Chay limped because both her hind legs had been broken just days after they’d entered the Hell; she had been run over by one of an endless line of bone-and-iron juggernauts transporting mangled bodies from one part of the Hell to another. The juggernauts moved along a road whose every cobble was the warted, calloused back of screaming unfortunates buried beneath.
Prin had carried her on his back for weeks afterwards while she healed, though the bones in her legs had never set properly; in Hell bones never did.
You are wrong, Prin. There is no Real. There is no outside reality. There is only this. You may need this delusion to make the pain of being here less for you, but in the end you will be better off accepting the true reality, that this all there is, all there ever has been and all there ever will be.
No, Chay, he told her. At this moment we are code, we are ghosts in the substrate, we are both real and unreal. Never forget that. We exist here for now but we had and have another life, other bodies to return to, back in the Real.
Real, Prin? We are real fools, fools to have come, if what you say is true and we came from somewhere else; fools to think we could do anything of use here, and most certainly fools to think we can ever leave this ghastly, filthy, sickening place. This is our life now, even if there was another one before it. Accept it, and it may not be so terrible. This is the Real; this that you see and feel and smell around you. Chay reached out with her right trunk and its tip almost touched the partially rotted face of a young female impaled face down on the spikes above, her emptied eye sockets staring blankly in at the two people cowering beneath. Though terrible it is. So, so terrible. Such a terrible place. She looked at her mate. Why make it worse with the lie of hope?
Prin reached out with his surviving trunk and wrapped it around both of hers as best he could. Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter, it is your despair that is the lie. The blood-gate across this valley opens within the hour to let out those who’ve been allowed a half-day glimpse of Hell in the hope of making them behave better back in the Real, and we have the means to leave with them. We shall, we will go back! We will leave this place, we will return to our home and we will tell of what we’ve seen here; we’ll let the truth of it out for ever, free into the Real, to do whatever damage to this outrage upon kindness and sentience it is possible to do. This vast obscenity around us was made, my love: it can be unmade. We can help, we can begin that unmaking. We can, we will do this. But I will not do it alone. I can’t and won’t leave without you. We go together or not at all. Just one last effort, please, my love. Stay at my side, come with me, escape with me, help me save you and help me save myself! He hugged her to his chest as hard as he was able.
Here come osteophagers, she said, looking out over his shoulder.
He let her go and looked round, peeking under hanging, rotting limbs to the uphill entrance to their impromptu shelter. She was right. A detail of half a dozen osteophagers were moving down and across the barren hillside, dragging bodies off the chevaux de frise and the other spiked and barbed barriers that littered the slope. The osteophagers were specialist demons, flesh- and bone-eating scavengers who lived off the carcasses of those re-killed either in Hell’s never-ending war or just in the normal course of its perpetual round of mutilation and pain. The souls of those they ate would already have been recycled into fresh, mostly whole if never entirely healthy bodies better able to appreciate the torments in store for them.
Like almost all the demons in the Pavulean Hell, the osteophagers resembled predator beasts from the Pavulean evolutionary past. The osteophagers moving down the hillside towards where the two small Pavuleans were hiding looked like glossily powerful versions of animals that had once preyed upon Chay and Prin’s ancestors, millions of years earlier: four-legged, twice the size of a Pavulean, with big, forward-facing eyes and – again like most demons – perversely sporting two, more muscular versions of Pavulean trunks from the sides of their massive, crushing jaws.
Their shining pelts of bright red and yellow stripes looked lacquered, polished. The colours were as much a hellish amendment as the trunks that the original animals had never possessed; it gave them the bizarre look of having been coloured in by children. They moved hulkingly from barbed barrier to barbed barrier along the hillside, lifting the hooked bodies off with their trunks or tearing them free with vicious-looking teeth nearly half a trunk long. They sucked down what were obviously the more prized parts, crunching on some smaller bones on occasion, but most of the bodies they collected were thrown onto ill-made bone carts pulled by blinded, de-trunked Pavuleans, following them along the valley side.
They will find us, Chay said dully. They will find us and kill us all over again, or part eat us and leave us here to suffer, or impale us upon these hideous works and come back for us later, or break our legs and throw us up onto one of their carts and take us to more senior demons for more refined and terrible punishment.
Prin stared out at the advancing, ragged line of demons, mutilated Pavuleans and giant carts. For a few moments he was unable to think properly, unable to take stock of their suddenly changed situation, and allowed Chay to mutter on, letting her words leech away the hope he had been trying to fill her with, letting her fill him instead with the despair he was constantly trying to hold at bay and which he could never admit to her was for ever threatening to overwhelm him.
The detail of osteophagers and their grisly retinue had come close enough now to hear the crunch of bones in massive jaws and the whimper of the bridled Pavuleans. He turned and looked in the opposite direction, towards the mill with its dark pool and the thick, unsplashing stream of blood that was now powering the giant, creaking wheel.
The mill was working! It had started up!
The gate it controlled must be about to open and the way out of Hell would present itself to them at last.
Chay, look! Prin told her, using his trunk to turn her away from the view of the advancing line of osteophagers and towards the mill.
