No one saw the slight smile that crossed Adramalik’s face. Dis had grown boring of late, he thought. A war of some significance would certainly make it more interesting.
* * * * *
The steep ascent through the Keep to Agares’ tower took nearly a day. Adjacent to the Black Dome and protruding through the flesh-mantle, it was a many-spired and buttressed claw tearing at the clouds that tried so hard to conceal it. From the long, vertical windows that ran the height of the building the small party caught breathtaking glimpses of the city. When they arrived in its vaulted reception hall adjacent to the Prime Minister’s chambers, the secretary indicated a long row of bloodstone benches and then disappeared hurriedly into one of the smaller adjoining rooms.
None of them sat. Valefar paced while Sargatanas stood at a window, gazing down at the soaring thousand-foot-high Arch of Lost Wings. Eligor studied a dingy fresco of some long-forgotten battle that must have been applied millennia past.
When Agares finally did appear he seemed preoccupied and distant. He ushered the three demons into his opulent chamber of state and indicated some heavy chairs. A pallid greenish light streamed through the windows in broad, dusty shafts. Tall and gaunt, Agares had a brittle, bureaucratic air, and his movements were almost nervous. While Valefar had never said anything in favor of the Prime Minister, Eligor remembered, neither had he said anything too condemning.
“The Prince has asked me, in his stead, to discuss your situation. He is, at the moment, with his Consort and has asked not to be interrupted.” The Prime Minister’s clipped, scratchy voice seemed grave but oddly tentative to Eligor’s ears.
“We can wait,” said Valefar evenly. A frown had worked its way onto his features.
“I am afraid that will not be necessary, Prime Minister. The Prince has fully briefed me on his views regarding the situation on your border.” The Prime Minister folded his arms and Eligor could see the large gold fly-shaped ring of rank on his thin finger. It was clearly an intentional gesture.
Eligor saw Sargatanas tilt his head. Agares was neither looking at him nor addressing him but speaking instead to Valefar while adjusting his floor-length robes. An insult to be sure, Eligor thought. Had things degenerated this far between the Prince and his lord?
“Lord Astaroth is poised on our border,” Valefar said. “We are simply asking what the Prince’s reaction will be if we engage Astaroth.”
“You will not engage him on the field of battle and, therefore, there is no reaction to anticipate. We will assure you that he pulls his troops back. And we will attempt to revive his failing economy as well.”
“And if he strikes at us first? Should we not defend ourselves?” Valefar’s tone was sharper, edgier.
“He will not,” Agares said, finally turning to Sargatanas. “Lord Astaroth is desperate. You know the state of his wards. If he were to launch an attack he would lose everything, and he knows it. This is merely a posture to gain attention. Our attention, not yours.”
Sargatanas slowly rose. The hornlets that floated above his head were encircled by orbiting jets of flame. “You do know, Prime Minister, that I will do what I must to protect my wards. I have spent far too much energy building them into what they are to let them be jeopardized. I may not have been waging incessant war on my neighbors, but trust me, I remember how it is done.”
Agares glared at him.
“And you may tell Prince Beelzebub that he is always welcome to visit Adamantinarx.” The remark was a direct challenge; Eligor knew the Prince had never visited the city.
With that, Sargatanas drew his cloak in, turned, and headed for the door. Valefar and Eligor, taking their cue from their lord, dispensed with any formalities and, without another word to Agares, followed. What he was thinking Eligor could only guess, but when he walked past Agares he saw the Prime Minister’s jaw clenched and trembling slightly.
Sargatanas crossed the chamber, opened the thick, pressed-soul door, and burst into the hall beyond, nearly knocking down a diminutive passerby. Eligor, close behind, hastily sidestepped the pair, noticing that the figure, adjusting its white raiments, was female.
Sargatanas pulled back, steadying her in his huge, clawed hands, keeping her from falling.
She had apparently come from Beelzebub’s Rotunda; the hall led only there. Her face was set, eyes wide, nostrils flared, jaw tight. It was an expression of some fierce emotion barely contained. The skin of her face, normally white as bone, was mottled with slight bluish-gray spots, and she was somewhat disheveled.
