Darksiders: The Abomination Vault (38 page)

They stepped out into the swirling ash and, at Death’s lead, scrambled to the top of the squat edifice. “We can see farther from up here,” he explained as he climbed. “Albeit not much.”

Both Ruin and Despair watched them ascend, snorting and pawing at the soot, ears tilted toward the ongoing shrieks.

“What
is
that sound?” War demanded, kneeling on the roof and squinting into the distance. “That’s no construct I’ve ever heard.”

“No. Those would be the phantoms bound to the perimeter. Enjoy the show while you can. We’ll have to go on stage ourselves soon enough.”

Death leaned back, bracing himself on Harvester, and dropped his head in concentration. The wind whistled around
him, adding a second mask of stringy hair atop the one that normally concealed his features. He’d done this before, and easily enough—but never across such thick boundaries, separated by so many realms.

The bone surface below him rippled, faded to a roughly contoured black. Brilliant as a lightning strike, and equally as fleeting, he saw the craggy visage of the Crowfather, expression sagging in one of his traditional scowls.

“Honestly, the two of you need to learn to damn well do this yourselves. I’ve got better things to occupy my time than play courier whenever you get lonesome …”

And he was gone. A sinuous conduit of pure thought stretched through the non-space his image had occupied, linking two distant minds, one great, one feral.

As War leaned over the roof’s edge, studying the first of the distant shapes emerging from the ashen flurries, Death’s attentions were worlds away, delivering the simplest, yet the most urgent, of signals.

T
HE CHAMBER’S WALLS WERE CONSTRUCTED OF OLD
, pockmarked bricks; less stone, to all appearances, than tightly compressed filth. Mold flourished between them, having not only covered but utterly consumed whatever mortar might once have been there. A sticky film of condensation coated it all, as if the room itself were sweating.

Given the sweltering, feverish warmth of Hell—the hot breath of a leprous loved one sifting across one’s skin, one’s soul—perhaps it was.

For its single inhabitant, however, the chamber held no discomfort. It wore only portions of its chipped and corroded armor—from the waist down, gauntlets, helm. The remainder lay in a heap in the corner, awaiting the demon’s attention. The
skin of its exposed torso was softly chitinous, like the underside of a roach, and riddled with cracks like old parchment. Those fissures glowed a grotesque blue, occasionally emitting tiny fingers of what might or might not have been flames.

Before the Knight of Perdition, atop a “table” that was really little more than a flat-topped mound of hardened mucus, lay his sword. The hideous blade—jagged, serrated, rust-pitted, and barbed—was so thickly encrusted with dried blood as to render it almost a blunt instrument. With careful, even loving attention, the Knight was slowly sanding and polishing the blade with what appeared to be someone’s severed tongue.

His meticulous and rather wet-sounding ministrations ceased abruptly, however, as one of the chamber’s doors crashed open. Made of the same dried demonic excretions as the table, it actually chipped flakes from the brick as it struck the adjoining wall. Through the doorway, winding so as to practically tie itself in knots, came the four-armed serpentine form of a shadowcaster.

“The mistress!” it hissed. Its voice was the crinkle of discarded snakeskin, flowing around a forked and flickering tongue. “I must be permitted to address the mistress! At once!”

Slowly, the Knight of Perdition lay the tongue upon the table and hefted its sword in gauntleted fingers. Its own words, emerging from within the helm, were hollow echoes. “Mistress Raciel has not called. We do not suffer her to be disturbed by the likes of
you
.”

“Even,” the lesser demon cooed, “when
the likes of me
have knowledge she craves? You underestimate our magics, sir knight.
We have located the Abomination Vault!
Even now, the forces of the mad one move to claim its wonders!”

“Wait here.” The half-armored rider strode from the chamber at a stiff-legged pace suggesting he very much wanted to run.

The supposedly blind shadowcaster craned its neck so that it could peer down at its own chest. Something seemed to be making the faintest rustling sound within its flesh.

“I do hope,” said the demon that was not
truly
a demon, “that you really were giving me Death’s signal. If you were just going on a sudden rant regarding the quality of the local carrion or whatnot, this is
not
going to turn out well.”

