Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [81]
CHAPTER SEVEN
(I)
The pallid censer smoke thinned from a rising, abyssal breeze, but even this far out in the Quarter Favius thought he could hear drifts of screams from the immeasurable city too far away to see. It brought delight to his horrid heart: the relief of the visual monotony, because for decades or centuries, the Great Emptiness Quarter and the Reservoir pit itself existed only in foul, glittery blackness.
But now?
So beautiful . . .
A new color to the terrain had been introduced: bloodred.
The bottom of the Reservoir was almost covered—not very deep yet—but covered all the same by the great scarlet gush from the sixty-six-foot-wide Main Sub-Inlets. Favius crudely thought the inflow into the Reservoir could be likened to a toilet slowly filling, only the toilet was the Reservoir itself and its tank was the Gulf of Cagliostro untold miles away. The Pipeway was running at full capacity now, the enormous pumping stations back in the Mephistopolis—at the harbor of Rot-Port—running at full tilt. Favius looked out across the impossible red vista, which churned and foamed from the force of the inflow. This close to the southern Main Sub-Inlet, the violent gush was almost deafening.
It’s finally happening, he thought. Had he been capable of the act, he might’ve cried in sheer joy.
The Conscripts under his command watched the outer perimeters, high and low, with great vigilance, always on guard for signs of an anti-Luciferic attack. Platoons of Golems marched along the ramparts, their horrid clay faces blank, the sounds of their massive feet thundering on the basalt causeway. And all the while, the sub-inlet gushed and gushed.
Exactly how long it would take to fill the pit to its six-billion-gallon prerequisite, the Legionnaire could not reckon, as time itself was unreckonable. Instead of counting seconds, minutes, and hours, then, he reasoned he could count depth. By the looks of the progress now, most of the pit had been filled to a depth of at least one foot . . .
Only sixty-five more to go.
Next, he stared directly at the sub-inlet’s great Y-connector, and in the waterfall-like expulsion of noxious fluid he knew he could see solid objects as well: detritus from the sea, scraps of old boats long since sunken by nauseating nautical creatures or artillery from vessels of the Satanic Navy. Corpses, too, were rife amid the inflow, but closer scrutiny showed him living creatures as well, siphoned all the way from the Gulf to here, via the Pipeway. Next, a school of Slime-Sharks burst through, followed by several twenty-foot-wide Gulf Nettles, their milky orb-heads oscillating above even longer barbed tentacles. An excited breath caught in the sentry’s chest when, in an instant, an immature Gorge-Worm was siphoned through—nearly a quarter of a mile long. Thousands of Conscripts surrounding the pit cheered at this astonishing evidence. The massive, gilled parasite churned in the shallow Blood-water, sidewinding like a snake in a shallow pool.
It was spectacular to behold.
The inflow continued to roar. Above, Dentata-Vultures and Caco-Bats flew mad circles over the Reservoir, inflamed by the Bloodwater’s meaty stench. Every so often, they shot straight down into the stew to snatch a buoyant delicacy on which to feed. When one of Favius’s Squad Leader’s—a Conscript Third Class named Terrod—approached, his armored hand extended to point into the rising gush.
“Commander! Praise Satan for this blessing!”
“Glory be to he who was cast out,” Favius replied.
“My heart sings for this great success, Commander, but we are all mystified—”
“As to what?” Favius’s voice grated.
“As to the purpose of this wondrous undertaking.”
“Keep your spirit on your duty, Terrod. Compared to Lucifer and his Hierarchals, we are unworthy to even contemplate such things.”
“Yes, Commander!”
“We exist to receive our orders, which we obey to the