A hundred-metre behemoth of steel and woven carbon raised one pendulous arm to point at the lord they’d come to hunt.
Lumi Laine was thirteen when she realised she would harrow Hell, seventeen when she realised how, and twenty-six when she did.
When the hellgate first opened, Management scrambled ten thousand personnel to divert a river through it, hoping to hold back what was waiting. Unfortunately, even the Phlegethon could only buy them a month.
The worst thing about Hell was that it made a habit of cultivating hope. A poor sinner might look up and see the skies darken and hope that the blood-lanterns of the Lightbringer were dimming at last. Only one who looked carefully would notice that what seemed to be clouds, were, in fact, solid seething mats of limb and wing. The most contemptible class of devil flocked sightlessly over the ash-sodden plains of Tophet, emptied of their regular play of tormented and tormentor.
That expanse was shadowed by what rose over the horizon; a monolithic slab of stone lovingly detailed until every sinuous curve and jagged vertex burst with frescoes, faces, fearsome wyrms and horned beasts. It was incoherent, casually making a melange of five thousand years of theme and symbol. Here rose Aeneas with his spear through the heart of Quetzalcoatl, there the surrendering Mordred was devoured by a pack of kappa, and everywhere the serpent, the serpent, the serpent, crawling around heels and whispering in ears and biting into throats. Even the architecture seemed at war with itself: gables, domes, arches; great ivory monoliths and dead concrete idols; marble graven with gold; and above it all a skyscraper whose windows were obsidian. In the penthouse suite its master brooded tightlipped.
Today, Hell was silent.
Flame poured soundlessly through the great gash that hung perfectly still at the centre of the flatlands, and though it did not even murmur like water as it flowed, its light shone with the promise of mutilation. Redirected by the desperate efforts of devilry, the burning fell laminar to the mortal lands, throwing up a great pall of ember-studded fog that drowned all motion. The river flowed, the devils seethed, the Prince of Tophet looked on with sunken eyes, and through that mist stormed a million tons of war-engine.
Vanguard ran an educational service: they livestreamed faerie nominology, memetic inoculants, and necromantic first-aid.
On the adult channel, past a bevy of warnings —
(CONSULT PRIEST BEFORE VIEWING, CONSIDER AMNESTICS, IS THE COALITION RIGHT FOR YOU?)
— they streamed the view of Hell. Someone up the hierarchy correctly calculated that ninety-nine out of a hundred people who saw it would turn away sickened and try never to think of it again, and the other one would forge herself into a spear to pierce the heart of Lucifer. They probably didn’t expect her to be thirteen, but no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Once she met a kid who told her that people who sold their souls deserved what they got. They had to wheel him down to the hospital to get the fork out of his shoulder.
What she was taught in school had not been adapted to a post-Impasse world. They discussed afterlives as theories, when she could look down through a scrying pool and see exactly what the measure of every man was, herself. Consulting feverishly with the local abbot one day she found out about something new. He looked kindly on her, in the empty church vaulted and ribbed as if a dying whale, and said:
“When Christ was crucified, his soul descended into Hell, and he rescued all the virtuous from their torments.”
His eyes crinkled, amused by the unusual inquiry. He had not seen them. This kind of man, who had been good all his life, lived in a different universe from the idiots who bought five hours of glory in this world with their eternity in the next.
But, she thought, even idiots are virtuous, compared to the Devil. And if Hell can be braved once, why not again?
She roared out into the great outspread ashdrifts. The sweeping iron columns that were her legs pumped madly through the blazing river. The air saturated with elemental fire and took on a grim crimson aspect. It was a vision, of, well —
The earth all around her boiled upward. At the same moment the clouds plunged down, revealing the garish sky above. She and her companion whooped in one sonorous bellow that rumbled across the plain, all the way to the tower in the distance.
The strength of Good Intentions thrummed through her teeth, sang in time with her treacle-beating heart, pierced her breast like a needle. The sheer promise of her sister’s movement was a thrill felt in the marrow. Intentions trusted her perfectly, and nothing could stop them together.
