'Did I?'
'Yes. Was that a mistake?'
'Why would it be a mistake?'
'You haven't actually
'Three. Well, two kills and one probable. At the very least, I left it a paraplegic.'
He wasn't lying. By then I knew the little clues — the averted gaze, a subtle deepening of the red scales around his neck — that were signs that he was toying with the truth.
No, Quitoon had killed an angel or two or three with his unforgiving fire. And nothing excited me more than the prospect of being taught how to kill as he killed. Demonation, he tried! For fully half a decade or more he attempted to teach me how to unleash my own fire. But the skill was beyond me, and the more I worked to force my body to do as I was instructing it, the more it gave up signs of petty mutiny. Instead of nurturing lethal fires in my body fluids and my belly, I got kidney stones and an ulcer. I passed the stones in a day and a half of blind agony some months later. The ulcer I still have to this day.
So much for learning the 'fire tricks.' My bloodline, Quitoon eventually decided, was so far from the purity of his own lineage that the methods he used were simply inapplicable to my own ancestry and anatomy. I remember to this day what he said when we finally agreed that trying to teach me his conflagratory genius was a lost cause.
'Never mind,' he said. 'You don't really need to cause fires anyway. You've always got me.'
'Always?'
'Didn't I just say so?'
'Yes.'
'Am I a liar?'
'No.' I lied.
'Then you'll always be safe, won't you? Because even if you can't be an incendiary yourself, all you have to do is call for me and I'll be at your side, cremating your enemies without even asking the reason.'
So, as I said, to Mainz. Even if the signposts had not been adequate to the task, it wouldn't have been difficult to find my way. Quitoon had left a trail of fires, which were as easy to follow as any map. I lost count of the villages he had destroyed, leaving not one habitable dwelling. He erased with the same thoroughness solitary farmhouses and churches.
As for the human populous, they either lay littered on the streets of the burned-out villages or, as was the case with many of the farmhouses, their occupants' fire-withered bodies lay in rows close to their blackened homes, their limbs drawn up to their bodies like charred fetuses. In two of the churches he had somehow managed to persuade the entire congregation of each to assemble outside the building, and then he had cremated them where they stood, so that the congregants fell side by side, some reaching out to those beside them — especially to the children — as the fire ate away all signs of who they had been.
This rampage had left the landscape I passed through deserted. If there had indeed been survivors, they had fled rather than linger to bury the dead.
Finally, the scenes of destruction became less regular, and I saw figures in the distance, and heard the sounds of marching feet. I hid behind the scorched remains of a stone wall, and watched as a battalion of uniformed men went by, led by their officer who rode on horseback, his face, unseen by his men, betraying a profound unease as he surveyed the smoky sky and smelt, as I smelt, the stench of cooked Humankind.
Once the anxious captain and his battalion of equally unhappy men had tromped by, I got up out of my hiding place, and returned to the road. There was a patch of forest ahead of me, but whoever had laid the road had decided against pushing through the dense interior. Instead the road skirted the trees in a leisurely curve. There was no sign of any further fireworks from Quitoon, the reason for which became apparent when the road brought me out the other side of the forest. The outskirts of Mainz lay just a few hundred yards ahead. There was nothing about the town that distinguished it from countless other towns Quitoon and I had seen. Certainly there was no hint that anything world-changing could be conceived there, much less be born. But, that said, the same was probably true of Bethlehem at a certain time.
I didn't quicken my step, but rather slowed it to a hobble as I entered the streets, so as to convince any citizen of Mainz who looked my way that the possessor of a face so traumatically unmade by fire was wounded everywhere about my body. Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. The God-fearing citizens of Mainz were no exception to the human rule. They called their children off the street as I scuttled by and summoned their dogs to drive me away from their thresholds, though I never met a dog so obedient to its master that it would obey an order to attack me.
And if, by chance, any of the citizens did get too close to me and my willful tails started to stir in my breeches, I had a gamut of little grotesqueries that invariably drove them off. I would let my mouth loll open like that of a man whose mind had drained away, the spittle running from it freely, while green-grey snot bubbled up from the scabby holes in the middle of my face where my nose had once been many, many fires ago.
Ha! That disgusted you a little, didn't it? I caught that little flicker of revulsion on your face. Now you're trying to cover it up, but you don't fool me with that oh-so-confident look, as though you knew every secret under Heaven. You don't fool me for an instant. I've been studying you for a long time, now. I can smell your breath, feel the weight of your fingers as they turn the pages. I know more than you'd ever think I know; and a lot more than you'd like me to know. I could give you a list of the masks you put on to cover up things you don't want me to see.
But trust me, I see them anyway. I see everything — the lies and, just as clearly, the nasty truth beneath.
Oh, while we're having this heart to heart, I should tell you that this is the last piece of my history I will be telling you. Why? Because after this there's no more to tell. After this, the story is in your hands, literally. You
Mister B. will be gone.
First, though, I have the secrets of the Gutenberg house to relate: secrets hidden behind several sturdy, commonplace wooden doors, and behind another door, this one made of light, a Secret greater than even Gutenberg could have invented.
I'm trusting you not to cheat me once I've given you the whole truth of things. You understand me? Though it's true that a demon born of lowly stock has no aptitude for great magical workings, time, solitude, and anger can teach even the least of creatures the power that simply living a long life can accrue, and the harm and hurt that such power can then cause. In Hell, the Doctors of Torment called those hurts the Five Agonies: Pain, Grief, Despair, Madness, and the Void.
Having survived the centuries I have sufficient power in me to introduce you to every one of the Five, should you deny me my promised flame.
The air between these words and your eyes has become dangerously unstable. And though when we began you seemed to genuinely imagine you had a place assigned to you in paradise, and that nothing of the Demonation could touch you, now your certainty has slipped away, and it's taken your dreams of innocence with it.
I can see in your eyes that there's no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they're history. You're in a darker place now. A place you chose, with me for company. Me, an insignificant demon with a seeping scar for a face and body that even I find nauseating to look at, who has killed your kind countless times, and would kill again, happily, if the opportunity were before me. Think about that. Is it any wonder that the soul you once had — the soul that was granted those moments of epiphany that made the degrading grind of your life easier to bear — has passed from sight? The other you, the innocent, would never have pressed on through stories of patricide and executions and wholesale slaughter. You would have waved it all away, determined to keep such depravities and debaucheries out of your head.
Your mind is a sewer, running with filth and hurt and anger. Its rancor is in your eyes, in your sweat, on your breath. You're as corrupted as I am, yet filled up with a secret pride that you possess such a limitless supply of wickedness.
