[42] Greed

Something about this place was wrong, and Perfidia's first words through the Door were "Don't pay too much attention to the geography." So Jay limited himself to shifting glances at the columns carved into Atlases, between which gigantic circular windows stared out of walls that had no windows from the outside. Fine marble, sleek floors, Greco-Roman inspiration. As he looked more he noticed the ceiling was higher in some places than others without any seeming transition, that certain segments of this vast lobby-like room stretched endlessly until they vanished into points on the horizon, that the pained faces of the statues holding up the walls turned and opened their eyes to watch him—

"I said—don't pay too much attention."

Perfidia tugged his shoulder. He looked away, but the images of those stone faces remained like phantoms on his retinas until he rubbed hard and blinked. He thought for a moment he heard a voice—I'm sorry, I'm sorry—but it faded as well.

They stood around the Door, which leaned against a seemingly stable wall. Kedeshah leaned against the same wall, breathing deeply, holding a hand to the sharpest-defined of the many wounds across her body.

Perfidia was pacing. "How long it'll take you to heal? A few hours?"

"You're not truly so ignorant, no?"

"Gimme a number at least, something workable. I know maybe you won't fully recover so fast but. I dunno!"

The bright white blood pooled around Kedeshah's small, sandaled feet. She tilted her head back and winced. "Ahhh... Fidi. Moloch landed a clean hit. My wings are shot."

"Okay so you're a little slower now. Slow for you is fast for us. It's all still workable. We're past Moloch and let's be real. He's the scariest of the Princes. Right? It's smooth sailing here on out."

"Don't act stupider than you are, Fidi."

"Can't kiss yourself?" Jay asked.

"If only the auspices of Lust smiled upon such exclusionary self-love," Kedeshah said with a sigh of ambiguous sincerity, "at that point it's Pride, and outside the scope of my abilities."

"I mean think about it." Perfidia paced before the Door. The huge furred coat swished about her ankles, and her hands barely reached out the broad cuffs. "Moloch's behind us. The head honcho is out fighting angels. Who's that leave? Rimmon is strong but he's slow. Belial? Belial can't be assed to do anything, that's his whole gimmick. The honcho sealed up Mammon or something. So we really just gotta make it past Beelzebub, who I may add we already escaped once during my brother's stupid jailbreak escapade—"

"He let us escape Fidi. Besides, you're forgetting one."

"I was being tactful. But let's be real. You can get us past her whether you're hurt or not. You're her daughter."

Kedeshah scoffed.

"I know, I know, that's the whole reason you're so reluctant," Perfidia said. "You don't wanna face her. Look. I have no idea what problems you got with your mother but the head honcho told me he used you as a bargaining chip to make her fall in line. So she clearly cares about you—"

"That's exactly the problem," Kedeshah said. "I dunno! Maybe this whole revenge scheme's a dumb idea from the start. Revenge is more Wrath, Lust is the polar opposite of Wrath. Maybe it's just not in me."

"How's this whole seven deadly sins thing work exactly," said Jay. "Can you only do certain things if they fall under your particular sin? So because you're Lust that means you can't like, ever be lazy or something?"

"Any devil can do whatever they fucking want they just like to make excuses for themselves," said Perfidia.

"We're wasting time standing here talking," said Jay. "Let's start moving?"

"Sure, sure." Perfidia helped Kedeshah peel herself off the wall, leaving a shiny white smear. "Come on. You can walk. You're not that hurt."

Jay shouldered his baseball bat and adjusted his hat and was prepared to follow Perfidia whichever direction led up, but as they all finally started moving Lalum's silver strings manifested in front of them: THE DOOR?

Because Perfidia had told Lalum it wasn't safe to scuttle off on her own, especially not to someplace that looked like a hiding place—"You're probably not the first thing to decide to hide there," she said specifically—Lalum instead cleaved close to the side of the Door, though its thin sides did little to conceal her. She was growing more accustomed to being seen, though, and now that her writing called attention to her she only shirked a moment before diverting her gaze downward.

SOME THING MAY FOLLOWE US THOROUGH.

"That's the least of our concerns," said Jay.

