To Hell and Back

Chapter 15

The cold was immense, titanic, walloping all the breath out of me in one shocked second before Japhrimel's aura closed harder over mine, flushing me with heat. I shivered once, a short cry caught in my throat, and my body quivered, ice congealing in my lungs before I blew out a cloud that immediately flashed into ice and fell with a tinkle on the packed snow. I sank in powder-dry snow to my knees, stepping off the cargo hatch's open metal stairs, glad I hadn't touched the half-railing. In this kind of weather, skin could freeze to metal instantly.

A terrific spike of glassy pain sank through my head before my body adapted to the lower oxygen load in the air, a hazy stain of Power spreading out in the ambient atmosphere. Steam drifted away from the egg-shaped field covering us both, Japhrimel steadying me as I almost toppled, sinking in the snow. Iron-hard fingers closed around my upper arm, hauling me up, and I found myself balanced on the thin top crust just like Japhrimel, whose boots rested feather-light, leaving no impression.

It was a nice trick, but it dried my mouth out and gave my heart an all-new reason to start hammering.

I knew he was a demon. But such a casual use of so much Power was terrifying in an all-new way. Just how many ways can a Necromance be scared to death? It sounded like a stupid riddle.

I found I could breathe again, and looked up to find Japh studying me. The wind, pawing at the hover's corners and struts, hurling itself around rock edges with a sound like silk endlessly tearing, covered any sound I might have made. The scar in the hollow of my left shoulder flared with soft heat, stroking down my body just like a caress — one that didn't remind me of the blank black space inside my head, and the hideousness it contained.

Japh tilted his head slightly, and I took an experimental step when he did. My feet crunched in the snow and his fingers tightened, my boots leaving an impression a quarter-inch deep.

I took another step. Panic bubbled up, I set my teeth against it. Anyone coming behind us would look at my tracks and think I was alone, stepping lightly over powdery snow deep enough to swallow me even if it had afforded a soft landing to the hover.

Japh's hand on my arm gentled, slid up to circle my shoulders. He pulled me into his side, Power cloaking us both, and I had the sudden startling feeling of being invisible. The psychic static of a demon, spreading through the ether with black-diamond-spangled haze, cloaked and outshone me completely. It was the equivalent of not being able to smell my own pheromones, disturbing and comforting in equal measure.

He set off, shortening his long strides to mine, and we moved over the snow together, not bothering to talk. The sound of the wind would have overpowered anything I could shout, anyway. Steam turned to ice, cracking and tinkling as it shredded away from the small space of warmth he carried us in.

Could he have done this when he'd just been Fallen, not Fallen with a demon's Power restored? Add that to the list of questions I wasn't sure I was ever going to get answered.

We headed straight for the cliff face. I wondered what was about to happen — was he going to take us right up the sheer, ice-laden wall? Could he? What about spreading his wings and catching the wind? They were built more for gliding than actual flight, but he'd carried me before. Was he going to do it again?

There were people I might have wanted to share this with, tell them what it was like if I could find the words. Unfortunately, they were all dead.

The cliff loomed, a trick of angularity making it wavelike, as if rock and stone might crest over and crush us. Japhrimel aimed us for a sharp spear digging itself into the side of the mountain, a slender black stone the wind had scoured clean, wet and glassy in the eerie snowreflected light. I shivered, though I was nowhere near cold, and his arm tightened.

That type of rock doesn't belong here.

We drew closer, step by slow step. The wind stilled for a moment, howling elsewhere while a freak of drift deadened its force around us. My nape prickled, uneasy, and I tried to glance back to see the hover. Japh drew me on, either not noticing or not caring.

Next to the sharp black stone, a deeper darkness beckoned. Is that what I think it is?

It was a slim crevice in the stone, festooned with clear sharp icicles. One of the ice-spears had broken and lay in shattered crystalline fragments on a rough-carved rock step. The aperture exhaled a low moan as the wind changed again, veering, and my ears protested at the pressure shift.

