Chapter 2
The Interrogation
Azazel kept hitting him, and Michael grinned right back at the furious demon pulverizing his face. He had no reason to retract what he’d said, and a few blows to the head weren’t going to kill him.
“Jalak was my brother!”
“Don’t worry. Stick around on Earth for a bit longer, and you’ll see him soon enough.”
Azazel punched Michael so hard that he and his heavy oak chair flew five feet into a pair of steel oil drums. The containers fell over, but they were sealed so Michael didn’t find himself in sludge. That was small comfort though. His jaw was starting to ache, and his restraints were preventing him from sitting up again.
“Let him be,” Sariel said as he helped Michael back to a perpendicular position.
“Thanks.”
Sariel nodded and walked back to Azazel, who had turned his back on the two of them. Sariel put his arm around the grieving bodyguard, and guided him away from Michael.
“What’s going on?” Lucifer asked as he walked into the vast warehouse carrying a blood-stained towel and attempting to force the dried, crusted crimson from his forearm and neck.
Sariel nodded toward the chair. “Michael is just abusing the hired help.”
Michael stared right back at his twin until Lucifer broke from the gaze.
“Azazel, will you go get me another towel?” Lucifer asked. “A damp one would be much appreciated.”
Azazel closed his eyes, breathed, and quickly exited the warehouse. Lucifer scrubbed the cleaner parts of the towel against the evidence of his recent massacre at the bar.
He grabbed a crate of pig iron that must have weighed a ton, pitched it onto his shoulder effortlessly, and dropped it down in front of his brother. “You know, for being a benevolent, merciful deity, your Jehovah sure did a lot of damage to demons that had nothing to do with his grievances.”
“He released them from their servitude.”
Lucifer laughed. “Is that what he’s telling you, nowadays? Now, all of my men are slaves to Jehovah and his little pattern here, right?”
“Jalak sits in the Hall of Souls waiting for his rebirth, along with 25,000 of your other men.”
Lucifer leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Is this a road you really want to go down with me?”
“Well, who are you more worried about? The men you’ve lost or everyone you are about to lose?”
“What is he talking about?” Lucifer asked as he turned toward Batarel, who was propped against crates of various commodities.
Sariel rummaged around in some crates and found an orange. He tossed it in the air, summoned one of his black and silver daggers, and sliced the fruit into eight, evenly segmented pieces in midair before joining his uncle in leaning against one of the crate columns in the vast labyrinth of boxes and barrels.
“He hasn’t said much since we left the bar,” Sariel said.
“Just enough to incite Azazel to wail on him for a bit?”
“Pretty much.”
“I see,” Lucifer said. He jumped from his crate and summoned his sword back from the ether, whirling it around and sliding it effortlessly through a few barrels of barley and soybeans. “You know, I used to think that this zinanbar substance that the goblin forgewrights put into swords was one of the only things that could kill us.”
“That’s the problem with ignorance,” Michael said as he looked directly at Batarel. “You kill all the smart people and stifle all the research, and you lose your edge. Stifle progress for long enough and people start dying because you fell behind.”
“The Council didn’t kill those thousands of demons,” Batarel said. “You and Jehovah did.”
“You’re not listening. They’re not dead. They’re in the Hall of Souls.”
“And just what is that?”
“It’s the center of the Order Primal. Whereas Chaos seeks only to destroy its sons and daughters through meaningless wars of aggression against other patterns, Order reincorporates its souls. While Chaos is killing its best and brightest, our universe brings them back to life again.”
“Only if they are killed within the boundaries of Order,” Batarel said.
“Just like your men.”
“And women and children,” Lucifer said with a clenched jaw that caused the veins in his face to bulge. “Lots of collateral damage when you destroy an entire Chaos legion.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours,” Lucifer said. “I wouldn’t be here if the oracles hadn’t showed me your death. They plucked it right out of the underflow. Father and mother were beside themselves. I had to come here to avenge you.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“No, instead you tricked me into coming. If you didn’t want me to avenge you, you could have just said so. Maybe leave me a note next time. I’ll let you die without shedding a tear.
