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There is a monastery, it’s said, where they have caught the Devil. Where one can see him, for a fee. Where for a greater fee one can negotiate other prizes, from a fleeting touch to a chunk of flesh.
Arthur approaches on a bitter midnight. He has marched for days through alpine peaks whose sun-bright faces blind in daytime, which become steely in the nighttime moonlight, like jagged knives. (Motorcars are too feeble for this terrain. Horses will not approach.) He has borne the cold invading his clothes like some kind of questing creature that turns his hands and feet to lead. Knowledge of this place is… esoteric, and Arthur moves in the right circles, but such circles are not notoriously reliable. He is thinking himself mad for the hundredth time when a great ruin of stone and torches appears in the distance, lonely in the snow.
Despite its disrepair, the monastery seems untouched by the Great War. The world has had worse concerns than the Devil lately, Arthur thinks — even now, after the armistice.
A wizened monk opens the small door at the end of a winding path. Arthur steps into an antechamber that is barely warmer than the outside, but even barely is a godsend.
“It is late,” the man says in a language Arthur speaks only haltingly.
“I have important business,” he says in the same language, or hopes he does. “I wish to see the Devil.”
The monk gives him a brief, appraising look, and negotiations begin.
“I wouldn’t think monks need so much money,” Arthur says as he hands over the fee of gold they settled on.
“This land is hostile. Everything we have must come from somewhere else.”
“And the others, who pay like I do — what do they hope to buy?”
The monk’s appraising look returns. He gazes at Arthur, implacable as a sphinx.
“Some see the existence of this beast as an affirmation of the presence of God, and we are happy to reassure them. Some wish to serve or supplant it, and those we hope to show the wages of sin. And some wish to revel in having power over a being of great standing. Those… well, their gold spends as well, and sympathy for the Devil would be misguided.” He blinks as the torches flicker, a moment of silence hanging heavy in the cold. “Which are you?”
“A scholar of hermetic knowledge,” Arthur says.
The monk only nods.
Arthur’s scholarship has taught him that most men like the monk are charlatans. They make up stories about ancient traditions that never existed, string believers along with impossible feats.
“How does a group of monks subdue the Devil?” he asks, following in the man’s wake.
“We did not subdue it. We received it — as if in a vision, from an angel of God.” They are headed deeper into the keep; the air grows musty and stale. “That was a little over four years ago. The angel set the necessary protections for restraint.”
“Why would an angel pick this place?”
“Why wouldn’t one? The will of God is ineffable.” The monk gives a shrug as they approach the end of a dank stone hallway and stand before an iron door. “And here we are.”
A heavy key turns a heavier tumbler, and the monk heaves open the barrier. Arthur steps forward, letting the torch he’s been given pierce the blackness. Its light reflects in the depths of a crimson eye.
Arthur’s breathing quickens. His fist tightens, shaking, around the torch. He brings it closer and illuminates a scarred face beneath dark hair, a collar locked around what appears to be a man’s neck, and a set of manacles pulling his wrists up painfully behind him. The man’s chest is bare and wan in the bitter cold, and it’s marked more deeply than his face is: the jagged lines of old wounds mixed with the raw and bloody mess of new ones, layered on his flesh. His face is a little below level with Arthur’s; he’s on a raised stone platform, on his knees.
The man — is he a man? The form, the size, are human. Those eyes are anything but. They meet Arthur’s own for a fleeting second, and they speak of millennia. A chill deeper than the wind passes briefly over Arthur’s heart.
They speak of pain.
The monk appears unfazed by any of it. “You have an hour. Call for me when you finish. I will not interfere.”
“Wait.” He expected more fanfare. Warnings. Rituals. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll… I don’t know, get tricked into helping him? Make a deal? Let him out?”
The response is a laugh — not unkind, only the sort that responds to a foolish question. “Make whatever deal you like with it. If you can get past the chains, let it out. Heaven binds its power and its person at the cell threshold. If harm comes to you in the process, of course, consider it on your own head.”
The door closes behind Arthur, leaving him, the Devil, and the dark.
“Er…” I don’t know what I expected, I suppose, Arthur thinks, lifting his torch.
Pausing on the thought momentarily, he concludes that what he expected was rage, the snarl of a wild beast. Or perhaps a suave gentleman, unaffected by captivity. He did not expect the Devil to be hurt.
