Darksiders: The Abomination Vault (29 page)

And I imagine he never would have, had he not come across one of your profane devices. I don’t know where he found it, or how; and again, I don’t imagine that it matters. All I know now is that, for the first time, Hadrimon may have the power necessary to wreak whatever vengeance he still feels is his due. And now that he has the influence of the Grand Abominations stoking the hatreds in his soul beyond all comprehension or sanity, I shudder to think of just how appalling that vengeance may be.

I
T REALLY DIDN’T TAKE THEM ALL THAT LONG
.

Even with three score angels on the wing—operating in organized flights from a central base camp, working in an ever-expanding spiral—it could potentially have been quite some time before they discovered anything of note. The territories occupied by the last of the Ravaiim, though certainly limited when compared with an entire realm, still covered a vast expanse. As such, their blood had spilled across and infused the earth over a broad swath of terrain, all of which had to be thoroughly searched. Further, much of what had appeared from above to be featureless plain had now revealed itself to be festooned with jagged crevices and narrow ravines, the entire region cracked and rough as an old callus. With these, the thick fumes that seemed to be the final lingering breaths of this dying world conspired to make any sort of search, however methodical, a dubious proposition at best.

Yet it was only a couple of days between the angels’ arrival and the first report of contact with the enemy, found scattered over a wide plain festooned with mushroom-like polyps of glistening, clot-speckled meat.

Now, following the directions of the scouting party—who had themselves returned to keep an eye on Belisatra’s forces—
the Horsemen and their allies silently closed on their targets. Death and War traveled on foot; the steeds of the Council’s Riders possessed many strengths, but stealth was not high on that list. Around and above them were forty of the White City’s soldiers; all that could be spared without leaving the base camp undefended or recalling the most distant scouting parties. And in the center of the slowly advancing forces, Azrael, his lips and fingers moving in eldritch incantations. They were simple spells—one to cloak the company in an illusory mist, making them all but invisible in the drifting haze; another to enhance their vision so that they might see just a bit farther through that haze than otherwise—but extending them over so many at once, while on the move, was proving tricky even for the ancient mystic.

Despite their difficulties, they drew ever nearer, step by soft and careful step. Until Death, peering intently through the fog and scattered particulates in the air, finally managed his first glimpse of what lay ahead.

He’d known the enemy forces were numerous—the scouts’ report had been explicit on that point—but it still came as something of a jolt to see them scurrying over the encrusted flatlands. Without taking the time to actually count, he estimated more than two hundred of the multi-legged stone workers, and almost half that many of the brass myrmidons, their spinning shafts kicking up clouds of dust.

He saw something else as well, something new. Several iron cauldrons, complete with articulated legs without and rotating gears within, crept slowly through the midst of the other automatons. At irregular but frequent intervals, the stone servitors would dump loads of earth into those peculiar receptacles, which would then, via the grinding of the gears and various magics that the observing Horseman could sense but not see, be compressed into so much pulp.

A pulp that left behind it trickles and stains of a deep crimson extract.

Death would have liked a closer look, purely out of curiosity, but it wasn’t necessary. He knew precisely what those devices were doing, even if the principles and methods remained unclear.

This was how Belisatra was extracting the long-lost residue of the Ravaiim blood from the flesh of the world.

“Still no word from the other scouts?” Death called softly.

Azrael shook his head, his voice still devoted to maintaining his spells.

“War? Thoughts?”

“Until we know otherwise,” the other replied, “we should operate under the assumption that this is
not
the only enemy force in the region. Avoid a prolonged engagement if possible, and devote a portion of our forces to perimeter guard if we
are
drawn into one.”

“I thought much the same.”

“We should hit them from all sides,” War continued. “Keep them from setting up any defensive lines, or organizing to protect the workstations.”

“Agreed. Four squads of ten angels each. Azrael, you, and I will each lead one. Azrael? Whom do you trust to serve as a fourth?”

The elder angel pointed, indicating an angel with a halberd over her shoulder, a warhammer with a beak nearly as long as her wingspan slung at her back, and a perpetual squint.

