[14] Welcome to Another Devilish Level
The cemetery, at night, under heavy downpour, was haunted. Between statues and mausoleums they wandered: ghouls, specters, revenants, wights, all watching with wide white eyes on such a terrible night as this. Unluckily for them, their prey came encased in a cage of glass and steel. When the jeep's headlights wheeled off the main road and swept the cemetery, those wicked phantoms reverted as though by finger-snap to what they truly were: stone outcroppings, gnarled vines, small creatures creeping to keep dry under the eaves.
In the passenger seat, Princess Mayfair Rachel Lyonesse Coke stooped unladylike, hands pressed to the bulbous orb atop the Staff of Lazarus, chin resting on the back of her hands. During the ninety-minute ride from the monastery, she'd said nothing. Now, when the jeep stopped in front of the Door, she blinked away endless mental coils and spoke tonelessly: "Wake the devil."
Without acknowledgement, Dalt completed the last few maneuvers to turn off the jeep, opened his door, exited, opened the back door, and dragged the devil into the rain.
Thus Perfidia Bal Berith awoke. Gradually she emerged, loosing a groan, trying and failing to rub the aching spot on the back of her head (wrists once more bound), until realization gripped her and she jerked with a start that brought her nowhere within Dalt's grasp.
"Oh fuck, oh shit."
"Refrain from vulgarity, please," said Mayfair, still in the passenger seat. "Or lose your lying tongue."
Halfway into another senseless utterance Perfidia received a fun treat: five of Dalt's beefman fingers cramming into her mouth to grip her tongue with clear intention to yank. That quieted her quickly.
"Now behave, please."
Perfidia nodded. The fingers withdrew and she shifted her jaw back and forth to readjust, wanting to spit too but figuring that would probably go poorly.
"Good," said Mayfair. "Now please open the Door."
A few blinks and the situation became comprehensible: Door, jeep, scattered fragments of memory. Right. Dalt died and Perfidia ran. Dalt got back up and—he must've knocked her out. The Staff of Lazarus. Mayfair reanimated him. Now he did whatever she commanded.
Perfidia suppressed the urge to cackle like a lunatic. Unfair. Simply unfair. What'd she do to deserve this? Be a devil? She was born a devil, no choice in the matter, unlike those first generation fallen angels who made a conscious decision to rebel. Or was it simply the sin of idiocy. Playing things bad from the start—
She cut those thoughts short. Playing bad before didn't mandate playing bad now. Strategize! Unlike the Waringcranes, Perfidia knew Mayfair inside and out. After all, the princess was critical to the story she constructed for Jay. If Perfidia could outwit anyone, it was her—one lacking even the singular Humanity required to qualify as human.
Nobody else was in the jeep. If Mayfair killed Jay, Shannon, or Wendell, they'd be zombies too. But Mayfair wouldn't want to kill them. Right. It existed right there on her character sheet back in the office: Pious (until pursuit of her goals forced her to abandon her morals). She'd be especially loath to sin against people from "the real world"—while they were alive, at least, Perfidia thought with a glance at Dalt.
How did this help? Jay and the others, if alive, still had the second car. The SUV. They possessed no warm feelings toward Perfidia, yeah, but they'd recognize her pragmatic value. Surely. At least, they'd come for Dalt. Right—right.
So the play was stall. Stall until they arrived.
"The door," said Perfidia, slowly, as though only groggily half-awake. "The car door...? But it's already open?"
"The Door to the other world," Mayfair said. With patience. Not like someone pursued. But Perfidia knew she was suppressing herself. To Mayfair, going from Whitecrosse to a world God actually made was like ascending straight to Heaven. Mayfair wanted that Door open. Wanted it badly. Any semblance else was façade. Perfidia couldn't let that calm, patient demeanor get in her head.
It got in her head. Even if Jay et al. were alive, even if they had the SUV, their pursuit hinged on defeating the dragon in their way. Fuck. The dragon. Great going Perfidia. Great fucking going with that one! When she banged out Jay's plot—having only a day to do so, remember—she thought to herself: He needs a big, climactic fight. A fight with what? Well, when you think fantasy, you think dragons. Kids still like dragons right? Problem was John Coke in 1642 went on a genocidal anti-dragon bender and massacred literally every dragon in Whitecrosse (to be fair there were only a handful). Whatever. Perfidia could whip up some new dragon for Jay, she'd say it was just hibernating the past half-millennium. Or maybe one of the nuns got corrupted into a dragon?