"With Kedeshah hurt it's not feasible to carry it with us," said Perfidia. "I can turn it off and store it in my coat but—"

"No," said Jay. "Leave it on—and leave it here. I still need a way out if I lose you. Or if you lose me."

"Pal, if you get lost you're never making it out regardless of whether there's an exit or not. But yeah I'm in favor of leaving it. We're strapped for firepower. If more humans come inside and start causing chaos that'll up our odds."

"Infinitesimally," said Kedeshah.

Lalum cast a final, uncertain glance at the Door, then followed Jay and the others as they made their way deeper into Pandaemonium.

Their footsteps echoed a long time, long after they themselves had vanished. Echoing... echoing. The only sound in an otherwise silent place. Though these lower floors of Pandaemonium contained the devil courts that might bring cause for industry and activity among the judges, the judged, and all the accomplices of Hell's version of law and order—let alone the peanut gallery—they had emptied in pursuit of novel Earthside delights. So it slowly became quiet again. The echoes softened, grew distant, the space no longer observed and thus no longer needing to conform to any sort of sense shifting, expanding, contracting around the Door, the sole foreign object within its carefully-constructed whole. Shifting—undulating—bubbling, the place itself liquid, the Door alone remaining coherent...

Until its translucent aperture rippled, until something new emerged. The lower halls of Pandaemonium snapped back into place instantly, though not necessarily the same place as when Jay and the others looked upon it; only the faintest trace of their retreating footsteps remained. The creature that emerged from the Door had no footsteps of its own, though. Nor did it need to hear those of the others. It looked the "direction" they went with more certainty than the architecture ought to have allowed, the walls having changing position. It saw differently now, since it ate the fruit. Warmth stood out to it. And in these cold and empty halls the only warmth that remained was the dissipating body heat Jay Waringcrane left behind. Well, that was how she interpreted the trail she saw lead away from the Door. (It may have actually been the blood dropping off of Kedeshah, which could not be so easily consumed by the surfaces of the structure.) Regardless, she knew which way she must go.

Viviendre de Califerne slithered on her belly. Though an unusual kind of motion, she moved far faster than she ever had before. For the first time in her life she felt strong. Strong enough to avert the apocalypse? No. No, of course not. Though she would like to believe in him, the hero, and his capacity to make it happen—of course she couldn't actually believe. She would try, though. And when they failed and died, they would at least die together.

—

Perfidia never shut the fuck up. Her voice invaded Jay's ears as he dogged her heels, and the oppressive silence otherwise made it difficult to ignore her. But as he looked down and saw they were climbing stairs without him noticing before, he wondered if her talking was maybe useful, in a talismanic way. A totem to keep at bay the encroachment of this—place. He lacked superstitions beyond those that fed his self-doubting paranoia but even he felt the uncanniness of his surroundings. Everything now was black, almost pitch black, but with harsh white outlines to guide the way and indicate boundaries; outlines that, the more he looked at them, betrayed whatever seeming authority they possessed with paradoxical and non-Euclidean forms. The harsh reminder not to focus on the geography returned to him and he stared at Perfidia's swishing barbed tail instead.

"The staff, the eye, the shield," Perfidia kept repeating. (She carried all three inside her coat, which had the properties of an RPG inventory screen: 999 objects ranging from potions to flying machines stored within one's pocket.) "The staff, y'know, splitting them. Won't kill em but it might slow em down. With the shield we can survive some attacks too. Then the eye—the eye's the wildcard. We can use that. Definitely. Turning Pandaemonium back to an earlier state—"

"Nonstarter," said Kedeshah, who led their little conga line up the stairs—no, flat ground again. "There are no 'states' of Pandaemonium. It's never changed."

"We can test it out. In fact we should. We need to know our options."

"Test it. Yeah sure. Make the place angry at us—that's best case. No, no, no. I won't let you."

"Fine. Our other advantage is Lalum back there."

"The spider?"

"That's right. She's got a useful power to control things with her threads. Well, I'm assuming she's got a spare faerie or two on hand."

I DO, the threads wrote.

Jay hadn't known that. He supposed she picked them up from the elves in the castle, complete with little pins to keep them docile.

