Brimstone Angels

“And what benefits Asmodeus benefits us all,” Lorcan said. A common enough saying in the Hells. “I’ll leave you to your … studies of the hierarchy, Rohini. Mother.”

He left the room as swiftly as he could, not looking back and listening with particular intent to the chorus of screams rather than another word of the conversation coming from the softly pulsing room.

Whatever Invadiah and Rohini were up to, they did not want him to know about it-and that was fine by Lorcan. He was no status seeker. With a human father, the hierarchy of the Hells was closed to him. While Rohini might please Glasya and earn her way to a transformation into an erinyes, and Invadiah to something greater still, Lorcan would always be a cambion, no matter whose boots he licked or whose schemes he chased.

Luckily, it suits me, he thought, striding through the hallways of Osseia. His mother might think him a dabbler and a dandy, but at least he’d managed to never become her pawn.

His path crossed a balcony that overlooked the Court of the Sixth, and Lorcan paused a moment. The archduchess herself perched on the throne, carved from the ivory that had been her predecessor’s teeth, her batlike wings curved around her like an icon’s niche. Coppery skinned and dark-haired, Glasya made Rohini look common. Glasya made everything look common. If corruption had a form, it was Glasya, and not a soul looked upon her that didn’t feel the urge to throw itself headlong into that corruption. She radiated like a star and she swallowed up the light around her. To look upon Glasya, Lord of the Sixth and Princess of the Hells, was a special sort of madness.

Glasya regarded the prostrate barbed devil in front of her with a stony face, while a swarm of hellwasps swooped around her, enforcing the audience’s distance with their sword-length stingers and bladed legs. A pair of pit fiends the size of small hills flanked Glasya’s throne, all muscle and whips. Devils of a hundred sorts stood, perched, or hovered in audience, giving the unfortunate barbed devil a wide berth.

Glasya tapped her scourge against the side of her throne as if counting time, while the creature before her shivered to the tips of the spikes that covered its black, muscular body. The barbed devils were the spy-hunters of the archduchess-tasked with hunting down intruders and agents of the other Lords of the Nine, the rulers of the layers of the Hells.

This one had failed in its task apparently. If it was lucky, Lorcan thought, riveted, Glasya would demote it. If it wasn’t … Well, it had heard the intruder’s screams as well as Lorcan had.

“May I never be so foolish,” he muttered to himself once more. You did not fail a Lord of the Nine-and if you did, you did not get caught holding the bag.

I know too much, Rohini had said. I might tell someone.

Do you think that wise? his mother had said. You don’t threaten Glasya.

Lorcan shivered. Whatever they were up to, those comments made two things certain. First, it was on Glasya, the lord of the Sixth Layer’s orders. Whatever Rohini and Invadiah were doing in Neverwinter, the archduchess wanted it so. Getting in the way of Glasya was suicide. Second …

I might tell someone.

You don’t threaten Glasya.

No one posed a true danger to Glasya except her father, Asmodeus, the lord of the Ninth Layer and the Risen God of Evil. The king of the Hells. The other lords might threaten her, other devils might pretend to her throne, but Glasya was Asmodeus’s only child. To threaten Glasya at this juncture, was to threaten him.

“What benefits us, benefits Asmodeus,” Lorcan murmured. “And what benefits Asmodeus, benefits us all.” No devil-no sane devil-would stand against Asmodeus directly, but such a statement could cover up quite a lot of schemes.

Lorcan shook his head. He wasn’t suited to being a pawn. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t need to know anything. He would simply stay out of it.

Glasya waved her hand and the barbed devil’s muscles all contorted at once. It screamed as if Glasya were pulling its intestines out with tenacity and a single hooked finger. It twisted and howled, and finally with an explosion of energy-burning hot and thick as soot-the barbed devil tore itself apart with a sick, wet rip. Lorcan flinched against the burning wind.

When it subsided, he looked back to the place where the barbed devil had been. There, in the tattered, bloody midst of its former body, a smaller form twitched. It jerked against the spent frame, tearing muscles, until it finally broke free and stretched delicate batlike wings. The shorter, softer quills that covered its body bristled, flinging gore over the assembled audience.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” Glasya said. She spoke to the newly reborn spined devil, but every other creature there took the warning for their own: the Lady of Malbolge was not to be crossed.

“You are most kind and generous, your grace,” the diminished creature gasped.

Lorcan shuddered again, and moved away from the balcony. The archduchess had been generous. She’d only demoted the devil, which meant it could earn its way back to the rank it had previously held-if, that is, the assembled audience forgot its failure. He left the palace and headed across the field toward the armory.

Something dripped on him from above as he passed under the overhang of the entryway. Red spots smattered his already filthy sleeve. He glanced up in disgust.

Above, the sharpened fangs that fringed the gates of Osseia impaled a pair of humans in robes. They weren’t foolish enough to wear their allegiances on their sleeves, but these were almost certainly Glasya’s intruders-and just as certainly, they had been cultists of another Lord of the Nine. The one on the left, a man of middling years, twitched, his body not quite finished dying.

Should Lorcan ever be so stupid as to displease the Lady of Malbolge, here was his fate. There was nowhere in the hierarchy for a half-devil to fall.

Invadiah kept her treasury in one of the tall bone-spires that rose out of Malbolge’s poisoned ground. Venomous flowers twined their way over the pitted surface, fed by the streams of shimmering effluvia that shifted and changed day to day, hour to hour. The ruddy ground, much like the halls of Osseia, lived. When they finished being an example to all, someone would throw the corpses on the fangs of Osseia to Malbolge, and slowly, the Sixth Layer would absorb them.

Lorcan picked his way across the suppurating ground and entered the tower that held his mother’s treasury. Two erinyes perched on either side of the inner door, batting a dead lemure back and forth between them like a ball with the flats of their swords, keeping it from resting too long on the hungry ground.

“Nemea,” Lorcan said tensely. “Aornos.”

His half-sisters spared him no more than a glance, but he had hardly blinked before red-haired Aornos had maneuvered herself behind him, planting him between the two fierce warriors. He looked up at Nemea, who was slimmer than Invadiah and bore a ragged scar across her chest.

“Come to borrow more of mother’s things?” she said, reversing her grip on the sword.

“At her offer,” he said smoothly. “Let me pass?”

“Sairche was looking for you,” Aornos said behind him. “Said we should tell her if you showed up.”

“Sounds like our baby sister found a secret of yours,” Nemea crooned.

Lorcan gave an exaggerated sigh. “All she found was that I don’t want to seduce a mortal with her in audience. Where did she say she’d be?”

“She didn’t,” Nemea said.

“You’ll have to hope she finds you,” Aornos added.

“Or that she doesn’t,” Nemea finished.

“Fine,” Lorcan said. “Open the doors then and let me finish my business.”

Nemea smirked at him, thinking-no doubt-that she could crush him with no trouble at all. Invadiah might not even care.

Might, Lorcan thought, is the important word.

Nemea stepped aside and pulled the door open for Lorcan. As he passed, she cracked the back of his legs with the flat of her sword, much to Aornos’s amusement. Lorcan flinched, but didn’t deign to cry out.

“Don’t forget, little brother,” Aornos called as he descended the winding stairway down to the treasury, “only what Invadiah agreed to. Wouldn’t want to have to turn your pockets.”

Godsdamned erinyes, he thought. Better Nemea and Aornos than the elite of the