“Lilith, until you came to Adamantinarx, this… this place was my heart.”
She could not avoid looking into the glowing hole in his chest as he spoke and realized for the first time what it must mean for there to be nothing within. The loss must have been nearly impossible to bear.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, wiping away the tears that again welled from her eyes. “Your being here fills both places,” he said, indicating the room and then his chest.
Lilith smiled through the curtain of tears and realized that she, too, felt a sense of completion. She swung her legs off the bier and stood shakily.
“Now,” she said, pulling him slowly at first toward the vestibule, “tell me again, from the beginning. About Heaven.”
THE FIELDS OF ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
The hot wind, hotter than any desert wind he had ever known, blew across the plain, burning his unprotected face, unnoticed. Standing upon a hillock, his back to the Acheron and the city beyond, Hannibal surveyed the massed troops—his troops—and felt drained. It seemed hopeless. The exuberance that had been building steadily within him as he had assembled his army was dissipating just as quickly as he began to realize what it would take to get them battle ready.
What was I thinking? Adamantinarx is not Qart Hadasht; its buildings are still made of souls! And I cannot have the pick of the finest mercenaries money can buy. I have these instead.
Twenty thousand souls stood upon the field’s gray skin, the fruits of his recruitment, an army that even the term “ragtag” would elevate. Hannibal had never anticipated the problems that would arise in trying to form units when no two souls shared any apparent strengths. He had been forced to make his officers break down individuals into categories. Those whose arms were dominant or even possessed two were either handed weapons or, more often, adapted to bear them by demons specially attached to Hannibal’s retinue by Sargatanas. But those adaptations were rarely completely successful.
Mago and he had been lucky in finding souls with any significant military background, and those they appointed as officers. Upon his order, he watched them begin to train the souls, and shortly he turned away from the scene, chin down in disgust. It really was hopeless. But other challenges had seemed hopeless before. And he had prevailed. He turned back, and this time his keen eyes studied the figures below, appraising and quantifying them. Slowly, as he shifted his gaze from cohorts of swordsmen to spear-bearers to mace-wielders, patterns of movement began to appear and he saw the glimmer of possibility emerge. It would be hard, but he would not give up and melt away into the crowds of the city he had sworn allegiance to. He would see it through if for nothing less than his oath to Sargatanas. Or wind up a brick, trying.
Chapter Twenty
DIS
Algol rose and set seven times before Adramalik was summoned by his Prince to join him in Moloch’s tower. He welcomed the climb to the Keep’s highest point. Not only did it finally release him from his prudent, self-imposed exile, but it also seemed to signify that the cloud of suspicion was lifting. He pulled closed his door and negotiated the many twisting corridors to the foot of the tower. The base was a hundred feet wide and buried within the mantle of flesh that lay atop the Keep. Only the uppermost portion of the tower protruded, phalluslike, through the heavy tissue, but what rose free into the sky provided the greatest unobstructed view of Dis possible. It was a clear sign of exalted rank, a token of Beelzebub’s admiration. Whereas Agares’ smaller tower was a carefully designed piece of architecture, a dark parody of the Above’s buildings, Moloch’s tower was a brutal spike bearing no friezes or adornments and windows only at the very top. Adramalik thought it almost primitive by Dis’ standards, a direct correlate to how he viewed Moloch. But what it lacked in refinement it made up for in sheer arrogant height. Looking up, Adramalik saw the stairs that hugged the tower’s tall, tubular interior ascending hundreds of feet above and lit at uncomfortably long intervals by small, inadequate braziers. Normally, annoyed, he would conjure a glyph of light and begin his ascent with an oath, but newly freed, he took the rough steps lightly, ignoring his feelings toward the Grand General who resided at the tower’s top. Still, Adramalik was in no particular hurry, savoring his freedom, and decided to take the steps rather than fly; in rare moments of blunt honesty he admitted to himself that he found Moloch difficult to predict, intimidating, another reason not to hurry. After the battle at Maraak, he was in no mood to be called to task by the general.
