Surface Detail

Here were the great valved doors that admitted the newly condemned; here were the roads the towering juggernauts of dead and dying trundled down, delivering their grisly cargoes to the vast prisons, camps, factories and barracks of the place; here the damned were set to their slave labour within the munitions factories or condemned to wander the ruins and the wilderness, or were chosen to fight in the everlasting war that consumed, recycled and re-consumed lives by the thousands and tens of thousands each and every day by, both sides.

Because there were two sides to Hell, though you’d have struggled to spot the slightest difference if you’d simply found yourself set down in the midst of either. The unfortunates delivered into Hell were allocated sides before they even entered the place, generally half going to one and half to the other.

There were two sets of the great valved doors – only admitting, impossible to exit through – two vast sets of boulevards paved with wracked backs and splintered bones, two whole sets and systems of prisons and factories and camps and barracks, two hier-archies of demons and – she’d been surprised to find – two of the colossal king-demons. They fought over the centre ground of Hell, throwing forces into the fray with a sort of manic relish, uncaring how many fell because they would always be resurrected again within days for fresh punishment.

In the rare event that one side established military superiority over the other, through simple luck or an accident of good leadership – threatening the balance of territory and forces and so the continuance of the war – extra recruits would be funnelled to the temporarily losing side by the simple expedient of shutting down one of the sets of gates, channelling all the new arrivals to the disadvantaged side, gradually restoring balance through sheer weight of numbers.

She thought of the gates she and Prin had entered through as the Eastern gate, for no particularly good reason. So they had been on the East side, but basically every aspect of the East side in this vast dispute was replicated in the West as well, and the two appeared identical in their gruesomeness. From a distance, anyway. She was not welcome in the West; smaller winged demons came up to mob her when she overflew too far beyond the front of the everlasting war, so she had to keep away entirely, or fly so high that the detail of what went on was denied her.

Still, she had flown to see the opposing Western gates, soared above the scattered dark clouds of the Western hinterland and even landed on occasion – usually only for a few minutes at a time – on certain jagged, frozen peaks, well away from the most intense fighting and the greatest numbers of enemy demons.

Whether in the West or the East, she looked down from such high crags, wrapped from the cold in her own gale-fluttering wings, and watched the scudding shreds of bruise-coloured clouds move over the distant landscapes of terror and pain with a sort of horrified amusement.

When she had killed the thousandth soul, she had taken the half-eaten body and dropped it at the feet of the great lantern-headed demon sitting in his red-glowing iron throne looking out over the vast reeking valley of smokes and fumes and screams.

“What?” the colossal creature boomed. With one enormous foot it kicked aside the husk of body she’d deposited in front of it.

“A thousand souls,” she told it, treading the air with deep, easy sweeps of air, keeping herself level with its face but too far away for it to swipe at her easily. “A thousand days since you told me that once I’d released ten times one hundred souls you’d tell me what happened to my love, the male I first came here with: Prin.”

“I said I’d think about it,” the great voice thundered.

She stayed where she was, the black, leathery wings fanning some of the valley’s noxious fumes towards the uber-demon’s face. She gazed into the gaseous impression of a face writhing and billowing behind the house-sized pane of glass, trying to ignore the four fat, dripping candles at each of the lantern’s four corners, their carbuncled surfaces veined with a hundred screaming nerve clusters. The creature stared back at her. She kept station, refused to move.

“Please,” she said, at last.

“Long dead,” the vast voice burst out across her. She heard the words with her wings. “Time moves more slowly in here, not faster. He is barely a memory. He died by his own hand, ashamed, penurious, disgraced and alone. There is no record of whether he remembered you at the end. He escaped being sent here, more’s the pity. Satisfied?”

She stayed where she was a while longer, upright in the air before it, beating her cloak wings like slow, mocking applause.

“Huh,” she said at last, and turned, dropping, swooping only to zoom again, beating away up and across the valley’s slope to its furthest ridge.

“How are the pains, bitchlet?” she heard the demon shout after her. “Do they grow?” She ignored it.