succubi.
He smiled as he passed each closed door. A blazing sigil—each Knight’s personal emblem—floated outside the occupied rooms. Moans and sighs mixed with growls and short panting shrieks, not all the sounds of harmless release. The succubi knew how to please, whether it was through their pleasure or their willing pain.
Adramalik, himself, rarely indulged. He could not afford to have any attachments to compromise his office, least of all the fire-laced loose lips of some highly placed, utterly tempting courtesan.
He moved purposefully, crossing the barracks floor quickly. The floor was moist and dotted with random puddles of reddish liquid that flecked his long skin robes. The feared Chancellor of the Order splashed ingloriously toward the far rear exit, where he ascended a wide staircase and passed beneath a carved archway, the final threshold before the Rotunda’s narrowing artery.
Beelzebub’s infamous domed Rotunda sat atop his fortress, embedded in the topmost folds of its rotting mantle. It was the single largest building in Hell, as much grown as it was built. Adramalik remembered standing on the foundation’s edge, the empty socket yawning, as the vast, archiorganic foundation had been laid and the dome had been blocked. A foul updraft continuously blew stinking air from the crater into his face and he would turn away frequently, gritting his teeth. He saw the first soul-bricks being conjured into place by Mulciber, Beelzebub’s architect-genius, the force behind this vast project. Adramalik remembered the endless lines of souls, kept in place by an army of winged Scourges, as they awaited their eternal fate. He could still hear their plaintive wailings as they were enfolded, layer by layer, into the great edifice. And he remembered how their cries had creased his master’s face with delight.
Adramalik made his way down the final tubular corridor toward the Rotunda, stooping as he approached the clenched doorway. By design, no attack on his lord could possibly have been launched from such a position of forced supplication. Adramalik was nearly on his knees as he scribed in midair the fiery glyph that would gain him entry. It was ironic, he thought, that the most powerful demon in Hell should be thus approached. It spoke volumes about Beelzebub’s paranoia.
As the sphincterlike door expanded, Adramalik saw the gathered demons only vaguely, distant and diffused by the dense atmosphere. The fires of their heads were bright sparks that flickered in the shifting skeins of airborne detritus. This was to be an Induction into the Order, an event as rare as it was important.
He entered, stood up, and the door constricted behind him. The twilight of Beelzebub’s chamber took a moment to adjust to, and Adramalik tried to see whether any significant changes had been made to the vast, circular room. Eons of attendances had imbued him with a familiarity and practiced eye that missed very little.
He was used to the suffocating closeness of the place but always thought it ironic that the largest building in Hell was also one of its most cramped. Few standing in the Rotunda’s center would have guessed at its monumentality. As he looked about, all looked as it should.
Adramalik slowly made his way toward the gathered demons, careful not to trip over the chunks of raw- looking meat that floated in the ankle-deep puddles of blood. He was used to this as well.
He stepped up to the gathered demons. There were about twenty of them—petitioners mostly—and Adramalik noted that not only was his lord not seated upon the throne but that the Prime Minister Agares, a great duke and personal advisor to Beelzebub, was also absent.
AGARESAdramalik knew everything about this fellow. Lord Agaliarept and he had left no stone unturned in their investigation of him. His had been a truly remarkable journey, beginning with an impact in Hell that put him far from every other demon who had landed. He had landed so far out on Hell’s fringe that, after wandering alone for millennia, he had taken up with the enigmatic Salamandrine Men. There he had learned to survive in the Wastes, to hunt Abyssals of all description, to adorn himself with their glowing stalks and pelts, and to use them as a native would. His weapons skills, which drew heavily on patterns and moves from the Waste dwellers’ craft, would be far beyond those of the other Knights. And he had a look to him that was intelligent and more than a little wild, due in part to a single, glowing Abyssal stalk that he’d thrust into his smooth skull. He was highly adaptable and had learned the ways of the court quickly and was quiet at the right times. Adramalik, who thought of him as something of a personal protege, knew that he would serve the Order well.
SALAMANDRINE MAN{6}Coinciding with Adramalik’s arrival, the gathered demons began to hear a faint buzzing that seemed to emanate from between the thousands of skins that hung from the domed ceiling. These skins hung from an intricate webwork of sinew, swaying as if caught in a gentle breeze, but no breeze, no cleansing balm, had ever filtered through the windowless chamber. The movement was created by the soul-skins themselves, rippling and contorting and trying futilely to free themselves from their captivity. Adramalik had sometimes come upon Beelzebub as he sat gazing up at their rustling dance and giggling softly, unaware that he was being watched.
The buzzing grew louder; in moments Beelzebub would assume his throne. Some of the demons shifted uneasily, but the initiate looked upward without a trace of apprehension. Adramalik thought again that he had chosen well.
Chapter Three
There could be no day or night in Hell. What was regarded as day would have been as twilight in any other place. Only red Algol, which some regarded as the Above’s Watchdog, could be used as any true measure of Time. It scratched its lonely path through the blackness at intervals regular enough to be measured and useful, and it was the wan star’s pallid rise that heralded the day. Its light affected nothing.
When Algol finally rose over Sargatanas’ finished palace, many millennia had passed. Its spire-ringed dome, now empty of the thousand winged workers, reared up over the city like a mighty mountain peak. The Audience Chamber within had no rival for its dark architectural beauty. Sargatanas’ aesthetic had been so sublime and its execution by Halphas so deft that when he first entered the chamber Eligor nearly forgot that he was in Hell. Mineral resources from all over Hell had been brought together, floated on barges down the Acheron, and used with such craft and subtlety as to strike dumb all who saw the chamber for the first time.
It was a hundred spans wide and the domed, pale-obsidian ceiling above soared half again more than that. Sargatanas took each visiting demon dignitary around himself, pointing out details, like the carved smoked-crystal capitals atop each of the five hundred gold columns or a particularly eloquent vein in the polished bloodstone floor. While the palace’s shell was built traditionally of bricks, there was not a soul-brick to be found in its core; all the materials used in the arcade, the Audience Chamber, and the dome had been painstakingly quarried from veins of native rock. That, alone, made the edifice unique. Sargatanas had had no desire to incorporate the suffering of souls into the heart of his great building-of-state. Some might have called it a monument to ego, but Eligor knew that it was a sincere attempt to keep the memory of the Above close at hand.
He, Valefar, and sometimes Valefar’s lieutenant, the Demon Minor Zoray, were frequent guides to the sights of the palace. When the great Earl and Demon Major Bifrons arrived with his large entourage, his three eyes widened with the sheer size of the chamber. As befit Sargatanas’ Prime Minister, Valefar took the lead, showing them the splendors of the new palace. Gasps came from the corpulent earl—gasps of admiration, Eligor was sure,