It had taken some getting used to, Adramalik admitted as he began to climb. The consuming of farmed or hunted Abyssals was the only real choice in the demons’ new, dark homeland; their spare flesh was uncompromisingly bitter next to the memory of repasts in the Above, but eventually he, like the others, had grown grudgingly used to it. A few, however, had, from the first day, committed themselves to another more repugnant alternative—the eating of souls, a practice that former angels, no matter how angry, could never truly condone. Moloch, Adramalik knew, felt no such compunction, and that he found revolting. Too many times had he entered the general’s chambers to watch him dining upon some flailing soul. So as not to be distracted, Adramalik would focus not upon the hungry general but, instead, upon the pooling blood, collecting in and oozing through the twin runnels that fed into identical troughs in the room’s center.
Arriving at the tower’s uppermost threshold, Adramalik opened the heavy door and was gratified to see the general already in discussion with the Prince, the joints of his recent meal tossed, trembling, in a corner while three more terrified fat souls crouched, waiting, in the shadows of the far wall. The dank smell of blood filled his nose-hole. Moloch, still licking his lips, lifted his head and fixed his many ice-blue eyes on the Chancellor General. He had to make an effort to keep the disgust from his face.
The pair was standing before one of the three wide, paneless windows that afforded the grandest unobstructed view of Dis in all of the city. As he approached, they grew silent, and the three demons stood for a moment, taking in the vastness of the world they had shaped. A sharp lightning-glyph dropped noisily from the clouds, licking the distant streets like a beast’s tongue. They all saw the fragments of buildings that it had exploded rain down slowly upon the distant, narrow streets.
Adramalik waited. Beelzebub seemed in one of those contemplative moods that he knew better than to interrupt. “Adramalik, have you ever stood on the edge of Abaddon’s Pit?” he asked finally with a buzzing intake of breath.
“Once, my Prince. And it was enough.” Even though it had been eons ago, Adramalik remembered the overwhelming stench and the nearly irresistible inward-rushing air that had threatened to pull him into the seemingly bottomless gorge. And the fear he had never known he could feel.
“Then you have an idea what it might mean for a demon to be destroyed and be brought down there. As one of his Horde.”
“Yes.” It was Hell’s hell and Abaddon was its legendary regent. Adramalik had frequently thought about the loathsome souls and the way they spent eternity. It was almost enviable to lie where you were destroyed, no matter what your condition was, aware, it was true, but not corrupted into something so far from an angel as to be unrecognizable.
“We will send him there.”
“Who, my Prince?”
“Adramalik,” the Prince buzzed, “I have given the order for General Moloch to begin amassing an army from the primary wards of Dis. It is my intention to rid Hell of Lord Sargatanas.”
The words hung in the air, their implications powerful. This was not going to be any ordinary petty border contest for territory, thought Adramalik. No, this was revenge against a powerful Demon Major. This was to be a war of scope and breadth, a war not only to recover the Prince’s Consort but also to send a message to the other Demons Major: the Crown of Hell would not tolerate disobedience.
It was a thrilling moment, Adramalik realized, one that he felt so privileged to witness that he could barely repress a savage grin. This simple or
der would herald a new reign of terror followed by a new era of stricter vassalage that would right some of the profound wrongs that had been steadily eroding Beelzebub’s influence.
“All to the good and long overdue, my Prince,” said Adramalik, believing every word.
“I knew that you would agree,” the Prince said evenly. “Agaliarept has, over time, given me good reason to suspect that my Consort has fled to Adamantinarx. So far, I do not know how she managed this and with whose complicity, but I want your Knights to find her and bring her back to me. I do not care what condition she is in so long as she is still able to feel pain.”
Adramalik nodded. His Knights would be grateful for the action and the opportunities, and he would personally supervise looking after Lilith when she was found.
“Chancellor General, what have your Knights uncovered in their… tireless investigation?”
Adramalik noted Moloch’s face crease with derision as he looked away.
How we despise each other! Adramalik thought. Just as it should be. He is not one of us no matter how much he tries. Once he voluntarily left the Above he stopped being one of us. A god, indeed! He looked at the general, gauging him, and came, as he always did, to the same inevitable conclusion. With all of his upstart posturing Moloch was still so formidable that Adramalik was uncertain whether his Knights, together, could bring him down. The powers his worshipers had imbued him with were broad and potent. And even if Adramalik were to challenge the deposed god, Moloch was the Prince’s champion and as such bore his unrelenting favor.
