see the end of the chamber, but I can make out the ceiling. It’s at least a mile high, and it gets even higher toward the center.

  There was a trio of natives who’d followed us for a while after we entered, but I can’t see them now. Maybe they’ve lost interest in us, or maybe they’ve fallen behind. It’s hard to tell because they’re wearing some kind of white fur that camouflages them against the snow.

  Not us. Infidel black is stylish, but it makes us stand out like a neon shoot-me-please sign against the white background.

  “Cris, you listening to me?” Q is asking.

  Jesus Christ, how many times had he said my name before I noticed?

  “Huh?”

  “Your turn for Aiden.”

  Shit. Well, he’ll take my mind away from my feet.

  I let my backpack fall off my shoulders. It lands with a crunch, digging a few inches into the snow. I decide that I hate snow. Cid helps me unstrap Aiden’s harness from Q, and then they fasten my boy to my back. I feel her tucking the blanket we use to keep Aiden warm around his body. His head rests on my shoulder. He stirs a little and his eyes open for a second. That’s not a good sign. The ferment must be wearing off again.

  El Cid pats me twice on my free shoulder to let me know we’re ready to travel.

  In the distance, miles behind us, tiny black dots move along a snow-covered hilltop. The natives? No, they’d be dressed in white. Someone else, then.

  I point. “You see them?”

  Q walks up next to me and scans the horizon. “Shit.”

  El Cid had already started walking onward, but she turns around at his curse. “What?”

  “It’s Keith,” Q’s low voice rumbles.

  “Bullshit,” I say squinting. “You can tell?”

  Q grunts. “That’s him.”

  Jesus.

  I watch those distant specks disappear back behind the hill. “How the hell did they find us?”

  “They must have a hound with them,” Cid says. “I thought Jessica was going to hold them back, but I guess not. We better keep a hard pace. I don’t think we have to worry much about them catching up with us in the short term. If we spend too much time with Nebuchadnezzar, though, we’ll need to worry.”

  My lips are chapped all to hell. It actually hurts to talk because of it. “Much farther?” I ask.

  “Twice as far as we’ve come,” El Cid says.

  Fuck me.

  El Cid smiles, truly undaunted by our freezing surroundings. “Gives us plenty of time to get a better lead on Keith’s men.”

  I feel Aiden’s soft, even breathing on my neck.

  “Nebuchadnezzar’s magic had better fucking work,” I say.

  “First, he’s as likely to try and kill us as help us,” El Cid answers. “And secondly, there’s no such thing as magic.”

  “You can call it whatever the hell you want,” I tell her, “if a dead body gets up and starts walking around, I call it magic.”

  Q snorts, but El Cid seems genuinely curious in that little Socratic way of hers.

  “Why’s that?” she asks.

  “Because . . .” I start with a normal tone of voice, but when Aiden shifts on my back, I continue with a whisper. “. . . because it ain’t natural. Dead bodies don’t just get up and walk around.”

  El Cid smiles as she takes the lead. Her braided black ponytail whips around her head as she looks back to me. “They don’t. Takes corpsedust to make them move.”

  She must be dense. Maybe this infidel philosophy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “I don’t see how dust is going to make a dead body start moving.”

  “Argument from ignorance,” Q says.
/>   I shake my head. “Your mom’s ignorant.”

  Q grins.

  “I tell you what,” El Cid says. “If Nebuchadnezzar doesn’t kill you and raise you in his thrall, you can ask him.”

  Q stops for a second, so we stop with him. Even with the weight of Aiden on my back, I march in place. It’s the only way to keep my toes from hurting.

  Q focuses on El Cid.

  “What?” she asks. “We’ve got to hurry now.”

  Q cocks his head to one side. “Only a moment. Are you going to be okay?”

  I’ve seen exactly two emotions ever cross Q’s face. Stoic, and more stoic. He’s at more stoic now, which means he’s probably torn about something.

  El Cid’s green eyes narrow. “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “Why?” I ask Q. “Why would she not be okay?”

  “She lost family in the Holocaust, Cris.”

  Holocaust, why the fuck would that matter . . . oh shit. “Who the hell are you taking me to?”

  El Cid starts marching again.

