Butcher Bird

"They're gone. Primo and the cave," said Spyder. "I can't see anything." Rocks tumbled down the mountain at them.

"We can't stay here!" shouted Lulu.

"Help me up," said Shrike. "I'm climbing."

"It's gone!" shouted Spyder. "We can't see anything."

"I don't need to see it," she said. "Can't you smell it?"

"What?"

"Flowers."

"The smell of the Inferno is like vanilla roses," said Count Non. "If you can follow that scent, we'll follow right behind you." Shrike nodded and the Count lifted her onto the rock face. Shrike climbed slowly, carefully, feeling her way up the wall, groping with her hands and feet for each purchase on the cliff.

Below, the desert floor was turning red and liquid as the sand superheated to glass where the airships' light weapons hit. Spyder pressed his forehead into the mountain. For the first time in what seemed like a long time, he stepped outside himself and looked at where his sorry ass had landed him: clinging to a murderous mountain on some imaginary island, with warrior angels above and demons below. "If you could see me now, Jenny," he whispered. "If you could see me now."

Count Non put his hand on Spyder's shoulder. Spyder looked up and saw Shrike kneeling on a ledge, gesturing for them to come up.

"You're next, little brother. Don't leave the lady waiting," Non said, giving Spyder a leg up the rock. As he climbed, Spyder heard Lulu huffing and cursing behind him. When he reached the ledge where Shrike waited, she grabbed him and pulled him inside. Spyder turned and pulled in Lulu, as Count Non came up behind her. Outside, the killing light from the airships was hitting all around the cave entrance. Dust and stones rained down on them from the ceiling. The smell of roses was sickening, cloying and overripe. Spyder was suddenly afraid. A light bolt hit just below the lip of the entrance and threw them deep inside the cave.

"We're not safe here," said Count Non. "We have to get down below."

"Back here." Shrike's voice came from deeper in the cave. "Stone doors. They're warm. And they smell like an abandoned florist."

Spyder and the others scrambled to her through the dark. At the rear of the cave, stood two massive doors, forty feet high, carved from the mountain itself.

"How do we open them?" Spyder asked.

"They feel light," said Shrike. "I think I can just pull them."

"Wait," said Count Non. "Shrike and Lulu are safe, but Spyder mustn't forget his blindfold." Non slid Lulu's blindfold from where it hung around her neck, unknotted it and stepped behind Spyder to tie it on.

"Shouldn't we put that back on Lulu?"

"Don't worry. Even the Clerks can't see through dead eyes into Hell."

"You sure?"

"My father knew the place well."

"I hope you're right. I didn't like the idea of stumbling around down there with all of us blind."

Quietly, Non said to Spyder, "We made it, little brother. The entrance to the Inferno. 'I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places.'" As the cool cloth of the blindfold slid over Spyder's eyes, something nicked his left ear. Then his arm. He heard something shoot by and strike the wall.

"Get down!" screamed Lulu.

Spyder didn't have a choice. Count Non had collapsed against his back, knocking them both to the ground. The Count was dead weight on top of Spyder. He slowly crawled out from under the Count's body. Things flew by over his head, but he made it behind a bend in the rocks. From there Spyder looked back and saw Count Non's body bristling with at least a dozen golden arrows. Bright angels were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder at the cave entrance, arrows and quivers raised.

"Get ready to open the gates," Spyder shouted to Shrike. "Now!"

He brought the Hornet up and spun the business end as fast and hard as he could. The angels' arrows flew at them, but were vaporized by the Hornet's flails. Spyder kept the weapon between the angels and them. The angels advanced steadily into the cave. Some stood over Count Non's body, and that made Spyder angry. He spun the Hornet faster as a blast of heat and the stink of rotting flowers washed over his back.

A strange light filled the cave when Shrike pulled open the gates of Hell. The walls turned a deep russet, and the light seemed to bubble, as if it were boiling to the surface of the world in sluggish waves, weighed down by the malevolent gravity of Hell below and the miles of earth it had to pass through.

The forward-most angels' skin and wings turned dark and shriveled in the Hell light. The ones that didn't cook and collapse immediately, backed quickly out of the cave. When they were gone, Spyder went to Count Non and checked his pulse. He was dead. Spyder pulled the blindfold from the Count's hand and set the Hornet gently down beside him.

"I can't use this blind. Maybe it'll do you some good wherever you are," Spyder said.