“My Knights managed to trace the Consort’s movements to the Sixth Gate, but from there… nothing. Of course, this is really Lord Nergar’s area of expertise….”
Adramalik saw the Prince’s head drop slightly. “Never mind, Adramalik. In truth, it does not matter. I have more than enough excuses to go to war with Sargatanas.”
The general snorted with barely veiled contempt. Adramalik watched Moloch move away from the window and across the room, his surrogate legs carrying him in unnaturally long, gliding strides. He stopped before the twin troughs and without hesitating plunged his hands into them. The blood sizzled and steamed as he searched for and found two objects that he pulled out and held before him. Adramalik saw them and even he felt a ripple of fear; held aloft before him were two of the most feared weapons in Hell—Puime-pe-Molocha, Moloch’s Hooks. Each bore ten vicious hooks, and even dripping blood as they were, Adramalik could see the fused-diamond inner edges, glistening and razor sharp, that no armor in Hell could withstand.
Moloch turned and looked straight at Adramalik, a predatory gleam in his eyes. The threat was unambiguous. The Chancellor General met and held his gaze but, facing those Hooks, knew that his attempt to match the general’s challenging mien was, at best, bravado. He was relieved when Beelzebub spoke.
“You are both to work together that we may be rid of him. Anything less and I will send you to give the Great Lord Abaddon my compliments personally.”
Both demons nodded.
Strapping the steaming weapons to his braided soul-sinew belt, Moloch dropped down and knelt awkwardly before Beelzebub.
“My Prince, I must gather my lieutenants and their troops. There are legions to be Summoned, blades to be sharpened,” he said, his voice flinty. “I would beg that I be allowed to begin at once.”
“Go, Moloch, and stir the fires of the Summoning Fields. And bring me Sargatanas that I may wear him upon my chest!”
Moloch rose, swung around, and headed for the door, the Hooks swinging where his legs would have been. Without a backward glance he crossed the threshold and leaped from the uppermost landing into the yawning darkness of the tower’s shaft.
A loud crack boomed through the chamber and drew the attention of Beelzebub and Adramalik back out into the ashen night. Another bolt of glyph-lightning, this time much closer, had smashed into the city, this one closer than the last. They could hear the faint dull cascading of the screaming chunks of buildings as they landed heavily upon their groaning neighbors.
“He is a weapon, Adramalik, my sharpest sword, little more,” buzzed the Prince. His body was beginning to ripple and vibrate and flies were separating, heading for the open doorway. “You are my shield. It may seem as though I favor him, but it is you and your Knights that I truly need in this world.”
“Thank you, my Prince,” Adramalik said. It was a candid statement that he had never thought he would hear. Whether it was said merely to keep him loyal or to simply bolster him in the face of impending war he did not care. It was said and that was enough.
“Adramalik, find the Prime Minister and ask him what he remembers about Lilith’s departure. I doubt that he knows anything, but any small clue might be important.”
“Yes, my Prince.” It would be amusing interrogating Agares. He was not the most imposing of demons.
“I have not yet decided to which of you I will award Sargatanas’ wards afterward,” the Prince said, only his rapidly disintegrating face remaining. “Be careful of Moloch, Chancellor General. He might well attempt to simplify my choices.”
And then the few remaining flies spread apart and he was gone.
Adramalik looked around at Moloch’s disagreeable chamber, thought for a moment about attempting to force the doors of the adjacent rooms, and realized the futility of it. Moloch’s Arts were at least good enough to keep anyone out of them. He turned to leave and just as he reached the doorway he heard the three caged souls begin a raucous keening, clutching the bars and rattling them. Perhaps they thought he would release them. For a moment he actually toyed with the idea, relishing the anger it would elicit, but instead he closed the door, shaking his head with the pettiness of it. Or, he wondered, was it fear? For now, it did not matter; the thought of war made him open his wings, and he hurriedly dropped through the tower’s darkness to tell the Order his news.
