Miserere

A censer is what you swing incense with, and this one has a barrel in its body: the right button swings it and wakes the embers, the left one fires. What comes out is not gunpowder but consecrated matter, ground fine, and down here that is the one thing the damned cannot stand. The poem has no such weapon: the game builds it, because Hell has none at all and because what comes from above is the only authority with any currency in this place.

It does not kill, because down here there is nothing left to kill. Whoever takes the shot comes apart, vanishes fast and re-forms slowly, and what a lead bead buys you is twenty two seconds of clear road; anyone who stops to finish somebody off spends the beads and finds them all standing again.

The embers are the real account. Left alone they die on their own, and only the swing of the pendulum with your arm raised brings them back: firing means standing there swinging instead of gathering. It is found on the one dead man in the antehell who stopped. The line the game shows over him says that this one stopped and is the only one, that the rank has circled him forever and does not see him because they are not looking at anything, they are running; that the Miserere he is carrying fires consecrated matter, the one thing the damned cannot bear down here; that it does not kill, it scatters, and they re-form.