I see it, I see it. Another flying death machine.
He wondered what she was talking about, then saw the moving shape, dark grey upon the still darker grey of the low, restlessly moving clouds.
I meant the mill; it’s working! But the flier, too; it must be bringing the ones who’re meant to get out! We’re saved! Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? He turned her towards him again, tenderly using his trunk to bring her round to him. This is our chance, Chay. We can, we will get out of here. He gently touched the barbed wire necklaces they each wore; first hers then his own. We have the means, Chay. Our lucky charms, our little kernels of saving code. We brought these with us, remember? They did not put these on us! This is our chance. We must be ready.
No, you’re still a fool. We have nothing. They will find us, give us to the superiors in the machine.
The flier was in the shape of a giant beetle; it buzzed furiously towards the mill on a blur of iridescent wings, its legs extending as it approached a shaved-level patch of ground by the building’s side.
Ha! Chay, you’re wrong, my love. We are destined to get out of here. You’re coming with me. Keep a hold of your horrible necklace. This barb; this one right here. Here, can you feel it?
He directed two of her still-perfect, still-unscarred, undamaged trunk fingers to the control barb.
I feel it.
When I say so, you pull hard on that. Do you understand?
Of course I understand, do you think me a fool?
Only when I say; pull hard. We shall look like demons to those who are demons themselves, and have their power. The effect will not last long, but long enough to get us through the gate.
The great beetle-shaped flier was settling on the patch of ground by the mill. A pair of demons, yellow and black striped, emerged from the mill to watch it land. The beetle’s fuselage body was about half the size of the mill; lower, longer, darkly sleek. Its wings settled, folded into its carapace. The rear of its abdomen hinged down and a small group of sturdy, grinning demons
and quivering, obviously terrified Pavuleans in rough-looking clothes came out.
The Pavuleans’ clothes alone marked them out as different, here. In Hell all suffered naked, and any who tried to cover their nudity only ensured themselves further torments as punishment for having had the effrontery to imagine they could exercise any control whatsoever over their suffering.
The eight Pavuleans exiting the giant beetle were also distinguished from the damned around them by being whole, carrying no scars or obvious injuries, seeping wounds or signs of disease. They looked well fed too, though even from this distance Prin could see a sort of hungry desperation in their movements and their facial expressions, a petrifying sense of probably being about to escape this landscape of pain and terror, but with the realisation dawning on at least some of them that perhaps they had been lied to. Perhaps this was not the end of a brief warning tour of Hell, designed to keep them on the straight and narrow back in the Real, but rather a taste of what was about to become their settled and already inescapable fate; a cruel trick that would be just the first of innumerable cruel tricks. Perhaps they were not getting out at all; perhaps they were here to stay, and to suffer.
From what Prin knew, for at least one of their number this would be brutally true; such groups were inevitably traumatised in the course of what they were forced to witness during these tours and – utterly unable to establish any rapport with the rapaciously forbidding and utterly disdainful demons who escorted them – quickly drew together, bonding like a tiny herd, finding a rough but real companionship amongst their equally horror-struck companions no matter how various their personalities, situations and histories might have been back in the Real.
To then have one of your number cut out of your little group, somebody you knew and felt some camaraderie towards, made the experience all the more vivid. It was just about possible to experience one of these horrific excursions and convince yourself that the unfortunates you saw suffering were quite different from you just because of the extremity of their degradation (they appeared sub-Pavulean; little more – perhaps no more – than animals) but to watch one of your group having all of his or her worst fears confirmed, consigned to everlasting torment just at the point when they thought they were about to be allowed to resume their life in the Real, made the lesson the tour was meant to teach stick much more thoroughly in the mind.
They’re about to go in. Be ready. Prin glanced back to see the nearest osteophager alarmingly close to their hideout. We have to go now, my love. He’d hoped to be closer when they made their approach, but there was no choice.
Pull on the barb, now, Chay.
So still you seek to deceive me. But I’ve seen through your shallow hope.
Chay! We have no time for this! I can’t do it for you! It only works at our own touch. Pull the fucking barb!
I will not. I press it instead, see? She winced as she pressed the barb further into her own neck, the other end impaling the tip of her trunk finger.
Prin sucked in his breath so hard and fast he saw the nearby osteophager turn its massive head in the direction of their shelter, ears twitching, gaze flicking this way and that, then settling on them
Shit! Right …
Prin pulled on his own necklace’s barb; the contraband code it symbolised started running. Instantly, he had the body of one of the grinning demons, and the biggest and most impressive type at that; a giant six-limbed predator long extinct in the Real, trunkless but with trefoil-fingered forelimbs that doubled as trunks. The rationalising rules of the Hell immediately caused the body-laden cheval de frise to rear up to accommodate his suddenly increased bulk so that he wore it on his broad, green and yellow back like some monstrous piece of armour. Chay cowered at his feet, suddenly small. She voided her bladder and bowels and curled into a rigid ball.
