Devil Ash Deceit (Devil Ash Saga) (4 page)

Ash winced at the mention of his former species. Goddard’s remark seemed personally aimed at him, but he could say nothing. The man was technically his boss, after all. Humans were just weaker than devils, and for that reason many devils looked down on the Earth-dwellers.

The team followed Goddard out of their meeting room and down the hall to the staircase. They descended past the ground level and continued until the stairs ended. Much to Ash’s dismay they found themselves near the Royal Guard’s barracks. The boy breathed a sigh of relief as they passed by without a Stryd encounter. They kept moving to the end of the hall and through a door that Ash had not seen yet.

The door led to a cramped circular stone stairwell, which the group moved quickly through and emerged into a narrow chamber with a large iron door and a single guard.

“Mr. von Gosick, sir! Lady Shiva! I certainly weren’t expectin’ no one, ‘specially you two, to come by this way ever!” The guard tensed up upon seeing his unexpected guests, as most of the Royal Guard would have in their presence.

“My associates here will be cleaning the prison ventilation system,” Goddard explained. “Please be aware of their presence down below and allow them in and out as they clean.”

“Yessir!” With an all-too-eager-to-please jolt of enthusiasm, the guard unbolted the enormous lock on the iron door and swung it open for them.

“I’ll give them a tour of the prison first. I’ll knock twice when we’re ready to come out.” The guard nodded his head in acknowledgment as he opened the door, allowing the team to pass through the prison entrance. Immediately Ash could see they were at the top of a large spiraling slope. The hall was large enough that all four of them could walk side by side and not touch the walls. As they began walking downward Goddard commenced his history speech.

“This wasn’t always a prison, you know,” he said. “When God first sent the devils to Hell our numbers were few and the threat of demons was at its greatest. We had no protection. The first generation of devils had no choice but to burrow underground for safety. This prison was at one time the cradle of devil civilization. It was from these humble beginnings that they were able to build their castle and then expand to aboveground dwellings. Most of the credit is owed to the first-ever Royal Satan Family, who paved the way for all of Devilkind.”

As they walked past the many branching hallways that housed the various prison cells, the team took notice of the prisoners inside. Ash tried not to look at them directly as he didn’t know how to act in the presence of condemned criminals. He felt sympathy for them being kept in such terrible conditions, but became conflicted knowing that most of them probably deserved their punishment.

As the group descended the sloping hall and curved around the bend, Ash finally noticed the air ducts above them. He saw a round pipe large enough for a child to stand inside wrapping around the slope with them. Every time they passed a branching hall with prisoner cells the pipe branched off with it. The boy wasn’t sure how far down this spiral hall went or how long the branching halls were, but it was evident there would be a lot of ducts to clean.

“The prisoners down here are all in for long-term sentences,” Goddard continued his history lesson. “They are arranged so that the lightest offenders are placed at the top, and the worst offenders are placed towards the bottom. Those are the prisoners that at one time posed a serious enough threat to the public that they have to be contained as thoroughly as possible. You see, the prisoners at the bottom are mostly all skilled warriors adept at using their soul power, meaning the soul seals on them need to be constantly renewed to keep them in check. It’d be best to stay away from them, and under no circumstances should you enter the bottom level of the prison.”

Goddard paused and directed their attention towards the air ducts. “As you can see, the air ducts have hatches before every branching hall. One of you can stay down here to collect the dust and shuttle it out, while the other two go up into the ducts and shovel all the dust toward those hatches. I’ll let you decide who gets to be the
lucky
ones who get to crawl through the ducts.”

“Thanks, but that won’t be necessary,” Shiva said. “These two will be going into the ducts,” she decided immediately and without consultation. The boys expected as much. Aura was beginning to have second thoughts about this job as he stared at the grimy tunnel of air ducts. If they looked that disgusting from the outside, he didn’t want to imagine the inside.

The group walked back up to the prison entrance where the guard was positioned. Goddard rapped twice on the iron door, and very slowly it creaked open. They exited the prison and Goddard showed them the small storage closet nearby. There they found a ladder for reaching the hatches, as well as a few small brooms. As Goddard explained once more how they should work, Ash began to wonder if the process couldn’t be simplified somehow.

“How about instead of sweeping all the dust out of the ducts and carrying it outside, we just burn it right there inside the air duct?” His idea seemed much easier to himself and Aura, but Goddard quickly shot that plan down.

“That would work if you didn’t care about the well-being of the inmates,” Goddard said. “If you were to start a fire inside the ducts, it would spread rapidly throughout the ventilation system since they’re full of highly combustible dust. The resulting blaze would rapidly raise the temperature down here. It wouldn’t take long for the entire prison to turn into a blazing inferno.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that…” Ash admitted.

“That’s not even all of it,” Goddard continued. “What else does fire do? It uses oxygen. Creating such a blaze would suck all the oxygen out of this place. So now you have burning, suffocating prisoners. Not a pleasant scene, is it?”

“Not really…”

“And lets not forget that if you were up in the air ducts starting the fire, it would immediately consume you as well.”

“I get it!” said Ash. “I
won’t
start a fire down here.”

After pulling the ladder out of the storage closet, Goddard set it next to the wall by the prison door. He climbed the ladder and pulled on a stone in the wall. There was no clear indicator of a panel, but the section of the wall opened into a hidden hatchway leading to the air ducts. Goddard got down off the ladder and turned to his team. “Ready, boys?”

Aura removed his jacket and followed Ash up the ladder and into the hatch. Shiva carried the ladder down to the first hatch in the duct system and waited for the boys to catch up. It was not an easy task for them; the air ducts were nearly filled to the top by several centuries’ worth of collected dust and grime. Goddard was not kidding around when he said the job hadn’t been attended to in a very long time.

