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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]