When Jay first refused to go to the monastery, she drew on the only aspect of the world in which he'd shown any interest—relic magic—and pulled some truly contortionist maneuvering to deploy the Staff of Lazarus as a final temptation. (Seriously, retroactively making Mayfair steal the staff was an ordeal. Perfidia could change a lot about Whitecrosse, but it was nigh impossible to contradict established facts. Luckily, the extreme haste in which she wrote the Mayfair-in-the-monastery plot left many details incomplete—and thus possible to alter.) Then she remembered Coke actually killed one of his dragons near the monastery. Everything clicked. With glee—with fucking glee!—she set up her planned final encounter, oh yes so clever. What a clever little devil.
The encounter, as visualized, went like so:
1. Jay flees the monastery with Mayfair and the staff.
2. Because Mayfair keeps close to him, it only requires a brief distraction (nuns, Makepeace, Olliebollen, etc.) for her to grab the staff and use it.
3. Devereux arises.
4. Devereux prioritizes protecting Mayfair. (It has to—Jay almost certainly realizes she's in control.)
5. This strategy limits Devereux's movement; Devereux relies on its flame breath, which Makepeace blocks with his shield.
6. It becomes clear Jay cannot hurt Devereux himself. Resourceful fellow he is, he scans his surroundings in search of a solution.
7. Jay discovers that part of the nearby monastery—the part directly above the dragon, how lucky!—is perched upon a particularly unstable cliff of mud made even less stable by the pouring rain. A few good baseball bat thwacks could bring it down...
8. Defended by Makepeace, Jay runs to the cliff and causes the landslide that sweeps Devereux into oblivion. Victory!
Even with the tax commandos' interference, the first few steps occurred exactly as planned. (In fact, Shannon and friends provided Step 2's distraction.) Likewise, the crumbling cliff and its propensity for a big sweeping mudslide remained. What was uncertain was Jay Waringcrane. Her encounter relied on predicting his behavior, something she thought she could do when she designed the encounter. Then the Pluxie snafu happened.
Would Jay notice the crumbling wall? Or would he be a dense dunderfuck and try to do things his own stupider way?
If he failed to kill the dragon, he wouldn't be riding to the cemetery anytime soon to save her.
After the long pause it took Perfidia to think these things, she finally replied to Mayfair. "Oh. The Door to the other world. Right." Still speaking slowly, but not too slowly, not wanting Mayfair to catch on.
Mayfair caught on. "Nobody is on their way to rescue you, devil. Not that humans created by God would bother to aid a sinful creature such as yourself. They had you tied up, after all. They see you as I do: a thing to be used—carefully—and discarded. Now, please dispense with the feigned ignorance and open the Door."
Behind them, the rain-drenched road—long and flat, without obstructions—remained dark. In such sheer night, the Land Rover's powerful headlights would be visible for miles. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
Stalling wasn't working. Then what was the play? There had to be a play. Twisting the truth? I don't have the key, Shannon does. We have to go back for Shannon. If Mayfair believed that, though, what stopped her from killing Perfidia right then and there? Even Mayfair's when-convenient moral obligation didn't extend to a devil from literal Hell. A thing to be used and discarded, after all. Without a use, Perfidia lacked a life.
Okay. Okay. Then open the Door. Right? Sure Mayfair was an aberration and her introduction into the real world would ping God's radar that something was wrong, but God was only omnipotent when He felt like it, good odds something so slight would slip His notice. Meanwhile, in the real world Mayfair would be a fish out of water, the sights and sounds and technology disorienting her. It might give Perfidia some kind of advantage. Might.
But if Perfidia opened the Door, if she fulfilled her use, Mayfair would kill her immediately.
"If you want me to open the Door," Perfidia said, "you gotta sign a contract."
Dalt seized Perfidia's index finger and bent it back until it snapped. "No," said Mayfair, over a chorus of Perfidia's screams.
Having expected some such response, Perfidia was able to wince her way back to coherence. "Hear me out. Hear me out. If you're gonna kill me whether I open the Door or not I've got no incentive to do it. I'd rather die spiting you—that's the devil way. I need assurance that if I do what you want I walk away alive." Fuck it'd been too long since she felt pain this bad. Few hundred years ago, when she was working her old job in Hell, her pain tolerance had been much higher. She tried to muster that past Perfidia to grit her teeth.
