by Daniel Caet
“Continue.”
“From a few weeks ago, the underworld is very upset. There are rumours of a high-level demon that is taking control of the lower demon clans. They say that he is accompanied by a sorceress with a power that has not been seen before in a human. Those who do not submit to their power are simply eliminated. The high-level demons have put a price on their heads, but nobody has been able to find them until now, it is as if they evaporated after each appearance. They arrive, they kill the leaders of the clans, they submit the clan to their will and they disappear. That's all I know, I swear to you.”
His words disappointed me greatly. It was obvious that he was telling me the truth, he did not know anything else and what he knew was of no use to me. My path closed just as I started it.
“You say they have taken control of some clans, which ones?”
“I do not know all of them, but it is said that Belfegor's children have fallen under his control.”
That information was very imprecise, but it gave me a starting point, a chance to find Liliath and find out where my children were, and it was all I could get from Ascaroth.
“We'll see if what you say is true.”
“I promise you that it's true and that's all I know, and if you get out of here I promise you that this will be between us, nobody will even know you've been here.”
“Oh, I'm sure of that.”
A quick turn of my sword cut off Ascaroth's head, which fell rolling in the room followed by the sound of his body falling to the ground. I had what I had come for and Ascaroth was a loose end that I could not afford. I took my cloak and left the house. No doubt the servants would soon find his remains, but considering the number of enemies that a creature like him should have, the candidates to be named for his death would not scarce. The devil's words had made me change course. It seemed that Liliath and her lover were taking all the necessary measures so that no one could find them, and that left me with only one exit. Only one of those demons that according to Ascaroth were under the command of Liliath and her lover could tell me where to find them. Belfegor’s children. Or more correctly, daughters.
Belfegor had been one of the great high-level demons that the angels had fought eons ago. A creature that fed on the lust of men, their sexual energy subjugating their instincts to then feed on their bodies and their souls. The peculiarity was that Belfegor and his children always adopted the appearance of a woman, and their prey were exclusively men. It was common to find these creatures in the brothels of big cities where they did not lack prey, and I was sure that Kish's brothels were no exception.
Once again, the taverns of the city were the best way to find directions to get to the brothels in the city. I knew that Belfegor's caste would not be in the larger and more crowded venues, too hard to hide the corpses of their prey there, so I pretended to be interested in the most discreet brothel I could find. Soon one of the girls in the tavern I entered indicated a secluded spot on the bank of the river, in the southern part of the city. And there I went that same night.
The street where the whorehouse was located was dark and narrow and only seemed to light up thanks to the little shine that the moon reflected in the river that ran parallel to it. When arriving at the door, an old and wrinkled man who served as a doorman smiled without teeth and let me pass. I knew that the hardest part was going to be distinguishing the ordinary whores from Belfegor's daughters, and the truth is that I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I was confident that, just as I could see the true form of Arpasetaj, my powers helped me to distinguish the correct whore. As soon as I was inside three women came straight to me and grabbed me with promises of all kinds of pleasures until they took me to a corner where old cushions that smelled of something I did not want to identify piled up. One of them put a glass of wine in my hand while all of them sat around me and began to touch me sensually, playing to get my attention. As much as I tried to concentrate, I could not see anything demonic in any of them. It was possible that my powers were failing me or that in that brothel there were none of Belfegor's daughters in which case I was wasting my time. Immersed in that thought I was about to give up when suddenly I saw a woman at the back of the room. She was tall, dark, with long hair up to her waist and with her face painted in an accentuated way. From all points of view, she was a very attractive woman, only she was not a woman. I concentrated my energies on focusing on her image and then the veil fell. The woman gave way to a creature of greenish scaled skin with eyes of an intense yellow colour and fangs that protruded slightly from her mouth. It was exactly what I needed. I told the women who accompanied me that it was that woman that I wanted. All of them put a face of enormous distaste for the profits they saw lost, and tried to convince me to choose one of them.
“Shalima? She is not half as expert as me, you will not enjoy her as much as me.”
“Shalima is not sweet like me, my lord, she is aggressive and uncouth.”
“My lord she is plagued with horrible diseases.”
As much as their efforts made me laugh, I could not deviate from my goal. Seeing the lost prey, one of them got up and explained to the woman that she was the chosen one. The woman came up to me and all the others left me, defeated.
“They tell me you want my company, my lord,” she said, leaning against me.
“Yes, I do. Although your colleagues have not spoken very well of you or your talents.”
“Envy is like that, my lord,” she replied, reaching under my tunic and grabbing my member who reacted immediately to her game. “But I think it's better if you're the one who judges my ... talents.”
“So far you seem very able.”
“Come, my lord, let's go to a more private place,” she said, grabbing my hand and leading me upstairs.
