Butcher Bird

The picture in his mother's art history text that had captivated him as a child was the Hell panel from Hieronymus 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.

There were workshops nearby where demons supervised souls in some of the more delicate work needed for the structures: the polishing and cutting of precious stones, the stripping of huge sheets of mother-of-pearl from enormous shells, the goldleafing of delicate statuary. Outside the workshops fortunes in diamonds, rubies and sapphires were piled, along with amber boulders the size of a man.

Millions of tons of concrete sluiced into giant foundation holes from thousands of storage tanks. At the bottom of the holes, souls were directing the lines that spewed the wet concrete evenly across the floor. Souls too slow to move or too clumsy to escape slipped under the gray, oozing mess like they were drowning in quicksand, and disappeared. The skeletons of a thousand new buildings were being lifted into place by massive claws and welded together by souls linked to other machines through yet more umbilicals. The one constant Spyder could make out in all the chaos was that the demons were the supervisors, while the damned souls were the work-gang slaves. This knowledge was nailed down when Spyder looked to the far side of the site and watched demons feed the bodies of injured and unruly souls into huge presses that squeezed all the fluids from them. The liquid was drained into tanks to be used as lubricant for the construction machines.

Spyder's heart was beating fast. His brain was on overload. This was not the Hell in the books. A demon grabbed a soul sporting a mohawk, kneeless black jeans and a safety-pi

Fifty

Holy Shit

Spyder and Ashbliss skirted the edge of the construction site and entered Pandemonium by a side street in what appeared to be the butchers' quarter.

Heavy-muscled demons in stiff rubber aprons hacked, gutted and sliced mystery meats in stinking shops on a dim boulevard whose gutters ran black with blood as thick and dark as chocolate syrup. Wriggling tentacles and the snouts and bellies of giant coal-colored hogs hung on rusty meat hooks next to the egg-white entrails of horse-size beetles.

They rounded a corner and entered a wide public plaza. The place was spotlessly clean and a pleasant scent of roses filled the air. Across the boulevard was a great, domed crimson building. Below the large central dome were a cluster of smaller domed outer buildings, with spiraling white minarets at the cardinal points. The place reminded Spyder of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, though this structure was a dark and dismal parody of the ancient church-turned-mosque.

"Is that the palace?" Spyder asked.

Ashbliss pulled him quickly through the plaza. "Of course. Keep your head down. Don't speak unless you're spoken to, slave."

"Let's walk by the entrance and see if there are guards."

"There aren't. We're going to my master's home."

"I don't trust you. Five minutes isn't going to kill you."

"It will if one of Beelzebub's other attendants sees us and asks questions."

Spyder stopped in his tracks, but Ashbliss didn't notice. When he reached the end of the chain, he was jerked back and almost fell over. The demon yanked Spyder with all his weight.

"Move, slave."

"No."

"We had a deal."

"Let's walk by the palace."

"Someone will see us!"

"They will if you keep arguing with a slave."

"You selfish beast. You want to trick me!"

"No, this one usually keeps his word. Though, some women might argue the point," spoke another more familiar voice.

Spyder looked at a nearby bench, the apparent source of the voice, but no one was there. Then, by his ear he heard, "Bring hither the fatted calf, and let us eat, and be merry. The prodigal son is returned."

"My lord!" cried Ashbliss, dropping onto his belly.

"Count? How did you get down here?"

Count Non smiled and clapped Spyder on the back. "Guess," he said.

"You're on the guest list?"

"I make the guest list, little brother."

Spyder looked at Count Non and in his eyes he saw unfathomable expanses of time. A heart wounded more desperately than Spyder had ever imagined was possible. A pit of reckless and brilliant fury. Desolation and pride-these most of all. They seemed to unfold from Count Non like a pair of dark wings.

"Holy shit," Spyder said.

"That was once my name in a dead Sumerian dialect."

"You're Lucifer."

"That's my name. Don't wear it out."

Lucifer went to Ashbliss and prodded him with his boot. "Up, you rosy turd. I know what you wanted from this mortal, and you can't have it. Normally, I wouldn't care about your second-rate treacheries, but we're at war and I need my loyal generals on their feet, not buried under quicklime in the garden. Understand?"

Ashbliss got to his feet, but stared down at the black and white pavement slabs that formed a checkerboard pattern in the square. "I understand, my lord. Have mercy on me."

"Mercy? You must be thinking of someone else."

"Cut the little creep some slack," said Spyder. "He's supposed to be sneaky. He's a demon for Christ sake. Oh. Is it okay to say that down here?"

"Do you hear that?" Lucifer asked Ashbliss. "This mortal, whom you were about to betray and murder, is pleading for your life. It will be a long time before you see such grace down here again."

"Kill me? We had a deal."

"No, you had a lie," said Lucifer. "This little wretch doesn't work for Beelzebub. Do you, turd?"

"No, my lord."

"Ashbliss here is a freelance thug. Someone has paid him to dispose of one of my better commanders. Possibly our friend, Xero. Little Ashbliss was going to trick you into doing the dirty work for him and then eliminate you."

"Is that true?" Spyder asked.

Ashbliss wrung his hands.

"Fuck him," said Spyder. "Drag him back to the butchers' quarter and let them hang him up on a hook."

"I can't refuse a guest," Lucifer told the demon.

Ashbliss burst into tears. His candles flickered out, one by one.

"Hell, I'm just blowing off steam. Can't you just lock him up or something?" asked Spyder. Then to Ashbliss. "You'll tell this man everything he wants to know, won't you, asshole?"