* * * * *
They left the Shrine together for the last time, and as they exited, Lilith could not help but wonder if Sargatanas had not brought her there as a last effort to get her to change her mind. He pulled the thick door shut and then turned to her and her suspicions were confirmed.
“You can change your mind, Lilith. If I do go back, it will mean that the way is clear for others. You could—”
She reached up and put a finger to his mouth.
“My love, this is the way it must be. As much as it will pain both of us.”
He nodded and, as she watched, the beginnings of his armor blossomed forth in the manner of demons and angels alike, coming up from his skin like rising white magma, smoothing and shaping itself to conform to his body.
He shook his head and took her hands.
“Why, why do I reach for Heaven when it’s already in my grasp?”
“Because the Heaven you reach for will give you that which you desire… a world of sublime tranquility. Beatitude. That I cannot offer you.”
Lilith paused to see his reaction. The pale armor continued to exude from within him, encasing his head and shoulders. He did not say a word but looked at her, the inner turmoil obvious. She almost felt that a single word from her could dissuade him from his path, halt the assault on Dis, and keep him in his city, in Hell. But she did not utter it.
“You are a seraph, Sargatanas. The highest of angels. You can never be anything else, no matter what shape you take. No matter where you are. You’ll never be content unless you are back where you belong.”
He let her hands slip out of his and she knew, then, that there was no turning back for him.
His new armor was nearly fully formed, its congealing surface swirling and blending and smoothing. When Lilith stepped back to look at him she saw a mountainous figure of power and intensity, unquestionably heroic yet almost physically unrecognizable to her save for his unchanged face. His sigils suddenly flared to life upon his breast, flanking the dark hole where his heart should have been, piercing the shimmering steam that wafted in curling sheets that were denser than normal from the armor’s formation.
“We must go,” he said. “Zoray awaits his Elevation. And then…” The demon’s voice traded off and Lilith tried not to think about the future.
“Yes, and then.”
As they walked the darkened palace corridors toward the Hall of Rituals, Lilith realized that, even with her sadness at Sargatanas’ imminent departure, she was actually eager to see the ceremony in which he raised the Demon Minor to the status of a Demon Major. An Infernal mirror of angelic Risings, it was not a commonplace event, and while she had heard about the ancient rite, she had never witnessed it in either Dis or Adamantinarx. The city was to be left in his hands and Sargatanas wanted his former Foot Guard commander as well equipped for the job as possible. She was relieved that Sargatanas had not chosen her; while she felt capable of governing Adamantinarx, it was a task best left to someone who had been in the city since its founding. He and Andromalius, the new provisional General-in-Chief of Adamantinarx, would be able officers of their posts.
Lord Zoray was, as Sargatanas had predicted, awaiting their arrival clad in the ornate symbolic six-winged trappings of the occasion and surrounded by his staff. Some of them would, as a result of his Elevation, be carried upward in station as well, and they fidgeted and shifted in anticipation. Zoray’s eagerness, too, was undeniable, and when Sargatanas strode ahead of her Lilith watched the soon-to-be governor kneel and prostrate himself. This was to be Sargatanas’ last official duty and, as she watched the heavily armored figure begin to fill the air around and over Zoray’s form with line after line of fiery glyph-script, she began to formulate plans for the time when she would be alone.
BEELZEBUB’S INNER WARDS
For two weeks the Second Army of the Ascension swept across the gray fields of Hell with all of the incandescent savagery of a surging sheet of lava. Opposition during the long march had been minimal, but when small armies of the Fly had been chanced upon Hannibal had watched as Sargatanas’ legions had flowed over the enemy, the encounters barely slowing the advancing souls and demons. He had no time for the niceties of negotiation, nor did the enemy seek it. It was a time of change, and the Soul-General felt proud and honored to be a part of it. Finally, his eternity had some meaning.
The landscape outside of Adamantinarx was something largely unfamiliar to those souls who had not been in the first great battle, and even those veterans who had grown quiet when they passed the limits of familiar territories. Their march took them past the Flaming Cut, where they saw the great cairn, and on into the wards of the enemy, and Hannibal saw that the closer they drew to Dis the more hostile the terrain became. It seemed as if Beelzebub, creating a first line of defense, had imbued the very ground and peaks and blood-rivers with his own anger. No town or outpost had been left standing, a curious fact, Satanachia had remarked, in light of the Fly’s historical reluctance to let go of his territorial possessions.
Whenever the vanguard of the army approached the blasted remains of happened-upon outlying settlements, demon sappers were called forward and the rubble was immediately demolished. Any freed souls who were whole enough to spring unaided from the resulting piles of brick and who were not immediately amenable to joining the army were destroyed on the spot, but, Hannibal always noted, with little surprise and a thin smile, they were few.
When, eventually, there were more of Beelzebub’s wards behind them than in front, demons and souls alike saw the air ahead, heavy with haze, suffused with a red-gold lambency, and Satanachia informed his generals that, due to its location, the source of this effulgence was most probably the Keep.