She grinned within her cockpit, muscle moving despite the thousand needles jabbed in haywire and the paralytic coursing through her blood.
There. I’m going to feed you his heart.
A hundred-metre behemoth of steel and woven carbon raised one pendulous arm to point at the lord they’d come to hunt. In its hand was a great length of steel whose hilt was the column of Trajan. It was crowned in the bones of every saint but one. About its shoulders was a cloak of prophecy: the apokalypsis of Patmos, the thousand awakened ones of the fortunate era, the molten mantle of Dhul-Qarnayn. A promise at last fulfilled:
He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.
Good Intentions giggled back her approval up the neurochannel, and they sprang forward.
Rising from the ash; great cambions and lemures, many-limbed and many-horned. On their backs they hefted twisted black steel things that pulsed with awful purpose. Perhaps they might even hurt her, but —
Great carnelians burst into being all over the length of the plain, and the legions of Hell found they had something else to worry about. She wasn’t planning on overthrowing the cosmic order alone.
Perhaps she tuned into goetics channels more than the average teenage girl; maybe she liked to read about UN sanctions on the infernal plane more than the average political scientist. But if you knew her, you’d think Lumi was a pretty average person. She had friends, liked to box, to climb, to get into ill-advised fights outside bars, to walk around under the black sunless Helsinki sky looking for interesting things; and she never really got bored.
When she volunteered for the Coalition’s cadet forces, her parents were unjustifiably surprised. Her mother made a great show of accepting her decision as her lip quivered, but Father grinned wholeheartedly and thumped her on the back.
She had worked out the very first day that she needed to invade Hell. The question, then, was with who?
Vanguard were all smiles and kids playing in fields and old grannies with three eyes looking over them. She didn’t object to them loosening up from the Foundation days — and she was certainly grateful for the propaganda — but what she needed was an army. Artillery, aircraft, angels; gunmen and drones and cannons. Something to direct her hate. The Coalition blazed with the fire of every weapon ever forged by man. Join us, they said, and you will wield them all.
The choice was obvious.
Screaming sleek airwings daubed a defiant blue streaked the sky above her. Their thunder broke the gibbering horde crowding the ether, and all around her long-collected standoff weapons smeared the lesser devilry and their schemes across the cinders.
The easy part was done. The marshals back home had predicted the joke of an ambush, and laid out in millimetre precision how it would be dismantled. Hell had tried anyway — never go for cleverness when callousness might do; that was the principle. Now, at last, the princes of the pit were desperate.
All Tophet flickered with Coalition light, and pulped fiends drenched the earth until it formed a sodden musclemulch. She kept her eyes on the fortress, and the needlelike tower that seemed to reach halfway to the sourceless light of Lucifer.
The ground shuddered.
The sky bulged towards the earth. For a moment, the horizon bent inward. Then it shattered and like a television fractured into manycoloured shards. Out of the broken heaven dripped fat droplets of zodiacal light which fell perspectivelessly, seeming as likely to patter off Intentions’ optics as to drown a distant mountain.
Then they landed calamitously in the middle distance, and out of them rose mirrors of every kind. A fat sprawling hedge, large enough to swallow her, composed of glass: some smooth and clear, some dully coated in static, some blazoned with bloated erythematic faces, and others yet babbling meaningless debasements.
A pulse of toneless alarm from your sister. No, no, idiot, obviously not mirrors —
In the cadet force they have her on cleaning duty as much as possible. Nobody quite takes seriously that this wispy girl really wants to kill people for a living. She just got swept up in the propaganda dragnet. Too many hot chicks in the mech ads; that’s their assessment.
Screens. Amaymon, lord of noise and madness.
Legs drove into the offal-soaked dirt and she thrust toward his heart. Around her the lesser warcraft of the Coalition advanced. A flight of tactically blinded angels ringed her with celestial glory and she pushed through the muck. They could not see the evil in her own spirit or else she’d already be dead.