  Reluctantly, I follow. “Who?” I demand.

  El Cid turns around, walking backward for a few steps. “He’s a necromancer, Cris. You knew we weren’t taking you to a choir boy.”

  El Cid told me that Nebuchadnezzar, unlike any decent necromancer, hadn’t waited to get to Hell before he began practicing his craft. He’d started early, inflicting horrific medical experiments on captured Jews. They didn’t know about genes back then, at least not like we do now. Apparently the Nazis didn’t believe in Darwin’s natural selection. They believed in some Lamarckian epigenetic bullshit. Nebuchadnezzar was part of a project where they tried to change the eye, skin, and hair color of their victims in hopes of forcibly joining them and their descendents with the master race.

  Maybe in this guy’s mind it was better to do that than kill them.

  Maybe.

  Miles of snow pass beneath our determined and freezing feet, and during this march, I see no sign of Keith or his men. They’re behind us though, I feel them on the back of my neck.

  It ain’t hard to pick out Nebuchadnezzar’s compound. It might be two stories, or two and a half, and it’s set into the side of the Pole chamber’s wall. The fact that he built the thing out of ice bricks makes the structure look a bit like a castle—and I shit you not—there’s a God damned ice swastika carved into a three foot circular depression over the arched entranceway. There’s a woodstone door there, too, except the wood is darker and redder than most woodstone I’ve seen. He might have gotten the lumber from hungerleaf trees, except—I look around this icy wasteland—I have no idea where he’d have gotten it.

  Q wanted to go in hot, guns out and ready—or barring that, sneak in. He even suggested we climb up the side of the Pole’s wall and descend down into the compound. We think alike, Q and I. We want to negotiate from a position of strength.

  El Cid countermanded him though. Said we’d “estrange” Nebuchadnezzar. Said he wouldn’t want to help us. Besides, with Keith behind us, we may not have time to pull that off.

  I guess I’m kind of happy she’s in charge on account of how fucking impossible it was going to be to climb that ice cliff with Aiden on my back.

  “Go ahead, Q,” El Cid said, miming a knock in the air with one fist.

  Q’s white eyes widen incredulously under his raised eyebrows. “You want me to knock?”

  El Cid smiles.

  Q rolls his eyes and shakes his head. We approach the front door. Aiden whimpers a little. I put my hand on my pistol. Q looks me and Cid in the eye, one after the other, his hand raised and balled up into a fist. Then he turns back to the door.

  He knocks four times.

  And then four times more.

  We wait.

  Aiden’s shivering pretty badly. It’s making me shake. My toes are starting to go numb. I march in place a little, crunching the snow under the wonderful-but-completely-fucking-useless-in-snow shoes Jessica’d made me.

  “Can we check—”

  El Cid interrupts me by raising one hand, palm open. She cocks her head to the side and listens. For a second, all I hear is Aiden’s breath and the cold-ass motherfucking wind as it blows across the Pole’s ice and cuts through my clothes, chilling my bones—but then I hear it.

  Step, step, drag . . . step. Step, step, drag . . . step. Step, step, drag . . . step. Q leans to one side, trying to look through the ice around the door. It’s just barely transparent, and I see a figure approaching us. Step, step, drag . . . step. The ice bends the light pretty badly, so I can barely make out that it’s a person coming. Step, step, drag . . . step.

  I hear some sort of mechanism go off to the tune of grinding stone. Another dark shape, maybe the size of a boulder, lowers on the far side of the almost opaque wall. As it does so, the door opens. Inch by inch, a corpse is revealed.

  Its pale face is long and almost devoid of rot. Perhaps the ice helps keep it fresh, I don’t know. It’s dressed in dark clothes that are very similar to an old world suit. It only has a black undershirt beneath its tattered blazer, and wears a pair of worn yet fashionable back dress shoes. Grey, literally lifeless eyes stare at us from within their sunken sockets.

  It does not bare its teeth or mutter gutturally. It does not raise its arms or begin to charge toward us.

  Instead, it bows.

