There But For The Grace (22 page)

I didn’t need anyone swooping down and asking questions. I didn’t know if Iaoel had it in her for a round two of covert charades, and getting through Sobel? Convincing him that I was just another one of the gang… that had been nerve-wracking as hell, and I didn’t know if I could do it again. I may
look
like I belonged down here thanks to the rock chained around my neck, but looking and playing the part were two
very
different things.

I kept moving. It took a bit of a hike over more of the black sand that rolled gently in small dunes before I could see what was what when it came to the Fifth. I have to say, like a lot of things I’d encountered down here, it wasn’t at all what I expected. For one, there wasn’t any fighting. Just a bunch of warrior-looking dudes hanging out around a landscape dotted with some pretty pitiful campfires.

I took a deep breath, and waded in. Moving through the seated men and women until I found a fire where they actually talked some. I figured talking was good. Maybe communication with the damned souls in this circle might be possible.

Iaoel warned me to tread lightly and reminded me that this was the circle of anger. Trying to deal directly with any of these guys could prove disastrous. With that in mind, I dropped into an empty seat at a guttering fire with five men around it. They were an interesting lot, to say the least. To my right was a big brawny dude that looked like he was straight out of the 1400s Scottish Highlands. Roughhewn kilted outfit, broadsword, and all. It was impressive, actually. Next to him, going counterclockwise around the fire, was a French soldier, like straight out of Napoleon’s army, then a British soldier out of the American Revolutionary War. Beside the Brit was what appeared to be an American Vietnam War Vet, and finally, on my left, was a gangbanger. I eyed him, and he lifted his chin at me.

“Ahhh!” the Scot made an angry noise, and kicked at the logs. “The fecken fire is going out!”

Sweet
, my opening had come a lot sooner than I thought it would. I fished out the lighter Azrael had given me, took a deep breath, and prayed it wouldn’t be so damn bright this time. “I got it,” I said quietly and got it near the wood before I flicked the dial. The flint rasped, sparks flew, and I let my breath out in a relieved woosh when it didn’t send up a flare announcing my position again, but rather licked out in a subtle blue flame, like a gas stove’s. The wood caught almost immediately and started burning with an eerie blue light, and I looked around at the guys around me.

Most of them held surprised expressions, like they were waking up, or like they’d all been mostly involved inside their own heads, and the fire had given them something to bring them out of their thoughts. They all looked around at one another and frowned, then looked at me. I smiled and waved a little.

“You with me?” I asked.

“Aye, we see you just fine lass, but what’s a wee thing like you doin’ here? A war’s no place for a woman.” I blinked,
I’m like five foot nine, how is that little!?
But the gangbanger was piping up…

“Man, fuck that! Bitch is packin’ heat that makes me
all kinds
of jealous. Where you get pieces like that, Mama?” I looked at the gangbanger and grinned.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I took a drink out of my canteen, and the men around the fire eyed it.

“It’s just water,” I said, “But you’re welcome to it.” I passed it around, and it seemed to wake them up even more. They were almost
normal
now, totally with it and aware, and
all of them
looked really unhappy to be here. They looked around us.

“Man, this sucks,” the gangbanger said. I looked at him.

“Yep,” I agreed and pulled out the map. I sighed, frustrated. Tab’s mark was getting so close to the other side of the big wall of Dis but had stalled out somewhere called ‘The Tombs.’ I stood up, looked out over the campfires, and felt my heart sink. At the base of the wall, I could see an undulating tide of what looked like hundreds of thousands of people swirling in little eddies of battle, but they mostly seemed to be going at each other, not the wall. It was the weirdest fuckin’ siege I’d ever seen. I mean, what was the point?

I dropped back into my seat and took the canteen back from the Frenchman, who held it out to me. I looked to each of the men who were around the fire.

“Here’s the deal…”

It didn’t take me a lot to do much convincing. I was kind of surprised by that. The five of them readily agreed to help me out by both telling me how it worked and by giving me their word that they would help bring others of the damned souls around to help too. They seemed affronted that they’d been duped for so long and were more than willing to channel their empty rage into something productive for a change.

