“How—?”
“One and a quarter billion! Does that fucking satisfy you? Go and count them if you don’t believe me; I don’t fucking care. You are beginning to bore me. Oh, I didn’t mention: it won’t all be fun for you. With each one you kill you’ll take on a little of their pain. The more you kill the more pain you’ll experience. Eventually the pain of the increasing hunger and the pain you’ve absorbed from those you’ve released should balance out. You might lose your mind again but we’ll deal with that when it happens. I expect I’ll have thought of something even more condign for you by then.” The king of the demons gripped the red-glowing ends of the mountainous seat’s arms and came roaring forward at her, making her beat back through the air. “Now do fuck off, and start killing.” It waved one vast hand at her.
She felt herself swallow, a sickness clutched at her belly and a terrible, aching need to fly away seemed to tug at her wings and the bundled muscles in her chest, but she held where she was, beating steadily.
“Prin!” she shouted. “What happened to Prin?”
“Who? What?”
“Prin! My mate, the one I came in here with! Tell me and I’ll do what you want!”
“You’ll do what I want whether you fucking like it or not, you dumb, wormed cunt!”
“Tell me!”
“Kill me a thousand and I’ll think about it.”
“Promise!” she wailed.
The enormous demon laughed again. “‘Promise’? You’re in
She beat back, fell away, swooped and zoomed, glancing fearfully back as the great demon sat back in his great glowing chair, wreathes of smoke from his recent movements pulsing through the air around him.
She killed her first that evening, as the already dull light deepened to a ruddy, sunless gloaming. It was a young female, caught on the rusted spikes of a
Chay landed, listened to the female trying to speak, but got no sense from the piteous creature. She hesitated, looking around, in case anything appearred familiar, but it was not the same hillside she and Prin had sheltered on.
She was crying as she folded her great dark wings round the female, trying not to tear the thin leathery membranes of her wings on the cruel spikes. Chay felt the female’s being move out of her broken, twisted body and into her own before dissipating entirely, just evaporating away like a little cloud on a warm, dry day.
She felt a different kind of hunger, and ate some of the body, tearing through the tough hide to get into the juicy buttock muscles.
As she flew back to her distant roost, she wondered how much pain would accrue as a result of what she had done.
She hung there, digesting.
Later, she was left with a sore tooth.
She had become an angel in Hell.
Twenty-one
When the adults were away sometimes they could play in the places where the adults played. She had a group of friends who were all about the same age and they played together a lot when they weren’t being taught in the little school room on the top floor of the big estate house.
The others could still be cruel to her now and again, when they wanted to get back at her for something or when she had won something and they wanted to remind her that it didn’t matter if she came first in a race or got better marks then anybody else in an exam, because in the end she was just a servant really — in fact worse than a servant because at least a servant could just leave if they wanted to but she couldn’t. She was like a mount or a hunt chaser or a game-hound; she belonged to the estate, she belonged to Veppers.
Lededje had learned not to pretend that she didn’t care when the other children were like this. It had taken her a while to work out how best to handle this sort of teasing. Crying a lot and running to her mother made it too easy for the children to use her like a toy when they were bored; press Lededje’s button and off she’d race. So that was no good. Not reacting at all, going all stony-faced; that just made them say even worse things until it ended in a fight and she — it always seemed to be her fault — got them all punished. So that didn’t work either. The best thing to do was to cry a little and let them know that she’d been hurt, then just get on with things.
Sometimes when she did this she got the impression some of the other children thought she hadn’t seemed hurt enough, and they tried to hurt her some more, but then she would just tell them they were being immature. Leave it behind; move on; learn and progress. They were just about at the age when this sort of adult talk could be successfully used.
They played in the places they were supposed to play, places where nobody had said they couldn’t, and — best of all — in the places where they definitely weren’t supposed to play at all.
Of the latter, her favourite had always been the water maze: the complex of shallow channels, ponds and lakes where the adults played with big toy battleships and where they watched the miniature sea battles take place from all the big towers and soaring arches and canals in the air.
She had been allowed to watch one of the battles once with her mother, though it had taken a lot of nagging and her mother had had to ask it as a big favour and even then it wasn’t one of the really important battles with lots of rich and famous people watching, it was just a sort of trying out and testing sort of battle that people from the estate could watch sometimes if they didn’t have other duties. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed it because she didn’t like heights; she kept her eyes closed most of the time, her hands grasping the sides of the little flat-bottomed boat they rode around in on the canals in the sky.
Lededje had liked it at first but eventually got bored. She thought it would be more interesting if she could be inside one of the battleships herself rather than have to watch other people working them. Her mother, still without opening her eyes, told her that was a stupid idea. For one thing she was too small. And anyway, only men were stupid and aggressive enough to want to get inside those floating death-traps and be shot at with live ammunition for the entertainment of the spoiled rich.
In the distance, Lededje had seen one of the old dome plinths, busy with people. Teams of workmen with cranes and big vehicles full of electronics were dismantling all the sat domes, two dozen of which had surrounded the mansion house in a ring a couple of kilometres across for as long as she could remember. The first time she had run away, it had been at the foot of one of those stone-clad plinths she had been caught. That had been years and years and years ago; maybe half her life. Now the gleaming white satellite domes were useless and outdated and being dismantled.
Right there and then, for the first time, she felt herself growing old.
They had to wait to be allowed to dock at the little pier on one of the towers, then go down in the coffin-like elevator and through the tunnel that led safely away from the lake and the towers and the channels and the ships. You could hear the guns firing even from the house.
She and the other children — well, most of them; two were too frightened — used to sneak under the fence that went all the way round the water maze. They kept well away from the miniature docks where the ships were maintained and repaired. The docks were usually only busy for the few days around one of the big proper battles, but even on the quietest days there would be one or two grown-ups working there.
Misty days were best. It all looked very strange and mysterious and bigger somehow, as though the toy landscape of the channels and little lakes had grown to be the right bigness for full-size battleships. She had an old foametal plank for her ship; the others used various bits and pieces of plastic, foametal and wood as theirs. They