"If my intention were to slay you either way," said Mayfair, "I'd have done so already and commanded you to open the Door with my staff."
"It takes Humanity to open the Door. Kill me and that Humanity goes poof in an instant, even if you use the staff. You already know that—or at least suspected it. It's the real reason you haven't killed me. But if I open the Door, you will. You can't lie to me, Mayfair. I'm the Master after all. I know your nature exactly."
The passenger door opened, which Perfidia took as a good sign, even as Mayfair rounded the jeep and stood before her with pitiless eyes, her half-dried hair in yellowish clumps that did little to hamper the innate prettiness of all descendants of the original Princess Tivania with whom John Coke sired the Whitecrosse royal lineage.
"Then I shall cease tiresome pretense, devil. Allow me to elucidate your situation: You die today. Your options are between a quick death and one of brutal physical torture."
Dalt seized a second finger and snapped it and Perfidia shrieked.
"The Whitecrosse royal family has, over many years, learned the best ways to deal with heretics and dissidents." Same expression, same toneless voice. "Above all, the status quo needed to be maintained in this world, did it not? So it was only natural. I have accessed the library under the castle. I have read of our most insidious techniques, I have seen the diagrams. Regrettably at present I lack our more creative tools, but Sir Dalton shall suffice, I do believe."
"Do it!" Perfidia laughed. Had to laugh. Had to put everything into this performance. Could not show fear. "I'm spawn of Hell, kiddo. Born in a lake of fire. I've suffered agonies you'd faint to think of. Jay will make it here on foot before you break me—"
"Tooth extraction. Nail extraction. The flaying of skin, segment by segment." Right, right. Perfidia heard it all before. Her unimpressed face prompted Mayfair to try harder: "I am certain we can use the power of this 'car' to create some sort of rack..."
"Sure, go ahead. Rip me in half. Then where are you? Stuck on this side of the Door. Look kiddo. Sign the contract with me. You're currently at subhuman levels of Humanity, you're not recognized by God, you can't sin—the same way a dog or cat can't sin. So you got nothing to worry about dealing with a devil. We fill out the contract. Very simple terms. I let you through the Door, you let me free—alive and unharmed." She glanced at her fingers and amended: "No further harm. Yeah sorry Little Miss Pious you'll have to let the devil go, but I don't see how you got any other option. Go ahead with the tooth pulling and nail extracting and whatnot, but I know you won't kill me unless I open the Door and I won't open the Door until I know you won't kill me. So without it in writing we're at loggerheads aren't we?"
Ignore that letting Mayfair through the Door was a bad idea in any other circumstance. Perfidia would deal with that particular trouble later, assuming she pulled this off. Her spiel gave Mayfair pause for thought, expression softened as though the rain eroded it. Mayfair might be an uppity little priss but she was also fourteen and fourteen-year-olds were invariably idiotic.
"I could have you raped," Mayfair muttered.
"Raped! Raped! That's in the Coke family's great big book of tortures too?"
An honest-to-fuck blush forced Mayfair to turn her face away. Perfidia had to laugh, had to laugh because she couldn't let Mayfair know what she stumbled upon. "And you'd watch, huh? Sure you'd like that. How religiously devoted of you. Rape me. You even know how sex works kiddo? Had that talk with your mom yet? Course not, she fucking hates you, but—"
"Shut up!"
Good. Good. "I mean hey if ya wanna get off I'll render that service free. Before I went into the whole fantasy-world-making business I was a succubus y'know? Been a few centuries but I still have all the tricks, and as I mentioned before you are currently in a blessed immune-from-sin state of existence." Had to hit back aggressively. Had to make Mayfair recoil in cringing terror from the whole rape thing. There was Pride again, her old friend, bubbling bubbling bubbling, Pride her precious darling. "I mean think about it kiddo. You really wanna go through that Door anyway? You can have anything you want in this world and at the end of it when you die it's just over, kaput, nothing. No pain, nothing. Nothing to fear in nothing. Come on kiddo, whaddya say. Let Perfidia Bal Berith take care of ya—"
Thankfully, before Perfidia could gag on the wretched words she was spewing, Mayfair made Dalt break another finger to shut her up. Perfidia obliged with a slightly-exaggerated scream.
