Surface Detail

Four

In Valley 308, which was part of the Thrice Flayed Footprint district of the Pavulean Hell, level three, there was an old-fashioned mill with a tall external over-shot wheel, powered by blood. It was part of the punishment of some of the virtual souls in that place that each day they be profusely bled for as long as they could without falling unconscious. There were many thousands of such unfortunates to be bled during each session and they were duly dragged screaming from their nearby pens by grotesquely formed, irresistibly powerful demons and strapped to canted iron tables with drains at their foot. These tables were arranged in serried ranks on the steep banks of the arid valley, which, had one been able to look at it from far enough above, would have been revealed as a ridge forming part of a truly gigantic footprint; hence the district’s name.

The once very important person to whom the flayed hand belonged was still, in some sense, alive, and suffered every moment from having had their skin removed. They suffered in a magnified sense, too, concomitant with their pelt having been so grotesquely scale-exaggerated that a single ridge on one of their feet — or paws, there being some fairly irrelevant disagreement concerning the correct terminology — was now vast enough to form part of the landscape on which so many others lived their post-death lives and suffered the multitudinous torments which had been prescribed them.

The released blood from the iron tables ran glutinously down pipes and runnels to the stream bed where it collected, flowed downhill as liquids are prone to do, even in entirely virtual environments, and ran — with increasing vigour and force as the blood of more and more sufferers paid tribute to the stream — down to a deep, wide pool. Even there, bound by the synthetic rules of the Hell, it resolutely refused to coagulate. From the header pool a broad channel directed it to the summit of the mill’s wheel.

The wheel was constructed of many, many ancient bones, long bleached white by the action of the acid or alkali rains that fell every few days and caused such torment to the people held in the pens upstream. The wheel turned on bearings made of cartilage laced with the nerves of yet more of the condemned whose bodies had been woven into the fabric of the building, each creaking, groaning revolution of the wheel producing seemingly unbearable agony. Other sufferers made up the roof slates with their oversized, painfully sensitised nails — they too dreaded the harrowing rains, which stung with every drop — or the mill’s thin walls with their painfully stretched skins, or its supporting beams with their protesting bones, or its creaking gears and cogs, every tooth of which hurt as though riddled with disease, every stressed and straining bone bar and shaft of which would have screamed had they possessed voices.

Far beyond, beneath boiling dark skies, the stream gave out onto a great blood marsh where sufferers planted and rooted like stunted trees drowned again and again with every acidic rain and each fresh wash of blood.

Much of the time, the mill didn’t even use the flow of blood collecting in its upstream pool; the fluid simply went on down the overflow and back to the stream bed on its way to the dark swamp in the distance beneath the darkly livid, lowering skies.

And besides, the mill powered nothing; the little energy it produced when it did deign to function went entirely to waste. Its whole purpose and point was to add to the excruciation of those unfortunate enough to find themselves within Hell.

This was what people were generally told, anyway. Some were told the mill did power something. They were told it held great stone wheels which ground the bodies and bones of those guilty of crimes committed within hell. Those so punished suffered even greater agonies than those whose bodies still in some sense resembled those they had inhabited before death; for those who had sinned even within Hell, the rules — always entirely flexible — were changed so that they could suffer with every sinew, cell and structure of their body, no matter how atomised it might have become and how impossible such suffering would have been with an utterly shredded nervous central system in the Real.

The truth was different, however. The truth was that the mill had a quite specific purpose and the energy it produced did not go to waste; it operated one of the small number of gates that led out of Hell, and that was why the two small Pavuleans sheltering on the far side of the valley were there.

No, we are lost, entirely lost, Prin.

We are where we are, my love. Look. The way out is right there, in front of us. We are not lost, and we shall shortly escape. Soon, we’ll be home.

You know that is not true. That is a dream, just a dream. A treacherous dream. This is what is real, not anything we might think we remember from before. That memory is itself part of the torment, something to increase our pain. We should forget what we think we remember of a life before this. There was no life before this. This is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. Eternity, this is eternity. Only this is eternity. Surrender to that thought and at least the agony of hope that can never be fulfilled will disappear.

They were crouching together, hidden within the lower part of a cheval de frise, its giant X of crossed spikes laden with impaled, half-decayed bodies. Those bodies and the bodies all around them littering this section of hillside — indeed the seemingly living or apparently dead bodies of everybody within the Hell, including their own — were Pavulean in form: metre-and-half-long quadrupeds with large, round heads from which issued small twin trunks, highly prehensile probosces with little lobes at the tip resembling stubby fingers.

Agony of hope? Listen to yourself, Chay. Hope is all we have, my love. Hope drives us on. Hope is not treachery! Hope is not cruel and insane, like this perversion of existence; it is reasonable, right, only what we might expect, what we have every right to expect. We must escape. We must! Not just for selfish reasons, to escape the torments we’ve been subject to here, but to take the news, the truth of what we’ve experienced here back to the Real, back to where, somehow, some day, something might be done about it.

The two Pavuleans presently hiding under the covering of rotting corpses were called — in the familiar form they used with each other — Prin and Chay, and they had journeyed together across several regions of this Hell over a subjective period of several months, always heading for this place. Now, finally, they were within sight of it.

Neither resembled Pavuleans in the peak of health. Only Prin’s left trunk was intact; the other was just a still-ragged stump after a casual swipe from the sword of a passing demon some weeks ago. The poisoned sword had left a wound that would not heal or stop hurting. His intact left trunk had been nicked in the same strike and made him wince with every movement. Around both their necks was a twist of tightened barbed wire like a depraved version of a necklace, the barbs biting through their skin, raising welts that seeped blood and left itching, flaking scabs.

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.