“Don’t sit here and try to play me, Michael. I’ve been going over that scene for nearly 500,000 years now. 300,000 years wing-walking and travelling inside of stable vortexes from Chaos with my legion, a few minutes watching them all burn up in this augmented atmosphere, and another 200,000 sitting here on my keister thinking you were dead. My brother. My twin.
“You didn’t ask me to come? You know better. Stop trying to mess with my head.”
Michael didn’t respond. His brother was right.
“Next thing I know,” Lucifer continued, “you’re in a bar in Nashville taunting me with white tendrils, and tormenting my personal bodyguard, who has gone above and beyond his paycheck helping our family. Millions of years of service, Michael. You’re a spoiled brat!”
“Azazel serves our family because he has to,” Michael said. “His family got into a debt too deep for even immortals to get out of. The system in Chaos oppresses everyone but us—everyone but the family in power.”
“That’s the way the universe works.”
“Your universe,” Michael pointed his head at his twin. “And their universe,” he motioned at Sariel and Batarel.
“You’re brainwashed, brother.”
“No,” Michael said. “Not anymore.” He wanted to gesture with his hands. “Can you get me out of these restraints please?”
“They’re steel, moron,” Lucifer said. “Sariel was just messing with you. Earth doesn’t have any zinanbar to make proper restraints with.”
Sariel flashed a proud grin from behind an orange peel he had stuck between his teeth and gums. Michael laughed despite the seriousness of the conversation as he broke from his restraints with his hands first and then his feet.
“Mind if I get up?”
“Free country, ain’t it?” Sariel said in a hillbilly accent.
Michael shook his head and tilted his head back as he circled his chair. “You know, Lucifer, I used to want to be just like you.”
Lucifer nodded but stayed quiet.
“I practiced fighting like you did. I beat up neighborhood kids. I tried to hang out with you, Sariel, and that Goblin Prince Elandril, but you were all too cool for me. My own twin, the Crown Prince, had better things to do with his time.”
Michael cast his eyes toward the long zinanbar blade that Lucifer was still practicing with. “You got better and better with military planning and combat, and I got more lost. I started hanging out with the Intellectuals, as you used to call them—our cousin Jehovah and his book buddies. And I got happier, I forgot about how father discarded me because I was born twelve minutes after you, and I started learning where we came from and what we have done. You have no idea what the Council has been keeping from us.”
“And I don’t want to find out,” Lucifer said. “I’m not supposed to know that stuff.”
“What you and the Intellectuals did,” Batarel said, “almost got you all executed. I fought everyone off to keep you and Jehovah alive. The Council deliberated for three whole years, and I won your freedom not once, not twice, but five different times.”
; “All we were doing was reading,” Michael said.
“Well, look where it got you!” Lucifer said.
“Yeah, look where it got me. Drafted into the army as a low ranking officer and put on the front lines in the Great War against the goblins. You know I killed one of Elandril’s brothers, right? Stabbed him right through the heart, but I had no choice. I was invading his universe and leading a charge to kill his father. And for what, exactly?”
“None of us wanted the Great War,” Lucifer said. “Least of all our family.”
“Elandril was my best friend,” Sariel added. “I grew up with him. It broke my heart to have to join that fight, but they started it.”
Michael looked at Batarel. “You’re really going to let that fly? You still haven’t told them? After everything you’ve done?”
Batarel rolled his eyes, but Sariel turned around on his heels to look up at his mentor. “What’s going on?”
“It was all fabricated,” Michael said. “It was all made up by a group of racist jerks who couldn’t stand to watch a prince of the goblins roaming around Alurabum. Your best friend was too good looking, he screwed too many of their demon daughters, and they killed his father and tried to eradicate their pattern because of it. That’s who you are fighting for.”
Lucifer turned to Batarel. “What’s he talking about?”
“For all I know,” Batarel said. “He could be telling the truth. Working for the Council, I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of. My part in the assassination that ended the Great War is still something that haunts me to this day.”
“It is the truth,” Michael said. “There are viewing orbs in the Council Library that catalogue the whole thing. Watch them when you get back, if there is anything to come home to.”
