Surface Detail

The flying demons who had flown up towards her had been smaller than her. She had cruel hooks midway along the leading edges of her wings, where a biped might have had thumbs on its hands. She had sharp teeth and strong jaws, and tree-trunkcrushing claws. She wondered if she could start killing demons.

The screams from below, the smells of flesh burned by flames and acid sprays and the rising, choking clouds of poison gas all drove her away after a while.

A large black shape flew across the landscape behind her.

She looked back, saw the giant beetle thing following her, catching up, keeping a hundred metres or so off her left side. It drew level, wobbled in the air, then peeled away. She flew on and it came back, repeating the actions. The third time, she followed it.

She trod the air, beating her leathery black wings slowly such that she seemed to stand in the air, level with the face of the enormous uber-demon who had taunted and killed her, most of a lifetime ago.

Its gigantic lantern head was lit from within, the pulsing flame-cloud continually taking on the appearance of different tortured faces. The towering candles at each corner of the creature’s squared-off head sputtered and crackled, their gnarled surfaces veined with the nervous systems of the screaming unfortunates embedded within. Below, its vast, amalgamed body of reconstituted bone, pitted, sweating metals, stress-cracked twisted sinew and bubbling, weeping flesh quivered in the heat released from its dull-glowing throne. Wreathed in its hideous fumes and retchingly intense smokes, it created a briefly recognisable face within its glassed-off lantern of a head.

Chay recognised Prin. Her heart, massive in her barrel of a chest, pounded harder. A sort of hopeless pleasure filled her for a moment, then she felt suddenly sick.

Prin smiled at her for a moment, then his face contorted in pain before the image disappeared. A flat, ugly, alien face replaced Prin’s and remained there, pop-eyed and grinning while the thing talked to her.

“Welcome back,” he bellowed. The sound was still ear-splitting, but just about below the level of pain.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I will not be one of your demons,” she told it. She thought about flying at him, claws out, trying to damage the thing. She had a brief image of herself caught in one of its colossal hands, crushed like a tiny fluttering bird inside a shrinking cage of girder fingers. Another image showed her trapped inside the creature’s lantern head, beating frantically against the unbreakable glass, wings ragged, jaws broken, eyes gouged out, for ever choking…

“You would be a useless demon, little bitch,” the thing said. “That is not why you are here.”

She beat the air in front of it, of him, waiting.

It tipped its head to one side a little. The four candles roared, screamed. “That hunger you feel…”

“What of it?” Sick again. What would it turn out to be?

“It is the hunger to kill.”

“Is it indeed?” She would defy, she thought. She would be defiant. For all the good that ever did in Hell. With enough pain, you stopped defying, or simply lost your mind; if you were lucky, maybe. “Death – real death – is a blessing in Hell,” she told him.

“That is precisely the point!” the creature thundered. “You may kill one person per day.”

“May I now?”

“They will die fully. They will not be reincarnated, in this Hell or anywhere else. They will be permanently removed, deleted.”

“Why?”

The thing put back its head and laughed; a thunder spilling over the flames and smokes of the valley below. The candles sputtered furiously, dripped. “To bring hope back into Hell! You will be their angel, whore! They will beseech you to come to them, to deliver them from their torment. They will worship you. They will try to tempt you with supplications, prayers, offerings; any superstitious fuckwittery they’ll think might work. You may choose whom to reward with death. Pander to their idiocies or deliberately ignore them; have the miserable cunts set up fucking committees amongst themselves to decide democratically who should be the lucky little grub-sucker who gets to be relieved of their burden of pain; I don’t give a fuck. Just kill one a day. You can try and kill more but it won’t work; they’ll die all right but they’ll come right back, worse.”

“And if I kill none at all?”

“Then the hunger will grow inside you until it feels like it’s something alive trying to gnaw its way out. It will become unbearable. Also, the wretches will have to do without their chance of release.”

“What is the point of releasing one soul from this infinitude of suffering?”

“It’s not infinite!” the creature screamed. “It’s vast, but it has limits. You have already scraped against the sky, you stupid whore; beat away if you want until you find the iron walls of Hell and then tell me it’s ‘infinite’! Finite; it’s finite. Truly vast, but finite.

With only so many tortured souls.”

“How-?”