Hail Infernal World: The Hellfire Saga Book 1, page 1
Righteous props for Rick Ferguson
“Ferguson’s wildly original debut… plays fast and loose with literary convention in a self-aware whirlwind of epic fantasy tropes and absurdist humor… Ferguson’s biting wit, over-the-top plot, and relentless meta commentary will have readers laughing and groaning in equal measure.”
Publishers Weekly
"In this debut novel, a so-called royal hero reflects on his life as upheaval awaits on the horizon... The winning difference here is the author’s tone, which would make the foulmouthed, fourth wall–smashing Marvel character Deadpool proud... a cavalcade of gonzo exploits. Readers will likely return for the sequel."
Kirkus Reviews 2019 “Best Indie Books” Award
“Engagingly jam-packed with mythical and otherworldly encounters… Ferguson playfully upends fantasy and horror genre tropes to successful satirical effect… [The] protagonist is an appealingly unconventional fantasy hero, while side characters and villains offer a memorable menagerie.”
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Hail Infernal World
The Hellfire Saga, Book 1
Rick Ferguson
Phabulousity Press
Table of Contents
Free offer: Dungeon of Doom
Introduction
Part I. The Keep
1. Erich von Beck
2. Wheeler Comes Up
3. The Poor Penitent
4. The Widow Mabry
5. Beatrice
6. Ambush at Mabry Farm
7. The Two Wolves
8. The Hanged Man
9. First Parlay
10. The Orchard
11. Second Parlay
12. The Watcher
II. The Lictor of Mot
13. The Witches of Tartarus
14. On the Vestibule
15. Nekromanteion
16. The Loki’s Rune
17. The Ruin of God
18. The Catacombs of Limbo
19. Aegir’s Daughter
20. Tethys
21. On a Hellbound Train
22. Pride and Prejudice
23. The Gift of Lilith
24. The Frozen Plain
25. Promissum Est
III. The Lord of Flies
26. The Wheel of Fortune
27. At the Baphomet’s Arse
28. Asmodai and Lilith
29. The Well of Mnemosyne
30. The Arrival of Kings
31. Malevolus the First
32. The Veil of Longing
33. Malebolge
34. The Chariot
35. The Librarian of Fate
36. The Dragon’s Breath
37. Malacoda
38. The Ruby Gate
IV. The Autarch of the Games
39. Leialel
40. The Three of Pentacles
41. The Black Swan
42. Khesfu
43. The Desolation
44. The Dark Sisters
45. Arrival
46. The Spear of Judgement
47. Shepherd and Wolf
48. The Magus
49. The Revenant
50. The Great Mystery
51. White Wolf
52. The Oath
53. Guardian of Fate
Afterword
Appendix I: The Last Watcher
Appendix II: The Politics of Hell
A note on the translation
Join the Adventurer’s Guild
About the Author
Also by Rick Ferguson
Acknowledgments
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For Charlie
“Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.”
* * *
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
I, the great Satan of Hell, will tell you a story.
Whether the story has virtue or none, I leave for you to decide—though the story is no more virtuous for being true. Like all tales, this one was recorded in the Book of Fate before time began. I tell it now so that you will understand how I came to sit upon the Black Throne of Pandemonium and serve as El’s adversary.
The story begins in medias res: With a feverish and drunken man draped across a dying horse on a black day, passing through a dead land.
Part I
The Keep
* * *
Chapter 1
Erich von Beck
It was December 13 in the Year of Our Lord 1864. A gaunt specter of a man rode a silver Morgan along a muddy ruin of road some eighty-five miles northwest of Savannah, Georgia. The sky was gunmetal, glowering with black thunderheads. Beyond the pines, the horizon was a line of blistering red—a burning depot, or the flames of Hell. An icy rain tattooed the man’s greatcoat as his trembling fingers drew close its folds. From his encrusted nostrils, clouds of frosted breath were torn away by the wind. Hardee hat lost in the pursuit, he could only suffer as frozen needles pierced his exposed scalp. Four days without liquor had turned his skull into a cannonball. Within him, the fever burned.
This gaunt specter was Colonel Erich von Beck, erstwhile commanding officer of the Union Army’s 32nd Indiana Regiment, or what remained of it. The 32nd had been comprised mostly of German Catholic immigrants: Farmers from the Indiana and Ohio hinterlands, shopkeepers from the tenements of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, itinerant drunks from the saloons of Newport, Kentucky. Amongst the regiments of the Army of Georgia, the 32nd was renowned for its discipline under fire. At Rowletts Station, Pittsburgh Landing, Corinth, Stones River, Chattanooga, Peachtree Creek, and Atlanta, the Dutchmen had proved their mettle. Von Beck—or “Bourbon” Von Beck, as the regiment had dubbed him after witnessing his insatiable consumption of corn liquor—raged each time at the eye of the storm. From the moment he had first drilled this motley troop of German Forty-Eighters and rawboned farmhands at Camp Sullivan until the moment he abandoned them at Ebenezer Creek, Von Beck had hammered the 32nd into Prussian steel—and Prussian steel did not break.
