Darksiders: The Abomination Vault (24 page)

Harvester had split in two, a scythe for each hand, and Death sent both razor-edged missiles hurtling downward before his own fall had covered even half the chamber’s height.

The first slashed across Belisatra’s arm even as she reached for her prize. Metal screamed, sparks flew, and though the armor held—truly she must be a skilled Maker indeed, to craft protections that could stand against Harvester!—it was enough to force her back, recoiling from the attack and abandoning whatever she’d meant to grab.

Death’s second blade proved even less effective. Hadrimon, encumbered only by the weaker but far lighter angelic armor, reacted faster than his companion. Affliction swept from its scabbard to parry its sister weapon. That scythe, too, rebounded from enchanted steel, and then both swept back through open air. They arrived in the Horseman’s waiting hands at the same instant his boots touched stone—the stone of the worktable, rather than the ground.

The chamber shook, and War stood some way to his left, cracks radiating through the floor around him.

Belisatra took one more step back, just beyond reach of the twinned scythes, and crossed her arms. Great chains, their heavy links bristling with barbs and blades, slid from the underside of the vambraces that covered her forearms. Longer than Ruin from nose to tail, almost as thick around as Belisatra’s own arms, they could not possibly have fit concealed within her armor—but then, such was the wonder of the Maker’s art. The chains rose and coiled of their own accord, as though Belisatra had as much control over them as over the arms from which they sprouted.

Above, the wide-winged angel hovered. Hadrimon held Affliction in his right hand. In his left, a triple-barreled pistol of iron, flesh, and bone. Death, of course, knew the weapon at once, and his rage at those who would stir up the memories and sins of a dead race flared hotter than the fires of Hell.

Black Mercy had not yet awoken; that much he could feel from clear across the chamber. Still, even at a fraction of its potential power, a shot from that profane gun wasn’t something he could afford to take lightly. He hefted Harvester, which was once again a single scythe, and readied himself.

Chaoseater seemed almost to hum with impatience. The chains swayed like angry cobras. The bone-whittled hammers on Black Mercy clicked back, ready to fall.

And that was when everything
really
went to Hell.

Or, rather, the other way around.

T
HEY ALL FELT IT
. T
O
D
EATH, AT LEAST, IT BEGAN AS A
peculiar prickling on the skin, almost like immersion in a fluid just slightly caustic. Frost formed in the surrounding corridors, only a few feet from the main chamber—yet the temperature
in
that chamber spiked, rising until shimmers of heat visibly rose from the stone slab on which Death stood.

The air grew thick, heavy, not as though it were choked with some sort of fume, but rather with a growing pressure. Something loomed from a direction that had nothing at all to do with north or south, east or west, depth or breadth or height. Something pressed against the walls through which the Horsemen so easily stepped, and it, too, wanted
in
.

Something ripped in the air above them—no, it was the
air itself
that tore!—revealing a ragged hole, black as matricide, reeking of brimstone. It fell away, a tunnel of nothing that led to a pit of liquid fire.

Hell, it seemed, had followed the Council’s Riders, and now it disgorged a fine selection of the horrors it had to offer.

Squawking, shrieking, shouting, gibbering; running, flying, slithering, flopping; they tumbled into the laboratory. On
and on, until it seemed even the huge chamber could not contain them all. Those that could clung to the walls, skulking overheard, while others mounted the balconies and gantries. Blades and guns of a blackened, twisted nature, formed from the desiccated secretions that were the heart of demonic craftsmanship, protruded from the occasional fist or tendril. Most of the hellish beasts seemed more than content, however, with tooth and talon.

For the length of several breaths they held, pausing in their cries and howls. The tableau grew silent, save for the skittering of limbs, the occasional splatter of dangling drool …

And Death’s muttered, “Well,
that
was unexpected.”

A single demon roared a command—Death could not, in the crowd, tell which it had been, but the voice was wet, burbling, like someone speaking through the scum congealed atop an old stew—and the horde fell upon them.

Hadrimon soared, twisting between flying horrors. Affliction licked out at any who dared come too near, and Black Mercy spoke in rapid bursts. Demons howled in pain as the teeth launched by the ancient weapon ripped through flesh and spirit alike.

