“Who is it?” the god called from the doorway. “Who do you see?”
“A girl,” Dill said. He glanced back through the window, but his neighbor had resumed writing in her book. “I can’t see her very clearly.”
“What size of room?”
“What? It’s…” He thought for a moment. “It looks expensive.”
Hasp grunted. “Then she has an overly inflated ego. Most of these poor bastards are lucky if they can grow hovels around themselves. But does she appear human to you?”
He nodded.
“Then she’s no threat. She probably got near us when we fought the crowds in the portal, or I might have been using her as a club. I can’t honestly remember. Close the shutters. She won’t cause us trouble.”
Dill returned to the doorway, but he didn’t close the shutters. The other room had no lanterns, no source of light. He couldn’t bring himself to shut the girl in the dark. “She can’t see the doorway from her desk,” he said. “It’s so dark in there.”
The armoured god shook his head. “This is Hell, Dill. Do someone a favor and they’ll just turn against you.” He flipped the orb, and snatched it out of the air. It glowed with renewed brilliance. Hasp set it down at the base of the doorway where the two chambers met.
Light burst from the device, and it began to swell, quickly increasing in size. The air around it shimmered and blurred like frosted glass. A bubble was forming. Dill backed away as the sphere grew larger than the doorway,
“Step inside,” Hasp said.
Dill hesitated. The space before him writhed with threads of light and hissing voices.
“Do it!” Hasp demanded.
The young angel stepped into the sphere. A feeling of terrible disorientation overcame him, and for a heartbeat he lost all sense of connection to the world around him. He was floating in a sea of light.
And then his feet struck solid ground with a resounding boom. The swarm of lights faded, revealing a spherical glass chamber as large as a planetarium. Opaque walls curved up over the young angel’s head, full of scintillations. Standing before him was the god, Hasp.
Hasp’s armour had changed. Instead of his old battered steel, he wore a suit of silvered metal. His grey wings and hair had turned as white as starlight, but his eyes held the same wry humor. “We’re standing inside a fragment of Iril,” he said, “the god of death and darkness himself.”
“Our father was shattered during the War Against Heaven. The Mesmerists constructed this tool from one of the pieces of him they managed to recover.” He grinned. “Then we stole it from them.”
Dill gazed up at the swarms of stars. “It’s…beautiful.”
“Here we can meet without setting foot in each other’s souls.” Hasp clasped Dill’s shoulder. “You must learn how to adapt and control your environment, and how to arm and armour yourself properly. Just look at your current armour…”
Dill’s tattered mail shirt hung like curtains of rust from his shoulders. It was an identical manifestation of the armoured garment he had worn since leaving Deepgate, the one he had died in.
“You’re only dressed in that sack of rust because you remember wearing it when you died. So change it. Visualize yourself in something stronger and finer.”
The young angel envisioned himself wearing a suit of silvered plate, like Hasp’s own armour. Nothing happened; he was still standing there in his old rusty mail.
Hasp grunted. “So far so bad. Try on that suit behind you.”
Dill turned. A few feet behind him stood a wooden mannequin dressed in shining new armour. “You made this?”
“There’s enough power left in this sphere to create armour and weapons for ten thousand archons. But it’s only one of two pieces of the shattered god we possess, and we daren’t drain it too much.” Hasp helped Dill into the suit, strapping the light plates together. “The other fragment is all that keeps the Mesmerists from storming the First Citadel.”
The suit felt as light as silk, and yet the hardened plates were as tough as steel. Dill flexed his wings, then lifted his arms; the metal gleamed under the swirling lights.
“Now a sword,” Hasp said.
Dill turned again, expecting to see a weapon beside the now-empty mannequin, but he was disappointed.
“Create it yourself,” Hasp said. “Simply will it to appear in your hand.”
Dill concentrated. He felt the grip swell inside his closed fist and watched the air solidify into a long heavy blade. A gold guard extended over his hand. And suddenly he was holding his old sword again, the very weapon he had inherited from his forebears.
“Hmm…” The god frowned. “This blade is too fragile and unwieldy. Try again.”
And so Dill focused his thoughts on the weapon again. The steel flowed like liquid silver, the blade shortened, and the guard retracted to form a simple crosspiece.
“Much better,” Hasp said. “Now defend yourself. Show me what you can do.” A blade suddenly appeared in the god’s hand and he lunged at Dill.
Dill had never been combat-trained, and his inexperience was soon evident. Hasp disarmed him in a heartbeat. Dill’s newly manifested sword clattered across the glass floor.
“This is not good, lad,” the god said darkly. “Ulcis’s priests have been woefully lax in their duties. They ought to have shown you how to take care of yourself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Pick up your sword. We have a lot of work to do.”
Training lasted until long after Dill was exhausted. And then it began again. Hasp showed him how to shrug off his weariness by force of will alone. Fatigue meant nothing in Hell, where the body was simply a manifestation of the soul.
“Souls,” Hasp explained, “do not tire.”
Days seemed to pass within that sphere, but the shimmering lights kept the same level of brilliance. Dill thought about nothing except the next attack and how to foil it. And Hasp attacked him relentlessly. The battle- archon did not waver or spare his opponent once. When Dill made a mistake, he suffered for it.
“Souls,” Hasp said, “do not feel pain.”
Dill winced up at him from the floor of the sphere, and clutched two bleeding fingers in his other fist. This soul was in a lot of pain.
“Bah!” Hasp gestured with his sword. “It’s all in your mind, lad, and yet your mind isn’t strong enough to let go of it. If I plunged this weapon through your heart right now, you’d die.” He frowned. “If we can’t detach you from this fiction with which you’ve surrounded yourself, then we can’t take you back to the First Citadel. Do you want to be trapped here? No? Then stop whining about spilled blood that does not exist and
Dill rose, but the blood on his hands still felt warm and slick.
Time passed in endless dazzling coruscations: weeks or years, he could not say. Dill parried and lunged, made feints, ducked and wove around the god’s blade, until Hasp was suddenly grinning.
“Drop the sword,” Hasp said.
The young angel tried to comply, but he couldn’t. The weapon’s hilt had fused with his hand. Welds had appeared where his fingers touched the metal. In panic, he flailed his arm to separate himself from the sword. It would not budge.
“Good,” Hasp said. “Now it’s time to rest.”
“Do souls need rest?”
“Ha! Perhaps I should have said ponder. You need to remember who you were before you stepped inside this sphere. And then we’ll begin again.”
Blood now soaked the ground between the Soul Middens; it flowed from broken masonry and woodwork and