He doesn’t know it is the Devil precisely, of course… but “devil” is an imprecise word. Arthur is certain he is looking at something much older than it appears. The names men put to such things are only approximations, gestures at concepts they can’t fully understand. True study has put him above such short-sighted certainty.
But spirit, rogue angel, Great Deceiver… whatever he is, he’s no longer looking up. His head hangs as if he has no more strength. His body shrinks back and Arthur realizes that he is trembling steadily, whether with fear or cold—
“The real thing never lives up to expectations, does it?”
He speaks, and Arthur flinches so violently he nearly drops the torch.
Like those red eyes, the voice speaks of pain, though more directly: it has the raggedness of someone who has used their throat too much to scream. But the words are casually sardonic. Arthur wonders if the thing — the man, the spirit, the creature, God knows what — can read minds. He takes a breath and steels himself, trying to summon an introduction, but the Devil speaks first.
“If I haven’t disappointed you too badly, I’d rather you get to the point, literal or otherwise.”
He’s speaking English, Arthur registers. An accent that’s utterly unplaceable.
“What — what do you call yourself?” Arthur asks.
“I am nameless.”
True names have power, Arthur thinks. He shouldn’t be surprised to not receive one.
“Are you… who the monks say you are? Should I call you the Devil? Lucifer? Old Scratch?”
The torchlight glints off bared, pointed teeth.
“Lucifer will do.”
“Then, Lucifer, I’m… I’m Arthur. A scholar of… well, a scholar. I’m pleased to meet you.” The impulse to shake hands fizzles, snuffed by the impulse to lift the torch and examine Lucifer’s fingers in search of claws, snuffed by lingering fear of whatever he is even in chains.
“Other people’s pleasure has rarely helped me.”
Arthur has a list of questions painstakingly prepared over his trek. He opens his mouth to ask about theology, cosmology, the nature of morality.
“Did other visitors do all… this to you?” he finds himself asking instead. “Was it the monks?”
An otherworldly being should be treated with reverence. But the scars on Lucifer don’t even look like the result of ritual. They are the torn edges of a child’s drawing ripped up in a fit of pique. His body hasn’t stopped shaking, and as Arthur’s eyes adjust to the light he sees that the man’s hands are clenched tight in his cuffs. Four years ago, Arthur thinks. Four years of stillness and hurt and piercing cold.
Lucifer’s baleful eyes lift slightly. “Is that the question of a scholar?”
“It’s… it’s…” Arthur stumbles to explain something he can’t even spell out to himself. “I want to know what sort of people I’m around.”
There is a sigh. A moment of hesitation, as if Lucifer is deciding whether to deign to speak to him.
“Some of it was my captors. Some of it was those who pay them. And some is older than the history of your kind.”
A hundred questions spring from that final statement. Queries on the conflict between good and evil, on the mysteries of gnosis. Arthur asks none of them. His gaze catches on Lucifer’s bare arm, and he sees a deep groove of raw scab, like the drained banks of a river of rotten meat.
“A woman wanted a rosary made with my sinew,” Lucifer murmurs. “She believed it would ward off evil. I pitied her.”
The gash flows upward to the shoulder. Its scabbed line disappears into a sea of bruises, the purple-black of noxious mold.
“One of the monks took out his fury on me for the state of the world. I loathed him.”
Arthur follows the bruising, circling behind Lucifer’s back. It fades out across… if Arthur’s eyes don’t deceive him, wings. But not the lofty, majestic spans he would expect on a fallen angel. They are small and ragged things, folded tightly against Lucifer’s body in the cold. Beneath them are two blunt, scarred, parallel ridges that remind him of the knife-mountains outside. Arthur has seen surgeries: clumsy repairs on bodies broken carelessly in the great industrial machinery of death that the war created, faces shattered and limbs shredded by shrapnel and machine-gun fire. But there is something hideously intimate about those ridges, about the whorls of twisted skin atop anatomy no human has ever possessed.
“My brethren broke my wings and sawed them off for my transgressions in Eden. Cast me bleeding to the pit. I…”
He should ask — was sin this creature’s doing? Is Lucifer misunderstood, as some occult sorts insist?
“You what?”
Lucifer’s labored breathing pauses.
“I loved them. A part of me does even now.”