What I needed was to get the giant gate open. It seemed to me that Tab still couldn’t fly. I could see other markers, flying above him at times and if Tab could take wing, he would have. So that left getting those gates opened up for him to pass through. Tab wasn’t one to waste opportunity in my experience. If those gates opened up, he’d take the path of least resistance to get past that wall. I knew this because it was what I would have done and
he trained me
.

According to MacDougal and Mo’ Money, the way it worked down here was they’d find themselves by the fire, take a rest, their anger building and mounting until all they wanted was, as Parker the Vietnam Vet put it, ‘to make the whole world fuckin’ burn’ (pardon his French). This made Jean-Pierre LaFont, who didn’t speak a lick of English, look at him funny. I’d at least gotten the Frenchman’s name out of him with my clumsy attempts at high school French—which I hadn’t even taken. I’d done German at my mother’s insistence. The only thing I could remember from my friend taking French was ‘hello, my name is…’ so we’d at least gotten that far. The rest was clumsy signing and drawing in the sand combined with what the British soldier knew of the French language which was a lot more than me.

Rackham, the Brit, was explaining, “It’s like we can’t sit still, and then we go out and rejoin the battle.”

“Yeah, except when we die, we wake up by the fire, and we go an’ do it all over again,” Mo’ Money finished.

“Okay, so we’ll need a lot of guys to make this happen. That gate and those assholes on the wall—” I pointed out what looked like Fallen armed with bows. “—are what helps keep you guys stuck in this loop.”

“Only way to get out is to take out the gate. That right, Mama?” Mo’ Money licked his lips and leaned way back. I could see the ‘what’s in it for us/what do you get out of this’ written all over his face, so I headed it off at the pass.

I raised a hand. “I have a friend stuck on the other side; it’s true. He needs to be on
this
side of things, and as for what’s in it for
you
—” He put up his hands, mouth drawing down into an expression that said ‘I didn’t say anything. That’s all you,’ but I pressed on. “—you really want to be stuck in the same loop, doing the same damn thing, over and over for all of eternity, or would you rather do something different?”

They all looked thoughtfully at one another and exchanged shrugs. “We’re already dead. This torment has gone on long enough. What d’y’ need us ta do?” MacDougal asked.

“I need you to explain it to the rest of these guys,” I said.

“How you going to get them to listen?” Parker asked.

“Same way I did you: I’m going to stoke their fires.” I held up the lighter.

“Let’s do it.” Mo’ Money clapped his hands together and rubbed them.

We started at the next fire over. I got it going better with the lighter, and Rackham stayed behind to talk to the souls around it. We went from fire to fire. Once a fire had been convinced, the man left to explain things came around and met up with our initial group of six, and we did it again. We ranged out in a concentric circle from our original fire, and I hoped that, being at the back, the fires turning from orangey-red to blue didn’t get the attention of the Fallen on the wall. I watched for any sign that they did, but they didn’t seem to notice one bit.

Tab was still stalled out in The Tombs during all of this, for which I was a little grateful. It was giving me time to get this going, and I was relieved to see, when we got these guys marching, that Tab was once again on the move.

It was a strange feeling, marching with what had to be thousands of damned souls on a full out assault on one of the gates of Hell. I couldn’t say that I wasn’t more than a little nervous. I mean shit. Luci-mort probably had the walls of Dis and the gate to it shut tight for a reason. Opening up those gates could be some seriously bad juju, but if I had a choice between Tab on this side and Tab on that side, you’d better believe I was getting those gates open come Hell or high water.

I was surprised to find the terrain on the battlefield to be what it was; which was swamp. Gross, thick, sucking mud that stank of rotting vegetation and came half way up your foot or more trying to keep you where you were. I was glad my boots laced as high as they did, because one was seriously trying to get lost in the muck. I didn’t know if the mud was harmful or not, or if Famine’s gloves were doing something to protect the rest of me, much like they had back in the Fourth. I couldn’t concentrate on that right now, but you sure bet you I was grateful I wasn’t getting stuck, and was able to still move relatively freely.