We entered a dark room, with a cot and a couple of candles on an old table that dimly lit the room and a small closed window on the wall in the background. As soon as we were inside the woman dropped her cloak to show herself completely naked in front of me. With her hands she undid mine and guided me to the cot. I barely had time to lie down when she began to play with my member in her mouth causing my body to respond without qualms to her orders. I felt my desire take control of my body, and I wanted to take control of hers. Suddenly she sat up on top of me turning pleasure into madness. Her movements controlled my whole being and my desire for her. I sat up and turned her on all fours to take her from behind. She enjoyed that game of power letting me do without a doubt waiting for the moment when my strength had run out to devour me. My mind was filled with images of my nights of passion and love with Liliath. Love. Only I had felt love in that pantomime. The rage and pride wounded took the reins of my body and I began to penetrate the whore with more force while she shouted asking for more. Finally, my body could not take it anymore and let it go while a scream came out of my throat, the moment she had been waiting for. I felt her body tense ready to turn on me, but she found a surprise, my sword under her throat. My other hand grabbed her hair pulling her head back.
“It has not been bad, but now you and I are going to have a conversation.”
“Let go off me, you bastard!” she screamed.
“It would be better if you shut up. If someone comes your throat will have a new hole.” Her only response was a grunt. “I know what you are and if you have seen the sword on which your neck rests you will know what I am. Now I'm going to ask you some questions that you will answer clearly and with the truth, or the only thing that your little friends will recover from you will be the guts that they can take off the walls, understood?
A new growl served as a yes.
“Your clan has been recently subdued by a Dhorak demon accompanied by a woman, right?”
“Yes, it is true but, how …?”
“I said I would make the questions,” I answered, pulling her hair tightly, making her writhe in pain. “Where are they hiding? Where can I find the woman who serves the devil?”
“I do not know.”
<
br /> “I do not believe you.” I pressed the sword against her neck. “Think carefully before you answer.”
“I do not know, it's the truth. They arrived suddenly, they met with the clan chiefs, and the next thing we knew was they were dead. The devil threatened us with the same fate if we did not become his vassals. The woman killed half of our children as a warning.”
That sentence left me frozen, and I almost lost control over the demon.
“I do not believe that they were satisfied with a promise of vassalage, no doubt they had to stay close to you to control you.”
“You do not understand anything, they do not need to do it. When a demon recognises another as his lord, a magical bond is formed that forces the devil to carry out his orders always, even though he is on the other side of the world. Once they have the oath of the whole clan, they do not need to stay close, we are simply theirs.”
My mind was beginning to think that this would also be a dead end. If I could not get the information I needed, I had no way to go, no way to find my children.
“So, it's that simple, now you are slaves of a Dhorak demon.”
“No, you're wrong. Now we are slaves of the red-haired woman, the Dhorak demon works for her.”
The obviousness of her words hit me hard. Of course, the devil was not the architect of all this, it was Liliath and her lust for power. The extremes to which that longing had led her seemed to have no end, she was ready for everything, including becoming the mistress of a group of demons.
“The devil, what is his name?”
“He calls himself Teragon.”
The name did not suggest anything to me, no memory of my wars with the Dhoraks, so I figured I should not have been involved with him before, and maybe that's why he had managed to escape our extermination.
“If you do not believe me, you can ask other demons,” the woman said. “We are not the only ones who have fallen under their power, they are taking control of the entire lower level of the underworld.”
I could not imagine what Liliath's goal was, what she wanted to achieve by controlling a few minor clans of demons, but that did not matter much. For the moment I had everything I could get from that creature, it was not the hope I needed, but at least it left me with an open door to locate Liliath. If her plan was to seize the minor clans and there were several ones that had already fallen, I still had the possibility of finding someone who knew how to locate her. If there was one thing I had learned in my years as a soldier, it is that you can never undertake an attack of that size without allies, and if I located those allies, I would locate Liliath.
My hand slid quickly under the throat of the creature that made a dull sound. Our conversation was over. I left the bloody corpse on the bed and dressed. Before leaving the room, I took one last look back and saw that the creature had regained its true half reptilian form. No doubt that brothel would give much to talk about the next morning.