In September, after Atlanta fell and Sherman’s winding snake of an army began its inexorable undulation to the sea, most of the regiment’s three-year enlisted had mustered out. Left only with green recruits and men whose prospects were so bleak that army life offered the safer bet, Von Beck had crawled out of a whisky bottle to lead the scraps of the 32nd onward under Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis, a murderous cocksucker who two years earlier had shot Bull Nelson dead at the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, four days after Ebenezer Creek, Von Beck was himself a murdering bastard. During those rare moments when the fever slept and his mind blundered briefly into lucidity, he prayed for death. As far as he could recall, Von Beck had prayed for death every day of his life.
* * *
Five days earlier, Von Beck had woken with a start in his tent, teeth rattling in his skull, brain engulfed in scorching blue flames. That was Friday. Summoning strength, he pulled deeply from the brown rotgut in his canteen and scrambled into his uniform. Then he trotted Trudy through the camp, saber raised as he rousted his exhausted men from their salt pork and chicory and back into column. For a feverish drunkard in his cups, he performed a passing imitation of a Union officer.
The regiment resumed its march toward Savannah. A day later, Von Beck was staring aghast at the red ruin of Valentine Schmidt’s skull, stove in like a rotting pumpkin. One white marble of the sergeant’s left eye dangled within a gory nest of bone shards and glistening brains.
After nearly four years of carnage, this last image was enough for Bourbon Von Beck. He snatched an ammunition belt from a shocked and pallid corporal and spurred Trudy into a furious gallop toward the towering treeline north of the creek. His shocked enlisted could do naught but watch their colonel hurtle away.
Just so, Von Beck’s latest measure of war was over. The subsequent days found him driving the Morgan over rolling red hills, through redolent pines, across burned wastelands of cotton and corn fields. He passed the black skeletons of beeches and white oaks. The stinking carcasses of slaughtered livestock. A hanged corpse twisting from a high branch. There was no sign of human habitation; the big plantation houses were blackened husks, the smaller farmhouses devoid of life. But for the cavalry on his trail, he might have been the last man on Earth. Should the troopers find him, they would drag him in irons back to Jeff Davis, who would doubtless eschew prison for the gallows. Denying General Reb the pleasure of hanging him was Von Beck’s only reason to live.
On the second day after Ebenezer, Von Beck woke inside a burned-out barn with his head swollen and the fever raging again. The fever was typhoid; he had seen enough of it in camp to recognize its grip. On the third day, with rose spots blooming on his skin and his body alternately frozen or aflame, the
Ahead, the banks of the muddy Ogeechee River bounded toward him. Over that sluggish brown ribbon loomed the blackened ruins of a railroad bridge—the same Central Railroad span that Colonel Hunt’s men had destroyed back in November to prevent the rebels from resupplying through Macon. Pursuit thundering behind him, Von Beck hunched over the saddle and hurled his horse at the skeletal bridge. Most likely, both horse and rider would plummet through the charred planks and into the channel below.
Onto the bridge. The rattling clop of hooves on wood. Protesting planks splintered and groaned. Then Trudy was across, leaping over a sprawling ash pile pierced by twisted black rails. Behind, the bridge’s wooden bones plunged with a rending crack into the sleeping water. The blue-clad posse drew up on the eastern bank, cursed and fired their revolvers. Von Beck wheeled his mount and galloped away.
That last scrape had used up the Morgan. For the balance of that day and the next, Trudy foamed at the mouth, scarcely able to lift cannon or hock. Her sunken flanks labored like a bellows. Somewhere around four o’clock, she stopped. Gripped by delirium, Von Beck scarcely noticed. With a shudder and groan, the horse collapsed. Von Beck rolled sprawling into the mud. There he lay for an age, lashed by frozen rain as his bloody nightmares ran wild under the darkening sky.
When at last the rattling sound of a wagon approached, Von Beck did not move. He might well have been dead—but he was not so fortunate. Sounds of a wagon dismount. A cough and a Halloo, friend! Von Beck pried open an eyelid. Before him loomed a ruddy pink hand.
“Tis either the hand of God or of the Devil himself reachin’ out to yer, friend,” came a voice. “Which it may be, I leave for you to decide.”
