Even Hell Has Knights (Hellsong) (24 page)

What if they’re attacked?

He was struck suddenly by a fear of them dying. Of a dyitzu crawling after him down the corridor. Of its clawed hands grabbing at his feet. Of its mouth tearing at his Achilles tendon.

Could I point the gun back in time?

Arturus tried to figure out how he could fire behind himself. Perhaps he could get his arm back from out in front of him, and then shoot along his leg down the corridor. He tried to wiggle his arm towards his hip, but his elbow kept running into the stone. Finally, he pinned his elbow against the corner and squeezed his arm beneath his body.

He issued a sigh of relief. It was possible. He tried to look behind himself, but bumped his head against the rock.

I won’t be able to aim.

He was sweating badly, he realized, and his breathing was heavy. He tried to move forward, but with his arm now caught against the stone, he couldn’t budge. He tried to move back. No luck.

I’m stuck.

His heart beat faster. He could feel his blood pounding in his ears. He could smell his own warm breath as he was forced to breathe it in again.

Help me.

He thought about shouting. About how long it might take for them to try and excavate him out of so much stone. Would his air last long enough?

This reminded him suddenly of his wrestling sessions with Galen. His arm was trapped, and he was stuck in a tight place under immense pressure.

“Stay calm,” Galen would assure him. “Assess the damage you are taking. Find a plan. Seize any opportunity. Little advantages can turn into big ones if you fight hard enough.”

My arm.

He flattened his hand and moved it back up along his body, propping his elbow in the same corner he had used before. When his hand was in front of his face, he was able to corkscrew his arm forward again.

He could breathe.

He could move.

I can do this. Julian needs me.

He crawled farther forward. Ahead the tunnel got dimmer, but using a torch would be useless, he realized. First of all, he’d have to crawl all the way out just to get the torch in front of himself. Secondly, even if he did all that, the torch would burn up all of his air in a hurry should he run into a dead end.

Just a few feet in front of him, hardly visible in the faint light, was a bend. The crawlway took a ninety degree turn to the right. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt the stone with his fingers.

He remembered a way that Galen had taught him to turn around at such a bend.

It won’t work here. Not enough room.

He took the turn slowly, having to wriggle his body to squeeze through. The stone was cooler here, and he couldn’t see at all. His gun hit a wall.

“Oh thank God,” he muttered.

The passageway dead ended. He inspected the dead end carefully to make sure that this wasn’t a false wall.

If it was, he figured, it was a damn impressive one.

And now I have to go back.

Arturus emerged, feet first, hot and sweaty, his hands shaking from spent adrenaline, his chest heaving, out of the crawlway.

“You alright?” Johnny Huang asked, lifting Arturus to his feet.

Arturus nodded, his vision swimming.

“Dead end,” he reported between breaths.

Fitch looked down it, and shook his head. “Man, imagine if you were running from the devils and tried to hide down that passage. You’d dead end, and they’d tear you to pieces.”

Duncan and Johnny nodded.

“Simon died that way,” Duncan reported. “His body and face were fine, but they’d torn all the flesh off his legs.”

There were more passages. Many more. Most were not as small, but a few were. In the larger tunnels, one of the hunters would travel along with him. It usually ended up being Johnny. Arturus didn’t mind this. He actually preferred the man’s company.

Finding the tunnels was a difficult task in and of itself, and Arturus found himself wondering how many passages they were missing between the ones that they found.

No one said this was going to be easy.

“Hey.” Duncan’s voice was a harsh whisper.

As careless as the footfalls of the hunters could be, they knew how to keep quiet after a warning.

Duncan’s figure was a dull red, lit only by the light from another tunnel. The hunter’s dim hand beckoned them forward. Beyond Duncan there was only blackness. Arturus feared that he might be standing on the edge of a cliff.

Duncan stepped forward into the dark, fading away into the blackness. Fitch followed him, unslinging his rifle.

“Torch please.” Duncan’s voice came from the emptiness beyond.

Fitch complied, kneeling at the edge of the light, and pulled out a woodstone torch. It had a thin wrapping of cloth along the top, marking it as one of Copperfield’s.

Fitch’s lighter had long since run out of butane, so it took him a
while to get a spark to catch.

The torch caught fire in a rush, and the black room beyond was suddenly alight.

“There,” Duncan said, “on the wall.”

The wall itself was made of Hellstone, so Arturus was unsure as to why the chamber was so dark. Usually light flowed through hellstone rather well, but this oddity was not what had captured Duncan’s attention. Deep grooves had been cut into the stone at almost head height.

“Is that hound sign?” asked Johnny Huang.

The four of them gathered around the grooves.

“Can’t be, too tall.” Duncan said.

“No, it is.” Fitch said. “It’s just a really big fucking hound.”

Duncan shook his head. “Impossible. It would be
huge
. It would have left deeper marks.”

“It did,” Arturus said, touching the stone. “Look at the spurs in the grain here, you can see where the stone is healing over. This sign is very old. Maybe ten or eleven years.”

Johnny nodded. “Boy’s no fool.”

Arturus smiled.

“The Infidel Friend said he was bit by one that big,” Duncan said. “I didn’t believe him though.”

They followed the grooves along the wall, none of them willing to stray too far from the light.

“I’ll hold the torch in the middle,” Fitch said, stepping into the center of the room. “That way you can spread out.”

They found hound sign along the walls.

“It could be Beast,” Fitch said.