From that night my life went into an obsessive routine that had only one objective, to find out Liliath's whereabouts. Every night I went to the city slums looking for demons to get information about my wife, her plans and her whereabouts and almost every time the result was the same, one demon less on the face of the earth and a new closed door. That obsession ended up taking me away from Kish, to other cities in Sumer and Akkad, but in all of them Liliath's shadow was slipping from my hands. Here and there I heard rumours about a new clan of demons subjugated by Liliath, and that made me focus for a time my efforts on that specific race hoping to get some useful information, but never anything definitive. The lack of results made me enjoy the other part of the process, the bloody one and, without realising, little by little my nights of hunting ended up being an excuse to exterminate demons. A part of me recreated in the pain produced in those creatures, in the blood spilled and in the torture, and gradually that part was taking control. Days gave way to months and months to years and I still did not get anything. For her part, Liliath's plan was a real success and not only was she the queen of numerous lower demon clans but even humans were beginning to fall under her power. In many smaller cities I found temples dedicated to a female deity, dark, with fire-coloured hair that was venerated out of fear. And although the humans had changed her name by transforming it into Lilith, it was not difficult to know who she represented. Seeing how she got everything she wanted while I had to live without my children filled me with rage and hatred, and that hatred helped me to forget my original goal to be simply a source of death and destruction, one the demons also baptised with a new name, the exterminator. My name generated fear among the demonic castes, and that generated many enemies among the upper levels who did not hesitate to try to stop me. But none of their efforts could stop my hunger for blood, and my life became that of a pilgrim who traveled the different kingdoms of men killing whatever demons he could find out of pure pleasure. However, even I could not escape the power of time. Almost three hundred years had passed, and although my appearance had not aged a single day I suddenly found that my search no longer made sense. I continued to hear rumours about Liliath, about revolts against her power that she had crushed but even she seemed to have ceased in her plans of domination of the underworld. I did not know if the rumours were true, and if they were, I did not know to what power she had resorted to stay alive after all that time, but it did not matter anymore. My children were human and, as such, were subject to the inevitability of time. After three hundred years my heart had accepted that I had lost them forever, and I could only cling to the hope that they would have had happy and long lives. And so, surrendering my heart to the reality of a loneliness that had been living for centuries, I became definitively what I had been so long, the exterminator.
In all that time I had not known anything about Abaddon or the archangels although I had no doubt that they should know about the existence of my alter ego, but I guess they did not give importance to a creature that, after all, was doing their dirty work eliminating demons and that they had no way of linking with Helel. During that time, I became a kind of ghost, without having relationships with anyone and without spending much time anywhere, nobody knew anything about me, nobody knew me, and so no suspicion was raised about my immutable appearance.
The empires and kingdoms that I knew, fell. Those kings who thought they were so important in their own time and would go down in history were forgotten to be replaced by a new king, Sargon, who conquered all the empire cities of Sumer and Akkad creating a great empire and unifying the people, their faith and even their language. But even in this empire the lives of the humans did not change much, they continued with their joys and their miseries, and I became a silent observer of their passage through the earth. And one day, finally, I found the strength to do something that I had not dared to do in all that time, return to Uruk.
Even I am not oblivious to the memories and their associated wounds, wounds that would never close for me. I had no reason to go back to Uruk in all that time and I did not have it now either, but three hundred years of solitude is a lot even for an eternal heart and, almost by chance, without thinking even, I found myself back in its streets. This time I had been transported to a nearby village and disguised as a pilgrim on my way to the temple I made the day long distance from Uruk on foot. I entered the city through the North Gate, the closest to the temple and the first thing I checked was that the city had not changed at all. Some buildings had been demolished and others built here and there, but the city remained the same, bustling, crowded and alive, tremendously alive. The faces had changed, but there were still merchants in the streets, women washing in the squares and peasants on the way to the temple. My feet made me travel the city recreating myself, not in what I saw, but in what I remembered because, although my body was in that new Uruk, my eyes could only see the old one. I spent the entire day touring its streets, soaking up its smells, identical to those I once knew. The city was now governed by councils reporting to Sargon in the city of Kish, no memory remained of
Gilgamesh or his people, and I wondered how the life of Raphael's son would have ended and if he ever knew that it was me who killed his father. None of that really mattered. It was sad to think that none of my old enemies were there to remind me of my past. My steps betrayed me by taking me to the place where I never wanted to go. My old home.
Armesh’s house no longer existed and, in its place, a different house occupied the land of the property, and I felt grateful for not having to relive the sorrow of the lost friends. But my gratitude was short lived. Next to what had been his house, the one that was my home was still standing. The house had not changed one bit except for a new low wall that had been built around it. Without thinking about what I was doing I crossed the threshold of the garden and went to the interior of the house. As soon as I entered a small woman and her daughter about eight years old looked at me scared, no doubt wondering who I was and what I was doing there.
“You cannot see me, I've never been here,” I said, taking control of their minds and the two immediately returned to their lives as if I were not there.
I walked through the halls of the house like a ghost. From the objects I could see in the house, I gathered that her husband was a farmer and was probably in the market trying to sell his crop or in some nearby field taking care of the watering. Suddenly I entered what had been my room with Liliath and there, the images assaulted me without any possible defence, my first night of love with Liliath and all the other ones that followed, Suriath holding my children in her arms, the smiles of Narmesh and Niel and finally nothing. And there, without anyone seeing me, in a house that was no longer mine, I, Lucifer, cried for all the lost happiness but, above all, I cried for myself.
When I managed to get back to myself, I went out into the garden to leave the house and the hot air hit my face. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the outside light, and then I saw her, standing in front of me, she had not changed the least since the last day we saw each other; Liliath. Her face looked at me serene, but without smiling, and her body stood as if it were a statue built up in the garden. That image collapsed my senses unable to process what they were seeing. The image, like in a dream, moved to approach me, and with an infinite softness and staring into my eyes touched my forehead with the tenderness of a lover and, in a second, everything around me changed.