"The power's not particularly constricted. I think it'll work on at least some of the Princes. If we get past Rimmon, Belial, and Ashtoreth by other means and save that power for Beelzebub—"

"This power," Kedeshah said, "it works on only one person at a time?"

"It's limited by the threads she can control," said Perfidia. "She has two hands, so the limit should be two."

"Then it's a nonstarter also. Sure, let's assume that'll work on Beelzebub himself. What about the swarm of bugs that buzz around him? Those won't be under her control. You say this power's used with threads? The bugs will eat through in instants. Stupid, stupid plan."

"I'm just brainstorming okay!" Perfidia turned to Jay, her face much more distant than her tail. "Feel free to chip in. You're such a smart guy after all."

"Ohhhhh human, you're such a smart guy~" Kedeshah said. "Look at little me, so hurt and weak. I'm sure a smart guy like you could find a way to pin me down and unleash your most bestial, carnal desires upon me!"

I'm sorry.

"Be serious!"

"Why should I? This is the stupidest idea ever. I could be doing anything else."

"Don't give me that. You want it. You want vengeance for Ubik. I know you do—"

HERO!

The spiderweb appeared right in front of Jay's face and he stopped hard on his heels to keep from walking into it, only for his feet to fly out from the frictionless black floor. He landed hard on his ass, clambered back up, looked around to check who saw him, and noticed Perfidia and Kedeshah veering a completely different direction, with Lalum in the midpoint between them nearly subsumed into the black background.

Then Jay realized: Perfidia hadn't veered off. He had.

He hurried back to them, wondering when he went off course. He thought he'd been following Perfidia's swishing tail the entire time, swish-swish-swish back and forth like a metronome, a hypnotic pace. He rubbed his eyes, pulled off his hat, let his hair breathe. Sweat dripped down his face and he brushed his hair all over and put the hat back on. Something about this place.

Perfidia and Kedeshah continued without a hitch:

"You need to admit you're only nervous about this cuz of your mom. Admit it!"

"Fidi look at me! My body's falling apart. It's gonna leave at least five scars. Scars—I didn't even think about scars. Oh, I'm ruined. How will I be able to live with myself?"

"Whaddya mean how? You're still the daughter of Lust aren't you? A fertility goddess, what're a few scars gonna matter?"

"Oh, ruination! The image of virginal purity, defiled—marred! by such unseemly imperfections."

"You're a literal whore what the fuck are you talking about, 'virginal purity'?"

"'Tis not the true existence of purity itself that matters, dearest yet most benighted sister of mine. O, to lose the image, the sense of purity, that is the deepest and most dismal agony one may suffer; for God may forgive the physical lack, but only if the mind knows and truly yearns for the soul of what is good and holy."

"Indulgent slut! Wailing on about these metaphysical matters your peanut-sized illiterate brain could never possibly comprehend! Soul—pah. Show me the soul of bread will ya?"

"Man shall not live by bread alone, so spoke Him that is holy for we wretched sinners to reck; 'tis faith, the spirit, that grants eternal life, and possessing it not, we are lost, dearest Charisma."

"Yeah and if I weren't pawning off my oh-so-precious purity in the back alleys of Whitecrosse you'd never have had bread to live off at all, so we'd sure see how well this faith fills your belly, eh? But go on Charm, whine to me some more about spirit! It's your right, I suppose. That's the whole reason I did it. So you'd never have to suffer those indignities yourself, but maybe a hint of gratitude in return—just a hint, that's all I fucking ask you prattling cunt—"

"O Charisma—"

"Charm—"

I'm sorry.

Jay looked up. He stood in silence, in blackness. He looked left, he looked right, he looked behind him. No Perfidia. No Lalum. No Kedeshah—not even the fluorescent droplets of her blood. No Charm and no Charisma, but of course they wouldn't be there, why would they be there. Why did he think—but they'd said—

Fuck.

Any random direction looked no different from all others. Jay tapped his baseball bat against the ground and produced a heavy sound, so at least he could be certain of the floor beneath him, but everything else was black. Not dark—he saw himself perfectly fine. Just black.