"Quiet, silence, cease your devilish wiles!" More on that subject. Mayfair tromped in a circle, jerking her arms in operatic motions before pawing at her face to wipe off all the water. Still just a kid. Still only fourteen. Easy mark.
"Okay, if you don't like that, just sign the contract. We'll keep it nice and simple, no legalese, you'll understand every word and know you're not getting f—not getting screwed. Good deal right?"
Mayfair quit tromping, slumped her shoulders in oh-so-readable expression of defeat. Perfidia kept up her snaggletooth smile, exuded the self-confidence that suckered humans since time immemorial into schemes and scams, that common feeling of the insecure: "This person knows what they're doing. How can it go wrong?" You were insecure, weren't you Mayfair. That's right. So stiff and formal, such a proper and elegant tongue—but what's that underneath? Your mother never cared for your precocity, hated it even. She isolated you, and you helped, believing you liked the isolation, thinking your own thoughts, but there was something underneath, wasn't there? You hated your wild and carefree brother—for his lack of decorum, you claimed to yourself—but there was something underneath: You wished you were more like him. Deep down you did. Especially one particular aspect, that's right. His easy manner with other people, his winning ability to capture hearts and keep them close. Maybe not the hearts of the nobility, but those of the common people—and of the opposite sex. Right. Exactly right, Perfidia remembered now. Your forebear Tivania passed down another genetic trait, didn't she? A trait Perfidia gave her. A trait to keep John Coke sated: Lust, lowliest of the seven cardinal sins, least offensive in God's eye and so the most pathetic. Simple carnal loneliness—craving for others.
Only a little more. Perfidia would cut through those defenses. The pathetic defenses of a pathetic little girl.
But unpathetically, bone-chillingly, Mayfair lifted a face of stone and eyes that gleamed.
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"There's another key."
"Eh?"
"Of course there's another key. They tied you up. They didn't trust you. They wouldn't rely on you as their only way out. One of them has a key." Mayfair paused, thought for one second. "Shannon has the key. It would be her with the key."
"There's no other key," Perfidia said simply, still wearing a smile, hoping her face didn't flicker or that if it did Mayfair was too enmeshed in her own thought processes to notice. "I'm the Master. That doesn't change if they put me in cuffs, okay? I control the Door."
"There's another key," Mayfair said. "I ought to have realized sooner."
"You'll feel real stupid if you kill me, drive back to Shannon, and find there's no key."
Mayfair stared at Perfidia. Long and hard.
"You will open the Door," she said, "or you will die, devil."
"Then you'd have nothing. You'd be trapped. Your loss!"
"Even if there is no other key, there's the other method. The original plan. We capture one of the heroes from the real world. The archbishop can extract their Humanity and fashion a key—"
"Won't work. Astrophicus can't actually do that. I only made him think he could to kickstart the plot." This was, incidentally, true. (As if Perfidia would ever give these guys an actual way to escape into the real world.) Being true, though, wouldn't make Mayfair believe it.
"You have ten seconds," Mayfair said. "Nine."
"I swear there's no other key, there's no other method, do you seriously think—"
"Eight. Seven. Six."
"You won't. You won't do it, I know. I know you!"
"Five. Four. Three."
Opening the Door was not the end. "Okay! Okay. Okay! I'll do it. I can't do it—I can't do it with this gorilla holding me!"
Mayfair ceased counting. Her face returned to an empty mask, an intelligent blankness. Damn though, Perfidia knew she was a person who could feel pity, knew she wasn't an emotionless robot. It wasn't in her character. Wasn't Perfidia pitiable? Wasn't she more pitiable than anyone else in this world right now? Zealotry. Insipid since the dawn of time.
Nonetheless Dalt relinquished her. He hovered close, and before Perfidia got a chance to collect herself a harsh shove sent her staggering toward the Door.
Shoulda called Mayfair's bluff. Shoulda done it. It could've been a bluff. It definitely could've been.
Anticipating being unable to reclaim the key from Shannon, Perfidia saved in her back pocket just enough of Jay's Humanity to open the Door. The whole other-world gambit had the benefit of costing essentially zero Humanity to create and maintain, but there was one small point of contact with the real world that necessitated expenditure, and that involved the Door. In Jay's case, reusing a world cut even this cost, but that was only because she kept the original hardware all these years. A new key had to be paid for.