He shivers, and Arthur suspects it is not only the cold.
Surely it’s all lies, Arthur reminds himself. The Devil is rather known for those. He’s playing on the weakness of the human heart to tempt Arthur to free him — the wounds will disappear the moment the chains come off. He must stick to his plan. Consider how jealous this meeting will make his rivals. Consider how insightful it will make his work. Consider how embarrassing it would be to admit he had an arcane being inches from him, and all he asked about was—
“Go,” Lucifer snaps.
And suddenly, Lucifer’s voice commands authority. Arthur flinches and draws back, taking a minute to muster:
“Why?”
Even as he says it, though, he senses something wrong. The air is lighter, its mustiness gone. A ringing has begun in his ears, rising in volume like the howl of an incoming train. Arthur ducks backwards with a speed he didn’t realize that he had. He retreats through the door breathless. But before he heads back down the hall — or calls for the safety of the monk — he stops.
A soft light is emanating from the cracks around the iron door. The ringing has calmed, taking on a peaceful, delicate bell-like tone. And through it Lucifer’s voice speaks in the tongue of the monks, a whisper.
“Brother?” he asks.
The response is as clear and calming as the bell-tone, entirely unintelligible.
“No,” Lucifer snarls back at it. “Speak the language of the people you condemned me to. Then say what you want and leave.”
The bell and the light falter and become sickly momentarily, as if disgruntled.
“I haven’t come to speak," the voice says. “I’ve come to let you go.”
There is a long silence — one that doesn’t feel long, because Arthur could listen to this sound and stare at this light forever. Heaven is an imprecise word too, but if this is what it feels like, lounging on a cloud in eternity suddenly sounds less dull. How, he wonders, could someone stand being born into a feeling like this and losing it? How bereft must Lucifer have been in silence for the first time?
However Lucifer feels, he doesn’t mention it.
“You never even told me why you captured me.”
The words hold more weariness than anger, but the light falters again anyway. The bell-tone quickens, agitated. But the other voice — brother — answers slowly.
“It was the war.”
Lucifer… laughs. Harsh and bitter and rasping with pain, smashing against the bliss of the heavenly bell.
“You have to understand, don’t you?” the other voice pleads. “We looked down at what we’d built one day and saw death on a scale incomprehensible to humans. Destruction beyond anything that they’d ever produced. We thought even no ordinary demon could have engineered it. Only…”
“You could have simply asked me.”
“You — you could have simply lied.” The light grows colder, the bell more somber. “It was safer to get you out of the way and… just see how things shook out.”
“And how did they? It’s hard to follow events chained up in a cell.”
“The war… persisted. But once a plan is set in motion, well… it didn’t mean you hadn’t been involved. Or that you couldn’t make it worse if we let you out again. We’re still paying for your choice in Eden, you know.” It’s more plaintive than any being of light should be. “But now it’s over. Humans are… stable, we think. Stable enough.”
There’s another silence, and Arthur resists the urge to peek through the door’s gaps. Would he be stricken down for it? Blinded? Would it be worth it anyway?
“Michael, you left me to years. Of torture.” Lucifer’s voice rises. “Was a single life saved because of it? Was the world made any better for my suffering? And you didn’t even trust me enough to visit and ask—”
“I thought of it a thousand times!”
The ringing stops. That divine peace evaporates.
“I didn’t ask at first because I didn’t want to know if you’d done it. And then I didn’t ask because I couldn’t face you if it had been a mistake. And now I’m still not asking. I’m not asking anything. All I can say is that… I meant for captivity to be kinder than this.”
The angel’s voice sounds desolate. Arthur wonders if he too has taken in the missing flesh, the scars, the bruises — the evidence of years of brutality worked on Lucifer’s flesh. Perhaps not everyone in the kingdom of heaven considers sympathy for the Devil a mistake.
But Lucifer lets the not-quite-apology pass. His cuffs rattle and he hisses in pain, his voice holding an edge like rusted steel.
“I’ve known you for eternity,” he says. “I never realized you thought so little of me.”
“I don’t know what I think of you. I haven’t known for centuries,” Michael says. “But I thought too much of you, once. And I’m not strong enough to bear that loss again.”
There is a peal of thunder and a crack of iron. Chains clatter to the floor. And when Arthur opens the door cautiously, Lucifer is gone — only the dark remains.