The jagged chains stretched even farther from Belisatra’s wrists, then shot up and around, shredding flesh from every demon they passed. They wrapped around some targets—a limb if it was all they could catch, a torso or head when possible—and either crushed the creature within to pulp or unwound so fast they sawed the thing in half.

War stamped and thrust, spitting demon after demon on Chaoseater’s black edge. He had little room to maneuver, trapped in the center of the workshop, surrounded by more foes than any of the others—and that was fine by him. Claws and blades screeched harmlessly off his armor, his blade fed on the chaos and carnage, and the grin on his face was almost, itself, demonic.

Behind his mask, Death smiled—and leapt.

He could have reached any of the lower bridges or balconies with that leap, so high did it carry him, but that would have meant coming up in the midst of a demon cluster. He’d be delivering himself into their hands before he could bring his own weapon to bear.

So instead, he leapt toward the wall
opposite
his goal.

The Horseman swung his legs forward so that they struck the stone first. His knees folded, absorbing the impact, and thrust out again in a second jump straight from the wall itself. Once more across the chamber, and he plummeted down onto his target from above. The startled demons thrashed about on the balcony, moving to reorient themselves to face the unexpected attack, and succeeded mostly in getting in one another’s way.

Stupid move. You thought to intimidate us, and all you did was crowd yourself so badly your numbers scarcely matter
.

Death tucked his legs tightly under him as he fell, so that they would not present the demons with potential targets before he could strike back with Harvester. The weapon now boasted two blades, one on each end of the haft. It was already whirling with impossible speed, nothing but a razored blur. Death’s wrists passed over and around each other, and he himself was spinning when his feet finally struck stone.

Blood and various ichors spattered in a series of short, swift geysers, followed by limbs and larger gobbets. And just that swiftly, the small balcony was empty of any living being but Death himself. Harvester’s twin blades had proved long enough to reach to all edges of the platform, and the tightly packed demons had left themselves no room to run.

A trio of duskwings—bat-like, venomous horrors of frightening speed—swooped down on the blood-slick balcony from above, their high voices screeching in fury. Leather wings battered the air, casting the stench of clinging, caustic guano
before them. They descended in a simple but effective formation, the two on each side a bit lower and farther back to ensure their target couldn’t dive aside from the central duskwing’s strike.

Death let them come, and then dived
forward
into a tight roll.

Harvester split before he was back on his feet, becoming a pair of long, narrow javelins. The Horseman rose and stabbed. The lead bat-demon was behind him now, still trying to recover from the dive he’d avoided. The other two flopped, screaming, on Harvester’s twin points.

But not for long.

The surviving member of the trio swung back around, but Death was already in the air. Harvester, again a single scythe, he held in one hand. The other snagged the creature by the throat, leaving them both dangling high above the floor.

The duskwing, not strong enough to maintain flight for long with a passenger, began to descend in a broad spiral. It lashed its barbed tail at Death, hellish poisons glistening in the light. It was the obvious move, however, and a simple flick of Harvester removed the threat. The demon shrieked once more as its severed tail tumbled into the massed demons below.

“War! Clear me some room to work!”

Below, Death’s younger brother was almost laughing, his entire body quivering with the energies Chaoseater absorbed from the battle. The creatures around him were humanoid, bursting with obscenely oversized muscles. Stunted wings, vestigial and useless, dangled morosely from their back. Their heads were horned, their mouths fanged; they were, in purpose and nature, not even individuals but weapons, no less so than the axes they carried.

These were the Phantom Guard, the core of almost every hellish army, feared throughout Creation.

But not by War.

The first sweep of Chaoseater shattered one axe and knocked three others aside. The second gutted all four of the Phantom Guard demons who had held them. Then, his blade and his soul equally empowered, War knelt and drove Chaoseater into the stone.

As in the White City, blades similar to Chaoseater itself burst upward in a thicket of deadly steel. Demons fell or retreated, screaming obscenities. The blades vanished as swiftly as they’d appeared, and Death had the space he’d requested.