Dalt remained behind her as she walked toward the Door. Specifically, he stayed between Perfidia and Mayfair, as though shielding the latter from the former. A smart move on Mayfair's part—given what Mayfair knew. She'd witnessed Wendell and Dalt firing their guns and knew what real-world tech could do. But Mayfair didn't know that keeping a closer personal eye on Perfidia would limit options for how she used Humanity. Dalt was, despite moving around, dead. He did not count as human. Mayfair, despite possessing less than one Humanity, kind of counted as a human, and that made all the difference. Dalt watching Perfidia didn't stop her from using Humanity openly; Mayfair watching did. As Perfidia approached the Door, she made sure to let Dalt's huge frame block Mayfair's line of sight.
Question was, what were the options? Dalt was faster than her. Stronger than her. And since he was a reanimated corpse, getting the drop with a Humanity-manifested gun wouldn't stop him. Plus, if she used Humanity for anything except opening the Door, then she'd be stranded even if she did kill Mayfair. She'd need to crawl back to Shannon. What then?
No. Perfidia had an idea. A risky idea, but an idea. She knew Mayfair. Knowing someone wasn't only about knowing their weaknesses or insecurities. There was another angle.
"So," she said as she stopped before the Door's arch, "you're gonna wanna know how I do it, right? How I control Whitecrosse I mean."
Silence.
"After all, you're not doing this just for yourself, are you? You wanna make Whitecrosse better. To save the poor damned non-souls who call it home, to bring them to paradise. How do ya plan to do that? Think they'd all just follow you into the real world if you asked nicely? Please."
Perfidia extended her bound hands and tapped a panel on the arch. It opened. She took Dalt not hassling her despite the length of her spiel as a sign Mayfair was listening.
"You wanna be the Master. Don't ya. If you were the Master, you could change anything you want. You could give them all Humanity. Plus anything else you wanna change about the world. And I can show you how. I can't do it dead—that's the type of knowledge that doesn't come back to a puppet. You know that, of course."
She pressed her palms to the control panel. Glancing over her shoulder to ensure Dalt blocked Mayfair's view, she channeled the last dregs of Humanity—doleful to watch it go—into the red shape of a key.
"A simple exchange," Perfidia said. "Let me live and I'll make you the Master."
The Door opened. Translucent flicker. Perfidia closed her eyes and hoped. Her only solace was she saw no better play. She knew what Mayfair wanted. She knew this would tempt.
Dalt seized her by the nape and she yelped. Her heart shuddered and a thousand self-scourging thoughts slashed her before her head was shoved through the portal. The familiar parking garage appeared for a second, then she was yanked out while Dalt—still gripping her tight—shoved his own head through.
Exactly how it went with Shannon. Empirical testing.
"Is it safe," said Mayfair. "Did she keep her word? Is that the other world?"
A nod from Dalt.
One second passed. Another. Mayfair's blank eyes pierced Perfidia through the rainfall.
"Give me the new key."
Dalt wrenched it out of Perfidia's grasp and handed it to Mayfair. Heat bloomed in Perfidia's head, an agony of anxiety, for every rational thought five more called her an idiot for not using the Humanity to make a gun, make a flamethrower and incinerate him, oh please as if that would work in this rain—
The key exchanged hands. Mayfair regarded Perfidia, then the open Door, and despite her placid face a slight tremble ran up what little of her skin showed: Anticipation withheld desperately.
Come on kiddo. This is it. This is your dreams realized. You don't wanna sour the moment with a coldhearted murder, right? That's not you. I know you. I got a whole page dedicated to you, Mayfair Rachel Lyonesse Coke. All your facts and foibles. You're fourteen years old. Despite everything, you're still optimistic.
A shove sent Perfidia tumbling through the Door; Dalt and Mayfair followed.
No more rain. A quiet, dry place, haunted only by a distant murmur in some pipe. The water dripped off them, pooled at their feet.
Mayfair spent a sentimental moment absorbing the grandiosity of this new world, this bare and utilitarian parking garage where the nearest car's bumper sticker read IF YOU'RE CLOSE ENOUGH TO READ THIS YOU CAN KISS MY ASS.
