With deliberate and quick steps it walked up the main aisle, and as it passed each working librarian something that Lilith could not see from her distance cleanly sliced their heads from their shoulders, causing their lifeless bodies to gout blood and collapse in upon themselves. Its appearance was so sudden that there was no time for the librarians to react, and in only brief moments the floor was littered with their disks.
Zoray spun around, pulling his sword from its sheath, and Lilith heard him quietly invoke a protective glyph. Not expecting combat, he had no armor upon him, and summoning it up would take too long.
The Hand of Beelzebub paused. Lilith knew that virtually every part of it could see, and yet, unnervingly, its gaze seemed fixed upon her. For a heart-pounding instant, as she was paralyzed and staring into its expressionless face, the world of the Fly spread darkly through her mind, filling her with dread and revulsion.
She cried out when a thin tendril of flies whipped forth, beheading Eintsaras where he had risen.
With sword extended, Zoray moved forward and said “Leave, my lady! Run!”
But Lilith knew that it was futile. With the palace opened up like a worm-bored body there was no place to which she could flee that would keep this monstrosity from her now that she had been uncovered. Even so, she found herself moving backward, toward the doors.
Zoray did not wait for the Hand to strike out at him. Closing swiftly with the dark figure, he lashed out at its head, its chest, its arm, but watched, with widening eyes, as the flies parted and his sword passed ineffectually through. Lilith heard the whipping wind of his sword-work as swing after swing met with only air. He turned his blade flat-on but succeeded in only batting the flies away in larger groups. She saw the Demon Major’s mounting frustration boil over as he upended a heavy table and shoved it, scraping noisily, across the floor at his opponent. The Hand simply dissipated into a shapeless cloud and then, just as quickly, resolved into its original form.
Like a demonic whirlwind, Zoray swept chairs and tables aside, treading upon the fallen books and circling around in an effort to draw the Hand away from her. But as he tore through the room, the desperation clear upon his face, the reality of the moment washed through her and suddenly she felt an overwhelming pity for him. As powerful as he had become, he was going to be destroyed protecting her, and there was nothing she could do to save him.
With a roar of frustration, Zoray dropped his useless sword and grasped a flaming wrought-iron brazier that momentarily caused the dark figure to billow and pull back. Lilith heard the buzzing crescendo, the flies’ anger clear to her ears, as the demon fanned its outrage with the guttering fire. Without warning, the Hand leaped forward, parting around the extended brazier and colliding with Zoray. The brazier clanged to the stone floor as the demon suddenly froze in place, his entire front blackened with noisy, writhing flies. And then, to Lilith’s horror, they disappeared into Zoray, boring their way through bone and then flesh and then bone again until she saw them emerge in blotchy patches from the back of his head and torso. When the flies left his perforated body it fell lightly to the Library floor, barely making a sound. She hardly noticed as Zoray drew inward, becoming a glowing disk. Rising up from the destroyed demon, the Hand of Beelzebub turned and regarded her with its thousand eyes.
“What is mine?” it grated in that all-too-familiar voice.
Lilith did not answer.
“Hell is mine.”
Lilith could not control her trembling.
“Hell’s minions are mine.”
It took a step toward her.
“Hell’s souls are mine.”
She closed her eyes.
“You are mine.”
She felt the coldness of them as they slammed upon her body with so much force that she tumbled backward, landing flat upon her back. As the room dimmed and her mouth was pried open, as the sound of them drowned out even her own terror and she felt them moving down her throat and into her belly, she heard one word repeated until she heard nothing more.
“Mine!”
Chapter Thirty-One
DIS
To Hannibal’s eyes, the capital of Hell looked as if giants’ hands had swept the inner wards of its buildings, leaving only the gouge-marks of their colossal nails—its former twisted alleys and streets and avenues—upon the ground.
After the hard march through the Wastes, progress toward the Keep had been easy. Dis was a shattered city, the shards of its buildings few and scattered, the obstacles to a marching army nearly nonexistent. What few buildings had been found stood shaking on the fractured edges of its outermost wards. These had been summarily razed, their souls liberated.
