The Wrong Goodbye

24.

The rain beat down on my face and neck, and made treacherous the stone steps that we descended. These steps were narrower than the ones I’d followed up to the main building, and they hugged the craggy canyon wall, making their path unpredictable and the going slow. The warmth and light of Dumas’s fireplace were but a distant memory, three stories and a world of wet away. Dumas led me downward through the darkness, looking dry as ever, as though the rain didn’t dare to dampen him. It was an illusion, of course; Dumas looked dry for the same reason Dumas looked human —because that’s how he chose to look.

Me, I looked like a drowned rat, my one shoe-clad foot squishing with every step, and my bare sock soaked clean through and caked thick with mud. Figures I’d wind up coming to the desert on the one fucking night it rains. Next time, I’m bringing a slicker and some rubber boots —provided I survive long enough for there to be a next time.

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Servants’ quarters,” Dumas replied.

“Yeah, I can see why you’d want to tuck ’em out of sight,” I said, glancing back toward the main building behind us —its crumbling façade barely visible through the pounding rain. “You’d hate to ruin the lovely ambience you’ve got going on back there.”

“What, you didn’t like the rug? I thought it really tied the room together.”

At the base of the slope up to the main building, Dumas jagged right, disappearing from view. I’d been figuring on a left-hand turn toward the constellation of outbuildings I’d seen on my way in. Visibility being what it was, I had no idea where Dumas had gotten off to, so for a moment, I just stood there like an idiot in the rain.

“Hey, Sammy —you comin’ or what?”

Turned out Dumas was standing in a natural alcove in the rock maybe eight feet high, and barely wide enough for two men to stand side-by-side. At first, the alcove didn’t seem to be that deep, and then I realized that what I’d taken to be the inside wall was in fact a heavy iron door, so thoroughly corroded by the elements that it looked as natural as the rock walls that surrounded it.

At the center of the door was a wheel —a wheel as rust-caked as the door itself. It would’ve taken a dozen Strong Man competitors and a can of WD-40 to move that thing an inch. Dumas spun it like a pinwheel in a stiff wind. And with a shriek like the cries of the tormented, the door swung inward.

Stepping inside, it was apparent this wasn’t so much an alcove as a cave. A well-trodden dirt floor led inward from where we stood, pocked here and there with strange stone outcroppings the color of sun-bleached bone. Torches hung on the walls at regular intervals, casting long shadows of the rock formations, and causing the corridor before me to writhe like a living thing as their flames licked at the stone ceiling above. The air was thick with oily smoke; it burned in my throat and made my eyes water. But beneath its tarry bite was another scent, sour and unpleasant: a sulfurous reek that seemed to emanate from the very walls.

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” I muttered.

“I know, right?” Dumas replied, his eyes dancing with mirth in the torchlight. “I was thinking of having a doormat made special.”

We proceeded down the natural corridor. Rooms branched off from it on either side —some sealed with iron doors of their own, some nothing more than bare rock arches leading into darkness. It was warm inside —too warm. Between the fumes, the heat, and the ever-shifting firelight, I felt dizzy, ill, disoriented. But if Dumas noticed, he paid no mind, instead leading me down, down, down toward God knows what.

No, I thought. About this, God has no idea.

Over time I became aware of a peculiar sound, low and rumbling like machinery. It built and built upon itself until it was damn near unbearable, a horrid oscillating pressure in my eardrums that made my eyes blur and my temples throb like the early stages of a migraine. I tried to hide my discomfort from Dumas. It worked about as well as any of my plans thus far.

“You hear that, Sammy? That’s the sound of commerce. Of product being made. I tell ya, it’s music to my ears…”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to smile, and winding up with more of a pained grimace. “Catchy.”

He nodded toward a door up ahead, another iron job that, if anything, was heavier and better reinforced than the one through which we’d entered. “You wanna see?”

I didn’t. I told him so. He showed me anyway.

I really shoulda seen that coming.

When he heaved open the door, the sound doubled in intensity. The pressure in my eardrums seemed to spread. My intestines fluttered like I’d eaten a bad burrito, and the fillings in my meat-suit’s teeth began to ache. It was all I could manage to keep my feet. Dumas was mock-oblivious, clapping one arm over my shoulder and ushering me through the doorway, his features ablaze with malignant delight.

