The War in Heaven (4 page)

“Yes,” replied Molock, “what of them?”

“Well, sir, I’ve traveled about, conducted a study of all of the regional records, sort of on my own, checked them several times, and the numbers appear to be in error.”

“Come to the point Cordon,” said Molock, impatient to be away from this place.

“Sir, your numbers are very low. The actual number of human disappearances for this year alone is 539, not the fifty-seven you reported. It could even be more.”

After a few seconds of silence, Molock pushed Cordon into the corner of the empty anteroom. “You think too much. You have overstepped the bounds of your authority in doing this thing. How many others know of your findings?”

“No one, sir,” replied Cordon. “I brought it straight to you as is policy.”

Molock’s hand loosened. “And so it shall remain.” “I don’t understand,” replied Cordon.

“Apparently, you do not know the master as I do. Would you really like to inform him that so many humans are missing? I reported the names of those that could not be hidden, the high profile cases. In reality, there are 543 missing humans.”

“Then you’ve purposely deceived the master,” deduced Cordon. “With all due respect, Lord Molock, this is a dangerous game you are playing. What if your secret is discovered?”

Molock looked toward his lieutenant with a suspicious eye. “What are your intentions, Cordon? Do you intend to inform the master of this
discrepancy? Do you have aspirations of using these statistics to further your own cause? That would be a very bad career move on your part, a very bad move indeed.”

There was a long silence. It became very obvious to Molock that his lieutenant just didn’t get it. How could he have lived for so long, been so clever so as to uncover the carefully guarded secret of the missing humans, yet be so stupid when it came to matters political?

“Let me spell it out for you, Cordon, in terms that even you will understand. After millennia of planning, we are finally on the threshold of ascending to our rightful place in the universe. This issue of 543 missing humans is a minor matter, but the master will allow it to distract him. He may postpone or even call off the invasion of Heaven. We have waited too long already. I want my freedom; I want out of this place. The master speaks frequently of turning this place from a realm of confinement to a kingdom all his own. But I tell you, to me it is still a prison. I will have my freedom. Of what consequence are 543 humans, or even 5,430 for that matter? The master will find out eventually, but only after we have ascended to our rightful places. When he is once more the bright morning star, coequal with God, he will accept and understand why we have done this thing. In that day, we shall all be greatly rewarded. I shall sit at his right hand, and you will be there with me, if you will but learn to hold your peace. Do you now understand?”

Cordon nodded. “My allegiance is to you, my lord; it always has been. I shall do as you command.”

Molock smiled, placing his hand upon his lieutenant’s shoulder. “Very well then, here is what I would have you do. Find out what you can about the vanished humans. Interrogate whoever you need to, even the humans at the scene of the incidences. Surely they saw something. Torture them if you wish…offer them enticements if you feel it necessary to do so, but bring me answers. Be discrete about it, but let nothing stand in your way.

Share your findings with me alone. If we solve this mystery, well, all the better. If we do not, it is of little consequence; we are on our way to a better place, Cordon. What happens within this prison, this burned out cinder of a world, will be unimportant once we depart. The humans and those angels who will not join us can have it for all eternity for all I care. Let them see how they like it.”

The huge red sun was like a brightly burning mass of coal before him as Cordon walked across the Plains of Hegath. The slowly decomposing carcasses of a myriad of birds of prey littered the grounds around him. Only a few still pirouetted overhead and feasted upon the bodies of the humans around him. Indeed, there were many humans whose only torment now was the blazing sun and merciless heat. Merciless heat? Hardly. They didn’t realize how good they had it. The environment here was mild compared to the land to the west. There, 6,000 miles beyond the horizon, in the realm of Hades, the ground blazed at oven temperatures—nearly 300 degrees. The humans sentenced to that place didn’t need voracious tormenting birds to complete their suffering, the torrid environment was sufficient, reducing their bodies to desiccated husks.

Cordon had traveled there on occasion, and was always only too happy to return to the more temperate clime of Zurel or Termantus. Even the frigid realm of the Continent of Darkness was far preferable to that blazing inferno directly beneath the red sun.

His mind wandered back to this place. It would require some work before it was once more up to the master’s standards. What a mess. He picked up one of the fallen birds, or at least what was left of it. He held in his hand a decapitated body. He gazed around, trying to determine which head was once attached to this particular body. Well, it didn’t really matter.

What was certain was that the head had not been severed from the body from the outside by some sharp instrument. The neck had somehow been severed from within, as if something had exploded in its throat.

Cordon turned his attention to the pair of dark shredded wings that had been discovered by the demonic guard who had come to relieve Rathspith, wings that allegedly belonged to the missing minion. He examined them more carefully. The removal of these wings had not been facilitated with a sword or other straight blade. These wings had been chewed off at their roots. It made Cordon cringe. Demons and angels alike tended to be pretty sensitive when it came to their wings. He looked around nervously; nothing else out of the ordinary caught his eye.

What could have done this, and why?
Cordon thought.
To keep you from flying off as you were carried away? Carried away by a cloud?
He scanned the ground around the wings; there had been a fierce struggle. Then he saw tiny prints in the sand, myriads of them, overlapping, crisscrossing, but prints of what? They were not the prints of an insect. They were almost like miniature footprints of an angel or human; they had a clubbed appearance, but a hundred times smaller. They were around the severed wings and the altars as well.

Then he noticed larger prints—the footprints of large bipeds. He knelt down to examine them. They were those of a group of angels, demons, or humans. He pondered what he had seen in the twenty minutes he had been here. This was a crime scene. There were a lot of clues, but right now they didn’t quite fit together. Cordon really wasn’t cut out to be a detective. It wasn’t what he was made for. Under normal conditions, there was no need for a detective in Hell.