And yet even so, Eligor thought, not since the Above had he seen anyone as beautiful as the startled creature that stood before them.
Valefar closed the heavy door behind them, breaking the silence.
“I… I did not see you,” she said after a moment. Her voice was calm. Her deep-set eyes were locked on Sargatanas’ face. Whatever emotion was at play, it was not leveled at him.
“Nor I you… Consort Lilith.” His voice was low.
“You know me?”
“I would hardly say that I know you.” Sargatanas suddenly seemed to realize that he was still grasping her and let go. “I saw you from afar at the opening of the Wargate. That was… nearly five thousand years ago.”
“And still, you remember me.”
Sargatanas looked down. Eligor saw something ineffable in his lord’s manner that he had never seen before. Only the barest wisps of purple flame wavered upon Sargatanas’ head.
“Yes.”
With that, Eligor thought, Lilith’s face seemed to brighten. She put her hand on Sargatanas’ arm for an instant and then pulled her white skin mantle tighter. She turned to Valefar and smiled.
“It is good to see you again, Valefar. It is Prime Minister, is it not?”
Valefar bowed and nodded. “It is, Consort. Thank you for remembering me. It has been a long time since I was in Dis.”
“Before you left, there were some who thought of you very highly, Val—Prime Minister. Your differences with the court were not universally rejected. But you were fortunate that they did not engender more anger than they did.”
“Of that I am aware.”
She clasped both of his hands tightly and Valefar looked pleased and then a little puzzled. She pivoted to greet Eligor.
“My name is Eligor,” he blurted. And when she laughed, it was so immeasurably unexpected and so pleasant a sound to his ears that he was sure that he betrayed his surprise. He had never heard anything close to genuine laughter in Hell. Sargatanas and Valefar looked nearly as startled as Eligor felt but recovered more quickly.
“I am sorry, Eligor. I meant no offense. It was just… Eligor?” She knit her brow and looked at him strangely.
Eligor, head tilted and mouth slightly agape, was focused on a small fly that had walked from beneath the fold of her skins and was slowly creeping up her thin neck. It was black and the closer he looked the more he was sure that he could see a face—a distorted angelic face—peering back at him.
A giant hand shot past him and plucked the fly from her neck, crushing it into greasy slime between clawed thumb and forefinger. Sargatanas wiped his fingers on the wall, leaving two short, dark streaks. The rasp of his claws echoed in the hall.
Lilith looked startled and then, almost immediately, her face returned to the expression Eligor had first seen. He read it, then read the emotion that had eluded him. It was hatred, veiled but deep, and he saw the weight of it descend like a heavy shadow across her perfect features.
“I must be going. Ardat Lili is waiting…. I told her… I must go now. Safe journey back, to you.”
She walked away, quickening her pace, hastening down the corridor without a backward glance. The three demons, shocked, saw her pale form recede into the shadows and vanish. They knew not to follow her; this was her realm, her prison, and no one knew the ways of it better than her.
They looked silently, solemnly, at one another as they began to move down the hall. A few paces away, Eligor thought h
e heard the door open, and when he looked back he saw Agares’ head poke out, craning around the doorjamb to examine the short, black smears upon the bricks.
When they were outside the Keep once again, the demons took wing without exchanging a word. Only when they had flown the breadth of Dis, landed, and approached its gate did they speak.
Valefar looked as downcast as Eligor felt, but Sargatanas seemed strangely in good spirits. Eligor shrugged when Valefar glanced at him; both demons had thought their lord would have been filled with anger over their aborted meeting.
Valefar shook his head, a wry look of incredulity written upon his face.
“What is it, my lord?” he said. “Does Hell’s firmament suddenly have a second star?”
“Not a second star, Valefar, but a new moon, pale and beautiful and luminous.” His eyes seemed fixed inward.
And Eligor realized what had happened. Lilith had had an effect far greater upon the Demon Major than either of his companions could have guessed. That distant look spoke volumes.
