somewhere safe. She has no idea what she’s gotten into.”
Eliot understood her frustration. Fiona was taking all the responsibility for this onto
“This isn’t turning out like I thought,” Eliot told her. “But it’s still
She stared at him, confused, as if it were an alien concept that Eliot could take leadership and responsibility for something, but then she nodded.
They tromped down the switchbacks, catching up with the others.
“Hey, cool air is back.” Mr. Welmann turned as Eliot got close. “That’s nice.” He sweated profusely, which was weird, considering he was dead.
Eliot kept playing quietly as they walked. He didn’t look back.
It took a while to get to the bottom of the switchbacks. How long, Eliot wasn’t sure. Time felt “slippery,” as if no time had passed, but simultaneously, it felt like it took forever, too.
No one spoke, heeding Robert’s warning not to attract any undue attention.
That was a good thing, too. On a nearby mesa, a battle raged as hundreds of people screamed and hurled rocks at one another, clawing, biting, and punching. There weren’t two sides; it was everyone against everyone else. It was like they had all lost their minds.
The trail ended. Here the first simple suspension bridge arced to an adjacent plateau (one with no obvious war waging upon it). The bridge dangled a half mile above a raging river of molten stone.
Eliot felt his resolve evaporate.
Robert leaned over the cliff’s edge and spit. It sizzled into vapor the instant it was outside Eliot’s protective musical bubble. “Whoa,” he said, impressed.
But Robert, being Robert, stepped onto the bridge without another thought. . and Eliot had to keep up with him or his friend would fry. The really strange thing was that Amanda, who had always been scared, walked right onto the bridge after Eliot.
The heat was terrific and the smell of sulfur and copper overwhelming. Eliot held his breath and played faster and louder so they wouldn’t die from the fumes.
He didn’t want to look down, but he had to see where he set his feet.
Far below, orange and red liquid boiled and churned and popped. Drifting by were tiny dots of smoldering solid stone crust.
They passed the low midpoint of the bridge and started climbing back up. Eliot spied the top of the plateau again. There were people there-not the crazy fighting ones, but the working ones.
The damned formed a line, shuffled along with rocks, dragging, rolling, and shoving them along until they got to the edge. . where they pushed the stones into the river.
Then they turned back, presumably to get another rock.
And much to his relief, not one of them gave Eliot or the others a second glance; in fact, they seemed to be going out of their way
Some wore rags, but most wore nothing. Their nude bodies were gaunt and reddened from the heat. They were bruised and scraped, and they all had burns-mostly on their hands and bare feet, but a few of them were completely covered in burn scars.
It reminded Eliot of Perry Millhouse, whom he and Fiona had killed in their second heroic trial. Perry Millhouse, who Eliot knew had actually been the Titan Prometheus, long fallen from power.
That’s where they’d met Amanda. Perry had kidnapped her and used her as bait.
He glanced back at Amanda. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her cheeks flushed.
Funny, you’d think that someone who’d been the prisoner of a homicidal maniac whose preferred method of killing enemies was burning them alive would look a little
They trod up the rest of bridge and stepped onto the plateau. From here, two bridges led to other mesa tops-both, more or less, getting them closer to the plains of the Blasted Lands.
“Which way?” Fiona asked.
Eliot stood on his tiptoes for a better look, which was when he saw the top of the adjacent plateau.
A thousand people crowded its edge-pushing and shoving to get onto the suspension bridge-running across, screaming and snarling. . straight toward them.
61. An intriguing Chimera Heresy penned by Sildas Pious in the thirteen century pertains to Jormungandr (aka the World Serpent). In Norse mythology, the giant snake is prophesied to emerge from the ocean, poison the sky, and then battle Thor (the god and the monster slay each other). This event supposedly occurs at end of the world, Ragnarok. In the Pious’s legend, however, valkyries with flaming swords and Christian angels fight the beast, chain it, and bury it under the earth. One of the chain links was forged into the Gates of Perdition. Centuries later, when Jesus Christ is said to have arisen and opened the gates of Hell, Pious explains these were the Dolorous Gates, not the Gates of Perdition. He claims that on the day the Gates of Perdition are destroyed, the Beast will rise, and it will signal
Eliot didn’t understand why there were so many people-all angry at him.
What had he done?
Thousands crowded along the edge of the distant plateau. They raised fists, threw rocks, and hurled insults in a dozen languages.
Was it because he was alive? Or because he’d
Eliot faced the bridge connecting the two plateaus and turned up the gain on Lady Dawn to the halfway point.
Mr. Welmann’s eyes widened, and he reached to stop him.
Eliot couldn’t waste time talking. Mr. Welmann didn’t know what he was capable of. In fact, it’d be simple to stop them. If anything,
He blasted out a power chord.
The other bridge wobbled and the slack stretched taut from the onslaught of sound. The damned on the bridge held up their hands to protect themselves-but were flung off like rag dolls.
Eliot belted out three more chords, and that felt good.
The rusty iron of the bridge heated and twisted like taffy. . stretched apart and fell into the chasm.
Mr. Welmann clamped a hand on Eliot’s arm over and pulled it away from the guitar.
“Let go,” Eliot told him, annoyed. “I got rid-”
But Mr. Welmann wasn’t even looking at Eliot; instead, he scanned the horizons. He lifted a finger indicating silence, and cocked his head, straining to hear.
“No,” Mr. Welmann whispered. “Listen.”
The sound was, at first, barely audible over the rumble of the distant volcanoes. Eliot heard one cry, then a shout of discovery, and then a combined wail of rage that spread over the land.
From the cliffs they’d traversed, the damned poured out of caves and crannies. Thousands and thousands of torches flared to life upon the slopes. And from every plateau and mesa, the shouts of not thousands-but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of angry souls combined into a thunderous roar.
Eliot let the magnitude of his mistake sink in. He’d messed up in a big, big way.
“Nice,” Fiona muttered, shaking her head.
“What’d you want me to do?” he asked. “Let them get to us? Fight them all? Don’t you think that would’ve made a little noise, too?”
He started coughing, the air once again hot and reeking of metal. His hand drifted back to Lady Dawn’s