And as she reached for him and raised the sword —
Could barely handle moron-standard gunnery, couldn’t maintain anything more complicated than a toaster, didn’t have the head for command. When she tried out at airmanship she scored a clean twenty crashes in a row on the sim. Handling a UHEC was like being a toddler again. Everyone she knew looked at her with pity. Fuck them, and she’d break the girls’ noses in the ring if they wanted to say shit about her.
And stomped her feet and twisted, hips core back shoulders, her sister synchronised perfectly with her, and with best intentions fell her fatal stroke toward the heart of the Lord of the South. His hundred bloodless lips yawned open on their portals and he gave a black laughter and said, Come, know Yourself, and let Us be done with this farce, and she felt ice in her nerves as he exegeted her failures and her worthlessness —
She trembled under the feedback, the first time they connected her to Good Intentions, newborn, forged out of some Sumerian idol, still and tense with ecstasy —
Learned to love it, to hunt it, to plead for it from the colossus, mewling like some kitten because what did she have to lose —
Every movement bursting with strength and joy in the first field deployment, the glory of success, of a place at last, a role to play in the great victory, and she did not even notice when an Insurgent thaumaturge dragged half her mechanised escort into the abyss —
And lay cradled in Intentions’ womb, unmoving, and felt the other girl’s contentment, and thought, I could stay here forever —
And screamed and crushed an Orange beneath her splayed fist, and the pilot couldn’t walk for a month —
Suffocated by bitterness when they named some other guy twice her age as the alternate pilot. She needed to feel that alone, the quiet, the unity —
And in the end they named her the first accredited full pilot of the new Apocatastasis-class frames. And she was overjoyed, though she could not appear in public (they would flinch from the new limbs and the old stumps). Her sister spoke to her in their dreams:
Come on! Did you ever think it wouldn’t be you? Who else is bloodyminded enough to be the scourge of Hell? Who else can see through the lies of Amaymon —
And she woke and cast away and expiated her sins by pulling her sword right through his heart.
Around her the screens shattered and burst; flechettes of glass rattled off her armor. The theophanic gilding would need some buffing out. A spray of technicolour blood lent a brief and failing colour to the greying soil.
Her sword felt a little heavier somehow, with something more than mere mass. As if her motions had some other kind of inertia to them. She had broken one of the angles of the world. She plunged it tip-first into the ground, and it stood silently beside her.
Behind the armies of the Coalition continued to pour forth, more by the minute, and she kept her eyes on the tower. She wasn’t so sure of herself she’d try that obvious trap on her own. No further devils arrived, and the men kept following behind into the little pocket of safety they’d carved out in the plain. Nothing tested their borders. Hovercraft and helicopters and trucks and IFVs and MBTs assembled behind her an anthill of activity. As they scurried back and forth setting up layers of thaumaturgic shielding and tartarean sinks her sister rang that muted alarm: something was wrong.
As it stood, they’d won.
Not just in this moment, but totally. Hell had rings within rings, machina ex machina, but it was fundamentally designed to take the weak and the defenceless and break them. Neither Asmodeus nor Abbadon had any answer to the radio, the guided missile, the jet engine. As long as the gate remained open, they could simply shuffle through ammunition and men, strengthen their grasp, and begin a campaign in earnest.
In no sense would it be easy. Thousands would die, but tens of thousands had come; to see off the worst relic of the Veil. All plans had been for the fighting to be most brutal at this beachhead. Without their weaponry, they were only meat for the lowest lare. With it, they feared almost nothing. She was meant to be their answer to the simultaneous appearance of all six Princes (and die in the answering), but instead…
She looked up toward the fortress, and the tower. Still as the grave. She would break open its vaults and arcades and let the million souls inside free. What she’d seen so long ago would end. And then she would climb to the false star of Lucifer and quench it.
As if mocking her, that was the moment she felt it. A sudden horrible lurching in her stomach, a cry of dismay from her sister, and she fell briefly to her knees. She sprang to her feet with a speed that belied her size, but Mammon had not descended from his stronghold. Then what?
Behind her, with no spectacle, the hellgate had vanished.