"I feel it," Mayfair said. "I feel His presence. I feel—the presence of God!"
She swooned. Actually swooned, the kind of motion you'd see nowhere except a Shakespearean play, a wild wobble of her whole body that carried her into the back of Perfidia's parked Porsche. The metallic thunk exploded in dead silence and Mayfair didn't mind, she twirled with her body splayed in ecstasy. Her arms stretched to a sky of concrete.
"He's here! Oh God, Your love washes over me, for the first time I truly feel it! Oh, oh! OH!"
Onto her knees she slid, then further into a posture of supplication, forehead to floor.
"The Holy Spirit imbues this poor and wretched form. I pray for forgiveness oh Lord, I pray for my many sins, worthless sinner as I am in face of You... Embrace me, oh Lord, lift me on your heavenly wings! Halleluiah!"
Her groping fingers tore at her stark outfit, then at her throat. She rolled onto her back and kicked little shoed feet out of the sodden and mud-caked flounce of her dress. Her back abruptly arched; her palms pressed down and her mouth hung open in an endlessly expanding O.
"Oh, oh—oh! Oh! Oh God! Oh Lord! Oh!"
"Excuse me?" said a middle-aged woman in an overcoat, keys in hand, standing beside her car door. "Excuse me, is everything alright?"
"Everything is glorious. Everything is joyous and happy." Mayfair flung herself from supine to kneeling and cut a wild gaze across the garage at the woman. "How can anything be wrong in this world where God's love is so warm?"
The woman's face moved from Mayfair to Dalt and Perfidia. Confusion contorted into disgust. "Did you people give this little girl drugs?"
"No no," said Perfidia quickly. "We're uh, we're actors. Actors—in a morality play at the local church. Rehearsing. I play the devil. Great makeup, right?"
Eyes scrutinized to the backdrop of more Mayfair moans. Finally: "You Evangelicals disgust me. Brainwashing these poor children!" The woman got in her car, slammed the door, and drove off in a puff of exhaust.
Mayfair paid her no mind. Panting in the subsiding throes of holy fervor she clasped her hands over her heaving chest and prayed with silent motions of her lips. A half-uttered amen severed the spell and she attempted to retake control of her face by donning a semblance of seriousness marred only by the squiggle of her smile.
"So," she said. "You said you'd make me the Master."
"Right. Right! Lemme show ya."
Two flights to leave the basement garage, three more to Perfidia's office, with an L-shaped corridor leading to the door. This late at night they encountered nobody else. Dalt needed to let go of Perfidia again so she could unlock the door. Like earlier, Dalt maintained position between Perfidia and Mayfair.
The office was crammed with scrolls, towers of them heaped against the walls and on Perfidia's desk, the same ones she temporarily made invisible when Shannon and Dalt first appeared. "These papers, they're Whitecrosse." Perfidia stepped inside, leading the way, flinging gesticulatory hands as though giving a guided tour. (The broken fingers on one hand hurt with every motion she made, but it was essential to the performance.)
"What do you mean, they're Whitecrosse?" Mayfair was half-concealed by Dalt's body; only one eye showed past his arm.
"I mean what I said. These papers are Whitecrosse, the words on them are Whitecrosse, and the changes you make to them you also make to Whitecrosse." A hard slap to one of the towers on Perfidia's desk lifted a plume of dust. "Take a look at one, any, you'll see."
Mayfair plucked a sheet. "Blueprint of Castle Whitecrosse. 1:500 scale. Detail: Castle Gate."
"Here. Look here. This one's good, you can see it changing."
Perfidia sidled around her desk and peeled the page she'd been working on before she got interrupted. When she held it to Mayfair, Dalt snatched it and handed it off.
"This one... describes the actions of Jay Waringcrane," Mayfair said. "There are lines manifesting at the bottom of the page... He appears to be arguing with his sister." Her head poked out behind Dalt. "By writing my own words onto these pages, I can make any change I want?"
"Well there are some limitations, I'll go over them with you and answer any questions." Perfidia busied herself behind the desk, shuffling the papers into order, reaching her hand down to grip the drawer under the desk where Shannon so kindly put her gun. "To make it easier on myself I idiot-proofed the whole deal so I wouldn't contradict something I already did. Also as you might expect you'll have some trouble trying to change anything about Jay. Or his sister. They have their own Humanity, after all."
