Affliction (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 1) Read online

  “Then I die.”

  He offers me something. It’s wrapped in a blanket.

  “I cannot move to unwrap it, what is it?”

  He produces the Old Lady, belt of shells and all.

  I feel myself grinning. “I have a mission for you, innkeeper. I cannot walk yet, so I need your legs. Will you do this thing for me?”

  He swallows. “I will try.”

  “Take your wheelbarrow to where the workers bring the lightrock and smelt it. I need you to gather me the lightrock. Several bags worth of stones, both as large as fists and those as small as you can find. As small as a grain of sand. Cover the bags with corpses and bring them to me. Do so quickly while they still wait to see if I’m in the palace.”

  There is fear in his expression, but this is a man whose only hope is me. “I will do this thing for you.”

  “You told me that there was no child when the Devil came.”

  His eyes narrow in confusion. “Yes.”

  “And that’s the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there is no other child in this city, save the ones in the middle chambers?”

  He stops. “I think there is one more, but I’m not sure. I hear them speaking sometimes, the Devil’s men, of a child. I think he’s connected to the Devil’s woman, but I know not if that child is in the city.”

  Please, Aiden. Don’t be here. I’ll find you. Just don’t be rotting away with your mother.

  She was smarter than that, right? If she was going to sell her soul to this Devil, maybe in hopes of getting Aiden to this place of eternal refuge, she wouldn’t take Aiden here too. She’d leave him behind, someplace safe. Someplace where the Devil could not find him . . . just in case. That’s the Myla I knew.

  Of course, the Myla I knew wouldn’t be fucking the Devil.

  The infidels have a fancy term for when a body starts to rot. They call it necrotizing or necrosis. There is a condition on the old world called necrotizing fasciitis where bacteria releases toxins into the skin, killing the cells there. I never saw it, but I imagine it must have looked very similar to what happens to people who use corpsedust. A few grey spots have appeared on my forearm. It’s the beginning of the rot. It’s necrosis. This place is finally getting to me. I’m rotting, right along with the rest of Maylay Beighlay.

  And if my son is here, then he’s rotting right along with me . . . or worse. They could be making a wight out of him.

  Maybe that spot came from the corpsedust Hagar shoved down my throat. More likely it’s from the food the old man brings me. I know he tries to keep it pure, but with the groundwater polluted with the dust, it’s probably inevitable that the devilwheat gets contaminated.

  The days go by, and the light gets dimmer. Augustus Caesar watches this, and he does not approve. Jesus watches it too, but who gives a fuck what he thinks.

  I still am not strong enough to sit up normally, but I’ve found a trick that works without causing me too much pain.

  I push myself onto my right hip and raise my left knee to my chest. I have to do this slowly so that the pain in my ribs doesn’t become unbearable. Then I work my right elbow under my body and push, swiveling myself around on my right buttock so that I end up in a seated position.

  I take a shell out of the Old Lady’s belt and pick up the knife the innkeeper left me. Its sharp blade easily cuts open the top of the shell. I remove the buckshot. Then I reach into one of the bags of lightrock the innkeeper provided me.

  It takes me a while gather a pile of broken pebbles that are small enough. I drop them into the shell. Then I cover it back over with paper and seal it shut with a little glue made from sinfruit.

  The lightrock buckshot will probably ruin the inside of the Old Lady’s barrel, but she’s always wanted to kill an Archdevil, so she won’t mind.

  I hear a patrol outside the temple, so I stop working to make sure that I don’t make any noise. I’m always worried that the innkeeper will get caught coming here by one of the patrols. He says they’ve stopped showing up at his inn to look for me. Apparently they think I’ve left the city. They think that I’m pretty healthy, he told me. They found Kessler’s body and thought that I dragged it up into the aqueduct to hide it.

  Let them think I’m strong.

  Let them think I’m gone.

