“Nobody’s going to die screaming,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.
It was a question that weighed on me heavily, assuming we found no demon smith. Would I be able to hold the Sword again?
I took a deep breath and hiked up the trail on his heels, with Tascius bringing up the rear behind me.
We wove through jagged pillars that arched overhead, climbing higher and higher as the sun beat down on us. Within an hour, I was almost grateful for the sight of the open mouth of a cavern, almost nothing more than a slot in the dark stone ahead of us.
Still, despite my desperation to be out of the sun, there was something about the darkness crawling inside it that made my hackles rise.
Azazel stared into the darkness, his eyes narrowed. “I’ll light the way. Melisande, stay between us.”
It was an order, not a suggestion.
The Watcher went first, and as he disappeared into the cavern, tiny stars flickered to life in the air around him like fireflies.
“You next,” Lucifer said, and Tascius nodded in agreement. I swallowed hard, and stepped into the darkness after Azazel.
The heat of the sun dissipated instantly, like the shadows had sucked away every bit of warmth from my body. I shivered and drew closer to Azazel, staying within the little cloud of his stars.
With Lucifer at my back, some of the latent fear left my body. We wove through the darkness, sometimes hearing small scuffles of an unseen something moving around, but Lucifer always reached out to touch me when I paused, listening intently.
It felt like something was watching us, like we were no longer really in the mountains at the edge of a wasteland, but under the eye of something too enormous and vast to comprehend.
I couldn’t even bring myself to speak until light filtered into a distant crack far ahead, and my eyes teared up at the red-hot brilliance of it.
As soon as we stepped out of the tunnel, the weight of watching eyes vanished, but a heat that made the wasteland sun seem like winter blasted against us.
I gaped open-mouthed at the mountain that loomed high above us. A woman’s face had been carved in the sheer drop, and a fall of lava gushed steadily from her open mouth, splashing viscously into the lake of fire that shimmered before us.
“Hekla Fell,” Azazel said softly. “The Forge of the Gods.”
I dropped my gaze. We stood on a broad shelf of polished obsidian, and a ramshackle little hut had been built under an overhang, only yards away from the lake of molten stone.
As I watched, a demon crept under tarp hung across the open door, slithering on a long body to the edge of the lake, and used a long pair of tongs to hold a crucible over the lava-flow. He had more arms than I could count, and the rest of him was still in the hut. Lank gray hair hung over two sets of his shoulders, and scorch marks smudged his scaled skin.
He tilted the crucible, revealing the flash of molten gold, and sighed in satisfaction before retreating to his hut. Before his head popped back inside, it swiveled to face us, revealing one normal eye, and one that was a round, polished ruby.
“Well, are you coming in or not?”
Then he vanished.
I glanced up at Azazel. “Is that what you were expecting?”
He blinked at the hut. “I’d expected a little more grandeur, but I’ll take what I can get.”
I took a deep breath and carefully walked over the sharp stone, avoiding razor-like ridges underfoot until we reached the door of the smith’s hut. Sweat ran down my back, and I could’ve sworn I felt my wings crisping from the proximity of the lake.
I paused outside the cloth door.
“Oh, do come in,” the smith said silkily, and I pulled aside the cloth and stepped inside.
16
Melisande
I blinked and let my eyes adjust to the darkness.
The first thing I saw was a rivulet of pure liquid gold, sparkling as the smith poured it from the crucible into a mold.
His body was coiled all around the interior of the hut, brushing up against tables laden with polished armor, over trunks packed with glimmering jewelry, and my breath caught at the sight of a sword hung on the wall, with a rippling blade of blue steel.
It was flawless. My fingers itched to take it down and test its weight.
“What are you here for, then?” The smith lowered the crucible.
I met his eyes, gazing at the ruby that looked like a bloody orb stuffed in his skull, and lost my voice.
Azazel ducked under the tarp, pressing his hand to the small of my back. “We’re here about a sword.”
The smith just laughed, a gurgling chuckle. “I have all kinds of swords. I have swords from Old Earth, swords from across worlds, swords made of gems and feathers and wood. But all my swords will kill someone, take your pick.”
“We’re here for a specific sword,” I said firmly, not backing up even as the smith’s centipede-like upper body drew closer. “Would you be able to make a sword that was the perfect inverse of the Sword of Light?”
The smith paused, and his tongue crept out and ran over his upper lip.
I felt movement at my back and moved aside to make room for Lucifer and Tascius, which put me uncomfortably close to the centipede demon, but if I could handle seeing giant eyeballs in the floors, I could handle being close to him.
“An inverse to the Sword of Light,” he repeated slowly, his good eye flicking over the new additions to his tiny hut. “You mean Gabriel’s sword?”
I resisted the urge to ask, how many Swords of Light are there? “Yes. I want a sword that is its polar opposite.”
The smith leaned back, and I dared to breathe a little deeper.
“Oh, but he would