Dense with the still-lingering, eddying dust and ash of destruction, the air grew brighter with the red-gold glow that emanated from the direction of the Keep. The terrain between Hannibal and the mountainous edifice was so barren and relatively smooth that it acted as a dark reflector of the dim fires of the Fly’s abode, making the ground look like the surface of a frozen lake. Only the swath of the great army that waited near the base of the new wall, now growing visible in the thick atmosphere, bespoke of any life upon the otherwise deserted plain. He turned in his saddle and looked into the red-tinged carpet of souls that was his army. Receding until they were tiny specks, the souls’ countless weapons, reflecting the fires of the Keep, sparkled like embers in the hanging ash. Breathtaking, he thought, a sight of unexpected beauty.
The plodding footsteps of the enormous Behemoths ahead shook the ground continuously, causing those waves of jostling souls closest to them to move forward in irregular clumps, but somehow Hannibal’s nimble steed managed to maintain its footing among them. The Soul-General was close—some thought too close—to the flanks of the advancing Behemoth line, but he felt that his troops should leave little open ground between them in the unlikely event that the giant creatures’ line was breached. And he knew that their bone-masked mahouts, in the unlikely event that the Behemoths panicked, would be quick to react. Protruding from each mammoth soul’s skull was the head of a long spike that ended inches from the soul’s brain; a sharp blow with the mahout’s hammer and the spike would be driven home, destroying the soul instantly.
Before him the new Keep Wall rose up, still distant but immense, ascending until it nearly obscured the Keep itself. Bathed in red, it was a sheer, solid expanse covered in an ever-changing net of glyphs that played upon the flat soul-brick surface like firelight through waves of blood. It was the product, he had been told, of Mulciber’s genius, and it was a marvel, built, Hannibal guessed, with such haste that it could only have been achieved with the use of every soul’s hand and body in Dis. He stared for long minutes as he moved forward, the layer of glyphs mesmerizing in its shifting patterns. Behind that floating shield, the wall was unbroken save for their goal—the single huge gate that lay behind a titanic raised drawbridge a thousand feet above the Keep’s base and no longer accessible by its wide bridge, which had been destroyed. Lying between the gate and the Second Army of the Ascension were not only the massed legions of the army of Dis but also the wide, bottomless moat of Lucifer’s Belt. Too hot and broad to traverse with any improvised barges, it would, unquestionably, prove a formidable barrier—a barrier that somehow needed to be crossed. Satanachia had already pointed to the gate as their objective, but the distance between the moat-edge and the gate above was too great to cast ropes. And no flyers in any great enough numbers accompanied them, all of their squadrons having been already committed to Sargatanas’ maneuver. For the moment, Hannibal could see no physical way of gaining their objective.
Even as Hannibal watched the advancing lines of demons ahead, an enormous bolt of red glyph-lightning, a curse he thought from the ground below, exploded into the ranks of Satanachia’s demons, pulverizing scores of them into a thick cloud of black dust that fell back down slowly. Was it sent by the Fly high above in his Rotunda? Was it just the beginning? Or am I letting my misgivings get the better of me? Hannibal
had never been this skittish before a battle. Another bolt of lightning, this time closer, jarred him and made Gaha flinch and then more discharges began to burst upward and Hannibal knew for certain that they were not natural. The Fly had created a defensive perimeter and they were edging all too slowly into it. Hannibal would lose many troops to the lightning before they had a chance to engage the waiting army, but there was nothing he could do.
The ground, which looked so uniform from a distance, had become irregular with wide, bubbling fields of dark, cooling lava, making their progress difficult. The Soul-General had not heard of these lakes in his briefing and wondered if they had been churned up by Dis’ rampant demolition. He became even more suspicious when he thought he heard dull sounds issuing from within them. Through the shimmer of heat and steam he thought he saw strange shapes in the slowly swirling crust but reasoned that it was nothing more than his imagination fed by the tension of the moment.
Above, the cloud-cover over central Dis was dense, and Hannibal knew that Eligor and his lord must be well on their way, perhaps closer than he expected. The thought comforted him, but he knew that even while their efforts would shorten the battle to come, many souls would be destroyed and many demons would find out how much truth lay in the dread tales of Abaddon.
