"Would you have me return, then? To Dis?"
"No, my lady, never. But I will have to impose serious, personal safeguards upon you."
"Thank you, my lord."
Eligor's eye met Valefar's; the Captain of the Flying Guard had lingered as much from the lack of his lord's orders as from his own fascination with Lilith. But now, with a meaningful nod from Valefar, Eligor turned and followed the Prime Minster as he began to descend the stairs. Valefar stooped and picked up Lilith's skins, folding them as he walked. Minutes later, at the entrance to the arcades, Eligor turned back and saw the two distant figures deep in conversation.
* * * * *
Lilith watched Sargatanas walk to the edge of the dais and sit down upon the pyramid's top step. His smoldering dark form contrasted sharply with the pale stones, the many ebon and red folds of his robes fanning out behind him. He seemed weary, cocking his head slightly as he looked at the distant, melted statue. "Very impressive, that," said Lilith.
"Yes," the demon said diffidently after a pause. "Just another tool for me to use against your former lord when the need arises. Please," he said, beckoning Lilith to sit next to him. She sat and delicately arranged the folds of her long, sheathlike skirt.
Sargatanas turned away from the darkening chamber and looked at her for a moment without saying anything, studying her small movements. His carefully composed court face was expressionless, but Lilith thought she saw, implicit beneath the slowly sliding plates a mixture of emotions. Is it melancholia? As they regarded each other she saw his expression change, saw the plates cease moving, the tight set of his jaw lighten.
"So why did you leave Dis?" he said. "And then come here?"
Lilith looked away and for an instant she imagined that her vision cut through the palace's stone walls, darting across the umber landscape all the way back to the Keep and her abandoned chambers. It was so odd that she would never see them again; she had spent so long within its confines. So long a prisoner.
"It's actually very simple, my lord. ... I cannot be ... owned. It is how I was made."
"Cannot ... or will not?"
"Both." The word hung in the air. "When Lucifer passed on his scepter to Beelzebub, when I became a bargaining chip in the transaction between them, I felt hurt, disgusted, outraged. But after all those millennia with that thing, I felt scooped out, bereft of my ... self. The Fly took away nearly everything that I was. That is Its way. And then, after so very long, the tiny part of me that I kept locked away ... the part that could imagine the Light ... saw a possible way: the souls. If I could give them hope and nurture it, then maybe they could become themselves again and by weight of numbers overthrow the Fly. Perhaps it was naive, but I secretly began to send out my little statues, sowing them among the damned. They became my surrogates for freedom and salvation ... and revenge."
He nodded gravely. "That answers why. But not what made you come here."
"I ... suffered a great loss." She paused. There would be a time to tell him about Ardat, about just how much she meant to her, but not now. "My lord, do you know what the demons in Dis call Adamantinarx? With slitted eyes and filled with hate they call it the 'City That Fell from Heaven.' Everyone there knows what it represents ... that it is the best that one can find in Hell. Everyone, too, knows of its lord and how he rules that city."
Lilith knew well the other reason she had chosen Adamantinarx, knew that she could not yet tell him that she had seen in his infrequent visits to Dis something in him that had reminded her of another demon—her lost lord. Sargatanas bore many of the same irresistible qualities that had made Lucifer the force he was: the ambition, the idealism, the ferocity. And now she had seen yet another similar side, the self-flagellating remorse.
"From what I have heard," he rumbled, "they spit after they utter that. And not just because they say the word 'Heaven.' Everyone may know of Adamantinarx, but not everyone wants it to exist."
"True, but I do. And I would call it home. I can never see Heaven; this is as close as I can come."
"And just how did you make your journey? Valefar never told me."
"Anonymously, alone, and upon the back of a beast. Prime Minister Agares had a hand in it. He is a strange one, my lord. On the surface dutiful, but beneath he is in great turmoil, I think. Were I the Fly I would not put too much trust in his allegiances."
"Interesting. I cannot imagine being in proximity to the Fly each and every day and not being a willing vassal. It would destroy a lesser demon. Well, Lilith," Sargatanas said, extending his hand, "you are welcome in the City That Fell from Heaven and as long as you stay here I will protect you with my last phalangite if need be."
Lilith put her hand—so white and small compared to his—upon his upturned palm, feeling the heat of it spreading. She shuddered as an unfamiliar sensation spread throughout her, a clawing away of the fear and misery that was such a large part of her being. Trapped beneath the millennia-deep sediment of her torment and resentment lay a pearlescent sealed casket and, within it, that imagined, barely fluttering self that Lilith knew had been deeply buried since she had arrived.
She looked down, shaking her head slightly.
"What is it?" Sargatanas asked softly.
"I ... I feel as if I am either dreaming or awakening."
The demon lord rose and, still cupping her hand in his, drew her up.
"It cannot be a dream, Lilith. My dreams are never this ... engaging."
Lilith smiled, closed her eyes for a moment, and felt as if her soul, like a dock of winged night-silvers, had risen, released at last, from within that now-open box.
Chapter Nineteen
DIS
The Keep was more silent than Adramalik had ever remembered it. What few functionaries he saw in its corridors and rooms bore the unmistakable mark of terror upon their faces. Tales were beginning to filter up from its base, tales of what had happened out in the city's Sixtieth Ward after the Prince had finally resigned himself to the fact that his Consort was no longer in Dis. What Adramalik heard made even him shudder.
He had been present when the Prince had finally come to the dark conclusion that Lilith was gone. Adramalik and Agares and a few other principals had, at first, stood rooted to the floor with mouths agape when Beelzebub's howling rage had manifested itself. Tiny flies, growing in size, had peeled away from his body in a seemingly unending, rising spiral, horrific to behold. And their faces, faces that he knew to have once belonged to angels, were pocked and distorted, torn and twisted, sublime in their madness. Each bloated fly was different from its brother, but each bore many limbs that ended in black blades that snapped and cut the air as the creatures, enlarging as they flew, jostled toward the Rotunda's openings and flooded forth into the dark skies of Dis. Relief spread through Adramalik's shaking body as he watched them depart; for a moment he had actually wondered if Beelzebub's rage might spill over onto him and Agares and indeed everyone in the Keep. But in a few short minutes the small gathering was standing alone in the quiet Rotunda, left wide-eyed and trembling, watching the frantic swaying of the skins above. Adramalik could not remember when his master had left the Keep last.
Even now he could hear, in the fearful silence that smothered the Keep, the echo of the whir of their wings and the sound their clattering bodies made, and a part of him held his breath in awe.
A day later, after the Prince had resumed his throne, someone had ventured into the Sixtieth Ward and come back to the Keep with a tale of what he had seen there. It was a large precinct, but, even so, nothing had been spared.
Souls, demons, buildings, even the very streets had been shredded, chopped, and ultimately defiled. Squashed hummocks of body parts stood in the plazas, misshapen islands in expanding lakes of blood. The stench of tens of thousands of rotting, half-consumed bodies, of buildings chewed and vomited up and stinking feces from the ensuing feast, had been overpowering even by hellish standards. And over the entire ward a fog of blood hung so thick that it made the carnage all the worse for its gradually revealed butcheries. The fog blanketed the ward for a few days and then it moved, by either command or the caprices of the infernal zephyrs, off toward the Wastes to ultimately descend, he had heard, upon Adamantinarx. Adramalik did not agree with those who rationalized it as a natural event; he knew his Prince too well and knew that he had every reason to suspect where his Consort had fled to. The fog was a warning. But, Adramalik pondered, how had she so easily managed to leave Dis unseen and unquestioned? This was something he needed to find out.