Barlowe, Wayne - God's Demon

'Hell's souls are mine.'

She closed her eyes.

'You are mine.'

She felt the coldness of them as they slammed upon her body with so much force that she tumbled backward, landing flat upon her back. As the room dimmed and her mouth was pried open, as the sound of them drowned out even her own terror and she felt them moving down her throat and into her belly, she heard one word repeated until she heard nothing more.

'Mine!'

Chapter Thirty-One

DIS

To Hannibal's eyes, the capital of Hell looked as if giants' hands had swept the inner wards of its buildings, leaving only the gouge-marks of their colossal nails—its former twisted alleys and streets and avenues—upon the ground.

After the hard march through the Wastes, progress toward the Keep had been easy. Dis was a shattered city, the shards of its buildings few and scattered, the obstacles to a marching army nearly nonexistent. What few buildings had been found stood shaking on the fractured edges of its outermost wards. These had been summarily razed, their souls liberated.

Dense with the still-lingering, eddying dust and ash of destruction, the air grew brighter with the red-gold glow that emanated from the direction of the Keep. The terrain between Hannibal and the mountainous edifice was so barren and relatively smooth that it acted as a dark reflector of the dim fires of the Fly's abode, making the ground look like the surface of a frozen lake. Only the swath of the great army that waited near the base of the new wall, now growing visible in the thick atmosphere, bespoke of any life upon the otherwise deserted plain. He turned in his saddle and looked into the red-tinged carpet of souls that was his army. Receding until they were tiny specks, the souls' countless weapons, reflecting the fires of the Keep, sparkled like embers in the hanging ash. Breathtaking, he thought, a sight of unexpected beauty.

The plodding footsteps of the enormous Behemoths ahead shook the ground continuously, causing those waves of jostling souls closest to them to move forward in irregular clumps, but somehow Hannibal's nimble steed managed to maintain its footing among them. The Soul-General was close—some thought too close—to the flanks of the advancing Behemoth line, but he felt that his troops should leave little open ground between them in the unlikely event that the giant creatures' line was breached. And he knew that their bone-masked mahouts, in the unlikely event that the Behemoths panicked, would be quick to react. Protruding from each mammoth soul's skull was the head of a long spike that ended inches from the soul's brain; a sharp blow with the mahout's hammer and the spike would be driven home, destroying the soul instantly.

Before him the new Keep Wall rose up, still distant but immense, ascending until it nearly obscured the Keep itself. Bathed in red, it was a sheer, solid expanse covered in an ever-changing net of glyphs that played upon the flat soul-brick surface like firelight through waves of blood. It was the product, he had been told, of Mulciber's genius, and it was a marvel, built, Hannibal guessed, with such haste that it could only have been achieved with the use of every soul's hand and body in Dis. He stared for long minutes as he moved forward, the layer of glyphs mesmerizing in its shifting patterns. Behind that floating shield, the wall was unbroken save for their goal—the single huge gate that lay behind a titanic raised drawbridge a thousand feet above the Keep's base and no longer accessible by its wide bridge, which had been destroyed. Lying between the gate and the Second Army of the Ascension were not only the massed legions of the army of Dis but also the wide, bottomless moat of Lucifer's Belt. Too hot and broad to traverse with any improvised barges, it would, unquestionably, prove a formidable barrier—a barrier that somehow needed to be crossed. Satanachia had already pointed to the gate as their objective, but the distance between the moat-edge and the gate above was too great to cast ropes. And no flyers in any great enough numbers accompanied them, all of their squadrons having been already committed to Sargatanas' maneuver. For the moment, Hannibal could see no physical way of gaining their objective.

Even as Hannibal watched the advancing lines of demons ahead, an enormous bolt of red glyph-lightning, a curse he thought from the ground below, exploded into the ranks of Satanachia's demons, pulverizing scores of them into a thick cloud of black dust that fell back down slowly. Was it sent by the Fly high above in his Rotunda? Was it just the beginning? Or am I letting my misgivings get the better of me? Hannibal had never been this skittish before a battle. Another bolt of lightning, this time closer, jarred him and made Gaha flinch and then more discharges began to burst upward and Hannibal knew for certain that they were not natural. The Fly had created a defensive perimeter and they were edging all too slowly into it. Hannibal would lose many troops to the lightning before they had a chance to engage the waiting army, but there was nothing he could do.

The ground, which looked so uniform from a distance, had become irregular with wide, bubbling fields of dark, cooling lava, making their progress difficult. The Soul-General had not heard of these lakes in his briefing and wondered if they had been churned up by Dis' rampant demolition. He became even more suspicious when he thought he heard dull sounds issuing from within them. Through the shimmer of heat and steam he thought he saw strange shapes in the slowly swirling crust but reasoned that it was nothing more than his imagination fed by the tension of the moment.

Above, the cloud-cover over central Dis was dense, and Hannibal knew that Eligor and his lord must be well on their way, perhaps closer than he expected. The thought comforted him, but he knew that even while their efforts would shorten the battle to come, many souls would be destroyed and many demons would find out how much truth lay in the dread tales of Abaddon.

Suddenly, with a brilliant flash and a great rushing sound, a huge, circular glyph materialized before the Keep Wall hanging many hundreds of feet over Lucifer's Belt. Surrounding its central sigil—Beelzebub's pale green mark— were myriad smaller devices, each, Hannibal recognized from their forms, the sigil of one of Dis' field commanders. He heard a collective hissing intake of breath from the surrounding troops of the soul army as the small sigils detached themselves and flew, arrow straight, into the pools of lava that lay at their feet in front, to the sides, and behind them. It was a Summoning!

Hannibal's ill-defined suspicions had been justified. The bubbling pools he and his souls had so carefully been avoiding rippled and came to life as the gray crust burst apart, sending shards of cooled lava into the troops and revealing the super-heated magma beneath. There, kneeling, were rank upon rank of concealed incandescent figures that rose and began to surge forward, their steaming armor dulling to red and darkening, hardening in the air. Springing with halberds and swords at the ready onto the ledges of firmer ground before them, wave after wave poured forth, rushing to meet the surprised enemy. Hannibal watched as many of his stunned troops were cut down before they could react, some tumbling forward into the yellow-orange lava that had given birth to the demons who now struck them down.

Farther ahead, Hannibal saw that the fighting had spread to his demon allies and that the legions of Put Satanachia were as beleaguered as his own. A dozen massive gates—unseen for the radiance of the lava—opened out onto the Belt from the base of the Keep Wall, and from them wide barges carefully fashioned of pumice and