Cordon rose to his feet and proceeded toward the altar from which a human soul had been taken. It wasn’t a long walk, only fifty yards or so, but all along the way the eyes of many humans were upon him. What might they know? He would begin the questioning immediately around the altar
from which their compatriot in pain had been taken, and extend the search out from there if need be. He decided he would offer them a carrot rather than a stick. It was not that he had any real sympathy for humans, he did not; however, an enticement would require less effort on his part and would be more discrete, something that Lord Molock insisted upon.

As he stood before the now vacant altar, he immediately noticed the state of the manacles and chains. They had been sheered off in a haphazard way. What sort of tool cut metal in this fashion? There were tiny shards of metal scattered around the altar and even on other altars, a dozen feet away. And this wasn’t just any metal; no, it was of a sort forged only by the angels and those who had fallen. It possessed an almost supernatural strength, many times more resilient than natural steel. Yet here it was, sliced to ribbons like common scrap. Cordon picked up a wrist shackle nearly half an inch thick that had been roughly sliced in two.

Incredible
, thought Cordon. Even an angelic sword would have had a hard task cutting this metal.

He sat down upon the altar to ponder what he had seen here. He looked around, and a particular human, a female, apparently Hispanic by birth, caught his attention. For a human, she was rather attractive, even here in this place. She was in a perfect position to have witnessed what happened as her head was drawn back by the chain around her neck to the optimum angle. But had her mind been clear enough to have grasped what she saw? Would her testimony of the things that had transpired be reliable, or more akin to fantasy? Like many of the humans here, she was not being ravaged by the birds. Her dark eyes followed Cordon as he approached. They held such a glassy look about them. This was not a good sign.

“Please, can you take me away too? I want to go home,” she said in a quiet dry voice.

Cordon knelt down before her altar. His deep blue eyes met her dark, seemingly unfocused gaze. The poor woman’s neck chain forced her head
back to such a degree that she gazed perpetually at an upside-down landscape, and the altar of the missing human. Tom Carson occupied the very center of her world.

“Why do you think that I can help you?” asked Cordon, his voice soft and melodic.

The woman gazed into Cordon’s face. It was the face of an angel, smooth and without blemish, framed in flowing golden hair. He was not like so many of the demons of this place, not a hideous being with a gaunt wrinkled countenance.

“Aren’t you one of them? I mean … a deliverer? Yes, you must be. I knew you would come. I knew you wouldn’t abandon me. I’ve repented, really I have. Please, give me another chance, I beg you.”

The woman was rambling and confused—a product of who knew how many years of abuse on the grandest scale. Her mind might well be as chaotic and disoriented as her speech.

“What is your name, child?” asked Cordon.

“My name? I used to know my name. But I haven’t needed to know it in so long. All we have to know is how to feel pain. I can do that.”

Cordon waited patiently, he had time. Still, he questioned whether interrogating this wench was worth its investment.

Then her eyes seemed to come to focus upon Cordon. “My name is Julie.” A single tear welled up in her left eye. “You’re not going to help me, are you? You’re not one of them. Your face is kind of like theirs, but your wings are not like theirs at all. You’re not going to help me.”

“Who is it you speak of?” asked Cordon, caressing her cheek gently with his hand. His voice was soft and gentle, the voice of an angel. “After all, I can’t tell you if I am or am not one of them if I do not know who they are. Tell me about them, Julie. Tell me all that you have seen. I may yet be able to help you.”

“I don’t know where to begin, how to describe what I saw,” said Julie, in a trembling voice. “There weren’t any birds feeding on me right then. I was healing, the way we do, after they’ve finished with us.”

“Yes, go on,” urged Cordon. “Tell me all that you saw, and I will tell you if your words might hold within them your own deliverance.”

“Deliverance?” asked Julie.

“Deliverance,” confirmed Cordon. “No, Julie, I’m not one of them, but maybe I can help you nonetheless. I can take you from this place, Julie. Understand, your deliverance would not be permanent, you would need to return to your eternal torment, such is your destiny, but it doesn’t have to be here, and it doesn’t have to be now. The wheels of business can turn slowly here in Hell. I might review your files, decide that this is not an appropriate punishment for the likes of you. It is my right. In the process of transferring you elsewhere, you would be taken to a waiting cell while a new place was prepared for you, while your paperwork went through. It would be a small but quiet waiting cell, a dark place away from the heat and blazing sun, a dark corner, free of torment where you might hide for a time. And your paperwork, as it were, might become lost for a while in the shuffle. Such things happen from time to time. You might languish there for a week, perhaps more. One can never say. Then you would be taken to another place, perhaps one not so terrible as this. All you need do to get the ball rolling is give me answers. Talk to me, Julie. Tell me what you have seen.”

There was a momentary silence as Julie digested all the information.

“The bugs came first,” began Julie. “Lots of bugs, and they were so big. They came from the sky like locusts. Maybe they weren’t bugs, I don’t know. They attacked lots of people around me, but they left me alone. I don’t know why. One of them landed there on the corner of my altar and just stared at me. He had a small face—almost like a man’s face. I was so afraid, but he left me alone. He didn’t hurt me.”

Julie went on to tell Cordon about the carnage—the birds falling from the sky all around her, of the new cries of terror. Then she told of three dark angels who talked to the man in front of her. She wept as she spoke of his release. Oh, if it could only have been her. She had heard and understood some of what the angels had told him. “What’s plasma physics?” she asked.