Barlowe, Wayne - God's Demon

'No, my Prince, never. There was weakness there, as there was in the realm of men. Men are fearful and wretched, and watching over them when I was a seraph was ... tedious,' he snarled. 'That is why I played with them ... why I lost favor and why I,' he indicated his missing legs, 'was burnt. But I do miss their offerings ... their children. Their hopeful, futile burnings. They had no idea how much I enjoyed the smell of that smoke! Had they but known, they would have stopped in a day. If I could get them to do that with their own children, imagine what I could have done with more time.'

Adramalik felt something brush past his foot, but when he looked down he had only an impression of a small, vague shape heading toward the center of the chamber. Others, too, were converging there.

'He yearns for the Above,' the Prince buzzed.

'Who, Prince?' asked Moloch.

'Sargatanas. I have heard that he sits on his throne staring through the hole in his dome, staring upward ... toward the Above. He has spent all these long millennia here and yet, as dim as it must be, he can still see the Light. He is stirring the same feelings in others among the Fallen. I cannot let this continue. Minister Agares and I have been hard at work drawing up plans for ridding Hell of him, plans that you, my general, will execute. You will take up those grievous Hooks of yours and with them tear away his dreams!' The Prince's form shifted and billowed with anger. 'With you victorious, I will take back Astaroth's wards and Sargatanas' as well. And I will wear him around my neck, crushed as you leave him, as a reminder to all that the line between Hell and the Above shall never be crossed!'

Adramalik had not seen Beelzebub this agitated since the early times—not since the wars of territory that had carved up Hell so long ago. He looked then at Agares, who had been silently listening. Why was I not brought in on the earliest discussions of battle plans? Why Agares ... why is he so favored? I will have to watch him.

A growing commotion drew the demons' attentions toward the center of the room, where they saw a gathering of many-legged, chittering creatures scrabbling in a flailing mound to climb atop one another. Each one's body was unique in shape and looked like an animated chunk of flesh, ragged and moist. Only a few bore single pallid eyes. In a frenzy of many-jointed legs they clawed themselves upward into a roughly demonic shape, a shape that, after a series of shudders and ripples, smoothed its form and became the Conjuror General, Agaliarept. He gave one more spasmodic twitch of his many arms— arms that had been legs moments earlier— and turned to confront the demons.

Adramalik heard his sibilant voice, a hissing like the venting of steam, issuing from the mouths of a hundred suspended bricks.

'Look,' the Conjuror said, and pointed at the floor. A pattern of bricks was already in place, and when he touched the closest brick it began to whine, setting off its neighbor, until the entire line, which disappeared into a wall, was noisily active.

'While I have not yet found her, I have finally found Faraii, my Prince. His domicile lies deep within a glyph- guarded building atop the central mount of Adamantinarx. Just as you suspected. It would seem that he has been confined to his chambers after his actions at Maraak,' Agaliarept added. 'I summoned you because I have, just this hour, found a way in.'

Even in the gloom, Adramalik could see the Prince's smile.

'That is welcome news, Agaliarept. The Baron has always been my insurance against the day that Sargatanas became difficult. With his help we will open up a second front on the Lord of Adamantinarx.'

Without waiting for a signal Agaliarept's many mouths began to move, each one murmuring a different incantation until Adramalik had the sensation that a crowd of conjurors stood around him. Agaliarept's eyes rolled and bubbling foam from his lips dottled his cowl and when, in the course of his trance, he trained his wand-arms upon the floor, just behind the bricks that were already aglow, these began to arise, separating and assembling themselves with screeches and small puffs of blood.

Before a few moments had passed, a four-armed figure stood upon a single thick pillar before the assembled demons—a brick construct nearly as tall as a demon. A large soul-mouth trembled in what seemed like its round head, and its overlong arms terminated in bricks with vacant eye sockets.

'Do it ... do it now, my Prince,' Agaliarept croaked hoarsely. 'We must act now or the glyphs will find us.'

Beelzebub coughed loudly and protruded his long, black tongue, and upon it Adramalik saw a fly trembling. It was slick with saliva, and its back was fiery green with tiny glyphs. The Prince withdrew it slightly and stepped up to the brick figure, clasping its oversized head in his hands, distended his proboscis, thrusting the fly deep into the slack soul-mouth. Adramalik heard a barking cough and knew that it was done. They watched the dull green glow of it as it descended into the bricks, gathering speed through the opening conduit on its way toward Adamantinarx. He and the other demons immediately grasped a waving arm and placed their eyes over the empty sockets, watching as the mil-lions of soul-brick eyes between the Conjuring Chamber and Faraii's chamber winked open and the darkness parted.

Their view through the countless eyes was less than perfect; a certain clarity was lost to the distances, the vast number of eyes needed to peer across so large a distance, and the overall gloom of the chamber.

Faraii was sitting upon the floor of a room that had been at once austere and elegant. Rage had visited that room, though, and in its wake had left a tableau of utter chaos. In the half-light it appeared that the room and its contents had been torn apart, clawed and mangled to be thrown in every corner. By turning the brick slightly, Adramalik could see once carefully worked wall hangings of stitched flesh lying in shreds, rent floor mats woven of tough Waste-veins, and fractured personal objects of every description looking like the jumbled and broken bones of so many skeletons.

But to the Chancellor General, the terrible centerpiece of the room was unquestionably the Baron himself. He was not as Adramalik remembered him, not the quiet, confident, self-contained demon who had wandered into Dis from the Wastes. Faraii sat awkwardly, still in his armor, almost as if he had been dropped upon the floor, his head canted to one side. His unblinking, glittering eyes were staring into someplace deep within himself as, with long, deliberate strokes, he slowly honed the black sword that lay across his lap. Like a creature from the Wastes, captivity does not suit him, thought Adramalik wryly. Thus has the Great Lord Sargatanas rewarded him for Astaroth's overdue death.

A mouth in a brick, a darkness within the darkness, opened behind Faraii, and Adramalik saw, somewhat indistinctly, a glow ascending from the wall's depths. The bright, emerging spark of Beelzebub's emissary paused upon the crushed lower lip and then took wing, entering the room to hover momentarily behind the oblivious seated figure. Purposefully it flew the short distance to Faraii's head and alighted, and still the Baron took no notice.

Boldly, the fly crossed Faraii's forehead, scuttling over his bony brow, and, clawing under his hard eyelid,