With one forelimb he picked her up by both of her trunks, the way he had seen demons do to his kind countless times before, and with a roar shrugged the cheval de frise off his back, letting it thunk down to one side, bodies and parts of bodies flopping and falling from its spikes.
There was a shrill scream; one of the carts carrying the corpses had been almost alongside, hidden by the weight of bodies on that side of the device, and when it had fallen, one of its spikes had pierced the foot of the Pavulean hauling the cart, pinning the creature to the ground. The osteophager who had been looking suspiciously in their direction took a step back, its ears suddenly bolt upright, an emotion between surprise and fear evident in its stance.
Prin snarled at it; the creature took another half-step back. Its fellows across the hillside had stopped and now stood motionless, looking on. They would wait and see which way this was going to go before deciding either to join in with leave-some-for-me! bravado, or pretend it had been nothing to do with them in the first place.
Prin shook the still-catatonically-inert Chay towards the osteophager. She’s mine! I saw first!
The osteophager blinked, looked round with apparent unconcern, checking to see what the rest of its detail was doing. Not coming bounding to its side to face down this sudden interloper steadfastly and together, clearly. The creature looked down, brushed at the ground in front of it with the back of one paw, claws mostly retracted.
Take it, it said in a grumbling, seemingly unconcerned voice. Consider it yours, with our blessing. We have plenty. It shrugged, lowered its head to sniff at the patch of ground it had scuffed, apparently having lost interest in the whole exchange.
Prin snarled again, clutched Chay to his chest, turned and bounded down the hillside past decaying corpses and spikes pennanted with ragged strips of flesh. He splashed through the dark stream of blood and went springing diagonally up the slope towards the mill. The group from the giant beetle had disappeared inside the building. The beetle itself had closed its abdomen and was unpacking its wings from beneath its gleaming wing covers. Prin was close enough to see demons moving inside its enormous faceted eyes.
Pilots, he thought, for an assemblage of code that might as well have been kept aloft through the wielding of an enchanted feather, or a magic anvil for that matter.
He leapt on up the hillside, towards the mill.
Five
From somewhere came the idea that there were many different levels of sleeping, of unconsciousness, and therefore of awakening. In the midst of this pleasant woozy calm – warm, pleasantly swaddled, self-huggingly curled up, a sort of ruddy darkness behind the eyelids – it was an easy and comforting thing to contemplate the many ways one might be away, and then come back.
You fell asleep just for an instant sometimes; that sudden nod and jerk awake again, lasting a moment. Or you had short naps, often self-timed, limited by knowing you had a few minutes or a half-hour or whatever.
Of course you had your classic Good Night’s Sleep, however much things like shift systems and all-night facilities and drugs and city lighting might sometimes interfere.
Then there was the deeper unconsciousness of being knocked out, put carefully under for some medical procedure, or randomly banging your head and briefly not even knowing your own name. Also, people still lapsed into comas, and came out of those very gradually; that must be an odd feeling. And for a while there, for the last few centuries, though not so often these days because things had moved on, there was the sub-sleep of deep space travel, when you were put into a sort of deep, long-term hibernation for years or decades at a time, kept frigidly cold and barely alive, to be revived when your destination approached. Some people had been kept like this back at home, too, awaiting medical advances. Waking up from something like that must be quite a strange thing, she thought.
She felt an urge to turn over, as though she was nestled in a fabulously comfortable bed but now had spent enough time on this side and needed to shift to lie the other way. She felt very light, she realised, though even as she thought this she seemed to feel very slightly, reassuringly heavier.
She felt herself take a deep, satisfying breath, and duly turne
d over, eyes still tightly closed. She had a vague feeling that she didn’t entirely know where she was, but it didn’t bother her. Usually that was a slightly disturbing sensation, occasionally even a very disturbing, frightening experience, but not this time. Somehow she knew that wherever she was she was safe, cared for, and in no danger.
She felt good. Really good, in fact.
When she thought about it, she realised that she couldn’t remember ever having felt so good, so secure, so happy. She felt a tiny frown form on her face. Oh, come on, she told herself. She must have felt like this before. To her slight but undeniable irritation, she had only a vague memory of when she had last felt anything like this untroubled and happy. Probably in her mother’s arms, as a little girl.
She knew that if she woke up fully she would remember properly, but – much as a part of her wanted to be completely awake, to answer this question and sort all this out – another part of her was too happy just lying here, wherever she was, drowsy, secure and happy.
She knew this feeling. This was often the best bit of any day, before she had to wake and fully face the realities of the world and the responsibilities she had fallen heir to. If you were lucky, you really did sleep like a baby; completely, soundly and without care. Then it would be only as you awoke that you were reminded of all the things you had to worry about, all the resentments you harboured, all the injustices and cruelties you were subject to. Still, even the thought of that grim process somehow couldn’t destroy her mood of ease and happiness.
She sighed; a long, deep, satisfying sigh, though still with an element of regret as she felt her sleepiness drift away like mist under a gentle breeze.
The sheets covering her felt outrageously fine, almost liquidly soft. They moved about her naked body as she completed the sigh and stirred a little under the warm material. She was not sure that even Himself possessed such fine—