withdraw and leave the Prince and Dis itself, taking his Order with him. Wounded and distracted, Beelzebub would not be able to stop them.
* * * * *
Hannibal felt the sound in his bones before he heard it. Beneath his feet he felt the floor of the Keep vibrate, felt it yield slightly as if it were shifting. At the present, they were climbing steadily upward and Satanachia informed him that they were roughly halfway to the Rotunda. At first he thought the dull sound was diminishing, but suddenly it gathered into a deep rushing sound and then the floor beneath his feet cracked. Braziers tumbled to the ground, spreading pools of flame.
Satanachia turned and looked at him with knit brows, listening.
'What is it?' Hannibal asked.
But realization suddenly cleared Satanachia's face and, wide-eyed, he shouted
As one, the vanguard turned, and the command went back down the unending stairs. The hundreds of confused troops squeezed into the narrow passage tried to maintain some form of order, but were too slow to respond. The rushing sound from below became the din of crashing bone-supports and bricks, and the Keep shuddered like a wounded animal. The floor heaved and buckled and Hannibal saw the long, dim staircase ahead thrown upward, completely broken apart by some titanic force.
As he fell, through the dust and broken bricks and tiles that flew toward him, he had a brief impression of something enormous, something vaguely human in form, rising irresistibly up through the ruptured floor on powerful wings. And as it passed, it gave voice, a deafening cry of release, pained and hoarse but also unmistakably triumphant. Hannibal recognized it as the voice of Semjaza.
* * * * *
The Rotunda floor buckled from the lack of support beneath it and formed a fractured and deepening bowl into which slid hundreds of Beelzebub's legionaries. The ugly mass of flesh that was the Fly's throne sank into a soup of ashy blood, rubble, and flailing demons and then suddenly erupted as the entire floor split open.
Eligor's mouth opened in silent shock.
For eons, the few scattered Watchers, buried and nearly forgotten, had been thought of almost as forces of Infernal nature. They had been in Hell before the demons arrived and, it was speculated, would be there after time ended. No demon had ever dreamt of actually seeing one.
Once Semjaza the Watcher had been beautiful, but that was very long ago. Incarcerated, it had grown immense and mad feeding upon the blackness that lay beneath all of Hell. A rank odor of age and decay filled Eligor's nostrils.
So tall that it was nearly a tenth the height of the Black Dome, the Watcher floated on six slowly beating wings that, fully extended, seemed as if they might span the Rotunda. It had fared poorly in its captivity, Eligor saw. Blind and with its nose eaten away by worms, its face was a tortured landscape of pits and wrinkles, the chiseled contours of its skull prominent. Its skin, once golden and miraculous for its magical markings, was a sickly pale gray and was dotted with holes and covered in sores. Visible, too, was the ancient, Throne-mandated punishment, the great scarred wound where its genitals had been ritually, wrathfully, excised for its sins. Upon its wrists and ankles were the burned-in scars of the elaborate glyphs that Those from the Above had used to cast it down and shackle it—glyphs that somehow Beelzebub had managed to neutralize.
Eligor saw it turn its huge horned and winged head to and fro, trying blindly to sense its surroundings. Beneath it, the remains of the floor cracked and began to slowly slide down, sinking of its own broken weight, lower and lower until it separated and dropped, taking with it those screaming demons that had been clinging to the bricks. When the dust had cleared, Eligor could see well down into the burning heart of the Keep. When he looked up he saw the hundreds of his flying demons who had retreated; there were fewer of them left than he had expected.
Once the sounds of the floor's sinking had subsided, a strange quiet settled throughout the Rotunda. Only the cavernous sound of Semjaza's breathing could be heard, as well as the slow flapping of its wings.
And then a soft buzzing arose and a green command-glyph sprang to life from the deformed figure that was Beelzebub. It sped up toward Semjaza and, without pause, sank into its head. The milky eyes closed and the six wings beat faster as the message was revealed. Eligor was sure that the Fly's weapon was gathering itself.
From the heights of the dome a white form descended and hovered before the withered face of the Watcher. Sargatanas, head ablaze and blue
Fearing for his lord, Eligor felt his breath catch in his throat. He could not see whether Sargatanas was speaking to Semjaza or simply showing himself, allowing the sightless Watcher to become aware of him. Whatever the case, the effect was immediate and startling. Semjaza reared backward as if it had been struck, fear unmistakable upon its face.
A roar of outraged buzzing rent the air and Beelzebub ascended, spreading and engulfing Sargatanas within himself. In the briefest instant Eligor saw his lord transformed from a thing of potent beauty to a figure ablaze in the center of a fiery maelstrom of flies. Eligor saw, too, the layer of glyph-mail eaten away and the flies beginning to penetrate the white armor. Without thinking, Eligor found himself in a steep dive heading directly toward Sargatanas. But as Eligor drew near and the flaming green flies pulled away, their lethal work done, he saw that there was nothing that could undo the damage that had been inflicted upon the demon. Barely able to stay aloft, Sargatanas began a long, slow descent and would have plunged into the smoke-filled darkness of the open floor below had Eligor not caught him.
As he dragged his lord away from the great hole, Eligor looked up and saw Semjaza, guided by the buzzing, moving purposefully toward the coalescing figure of the Fly. The Watcher said something in its own tongue, a language Eligor was unfamiliar with, and, opening its mouth, began to inhale deeply. The Fly tried to pull away, but it was in vain. An uncontrollable, continuous stream of blazing flies was pulled from the shifting form of the Prince and began to flow into the Watcher's mouth, sucked into its glowing throat. The being that was Beelzebub began to waver and fade and Eligor heard a terrible scream emanate from the shredding cloud of flies. It lingered and echoed in his ears even after the Watcher had finished devouring the last of the Prince of Hell. And Eligor would never be sure, but it sounded to him as if that final, anguished cry was the name 'Lilith.'
Seeing their master gone, the remainder of the Fly's troops broke and ran, making their way as best they could over the shattered floor. Most met their destruction at the end of a lance.