Suddenly, with a brilliant flash and a great rushing sound, a huge, circular glyph materialized before the Keep Wall hanging many hundreds of feet over Lucifer’s Belt. Surrounding its central sigil—Beelzebub’s pale green mark—were myriad smaller devices, each, Hannibal recognized from their forms, the sigil of one of Dis’ field commanders. He heard a collective hissing intake of breath from the surrounding troops of the soul army as the small sigils detached themselves and flew, arrow straight, into the pools of lava that lay at their feet in front, to the sides, and behind them. It was a Summoning!
Hannibal’s ill-defined suspicions had been justified. The bubbling pools he and his souls had so carefully been avoiding rippled and came to life as the gray crust burst apart, sending shards of cooled lava into the troops and revealing the super-heated magma beneath. There, kneeling, were rank upon rank of concealed incandescent figures that rose and began to surge forward, their steaming armor dulling to red and darkening, hardening in the air. Springing with halberds and swords at the ready onto the ledges of firmer ground before them, wave after wave poured forth, rushing to meet the surprised enemy. Hannibal watched as many of his stunned troops were cut down before they could react, some tumbling forward into the yellow-orange lava that had given birth to the demons who now struck them down.
Farther ahead, Hannibal saw that the fighting had spread to his demon allies and that the legions of Put Satanachia were as beleaguered as his own. A dozen massive gates—unseen for the radiance of the lava—opened out onto the Belt from the base of the Keep Wall, and from them wide barges carefully fashioned of pumice and loaded with more legionaries floated into view. They were ugly but effective vessels, and Hannibal watched with envy as the Belt was crossed quickly. Very shortly, the Fly’s unopposed legionaries were clambering up the bank, charging onto the battlefield to reinforce the legions that were already fighting.
The clamor of battle, the roaring of legionaries and the clashing of weapons, rose in Hannibal’s ears as the Behemoths in the front ranks crashed into the heavily armored troops of Dis’ Urban Legions. Great spumes of ash blackened the air as the troops of both sides impacted and were destroyed. The advance ground to a halt and Hannibal watched the cohesion of his and Satanachia’s legions disintegrate as they fell into a patchwork of enormous formations that attempted to hold off the still-gathering legions of Dis behind them as well as the already-engaged enemy legions from the front. Hannibal’s plans for a battle fought in any way resembling his past exploits were over; this day would be won only by the accumulated victories of each pocket of his and Satanachia’s troops—a reality that went counter to his instincts. Even with his misgivings, he knew that when a battle plan deteriorated, as this one had, the troops needed, more than ever, to see him in the fray, and with a roar he spurred his mount on into the thick of the fighting.
The sound of the two armies crashing together had been loud enough to take the breath out of Hannibal’s mouth, while the souls around him had looked at one another with wide eyes and shocked grins of amazement. Most had never before seen battle—in Hell or in their lives—and the newness of it was, to the majority of them, emotionally exhilarating. But that was fated to change.
Hannibal urged Gaha on toward the denser clots of fighting. He wondered why, other than the Spirits, there were no cavalry regiments in Hell; the mobility and ferocity they would bring to the battlefield would be spectacular. Perhaps breeding Abyssals was too difficult; perhaps flyers took their place. It was a shame. The creature he rode was as fierce and well trained a battle-mount as he could have asked for, far more potent a war beast than any horse could have been. Rising off its shorter front limbs to its more bipedal fighting stance, Gaha needed only to be pointed at the enemy to create havoc. With raking sweeps of its taloned paws the nimble Abyssal cleared wide swaths, allowing its master to swing his sword and move easily from one salient of imminent disaster to another. In this way, and with shouts of encouragement, the Soul-General kept his troops’ morale high and his own confidence from flagging.
Chaos had been created upon the battlefield, but Hannibal knew that it was a chaos deliberately orchestrated by Beelzebub. The organization of its seemingly random elements followed a logic, Hannibal recognized, that most likely only the Fly could comprehend and control.