The room was small and dark, and the air inside was thick with sulfurous steam; it billowed outward through the open door like hot breath on my face. No torches graced the close stone walls. Aside from the firelight that spilled in through the open door, the only illumination came from somewhere in the center of the room, a ghostly gray light that appeared at first to emanate from the very steam itself. But as the steam dispersed, I caught a glimpse of the machinery behind the awful racket —and the true source of the room’s sole light.

It appeared to be some kind of massive lathe, sitting at table height and fastened to the floor with bolts as thick as my arm. A hodge-podge of tarnished brass fixtures —wheels, knobs, cranks, and levers —jutted from its cast-iron shell, and several grime-caked gears transmitted power to the spindle from a thick rubber belt that extended upward to a diesel engine above, running at full bore and fixed to the ceiling by a series of heavy chains. Angling downward from the ceiling, as well as upward from the floor below, were several copper pipes, which snaked their way around the room from a cistern in the corner and converged on the object mounted on the rapidly turning spindle.

The object itself was scarcely larger than an acorn, and obscured from view by the steam that billowed off of it —steam generated by the water jetting toward it from the copper pipes. But as it turned, it flickered with familiar light, and beneath the clamor of machinery, I could just make out the melancholy wail of its song.

It was a soul. A human soul, reduced to a mere commodity by Dumas and his ilk.

The machine’s attendant —a hulking mass of demon-flesh clad head-to-cloven-hoof in thick, coarse leather —threw a lever, and the engine chugged to a halt. The spindle slowed and stopped, and, with a squeak of turning valves, the flow of water petered out as well. My head was grateful for the silence. My heart ached to see a soul treated so callously as this.

The machinist shook free of his gloves and stripped off his mask —a grotesque parody of the face beneath rendered in leather and brass, with a lens of ambercolored glass where the demon’s sole eye proved to be. Don’t get me wrong, the demon beneath was hardly a looker —picture a rabid, mangy, cyclopean Rottweiler, and you’re more or less there —but that mask? That mask was the stuff of nightmares.

“Nice getup,” I said.

The dog-beast eyed me with the sort of disdain you’d expect from a blue-blood stepping over a puking wino. “Boss,” it said with a voice a good octave lower than any human one I’ve ever heard. “There some kind of problem?” The words seemed unwieldy in the creature’s mouth, as if it were unaccustomed to speaking in a human tongue, and though it was speaking to Dumas, its eye never left me. The eye itself was black and glistening and rimmed all around with red. Its corners were crusted with dried mucus, sickly white against the creature’s pitch-black face. I could see my reflection in the surface of that eye, smaller and more frightened than I maybe would have liked.

“Problem? Nah —just giving Sammy here the nickel tour!” Then, to me: “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Sam, but old Psoglav here is the best skimmer in the business. A real surgeon with his blade. Ain’t that right, Psoglav?”

Psoglav said nothing, instead plucking said blade up from where it lay atop the stilled lathe —so quickly that I scarcely saw him do it —and testing the set of its edge against the ash-gray callus of his thumb. The blade itself was flat-topped like a chisel and very fine, with a tapered stem and a handle fashioned from what appeared to be a human bone. I confess I didn’t like the way Psoglav was looking at me while he held it.

Psoglav smiled at my obvious discomfort, flashing what looked to be a set of crude iron teeth jammed willy-nilly into his mottled gray gums, and then his hand flicked out at me, placing the tip of the blade under my chin so fast I didn’t even have time to exhale, much less react. Every muscle in the demon’s body was tensed, but the blade barely grazed my skin. Still, it was sharp enough to draw blood —I felt it dripping warm down my chin.

I wanted to move. To recoil. Hell, to take a fucking breath. But Psoglav could kill this meat-suit with a lightning flick of his wrist, so I didn’t dare. Instead I stood there, bleeding in the darkness.

“This monkey,” he said to Dumas, who seemed for all the world not to notice the drama unfolding before him, “he our new Collector?”

I said nothing. Dumas answered, “Perhaps.”

The pressure on the blade increased ever-so slightly, and my bleeding quickened. The damned thing was so sharp, though, I barely even felt it.

“I hope for his sake he proves more reliable than his predecessor.”