“All right. You!”

“Ezgati, Horseman.”

“Fine. Ezgati, you command the fourth division.” Death stepped aside, allowing War to indicate which unit should approach from which direction.

“The scouting party?” Ezgati asked. “We don’t know precisely where they’re stationed.”

“Keep an eye out,” War answered. “Hold off on any cannonades until you’ve located them
—unless
one of the other units requires immediate assistance. In that case, the scouts will have to take their chances.”

Ezgati grumbled under her breath, and Azrael scowled, but neither voiced any objection.

“Remember that your primary targets are the cauldrons. We—”

“Look there!”

Both Horsemen turned at the interruption. One of the angels held his halberd before him, pointing toward a clear spot where the eddies and currents of the breeze had temporarily opened a window through the fog. There, roughly a third of the way around the edge of the enemy operation, the aforementioned scouts had taken shelter behind an encrusted, necrotic dune. Their position should have kept them out of sight of the constructs, yet a small squad of the brass-and-stone soldiers were advancing on them, gradually, silently, from behind.

“Damn it!”

Several of the angels were already moving, weapons out and wings spread, but War raised a hand to stop them. “If we engage, the others will know we’re coming!”

“We are
not
just going to leave them out there to be cut down from behind!” Ezgati retorted.

“We need to—”

“Both of you
shut up
!” Death hissed. No, they couldn’t launch an overt attack without giving away their presence—but he might just have another option.

The elder Horseman dropped to one knee and plunged his fingers into the rotten, flaky soil, already whispering. Doing
this at such a distance was taxing, but not impossible. If he could just …

There!

Just ahead of the advancing myrmidons, skeletal hands bristled from the ground, already grabbing at the enemy. Death knew from experience that the rapid spindles would grind those bones to powder, but perhaps if he focused them
all
on a single construct, they might slow it for at least an instant—and, more important, ought to make sufficient noise to warn the scouts of the approaching attackers.

At the Horseman’s command, nearly a dozen of those hands converged on the construct in the center of the advancing line, reaching over and around one another so that they might all grab the rotating stalk at once.

Bone snapped, dust flew … And then the necromantic strength of so many hands dragged the spindle to a sudden halt.

The upper half of the construct instantly began whirling uncontrollably in the opposite direction, metal screeching under the sudden stress. Like the mad project of some drunken toymaker, part child’s top and part marionette, it wobbled as it spun. Its arms flailed wildly, and with them the killing blades into which the construct had already formed its hands. The two myrmidons to either side, as well as one standing a bit too close behind, were instantly hurled aside to land in heaps of shredded metal. Faster and faster the runaway automaton spun, leaning ever farther as it began to topple, until finally one of those arms dug deep into the earth and ripped itself free of the rotating torso in a spray of metal filings, dust, and something that might have been a mix of blood and groundwater. At that point the construct, now completely unbalanced, crashed to the dirt where it flipped a few times, denting itself grotesquely out of shape, before finally going still.

War, Ezgati, and Azrael stared, their jaws comically slack—first at the wreckage, then at Death.

Who, in response, could offer up little more than a halfhearted, “Huh.”

Still, while the attempt might not have gone precisely (or at all) as Death had expected, it worked. The small scouting party, alerted by the sensational cacophony, took to the air and vanished into the swirling haze long before the surviving members of that ill-fated ambush could reach them. And while the larger force of constructs clearly knew, now, that something was amiss—they couldn’t possibly have missed the clamor, either—they could only respond by converging on the fallen myrmidon, given that the attack lacked any more obvious origin.

Death shrugged, allowed the hands to fade back into the earth, and gestured for War to order the attack.

Things could, perhaps, have gone a bit more smoothly—the four separate divisions had to rush into position, now that the enemy was on guard—but ultimately, it made no difference. Two of the Riders of the Apocalypse and forty angels laid siege to an army of constructs that outnumbered them nearly eight to one, and the constructs never stood a chance.