Squawk!
answered Dust.

T
HE FIRST LINE
of Belisatra’s myrmidons came spinning through the ash, slowed only slightly by the particulate, and died as rapidly as they appeared. Inky shadow spread over them, poured from some unseen well, and the life, artificial as it may have been, simply fled their bodies. Even inertia seemed sucked from them, for they ceased spinning instantly and toppled, some tripping the next rank following behind.

Cyclones of bone, not unlike the storms Death had earlier unleashed upon the demonic hordes, rose from the ash, chewing through metal that might just as well have been children’s candy. Forks of black lightning seared the drifting soot, blasting holes through constructs and craters into the ground—and from those craters leapt slavering ghouls to fall upon the enemy with ripping fang and rending claw.

“I’m impressed,” War admitted, admiration for the unfolding mayhem rolling off him in an almost visible aura.

“I should hope so,” Death said. “You’d never believe how difficult and time consuming it was setting those wards in the first place. I’ll be fortunate if I can even muster the patience to re-create them after all this.”

“If you survive this at all.”

“And here everyone says
I’m
the gloomy one.”

On and on, Death’s necromantic defenses raged; and on
and on, Belisatra’s army of constructs advanced, a rising tide of brass and rock. The Horseman, for all his power, never had the slightest doubt which would fail first. His home had never been intended to stand up to a genuine siege.

The black lightning, the swirling bones, the inky pockets all slowed. Fewer constructs triggered the wards, and those wards they
did
trigger killed fewer constructs. And still the soldiers came, as if the ash itself gave birth to them.

“I wonder,” Death mused idly, “where they found
that much
brass?”

The last of the pre-prepared necromancies flickered and died. On that cue, the Horsemen dropped from the roof to land in the waiting saddles. The mounts charged, powerful enough that the churning ash posed only a minimal impediment. Before they knew what had happened, the automatons were falling to the twin edges of Harvester and Chaoseater.

War plowed through the center of the army, letting blades careen harmlessly from his armor. He swung Chaoseater in broad strokes, rending myrmidons half a dozen or more at a time. Ruin reared, hooves crushing anything foolish enough to stand too close.

Death and Despair swept around the edges of the mass, occasionally darting in and out to prove that even those farther from the borders were not safe. Against them he wielded scythes, knives, hammers, spears—all of them Harvester, all of them lethal. Few of the myrmidons came anywhere near to hitting him, and those who got close found their most precise strikes parried. Only when he had no other choice did Death rely on Mortis to stop an incoming stroke; he could not be certain how much power, how much life, the half-dead Abomination might retain, and he wasn’t about to waste its remaining utility on these creatures.

Not when the
true
enemies had yet to appear.

Even now, not quite fully recovered from their recent travails, the Horsemen had nothing to fear from the whirling myrmidons. Had it been only a question of attrition, with no concern for time, they could eventually have whittled down even so large an army as this.

Unfortunately, slaying the two Riders was not the foes’ only course to victory.

The constructs began to disperse, streaming around the edges of the conflict and making for Death’s abode. And here, out in the open, even the vaunted Horsemen could do nothing to restrain the tide.

“Fall back to the door!”

War wheeled at his brother’s call and sent Ruin plunging back the way they’d come. Death and Despair appeared beside them, and the horses swiftly outpaced the myrmidons.

“You’ll do us no good standing with us,” Death told the steeds as he and War dismounted. “Despair!” He pointed off toward the left. “Harry the flank.”

War matched the gesture, indicating right, and barked a similar command at Ruin. A pair of snorts, one brutish and one spectral, expressed the horses’ dissatisfaction with the arrangement, but both obeyed. Death and War stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the only door to the small structure.

And to the Abomination Vault.

Again Chaoseater and Harvester flew, again the constructs fell. On rare occasion, when the sheer press of numbers threatened to force the Horsemen through the doorway, Death unleashed a storm of bones or War called a copse of otherworldly blades from the ash, driving back all who approached. Heaps of shredded metal expanded into hedges, hedges into walls, until the myrmidons could hardly even approach without first digging through multiple layers of their own dead.

