Blind Shrike

"You come back safe or I'll find your ghost down here and kick your dumb, dead ass," Lulu said.

"Take care of Shrike while I'm gone," Spyder said.

"You got it."

Spyder went back to Ashbliss and held out the demon's candle to him. Sullenly, Ashbliss took it, and with a great deal of groaning and swearing, poured wax on the stump and stuck the candle back in place. The little flame popped back to life.

"I really am going to keep our bargain," Spyder said.

"You had better. Now, get down and roll in the dirt like the pig you are."

"What?"

"You'll need a disguise to get into Pandemonium. You're going as my slave. Get down and dirty yourself, meat."

Reluctantly, Spyder did as he was told. When he'd rolled in as much filth as he thought necessary, Ashbliss took pains to inspect him, slapping more dirt onto Spyder's face and especially his ass, "To give you an authentic sex slave patina," he said.

"We done?" Spyder asked.

"Nearly. Get on your knees."

"Don't get carried away with the sex slave fantasies."

"I need to chain your neck."

"Where're you going to get a chain out here?"

"Right here," said Ashbliss. He squatted down and his face turned a deeper shade of red as he strained. A second later, a shockingly long length of silver chain slid from out of his round, pink ass.

"No goddam way."

Ashbliss smiled. "If you want to call off our deal…"

"Put it on," Spyder said, lowering his head.

As he and the demon started toward the city, Spyder heard Lulu singing Aretha Franklin's `Chain of Fools.'

Forty Nine

The Garden of Earthly Delights

"So, are you any particular kind of demon?" asked Spyder.

"Why do you care?"

"Just making conversation. You're a horny little bastard. I thought maybe you were some kind of incubus or succubus or something."

"Lust is just my hobby. I'm simply a demon."

"Before you fell, were you any special kind of angel? Seraphim, cherubim, throne, archangel?"

Spyder and Ashbliss were stepping over the remains of demons and damned souls as they crossed the carnage-strewn alkali plain. The place stank, a combination of rotting flowers and scorched engine oil. Ashbliss was leading Spyder by the chain wrapped around his neck.

"I was simply an angel," said Ashbliss.

Spyder made a wounded sound. "Wow, that's sort of bottom of the barrel, isn't it? What are there, like nine ranks of angels? And you're all the way down in the basement. Kind of the janitor of the universe."

"We had to keep watch over the Earth. That's how I learned what beasts you talking meat really are."

"Is that how you ended up like this?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your demon form. Looks like you were dragged behind the ugly truck over rocky roads all the way down from Heaven. They wouldn't have pulled that on one of the heavy angel ranks, a seraphim or a throne, would they?"

"I like my form."

"Course. I mean, you'd have to. Not having any choice and all."

"Hush," said Ashbliss, and yanked the chain hard.

They came to a rough highway that curved gently into the distance toward the city. Along both sides of the road were hundreds of crucifixes, stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. Men and women, their skins stripped off, were secured to the crosses with nails through their wrists and wire around their chests. Their legs, which were free, high-kicked in unison, like some zombie movie chorus line. As he got closer, Spyder could see umbilicals ru

"You opening a theme park or something?"

"You looking for a job for eternity?"

"Seriously, what's with all the urban renewal? Why'd you fill in the razor pits back there? And what the hell are you building over there?"

Spyder pointed to a what looked like a boarded-up mine entrance in the distance, but it was not like any Earthly mine. This entrance went up for miles, and the planks covering it could each have represented a whole forest-worth of trees. The metal beams that buttressed the planks could each have been melted down and provided enough steel for a battle ship.

"That's always been like that, even before we were here. They didn't bother finishing Hell before they cast us down here. It's very rude, I think," said Ashbliss. "As for the razor pits, they were fun, but never necessary. We had to clear the land for the project."

"Which project would that be?"

"The only project. The only one Lucifer and the other master demons care about, at least."

"And that is…?"

"Heaven," said Ashbliss. "We're building Heaven."

"Interesting. I kind of thought there already was a Heaven. And they kicked your sorry asses out."

"That's God's Heaven. This one is for us."

"I get it. God looks down and sees your new and improved Heaven and slaps his forehead, realizing you fallen angels were right all along. Then, bang!, you win the argument."

"You're not as stupid as most of your kind. But you make up for it by talking to much."

"Is that what that city is, beyond Pandemonium? Part of the new Heaven? Is that what Hell really is, one big hardhat zone?"

"You tell me," Ashbliss said. "Behold."

When he was still a child, Spyder had found a book of his mother's. It was an art history text, left over from her brief attempt at community college. She'd lasted less than a semester and bad-mouthed the curriculum, the teachers and the other students non-stop whenever the subject came up. But even as a child it puzzled Spyder why she'd kept her school books if they brought back such painful memories. It wasn't until years later that he realized that it was probably his father's nagging that had propelled his mother out of school. Spyder's father considered all forms of self-improvement, short of studying i

The picture in his mother's art history text that had captivated him as a child was the Hell panel from Hieronymous Bosch's triptych, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." It wasn't the clever and artful ways the demons tortured the damned souls that had fascinated Spyder. He'd studied the top, the far background of the painting, where none of the sexy tortures were happening. That section of the painting depicted a ruined, burned-out city, or a city that had been built along very different aesthetic lines from a human city. The buildings and the sky above were black, as if grimed under a permanent layer of soot. Shafts of lemon-colored light shone from the windows of each building and sliced through the smoky darkness, which only added to the feeling that this was ground zero for some unknown holocaust.

All those memories and images came back to Spyder as Ashbliss led him down the chorus line road and into the enormous construction site for Heaven 2.0.

The scale of the project was so vast, Spyder's mind couldn't take it all in. Looking at the place was like being in a car accident-it came to him as a series of still images flashing into his brain, but the whole of it was beyond his comprehension. In the far distance entire mountain ranges were being blasted away or gobbled up by machines whose steel jaws were almost as large as the tops of the mountains themselves. A white sea of activity surged around the giant machines and Spyder realized that this ebbing and flowing tide was made up of millions of souls moving the ore mined by the machines to the horrible open-pit foundry nearby. Flames, miles high, rose from the foundry and molten steel flowed into molds down dozens of chutes, each as wide and as deep as the biggest river Spyder had ever seen.