Japh kept going. The crevice looked smaller than it was, dwarfed by the massive bulk of the mountain. It was actually large enough for both of us to slide in, despite the sharp teeth. His stride didn't alter; he walked right up to the vertical mouth and maneuvered us in, one of the icedaggers touching my shoulder and crackling as the heat of the shield touched it. I flinched, but nothing else happened, and with two more steps into darkness the wind fell off as if cut by climate seals.

The blackness thickened. Japh, what are you doing? I tried to hang back, slow down, but he pulled me forward, his arm gently irresistible. Another soft caress of warmth down my skin, a flush of Power against my nerve endings, and the skin of darkness lay against my eyes like a wet bandage.

"Japhrimel-" Claustrophobia filled my throat. No. Not into the dark, it's too dark

"One more step." His aura hardened, slashing the blackness with diamond claws, and the night slid aside, crimson light spiking through its torn coat. Light struck across my adapted eyes. I flinched, and Japh steadied me as the shielding I hadn't even seen from outside snapped back out behind us, a wall of glaucous rippling black. Displaced air ruffled my hair, fingered my coat, and finally swirled away.

"Holy shit," I whispered when my eyes cleared.

"It is a sight, is it not?" Japhrimel sounded tightly amused, but the bitterness in his tone robbed it of warmth. "No mere human has seen this, and precious few demons. Welcome to the Roof of the World, my curious."

We stood on a platform of smooth, glassy red rock. The cavern was so immense even the great bloody light couldn't fill its corners or its true height. A thin arching bridge of the same glassy redness poured away from our perch, its geometry just a fraction off, and that fraction hammered into my midriff, turning my stomach over hard. It was unquestionably demon work. Three other bridges slung inward from the circuit of the cavern, and their goal and apex was a massive crag of floating rock. Its bulk hung down like a shark's fin, and as I stared, trying to figure out the physics of something so vastly unreal, it drifted a little bit. It actually moved, like a whale will move slightly in the ocean's embrace, and when it did the bridge nearest us made a low sound that threatened to turn my bones to jelly.

The air was full of heat, sudden and shocking after the frigid waste outside. But this heat wasn't human. It mouthed my exposed skin with fierce chill, and my throat closed as I tried to backpedal, my body wiser than I was. Panic rose, beating in my head with jagged-edge wings.

Japhrimel's voice was lost in the terror filling my skull. I struggled to get free of his arms, because it was hot in here, so hot it burned, and I had felt a close cousin to that heat before.

In Hell.

"Stop!"

Down to my knees, teeth clicking together painfully as I jolted, Japhrimel's hands still at my shoulders. He shook me. "Dante. Stop. You will harm yourself."

I blinked up at him. For one horrifying second his face was a stranger's, only the green eyes searing and his lips drawn back as he said more, words lost in the roaring of memory.

I remembered. Claws snicking against my ribs, cradling the living beat of my heart, a sword of fire in my vitals. And a voice, deadly soft and oh-so-amused. There are so many ways to break a human. Especially a human woman.

I screamed, but it died halfway when Japhrimel clapped his hand over my mouth, the scar on my shoulder suddenly red-hot wire, digging into vulnerable flesh. The human darkness behind the green flame of his eyes returned, drowning me, and I struggled to think, to climb out of the sucking whirlpool of fear.

"You know me," he repeated. "You know me, hedaira. Come back."

I shuddered, teeth locking together and muscles turned to bridge cables, straining against his hold. Still, there was a curious comfort. I did know him. How many times had he repeated the same thing, over and over, while I shook and sobbed with the echo of psychic rape tearing through my head? The hunt for Kellerman Lourdes had left me with nightmares and reaction-flashbacks, none as intense as this but frightening enough.

I did know him. All the way down to my bones.

I broke the surface with a convulsive movement, almost tearing free of his hands. Even now, he was so careful not to hurt me.

I bent over, fingers locked around the slim comforting length of my sword, clenching around the terrible fist in my middle, lower than any nausea I'd ever felt before.

"Anubis," I whispered, the reflex of a lifetime hard to break. My lips moved against his palm. "Anubis et'her ka. Se ta'uk'fhet sa te vapu kuraph."