  We follow the dead thing through the halls of this ungodly ice castle. Step, step, drag . . . step. There are no decorations, just ice. The floor, thankfully, is rock, so walking isn’t all that difficult. It’s still cold in here, damn cold, but the fact that the wind isn’t blowing makes things a little more tolerable. None of us have any real winter weather gear. Step, step, drag . . . step. I start to wonder if we can get hypothermia or something. Probably wouldn’t be wise to spend the night in the Pole.

  Undead Jeeves here is an odd thing indeed, but not outside the realm of my experience. In Maylay Beighlay, the old man who saved me before he died had also not attacked me. He’d brought me food each day while he was alive, and did so one last time after his death.

  The corpse leads us down a tunnel which dead ends into yet another ice wall.

  “A secret passage?” Q asks as we make our way down the hallway.

  Step, step, drag . . . step. Jeeves keeps his left leg in the lead at all times. He makes two stutter steps, drags his back leg even with his front, and then finally moves his left foot forward. Even as far as corpses go, this guy isn’t winning any races.

  Aiden moans, a little louder than I’d like.

  “He needs ferment,” I say.

  El Cid nods. “Shortly.”

  At least his shivering has lessened. My thighs are burning from the effort of walking with him strapped to my back.

  Step, step, drag . . . step.

  Undead Jeeves walks straight up to the wall. Step, step . . . then he pauses. He shuffles around and bows at us.

  “I don’t understand,” Q says. “Is there an opening in the wall?”

  “We’re idiots.” El Cid snorts. “We just followed a fucking corpse.”

  Q rolls his eyes.

  “There were some stairs back there,” El Cid says. “Let’s see if Nebuchadnezzar is on the second floor.”

  Jeeves bows again.

  Now that the corpse is close to us, I notice some very odd scarring around its head. It’s almost like a headband, curving around his temples and rising over the dome of his skull.

  “What’s up with this?” I ask, pointing to the dark grey scar.

  El Cid leads us back down the hallway. “From a leucotomy.”

  This time, the corpse is following us.

  I’d never heard of that. “A what?”

  “A lobotomy,” Q clarifies.

  El Cid nods. “You perform it on a living person. If you do it right and treat the surgical incisions in the brain with rustrock, then when you raise the poor bastard as a corpse, they’re usually not violent.”

  I look back over my shoulder at Jeeves. He
bows.

  “Sorry, buddy,” I apologize to him.

  El Cid takes us up a single flight of ice stairs. She moves lightly, with perfect balance. Q follows with similar grace.

  It doesn’t work that way for me. I slip on the first stair and have to catch myself, hands flung outward as I fall forward. Aiden whines. The cold in my palms is excruciating. I look behind me and see Jeeves bow again.

  “Fuck you too, buddy.”

  I struggle to my feet. I lean up against the ice wall to my right for balance, head bowed forward under Aiden’s weight, and try the next step. And then the next. And then the next.

  El Cid and Q wait for me at the top of the staircase.

  I hate this shit.

  I’m breathing hard by the time I get to the top of the small flight. The fog of my breath settles on my nose as condensation.

  I hate the Pole.

  Oddly, the ceiling on the second floor is higher, and more work has been done on the decor. Rather than non-descript ice-brick hallways, many of the walls here are made out of single sheets of ice. Dead bodies are suspended in some of them, arrayed in unsettlingly artistic ways. They stand in grotesque mockeries of famous sculptures. Here, an Aphrodite with the arms missing. There, a Diomedes with genitalia properly worn away. I spot a corpse in the pose of the Thinker. The Thinker is a nude, white man. His face distorted from the ice as I walk toward him.

  His chin rests neatly on his upraised fist.

  Nebuchadnezzar is fucked up in the head.

  The Thinker’s eyes open and I almost lose my balance on the icy floor.

  Nebuchadnezzar is good-and-real fucked up in the head.

  The Thinker is a corpse—a damn well preserved one. If it wasn’t for his eyes being blue, I’d think he was a wight.

  “Over here,” Q says, leaning up against an ice sheet wall which doubles as a window.

  We can see the Pole through it.

  He motions at a distant hilltop. All I see is a white wasteland.

  “They’re building an igloo,” El Cid says.

  Q nods.

  I still can’t see it.

  “You think they’re settling down for the night?” Q asks.

  Finally I spot them, tiny black dots huddled around a white dome.