Out from the shadows, the Xanthos King rose from his throne of old, yellowed bones, his cloak unfurling into raven wings that flowed from his shoulders like a frayed sable cape. He stood exposed, God’s mistake: mounted on a frame whose make was human corpses, joints of torn ligaments, movement discontinuous as a stringless marionette’s, glared a ram’s brow lashed to a boarish snout, its eyes like Adnihilo’s, mottled by fire and void. Soon as the half-blood saw it, he felt ready to retch, heard Adam swallow his own. The Messah gasped and swore, and Lilum looked but a moment from fainting, forcing her eyes on the horror, her ears on the depths of the Devil’s rasping voice.
“You have earned nothing, have understood nothing.”
“But the dreams! The visions! I thought you—”
“Stop,” uttered the King, and Lilum’s voice froze in her throat. He spoke again. “Fall,” he said, and the priestess’s knees collapsed to the sand. “You are a servant, a supplicant…a slave. Whore of Barzakh. Your crown shall be a collar—Asmodeus.”
“As wills the King,” the demon replied. Knife in hand, he turned to Lilum and ran the blade between her breasts, dragged it down to her navel. The priestess shuddered in pain, yet there was no blood, just a darkness in her gaping chest as she was thrust into a trance. Her head snapped back, and three horns sprouted—two in front and one behind—the queen’s crown. Asmodeus gripped one to hold her in place as he gestured to Adnihilo.
The half-blood lurched away, and the Charred angel continued to beckon.
“Be not afraid, Heritor. Enter the dark womb and slough off your human soul. You shall return reborn, ready to receive the Anointment of Fire…as your father did before you.”
Adnihilo looked to Adam who in turn glanced to the demon and back again, nodding.
“Go,” the Messah said.
The half-blood stepped forward, bit by bit, until he stood close enough that Asmodeus laid a hand on his neck, atop the crest of the King. Adnihilo closed his eyes. There was a sharp pain where the Angel had touched, then nothing.
†
Adnihilo woke on a bed of golden sand—the soft, warm sand of Eemah. And all around him, walls of weather worn brick ringed round as the Altar, tall as the Walls of Barzakh. He craned his neck and saw the speck of light above. Impossible, thought the half-blood; but it was the bottom of a well, nowhere else to go—or so he thought.
Then came the drums: two close beats with a long pause between, the undulating rhythm of Adnihilo’s heart. Blood! it screamed till his palms were sweating and the bottoms of his feat began to burn. He looked down. The ground had become saturated, made red with the reverberation of the ritual drums. Blood! they called, and blood it was that seeped up from the golden sand. Boiling blood, violent. Already had the bottoms of Adnihilo’s feet become blisters, his ankles red and raw from the vapors alone. And so he climbed, desperate fingers and stinging toes clinging where the mortar had worn away over hundreds of years. But the blood chased after him, urged on from above by a discarnate choir chanting with the beat of the ritual drums.
“Blood! Blood! Raise it up!”
“Raise it up,” uttered the ghost of Cain, his body embedded in the bricks above Adnihilo’s head. The half-blood froze in shock, but only for a second, till the flood caught hot on his heels. Kill the boy, he thought, it’s what Cain would want, and he clambered beyond his mentor’s corpse.
Next, it was a woman’s voice. “Raise it up,” she said, and he knew it was Jezebel before he ever saw her burned corpse fused to the wall. It was his fault, what happened to her; that was all the half-blood could think as his fingers sank into blackened skin, tearing bodily tissue easily as tender meat might slough off a bone. But a heavy heart would only weigh him down, and the blood was boiling ever faster. He focused on the pain of his wounds, the heat of the vapor, and the burning in his forearms and in his back. It was punishment enough, he told himself in an attempt to abandon his guilt.
Ahead, above, a sallow cadaver hung inverted and half embedded from the wall. “Raise it up,” said the chuckling, dead smuggler as Adnihilo buried a hand in his greasy, knotted beard. He pulled himself up then passed a pair of corpses: a Gautaman woman dressed in a silk and a headless pirate in a jack of riveted gold. In turn, each spoke in incomprehensible tones, and the boiling blood rose with every syllable. Adnihilo didn’t feel it till the flood passed his ankles, but when the pain came, it almost knocked him from the wall. Sweat doused his face. He clutched the pirate’s jack like a beggar’s alms, forced himself onward, tears hidden in thick perspiration—the taste of salt stinging on his tongue.
“Raise it up! Raise it up!”
It was Magdalynn next, her lips and the tips of her nose and fingers black with sickness, the rest of her pale and so frail her bones broke under the half-blood’s weight. Yet he did not stop—could not hesitate now he’d come so far. The speck of light had become a blue sky; the well had not been so towering after all. “Raise it up,” he said in place of