The boys had to crawl on their hands and knees since they were too tall to stand in the ducts. Ash pushed forward through the dirt with his broom, for how long he was not sure, until he found the hatch and saw Shiva gazing up at him with a satisfied smirk. He impatiently struggled to open the sticky hatch door and dropped to the ground outside. Aura was right behind him.

The boys landed on the cold stone floor and immediately began coughing, brushing the grime out of their hair and off their clothes. Having lived on a farm, Ash had helped his mom with all sorts of gross jobs, but never before had he encountered such nasty conditions. When their coughing fits were over, Shiva addressed them with her own particular dry sense of humor.

“How was it?” she asked with a smile.

“
Horrible
,” Aura replied.

“We need facemasks,” Ash said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Shiva replied with no sense of urgency. “Now get back up there and start sweeping.”

The boys begrudgingly reentered the ducts, this time to crawl down the adjacent halls and sweep the dust back towards the hatch where Shiva waited. The filth fell to the floor and Shiva swept it up into a neat pile, then shoveled it onto a wheelbarrow she found in the supply closet. She would then take the cart upstairs several floors, which was no easy task either, to be burned outside the castle.

It was miserable work for everyone involved, and even Aura began to long for their usual training regime. After five hours of sweeping and shoveling and hauling dust, the team decided to break for lunch. They ventured back upstairs to the castle’s cafeteria, a buffet-style lunchroom where the boys were accustomed to eating for free. Shiva rarely ate with them, but because of how exhausted she was today she decided to join her subordinates.

The three of them were terribly dirty. Ash and Aura, covered in dirt and dust, their clothes ruined and in desperate need of a washing. Shiva was cleaner than the boys, but soaked in sweat and dead tired from lugging the wheelbarrow up and down the stairs all morning. There was not much conversation while they ate, and although Ash was plenty hungry he could not stomach much food. His injuries, along with the dirty, miserable conditions he’d been exposed to ensured the rest of his day would likely suck.

Their relaxing break was abruptly ended by Shiva, anxious to get their dreadful assignment over with. With their heads held low the team returned to the prison basement. The same guard was still on duty there and welcomed them back.

“I forgot to mention it earlier,” said the guard, “but if’n ya see any rats in there, wouldja mind collectin’ them fer me?” The guard handed the boys a burlap sack to store the tiny demons in. “The inmates ain’t allowed to have any
snacks,
” he added.

With that ghastly piece of information in mind, the boys went back to sweeping inside the air ducts. It didn’t take Ash long to run into his first rat nest. Demon rats looked a lot like Earth rats, but much uglier. Their eyes were twice as large and bulgy like a Chihuahua’s and they had a tall spiky spine running down the length of their backs. Ash squealed like a surprised girl when the first rat climbed out of the dust, hissing a warning not to come near its nest.

“Sorry little fella,” Ash said. “This is for your own good.” The boy snatched up clumps of squealing babies and shoved them into the sack. When all that remained was the hissing mother, Ash attempted to grab it too. The demon finally retreated, forcing the boy to crawl after it. The rat made it to a grate directly above one of the cells occupied by a prisoner and fell through the slotted bars. Ash watched as the little demon fell to the floor before an inmate.

It took only a second for the inmate to notice the creature. To Ash’s surprise, the criminal lunged forward and pressed his body down on the rat. When he sat back up, the poor man held the squealing rat in his hands. Without stopping to even think about it, the prisoner shoved the rat into his mouth headfirst and bit down. After a couple seconds, the rat was all gone and the inmate was licking his fingers clean. Ash had to crawl away before he ended up puking on the poor man.

The team worked tirelessly the entire day until they reached the end of the air ducts at the bottom of the prison. The boys climbed down from the hatch and relaxed as they waited for Shiva to return from dumping the last load. Ash’s white robe was now solid black and stunk to high Heaven. He and Aura both looked like they’d been working in a coal mine all day. After several minutes of catching their breath, the boys began to explore the final level of the prison.

“What do you suppose is down here?” Aura asked. They took a moment to examine their surroundings, discovering that the air ducts actually ended before the hall. They’d reached the bottom of the spiral slope. There were no more branching hallways or prison cells to be found. The bottom room offered only two choices of paths, leading to two different doorways. This section of the prison was less finished, and when the stone-paved floor ended the path became one solid chunk of rock.

“Well, we’re in a prison, so maybe some high-profile prisoners?” Ash said.

“Do you really think Goddard would tell us to stay away from some prisoners that he assured us could never escape? I think it’s something else.”

“Like what?”

“That I don’t know. Maybe it’s a weapon. Or some greater demons.”

“Why would they keep greater demons alive down here?”

The boys could hear Shiva walking down the spiral slope towards them. As interesting as the prison speculation was, Ash was anxious to get out. Being a mile underground was beginning to bring him down, figuratively speaking. “We can discuss this another time,” he whispered as Shiva approached.

“What are you slackers still doing down here? I got a note from Goddard,” Shiva informed them. She held up the scrap of paper for the boys to see.

“
Meet tomorrow at regular time for advanced flame training with Yazma Bethilda
,” Ash read aloud. “Always straight to the point with his notes…”

“About time!” Aura said in his most cheerful tone of the day. The lustful boy had been patiently awaiting his next encounter with the lovely flame instructor, as well.

More flame training with Yazma?
Ash thought.
This could actually be fun.

As the team began their ascension out of the spiral prison, Ash cast one last look back toward the ominous doors. Something was down there; something that Goddard did not want them to know about. A part of him couldn’t help but wonder if whatever was behind those doors could help him get back to Earth.