A scouting party was sent forward and after a day came back to the gathered general staff with news of the city ahead. Or, more properly, with news that the capital, in its familiar form, was no longer and that most of its buildings, like those of Adamantinarx, were gone. In the brief weeks since the battle of the Flaming Cut, Beelzebub and his Architect General had not been idle. The Keep still stood, surrounded by its ring of lava, but its mountainous form was now encased in an immense and featureless wall. And waiting at its base was an army nearly equal in size to that of Sargatanas.
None of this was comforting news, and the generals’ silence reflected their inner misgivings. Hannibal, too, struggled to find something in the report that might point to a weakness in the Prince’s stratagem. Every advantage seemed to lie with the Fly. Only Satanachia seemed unaffected by the circumstances, and he did his best to bolster his staff.
On a high escarpment just outside Dis’ immediate outskirts, Put Satanachia sent the order aloft for Yen Wang’s Behemoths to form up in multiple wedges in the host’s front ranks. With this first battle order the Second Army of the Ascension would descend upon the vast plain that had once been Dis and, however the battle went, the fate of Hell itself would be decided.
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
She saw him from afar, from a window in the tallest turret left in his palace. Standing upon the high parade ground, he was a white figure in a sea of ranked deep-olive flyers. Eligor strode at his side, as did Barbatos, each, she imagined, receiving his last orders. The wind, furious and steady, whipped at them almost as if they were already aloft, and Sargatanas’ ivory flight skins flowed around him, billowing dramatically. The time had come and in moments he would be gone. Gone from Adamantinarx, gone from her existence. And soon, in all probability, gone from Hell.
Lilith turned away and walked back into her chamber, heading toward the area she had devoted to her sculpting. From the open window the sound of rank after rank of flying demons taking to the air suddenly filled the room, a loud roar of wings accompanied by a steady wind that rattled her sculpting tools on their small table. She would not stand by the window and watch him ascend into the clouds. She did not want the sight of him disappearing into the dark clouds to be burned into her memory.
Ins
tead, she sat holding the large block of compressed Abyssal bone in her cold hands, turning it stiffly as if she were actually considering what to transform it into. She even picked up a tool just to convince herself that she was actually intent upon her new project. But as she lingered, scraper poised, she caught sight of the traveling skins, Ardat Lili’s skins, a corner of which peeked from beneath the flat, carved lid of a long chest. All of the possessions Lilith could carry from her life in Dis and her long journey away from the capital were within that chest, and she thought, with some pleasure, that, with the exception of her cherished tools, she had had no need of them since she had arrived in Adamantinarx; she had only to have hinted about any need and Sargatanas had provided it. Now she was not so sure that some of those items within the chest—the skins, the masks, the long dagger Agares had secreted in her bags—might not be useful yet again.
Lilith listened to the wind of the wings and when, after a very long time, it had subsided she placed the scraper and the untouched block back down on the table and rose. At the window again, she saw that the parade ground was empty, a dark and heavy cloud lowering to make it indistinct. As dark and indistinct, she thought, as her future now seemed.
Chapter Thirty
BEELZEBUB’S WARDS
He had never flown so easily, so quickly, and with such a sense of purpose. The hot wind that Sargatanas had summoned weeks ago with characteristic forethought sped the multitude of winged demons toward Dis in half the time Eligor would have estimated. In only two days, and with only one mass landing, the combined flying forces of Sargatanas and Satanachia had covered nearly all of the ground between Adamantinarx and Dis.
As one of the two force commanders, Eligor flew well above the main flights. In an effort to remain unseen no sigil was lit, making the formations hard to see even for the sharp-eyed Captain. Sargatanas, his pale wings spread like fans, soared just above him issuing unobtrusive command-glyphs that the Guard Captain and Barbatos had to pass on with equal stealth to the lesser officers.
Looking down between the dense pyramidal flights of flyers, Eligor saw landmarks that he knew from his infrequent land journeys to the capital. Even from this altitude, he could see the myriad roads and paths that were obviously converging on the sprawling city from all points in the Prince’s empire. Along one of these, Eligor finally saw the rear guard of his lord’s army.
Sargatanas had waited until the two great land armies were engaged before leaving the palace with his flying troops. Far below, Eligor now began to see the orderly battle formations at the rear edge of the Second Army of the Ascension wheeling into position according to their generals’ needs. He knew that they were still very far from the front lines and he looked forward and, not seeing the distant battlefield, saw only the great glow that surrounded the Keep. As high as he was, the Black Dome atop the Keep reared higher and, for all of its size, he only saw it in fragmentary glimpses far ahead and behind the luminous clouds. Is this not a truly mad plan? How can such a mountain of a building possibly be breached and then occupied? We will all be destroyed before our feet touch the dome, let alone the Rotunda floor! And then, as he shifted his lance uneasily in his hands, the echoes of tales of Abaddon’s realm and eternities of ice and darkness and shredding claws filled his mind and he clamped his jaws a little tighter. He had rarely thought of those stories before and especially not during his countless battles, but now, as he approached Dis, they seemed more threatening, more of a fearsome possibility.