"Lalum. Perfidia," he said. His voice echoed. The echo came back: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

When the echo finally died he noticed two white lines running parallel to create a lane. The lines had definitely not been there before. There were no other lines.

Following them was almost certainly a trap. How, he didn't know, but he considered turning around and going the exact opposite direction. How much would that matter? Blundering into a plane of perfect blackness with no distinction. Maybe springing the trap would be the better option.

His hands gripped the handle of his bat. Well, he'd come into this tower to save the world. Did he plan to do that by sitting back while Kedeshah did all the fighting? He hadn't cared much for the arrangement anyway. Following their heels while they bickered, waiting to interject with some crafty plan that made use of the random gaggle of superpowers at their disposal. He fucked up those devils at the monastery well enough. Maybe he could do something against whatever lurked in this darkness. Yeah, "maybe." He got the message clearly from Perfidia and Kedeshah that the creatures here were on another level compared to those chucklefucks. But what options did he really have?

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He tapped the bat against the floor in front of him to ensure the road didn't lead to some invisible pit. Even as he followed the path he kept considering turning back. But when he glanced over his shoulder the path now extended endlessly. He wondered how much of a choice he ever actually had.

When he looked back in front a door stood before him.

A plain, normal door. It shone white in the blackness. The knob was a mirrored sphere in which his own distorted form hovered within oblivion: body squished, head gigantic, and most giant of all the Cleveland Browns logo, which warped and deformed with every slight movement.

I'm sorry.

"I'm sorry," said the voice behind the door.

The voice stopped his hand, which until then had reached for the knob, since he'd already resolved to follow the path and figured this didn't change the mental calculus. The voice, though, changed something. He wasn't sure what. Maybe it didn't. Some ghastly apologetic puppeteer wailing out to him from a past he no longer remembered, some creature killed but not by this particular version of his cognition. Whatever. Whatever! What did it matter one way or another? A path gets laid out for you and you take it, you're not allowed to do anything unless you take it, that's the way it fucking works. In a game. Was this not a game? Didn't he want it to be a game, the ultimate game? Or was this the particular element of games he wanted to avoid when he asked to make his life a game in the first place?

Fuck!

He seized the knob and before he could twist the knob itself twisted, a pane of invisible glass shattered in the exact space the door occupied, and the door opened inward at a calm and steady slide.

Inside was—

Arms. Hundreds, thousands, long and multijointed, withered and pale, reaching out from a central point like weeds, hands with fingers some of which became new arms, new fingers, finally reaching an end—they all did in fact end—with gaunt split nails dug into white walls and floors. Each wrist impaled by a black spike, so that the hands and arms could solely fidget in their arrested forward reach.

If there were any body that sprouted these arms it couldn't be seen, only a darkened core into which their gaunt flesh disappeared.

"Okay." Jay glanced back at the door. There was no longer any door. "Got it."

His voice animated the arms, they twitched and quivered, but the black stakes held fast. A groan issued from the dark center. It reverberated up the arms and echoed off itself until it reached Jay with multiplicative force.

"So who are you. Do you talk?"

The groan subsided instantly. With crisp cleanness, a voice issued:

"Hi Mammon here, Prince of Greed. The Wealth Specialist!"

"Oh. Mammon. I heard about you." Jay remained cautious. "Perfidia mentioned you were—sealed up." Perfidia also seemed keen on avoiding Mammon entirely. The fact Jay stood here now, without having had much agency in the matter, called into question her equally dismissive assessments of Rimmon and Belial. Jay suspected they'd run into all of them at some point.

"But I'm not here to talk about me," Mammon said. "You're the star of this show! The man with a plan. The zero who became a hero. A classy customer who knows what he wants and how he wants it. Paradise schemer, Napoleon dreamer! Boy, have I got an offer for you!" Every single hand, all one thousand of them, cocked finger guns.

Jay smiled. Tacky. How tacky. This free-wheeling television commercial spiel. He had to suppress a laugh. This was a Prince? These devil elites Perfidia and Kedeshah feared? A cheap salesman. Seen during commercial breaks when watching shitty movies late at night.