The first shot rang through the sky, piercing the chaos of
battle. Death cried out to his brother—his precise words lost in the tumult—and dived forward, Mortis raised high.

The impact was enough to stagger him, even through the ancient shield. Mortis howled, lashing out to obliterate one of the nearby constructs, but Death scarcely noticed.

Hadrimon had arrived, and Black Mercy with him.

The Grand Abomination spat, over and over, raining a hailstorm of teeth across the doorway. Several constructs fell to misaimed shots, but clearly the maddened angel couldn’t have cared less. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware. Other shots pinged off the solid bone of Death’s abode, but they left deep gouges and spreading pockets of dry rot behind.

The angel was slowly getting his eye in, even through the ashen clouds, and Mortis was far too small a barrier to rely on. Still reluctant, for all he’d known the moment would come, the elder Horseman ordered the younger deeper into the structure.

“Still not comfortable with this,” War huffed between heavy breaths. “Not a lot of room to maneuver in there.”

“For them, either. Besides, I told you, I can get us out if I need to.”

Within the walls, the building opened up into a single broad room, just as austere as it appeared from without. The ghouls that Death had left here so long ago had finished their work, but it amounted to precious little. On one wall hung a variety of scythes—weaker and less versatile predecessors to Harvester, built while Death was still mastering his talents. Opposite the door, a slab of bone—a primitive cot, essentially—jutted into the room.

And that was it. Death was clearly a homeowner of few needs. If the portal to the Abomination Vault was indeed here, it certainly wasn’t making itself obvious.

“We ought to have a few moments,” War said, taking a quick peek past the doorjamb and then jerking back as Black Mercy pumped several teeth through the opening. “Just digging
through the sprawl of shredded metal we left behind should take them at least—”

A rapid fusillade of muffled
thumps
, like a full battery of Redemption cannons firing at once, reverberated through the walls. The entire structure shook as a series of concussive blasts ripped across the battlefield outside, shock waves hurling earth and dead constructs this way and that, white-hot flame melting into slag anything those shock waves missed.

“Unless,” the Horseman finished lamely, “Belisatra shows up with some new toy.”

“That would be my theory, yes,” Death told him.

Dozens of myrmidons began spinning along the paths, newly opened through the field of shrapnel, and then through the door. The first few died instantly, but every time either of the brothers spent too long standing in the doorway, Hadrimon took potshots at them from beyond. Slowly but surely, the chamber began to fill with stone, brass, and blades.

“Scarcely matters how many we kill, brother,” War shouted over the chime and screech of rending metal, Chaoseater whirling in vicious arcs. “If they fill the room with metal, we won’t be able to move. Hadrimon can pick us off at leisure.”

Death, who had already come to much the same conclusion, was crouched behind a circular barrier made of Harvester, spinning double-bladed in one fist. His other hand he held toward the nearest wall, slowly curling his fingers into a twisted claw.

The long bones followed suit, flexing apart like curtains. Death ducked his head and darted through.

Even from here, toward the rear of the structure, he could see a winding line, a veritable river of constructs moving toward the door at the front. Far behind them, half hidden in the soot, stood a stout armored figure that could only have been Belisatra.

The Maker might have been deprived of Earth Reaver, but
she’d clearly constructed something else to keep her occupied. Both hands were fixed on some sort of gargantuan cannon, consisting of no fewer than half a dozen barrels, any one of which was more than half the thickness of a Redemption cannon. A pair of mechanical legs supported the front end, providing an aiming bipod when she was still, walking along before her as she moved.

Not a Grand Abomination, no, not even close—but a brutal weapon of war for all that.

Of Hadrimon—and Black Mercy—Death saw no sign at all.

“War?” he called back.

“The damn angel’s in here!” came the shouted reply. “He’s out of reach, but if I can just get through the front ranks—”

“No!” If that idiot even
looked
like he might prove a threat, Hadrimon would kill him; and this time, Death doubted he’d have either the power or the opportunity to bring him back. “Follow the plan, damn you!”