“Earth and this Order universe, as you call it, are the ones that are going to be destroyed in a handful of years,” Lucifer said. “Batarel and the Council put things in motion which cannot be stopped at this point. You know what I’m talking about, Michael.”
“That I do. And so does Jehovah. The Council is nothing if not predictable. Sending black holes at the pattern to try to contain it and destroy the projection it creates is standard military procedure. Right out of the handbook.
“Lucifer, you watched an entire legion of demons disintegrate into this atmosphere moments after you pierced Jehovah’s body with that blade in Eden. Do you really think all of this wasn’t planned out? Do you actually believe Jehovah would risk his life on a fool’s errand at the edge of the cosmos? Do you really think I was resurrected at random?”
Michael scoffed and summoned his own zinanbar blade from the air and pointed it at a keg of gunpowder. “Those three black holes will rip through this galaxy and collide with the Order Primal, which is just teeming with pure energy from the 25,000 souls that power it. Most of that pure pattern energy will be sucked into those black holes, but as the massive objects collide and coalesce, an accretion disk is going to form and a powerful, destructive jet of energy will be shot out into space. Like this powder keg here, Order is primed to explode.”
He ran the powder keg through with his sword from three different angles that mimicked the directions that the black holes were coming from. “All it takes is a spark,” Michael added.
“Do you have any idea what kind of luck it would take to focus that kind of beam directly at the Courts of Chaos?” Batarel asked. “We’re talking about a trillion light years away, and you’re aiming at something that can’t even be seen from here yet.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it. I would advise you to take a look at Jehovah’s last published research at the Chaos University Library. You’re specifically looking for a journal paper on chaining supercondensers together to accelerate a beam of energy. Won best paper, if I remember correctly. I would hurry if I were you. Chaos doesn’t have much time.”
“Batarel, come on, what is he talking about?” Lucifer asked.
Batarel froze like a deer in headlights. His lip quivered, and he shook his head. “Sariel, make sure he gets out of here. Lucifer, I have to go.”
“You have to what?”
But he was gone. He vanished into thin air.
“What just happened?” Lucifer grabbed Sariel by his leather jacket. “He didn’t just apparate, did he? Tell me he didn’t just instantly travel back to the Council right in front of my face!”
“Well, it’s not instantaneous …” Sariel said, shrugging and smiling uncomfortably.
“Un … believable.”
“He couldn’t teach you how to apparate,” Sariel said. “You would have had to learn pattern magic, and it’s expressly forbidden to teach the Crown Prince how that works. Separation of church and state. You know the rules.”
Michael heard one of the doors to the warehouse open, and light from the street lamps outside flooded into a dark corner before returning it to blackness. Again and again, the door opened and closed until three sets of footsteps began to patter throughout the maze of crates and boxes. Lucifer and Sariel exchanged curious looks.
“Michael,” Sariel said, “did you bring friends? How exciting!”
“We’re getting the band back together,” Michael said, grinning.
Another set of footsteps joined them from a side entrance as Azazel came in the door carrying a dampened towel. “What the hell is going on?”
“Michael’s picking fights that he can’t win,” Lucifer said.
Azazel summoned his zinanbar sword from the ether and threw the towel to Lucifer, but the Crown Prince deflected the towel to a nearby crate. Azazel stayed put in the doorway, but readied his sword. Lucifer twirled his blade menacingly and eyed his twin brother as three other humans entered the light in the small clearing.
“Do you want me to sit this one out?” Sariel asked. “I actually do know pattern magic, and I don’t fight fair.”
Michael shrugged. “I’d like to reintroduce you to Uriel, Raphael, and our cousin Gabriel.”
“Uriel?” Sariel asked. “From the Council? Rank 4, right?”
“One and the same,” the young man with the blond hair replied. “And I don’t mind if you use pattern magic.”
Sariel summoned a second ornate, black and silver zinanbar dagger and popped another slice of orange into his mouth. “Your funeral, friend.”
“I’ve already died once. Death doesn’t bother me.”