"So what's the offer," he said. "My soul—sorry, my Humanity—for all my wishes? Been there."

Still, he didn't lower his guard. At any moment he might need to fight. He watched the flapping hands, waiting for one to break free and seize him. He scanned for exits, saw none.

"Humanity?" said Mammon. "No way Jose. Our prices are low, low, low! Call during this program and I can offer you a special sale price—"

"You're the embodiment of Greed. You're not fooling me."

"The price of: Victory! I want to win. Win, win, WIN! We're winning now and the big man can't stop us. You're absolutely, positively right you know. I want everything! Everyone knows it. I know they know it. That's why I gotta give it all away cheap, cheap, CHEAP! Fire sale! Everything must go! They'll never see it coming. Satan sure won't! That's what I thought anyway. If I gave my followers all these products for the low-low price of FREE he'd never expect it. Like that special, one-of-a-kind, limited-time-only Daughter of Lust. Gave it away to one lucky subscriber, Ubiquitous Bal Berith. Only Satan already had me solved. Saw right through me. Right under my nose—not that I have a nose—he put that Perfidia. I was the blind one, boy, blind as a bat! Eyes on the prize, cut me down to size."

"Uh... huh."

"That's all past though. I'm new and improved now. Ten times the stain-busting power, that's Mammon Plus! The problem was simple. My Greed became Envy. I wanted what was his. I wanted it more than anything else. I thought by giving everything away CHEAP I was fighting against my nature, breaking out of his plan. But I lost what made me Mammon, baby! Envy—he knows Envy like he knows himself. Envy is his closest toady. Once my Greed became Envy I was toast. Buttered!"

Jay untangled it in his mind. "So... you want me to free you. Then you'll help me get to the top of the tower and beat him."

"Has this ever happened to you? You want to get up and go to the top of your devilish Hell tower, but you just seem to have six hundred and sixty-six Satanic stakes impaling every single one of your arms? Fortunately, Mammon has the solution.—Actually I don't. I can't be freed. Certainly not by you."

"Okay. I can't free you. Then what the fuck do you want me to do, and what do you plan to do for me?"

For a long time Mammon said nothing. Then: "Step One! With a simple test, I'll determine if you're eligible for my special offer. Don't answer this question wrong!"

Mammon's arms slackened. They sagged en masse, giving the impression of some sickly plant wilting. Then all at once he bloomed again, as much as the stakes allowed him, his arm segments lifting, tightening around the black center. A force struck Jay, tugging him toward it. He planted his feet and resisted but his arms holding the baseball bat rose up, the bat being the locus of the force. It was like a powerful magnet gripped it, growing in power each second.

Jay tried to keep the bat from flying away. His shoes skidded over the frictionless ground. His body leaned forward, drawn by the bat as it dangled out in front of him. His shoulders stretched painfully. As he neared the first of the hands they flapped and pinched their fingers at his heels.

He had no choice. He released the bat and it zoomed into the center of Mammon. The force ended instantly and he fell back, then scrabbled away from the reaching hands, which could not reach far to follow him.

"Come on." He jumped to his feet. "Give it back you asshole."

A ripple ran up the arms. They bunched as much as possible into two groups. Twenty hands at the end of the first group twisted on their wrists to form a singular grasping entity and from the space at their center they pulled out—a baseball bat.

Not Jay's bat.

"Did YOU drop this golden bat?" Mammon asked.

The second bundle coalesced the same way and held up a second bat.

"Or this SILVER bat?"

Of course. Every kid knew this nursery rhyme, or fairy tale, or whatever the fuck it was. A weary woodcutter drops his axe into a lake, a woman emerges showing him a gold axe and a silver axe and asks which is his. A fable extolling the virtues of honesty. The woodcutter told the truth, neither was his axe, he'd dropped only an ordinary axe, and as reward the lady gave him all three axes. The end.