  The devilwheat is a sour, decayed ash on my tongue. It is bitter to swallow. The old man said he could no longer sweeten it because he was out of uncontaminated sinfruit. He had looked bad when last I saw him. I know he’s giving me all the fresh food and water that he can manage. I told him to take some for himself, but he refused.

  “Time enough to eat good food when the Devil is dead,” he’d told me.

  It’s a hell of a sacrifice, but he’s right. He’s still looking better than the people I saw in the entrance chambers to Maylay Beighlay so long ago. If he ever gets that bad, then I’ll make him stop.

  Even worse, he has to empty my chamber pot. Poor bastard.

  I’m getting lonely, isolated and weird. I talk to Caesar sometimes. He’s a great conversationalist, though he speaks in Latin, which is unfortunate—because I can’t understand him. I mean, I can, because it’s my delusion, but I have to pretend I don’t because I don’t speak Latin.

  I’m almost sure that the rot has gotten to my brain a little. He speaks to me the most after I eat the devilwheat. The water helps, though. Helps the corpsedust pass right out of me. Sinfruit juice would have been better, Q had taught me. It binds to the corpsedust and helps flush it out of a man’s system. Only this is impossible here, where the corpsedust is everywhere, because there is no sinfruit that it hasn’t already bonded with.

  My right foot is healing. I still have to use my trick to sit up, but it isn’t as painful as it used to be. I have many shells of lightrock buckshot. Even if it is lightrock which wounds this Archdevil, I doubt very much that I have enough to kill it. For this reason I start working on slugs. They are harder to make.

  Caesar watches my chiseling attempts. At first he thought they were very bad, and he was right. But lately I’ve been getting better. He smiles sometimes as I work. I think that he would be ashamed of my efforts normally, particularly considering the skill of the sculptor that made him, but since he’d watched my earlier attempts he knows how much I’ve improved. He can be proud of me for how much better I’ve gotten. Caesar usually isn’t the kind of leader who gives kudos to the “most improved player,” but in my case he makes an exception because he believes in what I’m doing.

  I think he is also happy that I know who he is. All the Christians came to this temple thinking he was some saint or another. Augustus Caesar likes to be recognized, maybe not as much as Julius did, but it’s hard to know because I’ve never had a conversation with Julius.

  The work is necessarily slow because I have to be very quiet for a couple of reasons. The first is that they might come get me. I don’t want that to happen. I want to get them. The second reason is that Caesar doesn’t like loud noises. Sometimes when I mess up and a strike echoes louder than usual, I look to Caesar to see what he thinks. His eyes are disapproving. I didn’t mean to, I tell him, but he doesn’t care. Caesar does not forgive mistakes. Caesar does not forgive fools.

  Slowly I heal. Slowly my belt of shells is filled with munitions that fire lightrock.

  Soon, sweet Myla. Soon I’m coming for you. Nothing can stop me. Caesar has sent me, and his will is absolute.

  The devilwheat is definitely making me loopy, but I’m not too bad off. I had saved a good portion of it earlier, and ate it right before the innkeeper came. I kept thinking he was telling me things, and I’d respond, but he hadn’t said them. The effects leave my body fairly quickly, but I think my isolation is making me a little crazy even when I’m sober. I’m well enough to start some exercises. I can put weight on my foot. Maybe it’s not healed enough to run yet, but I can do a few squats. Push-ups are fine. Sit-ups are tougher because after a few my side begins to hurt again. Als
o, the stone floor isn’t the most comfortable surface. The workouts are nice, though they make me crazier. Sometimes I can even see the statue of Caesar move. Once I saw Christ bleed. I didn’t mind that though, let him bleed. They told me he had died for me, but they lied. He didn’t die for me. He may have died for other people, but he didn’t die for me.

  The work on the slugs goes nicely. I’ve even gone back and replaced a few of my first tries. They weren’t very smooth. I’m still not sure how well these shells will fire, but I’m ready to try. I feel that I’ve made a reasonably good stone facsimile of the lead and copper slugs, but they still might jam up the Old Lady.