Right now I was in the thick of it between MacDougal and Mo’ Money, with Parker acting as my rear guard. We’d decided that there wasn’t an icicle’s chance in … well … Hell that we’d have a chance at this if we just went into the fray. There was too much of a chance the insanity of the damned already out in the thick of the fighting would either spread to the souls I’d woken up, or that it would be a fight for every inch to fend the mad damned off.

The solution had come from the Frenchmen, who had made a makeshift torch from one of the fires and had waved it in front of our faces. It was crazy:
crazy genius
. We’d outfitted every soul we could with a torch lit with the clarity fire from Azrael’s lighter, and the leading soldiers of our front line were just about to reach the tail end of the fighting lines. I nearly leapt and whooped with excitement when it was confirmed to be
working,
but Iaoel quashed it fast by pointing out the Fallen and Demons talking to one another and pointing.

“If we’re going to do this, we need to not waste too much time talking about it!” I cried and pointed up at the Fallen and Demonkind on the walls. They were already nocking arrows, and the sight of it sent my new army into a rage. A cry went up, the Fallen and Demons startled, and I was nearly crushed as our rear lines charged forward to be with the front lines in crashing against the walls.

Like in a mosh pit, I was carried forward, forty-fives out. I took aim where I could and tried to pick off the asshats on top of the wall before they could take out too many of the damned souls below. The damned that had firearms were joining me, and while their weapons didn’t do much but slow the wall guard down, mine actually successfully picked a couple off.

MacDougal, Mo’ Money, and Parker kept me in one piece when the odd damned who didn’t see a torch or get an explanation tried to get to me. Pretty soon, MacDougal sent up the bellowing call.

“Batter ram!”

We’d stolen a timber from the old, giant wooden pier on this side of the river, which I was grateful for. If it’d been stone, like on the Fourth’s side, I didn’t know what we would have used to beat the gates down. There wasn’t a whole lot of anything useful other than the weapons some had died with or were able to carry. Unfortunately, according to a couple of World War II vets, just because they’d died in a tank or bomber, didn’t mean the heavy machinery carried over. It just reinforced mine and Iaoel’s idea that crashing the gates, while a bad idea, was a really, really,
good idea
for Team Tab.

Hopefully it would do two things for us: one, it would provide Tab an exit, and two, it would cause such a giant clusterfuck for Team Luci-mort that they wouldn’t have time to properly chase us. I got the impression Iaoel was a bit annoyed or felt bad about that last point, and I wanted to ask her if she was serious but I had more important shit to deal with. Shit like the fact that I had no idea where the extraction point was going to be or how far we were going to have to run to get out.

Knowing my luck, there wouldn’t
be
anyone coming in for extraction, and I’d have to figure out how to get our asses out the same way I’d come in. Back to Purgatory and out the front gate itself. That would complicate the fuck out of things, but wouldn’t be impossible. That was if I could even get to Tab, which… no. There were no ‘if’s’ about that. I just had to have faith, which was in really, really short supply down here.

Mo’ Money pulled me aside, and the damned trotted by, hoisting the battering ram between the two lines of souls. I was surprised to see just as many women as men here in the Fifth, but it didn’t surprise me one bit that a lot of the women were wives or police or the like when they’d been alive.

“Everybody
heave!”
the cry went out, and the beam went back, but when it rushed forward, the gate
moved,
opening slightly right before the battering ram crashed into it.

“Yes!” I screamed, “Again! Again! MacDougal, Parker, watch my ass!” I checked the map. Tab’s mark was right in front of me at the gate. I shoved the map securely into my messenger bag and doubled down with my grim determination. I took aim and picked off Fallen and Demons off the wall, covering the battering ram operation as best I could.

“I need to be closer to the gate!” I shouted, and my three generals, for lack of a better word, made the push though the souls with me to get closer. I concentrated super hard on taking out anything that looked Fallen or like a Demon with any real critical thinking skills. The map provided a detailed look at the gates themselves, and Tab’s mark had been midway up the wall. I looked, and from the ground, I could see windows on either side of the gates in these round almost-towers set to either side of the doors.