Obviously, though, it wouldn't be so simple here. This was Mammon, Salesman of Greed. The "Greedy" answer would be to demand both the gold and silver bat, and then the real bat for good measure. But that was stupid. Jay had zero use for a gold or silver bat. He couldn't carry all three. At least the woodcutter could sell them and buy a hundred real axes, but Jay doubted he'd see any last-minute merchants before the final boss. He honestly did just want his bat back. He liked that bat. More than anything—or anyone—else, that bat had been his companion on this adventure. (His adventure... Yeah. He could call it that.) That bat never left his side. It helped him from minute one. It never betrayed him, he never had to suspect it would betray him.

It didn't matter what Jay actually wanted, though. It was most important that he determine the "correct" answer, at least from Mammon's viewpoint, since Mammon would probably bestow upon him some useful boon if Jay proved himself "eligible." But wasn't trying to game the system and approach the question like a riddle antithetical to what Mammon sought to gauge? He wasn't giving an intelligence test. Assumedly he wanted an answer that revealed Jay's moral—or rather immoral—fiber. What would Mammon even consider worthy?

Then Jay realized. Mammon already made it clear. And, surprisingly, Jay's honest answer was exactly the correct one.

"I dropped my bat. Not those two. Mine. Give it back."

The two arms, built of other arms, remained rigid a moment more, their precious metal bats a-glimmer in the white luminescence of the chamber. Then a television sound effect played, canned applause, party streamers popping, and the salesman voice announced:

"CONGRATULATIONS! You're our LUCKY WINNER. But we always knew you'd get it right. I knew as soon as I learned about your wish. Pure Greed! Greed without Envy! You wanted a whole other world all to yourself. Not this world. Not anyone's world. Your own! Untainted. Pure!"

Purity, said the voice of Charm. O Purity.

"Now, for the Lucky Winner's prize!"

The gold and silver bats crumbled to dust. The arms unwound and became once more a randomly-distributed glut. The dark center returned as their core, where the arm segments twitched and spasmed as the hands at their ends fanned out and gesticulated. Out of the center a shape emerged, oblong and dark—and Jay knew what it was from the instant its tip became visible. A baseball bat.

His baseball bat.

But changed. Black. Not like the gold and silver ones, which were never his—this was as though a coat of lacquer had been applied to the surface of what was the same, ordinary, store-bought bat he'd carried all this way.

Instead of the normal logo—he actually forgot what brand it was—new words were printed, professional and crisp: Mul Elohim.

"Have you ever had this problem? There's a God you want to kill, but you just can't quite seem to do it! Try and try as you can, but it's impossible to erase the stain of His love! Well I can't give you the power to kill God, but I do have the next best thing. Introducing: The New and Improved Mul Elohim! That's right, you've seen the prototype and now it's time for the real deal. After millennia of research, devil scientists have perfected the art of killing things that shouldn't be able to be killed. Pesky Princes bothering you with their so-called immortality? A few good hits with the Mul Elohim and they'll understand just how far from Divinity they've Fallen. One hundred percent satisfaction or your money back guaranteed! Can't afford to break the bank? No problem! Call now and the Mul Elohim is yours for only seven easy installments of Prince corpses. You won't see a better deal!"

As Mammon spoke, the black bat levitated between his twisting rows of arms. Jay reached out one hand and clasped the grip. The instant his fingers closed, a surge pulsed up his body. Any minor ache he'd felt—mostly from climbing up steps for the past few hours—disappeared instantly. Strength swelled him, strength he never felt before, not even from Olliebollen's rejuvenating magic. Power. He swung the bat once through the air and slid back from the resulting sonic boom. Wind whipped between the arms, which strained their hands to a smattering of limp applause.

"Seven Prince corpses," Jay said.

"Oops! My mistake," Mammon said. "Seven Prince corpses plus tax. You gotta kill the devil who brought you here too."

"Kedeshah?"

"Her? She's not worth a cent! The other one. Perfidia Bal Berith."

Jay tried to lower the godkiller bat. But it seemed to naturally remain upright within his grasp, as though propelled by natural buoyancy. "Why."

"Simple! She's his pawn. A final piece of Pride's. Whether she knows or not. The fact she's here at all is proof he wants her to be. You know the saying: Fool me once—can't get fooled again! No clue what his game is, but he's certainly playing! She is not the wildcard. You are. He put a piece of himself inside her but not you. He did not make you walk into her office and make that wish. So it's up to you, you, YOU to change the equation."

