Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

took samples of blood, hair, and nails from him and then were gone.
As I was drifting off into another round of painful dreams of what might have been, Ryerson casually strolled into the cell like he was stopping by for a friendly visit. He smiled warmly and stroked my cheek with the rough tip of his finger as he knelt down beside me. “I want you to know how sorry we are about the loss of your cop friend. I assure you that what happened was an accident. We did not want to see him come to harm.”
“Spare me,” I spat, suddenly enraged that this foul and loathsome creature would dare to mention Shaw to me. “The only reason why you’re sorry is because he was a cop and you didn’t want the entire Atlanta force breathing down your neck before you’ve committed your murders and hidden the evidence.”
Ryerson smiled at me like I was a lovely breed of talking dog that also proved to be semi-intelligent. “Look how smart you are!” he laughed. “I won’t trouble you for very long. I’ve come to make some last minute preparations before your big night.”
He reached into the inner pocket of the suit jacket he wore and withdrew a black opal on a delicate gold chain. It dangled from his fingers, catching the faded light and flashing brilliant colors that twisted and writhed grotesquely within its depths. I cringed in horror, knowing that the foul thing would go around my neck and there was nothing I could do about it. Ryerson slipped the oily stone beneath my shirt and gave my chest a gratuitous pat before he sat back on his heels to give me a greedy smile.
My skin tingled and then burned in small bites where the stone rested in my cleavage and I gagged with pain and revulsion. I wanted to rip my hands free of the rope and claw the thing off of my neck to fling it as far away from me as possible. But the ropes held me fast and shredded my skin raw as I fought to get free, adding physical pain to the agony that already filled my psyche. Defeated, I lay back helplessly and wept, fighting the nausea that burned in my belly.
Ryerson gave one last cruel chuckle. “It will all be over in a couple of hours and then you can rest.”
He whistled a merry tune when he walked away and disappeared, leaving me to weep helplessly and rage at the cruelty of the universe.
“Why don’t you fight?” Alejandro demanded when they came for us. He had managed to claw his way back to reality and came to crying out Shaw’s name and begging for forgiveness. “What is wrong with you?”
I didn’t answer him. I had nothing to say. The cult members were silent and kept their eyes averted from my face as they cut my ropes with box cutters and strapped me into a wheelchair. Despite the severities of his injuries, Alejandro tried to fight but to no avail. He couldn’t do much more that wiggle and kick impotently, but it was enough to frustrate the men. One of them let out an irritated sigh and jammed a thumb into Alejandro’s broken cheekbone and drew a shuddering shriek from him. Woozy and retching from the pain, he was as cooperative as they wanted while they strapped him into the wheelchair.
Night had fallen in the cemetery, though I couldn’t say how many days it had been since my capture. Beyond the funeral home where I was held, the Divine Inferno had placed a massive black altar a few feet from the edges of the cemetery proper. They surrounded it with brass candelabras holding enough red and black candles to fill the nearby retaining pond with melted wax. The altar had been cut from an enormous piece of ebony that had been varnished black and then smoothed and polished so that it reflected the bodies and faces of the crowd gathered around it. The effect screamed of death and hellish mayhem and my instincts kicked back in and I felt cold, bony fingers of terror slowly curl around my heart.
Ryerson wore a long black robe and cowl that he left open to expose his corpse-pale flesh. There were odd marks carved deep into his skin that oozed black in the candlelight. When my escort stopped before the altar, the black opal he was wearing burst to life and glowed in a hideous radiance of putrid light. He smiled brilliantly at the congregation gathered around him, and laughing joyously, he lifted one hand in a signaling gesture.
The people responded by lifting their hands to cup the dark opals in their palms and cast their eyes reverently to the ground. They spoke a bad mix of Latin and Sanskrit that was damn near incoherent and full of mixed metaphors about life and fire. It took me a minute, but I figured out that they were praying to Stolas, begging him to come forth from his Hellish domain and bless them with his presence.
I took it in, thinking that all of it looked like a badly staged scene from a clichéd B-rated horror movie about satanic cults and I giggled hysterically. One would think that and evil death cult would have more taste and imagination than this. No one deserved to die in such tacky surroundings while the chronically stupid filled the audience. I certainly didn’t intend to endure whatever they had planned for me in this venue. I like my torture nice and private, where small shreds of my dignity and my flesh could be spared prying eyes. I wondered how Shaw would react to a sight like this (with bewildered calm) and I burst into tears. Gods I missed him so much.
