"Where is Juvart?" asked one of the soldiers who’d covered us, and I recognized him now as Cresil, whom I’d accidentally wounded.
"He’s dead," Chara panted, doubled over, one hand on her knee.
"Killed while you went to collect your lover," Cresil spat. "A fine death for him!"
Chara lifted her eyes, then straightened her entire body. "This is no time for us to fight each other, Cresil. But if that’s what you want…" Her fist still gripped her shotgun, and seemed to tighten.
Cresil looked at me, then whirled away and shouted, "Let’s get this thing moving before they find a way inside!"
I noticed the raised desk in the center of the room, where the skeletal Demon with its huge spherical head had seemed to scan me before my psychological and emotional torture. That Demon now lay slumped over his desk, eyes staring with the piercing luminosity leeched from them and that balloon head pierced by bullets, collapsed upon itself, a flood of vile fluid having run down the side of the desk to pool on the floor.
There were about thirty of Chara’s caste of Demons loitering in the large central chamber, some badly wounded, one having lost a wing, several dying, and one of them suddenly pointed, cried out, "Up there!"
Somehow, the Celestials had been scaling the outside of the cathedral, and one of them appeared in the remains of the circular window high above the front doors. In the exchange of bullets that followed, two Demons went down dead, two others wounded, and the Celestial was blown backwards out of sight.
A lurch made me stumble; I was still dazed from my injuries as it was. Chara caught my arm again. There was a torturous screaming of metal as well. I thought it might be the machine building rising once more, for some typically inexplicable reason, but I realized quickly that the Black Cathedral had begun to move along its track.
"You’ve hijacked it," I muttered, my mouth full of blood.
"Yes."
"You killed the Demons who were in it…"
"Not all. Some joined us. We tried to herd the others out alive but they decided to fight. Does it bother you?"
"Not if it doesn’t bother you."
The two Demons wounded by the Celestial were carried off to the side to be tended to, the dead ones exclaimed over. Chara returned her attention to me as the commotion settled a bit. "Come on with me…you need to rest until you heal."
I allowed her to take my pillowcase of belongings, and lead me unsteadily toward one of the many doors that lined the central hall.
"This is why I had to wait to come for you," Chara explained, as she led me beyond the door into a very narrow corridor with a very low ceiling, which made me feel as if we were in a submarine. It was humid with steam that hissed from vents. "We had to plan all this."
"I take it we’re not just riding across the city…"
"No. We’ll be at the entry point to the lower levels soon. There are tunnels down there, linked to other cities…"
"Does it pilot itself?"
"Yes, but it’s programmed on its course, and we had to find a trustworthy Demon who could reprogram it. We were lucky and found two engineers from one of the torture plants who were willing to escape with us. Its next stop would have been elsewhere in the city, but the engineers have laid in a course for the furthest city on its line, instead…a place called Gehenna. From there it won’t be terribly far on foot or by wagon to Pluto. Some of these soldiers will go all the way to Pluto with us, and some will choose to remain in Gehenna."
More doors opened off this corridor. Chara ushered me through one of them and into a small chamber with two sets of bunk beds bolted into its walls, obviously meant for the cathedral’s regular attendants. A body was covered by a blanket on an upper bunk; perhaps one of her warrior comrades who hadn’t survived his injuries, or one of the crew they’d been forced to kill. Chara helped me onto a lower bunk. I groaned at the pain in my back, but the thin mattress was as close to Heaven as I would ever get.
"I’ll sit with you," she said, lowering her bare bottom to the opposite bunk.
"To guard me against your friends?"
"No one will hurt you. Much as some of them would like to."
I stared up at her face. So savage, terrifying only minutes before. Now beautiful.
"I’ve spent more time longing for you than with you," I said. "I was beginning to wonder if I was only imagining that you’d really come back for me. Imagining that there was really something between us."
"Humans. So insecure. So lacking in faith."
I smiled against my pain. But more serious, I said, "I’m sorry about your friends who’ve been killed. Really."
She nodded, turned her face a little. I wanted to hear her say she was sorry for the Damned who had suffered, as well. Suffered at her own hands. She even looked like she wanted to say it, but she didn’t. I think she felt it, but was too confused by the feeling, and still too proud a warrior, to admit to such a weakness.
"Sleep," she told me. "I’ll be here when you wake up."
"Thanks," I whispered to her. I reached across toward her. After a beat of hesitation, she accepted my hand, and continued to hold onto it until I faded from consciousness.
Day 74.
W
hen Chara told me that in order to take us out of Oblivion the Black Cathedral had to be reprogrammed, I envisioned some sort of computer system. Yet when I saw the cockpit, if such it might be called, it was more like the cab of an old steam locomotive crossed with a boiler room and the inside of a giant grandfather clock. Reprogramming had entailed the substitution of various gears, which were kept stored in metal footlockers, and the repositioning of the levers which covered the walls. There were valve wheels that controlled the flow of steam, and some greenish fluid bubbled in a thick glass tank heated over a ring of jetting blue gas. Like blood, this liquid seemed to circulate throughout the migrating building via pipelines hidden in its walls.
At the fore of this room, which was in actuality the rear of the cathedral when it was stationary, there was a single stained glass window, red on the outside like all the others but on the inside giving a clear, unobstructed view of the path ahead of us. Again, as in the torture rooms, the interior of the window seemed more to me like a kind of television screen.