The prayer died on my lips. Hot water scorched my eyes, and I looked up to find Japhrimel still there, still holding me. His coat rippled, a small sound like feathers shifting as his hand fell away.

Tears trickled hotly down both my cheeks. "I'm okay." It felt like a lie. I was getting good at lying, finally. Maybe not. Japh's silence was eloquent enough to pass for speech, and it was a relief to find I could understand, at least, this one little silence of his. It meant he didn't believe me in the politest of ways, and wasn't going to press the point.

His face was set, that human darkness very close to the surface of his glowing eyes. His mouth was a thin line, one corner slightly quirked, one of his winged eyebrows elevated too. My heart leapt, banging against my ribs and pulling the rest of my chest with it.

Gods above. I just had a panic attack and I think I'm having a cardiac arrest now.

"We should be quick." Half-apologetic, his mouth drawing down again and becoming solemn. "I would not ask it of you, but —"

"I'm all right." Toprove it, I tried to make my legs work. I failed miserably, and was suddenly very aware of a hollowness inside me. I was starving.

Fine time to get the munchies, sunshine.

Japh pulled me up, held me steady, and indicated the floating rock. It shifted again, and another bridge sang as it took the stress. The vibration passed through me, from scalp to soles, the same way a badly tuned slicboard will thrum right before it dumps you. "Up there." The pulsation stopped as he spoke. "This is a place between your world and Hell, not fully of either. Tread carefully."

How careful can I be? I've got a head full of C19 and vaston, and someone's got their finger on the detonator circuit. Problem is, I can't tell who. I don't think it matters. I contented myself with nodding, my hair falling forward into my eyes. I blew it back, irritably, and Japhrimel smiled. It was a small, strained expression, but a smile nonetheless.

"Let's get this over with." I eyed the bridges and the chunk of floating rock, my brain struggling with the sheer scale. There was nothing to compare it to, so it seemed absurdly in proportion, but my eyes would snag on the delicacy of the glass bridges and recoil in self-defense. "Are you sure it's here?"

He didn't answer, just set off for where the closest bridge met with our platform, his arm settling over my shoulders again as if it was designed to. The bridges looked absurdly frail compared to what they held — were they really supporting that chunk of stone? — but they were wide as two hoverlanes and twice as thick.

Oh dear gods, do I have to? I've never been afraid of heights, but this — there were no handrails.

The bloody glow painting the cavern flared, a wash of crimson light like a silent explosion. Japh's steps quickened, soundless. My bootheels made small dry sounds against the rock as he led me onto the bridge.

It was a steep slope, and slippery. The surface was grainy, with a slightly oily-grit feel like granite steps after a hard rain. I blinked several times, furiously, because we didn't so much walk as almost… I don't know, blink along the curve, Japhrimel's arm steady and warm over my shoulders but everything else shaking and juddering, especially when the hunk of rock would shift and one of the bridges would cry out in pained stress.

It didn't seem to take very long to reach the sharpest curve of the bridge, and from there it was a matter of seconds before Japhrimel exhaled, a sound of effort, and we stepped from the glass onto something soft.

The surface of the central rock was matted with dark dryness, crumbling off the edges as the bridges sang. Awful icy heat touched my cheeks and my knuckles, white-clenched around Fudoshin's hilt and scabbard.

Screw the wooden Knife, if Lucifer showed up we were going to see how much steel he could eat.

The bravado made me feel better until I looked up from the maroon dirt disintegrating under my boots.

It was a ruined city. Jagged broken towers pierced the red sky, a cobbled road rising from the dirt in front of us, shattered walls scattered like broken teeth, glowing sickly-pale in the bloody light. They had probably once been beautiful, luminous white stones interlocked with care and precision, but now they leered and toppled like a drunken man.

Even broken as it was, the city held an echo of something lovely. The ruins sang, each with its own slow silent voice, a chorus of sorrow. "Sekhmet sa'es." I could barely breathe the words. "What the hell is this?"

"This?" Japhrimel's tone was so bitter it scorched my own mouth. "This is the White-Walled City, where the A'nankhimel would bring their brides. I was here once, long ago. I do not think the stones have forgotten."