Sacred energies and tearing shrapnel detonated across Belisatra’s forces as a dozen circling angels opened fire with Redemption cannons. Around the edges, those artificial creatures that sought safety away from the enclosed ranks of their comrades instead found themselves peppered into chunks by volley after volley from the ranks of halberdiers. Unable to fire back—none of them was equipped with gun or cannon of its own—the constructs sought shelter within the shallow ravines that crisscrossed the plain, gathered in bunches to shield the “distilling” cauldrons, or darted forward in crooked paths, trying to close on their attackers.

Which was, of course, when the angelic blades came into play.

Swords of impossible width sliced stone and brass as readily as parchment. Ezgati’s warhammer whirled in murderous arcs, detonating anything unfortunate enough to meet with the blunt head it boasted on one side, often piercing two or even three constructs at a time with the bill on the other. Azrael and two handpicked soldiers meandered casually through the melee, cloaked in illusions to resemble a trio of the gleaming myrmidons. The scholar focused on maintaining both the phantom image and a second incantation, one to allow the other angels to sense their true natures—didn’t want their
allies
to mistake them for constructs, did they?—while his companions lashed out and obliterated enemies who never knew they were threatened at all.

The Horsemen, frankly, were almost superfluous—not that either of them gave any thought to hanging back. War treated the affair more as exercise than battle; he waded through the thickest of the enemy, letting stone claws and brass blades rebound impotently from his armor. Chaoseater rose and fell with an almost monotonous precision, leaving only rubble in its wake.

And Death … Death amused himself by clearing those ravines of constructs that had managed to survive everything else hurled their way. In leaps and bounds he passed into and out of crevices faster than the things inside could respond, and each time he left fewer of the living behind. Harvester flashed, singly and in pairs, as scythe or knife or spear as befit the width of any particular cleft. Eventually he borrowed a cannon from one of the angels and began clearing out huge swaths of each fissure at once—not because he needed to, but simply because he was growing a tad bored with it all.

This couldn’t
possibly
be the full extent of Hadrimon’s and
Belisatra’s efforts; he’d faced more than this at the Crowfather’s temple, as had the angels at the gates of Eden. Either they had multiple bands working on the Ravaiim homeworld at once, or the bulk of their forces hadn’t yet arrived.

Neither was an option that Death particularly enjoyed contemplating. Time to wrap this up and figure out what was going on.

He leapt up from the last crevice, casually tossing the cannon back to its rightful owner, and examined the field. Only a score or so of the constructs remained, and they had been backed into a couple of awkward pockets, easy pickings for the surrounding angels. None of the cauldron-like machines survived; Death reminded himself to check the wreckage, to make sure the enemy couldn’t salvage even a drop of Ravaiim blood.

The angels themselves had lost only three of their number. It was an impressive showing, given the numbers they’d faced—even considering how utterly they overpowered the foe on an individual level.

Impressive … and easy. Death’s unease grew stronger.

It was an unease that his brother clearly shared. War appeared at his shoulder and, without preamble, said, “It can’t be a trap. They’d have sprung it by now. Are they truly foolish enough to spread their forces out so thin?”

“I haven’t seen a great deal of tactical acumen in their previous efforts, but no, I do not believe they’re
that
careless. Either this was a test meant to gauge our strength, or the bulk of their army is occupied elsewhere, or—”

Whatever he’d intended to suggest, Death’s
or
effectively became
or we can worry about it later
. Because it was at that moment that the Horsemen and their angelic allies learned that the armies of Belisatra and Hadrimon were not their only competition for the blood of the Ravaiim.

Once more the forces of Hell had found them.

T
HEIR FIRST WARNING CAME AS A LOW UNDULATION IN
the earth. Not the simple vibrations of marching or running footsteps, this, but a tensing and flexing of the crust as though it cringed from some loathsome contact. The Horsemen, and all the angels not currently in flight, swayed with the unnatural palpitations. Even the surviving constructs, despite their utter lack of facial features or even recognizable heads, managed to convey a vague sense of unease as they braced themselves, skittering about to peer in all directions.