All three walked in their own astonished silences until they had cleared the Porta Viscera. They stopped just outside the gate.
“We should make all haste back to Adamantinarx,” Sargatanas said, narrowing his eyes as he looked out at the fires on the horizon. “I know Astaroth; he will not wait long to attack.”
“His desperation is like a gnawing beast at his throat,” said Valefar, momentarily distracted. Eligor saw that he was looking at something white in his palm. Before Eligor could get close enough to see it, Valefar had tucked whatever it was into his traveling skins.
Without a backward glance at Dis, the three ascended into the air and banked toward Adamantinarx.
Chapter Ten
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
The long journey back to Adamantinarx taxed Eligor more than he thought possible; he never thought the trip could be made so rapidly. If anything, the two Demons Major had held back because of him.
The approach to the city was obscure; an eruption to the west had created a vast front of dark ash clouds, and the city was just beginning to feel its arrival.
When Sargatanas, Valefar, and Eligor alighted on a rise outside the city, Adamantinarx was already on a war footing. Zoray had seen to that. Protocol dictated that they be met at the Eastern Gate by an escort contingent of Zoray’s Foot Guard, and the party could see them gathered beyond the wall.
These were the very best of the Household Guard, each stone-gray soldier bearing two curved lava-tempered swords that grew, instead of hands, from his thick wrists.
Zoray’s First Centurion of the Foot Guard stepped forward carrying Sargatanas’ robes of state and bladed scepter, and following him was an imposing line of standard-bearers, each carrying a stretched demon skin upon a pole. Some of the skins retained their owner’s bones, and they clacked together in the hot breeze.
When Sargatanas was before them, adjusting his robes, the assembled soldiers knelt in unison, fists to the ground.
“Are these what I think they are, centurion?” asked Sargatanas, silvered eyes sweeping across their number. The skins’ empty eye sockets gaped back at him.
“Yes, my lord,” he said, kneeling. “The Baron expressed his hope that this display of Astaroth’s spies would please you. It was Zoray’s idea to let him handle the problem. Apparently the skins were removed in ways that—”
“Faraii has been very busy, I can see. As has our venerable neighbor,” Sargatanas interrupted, smiling slightly to Valefar. “Thank the Baron for his diligence and good work, centurion, and have these displayed prominently at each gate.”
“Sire!”
As the centurion departed, three giant soul-beasts were brought up by their white-masked mahouts and the weary demons were helped into their howdahs. From his high vantage Eligor watched as the clay-colored throngs of foot-dragging souls, most of them work-gangs whipped aside by Scourges, crouched against the sides of buildings. The streets were, if anything, more crowded with the additional flow of legionaries streaming out to assembly points outside the city.
There were many more soldiers now in Adamantinarx than when the three demons had left. In his mind’s eye, Eligor could easily picture the raising of additional legions in the fertile lava-fields not so far south of the Acheron. Dispatched from the palace, dozens of decurions bearing Sargatanas’ conjuring glyphs, Eligor imagined, were coursing over the lava incunabula, carefully choosing the best sites. A fertile lava pit could easily yield a thousand legionaries, but finding one was a challenge; successful decurions were often rewarded with citations and sometimes promotion.
Long ago, Eligor, curious as always, had accompanied one such decorated decurion, had seen him expertly select just the right spot, where he cast the fiery glyph high into the ashy air and watched it plunge into the bubbling lava. Almost immediately, Eligor had marveled, the tips of halberds, the spikes of helmets, and the fingers of reaching hands broke the surface, parting the slowly swirling, incandescent flow of the lava. He had never forgotten the thrill of watching a battle-ready legion pull themselves from the very stuff of Hell, opening their eyes for the first time and lining up by the hundreds before him, steaming and tempering as they cooled. All this, Sargatanas had told him, was happening even as they entered the city.
The soul-beasts’ lumbering progress was steady through the congested streets. Carrying Sargatanas’ sigil-topped vertical banners before them, the Foot Guard and Scourges pushed through the milling souls, Overseers, municipal street-worm hunters, legionaries, and officials, widening a broad path for the three mounted demons.
