Surface Detail

Veppers looked at his antique watch again, then at Jasken, who nodded briefly. Veppers stood. “Well; things to do, time to go,” he announced. “Madam,” he said, nodding at the ambassador. “Fascinating to meet you,” he said to Demeisen. He looked at Lededje. “I wish you… peace, young lady.” He smiled broadly.“At any rate; a pleasure.”

He and Jasken, who nodded a trio of his own goodbyes, made their way to towards the doors. The drone Olfes-Hresh floated nearby, having reappeared earlier without anybody noticing. “Thing,” Veppers said to it as he passed.

The two men passed beyond the doors.

Moments later sudden bursts of light stuttered in the evening sky beyond the city. The wall screen flickered, hazed, then went to stand-by.

“Hmm,” Demeisen said. “His own estate.” He looked at Huen. “Surprise to you too?”

“Profoundly,” she said.

Demeisen glanced at Lededje. He flicked her nearest knee with one finger. “Snap out of it, babe. It’s not about your little revenge trip; we’re getting Hells destroyed. For free! Not even on our conscience! Seriously: who do you really think matters most, here? You, or a trillion people suffering? Fucking get grown-up about it, won’t you? Your man Veppers skipping off with a jaunty smile on his admittedly eminently punchable face is a small price to pay.”

A roar from overhead announced Veppers’ flier departing. Demeisen looked round at Lededje.

“You lying, inconstant, philandering fuck,” she told him.

The avatar shook his head, looked at the ambassador. “Kids, eh?”

Twenty-eight

She was in her sleeping pod, the aching fruit within its dark enfolding confinement, when whatever happened, happened.

She had been slowly stretching herself, extending one wing and then the other – creakingly, with much joint-grumbling and tendon-grating and what felt like even the leathery fabric of her wings protesting – then rotating her neck as best she could, against what felt like the gravel filling her vertebrae, then flexing first one leg and then the other, hanging by a single clawed talon each time.

Then, without warning, there was a sort of shiver in the air, as though the shock wave of a great explosion far away had just passed by.

The pod around her started to shake. Then it froze, somehow, as though the blow that had struck it had been cancelled from reality rather than allowed to ring on through the fabric of her great dark roost.

She knew immediately there was something odd and unprecedented about it, something that hinted at outside, at an existential change to her surroundings, maybe even to the Hell itself. She thought of the glitch, the silver mirror-barrier, the patch where the landscape had been deleted, smoothed over.

She had lost count of how many thousands she had dispatched since she had been brought back here. She had meant to keep count, but had baulked at scratching a mark for each death on the interior surface of her roost – she had considered this – because it just seemed so cold. She’d attempted to keep count in her head, but then lost it a few times, and then for a long time had thought that it didn’t matter. The last figure she remembered was three thousand eight hundred and eighty-five, but that had been a long time ago. She had probably killed at least that number again since.

The pain grew each time, after each killing, each release, every day. She existed in a sort of continual haze of aching limbs and over-sensitive skin and grinding sinew and ever-cramping internal organs. She liked to think that she ignored it, but she couldn’t really. It was there all the time, from when she woke to when she fell, moaning, grumbling, asleep. It was there in her dreams, too. She dreamed of bits of her body falling off or developing their own lives, tearing themselves off her and flying or falling or walking or slithering away, leaving her screaming, bereft, bleeding and raw.

Every day it was a struggle to let go of the upside-down perch, quit her roost pod and scour the blackened, pox-addled lands beneath for a fresh soul to release. She was getting later and later, these days.

Once she had flown for the joy of it; because flight was still flight, even in Hell, and felt like freedom for somebody who had grown up a devoutly ground-dwelling quadruped. Providing one got over one’s fear of heights, of course, which somehow – since the long-ago days when she’d grown old within a convent perched on a rock – she had.

Once she had loved to go exploring, fascinated to find the parts of Hell she hadn’t discovered before. She was almost invariably horrified by what she found, no matter where she looked, but she was fascinated nevertheless. Just the geography, then the logistics, then the hatefully sadistic inventiveness of it all was enough to captivate the inquiring mind, and she had made full use of her ability to fly over the ground that lesser unfortunates had to crawl, limp, stagger and fight over.