Alejandro continued to fight for his life. He yelled and struggled violently as three thugs in black robes came forward and hauled him from his wheel chair. For a moment it looked like he might break their hold on him. He bit a chunk from one hand and managed plant an elbow into the groin of another. They grunted as they held him down on the black altar and four more thugs strapped him to it.
The people roared with approval as Ryerson lifted his arms above his head and slowly turned in a circle, proudly displaying his manhood for all to see. The congregation cheered wildly and I wished that he would put that thing away. It was pitiful. No wonder the man was on a power trip. He had to over compensate for his little dinky doo.
“Bring forth the objects!” he called. I suddenly remembered the treasures Finvarra had gone out of his way to send me after and I finally made the connection. The Divine Inferno intended to twist the purpose of these magical objects to something dark and evil.
A dumpy, middle-aged woman brought out a long slender pole of orange alder wood with a thick bag of oiled leather tied around one end. A young woman in her twenties followed closely behind with a short sword that had an elaborately carved ivory handle and a heavily tooled leather sheath. It took three large men with significant muscle mass to wrestle an enormous bronze cauldron embossed with Celtic images of smiling faces large enough to fit a grown man to the front of the altar.
The middle-aged woman presented the spear Areadbhar to Ryerson with a smile and graceful bow, and then retreated with an awkward bow. He whipped the sack off of the end of the weapon and a raging blaze exploded from a long, slender blade that glowed as if it had just been birthed from a raging forge. The thing sparked as he brandished it over his head, and the crowd’s screams of approval turned to shrieks of terror as the sparks became streaks of light and lashed into the crowd.
Ryerson’s eyes danced at the carnage and he twirled the raging weapon in his hands and plunged it down into the center of Alejandro’s chest. The man let out a piercing scream that went on for long agonizing seconds before dwindling into a terrible wail of despair. I gaped in open-mouthed astonishment as Ryerson fought with both hands to pull Areadbhar from Alejandro as the spear drank hungrily of his fluids.
With a cry, Ryerson pulled the spear free and plunged the greedy blade to the shaft in a plastic bucket full of poppy seeds. Areadbhar fell still then, showing no sign of the magical weapon it had been seconds ago. The girl’s wide eyes bulged with fear as she stepped tentatively forward and offered the sword Claiomh Solais balanced reverently on the tips of her fingers. Ryerson snatched it from her and pulled the shining blade from its sheath in a smooth motion and raised it over his head in a two handed grip with the point down.
Alejandro was well into his death throes as he faced the blade. He turned his head to look at me with the light fading in his battered eyes and mouthed three words to me, “I’m so sorry.”
Ryerson began to chant, pulling Alejandro’s wavering attention back to him. The rhythm of the chant increased with every word until Ryerson was reciting it with tongue twisting speed and he bellowed mightily at the top of his lungs. Suddenly, Charlotte appeared at the corner of my eye, dressed in a robe of gold that was opened in the front to expose her naked body underneath.
She chanted in Uralic, the language I knew as a child, reciting the old spells created to summon spirits. Her voice overlapped Ryerson’s in a deadly song, the tones and rhythms twisting into terrible, beautiful music devoted to an ungodly creature and bring it forth.
Ryerson reached the end of his chant and plunged the shining blade of the Sword of Light into the midline of Alejandro’s face and then split the corpse down the middle with a stroke so easy that Ryerson might have been cutting butter. I screamed my horror and rage as a wisp of cloudy white lifted from the twitching corpse and went to Charlotte’s hand like it was on strings. Charlotte closed her eyes and held out the jewel to the newly freed soul, and the little bit of light that had been the man who had shadowed me for two years was drawn into the colors writhing within the stone and trapped there forever.
Charlotte continued to chant as two men released the straps holding Alejandro to the altar and stepped away. Disdainful of the life he had taken, Ryerson shoved the mutilated corpse off of the ebony altar to fall into the bronze cauldron with a splash of dark ale. He seized the spear again, and used the butt to completely submerge Alejandro for long minutes. The air rang with the perfect silence of the gathered crowd and Charlotte’s voice rose to greater heights as everyone waited with baited breath to see what would happen next. Charlotte moved to Ryerson’s side and bent over the cauldron to immerse her left hand into it and touch the body. The opal spun back and forth on its golden chain, the colors within it growing brighter and brighter until it was painful to look at.
A warm breeze moved over