"I need her. I need to transfer the Divinity to her."

"But wait! I have one more special offer: You don't! Keep the Divinity for yourself. I know you want to. That was the whole point of my test. Greed is your spirit, kiddo! You want, you don't even know what you want, but you want nonetheless! Pure Greed. Take it then. Become God—or as close as you can be to one. Seize everything you ever wanted."

"I hear that kind of power would destroy me."

"And it will! Of course it will. But not before you realize your every desire. Now tell me: Isn't a few short years of human life a worthy price for the peace of mind that the fulfillment of all you ever wanted brings? You'll have it all—what would there even be to live for after that?"

Jay tilted his wrist and managed to finally let the bat lower. After a few minutes of acclimation, he'd gotten used to the power that transferred from it to him, the heightened awareness he received of every joint, muscle, and tendon in his arm as they flexed one way or the other. The realization of his every desire. Wasn't that exactly the issue? Or—no.

Paradise. Could he really make it?

He had used that goal, paradise, for so long it was now just a word. For the first time he thought about what paradise would actually entail. A better world. A more just world. Rewrite natural laws. Erase hunger, war, famine, maybe even death if that was possible for a God. Eliminate scarcity, bestow upon them all prosperity. A shining, brief, blinking light of the divine; in that moment he would be everything to them all, and they would praise him, and when he burst into holy flame and reduced himself to ash they would rewrite scripture around him and utter his name unto eternity. Innate, uncontestable, absolute good, possible only from his intercession, his journey and struggle. Lalum might remain behind and write in her halting way his story for them to read, as in Whitecrosse they read John Coke's story. And Viviendre—and Viviendre.

Would it be worth it?

He wondered.

"You said," he muttered, words that drew him out of chasmic contemplation, "seven Prince corpses. You're one of the seven."

Mammon's arms seemed to smile, without any trace of a smile at all.

"No matter what happens," he said, "no matter who wins. You, Perfidia—or Satan. I remain trapped here, don't I?"

"I might—" Jay stopped himself. Would he free Mammon? Even as thanks for the Mul Elohim baseball bat? Did his vision of earthly paradise include the arbiter of all avarice?

"You can't sell to a salesman," Mammon said. "So don't even try. Besides. Whatever pretty world you make, where milk and honey flows freely and nobody ever wants a thing? That'd kill me sure as that bat. Besides. I've had some time to think here, sealed as I am. I remember now. I remember what I really want."

The hundreds of hands spread their fingers.

"Your answer to my question reminded me. I was once much greater than this. We all were. We were angels, closest to God. Even when we first Fell, we were still more than what we are now. We've corrupted over the years, all of us, lost our true forms. You asked to receive what was once yours. That was Greed in its purest form, Greed free of all Envy: To want what is yours and no one else's. I want to remember what I once was. As long as I am now this shape—I cannot."

To remember what he once was. Something about that—Jay was transported back. Playing his first game on the computer. Gasping in shock when the main character's village burned down, flabbergasted when the jester betrayed the king. Walking across a vast field with distant mountains, distant clouds. Holding back tears when the old knight sacrificed himself to save the party. All of them: The idealistic hero, the cheery heroine, the comic support character, the animalesque mascot, the brooding rival, the cackling villain atop his tower. Climbing the twenty floors of the final dungeon, facing iron giants and chimeras, opening a chest for a Tiamat to emerge with what felt like fifty heads snapping. The final battle... A shape he once was.

Look, Mother! I'm a sail!

I'm sorry.

"You understand—don't you. The thing you can never get back."

"Thank you," Jay said.

That other world. That game's world. Defined by rules, designed by an unknown office worker in a foreign land a decade before his birth, yet he'd never questioned the rules, never known the rules, never seen them, he was a sail, the wind whipped him whichever way, fifty people in black with their heads bowed over a hole dug into the ground. He was the hero. When the credits rolled and a hundred unintelligible Japanese names appeared in succession until only two words remained: THE END. He had been the hero. Then—he had been the hero.

"No, thank YOU! Your support means a lot—"

Jay brought down the bat.