Chapter 2
Wheeler Comes Up
Four days earlier, a coil of Sherman’s blue snake composed of thirty thousand Union farm boys and shopkeepers descended from the rolling uplands southeast of Macon into the low, sandy flatland bordering the sea. Von Beck’s 32nd regiment served under the fourteen thousand-strong XIV Corps, one of two corps recently reorganized by Sherman into the Army of Georgia. Von Beck rode at the head of his column of three hundred, all that remained of the one thousand green Dutchmen who had marched south from Indianapolis in the summer of 1861. Placed under Jeff Davis’s woeful command, the brigadier had permitted the 32nd to retain their colors, a stars-and-bars with an acorn astride the blue field. The banner was a reminder of the summer of 1863, when, left unsupplied in the mountainous wilderness of middle Tennessee, the regiment had fended off starvation by foraging for acorns.
Over the marching soldiers’ heads towered stately pines seventy feet tall, silent sentinels bearing witness as Sherman cut the heart out of the Confederacy. Ahead of the column marched the Negro pioneers: Field hands toting shovels and rakes. Freed by the Union army, they had been pressed into service to clear obstacles and smooth the sandy roads for the wagons and rolling iron. Behind the column shuffled several thousands of Negro refugees: House workers, the old and lame, women with babes, all with no recourse but to trail behind the army and subsist off its scraps. In the first weeks after Atlanta, the relationship between the Negroes and the Yankees was symbiotic; the pioneers supplied labor, and the army fed and watered them and their kin. As winter approached, the Yankees had turned parasitic. Stores confiscated from the surrounding farms and plantations had run out. This close to the sea, the army encountered only fields of rice, which they lacked the tools to hull. The solemn pines yielded no bounty. Still, the pioneers labored while the long trail of their hungry kin followed. What choice did they have? Behind them lay slavery; ahead lay the unknown.
Shortly after midnight on December 8 and twenty-five miles from the sea, XIV Corps reached the swollen and icy barrier of Ebenezer Creek, nearly two hundred feet wide. Behind the soldiers followed the mass of refugees, which Von Beck pegged at near one thousand souls. Somewhere farther behind them, Joe Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry was coming up. Two days’ march ahead, General Hardee was dug in outside Savannah. Around the corps, the wind whispered of impending calamity.
While the corps waited on the bank of the Ebenezer for the bridging crews to arrive, Von Beck sat Trudy and listened to the sighing pines. The men had marched into the wee hours, and the creek environs were illumined only by the waxing gibbous moon and the campfires springing up along the western bank. In the distance echoed the dull thunder of Wheeler’s guns, shelling the rear of the Union column.
Von Beck had spent most of that day fueling his drunk, and now his monstrous headache was aggravated by the rattle of wagons bearing Cumberland pontoons. The Chess wagons followed, bearing two layers of twenty wooden planks each. Von Beck wished he might commandeer one of the six-horse teams to drag his headache behind him.
As Von Beck swayed in the saddle and struggled to light his pipe, Sergeant Valentine Schmidt approached bearing a small miracle: A cask of whiskey. Schmidt was a butcher’s apprentice from Toledo, Ohio. In July, Von Beck had appointed Schmidt to his staff after the dust-up at Ezra Chapel, where the sergeant braved double-canister fire to drag a wounded major back to the Union lines. Von Beck had recommended Schmidt for the Medal of Honor. In the eyes of the butcher’s apprentice, this action placed his colonel on a pedestal next to General Sherman and Saint Boniface. Von Beck enjoyed Schmidt’s company; the sergeant’s jolly prattle and constant amiability offered convenient cover for his own disagreeable nature.
Schmidt saluted, traded the procured cask for Von Beck’s unlit pipe. The sergeant lit the pipe and handed it back. At the sight of a mounted Jeff Davis watching the pontoons approach, Schmidt narrowed waggish black brows.
“Schweinhund.” Schmidt’s accent was low German. “I pray daily to the Blessed Virgin that Saint Peter might soon greet him.”
The sergeant’s frame was short and portly, face bristling with black whiskers, cheeks glowing like a pair of red apples. He passed a rolled smoke below his nostrils, fished in his breast pocket for another match as Von Beck dismounted. Von Beck handed Trudy’s reins to an aide, took a long pull from the cask. Not whiskey, but the harsh burn of popskull. Thank Christ, Von Beck thought; for all he cared, it might have been turpentine. He nodded to the engineers now probing the western bank for a spot to anchor the bridge.
“They won’t build it fast enough for him,” Von Beck said. “He’s too afeared of Wheeler.”
“Bah!” spat Schmidt. “Wheeler has nothing to throw at us but rocks.”
“They’re cornered. They’ll fight.”