“Who’s that?” Arturus asked.

“We used to see him around Harpsborough when Mike was still Lead Hunter. Biggest hound you’ve ever seen. Klein said it followed the founders here. Mike says he shot it about three times. They thought they killed it once, but no one was sure. No one’s seen him since. Well, no one I believe at any rate. Martin says he sees him every couple of months.”

These are very old
.

Arturus traced the marks with his fingers. He could feel the small spurs of stone shooting up from the wounds. Hounds’ teeth never stopped growing, so they would grind them down against stone. After months of doing this they would create these grooves. The younger ones preferred woodstone.

“These could be his, then,” Arturus said.

“Maybe he came back,” Duncan wondered aloud. “Maybe he got Julian.”

“If so, we should see his blood,” Fitch was saying.

Arturus looked down one of the hallways.

This is it.

Hounds would dig out sleeping holes for themselves in woodstone. You could always find their chamber because they wouldn’t mark the walls leading up to it.

But there’s no woodstone here.

The passage also dead ended.

“Bring the torch,” Arturus called.

Fitch walked over his way.

Towards the back was a burrow, cut straight into the hellstone.

“Damn,” Duncan said as he walked up behind them, “that was one tough hound. A burrow in rock? Good eye, boy.”

The heat from the torch was uncomfortably close to Arturus’ face. He moved in to inspect the burrow. Its edges had healed in quite a bit, making the burrow smaller now than it must have once been. There was a blanket there, and four backpacks. He opened one, and found it to be full of devilwheat.

Fitch whistled. “Well, he
was
here. Any blood?”

Arturus shook his head. “It looks like he slept here sometimes. Maybe to get away from the village.”

“He may have had more than one place like this,” Fitch said. “We’ll keep our eyes sharp. He’s more likely to be around one of these hideaways.”

Ellen uncrossed her legs and sat like a man. She leaned forward and let her arms fall by her crotch. She looked across the table to where the discarded mold of Arturus’ knight lay.

“How can you stand this?” she asked Rick.

Rick shrugged, and looked up from his whittling work. “I whittle.”

“What are you making?”

“A type of flute.”

“Why?”

“To give you something to do while you wait and worry.”

“I’ve never been much good at musical instruments. You may regret it.”

Rick laughed and lay his knife down amidst the excess woodstone. “I might. But I’m sure if you practice long enough you will get very good at it.”

“Isn’t it dangerous, though, making so much noise?”

“Yes, it is indeed. You shouldn’t practice unless you are here.”

“When I’m good, I’m going to learn to play the saddest song.”

Rick nodded.

She looked at his serious face, which was frowning. “And when I play it, you’re going to look exactly like you do now.”

“It’s something, isn’t it,” Rick said. “To be able to express your emotions. I always have this feeling, right here.” He pointed to his stomach. “A tightness. I’m used to worrying for Galen. He’s gone often. But now I feel for Turi, too. I think I would like to play a song as well. Maybe feeling it will get it out of my damn belly.”

“Do you play?”

“Yeah. I was a music teacher, in the old world. I taught band.”

“I bet you were wonderful at it.”

“I was a monster!”

“No!”

“I was indeed. I would work those kids so hard. I thought that was the way to teach them, you know.”

“You don’t seem that way at all now.”

He picked up the unfinished flute and pointed it at her. “I haven’t started to teach you yet. Just you wait.”

Ellen giggled. “You’ll be nice. I know.”

“You’re right, I teach differently now.”

“You’ve taught people in Hell?”

“Turi.”

“Why do you teach differently?”

“Galen. Galen changes the way you do lots of things. He asked me to teach Turi an instrument, because he thinks that’s very important. I was teaching Turi how I always had. Showed him how to read music, chastised him for even the slightest errors. He became an excellent machine.”

“And then?”

“Well, I was teaching him to play music in the same way that Galen was teaching him to wrestle and to hunt. Turi was getting very stressed. Galen suggested I change how I taught him. I told him that I knew what I was doing, thank you very much, and that if he wanted Turi to learn how to play anything worth a damn, this was the way to do it. Then I went too far.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Then I told him he could teach Turi to play his damn self.”

Ellen leaned forward over the table. “What did Galen do?”

“He took over Turi’s lessons. He asked Turi to write him a song.”

“That’s it?”

“I was horribly embarrassed. Turi had no ability to write anything at all. He could play the music I had written down for him as well as a record. He knew chord progressions and enough theory to make him a prodigy in the old world, but he couldn’t write a damn thing. I told Galen that was something that couldn’t be taught.

“I feel bad about that sometimes. Not just for Turi, but for all the children I ever taught. For every child that was ever taught that way. I wonder why we figured it was right method? Maybe it came from military training, or something. Passed down from some weird totalitarian past.

“Anyway, Galen agreed to take over the lessons. He just told Arturus to go to his room and write him a song. Turi would do this for the entire time that he would have normally practiced. He had all this emotion, all this passion pent up from Galen’s teachings, the boy was just dying to release it. That’s when I learned that Turi was an artist. I was destroying that in him. I’d destroyed that in so many people. From that moment on, Turi wanted to play. He learned little tricks, and some bad habits too, mind you, but little things I had never taught him. And they were his. All this time, I’d been teaching music, without having the first God damned clue of what music was about.”

“So can Turi still play?”

“Of course. And make sure that’s a lesson to you. Never challenge Galen.”