“Beautiful, is it not? Lord Astaroth laid the stone, but it was I who did the shaping.” The spider skittered a little faster for the gaping portal. No doors, just an open archway dressed with a decorated gable—three eye-like mandalas set in ascending triangulation. “I truly believe this to be my greatest work yet. There’s just, just, something about it I can’t—” Adnihilo, Adam, and the others halted at the threshold. “Is something wrong?”
“The floor,” replied the pastor’s son, “it’s tilted.”
The half-blood noticed as well, and “tilted” was an understatement. Inside the cathedral was like gazing down the side of a cliff. Rows of columns ran sidelong down the slope, sculpted in the image of tortured souls holding steady the vaulted ceiling, though against what was beyond Adnihilo. Certainly not gravity, for by the end of the nave, the cathedral’s orientation became utterly vertical. He looked at Paimon who reared onto his hind legs.
With a sickly smile and squinting eye-sockets, he repeated the legate’s line then said with wringing fingers, “Be brave, Inheritor of Fire.”
“Thisss half-breed, mortal thing isss to be our champion?” hissed poisonous tones from within the sanctuary. Adnihilo could not see the source from outside, nor it seemed could Adam. They glanced at one another, skeptical, but Ba’al urged them on amidst another fit. One step each, they were straddling the threshold.
“What do you worship in a church in Hell?” asked the pastor’s son to no one in particular.
“The Devil?” guessed Adnihilo.
Again, the hissing voice bellowed. “Ignorant asss well?”
Another step and they were across the portal archway, Lilum and Paimon following close behind. The half-blood’s eyes couldn’t be seeing this right; the huge, vaulted room was illumed bright as day without lamp or candle, as if the soft, orange-yellow light was drawn in from the earthen fissures, borne by the air, bent and twisted toward the gaping black pit center of the transept. He could feel the very heat leaving his body, swallowed up by the darkness residing further inside. Likewise, he could hear the prodigious slithering, see the serpentine shadow of the source of the hissing disdain.
“Lord Astaroth,” said Paimon, bowing to the chimeric demon who lounged coiled on spider silk cushions. Below the waist he was a golden snake; above he was an angel but plump and thin-limbed and with membranous wings. When he spoke, his tongue fluttered.
“Thisss isss a waste of time. Look at him; there’sss hardly a drop of immortal blood. He won’t sssurvive the ritual. I’d gamble he doesn’t even know what is going on—do you?” he spoke now directly to Adnihilo. “Do you even know where you are?”
Lilum stepped between them, “We are within the halls of the Father’s eternal prison, here to free him from his bonds. Did He not explain this to you, or perhaps you have forgotten your position as His servant?”
“With all due ressspect, my queen to be, you are woefully misssinformed. Prison? Perhapsss once, but have you not already witnessed how we’ve shaped thisss world to sssuit our formsss?” Astaroth spread his stringy arms wide. “Yesss! What Ventus thought to be our ruinousss end, I, Lord and Master of Limbo, have molded into a veritable paradissse! I have divided heat from cold and light from darkness, forged order from chaosss and made manifest the very substance of thisss Cathedral Nox!” He slithered off of his silk pile noisily across a floor the texture of rippling ocean or of frozen lava rock. Rounding once around the visitors, the demon stretched to show his full magnificence. With a smile yellow as his oily curls, he answered, “You are wrong, bassstard blooded champion. You are ignorant of the caussse you ssserve. We worship not the King, though true to him we swore our fealty. But no, we do not worship him but that which gave him birth. That which old Ventusss shrinksss from, terrified. We worship the darknesss from which all thingsss enter life.”
“Th, th, thank you, Lord Astaroth,” replied Paimon, “That was a speech to match your work on the cathedral. But I’m afraid we’re running short on time. Lord Beelzebub has a contract with the fading one. Might we have your leave?”
“It’sss no wassste of my time,” the demon lord answered, slithering back to his cushions.
The spider bowed to his master one final time then skittered so close that Adnihilo could make out each strand of his wiry fur. “Climb on, and hold tight,” he said, though Paimon did not wait for confirmation, just plucked them one by one and dropped them onto his abdomen where they stuck to hair like the spines of a cactus: itchy, wreaking of turpentine and pigments. Nauseous, the half-blood watched the vaults and columns curve with the slope of the cathedral down into the earth as Paimon approached the cold and consuming pit. The closer they drew, the more distorted their vision, the more frigid the stale air felt against their skin. Adnihilo shivered; his weather-worn linen rags did little to insulate him, and between his vertigo and his itchy snares, Eyebrows’s breathing technique would be impossible. He tried regardless and caught the eye of the spider.
“That breathing, it’s Mara’s triple burner. You met with that deserter?”
“I learned it from a Gautaman boxer.”
“And did he tell you what it is for?” Paimon’s voice peaked, excited. His motion ceased.
