When she reached the final frieze the Radiance she saw reflected there, the sheer majesty and beauty of it, overwhelmed her almost as much as her hatred for it, and the room spun before her tear-filled eyes and went dark and she collapsed. She felt Sargatanas scoop her up and place her gently upon a central bier, an unadorned stone platform she was sure he used in some private ceremony.
This is where he is from. This is where he yearns to go back, she thought, staring up at the shimmering opal ceiling. And then a coldness gripped her. This is where I can never go. Nor would I want to. A clawing sadness like none that she had known, not even when Ardat Lili had not come back, washed powerfully through Lilith, replacing the fragile, newborn joy she had felt. I must not let him see this.
But it was too late. Sargatanas leaned concernedly over her, and, like smoke dissipating, she saw him for the first time for what he had been. Perhaps it was the influence of the images she had just seen or how he wanted her to see him. but looking in his eyes she saw the seraph. Not even with Lucifer had she been so sure of anyone's inner self. There is so much pain and longing in those eyes.
Sargatanas lifted her upright and, hesitating for a moment, ran two fingers through her hair.
Sargatanas paused and Lilith realized that, from that moment on, she would not be able to look at him without seeing that true, angelic core, no matter how awful he made himself.
"Lilith, until you came to Adamantinarx, this ... this place was my heart."
She could not avoid looking into the glowing hole in his chest as he spoke and realized for the first time what it must mean for there to be nothing within. The loss must have been nearly impossible to bear.
"Don't," he said quietly, wiping away the tears that again welled from her eyes. "Your being here fills both places," he said, indicating the room and then his chest.
Lilith smiled through the curtain of tears and realized that she, too, felt a sense of completion. She swung her legs off the bier and stood shakily.
"Now," she said, pulling him slowly at first toward the vestibule, "tell me again, from the beginning. About Heaven."
THE FIELDS OF ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
The hot wind, hotter than any desert wind he had ever known, blew across the plain, burning his unprotected face, unnoticed. Standing upon a hillock, his back to the Acheron and the city beyond, Hannibal surveyed the massed troops—his troops—and felt drained. It seemed hopeless. The exuberance that had been building steadily within him as he had assembled his army was dissipating just as quickly as he began to realize what it would take to get them battle ready.
What was I thinking? Adamantinarx is not Qart Hadasht; its buildings are still made of souls! And I cannot have the pick of the finest mercenaries money can buy. I have these instead.
Twenty thousand souls stood upon the field's gray skin, the fruits of his recruitment, an army that even the term "ragtag" would elevate. Hannibal had never anticipated the problems that would arise in trying to form units when no two souls shared any apparent strengths. He had been forced to make his officers break down individuals into categories. Those whose arms were dominant or even possessed two were either handed weapons or, more often, adapted to bear them by demons specially attached to Hannibal's retinue by Sargatanas. But those adaptations were rarely completely successful.
Mago and he had been lucky in finding souls with any significant military background, and those they appointed as officers. Upon his order, he watched them begin to train the souls, and shortly he turned away from the scene, chin down in disgust. It really was hopeless. But other challenges had seemed hopeless before. And he had prevailed. He turned back, and this time his keen eyes studied the figures below, appraising and quantifying them. Slowly, as he shifted his gaze from cohorts of swordsmen to spear-bearers to mace-wielders, patterns of movement began to appear and he saw the glimmer of possibility emerge. It would be hard, but he would not give up and melt away into the crowds of the city he had sworn allegiance to. He would see it through if for nothing less than his oath to Sargatanas. Or wind up a brick, trying.
Chapter Twenty
DIS
Algol rose and set seven times before Adramalik was summoned by his Prince to join him in Moloch's tower. He welcomed the climb to the Keep's highest point. Not only did it finally release him from his prudent, self-imposed exile, but it also seemed to signify that the cloud of suspicion was lifting. He pulled closed his door and negotiated the many twisting corridors to the foot of the tower. The base was a hundred feet wide and buried within the mantle of flesh that lay atop the Keep. Only the uppermost portion of the tower protruded, phalluslike, through the heavy tissue, but what rose free into the sky provided the greatest unobstructed view of Dis possible. It was a clear sign of exalted rank, a token of Beelzebub's admiration. Whereas Agares' smaller tower was a carefully designed piece of architecture, a dark parody of the Above's buildings, Moloch's tower was a brutal spike bearing no friezes or adornments and windows only at the very top. Adramalik thought it almost primitive by Dis' standards, a direct correlate to how he viewed Moloch. But what it lacked in refinement it made up for in sheer arrogant height. Looking up, Adramalik saw the stairs that hugged the tower's tall, tubular interior ascending hundreds of feet above and lit at uncomfortably long intervals by small, inadequate braziers. Normally, annoyed, he would conjure a glyph of light and begin his ascent with an oath, but newly freed, he took the rough steps lightly, ignoring his feelings toward the Grand General who resided at the tower's top. Still, Adramalik was in no particular hurry, savoring his freedom, and decided to take the steps rather than fly; in rare moments of blunt honesty he admitted to himself that he found Moloch difficult to predict, intimidating, another reason not to hurry. After the battle at Maraak, he was in no mood to be called to task by the general.
It had taken some getting used to, Adramalik admitted as he began to climb. The consuming of farmed or hunted Abyssals was the only real choice in the demons' new, dark homeland; their spare flesh was uncompromisingly bitter next to the memory of repasts in the Above, but eventually he, like the others, had grown grudgingly used to it. A few, however, had, from the first day, committed themselves to another more repugnant alternative—the eating of souls, a practice that former angels, no matter how angry, could never truly condone. Moloch, Adramalik knew, felt no such compunction, and that he found revolting. Too many times had he entered the general's chambers to watch him dining upon some flailing soul. So as not to be distracted, Adramalik would focus not upon the hungry general but, instead, upon the pooling blood, collecting in and oozing through the twin runnels that fed into identical troughs in the room's center.
Arriving at the tower's uppermost threshold, Adramalik opened the heavy door and was gratified to see the general already in discussion with the Prince, the joints of his recent meal tossed, trembling, in a corner while three more terrified fat souls crouched, waiting, in the shadows of the far wall. The dank smell of blood filled his nose-hole. Moloch, still licking his lips, lifted his head and fixed his many ice-blue eyes on the Chancellor General. He had to make an effort to keep the disgust from his face.
The pair was standing before one of the three wide, paneless windows that afforded the grandest unobstructed view of Dis in all of the city. As he approached, they grew silent, and the three demons stood for a moment, taking in the vastness of the world they had shaped. A sharp lightning-glyph dropped noisily from the clouds, licking the distant streets like a beast's tongue. They all saw the fragments of buildings that it had exploded rain down slowly Upon the distant, narrow streets.