A short blade whirled through the air so fast that Uriel didn’t have time to react. His wide eyes ventured from the blade hilt in his chest to Michael’s face as he sank to his knees.
“Then, you should feel right at home,” Sariel said as he balanced another blade on the palm of his hand. “Are you guys sure you want me using pattern magic? We could maybe have Lucifer here tie one of his arms behind his back while we’re at it …”
Michael looked at Azazel out of the corner of his eye before giving Lucifer his undivided attention. “That won’t be necessary …”
Lucifer and Sariel set their guard as Michael and the other angels advanced, but a dozen feet before engaging, Michael broke from the group and ran toward Azazel, who backed farther into the doorway he had just come from. The fear in Azazel’s eyes was justified. Michael wasn’t even a fourth of the swordsman that Lucifer was, but Michael was more than a match for his bodyguard.
Azazel parried a few blows, but Michael was able to cut holes in his sides in the process. The demon grew weaker as he bled out in a fury of slashes, and he soon favored his left side. As Michael heard another of the angels in the warehouse fall, he panicked. Azazel had to die before Lucifer or Sariel were able to reinforce him.
“Michael!” Lucifer called, “you coward!”
He only had a few moments to finish the guard off. Azazel deftly knocked aside a feint, but he opened his midsection up, and Michael took full advantage. Azazel’s eyelids opened wide as Michael ran him through the stomach.
“You’ll see your brother Jalak again real soon …”
Footsteps stomped
toward Michael, and he stood up and kept his back turned toward the doorway.
“Don’t think I won’t stab you in the back like you’ve done me,” Lucifer said.
“For once, brother, I’m ahead in a game, and you’re the one struggling to keep up …”
A sharp pain between his shoulder blades knocked the wind out of him, and he fell to his knees. Michael watched the blade go back through his body as Lucifer retrieved it. He looked up at Azazel, who was spitting blood onto his own black shirt. When he noticed Michael looking at him, he spat some of it in his face.
“Don’t let me die here, Lucifer,” the dying demon said.
“Sariel,” Lucifer said, “stop messing around in there! Azazel’s been hurt!”
A thud sounded from the next room.
“Sorry,” Sariel called as he walked in, “our cousin Gabriel wasn’t too bad with a blade … Oh … no …”
“It’s bad,” Azazel said, “but you’ve got to get me out of here.”
“Sariel, what can we do?” Lucifer asked and became infuriated when Sariel shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t give me that crap! I just watched Batarel apparate out of here. Can you carry him back to Chaos?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Sariel said. “I can’t apparate with him. Apparation requires a nearly infinite amount of energy to bring just one person through. Taking two of us back would be more than the primal pattern could sustain along the path.”
“Give me some options, here!”
“I could trigger a vortex transport, but we’d have to be outside the atmosphere first. Otherwise, the stratosphere would rip us apart just like it did our legion.”
“How long would this vortex transport take?”
“Maybe three months.”
“Three months? He doesn’t have that long, Sariel. You’ve got to do better!”
“Lucifer, Chaos is a trillion light years from here. It takes a small particle a trillion years at the speed of light to get back to Chaos. Wing-walking to stable vortexes and then wing-walking some more? 300,000 years. The best I can do with someone else is three months, and it’s difficult. What do you want me to say?”
“You woo … would try … to de …” Michael stuttered and pushed his hand to his stomach to press out the words. “You would deny him a resurrection? You would … let...t … t … him d …d … die in the cold of space?”
“I would honor his wishes,” Lucifer said. “He has the right to choose.”
Michael coughed on his laughter.
“The game has changed … b … b … rother. Keep sticking to the o … o … ld rules and our family won’t survive … Jehovah’s split isn’t the only one … Old e … e … nemies … Seek out friends …”
Michael felt himself slipping. He rolled onto his side and drifted in and out of consciousness. He saw Lucifer’s face above him, and then it blurred. It became Jehovah’s face. Lots of colors … white most of all … blended into walls …
And then naked on a floor that wasn’t a floor, next to walls that had no substance, and pillars that held up a translucent roof … So many stars … And three black holes coming right at him …