Surface Detail

“One and a quarter billion! Does that fucking satisfy you? Go and count them if you don’t believe me; I don’t fucking care. You are beginning to bore me. Oh, I didn’t mention: it won’t all be fun for you. With each one you kill you’ll take on a little of their pain. The more you kill the more pain you’ll experience. Eventually the pain of the increasing hunger and the pain you’ve absorbed from those you’ve released should balance out. You might lose your mind again but we’ll deal with that when it happens. I expect I’ll have thought of something even more condign for you by then.” The king of the demons gripped the red-glowing ends of the mountainous seat’s arms and came roaring forward at her, making her beat back through the air. “Now do fuck off, and start killing.” It waved one vast hand at her.

She felt herself swallow, a sickness clutched at her belly and a terrible, aching need to fly away seemed to tug at her wings and the bundled muscles in her chest, but she held where she was, beating steadily.

“Prin!” she shouted. “What happened to Prin?”

“Who? What?”

“Prin! My mate, the one I came in here with! Tell me and I’ll do what you want!”

“You’ll do what I want whether you fucking like it or not, you dumb, wormed cunt!”

“Tell me!”

“Kill me a thousand and I’ll think about it.”

“Promise!” she wailed.

The enormous demon laughed again. “‘Promise’? You’re in Hell, you cysted cretin! Why the fuck would I make a promise but for the joy of breaking it? Go, before I change my mind and break your semen-encrusted wings just for fun. Come back when you’ve sent ten times a hundred to their undeserved ends and I’ll think about telling you what happened to your precious ‘Prin’. Now fuck off!” It brought its vast arms sweeping up towards her, one winging in from each side, hands as big as her entire body splayed out, clawed and clutching, as though trying to catch and crush her.

She beat back, fell away, swooped and zoomed, glancing fearfully back as the great demon sat back in his great glowing chair, wreathes of smoke from his recent movements pulsing through the air around him.

She killed her first that evening, as the already dull light deepened to a ruddy, sunless gloaming. It was a young female, caught on the rusted spikes of a cheval de frise on a cold hillside above a mean trickle of an acid stream, moaning almost continually except when she had banked enough breath to scream.

Chay landed, listened to the female trying to speak, but got no sense from the piteous creature. She hesitated, looking around, in case anything appearred familiar, but it was not the same hillside she and Prin had sheltered on.

She was crying as she folded her great dark wings round the female, trying not to tear the thin leathery membranes of her wings on the cruel spikes. Chay felt the female’s being move out of her broken, twisted body and into her own before dissipating entirely, just evaporating away like a little cloud on a warm, dry day.

She felt a different kind of hunger, and ate some of the body, tearing through the tough hide to get into the juicy buttock muscles.

As she flew back to her distant roost, she wondered how much pain would accrue as a result of what she had done.

She hung there, digesting.

Later, she was left with a sore tooth.

She had become an angel in Hell.

Twenty-one

When the adults were away sometimes they could play in the places where the adults played. She had a group of friends who were all about the same age and they played together a lot when they weren’t being taught in the little school room on the top floor of the big estate house.

The others could still be cruel to her now and again, when they wanted to get back at her for something or when she had won something and they wanted to remind her that it didn’t matter if she came first in a race or got better marks then anybody else in an exam, because in the end she was just a servant really – in fact worse than a servant because at least a servant could just leave if they wanted to but she couldn’t. She was like a mount or a hunt chaser or a game-hound; she belonged to the estate, she belonged to Veppers.

Lededje had learned not to pretend that she didn’t care when the other children were like this. It had taken her a while to work out how best to handle this sort of teasing. Crying a lot and running to her mother made it too easy for the children to use her like a toy when they were bored; press Lededje’s button and off she’d race. So that was no good. Not reacting at all, going all stony-faced; that just made them say even worse things until it ended in a fight and she – it always seemed to be her fault – got them all punished. So that didn’t work either. The best thing to do was to cry a little and let them know that she’d been hurt, then just get on with things.