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
“My lord, our spies have just this hour returned from Dis,” Eligor said to Sargatanas upon entering the newly renovated warehouse. His lord and his bodyguard and their guides had not yet made their way through the small corridor that opened into the main stables. The pervasive salt smell of the Acheron, he noticed, was almost immediately overwhelmed, replaced by the powerful odd musk of the huge creatures he could just see in their high-walled stalls beyond. It had been no small feat getting them here. Before he had arrived, a special immense Conjuring Chamber, laced in lightning, had been constructed for Yen Wang and his Conjuror General, and it was never inactive until the dozens of his beasts had been brought forth.
Suddenly they heard loud snorts, which ended in strange, grumbling words unlike any Eligor had ever heard. Some unseen Behemoth was voicing its irritation, and soon each of them took voice, sharing their displeasure until the din in the front of the stables sent vibrations through the paved floor.
“And what have they discovered in the Fly’s nest?” asked Sargatanas loudly as they walked into the open paddock. Almost as he spoke, the snorting subsided and the air was filled, instead, with the quieter sounds of the Behemoths’ wheezing breathing and heavy shifting. Eligor wondered if the sound of his lord’s voice had been, in some way, responsible for their sudden quiet.
“All traffic in and out of the city has been curtailed; Beelzebub wants none of what we have learned to get out. But we have been fortunate. The spies are unanimous in their reports that a great army is being summoned and gathered, and that it is marshaling just outside the walls of Dis. It is under the banner of Grand General Moloch, my lord.” Eligor hoped he did not look as apprehensive as he felt.
Sargatanas did not break stride but looked gravely at his feet as he walked.
They began to pass the stalls that each held a single Behemoth, and Eligor, rather than trying to speak with his lord, examined them carefully. Each bay was constructed of elaborately carved Abyssal bone, brought on the conjured creatures’ backs from the Eastern Wards and installed carefully within the foreign
warehouse to make the Behemoths feel at home. Fresh slabs of yielding fatty flesh nailed to the stall sides protected them from inadvertent injury.
But as interesting as the exotic stalls were, Eligor found their inmates more so. He had found out just as much as the taciturn Yen Wang had been willing to divulge about them. In their Lives they had been great human emperors, viziers, and generals from a land known as Qin. There they had committed terrible acts upon their subjects, and so, because of their former power and ruthlessness, it had been seen fit to turn them into giant quadrupedal beasts of burden and war, at the constant disposal of their mahouts. Minus their toes and fingers, which had been removed to create flat hooflike feet, the thick-hided souls stood at least three times Sargatanas’ height. Two large arms that terminated in enormous, heavy bone-hammers sprouted from their shoulders, and these, for the moment, were relaxed and resting upon the floor. Each weapon was the mass of two or three demons. Eligor’s eyes took in their strange horn-crowned heads, their missing noses and upper jaws, their long, curving chinbones that served as weapon and ram, and he admitted to himself that he was eager to see them upon the battlefield. As he passed them their narrowed, suspicious eyes followed him and occasionally one would call out and laugh or mumble some indistinct utterance that the Captain was sure was an obscenity.
Sargatanas looked up occasionally but more often slowly stroked the restless bones of his jaw or pursed his hard lips in thought. Neither the foul odors of their dung and their musk nor the barks of their imagined insults seemed to affect him. Eligor knew that Sargatanas had been looking forward to visiting the stables and felt a pang that his message had been so ill timed to ruin the moment. Only when the party approached the last stall did Sargatanas look up at him.
“It would use Its greatest general to put an end to us. To this city and everything within it,” the demon lord said, almost to himself. “It is sooner than I wanted; our legions have only just made camp. But that is, perhaps, the Fly’s design. This battle was inevitable, Eligor. Make haste to Valefar and tell him this: He must gather our new allied Demons Major and Minor in council and have them brief their junior officers. Tell him that they must then begin the deployment of their legions immediately, as I will do with my own. And have Hannibal called back from his recruiting with whatever army he has managed to amass. The battle with Astaroth was but a skirmish compared to what we will face at the hands of Moloch and his legions.”
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