  If that happens, I’m a dead man. “See how that works, Jesus? I’m willing to die fighting for you, even though you never gave a damn about me. Why can’t you return the favor, huh? What’s the big deal?”

  That’s why I like Caesar. He didn’t promise me something and then take it away. He didn’t pretend that he was going to build some place that would keep me safe for eternity and then use it as leverage to steal away my worldly and otherworldly possessions. Caesar was straight up. He told me that he wanted shit for Rome.

  Jesus looks sad. He’s crying.

  “I’m sorry, Jesus. I didn’t mean to hurt ya. I mean, you’re all powerful and shit, so I’m not sure why you’d bother being hurt by a guy like me, but you chose too. I guess that’s your fault, you know. That plank-in-your-eye thing. You think I’m a sinner, but I wouldn’t have had a chance to do you any harm unless you made yourself get hurt by me. That makes you twice the sinner, because you did just as much harm in my name as I did on my own, and you knew better. Still, that’s the way you are, I guess, and I regret hurting you. I really do. I hope next time you’ll learn not to be such a big sissy and not take it so hard.”

  I thank my lucky firepits that God isn’t in Hell. If he was, that little blaspheme might be enough to make him side with the Archdevil.

  “Would you mind if I prayed to you?” I ask Caesar.

  Caesar didn’t mind, he was elevated to a God after his death by the Roman Senate. He warns me not to count on my prayer doing me any good, though. I thought this was refreshingly honest, but a bit of a gyp. See, when I pay him taxes, he builds me roads. What do I get when I pray? Jack shit.

  “I don’t deserve you, innkeep.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not so bad,” he jokes. “Particularly now that we don’t have to use this chamber pot.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re going to kill the Archdevil. You deserve much more than just me.”

  I feel guilty because he thinks I am an infidel. I want to tell him the truth. Maybe he wouldn’t be giving me this food if he knew.

  “I’m not the best,” I tell him.

  He puts a leathery, calloused hand on my arm, covering up the small grey spots there. “I don’t care,” he tells me, his voice strangely intense, “you’re all I’ve got.”

  There is an exercise the Infidel Friends use that Q taught me. Maybe they run into these situations where you have to stay fit without having much room to move every once and a while. It’s surprisingly taxing. You jump upward and then land, roll back on your back and then roll up forward. You jump again and then come down into a pushup. Then you come back up to the jumping position to complete your rep. At first the left side of my back prevents me from doing too many, but soon the pain goes away.

  I perform the exercise each day after the old man brings me food. Unlike before, working out with this intensity helps me push the corpsedust through my system. Because of the dust, the room spins during the middle of my work out. Sometimes I see the statues moving out of the corner of my eye. However, by the time I’m finished, my mind is clear.

  At first, clarity is depressing. The reality of the situation is pretty bleak. My Old Lady is a darling, but to the Archdevil she’ll probably be little more than a BB gun—even considering the custom ammunition I’ve made for her. Even if the Archdevil were dead already, he’s got over fifty men on his side as well as a pair of wights. Worse than that, somehow I’ve got to gather the emotional courage necessary to kill Myla.

  Then again, that last part might not be so tough.

  The Infidel Friends have strategies for fighting Hell. As opportunistic as they can be, they have an identifiable style, almost an MO. I try to put myself in Q’s head. What would he do if he were here?

  He would turn the environment against his enemies. That might take some doing considering the thing that I’m fighting is much better adapted to Hell than I am. After all, he was born here, and I’d just showed up a decade ago on account of my bad behavior.

  But there is a human element in this City. This is a place built by humans. It has machines, like the aqueduct. It has houses. It has people, rotten as most of them may be. I should consider all of these things as possible assets as I form my plan.

  And there are slaves. Infidel Friend like to free slaves. They like to earn their trust. They like to help them in their work voluntarily to show what kind of people they are. Infidel Friend like to sing with them and eat with them and earn their trust. Then they help the slaves free themselves.