Far off in the haze of mist and ash, during a short lull, Hannibal saw the silhouetted forms of the giant soul-beasts seemingly motionless, gaining ground one difficult footstep at a time. The Urban Legions were tough, hardened troops, he had been told, accustomed to living in a harsh city formerly under that severest of generals, Moloch; they would not be an easy obstacle to pass over.
As Hannibal resumed fighting he occasionally stole a glance toward Satanachia’s position, and as time wore on he saw that the Demon Major’s forces were suffering considerable losses. A large salient of Rofocale’s troops was bulging deep within Satanachia’s lines, and try as the Behemoths might to stop the enemy from pushing forward, they seemed too few against the seemingly limitless waves of steaming legionaries that issued from beneath the Keep. Time and again Hannibal saw their massive hammers come down amidst the carpet of enemy demons only to see the pulverized foe immediately replaced by clots of aggressive halberdiers climbing atop the rubble.
The ten nearest legions, arranged in close formation, entered the fray, packed tightly so that they seemed a solid wall. The rubble from the destroyed demons of both sides was so extensive that both armies found their legionaries climbing up steep, irregular inclines to engage each other. With the ceaseless, mounting destruction the footing was becoming extremely unstable, and he saw as much damage incurred because of masses of falling soldiers as there was from actual combat wounds.
Slowly, the Behemoths began to gain ground and what had been a standstill turned into a rout. The Summoning of legionaries from the Belt finally abated and Satanachia’s legions fell upon the fleeing demons, leaving a field strewn with smoking rubble.
Briefly, Hannibal thought he saw Satanachia’s sigil floating against the brightness of the Belt just where he would expect it—over the line’s center. A swift flash of white might just have been his brilliant two-handed sword, but Hannibal could not be certain. A giant green glyph emerged unexpectedly from the summit of the Black Dome and with a terrible scream of energy the wall came alive. Enormous bolts sprang from it, each one targeting a different Behemoth and enveloping it in a fireball of destruction. In short, disastrous moments, only fiery pits remained where the Behemoths had stood and the crackling wall had resumed its shifting glow. And a new wave of demons seemed to be forming upon the Belt. The battle had turned for the worse, and Hannibal’s spirits sank.
He looked again to the D
emon Major for any commands or for Azazel, and as Hannibal picked the standard-bearer’s gaudy form out of the milling legionaries a glyph rose into the sky from that embattled position and he knew without doubt that Satanachia was there. The fiery command streaked toward Hannibal, and when he had taken a moment to interpret its filigreed complexities the realization of what the Demon Major was asking of him nearly made him drop his sword.
* * * * *
Beelzebub was, Adramalik noted with some relief, in a state of rare and unexpected calm as he observed the progress of his legions. The Prime Minister, face burning from surveying the windswept battlements, stepped closer to the throne and saw something new in his Prince’s hand. Stripped of its flesh undoubtedly by Husk Faraii, Lucifuge Rofocale’s head had been ingeniously adapted by the Prince’s own hand to serve as a lens to focus upon the events far below him on Dis’ field of battle. Mounted on a short, gold staff, the once-defiant, proud head had been picked clean, broken apart, splayed out, and transformed into a dark contrivance, all inscribed bone with inlaid, functional gems and spinning glyphlets that covered its blackened length and breadth up to its gold-rimmed, circular eye sockets. Watching his Prince peering through Rofocale’s empty eyes, Adramalik had to marvel at the things his master could do, things that he found at once revolting and, despite himself, inspiring.
A noise caught his attention from the throne’s base. Adramalik noticed Agares for the first time, as the distorted demon tried in vain to suppress a bubbling cough. His appearance had so worsened that he seemed no longer a demon but now, wasted and raw, a detached part of the shadowed throne of flesh that he sat beneath.
“He is coming,” the Prince buzzed.
“Sargatanas, my Prince?”
“The Heretic!”
“Where is he, my Prince?”
“I cannot tell,” he said, never taking his many eyes from the skull. “He is clever, Adramalik. I only know that he is close.”
God's Demon Page 35