In the short time that I’d napped, the cathedral had already traversed much of the city and traveled down an incline into the tunnels below the streets. I was reminded of the subway system by which I was first transported to Avernus University.
The building threw no light of its own, but there were caged gas jets set into the walls out there, giving me a gloomy view of the tracks ahead, the curved tunnel which seemed bored through solid bedrock. We passed some off-shooting tunnels, and there were catwalks here and there and sometimes pipelines and conduits along the walls or arched ceiling. At one point, I saw several ragged figures scurry across the tracks and duck into the tributary of a narrow maintenance tunnel. I’m sure this subterranean labyrinth was home to a good many of the Damned, who down here were less likely to contend with the tortures of the Demons.
The two engineers, the male Thamuz and female Allatou, were making ready to stop the wandering church near the outskirts of Oblivion. There, Chara whispered, another twenty or so Demons would board before we continued on our way. I watched the engineers throw levers, turn wheels, and the cathedral squealed on its tracks, shuddered, began to slow.
Looking over at Chara, admiring her oddly flat profile, the heavy pout of her lips, I felt the familiar awe and even fear she inspired in me. I wondered what kind of relationship we might really be able to forge, with me feeling so much weaker and inferior than she, so ordinary compared against her exotic and animal-like nature. I had to remind myself that she, in turn, as a kind of manufactured organism, without an immortal soul, never having experienced the world of the living, might feel unworthy of
me
. Still, pathetically, her strength and perceived superiority challenged my sense of manhood. I’d have to work on that. We’d have to find a balance with each other that we could both be comfortable with.
I noticed the wound on her shoulder had been cleaned and was already partially healed. Gently I touched the skin around it but she brushed my hand away and looked at me sternly. I suppose she was embarrassed to have me display physical affection with the other two in the same room.
With a final whistle of steam and a grating jolt that made me stagger, the Black Cathedral pulled up to a stop beside a sort of raised subway platform dimly visible in the murk outside.
"How many days will it take us to reach Gehenna?" I asked Allatou, wondering if the slow progress of the church would be increased once we were outside of the city’s borders.
"
Days?
" she said.
I smiled. "Never mind."
"We should go meet the others," Chara said. "I have some good friends who will be boarding here."
Before I followed her out of the cockpit, I shot a look through the window and saw shadowy figures collecting on the subway platform, their silhouetted wings giving them away as Demons. I never thought I’d find such an ominous sight reassuring.
As we entered into the high-ceilinged central chamber, I said, "I hope they have paper in Gehenna. I’m running out of room in my journal."
"May I read your journal?" Chara asked without looking at me.
"Yes. Please. I’m flattered that you’d ask."
"I just want to see what you say about me," she said dryly.
Most of the other Demons were gathering near the front doors of the cathedral, and preparing to unbolt them. The broken glass there had been swept up and the two dead Demons removed.
The doors were opened, and the Demons flooded in. Chara had said there would be about twenty, but I counted only ten.
"Get the doors closed, hurry!" the last one through shouted. "The Celestials are everywhere…more and more of them! And troops of Angels have been coming, too!"
Angels. They might not be as skillful and strong as the Celestials, but they couldn’t be killed.
"Where are the others?" cried Cresil.
"All killed!"
"Nergal," Chara breathed. I imagined it was one of the friends she had expected to join us.
Another of her friends, who I would learn was named Uphir, rushed over to meet us. He barely acknowledged me as he panted, "The fight could rage for a long time…but not openly. Only if our people hide in the secret places, and strike as guerillas. Open combat is quickly turning in the favor of the Celestials; too many of them are pouring into the city. The whole army of Heaven, I swear! And now this army of Angels. Not to mention, not all of our people are fighting with us…less than I’d hoped…but more may change their minds as the danger grows…"
"The Celestials don’t care if they die…that’s their main advantage," Chara said. "Whereas I personally want to stay alive. Relatively speaking," she added for my benefit.
"They’re like the crabs," Uphir agreed, obviously referring to the mindless swarms of flesh-eating crustaceans I had encountered near Caldera.
The doors were bolted again. The cathedral could now resume its journey.
"We need to talk to the others," Uphir went on. "There’s a small group of sympathetic Demons in Pergamos; we should stop there and pick them up as well."
"Won’t the arrival of so many Demons in Gehenna and Pluto get back to the Celestials?" I asked. "Won’t the Creator Himself see it?"
Uphir turned to me with a forced patience, obviously out of respect for his friend. "There are good numbers of Demons of our sort in both cities; we’ll blend in. But if we must continue to run, if we must spread ourselves thin, separate, then that’s what we’ll do. After all, the object isn’t to organize an actual rebellion, or even an army, but simply to escape the genocide within Oblivion."
"As for the Creator," Chara said, "He’s senile. On His death bed, as He has been since nearly the beginning of existence. In creating life, in creating this order of things, His own life was sucked out of Him. He’s little more than a vegetable."
"That’s only a belief," Uphir cautioned. "But even if it is true, He can still rouse from His coma at times to reach out and squash us, if He cares to look hard enough to notice us. Some think when He realizes we’re spreading out of Oblivion, He’ll flood all of Hades in lava, and kill every last Demon so He can start again with all new ones of every species. While He’s making them, the flood will withdraw and the Damned will reconstitute." He almost looked like he wanted to shudder. "Let’s not even talk about Him…please. We have enough to worry about…"