Death snapped the duskwing’s neck and dropped down beside his brother. And he, too, began to draw on the power he’d drawn from the defeated foe.

Unlike War, the elder Horseman did not require any specific weapon to feed on the strength of the fallen. It came to him naturally, bits of energy sloughing from the departing souls and dispersing essence. But that meant that, for him, the chaos that fed War was insufficient. It was the deaths themselves that mattered.

Against the automatons on the fields of Kothysos or in the Crowfather’s domain, he hadn’t bothered. Though technically living, such lesser constructs, being soulless, granted him only a fraction of the power he could gain from other creatures.

Demons, though? Demons were vile engines of destruction, utterly irredeemable—but they were
alive
.

And Death grew strong as they fell.

He raised his arms, and a cloud of bone fragments sprang from the floor, precisely as they’d done outside. Again they whirled, a semi-solid cyclone with Death and War at the center.

This time, however, it was not several feet of solid stone at which the Horseman threw them.

Demons disintegrated into flapping fronds of shredded
meat. So loud was the whirlwind, the Horsemen couldn’t even hear the enemies’ screams. When Death allowed the bone storm to disperse, more than two-thirds of the demons in the chamber were dead or dying.

Of course, the downside to this was that the survivors consisted almost entirely of those demons tough enough to withstand such an assault.

Again the horde’s leader barked his orders, and this time Death could see who—or rather what—that leader might be.

After a good long look, he still wasn’t sure.

The creature was enormous; not the largest demon Death had ever seen, by any means, but certainly one of the largest
humanoids
he’d encountered. Better than twice War’s height, it was … fat.

Not as a descriptor; this was no humanoid creature that happened to be obese. It literally
was
fat. Ripples, rolls, bulges, and slabs of fat formed something vaguely the shape of a torso, with smaller columns or protrusions that might be arms and legs. It seemed to have no structure, no bones; it bent where it needed to bend, compressed where it needed to compress. The demon walked with a horrid, lurching gait, pointed with thick, gummy fingers.

And the head … Nearly as broad as the creature’s shoulders, it sat on a short stump of a neck, and it, too, was fat. No hair, no features, just more folds, stacked and rumpling where the face should have been. Only when the thing screamed its orders could Death see that one of those folds concealed a mouth. Ringed with jagged teeth—the only visible part of the demon with any rigidity—it proved nearly as wide as the head itself.

Death knew a great deal about demon taxonomy, but this monstrosity was new to him. He was about to ask his brother if
he’d
seen such a creature before, when War asked, “Do you suppose that thing has internal organs?”

I’d guess that means he doesn’t know any more about it than I
.

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

The Horsemen moved, and the remaining demons—as well as fresh reinforcements, dashing through the hanging portal and flinging themselves to the walls and balconies—roared as one.

“You go high this time.” Death’s burning eyes flickered meaningfully across the demons massing on the floor, then upward. War followed that gaze, nodded, and jumped for the nearest balcony.

Death waded into the horde, Harvester split, one scythe in each hand. Primarily more Phantom Guards, these, but accompanied by squat, powerful beasts whose stone claws crackled and smoked with undying flame. Even from halfway across the room, he could feel the heat on his skin.
Those
, the Horseman decided,
I think I’ll handle at a distance
.

A wise tactic, perhaps, but insufficient. Death was in the midst of a veritable ring of Phantom Guards when one of the flame-clawed demons dug its talons into the wall, ripped loose a chunk of stone twice its own size, and hurled it.

It was an attack he’d never anticipated, and for all his agility, the press of Phantom Guards meant that the Horseman couldn’t evade its flight.

Neither could at least three of the demons surrounding him, but that would prove little consolation in the moments to come.

The slab of rock—which seemed, impossibly, to have ignited beneath the demon’s flaming claws—slammed Death to the unyielding floor. Several of his attackers were pulped or incinerated, and it was only the Horseman’s greater resilience and swift reflexes that
partially
saved him. He lay pinned, his left side in flaring agony, fire licking at his arm, his shoulder, his neck. He could actually hear the sizzling as some of his hair, and bits of his skin, boiled away.