Halfway to the center mount, Sargatanas had the other beasts draw up next to him and stop.
“Before we rest, I would visit the site of the ridiculous statue Beelzebub insisted be built. From here I can see that it is very nearly finished.”
And, indeed, when Eligor peered into the cloudy distance he, too, could see the dark head of a colossal statue. The three demons turned their beasts, following the redirected troops down a long, gradually descending street toward the work site.
DIS
Adramalik followed Prime Minister Agares along a narrow dim corridor, like the fleshy, dank inside of a worm, that sank sharply beneath the Prince’s Rotunda. They were nearly as powerful as each other in their own spheres, nearly as influential, and their mutual suspicions kept them silent as they walked, a not uncommon occurrence when the two were together. Adramalik distrusted the Prime Minister, and in the paranoid world of the Keep distrust kept demons alive.
The corridor terminated into the entrance to Lord Agaliarept’s Conjuring Chamber. Beelzebub had ordered them to attend him here, and, having no other choice, they dutifully agreed. If anything bound the two demons together, it was their sense of incomprehension and distaste for the Prince’s Conjuror General. Sequestered deep beneath his master’s Rotunda, he never left his circular chamber, never interacted with other demons until they visited him, and never spoke unless it was in the course of a conjuring. His was an obsessive world of ancient spells, muttered incantations, and bricks. In many ways, bricks were Agaliarept’s primary focus, for it was through the combined and varying energies of specially selected bricks—souls of particular darkness—and through their kinship with other bricks throughout Hell that his powers played out. Endless deliveries of bricks, sought and found across Hell, made their way to his chamber and found themselves stacked everywhere.
Agares and Adramalik entered the wide kettledrum-shaped chamber and were immediately confronted with the sight of a thousand soul-bricks floating through a shredded mist at various heights. They moved in ceaseless concentric rings, hovering over the concave floor, out from which Adramalik could see complex branching patterns of brickwork radiating. At the Conjuring Chamber’s center, barely visible for all of the circling bricks, was Lord Agaliarept, illuminated only by the chains of glyphs that hung in the air before him.
The bricks, some of which narrowed their eyes as Agares and Adram
alik passed, parted like a school of the Abyssal flyers they had seen many times in the Wastes. Agares pushed those that did not move quickly enough aside, and Adramalik heard them sigh or sputter or swear. As the pair moved downward they were careful to avoid the occasional gaps in the brick floor. Adramalik knew that the floor acted as a kind of abstract map of Hell itself and that the gaps, or the simple placement of brick into them, affected those that Beelzebub chose to influence.
As Adramalik and Agares drew near him, the Conjuror General swung toward them. In his spindly arms Adramalik saw a single brick, a mouth visible upon its folded surface.
He is so different from us, thought Adramalik, jarred as he always was when confronted with the Prince’s chief sorcerer. Agaliarept stood, an ill-defined, robed figure, countless arms jutting from his torso like the spines on an Ash-burrower. These wandlike arms were constantly moving, seemingly tasting the air or feeling the ever-drifting currents of events. What little head protruded was cowled deep within a collar of skin-enfolded eyes, each tiny orb a different color. Disconcertingly, Adramalik never knew if he was being watched or, more irritatingly, perhaps, whether he always was. He regarded Agaliarept as a dark tool of his master’s and little more; the distance both Beelzebub and the strange being had created to keep him obscure also served to keep him relatively unapproachable.
Agares and the Chancellor General took up a position yards away from Agaliarept but close enough to discern the ember-lit flies that circled him. Without a word, the Conjuror raised a dozen of his thin arms and began weaving ghostly glyphs from tissues of misty air, drawing toward him selected bricks from the vast floating catalog and gesturing them into specific holes in the floor. The single brick that he held began to whine piteously and glow from within, and when the dozen or so summoned bricks were firmly in place Agaliarept laid it gingerly into a space at his feet.
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