"Yes, I suppose that follows logic," although Mayfair seemed hardly to be listening. "Tell me: Am I able to move the contents of Whitecrosse into this world? The way I myself have been moved?"
The question stopped Perfidia dead. Mayfair stared straight at her, big eyes demanding a response, not severely, but with genuine, absolute curiosity.
"Move Whitecrosse—here? Why would ya wanna do that?"
"Devil, you told me yourself. This world is touched by God; Whitecrosse is not. It is unfair that I alone of that forlorn realm's denizens may know His love. They all must come. It is only through His intercession that they may be saved. But many would resist leaving their homes—you said that as well, did you not? Could I but bring the entire world into this one..."
"Uh," said Perfidia. Hand frozen on the drawer. Trying to think of anything to get Mayfair to stop looking at her. "I'd strongly advise against that. God's a guy to be feared as much as loved, right? I dunno if He'd take too kindly to a bunch of stuff He didn't create suddenly showing up in His world. Y'know?"
Mayfair wasn't listening. "Answer me. Can it be done? Can Whitecrosse be moved into this world?"
"Uhhhhh... Yeah. Yeah it should be. Check uh, check that pile over there. See it. No the next one. Should be the third or fourth sheet from the top. Yeah."
"I see nothing of use here."
Perfidia opened the drawer. Her revolver bumped against the wood with a marbly sound and she grabbed it.
Everything that happened next happened in the span of two seconds.
First, with her other hand, the one with the broken fingers, Perfidia shoved the heap of papers atop her desk into the air. Dalt moved and he moved fast but as Perfidia thought—as Perfidia hoped—he didn't move to attack. He moved to shield Mayfair.
The real Scott Dalton Swaino II, the living one, thought only of attack. Football star sacking the quarterback. The mindset of a man like that was: to stop someone from hurting you, hurt them first. Not for a second did he ever attempt to shield Shannon.
When Perfidia made the Staff of Lazarus, she cheated. Obviously. Even in a fake world like Whitecrosse some fundamental laws couldn't be broken. The dead did not return to life. So she faked it. The body would move; muscle memory remained. But the person with the staff supplied the mind.
Dalt would've attacked. Mayfair defended.
Logically it made sense. This zombie Dalt could eat bullets for breakfast. His massive body covered Mayfair completely and with Perfidia's rinky-dink handgun that made hitting her impossible.
Perfidia wasn't looking to hit Mayfair.
She wheeled around and fired the revolver at the window overlooking the final edge of Cleveland until the bright black mass of Lake Erie. Before the glass shards even struck the floor Perfidia sprinted and leaped out the frame, out the old-paper-smelling office and into the acrid taste of urban decay. Sheer crisp air buffeted her face in the protracted moment at the apex of her jump, before gravity's pull redirected her downward.
Into the narrow balcony, more railing than balcony, of the second-floor office under hers. Belonged to a small family lawyer, son of a small family lawyer before him. The railing bit into Perfidia's folded leg and she twirled until her face scrubbed the gravelly texture of the balcony itself but her memory of this building, her memory of this city did not fail her. Ignoring the pains—fingers, leg, something scraped off her cheek—she scrabbled upright and vaulted the railing to seize a tall thin pipe that traveled up the bricks and slide to the garbage-strewn, hobo-dwelt alley below.
Already the balcony above rattled with the slam of Dalt's senseless bulk hitting it and by the time Perfidia was limping (limping, shit, why her leg, why did she have to hit her leg) down the alley an eruption of garbage signaled his descent to ground level. Obviously, he was faster than her, limping or not. Obviously, she expected him to pursue. But she knew Cleveland. She sat there in her office and watched this city build itself, watched it explode, watched it rust and die, the same lake reflecting her until it got too filthy to reflect a thing. She'd crawled all over it in her time, sniffing out unfortunates, fools, anyone willing to sign her contracts; she had excavated every sordid crevice.
She knew its sewers.
The grate opening to this city's septic underworld appeared exactly where she knew it to be, embedded in a drainage basin, the bars broken as they had been broken for the past thirteen years without a single civic care to see them repaired. A narrow aperture through which a slender woman might be able to slip—but not a musclebound behemoth.