Sargatanas sent down a glyph ordering them to gain even more altitude. Strangely, the wind seemed to be dying down, and Eligor noticed that the air was not only thicker but also foul smelling. Whether by his lord’s presence or his design or by some protective counterinvocation of the Fly’s, the gale’s lessening would more easily facilitate their landing. They rose quickly on well-rested wings, entering a thick bank of red-tinged clouds and steering through the heavy, disorienting mists only on the strength of Sargatanas’ certainty.
As Eligor soared upward, he tried to picture the chaos of the battlefield far beneath them, wondering about the fortunes, good or bad, of Satanachia, of Yen Wang, and of that resourceful soul Hannibal. For all Eligor or any of the other demons flying with him knew, the battle had turned one way or the other and glorious victory or utter defeat was already written upon the rubble-strewn fields of Dis.
On he flew with a diminishing sense of time and distance. The cloud-bank was an enervating environment, its passing billows slow and hypnotic. The sere wind-current they had sailed upon had left him and the flyers more than enough strength for this final dash to the dome. Over the sound of his own now-moistened wings, he could hear the cloud-muffled flapping of the nearest demons below him, their breaths coming in short but unstrained huffs that matched their wing beats. Above, Sargatanas flew silently, and Eligor could only imagine what must be going through his lord’s mind. Not only did the Demon Major have the innumerable concerns of the battlefield to address but also the fraught possibilities stemming from his army’s success or failure. Eligor found himself actually grateful that his only concerns were his duties as the commander of many hundreds of demons.
Closer to the Black Dome the flights began to encounter luckless patrols of demons patrolling the night sky. These were easily overwhelmed, their ash dissipating on the wind, erasing any trace of their presence and any evidence of their demise.
The huge formation leveled off at an altitude high enough to allow Sargatanas to issue command-glyphs without fear of being detected. This, Eligor knew, was essential to the final approach to the dome. Many of his lord’s spies had been destroyed ascertaining even the smallest structural weaknesses in the Black Dome. It would remain to be seen whether they had been sacrificed for naught.
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
The Library no longer had the familiar, comforting smell of dust and ancient volumes. Too many holes had been opened in the palace, allowing the winds from outside to purge it of its characteristic musty scent. Lilith watched the corner of the page she was holding quiver in the steady current of air that made its way to where she sat from a demolished corridor wall to her side.
Since her arrival in Adamantinarx, Lilith had found herself drawn toward the Library and its hitherto unimaginable wealth of learning, striving to come back every day for, at least, a short time. In Dis she had been so cloistered that her only source of learning was from demons she had met at court and on those rare occasions when they had been accessible they had never been terribly forthcoming. She had lived in a world of enforced ignorance.
She looked over at Librarian Eintsaras as he transcribed yet another of the Library’s volumes. This was the one place where Sargatanas had realized freeing the souls would be a detriment to the demons. To lose the Library was to lose the collected knowledge of eons. Because each book was fashioned around soul-vellum, they had to be transcribed to Abyssal-skin pages before they could be converted. Giving Eintsaras the glyph-of-transmutation, Sargatanas had known just how long it would take to change over the Library. The small army of librarians had barely made a dent.
Even as she watched, Eintsaras finished another page and, with the suddenly conjured glyph, set its narrator free. The soul, a female, looked around in utter confusion, holding herself up by the solid table in front of her. One of the librarians rose from his seat and escorted her away. Her life in Hell was her own again.
Lilith touched the tiny glyph on the page that initiated the narration. She had chosen a major work on the Wastes, a book that Eligor had heard and recommended, which detailed the findings of the most far traveled of the ancient mapping expeditions. The party had included many souls and the pages had been fashioned from them, lending the book a firsthand immediacy. But, as fascinating as it was, she found herself distracted. Zoray had promised to meet her in the Library to discuss her future in the city and just what her role might be, and she had been giving that question considerable thought since Sargatanas had departed. She knew she was
going to disappoint him.
The newly appointed governor of Sargatanas’ wards arrived alone. To Lilith’s eyes, though he was now a Demon Major with all of the newly acquired physical attributes that went with his Elevation, he looked fatigued, and it was little wonder. Since Sargatanas had begun to free the souls this was a new world, and with its beginning came new challenges. Working out just how the wards would function in their present condition was taxing, involving the creation of new economies and new ways of meeting challenges without the enforced use of souls. She could only imagine, with a bit of wryness, Zoray’s boredom as he listened to Sargatanas’ army of advisors.
Lilith touched the glyph again and the page’s ancient soul went silent.
Zoray moved around the table and stood, peering over her shoulder at the open book.
“Should I read anything into your choice of books, Lilith?”
“Perhaps. I have always wanted to see more of this world of ours. There are many mysteries out there, Zoray. Things I would like to see.”
“Really? Well, perhaps you might start with the surrounding wards. And the mystery of how we will get them to run smoothly.”
Lilith smiled, but then a look of bewilderment suddenly crossed her face. Looking past Zoray, she saw the dark figure of a soldier approaching, apparently having entered the Library from the wall that had been broken open. As he came closer she saw that the right side of the demon’s torso was missing, giving the appearance of having been cleft away in battle. This was not unusual in itself, but something about the way the demon moved was not right.
And then Lilith heard the buzzing and knew.
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