A shaggy pile of curled bone shavings lay around the piece's base. She watched, almost like an onlooker, as the fine chisels seemed to move almost by themselves, so light and deft was her touch, so inspired was she. Even so, this piece would take some time before it was finished; not only was it larger, but it also demanded more of her than she fretted she was capable of.
Her little Liliths were easy now; the formula for them was so clear that she could sculpt one in two sittings. Ardat was so impressed with that and so eager to take them out, Lilith thought, stinging herself with the reminder of her absence.
It had been good to see Valefar again, good to know that the influence she had exerted had succeeded in saving him. He had been so reluctant to leave. But it comforted her to know that he had been smart enough to settle in the only city in Hell remotely worth living in. Lord Sargatanas' city, Adamantinarx-upon-the-Acheron. It seemed like a dream, to her.
She had been in Hell a long time when that city was founded, alone and bitter, wandering through the darkness with only her hatred of the Throne growing in her belly. That, she had repeated for millennia, was not how it was supposed to be.
At times, she thought her ceaseless tears could have put out the very fires of Hell. Through the darkness she wandered and wept and brooded. And then came the Fall and Lucifer. She remembered staring up at the perpetual night sky, a mixture of fear and awe in her breast, as she watched the fiery descents. And then, somehow, Lucifer had found her and her world of isolation was changed.
She and he were alone together, far away from the others. Traversing the blasted landscape, sharing their rage and sorrow, they were almost happy to have been given each other. As she sat carving, she remembered the day she turned away from him and the moment when she turned back to see that he was gone. She knew where he was and knew, too, how and why he had left. These things he had sworn her to secrecy on, a secret she had faithfully kept. She had been his consort, his almost willing possession, for days only. But it had been time enough, she thought, chipping and shaving away at the statue, time enough to see the beauty and the baseness in him. The nobility and the deceit.
Lilith put the chisel down. That was it, she thought. That was what I saw in him. In Sargatanas. The same churning emotions, the same compelling look in his eyes. But was he the same? From everything she had heard, the Demon Major was fierce but fair. He ruled through wisdom, not butchery.
"Oh, where is she?" Lilith muttered, and almost as the words died on her lips she heard scuffing sounds outside her chamber. She rose, relieved, and walked quickly to the door.
The Chancellor General of the Order stood in the open doorway, cloaked in an ember-flecked and smoking traveling skin, a clear sign that he had just returned from outside the Keep. Eyes slitted, a smirk jagging his mouth, Adramalik signaled two flanking Knights to take up positions on either side of her. Without a word she followed him, the red-swathed Knights looming so large on either side that she felt smothered by their robes.
They traveled the corridors in silence, heading, she realized, toward the Rotunda. An audience with him? At this hour? Lilith always needed some kind of advance notice to put her mind in the right state for Beelzebub. That had been their agreement. This was unprecedented and with each step, though her fears were inchoate, Lilith grew more apprehensive.
They halted at the Rotunda's entrance and Lilith stooped over the narrow threshold, followed by Adramalik. The buzzing was loud, louder than she had heard it in some time.
She hated the long walk through the fetid gloom to the throne; there was too much time for her to undo the emotional armor that she ordinarily layered on. She looked up and saw that the hanging skins were unusually active, moving as if a strong wind was daring to disturb them. She was nearly to the throne; a single thick pillar of chewed flesh rose before her obscuring the view. The obscene buzzing was almost unbearable and now that she was so close another sound was also barely audible—a moaning that sent a blade of terror into her heart. She saw Agares in the shadows, chin down, arms stiffly at his sides, and heard something—a sound of rending. And then, passing the pillar, she looked up and, struck as if by a hammer, fell to her knees.
Twenty feet above the puddled floor, suspended by her wrists from a sinew and bone hanger, was Ardat Lili. Lilith saw her traveling skins lying in a heap far beneath her feet and saw, too, the six tiny statues arranged carefully, ludicrously, upon them. With a chuckle, Adramalik picked up Lilith by her neck and tossed her easily to the floor at her handmaiden's feet. Lilith landed upon her back and with flailing arms and legs scrabbled upright. Spattered with splashed blood, she looked up and saw her handmaiden's dangling body, alive with the rippling subdermal movement of hundreds of flies. Lilith knew what he was doing. Beelzebub was feeding, consuming everything within and liberating Ardat's skin just as he had done to all the other undead skins above.
Ardat Lib sighed and somehow Lilith heard it above the buzzing, above her own screams. The Prime Minister turned to her, and the haunted look in his eyes made his feelings clear.
"Nergar's police took her just as she was exiting the Keep," said Adramalik crisply. "The Prince warned you, Consort, warned you to keep your affairs ... simple. Instead you involved her."
Lilith's breath came in huge gulping gasps. Time passed and stood still. Somewhere in her mind, between the terror and the anguish, a horror was unfettered—the guilty understanding that, as much as she had cared about Ardat, she had used her zealous, trusting handmaiden and was solely responsible for her miserable end.
Lilith looked up. The Prince—her Prince—was almost done. What had been Ardat Lili was little more than a flapping skin-sack, hollow and empty, yet aware. Exiting flies issued from her mouth, swarming around her flaccid skin, examining their handiwork.
As Lilith watched, the rack begin to ascend, carrying the pathetic skin up into the gloom of the dome, and she heard Adramalik's soft laughter and splashing footsteps fade away. Only the Prime Minister remained with her and the Prince. He stood over her and reached down, putting his hands under her arms and legs and lifting her carefully.
Agares carried her through the Rotunda, and when he brought her back to her chambers and laid her gently upon her skin-covered pallet the only thing circling erratically through her mind like a fly was the droning sound of the Voice that had oscillated through the dome.
"Remember this, dear Lilith. She will."
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
Eligor studied him as he sat motionless upon his throne. Far away, deep beneath the Audience Chamber floor, he thought, he could hear the distant sounds of new construction. The barely audible, muffled clink of hammers upon stone was all that disturbed the stillness of the enormous chamber. He knew that the faraway hammering had to be of native stone being worked; the flesh-bricks always cried out when they were being cut and placed.
Sargatanas, too, seemed far away. He had returned to his palace in silence and had remained there, not leaving his throne and speaking only briefly to Halphas and then to no one for days. Eligor and the dozen Guard troopers stood some paces from Sargatanas like a frozen tableau. Once a day, for some hours, a dim shaft of Algol's red light would enter through the oculus and pirouette upon the floor, marking time, only to fade away as if it were sad to be ignored.
Sargatanas sat, only occasionally lifting or lowering his flaming head. A few times he raised a finger to his lips as if he were about to speak but then changed his mind. Through the night he did not stir, the only sign of life being the guttering sparks from his knit brow. His form shifted frequently, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. For one night he had no head at all, only concentric multicolored rings of flames with rotating horns at their center.