Beyond them we turned and made once more for our destination. We crossed a forest of gallows and a river that flowed with a noise like sobbing and whose spray, cast up by a gust, tasted warm and salt. We suffered the heat and poisonous vapors from a system of roads where motor vehicles of some kind crawled nose to tail, a network miles wide and I know not how—long, nor can I guess its purpose. We traversed hills gouged with trenches and the craters of explosions, rusted cannon the last sign of life except for one flag, raised as in victory, whose colors had faded to gray The hills climbed till we met another range so high we needed our masks; flitting through its canyons, we dodged stones that fell upward.
But past those mountains the land swooped down anew. Another plain of boulders reached beyond sight. Far off upon it, toylike at their remove, we spied gaunt black towers. The globe flared brilliant, the wand leaped to point in Ginny’s forgers. “By Hecate,” she cried, “that’s it!”
XXXIII
I drew alongside. The air was still cold and blowing, a wail in our ears, a streaming past our ribs, a smell akin to burning sulfur and wet iron. At hover, the broomsticks rocked and pitched. Her foot against mine was a very precious contact.
We peered into the globe she held. Svartalf-Bolyai craned around her arm to see. This close, the intervening space not too different from home geometry, the scrying functioned well. Ginny zoomed in on the castle. It was sable in hue, monstrous in size and shape. Or had it a shape? It sprawled, it soared, it burrowed with no unity except ugliness. Here a thin spire lifted crookedly from a cubical donjon—there a dome swelled pustular, yonder a stone beard overhung a misproportioned gate . . . square miles of planless deformity, aswarm with the maggoty traffic of devils.
We tried to look through the walls, but didn’t penetrate far. Behind and beneath the cavernous chambers and twisted labyrinths that we discerned, too much evil force roiled. It was as well, considering what we did vaguely make out. At the limit, a thought came from just beyond, for an instant-no, not a thought, a wave of such agony that Ginny cried aloud and I bit blood out of my lip. We blanked the globe and embraced till we could stop shuddering.
“Can’t afford this,” she said, drawing free. “Time’s gotten in short supply.”
She reactivated the scryer, with a foreseer spell. Those rarely work in our universe, but Lobachevsky had theorized the fluid dimensions of the Low Continuum might give us a better chance. The view in the globe panned, steadied on one spot, and moved close. Slablike buildings and contorted towers enclosed a certain courtyard in an irregular septagon. At the middle of this was a small, lumpy stone house, windowless and with a single doorway. A steeple climbed from it, suggestive of a malformed ebon toadstool, that overtopped the surrounding structures and overshadowed the pavement.
We couldn’t view the inside of this either, for the same reason as before. It seemed to be untenanted, though. I had the creepy feeling that it corresponded in some perverted way to a chapel.
“Unambiguous and sharp,” Ginny said. “That means she’ll arrive there, and soon. We’ll have to lay our plans fast.”
“And move fast, too,” I said. “Give me an overall scan, will you, with spot close-ups?”
She nodded. The scene changed to one from on high. I noted afresh how it pullulated in the crowds. Were they always this frantic? Not quite, surely. We focused on a single band of demons. No two looked alike; vanity runs high in hell. A body covered with spines, a tentacled dinosaur, a fat slattern whose nipples were tiny grinning heads, a flying swine, a changeable blob, a nude man with a snake for a phallus, a face in a belly, a dwarf on ten-foot pencil-thin legs, and less describable sights- What held my attention was that most of them were armed. They didn’t go for projectiles either, evidently. However, those medievalish weapons would be bad to encounter.
Sweeping around, our vision caught similar groups. The confusion was unbelievable. There was no discipline, no consideration, everybody dashed about like a decapitated chicken yelling at everybody else, they jostled and snarled and broke into fights. But more arms were being fetched each minute from inside, more grotesque flyers lumbered into the air and circled.
“They’ve been alerted, all right,” I said. “The drums—”
“I don’t suppose they know what to expect,” Ginny said in a low tight voice. “They aren’t especially guarding the site we’re after. Didn’t the Adversary pass word about us?”
“He seems to be debarred from taking a personal hand in this matter, same as Lobachevsky and for analogous reasons, I guess. At most, he may’ve tipped his underlings to watch out for trouble from us. But they can’t know we’ve acquired the capability to do what we did. Especially since we’ve made an end run in time.”
“And the diabolic forces are stupid,” Ginny said. “Evil is never intelligent or creative. They receive word a raid is possible, and look at that mess!”
“Don’t underrate them. An idiot can kill you just as dead.” I pondered. “Here’s what we’ll do, if you agree. Rush straight in. We can’t prevent them seeing us, so we have to be quick. Good thing our sticks function close to normal in this neighborhood. We won’t make directly for the yard or they might block us off. See that palace, I assume it is, over to the left—the one with the columns in front that look like bowels? Must belong to the big cheese, which makes it a logical spot for enemies to drop a bomb on. At the last moment we’ll swerve toward our real mark. You get inside, establish our paranatural defenses, and ready the return spell. I’ll keep the door. The instant Val appears, you skewer the kidnaper and grab her. Got it?
“Yes. Oh, Steve.” The tears ran silently from her eyes. “I love you.”
We kissed a final time, there in the sky of hell.
Then we attacked.
The wind of our passage shouted around us. The drear landscape reeled away beneath. I heard Svartalf’s challenge and answered with my own whoop. Fear blew out of me. Gangway, you legions of darkness, we’re coming to fetch our girl!
They began to see us. Croaks and yammers reached our ears, answered by shrieks from below. The flying devils milled in the air. Others joined them till several hundred wings beat in a swarm across the sooty stars. They couldn’t make up the minds they scarcely had what to do about us. Nearer we came and nearer. The castle rose in our vision like the ranges we had crossed.
Ginny must spend her entire force warding off sorceries. Lightning bolts spattered blue on the shieldfield, yards off, followed by thunder and ozone. Lethal clouds boiled from smokestacks, englobed our volume of air and dissipated. I had no doubt that, unperceived by us, curses, hoodoos, illusions, temptations, and screaming meemies rained upward and rebounded.
The effort was draining her. I glimpsed the white, strained countenance, hair plastered to brow and cheek by sweat, wand darting while the free hand gestured and the lips talked spells. Svartalf snarled in front of her; Bolyai piloted the broom. None of them could keep it up for many minutes.
But that conjure wave made it impossible for anything to get at us physically. The creature in charge must have realized this at the end, for the assault stopped. An eagle the size of a horse, wearing a crocodile’s head, stooped upon us.
My cutlass was drawn. I rose in the stirrups. “Not one cent for tribute!” I bayed, and struck.- The old power awoke in the blade. It smote home with a force I felt through my bones. Blood spurted from a sheared-off wing. The devil bawled and dropped.