Dumas smiled. “You hope no such thing. I know you’re still chomping at the bit to have a go at Daniel, and it looks to me like you’d be more than happy to exact your revenge on Samuel in his stead.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of steel. “Though if I were you, Psoglav, I wouldn’t.”

Though Dumas’s words were conversational enough, Psoglav’s eye widened in sudden fear, and faster than my own eyes could even register, he recoiled. The blade gone, I raised a sleeve to my bleeding chin and resisted the urge to collapse into a puddle on the floor.

“My apologies,” Psoglav said —to Dumas, though, not to me.

“Think nothing of it,” Dumas replied, the tone of levity in his voice restored.

“With your permission, boss, I think maybe I should return to my work.”

“Of course, of course,” Dumas replied. “The machinery of capitalism stops for no one —not even me.”

We took our leave of Psoglav, and Dumas shut the door behind us. I heard the diesel engine cough and sputter, and then roar to life once more. Soon, the awful racket of the lathe’s turning resumed.

“That Psoglav’s a real charmer,” I said, dabbing at my chin.

“Oh, he’s a tad excitable, I’ll admit, but he’s damn good at his job.”

“Not a fan of Danny’s, huh?”

“Seems there’s a lot of that going around lately. Although in Psoglav’s case, I’m not surprised. Most of the Collectors in my employ can’t stay far enough away from him, but Danny? Danny pestered poor Psoglav any chance that he could get. Always asking questions, bugging him to watch the skimming process, and generally following him around like some yippy little toy dog. Maybe Psoglav worries you’ll pick up where Daniel left off.”

“He’s got nothing to worry about. I’m never going to come work for you" —again, I added mentally —"and what’s more, I’m pretty sure you know it. So you wanna tell me what that little dog-and-pony show was really all about?”

“I just need you to understand the skill required to maintain an operation such as this, and the consequences of any lapse in said skill, so that you can begin to understand the severity of the situation in which we find ourselves.”

I thought back to my showdown with the bugmonster, and let out a single, barking laugh. “I’m pretty sure I understand the severity of my situation.”

“And I’m just as sure you don’t. See, Psoglav is a rare breed —a creature of such speed and singleminded focus that you’d think he’d been conjured for the sole purpose of extracting skim from souls.”

“Yeah? And?”

“And he’s the fourth such beast to hold that post.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What I’m saying, Sam, is that human souls are as volatile as they are fragile, and that for all of his talent, Psoglav, like his predecessors, is not infallible. Sooner or later, he will slip. Perhaps he’ll simply tire of his task, and his attention will wane. Perhaps one of the thousand tiny shards kicked off during the skimming process will find its way around his leather armor and send him on an unintended little trip. Perhaps he’ll simply sneeze. It doesn’t much matter what winds up causing Psoglav to slip; what matters is that when he does, he’ll take this cave and maybe half the canyon with him. Just as his predecessor did to my operation in Nepal, and as his predecessor’s predecessor did to the house I ran in Cook, Australia. It’s why I’ll only ever put a skim-joint at the ass-end of nowhere; I learned my lesson back in San Fran in ’06.”

I thought back. “What the hell happened in ’06?”

Dumas laughed. “Sorry, Sammy —sometimes I forget how pathetically short a span you monkeys get to live. I meant 1906. My skimmer cracked that one but good; between the shockwaves and the subsequent fire, over three thousand of your kind perished. Of course, they figured it was an earthquake, and I guess it was, at that —the buffoon cracked that soul so bad he disturbed the very plates beneath the ground, and leveled a city in the process. Since then, I’ve made it a policy to steer clear of urban centers, and to never, ever start a skim-joint on a fault line.”

“Big of you,” I said.

“Just good business,” he replied, oblivious to my biting tone.

A thought occurred to me. “You said three thousand of my kind were killed that day, but what about your kind? What happens to Psoglav, and to your customers, if this place blows?”

“You mean do they die? Why, Samuel, are you concerned my little tale might dent your rep as the first to kill a member of the Fallen in millennia?”

“Hardly. Just didn’t square, is all.”