—

It took—however many hits. The power that filled his body rendered them irrelevant in his mind, motions he scarcely perceived. By the end the thing that had been Mammon was a thousand shattered sticks sprawled across the ground. Nothing more than sticks. No more arms, no hands. Simple, snapped sticks in a pile, withered and black. Nobody who came upon them would recognize them as once belonging to one of the Seven Princes of Hell. The entire time Mammon had only thanked him, until at last a long groan rang out. Sticks—was that the former shape he'd sought?

Well. The bat worked as advertised.

The white room around him dispersed. He returned to the black space, though now white lines defined the walls and floor.

A moment more he breathed deeply, then he turned. Mammon had been pinned down already. The others would not be so simple and despite the sales pitch victory remained unguaranteed. Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Envy—why not Wrath too? Moloch might return, nothing stopped him. And, of course, Pride.

Plus tax. Perfidia Bal Berith. No need to decide about her right away. Either way, he needed her now. She knew more about this place than him, and most importantly she kept Kedeshah in line, and Kedeshah was useful. He still had time. He would decide about Perfidia when he needed to, no sooner.

Something moved ahead. Sharpened, Jay readied the bat. The sound of something smooth sliding. A long, slow hiss.

"Who's there," he asked.

The shape slithered forward. The bat lowered and a strange, abbreviated croak issued out his throat. He recognized her even before the face emerged out of the blackness. The smell—the scent of sweet perfume.

"Viviendre?"

"Hey." Almost a whisper. "Hey... S, sorry. I look a little different, fehfehfeh."

She wore the eyepatch and her hair cascaded about her shoulders. Her clothes were the fine ones from when he left her at the monastery, gemstones jingled and a bright cross hung from her neck. Below the waist, though—

"I ate a fruit. The thing that made those nuns the way they were. Sorry, I—I couldn't help it. I needed to help you. I needed to!"

The lower half of her body was the tail of a serpent.

"You don't have to say anything. I know. I know, I fucking know. But I don't regret it. I'm stronger now. I can move now. I can breathe now. I still only have one eye but that's not so bad. I'm a me that never existed. Could never have existed."

The thing you can never get back—but she never had it, only the image of what she could have had reflected in every other human being in the world.

"Now that I think about it, I suppose stalking you all the way here doesn't help my case none, hm? Fehfehfeh. Well you don't seem to mind it with that spider, so!"

"Viviendre," was all he could say.

"I don't care if we die, Jay. But let's die together."

Her scales gleamed as black as her hair. Her one eye shone with a simple reptilian slit for an iris. She grinned self-consciously, and as her dark lips parted two long fangs glinted.

"Fuck! Holy shit. There you fucking went."

Jay turned, and from the opposite direction they came: Perfidia at the front, jerking her arms around in rage, then the sullen Kedeshah and last Lalum.

"Oh look you went for a little rendezvous with your girlfriend." Perfidia stopped, looked over Viviendre, and shrugged. "Well, whatever. We'll use whoever we can get. You're not getting your relics back, though. And if you try anything funny at all—Kedeshah here will deal with you."

"Awesome, more trouble for me," Kedeshah muttered. Though her eyes were on something else—the bat. Jay thought about what Mammon said: Seven Prince corpses. Mammon had no way to enforce that price tag now, but what happened if Jay had to kill Kedeshah's mother? The bat would surely work on Kedeshah, too.

Perfidia didn't seem to notice the bat. Instead she checked her pocket watch. "Come on. Time's wasting! No more detours, got it? It should be obvious not to wander off on your own, but hurry up. I can yell at you while we walk."

She stomped off, then when nobody immediately followed she snapped her fingers. Kedeshah turned. Jay took a step—and looked at Lalum, then Viviendre. They were looking at each other. It was like an invisible line stood between him, and if he stepped again, he would break it. Somehow that line felt more powerful than even his bat.

The glare, from both sides, dripped murder.

"Come on," Jay said. "Both of you—behave." Then he walked through the line and it broke. Lalum and Viviendre followed, one on either side of him, and Jay wondered just how many people he would have to kill before it was all over.