It neared. She didn't even hear him tromping behind her, she managed to buy herself enough space via the element of surprise. Ten, five more steps, but if he wasn't running after her then what was he—
A gunshot rang out instants after the bullet drilled into Perfidia's back. In its acoustic cannonade caroming madly between the alley walls her body arched and pitched and her bare feet fumbled and her head slammed the brick.
He had a gun? He had a gun. Right. She gave it to him. When she fled the SUV at the monastery. She took it with her. Of course he would have it.
Now he ran at her.
Her own gun had flown from her hand, not that it mattered. Groaning, lifting limp arms like a marionette, her eyes fixed on the open drain ahead of her. Thudthudthud went his footsteps as her hands, even the one with the shattered fingers, seized the edge of the portal into oblivion and all the force in her body dragged her forward. Screaming, her one giant tug propelled her far enough forward that gravity did the rest.
Into a dark wet nook she dropped, her body a searing pile of pain. Almost immediately afterward an arm shoved through the gate and reached for her, just barely unable to seize with its grabbing fingers, and when the arm pulled back her mind managed to register: Next he'll reach with the gun.
Smell told her the way to go. Toward rancid rotting she pushed with every limb she could move, finding purchase everywhere with each to shove herself down the declining slope of this city's bowels. The gun discharged, it flashed and clapped and her ears turned into a vibrantly numb thrum as she slid away. A second shot, a third, a ricocheting bullet whizzing off a chunk of flesh on one shoulder before the fourth and fifth shots dwindled into a thunderclap.
Her body, useless, flopped onto some fetid mound. Rats somewhere scampered, all was dark. She listened to the echoing gunshots until they disappeared. Then all that remained was a ubiquitous—ubiquitous—drip-drip-drip. Ubiquitous.
Was she going to live? Everything hurt. It all hurt. But she was free. She escaped.
She escaped...
—
Mayfair Rachel Lyonesse Coke sat at the cherry desk that once belonged to the devil Perfidia Bal Berith. Cold air from the shattered window pressed against her nape but she minded it not. She pulled up her sleeve to observe the strange scales set deep into her flesh; scales that had appeared when she drank the faerie's blood at the monastery. Although she could not see without removing her clothes entirely, she felt the scales crawling up her arm, over her shoulder, and down her back. She tugged her sleeve back into place; such was the cost for what she earned. That and her brother's life.
On the desk were the pages that delineated her world: Whitecrosse.
The door opened. Sir Dalton entered. He said: "I was unable to recapture the devil, milady. I did wound her greatly, however."
Having him speak was superfluous, but Mayfair enjoyed the illusion of company. Despite what some said of her, Mayfair preferred company. She was simply so bad at keeping it. A wave dismissed Dalton and he sat patiently in a chair, awaiting her next command.
Now was no time to worry over the changed state of her body or the slight and ignorable emptiness gnawing at her. The papers beckoned. A full, academic examination was necessary; one she was fully prepared to undertake. First, she needed to assess the viability of her primary goal. Whitecrosse must come into this world. It, and its people, must be touched by God. Somehow, they must attain souls—attain salvation. Without that blessing, they were irrevocably damned; and what matter did improving their earthly existences mean when that short period of physicality was followed by an eternity of suffering? Without a path to paradise, nothing else mattered. No other course of action could produce greater good for her people, for her poor wretched souls.
And without them, what good was saving herself alone? Alone in her own tower... as always.
But if she was unable to change Jay or Shannon Waringcrane due to the Humanity they possessed, how could she possibly bring Whitecrosse into this world, the real world? Such an action would necessitate changing this world, and did not the same logic apply?
She wrote it on the paper: Whitecrosse is moved to the real world. The ink faded immediately until it could no longer be seen, as though swallowed by the parchment. No change occurred.
Perhaps it was impossible. Yet was not she herself a modification to this real world? What about the Staff of Lazarus she held? John Coke's memoirs made clear that no such magic existed on God's Earth; indeed, he condemned it as necromancy and hid the relic away in his vault. The staff still worked, however. Mayfair still controlled Dalton's corpse. If that were the case... then perhaps she need only become more creative in her methodology.
There were other relics, after all. Each possessed a miraculous magic. With them... combined with the power of the Master... could she carve a space under God's eye for Whitecrosse? Could she bring Whitecrosse to this earthly paradise? Mayfair stooped over the desk and began her examination.