  I probably don’t have time for all that, and these slaves are pretty damn broken. I remember how they refused to even raise their eyes in the presence of the Devil men. Still, I should consider them.

  I think. I think for a long time. Footsteps are approaching. My hand falls onto the Old Lady.

  The old man appears, another pack of food in his hands and a fresh canteen slung over his shoulder.

  “I don’t deserve you, innkeep.”

  He smiles, handing me the food.

  “I need more from you,” I tell him. “I need a pistol with a few magazines of ammo.”

  Instinctively he puts his hand to his belt. Maybe he has a pistol hidden there.

  “Not yours,” I tell him. “If worse comes to worst, I can take it off of a dead Devil man when the fighting starts. But see if you can’t come up with something.”

  He nods. “I’ll try.”

  I awaken to the sight of Caesar’s face. Strength has returned to my body. The rot had gotten a little worse at first, then a little better, and now it’s a little worse. I have no doubt that if I stay here any longer, the rot will start to win. At the moment, however, I feel as spry as ever. I remember how delicate Hagar’s bones had become. I fear a little that I’ve become that brittle, but somehow I can’t make myself believe it. I feel strong. Each day the Infidel Friend exercises get easier and easier. The pain is gone from my back and my right foot holds my weight. When jumping, sometimes, I feel a twinge of pain. I’m not quite at a hundred percent yet, but God damn it, I’m close.

  Maybe today should be the day.

  Best not to rush things.

  Tomorrow then. Or even the day after. But soon.

  To be honest, I have to admit that some of my wish to start this fight is sheer boredom. I don’t even know how many days I have spent in this small temple.

  I stand up, grateful now for how easy that is, and walk outside of the temple. The light is dim, but constant. It’s like an old world twilight. Because we are so close to the heart, even though most of the veins of frozen lightning are dark, others still carry that illuminated heartbeat.

  Still, the sun is setting on this city.

  This temple is located near the back wall, right by where Jenner led me in from the middle chambers. I move along it to where I’ve been shitting. There’s a hole which must lead down to some of the ancient plumbing of the place. The old man suggested I cover it with a dyitzu skin blanket to help keep in the smell. A good idea, but holy hell, taking off that blanket is no pleasant experience. I grit my teeth through the odor of my own fetid waste, squat, and add to the pollution.

  As quickly as I can, I cover it back over.

  I head back to the temple and pause at the entrance. I almost don’t go in.

  It would be so easy to head down into that city and start the murde
ring. I see one of them now, moving back from where he must have been guarding the entrance to the Heart.

  Not yet. The Infidel Friend are patient. They are wise to be patient. If I am to be thought of as an Infidel Friend, let me at least act like one.

  There is a shot somewhere outside. I hear the echo of the bullet’s report play along the far off buildings of the Heart chamber. The sound was faint, so I know it wasn’t directed at me. I creep outside of the temple, the Old Lady in my right hand. I load an untampered shell into her.

  In the distance there is a man moving amongst the buildings, coming back from his patrol. Although I’m pretty sure he’s the one who fired the shot, he doesn’t look disturbed. He must have seen something. Maybe a shadow. Maybe he’d just killed one of the kids from the middle chamber who’d dared to venture in for some reason. Maybe it was another stranger.

  Hell, if I’m really lucky, it could have been an actual Infidel Friend who’s come to kill the Archdevil . . . but I know better than to hope for that. There are no miracles in Hell, and besides, Q had told me that the Infidel himself had ordered his men out of this place.

  I return inside and look to the statues of Caesar and Jesus. “I’m leaving soon. Tomorrow. You will keep this place, I hope?”

  I haven’t had enough corpsedust today for them to talk back to me. Caesar’s stoic face and Jesus’ tortured one remain unchanged.

  It’s surprisingly hard to sit still. I’m practically dying to work out, but I need to wait for the old man to get here or I’ll have trouble getting the corpsedust out of my system. I’ll probably head out tomorrow on an empty stomach. Better to be hungry in a battle than hallucinating.