“Oh, come now, you’re a resident of hell —what’s the harm of copping to the sin of pride? And anyways, your reputation is intact; a cracked soul has never, to my knowledge, killed one of my kind. It does sting like a mother, though, I’ll tell you that —the blast can strip flesh from bone and limbs from bodies, and those closest to it usually slink off to a quiet corner of the Depths for a century or so to nurse their wounds and try to grow back what they’ve lost. Even still, some of them never come back quite right; my San Fran skimmer’s blind for good, and the poor bastard’s now got the reflexes of a tree sloth.”

“A real heartbreaker, that.”

Something tickled at the back of my mind, and I found myself thinking back to the mess that was last year’s Manhattan job. See, what happened was a bigwig seraph by the name of So’enel decided to go rogue and incite a war between heaven and hell. To do so, he conspired to mark an innocent soul for col lection —a major no-no according to the Great Truce —and since it was my handler the shitweasel was conspiring with, I was the one dispatched to do the deed. Lucky, no?

But even less lucky was Mu’an, the messengerdemon who served as go-between for Lilith and So’enel. Once their plan went south, So’enel endeavored to eliminate any evidence of his involvement —and since Mu’an fell solidly into that category, the seraph sent a cadre of his angelic lackeys to shut him up for good. They caught up to Mu’an at Grand Central, and unleashed a holy fury the likes of which the modern world had never seen. Mu’an escaped with his life —barely —but the force of the angels’ attack nearly wiped the terminal off the map. To this day, the government considers the blast an act of terror, and no fewer than three dozen extremist groups took credit for it. I wondered how many would take credit for the ferry boat in Maine that foundered a couple days back after an explosion ripped a hole in the hull and killed half the passengers on board; just the latest in a growing list of angel-on-demon violence.

“The blast that results from cracking a soul,” I said, “it sounds a lot like an angel’s wrath to me.”

At that, Dumas cocked his head, and then he smiled. “I suppose you would have some experience in that regard, wouldn’t you? Quite the bit of business you got mixed up with in New York. Yes, I suppose they aren’t dissimilar —both unleash the power of the Maker’s might, His grace, His wrath. In many respects, the human soul is a far greater font of power than even the greatest seraph can tap into —after all, you monkeys are, for reasons that to this day escape me, the Maker’s most favored little playthings. But humans lack the capacity to channel such power, and even the best of you are touched by sin, which blunts the damage to my kind. An angel’s wrath,” he said, as if trying on the word for size, “is more directed, more controlled… and because it’s not occluded by darkness, far more deadly to their Fallen brothers.”

“Why are you telling me all this? I don’t believe for a second you’ve even the slightest affection for me, and yet here you are, pulling back the curtain when you probably should’ve sent me packing. So what gives? What’s your angle?”

Dumas sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. For the first time since I’d arrived, he looked concerned. “My angle? Same as it ever was, Sammy. I’m a businessman, pure and simple, and as such, I have to protect my interests. And right now, Interest Numero Uno is keeping my ass off the white-hat’s hit-list. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but it’s open season on the Fallen out there. Our Chosen brothers are spoiling for a fight, and they’ll jump on any excuse to send a little wrath our way. Normally, that’s no concern a mine. I run a quiet operation here —keep my head down and my profile low. Only all the sudden here comes Danny Young with a yen to misbehave, and the more ruckus he makes, the worse things’re gonna get for me. See, whether or not he’s operating on my behalf, the fact remains he was once in my employ, and as such was privy to all manner of sensitive information —information that, left uncontained, could lead the feather-and-harp brigade right back to me. So when you wandered in from the desert asking questions about all things Danny, I figured shit —why not point Sammy in the right direction, see if maybe he can catch him? He does, and that’s two problems off my plate. Problem Two is you, in case you ain’t been keeping up.”

“Hold up a sec. You say you wanna point me in the right direction —does that mean you know where Danny is?”

“Would that I did, Sammy; it’d save us both a hell of a lot of trouble. But I’m pretty sure I do know what he’s planning, and more importantly, what’ll happen if he succeeds. If that happens, the stupid bastard’s gonna unleash a disaster of Biblical proportions —one that’ll make my skimmer’s slip in San Francisco and the subsequent destruction look like a goddamn kitten sneezing.”

“OK then, spill: what the hell is Danny playing at?”

Dumas answered my question with one of his own: “Tell me, Sammy —what do you know about the Brethren?”