Nearing Sargatanas' position, Eligor saw three winged forms drop down around him. He pulled up and saw that it was an officer—a Demon Minor— and his aides. They were in a grievous state, their wings tattered and weapons notched, but Eligor knew better than to think of them as anything but a serious threat. Even with his many battle-earned wounds, the officer—whose sigil proclaimed him as Scrofur—was an imposing demon bearing massive horns upon his shoulders and dozens of tiny, luminous eyes that spattered his face like blood-drops.
Eligor cowled the two small neck-wings about his head protectively and slitted his eyes, studying the two aides for a brief instant. They would have to be dealt with first and quickly.
He grasped his lance and threw it vertically as hard as he could. The three demons, jaws agape, stared up at it for just long enough for Eligor to raise his hands and create two destructive glyphs—glyphs that Sargatanas had taught him—which he fired into the bony torsos of the flanking aides. They each looked down in amazement as a livid fiery script from within burst them apart. With a snarl, Scrofur leveled his halberd and attacked, and Eligor, with the deftness and assurance of one well practiced, reached out and felt his descending lance slide into his waiting hand. Dodging sideways, he parried, evaded the other's strike, and lashed out, feeling his jagged blade tear satisfyingly at the officer's wings. It was not a painful wound, but it was a telling one. The Demon Minor lurched and spun as his wings tried to compensate for their sudden loss of effectiveness. He stabbed out desperately and caught Eligor under his cowl and behind the ear-hole, chipping the bone and causing him to wince and pull back.
Shaking his head, Eligor twisted back in and determinedly focused on his opponent's wings, slicing and tearing while evading the hurricane of blows that Scrofur was dealing. As they fought they both dropped lower and lower toward the battling legionaries below, who reached up with their pole arms in a vain effort to hook the demons. Ribbons of slashed wing-flesh gathered and swirled around Astaroth's officer as he tried to stay out of Eligor's lance's reach, but the inevitability of the fight must have been apparent to him. Wings beating twice as hard as his opponent's, Scrofur's breath came out in great, stentorian coughs.
With a move as graceful as it was deadly, Eligor whirled and severed one of Scrofur's wings at the elbow-joint. Pulling his lance free, he stabbed again at the reeling demon, thrusting unerringly and deeply into the demon's gaping heart-hole. Amidst a blaze of ruby light Scrofur began to collapse into himself, shrinking and compacting until he was nothing more than a hand-sized flattened disk adorned with his frozen face and glowing sigil. Teeth bared in a smile, Eligor snatched at the tumbling trophy and, holding it tightly to his breast, watched as it fused to his bone breastplate—a permanent phalera imbued with the powers that had been Scrofur's.
Eligor paused, wings beating slowly, and breathed in deeply. A palpable ripple of pleasure warmed him, causing him to relax momentarily. As he dropped even farther, three heavy, hooked pole arms came up to greet him from Astaroth's legionaries waiting below and he immediately flapped his wings hard, shooting upward.
Dodging knots of winged combatants, he flew back to his lord. The front line had slowly bowed backward, not, he knew, because of Astaroth's legions'
ferocity but because Sargatanas had ordered it so. The mounted Spirits had curved around behind the enormous force of enemy legions and were driving them in upon themselves. Pushed irresistibly together, their formations mingled, losing cohesion. And facing them in the now-inflexible shield-wall of Sargatanas' army, poised like an arrow at their breast, were Faraii's troops, honing their ax-hands upon their rough greaves and bellowing in anticipation of the slaughter to come.
From a few hundred feet away Eligor spotted Sargatanas, falcata in hand, a dark form limned in the fiery light of his Great Seal, standing against a backdrop of fluttering banners. Watching with unwavering attentiveness the battle unfolding and without turning toward him, the Demon Major issued Eligor his flying orders.
* * * * *
He assumed his place at the head of a giant wedge of his Flying Guard and ordered them to drop down. The five hundred closely packed flying demons swooped over the middle of Astaroth's confused legions, harrying them with their long lances from above. Eligor heard the shrill whine of arrows passing close to him. He saw a wavering sheet of another flight, poorly arrayed, arc up from behind the enemy legions only to bounce ineffectively off his and his demons' shields. He could not tell if they had been aimed at his troops or Sargatanas' but saw few gaps in his lord's legions below.
Diving headlong, Eligor led his troops into a slashing attack designed to help the Spirits gut the rear forces of Astaroth's middle legion. Stabbing lances and weighted sinew nets reached up from the enemy troops in a vain attempt to claw his demons from the sky, but the Guard was far too well trained to fall victim to these tactics and, with wings flapping furiously, darted into their midst. His lance connected with both a standard-bearer and a legionary with a satisfying jolt, impaling and lifting them as one, and he watched them crumble away into falling piles of rubble that tumbled onto their comrades. He hovered, seeing how the ash blown up from his wings, and the Guard's behind him, disoriented the enemy legionaries, and taking advantage of their confusion, he proceeded to spear one after another. The smoking rubble grew in mounds, making the footing treacherous for the enemy troops.
Eligor felt that long-missed exhilaration—the Passion, he called it—come over him; it had been a millennium, at least, since he had been in full combat.
With the Passion brought on by the cumulative brutal physicality of it all, he smiled as he thrust and jabbed and lost all sense of time. The battle-change was common enough—every demon he had ever spoken with had experienced it in some way, called it something. And every one had spoken of it with open yearning. Had the Fall changed them that much? He had often tried to remember if he had felt the same Passion during the War, fighting the Cherubim, the Seraphim, but found that he could not.
Eligor pulled back and up and watched his Guard slice into the legionaries again and again. Directly beneath him he saw a centurion's head explode from the impact of a lance driven through his eye socket. And then, seconds later, one of Eligor's own was pulled down and ripped apart. It was the give-and-take of war, something he was used to, but in this battle, he knew, there would be far more taking of life than giving. He watched rank after rank fall beneath the Guard's lances, leaving a trail of rock worthy of a mountainside. As he had hoped, the enemy beneath him began to waver, with small clots of soldiers trying to protect their backs, nulling in tight clumps or striking out blindly. And better than that, some began to run forward pell-mell, trampling their comrades, pushing into the already-crowded legions ahead of them. It would take little time; the panic they had created in the rear of Astaroth's formation would affect the entire army's cohesion.
Still thrusting and parrying, Eligor made his way to his lieutenant, Metaphrax Argastos, a former cherub whose laconic demeanor was counterpoint to his exuberant bravery upon the battlefield. Like himself, the wiry many-tailed demon was caked in dark, smoking ash and was grinning as his wings beat furiously and his lance flashed.
"Metaphrax, assume command!" Eligor shouted. "I am going to return to Lord Sargatanas."
Metaphrax, never losing concentration, nodded as Eligor's superior glyph-of-command blended into his own. Eligor then picked two dozen demons to accompany him across the battlefield. Soaring fast and low away from his Guard, he plunged through the columns of smoke and ash that rose skyward from the line of battle, the clashing of arms below mixing with the ferocious bellowing of the combatants and filling the Captain of the Guard's ears like a cantata of chaos.